Why Hank Green takes pseudoscience seriously

0:00Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over$1 ,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to ConsumerAdvocate.org. You get paid back up to 90 % of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save.

0:57trip in as little as two and a half minutes earn up to 10 % back on hotels and in 2025 engine customers save more than 300 million dollars on travel with zero booking fees no contracts and no bs more than a thousand businesses join engine every month join them and get 500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com slash Vox.

1:28Earlier this summer, I was scrolling and I saw this epidemiologist saying something wild. When they compared sunscreen users to non-sunscreen users, the sunscreen users faced increased risks of all the major skin cancers. I was like, wow, okay, sunscreen does what? Have I been lied to as a Florida man? But it's not because of the sunscreen. So I looked into it, and the study this guy was talking about showed that people who said they used more sunscreen did get more skin cancer. But it wasn't because of the sunscreen. The authors of the study say it's because sunscreen users tend to spend more time outside.

2:09And they aren't always great at reapplying sunscreen when they need to. It's the sun causing the cancer. It's not the sunscreen. And when you control for proper use, it's pretty clear. But this claim went totally viral. Almost 3 million views. And I think it's too easy to just dismiss pseudoscience like this. One, pseudoscience is spreading like wildfire all across social media right now. And two, the difference between science and pseudoscience isn't always immediately obvious. Like, scientists are wrong all the time. So where's the line here? What's the difference between science and pseudoscience?

2:52I wanted to figure this out, so I called up Hank Green. Hank is one of the best people out there at just talking about science. He's done it for almost 20 years on his YouTube channel, on SciShow, on Crash Course. And he does it with this very specific type of fascination and joy. Recently, he's been doing some really interesting reporting on the line between science and pseudoscience. So today on Unexplainable, what if the best way to understand why science works is to take pseudoscience seriously?

3:41Hank Green, thanks for coming on the show. Hey, thank you for having me. So you often do all these kind of weird niche deep dives on your channel, like missing asteroids or where the atoms in your toilet paper end up. That one wasn't very popular.

4:00Hank Green:It wasn't popular, really? No, I thought it was going to be a slam dunk right out of the park, and it was an underperforming for me. It was popular with me. Okay, good. But a while back, you made this video that started with a really huge question, which is, what is science? Yeah. Which I do want to get to. But in the spirit of going big, why do you like science? Well, I'm a very curious person. Or possibly I'm an average amount of curious, but have been lucky enough to have had cause to indulge in it enough that that muscle has gotten strong. And I've seen what a joy it is to go down rabbit holes.

4:43Hank Green:And what you find is that the reason we know most of the things is, in fact, that people work really hard to figure them out, usually through traditional scientific structures, but always through interrogating the universe in some way. So let's do the big question. What is science? Well, there are lots of different takes. I don't want to say that this is the only take, nor do I want to claim credit for this take. This is one of several takes. I think it's really important that we don't think that science is the current institution of science. Science is not the scientific method. Science is not the peer-reviewed publication.

5:27Hank Green:These are all emergent of a thing. They are emergent properties of a first step. And I think that science has been being done since before humans were humans. And what science is, is listening to the universe and hearing what it has to say. And if it is more than that, then science is intentionally asking the universe questions and then listening when it gives an answer. So if you notice that a red rose grows from the seeds of a red rose, then that's that kind of science. But if you have a red rose and a white rose breed, you're asking a question. You're saying, is this going to create white roses or red roses or pink roses?

6:13Hank Green:And the answer that the universe gives you is like, oh, now I know a new thing. I mean, you're calling a very broad thing. I know. Yes. I think that this is important. I think it is important to say this is not something that was invented in 1720. It's very tempting, and a lot of people have done this, to say that science was created by some guy recently. To start out saying, okay, there was a day science was created. And people will argue about this. I do want to say, if you had another person on, we'd argue about it. So I'm giving you my take. It's my take. Like, what is the thing that takes asking a basic question about the universe and turns it into what we, what maybe lay people think of as science now?

