How I Built This with Guy Raz - Complexly: Hank and John Green

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

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

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to Wondry Plus. My feeling when I was watching YouTube in 2006 was this isn't something that was made for me, this is something that is being made with me. and as is often the case in Hank and I's relationship, Hank sees the future coming and I am astonished by it. I thought we were doing a project for a year that was really fun and it was going to help us be closer to each other. Whereas I was like looking at my camcorder and thinking,

this will be in a museum someday. I was over the line. This isn't like TV. This is like the printing press. You did say that. I remember you saying that to me. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Hank and John Green turned their brotherly banter into a YouTube hit and grew it into Complexly, one of the biggest educational content companies on the Internet.

In December of 2006, Time magazine's annual Person of the Year cover story came out. And on the cover was a computer monitor with one word in the middle. You. And below it said, you control the information age. Welcome to your world. Now, just two months before that cover came out, Google acquired YouTube for about $1.7 billion. And right around this time, so roughly early 2007, Hank and John Green saw the potential of what was about to happen in the world of media. And they decided to leap right into it.

Because with almost no barriers to entry, YouTube seemed like a pretty interesting place to explore. And like many people we've profiled on the show, Hank and John Green didn't set out to become internet entrepreneurs. The two brothers started a YouTube channel as a way to keep in touch. Hank was living in Montana. John was in New York, and they missed talking to each other. So every day, one brother would post a video to the other brother. And the videos might include things like what was going on in the world, or a cool science discovery, or maybe a new song where them wrote. At the time, John was an aspiring, if slightly struggling, writer.

He'd written a few well-received novels, but only sold a few thousand copies. Hank was thinking about becoming a science writer. But because they were smart and funny and relatable, their video diary started getting views. At first, hundreds and eventually thousands. Today, that YouTube channel, Vlog Brothers, has 3.5 million subscribers. But that's actually a drop in the bucket when you consider how big their overall audience is. Because what began as a video diary eventually led the Green Brothers to build a business so sprawling. It's almost hard to wrap your head around it.

Let's start with their production company. It's called Complexly. And it has over a dozen different YouTube channels, mainly educational videos with a combined 30 million subscribers. Hank and John also run a business that makes and sells merch for other content creators. They founded an annual convention for YouTubers called VidCon. They founded another one for podcasters. They also have their own podcasts. They have a nonprofit that sells socks and sweatshirts and a bunch of other things and they donate all the money to charity. And did I mention that both brothers are hugely successful authors? John Green's Young,

adult novel The Fault in Our Stars has sold more than 23 million copies. And the thing is that almost all of these things I mentioned, Hank and John still have an active hand in them. They still appear in a lot of their own videos. They have not stopped being the vlog brothers. They still create a lot of content every day. And as you will hear, even though they run a for-profit company, almost all of the content they make is entirely free. And unlike, you many people in the business, they want to keep it that way. Hank and John grew up mostly in Orlando, where their dad headed up the state nature conservancy and their mom was a community activist. As boys, they played a lot together, but John, who is the older brother, was kind of

an anxious kid, and when he was a teenager, he needed a change of scenery. How old were you when your parents sent you to boarding school? My parents didn't send me to boarding school. I asked to go. You asked to go. Sorry. He sent himself away. I was 14. 14. Okay.

And this is a school outside of Birmingham, Alabama called the Indian Springs School. And tell me why you wanted to go. I mean, you were far away and were you having problems or you tried. Did you just want a better school? Like, what, why? I was a troubled kid, I would say, in a bit of trouble. Academically, I was really struggling at the public school I attended and then also just socially. I had a really difficult time. I was bullied a lot in middle school. And so I really wanted to go

to this school because it seemed like a place where people like me could feel included. And it was a really transformative experience for me. I was with peers all day long. It's really where I became myself. I continued to be a terrible student, but I started to find an interest in learning even if my grades didn't quite reflect it. Yeah. You've written about this a little bit, and you described yourself as almost kind of like trapped, that you were super nerdy, but super awkward, insecure. You couldn't have like normal social interactions with people that you just couldn't. What do that mean? That you just couldn't, like take me back to 14-year-old John Green, if I went up to you and I was like, hey, how are you doing?

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

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

And he would just, he would just in a very kind, loving way help me understand how to be a social person in the world. Yeah. All right. And so, Hank, so your brother's away. You grew up in Orlando. So you were basically kind of an only child when he was away. Yeah. Yeah, he'd come back for the summers. And I remember those summers as being sort of like being very glad to have my brother back for two days. And then the rest of it being quite a lot. A lot of conflict during those years. Were you, I mean, and this sort of foreshows what both of you would kind of focus on later on professionally, but were you, you more of a science kid? Because I know, John, you have talked about not being good at math, not being good at science, generally not being a great student. But Hank, did you, like, was science a thing that you just kind of gravitated towards as a kid? Yeah, yeah, even quite young. And I expressed that interest early on and my dad would like take me out on field visits in the

Nature Conservancy, like work that he was doing. And I'd get to see like the, you know, normal, boring work of science. But what it emphasized is that it's a job that normal people have. I remember doing a science fair project and it was just a very boring catalog of the species that lived in a waterway that connected to lakes and it did not get a single award among the dozens of different awards

they had created so that the maximum number of kids could get something. No one thought that this was interesting research. Are you still bitter? You sound a little still bitter. Very 100%. I remember like five of the kids that won and how their projects were not as interesting as mine. So, John, when you went out to college, you went to Kenyon in Ohio, and you studied English.

And while you were there, John, did you start to sort of think more deeply about what you might want to do or what you thought you would do? Yeah, I loved writing. I loved writing stories when I was a kid, and it would have delighted me to learn that I could be a writer, but I never thought I could. I thought it was like being an astronaut or something. Yeah. But Kenyon is well known for its English to play.

department, and I went there thinking that I would love to learn more about how to write good stories. But then there are only two fiction writing at the time anyway, two fiction writing classes at Kenyon, intro to fiction writing and advanced fiction writing. And I didn't get in to the advanced fiction writing class. There were like 14 applicants and 12 spots, and I was one of the two people who didn't get in. Who did not get it. Yeah. I mean, if you're not in the top 85%, of writers at your tiny little college in Ohio. It's hard to imagine how you become a writer as a job. And so it was really devastating to me.

I was embarrassed. I felt some shame. And it really made me rethink my professional life. And the plan I eventually developed was to go to divinity school because I also majored in religious studies to become an Episcopal minister. So this was your plan. Maybe, you know, I'll go to divinity school. I guess you kind of worked as an apprentice to a chaplain at a children's hospital. Yeah, I was a student chaplain at a children's hospital for several months when I was 22 right before I was supposed to go to divinity school. And then my time at the hospital, I think, helped me understand that I didn't want to become a minister. I've read a little bit about your time there. I mean, you've described it as a very sad period in your life.

I mean, being around sick kids, I can't imagine what that was like. Were the kids there, you know, were mostly kids that are going to be okay? Or a lot of them going to die? A lot of them were going to die and a lot of them did die while I was their chaplain. And I'm not the main character of that story. You know, the people who were in those rooms who were at the center of that horror and suffering were not me. But even so, it was really difficult. I was really young.

