YouSaid · the spoken record

Hank and John Green

lines on the record: 78
first: 2023-01-16
most recent: 2023-01-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So I have at that point I'd already had a number of weirdly successful internet projects starting in high school when I had like a Mars website that got way too much attention for someone who knew nothing and had read two books.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think I wanted to be closer to Hank. I think that was the biggest thing. We lived on different sides of the country, but also we never talked on the phone. We only communicated over Instant Messenger. And I felt like I didn't know him that well. And that felt like a big hole in my life. But then also, we were both really interested in online video and the way that online video was being used as a path into building community. And so we would have these conversations on instant messenger about how much we love the show with Zay Frank or how much we loved Lonely Girl 15 and how interesting it was and how new and different and thrilling it felt. And then one day those conversations just transitioned to us saying, well, we could do that. Why don't we try something like that?”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, really focused on technology. So during my grad school times, it became very clear that learning about the sort of future of our Earth was a very easy way to feel very sad all of the time and get burned out. And the only thing I could do was kind of go home and search Google for any solutions that were being proposed. And I transitioned that into as kind of freelance career, both blogging on my own and for a number of other publications writing about everything from electric cars to wind turbines to electronic paper.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a bit. I remember a lot of Instant Messaging. And at this point, I was and really had always been very enamored of my older brother and thought that whenever I could kind of get his attention, it was very cool and very good. And whenever he had an interest in a new kind of music or movie or something, I was, I very much believed deep in my soul in a very unquestioning way that that in fact was the coolest thing. And so we were in touch and I was always, I think, trying to impress him, but also, you know, obviously very caught up in my own stuff.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, sort of. I actually didn't quit my job at Booklist because looking for Alaska got published. I quit my job at BookList because while writing looking for Alaska, I had fallen in love with the woman who is now my wife and she got into graduate school in New York, which meant that we were moving to New York if we were going to continue our relationship. And so I would have stayed at book list very happily. But it did change my life, especially after Alaska received such generous reviews and then started to win awards. It did.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was not the end of the story, though. That was a lovely day. And I went ahead and bought a sushi dinner with, if I recall correctly, 3% of my advance. And it was a lovely dinner I spent another year and a half revising the book with my editor at Penguin Julie Strauss Gable. And that's really when the book came to have the kind of shape and texture that it has now.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a point where Eileen said, I think this is ready to go out to publishers. And then I sent it to several publishers. I actually didn't have an agent at the time. It was a little bit of a different era in publishing, at least YA publishing. And one of the editors called me back and said that they wanted to publish the book.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's the only way I know how to write a story. I'm sure I am unconsciously responding to lots of other writers, and I am unconsciously learning from everything I read. But in terms of what's happening consciously, I'm only at war with myself. The only real obstacle in my path is me, and the only way out is me.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know if that's universally true, but I had to get better at reading for sure. But, I mean, the truth is I have no idea how to write a book. Like in this interview, I feel like I'm trying to talk as if I know how to write a book when the evidence is overwhelming that I don't based on the fact that the last time I published a novel was five years ago. I mean, I have a very inefficient process in the sense that I write a draft and then I delete almost all of it.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a tremendously vulnerable thing. I never feel more like my body is on the outside of my skin than when I'm sharing writing with people. Of the 40 single space pages Eileen read, I think probably, I don't know, six or seven sentences from that are in looking for Alaska. So it did have a long way to go.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had a wonderful mentor, one of my editors at Booklist, Eileen Cooper, and I took her out to lunch one day. And I said, I'd really like to write a book about a kid at a boarding school who's grappling with guilt and grief. And she said, that sounds great, but you have to write it. And about a year later, I handed Eileen 40 single spaced pages of text with no margins and no paragraph breaks. And to her immense credit, she read it. And she said, you know, there's something here. And I worked on it over the next two and a half years.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was always writing, but I think your question is a really good one because I think it does take a certain amount of confidence to think, well, I could write a book. And I think what gave me that confidence was working at a magazine that reviewed 400 books every two weeks. And I would think, you know, I'm not that good of a writer. But 400 of these things did come out in the last two weeks. So maybe. And a lot of them weren't that good. Nothing personal. I mean, but the thing about books that aren't that good is you can see the strings of the puppets a little easier”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I was surrounded by people who read hundreds of books every year, some of whom had been reading hundreds of books every year for decades. And slowly they also began to offer me opportunities to review books myself. And then that became a bigger and bigger part of my job at booklist over the six years I was there.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, it would not have been a great job for 50 years, but it was an amazing job for that period of my life for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it was very meditative, especially coming from the children's hospital. Like I'm an extremely anxious person. But when you start working at a magazine after working as a chaplain at a children's hospital, it's pretty hard to get excited about any of the stuff that's happening, right? What's going to happen? The magazine won't come out? Oh no, this is okay. Like, it was such an awesome place to work. I've had a stupidly lucky professional life, but the greatest professional luck of my life other than being Hank Green's brother is getting that job.