#133 Hank Green on God, Science, and Consciousness

25:46Hank Green:You can't say you don't get a fridge anymore. You can't say you can't fly to see your grandma. Like you have to keep all of these things that we have already added to the world because if you take them away, people will be very angry. But then you have to create energy in new ways. And like, we didn't know how to do that. And now we do. And now, like, for sure, throughout the entire process, there have been people trying to like desperately stop it from happening because they own the oil that's in the ground. And if they can't get it out and sell it, they can't make that money. So, yeah, there are people trying to stop it.

26:17Hank Green:And those people, I think, are motivated entirely, like largely by greed. They probably think that, you know, they think about the good that they are doing for society as well as their own power and greed. Yeah, for sure. Like they think about what you like driving your car, you know, you like the gasoline. You like the plastic bottles. But the the I think that those brakes have been put on in a way that is very unjust and very infuriating. But the problem isn't easy. And so that is is almost a hopeful thing when you realize, oh, actually, there's all these interconnected things that actually make this quite hard.

26:56Hank Green:And then there's like a step after that where you're like, and so that problem is being solved in this way. Concrete's being solved in this way. You know, the electric stoves are going to work this way. How are we going to get people off of natural gas in the home? How does the heat pump work? What is, you know, what is the future of advanced geothermal? Like all of this stuff where it's like little, like there isn't a way to fix everything. but once you pay a lot of attention to a problem and then you actually like don't just become more hopeful you become useful yeah because you know about a bunch of stuff yeah that's right that's right so then how do you cultivate that kind of attitude i mean yourself like i you i sometimes get asked about this because i i don't like social media i don't think there's anyone on earth who is like yeah i feel good about my relationship with social media this is about it's about right i'll I'll say that there have been times in my life when I've loved it.

27:51Yeah.

27:51Hank Green:When I really, it, when it's just felt like the, the world's most exciting playground. Yeah. And then it inevitably, like some new platform comes up and I'm like, I love this. And then two or three years later, I'm like, actually. All the bad stuff. There's turns, turns out it did the same thing as all the other social media platforms. Yeah. Um, but yeah. We're in, we're in quite a unique position in that, like, you know, we have people who listen to us and they follow us and that can make it all the more fun and it's also our job and that's awesome yeah yeah but then at the same time i'm like i know what this is doing to people's brains and this is really horrible and it's causing like you know depression society much more much less stable so it's not good yeah for anybody i well what can we do are we like the the oil conglomerate CEO being like, yeah, it's not great, but you know, like you love your car.

28:48And like, but when really we just kind of want to keep our jobs. Yeah.

28:50Hank Green:I made a video about this because John, John and I, my brother who we create together, he says, are we like cigarettes? Like, are we the cigarettes? Yeah. Uh, which is not a great feeling to be asking yourself whether you're cigarettes, but what I, the video I made about this was talking in terms of food, which is like information is good, but just like food is good. Like nobody's going to disagree with either of those sentences. But if you put systems onto food that are like, how do you compete in the most ultra competitive environment? How do you make sure that people eat as much of this as possible?

29:32Hank Green:How do you, how do you, you know, get people addicted to this food so that they can't stop eating it that's bad and that's like kind of where we are with food a little bit like another thing to remember is that america is one of the few uh like right now well this is as we're having this conversation yeah i see time to say this but uh where like food is abundant and like the like it's so rare in the history of humanity yeah um and uh and and so that uh that's a new set of problems to solve and in the same way information is now abundant and also it's compete it's competing with other information in this hyper competitive landscape and so it is doing the same kinds of things where it is making itself hyper palatable it is making it is like any any trick that anyone can do to get you to stay on a website, they will do it both on the platforms side and on the creator side.

30:34Hank Green:Like we, you and I are in collaborations with these algorithms and we respond to the signals that they send us as creators in terms of what we want to create. So what I think about this long-term, I don't know how it goes, but what I think about this long-term is that every other media revolution has created a lot of instability and a lot of, like, just sort of toss the table, you know? Like, you're just playing a game and then you just flip the board. So it feels a little like we flipped the board. And in the long term, we're going to look at the internet like we look at books. Like, nobody's like, boy, books were a bad idea.

31:18Hank Green:But at the time, people were like, books were a bad idea. We need to control these. We need to limit them. We need to make sure that only the king can decide what gets printed. That's true. But then having said that, right, like the reason people thought books were bad is because, you know, like, say, the Catholic Church are like, these Protestant books, including the Bible, are terrible. You know, don't go reading these things. And then now we're like, oh, we're really glad that happened because we kind of now agree with a lot of the stuff that was being read. So like to see this technological revolution is good.

31:52Do we all kind of need to start really believing in the kind of the crap, the junk food, junk information?

31:59Hank Green:I don't. I think you're wrong about whether it's actually like that information was good. So the most popular book for like 150 years was the Malleus Maleficarium, which was like, here's how you identify and kill witches. So like that was a bad book. and it was really popular. And like Martin Luther was, people hated that guy. He was really reckless. You know, there were a lot of wars about this stuff. A lot of people died. And one of the things I try to keep in mind is that Martin Luther was also wrong about God. I mean, from my perspective. Lutherans, you should have tuned out for that bit. Sorry.

32:43Hank Green:but like nope like the enlightenment didn't follow immediately from the revolution so what did it follow from the reformation that's that's the that's the thing that we're going to see like what follows from where we're at right now I see I think it followed I mean it followed from a lot of time and like I'm not a historian or an expert on that era but like it what I mean is that it like it wasn't it didn't happen like 20 years later it happened like hundreds of years later yeah Yeah. You said Martin Luther was wrong about God from your perspective. I don't want to do the thing that people like me do, which is like bring you onto my show and ask you about the thing that we talk about, because then we'll get the clit.

33:23Hank talks about God. That's not what I'm trying to do.

33:26Hank Green:Well, you're going to make a thumbnail. It's going to have a big picture of a crucifix. I just wonder what you mean by that. I don't know if you've really spoken about your views. I mean a little bit. God and spirituality and religion and stuff. Do you have those views? Do you talk about them? Are you willing to talk about them? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I am an atheist. I think that I'm an atheist in the way that when people think about what God is, I think that that thing doesn't exist. I don't know about some people, in terms of how the universe started, I don't have an answer to that question. And so like in that way, I'm agnostic.

34:09Hank Green:So like maybe there was a sort of like a person who set the set the scene and pushed go. Yes. But but from from everything I have seen since then, it it all kind of follows. And this is new. I think that we haven't for that long had a coherent story of how Earth happened, about how the solar system happened, about how evolution happened. But every time we have sort of thought that maybe it was magic, it turned out to not be. so I don't think that there's like a a thing that like you know fathered a child and that was and that child was able to do you know miracles but the so and yeah that's like and so like what I am what there's like an emptiness I think that that can create but I'm like I don't know how many I shouldn't say I'm generations into this.

35:14Hank Green:My parents raised me as a Christian. But we are generations into this questioning. And what I see is a really powerful technology. People are like, do you think God exists? And I'm like, well, I think that God exists in that he is an extraordinarily powerful force in the world. I think that what I don't want to say, because it sounds like I'm diminishing it, And I'm not because like this is what I believe and what I believe is like human creations that like work together to make something that is as far as we know has never been done before. And we're little babies and we have no idea what we're doing.

35:52Hank Green:We don't weren't following the instruction manual and yet 8 billion of are able to like do this together. This is one of the tools that allows us to do that. And so in the way that I think that there are plenty of illusions that I go by and some of them are unavoidable illusions. Like I think they're deep inside of my neurology, unavoidable illusions. I think that this is a thing that is real practically. But it's not real for me. But I am often jealous. I wish that I had some reason to go to a room on Sundays and like hang out with my community. Yeah. And people have tried to. No, but the only way to do it is to threaten them with eternal fire.

36:45Hank Green:Well, it is. Because what other reason would you get out of bed on Sunday for? This episode is brought to you by Prime. What if you had one more chance with the one that got away? Damn. You came home. Based on the bestselling novel from Carly Fortune. every year after follows childhood friends sam and percy as they reunite in the dreamy nostalgic lakeside town of berries bay love can be hard to find so if you're lucky enough to find that person never let go a second chance at first love every year after now streaming only on prime marvel television's wonder man an eight episode series now streaming on disney plus a superhero remake not exactly what we'd expect from an oscar-winning director action simon williams audition for one of me i'm gonna need you to sign this assuming you don't have superpowers i'll never work again if anyone found out my lips are sealed marvel television's wonder man all eight episodes now streaming only on disney plus i think there is there is something to be said for the fact that you kind of in order to actually get that kind of stuff like the actual yeah you get out of bed and you go somewhere you have to actually you have to actually believe yeah it's so powerful it's so good like it has the potential to be and is often so good yeah i don't want to discount that many times when it is not good and when it is harmful to individuals and has been you know it's it's like does religion help you think we're all in this together does religion help you think my god versus your god you know Yeah.

38:23And some people have liked to talk about the concept of like practical truths or metaphorical truths that we sort of treat as though they're true and it makes us all sort of work well together. And I've always thought that that only worked to some extent. Like a lot of people are kind of culturally religious because they don't really kind of believe it. But they think that if we all did believe it, we'd have a better society. and i think when it comes down you know to the wire that doesn't work because it's like the rule that the gun is always loaded which is a really good rule to have like if you own a gun yeah the gun is always loaded it's not yeah we're going to treat it as though it is because everything works out better that way but if somebody breaks into your house and you need to go and defend yourself you're not going to actually pick up the gun that you know is in fact not loaded so i think like when it really comes down to making those important life decisions you have to actually believe the

39:15Hank Green:thing for it to like properly properly work well it can do it can be a gradient it can be it can do some things and not others yeah i think there and there is also like there's things that i i know that i believe i think that i believe biologically like i have no choice but to believe but i completely accept that they may be not true like free will yeah like 100 if if physicists keep telling me that free will probably doesn't exist. I'm like, they're probably right. Like I'm not them and they know more about this than I do. But like my biology tells me very clearly that free will is real. So like there's something happening in my brain that's like, this is you are an actor.