I certainly had never encountered so much death, so much unjust death. and, you know, like a lot of young people who read a lot of theology, I had a lot of, I guess, like somewhat sophisticated ways of making sense of suffering and how do we solve this problem of a good and loving God who allows such unjust suffering to occur in this world. And then when I was faced with the reality of it, it was very different and much harder for me to reconcile. And then I entered a very long period where I just, I was only very tangentially connected in any way to my religious tradition. And so I set out on a different path. So when that time ended at the Children's Hospital, I guess you moved to Chicago and eventually you found a job at a magazine called Bookless, which I guess for people who aren't familiar with it, it basically reviews books.

to kind of help librarians and bookstores decide what to buy. And what did you just apply and get a job there, like as an editorial assistant? Yeah. I started out as a temp because they needed somebody who could type in ISBN numbers, and not to brag, but I'm a very fast typist. And so I just did data entry for years. Ninety-nine percent of my job was data entry. Yeah. That's a job, by the way, that doesn't, I don't think it exists anymore, right? Well, I was very aware of the fact that they were one barcode scanner away from automating my job the entire time I was there. Obviously, it would not have been a great job for 50 years, but it was an amazing job for that period of my life for a lot of reasons. One of which is that it was very meditative, especially coming from the children's hospital.

Like, I'm an extremely anxious person, but when you start working at a magazine after working as a chaplain at a children's hospital, it's pretty hard to get a. excited about any of the stuff that's happening, right? Like, what's going to happen? The magazine won't come out? Oh, no. This is okay. It was such an awesome place to work. I've had a stupidly lucky professional life, but the greatest professional luck of my life other than being Hank Green's brother is getting that job. And eventually, did you get to review books as well? I did. I was surrounded by people who read hundreds of books every year, some of whom had been reading hundreds of books for every year for decades. And slowly, they also began to offer me opportunities to review books myself. And then that became a bigger and bigger part of my job at Booklist over the six

years I was there. When you were at Booklist, were you, I mean, I guess, maybe a spoiler alert, you published a book in 2005 looking for Alaska. This is your first novel. But I have to assume that, I mean, you were working on it. Were you, tell me how you got the confidence to start writing your own book. Were you doing it secretly at the beginning? Were you not taught? Like, how did you even start that process? Well, I was always writing, but I think your question is a really good one, because I think it does take a certain amount of confidence to think, well, I could write a book. Yeah. And I think what gave me that confidence was working at a magazine that reviewed 400 books every two weeks. Yeah. And I would think, you know, I'm not that good.

of a writer, but 400 of these things did come out in the last two weeks. So maybe. And a lot of them weren't that good. Nothing personal. But the thing about books that aren't that good is you can see the strings of the puppets a little easier. Yeah. And I had a wonderful mentor, one of my editors at booklist, Eileen Cooper. And I took her out to lunch one day. And I said, I'd really like to write a book about a kid at a boarding school who's grappling with guilt and grief. And she said, that sounds great, but you have to write it. And about a year later, I handed Eileen 40 single-spaced pages of text with no margins and no paragraph breaks.

And to her immense credit, she read it. And she said, you know, there's something here. and I worked on it over the next two and a half years with her. And was that really the first time since college that you let somebody see your writing? Because that's a very personal thing. I mean, it can be really scary because they might say this sucks. Yeah, it's a tremendously vulnerable thing. I never feel more like my body is on the outside of my skin than when I'm sharing writing with people.

of the 40 single space pages I lean read, I think probably, I don't know, six or seven sentences from that are in looking for Alaska. So it did have a long way to go. Right. And when you read, I mean, you hear this from writers all the time, which is to be a good writer, you have to be a really good reader first. You've got to learn how to be a good reader. Yeah, I don't know if that's universally true, but I had to get better at reading for sure. But, I mean, the truth is I have no idea how to write a book. Like in this interview, I feel like I'm trying to talk as if I know how to write a book when the evidence is overwhelming that I don't based on the fact that the last time I wrote published a novel was five years ago.

I mean, I have a very inefficient process in the sense that I write a draft and then I delete almost all of it. And that's the only way I know how to write a story. I'm sure I am unconsciously responding to lots of other writers and I am unconsciously learning from everything I read. But in terms of what's happening consciously, I'm only at war with myself. The only real obstacle in my path is me, and the only way out is me. At what point were you able to get an agent? I mean, did Eileen, it was there a point where she said, yep, it's ready to go. Let me make some calls.

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

Like, that was a lovely day. Yeah. And I went ahead and bought a sushi dinner with, if I recall correctly, 3% of my advance. And it was a lovely dinner. but I spent another year and a half revising the book with my editor at Penguin, Julie Strauss Gable, and that's really when the book came to have the kind of shape and texture that it has now. All right, so that book gets published. You're a published author in 2005, and I mean, the reception was really great.

It won one the best Wye Book of the Year award, this award Michael Prince Award. and like that was it. You were published writer. I mean, you were now a novelist. Yeah. Did it feel that way to you? I mean, you quit your job at book lists. So clearly you, I guess, are thinking, okay, I got to go all in on this now. Well, sort of. I actually didn't quit my job at book list because looking for Alaska got published. I quit my job at booklist because while writing looking for Alaska, I had fallen in love with the woman who is now my wife. And she got into graduate school in New York, which meant that we were moving to New York if we were going to continue our relationship. And so I would have stayed at Booklist very happily. But it did change my life, especially after Alaska received such generous reviews and then started to win awards. It did.

I mean, the numbers are probably very different now. But in that first year, how many copies did looking for Alaska sell? 7,000. 7,000. Yeah. And it's important to say that number because I think, Something like two or three percent of books published every year sell more than 5,000 copies. Like 95, 98 percent of books sell fewer than 5,000 copies.

Yeah, I mean, 7,000 copies was great. Yeah. I'd earned out my advance. I was able to sign a deal for a second novel and the people who read it liked it. And that was my definition of success at the time. You published your second book, an abundance of Catharines, I think a year later. How did that book do? Similarly.

I think Catherine sold 125 copies the week it came out. So not great, but it also slowly over time found an audience. Got it. And meantime, Hank, while John is basically becoming an author, you're sort of on a path that's going to take you towards science writing because after college, you did a master's degree at the University of Montana. You did it in environmental studies. And by the way, while John is moving.

around the country, right? Like he's in Chicago and then he's in New York, were you guys keeping in touch? Yeah, a bit. I remember a lot of instant messaging. And at this point, I was, and really had always been, very enamored of my older brother and thought that whenever I could kind of get his attention, it was very cool and very good. And whenever he had an interest in a new kind of music or movie or something, I was, you know, I very much believed deep in my soul in a very unquestioning way that that, in fact, was the coolest thing. And so we were in touch and I was always, I think, trying to impress him, but also, you know, obviously very caught up in my own stuff. All right. So we come to 2006.

