410: Too Weird to Fail

Are the geese in Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” Canada Geese? Why are there taglines on movie posters? Does footballer Joe Lewis have special shorts? How was the alphabetical order decided? Are lone geese searching for the rest of their flock? Should Canada become the 51st US state? …Hank and John Green have answers! If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [email protected]. Join us for monthly livestreams at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn. Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hank Green?

  You're listening to a Complexly podcast.

• 0:09Hank Green?

  Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

• 0:13John Green?

  Whereas I prefer to think of it Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers offer you dubious advice and answer your questions and bring you all the week's news from both Mars, Nancy, Wimbledon. Hank, I'm in a very echoey space because I'm in a concrete-

• 0:24Hank Green?

  You're a little echoey.

• 0:25John Green?

  I'm in a concrete box right now on vacation with my family, but I took the day off because they were going on a long boat ride and I just got done with the tour for Everything is Tuberculosis and there were a lot of planes, trains and automobiles, but blessedly there were no boats.

• 0:41Hank Green?

  Didn't need any more jiggles.

• 0:42John Green?

  I don't need another, I don't need another method of transportation this week. I've had too many.

• 0:48Hank Green?

  Yeah, recently Catherine wanted to go on vacation and I wanted to go on more of like a staycation, so we did a compromise and had an altercation.

• 0:57John Green?

  That's pretty funny.

• 0:58Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 0:58John Green?

  That's not bad.

• 1:01John Green?

  You just got back from vacation as well.

• 1:04Hank Green?

  I did actually, just give, and we, in fact, both of us very much wanted to go on vacation.

• 1:08John Green?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the big news in my world, the big news in my world is that my book, Everything is Tuberculosis, is out in the world. It's gotten great reviews. It's the number one New York Times bestseller. It's the first book, Hank, to be at the top of the New York Times bestseller list about tuberculosis in some time.

• 1:25Hank Green?

  You know, previously you mostly launched books aimed at teenagers and, but you had to stop because you kept hitting them.

• 1:34John Green?

  Nope, nope. We only get one of those per week, buddy.

• 1:38Hank Green?

  Because you're just pelting teenagers with-

• 1:40John Green?

  And then if you try to do a second one, it's never as good.

• 1:42Hank Green?

  Your aim got too good, your aim.

• 1:44John Green?

  See, this is, this is the problem with you is that you tell a joke and if it doesn't land, you double down on it and if it does land, you also double down on it.

• 1:53John Green?

  It's one of the things you need to learn as a young comedian.

• 1:56Hank Green?

  I guess. You always gotta have another joke.

• 2:00John Green?

  Yeah. How are you? How are you doing in general, man?

• 2:04Hank Green?

  Uh, yeah, I think, I mean, vacation was really good. I'm good. I'm, of course, when you do uh, go and, and don't work for a while, you come back and then there's a bunch of work that you didn't do.

• 2:18John Green?

  This is the problem with working for yourself is that, um,

• 2:22Hank Green?

  Yeah, I think every, I think a lot of people have that experience, but.

• 2:25John Green?

  Yeah. I mean, ideally, somebody steps into your shoes, right? Like, the ideal situation is you're,

• 2:31Hank Green?

  Sure.

• 2:31John Green?

  Say, a managing director at a firm that moves the pile of money around. I assume that seems like the best job in the world.

• 2:40Hank Green?

  Somebody, and somebody else is moving the piles of money around.

• 2:43John Green?

  Exactly. And you get back and they're like, exactly. You get back from your vacation and they're like, hey, the piles of money have been moved left, right, center, front. They are larger as a result of the movement and you're welcome.

• 2:55Hank Green?

  Yeah. Whereas I get back and they're like, Hank, it turns out that only, only you are the one who can record this advertisement and the future Hank segments for Ask Hank Anything and also the, do the, the, the review to make sure that you said all the things that you wanted to say in this episode of this thing. And that was just like,

• 3:19John Green?

  Yeah.

• 3:19Hank Green?

  That, those things is what I'm doing right now.

• 3:22John Green?

  It's a lot of work, your job. Um, my job is a little less work, but also a lot of work. I, I was very grateful to be on tour for the last few weeks. I thought that I would be exhausted because it was a different city every day, a different plane every day, and that is kind of tiring, but I wasn't exhausted. I was really energized, actually, because I got to see 14,000 people in our community and I got to be with people who are very active in the fight against tuberculosis and other diseases of injustice. And it was really, uh, instead of getting tired, I came away from, I mean, I did get tired. Like, I'm on vacation now and I didn't get to sleep in my bed and I missed my bed. I haven't been in my bed and I go for three weeks and I am a little, I am a little tired, but like, at the same time, it was very encouraging.

• 4:05John Green?

  And, and encouragement is a little hard for me to come by right now, but I was very encouraged by this.

• 4:11Hank Green?

  Yes, I've been, I've been thinking a lot about how, how we are both, I don't know, we're, we're lucky to have, to have found the sort of space that we have. I was in your podcast with Chris Hayes and, you know, just sort of like talking to like an MSNBC anchor and you're like just sort of offhandedly mentioning, you know, our community and the work that they, that we have done to build this, to help build this hospital in Sierra Leone. And, and like, that is such like a weird thing that I don't think like, like, because to like the average Chris Hayes viewer, like, like, what would they even think that

• 4:53Hank Green?

  meant? But it's such like a concrete foundational thing in my life.

• 4:57John Green?

  Right.

• 4:58Hank Green?

  And the way, and the way that it happened was just so organic and, but also with an eye toward actually trying to be like constructive and live in a society.

• 5:11John Green?

  Yeah. And in a long-term, open-ended commitment kind of way.

• 5:15Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 5:16John Green?

  That like you will never not live in the society.

• 5:18Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like we, we sort of like swung, like the pendulum has swung a little bit, like pretty far away from living in a society here for a moment. And

• 5:32John Green?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Hank Green?

  I think maybe hopefully there actually is a, there actually is a swing back where like certain really antisocial behaviors are taboo again.

• 5:43John Green?

  Right. Yeah. That'd be great to see. Anyway, let's answer some questions from our listeners.

• 5:52Hank Green?

  Okay. John, this first question comes from Lydia. Dear Hank and John. Hank, so here's the thing. Wild Geese by Mary Oliver is my favorite poem. And I've considered getting a tattoo to represent it, but this has led me to wonder, do you think the eponymous wild geese are Canada geese? That's certainly the only type of wild goose I see in my midwestern city. John, I have a relatively low opinion of Canada geese, which does interfere somewhat with my interpretation of the poem. For example, I have a hard time reconciling the aggression of a Canada goose with, quote, "the soft animal of my body." You do not have to be good, but you do have to answer me. Lydia, what do you think, John? Are they Canada geese?

• 6:34John Green?

  I've always assumed so, and I've always assumed that they're sort of the great poem that tries to rehabilitate the Canada goose, right?

• 6:42Hank Green?

  Hmm, yes.

• 6:43John Green?

  Do you know, do you know the poem in question?

• 6:45Hank Green?

  I don't. Is it in the public domain?

• 6:48John Green?

  Um, it is today, buddy. It is today. Um, it goes like this. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles over the rain are moving across the landscapes over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese high in the clean blue air are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination,

• 7:29John Green?

  calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over announcing your place in the family of things. So what we know about the geese is that they fly very high in the clean blue air and that they are headed home again. So they are definitely migratory geese. Now, most Canada geese are migratory, although some now just live full-time in Indianapolis, crapping in my backyard.

• 7:52Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:53John Green?

  The other thing we know about them is that, like the wild geese, the call is harsh and exciting. Now, harsh, certainly. Exciting, I would say marginally.

• 8:04Hank Green?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go, having listened to it and to have been living in a place where I hear two different types of geese.

• 8:13John Green?

  Hmm.

• 8:14Hank Green?

  I would probably say that this could definitely be Canada geese, but it could also be, be snow geese, which also have a harsh and exciting call. And, and look, I think that on average, if you spent, if you like, if you ask the average person, like, what's the better goose, Canada goose or snow goose? They'd say snow goose, but they're not spending time up close with snow geese. If snow geese were on, in the park all the time, pooping their little logs of half-digested grass and defending their territory to you, you'd also hate snow geese. The, I don't get why we don't like Canada geese, except that they are successful.

• 8:56John Green?

  Right, well, they're successful, but they also remind us of the fact that they are successful because we've built the world for them, which reminds us that we're terraformers of Earth, which is a horrifying reality that we have to confront, that we don't like to confront.

• 9:09Hank Green?

  I think some people probably are having that reaction. I think a lot of people are just like, I'd really rather there not be little logs of half-digested grass all over the place.

• 9:17John Green?

  Yeah, there's that as well. So here's the thing.

• 9:20Hank Green?

  I think that's probably the average person.

• 9:21John Green?

  Mary Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

• 9:25Hank Green?

  Canada geese.

• 9:27John Green?

  Almost certainly Canada geese, although there are occasional ocean-going geese that make their way to Provincetown and do fly high in the blue sky. And so it's possible. But I think it's almost certainly Canada geese.

• 9:44Hank Green?

  Yeah. And I think that we should love them for the successful species that they are. We're successful, they're successful, we're sharing a little bit of space.

• 9:53John Green?

  We have a soft animal part of our bodies. They have a soft animal part of their bodies. You know, they have that belly that's exposed, just like we have an exposed belly. And they are vulnerable and fragile creatures, just like us. I guess the main difference is that we know what's keeping the stars apart, and they don't.

• 10:08Hank Green?

  Yeah, as far as we know, they do have that glint of intelligence sometimes, though.

• 10:13John Green?

  They don't. They absolutely do not have that glint of intelligence. I have a...I love a bird. I'm a bird enthusiast, but you're gonna have a hard time making the case to me that birds, other than like crows and ravens, have that glint of intelligence.

• 10:31Hank Green?

  They do seem to have little families, though, so that's nice and cute.

• 10:35John Green?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, it's great. All right, Hank, I have a question for you. It comes from Ani, who asks, Dear John and Hank, given the extensive nature of movie promo nowadays... Well, I don't know, Ani, it really depends on the movie. Some movies don't get extensive promo, but I know what you mean. In addition to several iterations of strategically-released trailers, what purpose do movie taglines on posters serve? Are they remnants of a bygone era? What do you think they add to the movie-going experience? Also, what would the tagline for your biopic be? In a world...Ani. So Hank, you may not know this, but the Faulkner Stars originally had a tagline that they ended up scrapping. It was on the movie poster, but it was only on the first run of the movie posters, and then they took it off the movie poster because everybody hated it, except for me, who found it hilarious.

• 11:18Hank Green?

  Oh, God. Um, who wrote this? Do you know?

• 11:22John Green?

  Somebody at a movie studio and the tagline was one sick love story.

• 11:27Hank Green?

  Oh, I've seen that.

• 11:29John Green?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Hank Green?

  Yeah, maybe I maybe I've like seen an old movie poster that didn't get released. Do you have?

• 11:35John Green?

  I think you probably did. I have one. I have one downstairs, so you probably see it when you come stay at my house.

• 11:41Hank Green?

  Didn't use that?

• 11:42John Green?

  They didn't use that. And it would totally make sense that they didn't use it because it's a very earnest, you know, and I want I want like, I want to make art that's earnest. So like, I don't want to use that layer of irony to protect against the, you know, the the expectations of people. But I also wanted the movie to be funny. And I think it is it is funny in parts. Obviously, it's not a comedy. But like, it has its funny moments and like, because I what I really wanted for that movie and for that book was for Hazel and Gus to be people with full, rich, complex lives that contained everything that a life can contain, you know, including lots of humor. Like, I worked at a children's hospital and it was one of the funniest places I've ever worked.

• 12:24John Green?

  It was also by far the saddest place I've ever worked. Those aren't mutually exclusive. Like, people can be funny and sad even at the same time. And

• 12:32Hank Green?

  Yes.

• 12:33John Green?

  So anyway, it did have a tagline, but then they cut it, which was the right call. And uh, I can't remember if Paper Towns had. I think Paper Towns had it had a had a call, had a tagline as well. It was get lost, get found.

• 12:50Hank Green?

  Which is not really the moral of this story.

• 12:53John Green?

