Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► Welcome back to Cortex. On this episode, I am honoured to be joined by Hank Green. Hank is an OG YouTuber with the channel Vlogbrothers, that he runs with his brother, John Green. And over the last 18 years, he has become a huge figure in cultural and science communication, as Vlogbrothers grew into projects like Crash Course, Complexly, DFTBA, and many more.

00:00:22 ◼   ► I think Hank Green is one of the best communicators of our time, and I personally just feel smarter because I watch his content. Hank was one of the people at the very top of my list when I started this series. As you'll hear, he is an incredibly busy man, and I really wanted to know how he handles everything that he somehow manages to do, especially given the rate at which he comes up with new ideas.

00:00:46 ◼   ► Like this year, he shipped an iOS app that became the number one app in America. This man is non-stop.

00:00:53 ◼   ► Before we get started with the interview, I want to mention something we're doing with Cortex right now. I'll talk about this at the end of the episode, but we are running our annual holiday sale.

00:01:02 ◼   ► You can get 20% off an annual plan of Cortex by going to getmortex.com and using the code 2025holidays at checkout.

00:01:11 ◼   ► The Mortex for this episode is really good. Hank and I talk about what makes a great podcast and why PodCon didn't work.

00:01:18 ◼   ► So if you stop right now, actually, and sign up for Mortex, you're going to hear this whole conversation with no advertising interruptions.

00:01:25 ◼   ► That's at getmortex.com and use the code 2025holidays at checkout.

00:01:29 ◼   ► You'll also find the link in the show notes that automatically applies to discount.

00:01:33 ◼   ► But I'll tell you more about that later. For now, please enjoy my conversation with Hank Green.

00:01:40 ◼   ► So Hank, I want to get started by asking you the question I ask all my guests.

00:01:44 ◼   ► Yes.

00:01:44 ◼   ► What device is the most important to you for getting your work done?

00:01:48 ◼   ► I mean, the computer.

00:01:50 ◼   ► Yeah. Okay. What computer is that for you?

00:01:52 ◼   ► Oh, it's a Mac Studio. Because I primarily see myself now as a YouTuber.

00:01:57 ◼   ► There have been times when, you know, Twitter or Tumblr or TikTok took over.

00:02:03 ◼   ► But throughout all of it, I've been a YouTuber and I've never edited a YouTube video on my phone.

00:02:08 ◼   ► I've edited TikToks on my phone, but I edit in Premiere and I have tools with which to do that.

00:02:15 ◼   ► And if you wanted me to edit a YouTube video on my phone, I'd be really mad.

00:02:19 ◼   ► Because even as a video creator, my assumption would be, you can correct me if I'm wrong,

00:02:24 ◼   ► that the amount of views that you receive is higher on your social platforms than it is on YouTube.

00:02:28 ◼   ► Yeah, but not really.

00:02:30 ◼   ► They're not the ones you want, right?

00:02:31 ◼   ► Like, as such.

00:02:32 ◼   ► I mean, it's not just that it's not the ones I want. It's that I don't believe them.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:38 ◼   ► I think you're counting a view at three seconds and I don't think that counts. And I think that YouTube is

00:02:42 ◼   ► counting a view at some percentage of the full watch time of the video, 15 seconds, 30 seconds,

00:02:46 ◼   ► something like that. And the initial drop off is so fast that if you move that up one second,

00:02:53 ◼   ► if you go from five seconds to three seconds, you can have double the number of views,

00:02:57 ◼   ► especially on something like a TikTok. But yeah, it's both. I don't believe the number

00:03:02 ◼   ► and the quality of the view and the relationship that you build with the audience is very different.

00:03:07 ◼   ► So yeah, I try not to think of those as being related metrics, honestly.

00:03:12 ◼   ► That makes sense. I don't want to give YouTube a bad idea here, but why do you think it is that they

00:03:16 ◼   ► are more diligent with what they count as a view?

00:03:19 ◼   ► I think advertisers. Interestingly, TikTok actually counts views in two different ways. They count views

00:03:25 ◼   ► and they count qualified views. So a qualified view is a larger bar and it's the only ones that

00:03:31 ◼   ► actually get monetized on the platform.

00:03:32 ◼   ► That's the real view.

00:03:33 ◼   ► That's the actual view. And if you go into your analytics and you look at your qualified views

00:03:37 ◼   ► and you're like, why is that number so low? It's because the actual number of views is the lie.

00:03:42 ◼   ► That makes sense.

00:03:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:43 ◼   ► Alright, so preparing for this episode of all of the episodes in this series so far, this is the most daunting

00:03:50 ◼   ► because of the sheer amount of things that you do. So as far as I can work out, you are a YouTuber with two

00:03:59 ◼   ► very successful accounts, Vlogbrothers and Hank's channel. You're a host for Crash Course. You create viral

00:04:05 ◼   ► education content on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram. You're a best-selling author.

00:04:09 ◼   ► You have a number one hit app in Focus Friend and you're a founder of and have responsibilities for

00:04:15 ◼   ► create a merch company, DFTBA and consumer goods company, Good Store. That is a lot of stuff.

00:04:20 ◼   ► Yeah. I also host SciShow.

00:04:22 ◼   ► And dear Hank and John, yes, you are a podcaster too. Hilariously, I left out the podcast.

00:04:27 ◼   ► Yeah. I've never been one for traditional media. I recently did like a traditional shoot,

00:04:32 ◼   ► like a TV type shoot. And at one point the director was like, so how is it? Is it interesting?

00:04:39 ◼   ► Is it exciting? Is it how you thought it would be? And I was like, I was honest in a way I probably

00:04:45 ◼   ► shouldn't have been where I was like, I've never cared about this. I don't right now. I'm doing it

00:04:50 ◼   ► for other reasons than my excitement about this. It was very interesting. Like I love to see how things

00:04:58 ◼   ► get created. And that is part of why I was doing it just out of like pure curiosity to see that from

00:05:03 ◼   ► the inside. I also wanted to test out some of my own abilities. Like I wanted to be a journalist.

00:05:08 ◼   ► I wanted to like write for Scientific American. That was my dream. And I actually have written for

00:05:13 ◼   ► Scientific American now. But because magazines became like not a thing during my career, certainly not

00:05:19 ◼   ► like a growing industry. My interest has always been in like the impact wherever it is. And so I just

00:05:25 ◼   ► kind of chase it around.

00:05:25 ◼   ► Which results in many, many areas.

00:05:28 ◼   ► Yeah. I have a very hard time seeing an opportunity and not taking it.

00:05:32 ◼   ► That is the impression that I've gotten from you. Maybe it just didn't have been in the last couple

00:05:37 ◼   ► of years. And I think Focus Friend, which is a wonderful app around kind of time focus that you've

00:05:43 ◼   ► a part of the creation of. I think that was like an example to me of like, really, that doesn't really

00:05:49 ◼   ► fall in neatly with any of the things.

00:05:50 ◼   ► Yeah. So this came together because I was on my standup comedy tour, which is another thing we

00:05:55 ◼   ► didn't mention.

00:05:56 ◼   ► I think this episode is going to be just a litter of things that I did not pull out from my research

00:06:02 ◼   ► of things that you do.

00:06:04 ◼   ► So I was doing a standup show in Brea and my friend Jabril, he's a YouTuber. He's like does

00:06:10 ◼   ► computer science stuff. And Jabril lives around there. He came out to see me and he brought his

00:06:14 ◼   ► fiance at the time. And then I brought a friend as well. And my friend and Jabril spent all

00:06:18 ◼   ► their time together talking. And I've talked very little with either of my friends and

00:06:22 ◼   ► has been almost all my time talking with Brea, who is Jabril's partner. And she is an app developer.

00:06:28 ◼   ► And what I was so obsessed with is like that she sees the app store as a platform that people

00:06:36 ◼   ► create content on and then their content competes with each other on this very tightly regulated

00:06:42 ◼   ► platform that I did not understand that at all. And I was like, this is fascinating. And she

00:06:47 ◼   ► was like, I have always thought that I should partner with creators to make their thing.

00:06:52 ◼   ► And then that will be like another way of breaking through the noise of the app stores. And I

00:07:00 ◼   ► was fascinated by that. And so we kept in touch. And then we started ideating a little while

00:07:04 ◼   ► after that. So it is in like a weird way. It's the kind of the same thing where you're trying

00:07:08 ◼   ► to find a way to get people's attention on a platform on which everyone is doing that.

00:07:14 ◼   ► Considering all of these responsibilities that you have, what on earth is your to-do

00:07:20 ◼   ► system? Like how are you keeping track of the tasks that you have to complete on a daily basis?

00:07:26 ◼   ► I feel like I'm going to break your entire business model here. I use Google Tasks.

00:07:31 ◼   ► Well, you're using one. I thought you were going to say you didn't use one.

00:07:34 ◼   ► And I was like, well, it was great to speak to you.

00:07:37 ◼   ► I use Google Tasks and I use the Notes app. And I also use ChatGPT some for like holding ideas.

00:07:46 ◼   ► Oh, okay.

00:07:47 ◼   ► So like oftentimes when I have an idea for a video, I used to just put that in a Notes app,

00:07:51 ◼   ► but now I sometimes will type it into ChatGPT to just get that like initial feedback of,

00:07:57 ◼   ► this is a bad idea. I mean, it will never tell you it's a bad idea.

00:08:02 ◼   ► It will tell you your idea is genius every time. And maybe that's what I need. I need another voice

00:08:07 ◼   ► in my ear being like, you're smart, boy.

00:08:09 ◼   ► We just need the ultimate yes man in our pocket. Like I use it for like checking spelling and

00:08:15 ◼   ► punctuation and grammar in long things that I write, like blog posts and stuff.

00:08:18 ◼   ► Oh, wow. Yeah. The nice thing about YouTube is that I don't have to worry about this.

00:08:22 ◼   ► I've never been good at it. And I've always been very hesitant about writing on the internet

00:08:26 ◼   ► because I'm not very confident in my grammar. And it's actually, it empowers me to do that

00:08:30 ◼   ► because it's like a quick way to get it done. But every blog post I put into it, like, oh man,

00:08:35 ◼   ► this is one of your best. I'm like, they can't all be.

00:08:37 ◼   ► I know. Yeah. But yeah, in the ChatGPT projects, you can like put in the idea and then I can also

00:08:43 ◼   ► like stick in websites and PDFs and stuff, like papers. And then it's just all in one place.

00:08:49 ◼   ► And it's like digesting it for me a little bit where I can ask it things about this. And I could

00:08:53 ◼   ► be like, I read these three papers, which was the paper that had this data in it. And it's just like,

00:08:58 ◼   ► that's very nice to have because, you know, it's not pointing me to some thing that I don't know is

00:09:04 ◼   ► credible. It's pointing me to a thing inside of a thing I've already read. Yeah. What I will say

00:09:09 ◼   ► in terms of like my everyday, like all of the things I have to do, the project management system

00:09:16 ◼   ► is deeply dependent upon my assistant, Erin, who reads my emails. She knows me really well. So she's

00:09:24 ◼   ► like, you might want to respond to this. It goes in the, you might want to respond to this list.

00:09:28 ◼   ► If it's like, if you don't do this, somebody can't do their job. It goes on a list called now.

00:09:33 ◼   ► And so that's like a list for when somebody is waiting for me and it really sucks to not be able

00:09:40 ◼   ► to do your job because you're waiting on like a two sentence email from somebody. But sometimes the

00:09:44 ◼   ► now list also has like big, annoying projects on it.

00:09:47 ◼   ► Are you a blocker sometimes of work? And is that something that you struggle with?

00:09:51 ◼   ► So I have two hour blocks scheduled regularly that are unscheduled.

00:09:57 ◼   ► Okay.

