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celebrity

concept · in 61 videos (2007–2026)

Fame and its effects on the famous and on audiences; in 2008 John named 'celebrity' as the word he hates saying. Over the years the brothers called fame unfulfilling, dehumanizing and far less pleasant than it seems. John says he is not good at being properly famous, and Hank says the same of himself.

Videos by year: 2007: 3 · 2008: 1 · 2009: 4 · 2010: 1 · 2011: 1 · 2012: 3 · 2013: 1 · 2014: 3 · 2015: 5 · 2016: 1 · 2018: 4 · 2019: 4 · 2020: 8 · 2022: 3 · 2023: 1 · 2024: 8 · 2025: 3 · 2026: 7

Also known as: fame, the price of fame, being famous on the internet, famous people didn't act famous

Threads

Also named in the threads: The brothers' 20Q (20q.net) bit: the AI guesses Hank is Perez Hilton (2009) · DJ Paige Railstone: Nerdfighters invent a person to see how real she can become (2009) · The Fault in Our Stars film adaptation (2012) · An Absolutely Remarkable Thing: announcement and publication of Hank's first novel (2017) · John co-hosts a stop on Joe Biden's book tour and is struck by his listening · Vlogbrothers videos titled with Smash Mouth's All Star lyrics (2020) · Hollywood, Ending: announcement and publication of John's novel (2026)

Questions

Often together

What comes up in the same parts of the videos; the number is how many parts.

The Fault in Our Stars (film) (9) · Hollywood, Ending (4) · YouTube (12) · An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (4) · New York City (5) · perspective-taking (2) · Looking for Alaska (novel) (4) · economic inequality (2) · TikTok (3) · VidCon (4)

What the videos say

The most important statements of each year; all statements.

2007

  • 2007-04-23 · April 23rd: Celebrity — Hank: Asked to comment on reports he is on someone's free pass list, Hank notes he is apparently a celebrity, declines to comment, is fine with it, and is disappointed to rank after Brian Setzer. (playful) — 00:02:19
  • 2007-07-26 · July 26: The Price of Fame — Hank says the price of YouTube fame is comments: for every 100 views a video gets, there will be one comment. (playful) — 00:01:21
    • Hank says a few comments can be taken one by one, but 2,000 of them form a shape: a bell curve of mostly nice comments with two extremes, way too mean and way too nice. — 00:01:21
    • Hank finds the comments stressful - half seem to call him gay, half want his babies - but has tempered it by seeing that most people are very nice and supportive. (hedged) — 00:02:22
  • 2007-08-15 · August 15: Getting Featured on YouTube — Hank says the brothers should be happy with their current fame: being famous to cool people is better than being famous with everybody. — 00:03:23

2008

  • 2008-01-08 · The Return of Question Tuesdays — John: Asked what word he hates saying, John names 'celebrity': he thinks the world would be better if the word and the idea behind it ceased to exist. (hedged) — 00:01:06

2009

  • 2009-07-21 · Twenty Questions and Michael Collins — Hank reports 20Q then guessed 'John Green, author', and declares this the definition of famous: John is now officially famous. (playful) — 00:00:29
    • Hank concludes he shouldn't be upset if 20Q doesn't know him, since he hasn't been to the moon, and congratulates John on being more famous than the astronaut who stayed in the craft. (playful) — 00:02:53
  • 2009-08-06 (said on 2009-08-05, implied) · Robert Pattinson and DJ Railstone — John says the point is to find out how real made-up people can become and to remind us we are not innocent bystanders in celebrity: Pattinson has us to thank and blame for his beauty. — 00:02:47
  • 2009-10-18 · The Balloon Boy Hoax — John says the father so wanted to be a famous TV star that he faked his son's possible death, thinking, like all narcissists, that he was a genius. — 00:03:02
    • John's question of the day: since fame leads to divorce, personality disorders, head-shaving and general ass-hattery, why do people want fame and sell out values and loved ones for strangers' attention? — 00:03:02
    • John asks what incentive fame could offer if we behave as incentivized; it isn't money, since lawyers make better money than stars of TLC shows. — 00:03:31
  • 2009-10-25 · Fame: The Road Trip — John recalls his Balloon Boy video last week (week of 12 October 2009) and its question: why do people want fame despite ample evidence it is sucky and destructive? — 00:00:39
    • John says most viewer answers fell broadly into three categories. — 00:00:39
    • First category, fame lets you live after death: John says no one lives forever, since eventually no humans will remain to remember anyone. — 00:00:39
    • Second category, fame makes you rich without hard work: John is unconvinced; getting famous is peculiar but real work, and you don't get that rich. — 00:02:07
    • John thinks we are genetically coded to seek respect, not from everyone but from the people whom we respect. (hedged) — 00:02:36
    • John says we get to choose our silverback gorilla, and asks as his non-rhetorical question of the day: who's yours? — 00:03:41

