427: Ghosts to Fix the Housing Crisis

Do dogs have a preferred direction to chase their tail in? Why do we put the dollar sign before the number? Why don’t we have a word for “dying of thirst”? How do I approach public notoriety? …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. EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/dearhank Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:01Hank Green?

  You're listening to a Complexly podcast.

• 0:09Hank Green?

  Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

• 0:12John Green?

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

• 0:14Hank Green?

  It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you the best advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, you know what the big problem with eating a clock is?

• 0:23John Green?

  What's that?

• 0:24Hank Green?

  It's very time consuming.

• 0:26John Green?

  Oh.

• 0:27Hank Green?

  How's my brother doing?

• 0:31John Green?

  Medium. Medium well, I would say. Cooked on both sides for sure. I have been recovering from walking pneumonia, which is a great disease.

• 0:42Hank Green?

  Oh my God, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Does that just mean that you're fine, but you have pneumonia?

• 0:48John Green?

  Exactly. It means that I can walk around, but I still have pneumonia.

• 0:51Hank Green?

  I like the idea that the pneumonia is the one doing the walking.

• 0:55John Green?

  Mm hmm. Well, I don't think it's a good disease name. I don't like to be critical of the doctors, but I think in this case, it's like an old fashioned disease name. It's like dropsy or something or consumption. It feels like in 30 years, we won't have walking pneumonia. We'll have something that has a medical sounding name.

• 1:10Hank Green?

  Yeah, walking pneumonia. He's just walking around with pneumonia all the time. Did they diagnose you with that? They like go in and they're like, welcome to the doctor's office. You have, here are your walking pneumonia pills?

• 1:23John Green?

  Yeah, no, they gave me antibiotics. Those are the walking pneumonia pills. And now I feel better, but I don't feel all the way better. So I'm still a little fatigued. More to the point, Hank, I have been feeling, and I think this is a conversation we've explored extensively on this podcast. I'm not sure that we need to explore it again, but I've been feeling like the internet might be a bad.

• 1:47Hank Green?

  Yeah, I watched an interesting little presentation recently from Cal Newport.

• 1:54John Green?

  On the internet, on the internet, I'm sure.

• 1:56Hank Green?

  Yes, I did. But I watched it on YouTube, which is, to me, that's just a Netflix.

• 2:00John Green?

  YouTube is like Netflix, but anyone can make stuff, which is a little bit better than.

• 2:04Hank Green?

  Twitter, Blue Sky threads, which I think is like sort of peak bad.

• 2:08John Green?

  I agree. Twitter is peak bad. I mean, I went on Twitter recently to get some AFC Wimbledon news and I felt like I had to take a chemical bath afterwards. Like I felt dirty.

• 2:20Hank Green?

  Yeah, Twitter is very, uh, very much the place where you would go if you wanted to become a worse person, you know?

• 2:28John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if you wanted to be exposed to really toxic chemicals and see what kind of effect that would have on you.

• 2:35Hank Green?

  That's well, that is the Joker's origin story, you know?

• 2:38John Green?

  Yeah.

• 2:39Hank Green?

  Bad chemical bath, came out real, kind of, kind of twisted. It's just like a Joker factory over there. And this is kind of Cal Newport's point is that like, a lot of, like, how we imagine this is there's sort of like, uh, there's like a part of it that's about distraction and a part of it that's about, uh, like, losing and getting disconnected and alienated from, uh, the sort of like normalcy and only getting exposed to bad stuff. That's usually a problem for like people other than you, you know? That's their problem. And then there's like the next step where you cross over into a, one of the real bad places that you don't even really hear about. You don't even, I don't even know how I would get gab, you know? But in fact, all of these things are like, they're kind of on the same assembly line.

• 3:24John Green?

  Right, right, right.

• 3:25Hank Green?

  And you can like exit that assembly line at various points, but some people aren't going to. Some people are gonna stay on that assembly line. I had an idea once for a social media platform, John. I was like, oh, this would be such a good idea. It would be so fun and so interesting. And I, like, and I thought through it and like week two of thinking through it, I was like, this would be where people would go. Like when they get kicked off of another place and they wanted their own little spot to be evil together. And there'd be lots of people using it to like have their own little spot to be good together. But I was like, in no way, even then, do I want to contribute at that level? And would I want to have that level of responsibility for something occurring in the real world? Which is, you know, Twitter isn't real life, but it's real life, you know?

• 4:10John Green?

  Yeah. I'm really glad that we didn't buy Tumblr, you know? What a great decision.

• 4:15Hank Green?

  On the table?

• 4:16John Green?

  Oh, it's always on the table, Hank. I think Tumblr's available for $5.

• 4:22John Green?

  We could buy it tomorrow.

• 4:23Hank Green?

  Somebody bought it. Matt Mullenweg did buy it, which I hope someday he gets Twitter.

• 4:28John Green?

  I bet he'd sell it. I bet he'd sell it in a hot second.

• 4:33Hank Green?

  It's working for you, though.

• 4:34John Green?

  I've been enjoying Tumblr, which is a sentence that I never thought I would say. Never, ever, ever thought I would say.

• 4:40Hank Green?

  The cycles.

