(0:00) Good morning. It is Monday, April 18th. The 18th day of me vlogging everyday in April. 

(0:04) A lot of people have asked me in the past few weeks why I haven't announced this channel on Vlogbrothers, and I didn't really know the answer to that, so I decided to think about it a little bit. 

(0:15) There are a few reasons:

(0:16) One, I think that John might actually be like, afraid that I'm the member of the band who is going off to have a solo career, which is ridiculous. But in order to appease him so that he isn't afraid that I am trying to go off and do my own thing and abandoning him to be all alone, without his brother, which I would hate for him to be thinking. I didn't want to drag a bunch of people over here who might be the most hard-corest of Nerdfighters and might get a little bit overdosed on the Green. 'Cause that, I don't think that would be good for Vlogbrothers and I don't think that it would be good for our brotherhood either.

(0:49) But the bigger reason, number two: is that I really like the size of this, right now. I like the size of it, and I like the quality of it. We're at about thirty-five hundred subscribers right now on Hankschannel, which is showing a very modest amount of growth, which I like.

(1:05) What is great about that modest amount of growth is that when I ask questions I can go through and read every single comment on the video and respond to the ones that I am particularly interested in responding to. Which is a lot of them! Because you guys are very thoughtful and interested and don't leave, you know, four word comments, you leave like, whole paragraphs, in which you say interesting things and answer my questions in interesting ways and make me think about the things that I'm thinking about more deeply and more complexly. Which is really great. And I wouldn't want it any other way, so I'm not saying that you shouldn't, you know, tell your friends, or if there's something good that you shouldn't share the video. My goal here isn't to get a huge amount of people watching these videos. My goal here is to be able to talk to people who I think are interesting and are interested in what I have to say.

(1:54) YouTube is very weird, the way that we conceptualize ourselves and the people that we watch on YouTube is very strange. We're used to the people on our screens being famous people, and being unattainably something. Whether it's unattainably beautiful, or unattainably wealthy, or unattainably interesting. The thing about YouTube is that we are none of those things. I am not unattainably beautiful, I am not unattainably wealthy, I am not even unattainably interesting. And so that is very good, in the beginning stages. Very good way of helping to create a community where people see themselves as equals, and so people can actually work together and actually have a stake in what's being talked about and what's being created via the community. 

(2:32) At Vlogbrothers now we have two hundred thousand-ish subscribers, and that is a heck of a lot of people. And when every single video is getting watched by a hundred thousand people, it's hard to feel like you're a part of a community. Because there a hundred thousand other folks. A hundred thousand people is too many for a real like, sort of, discussive community to come about. And I don't think that discussive is a word, but hopefully you get what I mean.

(2:54) So what I like about this place, is that it can still be a discussive community where all of us can hang out and talk and feel like everyone is being a part of the conversation. And when I see the screen names below, I can know who you people are. So I can tell that it's sort of the cream of Nerdfighteria going on down here. Ooh. I'm not going to put that in. Am I? Can I? Could I put that in? See, I wouldn't put that in, in a normal Vlogbrothers video. But I'm going to leave it in here because I feel like it's okay. The cream of Nerdfighteria. In my pants. No.

(3:24) That's all. Now, I'm going to go make a Vlogbrothers video, that is much larger and more intentioned and more, sort of, explicit and written. There's a script. There's stuff. There's effects. It's fascinating and gigantic and I want people to think about it and talk about it, but it's not the same kind of just me being me anymore. And that's kind of what's happened with Vlogbrothers, because it's too big to just talk. To not be, you know, focused on a cool idea and making something that's really--you know, we can do that sometimes but we certainly can't do it five days a week. So that's why I really like this place, and hopefully John is understanding of that. And doesn't think that I'm trying to go off on my own and become a solo star. 

(4:09) Speaking of all of this, there has been a lot of great comments on my last few videos and hopefully on tomorrow, I will talk about some of the ideas that have been spurred in my head because of those comments. So thank you all, and I will see you tomorrow.