You are living, John, in New York. Right. Hank, you're in Montana because you'd finished your master's degree. And you are doing a lot of writing. You had your own blog and you were writing a lot about. like environmental issues. I think you even, you were like npr.org and about national geographic, right? Yeah. Yeah, really focused on technology. So during my grad school times, it became very clear that learning about the sort of future of our earth was a very easy way to feel very sad all of the

time and get burned out. And the only thing I could do is kind of go home and search Google for any solutions that were being proposed. And I transitioned that into a kind of freelance career, both blogging on my own and for a number of other publications, writing about everything from electric cars to wind turbines to electronic paper. Right. All right. So 2006, this is a pivotal year in what we now called a creator economy, because that was the year I think that YouTube was bought by Google. Yeah, that's right. So there's this thing YouTube. And there were clearly people who were kind of starting to experiment with this and doing all these weird things. Tell me a little bit about this idea that you had, John, to start playing around with YouTube

and communicating with your brother over it. What was that about? Well, I think I wanted to be closer to Hank. I think that was the biggest thing. We lived on different sides of the country, but also we never talked on the phone. We only communicated over Instant Messenger, and I felt like I didn't know him that well, and that felt like a big hole in my life. But then also, we were both really interested in online video and the way that online video was being used as a path into building community. And so we would have these conversations on Instant Messenger about how much we loved the show

with Zay Frank, or how much we loved Lonely Girl 15, and. how interesting it was and how new and different and thrilling it felt. And then one day those conversations just transitioned to us saying, well, we could do that. Why don't we try something like that? I mean, what was it about those videos? Because this is, I mean, this stuff on YouTube in 2006, 2007 was like, you look at it now and it's, it seems weird.

Or, you know, like, there was this like redhead guy who used to scream. What was his name? Kids used to watch him. What was his name? The screaming redhead kid. Redhead guy used to scream. Are you talking about Fred? Fred. Fred, Fred. That's amazing. Oh, God. What a great. Please leave that in. Please describe Fred as the redhead guy who used to scream. I don't think he has red hair, but okay. I'm sorry, Fred. I don't need to describe. It's incredible that Hank still got there, even though he doesn't have red hair. I don't know. I'm sorry, Fred. But there's a screaming guy.

So it was like what was on YouTube at the time was what was it about those videos that appealed to you before you guys decided to make your own? So I have at that point, I'd already had like a number of weirdly successful internet projects. Right. You know, starting in high school when I had like a Mars website that got way too much attention for someone who knew nothing and had read two books. He had like one of the first websites about Mars in the 90s. the early 90s? Yeah. It was just sort of like,

here's information. But this is not, this is not like a money-making venture. This was just something you did. No, I don't think I made any money off of that. But then in the transition between college and grad school,

I started a blog about how bad I-4 was, Interstate 4. And I like spray-painted signs and put them on the side of the interstate in Orlando that connects Orlando and Tampa. It's like the main interstate in Orlando. And it's very bad.

And everyone hates it. And so I started a kind of a transportation policy blog and I did make money with that. I remember you made like $200 from selling an ad, just one ad and I was like $200 for a website. Website ad. Yeah. And like the news came over. The local news came to interview me in the house. Oh, it was epic. Wow. And so like the internet just seemed to have all of this energy. Like you could do anything and people would notice. And YouTube was very much that way where it was very experimental, and the thing that was driving people forward was impressing their peers and connecting with people and having a good time. All right. So January 2007, you guys decide, I guess, John, this is your idea, but you guys decide to make like a YouTube diary to each other.

Like you would send a video to your brother, your brother would send a video to you, but of course it's on YouTube, so it's public. and this is what would become vlog brothers. And John, when you propose this idea of your brother, how did you describe it? You say, hey, I'm going to write you a letter or I'm just going to send you a funny video or I'm just going to, but we have to go back and forth.

How is it going to work? I think I said, what if we made videos back and forth to each other every weekday for a year instead of instant messaging? Every weekday, every single day. Yep. One of us made the video on Monday and then Hank would reply on Tuesday

and I would make a video on Wednesday all through the year. It's a lot of work. At the time, I didn't know how much work it was because I had never owned a video camera. We did not know what we were signing up for for sure. I remember calling Hank on Christmas Eve and being at the camera store and being like, which of these do I get? There's a bunch of them. Yes, we got the same camera so we could help each other work through our various technical difficulties.

And this was when, and you had to use like a camcorder, right? And connected to your computer and through a peripheral. It was on tape. It was on tape, right? And then you had to like upload it. Yeah. But what were the videos, like, what did you say, John, and you described them to Hank? You said, I'm going to make a video of what?

Like a day of my life? Like a letter, like. Guy, there was no idea. There was no idea. I did not get that far. The idea was if you don't make a video, You will be punished. That was it.

Okay, that was a deal. Yeah, that was it. So, like, whatever you can come up with. Yeah. And then it was just, like, two brothers trying to impress and one up each other for 15 years. The channel that you guys created was called Blog Brothers. Yeah. Right.

I think the first video was... The first video was sort of Hank laying out the rules. Is that right, Hank? Yeah, exactly. And you were, like, at a New Year's Eve party? It was a pretty cool video, actually. Yeah, it had B-roll. Hello, John.

By now you have... receive my message that we will no longer be communicating through any textual means, only video plugging. Does that make us crazy? Probably. This wasn't just talking to the camera and just uploading it. No, although we had a lot of videos that were talking at the camera and uploading. And almost immediately, we were conscious of the community too. And so almost immediately I wasn't just making it for Hank, even though I was making it to Hank. I became aware of the fact that it wasn't only for Hank. Right.

But it was a small group of people initially. It was like a few hundred people. Yeah, I have no idea how anyone even ever found us. Probably a lot of your friends or relatives are just people he told about. Like, hey, we're doing this thing. Yeah. Yeah. I remember posting around in like the Zayfranc forums.

And then I think John must have told some librarians about us because we had a lot of librarians early on. Oh, thank God for those early librarians. They did such a good job of modeling. community for us. So yeah, that was huge. Neil Gaiman, the author mentioned us on his blog a couple months into the project. That brought in a 50 or 100 people. What would you talk about? I mean, you mentioned a couple of examples, but you had to come up with something every day. And I know there's a famous one that kind of, this was the one that kind of really helped to take off, which was a Harry Potter song. Hank wrote it. Hank wrote it. God knows I didn't sing it. Because I need Harry Potter like a

Rindy Lo needs water and as Saturday approaches my necrows. Oh, Axio, Deathly Hallows, Incendio, book sales and bargers, it'll be like Phoenix, tears on a broken nose. Yeah, Axio, Deathly Hallow. Back then the front page of YouTube was curated by a human, and I wrote that song when the final Harry Potter book came out, and so it was actually now a tried and true tactic of getting views on YouTube is to make content around whatever. is in the zeitgeist. And so they picked out my video to feature on that day. And that brought in the Harry Potter fans. Yeah. And it's very charming and lovely and it's funny. But like there was no purpose to it other than just to amuse yourself. Like you wasn't, this is going to become a business

one day. No. I think we were very fortunate to have jobs is what I would say about that. Yeah. Yeah. I did not Think of it as a business then, but I thought of it as important. Like there was no piece of my mind that didn't think that this was going to be a big, big, big deal. And then it was going to be really cool to have been involved in the beginning of it. You knew that already in 2007. I've seen you, you were quoted around that time basically saying, you know, it's like early television. There might be like the I Love Lucy creators making a YouTube channel right now. in 20 years.

