Inside John Green's Film Premiere

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

0:38Today, we're diving into the remarkable story of Colin Rosenblum. Wow. Did you pay it to say that? That's crazy. That's very kind. It's crazy, but it's my favorite way to learn about a subject matter. I'm learning about so much more now that I can turn this research into like a seven minute podcast that I can listen to just when I'm walking. Did you tell it that I worked at the front desk of a hotel? Dude, the prompt is just, make me a podcast about Colin from Colin and Samir. That's it. I may be biased, but I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm hooked. So if you guys haven't checked out Copilot, check it out.

1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. YouTube and Hollywood have collided in fascinating ways and the splintering debris of that collision is all around us. You're not really running the show. The viewers are running the show. Finding that balance where you're sure that you're adding enough value to the individual's life that it justifies whatever you need to do in order to support yourself. That for me is the key.

1:51Hey, podcast listeners, this is Samir. This is Colin. And this is Nate. Nate, welcome back. Thank you, thank you. All right, we're here because of a conversation you had with John Green right before the premiere of his movie Turtles All the Way Down. Yeah, and before we get into that, you know, we're recording this on Wednesday. Kendrick just dropped his Drake diss track Euphoria yesterday morning. Who do you guys think is winning the beef between them? Kendrick, I listened this morning at the gym and it got me so hyped. The lyrics are out of control. I think the reality is between Kendrick and Drake, just generally, Kendrick is cooler.

2:27Drake is more popular, but Kendrick is cooler. And so like if you just go, you know, right then and there, it's like Kendrick won before it started. I'm not going to lie. I did not. I thought this was going to go over your guys' heads and you'd be like, what's happening right now? That's how old you think we are? You didn't expect us to chime in to have listened to this? Are you out of your mind? Nate walks around his office thinking we're like 70-year-old men who don't have access to the internet. Yeah, come on, man. What are you talking about? I don't know. You were dropping indie rock bands the other day and expecting me to know them.

2:58It's tough out here. Indie rock bands? Okay. All right. Wow. I feel so attacked. I feel very attacked. Okay, Nate, lay the context for this conversation. Anyway, so we're here to talk about John. We're here to talk about John Green, who, if you don't know about the Green brothers, John and Hank started uploading weekly videos to their Vlogbrothers channel in 2007. And they went on to start the educational channel Crash Course, co-founded VidCon, run all sorts of nonprofit work, such as their project for Awesome. but John is arguably better known to wider audiences as the author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Catherines, Paper Towns, and The Fault in Our Stars, which ended up being adapted into a hit movie in 2014.

3:46Just as a quick aside, there was a time in an Uber with Colin where we were about to go meet Hank and John and Colin said to me, isn't it crazy that John Green wrote The Fault in Our Stars? And I looked at Colin dead in the eyes And I said, that's not the same John Green, my friend. And it is the same John Green. Yeah, of course. I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that John had done all these things and wrote that book. That's how impressive the Green brothers are. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, look, it's crazy. It's been 10 years since that movie came out. And now his 2017 novel, Turtles All the Way Down, which explores conversations on OCD and mental illness.

4:26You know, it's not exactly the first thing you think about when you think about an easy-to-adapt book. But it's finally out. It's about a high school girl named Aza. And if you're listening to this on Thursday, May 2nd, it just came out on Max today. So what you're about to listen to is a conversation that Nate had with John in the lobby of the hotel before the premiere of the film. And when Samir and I listened to it back, there was a lot of really relevant conversation around what it means to build a true community online. Because a huge part of the success of Fault in Our Stars, no doubt, was the quality of the story, but also John's Nerdfighteria community, how they came to activate and support the film.

5:14And this notion of having a strong community is especially relevant right now with some of the volatility we're experiencing in the creator economy. And we'll explain that thought after you listen to this interview, with Nate and John. So you've obviously had several adaptations come out. What do you feel like has changed since that first go around to now? Well, the movie business has completely changed. Making a movie like The Fault in Our Stars and putting it in theaters is essentially impossible now. So I was fortunate to be, I think, one of the last people to really have that kind of experience where romantic drama that costs$12 million to make can get in front of tens of millions of people, or even more.

