WEBVTT

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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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Mapmakers -- 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

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if Alaska and Russia 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 -- 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,
secret-y 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,

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like, 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 of 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

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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

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that "There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons --

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That oppresses, like the Heft
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,
and I had a crush on her,

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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 30 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."

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(Laughter)

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But I learned what opportunity cost is,

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And along the way, the map
of my life got better.

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It got bigger; it contained more places.

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There were more things that might happen,

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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, 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 coastline,
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

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in high school, then I went
to another for college,

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and then I went to another,

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when I started working
at a magazine called "Booklist,"

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where I was an assistant, surrounded
by astonishingly well-read people.

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And then I wrote a book.

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And like all authors dream of doing,

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I promptly quit my job.

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(Laughter)

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And for the first time since high school,

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I found myself without a learning
community, 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 the 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 I discovered the show,

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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, away from their histories,

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and away from the people
that experience them differently.

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Sometimes improvements were made --
even the Sphinx got a nose job.

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Here, 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, 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,

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which present you with an outside view
of yourself embedded in a place,

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these mirrors come back empty.

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John Green: Makes me
nostalgic for the days

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when you could see
the pixels in online video.

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(Laughter)

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

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and the community of people
that built up around these videos

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was in many ways a community of learners.

00:10:24.765 --> 00:10:28.289
So we played Ze Frank at chess
collaboratively, and we beat him.

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We organized ourselves to take a young man
on a road trip across the United States.

00:10:32.750 --> 00:10:34.701
We turned the Earth into a sandwich,

00:10:34.725 --> 00:10:38.434
by having one person hold a piece of bread
at one point on the Earth,

00:10:38.458 --> 00:10:40.587
and on the exact opposite
point of the Earth,

00:10:40.611 --> 00:10:43.123
have another person
holding a piece of bread.

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I realize that these are silly ideas,
but they are also "learny" ideas,

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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,

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and yes, you will see people
complaining about calculus,

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but you'll also see people
re-blogging those complaints,

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making the argument that calculus
is interesting and beautiful,

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and here's a way in to thinking about
the problem that you find unsolvable.

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You can go to places like Reddit,
and find sub-Reddits,

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like "Ask a Historian" or "Ask Science,"

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where you can ask people
who are in these fields

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a wide range of questions,

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from very serious ones to very silly ones.

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But to me, the most interesting
communities of learners

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that are growing up on the Internet
right now are on YouTube,

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and admittedly, I am biased.

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But I think in a lot of ways,
the YouTube page resembles a classroom.

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Look for instance at "Minute Physics,"

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a guy who's teaching
the world about physics:

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(Video) Let's cut to the chase.

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As of July 4th, 2012, the Higgs boson
is the last fundamental piece

00:11:43.611 --> 00:11:47.091
of the standard model of particle physics
to be discovered experimentally.

00:11:47.115 --> 00:11:49.169
But, you might ask,
why was the Higgs boson

00:11:49.193 --> 00:11:50.679
included in the standard model,

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alongside well-known particles
like electrons and photons and quarks,

00:11:53.997 --> 00:11:56.517
if it hadn't been discovered
back then in the 1970s?

00:11:56.541 --> 00:11:58.541
Good question. There are two main reasons:

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First, just like the electron
is an excitation in the electron field,

00:12:01.848 --> 00:12:04.642
the Higgs boson is simply a particle
which is an excitation

00:12:04.666 --> 00:12:06.649
of the everywhere-permeating Higgs field.

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The Higgs field in turn
plays an integral role

00:12:08.941 --> 00:12:10.870
in our model for the weak nuclear force.

00:12:10.894 --> 00:12:14.054
In particular, the Higgs field
helps explain why it's so weak.

00:12:14.078 --> 00:12:16.142
We'll talk more about this
in a later video,

00:12:16.166 --> 00:12:20.000
but even though weak nuclear theory was
confirmed in the 1980s, in the equations,

00:12:20.024 --> 00:12:23.736
the Higgs field is so inextricably jumbled
with the weak force, that until now

00:12:23.760 --> 00:12:26.927
we've been unable to confirm
its actual and independent existence.

00:12:26.951 --> 00:12:28.726
JG: Or here's a video that I made

00:12:28.750 --> 00:12:31.959
as part of my show "Crash Course,"
talking about World War I:

00:12:31.983 --> 00:12:35.354
(Video) The immediate cause was
of course the assassination in Sarajevo

00:12:35.378 --> 00:12:37.389
of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

00:12:37.413 --> 00:12:41.839
on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian-Serb
nationalist named Gavrilo Princip.

00:12:41.863 --> 00:12:43.305
Quick aside: It's worth noting

00:12:43.329 --> 00:12:45.821
that the first big war
of the twentieth century began

00:12:45.845 --> 00:12:47.066
with an act of terrorism.

