Hank Green Unpacks YouTube's Biggest Problems

29:05Like it's very obvious that, you know, Hermes doesn't want to sell the most handbags. Right. You know, they want to sell the right handbags to the right people. At the right price. At the right price. Yes. And so like you can have platforms that are trying to do it differently and are providing different, you know, value propositions for their – Yeah. For the users of the platform. I don't know that this has played out. But in 2022, at the end of the year, Colin and I got on a Zoom with Elon Musk. Yeah. And he was talking about his intentions with Twitter. And he said something that really stuck with me, which was that he wanted to build it in a direction to limit the amount of regrettable minutes on Twitter.

29:47Yeah. Well, and like, honestly, Elon, for me, that's like all of them right now. Right. I was going to say, I don't know that it's come to fruition. It was a surprising perspective. I had never even heard that type of vocabulary that empathized with the viewer's feeling after they left the platform. YouTube talks about it too. Yeah. They do. Yeah, about regrettable. And like they have made changes for that reason. Yeah. Because that's where - I don't think they use that language. But that concept of like regrettable minutes is really interesting to me because the highest regrettable minutes I ever feel is TikTok.

30:22I never regret anything more than the time I spend. Most owners of any product would never even put forth the idea that there is a regrettable portion of time. Yeah, that's right. You know, like imagine a restaurant being like, We're not trying to minimize the regrettable meals that everyone has in a restaurant. Because look, they exist. Yeah. So I want to bring up because of this, the speed that technology is introducing us to visuals that we had never seen before, right? There's a comedian, Andrew Schultz, who said, right now on the internet, what works is a car crash. Meaning like to capture our attention is a high bar now, right?

30:57Like it is a high bar to capture mass attention and everybody knows it. And so if you're doing this as a business and you're in the business of attention, you're finding ways to keep pushing it up. And it reminds me of a thesis written by Hank Green in 2002 about nature versus culture. Oh, no. You looked at my thesis? Oh, yeah. Unacceptable. As a child wrote that. Well written. It's great. The first part of it is called My Head is Too Big, which is fantastic. I was just looking at it. It's like we were going through all of our old files and I was like, oh, my God. I think even better is the introduction where you say, this is titled, this is not an introduction.

31:35And then within it, you say, I don't even like getting introduced to people. It's like, the comedian from the start. I'm hooked, Hank. I'm with you. I think that this is actually incredibly relevant to this conversation about how the pace at which culture is developing for better or worse on the internet, right? Yeah. And I'm curious if you could explain that, the difference between nature and culture and your perspective today on these platforms and how much they're pushing culture forward. Could you defend your thesis from the University of Montana? Live. 20 years later. We'll take as much time as we need.

32:12I don't even know where to start. But I guess what I will say is it's very easy to find any simple story you want to tell because this is so big. Yeah. So I feel this is a sort of pet peeve I have in general. When like any like large statistical thing occurs, people will be like, oh, it's because of this reason and it's whatever they are presupposed to not like, you know, it could be because of microplastics or soy or the COVID or. You can find evidence of anything, you know, like. Yeah. Kids are spending too much time on TikTok. Like any anything you don't like could explain the thing that you don't like.

32:55and it tends to be some other thing that is very boring so my thought there is like if the car crash works then it's all car crashes but it's not all car crashes so how do we explain that like people are watching this and this is a long podcast where guys just talk about we haven't gotten to the car crash yet but it's coming yeah yeah this is gonna go this is gonna go very bad That's exciting. Stay tuned. And so like what – and the thing that I have seen over and over again is that creators who make the sort of like attention grab content, like they have to quickly pivot to something else or they have a very short life.

33:37And what's that about? What that's about is that we still want to be connected to humans. And I have a worry about parasocial relationships as replacement for social relationships. I think it's fine for it to exist, but I think that it exists alongside real life and real world connections.

34:09But that's what it comes down to. And so like that's much more interesting because that's the thing that I feel like actually influences people and connects with them and like they go back over and over again to the same person. Because in a world of infinite content, why would someone choose my video over any of the other videos? It's like to some extent, I'm trying to make a better video than other people. I'm not going to though. Like there are going to be better videos than my videos. I'm not going to make a Casey Neistat mini film every time I make a video. And so what they're coming back for is like their trust in me and the relationship they have with me.

34:42And so that's the thing that you have to establish. And a car crash can't do that. You don't form a relationship with a car crash, even when the car crash is metaphorical and it's a person doing something very attention-grabbing. That's a good point. Thanks. I don't know what that has to do with my thesis. Well, I think it does have to do with your thesis. Yeah, there was a story in your thesis about how when you were at summer camp, you had a blog, a written blog about Mars. Yeah, yeah. And I found this to be very interesting that you were at summer camp. You didn't have access to a computer, to the internet.

35:15And you missed a big event. I did. There was some sort of meteor or something happened with Mars. Yeah. And you missed it. And when you got back from summer camp, you noticed there were a ton of page views on your site. And you wrote that you felt ashamed of your disconnection. Oh, wow. And I look at that and I wonder— That guy's dead, by the way. Sure, that guy's dead. I don't remember his memories anymore. I looked at that and I wondered if that is part of why you have even that perspective that, you know, Vlogbrothers is not the car crash. It is the long, sustained connection. Yeah. Yeah, well, I also—the first thing I ever did on the internet—I mean, the Mars website was the first thing I ever did on the internet.

35:56The first thing that ever got like attention broadly is after I graduated from college, I was unemployed for a little while. And I stole like we buy houses signs that are always up. Yeah, sure. And I spray painted them with the URL of my new website, which was I hate I for dot com. It's about the road that goes through Orlando and how much it sucks. and I was like, I'm going to make a – and I'm going to use this as like a hub for like transportation reform. But like the way in is through – How old were you? 522 maybe. Fighting the good fight for transportation reform. Yeah. And it was wild because like the local news saw the signs and was like, we got to do a story on something today.

36:42We'll go to his house in Winter Park. And they did and I was on the news and I was like, and also transportation reform. What if people staggered their work days so we didn't have to be stuck in traffic? What if people carpooled more? What if people live closer to where they work? And then I tried to be like, I'm going to create a community of people who are going to do this. And it didn't work at all. Like they were there for the shock of I also hate a road. And what they hated was other drivers. And I'm like, yeah, that's the problem. It's not you. It's the people around you who are just like you also trying to get to work.

37:16and i did i when i moved to montana i shut it down because at that point i didn't hate i4 anymore because we just have we don't have you just have we don't have eyes yeah yeah i 90 is not part of town didn't you do your first brand deal through that website i did fuck you you're like that guy who does the rap yeah yeah i don't think i'm yeah yeah i did again it was incredibly long research doc but i don't remember what i sold it was a 200 transportation ad yeah yeah but it was it was like i do think like the first dollars you make on the internet are very important how how motivated are you by money and have you been throughout your life i'm very motivated by money um i have always been i i to some extent i think that i had like a chip on my shoulder because my i was among a few people who i knew who didn't have student loans um and i felt like Like I didn't deserve that among my friend group.

38:13And I was like, why do all these people have this? Like I had this much easier than all these people. And like it's going to be much easier. So like I just felt like I had to prove that I – which is wild. Like none of this actually proves anything. But I wanted to prove that I could make the amount of money that I had. My grandfather was a business person. So the amount of money that I inherited, which I did do. But didn't – doesn't actually prove anything. There was part of it that was that. There's part of it that it's just like I like objective metrics. Like I wanted to get an A. And once I couldn't get A's anymore, making money was like getting an A.

38:51And it's very like it's transferable. People get it. Like, you know, it's a status thing. But like I was very happy. And I'm still motivated by money, but I'm not motivated by having it. I'm just motivated by making it. And to some extent, it is – it's certainly not perfect. but it is a surrogate for the value you create. And it is just a surrogate. You also have to be good at converting the value into money, which is a separate step. When you have employees and you want to pay them better or you want to have profit distribution at the end of the year, that's important. And for a long time when I was CEO at Complexly, I felt like my job was to figure out how to make money and their job was to figure out how to create value.

39:41and I would like to think that we have shifted that some where everybody sort of gets that we like we all you know there's a bunch of people on the team whose job is both of those things or just one of those things or the other uh but like everybody's working together to do both of those things to create value and to convert the value to money somehow uh so we can pay for all the things yeah I I find it interesting I did just want to close the loop on your thesis because you were why does that connect to what I brought up? It's primarily because I think that the nature of humans is that we have valued the ability to communicate and also like the ability to communicate typically led to like a leader of a tribe and status within, you know, this tribal community that is natural, a natural state of being to us.

40:25And that has materialized on YouTube, right? Like you are a tribe leader with what you've built. And that is a highly valued thing in human nature. For sure. We just had a conversation with Dr. Peter Atiyah. And he's super knowledgeable. Yeah. But additionally, he's an incredible communicator. When he speaks, he speaks with confidence. He's super articulate. He's funny. Yeah. And in my head, when we were talking to him, I thought, if you were a worse communicator, we wouldn't believe you. Yeah. Right? And that's a really fascinating. And inversely, you're so good that if you did want to lie, which I'm not saying he does, but if you did want to.

41:11Sometimes I watch stuff from people and I'm like, man, this information is so good. And you're the wrong person. You can't deliver it. Yeah. And that's something that I think of with your videos, that your style of articulation is very fun to listen to. And I believe it. because the way you speak, the way it's cut, the way it's, the pacing of it. There's also an intimacy to, I'm between family right now. Like, I'm in the midst of a, with Vlogbrothers. That's like the most powerful. I'm in the midst of a family conversation. Yeah, it's like the most powerful thing. Which is incredibly powerful.

