2024-05-28
53 分钟Do you pay attention to your attention? John Green is the beloved author of The Fault In Our Stars, and when he started tracking his attention, he realized he was obsessed with evaluating human progress. He decided to start rating everything — from the capacity for human wonder to Canadian geese — on a five-point scale. In this deeply thoughtful conversation with Adam, John shares what he learned from his series of Yelp-style reviews, the gift of a great book, and the unexpected life lessons found in the last lap of Mario Kart. Read the full text transcript at go.ted.com/T4G8This episode previously aired June 22, 2021.
Ted audio collective hey listeners.
Today we're sharing a past episode of rethinking from the Archives.
Enjoy.
Today I'm talking to one of my favorite authors.
I'm John Green, and I am here in my basement in Indianapolis, Indiana.
John is best known for his heart stopping novel the Fault in our stars.
Hes also a longtime youtuber and podcast host.
Last month, he released his first nonfiction book, the Anthropocene, essays on a human centered planet.
Its based on his podcast by the same name.
The Anthropocene is the geological period of time thats also known as now, when humans are dominating the earth.
Johns Book is a brilliant analysis of some of the most monumentally important and some of the most charmingly trivial touchstones of our time.
He covers topics ranging from the plague and the human capacity for wonder to office air conditioning and googling strangers, to monopoly and penguins of Madagascar.
He reviews them all on a five star scale.
So I couldn't wait to get him to review a few things with me.
Is the correct pronunciation the Anthropocene reviewed.
I mean, that's how I say it, but I'm not sure that it's standardized yet.
So if you want to kind of stake out new ground, feel free to pronounce it a different way.
There's a part of me that wants to call it the anthropocene.
Yeah, or some people say the Anthropocene, but that feels a little pretentious to me.
I mean, it's a little bit of a pretentious word to start with, so I try to pronounce it in the most, like, flat, normal way possible.