471: Letters From Florida

Why is every saucepan round? Do authors get any influence over the physical properties of their books? How do animals change as they age? How do I deal with job rejection emails? Do other mammals experience morning sickness? …Hank and John Green 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.

• 0:09Hank Green?

  Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

• 0:12John Green?

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

• 0:14Hank Green?

  It's a comedy 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, you know why you haven't seen much of the Energizer Bunny lately?

• 0:23John Green?

  Why?

• 0:24Hank Green?

  It's actually kind of a sad story. He's in prison because he was charged with battery.

• 0:29John Green?

  Oh, not assault, just battery. Now Hank, let me ask you a serious question. Do you know what battery is?

• 0:37Hank Green?

  Uh, I think it's the part where you hit the person. I think it's, you can do assault without actually doing any physical damage, but battery is when the, when the flesh meets the flesh, or the bat.

• 0:54John Green?

  It's great, Hank. You did a great job summarizing that. I almost feel like you should be a defense lawyer. That would have worked in front of a jury anytime. Did the flesh meet the flesh?

• 1:05Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 1:06John Green?

  Where the flesh meets the flesh is not a terrible name for a novel.

• 1:09Hank Green?

  I would not, not for me, though. I wouldn't write that one. No.

• 1:14John Green?

  It's not a Hank Green novel. It's not a John Green novel either, to be fair.

• 1:17Hank Green?

  We gotta be careful with that.

• 1:18John Green?

  But I think it is a novel.

• 1:19Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're writing all kinds of books these days out there.

• 1:25John Green?

  It used to be. In my day, we only had two kinds of books, regular and science fiction.

• 1:32Hank Green?

  Yeah. Now, yeah, now, now they're doing, they're like, what if romance and fantasy were one thing?

• 1:39John Green?

  Yeah, it's great. It's good stuff. I love a good romanticy.

• 1:42Hank Green?

  Speaking of, I gotta say, I apologize for my chair. I'm getting a new chair. It's so squeaky. I'm trying to keep the hinge that squeaks from moving, but it will squeak, and it's not the greatest noise.

• 1:55John Green?

  Have you tried to grease it with like WD-40 or anything? Or are you just throwing it away?

• 2:00Hank Green?

  I have. I have tried to grease it, and something about this hinge is ungreasable, apparently. Send your tips to [email protected].

• 2:10John Green?

  Well, Hank, I am on the road. I am still on the road. I will always be on the road. I live in a different hotel room every night. We had an interesting conversation earlier where you told me that you've never once thought about the fact that, that your hotel room has been slept in by thousands of people.

• 2:26Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 2:28John Green?

  You think that like the hotel room just appears sui generis, utterly unprecedented?

• 2:33Hank Green?

  The illusion that they are trying to give me, and I accept the illusion. I know that it's true. I've, I've known that it's true for, you know, not the whole time. I think for a little while, I actually just straight never even considered the possibility. Now I am, I'm aware rationally that that's the situation. It just doesn't enter my mind. I let the illusion wash over me.

• 2:58John Green?

  Oh, I don't. I, I, I'm able, I love a hotel, and I'm very grateful to everybody who makes my hotel experiences so, so relatively pleasant. But I do rather miss, and you're not going to hear this sentence very often in human history, but I do miss Indianapolis.

• 3:15Hank Green?

  Yeah, I bet. I'm sure that you would like to be home. I hope that the touring is fun.

• 3:23John Green?

  The, there's a line in Hollywood ending that is taken from my real life where I said to somebody in Hollywood, they said, are you in LA or New York? Which is what people in Hollywood say. They said, do you live in LA or New York? Because there literally is no third place to them. And I said, I'm from Indianapolis. And without pausing, they said my condolences.

• 3:41Hank Green?

  Wow, that's funny. I have a similar experience where I, they say, are you from New York or LA? And I say, I live in Montana. And they say, oh, I love Whitefish.

• 3:51John Green?

  What's that?

• 3:52Hank Green?

  Which if you're, if you're from Montana, that, you're like, oh, I like you less now. Whitefish is like a resort. It's, it's like the, what's, what's the one in Wyoming where everybody goes?

• 4:06John Green?

  You got me, buddy.

• 4:07Hank Green?

  An acid hole? Jackson Hole, that's the one. It's like the Jackson Hole of Montana.

• 4:13John Green?

  Okay.

• 4:14Hank Green?

  It's like the fancy, fancy resort place.

• 4:17John Green?

  So I tried to ski twice, and the second time I had a panic attack near the top of the mountain, and my poor wife had to get me down the mountain. And I'm sure I've told this story on the pod before, but I'm still processing it because at one point I fell down and Sarah looked at me and I was drenched in sweat and fear. And Sarah said, I think this might be the first time that the ski patrol is going to be called over a mental health issue.

• 4:43Hank Green?

  It's scary.

• 4:45John Green?

  It's horrible. What a horrible sport.

• 4:48Hank Green?

  You, you can't, you get up there and then it's like, okay, you gotta do it now. You really do. You gotta do it. And you can, you can get like a quarter of the way down and be like, I'm freaking done with this. But you're not.

• 5:00John Green?

  No, it ain't up to you. It's up to the mountain.

• 5:03Hank Green?

  Yeah. You can't go back up to the lift. You can if you're up there. You might be able to get back on the lift and go down. But once you're a quarter of the way down, down's where you're going.

• 5:13John Green?

  I do not.

• 5:16Hank Green?

  Of the life.

• 5:18John Green?

  Great. Let's answer some questions from our listeners. Let's start with this one from Heidi who writes, Dear John and Hank, why is every saucepan always round? Why not square or something even cooler? Heidi 11.

• 5:29Hank Green?

  Heidi 11. This is so, I, I love the answer to this question. So many times, things are the way that they are so that they will be optimally useful. And it's true that this is a useful shape for a pan. It can make it easier to clean if it doesn't have any corners. The, the heat evenly distributes out from the middle to the edges. And if you've got a square, you're going to have corners that don't get very hot.

• 5:53John Green?

  Also, isn't there an issue where it's just stronger? Like, like cylinders are stronger than squares?

• 6:00Hank Green?

  Cylinders are stronger. Yeah. But I don't know that this is a huge deal for a metal pan. The, but the real root reason is that things are also the shape they are based on how hard or easy it is to make those things.

• 6:15John Green?

  Hmm.

• 6:16Hank Green?

  It is way harder to make a square pan than a round pan. You can kind of imagine a pan being made similarly to a pot where it's going to be on a wheel and then there's like the person shaping the thing as it spins. And this is like, makes it way easier to make that shape, except instead of, you know, being wet clay, it's molten metal. Like, it's hot metal that can be shaped. And so there's a whole sort of situation happening where you could watch people making, making pots and pans where the hot metal is being shaped as it spins. And so that, that is the, that is the only way to, you can only make things circular if it's being made in that way.

• 6:56John Green?

  You know how every time a new boss comes into an organization, they're like, I can see things from the outside. Like, I can, you know, I can see efficiencies that you've never glimpsed. And then eventually they learn that like, everything is the way that it is for a reason.

• 7:08Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:09John Green?

  And their efficiencies inevitably turn into like micro efficiencies at best.

• 7:14Hank Green?

  Yeah. I mean, there, there are rarely times when, you know, it's usually when like some new technology has happened. But yeah.

• 7:24John Green?

  Pretty much, though, in my experience, I haven't had that many executive bosses, but I've had a few. And every time they'd come in and they'd be like, publishing is fundamentally broken, and here's how we're going to fix it. And then eventually like six months later, they're like, actually, publishing is a pretty mature business where a lot of the innovation has already happened.

• 7:41Hank Green?

  Yeah. And there's, there's a bunch of constraints that we can't all change at the same time, unfortunately. And thus, we will continue to do this because fixing any of these problems would be marginal improvements at best.

• 7:51John Green?

  Yeah. And fixing the problems would create new problems. This is something people, especially in technology, underappreciate about solving problems, is that solving problems create new problems. And you have to ask yourself, do I prefer the new problems or the old problems?

• 8:04Hank Green?

  Yeah. Man, I, I love to create a problem by solving a problem.

• 8:08John Green?

  I know, but you sometimes forget about how, and sometimes that's really good, right? Like solving the antibiotic problem caused lots more adults, which created a problem, right? But like, that was a great problem to have, right?

• 8:25Hank Green?

  Yeah. It's like, oh, man, what are we going to do about? Yeah. It's, it's such a shame that antibiotics created antibiotic resistance. And it's like, well, that's actually, it was, it was a, a bunch of problems got solved on the way to antibiotic resistance that we should all be very happy got solved.

• 8:41John Green?

  Yeah. I'm just saying that like, the CEO of Electromagnetic Corp. and Saucepan Delivery Company

• 8:50Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 8:51John Green?

  has ideas that are, that are not as good as they think they are.

• 8:55Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's really cool to see, like, things being in, like, the, the way that they are based on. Things that aren't visible to us, you know?

• 9:06John Green?

  Yeah, it's beautiful.

• 9:07Hank Green?

  Like, a good example is that a great number of LED lights do not have, have no reason to be the shape that they are, but they are the shape that they are because there were really good reasons for incandescent lights to be the shape that they were. And now LED lights just kind of have to fit into that form factor because that's the, that's like the sockets and the lamps and the holes in the ceiling are designed for those older light bulbs. And now we're making new sockets that are designed for the LED lamps that are designed to fit into the old sockets and we're just gonna be stuck that way forever.

• 9:41John Green?

  Right, right.

• 9:42Hank Green?

  Just gonna live in that world. Yeah.

• 9:44John Green?

  Right. All right, Hank, we got another question. It comes from Kat who writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm reading Hollywood Ending, available for purchase at your local bookstore in a tiny coffee shop and really loving how the book feels in my hands, which is big for me. I generally prefer soft covers, but I make exceptions if I really love the author or the general hand feel of a book. Now, Hank, I just have to tell you before I get to the rest of this question, Kat is my type of reader, okay? I need more readers in the world who use the phrase "hand feel."

• 10:09Hank Green?

  Hand feel, yeah.

• 10:11John Green?

  It got me wondering. I know authors get a say over things like the font and the cover design. Oh, Kat, I've got terrible news. But do you get influence over all the physical properties of the book as an object? Are you out here feeling different weights or types of paper? Do you get to sample different book prototypes and choose between various dimensions and shapes and weights? If yes, how do you, as the author, think about those things? If no, have you ever gotten an early copy of one of your books and been like, this feels awful, Pumpkins and Penguins, Kat?

• 10:37Hank Green?

  Hmm.

• 10:38John Green?

  Hank, did you have control over your covers and the font?

• 10:40Hank Green?

  I got my first cover, I've told this story before, and I was like, hmm, you guys, I see what you did there, but you can't make it look like a John Green book.

• 10:50John Green?

  I see where you're going for, and I hate it.

• 10:52Hank Green?

  Yeah, I get it, I get it, I, I, I appreciate it, I understand that it's probably the best thing to do, but let's not have a handwritten font.

• 11:03John Green?

  Yeah, I, I am very lucky that I get quite a bit of say in my covers. Like, I essentially have veto power. It's not in my contract or anything, but I, I functionally have veto power. And I think more and more authors have veto power. When I started out, you had no control. Like, I actively disliked some of the covers for my early books, and I had absolutely no ability to change them.

• 11:25Hank Green?

  Oh, man, an abundance of Catherine's.

• 11:28John Green?

  Well, we don't have to talk about it, but it had had a cover, and now it has a different cover, which was designed by a nerd writer named Sarah. Thank you, Sarah.

• 11:36Hank Green?

  Uh, yeah, I got a very similar cover to the abundance of Catherine's cover for one of my international editions, and I was like, look, if you're gonna use a few different silhouette cutouts, I need you to not repeat one of them. Like, good God.

• 11:51John Green?

  Well, I have, I will say, I have no control over my foreign covers, and when they come, I am surprised every time. I am surprised by the title, which they often change, like the title in Norway of The Fault in Our Stars is Bad Word Fate? Like, like, I can't, I can't say the title on this podcast because of, because there are 11-year-olds listening.

• 12:12Hank Green?

  It's a great, it's a great title for a book.

• 12:15John Green?

  It's a great title for a book, but it's a bold title for a children's book.

• 12:21Hank Green?

  You know, they, they, we're prudes over here in America.

• 12:24John Green?

  We are, we clearly are. Uh, my favorite title, though, is the Swedish title of The Fault in Our Stars, Sooner or Later I Will Explode.

• 12:33Hank Green?

  That's so good. That's a really different direction to go in.

• 12:39John Green?

  It's so good.

• 12:40Hank Green?

  Uh, do you, do you know, do you have any good Hollywood ending titles yet?

• 12:43John Green?

  All the titles are Hollywood ending. They're not even, they're not, like, I think the, uh, the, the, the, the only one that's not using the English words Hollywood ending is in Brazil.

• 12:55Hank Green?

  Hmm.

• 12:56John Green?

  So, yeah, and all the covers look the same now because they've...

• 13:00Hank Green?

  Oh, so using the English, English words, okay.

• 13:02John Green?

  Yeah, and all, all the covers are, are designed similarly now or the same because there's so much internationalization of overall culture that, like, it makes sense because French readers are gonna see the English edition and vice versa, and so might as well have more impressions of the same cover.

• 13:18Hank Green?

  I'm looking at the Italian edition, and it says Hollywood Ending, John Green, but there's a subtitle. Amore fuori copioni, which means... I'm looking it up. Ooh, cute. Do you know what it means?

• 13:31John Green?

  What's it mean?

• 13:32Hank Green?

  It means "love off script."

• 13:34John Green?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 13:35Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 13:36John Green?

  Yeah, I'll take it.

• 13:37Hank Green?

  Yeah, that's a little pun, a little extra pun.

• 13:41John Green?

  Yeah, that's great stuff. I mean, I'm, I, I'm so grateful that I have foreign editions. And look, I'm grateful to be published at all. But the answer to your question is, the vast majority of authors get absolutely no say in whether or not the book is matte or glossy on, on the dust jacket, whether or not the, what the font is, whether or not the paper is of a certain quality. I get some say in that stuff, and it's really, really important to me because I share your love of hand feel. That sounded not quite like I wanted it to sound.

• 14:15Hank Green?

  It's okay.

• 14:17John Green?

  Okay. You sure?

• 14:19Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 14:20John Green?

  Because I'm consumed with regret.

• 14:23Hank Green?

  Well, I think that that's something that everyone should know about you.

• 14:29John Green?

  Do you ever, do you ever see people say, like, I recently saw an interview with Madonna where she was like, I don't regret any of it because it gave me the life I have today and I love my life. And I was like, what is that like?

• 14:40Hank Green?

  Yeah, that's, I've seen this and I just don't believe it. I cannot accept it. It's like when I, it's like when I see people who say that they like the taste of olives. I'm like, you're right, you're just lying. It tastes so bad.

• 14:55John Green?

  I think Sylvester Stallone in a recent interview, uh, he's on a press junket for something, and he said, I could build a palace with my regrets.

• 15:03Hank Green?

  Yeah, and he's like, and I can, and I have. It's in Hawaii.

• 15:10John Green?

  It's on the water. It's lovely.

• 15:13Hank Green?

  I shouldn't have done that movie, but I said, have another house. I, I, I made...

• 15:18John Green?

  I call this one Rocky IV.

• 15:23Hank Green?

  So, I, I, to authors out there, I was shocked by this. I couldn't change much about the book, but I said, hey, can I make a change to the cover? And they were like, no. And I was like, okay, but here's the change. And I showed them the change, and they were like, yeah, sure, actually.

• 15:43John Green?

  What was the change?

• 15:45Hank Green?

  And I don't think anyone in the wild has ever noticed this change.

• 15:51John Green?

  Wow.

• 15:53Hank Green?

  But if you look real close, you might find it.

• 15:56John Green?

  Okay, let's, uh, let's open up the...

• 15:59Hank Green?

  But only in the hardcover, original hardcover edition.

• 16:01John Green?

  Hank and John at gmail.com. Tell us if you find the change, and Hank will reveal it in the next episode.

• 16:07Hank Green?

  But I think this is a very cool, cool thing. I also added Carl's eyes in that book. I was like, I'd like him to have eyes, so I added the eyes and, and, but, but I was like... So, so to authors of the world, you know, I do think that I am weird, for sure, and so this might not be the case. But if you do a little something that's unnoticeable, they might let you get away with it.

• 16:30John Green?

  So, readers of Hollywood Ending have figured out that there are different colors to the cases underneath the, uh, dust jacket? It depends just on whether you got a signed edition, where you bought it, whatever. There's four different, uh, case color combinations. When this, they initially were like, hey, is this something you'd be interested in? I said, yes, I would like there to be 632 different color combinations, like there are 632 different color combinations in Andy Warhol's Sunset series. Then they were like, great, our counter offer is four.

• 17:06Hank Green?

  Which is a bit of a bummer, but it's something.

• 17:12Hank Green?

  I love that, John. It's so cool. I mean, I, I, you're right. I mean, I don't know what the, I don't know what the limitations are here. Um, so perhaps...

• 17:22John Green?

  There are some limitations.

• 17:23Hank Green?

  Yeah, so perhaps this would not be a possible thing to do. But as a reference and a project, um, I think that's a fantastic idea, but I was delighted to find that, that the moment when people realized that there were different colors.

• 17:37John Green?

  Yeah, I didn't want to spoil that for them. I wanted them to figure it out on their own. It was a great joy.

• 17:42Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 17:42John Green?

  All right, let's answer another question, Hank. This one's from Ruth who writes, Dear John and Hank, the other day I was walking and I saw a squirrel that was going gray. Not a gray squirrel, a brown one graying, like me.

• 17:51Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 17:52John Green?

  I'd never noticed this before. Do squirrels grow old in the same way that humans do? In what ways do other mammals age differently than humans? I've seen my dog get slower in her later years, but she's also not getting wrinkly or forgetful.

• 18:03Hank Green?

  Hmm.

• 18:04John Green?

  When, when repeated a bark.

• 18:06Hank Green?

  Ruth.

• 18:07John Green?

  Ruth, Ruth.

• 18:09Hank Green?

  Ruth.

• 18:09John Green?

  Nice.

• 18:12Hank Green?

  Yeah. No, I would never have realized.

• 18:16John Green?

  Me neither, until just now. I mean, I really had to act it out. Had to bring it to life.

• 18:21Hank Green?

  So there's a lot here.

• 18:23John Green?

  Okay.

• 18:23Hank Green?

  But I think actually animals do get wrinklier as they get older. We just don't tend to notice as much because they're covered in hair. So that's one thing. Animals do gray. And there's something very interesting about graying in that it appears that it happens more, though not only, in social species than in species that are not social. And so that's an indication that maybe it's a signal. It's so like, it's definitely a signal in the case of like a silverback gorilla. So the gorilla is going gray as it matures and it like, takes on a new social role in its community. And that may also be the case for humans, where to some extent, it is signaling that this person has entered into a different phase of life

• 19:08Hank Green?

  and it should be treated or respected differently.

• 19:12John Green?

  Now, tell me more about how I should be treated and respected, please.

• 19:15Hank Green?

  I think that you should be. I think that we've messed this up. We've messed this up by like praising youth too much. But I think that in a proper society, I would, people would look at me and be like, what's wrong with him? Why doesn't he have gray hair? And is not bald? I just, I'm like stuck in youth. I need to, I need to move past, I'm 46 years old. What's going on? And the Steve Martins of the world would just be respected earlier. But clearly socially, we now have, we obsess over youth. And so we are oftentimes

• 19:55Hank Green?

  hiding the signs of aging, where otherwise we would not. But it does, it does seem like that to some extent, it probably plays some kind of social role. But it also shows up in other animals that are not super social, just less so. And so there's probably also a component that's about senescence to some extent. And all animals age. I don't know that all animals get forgetful. It seems likely that they would, because the brain is really hard to figure out and maintain. But certainly, all animals age, and squirrels are no different. And they will be less physically capable. They do get gray hairs. And they are social animals, super social. You wouldn't necessarily think of them that way, but.

• 20:41John Green?

  I would. God, they won't shut up.

• 20:44Hank Green?

  They have a lot of interactions with each other.

• 20:46John Green?

  That reminds me, actually, that today's podcast is brought to you by social animals. Social animals, more likely to be gray foxes, if you will.

• 20:54Hank Green?

  And this podcast is brought to you, just asking if you can make a little change. Just ask for fun, just like a fun little change, something nobody's gonna notice.

• 21:03John Green?

  Literally, nobody noticed, apparently.

• 21:04Hank Green?

  Yeah, as far as I can tell.

• 21:06John Green?

  Today's podcast is also brought to you by Round Sauce Pans. Round Sauce Pans, I was gonna talk about the rectangular saucepan we have, but we didn't get to it, Heidi.

• 21:19Hank Green?

  And this podcast is brought to you by that bed that's behind John. Let's not think about it too much.

• 21:25John Green?

  It's fine. It's clean. People work hard to keep it clean. That's what I tell myself.

• 21:30Hank Green?

  That's right. That's right. This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by Wayfair. There are a number of objects in my home that I have been extraordinarily well-served by, maybe for 15 or 20 years. Like a pair of fake leather upholstered stools that I've had forever. But they've seen better days. They maybe need a little bit of a refresh. Good news, Wayfair helps you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value, and trusted reviews. Wayfair verified products are hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. You can use filters, customer photos, and more than 20 million verified five-star reviews to confidently find the right fit for your home. And now those stools that I had 15 or 20 years ago, I don't have those. I have different stools

• 22:15Hank Green?

  that are very comfortable and look, let's just say, better. Find pieces made for real life and get even more value with Wayfair Rewards. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

• 22:38Hank 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 gonna 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,

• 23:19Hank Green?

  and I knew immediately, this is gonna work. I went downstairs and Catherine was like, "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,

• 24:03Hank Green?

  but that's not what they want me to do. I shouldn't do that.

• 24:12Hank Green?

  This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by Factor. Factor makes chef-crafted, dietitian-designed, ready-to-eat meals, so you don't have to choose between real food and convenience. You can have both real food and convenience, which is good, because I will choose convenience every time, even if convenience is just peanuts again. Literally. I eat a lot of peanuts. Factor meals are ready in two minutes. And I'm not joking there. They are ready in two minutes, and they require no prep and no cleanup. So even the days when your schedule is completely out of control, eating well is still achievable. But here's a secret I have for you. Sometimes I actually do introduce cleanup artificially. I will move it from the Factor container onto a plate, so I can feel like I'm having

• 24:57Hank Green?

  a real meal. And that's fine. And then I have one plate to clean. I don't have a bunch of pots and pans to clean, though. Every week, you will find over 100 nutrient-dense menu items to choose from, and new options like salmon burgers, shredded pork, collard greens, and more. Plus add-ons you'll crave, like pumpkin-flavored cheesecake and protein shakes. 97% of users agree that Factor meals help them live a healthier life. So you can feel confident that you're doing something good for yourself with every meal. True story, right now, I do not have any Factor meals in my fridge, and I am hungry, and I'm about to go inside and absolutely rummage for something, and I'm sad about it. Some current Factor meals include chicken taco bowl with corn salsa and cilantro crema. This is making

• 25:42Hank Green?

  me so hungry. Onion portobello burger with potatoes and white cheddar. That's right, they can help you go vegetarian or eat less meat. You can also have golden corn and shrimp risotto with Brussels, cabbage, and pepper medley. But I can't, because I'm allergic to shrimp. Let's eat real. Head to factormeals.com/dearthank50off and use code DEARHANK50OFF to get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last until October 31, 2026. That's code DEARHANK50OFF at factormeals.com. Dear Hank, five zero off at factormeals.com. See the website for more details.

• 26:24Hank Green?

  All right, John, we got another question. It's from Alyssa, who asks, Dear Hank and John, I am an economics and policy researcher looking for a job. Unfortunately, as an economics and policy researcher, I know about the economy. My email fills up daily full of rejection emails, some of which are from jobs I applied for in March. Every time I receive an email, I know it's another rejection, and I feel my body fill with dread and sadness, like I'm 15 again, listening to angsty music. What should I do? Should I sign up for lots of marketing and spam emails to hide the rejections? Should I ask employers to call me, so my email isn't a depressing place? Pumpkins and penguins, Alyssa.

• 27:05John Green?

  Oh, I know this feeling of like, almost wanting to avoid the inbox, because it only contains bad news after bad news after bad news. So I don't particularly, obviously, know your situation, but I know that situation. I don't think that you should do either of those things. I think you should stay the course, as they say. Although it might make sense to, you know, follow up, try to get advice from people when they do reject you. This is something my dad taught me, that I find physically painful, but I still do. When I get rejections for writing stuff, I still follow up and say, can you give me any advice? I ask for advice, not assistance, because people are more willing to give advice

• 27:46John Green?

  than assistance. And so I still do that, and I recommend doing that. Because sometimes you learn something important. I remember once, I don't know how to tell this story generously, Hank, so I'm just gonna tell it.

• 27:59Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 27:59John Green?

  Once I interviewed someone, and I said, have you ever been through a difficult thing? And how did you get through it? It was one of standard questions that I was told to ask in the interview. And the person said, yeah, yeah, I've definitely had some struggles. I took a really hard class my senior year of college in chemistry. And I said, and how did you get through that obstacle? And they said, oh, I dropped it.

• 28:24John Green?

  That's a bad answer to that question.

• 28:26Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an honest answer.

• 28:29John Green?

  It's too, it's too, it's way too honest. It's way too honest.

• 28:32Hank Green?

  Now, I do think it's important to try and have the email not be an old, an only desperate place.

• 28:40John Green?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Hank Green?

  And so I would, I would wanna maybe recruit some friends, maybe, maybe use email the way that it was once used, where we would write, this is a crazy idea, letters to each other, ma- mail.

• 28:55John Green?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Hank Green?

  I have not used email that way in so long, but I did.

• 29:04John Green?

  I did too.

• 29:05Hank Green?

  And I've written some good emails. Most of the good emails I write now are business emails. And I can, I will occasionally write a good business email, but I'd never write a, a good social email.

• 29:19John Green?

  No, no, that, that period of the internet seems to have passed, along with the period of the internet that wasn't run by personalized algorithms. I miss those, receiving those kinds of emails. Occasionally I'll get an update email from a friend that I really enjoy reading, but not that often.

• 29:39Hank Green?

  I'll get, well, I mean, it's nice.

• 29:40John Green?

  Most of my emails are very functional. And like, that's, that's, I think, what makes the inbox such a bummer, is that people are either telling you information that you need to know about, you know, middle school volleyball games or whatever, or they're asking you for something. They need something from you.

• 29:57Hank Green?

  We have done this to ourselves. But I think also, we, like, it has been done to us by the sort of tragedy of the commons. Like, the email got treated like a commons in the same way that the mail did.

• 30:10John Green?

  Right.

• 30:10Hank Green?

  Um, but also, we've outsourced so much of our communication into the group chat, or the, the text message, or, or I guess, the Instagram DMs here. I saw this reel and thought of you. I don't know. It makes me feel like a, a good activity would be to write a letter once in a while, even if it doesn't get sent through the mail.

• 30:33John Green?

  Yeah, I've been writing letters on tour, and it's been really helpful for me. Um, I need to do things that just ground me in the world. But I'm sorry you're going through it. There are a lot of people in the inbox who are going through, uh, hard times with employment. And, you know, people keep talking about the, the K-shaped economy, that like, it's working for a few people and not working for the vast majority of people. And I don't know if that's, um, I'm not an economist, but we see it in the inbox. And I'm, so at least I hope that it helps to know that you're not alone. But it probably doesn't help much, because the truth is, it just sucks having to like, go after job, after job, after job, and not getting them. It's really hard.

• 31:13Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 31:14John Green?

  All right. We've got to get to one more question and a major important correction before we get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. This question is from Lauren, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I find myself preparing to welcome our second child. We waited a bit between kids, because despite having a very low-risk and uneventful pregnancy for baby number one, I found the experience of being pregnant so woefully unpleasant that I could not fathom going through it again until recently. While things have been somewhat better this time around, it did have me pretty down and out for about 16 straight weeks. My question is, do other mammals experience this? Or is morning sickness a uniquely human phenomenon? Pumpkins and pregnant, Lauren. Lauren, I just want to encourage you by saying you are not alone. I do not know that there are, I don't know

• 31:55John Green?

  about the other mammals question. That's more of a Hank and Deboki question. But the John part of the question is, is that like, it's, pregnancy is so profoundly unfair, Hank. We don't get into this enough.

• 32:07Hank Green?

  It's wild. Yeah.

• 32:08John Green?

  It's, it's, it's, it's a body horror movie that happens routinely in real life. A new human being invades your body and grows inside of you.

• 32:20Hank Green?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:22John Green?

  It's upsetting. If you pitched it to aliens, they would be horrified.

• 32:27Hank Green?

  Yeah. And the crazy thing is, lots of animals just lay eggs.

• 32:32John Green?

  Yeah, of course they do.

• 32:34Hank Green?

  That works. And the placental mammals were like, what if we made this so messed up? And, and it was, it turned out to be really, it turned out to be really good for the babies. So we do it that way.

• 32:49John Green?

  I mean, it solved a problem and it created a problem. The problem it solved, uh, was important. But the problem it created is called morning sickness. Hank, do other placental mammals get morning sick?

• 32:58Hank Green?

  We think so. But isn't it wild that I'm saying we think so?

• 33:03John Green?

  Yeah, that's just an indication that we don't do enough research.

• 33:06Hank Green?

  Yeah. So, so it looks like, particularly in primates, there's a lot of like, food rejection that goes on early. Like, zookeepers will notice this, that when like a marmoset is pregnant, they, they will not eat as much early in pregnancy. There's also, we also have noticed this with dogs, where they might vomit more often, uh, or reject food more often when they are early in pregnancy. It doesn't seem like anybody gets it quite as bad as us, though. You keep finding ways in which, like, we have, like, weird stuff about us, and they're always kind of bad. And often, like, pregnancy in particular, it seems like, is, is, like, we are among the worst at giving birth.

• 33:50John Green?

  Yeah, I believe it. We have a very high evolutionary circumstance. Of maternal death, really high compared to other animals.

• 34:00Hank Green?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 34:01John Green?

  Um, so Sarah found out she was pregnant right before we went on a trip to Australia, like 30 minutes before. And we called the doctor, and we were like, Sarah's got this trip to Australia where we were going together. Should we go? And he was like, I mean, there's no reason not to go, except that it's gonna suck. And it did. It did. It did. She was like, she was jet lagged and sick, which is

• 34:29Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 34:30John Green?

  a pretty brutal combo.

• 34:32Hank Green?

  Yeah. Um, there is, there was a study, this is weird, but there's a study looking at rats versus primates. And there's this particular hormone that seems to be tied maybe to morning sickness. And primates had like a 15X increase in it, while rats during pregnancy had like a 2X increase.

• 34:53John Green?

  Hmm.

• 34:53Hank Green?

  So there's seemingly something particularly about our family tree that, that, um, might make this worse.

• 35:01John Green?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Hank Green?

  Which is, I don't know, man. Deboki wants to write a whole, is, is like, always talking about this book that she will some, someday wants to write about pregnancy, and also more specifically miscarriage. And, um, it, like, it's just, the rabbit hole goes down forever, and there's so much that we don't know and have not done the work to figure out.

• 35:26John Green?

  Right. Right. Wow. Well, I hope Deboki writes that book someday.

• 35:32Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 35:33John Green?

  Hank, before we get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, we have to address the 200 emails that we received on, uh, correcting us on a topic that, uh, people feel very, very strongly about, especially people in the southeastern corner of the United States.

• 35:49Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 35:50John Green?

  I don't really know which of these 200 emails to read, not least because they are all very long.

• 35:58Hank Green?

  Turns out people are still writing letters.

• 36:01John Green?

  Yes. They're writing letters into our inbox.

• 36:03Hank Green?

  It's all coming to us.

• 36:05John Green?

  So Hank, in episode 467, you said, I'm quoting directly here, Florida hates us. And people really took that personally. They felt that this was utterly unfair to us, um, on, and to them as Floridians.

• 36:24Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 36:24John Green?

  That in fact, Florida loves us, and they reminded us of many times when we have been to Florida, including my recent trip to Gainesville last week, where we played sold-out shows to Floridians.

• 36:37Hank Green?

  So Florida does not hate us. However, when we look at the per capita numbers of people who fill out the Nerd Fytaria Census.

• 36:46John Green?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Hank Green?

  Uh, so, so like, the places.

• 36:50John Green?

  Florida loves us the least.

• 36:51Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 36:56John Green?

  No, I don't think.

• 36:57Hank Green?

  So we could, I could tell you, I could tell you that, that when, when, when it, when, you know, there's plenty of people in Florida who want to see us, but per, like, if you divide that by the number of people who live in Florida, the number is lower than it is in other places.

• 37:10John Green?

  No, we do well in Florida. I'm not saying, I, I, I don't totally agree with that. We do fine in Florida. I had an amazing show in Gainesville. I enjoyed being with Patreon on stage so much.

• 37:19Hank Green?

  I'm sure, yeah, I bet it's, I bet Gainesville and Tallahassee are going to be great places for us because there's.

• 37:24John Green?

  Orlando will be good because Orlando's a happening town. It's our hometown, et cetera. Miami's a great town to play because it's an amazing city. I'm, Florida is a lovely place. Here's the thing though, Hank. We genuinely received over 200 emails about this Florida thing. And the original bit was about how we went to Seaside, Florida, and nobody recognized us for like 10 days. They were all people in our core demographic, age-wise, who had no idea who we were. We received 200 emails from Floridians. None of them were people from Seaside, Florida. Not a single person went into our email inbox to defend Seaside, Florida. So I think we've identified the issue. It's not that Florida hates us, it's that Seaside hates us.

• 38:07Hank Green?

  Yeah, or is indifferent to us, which is fine.

• 38:10John Green?

  It's fine. We don't, by the way.

• 38:12Hank Green?

  We're gonna get 200 emails from people in Seaside. There's gonna be a petition.

• 38:20John Green?

  I'm okay with Seaside, Florida being indifferent to us because, to be honest with you, I'm indifferent to Seaside, Florida.

• 38:26Hank Green?

  Yeah. Well, and the other thing I'll say about this per capita measure that we're doing here is that you look at the demographics of Florida and there's gonna be some, some things weighting it against us.

• 38:36John Green?

  It's a little older than your average state and, and our audience is a little younger than your average person.

• 38:41Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 38:42John Green?

  All right, Hank, it's time for the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. I'll start because I have really sad, very unfortunate news from AFC Wimbledon. Mikey T., Mike, Michael Talia Doros, the longtime AFC Wimbledon commentator, who had an encyclopedic memory of every AFC Wimbledon and Wimbledon FC game ever played. You could tell him any date and he could tell you every game that he'd ever played. Mikey T., who went to over 2,000 consecutive AFC Wimbledon games over 38 years, never missed a game for 38 years, passed away a couple of days ago. He was at the game commentating, as he always has been, our

• 39:23John Green?

  play-by-play commentator for the radio and TV broadcast of the games for the last 20 years. He was at the game 10 days ago, passed away yesterday as we're recording this. And I just have to say on a personal note, like, Michael made art. He put art into the world. His art was his commentary and it was very funny and full of wordplay and, you know, astonishingly good, so much better than the football on the pitch, to be honest with you. And.

• 39:53Hank Green?

  And that's so important. Like, it's, it is, you know, ultimately, sports is entertainment and.

• 39:59John Green?

  Yeah, it's what makes the game great, is, is the art that he put into the world. And, you know, a lot of weeks he was putting in that art for the few hundred people who were listening or watching. And it's a reminder that you don't have to make art for a really broad audience to have a really deep impact. I just, I, it breaks my heart. He was Mr. Wimbledon. He was the, the, the person that the rest of us look to and, and still will be. So I, I, I was lucky to know him a little bit and count him as a friend and I, I will miss him very, very much.

• 40:36Hank Green?

  John, in Mars news, it's regular old Mars news. It's good Mars news, though. I like it when, when, when Mars news happens and it's just science being done, especially when it's still being done in the United States of America. So there's a bunch of water ice at the North Pole of Mars. This is good news because water is, you know, interesting chemically and also useful. And we used to think that it was like 25% dust. So it was like, it was like snow mixed with dust and then it would get compressed into this dusty ice mixture. As we have started.

• 41:12John Green?

  I've walked on that in Chicago and it's disgusting.

• 41:14Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's that stuff. So the, the dust in the ice is an insulator. It can also absorb sunlight and cause the ice to warm up enough that it will sublime away. So on, on Mars, things don't melt because the pressure is so low. Instead, it just turns straight into a vapor. And, but it seems that it, new methods have changed the way that we do this estimate. And it looks like it's like 3% dust, which means that the, the water ice is actually quite clean. That would be more useful for us. It might actually reflect away a lot more of the sunlight into space than we thought. And so as the, the

• 41:56Hank Green?

  more sunlight gets reflected, it warms the planet up less and you lose less of that ice to sublimation. And it also means that the water ice could have absorbed enough sunlight to melt parts of the ice, creating little pockets of liquid water that might actually stick around for a little while and could be, who knows?

• 42:15John Green?

  A place where life would live.

• 42:17Hank Green?

  Some liquid water that sometimes is on the surface of Mars.

• 42:21John Green?

  Wow. Liquid water on the surface of Mars, maybe.

• 42:25Hank Green?

  Sometimes.

• 42:26John Green?

  Now, Hank, I have a follow-up question about this. I assume Martian dirt is really bad dirt in terms of ingesting it.

• 42:36Hank Green?

  Extremely bad.

• 42:38John Green?

  So we would have to very carefully filter out the dirt from the water?

• 42:44Hank Green?

  Um, I actually don't know. So I don't know if the dust, well, first of all, this would be easy. So even if it was very bad, I'm not 100% sure that the bad parts of the dust are also in the ice parts. But it's very easy to filter water out from dust because you just melt the water. You could even boil the water and then recollect it. You just, you, you, just, distillation would do all of the work of getting out of the, the stuff that would be bad about the water. That's gonna take a lot of energy, but, you know, so, so will everything.

• 43:20John Green?

  Right, right, right. Okay.

• 43:21Hank Green?

  So I'm not particularly worried about that, but I am worried in general, when it comes to human exploration of Mars, a thing that I did not know when I made a bet that I, I once made many years ago, that I did not know is how potentially hazardous to human health the chemical makeup of Martian dust is. So that could be a real drag on, on human exploration of the red planet.

• 43:47John Green?

  Wow. Well, I'm happy to have humans go to Mars on or after January 1st, 2028.

• 43:55Hank Green?

  It's gonna be so weird, John.

• 43:57John Green?

  It's not gonna be weird. It's gonna be so cool. This podcast is gonna be called Dear John and Hank. I get to do the intro and then you say, or as I like to think of it, Dear Hank and John. It's gonna be great. People are gonna love it.

• 44:06Hank Green?

  And will you do the dad jokes?

• 44:08John Green?

  No, no, no, you'll still do the dad jokes. I can't, I can't, I can't deliver that kind of high-quality content.

• 44:15Hank Green?

  It's gonna, it's gonna be weird. It's gonna, it's gonna be a little bit off balance, but we'll figure it out. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Everybody can experience a stutter through it the first time. We have to do it.

• 44:25John Green?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, we still got it. We still got like a year and a little bit, so.

• 44:28Hank Green?

  Yeah. And who knows, John? Maybe, maybe we will hit the singularity and there will be humans on Enceladus by 2028.

• 44:39John Green?

  Maybe, but in the meantime, all I can tell you for sure is that it's a joy to pod with you and that I appreciate the opportunity and that people can send us their questions at [email protected]. Today's podcast was edited by Linus Openhouse, mixed by Joseph Tuna Metish. 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 Devoki Chakravarti. The music that you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunarola. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.