6:02Potentially over 100 million people saw that movie. So it's a very different world now. It's a very fractured media landscape. YouTube and Hollywood have collided in fascinating ways, and the splintering debris of that collision is all around us. And so it's, you know, I've been really lucky to live through all of that, to live through the rise of YouTube and what might still prove to be the fall of old Hollywood. I think that, you know, big media companies have a lot of time to reinvent themselves. They have a lot of runway and they also still have a lot of revenue and a lot of audience. And they're still, you know, big movies that make sense that are in movie theaters all the time.

6:47But it's just a very different landscape today. And, you know, I don't know how to navigate that landscape as well. But I really, so I just have to hope that people find the Turtles All the Way Down movie and think that it's as good as I think it is. It's always a really thrilling, terrifying moment, this moment, the moment before anyone sees the movie. It's done. There's nothing that can be done to make it better. and yet nobody's seen it yet. And so I'm really nervous about that. I'm also really excited because I think it's a special movie. But if I were talking to you in five hours, I would probably have a very different answer because people will have seen the movie.

7:33And when you're in a room with 1 ,300 people, you can kind of gauge the reaction a little bit. You can get the feeling of how it's working. And so I'm just really excited for that and really grateful that I get to have that opportunity, even though it's a streaming movie, that I still get to watch it with 1 ,300 people. So would you say that side of it hasn't changed? That part of it hasn't changed 10 years later. So the way movies get distributed has changed. The business has changed in really fundamental ways, obviously. But the excitement of sharing a movie with an audience is the exact same.

8:10It's interesting you brought up the collision course of Hollywood and YouTube, because I know in our studio, That's like been the theme of 2024 so far, what we've been talking about internally. And I think you're someone who's toggled both worlds in a way that not many people have. And you said, right, like you've been there since the jump pretty much. And I guess like what are the conversations you might be having with folks on both sides right now? Like what's what's on people's minds? The conversations I'm having on the YouTube side are a lot about premium content, about how do you make content that can compete with high-quality video games, that can compete with TikTok.

8:48Because I don't think any of us really want to be in TikTok long-term, to put it frankly. I think most people feel like that's an unstable place where the relationship between audience and creator is kind of undermined by the platform instead of deepened by it. Yeah. and that's not just true for tiktok i think it's true for for swipeable video in general um and so wanting to have one foot in that world while also have you know and wanting to meet audiences where they are with so i think i think a lot of people want to meet audiences where they are which is on reels and tiktok and youtube shorts while also making premium content that lives on youtube that's generally shot horizontally.

9:39And that's a fascinating and relatively new challenge. You know, I mean, we never thought, like... And then on the Hollywood side, you know, I think people are trying to find a way forward, trying to figure out what's going to work in a different world. And that's true for the streamers. It's true for producers. It's true for actors and directors. It's just a really strange time. It's a strange time in book publishing, too, because so much of the traditional ideas around publishing are getting challenged just like they are in Hollywood. I find that exciting, but, you know, there's going to be a lot of fallout.

10:22And I don't know what those models look like in the future. I think that the current model is super broken. The model where it's bad for consumers, it seems to be bad for companies, it seems to be bad for everybody. Everyone to have 37 different streaming services competing for our attention obviously isn't going to work. But I don't know what the future holds. I'm extremely bad at predicting the future. It's incredible that I've been on YouTube for 17 years because I never saw the next YouTube trend coming once in all that time. You never did like the Harlem Shake. I never did the Harlem Shake.