• 4:41John Green?

  The cycles. It's kind of the only healthy, productive social media platform for me, and it's only healthy and productive because I'm not John Green most of the time. I'm an unpaid intern for the Awesome Coffee Club, or I guess now called Keats and Co.

• 4:54Hank Green?

  You're doing amazing. It's doing so much better than the tea, and it makes me infuriated.

• 4:59John Green?

  Well, I think it's because I'm so effective as a Tumblr marketer. It really has been. It's really a lot of fun. And then when people are like, they say nasty things about me, I just respond like, why are you talking so bad about a coffee company?

• 5:14Hank Green?

  They donate all their profit to charity, and they sell coffee.

• 5:18John Green?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Hank Green?

  If you're gonna be mad at our coffee company, there's others you could be mad at.

• 5:22John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get mad at Black Rifle Coffee or something. Don't get mad at me. All right, let's answer some questions from our listeners, beginning with this one from Jubilee and Clara, who write, Dear John and Hank, I was watching my dog chase his tail, and I noticed that when he switched from going counterclockwise to clockwise, he was a lot worse at it. And it made me wonder, is it kind of like how humans are right-handed or left-handed? Like, different dogs are just better at chasing their tails in different directions? I don't know if this makes any sense, but I hope you can help. The greatest sibling duo other than you guys, Clara and Jubilee.

• 5:52Hank Green?

  All right, John, you're gonna have to narrate what's about to happen.

• 5:56John Green?

  Okay.

• 5:57Hank Green?

  Because this is an audio podcast.

• 5:59John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:59Hank Green?

  Unless you're a subscriber to the Patreon.

• 6:02John Green?

  Okay, so I'm watching Hank. He's standing up. He's leaving the room. Oh, he's turning? He's turning left? He's turning, I believe that's counterclockwise.

• 6:14John Green?

  And now he's turning clockwise and he's, you know, he's not as good at

• 6:18Hank Green?

  Yeah, it was definitely harder one way than the other.

• 6:20John Green?

  He's not as good at turning clockwise. Now, this is what is known as a rigorous experiment. I believe that scientists would be impressed.

• 6:28Hank Green?

  I feel like I undid my dizziness a little bit. Like, I'm not that dizzy.

• 6:32John Green?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 6:33Hank Green?

  Does that work?

• 6:34John Green?

  I don't know. So I

• 6:35Hank Green?

  I feel like I would have been dizzier if I had just done one.

• 6:37John Green?

  I think there might be two things at work here. I think it could be that the dog is tired after running in the dog's preferred direction, and that slows the dog down.

• 6:45Hank Green?

  Also, the second one, I gotta do it again, where I would start with the other direction, because I was a little dizzy when I started.

• 6:52John Green?

  And then the other thing is the dizziness, right? Like, even, even dogs get a little dizzy chasing their tails. Now, it's still fun, but they get dizzy. I think that's probably, if I had to guess, I would think that's more responsible for it than than anything else. But I imagine that that all mammals have dominant hands, right? Like,

• 7:10Hank Green?

  I don't know that that is true. I didn't do research on this.

• 7:13John Green?

  What would be different about us, like, than a dolphin?

• 7:16Hank Green?

  Oh, well, I don't think dolphins have dominant hands. I'll tell you that, due to the lack of hands. So the thing about people is that we have, like, we have a limited amount of, of, you know, brain to devote to a task. And, and there's a lot, there's a lot to devote. Like, obviously, you can do less with your feet than you could do with your hands. That's partially physiology, but it's partially neurology. So there's just, like, less neural circuits going there and sort of less established circuitry devoted to that. But our hands have a lot of circuitry devoted to them, but our dominant hand has the same, like, physiological surgery, but like, there's, our brains have developed in such a way that it's like, there, I can only do so much in terms of developing dexterity. And so I'm

• 8:01Hank Green?

  going to devote that to one hand, because I have a limited amount of dexterity to have. But if, like, you're, if you got paws and they kind of all do the same thing, then that would, that wouldn't be so much the case. Dogs probably have a lot more in terms of, like, mouth stuff.

• 8:15John Green?

  Sure, this would be a very compelling argument, except That studies have shown that most dogs and cats have a dominant paw and can be right or left pawed.

• 8:24Hank Green?

  All right.

• 8:25John Green?

  And also horses have a dominant or lead foot for tasks like cantering and primates have varying degrees of handedness with interestingly chimpanzees typically being right-handed whereas orangutans are typically left-handed.

• 8:38Hank Green?

  Wild.

• 8:39John Green?

  Whales have been observed with right-jawed preferences as a form of lateralization as well.

• 8:45Hank Green?

  Right jaw?

• 8:47John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, you know, you chew with your right jaw a little more than with your left jaw.

• 8:50Hank Green?

  I think I do that.

• 8:51John Green?

  Yeah, well, you're probably, well, aren't you left-handed?

• 8:54Hank Green?

  No.

• 8:55John Green?

  Oh, are you sure?

• 8:56Hank Green?

  You're thinking of mom.

• 8:57John Green?

  Oh, I'm thinking of mom. She's left-handed. Now, you're right-handed. That's interesting. I'm also right-handed.

• 9:02Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 9:03John Green?

  Well, there you go. We can't be, we can't all be special.

• 9:06Hank Green?

  John did the research, but I, I guess that makes sense. I mean, I guess, I don't know if it makes sense, but I guess it's true.

• 9:13John Green?

  Handedness is a great word.

• 9:15Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 9:15John Green?

  Like there are scholars of handedness. Imagine if you're like at a party and you walk up to someone and you're like, hey, what are you doing? They're like, I'm a professor of handedness.

• 9:25John Green?

  I'd love to talk to that person. I bet they'd, I bet they'd have so many facts for me.

• 9:29Hank Green?

  You know, talking to people who like have a, a deep set of knowledge.

• 9:34John Green?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Hank Green?

  So good.

• 9:35John Green?

  That's what I love about tuberculosis people. They know so much about tuberculosis.

• 9:39Hank Green?

  Oh, they know so much.

• 9:40John Green?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Hank Green?

  There's so much to know.

• 9:42John Green?

  What is the best kind of professor to meet at a cocktail party? This is a great question.

• 9:47Hank Green?

  Bats.

• 9:47John Green?

  Bats. Like, uh, baseball or, or creatures?

• 9:53Hank Green?

  Baseball, professor of baseball also would be pretty interesting. I got a bunch of questions for them, but I, I was recently and people, people may not have seen me talk about this on a podcast that was not this one, uh, but I talked to a bat scientist at a party and it was wonderful. Uh, and I learned a lot and I said, what's the weirdest thing about bats? And he said, we don't, in Montana, we don't know where they go in the winter.

• 10:13John Green?

  Hmm. Wow, that's pretty interesting.

• 10:17Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 10:18John Green?

  Ducks in the pond and catcher in the rye, only, uh, we really don't know.

• 10:23Hank Green?

  We really don't know. We just don't know. Yeah. They, it turns, it seems like they spread out.

• 10:27John Green?

  Oh.

• 10:28Hank Green?

  Like they don't all like find like one, one place to go and, and hang out together. They, uh, they go.

• 10:33John Green?

  They like to, they like to spend their winters apart.

• 10:35Hank Green?

  And like little like space between rocks. Yeah.

• 10:39John Green?

  I have to confess that while I like spending most of my time with people, I would love to be able to spend the winters alone underneath a rock.

• 10:48Hank Green?

  Just in the space between rocks.

• 10:49John Green?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:51Hank Green?

  He looks so peaceful right now, everyone.

• 10:54John Green?

  The space between rocks. I mean, it'd be a rough place for me personally to run out the winter, but

• 10:59Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 10:59John Green?

  I don't know. My ancestors did it.

• 11:01Hank Green?

  If you weighed, if you weighed like five grams, you know?

• 11:04John Green?

  Yeah.

• 11:04Hank Green?

  It couldn't hurt that bad to lay down on something if you weigh five grams.

• 11:08John Green?

  I'd like to weigh five grams and be able to fly, but I don't want to be a bat.

• 11:12Hank Green?

  You just want to be like a little human who weighs five grams and can fly?

• 11:16John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little flying five gram human.

• 11:18Hank Green?

  Man, my house would be so big if I were five grams. I would feel like it was very big.

• 11:23John Green?

  Yeah, exactly. We would need so much less stuff. This is, this goes back to your longstanding argument that humans are too big. Like, imagine how easy it would be to get carbon neutrality in a world where we all weighed five grams.

• 11:34Hank Green?

  Oh, my God. We, like, what would we do with all the land?

• 11:38John Green?

  Our cars would weigh like 20 grams. We wouldn't have to have all the land for agriculture and stuff.

• 11:43Hank Green?

  We wouldn't need cars. We could just fly.

• 11:46John Green?

  It's a great point, Hank. Really good point. That hadn't occurred to me. Did I ever tell you about the time I was gonna buy a house? I was really excited about the house. Sarah and I looked all through the house and we were like, this house is wonderful. And then I went into the bathroom to pee and inside the garbage can was a dead bat. And I was like, well, maybe not.

• 12:03Hank Green?

  What?

• 12:04John Green?

  Yeah, dead bat.

• 12:05Hank Green?

  I actually, I've been working on, this is unrelated, but I've been working on a housing crisis policy suggestion, and I want to hit you with it.

• 12:12John Green?

  Great. This is, this is just what people come to Dear Hank and John for.

• 12:16Hank Green?

  So what's the, there's only one situation where you find a house that is, uh, like, surprisingly cheap, that's in a nice neighborhood, and it's a good house.

• 12:24John Green?

  Okay.

• 12:25Hank Green?

  Do you, do you know what this situation is where, where you find a way below market rate house?

• 12:30John Green?

  Bats in the trash can?

• 12:31Hank Green?

  Close. Haunting. It's gonna, there's a, there's a ghost in that house and it's murdered people. So you've got a murder ghost in the house. So my suggestion is that 10% of homes in America get, not a murder ghost, because that, nobody's gonna move into that house, but like a mean ghost. Like, like a pretty mean ghost.

• 12:49John Green?

  Okay.

• 12:50Hank Green?

  So now you're probably thinking, how do we decide which 10% of the homes to give pretty mean ghosts to?

• 12:55John Green?

  That's not the only thing I'm thinking, but yes.

• 12:58Hank Green?

  I have a policy suggestion here, which is that it is anybody who's ever purchased an NFT.

• 13:03John Green?

  Oh.

• 13:04Hank Green?

  Gets a gets a house ghost. And this is appropriate because they they spent all this money on something that doesn't exist. So we should give them something that shouldn't exist, but does like a Victorian child who will not leave their crawl space.

• 13:17John Green?

  Is this a good time to confess to you that I have purchased an NFT?

• 13:21Hank Green?

  You're getting a ghost.

• 13:24John Green?

  It wasn't very expensive, but I did buy one. I wanted to be in on the craze. I wanted to be in on the craze. They were they were talking some sense. It made sense to me. It's not a monkey. It's an abstract design and it's mine. You can't you can't you can't have it. I own it.

• 13:42Hank Green?

  Uh huh. You own an NFT. I also own an NFT. I'm getting a ghost as well, but I didn't buy it. It was given to me by YouTube.

• 13:49John Green?

  Oh, okay. No, I bought mine.

• 13:50Hank Green?

  They'll like give you a thing, you know?

• 13:52John Green?

  I bought mine for a little bit of my Bitcoin, which I also have.

• 13:56Hank Green?

  That was probably a terrible thing to spend your Bitcoin on, but okay.

• 13:59John Green?

  No, man. What are you talking about? That thing's only appreciated. That NFT has gone to the moon.

• 14:03Hank Green?

  Oh, I believe it to the moon.

• 14:05John Green?

  I think I paid $50 for it and I don't know that it has any residual value whatsoever.

• 14:10Hank Green?

  No, no.

• 14:11John Green?

  This next question comes from April, who writes, Dear John and Hank, why do we put the dollar sign before the numbers? If we always say the word dollars after the amount, we write dollars 20, but we don't say dollars 20. What's up with that? Thanks, April.

• 14:24Hank Green?

  Oh my God. So Tabuki and I worked on this one, man. We went as deep like we tried. And if you know more about this than us, please let us know. But this, this is a, uh, an unclear convention. And it's weird because this is the only unit that we do this with. Like you, if you like cents, for example, that goes after. And that's also currency, but also all the other units.

• 14:47John Green?

  Inches, feet.

• 14:49Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 14:49John Green?

  Milliliters.

• 14:50Hank Green?

  But pounds, the currency goes in front.

• 14:52John Green?

  However, it must be noted that in Quebec.

• 14:55Hank Green?

  Yeah. In Quebec, it is dollars twenty. You put the dollar sign after the amount because it's French and you put the Euro sign after in France. So in addition to discovering that, the main thing that we found was that probably the earliest version of this is pounds and it goes back to the 17th century, probably. And also potentially medieval scribes did all units this way. So there was a time when it was mostly like this, where you would put the unit you were talking about and then you would put the number. And that was maybe easier to read or to understand when you were a scribe, or it was just the convention of the time. But then after a while, because

• 15:36Hank Green?

  of the way that we speak, we put it afterwards. So you say 20 inches and you put inches after. But with currency, for whatever reason, it never changed. Now, there is also what I think is probably just a myth that you would put it first so that like when you're writing a check, you can't like add an extra one in front. So if you're writing like, you're writing like, like a hundred dollars, you couldn't like, you put the dollar sign in front to like mark out so that you couldn't put an extra one in there and have it be eleven hundred dollars or something. And that, but that's, that seems like it, it is far predated by these other instances of pounds being first in the 16th century or 17th century.

• 16:15Hank Green?

  Fascinating. That's what I got. But I, I had like noticed this, you know, that like we, like we say it differently than it is written, but I'd never really thought about how weird that is. It's like the only, the only like unit that we do that with. And money is a unit. Yeah. Also, I hadn't really considered. Also, it's a construction, just like inches. Well, like inches, but even more so. Like at least an inch is a, like a thing, you know, that exists. There is, there is, distance exists. Currency is all in the head. Distance exists, but inches don't exist. Value exists, but currency doesn't exist, would be my, my way of saying that.

• 16:59Hank Green?

  But there's many kinds of value that are not, cannot be measured in dollars, but there are. Like what? Like love? Like love, John! Jeez Louise, come on now. Like excitement and passion. Come on, if you can't exchange it for our ice cold dollars twenty bill, what's the point?

• 17:20Hank Green?

  Difficult to monetize, as they say, the love.

• 17:24John Green?

  I don't know. I don't know. Instagram's found a way. You hit that heart button. It matters.

• 17:29Hank Green?

  Oh, boy. Man, I'm so sick of it. I'm getting pretty sick of it, John. I'm so, I'm, I'm tired.

• 17:38John Green?

  I think we're sort of canaries in the coal mine because we've been online since 1993.

• 17:42Hank Green?

  Are we? I feel like a number of people have led us on this position.

• 17:47John Green?

  That's true. You're right. You're right. We're not on the leading edge of figuring out that the internet, the social internet is maybe not so great. In fact, like I could go back to my 2018 self who was like, hey, I don't think the social internet is so great. And maybe just listen to him.

• 18:01Hank Green?

  Yeah, totally.

• 18:02John Green?

  But I don't know what to do about it, though. I don't know how to, and this is what's so interesting to me. This is why I keep coming back to it and keep worrying about it and it occupies so much of my brain space. Is I don't know how to respond to it. The things that really get me are the things where like I feel like there's an intractable, intractable problem that I just don't know how to solve. And the more I think about it, the less I know how to solve it. I mean, this is true for some things in the world, but it's also really true for like my relationship with the internet in particular. And it's also true with like things in my personal life. And those are the things that I just like, that literally keep me up at night. Because I don't know how to react to knowing that the internet is bad, not just for me, but like hard stop.

• 18:46Hank Green?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 18:47John Green?

  Because I am an internet person.

• 18:49Hank Green?

  Right. For me specifically, it's really hard because I like this, it's like, it's, it's a little bit, and this is, I don't know, this is gonna probably sound like an exact, kind of a cringe exaggeration. But it's a little bit like, so you want me to leave my country?

• 19:03John Green?

  That does feel like a cringe exaggeration. You're right. Way to see it coming.

• 19:11Hank Green?

  Well, and this was another thing that was that they talked about in this Cal Newport video, which it will probably have been in a previous edition of We're Here, where they were like, what ultimately needs to happen is this behavior needs to become cringe.

• 19:26John Green?

  Right. There has to be like a social norm where we say like, hey, like, lack of nuance and outrage culture is actually super cringe.

• 19:34Hank Green?

  Yeah. And also, like, the, just the going of the people onto the internets.

• 19:40John Green?

  But that's, that itself is so hard, because I think what the internet gives us, and this is aside from like Wikipedia, right? Like, we're not talking about the dissemination and implementation of information for which the internet has been incredible and like one of the greatest accelerators of human progress in history. We're talking about the social internet, where, you know, you, you sort of, through these large multinational corporations, you agree to exchange pieces of yourself so that you can communicate with other people in a many-to-many way. And that is hard to get out of, because we benefit from it so much, Hank. Like, I think one thing, we don't talk about how privileged

• 20:21John Green?

  we are in this conversation, because we're some of the very few people who have like, definitely, definitely benefited from the social internet. Even if it's making society worse, it like bought my house. And that's not true for most people. So, I don't know how to respond to it, and I don't know what to do about it, but I do think that I need to change my relationship with it pretty dramatically. Now, I haven't been making content on what I think of as the social internet. Like, I'm making podcasts and YouTube videos and writing books and everything, but like, I haven't been making content on the places that I feel uncomfortable, but I'm still using them. You know, it's the, it's the infinite jest.

• 20:57Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 20:58John Green?

  It's this, it's this form of distraction that's so good, that's so complete, that's...

• 21:04John Green?

  You know, makes you feel like you don't have to grapple with the world as it is. But at the same time, like you do, and it's making the world worse. So I, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, man. It's stressing me out. I don't know how to handle it. I'm sure lots of people with good ideas are going to write in and tell us exactly how to handle it. But I just, I don't, I, I've thought hard about it and I don't, I don't know that there's an easy way.

• 21:25Hank Green?

  Which reminds me, John, that this podcast was brought to you by thinking hard about it and not knowing that there's an easy way.

• 21:31John Green?

  Hmm.

• 21:32Hank Green?

  We had to talk for a little while about whether or not we wanted to take this sponsor.

• 21:36John Green?

  Uh, yeah.

• 21:36Hank Green?

  Because, you know, we're careful about the sponsors we choose here at Dear Hank and John. But we decided that I thought hard about it and I'm not sure that there's an easy way. Was actually a sponsor that we did, we did want to take, uh, $20 per thousand downloads for.

• 21:51John Green?

  Why don't companies ever come to us with concepts like that? They always come to us and they're like, hey, sell our, sell our stuff. And I'm like, that's the most boring thing that I could possibly do.

• 22:01Hank Green?

  Why won't you have it be the concept of the moon?

• 22:05John Green?

  Why, well, it's not the concept of the moon, by the way. I wanted Dr. Pepper to sponsor humanities relationship with the moon, which continues to be a great idea.

• 22:14Hank Green?

  It is a good idea.

• 22:15John Green?

  Today's podcast is also brought to you, of course, by House Ghosts. House Ghosts, Hank's really bad solution to the housing crisis.

• 22:22Hank Green?

  It's going to lower prices like crazy. This podcast is also brought to you by wherever the bats go. Wherever the bats go, the space between two rocks?

• 22:31John Green?

  Yeah, God, send me there. Uh, and today's podcast is brought to you by walking pneumonia. Walking pneumonia, it's just chugging along.

• 22:39Hank Green?

  All right, John, this next question comes from Grace, who asks, Hank and John, why don't we have a word for dying of thirst? Or just being really thirsty? Uh, people say, I'm starving all the time, but there isn't an equivalent for being thirsty. I understand it's not that big of a thing to say, I'm so thirsty. Or, or people are dying of thirst out there, but I really, really want there to be a dedicated melodramatic word. Drinking lots of water just in case, Grace. There's kind of some melodramatic thirsty words, parched.

• 23:07John Green?

