Hank Green Unpacks YouTube's Biggest Problems

do you want to know like YouTube's biggest problem huh is YouTube is the government and it's like there's something wrong with the street wow that's a good point you're convincing yourself that you're doing something but you're not it shocked me explain to me why I'm wrong or fix it how motivated are you by money oh God what is your most successful company how did you actually do them well were you forced to actually think about the end of Vlog Brothers I um today on the Colin smir show we're joined by Hank Green Hank started the channel Vlog Brothers back in 2007 with his brother John Green as a way to stay in touch when they lived in different states 2,220 videos later and Hank and John are still doing this experiment it's allowed them to expand their creative Endeavors and build companies like complexly which produces crash course and saow not to mention that he's a New York Times bestseller and also has like 8 million followers on Tik Tok most likely if you hang out on the internet Hank Green has explained something to you last year Hank was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called Hotchkins Lymphoma and because Hank Green is Hank Green he also wrote A comedy special throughout the experience which Colin and I actually got to go see here in La this was a really special conversation for us to have on the show Hank's seen YouTube since the beginning he's launched companies he's had successes failures and he has such a good perspective on the career of being a YouTube Creator this episode is sponsor Ed by kajabi kajabi is a platform where the average Creator is making $40,000 a year through selling courses and memberships it's also the platform that we use to launch our course creator startup now we built a course because we really enjoyed teaching and we felt like it was a great way to take our knowledge and experience and offer it to our audience in a more structured learning environment Creator startup takes you through the four key pillars of building a Creator business and each module of the course comes with videos worksheets live sessions and challenges es that are all hosted on kajabi one of the best parts about launching a course on kajabi is that it comes with a built-in community so students can actually meet each other ask questions and chat about the curriculum kajabi is super easy and intuitive to use from the templates we use to design the course to the built-in email marketing that we used to sell the course it allowed Colin and I to focus fully on the curriculum and the content so if you want to explore launching a course Right Now kjab is offering a 30-day free trial just go to kj.com Colin and Samir the link is in our description all right now for our conversation with Hank Green hi Hank welcome to the show hello what's happening what are you doing in La uh this other things like it but I'm here because I'm doing a little standup comedy tour talking about cancer treatment in comedy form right okay for an hour on stage so the the the thought that I think all the time when I see your work when I think about the things you do even when I think about this trip to La is just how do you put out so much stuff even the fact that while you had cancer you were Contin like you were continuing to put out work and wrote A A comedy special during that time yeah yeah I mean I like I don't do this job because I need to yeah you know like I I like there's there like the question of what compels a person to create is weird and uh you know know it probably has good fuels and bad fuels in there but when I was sick I remember uh I made a I made a videos according to our normal schedule you know for Vlog Brothers which is once a week and I remember being really grateful for that to like have a like and it was physically easy you know like it's not a big drain on the body to push recording the camera and and like do a thing for 15 minutes um and editing obviously not super physically draining and but it it just felt like oh like this is what I'm good at this I know how to do this I will do this and I will have and I will have done a thing and it will feel like I'm still a human being living a life you know because I think illness can be like that sometimes where you're like am I just ill like is that my existence now so to have sometimes when I was writing a blog post about gravitational waves or making a Tik Tok uh or making a YouTube video it was like I'm still doing the thing that I'm I heard your brother John say that you don't think about the end of Vlog brothers and a lot of what you do and that he's the type of guy yeah who asks himself how much longer can I do this how long is this going to last and a lot of YouTube creators are going through that yeah we ask ourselves that of just uhuh can this really last how long is this going to go when you were going through cancer were you forced to actually think about potentially the end of Vlog Brothers for sure I mean the so like I assumed that I'd have to stop at some point during treatment I could just feel too bad it never happened um in part because my cancer was so responsive that I didn't have to do as much treatment as we thought I might and I but I also thought I'll get back to it you know at some point like this isn't my this isn't my last video I don't like ideally you know when your last video is like that's like if we take it out to the edge it's very nice to be like I'm going to like we're going to stop doing like maybe I'll make some stuff in the future but like you don't just not upload one day which does happen like people die of all kinds of things uh and but ideally you know and you can think and process it um but like I've never been like a look forward very far person yeah to me it's it's actually not like I I totally appreciate what you said around like you know pressing record filming editing the thing that I think about though is the writing yeah because when I think about you I think about you as a writer oh thank you because that means a lot to me because I watch people wouldn't but when I watched some of your stuff like I wrote some of the the quotes down from a video about death just while we're on the topic of mortality and cancer um you wrote some uh or you again you said these things but in my mind it's like I did write all those words you wrote all those words down before you say them right uh there there's a point where you say I'm getting to an age where I see clips of myself on the internet doing stuff I had no idea I did um which is really for a YouTube Creator it hits home it's a lot of deep empathy there and then you say are all the me having experiences I've forgotten dead already that's a profound you get you don't get that one without cancer man like I did I hadn't like I hadn't had that I hadn't had that feeling until I was closer and I'm like well like I like I'm the guy from high school like I'm that guy but I'm also not that guy and like all like there's a lot of moments in my life that are gone now and so I I mean it's you know this is a show about uh internet creation but like life is a thing and uh and and getting close to the closer to the edge very much sort of made like what what hit was like not what am I going to miss from science which I thought I was going to be worried about I was like oh my God like you know moon landings and Mars missions and like fusion and whatever else AI like all this stuff is happening I'm G to miss it it was like I'm gonna miss my like adult son it was like how was Katherine and Orin gonna do it without me kind of stuff yeah so like that was like like uh I wasn't worried about dying I was worried about like not being around to do the work that I feel like I like am obligated to do and also love doing but like um and and the making of content actually is is like when I could like crank out a quick Tik Tok and be like that was a good one and people will like that and also they'll be like he's doing that while he has cancer or like to educate people about cancer while you're doing it to become the science story um was uh was just felt it just felt like the it feels very right it feels like the thing and and like instead of being sick and playing Marvel snap which also was fun uh I I was like doing a thing that I felt like was additive you know purpose is a is a very important yeah arguably the most important uh part of the the life recipe uh but I think also you a Creator because of the reward systems that you talked about it's one of the few not one of the few places but it is a very specific place where the reward systems can be extremely uh you know quantifiable right it's like there's a metric uh in the reward system and I imagine that this experience made you to push to think about like the qualitative metrics or were you just like damn I didn't get to five million on Vlog MERS the I mean we've been doing it for so long that uh there are we've definitely gotten over some of the easier simpler metrics so so Vlog Brothers is by far most important YouTube channel but like not by any means the one that gets the most views or the one that has the most subscribers but it's the one that generates the most value for the world and for us and for I think the people who engage in it and so like we know that like it was like that isn't like oh I have to remember that even though it only has 3 million subscribers and not like the 15 million that crash course has that like it's the reason that we could do crash course we could do VidCon or could do s show all these things or like you know we could only launch from that plat platform of of like you know a real strong Community um I don't have to I don't have to remind myself of that like that's in there you know we've also been doing it for I don't know 17 18 years now and oh God yeah it's a it's a long time uh we've got fans who were not born when we started the show um wow uh the show I don't know what are what are things um and uh yeah so so like that's always been obvious to me um so that that wasn't new uh but the the finite number of hours I have to work or to do anything aren't is is a little new yeah I'm not JN is pretty obsessed with mortality and I wasn't and now I am too if you want to like really get in touch with your immortality don't like it's not better don't do it yeah yeah I think um one of the most fascinating things about you is like you know of course i' I've watched your stuff I uh you know enjoy watching Vlog Brothers I love the like editing style the quick again the writing is fantastic I missed the you know I was out of high school during crash course so like most of the people who work here were in high school and you know crash course was shown in all of their classrooms right and are incredibly grateful yeah and they're very grateful uh someone here yesterday told us they got a five in their AP class because of you you know I I didn't even remember that that was the scoring metric of an AP class but um I didn't take any classes one of the things that that shocked me we make these these research documents before a guest comes in and yours was the longest by oh wow probably double or triple because of the sheer amount of companies that you've started and there's a great quote uh from your brother John where he said if you give Hank Green five minutes he'll come back with a limited liability company and I was just curious this this is a question that we ask a lot of different creators because I've struggled with it a lot but I imagine you struggle with it how do you