10:54I was always behind the times, always have been, always will be. And I think one of the reasons people like Hank and I's content is because it seems behind the times. like it seems sort of retro you know the the sneakers I wear most days are these Adidas Sambas that I've worn a version of since 2003 and suddenly those are very fashionable again it's surreal for me because it's just like your thing comes back occasionally and so occasionally Hank and I style will come back, but usually it feels kind of retro. Yeah. No, it's a good point. Um, I know you brought up book publishing as well, and there's a great New Yorker profile about you that came out in 2014 called the teen whisperer, which also it's wild.

11:42That was 10 years ago. Um, but in it, you know, it talks about how nerd fighters everywhere helped propel the fault in our stars to like a bestselling book on Amazon six months before it even came out, you know, while you were doing pre-orders. You also like signed the first 150 ,000 print copies, I believe yourself and had to go to physical therapy for your shoulder. What did you learn about the relationship between the strong YouTube community and book sales early on, even if it was by accident to a degree? Well, even before that, my previous book came out in 2008 and it became a New York Times bestseller only for a couple of weeks.

12:19It was only a bestseller because Nerdfighteria, our internet community, was really well organized and all ordered the book at the same time and made sure to order it from places that, you know, reported to the New York Times book bestseller list. They were very focused on that as like a gift for me and wanting to make sure that like they could have the maximum impact with their book purchase, which is extraordinarily generous. The connection between a community and And a product can be very strong, of course. But the product has to be good enough that it can ultimately live on its own. Because all the community can provide really is activation energy.

13:05With The Fault in Our Stars, Nerdfighteria provided extraordinary activation energy. But they also did with my previous books. And that just happened to be the one that also resonated much more widely. Yeah. I didn't expect that. And honestly, I don't need it. I mostly write for, you know, people in or adjacent to our community. When I think about writing, I mostly think about it in the context of people who engage with our work one way or another, whether it's on Vlogbrothers or elsewhere. And so, you know, it was lovely in some ways, surreal and uncomfortable in other ways to have suddenly be relatively close to the center of U.S.

13:47pop culture and have like Saturday Night Live sketches made made about your book and everything. That was definitely a strange experience. It wasn't one that I was anxious to repeat, to be honest with you. For me, a lot of times when an internet community gets really big, it paradoxically becomes less powerful, or at least less powerful in the lives of the individuals who care about it. And so Hank and I, very consciously after 2014, we thought, well, how can we keep Nerdfighteria strong and productive? And I think ultimately that meant making it less about us as individuals. and so that's that's sort of what we've been trying to do over the last 10 years is to make the community more about the community for lack of a better way of saying it do you feel like off of that to like a lot of uh whether it be like you're already doing non-profit work before 2014 and you're already like doing the project for awesome but do you feel like almost doubling down on the core community was like a response almost to the massive mainstream success of felt in our start?

14:51For sure. Yeah, it absolutely was. And it was something we did pretty consciously because we didn't want to be mainstream famous, for lack of a better term. I think we, to be honest with you, yeah, it was uncomfortable and I didn't want to, I wasn't, I didn't want to keep doing that. I mean, I think for some people it's great, like, but I don't know how they do it. I don't know, you know, I don't know. It's, it's really, it's really difficult not to be able to to go to the grocery store. And I started to feel a lot of anxiety that like I wasn't giving people enough time or I wasn't being as patient and with people as I wanted to be.

15:27Because when somebody comes up to me and they like my work, that means a lot to me. And I'm really grateful to meet them. And I wanna be able to express that gratitude. But it becomes really difficult to express that gratitude if like you can't navigate an aisle in a grocery store. And so I think for a lot of reasons, we wanted to pull back from making the community about us. And, you know, obviously we're still really important to it. I think if Hank and I got hit by a bus tomorrow, it would be really bad for Nerdfighteria. But the most important thing to me is to try to be a good member of that community and a good leader in it rather than to make it about me or our work.

16:10I read Evan Puschak's book, Escape Into Meaning, last year. And I thought it was really strong. Your quote or review of it is right on the cover in the back. So imagine you had read it as well. Yeah, I've been following his work on The Nerdwriter for years. When he put his book out, he also put out this really interesting YouTube video explaining his journey where, you know, he said he always wanted to write a book. And that's why he started a YouTube channel. I may be remembering this incorrectly, but he might have said, like John Green. Do you think you or Evan's path build something sustainable first and then launch the book project off of that?

