His Brilliant Videos Get Millions of Views. Why Don’t They Make Money?

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio. I am busting into this People I (Mostly) Admire episode to tell you that we are doing a live Freakonomics Radio show in Los Angeles on February 13th. And I hope you’ll join us. Guests will include Ari Emanuel, the CEO of the sports and entertainment firm Endeavor; the filmmaker R.J. Cutler, and the Freakonomics Radio house band led by Luis Guerra. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/live shows. A portion of our ticket sales will go to wildfire relief efforts. Again, that’s freakonomics.com/live shows, February 13th in L.A. I hope to see you there.

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My guest today, Hank Green, is responsible for some of the best content you can find on the internet. His company, Complexly, which he co-founded with his brother John Green, has over a dozen YouTube shows, including the incredibly popular Crash Course and SciShow. Hank operates at the intersection of wildly entertaining and incredibly smart. He’s a fantastic science communicator, but his content is also personal, funny, and empathetic.

GREEN: My big concern was that it would take over my kind of carefully crafted 15 years of building a sort of public image of who I am in people’s heads. But then I quite quickly realized that cancer is part of life and we’re all going to deal with it in one way or another in our lifetimes.

Welcome to People I (Mostly) Admire, with Steve Levitt.

Hank Green’s YouTube channels are just the tip of the iceberg. He also hosts multiple podcasts, is a musician, runs big charitable endeavors, and is the author of two New York Times best selling novels. But it all started in 2007 on YouTube with Vlogbrothers.

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GREEN: In 2007, my brother and I had been fans of this guy called Ze Frank, who had this daily video project that he did for all of 2006. And it was really amazing and really inspirational. So John, who was already at that point a professional novelist, and I, who was doing 25 different things, none of which added up to anything like a full time living, we, like, went into this, and it was like, here’s the rules: We’re going to make videos. They can’t be longer than four minutes. We’re going to make one every other day of the week but not Saturday and Sunday. And we can’t text each other or email each other. We can call each other because we had to have some way of communicating — we didn’t call each other that often back then anyway, and this is how we’re going to do our brotherhood for a year. And we called it Brotherhood 2.0.

LEVITT: Just to be clear though, I think to put more context, this is 2007. At that time, YouTube was not very much. It had been launched in 2005. I think Google had just bought it in 2006. I was very much on record saying that Google had overpaid at $1.5 billion dollars, whatever it was. And nobody, I don’t think, could be making money. So this was more like an art project.

GREEN: I thought it was such a big deal, and I was right. And that’s the best call I’ve ever made in my life. I mean, The Show with Ze Frank seemed so on the face of it, like the beginning of something big to me. It’s like being here for the start of TV and like have Lucille Ball be a colleague. I was like, this is going to be amazing. I didn’t care about the way that the media industry was. I never wanted to be on TV. I didn’t care about movies. Video was not a thing for me. And so coming into it, I never, like, wanted that. So I ended up wanting it. I ended up wanting where I was. And I still do. Which is really powerful. 

LEVITT: Explain what you mean by that.

GREEN: Well, a lot of YouTubers came into it because they wanted to make TV shows, and they couldn’t. There were too many gatekeepers, and so they, like, started to make things that were, like, TV on YouTube. And then once they got popular, which many of them did, they were like, “Now I can do stuff with TV.” And that was just extremely draining and limiting to them. Because once you start doing stuff on your own, when you’re in charge, you make all the money, you make all the decisions. You move into TV and movies, there’s a billion people who are making money and making decisions — so many gatekeepers and limits to the distribution. I think it was a big distraction for a lot of creators.

LEVITT: I see. So, you’re saying all you really wanted to do was talk about your life and ideas in an unfettered way. And so, this was the perfect medium for you. Whereas most of the people thought YouTube could solve some other problem for them.

GREEN: Was a stepping stone to something else.

LEVITT: Interesting.

GREEN: The other thing that was really fun about it for me anyway, is that like John’s my big brother and I was like, “Oh, my big brother is like inviting me into his life in a more significant way.” And also I get to try and make him laugh two or three times a week, and he gets to try and make me laugh two or three times a week. And it just feels like a good, productive kind of competition.

LEVITT: So, Vlogbrothers did turn out to be a stepping stone to something a little different. So, it must have been 2011 or 2012, so four or five years after you’d launched Vlogbrothers, that YouTube started something called the Original Channel Initiative, where they set aside, I think it was a hundred million dollars to encourage folks like you and Madonna and Deepak Chopra.

GREEN: People like me and Madonna. 

LEVITT: But they wanted to create new YouTube channels.

GREEN: Yeah. Bump up the credibility of the platform I think. They wanted to like have more prestige content. This has always been a problem — it’s not a problem anymore, but it was a problem for a long time that YouTube, like, just couldn’t figure out how to be taken seriously despite the tremendous amount of attention it had at its fingertips.

LEVITT: And that was the genesis of both Crash Course and SciShow, right?

GREEN: That’s right. Yeah.

LEVITT: They just reached out to you cause you had a big audience and said, “Hey, we want you to make high quality educational programming?”

GREEN: I think the statute of limitations is up and I can tell the truth here.

LEVITT: Good. I love that.

