Pod Insights Dear Hank & John 415: Bombarded by Space Frogs About this episode How did John bike to the airport? How do we know that Earth isn’t being bombarded by space frogs? How can we channel more Uncle Mike in our everyday lives? Do fish have bums? What has the Beef Days experience been like? Does the Earth receive a uniform amount of energy from the sun? …Hank and John Green have answers!
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Hank Green? You're listening to a Complexly podcast.
0:09 Hank Green? Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.
0:12 John Green? Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank.
0:15 Hank 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, there's this dog that's barking like 500 times a day in my neighborhood. I mean, I don't know exactly. That's just my rough estimate.
0:29 John Green? Ah, because it's going rough, rough, rough. You know, he's been barking 500 times a day and peeing in the house at least once a day is Potato.
0:37 Hank Green? Potato does not shy away from letting his opinion be known.
0:40 John Green? Potato does not conform to the expectations of the social order. That's not who he is as a dog.
0:49 Hank Green? Can you ever escape the expectations of the social order a little bit here and there? What do you do?
0:54 John Green? Not really.
0:55 Hank Green? What do you do to show that social order who's boss?
0:59 John Green? God, I mean.
1:00 Hank Green? Not much.
1:01 John Green? I.
1:01 Hank Green? You biked to the airport. You biked to the airport. That's showing the social order who's boss.
1:07 John Green? There were a lot of questions in our inbox about how exactly I biked to the airport. From Alex, for instance, can we have details on how John biked to the airport? Where did your luggage go? Where did you leave your bike? Did you lock it at the airport? Did you have to collect it on the way back? All these are great questions, Alex.
1:25 Hank Green? Yeah, you didn't just show the social order who's boss. You showed the infrastructure who's boss.
1:30 John Green? That's right. I'm not, I'm not living with your infrastructure. No, we preparked a car at the economy lot of the airport with our bags in it. And then we biked to that car and then took the bags out and put the bikes in.
1:42 Hank Green? You have raised way more questions. I feel like that was more work.
1:47 John Green? Nope.
1:48 Hank Green? It wasn't more work. How does, how did this make things better?
1:50 John Green? Because we were escaping 400,000 human beings, the largest nonreligious gathering of human beings on earth, the Indy 500. We were escaping on our bikes so that we didn't have to deal with traffic.
2:02 Hank Green? Oh, the traffic.
2:04 John Green? That's right.
2:04 Hank Green? Specifically, the Indy 500 traffic.
2:06 John Green? Which is the worst, literally the worst traffic, a nonreligious traffic in the world.
2:11 Hank Green? Oh, and so, and that was literally you escaping the social order.
2:15 John Green? Yes, I refused to conform to car culture and instead biked to a car.
2:23 Hank Green? To a car that I had previously drove to the airport.
2:27 John Green? Which actually is not a bad summary of my relationship to the social order, which is that even when I'm not conforming to it, I am a little bit.
2:35 Hank Green? Yeah, for sure.
2:36 John Green? I don't want to, but I do. Like, I think of myself as this, you know, like, I'm an artistic character and I'm a little bit depressive and forlorn. And I'm critical of the social order and everything. And I live outside of it because I'm an artiste. But then I also have, like, exactly two kids and live in the suburbs and have a lawn and everything.
2:57 Hank Green? Yeah, you know how I defy it largely through foods? So do you know about reverse quesadillas?
3:02 John Green? No, is that where the cheese is on the outside?
3:04 Hank Green? That's where the cheese is on the outside. And what's it gonna be on the inside?
3:07 John Green? Tortilla?
3:07 Hank Green? You'd think, but that actually doesn't make any sense. A reverse quesadilla is when you take a slice of Swiss cheese and you just grab with it a handful of instant mashed potatoes.
3:18 John Green? Uh huh.
3:19 Hank Green? And then you eat that with the instant mashed potatoes on the inside and the Swiss cheese as a roll on the outside. That's what I call a reverse quesadilla.
3:27 John Green? And it's really good. Certainly outside the social order, that's for sure.
3:30 Hank Green? Yeah, nobody ever thought that would be a thing people did.
3:33 John Green? Yeah, how do I resist the social order's expectations of me? I really don't. And the other thing is that even though I'm an artist and everything, I want the social order to like me and think highly of me. I want, you know, like, my neighbors to think like, well, there's a stand-up guy who takes out the trash every Tuesday.
3:51 Hank Green? Do you ever look at your, like, ranked quotes on Wikiquote? See where the, like, best thing you've ever said is?
3:57 John Green? Can I do that right now?
3:59 Hank Green? You can. And this is very, I don't know, it's not maybe not Wikiquote. It's like, just type in John Green quotes.
4:05 John Green? The first one that comes up is, "People die."
4:10 John Green? "That's true in novels and it's true in life. Die is one of the very few things we all do. To deny or ignore the omnipresent reality of death seems to me a disservice to human beings."
4:19 Hank Green? Where are you? Are you on Wikiquote?
4:20 John Green? Yeah, that's the first thing that it says.
4:22 Hank Green? What I meant was Goodreads. Goodreads has them ranked by likes. And with 46,000 likes, that's way more than mine. You know what it is?
4:31 John Green? What?
4:31 Hank Green? "As he read, I fell in love, the way you fall asleep slowly and then all at once."
4:36 John Green? It's a banger.
4:37 Hank Green? I go to see if my version of that quote shows up on my quote page on Goodreads.
4:42 John Green? Yes, I like your version of that quote even more, actually. The next one I did know when I was writing that I was gonna be widely quoted. Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together in less than until all living humans read the book. That's like such a quote for book lovers that I knew it would, I knew, I knew book lovers would like it.
5:03 Hank Green? My top one has 424 likes and I didn't even write it.
5:08 John Green? Oh, that's my favorite kind. Who wrote it?
5:10 Hank Green? I don't know. It's an internet meme. Behold the field in which I grow my [bleep]. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.
5:15 John Green? Now we go, now the editor has to use their magical bleep skills.
5:19 Hank Green? It's true. You do have to bleep that, but I was quoting a quote that was not even my quote. It's just, it was a character in my book quoting an internet meme and everybody thinks I wrote it.