2010

  • 2010-07-14 · Top 10 VIDCON MOMENTS — John says that although YouTubers are mostly introverted, nerdy people, everyone at VidCon was incredibly nice, famous people did not act famous, and the vibe was supportive and collaborative. — 00:01:51

2011

2012

2013

  • 2013-10-15 · Thoughts for Nerdfighteria — John says they realized years ago that fame is not very fulfilling, but making stuff you like with people you like is tremendously fulfilling. — 00:02:09

2014

  • 2014-02-11 · A Middle Aged Man — John feels that a relatively small number of people raise someone to celebrity, and then everyone gets to participate in relishing their downfall. (hedged) — 00:02:32
    • Without excusing anyone or calling celebrity the worst oppression, John worries that relishing celebrities' problems is bad less for them than for us. (hedged) — 00:03:05
  • 2014-04-15 · Walking the Red Carpet: Thoughts from Los Angeles — John says he loves Nerdfighteria and talking about what he cares about but does not want to be a real celebrity, which is why they always turned down TV; he went because he is proud of the TFIOS film. — 00:01:59
    • Asked how he handles the attention and whether the community will change, John wanted to shout that he was freaking out, and decided Grumpy Cat, staying cat-like and grumpy, has it figured out. (playful) — 00:02:24
  • 2014-06-06 · Thoughts from the TFiOS Premiere! — Hank thinks the long-running trend has been to hide complexity for an illusion of effortless perfection: technology in beautiful boxes, entertainment as magic show, celebrities as perfect embodiments of cool. (hedged) — 00:02:24

2015

  • 2015-04-14 · A Long Good Day — John says the red carpet is intensely, overwhelmingly strange: photographers seem to imagine you as an object they need to acquire rather than a human being. — 00:01:19
    • John says the palm trees are cool, beautiful, totally unsustainable and unnatural, much like the whole screaming machine of celebrity. — 00:03:06
    • At a restaurant later with the real, complicated people who made The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns, John kept thinking that they care for each other, especially when the cameras are off. — 00:03:14
  • 2015-05-12 · Becoming Someone Else — John says he is much more self-conscious: being recognized makes him anxious, and though grateful, he finds people photographing him from a distance weirdest. — 00:01:28
  • 2015-07-17 · Is YouTube Good for Humanity? — Hank says what used to be called fame, a word he is uncomfortable using, has started to seem really weird to him, probably because he now experiences its effects. (hedged) — 00:01:47
    • Hank says online success used to come with a community and a real creator-audience relationship, but as the culture grows that relationship feels less real, so online success looks more like traditional fame. (hedged) — 00:02:13
  • 2015-07-28 · Paper Towns, Agloe, and Touring: Thoughts from (Many) Places — John says Paper Towns is about the challenge of understanding that others are as complex as you, which is especially hard inside the publicity machine, since it commodifies everyone it touches. — 00:00:37
  • 2015-11-19 · Is Success a Bad Idea? (Pizzamas Day 9 of 10) — Hank: There isn't room in human brains for everyone to be known by many people; Hank defines fame as having your face recognised by more people than average. — 00:01:27
    • Hank contrasts success as achieving what you set out to do (the good definition) with achieving what most people cannot, which rests on scarcity: not everyone can be famous or in the top fifth of income. — 00:02:03