00:09:57 ◼   ► And sometimes those are scheduled for things like write the proposal for this. And that kind of

00:10:05 ◼   ► annoys me because then that's not really an unscheduled block. But the reality is that like

00:10:11 ◼   ► that isn't going to get done if I don't schedule a time to do it. And then the other problem is that

00:10:17 ◼   ► like, if I don't do that, I will fill up every moment. You know, like Mike emails me and is like,

00:10:23 ◼   ► can you do Cortex? And I'm like, yeah, I want to do Cortex. But what did I say when you emailed

00:10:28 ◼   ► me about Cortex? What did I tell you?

00:10:29 ◼   ► You said, I'm working on something right now, a book. And can we do it later? And I was like,

00:10:35 ◼   ► sure. I was like, I was just happy you said yes. You know what I mean? I don't care if we do it in

00:10:39 ◼   ► six months. Like I was just happy you said yes.

00:10:41 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. So I pushed it. And I do that a lot because I do want to say yes to everything,

00:10:45 ◼   ► but I have had to come to the realization that if I say yes and schedule within the next two weeks,

00:10:50 ◼   ► that's doing everything. But if I say yes, and I'm like, okay, Aaron, find a time on a week where we

00:10:56 ◼   ► currently have a Friday where I'm okay. You know? So I try to schedule a lot of unscheduled time and

00:11:03 ◼   ► I try to leave all of Thursday unscheduled.

00:11:06 ◼   ► So the lists that you mentioned that your assistant is putting together, where are they?

00:11:11 ◼   ► They're in Google Tasks.

00:11:12 ◼   ► Okay. So you share their Google Tasks with her and then they will put all this stuff in for you.

00:11:17 ◼   ► Yeah. And then I have an entirely separate system for organizing Hank's channel.

00:11:22 ◼   ► What is that system?

00:11:24 ◼   ► Interesting. Is this collaborative or a private system?

00:11:30 ◼   ► It's collaborative. So it's just me and my main editor who also manages a few other editors.

00:11:37 ◼   ► And it's got Kanban-y or something.

00:11:40 ◼   ► Kanban.

00:11:41 ◼   ► Kanban.

00:11:42 ◼   ► Yeah. This is the columns where you move cards from place to place.

00:11:46 ◼   ► So it's got like 12 columns.

00:11:48 ◼   ► That's a lot of columns.

00:11:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I know. Everything from like, this is an idea to the last one on the list is things that we've made but aren't uploading.

00:11:57 ◼   ► Hey, that was a great one. You know, you've always got to have some stuff in there.

00:12:02 ◼   ► Yeah, where it's just like, well, it was an idea. I got the final product and I was like, well, I'll pay everybody for this.

00:12:08 ◼   ► But I'm actually, I don't want this on the internet.

00:12:11 ◼   ► Sometimes you can only know once it's done, you know?

00:12:15 ◼   ► I'll see if I can read you if I'm not embarrassed of any of these.

00:12:18 ◼   ► There's one called This Will Never Stop Surprising Me.

00:12:21 ◼   ► And it was about Elon Musk and his lack of responsibility for anything that he does.

00:12:29 ◼   ► It was specifically about assassination of a couple of Democratic lawmakers.

00:12:34 ◼   ► And within 15 minutes, he was blaming the left for it and saying that the left was the party of violence.

00:12:41 ◼   ► And I found it shocking then. I find it shocking now.

00:12:44 ◼   ► But I just didn't want to deal with it. There's so much context.

00:12:48 ◼   ► And now it's like the news has moved on so fast that it's like, does it even make sense anymore?

00:12:54 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. Who's even heard? Who even remembers that? Yeah.

00:12:57 ◼   ► So over time, it feels like from the outside, your way of starting businesses is you have an idea.

00:13:04 ◼   ► You start that business and you lead that business in some way.

00:13:07 ◼   ► And it seems like more recently, you've started stepping back from some leadership positions and some of the things that you're involved in.

00:13:14 ◼   ► How did you manage to do this? And did you find it hard to let go?

00:13:17 ◼   ► I actually I haven't found it that hard to let go, but it has found it hard to let go.

00:13:25 ◼   ► So for additional context, around two years ago, I was going through cancer treatment.

00:13:29 ◼   ► And during that, I had to step back and not be leading out of necessity.

00:13:34 ◼   ► That is a way to force you. That will do that.

00:13:37 ◼   ► Yeah. If you're doing cancer treatment, you can't do much.

00:13:39 ◼   ► No.

00:13:39 ◼   ► And for people who don't know me, I'm now in remission and have been and things look good.

00:13:43 ◼   ► Amazing.

00:13:44 ◼   ► And we had already been looking for leadership at the merchandise company and good store, which are one in the same entity, though they exist separately on their own books.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:53 ◼   ► And so that was like both good and bad that we had already done that.

00:13:57 ◼   ► It turns out to be like complicated because it was a little like, OK, here's the new CEO and your old CEO is gone.

00:14:03 ◼   ► I wasn't there to like do any transitionary work and that would have been good.

00:14:07 ◼   ► And then we had a great and strong operator and Julie Walsh at Complexly.

00:14:15 ◼   ► And so for the first little while, John stepped in as CEO and then he transitioned it over to Julie.

00:14:22 ◼   ► And then as I was recovering, it was like six months of recovery and I was just like, Julie's doing a better job than me.

00:14:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:30 ◼   ► And so it just made sense to make that transition.

00:14:32 ◼   ► Complexly's transition has been, I think, pretty easy, but it still needs me for all of the things that it needs me for.

00:14:41 ◼   ► Like it needs me for, to some extent, strategic stuff where like I am probably the best YouTube strategist, not just at Complexly, but in the Inner Mountain West.

00:14:51 ◼   ► Not to toot my own horn.

00:14:52 ◼   ► Maybe the world.

00:14:54 ◼   ► You don't know.

00:14:55 ◼   ► That's right.

00:14:55 ◼   ► You've been doing it for a long time.

00:14:57 ◼   ► I have a level of expertise that I will not deny.

00:15:00 ◼   ► As a host, I'm good at that and cheap for Complexly.

00:15:04 ◼   ► I'm not cheap for anybody else.

00:15:05 ◼   ► Complexly manages Crash Course and SciShow and...

00:15:10 ◼   ► Eons, Bizarre Beasts.

00:15:11 ◼   ► We've got a bunch of educational properties on YouTube and looking to continue to increase that.

00:15:16 ◼   ► And then I think Complexly is pretty reliant on me for fundraising.

00:15:19 ◼   ► So Complexly is crowdfunded about a third of its revenue and would not work without that.

00:15:26 ◼   ► Like I think SciShow might be able to work in a scaled down version without crowdfunding.

00:15:33 ◼   ► Everything else couldn't even work scaled down, except for Eons.

00:15:37 ◼   ► Eons could because it's funded by PBS.

00:15:38 ◼   ► And that's really important to me.

00:15:40 ◼   ► And it's work that I quite enjoy.

00:15:41 ◼   ► It's also like in terms of like the amount of work per dollar generated, it's the best use of my time that I've ever found.

00:15:49 ◼   ► Because like the amount of value that Complexly is creating is very obvious to people.

00:15:54 ◼   ► But the credible ask coming from me, I think is even stronger with me not being the CEO, with me being like a fan more than anything.

00:16:04 ◼   ► So in these businesses, say like with Good Store and stuff like that, do you ever have to contend with people wanting to do things differently to how you would do them?

00:16:13 ◼   ► Oh, for sure.

00:16:14 ◼   ► I have this struggle on SciShow because SciShow is like, SciShow was my baby.

00:16:18 ◼   ► Crash Course was John's baby.

00:16:20 ◼   ► And honestly, and like this is the crazy thing, they're just safer than me.

00:16:25 ◼   ► They play it safer.

00:16:26 ◼   ► I'm like, you could do that.

00:16:28 ◼   ► You can make a little bit of clickbait.

00:16:29 ◼   ► You can use a video that you haven't quite got the rights to.

00:16:33 ◼   ► You know, it's probably fine.

00:16:34 ◼   ► This is coming from the best YouTube strategist in the Midwest.

00:16:37 ◼   ► And they're like, no, actually, Hank, we can't do that.

00:16:42 ◼   ► Like, I remember one time I was working on something for SciShow and I got fact checked and they were like, what's your source?

00:16:49 ◼   ► And I was like, the theory of evolution.

00:16:51 ◼   ► Like, I don't have a source for this.

00:16:54 ◼   ► Charles Darwin's idea of evolution through natural selection is my source for this.

00:16:59 ◼   ► I'm making a bold statement here that, like, if something survives, there will be more of it.

00:17:05 ◼   ► And the great thing about Hank's channel, about like my personal channel, is I can make a video that's like one of my popular videos this year was called the hardest problem evolution ever solved.

00:17:16 ◼   ► That's not a scientific thought.

00:17:18 ◼   ► That's my judgment.

00:17:20 ◼   ► And it's also wrong.

00:17:21 ◼   ► Like the video is about the transition from the water to the land, which is a very hard problem.

00:17:25 ◼   ► But in terms of like the thing that happened the fewest number of times, it's endosymbiosis and the mitochondria.

00:17:32 ◼   ► But like, you know, I really wanted to make this video about the difficulty of vertebrates getting from water to land and like how the things that you would think would be the hard parts of that were not actually the hard parts.

00:17:46 ◼   ► The hard parts were things that you wouldn't think of, like vision being different in the air and like water needing to stay inside of your body and not having to worry about drying out what you don't have to do in the ocean.

00:17:59 ◼   ► But I also wanted to get views on that video, you know, you know, so I put it inside of the frame of like, this is the hardest problem evolution ever solved, which I think everybody knows that that's like my opinion.

00:18:09 ◼   ► So that's something that SciShow would never do.

00:18:12 ◼   ► So at this point, like SciShow is like the job that you work at.

00:18:17 ◼   ► And then Hank's channel is your side thing where you can do all the stuff that your job won't let you do.

00:18:21 ◼   ► For sure.

00:18:22 ◼   ► I mean, I'm working on this book about the biology of cancer, too.

00:18:25 ◼   ► And it's so wild to like send it off to oncologists and they're like, no, this isn't right.

00:18:29 ◼   ► And I'm like, yeah, it is.

00:18:31 ◼   ► And I'm like, some guy.

00:18:33 ◼   ► I feel such a dick where I'm like, they'll be saying like, you can't say that cancer is a living organism.

00:18:38 ◼   ► And I'm like, OK, but there are contagious cancers that have existed for thousands of years and they spread from organism to organism and they are genetically different from that organism.

00:18:51 ◼   ► Now they have evolved to lose most of their chromosomes and most of their abilities.

00:18:55 ◼   ► They've evolved to be non-lethal so that they can survive longer.

00:18:59 ◼   ► How is that not an organism?

00:19:02 ◼   ► And they're like, well, in that case, it is.

00:19:03 ◼   ► And I'm like, well, I feel like I'm safe drawing the line at a slightly different place than you.

00:19:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:19:08 ◼   ► Well, this is the difference.

00:19:09 ◼   ► You're not an oncologist.

00:19:10 ◼   ► Just play one in the Internet.

00:19:12 ◼   ► Like, what do you want?

00:19:13 ◼   ► The other thing is that oncologists and I had to discover this.

00:19:16 ◼   ► They're not biologists.

00:19:17 ◼   ► You know, the first interviews I had with oncologists, they were like, I don't know about any of this stuff.

00:19:21 ◼   ► I was like, what do you know about?

00:19:22 ◼   ► And they're like, I know how to treat cancer.

00:19:23 ◼   ► And I'm like, yeah, that's a good point.

00:19:25 ◼   ► That's your job.

00:19:26 ◼   ► You don't need to know where it comes from.

00:19:28 ◼   ► You just need to know how to fix it.

00:19:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

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00:19:31 ◼   ► But like the people treating it, they need to understand how to read scientific studies, how to dose chemotherapy, how to correctly order treatments and how to have good relationships with patients.

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00:20:59 ◼   ► I would love to know a little bit about what a typical workday looks like for you.

00:21:04 ◼   ► So we've mentioned that you set yourself some time, which is to deal with the non-normal things, right?