5:28 John Green? I wonder how many you have to go to me before you find one that I didn't say.
5:32 Hank Green? My fifth one down is also something I didn't say. I had a very happy childhood. I just wasn't a very happy child. It's a John Green quote.
5:39 John Green? That's a John Green quote.
5:40 Hank Green? He said that to me in the car once and I was like, I'm taking that and putting that in my book.
5:44 John Green? And I was bummed because I kinda wanted to use it in one of my books because it is a banger of a line.
5:49 Hank Green? Yeah.
5:49 John Green? I don't really see any that aren't me. Lots of people quote, quote me incorrectly on Tumblr, but I don't see any of the most voted ones as, as, as incorrect quotes.
5:57 Hank Green? I found it here, uh, pretty far down my list. Their voice came out of the watch, slow, and then all at once, like ketchup.
6:08 Hank Green? Those are the people who knew that I was referencing John Green in that moment. Thank you.
6:11 John Green? Yeah, a lot of people did. That was good.
6:13 Hank Green? It is such an author wanting to conform to the social order thing to go to your page and see what, what people liked about what you did. So that is what we do.
6:22 John Green? Well, I mean, we're gonna conform to the expectations of our podcast listeners because that's what we do by answering questions from our listeners, beginning with this one from B who writes, hello frogs are quite small. Sadly, this means that they would burn up on reentry if they were flying toward the earth at a great speed from outer space. They're quite small and would likely be too small for NASA to even notice. How then do we know that earth is not constantly being bombarded by space frogs? How many space frogs would there have to be for us to notice? Space pumpkins and space penguins, B?
6:49 Hank Green? Well, I don't know that we would. How big is this frog? One of the, like, Hmm.
6:54 John Green? Frog size.
6:54 Hank Green? I think you might.
6:55 John Green? I think the issue is that there's no way a frog could live in outer space.
6:59 Hank Green? Ah, well, that's a, that's an Outlander statement. You say that now.
7:03 John Green? Well, I guess if the frog had a little frog space suit, the frog space suit could live in, it could live in outer space for a while. Yeah, if it was like a hyper intelligent frog and like billions of them were, were headed to Earth from outer space, would we even know? And I think the answer is probably not.
7:20 Hank Green? I've gotten distracted by the fact that there's a spider on my, my monitor, but he's gonna live his life and I'm gonna live mine. Is that okay?
7:26 John Green? That's fine.
7:26 Hank Green? I think that we'd be able to see the frogs. I think that when we see shooting stars, they're smaller than many frogs.
7:33 John Green? Oh, really?
7:34 Hank Green? Frogs are quite small, but some frogs are not that. Those are like baseball sized. I think that if a baseball sized frog hit the atmosphere, we would definitely see that baseball sized frog.
7:42 John Green? Okay. Well.
7:43 Hank Green? But, but they might not look that different from a normal meteorite. But I bet if we were getting hit by a lot of them.
7:48 John Green? Yeah.
7:49 Hank Green? Then eventually we'd notice. But if there's like one a day.
7:51 John Green? Yeah.
7:52 Hank Green? No, that's, that's just background noise.
7:54 John Green? Wow. So the space frog could be trying to reach out to us, burning up on reentry over and over again, and we would have no way of knowing.
8:01 Hank Green? No way of knowing over and over again. And also can you prove a negative? Like, is, you can't, like, is this happening? Is this not hap-? It's very hard.
8:10 John Green? Yeah, it's hard to prove a negative.
8:12 Hank Green? The whole space could be filled with frogs and we wouldn't be able to detect them, for sure.
8:16 John Green? Yeah.
8:16 Hank Green? And by filled, I mean, you know, like one for every couple of square miles of space, cubic miles.
8:21 John Green? Well, there's something sort of satisfying about knowing that at least if it was a bullfrog, we'd see it as a shooting star. Hank, I gotta ask you this question. It's about our Uncle Mike. You know Uncle Mike?
8:29 Hank Green? Yeah, sure. We got an Uncle Mike question.
8:31 John Green? I did an event at, uh, in Birmingham and Uncle Mike came and somebody said, is Uncle Mike here? One of the podcast listeners was there and said, is Uncle Mike there? And I answered the question because he was there.
8:40 Hank Green? Uh huh.
8:40 John Green? Uncle Mike, I got to visit with Uncle Mike. It was great. And two things about Uncle Mike that we know, of course, longtime listeners of the pod know, is that Uncle Mike does not use unnecessary words.
8:49 Hank Green? Unlike us.
8:50 John Green? Unlike us. He's the opposite of us in many ways. But also when Uncle Mike is done attending a meeting, he leaves the meeting, which is the most heroic behavior I've ever seen in my entire life. When Uncle Mike has decided the meeting is over, that meeting is over for Uncle Mike.
9:04 Hank Green? It can be, can keep going for other people, but it's over for Uncle Mike. That's, that's defying the social order, right?
9:09 John Green? That is defying the social order in the most beautiful, heroic way I can personally imagine. Saying, saying no to a meeting in the middle of a meeting is, I mean, it's all of, all of my wishes and hopes and dreams for my future. So anyway, we got this great email from Emily who writes, Dear John and Hank, my husband and I live in Birmingham and attended John's book event tonight for Everything is Tuberculosis. We're longtime listeners of the pod and we did not put it together until now that we go to church with Uncle Mike.
9:40 Hank Green? I met somebody recently who knows Uncle Mike.
9:43 John Green? Well, I mean, lots of people know Uncle Mike. He's like, he and our Aunt Gillian are wonderful, wonderful people and like really important philanthropists in Birmingham.
9:52 Hank Green? Can I, I actually, I don't know if I've told you this story, but it's kind of amazing. So I was having a meeting with the executive director of a science museum and, and he found out that before he did like a little research on me and he was like, we have something in common. I was also born in Birmingham and I worked there for a long time. I worked at the science museum there.
10:10 John Green? Hmm. Great science museum.
10:11 Hank Green? And then he said the most Birmingham sentence possible, which is, now, I'm sorry for saying this, but what's your mother's maiden name?
