453: Nobody Is as Good as Me

Real quick everybody, straight message. Here from Hank Green, I have had a really weird career. I've done a lot of really cool things, but by far the thing that I get thanked for the most in public and am most proud of and am most amazed by, because of course, like this is not a thing that I did. It is a thing that many people did that I helped with, is Crash Course. YouTube.com slash Crash Course. It is really good. It helps people learn in situations where they need that help. It helps lower the barrier to getting information in your head. We've never charged anybody for it. We've never advertised it. We've never convinced a school board to buy it. The only reason people use Crash Course is because a student decides to use it because they think that it's gonna help them or a teacher decides to use it because they think they're gonna help their student. That's how we want Crash Course to be. The only reason it's successful is because people are choosing to use it. And I know that sounds crazy, but in educational media, that is not often how things go. But there are two true things about the world. Number one, making Crash Course is expensive. It's a lot more expensive than making the average YouTube video because you gotta get things right. You gotta have consultants. You gotta have a lot of review. And a second thing that's true is that some people, and not most, but some people have extra money. And this is the only reason that Crash Course works. It is because some people who can pay for it so that not everyone else has to. And now that Complexly is a non-profit, that's a thing that happened this year. Complexly, the parent company of Crash Course is a non-profit. So we belong structurally, officially, to the public. And so that's gonna help out with this situation. And the other thing that helps out is that right now, the 2026 Crash Course coin is here and is only available until May 29th at CrashCourseCoin.com. Not everybody has the money to buy a Crash Course coin, but everybody has the time to consider whether or not they're the person who should. And if you just considered that, you've done the job. Because some of you considered it and said, you know, actually I am. And some of you considered it and said, no, I need to make responsible financial decisions right now. That's all I'm asking. Everybody who considered it did their job. And the ones who realized that they could financially support Crash Course, those people, they are now going to CrashCourseCoin.com, right? They are now on their way to Crash CourseCoin.com to get these beautiful coins. Every coin helps us reach thousands of learners and your purchase is tax deductible, which I am told I should mention. It also happens to be true. You can find more of the specifics at CrashCourseCoin.com because the 2026 Crash Course coin is available for only a short window. If you could support the work that Crash Course does, please do. It is so great. They do such a good job and they provide so much value for the world. They should be able to do more. Go to CrashCourseCoin.com. You're listening to a Complexly podcast. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Gors, I prefer to think of it Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, my friend's a lumberjack and he told me that he has cut 2,417 trees. And he knows because every time he cuts a tree, he keeps a log. Oh, that's good. Did you get that jacket from the lumberjack? Oh, no, I got this from the fancy clothing store, but I'm glad that you think that it looks like I might have gotten it from a lumberjack. It looks like he might have gotten it from a lumberjack, but it's a good looking jacket. Oh, thanks. You got a good looking jacket yourself. Go AFC Wimbledon. We're staying up. Up to the cup. Cup, cup, cup, up, up. And Dr. Seuss and et cetera. Yes, we're staying up. That's the important thing. I don't care how you celebrate it as long as you celebrate it. How are you, Hank? Hi, I'm on top of the world. Oh, really? I've had this song, It's raining tacos in my head for three days, so that's how I'm doing it. It's raining tacos from out of the sky tacos. Yeah, that was a constant companion when my children were the age of your child. It just, I wake up in the morning and it's like lettuce and shells, cheese and meat. That's, it's raining taco. That's what my brain does. And I do wonder what the having of a song in your head is about. Yeah, I don't know. It feels like it's about something. I don't think it's, I think it's like dreams being the waste products of the mind. I don't think it's about much of anything. But if you want to give it meaning, I think that's fine. Well, but even if it's a waste product, that's about something. I don't mean that it's about like, why is it happening? How can I have like a bunch of thoughts and be doing a bunch of things in that whole time? Yeah. My brain's like, it's raining, just like right in the back there. Yep. It's just the whole separate part of it is dedicated to the taco song. The whole separate part of my brain that's dedicated to something else right now is dedicated to my book, Hollywood Ending, that comes out on September 22nd. September 22nd. And I just wanted to ask you if you've read it yet. 20% of the way through. 