WEBVTT

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So, this is a map of New York State

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that was made in 1937
by the General Drafting Company.

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It's an extremely famous map
among cartography nerds,

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because down here at the bottom
of the Catskill Mountains

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there is a little town called Roscoe

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- actually, this will go easier
if I just put it up here -

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There's Roscoe, and then,
right above Roscoe, is Rockland, New York,

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and then right above that
is the tiny town of Agloe, New York.

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Agloe, New York,
is very famous to cartographers,

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because it's a paper town.

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It's also known as a copyright trap.

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Because my map of New York
and your map of New York

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are going to look very similar,
on account of the shape of New York.

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Often, map makers will insert
fake places onto their maps,

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in order to protect their copyright,
because then,

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if my fake place shows up on your map,

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I can be well and truly sure
that you have robbed me.

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Agloe is a scrabblization of the initials
of the two guys who made this map

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Ernest G. Alpers and Otto Lindberg,

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and they released this map in 1937.

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Decades later, Rand McNally releases a map

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with Agloe, New York, on it,
at the same exact intersection

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of two dirt roads
in the middle of nowhere.

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Well, you can imagine the delight
over at General Drafting.

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They immediately called
Rand McNally, and they say,

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"We've caught you!
We made Agloe, New York, up.

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It is a fake place. It's a paper town.

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We're going to sue your pants off!"

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And Rand McNally says,
"No, no, no, no, Agloe is real."

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Because people kept going
to that intersection of two dirt roads

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(Laughter)

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in the middle of nowhere,

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expecting there
to be a place called Agloe,

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someone built a place
called Agloe, New York.

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It had a gas station, a general store,
two houses at its peak.

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(Laughter)

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And this is of course a completely
irresistible metaphor to a novelist,

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because we would all like to believe
that the stuff that we write down on paper

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can change the actual world
in which we're actually living -

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which is why my third book
is called "Paper Towns".

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But what interests me ultimately more
than the medium in which this happened

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is the phenomenon itself.

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It's easy enough to say that the world
shapes our maps of the world, right?

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Like the overall shape of the world
is obviously going to affect our maps.

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But what I find a lot
more interesting is the way

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that the manner in which we map
the world changes the world.

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Because the world would truly be
a different place if North were down.

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And the world would be a truly
different place if Alaska and Russia

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weren't on opposite sides of the map.

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And the world would be a different place

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if we projected Europe
to show it in its actual size.

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The world is changed
by our maps of the world.

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The way that we choose to, sort of,
our personal cartographic enterprise

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also shapes the map of our lives,

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and that in turn shapes our lives.

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I believe that what we map
changes the life we lead.

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And I don't mean that in some, like,
secrecy Oprah's Angels network, like,

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you-can-think-your-way-out
-of-cancer sense.

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But I do believe that while maps
don't show you

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where you will go in your life,

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they show you where you might go.

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You very rarely go to a place
that isn't on your personal map.

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So I was a really terrible
student when I was a kid.

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My GPA was consistently in the low 2s,

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and I think the reason
that I was such a terrible student

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is that I felt like education
was just a series of hurdles

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that had been erected before me,

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and I had to jump over
in order to achieve adulthood.

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And I didn't really want
to jump over these hurdles,

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because they seemed completely arbitrary,
so I often wouldn't,

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and then people would threaten me,
you know,

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they'd threaten me with
"this going on my permanent record",

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or "you'll never get a good job".

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I didn't want a good job!

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As far as I could tell
at eleven or twelve years old, like,

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people with good jobs woke up
very early in the morning,

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(Laughter)

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and the men who had good jobs,
one of the first things they did

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was tie a strangulation item
of clothing around their necks.

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They literally put nooses on themselves,

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and then they went off to their jobs,
whatever they were.

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That's not a recipe for a happy life.

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These people - in my, symbol-obsessed,
twelve-year-old imagination,

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these people who are strangling themselves

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as one of the first things
they do each morning,

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they can't possibly be happy.

