Unexplainable - Why Hank Green takes pseudoscience seriously

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Dismissing pseudoscience is too easy. Understanding why it spreads so quickly is harder. It can teach us why real science works and how to spot the difference between the two. To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix! Guest: Hank Green, creator of SciShow and Crash Course, co-host of Vlogbrothers For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and you can see photos of past work, credentials, and reviews all right in the app. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the Right Pro today. Earlier this summer, I was scrolling, and I saw this epidemiologist saying something wild. When they compared sunscreen users to non-sus sunscreen users, the sunscreen users face increased risks

of all the major skin cancers. I was like, wow, okay, sunscreen users. does what? Have I been lied to as a Florida man? But it's not because of the sunscreen. So I looked into it, and the study this guy was talking about showed that people who said they used more sunscreen did get more skin cancer. But it wasn't because of the sunscreen.

The authors of the study say it's because sunscreen users tend to spend more time outside, and they aren't always great at reapplying sunscreen when they need to. It's the sun causing the cancer. It's not the sunscreen. And when you control for proper use, it's pretty clear. But this claim went totally viral, almost three million views. And I think it's too easy to just dismiss pseudoscience like this. One, pseudoscience is spreading like wildfire all across social media right now.

And two, the difference between science and pseudoscience isn't always immediately obvious. Like, scientists are wrong all the time. So where's the line here? What's the difference between science and pseudoscience? I wanted to figure this out, so I called up Hank Green. Hank is one of the best people out there at just talking about science. He's done it for almost 20 years on his YouTube channel, on SciShow, on Crash Course, and he does it with this very specific type of fascination and joy.

Recently, he's been doing some really interesting reporting on the line between science and pseudoscience. science. So today on Unexplainable, what if the best way to understand why science works is to take pseudoscience seriously? Hank Green, thanks for coming on the show. Hey, thank you for having me. So you often do all these kind of weird niche deep dives on your channel, like missing asteroids or where the atoms in your toilet paper end up. That one wasn't very popular. It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't. popular, really? No, I thought it was going to be a slam dunk and right out of the park and it was it was an underperformer. It was popular with me. Okay, good. But a while back you made this

video that started with a really huge question, which is what is science? Yeah. Which I do want to get to. But in the spirit of going big, why do you like science? Well, I'm a very curious person. or possibly I'm an average amount of curious but have been lucky enough to have had cause to indulge in it enough that that muscle has gotten strong. And I've seen what a joy it is to go down rabbit holes. And what you find is that the reason we know most of the things is in fact that people work really hard to figure them out, usually through traditional scientific structures, but always through interrogating the universe in some way. So let's do the big question. What is science? Well, there are lots of different takes. I don't want to say that this is the only take, nor do I want to claim credit for this take.

This is one of several takes. I think it's really important that we don't think that science is the current institution of science. Science is not the scientific method. Science is not the peer-reviewed publication. These are all emergent of a thing. They are emergent properties of a first step. And I think that science has been being done since before humans were humans. And what science is, is listening to the universe and, like, hearing what it has to say.

And if it is more than that, then science is intentionally asking the universe questions and then listening when it gives an answer. So if you notice that a red rose grows from the seeds of a red rose, then that's that kind of science. But if you have a red rose and a white rose breed, you're asking a question, you're saying, is this going to create white roses or red roses or pink roses? And the answer that the universe gives you is like, oh, now I know a new thing. I mean, you're calling a very broad thing. I know. Yes. I think that this is important.

I think it is important to start to like say this is not something that was invented in 1720. You know, like it's very tempting. And a lot of people have done this to say that science was created by some guy recently to start out saying, okay, there was a day science was created. Right. And this is like people will argue about this. So you're not having like a, like, I do want to say, if you had another person on, we'd argue about it. So I'm giving you my take. It's my take.

Like, what is the thing that takes asking a basic question about the universe and turns it into what we, what maybe lay people think of as science now? Yeah, I mean, so the first step is ask the universe a question, try and get an answer. The second step is sharing information and letting it be critiqued and basically opening it up to attack from every angle. Like, please tear this apart. Like, as humans, there's this very tempting thing to say, okay, well, this is what I have learned. is what I've been taught. And then when somebody says, no, it's not that way, the thing you, the instinct is, often to say, well, let's fight about that. And I will protect my idea with my life. But what happened was at some point, people say actually no. The thing that we're going to do is,

like, I'm just not going to believe you if you don't share how you figured this out with me. And it will not get written in the books unless you let us check. But check my work. Yeah, check my work. You've got to let me borrow your telescope or I'm not going to believe that there are moons orbiting Jupiter. We'll have this argument in public. We'll go and to like have meetings and we'll share our information and then we'll argue and fight. But ultimately, you will open your fist.