20% of the way through. You're still in part one. It's good. It's things are occurring. Part one is most of what I'm working on. So some of it will change, but not too much of it hopefully. But if you have any notes for part one, let me know. If you have notes for the rest of it, don't let me know. Okay. You got it. You know, there's a lot that I didn't know about Andy Warhol that I'm learning. So there's that. Are you learning more about Andy Warhol or about Hollywood, more about Warhol, huh? I mean, I know more, I know about Hollywood more than the average person. I think I'm learning about how... The way in which the people in front of the camera are objects to be moved around. Yeah. Like really, they are both the stars and like in a weird way, completely powerless. Totally powerless. Actors are cattle as Alfred Hitchcock famously put it. So that is actually, I mean, I've experienced that directly having been cattle. Yeah. And like they want you to feel like you're not. They want you to feel like you're very special. Yeah, but mostly they just need you to have your face and stare in the right direction and say the right thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then do it 17 times. Right. And then you as an artist, as an actor, you have to find ways to turn that into art to create the very similitude that's so important to the actual product. Yeah. And that seems to me like the hardest part. On the fifth camera angle. Yeah. The fifth time you do it at the fifth camera angle. Yeah. Right. The 37th time you do it to bring your full self to it seems really challenging. It is a weird job and it is not... The glamour seems to have nothing to do with the actual process of the art. Right. Oh no, that's very true. Yeah. The glamour is more about the fact that it tends to attract people who are stereotypically beautiful, tend to get work. And also I think that there's some glamour in the popularity of the art, right? Like it's an art form that still has wide reach, which most art forms don't. I often say that if you sell 100,000 books, you've had a tremendously successful book. And if you sell 100,000 movie tickets, your movie is a complete failure. Yeah. You know, it's just a whole different scale at which like the art takes place, a whole different kind of audience. Right. And it has both the scale, it has both the reach and the cachet. Like I don't know how else to talk about it, but like it is just... Right. Like YouTube doesn't have the cachet. Yeah. I could get more views on a two hour long YouTube video than a two hour long movie would get. And like nobody would think that those were similar achievements. Right. Yes. Nobody complimented me on my hour long crash course, deep dive into tuberculosis and said like this really deserves an Oscar. No, nobody came forward thinking that it was gonna be, I don't know, did it win anything? But what do you mean win anything? Did it get a webby? It wasn't nominated for any, no, it didn't get a webby. Ah, come on. You could have got a webby for that. I'm not interested. I have to confess, Hank. And this is, I am interested in prizes truly. Like I don't want to be, but I am, but I am not interested in webbies. I think I already have one. Oh yeah, yeah, I think we both do. I think we have a, we might have like a lifetime achievement award webby. Well, what's the point of a second webby? I don't want a second Oscar either. Do you have an Oscar? No. I don't want a first one. Well, I bet you'd want a second one if you had a first one. Maybe, I don't know. Do you think, I don't think people who win MacArthur Genius grants think, man, I wish I had a second MacArthur Genius grant. I think they just walk around all day saying I'm a MacArthur Genius. Mr. MacArthur says I'm a genius. As you know, John, I am much, much more compelled by the market-based prizes of number one, New York Times bestseller, number one app in the app store, 20 years of continuous relevance in the Salience factory. All of those things are where I derive my feelings of I actually did a good job. It's a totally normal thing to want and an easy thing to achieve being relevant in the Salience factory. Put it on his tombstone, everybody. Hank Green, he's spent 20 years feeding content to the Salience factory and he's saved relevant the whole time. It's almost like an insult to say that he's relevant the whole time. Did you do it with a normal, healthy brain? Because that doesn't seem possible. That seems unlikely. I'll say, I'll say. All right, let's answer some questions from our listeners beginning with this one from Ella. It's kind of on topic, Hank. Dear John and Hank, why is it so hard to do things? I look at people like you guys doing so many wonderful things for the world and I am amazed. I like to think I have some brains in my head and feed in my shoes, but when I start to think about actually making things happen in the world, I get totally stuck and I feel like I don't have the skills necessary to actually make anything happen. To complicate the matter, I graduated college last spring and have been suffering from no longer having consistent validation of my intelligence syndrome. When did you guys feel confident enough to start building businesses and making your work public? How can I unearth a little bit of the confidence in my own life? Ella, it's a great question, Hank. I mean, first off, Ella, you are still really, really young and new in your career. So like, you know, when I was your age, I looked in my doctor's chart and the first thing I saw was patient is a low functioning young adult. That's, they really shouldn't put that within reach. Well, they should, she shouldn't have left the room, but on the other hand, I shouldn't have opened the chart. Okay, you didn't just glance, it was... No, I didn't glance, I opened. Wow. Well, I was a low functioning young adult, Hank. That's the kind of thing that a low functioning young adult would do. And that's fine, that's what young adulthood is for. It's for functioning low. Yeah. I have had this conversation several times with people where I like, you gotta understand, John Green uploaded his first YouTube video when he was 30, like this was not... Right. We didn't start out like this. Yeah. Though you had published a novel by that point and it didn't be popular with librarians. Yes, it had been limitedly popular, but even then, I spent five years writing that book from the time I graduated from college and stopped working as a chaplain to the time it came out was like six years and I was writing the books the whole time. But also the kind of cultural relevance that we have is not something that all should aspire to because it is not... It's very, very much so a game that is only... The status is in it being limited availability. And it's not just that it's a rare thing, it's also that it's not entirely a desirable thing, which I don't think enough people talk about. Like most people are not well-equipped to this job, including me, you are pretty well-equipped to it, but I think most people aren't. But I think L is real question is, how do I go from feeling like I'm doing nothing to feeling like I'm doing something? And that's hard. Especially like in an amazing way, like you and I started on YouTube with a little bit of an audience. And that was so valuable because of your books. And so we were creating for each other. So we were holding each other accountable, but we were also creating for this small audience and we were able to make some things with this small audience and we felt an obligation to that small audience. It's very hard to feel like you should create when you are creating for no one or nothing. So building a community of creation, a community of agency is great where you can sort of like compare notes. Or not necessarily building it, but just being part of it. Whether that's a writer's group or finding it, building it, maintaining it, however it works, but whether that's a writer's group or a painting class. Sarah started out as a ceramicist by taking one pottery class, met great people, met great teachers and now makes, actually useful things in the world, not YouTube videos, but mugs. I mean, intelligence is so interesting and weird and great. You talked about having that validated in school, but the thing that you're talking about now really isn't about intelligence, it's about agency. It's about having the ability to do things in the world, being allowed by the world to do things and also doing things despite your brain being like, maybe you shouldn't do these things. And so it's overcoming all of those barriers, some of which are like, there's no guarantee that you can overcome all of them. But that's the frame to think of it inside of, like how do I become a person who affects the world in some way? And work is the way that most people do that. And you affect your company, you affect the work that they do. But it's not the only way. It's not the only way, yeah. No, I mean, I think there are people who make big change in the world through volunteering. There are people who make big, in fact, if I look at the work that I've done, I think a lot of the most impactful work that I've done has been outside the realm of so-called work. Yeah, I'm so grateful for people who are like friend centers who like, when I say that I, like they asked me to hang out and I say, no, I can't today. And then they asked me again, I say, I also can't that day. They still ask, they keep asking, the third and the fourth of the fifth time. And eventually I'm like, yeah, it is, it's really not that I don't wanna hang out. It is that like life is complicated. And so we had like, there are people in my life who are this way and I'm so grateful for them. And I am not this way. And I like, that's one way in which I like, wish I had more agency in the world where I could be that for people. And I think all the time about how I would organize that. And then I simply do not do it. But there's all kinds of things like that where you act in the world and you become, you become in the world in a different way. And feeling like you can't act in the world, like you can't affect things is very frustrating. Yeah, turns you into a low functioning young adult. Let's answer this next question from Nick. You're right, dear John and Hank, what's next for Nerdfighteria? It's been incredible to see the maternal center of excellence come to life powered by my silly socks. And now that is finished and fully operational. I find myself wondering what the next big thing could be. Do we need to provide ongoing support to keep the maternal center of excellence up and running? Yes. Could we build something else in the Kono district to support the healthcare system and see early on? Is there some other big projects? Somewhere else in the world we can support, pumpkins and possibilities, Nick. So first of all, the work is never done. I'll tell you that. Oh yeah. There's, you know, the gap between where we are and the just world is wide enough that we will not finish. I'll be busy for the rest of my life. I think my kids will be busy. Maybe their kids will be all right. You think that we'll just have a just world? I hope we have a more just world. We already have a more just world. I mean. Well, not then last year, but yeah, then 30 years ago. The 70s, yeah. Yeah, for sure. So the, yeah, I think that, but I don't think that there will be a final just world. Well, that makes one of us. I do. The kingdom of God is coming for Earth, Hank. Oh, dang it. It's just taking a while. Anyway, we don't talk about the old one. Are we gonna have to wear sunscreen? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the sun isn't gonna go away. We've already established that would be really bad actually. No, I mean, so like I could see two things. The kingdom of God comes to Earth. I need to wear more sunscreen because it's bright out. Or two, the kingdom of God comes to Earth and it's like, you don't have to wear sunscreen anymore. We fixed that. I think that there will always be, I see what you mean. Like there will be no more place for suffering in the world. I don't think that, the issue for me, and we're getting away from Nick's question, but the issue for me is not the existence of suffering, but the unjust distribution of suffering. I have issues with both. And that suffering isn't randomly unjustly distributed. It is unjustly distributed according to structures that were built by humans. Yeah, I mean, I don't like that it's randomly distributed either. I don't like that either, but I can't do anything about that. Yeah. Whereas I can do something like we can do something about the human built systems that are causing unjust distribution of