  Oh, I'm parched, but parched doesn't communicate a sense of impending doom.

• 23:13Hank Green?

  No, no, in the way that starving does. Well, I mean, you could make the case that like the problem with starving, and I believe Dave Matthews once made this case. I don't know why I remember that.

• 23:22John Green?

  Panic at the disco.

• 23:25John Green?

  I'm experiencing intense anxiety. Go on.

• 23:27Hank Green?

  Did, did once, it did once make the case that, uh, that starving should maybe be left for situations where starving is actually occurring, not for when like we've postponed dinner for a couple of hours.

• 23:39John Green?

  Oh, I thought, wait, I, I thought you were gonna quote Dave Matthews lyrics to me. You're just, you just happened to remember an observation Dave Matthews made on a podcast like 20 years ago or something?

• 23:48Hank Green?

  And yeah, and then he said, "A little baby," like that.

• 23:52John Green?

  I knew it was coming. God, I got hit with it unexpectedly.

• 23:57John Green?

  I knew it was coming and I got ready and then you completely derailed me and I thought that I was safe and then it came.

• 24:06Hank Green?

  What would you say, John?

• 24:08John Green?

  Gosh, um, I, I, I would say that the reason we don't, I, I have an actual theory for this, which is that the reason we don't have a word for this is that dying of thirst, uh, occurs quite quickly and, um,

• 24:21Hank Green?

  You don't, you don't, you don't have a lot of time to talk about it.

• 24:24John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're too parched for the conversation anyway. I think, I think that's why, but I kind of, I have to say, and this is gonna make me sound like a, like a real do-gooder, even cringier than Hank was earlier, and say that I kind of agree with Dave Matthews, that like, starvation is, is, I mean, I, I hate to be a downer, but like, maybe the least funny thing in the world. And the inflation of language that we use does drive me a little bananas sometimes. Like, like 100%, this is the best example, and we've used it before on the podcast, but when you agree with someone and you say 100%, I agree. And then, that's not enough, though,

• 25:05John Green?

  and eventually you say 1,000%. And then eventually you say 100,000%, I agree. It's, it's lost all meaning.

• 25:11Hank Green?

  Yeah, I agree with you a million percent, John. But this is part of language. Like terrific used to mean inspiring of terror.

• 25:18John Green?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome originally meant like filling you with awe, which is not an entirely, like uncomplicatedly great emotion.

• 25:27Hank Green?

  Yeah, right. And, but very different than like, uh, you know, the wheels on a car being awesome. Yeah. Rims. Friend is how I say it when I see somebody.

• 25:38John Green?

  Sure, I've heard you say that before. Yeah. Awesome rims. Friend.

• 25:42Hank Green?

  Yep.

• 25:43John Green?

  You're somebody who pays a lot of attention to rims on a car wheel.

• 25:47Hank Green?

  Hmm, I wouldn't say that.

• 25:49John Green?

  You notice a great rim. You're a car guy.

• 25:52Hank Green?

  Orin loves any car that is non-standard.

• 25:56John Green?

  Okay, yeah, so do my kids.

• 25:58Hank Green?

  He's a real big, he's like, "Custom car!"

• 26:01John Green?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Hank Green?

  But even if it's like, spray painted, uh, in somebody's backyard, like halfway done.

• 26:08John Green?

  Right.

• 26:09Hank Green?

  He's like, "Custom car!" This kid just wants any car that is doing a little something.

• 26:13John Green?

  He just wants people to do work, which we don't do anymore.

• 26:16Hank Green?

  We've just stopped. It's so, it's like, everybody's gotta have a car that's like, either, you know, like, something monochrome. Like, even, even a little bit of, of blue these days. People are like, "I don't know, I'd rather just have the simpler situation where it's gray."

• 26:32John Green?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Hank Green?

  I don't know.

• 26:33John Green?

  Now, I've never been very expressive with my cars, and you're right, I'm losing an opportunity to express myself, whether through bumper stickers, or through paint, or, um, indeed, through customizing the car in other ways, like giving myself those, uh, cool neon lights along the runners.

• 26:46Hank Green?

  Yeah, hover lights.

• 26:48John Green?

  Hover lights.

• 26:49Hank Green?

  Hover lights.

• 26:49John Green?

  See, you even know the lingo.

• 26:51Hank Green?

  Yeah, sweet hover lights. They're awesome, friend.

• 26:54John Green?

  Yeah, that does sound like you.

• 26:56Hank Green?

  Sublime.

• 26:57John Green?

  Sublime is another great example of language inflation. I mean, that used to mean something very, very specific, and now it means like, anything...

• 27:04Hank Green?

  That feels nice, yeah.

• 27:06John Green?

  All right, we've got another question. This one comes from Jeffrey, who says, "Dear John and Hank, I'm reaching out to you to ask about how to approach public notoriety." Well, Jeffrey, it's complicated, man. Uh, oh, generally at a local level, it's getting better. "I'm considering running for local office in a mid-sized city, and I know that as soon as I start a campaign, I will get criticism, even mean comments. Even if they're a minority, the comments. Historically, I don't respond well to people being mean to me." Yeah, I mean, that's, that's the case for most of us, Jeffrey.

