He was inspired by the early days of online video and the creative projects of pioneers like Ze Frank. He saw an opportunity to be part of a new media revolution and create content collaboratively with an audience.
He realized how easily the internet could be used for harmful purposes, which he didn't foresee in the early days when it was more about excitement and creativity without clear monetization or status.
They use tactics like questioning why certain stories aren't being covered by mainstream media, creating confusion with unrelated visuals, and leveraging the 'David versus Goliath' trope to position themselves against established media institutions.
He acknowledges that someone has to do the reporting and get the truth, which is not something influencers like him are doing. He emphasizes the importance of legacy media for conducting original reporting and getting paid to do it.
He takes down pieces of content if they lead people to believe something untrue, even if the original statement was correct. He sees this as his responsibility to ensure his audience believes true things, and he often turns corrections into engaging content.
He avoids certain topics to prevent alienating parts of his audience, which he feels is necessary to maintain broad trust and reach a diverse audience. He also faces the challenge of explaining complex issues without overwhelming his audience or himself.
He believes in teaching media literacy by showing his audience how he finds good information and by correcting mistakes transparently. He aims to make people believe true things and understand the process of uncovering truth.
He suggests leveraging the audience's enthusiasm by having them share the show with others, emphasizing that the quality of the content is already high and just needs more visibility.
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Thank you.
So we're bringing you a longer edit here. We begin when I asked Hank about the start of his YouTube career. I agree on my career as a content creator screwing around on YouTube in 2007. We didn't really start to do science communication and educational stuff for a few years after we started, weirdly enough. It's been a long journey of being a YouTuber since 2007.
Was there a particular video in those early days that made you realize this is what I want to do? Like, this is how I can connect with people.
So 2007, 2006 was an interesting time in online video because people were just starting to figure out what it was. And watching Ze Frank, who was kind of in many ways the original video blogger, do projects with his audience, like dress up your vacuum cleaner. Let's try and make the Earth a sandwich.
We've completed the first Earth sandwich. At this point,
Right through the middle of the earth, goes right down to New Zealand where there's another baguette. It was like, oh, that's the thing that's different about this. I'm not making something for an audience. I'm making something with an audience. Every video is informed by the response to the last video and they come out every day. The cycle was just so much faster. What did you see in it that maybe your peers at the time didn't?
I don't know. I think it was a lot of the liberal arts education that I had where I was like, what if I'm Lucille Ball? You know, it's much more interesting to be around at the beginning of TV than the 70th year of it. And I felt like I was going to get to be around for the beginning of TV. And it turns out, I think ultimately it was a bigger deal than that. If you count the sort of media revolution of the Internet.
Tell me what you know now, all these years later, that you didn't in the early days about how the internet works. Oh, the biggest thing I didn't know is how easily it could be used for evil, Micah. I really didn't expect that. There wasn't a reason to do it in the beginning, except that it was exciting and interesting. It wasn't clear how to monetize. There was no status that came along with it. Like, my grandparents weren't excited that I was a YouTuber anymore.
My parents weren't either, really, though my parents, of the parents I know who have YouTuber children, were the most on board of any...
But now it's an extraordinarily high status job. People will work very hard to get it. And that feels very weird to me as a person who like started out in a world where no one wanted this. It sure seems like the algorithms that govern platforms like YouTube, X, TikTok, Instagram, etc., they don't seem to really value truth. Yeah.
How would you program that in? I mean, even if you wanted to. Exactly. They value attention. Yeah. And when it comes to influencers who've really hacked attention, who really understand virality, tell me a little bit about their tactics.
It's easier if you don't have a super tight allegiance to the truth. Like there's this great way to get people to pay attention to an item of news, which is to say, no one's talking about this. Why aren't they talking about this? There are so many stories out there that the media is not covering. I left my job in the mainstream media to bring you these stories. So I urge you. I don't know how come nobody is talking about this drought that we're having. Why is no one talking about ACON?
He is building a city. I'm not, I'm not joking. And then you just like show yourself superimposed in a TikTok over a bunch of BBC news headlines. They're like, oh yeah, they're talking about it. They're talking about it. You know, you also want to have yourself on the screen with something visually interesting that is not you. Maybe a clip that
Doesn't really feel like it's related to the thing you're talking about so that the person is confused a little bit. Confusion is a great emotion for an audience to be experiencing if you're trying to increase retention, because if their curiosity is satisfied, they leave. Let's look at Dylan Page for a second. He's the self-proclaimed top news influencer on TikTok. He has over 13 million followers.