suffering. That's my idea of the kingdom of heaven coming to Earth is like, you can't do anything about randomness. You can't do anything about bad luck, but you sure can do something about the fact that your zip code or the country in which you're born can determine so much of your educational opportunities and the effectiveness of your healthcare interventions. Anyway, Nick, this is one of the difficult things about building a hospital is that the building of the hospital is very dramatic and interesting and it's easy to get donors. There's definitely more dramatic interesting things in the world, but. That's true. Have you heard about our incinerator and our laundry system? Yeah, it's true. It's not the sexiest thing that you can build. But it's not the most salient thing you could build, as Hank Green would say. But it's relatively salient. The idea that there wasn't a thing and now there will be a thing. Maintenance, the maintaining of systems and the slow incremental building of systems through maintenance and support is much, much less salient. Oh man, sure is. But also much, much more important. It's the thing, it's the whole thing. It's the whole thing. I have so many thoughts about this. I've been thinking about this a ton lately. How do you do the necessary, boring technocratic work while also keeping people's attention? And that's a little bit our jobs. So sometimes I think we have to do fun, grabby little things. Also, and not just because to keep people's attention, but because everyone deserves joy. And fun. And one of the things I've been thinking about is, like how do we do science together? This is a... Like as a community. As a community. I would be interested in this. I feel like there's opportunities there. I started this project and I really need to get back and keep it moving, where I'm trying to figure out how many names the average person knows. And how would you figure that out? Because I have this theory that about 10% or more of the words we know aren't names for people. Because a name is just a word for a thing. Yeah, but I know Alex Rodriguez and I know Dolly Parton. Yeah, you know so many, you know a lot of words, but you know so many names. And so I wanna know, is it like 1%? Is it like 50%? Like how many of the words I know are for people? That's a very interesting thing thought to me and not something that anybody's ever done research on. There's people who've done research on similar things, but not quite this. And I'm like, I feel like Nerdfighter could help with that. Yeah, no, I agree with you that having projects like that is very valuable for the... I mean, it's valuable because it's interesting, but it's also valuable for the connectivity in the community, right? The sense of connectivity. And I think the Maternal Center of Excellence has been very valuable for that. The question for me is how do I keep the Maternal Center of Excellence very valuable for that? Such that people are as interested in maintaining the place as they were in building it. So if you're a maintenance enthusiast like myself, go to pih.org slash Hank and John right now and donate to Partners in Health or get your awesome socks. Because I do think that, you know, the big project to me is how many deaths can we avert over the next generation with this incredible new gift to the Kono district? And the answer to that is determined primarily by whether or not the hospital is adequately supplied, staffed, has adequate space and systems. I mean, so much of everything. Even being alive is about maintenance. Like just like, I've got a body and I need to take care of it. And it takes up a fair amount of my life, you know? Thinking about both how to take care of the physical part and the non-physical part, it's a lot. It's part of being a high functioning older adult. It reminds me of the Great Kurt Vonnegut line and other flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. He's stuck it right in my belly with that one. Yeah, I mean, really. Leave it, Kurt, I don't need to hear it. You really nailed Hank Green there. This next question comes from Emma who asks, Dear Hank and John, the other day I woke up hours before my alarm and I got up instinctively to shake my leg, which had gone numb during my sleep. And when I say got up, I mean stumbled out of bed and nearly fell because of my absent leg. Ha ha. My question is, in the context of sleep, do our brains know when our limbs have gone MIA? And do they wake us in order to preserve our limbs? What happens if you don't wake up and your limbs continue to go numb due to a traitorous hair tie or unfortunate sleeping position? Legumes and armadillos, Emma. What's the deal, Hank? It turns out that you can create a problem for yourself. And as Tboki and I felt on this rabbit hole together, we found out about a thing called Saturday Night Palsy, which is a real condition that we do not, there is argument over where the name came from, which is it could be that it happens after a Saturday night when you've been out drinking and it was named after Saturday Night Fever and it is Saturday Night Palsy where you wake up on Sunday morning or on Saturday morning after partying and you went so hard, whether it was drinking or whether you just stayed up real late, that your body was not awake enough to move you when this happened and you could put so much pressure on your arm for so long that you can have weeks or months of weakness in that arm. Wow, wow, that's not great. Now I've got a new disease to worry about. But there is also the idea that this was actually from the phrase Saturday Night Palsy. Oh, that's funny. And that's actually a different thing that is to do with lead poisoning and apparently lead and Saturn are connected. It's like Saturn is the God of the metal lead, which if you look into the alchemy stuff, which I stopped after a little while, but I did read some Wikipedia about this and that that just got egg-corned into Saturday Night Palsy as a separate problem. And then, but