00:21:12 ◼   ► So you're setting your unstructured time.

00:21:14 ◼   ► But do you have like a set schedule that you follow?

00:21:17 ◼   ► Like, for example, do you block out all of Tuesday to make a Vlogbrothers video?

00:21:20 ◼   ► Like, do your week's shape look roughly the same?

00:21:24 ◼   ► Yes, not always.

00:21:25 ◼   ► And like whenever something weird happens, it messes up the weeks before and after.

00:21:31 ◼   ► And that is pretty constant.

00:21:33 ◼   ► But Thursdays are SciShow days.

00:21:35 ◼   ► So usually I'll just go to the gym and then hang out with my wife.

00:21:39 ◼   ► And then the rest of the day is SciShow.

00:21:41 ◼   ► Did I say Thursday or did I say Tuesday?

00:21:43 ◼   ► Thursday, you said.

00:21:44 ◼   ► It is, in fact, Tuesday.

00:21:46 ◼   ► And then Thursdays are Vlogbrothers days where I have the whole day unscheduled so that I can work on Vlogbrothers, which Friday is my Vlogbrothers upload day.

00:21:55 ◼   ► I know that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm not going to do much else.

00:21:58 ◼   ► Dear Hank or John moves around right now, which isn't ideal.

00:22:02 ◼   ► But just because John and I have such weird schedules, we've been having a hard time finding a solid day for that.

00:22:07 ◼   ► But yeah, other than that, I try to keep a big block of two to three hours in the middle of the day.

00:22:13 ◼   ► It usually ends up being two and sometimes is 90 minutes.

00:22:17 ◼   ► And then when the later hours from two or three on is when I do meetings.

00:22:22 ◼   ► I was going to ask you about meetings.

00:22:24 ◼   ► It seems like you would be in a lot of meetings.

00:22:25 ◼   ► Not as many as you might think, but still a lot.

00:22:29 ◼   ► I certainly employ people who are in way more meetings than I am.

00:22:32 ◼   ► Are they virtual meetings or in person?

00:22:34 ◼   ► Usually virtual.

00:22:35 ◼   ► Do you have a preference?

00:22:37 ◼   ► I would prefer, honestly, a phone call.

00:22:40 ◼   ► I don't like Zoom.

00:22:42 ◼   ► And I don't know why.

00:22:43 ◼   ► Maybe I'm just too Gen X.

00:22:45 ◼   ► But there's something about it where I'd rather be able to stand up, walk around.

00:22:50 ◼   ► And also, I have to be looking at my computer if I'm on a Zoom call, which is just like the whole universe is beckoning to me.

00:22:58 ◼   ► Whether that's cleaning my desktop, which is actually the best meeting activity for me.

00:23:04 ◼   ► If it's like kind of a meeting where I don't have to be there for the whole thing, but I have to be there for the whole thing.

00:23:08 ◼   ► Cleaning the desktop is great because you can still listen.

00:23:10 ◼   ► And my desktop, not in a good position ever.

00:23:14 ◼   ► You're just putting stuff on there all the time?

00:23:16 ◼   ► I just flop stuff onto the desktop.

00:23:17 ◼   ► Every video that exports, exports to the desktop.

00:23:20 ◼   ► Oh my God.

00:23:21 ◼   ► My OBS exports to a special folder on my desktop.

00:23:25 ◼   ► You're not actually using the desktop like a desktop.

00:23:27 ◼   ► Like I would assume.

00:23:28 ◼   ► No, no, no.

00:23:28 ◼   ► You're not actually going to the desktop to find a file.

00:23:31 ◼   ► You open Finder and find it in the folder called desktop.

00:23:34 ◼   ► Always Finder.

00:23:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:35 ◼   ► So really, it could just be anywhere, couldn't it?

00:23:37 ◼   ► And then you wouldn't have to clean it up.

00:23:38 ◼   ► You ever thought about that?

00:23:39 ◼   ► You just save it, hide it, and then you never need to see it.

00:23:43 ◼   ► I mean, I don't ever see the desktop.

00:23:45 ◼   ► The windows don't ever close enough for me to get to it.

00:23:48 ◼   ► I love that.

00:23:49 ◼   ► So it's all just there stacking up on top of each other.

00:23:52 ◼   ► The six layers deep.

00:23:52 ◼   ► Wouldn't want to tell you how many files there are.

00:23:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I think one of the worst long-going societal changes after the pandemic is that

00:24:02 ◼   ► we all do video calls now.

00:24:03 ◼   ► I thought you were going to say that just like, we've ruined our desktops.

00:24:06 ◼   ► I mean, potentially.

00:24:08 ◼   ► The studies have not been completed, but it could be.

00:24:12 ◼   ► We don't know.

00:24:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:24:13 ◼   ► I mean, like the video call with a bunch of people in it, I wish that everybody would

00:24:17 ◼   ► just keep their mics on.

00:24:18 ◼   ► Unless your dog's barking or unless you've got like a kid in the room with you, just

00:24:23 ◼   ► keep your mic on.

00:24:24 ◼   ► Because when you're in a meeting, everybody's mic is on.

00:24:27 ◼   ► Yes.

00:24:28 ◼   ► Like when you're in a room together, nobody's muted.

00:24:30 ◼   ► And like part of this is like, I make jokes.

00:24:33 ◼   ► I'm a comedian.

00:24:34 ◼   ► I like telling a joke and then like searching the screen for a smile to like be like, did

00:24:39 ◼   ► that land?

00:24:39 ◼   ► But I just feel like it's very disconnected in that way.

00:24:43 ◼   ► I don't labor under the illusion it's worth getting everybody back in the physical space

00:24:48 ◼   ► every single day, though we are working more on getting people into a physical space for

00:24:53 ◼   ► like regular offsites or onsites, which I think are really good and important and fun.

00:24:58 ◼   ► But the Zoom call when it's two people, I'm just like, I don't need to look at you right

00:25:03 ◼   ► now.

00:25:03 ◼   ► I agree.

00:25:04 ◼   ► I prefer in-person meetings.

00:25:06 ◼   ► I do not want every meeting to be in person though.

00:25:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:09 ◼   ► I like the important ones, the ones where you feel like you're really doing something.

00:25:12 ◼   ► Like I want that to be in person, but yeah, I agree.

00:25:16 ◼   ► Like a lot of this stuff can just be done over the phone and that would be preferable.

00:25:20 ◼   ► There's like a little Slack thing where you can just like push a button and their Slack

00:25:24 ◼   ► rings and they're like, hello.

00:25:25 ◼   ► I didn't know it did this.

00:25:27 ◼   ► I really like that with a person who I know well, and we have a good working relationship

00:25:32 ◼   ► where I'm just like, I don't want to have like a 15 minute chat right now.

00:25:36 ◼   ► I want to like have a 30 second phone call during which we could get all of that done.

00:25:41 ◼   ► And it is just like popping into the office back when popping into the office used to

00:25:45 ◼   ► be a thing.

00:25:46 ◼   ► It's like not to be overused.

00:25:48 ◼   ► And if somebody pops into the office like every day for 30 minutes at the same time, it's like

00:25:52 ◼   ► a problem.

00:25:53 ◼   ► But if you just need to like, hey, Matt, I need to know this thing, but I don't just need

00:25:59 ◼   ► a fact from you.

00:25:59 ◼   ► I need to like a little bit of context along with that fact.

00:26:02 ◼   ► That system is Slack's huddle system.

00:26:04 ◼   ► Yes.

00:26:04 ◼   ► I also like it for the complete opposite of like, we're just all going to be in this room

00:26:10 ◼   ► and we're not even necessarily talking.

00:26:11 ◼   ► Oh, just like Discord.

00:26:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:13 ◼   ► We're just hanging out while we're working.

00:26:15 ◼   ► I've done some work sessions with some colleagues like that.

00:26:18 ◼   ► And I enjoy that because that does also feel like it's got that kind of, I'm in the office

00:26:23 ◼   ► vibe where you're just sitting there doing your own thing.

00:26:25 ◼   ► But every now and then someone will pipe up with something to say.

00:26:27 ◼   ► Considering kind of your place in the world professionally, your time is valuable.

00:26:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:34 ◼   ► Because every moment where you're not in a meeting, you could be creating some piece

00:26:39 ◼   ► of content, another idea, a whole other business could be happening.

00:26:43 ◼   ► Do you have a strategy for making meetings worth the amount of time they take up for you?

00:26:48 ◼   ► Or if you just kind of resigned yourself to the fact that you don't have a say?

00:26:52 ◼   ► The majority of the meetings I'm in are one-on-one.

00:26:55 ◼   ► Okay.

00:26:56 ◼   ► So in that case, those meetings tend to go for the amount of time they need to go.

00:27:01 ◼   ► Yep.

00:27:02 ◼   ► They're much more likely to end ahead of time, before town.

00:27:05 ◼   ► They are meetings that I have chosen to be in because I need to be providing feedback to

00:27:11 ◼   ► and getting context from someone regularly.

00:27:14 ◼   ► And so like those meetings, there's a part of me that wishes I was having more of them.

00:27:20 ◼   ► So like I have one with our head of production at Complexly.

00:27:24 ◼   ► We're talking about like how shows are going, how new ideas are going, how new projects are

00:27:29 ◼   ► going, how things are developing.

00:27:31 ◼   ► And I think that's really important.

00:27:34 ◼   ► I don't have one of those with like our head of development who's in charge of like revenue

00:27:38 ◼   ► at Complexly.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And I think that I am going to start having one of those more regularly because I, there's

00:27:44 ◼   ► just like a lot I don't understand about that.

00:27:47 ◼   ► And it's interesting because like Gabriel's better at production than me.

00:27:50 ◼   ► Kelsey's better at development than me.

00:27:52 ◼   ► And like I'm better at YouTube than them.

00:27:54 ◼   ► So there's a lot that we get from each other.

00:27:56 ◼   ► You know, my assumption is that YouTube is your top work priority.

00:28:01 ◼   ► Like it's the top of the funnel.

00:28:03 ◼   ► Everything else is benefited from you being on YouTube.

00:28:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:28:08 ◼   ► Does it mean that you would push other stuff to the side for YouTube work?

00:28:13 ◼   ► Like, is it given that kind of respect because of how important it is to literally everything

00:28:19 ◼   ► else functioning?

00:28:19 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:28:20 ◼   ► So I have basically three buckets of YouTube content.

00:28:24 ◼   ► I've got vlog brothers, which is a almost 20 year long project.

00:28:30 ◼   ► And that's like the foundation of everything.

00:28:32 ◼   ► And so that's something that I like, I can't not do unless like we're retiring basically.

00:28:40 ◼   ► Like we would have to retire from the vlog, but this channel would be a very big deal.

00:28:43 ◼   ► There have to be like a lot of reasons.

00:28:46 ◼   ► And, you know, because I've done it for so long, it's not very hard and it is very validating

00:28:50 ◼   ► and very like comfortable.

00:28:52 ◼   ► And it's a thing that I very much enjoy.

00:28:54 ◼   ► And then there is Hank's channel would be the second bit of it, which is like, this is

00:28:59 ◼   ► where I make my stuff.

00:29:00 ◼   ► And about a year ago, maybe a little less than that, I started to like really focus on

00:29:05 ◼   ► it in large part because I wanted to stop focusing on short form.

00:29:08 ◼   ► So I was making all the short form content and I was like, I don't actually feel this great

00:29:12 ◼   ► about this.

00:29:12 ◼   ► And I think that I can do more and better if I was focused on YouTube.

00:29:16 ◼   ► And I think people like individuals are better served by the way YouTube works rather than

00:29:23 ◼   ► the way shorts or reels or TikTok works.

00:29:25 ◼   ► Definitely.

00:29:26 ◼   ► Yep.

00:29:26 ◼   ► So I just wanted to indulge in it a little less.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And then I've got like the things that are projects like Dear Hank and John clips and

00:29:34 ◼   ► then SciShow and Crash Course and like me hosting stuff or appearing on other people's things,

00:29:38 ◼   ► which I kind of think of as all, all one bucket.