7:03Hank Green:Yeah, I mean, so the first step is ask the universe a question, try and get an answer. The second step is sharing information and letting it be critiqued and basically opening it up to attack from every angle. Like, please tear this apart. Like, as humans, there's this very tempting thing to say, OK, well, this is what I've learned. This is what I've been taught. And then when somebody says, no, it's not that way, the instinct is often to say, well, let's fight about that. And I will protect my idea with my life. But what happened was at some point people say, actually, no. The thing that we're going to do is, like, I'm just not going to believe you if you don't share how you figured this out with me.

7:48Hank Green:And it will not get written in the books unless you let us check. But check my work. Yeah, check my work. You got to let me borrow your telescope or I'm not going to believe that there are moons orbiting Jupiter. We'll have this argument in public. We'll, you know, go and to like have meetings and we'll share our information and then we'll argue and fight. And but but ultimately, you will open your fist. You will not you will not protect your information. You will share your information. And we will like this will be a much better way to get to truth. truth and it's crazy like like galileo is a good example of like people argued with him so hard and for good reason because these tools were brand new and they weren't very good uh and then when they got access to the tools they were like actually yep nope there's no really no other way to explain what we're seeing than there are moons orbiting jupiter so what you're basically saying is the thing that makes science science the thing that has led to satellites and vaccines and, I don't know, rocket ships.

8:50I'm in a space mode there. But the thing that has led it is this one basic idea of, here, please check my work. And everything flows from there.

9:00Hank Green:Yeah, it really is like, it's saying, we need to cooperate on this. This isn't just going to be like, one person is in charge of truth. It's going to be all of us together are trying to get to truth, which is not something that any individual is in charge of. And what emerges from that is just a ton of stuff, like the entire institution of statistics. Like statistics is about helping scientists talk to each other and tear each other's work apart. The journal, the Royal Society, the abstract, all of these things, replication, all of these things are emergent from that property. And then you get all of this stuff that's like actually really powerful for uncovering truth about the world.

9:39So you're pointing at this shift, like you're saying, to something communal, right? Yeah. Because the only way to get to better answers is to have other people check in. And then the last thing I think you're pointing at is some kind of embrace of doubt or uncertainty.

9:53Hank Green:Yeah. This sort of self-consciousness that I am learning a thing, I'm making a theory, but I actually am not sure I'm right and I need the help of my community to check. But it does seem like it's explicitly an embrace of doubt, right? Yeah, I mean, something that actually helped me understand what science is, is looking at what pseudoscience is. Because it's not like pseudoscience feels like it's just people being wrong confidently. But it's not just being wrong. It is really the pseudo part. It's the part where it's attempting to look like science. Yeah. While at the same time, never doing the fundamental base unit thing of saying, please tear apart my data.

10:34Hank Green:Got it. Please look at everything I am doing. And if you are right, I will accept it. I'll put my tail between my legs and be like, I guess I was wrong. Are there any examples of pseudoscience that drive you particularly nuts? Oh, I mean, the vaccine causes autism thing is really bad because of how amazing vaccines are. Yeah. Do you want to just say a little bit about where that came from? Yeah. I mean, there was a guy who did a study. Turns out he had a ton of conflicts of interest. And then from there, like, after digging in and seeing how much sort of human selection was at play, it was like, oh, this isn't a very good study.

11:10Hank Green:There's doing a lot of things. The data was kind of like not convincing, right? Yeah, it was both not convincing and it seemed intentionally altered. I think he was doing it intentionally, but you could make the case he wasn't. And then from there, it just sort of like was wildfire. How do you feel about the fact that this kind of thing is the thing that is taking off like wildfire and so many people are ignoring just the mountains of data on how vaccines tend to work and are safe and are saving lots of lives? Like, what does that mean for you as someone who's trying to communicate this stuff to people?

