Hank Green: Good morning, John!  Different John, though, from the usual one.  Nerdfighteria, it is a beautiful and amorphous thing, and to be honest, even now, 8 years later, when someone asks me what a Nerdfighter is, I'm not entirely sure what to say.  I think overall, it's a shared set of values.  Belief in equality, the knowledge that silliness is not the opposite of seriousness, a desire to understand the world as completely as possible, and constant, active work not to oversimplify the problems that we face as people and as members of a species that has a really dramatic effect on other members of that species and also on the entire planet.  That doesn't fit very well into a radio interview, I have found, but if the whole point is imagining people and situations complexly, maybe it makes sense that we don't really put it into a sound bite.  

One of the most remarkable and wonderful things about Nerdfighteria is that, despite its amorphous structure, real groups in real places have started to exist doing real things, what??  Sometimes that's as simple as providing a social structure for people who don't have other social structures to fit into, which can be particularly helpful in college, when people are sort of yanked out of their former lives and placed down in 'okay, now make friends!  it's gonna be fine and also terrifying!'.  Which is why I'm so proud and pleased that nerdfighter groups have just popped up without any supervision from us at colleges across the world.  And also that DFTBA UM, the Nerdfighter group at the University of Michigan, crowdsourced the funding of this video through the Project for Awesome for me to talk about college nerdfighter groups.  Bwaaaah, it feels kind of Inception-y.  I don't know.

Nerdfighter groups at colleges are a chance for people with similar outlooks and experience to get together and feel comfortable.  Somewhat predictably, they spend less time partying and more time talking about social and political issues than your average fraternity, but that doesn't mean it's not fun.  It's a chance to get together and talk about some of the issues that are facing us and our schools and our country and our world.  From that basis, many things can happen--friendship and content and action, and watching that happen,  even though it's something that I can take absolutely no credit for, is something that makes me immensely proud.  

Thanks to John Yates and DFTBA UM and all of the other members of all of the other nerdfighter groups out there.  You can find more of them at nerdfighteria.com/map.  Thanks to all of you for supporting each other and for helping make the world a better place.  I'll see you on Tuesday.