like who are you how do you describe yourself today oh like when people ask at a party like what I usually say that I make educational videos so I I say like I make educational videos for teachers and students um because the New York Times called you yeah the New York Times called you a novelist and longtime host of quirky YouTube educational videos sure that sounds good quirky YouTube education the no at a party I noticed you didn't use the word quirky in your description he's a quirked up whiteed with the sock there it is I I'll use that one it's not untrue uh YouTube teacher what do you do [Laughter] um I yeah I I don't tend well because like I almost feel like novelist is too too like kind of a brag totally it would be AB I met someone at a party that said I'm a novelist I'm going to meet someone else yeah John's like I wrote a few books what do you do I wrote some books oh have anything I've read and he's like yeah probably but then but then if I tell you we'll be talking about it yeah like I also don't know all the books you've read so I don't know if anything you've read um yeah I uh like entrepreneur is not a part of that you oh yeah ENT I don't usually say entrepreneur entrepreneur maybe I definitely am yeah yeah I think that was that you know again I know it about you but I think the depth of it was surprising to me looking into it yeah I think what confuses me is I look at our career and I think you know if I leave Samir for five minutes he comes back with domains yeah right which is essentially like the the precursor which is the PRS precursor to LLC LC my domain name is uh is just a list of like wow I spent a lot of money on that idea it's never going to happen oh yeah and like collectively we've also had many ideas we own lot of domains we've made a lot of logos for companies that will never see the light of day that's my favorite activity but when I look at you I'm like how did you actually do them well I'm older than you still give you some still give us time yeah we could activate any of these domains at any moment yeah uh I mean uh it's it's I think it to to some extent it is really uh there's a foolishness to it that to believe that like with all that stuff I'm currently doing that it's a good idea to start something new which I now have grown out of a little bit largely due to uh requests from people in my live show um there is this you know you guys know must know who Z Frank is used to run Buzzfeed video before that he was like the first basically the first video bler kind of but people will argue of course um and and Z made this video during the year that he made videos in 2006 he made a video and I don't know the title of it but it's about what he calls brain crack where you have this idea in your head and you can get addicted to the idea part of the idea where you like you just make it more more perfect in your brain and then you're like well I can't do it until I can do this part that's going to make it perfect and and once you get that part you're like oh but if also I added this to it then that would then finally we could get it out in the world and like people would would flock to it you can't get addicted to your own ideas like it's it's just like like just like pumping your own brain full of sugar and you're you're convincing yourself that you're doing something but you're not I very much took that to heart and I was like anytime I feel like I have a good idea I should just do it and if it fails I should look at why I I should learn from that and see if we can iterate on it but if it succeeds then that's the goal like we did it like it's succeeding now and like now we're sort of like trying to juggle and keep it up and find people to fill in roles and make the thing work and that's that's like that became the failure state for me like it became worse when things were successful sure because then you have a thing that you have to know yeah now now I have now I have like a bunch of new employees to manage doing something totally different from the other team that I'm working with the0 to one is really fun yeah right like this thing didn't exist it's in my mind now it exists super fun yeah the one to 10 for me is incredibly challenging it's it's like a a math equation that I feel like I just it's so hard for me to solve hiring manag Slow Grow right rather than theive excitement of the dopamine hit of like it exists now this YouTube channel exists now yeah but then you're in year seven and you're like okay now right you're in year seven but you're still yourself and so you are doing stuff to your team where you're like oh I launched this new product last night exactly and they're like Hank you can't yeah please do that and then you're like again you're like I'm the Creator so who are you to tell me cuz I I can make stuff I've made it before no I absolutely know that I can't do it uh and I still do it sometimes um but I mean that's the creative impulse though I appreciated your perspective on how I built this where you said I listen to your show and everyone seems like they're so put together and you said I'm like hanging by a thread I'm just trying to get by and I resonated with that because I feel like we are you know we are pushing we've been working together for a long time and I still feel like I'm like wow we're we're more successful than we were last year yeah we're more successful than we the year before that we're launching more things but I still don't necessarily have this feeling of like I have it all put together I have a huge problem with how I built this in that it seems like it seems like all of the people are lying like I like I mean I you know of course it's like telling the story of a 20-y year history of a company and so you're glossing over all of the hard Parts yeah but like I just I want to there to be a a podcast that's just about the hard Parts like like I didn't know how to go to market in this I was a total mess and I still am with h green but that episode was titled complexly and I'll tell you that when I first listened to that episode I didn't know what complex it was and you know it's it's a company that you were the CEO of for a very long time until uh last year yeah uh I'm curious if you can explain that because that that was I thought it was interesting that was the title of the episode when I imagined it would be Hank and John Green it complexly yeah I mean complexly is the company that makes crash course in sa show and a bunch of other shows Journey to the microcosmos eons bizarre beasts all like educational shows the goal the idea of the company is get good in like information into people's heads in every way we can like all of the media and platforms we can imagine which is mostly YouTube right now but also podcasts and we're working on some uh I don't know if I can say but I can we'd like to have print involved in that in some way or another I don't know I don't know whether we're working on it or not you're not the CEO anymore we love for that to happen and is that all is the company work primarily because I know that crash course was started actually from a YouTube like Originals initiative yeah where they gave you uh I think $450,000 as an advance against future ad Revenue to start the channel yep um today is it all monetized through advertising or is there other are there Partners or there one of the crazy things about complexity is we monetize each of our channels very differently um which is probably not a good way to build a company we've realized because doesn't allow you to scale any individual Department um but crash course is probably at least like the biggest piece of the pie is probably grants so like people like Rich humans and Foundations um and you know large companies are like you do amazing work we'd love for there to be a computer science crash course and we're like we'll take your money and make it here's how much it costs uh so that's probably the biggest pie piece that's second biggest pie piece is people give us money who are just normal people so we have a yearly campaign where we sell a coin for $100 uh which is more than the coin is worth that is aing model of sort interesting I'm really curious about this because you you've seen YouTube from the beginning really right like was your first Youtube upload 2006 or 2007 it was January 1st 2007 January 1st 2007 so that so I made my first YouTube video in 2006 yes and it was at a New Year's Eve party at Lake Taho it's a fantastic video it has it actually is it feels like internet history in a very like whenever I watch it I feel like I'm watching a documentary about whenever you watch it yeah I've watched it a few times I just go back by the way Hank it's not very long no it's true a few it's like 90 seconds long uh and it also has one of my favorite songs in the beginning the death cap song in when that you guys used to use um but when you guys uploaded that video like you know the evolution from that that first upload uh to now when you when you first started catching some traction you were really confident in it there's a uh there's a quote that I wrote down about it this I sort of believed intrinsically that despite all the evidence that YouTube was a big deal and I wanted to put all of myself and all of my energy into this thing why did you believe that I I just loved it like I loved like I could see I could I could see that it was different uh and I could see that it was working and and like YouTube in the very beginning was a lot of pirated like St Daily Show and Family Guy clips and then alongside that was this stuff that like smash was doing and um you know brookers and renetto and like people no one thinks about anymore um that that were uh really working and people were really liking them and I was like oh like this feels like it's gonna be like TV like people like we forget that like when media starts it's usually sidelined and not as not like as respected like when radio started it was not as respected as the stage you know like you could go watch and like to some extent that's still the case like movies are a little bit less respectable than like going to watch Shakespeare or whatever or going to Broadway so like to be there for the beginning of a thing is very exciting and that that was much more interesting to me and I did like feel and I feel very Vindicated in this I've made a lot of bad predictions in my life but like like I felt from the beginning like someday there will be museums about this um and and like this feels like as and it was so it this is such a silly sentence when I first thought of it in my like like that like it felt like this was going to be as big of a deal as the printing press like not YouTube but like online media and that seemed so silly and now we're like oh it probably is and that's probably [ __ ] terrifying rather than really exciting because it turns out the print like the printing press really sort of [ __ ] things up for a while and there were like hundreds of years of religious wars about it because all the power structures got fractured which ultimately was good but in the short term was messy and dangerous and now and now like I'm like oh so we're in the messy and dangerous part now like 2007 not messy and dangerous 2024 very messy and dangerous it feels like because everyone has the opportunity to message anything at any time yeah and that should that and we don't have like the structures to deal with it you know that like that's what H like no one thinks a books are dangerous now now but there was a time but books used to be the most