39:55Hank Green:Yes. And almost it wouldn't work if my brain hadn't created, if that's an illusion, it wouldn't be possible to be in the world doing the things that we do without that illusion. So it's like really deep down. And I don't even believe, I believe it the way that I believe the chair is here. Right? Like Jordan Peterson. I believe it in a way where if my life depended on it, I would be like, yeah, no, that's real. I decided to be here. Yeah. Which like is a bit involuntary. Like when I ask you to reflect on it, is the chair really here? well like maybe okay technically this good but it's like it's so you just came in and sat down on it you must believe it's there because you had a pretty strong level of confidence that you wouldn't just like fall down into the into the earth and it's just there you just have that belief as a result of like stimulations of your sense data it just kind of happens and it in fact even with something like sense perception i don't know what you think about this as a science man but like we think that we've got these sort of just windows into reality that we've kind of like we exist sort of up here in our skull and then our eyes are like big windows and got ears and we just sort of experience the world as it is like we're looking out of a window yeah when it seems pretty plausible to me that actually we're kind of like a bit of a machine that has a bunch of sensors on the outside and a helpful analogy for this that i like to talk about that i i borrowed from Bernardo Kastrup is like being in an airplane, flying an airplane with the windows shut.

41:33Yeah. Because you can do it because there are sensors on the outside and it gives you all the information on the dashboard. But the information on the dashboard is not the clouds and the air pressure. And so maybe our sensor is doing a similar kind of thing.

41:45Hank Green:That's basically right. I mean, so they call it the sensorium and different animals, different species have different sensoria. And like you and I might have different sensoria. You know, you might hear differently, you might see differently. And like it seems, interestingly, it seems like across the species, the sensorium is pretty consistent. Like red is probably kind of red to you. It's probably kind of red to me. Like that stuff seems to be roughly the same. But taste and smell are two that definitely can be quite different from person to person. But much bigger than that is like, you know, bats or dolphins.

42:25Hank Green:You know, it's stuff that like fish see very differently than we do. And there's lots of sensations like electrical fields that we don't have. There's colors that we can't see that other animals can see. And that just like sort of proves the point that like this that I'm seeing right now is the version of reality. So there's a thing like I don't think that the things don't exist. people are like that some people are yeah i don't get that but the things are there and like there's something happening and i'm detecting that and that is allowing me to move around in the world but this like what i'm seeing isn't the world this is the version of the world that my that i am able to detect which is different from other animals yeah and that that came to mind because when you were talking about illusions that you kind of know are illusions yeah but believe in anyway yeah somebody who's religious might listen to something like that and go like you know this isn't an illusion like i this isn't just a made-up thing that we it's like there are illusions that we can talk about that are so fundamental that they are as sort of true as like the chair that i'm looking at right now so like to say something is an illusion isn't to say that there isn't something real something that causes it and that it serves an important purpose and that it's like there really is something going on right that somehow our interaction with it or our description with it isn't the thing itself i think you know what i think theologians agree with that that like if there is a god who created the universe and exists like timelessly and limitlessly then as long as you are imagining something you are like not imagining that thing because you just you you can't it's like not what your your brain is capable of doing right yeah yeah yeah and like i i find this uh i find that there are so many more interesting things than that and like and that's like one of my big problems uh with like not like not with the idea of a god but like with my ability to engage with it where i'm just like nah like it feels a little bit like uh

44:38Hank Green:whatever is mysterious or or like it's like a morphing definition which is very like it's you can't it's unfalsifiable um so it's just sort of like always out there like a thing and and it does feel a little bit like uh sort of it's it's about the philosophy of it it's about It's about like, can we put words together in such an order such that we've proved that God exists? Which is, I don't know. That's not. It also just seems to me like not what it's all about. Like as if I sometimes sort of imagine that you'll get to the pearly gates and God will be there. And it's like, oh, you've been a good person and you've given to charity and you've even you've believed in Christianity and you're a, oh, you're a Lutheran.

45:25hmm oh you don't agree with premise 55 of ed phase's hundred premise argument for the existence of god no no no no sorry you know it just feels like that's not what it would be about yeah and so traditionally people would look to theologians would look to philosophy as like faith seeking understanding you know it wasn't like sure the reason you believe or like the grounds for the truth but just like oh well i know that this thing is true through experience and other stuff and i just kind of want to understand it. And Thomas Aquinas famously thought all religious language was an analogy. He thought it was literally impossible to speak about God.

46:03So God is not powerful. God is not loving. God is not knowledgeable because these are like human concepts. You can only really say what God is, what God is not. I think there's some degree to which we are, you know, to get the God, we, okay, God tick, we've done it, you know, put that to the side. This whole thing about our interaction with the world is really interesting, right? Because it feels like yeah like i don't know how do you imagine yourself like who is hank green is he like a brain in a in a skull is he like a self that imposes on material stuff like what is i am

46:34Hank Green:i imagine myself day to day the same way everybody else does uh-huh just like the the sort of uh i think that this is a not real thing but like i imagine that i have like this continuity of self through my whole life and that has added up into like this thing and it's a story that I'm like that on the inside of my head like the self is myself as a story that I'm telling to myself about myself that's I think that that's mostly what we're doing yeah and I think that that's the normal way uh and that's like the useful way I don't think that that exists um so like for example if something happened to me in fourth grade that I do not remember and if someone told me about it, I would be like, I don't remember that happened.

47:21Hank Green:Is that kid still alive? Like, is that self a part of a self? I, like, I, like, stories are very powerful. They're like the basis of so much of what's interesting about humans. So I'm not saying that it's not a good, cool, useful, evolved, loved like selected for tool the self the self yeah uh but i don't i don't think that like uh i even so as another example so i since i went through cancer treatment i i get these flare-ups of and i have no idea what they are and i just like feel awful like i feel like i get this like my skin hurts and my knees hurt and and i have fatigue and i have like very low motivation to do anything.

48:14Hank Green:And so if myself is like a collective of abilities and characteristics, when I'm having one of these flare-ups, am I a different self? Because I have different abilities and characteristics when I'm having a flare. If anybody knows what I'm talking about, let me know. Those doctors are confused. And it's gotten much more rare, but it happened a lot right after I finished chemo and radiation. And I'm like, So like what, like if I'm not that, then what? And I just think that all of those things go into how I act in the world and how I behave. You know, I think everything I know, everything I've learned, all the relationships I've had, like all the memories that I have and all my fears and anxieties that were built by all these experiences I've had, like all that stuff goes into how I act in any individual moment.

49:06Hank Green:and I think that that is a thing but that's not what I think of as myself I don't think of myself as the actor acting now I think of myself as the story of the whole thing and I'm totally comfortable with that not being real but also being what I am yeah but it's really annoying how embedded it is into our language the way you have to say something like I don't believe in the self it's like okay wait hold on tools for a second well that that's because i i think that these things are evolved for a reason i think that they're they're they're tools that we have for a reason and there i have i'd love to ask you about this question so i have this this problem where i think things like this like that i know that aren't aren't real um and but they are biological like they they are like free will is a good example of right i'm feeling this it's a very good chance that it's an illusion that like you know if you just sort of like started the initial conditions I would end up where I am again and there would never have been a moment where I actually could have changed any of this but I feel it and I think that like it seems almost necessary to be a

50:28Hank Green:actor in the world to have free will or to imagine free will. Yeah. So I think that it's both fake and biologically selected for. So the illusion is biologically selected for and it's really deep down. So it's real in the way that the chair is. Yeah. But there are other things like that that I think are also selected for. Maybe not in the same way. Well, probably some things that are the same way. But like, but as an example, like, uh, like superstition or a God or a religion, those things are culturally selected for. Yeah. And so if I'm like okay with accepting a fiction of free will and just like saying like, well, my body is meant to feel this, should I also be okay with like accepting the fiction of and like wholly accepting the fiction of a religion or of xenophobia?

51:32Hank Green:Like another thing that I was culturally selected for. um and uh so like i like obviously i don't feel okay about like you know of course we're all afraid of outsiders that's like a thing yeah that's like a you know selected for by culture and by you're probably biologically as well um and and so the uh but like you have to push against that but i don't feel like i have to push against everything and so i guess i i would i i'm curious what you think about all of that i think yeah whether you should or shouldn't is an impossible question to answer but it's interesting that sometimes you do and sometimes you don't yeah right like you kind of know that the the chair as you're interacting with it is a bit of an illusion but you're willing to kind of say but that's just how i interact with the chair and as far as i'm concerned the only world that exists is the world that i perceive and so if i perceive a world with the chair in it then like what does it mean to say that this is real yeah if like the only possible way in principle i could ever even interact with it would be through a different way it would be as if like you were constantly dreaming and you were only ever in a dream and that's like all you experience yeah and someone kind of said to you hey man like you know you're in this thing called a dream and like outside of the dream there so that you could be like cool interesting man but But it would make more sense for you to say...

52:58Hank Green:It wouldn't be helpful to your consciousness to be like, oh, I guess everything's fake. Exactly. And it would actually make more sense, I think, for you to use the word real to describe what's in the stream and fake or other to describe what you never get to experience. Right. So, yeah. Okay. So, if an illusion like God is like that, then why not? The problem is I don't think it's quite as fundamental. Some people claim it is. Some people are like, you believe in God and you know it deep down in your heart. Oh, yeah. That's got to be wrong because for so many years we didn't do it. Yeah. We had different kinds of gods.

