YouSaid · the spoken record

Hank and John Green

lines on the record: 78
first: 2023-01-16
most recent: 2023-01-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But 99% of the time we've been flying to the light. And then you 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. Seems like maybe there was a lot of luck involved in you ending up on the moon.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Vlogbrothers, 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 from my family. I was able to just like pay another rent to my colon so that I could keep making Vlogbrothers videos. And that's just not an opportunity for a lot of people. So even those little things, those little pieces of luck, it's so hard to see them sometimes. 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We talked about it for like 45 minutes yesterday. And my feeling. 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could definitely imagine that there are a number of people who would be better at this than me. And I would never want to not be involved. And I still love being involved in VidCon. 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. 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. What?”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 DFTVA is a... I don't know, 25 million dollar company, but a lot of that money is going.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as far as the thing to remember about the people who are making $50 million, which I think have probably a 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's attention are making less than $15 an hour or something. Yeah.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 think that it's, 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 like that feeling a little too much and am 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 because that's outside of the promise that has been made. Of the content is free Creating the value, but you can't capture it in the same way. It's like an easement on a property. If you can't turn it into a bunch of houses, the land is worthless. And, like, I'm not saying 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 like I think that that's the right promise to make.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 got to understand that what your actual business is is creation of value. 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. And I think that's how I think about the value that complexity 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 in order to do that, it's not about capturing less value. It's about creating more.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a series on this particular topic, and we'd 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, we were actually on tour for the Fault and 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. Turned out to be a little bit harder to focus on Crash Course than I expected it to be.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah I would never stop 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still don't understand it, to be honest with you. Mostly, it was extremely surreal. 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's just honestly, it sort of feels like it happened to somebody else. But when it became an Amazon bestseller 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 Vlogbrothers live stream. 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. I wrote the book in this intense period of grief and anger. I was trying to explore 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like to go from seeing the numbers on the screen to seeing the faces in the audience is really important. And it was also really important, I think, for the industry to realize that it was an industry, to get together and to know that this thing matters and also is at the beginning.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember the actual difference between making money and not making money that first year was that I said on a Vlogbrothers 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 twenty thousand dollars, and that was it. That was the thing that pushed us over the line.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we partnered with the company that produced this Harry Potter convention that I had done. And so they did a lot of that. I did all of the guest management. It was to the point where 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 kinkles, and like, you know, really just making it happen one way or another.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 you to California.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I said, what if we could do YouTube convention and 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 was 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. It let the fans go deeper because they could see how these things were being made.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 this, 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 you call it bootstrapped, where you take the profit and use that to grow the company rather than trying to Attract investment.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 that I still sing to myself whenever I have to think about what the different types of quarks are.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I, over the course of years, capitalized on that guilt in every way possible. It didn't even, honestly, it didn't occur to me. We've had a very lucky brotherhood in that jealousy hasn't really played much of a part.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Gotten this really significant payday, and it felt kind of like at least it was partly because of Vlogbrothers, and there was no equivalent for Hank.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the meantime, John, I mean, you were 2005, 6, and then 8. You cranked out three books between novels. In that time. And so you are basically spending Percentage of your time making these videos and a percentage of your time writing the book, paper towns? I'm curious when Paper Towns came out, we're going to talk about the fault in our stars in a moment. When Paper Towns came out, was there any impact on book sales? Was it different?”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 because 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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 do 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. And then I was like, ah, this is making me much less happy.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 And that year, I very nearly sold my blog for what would have been life-changing money. Yeah.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Didn't, as is often the case in Hank and I've 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 that was going to help us be closer to”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 non-exist anymore.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 that it was going to be really cool to have been involved in the beginning of it”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 kind of a transportation policy blog. And I did make money with that”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT