 Lleidydd yn jentwm yn welcau. Mi ydym yn Tania Beckett. I'm a news presenter and business presenter for the BBC and sitting with me here is a man who probably needs no introduction. He is John Green. He is author of one of his many roles, Young Adult Fiction. Let me just give you some data. He won the 2006 Prince Award. This was here for his debut novel looking for Alaska. His sixth novel, which is The Fault in Our Stars, was actually number one at the box office in 2014. It was made into a film, so that in and of itself is success enough. But there's plenty more, John, I think that you can outline for us. Let's just start with your writings, first of all. If you look at the books, they seem to me to have a fairly dark theme. These are aimed at children, I would still call them children, but they're 17, 18, that type of age. And yet you address some pretty serious things. The death of young people, the concept of death and loss and illness. Why do you go into those dark corners? Well, I think because I think it's a big part of life and I think that it's a big consideration for young people. Although not just young people, it turns out that death is sort of an ongoing concern. When did you discover that? When I was a teenager, that's probably why I write those characters. Is that the reason that it preoccupied you as a teenager? I think that death probably didn't preoccupy me as a teenager until I lost a friend in a car accident when I was 16 and after that it did. The problem with death, I guess for me, my personal death, obviously catastrophic, but there is inside of that a much larger problem, which is the problem of the end of us. The problem that this beautiful Congress Hall and everything else that we make or say or do will eventually be lost. It will be gone and not in the sense that 99% of Roman texts are lost, but in the sense that there will be no humans or anyone else to appreciate it. There's lots of exciting stuff happening here with people talking about transhumanism and us uploading our consciousnesses to the Internet and getting into spaceships and travelling thousands of light years away. The heat death of the universe, it will come. There will come a time. That idea that everything that comes together falls apart, everything that in a way to be is to know that you will one day not be is a really important and difficult idea to get your head around. I think if we have a worldview that doesn't acknowledge that, we end up either sticking our heads in the sand or else being on the wrong course. I think that there is great hope to be found within life as we know it to be, which is a thing that ends. I do sometimes write about death. I did write a comic novel. It's just nobody read it. I do sometimes write about death, but I believe that good fiction is hopeful. I believe that good fiction is optimistic and I believe that if it isn't optimistic, it's kind of dishonest. So I try to be hopeful. Right. Tell me a little bit about the storyline in the Fulton R stars. It's very painful, isn't it? Yeah. Hopefully. I hope so. When I first graduated from college, I worked briefly as a student chaplain at a children's hospital. I was going to become a minister and then dropped out of Divinity School on the first day and went a different path. Ever since then, I've been trying to write about illness in children and about the relationships that kids form with other sick kids and also about the stigmatisation that they have to live with, that there's this sort of emotional trauma of being seen as other not being able to participate, not just in sports, but in regular everyday conversations where someone's like, oh my God, I could not wear those shoes. I would literally die. Then you look at your friend and you're like, oh, whoops. Because she's literally dying. Her presence makes everything awkward and uncomfortable. That social stigma really fascinated me because most of the stories that we have, and we have tons and tons of cancer, I mean it's a genre essentially, the cancer romance, in which the first one was Love Story by Eric Segal. I don't know if you remember that book, but basically you fall in love, somebody gets cancer. The healthy person learns important lessons about how to be grateful for every day. That book, The Healthy Person, learns that love means never having to say you're sorry. That was the famous line from that book, love means never having to say you're sorry, which is the most ludicrous definition of love. I mean my experience is that love means constantly having to say that you're sorry. But the problem I have with that way, and this is what inspired, this is the other thing that inspired the book I guess, the problem that I have with that way of looking at the world is that it imagines that sick people exist and that people can learn lessons and that the meaning of a sick person's life is not intrinsic to them, but is instead somehow dependent upon healthy people. And I just don't buy that. I just don't buy the argument that the sick or the poor or the systemically disenfranchised are in some way suffering nobly. And I think we're all trying to find meaning within our lives and that ultimately is what I wanted Hazel's story, Hazel and Gus's story to be about is them trying to find meaning inside of their own lives rather than trying to make other people feel lucky or grateful. Right, so what conclusion do you come to there? As you rightly say, all of us at some point will die, but for many people it seems like a very distant prospect for other people, a more present prospect, but at some point we have to find some meaning in life that doesn't make us think, feel too fatalistic, that wants to achieve something or do something positive with our lives. How do we balance those two things? Right, there's a great line in Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack Up, I'm going to mawl it, that one must hold together a sense of the futility of effort and a sense of the necessity to struggle on anyway. And I really believe that. Yes, it's true, someday all of this will be gone, but not today. Yes, it's true that someday we will all die, but not today. And so we have incredible opportunities today. And I think that's what gets me excited. Not just in writing, but in the work that my brother and I do