53:33Hank Green:We had ancestor gods. Yeah. It depends what you mean though, right? Because some people will say, oh, what really happened was you started talking about other stuff, but really that was God. Oh, wow. You know, like when you're talking about - I'd call that presumptuous. They literally call it presuppositionalism. Sorry, I meant presumptuous. Yeah. when you like you sort of have to the idea is that you have to sort of presuppose the existence of God before anything like works but yeah the thing that's different for me is like there are some illusions which you cannot help but feel there are some things which it seems literally impossible to switch off like the the freedom thing yeah you can't just decide to like realize I think if you meditate for long enough you maybe you can you can start to notice that the thoughts that are arriving in your head you know elephant there it is you know is isn't it kind of annoying that i've got that power over you i can just i can just plant that in your brain like yeah okay you could probably become aware of that but you couldn't like you can't really switch off that day-to-day feeling whereas i think with the religion thing people kind of can and again with the xenophobia thing people also can it seems like people can yeah you're always gonna have implicit biases and stuff but people seem to manage to get by roughly speaking at least having less of that than like a like a sort of ancient tribesman might have done yeah whereas i think with the free will thing not only like is it harder to do that it might in part be harder to do that because there's just kind of like no reason to like for what yeah like oh great now i'm not free like how does it serve exactly yeah whereas some people and of course there's debate about this but if you're of the school that thinks that religion is like this really helpful thing in the way that xenophobia evolved to be really helpful to tribes but now isn't helpful anymore that we actually do have reason to to move away from that and so we should resist that illusion but you know why would you do that with free will or the existence of the chair it sort of doesn't serve the same kind of sort of societal function anymore but i don't know like why not it's the same thing sometimes when i talk about ethics and like good and bad and i say oh you know it's just emotional expression that's kind of my view that there is no objective good or bad and people have sometimes said to me that like you know i just really i just feel really strongly that certain things are bad you know torturing babies for fun is wrong that's just i just and it's like yeah but you can't prove it and like you know blah blah and people have sort of pointed out i think plausibly you also can't prove that like the external world exists, that the chair exists.

56:08You just feel really strongly that you've got these perceptions and you just feel like that corresponds to a real world. So why not do the same thing with good and bad? It feels like there's good and bad. It feels like there's, you know, a God. Why not just accept it on the same grounds? Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel, maybe. Or white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.

56:39Hank Green:This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. I guess because so much of what I base my sort of understanding of the world on is looking like working really hard to eliminate all biases and to interrogate the universe in such a way that it grants you an answer.

57:25Hank Green:Yes. And that is where today's sponsor, Ground News, comes into... Okay, we're far too late into the episode for that to be the segue, but this episode is actually sponsored by Ground News. So thank you. Thank you for that, Hank. But yeah, eliminating bias. How? like oh i mean that's the that's the whole process of science yeah so one step at a time right you got to figure out where bias creeps in and try and get it out you know randomized controlled trials didn't come out of uh somebody sat down once and was like what about a randomized controlled trial you know we'll double wind it uh and and i did it i created the the gold standard of science um like it it was one step at a time where where where and really what it was here's here's where it came from.

58:08Hank Green:And this is, I think, the deep, at-the-base revolution of science, is that for a lot of human history, ideas have been about having an idea and protecting it. So I have this idea, this is how I understand things, you can come at my idea and I will defend my idea. And that's how religion still works. When a creationist has a debate, with, this is why I don't like these debates, is because it's sort of like dragging everything into the argument frame where like we're lawyers defending our clients. When that's what science is, is it's saying it's instead of like, this is the idea, it's like, this is the idea.

58:53Hank Green:And can have at it, tear it to pieces. And if you embarrass me, I will be embarrassed. If you discover, like, if you find a way to prove to me that like there isn't a way to a way for like life to start growing in the broth unless it is exposed to some other already living thing or some seed of a living thing, then I will have to sort of like tuck my tail between my legs and admit that you were right. And that's and and the way that you do that is you make your methods available. You say, here's how I did it. Or you do it in public, like you invite people over to watch the experiment. You have people come and look through the telescope.

59:33Hank Green:and you know like the the other thing about it is it doesn't happen in a moment it always feels like it does historically you know galileo looked through the telescope and was like oh moons of jupiter i guess everything's going like revolving around the sun yeah um it's it's like he said that and people were like i think that your telescope's broken and maybe it was because it sucked it wasn't a good telescope yeah it was an early one they did lots of weird stuff they had like weird artifacts that would get created by the light bouncing around inside of them. So like there was all kinds of opportunity for him to have been wrong.

1:00:07Hank Green:Yeah. Interesting. And but what it's all about is that that process of saying like, I'm going like, you aren't doing this unless you are telling us how you're getting this information. And from that springs everything. It springs, you know, having a method section. It springs the entire mathematics of statistics. it's like all of the you know tools that we have to to try and eliminate all the little ways where we might accidentally fudge the data and make sure we never do so how objective do you think science has become like how much do you think it has achieved just generally like where scientific progress and scientific institutions are at how much do you think they have achieved the ability to say, yeah, we are pretty objective in our analyses.

1:00:57Because not that long ago, it seemed quite clear. When I read about the history of science and I read about people arguing about whether the universe is eternal or whether it's not, it seemed like bias was pretty strong. Einstein's famous great blunder, where he adds in this cosmological constant. Because otherwise, the universe had a beginning, or is expanding or whatever. And then it turns out it's expanding and he goes, oh, you know, my bad. And it was just because of like a philosophical assumption. I think people look at today, you know, the stock image of a person in a lab coat with a test tube and think, yeah, that is the paradigm of objectivity.

1:01:35But are we going to look back on this and think, gosh, we are like, we were so biased.

1:01:43Hank Green:When it comes to these big things, that's what we tend to think of as science. There are probably going to be cases here and there. And we do know that there are publication problems. Whenever you set up a system of incentives that shapes things, it's hard to publish a null result, and so those papers don't get published. And so, you know, if you do a meta analysis, you never get the papers with the null result because they didn't get published or you can't find them. So, like, there are things like that, but they're known and they're like big scientists are trying to figure out and go after them.

1:02:24Hank Green:There's also people who, fuck, like will lie. Like there's fraud in science sometimes where people, and there are like forensic investigators who are working to uncover labs that are publishing fudged data and, you know, pictures that are photoshopped. And it's like, that's a thing that happens. What's the motivation for scientists who lie about data? Publishing. Getting the publishing. getting more papers published which helps you get better jobs and helps you get um you know grants come along with that and you get paid partially through the grants and can i i want to ask you a slightly broader question but before we get to that yeah i will say there's a lot like most of what science is is very incremental yeah and that stuff is it there's just like lots of boring everyday good science being done and we are learning a ton about the universe through that work.

1:03:18Well, the question I was going to ask is, it sort of sounds naive, but the basic questions are sometimes the best ones. What is science? And I don't mean that in a sort of like, you know, you're teaching a classroom of kids for the first time. Science is how we found out. I mean, like, what is science? What are we doing? Like, what counts as science?

1:03:37Hank Green:I mean, I think that like, as I have tried to interrogate that question for myself, because I ended up with this wonderful job that I have. I think that it really is, it is the it's the act of saying this is what i think well i've i've observed the universe i've tried to ask the universe a question in this way and i think this was a good way so like that's number one i like at the at the root that probably is science so science is asking the universe a question in a way that it might answer and then what we think of as science so like that that's like babies do that yeah you know um you know every human in throughout all of humanity pre like neanderthals did that but uh you know there's there are probably non-humans on earth right now doing that um but what what we think of as science is doing that in such a way where you say tear this to pieces yes yeah for the record the few times when you've said like science doesn't do this it does this you've been open for those listening you've sort of been opening your hand like a like a flower.

1:04:40And it's sort of like, you know, giving something to the world to be attacked. I mean, so much of science is about falsifying a view rather than proving it. It's like, here's my theory, and now we're going to try to prove it false.

1:04:50Hank Green:And if we can't, then we've got good reason to believe it. And then a lot of what people think of as science is scientific consensus. So it's the stuff that has been interrogated for decades. And over that time, it has been so good explaining the phenomena we see that everybody's sort of agreeing on it. And, you know, I've been lucky enough to live in a time where I got to see that happen a few times. You know, like when I was a kid, there was no consensus around there being a meteorite that killed the dinosaurs or a comet or whatever it was. And now that's a thing. Like we like, there's just consensus around that.

1:05:26Hank Green:We have all kinds of data that confirms that. And it explains all kinds of things that we see. okay just as a footnote here at the moment is there something that there is like a wacky like wild no consensus thing that you really just wish we could figure out like something kind of specific oh i don't know that you're just like i just i want us to work out if that if that is how that that happens nothing's coming to mind immediately for me it's it's probably some some like brain science yeah i mean it'd be great to find like consciousness in there somewhere that would be that would be good that would be to find consciousness in someone else's brain i mean that would be yeah really cool rather than just my own which i which i do every day um for better or worse um i'm quite wrapped up in a debate at the moment uh in by which i mean i i ask people about this and they have differing views and i speak to scientists about what science does in that i mean you just said that science explains things there's a kind of a debate as to whether science actually explains anything at all, or whether it's better to say that science describes things.

1:06:30An example I always give is Isaac Newton, who discovers gravity. And what does he discover? Well, he just discovers that the same thing that makes objects fall keeps planets in orbit.

1:06:43Hank Green:And then later we discover that it's a warping of space-time. But why? Why? And it's still like, because people often think, okay, so Newton described gravity and then we improved on it. And now we aren't. But what actually happened was Isaac Newton discovered this thing that happened, that objects fall and that planets move and that it's the same thing. And then he mathematically described it. And then he wrote explicitly in the second edition of the Principia, but I don't know what gravity like is. I don't know why it does that. I just know that this is how it does it. Einstein comes along and comes up with a sort of better way of picturing.

1:07:20It's actually a space-time fabric and objects sort of bend it. But we still don't know why it does that. And some people want to say, well, that's because what science does is it keeps asking until we figure out why. Or is science just getting better and better at describing what's happening and making predictions about the future, but never able to really tell us why stuff happens? You know what I mean?

1:07:43Hank Green:Yeah, no, I know what you mean. So natural selection is a good example of an actual mechanism. Mm-hmm. So if a single-celled organism figures out a new way to metabolize a new kind of food, that food source is abundant, but nobody else can metabolize it, it starts metabolizing it, and then it divides. And now there's two that can metabolize this new food. Mm-hmm. And then there's four, and then there's eight. Like, this is mechanistic. We're not talking—we're not—we're—I'm not telling you, like, that something is happening. I'm not describing a thing that's happening. I'm telling you how it's happening.

1:08:13Hank Green:Yeah. This is how life on Earth happened, and that's, like, a pretty big thing. Mm-hmm. And, you know, 10 generations later, there's like that gene that allowed for that microorganism to digest that new kind of food is like starting to take over the population of those microbes. You know, 100 or 1 ,000 generations later, there's no microbe left that doesn't have that gene. And that allows you to respond to the environment. It allows you to, and like the environment is constantly changing because it's made of other self-replicators. And like this is biology. This is ecology. This is all the beautiful, engaging stuff that David Attenborough is going to tell you about.

1:08:54Hank Green:And so that is actually. And I think that it can get there. But now you can start to say, okay, but they're made of atoms and we don't know what electrons are. But like we know, and in the same way, we know about like, you know, Newtonian mechanics to some extent is like, you know, it's good at describing stuff, but it's also like kind of the thing that's happening. You know, things are colliding. Energy does, it is moving from, it's like the energy in a system isn't going anywhere. Yeah. It's staying inside of the system. Like it can't be destroyed. and it feels like what the mechanics are describing are those interactions like when you say you know there are sort of it is doing this it is doing that that what the scientist is kind of telling you this is what people will say is that the scientist is telling you what it does and the scientist can't tell you what it like is my friend philip goff has a has a helpful analogy here with chess where if you ask a chess player like what is a bishop they'll say oh it's it's yeah it's that which can only legally move diagonally right and you're like yeah but what like what is it and they're like what do you what do you mean like that just that's just what a bishop is it's just like what it does and similarly a scientist when you say what's an electron and it's a negatively charged particle and you say but you know negative charge is kind of described by what something does what like is it and they go it just is what it does but if you asked if like a carpenter came along and was like what's that bishop made out of and the guy said oh well i just asked the chess player about that and he said it's it's a thing which moves diagonally he'd be like that's like the least helpful thing you possibly could have said to me and the philosopher i think comes in and wants to know like you know why do the molecules split why does you know absorbing energy make me bigger why does being near an object of mass bend space-time so i'm attracted to it and like what is an electron you know i mean i think that i think that a lot of what you're talking about is at the what we're talking like it's stuff at the edge um and and there are that i don't know there's reason there's there's reason to believe that it will the edge will always be there yeah but when i went like when the natural selection example like that is mechanistic we are you are saying like we're not explaining we're not describing this is how it happens and in the same way like plate tectonics like here's why mountains exist it's because like they're you know you they're atoms and so there's a mystery deep down inside of the the mountain but like we know why the himalayas are there and we didn't used to yeah i think for myself i think it depends on your level of analysis because i think like okay yeah so you could say like why why are the himalayas there because of plate tectonics right yeah and it's only if you there and that's that that is a true answer to that question.

1:12:02That is actually why they're there. But then if you become like a real pedant, like a child keeps saying like, but why, but why, but why, then if you actually followed that chain all the way down to the bottom, you would end up somewhere like, you know, atomic physics and you'd end up essentially describing. So it depends on your level of analysis. I keep giving this example to different scientists to see like what they think of it. I'll be interested to see what you think of this actually. So I'm like, imagine like I blow a trumpet it's annoying that this is I could have done it better but this is what it's been now so we'll run with it if I blew a trumpet and a light turned on just over there like a red light and I worked out that if I blow the trumpet louder yeah it's brighter and if I blow a different note like it's it's blue and I sort of and I test it over and over again and then I sort of make this prediction I'm like okay I think if I play a g flat that you know this exact you know decibel that it'll be an azure shade and and it's perfect and so i've mapped it all out and i know now exactly how those things correlate and i can make predictions about how to do it and so i blow the trumpet and the light turns on and somebody goes wow like you know why did the light turn on and i say oh because i blew the trumpet right have i explained why the light turns on or not and some scientists i speak to go yeah you have and i'm like i don't know man And it feels to me like when someone says, well, we know why the Himalayas are there because of plate tectonics.

1:13:30That's a bit like saying, we know why the light turned on. We've worked out it's because of the trumpet. Okay, but like why does blowing the trumpet turn the light on, you know? So you can kind of keep going deeper.

1:13:41Hank Green:But you recognize that, so with the light, I think that that is analogous to a lot of atomic, like subatomic physics. Yeah. We're like, we don't have a theory here that ties it all together. But I think that if you were able to go up to the light and take apart the light and find inside of the light a microphone and a transistor, and you can send the transistor off to a lab and be like, reverse engineer this for me, tell me what it does. There's like a Raspberry Pi in there. Yeah. And you're like, well, now, like mechanistically, I do understand. But you still don't know what the atoms of the transistor are made of.

1:14:26Hank Green:So I think that like, I think it's got to be both, right? Yeah. And so like, it is to some extent, like how useful is the, like how useful is the tool? Yeah. So like, if we understand plate tectonics, it like explains a lot of things. Yeah. and it depends on the context in which you're asking in that like if you said oh like you know alex why are you wearing a jacket and i said because it's cold you'd be like okay but if you were some alien creature who didn't have like sense data on your skin and didn't understand that there was this that cold was then me saying because it's cold would prompt you to then go what's that and why does that do that and what it's a but because in the context we've sort of got this baseline agreement we can say oh you wore it because it's i would love love to explain cold to an alien yeah right that would be so fun yeah but i think it would be but it's totally doable do you say okay okay like like thank you Good debate.

1:15:38Cliffhanger. The next time. What do you mean?

1:15:41Hank Green:What do you mean? You mean like an alien who couldn't feel cold? Yeah. Well, I couldn't explain the sensation to them. So what could you explain? I could explain. I could say. So the way that our bodies function chemically is that we have like these molecules. And they function optimally when there's a certain amount of energy in the system. And if there's not enough energy in the system, they stop working. And the thing that is us, the continuity that is our bodies, stops. And they probably have some analog for that. um and uh and so our bodies tell us when we get even a little bit we start to get even a little bit close to that it's a little unpleasant when we get very close to that it's very unpleasant but even when we're like just a couple of degrees off when we have a little bit more or less energy than is optimal for our bodies yeah our bodies send us signals and they say we you know this isn't optimal and it's a little unpleasant like the sensation is unpleasantness but suppose the alien said to you like what's what's that what's unpleasant what does that mean yeah i mean it's it's a it's an aversion signal so it's a signal that our bodies are giving to us my my spaceship has an aversion signal yeah you know like so so that's kind of right the spaceship's feeling cold well the question is does this alien also have consciousness yeah okay but then if it has consciousness but not that kind of consciousness yeah so imagine so like so like alien please give me an example of a qualia like give me something that you feel yeah that's that like drives you in a in a either toward or away from i wonder if maybe the reason why we just said opposite things is because we're talking about two different things which is there's like the the physical processes that like correlate with the experience or the or the qualia and then there's the experience for the qualia itself right i mean you did crash course psychology some 10 11 years nine years ago?

1:17:41Something like that. Something like that, about a decade ago, and you did the consciousness thing. So, you know, you'll, I don't know to what extent doing that or thinking about that, like gave you like hardline views about this, but you probably, like you're familiar with, I imagine Mary's room, the thought experiment, if you come across this, I talk about this sometimes, I talk about this a lot. Sorry to my audience who have heard me bang on about the same things over and over again, but I think it is, it is, it is really useful which is this mary is in a room and it's black and white there's no color and she's born in this room and what she does is she gets given like every single possible bit of information that it could in principle ever even be possible yes i have heard to write about yeah blue right yeah and so she knows everything there is to know about blue that can even possibly be written down onto a piece of paper and then at the end of her life she walks outside she sees something blue has she learned something new and the answer seems to be yes and can we agree that like we couldn't explain that thing for sure to an alien absolutely but isn't that what like cold

1:18:51Hank Green:is well it could be i mean there is so like you can define things in many different ways so like is cold is cold is called the the sensation of cold or is called the tool that has evolved to to like help us survive i think that is the difference and that's why we disagreed about whether you could explain this to an alien because maybe we're talking about two different things i think we were but look if you can explain to an alien yeah like some mechanistic process by which organisms you know move from cold into into hot like it's cool that you can do that but it kind of suddenly becomes a little bit uninteresting do you know it becomes like now we're gonna fight It's like a little bit like, okay, it's a bit like explaining to an alien that plate tectonics or something.

1:19:41It's like, it's cool. It's interesting. Yeah, we've got this thing. Cool. And they'd be like, oh, nice. So your rocks kind of like bump into you. Yeah, sweet, man. Cool. But if you said to them, oh, and by the way, when they do that, it comes along with this intangible experience.

1:19:54Hank Green:Well, that's what I think. I think that the alien has consciousness. Yeah. And so they might not have hot and cold because maybe their chemistry, I don't see how this would happen, but maybe their chemistry doesn't require it. But if they have sensations, like there are things that they sense. And it's so hard for me to imagine a complex living system, like a multicellular organism that doesn't have experience. yeah there's a there's a really famous essay that was written by thomas nagel in the 70s called what is it like to be a bat and it's a sort of really groundbreaking philosophical essay because like you can imagine being a bat in and the reason he uses a bat is because the bats can see can't they're not actually blind but they they echo locate right and you can imagine being a bat in the sense of you can imagine being yourself like you can imagine hanging upside down like like clicking around trying to get around but that's not imagining what it's like to be a bat that's imagining what it's like to be you pretending to be a bat yeah right but what it's actually like to be a bat for a bat his essential conclusion from this essay is that it's not possible to know it's not possible to take that experiential thing and reduce it to scientific explanation or put it into words and yeah we know that there are animals that can sense like infrared you know and we can't and we can like mimic it by like an infrared camera but we're not seeing infrared there we're seeing normal color yeah i mean echolocation is much weirder yeah to me it's like oh infrared maybe it's another color like yeah like imagine all the colors but with more yeah i can kind of do that but with echolocation they're not like clicking and having it and and like i don't know like like what is it what are they what are they experiencing because it's not one of our senses yeah it's not like one of our senses turned up or down or with like a wider range it's it's a whole other one yeah or like the what does it feel like does it smell does it does it taste does it be its own thing wouldn't it like does it received it's probably probably we know whether it's probably there's somebody who's put a bat in an fmri probably and knows that it's what part of the brain it's activating so they might see but who cares sound you know who cares what part of the brain is activated because you know you because again to us because now we're the aliens right yeah and and we we look at the echolocation we're like oh that's cool that's that's interesting but the thing that really grips us is like what is that like you know like the birds who can navigate using the magnetic field what are they feeling what is that yeah well here's like isn't isn't this cool that we have like uh like hunger is not like sight like two sensations they're not like each other but they are like each other like they And so I kind of imagine like inside of me there's like a central trading post and everybody's trading like fish for berries, you know?