  No, that's not what the book or the movie is about. But, you know, there is some getting lost in it. And I guess there's not really, but like, whatever. It sounds it seems like a movie tagline, you know? I don't know why they do them now, because it seems like totally irrelevant to the contemporary movie experience, unless it's like, unless it like feeds into socials, the way that like the Avengers Endgame most ambitious crossover of all time tagline fed into socials where people were like, no, the most ambitious crossover of all time is Hank Green and Dan Howell making content together or whatever.

• 13:32Hank Green?

  So are we supposed to try and figure out like our life story tagline?

• 13:36John Green?

  Yeah. What would your bio, what would the tagline be for your biopic?

• 13:39Hank Green?

  Uh, he came, he saw, he forgot why he came or saw, and then had to walk back to the other room to remember what he was doing in that room.

• 13:53John Green?

  That's pretty good. I mean, it's not succinct. That would be my only criticism of it.

• 13:59Hank Green?

  Well, it is, this is, this is a difficult copywriting task.

• 14:03John Green?

  Mine, I think, would be, uh, something, something definitely hypochondriacal. Like, does my eye look funny?

• 14:10Hank Green?

  Oh, really?

• 14:12John Green?

  Yeah.

• 14:16John Green?

  Something in that category, you know, something where it's like, this guy, this guy's clearly struggling with his mental and his physical health. That's what I'd want to communicate in my tagline.

• 14:28Hank Green?

  Uh, I want to communicate like, um, like just that, just that like special combination of, of just like haphazard energy, uh, like, like an ambition, but for nothing in particular.

• 14:45John Green?

  Right, right. Like, not like ambition to take over the world, but ambition to do weird stuff. Like, the real ambition that you and I have is an ambition to do weird stuff. Like, part of that is, like, there's, and there's ways in which that's cool and super productive, like building a maternal hospital in Sierra Leone is the greatest example of that, right?

• 15:06Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 15:06John Green?

  Like, that happened in part because you and I had ambition to do something weird and different. But then, like, there are other ways in which our ambition to do something weird and different is not at all productive. Like, for instance, if you have an ambition to see AFC Wimbledon become a third tier English soccer team and you devote resources to that, like, that's a weird ambition, you know? And like, people will be like, oh, that's kind of weird and cool, but they won't be like, oh, that's a good use of resources.

• 15:35Hank Green?

  Yeah. Uh huh. Yes. Uh, too weird to fail.

• 15:41John Green?

  Too weird to fail. That's a great tagline. You got there.

• 15:44Hank Green?

  Cause, cause that's great. Cause it actually makes sense because if you're just trying to be weird, you kinda can't fail.

• 15:51John Green?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:52Hank Green?

  Cause you're not, yeah, it's, everybody's like, well, it's weird.

• 15:55John Green?

  Right. If, if it succeeded in being weird, it succeeded, right? Like having a podcast for the last eight years where we literally, unironically share the news from AFC Wimbledon and Mars.

• 16:06Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 16:07John Green?

  And the podcast is still kind of a hit is proper weird.

• 16:10Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah, we got a lot of that. You remember when we for like, like, eight months only titled our videos, lines from a Smash Mouth's All-Star?

• 16:20John Green?

  And our views didn't go down at all?

• 16:23Hank Green?

  We were like, you know what, YouTube, everybody's talk, like talking about title optimization. What if we can prove?

• 16:30John Green?

  That thumbnails and titles don't matter.

• 16:32Hank Green?

  What if we can prove that you can really do it a different way? I'm, yeah, I mean, they matter for like, but they don't, but like, what if you could prove that there's another way? This is what I, this is what I want everyone to be doing. Honestly, there's just not enough experimentation, not enough weird.

• 16:47John Green?

  Yeah, I agree. We need to, we need to lean harder into weird, especially weird stuff that doesn't hurt anybody. Cause we've got a fair amount of weird stuff that does hurt people.

• 16:56Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 16:56John Green?

  But that's not the kind of weird we're looking for. In fact, this reminds me of our next question, Hank from Taylor, who writes, Dear John and Hank, does Joe Louis, who I helped pay for, he was a real life AFC Wimbledon player, get special, specially made shorts? Does he take them to a tailor or do the normal shorts that the rest of them wear just look like that on him? Taylor.

• 17:15Hank Green?

  I think that that's just, I think his body does it to the shorts. I don't think the shorts do it to his body.

• 17:21John Green?

  That is correct. He gets the same shorts.

• 17:24Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 17:25John Green?

  But his body does that to the shorts and what his body does to the shorts is magnificent.

• 17:31Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:33John Green?

  And I know Joe listens to the podcast, so hi, Joe.

• 17:36Hank Green?

  Oh, wow. Uh, the, the other day we couldn't, a friend of mine and I couldn't think of the, the name of the band, Greta Van Fleet.

• 17:46John Green?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:46Hank Green?

  And, uh, and so, so we were asking a friend and, and I said, you know, the cute little guy with the weird voice. And he was like, oh, Greta Van Fleet. So like, you just, like, you just do what, you do what the first thing and you put, put ideas into other people's heads. I don't think though, that I've ever done anything very special to a pair of shorts.

• 18:06John Green?

  No, um.

• 18:08John Green?

  No, nothing worth repeating on a podcast anyway.

• 18:11Hank Green?

  Thanks for the immediate response.

• 18:15John Green?

  Well, I just know you have colitis.

• 18:22Hank Green?

  Man, I don't, I don't, I've, I basically don't own shorts. It's, it's been a long process for me with the, with the visible legs.

• 18:32John Green?

  Yeah, I'm wearing shorts right now, but they always make me uncomfortable. I always feel like I'm performing for, like, I'm performing as someone else. Like, I'm cosplaying a middle-aged man who's on vacation.

• 18:43Hank Green?

  That's so weird, isn't it? The, the sort of like, like, with the personas that, and we, of course, think about this like way more than anyone else. But we're, so we, on our vacation, we were in Ireland. We did a bunch of cool stuff and Catherine was like, you should get a flat cap, like a wool Ireland style. I put it on and I was like, that looks pretty good. And Catherine was like, I love that. And I was like, no, but I can't wear it. I can't buy an Irish-style hat and wear it around Ireland. What is, what's next? That I start speaking in a very good Irish accent all of the time?

• 19:18John Green?

  Yes, you and your Irish brogue, I'm sure it would impress me. The fact that you were able to go to Ireland for two weeks and come back not with an Irish brogue is impressive, actually. Very proud of you. You've matured a lot.

• 19:30John Green?

  But yeah, I think we are probably more hyper-aware of performance than most people that like all identity is performative because we've been performing our identities and living our identities for a long time.

• 19:44Hank Green?

  I think everybody's kind of like that, though. Here's what I think. I think you can go into a store and you can see a shirt and be like, I could never pull that shirt off. And then you could put that shirt on and no one would even think for a second about that shirt.

• 19:57John Green?

  Well, they wouldn't think that you can't pull it off. They would think the fact that you're wearing it indicates that you can pull it off.

• 20:02Hank Green?

  Yeah. I honestly think that for the most part, they would, they kind of wouldn't think about the shirt. I think that the shirt probably wouldn't even be that weird.

• 20:11John Green?

  It depends on how good the shirt is. If the shirt, for example, we have another question from Sarah, who has a pot, who has a bumper sticker that says, honk if you're letting the small animal of your body love what it loves. I guess this is the Mary Oliver special. And, and that, if you put that on a T-shirt, right? Like, everybody would look at the T-shirt and be like, I love your Mary Oliver T-shirt. So people would notice it, but they wouldn't think like, oh, you can't pull off a Mary Oliver T-shirt. The mere fact that you're wearing it means that you can pull it off.

• 20:42Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 20:43John Green?

  That's my contention. And I experience this when I go to a casino, Hank. You can be a person other than who you are.

• 20:49Hank Green?

  What?

• 20:50John Green?

  You know? Yeah, like, I go to a casino and I have a made up name and a made up identity. I've never told you this before.

• 20:56Hank Green?

  Maybe you have, but it, you know, we've had a lot of conversations.

• 21:00John Green?

  It's true.

• 21:01Hank Green?

  But, that's just a weird way to say that. But you only do it in casinos?

• 21:06John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd be weird to do it anywhere else.

• 21:08Hank Green?

  Who are you? What's the name? Is it like Bennigan's McShane?

• 21:13John Green?

  No, no, it depends. So Sarah and I will create a character. Like, one time we created this character who made, researched Beyond Meat, like, meat alternatives, but for salmon.

• 21:26Hank Green?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 21:27John Green?

  And so when I got into a conversation about it at the, at the blackjack table, I was just like, yeah, you know, the texture is really challenging. That's one of the things that's really hard about it. The flavor profile is relatively straightforward, but the flaky texture of salmon is hard to recreate with a vegetable-based protein. And, I mean, I had a whole conversation where I was this guy, and then the money part of it was at the end, at the end of the night, when I was wrapping up at the blackjack table, the dealer came up to me and said, it's nice to meet you, Mr. Green.

• 21:57Hank Green?

  Now, this is why, this is why they're not recruiting you to be in the CIA.

• 22:02John Green?

  No, no, but I think I had the other table mates trick to the people who were in their seventies and eighties.

• 22:08Hank Green?

  I love that. I love that. I love that for that person. Can I tell you a little story about a little thing that happened to me today?

• 22:14John Green?

  Please.

• 22:16Hank Green?

  I got a burrito, but in a bowl, because I didn't want to have the whole burrito part. And, and, and the guy who made the burrito, as he was handing me the burrito bowl, he said, I would try to make this one look... Like it was good enough to go on the website. And I was like, I love that. This is the greatest little, this is a moment, great little moment. I'm going to really enjoy looking at this burrito bowl.

• 22:44John Green?

  Yeah, that's lovely.

• 22:46Hank Green?

  I'm like, that's, thanks for, you might say that to all the guys, but like.

• 22:50John Green?

  It still matters, though. It, it, it, yeah.

• 22:53Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 22:53John Green?

  Just like I, some care and attention went into the making of this.

• 22:57Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 22:58John Green?

  Hank, that reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the burrito bowl on the website. The burrito bowl on the website, getting recreated in Missoula, Montana every single day.

• 23:09Hank Green?

  This podcast is also brought to you by the Fault in Our Stars. The Fault in Our Stars, one sick love story. Cause we always do taglines, but now I got to do the tagline.

• 23:19John Green?

  Uh, today's podcast is also brought to you by Joe Louis's Shorts. Joe Louis's Shorts, it ain't the shorts, it's the man.

• 23:26Hank Green?

  And this podcast is brought to you by the soft animal body of the goose, the Canada goose. All right, John, another question comes from George, who asks, Dear Hank and John, how do people come up with alphabetical order? Why is A, B, C, D, E, F the order and not like B, Y, F, L, K, M, W? Rhymes with orange, George. Sorry, I mispronounced your name at the beginning there, George. We do not know, of course, why the original people put the alphabet, alphabet into alphabetical order. But it was done a very long time ago, and we have been using it in the same order for a long, long time. There isn't a sense to it. All the vowels are mixed in. There, there's a sense to some of it, like U and W are, and V are all close to each other because they came from the same letter.

• 24:10Hank Green?

  So we didn't, used to have all those letters, and so those are all descendants of the same letter.

• 24:15John Green?

  Ugh.

• 24:17Hank Green?

  What?

• 24:18John Green?

  That's the letter.

• 24:19Hank Green?

  Oh, yeah. I thought you were just making an upset noise.

• 24:23John Green?

  No, no, no, that's how, that's how the people express their dissatisfaction with the.

• 24:28Hank Green?

  And it's all those letters when you put them together.

• 24:36John Green?

  I think I got there.

• 24:37Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 24:38John Green?

  That was the original letter.

• 24:40Hank Green?

  It was the drunk to which letter. Mm hmm. And I can't stop.

• 24:46John Green?

  I can't.

• 24:46Hank Green?

  People are not gonna like that.

• 24:47John Green?

  I know, but I can't stop. I want to, believe me. You think I want to be doing this?

• 24:51Hank Green?

  All right, we're gonna move on then. I was talking to Daboki about this before, uh, because we have a little call where we talk about the sciency stuff. And she was like, uh, she told me that in Bengali, which her mother speaks, um, and she speaks a little bit of that the, that alphabetical order actually has an order.

• 25:11John Green?

  Oh.

• 25:11Hank Green?

  So it, it like, I, and I, I like, of course, cannot tell you the order, but basically-

• 25:18John Green?

  It's based on a logic.

• 25:19Hank Green?

