Pod Insights Dear Hank & John 426: The Hank Green Twitter Memorial Garden About this episode If John and Hank had to name something after each other, what would it be? Could a balloon make it to space? Are athletes offended by how we talk about them? Does a Bloody Mary actually help a hangover? Why do dogs smell like that when they’re wet? Do John and Hank watch each other's videos? …Hank and John Green have answers!
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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.
0:11 John Green? Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank.
0:13 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.
0:19 John Green? John? Yeah.
0:20 Hank Green? They robbed a calendar store and they got caught. Terrible news.
0:24 John Green? Hmm.
0:24 Hank Green? They each got six months.
0:28 Hank Green? John, I recently, I was watching a Conan O'Brien podcast and he was talking on his Conan O'Brien podcast about the ads that he gets on Instagram reels. Do you get ads on Instagram reels?
0:39 John Green? Oh, yeah.
0:39 Hank Green? I have never been served an ad.
0:43 John Green? Wow, well, you are clearly a very special little boy. Congratulations.
0:47 Hank Green? Well, what is it? I'm not specialer than Conan O'Brien.
0:51 John Green? I assume that you've been somehow whitelisted as a user they do not want to show ads to. Maybe you're immune to advertising. You're not getting ads for the most, actually.
1:01 Hank Green? What do you get? What do you get?
1:02 John Green? I get ads for the Awesome Socks Club and Keats & Co Coffee and Tea. I would say every fifth reel.
1:10 Hank Green? Yeah, well, they know, they know what you're into.
1:12 John Green? Yeah, I mean, they know what I'm into, but I'm already a customer. You can't convert me a second time. It reminds me of the all time great Amazon toilet seat review where the person wrote, "Amazon's algorithm has become convinced that since I bought a toilet seat, I'm in the market for hundreds of toilet seats."
1:30 Hank Green? It's hard to tell. And also, you could always buy more at good.store. It is, it is amazing the extent to which they identify your interests. For example, now when I go on, onto Twitter, which of course I never do and would never do.
1:44 John Green? Oh, gross.
1:46 Hank Green? It will, I'll get a bunch of content in addition to the, the sort of scum at the bottom of, of the barrel of humanity. I will occasionally get a piece of content about Hank Green and I'm like, boy, you know my interests.
2:00 John Green? Oh, boy. Yeah. I mean,
2:02 Hank Green? I used to, I had to search for that.
2:04 John Green? What's it like to, uh, what's it like to be hanging out in the internet's worst cesspool?
2:11 Hank Green? It's so bad.
2:11 John Green? And that's saying something.
2:12 Hank Green? It's so, it's so bad. It's scary. It, I mean, I don't want to talk about it. It is horrifying.
2:18 John Green? Maybe. I'm just gonna throw it out there. You should stop going.
2:21 Hank Green? Yeah. I do think that I am there largely to feel, feel sensations, like it provides sensations in ways that the other platforms don't. And by sensations, I mean fear, anger, disgust, outrage.
2:36 John Green? All the major feelings that one seeks in life.
2:41 Hank Green? It knows which ones I'm, I'm really looking for. I don't know. I don't know. I'd rather see a toilet seat advertisement.
2:48 John Green? Oh, for sure. I'd rather, I, it'd be great if the internet was nothing but toilet seat advertisements. If they just replaced the entire thing with toilet seat ads. I feel like that would genuinely be a step up for society.
2:59 Hank Green? Definitely. I mean, I don't see any, uh, strong signs that the near term influence of the internet has been, uh, good.
3:08 John Green? Yeah.
3:08 Hank Green? TikTok's really got me pegged as a guy who would like to build a small army of men to shoot zombies.
3:15 John Green? Oh, they always giving you ads for those, uh, those mobile games?
3:19 Hank Green? Yeah. And it's like, not this one. This one's a good one. And I'm like, I don't believe you. I believe if you, if you're paying this much money to acquire me as a customer, there isn't a way in which it's not going to extract a great deal of money from me once I download it.
3:32 John Green? No, that's absolutely right. That's, that's the right impulse. And in general, that's always the case with advertising, except for when you're advertised items from good.store.
3:42 Hank Green? One thing you know is that money is not gonna go to some guy somewhere. It's gonna go to make the world a better place and you're gonna get good stuff.
3:50 John Green? We got that going for us. We are participating in a different kind of capitalism that I find a little less problematic, but only a little. Let's move on to a question from Raquel, who writes, Dear John and Hank, if you had to name something after your brother, what would it be? You can choose anything and the other brother cannot stop you. For the sake of names, Raquel. This is a great question.
4:11 Hank Green? We've both already got one.
4:12 John Green? What's named after me?
4:13 Hank Green? Well, what do you think a John is?
4:15 John Green? No, no, no, man. I'm not talking about a toilet or like any, they're saying like, if you could name a park after them, or a bridge, or anything on earth.
4:24 Hank Green? Oh, well, I thought, I thought it was like a thing, like, like, do you know what a Hank is?
4:28 John Green? Uh, isn't it an amount of yarn?
4:31 Hank Green? It's an amount of yarn.
4:33 John Green? Yeah, yeah.
4:34 Hank Green? For a long time, if you Googled Hank Green, you'd get green yarn. I don't know why I would have Googled Hank Green so many times in my life.
4:41 John Green? Yeah, it's not a great sign. I have to say that for many years I Googled John Green a lot. And then the internet broke me. It broke me like a wild horse that couldn't be broken. It taught me that in fact, I am not a buck and bronco. I am just another docile horse that is subservient to man. I completely gave in and do not Google myself anymore ever.
5:02 Hank Green? For me, the internet, the, the, the horse that is the internet kicks me in the leg, shatters my femur.
5:08 John Green? Yeah.
5:09 Hank Green? My femur heals and I'm like, that's fine. And I will, I'll, it'll never happen again. And also this femur, strong as ever. And then it happens again. And I'm like, turns out the femur was not as strong as I thought. Yeah. Turns out, it turns out I still have some bone shards in there.
5:24 John Green? Yeah. I think I would name Twitter Hank Green. I would name it Hank Green's social media service.
5:30 Hank Green? Yeah.
5:30 John Green? And then Hank would be so inundated with Google messages, he could no longer successfully Google himself, which I really do think Hank, like one day you're going to come to me and you're going to say, I stopped Googling myself. And I'm going to be like, you did it. Like you achieved enlightenment. That was the last thing you needed to shed in order to become the truest version of yourself.
5:49 Hank Green? John, I think that you, you know, those bananas that never turn green, but like, that's what they're never turn yellow. That's what they're supposed to do. And you like, eat like, you cook them a different way?
5:58 John Green? Plantains?
6:01 Hank Green? Maybe.
6:05 Hank Green? It could be.
6:06 John Green? Yeah, I know. I know about plantains.
6:08 Hank Green? Well, those are John Green's now. Or maybe it's like a variety of plantains.
6:12 John Green? Actually, I would love to name a park after you.
6:16 Hank Green? Oh.
6:17 John Green? But not, not in Missoula.
6:18 Hank Green? Can I do, can we, can it be a really weird park? You know what I've always wanted to do, John?
6:22 John Green? What?
6:23 Hank Green? Can I tell you my idea?
6:24 John Green? Oh, God, yes.
6:25 Hank Green? So here's what I want to do. I want to create a sort of a contemplative walk. You know, like a labyrinth, you know, one of these places where it's just like you go to spend time with yourself in your mind. And in the same way, there's a place near Missoula called the, the Garden of a Thousand Buddhas. And it's a sort of like a contemplative walk place. And they have inscribed stones that have like Buddhist thoughts on them, you know, like,
6:51 John Green? Fewer Buddhas than I would have expected at the Garden of a Thousand Buddhas.
6:54 Hank Green? There's a thousand.
6:55 John Green? Yeah, I guess that I didn't understand how small a number in the scheme of things 1,000 is.
7:00 Hank Green? Yeah, yes.
7:01 John Green? I was imagining just a, just a vast expanse that stretched out to the horizon of Buddhas.
7:06 Hank Green? Yeah.
7:07 John Green? And I got sort of a solid acre of Buddhas.
7:11 Hank Green? But it's a, it's a nice contemplative walk. And I like a nice contemplative walk. And I want one that's like in, just like sort of lovely and has, has features. But I also want the rocks to be inscribed with drill tweets.
7:28 John Green? It's a bad idea. It's not a good idea.
7:30 Hank Green? Or just like, maybe just like classic tweets. Just like, it's a, it's a memorial to Twitter, because I do actually grieve for it a little bit. I know that I'm weird. But I know that there are other people like this too, or at least one other person who is like this too, because I've talked with them about it. But, but I'd like, there's a, there's a, like in the same way that like Vine gets to live on, on TikTok and like Vine compilations and stuff. I'd like there to be like a physical manifestation of good, of like some good in quotation marks. They're not going to be Buddhist cones, you know? They're going to be dumb tweets, but like dumb tweets and like a celebration of like how dumb humans are. And I just want, I like want a memorial. I want a memorial to
8:13 Hank Green? Twitter, which is the stupidest thing I've ever said. I hadn't really considered that that's what the thought actually was until I said it out loud. But that's what I want. I want a nice contemplative walk with dumb tweets inscribed into stones that line the walkway.
8:28 John Green? What would some of those tweets be? Do you have any in mind?
8:30 Hank Green? What about this one? Does anyone think global warming is a good thing? I love Lady Gaga. I think she's a really interesting artist. That was Britney Spears. In one tweet. Also Ed Balls. Like you just have Ed Balls. Do you know Ed Balls?
8:44 John Green? No.
8:45 Hank Green? Ed Balls is a British politician, I think. And he once tweeted the words Ed Balls, period. And that's the whole tweet.
8:54 John Green? Yeah, I mean, I, again, I'm not sure that it's worthy of a memorial garden. I can think of greater things that we did as a culture that we should sort of, because that's what a memorial garden is all about, right? It's about lifting up the best of us.
9:07 Hank Green? Yeah.
9:08 John Green? I guess I'm going to submit that Twitter was never the best of us and that you are remembering it that way.
9:14 Hank Green? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
9:16 John Green? Okay.
9:16 Hank Green? No, I'm not. I don't think Twitter was ever the best of us. I think that we should mourn our idiocy. I think that we should celebrate the dumb little flaws of humanity. Like, we were given this tool to say anything we wanted in the whole world. And, but, and, look, 100%, one, one thing I know for sure is 200 years from now, Twitter will not be a thing. Microblogging will not be a thing. People will not do this anymore because they will have realized that it rots your brain and it rots society. We only remember yellow journalism for like the bad parts. But there's also stupid parts, dumb little parts of yellow journalism that just have been forgotten. And I want the dumb little parts of Twitter to have a little walk where you walk and you're like, God, we're dumb.
9:59 John Green? All right, can I expand it?
10:01 Hank Green? Yes, expand it.
10:02 John Green? I actually think the problem is, is that you're so married to Twitter. And that lots of other people use Reddit or Tumblr or Facebook or Instagram. And I don't think any of this stuff is going to exist in 200 years.
10:14 Hank Green? For sure. Yes.
10:15 John Green? There might be a video sharing platform in 200 years, but I don't think there will be anything else.
10:21 Hank Green? Yeah, I agree.
10:22 John Green? My, my concept would be a memorial to the social internet. And I wouldn't make it only dumb fun things. I would also make it an overall memorial. The way when you go to like President Nixon's Presidential Library, they're like, yeah, I mean, he made some bad calls.
10:38 Hank Green? Yeah, I mean.
10:39 John Green? An overall memorial to the social internet as a way of saying also, this is over. We should stop.
10:46 Hank Green? And we're all very sorry.
10:48 John Green? We're sorry and we're, we're ending it. It's like, it's, it's like a memorial to cigarettes. Like this was fun. There was a lot to recommend this at the time and now that time is over.
10:58 Hank Green? No, yeah, we, there was, there was a solid 300 years of tobacco smoking.
11:02 John Green? And then there was like 50 years where we knew, but we didn't know, know, or we knew, but we hadn't accepted, which is the part that we're in now with the social internet.
11:11 Hank Green? The Hank Green Memorial Twitter Park, but I'm not dead Twitteris.
11:18 John Green? I like the parenthetical a lot. And then eventually you can just like scrape off the parenthetical when you do die.
11:25 Hank Green? Yeah.
11:26 John Green? Yeah. Yeah. It's a million dollar idea. It's great.
11:31 Hank Green? I'll charge people to get in and I'll charge them cigarettes so that I can give them away to underage teens.
11:40 John Green? Thereby capturing what Twitter was really, really good at, which was basically selling children Lucy's, metaphorical Lucy's, but that's what Twitter was the whole time. It was selling children Lucy's.
11:54 Hank Green? Yeah. It's just like, would you like more cigarettes? Yeah, we have an infinite number. They won't provide you with feelings.
12:02 John Green? Yeah, no, listen, there's 20, there's 20 cigarettes right here, but if you scroll down, there's 20 new ones forever.
12:09 Hank Green? Put them in your brain. Let us decide what reality is for you. That'll be fine.
12:14 John Green? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's decide for you what you're going to feel today. You'll like it. Uh, you won't like it, but you'll like it. It'll be a really weird thing for you, but you're going to be into it. You're not going to be able to stop, so you must like it.
12:27 Hank Green? What are we talking about?
12:28 John Green? Being chronically online.
12:29 Hank Green? This next question comes from gnome who asks, dear Hank and John, when a balloon gets released, how far up can it go? I'm guessing it may burn up at a certain point. Could a balloon theoretically be made structurally stable enough to make it all the way to space? What then? I hope this question blows you away. Gnome, great one, gnome.
12:47 John Green? I got, I got an answer before you answer it.
12:49 Hank Green? Hit me.
12:50 John Green? I think a spaceship is essentially a slightly hardened balloon.
12:56 Hank Green? No.
12:57 John Green? Yeah, it's a balloon. It's a nice, it's a, it's a very fancy hard shell balloon.
13:03 Hank Green? The defining factor of a helium balloon is that it rises because of buoyancy. The defining factor of a spaceship is that it rises because of rocket ship power.
13:14 John Green? All right.
13:15 Hank Green? That's a pretty, that's a pretty big difference.
13:17 John Green? I've been proven wrong in a single sentence. Move on.
13:21 Hank Green? I mean, this is so unlike Twitter for you to just accept being wrong about something. I really need you to push back on me, but like in the stupidest way possible.
13:28 John Green? You want me to double down, but be like, be like balloons have nothing to do with helium?
13:34 Hank Green? No, no, no. You gotta turn it back on me. You gotta be like, you gotta be like, so you're saying that it, that, that the only thing that matters is how you get higher in life?
13:42 John Green? Hmm. What could be more privileged?
13:48 Hank Green? So, uh, so the reason the balloons go up is because they're lighter than air. We know that.
13:53 John Green? Yeah.
13:53 Hank Green? So they're, they're not going to go up when the air is.
13:56 John Green? Really, really light.
13:57 Hank Green? Yeah. When, when, when they actually become more dense than the air. But what, what actually happens is that part of what's going on with a balloon is that the air like inside and the air outside are not totally equivalent. So blow up a balloon. There's actually more air on the more, there's more helium molecules on the inside than there are molecules on the outside. That's what's pushing the balloon outward. So it doesn't flop down. Pressure, pressure is actually higher inside. It's just that the molecules way less or the atoms, the particles way less. And then, uh, and as it goes up, the outside pressure gets lighter and lighter and lighter. And the balloon gets bigger and bigger and bigger because there's less pushing on it from the outside and more pushing on it from the inside until at a certain height, the balloon pops.
14:37 Hank Green? And so you have to make, in order to like, one thing you'll see is like, when you do a, like a big old weather balloon to go really, really high up in the air. When it's low down, it doesn't look very big. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger as it gets higher. Because the air pressure around it is getting lower and lower. It's pushing on the balloon less. They have the same number of particles inside, but they are, look much more inflated. And then eventually that difference becomes so large that it will tear the balloon.
15:00 John Green? So the guy who took a balloon to space and then jumped out of it and, and parachuted down to earth. Remember that guy?
15:06 Hank Green? Uh huh.
15:07 John Green? He just passed away.
15:08 Hank Green? He did. I, I recently found that out.
15:11 John Green? Point being.
15:12 Hank Green? The Twitter and Felix bound Gardener Memorial Garden by Hank Green.
15:16 John Green? I don't think you want that one. That guy was really radicalized by the social internet, actually, as it happens.
15:21 Hank Green? Oh, no.
15:22 John Green? Yeah.
15:22 Hank Green? Really?
15:23 John Green? For real. No, yeah, that's not a joke.
15:25 Hank Green? Oh, my God. Okay.
15:27 John Green? He's super disappointing. Point being, he was at the edge of space. He wasn't in space, right? Because you can't be in space.
15:32 Hank Green? Oh, correct. For sure. Yeah, 100%. Not a guy.
15:35 John Green? But he just, he came from very, very high up where you could see the curvature of the earth and everything, and then came down to what I consider to be earth.
15:43 Hank Green? Yeah.
15:44 John Green? But in some ways, he was in earth the whole time because he was in our atmosphere still.
15:48 Hank Green? Yeah, he was, he was just as much on earth as, as you when you're jumping.
15:52 John Green? I mean, yeah.
15:56 John Green? Sort of. I see, I see, I see what you mean.
16:00 Hank Green? You know, it's pretty, it's pretty crazy that you can jump and then like the sky is under you.
16:05 John Green? Yeah. No, you're basically parachuting out of an airplane every time you jump.
16:10 Hank Green? And that's why John hates it so much.
16:12 John Green? I don't love jumping. Not a fan. All right. This next question comes from Gwen, who writes, Dear John and Hank, but mostly John, can you please explain to me why so much of sports talk about players switching teams or retiring makes it sound like they are talking about like racehorses or something? Or like goods being traded? Are players offended by this? Should they be? It always sounds extremely weird to me as someone who does not partake of sports ball, P and P, Gwen. Now, Hank, you may remember when I, when I bought a player for AFC Wimbledon, I made a video that said, I bought a player for AFC Wimbledon. And a lot of people were like, whoa, there, that's messed up.
16:43 Hank Green? It's, it's 2025. We don't buy people.
16:45 John Green? Well, you can't be buying a player. And I was like, you're right. There is something wrong with the language, but there is also, there, there are two competing facts that we must hold in our head at the same time, which is that the player is an asset and the player is a person. An asset in the sense that their future playing has value to the economy. Uh, this is not just true of, of sports ball, by the way, right? This is also true of all of us. And a, and, and so if you've signed a 10 year contract, that, that some other company has to pay off in order for you to join their company, like that's, that's a trade of you as a human being, but also a trade of the, the value of your asset.
17:25 John Green? Now, most of us don't sign those contracts because most of us don't work in those fields, but there are some fields like that. Some AI jobs are like that, et cetera.
17:31 Hank Green? Okay.
17:32 John Green? As for whether the players feel weird about it, I only have a couple of friends, real friends, who are professional athletes. And yes, they feel weird about it and also are like highly, highly cognizant of how messed up it is, that billionaires are trading millionaires for their physical assets. That like, yes, that is, that is a super weird phenomenon of the 21st century that didn't really exist in the same way before the big sports era.
18:00 Hank Green? Now, like, Right.
18:01 John Green? As a result, a lot of player contracts are much higher than they used to be. So like, if you're in the fourth or third division of English football, you make a pretty good living, which was not the case 20 years ago. But there is something very weird about the idea of like, the rights to you as a player being like a saleable asset. Like, that is weird that we should, we should be bothered by that, I think.
18:22 Hank Green? Is there a way to do it that's not that?
18:24 John Green? Yeah, I think the way to do it that's not that is to have, and this would not work, just to be clear. But if players had complete freedom of movement and signed like one game contracts, or like you got paid per game, then that, that would solve the problem. Then you could go wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted for more money or whatever. But like, that would create its own set of problems and would not be very practical. So I think this way benefits players in a lot of ways, especially in sports that have good contracts with their owners, or in sports like football, where the owners are always at risk because of the prospect of relegation. But like, the owners have to be able to experience
19:05 John Green? some risk one way or another in order to motivate a good market, right? So like, it's one of my issues with, say, American football, is that often NFL players are underpaid relative to their value in part because there is no like second NFL that you could go to.
19:22 Hank Green? Right.
19:23 John Green? There's like much inferior professional leagues like the CFL, but in, in soccer, you know, La Liga is almost as good as the English Premier League, and the league in Italy is almost as good, and the league in Germany is almost as good. And there's lots of different ways to make a living. And so you can kind of pressure the market that way.
19:39 Hank Green? Are there a lot of German players in English football?
19:42 John Green? There are increasingly, because now the English Premier League is so much bigger than all those other leagues that like, People are moving over like Florian Wirtz, who just became a player for Liverpool, for instance. So yeah, it is weird, Gwen. I don't think you should think that it's not weird, but I also think that to Hank's point, there's no easy way to make it better. You know, I mean, already like most, most professional football leagues in the US have pretty strong unions that can collectively bargain. I think in the case of the NFL, they need to collectively bargain a little more aggressively, but like there is still significant advantage to those contracts. But yeah, my friends who are, my friends who are professional footballers all think that it's weird.
20:21 Hank Green? That's so interesting. I would have expected that you just sort of like, well, this is how things are. And, and like, you know, if you get traded to a better team, that that's really exciting. You sign a new contract. That's like a kind of dream come true situation.
20:33 John Green? Oh, I think it absolutely is. I, I think it absolutely is, but I think there's something weird about the idea of your rights being like, and, and, and players in, in England, players have way more control over where they go. A lot of, not, not all the time, but usually they have more control in where they go. So they have some say in where they go. Like in, in baseball, you can just find out one day like, oh, you've been assigned to the Red Sox and also you're no longer a major league baseball player. You're now playing for their minor league team. Like that can just happen to you one day.
21:01 Hank Green? Yeah, yeah. Hockey, it's always funny like that when a new hockey player is like traded to the team, they always do like an interview with them and they're like, so why are you excited to move to Seattle? And they're like, ah, I mean, why am I excited to like get my kids out of their school and drive them across the country? Like, and like deal with all of the fallout and my wife losing all of her friends and, and me like having to make a bunch of new friends. Like, I don't really care about Seattle. Like I, I had a life, but they have to like fake it, you know, they have to be like, oh, it's Seattle, the Space Needle, all the things that I've heard about Seattle, I guess. But you're just a, you're a hockey player. So you're doing what you're doing.
21:40 John Green? It's even more brutal. It's even more brutal when they come to a new third tier English football club, Hank, where they have to be like, yeah, I mean, I haven't really caught up on the history yet, um, of whinging town bulges.
21:56 John Green? But I hear that the, uh, the Winjingtown Bulges fans are like no other fans in the country. I'm so excited to get started working here at Winjingtown.
22:07 Hank Green? No, the full name of the town is Windington Bulges.
22:10 John Green? Oh, okay. I see. Windington Bulges. So it's the Windington Bulges Wanderers is the name of the football club.
22:15 Hank Green? Yeah.
22:18 John Green? What do you think they, what do you think was the sort of historical, uh, trade in Windington Bulges? Do you think it was cobbling, shoemaking?
22:27 Hank Green? Yeah, no, it was a, it was, it was, uh, it was a quarry town. Um, so Windington is at the, is the town. And then there's a suburb called Windington Bulges where the quarries are.
22:39 John Green? And that's where the football club is located because of course.
22:42 Hank Green? Well, one of them.
22:43 John Green? Yeah, their great rival is Wind, is Windington, Windington.
22:47 Hank Green? Windington South.
22:48 John Green? Windington South, Windy, Windington Wednesday, uh, who of course play fun rarely on Saturdays as, as it goes in English football. That reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by Windington Bulges Wanderers FC. Windington Bulges Wanderer FC. It has never been a better time to get a season ticket.
23:07 Hank Green? This podcast is also brought to you by the Hank Green Memorial Twitter Garden. Twitter is dead, not me.
23:12 John Green? For now. And today's podcast is brought to you by balloons that go almost to space, but literally can't go to space. That's a metaphor.
23:19 Hank Green? And finally, this podcast is brought to you by Good Store. Good Store, sending advertisements to John Green and money to Partners in Health.
23:27 John Green? Hank, we got another question from Clarissa who writes, Dear John and Hank, does a Bloody Mary actually ease your hangover? Doesn't the body take a while to process that alcohol? Is it all placebo? Hoping you'll explain it all. Clarissa. P S. Hi from the Philippines. Thanks for your tuberculosis advocacy. I moved to London and nobody there talks about TB and I hope one day that'll be true back home. That's very nice. Thank you. I can't wait to go to the Philippines next month.
23:46 Hank Green? Oh, what, what?
23:48 John Green? Yeah, for some TB advocacy work.
23:50 Hank Green? Amazing. Enjoy.
23:51 John Green? I'm excited. The only downside is that it is literally 12 hours time difference. So it does not matter if you go left or right when you are leaving from Indianapolis because it's about the same flight length.
24:04 Hank Green? I hate Bloody Marys.
24:06 John Green? Oh, yeah, me too. They're disgusting.
24:07 Hank Green? Like, if you'd given me a billion years and all of the ingredients in the world and said, "Make a bunch of cocktails," I never would have got to the tomato soup with vodka one.
24:17 John Green? Yeah, no, absolutely. There is some truth to the hair of the dog, Hank, that if you-
24:24 Hank Green? Yeah, kind of. I mean, in the way that it makes you feel everything less.
24:29 John Green? Do you want to talk about a dangerous game?
24:35 John Green? Forget Twitter.
24:36 Hank Green? Continuously eating dog hairs from dogs that do bite you?
24:40 John Green? Hair of the dog is a dangerous game. So I would, I generally recommend, now, some people say that there's B vitamins in the Worcestershire sauce, and that's the key, because it supports brain function, and there's electrolytes in the tomato juice and whatever, whatever. But the truth is-
24:55 Hank Green? You could have a Gatorade with a B vitamin.
24:59 John Green? There you go.
25:00 Hank Green? Like, that's on the table. That's, that is also available to you.
25:03 John Green? Yeah, I think that's the best strategy. In general, the best strategy, and I learned this from my best friend, Chris Waters, who told me once, we were at a party and I was, I was reaching for a beer, and we were, he was like, "Let's leave in like 10 minutes." And I was like, "Perfect." And so I reached for a beer, and he said, "You know, nobody ever regrets not having the last beer."
25:20 Hank Green? Especially if you're about to leave, because the beer is to help with the party. If you're leaving the party, you should not still be drinking.
25:25 John Green? Agreed. Absolutely agreed. Not only that, if you take that to its logical conclusion, the first beer is the last beer. Nobody ever regretted not having zero beers.
25:35 Hank Green? As a person who has not been drinking much in the last few years, I can say, there are parts of it I miss.
25:43 John Green? Yeah, the kind of socialization lubricant function.
25:45 Hank Green? Yeah, largely that. Yeah. There's also just sort of a pleasant, happy feeling that you can get if the stars align.
25:55 John Green? Oh, you gotta be real careful to ride that line.
25:57 Hank Green? Doesn't happen every time. And that, that makes it, that's just like casino vibes. Like, yeah, perfect, I'm gonna pull the lever and see.
26:05 John Green? I do love a casino.
26:07 Hank Green? Yeah. I don't, but I love other kinds of similar things.
26:11 John Green? You love Twitter, which is the ultimate casino.
26:14 Hank Green? And, and this whole job that we have.
26:17 John Green? That's true. A lot of randomized rewards in our career, for better or worse.
26:22 Hank Green? It's real weird, real weird.
26:24 John Green? It's a real, uh.
26:25 Hank Green? Randomized punishment, too. What if you went to a casino and like every 30th pull you won and every 60th pull it kicked you in the nuts?
26:33 John Green? I think people would still go to the casino because uh.
26:35 Hank Green? Yeah, yeah.
26:36 John Green? What actually happens is that people have a very negative experience when they lose money.
26:39 Hank Green? Like, yeah.
26:41 John Green? You do kinda get kicked in the nuts.
26:42 Hank Green? That's a good point.
26:43 John Green? Nine times out of 10.
26:44 Hank Green? Yeah. So alcohol's a little bit like that. Uh, there is some, there's so like, obviously alcohol can dull your sensations, so that that could be done for you. Uh, but there's Tylenol as well that's available. And and there is something to like spicy food, maybe for a hangover to just like.
27:00 John Green? Hmm.
27:01 Hank Green? Get you out of it for a second. It's it's sort of a.
27:04 John Green? Just give you a different discomfort.
27:06 Hank Green? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like horseradish can be good at that, where it's just, uh, get your brain focused on something else. But I'll tell you what my favorite hangover cure is, is, uh, one, not getting them. Uh, but then if I do, two, sleep. If I can make that happen. I love, I love to sleep.
27:23 John Green? I enjoy a large breakfast.
27:25 Hank Green? Oh, yeah, for sure. Toast.
27:26 John Green? Followed by a long nap.
27:28 Hank Green? Uh huh.
27:30 John Green? Yeah. But in general, yeah, I just, I I haven't gotten a lot of hangovers in the last like 10 years, thankfully. But when I do get them, oh, it's like a two day experience now.
27:38 Hank Green? Yeah, yeah.
27:40 John Green? All right, Hank, I got another question from you from Laurel, who says, Dear John and Hank, but probably mostly Hank if we're being honest. Laurel, you underestimate me. Why do dogs smell like that when they're wet? Every time I give my dog a bath, it's followed by three hours of that classic wet dog smell. I call it the Fritos smell, Laurel, because it smells exactly like Fritos.
27:56 Hank Green? Oh, no, different smell. That's a, that's the dog foot smell. Dog wet smells a totally different smell, does not smell like Fritos.
28:03 John Green? Wet dog smells like Fritos. End of, end of sentence. I have a dog, you don't.
28:08 Hank Green? We're smelling different dogs.
28:09 John Green? Clearly. Uh, shouldn't he smell good after having a bath? I don't smell musty and weird and like a Frito when I get out of the shower. So why does my dog, thanks, barks in baths, Laurel?
28:19 Hank Green? Does Laurel say that it smells like a Frito?
28:21 John Green? No, I added that for myself.
28:22 Hank Green? Okay, just making sure, because I think you're wrong.
28:25 John Green? Everyone is gonna write in to say dogs, wet dogs smell like Fritos, and I don't wanna deal with all that extra.
28:31 Hank Green? Smell like Fritos. Dog paws smell like Fritos for sure.
28:34 John Green? Yeah, because dog paws are always a little wet.
28:39 John Green? Is there a reason for this, Hank, that you know of?
28:42 Hank Green? Yeah, I mean, dogs have, look, they have a lot more hair than us. They got a lot. They make a must, they make a musky smell that is a communication between dogs. So, but yeah, there's a bunch of stuff going on there that is probably intentionally evolved in order for dogs to be able to communicate.
29:04 John Green? All right. Well, that's helpful. So there you go. They smell like that too, because they like to sniff at each other.
29:10 Hank Green? Yeah. And they got, they got, if you'd like to know, there's some short chain fatty acids. That can smell kind of sour and a little bit like gross, like
29:20 John Green? It's mostly salty.
29:21 Hank Green? And then there's like an earthy musty smell, which is, that's from bacteria on them that produced that in the same way that a lot of our body odor smells made by bacteria. And there's also some yeast byproducts that you're smelling. So does that make it better?
29:38 John Green? No, but thank you for sharing.
29:40 Hank Green? This next question comes from Ismar, who asks, Dear John and Hank, I'm an avid fan of the work you do. However, due to how busy life can get, sometimes I miss videos on your personal channel and I don't watch either of your shorts or TikToks because I don't watch shorts or TikToks. But when I was watching Hank's latest video on Hank's channel, I was wondering, do you watch all of each other's videos that are not made or posted on the Vlogbrothers channel? No, it isn't Mar, Ismar. John?
30:07 John Green? Yeah.
30:09 Hank Green? No.
30:10 John Green? No.
30:12 Hank Green? I watch all the Vlogbrothers videos.
30:13 John Green? I do too. I watch all, I even watched your 20 minute Vlogbrothers video.
30:17 Hank Green? Sorry about that.
30:18 John Green? Well, it has 2.8 million views, so it's hard to complain. I watched all of that. I watch all Vlogbrothers videos and I have since 2007. I would say I watch most Hank's channel videos, like when the topic interests me, which it usually does because it's my brother and so I'm interested. But I wouldn't say I've watched every Hank's channel video. And then I would say I watch about 3% of Hank's TikToks.
30:41 Hank Green? Yeah. Yeah, I don't, I watch John's TikToks when they come across my feed. I'm not going to tiktok.com/jongreen, whatever it is. What's your TikTok?
30:51 John Green? Point being, you don't even know that I haven't made a TikTok in three months, I assume.
30:55 Hank Green? No, no, no, no.
30:57 John Green? That would surprise you.
30:58 Hank Green? Well, it wouldn't surprise me, but it's not something that I, if you could have told me that you've made, you've made six in the last week and I would be just as not surprised.
31:08 John Green? Right, yeah. So I, I stopped making TikToks, actually. And I, I may start again at some point, but for now, I'm not, I'm just not really interested in it. Like, I just don't feel the pull. And unlike Hank, I don't feel an obligation to participate in social media platforms that aren't giving me much back.
31:27 Hank Green? Yeah, as a citizen of the internet, it's a crampy time.
31:31 John Green? I don't know, I don't know, you mean like nervous making, or?
31:34 Hank Green? I guess I was thinking, it makes me want to poop, you know, digestive cramps.
31:38 John Green? Oh, okay.
31:40 Hank Green? Yeah.
31:40 John Green? I mean, I, I've honestly felt that way since about 2016. So.
31:44 Hank Green? Yeah.
31:45 John Green? It's nothing new for me. At any rate, there's no TikToks of mine to watch, Ismar, so you're not missing out on anything there. There's John's channel live streams where I play FIFA with my buddy Stan. You're not missing out much there either.
31:58 Hank Green? Yeah, I don't, I've, I've not watched many of those.
32:02 John Green? And, yeah, yeah. So that, there you go. That's about the situation. I'm trying to make stuff right now, like Hank is, we're kind of at an interesting crossroads. I don't know that we've articulated this to each other, but I think we're at an interesting crossroads where I'm trying to make stuff for like extremely small audiences that I'm really interested in, you know, like through the secret Patreon or through John's channel or whatever. And you're trying to do like mass media communication about science, which I think are two different but equally valid responses to this moment.
32:42 Hank Green? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The less valid thing, which I was thinking about trying to do some in the past is like, uh, participation in the discourse.
32:50 John Green? Yeah.
32:51 Hank Green? Which is just, I don't know, I just feel so helpless about it now.
32:54 John Green? I don't know if it's very productive is the problem. I might be wrong. It doesn't feel productive to me right now. But maybe it is.
33:02 Hank Green? I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to, like, it's just so boxed in on all sides. But yeah, I, I continue to be excited about the, my ability to be a professional science communicator, which is really great. It's a great job.
33:15 John Green? It's a good job.
33:16 Hank Green? But it's, it can be tricky. Here it is. I'm not like, I'm not always sure what the difference between a Hank's Channel video and a Vlogbrothers video is. I think that this is the problem I've set up for myself. And so like, what really determines whether it's a Hank's Channel video or Vlogbrothers video is like whether I have to upload a Vlogbrothers video that day. Often, not always. There's stuff that I wouldn't put on, on Hank's Channel.
33:35 John Green? Right.
33:36 Hank Green? But there, but there's nothing that I put on Hank's Channel that wouldn't be a good Vlogbrothers video, you know? We've done everything. It's not like there's a lane there.
33:43 John Green? Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a community focus that isn't on Hank's Channel as much.
33:48 Hank Green? Yeah.
33:49 John Green? You know, part of building community sometimes is getting videos that get lots of views. I was just looking at our analytics and, I mean, it's really become an interesting divide. Like, I still make videos that get a lot of views, but in terms of people who aren't regular nerd fighters, something like 85% of the views that come in, come in from your videos, which is really interesting. But I, but I think it works. Like, I think like, you target the broader audience and like, some of those people stay, and I target the people who stay. I like it. It's working for me.
34:22 Hank Green? You definitely, like, it wasn't always that way. You definitely, back in the day, loved to make a video that would get a bunch of views.
34:29 John Green? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm writing, I'm writing one now that's not going to get a bunch of views, but that's about how I still care about views and I can't break myself of this habit.
34:37 Hank Green? Yeah.
34:38 John Green? The truth is, Hank, like, we are not YouTubers in the traditional sense in a lot of ways, but like, actually, in most of the ways, we are. We are very much YouTubers. We care about attention. We compete in the attention economy. We want to get views. We want to get people to watch and like and care about our stuff and like.
34:53 Hank Green? We like, we want, there's a bunch of YouTubers that I like care what they think about our content, you know?
34:59 John Green? Hmm, that's interesting. I don't, I don't feel that way, but that's interesting. I mean, I, I, I care what they think about the project. I don't care what they think about an individual video.
35:08 Hank Green? Okay, yeah.
35:09 John Green? But yeah, I've been, I've, I've been, I've been wrestling a lot recently with the question of, why did I want this so badly? And when I got it, why did I hate it so much?
35:20 Hank Green? Yeah.
35:20 John Green? It being fame and, and, and outside attention. And I think I've gotten to the core of why I wanted it so much. You know, I didn't have it as a kid. I was lonely. I wanted to be popular, all that stuff. But I don't think I've gotten to the core of why I found it so unpleasant and sort of repulsive. And at the same time intoxicating, right? Like it's much closer to my relationship with cigarettes, you know, than it is my relationship with anything else where like I'm grossed out by it and like horrified by my desire for attention, but at the same time intoxicated by the attention itself.
35:59 John Green? And that's, that's a hard thing to like untangle or disentangle from everything, all my other motivations, you know? Like, I don't know how to, I don't know how to separate out those motivations all the time.
36:10 Hank Green? Interesting. I don't have the same negative vibes around it.
36:15 John Green? I know, I know, which I find admirable, but you also don't mind the attention as much.
36:20 Hank Green? Right. Yeah. And I, I find those two things inseparable, like the fact that I don't mind the attention, plus the fact that I want the attention that those are related, but you're saying that you, you want the attention, but don't like it.
36:32 John Green? I always wanted it and I like it a lot less than I thought I would. How's that?
36:37 Hank Green? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That totally makes sense. Things are not what they, what, what you think they are going to be.
36:42 John Green? No, for sure. And like, I'm very grateful for the attention. Um, I really am like it's, it's enabled a lot of wonderful things to happen in my life. And I'm, I'm super grateful for it. And so that's part of what makes it so complicated to also find it unpleasant. Let's move on to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, since I didn't expect to get so confessional. Fortunately, no one misses until the end of the pod.
37:04 John Green? What's the news from Mars this week, Hank?
37:06 Hank Green? I don't know. I, I've, I'm just very like, there's only, so we record these.
37:11 John Green? You can't get two, you can't get two weeks of news out of the fact that there's probably life on Mars?
37:16 Hank Green? I mean, they're so like, the, the thing is that these, that our, our episodes are currently coming out substantially delayed. So when Mars is actually in the news, it feels weird because, uh, because people are like, yeah, no, I, I heard about that many weeks ago. But yeah, no, that's, that's where my brain's at. Kind of the news from Mars is a little bit how the news from Mars has been covered, which I think it's been pretty good.
37:41 John Green? Yeah. I was going to say, most people aren't saying like, this is irrefutable proof of life on Mars. But at the same time, they're saying this is a really big deal.
37:48 Hank Green? It's a little weird that NASA is currently being run by the transportation. Secretary because there is no administrator of NASA because it's not functioning super smooth over there. Not in NASA, but in Washington generally. And so that's a little strange to have like Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy get up and tell us about life on Mars. But he didn't do a terrible job of going through it and you know. It's been interesting to see everybody's kinds of takes, you know, like, like the different levels of communication and like, what are we going to talk about? Like, what's the, are we talking to people who have some understanding of chemistry, no understanding of chemistry? And, and the other piece of news from Mars is I saw this video about like, you know, the, the news.
38:33 Hank Green? Got a lot of views. Wild to me how it's always such an education when a piece of content gets a lot of views because there will be people in the comments like. When I said, like, when you say life on Mars, I mean, like, dogs and stuff. I don't care if there's microbes on Mars. And I'm like, wow, I am so far away from where you're at. Yeah. Microbes on Mars is actually would be extremely, just so you know, that would be very big news. But a lot of people are sort of like, that's not actually.
39:03 John Green? But I think it's important to understand why it's huge news. And maybe you just assume that because it's been a huge deal to you for your entire adult life. But it would be a huge deal because we've never established life anywhere else but Earth.
39:15 Hank Green? Yeah.
39:15 John Green? And it would also imply that life is in fact either really, really common. Or else life is co-evolved from Mars and Earth.
39:27 Hank Green? Yeah, yeah. So either life is very common or life is able to travel between planets.
39:31 John Green? Both of which would be huge deals.
39:33 Hank Green? Yes.
39:33 John Green? No, that's a huge deal. That's, I would argue a bigger deal than the news from AFC Wimbledon.
39:40 Hank Green? I agree. It's a big deal. So what's going on? What's, I, I texted you.
39:46 John Green? Yeah. Because you know what's going on at AFC Wimbledon because you're a fan now, whether you like it or not.
39:51 Hank Green? And I went, you know, I opened Google and it knows I care about AFC Wimbledon and it was like, here's the score of the game that's happening right now. I was like, oh, they're down by one. That game's over. And then I opened it two hours later and they won by two. They went from one nil down to two one up.
40:08 John Green? They won by one, but yes, they won. And
40:10 Hank Green? Yeah, they got two goals.
40:11 John Green? You weren't wrong for thinking that going one nil down meant the game was over since we had not come from behind to win a game in 600 days.
40:20 Hank Green? Oh, my God. Are you serious?
40:22 John Green? So it had been a while. I think that's right. I only read it on Blue Sky, so it might be wrong, but I think it's right. Anyway, it's been a while is the point. And AFC Wimbledon went one nil down on a very annoying goal in a very bad first half. I mean, we played a terrible first half. I was frankly disgusted. And then in the second half, we played great. Jake Reeves, our captain, our talisman, gave us a goal back to tie the game. And then Matt Matty Stevens won a dubious penalty and we he finished the penalty and we won the game 2-1. And I had forgotten what it feels like to come from behind. It was so exciting. I was thrilled for the fellas. Like, they had also forgotten that it was possible to win
41:05 John Green? after losing. They are now in 11th place. And I mean, stop the count, Hank. Let's just end the season right now. 11th place would be amazing. Be stupid good. 12 points after eight games. We probably need about 51 points to stay up. So we're on our way. We're on our way. If we certainly if we kept this up for the rest of the season, we would be easily safe. But the expectation is that things will take a turn at some point. But for now, we're playing great.
41:32 Hank Green? Playing great. This podcast would not exist without questions sent to Hank and John at gmail.com. So thank you to everybody who sends you questions. It's always a pleasure to read them. This podcast, it's edited by Ben Swartout. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna Medich. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halsro Haas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Tim Bucicravardi. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunarola. And as they say in our hometown,
42:00 John Green? Don't forget to be awesome.
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