10:19 John Green? Oh yeah. We get a lot of that. Get a lot of that in Birmingham.
10:23 Hank Green? And I said, our mother's maiden name.
10:24 John Green? Don't answer, don't answer. Don't give away the clue to our credit cards.
10:28 Hank Green? So I said it and then he immediately named several members of our family.
10:31 John Green? Oh yeah. I mean, all of our family.
10:33 Hank Green? That's how Birmingham works for you, man.
10:35 John Green? Yeah. They're like, they know our cousin Braxton. They know our Uncle Mike. They know our Uncle Bill. They know our Aunt Fran. They know everybody. So anyway, Emily also knows Uncle Mike and says, here's our question. How can we all channel more of Uncle Mike in our approach to life? We would ask him, but we all know he's a man of few words. Sincerely, Emily.
10:55 Hank Green? Next time you're with Uncle Mike, can you just bust out your like voice memo on the iPhone and ask that question?
11:00 John Green? Yeah.
11:00 Hank Green? Whatever, whatever three words he gives us.
11:03 John Green? We don't like, we don't want like Uncle Mike surrounded by paparazzi at church, you know, like people coming up to him, asking him for advice and everything.
11:10 Hank Green? I don't know, John.
11:12 John Green? Yeah.
11:13 Hank Green? How to live a good life, but I know that I'm not doing it quite right.
11:16 John Green? Oh, same. I mean, I at least have an idea in my, my, uh, my quiver called forgiveness. You don't even have that.
11:25 Hank Green? What?
11:25 John Green? Yeah.
11:26 Hank Green? I, I have forgiveness. People forgive. I forgive. What are you talking about? Are you talking about like?
11:32 John Green? Forgiveness from on high, though.
11:33 Hank Green? Oh.
11:34 John Green? That sweet, sweet, unearned grace.
11:37 Hank Green? Well, I don't want, I don't want that. That's too, that's too much.
11:40 John Green? That's too much for you?
11:41 Hank Green? Yeah.
11:41 John Green? Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.
11:43 Hank Green? Here's what we know. We know from decades of research, almost a hundred years at this point of, of happiness studies, like we started studying happiness almost a hundred years ago in a scientific way, and we know what delivers, which is personal betterment and community.
12:00 John Green? Yeah.
12:01 Hank Green? We know that.
12:02 John Green? Which Uncle Mike is great at. I mean, that's the thing. Uncle Mike has never stopped.
12:06 Hank Green? He's a church.
12:07 John Green? He's never stopped working on himself. He's never stopped deepening his relationships with his family and he's never stopped, you know, going to those places that help him build community, whether that's work or, uh, or church or whatever.
12:21 Hank Green? Yeah. And I just, I am particularly, I don't know. I think that there are lots of, uh, lots of elements of our society as it currently exists.
12:31 John Green? Yeah.
12:31 Hank Green? That alienate you from, from community, that do, that take you away from that thing that we know is the thing that delivers happiness.
12:39 John Green? Yeah.
12:39 Hank Green? That that's, uh, the sort of, the, the weight that we ascribe to those interactions now, or it is, is the, the sort of, the value that we place on, on economic, uh, creation and, and all that stuff. It does, or, or if it's like how exposed we are always to every giant problem that the world contains. And so how could my community matter when X and Y and Z are all happening at the same time?
13:08 John Green? Right, right, right. Uh, can I tell you what I tweeted today?
13:11 Hank Green? Oh, is it going to be relevant?
13:12 John Green? It's relevant, I think. I think it might be my last tweet and it's not on Twitter, of course, it's on Blue Sky. But I just, I feel less and less drawn to tweeting at the moment.
13:22 Hank Green? Yeah.
13:22 John Green? But today I had a good tweet. I tweeted, every day I got to remind myself that when Christ said to feed the hungry, he wasn't talking about the algorithm.
13:29 Hank Green? Yeah, we're all hungry for the algorithm, but it's not, I don't think it's delivering, John.
13:34 John Green? No, but I'm trying to feed it as much as I'm trying to be fed by it. And I find myself feeding it in ways that are unfulfilling for me and also like getting fed in ways that are unfulfilling for me.
13:45 Hank Green? Yeah, I don't know, though. There are fulfilling parts, but I need...
13:51 John Green? And like, this is something, one of the questions I had in Birmingham that I thought was a really good question was, how do you reconcile the fact that so much good advocacy and activism and community happens on the social internet? With the fact that the social internet is a driving force in increasing loneliness, disconnection, polarization, et cetera?
14:13 Hank Green? Yeah.
14:14 John Green? And I didn't have a good answer for that.
14:15 Hank Green? People were asking you that question or you were asking it to yourself?
14:18 John Green? That was one of the questions I got in Birmingham and I don't have a good answer for it.
14:21 Hank Green? I had to ask myself that question all the time, but I feel like no one ever asks me that question because it was too mean.
14:26 John Green? Yeah, right. It's like saying like, hey, I think your wife's work might have been bad.
14:30 Hank Green? Bad? I have, I have a long document of video ideas and one of them that's been on there for like over a year is called, "Am I cigarettes?"
14:39 John Green? Yeah, "Am I cigarettes?" It's a great video title for a Vlogbrothers video.
14:43 Hank Green? I'm worried about whether or not I'm cigarettes.
14:46 John Green? Yeah, I am also worried about whether I'm cigarettes or am I filtered cigarettes? You know, where, where people are like, well, no, cigarettes are bad.
14:54 Hank Green? You might as well do it with the Vlogbrothers.
14:57 John Green? Look at these guys. They're not, they're not so bad.
14:59 Hank Green? Yeah, it's definitely better than the alternative.
15:03 John Green? Yeah, maybe we're Nicorette, you know, where people, where it's still not great for you and like, hopefully it's getting people off some of the hard stuff. But we're not...
15:11 Hank Green? I don't think we're Nicorette yet, but I think we're, I think we're thinking about it.
15:15 John Green? We're thinking about becoming Nicorette. We're on, we're on a journey of Nicorette meaning.
15:20 Hank Green? Yeah, like I'm making this like prompt journal. That's all about how do you connect with people and go outside.
