John Green Tests the Limits of YouTube

Published Jul 21, 2022, 4:05 AM

John Green is the author of The Fault in Our Stars and six other novels. He also co-founded a company that makes educational videos that have been viewed billions of times.

John's problem: How do you make videos that actually help people make it through college?

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Pushkin. What's your what's your job? When when people say say your name and your job, what do you say? I usually say that I work in educational video because that shuts down the conversation pretty quickly, or else I say that I that I write books. Depends on the context. I guess you just whatever shuts it down fastest. Most of the time, I want to try to talk about the person I'm talking to, not about myself, and so far as possible, then let me apologize to you for the next album. For the next hour, I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where entrepreneurs and engineers talk about how they're going to change the world once they solve a few problems. My guest today is John Dreen. He's the author of several novels, including The Fault in Our Star, which sold millions of copies and was made into a movie, but he has not quit his day job at the educational video company he co founded with his brother. The company is called Complexly, and among other things, the company makes a series of YouTube videos called crash Course. The videos are wildly popular. They've been viewed billions of times, but John wants complexly to do more. The problem he wants to solve is this, how do you make YouTube videos that actually help people make it through college? John's online production company, and to hear him tell it, much of his success as a novelist grew out of his desire to hang out with his brother Hank more often. They lived far apart from each other. They didn't talk much, but John told me they bonded over online video. When we started watching online video in two thousand and six, we just loved it. We loved the way that it just felt wetly different from television. It felt completely different from any other visual media. It felt wide open in exciting and terrifying ways. And you know, back then I was writing books and in my mid twenties, and Hank was running a blog called eco Geek, and watching YouTube videos together was the main point of connection for us. We didn't talk on the phone much, we weren't that close, really, but we loved these YouTube channels and these other non YouTube online video projects so much that it became, you know, the kind of the place for us to connect as brothers in adulthood. And then in December of two thousand and six, I came to Hank with the idea, well, what if we made our own YouTube channel. I make a video on Monday, You make a video on Tuesday, and we do that every weekday for all of two thousands seven. So you start doing it. Well, like, what was it? Like? How'd it go? I would say, for like the first hundred videos, for the first six months or so of the project, we had an average of four hundred viewers per video, and that sounds very small by contemporary standards, but it felt amazing to us. Okay, so you got your four hundred people. What happens next? In July of that year, Hank released a song about the Last Harry Potter Book, which is probably like the single most important thing that ever happened to us professionally and the single biggest thing in my professional life looking back at it. Because it was featured on the front page of YouTube, it got a lot of views. But more importantly than getting a lot of views, a large section of the Harry Potter fandom came into our community. And these were people with a lot of experience in how to structure fan communities, how to make message boards, how to do stuff together, and we learned so much from them, and you know, almost overnight we went from having I think two hundred and fifty YouTube subscribers to something like five thousand. And that was scary in some ways, like it was hard to know what to do with that, but it was also really invigorating and exciting. And because those people had so many deep connections in building online communities, we had a huge headstart, which eventually led to the schedule that we have now where every Tuesday I make a video addressed to Hank and every Friday he makes a video addressed to me. And you know, at this point, we've been doing that for fifteen years and it continues to really be the center of my professional life and the part of and really fundamental to everything else that we do. I mean it, it's striking that you call that the center of your professional life. Still given yeah, extraordinary success you've had writing books that you get made into movies and sell millions of copies, right, Like, that's an amazing statement. Yeah, but I don't think that those books would have been as successful without that community. First off, but more importantly to me, we are still in an ongoing learning process with them. I am always learning new strategies for being in community with people, which is I mean to me anyway, kind of the meaning of life. So it is at the center of my professional life. And obviously, like the other stuff that we do, is very very important to me, and now we have large teams of people working on lots of those things. And of course my books are very important to me. But if I think about the thing that I would would most not want to give up, I would most not want to give up the opportunity to make videos for those people every Tuesday. A few years after John and Hank started making those videos, they started hearing from school teachers. Sometimes John would send his brother a video telling him some amazing story from history. Sometimes Hank would send a video to John describing some absurdly complex detail of biology, and teachers loved it. So John and Hank decided to try to make real educational videos, a series they would end up calling crash Course. But here's the twist. They wanted to make videos that students would love. I remember, almost as a proof of concept, in twenty ten or twenty eleven, Hank made a series of videos about the circulatory system, and I made a series of videos about the French Revolution and I was trying to make videos that pointed out that the French