420: The Plant Episode

Does John want to be a corn or pea plant? If we were able to put enough plants on Mars, could they produce enough oxygen for us to be able to breathe? Is there a scientific definition of what constitutes a weed? How do purple leaves work? Should I tell my friend she’s been watering a fake plant for seven months? …Hank and John Green have answers! If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [email protected]. Join us for monthly livestreams at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:01Hank Green?

  You're listening to a Complexly podcast.

• 0:09Hank Green?

  Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

• 0:12John Green?

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

• 0:14Hank Green?

  It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, I recently asked Orin what the chemical formula for water was.

• 0:25John Green?

  Yeah.

• 0:25Hank Green?

  And he said H I J K L M N O, because it's H to O.

• 0:29John Green?

  H to O, H to O.

• 0:32Hank Green?

  I like that. That's like a traditional dad joke. Like that, I think that we could be happy with that because like, nobody's laughing. But that's what dad jokes are. They don't have to be. They're not supposed to be good.

• 0:42John Green?

  100% agree with you that nobody's laughing. We're on the same page there.

• 0:48Hank Green?

  John.

• 0:49John Green?

  Yeah.

• 0:50Hank Green?

  What's the best thing you've ever done?

• 0:52John Green?

  Oh, probably with Nerd Fightaria, raise money to build a hospital and lower the cost of diagnostics and treatments for tuberculosis. What about you?

• 1:08Hank Green?

  Oh, um, I like went, I want, I like to like cliffdove into a river once.

• 1:14John Green?

  Oh, I misread the question. It's like when, it's like when I was dating that girl in college and she said, what's your biggest fear? And I said, probably abandonment. What's your biggest fear? And she said geese.

• 1:29John Green?

  I had a very small part to play in both those, both those successes with TV and with building the hospital, but I'm still immensely proud of them. So that's what I'd say. But now that, now that you're asking me like on a different level, I guess it's probably the time I jumped out of an airplane.

• 1:45Hank Green?

  Did you what? You did not do that.

• 1:47John Green?

  Yeah, I did.

• 1:48Hank Green?

  No, you didn't.

• 1:49John Green?

  I did when I was in my twenties.

• 1:51Hank Green?

  You sky dove?

• 1:52John Green?

  I sky dove. I mean, I had a, I was strapped, I was strapped to a guy, but I sky dove.

• 1:57Hank Green?

  This is brand new lore. I've heard the geese story a thousand times. I've never heard you jumped out of a plane.

• 2:02John Green?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Hank Green?

  That's so antithetical to everything I know about John Green. You couldn't get on a table.

• 2:09John Green?

  I just tricked you.

• 2:11Hank Green?

  Oh, goddammit.

• 2:12John Green?

  I tricked, I tricked, I tricked you, I tricked you, I tricked you. That was such an obvious trick.

• 2:17Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 2:18John Green?

  If I, first off, I could never ju- how did you believe that trick? I ju- of course, I never jumped out of a plane.

• 2:24Hank Green?

  You did believe it.

• 2:26John Green?

  I had to trick it.

• 2:27Hank Green?

  For the first two times, I said, no, you didn't. And you said, yes, I did. And then the third time you said, yes, I did. I was like, okay, I guess he wouldn't lie to me.

• 2:36John Green?

  Nothing tastes better than an old fashioned trick.

• 2:39Hank Green?

  Oh, man. I once convinced a friend of mine in, uh, in college that, that people got herpes from oranges and it was transmitted to the oranges by whales.

• 2:51John Green?

  Well, that is a gullible friend, is all I can say about that.

• 2:57Hank Green?

  I really thought I was just, uh, like, sort of vibing in a, in a, in a sort of absurdist zone and he was like, oh, interesting.

• 3:05John Green?

  Wow, interesting. Didn't know whales and oranges ever interacted.

• 3:08Hank Green?

  That's when I first understood the full extent of my power.

• 3:12John Green?

  The power of the trick is something immense. Um, I'm always trying to trick Sarah and at this point I can't do it because she's so alive to the possibility of a trick, you know?

• 3:21Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 3:21John Green?

  But then sometimes I'll tell her something true and she won't believe it because, uh, she's so used to being tricked. Like when I told her that the leader of that, uh, that cult was called Seth Jeffs. She was like, there's no way that guy's called Seth Jeffs. Like, nobody was ever named Seth Jeffs. Uh, which reminds me, Hank, that we've got to talk about something that recently happened on the podcast, which is we talked about Tiger Blorng.

• 3:51Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 3:52John Green?

  An acquaintance of mine who, first name Tiger, middle name Blorng, because her parents were big Auburn Tigers fans. And this inspired thousands of people to write in with what their own names would be if they were named mascot of their college team, color mix of their college team.

• 4:12Hank Green?

  Uh huh. My guy would be Grizzly Milver.

• 4:15John Green?

  Grizzly Milver, which is a totally normal name, not much more normal than Gopher Mold.

• 4:21Hank Green?

  There's a lot of molds.

• 4:23John Green?

  Or Catamount Gorpel. If I met somebody named Catamount Gorpel, I would be like, "Your parents were taking a big swing and they connected."

• 4:35Hank Green?

  You know, sometimes you have real tragedies in the name department. The tragedy, of course, spelled with E-I-G-H at the end, but not in that, not with Catamount Gorpel.

• 4:46John Green?

  No, that's a pure win.

• 4:48Hank Green?

  Husky Pergold Green.

• 4:50John Green?

  Somebody wrote in to say, "Mine is Husky Pergold, which sounds like a food for fat dogs."

• 4:59John Green?

  Allison said, "Hokie Mirage is a beautiful name, darn it."

• 5:04Hank Green?

  Yeah. Hokie Mirage. What's her last name? I shouldn't, we shouldn't say.

• 5:09John Green?

  We shouldn't say.

• 5:10Hank Green?

  We shouldn't say. Hokie Mirage.

• 5:14John Green?

  Another listener wrote in to say that they actually knew of someone named Crimson Anne White from an Alabama fan, because Crimson and White are-

• 5:22Hank Green?

  Crimson Anne White.

• 5:24John Green?

  Crimson and White.

• 5:24Hank Green?

  Oh my god. Crimson's a nice name.

• 5:27John Green?

  Crimson's not a bad name. Anne's not a bad middle name. White's not a bad last name. It's just Crimson and White is

• 5:33Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 5:33John Green?

  A hardcore commitment to your college football team. You do not want that girl going to Auburn.

• 5:39Hank Green?

  You have to be in that space.

• 5:40John Green?

  Wolverine Blaze. I also like that one.

• 5:43Hank Green?

  It's a really, yeah, you actually cannot, you have to go to a different school. You have to go to someplace where if people are like, "Oh, Crimson Anne White, that's a nice name."

• 5:50John Green?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Hank Green?

  But not if you're Rolling Tide.

• 5:57John Green?

  If you're a BYU fan, you're Cougar Slue.

• 6:01Hank Green?

  Okay. I like Catamount better than Cougar.

• 6:05John Green?

  I don't know. I think Cougar works.

• 6:07Hank Green?

  If you're gonna be named after a big cat, I think Cougar has a number of connotations, whereas Catamount doesn't really.

• 6:13John Green?

  Oh, fair enough. What about this one, Hank, from Will? Buffalo Glack.

• 6:17Hank Green?

  Oh, yeah. Buffalo's an amazing name. Usually you have to earn Buffalo, you know, you have to, you have to be out there on the plains for a period of time so that you could become, you could become a Buffalo man.

• 6:27John Green?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:28Hank Green?

  But no, sometimes it's just about your dad's favorite college football team.

• 6:32John Green?

  Buffalo Glack.

• 6:33Hank Green?

  What if it was the, someone who was a huge fan of the Mighty Ducks?

• 6:36John Green?

  Oh, the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, so that's Duck White.

• 6:40Hank Green?

  Duck Gro- Groringe, I believe.

• 6:44John Green?

  Green and orange? I thought it was green and white.

• 6:46Hank Green?

  I think it might be green, white and orange.

• 6:48John Green?

  Okay, let me, let me try here. Gu orange, duck orange.

• 6:52Hank Green?

  Duck guai, duck's guai orange.

• 6:55John Green?

  What about sparky mold?

• 6:57Hank Green?

  There's a, this is, this is a big problem with the golds.

• 7:00John Green?

  It's a big problem with the golds.

• 7:01Hank Green?

  Never sounds good.

• 7:01John Green?

  Especially if it's maroon and gold.

• 7:03Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:04John Green?

  Also, there's a lot of bloranges. The gators are bloranges, of course.

• 7:07Hank Green?

  Gator blorange.

• 7:09John Green?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Hank Green?

  That's great.

• 7:09John Green?

  Trojan carnal isn't bad.

• 7:13Hank Green?

  I would not name a child Trojan.

• 7:15John Green?

  Nah, fair enough. Fair enough. It's a big, it's another big swing. And then, of course, if you're a University of South Carolina fan, it's cock blarnet.

• 7:30Hank Green?

  That's gonna kill me.

• 7:32John Green?

  It made Hank cough. It made him laugh so hard. All right. Uh, thank you for submitting all of your magical names. We can't get over them. We're in love with them. Thank you.

• 7:41Hank Green?

  I'm gonna adopt cock blarnet into my daily.

• 7:46John Green?

  It's a way of saying.

• 7:47Hank Green?

  John.

• 7:48John Green?

  Gosh darn it. Except it's cock blarnet.

• 7:51Hank Green?

  People are like, is that a curse? No, it's to do with the college football team.

• 7:54John Green?

  It's about a rooster and, uh.

• 7:58Hank Green?

  Garnet and blue, I guess.

• 8:00John Green?

  Garnet and gold.

• 8:00Hank Green?

  Garnet and blue, yeah. Blarnet.

• 8:02John Green?

  Cock blarnet. Cock blarnet, Hank. All right, Hank, why don't we answer some questions from our listeners? Because they didn't just write in.

• 8:10Hank Green?

  That's different for me.

• 8:11John Green?

  With, um, with their college mascots. They also wrote in with our questions, beginning with this one from Isabel, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm growing plants in biology class. I've planted four peas and one corn kernel, and they have germinated. I'm gonna name my plants, uh, the first names of the authors of my five most recent books I've read, one of which was the hit new book, Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green. So does John want to be a corn or a pea plant? I'm right, yes, that corn needs to have more than one plant in order to pollinate because of the nature of corn.

• 8:40Hank Green?

  Gosh, John, that's actually maybe a topic you know more about than I do.

• 8:44John Green?

  Well, I'm pretty positive about this just because I live in Indiana, and so you ingest a certain amount of corn knowledge as a result of just being a resident. And so I'm gonna choose to be a pea plant. Thank you for making me a pea plant in advance.

• 8:57Hank Green?

  You wanna self-pollinate.

• 8:58John Green?

  Making peas. I wanna self-pollinate. I always.

• 9:01Hank Green?

  I just, I've always said it would be easier.

• 9:04John Green?

  I would like to not have bees involved and I would like to not have to have multiple plants.

• 9:09Hank Green?

  Yeah, yeah, I see. You don't want to have bees involved. That's a huge, that's actually for sure. Or like a person coming by with a toothbrush.

• 9:17John Green?

  I don't want to have bees all up in my business trying to make me pollinate.

• 9:21Hank Green?

  Yeah, you want to do that, you want to do that peacefully by yourself.

• 9:26John Green?

  I like doing most things alone, but this question-

• 9:28Hank Green?

  Can I suggest another name of a plant? One of these other plants?

• 9:32John Green?

  Yes.

• 9:32Hank Green?

  Cockburnet.

• 9:35John Green?

  Cockburnet, Hank, we're trying to stay on task here. This next question comes from Isla, who writes, "Dear John and Hank, I was at a space museum recently and learned that the atmosphere of Mars is 95% carbon dioxide. So my mom and I were wondering if we were able to put a lot of plants and trees on Mars, could they transform enough carbon dioxide into oxygen for us to be able to breathe pumpkins and Martians? Isla."

• 9:52Hank Green?

  What an amazing science communication opportunity, John.

• 9:56John Green?

  Yeah.

• 9:57Hank Green?

  So as you may have just heard, 95% of the atmosphere of Mars is carbon dioxide. Which planet, Earth or Mars, do you think has more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere?

• 10:08John Green?

  Gotta be Mars.

• 10:10Hank Green?

  It's Earth, baby.

• 10:12John Green?

  Earth is more than 95% carbon dioxide in its atmosphere?

• 10:15Hank Green?

  No, the absolute number. So Mars's atmosphere is-

• 10:19John Green?

  This is, this is like me telling you that I jumped out of an airplane. That's a classic trick. You set me up and then you- Cockburnet, you, that is a trick.

• 10:30Hank Green?

  We gotta make Cockburnet shirts.

• 10:33John Green?

  We gotta make it happen.

• 10:38Hank Green?

  Okay, I, I have the exact right designer for it too. I already know who I want to do it. So this is, this is like a thing all the time, is like, there are, there are different ways to represent numbers and percentages, mean, mean something but sound like they mean another thing. But yeah, the, the Earth has, it's like 0.4% or 0.04% of, I actually don't know, but it's something like that, of our atmosphere is carbon dioxide, it's very low. So like adding a little bit matters a lot, which is why having added a little bit has mattered a lot. But we actually have more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere in absolute terms than Mars does.

• 11:16John Green?

  Because we just have so much atmosphere and Mars has so little.

• 11:19Hank Green?

  Well, actually, more like Mars has very little atmosphere. So this would actually be a terrible place for plants for a number of reasons. Trees, if we wanted a tree to grow on Mars, we would have to do a huge amount of work on Mars to increase the density of the atmosphere. And then also, I think, a huge amount of work on the tree to genetically engineer it to be able to survive in such a tremendously hostile environment. But isn't that cool? I think that's so cool.

• 11:44John Green?

  That is pretty amazing. It just reminds me that air is made out of stuff. And when I breathe air, I'm actually breathing stuff.

• 11:50Hank Green?

  Like, one of the most important things that we all forget. It's invisible. And yet, if you don't, this is, I've probably been on this tangent with you before.

• 12:00John Green?

  Yeah, that's all right.

• 12:01Hank Green?

  But for 99.99% of the existence of humans, we have known that the fastest way to die is to not breathe.

• 12:11John Green?

  Right.

• 12:12Hank Green?

  And we found out why that is after the United States of America happened.

• 12:18John Green?

  Which, in terms of human history, was basically three hours ago.

• 12:21Hank Green?

  Somebody recently, like, mentioned to me, they were like, yeah, the US has been around for five 50 years. And I was like, oh, that's really, that's really not a lot of 50 years. Just five 50 years?

• 12:33John Green?

  Yeah, so yesterday, my mother, also your mother, and I were going through some for jewelry to decide what, what you're not going to get, basically, what I'm going to steal before it has a chance to get into the estate. And she showed me her grandmother, your nanny, my nanny, her wedding ring. And her wedding ring was actually borrowed from my, our grandfather's grandfather, whose name was John Thomas Goodrich. And it had his wedding date inscribed inside of it, not their wedding date inscribed inside of it.

• 13:08Hank Green?

  Wow.

• 13:08John Green?

  Which was February of 1869, which was essentially

• 13:14Hank Green?

  Nice.

• 13:14John Green?

  half of America ago.

• 13:16Hank Green?

  That's wild.

• 13:17John Green?

  More than half of America ago, actually. And I sort of almost knew that guy.

• 13:23Hank Green?

  Right. So, America feels very old, also not very old. We'll see how it goes.

• 13:30John Green?

  All those, all those institutions that feel super solid were invented five, 50 years ago.

• 13:37Hank Green?

  Do you, I was recently researching gerrymandering. Do you know how gerrymandering got its name?

• 13:43John Green?

  From a guy named Jerry? That's my guess.

• 13:45Hank Green?

  His last name was Gary, actually, but it ended up getting weirded to Jerry.

• 13:49John Green?

  Like Jiffy and Giff.

• 13:50Hank Green?

  But the weird, yeah, the weird thing, the weird thing is that the mandar comes from the fact that his district, which he did not like about this, his district looked like a salamander.

• 14:05John Green?

  Really?

• 14:05Hank Green?

  Yeah. So it's the gerrymander. It's like the salamander named after Jerry, the salamander.

• 14:12John Green?

  Oh, man, that's great. I mean, and by great, I mean terrible. Gerrymandering is a weird concept to a lot of people.

• 14:18Hank Green?

  Gerrymandering is, is one of, one of the things I, I think is the biggest problem with America.

• 14:23John Green?

  Yeah, it is definitely, it's top 10, top 10 structural issues.

• 14:29Hank Green?

  Yeah. And like very not talked about and very difficult to solve.

• 14:33John Green?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Hank Green?

  Which maybe those two things have something to do with each other, but I don't know.

• 14:36John Green?

  Let's go back a little further in history, Hank, and answer this question from Lily, who writes, Dear John and Hank, how long did it take for Earth to become covered in soil? It's like everywhere now, rooting around, Lily.

• 14:46Hank Green?

  Oh, it was, I mean, so if you've been watching Vlogbrothers videos.

• 14:50John Green?

  We actually went into this recently.

• 14:52Hank Green?

  We talked about trees and what a big deal they are and how they did in fact do a mass extinction. And this was part of the start of the Carboniferous. Uh, and I think that's roughly when it happened, which was around 700 million years ago. So.

• 15:06John Green?

  No, it happened 300 million years ago.

• 15:08Hank Green?

  Okay. So, which I think was around like 300 million years ago. And, uh, so not that long, it's a four and a half billion year old planet. And trees got up there and like plants had been there, but they didn't have like really strong structures. And so they couldn't break down the rock very easily. So there was like some soil stuff happening. But when the trees got up there and they were able to break this like bedrock by just getting their, their little fingers in it and, and growing. They cracked, they just cracked so much rock and then they, uh, they themselves fell over and there, there weren't super fast and good ways to break them down, though physically this would happen eventually if the trees were exposed to oxygen.

• 15:48Hank Green?

  And, uh, and that sort of was the thing that, that really made, I, I think, as far as I know, this is what made the, the earth like soft, basically, made, made land soft instead of just rocky.

• 16:00John Green?

  Now it's soft. Now it's got all this weird soil in it that's got all these weird animals in it that are making more soil.

• 16:06Hank Green?

  Yeah, there was so much of, of the time that life has been on earth that the land was pretty empty.

• 16:13John Green?

  It was mostly a water phenomenon, life. And on some level, it still is mostly a water phenomenon. It's just that there's a land animal that has become a, not to brag, but a huge deal.

• 16:28Hank Green?

  Sometimes I, I will chat with somebody who doesn't think that people are that big of a deal.

• 16:33John Green?

  Yeah.

• 16:34Hank Green?

  And I don't, I don't agree.

• 16:36John Green?

  Oh, man, we are a huge deal.

• 16:38Hank Green?

  We're a pretty big deal.

• 16:39John Green?

  We're the first thing that ever named the Ginkgo tree. We're the only thing that knows, this is, this is wild, Hank. So Ginkgo trees are a invasive species in Indiana, like they're not native to Indiana.

• 16:54Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 16:54John Green?

  Unless you go back 200 million years, in which case they are native to Indiana.

• 17:00Hank Green?

  This, yeah, this is true of horses as well. Horses.

• 17:03John Green?

  Right. Horses are not native to North America unless you go all the way back.

• 17:08Hank Green?

  In which case, like, they started here.

• 17:10John Green?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Hank Green?

  This is where horses began and camels, I think, too, began in North America.

• 17:15John Green?

  We live on a wild planet and we have, over the last, like, I would say 10,000 years, had a wild run. Wild.

• 17:24Hank Green?

  Yeah. It's a, it's a weird thing to be a part of. Yeah. Can I ask you a kind of tough one?

• 17:31John Green?

  Sure, of course.

• 17:33Hank Green?

  Um, there are some people who get a sense of joy out of the bigness of humans. And some people who get a sense of uh

• 17:42John Green?

  Dread.

• 17:42Hank Green?

  Dread and and almost like like a moral failing out of the bigness of humans. And I am, I am both of those people.

• 17:51John Green?

  Yeah, I think you have to hold those competing ideas together in your mind without cracking up. To borrow a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, I think you have to find a way to say, this is both a cause of joy, look, you know, without us, not only would there not be any Billie Holiday records, but there wouldn't be anyone to listen to Billie Holiday records. And a source of like, but at the same time, we are a complete catastrophe. Both, both have to be true at the same time.

• 18:18Hank Green?

  Well, yeah, yeah. And the thing that I feel about it, like that both of the emotions come from the exact same place, which is just the bigness. So there's like this like, wow, like, first of all, what an interesting thing. Second, I'm part of the interesting thing. And I think it's way more interesting than most people think because of course, the, the thing that we're made out of is the thing that's eat the hardest to see. You know, like the water of humans, like fish can't see the water, you know, David Foster Wallace.

• 18:48John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:48Hank Green?

  The, our water isn't the air, you know?

• 18:51John Green?

  No.

• 18:51Hank Green?

  Of course, as we were just talking about, it kind of is.

• 18:53John Green?

  No, it's consciousness.

• 18:55Hank Green?

  Is, is, is not just consciousness, it's the links between each other's consciousnesses. It's all the ways in which like, the way I talk is influenced by the way you talk. Like, I am built out of all of the people I've ever met. And I don't feel that way, but it is true.

• 19:11John Green?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 19:12Hank Green?

  All of the words that I'm saying were created by people and they are just the water. And I think that the links in the communication is, is the water. And, and it is like, it is the thing that turns us into, you know, a super organism of individuals. And I think that that is so cool, but that bigness also is like, it's so big that it is. Like like mysterium tremendum level terrifying.

• 19:37John Green?

  Right. Well, it's very similar to the mysterium tremendum, actually, in the sense that it evokes both like awe and joy and a fearsome dread.

• 19:46Hank Green?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 19:49John Green?

  I really connected to something you just said about the links between human consciousness and how all the words that we ever will say were invented by someone and learned by learned from someone. Because it reminded me that like, language can change the air we're breathing on some level. Language can change the vibe so immensely. Like, that's what I love about poetry is the way that like reciting a poem can change the air in a room and you just feel everyone in the room feels differently. My friend Kava Akbar does this thing where he recites a poem and then notes how the the room has changed as a result of the recitation of the poem. And like, that is so true. It's like, it is, it is so true that we are literally made up and out of

• 20:35John Green?

  the language and thoughts and feelings and fears and hopes and dreams of our ancestors.

• 20:41Hank Green?

  Which makes, it makes like, perfect sense why people get so freaked out when language changes around them and and like, you know, it's like some like a part of language changes and then like it starts to head over toward them. They're like, I don't like the way these people are talking anymore. Like, it was okay when people said uh and um, but now people say like, and that's not how it should be. Why are we talking like that? Because.

• 21:08John Green?

  Oh, actually, that reminds me, this podcast is actually brought to you by.

• 21:19Hank Green?

  It was very unexpected. That was very, that was very.

• 21:23John Green?

  I don't know what that word means. If, is it offensive?

• 21:26Hank Green?

  Uh, it's a word for a butt.

• 21:28John Green?

  Oh, okay. Well, I didn't know that.

• 21:34Hank Green?

  How is it a word for a butt? It's spelled G Y A T T. Yeah, I believe it's it's something like, and forgive me, I'm probably going to get this wrong, but like. You're so old. She got. Oh, she got that bottom. Exactly. She she I I think, please, please, please do not take that as gospel. Yeah, please don't send in corrections, okay? Oh, you can you can send in corrections. I just don't want you to move out into the world and and and say that fact to people as if it is definitely true. This podcast is also brought to you by the air, the air. It's everywhere. And like, you will die so fast without it. And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by self pollinating plants, self pollinating plants.

• 22:19Hank Green?

  No bees. Nice. And this podcast is brought to you by Cock Barnet. Cock Barnet. The new he's he's headed out into the universe and he's got to be president someday. He probably will, but I wouldn't be surprised. He doesn't even have to have a body, you know, he'll just be like an AI named Cock Barnet and people will be like, I'm in. Yeah, yeah, I just want Cock Barnet to tell me what to do with my life. I just realized this is the plant issue of Rosiana's only sent us plant questions. Oh, really? And we didn't notice, we didn't notice.

• 22:57Hank Green?

  For because because it's episode 420. Oh, it's the plant episode.

• 23:03Hank Green?

  Rosiana, that's so funny. Oh, man, that's good. That's good. Well, in in that spirit, here's the question. I was reading one of this is from Jen who asks, do you rank a John? I was reading one of Ross Gay's essays from the Book of More Delights on dandelions and had a sudden vivid memory of being in elementary school science class and learning about weeds and how they were mean plants who stole all the nutrients for themselves and choked out other good plants. At the time, I didn't question this, that is some propaganda. At the time, I didn't question this, but thinking about it now, it seems very weird to assign morality to plants like that. Is there a scientific definition of weed? Don't plants in general just like absorb as many resources as they can? Not a genie, just a gen.

• 23:48John Green?

  Well, this is something about life in general, right? Which is that life is trying to take up as much space as possible. And when humans get mad at other humans or get mad at like the species for trying to take up as much space as possible, I'm like, we are trying to resist literal millions of years of input that we have been told to try to take up as much space as possible. We are trying to undo all of that pressure and

• 24:13Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 24:13John Green?

  not take over the world.

• 24:15Hank Green?

  The, the big thing evolution selects for is continuing to exist and replicating. Like those are the things.

• 24:22John Green?

  We're trying to resist that to some extent.

• 24:24Hank Green?

  Yeah, well, interestingly, I don't know that we are trying, but we are nonetheless, which I thi- is, is a fascinating thing to be.

• 24:33John Green?

  Oh, in terms of replication, yes, that is a weird, it's a weird thing. But get to the point of the question, is there such a thing as a weed?

• 24:40Hank Green?

  Well, weed is just a plant we don't want. And, and there are, there are different contexts for that, of course. Like if you have a lawn and you want just the one species in your lawn because you want it to look very homogenous, you want it to have that blanket of green that feels like you're in control, then you only want that one plant and, and anything that isn't that becomes a weed, even if it's a native plant, even if it's a beautiful plant, even if it would otherwise be like a delicious plant for your cows to eat, it's not the plant you want there.

• 25:11John Green?

  But as you know, Hank, I've turned my lawn into a meadow.

• 25:15Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 25:15John Green?

  And even in the meadow, there are weeds because there are, there are

• 25:19Hank Green?

  Plants you don't want there.

• 25:20John Green?

  Plants we don't want there because they will take over the entire, entire area. And so we have to figure out how to deal with like Japanese stilt grass, for instance. We, we don't have anything like a monoculture in our, in the little lawn that we do have, but even when you're not trying to create a monoculture, you can still have plants you don't want.

• 25:42Hank Green?

  There's like also a sort of economic definition of weed, which is a plant that is harming your ability to maximize the economic value of your land. So here in Montana, we have like a big knappweed problem and there's a bunch of other plants that are just bad for cattle. So if you have a bunch of this plant on, that's, that, you know, the cows either will choose not to eat, thus selecting for more of that plant, because the plants that the cows like to eat are the ones getting eaten. Or you will have the cows eating that and the cows will get sick. So if you have like a certain species that that are like weeds because of that. And then they're like, like governmentally defined as a weed because the government is trying to decrease them

• 26:24Hank Green?

  because they're trying to help out the economy of an area by not having that weed around. So weed, that's what weeds are.

• 26:32John Green?

  All right, simple definition of weed is a plant we don't want. I like it. I have another question for you that I think will be harder for you to answer.

• 26:37Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 26:38John Green?

  From Ben who writes, Dear John and Hank, I've been listening to the podcast since the very first episode. It's enhanced my life so much. If trees use chlorophyll in their leaves to gather energy from the sun and chlorophyll is a green pigment, how the heck do purple leaved trees such as Japanese maples work? How have you, Ben?

• 26:54Hank Green?

  They also have green in them.

• 26:59John Green?

  Hmm.

• 27:00Hank Green?

  So the chlorophyll's in there. It's doing its chlorophyll things. There are.

• 27:04John Green?

  Well, I guess it isn't going to be that hard for you to answer then.

• 27:08Hank Green?

  There are some photosynthesizers that use, that don't use chlorophyll. They they photosynthesize them otherwise, but the all of the plants, the big multicellular plants are descended from chlorophyll, like a chlorophyll ancestor. So they all use chlorophyll and the the purple ones just have other pigments in there as well that do other things. So they're like a Japanese maple would have like an anthocyanin, which is going to do other work. I don't know if it's like an antioxidant to like help prevent it from getting zapped too much. Or what? I don't know actually what what purpose that is in there, but it is.

• 27:45John Green?

  Maybe it's just there to be pretty, man.

• 27:47Hank Green?

  Or it could just be there to be pretty, you know?

• 27:49John Green?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Hank Green?

  It's just like, I want it to be prettier.

• 27:51John Green?

  Why do peacocks have too many feathers? Because they're pretty. Other peacocks find it hot.

• 27:56Hank Green?

  Yeah, but that's how plants work. They don't find each other hot, as far as I know.

• 28:00John Green?

  Well, I was gonna say, you know absolutely nothing about the like, we do not know anything about the inner lives of plants. The hard stop.

• 28:10Hank Green?

  And you actually can have some of these colored pigments in other plants. So like, like when the green gets pulled out, you, you can sometime during deciduousness, you can sometimes have pigments left behind that, that have the fall colors.

• 28:23John Green?

  All right. Well, this question is going to be properly hard for you to answer, I promise.

• 28:28Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 28:29John Green?

  It's from anonymous, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I gave my friend a fake plant with instructions on how to water it as a joke. I thought I would just tell her after a couple of weeks. However, it seems I have forgotten about it. And now it's been seven months of her watering a fake plant. I went to her house this morning and laughed so hard I cried, but I still didn't tell her. I feel bad because she's really proud of herself for keeping this plant alive. Should I never tell her and hope that she forgot who gave it to her? She's named it Charlie and she loves it. Or should I tell her and probably suffer through the late April Fools joke? Please help. Fake Plants and Frogs, anonymous. Now, anonymous, this is why I waited less than 30 seconds to tell Hank that I had successfully tricked you. The moment you've tricked them, you reveal the trick.

• 29:13Hank Green?

  Reveal the trick.

• 29:16Hank Green?

  I mean, it might be okay to let it go for a week. Oh, wow. I, I have a lot of, a lot of potential solutions here. One, you wait for the next April Fools day and then that's a year-long April Fools joke. And that way you're saying like, I knew that you would do this. It's not super silly that you did this. It's a whole thing.

• 29:36John Green?

  It also says, I thought about you all year, but I don't, I don't love that solution. Do you have another one?

• 29:41Hank Green?

  Yeah, you get another identical plant that's really alive.

• 29:46John Green?

  Yes. Hey, it's John, retroactively inserting a spoiler alert. I'm about to spoil the entire plot of A Tale of Two Cities. So hit that 15-second forward button that you use to skip the ads. The Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, you swap them out.

• 30:02Hank Green?

  Yeah. Is that how The Tale of Two Cities worked?

• 30:05John Green?

  Yeah.

• 30:05Hank Green?

  They swapped one city for another city?

• 30:07John Green?

  No, no, no. They swapped one prisoner for, for another guy. And then the, the, you know, the, the guy sacrifices himself and the, the other guy gets to live happily ever after with his lady.

• 30:22Hank Green?

  All those people are back now. They don't know about the plot of Tale of Two Cities. You swap out the plant, or, or...

• 30:33John Green?

  Or, or, or cockburn it.

• 30:36Hank Green?

  What?

• 30:37John Green?

  Here it is. Here it is.

• 30:39Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 30:39John Green?

  You say, "You've taken such good care of that plant." "Can I buy it from you?"

• 30:47John Green?

  It's beautiful.

• 30:49Hank Green?

  "And that's a pretty plant. I'll give you a hundred bucks. Cold, cold, hard cash."

• 30:53John Green?

  Just like, "I will do anything. I will do anything to avoid the awkward conversation"

• 30:58Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 30:59John Green?

  "that we're about to have. Can I buy this plant from you?"

• 31:01Hank Green?

  You could buy a much larger plant and accidentally drop it on the fake plant and be like, "Oh no."

• 31:06John Green?

  "Oh, I broke it. I broke the plant. Oh, I lit it on fire. It's on fire."

• 31:13John Green?

  "Oh no. Oops. I was chewing the incense and I lit the plant on fire. It's..."

• 31:18Hank Green?

  No, they probably don't. They're not flammable, I bet. They probably make a lot of...

• 31:21John Green?

  I suspect they aren't. I suspect they'd be the last thing left after a fire. Fake plants.

• 31:26Hank Green?

  Hmm, man, this is a tricky one.

• 31:29John Green?

  It's a tough one because this is, because what you really need to do is go back in time and not do this, right?

• 31:35Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 31:36John Green?

  But how often in life do you think that? How often in life do you think like, "Well, I wish I just hadn't done this. Then I wouldn't be in this mess."

• 31:42Hank Green?

  You have to hire a spy.

• 31:44John Green?

  Okay.

• 31:45Hank Green?

  And the spy is...

• 31:46John Green?

  I'm in so far.

• 31:47Hank Green?

  And the spy is going to say, "This is a fake plant," to your friend. And then your friend will be like, "Did you give me a fake plant?" And you will say, "The plant was fake."

• 31:57John Green?

  Oh, yes. Okay. So you have a friend, go to the person, look at the plant and say, "I think this plant is fake." And then the friend goes back to anonymous and says, "Did you get me a fake plant?" And then anonymous is like, absolutely baffled.

• 32:13Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 32:14John Green?

  Yes. That's the solution. That's the solution.

• 32:16Hank Green?

  "I bought it at the garden center. I had no idea it was a fake plant. It was near all the real ones."

• 32:22John Green?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 32:23Hank Green?

  I didn't like go to Silk Warehouse. When we were children, there was a place called Silk Warehouse.

• 32:27John Green?

  Yep.

• 32:28Hank Green?

  And I, and, and my father... Gave me a lecture.

• 32:31John Green?

  Also my father.

• 32:32Hank Green?

  On, on market research and how it can lead to really truly bizarre outcomes like building an entire box store just for fake plants. And I remember that forever.

• 32:44John Green?

  Silk Warehouse didn't make it. No, kind of got swallowed up by Pier One, which was doing the same thing, but also sold chairs.

• 32:51Hank Green?

  Yeah, uh huh.

• 32:52John Green?

  Yeah, I would say I got it at the garden center. I'm very confused by this situation. No one's more surprised than I am to learn that it's a fake plant.

• 32:58Hank Green?

  I'm worried that there's gonna be a lot of mold in this plant.

• 33:01John Green?

  The other thing you could do is when they come to you and they're like, did you buy me a fake plant? You could like take it out of its casing or whatever and be like, I don't think this is a fake plant.

• 33:11John Green?

  I think it's just got plasticky leaves.

• 33:13Hank Green?

  Eventually, they, don't you notice that the tree hasn't changed shape at all?

• 33:19John Green?

  Yeah, like, don't you notice that it's not growing?

• 33:22Hank Green?

  Well, maybe they're messing with you. Maybe they know. Maybe they've reversed pranked.

• 33:27John Green?

  It's a classic, it's a double reverse trick.

• 33:31Hank Green?

  They're making, you're gonna, they're gonna make you feel bad until you finally break down and then they're gonna laugh in your face when you tell them.

• 33:44John Green?

  You just gotta play this.

• 33:45Hank Green?

  That's what you get.

• 33:47John Green?

  You gotta, you gotta tell them, hey, uh, quick thing. If you listen to the new episode of Dear Hank and John, there's a question from anonymous that I think might be relevant to our lives.

• 33:57Hank Green?

  Oh, God. Well, yeah, and then, and then they'll know that even if they weren't reverse pranking you, they should pretend that they're reverse pranking you.

• 34:06John Green?

  Right.

• 34:07Hank Green?

  Wow, there are layers on layers, John.

• 34:10John Green?

  Yeah, we can't wait to see how this resolves.

• 34:12Hank Green?

  This question is like an ogre.

• 34:13John Green?

  You gotta follow up, but you might have to send a couple of emails because we're getting so many college nickname emails that it's hard to find the other emails, but please follow up with us. All right, Hank, it's time to get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. AFC Wimbledon signed three players just today.

• 34:30Hank Green?

  Woo-hoo, you needed to do that.

• 34:33John Green?

  There's been, and there's some drama about it as well, Hank. There's always drama.

• 34:37Hank Green?

  How did you get drama?

• 34:38John Green?

  All right, so we signed a young man, they're all young men. Um, one of them is 29, but like, that's still, that's still relatively young. We signed a 21-year-old young man named Antoine Hackford, which is a great name. I mean Hackford, on a two-year contract. Um, very exciting. He's, uh, he's, he's fast. Everything, everyone says that he's fast. That's what the comments about him on, on, on the internet say. Um, and, uh, he's supposed to be good and he's supposed to be able to score goals, which is key. Then, um, we also, we also signed a guy named Danilo Orsi, very controversial.

• 35:15Hank Green?

  Okay. Uh-oh. Is he bad at soccer?

• 35:18John Green?

  It's worse, Hank. It's worse. He used to play for the franchise currently plying its trade in Milton Keynes.

• 35:25Hank Green?

  Whoa. Well, you know, you, you're a soccer player. You gotta take the opportunities you get.

• 35:31John Green?

  Respectfully disagree and would love to have this conversation with Danilo. That in fact, you don't have to take the opportunities as they come.

