Jumping Pews

Hank interviews John in the first episode of his new podcast, Humans! They talk about why John's worried about Hank, why being in favor of humans is now counter-cultural, how John's seminary training might have helped the brothers' internet success, and what Mark Twain has to do with any of it. You’ve heard them interact before — but not like this. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hank Green?

  Hello, it is Hank. I'm sorry to have invaded the Dear Hank and John feed for my own nefarious purposes here, but I have a little sample for you to listen to, a sample of a new podcast I'm doing, which is called Humans, in which I have conversations with interesting people about how weird and awful and wonderful it is to be a person. I've recorded about a dozen of these already, and I've had conversations with authors and actors and astrophysicists. The first three episodes are with John Green, who is my brother, who you probably know about, Winna Lou, the editor of the New York Times Game Connections, and third is our episode with Helen Hunt. Yes, that Helen Hunt, the Oscar-winning actress who has an IMDb credit in every one of the last 50 years and who I had a huge crush

• 0:45Hank Green?

  on in high school. And then our fourth episode is probably going to be, I think, with Zay Frank, the guy who basically invented vlogging and who inspired John and I to start the thing that we do now, and also now makes the show True Facts with Zay Frank, which you may have seen, which is absolutely hilarious. Anyway, the overall conceit of the show is that it is good to take a little bit of time here and there to zoom out a little, to understand that the thing that we are is very weird, certainly unique in the history of the Earth and also of the known universe. Being the kind of thing we are is a weird thing that nothing has ever done before, so it's not surprising that we're not always great at it. But in order to make it through, we're gonna have to be careful, we're gonna

• 1:28Hank Green?

  have to be thoughtful, we're gonna have to think and listen. So that's really what the idea is. I'm just trying to talk to interesting people and extract from them ways in which humanity can survive. New episodes come out every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. And now I will play for you a little teaser of the first episode of Humans with my brother John Green.

• 1:50Hank Green?

  I hear you talk a lot about, in favorable ways, like, things lacking sentimentality. Like, you wanted to write an unsentimental cancer book.

• 1:58John Green?

  Yeah.

• 1:59Hank Green?

  But you're also very earnest.

• 2:00John Green?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Hank Green?

  And these two words sound like the same thing, sentimental and earnest. I know that they're not. But that does seem like a contradiction. Like, you're one of the most earnest people I know, but at the same time, you are constantly, like, striving for a lack of sentimentality.

• 2:14John Green?

  Yeah. Achingly, achingly earnest. Fringingly earnest.

• 2:19Hank Green?

  Sounds like someone's called you that.

• 2:20John Green?

  So annoyingly earnest. It annoys me just to get out in front of it. Like, I also find it exhausting.

• 2:28Hank Green?

  What does that word even mean to you?

• 2:30John Green?

  It means like sincere, serious, unironic. Mostly it means unironic. And I want to be that in my work. I want to be that in my life. I don't want to use the armor of irony or cynicism to protect me against real feeling. I want to feel all that there is to feel while I'm here. I think that other approaches to life are a waste of time. But I don't want to be sappy about it. It is a very fine line, Hank. You're right. And I'm not always on the right side of the line.

• 3:07Hank Green?

  Well, but you know about it. You know about that line.

• 3:10John Green?

  I know about the line.

• 3:11Hank Green?

  It's bright to you.

• 3:12John Green?

  I'm aware of the line. In most of the book version of The Fault in Our Stars, I found it. I tried to anyway.

• 3:20Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 3:21John Green?

  But I'm not always on the right side of it. Like, if you're going to err on the side of being cheesy or on the side of being cold and distant, I'm always going to err on the side of being cheesy. And so I'm aware of the line, but I don't always walk it perfectly. But I think that the cold, distant, merely intellectual approach to life and art leaves a lot on the table. It leaves a lot of human feeling on the table that's really at the center of what it is to be a person.

• 3:53Hank Green?