00:29:41 ◼   ► And there is like one thing that for me would push everything but Vlogbrothers to a back burner.

00:29:46 ◼   ► And that's trying to finish a book.

00:29:48 ◼   ► I think that getting books done for me is really important.

00:29:55 ◼   ► Why?

00:29:55 ◼   ► Because they don't get done without a lot of attention.

00:30:01 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:02 ◼   ► And they are also a format that does something very different than a YouTube video.

00:30:11 ◼   ► So the process of writing a book is very gratifying and very hard.

00:30:17 ◼   ► The process of getting that book published sucks.

00:30:20 ◼   ► It's just like so much more work and so slow.

00:30:24 ◼   ► You know, I'll finish this book hopefully in the next couple of months and then it'll be a year before it's out.

00:30:30 ◼   ► Oh, I'm saying that made me nauseous thinking about finishing this book.

00:30:33 ◼   ► It's so hard because like the research is both hard, like intellectually, like I'm doing like research on cell receptors and the different ways that cells trigger each other to grow or not grow.

00:30:45 ◼   ► Or like apoptosis cascades, which are just silly and like none of this stuff's going in the book, but I have to like know it in order to say a version of it that is both simple and correct.

00:30:56 ◼   ► But then also I'm like interviewing like cancer patients, people who are in treatment, people who will have their disease for the rest of their life, people who have lost people.

00:31:07 ◼   ► And so I'm like doing this intense emotional research at the same time as a cancer survivor.

00:31:12 ◼   ► It's so hard.

00:31:13 ◼   ► It's really rewarding, but it's very hard.

00:31:15 ◼   ► But then like the final product of a book is still this thing that in society we understand as something to be taken seriously and for time to be taken with it.

00:31:30 ◼   ► And it is not just another YouTube video you watched today.

00:31:33 ◼   ► And for topics that I think are worthy of that, I want to write books and I want to write a book every couple of years.

00:31:42 ◼   ► This one hopefully is harder than the rest of them will be.

00:31:46 ◼   ► But I have got like some ideas that I really feel like what we understand now is so different from what people think we understand.

00:31:56 ◼   ► But like you can't really make a YouTube video about it or if you do, people aren't going to watch it or there's just too much groundwork that has to be laid.

00:32:04 ◼   ► And I think cancer is a great example of one of those where our perspective on it is just always a little bit caught in the past.

00:32:11 ◼   ► I'm talking to Simone Yutch about this and she said, it's like we have the Lonely Planet Guide for 10 years ago.

00:32:16 ◼   ► I was like, goddamn, I'm putting that in the book.

00:32:19 ◼   ► I think that's important and it's something that I want to focus a lot on.

00:32:22 ◼   ► And I also think that it can be like more impactful.

00:32:25 ◼   ► Things like The Anxious Generation, where it's like these books that get a lot of attention and it's because they're a book.

00:32:33 ◼   ► They have to be packaged in a book for Jonathan Haidt to become like the parenting guru of 2025.

00:32:40 ◼   ► Not that I think that's exactly what we need, but it's better than the alternative.

00:32:44 ◼   ► It's interesting hearing you talk about that and saying like this is something that you would prioritize over even Vlogbrothers.

00:32:51 ◼   ► Do you see books as like your legacy?

00:32:55 ◼   ► It is like a very legitimizing thing, I can imagine, to see your name on a bookshelf.

00:33:01 ◼   ► But you have so many other things that you will probably be remembered for more than anything you put on a shelf.

00:33:09 ◼   ► I'm not sure if that's true.

00:33:11 ◼   ► It might be.

00:33:13 ◼   ► I think that there's an element of I like the format of the book in that I see it as personally legitimizing the way that a lot of YouTubers see a TV show or even like a commercial gig as legitimizing.

00:33:25 ◼   ► Because they imagine themselves being actors or if they, you know, directing a movie, like whatever it is that they were excited about at the beginning of their career, they want to work toward that.

00:33:35 ◼   ► And a book is definitely, I'm more of a book guy than a TV guy.

00:33:38 ◼   ► But I think that there's also like a reality that media doesn't take it seriously unless it's a book.

00:33:44 ◼   ► Yes.

00:33:44 ◼   ► Like, never will the New York Times have a review of YouTube videos.

00:33:49 ◼   ► And the other thing is, it's a huge amount of investment.

00:33:55 ◼   ► And so you take it very seriously.

00:33:57 ◼   ► Just yesterday, I was in the SciShow studio, and we had gotten this deal with a big funder, and they'd set up one of our sets to be really pretty.

00:34:05 ◼   ► And then I got in there and like I was bumping the table and like the light was wiggling a little bit.

00:34:09 ◼   ► And Hiroko, who's the producer, was like, we have to figure out how to make this light stop wiggling.

00:34:14 ◼   ► And I was like, do we?

00:34:15 ◼   ► And she was like, well, once we've made it this perfect, we have to make it all the way perfect.

00:34:20 ◼   ► Yes.

00:34:20 ◼   ► And I was like, so now everybody is here and we're like everybody's time is being spent making sure the light doesn't wiggle at all.

00:34:28 ◼   ► I'm good with 95%.

00:34:29 ◼   ► I've always been like more of a 90% kind of guy myself.

00:34:34 ◼   ► But with a book, you've got to be more intentional and just so much more process of editorial review.

00:34:40 ◼   ► And that results in a better product as part of it.

00:34:42 ◼   ► But then also, I think that it's easier to move the needle with a book still in terms of what I want to do is demystify cancer and make people less scared of it.

00:34:51 ◼   ► That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be scared of it.

00:34:53 ◼   ► But I also like another thing I want to do is like demystify cancer treatment and make people less scared of that.

00:34:59 ◼   ► Because fear of cancer treatment kills people.

00:35:01 ◼   ► And like the way that it works now is not how it worked in the 90s.

00:35:05 ◼   ► It can be very bad, but it is much less likely to be very bad than it used to be.

00:35:11 ◼   ► It's interesting because it sounds like what you're thinking about with cancer and books in that ilk.

00:35:15 ◼   ► These are personal goals of yours, right?

00:35:18 ◼   ► That this is a thing that I, Hank Green, want to do.

00:35:22 ◼   ► And that is separate from some of the business goals.

00:35:26 ◼   ► Not that it shouldn't be, but it is just, it's very interesting for me in this conversation to hear you talking about books in this way.

00:35:35 ◼   ► And I understand the importance to them, but I just, I'm not sure that it's what I would have imagined hearing you say today.

00:35:40 ◼   ► I mean, I also, I love YouTube videos and I think that they also move the needle.

00:35:44 ◼   ► I just think that they move the needle in a very crowded environment in which a lot of people are moving the needle in different ways.

00:35:50 ◼   ► It's moving a needle.

00:35:51 ◼   ► I actually think they're different needles that they're moving, right?

00:35:54 ◼   ► And like books move a very specific needle.

00:35:57 ◼   ► And I don't know why in 2025 that continues to be the case, but it is that way.

00:36:04 ◼   ► And you see this in discourse too, like the abundance, the Ezra Klein book, like if they just like made a bunch of video essays about that, there wouldn't have been national discourse about it.

00:36:13 ◼   ► And the national discourse wasn't like all like, we did it, everybody.

00:36:16 ◼   ► This is the agenda.

00:36:17 ◼   ► But it was like, you know, like I had a friend text me and be like, what do you think of this sort of abundance framing?

00:36:23 ◼   ► And he's just a guy.

00:36:24 ◼   ► He's like a doctor.

00:36:25 ◼   ► He's like a OBGYN.

00:36:27 ◼   ► And he was texting me about abundance.

00:36:29 ◼   ► And I'm like, Trent, it hit you.

00:36:31 ◼   ► You're in the discourse.

00:36:32 ◼   ► The discourse got to Trent.

00:36:34 ◼   ► Like that's the thing that like you and I, I especially, I'm so caught up in the discourse that is like the slice of the population who is watching long form YouTube, which is just not most people.

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00:37:30 ◼   ► They made it easier to get started with the AI system, but you can do it however you want.

00:37:34 ◼   ► However you start, you're going to have beautiful design options with no experience required.

00:37:38 ◼   ► That's what's always been so valuable to me about Squarespace.

00:37:40 ◼   ► I'm able to just choose a website template and customize it to meet my needs.

00:37:45 ◼   ► They've built all of the bones and the structure so I know exactly what my website needs, but I can go in and change logos and fonts, colors, layout, all in a drag-and-drop interface that I can do on the web or in their app.

00:37:57 ◼   ► It is incredible.

00:37:58 ◼   ► Now, once you have your website going and you want the world to see it, you've got to think about SEO.

00:38:03 ◼   ► I mean, and I don't know how to do that.

00:38:04 ◼   ► Search engine optimization, I couldn't tell you.

00:38:07 ◼   ► But that's why every Squarespace website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an ultra-generated sitemap, and more, so people are able to find your site through search engine results.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Go and try it out for yourself.

00:38:19 ◼   ► Don't just take my word for it.

00:38:20 ◼   ► Go to squarespace.com slash cortex.

00:38:22 ◼   ► You can sign up for a free trial, build your website, see how easy it is, see how many features you have access to.

00:38:27 ◼   ► And then when you're ready to launch it to the world, use the offer code Cortex.

00:38:31 ◼   ► You will save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain.

00:38:35 ◼   ► That is squarespace.com slash cortex with the offer code Cortex for 10% of your first purchase and to show your support for the show.

00:38:42 ◼   ► Thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of Relay.

00:38:45 ◼   ► Clearly, you enjoy acting on new ideas.

00:38:49 ◼   ► Otherwise, you wouldn't have had so many things that you have done.

00:38:52 ◼   ► Correct.

00:38:52 ◼   ► How do you choose which ideas are worth pursuing or who chooses them for you?

00:38:59 ◼   ► Yeah, so that obviously has changed a lot over the years.

00:39:03 ◼   ► It used to be that an idea was good if it would cost a dollar and make two, you know, or could.

00:39:07 ◼   ► In my irrational exuberance late night staring at the ceiling, I felt like maybe that was possible.

00:39:12 ◼   ► And even the very first things I ever did, actually, when I think back, ideas were good.

00:39:18 ◼   ► Not if they would take a dollar and make it into two, but if they would take an amount of money I currently had access to and turn it into people paying attention to me, which is what the whole creator economy runs on.

00:39:31 ◼   ► So the very first thing I did that I think you could consider a business was called IHateI4.com.

00:39:38 ◼   ► I grew up in Orlando and there's the interstate that runs through Orlando is Interstate 4.

00:39:41 ◼   ► And it's a bad place, I4.

00:39:44 ◼   ► And I like stole We Buy Houses signs, which I find obnoxious.

00:39:48 ◼   ► And then I spray painted a stencil over it that said IHateI4.com.

00:39:52 ◼   ► And it was just like a way to get people who were driving on I4 to go to a website.

00:39:56 ◼   ► And this was in the 90s.

00:39:58 ◼   ► So websites were relatively new.

00:40:00 ◼   ► And people came to the website.

00:40:02 ◼   ► And then like also the local news did a story on it.

00:40:05 ◼   ► And I was like, I turned minimal supplies into attention, everybody.

00:40:09 ◼   ► Welcome to Hank's rest of his life.

00:40:12 ◼   ► And then the monster was born.

00:40:13 ◼   ► But I also was like, how do I advocate for better transportation policy?

00:40:19 ◼   ► There was this project being proposed for I4 to create like two lanes that would go on top.

00:40:26 ◼   ► So there'd be like the lanes below and then there'd be lanes on top.

00:40:29 ◼   ► And those ones you'd have to pay for.

00:40:31 ◼   ► Oh, my God.

00:40:32 ◼   ► What a metaphor.

00:40:34 ◼   ► So they didn't end up doing that.

00:40:35 ◼   ► But yeah, I got to go on the local news and be like, it's Orlando.