  There's a logic to it. Yes. And, and like, she did it for me and I was like, oh, that like, that sounds very logical. So like, like certain, like, like there, there's a, there's a rhythm to, uh, the sort of beginning of each letter and then the sound after the letter. And so you do all of those in order and then you start with a new beginning and then the same sounds and then a new beginning and the same sounds.

• 25:44John Green?

  Hmm. That's smart. I like that more than just random, let's separate out the vowels. But we don't separate out the vowels by like the same number. There's no consistency at all about our alphabet.

• 25:56Hank Green?

  Yeah, we do have A, E, I, O, U. Like we have a separate order for vowels, which is, is it the alphabetical order of the vowels?

• 26:04John Green?

  It's the alphabetical order of the vowels, but like, again, the alphabet doesn't matter. So it could be U, O, I, E, A. It wouldn't be any different.

• 26:11Hank Green?

  Yeah. Right. Right.

• 26:14John Green?

  Except we have to keep the U, the W and the V together.

• 26:17Hank Green?

  We do. We could, I don't know how we do it. I'll be, here, maybe I could figure out. If we took the English alphabet and we did it more the way that Bengali does it, uh, what would it be like? I can't do that for you right now, but I bet I could with a little bit of time. So let me work on it.

• 26:37John Green?

  Okay, Hank, come back to us. You don't seem busy enough, so please work on recreating alphabetical order, which is exactly the kind of weird, highly specific project that I love for you in your retirement. Like, I really hope that you retire someday and you call me and you're like, yeah, so listen, man, it starts with D. Who knew?

• 26:58Hank Green?

  Who knew?

• 26:59John Green?

  I didn't expect it either.

• 27:05Hank Green?

  Yeah. Well, it also is inconsistent in how the letters work, right? So like W is just a word. It doesn't have anything to do with the sound of W.

• 27:17John Green?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Hank Green?

  Like, like in Bengali, it would be like woo, like you'd make the, and then like D would be duh, and T would be tuh. And like, but instead, we have like a bunch of different ways of doing it.

• 27:30John Green?

  Well, and in other languages-

• 27:31Hank Green?

  A lot of them are like CT, but then we have F, which is, we should be fee.

• 27:36John Green?

  In other languages, a lot of the, a lot of the letters are pronounced differently. So like, that is in no way consistent, even in languages that use the Latin alphabet and put it in the same order that we put it in. No, Hank, the only solution, and I've been saying this for years, is for you to retire and devote yourself full time to coming up with a new order to the alphabet that is based on reason and logic.

• 27:59Hank Green?

  I'm gonna standardize everything and do it with an iron fist after taking over everything. That's gonna be my first step.

• 28:08John Green?

  Like Robespierre in the French Revolution. You'll be like, this is year one. You heard me. Year one.

• 28:14Hank Green?

  How do I know? Cause it's, cause I'm doing it. And there's gonna be a hundred seconds in a minute.

• 28:23John Green?

  Year one of what turned out to be three.

• 28:29Hank Green?

  Hey, look, that's, that's a, that's a last. He lasted a while.

• 28:33John Green?

  Yeah. I don't know that he was alive for that entire three, but the calendar was. Oh, man. It was a bad, it was a bad time to be a politically powerful person in France, or, or really anybody in France, come to think of it. Avoid the French Revolution. Maybe that'll be the tagline for my biopic. That's my recommendation for you.

• 28:57Hank Green?

  Just trying to avoid the French Revolution.

• 28:59John Green?

  Don't, don't go full French Revolution.

• 29:02Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 29:03John Green?

  That's my world historical advice as a student of world history. This next question comes from Bella, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I live in the northeast of the United States and I always take great joy in watching the migrating Canada geese. This is our geese episode, Hank.

• 29:14Hank Green?

  It's geuses.

• 29:15John Green?

  In the spring and fall. Whenever I see a lone Canada goose flying by itself, I always experience some amount of worry about its fate. Will it just find another flock to latch on to? Does it need to find its original flock? Do geese have families? Are we ultimately all alone on this cosmic journey between Canada and slightly, slightly south of Canada?

• 29:34John Green?

  It's great, Bella. That is our preferred designation these days, South Canada. Be geese and goslings, Bella.

• 29:43Hank Green?

  They're gonna have so many provinces. They're not gonna know what to do with all their provinces when they take over America.

• 29:52John Green?

  Oh, man, they're gonna have so many pro- they're gonna have a North Dakotan province and a South Dakotan province. I bet the, I bet the logic up and make one Dakota province, actually.

• 30:00Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're gonna, first they'll do the alphabet, then all of the north, south, east, west, that's just gonna be one state each. There's just one Virginia, there's just one Carolina.

• 30:12John Green?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Hank Green?

  And

• 30:13John Green?

  And then they're gonna make Tulsa the capital of Oklahoma.

• 30:16Hank Green?

  Yep. Each one of the Hawaiian Islands is a different state now.

• 30:21John Green?

  Oh, really?

• 30:21Hank Green?

  Yep. That's what Canada's gonna do, that too.

• 30:23John Green?

  Even, even the one that Larry Ellison owns? Can we have, can we have one not owned by a person?

• 30:27Hank Green?

  Yeah, that one's gonna be, we're gonna kick him off, though.

• 30:31John Green?

  Oh, great. Cool.

• 30:32Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's gonna just, it's actually just gonna be beavers now. And

• 30:37John Green?

  But they, they, can they vote?

• 30:39Hank Green?

  Yeah, of course. They vote by like whether or not they come out of their, their little huts of

• 30:46John Green?

  Oh, they vote like Poxitoni Phil.

• 30:48Hank Green?

  Yes, exactly.

• 30:50John Green?

  I love it.

• 30:52Hank Green?

  You nail like the face of East Prime Minister candidate to a tree and then whichever one they nibble on, that's the, that, and actually that decides it for the whole country.

• 31:00John Green?

  We're getting, we're getting out of the humans voting business. We're getting into the beaver voting business.

• 31:05Hank Green?

  And it's year one of the era of beaver.

• 31:11Hank Green?

  But anyway, as for the geese.

• 31:15John Green?

  I love the idea that humans can do all the steps, like we nominate the candidates, we like have the political parties, we do all the steps up to the last step, and then we're like, listen, we can't be trusted with the last vote. That's why we give it to the beavers.

