458: Ancient vs. Hyper-Mortal (w/ Paige Lewis!)

Will John release a “John’s Version” of his books like Taylor Swift? How do I start writing again? What can I look forward to in adulthood? How long does it take love to go to the sun and back? Where does our responsibility to ourselves end and our responsibility to others begin? …Paige and John have answers! If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [email protected] Join us for monthly livestreams at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn Produced for Hank and John Green by Complexly See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hank Green?

  You're listening to a Complexly podcast.

• 0:09John Green?

  Hello and welcome to Dear John and Hank.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  Or, as I prefer to think of it, Dear Paige and John.

• 0:16John Green?

  It's a podcast where two friends give you dubious advice, bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon, and answer your questions. I'm joined today by my ancient friend, Paige Lewis.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Wait, ancient is like, I'm really old.

• 0:29John Green?

  No, you're actually very young. Ancient in the sense that that's the nature of your wisdom. You write epics, Paige.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, that is, yeah, I like to be thought of as like the, um, the symbol of kumey.

• 0:42John Green?

  Yeah.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also, I feel like I've known you since before Kav and I got married, like, which is a long time.

• 0:50John Green?

  I have known you since before you got married, and...

• 0:53Speaker 02

  That's pretty cool.

• 0:54John Green?

  It is really cool. It's been very, very cool to see. So for those who don't know, Paige is a poet, and most recently, the author of a novel called Canon. That's one of my favorite books of all time. And Canon is a non-binary epic, as it says at the very beginning of the book. And it's, it's this, I hope you take this as a compliment, but I think it's the strangest book I've ever read, and one of the most enjoyable.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  No, I like that. I think that that, thank you, by the way. That's very sweet. I think that, um, everyone so far has been calling it weird. But I think that that is a good thing.

• 1:31John Green?

  Yeah. Well, it's not like, uh, it shouldn't be a huge surprise to you that people consider it weird, because it is a different novel from the ones that people are used to reading.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Right. I was thinking the other day about, um, how nice your voice is. No, well, I, and you called me out of the blue like a month ago. And I was in an airport, and I was going to be in an airport for the next like six hours, and I was really bummed about it. And then you called, which is weird, because no one ever calls. That's like, not a thing people do anymore. And... After I talked to you, I was totally fine in the airport, and I think it's because your voice is so calming. And that makes me think, I know you're not going to be doing the voices for Hollywood Ending, right?

• 2:24John Green?

  Probably not, no.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  For the audiobook, which it would be interesting to see you do, but I think that you should get a job sort of recording warnings for people.

• 2:35John Green?

  Hmm.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Like, oh, no, a nuclear bomb is coming your way. Like, if everyone heard it in your voice, I think it would be fine and everyone would accept it.

• 2:45John Green?

  Good news and bad news, y'all. We've got a tsunami on the horizon, but

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:51John Green?

  But there's really no but to that sentence. Thanks for coming to my party. All right, we are going to answer some questions from our listeners, but first, I just have to say that in addition to being the author of Canon, you are also one of the only people who's ever read Hollywood Ending. And you wrote me a very nice email about it, which I appreciate very much. So, thank you. Thank you for being such a good friend and thanks for hosting this podcast with me.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. If I hadn't liked it, would I have been allowed on the podcast?

• 3:18John Green?

  If you hadn't liked it, I think you would have pretended to like it because that's who you are as a person.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  No, I think that if I hadn't liked it, I wouldn't have said much to you. I would have been like, you did it, you wrote a book. But I read it and I don't often, not that I don't care to write a lot to people, but I don't often get out of my head long enough to tell people about the things that I love about them. And it was exciting to read your book and then want to, every like, four words text you about how great your book was. And I love all of it. I even like the people that I hate in the book. Like, I don't think of the, like, the bad guys in your book as evil.

• 4:03John Green?

  Yeah.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  They feel like people, which makes it feel much more sinister. Like, it just feels very realistic, sort of bad guy-y. And I really love that about the book.

• 4:14John Green?

  Yeah, I think the truth of villainy is that it's so much sadder and more depressing than just people who are evil.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. No, that is a good way to think of it. And it is very sad and depressing how the villains work in your book.

• 4:29John Green?

  Well, thanks, I guess. All right. Now that we're a real mutual appreciation society, let's answer some questions from our listeners, beginning with this one from Aaliyah, who writes, "Dear John and Paige, I just finished listening to the 2014 episode. Paige, quick background, in 2014, I was famous, and it was unpleasant, and I made a podcast about it with my brother, where John expressed the desire to rewrite all of his previous books, to which I asked, why don't you release a John's version of the books, like Taylor Swift's Taylor's Version albums, or an annotated edition like Anne Patchett's Bel Canto? I love marginalia and would love to read your marginalia reflected on your own work. My name pronunciation is too confusing to have a name-specific sign-off, but it's Aaliyah, or Aaliyah, or Eliyah, or Aaliyah."

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Um, why haven't you done that, John?

• 5:14John Green?

  Why haven't you done it, is the real question. Um, I haven't done it because I would be too embarrassed to reread my book, my books, even to annotate them and tell you how horrible they are.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  When was the, when was the last time you reread one of your old books?

• 5:29John Green?

  I read Paper Towns, which I wrote in 2008. I, I read in 2010 to write a movie adaptation of it, to write like a screenplay adaptation.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:40John Green?