He calls himself News Daddy. How old is Dylan Page? He looks like he's 18 years old. Here's something no one's talking about. Trees and land absorbed almost to no CO2 last year. And the consequences of that is not just devastating. What's working for him? It's like a billion little tricks. And I use some of these tricks, too. But the main thing you have to be as a Dylan Page or as a Hank Green is.
is really kind of obsessed with what makes the numbers go up. I see him in that way as a kindred spirit. His videos can have a sort of anti-institutionalist zing to them. Rene Duresta has called it the David versus Goliath trope. Yeah. Me versus the mainstream media. It is a great story.
And it's funny because I work inside of an institution that is very careful, like Crash Course and SciShow are both this way, where they're careful and they do a lot of primary research.
But I also do the other thing where it's just like me redigesting existing reporting and they like and trust it more when it's just coming from me. The videos of just Hank speaking unscripted, they seem to do better? I mean, per unit of work, they do way better. I feel like it's easier to trust a human. Instead of getting to choose between like a couple of dozen media outlets, you get to choose the exact person who has the worldview and the outlook and
And makes the content that vibes with you best and has the face that vibes with you best and the voice that vibes with you best and the jokes that have the most relevance to your life. You're kind of describing the parasocial relationship. Yeah. I think that if it's treated respectfully and if you sort of understand the responsibility that comes along with that.
That's not necessarily a terrible thing. So walk me through how you kind of play the game while still living up to your values. Like, give me a little sense of the thought process. One thing that has worked well for me is actually taking people on the journey. You will see me be fascinated by discovering something cool. Give me an example of a time where you felt like the process was really genuinely captured.
I had this thought while I was picking up my son at school that all the fancy pants parents, their cars looked weird. Instead of looking like regular car colors, they looked like mud.
And so I just sat there on my computer and I was like, why do cars look like putty now? And I recorded my screen and I recorded my video and I went down the path of reading original journalism from people who had interviewed car color specialists. And I went and found out the original color that this started with.
The growing trend of flat gray cars started with Nardo gray by Audi. All right, should have gone to the second comment. This is three years ago, by the way. Nardo gray, Audi's classic gray color. Nardo, love that.
Apparently Nardo is like a driving track. Now I call them Nardos when I see them around town. And that was just like a really authentic, like come with me on a journey as I discover like weird things about the world. And it's very low stakes, right? Because if I get it wrong, then he's going to like take the wrong medicine.
The stakes are low, but what I do love about it is intentional or not. And you can tell me you are kind of teaching media literacy. You're like people trust you and you're showing them how you find good information.
I was really impressed with your one about the myth that we all eat a credit card's worth of plastic every week. Oh, yeah, this was a while ago. Because this was not just some goofball internet thing. This was reported by a lot of mainstream outlets, right? It started with a report on...
from the World Wildlife Fund that took the upper bound of a meta-analysis. So there was a bunch of different analyses that looked at different sources where you might get plastics from. So a bunch of them.
And then if you add up the top range of every one of those sources, it turns out it's a very large number. But then that number got worked into a peer-reviewed article as a background stat. What then happened is the press people at that university looked for the most interesting piece of information in that paper, which, of course, was the fact that we eat a credit card's worth of plastic every week, which is not true.
And they pulled that and they put it in the press release. And then that got put into a bunch of different articles. And it was such a useful thing for getting people to click on things that that quickly spread from like less credible outlets to more credible outlets. Because all you had to do is go and look at the source, which was a peer reviewed article that did contain the stat. And it wasn't some big conspiracy theory. There was no foul play. It's just just sloppiness laundered from source to source. But it does make me ask.
Does that sound right to you? A week? I feel like our food would be harder to eat. Or our stomachs would be filled with many credit cards worth of plastic. And that's sort of where I started from as I was like, that sounds wrong.
But where your flag gets raised is going to be different for every person. It's going to be based on your worldview. So if you only fact check facts that sound wrong, you're going to be missing all the ones that sound right that are nonetheless wrong. Of course, everyone makes mistakes. You've made mistakes. You make mistakes and on the media as much as it pains me to admit. One thing that I think you do really well, though, is that you do more than own up to an error. You kind of turn it into an event of sorts. Yeah. Yeah.
People love an I was wrong video. I love views. This is what my entire business is based on. It is important to me. And we were wrong about avocados. Let's talk about the avocado one. Okay. Yeah. You had made a video that included what you later learned was a myth that avocados are
exist in the form we know them today, thanks to an extinct creature called the giant ground sloth. Yeah. The idea being, fruits mostly exist for seed dispersal reasons. You eat the fruit, and then you poop the seeds out somewhere else, and then they get to travel farther away from their home tree. And so the idea is, well, who the heck was eating an avocado and swallowing that pit? It certainly was not something the size of a human.
