[Music] welcome to Gear biscuits I’m Rhett and I’m Linc thanks for joining us in another biscuit from the road today not from the round table of dim lighting Bret we have we are at VidCon and we’re actually talking with one of the founders of VidCon also New York Times bestselling author and one half of the vlog brothers John Green now I was so excited to have this conversation with John as excited as I’ve been to talk to anybody on here biscuits not just because he was recently named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in the world linked by Time magazine not just because not just by you know he’s influential in my life but one top 100 in the world and this is on ear biscuits link this is happening on your biscuits not just because of that not just he’s been a friend for a long time and we’ve always looked up to the vlogbrothers and what he and Hank do on the Internet not just because he’s got a book The Fault in Our Stars that has been on the New York Times bestsellers list for over two years it’s been at number one for over two years and then he’s got a movie that as at the time we’re recording this it’s made over a hundred million dollars the movie based on his novel that was adapted to fall in our stars well then why are you excited I’m just super excited about we want you to be excited but I’m excited for him and I was excited to talk about all of these things that are happening all the success that he’s experiencing and the way that YouTube is such an integral part in him getting there just to get back to the Fault in Our Stars if you don’t know much about it the plot follows two teenagers who fall deeply in love after meeting ass at a Cancer Support Group here’s a clip what’s your name hazel what’s your full name hazel grace Lancaster what are you looking at me like that because you’re beautiful oh my god let’s go watch a movie huh um I’m free later this week coming now you could be an ax murderer there’s always that possibility and you might know before the success of The Fault in Our Stars and probably even a bigger part of what John is all about is what he does with his brother Hank the vlogbrothers and these guys have been an inspiration to us they’ve essentially started back in January of 2007 with something they called Brotherhood 2.0 which consisted of daily back-and-forth vlogs that community communicated with each other through vlogs they say we’re not going to texting haven’t any texting but we’re gonna communicate with each other every single day email for a year back and forth right and then if if they didn’t meet the requirement of making their video for that day they had to undergo a physical punishment that they agreed upon earlier and they did it for the whole year after the year was up they continued and they changed the frequency oh man they still do them to this day when you watch the videos they’re addressing each other as well as their fan base the nerdfighters good morning Hank it’s Sunday it’s news day and the news around here is that my house is a construction zone and most of the electricity is turned off and we don’t have any place to sleep and unrelated to the incredibly expensive home renovation my basement flooded on Friday so now I have to take out all the carpet and fixing it is gonna cost a billion dollars and I’m cranky and when I get cranky I put Willy and his tiny elephant costume and of course they’ve gone on to just a crazy amount of success on the Internet there they call their fans the nerdfighters and there’s a lot of them out there they have an amazing community they started a project for awesome they started the foundation to decrease worldsuck they started VidCon you know the the green brothers have done all kinds of things and then we find in this conversation we’re finding John and a really interesting time where he’s experiencing he’s in the midst of experiencing this amazing success with The Fault in Our Stars but he’s also still doing every other thing that he’s always done and so we talked to him about what it’s like what did to be in the midst of this right I love the quote here I think this is an association with Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people actress shailene woodley from The Fault in Our Stars is quoted as saying some say that through his books John gives a voice to teenagers I humbly disagree I think John hears the voices of teenagers he acknowledges the intelligence and vulnerability that stem from those beautiful years when we were for the first time discovering the world in ourselves outside of our familiar familial stories but he doesn’t just listen to young adults he treats every human he meets as their own planet rather than simply one of his moons he sees people with curiosity compassion grace and excitement and he’s encouraging a huge community of followers to do the same what a gift to be alive at the same time as this admirable leader and what a gift to have this conversation I was really fun yeah so here it is are your biscuit with John Green you were just telling me you’re like coming off a marathon and I don’t know you’re not at a finish line but VidCon is usually the crazy time of year but putting in perspective of everything that’s been happening to you and your family yeah if it calls great but yeah it feels downright relaxing yeah you know I’m happy to be here but but I am very excited for Sunday we’re going on my wife and kids and I are going on vacation and that’ll be really nice so oh yeah nice and we’re just gonna really just have some downtime as much as we can how old are the kids now four and one that’s it that’s not a vacation it’s it’s but it’s um it’s just a different kind of stress yeah okay but a really welcome kind of stress yeah you’re right it’s not it’s not properly relaxing mine are ten and five now and that’s just now getting to the point where it could be considered a vacation yeah yeah so there’s no time to go I just I I’m excited for when they’re both potty trained that’s gonna be amazing well hopefully one is now yo yeah yeah he’s great he’s great well let me ask you how’s your shoulder no it’s better I got a cortisone shot I am I injured my shoulder playing Fifa which is very embarrassing it what was the diagnosed when you went to the doctor I went to the doctor I initially lied to the doctor and I told the doctor that I’d been throwing my kid up in the air Oh because I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth that I had been playing Fifa but he was playing a video game he was like there was he was like three your fists in the air you’re celebrating tonight and I badly injured my right shoulder and he was like so you had some resistance when you when you injured it and I was like not really and it was like you’re like you’re pushing up your kid now he’s like well all right fine I was playing a video game and I raised my arms in triumph and I felt my right arm pop and it really hurt and the doctor was like oh well that’s it completely now I yeah you need to be honest with me these details are important yeah it turns out so anyway I got a cortisone shot it worked really well and we’ll have to kind of wait and see on the long-term effects of me throwing my hands in the air after well playing Fifa I mean because you you’re gonna think of it every time you score going FIFA now oh yeah no they’re consciously you’re gonna tense aw I don’t celebrate anymore and I think it’s made me a worse player so you’re just kind of just you just sort of just sit in that the afterglow of a goal yeah I just trying to I just try to enjoy it quietly now he’s a very pensive FIFA player yeah yeah forgive me for for reaching for a connection here but is there some analogy I’m wondering if there’s analogy between all the success of the book in the movie and just it’s phenomenal what’s happening and I’m so excited and it’s it’s amazing but is there an Associated injury with this celebration was this self-inflicted that’s a good analogy I mean I definitely I definitely think that any any kind of dramatic change in your life even if it’s a really positive change is stressful like you know moving is is stressful getting man getting married is stressful having a kid is stressful these are all wonderful wonderful things like it’s some of the best stuff that that can happen to you but it’s also kind of overwhelming and this this experience has been totally overwhelming and at times at times really really restful even though it’s been also joyful and you know uh it’s about the best book to movie experience you could possibly have to be proud of the