dangerous thing and and people killed each other about them and like books can still be dangerous like there are books out there that I'd be like very upset if my son was reading about Nazi [ __ ] but like I don't how much can I Chistmas podcast as much as as much as you want yeah yeah it's your call that's not usually my brand no but it's it's it's a good point about about YouTube and Just where we're at right now um especially in this year with with how much technology has evolved it's so fast yeah I'm curious when you look at where YouTube is today where are you optimistic like if there if there is that element of okay it's a little bit scary where online video has come yeah yeah what is the optimistic side of that um I like ultimately the optimistic side is regardless of how dangerous books were after uh you know as Martin Luther's printing out pamphlets um and creating the Reformation uh nobody's sad that we have books now like books are great um so there there's like optimism there I think that it's going to keep getting worse before it gets better but like but in terms of like near term I think that by far most of the stuff on YouTube is still very good I think people get a lot of value out of it um but uh it is very scary to me because it does it feels a little bit like any platform that uh needs that wants to compete with the the the sort of big people in the room is is going to do whatever it takes and like the the biggest thing that gets people to stay on a place not there's a lot of things but like that the like most motivating emotion is moral outrage um and I remember saying to a I won't say who but like a high up person at YouTube once that they were like but you know that we have like we're trying to do this the right way you can see that and I'm like I can see that you are trying to do this the right way but can you see that I'm worried about who takes over when you're gone I don't know them but YouTube will still be there and it will still have that power and if YouTube you know what what does it look like if YouTube needs to do something to get its juice back you know and like what is that thing uh what does Facebook look like if it needs to grow forever and ever like what like what compromises do you end up making and what does it look like when there's some competitor who's cutting all the corners that you don't cut um when do you start cutting Corners to compete is that something that you see when you talk about competitors like that's actually happening when you look at Tik Tok versus YouTube and Tik Tok not paying creators obviously in the same way I mean obviously the platforms are very different um but you've talked about this on your channel like there is a huge discrepancy in how Tik Tok is able to pay creators as opposed to YouTube yeah and also how it handles moderation like you you like to there I think that there you we're starting to see more platforms that are like let's just not do moderation as heavily or platforms that are like I think Tik Tok does but it's just very clunky about it where you'll just like lose your account and then you want to get your account back and you're like I didn't do anything wrong you like it I got reported for bullying but like I think people were just Mass reporting me because they didn't like my content and then that's it like there's no one to email yeah and and you're not a priority the reality is I should like I know people at Tik Tok and I'm like hey can you help my friend out and they're like I can't I can't as a person who works at Tik Tok talk to those people internally and if you work at Tik Tok and you want to say Hank you shouldn't have said that email me because I got some people like their accounts back but I think I think one of the most challenging things about Tik Tok and actually I guess just all these platforms is that their their video platforms and the highest engaged video wins yeah right and that's that's a challenge as we right but the question is should it be that way uh because I you know like I think that all these platforms to some extent are saying like Okay well we do want people to be uh like have a positive experience as well and we can make that decision I've had this conversation with a lot of higher up people in there like these algorithms don't like they're not focused on trying to make a specific outcome happen and I'm like yes they are of course they are and they're like well well aside from to make the most money for the pform and I'm like yeah that's it that's it and but like but that doesn't have to be the only thing that a company wants like it's very obvious that you know heres 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 and so like you can have platforms that are trying to do it differently and are Prov providing different you know value propositions for their yeah the the 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 that really stuck with me uh which was that he wanted to build it in a direction to limit the amount of regrettable minutes on Twitter yeah well and like for me that's like all of them right now right I was 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 for uh that empathized with the viewers feeling after they talks about it too yeah they do yeah about regrettable and like they have made changes for that reason yeah but because that that's where I don't think they use that language but that concept of like regrettable minutes is is is really interesting to me um because the the highest regrettable minut I ever feel is Tik Tok I 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 you know like imagine a restaurant being like we're just trying to minimize the regrettable meals everyone has at a restaurant because look they exist yeah so I want to bring up because of this this the speed that technology is introducing us to visuals that we had never seen before right there's a comedian Andrew who said right now on the internet what works is a car crash meaning like to cap to capture our attention is a high bar now yeah right like 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 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 [ __ ] you about nature versus culture oh no you looked at my thesis oh yeah unacceptable child wrote that well written the the uh the first part of it is called my head is too big which is Fant 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 oh I think even better is the introduction where you say this is titled this is not an introduction and then within it you say I don't even like getting introduced to people it's like the comedian start I'm hooked 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 and I'm curious if you can explain that the difference between nature and culture and and your perspective today on these platforms and how much they're pushing culture forward look could you defend your thesis from the University of Montana yeah live 20 years later take much time as we need yeah uh I um I don't even know where to start but I guess what I what I will say um is it's very easy to find any Simple Story you want to tell CU this is so big yeah so I like I I feel this is a 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 um you can find evidence of anything you would like to believe yeah kids are spend on Tik Tok like any anything you don't like could explain the thing that you don't like um and it and 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 going to go this is going to go very bad soon that's exciting stay tuned um I and uh 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 and what's that about what that's about is that we still want to be connected to humans and I have a a worry about um you know parasocial relationships as replacement for social relationships like I think it's fine for it to exist but I think that exists alongside uh you know real real life and real world connections um and the uh and but like that's 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 cuz in a world 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 they're going to be better videos than my videos I'm not going to make a Casey IAT mini film every time I make a video and uh and so what they're coming back for is like their trust in me and the relationship they have with me and 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 if that has to do with my thesis there Point 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 right yeah and [ __ ] I found this to be very interesting that you were at summer camp you didn't have access to a computer yeah to the internet and you missed a big event there was some sort of meteor or something happened with Mars yeah and you missed it and you when you got back from summer camp you noticed there were a ton of page views yeah 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 is dead by the way don't remember his memories anymore I looked at that and I wondered if if that is part of why you have even that perspective that you know Vlog Brothers is not the car crash yeah it is the long sustained connection yeah yeah well I also the first thing I ever did on the internet I mean that the Mars website was the first thing I ever did on the internet the first thing that ever got like attention broadly is after I graduated from college I was unemployed for a little while uh and I stole Like We Buy Houses signs that are always up in and I spray painted them with the URL of my new website which was ihate for.com which was about the road that goes through Orlando and how house much sucks and uh 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 how 22 maybe um fighting the good fight for transportation yeah um and it was wild because like the local news saw the signs and was like we got to do a story on something today we'll go to his house in Winter Park uh 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 car pulled more what if people Liv 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 want they were there for the shock of I also hate a road they 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 and I did I when I moved to Montana I shut it down because at that point I didn't hate I4 anymore cuz we just have we don't have we don't have yeah I I90 is not part of town didn't you do your first brand deal through that website I did [ __ ] you you're like that guy who does the I don't think i' 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 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 I didn't deserve that among my friend group and I was like why do all these people have this like I have this much easier than all these people and like it's going to be much easier so like like 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 um 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 an a MH um and it's very like it's transferable people get it like I like you know it's a status thing um but like I 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 not certainly not perfect but it is a surrogate for the value you create um it's and it is just a surrogate like you also have to be good at converting the value into money which is is a separate step yeah uh 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 um and I for a long time when I was CEO at complexity I felt like my job was to figure out them how to make money and their job was to figure out how to create value and 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 I find it interesting I did just want to close the loop on your thesis because you like why does that connect to what I