11:46Hank Green:I mean, a billion things. I mean, one thing that is really important to say is we should check these things. And so frustrating to be like, OK, so what did we do in response to this? We did so much research. We did so, so much different kinds of research and find the same answer from every angle we hammered at it from. And it's very frustrating and scary to think that now the, you know, the rates of vaccination are going down. It's frustrating that, you know, measles is an eradicable disease. It is possible to eradicate it. We could live in a world with no measles. This isn't true of all diseases.

12:27Hank Green:Some diseases have reservoirs in other animals, and so they're very hard to eliminate. But measles is a human disease. We can get rid of it. It would be amazing if we did. We're not going to do it anytime soon, but we absolutely could. And it's frustrating because I love it. Like the fact that we eradicated smallpox. Oh, my God. Like, I can't. It's so freaking cool. Like, you cannot imagine. You cannot imagine how bad smallpox is. And it's gone. It's gone. We did that. And the story of how we did that is amazing. It's like a triumph at every angle. It's like such a tremendous human achievement.

13:02Hank Green:And I cannot wait for us to get the next one, you know? It's frustrating. Anything that holds us back from, you know, this amazing progress that we get to have as humans is very frustrating. So what seems interesting to me there is that if the idea of science is to be open to checking and open to your community holding you accountable, by dressing yourself up in those clothes, you're saying implicitly, I'm open to being checked. But then you're not actually being open to being checked. And it allows you almost to rest on the laurels of that confidence while not necessarily having to do the work.

13:41Hank Green:It's interesting because it's not science and yet it benefits dramatically from the credibility that science has earned. You know, it's it. And I don't want to say that we don't ever like discover that we were wrong. We do. But man, there is a lot of dressing up BS in the clothes of science right now. And one of the most, like, strong tells of this is that it is always around something that is very easy to pay attention to. You know, like, it's the aliens built the pyramids. Like, if that's true, wow, that would be a very big deal. That would be like the coolest news of all time if aliens built the pyramids.

14:26I would definitely pay more attention to that than like the latest Alzheimer's drug that doesn't work.

14:31Hank Green:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or even an Alzheimer's drug that works a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. Which is what most of them do. The pseudoscientist is always talking about stuff that's really easy to pay attention to, fun to go on podcasts and talk about. Because ultimately, we tend to find it easier to believe things. This is a known phenomenon of human brains. We tend to find it easier to believe things when they are easier to pay attention to. And it seems like there's also maybe a narrative around there. It's not just that this is true, but that this is who's keeping it from you. It's more of a character and a story, it seems.

15:07Hank Green:It's a better story. It's like a very interesting story. And I think it also can be very easy to believe something that will make you into the hero that saves everyone.

15:22In a minute, why does pseudoscience always seem to end up at aliens?

15:47So why are we even trying? My name is Olivia Lanes. I am the global lead for content and education at IBM Quantum. So you will not need a quantum computer the size of a football field. The quantum chip is really, you know, the size of a stamp. So the chip itself is never going to be the size of a football field. What could be a very large footprint is all of the infrastructure that goes around cooling it, housing the chip and controlling it. IBM has really been, I think, the biggest pioneer in terms of making this technology accessible. IBM has deployed at this point over 90 quantum computers worldwide.

16:32So if we talk about scaling, I will just say we have a plan. We have what it takes engineering and science-wise to make these computers work and to build them up to the scale that we know they will be useful. If you would like to learn more, you can do so at ibm.com slash quantum. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.

17:16And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

17:35Support for the show comes from Injun. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Enjin is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes. Earn up to 10 % back on hotels. And in 2025, Enjin customers saved more than$300 million on travel, with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1 ,000 businesses join Enjin every month. Join them and get$500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com slash Vox.

18:29It's interesting. There's two ways, I think, to deal with something like this. One is something that I talk about a lot, which is like, there's the whole going over COVID and who messed up and did we lose trust? And I do think there's like a lot of reasonable stuff to talk about there. You know, I spoke with Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH, who was really talked a lot about having too much one size fits all stuff in COVID. And he's been going on all these conversation tours and talking to people and building relationships to get them to trust science. That's like one side of the argument.