00:12:47.090 --> 00:12:49.421
So Franz Ferdinand
wasn't particularly well-liked

00:12:49.445 --> 00:12:53.079
by his uncle, the emperor Franz Joseph --
now that is a mustache!

00:12:53.103 --> 00:12:56.878
But even so, the assassination led Austria
to issue an ultimatum to Serbia,

00:12:56.902 --> 00:13:00.114
whereupon Serbia accepted some,
but not all, of Austria's demands,

00:13:00.138 --> 00:13:02.698
leading Austria to declare
war against Serbia.

00:13:02.722 --> 00:13:06.103
And then Russia, due to its alliance
with the Serbs, mobilized its army.

00:13:06.127 --> 00:13:08.437
Germany, because it had
an alliance with Austria,

00:13:08.461 --> 00:13:09.958
told Russia to stop mobilizing,

00:13:09.982 --> 00:13:13.241
which Russia failed to do, so then Germany
mobilized its own army,

00:13:13.265 --> 00:13:16.334
declared war on Russia,
cemented an alliance with the Ottomans,

00:13:16.358 --> 00:13:19.937
and then declared war on France,
because, you know, France.

00:13:19.961 --> 00:13:23.414
(Laughter)

00:13:23.438 --> 00:13:25.682
And it's not just physics
and world history

00:13:25.706 --> 00:13:28.838
that people are choosing
to learn through YouTube.

00:13:28.862 --> 00:13:31.240
Here's a video about abstract mathematics.

00:13:33.914 --> 00:13:36.598
(Video) So you're me, and you're
in math class yet again,

00:13:36.622 --> 00:13:38.624
because they make you go every single day.

00:13:38.648 --> 00:13:41.915
And you're learning about, I don't know,
the sums of infinite series.

00:13:41.939 --> 00:13:43.565
That's a high school topic, right?

00:13:43.589 --> 00:13:47.505
Which is odd, because it's a cool topic,
but they somehow manage to ruin it anyway.

00:13:47.529 --> 00:13:50.687
So I guess that's why they allow
infinite series in the curriculum.

00:13:50.711 --> 00:13:53.863
So, in a quite understandable need
for distraction, you're doodling

00:13:53.887 --> 00:13:56.819
and thinking more about what
the plural of "series" should be

00:13:56.843 --> 00:14:00.485
than about the topic at hand: "serieses,"
"seriese," "seriesen," and "serii?"

00:14:00.509 --> 00:14:03.808
Or is it that the singular should be
changed: one "serie," or "serum,"

00:14:03.832 --> 00:14:06.276
just like the singular
of "sheep" should be "shoop."

00:14:06.300 --> 00:14:07.793
But the whole concept of things

00:14:07.817 --> 00:14:11.278
like 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 and so on
approaches one, is useful if, say,

00:14:11.302 --> 00:14:13.065
you want to draw a line of elephants,

00:14:13.089 --> 00:14:14.905
each holding the tail of the next one:

00:14:14.929 --> 00:14:18.097
normal elephant, young elephant,
baby elephant, dog-sized elephant,

00:14:18.121 --> 00:14:21.092
puppy-sized elephant, all the way
down to Mr. Tusks and beyond.

00:14:21.116 --> 00:14:22.897
Which is at least a tiny bit awesome,

00:14:22.921 --> 00:14:25.868
because you can get an infinite number
of elephants in a line,

00:14:25.892 --> 00:14:28.345
and still have it fit across
a single notebook page.

00:14:28.369 --> 00:14:30.991
JG: And lastly, here's Destin,
from "Smarter Every Day,"

00:14:31.015 --> 00:14:33.424
talking about the conservation
of angular momentum,

00:14:33.448 --> 00:14:34.925
and, since it's YouTube, cats:

00:14:34.949 --> 00:14:38.060
(Video) Hey, it's me, Destin.
Welcome back to "Smarter Every Day".

00:14:38.084 --> 00:14:41.426
So you've probably observed that cats
almost always land on their feet.

00:14:41.450 --> 00:14:43.410
Today's question is why?

00:14:43.434 --> 00:14:46.190
Like most simple questions,
there's a very complex answer.

00:14:46.214 --> 00:14:48.224
For instance, let me reword this question:

00:14:48.248 --> 00:14:53.443
How does a cat go from feet-up
to feet-down in a falling reference frame,

00:14:53.467 --> 00:14:56.432
without violating the conservation
of angular momentum?

00:14:56.456 --> 00:14:57.467
(Laughter)

00:14:57.491 --> 00:15:00.968
JG: So, here's something all four
of these videos have in common:

00:15:01.397 --> 00:15:04.516
They all have more than half
a million views on YouTube.