GREEN: We got an email that was like, “Hey, can you put together a proposal in the next four days?” and it was like, what? I guess. And so what clearly had happened is that they had had this idea and they had gone to a bunch of Hollywood production companies and said, “Hey, we want you to make content for YouTube.” And then like two or six months into that process, someone had said, “Should we ask any of the native creators if they would like to try and do some stuff on the platform just as like an experiment?” So about 10 percent of the people who got this money were people who made YouTube videos and 90 percent were people who made Hollywood stuff. And so we had to put the SciShow and Crash Course proposals together in, I think, less than a week.

LEVITT: Were these things you wanted to do already and you just didn’t have the resources? Or they just said, “Hey, you should do something?”

GREEN: Well, when somebody says like, “Hey, we could give you a half a million dollars to do something.” I’ve always sort of think of ideas as mostly a combination of like understanding both the problem set you occupy and the tool set you occupy. And so I had a pretty good understanding of the problem set I occupied. And then I had a pretty good understanding of my tool set, but then suddenly that tool set included potentially a half a million dollars, which like your tools start to look different if you can mix them with 500 grand.

LEVITT: Wait, could I still buy you for 500 grand?

GREEN: Not anymore, but, like, you don’t need much more than that. I mean, yeah, you could, like you could, probably. If the idea was the right idea. 500 grand just still does not come along every day. I had like 20 ideas and I sent them all to John, and one of them was SciShow. And John had one idea and it was Crash Course. And John looked at all my ideas and he said, “Look, Hank, what if we look at the problem space as what do we think would be best for the world in addition to what do you think we could do?” And this is like a great collaborative thing that John and I have where like, I’m always thinking, ‘This is possible. Like, there’s a possible thing. and so we should go do that!’ And John’s like, “Okay, but how does that make our lives better and the world better at the same time?” And it’s like, oh, it doesn’t really. And that is how, it became SciShow and Crash Course. 

LEVITT: So, well, it is incredible what happened with Crash Course and SciShow. I don’t think anyone would have imagined — 15 million subscribers for Crash Course. Roughly 2 billion video views, and SciShow has over 8 million subscribers and one or two billion views. And these numbers are so absurd that it’s hard to wrap one’s head around them. One of my own personal favorite videos is one you did explaining why an ancient Roman shipwreck has been critical to cutting edge particle physics. Could you tell that story?

GREEN: I can try. It’s a long video. It’s really weird.

LEVITT: Yeah, it is weird. I love it.

GREEN: In order to try and like understand weird things about the universe, we have to figure out where particles are coming from, and there are weird circumstances where maybe particles might arise somewhat spontaneously. but it’s very hard to tell that because particles come from everywhere. So to figure this out, they want to shield an area of a detector from all particles that might be coming from outside. You only want to observe the particles inside of the detector, but there’s particles everywhere all the time.

LEVITT: So they bury this thing.

GREEN: And that’s going to block out all of the ones from space, but also the mountain emits particles. So like line it with lead, right? Except lead also emits particles, but lead only emits particles for a while after you have mined it — not forever. So what you need is very old lead. And they found, in the Mediterranean, a ship that had sunk, like a Roman shipwreck, and it was full of old lead, and the archaeologists were like, we have to preserve all of this old lead, but no one would give them money to get the lead off of the bottom of the sea — lead is very heavy, and that would be very hard — and the physicists were like, give us 10 percent of your lead, and we’ll get all of it up. We’ll pool our resources here and we’ll melt down the old ancient shipwreck lead and make a casing around our detector so that we can block out any external particles so we can discover like how the universe started.

LEVITT: I remember you saying that they could pin down when this shipwreck happened to some 40 year period. And you went through how the archeologists did that. And then you talked about the particles in the antipar — what I love about it is that it is both fun and super smart and somehow delivered in a way for me that it sticks. Obviously that is your magic. That’s why people love to listen to your shows

GREEN: Yeah. I mean, the part of my life where I get to do science communication, is just really great. It’s such a cool job. There’s like so many very cool people who work in that space, so I have a bunch of amazing colleagues. And then the world is so interesting that there’s always more, you know? There’s always more to share.

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LEVITT: I suspect a lot of people, when they see that you’ve got billions of downloads, they jump to the conclusion that you’re just minting money with Crash Course and SciShow. But creating great content like yours is really expensive and ad revenue, I don’t think it’s even sufficient to cover the costs of making those shows, right?

GREEN: No, no. Definitely not. Even when you count up all of the stuff that we made 10 years ago that’s still getting views, and everything we’ve made since, that ad revenue does not add up to being able to pay for the next season of Crash Course.

LEVITT: Which is kind of crazy if you think about it, because you’ve won, in some sense, the game on the internet, right? You deliver these things and, and so many people want to see it, and yet it doesn’t pay for itself. The economics of the internet are strange, because some people out there are willing to produce okay content and give it away for free, it becomes very difficult for anyone who produces content to charge for it. If you charge for your content, or if I charge for this podcast, our audience would shrink away to almost nothing and ads are a really inefficient way of monetizing what you do. I mean, it seems strange to me. Have you thought about a world of micropayments? It seems weird to me that the internet didn’t develop to have micropayments.

GREEN: People try it over and over again. What we ended up with instead is a system of crowdfunding that I think isn’t terrible. I think it’s better than advertising. I think that, like, the sort of cultural acceptance of crowdfunding as an institution where like, if you really love something and you don’t want it to go away, and you have $5 a month, you can be a reason why thousands of other people get it for free. Like on SciShow, we have one person who crowdfunds SciShow for every 10,000 — not views, individual humans who watch SciShow. And that’s wild. On Crash Course, we have what’s called the Crash Course Coin, which is our yearly fundraiser. And the coins are in denominations of learners. So, if you give us a hundred dollars, we can use that to reach a thousand people. So, like, that is how Crash Course gets made. And then we get money from, like, rich people, like granting agencies and like Howard Hughes Medical Institute to make stuff.