Revolution is not dry or distant. It's wild, yeah, super wild, super wild and hyper relevant to today. And learning about the French Revolution is not something that we do because you have to jump over a series of arbitrary hurdles in order to get a piece of paper that says that you're a high school graduate. It's something that we do because it is wild, and it's actually quite fun to learn about and really instructive for understanding your place in the universe and in human history. And that's what we wanted to try to capture, that feeling that learning can be a true thrill. And so we made these series of videos, but we were again and again coming up against one the limits of our own talents, our inability to edit video with the quality that we wanted to edit it, and two the limits of our own writing capabilities, the limits of our academic expertise. And so that year, which was also the year that I was writing The Fault in Our Stars, we were really trying to find a way to make formal educational content with a small team of one or two people. But it's so hard to go from two people alone in their basements, one in Indianapolis, one in Montana, to hiring someone like I had no idea how to hire someone. I'd never done anything like that. Well, and also, I mean, you've been doing this project with your brother because it's creative and interesting and it connects you to your brother, but it's not a business. Right, And then suddenly now it seems like you're talking about something very different, which is not just a creative problem, but like a whole other set of problems are arising now, right, Yeah, just the existence of a business is a whole set of problems, seriously, Like payroll is a problem, taxes and figuring all that stuff out, like having corporate Like I remember when our dad, thank god, like our dad was like, I can help you set up the corporate by or whatever. And Hank and I read this stuff and we're like, there has to be a president. Who's going to be the president? And I would think the first or a first question you would have to answer if you're going to do that is how are we going to pay this team of people? That was indeed the first question, Yes, how did you pay a team of people? Well, when we first started out, this is ludicrous, but I wrote an advertisement in Craigslist and shout out Craigslist. Shout out Craigslist. By some extraordinary good fortune. One of the people who applied for that job as sort of a videographer and editor was Stan Muller, who's the co founder of Crash Course History and who has extensive experience in history and extensive experience in video production. But to start, I was like, Stan, can't pay you to make history videos yet. I hope we can find a way to pay you for now. The way that I'm going to pay you is that together we are going to make videos where I play the video game Fifa, and that's what is going to pay the bills. And that is basically what paid the bills for the first few months. So you made videos of you playing the video game Fifa, which assume as a soccer video game. Soccer game. Yeah, I played as a Swindon Town fourth tier of English football, and people would watch the videos of you playing the video game and you would run ads over that and you would get money from that and pay stand to make history videos, which was your true dream. Well, at the time, we weren't even yet making the history videos. I was more paying stand to try to get to a point where we could make the history videos. And then what allowed us to make the history videos eventually was support from YouTube. YouTube had a content creator fund. We got a small I guess advance you would say, because we did have to pay it back through advertising revenue. We got a small advance to actually start making Crash Course. And that was the critical moment, was them showing some faith in that idea. And by the end of twenty eleven, which was only a few weeks before the Fault in Our Stars came out, we were able to start making Crash Course videos because by then we'd hired writers, and we'd hired a team of animators, and we had the editors and videographers who we were working with closely. And so that was the beginning of Crash Course. Stan and I filmed the first episodes of Crash Course World History just a few weeks before the Fault in Our Stars came out in January of twenty twelve. And then the Fault in Our Stars was also a big deal, right and tied. It seems very much to what you were doing on YouTube. Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways, my experience of It was probably different from the outside experience of it in that I saw the success of the book as a chance for me to take a year away from writing and really focus on Crash Course, focus on trying to, you know, make educational video that would reach a lot of people and that would be able to be useful to students in form of educational settings. That is super interesting, right, I mean, I don't want to make too much of it, but like the fact that this wild best seller of a novel allows you to pursue your actual dream of making educational videos. Yeah, I mean, I want to be clear that, like, having a best selling novel was definitely also a dream of mine, and I was very It was fun that it happened, and I was very grateful for it. I don't want to sound like that, but my experience of it was that, you know, I mean, when you're a working writer, you have to publish on a schedule. Partly because of the rent and the success of the Fault in Our Stars allowed me to not have to publish on that schedule, and that in turn allowed me to really be able to focus on Crash Course full time. Today. Complexly, the company that John and his brother started to make the Crash Course videos. Has a staff of around fifty people and a multimillion dollar budget. They've made thousands of online videos that have been really successful. Now John and his colleagues that complexly are trying to solve a problem that's even harder than making educational videos that are actually fun. That's coming up after the break. That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. John and his brother Hank succeeded in making educational videos that students love. Now there's a bigger problem that they're trying to solve, or at least to help solve. Lots and lots of