This is in 2007, you're thinking this. So 2027, you're right. I mean, we're going to look back and say, wow. Yeah. I mean, that was amazing. But you already felt that early on? I felt it for, I think, two reasons. One is that my big brother thought it was a big deal.

And so whatever John thinks is a big deal, even today, I'm like, he's right. I don't have to think about that. The other thing was that, you know, I watched cable happen. and then this was going to be so much bigger than that, so much more ability for the barriers to be very, very low and the gatekeepers to just not exist anymore. Yeah. My feeling when I was watching YouTube in 2006,

watching early online video projects, was this isn't something that was made for me, this is something that is being made with me. It is aware of me. It is responding to my presence and to the presence of the audience in really interesting, innovative ways. Yeah.

I didn't, as is often the case in Hank and I's relationship, Hank sees the future coming, and I am astonished by it. I thought we were doing a project for a year that was really fun, and it was going to help us be closer to each other. Whereas I was like looking at my camcorder and thinking, this will be in a museum something. Like I was over the line. This isn't like TV. This is like the printing press. You did say that. I remember you saying that to me. When we come back in just a moment, how a failed deal creates an opportunity for Hank and John to turn their growing YouTube channel into a real business. Stay with us.

I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2007, 2008, and John and Hank have started a YouTube channel called Vlog Brothers. And at this point, it's just a fun thing they're doing on the side. But that is about to change pretty soon. At what point into this project were either of you thinking, you know, we have a business here.

We have some kind of business idea here. Because I have to imagine the first year, you know, I don't know if YouTube was monetized. I don't know how it worked at that point. But was it making any money for you? Was it generating any revenue for bands? Yeah, I think that we got into the partner program right at the end of the first year. But it was $50 a month or something.

Right. And that year, I very nearly sold my blog for what would have been, you know, life-changing money. Yeah. This was the blog that called, it was called Ecogeek? Yeah, for like low six figures, but it would have come along with a job that I very much wanted. Can you tell me who was going to buy it? I think I probably can. It was scientific American.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, it was honestly, for me, it was more that I was going to get to be a writer for Scientific American, which was a dream for me. So you'd get a six-figure payout and a job at Scientific American. They'd own the blog. Yeah. And that not happening because of the financial crisis is the thing that made like the whole rest of all of this happen, I think, to some extent. Right.

So because the financial crisis, basically, you were close to maybe closing that. But then they came back and they're like, you know, we can't do it. Yeah. They basically had a freeze on all deals. And then that's kind of when I was like, oh, we should maybe think about the ways in which this could be a business. But at that point, YouTube had started paying us enough. But that was very different from starting a business. So, like, John and I making videos and getting paid ad revenue was very different from, like, we wouldn't have ever had to hire anyone.

We could have just kept doing that. And the money you were paid by YouTube was probably, what, a couple thousand bucks a month? Yeah, it was getting up toward that. Yeah. All right. So, I mean, and by the way, how many at that time, 2008, you know, when this deal with Scientific American fell through, how many subscribers did your YouTube channel have? Do you remember?

I mean, we'd made 200 videos before we had our 200th YouTube subscriber. Wow. And then by late 2008, we were at 70 or 80,000. Which was, you know, one of the bigger channels on YouTube. I'm curious about something because both of you guys are Gen Xers, like Gen Xers. And as you know, as I know, our generation is one that prized sarcasm, irony. And you guys were in our earnest. You even kind of called your whole crew like nerd fighters and like that was your tribe, right?

I mean, did you guys just never get that part of being a Gen X or never, you know, make it into your? We were never terribly sarcastic young people. Yeah, that was Hank. That was such good sarcasm that I couldn't read it myself. I see. Okay. We were super snarky, both of us, incredibly. Yeah.

I hope that the things I wrote and published will never see the light of day because of how. I hear you. Oh, my God. That's also, I was brought there by our audience. I don't think that people responded well to it. Yeah. To the sarcasm and the snarkiness. Yeah, when we did stuff like that.

Yeah. And I also don't think I liked it. I didn't like how it made me feel to make content like that. Like I made a very popular video a few years into our project that was just like things I hated about the world, which was kind of in that Gen X vein. It was just a bunch of rants very quickly. And it did really actually did quite well. But I went and I sort of looked at the comments and the kind of audience it attracted. And I also thought about how it made me feel to be thinking about my next rant video. If I was going to make another one of those, I had to look at the world and find the things I didn't like about it. Yeah. And then I was like, ah, this is making me much less happy. Well, this gets at something really important, though, Hank, which is that optimizing for views and optimizing for revenue does not optimize for the health of one's community necessarily. And we had to learn that the hard way several times.

I always used irony and cynicism as a form of armor as a way of protecting myself against having to reckon earnestly with the world, which felt terrifying and felt like I was going to be devoured by the world if I ever exposed my soft belly to it. And it was only in seeing Hank's work and the way that people responded to it generously that I started to realize that actually, even though it's scary, you have to try to be earnest. Like, earnestness is the most underrated thing in contemporary experience, I think. Yeah. And meantime, John, I mean, you were, I mean, like 2005, six, and then eight, you cranked out three books, three novels.

Yeah. In that time. And so you are basically spending a percentage of your time making these videos and a percentage of your time writing the book, paper towns. Right. Well, I'm curious, when Paper Towns came out, we're going to talk about the fault on our stars in a moment. When Paper Towns came out, was there any impact on book sales? Was it different?

Yes. It was different than the previous two books. I think that Paper Towns sold about 50,000 copies in its first year. And how much of that was connected to what you guys were doing on YouTube? I think a lot of it was connected to what we were doing on YouTube. Like, I remember feeling kind of guilty because Hank didn't have something. like that, you know? Like, I'd gotten this really significant payday, and it felt kind of like, at least it was partly because of vlog brothers, and there was no equivalent for Hank.

And then I, over the course of years, capitalized on that guilt in every way possible. No, it didn't even, honestly, it didn't occur to me. Yeah. Yeah. We've had a very lucky brotherhood in that jealousy hasn't really played much of a part. It's kind of how you built your personal and professional relationship also, which maybe by design or by luck that happened. So when Paper Towns came out, John, you had vlog brothers. So you had an audience of 80,000 subscribers.

Right. And so all of a sudden you have this your own direct channel. You don't have to beg. I mean, of course, you still, you want to go on fresh air. You want to go on the today's show. You want to go on. But I didn't. Huh?

I didn't get on any of those shows. But you didn't have to. to because you had your own marketing channel. You had your own channel, essentially. Yeah. That is exactly right. And I don't think I totally realized to that until Paper Towns came out. All right. So we have this deal fall through for your blog, Hank. Paper Towns comes out. I mean, I know the timeline is. It's actually almost, it was almost the same week. Oh, wow. Okay. And now you're kind of leaning into the YouTube thing. And tell me a little bit about what that meant in 2008. leaning into a YouTube business. Because if YouTube was paying you a couple thousand bucks a month, that's great, but it might not be enough to build a sustainable business. So what,

correct me or wrong, but like, Hank, you kind of drove this business thinking. And John, you were interested in it, but it wasn't really, that wasn't how you thought about things initially. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I don't have a spreadsheet bone in my body. I've got a bunch now. Hank is more naturally entrepreneurial than you, John. Oh, for sure. Even when we were kids, Hank was naturally entrepreneurial. And I was very focused on aligning myself with powerful institutions that could provide me with stability and health insurance.