41:45To start every episode, Good Morning, John. Yeah. Where you're like, what? Am I supposed to be watching this? Am I supposed to be here? And they've let me in. Clearly, they've let me into this relationship. It's actually one of the best frameworks for a channel on YouTube. Yeah. That has not been replicated. You know? And that framework, again, builds like this incredible depth of trust. And like, I just think a lot about what you said earlier in the conversation that that then unlocks the whole world, right? Because of that deep connection to a few hundred thousand people. You know, that connection to those people is what unlocks the rest of it.

42:22Yeah, and I mean, I think that it's easy to forget how many people 300 ,000 people is. Totally. We have this conversation with a lot of creators where I call it relative zero. I ask creators often, what is your new relative zero? Yeah. Where you would say that nobody watches. Right? Because I had this conversation with like, yeah, nobody watched that one. It was only 120 ,000 views. For some people it's a million. I asked this question to Mr. Beast. Yeah. I said, well, what's like nobody watched your video? Yeah. Sub 200 million. well we're all we're all where we are we all are where we are i don't know what that means but but but it's incredible my wife and i say everybody's themselves yeah but to have this relative zero like for you there's a relative zero to vlog brothers right yeah which would be oh yeah no i mean if we were if we were 90 000 people yeah like 80 000 i'd be like what the hell happened 80 000 is nobody watched that one yeah 80 000 human beings listened to you and nobody watched it, right?

43:24And so that again - I wouldn't necessarily think nobody watched, but I would be very worried. But there would be something weird. You'd be like, something's off. We don't mean nobody, but we say. We say, man, nobody watched that. Yeah, nobody watched that. And I think that's a really fascinating, again, nature versus culture thing. Yeah. The thing that you've done also, I think over the more recent years, has become this authoritative voice in our industry, right? Yeah, I like to try to do that. Creators look to you - You're a very public as well as private advocate. We've been in rooms with you and leaders from YouTube and other platforms, and you will gladly stand up and share your opinion.

43:59You'll say things that sometimes we think but we won't say out loud. I'm in a nice place of not needing to care that much. I mean, complexly, I do have to not make YouTube too angry. We do get money from them for various projects, and we work really closely with them. on our, we have a thing called study hall, which is a crash course, but actually you can get college credit through a partnership with Arizona State University and the gostudyhall.com. And if you're interested in that, college credit for cheap.

44:33And like the people at Complexly will sometimes be like, Hank. Like we are trying to run a business here with our friends and partners. And I'm like, I only say things that are true. Like, like, and like, I'm careful. And I'm like, I will, if I see something that smells fishy, I go internal first. I ask people at YouTube. I'm like, is this like, explain to me why I'm wrong or fix it. And like, I don't need to, I don't need to make a video that's going to get a bunch of views. Like, that's not, that's not important to me. And what's important to me is either that I'm, I've got this wrong and that you're actually doing the right thing here or that you didn't know about it.

45:14or you thought you'd get away with it, but you're going to fix it. Like that's way more important. Shorts revenue sharing gets announced. Uh-huh. Colin and Samir are in the video announcing it. Yeah. You retweet the video with a series of takes that just, I remember when I saw that tweet, I was just, because it is like, it's like - I got some calls about that one. I'm sorry. No, but it's like, again, you're an authoritative voice. I trust you. I look to you for what we should be thinking when it comes to how we structure platforms creative relationships, how we think about ourselves as creators and getting that.

45:51I remember that tweet so vividly because also we were on our way to Palm Springs to a creator summit that we were both going to be at. And I was like, is Hank mad at us? Did we do something wrong? The first conversation we were going to be moderating was about YouTube shorts, about the announcement. And you were in the front row. You were in the front row. Yeah. I don't know if you have any, this is like a core memory, but I don't know if you have any recollection of what this was like. But for us, it was like, oh, wow. You know, and it made us recognize that we could also and should also, you know, really think through this stuff.

46:24You guys are a very, very valuable voice for YouTube and for any platform. Yeah. So that, I think your voice in revenue sharing has been really interesting because my perspective on revenue shares and YouTube is that they didn't have to do it. I disagree with that. And I'm curious to, you know, and I'm like, when I look at it, that's been my perspective. You mean they didn't have to do it from the start? From the start. And the fact that they did it is pretty incredible and that they've sustained it is incredible. And I think maybe the reason I've had this perspective is because for the first 10 years of our YouTube career, AdSense revenue was nominal.

47:05It wasn't even a line. It was found money for us. It wasn't even a consideration because we made such niche content that the way we made money was through different avenues. And I never considered AdSense revenue as a part of our business. It was like, hey, we get to upload these videos for free and then I can make a brand deal. YouTube doesn't get a cut of that, but I'm playing the brand deal on their platform. So actually, this is a great scenario for me. But over time, that's changed. And I'm curious your perspective, because you said you don't have that perspective. Well, I mean, I don't think that that I think that they I don't know if they had to, but they felt like they did.

47:44Yeah. So at the time we were getting all the bigger in 2007, all the bigger YouTubers were getting emails from other platforms that were offering rev share. Got it. And some people were taking those calls and it was interesting. And what would it mean? And what like, you know, there wasn't YouTube was a baby. Like there wasn't any, like it had audience. But the question was, could we pull audience to a new platform that would share revenue with us? And that's why they did it. I like to think that it's good for them to have created, to have that money mean that they're creating like a really vibrant economic ecosystem that wouldn't exist without that extra money.

48:29And for sure, like most creators who are our size do not make most of their money from AdSense. But you make a lot of money from AdSense. Like it's real money. Yeah, sometimes I look at it and I'm like, this is crazy that this, we just upload videos and then we get this check. Because additionally, it's like we don't talk to the advertisers. No. We don't. Don't do any work. We don't go back and forth. Yeah, YouTube does all that work. They do all the work. And it's, that's pretty impressive. Yeah. And the impact of the library over time is unlike anything I've ever seen. Yeah, depending on the kind of library, you guys have a great long form, long tail watch.

49:05The fact that there are some creators who are putting in work now that will actually pay them back if they choose to stop for a period of time is pretty impactful. Yeah. Yeah, we've closed channels down and they just like make money. Right. Like sit there making money. I mean, not a lot. Not as much as when they were active, but, you know, people watch those old videos. I do think what's interesting right now is that there are creators who are at a point where they have grown to such a degree and have such an affinity with their audience that they now can go to a different platform where they have their own platform.

49:36Like you look at the Dude Perfect app or even Nebula as a different option, Dropout. There are these OTT platforms coming up where actually they are succeeding and they are working and those creators are taking the lion's share of the revenue. Oh, yeah. like that that to me feels like a very new shift where it's working one of the two or three biggest stories in the creator economy right now and i like i i think it's very exciting um the opportunity is well here's like here's the thing so like it's it's i think it's all about like the the story of digital media is about fracturing like you fracture fame like there's never gonna be like will there ever be a Brad Pitt again?

50:20You know like will we ever be as focused on a celebrity? Like where will it be just sort of like bits and pieces all over the place? With the music industry I think the music industry is a much better analog. Agreed. I very much agree with that. And the music industry has like always been a little like that but is more like that than ever. Where like I'll find somebody who has like 200 million streams a month on Spotify and be like this person is not famous. They're just not in the popular culture. happening in video for sure there's a lot of pride in music consumption of having your own private space where you like a band that no one else likes and i think there's a lot of pride in the creator economy too of liking a creator that no one else likes anyway yes and so like you like you can see that like why wouldn't that extend to platforms where there's a platform that's for like dropout is a great example of like it's for a certain kind of person you know there are like they're like this kind of nerd we made a platform for this kind of nerd.

51:19And Nebula is a platform for a different kind of nerd. Like they are. I'm sure that there's overlap but they're for different kinds of nerds. We're all nerds. You spend this much time on the internet. You guys are not nerds. We put on a good front. Look at Samir's sweater. They bought me this so that I would have something to wear. I think that I started on the internet with a blogger account. You know, like I'm like, I'm still a little bit of an internet nerd. I've seen your forearms though. Which reads nerd? No, it reads athlete. Oh my gosh, let's end the podcast right now. That's the nicest, kindest thing anyone's ever said to me.

51:59I love it. My wife is very into forearms and it's made me Oh no, she has pictures of Colin's forearms. She's like, Hank, when you go on the show, try not to bring up his forearms. Please don't tell him about them. I know we talk about them often. Just try not to. it's made me more, uh, more aware of four arms. I actually think that's, that is what connected Colin and I is that we were, we both have pretty nice four arms, but there's some underlying, but there's some underlying nerd to you as well. It is what connected us. I think there's that we were nerds pretending to be athletes, you know? And I think we, we discovered together.

52:37We were like, Oh, it's safe here. We're actually nerds. Actual athletes would not have started the lacrosse network. Right. Right. Totally. Yeah. No way. Where were we? What were we just talking about? Oh, different like OTT apps for nerds. Yes. But I think that also plays into the world of connected TVs and the fact that most people are watching stuff again on television. It's like, there was a time where we were all, you know, like, oh, this is for the mobile device. Even do you remember when Verizon launched their platform Go90? Remember that? Where it was like, it's a phone, but you go 90.

53:08um i you didn't know why it was called that yeah today years old yeah yeah yeah that's why it was called that uh but everyone is making stuff for the phone yeah and now it's interesting that we saw last year 30 of our viewership is coming from connected tv and the average view duration of that is 40 minutes that means people are sitting on television watching 40 minutes of the cullen and samir show that then opens up the door to scrolling over to the dude perfect app and having the dude perfect app be a safer place for kids to navigate than YouTube, right? And then drop out being more of an environment where I can find the stuff I like.