brought up sure uh it's primarily because I think that the the 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 and that has materialized on YouTube right like you are a tribe leader uh with with what you've built and that is a highly valued thing in in human nature for sure we we just had a conversation with um Dr Peter AA and he's a super knowledgeable yeah but additionally he's an incredible Communicator he's ve when he speaks speaks he speaks with confidence uh 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 I'm not saying he does but if you did want to sometimes I watch stuff from people and I'm like man this information is so good and you're the wrong person you can't and that's something that I think of with 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 I'm between family right now right I'm in the midst with Vlog brother I'm in the midst of a family conversation yeah it's like the most powerful thing that incredibly powerful to start the every episode good morning John um where you're like where am I supposed to be watching am I supposed to be here and they've let me in clearly they've let me into this relationship I think it's actually one of the best Frameworks for a channel on YouTube yeah not been replicated yeah you know uh and that framework again builds like this incredible depth of of trust and like I 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 that connection to those people is what unlocks the rest of it yeah 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 I call it relative zero I I ask creators often what is your new relative zero yeah where you would say that nobody watches right cuz I I had this conversation like yeah nobody watched that one it 120,000 views some people it's a million I asked this question to Mr Beast yeah said 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 ,000 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 and so that that I wouldn't necessarily think nobody watch 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 nobody watched that and I think that's a really fascinating um again nature vers culture thing yeah the thing that you you've done also I think over the more recent years has become this authoritative voice in our industry right that like to try to do that cre look to you you're a very public as well as private Advocate you like we've been in rooms with you and leaders from YouTube and other platforms and you will gladly stand up and share your opinion you'll say things that sometimes we think but we won't say out loud I yeah I'm in a nice place of not needing to care that much I mean complexly we like I do have to not make YouTube too angry to some like 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 uh gudy hall.com and if you're interested in that college credit for cheap the um the and and like the people at complexity 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 I like and 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 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 or 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 uhhuh 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 guys 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 platform Creator relationships uh how we think about ourselves as creators and getting that I 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 and it made us recognize that we could also and should also you know really think through this stuff you guys are very very valuable voice for YouTube and for any platform yeah so that that I think your your voice in 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 you and I'm curious to to you know and I I'm like when I look at it that that's been myp 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 it wasn't even a line it was found money for us it wasn't even a consideration because we 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 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 this is a great scenario for me um but over time that's changed uh and I'm curious your perspective because you said you you 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 yeah so at the time we were getting all the bigger in 2007 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 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 that it's good for for them to have created to have that that money mean that they're creating like a really vibrant economic ecosystem that wouldn't exist without that extra money and 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 I 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 checked because additionally it's like we don't talk to the advertisers no we don't work we don't go back and forth work they do all the work and it's that's a 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 like the fact that there are some creators who are putting in work now that will actually pay them back if they choose to stop yeah for a period of time is pretty impactful yeah yeah we've closed channels down and they just like make money right 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 a their own platform like you at the Dude Perfect app um or even nebula as a different option drop out there are these Ott platforms coming up where actually they are succeeding and they are working and those creators are taking uh the Lion Share of the revenue oh yeah like that that to me feels like a very new shift it's working what one of the two or three biggest stories in the Creator economy right now and 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 going to be like will there ever be a Brad Pit again you know like will we ever be as focused on a celebrity like or will it be just sort of like PE bits and pieces all over the place would the music industry I think the music industry is a much better analog agreed I I very much agree with that um 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 like they're just not in the popular that's happening in video for sure lot of Pride inic consumption of having your own private space where you like aand that no one else likes and I think there's a lot of pride in the creater economy too of liking a creater 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 they're are like the there are like this kind of nerd we made a platform for this kind of nerd yeah and nebula is a platform for a different kind of nerd you know like they are they're like I'm sure that there there's overlap but like they're they're for different kinds of nerds you know we're all nerds you spend this much time on the inter are not nerds we put on a good front mir's sweater yeah but we were we were C for they bought me this so that I would have something to wear I I think that the like I like I started on the internet with a blogger account you know I'm like I'm still seen your forearms though which reads nerd or no it it reads athlete oh my let's end the podast right now that's that's the nicest kindest thing anyone's ever said to me ever yeah my my wife is very into forearms and it's made me pictur forearms he's like Hank when you go on the show try not to bring up your forearm please please don't tell him I know we talk about the mo just try not to it's made me more uh more aware of forearms I actually think that's that is what connected Colin and I is that we were forearms we both have pretty nice forearms but there's some underly but there's some underlying nerd to you as well it is what connected us I think though that we were nerds pretending to be athletes okay you know and I think we we discovered together we were like oh it's safe here we're actually nerds actual athletes would not have started the Lacrosse Network right right on YouTube totally yeah no way where were we what were we just talking about oh oh oh different like OT apps for NDS yes but I think that also uh plays into the world of connected TVs and the fact that most people are watching stuff again on televisions 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 yeah remember that where it was like it's a phone but you go90 um 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 was making stuff for the phone now it's interesting that we 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 Colin 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 Dropout being more of an environment where I can find the stuff I like um it puts into question the the you know this is such a dumb media but bundling and unbundling of like do these things start to come together you know dude perfect just announced that Zack King's now on the app you know that is a form of of bundling out 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 yeah uh kids yeah put that all together that's that's actually potentially a a threat to YouTube and YouTube premium and the concept that YouTube is actually an Ott app yeah as well I love that YouTube is being threatened in a couple directions right now I like I love YouTube I think YouTube's like I love a lot of people there like I think it's like it's it's amazing it's an amazing thing and they have like a huge Suite of amazing features and they care about creators and like but I I do like to see some jins in the Google armor it felt a little bit like we were going to live in Google's world or alphabet's world uh and now it's like maybe we're going to have a bunch of different things going on um so yeah I 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 a had a very hard time for a few reasons um creating products that are uh more specific so like 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'd get those channels out free and 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 uh 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 do you want to do it with us and hey you know 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 the split is based on watch time I don't know something like that you want to know like YouTube's biggest problem huh 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 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 um I also I wonder how valuable YouTube even wants YouTube premium or some potential bundling type of subscription to be to in order to protect the advertising business this 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 is is so good yeah interesting and and but what is our take from premium as creators do we know we get the same take we but it's after they pay the labels the labels so the labels get I don't know what it is $8 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 exper I go and watch on a non- premium account sometimes and it's like sucks yeah yeah it's kind of jarring because you forget what it's actually like um I still think this is now a complete aside but in the advertising business I'm still surprised that more ads aren't made with creators for YouTube so like we're watching TV ads on YouTube which we aren't used to most people watch YouTube aren't used to watching a television ad but if you well I mean I bet people who watch YouTube are are now yeah I guess so if you see a lot of them you get but it' 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 when with for our charity store good store um 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 60c AD that can run crossplatform my my thought is like I don't know if the 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 the ad weird uh yeah and it is the ad agencies also have a lot of power of course uh over this whole thing yeah but it would it would be very disruptive to be like hey here here's