movie to have the movie do well to have been included in the process all of that stuff just really doesn’t happen to authors very often so and you kind of built you kind of built that in because you weren’t jumping at the chance to for it to be adapted into a movie if it wasn’t gonna be with certain stipulations right right you’re just hungry please make please make this into a movie yeah I know I’ve been in a position where I had to be hungry before and that does make you a lot less discerning and this time I wasn’t hungry I didn’t really want to see a movie made of this book initially because it’s so personal to me and I just didn’t think they could anyone could really do a good job I thought that it would be sort of schlocky and I think they really succeeded in staying true to the tone of the book now most of that was luck but some of it was kind of waiting for the right people to come around because you didn’t direct the film you guys say it’s luck yeah well it’s not my movie it’s Joshua’s movie so right and you know ultimately I didn’t pick Josh I wish I could take credit for that but the producers of the movie pick Josh I mean I you know saw his movie and talked to him before he was hired but yeah everyone else did a great job I did very little now are you are you having a good time are you enjoying the process yeah I enjoyed I enjoyed like going to the premiere so much and I we had a we had a showing in Indianapolis that was just with family and friends and people who’ve kind of helped us along the way of writing the book and then making the movie you know just whether like by babysitting for our kids or whatever and that was really special to have you know 200 people in a room all of whom you care about all of whom helped make this possible and to be able to watch the movie with them was really really special but isn’t it kind of a challenge when I mean so many people in their lives they’re they dream of one thing and I mean you tell me but I would assume that there’s just been a number of dreams come true for you at this point like whoa everything is falling into place but with that experience is there this well it it’s not as good as I thought it would now that I’ve got these dreams and they’ve kind of lined up in a row or is it not all it’s cracked up to be is it still a grass is greener is it I think that’s the question behind are you are you enjoying it overall or is it actually very difficult to enjoy it because of all the other pressures that are coming on as well yeah I think well I think you guys have you’re probably sensitive to that because you guys have had some dreams come true yeah and it’s always a fun it’s a bit of a weird experience because you’re like this is what I always dreamt of which is not quite the same thing as I’m so happy it’s it’s it’s similar but it’s not quite the same thing I a lot of this isn’t what I dreamt of for the record like okay I never I from a long long time ago starting in maybe like 2008 I would say to Hank like I really do not want to become widely known because I think that would be I think it would wouldn’t be fun I started you know you get a glimpse of proper celebrity and you see how it can be destructive and how it can be so disruptive in people’s lives especially their family lives and so I was very wary of that that’s why we’ve never done a TV made a TV do or anything like that because you guys can attest to how famous TV will make you oh yeah especially when you’re on that IFC no no no that’s in like 20,000 homes now oh yeah like the population of Fuquay Varina I mean I wouldn’t categorize it as a setback it was a great experience but yeah it was I mean it sometimes I feel like it was in terms of what I was what we want to do and accomplishing where we are it’s the kind of thing that you enjoy it’s like when you go on an incredible trip somewhere that’s kind of challenging but exciting and got a there’s all these new experiences I think it’s very difficult for people to enjoy it in the moment but you enjoy it and the pictures and the memories right it’s just you have you have you thought about that actively throughout this process like I want to stop and enjoy this yeah yeah I’ve tried to stop and enjoy it a lot and I’ve been lucky that things have been so enjoyable you know that it hasn’t been stressful or more needlessly stressful at least like you know that I haven’t had to go around and pitch a movie I don’t like wait right is what most authors have to do and that that’s not nearly as fun but yeah I’ve really I have taken time to enjoy but I think that I will enjoy the pictures more you know like I think inevitably looking back on something you can look back on it with such unambiguous fondness because you’re not tired anymore you’re not stressed out anymore yeah you’re not thinking about when you have to get up in the morning or the fact that your stomach hurts anymore you’re just really enjoying it so I’m okay with that I’ve always been like I don’t know there’s something about being a novelist it makes my whole life oriented toward the past a little bit like I like having written a lot more than I like writing you know I like I like looking back on on on a writing experience a lot more than I like being in it so I don’t mind enjoying things in retrospect right now and you know there is this romanticized version of the life of an author right I picture you in a cabin somewhere with no and there’s no electricity you’re writing like a Gandalf typewriter by the like a lamp oil you’re smoking a pipe yeah you know I think everybody has this this this picture is like okay well now you’ve reached that level right okay you’ve got this the smashing success now we’re all gonna read the next thing that you write but we all know that you there’s a lot of other facets right so there’s so many other things that you’re involved in and you haven’t slowed down any of that stuff so is there this temptation now it’s just like oh yeah I could do that I could go spend a week with a crazy woman somewhere and she might hold me hostage for a while I feel like a lot of your understanding of being a novelist comes from misery yeah I do worry about I do Kathy Bates coming in my cabin that’s why the cabin not worth the risk of Kathy Bates showing up um no like I write in a Starbucks the same Starbucks for a long time yeah I I don’t know I want to keep doing all the stuff that we do i mean i-i i do want to write another novel at some point i like writing books i like being inside of a story but i really love crash course and vlogbrothers and I love the art assignment like that stuff I’m really passionate about that stuff and and it’s right in front of you there’s a fulfillment y’all know this like there’s a fulfillment to doing something that goes up in a week or in a few days as opposed to doing something that takes you know six months of work and then it’s out and then you know then there’s always sort of that like postpartum depression of the doubt and no God and I think we experience the fear sometimes of never creating that big thing so I mean we we look to you as an inspiration to okay in the midst of all the things that you’re creating and you and Hank are working on that you’re you’re you’ve written and you you will continue to write and create that thing that requires the investment and then it’s gonna take right a year or years to put it together right I mean that is that is agile and fascinating right yeah like how do you stay disciplined even when you have other work you know and when your other work is quite a little yeah yeah it’s doing well and like there is that there is that challenge for me though they’re so separate like the passion that I feel for writing is so different than the than my like interest in online video because it’s one one part of me that wants to like be in my basement you know 12 or 14 hours a day and then there is another part of me that’s really started to like collaboration as crash-course and the other things have grown to involve teams I really like that you know I like working with smart interesting people who kind of keep me a little bit young and helped me to think think more broadly about stuff than I otherwise would if I was stuck inside my own head so I’m hopeful that I can find a way to kind of chart the middle path even if it means that there’s a little bit less crash course in a little bit and a little bit longer between novels that I can still stay involved in both yeah I would say that you’re probably you @un Hank some of the least materialistic people that you know I know but