I wanted to talk about failure.

So, that's a good start. There have been a number of times in my professional career where I have failed at things.

The most spectacular of them, I mean, it's hard to say. You're always on a spectrum of failure, but I think probably the thing that I am most frustrated by is Wizard School. Which was a game - is a game - that I developed with a friend of mine with art by Karen Hallion who's AMAZING and she did such an amazing job.

I was working with Eric who has developed games before, both in terms of like developing games that are fun to play and also getting them made and distributed and meeting deadlines. And I'm just, I never missed a deadline like that one. "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries," we had some serious missed deadlines with the DVDs.

It has turned me off doing anything in that world heavily. And I feel very bad. We finally have the Wizard School Expanded Set, it's actually sitting over here, the cards are.

Part of why this took so long is that we developed new game mechanics that hopefully, for people who are dedicated to playing this game, make it a little easier to play, a little faster to play. There's like a summer school kind of, is the idea of it. There's like a summer time - there's summertime cards, like Imposter Syndrome and Ecology Camp.

This is all part of the Hank's Dirty Little Secrets pack, so it's got a bunch of cards that are somewhat specific to my highschool experience. Which I now realize was a very long time ago. There's a Spice Goats card.

The fact - it took a huge amount of time to do that. Part of that was in my camp. Just writing the cards took longer than I expected.

Part of it was game development, and then a huge part of it was manufacturing, which—printing cards is a known quantity, people—it should not have been as hard as it was. But it was hugely difficult and I apologize so much to all of the people who waited so long for this. It's been literal years, and you know I was holding up the cards just now, this does not look like years of work. And so I consider it to be a failure. And it also, like the game itself is hard to play, like the rules are quite complicated, and you have to be pretty into the game to play it. We should have developed something that was simpler and more easy to play right out of the box and less like scratching your head about what phase of the turn you’re in. And so I feel like that was a big, big mess up. It was a thing that we made, that we did, that financially at this point it's in the red. Luckily, that's not a huge problem for DFTBA games, like we can figure that out and get everybody the things they need and offer up refunds to everybody who wants refunds, which we've done. If you are curious about that you could check Kickstarter if you are a backer and you were like “Oh! I didn't know refunds were available.” Go check out the Kickstarter. But we will soon be sending stuff out that's like “Fill this stuff out if your address has changed and we're gonna send you the thing we said we were gonna send you years ago”. And it's been sitting on my brain for all that time feeling like I'm letting people down, and so like the only thing to do was to, you know, try and yell at people who were being slow, and maybe I should have done that more and better.

But I also, like, part of my, I don't know, half-time superpower, half-time greatest weakness is, like, I'm never doing one thing at a time, and so there's always something else to focus on. Like, literally right now I should probably be working on PodCon.

I definitely don't think of these things in terms of failure happens when you never get out of the red, I feel like failure happens when you let people down. If suddenly we had to like lay off a bunch of people from our company, that would feel like a pretty big failure. Or if I had invested all of everything into something and that hadn't succeeded and then I was destitute, that would feel like a failure. If I was gunning for some kind of - ultimately, I think this is like what is the biggest failure, what feels like the biggest failure is when it's the opposite of what you imagined as the biggest success. And so there isn't any projects I've ever done that the goal was to build a billion-dollar company and so when they don't make money, it's not like the big failure that I didn't make a billion-dollar company. Ultimately, I'm trying to make stuff that makes people happy, and so the failure is when it makes them sad.

Even with little things sometimes that happens. Inevitably, in events, you will make people sad because you can't invite certain creators to events and that's going to frustrate them and make them feel underappreciated and, inevitably, you know, you put something in the wrong room and 1,000 people wanna go to it, but it's a 500-person room and you just estimated incorrectly or you weren't able to shift it in time and then there's 500 people who feel really let down and that also feels like a failure.

The money side of things is all about sustainability of the product, whether it can continue to exist. And so I do sometimes have people  ask me, like, "When do you consider a thing a success?"

Ultimately, a thing is not successful until it is economically sustainable, but it isn't a failure because it's not economically sustainable. Because something ends I don't see that as "because it failed." Maybe I should, maybe that would be the correct syntax, that might be the correct use of the English language. But so, maybe I would say that it failed, I just don't internalise that as a failure. To me, that seems like a risk that was taken. It's like, you know, trying a dance move and you fall down, like, okay, you might've looked super cool, but it turned out you didn't look super cool, but like you have to fall down sometimes in order to have other dance moves that look good. This example... That's what I came up with!

Having a non-successful business, that's like, you try things and sometimes it doesn't work. For example, we will soon be sending out - to the people who bought Truth or Fail packages - we'll be sending out the ones that we've made and refunding them the money for those because Truth or Fail did not catch on, and I think for a lot of interesting reasons, but ultimately like the only way in which I feel that Truth or Fail was- So this is, if you are not aware, Truth or Fail was a trivia game that we were trying to get to sell to student unions, pubs, libraries and just like have an easy, accessible trivia game that people could play and come together into a physical space and it would have a video version and just a slideshow hosted version. And I like this idea, I think it's a great idea and I just don't think that we have the ability to like grab the market by its lapels and be like, "Here, here, I got this product for you!" I don't know, I just don't have the expertise in that kind of sales.

