Being vulnerable, favorite lines and 2014 Tumblr: Q&A with John Green

John Green, a podcaster, philanthropist, YouTuber and author of seven New York Times bestsellers visited as part of Miami University’s lecture series on Sept. 23. The Miami Student got to sit down and talk with him about anxiety, vulnerability and 2014 Tumblr.

Questions and answers have been edited for concision and clarity.

How’s your garden doing?

Despite being a sort of “warm-up question” meant to put everyone at ease, Green answered in his usual kind yet ironic manner.

“It has not been the best year for our peppers,” Green said. “We usually would make like 100 bottles [of hot sauce], but this year we might make 10. I’ve had a busy summer. I had a mental breakdown that was very time-consuming.”

His openness about his mental health might come as a surprise to those not well-versed in the world of John Green, but his fans often comment on Green’s refreshing vulnerability and honesty in nearly all subject matters.

It provided a perfect transition to the next question:

How do you stay open and vulnerable in a world that often demands us to be anything but?

“It's really hard to be vulnerable. It's really hard to be earnest. It's so, so tempting to wear the armor of irony when you approach the world, right?” Green said. “Because encountering the world in a non-ironic way feels actively dangerous to me. Feels like people are gonna [say] ‘he's cringe’, which, I am, you know, but better to be cringe than to be pulled into the majesty of the universe.”

He went on to comment on the fact that he got famous relatively later in life, and has many of the same friends and the same spouse from before he grew into a celebrity.

“Not [even] Drake can say that,” he added.

Green also said that the “famous parts of being famous kind of suck” but that he was happy to use his fame and influence to advance good causes, such as when his online community of “Nerdfighters” pressured a drug company to lower the price of tuberculosis tests.

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One thing that so many people admire about you is your constant undercurrent of hope. What’s giving you hope these days?

Green paused at this one and thought a bit before answering.

He started with the notion that nothing gives him more hope than the knowledge that we can make change together.

“A lot of times when we're in the midst of a crisis, we respond to that crisis, and then there's another crisis, and we respond to that crisis,” he said. “I think this is especially true online, where there's always some emerging horror, and we have to put out that fire in order to deal with the next emerging horror and that can be really important. Crisis response is super important, but sometimes if you don't hang around and pay long-term attention, you miss the change.”

If there’s one thing you can trust in a John Green interview, it’s the duality of social media’s role in crisis management and the world-at-large.

He talked about how in 2017 Sierra Leone, where Green and his wife collaborated with Partners in Health and the government to support the healthcare system, one-in-17 women was dying from a lack of a healthcare system. He said this phenomenon was similar to what we would have seen 5,000 years ago, but that in the last seven years since then, maternal mortality in Sierra Leone has rapidly declined by a whopping 60%.

“[It is] a reminder that when you introduce even a basic healthcare system, you can see tremendous results, and that gives me hope,” Green said.

Can you give us “a rose and a thorn” about social media?

Surprisingly, Green loved the “rose and thorn” terminology, even as he confided his overall lack of hope in technology as a whole.

“A rose for me is social media is incredibly powerful at organizing people and can be an amazing tool for activism,” Green said.

Whatever the bright sides may be, Green still brought up a serious thorn: internet platforms only care about your attention, monopolizing that attention and owning as much of that attention as possible so that they can sell it to advertisers.

“I think that shows in the consequences that we've seen for the overall social order,” Green said. “When it comes to social media use, I can’t speak for other people, [but] it makes me lonely and it makes me feel despair, which are two pretty serious consequences, and I have to think hard about whether I really want to participate in something that's doing that to me.”

Your books are known for having pretty incredible quotes. What “banger” lines have you written that you'd thought would do better, but didn’t?

Green was quick to answer with a resounding “absolutely,” and jokingly followed up with what he thought was an underrated line from his latest novel “The Anthropocene Reviewed.”

“I wrote what I thought was a pretty banger line in ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’ where I said, ‘A species that's only ever found its way to more, must now find its way to less,’” Green said. “I thought that was good, but nothing. Nothing came of it.”

If you could bring back Tumblr, would you?

Green was initially famous on Tumblr, but a series of convoluted issues essentially bullied him into leaving the website. Shockingly, Green seems to have made his peace with the website.

“I’m [actually] on Tumblr. Yay! Back on Tumblr,” Green said, before asking “Do you even remember Tumblr?”

After assuring him that Tumblr was still a very much present in this generation’s collective mind, he followed up with another flattering characterization of the site.

“I think Tumblr got to where it needed to be, and now it’s pretty cool and pretty quiet and calm,” Green said. “And it’s sort of a sane-ish place on the social internet, which is very, very funny to me, because I definitely lived through some times when it wasn’t.”

How has your relationships (as a father, husband, brother) affected the way you view current existential threats like climate change?

It’s a bummer question, and Green initially responded with an answer peppered with anxiety.

“As a father, it’s very difficult to live in a world that feels like it's collapsing,” Green said. “And I do worry a lot about my kids. I worry about them inheriting a worse time than I inherited, or going through a worse time than I went through. They have already been through a worse time than I went through.”

But he quickly added on his trademark pro-humanity viewpoint, reminding us all why he feels that humans are a “deeply underrated species.”

“At the same time, I turn back to history, and I see the problems that we’ve solved before, big problems, intractable problems, problems that felt permanent and felt existential,” Green said. “And I'm encouraged by our ability to solve problems together,” Green said. “I think that’s our secret sauce as a species. Nobody else collaborates as effectively as we do, and I find hope there.”

Secret sauce indeed.

greenpt@miamioh.edu