Dear Hank & John - Jumping Pews

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

Hank interviews John in the first episode of his new podcast, Humans! They talk about why John's worried about Hank, why being in favor of humans is now counter-cultural, how John's seminary training might have helped the brothers' internet success, and what Mark Twain has to do with any of it. You’ve heard them interact before — but not like this.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, it is Hank. I'm sorry to have invaded the dear Hank and John feed for my own nefarious purposes here, but I have a little sample for you to listen to, a sample of a new podcast I'm doing, which is called Humans, in which I have conversations with interesting people about how weird and awful and wonderful it is to be a person. I've recorded about a dozen of these already, and I've had conversations with authors and actors and astrophysicists. The first three episodes are with John Green, who is my brother, who you probably, know about. Win a Lou, the editor of the New York Times game Connections, and third is our episode with Helen Hunt. Yes, that Helen Hunt, the Oscar-winning actress who has an IMDB credited every one of the last 50 years and who I had a huge crush on in high school. And then our fourth episode is

probably going to be, I think, with Zay Frank, the guy who basically invented vlogging and who inspired John and I to start the thing that we do now. And also now makes the show True Facts with Zay Frank, which you may have seen, which is absolutely hilarious anyway. The overall conceit of the show is that it is good to take a little bit of time here and there to zoom out a little, to understand that the thing that we are is very weird, certainly unique in the history of the Earth, and also of the known universe. Being the kind of thing we are is a weird thing that nothing has ever done before, so it's not surprising that we're not always great at it.

But in order to make it through, we're going to have to be careful, we're going to have to be thoughtful, we're going to have to think and listen. So that's really what the idea is. I'm just trying to talk to interesting people and extract from them ways in which humanity can survive. New episodes come out every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. And now I will play for you a little teaser of the first episode of humans with my brother John Green. I hear you talk a lot about in favorable ways, like things lacking sentimentality. Like you wanted to write an unsentimental cancer book. But you're also very earnest. Yeah.

And these two words sound like the same thing, sentimental and earnest. I know that they're not. But that does seem like a contradiction. Like you're one of the most earnest people I know, but at the same time, you are constantly like striving for a lack of sentimentality. Yeah. Akingly earnest. Pringingly earnest.

Sounds like someone's called you that. So annoyingly earnest. It annoys me just to get out in front of it. Like I also find it exhausting. What does that word even mean to you? It means like sincere, serious, unironic. Mostly it means unironic. And I want to be that in my work.

I want to be that in my life. I don't want to use the armor of irony or cynicism to protect me against real feeling. I want to feel all that there is to feel while I'm here. I think that other approaches to life are a waste of time. but I don't want to be sappy about it. It is a very fine line, Hank. You're right. And I'm not always on the right side of the line.

Well, but you know about it. You know about that line. I know about the line. It's bright to you. I'm aware of the line. In most of the book version of the fault in our stars, I found it. I tried to anyway. Yeah.

But I'm not always on the right side of it. Like if you're going to err on the side of being cheesy or on the side of being cold and distant, I'm always going to err on the side of being cheesy. And so I'm aware of the line, but I don't always walk it perfectly. But I think that the cold, distant, merely intellectual approach to life and art leaves a lot on the table. It leaves a lot of human feeling on the table that's really at the center of what it is to be a person. This is why I want to ask this question, because, like, you don't have anything against being earnest. I'm there with you, and I've been brought there by you. But what is sentimentality? What is on the other side of that line? Is it just like people's perception of the earnestness? Or is it actually a different thing? I think it's a different thing. To me, sentimentality is a little bit of a lie. It's the kind of lie that we tell our in retrospect, looking back at the past. It's the lie that everything happens for a reason. It's the lie that, you know, the sort of cursive encouragements that are posted at IKEA tell us.