15:27 John Green? Yeah.
15:27 Hank Green? Making, making, uh, maybe making a little less Tik Tok, little more, little more con- long conversations with, I, I really want to do a long conversations series.
15:39 John Green? Oh yeah, that's good. That's a good idea, Hank. There aren't any of those on the internet right now. We don't have any podcasts.
15:43 Hank Green? I know.
15:43 John Green? Conversations between an internet celebrity and an expert.
15:47 Hank Green? I don't even want to talk to experts. I just want to talk about interesting stuff, but I don't know. Look, I don't know.
15:53 John Green? Well, I would submit that you have a long conversation podcast where you talk about interesting stuff every week.
15:59 Hank Green? I know, I know. And we're doing it. This is the second week in a row. We've done it almost like it's a weekly podcast.
16:04 John Green? I know. I was gonna say, maybe make our weekly podcast weekly again. Maybe that's step one.
16:09 Hank Green? Make weekly weekly again.
16:13 John Green? All right. We gotta get to this question from Violet.
16:16 Hank Green? Okay.
16:16 John Green? Violet has an important question. She's two.
16:18 Hank Green? Okay.
16:18 John Green? She writes, Dear John and Hank, do fish have bums?
16:21 Hank Green? Oh Violet, I have, I, I have great news.
16:24 John Green? I have.
16:25 Hank Green? Yes, and also no.
16:26 John Green? Oh, I was gonna say a hard no.
16:28 Hank Green? Well, this is the thing. What is a bum?
16:30 John Green? What is a bum? You take the yes, I'll take the no. We'll, we'll treat it as a, like a policy debate.
16:36 Hank Green? I'm steel manning, yes, fish has bumps.
16:40 John Green? Correct.
16:40 Hank Green? I'm not saying that this is my actual personal opinion, but I'm going to pretend that it is.
16:44 John Green? Right.
16:44 Hank Green? A bum is where the poop comes from.
16:46 John Green? Yeah.
16:46 Hank Green? And they got a place where the poop comes from. It's called a cloaca and it, uh, it's a, it's a hole that they got where the poop comes from. And there's one fish, Violet, if you could believe this, where the cloaca sits right up behind its head. So it poops like right out of the back of its head and that's really weird.
17:03 John Green? So you're saying that, just to be clear, that the bum is on the head of the fish?
17:07 Hank Green? The bum is on the head.
17:08 John Green? And that's a bum, even though it's on the head.
17:10 Hank Green? Head bum, because it's where the poop comes from.
17:12 John Green? Now Violet, this is a great example of how not to debate. When you're debating someone, you don't offer up a example that definitely disproves your point.
17:25 Hank Green? Bum? Okay. Violet, turn to your mom and ask if a bum is where the poop comes from or not.
17:32 John Green? Well, it is true that all human bums are where, not all, many human bums are where the poop comes from. Okay? That is true, Violet. That is very, very true. That doesn't mean that everywhere poop comes from is a bum. That's the mistake that Hank has made. In fact, lots of animals don't have bums. Instead, they have different areas where the poop comes from, including from their heads. Isn't that so silly?
18:07 Hank Green? There's also animals, and I am truly arguing it myself now, where the mouth hole and the food, the food go in hole is the same as the waste go out hole. And in that case, you would be hard pressed to call that a bum, just because it's where the poop comes from.
18:21 John Green? You'd be hard pressed to, and yet that's exactly what you're arguing.
18:25 Hank Green? That's what I have signed up to do. So what is your, what is your bum, John? Is it the shape? Is it the two cheeks?
18:31 John Green? Yeah. Yeah, it's the two cheeks. It's the double cheeks.
18:34 Hank Green? Some frogs have bums.
18:35 John Green? Lots of animals have bums. Baboons have bums.
18:37 Hank Green? Not as many as you'd think, actually, if you look close.
18:40 John Green? I would argue that like a squirrel has a tiny little bum. I would argue that dogs, hmm.
18:47 Hank Green? Squirrels don't have bums.
18:48 John Green? Squirrels have tiny little bums.
18:50 Hank Green? No, they don't. They don't have butt cheeks.
18:52 John Green? They're almost invisible.
18:54 Hank Green? They don't.
18:54 John Green? But they're, they are invisible, but they're still there. And then dogs don't have bums. It's mostly, now that I think about it, Violet, and this is a really good question, because it's made me think a lot.
19:03 Hank Green? If dogs don't have bums, squirrels definitely don't have bums. Horses, horses have bums.
19:08 John Green? Horses have little bums.
19:09 Hank Green? They have gigantic bums. And I will take the, I will strong man that argument.
19:13 John Green? You know what I'm thinking here, Violet? I'm thinking that it's mostly primates and horses that have bums.
19:20 Hank Green? It's, it actually is something, it shows up really more prominently when you go upright. So people have, have more pronounced posterior's than most animals.
19:29 John Green? Yeah. And then you've got like the vast majority of life, which is insects, Violet, and you're gonna be hard pressed convincing me that a mosquito has a bum.
19:38 Hank Green? And if a mosquito doesn't have a bum, then then fish really don't either.
19:41 John Green? Yeah.
19:41 Hank Green? Though I actually don't know what happens at the end of a mosquito. I just not, I'm not entirely sure what a bum is.
19:46 John Green? I think that we know, and I think that it's the end of the legs. And I agree with you, Hank, that the more upright
19:52 Hank Green? The end of the legs is the feet.
19:53 John Green? No, the other end of the legs, my man.
19:54 Hank Green? Oh.
19:58 Hank Green? Yes. One thing that we all know for sure is that bum is legs.
20:02 John Green? All right, we're not getting into that, Violet, because you didn't ask about that. We're not gonna cause that trouble today.
20:06 Hank Green? The part of the body that you sit on, it says.
20:09 John Green? Well, in that case, like a mosquito, its bums would be its feet, cuz that's where it sits.
20:15 Hank Green? And fish wouldn't, definitely wouldn't have them. Cuz when was the last time you saw a fish sit?
20:19 John Green? No.
20:20 Hank Green? You're sitting just like sitting down reading a little book along this little fish stool.
20:24 John Green? It must be tiring to be a fish.
20:25 Hank Green? No, it's not. You get to float.
20:27 John Green? Oh, I guess that's a good point.
20:29 Hank Green? You get to float. This is the thing about fish. You could be as big as you want and not have to worry about it.
20:34 John Green? I would wanna be a fish, but not for a whole day. I would want like an hour and a half of being a fish, just to understand, like, do I have a bum? What do I think about? What do I feel? What is the extent to which like I can suffer? What is the extent to which I can like contemplate the mysteries of existence?
20:49 Hank Green? Is there, is there a thing that it's like to be a fish is what I really wanna know?
20:52 John Green? Yeah. I don't know. And I can't know.
20:55 Hank Green? I know.
20:56 John Green? Unless I become a fish.
20:58 Hank Green? I know that there's a thing that it's like to be a dog.
21:00 John Green? Yep.
21:00 Hank Green? And I know that there isn't a thing that it's like to be a tree, but I bet there's a thing that it's like to be a fish.
21:05 John Green? I bet there's a thing that it's like to be a tree, actually.
21:08 Hank Green? You think so?
21:08 John Green? Yeah, yeah.
21:09 Hank Green? You think, you think trees have like a kind of consciousness?
21:12 John Green? I think they're really calm. Yeah.
21:14 Hank Green? Just chill.
21:15 John Green? Yeah.
21:16 Hank Green? There's a thing that it's like to be a tree. I don't.
21:18 John Green? Well, I mean,
21:20 Hank Green? Maybe we should examine the speaker.
21:21 John Green? Journey of meaning, and maybe you'll get there eventually.
21:23 Hank Green? This is, this is the kind of slow talky podcast. Where like the, the music doesn't have, um, a recorder in the beginning of it, and instead it's like, just like sort of a slow thumping with like piano plinks. And then at the end of it, we're like, you know, I haven't deeply looked at whether or not I think fish have little bums.
21:48 John Green? That's right. Yeah. One thing about this podcast is that it kind of covers all podcast genres because it depends on the vibe. Like some days, even when we have a somewhat silly question from Violet age two, there are some days that we can't help but take it seriously. And then other days, somebody will ask us a very serious question and we'll be like, have you heard this bit about Alvin and the Chipmunks we've got?
22:11 Hank Green? Man, I forgot about the Alvin and the Chipmunks bit.
22:14 John Green? And so we kind of cover most of the major genres. I think that's why we're a hit podcast for teens and a sleep podcast and an exercise podcast is because we contain multitudes. Why don't you ask this question from Ignatius?
22:26 Hank Green? This next question comes from Ignatius, who asks, Dear Hank and John, I hope you are well. I was wondering what your experience of Beef Days has been in a year since you first talked about it. If you are still continuing with it, what has been the moments of stretch or comfort? Oh, that's a nice way of asking that. Has the introduction of a new ritual made the time pass differently? What is the experience of introducing and sharing something new like this into a larger group? Any and all insights are appreciated. Pumpkins and Penguins, Ignatius.
22:55 John Green? Yeah, it's a big one, Hank.
22:56 Hank Green? It's a good question. And, and also like, honestly, I felt like when we introduced Beef Days, we ran up against the limits of our power.
23:05 John Green? Oh, yeah. Cause you can't change a norm. That's what I learned. Except you can change a norm for yourself and I've done Beef Days. So here's, here's what I've done. Here's what I've learned. One, this thing where like you celebrate certain holidays as Beef Days doesn't work for me because it just doesn't work for me. Like it doesn't work for me to say like, oh, July 19th is going to be a Beef Day. Instead-
23:27 Hank Green? And we're gonna celebrate a person.
23:28 John Green? Once every like two months, I'll be like, oh, I think I'm gonna have a Beef Day today. And that has worked much better for me than like, cause like my first Beef, Beef Day was July 4th. And I was like, oh, it's July 4th. Like we'll make it a Beef Day. And then at the end of the day, honestly, I kind of felt sort of bad because I'd eaten a bunch of beef.
23:48 John Green? Doesn't make you necessarily feel very good. So what I've noticed is one, I just eat much less meat overall because every time I have a choice, I'm like, ah, well, I'll just get like an Impossible Burger or something. Or I just make a vegetarian meal. Like we'll make a vegetarian chili or whatever. So that's one thing I've noticed. The second thing I've noticed is that I probably, I don't eat more of any other meat because it's been about a year now, hasn't it? Oh yeah, it's been a year since Beef Days started. I don't eat more of any other meat. I just eat less meat overall. And then I have probably eaten beef on, I would
24:29 John Green? say between five and seven days. I've had five to seven Beef Days this year. And it's been great. It has not been hard. It has not been an inconvenience. The times I've had beef, like I remember one time we were at a steakhouse and we were at a casino in St. Louis when I was on tour and we went to a steakhouse, Elise, my publicist, and Sarah and me. And I was like, I'm at a steakhouse. I think I'll have some beef. And so I had a Beef Day then. And I've had a few other Beef Days throughout the year, but not that many. And I haven't missed beef.
25:02 Hank Green? Yeah, I think I had been not eating a lot of beef before Beef Days got introduced.
25:07 John Green? I know. You're ahead of the curve.
25:09 Hank Green? We still, we still, sometimes there, a beef will happen, you know, usually when there's some kind of recipe that's a lot easier with beef.
25:19 John Green? We do have a rule. It reminds, I've probably had beef more than seven days because we have a rule that if beef is being served at like a place where like if some, if we're going to somebody's house and beef is being served, we're not going to turn it down.
25:30 Hank Green? Yeah, yeah.
25:31 John Green? But I have, that maybe happened once or twice this year.
