
Dismissing pseudoscience is too easy.
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Noam Hassenfeld
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Hank Green
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Noam Hassenfeld
Earlier this summer, I was scrolling and I saw this epidemiologist saying something wild. When they compared sunscreen users to non sunscreen users, the sunscreen users faced increased risks of all the major skin cancers. I was like, wow, okay, sunscreen does what?
Hank Green
Have I been lied to as a Florida man?
Noam Hassenfeld
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 3 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. 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.
Hank Green
Hey, thank you for having me.
Noam Hassenfeld
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.
Hank Green
That one wasn't very popular.
Noam Hassenfeld
It wasn't popular? Really?
Hank Green
No. I thought it was gonna be a slam dunk.
Noam Hassenfeld
That feels like right out of the park.
Hank Green
And it was an underperforming.
Noam Hassenfeld
It was popular with me.
Hank Green
Ok, good.
Noam Hassenfeld
But a while back you made this video that started with, with a really huge question, which is what is science?
Hank Green
Yeah.
Noam Hassenfeld
Which I do want to get to, but in the spirit of going big, why do you like science?
Hank Green
Well, I'm a very curious person or, 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, what a joy. Go down rabbit holes. And what you find is that the reason we know most of the things is in fact that people worked really hard to figure them out. Usually through traditional scientific structures, but always through interrogating the universe in some way.
Noam Hassenfeld
So let's do the big question. What is science?
Hank Green
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 gonna create white roses or red roses or pink roses? And the, you know, the, the answer that the universe gives you is like, oh, now I know a new thing.
Noam Hassenfeld
I mean, you're, you're calling a very broad thing I know.
Hank Green
Yes. I think that this is important. I think that it's important to. 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.
Noam Hassenfeld
Right?
Hank Green
And this is like, people argue about this. So you are not having, like, a. Like, I do want to say, if you had another person on, we'd argue about it. So, like, I'm giving you my take. It's my take.
Noam Hassenfeld
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?
Hank Green
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. This 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 gonna do is like, I'm just not gonna believe you if you don't share how you figured this out with me. It will not get written in the books unless you let us check.
Noam Hassenfeld
Check my work?
Hank Green
Yeah, check my work. You gotta let me borrow your telescope or I'm not gonna believe that there are moons orbiting ju. We'll have this argument in public. We'll go and 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 protect your information. You will share your information, and this will be a much better way to get to truth. And it's crazy. Galileo is a good example of 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.
Noam Hassenfeld
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.
Hank Green
Yeah. It really is like a, 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.
Noam Hassenfeld
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?
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Hank Green
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.
Noam Hassenfeld
Yeah.
Hank Green
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.
Noam Hassenfeld
Are there any examples of pseudoscience that drive you particularly nuts?
Hank Green
Oh, I mean the vaccine causes autism thing is really bad because of how, how amazing vaccines are.
Noam Hassenfeld
Yeah. Do you want to just say a little bit about where that came from?
Hank Green
Yeah. I mean, there was a guy who did a study. Turns out he had a ton of conflicts of interest. And then from, from there, like, like after digging in and seeing how much sort of human selection was it at play, it was like, oh, this isn't a very good study. There's doing a lot of things.
Noam Hassenfeld
The data was kind of like not convincing, right?
Hank Green
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.
Noam Hassenfeld
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?
Hank Green
I mean, a billion things. I mean, one thing that is really important to say is we should check these things. And so frustrating to be like, okay, so what did we do in response to this? We did so much research. We did so, 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 there. 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 gonna do it anytime soon, but we absolutely could. And it's frustrating. Cause I love it. Like, the fact that we eradicated smallpox. Oh, my God. Like, I can't find. So freaking cool. Like, you cannot imagine. You cannot imagine how bad smallpox is.
Noam Hassenfeld
Yeah.
Hank Green
And it's gone. It's gone. We did that. And the story of how we did that is amazing. And 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. This amazing progress that we get to have as humans is very frustrating.
Noam Hassenfeld
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.
Hank Green
It's interesting because it's not. It's not science. And yet it benefits dramatically from the credibility that science has Earned, you know, it's it. And. 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. 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
Noam Hassenfeld
definitely pay more attention to that than, like, the latest Alzheimer's drug that doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hank Green
Or even an Alzheimer's drug that works a little bit.
Noam Hassenfeld
Yeah, a little bit.
Hank Green
Which is what most of them do. The pseudoscientist is always talking about stuff that's really, like, 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. This is a known phenomenon of human brains. We tend to find it easier to believe things when they are easier to pay attention to.