So the theory, and this was published in a paper, it was just an idea, it was that there was these giant ground slots. And then like this became a great fact. This is like a dinner table conversation. Yeah. The biggest bias in media is toward a cool story.
We are not lefty righty. It's like, what's interesting? So we had this bias toward the interestingness of this story. And so a lot of people wrote stuff about this. And over the years, it has become clear that there's no evidence at all that avocados were ever a part of ground sloth diets. Probably avocados have weirdly big pits because people bred avocados to be big and the pit got big along with the avocado.
Boring. Yeah. So we got to make a video that was like, "We were wrong about avocados!" Here at SciShow, we take accuracy really seriously. Our last video on this subject relied on some sources that, as we described, were a little flimsy for the arguments we made. Because of this, we have unlisted that video. As always, we are here to spread ideas supported by evidence and science, not myths. But we are never, of course, above spreading some avocados on our toast. And it was the most popular video that month.
There's a time when it like actually does hurt. We had a recent instance where we had to do like a full on correction. What was it? It was a SciShow video. It was about CPAPs. I misread a line.
The line was correct in the script, and it sort of made it sound like CPAP machines don't do any good when, in fact, they do. YouTube has a back-end editor where you can make a video shorter. So we removed that line, and we talked about it with our audience. And that hurts way more, where you're like, there's going to be people who are going to walk away with that in their head, and they'll never see this correction. Is it possible that...
do you think, for people to be deeply informed about current events, to get nuanced coverage and expertise from social media alone? What's social media, Micah? Is it podcasts? Is it YouTube? Yeah, TikTok, YouTube, a world without legacy news. Without legacy news, no, because someone has to be doing the reporting. Yeah.
And I'm not doing that. Dylan's not doing that. Like someone has to be talking to sources, getting the truth, doing the work and getting paid to do it. So no, like, but where's the line? Like, what is social media? This idea that like you are the media now, like, am I? Because I don't feel like I have sources. I don't feel like I...
know how Congress works, even. You're referring to this QAnon phrase that Elon Musk adopted on X and said after the election, you are the media now. Yeah. And the process of uncovering truth is not easy. And...
That's part of why legacy institutions get it wrong sometimes. And then somebody on the internet can be like, look at how they got it wrong. And so stop trusting that institution forever. People who do this sort of like news analysis stuff, they don't understand that like when they read an AP article, somebody had to do that work to find those things out. It wasn't just magically created by a genie.
Making corrections, of course, is a long practice of the legacy media. I get the sense it's not always the practice of content creators. And yet, according to Gallup, Americans continue to register record low trust in legacy media. You really think a lot about maintaining trust with your viewers. How do you conceive or quantify or...
visualize trust and how do you protect it?
I worry about it all the time. It's probably my biggest worry as an individual content creator. I have like bigger worries as a business owner of trying to keep people employed and stuff. Like if people lose trust in SciShow, that impacts the bottom line. But as a person, I got into YouTube because I like to be liked. You know, I desperately don't want to become another story of like somebody I thought was good but turned out to be bad. And sometimes I have no control over that.
You're allowed to like in private hate me. I remember how much my friends hated Dave Matthews band in high school. And that was part of our identities. Dave Matthews did nothing wrong. Dudes love to hate a band. I mean, that's just that's absolutely it's our rights. But if there are reasons that that's happening that are my failings, I do want to know about it. People have so many reasons to lose trust in the world right now. And I don't want to be a part of that. How does that fear shape the topics you choose to take on?
There's always a little bit of time between when I make something and when I post it. And whenever I post something and the...
piece of content is making people believe something that is not true, even though what I say is correct, I see that as my responsibility. That is a failing of me. And so like I take those pieces of content down and sometimes people kind of get like bullied. They're like, why are you self-censoring? Just because people misunderstood what you said doesn't mean that what you said wasn't true. And I'm like, yeah, no, that's that's correct. But my goal isn't to say true things. It's to make people believe true things. Yeah.