Yeah. So the first thing that looked like was starting a merchandise company with my friend Alan Lestufka, who was also a YouTuber. This is the company called DFTBA, which stands for. Don't forget to be awesome. Right. So I had burned CDs and sold them at Harry Potter conventions, and I was like, people are buying these. Like, I can't make enough of them. CDs of your song?

Yeah, of my music. Oh, you would burn your, oh, and what other music was on there? Oh, I just made a lot of, like, nerdy, like sometimes it was about science, sometimes what? You're so under, I don't mean to cut you off, man, but that is such an underplay of how awesome your music. was in 2008. Like Hank wrote this song about quarks. Quarks. That I still sing to myself

whenever I have to think about what the different types of quarks are. Which happens all the time in a person's natural everyday life. It happens regularly. I know what they are. I can still sing the song. Up down, Strange Charmed, top bottom.

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

Yeah. And we'll sell shirts and posters and CDs. And we were really a record label for YouTubers in the beginning, but very much without any knowledge of what record labels actually did. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. So you would basically say, hey, if you're a YouTuber and you want to record music, we'll distribute it, we'll handle the business side for you.

That was the idea. And you'll get so much more of every sale because the idea here is you're doing the marketing, you're producing the music, all we're doing is paying for the CD to get made and shipping it out and handling customer support. Right. And so it started out as a label and eventually morphed into what it is today, which is basically a shop, a merchandising shop for YouTube creators, anybody really who wants to sell t-shirts or products, bags. Yeah, we work with podcasters and YouTubers mostly. And, I mean, was it sustainable? Did it, did it, did make money right away. Oh yeah. I mean, we've never taken on substantial investment

for any of our things. Everything that we do has been profitable from the beginning. It's grown with its own, I guess they call it bootstrapped, where you take the profit and use that to grow the company rather than trying to attract investment. Blitz scale it with a bunch of money. We go slow. We go easy. We're not trying to make the biggest things ever. We're just trying to solve problems for people. Yeah. All right. So this is the beginning of where this interview becomes really, really like a crazy roller coaster ride on speed and other amphetamines because the number of businesses and things that you guys will do from this point forward is mind boggling. So I'm going to try to get to most of them. But I'm just warning listeners that there's a lot coming now.

I'm not great at focus. Oh man. You give Hank Green five minutes. and he gives you a limited liability corporation. I mean, you probably annoy the limited liability corporation, like, registration office. Because you're in there all the time. They're like, oh, God, here he is again. But you've got this kind of growing community, and you're tapped into this world of people who are clearly engaged, which leads you to the next venture that you found, which is called VidCon.

This is a conference kind of around YouTubers. Tell me how you came up with that idea. I love conventions and had been to a number of them, like anime conventions, nerd conventions, Harry Potter things. And I had become friends because I was a performer at them with sort of a team of people who had created a Harry Potter convention. And I'd also been to Penny Arcade Expo, Pax, which is a video game convention that combines enthusiasm for it

and also the actual industry of video games. And I thought that that was a very good model because it allowed the industry to see the fans and the fans to see the industry to let the fans go deeper because they could see how these things were being made. Yeah. And so I said, what if we could do a YouTube convention and like some people who work at YouTube would be there and people who work at advertising industry would be there. But like the core of it's going to be that YouTubers and their audiences will be there. And it was sort of like the economy was still getting its legs under it. So there weren't a lot of conventions happening. So it was easier and cheaper to start one than it is now.

And this was, I think you had the first one 2010 in Anaheim. I think they're all in Anaheim, right? No, that was back in Century City, actually. In Century City, okay. And you had 1,200 people come out. But before we get there, like, tell me, like, where did you even? How did you even It is such a massive undertaking

How did you start it? Where did you go? Who did you ask? I mean, there's like, there's old companies that businesses around these things that are massive. I mean, the first thing that I had to do was reach out to a bunch of people who make YouTube videos and say, would you show up if we did it? We aren't going to be able to pay you,

but we'll pay for your hotel rooms. We'll fly out of California. Which you didn't know whether you could, but... I did a budget. You know, we had something against it. You took a loan out? No, we had to sign a piece of paper that said, we will fill up this many hotel rooms in your hotel. And if we do not do that, then we will go bankrupt.

Wow. Yeah. What hotel was it? Oh, the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, which probably has a different name now. But right across the street from CIA, actually. So what was the next step? Did you have to bring a staff on? Did you have to, I mean.

Yeah, so we partnered with the. company that produced this Harry Potter convention that I had done. And so they, they did a lot of that. I did all of the guest management. It was to the point where like the night before the event, I was like, we need a sign at the bottom of the escalator telling people which way to go. And as it kinkos and like, you know, really just making it happen one way or another. Yeah. I mean, we were on the phone with YouTube telling them what sponsorship number we thought made sense. And they were telling us, no, we will not sponsor this janky convention. Wow.

They wouldn't even sponsor the first one. Not the first year. I remember the actual difference between making money and not making money that first year was that I said on a vlog brother's video, if anybody knows anybody who would like to sponsor an online video convention, please email me. And the daughter

of an executive at Cisco was like, here's my dad, maybe. And they came in for $20,000 and that was it. Wow. That was the thing that pushed us over the line. Like Cisco, the networking company? Yeah, because I think at that point they owned flip cameras, which was a thing. Yeah.

Wow. But even so, like, how much did it cost, by the way, to go? Oh, gosh, $60 maybe? I don't remember. $60. And then you had to pay for your hotel. But that's, I mean, how did you cover your costs? Well, that's how we did it, $60 at a time.

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

It happens every year. And how did it go? Oh, it was so good. Awesome. Like to go from seeing the numbers on the screen to seeing the phases in the audience is really important. And it was also really important, I think, for the industry to really. realize that it was an industry, to get together and to know that this thing matters and also is like at the beginning. Yeah, it was really important to us to have it across the street from

CAA precisely because CAA did not represent any YouTubers. Well, that's a great story, but I think that we took the cheapest hotel. I'm curious because in a previous era, right, guys like you would not necessarily be able to break through the gatekeepers, right? I mean, both of you are very handsome and charismatic and all those things, but there was maybe a certain look or a certain voice or a certain type of person that, you know, would be allowed on television. Yeah, you know, we got into this without wanting to be in television. That was never a dream of either of ours. And so it wasn't like a stepping stone. It was we were where we wanted to be.

Yeah. All right. So VidCon, the first VidCon, kind of, were you able to come out of that with some profit? I mean, they're hard. The margins on these things can be really thin. Yeah. I think it was like $10,000 of profit. So basically you broke even.