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Why would I want to jump over
all these hurdles

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and have that be the end?

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That's a terrible end!

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And then, when I was in tenth grade,
I went to this school,

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Indian Springs School,
a small boarding school,

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outside of Birmingham, Alabama,

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and all at once I became a learner.

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And I became a learner,
because I found myself

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in a community of learners.

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I found myself surrounded by people

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who celebrated intellectualism
and engagement,

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and who thought that my ironic
oh-so-cool disengagement

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wasn't clever, or funny,

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but, like, it was a simple
and unspectacular response

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to very complicated
and compelling problems.

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And so I started to learn,
because learning was cool.

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I learned that some infinite sets
are bigger than other infinite sets,

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and I learned that iambic pentameter is
and why it sounds so good to human ears.

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I learned that the Civil War
was a nationalizing conflict,

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I learned some physics,

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I learned that correlation
shouldn't be confused with causation -

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all of these things, by the way,

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enriched my life
on a literally daily basis.

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And it's true that I don't use
most of them for my "job",

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but that's not what it's about for me.

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It's about cartography.

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What is the process of cartography?

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It's, you know, sailing upon some land,
and thinking

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"I think I'll draw that bit of land",

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and then wondering,
"Maybe there's some more land to draw".

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And that's when learning
really began for me.

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It's true that I had teachers
that didn't give up on me,

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and I was very fortunate
to have those teachers,

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because I often gave them cause to think
there was no reason to invest in me.

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But a lot of the learning
that I did in high school

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wasn't about what happened
inside the classroom,

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it was about what happened
outside of the classroom.

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For instance, I can tell you that,

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"There's a certain slant of light,
[On] winter afternoons,

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That oppresses, like the heft [weight]
Of cathedral tunes",

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not because I memorized
Emily Dickinson in school,

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when I was in high school,

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but because there was a girl,
when I was in high school,

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and her name was Amanda,

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and I had a crush on her,
and she liked Emily Dickinson poetry.

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The reason I can tell you
what opportunity cost is,

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is because one day when I was playing
Super Mario Kart on my couch,

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my friend Emmet walked in, and he said,

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"How long have you been playing
Super Mario Kart?",

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and I said, "I don't know,
like, six hours?", and he said,

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"You realize that if you'd worked
at Baskin-Robbins those six hours,

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you could have made thirty dollars,
so in some ways,

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you just paid thirty dollars
to play Super Mario Kart",

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and I was, like, "I'll take that deal."
(Laughter)

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But I learned what opportunity cost is,

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and along the way,

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the map of my life got better,
it got bigger, it contained more places.

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There were more things that might happen,
more futures I might have.

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It wasn't a formal
organized learning process,

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and I'm happy to admit that.

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It was spotty, it was inconsistent,
there was a lot I didn't know.

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I might know, you know,
that Cantor's idea

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that some infinite sets are larger
than other infinite sets,

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but I didn't really understand
the calculus behind that idea.

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I might know the idea of opportunity cost,

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but I didn't know the law
of diminishing returns.

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But the great thing about imagining
learning as cartography,

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instead of imagining it
as arbitrary hurdles

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that you have to jump over

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is that you see a bit of coast line,
and that makes you want to see more.

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And so now I do know
at least some of the calculus

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that underlies all of that stuff.

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So, I had one learning community
in high school,

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then I went to another for college,

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and then I went to another,
when I started working

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at a magazine called "Booklist",

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where I was an assistant

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surrounded by astonishingly
well-read people,

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and then I wrote a book,
and like all authors dream of doing,

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I promptly quit my job.

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And for the first time since high school,

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I found myself
without a learning community,

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and it was miserable.

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I hated it.

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I read many, many books
during this two-year period.

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I read books about Stalin,

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and books about how the Uzbek people
came to identify as Muslims,

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and I read books about
how to make atomic bombs,

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but it just felt like
I was creating my own hurdles,

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and then jumping over them myself,
instead of feeling the excitement

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of being part of a community of learners,
a community of people

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who are engaged together
in a cartographic enterprise

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of trying to better understand
and map the world around us.

