Good morning, John. I have a theory that the acquisition cost or the evaluation of a social media platform has nothing to do with the amount of money that it can or could make. It has to do with the purchase of human lives. Like, you and me. Ah- Us. They're buying us. There's a mysterious magic when it comes to how to value a company. They say that Twitter, for example, is worth $10 billion, which doesn't seem to make much sense to me because it doesn't do anything. Most industries have set ways of determining how to value a company, and that involves like its assets, like if it owns buildings, and its liabilities, and its profit, and its revenue. The basic place to start is either 10 times profit or 3 times revenue. Tumblr made $15 million last year, and it sold for $1.1 billion dollars. That's like a 75 times revenue! And it made- didn't have any profit! Instagram sold for a billion dollars, and it has literally never made money. So they're buying something else. They're not buying the revenue, or even the potential revenue. What is being valued there is the user, the person who spends time on the site. Again, us. Like, us as people. I do not spend money on Facebook or Instagram or tumblr. I spend time on those things. Lots of time. And what am I- what are we if not just a collection of hours and minutes and years and decades spent doing stuff? And for Google and Microsoft and Yahoo! and Apple and others to be engaged in a high-priced bidding war for the stuff that makes up my life is a little weird and worrying. It's not worrying because I feel like we shouldn't be spending time doing those things, you could spend time doing whatever you want. It worries me because big companies are run by smart people who are supposedly savvy and know what they're doing. They seem so be imagining a future where it is extraordinarily valuable to be the lens through which I see the world, and the ways in which that becomes monetarily valuable freak me out. It's weird that we've moved into this world where we value the platform on which things are built much more than we value the things that are built with them. It's like buying concrete and saying, "This concrete, nothing would be possible without it! Let's purchase the concrete for lots of money!" and then ignoring the fact that, like, you're creating things that have actual value with the concrete. "Who needs that? The stuff will get built as long as you provide the concrete! The concrete's where the real value is." I prefer creating businesses based on real money and creations that actually exist and do things for people. Having real relationships and real fun seems to be working OK for us here in Nerdfighteria, well enough that we're hiring! If you wanna be a part of a team that's changing the world and you're an amazing graphic designer and you can design anything from motion graphics to socks, we are interested in talking to you. There is a link in the description. John and I understand pretty deeply that our only asset is you [points to the viewer]. You [points again]. Without you, we could not do Sanditon, or DFTBA Records, or CrashCourse, or SciShow, or, God forbid, even 2-D glasses! That's why we don't have pre-rolls on vlogbrothers, that's why it's never gotten old working our butts off making content and new things because we feel deeply indebted to you. I think that's the way to create an interesting, sustainable business: not by treating your users like hours to be monetized, but by treating them like people who you need. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.