That, to me, is sentimentality. We're creating these cute little nice things to tell ourselves about the horrors that aren't really real. Right. Like, I don't want to crap on anyone's worldview, but I think it's very, very, very difficult to argue that everything happens for a reason in a world of such profound human-built injustice. Do you think that that is, I mean, I know that we have different worldviews here. Has that changed how you feel about religion, about God? No, not really, because I've never believed in a God who intercedes some of the time, but not all of the time. I've never believed in a best of all possible world's sort of theology. I've always believed in a God who acts on humanity primarily through humanity. Always is a long time. Yeah. That feels like a more

complex theology than probably was taught to a 13-year-old. I didn't really grow up believing in God. So like I was able to conceptualize God when I was in my 20s or 19, you know, like I was able to form a theology without a ton of baggage. I feel really bad, actually, for people who grow up so religiously traumatized by the fear of hell or by these religious tenants that would tell people that they're not full people or that they're somehow removed from God's love for being themselves. You see that a lot with people in the LGBTQ community. You see it a lot with people who grow up being told that their desires or their way of being in the world is itself somehow terrible or worse than other ways of being in the world. I didn't grow up with any of that. Like, we grew up going to

church occasionally, but like it wasn't a big deal. And so by the time I came to Christianity, and I really came to Christianity because I'd grown up a Christian. I think if I'd grown up a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindu, I would have gone to those faiths. But I went to Christianity and, you know, was able to find enough there for me for it to feel productive. This is fascinating. I had always assumed that it was kind of a continuousness, even though, of course, like our parents and you go to different churches. Yeah. You know, you're Episcopalian. They're Methodist. I mean, nominally, mom and dad don't go to church, so. I assume that you had sort of just like carried it through. You got confirmed and just like I did. And you were just paying more attention in church and in Sunday school than I was.

No, I don't think so. Okay. I don't think so. I didn't really read the Gospels until I was in college. Oh. That's probably true of most middle school students. They're not out there reading the Gospels. But I don't know. Maybe. For as far as I can tell, nobody's out there reading them. A whole lot of people who say a whole lot about Jesus, not doing a lot of gospel reading. But is one of the reasons you don't talk that much about your faith that you are sensitive to people who have been traumatized? Yeah, for sure. And I don't labor under the delusion that it's right either. And so I don't have the same.

I mean, there's a lot of talk about evangelism. It really feels like that's one of the things about faith is that you're supposed to believe it's right. That's what faith. That's what that word means. You're supposed to believe that it's a right. Okay. I'm not sure you're supposed to believe that it's the right. But there's a lot of emphasis on evangelism in Christian history and in Christian literature on the idea that like you should go out and preach the good news that you can be forgiven and yada yada yada of radical hope that hope is available to all people at all times, even unto death and all that stuff. And I mean, first off, like, as a Midwesterner, I'm congenitally incapable of that kind of evangelism.

But secondly, I just don't feel like it's my way or my place. I don't feel like it's my place to say to somebody who's hugely religiously traumatized, oh, but like come back. If you just were at this church instead of that church, it would have been better. It's interesting, because sometimes when I talk about how I like, I'm a little bit jealous of religious people that like having this built in community, having a worldview that you can sort of fall back on, having, you know, some amount of comfort about the everlasting nature of the soul, you've tempered me in those moments and you've been like, now, like, not all puppy dogs over here. It's not all puppy dogs. And a lot of times to create an in-group, people create an out-group. And that's very dangerous, especially when it comes to something that's as important as religion, where you're talking about fundamental truths, if you're talking about a group of people who can't access fundamental truths or who are removed from the deepest love that is available to us as humans, like, that can be very, very dangerous.

I remember once I went to a Pentecostal church, a pew jumping church, as the pastor described it. It was called Church O' the Woods. Did you jump any pews? I did not jump any pews, but I, you know, I felt it. I felt my hands going up. I felt the magic. The thing happened. So I was like, what the hell is happening?

Like, the thing is happening. I am moved. I am transcended. I am, you know, not jumping over pews, but I'm about to. Nice. And then during the prayers, the pastor started railing against the Pentecostal church across the street and how they were doomed and fallen. And I was like,

Oh, man, that's a bummer. Did you need that part? You just transcended me, man. We don't need to go here. Can't we just sing and dance? Do we have to go there? It was like, pray for our fallen brethren across the way at Church of the Woods. Man, church of the woods sounds amazing.

It sounds like you actually just go into the woods and transcend. Pretty good church, man. It was pretty good church. I was looking at a bunch of interviews with John Green because I was going to do this. And also I'm trying to learn from good interviewers and how they do their thing because it's not particularly easy. There's a bunch of stuff you can use your brain in a lot of ways. And you did a wild card with Rachel Martin on NPR. And I was scrolling through the comments because that's what I do. I wonder how you feel about this number one comment,

first comment with a thousand likes. I think John Green is my pastor. Yeah. I mean, that's nice to hear. You're going to get people to jump some pews? I don't think I'm going to get anybody to jump over pews. And indeed, I don't want to because that stuff is so powerful that it's tricky. I don't want to have that kind of power over people. I don't think anybody should want to have that kind of power over people. I'm suspicious of people who want that. I think I used to want that when I was in my 20s, but that's a byproduct of being in your 20s. You're not allowed to want it in your 40s. You wanted to be a pastor that would get people to jump up of abuse. Well, I wanted to be a pastor who would get people pretty enthusiastic. I was never going to be a pew jumping church guy. But you wanted to have that power. Yeah. I mean, I literally wanted to be a pastor.

And I wanted to be a pastor partly because I wanted to, you know, shepherd a flock. Yeah. Make people feel those big feelings. And help people through the biggest, most difficult parts of their lives. Sure. But I'm trying to get to the thing that you were saying just then, which is like the difference about how you were feeling about it in your 20s. Like, you wanted to be like the, the least.

of this group in a really powerful way. Yeah, the leader of the group, for sure. Yeah. I don't think that's universal among pastors, by the way. I think lots of pastors go into it for primarily service-related reasons. I'm not sure that I was one of those people. Yeah, and you probably would have ended up there. I would have gotten there.

Yeah. I would have gotten there. But it would have been a journey. How do I feel about somebody saying that and lots of people upvoting it? I feel grateful. but I also feel like humans need better third places than the internet. Yeah. And they deserve better third places than the internet.

And so I worry about them if I'm their pastor because I worry that I'm, the place where I do that work is not suited to that work. We did it anyway. Yep. Yeah. And look, I've always been conscious of that, Hank. Like even in 2007 when we had like 400 YouTube subscribers, I was very conscious. of the fact that people were taking us seriously and as a result, we needed to take the privilege of being in their lives seriously. As a writer, you know, I try to remember that young people are giving me,

usually young people, are giving me a seat at the table in their lives when they're forming their values, which is very serious business. And I should try not to mess that up if I can, both in the way that I write and in the way that I talk in public or live in public. So one of the weird things about you and I is that we've been making vlog brothers videos for 20 years. There's not a lot of people who are still at it and of the ones who are, they don't have a steady sized audience. Right. The way that we have. We basically have the same number of viewers now that we had in like 2012.

Yep. And we've had peaks and we've had valleys, but like we've never. dropped down to a place where it feels like, it's really worth doing it anymore. I can't really figure out why. I think that some of it is the quality of the audience that we got from the beginning. It was just like the kinds of folks that we were reaching.

Some of it is that we are trying. Like in those valleys, we're like, okay, this is starting to look worrying. What should we do about this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We start to do a little clickbait. We're not above it. Certainly not.

But I wonder to what extent, like, I've never thought about this before, but like your both desire and a little bit of training in having a flock might be a part of that. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it might be a part of it. I think that the biggest thing is that we. have changed with our audience. We've grown with our audience. And there's a lot of luck involved in that. At the end of his life, Mark Twain was asked, what's the difference between you and Brett Hart, this other kind of comedian from the West, who was a beloved comic writer who never really ascended into the, you know, the literary pantheon the way Twain did? And Twain said, and he was like,

what's the difference between you and Brett Hart and these other guys? And Twain said, they were kidding, I was preaching. And I do think on some level, we've been preaching the whole time. Now, you know, it's not religious preaching, but it's preaching. It's trying to talk to each other and an audience about the big stuff at the center of human life, whether that's grief or love or astronomy. I'd say you talk a fair amount about religion, but I actually hear you talk less about Twain, and I know that he was also a subject of study for you in school. Yeah, it's true. It's true. I double majored in English and religion. You're asking me a lot of questions about religion. You're not asking me any questions about Twain. And that is the tease. If you want to finish, just search

humans, Hank Green, wherever you get podcasts, and follow the show. New episodes every Thursday. day.