• 31:29Hank Green?

  Uh huh. If, I mean, the, the, one of the real problems is that there are times when it does feel like it's just a beaver.

• 31:37John Green?

  Yeah, it does. It does.

• 31:38Hank Green?

  Like, I want, I want, I want fewer 50 50s going on in American politics. Cause I just feel like.

• 31:45John Green?

  Yeah, we need more 80 20s in American politics. We need more 80 20s. And right now, we don't have a lot of 80 20s. But anyway, Hank, should we worry about the lone Canada goose?

• 31:55Hank Green?

  Um, probably not. So Canada geese are certainly very social. They travel in family groups. It isn't like they're just like sort of flying around and glomming on to whatever group of geese they see. They hang out with a specific group that are often, you know, in some way have like family familial relations. And, uh, and they also mate for life. So if you do see a lone goose, it may be that they, uh, are in a situation where they've lost their mate, but it could also very easily be a situation where their group has settled down and they are doing something specific. Or they might have like a partner who is nesting and they're off, uh, flying to do goose work.

• 32:38John Green?

  Sure.

• 32:39Hank Green?

  Yeah, gets, get, do, doing the work of the geese. Uh, but you do often see them together and that is, that is why. So is there is a potential that if you see a goose all by itself and it's sort of like always by itself, that, that, that is a sad situation for that goose.

• 32:54John Green?

  It's a lonely goose.

• 32:56Hank Green?

  But oftentimes when you see a lonely goose, in fact, there will be other geese that it is going, either going away from or coming back to. And it will, it will return and can reconnect with them because you, these family units don't, they, they tend to be self perpetuating. And so they don't like die out. Um, so there's, but like, there also might be like a male, like a young male thing, which is often a thing and, uh,

• 33:22Hank Green?

  like a social species is that young males will sort of head off into their own and, and maybe pick up.

• 33:28John Green?

  Forty nights in the wilderness and all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, Hank, before we get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, I want to ask you one more question, and believe it or not, it is a goose question. It comes from Kelsey, who writes, Dear John and Hank, your CBC interview with Matt Galloway this morning was fantastic. My pre-ordered copy of Everything is Tuberculosis is arriving Monday, and I can't wait. That's great. Thank you for listening. And I should also mention, Hank, I was on another podcast that I really enjoyed.

• 33:54Hank Green?

  Is Matt Galloway a goose? Is that why this is looped back to the goose thing?

• 33:58John Green?

  Hold on a second.

• 34:00Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 34:01John Green?

  It was Wild Card with Rachel Martin, and it was probably the best, single best interview I've ever done. I love that Chris Hayes podcast. I had so many great interviews on this tour, but that Rachel Martin podcast was incredible. She just like gave me so many gifts in that conversation. But anyway.

• 34:15Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 34:16John Green?

  Kelsey goes on to say, however, I am also reeling from listening to your podcast, episode 259, Infinite Bird, where you suggested that Canada is secretly part of the US, given the current political situation. Are you sure about that?

• 34:28Hank Green?

  Take it back!

• 34:29John Green?

  And just checking in as a non-51st state or Kelsey. So Hank, I didn't ever realize that I would have to be in this position.

• 34:36Hank Green?

  Yes.

• 34:37John Green?

  But I would like to state for the record

• 34:39Hank Green?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:40John Green?

  That I was 100% serious.

• 34:42Hank Green?

  51st state, baby. Red, white, and blue.

• 34:50John Green?

  Kelsey, I think Canada, and I, again, this is a weird situation to be in, but I think Canada is a sovereign nation.

• 34:58Hank Green?

  No, John. The 51st state is a maple leaf. They get that. That's all they get. Put that on the, there are going to be 50, 51 stars on the flag, but actually just 50 because one of them is a maple leaf.

• 35:13John Green?

  Yeah. Anyway, right, 50 stars and one maple leaf. That's how we're gonna, that's how we're gonna settle this thing? I'm sorry, Kelsey.

• 35:22Hank Green?

  We're honoring you with one single maple leaf.

• 35:24John Green?

  I'm sorry if my joke about the United States and Canada having a deeper-than-usual relationship was, was misinterpreted into a political movement where Canada becomes the 51st state, which obviously it shouldn't become. Okay.

• 35:37Hank Green?

  And now we know that Donald Trump is a listener to the pod.

• 35:39John Green?

  Yeah, longtime friend of the pod.

• 35:41Hank Green?

  Unfortunately, we seem to have given him the wrong idea. And we'd just like to say, Don, we think that there's a number of mistakes you've made.

• 35:52John Green?

  Yeah. And also, just like, how, how did you listen to the podcast and take that away, but not the values of the podcast? Um, that the last shall be first and the first shall be last and the meek shall inherit the earth and etc. Don. Anyway, moving on Hank.

• 36:09John Green?

  God, I watched three football games while I was on vacation and they were all infuriating.

• 36:18Hank Green?

  That's not good.

• 36:19John Green?

  Oh my God.

• 36:20Hank Green?

  Is this the news from AFC Wimbledon?

• 36:22John Green?

  The last six goals that AFC Wimbledon have given up have been given up in the 85th, 90th, 95th, 90th and 96th minute.

• 36:31Hank Green?

  What the?

• 36:33John Green?

  We were winning one game 2-0.

• 36:34Hank Green?

  That's why they created that, that letter.

• 36:36John Green?

  We were winning another game 1-0. We were winning another game 1-0 and in all those, in two of those occasions, we tied the game and in one of those occasions, we managed to lose the game. So we went from a potential nine points down to two points and this is the run in. This is, this is when we have to be good because the teams around us are good. And it's just been devastating. So right now, we're still in the playoff hunt. We are still in, uh, I believe fifth place and, and so fifth place, sixth place and seventh place, they all go to the, they all go to the, the playoffs. But I don't want to go to the playoffs, Hank. I wanted to go up through, through the automatic promotion ranks. So we don't have to worry about the playoffs, but that looks like a distant dream. Now

• 37:17John Green?

  we're five points off the automatic promotion spots with only six games to go. Um, so it's not looking, it's not looking perfect if I'm being honest.

• 37:26Hank Green?

  Just win all those games.

• 37:28John Green?

  Well, if we won all those games, if we won all six of those games, we would indeed be promoted. In fact, if we won four of them, I think we would be promoted, but, um, I don't.

