Hank Rebranded Without Any of Us Noticing

good morning hickets tuesday you'll note that puff levels remain at near record levels so recently my daughter was discussing how she did not like the cornmeal casing on her school lunch corn dog and two things occurred to me first i realized that almost all of my conversations over the last year have been either about it or at least shaped by it like even when i'm talking with friends and family about something other than the pandemic and its direct consequences the pandemic is still essential to the geometry of the conversation like when we're talking about politics we're also talking about the virus when we're talking about school or work or really anything we're also talking about the virus but this conversation about the corn dog could have happened two years ago or five years ago or really any time because children have been pulling the cornmeal off of corn dogs and school lunches since time immemorial like i'm pretty sure that such a scene is depicted on a grecian urn i didn't say any of that to my kid though because to call attention to the pandemiclessness of the conversation would have been to add the pandemic to the conversation what i said was you know your uncle hank loves corn dogs and then my daughter said does he and it was in that moment hank that i realized how successfully and profoundly you have rebranded yourself like in 2010 you were a goofball corn dog enthusiast and today you are a tick-tock sensation who is among the world's leading science communicators two phrases by the way tick-tock sensation and science communicator i had literally never heard in 2010. i guess broadly speaking there are two approaches to rebranding you can take the planter's peanuts path where you announce a dramatic shift by having a commercialized funeral for your animated spokes nut and then rebrand with a hip baby spokes nut and then there are the slow motion over time reimaginings that often happen without us much noticing them until we look back into the past like i have this experience sometimes when i'm walking in the woods and find what appears to be an ancient beer can but upon close inspection it turns out it isn't ancient it's from like 1994 when i was not only alive but sometimes drinking beer and those of us who've left behind a lot of artifacts online over time from tweets to youtube videos are beginning to have a similar experience like when i look at march 2007 vlogbrothers me that person is both familiar and quite distant obviously that guy and i have a lot in common but we're also really different like if you ask me to tell you one essential thing about myself the most important thing it would be that i'm a parent something 2007 me wasn't 2007 me wasn't the author of the fault in our stars or resident of indianapolis or a supporter of afc wimbledon or the co-founder of crash course or best friends with chris and marina or someone who enjoyed jogging and on and on and on and hank 2007 you wasn't a father or an author or the ceo of an educational media company you were a goofy youtuber who loved corn dogs i mean here's how successfully you've branded away from corn dogs hank there was a corn dog hank t-shirt to go with the pizza john t-shirt pizza john still very much here corn dog hank forgotten to history all right this video has been all over the place we got to bring this to some kind of conclusion okay here we go big finish hank one thing you explore really brilliantly in your novels is how on the internet you can never fully leave your past behind because everything you ever said is in some ways still being said when people read or hear an artifact from your past they are reading or hearing it in their present i don't really know how to navigate the complexity of having pieces of my past from books to tweets floating around in other people's presence but when i look at it i look to you because we've never let the fact that you're the younger brother get in the way of you being the wise older brother and it seems to me hank that one of the ways you've staged yourself is by changing all that noted hank plus corn dogs remains a great love story as prominently noted in my 2021 vision board hank i will see you on friday

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 343,206

Rating: 4.9861903 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: REnBc3Jk7OQ

Length: 3min 48sec (228 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LetterCrafty5600]

I definitely remembered that Hank likes (liked??) corndogs but THERE WAS A SHIRT?!

[u/speakshibboleth]

How do you know you've been a youtuber for over a decade? You use the term "rebranded" instead of "changed as a person". Lol