  This is why I want to ask this question, because like, you don't have anything against

• 4:01Hank Green?

  being earnest. I'm there with you, and I've been brought there by you. But what is sentimentality? What is on the other side of that line? Is it just like people's perception of the earnestness? Or is it actually a different thing?

• 4:15John Green?

  I think it's a different thing. To me, sentimentality is a little bit of a lie. It's the kind of lie that we tell ourselves in retrospect, looking back at the past. It's the lie that everything happens for a reason. It's the lie that, you know, the sort of cursive encouragements that are posted at Ikea tell us. That, to me, is sentimentality.

• 4:37Hank Green?

  We're creating these cute little nice things to tell ourselves about the horrors that aren't really real.

• 4:43John Green?

  Right, like.

• 4:46John Green?

  I don't want to crap on anyone's worldview, but I think it's very, very, very difficult to argue that everything happens for a reason in a world of such profound human-built injustice.

• 5:01Hank Green?

  Do you think that that is, I mean, I know that we have different worldviews here. Has that changed how you feel about religion, about God?

• 5:11John Green?

  No, not really, because I've never believed in a God who intercedes some of the time, but not all of the time. I've never believed in a best of all possible worlds sort of theology. I've always believed in a God who acts on humanity primarily through humanity.

• 5:28Hank Green?

  Always is a long time.

• 5:32John Green?

  Yeah.

• 5:32Hank Green?

  That feels like a more complex theology than probably was taught to a 13-year-old.

• 5:36John Green?

  I didn't really grow up believing in God. So like, I was able to conceptualize God when I was in my twenties or 19, you know, like, I was able to form a theology without a ton of baggage. Like, I feel really bad, actually, for people who grow up so religiously traumatized by the fear of hell or by these religious tenants that would tell people that they're not full people or that they're somehow removed from God's love for being themselves. You see that a lot with people in the LGBTQ community. You see it a lot with people who grow up being told that their desires or their way of being

• 6:21John Green?

  in the world is itself somehow terrible or worse than other ways of being in the world. I didn't grow up with any of that. Like, we grew up going to church occasionally, but like, it wasn't a big deal. And so by the time I came to Christianity and, and I really came to Christianity because I'd grown up a Christian. I think if I'd grown up a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindu, I would have gone to those faiths. But I went to Christianity and, you know, was able to find enough there for me for it to feel productive.

• 6:53Hank Green?

  This is fascinating. I had always assumed that it was kind of a continuousness, even though, of course, like our parents and you go to different churches.

• 7:02John Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Hank Green?

  You know, you're Episcopalian, they're Methodist.

• 7:05John Green?

  I mean, nominally. Mom and dad don't go to church, so.

• 7:09Hank Green?

  I assumed that you had sort of just like carried it through. You got confirmed and just like I did, and you were just paying more attention in church and in Sunday school than I was.

• 7:18John Green?

  No, I don't think so.

• 7:19Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 7:20John Green?

  I don't think so.

• 7:20Hank Green?

  Interesting.

• 7:21John Green?

  I didn't really read the Gospels until I was in college.

• 7:24Hank Green?

  Oh, that's probably true of most middle school students. They're not out there reading the Gospels. But I don't know.

• 7:32John Green?

  Maybe. For as far as I can tell, nobody's out there reading them.

• 7:37Hank Green?

  A whole lot of people who say a whole lot about Jesus, not doing a lot of gospel reading. But is one of the reasons you don't talk that much about your faith that you are sensitive to people who have been traumatized?

• 7:50John Green?

  Yeah, for sure. And I don't labor under the delusion that it's right either. And so I don't have the same, I mean, there's a lot of talk about evangelism.

• 8:00Hank Green?

  It really feels like that's one of the things about faith is that you're supposed to believe it's right. That's what faith, that's what that word means.

• 8:08John Green?

  Uh, you're supposed to believe that it's a right.

• 8:12Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 8:12John Green?