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And then, in 2006, I met that guy.

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His name is Ze Frank.

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I didn't actually meet him,
just on the Internet.

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Ze Frank was running, at the time,
a show called "The Show with Ze Frank",

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and that was my way back
into being a community learner again.

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Here's Ze talking about Las Vegas:

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(Video) Ze Frank: Las Vegas was built
in the middle of a huge hot desert,

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almost everything here
was brought from somewhere else -

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the sort of rocks,
the trees, the waterfalls.

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These fish are almost as out of place
as my pig that flew.

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Contrasted to the scorching desert
that surrounds this place,

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so are these people.

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Things from all over the world
have been rebuilt here,

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away from their histories,

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and the people
that experience them differently.

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Sometimes, improvements were made.

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Even the Sphinx got a nose job.

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Here, what you see is what you get,

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and there's no reason to feel
like you're missing anything.

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This New York means the same to me
as it does to everyone else.

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Everything is out of context,

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and that means
context allows for everything.

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Self Parking, Events Center, Shark Reef.

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This fabrication of place could be one
of the world's greatest achievements,

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because no one belongs here,
everyone does.

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As I walked around this morning,
I noticed most of the buildings

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were huge mirrors reflecting
the sun back into the desert.

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But unlike most mirrors,
which present you with an outside view

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of yourself embedded in a place,
these mirrors come back empty.

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John Green:
It makes me nostalgic for the days

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when you could see
the pixels in online video. (Laughter)

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Ze isn't just a great public intellectual,
he's also a brilliant community builder,

00:10:22.678 --> 00:10:24.686
and the community of people that built up

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around these videos was in many ways
a community of learners,

00:10:27.552 --> 00:10:30.700
so we played Ze Frank at chess
collaboratively, and we beat him.

00:10:30.700 --> 00:10:34.654
We organized ourselves to take a young man
on a road trip across the United States.

00:10:34.654 --> 00:10:37.222
We turned the Earth into a sandwich

00:10:37.222 --> 00:10:40.762
by having one person hold a piece of bread
at one point on the Earth,

00:10:40.762 --> 00:10:43.056
and on the exact opposite point
of the Earth

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having another person
holding a piece of bread.

00:10:45.416 --> 00:10:50.809
I realize that these are silly ideas,
but they are also 'learny' ideas,

00:10:52.240 --> 00:10:54.211
and that was what was so exciting to me,

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and if you go online, you can find
communities like this all over the place.

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Follow the calculus tag on Tumblr,
and yes,

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you will see people complaining
about calculus,

00:11:02.497 --> 00:11:05.165
but you'll also see people
re-blogging those complaints,

00:11:05.165 --> 00:11:08.164
making the argument that calculus
is interesting and beautiful,

00:11:08.164 --> 00:11:11.925
and here's a way in to thinking about
the problem that you find unsolvable.

00:11:11.925 --> 00:11:14.534
You can go to places like Reddit,
and find sub-Reddits,

00:11:14.534 --> 00:11:17.034
like 'Ask a Historian', or 'Ask Science',

00:11:17.034 --> 00:11:20.247
where you can ask people
who are in these fields

00:11:20.247 --> 00:11:21.817
a wide range of questions,

00:11:21.817 --> 00:11:23.998
from very serious ones to very silly ones.

00:11:23.998 --> 00:11:27.471
But to me, the most interesting
communities of learners

00:11:27.471 --> 00:11:30.566
that are growing up on the Internet
right now are on YouTube,

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and admittedly I am biased.

00:11:31.978 --> 00:11:35.943
But I think in a lot of ways,
the YouTube page resembles a classroom.

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Look for instance at "Minute Physics",

00:11:38.459 --> 00:11:40.889
a guy who's teaching
the world about physics.

00:11:40.889 --> 00:11:42.944
(Video) Let's cut to the chase.

