John Green: Gen Z should read more books to "shrink the empathy gap"

John Green's advice for how Gen Z can "shrink the empathy gap": read more books.

Transcript

00:00I think they should be reading more books, but I'm biased. That's like asking a musician if

00:06people should listen to music. Here is my case for books. My case for books is that they shrink

00:11the empathy gap. Because when I read Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield isn't my friend or my

00:19spouse or my anything. He is as close as I can come to being someone else. And through the process of

00:26imagining with clarity and sophistication what it's like to be someone else, we both learn what

00:31it's like to be ourselves, but we also learn what it's like to be one of the 8 billion other people

00:36on this planet.