in terms of our philanthropy, like what gets me excited is that we've seen tremendous change in the last 25 years. We've seen massive reductions in infant mortality, massive reductions in maternal mortality. And if you take seriously the body and the sanctity of the body and the sanctity of human life, then those are huge accomplishments. And that's the kind of thing that's the kind of place where I find meaning. And then I also find meaning within love, within my personal relationships with the people I love. And I find a lot of purpose in that. I find a lot of connection and meaning there. And so those are kind of, I guess, the twin poles that allow me to know that all effort is going to be ultimately futile and also know that it's not futile now. And that's what's important. OK, we're going to come back to that sort of dark theme. Later on, I want to lighten things up and talk a little bit about your vlogging. OK, now in the UK, we have seen particularly quite young male vloggers become stars. Sure, many of them are my friends. I think this one in South Africa, he just sort of talks about his day. But there are these women who, he wrote a book about his vlogging in fact. And there are many young ladies, you know, teenagers who flocked to get a signing of his book and so on. How do you make that work? How do you make yourself into a star if you weren't already? Well, I mean, yeah, first, be super young and crazy handsome. That's been my strategy. No, it's funny, you know, I feel like the mainstream media often dismisses internet personalities or internet video makers because they tend to be young and because they tend to be good-looking. And I feel like I am a great counterbalance to that. And there are also, because it isn't about that really. I mean, I'm sure that's part of what part of what an audience might feel connected to, but I don't think that's the center of it. I think what makes it magical and when it works is when it feels like an authentic relationship. Before I started making videos in 2006, I was a huge fan of this guy, Ze Frank, who basically invented video blogging. All the jump cuts, all the conventions of videoing, he basically invented. And I mean, I felt like we were friends except that he didn't know me. But that we were friends. And I looked forward every day to his videos. And that's the kind of relationship that I want to have with our community. The traditional model for media making is that you make stuff for people. And you make stuff for as many people as possible because we don't have a robust public broadcasting system. And so we rely a lot heavily on advertising and advertisers only care about eyeballs. They only care about the number of impressions that they can get or they care too much, I would argue about it. So, in traditional broadcast, in traditional media, you want the biggest possible audience. And you want them to think of you as separate as someone who's making something for you that you like. And with online media, I don't feel like I'm making something for my viewers. I feel like I'm making something with them. And that's literally true in the sense that when they comment on a video, they change the video page. They reshape the context in which the video is being viewed. But it's also figuratively true in the sense that they inspire every video idea that I have. They're the ones asking the questions. If they say, you know, in comments, I don't understand what's going on with the deficit and is the stimulus a good idea, then that gives me the opportunity to make a video about debt to GDP ratios and stuff. So that sense of doing things with an audience, rather than for an audience, is the first thing that I think is the key to online media success. And the second thing that I think is really important is not caring about how many people watch your videos, but caring about how many people love them. Not caring about the number of eyeballs, but caring about the amount of passion that's being created. I don't think it's ultimately that interesting. I mean, again, no offense to anyone here who happens to be in this business, but ultimately, I'm not interested in making... We have a very successful reality program in America called Deadliest Catch, where you follow around some crab fishermen and they so far don't die. But it's very scary and intense and they catch the crab or they don't. And it's fun to watch. I don't want to make Deadliest Catch because it's fun to watch. I watch it. Millions and millions of people watch it. But I don't love it. I wouldn't buy a Deadliest Catch t-shirt. I wouldn't go around advertising my affection for Deadliest Catch. I wouldn't put in my Twitter bio, author, YouTuber, Deadliest Catch fan. And I want to make the kind of stuff that may not appeal to the broadest possible audience, but will have that kind of depth of engagement where someone will say on their Twitter bio that they're a nerdfighter or they will say on their Twitter bio that they love my books or love Crash Course. We have that one on the ice truckers. Yeah, same thing. That's good. If somebody came with a TV proposal to me and said, this is what we're going to do, I was like, okay, I think you need to get help. And then you watch it and you think, oh, that's not good. It's quite watchable. It's people in adversity. It's a slightly different thing from a television point of view that you're creating, isn't it? Yeah. When we're talking about television matters, you're very interested in education. Talk to me about how you create these educational videos and what it is you're trying to do. And what you think is important to educate young people about? Well, that's several good questions that I might forget one of. What are you going to educate people about? Young people, what do you think is important? In 2011, YouTube offered us some startup capital to make proper educational video with animation and curriculum consultants and educators and scripts and teleprompters and traditional TV costs. I don't know what it costs, actually, but we've made the first season of Crash Course for about $150 a minute, which was $149.50 a minute more than we'd ever spent on online video. Instead of it just being me in my basement, suddenly there were some people to help us out. I started out introducing world