00:11:42.944 --> 00:11:46.224
As of July 4th, 2012, the Higgs Boson
is the last fundamental piece

00:11:46.224 --> 00:11:49.680
of the standard model of particle physics
to be discovered experimentally.

00:11:49.680 --> 00:11:51.690
But, you might ask,
why was the Higgs Boson

00:11:51.690 --> 00:11:53.200
included in the standard model,

00:11:53.200 --> 00:11:56.543
alongside well-known particles
like electrons and photons and quarks,

00:11:56.543 --> 00:11:59.038
if it hadn't been discovered
back then in the 1970s?

00:11:59.038 --> 00:12:01.273
Good question.
There are two main reasons.

00:12:01.273 --> 00:12:04.516
First, just like the electron
is an excitation in the electron field,

00:12:04.516 --> 00:12:07.306
the Higgs Boson is simply a particle
which is an excitation

00:12:07.306 --> 00:12:09.426
of the everywhere-permeating Higgs field.

00:12:09.426 --> 00:12:11.677
The Higgs field in turn
plays an integral role

00:12:11.677 --> 00:12:13.817
in our model for the weak nuclear force.

00:12:13.817 --> 00:12:16.854
In particular, the Higgs field
helps explain why it's so weak.

00:12:16.854 --> 00:12:18.977
We'll talk more about this
in a later video,

00:12:18.977 --> 00:12:21.947
but even though weak nuclear theory
was confirmed in the 1980s,

00:12:21.947 --> 00:12:23.557
in the equations, the Higgs field

00:12:23.557 --> 00:12:25.862
is so inextricably jumbled
with the weak force,

00:12:25.862 --> 00:12:27.975
that until now we've been unable
to confirm

00:12:27.975 --> 00:12:29.875
its actual and independent existence.

00:12:29.875 --> 00:12:31.512
JG: Or here's a video that I made

00:12:31.512 --> 00:12:34.790
as part of my show "Crash Course",
talking about World War I:

00:12:34.790 --> 00:12:38.292
(Video) The immediate cause was of course
the assassination in Sarajevo

00:12:38.292 --> 00:12:41.210
of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
on June 28, 1914,

00:12:41.210 --> 00:12:44.450
by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist
named Gavrilo Princip.

00:12:44.450 --> 00:12:47.128
Quick aside: it's worth noting
that the first big war

00:12:47.128 --> 00:12:49.858
of the twentieth century
began with an act of terrorism.

00:12:49.858 --> 00:12:52.188
So Franz Ferdinand
wasn't particularly well-liked

00:12:52.188 --> 00:12:54.388
by his uncle, the emperor Franz Joseph

00:12:54.388 --> 00:12:55.880
- now that is a moustache! -

00:12:55.880 --> 00:12:59.469
but even so, the assassination led Austria
to issue an ultimatum to Serbia,

00:12:59.469 --> 00:13:02.634
whereupon Serbia accepted some,
but not all, of Austria's demands,

00:13:02.635 --> 00:13:05.004
leading Austria to declare
war against Serbia.

00:13:05.004 --> 00:13:08.440
And then Russia, due to its alliance
with the Serbs, mobilized its army.

00:13:08.440 --> 00:13:10.958
Germany, because it had an alliance
with Austria,

00:13:10.958 --> 00:13:13.038
told Russia to stop mobilizing,

00:13:13.038 --> 00:13:16.265
which Russia failed to do,
so then Germany mobilized its own army,

00:13:16.265 --> 00:13:19.354
declared war on Russia,
cemented an alliance with the Ottomans,

00:13:19.354 --> 00:13:22.458
and then declared war on France,
because, you know - France!

00:13:22.458 --> 00:13:25.780
(Laughter)

00:13:25.780 --> 00:13:28.203
And it's not just physics
and world history

00:13:28.203 --> 00:13:31.203
that people are choosing to learn
through YouTube.

00:13:31.203 --> 00:13:33.737
Here's a video about abstract mathematics.

00:13:35.766 --> 00:13:38.468
(Video) So you're me,
and you're in math class yet again,

00:13:38.468 --> 00:13:40.862
because they make you go,
like, every single day.