53:42It puts into question the, you know, this is such a dumb media concept, but bundling and unbundling of like, do these things start to come together? You know, dude, perfect just announced that Zach King's now on the app. You know, that is a form of bundling. Hey, where's all the kid friendly content that's COPA compliant, which for those of you who don't know means like ability to advertise towards kids. Put that all together. That's actually potentially a threat to YouTube and YouTube premium. And the concept that YouTube is actually an OTT app as well. I love that YouTube is being threatened in a couple directions right now.

54:24I love YouTube. I think YouTube's – I love a lot of people there. I think it's amazing. it's an amazing thing and they have a like a huge suite of amazing features and they care about creators and like but i i do like to see some chinks in the google armor it felt a little bit like we were going to live in google's world or alphabets world uh and now it's like maybe we're going to have a bunch of different things going on um so yeah i do think that it's a it's a kind of threat and i think it's very hard to respond to i don't think that youtube could help people youtube's have had a very hard time for a few reasons um creating products that are uh more specific so like sure like you i i've i've heard rumblings for a long time that youtube would like to have a product where you can subscribe like pay money to get access to certain channels but not like everything and you pay less than you'd pay for youtube premium right and you get those channels ad free.

55:24And I think there's just like weird reasons and like they have a lot of stakeholders and a lot of relationships. There's like reasons why that's very hard. Yeah. And, and so it, it, it makes, it like creates an opportunity there. I think bundled memberships would be interesting if we could say, Hey, we're going to start a membership. Hank, do you want to do it with us? And Hey, you know, other creator economy channel. Do you want to do it with us too? And now we have a, a bundled membership where each of us uploads and people get access and maybe the split is based on watch time. I don't know, something like that.

55:59I mean, do you want to know like YouTube's biggest problem is music? So in order to create a subscription product, they have to, like, it's very hard to do that without including music because of course a lot of videos include music. And so would you just, would you have those have ads as a surprise or would you just not have those videos be available and so they have this relationship with the music industry and there's an amount that they have to pay to them to have to have right you know to be able to play the content that has music in it and uh and so so like the the youtube premium product has to include basically all like a spotify subscription price point plus like everything above that is what's actually being paid for the youtube content and so it has to be too expensive to make i think well it makes more sense now that there's so many ads but uh to to make sense and then to to have a sort of like alternate bundle like you like you'd have to carve out the labels and then that might create a problem for that product like technologically, like trying to figure out how to solve that problem.

57:14I also, I wonder how valuable YouTube even wants YouTube premium or some potential bundling type of subscription to be in order to protect the advertising business and keep that moving. Yeah, no, I think they're going to have to start raising the price of premium because the advertising business is so good. Yeah. Interesting. And what is our take from premium? as creators do we know the same take but we but it's after they pay the labels the labels so the labels get i don't know what it is eight dollars yeah and then everything else gets split i've i've been a premium subscriber for so long that sometimes i have to remember that i need to empathize with the people who aren't yeah right and like what is their experience what is their like i do go and watch on a non-premium account sometimes and it's like it's jarring yeah it's kind of jarring because you forget what it's actually like yeah um i still think this is now complete aside, but in the advertising business, I'm still surprised that more ads aren't made with creators for YouTube.

58:13So like we're watching TV ads on YouTube, which we aren't used to. Most people who watch YouTube aren't used to watching a television ad. Well, I mean, I bet people who watch YouTube are now. Yeah, I guess so. If you see a lot of them, you get used to it. But it'd be more fun if it was you in your room doing a Hank Green video as an ad before a Colin and Samir video. That's more fun. Yeah, for sure. I mean, for our charity store, Good Store, those ads that are hosted by me and John do very well. Of course. But like better than anything else. Of course they do. And I think like the ad agencies who are spending huge budgets to make a 15, 30, and 60 second ad that can run cross-platform.

58:52My thought is like, I don't know if the Hank and John ads will work on television. So it goes the other way, like build it for social first and then play it on television. But maybe. Yeah. And that would be pretty disruptive to the ad agencies. That would be very weird. Yeah. And it is, the ad agencies also have a lot of power. Of course. Over this whole thing. Yeah. But it would be very disruptive to be like, hey, here's the brief. Can you just make it? I mean, there's a, like that exists. You get videos as ads. Yeah. Sometimes. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. You just mean like a more formalized system.

59:30System. to integrate creators in that way. If it made money, people would do it. Listen, we could buy a domain right now. The three of us. All right, we're launching a new company. New company. At the table. That's right. One thing I'm curious about, because we talk about a lot of these policies, YouTube, like how we all communicate differently to YouTube, right? And sometimes we communicate in public forums. Sometimes we communicate with our partner managers. and they do a lot of unscalable things, which I appreciate. Meaning YouTube does the most to engage with their creators. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:00:07And we get to have a voice. But there's, over the past, you know, decade, there's been rumblings of like creator unions or lobbies where we can bind together and have a singular voice towards platforms. And Colin and I have talked about this before and I know you've been involved in some of these efforts. But to me, it feels like we are wildly different than other unions because of the nature of what we're doing. Like we are a media company. Complexly is a media company. We aren't actors. Yeah. We don't work with a studio. We are our own studios. You know, like we are laborers for Colin and Samir.

1:00:44Right? So what are we going to unionize against ourselves? Like it's the, but there probably needs to be a unified voice to the platforms why has this not really worked well it's so i mean the creators are so different from each other for one thing so like there's a lot of creators like if you are you know in your first thousand subscribers you're completely different than if you're in your first hundred thousand subscribers and then if you're there you're completely different if you're in your 10 million like it's just like a totally different set of businesses and so and and also there's like the majority of the i don't know actually probably not but like the majority of the views are probably going to channels that have over 100 000 subscribers whereas the majority of the channels probably have less than a thousand and so like that like who do you prioritize in this conversation like the people who are getting the most views and who are you know generating the most revenue or do you prioritize the people who are there are the most of them um and though like it feels a little bit like when you're thinking about a union you're thinking about like okay how do you create for like create systems that work for everybody that allows people to have a chance um and that you know i i would think of advocating for things like a way to reach someone if there's a problem you know which if you have fewer than a thousand subscribers you just don't have if you have fewer than 10 000 or 100 000 you may not have um and whereas if it's like you and i it's a totally different set of problems because that problem is already solved for us and so we're looking at like hey um you know we like we want to do this new project or hey like like big or or you know we don't like the the ad how you're going to share revenue on shorts we think you should do that differently um or we don't like that you're doing shorts at all like what's the fucking strategy yeah guys um what which i'd love to talk to you guys about that let's do it yeah But yeah, so I think that they're like, that's a problem.

1:02:47And also what you identified, which is that most unions are employees of companies. Some unions like the Screen Actors Guild are contractors. And like the Writers Guild, like they don't work. They're not like employees. There's contractors with these things. I don't like it's weird. Like the way that the way that, you know, Hollywood works is different from any industry. And then we aren't either of those things. We are not contractors. We do not work for YouTube. We are not contractors for YouTube. We're not like Uber drivers. We run a company. Like we run companies and we license our content to YouTube.

1:03:21We are content licensors. We don't work for them. We work for us and they provide a tool with which we can help run our business. But that does mean what it's more like is a government. like youtube is the government of the town that like that our business is on the street of and it's like there's something wrong with the street and you talk to the government about it like neil is the president of you or the mayor of youtube and we pay taxes in some sort of we pay taxes to youtube and and you and youtube helps us and like the town provides services for and like that's that's like the close which is weird because of course we did not elect neil mohan uh but like is uh but but it like somebody did uh and he kind of works for the shareholders he didn't like inherit it yeah so that's good yeah um yeah he works for the shareholders and like we are a stakeholder among other stakeholders right like there's advertisers and there's the labels and there's creators and there's of course the people who watch the videos and also society ideally yeah earth that should be one fascinating ecosystem it is it's wild and i think all of identified this and been like i'm gonna buy one of those and then i will be the king of one of these towns yeah uh that that it is like being it is sort of a modern day um nation state thing like i live on the internet yeah you know yeah it's jarring to see you in real life yeah a lot of my life there yeah this is not how I typically see you or know you.

1:04:54You're mostly made up of pixels, typically. Should we talk about shorts? I was going to say, yeah, which is why it's such a big deal when something like shorts is announced. Try speaking to a non-YouTube native person about shorts, and with any level of passion, and they will not reciprocate it at all. It does not matter to them. They're like, oh, the vertical one's on there, too? Sure, yeah, fine, whatever. And it's such a big deal. To us, it's like, everything changed. We're like, no, but it can risk what the platform is. We're like, it's taking away from long form. And they're like, I don't know.

1:05:27They're like, it's just all vertical and it swipes. And you're like, oh. No, my God, everything's changing. I think there was also this weird. I made$4 from it. It's bad. There's this weird, like, it felt very reactionary, I think. Oh, yeah. Right? And I think that felt strange. I didn't feel it felt obvious. It felt obvious. Yeah, yeah. Not strange, but just like. to be honest I'm actually relatively happy with where the platform has netted out which is that long form viewership is still from my understanding what's working what's being prioritized and people are watching on connected TV which I think is good for creators and clearly good for viewers people are enjoying it I was worried that that wouldn't happen when Shorts was announced that it would change the viewing behavior of the platform yeah and I think that it has especially on mobile that's what changed I guess actually it's just bifurcated the behavior Yeah.