• 37:36Hank Green?

  Are they against bad teams?

• 37:38John Green?

  It's a mix. It's a mix. There are some bad teams. So the next team we play, Harrogate Town is not very good. Um, so there's some hope there and then I'm going to see us play.

• 37:50Hank Green?

  They're like, they're like, uh, they're like Hank Green in shorts. Not very good.

• 37:54John Green?

  They're like Hank Green, Hank Green in shorts. They don't, uh, they don't, they don't fill out the uniform, if you will.

• 38:02John Green?

  Not like Joe Louis does. Then you've got Doncaster, who are promotion candidates, Chesterfield, Gillingham, or Gillingham, depending on your worldview, Port Vale, and our last game is against Grimsby Town. So that game against Port Vale could be huge. They're currently in the playoff spots. And then that game against Grimsby Town on May 4th is going to be huge. I'm going to be at the game on April 18th. If anybody's there, please say hi. But in the meantime, it's looking tense for AFC Wimbledon, only one win in our last five games.

• 38:35Hank Green?

  Well, news from Mars, the Curiosity Rover has found the largest organic molecules on Mars ever found.

• 38:43John Green?

  Now, what does that mean? Does that mean life?

• 38:45Hank Green?

  No, not necessarily. There are ways that these molecules can be made geologically. So, but they're made in interesting ways geologically, when they're made geologically. So it was analyzing a rock sample called Cumberland. You remember Cumberland Farms, Sean, when we were growing up?

• 39:04John Green?

  Sure, of course.

• 39:05Hank Green?

  It was the one that I was a little bit more worried to go to.

• 39:09John Green?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Hank Green?

  Rather than 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven felt safer than the Cumberland Farms.

• 39:14John Green?

  7-Eleven felt like Cumberland Farms was across the street, and so you actually had to cross the busy road twice to get to Cumberland Farms, whereas 7-Eleven, you didn't have to cross the busy street at all.

• 39:25Hank Green?

  Yeah, but it also, it also just-

• 39:27John Green?

  It was like literally safer. But also, it felt a little-

• 39:31Hank Green?

  There was a vibe.

• 39:32John Green?

  There was a vibe at Cumberland Farms, where you'd be like, don't drink the milk from there, you know?

• 39:37Hank Green?

  Yeah, it was a little more cigarette-centric of a store.

• 39:40John Green?

  It was more of a cigarette shop than a convenience store in the old-fashioned sense.

• 39:46Hank Green?

  Uh huh.

• 39:46John Green?

  Do you know that there's still Cumberland Farms out there?

• 39:50Hank Green?

  Look at that.

• 39:51John Green?

  It's colloquially known as-

• 39:52Hank Green?

  Where's the nearest one to me?

• 39:54John Green?

  Cumbies is its colloquial name, which I do not love.

• 39:59Hank Green?

  No, that's terrible. There are no more in Orlando. There's three in the state of Florida. They are almost entirely in, it looks like, New England area.

• 40:09John Green?

  Yeah, they're on the beach out there in Florida. You know, there's one, there's one like, if you drive straight from Orlando to the beach.

• 40:16Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 40:16John Green?

  Yeah, there's a Cumbie in Rockledge. That's the kind of vibe.

• 40:22Hank Green?

  Oh, boy.

• 40:24Hank Green?

  Cumbies.

• 40:25John Green?

  I wish I didn't know that.

• 40:26Hank Green?

  I've got a logic.

• 40:27John Green?

  I'd love to go back in time to before I knew that.

• 40:29Hank Green?

  Against a dear Hank and John Cumbies edition.

• 40:32John Green?

  All right. What's, uh, what's the news from Mars? Right, so we don't know that these are living organisms. These aren't living organisms, but they're large organic.

• 40:40Hank Green?

  They're large organic molecules and the rock is called Cumberland and I don't know why. But they were looking for amino acids and they did not find any, but they found small bits of decade, undecade and dodecade, which are basically just 10, 11 and 12 carbon, long carbon chains. And they hypothesized that these are actually fragments of fatty acids. And they, uh, so they, so what they did is they mixed some fatty acid with, I think, an 11 carbon chain with Mars-like clay and then heated it up and found that decade was released from that. They did that here on Earth to see if, indeed, is probably these fatty acids. Fatty acids are very important for life. Your cell membranes are made out of them.

• 41:25Hank Green?

  Um, and, uh, so, and we think that, uh, that they, when they are made geologically on Earth, they are made when water mixes with minerals from hydrothermal vents. So, uh, we are continuing our little, little trek down the journey of Mars, early Mars being more and more Earth-like in its infancy.

• 41:47John Green?

  Yeah, because we had hydrothermal vents, right? And that's probably where life first emerged.

• 41:51Hank Green?

  That's what we think, yeah. That's the, that's the leading candidate. That's where I'm at.

• 41:54John Green?

  So the idea that they also had hydrothermal vents means that probably life would inevitably emerge there.

• 42:01Hank Green?

  We don't know. We only, the thing about life, uh, is that it happened one time and so you can't actually learn very much from it happening one time. You know, if it happened twice, you can say something about how, how common it is, but when something only happens once, you can't really say anything about how common it is.

• 42:15John Green?

  So we've only, so life has only emerged on Earth once, we think?

• 42:19Hank Green?

  As far as we know. Um, if it emerged a separate time, then the, the version of it that we have now consumed and outcompeted it, the other forms to extinction.

• 42:30John Green?

  Okay. Okay. That's wild, though, that like.

• 42:34Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 42:36John Green?

  I mean, first off, it's wild that life emerged here. I mean, I guess it's

• 42:39Hank Green?

  Life is very strange. It, it, it, we don't, we have no idea. And the, and we, we do not, we still do not have a chemical explanation for how it happened, like a physical explanation for how it happened. We're working on it. We're closer than I, we were when I was, when I was in school, but.

• 42:57John Green?

  Don't we sort of not fully understand even what life is? Like, don't we not really have a strong definition of life? Because, you know,

• 43:09Hank Green?

  I think we do.

• 43:10John Green?

  There's lots of things that challenge it, like viruses and whatnot.

• 43:13Hank Green?