LEVITT: What I find, discouraging about this is what you love to do is to create content. And what you’re great at is creating content. And yet, you must spend a lot of your time trying to find the funding to do it.

GREEN: Well, Steven, I will admit that I also enjoy watching a number go up, especially when that number is of dollars. I do enjoy finding ways to figure out how to fund these shows. It is a bit of a drag eventually, So like, coming up with an idea is very fun, doing it for the first year is very fun. The fifth year you’re like, “Oh, it’s Crash Course Coin time, I have to spend a lot of time trying to sell Crash Course coins because it’s Crash Course Coin time.” I find it frustrating that I feel like Crash Course does a tremendous amount of good in the world, and we are all always limited by money. I mean, I guess everybody’s limited by money, but like that business unit I think has always had like a 0-percent profit margin. And I am exhausted by it. I’m not exhausted by trying to make money. I’m exhausted by not having it. I’m exhausted by, like, being in precarity all of the time. Like, not as a person, which is the only reason that I, like, have energy left to give. Like, as a person, I’m fine. I have income that comes from all over the place if I don’t make my money from my businesses. I make money from, like, the personal stuff that I do; books and comedy and stuff. But it is exhausting running businesses that are like, it is not clear what the model is.

LEVITT: Yeah. And that’s a real market failure because to put it in economic terms, there is an enormous positive externality that you create.

GREEN: Yeah. So if there’s any billionaires listening.

LEVITT: Yeah, no, billionaires are one approach, but it also seems like when you have positive externalities, that’s what governments are for. And of course, it’s extremely difficult to get governments involved in choosing which content is valuable or not valuable. But it does seem like it’s a mistake that we make it hard for people to support careers of doing great stuff. What gets rewarded is if you can create content that is really cheap. Like the Kardashians for instance, have enormous viewership, but the videos they make are much cheaper and easier to do than the ones that you and John do. And so those are business models that thrive. And I just think there’s something to be sorted out of how we can subsidize the kind of work that you do in ways that are viable.

GREEN: It’s one of the things we have to sort out. There’s a huge amount of money and I think that it is stuck. I don’t know how long it stays stuck or if it just like moves real slow, and like eventually catches up to where we were 10 years ago, but I think it would be a lot better for the world and the country, if we sped that up. 

LEVITT: So both Crash Course and SciShow live in a strange place in the education ecosystem. You deliver real knowledge in an incredibly entertaining and engaging way, but it’s not for credit. And I think mostly consumed by individuals rather than used by teachers in more traditional classroom ways of teaching. And it seems to me that this is a tough space to inhabit because no one’s compelled to watch your videos. People come because they get value. And it means that your content always has to be fantastic. And as a professor who has to deliver content to my students, I know firsthand how difficult it is to deliver material that both teaches and entertains my students. And I hadn’t really thought about it in this way before, but people like you have ruined it for people like me because my students no longer tolerate the mediocrity that I’m able to give them in the classroom.

GREEN: I would love to say, “No!” but kind of. Obviously like the classroom is like an ancient institution and I think that it is the best way still.

LEVITT: Best way for what?

GREEN: Having a teacher and pupils is really valuable. I think that a teacher in the room with students is more than we think they are. In addition to being a source of information, they are also like a trainer or a coach. Like a person you don’t want to let down and an authority who could tell you whether you’re doing a good job or a bad job. But, like, I think that we aren’t done developing our tools for that ecosystem.

LEVITT: Do I agree that teachers as motivators and guides are incredibly important? Absolutely. But mostly what we force teachers to do is content delivery, right? We force thousands of high school teachers to create a lesson on the same topic from scratch, and deliver that in front of a classroom live without any of the aids that you and John have in creating amazing content online. I’ve long wondered why we continue to deliver content in that way instead of say having the teachers press a button that plays amazing content created by super communicators, and then the teachers do all the things that you could never do in a video because you’re not there in the room and you’re not motivating them directly. But in some ways you can’t really agree with me because you’ve never tried.

GREEN: This is true.

LEVITT: To be the replacement for that kind of content.

GREEN: No, we’ve never tried to be a replacement. What I know is that when we’re doing a Crash Course or a SciShow video, we have way more tools at our disposal and way more human beings working to create that. And Crash Course has always been like, what if we could take a 40 minute lecture and make it 11 minutes? Because like, look, people’s attention spans are not what they used to be. Do we let education be the one thing where it’s like, “No, we have to fight for the attention span while everything else is shortening it!” And so like lose the battle to everything else? Or do we find some middle ground between that and actually accommodating where students are at now?

LEVITT: It’s interesting you say that because I’ve lectured to my students forever and I have 90 minute class periods and I always had this dirty little secret which is that I only had, at best, 25 minutes of material. And I stretched out in the classroom by writing really slowly on a chalkboard so it would slow down everything to the crawling pace. But after Covid, I felt guilty, and it was so obvious, and so I decided I would just record my videos. Now, low quality videos, nothing great like you do. And I would whip through them and 90 minutes would turn into 20 or 25 minutes. And I just acknowledged that. And I would tell my students, “Look, I’ve been a fraud. I’ve been pretending to do 90 minutes of material. I don’t have 90 minutes of material. What I have is 25 minutes. So, I’m going to give you 25 minutes, and then that’s going to leave us 65 minutes where we’re just going to shoot the crap about whatever comes into our mind.”

