Good morning John. Hey, look! It's Portland, Oregon, outside that window, also in this hotel room, I guess? I mean, what is space? I'm up in the air, fourteen stories, and inside of a hotel room that is owned by, I assume, a hotel chain. But am I even in any of those places? Am I not just in the space between my neurons? Is that Portland? Is that area between my neurons Portland just because I am within the boundaries of the city of Portland, Oregon? Ugh.

As you might be able to tell just by the conversation I just had with you I've been hanging out with the creators of Welcome to Night Vale, Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor. Their book just came out, debuted number four on the New York Times best-seller list, number four because Nicholas Sparks, J. K. Rowling, and John Grisham all came out with new books this week. Bad week to try and get to number one.

I was with Jeffery and Joseph when they got the news that they were number four on the New York Times best-seller list, and that was a great experience for me not only because the Chinese crêpes from the Portland food cart we were eating were amazing, but also because it was good to see that happen to a person.

I'm feeling very thankful right now. I'm feeling thankful for, like, three or four things. Just great comments on the last couple videos that we've made. Remarkable how well-received my Benghazi video was. I got lots of hate, just to be clear, but, like, the like-to-dislike-ratio was amazing, which makes me feel like there's a lot of interest in this kind of content. I mean, it doesn't go super viral. Let's be honest: if my video was about getting riled up and angry about one or the other side, how wrong they were, how evil they were, how they were trying to destroy America - and this is literally the rhetoric that people use in these conversations - it would have gotten more views.
It would have made people want to stand up on the mountain tops and shout to their people and it would have gotten more than 300,000 views.

But! 300,000 views, it's a tremendous amount it's the kind of influence that high-school or college Hank could only have ever dreamed of having! So, what is the goal? What is the important thing here? That we use the platform we have to get more views? To grow a bigger platform, and then we use that platform to grow a bigger platform and then that bigger platform we can then use to grow a bigger platform? Is that the only goal?

At a certain point you have to say that, like, doing things that you know, as a person, are bad for individual people and culture as a whole are not worth doing just to get a bigger audience, and instead you use the platform you have, and God am I grateful to have this platform, to do something you think is good. And I think making content that removes the charge, that removes the fear, of the other fifty percent of Americans from the political discourse, that would be extremely valuable.

I also wanna say thanks to all the people who left really positive, constructive, fascinating comments on John's YouTube Red video. I just installed YouTube Red, I love, I'm just, like, digging not having advertisements. There's the thirty day free trial, signed up for it, and it's - it's a dream, honestly. It's just me and my subscriptions. It's nice, I get what all those people who have ad-blockers installed, I understand why you do it. I've never done it because it's literally how I pay my employees so I would feel a little bad about that, but I totally understand.

At the moment, John, I'm just, I'm inspired to do things that I thing are cool, are interesting that I think people would like. That's really, I guess that's all we've ever wanted to do. And we get to do it. We're so lucky.

Thanks, everybody. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

I ate a whole lot of pizza before I made this video. I do not feel great. I feel less than great.