Good morning, John! In amongst the set of amazing analytics that Alexandre Daly put together, there were some, there were a couple of actually pretty big surprises.

But the biggest one is he did an analysis to see which of us said more words per video. He did this using the transcripts on the Nerdfighteria Wiki. There are like 600 on there for each of us, then he averaged the number of words we say per video, and you said 759 words per video. And I said, on average, 759 words per video.

I don't know if this is going to seem that weird to people who aren't me, but it seems extremely weird. Like you probably don't think a ton about how we make Vlogbrothers videos, but most Vlogbrothers videos since like 2010 have been scripted.

So you write a script, and I make my scripts like around 650 words long, because I know that that's gonna make a 4 minute video. And then the script is over there and I use it as a guideline and I don't really know how many words I actually end up saying. But apparently I end up saying about 110 more words than are in the script. I did not know that, until literally today.

And it seems that you have settled on a similar strategy. I don't know what your strategy is, but I know that we're both trying to get the most information into a 4-minute long video possible, so it seems kind of likely that we'd end up with similar numbers at the end.

But exactly the same indicates more than just trying to achieve the same goal, it means that we're trying to achieve it in the same way. We've settled into a pace of speech that is exactly—nearly exactly the same.

I am entirely aware that we've built this channel together, that its content, its community, its projects, are all an amalgam of you and me, and also the people who are watching the stuff all put together. But I've still somehow, like imagined this whole time that what you do and what I do are pretty different.

As an example, when we were on the Turtles All the Way Down tour, you told me about your idea for, like, rating different facets of the human-centered world on a 5-star scale.

And I made a video called "Hank Reviews Everything," where I review traffic cones, and socks, and a half-empty bottle of Fiji water, and a thermostat in 4 minutes and then I never thought about that again.

Whereas your version of that idea was years of carefully constructed elegant podcasts, followed by a deeply introspective book that is as much comedic memoir as it is historical explanation.

I was like, "Bang, bang, bang! I'll do this idea, and I'll be done with it!" And you were like, "Let's spend some time here."

Despite what I said in my last video, we're not the same people, and I think what makes Vlogbrothers so cool is that we experience the world in very different ways, but we share a lot of values.

But this has made me realize that there's more to it than that. You and I influenced each other so much in how we create these videos that it is very true to say that neither of us created the form of the Vlogbrothers video—we did it to each other. So much so, that we say, on average, the exact—to three significant figures—the exact same number of words.

Will this video have 759 words? Almost certainly not. But you can't see reality with just one data point, and when you put all the data points together, you get a really specific story.

The way that we did this, and it was not intentional, makes it so that everything you make is also very much a thing that I made, and everything that I make is also very much a thing that you made. You can see the collective nature of this project in the data.

But John, what I thought was an idea for a 4-minute video, you thought was something a lot more than that. And it has become a deep, and peculiar, and captivating, and hilarious book. And there are things happening with it.

Some cool folks have put together The Anthropocene Reviewed dot com (https://theanthropocenereviewed.com), which allows you to take a picture with the book and a place, and also rate that place on a 5-star scale. So far it's just you and me on this site, but I imagine soon there will be more.

You're also going on a virtual book tour May 17th, 18th, 19th, and 22nd, you can pick your date based on which store you live closest to, or which guest host you'd like to see the most.

Tickets to the events come with a copy of the book, and you can either have that shipped to you, or you can pick it up at one of the partner stores. You can find out more about all of this at the links in the description.

And as I have said before but you can't say it enough, The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green comes out May 18th, and all copies will be signed. Mine is! John, I'll see you on Tuesday.