John Green blends humor and vulnerability in Miami Lecture series

When the New York Times bestselling author and influential YouTuber, podcaster and philanthropist John Green took the stage on Sept. 23, a sold-out Hall Auditorium exploded into applause.

As the cheers and whistles died down, Green wasted no time getting to the heart of his lecture, aptly titled “How The World Ends.”

“Well the world is going to end, right?” Green said to some light laughter. “I mean, that's the weird thing about being a person, as opposed to being a dolphin or a chimpanzee, is that we know that every species has what's called a temporal range, that there's a time at which they begin to be a species, and there's a time at which they no longer get to be a species.”

However, Green didn’t stick to just the end of the world. Moderated by Rosemary Pennington, chair of the media, journalism and film department, Green took the audience on a whirlwind journey of topics, including his fascination with tuberculosis, his storied writing career, thoughts on book banning and his struggles with OCD.

Despite the often heavy subject matters, Green’s faith in humanity shone.

“[Humans] are not the monsters we’ve made ourselves out to be,” Green said. “I have to believe that we — not that we are good news [for the planet] because that’s a bridge too far, I agree — but that we can be good news, that we’re capable of being good news, that together, we can solve problems that seem utterly impossible, utterly intractable.”

His lecture also incorporated plenty of his trademark nerdy humor, riffing with the crowd about late-stage capitalism, his brother Hank and how his home state of Indiana was just “Ohio but worse.”

Still, Green’s jokes often held a deeper commentary within them, especially his notes on Generation Z, who made up the majority of the attendees.

“I think that y’all are, in general, doing a pretty good job being pissed off,” Green said. “And that's really important. We change the problems we’re angry about, we rectify the injustices that we’re horrified by and we tend not to rectify the injustices that we don't notice or ignore, and so I actually think that I'm very encouraged by the attentiveness of young people.”

Photo by Sarah Frosch | The Miami Student
Students were invited to attend John Green’s free lecture on Sept. 23, as part of Miami University’s lecture series.

Henri Bala, a fan in the audience and a second-year graduate student, said Green’s mastery of blending emotional and logical appeals makes him a must-watch lecturer.

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“It’s refreshing to see excellence hand in hand with sheer vulnerability,” Bala said. “Usually, you're conditioned to think of those as mutually exclusive, and this guy’s work across different media crosses all kinds of quarters. So yeah, he was a rock star in there.”

Other students, like senior strategic communications major Lea Johnson, are just happy to see the man who has gotten them through many a high school history course.

“‘Crash Course’ was where I was like, ‘Oh, John Green and Hank Green, they’re pretty cool,’” Johnson said. “And then I was a huge “The Fault in Our Stars” fan, [so, this lecture] made me want to read more of his books.”

The lecture was eventually opened up to audience questions, allowing attendees a chance to say hello, ask for advice, or even, in one notable case, introduce their mom.

Green left the lecture to a two-minute standing ovation, smiling the entire time.

greenpt@miamioh.edu