Good morning, John. It's the final day of Pizzamas.

This is not a complaint, but Pizzamas is a challenge. We have more demands on our time than we did in 2007 and even though we mostly clear out  our schedules during Pizzamas, stuff creeps in. It's hard to do. Especially because I always try to do like one or two really ambitious Pizzamas videos, almost as if I enjoy a challenge as long as it's achievable. But Pizzamas has been extra weird this year for me because I already haven't been working at full capacity because I've been transitioning out of cancer treatment and into recovery which is not insubstantial. Like, I should definitely be clear. I don't always feel the way that I look like I feel when I'm on a video, like, this is a challenge. And recovery is just time consuming, whether that's, like, walking for a half a mile and then for a mile and then for two miles, it just takes time. But the biggest weirdness is that, like, I'm not gonna go back to my jobs the way I had them before I got sick.

For more than 10 years, I have been the CEO of two different companies. During part of that time, I was the CEO of three different companies. And there's maybe a couple of things that you would know, uh, given that I was the CEO of three very different companies at the same time. What are those things? One: I'm a mess. I'm a mess! I'm not making great decisions, but second and more importantly, like, I'm not doing this by myself. You might have noticed that also during that period of time, I, like, wrote two novels and made a billion TikToks and spent way way way way way way too much time on Twitter. I have never in my life as a CEO been a full-time CEO. And there's disadvantages there, like, I have had many times when I have felt bad that I couldn't do all the things I felt like I needed to be able to do. What makes it possible is a bunch of people who understand and believe in the missions of the organizations and great leadership from people who are not me.  Two of my best friends: Dave, who has run DFTBA with me and Julie who has run Complexly with me. Like, where those companies are now and where they were when those people started working at them is wild.

So before I got sick, it was already becoming clear that as these--both of these companies continued to grow, it wasn't gonna be sustainable in the long term. And it wasn't an immediate need, but, like, eventually it would be and you don't want to do a big change when the need is immediate. So we started looking for a CEO, we got some great candidates, I noticed a lymph node in my armpit, we talked to some of those candidates, I got a biopsy, we interviewed more of those candidates, I was diagnosed with cancer, and by then, we actually had a pretty good idea of who we wanted to hire. But it was like the day, like, May 4th was the day I got diagnosed with cancer. I remember that 'cause it's the day before my birthday. And the next day, my birthday, I went to work and had a long meeting with the people we were working with to recruit a CEO. So before we had this big meeting where we were trying to figure it out, I had to send an email to be like, "Hey, just so you know this might--is why I'm acting weird." But everybody was great. We handled it fine. Uh, it's all part of life.

So the person we ended up hiring, LJ Joukovski, is amazing. I am so happy. Like, while LJ had family members who were certainly aware of John and I and our work, she's had a bit of a crash course in Pizza John over the last couple of months. But watching her absolutely embrace the weird has been amazing. It's weird hiring a CEO because, like, different, like, high level leaders are going to be very motivated by different things. I think it's safe to say, and I don't think LJ would mind me saying it, that she could make a lot more money at a different company. Like, DFTBA is not set up to grow super fast, to maximize revenue or profit, and, like, get to the point where you sell and everybody makes a bunch of money when you sell. So we knew that we were going to have to find somebody who is, like, more interested in interesting. You know? Like, more interested in weird. Like, I don't--like professionally don't tend to really know what I'm doing. Like, I don't have business training. I don't have goals that I'm chasing. I have, like, that looks interesting, let's go look at it. But obviously, I have a lot of my identity tied up in these companies. I care a lot about them, I care a lot about the people at them, I worry about them all the time, and I like that worry.

So letting go of leadership has been weird. Even though it's not just that I thought it was the right thing to do, I also wanted to do it, like, at least a really big part of me wanted to do it. And the thing that was like holding me back, I mean fear. Fear that it'd be, like, the wrong person that it wouldn't work out that, you know, that could be really contentious and hard. But also, like, I know that these companies are weird and special and I worry that no one else could understand their weird and specialness like I do. And really the root of it is like "What if they make a different decision than I would make?" Which, like, yeah, yeah that's that's how this is going to work and that's good because LJ knows way more than I do about a lot of things.