  I'm not sure you're supposed to believe that it's the right. But there's a lot of emphasis on evangelism in Christian history and in Christian literature, on the idea that like you should go out and preach the good news that you can be forgiven and yada, yada, yada, of radical hope, that hope is available to all people at all times, even unto death and all that stuff. And, I mean, first off, like as a Midwesterner, I'm congenitally incapable of that kind of evangelism. But secondly, I just don't feel like it's my way or my place. I don't feel like it's my place to say to somebody who's hugely religiously traumatized, "Oh, but like, come back. If you just were at this church instead of that church, it would have been better."

• 8:58Hank Green?

  It's interesting because sometimes when I talk about how I like, I'm a little bit jealous of religious people that like have. Having this built in community, having a worldview that you can sort of fall back on, having, you know, some amount of comfort about the everlasting nature of the soul. You've tempered me in those moments and you've been like, no Hank, not all puppy dogs over here.

• 9:19John Green?

  It's not all puppy dogs and a lot of times to create an in-group, people create an out-group. And that's very dangerous, especially when it comes to something that's as important as religion, where you're talking about fundamental truths. If you're talking about a group of people who can't access fundamental truths or who are removed from the deepest love that is available to us as humans, like, that can be very, very dangerous. I remember once I went to a Pentecostal church, a pew jumping church, as the pastor described it. It was called Church O' the Woods.

• 9:51Hank Green?

  Did you jump any pews?

• 9:52John Green?

  I did not jump any pews, but I, you know, I felt it. I felt it. I felt my hands going up. I felt the magic. The thing happened. So I was like, what the hell is happening? Like, the thing is happening. I am moved. I am transcended. I am, you know, not jumping over pews, but I'm about to.

• 10:07Hank Green?

  Nice.

• 10:08John Green?

  And then during the prayers, the pastor started railing against the Pentecostal church across the street.

• 10:15John Green?

  And how they were doomed and fallen. And I was like, oh, man, that's a bummer.

• 10:21Hank Green?

  Did you need that part? You just transcended me, man. We don't need to go here.

• 10:26John Green?

  Can't we just sing and dance? Do we have to go there? I was like, pray for our fallen brethren across the way at Church of the Woods.

• 10:38Hank Green?

  Man, Church of the Woods sounds amazing. It sounds like you actually just go into the woods and transcend.

• 10:44John Green?

  Pretty good church, man. It was pretty good church.

• 10:46Hank Green?

  I was looking at a bunch of interviews with John Green because I was gonna do this. And also, I'm trying to learn from good interviewers and how they do their thing, because it's not particularly easy. There's a bunch of stuff you can use your brain in a lot of ways. And you did a wild card with Rachel Martin on NPR. And I was scrolling through the comments, because that's what I do. I wonder how you feel about this number one comment, first comment with a thousand likes. I think John Green is my pastor.

• 11:14John Green?

  Yeah, I mean, that's nice to hear. I

• 11:18Hank Green?

  You're gonna get people to jump some pews?

• 11:19John Green?

  I don't think I'm gonna get anybody to jump over pews. And indeed, I don't want to because that stuff is so powerful that it's tricky. I don't want to have that kind of power over people. I don't think anybody should want to have that kind of power over people. I'm suspicious of people who want that. I think I used to want that when I was in my twenties, but that's a byproduct of being in your twenties. You're not allowed to want it in your forties.

• 11:42Hank Green?

  You wanted to be a pastor that would get people to jump over pews?

• 11:45John Green?

  Well, I wanted to be a pastor who would get people pretty enthusiastic. I was never gonna be a pew-jumping church guy.

• 11:52Hank Green?

  But you wanted to, you wanted to have that, that power?

• 11:55John Green?

  Yeah, I mean, I literally wanted to be a pastor, and I wanted to be a pastor partly because I wanted to, you know, shepherd a flock.

• 12:02Hank Green?

  Yeah, make people feel those big feelings.

• 12:05John Green?

