Aghhh-okay.
Good morning, John.
Two years before you emailed me and told me that it was a good idea to make a bunch of weird video blogs
on a weird new platform called YouTube, you published your first book.
A book that did a thing that books like it
don't really do that often.
Not only was it a book about, like, real people in the real world that did okay,
it kept doing okay, and in fact kept doing better.
And now that book, that is 13 years old,
is being turned into an eight-episode miniseries on Hulu.
No, we're not getting a movie, it's better than a movie, because there's more of it!
I know that you've been waiting for this for a very long time and I'm- I'm really excited and really hap-
I just want to watch it!
And this is a reminder of something I've learned
several times over the 38 years that it took to become a 38 year old:
You never know how things are gonna go, and you don't know when hard work is gonna pay off.
And also you don't know if it's gonna pay off. It might never, but it also might just take a while.
Last week I was at the YouTube Creator Summit, which is where YouTube flies a bunch of Youtubers to a fancy hotel and then we yell at them, basically.
I was a little bit expecting to be seen
as like, what I am- which is like, old and useless and yesterday's news. And look, I'm not down about this.
I got a book. It's very exciting. Crash Course and SciShow are doing amazingly well.
But it's season 12 here on Vlogbrothers, and that- like, in TV, that doesn't happen. And I'm fully aware the people who are getting popular on
YouTube right now are often like making feature films
seven days a week to make it on this platform, but I'm sitting here in front of the same bookshelf
I was sitting in front of
back when shawty was pulling on her apple-bottom jeans and the furry boots for the first time.
How is this still working? I'm not asking questions!
But at this point I know next to nothing about how to get popular on YouTube. I know that it's hard,
I know that it's rare,
I know that when it happens
it's not because you had a really great idea, or you really worked your butt off, or you got really lucky or you had access
to resources or knowledge that other people didn't have access to- it's because all of those things happened at the same time.
I don't have any special knowledge. The last time I created a YouTube channel from scratch, smartphones
didn't exist. Oh God.
But, I do know about some of the mistakes that I've made and that other creators have made. I know a little bit about
what to do and not do once you start to have an audience, and also I know
what to do when you realize that maybe that's not going to last forever.
This is a fantastic job that I love and that I want as many people as possible to have, but the highs can be very high and the
lows can be very low. On YouTube, and really all social media,
you got these numbers
right down here, always telling you how many people are watching, how many people liked it and how many people didn't like it. Because they're so
objective and concrete, it's very easy to let those numbers take over as a kind of surrogate for how much you matter.
But what goes up must come down, and here on Vlogbrothers
we've seen enough up and down and up and down to not have our self-worth so tied up in it.
But getting to this point was a process.
I worry a lot about younger creators, both big and small
but I also have a lot of hope. I think a greater and greater percentage of people are gonna be able to be
professional creators because of the fracturing of fame, because of the rise of new patronage models. But on that path,
there's a lot of pitfalls and anything that I can do
personally to make that easier for other people- that's stuff I want to do, and I honestly hope that that becomes a bigger and bigger
part of my professional life.
And because I like this job so much, if I can help other people have it and help them have it in a
productive way that is healthy,
that's like the best possible outcome for me. Which is part of why I'm headed to VidCon very soon!
If you're Community Track, the signing lottery is open right now and it's gonna be closing,
so I just wanted to mention that, so if you want to get into any of the signings, you need to buy tickets very soon.
And I'm working on my Creator Track talk which is part of why I've been thinking about this stuff so much.
But it's hard to have advice that works for everybody because all kinds of creators are so different from each other.
But here's a little bit: A Hulu series? That is very, very cool.
And it is something that happens to basically no-one. But John, nothing you and I have ever done is as good as finding joy in
making stuff and finding a great community to make it inside of and also maybe
finding a little bit of faith in humanity.
John, congratulations, for real. I'll see you on Tuesday.
This is the end screen song.
(sung) Jason Derulo!