1:06:18Mobile is now shorts and people are moving to connected TV. It's allowed both things to happen at once, which I think was really smart. Yes. Because you can watch on connected TV and then swipe on shorts at the same time, which is a lot of hell. Now I'm double YouTube timing. Right? But actually, if you watch someone watch YouTube, that's probably what's happening. With one of our videos. Yeah. 40 minutes, it's on the TV. Yeah, I'm watching and I'm watching shorts. But you're watching shorts while it's happening. Yeah, I'm like, there's got to be something better than Colin Samir on here. somewhere yeah it also means that the people so like tiktok has a problem of people build an audience on tiktok and then it's like what do you do right you try to get them to youtube or do a podcast or somewhere you can actually have a deeper relationship and have like a direct connection instead of just like one day you never show up on their feed again which is how tiktok works you know um and if you're not capturing if you're not if you're not getting spiced by the algorithm them for some reason if you're not doing something um yeah so the um so yeah i mean it seems like obviously they had to do it is what it seems like to me like they weren't going to let themselves get like blockbustered by tiktok and just be like oh i guess we'll just lose market share you know they had to fight for it and uh and then like like but they also had to launch a product that wasn't ready felt like to me um and i remember when they were launching shorts it was like you have to put the hashtag shorts in the video so that it'll know it's a short and i'm like wow you guys are hacking right now right that that i've always empathized with actually with platforms i actually always appreciate when something gets shipped and i'm like oh wow yeah you are you are you're not too dissimilar to us yeah putting the hashtag shorts is fine but like not knowing what the algorithm is going to do before you launch it is a little scary like what it's going to do rabbit holes am i going to get driven down um and i immediately did or i was like neil buddy i got it all right man spaces real fast from rocket ships like that shouldn't be a direct like rocket ships should go to rocket ships my man yeah okay yeah yeah well that was early and that's that's been worked rocket ships do have some correlation now i know if you do the math you're like that's pretty quick i can see yeah i can see on the the note of like fractured fame and fractured, you know, uh, affinity even.

1:08:38Yeah. VidCon, which is your baby. You created VidCon. Yeah. Um, in the, in the past few years has been a very different experience. I think largely because of short form content. Yeah. Because, you know, we will walk around VidCon and we'll meet someone and be like, oh, great to meet you. And then we'll look them up and they'll have 11 million followers on tiktok and it's like i didn't know that person and they can just walk through the convention hall yeah because some people know who they are yeah but some people have no idea and so what we realized in in probably two vid cons ago was like everybody's famous now the person watching us has more subscribers than us yeah could be yeah and it's like even on youtube it's very hard to know like i running around all the time running across really great creators I've never heard of who have more subscribers than me you know I'm like when did you start doing this and how are you so good at it but it's a very different game now but the I mean I love that but it does make it hard to run a conference luckily I don't have to do that anymore but it's very hard to try and like when we started it was like YouTube is a community and everybody knows each other and now it's like trying to make a conference for music.

1:10:01And again, there was clear tribe leaders. It's very different than 2017 when Logan Paul is running into the fountain and like hordes of people are following him and Casey is doing his own meetup and people are showing up there. And it was clear as people were walking throughout the convention, there's those tribe leaders. There was almost like a hierarchy, right? That was like, okay, here's the really popular creators and they're the cornerstones of this, right? And then there's, you know, like a Coachella poster. Yeah. You can't have that really anymore. You can still, but less. Less. Yeah. And also like they're so different from each other.

1:10:34Like you don't go to Coachella and expect to see Tim McGraw and Rihanna, right? But that sometimes happens. Okay, maybe it does. I don't know. Because you've got Coachella and then you've got stagecoach. It was recently that I have learned that it's pronounced Coachella. Right. Again, forearms. Yeah. When you have the forearms, you know Coachella. Yeah. Yeah. you guys I think that Coachella is nearby it is okay so you would know more yeah yeah it's but once you niche down at all it's very it gets very tricky and I think also to some extent it's easier to get newer creators to want to come to VidCon because it might be their first VidCon as a future creator they might have been as a fan before and whereas you know some folks who have been to this for a long time are like I'd rather I gotta a lot of work to do right now and i like i don't have that weekend to spend doing that do you have any thoughts on on where the creator economy is heading and how it collides with hollywood like how these how these two interact with each other oh god i want them to stay separate for as long as possible hollywood is some mess i have a lot of friends who are writers um for tv mostly and it sucks.

1:11:51Like it's like they work so hard on things. Like everybody is always working on something that's probably not going to get made. And like YouTube is never like that. Like if you're working on it, you're going to upload it. Like even if it doesn't turn out that good, it's going up. Even if you're like biting your teeth and like, oh, this isn't it. You're still going to upload it. Yeah. We spent money on this. Fine, it's going out. Yeah. I'll do better next week. we spent$500 on that already? We got to upload. And so like, but I don't know. Like, I think that the I think that the the way that they're emerging is in these over the top platforms.

1:12:28So like you see what Nebula is doing with originals and that feels a little bit more like Netflix. and the but at the same time it still has that like how do we do this with a normal amount of money rather than try and make something cost 300 million dollars and be like this is going to be the biggest thing that will ever exist how do we make the best 20 to 30 minute piece of video with what we have I think that's their biggest struggle is that they've done things a certain way for a very long time where one camera is operated by four people. Yeah. And we, again, Jenna Marbles with the MacBook.

1:13:11Yeah. And that was compelling content. Yeah, of course. So we value like how to connect with people more than we value the other pieces of the puzzle. And those are different value systems. Mm-hmm. Your production costs to make Vlogbrothers. Vlogbrothers makes money. Vlogbrothers makes money. Because it's very interesting. Because it's free to make. Yeah, I think we, like you think about the revenue creation is one thing, but actually just that our production costs are so low. And the concept of being a creator is that your production costs essentially remain the same. Yeah. If not, they increase very little over time, unless you're making Mr.

1:13:44Beast videos or something like that. But your revenue exponentially increases and your audience exponentially increases. And so that margin - I mean, if it does. If it does. If it works, if it works, that's what happens. And we don't, the production cost does not necessarily trail up with the revenue. And Complexly shows started with money because of that YouTube original deal. Which was tricky. They started at a standard. I think one of the best things that ever happened to us with Lacrosse Network is you tried to get that money. I tried. I tried to get that YouTube money. And it was right after.

1:14:17It was immediately after. And they were like, also, I think our idea was so niche. And we were not trusted 21-year-olds. But there were other sports networks on YouTube that were getting funding. Yeah, they were all like Hollywood production companies. They were all Hollywood production companies. and I came with a pitch showing that each of our videos would cost between four and five thousand dollars to make because I went to film school and I was like this is the budget here's the below the line people the above the line like here's all this jargon for you and they looked at me it was in San Bruno and they looked at me and they were like the only way that this will work for you is if this costs zero dollars to make so figure out the zero dollar budget yeah they were like figure out how this costs you zero dollars that's great That's great advice.

1:15:01But it costs you time. I think it's one of the best things that ever happened to that company. For sure. It's the only reason it succeeded is because we had a methodology that was like, oh, if we spend any money. I'm just looking to see if you can see the lacrosse network play button behind you. Oh, yeah. It's the old one. It's the really old one. Yeah. But the only way that worked is because it was like we sat together and we were like, so what do we make that cost us zero dollars? Yeah. And we had that system all the way until the company was acquired. which makes it that much more amazing actually what Complexly has done and been able to sustain.

1:15:33That transition was really hard. So Sideshow and Crash Course both got$450 ,000 to start. Oh, each. Yeah. Wow. So that's a lot of money. Yeah. And so we hired to make those shows. And by the end of the first year, we were making enough money. We would have been making enough money to pay for the company to exist if we weren't paying to repay the money, which we were. and so youtube basically forgave our loan oh wow yeah so that we could keep doing it at that point most of those channels that they had funded so they funded a huge like a few youtubers got the money like phil defranco and retin link and we and fine brothers i think all got some money but 90 other like hollywood production companies got money to make this stuff on youtube and all 90 of them stopped at the moment the money stopped flowing.

1:16:28And we were like, we can keep doing this if you forgive our loan. And they were like, well, I mean, everybody else just stopped and like are never going to pay anything back. And you're like one of the most successful things that's come out of the program. So they did do it and we were very grateful. What is your most successful company? I don't know what you mean. I mean, Crash Course. Profitable? Not complexly. because because yeah crash course i would say is the most impactful impactful yeah for sure and the way that i measure success i'd say that crash course is the most successful thing we've ever done yeah um but it's never i think that it loses money every year internally at the company sometimes i think since the coin launched maybe it it doesn't anymore but um it's it's very very narrow margins um in terms of like profit i mean in terms of profit of the things that i've done uh good store which is our like charity like it's like you can buy you can subscribe to get coffee yep we're gonna launch tea soon we're gonna uh we've got um soaps and like some cleaning personal cleaning products and socks which are also kind of consumable um and you can just subscribe to various things or just buy one-off products and all the profit from that goes to partners in health This year, Good Store's donation was over$3 million.

1:17:53Wow. Okay. Got it. Where did the idea for Good Store come out of? It came out of that need to raise$25 million for Partners in Health. And like part of what we were, John and I said, it was like, okay, so we'll take DFTBA, which is our like, we help creators make products. And we're like, okay, we'll give all the profit from DFTBA to Partners in Health or all of our distribution. so anything that would come to us that's going to go straight to partners and health and the uh and and that's going to be a big part of it but it wasn't like we were just having a hard time it's a it's a tricky like merch is a tricky business sometimes you have really big years sometimes you don't um it's all it's a weird do you buy enough do you buy the right number of products and what are shipping rates doing etc it's interesting you bring up dftba which creates products for creators.

1:18:44We talked about VidCon, which is a creator conference. We didn't talk about Subable, which was a subscription platform you sold to Patreon. So much of this is extremely creator-centric, like solving creator-centric problems. I was listening to John, and he said, yeah, we're successful. We're not that successful. We've never been at the center of YouTube culture. Oh, yeah. Well, no. Not a good place to be. Some people can handle that pressure, but not me. And I think he's referring to like being a Logan Paul or Eliza Koshy or something like that. But when you look at actually what you've built, it is pretty core to the center of YouTube culture.