00:40:39 ◼   ► You really need to live closer to where you work if you want to have your life be better.

00:40:43 ◼   ► Which is still true.

00:40:44 ◼   ► If you can, you should, even if your house is going to be smaller.

00:40:48 ◼   ► But now there's a lot of different things that have to go into the idea.

00:40:51 ◼   ► So what's going to make me excited about it?

00:40:53 ◼   ► Almost now an idea isn't good unless I already have a person in mind for who's going to run it.

00:41:03 ◼   ► Ah, OK.

00:41:05 ◼   ► How long has that been the case?

00:41:07 ◼   ► Maybe five years, maybe three.

00:41:10 ◼   ► So like I can't look my wife in the eyes and say, here's this new thing I want to do.

00:41:16 ◼   ► Unless I'm also saying, here's this old thing I don't want to do anymore.

00:41:20 ◼   ► And so the reality of the list of things we've hit that I do and want to continue doing means that an idea isn't good if it's going to take a lot of my time.

00:41:31 ◼   ► So like the reason the cancer book is a good idea, despite the fact that it takes a lot of my time, is that I am particularly well suited to execute it.

00:41:39 ◼   ► So like now I have to be careful because there's so much that I could do that I'm focused on things that like aren't going to get done by someone else anywhere near as well as I would be able to do it.

00:41:51 ◼   ► And also the outcome, I think, is really important.

00:41:54 ◼   ► And so that's great.

00:41:57 ◼   ► That's a great position to be in, especially since I'm relatively young.

00:42:01 ◼   ► So like to move outside of my life, what I think makes a good idea is like something that is achievable with the tools and skills that you currently have.

00:42:09 ◼   ► And that includes your relationships with other people.

00:42:11 ◼   ► Something that is like solving a problem that people have and something that can turn that ability to solve that problem into a way to sustain itself.

00:42:23 ◼   ► So, you know, that might be Patreon, but it might be a product, a physical product that has to be purchased with a profit margin.

00:42:29 ◼   ► It might be a subscription service.

00:42:31 ◼   ► Like it could be lots of different models, but the solving of the problem has to be able to sustain the solving of the problem.

00:42:37 ◼   ► So you have Goodstore now.

00:42:39 ◼   ► Originally, you had a bunch of small businesses, like Ideas, right?

00:42:43 ◼   ► So you had Awesome Socks Club.

00:42:45 ◼   ► You had the Coffee subscription.

00:42:47 ◼   ► You're kind of like running these businesses.

00:42:49 ◼   ► You have Sun, Base, and Soap.

00:42:51 ◼   ► Now they're all in the umbrella brand of Goodstore.

00:42:54 ◼   ► Does having the brand Goodstore make it easier to do future products?

00:42:59 ◼   ► Because now like you don't have to set up an entire business and brand and website.

00:43:04 ◼   ► It all can live in the structure that you've built.

00:43:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:07 ◼   ► And that was always the idea.

00:43:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:08 ◼   ► I've owned that domain name for a long time.

00:43:10 ◼   ► It's a very good domain name.

00:43:13 ◼   ► It is good.

00:43:14 ◼   ► I paid out the nose for that domain name a long time before I was using it.

00:43:17 ◼   ► But yeah, my initial idea for Goodstore was like, why can't I like shop at Amazon, but have the money go to make the world better instead of to Jeff Bezos?

00:43:27 ◼   ► And so that was the initial idea.

00:43:29 ◼   ► And the reason why that idea is bad is that, in fact, in order to make it competitive, I was thinking like, we'll be the target to Walmart.

00:43:38 ◼   ► Like Amazon will be Walmart.

00:43:39 ◼   ► What if there was like a target that was like good stuff?

00:43:42 ◼   ► All the stuff there is good.

00:43:44 ◼   ► But it turns out that's a really hard business and there's lots of reasons why running that business requires you to be pretty ruthless.

00:43:51 ◼   ► And I'm not a ruthless guy.

00:43:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:54 ◼   ► And Jeff Bezos is.

00:43:55 ◼   ► So he's going to win that one.

00:43:57 ◼   ► And also it turned out people don't care that much about where the money goes.

00:44:01 ◼   ► So most people, when they're making a purchasing decision, this was a wild realization.

00:44:05 ◼   ► A lot of people are turned off by that message.

00:44:08 ◼   ► So if you lead with the profit from this is going to go to charity, what their mind says is, why don't I just make a donation to charity instead of paying extra for this product?

00:44:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:17 ◼   ► But the actual data supporting it is that when we do marketing, if we lead with 100% to charity, we do not sell the product anywhere near as effectively as when we lead with the good things about the product, like why people like it and why we think it's a good product.

00:44:34 ◼   ► But then if the last message is 100% of the profit to charity, that does increase purchase rates.

00:44:39 ◼   ► That actually makes sense to me for a different reason.

00:44:41 ◼   ► But I would read that as people just want to know why the product's good.

00:44:45 ◼   ► Yes.

00:44:45 ◼   ► Okay, great.

00:44:46 ◼   ► The money goes to charity.

00:44:47 ◼   ► But is it crap?

00:44:48 ◼   ► Like, is it a bad product and the money goes to charity?

00:44:51 ◼   ► Now what am I going to do?

00:44:53 ◼   ► Well, and I had been of the opinion of like, as a person who's in the product space, I'm aware that actually most products aren't that different from each other.

00:45:02 ◼   ► There are, of course, terrible products.

00:45:04 ◼   ► Like if you buy a $15 coat rack, it's going to be much worse than a $95 coat rack.

00:45:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:10 ◼   ► But if you buy a $200 coat rack, it's going to be identical in terms of functionality to a $90 coat rack.

00:45:17 ◼   ► What you're selling there is story.

00:45:19 ◼   ► And so I thought the story that I was going to be telling was all the profit goes to charity.

00:45:23 ◼   ► But that does not actually tell people anything about the quality of the product.

00:45:26 ◼   ► So you can't lead with that.

00:45:28 ◼   ► And it gives people a sense that the product may in fact be inferior because otherwise, why would you be doing this?

00:45:33 ◼   ► Also, if people don't know who I am, they think it's scammy.

00:45:36 ◼   ► I can imagine that you're faced with that quite a bit of, well, why are you doing this then?

00:45:39 ◼   ► Right?

00:45:40 ◼   ► Because I think there's that mentality that people are like, surely you just want to be successful so you can buy a yacht or whatever.

00:45:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:45 ◼   ► So when I realized that I wasn't going to become like a, I don't know, an alternative to Amazon seems like an insane thing to say.

00:45:52 ◼   ► But like, it's just a place where people buy stuff because it's a better place to buy stuff.

00:45:55 ◼   ► I was kind of going through it and a super smart marketer, I talked to him and he was like, you know, what you're doing is totally different from what you think you're doing.

00:46:05 ◼   ► What you're doing is you're creating a product that you believe in as a person who has an audience that has values.

00:46:12 ◼   ► And then you're selling the product inside of your values.

00:46:15 ◼   ► And I was like, yeah, that is what I'm doing.

00:46:18 ◼   ► And he was like, so just do that with other people too.

00:46:21 ◼   ► If you want to grow, the only way you can grow right now is if you grow your audience.

00:46:25 ◼   ► But other people already have audiences.

00:46:27 ◼   ► So reach out to Ronaldo and be like, Ronaldo, what do you want to sell?

00:46:31 ◼   ► And what charity do you want to support?

00:46:33 ◼   ► Now, I don't know Ronaldo, but I do know a lot of YouTubers.

00:46:38 ◼   ► Like celebrities do endorsements all the time and sometimes they make $100 million, but like maybe they want their audience to know that they care about stuff and that's going to be really valuable to them.

00:46:50 ◼   ► And so will the donation that you then make to the situation that they care about.

00:46:55 ◼   ► So we just did our first, we've done a couple of little collaborative projects with the McElroy brothers, but we did our first like big collaborative project with Technology Connections, Alec Watson.

00:47:04 ◼   ► And it was like amazing.

00:47:07 ◼   ► It's our third biggest product of the year.

00:47:09 ◼   ► Oh, that's fantastic to hear because I saw it and those socks are incredible.

00:47:12 ◼   ► They just look so good.

00:47:14 ◼   ► And I'm really pleased to hear that it worked.

00:47:16 ◼   ► I mean, I would imagine, I don't know, you can tell me, I don't know if that's a hard sell or not with a large amount of creators.

00:47:23 ◼   ► Like, do they want to spend time promoting something they get no money for?

00:47:27 ◼   ► I genuinely don't know.

00:47:28 ◼   ► I think that we have to make it easy in a way that we really didn't for Alec.

00:47:32 ◼   ► He worked so hard.

00:47:33 ◼   ► The thing is like, nobody's like that guy.

00:47:35 ◼   ► He's so specific.

00:47:37 ◼   ► The first time I ever had like a call with him, I was like, I love your stuff.

00:47:41 ◼   ► I'd love to chat.

00:47:42 ◼   ► And I got on the phone.

00:47:43 ◼   ► I was like, what do you want to do?

00:47:44 ◼   ► This is what you got so far.

00:47:46 ◼   ► What do you want to do?

00:47:47 ◼   ► And he was like, this.

00:47:48 ◼   ► And I was like, yeah, but like now that you've got all of these new tools, he's like, I want to do this, but more.

00:47:55 ◼   ► I only want to do this, but like there's a bunch of topics that I couldn't cover unless I had money.

00:48:00 ◼   ► And now I want to cover those topics.

00:48:01 ◼   ► That video, the most recent like catalytic converter video.

00:48:04 ◼   ► We basically bought a whole car so he could saw a catalytic converter out of it.

00:48:07 ◼   ► Like he has a garage now, you know, he's got a lift.

00:48:10 ◼   ► So that's what he wanted.

00:48:12 ◼   ► But he's never done merch and he is doing so fine with just Patreon that he's never done advertising.

00:48:19 ◼   ► So this was like the first time he'd ever done merch or advertising.

00:48:22 ◼   ► And the only reason he did it is because like he wanted to make the world get better while also satiating all these people who are like, give me something to buy from you.

00:48:30 ◼   ► It's clear that you and your brother have been responsible for a lot of good.

00:48:35 ◼   ► And that's important to you because the two of you will not stop and keep coming up with new ways to try and donate more money to more charities.

00:48:44 ◼   ► Like it's an incredibly good thing.

00:48:46 ◼   ► Like you, I don't think that either of you have to go as hard as you do, but you do.

00:48:51 ◼   ► And I think it's amazing when you started doing this.

00:48:54 ◼   ► So this is obviously a notion that two of you came to at some point in your careers.

00:48:58 ◼   ► Would you have hoped that more creators did this kind of stuff?

00:49:03 ◼   ► You could kind of make the case that like the most popular YouTube channel is a little bit of this.

00:49:09 ◼   ► You know, Jimmy looks at, you could call him a philanthropist.

00:49:15 ◼   ► But like what Jimmy really is, is like, and everybody knows this and he's very open about it.

00:49:19 ◼   ► I'm not saying something mean about Mr. Beast here.

00:49:20 ◼   ► He's a YouTube optimizer.

00:49:23 ◼   ► He is like, how do you get the most views on a YouTube video?

00:49:27 ◼   ► And one of the ways to do that is to give away money or to make a positive impact in the world, to do team trees, to do team seas, to build a bunch of wells so people can have access to clean water.

00:49:40 ◼   ► And so like in a weird way, not only is it common, it's like one of the tools in the most successful YouTube optimizer of all times arsenal.

00:49:52 ◼   ► I completely agree with you saying, I just wouldn't have put the two of you in the same area because there's a difference, an earnestness, which I think is important that you have that maybe is not, I don't know.

00:50:05 ◼   ► I'm not making any judgment.

00:50:06 ◼   ► It's just different.

00:50:07 ◼   ► It's just a very different vibe.

00:50:08 ◼   ► And it's not my vibe particularly, but your vibe is more my vibe.

