Good morning John. A month and a half ago I got on a plane and flew to Los Angeles, California.

First stop off of the plane: In-N-Out Burger. My cashier was a fan of SciShow! Second stop: my hotel, where I was asked by the check-in person whether or not I was there to party. Seeing no sign that I was here to party, I assumed he was joking. So I said something to the effect of like "Duh, what part of this package with the baggy eyes and the nerd... thirty-four year old dirty T-shirt-wearing guy makes you think that I'm not 100% turning down for what?" But it turned out he was not joking, because he then told me twenty different parties that were happening within a block and the dress codes for those, which I had no way of achieving.

Turned out I was not just in Los Angeles, John; I was in Hollywood. Staying at the Roosevelt Hotel. Advertised on Google Maps as having a celeb-friendly nightclub and pool. I don't know what that means.

It was a secret why I was in LA, and that annoyed me because so many interesting and weird things happened, and the whole point of being a video blogger is that when weird things happen to you, you get to share them. But now, I CAN share the reason I was in Los Angeles.

I was there as part of this thing where YouTube is promoting YouTube channels. They were taking pictures and videos of me and Michael Aranda and Caitlin Hofmeister for the SciShow promotion, print advertisement and television advertisement campaigns, which are now a thing in the real world all over the place: in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in New York, and on television, during the Walking Dead premiere, during the Big Bang Theory, during Late Night with Jimmy Fallon...

The Walking Dead premiere was viewed by seventeen million people, and all the people that didn't TiVo through the advertisements saw ME. What did they think? What did they think about? Probably not much. Usually when you see an advertisement, you're like uhhaouwjevba. Hopefully, I subconsciously influenced them into thinking that science is still cool and that they are still curious about the world, no matter what zombie pandemic is on the way.

Here's the thing about Walking Dead zombies: they've been dead forever, and they're not eating anything; there's not enough humans left to create fuel for them, but somehow they are magically able to continue moving. What powers them - are they photosynthetic?! Maybe they're somehow tapped into dark energy and that's powering them. If we could end the zombie apocalypse and capture some of them and put them, like, in hamster wheels with like a brain on the other side of the wheel and they could just climb after it forever, it would be infinite free power! We could go from the zombie apocalypse to a complete utopia! I'm just sayin'!

Anyway, how I feel about being on TV and on the side of buses and subway cars is that I don't know how I feel. A big piece of me understands that this is a big deal, and it searches the rest of the me for the thing that I'm feeling about it, and it is unable to find a feeling.

The disconnected for me thoughts are like: is this good for SciShow? And I hope it is because I think that more SciShow is better for the world, because we really do need to be a more scientifically literate society, and I think that SciShow does a fairly good job of that as compared to television science stuff. And then another piece of me is: are these campaigns in general, it's more than just SciShow, good for online video as a thing?

The goal of the campaign isn't about SciShow; it's about making YouTube seem like a legitimate place to spend your time as a viewer, and as a legitimate place for advertisers to spend their money. It's about welcoming far more people and also more money into this medium than has ever been here before.

And I'm a little ambivalent about that because as the YouTube community becomes so big and multifaceted that it breaks from that singular YouTube community into plural YouTube communities, YouTube, as a thing, is a little bit less special if it's mainstream.

Which is why I'm so extremely happy that Vlogbrothers is way too weird to ever be actually mainstream! And we are dedicated to that! We will not allow Vlogbrothers to be unweird enough for it to be mainstream! THIS HAS TO BE WEIRD!

I just grabbed you right by the neck, there. THE PIZZA JOHN HAS TO HUMP THE PUPPY SIZED ELEPHANT WHILE SWOODILYPOOPING IN AGLOE, NEW YORK! DEATH TO PENNIES, JOHN! I'll see you on Tuesday.