You've said that you're careful about taking on hot button issues, but aren't the hot button issues the most important issues
for someone like you to weigh in on? Oh, boy. How do you make that calculation, weighing this precious trust that you're trying to protect while also serving your audience? Yeah, I think you are right to put your finger on this. This is a really interesting thing. There are certain things that I feel like literally I do not have the expertise to take on, but there's more to it than that, too. There are issues that I do understand pretty well
that I don't talk that much about, I can be like, well, some of my audience is going to be really big Elon Musk fans, and some of them are going to be really big Elon Musk haters. I know where I am on that, but I'd rather not alienate the Musk fans, and I'd rather not alienate the Musk haters. So, like, when that freaking spaceship got caught by that tower, that was amazing. And I was, you know, I was a little bit publicly amazed, but...
But I can make the choice because I'm trying to preserve that trust and because I'm trying to preserve my sanity. I don't want to be in fights on the Internet all the time. I can make the choice to just not engage with certain topics. And that is not a choice that I feel like you, for example, have.
Yes. And that's what I'm concerned about, because if you as one of our highest integrity content creators feel like there are certain topics that you can't talk about because it would negatively impact your business. What does that mean about a future where more and more content creators are taking the place of what journalism and legacy media used to serve?
I hadn't actually thought about this, but it is another way. And it's not the only way that this transition is not great for actual information environment. I guess what I'm wondering is like if it's possible to maintain the broad trust you have to reach a really large, diverse audience, which I sense you do, while maintaining
charging headfirst into topics that inevitably upset and alienate some viewers? Like, is it an either-or proposition? Yeah, I mean, I feel this way even when it comes to, like, my position on who to vote for in the election. I don't want to alienate Trump voters from science, you know? If you don't feel like you can be comfortable in the space of SciShow, then, like, where are you going to get your good information?
We go into controversial stuff when it is connected to science. But I don't because I'm like me and I'm like trying to do what's fun and interesting to my audience. I don't know that people get that distinction. And it's really troubling. Like one of the reasons that SciShow has lost a lot of trust with that kind of audience is because we use gender inclusive language. When you say gender inclusive language, like... Instead of saying women who menstruate, you would say people who menstruate, which also is...
for clarity, more inclusive broadly, because there are lots of women who don't menstruate. And we've been very open about why we do that and about why we think that is the correct choice for
But people lose focus on what you're saying and they're like, oh, my God, this this is woke. And I'm like, oh, my God, like I don't want to lose those people. But I also like I don't like there's no reason to not use gender inclusive language. Your audience, it seems, really wants you to explain everything to them because you're good at it and you explain a lot of things. Well, that's a lot of pressure.
It seems that it's kind of a pressure that's much more easily borne by a news organization than just one guy. Yeah, I would absolutely go insane if I thought I had to explain everything.
But what I want to do is I want to help people understand how weird and cool and interdependent their world is. And what I really want is for people to believe that humans are good. This line of work has brought to me a real deep appreciation and fascination with humanity.
that I really do want to share because I don't think that we have great systems for meaning making right now. But if we discard the feeling that humans are cool or good, then we got nothing. It's very easy to think about murder and be like man's inhumanity toward man, but very hard to think about like jazz or love or,
And like, tell me a species that has ever thought about a future generation that isn't a human. I can't think of one. If you gave raccoons this much power, they'd f*** it up faster than us. I have, I guarantee you. Hank, at On The Media, we've been tracking the shrinking size of journalism in this increasingly vast media landscape. Yeah.
We want to meet people where they are. And many of them, I can tell you, are not listening to public radio stations or like stumbling across our show on a podcast app where there's zero discovery. Do you have any tips for us? Like, how can we reach more people? How can on the media reach more people?
It's funny because my first thought is the problem isn't you. It's us. Because your show is so good. Thank you. I'm sorry. That is a hard nut to crack. You know, what we're up against isn't easy. Like you have to be entertaining. You have to be cheap and you have to be long, ideally. And that's a really hard set of things to balance. And we are in not the greatest times.
environment for getting this analysis out there. But I guess I'll continue to tell people about it. Thank you. I appreciate that. What I'll say is you're listening, like somebody's listening, a bunch of people. I wonder what they're all doing right now. Stuff. They're doing stuff right now. But they should tell people about this. The pitch is you got to have your audience tell people about how good your episodes are.
We'll work on that. We'll work on that. Hank, thank you so much. Thank you. I love this show. Hank Green hosts the educational YouTube channels Crash Course and SciShow. You can find him on most platforms at Hank Green. You heard it from Hank. Please help us reach new listeners by telling your friends about the show. You know, you can share this episode or really any OTM pod that speaks to you straight from your podcast app.
Oh, and by the way, we're sharing a couple video clips of my interview with Hank on our Instagram and TikTok accounts. You can find us at On The Media. Thanks for listening to the pod. Catch The Big Show this weekend. And happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I'm Michael Loewinger.