we all know that I mean that there’s been some financial success with what’s happening with The Fault in Our Stars yeah have you splurged on anything yeah yeah I bought my dream car a year after the fall nurse stars came out on the one-year anniversary brand-new cyber metallic gray Chevy Volt five five years of desperately wanting a Chevy Volt and got rid of her station wagon and got this Chevy Volt and it’s so from zero to 20 it’s just the fastest car in the world it’s all torque it’s like driving it’s super fast all right golf cart in the world great but it goes 80 it’s like a golf cart that goes 80 so fun to drive man it’s all–it’s it handles so great so yeah I got it I got a volt and then there’s a lot of rednecks where we’re from that have golf carts and lawn mowers definitely gas-powered we did that and then you know we did I don’t know we go what we go on nice vacations and stuff but no we don’t mean you know Sarah and I don’t have any particularly I mean we like we like art we like books but we don’t have any particularly ambitious non philanthropic plans right has the success of the book and the movie created an imbalance in the vlogbrothers so I think a little bit that’s a great question you guys you guys man it’s always good that’s why I like that’s why I like this podcast that’s an interesting question it it hasn’t because Hank doesn’t care about material success at all but it has in the sense that there are all these people watching our videos who maybe don’t identify as closely with nerdfighteria as we’re used to and so they don’t identify as people who are interested in nerdfighter projects and who are you know kind of equally interested in both of our work that’s always been the hallmark of the vlogbrothers channel is that like there was never any competition Hank and I never fought that’s pretty rare for a two-person collaborative I mean you guys have been very lucky and Hank and I have been very lucky but I think a lot of times it gets it gets weird at some point but we were very conscious of that going into the movie and so I feel like now that the movie is you were conscious of it was there a conversation yeah yeah yeah we had several conversations where we talked about what we were gonna do about kind of the influx of fans who maybe aren’t nerdfighters and I think we both felt like some of them will become nerdfighters which is amazing and some of them will go on and like other stuff which is good too and we’ve just been trying to stay true to that and to make you know – in this whole process as far as possible to make videos that are for nerdfighters and hopefully we’ve been doing a pretty good job of that so that the people who are really interested in the community and the project based stuff will stay into it well it’s interesting you seem to be the answer seems to be very much focused on the audience and well but there’s the psychology of it in within your mind with in Hanks mind you know I know for for me and well I’ll just speak for myself I won’t speak for Rhett but there’s a thing in a partnership where at least for me there’s a question in my mind of am i contributing enough hmm you know it’s it’s not am i the favorite in enough people’s minds you know are half the tweets who say so-and-so’s my favorite are just or me everyday no but that okay am i and I want to be an equal contributor here right and that’s something that goes through my mind there’s a psychology to that that well this is probably a good time for me to tell you that I’m working on a book about two teenagers if that goes well that sounds like a terrible commercial I that’ll never work yeah no I guess I guess for us we don’t really feel that or I don’t feel that way because I’m conscious of what I’m contributing I’m also extremely conscious of what Hank is contributing I mean Hank works tirelessly more than any other person I know and so I never worry if Hank is I mean he may worry if I’m pulling my weight I’m sure he does sometimes but I certainly never worry if he’s pulling his because he just um he is absolutely indefatigable when it comes to finding new stuff to do finding new stuff to share finding new ways to make educational material like he just he has no quit in him and so no I I feel like we contribute very different things and that’s been a lot of the strength of it as me knowing what’s mine and him knowing once his you know I think that’s a that’s definitely a part of the maturation process of a duo yeah you know we’re a lot more like brothers than we are friends in a lot of ways right we known each other for so long but yeah I think a big part even though the past a decade it’s like specialization between the two of us and you’re kind of like oh yeah you know and when when link takes this it’s better when I take this mm-hmm element of it the final product ends up being better I think that’s a it’s been a big right big thing for you got to learn it you got to learn to trust each other um even when you don’t necessarily agree if it’s someone else’s but I’m like well that’s Hanks thing so yeah we look for their strengths yeah his strengths right exactly got it yeah now were you guys I’ve read that you guys weren’t close as kids no we really weren’t I mean well we in the sense that we were the you know it was just the two of us so we were we were kind of close just because we lived in the same house all the time two years three years of our three years apart and then but I went to boarding school when he was 11 I was 14 and he was 11 so I didn’t know him past childhood you know and then we didn’t really we we we liked each other a lot I think we had great admiration for each other and for I had a lot of admiration for the work that Hank was doing back you know after he graduated from school but I didn’t know him well until vlogbrothers and now of course I know I mean I know him arguably too well right okay so I want to I’ll get back to Brotherhood 2.0 but just to kind of you know when you went off to boarding school and then from there what was what was life like for you there I mean that’s it was great I mean I went to this weird very progressive boarding school in Alabama that was responsibility oriented so unless you did something to get your privileges revoked you had a lot of freedom and was co-ed and it was very open and liberal and everything that you don’t picture when you picture rural Alabama and why did you go there well I was a kind of a terrible student that was reason one and then also I had a lot of social problems and my cousin’s had gone there a couple of my cousin’s had gone there and so I really wanted to because I thought my cousin’s were cool and I also just wanted to start over I wanted a place where people hadn’t known me for as this like massive nerd you know for my whole life and so this was a chance to start over of course it turns out that you take your nerdiness with you you picked up right where you left off yeah it wasn’t much better I mean it was better in the sense that nerdiness was celebrated at Indian spring so I quickly found a group of friends and um and I became you know by the end of school there were only 52 people in our graduating class there wasn’t a ton of room for cliques and I really I was lucky too that was the place where I made my first real deep school friendships you know I’d had two best friends growing up but they hadn’t been in the same grade as me so that that connection of like school to life was just complete because we were never off campus unless we were together so there was an intimacy to it that I think most people associate with college that I kind of had in high school and so that was perfect fodder for a book yeah yeah and a lot of Looking for Alaska comes my first novel comes from that time you know living with a bunch of young people together with sort of minimal adult supervision now were you writing at that time yeah I like to write a lot I wasn’t very good but I wrote for fun as well as for school so I did writing was really the only I guess like productive extracurricular activity I had the only thing that I did that wasn’t bad for me and I was lucky to be surrounded by really good writers in high school I had I had good teachers but I also had classmates who were in in retrospect really really great writers some of whom went on to be published like Daniel Allen but some of whom didn’t but it was great it was a great environment to to think about writing because there were so many people reading so much in writing so much and having lots of conversations about it why are you guys in Alabama what