1:22:53Hank Green:And like fish and berries are totally different things. Like just like hunger and fear are totally different things. But like there's something inside of me that's like, okay, well, you have all of these things. And so we have to like weigh all of this stuff. We have to weigh anxiety. We have to weigh love. We have to weigh cold. we have to weigh um you know thirst all of these things at the same time and pain pain like the original one you know like it's got to be the first sensation yeah either that or like the most pure sensation too like actually that must no it must be it must because i was going to say maybe it's like light you know people think about sort of light perception but then you kind of have to for that to be useful there needs to be some rudimental sense in which you you like want yeah the light and you don't want the dark or vice versa yeah yeah just just like like want is the want is the craziest thing yeah and i think it's it's almost like all of those currencies add up to the want i think so i mean it seems to me that all action requires want because in order to do anything yeah you need at least consciously you need to sort of want the world to be a way that it's not otherwise you can't act even if it's like really rudimentary and i think want kind of requires some semblance of like pain and pleasure because like to to have a preference is kind of to say you know this is better than this which means i prefer this to this which means at least comparatively this is like that i don't like and that's that's kind of what pain yeah i mean that's this the if you go if you go far enough down if you think of like ciliates like i don't think maybe you disagree i don't think that they have uh they have sensations i don't think that they feel i think that they there's like uh you know there's a gradient of acid and they're moving away or toward it there's a gradient of light and they're are they moving away or toward it?

1:24:55Hank Green:And so that's still kind of, it's not want in the way that we think, but it is acting in the world to make the world the way that is better for you. Yeah. Yeah. But at some point, the place where that transitions into sensation, that just seems to me like a thing that would evolve. You know? It seems like there's just too much to have it be like a math equation where it's a bunch of chemicals receiving signals and thus resulting in an action. Eventually, you have to have the central trading post where all of these sensations is kind of turned into like one thing. Yeah. And is that what experience is?

1:25:44Yeah. Because it seems like the great mystery in the philosophy of mind, the so-called hard problem of consciousness is this weirdness of adding together like atoms a bunch of like material and then you get like this thing out that that feels different to people the taste of coca-cola or something it's not even like you don't just get you know all the brain activity correlated with it's like you get this thing the taste of coca-cola and there are like a few issues with that firstly they seem to be different kinds of things i've sometimes compared it to like taking a bunch of tangerines and if you just put them in the right order then you get like the concept of divorce it just it just doesn't make sense i yeah i don't like yeah yeah i i'm not

1:26:28Hank Green:sure i agree but i understand what you mean but here's the other thing the so-called china brain experiment which you may or may not have heard of i'm throwing out all these i you know i hate when someone names something and says have you heard of this and you're like no and then they start describing you like yeah yes i have heard of this i didn't know i look like i don't yeah so so it's this idea that like if all that a brain is is just like you know neurons sort of firing information it's just information moving around and then if you just have enough information moving in the right way in a complex organization you get the taste of coca-cola you get this thing called consciousness then in theory you could replicate this you actually need many many many many more people than are in China.

1:27:11But they picked China because there was a lot of people. And you just imagine that you take a brain and for every single neuron in your brain, there is a human being somewhere on some planet with like a little, you know, sticky note, passing a bit of information and you replicate it one for one. Would there emerge this big taste of Coca-Cola like in the China? Because it seems like... It wouldn't.

1:27:40Hank Green:That wouldn't happen. But how can you say that? Because if all that the sensational experience is, is just the movement of information in the right way, well, I've got the same thing. It's just like bigger. So why not? Because some people say like, huh, yeah, I guess it would. Yeah, I guess there would be a big China brain. But you seem to think that there wouldn't be? You know, I haven't spent a ton of time with a thought experiment yet. But there's, I mean, there's like some mechanistic problems there where it's not all binary. So it's not like passing a note. But that could be solved. Yeah, yeah.

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1:29:26Hank Green:It would be really weird. It would be really weird. I think so like the brain will always be the final frontier you know it's very strange so like you know most complicated thing in the known universe outside of all the other brains and and I just I think that we're like still quite at the beginning of it yeah and I'm really interested like the question of like when or whether a computer will suffer which is kind of the china brain a little bit yeah is really interesting and not like like we've had this script in this i show pitch document for years and like we just can't write it what about when a computer will suffer yeah when when will like when will a computer suffer yeah well what is it is it when will it suffer or will it ever suffer i mean what's it alex it's whichever title gets more clicks uh but yeah i don't i don't know i i think i i think uh that that they are you know they are the same same question kind of because you know there's like the first step and then the second so if they will when i guess when the answer could be never yeah yeah fair enough yeah um the uh but that yeah right that is the kind of the china brain except instead of people passing notes it's just like you know zeros and ones on a computer somehow um the and like i think the answer is if the title is will a computer ever suffer i i feel like or could feel like the answer is yes because like that's you know i think that yeah all of the things that happen in the brain happen in the brain i think the consciousness is emergent of the cells not of the universe, you know?

1:31:16It's interesting that you say no to the China brain, but yes to the computer brain. I know! And I wonder if that's like, just because of how we like, I'm going to move this up. Well, I think that's why it's such

1:31:26Hank Green:a good thought experiment, because it really separates you from the... It really pulls you out of the intangible. Yeah. Because it's like, maybe it's just because it's easier for us to imagine a computer that's really complex, because we now have complex... I don't understand what's going on in there, just like, I don't know what sounds going on here. Yeah, but we can show me an NVIDIA GPU. I'm not going to be able to tell you what that is. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it's simpler than the brain, but I don't know. It's a lot more complicated than anything else I've ever touched. I saw this meme about like, you know, the guy who like goes back in time to impress like the middle aged people with his like incredible increased technology.

1:32:03And they're like, OK, so how does how does this electricity thing work? And he's like, I don't know. I've got no idea. Check out this. Oh, the battery's dead. I promised this used to you, but I couldn't possibly explain why.

1:32:15Hank Green:So there's this thing called an electron. We don't know what it is. Yeah, exactly. Computers, I think, offer a really interesting litmus test to your philosophy of consciousness. Because if you think that the question of whether a computer can become conscious is basically the same question as whether consciousness is just reducible to material activity. Or could we create, like, if the brain is like an antenna for consciousness, couldn't we build a computer that was an antenna for consciousness? Oh, man, I hadn't even thought about that. Oh, dear. That's not good, is it? This is the thing about the hard problems.

1:32:53There's always a harder problem around the corner. You know what confuses me? And I've talked about this a couple of times now. And I'm being a bit silly, but I genuinely actually wouldn't know how to answer this. You know, people say things like, you know, chat GPT could become conscious. okay let me just say that it's conscious let's just grant okay it becomes conscious what does that mean like you've got chat gpt on your phone presumably i've got it on my phone does it mean that like there's an individual conscious agent in each of those does it mean that there's like one big thing called chat gpt that's conscious and it's got all of these individual what like

1:33:30Hank Green:avatars or express like would that literally what would that even mean mean would it be conscious only in the moments when it's active because that's it's not like sitting there exactly waiting around for you it's only like doing something in the times when it's doing something and i guess our brains are the same and our is every instance there's every question a new consciousness yeah and not just like yours and mine but like every every new yeah a consciousness that like blinks in and out of existence. I was talking to Nate Torres about this and his very good point was, we cross these lines when they are fuzziest.

1:34:06Hank Green:So the idea that consciousness is a binary is maybe a bit of a problem. Things don't tend to be. It certainly feels like it would be as a conscious thing. It feels like it would be this or nothing. But I think that maybe it might not be. I think that like oftentimes times the thing that we think are are light switches are dimmer switches and and so that like they're that the the line will not get crossed when one day it's it like stands up on a tree stump and says i am chat gpt and i have suffered yeah by that point it will be far too late have you seen um neo the uh the humanoid robot oh yeah i haven't i haven't looked deep into this i've just seen thumbnails it is hilarious i i literally learned about this yesterday because mkbhd yeah made a video about it and then there's an interview by the wall street journal so it's like a humanoid robot that's been built by some company and it's supposed to be like this essentially like this slave and it's like you can pre-order it right now for twenty thousand dollars it will ship sometime sometime in 2026 yeah you say that like it's a lot of money but it's like what you know it's like a year of groceries now it is it is a lot of money when you consider that right now the robot is remote controlled oh there's like a person so like the idea is that basically one day how did how did i miss this this is incredible how did i miss this with all like i keep seeing it all over the place but there's just like a remote operated so they can see my house yeah so so the idea is that one day this will be a fully autonomous robot but we need all the data but we need to train it and the way that we train it is by getting rich people spend twenty thousand dollars and then they have to schedule like a moment where somebody will remotely control the robot literally do the dishwasher for them which will then teach it how to how to do a dishwasher yeah and so the the wall street journal went and did a did a sort of interview with the with the ceo and met this this neo and there's literally this guy stood there with with a headset on and control you know like a we remote or something and um she's testing it out and she's like okay so go and do go and put this in the dishwasher and it takes him like five minutes going like like it's like having basically you're paying twenty thousand dollars to have like a drunk toddler like attempt to do tasks in your house and then do you know the scariest part about this right is firstly i forget the the woman's name of the wall street journal but she's interviewing the ceo and she's like okay so so you'll need people to to train this people will need access to your your house and they're like yeah but like if you want this technology to be useful you just have to accept that social contract and then she's like okay and then she's like so what's stopping neo once it is autonomous or when it's not from just like picking up a really heavy object and dropping it on my head when i'm asleep or boiling some water and and the ceo is just like well i mean that would be physically possible but it won't be allowed to yeah we will which is which we've seen so clearly yeah and i don't even like i'm not even attributing malice to it or like it doesn't like want to hurt you but like we've already seen that chatbots yep will hurt people.

1:37:30Hank Green:You know, they'll drive you freaking crazy because the incentives are very weird. Can I tell you, I read this book and I don't know, it was a science fiction book and I can't remember anything about it. Except. I would love to hear about that. Except that in order for the AI to work, you had to raise it like a child. Yeah. And this makes a kind of sense to me. Yes. It had to be born. It had to like be bad at walking and moving around. It had to, like a person had to be a parent to this thing. Yes. And then it would learn how to be a person, which is how we do it. Yeah. I've just found it. Joanna Stern is the woman at the Wall Street Journal.

1:38:06And she says at the end of this interview, she says, the next few years isn't about owning a super useful robot. It's about raising one.

1:38:13Hank Green:Yeah. Because we're growing AI. We're not like inventing it. We are growing. You talked about this in a recent video. We're growing it. we're like we're it's a it's it's almost like a sort of biological organism that's like learning from its environment one of the one of the top comments quoted the ceo saying the robot like has the ability to terminate you but it will not because of its programming said by every scientist in every sci-fi apocalypse doomsday movie like ever yeah yeah but yeah it's great isn't it it's sort of like it's like oh yeah it's literally the start of a movie it's like the ceo being like somebody being a little, isn't this kind of dangerous?

1:38:53And they're like, oh, don't worry, it's not allowed to do that.

1:38:56Hank Green:This made me think about the China computer. Yeah. That I don't know that you could start it up and have it be conscious. The China brain and the computer consciousness have merged into the China computer. Oh, is that what it was called? Okay. So we've got this really complicated Chinese machine. So the China brain. I think there's a thing that makes me feel like it would be more possible if it wasn't conscious from the moment it started. But something happened over the course of it existing in an environment where consciousness emerged. And I think that that might be kind of how it works with us.

1:39:38Hank Green:Like I have a son and like, I feel like he, he's nine. He just turned nine. And I feel like he's like, kind of don't take this out of context, more conscious now than he once was. He's more introspective now than he once. He's more aware of, of like his self. He's more. And like, I, you know, from the beginning, I think that there were sensations and there were like, like I want in this direction and not in another. but there weren't there weren't like stories around it he doesn't have he didn't have like a thing to place that inside of he didn't have memories he didn't so like when you're a baby baby you don't have this continuity you don't have and like i don't know that you are forming memories like you're learning how to use your brain the brain learns how to use itself it's so weird because yeah it there's no other way to do it yeah so that a little bit sort of like i'm so interested in the development of brains in infants because I think it can tell us quite a lot.

1:40:43I don't know anything about it, but I meant to look into it, some discussion about the dominance of the right hemisphere in children, and then the left hemisphere sort of comes to predominate later in life or something like that. So that's why children are much more like feely and language isn't really a thing yet. And then it sort of becomes so, I don't know. One thing that is for sure is that it is extremely complicated yeah i also think by the way that might have something to do with the free will thing the hemisphere stuff i talk about hemispheres all the time as well because i think it's so interesting the way that they like independently interact and i think that like maybe our feeling of free will comes from our like retrospective rationalization of

1:41:26Hank Green:stuff that we just did that that that is i mean i've heard that as an explanation for like why it feels like free will is because we are always telling a story to ourselves exactly and in like what story makes sense and you know but you know i i can't cite this with any level of accuracy but people who had only have one hemisphere of the brain like you or or corpus callosum or have the split split the brain too you can show them a thing and then they can act based on what they're seeing but they don't know that they're seeing it and so they tell you a story about why they're acting that is different from the actual reason exactly i talk about this all the time i sometimes talk about alex o 'connor bingo and if you're at home it's like you know consciousness china brain mary's room split brain gnostic gospels which you've managed not to do um although i did do that with ret the other day somehow somehow it just happened um but yes the split brain stuff is fascinating like you can watch on youtube the experiments where they'll send just the right or the left visual field information so the left brain does speech and it also governs the right sort of visual field and the right brain doesn't do speech and it's left visual field so if you show the left visual field so right hand side of the eye book the person goes book and you show the word camera they go camera if you show them to the other side cowboy they'll say i didn't see anything i don't know what you're talking about and then you give their their left hand a pencil they just close your eyes and just let your hand they'll draw a cowboy which is crazy but so the weird thing that i think you're talking about and there's been like really specific um proofs of this in split brain patients this is just in people by the way who have the split the the corpus callisotomy is split like in in functioning brains they just communicate with each other of course yeah you can't just do this at home i should clarify that um but with these split brain patients who've had that procedure, if you show them an instruction to just the right hand side of the brain and they're in an experiment, so they're awaiting instructions and the instruction says, get up and walk over to that table, they'll get up, they'll walk over there.

1:43:34Then when the experimenter says, why did you just do that? It's not even that they say, oh, I don't know. They're like, I wanted a glass of water. Exactly. And they believe it. They think it's true. And so I'm thinking, yeah, like when you were talking about free will earlier, and I was thinking about the hemispheres as I always do, as we always do, I was like, you know, okay, so if the right brain just does stuff and then the left brain retrospectively says, oh no, I remember that the reason why I did that before was because of this, this, and this. That's why we get this weird feeling. I feel like I chose to do that because that was me when actually, no, you didn't.

1:44:12Hank Green:I feel like if I actually believed that I didn't have free will, I would act differently, which people say this quite often and often, often like as a means of objection, they say to me, you don't act like there's no free will. And I'm like, what would that look like? Like how, why would you, why would you act differently? I don't know. Because like, you know, people say, people say, I do still care about all the same things. Exactly. The argument against free will is that you are just governed by the desires that you don't control yeah so when you eat it's because you're hungry and you don't control being hungry and whatnot and so somebody says well what if you just knew there was free will it's like i'm still hungry yeah still gonna go and eat i'm just gonna know that that's like why i'm doing it it's it's it's exactly the same thing as as something like hunger like you feel hunger and i could say oh but hank don't you know that the reason you feel hunger is because of this evolutionary explanation for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:45:10And you'll go like, oh, that's really interesting. But I'm still hungry. It doesn't like remove the hunger just to explain why it's happening. It's almost like something emerges from a world of a bunch of people who don't have free will.

1:45:26Hank Green:And I'm not saying that like society has free will, but there is a thing that emerges. I was just thinking about how, like, ever since you said elephant, there's been this like little thing in my head that has been saying, and the way that you put an elephant in my head, I allow the TikTok algorithm to put whatever the hell it wants in my head. And its incentive is to give me whatever will keep me on the app for longest. That's the whole game. And maybe with a side of showing me ads, you know, so they got to turn it into money somehow. And that puts stuff in my head and it changes who I am. So what I do have is attention.

1:46:06Hank Green:Do I have control over my attention? I don't know. But I know that if I say the only thing that I have is attention, and if I give that away to five billionaires and I'm like, that's the right choice to make, then I'll be less likely to do that in the future. And also everybody who heard that will be a little less likely to do that in the future. So there's this thing that's going on. It's, you know, there are all these big brain tech guy ideas that Twitter is the super consciousness. But there is a super consciousness and it is a thing that travels between us and it does change behavior. It's the Silicon Valley brain.

1:46:56Hank Green:I hope not. Yeah. Hopefully it's the whole world and we're all doing it together and the Midwest is included. for once. That would be nice. That would be nice. Yeah, I think a lot about this kind of stuff. And I think about brains and what they do and consciousness and this kind of stuff and this algorithmic thing. You're right. They just... I like what you say about attention. I was just thinking about that and how to put it into words. Somebody right now is scrolling on the comments, right? because you do that when you watch a video you go oh i'm just gonna scroll through the comments and somebody who was just doing that as i said those words was scrolling and reading something and i said someone's scrolling in the comments right now they've gone whoa yeah and their attention has just been pulled back up it's the the cocktail party effect which you talk about in that video 10 years ago um which is you know if you're at a cocktail uh party yeah and there's loads of noise around and i'm listening to what you're saying and there's this murmur murmur No awareness of any of this stuff happening back there.

1:48:04You couldn't say what that conversation is. You can't even hear it. It's like a big murmur. But if someone over there, you know, says your name or says your hometown or something, you just like, you're like over there all of a sudden. And it's not clear, like, exactly how or why that's even possible. But I know that makes me suspicious as to whether we have full control over our attention.

1:48:25Hank Green:I don't think that we have full control over our attention. I think that no one living on the earth today who's paying attention to their consciousness at all is like, yeah, I've got total control over my choices. I just closed the Reddit tab and opened the Reddit tab again. I closed it and then I typed an R.E.D. So that's I'm totally in control here right now. Yeah. So, you know, and like I've closed TikTok and opened TikTok. Yeah, I've done that. It's a mess. So, yeah, we the the the thing that I like I am most worried about maybe in I've got a lot of worries, but I am very worried about this in terms of like how our minds interact with their world around them.

1:49:13Hank Green:I am worried about the extent to which we have these algorithms optimized for making money. And just like when you have a food company optimized for making money, you don't end up with the healthiest food. I think when you have an information company optimized for making money, you don't have the healthiest information. And that can be in a lot of different ways. But I think the biggest way that seems so obvious to me is that it encourages a lack of faith and trust in everything. because the a very easy way to get people's attention is to say this thing that you think you should trust is bad actually i think about uh rfk jr as a science communicator because i'm a science communicator yeah and he's communicating about science okay yeah about yeah about the body of human knowledge and he he talks of and and i i think about like why he is successful at getting information into people's heads because that's part of my job is to like share things that are interesting and hopefully also useful.

1:50:22Hank Green:And I'm sure that he sees himself in the same way. And when I really like sort of dove deep into how his career has gone and how he talks about stuff, there's a trick that he will always have that I will never have, which is that he can say whatever. And if you want to get attention from people, what should you say? The government is poisoning your children. And I can't say that because I don't think the government is poisoning your children. And I think that there's a huge amount of evidence to indicate that the government is not poisoning your children. But if you'd like someone to look at you, the government is poisoning your children is a pretty good place to start.

1:51:10Hank Green:and and like what's and then like you can build the story from there but it is the scariest possible thing so you show them the scariest possible thing and i look through my social media feeds and i see versions of that that are more appealing to me you know that like they you know there'll be some graph that's like shows how how bad everything is and how how we're like headed toward certain doom. And I can't look away from that graph because that's a real thing that's really happening. And then sometimes I look deeper and actually it isn't. Actually, that graph was misleading in a number of ways.