1:19:25Sure. That's great. Thank you. Like, how do you look at your place within YouTube culture and what you've done? Even the fact that like when Samir listened to How I Built This, he hadn't heard about Complexly. You know? Yeah, I mean, I'd like people to know that Complexly exists and that it's like a great group of people who make a lot of amazing stuff, work really hard. And but like to some extent, I don't like maybe this is going away some, but I was happy. People like a lot of times I hear YouTube YouTubers kind of have a chip on their shoulder about being ignored. And I'm like, yeah, but you don't know what it's like to not be ignored.

1:20:01Like it is kind of nice to fly under the radar. I see because I was a reporter in a former life and I see what happens. Like I see how like those companies are treated by the press. Like they're not like constantly getting talked about as like, you know, bastions of success and how wonderful they are. Like they get, you know, like being in the press means that people are going to be looking at you and scrutinizing you and deciding that they think that your strategies are bad or they think their strategies are good and you're getting analyzed by stock market analysts. And it's a whole thing. And like this is kind of nice.

1:20:40It's just like be here and like build things and like deliver value and like get like feel good that we're delivering value rather than what we're being appreciated for delivering value. you you've had this like really cool gradual i mean you guys early vlog brothers there's some videos that have 10 like in the 10 plus you had some pops mostly about giraffes yeah but uh yeah that was a that was big on youtube for a while just people love love was big uh at a moment don't try it now i don't think it'll work but that was a problem or maybe try it now i don't know i could bring it back but but i do like i've always craved the that level of connection that that you and John have, where you're able to just deliver to a camera on a consistent basis, like that's YouTube.

1:21:26And I think that gradual nature over a decade plus, almost two decades now is, is incredible and very aspirational. And I, I'm curious your perspective on how creators sustain, because we're, we're now at a point of retirement, right? Matt Pat retired. Tom Scott is kind of taking a step back. A lot of creators have said like, look, I, I think, I think I want to take a step back. And it does require, to do YouTube right, it requires a lot of you. Yeah. It requires almost all of you. There's a quote in the Yes Theory book where Matt, who stepped away from Yes Theory, said, for it to work, it requires your constant obsessive attention.

1:22:03And I think that's the thing that kind of drains you and is unsustainable for decades and decades. And we haven't seen it yet. You're one of the few cases where we've seen like, oh wait, you could do this for a long time? Yeah. What do you think the equation is to do it for that long? Well, I mean, I don't know, man. People have a lot of ideas about like the right way to have like to find success. And I'm like, I am so sorry. My advice to you is to be me. Like, I don't know what's wrong with me, but like I am not like I don't burn out very easily. I think I have like there's reasons why I don't burn out easily.

1:22:37I think that my fuels are pretty clean burning. Like I'm not being driven by like I'm not. And I think that this is why I could never come up on YouTube today, but I'm not. This is going to sound incorrect. I'm not that ambitious. I am absolutely a very hard worker and I don't ever buy it when anybody who has a lot of success doing this job says it was just luck. I'm like, it wasn't luck. You worked very hard. Like you found a way, you found a thing and you fucking hammered at it. Right. And like, I know, I know you did and I don't even have to look, but if I look, I will find that you did. And so I'm a very hard worker, but I'm not that ambitious.

1:23:18Like I'm much like, but I'm driven by like doing weird things and trying things that are different. And, and, and like, like it, and, and this is a great place for that because usually what people do, Is they look at a new medium and they film the play. They're like, we're going to make movies now. And the movie is going to be, we've got a camera. We're going to point it at the play. And the actors are going to act on the stage. And that will be a movie. But like, that's not what it turned out movies were. Movies turned out to be a totally different thing. And you could do a bunch of things that you couldn't do with plays.

1:23:53And that took forever to figure out. That's the interesting place to be. Is like the space where you're trying to figure out, like, okay, we've got TV. We've got video. we've got music, we've got our existing, we've got radio, we've got all this stuff. What's it look like now? What's it look like when tools are cheaper, when distribution is level, when it's many to many, what does it look like now? And just being in there, it's so sparkly in the brain. And that's what's driving me. That's a pretty pure place to be. And I think part of that, I would imagine, comes from what YouTube was like when you started.

1:24:29you are somewhat similar to maybe the first people to start skateboarding you know what I mean? they're just exploring

1:24:40there's no money there's no money you don't know what you can do with this board no one thinks you're cool at the very beginning someone did a kickflip and they were like that was impossible there's literally a trick called an impossible that everybody can do now exactly you started in that place where all that mattered was that, doing something different, experimenting. Yeah. And that is what hooked you on it, where I imagine there are people who are starting today with different contexts for the platform and are like, oh, this is a place for money. This is a place for fame. This is a place for business building.

1:25:13Well, you also can't do it unless you are really driven now. Like we weren't focused on, like we loved to get views, of course, in the beginning. Like that's obviously like exciting. But we didn't have a lot of competition. Like people are like, oh, look, they edited. Like Smosh started doing lip syncs. Right. You know, and like is still out there because they iterated. You know, they were interested in what was possible with the format and or with the tools that we had. Like, what can you create? And like I feel like online media creates genres as fast as that we used to create shows. you know like there is a new genre of content as often as there used to be like a new show on TV yeah I'm sure it's not often but when you're in a room with Rhett and Link and Smosh and some of these people who have been on YouTube since 2006 what are the conversations that you're having I imagine there's these like yearly meetings where it's like YouTube legends around a table the elder statesman that would be wonderful but I mean we mostly talk about what's going on now you know like we it would be very fun to reminisce but like there's so much happening right now.

1:26:31It's like how are you guys responding to this? It's like this conversation. It's not what I had in mind. Sorry. But fine Hank. Do you remember the first moment or was it more gradual? Was there a moment of like validation for you early on of like oh this is a thing? Yeah. I mean there were a bunch. I did music that first year like every Wednesday. So it would be every two weeks because we traded off days um every time i had a wednesday i'd i would release a song which is a wild thought because at that moment i was like learning to play guitar that's crazy um and the second one i did like went kind of viral um i mean at that time absolutely viral like it got you know 10 times 100 times more views than any of our videos ever had before and in particular it got like good views like it was about Harry Potter and so it was like Harry Potter fans were all like sharing it around and watching it and talking about it and so it was like being invited into a supportive fandom and also like having that fandom come over and be like part of our fandom part of our community and that I was like and also YouTube at this point had a manually curated front page that everybody who used YouTube shared.

1:27:49Yeah. So you'd go to YouTube.com and be the same page for everybody. I remember that, yeah. And it was featured there. And so it was just like wild. Yeah. But I also had that feeling like with the Mars site when it got indexed by Yahoo, which was also manual back then. And it was like, oh my God, I'm into less traffic because I'm like one of the seven. Like when you search for Mars on Yahoo, this is one of the seven links that they show you. Right. Yeah. Those moments of validation are so important for young creatives. Yeah. Because you just, you don't know if you're anything for a while. Yeah.

1:28:21And then something happens. This is what's so good about TikTok is that it is good at doing that. It's good delivering that. Yeah. But then it doesn't have a system for going beyond that. It's almost like that's all they want to deliver. It gives it and then potentially takes it away. It feels like it's been taken away. I did go to a comedy show with all TikTok creators. Oh God. There's so many good comedians on TikTok. It wasn't good. Oh. was not good because I think they had, they're getting signals very early that they have it, but it's a different craft. Oh yeah. Very different craft. Oh yeah.

1:28:55But the room is packed. Oh. Right. So it's like, I think some of this stuff is going to be kind of odd where these signals are giving you a different type of signal and maybe it's not actually what it is. And, you know, we're starting to see some social creators start acting or music and it all happens way too fast because it's like the signals are off. you know? Right. Well, attention is not necessarily the only signal that should tell you the other stuff, right? That you are a good comedian. Right. I mean, and that's, that's like, like, it's very different. Like being on a stage is very different.

1:29:28You have to figure out what, like, if you're going to do stage stuff, you have to figure out what you're good at doing on a stage and you don't know. You don't know until you have to spend some time. And like the easy thing, and I suggest this is like, is live podcasting. Cause that's how, that's like the best way I feel like to get comfortable on a stage where you start to feel how it's different when there's an audience in the room but you're also doing something that's pretty chill and you can put it out on your podcast feed and also yeah we have plans to do a live pod tour yeah so that's good that's good and on that note i was curious if we could get your advice on what you think we should do you too yeah no because i think we you know we've had talks uh in the past of like Like, you know, you guys come up a lot in our internal conversations.

1:30:18Well, Hank and John made VidCon. Should we make a creator conference? You know? Like, well, Hank and John make educational videos. Should we start making educational videos? Yeah. You know, like, there's a lot. You guys come up a lot. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it's very smart to be in the business of helping people get better. Like, so you have like a huge opportunity, a very good thing here. Like this, I feel like you can kind of make it, like it would be easy, I think, for this business to be 10 times bigger than it is. I don't know if it'd be easy for it to be 100 times bigger. I think that you have a couple of choices to make on that path.

1:30:57So like you are calling in Samir. Listen to Rick Steves' How I Built This is something that I do. Rick Steves is like a travel guy. he made a travel show on PBS forever. And it was like weird. And one of the things that Rick Steves talks about is he's like, I kind of wish that we'd called it something else because it's called Rick Steves. Right, yeah. And like everything's branded, like all those travel books are branded as Rick Steves. And, you know, seeing what theorist has done, where like it's possible for MatPat to step away. And that's like, that, John and I call this the Jerry Garcia problem where like at the end of his career, Jerry Garcia was kind of like done.