the brief just can you just make it I mean there's a there like that exists you get videos as ads yeah sometimes mhm yeah yeah of course yeah I I you just mean like a more formalized system system to integrate creators in that way yeah yeah if it made money people would do it listen we could 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 uh one one thing I'm curious about because we you know we talk about a lot of um these policies you know YouTube like how we all 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 uh and we get we get to have a voice but there's 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 sing voice towards platforms and col 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 colon right what are we going to unionize against ourselves but toied to the plats why this 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 if you are you know in your first thousand subscribers you're completely different than if you're in your first 100,000 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 the 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 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 [ __ ] strategy guys um what which I'd love to talk to you guys about that um but yeah so I think that there there like that's a problem and also what you identified which is that most unions are employees of companies some unions like the Screen Actor Guild are contractors uh in in like The Writers Guild like they don't work they don't they're not like employees there's contractors with these things I I like it's weird yeah like the way that the way that you know Hollywood works is different from any industry um 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 are uh we run a company like we run companies and we license our content to YouTube We're content licensers like we don't work for them we work for us and they provide a tool with which we can uh run like help run our business but that does mean it 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 of or the mayor of YouTube and we pay taxes in some sort of way 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 clo which is weird because of course we did not elect Neil Mohan uh but like is but but it like somebody did uh Anders he didn't like inherit it so that's good um yeah he works for the shareholders and like we are a stakeholder among other stakeholders like there's advertisers and there's the labels and there there's creators and there's of course the people who watch the videos and also Society ideally yeah Earth should be one what a fascinating ecosystem it is it's wild and I think all of these platforms and I think that like some people have correctly identified this and been like I'm going to buy one of those and then I will be the king of one of these 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 I live a lot of my life there yeah this is not how I typically see you or know you you're mostly made up of pixels typically two diens 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 anned comes try try speaking to a non YouTube Native person about shorts and and with with any level of passion and they will not reciprocate it at all it does not matter to them they're like oh those the vertical ones on there too sure yeah fine whatever and such a big deal like to us it's like everything Chang we like no but it it could risk what the platform is we're like it's taking away from long form they're like I don't I don't knows like it's just all vertical and it swipes and you're like oh my God everything's changing I think there was also this I made $4 from it it's bad there's this weird like uh it felt very reactionary I think like right and I think that that felt strange um I didn't feel it felt OB like that strange but just like to be honest I'm I'm actually relatively happy with where the platform has Ned out which is that long form viewership is still from my understanding uh what's working what's being prioritized and people are watching on connected TV which I think is good yeah uh for creators and clearly good for viewers people are enjoying it um I was worried that that wouldn't happen when shortz was announced that it would change the viewing behavior of the platform yeah and I think that it has DEC especially on mobile that's where it changed I guess actually it's just B forc mob ISS and people things to happen at which I think was really smart you can watch on connected TV and then swipe on shorts at the same time which is a lot of how 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 40 minutes is on the it's on the TV watching and I'm watching shorts but you're watching shorts while it's happening yeah like there's got to be something better than col Sam on yeah it also means that the people so like Tik Tok has a problem of people build an audience on Tik Tok and then it's like what do you do like you try to get them to YouTube or to 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 feet again which is how Tik Tok works you know um if you're not capturing if you're not if you're not getting sping by algorithm for some reason you're not if you're not doing something Tik Tok yeah so the um so yeah I mean the 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 block bustered by Tik Tok 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 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 tech 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 has shorts is fine but like not knowing what the algorithm is going to do before you launch it is a little scary like rabbit holes am i g to get driven down um and I immediately did where I was like Neil buddy I got at to alt-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 that was early and that's that's been working rocket ships do have some correlation now yeah I know if you do the math you're like that's pretty quick I can see I can see it on the the note of like fractured Fame and fractured you know uh Affinity even yeah VidCon which is your baby you created VidCon yeah um in the 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 then we'll look them up and they'll have 11 million followers on Tik Tok 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 vidcons 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 run around all the time running across really great creators never heard of who have more subscribers than me you know I'm like M yeah like when did you start doing this and how are you so good at it but uh it's a it's a very different game uh now but the I I mean I love I love that but it does make it hard to run a conference luckily I don't have to do that anymore right but it's very hard to try and like like when we started it was like YouTube is a community and everybody knows each other and now it's like it's like trying to make a conference for music and again there was clear there was clear tribe leaders it's very different than 2017 when Logan Paul is running yeah into the fountain and like hordes of people are following him and Casey is doing his own meet up and people are showing up there and it was clear as people were walking throughout the convention yeah there's those tribe leaders there was almost like a hierarchy right that was like okay here's the here's the really popular creators and they're the the cornerstones of this right and then it and then there's you know like a Coello poster yeah you can't have that really anymore you can still but less yeah and and also like they're so different from each other like you don't go to a you don't go to coel and expect to see Tim mcra and Rihanna right but that sometimes happens okay maybe it does I I don't know and you got recently that I have learned that it's pronounced Coachella right again forearms yeah yeah that's when you have the forearms you know Coachella yeah yeah there's but there you guys I think that Coachella is nearby it is it is right good J so you would know more yeah um uh yeah it's but once you Niche down at all it's very it it's very tricky and I think also to some extent it's easier to get newer creators to want to come to V con 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 those for a long time are like I'd rather I got 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 like 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 GNA 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 we spent money on this going to be going out we spent $500 on that already we got to upload and uh 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 so like you see what nebula is doing with Originals um and that feels a little bit more like Netflix um and the but at the same time it still has that like how do we do this this with a normal amount of money rather than try and make something cost $300 million and be like this is going to be the biggest ever exists how do we make the best 20 to 30 minute piece of video with what we have yeah I think that's their biggest struggle is that they've 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 and that was compelling content so we we value like how to connect with people than we value the other pces of the puzzle and that those are different value systems M your production cost to make Vlog Brothers Vlog Brothers makes money Vlog Brothers makes money because it's very free to make yeah I think we like you think about the 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 they increase very little over time unless you're making Mr Beast videos or something like that but your Revenue exponentially increases and your audience exponentially increases and so that that that margin if it does works if it works that's what happens um and we don't the production cost does not necessarily Trail up with the re 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 you money and it was right after it was it was immediately after and they were like also I think our idea was so Niche and we were not trusted 21y olds but there were other sports like networks there YouTu that were getting funding they were all like Hollywood production companies they were all Hollywood production companies uh and I came with a pitch showing that each of our videos would cost between four and $5,000 yeah 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 yeah and looked at me I 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 Z to make so figure out the Z budget yep they were like figure out how this costs you Zer that's a great that's great advice but costs you time I think one the best things that ever happened to that company for sure it's the only reason it succeeded is because we had the methodology that was like oh this if we spend any money I'm just looking to see if you can see the Lacrosse Network play button behind you the old the old one the really old one yeah but the only way that worked is cuz it was like we sat together and we were like so what do we make that cost us zero 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 that transition was really hard to go so sidh show and crash course both got $450,000 to start oh each yeah wow oh wow that's that's a lot of money yeah and uh and so we like hired to make those shows and by the end of the first year we had 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 def Franco and R 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 and 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 what is your most successful company I don't know what you mean profitable I guess yeah I mean crash profitable not complexly C because yeah crash course I would