• 27:31Hank Green?

  Yeah, it's good, good, good thing to know about yourself.

• 27:34John Green?

  "But I'm getting better. I don't want to avoid making my community better just because of a few bad beans. Do you have any recommendations or tips on how to deal with people being not nice to you at a public level? Land of the brave, home of the Jeffrey."

• 27:45Hank Green?

  I have a private theory that this is why so many politicians are lawyers, because they're used to people being mad at them.

• 27:51John Green?

  Oh, like they're used to being yelled at?

• 27:53Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 27:53John Green?

  Yeah, I had a conversation recently with an exceptionally famous person, and I, I, I said, "It must have been difficult being criticized by," um, I'll just say who criticized them, "by, uh, RFK Jr. because..." Like then you're much more in the public eye and it must have been very difficult. And they were like, it was. And I didn't know how to follow that up because like it would just be difficult. And like having the head of health and human services for the United States government hate you would be uncomfortable.

• 28:27Hank Green?

  What one of the things is just like, we're kind of unfamiliar with it. Like, we're not super familiar with the idea that anybody would sort of publicly dislike you because it doesn't happen, you know? It's very uncommon and unpleasant when friendships go that badly that you have that kind of situation in your personal life.

• 28:47John Green?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Hank Green?

  Extremely common and like, you know, unavoidably common. Once you're living some kind of, especially a political life in the political sphere.

• 28:56John Green?

  Right.

• 28:56Hank Green?

  You're gonna, you're gonna have that. Now, my experience to some extent is it's a lot easier to discard and maybe too easy to discard the criticisms that are very clearly in bad faith and from people who don't really have any interest in and would never really be supportive of you. So there's just like a group of people who it's kind of easier to sort of like have it roll off your back a little bit because it's like, well, yeah, we disagree on some really fundamental stuff. First, you're gonna like be mean to me. And then it's a lot harder when it comes from people who are like, feel like they are more your people. And I think that like, the, the, one of the hardest things about our job, me and John's

• 29:36Hank Green?

  job is like, knowing when the criticism is, is actual, is valid and is something to take seriously and knowing when it's just like, ah, like, I just have to not exist in the same world as that. Like, that can't be part of how I approach things or I will never be able to move through it because like, that isn't in good faith. That is intentionally designed to, not really even to attack me, but to attack like ideas that I think are good. Like, they're going for the idea more than they're going for you. And so it's very, it can be very hard to actually tell the difference between those two things. And then the second thing is like, when you have decided to take it seriously, like, how do you actually take it seriously? Or, or when your subconscious decides to take it seriously, spend some conscious time going down the.

• 30:17Hank Green?

  The path and saying like, okay, why is this landing so hard? Is it something that that is an internal conflict with myself? Is it something that I actually think is a problem? Is it something I'm being like held back from speaking on because of of like, you know, the the sort of difficulties of politics? And then, once you understand that, just saying it to yourself, just being like, okay, I have just I have made my decision and here's why. And just like knowing that and trying to feel comfortable with the choices that you have to make because you're gonna have to make hard choices, even if it's a tiny town with, you know, not not a tremendous amount of responsibility. You're gonna have to make a lot of hard choices.

• 30:57John Green?

  Well, and there's still a lot of responsibility in a tiny town, right? I mean, because you're responsible for all those people and those people are your neighbors, which in some ways is harder than what we do, right? Because most of the people in our core audience are not also our neighbors. I I mean, this is something I struggle with very, very heavily. And I've been struggling with it for 20 years and I haven't won out over it. I I haven't figured out a way to deal with it well. Hank is really good at differentiating between bad faith criticism and good faith criticism. I just feel like I touched the stove and it hurt, you know? And then I have to do this long analysis of whether or not like it hurt because I touched

• 31:39John Green?

  the stove or the stove touched me or like, did, you know, did the stove have a good point? And it just like, didn't do a good job of making the point? Or did I actually like enter into the stove's room in a really loud and unpleasant way, thereby making it inevitable that the stove was gonna, you know? It just the the the list of considerations and concerns goes on and on. And like, that's why I don't sleep well at night. But I I still think it's worth it. That's what I would say is that like, I think it's worth it if you're, if you believe in what you're doing and you're trying to do something that you think is interesting and important and you know, you hope can be useful for people. I still think it's worth it. At the same time, like my therapist always

• 32:22John Green?

  says it takes five positive comments to make up for one negative one. And there's no way that's true.

• 32:27Hank Green?

  Hilarious. That, that ratio is so, I mean, it doesn't matter how many positive ones I get. If there's a, if there's a negative one that lands, it's the only thing I hear for a week.

• 32:40John Green?

  Yeah. Well, the truth is the positive ones don't land because I'm like, no, I know that I'm a monster. So there's no way you're going to convince me otherwise. And then when somebody like convincingly makes the case that I'm a monster, I'm like, yeah, I've been trying to tell you. I knew that.

• 32:54Hank Green?