• 35:40Hank Green?

  Some, sometimes an opportunity comes along and you're like, I have to say no because of morality. I don't care about my career. You guys stole a soccer team.

• 35:49John Green?

  I mean, remember that time, Hank, when Coca-Cola came calling and offered us an unfathomable amount of money? And you were like, I'm not sure I can take this money for sugar water? And we didn't take it.

• 35:57Hank Green?

  You know what I did with that, though?

• 35:59John Green?

  What?

• 35:59Hank Green?

  I sent it to a friend who needed the money more than I did.

• 36:02John Green?

  There you go. Yeah. So point being.

• 36:04Hank Green?

  Yeah. I didn't, I didn't say, hey Coca-Cola, you don't get to advertise. I was like, you're gonna find somebody. You might as well work with this person who I think is good. Yeah.

• 36:12John Green?

  And then finally, we signed, uh, Nathan Assimwe, or Assimwe, I don't know how to say his name yet. Uh, who's a wingback. And so, uh, he replaces, uh, Josh Neufield, who departed over the summer for the bright shores of Bradford City. Why is that controversial?

• 36:29Hank Green?

  Because, uh, they're, they're trying to figure out whether or not people are allowed to fly in soccer.

• 36:35John Green?

  What is what? I don't understand.

• 36:37Hank Green?

  You said he was a wingback.

• 36:39John Green?

  Oh, yes, he is a wingback. I'm sorry. He is. Yes, that's, that's good stuff. That's good stuff.

• 36:46Hank Green?

  You know, it's not.

• 36:47John Green?

  Your day job.

• 36:48Hank Green?

  It's kind of cheating.

• 36:49John Green?

  It's kind of cheating to be a wingback. Um, it'd be nice. It'd be nice if you could have like rocket power or, or wings. But no, Nathan Assimway is just a regular fella. Um, who's on loan from Charlton Athletic.

• 37:04Hank Green?

  Tetrapod.

• 37:05John Green?

  He's a tetrapod, just like the rest of us. He's just a little bit faster and stronger than most of us. And he's pretty good, pretty good on his feet.

• 37:14Hank Green?

  Of like a sports reporter, starting out with Nathan Assimway, uh, new wingback to tetrapod from Northampton.

• 37:26John Green?

  Oh, the Ghanaian tetrapod signed a one-year contract.

• 37:31Hank Green?

  In the family osteichthys.

• 37:36John Green?

  From the only remaining species of the genus Homo comes Nathan Assimway.

• 37:44Hank Green?

  We just, we don't have, we don't have enough pedantic phylogeny and sports reporting.

• 37:50John Green?

  What's the news from Mars?

• 37:52Hank Green?

  Well, the news from Mars, John, you may have heard of the Mars Sample Return Mission. This is a mission where they're trying to go pick up stuff that the Curiosity Rover has left behind in little vials.

• 38:02John Green?

  I think of it more as an experiment and can we get to and from Mars with a non-human?

• 38:08Hank Green?

  Yeah, that would, that, yeah. Can we get to and from Mars, spending billions of dollars to get simply like one kilogram of material back regardless of it, and it does not have to like breathe or eat. That, that program is in a weird spot because it is funded both by NASA and ESA. And the NASA part of it, uh, has, is in the air as to whether that will ever happen or be funded. The ESA part of it, just going ahead, just like all of the parts that they were gonna make, they're just still making them. And they have actually, like the company that was working. On the the the the Earth return return orbiter, which is the thing that will actually like launch up from Mars and bring it back to Earth.

• 38:54Hank Green?

  That team is still operating and one of the companies that's been subcontracted to work on that orbiter has delivered the orbit insertion module, which will help the spacecraft enter Mars's orbit. They actually finished one of the first modules in 2024. They confirmed that the module can indeed do the thing that it's supposed to do. And now the orbit insertion module has been shipped to the Airbus Defense and Space place, and that's the company that has been contracted to fulfill the whole thing. And so it's like, there's pieces of it that are actually being made and delivered.

• 39:28John Green?

  Yeah. When's it gonna get to Mars?

• 39:31Hank Green?

  I don't know, man, because the part that the US was gonna do. Or does not a great partner right now?

• 39:38John Green?

  Is it gonna get, you're telling me, is it gonna get to Mars before or after 2027?

• 39:43Hank Green?

  After.

• 39:43John Green?

  Okay, so we're telling me we're not even gonna, we're not even gonna even like get something else, something non-human to and from Mars before 2027?

• 39:52Hank Green?

  That's correct.

• 39:54John Green?

  Well, thank God, thank God Elon's got a plan. Elon's got a plan, so don't worry about that.

• 39:59Hank Green?

  He sure does.

• 40:00John Green?

  All right, well, congratulations slash my condolences on your attempts to get a sample from Mars to Earth.

• 40:08Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 40:09John Green?

  Before 2027. That, by the way, I'm totally in favor of. I think we should get as many non-humans to Mars between now and 2027 as possible to prepare the way for humans in a post 2027 world, when this podcast is called Dear John and Hank on January 1st, 2028.

• 40:27Hank Green?

  It's coming up.

• 40:28John Green?

  Hank, thank you for podding with me. Thanks to everybody for listening. You can send us your questions at [email protected].

• 40:35Hank Green?

  This podcast was edited by Chris Ankiko. It was mixed by Joseph Tunamenes. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halsrojas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Ganna Rola. And as they say in our hometown, cock blarn it.

• 40:58John Green?

  That's good. That's good. I liked it. I enjoyed that.