GREEN: And that’s probably a better way.

LEVITT: It’s what the students wanted from me. I think I was actually much more useful to them. It was much more efficient. So it’s really interesting, when you say Crash Course has always had the view that you take 40 minutes of material and you explain it in 11 minutes.

GREEN: Similar ratio.

LEVITT: Exactly.

GREEN: Well, I also, think that’s a better way for a teacher to establish both their credibility and their role as a motivator when you have more time to be in conversation with students. Because you know stuff, but also, like, they can get to know you better as a person and feel more responsible to you.

LEVITT: Yeah, I agree completely. Now, interestingly, you haven’t tried in a high school setting to deliver curriculum that replaces the existing system. But you are trying to do it for college with something you’ve launched called Study Hall. Could you talk about Study Hall and what your aims are with that?

GREEN: Yeah, so we are all aware that higher-ed is too expensive, and carves out a lot of people who could benefit society if they got more education. And I think YouTube was talking with A.S.U., Arizona State University, who’s a university system — that talks about how they have a responsibility to include as many students as possible. And we forget how dystopian American education is that schools are ranked almost primarily by how many people they reject.

LEVITT: Yeah, it’s true.

GREEN: You know a school is very good if it rejects 90 percent of its students. You know, it’s very bad if it accepts 90. “BLAHH!” It’s very upsetting. A.S.U. is set up to try and include as many people as possible. And they’ve actually, like, lived that in a really effective way.

LEVITT: I agree with everything you said about A.S.U. They’re amazing. I’m actually starting a high school on the A.S.U. campus working with A.S.U. and I have been stunned at the degree of innovation. In an area in which there is virtually no innovation, every time I hear about something good, it turns out to be done with A.S.U., like Study Hall.

GREEN: Yeah. So, basically we’re like, okay, how do we use all of the things that all of us have? YouTube has money. A.S.U. has students, and you know, courseware and, accreditation and we know how to make appealing educational video. How do we pull that into something that’s the most helpful? So we all got together and we were like, okay, what are the actual problems that students face? One of them is just that students don’t get to, like, ramp in. There’s like a day and you become a student. And a lot of students who are coming in, maybe later in life, or they’re coming in and they’ve got to work at the same time, or they’re supporting family members at the same time, those people tend to do a year of college, get some loans, and have debt, and then they drop out because they’re like, “Oh, actually I can’t make this work.” And so you need to give people a chance to, like, try some stuff out. Also, you oftentimes come in and you have to pay for a bunch of courses that aren’t even going to count toward your degree because maybe you didn’t get the kind of education you needed in high school, or it’s been a while since you’ve been in school. And so we were like, okay, so we can try and make those things like as low lift as possible. 

LEVITT: But just to be clear, what you’re delivering is a college course in the form of YouTube videos. The videos are freely available to anyone on YouTube, however if you want the support of A.S.U., you can pay $25 to join a cohort of others watching the videos. And then at the end, students can pay $400 to get college accreditation for the course, which is amazing since the typical cost of attending university is huge in comparison. 

GREEN: Yes. There’s got to be a better way to do it, is how I feel. We might be waking up to that. It feels like, finally, at least for the moment, higher ed isn’t increasing faster than inflation in terms of cost, though it has for the last 40 years every year. And if you stay on that path, eventually it’s not worth it anymore. Like, there is a point where it gets so expensive that it does not deliver as much value as it costs. It will eventually get there, and it’s already gotten there for a lot of students. And we just can’t accept that. We should not be able to accept that as people who care about people.

LEVITT: You know, it’s really interesting as I think about this. So I have been deeply embedded in higher education for my entire adult life. And I look at it and I think, I can’t even begin to think about how to fix it. And so then I think, well, geez, high school, I think I could really change the way you do high school. So I’m out here launching a high school, maybe because I know less about it than I do about college, but you’re the opposite, right? You’ve been working in this high school space all these years. You’re like, “I don’t know how to fix that. I’m going to go do college.” It’s really interesting. I don’t think I’m just making this up. I think in part both of us understand the realities of this other piece better, and so we’re shying away from it and going to the thing we understand less well.

GREEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. John and I say, “We do not do this because it is easy. We do this because we thought it would be easy.”

LEVITT: I love that. So is it working? I’ve gotten so used to counting your YouTube views by the billions. Then I go to Study Hall and I see you’ve got only, in quotes, 9 million views. But does it feel like it’s working?

GREEN: It feels like it’s working. It feels like it could be working better. When I look around at how higher ed markets itself, we’re just not doing that. There’s so much competition for that dream and we’re not selling a dream. We’re selling like, “Hey, this is complicated. Take your time. Let’s break it down step by step and not get freaked out here.” Versus a bunch of, at this point, optimized marketers who are like, trying to hit quarterly goals, and are working with very large budgets, and are very good at their jobs. We thought maybe that our — just like Hank and John plus Crash Course would do it on its own. At the same time, when you’re dealing with people who are paying money, it’s always going to be a little lower thing. The numbers are good. We have a lot of classes that are full and some that aren’t. But, we wanted to be growing faster than we are, for sure. I mean, I usually do.