  And help people through the biggest, most difficult parts of their lives.

• 12:09Hank Green?

  Sure, but I'm trying to get to the thing that you were saying just then, which is like the difference about how you were feeling about it in your twenties. Like, you wanted to be like the, the leader of this group

• 12:20John Green?

  Right.

• 12:21Hank Green?

  in a really powerful way.

• 12:22John Green?

  Yeah, the leader of the group, for sure.

• 12:24Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 12:25John Green?

  I don't think that's universal among pastors, by the way. I think lots of pastors go into it for primarily service-related reasons. I'm not sure that I was one of those people.

• 12:34Hank Green?

  Yeah, and you probably would have ended up there.

• 12:36John Green?

  I would have gotten there.

• 12:37Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 12:38John Green?

  I would have gotten there, but it would have been a journey. How do I feel about somebody saying that and lots of people upvoting it? I feel grateful, but I also feel like humans need better third places than the internet.

• 12:52Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 12:53John Green?

  And they deserve better third places than the internet. And so I worry about them if I'm their pastor, because I worry that I'm, the place where I do that work is not suited to that work.

• 13:06Hank Green?

  We did it anyway.

• 13:08John Green?

  Yep. Yeah. And look, I've always been conscious of that, Hank. Like even in 2007, when we had like 400 YouTube subscribers, I was very conscious of the fact that people were taking us seriously. And as a result, we needed to take the privilege of being in their lives seriously. As a writer, you know, I try to remember that young people are giving me, usually young people, are giving me a seat at the table in their lives when they're forming their values, which is very serious business. And I should try not to mess that up if I can, both in the way that I write and in the way that I talk in public or live in public.

• 13:50Hank Green?

  So one of the weird things about you and I is that we've been making Vlogbrothers videos for 20 years. And there's not a lot of people who are still at it. And of the ones who are, they don't have a steady sized audience.

• 14:03John Green?

  Right.

• 14:03Hank Green?

  The way that we have. We basically have the same number of viewers now that we had in like 2012.

• 14:08John Green?

  Yep.

• 14:09Hank Green?

  And we've had peaks and we've had valleys, but like we've never dropped down to a place where it feels like it's really worth doing it anymore. I can't really figure out why. I think that some of it is the quality of the audience that we got from the beginning. Like it was just like the kinds of folks that we were reaching. Some of it is that we are trying, like in those valleys, we're like, okay, this is starting to look worrying. What should we do about this?

• 14:39John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We start to do a little clickbait.

• 14:43John Green?

  We're not above it.

• 14:44Hank Green?

  Certainly not. But I wonder to what extent, like, I've never thought about this before, but like, your both desire and a little bit of training in having a flock.

• 15:01Hank Green?

  Might be a part of that.

• 15:03John Green?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it might be a part of it. I think that the biggest thing is that we have changed with our audience. We've grown with our audience. And there's a lot of luck involved in that. At the end of his life, Mark Twain was asked, what's the difference between you and Bret Hart, this other kind of comedian from the West, who is a beloved comic writer, who never really ascended into the, you know, the literary pantheon, the way Twain did. And Twain said, and he, I was like, what's the difference between you and Bret Hart and these other guys? And Twain said, they were kidding. I was preaching.

• 15:45John Green?

  And I do think on some level, we've been preaching the whole time. Now, you know, it's not religious preaching, but it's preaching. It's trying to talk to each other and an audience about the big stuff at the center of human life, whether that's grief, or love, or astronomy.

• 16:07Hank Green?

  I'd say you talk a fair amount about religion, but I actually hear you talk less about Twain. And I know that he was also a subject of study for you in school.

• 16:15John Green?

  Yeah, that's true. It's true. I double majored in English and religion. You're asking me a lot of questions about religion. You're not asking me any questions about Twain.

• 16:26Hank Green?

  And that is the tease. If you want to finish, just search humans Hank Green, wherever you get podcasts, and follow the show. New episodes every Thursday.