The Exchanges

Q So there's this thing, YouTube, and there were clearly people who were kind of starting to experiment with this and doing all these weird These weird things. Um, tell me a little bit about this idea that, that you had, John, to start playing around with YouTube and communicating with your brother over it. What was that about?

A Well, I think I wanted to be closer to Hank. I think that was the biggest thing. We lived on different sides of the country, but also we never talked on the phone. We only communicated over instant messenger, and I felt like I didn't know him that well, and that felt like a big hole in my life. But then also, we were both really interested in online video and the way that online video was being used as a path into building community. And so we would have these conversations on Instant Messenger about how much we loved the show with Zay Frank, or how much we loved Lonely Girl 15, and how interesting it was, and how new and different and thrilling it felt. And then one day those conversations just transitioned to us saying, well, we could do that. Why don't we try something like that?

AI assessment note: “I think I wanted to be closer to Hank. I think that was the biggest”

Q I mean, that was amazing, but you already felt that early on?

A I felt it for, I think, two reasons. One is that my big brother thought it was a big deal, and so whatever John thinks is a big deal, even today, I'm like, he's right. I don't have to think about that. The other thing was that, you know, I watched cable happen, and then this was gonna be so much bigger than that, so much more ability for the barriers to be very, very low, and the gatekeepers to just not exist anymore. Yeah. My feeling when I was watching YouTube in 2006, watching early online video projects, was this isn't something that was made for me, this is something that is being made with me. It is aware of me. It is responding to my presence and to the presence of the audience in really interesting, innovative ways.

AI assessment note: “I felt it for, I think, two reasons.”

Q and this sort of foreshadows what both of you would kind of focus on later on professionally, but were you, um, More of a science kid, because I know, John, you have talked about not being good at math, not being good at science, not, generally not being a great student, but Hank, did you, like, was science a thing that you just kind of gravitated towards as a kid?

A Yeah, yeah, even quite young, uh, and I, I expressed that interest early on, and my dad would, like, take me out on field visits in the Nature Conservancy, like, work that he was doing, and I'd get to see, like, the, you know, normal, boring work of science, but what it emphasized is that it's a job that normal people have. You know, I remember doing a science fair project, and it was just a very boring catalog of the species that lived in a waterway that connected two lakes, and it did not get a single award among the dozens of different awards they had created so that the maximum number of kids could get something. No one thought that this was interesting research. Are you still bitter?

AI assessment note: “Yeah, yeah, even quite young, uh, and I, I expressed that interest early on”

Q I've read a little bit about your time there. I mean, you've described it as a, a very sad period in your life. I mean, being around sick kids, I can't imagine what that was like. Were, were the kids there, you know, were, were mostly kids are gonna be okay, or, or, or a lot of them gonna die?

A A lot of them were gonna, were gonna die, and a lot of them did, did die while I was their chaplain, and I'm not the main character of that story. You know, the, the people who were in those rooms who were at the center of that horror and, and suffering were not me. But even so, it was really difficult. I was really young. I certainly had never encountered so much death, so much unjust death. Um, And, you know, like a lot of young people who read a lot of theology, I had a lot of, I guess, like, somewhat sophisticated ways of making sense of suffering, and how do we solve this problem of a good and loving God who, who allows such unjust suffering to occur in this world, and then when I was faced with the reality of it, it was very different and much harder for me to reconcile. And then I entered a very long period where I just, I was only very tangentially connected in any way to my religious tradition. And so I, I set out on a, on a different path.

AI assessment note: “A lot of them were gonna, were gonna die, and a lot of them did”

Q I wonder what you think of where the creator economy has, has come to now. When you see these YouTubers who are making tens of millions of dollars on challenges or playing video games, unboxing videos, opening toys, what do you think about that?

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

AI assessment note: “if they're creating that much economic value and they're capturing some portion of it”

Q Yeah. That's a job, by the way, that doesn't, I don't think it exists anymore, right?

A Well, I was very aware of the fact that they were one barcode scanner away from automating my job the entire time I was there. Obviously, it would not have been a great job for 50 years, but It was an amazing job for that period of my life for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it was very meditative, especially coming from the children's hospital. Like, I'm an extremely anxious person, but when you start working at a magazine after working as a chaplain at a children's hospital, it's pretty hard to get excited about any of the stuff that's happening, right? Like, what's gonna happen? The magazine won't come out? Oh, no. This is okay. It was such an awesome place to work. I've had a stupidly lucky professional life, but the greatest professional luck of my life other than being Hank Green's brother is getting that job.

AI assessment note: “they were one barcode scanner away from automating my job the entire time”