00:13:40.862 --> 00:13:44.231
And you're learning about, I don't know,
the sums of infinite series.

00:13:44.231 --> 00:13:46.915
That's a high school topic, right?
Which is odd, because

00:13:46.915 --> 00:13:49.775
it's a cool topic, but they
somehow manage to ruin it anyway.

00:13:49.775 --> 00:13:52.996
So I guess that's why they allow
infinite series in the curriculum.

00:13:52.996 --> 00:13:55.536
So, in a quite understandable need
for distraction,

00:13:55.536 --> 00:13:57.429
you're doodling and thinking more about

00:13:57.429 --> 00:14:00.536
what the plural of "series" should be
than about the topic at hand.

00:14:00.536 --> 00:14:02.728
"Serieses," "seriese,"
"seriesen," and "serii?"

00:14:02.728 --> 00:14:04.868
Or is it that the singular
should be changed?

00:14:04.868 --> 00:14:06.677
One "serie," or "serus," or "serum?"

00:14:06.677 --> 00:14:09.258
Just like the singular
of "sheep" should be "shoop."

00:14:09.258 --> 00:14:11.145
But the whole concept of things like

00:14:11.145 --> 00:14:13.495
1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 and so on,
approaching one,

00:14:13.495 --> 00:14:16.145
is useful if, say, you want
to draw a line of elephants

00:14:16.145 --> 00:14:18.121
each holding the tail of the next one:

00:14:18.121 --> 00:14:20.311
normal elephant, young elephant,
baby elephant,

00:14:20.311 --> 00:14:22.463
dog-sized elephant,
puppy-sized elephant...

00:14:22.463 --> 00:14:24.553
All the way down to Mr. Tusks and beyond.

00:14:24.553 --> 00:14:26.540
Which is at least a tiny bit awesome,

00:14:26.540 --> 00:14:29.483
because you can get an infinite number
of elephants in a line

00:14:29.483 --> 00:14:32.033
and still have it fit across
a single notebook page.

00:14:32.033 --> 00:14:34.696
JG: And lastly, here's Destin,
from "Smarter Every Day",

00:14:34.696 --> 00:14:37.110
talking about the conservation
of angular momentum

00:14:37.110 --> 00:14:38.730
and, since it's YouTube, cats:

00:14:38.730 --> 00:14:41.875
(Video) Hey, it's me, Destin.
Welcome back to "Smarter Every Day".

00:14:41.875 --> 00:14:45.283
So you've probably observed that cats
almost always land on their feet.

00:14:45.283 --> 00:14:46.813
Today's question is why?

00:14:46.813 --> 00:14:49.684
Like most simple questions,
there's a very complex answer.

00:14:49.684 --> 00:14:51.844
For instance, let me
reword this question:

00:14:51.844 --> 00:14:55.592
How does a cat go from feet up
to feet down in a falling reference frame

00:14:55.592 --> 00:14:58.592
without violating the conservation
of angular momentum?

00:15:00.402 --> 00:15:03.630
JG: So, here's something
all of these videos have in common:

00:15:03.631 --> 00:15:06.630
they all have more than
half a million views on YouTube.

00:15:06.630 --> 00:15:10.130
And those are people
watching not in classrooms,

00:15:10.130 --> 00:15:13.123
but because they are part
of the communities of learning

00:15:13.135 --> 00:15:15.734
that are being set up
by these channels.

00:15:15.734 --> 00:15:18.706
And I said earlier that YouTube
is like a classroom to me,

00:15:18.706 --> 00:15:21.396
and in many ways it is,
because here is the instructor

00:15:21.396 --> 00:15:24.687
- it's like the old-fashioned classroom -
here's the instructor,

00:15:24.687 --> 00:15:27.157
and then beneath the instructor
is the students,

00:15:27.157 --> 00:15:29.164
and they're all having a conversation.