You will not, you will not protect your information. You will share your information. And we will, like, this will be a much better way to get to truth. And it's crazy. Galileo is a good example of, like, people argued with him so hard, and for good reason, because these tools were brand new and they weren't very good. And then when they got access to the tools, they were like, actually, yep, nope, there's really no other way to explain what we're seeing than there are moons orbiting Jupiter.

So what you're basically saying is the thing that makes science science, the thing that has led to satellites and vaccines and, I don't know, rocket ships, I'm in a space mode. there. But the thing that has led it is this one basic idea of here, please check my work. And everything flows from there. Yeah. It really is like it's saying we need to cooperate on this. This isn't just going to be like one person is in charge of truth. It's going to be all of us together are trying to get to truth, which is not something that any individual is in charge of. And what emerges from that is just a ton of stuff, like the entire institution of statistics. Like, statistics is about helping scientists talk to each other and tear each other's work apart.

The journal, the Royal Society, the abstract, all of these things, replication, all of these things are emergent from that property. And then you get all of this stuff that's, like, actually really powerful for uncovering truth about the world. So you're pointing at this shift, like you're saying, to something communal, right? Yeah. Because the only way to get to better answers is to have other people check it. And then the last thing I think you're pointing at is some kind of embrace. of doubt or uncertainty. Yeah.

This sort of self-consciousness that I am learning a thing, I'm making a theory, but I actually am not sure I'm right and I need the help of my community to check. But it does seem like it's explicitly an embrace of doubt, right? Yeah, I mean, something that actually helped me understand what science is is looking at what pseudoscience is

because it's not, like pseudoscience feels like it's just people being wrong confidently. But it's not just being wrong. It is really the pseudo part. It's the part where it's attempting to look like science. While at the same time, never doing the fundamental base unit thing of saying, please tear apart my data, please look at everything I am doing. And if you are right, I will accept it.

I'll put my tail between my legs and be like, I guess I was wrong. Are there any examples of pseudoscience that drive you particularly not? Oh, I mean, the vaccine causes autism thing is really bad, because of how amazing vaccines are. Yeah. Do you want to just say a little bit about where that came from? Yeah.

I mean, there was a guy who did a study. Turns out he had a ton of conflicts of interest. And then from there, like, after digging in and seeing how much sort of human selection was at play, it was like, oh, this isn't a very good study. There's doing a lot of things. The data was kind of like not convincing, right? Yeah, it was both not convincing and it seemed intentionally altered.

I think he was doing it intentionally, but you could make the case he wasn't. And then from there, it just sort of like was wildfire. How do you feel about the fact that this kind of thing is the thing that is taking off like wildfire and so many people are ignoring just the mountains of data on how vaccines tend to work and are safe and are saving lots of lives? Like, what does that mean for you as someone who's trying to communicate this stuff to people? I mean, a billion things. I mean, one thing that is really important to see. day is we should check these things. And it's so frustrating to be like, okay, so what did we do in

response to this? We did so much research. We did so much different kinds of research and find the same answer from every angle we hammered at it from. And it's very frustrating and scary to think that now the, you know, the rates of vaccination are going down. It's frustrating that, you know, measles is an eradicable disease. It is possible to eradicate it. We could live in a world with no measles. This isn't true of all diseases. Some diseases have reservoirs in other animals, and so they're very hard to eliminate. But measles is a human disease. We can get rid of it. It would be amazing if we did. We're not going to do it anytime soon, but we absolutely could, and it's frustrating because I love it, like, the fact that we eradicated smallpox. Oh my God! Like, I can't, like, so freaking cool.

Like, you cannot imagine. You cannot imagine. You cannot imagine. You cannot imagine. Imagine how bad smallpox is. Yeah. And it's gone. It's gone. We did that. And the story of how we did that is amazing. It's like a triumph at every angle.