I still think it's a great idea, and the only way I feel that it is a failure is like the amount of time that people put into it, and of course, people were paid for that time. But, like, they were working on a really cool project, they had, like, they made really great stuff that isn't going to become, like, you know, that isn't going to become a sustainable thing that they will get to continue to do. And I think that everybody working on the project was excited about working on the project, even though they were working really hard. And also like probably putting in extra hours to make this thing a thing. And ultimately it's on my shoulders that I didn't foresee the market correctly for this product. Or maybe didn't do enough market research. But, anyway, so like I feel bad for the people who worked on it. I don't feel bad that it wasn't successful. I just, I feel bad that, like, you know, a lot of people's great creative energy went into a thing that it now going to have to find other ways to come out into the world, and those things will come out in the world in various ways. But who knows? I feel like I've been trying to make Truth or Fail work for a decade. I think it's been eight years—well, more than that, like nine. Maybe nine years since I've been, uh... I mean and Truth or Fail did work once upon a time. If you know what that is, good for you. I'm not going to explain the original Truth or Fail. And then Truth or Fail is also a segment on SciShow Tangents, so it has its life there as well.

The failure of Wizard School is definitely weighs on me more heavily because that failure is like letting down a lot of people who trusted me to make a great product. And, one, the product isn't that good. If you are a dedicated, hardcore Wizard School player, I want to give you the biggest high five of all time, because I think there is fun to be had in this game.

But I particularly think that it's beautiful. Like, the color scheme is so good, and the art is so... Karen did such a great job, and the artist, the designer who did the card layouts, did a great job. 

And I know a lot of people feel let down. I know most people feel like, "Oh, that thing still exists." But for the people who do feel like, you know, they got let down by me and I kind of can't trust me as much anymore, like that's huge for me. What I want to do less is rely on, like, this, like, community of people who, you know, who trust me, because that is too valuable to be leveraging, you know? Especially when, like, Wizard School, I might let them down and, like, you know, sour that relationship.

Ultimately, my hope is that the value that people get from Vlogbrothers, or from SciShow, or from Crash Course, is in part due to, like, you know, some kind of connection and, like, trust. Understanding that, like, I want nothing more than to, like, make life better for other people. And if there is a perception that, like, "Oh, this was all built in order to sell card games or, you know, tickets to events or something," then like, you know, you start to wonder if any of it was ever real. And then, like, that like... if you, like, destroy someone's faith in something that they really believe in, that's terrible.

And that's why it pisses me off so much when, like, YouTube creators, like, fucking sell their audiences on gambling sites when their audiences are fucking TWEEEEEEEELVE! I'm fine. Fucking, YouTube, man, this place is fucking wild. Like, it's interesting for me to analyze the parts of it that get me the worst. That, like, it's not so much losing money. I've done bunch of different things that have lost money,

that, like, you know, cost a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars and made like a hundred and fifty or a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. And, like, that's a sting for sure, and that's usually within the context of a larger budget. So, like, there is money to take these risks with, you know? Those losses are very educational, usually. And so, there's been plenty of times when we've, especially in the conference world, tried to make something work that didn't work and lost money.

I've never had to go bankrupt, ever had to do a bankruptcy filing, so that's good. But in business, like, you try new initiatives all the time and and some of them, you know, you spend a lot of money on something that's not, that turns out to not be something that's gonna turn into revenue. To me, if you have a 50% chance of making, like, creating a new, sustainable thing, you've got, you just got to do it. Because, like, one, you've got the chance that it will become sustainable, and two, even if it doesn't, you will have gained value from that experience. You will have learned, you will have managed, you will have, you know, you will know new people, you will know new things about the world that are going to come in handy at other points in life. And unless, like, there's a better place to spend the money, which there very well might be, then, like, that's the threshold for me. Like, it's not, I don't need a 90% chance of success. I need, I need like a 50% chance of success. Though, I will say, Rolf is an amazing game, and I love playing Rolf, and that has another DFTBA Games game developed with a different person, and I love it, and we do have lots of copies of that at the DFTBA warehouse. So, that game, I am interested in marketing and selling in other ways, but because it's, I think it's great. I think it's just a lot of fun to play.

Truth or Fail got closed down. Probably some other things I'll do over the years are gonna stop being things after being things for a while.

ike, the fact that SciShow and Crash Course are entering their eighth year is nuts. Like, it should... Things, TV shows don't last that long, so that's great and weird and wonderful, and I'm so happy. And, like, you know, we're having our 10th VidCon in Anaheim this year, and like, total probably, I think, like, our 14th or 15th VidCon. That's not always how things go. So, I'm aware that, like, there's hits and there's misses.

Um, another miss: we have way more of these calendars than we sold, you guys, and we don't want to have to recycle all of them. So, we've just counted them to $10, and if you want an absolutely gorgeous Pizza John calendar with all these good faces on it, sometimes you miss the mark a little bit on your order estimates, and now we've got too many. So, if you want to order those, I mean, not saying we didn't sell a lot. We sold a lot! Thank you to everybody who bought one. It's all for charity, by the way. So, even if you're like, "Oh, I paid more than $10 for that," it went to charity. Don't worry about it.

But yes, we would love to have those see their usefulness played out if you are interested in that era. I'll put a link in the description. But, to backers of the Wizard School project who haven't got all of their perks yet, years later... I feel like a dick.