16:44is that you know the path I see some young writers succeeding without having much of an online presence and I do think that that's still a viable path I think that both are paths you know I was doing okay as an author before we started our YouTube channel you know it was it was a living and I enjoyed the work and felt like I was successful I'd you know I'd won prizes in in young adult fiction and felt really good about where where my books were but obviously starting the YouTube channel really helped. Interestingly, I was very reluctant to like market my books to my audience in those first few years.

17:24Like my publisher would always be like, put your book in the background. Like why not put one copy of the book in the background just so people know you're an author. And I would be like, no, that's, that's selling out. That's lame. That's like, that's like eating a Carl's Jr. hamburger for$5 ,000 on, on YouTube. Like you just can't do that. It's awkward. And then eventually I had to learn to love marketing and talking because what I came to eventually is that I worked really hard on this and I'm very proud of it. And also these people are invested in my life and my work. And that's part of the reason that they show up every week.

17:58And it doesn't do either of us a favor for me to pretend like that other work doesn't exist or like it's somehow totally separate from what I'm doing on YouTube. So I think that it's become an important marketing tool, but I think in general, you can't build a strong community by thinking about marketing a product. I think you build a strong community by being a strong member of that community and a strong leader of it. And, and by encouraging the community to do fun and cool and interesting stuff together, not by saying, I'm going to build a community so that I can sell cliff bars or whatever it is that you want to be in the business of selling.

18:37For me anyway, there has to be a real value add in the life of the viewer so that their life isn't just made better by watching the video. Their life is also made better by participating in the community, by being part of what you're trying to do. And that's in some ways a lot harder. Like it's very hard to get somebody to watch a YouTube video in 2024, of course. But it's even harder to get somebody to not just comment, but to start to think of themselves through the lens, in part like through the lens of that community and what that community is doing together. That's where the real value is.

19:21and I know it's I know that's easy for me to say because I've been doing it for 17 years and I've never needed to rely on the advertising income in order to make a living and so I've always had another job and and all that stuff but finding that balance where you're sure that you're adding enough value to the to the person to the individual's life that it justifies whatever you need to do in order to support yourself that for me is the key you know to some extent we have always been the followers in Nerdfighteria. We've been led in terms of what the values of the community are going to be. We've been led in terms of what kind of content we should be making.

20:01And so we don't actually decide nearly as much as people think we decide. A lot of times we're just answering Nerdfighteria's call. I think one of the first observations I had, and I probably shared with you all, was there was like 1 ,400 people there too. It was like a big crowd. And then after the movie, you know, the cast and director came out and then John came out last and he like got far and away the biggest applause. How many authors are there out there that have that kind of loud community, I guess, just like so on display? Yeah. I mean, the reality, though, it's like it's tough for me to call like John Green is an author, but it's tough for me to call him just an author.

20:37Like he is part of the multi hyphenate group. And I do think making a video, you know, weekly videos every week for like a decade. 18 years. Yeah, that's how a community builds. But I think he said some notes in there that, you know, about how to actually have that relationship with the community that I think are exceptionally important for us to talk about. Because it's not just the fact that he was making videos. And I do think right now, maybe we are in a world where views and audiences are relatively accessible through platforms. Connection is not accessible. And rarely do we actually, it's hard to emphasize connection.

21:20It's hard to emphasize community. We're learning, we've been learning that throughout the past year or two years as we've like launched a discord, started education. These things require a lot of work to be active members of the community. And if it feels like work, then it's, it's, something's off, right? Cause like, it should just be, you are a member of the community because you enjoy being a member of the community. He made this really good point that resonated with me a lot, which is, you know, you can't build a strong community by thinking about marketing a product. You know, especially in the creator sense, I think a lot of people throw around the term community with this idea in mind that the community is there to then transact.