1:31:40He didn't want to be like touring all the time, but he had all these people who were economically dependent on him. He had like all the roadies and the tour people. And like, it wasn't just the audience. It was like these people who would lose their jobs if he retired. And he, like, you can't have the Grateful Dead without Jerry Garcia. And so he just like kept doing it even though he didn't really want to. And you don't want to have that problem. You know, you don't want to be in a situation where you don't want to do the job anymore, but you can't quit because you care about the people around you too much.

1:32:08So you have to build something or you have to decide. And like the thing with Rick Steves that really interested me is like he made that choice and he delivered. And it's actually great. And what he does is like as it's gotten bigger, he's just like we're going to be this size. We're just going to make more money and everybody's going to love their job because they're going to make more here. as long as we get along and that you're working at the company, you're going to make way more than you'd make at any other production company. But you can't sell it. You can't sell Rick Steves without Rick Steves.

1:32:40So that's a little bit of a challenge. You can't scale a person. You have the number of hours in your day that you have. And so that's as advice. I'd be like, look at that because you have lots of opportunities. You just have to figure out what the, like how much can you scale Colin and Samir as humans? I get, I get challenged. It's really good advice. I get challenged with this thought often now. I got the opportunity to ask Jeremy Zimmer, the founder of UTA, this question. I'm curious your perspective. It's kind of the Rick Steves thing. I've been thinking about like, do we just make a great show or do we build a great company?

1:33:22Yeah. And sometimes those things are at odds with each other because I've found that to stay in the pocket of being a great creative, sometimes the business building gets in the way of being a great creative. The hiring, the team management, the stress, the problems that arise from building a company weigh on your mind in a way that doesn't allow free creative thought. Right? Oh, yeah. And so those are at odds at times. And we've seen incredible outcomes for people who have built great shows. Of course, there's, there's, they're outliers and they're top 1%, but like Alex Cooper with Call Her Daddy, you know, she made a three-year deal with Spotify at$60 million.

1:34:05That would be an exit that someone would be excited about, but that's a three-year deal. And that's like, you build a great show, there could be a great outcome. But even she started a podcast network. Okay. Touche. That's not, that's not her name. Touche. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And it's wild to like get cancer and be like, wow, I'm more productive creatively than I was before because I don't have as many Zoom calls to go to. Right. You don't have to go to Zoom calls when you get cancer by the way. So try that out sometime.

1:34:39And that was a bit of an eye opener for me. And so we had transitioned. we actually had already hired or were in the process of hiring this was very lucky a CEO for DFTBA like we had like recruited and we had like five candidates and we've been narrowing it down I was the CEO then of that and Complexly yeah and before that I was the CEO of VidCon and Complexly and DFTBA all at the same time and for a little while Subable was at the same time as all those other things that's crazy so it's not a good idea it's crazy but don't smile about it yeah it was it's a bad idea don't be the CEO of more than one company is a message I would send to even very wealthy people.

1:35:22Who are you sending the message to? The gusto. I just applaud the gusto. I applaud the gusto. And so we had been hiring for that and we found an amazing person and she kicks ass and she's way better than I am. And so that transition happened while I was getting diagnosed. So it was like very good timing. And then we transitioned to have John take over a CEO of Complexly for a while and then moved our, with like some padding, moved our COO up into that position. Who is, she's doing that now. And that is, you know, it's frees me up to do a lot of thinking, strategic thinking that I think is great for Complexly.

1:36:05It's like, I understand online video pretty well. And that's a real value for the company And I shouldn't necessarily be thinking about stuff that I'm not that good at, like contracts with partners and, you know, disputes. Legal disputes. Yeah. Very bad. Sucks a lot of time. Yeah. So we just had a launch like last week that was very sort of spur of the moment, like Hank Green idea. Everybody came together and supported it. And it did really well. And like SciShow raised a bunch of money to keep making the show. But, you know, I think that that wouldn't have happened if I didn't have that free time.

1:36:42And also I'm working on like stuff that maybe will turn into a book that will be published by the company or a series of videos that will be or both. Like that's I'm very interested in this. Can how do you take Scott Hanselman talks about this? He's like a tech blogger who's been doing he's worked for he works for Microsoft. Like how do you like you have a finite number of words you can write. How do you make them do the most work possible? So you have a blog post, but that goes in your newsletter. It gets cut up into tweets. It gets turned into a video. And why not? It's going to reach different people.

1:37:15And I do this with SciShow now where I'll finish shooting SciShow. And then I'll go in the hallway and I'll be like, did you know about this science thing? And then that'll upload later concurrent with the SciShow episode that I just recorded. And it's just me paraphrasing what I delivered to a camera from a teleprompter. That's a role I would be happy to hire for here. Like content syndication within our own organization. Yeah, you do that. Yeah, we do it. You like shortify this. So much gets left on the table. We actually don't do short form content of this anymore because our audience is better at it than we are.

1:37:46And we were competing with our audience. And it was like embarrassing for us here. I was like, how are we not as, we're not as fast and we're not as good. Yeah. And we also weren't really monetizing shorts. Sure, well, you can't. You can't. It's gotta be a funnel. This is where I'm at. Here's my two tips for people who have companies that do shorts. Yeah. One, if it changes hands once, that's too much overhead. I love that. Yep. Two, it's a funnel. Yeah. That's all. Like, you aren't going to turn this into a thing that's going to be a business. So with that in mind, right? Like, that's where I made the call that we were investing in cutting the stuff up into short form.

1:38:28But I was like, really, you see Hank in this set. My hope is that we build a brand big enough that you know that he's at the Colin and Samir set or that we have him in exchange. And you're like, who are those guys? What's this from? I'm going to ask. Oh, it's from Colin and Samir. I'll go listen to it. Yeah. But also a shorts viewer is typically not a long form viewer. Yeah. And so - It's hard to move them over. It wasn't really that big of a funnel. Yeah. And we, Colin and Samir shorts on TikTok and YouTube shorts are the biggest pieces of Colin and Samir content on the internet that we have not made.

1:38:59We don't make those pieces of content. Yeah. But they are the biggest. They're the most viewed pieces of content of Colin and Smear. I don't know that that's a bad thing. I like this is a huge. I cannot. John and I have a podcast. I cannot get the man to sit in front of a camera during our podcast. I'm like, I'm set up in my office and I can just clamp my DSLR on and I can take straight to my drive and send that to an editor. And John's like, I am sitting in a chair in my basement. and I'm not going to set up. It does change the energy. Yeah. I think the energy is better without cameras. Yeah.

1:39:37Most of the time. But we can't turn it into anything. Yeah. True. People don't watch if it's just the waveform. See, that's what I really appreciate, that who we actually are as YouTube creators is the modern programming executive. Yeah. Right? That's who we are, though. And other things. Yes, and other things. But you are deeply empathetic towards how to get this out to an audience. Yeah, and I think I also want it more than John does. John's like, what are you going to do with more audience, Hank? And I'm like, number go up. Yeah, but John, I'm actually curious about your relationship with John.

1:40:18Because you both started this when you were in your 20s, I believe, Vlogbrothers. Yeah, I think he might have just turned 30. Now you're in your 40s. How has your relationship changed throughout, you know the past couple decades oh i mean then like at the beginning we did not know each other very well right uh you know like he went to boarding school when i was uh like 12 13 so like that's when we stopped living together in the same house permanently like he'd come back for summer and he's very cool guy he's very smart he's very like you know he's good good guy and like i like So like it's not just like I love him like a brother.

1:40:56It's also like he's a great friend and he's like very fun to talk to. We like how we share a lot of values. So he like he's absolutely my best friend. And the so that like the the and like that wasn't the case then. You know, it was sort of like I felt honored, honestly, to be asked by this guy who was like a published novelist and very talented and like having his career do his career things. to be like, Hank, we should do a thing together. I was like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And at that point, what was I doing when I was 27? Oh, I was at that point a freelance web developer and like database designer.

1:41:35So like boring work and also scalable, like easy to scale up and down work. So it was very good transitional work for this. And I was also blogging. But somehow it just like, I mean, I look back at times when YouTube was really not working for us. Very much not working. for two guys to make, I think there was one year we made like 30 grand total together as a company in LA. And somehow it just... Well, it's worked now. It's worked now. But at that time, it was so irrational to keep going in some of those moments. But I think that's why it's worked now because we liked it enough when we weren't making money.

1:42:17Like similar to the whole skateboarding thing. We liked it enough to keep doing it when there was no money and there was no opportunity. Stateboarding is a great metaphor. Like there was that era of YouTube when we were all just like. Soul skaters. We were like looking at each other and we were like, did you like the thing I did? It's like no audience validation would matter enough. So it's like other creators, please tell me. Because that is, I mean, getting constructive feedback from creators is like, like appreciation from creators is the best. That's the best. Thank you. Because you know. Yeah, for sure.

1:42:48But I think all the time about how I couldn't have made, I couldn't have had that year where I made$17 ,000 if I hadn't had the safety net of my family. Yeah, and Catherine was making money. Right. Yeah. Was there ever a moment, you know, as you and John start bringing on all of these different companies and stress starts to build, that you think maybe this business, these businesses we have together, is actually not good for our relationship together as brothers? No. No, and I think that this is one of the reasons why, obviously they don't always work, but why family partnerships can work. There's a lot of brothers in media.

1:43:33It's specifically brothers, which is interesting. I think there might be an element of one-upsmanship involved trying to impress the other. It's a common dynamic among brothers. And so like the most important, like the brotherhood is more important than the project. And so like we always know that. And as long as we don't stop believing that, then when there is a disagreement, there is a solution. And on the table is we stop. You know, like the brotherhood is more important. Like, if we have a big enough disagreement, like, we can just not do this. So, like, you know, I think that Red and Link are like that.