there have also been situations like I think one of the members of Megadeth fell asleep with his arm draped over a chair. And he forever now has, his hands doesn't work properly. Really? Yeah. Which makes me think that he, it wasn't just like a normal sleep. It was a sleep that had some contributing factors to it. I mean, I don't usually fall asleep with my hand over a chair, but on the other hand, literally and figuratively, I feel really bad for that guy from Megadeth. I imagine that his hands are pretty important to him. Yeah, I actually don't know which guy it was if it was a guitarist and they probably mostly are. Or drummers. Also, yeah, that's the other kind. Yeah, I mean, is there any other, is there any other member of Megadeth? I don't think they have a tympanist. Do they have a floutist? Plays the Glockage Spiel. I mean, all of this is gonna require a lot of fingers and stuff. That's true. There's very little in the way of, I mean, I guess Death Leopard has a one armed drummer and he's done pretty well. He made it work. He made it work. But it does feel like saxophone. I'm trying to think of things that you play primarily with your mouth, but even those you also play partly with your hands. Yeah, maybe he does the little harp. Bow down, down, down, down, down, back down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. I mean, is that just scat singing? Is that what you just did? No, it's a little mouth harp. Oh, maybe. Sorry, that was so distractingly bad. I lost track of what you were talking about. Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by Hank's Mouth Harp. Hank's Mouth Harp. Yes. This podcast is also brought to you by David Mustaine, who is the front man of Megadeth and is the guy that we've been talking about this whole time. And indeed, he does play guitar. Does he or is he just a singer? If he's the front man, isn't he just a singer? He also plays guitar. I don't know if he plays guitar as much anymore. Okay, all right. Today's podcast is also brought to you by the Maternal Center of Excellence, the Maternal Center of Excellence in Kono District in Sierra Leone. Still in need of your support. And this podcast is brought to you by low functioning young adults. Low functioning young adults. What would we do without them? We're here. Retired. Get used to us. This episode of Dear Hanging, is brought to you by Quints. I doubt you have noticed, but I do like to be somewhat intentional about what I wear on any given day. There's a lot of hoodies that get thrown in, you know? There's a lot of decisions that I'm not super proud of, but help has arrived in the form of Quints because I wanna open the closet and have there be not a lot of work for me to do, but a lot of things that like work well with each other and look good and almost like maybe I'm doing a good job of being an adult. Quints can be a huge help here. You got 100% European linen shorts for $34. You got Pima cotton tees that feel the way a t-shirt's supposed to feel. You got pants that are relaxed enough to wear around the house, but put together enough that nobody's gonna polite. You'll ask if you're doing okay. And the reason everything costs 50 to 80% less than what you would pay at comparable brands is that Quints works directly with the factories and skips the middleman layer. This is how you could do premium materials without the premium brand markup. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quints.com slash deerhank for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too, that's qince.com slash deerhank for free shipping and 365 day returns quints.com slash deerhank. I got a question from Katie Hank who writes, deerhank and Hank, I was aimlessly scrolling through Facebook Messenger just now when I came across a post for a mirror that was described as quote, never used. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. And it got me thinking. Is it possible for a mirror to have never been used given that it is always reflecting and surely the person selling it looked at themselves and then at least once, this feels like false advertisement. It's all smoke and mirrors, Katie. I love this. When is a mirror, like, is there, do they make the mirror factories so that they're like always face down so that the employees of the mirror factory do not look at the mirror so that it does not arrive at Bath and Body Works having been used, but then they put it up on the wall and it immediately is used. No, no, no. Okay, so here's how you never use a mirror. You build it upside down. Build it upside down. You've got to build it upside down. So the only thing it's reflecting, even then it's being used. It's just like a tree falls in the woods and nobody's there to hear it kind of used. It's being used by whatever it's laying on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still reflecting the floor, but this is how you keep it from being used by a person. Is it being used if it's not being used by a person? Not really. Well, that's the tree falls in the forest question, right? I mean, if a bird comes up to the mirror and is like, hey, look at me, then it's being used. You're like, God, we've got to throw this little way. It's been sullied by a cardinal. Never been used. So I think that you build it upside down, you put it in a box, and then you don't unbox it until you, maybe it's never been unboxed. Maybe that's what they mean, in which case it's never been used because it's never been seen by a human. You never know. You can't know. You can't know what happened. It's true. You can't know that it's never been used. So I need a mirror that's a mirror and it's acting as a mirror, but then I get the mirror and it turns out that there was a mirror film on top of the mirror, and I get to very satisfyingly peel that mirror film off. And then I know that I'm the first person who used the mirror. Right. And that is, of course, essential. Never been used. The experience of a mirror is to know that you're the first person being seen