were your parents doing there well I lived my we’re still living in Florida at the time my dad is directed the nature conservancy down there for a long long time and I was um yeah so we we just moved to basically moved to I moved to Alabama and they stayed in Florida okay and then when you went to college you studied early Islamic history yeah yeah so that was that the name of the major no I was a religion major but my my area of academic interest I guess was early Islamic history so that’s what I wrote all my papers about so what what goes into that I mean that in in terms of the choice motivation well I took one class in I took a intro to religion class and I took kind of an intro to Islam class and which is really interesting to me that there was this you know there was this worldview that a billion people shared that I knew basically nothing about I mean this was in the late 1990s so Islam wasn’t really part of the cultural conversation in the United States and so I just I just became really interested in it and I wanted to learn a lot about it I wanted to learn especially a lot about kind of the emergence of Islam and how it spread I’ve always been interested in how ideas spread and we like to imagine really simplistic ways of ideas spreading but it’s really really complicated so we always think that Islam spread by the sword for instance with the growth of the Arab Empire but in fact like it’s much more complicated than that in a lot of times the conversion the conversion happened without any kind of war or battle or anything but the reasons why it happened were equally complicated so I just found that really interesting in my thinking about you know how do I have an idea that gets inside of someone else’s head and then how do we have ideas that get inside of millions of people’s heads that was a very early but kind of modern example of it because it happened and you know like 622 CE II so this is what your biscuits listeners come for oh yeah but so it sounds like you came at a religion major from an academic perspective was there a personal faith perspective because you wanted to be a priest too right yeah there was I mean I’m not a Muslim but but I’m a companion but I did I was really interested in in religion and my interest in becoming an Episcopal priest was not primarily looking back like about my personal faith it was about my like interest in theological questions and in questions of meaning and suffering and and thinking that that would be a good place to have those conversations like thinking that the church for me growing up and especially in college was a place to have those conversations about suffering and about hope and whether there was any meaning in human life and that was a biscuit belly in your yeah you’re still Episcopalian yeah like growing up with your parents or like they were they were method it’s all the same though when it’s that like sort of you know lefty/lefty protestant stuff it’s pretty interchangeable I shouldn’t say that as an Episcopalian no the only the benefit of being Episcopalian is you get to kneel more I’m a big fan of kneeling and crossing myself you can get to heart do that hardly at all as a Methodist so that was the number one draw for me well that sounds like a joke but there may be some you know I like really I like I like the sort of I like ritual and I like rituals that that pull me back through history you know that that connect me to people who lived 1800 years ago or whatever and I know that I mean you you’ve said this a number of times in other interviews how that wanting to become a priest you ended up becoming a student chaplain yeah in a Children’s Hospital yeah that was kind of the beginning of the the story of Fault in Our Stars yeah that’s where it that’s where I started trying to write it right after I worked at the hospital I worked there for about six months you know it was a weird job because I was a student chaplain but when I was on call they were no other chaplains in the hospital so I was the only person that if someone died if a baby was going to die and needed to be baptized I was the only person there to baptize the baby and or if someone died I was there with the family when as they went through that process but also you know if there was any kind of trauma part of the a chaplain always part of the trauma team so the the chaplain and the social worker usually are stay with the family you know through the emergency department and the process of getting admitted to the hospital so what is the experience of being that close to dying children what kind of impact does that have on your faith pretty severe one positive I would no no no I mean you know I had a lot of I had a lot of ideas about why theologically sound I think ideas about why good you know good people have horrible things happen to them about why suffering exists and why it’s unjustly distributed and all that stuff the problem that Christians call theodicy the problem of evil you know in a world where God is good and powerful but all of my ideas about it proved kind of useless you know I mean I could I could I could say that those things were intellectually true I just didn’t care because you know I was face to face with the randomness arbitrariness of human existence and the idea that this stuff was happening for a reason seemed very problematic to me now that didn’t destroy my faith and I still go to church and it’s still an important part of my life it did make me think that I shouldn’t be working from inside the church like I shouldn’t be doing this work from inside the church because I just didn’t have the the right kind of DNA for it you know also I couldn’t do it like I mean after a good a good chaplain or social worker anyone who works in a Children’s Hospital really has the ability to do this incredibly difficult work this emotionally wrenching work to be fully present to be fully there for the people who need you and then to go home and be fully there for your family and for the for the people in your non-professional life and I did not have that ability at all so you know I kind of learned that about myself and that’s a good thing to know and I still really I have great I have great affection for chaplains whenever I am in the hospital I’m always like bring me the jab I want to I want to hang out with you everybody whoever’s on call tonight so Carson Daly couldn’t do it either yeah priest so you should connect with him so did you and do you find satisfactory answers to those questions that you’re kind of faced with when you when you see children going through that kind of suffering do you find that in your faith um I do I do to an extent I don’t I don’t as completely and without reservation as many of the people I know and many of the people I admire both intellectually and in the way they go about their lives I just um I’m I’m okay I guess I guess for me like I’m okay living in a world that’s arbitrary and random and unfair I need to know the kind of world I’m living in in order to be happy and I need to I need to try to orient as much of my work toward injustice or and inequality as possible because otherwise because that’s what that’s what makes me feel meaning you know and that’s true that’s true in in the church like the stuff the stuff that gets me most excited about being a member of my church is about service and connection more than it’s about any kind of evangelism or direct evangelism or whatever and the stuff that the stuff that gets me going and in my professional life is about you know the project for awesome or building a school in Bangladesh or whatever like that if it’s a lot more interesting to me than how many subscribers we have right well not in that you know brings up another thing which is obviously Hank is involved in all those things and seems very much equally motivated but as far as I understand he doesn’t share your faith no yeah no right well I don’t know if he’d identify as an atheist but he wouldn’t identify he’d identify as close oh I don’t know I don’t we don’t talk about that stuff that much mostly because our worldviews are turned in the same direction yes so like what we want to do on a daily basis has turned in the same direction it’s kind of two ways of imagining meaning to life one way is that like we as human beings constructed we make it up as we go along and another is that we derive it we derive it from some organizing principle to the universe or some source scripture or whatever it is and in the end I don’t know if I care if meaning is constructed or derived as long as like the