say is the most impactful impactful yeah for sure in 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 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 we're GNA 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 oneoff products and all the profit from that goes to Partners Health this year that was this year good stores donation was over $3 million wow wow 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 a what we were we John and I said 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 that would come to us that's going 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 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 a shipping rate's doing Etc it's interesting you bring up dftba which creates products for creators we talked about VidCon M which is creater conference we didn't talk about subbable which was a subscription platform you sold to to patreon yeah uh so much of this is like extremely Creator Centric like solving Creator Centric problems yeah I was listening to John and he said like 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 I think he's referring to like being a Logan Paul or Eliza Koshi or something like that um but when you look at actually what you've built it is pretty core to the center of YouTube culture sure that's great thank you like H how do you look at your place within YouTube culture uh 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 um 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 totally like it it is kind of nice to fly under the radar I I see because I was a reporter in a former life and I see what happens like I I see how like those companies are treated by the Press like they not like constantly getting talked about as like you know bastions of uh 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 it's a whole thing and like this is kind of nice yeah it's just like be here and like build things and like deler 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 t like in the 10 plus million you Pops mostly about giraffes yeah but uh that was that was big on YouTube for a while people love was big at a moment don't try it now I don't think it work but a problem or maybe try it now I try it now 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 yeah and I think that gradual nature over a decade plus almost two decades now um is is incredible and 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 uh I think I I 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 um 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 and 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 can do this for a long time yeah what do you think the equation is is to do it for that long well I mean I don't know man people 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 have 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 like I think that my fuels are pretty clean burning like I'm not being driven by uh like my 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 [ __ ] hammered at it right for and like I know I know you did and I don't have to look but if I look I will find that you did um and and uh so I'm a very hard worker but I'm not that ambitious like I'm much like but I'm driven by like doing weird things and trying things that are different and um 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 uh and you could you could do a bunch of things that you could couldn't do with place and 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 we've got TV we've got video we've got music we've got our existing we got radio we got all this stuff what's it look like this like now what's it look like when tools are cheaper when distribution is level when it's many to many what like what does it look like now and that like just like being in there is Extreme like it's so sparkly in the brain and that's what's driving me yeah that 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 yeah you are somewhat similar to maybe the first people to start skateboarding you know what I mean like they're just exploring I'll take it there's like Tony like there's no money there's no money there's no money you don't know what you can do with this no one thinks Co at the very beginning someone did a kick flip and they were like that was impossible like there's literally a trick called an impossible that everybody can do now right right exactly like you started in that place where all that mattered was that doing something different experimenting yeah um and that is what hooked you on it where I imagine there are people who are starting today with different context 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 well you also do it unless you are really driven now like we weren't like we weren't focused on like we loved to get views of course in the beginning like that's obviously like exciting but uh but we didn't have a lot of competition like people are like oh look they edited you know like like smash 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 uh or or with the tools that we had like what can you create and like I've I feel like online media creates genas as fast as that we used to create shows you know like there 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 rtin link and smos and some of these people who' have been on YouTube since 2006 yeah are what are the conversations that you're having I I imagine I imagine there's these like yearly meetings where it's like YouTube legends around a table theer States the El states that would be wonderful uh but I I mean we mostly talk about what's going on now you know like we we did it it would be very fun to reminisce but like there's so much happening right now it's like how are you guys responding to this it's like this conversation yeah you know it's not what I had in mind sorry but fine Hank do you remember the 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 um I I did music that first year i' like every Wednesday so be every two weeks because we traded off days um every time I had a Wednesday I I would release a song which was a wild thought because at that moment I was like learning to play guitar 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 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 um 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 uh that I was like and also YouTube at this point had a manually curated front page that shared that everybody who used YouTube shared yeah so you'd go to youtube.com and be the same page for everybody 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 going to Lost 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 cuz you just you don't know if you're anything for a while yeah and then something happens this what's so good about Tik Tok is that it is good at doing that it's good delivering that 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 Tik Tok creators oh God there's so many good comedians on Tik Tok it wasn't good oh um 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 but 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 uh social creators start acting or music and it all happens way too fast because it's like the signals are are off you right attention is not necessarily the only signal that should tell you the other stuff right that you are a good commedian right I mean and that's that like like it's very different like being on a stage is very different you 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 you have to spend some time and like the easy thing and I suggest this is like is live podcasting CU that's how that's like the best way I feel like to get comfor 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 and you can put it out on your podcast feed which yeah yeah we have plans to do a 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 because I think we you know we've had talks uh in the past of like you know you guys come up a lot in our internal conversations well Hank and John made VidCon should we make a Creator conference you know like well Hank and John make educational videos should 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 uh business of helping people get better like so so you have like a you have a huge opportunity a very good thing here this this I feel like you can kind of make it like it would 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 um I think that you have a couple of choices to make on that path so like you are calling in Samir um 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 is 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 uh and like everything's branded like all his travel books are branded as Rick Steves and fig and and you know seeing what theorist has done we like it's possible for matat 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 he 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 Ries and the tour people and like it wasn't just the audience it was like these people whose job would lose their jobs if he retired and he like you can't have the grateful Dad without Jerry Garcia and so he just like kept doing it even though he didn't really want to um 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 so you have to build something um or or you have to decide and like the thing with Rick Steve 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 uh but you can't sell it you know you can't sell Rick Steves without Rick Steves so like that's a little bit of a challenge you can't scale a person like have the number of hours in your day that you have and uh so that's a that like that's like 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 in Samir as humans I get I get um Challen it's a really good advice I get challenged with this thought often now um I got the opportunity to ask Jeremy Zimmer the founder of UTA this question I'm curious your uh perspective it's kind of the Steve's thing I I've been thinking about like do we just make a great show or do we build a great company yeah and sometimes those things are at odds uh with each other because I found that to to stay in the pocket of being a great creative sometimes the the business building gets in the way of being a great creative the hiring the team management the stress the um problems that arise from building a company um 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 their outliers in their top 1% but like Alex Cooper with call her daddy you know she made a three-year deal with Spotify at $60 million that 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 I yeah I think you're absolutely right and it's wild to like 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 um You don't have to go to zoom calls when you get cancer right away so try that out [Music] sometime and that that was a bit of an eye opener for me and so we had transitioned we actually had already hired or 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 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 dftv all at the same time and for a little while subbable was at the same time as all those other things it's not a good it's CRA it's 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 um who are you sending that message Gusto I just just applaud the Gusto the gust um and uh and so we had been hiring for that and we found an amazing person and she she kicks ass and she's way better than I am um 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 complexity for a while and then moved our with like some padding moved our coo up into that position who she's doing that now and that is you know it's freeze me up to do a lot of