2016

2018

  • 2018-01-26 · I Wrote a Book. I WROTE A BOOK. How did I do that? — Hank: Another is how destructive and dehumanizing fame is. — 00:02:41
  • 2018-01-30 · Hank, I Have Some Advice — John calls it the story of one woman's ascent, or descent, into fame and punditry, and an exploration of how humans behave facing big shared challenges. — 00:01:33
  • 2018-05-11 · Looking for Alaska Movie (BUT BETTER) and YouTuber Things — Hank: After a crazy run on the platform and in the public eye, Hank thinks he came out with a stable identity and a healthy attitude, and hopes to help others deal with both getting big and not getting big. (hedged) — video description
    • Hank thinks a growing percentage of people will be able to be professional creators because of the fracturing of fame and the rise of new patronage models. (hedged) — 00:02:41
  • 2018-08-10 · My Giant Robot Suit — Hank writes that the internet can collapse the distance between people chatting among themselves and a mainstream celebrity; celebrities feel like ordinary people, so reacting to hearing terrible things is understandable, but those people see the robot suit, not the person. — video description
    • Hank says you can't have the good parts without the bad: influence, power and money come from the same suit that makes harm easy and makes you look impervious to harm. — 00:01:56
    • Hank says that as fame has fractured and more people get their own robot suits, this is important to discuss; the metaphor may help people understand this very new world. (hedged) — 00:02:48

2019

  • 2019-05-14 · An Open Letter to Professional YouTubers — John: Fifth lesson: you are a person; fans will see you as more than a person, which is intoxicating, while others will call you less than human, literal trash. — 00:02:26
  • 2019-05-21 · Keanu Reeves: A Love Letter — John says he has seen up close how the celebrity industrial complex manufactures heroic or villainous narratives, whichever pays, and is disturbed by corporations commodifying souls to sell tickets. — 00:00:00
    • What fascinates John most is Keanu's off-screen work with the press and his seeming ability to keep a sense of self while famous, which John reports is tricky. (hedged) — 00:01:27
    • John wanted fame when younger so people would like him, but when his work became known he felt people liked Mickey Mouse, not him. — 00:02:55
    • John says fame's real problem (being photographed on a park bench) comes with real opportunities: lending your voice to causes and brightening days with selfies or photobombing weddings. — 00:02:55
  • 2019-06-11 · Why I Haven't Written a New Book — John says that with a lot of success it can feel like everyone has to develop an opinion of your work, even people not familiar with or interested in it. — 00:01:14
    • John says making something people like, or dislike so much they define themselves against it, can be pretty destabilizing. — 00:01:36
  • 2019-07-16 · star struck — John: At 41 John still gets starstruck: around people he admires he talks too much, feels nervous, and afterwards concludes he made a fool of himself. — 00:00:00
    • John says part of what Hank explored so beautifully in An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is how weird fame is. — 00:00:29
    • Fame is relative: Hank would probably act calm with Firmino, not from immunity but because to him Firmino isn't that famous, while John knows even his dentist's name. (hedged) — 00:00:29
    • In a grocery store cereal aisle a young person started screaming; John looked around in panic for the emergency before realizing he was the emergency. (playful) — 00:00:58
    • Being recognized is inherently weird: the fan saw John Green, but John was experiencing himself as a middle-aged Indianapolis dad seeking the least sugary cereal his kids would eat. — 00:01:27

