426: The Hank Green Twitter Memorial Garden

If John and Hank had to name something after each other, what would it be? Could a balloon make it to space? Are athletes offended by how we talk about them? Does a Bloody Mary actually help a hangover? Why do dogs smell like that when they’re wet? Do John and Hank watch each other's videos? …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. 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.

• 0:11John Green?

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

• 0:13Hank 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.

• 0:19John Green?

  John? Yeah.

• 0:20Hank Green?

  They robbed a calendar store and they got caught. Terrible news.

• 0:24John Green?

  Hmm.

• 0:24Hank Green?

  They each got six months.

• 0:28Hank Green?

  John, I recently, I was watching a Conan O'Brien podcast and he was talking on his Conan O'Brien podcast about the ads that he gets on Instagram reels. Do you get ads on Instagram reels?

• 0:39John Green?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:39Hank Green?

  I have never been served an ad.

• 0:43John Green?

  Wow, well, you are clearly a very special little boy. Congratulations.

• 0:47Hank Green?

  Well, what is it? I'm not specialer than Conan O'Brien.

• 0:51John Green?

  I assume that you've been somehow whitelisted as a user they do not want to show ads to. Maybe you're immune to advertising. You're not getting ads for the most, actually.

• 1:01Hank Green?

  What do you get? What do you get?

• 1:02John Green?

  I get ads for the Awesome Socks Club and Keats & Co Coffee and Tea. I would say every fifth reel.

• 1:10Hank Green?

  Yeah, well, they know, they know what you're into.

• 1:12John Green?

  Yeah, I mean, they know what I'm into, but I'm already a customer. You can't convert me a second time. It reminds me of the all time great Amazon toilet seat review where the person wrote, "Amazon's algorithm has become convinced that since I bought a toilet seat, I'm in the market for hundreds of toilet seats."

• 1:30Hank Green?

  It's hard to tell. And also, you could always buy more at good.store. It is, it is amazing the extent to which they identify your interests. For example, now when I go on, onto Twitter, which of course I never do and would never do.

• 1:44John Green?

  Oh, gross.

• 1:46Hank Green?

  It will, I'll get a bunch of content in addition to the, the sort of scum at the bottom of, of the barrel of humanity. I will occasionally get a piece of content about Hank Green and I'm like, boy, you know my interests.

• 2:00John Green?

  Oh, boy. Yeah. I mean,

• 2:02Hank Green?

  I used to, I had to search for that.

• 2:04John Green?

  What's it like to, uh, what's it like to be hanging out in the internet's worst cesspool?

• 2:11Hank Green?

  It's so bad.

• 2:11John Green?

  And that's saying something.

• 2:12Hank Green?

  It's so, it's so bad. It's scary. It, I mean, I don't want to talk about it. It is horrifying.

• 2:18John Green?

  Maybe. I'm just gonna throw it out there. You should stop going.

• 2:21Hank Green?

  Yeah. I do think that I am there largely to feel, feel sensations, like it provides sensations in ways that the other platforms don't. And by sensations, I mean fear, anger, disgust, outrage.

• 2:36John Green?

  All the major feelings that one seeks in life.

• 2:41Hank Green?

  It knows which ones I'm, I'm really looking for. I don't know. I don't know. I'd rather see a toilet seat advertisement.

• 2:48John Green?

  Oh, for sure. I'd rather, I, it'd be great if the internet was nothing but toilet seat advertisements. If they just replaced the entire thing with toilet seat ads. I feel like that would genuinely be a step up for society.

• 2:59Hank Green?

  Definitely. I mean, I don't see any, uh, strong signs that the near term influence of the internet has been, uh, good.

• 3:08John Green?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Hank Green?

  TikTok's really got me pegged as a guy who would like to build a small army of men to shoot zombies.

• 3:15John Green?

  Oh, they always giving you ads for those, uh, those mobile games?

• 3:19Hank Green?

  Yeah. And it's like, not this one. This one's a good one. And I'm like, I don't believe you. I believe if you, if you're paying this much money to acquire me as a customer, there isn't a way in which it's not going to extract a great deal of money from me once I download it.

• 3:32John Green?

  No, that's absolutely right. That's, that's the right impulse. And in general, that's always the case with advertising, except for when you're advertised items from good.store.

• 3:42Hank Green?

  One thing you know is that money is not gonna go to some guy somewhere. It's gonna go to make the world a better place and you're gonna get good stuff.

• 3:50John Green?

  We got that going for us. We are participating in a different kind of capitalism that I find a little less problematic, but only a little. Let's move on to a question from Raquel, who writes, Dear John and Hank, if you had to name something after your brother, what would it be? You can choose anything and the other brother cannot stop you. For the sake of names, Raquel. This is a great question.

• 4:11Hank Green?

  We've both already got one.

• 4:12John Green?

  What's named after me?

• 4:13Hank Green?

  Well, what do you think a John is?

• 4:15John Green?

  No, no, no, man. I'm not talking about a toilet or like any, they're saying like, if you could name a park after them, or a bridge, or anything on earth.

• 4:24Hank Green?

  Oh, well, I thought, I thought it was like a thing, like, like, do you know what a Hank is?

• 4:28John Green?

  Uh, isn't it an amount of yarn?

• 4:31Hank Green?

  It's an amount of yarn.

• 4:33John Green?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:34Hank Green?

  For a long time, if you Googled Hank Green, you'd get green yarn. I don't know why I would have Googled Hank Green so many times in my life.

• 4:41John Green?

  Yeah, it's not a great sign. I have to say that for many years I Googled John Green a lot. And then the internet broke me. It broke me like a wild horse that couldn't be broken. It taught me that in fact, I am not a buck and bronco. I am just another docile horse that is subservient to man. I completely gave in and do not Google myself anymore ever.

• 5:02Hank Green?

  For me, the internet, the, the, the horse that is the internet kicks me in the leg, shatters my femur.

• 5:08John Green?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Hank Green?

  My femur heals and I'm like, that's fine. And I will, I'll, it'll never happen again. And also this femur, strong as ever. And then it happens again. And I'm like, turns out the femur was not as strong as I thought. Yeah. Turns out, it turns out I still have some bone shards in there.

• 5:24John Green?

  Yeah. I think I would name Twitter Hank Green. I would name it Hank Green's social media service.

• 5:30Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 5:30John Green?

  And then Hank would be so inundated with Google messages, he could no longer successfully Google himself, which I really do think Hank, like one day you're going to come to me and you're going to say, I stopped Googling myself. And I'm going to be like, you did it. Like you achieved enlightenment. That was the last thing you needed to shed in order to become the truest version of yourself.

• 5:49Hank Green?

  John, I think that you, you know, those bananas that never turn green, but like, that's what they're never turn yellow. That's what they're supposed to do. And you like, eat like, you cook them a different way?

• 5:58John Green?

  Plantains?

• 6:01Hank Green?

  Maybe.

• 6:05Hank Green?

  It could be.

• 6:06John Green?

  Yeah, I know. I know about plantains.

• 6:08Hank Green?

  Well, those are John Green's now. Or maybe it's like a variety of plantains.

• 6:12John Green?

  Actually, I would love to name a park after you.

• 6:16Hank Green?

  Oh.

• 6:17John Green?

  But not, not in Missoula.

• 6:18Hank Green?

  Can I do, can we, can it be a really weird park? You know what I've always wanted to do, John?

• 6:22John Green?

  What?

• 6:23Hank Green?

  Can I tell you my idea?

• 6:24John Green?

  Oh, God, yes.

• 6:25Hank Green?

  So here's what I want to do. I want to create a sort of a contemplative walk. You know, like a labyrinth, you know, one of these places where it's just like you go to spend time with yourself in your mind. And in the same way, there's a place near Missoula called the, the Garden of a Thousand Buddhas. And it's a sort of like a contemplative walk place. And they have inscribed stones that have like Buddhist thoughts on them, you know, like,

• 6:51John Green?

  Fewer Buddhas than I would have expected at the Garden of a Thousand Buddhas.

• 6:54Hank Green?

  There's a thousand.

• 6:55John Green?

  Yeah, I guess that I didn't understand how small a number in the scheme of things 1,000 is.

• 7:00Hank Green?

  Yeah, yes.

• 7:01John Green?

  I was imagining just a, just a vast expanse that stretched out to the horizon of Buddhas.

• 7:06Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:07John Green?

  And I got sort of a solid acre of Buddhas.

• 7:11Hank Green?

  But it's a, it's a nice contemplative walk. And I like a nice contemplative walk. And I want one that's like in, just like sort of lovely and has, has features. But I also want the rocks to be inscribed with drill tweets.

• 7:28John Green?

  It's a bad idea. It's not a good idea.

• 7:30Hank Green?

  Or just like, maybe just like classic tweets. Just like, it's a, it's a memorial to Twitter, because I do actually grieve for it a little bit. I know that I'm weird. But I know that there are other people like this too, or at least one other person who is like this too, because I've talked with them about it. But, but I'd like, there's a, there's a, like in the same way that like Vine gets to live on, on TikTok and like Vine compilations and stuff. I'd like there to be like a physical manifestation of good, of like some good in quotation marks. They're not going to be Buddhist cones, you know? They're going to be dumb tweets, but like dumb tweets and like a celebration of like how dumb humans are. And I just want, I like want a memorial. I want a memorial to

• 8:13Hank Green?

  Twitter, which is the stupidest thing I've ever said. I hadn't really considered that that's what the thought actually was until I said it out loud. But that's what I want. I want a nice contemplative walk with dumb tweets inscribed into stones that line the walkway.

• 8:28John Green?

  What would some of those tweets be? Do you have any in mind?

• 8:30Hank Green?

  What about this one? Does anyone think global warming is a good thing? I love Lady Gaga. I think she's a really interesting artist. That was Britney Spears. In one tweet. Also Ed Balls. Like you just have Ed Balls. Do you know Ed Balls?

• 8:44John Green?

  No.

• 8:45Hank Green?

  Ed Balls is a British politician, I think. And he once tweeted the words Ed Balls, period. And that's the whole tweet.

• 8:54John Green?

  Yeah, I mean, I, again, I'm not sure that it's worthy of a memorial garden. I can think of greater things that we did as a culture that we should sort of, because that's what a memorial garden is all about, right? It's about lifting up the best of us.

• 9:07Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 9:08John Green?

  I guess I'm going to submit that Twitter was never the best of us and that you are remembering it that way.

• 9:14Hank Green?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 9:16John Green?

  Okay.

• 9:16Hank Green?

  No, I'm not. I don't think Twitter was ever the best of us. I think that we should mourn our idiocy. I think that we should celebrate the dumb little flaws of humanity. Like, we were given this tool to say anything we wanted in the whole world. And, but, and, look, 100%, one, one thing I know for sure is 200 years from now, Twitter will not be a thing. Microblogging will not be a thing. People will not do this anymore because they will have realized that it rots your brain and it rots society. We only remember yellow journalism for like the bad parts. But there's also stupid parts, dumb little parts of yellow journalism that just have been forgotten. And I want the dumb little parts of Twitter to have a little walk where you walk and you're like, God, we're dumb.

• 9:59John Green?

  All right, can I expand it?

• 10:01Hank Green?

  Yes, expand it.

• 10:02John Green?