LEVITT: I think one of the challenges is that the things that we teach people in college, by and large, are not things that they actually want to learn or are directly valuable to them. Our university system is built around the idea that there’s a bunch of stuff you should know for vague reasons that are unrelated to actually ever using them in your life or in your job. I think that is what makes me so confused and — so confused about how I would change higher ed, because I feel like the transformation should be, well, we should figure out the things that are really useful for kids and that’s what they should be learning, but the system is not built that way at all.

GREEN: I took a class when we were developing Study Hall. I took like a college math class, just like, here’s the stuff you should have learned in high school, basically. And it was so intolerable.

LEVITT: In what ways?

GREEN: Well, it was all online and there was this special software that you had to use to interact with it. And so you had to type in the answers to the questions. And it’s algebra, so you have to, like, put stuff in superscript and subscript, and you have to use special characters, and you’re hunting down all the special characters, and then you click submit, and it’s like, that was wrong! You have to take three more questions, but the thing you got wrong is there was, like, a space between the “X” and the “2”. And I was like, if you can get through this class, just give them a degree! They should be able to have any job in America if they can get through this class. Because it’s not an exercise in being good at math, it’s an exercise in perseverance! And I feel like that’s some of what we’re doing in higher ed. They call them “weed out” classes. I remember taking them. And like a bunch of people who thought they were going to be oceanographers became literature majors, you know? It’s got to be really bad for, like, America to have a bunch of people who could have been doctors get crunched out because we teach organic chemistry in the least interesting way possible.

LEVITT: So you talked about how you make your money in ways other than your online work. And one of those is writing books, works of fiction. So I’m trying to imagine myself in your shoes. And you know what the last thing I think I would have done? Try writing novels after my brother has written one of the best selling and most beloved young adult novels of all time in the form of  The Fault in Our Stars. Did you not think the bar was set pretty high when you went out to try to write novels?

GREEN: Yeah. Well, you know what I didn’t think was, “Oh, I bet this might be like the Fault in Our Stars.” I had always wanted to be an author, though. I’d always wanted to have written a book, if you know what I mean. Rather than to actually write a book. It took me a long time to go from having the sort of seed of the idea for An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, to actually wanting to write it. Or like, not wanting, like I wanted to write it, I just didn’t want to do the work.

LEVITT: You wanted it to be written. You just didn’t want to write it.

GREEN: Yeah. And like when I would sit down to try and work on it, I wouldn’t have the fuel. And then one day I found the fuel, which was really interesting. Looking back, what actually did it for me was realizing that I had a lot of ways to express myself, but there were some ideas that I felt like, I couldn’t get at in the media that I was currently using to express myself. And then eventually, falling in love enough with my characters that I couldn’t let them hang and just like sit there halfway through their story. 

LEVITT: So I have to admit, I hadn’t read your books.

GREEN: Oh, yeah, sure. Most people haven’t. It’s not The Fault in Our Stars!

LEVITT: But I knew we were going to be talking, so I figured, well, I better read the first 20 pages. So I opened up the first one. It’s called An Absolutely Remarkable Thing last week. And 20 pages turned into me getting totally enthralled by it and reading the whole thing in two days. And I’m not the only one who loved it. It was the number one New York Times Bestseller. Without giving away too many spoilers, the characters in your book become internet famous. But your portrayal of internet fame, how it affects the characters in the book, it’s a real mixed bag at best. You portray a real dark side to internet fame. Did you intend your book to serve as a cautionary tale for young people pursuing the internet as a career?

GREEN: Yeah. And also for other people who are not pursuing the internet as a career to like understand better these people who you see all the time. And that they are not always making great decisions, even if they feel like they’re sort of living the life. I based that on things I had seen a lot of my colleagues do, and things that I have done, and things that I’ve wanted to do and stopped myself from doing. And mistakes that I still make. It’s wild to have written those books and then to have had the next five years happen and to just see how we have continued down what I think is, you know, understandable but really not great.

LEVITT: You’re talking about with the internet? With social media?

GREEN: Yeah, the extent to which it feeds fear and outrage and feelings of superiority to others. It’s sort of chewing up any institution that is trying hard and spending money to be better, in favor of folks like me who just, like, people are like, “They got a good vibe!” And like, sometimes the vibe is good because the vibe is good. And sometimes the vibe is good because they’re telling you that you’re superior to others and should be scared, which has always been a thing with media, but it just feels like it’s really breaking down right now.

LEVITT: For me, the process of creating the Freakonomics books was almost pure joy, because Stephen Dubner did all the hard work. We’d brainstorm ideas, we’d map out what we wanted to say, and then he’d toil away all day and send me maybe 500 words of absolutely amazing prose at the end of the day. And I’d make maybe one or two minor comments and I’d say, “Amazing work, Dubner. I can’t wait to read what you write tomorrow.” But then I made the terrible mistake of agreeing to write a textbook without Dubner. And I could not believe how painful it was to actually have to write so many words. It really broke my spirit. Did you find it as hard actually putting the words on the page as I have when I’ve tried to write a book?

GREEN: No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t sound like it. You know, I kind of had a system.

LEVITT: What’s your system?