1:44:19I think that— I mean, I resonate a lot with that. I mean, I feel like we've felt that way through the years, that if anything's not working, you know, the lowest common denominator is that we are still friends, like, very extremely close and feel like brothers. Yeah. And that is a wonderful byproduct and gift of this experience that we don't have to let that be taken away. Yeah. It's way more familial than it is friendship, I would say, when you do this together for 12 years, you know, because it's very different than friendship. That is a very different thing. Because also you are the only people who know actually what it has been like to be Hank and John in this weird way.

1:44:59Yeah, and we've been through the whole thing together. You've been through the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. I think about that with my wife too, where it's like, you know, like we have been, like we've been through so many things together that like we are a unit in that way. There was a, when I think about your path, I think like there is a, like a perceivable path that you guys could have just been great creatives. You know, like you make cool videos, write cool books. You know what I mean? Like I've done that and just done a bunch of businesses. Yeah, and made a ton of money doing that and lived a maybe simpler life.

1:45:33For sure, simpler. Yeah. I think that, so like - This is the thing I'm pondering right now, right? It's like, how complex do I want my life to get? And how simple can it be? Because now we've afforded ourselves this interesting moment in time where now we have optionality. We didn't have optionality before. Now we have optionality. So now that I have optionality, I like hearing when people also had that optionality. What were your thoughts? I mean, one, I want to try new things all the time, and that's a thing for me. Got it. Okay. And at this point, I probably, well, don't say it. I probably have started my last business that's going to be a big business.

1:46:12But maybe not. I don't know. Hopefully, it will be alive for a long time still. Which business is that? Just VidCon and Complexity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not going to do another big one. I see. Like if I do another thing, I will be very intentional about having a very small team of people who I already know, I think.

1:46:40And because I get dragged in by ideas. Like you talk about like a creator conference and I'm like, man, VidCon could do a better job of that. And like, wouldn't it be cool if I like went back into VidCon and I helped them, you know, spice that piece up. and I'm like, oh my God, Hank, stop. Stop thinking about cool things you could do. Of course, so it's great. It's a wonderful space to be in, but you've got to be intentional. So you're right. And the thing that, so there's, I want to try something and see what it's like. That's a piece of it. And I have this problem where anytime I see anybody who I respect doing something, I'm like, I want to see what it's like to do that.

1:47:20And this is why I'm in Los Angeles doing stand-up comedy without cancer. For sure. But there's a somewhat finite amount of time. Oh, for sure. So this is the other thing. To what extent do you feel an obligation to do something with what you have? So there are a bunch of different reasons to feel that obligation. So you can think, okay, I've signed up to tell people, I'm going to help you in your creative career, which is what you guys have done. To what extent do you feel an obligation to have that goal have a maximum impact? Because if you want to have the maximum impact, you have to grow a larger company.

1:47:56And so that's a struggle that we have at Crash Course, where we're like, okay, this is a huge obligation to try and help people to provide a tool that helps people do some of the hardest things that they do and also make their lives better and their communities better by having the ability to get more education more quickly and to do better on their tests, et cetera. So that's a huge obligation. It feels like we need to be doing partnerships with universities, helping people get through college cheaper, helping, you know, like it's just like a huge value to everything, you know, to have there be more nurses and have there be more engineers like this is great.

1:48:39so it like it that that how much do you feel that weight um and then there's the reality that like if you want to be rich like and like i don't think that it's necessarily a thing that you should do like i think that being rich is just another thing to be but but a lot of people want to be rich and if you want to like be rich you have to build a business that you can sell outside of um getting rich what you talked about first was like impact how much impact how much responsibility do we feel to make an impact and you brought up asu and the credits the study hall the fact that like this blew my mind that that people are able to watch youtube videos essentially take a course via youtube videos and then get college credit at asu that can then be transferred for you know hundreds of universities yeah and it made us think about, okay, well, what's the maximum way we could actually make an impact with the knowledge that we're accruing from the people we speak to and what we do on a daily basis?

1:49:39It probably is to create some sort of curriculum and find a way to license it or make it available to people through the college system. Oh, yeah. Potentially. Because that is still, for high school students, like, what should be or what is next. Yeah, and, like, film school is maybe a problem. I went through it. Yeah. Like I think that – Oh, because of the curriculum. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course. Teaching the skills that people need. Like it takes so long for new industries to penetrate academia. The University of Montana, which is the town I live in, has a media arts program instead of a film school.

1:50:20And it's actually significantly easier to hire out of that program than a film school because people coming out of film school are like – they're like, this is all wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wouldn't hire someone. And I'm like, yes, we're definitely doing things wrong because it's cheaper and it doesn't matter. Yeah. Do you think that is a realistic opportunity for us? I don't know. Knowing what you know with study hall and ASU. I think that the big question is how do you integrate with academia? So like, I think that that's a smart idea, but it's, you're creating a product that doesn't have a market.

1:50:57yet so there isn't like what it what like how do you and i actually don't like i i would be the guy i'd ask this question but i don't know the answer to it um like how do you get a course in a school like how do you convince teachers to offer these courses yeah or the university and how do you get them tied into the the you know the majors it's not being asked for enough yeah well i think it's I think it's totally being asked for, but I think that like they haven't created the like, you know, a major like has requirements. So how do you get this course into the requirements for a major that a lot of kids are choosing?

1:51:37Or how do you get a new major introduced? And like that's all, you know, interior, slow-moving, bureaucratic academia stuff. The nice thing is that education is, you know, you can select your education now on the internet, which I think is really great. I really like that because I was someone who didn't really learn in the traditional system. I didn't like it. I liked when I got to college and got to select my education more. This is a huge question. So like one of the things that I'm worried about with higher ed is like if you keep raising the price faster than inflation every year, every year it becomes less worth it.

1:52:11Yeah. Every year some things become not worth it. Every year it becomes not worth it for some people, for more people. And then eventually it becomes not worth it for everyone. You know, like there comes a point where it does not deliver as much value as it costs. So they have to figure it out. And like they're not. It's just like it just keeps happening. It keeps getting more expensive to teach people. And I don't understand why. Because I, well, I mean, I understand why I'm more than the average person. And it's not simple. There's not like a simple solution to it. It's not like there's like one part of the thing.

1:52:44Just cut that out and you fix it. It's a bunch of stuff. And it's like weird economic incentives and they're all, the schools are competing with each other and the students have to make choices. And it's like, oh, should I have, when I graduate, what are my student loans going to look like? That's not what you're thinking about. You're thinking about what the experience you're going to have for the next four years. For sure.

1:53:04So, yeah. So, I'm just very, I'm very worried about it because like we need to, like there needs to be a system to educate people and it should be good. And like the ones that we have are good. Universities are good. They're just, like, they deliver good value. They just are delivering good value at a higher and higher price constantly. I wonder if something, though, will just sort of fill in the market. Like, if there will be a resurgence in trade schools. Like, someone will come in, right, and, like, brand a trade school and the experience of a trade school and the courses that are offered in a way that has never been done before.

1:53:38Even, like, Google offering certifications. It's like, oh, I trust Google, and that's affordable. The question is almost like summer camp. It's like three months and you go and then you learn a skill and then you leave. I love the idea. Actually, I love the idea of camps. ASU does this thing, Arizona State University, where like for chemistry, it's hard to take chemistry online because like you need to be in the lab sometimes. And so what they do is they have a chemistry course. You take it online and then they have a three week like chemistry lab, three week long. And you do it every day with the same people.

1:54:10And I'm like, I feel like I would make friends, you know? I feel like we have, like, at the end of it, you're like, we did that together. We did chemistry for three weeks straight, eight hours a day. It's a lot. Which is easy not to feel in a semester-long economics class or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to pivot quickly because I wanted to ask you this question, but I think it's somewhat related. You had this quote about Twitter. You said, Twitter is such an interesting case because it's far more influential than it is successful. Yeah. And I don't know why. It reminded me of the conversation we were just having around education, that it's like very, you know, college is a very influential system and maybe it's not as successful as it should be.

1:54:48But I was curious if you thought right now there's a ton of chatter on Twitter or X, I'm still not used to calling it X, about, you know, original programming, about video content being monetized. Do you think it has a shot to become a successful creator platform? You know, it is a very influential place. People of high influence spend a lot of time on there. But what could happen to make it a reasonable part of, you know, creator monetization? I think there's a lot of product that needs to get built. And I think it's not just... it's not just like video player product, you know? I think that there's a lot of advertising product that isn't there yet.

1:55:36We vastly underestimate the amount of engineering that has gone into the systems YouTube uses to deliver advertising, which are very good and are the reasons that we make money per view. Twitter is, I think, publicly, famously already unprofitable. So sharing revenue just cuts into that problem. um i i think that the i don't know how limited the runway is um for for twitter like i like it's not infinite right like if it if it loses money every month forever eventually you run out of money somehow unless i guess you could have a billionaire continue to fund it um it would need to be a different thing like it like and like that's possible you know youtube has shorts on the app now and it's sort of like a very forward-facing experience like it was a very which is very different from what the app used to look like so that's very different but like it almost needs to be video first for i feel like it to work and i then that's not the expectation people have for twitter like that's not what they're looking for probably not looking for noise like audio when they're on twitter like that's a big barrier to overcome i'm on twitter when like specifically I can't be watching TikToks because TikToks make noise.

1:56:59Yeah. And so like that's like it's a text medium. And like so, but I also in order to answer that question, I would love to see watch time metrics. There's a lot of videos on Twitter that say like, this is how many views. It's like got 20 million views. and I'm like, I feel like that video has 20 million seconds of views. 20 million starts. Yeah. There was a time where like I think Facebook video was like if you started it. It counted. And it auto started. And it auto started. Yeah. No, I wrote an editorial about this. Great. I'll read it. It was a big fucking lie. Yeah, yeah. I recall. It was a mess.