00:15:04.540 --> 00:15:07.609
And those are people
watching not in classrooms,

00:15:07.633 --> 00:15:11.274
but because they are part
of the communities of learning

00:15:11.298 --> 00:15:13.313
that are being set up by these channels.

00:15:13.686 --> 00:15:16.417
And I said earlier that YouTube
is like a classroom to me,

00:15:16.441 --> 00:15:19.124
and in many ways it is,
because here is the instructor --

00:15:19.148 --> 00:15:22.166
it's like the old-fashioned classroom:
here's the instructor,

00:15:22.190 --> 00:15:24.513
and then beneath the instructor
are the students,

00:15:24.537 --> 00:15:26.608
and they're all having a conversation.

00:15:26.632 --> 00:15:30.661
And I know that YouTube comments
have a very bad reputation

00:15:30.685 --> 00:15:32.080
in the world of the Internet,

00:15:32.104 --> 00:15:35.175
but in fact, if you go on comments
for these channels,

00:15:35.199 --> 00:15:38.354
what you'll find is people engaging
the subject matter,

00:15:38.378 --> 00:15:42.625
asking difficult, complicated questions
that are about the subject matter,

00:15:42.649 --> 00:15:45.387
and then other people
answering those questions.

00:15:45.411 --> 00:15:50.245
And because the YouTube page is set up so
that the page in which I'm talking to you

00:15:50.269 --> 00:15:54.112
is on the exact -- the place where I'm
talking to you is on the exact same page

00:15:54.136 --> 00:15:55.294
as your comments,

00:15:55.318 --> 00:16:00.950
you are participating in a live and real
and active way in the conversation.

00:16:00.974 --> 00:16:04.545
And because I'm in comments usually,
I get to participate with you.

00:16:04.569 --> 00:16:07.023
And you find this
whether it's world history,

00:16:07.047 --> 00:16:10.109
or mathematics, or science,
or whatever it is.

00:16:10.133 --> 00:16:13.406
You also see young people using the tools

00:16:13.430 --> 00:16:17.310
and the sort of genres of the Internet
in order to create places

00:16:17.334 --> 00:16:20.476
for intellectual engagement
instead of the ironic detachment

00:16:20.500 --> 00:16:25.197
that maybe most of us associate with memes
and other Internet conventions --

00:16:25.221 --> 00:16:27.745
you know, "Got bored. Invented calculus."

00:16:27.769 --> 00:16:31.220
Or, here's Honey Boo Boo
criticizing industrial capitalism:

00:16:31.244 --> 00:16:33.910
["Liberal capitalism is not at all
the Good of humanity.

00:16:33.934 --> 00:16:37.493
Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle
of savage, destructive nihilism."]

00:16:37.517 --> 00:16:39.801
In case you can't see
what she says ... yeah.

00:16:40.325 --> 00:16:43.982
I really believe that these spaces,

00:16:44.006 --> 00:16:49.039
these communities, have become
for a new generation of learners,

00:16:49.063 --> 00:16:53.428
the kind of communities,
the kind of cartographic communities

00:16:53.452 --> 00:16:57.995
that I had when I was in high school,
and then again when I was in college.

00:16:58.019 --> 00:17:01.288
And as an adult, re-finding
these communities

00:17:01.312 --> 00:17:04.622
has re-introduced me
to a community of learners,

00:17:04.646 --> 00:17:09.544
and has encouraged me to continue
to be a learner even in my adulthood,

00:17:09.568 --> 00:17:14.279
so that I no longer feel like learning
is something reserved for the young.

00:17:14.303 --> 00:17:16.526
Vi Hart and "Minute Physics" introduced me

00:17:16.550 --> 00:17:19.350
to all kinds of things
that I didn't know before.

00:17:19.754 --> 00:17:21.433
And I know that we all hearken back

00:17:21.457 --> 00:17:24.543
to the days of the Parisian salon
in the Enlightenment,

00:17:24.567 --> 00:17:26.596
or to the Algonquin Round Table, and wish,

00:17:26.620 --> 00:17:28.745
"Oh, I wish I could have
been a part of that,

00:17:28.769 --> 00:17:31.614
I wish I could have laughed
at Dorothy Parker's jokes."

00:17:31.638 --> 00:17:36.416
But I'm here to tell you that these places
exist, they still exist.

00:17:36.440 --> 00:17:40.969
They exist in corners of the Internet,
where old men fear to tread.

00:17:40.993 --> 00:17:41.996
(Laughter)

00:17:42.020 --> 00:17:48.845
And I truly, truly believe that when
we invented Agloe, New York, in the 1960s,

00:17:48.869 --> 00:17:52.667
when we made Agloe real,
we were just getting started.

00:17:53.246 --> 00:17:54.398
Thank you.

00:17:54.422 --> 00:17:57.003
(Applause)