GREEN: Oh, yeah. The system is, know where I’m headed, roughly. But also know when it’s okay to not end up there. But know where I’m headed roughly, understand the characters, understand their situation. And I would also try and stop before I was done. If that makes sense. So like, if I knew I was going to stop writing in 20 minutes, but I was about to reach the end of a chapter, I’d just stop. So that I could start back up while I was still in the middle of the flow of that chapter. And then I would also like have areas of — this is important — I’d have areas of the book that I felt were really good. And before I wrote, I would read them and I would think to myself, “This is good and worth it.” Because, you know, a lot of self doubt, is what I feel like is limiting. And then the other thing is just that, like, the only thing that writes a book is time. And so, to think that it’s going to be, like, a YouTube video — this is for me, not for you. But, to think it’s going to be, like, a YouTube video where I’m going to be done with it soon? Is a real brain breaker. You cannot be there. You have to be in the space where, like, “This is going to take the amount of time that it takes. But if you did 500 words today, that’s amazing.” And you just have to kind of do that every day.

LEVITT: Reading the two books, the first one felt like it was easy for you to write, and the second one much harder to write? 

GREEN: Yes, that is correct.

LEVITT: That second one really was much tougher for you?

GREEN: Well, in some ways it was. It was easier because I had the characters and I had their, like who they were. And I had the end, I knew where we were headed. I think especially it was harder because it was multiple points of view. 

LEVITT: So how come there hasn’t been a third book?

GREEN: Oh, the story ended.

LEVITT: You’re full. This is something you wanted to do and you did it?

GREEN: Yeah! But I could totally write more fiction and I’ve started a couple of fiction projects since then. I’m excited about both of them. They are not top priorities right now. I have been writing a nonfiction book. I’d love to do more science communication in book form, and I got an amazing opportunity to write about one of, I think, the most interesting and relevant topics to all of us, which is cancer. So I’ve been working on the first draft of that book, which I get to talk about both from the perspective of a science communicator and a person who has done cancer treatment and had cancer.

Hank Green was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2023.

*     *     *

In spring of 2023, Hank was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is a blood cancer. And very shortly thereafter, he posted a really amazing, very personal video on Vlogbrothers. I asked him if it was a difficult choice to go public with his cancer experience.

GREEN: Well, I had to. Initially I was frustrated that I had to, because it took the decision away from me.

LEVITT: And you had to in the sense that you churn out enormous amounts of content.

GREEN: Yeah. I can’t just like vanish or suddenly be bald. So yeah, I had to talk about it and I have three friends who had also been creators and had been through cancer treatment or, you know, something quite similar. Very visible, scary health stuff. And all of them had been totally different levels of public with it, and that was really helpful. And also, the moment I started actually writing about it, I was like, “Oh, I want to. I actually want to be public about this.” And my big concern was that it would take over my kind of carefully crafted 15 years of building a sort of public image of who I am in people’s heads, and it would take over that as like, this is the one thing that I am. And one of my friends, Greg Miller, who reviews video games, he also had Hodgkin’s and he was like, “Oh yeah, like, nobody thinks about that anymore, 10 years later. Like no one thinks that as part of my story.” But then also I quite quickly realized, first, that cancer is part of life and we’re all going to deal with it in one way or another in our lifetimes. Whether that’s ourselves or a loved one. And I was like, well, it’d be probably really good for people to, like, see cancer more visibly and to have it not be, like, shunted away. But then also like we’ve moved away from the world where every time someone got cancer, the same thing happened. It kind of made sense to have it be taboo. It was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s so sad. I have to like mentally prepare for that person dying.” And that’s certainly the case in some cancers. And it is not the case in other cancers. There are situations where you continue to live with cancer for many years. There are cases where you’re cured. There are cases where you very rarely make it five years. It’s so many different diseases. They all used to have pretty much the same outcome and now they don’t, And so we have to start talking about it differently. And then on top of all of that, I explain complicated stuff for a living, and so I got to be like, “Oh, this is actually interesting science is occurring inside of my body right now.”

LEVITT: Yeah. My daughter Sophie is a Hank Green super fan and I asked her what she liked best about you and she said the way you talked about your cancer. And from the very beginning, you did talk about cancer in a way that was unusual. You talked with vulnerability and honesty and none of the false bravado that usually comes along with cancer. It’s like, “I’m going to kick cancer’s butt!” I mean, there’s none of that. And you also couldn’t help yourself, it seemed, throwing a little science in here and there. You kind of hinted as we started this conversation about cancer that you had a carefully crafted image that you had created of the happy go lucky science communicator, but in a way, that one video you did where you introduced your cancer, I don’t know, I think it showed your real character in a way that was really powerful and honest and I think a model for how people should talk about cancer.

GREEN: I mean, thank you very much. And thank you — your daughter is also very kind. You know, I’ve made a lot of heartfelt videos over the years. And the second video I made after my diagnosis was very much I think the true magnum opus of my entire cancer experience, which is, me doing a tier list ranking of the press that I got for getting cancer. Where I got to go through and like, yell at news outlets for doing a bad job of talking about me and cancer. One of the headlines was, “John Green’s brother diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” But I love making videos, and it changes how I feel. Like I feel different after I make a video. I feel more like the person I am when I’m performing it to the camera. I think that was a really great tool for me to deal with it emotionally. And also I’m so not a, like, “We must fight,” kind of guy. I get that it’s random. And that, like how cancer treatment goes is to some extent affected by how you act. Like you have to do things to try and stay healthy, both mentally and physically, but, like, ultimately the peer reviewed research shows pretty clearly that like how it goes is just dumb luck. You know, things went really well for me so far. Hodgkin’s is a very treatable cancer. It responds really well to treatment. It seemed like an opportunity. It seemed like, this is a really interesting thing that is happening and I think — you search for meaning too, in times like that. And so to be like, “Okay, well, what do I do for a living? I should just keep doing that.” And it’s so great that I’m in a situation where like the thing I do for a living can be informed by this rather than just, you know, dragged upon by it. 