1:51:51Hank Green:Or I saw one once that straight up just was wrong. It was just somebody had put the numbers in wrong, but that's the one that went viral because it's the one that showed the scariest version of the story. Yeah. And I think that if the world is composed of a bunch of people who have no accountability for their lies or their mistakes even let's say that like they don't have to be intentionally misleading you but like people make mistakes all the time or or they want to get views and so they they they find that when they're more angry that they the videos do better if you have a world that's composed of all of this then you have a world that is more freed at the edges one that maybe people are more aware of problems than they used to be and so that's can be a positive but one that is uh where where uh if if you are exposed to all of this it's just impossible to feel any agency and it is uh and all you feel kind of is that um at the root of it there is this insurmountable evil um and i worry i worry i worry about this because that content does so well but that's why i think people like content like yours because in part what you do is you you notice this and you try to sort of speak against it and i was just thinking there's this really interesting phenomenon that's maybe going on here which is that you've kind of how do you get people's attention you take this thing that's happening in the world that people trust and you say hey don't actually trust that thing and what you sometimes do in a video is you'll say there's this thing in the world that everybody trusts which is the videos people saying not to trust stuff yeah and you're saying hey like don't trust that stuff and i'm doing it right now yeah so people are still like so you still manage to capture people's attention with a similar sort of like hey this this thing that you think is like wrong but yeah only because you've been sort of faced with videos that i really liked recently about double a batteries okay so i i didn't see that oh yeah it didn't It did fine.

1:53:58Hank Green:The idea was I went in thinking there must be a reason why AA batteries still suck. So they're the same as they were when I was a kid. I'm 45 years old. They're maybe a little bit better than they were back then, but they're basically the same. And why? Like I've got an electric car. It can go for 300 miles. Why would a AA battery still suck this bad? Why are we still using this old shitty chemistry? yeah and and i thought the answer would be that uh like some some form of evil like somebody's got a cartel somewhere and they're like not letting batteries get better because that would be bad for the bottom line they want to keep us buying batteries and i looked into it and like the ultimately it's like kind of fine like it's it's ultimately because lithium-ion batteries produce a different voltage than alkaline batteries.

1:54:53Hank Green:And so in order to get a lithium ion battery that works in a normal device that currently takes AA batteries, you have to put a voltage stepper in it and that makes it more expensive. It takes up space inside of the batteries so you don't get as much gain as you'd think. And so like we're making these voltage steppers smaller and cheaper and so maybe eventually we'll get there. But in the meantime, we haven't because it's hard. And it's more expensive and also the devices that use AA batteries tend to not need that much electricity anyway. And if we need a device that does need more electricity, we just put a rechargeable lithium ion in it from the start.

1:55:31Hank Green:So like we solve the problem a different way. And like the toys, like really the problem is that like people are building toys still that use alkaline batteries because it's cheaper to do that. So like the toy people are to some extent to blame. It's not the cartel. But they're also following incentives that kind of make sense. And most toys don't get used for that long anyway. So they probably don't need that much battery stuff. Maybe we just need to bring more awareness to the lack of development of AA technology, which I've never thought about. I think one of your greatest talents is not even just in really helpfully explaining to people why certain things are the case, but thinking of the kind of stuff that kind of actually does need explaining but you've never thought like i i've never once questioned why double a batteries suck yeah and i don't know how an idea like that hasn't hasn't struck me and it's kind of annoying that it hasn't i mean we were just talking before about all these video ideas like i i mentioned ret ret and link they did their uh eating every they were like eating every food that's mentioned in the bible yeah so every single time a food is mentioned of any kind in the bible they they we're youtubers and i'm like that is so are you you've got your own ideas you can we have them in i need someone doing that we you've got a ton of ideas you just i have you have different ideas yeah but yeah i have to bring somebody on who does think of such such things and interview them in missoula montana i don't yeah i don't i don't know that i need to see you eat every food in the bible though that's fair enough actually yeah that's a that's a more of a retin link idea yeah you might be right maybe the universe just i love it i love ideas and how they work because like what's that just sort of occurs to you doesn't it yeah i mean i think a lot i think about it a lot because i have a lot of ideas yeah and and um it and so when i'm having an idea i i now do the thing that i do with like anxiety you know when i'm having an anxiety i'm like what's what's happening where did this come from yeah uh whereas you don't tend to do that without ideas because you don't want to like interrupt the process.

1:57:38Hank Green:It's not unpleasant. And so you're not like searching for a reason why this is happening to you. But because it happens to me, I've have done it. And what I really think it comes down to is like a good understanding of a problem set and a good understanding of a tool set. So like what Rhett and Link are thinking is like, we need to make something that's going to make people click. It's going to be fun to watch. we're going to have a good time doing it. We've got all the tools necessary to pull this off. So like they understand their, their, their problem set, which is like, how do you get people to watch something that they're going to enjoy?

1:58:18Hank Green:And then they understand their tool set, which is like, we're Rhett and Link. And like, we have mythical entertainment around us. And yeah. And so like that, and, and like the audience that they have, like, what is their audience like? What does their audience expect? Yeah. You know, you're working with your own tool set and problem set yeah i suppose so and they they do it very differently as well i was just i was just there i was just at mythical hq again and it is quite the operation it's quite the operation people on computers who i'm just like what could that person possibly be doing i don't i don't understand like what how are there they're ordering every food in the bible yeah that probably was what he was doing that day yeah i am i'm just wondering since you mentioned ideas and you come up with ideas all the time there must be sometimes when you have ideas which you have to abandon either because you actually just can't work it out or no one's worked it out where like yeah you stumble or maybe that becomes the video where you're like huh why are double a batteries so bad and you look it up and you're like oh no one knows and so you can make a video being like hey guys like let's improve our double a batteries that kind of thing must happen a fair amount of the time yeah i mean that's that's the great thing about this particular job um so so if if the question presents itself which it doesn't always and i don't i couldn't tell you where the double a battery thing came from um but if the present if the question presents itself the answer is always interesting yeah or it could be i could i pretty much can always make the answer interesting and there's a lot of different ways that i have learned to do that and that it sort of like comes down to the comes down to the question yeah philosophers do the opposite they've got really interesting questions and really drawn out boring answers like you know i don't know it's it's or they just sit around thinking about china they're hard they're hard questions they are and a lot of the time they are just literally meaningless or completely impractical but but i i defend the sort of doing philosophy for philosophy's sake you know me too i think it's interesting it's like a mental exercise sometimes it's just like go to the gym or something there's and there's stuff in there yeah you did the philosophy crash course as well right you did the philosophy one yeah yeah that must have been quite quite hard to get right i'll tell you what it was a hundred percent uh other people's words yeah right so i was a that was a teleprompter yeah yeah just like psychology was um and we didn't i was the cheapest available host but i learned a lot i can imagine like you're sort of reading from a teleprompter being like oh oh oh right oh right that'll be with sideshow that happens all the time yeah every time i go into shoot sideshow it's a failure if i walk out without having learned something yeah yeah yeah you've got to be like a newsreader who is sort of like reading these stories and managing not to constantly be sort of like oh did you fish do that yeah yeah i think it's i think it's it's it's quite the it's quite it's quite the talent it's quite the talent yeah i mean the worst videos are always the ones that i want to that i care about the most like double a batteries you can just crank that out yeah but like the moment i i feel like something's important and i want to like do it really well yeah it's a catastrophe do you mean in terms of trying to get the video done or the actual quality of the video, the results.

2:01:46Hank Green:The quality of the video that results is much higher, but it's going to be six months before it's done a minimum. I'm the same. There are video ideas I've been wanting to make for literally years. Yeah. I've got footage in the can. Me too. Ready to go. It's just like, but that's almost worse because now I'm like, I don't remember what that is. I interview, I've got this video that I wanted to make a couple of years ago and I still plan on making it. and it i thought it'd be cool if i interviewed a couple of experts so i went i interviewed got like an hour footage they're thinking yeah what happened to that footage i emailed them recently and was sort of like hey i just wanted to randomly say yeah i still plan on making this i'm really sorry and they're totally cool with it but now i'm also like i've got two hours of interview on a subject that i haven't touched in a few years i'm now going to have to watch through the whole it's just like you're just like making more and more work for yourself which is why i quite like the fact that a lot of the time with like podcasts and conversations i have it's really difficult to predict what will do well oh yeah it's so difficult to predict that there's much less of that kind of like oh gosh like this one gotta be ready for that make sure that it's like let's just have a chat and like see see how it goes on the internet yeah i've been amazed at some of the some of the good and the good and the bad actually the ret ret's episode the first episode i did with ret is the second most popular episode we've ever done just under a journalist from the uk called peter hitchens who stormed oh yeah yeah i thought about storming out a couple times just to just try it out i sit up see how you've never walked out of you put an elephant in my head i know i know it's like it's it's it's pretty yeah i did i did watch i did watch that it's hard not to want to watch things like that that's the thing is it that's it i i i really didn't know whether to whether to upload it because he well he was just he acted very strangely so yeah if he afterward especially yeah that's it if he'd have just walked out yeah then first i probably wouldn't have uploaded it just add his you know request if he said like yeah if he just walked out and as he's walking out said like by the way i'd rather you didn't run this then like if my if you said to me you know alex like i feel like i've looked it back and like my hair wasn't quite right then it's like cool well you know like i like to yeah make sure that guests are comfortable to know that we're not going to post anything they don't want but it was such an extraordinary moment that i had to make this this decision yeah and um yeah i i don't know man it was it was what's it like because i know that you were into new atheism as a as a youth yeah what's it like getting to like hang out with all these guys huh yeah it's like i mean it's a it's a privilege and an yeah and an honor but as i'm sure has happened to you many times given that you are you know internet famous and you've done all these kinds of interesting things you find yourself in situations where like And either because when an email comes through and you get an opportunity, you're like, wow, this is really exciting and very excited.

2:04:45And then as time goes on, you're getting ready for it and you're expecting it so that when it actually happens, it's almost like normal. You're so used to the idea that this is happening that it happens and you're like, cool.