It's like such a tremendous human achievement. And I cannot wait for us to get the next one, you know? It's frustrating. Anything that holds us back from, you know, this amazing progress that we get to have as humans is very frustrating. So what seems interesting to me there is that if the idea of science is to be open to checking and open to your community holding you accountable. By dressing yourself up in those clothes, you're saying implicitly, I'm open to being checked,

but then you're not actually being open to being checked. And it allows you almost to rest on the laurels of that confidence while not necessarily having to do the work. It's interesting because it's not science, and yet it benefits dramatically from the credibility that science has earned. You know, it's, it, and I don't want to say that we don't ever like discover that we were wrong. We do. But man, there is a lot of dressing up BS in the clothes of science right now.

And one of the most like strong tells of this is that it is always around something that is very easy to pay attention to. Hmm. You know, like, like it's the aliens built the pyramids. Like if that's true. wow, that would be a very big deal. That would be like the coolest news of all time if aliens built the pyramids. I would definitely pay more attention to that

than the latest Alzheimer's drug that doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or even an Alzheimer's drug that works a little bit, which is what most of them do. The pseudoscientist is always talking about stuff that's really easy to pay attention to, fun to go on podcasts, and talk about. Because ultimately, we tend to find it easier to believe things.

It's a known phenomenon of human brains. We tend to find it easier to believe things when they are easier to pay attention to. And it seems like there's also maybe a narrative around there. It's not just that this is true, but that this is who's keeping it from you. It's more of a character and a story, it seems. It's a better story.

It's like a very interesting story. And I think it also can be very easy to believe something that will make you into the hero that saves everything. In a minute, why does pseudoscience always seem to end up at aliens? Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.

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It's interesting. There's two ways, I think, to deal with something like this. One is something that I talk about a lot, which is like, there's the whole going over COVID and who messed up and did we lose trust. And I do think there's like a lot of reasonable stuff to talk about there. You know, I spoke with Francis Collins, the former head of the NIH, who was really talked a lot about having too much one-size-fits-all stuff in COVID. Yeah.

And he's been going on all these conversation tours and talking to people and building relationships to get them to trust science. That's like one side of the argument. And then the other side is just like, I don't know if it's a trust in science problem as much as a pseudoscience is so interesting problem. Yeah. And I don't know if science could be the most trustworthy thing in the world. People would still get excited about they're hiding this from you. people want to have the thing that they think nobody else knows. I don't know.

Is it crazy to wonder whether science should embrace any pseudoscientific strategies? Should science be like making journals called like the secret society of safe vaccines? We can't do that, but we can't learn. I mean, why does this work? Like, I read, I read, like, pseudoscience books to understand them. And I love to, one of my favorite, this is dumb, on favorite things is to grab a book, like, a pseudoscience book, pick a random page, find a claim, and then track down where that came from. Because they always come from somewhere. There's always some weird place.

And it could be like a, it could feel like a week-long activity. What have you found? You know, find, like, crazy things about the world. you know, it can be, you know, they use ground penetrating radar around the pyramids and there was this weird geological formation. And it's like, well, what's that weird geological formation? Maybe we aren't doing ground penetrating radar enough. Maybe we just don't know enough about what the interior of the world looks like. So the first time you see it, you're like, is that aliens?

One of my favorite pseudoscience things is like we've just started to detect for the first time ever objects from other solar systems or other planetary systems that have entered into our solar systems. system. And we can do this now because we have better tools. And there's people who have claimed that like two of the first three of these objects that we've ever detected are like from aliens. Very high rate of aliens. And I'm like, that's a high rate of aliens. Maybe we just don't know what these things look like yet because we've only seen three of them. And so maybe they look a little bit weird. Maybe they look weirder than the average our solar system rock. They have different properties. And so maybe it might be that that's what's going on rather than two-thirds of all rocks in space are alien spaceship parts. But that thing happens all the time. When you start

to do these investigations, the first information you can find and tends to be quite weird. Yeah. And that space where you aren't sure, that's where, like, that's where science is so great. And so immediately giving that thing an answer of aliens is. is a really bad idea because that stops you from continuing to do the science and then you keep doing the science and you find out new and interesting things about the world. I love that because I feel like everything we try to do on our show is focusing on those spaces or we don't have an answer. Yeah. And I find them so unbelievably fascinating because it's crazy to me how little we still know about everything. And I just get so excited that there are these huge gaps that we don't know anything about.

And to think that someone wants to just fill them in, it's like generations of people have lived and died trying to fill these in. And you're going to just fill this in with aliens or you're going to fill this in with, I don't know, some magic element that doesn't exist. Yeah. I mean, and like it could be aliens. It could. It's actually true. Aliens is just a tricky one because we keep thinking it might be aliens and it keeps not being aliens because aliens can explain anything. which is a real problem for a hypothesis.

It's usually not aliens. So far it's never been. Okay, so last thing I wanted to ask you is very weird. But one of my favorite things about the way that you present science is the way that you seem so comfortable with being wrong. You had this video about what sound thunder makes. Thunder does not make noise. Thunder is noise.

And then you're talking about, can a sound make a sound? Can a goose make a honk? Now I'm thinking about goose honks. Like, can a goose honk squeak? And then, like, in real time in the video, you're like, I will die on this hill. Thunder does not make a sound. But the thunder does not clap.

I'm going to die on this hill. I will. People will say the Thunder claps. But no, that is a thunder clap. It is a noise. The thunder doesn't clap. And then 15 seconds later, the video, you're like, wait, I don't know if I should die on that hill.

I think, I think maybe honks can squeak. Oh, no, maybe I'm wrong. A sound can make a sound? I'm, I'm terrified. I'm no longer dying on this hill. The goose has changed my entire perspective on this. Maybe the thunder can clap, just like a honk can squeak. I know this sounds like the weirdest example to give, but I actually think that that in some

sense is showing people how you think, that you're willing to admit that you're wrong, or you're willing to just show us how you think in real time? Yeah. I wonder if that is actually, is that an intentional thing when you're trying to present science to people? Yeah, I mean, it is totally intentional. I don't know that I'm thinking I'm helping people understand how science works. I think I'm thinking, like, people will enjoy watching the thinking.

happen. Yeah. Yeah. I used to have this format. I haven't done it in a while where I would just like have a question and I'd go and figure it out live and record my screen while I do it. I think that people should see it. I think that people should see the process of me struggling.

You like get science more when you actually like find a question you want to dig into. Yeah. So for anyone out there who is wondering whether something is kind of giving off pseudoscience pseudoscience alarms or whether it is, you know, real scientific research they're looking at. Yeah. What do you recommend doing to figure out which is which? I mean, there actually is plenty to be said for just trusting what is inside of the current system of science.

So to look and say, okay, well, it's, it's in a peer-reviewed journal. It's being said by credible people. It's, you know, people who are experts in that, that area. There's value to that, it turns out. like, they're going to be more boring on average. And then another, and this is so hard, is to understand that, like, you're, like, we're all activated by the scary thing. I'm not immune to any of this stuff.

Yeah. But partially, like, I also have to understand that that stuff is traveling more because it's scary. Yeah. And so we have to understand that the hotter the claim, the more important it is to investigate it, and also the more likely it is that we actually have really good data. So the scarier the claim, maybe alarm bells a little bit and double-check sources. Right.

And one, like, double-check sources is so weird because, like, the thing isn't, like, I think that people are fine at being able to check. What they're bad at is knowing when the red flag should go up. Like, when should I check? If things are confirming your priors, you just don't. I don't. Nobody does. Right, right.

And so what for me now raises a red flag. flag is, is this a just top tier piece of engagement bait? If you see something that's like, oh my God, I cannot believe how messed up the world is. It might be, trust me, the world's messed up. It might be that the world's messed up. I'm not saying it's not messed up. But it's very, like, very often you track down those things where, like, they are the most hyper-salient claims are the ones that are least likely to be true.

All right. Hank, thanks for the advice, and thanks for coming on the show. It's really been a pleasure to talk to you. You got it. If you want to see this episode on video, head over to Netflix. This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Joanna Solitarev. Our video editors are Shelby Smith and Alex Coles.

Our animator is Kareem Karea. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Our studio engineers are Devon Howard and Joe Nebris. mixing in sound design by Christian Ayala, music from me, Meredith Hadnott runs the show, and Bird Pinkerton waited for Flapton to put the finishing touches on the guitar. Finally, he handed it to her. Here, he said, good is new. Get this to Plattie as soon as you can. And I added something to your beak beeper there.

Just press that button on the back if you ever need me. Direct line to Yardbirds H.Q. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. show with Bird and me. If you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at Unexplanable at vox.com. Or if you'd like to support the show, join Vox. Become a member. Just go to Vox.com slash members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. We'd love to hear it. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we'll see you right back here next time. Support for the show comes from KPMG. In any organization,

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