Yeah. And at this point, 2010, 2011, would you describe your overall business, like your overall revenue as massive? It was a sustainable, like where were you kind of financially in life? Median American household. Yeah. Right. Which was awesome. Yeah, I mean, that's all we needed.

And as you mentioned, John, you had moved by this point to Indianapolis. Yeah, I moved to Indianapolis in 2007. And you moved to Indianapolis because your wife got a job at the art museum there. Exactly, yeah. So from my perspective, as I told Sarah when she was applying for jobs, all basements are essentially identical. And so it doesn't really matter to me where I'm writing. Yeah. And Hank, you were still in Montana. He still are there now. Yeah. And at this point, really, I think 2011 is another turning point, which is when you worked with YouTube to launch what would become crash course. And any middle school and high school kid knows, and even adults, no crash course.

But really, like, did you, John, see the video work and the YouTube work as, like, what you did? Or did you still see yourself? as a novelist. I saw myself primarily as a novelist because that was how I made a living. But the biggest thing is that Hank and I had always wanted to make educational videos. And we would talk about it all the time. We would have these hours-long conversations where we would discuss different paths toward achieving this dream of being able to make educational video with a team that had really good animation and was fact-checked and all that stuff that we just weren't in a place to be able to do from our basements. So when you kind of launched Crash Course,

and I guess there was some funding from YouTube, the idea that you guys had was we're going to make videos about a variety of topics that would essentially be like free school, that will get kids or people excited about science or history or what was sort of the idea behind it. We wanted to make learning fun. We wanted to make it feel the way that it feels for us in adulthood,

which is thrilling. It's so exciting to be able to better understand the universe and our place in it. That's so wondrous and funny. And so our initial idea was really we want to take the best of YouTube culture and the best of educational approaches to content and bring them together. Because one of the things that YouTubers are extremely good at is holding on to people's attention in an environment where there are many demands for your attention. And it is increasingly the challenge, I guess, that school teachers face.

Yeah. And you, John, you'd handle humanities. Hank, you handled the sort of the sciences. And in that, by the way, I'm just curious, can you talk about how much YouTube gave you to start that? Yeah, I think they gave us $450,000. Yep, that is right. But you would own the IP. They would not own it.

Right, exactly. So it was sort of an advance against advertising royalty. So they recouped via advertising revenue, but we got to own the IP. And here now with $450,000 from YouTube, what did that mean? Like, did that mean you could hire a team of people around you to help you? Because was it just the two of you up until that point? Yeah, we had just hired our first people, executive assistants slash operations people. right before that money came in.

Right. And so what it meant for the humanity side of Crash Course was that Stan Muller could come on full-time and be the producer and director and editor of that show. And also that we could hire animators and people who made the videos look really good. All right. So 2012, obviously this is the first time.

time a lot of, I should say older people, let's say parents hear the name John Green, because all of a sudden this book comes out, the fault in our stars. And this one is different, very different from your previous books in that it doesn't sell 150 copies in the first week. It was the number one book on Amazon six months before it was published. Yeah. The first, I think the first run was 150,000 copies. I think it's sold worldwide more than 20 million copies. That book? Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. By this point, by 2012, you know, you had probably, what, 2 million subscribers on your YouTube channels? Probably about. And people knew you, John, from the videos, but great books. It's so hard to break through, right? Oh, yeah. How did this book become number one on Amazon

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

Yeah, about kids living with really serious illness and having to face mortality at a really young age. I wonder how you came up with such a complex world, right? It's two characters, and they meet in this support group, and they're both, you know, ones in remission, one's struggling with thyroid cancer. And I think about your time as a chaplain working in a children's hospital and presumably that, you know, experience informed some of your knowledge, but like, where do they come from?

I do think that my time at the hospital was extremely important to me, you know, learning from, listening to young people living with cancer. I think the most important thing, though, was my friendship with a young woman named Esther, who was a fan of our videos. Yeah. And Esther and I and her family and her friends, we were all quite close in the last. six months or so of Esther's life. She died in 2010, and I'd written a lot of stuff set at a children's hospital over the 10 years since I worked there, but after Esther died, I started to rethink all of it. You know, I wrote the book in this, you know, intense period of grief and anger.

I was trying to explore, and for myself as much as anyone, the question of how can a short life be a full life, be a rich and good life? Because I did and do find it so hard to understand why Esther and so many young people like her aren't here with us. Yeah. You obviously had an audience. and a lot of young people are on YouTube, are on YouTube, and a lot of young adults. And so that book, of course, blew up. But what do you think it was about that book that just resonated in that way? I mean, you have to be, had to have been, and probably still are stunned,

that 24 million copies of that book were sold. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's honestly, it sort of feels like it happened to somebody else. But when it became an Amazon best sell, months before it came out, that was for two reasons. One was that I announced that I was going to sign the entire first printing of the book. So that was 150,000 copies. And then the second reason was that I read the first two chapters in a live stream, like on a vlog brothers live stream. And the reaction to those first two chapters was very different from anything I had ever

experienced before. And so I did have a little bit of a clue after that that it was going to be different. And the other clue I got that it was going to be different was when Hank read the book and he called me after he finished and he said, I think your life is about to change. When we come back in just a moment, how Hank and John balanced time and money to keep growing the video business and why they don't ever want to charge money for their content. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012, and Hank and John Green have just launched a new educational video series called Crash Course. In John's novel, The Fault in Our Stars, is already shattering expectations, which is something he can't fully explain.

I still don't understand it, to be honest with you. Mostly, it was extremely surreal. Hank went on tour with me for like five weeks, and we were driving around the country, and then I got home, and I called my agent, and I was like, when does this end? And she was like, I don't know. It might be a while. And you were still making videos while you were touring. Oh, yeah. I never stopped making videos.

Like for us, it is a way to have ideas. Even if I was only making the videos for Hank, I wouldn't want to give it up because I really like that practice of looking at the world that way. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because in almost every case on this show, the person or the people who make the business are making it because they love. love it or they have a good idea and they want to keep doing it even after they've made lots of money because they love it, right? And so like you also have this YouTube world that you're part of with your brother, which is a real thing. It's becoming at this point when the Fultonar Stars is released, it's becoming a business, a real business which would be folded into a big production company called Complexly. Yeah, we were actually on tour for the Fault

Our Stars when the first crash course world history video came out. And the way I thought about it was it's great that this book is successful because now I don't have to write a book for a year or two. And I can focus on crash course. Right. It turned out to be a little bit harder to focus on crash course than I expected it to be. Yeah. So there's this, this is where sort of the part of the interview where we really have to talk about compartmentalizing because you know, not just your personal and emotional lives, but the professional lives, right? You've got

really the fault in our stars has created a whole world of people who are connected to it, and you are at the center of that. And then there is this increasingly growing world of Complexly. It becomes your business. And I don't, we don't have enough time to mention all the shows that complexly produces. It's like Crash Course and SciShow and how many shows total? Is it? How many shows, total is under the complexly banner? Yeah, I think that it's probably around 20 something. These are just the video shows, not the podcasts. I probably counted the podcasts in there. Yeah, okay. But then you're also in four podcasts? Yeah, probably. Let me ask about the business model, which is all content, it's all free content. This was basically was self-financed, right? You got the

YouTube investment, but then over time, it sounds like you built it up, you know, slowly, slowly, and now you've got a pretty sustainable business, but there are other companies that sell subscriptions to content that you offer for free. I'm sure over the last many years, you had lots of maybe unsolicited advice with people saying you've got to turn this into a subscription. You have to have a freemium model and a premium model.