2:04:56Hank Green:Yeah, it's not like you run into them at the coffee shop and then you like sit down and have a really engaging conversation out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I get more starstruck when it comes to like random, like micro celebrities who I've heard of that I never expected to bump into on the street or something, right? But it's really interesting because I feel as though I am like picking up this conversation where it was dropped off because new atheism was a thing. It's become fashionable to say that it's kind of dead. but there are still a lot of atheists and there's a lot of people who are interested in religion yeah and there's not really a bit there's not a movement there's not a discussion and so when it comes to sort of agnostic atheist you know content particularly online you know there's lots of people there's lots of people doing it but it doesn't seem to be sort of as unified a movement and when it comes to like writing books or stuff like that there's someone really doing that and so i kind of feel like okay i'm in this position where i can pick up this baton but i'm not trying to be the protege of someone like Richard Dawkins.

2:05:59I love Richard, you know, and I've spent a lot of time with him and I respect him a lot. But I tell this story sometimes of when I saw him in a car park and he asked me, I'd said to him that the God delusion I felt didn't adequately explain or deal with a particular argument. And he said to me later, he said to me at this event, he was like, what could I have done? And I said, well, you know, you treat all kinds of causation as if they're the same thing. And he says, well, do you think there are different kinds of causation? I said, oh, actually, I do. And then I sort of spent about 30 to 60 seconds trying to explain what I thought the difference was, to which he said, but what the fuck has that got to do with anything interesting?

2:06:44Thank God I'm not a theologian. And then he walked away. And by the way, he wasn't being rude. That's just, that's just, that's just who he was. And I really felt as though like being left stood there in this in this car park with my hand like okay you know i felt that was quite representative of what i feel like i'm doing which is literally the archetypal new atheist has has has done his his career has done these really interesting things and wonderful things and has gotten to this point where now at this point of the conversation where i'm like well there's this really interesting stuff about god and religion and he's like i'm not interested in that and literally walks away, leaving me to sit there like, okay, sure.

2:07:26You did the metaphor in a car park. It's me then, you know, and then I sort of feel like that is what my career is. It's Richard Dorkin saying, I'm not interested in that and walking away and me saying, well, I am. I'm still here. So let's keep it going. That's kind of, so it's been really interesting in that way to feel as though I'm talking to people who I've got to credit in part for my existence in the world as I am on the internet, but at the same time feeling like I'm at the end of their intellectual career and I'm at the beginning of mine. And it's not like I'm going to repeat what they did.

2:08:00So it's a weird feeling.

2:08:02Hank Green:Such a different world too. Yeah. So I guess it's similar to how people feel like with parents where you love your parents, but you sort of feel like you're about to inhabit a different world to them. And there's sort of this crossover point where i respect you and love you but i'm like i see things different life yeah yeah the world i it's funny i i had a very similar experience to this when i was in college and i i had read this book was very meaningful for me uh by daniel quinn called ishmael and just sort of like you know in in the in like perfect moment kind of thing where it's like okay I can see the world as an adult now and be much more critical of it and much more thoughtful about it.

2:08:46Hank Green:And he had written a bunch of later work. And I sent him an email. And I was like, you know, in your work, you talk about how humans are just another animal. And there's nothing really special about us but X, Y, Z. Here's why I think that there's something that's exceptional about humans. And he basically wrote back and he was like, what you've identified here is that we disagree. and uh and i think that like you know humans are uh very smart and cheetahs are very fast and blue whales are very big and and you know that's just that's just all different like different qualities of animals and my instinct was to like write back and be like no like i'm not saying that we don't like many animals have many you know superlatives but you know there's a different thing that we're doing here but but he very sort of intentionally and i think like any 60 year old man emailing a college student was like being very gracious to email at all and was saying it's okay for us to disagree yeah and i took that with such like i felt so good about that like oh yeah like oh like i like you know i see a thing differently from you and like we are all going to see things differently from each other yeah i think that's an important part of it's where like if you're if you're trying to be anything more than just an interesting an interested reader of someone's work yeah if you want to like do something if you want to like put out content if you want to write a book if you want to be a scientist you're not going to do that unless you meet some point of departure right because otherwise what are you there for right and it was almost like i was so young that i didn't think it was possible yeah disagree with someone who i agreed with on so much yeah yeah yeah yeah but that's that's the most interesting kind of disagreement so i imagine yeah the feeling you had there is a is a similar one but i i am constantly just i feel so so lucky and it's like it's usually after the fact um and also i mean even like there's the new atheist stuff but there's also like you know i grew up at the at the during the heyday of of youtube and so like i've spoken to some really interesting people you know i've had ret on the show and v source on the show i didn't know that and like yeah that hasn't gone out yet it'll be out by the time this episodes out but yeah like like v i was like it was like the coolest thing ever and i still love v source and like it comes in and we do the episode and it's really cool we have a great time and then suddenly when he sort of leaves and i'm sort of you know getting a taxi home whatever then i'm sort of like what like man like that was that was v source you know i'm sat with hank green and it's like you know i once walked into a bar in this town in missoula montana i walked into a bar My favorite bar.

2:11:22Hank Green:The bar I always used to go to back when I went to bars. Yeah. And a guy pointed at me with two fingers and he said, Vsauce. You're like, hey, Vsauce. Hank here. Every time I think about Michael, I think about that. Yeah. Yeah. But it's cool that somebody sort of - Yeah, they were right enough. There was something was going right there. Because it's not like they were like, Tom Hanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That something's correct. Uh-huh. And, you know, I've had that sometimes. There are some actors who I look a little bit like that I sometimes get confused for. Right. Because they like know they're like, I know that face.

2:11:57Hank Green:Exactly. And then they're like, and now. Because I thought for a time, maybe I just like really look like these people. So people confuse them. But I don't think it's that. I think it's like, I know you from your. I've seen you on a screen. Yeah, exactly. It's something like that. But yeah, I feel I feel incredibly lucky. And I try to I try to kind of write down things that happen. I did. I'm really glad I started in 2017. I like had this I got this journal which I type sort of try to keep a kind of diary of sorts but I've got this handwritten journal which 2017 opens like yeah okay I'm gonna start this thing I'm 17 years old and I've got this YouTube channel called Cosmic Skeptic and it's got like 70 ,000 subscribers I think it's you started when you were 27 I started when I was 17 oh yeah god yeah which is 10 that's wild whenever that was 10 9 9 10 years ago about a decade ago yeah so I I was like 16, 17.

2:12:47I was like, yeah. I was making videos from when I was a teenager. Yeah. When did you start?

2:12:51Hank Green:When I was 27. Yeah, right. Okay. So exactly 10 years. Is that when you started or when things kind of - No, that was the first video, 27 years old. We were like the grownups in the room. Yeah, yeah. In 2007. Yeah, right. I gotcha. Yeah. Well, I mean, I would have started a few years earlier than that, but 2017 is when, because that's why I wrote it down. I'm like, wow, I've got 70 ,000 subscribers. This is crazy. and i'm writing about all this cool stuff that's happening it's sort of like oh like this person like followed me on twitter and stuff like that and i'm reading it back and i'm like that is so cool because now like you know oh like well it's not it's not something i think to write home about yeah right there's all these little moments yeah and and like you know i'm i'm sort of and i can tell when sometimes i'm writing in the hope that i'll read it back where i'll be like oh i hope that one day I get to do this, hoping that one day I'll read it back.

2:13:43And yeah, it's like - My God, I don't journal at all. It's well - It's so good. It's well worth it. You said, I remember in a recent video, someone asked you about advice relating to cancer and you told them to - I did journal during cancer. To journal. So you did journal a little bit,

2:14:01Hank Green:but was that more like functional? It was both. It was functional because like chemo has symptoms and you want to know what your sort of typical process is. So there's a super useful functional element to it. But I also journaled like a journal. And, you know, some days I wouldn't. Some days I'd be like, cool, feel like crap. Here's my three symptoms for the day. But then, you know, I go back and read that. There's a bunch of good stuff in there. But even, yeah, that's what I was going to say. Even now, it's not been like that long. And you probably will flick through it when you think to it and be like oh i forgot i was thinking that yeah that is something you can do i mean people are always like oh you should journal because like it's good for your mental health or it's kind of medicine like i that none of that is the reason i just think it's really really interesting to have like a dialogue with yourself yeah and also you know how like sometimes people find history really weird in that like what is it like mlk and and frank were like born on the same day like that kind of stuff it's like no way there was that crossover yeah that happens in your own life because i'm like reading back and i'm like oh like i met this person today like now a friend of mine or something yeah and then underneath i'm like oh also you know i hit this many subscribers or i just traveled it and like no oh whoa yeah yeah so i only had that when that happened this is why i say the self doesn't exist yeah like like the story i'm telling is not the one that i experienced yeah yeah well hank green whoever you are i actually i i ended my podcast with Rhett saying the same thing, but that's only because we had some trifles trying to pronounce his second name.

2:15:40That's the reason I said whoever you are, because apparently McLaughlin is the American way with like an F. McLaughlin, whereas I would say McLaughlin. I got some gripe in the comments. Although I am a big fan of getting trivial things wrong incorrectly. I don't do this. Just for the engagement. I don't do this. Not on purpose. But the best version of this I ever saw was Adam Neely, who was a musician, who's like a music youtuber yeah you know him yeah like adam neely like washington

2:16:09Hank Green:as in he lives in washington no as in he wrote the song washington oh uh maybe brad neely that's no yeah maybe not man no he's he's like he's like a sort of um you know like music theory and and he did this episode on perfect pitch and he's sort of walking like down the street and this car horn goes off and he's like so so i have perfect and he's like for example i know that that was like an E flat and I can't remember exactly but as far as I remember like it wasn't an E flat and everyone was like oh you know it wasn't and everybody's in the comments like that was not an E flat and I'm sure that at some point he then said I knew that was not an E flat but I said it was because I knew that everyone would comment about it now I can't remember if that's exactly how it happened or maybe that was just a really great cover story but it's just it's just genius So, John Green, thank you for your time today.

2:17:00Hank Green:Yeah, oh my God. It's been great fun. This was fun. It was scary because I had no idea what we were going to talk about, but instead we just talked about everything. That's right. That's the way it should be. The grill is shot. The chairs are held together by optimism. And what happened to the rug? Sounds like your outdoor setup is not ready for patio season. Fix it all with Wayfair. Shop Wayfair for grills, rugs, furniture, and more. With 20 million five-star reviews, room of choice delivery, and experts set up on qualifying orders, it's never been easier to do more for less. Get 10 % off your first eligible purchase.

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