  Yeah, I think that, I mean, there's different ways you can draw the line, but like, life is definitely a thing. And we have, we have an understanding of what that thing is. Like, there isn't like a fuzzy line between like a rock and you, like you are definitely alive. And so we know that like life exists and is a thing.

• 43:35Hank Green?

  And there are, there are just, there is like several different, in different disciplines, there are different ways to draw that line. And some, some of them kind of do draw it where virus is included and some don't.

• 43:46John Green?

  Right. Okay. But that doesn't mean that we don't know what, whether life is a thing or what thing life is. Cause we, we, it's like, um, some of it is vibes based, but some of it is pretty unambiguous. Like viruses might be vibes based, but the rest of it's kind of unambiguous.

• 44:05Hank Green?

  Yeah. My, my opinion is that like, that the fuzziness of a border between things.

• 44:12Hank Green?

  Like there's, there's fairly really fuzzy borders between some things, like there's a really fuzzy border between like, what's a shrub and what's a tree? Like, it's very, very fuzzy. But the, there's a little bit of fuzz when it comes to life, but it is not, but like, there's fuzz everywhere. It's, it's always a little fuzzy, but it's pretty, it's actually sharper than maybe you might imagine.

• 44:31John Green?

  Okay. Well, I just imagine it is fuzzy because I imagine like all human built language categories as fuzzy.

• 44:40John Green?

  So like, I imagine the category of fish is fuzzy.

• 44:43Hank Green?

  Amounts of fuzzy. Well, fish is extremely fuzzy.

• 44:46John Green?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Hank Green?

  Fish, fish basically doesn't exist.

• 44:48John Green?

  Fish don't exist. I read a book about it.

• 44:51Hank Green?

  I mean, fish only exist, eh, eh, fish only exist in the, in the sense of like, you look at it and like, that looks like a fish, which is also like a fine categorization system.

• 44:59John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. This is helpful for me. There might be life on Mars, but we don't know. Life has only evolved once that we know of. And so it could be common or it could be rare. We just don't know yet.

• 45:10Hank Green?

  Yeah. I mean, the big question, I, I think that when we end up on Mars doing science, the thing that will probably answer, well, if we answered, it will be answered in the positive. Um, otherwise we'll just keep searching and not know for sure. Um, is whether life existed in the distant past there.

• 45:31Hank Green?

  And there's probably, you know, based on how, based on the fact that like Mars isn't geologically active. So it's not like chewing up its own crust all the time, like Earth is, then we'll probably actually be able to figure that out. Cause the, the old stuff is still there. The evidence is probably still around.

• 45:49John Green?

  Right. We just need to dig down and get those sweet Martian skeletons.

• 45:55Hank Green?

  Yeah. Or probably like fossilized bacterial mats.

• 45:59John Green?

  Yeah. That's not going to be quite as exciting for me, but it'll still be cool.

• 46:03Hank Green?

  Yeah. I mean, based on how life went on Earth is a really, really low chance of a skeleton, of any, any kind of like hard multicellular.

• 46:13John Green?

  It took so long to get from one cell to two.

• 46:18Hank Green?

  It took a huge amount of time.

• 46:21John Green?

  It took more time to get from one cell to two than it took to get from two cells to humans by a wide margin.

• 46:26Hank Green?

  Basically, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And yeah, you, you like hear about like, like life on Earth at the outside, maybe four billion years old and.

• 46:39Hank Green?

  And like every time you look up how old something that you think of as a life form, it's never more than a billion.

• 46:46John Green?

  No.

• 46:47Hank Green?

  Cause like before that, it's like, just not much going on.

• 46:50John Green?

  Yeah. I know. We are very unlikely and very valuable as a result.

• 46:56Hank Green?

  That is.

• 46:56John Green?

  That's something to remember about humans.

• 46:59Hank Green?

  It could be that life is quite common, but life like us is quite rare. I don't know. I was never hit with this as like a young, interested in science kid, but it's really wild that it took almost a third of the life of the universe for life to go from existing to capable of making a hat, you know?

• 47:23John Green?

  Right. Or capable of understanding what a star is.

• 47:26Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 47:28John Green?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Hank Green?

  It's pretty wild. That's a long time for life to need to exist uninterrupted.

• 47:34John Green?

  Yeah. And we are one of the only life forms in the history of the known universe that knows what a star is.

• 47:41Hank Green?

  Yeah. Yeah. I, I'd be interested to, to know if there are any, I mean, I think it seems like other animals can appreciate beauty in a way.

• 47:49John Green?

  Yeah, no, I believe that they can.

• 47:51Hank Green?

  But.

• 47:51John Green?

  They can look at the stars, but they can't know that the stars are.

• 47:54Hank Green?

  Yeah, no, we're the only ones that know.

• 47:56John Green?

  On another, in another part of the galaxy.

• 47:58Hank Green?

  We're the only current, currently existing life form that, that could, is capable of knowing that, I think.

• 48:04John Green?

  Yeah. Maybe Neanderthals could have known that.

• 48:06Hank Green?

  But almost definitely, yeah.

• 48:08John Green?

  But they don't know it now.

• 48:09Hank Green?

  They did, they didn't know it.

• 48:09John Green?

  Cause we killed them.

• 48:11Hank Green?

  Or.

• 48:12John Green?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 48:13Hank Green?

  Maybe, yeah. There's been some.

• 48:17John Green?

  There's some good debate about that one.

• 48:19Hank Green?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 48:20John Green?

  I just don't trust us personally. But anyway, we gotta, we gotta stop the podcast.

• 48:22Hank Green?

  That is how I feel. I feel like it would be really unusual. Like we're pretty big impact on, on most environments we exist in. It'd be weird for us to not have played a part.

• 48:31John Green?

  Yeah, that's how I feel, too. But we'll see. We'll see. That's something that we'll figure out in the future, too, I think.

• 48:37Hank Green?

  I hope so, yeah. All right. Good podcast, John. Thank you for hanging out with me.

• 48:40John Green?

  This was a fun one. Thank you, Hank. Thanks for the goose spectacular.

• 48:43Hank Green?

  So many geese. If you want to send us your questions, that's at [email protected]. This podcast is edited by Linus Ovenhaus. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna Metashar. Communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halsrojas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Devoki Chakravarti. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gonna Rolla. And as they say in our hometown...

• 49:05John Green?

  Don't forget to be awesome.