You've got to charge people because you're not going to make enough money from ads alone. But your model basically depends, I think, primarily on advertising, right? Yes. that's definitely the biggest piece of the pie. And then the rest is crowdfunding and grants. So organizations that are like, hey, you're making this and you're making it for free. Like we'd like you to make an episode like a series on this particular topic and we do that with their money. And then we also ask people to give us money so that we can do it. Definitely if that money were not there,

this would not be a sustainable business. But the thing that strikes me about complex, is that it may not generate the kind of money. I mean, if you look at like the top 20 or 30, the biggest YouTubers in terms of revenue, you guys are not on that list, which there are YouTubers who are making tons of money of videos that are pranks or challenges of basically seven to 12 year old boys who are watching their videos and like crazy money, like 50, 60 million dollars a year. And you guys are making educational content. that is not making that kind of money, but your stuff is evergreen. I mean, the value in what you're building is the content lives forever. It can be sold one day. Well, there's, I mean, there's, you know, we mostly think about that value through the lens of anybody who's in business. You've got to understand that, like, what your actual business is is creation of value.

Yeah. And that there's always a majority of that value that isn't being captured by you. it's being captured elsewhere. Like, I buy my iPhone because it delivers to me more value than it costs me. Right. And I think that that's how I think about the value that complexly provides, is that we want the value we deliver to be way more than the value that we capture. That's the goal.

And that's not usually the goal. But, you know, in order to do that, it's not about capturing less value. It's about creating more. But the reality is that, I mean, we'd, Ken Burns on the show earlier this year, and he's sitting on an archive that he owns that might be worth $3,400 million, right? I mean, there are artists who are selling their music archives for hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, is there a world where you could imagine selling all this stuff one day to, you know, Linda.com sold to LinkedIn. Right. I mean, is there a world

where you would even consider that? So obviously, I think that there's a lot of value that it creates, but I don't know that it's that valuable because you can't pay wallet. Right. Because that's outside of the promise that has been made. All of the content is free. So it's creating the value, but you can't capture it in the same way. It's like an easement on a property, you know. If you can't turn it into a bunch of houses, the land is worthless.

And like, I'm not saying, like, acquisition is off the table. I just don't think that it's as valuable as it would be if we hadn't made that promise. But I just feel so, like, I think that that's the right. I promise to make. Yeah. Complexly has today between the two sort of main offices in Montana and Indianapolis, got about 50 employees. Yeah, I think it's a little over 60 now. Yeah. But, I mean, at least for you, Hank, I mean, you are also the CEO of this. And we haven't even talked about the other companies that you will have founded. But how do you organize your time? How do you, how do you have time to do this podcast? I don't know. You know, it's definitely something that I could

not do without a lot of support. Because I am, like, my first job kind of remains being a vlog brother. Yeah. You know, I listen to your show, and I hear a lot of people who are, like, seem very on top of it. But I definitely feel like I am not and am always a little bit on a tightrope and maybe you like that feeling a little too much. And I'm very glad to have the support of people who don't. want that feeling. And as much as I think that I've been really effective at helping complexly be a

sustainable business, despite the fact that its business model is a little nutty, you know, I have, for the majority of my professional career, and this has changed a little bit. But I've really organized myself around sort of like what's succeeding, just head in that direction, what's exciting head in that direction, what's causing you the most stress, head in that direction. But I don't I think that the company is now of a size and has been for a while, where we've had to sort of change how we see that and be more strategic. I wonder what you think of where the creator economy has come to now. When you see these YouTubers who are making tens of millions of dollars on challenges or playing video games, unboxing videos, opening toys, what do you think about that? The first thing I'd say is that there are some people who get paid tens of millions of dollars a year to play act like children.

And we call them movie stars and we don't think of the money that they get paid as being wild or weird because we have become accustomed to this world where if you're exceptionally good at play acting, you can make tens of millions of dollars doing it. And so if they're creating that much economic value and they're capturing some portion of it, that's not really. for me to judge, I feel like. And as far as, you know, the thing to remember about the people who are making $50 million, which I think of probably, and very edge case, if that's even a real number, I don't know if it is, is that the vast majority of people who are working really hard to make interesting content that entertains people or educates people or captures people its attention are making less than, you know, $15 an hour or something.

Yeah. We don't talk about that. It's not interesting. It's not front page news. but it's actually like a substantial part of the economy now and I want more people to have the job that I have in love. In order for that to happen, you have to have more money in the ecosystem. You have to have more robust advertising and crowdfunding and different tools for creators.

And when that happens, it means that the big people are going to get bigger, but it also means that the people who are making $20,000 a year are making $40,000 now. And that seems like a huge win. That's a much bigger deal to us. Yeah. One of the million companies that Hank started that we haven't talked, about is subable, a company that was eventually acquired by Patreon. And that was a...

There's a company that you started to help people subscribe to content that they liked. And they could pay for it or not pay for it. Right. And the reason Hank started subable and the reason that we've been really interested in businesses like that is because we know from experience and we've seen in the lives of the people we work with and the people we're friends with that what really transforms the lives of people is not going from making $300,000 a year to $50 million a year. It's going from making $12,000 a year to $60,000 or $80,000 a year.

Right. And so our interest is really in those tens of thousands of creators who will be on that journey if only we have better monetization tools. Let me ask you, I know I'm going to sound like a complete horrible jerk to lots of people listening, but I hate the fact that most kids, a majority of kids, my kids age, say they want to be YouTubers. And they're not talking about being Hank and John Green YouTubers. They're talking about being famous. And I worry that human species cannot sustain a world where everybody is famous.

I mean, right now, who knows how many millions of TikTokers and Instagrammers and YouTubers have more than 500,000 subscribers? There's tons, tons. And I get your point about wanting to create an ecosystem that employs people, and that's really great. But is there any part of you that is worried or sad that most kids, at least in the U.S. today, want to be YouTubers when they grow up? There's no part of me that's sad that most kids want to be YouTubers in the 80s if you'd asked my classroom. We'd all want to be rock stars or basketball players. I'm not particularly concerned about kids who want to have jobs that bring attention and status. I think that that's pretty typical.