1:57:40I think it's too easy to forget a tweet to properly compensate a creator for a tweet. Yeah. As harsh as that may sound, like a YouTube video at 20 minutes long, it will make an impact if you liked it, got to the end. And you will remember that creator tomorrow. You will probably go back for them and there's enough time to serve an ad. I think a tweet is like it's the smallest unit because it is mainly text-based of information, which makes it a great platform because it's easy to upload. Yeah, and I think that the strategy makes sense. So like if the strategy is, okay, so the tweet is then the beginning of the funnel and the, and like, ideally you can have the whole funnel on the platform.

1:58:20Right. But like it, it, I almost feel like it needs to take you to a separate experience where it's like the tweet takes you to a newsletter and the newsletter looks quite different from the rest of Twitter. With this thought for me of like, you know, we started the conversation kind of around mortality and like you, you being faced with it head on. And, and, and now when you look at like, you know, when I think about vlog brothers and, and all the, the, the work that you put out regularly, you know, like I, I don't really watch cross course or a scishow, but I poked over to a scishow video that you made recently.

1:58:56And I was like, that was a great video. And it's not that different from like, you're sitting in the vlog brother set too. Oh yeah. That's a weird one. Yeah. That was a weird one, but I enjoyed it. Uh, and, uh, I was curious just specifically with, with vlog brothers, how many new viewers you get on that channel and how many returning viewers and if you know that because i'm so curious about like how are new people just discovering you for the first time now and then hopping on this train you have and and how many are there like legacy people from the past decade who are just like this is what i do i watch i watch these guys talk to each other so i'm gonna keep watching these guys talk to you yeah i mean we have good good data on the on the diehards.

1:59:39So we do a census of the community every year where we, and I suggest to any creator to do this because it, it, it gives you information that you need. Yeah. But like, it also is good for them for you to have that information. For sure. So it's not like, it's not like you have to trick them. Like it's literally, hey, do this and it will make it better for me and you for me to understand you better. And that's the whole, like that's the value prop. And then, like you also get information that you can use for various things like like through a survey like yeah we use survey monkey okay so just a simple yeah which is like i don't know like their product is always morphing but like we've been using it for so long it's not we're kind of stuck on it um you just announce it through a series of uploads and yeah we i just like i announce it on all the places and then i you can use like coded links so you can sort out like the people who came from twitter versus the people who came from tiktok versus the people who came from youtube um and yeah people so like the i'd say 80 plus percent of our audience has been watching for uh more than two years so like they are in it and i'd say probably you know like up to like maybe 10 percent have been watching for more than 10 years so there's a lot of people who've been a lot of been in it for a long time yeah and obviously people come in and out uh obviously you know we're not catching like that that survey has a huge sample bias toward people who are willing to go click and click on a survey and fill it out um so that's going to be more likely to get the people who've been around for a long time and uh but but yeah it's people of people people stick with it but there are also new people who come in all the time the reason i ask the question and how it connects to mortality is because i think about this premise of us being immortalized on this platform in some way that like when you are done uploading new people could discover you yeah and go on a journey with you for years yeah but will they like i don't know i mean there's not like like this doesn't it doesn't like uh alleviate the problem of mortality where like eventually you are forgotten you know yeah no matter what it's actually very i think it's a peaceful thought to recognize that you're going to be forgotten like i i actually think that's nice i think it's a peaceful i think that's most i think most people don't find that peaceful i like i have found peace in that thought that like it will matter for a short period of time to a small group of people and then it won't matter what what freaks me out what i thought about was like people are going to re-upload my videos and if like i'm dead that won't stop and you can't even monetize those you can't even claim those yeah who's gonna do the work who's gonna do the content id work who's gonna make a video another impersonator is using my uh the yeah the um and that like and people like the the thought of and i even like i a little bit thought of this like you know i didn't have to get too too focused on this because i wasn't ever like uh in a situation where like i was gonna probably be dead with well there was a moment this is the wildest though it's weird getting seriously ill i when i first went to my doctor and like we knew that i probably had cancer so this before i was diagnosed with anything i i was like i'm just gonna be flat like straight with you here i would like to know if i'm like i just want to know i'm going to be alive in like three months like because otherwise like i needed to do a bunch of stuff and she was like well at this point we just can't say anything yet and so like that night i went home and i started like recording the bedtime stories that i told my son so like that like in those moments i was thinking like should we have a strategy for like how to continue to monetize my work so that there's still income after i'm gone which is a weird thought like how do you keep you know like that like to some extent it's passive and like that probably would be enough um but the you know the thought of like you know what do you like should like is it weird to like re-upload a dead guy's videos and i'm like oh no i actually have no idea like it's strange it's not like they like they still play, you know, episodes of TV shows with dead people in them, you know?

2:04:21Strange to think about this almost 20-year-long conversation with your brother as an asset that will be transferred over to your future children. Oh, yeah. Right? Like, that's an interesting and strange thing, too. You've got to take that seriously as a creator. Like, your will becomes different when it's not just money assets and it's creative assets. So it actually is more important for creative people to have wills than the average person. So look into it. There's a business. There's a business for us. I'm going to take some time before I look into it. Hank, let's do it. Willsforcreatives.com.

2:05:00Wow. First of all, we could hire lawyers. That sounds like so much fun. We could talk to lawyers all day, you and I.

2:05:09Like, you know, I think all of us in the community when we heard you had cancer was just this weird feeling. Right. Of just like, oh my God, Hank, what? And when you made that video, it felt like it took the air out of that, like depressurized that balloon in a way that was just so Hank Green and such a profound approach to that news. Right. And so YouTube, it was just so YouTube to do a tier list. It's like of my cancer friends. Yeah. Where do those ideas come from? Like, are you writing regularly are you like jerry seinfeld like are you sitting and just writing ideas every day or are you is it just like okay what would be funny um you know like the idea i don't sit down and think uh what am i gonna make a video about i am always thinking what am i gonna make a video about i see so like like there's a subroutine running all of the time that's like oh I'm going to LA how am I going to make a video about oh I'm going to be in Collins what am I going to make a video about oh I'm going to be in my hotels near Venice Beach what am I going to make a video about oh I'm going to be in Palm Springs I can make a video about dates which they make in like the fruits understood got it I don't I know nothing about dating funny video yeah yeah a video about dating from a guy who's been with the same woman for 28 years in a city where they make dates yeah do you know what your video is about this friday it's actually already done yeah it's already done project for awesome which is our yearly charity so like we're changing some things up for the p4a this year and uh so it's just sort of an update and i recorded it before i left will you shoot one this week while you're in la for the fall i'm i was like planning i have an idea but i need to like get my shit together and i don't know i'm gonna get a chance you're also doing one of the shows yeah is the idea dependent does it have to do with you being in la yeah yeah okay oh but i have to say thank you for for that because that was the intent of that video and then to some extent to to signal that like sick people are alive which i think we forget sometimes where it's just like we're like a lot when we're young we if we're lucky we get used to being well and uh and and we are afraid of illness i think somewhat understandably because it sucks and is like, you know, you don't have, it's like uncomfortable.

2:07:36So I like just wanted to like signal that it's normal to be sick. It's part of life. And like sick people are alive. Do you ever think about what you want to leave behind or like what the, do you think about the concept of legacy or like, this is the impact that I hope I'm leaving behind? Yeah, I didn't. and then i did uh and i still like i'm back to not really thinking about how much was this great news um hopefully i'll stay there for a while uh but but it was a comfort to be like i've done like look i've lived a lot of lives already so like even if i die young i will have died having done a lot of cool stuff and um so that that's a comfort like there were things that that didn't help with but there were some some thoughts that that did help with you know but but like i think much more important than than legacy is impact like it's not like it's not like how do i because look like there is going to come a time when like like i don't know when but someday there will be no humans left hopefully it's a long long time from now like i think it's going to be a long long time i think that we're at the beginning of humanity most likely um i but probably uh well not probably definitely a heat death happens and like humans don't exist anymore um and and no one remembers you if everybody's dead so like there's a there it happens eventually so legacy is a is a false thought in terms of immortality um and so if you say like what is it well it's just impact and like you can have impact while you're alive and your impact continues when you're gone like everybody affects the world some uh like nobody does anything by themselves uh so like we're all doing it together.

2:09:25Like we're all just like humanity is a weird thing. Not entirely sure what it is. Seems like it might be like a giant ant colony that's has some like simulation of consciousness but that isn't actually there and it's very, very cool to think to be a part of. We don't understand. It's definitely the weirdest thing in the known universe. And so like getting to be a part of that and like thinking what like you know, in my world view, there's no objective value. Like all value is assigned by people. But like choosing things to assign value to, you know, and to me that's like less suffering, more thriving, more happiness, more creation, and like more discovery, like more knowledge.

2:10:14And so like if you can be focused on the things that you have assigned value to, and like I think that that's to some extent a choice, and to some extent it's obviously very culturally informed. But getting to be a part of that, the things that I have assigned value to, that's so good. To some extent it's like we need to know about anatomy and physiology so you can get into nursing school. And to some extent it's like, isn't this funny? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, so that is far more than legacy. is what I think about. Amazing. Hank Green, thank you for coming on the show. You look great. Thanks.

2:10:57I feel good. Outfit is phenomenal today. And thank you for complimenting my forearms. You changed Colin's life today. Honestly, you changed his life today. I appreciate that. Only forearms. I can't wait to come see your show. I hope everyone gets the opportunity to see it as well. This was a conversation I'm so glad we got to have and record it. It's a lot of ground. A lot of ground. A lot of ground. Yeah. There's still more to cover. Part two. Coming soon on willsforcreatives.com. All right. See ya.