2020

  • 2020-01-03 (said on 2020-01-02, implied) · Re-Thinking our YouTube Channel — Hank says the channel is personality-based, and having too many people hold opinions about your personality turns out not to be great. — 00:02:45
  • 2020-05-19 · Didn't Make Sense Not to Live for Fun — John thinks All Star might be a song about celebrity by people who didn't not want fame, which isn't quite wanting it; if so, its lyric is a great double negative. (hedged) — 00:03:24
  • 2020-05-29 · Get Paid — Hank describes the old model: a star builds a career, audiences gain affinity and see movies because the star is in them, as Chris Pratt went from Parks and Rec to Peter Quill to Jurassic World. — 00:00:00
    • Hank calls the star model fine: it may crowd out other actors, but it is how things work, everyone does what they want, and a familiar face is a nice door into a movie. — 00:00:46
    • Hank says Quibi misunderstands celebrity: a star may inform which movie people see, but people won't follow a celebrity to a new platform because they don't care much about celebrities. — 00:01:15
  • 2020-07-17 · So Much to See — Hank says the story of quarantine has been TikTok taking off (he shouts "KOWW!") while Quibi, billions of dollars trying to work with the most talented creators, went "blehh". — 00:02:28
  • 2020-07-21 · Somebody Once Asked . . . — John: Having a TikTok-famous brother feels mostly good to John, but a little worrying. — 00:03:21
  • 2020-09-15 · All That Glitters Is Gold — John's example: when younger he thought being famous was the most glitteringly magnificent thing, but seeing it up close he found it more complicated. — 00:00:29
  • 2020-10-16 · Still Riding a Big Wave that I Do not and Cannot Know — Hank says he called it 'fractured fame', since the monolith of celebrity has broken down since the 1950s, but now thinks that was his lens: it is bigger than fame. — 00:00:58
    • Hank predicts that part of the economy will become a bigger and bigger deal. — 00:01:35
  • 2020-10-27 · The time I met Joe Biden — John says he had become used to people saying kind things they didn't mean, because even modest fame works as a filter distorting how people look at you. — 00:00:29

2022

  • 2022-04-05 · Celebrities I've Met and Whether I'd Vote for Them??? — John says being famous is really weird and far less pleasant than it is made out to be. — 00:02:26
    • The middle-school feeling that everyone is watching and judging you is, for the famous, kind of true: Serena Williams in a restaurant is watched and even photographed. — 00:02:26
  • 2022-05-06 · Why I Didn't Quit YouTube (yet) — Hank: One form of the weight: a responsibility Hank may not live up to, being everyone's 'unproblematic king', what everyone imagines him to be, which is impossible. — 00:00:58
  • 2022-12-20 · The Best Books Get Better — John says he first loved them as fun adventure stories about internet culture and fame, articulating celebrity and the fracturing of attention as no book had before. — 00:02:26

2023

  • 2023-10-17 · My Next Book — John: When John was close to the center of US pop culture he was not happy: he craved fame and attention, but it made him really anxious, and he doesn't want that again. — 00:02:26

2024

  • 2024-01-02 · Being Old on YouTube — John says they have been very successful for an astonishingly long time with wonderful people, but never that successful or near the center of YouTube or culture, and that is where he is happiest. — 00:01:12
  • 2024-04-30 · Not Doing That Great — John: Since The Fault in Our Stars movie came out ten years ago, John has learned again and again that he is just not very good at being properly famous. — 00:01:56
    • John says that although our whole social order worships fame, there is a reason so many people don't survive celebrity. — 00:02:26
  • 2024-05-24 · An Ancient Apocalypse — Hank says that at some point in the last few years he did become famous, and being famous is weird, especially when people ask how he is because they last saw a video a year ago. — 00:00:29
  • 2024-08-07 · Dear Hank and John Livestream! — John says nobody flies too close to the sun for long (as with MrBeast); it happened to him and was so unpleasant he would do almost anything not to become famous again. — 00:10:08
  • 2024-09-20 · Do I Regret TikTok? — Hank does not regret his experiences on TikTok, but regrets a little that it made him substantially more famous, though fame has benefits too. — 00:05:21
  • 2024-10-01 · On Fame and Chappell Roan — John says proper fame is far from the worst thing he has experienced, but it is the worst purportedly good thing he has experienced. — 00:01:19
    • John says fame is very much an intoxicant: being at parties with famous people and receiving so much outside affirmation, but intoxicants have downsides. — 00:01:48
    • John says fame is a problem because, as a culture, we worship at the altar of fame. — 00:03:45
    • John has come to understand that how he feels about fame is mostly a function of how he uses it; when the photo was taken he only knew to make more of it. — 00:04:15
  • 2024-11-05 · Why Do I Still Make YouTube Videos? — John says strangers know only the idea of him he puts forward, perfectly edited though a four-minute video takes forty to record; the growing gap between public and private self gets weirder. — 00:01:56
    • John craved fame when younger and is grateful for parts of it, but at 47 he does not want to be famous, especially not more famous: near the top there is not much oxygen. — 00:02:55
  • …and 6 statements more in 2024 — all statements of 2024

