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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, mapmakers will insert
fake places onto their maps,

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in order to protect their copyright.

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Because then, 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 Alpers and Otto [G.] 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 call
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, expecting
there to be a place called Agloe --

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someone built a place
called Agloe, New York.

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(Laughter)

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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 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
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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"Do 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.

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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.

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We turned the Earth into a sandwich,

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by having one person hold a piece of bread
at one point on the Earth,

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and on the exact opposite
point of the Earth,

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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 4, 2012, the Higgs boson
is the last fundamental piece

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of the standard model of particle physics
to be discovered experimentally.

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But, you might ask,
why was the Higgs boson

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included in the standard model,

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

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if it hadn't been discovered
back then in the 1970s?

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Good question. There are two main reasons.

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

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the Higgs boson is simply a particle
which is an excitation

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of the everywhere-permeating Higgs field.

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The Higgs field in turn
plays an integral role

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in our model for the weak nuclear force.

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In particular, the Higgs field
helps explain why it's so weak.

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We'll talk more about this
in a later video,

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but even though weak nuclear theory was
confirmed in the 1980s, in the equations,

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the Higgs field is so inextricably jumbled
with the weak force, that until now

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we've been unable to confirm
its actual and independent existence.

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JG: Or here's a video that I made

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as part of my show "Crash Course,"
talking about World War I:

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(Video) The immediate cause was
of course the assassination in Sarajevo

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of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand,

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on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian-Serb
nationalist named Gavrilo Princip.

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Quick aside: It's worth noting

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that the first big war
of the twentieth century began

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with an act of terrorism.

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So Franz Ferdinand
wasn't particularly well-liked

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by his uncle, the emperor Franz Joseph --
now that is a mustache!

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But even so, the assassination led Austria
to issue an ultimatum to Serbia,

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whereupon Serbia accepted some,
but not all, of Austria's demands,

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leading Austria to declare
war against Serbia.

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And then Russia, due to its alliance
with the Serbs, mobilized its army.

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Germany, because it had
an alliance with Austria,

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told Russia to stop mobilizing,

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which Russia failed to do, so then Germany
mobilized its own army,

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declared war on Russia,
cemented an alliance with the Ottomans,

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and then declared war on France,
because, you know, France.

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(Laughter)

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And it's not just physics
and world history

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that people are choosing
to learn through YouTube.

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Here's a video about abstract mathematics.

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(Video) So you're me, and you're
in math class yet again,

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because they make you go every single day.

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And you're learning about, I don't know,
the sums of infinite series.

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That's a high school topic, right?

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Which is odd, because it's a cool topic,
but they somehow manage to ruin it anyway.

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So I guess that's why they allow
infinite series in the curriculum.

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So, in a quite understandable need
for distraction, you're doodling

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and thinking more about what
the plural of "series" should be

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than about the topic at hand: "serieses,"
"seriese," "seriesen," and "serii?"

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Or is it that the singular should be
changed: one "serie," or "serum,"

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just like the singular of "sheep"
should be "shoop."

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But the whole concept of things

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like 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 and so on
approaches one, is useful if, say,

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you want to draw a line of elephants,

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each holding the tail of the next one:

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normal elephant, young elephant,
baby elephant, dog-sized elephant,

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puppy-sized elephant, all the way
down to Mr. Tusks and beyond.

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Which is at least a tiny bit awesome,

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because you can get an infinite number
of elephants in a line,

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and still have it fit across
a single notebook page.

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JG: And lastly, here's Destin,
from "Smarter Every Day,"

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talking about the conservation
of angular momentum,

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and, since it's YouTube, cats:

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(Video) Hey, it's me, Destin.
Welcome back to "Smarter Every Day."

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So you've probably observed that cats
almost always land on their feet.

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Today's question is: why?

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Like most simple questions,
there's a very complex answer.

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For instance, let me reword this question:

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How does a cat go from feet-up
to feet-down in a falling reference frame,

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without violating the conservation
of angular momentum?

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(Laughter)

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JG: So, here's something all four
of these videos have in common:

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They all have more than half
a million views on YouTube.

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And those are people watching
not in classrooms,

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but because they are part
of the communities of learning

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that are being set up by these channels.

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And I said earlier that YouTube
is like a classroom to me,

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and in many ways it is,
because here is the instructor --

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it's like the old-fashioned classroom:
here's the instructor,

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and then beneath the instructor
are the students,

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and they're all having a conversation.

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And I know that YouTube comments
have a very bad reputation

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in the world of the Internet,

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but in fact, if you go on comments
for these channels,

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what you'll find is people engaging
the subject matter,

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asking difficult, complicated questions
that are about the subject matter,

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and then other people
answering those questions.

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And because the YouTube page is set up so
that the page in which I'm talking to you

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is on the exact -- the place where I'm
talking to you is on the exact same page

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as your comments,

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you are participating in a live and real
and active way in the conversation.

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And because I'm in comments usually,
I get to participate with you.

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And you find this
whether it's world history,

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or mathematics, or science,
or whatever it is.

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You also see young people using the tools
and the sort of genres of the Internet

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in order to create places
for intellectual engagement,

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instead of the ironic detachment

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that maybe most of us associate with memes
and other Internet conventions --

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you know, "Got bored. Invented calculus."

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Or, here's Honey Boo Boo
criticizing industrial capitalism:

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["Liberal capitalism is not at all
the Good of humanity.

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Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle
of savage, destructive nihilism."]

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In case you can't see
what she says ... yeah.

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I really believe that these spaces,

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these communities, have become
for a new generation of learners,

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the kind of communities,
the kind of cartographic communities

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that I had when I was in high school,
and then again when I was in college.

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And as an adult, re-finding
these communities

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has re-introduced me
to a community of learners,

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and has encouraged me to continue
to be a learner even in my adulthood,

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so that I no longer feel like learning
is something reserved for the young.

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Vi Hart and "Minute Physics" introduced me

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to all kinds of things
that I didn't know before.

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And I know that we all hearken back

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to the days of the Parisian salon
in the Enlightenment,

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or to the Algonquin Round Table, and wish,

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"Oh, I wish I could have been
a part of that,

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I wish I could have laughed
at Dorothy Parker's jokes."

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But I'm here to tell you that these places
exist, they still exist.

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They exist in corners of the Internet,
where old men fear to tread.

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(Laughter)

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And I truly, truly believe that when
we invented Agloe, New York, in the 1960s,

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when we made Agloe real,
we were just getting started.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)