history, tied a little bit to the AP curriculum in the US, the sort of upper level high school curriculum in the US, and my brother started out introducing ideas in biology tied to the AP curriculum. We did that partly because we think biology and world history are super important, but also because we felt like there weren't good free educational videos out there. This is a huge for-profit business, but we felt like this stuff could be made for free and distributed for free very easily. To your question about what is important to teach, our approach with Crash Course, we try very hard not to teach subjects just because they're in school. I have a huge problem with the current way that with the way I was educated, with the way I think most kids in the US at least are educated these days, which is that school is treated as a series of arbitrary hurdles that have been set up in front of you that you are told that you need to jump over in order to get a piece of paper that says that you can jump over some more arbitrary hurdles in order to get a piece of paper and that this is the reason that you are educated so that you can get a job. When in fact I think the reason that as a social order we've invented public education is because we sort of decided as a group that a well educated population is better. It's better for us. It's not just better for students, it's better for adults. The reason I pay taxes for schools even though I don't have a kid in school is because it's better for me to have a well educated population of Americans. But when you treat it like it's just like why do you have to learn math because you have to learn math? Why do you have to learn biology because you have to learn biology to get the degree? Why do you have to, you know, why do we have to read Wuthering Heights? Because you have to read Wuthering Heights to get the degree. Instead of saying why do we have to read well Wuthering Heights isn't a great example actually. Why do we have to read Pride and Prejudice? Because it's a great novel because it's going to help you in your life because it's going to help you to understand the world around you because you'll get the Jane Austen jokes that you don't currently get because it'll make you a better boyfriend. Right? So we try to approach it from that angle. Like why do you learn history because it will make you a better and more interesting person and it will allow you to contextualize your life and the world around you better. Which in turn will make you a better participant in civic society, will make you a better and will make you more money in the long run and will be good for the economy in the long run. So that's the approach that we try to take. All right. Let me ask you also about, gosh I've forgotten the question I was going to ask her. Sometimes I'm so completely wrong for it. The theme of this forum, the World Economic Forum is the fourth industrial revolution. We hear a lot in business in the area that I work in about the need for emotional intelligence. What the fourth industrial revolution is supposed to be about is when not robots necessarily but artificial intelligence allows people to take, allows robots or computers to take the jobs of accountants. It's about brain not brawn. This would be quite a frightening next step and the prediction is in fact millions of jobs will be lost to this. So if you're educating young people what you need to tell them is that they need emotional intelligence. The question is what we mean by that, but it seems very much that that is what you're teaching, isn't it? It's certainly what we want to encourage in the classroom. So I mean Crash Course is not intended to replace classroom experiences precisely because I think that so much. Crash Course is the name that you've got. That's the name of our channel. Precisely because I think that so much of the emotional intelligence is learned in school. It's learned from peers and it's also learned from sort of modeling by teachers and I can't replace that and I also don't want to. Maybe there will be robots that can replace it someday but not that's not going to be my life or not my job. So I am, but I do want to introduce some nuance to these topics and some critical thinking to them so that when we for instance teach history, when we make history videos I don't just want to make videos that are about history. I also want to make videos that talk about the different ways that we study history, different approaches to the study of history and what's wrong with some of them and right with some of them and where privilege functions in the conversation and stuff like that so that you aren't just learning about the Atlantic slave trade or about the supposed fall of the Roman Empire which I don't, as far as I can tell never actually happen. But instead you're learning about approaches to the study of history. Why did this historian write this way and those critical thinking skills hopefully will be useful in this future job market. I do think that those are going to be important. I'm going to use your analogy of the Roman Empire. The reason that it came back, there was a resurgence was primarily art. Art plays a bigger role than sometimes people give it credit for. What is the role of art now? We see so much turmoil as a European, I'm thinking particularly about the war in Syria and this absolute flood of migrants in a very poor state emerging from that part of the world and finding sometimes welcoming arms in Europe but often not. I know that the BBC doesn't feel very strongly about using the word refugee when we're talking about refugees because there are international laws for refugees and certainly the people escaping conflict in Syria are conflict refugees. I think the role of art is complicated. I don't really believe in the sort of like George Orwell Iran novel of ideas. I actually like George Orwell a lot. It's a great writer but I don't believe in that kind of politicized novel. It's a prediction of the future in a way. Yeah, well I mean Orwell just turned out to be very prophetic but at the time it was a highly politicized novel making arguments about communism and totalitarianism at a time when it wasn't clear when a time when lots of people were communists and lots of people thought totalitarian governments were the