in it, that nobody else's body has been exposed into this mirror. Mirrors are so weird. I know, you are always talking about it, it's because you don't understand optics, Hank. Like you're... It's not just that. No, you have a blind spot. You have a place, you, like some mirrors, have a place where you just can't reflect the truth. I guess that just means that it's never been hung up. Maybe it means it's still in the box, but I think the critical thing is that it's been used. Yeah. Like you use a... A mirror is used the moment an organism with eyes sees into the mirror. Right, how complex does the eye have to be for the mirror to be being used? Is it just like a sort of light detection spot? I guess probably. If a light bounces off of there and then... Light bounces back at you and you're like, well, that was weird. I was like, oh, I gotta move away from that or toward that, that's being used. And I think that there's microbes probably on the not used mirror, in which case it's used from the moment it's made. I don't know how mirrors get made, they're probably pretty hot at first, but... You know what would suck is being a little bacterium on a mirror, how I'm like, being a bacteria would be confusing already, but then you've got the double confusion of being like, well, what's that? Oh, it's me, it's me. Huh? You think you don't understand optics, Hank, imagine being a bacterium. I feel like mirrors are a place where bacteria do not last long. They're very like, oh, there's a smudge, gotta get rid of that. That's true, that's true. So a lot of Windex headed toward them. Yeah, that's true. Can't be good for a little guy. Katie, I think you need to follow up with the seller and be like, I'm gonna question your... I filed a complaint with the FCC. You've clearly used this mirror. I can't help but notice that you took a picture of the mirror that has your camera in it. Ergo, the mirror is used. I don't know why it's the FCC, I guess because Facebook's involved. Yeah, I guess so, but at any rate, it seems like they're super responsive to consumer queries at the moment. Let's move on to another question from Mariah, who asked, you're John and Hank. I just pre-ordered Hollywood Ending from Fountain Bookstore here in Richmond, Virginia after John's visit and it made me wonder, do you guys purchase each other's books in stores? I know you probably give free copies to give out to friends and family and stuff, but if my brother had a book in stores, I probably couldn't resist buying a copy anyway. Pumpkins and pre-orders, Mariah. Mariah, you're a better brother than I. I don't think I've ever bought a John Green book. Are you serious? I don't know why, they're around. Well, that's true, but I like buying a Hank Green book in the store, I like the feeling of being... I'm always like, is the book saleer gonna ask me? Are they gonna ask me? Are they gonna be like, oh, I hear this book is great and I'll be like, it is great, it's by my brother. That's worth 25 bucks right there. That, if that happens, and I'm glad that it apparently did. And you do get a very limited number of finished copies. You only get 20 usually. So you negotiate the number of finished copies you get in your book deal and then they send you your 20 books or whatever. And so Hank's in my top 20, but I don't know that he's in my top five. Oh, but I get the book before it comes in. I don't get the final book. No, but you don't get an advanced... They haven't made advanced readers copies for my book since 2011. Oh, wow. 2008. Oh, I just get a PDF. You just get a PDF. Walking around PDF-ing it. They haven't made, why haven't they done that? I got ARCs. I know. It's because my books were considered to... Oh. My first read of piracy was too high. Ah, you do. Fancy pens, McGee over there. Don't have a MacArthur Genius grant, that's for sure. I really hope you win a MacArthur Genius grant at some point so I can complain constantly about not having one. Oh, because it'll hurt so bad. I feel like, here's what I think. I feel like giving me a MacArthur Genius grant would be a waste. I don't need that. What? What do you mean you don't need it? Like, what is it? It's a grant. I don't need money. What is it? Well, no, you would give the money to partners in health. Oh. Did they let you do whatever you want with it? How much is it? I don't know, like $600,000 or something. Oh my God. It's a lot of money. How much is it? Why don't we just start our own? Be like, ha ha ha. Vlogbrothers Genius grant. And then the first, it's $800,000. It is, it's gone up. The first winners would be Hank and John Green. Yeah. It's like, there's this famous, have you ever read that book, The Island of the Blue Dolphins? No, I did not. I did not. I read his book about a person surviving alone on an island of Blue Dolphins. Anyway, the writer of that award endowed an award for historical fiction and children's literature called the Scott O'Dell Award. And my favorite fact about the Scott O'Dell Award is that Scott O'Dell has won it, I think, three times. What? I don't know. I don't know. What? Yeah. You can get more than once? Not only that, you can get your own award. That's what we should do with the Vlogbrothers Genius grants. We should start it, we should do a big press release. We should make a big announcement. And then we should, I love this idea. And then we should announce that the first two winners are Hank and John Green and never do it again. It costs us nothing. Punked. Well, we just could be like, listen, we keep looking for geniuses, we can't find any. Yeah, nobody's as good as me. They've all got weird opinions that aren't exactly like mine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. They're all problematic in some way. Except for me. Not like me. Except for me. Not like me. I've couldn't spend it. I agree with myself on everything. Oh man, I do really hope you win one. That would be so funny to me. They just like, you don't have to apply? They just like pop you with the money? See, now you want one. Who's this MacArthur guy? Some rich guy from the early days. What did he do? Something bad, I bet. I mean, it's never clean. The other day I was like, it's never clean. And Sarah was like, I don't know, your money's pretty clean. And I was like, no way, man. I cut down so many trees printing the Fault in Our Stars. Oh my God. I did. I'm gonna get up to the gates of heaven and they're gonna say, St. Peter's immediately gonna say, I have two comments. And I'll say, I'll preempt you. The trees from the Fault in Our Stars and the LaCroix. And the LaCroix. That's, I think you're pretty clean, John. You just don't have MacArthur money because MacArthur made way more than you through the mail order insurance business and massive strategic investments in Florida real estate. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Hopefully his mail order insurance business was a good one. I can't imagine it was. Well, not if he made that much money. But maybe we shouldn't be criticizing MacArthur, Hank, since you were up for a MacArthur Genius grant. I definitely am not. They look for people who are like, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like my friend and co-host of the away and Daniel Alarcon. Daniel is gonna, huh? He got one or you think he's up for one? He got one. He got one. Yeah. Amazing. All right. And recently deserved. He's a brilliant, maybe like three years ago, he's a brilliant writer and he created Radio Ambulante, which is like the most amazing radio show. Is this like what it's about? Like are people making this like a, this high class, cool, sparkly, not gonna make any money content for like elites because they're like, I'm gonna get to 800,000. No, no, no, no, no. I don't think anybody thinks about that, to be honest with you. I think people make stuff for that's sparkly and fancy because they like sparkly and fancy stuff themselves. It's the same reason we never wanted to be on television, right? Like all of our early YouTube friends wanted to be on TV and wanted to have TV shows, even though they were gonna make less money making TV because like that was their dream when they were young. Yeah, and it's for the status, just like with, there's cachet, just like with the movies versus a YouTube video. But there was no cachet for us. Like we weren't interested in it because it wasn't cool to us. Yeah, but then Scientific American sends me an email and I like have a very strong emotional reaction. Yes, so it's about what's cool to you, what was cool to you when you were a kid and like when I was a kid, I wasn't reading lots of popular books. I was reading, you know, books that I considered to be quite fancy. Daniel and I were reading Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston and we were reading Shakespeare and we wanted to be part of the Canon. Like that was the cool thing back then. And so when the Canon comes calling, it still feels really good. Yeah, yeah, even if the Canon is no longer relevant. And it isn't, to be honest. I mean, like, I don't even agree with the idea of a Canon anymore. You know, like I think art is so much bigger and broader and more interesting than that, than merely like establishing a set of like cortex that define a culture. Like that's obviously, you know, hugely problematic in lots of different ways. And even so when the authorities from that world come calling, I am always delighted. I have this ambivalence about this because like, one, I don't think that there should be a Canon and there shouldn't be like this thing that defines everything. And at the same time, like I kind of missed the days when everybody read the same stuff and we had these touchstones that we could share. It's almost like it's not about which things you pick, it's about that you pick, but at the same time, you have to pretend that there's a reason why you picked. Pretending that there's no difference in quality between, and I say this with a lot of affection for my novels, like no difference in quality between a John Green novel and a Toni Morrison novel does a great disservice to the overall quality of discourse in the world. Yeah, right. You gotta pick good stuff. You gotta pick something really good. But there's like some, but there's lots of really good, I mean, lots, but there's enough really good stuff that there's too much to be in the Canon. Yeah, but I think that traditionally the Canon was used as a way of excluding people who didn't come from backgrounds that were seen as worthy of the Canon, which meant that the Canon was very white, it was very male, it was very dead. And that made literature feel cold and distant and turned a lot of people off from literature. Whereas if you were educated, the way I was educated in high school, where we were reading Toni Kushner's Angels in America and we were reading Vonnegut and we were reading Toni Morrison, who was just winning the Nobel Prize, like when I was in high school. We were reading Alice Walker, like that stuff was really invigorating and felt really alive and present in ways that have been very helpful to me as a reader in person. Right, and that probably felt to some extent like that when the original Canon was being defined, which wasn't that long ago, it's not like we've had one Canon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Shakespeare's always sort of been hanging out in there for a lot of time, but. Yeah, he's usually been in the conversation because he is the best in English. He's done, he did English really good. He's the best at English. Yeah. He won English, but you know what? He never won, Hank, he never won a Nobel Prize, not even one of them. He will. Very unlikely, they don't give it to dead people. Well, he won't be dead anymore. He'll be AI Shakespeare and he'll be writing new stuff. And you can hang out with him, you can write him a message and be like, Shakespeare, my girlfriend has been really upset about the way of the faith, but I didn't turn the light off before I got into bed and I