19:04And then the other side is just like, I don't know if it's a trust in science problem as much as a pseudoscience is so interesting problem. And I don't know if science could be the most trustworthy thing in the world. People would still get excited about they're hiding this from you. People want to have the thing that they think nobody else knows. I don't know. Is it crazy to wonder whether science should embrace any pseudoscientific strategies? Should science be like making journals called like the secret society of safe vaccines?

19:45Hank Green:We can't do that, but we can learn. I mean, why does this work? Like I read, I read like pseudoscience books to understand them. And I love to, one of my favorite, this is dumb. One of my favorite things is to grab a book, like a pseudoscience book, pick a random page, find a claim, and then track down where that came from. Because they always come from somewhere. There's always some weird place. And it could be like a week-long activity. What have you found? You know, find like crazy things about the world. You know, it can be, you know, they use ground-penetrating radar around the pyramids and there was this weird geological formation.

20:24Hank Green:And it's like, well, what's that weird geological formation? Maybe we aren't doing ground penetrating radar enough. Maybe we just don't know enough about what the interior of the world looks like. So the first time you see it, you're like, is that aliens? One of my favorite pseudoscience things is like we've just started to detect for the first time ever objects from other solar systems or other planetary systems that have entered into our solar system. And we can do this now because we have better tools. And there's people who have claimed that like two of the first three of these objects that we've ever detected are like from aliens.

21:00Hank Green:Very high rate of aliens. And I'm like, that's a high rate of aliens. Maybe we just don't know what these things look like yet because we've only seen three of them. And so maybe they look a little bit weird. Maybe they look weirder than the average our solar system rock. They have different properties. And so maybe that's maybe it might be that that's what's going on rather than two thirds of all rocks in space are alien spaceship parts. But that thing happens all the time when you start to do these investigations. The first information you can find tends to be quite weird. Yeah. And that that space where you aren't sure, that's where like that's where science is so great.

21:36Hank Green:And so immediately giving that thing an answer of aliens is a really bad idea because that stops you from continuing to do the science and then you keep doing the science and you find out new and interesting things about the world. I love that because I feel like everything we try to do on our show is focusing on those spaces where we don't have an answer. Yeah. And I find them so unbelievably fascinating because it's crazy to me how little we still know about everything. And I just get so excited that there are these huge gaps that we don't know anything about. And to think that someone wants to just fill them in, it's like generations of people have lived and died trying to fill these in.

22:22And you're going to just fill this in with aliens. Or you're going to fill this in with, I don't know, some magic element that doesn't exist.

22:32Hank Green:Yeah, I mean, and like, it could be aliens. It could. It's actually true. Aliens is just a tricky one because we keep thinking it might be aliens and it keeps not being aliens because aliens can explain anything, which is a real problem for a hypothesis. It's usually not aliens. So far, it's never been. Okay, so last thing I wanted to ask you is very weird. But one of my favorite things about the way that you present science is the way that you seem so comfortable with being wrong. You had this video about what sound thunder makes. Thunder does not make noise. Thunder is noise. And then you're talking about, can a sound make a sound?

23:17Can a goose make a honk? Now I'm thinking about goose honks. Like, can a goose honk squeak? And then like in real time in the video, you're like, I will die on this hill. Thunder does not make a sound. But the thunder does not clap.

23:32Hank Green:I'm going to die on this hill. I will. People will say that the thunder claps. But no, that is a thunder clap. It is a noise. The thunder doesn't clap. And then 15 seconds later in the video, you're like, wait, I don't know if I should die on that hill. I think maybe honks can squeak. Oh, no, maybe I'm wrong. A sound can make a sound? I'm terrified. I'm no longer dying on this hill. The goose has changed my entire perspective on this. Maybe the thunder can clap, just like a honk can squeak. I know this sounds like the weirdest example to give, but I actually think that that in some sense is showing people how you think, that you're willing to admit that you're wrong or you're willing to just show us how you think in real time.