right solution. Those novels can have an impact. To me the most important and interesting thing that art can do is to be a way into empathy. It can help us become more empathetic. It is incredibly difficult when we think about the conflict in Syria or when we think about refugee crises in South Sudan or we think about conflict in other places in the world. It is so, so, or even when we think about ISIS and people living in that part of Syria and Iraq, it's so hard for us not to imagine those people monolithically because we don't know in many, we very rarely know their individual stories so we tend to see them as blocks we tend to see Islam as a block as one thing and fail to appreciate the astonishing new millennial diversity within Islamic tradition and we do that we dehumanize people we're not seeing them as individual people who are like us, we're seeing them as other, we're seeing them as a them and that's very problematic and I think that one thing art does do well is help us to imagine what it's like to be someone else. I am stuck inside of this particular consciousness and this particular body and it is the only consciousness I will ever have. These eyes are the only eyes I will ever see the world out of and that is this horrible, horrible prison when it comes to trying to imagine what it's like to be someone else. I have no idea ultimately what it's like to be you I have no idea what it's like to be a woman I have no idea what it's like to be British I have no idea you know and so the challenge is how do I learn that how do I learn to listen better and I think art is a good way to do that because when I read a story that I love like when I read Catcher in the Rye I don't read it and think like this is me reading about Holden Caulfield I feel like I'm living inside the mind of Holden Caulfield. I feel like I've escaped this prison of myself and I'm able to live in someone else's body and that's very powerful for me and so to me empathy is at the core of what I'm trying to do. Jolly Good, I'm going to open the floor for questions. Would anybody just put your hand up if you have a question you would like to ask loads of them? Yes, let's just take this one first of all and then this gentleman straight after as we make. I'm sure there are questions here too. Jen Hyatt, Global Swab Social Entrepreneur My daughter Kate would just be in awe that I'm sitting in the same room with you. I asked her recently why she was so obsessed with your novels and she just said simply mum there are no happy endings and I think that's amazing that your commentary on emotional intelligence is profound. Turning to something like Paper Towns I'm also quite interested in your view on both of those central characters in that. Really I see rights of passage in different ways where they have different kinds of relationship to risk and risk is profound for both of them but very different and one might see that Margo is the risky character but actually possibly not. I'd be really interested in your reflections on self and risk in the fourth revolution for teenagers. That's a big question. I'm very interested in how we identify the self in this contemporary world in a digitized world where the self that we project we project different selves online and even in different platforms online and that can mess with, especially when you're young with your understanding of what is the core you. In general that whole question of like what do I mean when I talk about myself is insanely complicated and I've been trying to write about it for the last few years and we'll see if I ever finish another novel. I do think that people often identify themselves or one of the ways that we understand ourselves is as risk taking or risk averse. I think there's something about adolescence where you're attracted to the flame to the fire. I felt this intense urge to self-destruct when I was a teenager to act out in self-destructive ways and I didn't even really know where it came from but for me risk was about trying to establish the boundaries of myself I guess and I had a much more sort of Margo world view than Quentin world view but I also got a lot of second chances which most people don't get. I think also what's interesting is how different people perceive risk isn't it? Yes please. So my daughter Julia is also glad that I'm here to hear John. Why didn't you all's kids come? I think we should be FaceTiming and alone. That's the real future with. John says you are so brilliant at understanding teenagers which most of us can't and speaking with them and empathizing with them and speaking for them. I just wonder since you also worry whether you worry about getting old and losing understanding or even more of the point perhaps whether you worry that when your son becomes a teenager and like all teenagers says dad you don't understand me or us and then you might have a point what does that do to your career or what does that do to your whole world view? That's going to introduce some self-doubt. Yeah for sure. No matter how well you are able to communicate with teenagers outside of your family you'll never be able to communicate effectively with the ones inside of your family I think. I think for most teenagers frankly like good parents disappear. They just don't think it's painful to hear this I'm sure. When I was a teenager my parents were good parents and that meant that I just thought about them very very rarely. I was not particularly concerned with them in any way. I was very focused on peer relationships. I do I mean I worry that I'll be I worry I mean I am out of touch so I don't have to worry about being out of touch but I've been out of touch for a long time I don't listen to One Direction but I also didn't listen to NSYNC I didn't listen to Justin Bieber like I have a long and storied tradition of being out of touch with pop culture that goes back to when I was a teenager. My hope is that I can just be authentic about it if I can be authentic about who I am in my experience anyway they respond very positively to that. It's when you try to act like you aren't old that it gets super awkward. There we must leave it John thank you so much and thank you all very much for being so engaged and listening I wish we had longer but we don't. Thank you so much. Thank you guys again.