thought that she was gonna get back up and press her teeth turns out she was done. What do I do? Shakespeare's epitaph is one of my favorite little poems. Don't you dare make me into an AI. That is literally what he said. Oh yeah. Good friend for Jesus' sake, for bear, to dig the dust and close it here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones and cursed be he that moves my bones. He did not want his bones moved, Hank. He did not want his bones reanimated by AI in the 21st century. He specifically asked us not to do that. Don't you move my bones. Don't move my bones. And I'm sure somebody's already done it. It's time to get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, Hank. So there's the Psyche spacecraft. It's traveling to an asteroid, which is also called Psyche and it's in the asteroid belt, which is between Mars and Jupiter. And so this mission has to go past Mars, but since it's doing that anyway, they decided to use Mars as a gravity assist. So Mars is involved here in two ways. First, it's speeding up this probe. So basically Mars is going around and this probe gets close enough to Mars that Mars starts to pull on it and then it pushes itself off of Mars and it gets a little bit of a speed boost. So that's great. It gets there a little sooner with less fuel. But also as it's doing that, it's gonna take a bunch of pictures of Mars. Not really because we need pictures of Mars, but because it gets something to take pictures of, which allows the scientists to mess with and calibrate all of the instruments on board so that they're all ready for the moment that it arrives at its actual target. So that's happening soon. Hmm, that's pretty cool. It's exciting. Yeah, and then it'll get to Psyche in 2029. Whereas it has already passed Mars as of this coming out, not as of the recording, but as of this coming out. I'm concerned that we're not gonna get any humans there next year. Yeah, well, you know, singularity. I don't know what that means. The singularity is the point at the center of the black hole where physics breaks down. But it also applies to the point at which intelligence can manufacture itself and then all of our systems for understanding how fast anything can move break down. And we immediately ascend into the world where we no longer get sunburns. Okay, well. The kingdom of God? Is that what you call them? The kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, depending on which gospel you're reading. That's your next reading assignment for after you're done with Hollywood ending. All right, Hank, AFC Wimbledon have released their retained list, which is who is gonna be with the team next season? Both of our goalkeepers, Joe McDonald and Nathan Bishop are under contract. Ryan Johnson, our captain is under contract. Marcus Brown is coming back for another year. He's under contract. Maddie Stevens, our goal scoring extraordinaire is under contract. Junior in Kang is under contract. Although I will be surprised if we hold on to Starboy Junior in Kang because he is so young and so good. I would not be surprised if somebody came along and purchased him in the summer. But let's keep our fingers crossed that that doesn't happen. Two of our best players, in my opinion, are not currently signed up for next season. Steve Seddon, who is the player of the year this season, created more assists than any other player and did a great job tracking back as well. And Joe Lewis, our long-time defender and talismanic tall guy. Small bottom big. Small bottom big. Those two guys have not signed on yet. It's not clear if they will. And a lot depends, I think, in terms of the quality of the team next season on whether they do resign. In general, I feel like there is hope here. But you got to remember this team survived by three points this season. So if we're going to get better next season, which is not going to be easy, we're going to have to find ways to not only hold on to our current players, but get better ones. And that is pretty challenging. We're going to have to, as Craig Cope explained to me when I saw him at the end of season awards, he said, we can't buy stars, so we have to make them. Oh, and then they'll just leave us. And then they will leave us. But hopefully for a big fee like Ali Al-Hammadi did, because if Ali Al-Hammadi hadn't come to Wimbledon, we wouldn't be in League One, not because he did anything to get us there, but because of the million bucks that we got for selling him to Ipswich Town. Sometimes it's great when they leave fairly soon after joining. In my opinion, Ali Al-Hammadi will always be a Wimbledon legend for what he did for the club. And a lot of what he did for the club was leave. Fascinating. I'm glad that we don't fund space missions this way. Be tricky. Be tricky. Just train scientists to China. Yeah. How'd you get your new crop astronauts? Oh, well, let me tell you. Geez, we got this guy on loan from India. We got this guy. This guy, he's got no chance of staying with us. He's gonna be sold any day now, but we got him for now. Yeah, no, it's not like that. We're gonna get a big boost for, they're gonna sell all of our astronauts and just do robotic missions. They're gonna do so much more science. That would be really, really bad for your ability to get a human on Mars by 2027. I don't think actually it would change the odds at all. John, thank you for potting with me. And thank you to everyone for sending in your questions at hankinjohn at gmail.com. I love to see him come in. This episode was edited by Michael Polk. It was mixed by Andrew Smith. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosyana Halsrow-Hoss in Hanna West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. The music you're hearing now at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Danarola. As they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome. Don't forget to be awesome. Don't forget to be awesome. Don't forget to be awesome. Don't forget to be awesome. Don't forget to be awesome.