  And it was a horrible experience on every level. Like, it was a horrible experience to reread the book and be so disappointed by it. It was a horrible experience to try to write a screenplay. And then the worst of it, Paige, if I can be frank and a little bit, um, base, the worst of it was that the movie studio that paid me to write the screenplay was so disappointed with my screenplay that they withheld the final $5,000 of my payment.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, forever?

• 6:08John Green?

  Forever. I saw the guy who did this at, at, at the opening of The Fault in Our Stars, and I embraced him and whispered into his ear, "I remember the $5,000."

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that feels very insulting. Um...

• 6:21John Green?

  It was, exactly, exactly. It was, it was insulting.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  They're not even like, "We have notes for you." They're just like, "All right, you gave us this, and here is $5,000 less than we..."

• 6:35John Green?

  This is not worthy of what you're contractually obligated to be paid.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  That feels like the worst. Like, that would be a thing that you would, as you were writing this screenplay, like, you would tell yourself, "Okay, the worst that could happen is they just..." Give me some notes, or they say they didn't like a specific part. But no, the actual worst that could happen was they would give you way less money.

• 6:58John Green?

  Yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Because they thought it was so bad.

• 7:00John Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  And to think of it being something that you can measure in dollars is also kind of heartbreaking. Like

• 7:10John Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Thing that you made, it can be measured in money.

• 7:14John Green?

  The commodification of art in general is horrifying, right? Like, it feels like watching, um, watching sausage get made in the worst way. But having it laid bare for you like that, like, this isn't worth the last $5,000. I assume that you will be a person of so little import in my life that I don't have to pay you is especially annoying, I think.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  You, you had only waited like two years to read it since having written it, right? Or at least having published it, which isn't very long. And I will say, I was in high school in 2008, so I wasn't even doing anything cool yet.

• 7:50John Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  You had already written books, like, that's so exciting. But that is also, it's been a while since 2008.

• 7:58John Green?

  It has been.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  If you were to go back and try to rewrite the book or write a new screenplay, do you think it would come out differently? Or do you think you would give up?

• 8:10John Green?

  I think it would come out so differently that it wouldn't be the same book anymore. Like, I, I can't, I can't go back and write Looking for Alaska again because it was all so raw then. And I didn't know what I didn't know in ways that probably are, are, are things people like about the book, but not things I like about the book. I don't know, this is your first novel. So how, how are you feeling in the wake of your first novel? Like, have you reread it obsessively since it came out?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Um, no, Kavet, my husband has. Uh, he keeps reading it, which is very nice. Um, and he likes it, like, he's not reading it to point out where I could have done better or to say I should have gotten less money for it. Um, but.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  But I I I'm not a big fit, like I don't like the idea of having to go back into that world, especially because I want to focus on writing a new thing.

• 9:01John Green?

  Yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  But I also think about how often writers talk about like editing their work and when the editing process is finally, finally done. And I remember the poet Stephanie Burt giving a reading. And as she was reading from her poems, she was writing something in her published book, uh, like while on stage. And I asked her afterwards what she was doing and she said she was editing the poems. Um, and I was like, they're already published. You can't do that. And she's like, of course I can. Like, I'm going to keep reading them to people and thinking about how uh, to change them once I hear them in the air. Uh, and I thought that that was so interesting and also

• 9:44Speaker 02

  very stressful. Um, like even saying that I've handed this book to a publisher and gotten it printed doesn't mean that I will stop editing it. I don't know. I don't want to edit forever. I don't want to think about the books forever. And so I imagine doing a John's version of every book you've ever written would just prevent you from writing new books, maybe?

• 10:08John Green?

  Yeah, I also think it would potentially make them worse. Like, do you remember that how Auden changed a bunch of his poems like later in life and like almost exclusively made them worse?

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The poet Mary Ann Moore did the same thing where she had like a really long poem about poetry and then cut everything but three lines. And then in her-

• 10:29John Green?

  Oh, I love that poem, too.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  It's such a good poem. Uh, in like the, the, uh, the Mary Ann's version after is really kind of funny, but it's not, it doesn't have everything that you want from the original poem. Um, and she, in one of her books she published like an epigraph that just said, omissions are not accidents. Like she meant to take everything out that she took out. And so, yeah, I think there's definitely, I'm sure for her, she really liked the new additions, but I think that most people prefer the, the, um, non-edited or non-omitted bits from poems.

• 11:09John Green?

  Yeah, I think those are the good parts. The first line of Marianne Moore's poem about poetry is one of my all time favorite lines in a poem. I too dislike it. There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  It's so good. She's so good. She's so weird. And I always think about her, there's like this sort of anecdote that Elizabeth Bishop would tell about Marianne Moore. And Elizabeth Bishop was kind of like her protege. But Marianne Moore lived with her mother her entire life and her mother's entire life. So when her mother passed away, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore were like in a, they were driving to the funeral. And they passed a sign that said something like lizard exhibition this way. And Marianne Moore like perked up for the first time since her mom died. And then she sort of sat back down and she said, well, maybe on the way back.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  I think is so sweet and says a lot about her as a poet and the things that she valued and loved. And so, yeah, I think that, I don't know, I wouldn't want you to write a bunch of new versions of your books. No, no pressure or anything.

• 12:21John Green?

  I wouldn't want you to write a new version of canon. I would want you to write another book.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Right? That's the thing. We, we have so little time left, John. I'm ancient.

• 12:30John Green?

  I know. You are ancient. I mean, the good thing about being ancient is that you've kind of always been here and sort of always will be.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 12:38John Green?

  Whereas I feel very mortal. Hyper mortal.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  I mean, who don't, like, it might be a thing where, where someone discovers a way to keep you on, on the planet for like 200 years.

• 12:52John Green?

  Would you want that, Paige? What is your, what is your ideal lifespan?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  I would, I would like to die eventually, probably before 100.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  That would be cool.

• 13:07John Green?

  I spoke to a friend recently who said that they would like to live to be 10,000 years old, and I said, I reject that out of hand. And he said, you're just not thinking very hard about it. You would also like to live to be 10,000 years old. And I was like, I'm almost positive I wouldn't.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  No. Well, and are you thinking about it like the Sibyl of Kume? Like, would you want to also have eternal youth? Or are you going to be aging all 10,000 years?

• 13:33John Green?

  I think you would have to have some kind of stop aging clause in your 10,000 year journey.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  You have to really think about that. Like, find all of the ways it could go wrong and get ahead of that before you make your wish.

• 13:45John Green?

  Oh, yeah, no, I read Tuck Everlasting. You do not want to live forever.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  I forgot about that book.

• 13:52John Green?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Would want to see that rewritten. No, I haven't read that one. But I feel like I've heard so much about it that I have read it.

• 14:00John Green?

  Yeah, I'm actually a huge, I'm a huge fan of the first Twilight book.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  I bet it's great.

• 14:05John Green?

  I'm on a apologetically enthusiastic about it. All right, let's answer another question, this one from Tessa, who writes, Dear Paige and John, I've loved writing my entire life. I spent most of my adolescence dreaming of being an author one day. I'm now 25 and I work in a library and it still gives me a thrill to get to touch so many words and worlds between pages. But in the past three years or so, I've failed entirely to write much of anything. I still love writing and the mechanics of storytelling, but given the choice, I can't get myself to write, even though I have the time. I feel weighted down by the expectations I've put on myself for two decades. And further, I'm afraid that I actually don't have anything to say at all. I feel paralyzed and the longer this goes on, the more I shame myself for not digging myself out. Do you have any advice on how to get started? Again, a backward asset, Tessa.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's such a, I would love to work in a library, though. So I'm a little bit envious already about Tessa's position, right? You get to work in a library and you get to eventually, right?

• 15:02John Green?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  But how do we, how do we get tested to write?

• 15:05John Green?

  How do we get back there? I think that it is the weight of expectations as much as anything else. And then secondarily, the feeling that when you write something down, it's, as my friend Danielle Aragon says, it's a little bit of a faint reflection of what was in your mind. And so there's always a disappointment, I think, between the imagining of it and the languification of it. There's always something, you know, that feels frustrating in that process. But it's still worth it. And I think the key is to give yourself permission to suck, to like, tell yourself.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  You gotta suck.

• 15:47John Green?

  You, nobody starts playing the piano and that later that day says, well, I'm ready for Carnegie Hall.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. And I don't even want to meet that person if they exist.

• 16:00John Green?

  No, no, they would stink.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. They would be the worst person because they have learned nothing.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  And I think that, yeah, we all suck when we start. And we kind of just, we move toward the horizon of like sucking less as we write more. But I don't know that we ever reach the, like, the, I am completely great and should go read poems at Carnegie Hall.

• 16:27John Green?

  Maybe there are people who do that, but like, not the vast majority of, of working writers, you know? Like, the vast majority of working writers are practiced at something that they've spent a long time on and that they're getting, that they're hopefully still getting better at, right? Like, I heard your husband on stage recently say that he hopes he hasn't written his best book. And I feel the same way, like, I, I want to be embarrassed by my past work because I want to be able to make progress from it.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think that. I don't know. I think that I would, I don't believe in a lot of absolutes. Um, but I do believe that if you write more, you will get better, like the more you write, the better you will get. And I think that that just means you start at one point and yes, you suck, but if you write the next day and the next day and the next day, you're going to suck less than you did on that first day. Um, but it's okay to suck because no one necessarily has to see it right away.

• 17:24John Green?

  Yeah. Well, one thing I tell myself almost every day that I spend writing something new is that I don't have to write anything today that ends up in the book.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 17:34John Green?

  And so if I'm writing terribly, which I usually am, that's fine because it's not going to end up in the book anyway.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, no one's gonna look at it. Uh, you can burn it, uh, eventually so that no one has to see it in some library that's bought all of your, the rights to all of your work, right?

• 17:51John Green?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  I don't know if you're worried about that at all, but I want to burn everything after, after I die.

• 17:58John Green?

  I don't think you should. I'm opposed to that. When Kafka did it, I was disappointed in him and I'll be disappointed in you.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  But he didn't do it. He, he was betrayed.

• 18:06John Green?

  I, well, when Kafka tried to do it, I was disappointed in him.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  You didn't even know him.

• 18:12John Green?

  It's like how, uh, it's like how Keats's friends ruined his epitaph. Or is it epigraph?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  How did they ruin it? I didn't know they ruined it with the, you mean the, the something written water?

• 18:25John Green?

  He wanted his epigraph to be, here lies one whose name was written water. And instead they wrote like, here lies a great English poet who insisted that his epigraph be, here lies one whose name was written water. Which misses the whole freaking point of having your name written water.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  That's so funny. I love that. Uh, they were like, no way, buddy. We're gonna really remember you.

• 18:46John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  It's actually a very sweet thing for the friends to do if, I know it ruins the, the sort of epitaph, but still, it's very sweet.

• 18:56John Green?

  Yeah, I always get my epitaph and my epigraph mixed up. Epigraph is what you put at the beginning of the book.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:02John Green?

  And epitaph is what you put at the end of your life.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. You start here, you end here. Yeah.

• 19:08John Green?

  Right.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Um, I, I think that.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Maybe we need to, maybe we need to scare ourselves a little bit with uh like jump starting our writing. And one thing that Cave and I did early on uh was, well, it was Cave's idea. I would have never wanted to do this, but he said, uh, we had just started dating and he wanted us to write a poem every day and share it with each other. Um, and I have never taken writing more seriously than I did for that month, uh, where we did that, uh, because we were just starting to fall in love. And if I wrote a really bad poem, um, it was just like, maybe he won't love me if I, if I really, uh, if I do not complete this on it in the

• 19:56Speaker 02

  way that I want to. And so I think that that could be a way of really frightening yourself into writing is to be like, I have to show it to a friend. Uh, and they know that I have to show it to them by the end of this, like, set time limit. Um, and I don't know, it really helped me, even though I'm a very anxious person, um, it helped me get more serious. But I think that also just routine really helps, just like waking up every morning and writing for as long as you can, even if that's just like 15 minutes. I think that that helps take some of the fear and anxiety out of the process.

• 20:34John Green?

  Yeah, it also takes some of the, the, the sense that this is a magical thing that's removed from most people's reality out of the process, where you just, it's like building a chair, you know, like it's, it's something that you, you, you do every day and a craft that you get better at over time, rather than like, uh, you know, something, uh, that, that is made in ivory towers that are somehow distant or different from you.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Like as soon as you put the last period on the work, it goes to The New Yorker or something.

• 21:06John Green?

  Right, right, right. Uh, your story about writing poems with Cave reminded me of when Sarah and I first started dating. I had sold Looking for Alaska to a publisher, but it had, it wouldn't, wouldn't be published for another two years. And I remember sharing a draft with her like right when we started dating and she called me and uh, this was before cell phones. So she called my landline from her landline. And the first thing she said was, it's a good thing I liked that book, John, because if I hadn't, I don't think this would have worked.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Oh my god. Yeah, that's amazing.

• 21:41John Green?

  But that's kind of real.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  That's a great compliment. Yeah. Like, and this is like a new thing. And if you are, uh, if you write something she really hates, how can she even look at you?

• 21:54Speaker 02

  But it's also great that you had already like written the book and sent it off and had it accepted before, um, like, or while you and Sarah were getting serious?

• 22:06John Green?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Like, I don't know, imagine trying to go on a date at like, right now.

• 22:11John Green?

  Oh, it would be impossible.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Like, how do you, how do you know this person likes you for like who you are? Rather than just like who they see you are on like, on the internet or when they listen to you? Imagine dating someone who has listened to all of your podcasts.

• 22:27John Green?

  Right. And you're like talking to them and like asking them like what they're interested in. And then they ask you what you're interested in and you say AFC Wimbledon and they say, I know.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  They're like, I know everything that you've ever said about them.

• 22:39John Green?

  Right.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  That would be awful. Glad that doesn't have to happen for you.

• 22:43John Green?

  I do think that I feel really, this is one of the things I wanted to write about in Hollywood Ending and one of the ways in which my life is different from their lives, one of the many ways, is that I had, I was settled by the time all that stuff happened. Like, I had kids, I had a normal life, I had a dog, I had, you know, like, I was where I was gonna be for the foreseeable future. And if it happens when you're 22 or 17, like it does for a lot of internet creators, or like it does for a lot of young actors these days, I can't imagine how destabilizing it is. Like, no wonder they end up mostly dating famous people because like, who the hell else understands what it's like to be them?

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yes, I think about that all the time. Like, how hard it would be to be like an actor, to be famous and just constantly in some form of spotlight and to, yeah, you can only really date other people who have gone through that. And that sounds, um, like a nightmare. And so it totally makes sense that you have like Kai and Juniper, um, even though Kai is very, very early in the sort of acting world, he's very new to it, it's still going to be something he can't really share with normies.

• 24:01John Green?

  Yeah.

• 24:03John Green?

  Yeah, the way that like when we go out for a drink of club soda.

• 24:10John Green?

  I feel like I had to clarify that. You and I talk shop in a way I can't talk shop with the vast majority of people, right? Like, and it's just, yeah, there's something very, very weird and isolating about fame, even small amounts of it. But the more of it that you get, the more isolating it becomes until you're like, you know, Tom Hanks or whatever, and you can't, or Barack Obama, and you can't walk into a restaurant without everybody turning their head for the rest of your life.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and then imagine all of the terrible pictures of you that wind up on the internet.

• 24:43John Green?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Just awful, awful pictures.

• 24:47John Green?

  Yeah, super embarrassing. It's funny that I wanted so badly to be famous when I was in my twenties. But this is, let's, let's move on to another question. This one from anonymous who writes, Dear John and Paige, in a recent episode, you talked about how you made it to adulthood without knowing that moonlight exists, which is true, Paige. I did not know that moonlight existed until I was about 22.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  That's fine.

• 25:08John Green?

  Well, it's not, it's not ideal, but I did grow up in Orlando where there isn't a lot of moonlight.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, there's nothing in Orlando.

• 25:15John Green?

  That's right. It's a well of metaphorical and also literal darkness. John was 22 when he realized moonlight existed, and I'm 22 too. But I don't feel like an adult. I almost feel, I'm almost finishing college and I don't have a job yet. So I've been thinking a lot about becoming an adult and everything I'm going to miss about college. I know you've talked about how there's a lot to look forward to in adulthood, but I don't see it. My question is, what can I look forward to in adulthood? And what do you miss most about being 22? Anxious about adulthood? Anonymous.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 25:45John Green?

  Is there anything you miss about being 22?

• 25:47Speaker 02

  I was just, yeah, I was just thinking about that. Um, I, I can't say that I do miss much about being 22. I think at the time I thought I was very adult. Um, I remember at one point going out to get drinks with like one of my college professors around that time and thinking that was very cool. And now I look back on it and I'm like, man, that was weird. Um,

• 26:11John Green?

  Yeah, unfortunately, that might have been weird.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  I wish young me had not thought that that was a cool thing to do. Um, but yeah.

• 26:20John Green?

  Depends on the drink.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Right, right. It was, uh, I, I didn't know what to order because I'd never really ordered drinks before. And so I just ordered what they ordered, which was vodka and Red Bull.

• 26:31John Green?

  Oh, wow.

• 26:33John Green?

  Yikes.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was awful.

• 26:35John Green?

  I was thinking we were sort of on a, on a club soda kind of drinking vibe.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  No, no. Uh, now we are. Now we're on that.

• 26:42John Green?

  Now we are. Now we are on that vibe.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  What is there? Do you miss anything about 22? I mean, besides, you thought you wanted to be famous at that age.

• 26:49John Green?

  Yeah, no, I don't miss that. Um, I don't, I, no, I don't miss much about being 22. I think it's really, really challenging. The, if I miss something, it's also something I'm glad I don't have, which is that when you're 22, everything is still possible. Like, I remember applying for jobs as a medical transcriptionist and as a paralegal and as a religion teacher and as an English teacher and having no idea which one of those jobs I wanted to get.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  That's so many things. Um, yeah, you don't really know what you, I, I had just got, got into grad school for, for writing and was already teaching. Um, like I jumped right into teaching while I was in grad school, which meant that the students I was teaching were just like a few years younger than me.

• 27:34John Green?

  Yeah.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  And that was a very, very strange experience, but because I still teach, I've noticed myself getting much older with just the references that I make don't land as much as they used to because I'm farther and farther away from the age of my students. And so that has been like a really interesting and humbling experience.

• 27:56John Green?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Because you can sort of map how much older you, you get every year. Just based on how much they laugh or do not laugh at your jokes.

• 28:06John Green?

  I remember I was speaking at a high school when The Fall of Our Stars came out. I was speaking at a high school in like San Francisco or something. And I was like, I know how to, I know how to make these kids like me and think that I'm cool. I'm going to reference the, um, musical artist K E dollar sign H A.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Ah, yeah.

• 28:29John Green?

  Whom I called Keisha.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh.

• 28:33John Green?

  But who goes by Kesha?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, you really messed that up immediately.

• 28:37John Green?

  And then there was the second level of it not landing, which was that they no longer cared about Kesha.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 28:44John Green?

  So like in addition to mispronouncing Kesha's name, they were like, also Kesha isn't cool anymore.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 28:51John Green?

  Oh, boy, I've really, and then that's when I just, that's when I accepted that I need to, I need to stick with my level of references. Because they know, they know when you're talking down to them, they know when you're trying to be cool to them. They have a sense of these things, and if they don't have a sense of them, they should, right? Like if they don't have a sense that it's potentially weird for your professor to take you out and get you drunk on vodka and Red Bull like they should.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and it's like they, they're ready to be like, don't try to connect with us. Like, I think that's what's going through everyone's brain when I try to do something like that.

• 29:24John Green?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And or don't try to connect with us as a peer, because like we don't see you as a peer. We see you as a, as, as someone we admire, as a teacher, as like someone we look up to. And like, you've got to accept that role, even if it's uncomfortable for you.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, and it's I am, I am, that is another, uh, horizontal march. I'm just like always marching toward accepting that I am, um, much older than my, my students. And I think that's fine. Um, but what about, what do you like now? What is there something to, what is something to look forward to?

• 29:59John Green?

  There's so much to look forward to, like you can't, when you're 22, you can't know what it's like to have had a friend for 25 years.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Wow, yeah.

• 30:07John Green?

  You can't know what it's like to have those foundational relationships feel very like settled. And also, you fall in love with either birds or trees. This is something that I didn't know about, but like you hit middle age and you're like, you either become a bird person or a tree person. I became a tree person.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:25John Green?

  It's lovely. Yeah, I, I, my, my, my affection for trees is, is a genuine astonishment to me.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  No, that's amazing. Have you learned the names of the trees? Or is it more of just you appreciate them because they are trees?

• 30:40John Green?

  Well, I do, I have learned the names of the trees, most of the ones at least in my yard.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 30:45John Green?

  I've got a little, little stand of trees behind my house.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  You do, you do, and it's great.

• 30:50John Green?

  Thank you. And I go and I hang out with them and sometimes one of them falls down and I feel really bad.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  I have the same feeling. There was a tree, because we have a few trees in our backyard and um, one of them like split in half.

• 31:03John Green?

  Yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  During a storm and I was like, it was as sad as seeing like an animal like get really old or something like I didn't want to see that tree fail at being a tree.

• 31:15John Green?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  And it bums me out every time I see it.

• 31:18John Green?

  I still think like of individual trees that are in my life that they're kind of more important than I am. Like they're serving such an important purpose and they're like holding all the ground together and they're also reaching up and turning carbon dioxide into oxygen and all that stuff. And I just, I just think that what they're doing is really extraordinary and worthy of celebration and I kind of love them. And I didn't have that feeling when I was 22. I thought that like, nature was this sort of

• 31:50John Green?

  outside problem and I was an inside cat.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  Well, you, you did grow up in Orlando where nature sometimes feels like an outside problem.

• 31:58John Green?

  It does.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Because it's so hot there.

• 32:02John Green?

  It's so hot.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  It's so hot and it's so humid and you just feel gross all the time. I went to school in Tallahassee, Florida and uh, didn't have a car, didn't know how to drive. And so I was walking about three miles to campus every day.

• 32:17John Green?

  Wow.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  And I had to bring a change of clothes because it was so disgusting to like get inside and be completely sweaty. Um, and I'm sure that I smelled really bad for all of my times teaching. And so I'm sure that's another reason why my students didn't want to connect with me. Uh, but. But yeah, no, trees are great. I think I'm a bird person, like I'm a big tree person, but I think I'm I am much more uh delighted when I see like any bird, like even like I think robins are amazing.

• 32:48John Green?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  That there's a way in which some people get very used to particular birds um that they see all the time, but I think that they're also incredible.

• 32:57John Green?

  Yeah, the everyday birds like pigeons and robins and cardinals, you start to think are just ordinary. But if you pause to actually look at them, there's nothing ordinary about them. They look like the dinosaurs they are.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  They're so great and pigeons especially. There's people that just go around and help pigeons in cities. Like when they get string wrapped around their feet, there are just people that go around and catch them and take the string off their feet. So it doesn't hurt them and I want to be one of those people one day. I think that that's what I'm looking forward to with aging is like one day I will catch pigeons um and help them maybe.

• 33:33John Green?

  I love that. I love that.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  So there's that to look forward to in aging, uh trees and birds and um meeting people that you love, like new people. Um possibly uh building a uh chair of some sort. Like it's not gonna look great, but you're gonna want people like Kaveh recently built a bench for the first time. He loves it.

• 33:56John Green?

  Oh, built a bench with my dad when I was a kid. I still think about that bench all the time.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  What happened to it?

• 34:03John Green?

  Well, we we had to leave it in uh when we left Florida.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Uh so someone's enjoying it right now, I bet.

• 34:09John Green?

  Hopefully, but the important thing was leaving Florida, Paige.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it took me a while to leave Florida. I was like maybe twenty six when I left Florida.

• 34:18John Green?

  And did you grow up there?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I grew up in uh I grew up near the Everglades. Um and every every sort of field trip was just to go into the Everglades and um and touch gross stuff. It was great.

• 34:34John Green?

  I knew that, but I just wanted to ask for the benefit of our listeners.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  No, no, no. You didn't know that I had ever spent any time in Florida.

• 34:40John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  But I never wanted to live in Orlando.

• 34:45John Green?

  Nobody does.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  It's such a nightmare there.

• 34:49John Green?

  Well, I should say for Orlando-based listeners that Orlando is a better town than it was in the 1980s and 1990s. It has more cultural offerings. It has fewer, hopefully, bullies. But it was not the best place for me personally to grow up.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  How long were you there?

• 35:08John Green?

  Until I was 14.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, that would be the time for bullying, too.

• 35:14John Green?

  Yeah, middle school was pretty rough, man. It was really hard. It's just, the thing I think about now that I couldn't think about then is that school was not safe for me, which was very stressful and really hard and difficult to navigate. But for so many kids at my school, home was not safe for them.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:34John Green?

  And home was very safe for me. And so, you know, including kids who bullied me, home might have not been safe for them. And, you know, they were acting out dynamics that they probably saw at home. And so, you know, now I can look back on it with a very different understanding of what happened than when I was experiencing it, when I just desperately wanted to be liked and accepted.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  That's a very nice way to think about it.

• 36:02Hank Green?

  This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by Quince. I do very much like opening up my closet and finding an item that I know is going to be both comfortable and I'm just gonna look good in it. It's gonna go well with my khakis, or my jeans, or my third kind of pant that I have, like a pair of orange pants. Just things that make getting dressed easier. And that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and merino wool. And the styles are timeless, and they're versatile, and they're designed to become dependable pieces that you reach for day after day. This morning, I put on this jacket that I'm currently wearing with just a white t-shirt, and I knew- Immediately, "This is gonna work." I went downstairs and Catherine was like,

• 36:47Hank Green?

  "Look at that nice jacket. Where'd that come from?" You know where it came from? It came from Quince. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middleman. So you're paying for the quality, not the brand markup. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know that it was Dear Hank and John. It's a good way to support the show. I feel like I should say it's Q-U-I-N-C-E. I guess it's pretty easy to spell Quince. Quince.com. I feel tempted to make up a tagline for them, but that's not what they want me to do. I shouldn't do that.

• 37:35John Green?

  Dear Hank and John is brought to you by NOCD. So you may know that I've had obsessive-compulsive disorder since I was a kid, but I was only diagnosed as an adult. I lived with intrusive thoughts and the compulsive behaviors I used to manage those intrusive thoughts for many years without treatment. OCD is not just anxiety. If you have those "what-if" intrusive thoughts and you cannot close the loop on them and you find yourself in thought spirals, you might have OCD. And it's not the organizing stereotype you've heard. It's a persistent, unwanted series of intrusive thoughts that feel totally out of character, along with mental or physical behaviors that you feel driven to, to get relief, even when that relief never actually comes. The good news is that OCD is highly treatable

• 38:20John Green?

  with the right kind of specialized therapy. It needs ERP, Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy, which has proven to be the most effective treatment, and it has transformed my life. NOCD is the world's leading provider of OCD treatment, covered by insurance for over 138 million Americans. There are licensed therapists who specialize in ERP therapy, who meet you in live, face-to-face, virtual sessions with support between sessions, so you're never facing OCD alone. So if you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NOCD can help. Book a free 15-minute call to get started at nocd.com. That's nocd.com.

• 39:02John Green?

  All right, let's answer this question from B-Ba-B-Ba-Doba.

• 39:08John Green?

  Dear John and Paige, I love the sun. If I say I love you to the sun now, when will the light slash love it might send back to me actually reach me? Do I need to consider how long my thank you takes to get to the sun? Or do you think the sun can hear my heart immediately? Thank you for your hit podcast for 21 year old kids.

• 39:26John Green?

  I think that nothing travels faster than light, right? Including love. And so it's gonna take seven minutes to get to the sun and seven minutes to get back. Or am I wrong?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  What if it's a little bit heavier, though?

• 39:37John Green?

  Hmm.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Like, you think that, like, love might be slightly slower than than light?

• 39:44John Green?

  Right. So nothing's faster than light, but lots of things are slower, like me.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:48John Green?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Uh, so far, like, we could probably figure out how to to get to that speed eventually, but not now.

• 39:55John Green?

  No, and it seems like things start to break up when they get really close to that speed. And that's not something I want to have happen to me, or indeed to my love. So

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:04John Green?

  Let's say that at a max, love travels half the speed of light.

• 40:11John Green?

  That I could see us getting to.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:14John Green?

  So then you're looking at about a 30 minute round trip for the love to arrive, get ingested by the sun, the sun to process it, because you don't just like, hear I love you and say I love you right back. You have to really take it in and then respond with your own separate love. I'd say half an hour.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's like, if you watch an episode of The Simpsons, uh,

• 40:39John Green?

  Yep.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  with with commercials.

• 40:41John Green?

  Right.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Then, at the end of the episode, you will have heard back from the sun.

• 40:46John Green?

  Yeah, I think that's about right.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, the idea of saying I love you to someone, and then they have to take a lot of time to think about it before they say anything back, like, whatever that amount of time is, sounds like an eternity to me, and would be like, my version of hell, a little bit. Uh, it's just like, the waiting part of

• 41:06John Green?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  whether or not they're going to say anything back. And hopefully, it is a nice thing. Uh, but it very much might not be.

• 41:14John Green?

  The first time I said I love you to Sarah, um, it was Easter Sunday, 2004. And I would say there were two to three seconds before she said, she she responded.

• 41:30John Green?

  And she didn't say, I love you too. She said, I love you.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 41:33John Green?

  As if like she had thought of it herself.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. She's like, I really said it first.

• 41:38John Green?

  Yeah.

• 41:42John Green?

  Um, but those were a long two to three seconds for sure.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:45John Green?

  Because I was like, I was like, have I made a terrible error?

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. And there's part of you maybe that wants to be like, never mind, I didn't say anything.

• 41:53John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  You take it back? Yeah.

• 41:57John Green?

  Oh, I have definitely regretted saying I love you before, but not that time.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, it's fine. I think that, uh, it probably was good at the time for you to do it. Um, it might have prevented someone from crying, which is good. Uh.

• 42:13John Green?

  Oh, I think you're thinking of me as much more of a, uh, dumper than a dumpy, but in fact, I am a dumpy.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 42:21John Green?

  So I would say I love you and they would be like, cool, cool. Sorry.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 42:25John Green?

  Sorry. Sorry that this is so awkward.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. No, that sounds awful. Um, I, I don't want to experience that anytime soon. When I said, I love you to Cave, it was through postal, like it was, uh, mailing, we were mailing letters to each other. And so I had to wait quite a long time to hear back, uh, and get it in writing so that.

• 42:47John Green?

  Several episodes of The Simpsons.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  So many episodes of The Simpsons. It was, it was pretty, it was pretty rough. I don't know why I did that to myself.

• 42:54John Green?

  Did he not call you immediately?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I don't think he did. I think he wa- like he liked the idea of the response, uh, coming back in the same way that like I had given it to him.

• 43:07John Green?

  That's very romantic.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  It's, it's very sweet, but also it was very, very, uh, anxiety inducing for a few days.

• 43:15John Green?

  Yeah, I can imagine.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Probably wouldn't do that again.

• 43:20John Green?

  No, that's a big one to hold on to.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:23John Green?

  All right. Paige, before we get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, I have to ask you one more question.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:30John Green?

  It's from Mahi and it's a thinker. It's a deep one. Dear John and Paige, I've been thinking about our responsibility toward others. There is a neat idea that we should be considerate of others as long as it does not affect us in a significant way. However, that's a very blurry line. How does our responsibility to ourselves end and our responsibility to others begin? Has anyone else received a memo or is this something that I missed? Longtime admirer, Mahi. I think this is like the biggest question in the world.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 43:57John Green?

  Like where does our obligation to others end and our obligation to ourselves begin? And what do we owe to others versus what do we owe to ourselves is like the hardest question. And the most interesting question that there is out there.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I feel like my impulse is to answer it in a jokey way. Because I don't know, I don't know the answer yet. I'm still figuring that out. But I am thinking about a subreddit called Girl Dinner.

• 44:26John Green?

  I love Girl Dinner.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  It's so good. And it's just like people posting pictures of what they're eating and the problems they're going through. Or like the excitement they're going through. But so often they'll post like an issue like related to a relationship. And then the other Redditors will comment and tell them what they should do. Which is almost 100% of the time to leave the person that you're with.

• 44:52John Green?

  Yes, yes, yeah.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  And just always like just get rid of that guy.

• 44:56John Green?

  The slightest problem is like huge red flag, abandon him immediately.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so, which I think is really funny. But maybe Redditors are the ones that will tell us when we should stop giving ourselves and start like caring about helping others. I don't know.

• 45:16John Green?

  Well, if we're going to listen to Reddit, I'm afraid that it's going to lean very heavily on self-care at all costs. Which I think there's a case for, but I also, I personally find a lot of fulfillment in. Like what other people might call sacrifice?

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:31John Green?

  Like, when I think about like, the first year of my kids' lives, or my dog's life, or whatever, there's a lot of sacrifice in there. And it was very valuable sacrifice for me, and I'm very glad that I made it. And so I don't think it's as simple as like, you know, do what you want in every moment that you can do what you want. I think it's more complicated than that. And I also do not have it figured out, and I'm still trying to figure it out. But the answers that fit on a bumper sticker are kind of, by definition to me, not good answers. And I think a lot of the internet is focused on answers that fit on a bumper sticker.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I recently saw a bumper sticker in Seattle that said,

• 46:18Speaker 02

  basically it said graffiti, "As beautiful as a rock in a cop's face." And I was like, "That is the wildest bumper sticker I've ever seen." And so I am just, I'm now interested in what one can fit on a bumper sticker. Because I didn't know you could fit that, that feeling, or that love of, of like, street art on a bumper sticker. And so, yeah, I think that there's more to, like, life than self, self-care. I think that it is important to care about our beloveds, and hopefully they will care for us as well. But I think it's just like, you figure it out, and you try to get a good balance as you go.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  And sometimes you'll feel like maybe you've given too much of yourself. And then you sort of calibrate. I don't know that there's like, I don't know that there's an answer.

• 47:12John Green?

  I don't think there is. I, it's, what's that Rilke poem? "I have to go into the bathroom to find it." Hold on.

• 47:21John Green?

  You know the one, Paige.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  No, I don't.

• 47:24John Green?

  All right, so if I sound a little different, it's because I'm on a new mic. Paige and I got cut off from our recording because I tried to go to the bathroom to read Paige a Rilke poem.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  It was such a good poem, too.

• 47:37John Green?

  I'm taking you back to the bathroom. I'm gonna show the people what it was. All right.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  And you're sure it's not gonna cancel us out again?

• 47:44John Green?

  It might, it might.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  No, it's the recording.

• 47:47John Green?

  It's a Sister Corita Kent artwork, and it just says ornery in big letters. And then she wrote that part of this Rilke poem. Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything, live the questions now. Perhaps someday you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. There you go, a little bit of Rilke for you from my bathroom.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good place to have Rilke. It's a good place to have poetry.

• 48:33John Green?

  Yeah, you know, that way I see it every day.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  My plan is to get a bathroom that's just mirrors on every side.

• 48:41John Green?

  I hate it.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Just make everyone so uncomfortable that they don't come to my house anymore.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, just look at yourself.

• 48:51John Green?

  Okay, that sounds terrible.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it would be really bad. I won't do that.

• 48:56John Green?

  Paige, I have to tell you the news from AFC Wimbledon, and then you can or cannot tell me the news from Mars, according to your whims.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, love that.

• 49:03John Green?

  The news from AFC Wimbledon is that our women's team has appointed a new manager. Our longtime manager of 10 years, Kevin Foster, left the club at the end of this last season. And we have now appointed Sabia Jamal to be the new women's manager. I'm very excited about this appointment. The big job for AFC Wimbledon's women's team is just to stay in the third tier of the women's pyramid of football. And I think Sabia Jamal is the perfect hire for this job to like get us good enough players and good enough results that we can compete in the third division. And I'm really excited. She did an interview to announce her coming to the club that I thought was very impressive. And I'm fired up.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Wow. Yeah, that's good firing. I did not come up with any news from Mars except for the very accurate film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which I would suggest you would watch if you haven't seen it.

• 50:04John Green?

  I've never seen it.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  It includes a monkey that you want to survive and that you love. And it includes aliens that are trying to destroy our main character. It's pretty good.

• 50:19John Green?

  It sounds great. So check out Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Paige, thank you for podding with me. What a joy it has been. Paige's book is called Canon. It's so good.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  And John's book is Hollywood Ending with a whole comma in there.

• 50:34John Green?

  Yeah, there's a whole comma. Today's podcast was edited by Linus Obenhouse. It was mixed by Andrew Smith. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. We're produced by Rosiana Hoss-Rohas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. And the music that you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunarola. Finally, Paige, as they say in my hometown, don't forget to read Canon.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  That's not what they say. What do they actually say?

• 50:57John Green?

  They say, don't forget to be awesome.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.