Noam Hassenfeld
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.
Hank Green
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 everyone.
Noam Hassenfeld
In a minute. Why does pseudoscience always seem to end up at aliens?
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Noam Hassenfeld
Welcome to Earth. 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's 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.
Hank Green
Yeah.
Noam Hassenfeld
And I don't know if science could be the most trustworthy thing in the world. People, 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?
Hank Green
We can't do that, but we can learn. I mean, why does this work? Like, I read like pseudoscience books to understand them and I love to. One of my favorite. This is dumb. One of my 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 be like a week long activity.
Noam Hassenfeld
What have you found?
Hank Green
You know, find like crazy things about the world. You know, it can, 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 system. And we could 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.
Noam Hassenfeld
Very high rate of aliens.
Hank Green
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 that's, 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 is. Tends to be quite weird. And that space where you aren't sure, that's where science is so great. And so immediately giving that thing an answer of aliens 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.
Noam Hassenfeld
I love that. Cause I feel like everything we try to do on our show is focusing on those spaces where 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, I, 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, it's like generations of people have lived and died trying to fill these in. And you're gonna 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.
Hank Green
Yeah. I mean, and like, it could be aliens. 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.
Noam Hassenfeld
It's usually not aliens.
Hank Green
So far, it's never been.
Noam Hassenfeld
Okay, so last thing I wanted to ask you is very weird, but. 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.
Hank Green
Thunder does not make noise. Thunder is noise.
Noam Hassenfeld
And then you're talking about, can a sound make a sound? Can a goose make a. Make a honk?
Hank Green
Now I'm thinking about goose honks. Like, can a goose honk squeak?
Noam Hassenfeld
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
Hank Green
the thunder does not clap. I'm gonna die on this hill. I will. People will say that the thunder claps, but no, that is a thunderclap. It is a noise. The thunder doesn't clap.
Noam Hassenfeld
And then 15 seconds later in 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.
Hank Green
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.
Noam Hassenfeld
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?
Hank Green
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 do. 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.
Noam Hassenfeld
Yeah. So for anyone out there who is wondering whether something is kind of giving off 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?
Hank Green
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, there's value to that, it turns out. And 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, but partially, like, I also have to understand that that stuff is traveling more because it's scary.
Noam Hassenfeld
Yeah.
Hank Green
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.
Noam Hassenfeld
So the scarier the claim. Maybe alarm bells a little bit and double check sources.
Hank Green
Right. And one like double check sources is so, 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.
Noam Hassenfeld
Right, right.
Hank Green
And so what for me now raises a red 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 they are the most hyper salient claims are the ones that are least likely to be true.
Noam Hassenfeld
All right, Hank, thanks for the advice and thanks for coming on the show. It's really been a pleasure to talk to you.
Hank Green
You got it.
Noam Hassenfeld
If you want to see this episode on video, head over to Netflix. This episode was produced by Valerie Shenkman and me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Joanna Solotaroff. Our video editors are Shelby Smith and Alex Coles. Our animator is Karim Correa. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Our studio engineers are Davon Howard and Joe Nebris. Mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala. Music for me Meredith Hoddenott 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 as new. Get this to Platty 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 hq. Thanks as always to Brian Resnik for co creating the show with Bird and me. If you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you. Please email us@ unexplainableox.com or if you'd like to support the show, join Vox. Become a member just go to vox.com 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.
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Host: Noam Hassenfeld (Vox)
Guest: Hank Green
Air Date: August 10, 2026
This episode of Unexplainable dives into one of science communication’s toughest puzzles: distinguishing science from pseudoscience, especially as misinformation accelerates on social media. Host Noam Hassenfeld and guest Hank Green—the beloved science explainer and author—explore why pseudoscience is so temptingly viral, how real science protects itself from error, and what draws people to wild, unproven claims. The episode ultimately argues that taking pseudoscience seriously is an essential tool for defending the rigor and humility at the heart of genuine inquiry.
[25:08–27:12]
Trust the system, but stay awake:
Red Flags:
“The hotter the claim, the more important it is to investigate it.” (Hank Green, 26:06)
“The most hyper-salient claims are the ones that are least likely to be true.” (Hank Green, 27:12)
Taking pseudoscience seriously—investigating where it goes wrong and why—isn’t just about refuting errors. It’s about understanding the deep structures and social habits that make science resilient, humble, and collaborative. In an age when misinformation is everywhere, “check my work” and “I could be wrong” are still science’s quiet superpowers.