I studied environmental studies with a focus on non-fiction writing. Part of that program I started this blog called EcoGeek which was my response to being constantly told in the environmental studies program that humans were destroying the planet and would and it would be terrible and... freak out. And that was sort of my, like, intro into, like, creating content for the internet and also sort of running an internet business.

2007, uh, was when Vlogbrothers started and I was still doing EcoGeek, that was still my full-time job. But it was also the time when sort of the wave of, like, Al Gore/inconvenient truth/Katrina environmentalism was finally crashing and so EcoGeek became less sustainable so the income for Hank Green plummeted that year. But it was OK because Vlogbrothers was so fun and I sort of believed intrinsically, despite all the evidence, that YouTube was a really big deal and I wanted to put all of my self and my energy into this thing.

I think really what it was is that, like, the distribution walls had come down and we could create video content and, like, get it viewed in ways that had never been possible before. I believed very early on that online video was a huge, important cultural thing and I think that that was not prescience or, like, intelligence. I think it was just me being weird and, like, glomming onto something 'cause I thought, like, "Ah, this is cool! It's so weird!"

So we didn't have a plan when we started at all. We wanted to make whatever people would watch and people would find interesting and that, like, felt not gross to us basically.

So, like, when you're making a video everyday sometimes you're not gonna have an idea and you're like "I have no idea what I'm gonna do" so sometimes I'd sing a song about Helen Hunt.

"Helen Hunt, Helen Hunt,
You make my heart do acrobatic stunts"

Sometimes John would make a video about the French Revolution and we were good at those videos. And when YouTube came to us and said "If we gave you some money to make something that's, like, you know, next level, what is that and what would you make?" And John and I talked about it and we had, like, a thousand ideas. What we came to was, like, "Well what's the thing we're good at and that, like, is good for the world?" And so educational content seemed to be the most logical thing to do and so we pitched them two ideas, Crash Course and SciShow, Crash Course being focused on educating people, like, straight up high school and college level stuff to help kids who are in school and SciShow being sort of just more like "Science is awesome! The world is fascinating. Let's talk about it."

So it turned out much better than I feel like it should have. And then there's seven years of making online video. That's a whole other story. So, that's my whole life.