people I’m working closest with are turned in the same direction like the meaning that they find is similar so it Orient’s us similarly and that with Hank I mean we’re pretty much a hundred percent on the same page all the time like we never one thing we never argue about is like purpose so that’s that’s good because that’s a pretty core argument if you end up having it you know right yes that’s so fascinating I I guess I’d like to go to the Brotherhood 2.0 because that kind of it sounds like that defines your friendship you know it’s what you just said is like a real testimony to the fact that even though you guys may become you have beliefs that are rooted in different places that you’re so aligned when it comes to what you guys are accomplishing together as a team it’s it it’s it’s amazing having not been close as kids was the whole Brotherhood thing was that Brotherhood 2.0 but was that his idea it was my idea your idea yeah I was a big fan well we were both big friends as a Frank and the show was a Frank and it’s I’m I I didn’t think that because the first video was like yeah but then the second video your first one the first thing out of your mouth is I’m not gonna be good at this to me it seemed like you were saying I don’t know if this is a great idea but I’ll do it it was my idea was not gonna be show her face but my idea but I have to say that if Hank hadn’t gotten enthusiastic about it it never would have happened so I was like we should do a collaborative video blog that’s like the show but you only have half as much work because you’re talking to each other and plus then we could stop textual e communicating and start like talking to each other every day which we hadn’t done really because we only talked over text so was the day show done that point no it was it was it has to go it had three months to go but everyone knew it was going to end and so we were kind of thinking about the future in how sad we would be and yeah I mean if Hank I had the idea but then if Hank hadn’t been like yes let’s do that let’s here’s how here’s where you go get a camera here’s the camera that you get here’s how you edit video I mean you know he I’d never made a video before I’d never owned a camcorder before so it was and you didn’t believe you could do it that’s the first words out of your mouth no I thought I’d be terrible and to be fair I was I was terrible for many months I was you go back and you watch those old videos and I find them just crushing crushingly slow well you caught it in that first video you referred to the endeavor as a documentary yeah no that’s what I thought it was gonna be do it I was imagining it right yeah but it is not I mean maybe it is it’s kind of a it’s it’s kind of it’s a document of our of our lives over many many years which is something I’m gonna be so grateful to have and I think I think that our you know my kids will be so grateful I hope you know to have but but you know almost from the beginning we saw it as a project with an audience and an audience that we had to engage with and that doing stuff even if it was only a couple hundred people doing stuff with those two hundred people was gonna be a lot cooler than anything that we could do just with each other like just talking to each other was not going to be as interesting as actively engaging the people watching it so you you I’m assuming you got some of that the idea of an audience and all right just almost creating a movement with a way that is a kind of dealt with that everyone who was involved in all the ideas that he had absolutely so when you started you had that in mind like this is a this is community building well I think maybe for the first two weeks we didn’t think of it that way but we started to think of it as community building very quickly I think the first time that we really understood that there was a community around the videos we only had maybe 300 regular viewers and I had to be hospitalized because I had this very rare weird infection behind my eye that wasn’t serious but like you had to get IV antibiotics and to cheer me up the Hank asked people to put something on their heads because that had become an inside joke somehow and we had like 300 viewers and we got like 240 pictures and I was like oh my gosh that is I mean percentage right can you imagine a straight about like that today I mean it’s just unimaginable so it was a different time a different world but yeah it was that’s when we realized oh my gosh like we should probably do something other than just have people put stuff on their heads well and because of that you’re I got fixed yeah it did work look look at me now still – I pretty awesome well I mean I could definitely say that when we decided that oh we needed we needed to name our community we need to cut we need to do this it was definitely looking at you guys and thinking oh look what they’ve done here they’ve created they’re not creating content only there they’re building a movement and there they’re accomplishing so many things and they and they see the potential in that community I mean what was that process like obviously you just kind of revealed that first initial realization of how they could be motivated to do something but when did you start thinking about this is a strategic community I mean here we are at VidCon right it’s kind of seeing the culmination of that but what’s that process like I think you know we never we never wanted to think of the community just as like a launching pad for other ideas like we wanted it to live to have its own life and to have its own meaning but you know I think VidCon was really the first thing that emerged out of nerdfighteria that became much different from nerdfighteria and much larger and you know it really it came of a hank’s feeling that we needed a conference and that he knew a lot of people who made youtube videos and so he should just do the conference and I thought that was a terrible idea I thought it would make people who made YouTube videos hate us and that if the conference was bad it would be the end of our careers also it’s very expensive so we essentially like had our houses against the conference I just I thought it was a bad idea but I did know by then that I have to trust Hank when he has an idea if he sticks with it for more than like six hours it’s usually something that he’s going to do whether I like it or not so I better I better get behind him and then of course you know VidCon turned out to be amazing and then from there we did start to launch channels that are kind of outgrowths of their nerdfighter area but are separate from it like crash course or scishow or the art assignment and we’ve done that I still think of that as an extension a way of kind of like building small groups within a big group because it’s really problematic when a community becomes so large that it’s unwieldy that people it’s hard for people to think of themselves as you know as nerdfighters if what’s a nerdfighter if everyone’s a nerdfighter yeah and so we want there to be communities within the community whether it’s the minecraft server or the people who like to watch me play FIFA or the people who are passionate about the art assignment whatever it is like that’s really important I think to the future too like making it work making it sustainable so that people are still still feel involved enough to want to be want to do stuff with us well yeah I think about the fact that it doesn’t goes back to the question that we asked earlier was does the success of the book in the movie is it upsetting the balance of the vlogbrothers but it also potentially creates this sense that your community is built on so many different things that you guys have done over time and then to have something that is this landmark achievement in a real traditional sense almost have you thought about how that might threaten the community yeah I mean it’s been a big concern for us is how do we sort of like you know kind of build a seawall against the rising tide of The Fault in Our Stars so that it doesn’t become a moment that we all look back on and say like oh it was all magical until then um and you know my our main strategy for that like the first video I made after after The Fault in Our Stars came out was devoted almost entirely to the book that we’re reading this summer for the nerdfighter book club about living in a slum in Mumbai and I just was basically I did that partly as a way of saying like okay well now back to normal Frank you know like now now back to talking about stuff that we care about with people we care