But I am concerned about whether those jobs actually provide value to the people who end up having them. We've been doing this for so long. We've seen a lot of young people get a lot of attention and build big audiences really quickly and then really struggle. Yeah. And that is something that Hank and I are both deeply concerned about, that there are not a lot of systems for support. It's almost like a career as a professional athlete. It lasts a couple or three years, and then you're 30 years old, and you've only ever done one thing, and it's hard to figure out what to do next. Yeah. But I also think it's important to recognize that we don't get to

choose what teenagers want. And so deciding whether it's good or bad, it feels a little unnecessary. Yes. It feels like a jerk thing to say. Just say it. Well, it's a little, no, I don't think it's a jerk thing to say. It's more like if you're standing outside and the wind is blowing in from the west and you're like, I really think the wind should be blowing in from the east. And the wind is like, I don't really care. Yeah. There's something about the way your business work, I think is really important to point out, which is a significant, maybe the majority of the profit from all the different businesses doesn't go to Hank and John. It goes to pay the staffs and then to charity. But before we get there, I want to understand the revenue stream. So there's Complexly,

which of course is your sprawling media empire of shows. Subable was acquired by Patreon, and I know that is part of Patreon now. VidCon eventually was acquired by Viacom. But you also have, you've got a sock club. Don't laugh at the sock club. It's by far the most successful thing we've ever done. It's true. So give me a sense between complexly and all of the, like all the businesses that you guys oversee now, which is how many? Oh, it's really only two.

It's only two day to day. Okay. So some of them were spun off or sold or merged. And so between all the revenue that comes in every year, how much is it? What's your estimate? 30? I don't know. It depends on how you count too. DFTBA is a strange business because a lot of money is royalties. So we never see it. We sell the product, but like the majority of the money from that product is going to the creator, not to us.

Right. So you can say that DFTBA is a, I don't know, $25 million company, but a lot of that money is going back. Right. And it's a very narrow margin business, as is complexly. How much roughly of whatever's left goes to you guys? I think I make $27,000 a year. Yeah, John takes a very small salary. I take a normal salary. Oh, I didn't know that. You didn't know that?

No. But most of the income goes to different charities. Yes, or to employees. You know, you guys are now in your 40s and you're still young and you have, I'm pretty sure, like, 40 more business. I mean, I hate to use the term hamster wheel because it doesn't. sound like, I mean, I know you love what you do. But when you think about the next sort of 10, 20 years, in 20 years, are you doing all this stuff still? Are you writing books? Are you, you know, making all these shows, making all this content, hosting these events, gathering people together and launching other businesses? I don't know. I don't think about it. He doesn't think about it. That is literally true. I think about it. I think about it. I think. I think. I think about it enough for both of us. We are a good team.

Sometimes I'll be like, Hank, how is Vogue Brothers going to end? Have you thought about it? And he'll be like, no, not really. It's not going to end this year. Right, right. Maybe it doesn't have to end, or maybe you won't know. Like the fault in our stars. You don't even know how it ends. Yeah, I think that is the truth, right?

Like, no matter how much I plan, I don't know how it's going to end. The thing that I've come back to over the years, because there have been a number of times where I thought I might be close to done. I'm pretty tired. I'm pretty burnout. I love working on the stuff that we work on and I love working with the people we work with. But I also

want to be conscious of my limits. John Wesley once said to do all the good you can in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, to all the people you can for as long as you can. And that was like my guiding

concept about being alive was like, I'm not not alive to be happy. I'm not alive to be fulfilled. I'm alive to do as much good as I can, as fast as I can for as long as I can. And man, that is not a sustainable strategy. It's not a good way to live a life. So I've had to rethink it in the last few years for sure, but it's hard to imagine wanting to stop. Yeah. I will say that this for me, I don't see myself as I'm not the kind of CEO who's like, I am really the only person who could possibly, do this job. Yeah. I could definitely imagine that there are a number of people who would be better

at this than me. Yeah. And I would never want to not be involved. And I still love being involved in VidCon. You know, like, I still love it when there are problems that they have to come to me with. And I'm like, yeah, I know a lot about this and I can help. And I love to start things as well as to keep them going. And right now, I really can't. I am functionally at the edge of what I can do. And I can't do anything new, and that's okay, but I would like to be able to someday, for sure. Hank, what? Are you treating this episode of how I built this the way that you did that vlog brother's video before the first VidCon where you were like, hey, does anybody

have a kid who works for Cisco who wants to, are you, has anybody want to lead a really fantastic educational media company? I love it. Listen, it's another platform. You might as use it. The listeners of this podcast are perfect. for you. And so you're just, you're just throwing out the line and seeing if anybody's like, my email address. Yeah. We'll post it. I love it. Guy, you want a job? I agree. Oh, yeah,

guy, do you want a job? I mean, I agree with Hank, by the way, that neither of us deep down is made of CEO stuff. Yeah, sometimes I listen to people on this podcast and I'm like, are you joking me? You seem really, really together. Oh, God, they're so together. They wake up so early. When you guys think about all that's happened to you because you are, you've really had a huge impact, you know, a cultural impact. But when you think about all that you built and all these teams and this content and where you are now, how much of this do you attribute to how hard you work and how much do you think has to do with just being lucky, being at the right place, the right time. We've been waiting for this question. I've listened to the podcast guy. We talked about it for like 45 minutes yesterday.

And my feeling is that it's so 100% luck that it's impossible to even explain how 100% luck it is. But within luck, we have to remember the way that luck is not like rolling dice. It's a series of structures and power systems that make paths easier for certain people. Yeah. Yeah, I think all the time about how while I was in grad school, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and initially had a very inexpensive medication. But by the time we started making vlog brothers, I needed to get on a new medication that was $500, $600 a month. And I was able to just do that because I had support for my family. I was able to just like pay another rent to my colon so that I could keep making vlog brothers video.

and that was just, it's just not an opportunity for a lot of people. So like even those little things, those little pieces of luck, it's so hard to see them sometimes. Yeah. Like I can't even attribute it to skill because I'm not even that strategic. I just sort of go towards what's working. Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting answer, Hank, because like there have been a few moments in our career where we didn't like fly blindly toward the light like moths

at night for reasons we didn't understand. Like there have been a few tactical decisions. Just like three or four. Yeah. 99% of the time we've been flying to the light. And then you like go on an interview show and people are like, hey, how'd you get so successful? And you're like, oh, I flew to the light. And all the other moths are like, hey, I was also flying toward the light.

Yeah. Seems like maybe there was a lot of luck involved in you ending up on the moon. That's Hank and John Green, vlog brothers, authors, and co-founders of Complexly. By the way, if in like 500 years from now, right, Aliens come to our planet and start digging around. They come across a time capsule with one viral video that could explain the whole thing. Like, explain everything about YouTube. What would you guys put in that time capsule?

My answer is Mark Rober's video where he invented a really beautiful and complicated obstacle course for squirrels. Wow. What's your pick, Hank? Is it like Charlie bit my finger, Rick Roll? No, I was thinking about the doodling and math class series that Vihart did like 10 years ago. I was just thinking about Vihart. Yeah, she made this series where, you know, she explores pie and spirals and hexagons in really lovely and unconventional ways that I think the aliens would dig. You guys are all going all up market.

I'm going for Fred learns how to swim. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show. this week. If you love our show and want to show your support, please help us spread the word. Tell a friend about how I built this or send out a message on social media. If you want to contact our team, our email address is hibt at ID.wondery.com. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, we're at How I Built This and I'm at Guy.Ros. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ronteen Arablewe.

It was edited by Neva. a grant with research help from Catherine Seifer and technical assistance from Neil Tebowalt. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Carrie Thompson, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. Our intern is Susanna Brown. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.