people start college, borrow a lot of money, and then drop out. They never finish, and the reasons they don't finish are complicated and multifaceted. And one of the things that we've had to grapple with, one of the realities that we've had to grapple with, is that this is not just a educational information problem. It's not just about the availability of information. Ten years ago, I think it was primarily about the availability of information that was the biggest problem then. The biggest problem now is much more complicated, which is that there's a lack of support. I'll give you an example of this to try to understand some of the challenges that people have when they're trying to do online college or when they're trying to do a low residency program. I took a college math course that's offered through an accredited university, and you basically have to pass this college math course in order to even get an associate's degree. Okay, and I think that I am a fairly smart person. I passed high school math. I remember most of high school math. I could not pass this college math course. I couldn't pass it if you gave me five years to pass it. And yet I think that I should be eligible for a bachelor's degree. Like I think that the bachelor's degree that I received was deserved at least on some level. So I just I want to understand, like, if this math class is the thing, is it that it's hard to learn on like I don't quite Yeah, yeah it's yet. So it's it's that it's hard to learn online. Yeah, and also that there's not a lot of support. So if I want to understand a concept in college math, and I'm taking most of the sort of online courses. Now, there's not a ton of different ways for me to learn. And what I need when I'm learning is I need like a bunch of different opportunities. I need to be able to hear lectures, but I also need to be able to read books. But I also need to be able to watch videos, and right now there isn't much of a formal structure for that. And so that's what we are interested in trying to solve. How can complexly better support the students who are going to be struggling with those early college classes that we weed out as the wrong word that proved to be needless barriers to so many people getting the education that they want and deserve and will work hard for. It's just that like they need a whole different level of support in order, like I need a whole different level of support in order to pass that college math us. So that seems big and complex and like beyond the scope of a company that makes educational videos. I think that we can be part of solving the problem. But I think that that's a great observation that we are not going to solve it on our own. I am keenly aware of the fact that we are not going to fix college by ourselves. So what are you doing? I mean, have you tried? Are you working on it? Have you made progress? We are trying, and I think we have made progress. One of the things that we've realized is that, like we are now working with Arizona State on a series of projects, and one of the things we realize very early on is that we can't just make a here's how to do college math series. We have to make a here's how to do college series, Here's how to approach college as a whole, and here are the places where you can go for support that you probably don't know about because they're not frequently shared. So you kind of have to go meta. You've been making educational videos, but you need to make videos we're not just about learning, but about learning how to learn. Yes, yeah, very much. So, so are you actually making videos now that are like whatever, goofy and fun and animated, but about like how to deal with being an online college student. We're trying, But I think you've just identified the challenge, which is, like, how do you make them goofy and fun when they are like about like here's where your advisor is. It's not as fun as the French Revolution, or it's not as funny. That is maybe the underlying problem beneath all the other problems. It's fairly straightforward to make the circulatory system and the French Revolution exciting because they are exciting. Yeah, and they are. They are central to understanding how we got to now. Knowing how to navigate the bureaucracies of large online university spaces is a little less inherently fun. Let me give you an example of one video that I've spent a lot of time trying to think about how to do. How do I make a video that's about where you get help that isn't a boring list of places where you get help, because that I think is literally unwatchable. How do you make that video fun and engaging and not listy? That is an interesting problem. Have you solved it? No at all? Yeah, it feels very listy. Still, can you make it a song? That's a good idea. I can't make it a song, that's for darn sure. But maybe maybe Hank can. He does have a history. That's a great idea. Oh, Hank is gonna I'm gonna text him. We'll see if he writes back. He probably won't. I think he's homing right now. Actually, that's a great idea, and it also reminds me of something that is a problem for me, which is that I get very stuck in how I used to do it, how it's worked for me in the past, Like how crash course history worked is just not how this can work. And so I need to maybe make the same kind of leap when we were not making vlog brothers videos anymore. Now we're making crash course videos. We're not making videos that are for each other. Now we're making videos that are for students. Maybe I need to make that same kind of leap we're not making videos Hank has replied. He says he says, no exclamation point. I was really excited for like thirty seconds. Then he says it's a good idea, which seems to be a direct conflict with NO. I think the no might might be about not like feeling like now I'm no longer twenty seven years old. I'm now forty three year old CEO, and I don't know if I want to do that, but I'm gonna make it. Oh yeah. He says. The challenge for that is making it so that it's not cringe, and you know, like you don't want it to be the like an educational rap video. That's the worst version of it. Yeah, the worst version of it is an educational rap video. And I think that Hank is concerned that it would be that the bad version of it is indeed very bad. Yes, the bad