00:50:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:12 ◼   ► I also don't watch a lot of Mr. Beast videos, but also like that's not the only thing.

00:50:18 ◼   ► It's very easy to kind of see Logan Paul as like everything.

00:50:22 ◼   ► A YouTuber figures out how to make himself a billionaire and that's a lot more money than I'll ever give away.

00:50:29 ◼   ► So there is that.

00:50:30 ◼   ► But there's also a reality that like it's a good job and I want it to be a good job for people first.

00:50:37 ◼   ► I want people to be able to make stuff and make audiences happy for a living.

00:50:43 ◼   ► And so I would never begrudge someone who is at the beginning of their career for taking the brand.

00:50:50 ◼   ► I take the brand deal money too.

00:50:51 ◼   ► Like I don't donate all of this stuff.

00:50:52 ◼   ► You can't.

00:50:53 ◼   ► No, I have to live.

00:50:55 ◼   ► I make enough money from Complexly to like have health insurance and a retirement account and that kind of stuff.

00:51:01 ◼   ► That's how I pay myself there because that's most of my income comes from doing gigs, selling books and Hank's channel.

00:51:11 ◼   ► So like Vlogbrothers revenue doesn't come to me.

00:51:14 ◼   ► Complexly revenue doesn't come.

00:51:15 ◼   ► I feel really weird about like I need to make sure that Complexly revenue doesn't come to me in any big way.

00:51:19 ◼   ► We don't take profit distributions from Complexly because so much of it is crowdfunding that I would feel really weird about being like buy Crash Course Coin.

00:51:27 ◼   ► And then like, oh, the Crash Course Coin was exceptionally successful this year.

00:51:30 ◼   ► Extra hundred grand for me.

00:51:32 ◼   ► I can't do that.

00:51:33 ◼   ► Same with DFTBA.

00:51:34 ◼   ► We don't take distributions there.

00:51:35 ◼   ► Just to like make it definitely the case no matter what that I am not profiting from Goodstore, even though that has a whole other arm of the business.

00:51:44 ◼   ► So there's lots of ways that I still make money.

00:51:47 ◼   ► But I had one person at my company say to me like, are you like financially okay?

00:51:51 ◼   ► And I was like, yes, I am.

00:51:53 ◼   ► One New York Times bestselling novel like actually does do quite a lot of work.

00:51:57 ◼   ► And I also I sold VidCon to Viacom.

00:52:01 ◼   ► So that was also a good day for me.

00:52:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:04 ◼   ► You must enjoy number go up even if the money doesn't come to you, right?

00:52:09 ◼   ► Like that must be something that you draw some excitement from.

00:52:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:12 ◼   ► You would not believe the number of times, even during the Technology Connections sock product.

00:52:18 ◼   ► I'm looking at Shopify 20 times a day.

00:52:22 ◼   ► I'm seeing how every little optimization we do is affecting things.

00:52:27 ◼   ► I'm like really looking at like the pitches that Alec was making and how they were converting and tweaking the pitch from time to time.

00:52:37 ◼   ► And one of the things being like, don't start with charity, like end with charity.

00:52:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:42 ◼   ► And then tell people why you want to do this.

00:52:45 ◼   ► But like just explain it from your perspective.

00:52:47 ◼   ► Why did you want to do this instead of the thousand other things you could have done?

00:52:50 ◼   ► And Crash Course Coin, I'm the same way.

00:52:52 ◼   ► Like none of that money is coming to me, but I'm just like obsessed with seeing how well that's going to do year to year.

00:52:59 ◼   ► It's a very big deal for the company and there's kind of like two stages.

00:53:05 ◼   ► There's, oh my gosh, we might not hit the goal.

00:53:09 ◼   ► And that's like its own kind of, you have to pay a lot of attention to that.

00:53:12 ◼   ► We have an internal goal.

00:53:13 ◼   ► And then there's the, oh my gosh, we might exceed the goal.

00:53:17 ◼   ► And how exciting is that?

00:53:18 ◼   ► And what's that going to enable?

00:53:19 ◼   ► And so both of those are very motivating in terms of wanting to look at the thing and see the number go up.

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00:55:22 ◼   ► Our thanks to FitBod for the support of this show and Relay.

00:55:24 ◼   ► You mentioned Shopify.

00:55:26 ◼   ► You have Shopify on the home screen of your phone.

00:55:31 ◼   ► Yeah, let's talk about my home screen.

00:55:32 ◼   ► So I am assuming that is because you're checking it a lot because you like to see the numbers going up.

00:55:39 ◼   ► Well, you've seen it in my psychology.

00:55:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:41 ◼   ► So I open Shopify and then I can switch between all of our stores.

00:55:45 ◼   ► So we have the DFTBA, the Pizzamas store.

00:55:48 ◼   ► We have the Crash Course Coin inside of there, and we have Good Store.

00:55:52 ◼   ► How often a day are you checking Shopify?

00:55:55 ◼   ► Like on an average day?

00:55:56 ◼   ► Like today, I won't check it at all because we don't have anything big going on.

00:55:59 ◼   ► During Q4, I'll be checking it a lot because Christmas stuff.

00:56:04 ◼   ► During Pizzamas, I'm checking it a lot.

00:56:06 ◼   ► During Crash Course Coin, I'm checking it five times, ten times a day.

00:56:09 ◼   ► When you sent me your home screen, you said for me to ignore how many messages you had.

00:56:14 ◼   ► I made zero promises.

00:56:16 ◼   ► And so I would love to know why you have over 3,000 unread messages.

00:56:22 ◼   ► I just don't understand how that occurs.

00:56:25 ◼   ► What's going on in there?

00:56:26 ◼   ► I don't read my messages.

00:56:27 ◼   ► Like, come on.

00:56:28 ◼   ► Who are they from?

00:56:29 ◼   ► So I'll get, for example, I had to cancel a therapy appointment, and this morning my therapist wrote me, thanks for letting me know.

00:56:37 ◼   ► And I got that as a notification, and I didn't read the text.

00:56:40 ◼   ► There's a lot of that.

00:56:42 ◼   ► I also, every voicemail I get goes to text messages.

00:56:45 ◼   ► I don't know why.

00:56:46 ◼   ► I don't feel like I signed up for that.

00:56:47 ◼   ► But if I look, like, it's a lot of times, like, I read the text on notifications, and then I don't click to read it, because I've read it.

00:56:55 ◼   ► I feel like, you've got to give me an extra 15 minutes to some point in your life, and I think I could help you filter some of this stuff out.

00:57:01 ◼   ► Like, I can, we can fix some of this.

00:57:03 ◼   ► So I'm at the bottom, and all of these texts are unread, and they are all from friends.

00:57:07 ◼   ► Oh.

00:57:08 ◼   ► And they are all texts I've read.

00:57:09 ◼   ► How do you know you've read them?

00:57:11 ◼   ► Because I read them, when they were on my notifications.

00:57:14 ◼   ► But you're not doing anything about it.

00:57:15 ◼   ► So, like, you got a text from a friend, you read it, and then that was just the end?

00:57:19 ◼   ► There was no reply?

00:57:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:21 ◼   ► You know, like, the last text.

00:57:23 ◼   ► Okay.

00:57:23 ◼   ► William Osmond sent me a heart.

00:57:25 ◼   ► That was, like, his reply to my reply, and that was the end of the conversation.

00:57:29 ◼   ► And that will stay unread until one day one of you initiates a new message?

00:57:34 ◼   ► Yes.

00:57:35 ◼   ► That is fascinating.

00:57:37 ◼   ► I've spoken to so many people about their home screens and their devices over the years.

00:57:40 ◼   ► I've never come across someone who's like, I just don't open it.

00:57:44 ◼   ► It's incredible.

00:57:45 ◼   ► That explains how you would have over 3,000 unread messages.

00:57:49 ◼   ► That's the reason.

00:57:50 ◼   ► And then I got one from my friend, Shoran, and it says, I'm in your living room.

00:57:53 ◼   ► Curious if I can borrow your muscles, because he needed to move a bike rack.

00:57:57 ◼   ► And I went down, and I went into my living room to help him move the bike rack.

00:58:01 ◼   ► I didn't open the text.

00:58:02 ◼   ► I saw the notification.

00:58:03 ◼   ► I love that you would get a notification.

00:58:06 ◼   ► It says, I'm in your living room, and would not open that message.

00:58:11 ◼   ► It's Missoula.

00:58:12 ◼   ► All the doors are open.

00:58:14 ◼   ► You don't have a browser on your home screen.

00:58:17 ◼   ► I've got the Google app.

00:58:20 ◼   ► Okay.

00:58:20 ◼   ► That's how I do browser.

00:58:21 ◼   ► I open the Google app, and I search from there.

00:58:24 ◼   ► So what if it's a website you want to go to?

00:58:26 ◼   ► You just open Google and search for it?

00:58:27 ◼   ► I never go to websites I know I want to go to on my phone.

00:58:30 ◼   ► Right.

00:58:30 ◼   ► So you're not doing any kind of typical browsing on your phone.

00:58:34 ◼   ► You're answering questions on your phone, right?

00:58:36 ◼   ► That's essentially what's happening.

00:58:37 ◼   ► What website would I want to go to?

00:58:40 ◼   ► Sorry, it's 2025.

00:58:41 ◼   ► Does the web still exist?

00:58:43 ◼   ► You have Wikipedia there, though, right?

00:58:45 ◼   ► So like similar?

00:58:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:58:46 ◼   ► Like you're looking up stuff?

00:58:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:58:48 ◼   ► Wikipedia.

00:58:49 ◼   ► Wikipedia is a better search engine than Google now for many searches.

00:58:52 ◼   ► And just like Reddit, which is not on my home screen.

00:58:54 ◼   ► Man, I feel like I did not budget enough time in this episode to look at this home screen.

00:58:58 ◼   ► This is incredible.

00:58:59 ◼   ► You're really using your phone in a new and exciting way.

00:59:02 ◼   ► What are you learning in Duolingo?

00:59:03 ◼   ► That's actually my son uses Duolingo.

00:59:06 ◼   ► Okay.

00:59:06 ◼   ► He does not have a device right now, but he does Duolingo math and Spanish.

00:59:10 ◼   ► Oh, math.

00:59:11 ◼   ► Okay.

00:59:12 ◼   ► What are those courses like?

00:59:14 ◼   ► Do you ever take a look at them?

00:59:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:16 ◼   ► It's super fun.

00:59:17 ◼   ► I mean, Oren is super into math.

00:59:19 ◼   ► He's a very mathy kid.

00:59:20 ◼   ► He's got lots of ideas, but if you ask him what he's thinking about, he's like, I'm not going

00:59:25 ◼   ► to talk about that.

00:59:27 ◼   ► But if you ask him what 28 divided by three is, he's going to love that.

00:59:32 ◼   ► He's going to be working on that and he'll pop you out the correct answer.

00:59:35 ◼   ► So it's great.

00:59:36 ◼   ► It's really visual.

00:59:38 ◼   ► It's intuitive.

00:59:38 ◼   ► It like does stuff, not just in terms of absolute numbers, but in terms of like sometimes like

00:59:44 ◼   ► vibes-y early on where it's like, okay, so like what portion of a hundred is 10?

00:59:51 ◼   ► And then you just drag out a little guy.

00:59:53 ◼   ► It doesn't even give you a number.

00:59:55 ◼   ► You just try to visualize how much of a hundred is about 10.

00:59:58 ◼   ► And if you get it within like a range, it counts it as right.

01:00:01 ◼   ► So it's very intuitive and fun.

01:00:04 ◼   ► You know, it gives them like all the noises and like it's gamified perfectly that it keeps

01:00:08 ◼   ► them going.

01:00:09 ◼   ► The haptics, like the way it vibrates.

01:00:11 ◼   ► Oh my God.

01:00:12 ◼   ► It's so good.

01:00:12 ◼   ► Like all the little, they got so many little dopamine explosions in Duolingo.

01:00:17 ◼   ► I feel like my Duolingo experience is very different to most people's.