about and and you know like it being being a fan of the vlogbrothers means a lot of this you know for better I hope you like this but this is what it is instead of trying to orient ourselves to the most possible viewers I think that and that in that respect we’ve taken inspiration from you guys because you were very conscious about choose kind of choosing community over virality at some point and and using virality as a way to build a community instead of using community as a way to build virality and that’s I I thought that was really smart and it also like it also made me like more of a fan if that makes sense like it made me more interested in your work instead of it just being like oh I know I can go there to see a funny video it was like oh I like those people it can hang out yeah I mean we didn’t know with good mythical morning that it would become what it has but we’re very glad because we it’s based on our friendship and it’s based on you know who what we want to talk about and letting people in in that conversation you know the us that is not just the two of you guys but as your entire community is something that we we constantly kind of check against to control okay what is our us is it just the two of us or is it also our fans a mythical beast kind of a thing yeah what was a milestone early on that kind of bumped up vlogbrothers from I mean you knew pretty early on you had an audience yeah but I mean it was tiny but you weren’t very early you were talking to that you would you would always talk to each other you still do yeah but you’re not really you know everybody yeah you just have this like innate way to address each other in the right moments of your vlogs but then you’re talking to everyone it’s it’s an interesting talent yeah that’s a weird balance when I first started that no one else really has to do I don’t know what else has to say good morning Hank it’s Tuesday yeah I’ve said like I’ve said good morning Hank it’s Tuesday on something like like 250 consecutive Tuesdays and when you say hey you’re you are used are you still thinking Hank are you thinking everybody but I just say hey I just I call them Hank you know I I really I do still think Hank and I still think that Hank is the first and most important member of my audience but I’m very conscious that it’s not just Hank and there are lots of times that Hank knows something that I have to tell everyone so in that case I try not to say Hank in that case I try to try to come out of that like idea that it’s just an open letter to Hank and be like hey nerdfighters Hank knows this but Hank has a concert on Wednesday what was the philip defranco milestone you know we had a few milestones the first one and the first big bump was back in the days of featured YouTube videos okay yeah Hank had a video that was featured about the last Harry Potter book coming out he had he sang a song about it and that suddenly we went from 200 subscribers to 7,000 almost overnight and then along the way there were a lot of other bumps there was a huge series of bumps really from Phil where Phil would talk about the vlogbrothers how much you liked the vlogbrothers one time I think the first time in a video intro he referenced us you know he had that old video intro where he would be and he was was very very say Frank sounding yeah I’m back in 2007 as were we yeah and and he mentioned the vlogbrothers and we got another several thousand subscribers then but it was you know YouTube still I think but especially then for us was really about youtubers helping youtubers there was very little at least in my memory there was very little of anybody trying to take anyone else’s audience and a lot of trying to expand the overall size of the pie which was really it was it was a good yeah it was a good era in YouTube history it felt like we were Hollywood before the studio’s the studio system came in you know like Hollywood in the teens where we were kind of making up the rules as we went along and what we were doing was accidentally important to the future you know it shaped the future we just didn’t know it at the time and of course I think more than anyone’s a did that say by inventing the idea that online video projects could be community oriented and then also by inventing most of the conventions of the vlogging genre which he had no idea he was doing at the time of course right it’s amazing it’s amazing it how like you said how much feel sounded like everyone in 2007 sounded like Phil if they’re logging yeah right Annie and he said that yeah now he also promoted the book was that Paper Towns Paper Towns yeah paper he promoted Paper Towns when it came out as you know he was gonna do that and what happened I didn’t know he was gonna do it and it was responsible for it being on the bestseller list the second week I mean I think the first week that it was on it was nerdfighters and then he kind of got it on for a second week just by talking about it and saying he liked it and then it held on for a third week and then it fell off and I thought that was about as good as book sales would ever be would ever be I mean that was amazing to me the idea that my book could make the New York Times bestseller list was just for any bearded son yeah I was crazy I mean I could never have imagined that I certainly never thought about that when I was writing it I mean never occurred to me that it would be a book with that kind of audience well and you pointed out in a you know an a tumblr post that a lot of people have assumed oh well this is this was this book was popular at The Fault in Our Stars because of your YouTube career but you’ve explained hey I had three out four books already out there right and they would make it to the the bestsellers list because of nerdfighteria then they would fall off in this in this one how many weeks was it at number one it’s still there yeah and how many weeks weeks you’re talking now 130 I mean insanity yeah but you say you kind of outlined the reasons why and it’s you know it’s it’s is things beyond well it’s actually kind of simple I’ll let you yeah it is things beyond there and fight area that said it never would have happened without nerdfighteria right if I hadn’t had this audience it never would have happened because the the the initial activation energy never would have been there I mean we sold 80,000 books in the first week and that was entirely because it were released primarily because of nerdfighter I mean I’d like to think that I had some people who just like my books but let’s face it not that many I mean you had you committed to signing every pre-sold yeah which turned out to be 150,000 150,000 that you signed I did and did did Hank also sign the book Hank put little Hank or fishes in 5% of them which was still a huge undertaking I mean that’s a lot of the smaller books it was it was a few hundred all 150k I did indeed and so so obviously that’s nice I don’t know how that’s possible that you actually did that I don’t believe that you did but it’s okay machine on the standard stamps I did it took two months it was really enjoyable I might do it again just because I found it so relaxing like I know this like our work can be very stressful and like on some on some level you’re never not working but when I was during those two months I was signing like people would call and I would be like I’m sorry I have to sign a hundred fifty thousand sheets of paper so I cannot I will have to talk about this later it’s a different kind of writing you know but I mean the point is yes without nerdfighteria it wouldn’t have had this huge bump before anybody could even read it right it had that initial energy but the reason that the book has hung around is I mean it’s partly that people like it it has very good Goodreads ratings much better than any of my other books so I think people have responded to it generously and then I think it’s also partly that you know this is underappreciated by us on the internet but the the IRL people worked IRL hard to sell a lot of IRL books so I think you know I had an amazing amazing and still do amazing sales team around that book and penguin just believed that they could force it down people’s throats and if they forced it down enough people’s throats that it would catch on by word of mouth and that’s what they didn’t I mean it was it it was a great book it is a great book and it’s just a confluence of everything working correctly I think that’s what you said at the beginning yes and then so now you’ve cursed I who knows how many different industry with the expectation you know people