  I actually think the problem is, is that you're so married to Twitter. And that lots of other people use Reddit or Tumblr or Facebook or Instagram. And I don't think any of this stuff is going to exist in 200 years.

• 10:14Hank Green?

  For sure. Yes.

• 10:15John Green?

  There might be a video sharing platform in 200 years, but I don't think there will be anything else.

• 10:21Hank Green?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 10:22John Green?

  My, my concept would be a memorial to the social internet. And I wouldn't make it only dumb fun things. I would also make it an overall memorial. The way when you go to like President Nixon's Presidential Library, they're like, yeah, I mean, he made some bad calls.

• 10:38Hank Green?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 10:39John Green?

  An overall memorial to the social internet as a way of saying also, this is over. We should stop.

• 10:46Hank Green?

  And we're all very sorry.

• 10:48John Green?

  We're sorry and we're, we're ending it. It's like, it's, it's like a memorial to cigarettes. Like this was fun. There was a lot to recommend this at the time and now that time is over.

• 10:58Hank Green?

  No, yeah, we, there was, there was a solid 300 years of tobacco smoking.

• 11:02John Green?

  And then there was like 50 years where we knew, but we didn't know, know, or we knew, but we hadn't accepted, which is the part that we're in now with the social internet.

• 11:11Hank Green?

  The Hank Green Memorial Twitter Park, but I'm not dead Twitteris.

• 11:18John Green?

  I like the parenthetical a lot. And then eventually you can just like scrape off the parenthetical when you do die.

• 11:25Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 11:26John Green?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a million dollar idea. It's great.

• 11:31Hank Green?

  I'll charge people to get in and I'll charge them cigarettes so that I can give them away to underage teens.

• 11:40John Green?

  Thereby capturing what Twitter was really, really good at, which was basically selling children Lucy's, metaphorical Lucy's, but that's what Twitter was the whole time. It was selling children Lucy's.

• 11:54Hank Green?

  Yeah. It's just like, would you like more cigarettes? Yeah, we have an infinite number. They won't provide you with feelings.

• 12:02John Green?

  Yeah, no, listen, there's 20, there's 20 cigarettes right here, but if you scroll down, there's 20 new ones forever.

• 12:09Hank Green?

  Put them in your brain. Let us decide what reality is for you. That'll be fine.

• 12:14John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's decide for you what you're going to feel today. You'll like it. Uh, you won't like it, but you'll like it. It'll be a really weird thing for you, but you're going to be into it. You're not going to be able to stop, so you must like it.

• 12:27Hank Green?

  What are we talking about?

• 12:28John Green?

  Being chronically online.

• 12:29Hank Green?

  This next question comes from gnome who asks, dear Hank and John, when a balloon gets released, how far up can it go? I'm guessing it may burn up at a certain point. Could a balloon theoretically be made structurally stable enough to make it all the way to space? What then? I hope this question blows you away. Gnome, great one, gnome.

• 12:47John Green?

  I got, I got an answer before you answer it.

• 12:49Hank Green?

  Hit me.

• 12:50John Green?

  I think a spaceship is essentially a slightly hardened balloon.

• 12:56Hank Green?

  No.

• 12:57John Green?

  Yeah, it's a balloon. It's a nice, it's a, it's a very fancy hard shell balloon.

• 13:03Hank Green?

  The defining factor of a helium balloon is that it rises because of buoyancy. The defining factor of a spaceship is that it rises because of rocket ship power.

• 13:14John Green?

  All right.

• 13:15Hank Green?

  That's a pretty, that's a pretty big difference.

• 13:17John Green?

  I've been proven wrong in a single sentence. Move on.

• 13:21Hank Green?

  I mean, this is so unlike Twitter for you to just accept being wrong about something. I really need you to push back on me, but like in the stupidest way possible.

• 13:28John Green?

  You want me to double down, but be like, be like balloons have nothing to do with helium?

• 13:34Hank Green?

  No, no, no. You gotta turn it back on me. You gotta be like, you gotta be like, so you're saying that it, that, that the only thing that matters is how you get higher in life?

• 13:42John Green?

  Hmm. What could be more privileged?

• 13:48Hank Green?

  So, uh, so the reason the balloons go up is because they're lighter than air. We know that.

• 13:53John Green?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Hank Green?

  So they're, they're not going to go up when the air is.

• 13:56John Green?

  Really, really light.

• 13:57Hank Green?

  Yeah. When, when, when they actually become more dense than the air. But what, what actually happens is that part of what's going on with a balloon is that the air like inside and the air outside are not totally equivalent. So blow up a balloon. There's actually more air on the more, there's more helium molecules on the inside than there are molecules on the outside. That's what's pushing the balloon outward. So it doesn't flop down. Pressure, pressure is actually higher inside. It's just that the molecules way less or the atoms, the particles way less. And then, uh, and as it goes up, the outside pressure gets lighter and lighter and lighter. And the balloon gets bigger and bigger and bigger because there's less pushing on it from the outside and more pushing on it from the inside until at a certain height, the balloon pops.

• 14:37Hank Green?

  And so you have to make, in order to like, one thing you'll see is like, when you do a, like a big old weather balloon to go really, really high up in the air. When it's low down, it doesn't look very big. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger as it gets higher. Because the air pressure around it is getting lower and lower. It's pushing on the balloon less. They have the same number of particles inside, but they are, look much more inflated. And then eventually that difference becomes so large that it will tear the balloon.

• 15:00John Green?

  So the guy who took a balloon to space and then jumped out of it and, and parachuted down to earth. Remember that guy?

• 15:06Hank Green?

  Uh huh.

• 15:07John Green?

  He just passed away.

• 15:08Hank Green?

  He did. I, I recently found that out.

• 15:11John Green?

  Point being.

• 15:12Hank Green?

  The Twitter and Felix bound Gardener Memorial Garden by Hank Green.

• 15:16John Green?

  I don't think you want that one. That guy was really radicalized by the social internet, actually, as it happens.

• 15:21Hank Green?

  Oh, no.

• 15:22John Green?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Hank Green?

  Really?

• 15:23John Green?

  For real. No, yeah, that's not a joke.

• 15:25Hank Green?

  Oh, my God. Okay.

• 15:27John Green?

  He's super disappointing. Point being, he was at the edge of space. He wasn't in space, right? Because you can't be in space.

• 15:32Hank Green?

  Oh, correct. For sure. Yeah, 100%. Not a guy.

• 15:35John Green?

  But he just, he came from very, very high up where you could see the curvature of the earth and everything, and then came down to what I consider to be earth.

• 15:43Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 15:44John Green?

  But in some ways, he was in earth the whole time because he was in our atmosphere still.

• 15:48Hank Green?

  Yeah, he was, he was just as much on earth as, as you when you're jumping.

• 15:52John Green?

  I mean, yeah.

• 15:56John Green?

  Sort of. I see, I see, I see what you mean.

• 16:00Hank Green?

  You know, it's pretty, it's pretty crazy that you can jump and then like the sky is under you.

• 16:05John Green?

  Yeah. No, you're basically parachuting out of an airplane every time you jump.

• 16:10Hank Green?

  And that's why John hates it so much.

• 16:12John Green?

  I don't love jumping. Not a fan. All right. This next question comes from Gwen, who writes, Dear John and Hank, but mostly John, can you please explain to me why so much of sports talk about players switching teams or retiring makes it sound like they are talking about like racehorses or something? Or like goods being traded? Are players offended by this? Should they be? It always sounds extremely weird to me as someone who does not partake of sports ball, P and P, Gwen. Now, Hank, you may remember when I, when I bought a player for AFC Wimbledon, I made a video that said, I bought a player for AFC Wimbledon. And a lot of people were like, whoa, there, that's messed up.

• 16:43Hank Green?

  It's, it's 2025. We don't buy people.

• 16:45John Green?

  Well, you can't be buying a player. And I was like, you're right. There is something wrong with the language, but there is also, there, there are two competing facts that we must hold in our head at the same time, which is that the player is an asset and the player is a person. An asset in the sense that their future playing has value to the economy. Uh, this is not just true of, of sports ball, by the way, right? This is also true of all of us. And a, and, and so if you've signed a 10 year contract, that, that some other company has to pay off in order for you to join their company, like that's, that's a trade of you as a human being, but also a trade of the, the value of your asset.

• 17:25John Green?

  Now, most of us don't sign those contracts because most of us don't work in those fields, but there are some fields like that. Some AI jobs are like that, et cetera.

• 17:31Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 17:32John Green?

  As for whether the players feel weird about it, I only have a couple of friends, real friends, who are professional athletes. And yes, they feel weird about it and also are like highly, highly cognizant of how messed up it is, that billionaires are trading millionaires for their physical assets. That like, yes, that is, that is a super weird phenomenon of the 21st century that didn't really exist in the same way before the big sports era.

• 18:00Hank Green?

  Now, like, Right.

• 18:01John Green?

  As a result, a lot of player contracts are much higher than they used to be. So like, if you're in the fourth or third division of English football, you make a pretty good living, which was not the case 20 years ago. But there is something very weird about the idea of like, the rights to you as a player being like a saleable asset. Like, that is weird that we should, we should be bothered by that, I think.

• 18:22Hank Green?

  Is there a way to do it that's not that?

• 18:24John Green?

  Yeah, I think the way to do it that's not that is to have, and this would not work, just to be clear. But if players had complete freedom of movement and signed like one game contracts, or like you got paid per game, then that, that would solve the problem. Then you could go wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted for more money or whatever. But like, that would create its own set of problems and would not be very practical. So I think this way benefits players in a lot of ways, especially in sports that have good contracts with their owners, or in sports like football, where the owners are always at risk because of the prospect of relegation. But like, the owners have to be able to experience

• 19:05John Green?

  some risk one way or another in order to motivate a good market, right? So like, it's one of my issues with, say, American football, is that often NFL players are underpaid relative to their value in part because there is no like second NFL that you could go to.

• 19:22Hank Green?

  Right.

• 19:23John Green?

  There's like much inferior professional leagues like the CFL, but in, in soccer, you know, La Liga is almost as good as the English Premier League, and the league in Italy is almost as good, and the league in Germany is almost as good. And there's lots of different ways to make a living. And so you can kind of pressure the market that way.

• 19:39Hank Green?

  Are there a lot of German players in English football?

• 19:42John Green?

  There are increasingly, because now the English Premier League is so much bigger than all those other leagues that like, People are moving over like Florian Wirtz, who just became a player for Liverpool, for instance. So yeah, it is weird, Gwen. I don't think you should think that it's not weird, but I also think that to Hank's point, there's no easy way to make it better. You know, I mean, already like most, most professional football leagues in the US have pretty strong unions that can collectively bargain. I think in the case of the NFL, they need to collectively bargain a little more aggressively, but like there is still significant advantage to those contracts. But yeah, my friends who are, my friends who are professional footballers all think that it's weird.

• 20:21Hank Green?

  That's so interesting. I would have expected that you just sort of like, well, this is how things are. And, and like, you know, if you get traded to a better team, that that's really exciting. You sign a new contract. That's like a kind of dream come true situation.

• 20:33John Green?

  Oh, I think it absolutely is. I, I think it absolutely is, but I think there's something weird about the idea of your rights being like, and, and, and players in, in England, players have way more control over where they go. A lot of, not, not all the time, but usually they have more control in where they go. So they have some say in where they go. Like in, in baseball, you can just find out one day like, oh, you've been assigned to the Red Sox and also you're no longer a major league baseball player. You're now playing for their minor league team. Like that can just happen to you one day.

• 21:01Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah. Hockey, it's always funny like that when a new hockey player is like traded to the team, they always do like an interview with them and they're like, so why are you excited to move to Seattle? And they're like, ah, I mean, why am I excited to like get my kids out of their school and drive them across the country? Like, and like deal with all of the fallout and my wife losing all of her friends and, and me like having to make a bunch of new friends. Like, I don't really care about Seattle. Like I, I had a life, but they have to like fake it, you know, they have to be like, oh, it's Seattle, the Space Needle, all the things that I've heard about Seattle, I guess. But you're just a, you're a hockey player. So you're doing what you're doing.

• 21:40John Green?

  It's even more brutal. It's even more brutal when they come to a new third tier English football club, Hank, where they have to be like, yeah, I mean, I haven't really caught up on the history yet, um, of whinging town bulges.

• 21:56John Green?

  But I hear that the, uh, the Winjingtown Bulges fans are like no other fans in the country. I'm so excited to get started working here at Winjingtown.

• 22:07Hank Green?

  No, the full name of the town is Windington Bulges.

• 22:10John Green?

  Oh, okay. I see. Windington Bulges. So it's the Windington Bulges Wanderers is the name of the football club.

• 22:15Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 22:18John Green?

  What do you think they, what do you think was the sort of historical, uh, trade in Windington Bulges? Do you think it was cobbling, shoemaking?

• 22:27Hank Green?

  Yeah, no, it was a, it was, it was, uh, it was a quarry town. Um, so Windington is at the, is the town. And then there's a suburb called Windington Bulges where the quarries are.

• 22:39John Green?

  And that's where the football club is located because of course.

• 22:42Hank Green?

  Well, one of them.

• 22:43John Green?

  Yeah, their great rival is Wind, is Windington, Windington.

• 22:47Hank Green?

  Windington South.

• 22:48John Green?

  Windington South, Windy, Windington Wednesday, uh, who of course play fun rarely on Saturdays as, as it goes in English football. That reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by Windington Bulges Wanderers FC. Windington Bulges Wanderer FC. It has never been a better time to get a season ticket.

• 23:07Hank Green?

  This podcast is also brought to you by the Hank Green Memorial Twitter Garden. Twitter is dead, not me.

• 23:12John Green?

  For now. And today's podcast is brought to you by balloons that go almost to space, but literally can't go to space. That's a metaphor.

• 23:19Hank Green?

  And finally, this podcast is brought to you by Good Store. Good Store, sending advertisements to John Green and money to Partners in Health.

• 23:27John Green?

  Hank, we got another question from Clarissa who writes, Dear John and Hank, does a Bloody Mary actually ease your hangover? Doesn't the body take a while to process that alcohol? Is it all placebo? Hoping you'll explain it all. Clarissa. P S. Hi from the Philippines. Thanks for your tuberculosis advocacy. I moved to London and nobody there talks about TB and I hope one day that'll be true back home. That's very nice. Thank you. I can't wait to go to the Philippines next month.

• 23:46Hank Green?

  Oh, what, what?

• 23:48John Green?

  Yeah, for some TB advocacy work.

• 23:50Hank Green?

  Amazing. Enjoy.

• 23:51John Green?

  I'm excited. The only downside is that it is literally 12 hours time difference. So it does not matter if you go left or right when you are leaving from Indianapolis because it's about the same flight length.

• 24:04Hank Green?

  I hate Bloody Marys.

• 24:06John Green?

  Oh, yeah, me too. They're disgusting.

• 24:07Hank Green?

  Like, if you'd given me a billion years and all of the ingredients in the world and said, "Make a bunch of cocktails," I never would have got to the tomato soup with vodka one.

• 24:17John Green?

  Yeah, no, absolutely. There is some truth to the hair of the dog, Hank, that if you-

• 24:24Hank Green?

  Yeah, kind of. I mean, in the way that it makes you feel everything less.

• 24:29John Green?

  Do you want to talk about a dangerous game?

• 24:35John Green?

  Forget Twitter.

• 24:36Hank Green?

  Continuously eating dog hairs from dogs that do bite you?

• 24:40John Green?

  Hair of the dog is a dangerous game. So I would, I generally recommend, now, some people say that there's B vitamins in the Worcestershire sauce, and that's the key, because it supports brain function, and there's electrolytes in the tomato juice and whatever, whatever. But the truth is-

• 24:55Hank Green?

  You could have a Gatorade with a B vitamin.

• 24:59John Green?

  There you go.

• 25:00Hank Green?

  Like, that's on the table. That's, that is also available to you.

• 25:03John Green?

  Yeah, I think that's the best strategy. In general, the best strategy, and I learned this from my best friend, Chris Waters, who told me once, we were at a party and I was, I was reaching for a beer, and we were, he was like, "Let's leave in like 10 minutes." And I was like, "Perfect." And so I reached for a beer, and he said, "You know, nobody ever regrets not having the last beer."

• 25:20Hank Green?

  Especially if you're about to leave, because the beer is to help with the party. If you're leaving the party, you should not still be drinking.

• 25:25John Green?

  Agreed. Absolutely agreed. Not only that, if you take that to its logical conclusion, the first beer is the last beer. Nobody ever regretted not having zero beers.

• 25:35Hank Green?

  As a person who has not been drinking much in the last few years, I can say, there are parts of it I miss.

• 25:43John Green?

  Yeah, the kind of socialization lubricant function.

• 25:45Hank Green?

  Yeah, largely that. Yeah. There's also just sort of a pleasant, happy feeling that you can get if the stars align.

• 25:55John Green?

  Oh, you gotta be real careful to ride that line.

• 25:57Hank Green?

  Doesn't happen every time. And that, that makes it, that's just like casino vibes. Like, yeah, perfect, I'm gonna pull the lever and see.

• 26:05John Green?

  I do love a casino.

• 26:07Hank Green?

  Yeah. I don't, but I love other kinds of similar things.

• 26:11John Green?

  You love Twitter, which is the ultimate casino.

• 26:14Hank Green?

  And, and this whole job that we have.

• 26:17John Green?

  That's true. A lot of randomized rewards in our career, for better or worse.

• 26:22Hank Green?

  It's real weird, real weird.

• 26:24John Green?

  It's a real, uh.

• 26:25Hank Green?

  Randomized punishment, too. What if you went to a casino and like every 30th pull you won and every 60th pull it kicked you in the nuts?

• 26:33John Green?

  I think people would still go to the casino because uh.

• 26:35Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:36John Green?

  What actually happens is that people have a very negative experience when they lose money.

• 26:39Hank Green?

  Like, yeah.

• 26:41John Green?

  You do kinda get kicked in the nuts.

• 26:42Hank Green?

  That's a good point.

• 26:43John Green?

  Nine times out of 10.

• 26:44Hank Green?

  Yeah. So alcohol's a little bit like that. Uh, there is some, there's so like, obviously alcohol can dull your sensations, so that that could be done for you. Uh, but there's Tylenol as well that's available. And and there is something to like spicy food, maybe for a hangover to just like.

• 27:00John Green?

  Hmm.

• 27:01Hank Green?

  Get you out of it for a second. It's it's sort of a.

• 27:04John Green?

  Just give you a different discomfort.

• 27:06Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like horseradish can be good at that, where it's just, uh, get your brain focused on something else. But I'll tell you what my favorite hangover cure is, is, uh, one, not getting them. Uh, but then if I do, two, sleep. If I can make that happen. I love, I love to sleep.

• 27:23John Green?

  I enjoy a large breakfast.

• 27:25Hank Green?

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Toast.

• 27:26John Green?

  Followed by a long nap.

• 27:28Hank Green?

  Uh huh.

• 27:30John Green?

  Yeah. But in general, yeah, I just, I I haven't gotten a lot of hangovers in the last like 10 years, thankfully. But when I do get them, oh, it's like a two day experience now.

• 27:38Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:40John Green?

  All right, Hank, I got another question from you from Laurel, who says, Dear John and Hank, but probably mostly Hank if we're being honest. Laurel, you underestimate me. Why do dogs smell like that when they're wet? Every time I give my dog a bath, it's followed by three hours of that classic wet dog smell. I call it the Fritos smell, Laurel, because it smells exactly like Fritos.

• 27:56Hank Green?

  Oh, no, different smell. That's a, that's the dog foot smell. Dog wet smells a totally different smell, does not smell like Fritos.

• 28:03John Green?

  Wet dog smells like Fritos. End of, end of sentence. I have a dog, you don't.

• 28:08Hank Green?

  We're smelling different dogs.

• 28:09John Green?

  Clearly. Uh, shouldn't he smell good after having a bath? I don't smell musty and weird and like a Frito when I get out of the shower. So why does my dog, thanks, barks in baths, Laurel?

• 28:19Hank Green?

  Does Laurel say that it smells like a Frito?

• 28:21John Green?

  No, I added that for myself.

• 28:22Hank Green?

  Okay, just making sure, because I think you're wrong.

• 28:25John Green?

  Everyone is gonna write in to say dogs, wet dogs smell like Fritos, and I don't wanna deal with all that extra.

• 28:31Hank Green?

  Smell like Fritos. Dog paws smell like Fritos for sure.

• 28:34John Green?

  Yeah, because dog paws are always a little wet.

• 28:39John Green?

  Is there a reason for this, Hank, that you know of?

• 28:42Hank Green?

  Yeah, I mean, dogs have, look, they have a lot more hair than us. They got a lot. They make a must, they make a musky smell that is a communication between dogs. So, but yeah, there's a bunch of stuff going on there that is probably intentionally evolved in order for dogs to be able to communicate.

• 29:04John Green?

  All right. Well, that's helpful. So there you go. They smell like that too, because they like to sniff at each other.

• 29:10Hank Green?

  Yeah. And they got, they got, if you'd like to know, there's some short chain fatty acids. That can smell kind of sour and a little bit like gross, like

• 29:20John Green?

  It's mostly salty.

• 29:21Hank Green?

  And then there's like an earthy musty smell, which is, that's from bacteria on them that produced that in the same way that a lot of our body odor smells made by bacteria. And there's also some yeast byproducts that you're smelling. So does that make it better?

• 29:38John Green?

  No, but thank you for sharing.

• 29:40Hank Green?

  This next question comes from Ismar, who asks, Dear John and Hank, I'm an avid fan of the work you do. However, due to how busy life can get, sometimes I miss videos on your personal channel and I don't watch either of your shorts or TikToks because I don't watch shorts or TikToks. But when I was watching Hank's latest video on Hank's channel, I was wondering, do you watch all of each other's videos that are not made or posted on the Vlogbrothers channel? No, it isn't Mar, Ismar. John?

• 30:07John Green?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Hank Green?

  No.

• 30:10John Green?

  No.

• 30:12Hank Green?

  I watch all the Vlogbrothers videos.

• 30:13John Green?

  I do too. I watch all, I even watched your 20 minute Vlogbrothers video.

• 30:17Hank Green?

  Sorry about that.

• 30:18John Green?

  Well, it has 2.8 million views, so it's hard to complain. I watched all of that. I watch all Vlogbrothers videos and I have since 2007. I would say I watch most Hank's channel videos, like when the topic interests me, which it usually does because it's my brother and so I'm interested. But I wouldn't say I've watched every Hank's channel video. And then I would say I watch about 3% of Hank's TikToks.

• 30:41Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't, I watch John's TikToks when they come across my feed. I'm not going to tiktok.com/jongreen, whatever it is. What's your TikTok?

• 30:51John Green?

  Point being, you don't even know that I haven't made a TikTok in three months, I assume.

• 30:55Hank Green?

  No, no, no, no.

• 30:57John Green?

  That would surprise you.

• 30:58Hank Green?

  Well, it wouldn't surprise me, but it's not something that I, if you could have told me that you've made, you've made six in the last week and I would be just as not surprised.

• 31:08John Green?

  Right, yeah. So I, I stopped making TikToks, actually. And I, I may start again at some point, but for now, I'm not, I'm just not really interested in it. Like, I just don't feel the pull. And unlike Hank, I don't feel an obligation to participate in social media platforms that aren't giving me much back.

• 31:27Hank Green?

  Yeah, as a citizen of the internet, it's a crampy time.

• 31:31John Green?

  I don't know, I don't know, you mean like nervous making, or?

• 31:34Hank Green?

  I guess I was thinking, it makes me want to poop, you know, digestive cramps.

• 31:38John Green?

  Oh, okay.

• 31:40Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 31:40John Green?

  I mean, I, I've honestly felt that way since about 2016. So.

• 31:44Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 31:45John Green?

  It's nothing new for me. At any rate, there's no TikToks of mine to watch, Ismar, so you're not missing out on anything there. There's John's channel live streams where I play FIFA with my buddy Stan. You're not missing out much there either.

• 31:58Hank Green?

  Yeah, I don't, I've, I've not watched many of those.

• 32:02John Green?

  And, yeah, yeah. So that, there you go. That's about the situation. I'm trying to make stuff right now, like Hank is, we're kind of at an interesting crossroads. I don't know that we've articulated this to each other, but I think we're at an interesting crossroads where I'm trying to make stuff for like extremely small audiences that I'm really interested in, you know, like through the secret Patreon or through John's channel or whatever. And you're trying to do like mass media communication about science, which I think are two different but equally valid responses to this moment.

• 32:42Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The less valid thing, which I was thinking about trying to do some in the past is like, uh, participation in the discourse.

• 32:50John Green?

  Yeah.

• 32:51Hank Green?

  Which is just, I don't know, I just feel so helpless about it now.

• 32:54John Green?

  I don't know if it's very productive is the problem. I might be wrong. It doesn't feel productive to me right now. But maybe it is.

• 33:02Hank Green?

  I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to, like, it's just so boxed in on all sides. But yeah, I, I continue to be excited about the, my ability to be a professional science communicator, which is really great. It's a great job.

• 33:15John Green?

  It's a good job.

• 33:16Hank Green?

  But it's, it can be tricky. Here it is. I'm not like, I'm not always sure what the difference between a Hank's Channel video and a Vlogbrothers video is. I think that this is the problem I've set up for myself. And so like, what really determines whether it's a Hank's Channel video or Vlogbrothers video is like whether I have to upload a Vlogbrothers video that day. Often, not always. There's stuff that I wouldn't put on, on Hank's Channel.

• 33:35John Green?

  Right.

• 33:36Hank Green?

  But there, but there's nothing that I put on Hank's Channel that wouldn't be a good Vlogbrothers video, you know? We've done everything. It's not like there's a lane there.

• 33:43John Green?

  Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a community focus that isn't on Hank's Channel as much.

• 33:48Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 33:49John Green?

  You know, part of building community sometimes is getting videos that get lots of views. I was just looking at our analytics and, I mean, it's really become an interesting divide. Like, I still make videos that get a lot of views, but in terms of people who aren't regular nerd fighters, something like 85% of the views that come in, come in from your videos, which is really interesting. But I, but I think it works. Like, I think like, you target the broader audience and like, some of those people stay, and I target the people who stay. I like it. It's working for me.

• 34:22Hank Green?

  You definitely, like, it wasn't always that way. You definitely, back in the day, loved to make a video that would get a bunch of views.

• 34:29John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm writing, I'm writing one now that's not going to get a bunch of views, but that's about how I still care about views and I can't break myself of this habit.

• 34:37Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 34:38John Green?

  The truth is, Hank, like, we are not YouTubers in the traditional sense in a lot of ways, but like, actually, in most of the ways, we are. We are very much YouTubers. We care about attention. We compete in the attention economy. We want to get views. We want to get people to watch and like and care about our stuff and like.

• 34:53Hank Green?

  We like, we want, there's a bunch of YouTubers that I like care what they think about our content, you know?

• 34:59John Green?

  Hmm, that's interesting. I don't, I don't feel that way, but that's interesting. I mean, I, I, I care what they think about the project. I don't care what they think about an individual video.

• 35:08Hank Green?

  Okay, yeah.

• 35:09John Green?

  But yeah, I've been, I've, I've been, I've been wrestling a lot recently with the question of, why did I want this so badly? And when I got it, why did I hate it so much?

• 35:20Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 35:20John Green?

  It being fame and, and, and outside attention. And I think I've gotten to the core of why I wanted it so much. You know, I didn't have it as a kid. I was lonely. I wanted to be popular, all that stuff. But I don't think I've gotten to the core of why I found it so unpleasant and sort of repulsive. And at the same time intoxicating, right? Like it's much closer to my relationship with cigarettes, you know, than it is my relationship with anything else where like I'm grossed out by it and like horrified by my desire for attention, but at the same time intoxicated by the attention itself.

• 35:59John Green?

  And that's, that's a hard thing to like untangle or disentangle from everything, all my other motivations, you know? Like, I don't know how to, I don't know how to separate out those motivations all the time.

• 36:10Hank Green?

  Interesting. I don't have the same negative vibes around it.

• 36:15John Green?

  I know, I know, which I find admirable, but you also don't mind the attention as much.

• 36:20Hank Green?

  Right. Yeah. And I, I find those two things inseparable, like the fact that I don't mind the attention, plus the fact that I want the attention that those are related, but you're saying that you, you want the attention, but don't like it.

• 36:32John Green?

  I always wanted it and I like it a lot less than I thought I would. How's that?

• 36:37Hank Green?

  Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That totally makes sense. Things are not what they, what, what you think they are going to be.

• 36:42John Green?

  No, for sure. And like, I'm very grateful for the attention. Um, I really am like it's, it's enabled a lot of wonderful things to happen in my life. And I'm, I'm super grateful for it. And so that's part of what makes it so complicated to also find it unpleasant. Let's move on to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, since I didn't expect to get so confessional. Fortunately, no one misses until the end of the pod.

• 37:04John Green?

  What's the news from Mars this week, Hank?

• 37:06Hank Green?

  I don't know. I, I've, I'm just very like, there's only, so we record these.

• 37:11John Green?

  You can't get two, you can't get two weeks of news out of the fact that there's probably life on Mars?

• 37:16Hank Green?

  I mean, they're so like, the, the thing is that these, that our, our episodes are currently coming out substantially delayed. So when Mars is actually in the news, it feels weird because, uh, because people are like, yeah, no, I, I heard about that many weeks ago. But yeah, no, that's, that's where my brain's at. Kind of the news from Mars is a little bit how the news from Mars has been covered, which I think it's been pretty good.

• 37:41John Green?

  Yeah. I was going to say, most people aren't saying like, this is irrefutable proof of life on Mars. But at the same time, they're saying this is a really big deal.

• 37:48Hank Green?

  It's a little weird that NASA is currently being run by the transportation. Secretary because there is no administrator of NASA because it's not functioning super smooth over there. Not in NASA, but in Washington generally. And so that's a little strange to have like Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy get up and tell us about life on Mars. But he didn't do a terrible job of going through it and you know. It's been interesting to see everybody's kinds of takes, you know, like, like the different levels of communication and like, what are we going to talk about? Like, what's the, are we talking to people who have some understanding of chemistry, no understanding of chemistry? And, and the other piece of news from Mars is I saw this video about like, you know, the, the news.

• 38:33Hank Green?

  Got a lot of views. Wild to me how it's always such an education when a piece of content gets a lot of views because there will be people in the comments like. When I said, like, when you say life on Mars, I mean, like, dogs and stuff. I don't care if there's microbes on Mars. And I'm like, wow, I am so far away from where you're at. Yeah. Microbes on Mars is actually would be extremely, just so you know, that would be very big news. But a lot of people are sort of like, that's not actually.

• 39:03John Green?

  But I think it's important to understand why it's huge news. And maybe you just assume that because it's been a huge deal to you for your entire adult life. But it would be a huge deal because we've never established life anywhere else but Earth.

• 39:15Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 39:15John Green?

  And it would also imply that life is in fact either really, really common. Or else life is co-evolved from Mars and Earth.

• 39:27Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah. So either life is very common or life is able to travel between planets.

• 39:31John Green?

  Both of which would be huge deals.

• 39:33Hank Green?

  Yes.

• 39:33John Green?

  No, that's a huge deal. That's, I would argue a bigger deal than the news from AFC Wimbledon.

• 39:40Hank Green?

  I agree. It's a big deal. So what's going on? What's, I, I texted you.

• 39:46John Green?

  Yeah. Because you know what's going on at AFC Wimbledon because you're a fan now, whether you like it or not.

• 39:51Hank Green?

  And I went, you know, I opened Google and it knows I care about AFC Wimbledon and it was like, here's the score of the game that's happening right now. I was like, oh, they're down by one. That game's over. And then I opened it two hours later and they won by two. They went from one nil down to two one up.

• 40:08John Green?

  They won by one, but yes, they won. And

• 40:10Hank Green?

  Yeah, they got two goals.

• 40:11John Green?

  You weren't wrong for thinking that going one nil down meant the game was over since we had not come from behind to win a game in 600 days.

• 40:20Hank Green?

  Oh, my God. Are you serious?

• 40:22John Green?

  So it had been a while. I think that's right. I only read it on Blue Sky, so it might be wrong, but I think it's right. Anyway, it's been a while is the point. And AFC Wimbledon went one nil down on a very annoying goal in a very bad first half. I mean, we played a terrible first half. I was frankly disgusted. And then in the second half, we played great. Jake Reeves, our captain, our talisman, gave us a goal back to tie the game. And then Matt Matty Stevens won a dubious penalty and we he finished the penalty and we won the game 2-1. And I had forgotten what it feels like to come from behind. It was so exciting. I was thrilled for the fellas. Like, they had also forgotten that it was possible to win

• 41:05John Green?

  after losing. They are now in 11th place. And I mean, stop the count, Hank. Let's just end the season right now. 11th place would be amazing. Be stupid good. 12 points after eight games. We probably need about 51 points to stay up. So we're on our way. We're on our way. If we certainly if we kept this up for the rest of the season, we would be easily safe. But the expectation is that things will take a turn at some point. But for now, we're playing great.

• 41:32Hank Green?

  Playing great. This podcast would not exist without questions sent to Hank and John at gmail.com. So thank you to everybody who sends you questions. It's always a pleasure to read them. This podcast, it's edited by Ben Swartout. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna Medich. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halsro Haas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Tim Bucicravardi. 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,

• 42:00John Green?

  Don't forget to be awesome.