01:00:20 ◼   ► So my wife was one in Romania.

01:00:22 ◼   ► And so I learned Romanian in Duolingo.

01:00:25 ◼   ► I've been doing it for a couple of years.

01:00:26 ◼   ► They have not put a lot of effort into the Romanian course.

01:00:30 ◼   ► So like I see people doing Spanish.

01:00:32 ◼   ► It's like, wow, look at all these features.

01:00:34 ◼   ► This looks amazing.

01:00:35 ◼   ► It's very basic for me.

01:00:36 ◼   ► It's a very, very basic system, which look, I'm not going to argue with like Romanian

01:00:42 ◼   ► is one of those languages that is useful in one place.

01:00:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:45 ◼   ► And they all speak English really in the main city.

01:00:48 ◼   ► So it's super useful.

01:00:50 ◼   ► What else surprised you?

01:00:51 ◼   ► I feel like I understand why Airtable's there now.

01:00:54 ◼   ► Like that was initially a surprise to me because find Airtable to be a really complicated and

01:00:58 ◼   ► not fun piece of software to use.

01:00:59 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe I should have called you and been like, Mike, what should I have

01:01:03 ◼   ► my project management software be for Hank's channel?

01:01:06 ◼   ► But it's working now.

01:01:06 ◼   ► So I don't need advice.

01:01:07 ◼   ► I think honestly, for any kind of like video management, like from all the people that I've

01:01:14 ◼   ► spoken to, anything that does one of those like column based Kanban things like that seems

01:01:18 ◼   ► to be the way that people really value you, like how those kinds of things work.

01:01:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:21 ◼   ► So I know where a video is.

01:01:22 ◼   ► I know if it's in script and I have the link to the script and I know if I get an email

01:01:26 ◼   ► when the final cut is delivered and I can.

01:01:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:29 ◼   ► So before we finish up, I want to give you the opportunity to tell the Cortex audience

01:01:34 ◼   ► about something you're excited on right now.

01:01:36 ◼   ► Okay.

01:01:37 ◼   ► Here's honestly what I'm excited about is the real world.

01:01:42 ◼   ► Okay.

01:01:43 ◼   ► I think that it's time for the backlash to begin.

01:01:45 ◼   ► I keep visualizing what my phone would look like with a nail through it.

01:01:49 ◼   ► That must mean something.

01:01:50 ◼   ► I think that means something very important.

01:01:52 ◼   ► Texture therapist backhack, please.

01:01:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:59 ◼   ► And so like, I've been working on projects like this.

01:02:01 ◼   ► So one of the projects is, have you heard about this?

01:02:04 ◼   ► It's a prompt journal I made called the book of good times.

01:02:07 ◼   ► And the idea of the prompt journal is that it's sentient, but it's trying to become a human.

01:02:11 ◼   ► And so it needs you to do tasks for it in order to become more like a human.

01:02:15 ◼   ► And all of those tasks are human tasks.

01:02:17 ◼   ► And some of them involve the internet.

01:02:19 ◼   ► The internet can be a place where you're a human, but some of them involve sitting under

01:02:22 ◼   ► a tree or writing a letter to someone who you haven't talked to in over 10 years or something

01:02:28 ◼   ► like that.

01:02:28 ◼   ► I bet if you search for a book of good times, you can find it.

01:02:31 ◼   ► And I think that's like a good present, like it's present season too.

01:02:34 ◼   ► Like a lot of focus on good store and like gift baskets, gift bundles, things that you

01:02:41 ◼   ► could buy for people.

01:02:42 ◼   ► And they're like really like nice soaps and teas and coffee and socks, cozy stuff, bath

01:02:49 ◼   ► bombs that you can have and give to a person.

01:02:52 ◼   ► And then also they know that they're helping to have a nice cozy time, but also fund a hospital

01:02:58 ◼   ► in West Africa that is saving lives already.

01:03:00 ◼   ► I like that you waited to the end, right?

01:03:02 ◼   ► And then you put the charity part at the end.

01:03:04 ◼   ► I've trained myself.

01:03:06 ◼   ► I am a very happy, awesome Socks Club subscriber.

01:03:09 ◼   ► I've been subscribed for years.

01:03:10 ◼   ► And so I will put a personal recommendation down on that product.

01:03:14 ◼   ► It's good for you.

01:03:15 ◼   ► It's good as a gift too.

01:03:16 ◼   ► I absolutely love it.

01:03:18 ◼   ► Yeah, and we have gift structures.

01:03:19 ◼   ► So, you know, it can be a bit much to sign up for a gift that's going to keep billing your

01:03:24 ◼   ► bank account forever.

01:03:24 ◼   ► So we have like six month subscription you can buy as a gift or 12 month.

01:03:28 ◼   ► I want to thank Hank for taking time out of his schedule to join me on Cortex.

01:03:33 ◼   ► And I really hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did.

01:03:37 ◼   ► I mentioned earlier that I was going to give you more information about Cortex, which I'm

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01:04:13 ◼   ► content we have ever done on the show.

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01:04:18 ◼   ► And it helps me continue to put so much effort into making it enjoyable and informative for

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01:04:22 ◼   ► Cortex occupies a lot of my working time and has taken up even more so since starting this series.

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01:05:12 ◼   ► To give you an idea of the content that you've been missing out on, I'm going to include a MoreTechs

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01:05:19 ◼   ► I'm going to play to you the segment that I did with Jon Gruber earlier this year, where

01:05:23 ◼   ► we talk about the business behind his website, Daring Fireball.

01:05:26 ◼   ► And remember, if you sign up for MoreTechs, you don't have to hear ads anymore.

01:05:30 ◼   ► We're going to take one last break before I play this MoreTechs segment with Jon Gruber.

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01:05:45 ◼   ► Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

01:05:48 ◼   ► I really hope that you enjoyed my conversation with Hank Green, and I'm really excited for

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01:06:12 ◼   ► This episode of CoreTechs is brought to you by Stuff.

01:06:16 ◼   ► You heard on this episode me and Hank talking a lot about to-do lists, you know, how important

01:06:21 ◼   ► they are and how for someone so busy as Hank, you've got to get this stuff written down, especially

01:06:26 ◼   ► when you're doing so many things as him.

01:06:27 ◼   ► If you can relate to having lots of things on your plate, you need a to-do system that gets

01:06:32 ◼   ► you.

01:06:33 ◼   ► And if you want clarity, peace, and focus when it comes to those to-dos, you need to try

01:06:38 ◼   ► stuff.

01:06:39 ◼   ► Sometimes, it's not your workload that's tiring you out, it's the open loops that your

01:06:43 ◼   ► brain is silently juggling.

01:06:45 ◼   ► That phone call you have to make, that chair you want to get fixed, that email you never

01:06:49 ◼   ► answered.

01:06:49 ◼   ► Your brain is keeping track of all of it constantly, and those invisible open loop micro-stresses

01:06:54 ◼   ► are draining.

01:06:55 ◼   ► Stuff lets you brain dump everything in your mind.

01:06:58 ◼   ► Clear those open loops instantly, and then organize it all to handle at the ideal moment.

01:07:04 ◼   ► Stuff is a beautifully designed app that is optimized for iPhone and iPad.

01:07:09 ◼   ► Plus, it makes capturing tasks easy and frictionless.

01:07:12 ◼   ► You can add tasks by typing, talking, or using the camera.

01:07:15 ◼   ► It's built to intake information quickly and turn it into actionable tasks right away.

01:07:20 ◼   ► They have a listen mode that lets you speak your tasks out loud, so you can look into your

01:07:24 ◼   ► cupboards and pantry and say the groceries that you need.

01:07:27 ◼   ► Stuff will listen and add them to the right lists automatically.

01:07:30 ◼   ► Lists in Stuff are built like completable projects.

01:07:34 ◼   ► So that book you want to write, the business you want to get started, or that trip you want

01:07:38 ◼   ► to plan can actually start to take form inside Stuff step by step.

01:07:42 ◼   ► And the magic of Stuff is that it gets exponentially more powerful the more you feed into it.

01:07:47 ◼   ► I've been playing around with Stuff, and it is genuinely one of the best designed iOS apps

01:07:52 ◼   ► I've seen in a while.

01:07:53 ◼   ► It is doing some really interesting things, and it has all the features that I would want

01:07:58 ◼   ► from a to-do app, as well as doing some things in a new and refreshing way.

01:08:02 ◼   ► It's full of delightful animation and features that make it fun to use, which I love in an

01:08:07 ◼   ► app like this.

01:08:08 ◼   ► You want to be encouraged to keep coming back, because it becomes an important part of your

01:08:12 ◼   ► system.

01:08:12 ◼   ► I recommend trying out Stuff if you're looking for a task manager of any kind, be it something

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01:08:19 ◼   ► Download Stuff for free today by going to trystuff.app, that's T-R-Y-S-T-U-F-F dot A-P-P,

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01:08:40 ◼   ► Get Stuff done and start closing your open loops.

01:08:44 ◼   ► Download Stuff from the App Store today.

01:08:46 ◼   ► Thanks to Stuff for their support of this show and Relay.

01:08:50 ◼   ► So, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the business model of Daring Fireball, and

01:08:55 ◼   ► kind of how that's changed over time.

01:08:56 ◼   ► Okay.

01:08:57 ◼   ► Happy to talk about it.

01:08:58 ◼   ► Obviously, advertising has been a thing that's existed for a long time, but you've also had

01:09:02 ◼   ► a membership model as part of Daring Fireball.

01:09:04 ◼   ► And this is when I was researching for this episode, I remembered that I was a Daring Fireball

01:09:10 ◼   ► member, and then realized, I don't think I am anymore, and I can't find any reference to

01:09:17 ◼   ► it.

01:09:17 ◼   ► So, it seems like everybody does membership now, but you stopped?

01:09:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I did it before anybody, I think.

01:09:24 ◼   ► And I didn't really stop, stop.

01:09:27 ◼   ► I just sort of let it fade away and sort of stopped taking the money from people.

01:09:34 ◼   ► And the initial idea was, I started the site in 2002, and there was, at the time, there

01:09:40 ◼   ► was nobody making any kind of money on blogs at all.

01:09:43 ◼   ► There were no ads on blogs.

01:09:45 ◼   ► And I had a whole article in 2003, maybe, where I was one of the very first sites to run Google,

01:09:52 ◼   ► whatever they called them, ads.

01:09:53 ◼   ► AdWords?

01:09:54 ◼   ► AdWords, yeah.

01:09:55 ◼   ► It obviously was not a good fit for Daring Fireball, ultimately, and it didn't make much

01:10:00 ◼   ► money.

01:10:01 ◼   ► And it clearly, the way to make money was to write certain keywords.

01:10:06 ◼   ► I wrote this article at the time about design work, and I used this analogy that I had read

01:10:12 ◼   ► in an article in a newspaper.

01:10:14 ◼   ► I can't find it because it was from the 90s when I was in college, and it wasn't on the

01:10:18 ◼   ► internet.

01:10:18 ◼   ► But it was in the Philadelphia Daily News, the second daily newspaper here in Philly.

01:10:23 ◼   ► It was a great article where somebody just wrote, it's the sort of thing newspapers don't

01:10:27 ◼   ► do anymore.

01:10:27 ◼   ► But some writer or columnist for the paper went to a bunch of men's hair replacement

01:10:33 ◼   ► specialists, you know, for men who are losing their hair and want to get like a toupee or

01:10:37 ◼   ► a hairpiece or something to make it look like they have more hair.

01:10:41 ◼   ► Why do so many men's hairpieces look so bad?

01:10:46 ◼   ► Why are they so obvious?

01:10:47 ◼   ► And in today's world, you don't really see hairpieces.

01:10:50 ◼   ► I think people do hair replacement or they just go, you know, it's just much more socially

01:10:53 ◼   ► acceptable to go bald and just shave your head or whatever.

01:10:56 ◼   ► But it was more of like an 80s, 70s, 80s thing.