in suits and all types of industries are now expecting their thought they’re throwing you around it’s so many rooms if you if you got oh if you’ve got a website or a YouTube channel unless you’ve got yet get that DeFranco got to mention your 3 years earlier and then okay and what else in it you know it right right they will they all in Hollywood they all think it was because of my Twitter know about YouTube in Hollywood you know they’re just like man he has a lot of Twitter followers he must have told them to go to the movie and they must have gone right and I’m like wow they want to boy that down you’re right it was Twitter the inescapable truth is none of it works if it if it’s not good yeah so it also has to be authentic like yeah it you know you have to really genuinely want to talk about something and want to connect you know it can’t just be about a desire to oh like this is a way to get rich like it’s it’s at first off it’s a terrible terrible way to get rich and it’s just not if you want to get rich like go move the big pile of money around and try to make it bigger like that’s the way to get rich like this this has to be about a desire to to genuinely connect with people and to have real conversations that matter to you and if it’s not then I think it never works and it’s interesting because at this point you know if I zoned out for a second which I didn’t and came back to your statement I wouldn’t know if you were talking about which you know The Fault in Our Stars or the vlog brothers or any other any other project because that is the cornerstone of all of it is the authenticity and you know you’re not you’re not just looking to move a big pile of money around no no you have to want it you have to want to do something but I think most people do deep down I think most people I don’t think people really I think most people want to do work that matters and there’s lots and lots of ways of doing that I mean and it doesn’t it for many people it for most people it doesn’t get to be their profession you know so but I’m always you know I’m always amazed by by people who aren’t defined by their profession in the way that I am you know who just go out and do volunteer work and it’s just something that they’re very passionate about and they find a lot of fulfillment there but you have to if you’re not guided by that that you know that desire to make a difference in people’s lives and to try then I think you get off path really really quickly it’s it’s really hard to stay focused on that but if you get off that path it goes to all bad places well let me ask then I think we’ve pinpointed your passion what makes you angry astons lack of nuance in conversations that sort of that I that idea that things simply are simply aren’t or that you know whether it’s about history or or religion or all of the things that that the internet fights about if we’re not seeing it nuanced if we’re not if we’re not trying to understand another person’s narrative you mean the gray the gray areas of life all the gray spaces are really fascinating to me and I wanted that Liam Neeson movie yeah it’s a little dark in the plane he want to talk about being angry he’s very angry yeah he’s always after somebody yeah II am Neeson as he needs to get revenge so yeah I I do think that uh yeah I think I for me at least that’s the that’s the thing that makes me mad is we always counter this I mean you see it a lot on the internet I think when people people make sort of bold statements that that are easily reblog allure that or that look you know are sort of the the internet version of a bumper sticker you can’t I don’t think you can get to the I don’t think you can get to the capital T truth but via the internet version of a bumper sticker I think you have to have nuanced conversations and complex conversations about complex ideas that that that are open to the idea that you might be wrong or that you you want to have your thinking further clarified instead of coming into it you know wanting to shout the unassailable truth that you know to be true and that’s a frustration for me on the internet because I want to stay I want us to have a really high quality of discourse so like I see that a lot in in YouTube comments nerdfighteria is incredibly blessed in this respect the comments on our videos are amazing but even on crash course comments it often quickly descends into fighting about the gold standard or whatever right well it’s interesting because there is a large level of irony in the fact that you’re in very eloquent guy you speak eloquently you write eloquently your characters speak in ways that most teenagers that I know don’t speak you know and they don’t speak any in any way that is reflective of YouTube comments it’d be great to write a novel it’s okay here’s an idea for you guys maybe we could work together on this write a novel that’s just YouTube comments or you try to construct a narrative you know like it’s it’s one person is really mad we thought we’ve got an idea based on YouTube comments the audios up oh that’s easy but you know I thought about that now it’s one of the observations that my wife made as she was reading the book was that she’s liked the way they speak to each other it’s it’s almost like you’re calling people to a higher level of discourse is that intentional or is that just how you want your characters to come across or I mean I do I want them to I’m more interested in them sounding like we feel like we sound yeah we always feel like we sound pretty smart you know but then when you actually diagram the things that we say it’s completely under gravel like the sentence I’m sure it’s not a sentence in any way I hate reading my interviews you know God when people just they just write down what you say I make it into a sentence you know what I mean it’s like I’m a sixth grader in every single interviews all the time do I cut through my sentences but yeah I I I do want to I’m interested I like I like writing about people who are really openly enthusiastically engaged and not not terribly embarrassed about it and I think those people it in their best moments like do have do have conversations at least that feel that way but particularly The Fault in Our Stars I was also conscious that I was writing in this genre of the star-crossed lover and that genre is defined by it’s sort of purple prose you know like the fact that Romeo and Juliet’s first 12 lines back in four to each other form a sonnet like people don’t talk like that but it’s it’s always been part of the way that we think about kind of cursed romance so I wanted to I wanted to use it but hopefully also undercut it at times particularly in the second half of the book right well I what I wanted to ask just to get back to you and Hank so are you guys best friends what mean what the whole process over the years since Brotherhood 2.0 and it sounds like beginning your friendship yeah really why was that the beginning of your friendship and characterize it now it was the beginning of our friendship as adults on equal footing for sure or at least it was a dramatic change you know where we became really really close yeah I definitely think that I mean I have a I have a best friend in India am place who I see every day and who like you know like essentially they they co-parent our kids and we co-parent theirs and my friend Chris okay you don’t know him okay he might come to VidCon someday what is it what does he do he works he owns an interpreting company he does medical and legal interpreting it’s really cool actually he works with with a huge Burmese community in Indianapolis a lot of Burmese people settled in Indianapolis in the last 20 years and he works with that community to make sure that people you know when they’re in the hospital or whatever can have kind of high quality conversations with their doctors right providing good interpreters that’s difficult anyways I know right yeah even if you can’t speak the language I struggle with it look I lied to my doctor about how I hurt my shoulder but yeah so but Hank and I I mean Hank and I are best friends and we are well you know you can only have one oh yes there is that Hank I mean Hank is my brother we are we are super tight brothers okay we could not be closer as brothers also I think my wife is probably my best friend okay yes I could have really thrown you under the bus I’m glad you yeah so what yeah but you crawled out yeah but yeah I she lifted her third butt okay I have seven best friends now now that I think of it ya know Hank and I Hank and our so close that it doesn’t