22:04And there's no doubt that the Green Brothers have a strong community that transacts, whether it's with the film in this instance or like Awesome Socks, right, or all types of things that the Green Brothers put out. There's so many ways to transact. But he says you build a strong community by being a leader, encouraging the community to do fun and interesting stuff together. He says there has to be real value in the life of the viewer so their life isn't just made better by watching the video, but made better by participating in the community, right? that like in their real life, outside of just watching a video, you are not only participating yourself, but giving your community opportunities to participate.

22:44I wonder how much when a book is getting adapted, specifically of John's now, of course, like The Fault in Our Stars gives you a lot of proof that this is going to work, right? And he's a great writer and he can write great stories. But I wonder how much the community component plays into the like Max's decision or whoever the buyer's decision was to adapt John Green's book. I would imagine it has to play some role, right? Like when you show up to the premiere and as you said, Nate, everyone cheers for John and not the actors. Or I'm sure they cheer for them, but not in the same way. You know, that's fandom and that's significant.

23:19And I think it's really inspiring to me to listen to John and to look at the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel and see that the majority of the viewership is between 100 ,000 and 200 ,000 views. sure that's a lot of viewership but this is not crazy youtube algorithmic viewership these thumbnails are screenshots of their faces you know these there's one title i'm looking at right now that just says full hank i don't even know what that means yeah that has 150 000 views and i think it's just like it's it's really important as a creator especially when you're chasing the advertising market. And the advertising market requires high viewership, right?

24:04That's all about eyeballs. To think about the other side of this, which is just doing good work consistently over time and building a community. And John says in that conversation with you, Nate, a lot of times when a community gets really large, paradoxically, it also becomes less powerful. I really like that yeah and I believe that I think that actually the you know even the size of that audience of people clicking no matter what for the Green Brothers on Vlogbrothers that's too big of an audience too big of a community to actually manage like if you were managing a Discord server with 150 ,000 engaged people it would be too many people if you were at a event with 150 ,000 people.

24:55It'd be too many people, right? Like to try and actually create connection or create something meaningful for them. So when you start to think about like the next chapter of the creator economy and how advertising has become more and more volatile, communities do support creative endeavors quite a bit. But a community cannot be that big for you to actually be able to manage it. And the word community is not something to be thrown around lightly. I think that's what I took from this conversation. He says it's not easy. Yeah, I think to your point before we even listened to Nate, you and John, Samir, you said something like it should be easy in a way.

25:35Like for you, it should be easy to be at least a member of your community. Yeah. Right? You should be telling stories and making videos about a community you're already passionate about. Mm-hmm. So that you would almost do it no matter what. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah, you can't be looking at your audience with such a strategic lens. I do wonder, though, about this, like the broader sense of YouTube Hollywood. Just as we're like this week has been a really interesting week. Obviously, headline came out about Wesley Wang, a filmmaker who uploaded a YouTube video. That YouTube video then got picked up by Sony and TriStar through Darren Aronofsky.

26:15It's a great story. And what a great cold email. Yeah, it's a great cold email. Check out our Twitter. There's the whole kind of, you know, the screenshot of the email there. And we had a nice long conversation with him. That conversation actually made me think a little bit deeper about this concept of YouTube and Hollywood and social and Hollywood and that are these worlds actually converging? Are they actually coming together or are they two separate tracks that are close? And you can jump from one track to the other, but being on one of the tracks does not mean you're naturally going to go to the other track.

26:49You have to make the conscious decision to jump. The whole process is so different. Even the concept that you can take another piece of work and like adapt it into something else, like that's just so different. The timelines are different. The collaboration scale is different. Like everything is different about how Hollywood works. Yeah, I mean, even John talked about the element of he writes YA novels that he thinks Nerdfighteria will like, But he's tried his hand at screenwriting and he's like, I don't know how to do it. Like I bring another, you know, that's where other people come in. There's other people who are coming in the door to direct.