01:10:58 ◼   ► Like a lot of men would wear hairpieces that look bad.

01:11:01 ◼   ► And the experts, these guys said, oh, it's easy because the way to wear a hairpiece is

01:11:06 ◼   ► to make it look like you're slightly less bald than you actually are.

01:11:10 ◼   ► And that they all would name Bruce Willis, who at the time would wear a hairpiece in a lot

01:11:14 ◼   ► of his movies or his TV shows as like a perfect example where he had receding hairline at the

01:11:19 ◼   ► temples, but it was more hair than he actually had on his natural head.

01:11:23 ◼   ► But a good hairpiece costs a lot of money.

01:11:26 ◼   ► And when you tell somebody it's going to cost a lot of money, they say, I want a lot of hair.

01:11:30 ◼   ► And then you give them what the client asked for, which is a lot of hair.

01:11:34 ◼   ► And they wind up with a hairpiece that doesn't look good.

01:11:36 ◼   ► And I wrote about it was about doing freelance design, which I had done was the main thing

01:11:41 ◼   ► I had supported myself with before Daring Fireball was a full time job.

01:11:44 ◼   ► And it was sort of similar with design, where it's like to make a good website or, you know,

01:11:49 ◼   ► in later years, an app or something for a client might cost a lot of money for a good team and

01:11:54 ◼   ► good designers.

01:11:54 ◼   ► But the right answer might be a very minimal, small solution.

01:11:58 ◼   ► But you tell a client that it's going to cost a lot of money and they say, I want a lot of

01:12:01 ◼   ► website.

01:12:02 ◼   ► I want a lot of menus at the top.

01:12:04 ◼   ► I want to see a lot.

01:12:05 ◼   ► And anyway, that article gave me AdWords for men's hair replacement things.

01:12:10 ◼   ► And because it was a new and a novelty and I introduced it, I didn't tell people, please

01:12:17 ◼   ► click my ads.

01:12:18 ◼   ► That was against the rules as it should be.

01:12:20 ◼   ► But it was pay per click.

01:12:21 ◼   ► But people were trying to support me.

01:12:23 ◼   ► And so they were clicking.

01:12:24 ◼   ► And those ads happen to be incredibly high pay per click compared to my other ads.

01:12:30 ◼   ► But that wasn't the whole my site isn't about men's hair replacement.

01:12:34 ◼   ► I just used an analogy in one article.

01:12:36 ◼   ► And all of a sudden I went from making like, I don't know, $8 a day or something, probably

01:12:41 ◼   ► less from the AdWords to I was making like hundreds of dollars a day for a week with those.

01:12:47 ◼   ► And I was like, oh, this is awful.

01:12:48 ◼   ► Don't do that because it's going to motivate me to write about things for the keywords.

01:12:52 ◼   ► Matt Howey wrote a PVR blog for a long time, a couple of years, I should say.

01:12:57 ◼   ► But it was about like TiVo and TiVo's rivals in that era.

01:13:01 ◼   ► And the whole blog was about DVRs.

01:13:04 ◼   ► That's all he blogged about on that blog.

01:13:06 ◼   ► And he had AdWords and he'd get the DVR AdWords.

01:13:09 ◼   ► And they were good pay per click ads.

01:13:11 ◼   ► And so it was win win because he was getting relevant ads and they were high pay per click.

01:13:17 ◼   ► But the ones I was getting weren't.

01:13:18 ◼   ► So anyway, I came up with this membership system and I thought, well, people want full feed RSS.

01:13:24 ◼   ► And I had a free RSS feed with just the article excerpts and you had to pay $19 a year, just a year.

01:13:33 ◼   ► And then one of the perks was you'd get a unique URL to get the full feed RSS, not a password, but a unique URL because that's what worked with feed readers.

01:13:43 ◼   ► But then Google Reader came out and that's not how Google Reader was meant.

01:13:47 ◼   ► And so people would search in Google Reader and there were like hundreds of daring fireball RSS feeds because it was each unique string was showing up from each person who put it there.

01:13:57 ◼   ► And then there was the one that I wanted there for the public to use, which was excerpts only.

01:14:01 ◼   ► But any normal person who was searching for the feed would be like, well, why would I want this one without the articles?

01:14:06 ◼   ► I want the one with the articles and they'd subscribe to one of those.

01:14:09 ◼   ► And I thought, this isn't going to work.

01:14:11 ◼   ► And I thought, I got to think of something else.

01:14:13 ◼   ► And I thought, well, what if I just charge for a weekly sponsorship and the weekly sponsor got to add an article to the RSS feed just in their own voice?

01:14:22 ◼   ► And that was like 2006 or 7 and here it is 19 years later and it's still the primary source of income for the site.

01:14:29 ◼   ► And I could make the RSS feed full content free for everybody.

01:14:34 ◼   ► But then I didn't have any other perks for members.

01:14:37 ◼   ► So I just sort of let it fade away.

01:14:40 ◼   ► I mean, you were in the age of email newsletters now, right?

01:14:43 ◼   ► Right.

01:14:44 ◼   ► You've never felt a desire to do that kind of thing?

01:14:49 ◼   ► No.

01:14:50 ◼   ► Well, I should and I might add.

01:14:54 ◼   ► I really might.

01:14:55 ◼   ► You know, I don't like talking about unannounced features, much like Apple.

01:14:58 ◼   ► But I should probably have a membership thing.

01:15:03 ◼   ► I don't know, 10, 15 bucks a month and that you'd get extra content.

01:15:06 ◼   ► And something like what ATP does or what you guys do at Relay with a bunch of – or like I guess we're talking about right now.

01:15:13 ◼   ► A members only extra, you know, like make the last act of each episode of the talk show members only and charge some number of dollars a month.

01:15:22 ◼   ► And remove the ads.

01:15:23 ◼   ► People like that.

01:15:24 ◼   ► See, that's part of the problem.

01:15:25 ◼   ► I know that they do, but I don't want to remove the ads because I don't like to think of the ads as being detrimental.

01:15:33 ◼   ► Interesting.

01:15:33 ◼   ► Okay.

01:15:34 ◼   ► You know, and sometimes in my show, because I read the ads live during the thing, oftentimes the conversation will turn to what we just talked about in the sponsor read.

01:15:42 ◼   ► You do a very good job with that.

01:15:44 ◼   ► That works quite nicely.

01:15:45 ◼   ► You do integrate the ads into the content better than most.

01:15:49 ◼   ► So, I don't know.

01:15:50 ◼   ► I guess if I tried that, I would try it first by not removing the ads, but encouraging members who don't like the ads to be guilt-free about skipping them, you know.

01:15:59 ◼   ► And I do put them in the chapters.

01:16:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:16:01 ◼   ► And so, I can't see why you're listening to the show using a client that doesn't support chapters.

01:16:05 ◼   ► And we do put the ads in the chapters.

01:16:07 ◼   ► And if you haven't been skipping because you feel like you shouldn't out of some kind of guilt, then just go ahead and skip.

01:16:14 ◼   ► Talking about podcasts and money, though, you have a very interesting model in Dithering, which is a purely 100% paid podcast, which I find to be a very curious and fascinating business model.

01:16:26 ◼   ► It will only work in certain scenarios.

01:16:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:16:29 ◼   ► I assume it works very well for you and Ben.

01:16:31 ◼   ► Yeah, it's very profitable.

01:16:32 ◼   ► What was your initial thought to Dithering?

01:16:34 ◼   ► Was it something you thought would work?

01:16:36 ◼   ► Yeah, I wasn't sure how well, and I'm not quite—honest to God, I don't remember how much of it was Ben's idea and how much was mine.

01:16:44 ◼   ► I think it was a little bit—I'm going to say more 60-40 Ben's to mine.

01:16:48 ◼   ► But I know that I don't do enough new things and doing a new thing, and it's—I forget when we started.

01:16:56 ◼   ► I know we launched in 2020.

01:16:57 ◼   ► It was during COVID.

01:16:58 ◼   ► During COVID.

01:16:58 ◼   ► But I can't remember whether we were already set to do it before COVID hit in March.

01:17:05 ◼   ► We'd certainly been talking about it.

01:17:06 ◼   ► I just don't know how certain it was.

01:17:08 ◼   ► I think we launched in April.

01:17:09 ◼   ► And so I think it was already in the works, and it was sort of coincidental, but it sort of accelerated it.

01:17:14 ◼   ► But I loved the idea, the neatness of—it's like the complete opposite of the talk show, where the talk show is entirely free for everybody with sponsors, and this would be a show that is $5 a month, or maybe it was $4 at the time, and I think it's $6 or $7 now, or built into the Stratechery bundle with no ads.

01:17:36 ◼   ► And with the complete opposite of my show, a profoundly short and limited 15 minutes on the button every episode, and a regular publishing schedule.

01:17:46 ◼   ► All things different.

01:17:48 ◼   ► No, but I think that's what makes it interesting, right?

01:17:51 ◼   ► Every single aspect of it is different, other than the way I sound.

01:17:54 ◼   ► I mean, also, Ben's a perfect co-host.

01:17:56 ◼   ► I mean, I remember when Dithering came around, like I said to you both, like, my favorite episodes of the talk show were the ones that Ben was on.

01:18:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:03 ◼   ► I mean, I do also miss the fact that Ben's not on the talk show.

01:18:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:05 ◼   ► Because you two—sometimes I'm listening to—like, I just listened to the episode of Dithering that came out about Jeff Williams.

01:18:12 ◼   ► I actually wanted to hear you two go longer on that.

01:18:14 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:18:15 ◼   ► Which I'm sure you must feel sometimes.

01:18:16 ◼   ► I do.

01:18:17 ◼   ► I do.

01:18:17 ◼   ► And we don't have a thing like we can't have him on the talk show, but it just never comes up.

01:18:22 ◼   ► Because saying about that, I was talking to my wife about recording the show today, and she was like—I was talking about, like, you know, the stuff that you do.

01:18:29 ◼   ► And she was surprised that you do have a business partner, because she's aware of you as kind of like a solo act, essentially.

01:18:39 ◼   ► Do you have—and I know you've had other projects in the past, like Vesper, which is a notes app that you worked on.

01:18:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:46 ◼   ► In working with Ben and working on your own, what is that experience like?

01:18:50 ◼   ► Do you like having collaborators, or do you prefer to be solo?

01:18:53 ◼   ► Do you take different things from each experience?

01:18:55 ◼   ► I like having Ben as a collaborator.

01:18:57 ◼   ► I loved making Vesper with collaborators.

01:18:59 ◼   ► Until it wasn't good, I liked the early years of the talk show with Dan Benjamin.

01:19:04 ◼   ► And going back to college, I loved working at my student newspaper with a team, a really amazingly talented team.

01:19:13 ◼   ► Just unbelievable luck of how many good people—you know, at a university without a journalism program, and we have—most of us were from, like, the engineering college, or I was studying computer science.

01:19:23 ◼   ► It was an amazing group of people, and I really loved the collaboration of it.

01:19:28 ◼   ► But it's like I've made this thing for me that is more not in form, but in mentality to, like, being a novelist at Daring Fireball.

01:19:38 ◼   ► You don't really think that novelists have collaborators, but that's sort of how I do Daring Fireball.

01:19:44 ◼   ► I like it.

01:19:45 ◼   ► I mean, I think I get along with people.

01:19:47 ◼   ► I enjoy it.

01:19:48 ◼   ► I enjoy—the episode that just came out today was one where Ben came up with an idea that I had had myself, but it was when I was, like, drifting off to sleep.

01:19:56 ◼   ► So I didn't write it down, and I'd forgotten it, and it came up, and it's, like, I think a really, really key insight.

01:20:01 ◼   ► And, you know, here we are five years into it, and it feels as fresh as ever.

01:20:06 ◼   ► I kind of hoped that it would, but it doesn't feel like, ah, this is getting old.

01:20:10 ◼   ► It feels like, ah, this is great.

01:20:11 ◼   ► I could do this, you know, into the foreseeable future.

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