seem I mean we’re like I can’t imagine working without him I can’t imagine I wouldn’t be interested in doing things if it weren’t for collaborating with Hank is the nature of your your conversations do they are they ever like friends or is it because you’re business partners – yeah I mean we do that nice so much about conversations are just about our collaborative business endeavors and that defines our friendship but I don’t even know if that’s a I mean that there’s pitfalls associated with that but it’s not necessarily a bad thing I don’t think it’s bad I you know I need shared projects to talk to Hank about because otherwise I don’t know what to talk about and not just to him but to anyone I don’t like I’m not I don’t know I don’t know how to have like a conversation about nothing and Hank and I III think Hank doesn’t doesn’t either and so this gives us something to talk about it gives us something to do together it’s like you know if I always think it could it could have been model planes you know it could have been that I build the model planes and Hank paints them but you said model planes I’m really into the I’m I’m fascinated by people who like devote their lives to model play in their model cars or whatever like people who really are really passionate and like they get I think maybe as big as this couch yeah I know and people um other people are the planes both come home from a linear relationship they come home from work or whatever and they’ve had a long hard day at work and they think you know what I would like to do to calm down I would like to build a model plane now and I think that’s really cool and yeah so Hank and I could collaborate on model planes or whatever but like we need to collaborate on something yeah in order to stay close oh yeah there’s that we talked about it a lot there’s when you have a shared goal it’s that you’re willing to work through things that if the if the only goal was just to maintain the friendship at some point you’d be like okay well this is good this got frustrating after 30 years right right you know I mean it’s almost like a marriage yes you know it absolutely is I think you need shared projects in a marriage to like you need you need things that orient you yeah why so many people get divorced after the kids leave because it’s like you know that’s interesting well you know we’ve got this project which is to get this kid prepared for life and then they they leave and it’s like okay we need model planes now you have to have something there yeah yeah you got to take care of the the relationship as well as the relationship with your kids which can be challenging because kids it’s easy for kids to kind of take over a marriage right true so what’s the next model plane if you’ll forgive me I’m glad that I introduced that to to our conversation you know well the next thing is that we are working with the Gates Foundation to expand our crash course channel to include this thing big history where we zoom out it’s really interdisciplinary approach to studying the universe so you begin at the beginning of the universe and you go through the lives of people but but by taking a sort of zoomed out look it’s a very different world of history it includes a lot of science and a lot of astronomy and lots of you know lots of lots of time before people and then even trying to imagine a time after people what that’s going to look like with what the future looks like and that’s really cool and then we’re also I’m going I don’t think I can say where I’m going and who I’m going with I’m going on a trip far away with someone I really admire and I’m really looking forward to that as an extension of our work on global health and and poverty and will we expect like what on the backside of this yeah so videos on the back side of that videos and then also a discussion of what works in when it comes to making life making making it so that kids have healthier lives in the developing world okay so there’s Oprah a campaign as well as yeah Oprah it is Oprah I’ll be going I’ll be traveling with Oprah on Oprah’s plane okay so excited it’s gonna be nice we now know that it’s it’s it’s Stedman I mean you’ve already is I’m gonna continue to engage you you’ve already mentioned gates so maybe it’s Bill Gates himself I it’s it’s it’s not anyone as cool as Bill Gates but it’s someone really cool oh and that person is listening and their feelings are hurt right now I’m sorry person but I think we both know you’re not at school gates Oh for a second I thought he said I’m sorry Percy and I was like ah it’s Percy guy that’s sing Stand By Me Percy Jackson sledge Percy Sister Sledge he’s big philanthropist that’s why that’s why there needs to be two of you one to remember half of the joke and the other room with the other there’s a lot of that that happens well you know unfortunately because we’re at VidCon we can’t have you sign the roundtable of dim lighting but you can write on this you could write on this table and the Presidential Suite I’m signing it with my mind though my mind and then next time you’re in the Burbank area you’ve got to come in it and inside it yeah absolutely yeah this has been a great conversation thanks man thank you guys so much and I have to say also thanks for making stuff that I can be a fan of lo these many years it’s been great to watch to watch you guys make so much fascinating stuff and I really think you’re just the beginning so here’s to many more years yeah thank you thank you we’re we’re honored by that sir all right take care guys [Music] and there you have it our ear biscuit with the one and only John Green you know it’s just confirmation talking to him in the midst of all this it’s just confirmation of how great a guy he is and how down to earth he is and how well he’s obviously seizure very smart I think me and you together is it we’re about as smart as John Green like you combined us and that’s why we was it was a conversation no that’s why we didn’t like Hank be there Oh exactly like we’re gonna interview Hank we’re not separately at a later blog brothers at the same time we’re not that’s stupid yeah or we don’t we don’t want to look that student might huh yeah it’s just it’s amazing I hope you know one of the things that we want your bisque is to be in hope that it is is a place where you hear a conversation that has a different tone we talked about slightly different things and I hope that we just haven’t regurgitated and done another typical interview that a lot of people are gonna do with with John but I hope that you know I know that what I got was just some insight into the fact that yes the media may see this guy as the author of The Fault in Our Stars and he is very much that but hopefully what we’ve kind of you know revealed is that he’s so much more than that not just as a person but as an artist as a creator as a person who is just such a voice in so many ways to our generation really and he sees himself in that way and it’s refreshing he hasn’t just checked out because he’s had a huge success well the fact that it was I mean yeah we’re friends like acquaintances slash friends but we sent an email about being on air biscuits and he was like he replied and he was like yes you know it’s like I appreciated the fact that we were still able to get through to the guy and he graciously accepted our invitation it was no different he said I’m just sitting down with him this VidCon was no different than sitting down with him at last year’s VidCon right in spite of what he’s experienced and I just I personally appreciate that no I know you probably dude listening it’s great when great things happen to great people let John know what you think of this ear biscuit tweet at him it’s at real John Green his first name is actually real we didn’t talk about that that’s weird but his middle name is John and his last name is green real John Green on Twitter hashtag ear biscuits let him know what you thought also rate us on iTunes you know that’s always helpful comment on soundcloud we appreciate it yeah and keep a look out for my new book as I already mentioned about two people with cancer you know what three people with cancer screw it I’m going with three people three teenagers still teenagers a love triangle but they all have cancer and I’m really hoping that it’s really gonna do well and our shames alright guys we do this every week as you know except next week we’re taking a one-week break from your biscuits but rest assured the following week we will be back with another biscuit for your ears thanks for listening [Music] [Music]