00:15:29.164 --> 00:15:31.070
And I know that YouTube Comments

00:15:31.070 --> 00:15:34.168
have a very bad reputation
in the world of the Internet,

00:15:34.168 --> 00:15:37.436
but in fact, if you go
on comments for these channels,

00:15:37.437 --> 00:15:40.436
what you'll find is people
engaging the subject matter,

00:15:40.436 --> 00:15:45.018
asking difficult, complicated questions
that are about the subject matter,

00:15:45.018 --> 00:15:47.492
and then other people
answering those questions.

00:15:47.492 --> 00:15:50.231
And because the YouTube page is set up

00:15:50.231 --> 00:15:52.763
so that the place
in which I'm talking to you

00:15:55.172 --> 00:15:56.633
is on the exact same page

00:15:56.633 --> 00:15:59.581
as your comments,
you are participating in a live

00:15:59.581 --> 00:16:03.080
and real and active way
in the conversation.

00:16:03.080 --> 00:16:07.018
And because I'm in comments usually,
I get to participate with you,

00:16:07.018 --> 00:16:09.544
and you find this
whether it's world history,

00:16:09.544 --> 00:16:12.544
or mathematics, or science,
or whatever it is.

00:16:12.544 --> 00:16:16.012
You also see young people using the tools

00:16:16.012 --> 00:16:20.096
and the sort of genres of the Internet
in order to create places

00:16:20.096 --> 00:16:22.997
for intellectual engagement
instead of the ironic detachment

00:16:22.997 --> 00:16:27.374
that maybe most of us associate
with memes and other Internet conventions,

00:16:27.374 --> 00:16:30.368
you know "Got bored - Invented calculus",

00:16:30.368 --> 00:16:33.741
or here's Honey Boo Boo
criticizing industrial capitalism

00:16:33.741 --> 00:16:36.431
["Liberal capitalism is not at all
the Good of humanity.

00:16:36.431 --> 00:16:39.805
Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle
of savage destructive nihilism"].

00:16:39.805 --> 00:16:42.104
In case you can't see what she says...
Yeah.

00:16:42.717 --> 00:16:47.000
I really believe that
these spaces, these communities

00:16:47.882 --> 00:16:51.171
have become, for a new generation
of learners,

00:16:51.171 --> 00:16:55.578
the kind of communities,
the kind of cartographic communities

00:16:55.578 --> 00:16:59.828
that I had when I was in high school,
and then again when I was in college.

00:17:00.425 --> 00:17:03.643
And as an adult,
re-finding these communities

00:17:03.643 --> 00:17:06.643
has re-introduced me
to a community of learners,

00:17:06.643 --> 00:17:11.665
and has encouraged me to continue
to be a learner even in my adulthood,

00:17:12.065 --> 00:17:16.419
so that I no longer feel like learning
is something reserved for the young.

00:17:16.419 --> 00:17:19.157
Vi Hart and "Minute Physics" introduced me

00:17:19.157 --> 00:17:21.708
to all kinds of things
that I didn't know before.

00:17:21.708 --> 00:17:23.545
And I know that we all hearken back

00:17:23.545 --> 00:17:26.545
to the days of the Parisian salon
in the Enlightenment,

00:17:26.545 --> 00:17:28.816
or to the Algonquin Round Table, and wish,

00:17:28.816 --> 00:17:31.266
"Oh, I wish I could have been
a part of that,

00:17:31.266 --> 00:17:34.013
I wish I could have laughed
at Dorothy Parker's jokes".

00:17:34.013 --> 00:17:38.823
But I'm here to tell you
that these places exist, they still exist.

00:17:38.823 --> 00:17:44.356
They exist in corners of the Internet,
where old men fear to tread. (Laughter)

00:17:45.093 --> 00:17:50.969
And I truly, truly believe that when
we invented Agloe, New York, in the 1960s,

00:17:50.969 --> 00:17:55.519
when we made Agloe real,
we were just getting started.

00:17:55.519 --> 00:17:57.108
Thank you.

00:17:57.109 --> 00:17:59.500
(Applause)