thinking strategic thinking that I think is great for complexity because like I understand online video pretty well and that's a real value for the company and I necessarily be thinking about stuff that I'm not that good at like contracts with partners and uh you know disputes legal disputes yeah yeah I'm very bad sucks a lot of time yeah yeah so I 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 Sao raised a bunch of money to make keep making the show uh you know I think that that wouldn't have happened if I didn't have that free time and 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 a very interested in this can how do you take I Scott Hanselman talks about this he's like a tech blogger he's been doing he to work 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 like have a blog post but that goes in your newsletter it gets cut up into tweets it gets turned into a video and like why not it's going to reach different people and I like I do this with sa show now where I'll like finish shooting saow 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 S Show 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 mean you do that yeah we do it you like shy this so much gets left on the table honestly actually don't do short form content of this anymore because our audience is better at it than we are and we were competing with our audience and it was like embarrassing it 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 short well you can't you can't it's it's got to be a funnel this is where I'm at it's two 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 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 in cutting the stuff up into short form but 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 in smir set or that we have an exchange and who are those guys what's this from I'm gonna ask oh it's from Colin I'll go listen to it yeah but also a shorts viewer is typically not a long form viewer yeah and so hard to move over it wasn't really that big of a funnel yeah and we Colin and Samir shorts on Tik Tok and YouTube shorts are the biggest pieces of Colin and smir content on the internet that we have not made we don't make those pieces of content but they are the biggest uh they're the most viewed pieces of content of Colin and smear I don't 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 am 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 but like we can't turn it into anything yeah true people don't watch if it's just the wave form that's that's what I I really appreciate that who we actually are as YouTube creators is the modern programming executive yeah right we that's who we are though yeah yes and other things but you are deeply empathetic towards how to get this out to an audience 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 yeah I'm actually curious about your relationship with John because you you both started this when you were in your 20s I believe brother might have close to 30 now you're in your 40s how has your relationship changed uh 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 it's also like he's a great friend and he's like very fun to talk to we like have we share a lot of values um so he like he's absolutely my best friend and the um so the like the the 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 Han we should do a thing together I was like yeah yeah absolutely um and at that point what was I doing when I was 27 oh I I I was at that point a freelance web developer and like database designer so 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 I look back at times when YouTube was really not working for us very much not working where you know for two guys yeah to make like I think there was one year we made like 30 grand total together as a company yeah in LA and somehow it just you just well it's worked now it's worked now no but I mean at that time it was so irrational to keep going mhm you know in some of those moment could I think that's why it's worked now because we liked it enough when we weren't making money and like similar to the whole skateboarding thing like we liked it enough to keep doing it when there was no money and there was no opportunity skateboarding is a great metaphor like there was that era of YouTube when we were all just like Soul SK like we were like looking at each other like we 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 I cuz that is I mean getting constructive feedback from creators is like like appreciation from creators is the best that's the best M thank you cuz you know yeah yeah for sure but I think all the time about how I couldn't have made I couldn't have had that year where I made $177,000 if I hadn't had like this like the safety net of my family and yeah and Catherine was making money and right yeah was there ever a moment uh you know as you and and John start bringing on all of these different companies and stress starts to build that you think maybe this uh business these bus businesses we have together is actually not good for our relationship together as brothers not no um and I think that this is like this is one of the reasons why like part like um obviously they don't always work but like why family Partnerships can work there's a lot of brothers in media like it's specifically Brothers which is interesting I think there might be an element of one-upsmanship involved trying to impress the other um is a common Dynamic among brothers and so like the the F the most important like the Brotherhood is more important than the the project and so like we always know that and as long as we can as long as we don't stop believing that then when there's a disagreement there's a solution because this and and on the table is we stop you know like the Brotherhood is more important like like if we have a big enough disagreement like we can just not do do this so I like and like you know I think that R and Link are like that I 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 if anything's not working um you know the the lowest common denominator is that we are uh still friends like very extremely close and feel like brothers yeah and and that is a wonderful byproduct and gift of this experience that can't 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 it's very different than friendship that is a very different thing because also you you are the only people who know actually what it has been like to be Hank and John in this we we've been through the whole thing the whole 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 yeah that uh like we we are a unit in that way there was a when when I think about your path I think like uh 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 just done that and not done a bunch of businesses yeah and made a ton of money doing that and lived a maybe simpler life for sure simpler yeah I think that so like I 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 cuz 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 now that I have optionality I like hearing when people also had that optionality what what were your thoughts I mean one I like I want to try new things all the time and that's like a thing for me got it okay so like I want I and at this point I probably well don't say it I probably have started my last like business that's going to be a big business but maybe not I don't know I hopefully it'll be alive for a long time still so but like I think just VidCon and complex DBA like I think that like I'm not going to do another big one like if I do another thing it will be I will be very intentional about having a very small team uh of of people who I already know I think um and uh because I I you 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 went back into VidCon and I help them you know spice that piece up and I'm like oh my God Hank stop stop thinking about like cool things you could do of course like so it's it's great like it's a wonderful space to be in but like you gotta be intentional so you're right uh and the thing that so like there's I want to try something and see what it's like that's piece of it and I have this like problem where anytime I see anybody who I like respect doing something I'm like I want to see what it's like to do that um and which is why I'm in Los Angeles doing standup comedy about cancer for sure um but there's a somewhat finite amount of time oh for sure so this is the other thing is like to what extent do you feel an obligation to do something with what you have so there there are a bunch of different like reasons to feel that obligation so you can think okay I've signed up to tell people like 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 to have that goal have a Maximum Impact because if you want to have the Maximum Impact you have to grow a larger company yeah um and so that's a struggle that we have at crash course where we're like okay like this is a huge obligation to try and help people to like 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 you know get more education more quickly and and to do better on their tests Etc um so like 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 so 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 impa 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 credit unities and it made us think about okay well what's the the the maximum way we could actually make an impact with with the knowledge that we're acre from the people we speak to and what we do on a daily basis it probably is to create some sort of curriculum and find a way to license it or make it available uh to people through the college system oh potentially because that is for high school students like what the what should be or what is next yeah and like film school is a maybe a problem to I I I went through it yeah like I like I think that because of the curriculum yeah because it's not teaching teaching the skills that people need like it takes so long for new Industries to penetrate Academia we the University of Montana which is in the town I live in uh has a media arts program instead of a film school and 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 well this this is all wrong doing H some I'm like yes you're definit we're definitely doing things wrong because it's cheaper and it doesn't matter yeahh do you think that is a a realistic opportunity for us I don't knowing what you know I think the big question is how do you integrate with Academia so like I I think that that's a smart idea but it's uh you're s you're creating a product that doesn't have a market yet so there isn't like what what like how do you and I actually don't like I I would be the guy I'd ask this question to 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 yet well I think it's I think it's totally being asked for but I think that like they 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 or 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 yeah um I I really like that because I was someone who didn't really learn in the traditional system I 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 one of the things that we are 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 yeah every year some things become not worth it everything it becomes every year it becomes not worth it for some people uh for more people and then eventually it becomes not worth it for everyone you know like there comes a point where it's 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 they there's it just keeps happening they keep it keeps getting more expensive to teach people and I