LEVITT: I think everybody’s reaction to getting cancer is different. You are the first person I’ve ever heard of whose reaction was to become a stand-up comedian. You actually ended up performing stand-up comedy while going through treatment. Walk me through why you turned to comedy at this stage in your life?

GREEN: I had been like, “I’m going to be in bed a lot. Please people tell me like what video games I should play. Tell me what media I should consume, what audio books.” My brain was so tired and, this is pretty common when you’re doing chemo, your brain doesn’t work good. Like watching an hour-long drama was impossible because I couldn’t remember, I couldn’t pay attention, I’d keep falling asleep. And people had suggested stand-up comedy specials to me and I was like, “Oh, this still works for my brain.” I can watch this. I laugh. It makes me think, but if I like fall asleep for a while and I wake up, you can just pop right back in. They’re just telling a new joke now. And so I watched so much stand-up comedy while I was sick. And I started to, in the moments when I was feeling okay, start to see it not just as like, this person’s telling a joke and I like it. I started to see like the things they were doing to help me enjoy it. I started to understand how they were crafting these jokes. And one thing I noticed about stand up comedians is if they want to show you that it’s time to laugh they’ll drop the mic down a little bit. They’re showing that they’re not about to say anything else. If you keep the mic up there, people are like, “Oh, they might say yet another funny thing.” But if you drop the mic, just like three inches, everybody like, “Ah, now it’s time for me to finally let out my laugh.” And I’m like, “They’re directing the audience and the audience has no idea it’s even happening!” And so I started sort of like, to really get into the craft. I journaled when I was sick. It’s a very good thing to do. And I would sometimes be journaling and then I’d like break into like being funny to myself about the absurdity of what I was going through. And some of that stuff became the seed for like writing it into a whole long thing.

LEVITT: So people can see that stand-up comedy act that you did online. It’s called Hank Green: Pissing Out Cancer. And I think my favorite part of it was when you had to tell your son, who was I guess maybe six-years-old at the time, that you had cancer, can you tell how that went?

GREEN: Yeah. It was obviously early in the process. It was after we had found out what kind of cancer I had. So we knew more what treatment was going to look like. And so we sort of sketched out what the future was going to look like, and he said to me, “Dada,” in response to all this information, we downloaded on him, “Dada, did you know that sometimes if you touch a magnet to a piece of metal, that piece of metal will also become a magnet.” And I was like, I don’t know if that’s a metaphor or if you just like sharing facts, which I also do, but that’s great. You’re working through it in your own way.

LEVITT: Death and severe illness are so hidden away in our society. Most deaths are of the elderly, they happen, they’re removed in hospitals, and people like you and me just aren’t very exposed to death very much. Were you worried about doing comedy around a topic like cancer, worried that you’d offend people?

GREEN: Yeah. Oh my God. It’s the thing I was most afraid of was it being seen as insensitive to people who were having a much worse experience with it than I was. And I workshopped it in Missoula, where I live, and I do a show every week after having worked on it all week. What happened was, like, what I was doing got out around town, and, like, I think that I had a higher than average number of people with cancer in the room then you would expect if you were in a normal room when I was doing the show. I’d have people come up to me afterward and they really liked it, and they were in worse spots than I was in, and like had been, you know, dealing with treatment for many years. And, you know, I was like, I think I’m treating this respectfully and I’m like doing it the right way, but like, I don’t know. It’s a big, complicated world. And at one point I was doing a little bit of crowd work and I was crowd working this woman and she said, “This is my husband, he has cancer,” or something like that. So this guy in the front row with this big white beard, and I was like, maybe shouldn’t have, but I was like, “Oh, tell me about your situation.” This is a comedy show. Let’s talk about your cancer. And like he gave me enough information that I knew that he was terminal. Crowdwork is the scariest and most fun part of it for me, where you’re like, “Okay, you’re going to tell me a situation and I’m going to try to use that to make people laugh,” which is not easy when it’s terminal cancer. And in fact, I did panic at that moment and I was like, “Oh, well, like, thanks for coming to the show.” His beard was so big that I couldn’t tell if he was enjoying himself, honestly. And so I was very worried about it and I went home and I was like, “Well, that guy didn’t like the show.” And then two shows later, he was back and it was him and his wife and another person was with them, who was a younger woman, who was maybe, you know, between like 18 and 22. And after the show they came up and they chatted with me and he said that he wanted to go first by himself before he brought his daughter with him.

LEVITT: That must have been one of the best feelings you ever had in your life.

GREEN: I mean yes and no, like you don’t know how it’s going to hit you. I had of course thought about all the different ways I would feel if I found out that I might die and I was so wrong. The only thing that I thought about was like, what it would be like, you know, just not being able to watch my kid grow up, and also, you know, him not having me. And that, you know, obviously they had been working through it and I got to be part of them working through it.

LEVITT: You know, when I heard that you were going to do comedy around cancer, it never occurred to me that one of the things you could do would be to help this man who’s terminal with cancer. And the really incredibly difficult thing about how the people who are going to be left behind, how they process it, but that’s super powerful that you were able to fit into that space.