But also in, like, our first conversations with LJ, something she said comforted me a lot. She said, "I don't really want to take this job if you're just going to like check out and go do other stuff while I do this because part of the appeal is getting to work with you," and I mean, LJ, flattery will get you everywhere. That feels really good and I'm totally aware that like a lot of this is about feelings and it's about, like, how I imagine myself and how I want to be imagined. And that also means, of course, that I'm still very involved in DFTBA. I will probably gonna get together some kind of actual job title for me at the company eventually. But there's a ton of stuff that DFTBA is still gonna be able to do and I wanna help it do it, and like, I don't know if you know, but like, DFTBA does lots of cool weird things and it's very--it's like surprisingly big.

So meanwhile, as all of that was going on, I was getting cancer treatment and you took over as CEO at DFTBA and Complexly before LJ started and I was like, "I will start back up as CEO after I finished treatment" because I didn't understand how cancer treatment works. I thought I would finish and I'd be like, "Alright, put me back in coach!' And I would do that if I felt like I needed to, but the reality is that the recovery from cancer treatment takes time and I didn't realize that. I don't know, this is all very new to me. Reality is that Julie's been running the day-to-day at Complexly for ages anyway, and so we have promoted her to Acting CEO with the Acting being for, like, if at some point Hank comes back, uh, then Hank can come back. And obviously I'm also not leaving Complexly, like, there's so much still to do there. I think maybe we're gonna put me on some special projects and I can do smaller things, uh, but just generally stop being a giant bottleneck for the whole company because I'm either sick or just, you know, too busy talking about worms on TikTok.

The teams at both of these companies are great and I love working with them and I'm very glad that I get to continue working with them. And if there's anything I know about me, it's that I will fill the time up, like, I'm not worried about not having stuff to do. I had, like, two bizarre but not terrible business ideas during chemotherapy and then before I finished radiation, I was on stage doing cancer stand-up comedy. I have received a wildly outsized amount of support and opportunity over the years. And there are certainly ways that I have helped and enabled both of these companies, there are also ways that I have been a limitation for sure. And despite my part-time leadership and also I hope a little bit because of my part-time leadership, both of those companies have really thrived and are doing really amazing cool things in large part, honestly, because the support of this community. Like, neither of those companies or VidCon could ever have existed without this foundation to build upon. I don't know I'm just, like, really lucky, which is a weird thing to say a few months after you get cancer, but I am. Also, you should have seen Katherine's eyes when I told her that I was gonna be stepping down from executive leadership at both of these companies. Best anniversary present ever! Oh, also I told her that today was my last Pizzamas video so I could shave my mustache and she said, "You don't have to." What!?

Anyway, a thing about getting a lot of support over the years is that you understand how much support matters and you want to turn that back and support others when you can, which is why for over 10 years now, half of the advertising revenue from the vlogbrothers channel has gone to grants to small educational internet content creators. It's just a lot harder to get into this game than it used to be, so we wanna make it slightly easier in a tiny way. These grants over the years have gone to creators like Alexis Nicole, Answer in Progress, The Financial Diet, Wendover Productions, Real Engineering, uh, a little channel called Kurzgesagt got a grant the first year. If you're working on educational content on the Internet or you know somebody who is, uh, you can apply. The link is in the description to the application. It's for people who are currently making content, mostly focused on long form or short form video, and the grants aren't huge, but they can be helpful. They're usually between, like, one and three thousand dollars. Sometimes go higher than that.

And since you made it to the end of the video, do what you will with this: We ordered too many of a few things. This actually happens every year, but now we have a CEO who's actively trying trying to solve problems. And LJ is like, "We don't wanna have some of these things in the warehouse for a whole year." Like, for example, a hundred of these don't take up like a small amount of space. So we have steeply discounted a few items. They include: The rug, which is now a mere $50, Chizza John, the earrings, and the oven mitt, which I thought was going to sell great 'cause they're wonderful. All those are steeply discounted right now and since you made it to the end of the video, if you use the code "HANKSENTME," that will give you an extra $5 off on any or all of those items.

So if you would like to commit to the bit, now is the time. John, this Pizzamas has been wonderful. Thank you so much for being my brother and for being a temporary CEO and for helping and supporting me. Thank you to Drawfee for making a Pizza John shirt, I love--this is my favorite personally. Teamwork though is the top seller which is not what I predicted, I thought it was gonna be this one. Thought this was gonna be number one, this is number two. But who knows? It could still switch. There's still time, but not very much. This year's Pizza John shirts are only available for the next couple of days and then never again, that's how it works! So you have to act now.

John, I'll see ya when I see ya.