  Yeah, but it is so important. It is so important. And I'll say to everybody who is listening, like, public service, like running for office is not something that you can't do. Like, I mean, depending on your citizenship status or wherever you live, like maybe, but like, but like, this is a, this is a thing that is open to people and, and should be considered to be a thing that you might do. Like we, nobody's happy with the way things are. And one of the worst effects of the internet, I feel like, is making everyone kind of feel like there is no way to do anything about any of these problems. It is just like more and more hopeless. Like that's where the assembly line that I feel like you kind of can get put on.

• 33:39John Green?

  Yeah, totally. Totally. And this is true even in like, when I, in my very narrow world of tuberculosis, like it is news when the government is holding up tuberculosis funding and it is not news when that tuberculosis funding, thanks to the hard, dedicated work of TB fighters and other activists starts moving. Right? Like, that's just not news. It doesn't show up in the news. And that's happening. Like we started to see real money move. And it's really exciting and it's only happening because of advocacy. It's only happening because of elected officials and, and the people pressuring them. And it's not where we want it to be, of course. It's not what we wish it would be. It's not where it ought to be, et cetera, et cetera. But like that progress is real. It's just largely goes unobserved.

• 34:23Hank Green?

  And like, of course, you know, of course, like the, the news is the bad news. Like it, it makes sense in terms of the incentives of, of the structure. And also like, we need to be paying attention to the problems. But when the problems are infinite and there is a crisis for like, like there's every kind of crisis all sort of lined up next to each other. I think the sort of net effect is that you can really sort of like lose faith that anything can be done at all. But like, when you get into it, I think when you get in there, you actually see that like the reasons why things aren't getting done is because they are hard, which is actually I, I kind of something hopeful and lovely. When it's like, oh, I see. So they're like, a thing is bad and not ideal because there isn't an easy solution. Well, that's a little de-radicalizing.

• 35:06John Green?

  Yeah. And also a little encouraging because then we can work together on finding solutions. And you can actually believe that other people want to find solutions. I will say, in my experience, getting close to the problem is not always de-radicalizing, but your point is well taken.

• 35:23Hank Green?

  It can be.

• 35:24John Green?

  Hank, we got to transition to the news from ours in AFC Wimbledon real quick. You may remember that AFC Wimbledon do not go 1-0 down unless they are going to lose the game. That is the rule. It has always been the rule. If we give up the first goal, we're going to lose or at best tie until two weeks ago, when we came back from 1-0 down and 1-2-1. And then guess what happened again this week? We were losing 1-0 and I was like, it couldn't happen again, could it? It did, it happened again. We won 2-1.

• 35:52Hank Green?

  What's going on?

• 35:53John Green?

  What is going on?

• 35:54Hank Green?

  Unbelievable. What team is this?

• 35:57John Green?

  What team is this? As, as our manager.

• 35:59Hank Green?

  We went like 600 games without doing that and did it twice in a row?

• 36:02John Green?

  We did it twice in a row. We've, we've won two on the bounce, as they say in England, and we're find ourselves stunning in the stunning heights of ninth place. Somebody stop the count. This, this season is over. Let's call it a day. Ninth place in League One, are you kidding me?

• 36:19Hank Green?

  I don't know, just keep winning games, John. You could go up to League Zero.

• 36:23John Green?

  We could, we could be a League Zero team, the real dream, be in the championship. Hank, I, I say this with all the love in the world for AFC Wimbledon. If we were in the championship, we would get demolished.

• 36:36Hank Green?

  But would you make a bunch of money for one year?

• 36:38John Green?

  We would. We would make, and we would save it all. We would not spend any of that on players. We would just lose every game and be like, thank you for the money.

• 36:47John Green?

  And then we would build an add-on to the stadium and then we could, then we could be sustainable. But yeah, no, I mean, ninth place in League One, it's incredible. I don't even know what to say about this team. The way they're playing together, it makes me so proud to be a Wimbledon fan.

• 36:59Hank Green?

  Well, we got a new team at the US government as well because it's the astronauts, the new astronaut class. The first new class of astronauts since 2021. There were 8,000 applicants, probably all of them pretty high-quality folks. It whittled down to 10 people who will begin training soon and they will graduate in two years, at which point they will be astronauts. If the Artemis program continues, question mark, they might end up being part of future missions to the moon. These people might also be the first NASA astronauts to go to a commercial space station in low Earth orbit after the ISS retires, which is going to be around 2030.

• 37:42Hank Green?

  And most importantly of all, it is possible that some of these people will still be astronauts if we get our act together and someday go to Mars. Some of these people could be the first people on Mars.

• 37:54John Green?

  That's pretty exciting. And as long as it happens after 2028, I'm all for it.

• 37:58Hank Green?

  You're safe.

• 37:59John Green?

  Okay. All right.

• 38:01Hank Green?

  You're safe. So congratulations to the new class of astronauts. That sounds intense. That's not, it's never a place I was headed.

• 38:10John Green?

  I've never been in a situation where there were 8,000 applicants and 10 people accepted, and I was one of the 10. Let's put it that way. All right, Hank. Well, thank you so much for podding with me. Thanks, everybody, for listening. You can send us your questions at [email protected]. We don't have a pod without them, and we appreciate them so much.

• 38:26Hank Green?

  This podcast is edited by Ben Swartout. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna-Medich. 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 Debuki Chakravarti. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunarola. And as we say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.