GREEN: Yeah. And I’d like to do it more. I mean, we don’t have a good relationship with death, generally. I think that we don’t have a good relationship with cancer. I think that people are very afraid of chemotherapy. It’s obviously very bad. I think it’s in many cases much better than it used to be. We’re better at managing the symptoms of it. I didn’t puke once. I was on several chemos that, like, have known strong nausea as a side effect, but I got so many drugs to deal with that. I probably would’ve ended up puking if I had had to stay on the chemo for longer, but, because we don’t talk about it a lot, we don’t update our sense of what it is enough.

LEVITT: I had Suleika Jaouad on the show. She’s written an absolutely incredible book called Between Two Kingdoms about her cancer journey. And one of the things she talked about is this trope, how after you get cancer, suddenly you see everyday as so valuable and life becomes a treasure and you’re changed for the better. And that wasn’t her experience at all. When her cancer went into remission after years of struggle, she felt lost and depressed and she knew how to live with cancer but she didn’t know how to go back to regular life. Do you see things differently after cancer? Live differently? Have you felt any of what Suleika talks about?

GREEN: Yeah. I mean, we had very different experiences, you know, she was in treatment for many years and I think is back in treatment now. I was only in treatment for a few months. But even so, I came out being like, “All right, well, here’s this life that I set up for myself.” And to some extent, honestly, I was like, “Oof, this feels like a different guy’s life. I don’t feel like I fit into it the same way anymore. And that’s a problem.” I’ve got a lot of responsibilities. I got a lot of important things to do and I felt like I had been plopped back down into somebody else’s life. And I’ve adjusted back into it, but I’ve also adjusted the life, and the balance between those two things is still a source of tension for me. What I had was I need to live. I need to do life. I need to do as much life as I can. And I was lucky to have a bunch of life to then go live.

If you’d like to watch Hank Green’s stand up show Pissing Out Cancer. It’s available at the website dropout.tv. It’s a subscription site, but they offer a three day free trial. and free clips are also available on YouTube. Hank’s first book of speculative fiction is entitled An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. And his second book is called A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor. Of all the things Hank does online, my personal favorite is SciShow, which delivers amazingly interesting science content completely for free.

LEVITT: So this is a point in the show where I invite my producer, Morgan, on to take a listener question.

LEVEY: Hi, Steve. A listener named Armando from Puerto Rico, wrote with a question. He wants to know, with such a big platform — public platform, how do you handle being wrong? Steve, how do you handle getting things wrong? And I want to know how that reaction changes depending on the context. Like, how do you handle getting things wrong in your personal life or, in a piece of writing for a popular audience versus an academic paper?

LEVITT: So on a personal level, and I think you will attest to this, Morgan, just as a human, I think I’m unusually open to recognizing and acknowledging my mistakes. I think it helps that I don’t care very much what other people think about me, and I also don’t think of myself as an expert in very many things. And so I walk around constantly in a fog of confusion and I expect to make a lot of mistakes.

LEVEY: Yeah, Steve, I can attest. Sometimes mistakes are made in the interview, and you’re very amenable to letting me correct the mistake in our episode, or cutting something from an episode. You acknowledge when you’re wrong, and it’s really helpful for us.

LEVITT: Yeah, so I think that’s true. So it’s easy when you catch mistakes before they’re in the public domain. Now, I will say, I learned the hard way that in academics any mistakes, even the smallest ones, are hugely costly. I’ve made mistakes in published academic papers that have been caught by other people on two or three occasions. and actually the reason why those mistakes are so costly is subtle. Because the only people who find your mistakes in an academic paper, by and large, they are people who don’t like you or they don’t like your findings. That’s why they’re looking for the mistakes. So, if they find a little mistake, they act like they found a huge, catastrophic mistake. And they use it as a vehicle to discredit you. And that’s what I would say happened with my paper on abortion and crime with John Donahue. We had made a mistake in a few columns on the very last table of the paper that was added at the very last minute. And the numbers didn’t even change that much, certainly the story didn’t change. But reading what the critics wrote in their paper and the surrounding media coverage, you would have thought that every bit of our argument was wrong, and it’s both an enormous investment of time to write a response that tries to put the mistake into context, and reputationally, it’s hugely damaging because few people have either the time or the interest to really read carefully over the criticism and the response and make a reasoned judgment. In that context, oh God, the worst single email I think I could receive is for someone to say, “Hey, I was reading your paper and you made a mistake.” That is just heart wrenching when that happens because you know what the cost will be. I try to be honest, and when I make mistakes, I correct them. What I really did was to try to put in a process that was much more careful, and I work really, really hard to try not to make mistakes. But in comparison, we made some mistakes in Freakonomics and nobody really cared. we were writing about the KKK and, a guy named Stetson Kennedy who had infiltrated it back in the 1940s. And, it turned out that an amateur historian in Florida had looked into it and, Stetson had made up some of the things that he said he had done. Someone else had done it, and that person had died, and Stetson was claiming credit. So, Stephen Dubner and I wrote a New York Times piece on it, just saying, “Hey, we made the mistake, and here’s the truth.” And we fixed the future editions of the book. And it was actually a really fun and interesting experience to go back and make that correction.

LEVEY: Listeners, if you have a question for us or a concern, our email is PIMA@Freakonomics. com. That’s PIMA@Freakonomics.com. We read every email that’s sent and we look forward to reading yours.

Next week we’ve got an encore presentation of a conversation I had with the incomparable primatologist Jane Goodall. And in two weeks, we’ve got a brand new episode featuring philosopher Owen Flanagan.

People I (Mostly) Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey and mixed by Greg Rippin. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at pima@freakonomics.com, that’s pima@freakonomics.com.