2025

  • 2025-08-05 · ONE TAKE JOHNNY — Hank says Isaac Asimov didn't like being famous, while Hank doesn't mind being famous but is not very good at it. — 00:14:05
    • John teases that Hank is nice to strangers the way a town's mayor is, so strangers recognize him because he makes them. (playful) — 00:14:42
  • 2025-08-26 · Not to Criticize Hank… — John says that fame now works person by person: apart from stars like Taylor Swift or Rihanna, the fractured information landscape leaves no shared celebrities. — 00:00:47
  • 2025-10-03 · Is It Time to Retire? — John says the desire for public attention was beaten out of him a long time ago. — 00:02:51

2026

  • 2026-02-14 · Project for Awesome 2026 part 4! — Hank says the worst part of being a public figure is being a target, probably worse than being bothered in public. (hedged) — 06:02:07
  • 2026-03-31 · I've Been Keeping a Secret… — John: Trading one's frailties for public attention used to concern mainly movie stars; now everyone on the social internet trades experiences, traumas and personal lives, part of what the book is about. — 00:01:27
    • The book is also about love and how we find it, and about celebrity and the fame machine, all of which John has seen up close over the last decade. — 00:01:56
  • 2026-06-02 · The Instagramification of Human Experience — John: Warhol worshipped celebrity, as we all do now, and understood what happens when you trade parts of your private life for public attention; he worked hard to keep his own private life opaque. — 00:00:58
    • What fascinates John most is how Warhol's work dealt with celebrity: fame renders you both larger than life and two-dimensional. — 00:01:27
  • 2026-06-16 · My First Novel in Nine Years Has a Cover — announcement: John says he began a novel about fame, trauma and loving our way through them about eight years ago, and today finally gets to show its cover. — 00:00:00
    • John doesn't know what being a young movie star is like, but knows something about the fame and content-creation machine that turns human experience into content and then movie tickets. — 00:00:29
  • 2026-07-10 · How Status Destroys Us — Hank says they have seen the distortions this status creates in systems, individuals and themselves, ranging from kind of fine to really bad, with not many good. — 00:04:15
  • 2026-07-28 · 'Are You John Green?' — John feels so conflicted about celebrity that he wrote a book about it, and did not particularly enjoy his time near the center of US pop culture, when Kim Kardashian was tweeting about him. — 00:03:27
  • 2026-10-27 · Should I Salinger… — John says J. D. Salinger did not reject fame at first: he was an actor and wanted to play Holden Caulfield in an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, although he was in his 30s when it came out. — 00:00:42
    • John says making vlogbrothers videos every Tuesday and publishing books bring him joy and fulfillment, but public work opens him to a level of scrutiny and attention he finds uncomfortable. — 00:02:12
    • John says he is an introvert with a complicated relationship with fame who easily retreats into himself, yet he also wants to live a public life, tell stories for people and make a video every Tuesday. — 00:03:53
  • …and 1 statement more in 2026 — all statements of 2026