25:33 Hank Green? To be honest, I felt a little disillusioned by Beef Days. Like I, when I, I feel like when we had the idea, we were like, this is gonna, and this started on the podcast. We were like, this is gonna be, people are gonna be excited about this. This is gonna make sense. It's gonna be like a way to add ritual to our lives that are more increasingly devoid of rituals. And maybe there will be a community aspect to it. And it just seemed like, The reception was was a mix of like people who are just like eh and then a bunch of people who are like kind of mad at us for not seeing a complexity with beef that they saw, which I
26:13 Hank Green? honestly, having looked at the data, think that those like those arguments that were presented to me were not good arguments. They're like, oh, but if you do beef this way. I'm like, no, not really. Like all beef is like a huge problem for climate change. If we can reduce the amount of methane being produced right now in any way possible, that that would be great. And we are doing way too much. And cows in particular are a really inefficient way to create protein. There are arguments you can make. I just don't think any of them are that good. And I but I didn't feel like having the arguments.
26:47 John Green? Sure, sure, sure.
26:48 Hank Green? Especially because like a lot of these people were from in in places where their livelihoods are tied up in
26:56 John Green? Totally.
26:56 Hank Green? and ranching, which I totally get. So the
27:00 John Green? Yeah, I mean, as somebody who makes cigarettes for a living, we get it.
27:04 Hank Green? Yeah.
27:06 Hank Green? Yeah, it's it's it's no fun to need to question the the overall impacts of your profession of world.
27:13 John Green? Of your work. Believe us.
27:17 Hank Green? And yeah, so I I just kind of like I put it in the category of failures and and and didn't want to think about it.
27:26 John Green? I put it in the category of failures from the perspective of building a community around it because what we what we've learned is of course what we already knew, which is that it's incredibly hard to change behavioral norms of the social order.
27:41 Hank Green? It's so hard.
27:42 John Green? What you can do is opt out a little bit and not meet the social order's expectations, which takes us back to the beginning of the pod. And in that sense, I actually think that we've done a pretty good job. So I'm kind of proud of us, which reminds me, of course, that today's podcast is brought to you by defying the expectations of the social order, not always a good thing. Sometimes the social order has really good norms, like don't kill people. That's a good one. But then sometimes you have to defy the norms of the social order occasionally.
28:09 Hank Green? That's right. And speaking of, this podcast is brought to you by the reverse quesadilla. The reverse quesadilla. Give it a try, cold or hot.
28:17 John Green? And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by Violet's Fish Bums. Violet's Fish Bums, they don't exist.
28:23 Hank Green? And they're sitting on their little stools, reading a book with their fins. And also, this podcast is brought to you by frogs in space.
28:31 John Green? Frogs in space.
28:32 Hank Green? Their extraordinarily advanced technological civilization of space frogs surrounding everything in the solar system, constantly bombarding into planets just for fun. That's how they do it. They don't care about their lives. They're, they're free, free to do whatever they want, including violently crashing into a atmosphere and creating a fiery ball for us to observe from, from land down here on earth.
28:57 John Green? This is really, really great outro, Hank. It felt really strong. It didn't, it didn't at all feel like you kept the voice right, but you lost, you lost the plot. All right. We got another question. It's from Ann. Ann writes, Dear John and Hank, does the earth, I have always wondered this, and I have no idea what the answer is. Does the earth receive a uniform amount of energy from the sun at all times? Like, are hot days hot because of weather patterns here on the planet? Or is there a heat wave because the sun sent over more energy that day? It is very hot today, really quite hot, and I am uncomfy. Please advise. Sweltering, Ann.
29:32 Hank Green? Oh, boy. It's a, it's a big messy mess, Ann.
29:36 John Green? It's complicated.
29:37 Hank Green? It's very complicated. And, and so, as you have no doubt noticed, you get less energy from the sun in the winter and more in the summer. Now, if you're near the equator...
29:49 John Green? Well, it feels that way, but is that a earth thing or a sun thing?
29:53 Hank Green? Well, the sun is emitting the same amount of energy roughly at, at all times. There are long-term fluctuations that, but they are not...
30:01 John Green? But I'm a little further from the sun during winter. Is that it?
30:05 Hank Green? You know, you are not further from the sun during winter.
30:08 John Green? Great.
30:09 Hank Green? The, the sun is hitting the earth at a increased angle. So if you like, hold up your hand to a, a light source and it's perpendicular, all that light's going to be hitting your hand at the maximum amount of, of light per, but if you tilt it.
30:24 John Green? Yep.
30:24 Hank Green? Then the same amount of light is going to be hitting... Across that whole hand and a lot of, but a lot of the light that would normally be hitting the hand is going to get passed. So it's going to get less of the light and the earth is a sphere. And so right when it hits at 90 degrees is the maximum amount, but as it curves up to the pole, at the pole, basically, if you were right on, the pole would basically get no light because fly right over the top. And then, you know, I mentioned halfway down, you're about at a 45 degree angle to the sun and you're getting roughly half as much energy per square foot of the earth's surface.
31:00 John Green? Okay.
31:01 Hank Green? And, uh, and that angle changes throughout the year as the earth goes around the sun. Um, and so where that, where that point at which the 90 degree angle is happening, moves around the surface of the earth and it moves northward during the summer. So that's the biggest thing. You'll also notice that the sun, uh, for these reasons goes down earlier in the day.
31:27 John Green? Sure.
31:28 Hank Green? And so you're going to get less because the sun's going to be up for less time in the winter. But then also you have the atmosphere, which is doing all kinds of crazy things. It's carrying heat around. It's moving heat from one place to another. There are all of these currents that are, uh, both on a macro scale, very predictable and on a micro scale, very chaotic. And so you end up in a situation where you're going to have a day in the middle of the winter when it's, you know, surprisingly warm, unseasonably warm, or a day during the summer and it's unseasonably cold. And so the, but the, um, the amount of heat that is being released by the sun is very consistent. The amount that is being absorbed by the earth,
32:07 Hank Green? depending on where you are, uh, is going to be very inconsistent, both because of the seasons and also because of the, of weather and of, and like clouds. Obviously we know that it's going to be less warm on a day when the clouds are reflecting away all of the light.
32:24 John Green? Right. It's always fascinated me that they aren't reflecting away all of the light, right? Because it's still daytime, but like darker clouds reflect more of the light and lighter clouds reflect less of the light. And it's weird. It's the Earth is weird.
32:39 Hank Green? Yes, Earth is weird.
32:41 John Green? It's a weird situation that we found ourselves in that we're just a bit tilted, you know, that we happen to be this, this, of course, it doesn't, it happened this way because this was the only way it could have happened. I understand that. But it's still weird. It's still, it still blows my mind.
32:55 Hank Green? Yeah, I, I was talking to a stellar physicist once and
33:01 John Green? As you do.
33:02 Hank Green? It's a good job. One of the things that they had discovered that was a big surprise, because when you only have one sun to study close up, you want to start to study close up, like you, you assume that all stars like the sun are like the sun. But one thing that they have found is that most stars that are like the sun have much more fluctuation in the amount of energy that they give off
33:24 John Green? Oh.
33:25 Hank Green? over periods of time. And so the sun appears to be an unusually stable sun like star. And
33:33 John Green? So far.
33:34 Hank Green? Well, for billions of years.
33:36 John Green? Yeah.
33:37 Hank Green? And that could, that could have a, have had a very positive impact on the ability of life to keep doing its life thing for a long period of time.
33:48 John Green? Yeah, I would imagine if like the amount of energy coming out of the sun was radically different week to week or year to year or century to century, it would be a real problem for the development of life.
33:59 Hank Green? Yeah, it can be, it could also be a real problem for water to stay as a lot of water on the planet.
34:06 John Green? Hmm.
34:07 Hank Green? One of, one of my like chief beliefs about the Earth being special is that we have both a lot of water and a lot of land, which
34:15 John Green? Right.
34:17 Hank Green? Some, some folks have done some research indicating that that might be pretty unusual.
34:21 John Green? Yeah. It is nice to have a lot of water and a lot of land. There's a lot, there's a lot to recommend, um, Earth. As I've said before, I think it's a really extraordinary planet.
34:32 Hank Green? If we had like 20% more water, there would be no land.
34:34 John Green? Wow. That's fascinating. That's so weird.
34:38 Hank Green? Yeah.
34:39 John Green? You know what else is weird?
34:40 Hank Green? What?
34:40 John Green? Owen Goodman leaving AFC Wimbledon. Why'd he do it, Hank?
34:44 Hank Green? Are we talk, is that what time it is now?
34:47 John Green? He was playing for the best team on Earth. It's time to transition to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Owen Goodman, already playing for the world's best football club, somehow got his head turned by a different football club. It's so fascinating and problematic. He was my favorite goalkeeper we've had since Owen Ramsdale. No, he was my favorite goalkeeper we've had since Aaron Ramsdale, and now he's gone. Owen Goodman, gone. Just signed a contract for some other team.
35:14 Hank Green? Whatever. Goals easy.
35:16 John Green? Ah.
35:18 Hank Green? You can hit it with your hands.
35:19 John Green? He signed for Huddersfield Town, Hank. Huddersfield Town? Come on now.
35:24 Hank Green? Are there, are they in the, the league that AFC Wimbledon is now in?
35:28 John Green? I don't know. According to, um, they're, yeah, they're in, they're in League One, but they're like a very ambitious League One team. I'll tell you what his Wikipedia says right now, and this probably will be edited at some point. He plays as a goalkeeper for League One club Huddersfield Town, the home of northern football, up the toffees. I assume that won't stay.
35:48 Hank Green? Two bleeps, two bleeps in this episode. That's wild. A little Wikipedia vandalism for you.
35:54 John Green? Owen Goodman's gone, Josh Neufield is gone, James Tilly is gone, so both of our wing backs are gone. Uh, Marcus Brown, it's not looking great.
36:03 Hank Green? How are your wing fronts?
36:05 John Green? Our wing fronts, um, we've got, I would say we got half our wing fronts at the moment. Matty Stevens is staying. Marcus Brown looks likely to leave. Um, and so the Nerd Fight area's own Marcus Brown, it was a six month signing. Looks, looks to have been a six month signing. And, uh, yeah, so we've got some rebuilding to do. And as of recording this podcast, we have signed, and I think this is a bold decision, zero players for our League One season.
36:32 Hank Green? Oh, boy. That's interesting, considering that's a bunch of your players have been signed.
36:38 John Green? To other teams. Yeah, but it's okay. Craig Cope, our director of football, he's working on it. He's doing stuff behind the scenes. He's, he's, he's got his mojo going and he's going to find the right solution for us.
36:52 Hank Green? That's right. And it's, he's not gonna, he's not gonna abide by the social norms of signing, signing players right away.
36:59 John Green? No.
36:59 Hank Green? That's just, that's just a norm. No.
37:01 John Green? Yeah, that is a norm. And the fact that our preseason trip to Spain starts in eight days is fine. We will have 11 players and a goalkeeper for that preseason trip. I'm confident.
37:17 John Green? We currently have no goalkeeper.
37:18 Hank Green? I'm worried. This is very worrying.
37:21 John Green? Yeah, I mean, we have to, we have to just revel in the fact that we got promoted and understand that it was-
37:28 Hank Green? And everybody's like, I got on that promotion team. It feels really good. And I-
37:31 John Green? I'm gonna go get a bigger, better job. Yeah, I'm gonna go take my big opportunity since I'm from a promoted team. And I totally understand that. Like, we can't-
37:38 Hank Green? And it's not like A. S. Wimbledon's gonna get promoted next year.
37:41 John Green? Well, no. But maybe. But no, no, probably not. But you never know. I mean, things happen. Weird things happen. Leicester won the Premier League. Anything's possible. What's the news from Mars? Hey, hey, I have, I have a suggestion for Mars news based on some recent feedback we've gotten in the inbox.
37:59 Hank Green? Okay, hit me.
38:00 John Green? Fewer bummer's, please.
38:02 Hank Green? Oh, well, here's, oh.
38:09 Hank Green? So there was a period of time, here's how I'll pitch it. There was a period of time when the social internet was a place of, of joy and weirdness. And one of the things about that period of time is that we give every mission its own little cute little Twitter account. And they're like, the Curiosity Rover would tweet and the Insight Lander would tweet and the-
38:30 John Green? Yeah.
38:31 Hank Green? Yeah, the orbiters would tweet and they'd all tweet at each other and it was cute.
38:34 John Green? They would, they would reply to each other. It was adorable.