don't understand why because I well I mean I understand why 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 just 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 that 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 GNA have for the next four years for sure um so uh yeah so so I I'm I'm just very I'm very worried about it because like we like we need to like there needs to be a system to educate people and 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 uh sort of fill in the market like if there will be a Resurgence in trade schools like someone 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 even like Google offering certifications it's like I trust Google and that's affordable yeah 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 actually I love the idea of camps ASU does This Thing Arizona State University where like for 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 3 week long and you do it every day with the same people and I'm like I feel like I would make friends you know I feel we like at the end of it you're like we did that together we did chemistry for 3 weeks straight8 hours a day a lot is easy not to feel in a semester long economics class or something like that yeah I'm gonna pivot quickly because I wanted to ask you this question but I think it's somewhat related you had this quote about Twitter um 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 it it reminded me of the conversation we just having around education that it's like very you know it's college is a very influential system and maybe it's not as successful as it should be but um 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 um about you know original programming about video content being monetized do you think it has a shot to become a a successful Creator platform you know it is a very influential place people people of High influence spend a lot of time on there but but what could happen to make it a reasonable part of you know Creator I like um I think that it's I think it's 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 like that there's you like I think that there's a lot of advertising product that isn't there yet like we are we vastly underestimate the amount of engineering that has gone into uh systems you uses to deliver advertising sure which are very good and are the reasons that we make money per view um 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 of 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 was a very which is very different from what the app used to look like so that's very different but like it 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 they're probably not looking for noise like 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 Tik toks because Tik toks make noise yeah um so like that that's like it's a text medium and like it so but um I I also in order to answer that question I would love to see watchtime metric there's a lot of a lot of videos t 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 count and it auto started and it auto started yeah no I wrote an editorial about this great was I'll read it a big [ __ ] lie yeah I it was a mess um I think it's it's too easy to for get a tweet to properly compensate a creator for a tweet as as that not a video at 20 minutes long you will it will make an impact if you liked it got to the end and you will remember that Creator tomorrow they you will probably go back for them and there's enough time to serve an ad yeah I think a tweet is like it's the smallest unit um because it is mainly text based of information which makes it a great platform because it's easy to upload yeah and and like I think that the the strategy makes sense so like 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 right but like it it need I 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 um you know we started the conversation kind of around mortality and like you you being faced with it U head on 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 CRC course or a s show but I poked over to a s show video that you made recently and I was like that was a great video and it's not that different from like you're sitting in the Vlog Brothers set too oh yeah that's a weird one weird but I enjoyed it uh and and uh I was curious just specifically with with Vlog Brothers how many new viewers you get on that channel 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 each other yeah I mean we have good good data on the on the the die hards so we do a census of the community every year where we and I suggest to any Creator to do this because it uh it it gives you information that you need but like it also is good for them for you to have that information so it's not like it's not like you have to trick them like it's literally um 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 you do it like through a survey like yeah we use Survey Monkey okay so just a simple survey 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 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 Tik Tok versus the people that 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% have been watching for more than 10 years so there's a lot of people who've been 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 can go 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 people people stick with it but there are also new people who come in all the time the reason I asked the question and how it connects 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 mean 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 I think it's a peaceful I think that's most I think most people don't find that peaceful but like I have found peace in that thought that like 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 going to do the work who's going to do the content ID work who's gonna make a video another impersonator is using my Tik to uh the yeah 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 I wasn't ever like uh in a situation where like I was going to probably be dead with well there was a moment this is the wildest so 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 she 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 G to be alive in like three months like because was otherwise like I need to do a bunch of stuff and she was like well at this point we just can't say anything yet wow and I so like that night I went home and I started like recording the bedtime stories that I tell him my son H 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 guys videos and I'm like oh no I actually have no idea like it's not like they like they they still play you know episodes of TV shows with dead people in them you know yeah strange to think about uh 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 that has to be like you got to take that seriously as a Creator like like the uh like your will becomes different when it's not just money assets and it's creative assets so actually is more important for Creative people to have Wills than the average person so look into it there's a business there's some time before I look into it well Hank let's do it Wills forc creatives decom I wow we could hire lawyers sounds like so much fun we could talk to lawyers all day you and I like you know I think all of us in the community when 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 uh like depressurized that balloon in a way that was just so Hank Green and such a profound approach to that news right uh and so YouTube it was just so YouTube a list to do a tier list it's like of my cancer press 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 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 sub routine running all of the time that's like oh I'm going to LA I going to make a video about oh I'm going to be in colins M what I'm going to make a video I'm going to 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 understand uh got I don't I know nothing about dating funny video yeah uh yeah video about dating from a guy who's been with the same woman8 city where they make dates yeah do you know what your video is about this Friday it's actually already done yeah the project for awesome which is our yearly charity so like we're changing some things up for the P 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 [ __ ] together and I don't know I'm G to get a chance you're also doing go to shows yeah is the idea dependent does it have to do with you being in La is that 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 of 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 it's like you know you don't have it's like uncomfortable so I like just wanted to like signal that it's normal to be sick it's part of life and 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 I didn't and then I did uh and I still like I'm back to not really thinking about it much which is 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 cuz look like there is going to come a time when like that 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 no like nobody does anything by themselves uh so like we're all doing it together like we're all just like human like humanity is a weird thing not entirely sure what it is seems like it might be like a giant ant colony that's uh has some like simulation of Consciousness but that isn't actually there and it's very very cool uh to thing to be a part of we don't understand it's definitely the weird thing the known universe the uh and so like getting to be a part of that and like like thinking what like you know in my worldview there's no objective uh uh value like we assign like all value was assigned by people but like choosing things to assign value to um you know and to me that's like less suffering more thriving more happiness more more creation um uh and and like more Discovery like more knowledge and so like to like if you can be focused on the things that that you have assigned value to and like I think that that is to some extent a choice and to some extent it's obviously very culturally informed uh but like getting to be a part of that the things that I have assigned value to and is is like that's that's that's so good you know to some extent is like I like we need to know about anatomy and physiology so you can get in a nursing school and to some extent it's like isn't this funny yeah yeah uh and yeah so so that uh far more than Legacy is is what I think about amazing and green thank you for coming on the show you look great thanks feel good outfit is phenomenal today amazing and thank you for complimenting my forearms you changed Colin's life today honestly you changed his life today I appreciate that uh only forearms um I can't wait to come see your show uh 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 lot of ground covered a lot of ground yeah there's still more to cover part two coming soon on Wills forc creatives decom all right see [Music] you

Channel: Colin and Samir

Views: 156,079

Keywords: colin and samir, colin samir, Colin and Samir Videos, colin and samir show, Amazon FBA, Robinhood Stocks, Making money online, how much money on youtube, How Much Does it Cost to be a Nerdfighter, Hank Green Eats His Last Meal, Asking Dumb Questions About Science w/ Hank Green | The Yard, A STRATEGIC (and ignorant) VICTORY!!!, Why do Billionaires do Super Bowl Ads???, The Juiciest Hank in the World, Apple Totally Screwed Small Podcasts (and it was the right thing to do)

Id: xvZB93rnq4Q

Length: 130min 17sec (7817 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024