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I started out as a temp because they needed somebody who could type in ISBN numbers and not to brag, but I'm a very fast typist. And so I just did data entry for years. 99% of my job was data entry.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then, when I was faced with the reality of it, it was very different and much harder for me to reconcile. And then I entered a very long period where I just was only very tangentially connected in any way to my religious tradition. And so I set out on a different path.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of them were going to die, and a lot of them did die while I was their chaplain. I'm not the main character of that story. You know, the people. Who were in those rooms who were at the center of that horror and suffering were not me. But even so, it was really difficult. I was really young. I certainly had never encountered so much death, so much unjust death. And, you know, like a lot of young people who read a lot of theology, I had a lot of, I guess, like somewhat sophisticated ways of making sense of suffering and how do we solve this problem of a good and loving God who allows such unjust suffering to occur in this world.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was a student chaplain at a children's hospital for several months when I was 22 right before I was supposed to go to divinity school. And then my time at the hospital, I think, helped me understand that I. Didn't want to become a minister.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, if you're not in the top 85% of writers at your tiny little college in Ohio, it's hard to imagine how you become a writer as a job. And so it was really devastating to me. I was embarrassed. I felt some shame. And it really made me rethink my professional life. And the plan I eventually developed was to go to divinity school. Because I also majored in religious studies to become an episcopal minister.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I loved writing. I loved writing stories when I was a kid, and it would have delighted me to learn that I could be a writer, but I never thought I could. I thought it was like being an astronaut or something. But Kenyon is well known for its English department. And I went there thinking that I would love to learn more about how to write. Good stories. But then there are only two fiction writing at the time anyway, two fiction writing classes at Kenyan intro to fiction writing and advanced fiction writing. And I didn't get into the advanced fiction writing class. There were like 14 applicants and 12 spots and I was one of the two people who didn't get in.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, even quite young. And I express that interest early on and my dad would like take me out on field visits in the Nature Conservancy work that he was doing. And I'd get to see the normal boring work of science. But what it emphasized is that it's a job that normal people have. I remember doing a science fair project, and it was just a very boring catalog of the species that lived in a waterway that connected two lakes. And it did not get a single... Award among the dozens of different awards they had created so that the maximum number of kids could get something. No one thought that this was interesting research.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Yeah, he'd come back for the summers, and I remember those summers as being sort of like being very glad to have my brother back for two days. And then the rest of it being quite a lot, a lot of conflict during those years.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're talking to somebody and you sort of lean forward and they take a half a step back and then you lean forward more, they're actually trying to communicate to you that there's not enough space between the two of you. And he would just, in a very kind, loving way, help me understand how to be a social person in the world.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that looking back, a lot of it was probably shaped by having OCD and struggling a lot with anxiety. And so a lot of the conversations I would have would sort of be filtered through this sieve of anxiety. And so I would laugh too late, you know, when somebody said something funny or I would respond awkwardly or inappropriately from not fully understanding the context because I wasn't really able to fully listen to them. And when I got to high school, I started to have friends who really understood me and were okay with me, if that makes sense. Like I had this amazing best friend, Todd. And he was like a guide to the universe of interacting with other humans.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you've written about this a little bit and you described yourself as almost kind of like trapped that you were super nerdy but super awkward, insecure. You couldn't have like normal social interactions with people that you just couldn't. What did that mean, that you just couldn't take me back to 14-year-old John Green, if I went up to you and I was like, hey, how you doing? It would just be a weird interaction.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a troubled kid, I would say, in a bit of trouble academically, I was really struggling at the public school I attended and then also just socially I had a really difficult time. I was bullied a lot in middle school. And so I really wanted to go to this school because it seemed like a place where people like me could feel included. And it was a really transformative experience for me. I was with peers all day long. It's really where I became myself. I continued to be a terrible student, but I started to find an interest in learning even if my grades didn't quite reflect it.”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way to keep in touch. Hank was living in Montana. John was in New York, and they missed talking to each other. So every day, one brother would post a video to the other brother, and the videos might include things like what was going on in the world or a cool science discovery or maybe a new song where them wrote. At the time, John was an aspiring, if slightly struggling writer. He'd written a few well received novels, but only sold a few thousand copies. Pank was thinking about becoming a science writer. But because they were smart and funny and relatable, their video diary started getting views. At first hundreds and eventually thousands. Today, that YouTube channel, Vlogbrothers, has three and a half million subscribers, but that's actually a drop in the bucket when you consider how big their overall audience is. Because what began as a video diary”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My feeling when I was watching YouTube in 2006 was this isn't something that was made for me, this is something that is being made with me. And as is often the case in Hank and I's relationship, Hank sees the future coming and I am astonished by it. I thought we were doing a project for a year that was really fun and that was going to help us be closer to each other”
2023-01-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Complexly: Hank and John Green · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT