430: A Yawn Across Time

Would it be harder to swim in lava or water? Why do I have one long white hair that grows from my face cheek? What would the stars look like if I were moving faster than light, like the Enterprise in Star Trek? What role do John and Hank play with Partners In Health? How does gravity impact digestion? What is the longest length of time a yawn has been spread? Why is everything so hard? Can you quell my fears about AI? …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.

• 0:12John Green?

  Or 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. John?

• 0:22John Green?

  Yeah.

• 0:23Hank Green?

  Every morning, every morning, I'm going out of the house, I'm taking Orr into school, I get hit by a bike. It's a vicious cycle.

• 0:31John Green?

  You know, I actually did get hit by a bike once. A bike messenger hit me.

• 0:34Hank Green?

  I know.

• 0:34John Green?

  And I never quite recovered from it. My, my mouth has never been the same since he hit me with his shoulder to my face. I broke my nose, I got a concussion and...

• 0:45Hank Green?

  Teeth, teeth problems.

• 0:46John Green?

  And teeth problems that have lasted for the last 20 years. That was 2003, I believe.

• 0:51Hank Green?

  Once there's teeth problems, man, it is hard to not have teeth problems.

• 0:55John Green?

  Yeah. Hank, can I tell you what I did this morning before work that was much better than my usual strategy of scrolling?

• 1:03Hank Green?

  What'd you do?

• 1:04John Green?

  I made hot sauce with your mother.

• 1:06Hank Green?

  Oh.

• 1:08John Green?

  And we just like cut up the peppers and we chatted and we put the peppers in the blender and we, we did all the salt and everything so that they can ferment over the next two weeks and then we put them all in the, in the, in the jars and it was great. Why don't I do that every, why don't I do something like that every day where I see someone early in the morning from like six to eight?

• 1:28Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 1:28John Green?

  Why don't I do that?

• 1:29Hank Green?

  That sounds nice.

• 1:30John Green?

  Or exercise or do something other than scrolling.

• 1:33Hank Green?

  I don't know. It's hard to get out of bed. That's part of it. Like, you know, we're, we're, we've got our, our, our experiences, you know, and they're happening at a fairly deep level. And one of our experiences is don't get out of this thing. This is great in here.

• 1:45John Green?

  Yeah.

• 1:46Hank Green?

  Well, you do need something, but like right next to you is a thing that contains the universe. So grab onto that.

• 1:53John Green?

  Well, it feels like it contains the universe. It actually contains a very small slice of the universe.

• 1:58Hank Green?

  That's what my lizard brain thinks. I do, can I tell you about my new strategy?

• 2:02John Green?

  Yeah, please.

• 2:03Hank Green?

  So far, it's been working pretty well.

• 2:04John Green?

  Please.

• 2:05Hank Green?

  So I've, I've set my phone to block all of the major social media apps, but I still need them as part of my, like, I need to DM people if nothing else. And so what I've done is I've set it to block them. But then there's like a little ignore your time limit for the day thing. But I only ever set it to let me ignore it for 15 minutes because what happens is I go out to DM a friend. And then I'm in the app and they know this. This is why they've done it this way. I'm in the app and I'm like, well, I can't leave now. The whole universe is in here. Who knows what's behind door number two? So I opened door number two and then 15 minutes later, it's like, that was your 15 minutes, bud. And I could extend it. There's a button that lets you extend it, but at least it reminds me

• 2:47Hank Green?

  that like, I've been doing this for 15 minutes and stops me from doing it for another 15 or 45 minute like session on one of these apps where I'm like trying to like, my subconscious brain is like, avoid work. Work is hard. Work is bad. Just scroll. Particularly, it's worked well with the, uh, the Twitters and the, and the blue skies and the threads.

• 3:08John Green?

  I don't even know how to get DMs on those apps. Um, I, I can't, I can't log into my Twitter anymore. Rosiana changed the password so that neither of us know it, which I think is kind of brilliant because when Rosiana knew it, I would just badger her until she would tell it to me. But now neither of us know it. And so it's over. My relationship with that John Green has come to an end.

• 3:28Hank Green?

  I, I've been thinking about whether I should delete all of my old tweets.

• 3:32John Green?

  Oh, I did that. It felt great. I, I backed them up so that I have them for posterity.

• 3:37Hank Green?

  You have a posterity folder somewhere?

• 3:39John Green?

  In case anybody ever comes.

• 3:41Hank Green?

  You should sell a DVD. You should sell a DVD of your tweets. Like, go to dfdba.com and buy John Green's tweets on a thumb drive.

• 3:50John Green?

  I mean, I looked at some of them from like 2000, you know, I mean, I was tweeting for a long time.

• 3:55Hank Green?

  Oh, yeah. I used to tweet and I'd be getting like 20 likes.

• 3:59John Green?

  Yeah. And I'd feel great about that.

• 4:00Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 4:01John Green?

  My tweets from like 2009, just do not hold up was my overall impression. And I was really glad that nobody like combed through those 2009 tweets.

• 4:10Hank Green?

  That's a big, that's a big concern that I have because, because it used to be that it was like really hard to comb through somebody's tweets. But now you can just like ask an AI and say like, hey, AI, go find anything this person has ever said that could make someone angry.

• 4:22John Green?

  Yeah.

• 4:23Hank Green?

  And I love that. That's a great fun world.

• 4:26John Green?

  You should absolutely delete all your old tweets. It feels amazing. It feels even better than when you delete a post right after posting it. I've been doing this on Tumblr a lot where I'll, I'll tumble something. And then I'll immediately delete it and people. Be like, why did you delete it? And I'd be like, because the moment it became stressful and unfun, I deleted it, which felt great.

• 4:45Hank Green?

  I used to make TikToks that had a set time limit and people loved that. It'd be like, this TikTok is just for the people who are here this hour.

• 4:53John Green?

  So Hank and I are trying to embrace the slow internet. But one thing I've heard from a lot of our listeners is that they use this podcast to embrace the slow internet. And it doesn't actually help them to hear us whining all day about our scrolling problem.

• 5:04Hank Green?

  Absolutely true. If I hear somebody say the word Twitter, I'm like, I gotta check Twitter. It's amazing.

• 5:09John Green?

  Really? Oh, when I hear somebody say the word Twitter, I feel a physical revulsion.

• 5:12Hank Green?

  Well, I get it more with TikTok than Twitter. I'll be honest. I used to get it with.

• 5:16John Green?

  I don't, I'm not on TikTok either. I, I, something inside of me broke and I don't think it can ever be fixed. Hank, can I ask you a question?

• 5:23Hank Green?

  Yeah, please.

• 5:24John Green?

  It's from M who writes, Dear John and Hank, assuming I'm fireproof, how much harder would it be to swim in lava than water? Appreciate you, M. Now Hank, before you answer this question with science, I think I know the answer.

• 5:37Hank Green?

  Okay, I, I, I, there is a definite answer.

• 5:40John Green?

  I think it would be utterly impossible because my understanding is that it basically has the same density of rock. It's just really, really hot, so it's liquid.

• 5:49Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah. Like if you like, like stewed on lava, you might sink into it a little bit. But if you laid on lava, you would just lay, you'd just be laying on lava.

• 5:58John Green?

  Hmm.

• 5:59Hank Green?

  Like laying on a bed, but hotter.

• 6:01John Green?

  Like if you could like, like you could push your fingers into it because you would be putting a lot of pressure on a very small area. So you'd be increasing the pounds per square inch.

• 6:09Hank Green?

  You couldn't swim. There's too much of you for swimming.

• 6:12John Green?

  You would, so if you're, if you're fireproof.

• 6:15Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 6:15John Green?

  One thing that's important to note is that you've, you've basically eliminated physics from the equation. So you're saying like, it doesn't matter how hot I am. So we could also just make you the same density as rock. And then you could swim in lava because we're basically the same density as water, a little different, but.

• 6:31Hank Green?

  And we actually, one of the fun things about water, you can change your density so that you can sink or you can float.

• 6:36John Green?

  Inhale and exhale. Yeah. So that's fun. So basically you could make it like that, like it's like that for rock and it would still be much harder to swim in rock because of the viscosity or in lava because of the viscosity. So water, obviously, you've seen it. It doesn't hold it's hold together as as thickly as maple syrup, but maple syrup holds itself together much less thickly than lava.

• 6:56Hank Green?

  Right, right. Could you swim in maple syrup if you needed to?

• 6:59John Green?

  I don't think you could.

• 7:00Hank Green?

  You can go watch YouTube videos of people trying, which is amazing.

• 7:04John Green?

  Okay, of course you can. Of course you can.

• 7:07Hank Green?

  I don't know if it's maple syrup, but like people swim in liquids of different density to get views. Why wouldn't you?

• 7:13John Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Hank Green?

  Like if somebody put an outdoor swimming pool of of corn syrup in front of me, I'd try to swim in it. Absolutely. Butter, melted butter, oil.

• 7:21John Green?

  Yep.

• 7:21Hank Green?

  I, yeah, absolutely. And with the with the process of getting myself back to my natural state via pain, yeah, but like.

• 7:28John Green?

  Would you do it for the views or would you do it for the experience? I think, and I'm just going to tell you what I think your deepest heart is. I think you would do it for the views.

• 7:37Hank Green?

  I'd do it for both, you know? I do it for the, I do it for three things. I do it for the views. I do it for the experience. And I do it because there'd be other people around egging me on.

• 7:48John Green?

  Right.

• 7:49Hank Green?

  Once somebody eggs me on, there's a, there's sort of a lot that I'll do, you know, which is what a lot of the first year of Law Brothers was. You can't say that's not true of you, Mr. I waxed my chin and ate a blenderized Happy Meal.

• 8:00John Green?

  Oh, Hank, I wanted views so bad.

• 8:04Hank Green?

  Oh, you're a different man now.

• 8:05John Green?

  Nobody wanted to be famous more than I did in 2003. I wanted to be famous more than I wanted anything in the world. I would have sacrificed my family for it. Not you, but you know, the parents, they're not listening. They can't keep up with all the stuff that we make. There's no way that they're listening right now. I would not have actually sacrificed you, mom and dad.

• 8:24Hank Green?

  Good.

• 8:25John Green?

  But I would have sacrificed a lot to get famous. But then I got famous enough and I found out that there's no oxygen at the top of the mountain. It's not fun up there. It doesn't feel good. And I don't want to go back.

• 8:37Hank Green?

  There's a Jimmy Carr quote that's like, everybody's jealous of of where you are, but nobody's jealous of how you got there. And I'm like, actually, opposite.

• 8:45John Green?

  Yes.

• 8:46Hank Green?

  Like, I'm jealous of how I got here, but less jealous of where I am. My path to the top was actually quite fun.

• 8:55John Green?

  Yeah, no, lots of good times.

• 8:57Hank Green?

  But since the higher it has gotten, it has gotten harder and harder. Yeah.

• 9:01John Green?

  Yeah, because there's no oxygen up there.

• 9:03Hank Green?

  Oh, God, what does that mean? Tell me what that means to you.

• 9:06John Green?

  Well, when you go up to the top of Mount Everest, I don't know if you know about this.

• 9:09Hank Green?

  No, no, no, no, I know, I know about.

• 9:13Hank Green?

  I know about how there's no air, but what does, what does, what does it mean to have there be no air at the top of the fame pyramid?

• 9:18John Green?

  The higher you go up the mountain, the less oxygen there is, the harder it is to breathe, the more stressful it is, the fewer people who are up there with you, the less time you feel like it's sustainable to be up there, all that stuff. The more people who are like, what the hell is wrong with this person going to the top of the mountain? They must have made some deal with the devil. There's all kinds of things that I don't like about being at the top of the mountain. Now, being on the other side of the mountain.

• 9:43Hank Green?

  Oh, oh, so you can, it isn't just up and then back down?

• 9:47John Green?

  No, no, you go down the other side.

• 9:48Hank Green?

  Because you're changed by the mountain. Where you are is different.

• 9:55John Green?

  You're changed by the mountain. And so on the other side of the mountain, I actually, I find it pleasant over here, but I have too many memories of what it was like on top of the mountain. And so if, for instance, my brother announces that there is a nearby mountain peak that he would like to summit, I'm like, mm, I don't love it for him.

• 10:13Hank Green?

  Oh, I thought you might be a little like, should I go with him?

• 10:17John Green?

  Oh, no, no, no, no buddy.

• 10:22Hank Green?

  I thought that might be where we were headed, but that's not where we were headed.

• 10:26John Green?

  No, I just worry about, I worry about you up there.

• 10:28Hank Green?

  You're like, do you have enough oxygen tanks?

• 10:30John Green?

  Yeah, you don't have oxygen tanks. You're going up there raw.

• 10:36Hank Green?

  But I've got all the experience from the previous summits.

• 10:39John Green?

  That's true. You watched me summit and you were like, that looks fun. I'll do that.

• 10:43Hank Green?

  There is a lot of our career that is like you doing something and then being like, this isn't that great. And me being like, I will do it too.

• 10:52John Green?

  I'll try it. I'll bet I'd like it.

• 10:54Hank Green?

  It must be better than even John thinks it is.

• 10:57John Green?

  Well, you, to be fair, handle that stuff better than I do. I think you have naturally more lung capacity than I do, to extend this metaphor to absurd degrees.

• 11:06Hank Green?

  I think that my, as does tend to occur, my lung capacity has decreased with age.

• 11:11John Green?

  Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, down here on the other side of the mountain, it's not bad. It's not bad at all. The only thing that I miss about being like properly in the center of pop culture famous is that I wish that when that had happened, I'd been obsessed with tuberculosis. But of course, if I'd been obsessed with tuberculosis, that wouldn't have happened. So anyway, you can't swim in lava.

• 11:34Hank Green?

  Anyway, you can't swim in lava. Another lesson that we all need to learn as humans. This next question comes from Morgan, who asks, Dear John and Hank and Hank and John, why do I have one weird, long, paper, white hair that grows out of my face cheek?

• 11:52Hank Green?

  I have one that grows from my collarbone, too, and my wife has one that grows out of their forehead. So I know it is not just me, but why? It had to be like an inch or two before I noticed. It must grow really fast. Only a mild inconvenience, but our bodies are so weird. Harry Pumpkins and fairy penguins, Morgan.

• 12:09John Green?

  Yeah. What you, what do you think, Hank?

• 12:13Hank Green?

  You know, the, you're right. Our bodies are so weird. I mean, the basic answer, John, is that we're 30 trillion cells all working together and listening to each other in a bizarre and silent symphony of chemicals. And what, what a cell does, like, remember back when you were one cell?

• 12:30John Green?

  Vividly.

• 12:31Hank Green?

  And then like every cell that came later had to decide what part of a body it was going to be.

• 12:38John Green?

  Right.

• 12:38Hank Green?

  And then some parts became like meter long neurons and other parts became like the epithelium of the colon. And those are all very different things. Like if your skin cells were like your lung cells, you would be wet and sticky and dead. The system that controls what turns into what and like, like, you know, as simple as like, like the skin on my forehead is very similar to the skin on the top of my head. But like, there's a difference in that, like a bunch of hairs come out of the ones on the top of the head. And also there are hairs on the forehead. They just start like really small and different. So it's very strange. And, and one of the sort of cutting edge spaces of biology that we still are trying to understand, and sometimes things go a little bit weird.

• 13:22Hank Green?

  And you get like a weird hair that comes out of your collarbone or your middle of your forehead. And those hairs oftentimes are different. This is hilarious. For whatever reason, your computer thinks you're giving me a thumbs down constantly.

• 13:37John Green?

  Oh, sorry. I'll move my hand.

• 13:40Hank Green?

  I'm like, he doesn't like it, but, but I look at your actual hand, you're not doing a thumbs down at all. Like in what way? The like, like sometimes it gives me balloons and I don't even know how to do balloons.

• 13:50John Green?

  Yeah.

• 13:51Hank Green?

  It never works when you, when you're trying to make it work.

• 13:54John Green?

  Right. Oh, you just got fireworks.

• 13:57Hank Green?

  Did I?

• 13:58John Green?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Hank Green?

  What I was trying to do, I was trying to thumbs up.

• 14:00John Green?

  Well, you got fireworks instead. Your whole screen turned black and it went full, full fireworks. I have one of these hairs. It's up here in my upper cheek, halfway between my eye and my beard. And I love pulling it. I love, I don't know what it, it's a little bit of pain, but it's the right amount of pain for me, buddy.

• 14:18Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 14:19John Green?

  And I love pulling on it. So I don't shave it or anything because I'm always waiting for it to grow long enough that I can tug it out. So it's good to know that I'm not alone. There's Morgan, Morgan's wife and me.

• 14:30Hank Green?

  I got one eyebrow that just goes forever and Catherine loves yanking that boy out.

• 14:34John Green?

  Oh yeah, those are fun ones too.

• 14:35Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 14:36John Green?

  All right. Hair is weird. Bodies are weird. We're 30 trillion cells in a complicated symphony. And if all of our cells were the same, we would be wet, what and dead?

• 14:45Hank Green?

  I don't remember what I said.

• 14:47John Green?

  It was great.

• 14:47Hank Green?

  Said, I might've just said wet and dead.

• 14:50John Green?

  That's also what you would be like, by the way, if you tried to swim in lava.

• 14:55Hank Green?

  Wait, what?

• 14:56John Green?

  Yeah, you'd be wet and dead.

• 14:58Hank Green?

  I'd be wet with lava? Hold on. No.

• 15:01John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

• 15:02Hank Green?

  I'm not, I'm not allowing that to pass.

• 15:04John Green?

  Well, it's true.

• 15:05Hank Green?

  You can't be, lava cannot make you wet. Oil can't make you wet.

• 15:08John Green?

  It's a liquid.

• 15:09Hank Green?

  Hmm. I feel like ethanol can make you wet, which is interesting.

• 15:13John Green?

  Yeah. No, any liquid can make you wet. Liquid nitrogen can make you wet. They all make you wet.

• 15:18Hank Green?

  No.

• 15:19John Green?

  Yeah. If you went swimming in liquid nitrogen, you would also get wet. Everyone knows this.

• 15:24Hank Green?

  We're gonna need, I'm gonna need to do a poll.

• 15:28Hank Green?

  Do other.

• 15:29John Green?

  Your proposal is that only certain liquids can make.

• 15:31Hank Green?

  Only water makes you wet.

• 15:33John Green?

  No, that's dumb. That's dumb. If I pour, if I pour vodka on myself, I'm, I am wet.

• 15:38Hank Green?

  Yeah. Because 60% of that vodka's water.

• 15:41John Green?

  If I pour Everclear on myself, I'm wet.

• 15:44Hank Green?

  No. Yes.

• 15:46John Green?

  I am, I'm sure.

• 15:47Hank Green?

  No, but like still, there's like 20% of that's water.

• 15:51John Green?

  No, no, like 3% of it is water, buddy. That's some high quality alcohol they got through Everclear.

• 15:56Hank Green?

  That's for chemistry. That's not for food.

• 15:58John Green?

  I agree. I had a one shot of Everclear in my life and it was more than enough.

• 16:03Hank Green?

  I did too. We, but it was for like a SciShow shoot. Again, I was being egged on.

• 16:08John Green?

  You do love being egged on.

• 16:10Hank Green?

  I, I, yeah, I, I did, I used to do, we used to do a bunch of like weird props to fun SciShow. But yeah, I, I did a shot of Everclear for SciShow and it made me very drunk.

• 16:19John Green?

  Yeah, no, it's got a lot of alcohol in it.

• 16:21Hank Green?

  This is a problem. I like, I have, I can't work anymore, but I also can't go home.

• 16:25John Green?

  If you pour hydrogen peroxide on yourself, or you pour alcohol on yourself, you get wet. That is a fact, because any liquid can make you wet.

• 16:35Hank Green?

  I feel like any liquid that makes you cold makes you wet.

• 16:39John Green?

  That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

• 16:40Hank Green?

  Well, it's not because you can't detect wetness. You can only detect the sensations of wetness, which include the evaporation that happens when a more volatile substance like water or ethanol is on your skin. When the warmer molecules evaporate away and the, what's left behind is the colder molecules. And you've experienced that as the coolness of wetness.

• 17:05John Green?

  No, you can be warm and wet.

• 17:06Hank Green?

  Wetness is something that happens in your consciousness. It is not something that happens physically in the world.

• 17:12John Green?

  It's something that happens to my hair, I'm pretty sure.

• 17:15Hank Green?

  No, that's actually true. So, okay, now we're picturing a shirt.

• 17:20John Green?

  Yes.

• 17:20Hank Green?

  With oil on it. That shirt is not wet. That shirt has stain.

• 17:26John Green?

  No, if it has enough oil, it's wet. Trust me.

• 17:29Hank Green?

  Wet with oil?

• 17:30John Green?

  Yeah, wet with oil. It's wet with olive oil.

• 17:34Hank Green?

  Wet with oil.

• 17:36John Green?

  Are you Googling it? Are you asking Google what, what Google's AI thinks about being wet with oil?

• 17:41Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 17:42John Green?

  Hank, I just have to say something about AI very briefly. And I apologize if this is going to offend a portion of our audience. And we can go back to the wetness issue, but I hope you say this very briefly.

• 17:51Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 17:51John Green?

  We are mammals, okay?

• 17:57Hank Green?

  We are mammals and it's not speciesist to think that we should survive.

• 18:02John Green?

  We are mammals. AI is not a mammal. I think this is a very important distinction. I was in a conversation about AI recently and all these people were having all these highfalutin conversations about it and I was like, "You, you guys are mammals." You have a, you have a deep brain that experienced sensations. You are an experiencer.

• 18:21Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 18:22John Green?

  You can get wet.

• 18:26Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 18:27John Green?

  With oil or liquid nitrogen or any liquid because that is the nature of getting wetness.

• 18:32Hank Green?

  Don't get wet with lava. Don't get, absolutely do not get wet with lava.

• 18:36John Green?

  You will be wet and dead. All right, we got a question from Sydney. It's a science question. This one's for you, Hank. Dear John and Hank, but mostly Hank. "In Star Trek, when the Enterprise is traveling faster than light, the stars appear as little white orbs that move past the ship without streaking or doing anything weird, which doesn't seem right to me. Wouldn't there not be any stars because the light they're emitting wouldn't be able to catch up to the Enterprise? Or would they be moving past so many stars so quickly that the light is sort of everywhere and the view of the ship is pure white? Would it look more like weird light tunnel that happens in hyperdrive from Star Wars? Do we have any way of knowing Pumpkins and Penguins, Sydney?"

• 19:07Hank Green?

  I mean, I don't know.

• 19:11John Green?

  You don't know? Oh, I thought, I thought you and Devoki would research the heck out of this question. This is a perfect question.

• 19:16Hank Green?

  We had to reschedule this podcast so Devoki and I didn't get a chance to talk.

• 19:19John Green?

  Oh, I mean, there's no way you know.

• 19:22Hank Green?

  I can give you, I can, I can give you a thought.

• 19:24John Green?

  We have a lot of physicists who want, we over, we overindex on physicists.

• 19:29Hank Green?

  And also we overindex on Hank Green should know the answer to every question.

• 19:33John Green?

  We do.

• 19:34Hank Green?

  So let's turn it back on the audience.

• 19:36John Green?

  Physicists, especially astrophysicists, tell us the answer. What would it look like if we were traveling on the Enterprise faster than light, which we know we can't do, but if we could, what would it look like?

• 19:47Hank Green?

  Come back to the next episode of Dear Hank and John for the answer to that question. I love this. I love this. This is-

• 19:53John Green?

  This is great. This is great.

• 19:54Hank Green?

  We gotta turn it back on the audience.

• 19:55John Green?

  This is once an episode.

• 19:56Hank Green?

  We should do it once an episode. All right. Our next question comes from Ava, who asks, "Dear Hank and John, Lumela from the Mountain Kingdom, I am a Peace Corps Vol- Volunteer serving in the health sector in Lesotho. My clinic regularly partners with Partners in Health. And I've realized that I actually do not understand the role you all play. Are you board members, contractors, very fancy donors, or another role? This is a great question. Yeah. It's a little bit of all and none. What is your official role within PIH? Actually, I think, John, you do have one. I'd love to better understand how some of my favorite creators work in our shared field. Not a gardener, Ava.

• 20:34John Green?

  Great, great, and a specific sign off. So I am on the Board of Trustees of Partners in Health and have been for a few years. Hank is not.

• 20:41Hank Green?

  I'm just some guy.

• 20:43John Green?

  Hank is a, I would say, designer of fundraising techniques for Partners in Health. And also a major donor.

• 20:51Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 20:51John Green?

  So we both donate some money every year, but the most, the lion's share of the money that gets donated from the community comes through Good Store and the Keats and Co. And the Awesome Socks Club and other stuff that we do.

• 21:06Hank Green?

  Yeah, every year, there's like a large pool of anonymous and non-anonymous donors. And we are, we are among the anonymous donors during the Project for Awesome. And then we also donate separately during specific campaigns.

• 21:18John Green?

  So we're mostly very fancy donors, but we do work some, work with them some on strategy and communications and marketing with their marketing team, talking about storytelling, stuff like that. So we get to, we get to work with them in broad, interesting ways, which is really fun for us. But the, I think the most important thing we do is raise money.

• 21:37Hank Green?

  What is a Board of Trustees?

• 21:39John Green?

  You got me, man. I mean, I, I don't know. I go, I go to a meeting twice a year. There's a lot of nice people there. They have bagels in the morning. And PIH has an interesting board because I think it's the board of people who look after the health of the charity, broadly speaking. But the PIH has an interesting board because a number of people on the board are patients or people who have been served by, at PIH sites. People who've worked on PH sites, not just in the health part of it, but in maybe transportation or some other part of it. And so it's a really cool board because you meet lots of interesting people from all over the world. I'm happy to be on it. It's nice to be able to meet with folks who are really working on system-wide change throughout

• 22:24John Green?

  the year. It's really encouraging to me and a great reminder. And if anything, I think like, part of what I wish could happen and maybe will happen down the road is I wish like, everyone could get the kind of updates that I get from PH's sites, because it's super encouraging, even in difficult times, to see how people are finding ways to work together, work with governments, work with other folks like, um, like Ava. And it actually makes you feel not hopeful exactly, but less hopeless to engage deeply with problems, in my experience. So I wish everyone could have that, because I, I do feel like sometimes, like, you know, my engagement with most issues is so relatively superficial, because I'm

• 23:06John Green?

  just following it online, or whatever. Like, my engagement, for instance, with, I don't know, a problem like climate change, is, is relatively superficial. I'm following it through Hank, I'm following it online, I'm following it through news stories, but I'm not like, in the meetings with the people who are really trying to drive down carbon emissions. And if I were, I think I would feel a mix of more frustrated, but also more hopeful.

• 23:31Hank Green?

  Well, maybe a couple of years ago, that's how you'd feel.

• 23:35John Green?

  But now I just feel hopeless. That's also kind of the case.

• 23:37Hank Green?

  You certainly feel frustrated. I mean, it's always very hard when you're moving backward, you know?

• 23:41John Green?

  Yes, for sure.

• 23:42Hank Green?

  And, and in a weird way, this might resonate with you in, in terms of global health, but the, like, progress continues to be made, uh, but, but it is a mix of past action, that is still having an effect in the world. And it is because of, in climate, um, to some extent, like, simply, you know, market forces.

• 24:03John Green?

  The incentives have changed.

• 24:04Hank Green?

  Yeah, like ultimately, you know, solar, like a solar power plant can make money. And so people build them to make money. There isn't, it isn't like, it's, it's just that the technology has gotten better. And also like, we're benefiting from the climate decisions of China a lot. So the Chinese government subsidizes uh, the development of these technologies, which is driven down the prices a lot, uh, batteries and solar panels particularly. And, you know, one of the wild things is the current administration is actively anti-green energy, anti-electric vehicles, anti-charging stations, anti-everything. But this year, there will be more charging stations installed in America than any other year previously. And at the end of the year, 35% of the charging stations in America will have been built in the last 12 months.

• 24:49John Green?

  Wow. That is mind blowing. But that's just because people think they can make money.

• 24:54Hank Green?

  It's partially because people think they can make money. And it's partially because when you pass legislation, that makes it easier to make charging stations, that money takes forever to get out into the world. And so for the last, for the like four years of the Biden administration, it's just like, that's how long it took for the projects to get planned and approved and the money to get dispersed. And now they're being built.

• 25:15John Green?

  Right, right. That does resonate very deeply with global health. The only thing is that the incentives aren't changing nearly fast enough in global health. Whereas they are changing fairly quickly in climate.

• 25:25Hank Green?

  Yeah, ultimately, in terms of energy, they're changing quite quickly. There's a lot of other climate problems that, that don't have the, that don't have the incentives lined up as well.

• 25:34John Green?

  Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the incentives. The incentives not sponsoring any podcasts despite being a really powerful force in our world.

• 25:44Hank Green?

  Yeah, incentives doesn't actually have to buy.

• 25:47John Green?

  It doesn't have to buy ads.

• 25:49Hank Green?

  To be the most important force in the world.

• 25:51John Green?

  It wins every time.

• 25:53Hank Green?

  Oh, man. The incentives are there when you wake up in the morning. The incentives are there. When, when you're in the Peace Corps in the suit too.

• 26:02John Green?

  They're tucking you into bed every night.

• 26:05Hank Green?

  This podcast is also brought to you by that one hair. That one hair. What's going on? Stop reminding me that I'm just a bunch of cells.

• 26:14John Green?

  Today's podcast is also brought to you by mammals. Mammals, we are one.

• 26:19Hank Green?

  And this podcast is brought to you by Wet and Dead. Wet and Dead. That's what you'd be without cell differentiation.

• 26:26John Green?

  And indeed, if you jumped into lava.

• 26:31Hank Green?

  I mean, definitely not. It just doesn't feel wet in there.

• 26:34John Green?

  All right, Hank, we got an interesting question from Sarah. I don't know if you know the answer to this one, but I thought it was pretty fascinating. Dear John and Hank, how does gravity impact digestion? I can't help but know digestion tends to go downwards, or at least down toward the center of the earth, as does gravity. I feel like there's got to be something there where gravity is at least helping a little. If I were upside down all the time or in space, would I digest differently? Pumpkins and penguins, Sarah.

• 26:58Hank Green?

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of people kind of intuitively feel like if you were just hung by your feet, that you wouldn't digest at all. Like, very obviously, the food starts at the top and then goes to the bottom.

• 27:07John Green?

  No, but there's a lot of muscles involved. I know this because of my own motility challenges. So there's definitely a lot of muscle contraction involved.

• 27:16Hank Green?

  Yeah, so there's this thing called peristalsis, which you experience a little bit when you're swallowing. So you can sort of feel the beginning of peristalsis.

• 27:23John Green?

  I just felt it.

• 27:24Hank Green?

  Which is, is imagine milking a cow udder, except that happens to your entire digestive system and the muscles of your digestive system do it.

• 27:34John Green?

  Hmm, I'd rather not use that metaphor.

• 27:37Hank Green?

  Okay, well, that's basically what is happening, and it pushes the food through. And it's part of what causes the noises that your digestive system makes. And when you're having an intestinal cramp, that's the peristalsis locking in place and just like grabbing constantly and pushing really hard. So you know that the feeling of a of a peristalsis cramp. But that does not mean that it is, that gravity isn't part of it. And in fact, digestion is harder in space, which adds to the unpleasantness of being in microgravity. So the stomach contents especially can float.

• 28:16John Green?

  Oh, God.

• 28:17Hank Green?

  So that means that burping can be dangerous.

• 28:20John Green?

  Oh, panic at the disco. Panic, panic, panic.

• 28:22Hank Green?

  And heartburn is more common. Why would anyone?

• 28:26John Green?

  Oh, I recently met an astronaut.

• 28:30Hank Green?

  Uh huh.

• 28:30John Green?

  And it was so obvious to me that she was fundamentally different from me.

• 28:36Hank Green?

  Like in a deep, profound way. Every astronaut I've ever met, I was like, oh, you're, you're like, you're like a kind of American that I, I don't meet.

• 28:45John Green?

  Right.

• 28:46Hank Green?

  Not only are you unlike me, you're unlike everyone I know.

• 28:49John Green?

  Yeah, fundamentally.

• 28:51Hank Green?

  Yeah, ju- just like, like the, a kind of what seems to me a very healthy ambition that I'm unfamiliar with in my work. Like, all of the people I know who are ambitious are not healthily ambitious the way that astronauts seem to be.

• 29:05John Green?

  Yeah, or Peace Corps volunteers.

• 29:07Hank Green?

  Yeah, you know, what we should do more of a- as Americans is the Peace Corps.

• 29:13John Green?

  We should do more volunteerism in general, but yes, I agree.

• 29:18Hank Green?

  It's a great, like, way of continuing to build yourself, you know?

• 29:21John Green?

  Yeah. What do you think the chances are that I'll go to space?

• 29:25Hank Green?

  Zero.

• 29:26John Green?

  You really think so?

• 29:28Hank Green?

  Well, I mean, I, I think that there's some below zero possibility that, like, death will get solved sometime in the next 40 years. And you will live for a thousand years, at which point it will be a very low stakes thing to go to the moon.

• 29:42John Green?

  The idea that it's more likely that we're going to solve death than I'm going to go to space on my own in my natural lifetime is fascinating to me.

• 29:51Hank Green?

  That, well, that seems right to you, doesn't it?

• 29:53John Green?

  Probably, although I can see space travel getting vastly safer and becoming like intercontinental flight within the next 40 years as well. And then I might do.

• 30:01Hank Green?

  I mean, let me tell you that I don't think that we can handle the carbon impact of that form of travel.

• 30:07John Green?

  Great, well, then I won't do it. Um, I'm out. I already create way too much carbon because of my obsession with AFC Wimbledon.

• 30:13Hank Green?

  That's right.

• 30:14John Green?

  Let's move on to this question from Jess who writes, Dear John and Hank, I started listening to the podcast a few weeks ago and just got to episode 56 when Hank's child announcement is made along with John's Snickers announcement. You'll recall that I received 450 something Snickers the same time you revealed that you were going to have a child. And I was basically equally excited about both. During the AFC Wimbledon news segment, Hank was understandably yawning. Try not to take that personally. And this caused me to yawn 10 years later. My question is, what do you think is the longest length of time a yawn has been spread? And given that you guys sometimes edit your own content, have you ever caused yourself to yawn across time, Jess?

• 30:50Hank Green?

  Oh, I've definitely caused myself to yawn across time. I, you know, I scrub through the yawns pretty regularly. Like, I don't tend to watch the parts where I'm not talking when I'm editing a video, but it has happened.

• 31:02John Green?

  I'm sure it's happened to me, too.

• 31:03Hank Green?

  Over a thousand videos, so.

• 31:05John Green?

  So we know, we know there's an outer limit on the longest period of time a yawn has caused someone to yawn, right? It's gotta be like 1920.

• 31:12Hank Green?

  Yeah, but it's gonna keep getting longer. We have to go and find an old yawn.

• 31:17John Green?

  Yeah, I think you gotta find the original yawn, the first time somebody yawned. And, and you've got to be able to yawn audibly, right? So like, that's its own complexity, because yawning on a 1905 phonograph is not gonna sound like a yawn. It's gonna sound like nothing.

• 31:33Hank Green?

  Hmm, you're right.

• 31:35John Green?

  So you gotta have like a really good audible yawn. I think we're talking about 1920s, probably, in terms of movies. You probably have a good audible or, and visual yawn by the late 1920s. And so we've maybe got a hundred-year gap between contagious yawns. That's exciting.

• 31:54Hank Green?

  But also, like, as, as we continue to develop, like, that, it'll be, you know, if humans can hold on, we'll have, like, 10,000-year yawns. What yawns? Yawns. But also, John, it, it isn't, it isn't just hearing a yawn. You can read about a yawn, and it can make you wanna yawn.

• 32:11John Green?

  You can read about a yawn, so it could be Beowulf.

• 32:15Hank Green?

  We gotta, we gotta, let's make sure that Beowulf didn't yawn ever in there.

• 32:18John Green?

  It's gotta be literature's first yawn. Is that true, that you can get a contagious yawn from just reading about a yawn?

• 32:25Hank Green?

  Oh, yeah. I've been holding one back since we started this question.

• 32:29John Green?

  I've been holding one back, too.

• 32:32John Green?

  I am quite tired.

• 32:33Hank Green?

  So, so yeah, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta stretch way back before the phonograph. And also, what about this, John? What if all yawns are actually contagious yawns?

• 32:45John Green?

  What if in some ways we're responding to the first yawn?

• 32:49Hank Green?

  Yeah, there was some monkey that yawned.

• 32:52John Green?

  I want to yawn so bad right now. I almost did it. Almost did it. Had to hold it in.

• 32:58Hank Green?

  Holy, yeah, we're working hard over here.

• 33:00John Green?

  Yeah. I'm suddenly aware of my own fatigue. I could take a nap right now.

• 33:05Hank Green?

  I'm having a wakeful yawn.

• 33:06John Green?

  Yeah, I don't have a ton of those. All right. This is fascinating. It goes back to the first, the longest time is all the time that, since the first yawn by the first primate. That's Hank's theory.

• 33:18Hank Green?

  Well, that could be, but I think that if anybody knows of some classic literature yawns deep in, in, you know, Cervantes or Bealof or something.

• 33:29John Green?

  Yeah. Yeah, let us know what the first yawn in literature was.

• 33:32Hank Green?

  Did Gilgamesh ever yawn? I bet he did.

• 33:34John Green?

  Did Gilgamesh yawn? Are there yawns in the Bible? Are there old school yawns is our question? Send us your oldest yawn and we'll see if it makes us yawn. We'll try to set a new world record.

• 33:49John Green?

  All right. Tara writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm a relatively fresh listener. In order to catch up on the decade of episodes I've missed, I randomly scroll and select each time.

• 33:56Hank Green?

  What if we're getting a bunch of fresh listeners?

• 33:58John Green?

  Yeah, this has led me to transporting different passages of time simply through the voices of two middle aged American men.

• 34:03Hank Green?

  Oh, my God.

• 34:04John Green?

  I was gonna take that personally, Tara, but then I realized I can't.

• 34:07Hank Green?

  Soon enough, John, you'll be like, middle aged? Why, thank you.

• 34:10John Green?

  Today I found myself in 2017, listening to both you being very optimistic, particularly about the freedoms and growth we as a society have seen and will see. In 2025, it seems these outlooks are hard to come by. My question to you is, how do we approach opinions of such a large scale changing? Is fear from backlash a factor in the Stark Division politically? And lastly, why is everything so hard? A rat backwards, Tara. So I actually think that we have to hold competing ideas in our mind at the same time. Like, we have to hold the idea that poverty is going to go down this year and that fewer children will die this year than any year in the last 8,000 years. We have to hold that idea. That is real. That is exciting. That is the result of millions of humans, maybe billions of humans, working together to make the world suck less, with

• 34:55John Green?

  the fact that in many ways, things are getting worse.

• 34:57Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 34:57John Green?

  We have to hold those two facts together, and I don't know how to hold them together because the shininess of "in many ways, things are getting worse," which is very true. Like, the things are genuinely getting worse, really for the first time in my lifetime. You know, we've seen American life expectancy go down three or four years in a row. We've seen, I mean, it's bouncing back now, but like, only because it got so low. We've seen gains in healthcare equity stall out and in some cases be reversed. We may see childhood mortality go up, probably not in the next couple of years, but to Hank's point earlier, that these things take a long time after policy changes to really start to see the effects. We may see it in three or four years. And so, things are getting worse, and yet, when

• 35:41John Green?

  I graduated from high school or college, which I see as the great golden age of human history, in the 90s or 2000s, 12 million children were dying under the age of five every year, and last year, fewer than 5 million did. Like, so how do we hold those things together? I don't know, but we have to.

• 35:57Hank Green?

  There's also, and I don't know if this is worth the time it's going to take to say, but there are a lot of people who think things are bad that just actually aren't that bad. Like, there are things that are bad that we think are worse than they are.

• 36:11John Green?

  Oh, interesting.

• 36:12Hank Green?

  I was watching this video. It just popped up on my YouTube. I was watching this video, and this guy makes an offhanded comment that like, you know, say, there's obviously a lot of hard things about the Third World, but at least they eat real food.

• 36:25John Green?

  Oh, no, that's a bad take.

• 36:27Hank Green?

  And I was like, I was like, what's, what?

• 36:30John Green?

  That's a bad take on a lot of levels. The use of the phrase "Third World" is the beginning of the bad take.

• 36:35Hank Green?

  It was from start to end, and it was a very sort of progressive-ish feeling video. And, and... It it made me think about, you know, there's two stories about like food and health in America. And and the one that is like being told right now is our food is poisoning us. And and the other one is, this is the first time in human history that plenty has been the problem. And that has been the case for maybe fifty years.

• 37:04John Green?

  Right.

• 37:05Hank Green?

  And so we're not good at it yet, and we're getting better at it. We're figuring it out, but but like the first thing we figured out is how to have enough food. And like, for ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of human history, that's not the situation we were in. Almost everyone was food insecure. And the the immediate flip from, okay, we we have enough food to the biggest problem in the world is that is our unhealthy relationship with all of these foods that we have now engineered to be hyper palatable. And, uh, you know, the capitalist push toward making something that you literally cannot resist. Like, that's a problem, but like, it's it's a kind of an understandable problem, given

• 37:41John Green?

  Yeah.

• 37:42Hank Green?

  the the situation that we have ended up in. And it also seems like a solvable problem if we interface with it as a problem and not as like us being poisoned. And I just like, I feel like there's a lot of people walking around feeling as if every aspect of modern life is a harm that has been perpetrated on us.

• 37:59John Green?

  Right. Instead of a series of choices that we made for, in some cases, bad reasons for sure, but in some cases, really good reasons. Like, we had a green revolution that, you know, led to way, way more food being available. And that was really good news for humanity. It was really good news for the number of children who die. It was really good news for the number of people who are experiencing misery day to day. And to me, the failure of that revolution was that now we have plenty and we do a bad job of distributing those resources, such that there are still lots of people who go hungry every day. Now, that's a failure, and it's a huge failure. And it's, to Hank's point, a failure that sort of by definition is only been around for the last fifty years.

• 38:45John Green?

  But we need to understand that like the the progress is also real like the the new problem is a difficult problem and it is it is a horrifying problem in many ways, but it is better than the problem that we replaced it with.

• 39:00Hank Green?

  Right, right. The new problem is created by the old solution. Like, climate change is a is a problem largely of providing people with things they wanted. Um, I think at this point, not anymore. Like, we could, we could have moved past that by now. But, you know, the the first, you know, like, I'm glad of refrigerators, you know?

• 39:20John Green?

  Oh, me too. I mean, talk about food security. Nothing spells food security like a refrigerator that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I mean,

• 39:27Hank Green?

  And like, we just haven't, we just, of course, we don't think about it.

• 39:30John Green?

  Well, those of us who have access to refrigerators don't think about it, but yeah, lots of people don't. So that's, uh, that's our hopeful message is that we are going to create new problems with new solutions, but those new problems will hopefully be better than the old problems.

• 39:45Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 39:45John Green?

  Sometimes I think we make problems, we create solutions, and then the solution is actually worse than the previous problem. I think that happens as well. I think that's happened some with social discourse, with attempts to address loneliness. Uh, I think we've seen some of that, but I also think that a lot of times when we're solving a problem, we create a new problem that's not as bad.

• 40:06Hank Green?

  Yeah. I think there's a lot of, uh, solving problems that don't really exist going on. Solving the problems of the subconscious's immediate needs rather than the whole need, but...

• 40:16John Green?

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, we don't like to be uncomfortable. We don't like to be bored, and the internet is really good at making us feel comfortable and not bored. And in the moment, less lonely, the problem is, at least in my experience, is that it makes me more lonely in the long run.

• 40:30Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 40:31John Green?

  And that's really hard to address. Like, making friends in adulthood is one of the hardest things I've ever done.

• 40:36Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 40:37John Green?

  It's incredibly uncomfortable.

• 40:39Hank Green?

  It shouldn't be so hard.

• 40:40John Green?

  It shouldn't be so hard. There should be better structures for this, but it's a problem that we didn't have to figure out for like most of human history, because it was solved very naturally by living in tiny communities. But now we got to figure it out.

• 40:51Hank Green?

  Yeah. All right, John. Well, a related question, if we can do one more before the news of from AFC Wimbledon and Mars.

• 40:57John Green?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 40:58Hank Green?

  Okay. It's from Olivia who asks, "To the equally awesome Green Brothers, I'm fairly terrified of AI. Not in a Skynet, Matrix, Robots, uh, Flight of the Conquerors kind of way." But in a toddler with a loaded gun sort of way. I don't think humanity is capable of having this thing without inevitable tragedy. Is there anything you know or believe that might quell my fears? Nerd Fighter sent the 50 jokes in four minutes video and still 100% here for the puns. Olivia.

• 41:24John Green?

  That makes one of us, Olivia.

• 41:25Hank Green?

  Well, Olivia, here's what I'll tell you. At least there are puns, but also AI can do puns. Sometimes it can't. It doesn't know what it's doing. That's one thing that seems certain. Um, I can't really help you.

• 41:40John Green?

  Mm hmm. Me neither.

• 41:41Hank Green?

  My biggest source of hope is that like humanity and individual human groups have been confronted with existential crises many, many times that they have overcome. And that's like my, my basic source of hope. In terms of the specifics here, it's very hard because the future is going to be very weird. And so I can't get specific about solutions because I can't get specific about the problems. I don't know what's coming. It's very big and weird.

• 42:08John Green?

  We don't know what's coming. We know that AI is getting faster and better and cheaper and more efficient over time. And we think that will continue, but we actually don't have strong evidence for the idea that it will continue until it becomes something vastly smarter and more powerful than we could possibly imagine. We don't know that. We are guessing that based on a curve of change that we've seen so far, but we don't know that that curve of change lasts forever.

• 42:39Hank Green?

  Yeah. I mean, I, there's a lot of people who, who are very worried. So, so there's people who are like hype men who think that that's going to happen, but there's also people who are like the opposite of hype men who are worried that that is going to happen. It seems like the closer you are to it, the more you think that that is fairly inevitable. It's just sort of a matter of when. But I also don't think that we need to get to super intelligence for it to become a big problem. I think we are already suffering the effects of a society run by AI, which is that our realities are defined by recommendation algorithms that are designed to keep us on websites, not designed to increase human thriving. So those are actually, those systems are actually quite optimized. They are what they would call aligned with what we want them to do. It's just that we have aligned them to a terrible purpose, which is to keep us on a

• 43:22Hank Green?

  website rather than to make our lives better.

• 43:25John Green?

  Yep. Preach, brother. Literal brother. I think we can change those alignments, but it's defining reality in profound, profound ways. Like, there is no way Donald Trump becomes the president without Twitter, and there is no way Donald Trump becomes the president without Twitter's particular physics and algorithms, which were designed by AI on some level. And so, yeah, I mean, we live in a vastly different world because of AI and algorithms than we did 10 years ago. We will live in a vastly different world 10 years from now. I think the question is, what do we optimize for? And when we optimize for things that are socially destructive, we get a less socially productive world.

• 44:01Hank Green?

  But if you optimize for things that are socially productive, then are you, then is there like some board of directors in Silicon Valley who is defining reality for America? And is that, how's that feel?

• 44:14John Green?

  Not great. No, I'm pretty freaked out, Olivia. I'm pretty freaked out.

• 44:18Hank Green?

  10 years ago, Facebook did experiments where they were like, we could tweak the algorithm and it makes people happier. And everybody was like, oh, no, don't do that. That seems very weird and bad.

• 44:29John Green?

  Well, and also, people didn't use Facebook as much.

• 44:32Hank Green?

  And also, happy people use Facebook less.

• 44:34John Green?

  Yeah. Why would they use Facebook? Facebook is, I mean, you know, these tools are functionally distraction tools, and what they're distracting you from is some kind of like boredom, or pain, or psychic pain that's way down deep.

• 44:46Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 44:47John Green?

  Anyway, thanks for coming to the party, Olivia.

• 44:49Hank Green?

  Sorry, we can't provide you with nothing except for the reality that humans have solved every existential problem so far. No one thought we were gonna get through the Cold War, you know?

• 44:59John Green?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Hank Green?

  And like, here we are. That was, you know, 80 years ago.

• 45:05John Green?

  Yeah, we made it 80 whole years. I'm not, I'm not actually encouraged when people are like, oh, we figured out nuclear weapons. I'm like, did we? Or have we just made it 80 years, one human lifetime?

• 45:18John Green?

  During which there has been some proliferation.

• 45:20Hank Green?

  There has been a great deal of proliferation.

• 45:23John Green?

  So I'm not feeling, not feeling that good.

• 45:25Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 45:26John Green?

  All right, Hank, I got, we got to get to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Let's start with the news from AFC Wimbledon. AFC Wimbledon's women's team is in the third division, the FAWPL premier division. They've had a rough start to the season. There's no getting around it. Two losses, two draws, but they just won their first game of the season, which is very encouraging because there are some really big teams like Watford, which used to be in the premier league. They're in the third division with us and we just won our first game of the season. So I wanted to call that out. We got beat by Watford, but then we beat Billerica Town.

• 46:00John Green?

  They haven't won a game yet this season, nor have they tied a game. But anyway, we beat them, which is important because there are only two teams that get relegated out of this league, I think. And so if we can just make sure we're not in that bottom two, which right now we're not, then we should be fine.

• 46:12Hank Green?

  Great.

• 46:13John Green?

  What's the news from Mars?

• 46:14Hank Green?

  Well, it continues to be three I Atlas news. So as, as if you were listening last week, you heard three I Atlas is this very weird interstellar comet. So it's a, it's a thing that's not from our solar system. We've been starting to find these objects. They've always been there, but we didn't have the tools necessary to detect them or, or to understand their orbits well enough to definitively say that they're not from here. But now that we, we can, we've tracked several of these and this one's special and weird and we don't know what's going on with it. It's acting particularly strange, which is making scientists think that it's made of strange stuff. And that is exciting because it, you know, we're not going to be able to go to other solar systems and examine them.

• 46:59Hank Green?

  Like that's just, that's not, that's not in the cards for the next, you know, 500 years.

• 47:04John Green?

  But I mean, I'm going to take the over on that. That's like you saying that we're going to make it to Mars by 2028. There's no way we're making it to another star.

• 47:12Hank Green?

  I don't mean a human, I don't mean a human is making it to another star system, but in 500 years I would not be surprised if we still exist, that we were able to get a probe to.

• 47:21John Green?

  I would be surprised. For the record, when I am alive, because we've cured death, I want to rename the podcast Dear John and John and Hank.

• 47:30Hank Green?

  500 years from now?

• 47:32John Green?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Hank Green?

  Okay, somebody write down what that date is.

• 47:34John Green?

  Yeah.

• 47:35Hank Green?

  So we want to look at this thing, but we are in a situation where Earth is increasingly unable to observe this because the sun is in the way. But Mars is on the other side of the sun right now, and so all of the Mars instruments can still observe this comet, which is so cool.

• 47:52John Green?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Hank Green?

  And last week, there was, we were talking about the rover that was taking pictures of it, but now there are a bunch of orbiters around Mars. So there's the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which is ESA, a European Space Agency orbiter, and it is usually focused on getting images from the surface of Mars. So it points down. And this object in the sky is anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 times fainter than the surface of Mars, what it's usually trying to take a picture of. But they were still able to get a few pictures of it. And they turned it into a little GIF for us that you can look at on the internet. And ESA is planning to keep looking at these images to see what else they can learn about the size of the comet and what it's made of, because that will help us understand what

• 48:37Hank Green?

  other solar systems are like, I should say planetary systems, because in fact...

• 48:41John Green?

  They're not solar systems.

• 48:42Hank Green?

  There's only one solar system.

• 48:43John Green?

  We've got the only one.

• 48:45Hank Green?

  Yeah, it's the system that is of the star Sol.

• 48:49John Green?

  Yeah. It's cute that our star has a name that isn't the sun.

• 48:53Hank Green?

  Yeah, Sol. And then it's cute that solar system is like, oh, that's us.

• 48:58John Green?

  Yeah. That's us, that's just us, that's sweet. Just us, Jupiter, Mars, et cetera, and...

• 49:05Hank Green?

  The Oort Cloud.

• 49:06John Green?

  And then an Oort Cloud. Love a good Oort Cloud. Well, Hank, thank you for podding with me. Thanks to everybody for listening. You can email us your questions at [email protected].

• 49:16Hank Green?

  This podcast is edited by Ben Swartout. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna-Medish. 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 Deboki 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...

• 49:35John Green?

  Don't forget to be awesome.