38:37 Hank Green? Yes. And, and it felt like, it felt like we were in a special moment in time. And that special moment in time has passed. It has passed in two different ways. One in which, maybe- We just don't feel the same sort of joy in seeing these things tweeting, especially maybe a lot of the more science focused people have just left Twitter, gone to Mastodon or Blue Sky or whatever, just maybe realized it was all cigarettes the whole time. So, so there's maybe a little less demand for that kind of thing. And then in addition to that, there's maybe a lot of people who are losing their jobs over there.
39:19 Hank Green? So we're closing down all of these cute little mission Twitters.
39:27 Hank Green? And instead, we'll sort of consolidate it under the main NASA accounts.
39:33 John Green? Oh, man, that's such bad news. It really is like the end of a kind of internet. It's like, it's a huge bummer. It's like the end of a certain sort of internet. It's like the world saying like, hey, yeah, no.
39:45 Hank Green? Cute that was.
39:46 John Green? Remember the fun internet? That's dead now.
39:49 Hank Green? Yeah.
39:49 John Green? Yeah.
39:50 Hank Green? Yeah. You know what we have instead of the fun internet? I guess just have a conversation with an AI by yourself.
39:56 John Green? Yeah, no, just talk to, I watched a video recently about a person who's in a relationship with an AI and feels very warmed by that relationship. And I didn't know how to conclude. I didn't know what to conclude from that. I didn't know whether to feel good or bad or somewhere in between. I, I do know that humans are great. And the more we can talk about our problems to other humans in real space, the better we feel. There is a lot of evidence for this. Humans are great and get out there and, and, and talk to some.
40:43 Hank Green? Can I hit you with something for the people who stuck around this long? Yeah, please. So just for y'all, because I know a lot of people maybe don't stick around for all the news. And also because I had to deliver you more Mars bummer. I'll try, I'll try my best to dig up some less bummer in Mars news in the future. I, for, for years, I, well, I'd, I'd say I was for like, for a year, I was working very hard on a novel that takes place on a space station and the space station is run, run by an artificial intelligence. That is an important character in the story. The people who live on the space station, one of the tropes of the novel, there's a bunch of like weird things about the space station
41:27 Hank Green? that are like ostensibly it trying to solve problems about humans being sort of often in non-ideal situations that, that they weren't, kind of weren't well set up for. Yeah. Uh, by modern society. When you live on earth, you can kind of have any AI you want to be like, uh, your guide through the world. And also you could have none, but most people choose to in this future world. When you go to this new space station, you have to like discard any AI you have lived with, which is a very difficult and personal decision that these people have to make. And then you get a collective AI that everybody has the same one and it is, uh, you know, ostensibly because the space station is a less safe place, it, every, there has to be some kind of central authority.
42:12 Hank Green? Anyway, I had this whole thing set up, it's a murder mystery, the, the. This sounds great. Why aren't you, why, why, why, why aren't I reading it? I'm gonna tell you. Oh, great. We, we, I set this little world up. I mean, a number of things happened. I got cancer. There's a lot of stuff has happened since I was right, working on this book actively. And what, but what happened was AI happened. So this was all written before GPT four. And then I was like, oh, this, like, if, if this book is published on the sort of speed at which books get published, by the time it comes out, it will be wrong about a lot of things that I do not currently understand.
42:52 Hank Green? But I have recently started working on it again because I feel like I might have enough of a grip on what AI might end up.
43:02 Hank Green? Looking like or being like for people that I can at least like, or like I have a like, it's it's at least a lens through which I can say things that I think are interesting.
43:11 John Green? Yeah.
43:12 Hank Green? But the sort of the central premise of the of the book is that someone on this like space station where the same AI is basically monitoring every person in the space station. Uh, someone manages to do a murder, uh, which starts to drive the AI kind of insane because it can't solve the murder. And so it brings up three people from Earth to try and solve the murder because it feels like nobody, there's no, there's no way, uh, that people from the space station can do it.
43:39 John Green? Wow, that sounds really cool, Hank. I'm in.
43:42 Hank Green? It's a little murder mystery, but murder, it turns out murder mysteries are hard, but I'm.
43:45 John Green? Very hard, very hard. I, I won an Edgar Award once, and I'll tell you what, the biggest surprise of it was that I'd successfully written a murder, uh, a mystery novel.
43:54 Hank Green? Yeah, well, there were, it turns out there wasn't even a murder.
43:57 John Green? There wasn't a murder, but there was hopefully a mystery and I wanted it to be a mystery novel, but I always thought that I'd kind of failed at that. You know, one thing, just in hearing you talk about this, one thing that I've noticed is a difference between you and me, and I'm not sure which of us is more in line with the social orders, norms and expectations here is, but when you're talking about a story that you're working on, you always refer to it as a book, which I've always felt like is so bold because like, how do you know it's going to end up a book? How do you know it's going to be between covers? Whereas like, when I talk about a story I'm working on, I always call it a story because I'm terrified to call it a book. Until it's like, until my editor says that she will publish it, I'm terrified to call it a book.
44:37 Hank Green? Well, I'll tell you what, if it's not a book, it's a, it as is, it's a good short story. Like, I can publish it. I can publish what I have right now as a short story. Um, but, uh, it would not have a solution to the murder. It would just have a murder.
44:51 John Green? People do like that when they read mystery stories.
44:53 Hank Green? AI going insane. Yeah.
44:55 John Green? Yeah, people do like that. Well, I look forward to reading it, but I know you're working on lots of stuff, but I hope you find time to write because I love your writing.
45:03 Hank Green? Yeah, it's fun. It was interesting to go back and read what I had written three years ago and be like, well, some of this is, but some of this is good.
45:11 John Green? Good.
45:12 Hank Green? One last bleep for you at the end.
45:14 John Green? Yeah, that was just Hank's calendar telling him that he has to go. So why don't you read the credits?
45:19 Hank Green? All right. This podcast is edited by Chayton Whaley. It's mixed by Joseph Tunametish. 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 Tabuki Chakravarti. And the music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunarola. Thank you, John. And as they say in our hometown.
45:39 John Green? Don't forget to be awesome.
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