version of it is bad, and that's a high risk thing. Was there any particular example you want to give it, a thing you tried that didn't work. I mean everything I've tried so far has been fairly listy or else it's been a little cringe. Yeah, And that's another thing that's changed about the Internet over the last ten years, like the what makes young people feel like they're being talked down to or feel like they're being I guess infantilized has changed a lot over the last ten years. Yeah, and we need to reflect that. I think we've done a good job in general at Crash course of reflecting that in the ways that we've evolved our content as the you know, the needs of our audience has changed. But that's always a risk when I'm writing something because I am out of touch you are cram cringe. Yeah, like I'm super cringe like my kids, you know, are are duly horrified. After John and I talked earlier this year, he and his colleagues released a new series called How to College. A series aims to quote break down how to apply for, succeed at, and graduate from college. John still has not figured out how to make that list video though. We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Okay, let's get back to the show. We're going to close with the lightning round. There's a lightning round, John, I'm ready. Okay, what's something you watched on YouTube lately that you loved? I love watching these primitive technology videos where this guy you never see his face, but he's he just smelted iron for the first time. So it started out just kind of building structures, and then he made a kill and so he could have some pottery, and now he's made iron, so he's entered the iron age, which is very exciting. Okay, what is one piece of advice you'd give to somebody who is trying to solve a hard problem. Listen, Listen, listen, listen to the people who you are trying to solve the problem for very good. I don't think we do enough listening. What's your favorite app on your phone? The app I use the most is the I Follow app, which allows you to watch third tier English soccer games. And I'm a huge fan of this third t your team AFC Wimbledon, so that's the one I use the most. More than a fan. For the record, I am more than a fan, It's true. More than a fan. I am a sponsor. They AFC Wimbledon, where our logo on the liminal space between left thigh and buttock on the back of their shorts. I also own a small, small part of the team. But the great thing about AFC Wimbledon is that everybody who pays more than thirty bucks a year is an owner of the team, and everybody gets the same vote no matter how much they contribute. But not everybody gets the liminal space. That's right, Not everybody gets that coveted back of short sponsorship. If you have a ten minute break in the middle of the day, what do you do to relax. I don't have a lot of ten minute breaks. I have one ritual every day during lunch. Though for many years I've watched this YouTube series that only about fifteen thousand people watch, where this guy named Ben plays a video game called Football Manager where he manages a pretend football team, and it's basically just a spreadsheet, but I'm deeply, deeply invested in it, and it is something I spend the entire morning looking forward to and the entire afternoon feeling in the warm glow of wow. And it's also a reminder to me that there are lots of those little communities, well I mean little, fifteen thousand people isn't little, But there are lots of those communities on YouTube, lots of pockets of places that almost everyone doesn't know about, but where for a lot of people there's a deep feeling of connection and contentedness. If you were to imagine a conversation between yourself now and yourself in whatever it was twenty ten, when you're trying to figure how to pay one guy to make videos about the French Revolution? What do you know now that you wish you to the end? What do you think you ten years ago could tell you now? I don't know how does that conversation go. It would be very interesting to have a conversation with my two ten self. I feel like I would tell him the most important thing you are going to do is hire that first person and so be very thoughtful about who that person is. And then there would be some stuff that I would try to tell him about celebrity and about being famous, and I would want to I would probably want to prepare him for that a little bit, because I definitely did not feel prepared, like I thought that. I mean, I never know how to talk about this stuff because I don't want to sound ungrateful. And I am so so grateful that my books have reached such a wide audience. But the process through which you know, someone becomes famous is kind of like a somewhat dehumanizing process, Like people don't think of you as being a full person, and so like there is there is something about being famous that is that is a little uh destabilizing, I guess for at least for me, for my sense of self. And so during that period where my work was like fairly close to the center of pop culture, which was a very brief period, it was weird, and I would want to like get him ready for that. As for what my two ten self would say to me, now, that is a really interesting question that I have never thought about. My two thousand and ten self would never have any idea that you know, my books would become so popular, and so I think he would be like, well, why are you still working? Why are you still working? I love the work that I do and it gives meaning to my life, and if if I don't work, I feel very adrift. So I don't know what the point of life is. I don't know what the point of a human life is. But I know that my life feels pretty empty when I'm not writing. And I mean because most of what I do is writing, even if it's writing a crash course or I'm still I'm still writing. And so my life when I don't write feels pretty not good. So that's what I would tell my two thousand and ten self is just like, we gotta do this man. John Green works in educational video. Today's show was produced by Edith Ruslow, engineered by Amanda kay Wong, and edited by Robert Smith. Special thanks to Kate Parkinson Morgan for her help on this episode. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem

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