414: Tell Me What Your Pain Sounds Like

How do people determine if they have a high or low pain tolerance? Can John and Hank tell the difference between their writing styles? How can I find my joy in my teenhood? Why don’t astronomers know more confidently when and where space stuff will collide? What do I do about my sneezing newborn? Which of the books that John and Hank have written should you start with? Is Rax Roast Beef and Rax Pizza Buffet the same thing? …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. Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn 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?

  Nor as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank.

• 0:15Hank Green?

  It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon, apparently at pretty different energies. John, did you know why Pavlov's hair is so soft?

• 0:29John Green?

  No, why is Pavlov's hair so soft?

• 0:31Hank Green?

  Because he conditioned it.

• 0:33John Green?

  Oh, yes, he did. He did. He reminded it daily that if it waited for a certain moment, it might just get a reward.

• 0:42Hank Green?

  And then it salivated all over itself.

• 0:46John Green?

  Yes.

• 0:46Hank Green?

  That made it soft.

• 0:47John Green?

  How glad are we that hair does not salivate?

• 0:52Hank Green?

  Oh, huge win.

• 0:53John Green?

  How much worse would that make everything?

• 0:56Hank Green?

  It does. It does sweat. Like, it is like up there with a bunch of, like, it will wet itself.

• 1:02John Green?

  Yeah, but it doesn't sweat itself. It's not like the sweat comes out of the end of the hair.

• 1:08Hank Green?

  No, but I bet if the body could have figured out how to do it, it would have. I recently did a tremendous deep dive on keratin, and I can't tell you all about it right now because you won't care. But when I set it up, it's going to be great in a Hank's Channel video that I'm going to make about life.

• 1:29John Green?

  Wow.

• 1:30Hank Green?

  You're gonna love it. And that's really how you tease a video, is like, look, I can't, this is so boring that I am going to have to tell you a huge, long story before you will care about it at all.

• 1:45John Green?

  People, by the way, people loved my 15-minute, "As If You Weren't There," and "Part of It You Weren't There," summary of AFC Wimbledon's journey to become a third-tier English soccer team. You thought that people were gonna hate it. They laughed it up, Hank.

• 2:01Hank Green?

  Yep. All of the people who didn't like it didn't write emails.

• 2:05John Green?

  That's exactly correct. They got bored and stopped listening, so they did not write emails. Let me ask you a question from Rihanna, Hank.

• 2:13Hank Green?

  Oh, we're gonna just do that. I love it.

• 2:15John Green?

  Yeah, we're going right into the...

• 2:16Hank Green?

  Because you sensed my feeling from last week, that maybe the intros were a little too long, so this week, it's just hair sweat.

• 2:25John Green?

  Just hair sweating right into it. Dear John and Hank, I've always been curious as to how people can say, I have a high or low pain tolerance when they can't

• 2:32Hank Green?

  I knew you were gonna pick this one out.

• 2:35John Green?

  Pain through the bodies of others. How do you know if you have a high pain tolerance? Can you ever know how your pain ranks on an objective level, not the singer Rihanna? I think this is such an interesting question because as you know, Hank, I am obsessed with the fact that we spend all our time here inside of one consciousness and looking at the world through one set of eyes. And yet, we think that we know what it's like to be other people and often can be quite presumptuous about their experience.

• 3:03Hank Green?

  And the thing is, this is like multiple levels, right? Because do you have a high tolerance for pain could mean I experienced the same amount of pain as you, but I tolerate it more. It could also, it could easily be interpreted as when we have the same stimulus, I experience less pain.

• 3:23John Green?

  Right.

• 3:25Hank Green?

  And I've no idea which of those things we would be measuring, and I don't think anyone does.

• 3:31John Green?

  It's not just that, though. It's also that we assume that having a high pain tol- quote unquote, high pain tolerance is good, and having a quote unquote, low pain tolerance, which I'll be the first to admit, if insofar as there is a thing, I'm on the low pain tolerance side of the scale.

• 3:47Hank Green?

  I actually, when I was reading this, I remember when I was a child, our father said to our mother, in, within hearing of me, he just has a very high pain tolerance. And I took that as objective fact, because he wasn't saying it to me to like compliment me, but I did hear it as a tremendous compliment and moved through much of my life believing I had a high pain tolerance. And now I realize I definitely do not. And instead, what my dad had identified was that I just kept doing things that hurt me over and over again, despite the fact that it did hurt me. I just was bad at risk management.

• 4:22John Green?

  Right. Also, you were my little brother, and I'd set the bar so low when it came to pain tolerance. That inevitably dad was impressed by you.

• 4:35Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 4:36John Green?

  But I do think in general, Len, there's a, there's a measure of judgment about people who experience lots of pain.

• 4:45Hank Green?

  Yes.

• 4:46John Green?

  There's this great quote that you've heard me say a million times, Hank, but it's from The Body and Pain by Elaine Scarry, where she writes that to have great pain is to have certainty and to hear of another's pain is to have doubt.

• 4:57Hank Green?

  Yes.

• 4:58John Green?

  And that is especially true when you're talking to like, you know, that can be especially frustrating when you're talking to like medical professionals and you're like, I have great pain and they're like, I'm sorry. And some of that is because we have insufficient ways of dealing with pain, like we have insufficient ways of confronting pain.

• 5:14Hank Green?

  Do you know about my, my fix for the terribleness of the pain scale?

• 5:20John Green?

  No.

• 5:20Hank Green?

  So there's a pain scale is like one to 10, right?

• 5:22John Green?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Hank Green?

  And they show you like the faces for the kids, the faces on the one to 10 scale.

• 5:26John Green?

  I used it in the, the Faulkner Stars, my, uh, my hit book.

• 5:30Hank Green?

  Uh huh. It's, it's in a lot of the doctor's offices because you gotta communicate about pain. It's very hard because of course you could always sort of imagine a situation that would be even more painful than the one that you are in.

• 5:41John Green?

  Totally.

• 5:41Hank Green?

  But here's, here's my solution. I just don't think numbers are a good way and I don't think words are a good way. And what does that leave us with? Sounds.

• 5:52John Green?

  Nerd.

• 5:53Hank Green?

  Yeah. You should be like, okay, can you tell me what your pound pain sounds like? Cause if I go like, you know that that's very different from like, which is very different from like, and those are all like very clear kinds of pain that I have had.

• 6:09John Green?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:10Hank Green?

  And I think that like, there's so much objective difference between different kinds of pain. There's like the amount of time that it lasts. There's, there's like it's variableness as it lasts. There's where it's located in the body. There's how it limits movement. Is it just always there or does it happen when you do certain things? Like it's such a big, wide variety of stuff. There's a recent video where a bunch of people got bit by this bullet ant that's supposed to be the most painful ant and they did their best to measure how much more, more painful that was than a control sting, which was just from a wasp.

• 6:50John Green?

  Fun.

• 6:50Hank Green?

  They did the math and all of them underestimated how, pretty much all of them underestimated how painful the bullet ant actually was because they simply. Didn't feel rational saying that it was like 4,000 times worse.

• 7:06John Green?

  But it is 4,000 times.

• 7:07Hank Green?

  But it's 4,000 times worse.

• 7:09John Green?

  I'm gonna try to avoid getting bit by a bullet ant. That sounds like it would be wildly unpleasant. I'm certainly not gonna volunteer for a YouTube video where I get bit by one.

• 7:17Hank Green?

  It's a great video. They did it in a very, I think, clever way, but.

• 7:23John Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Hank Green?

  I also am not going to get myself stung by a bullet ant unless you can guarantee me like 10 million views.

• 7:29John Green?

  Oh, my God. And that's the thing is, that's not a joke. To me, I only, this is a fundamental difference between us. Is that like you're, you are a good YouTuber and I am not a good YouTuber. And also I take pride in not being a good YouTuber.

• 7:45Hank Green?

  Yes, it's very important to my career that you're not a good YouTuber. Like, we need, we need that.

• 7:51John Green?

  If I was a good YouTuber, we would have flown too close to the sun a long time ago.

• 7:56Hank Green?

  I'm flying so close to the sun on Hank's channel right now.

• 7:58John Green?

  You are.

• 7:59Hank Green?

  I'm like, hmm, what's it like up here?

• 8:01John Green?

  Every time you make a new Hank's channel video and it gets a million views, I'm like, why are you doing this? Like, you're, you're flying too close to the sun. Like, we all know how this ends. Like, don't you remember Tumblr?

• 8:12Hank Green?

  This sun is so tasty.

• 8:14John Green?

  Oh, my God.

• 8:15Hank Green?

  It burns my skin.

• 8:16John Green?

  Exactly. Talk about a pain scale. So, anyway, I know that I'm not a good YouTuber. And but you're a very good YouTuber and you need me because I keep Nerd Fight area a little bit smaller, which is good.

• 8:34Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need a filter.

• 8:36John Green?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Hank Green?

  We need to, we need to filter the audience in certain ways. You, there was a time when you made Nerd Fight area bigger. And then, you know.

• 8:42John Green?

  I know.

• 8:43Hank Green?

  Eventually, a lot of those people dropped out.

• 8:45John Green?

  It wasn't because I was a great YouTuber, though. It was because I had a hit book.

• 8:50Hank Green?

  He almost gave himself a compliment, everybody.

• 8:53John Green?

  Well, oh, because I almost said I'm a good writer.

• 8:57Hank Green?

  Yeah, you almost said a great writer, which you literally couldn't say even now.

• 9:02John Green?

  Yeah. All right, let's move on to this question from River.

• 9:06Hank Green?

  No, are you done with the pain question? Oh, I'm not. We, there are ways where we try to objectively measure pain. There's a few ways that we try to do it. There's a thing where you submerge your hand in cold water and see how long you can keep it there. And this mostly works for like testing pain for one person. So you have a person take a pain control medication and do it and then like, report when they'd like to take their hand out of the water when they can't keep it in any longer. It's surprisingly painful to have your hand in very cold water. And, uh, and it's less useful when it comes to comparing different people because one person might just be able to deal with it better and be experiencing the exact same amount of pain. And we just have no idea how to, how to handle that. There's also like

• 9:49Hank Green?

  differences in physiology that can mess with this that aren't just like about the nervous system. If you saw something as being like way more red than me, that would just be like, oh, interesting. But if you experience a pain that is way more painful than me, I just don't have a good way to understand that.

• 10:06John Green?

  Right.

• 10:07Hank Green?

  And so that just, it makes it very hard.

• 10:08John Green?

  We got a great question from River Hank, that's about us. And you know how I love a question about us. You know how I love a self-reflection moment. Dear John and Hank, I subscribe to the We're Here newsletter available now at we'rehere.beehive.com. And whenever I read the opening paragraphs, I feel like I can tell within a sentence or two whether it's Hank or John that's written it. And I don't recall being wrong so far. My question is, can I tell the difference? Are y'all aware of significant differences between your written speech patterns? And can you tell the difference between each other's written work, paragraphs and psycholinguistics? River, absolutely. Like I can, when I read Hank's books, I hear Hank's voice.

• 10:48Hank Green?

  Yes. And, uh, and if I, if someone tries to write something as me, like if they're trying to write like a marketing email for, for Good Store, and they're like, this is from Hank and here's, here's what it says. I'm like, thank you. I will now write it the way that I would say it. And I have no idea. Like how, like what's happening?

• 11:12John Green?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:13Hank Green?

  But I don't know. I've just written a lot of stuff. You develop a voice eventually.

• 11:16John Green?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Hank Green?

  It's pretty specific. Having a distinct, like a distinguishable voice is valuable.

• 11:22John Green?

  Right.

• 11:23Hank Green?

  In, in the business that we're in. And so I think that we, it just like ended up that way. But yes, we write very differently. Our sentences are different lengths.

• 11:33John Green?

  Right.

• 11:34Hank Green?

  They're structured differently. We have different habits, not to say that they're good habits, but like

• 11:39John Green?

  No.

• 11:40Hank Green?

  we have different habits.

• 11:41John Green?

  Exactly. We have different, different predictable flaws in our writing.

• 11:45Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 11:46John Green?

  Which is what I think of them as, but also like different, like certain quirks, like the way that I use M dashes is very different from the way you do and like.

• 11:54Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 11:55John Green?

  But your, your, your work just sounds like you and mine sounds like me. And that is not something that was true for me when I was 23 years old.

• 12:04Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 12:04John Green?

  It, it, it took me.

• 12:06Hank Green?

  It just takes time.

• 12:07John Green?

  Yeah. I mean, I think writing Looking for Alaska was the first time when I, and I finished that when I was like 27, 28. That was the first time, and it was a five year process. And through that five year process, I found out what I sound like.

• 12:22Hank Green?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:23John Green?

  I, because I remember when I was, when I didn't get into the advanced creative writing class at my college.

• 12:28Hank Green?

  I'm so shocked that you remember that.

• 12:31John Green?

  When there were 15 applicants and, and 12 spots and I was one of the three people who didn't get in, which I remember quite vividly and is sort of a defining experience in my life. When I didn't get into that advanced creative writing class, my creative writing teacher asked me over to his house to have a drink and we sat there with, I sat there with him and his wife. And he was like, look, man, like the story that you submitted wasn't very good. But when you tell stories during the break in, in, in our seminars, those stories are very good.

• 13:04Hank Green?

  Yep.

• 13:04John Green?

  And so you've got to figure out how to write stories like you tell stories, like how to sound like you sound, not how to sound like bad Philip Roth, but how to sound like you sound. And that was really, really great advice. And I think if he hadn't given me that advice, I would have abandoned my dreams of writing. So shout out P F Kluga.

• 13:25Hank Green?

  I, I mean, I have a similar, uh, story that's, I think, a less.

• 13:32Hank Green?

  It's less takes less space in my head because of how it is a less significant thing. But I remember the first time I got rejected from a literary magazine and it was like a it's a UM Environmental Studies Literary Magazine. And I went and I was like super into this and I worked really hard on it. I really thought that it was good. And, and what I needed to hear was this is all about you and it is for you. Like you wrote a thing that is 100% about your experience of the world for you in which you are the character who is just having smart thoughts.

• 14:12John Green?

  Yep. Yeah, which is, which is developmentally appropriate.

• 14:17Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 14:17John Green?

  I would argue for someone in their early twenties. But it is, it is real. Like it takes time to learn how to write for an audience. And one of the like weird, one of the things I don't understand very well about myself is that I rarely write except for an audience. Like I wrote everything is tuberculosis, not for an audience. Initially, I was writing because I was writing because writing is my way of thinking and trying to understand something. But like, it wasn't until I realized I was writing something for an audience that I kind of kicked into high gear and got really excited about everything is what would become everything is tuberculosis. Because I love writing for an audience. And even when I was like 15 years old,

• 15:01John Green?

  I didn't journal. I wrote stories that I imagined were for an audience. And I don't know what that says about me. I don't think it says anything great. It's not something I'm super proud of, but it's real.

• 15:13Hank Green?

  Yeah, I did the same thing.

• 15:15John Green?

  Yeah.

• 15:16Hank Green?

  Yeah. We, we, I don't know, we both have that bug. But let's stop talking about us writing because I was just talking about how that's, nobody wants to hear that.

• 15:28John Green?

  That's

• 15:28Hank Green?

  Just a couple of guys.

• 15:30John Green?

  People don't like shop talk and they shouldn't like shop talk, right? Like I don't

• 15:34Hank Green?

  Unless they're in the shop, you know, unless

• 15:36John Green?

  Unless they're in the shop. Unless, unless they're in the shop. All right. Let's answer this question from Anna who writes Dear Green Brothers.

• 15:42Hank Green?

  Let me do one.

• 15:43John Green?

  Okay, but this one is important.

• 15:45Hank Green?

  Okay, well.

• 15:46John Green?

  You can do the next three. You do the next three. I'll do this one.

• 15:49Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 15:50John Green?

  Seeing as you are a top podcast for teens, thank you, Anna. We appreciate you acknowledging the reality that this is a top podcast for teens, including a top sleep podcast for teens, a top workout podcast for teens, a top podcast for tweens, and a top podcast for grownups. I figured you might enjoy a question from a real life teen. I know when I'm an adult, I'll look back and miss being a teen, but right now, I mean, disagree with your.

• 16:14Hank Green?

  Somebody's told you that.

• 16:16John Green?

  Yeah.

• 16:18John Green?

  Not sure, not sure that we're on the same page about the assumption at the core of the question, but we'll get there. I'll look back and miss being a teen, but right now it's very stressful and I mostly just want to grow up and gain more independence. How can I find more joy in my teenhood? Pumpkins and Penguins, Anna?

• 16:33Hank Green?

  Here's what I'll say.

• 16:35John Green?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Hank Green?

  You will miss your body working as well as it does right now because it, it might be at, at its like, uh, near its like peak level of functioning. It might not be.

• 16:50John Green?

  I was gonna say, if you're like me, Anna, and you're smoking 40 cigarettes a day, which I hope you're not. But if you're like me when I was a teen and you're, you're crushing 40 cigarettes a day, like you're, you're actually not going to reach your bodily peak until your early 40s. Not because you work so hard, but because you set the bar so low.

• 17:13Hank Green?

  So there's, there's that. I don't know. What do I miss about being young? There's a certain amount of just.

• 17:20John Green?

  There is nothing.

• 17:22Hank Green?

  There's also, here's, here's what, let me see if, what you think of this.

• 17:26John Green?

  All right.

• 17:27Hank Green?

  There is something where the connections I had with the people, like my friends, were so unquestioned and unquestionable that it was like, it was just like, this is where I belong. And these are the people that I have found and I'm going to be with these people. Whereas I feel like friendship in adulthood and, and, you know, many relationships in adulthood are very like, uh. You know, you're kind of, sometimes you're stuck with people like work and you're like, you just like deal with the ones and not necessarily gonna be loving them. Or, you know, you kind of like are thinking harder about whether these people are the ones you want to hang out with or not.

• 18:09Hank Green?

  I just like miss just valuing people because they're my people.

• 18:14John Green?

  So I'm going to push back against everything that you've said.

• 18:18Hank Green?

  Okay, hit me.

• 18:19John Green?

  Respectfully, because my experience of being a teenager is that I wasn't very secure in those core relationships, even the relationship with my parents or the relationship with you or my relationships with my friends or my, especially with romantic partners. Like, I didn't feel that sort of like core security. And in adulthood, I do, and that's actually the main thing that I don't like. I, I, I, I, I wouldn't want to go back to being a teenager because of that constant feeling of like insecurity and insufficiency and, you know, I, I felt very much like Anna, like I wanted to just grow up and be independent and not have to like deal with all the newness of everything.

• 19:00John Green?

  The one thing that I recommend about being a teenager is that you're doing so many things for the first time that there's an intensity to that that is really thrilling. Now, it's also like horrible, but it is thrilling, right? Like, there's an intensity to falling in love for the first time or grappling with questions about suffering and meaning for the first time independent from your parents that's really interesting and fulfilling for me, anyway. But like, I don't, I, I don't think you're gonna miss being a teenager.

• 19:32John Green?

  I don't miss it.

• 19:34Hank Green?

  Who knows? Like, everybody's got a different, different.

• 19:36John Green?

  Everybody's got a different journey, but I had, I, I enjoyed being a teenager. I had like, I had great friends, like you, I had like deep, deep friendships that, that, you know, carried me through those years, but those years were hard, man. That was hard. My feet were always changing size. It was hard.

• 19:54Hank Green?

  That's not the first thing on my list, but yeah.

• 19:59Hank Green?

  The feet have maintained the same size for a long time and there is a convenience to that.

• 20:04John Green?

  There is.

• 20:04Hank Green?

  One thing I'll say in that vein also is I, I, I, for so many years, I think, I feel like I had my hair figured out.

• 20:11John Green?

  Hmm.

• 20:12Hank Green?

  And then when I, when I lost my hair and then I came back curly, I, it was, I was trying to figure that out and now it's straight again and I'm trying to figure this out again.

• 20:20John Green?

  Hmm.

• 20:21Hank Green?

  And I have, I feel like I haven't had a haircut I liked in years.

• 20:25John Green?

  Do you feel like it's a second adolescence, this, this new world that you live in with a new body?

• 20:34Hank Green?

  Yeah, a little bit. And like new, and like, how do you, how do you prioritize? How do you figure out? I don't know.

• 20:41John Green?

  Because it's not just the new body.

• 20:44Hank Green?

  Is that what a midlife crisis always is though? It's just, it's just like, uh, please let me go through adolescence again?

• 20:49John Green?

  Maybe. Um, I don't know. Again, I, I, I really don't want to romanticize adolescence, which I, I find to be like one of the core things that adults do unjustly. Like if they could actually go back and be a teenager for a day, they'd be like, oh, no, no, not this, not this.

• 21:09Hank Green?

  I just think that there, there are some teenagers, I think, who, uh, and I, I was at times one of them.

• 21:15John Green?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Hank Green?

  Certainly not all the time, but who are just very confident and comfortable.

• 21:19John Green?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Hank Green?

  And I think that like, that's the thing that we are all seeking. And if you find that in school, that can actually be quite hard because then that structure goes away.

• 21:30John Green?

  Right.

• 21:30Hank Green?

  And you're like, now I'm, now I am without it.

• 21:32John Green?

  Right.

• 21:33Hank Green?

  So maybe there's like a joy and a, and a benefit in never quite finding it in school so that you, uh, you can try and settle on it in a more stable system that is the whole rest of your life that you will have outside of school.

• 21:47John Green?

  Yeah, certainly you, you don't want to, uh, be like, be like that character Tom and achieve the kind of limited excellence at the age of 19 that smacks of anticlimax as Fitzgerald puts it in The Great Gatsby, one of the most damning disses of all time.

• 22:06Hank Green?

  I was like, who the hell is Tom? And why is John being so mean to him?

• 22:12John Green?

  Well, he's a very careless person, Hank. He caused a lot of harm in that story. Which reminds me, actually, that today's podcast is brought to you by, by Tom Buchanan. Tom Buchanan, you know, I wouldn't necessarily get in a car with him.

• 22:28Hank Green?

  This podcast, I don't know if you know this, John, but it is also sponsored by Tom Hardy. Tom Hardy.

• 22:36Hank Green?

  He's got that shape of a head.

• 22:38John Green?

  Yeah, for sure he does. And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by Tom, Tom Brady. Tom Brady, he was surprised when he drove the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 to be booed, but he has hated here.

• 22:54Hank Green?

  You all gotta know that. And finally, this podcast is brought to you by Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison, Tommy Edison, little Tommy Edison. Brought you the light bulb, brought you the movie projector, maybe the telephone? Poss- no, that was a different guy.

• 23:11John Green?

  Yeah, he didn't actually bring you any of those things, but-

• 23:13Hank Green?

  He definitely electrocuted an elephant.

• 23:16John Green?

  Okay, did he really?

• 23:17Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 23:18John Green?

  Wow, what a, what a thing to be remembered for. The phonograph and the electrocution of an elephant. Well-

• 23:27Hank Green?

  Phonograph, that's what I was trying to think of.

• 23:30John Green?

  What I love about that joke is that I've never once in my long life thought of Thomas Edison as good old Tom.

• 23:40Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 23:40John Green?

  Thomas.

• 23:41Hank Green?

  He's definitely a two-namer. He's a two-name kind of guy.

• 23:44John Green?

  I even know his middle name, weirdly. Why do I know that his-

• 23:47Hank Green?

  Alva?

• 23:48John Green?

  Alva, why do we know that his middle name is Alva? What is, what is wrong with our education system? That somehow you and I ingested that Thomas Edison's middle name was Alva, but, but we never ingested, for example, how limits work.

• 24:02Hank Green?

  No, you're correct. I didn't. And the horrible thing is, Will, Will, and I'm sorry to bring it here, but will this be the case for people who today are influential people who are industrialists, who are, will, will they be remembered the way that we were sort of taught as Thomas Edison is just like a good old guy who made a lot of good stuff happen when we were kids? What a smart American industrialist.

• 24:35John Green?

  I wrote my third grade biography on Thomas Alva Edison, and I remember that I used the word interesting several times because it took up a whole line when I wrote it in cursive, and it had to be like a seven-page paper. So, yeah, Thomas Alva Edison, I wish him well. And, you know, for today's industrialists, I would just remind you that history comes for us all, even Thomas Edison, eventually got eclipsed by Nikola Tesla. All right. Let's answer some questions from our listeners, Hank. Why don't you ask a couple?

• 25:08Hank Green?

  Yeah. This next question comes from Will, who asks, Dear Hank and John, why does it seem that astronomers are so uncertain about when and where space stuff will hit other space stuff? I feel like I'm always reading articles about asteroids that may or may not hit Earth or the moon. Aren't the motions of our celestial bodies constant and easy to predict? Why aren't they more certain about their calculations? Looking at the sky in terror, Will. Will, I have, I, look, you have no idea, no idea, how accurate these measurements are. It's amazing.

• 25:47John Green?

  It reminds me of a joke that an astronomer told me once. An astronomer gets pulled over by a police officer, and the police officer says, do you know how fast you are going? And the astronomer says, somewhere between 10 and 100 miles an hour.

• 26:03Hank Green?

  Which is so accurate.

• 26:05John Green?

  So incredibly accurate, right? Like from the context of spacetime.

• 26:11Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 26:12John Green?

  Between 10 and 100 miles per hour is incredibly impressive. If you can get it within an order of magnitude, like you've basically got it.

• 26:19Hank Green?

  Yeah, that's that's for stuff outside of the solar system especially. But like with stuff in the solar system, we know this stuff with such a huge degree of precision. And I can talk you through many of the reasons why it's very hard to get that level of precision. And why we are always constantly working toward a higher precision. There was recently like an asteroid that might hit Earth. It was like it went from like a less than 1% chance to an above 1% chance. And everyone was like, oh, and it kept going up, you know, for a couple of days before it went down. And what you have to remember is that when we are looking at these objects, especially at first,

• 27:00Hank Green?

  we are looking at a dot on a background of stars that has moved from one place to another in on a flat plane. We don't have like a top down view of the solar system where we can see all this stuff. We can only look at it from one direction. So we have to do all kinds of crazy stuff with like brightness and like how it's moving compared to the background stars as we move around the earth, because as we move, these things also move. But they the the stars all stay in the same place. So we can kind of use that effect to see them from different angles and that gives us more data. So we have to do a lot of observation of a lot of different objects and they're just dots.

• 27:43Hank Green?

  And you can't use brightness because they can be made of different stuff and they can have different levels of brightness just because they just happen to be darker, not because they're closer and or bigger. And so all those things matter. So we have to figure out how big they are to figure out their orbit. And then and then if they get close enough, we can actually bounce radar off of them.

• 28:06John Green?

  Hmm.

• 28:06Hank Green?

  And that gives us their distance. And and this has to be within like millions of miles. So it can't be more than millions of miles away. And when we get a radar signal, that tells us how far away they are to within meters.

• 28:21John Green?

  Wow. Wow. So that's when we can be like, this one's probably going to land in the Indian Ocean.

• 28:26Hank Green?

  Yeah, but it's still tricky. Like, you have to, you have to get a bunch of measurements. And so what often happens is like, you start, you like, start getting lots of measurements on, or you start with getting like, a few measurements on lots of objects, and then you look at the objects that have the highest probability, and you get more measurements of those objects to get more specificity on where they're headed. So it's just a tremendously difficult problem. And the thing I try to remind people when we hear about an asteroid that might hit Earth, is if this was 10 years ago, we wouldn't have any idea until it hit us.

• 29:01John Green?

  Hmm.

• 29:03Hank Green?

  And like-

• 29:03John Green?

  That sounds better, actually. I feel like, I feel like we've regressed as a species. I want to not know.

• 29:10Hank Green?

  Well, there are things we can do, so it feels like a good idea to know.

• 29:14John Green?

  Hmm. Wow. Mind blowing. If we didn't know 10 years ago, we would have just gotten hit by it.

• 29:22Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 29:23John Green?

  Now we're gonna have like, six weeks of stress.

• 29:26Hank Green?

  Where we have to worry because we're just better at knowing about stuff. The same thing with pandemics, where like, you know, for so many years, pandemics just happened or didn't happen. And now we have, we're all thinking about bird flu four years before it happens or doesn't happen.

• 29:42John Green?

  Hmm. Thanks for that, Hank. This next question comes from Miranda, who writes, Dear John and Hank, initially I was thrilled to become a new mother, and my daughter appeared nearly perfect. However, it has come to our attention that she sneezes a lot.

• 29:57Hank Green?

  Oh, no!

• 29:58John Green?

  As a mother and newly minted pediatrician, Hank, can you imagine? You're a doctor, and you've got a sneezer.

• 30:06Hank Green?

  You know how abnormal it is for people to-

• 30:09John Green?

  That's exactly what Miranda says. You can understand my serious concern, as this is not normal. To make matters worse, she refuses to stop sneezing when politely requested. I'm afraid she doesn't grasp the severity of the issue. Any advice is appreciated. As you know, newborns are terribly challenging to refund or exchange. You have the right, Miranda.

• 30:32Hank Green?

  You're saying that we don't have to comment on this absolute banger of a question? We can remain silent?

• 30:40John Green?

  What would you, uh, what would you do, Hank, if you had a, had a child who was a sneezer? I think Miranda makes a great point. They are not, they are not refundable.

• 30:49Hank Green?

  No. So here's, here's the thing, and this is gonna be hard, but you have to psychologically trick your brain into thinking it's cute. So you have to, you have to remove yourself from the, from the understood rational, objective knowledge that this is never normal. And be like, actually, maybe that's kinda cute.

• 31:08John Green?

  Okay. I bet, I bet newborn sneezes are more easy to cuticize than adult sneezes.

• 31:17Hank Green?

  What you don't wanna do, though, is to let that cross over into an acceptance of adult sneezes, especially as a pediatrician.

• 31:25John Green?

  Right. Or child sneezes. Every time a child, every time a child sneezes in your office, you need to tell the parent that is not a normal experience, and what the child is going through is concerning. I was actually gonna recommend that you seek out Dr. Never Sneezer Scrooge, the original doctor who said that sneezing is never normal, he never sneezes. And because maybe Dr. Never Sneezer Scrooge has some insights into how that you can stop your newborn from sneezing.

• 31:53Hank Green?

  Do you, do you think this person, this original person, has a disorder and like, doesn't sneeze because there's like something wrong with their brain?

• 32:01John Green?

  It's possible.

• 32:03Hank Green?

  Do they have like the weirdest stroke ever?

• 32:05John Green?

  Yeah. I think it's more likely that Dr. Never Sneezer Scrooge sneezes on occasion. And when, when he does sneeze, feels immense shame. Just feels like, oh my god, I've, I've failed again.

• 32:20Hank Green?

  What did I do?

• 32:21John Green?

  Like, yeah, I think that's, that's more realistic to me, is that there's an element of just like horror and shame and a feeling of like, I can't believe that happened to me. I must hide it. It is a totally unacceptable phenomenon. But fortunately for you, Miranda, you are yourself a trained physician. And so if anybody knows if this situation is creeping into the pathological, it's you. And so I trust your judgment even, even more so because you acknowledged in your email that your daughter sneezing is not normal.

• 32:58Hank Green?

  Yes. Oh, I don't know what I don't know how to handle it. It sounds hard. It sounds like a difficult life that we all have to live here. Uh, but I think that I think that if you can just for just for the infancy, just try, try and accept, try and make your convince your brain that it's actually just like a cute little.

• 33:17John Green?

  I also remember when my children were very young, trying to make rational arguments to them about their behavior. And I would be like, don't cry. It's three in the morning.

• 33:30Hank Green?

  I hope there's nobody listening who does not know the lore and is worried about their sneezes right now.

• 33:36John Green?

  I think that we should become so post ironic that we ourselves don't even know whether sneezing is normal. Like by the time this podcast becomes Dear John and Hank in 2028, I want us to be in a space where nobody even remembers the war. All they know is that sneezing isn't normal.

• 33:51Hank Green?

  We gotta go back and listen to the episode and figure out, does this happen on the first day of 2028? Or does it happen on the last day of 2028?

• 33:58John Green?

  I think humans have to be on Mars by the end of 2027 in order.

• 34:04Hank Green?

  By 2028? No, because if you're, if you land on Mars on May 18th of 2028, you're on Mars during 2028.

• 34:12John Green?

  Right. But isn't there some rule where like Mars is further away every other year? And so it's gotta be 2027.

• 34:19Hank Green?

  Technology is gonna happen in 2028. Could be teleporters.

• 34:24John Green?

  There could be, except I'm pretty sure that the initial bargain we made was that by, by the end of 2027, there would be humans on Mars, which is the most ludicrous thing that you could have ever imagined. Like, that makes you look like such a techno optimist. It makes you look like one of, it makes you look like.

• 34:42Hank Green?

  The problem is that the wager matters. And so we're still talking about it, where most of my stupid thoughts that I had back then have been forgotten. But this one, we had to hold on to. And now, now every time I say anything about what the future might hold, people are gonna be like, yeah, these people are gonna be Mars in 2027.

• 34:58John Green?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Hank Green?

  But we gotta, we gotta listen. We gotta listen. Cause if it was by 2028, then I have one more year than you think.

• 35:06John Green?

  That's true. That's true. But it wasn't. So.

• 35:11Hank Green?

  We'll find out.

• 35:12John Green?

  We got another question from May who writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm 12 years old. We're privileging the tween and teen questions right now in an attempt to become a hit podcast for teens. I am 12 years old, about to be in seventh grade, and I've been listening to the podcast for a few months, and I've heard a lot about your book, and they sound good. But I'm not sure if I'm old enough to read them yet. How long should I wait to be able to read your books? And what book would be best for me to read? I hope your books are amazing as they sound, May. It's a really good name-specific sign-off, May, and it tells me that you're great with language and probably, you're certainly intellectually ready to read my books.

• 35:54John Green?

  I don't know, Hank, what do you think? May's ready to read your books, too.

• 35:58Hank Green?

  I have no idea. I have no idea. I have no idea. I feel like I cannot give someone's 12-year-old advice on books to read.

• 36:08John Green?

  Yeah, May, to be honest with you, I'd have a conversation with your parents. And here's the conversation I'd have with your parents. I would say, Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, Auntie, Uncle, whoever's in the house, I would say, hey, it's me, May.

• 36:23John Green?

  I am thinking about reading these books by John and Hank Green, mostly by John Green.

• 36:29Hank Green?

  There's just more of them.

• 36:30John Green?

  He needs the money more, because he'll actually spend it, unlike Hank Green, just donated to Partners in Health. So, I'm thinking about reading these books, and would you mind reading one? And telling me if you think I'm ready to read it? And then you can kind of get an insight from the people in your, the grownups in your family. That's the first thing that I'd do. I will say, ironically, the only book I've really definitely published for adults, Everything is Tuberculosis, is the one that I'm least concerned about you reading.

• 37:05Hank Green?

  Yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 37:07John Green?

  You'll learn a lot about tuberculosis, and...

• 37:11Hank Green?

  It's gonna be way ahead, way ahead.

• 37:13John Green?

  Yeah, so, I don't know where I'd start. I know, people ask where to start reading my books. I mean, with Hank's books, it's pretty obvious, you start with the first one, because it's a two-book series. With my books, I don't know. I wrote those books like 20 years ago. I have no memory of them.

• 37:30Hank Green?

  Who knows what they're like?

• 37:32John Green?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, I don't even, can I really recommend them in good faith? I genuinely don't know.

• 37:37Hank Green?

  This next question comes from Soma, who asks, Dear Hank and John, my brother and I recently went on a trip to Finland. As longtime listeners of the podcast, one of the items on our to-do list was to go to Rack's Roast Beef. But upon arriving in Finland, we discovered that all the Rack's are Rack's Pizza Buffets and not Rack's Roast Beef's. Are they the same thing? We must know for our next time. Did you go? Did you not go?

• 38:03John Green?

  No, I think they did go. They had to have gone. Because it is a completely different Rack's. So the Rack's in America, Rack's Roast Beef-

• 38:10Hank Green?

  It's just the same letter, is it used for a different restaurant?

• 38:13John Green?

  Absolutely. It is the exact same letters in the same order used to describe an entirely different phenomenon. Like, like bear with it and bear, oh my God, there's a bear.

• 38:23Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 38:24John Green?

  It's very similar.

• 38:26Hank Green?

  It's very similar to that.

• 38:28John Green?

  So Rack's Pizza Buffet-

• 38:29Hank Green?

  But they are both restaurants.

• 38:30John Green?

  Hank and I've never been to, because we've never been to Finland. But interestingly, Hank, I am going to Finland in 2027. I already have a trip on the books to Finland.

• 38:38Hank Green?

  Wow.

• 38:39John Green?

  And when I go to Finland, one of the main things I want to do is eat at a Rack's Pizza Buffet. Because you'll recall, it was at a Rack's Pizza Buffet that, that listener of ours had their pants ruined.

• 38:52Hank Green?

  Yes. No, that's where you go to get your pants ruined.

• 38:55John Green?

  That's where you go to get ruined pants.

• 38:57Hank Green?

  I'm not exactly sure how the ruination occurred.

• 39:01John Green?

  I also don't fully remember the story, but Hank and I were waxing poetic about Rack's Roast Beef, this restaurant from our childhood, that still has a couple of places open in like Ohio. And Hank and I went on a road trip and went to a Rack's Roast Beef. It was pretty good. I was surprised. I enjoyed my trip.

• 39:14Hank Green?

  Oh, yeah. It was very similar.

• 39:16John Green?

  It tasted just like the Rack's Roast Beef from my childhood. But several people from Finland wrote in and said, we also have a Rack's Rack's Pizza Buffet. And one of them wrote in and said, Rack's Pizza Buffet is best known in my family for having ruined my pants. And went on to tell a story about the ruination of their pants. That was, it was solid gold. And so I think that the next time you're in Finland, Soma, you have to go to Rack's Pizza Buffet. One, give us a review. Let us know how the pizza is, for God's sakes. And then, two, you know, see if you can get your pants ruined.

• 39:47Hank Green?

  You never know what's gonna happen at a Rack's. I'll tell you that. Well, one, one thing that I didn't expect to have happen at the Racks that we went to is to not be able to go inside because it was full of boxes.

• 40:00John Green?

  It is drive through only.

• 40:03Hank Green?

  And like, and because the inside of it is being used for storage.

• 40:09Hank Green?

  The dining room is just where they keep the old cups.

• 40:16Hank Green?

  It was a weird experience, John. I'm glad that we did. I wouldn't, I wouldn't wear my Racks T-shirt. I got a Racks T-shirt. And I get comments on it all the time. People are like, "Oh, my God, I grew up with Racks." Anybody from the Midwest or the South, uh, who is in their 40s is very excited.

• 40:37John Green?

  All right, Hank, before we get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, we need to answer a question.

• 40:43Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 40:44John Green?

  It's from Sabina, and it is a sports related question to sort of ease us in to the discussion of AFC Wimbledon. Sabina writes, Dear John and Hank, Timothy Chalamet, uh, an American actor, Hank, just for context, recently got Kylie Jenner, and Kylie Jenner is an American entrepreneur and, uh, reality TV star. Timothy Chalamet recently got Kylie Jenner to come to Indianapolis on a Saturday for a New York Knicks game. What is the most outlandish thing your wives have ever done as a result of your interest in sports? No offense to Indianapolis, Sabina. Now, I want to be very clear about something. Kylie Jenner was psyched to come to Indianapolis, uh, and who wouldn't be? This is the white hot center

• 41:26John Green?

  of American culture. This is where it all goes down. This is where it happens. I am living, I, you know, we talked earlier about Hank flying too close to the sun when it comes to the popularity of Hank's channel. I fly too close to the sun just by living in Indianapolis. This place is too cool for regular people like me. So Kylie Jenner was delighted to be in Indianapolis. Um, the weirdest thing that my spouse has ever done for my love of sports is sign off on me paying the contract of AFC Wimbledon player Marcus Brown.

• 41:59Hank Green?

  Yes.

• 42:02John Green?

  I mean, if Timothy Chalamet did that for a New York Knicks, I think that Kylie Jenner would be duly upset.

• 42:08Hank Green?

  I'm kind of stuck on Kylie Jenner and Timothy Chalamet at a New York Knicks game.

• 42:17John Green?

  They go to all the New York Knicks games.

• 42:19Hank Green?

  Are they a couple? Or are they just like really good friends?

• 42:24John Green?

  Yeah, they're besties. No, they're in a romantic relationship.

• 42:28Hank Green?

  Oh.

• 42:30John Green?

  Hence the question, what is the weirdest thing that your spouses have ever done?

• 42:37Hank Green?

  Did you see that Billie Eilish was kissing Nat Wolff?

• 42:41John Green?

  I did. I did. Yes. I don't know. I don't want to talk about my friends. But yes, I saw that picture. My friends' private lives should be able to be private.

• 42:53Hank Green?

  Well, Timothy Chalamet and Kylie Jenner's private lives aren't private, but that doesn't matter because Timmy Jimmy ain't John's friend.

• 42:59John Green?

  No, he is not. I've never met Timmy Jimmy. He seems like a lovely, very ambitious young man.

• 43:06Hank Green?

  Yes. I don't, what, do I like sports? I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is during a vacation in Ireland, I made Catherine go to an industrially harvested peat bog. But that's not sports. That's just my interests. In the same way that you are into football and be like, come on and do that. But I'm like, Catherine, I don't want to go see a peat, like, when I told people I wanted to go see a peat bog, they like suggested all the like, the nice ones that were pretty.

• 43:42John Green?

  No, you're not into that.

• 43:43Hank Green?

  And I was like, I want to go to one of those, but what I really want is to go to one that's been industrially harvested. And they were like, they don't put those on display. And I was like, yeah, but like they're around. So I just want to like find one. And they're like, okay, you'll have to probably like. Walk through a bunch of branches and brambles. I was like, that's, that's cool.

• 44:07John Green?

  Wow.

• 44:07Hank Green?

  Take me to the bog.

• 44:09John Green?

  Yeah, I think that your fascination with bogs and my fascination with sports are very similar. They come from similar places, which that we is that we are trying to build community in a world where community is not natural. And the second thing about it that's the same is that um, most people would find it very, very boring.

• 44:29Hank Green?

  Yes. And, and then the third thing is that it can make your shoes muddy.

• 44:33John Green?

  Oh, absolutely. Um, I went to an AFC Wimbledon game that was a nil-nil draw. And at the end of it, uh, one of the people I'd brought with me to the game, a friend from Indianapolis, turned around and said, so they can just not score?

• 44:47Hank Green?

  Ah.

• 44:51John Green?

  And I was like, yeah, yeah, you can fly all the way from Indianapolis to London just to see no goal.

• 44:58Hank Green?

  Nothing. Yeah. Look, the whole game happened.

• 45:02John Green?

  The whole game happened. I mean,

• 45:04Hank Green?

  The whole game happened.

• 45:05John Green?

  Just think of all the events that occurred.

• 45:10Hank Green?

  My God.

• 45:12John Green?

  Oh, boy.

• 45:14Hank Green?

  And also Pete Boggs and English soccer about a preservation of the past and our histories.

• 45:20John Green?

  Yeah, yeah. All right, let's move on to the news from AFC Wimbledon. The news broke an hour ago.

• 45:26Hank Green?

  Oh. Who broke it?

• 45:29John Green?

  Uh, the club. We don't really have like reporters beating down our door.

• 45:34Hank Green?

  Who's gonna put it back together?

• 45:36John Green?

  Well, maybe no one because Josh Neufill, um,

• 45:40Hank Green?

  Oh.

• 45:41John Green?

  arguably our best player, our player of the season last year.

• 45:44Hank Green?

  Wow, I have not, I don't know this guy's name. You don't care about him, even though he's your best player. This is why he's leaving because you didn't talk about him on the pod enough.

• 45:51John Green?

  It's possible. It's possible. He uh, had the opportunity to sign another contract for Wimbledon. Um, and he has chosen not to. He has signed for Bradford City, another team that's been promoted from League Two to League One, but um, uh, a, a club with a bigger budget, I think it's safe to say. And you can't, of course, you cannot begrudge a player signing a bigger contract. These are short careers and uh, it's not like we're talking about billions of dollars here. So uh, I, I wish Josh the best, but I am a little bit personally devastated.

• 46:28Hank Green?

  Yeah. Well, what you gotta do is get some, get, get a loner from.

• 46:35John Green?

  Yep.

• 46:36Hank Green?

  From, from just Mansfield United.

• 46:41John Green?

  There you go. There you go. Mansfield United?

• 46:44Hank Green?

  Is that, is that one of them?

• 46:45John Green?

  There is a Mansfield town.

• 46:47Hank Green?

  Oh, what's Mansfield United then?

• 46:50John Green?

  Are you thinking perhaps of Manchester United?

• 46:53Hank Green?

  Sure, that's likely.

• 46:55John Green?

  We'll get a loner from them.

• 46:57Hank Green?

  Okay, for the wing.

• 46:59John Green?

  For the wing. That's right. We, we gotta get somebody who can play wing back. And it's not gonna be Josh Neufill because he's joined Bradford City. So I wish him well. What, we used to call him Joshie Nine Town because Neuf means nine and Ville means city.

• 47:14Hank Green?

  Yeah, that's cute. I like that.

• 47:16John Green?

  Well, not anymore. Bradford City will have to come up with their own nickname for him. They're gonna love him as much as we did. Yeah, okay. We wish him the best.

• 47:25Hank Green?

  Well, I don't know. Let's just, uh, talk to somebody with a couple hundred thousand dollars to spend on a player. Is that how much they cost?

• 47:38John Green?

  That's about how much they cost.

• 47:40Hank Green?

  Really?

• 47:42John Green?

  Um, yeah, some of them.

• 47:44Hank Green?

  I guess it's a job, you know?

• 47:45John Green?

  Some of them, yeah, you know, they, they'll get paid between 200 and, and 300,000 dollars, the average league player. But again, like.

• 47:52Hank Green?

  League one, as, and this is the league you're in now.

• 47:55John Green?

  That's the league we're in now, but you've gotta remember.

• 47:56Hank Green?

  Like, all the players get that much?

• 47:58John Green?

  Oh, most of them do, but you have to remember, this is a short career, right? So like, if you're lucky, you play for 15 years.

• 48:05Hank Green?

  I'm just doing the math. It's expensive to run this team.

• 48:08John Green?

  It is expensive to run this team.

• 48:09Hank Green?

  But the thing is, they're not in the good leagues.

• 48:15John Green?

  Well, I think that we are in the good leagues, Hank. I could, I think all the time about how we used to be a ninth tier English soccer team.

• 48:20Hank Green?

  There's nine? There's a, there's 11 tiers?

• 48:25John Green?

  No, there's, yeah, there's, actually, there are 11 tiers. Um, we started in the ninth tier, but yeah, there's 11 tiers.

• 48:32Hank Green?

  Okay, League One is the third tier.

• 48:35John Green?

  Yeah, so we're actually, we're actually doing great.

• 48:38Hank Green?

  Okay, great.

• 48:40John Green?

  Yeah. What's the news from Mars?

• 48:42Hank Green?

  Uh, well, wouldn't you know?

• 48:46Hank Green?

  It's still out there doing Mars stuff.

• 48:50John Green?

  It continues to orbit around the sun.

• 48:54Hank Green?

  And there's an orbiter orbiting around Mars as it orbits around the sun. It's called Mars Odyssey, and it got a rare glimpse of Erisia Mons, which is one of the biggest volcanoes in the solar system and also on Mars. It's around 12 miles tall and has a diameter of 270 miles. It's almost twice as big as the largest volcano on Earth, which is Mount Aloha. And the thing is, Erisia Mons is usually covered by clouds because there's air blowing up the sides and then it gets cooled and that forms clouds. And the clouds make it hard to get a picture of this volcano. But in early June, the orbiter was able to get a picture of the peak of the volcano through the clouds and you can go see it. And it's wild that like we've taken so many pictures of Mars,

• 49:38Hank Green?

  but to actually be able to see the top of this volcano is very rare.

• 49:42John Green?

  Wow.

• 49:43Hank Green?

  It's sticking out above the clouds.

• 49:45John Green?

  That's pretty crazy. That's hard to get my head around. I don't think of Mars as being that visually stimulating, I guess.

• 49:53Hank Green?

  Oh, it's changing. There's weird stuff about Mars.

• 49:57John Green?

  Wow.

• 49:57Hank Green?

  You know about the spiders?

• 49:59John Green?

  No.

• 50:00Hank Green?

  Not the David Bowie ones. Maybe I'll tell you about the spiders next week.

• 50:04John Green?

  And now I just want to state for the record that if there were spiders on Mars, as I understand spiders, that would be the biggest, that would be the moment where you get to spend the first 15 minutes of the podcast talking about the news from Mars.

• 50:19Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, that would be big. That would be, that would be big to, and also really unfortunate, you know? If like the first life that we found on another planet was very spider-like, I would be, I would be a little bummed. I'd be like, but are they cute at all? No? Okay.

• 50:38Hank Green?

  No, there are these, there are these things that happen on Mars. It's a geological thing that happens, but it's very weird and it is active. It happens every year.

• 50:47John Green?

  Wow, that's cool. Well, Hank, thank you for podding with me. Thanks to everybody for listening. And we're very grateful to the folks who help make us, help us make this podcast. And Hank is now going to read their names.

• 51:00Hank Green?

  I am, and they include Ben Swartout, who edited the podcast, Joseph Tunametish, who mixed it. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halsrohassam, Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Devoki Chakravarti. The music 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.