Hey, so something worth knowing is a benefit for the nonprofit organization that makes Crash Course and SciShow Complexly. It's September 16th, 2026 in Los Angeles, California at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. Please join us. It's going to be incredible.
Friends have complexity like Mark Rober, Katie Max, Simone Yech, and Moore will share inspiring talks about what makes them hopeful and join Hank Green on stage for fun interactive discussions. Complexly has been creating free educational content like SciShow and PBS eons and Crash Course in Bizarre Beasts for nearly 15 years and 6 billion views. But this year, we've become a 501c3 nonprofit and we're doing something worth knowing as an in-person event that benefits Complexly and our impactful educational media. It's the first ever Complexly in-person event and it's a fundraiser to support our mission of inspiring curiosity and lowering barriers to knowledge building because curiosity builds understanding and understanding builds a better world.
Tickets go on sale to the general public June 30th at somethingworthknowing.com. So come build a better world with us on September 16th and experience something worth knowing you can get your ticket at Complexly.info slash something. We are recording this a week from When You Hear It, which is always the case for Dear Hank and John. That seems especially important to note right now as things are bad in America right now and you know we're in the midst of sort of a dual crises of COVID-19 and also pushing back against the violence that has been done and is being done to Black people by institutional forces.
And so we don't know what the world looks like right now but we are hoping very much when you hear this that it looks better but obviously worried that it does not. Yeah and one more thing I want to say about this Hank is that I often feel like the political and social and historical context that White people bring to this crisis is inadequate and that's true for me certainly and it's also true for many people I know. One example of this among many is that most White people have never even heard of the Red Summer of 1919 when state-sanctioned violence against Black people and protests against it occurred alongside a global disease pandemic. And so when a story is in the news it's really relatively easy to pay attention to it it's easy to make statements about it and statements in support of protesters and I think that's very important but I also think it's important to pay sustained ongoing attention because long-term problems demand long-term solutions they demand that we make changes within ourselves and within our systems not just over one day but over an entire lifetime and over many human lifetimes and that's the commitment that we need to make to each other and especially to people who have been disenfranchised and oppressed by the systems of power in the United States and that is the work of a lifetime but let it be the work of our lifetimes.
Okay here's the podcast. This first question is from Anonymous who asks Dear Hank and John my mom has depression it's bad at the moment and she needs support it's the first time I'm supporting her with something rather than her supporting me through stuff I'm not sure how to phrase a question on this but I could do with some general advice Anonymous. First of all this is lovely to understand and to be in those moments and those transitions where it goes from an entirely one-way relationship to being to being on a kind of adult relationship where you need each other and you know that you are needed and so that it's a big step and to be aware of it is the first important thing. Yeah I mean I can only speak from my own experience of living with depression but in depressive instances in my life a lot of the support that I've benefited from I mean first off I've benefited from somebody asking me how I'm doing that day that minute and not judging my answer not judging me for being in pain I think it's important to understand that the depression while it can look like just malaise is often accompanied by very intense psychic pain that's very very difficult to manage and that's part of why you or at least in my case part of why I tend to retreat from the world when it's happening.
I think one of the things that I've found most helpful is when someone will help me navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracies that it is necessary to navigate in order to get good and consistent care that's so hard to do when I'm unwell it's so hard to like make follow-up appointments and it's and figure out where the place is and figure out which pharmacy is which and when are generics are all these questions and if you can just have somebody who's there with you it's somebody you can trust so that you know that what they're you know that the advice that they're giving you at least comes from a place of love even if it doesn't always make sense to you I find that really helpful because it is overwhelming to try to get help especially because when you're really depressed or again when I am I feel like it won't matter I feel like help doesn't matter like it's not gonna work yeah you know and I believe that as firmly as I believe anything else it seems as true to me as any other truth now the actual truth is that it will help or that it may help and that over time trying a bunch of different treatment strategies eventually it's very likely very probable that something will help and that I will recover but I don't feel that way and so having someone in my life who can consistently say and for me it's Sarah having someone in my life who can consistently say we're gonna get through this like not you're gonna get through this but we're gonna get through this and I'm gonna I'm gonna take you to the doctor and I'm gonna follow up about the prescriptions and I'm gonna help you remember that it's twice a day after morning and after dinner and that stuff really helps me yeah and and you know I think that like knowing that you're a part of something you know you're part of this family unit a part of a community whatever that whatever that the unit of that is and so that's really about like showing up and being there and you know if you can and in a way be needed in simple ways and and also if you can show them that you need them in simple ways and you know it might be like hey can you help me with this this task I want to do like I want to write letters and so you can you help me write some letters to people because I want to you know do this craft activity or this experiment or something to involve them with that I find that you know a big path forward for me is is just conversation if you can get to that point and it's not like it's not like a cure-all it's not like if it makes it better immediately but in that moment it can be better and that can show that there there might be a better somewhere down the line yeah like recently Sarah a few weeks ago Sarah was like do you want to play tennis and I was like do you mean do I want to get in a car and go to a park and play tennis no of course I don't want to play tennis and she was like no she was like we're gonna go play tennis and honestly like I didn't feel better afterwards but I did feel better while playing tennis like yeah and that's something right right you know and so uh-huh yeah you just have to look for those moments and understand that slowly you'll string together more of them yeah this morning you know I think I've been operating with something about you know diminished capacity diminished emotional feelings right now and this morning I you know I worked out a little bit um and I didn't want to and I hated the whole time getting ready to and then I did it and I felt better while I was doing it and then immediately afterward that you know world came crashing back down and I felt bad again um but I didn't feel worse I just felt bad again and there was that period in there when I didn't feel bad because I was concentrating on my body which is a thing that I do need to take care of no matter what um you know I've been having fair a few different body problems um recently and uh don't need to get into details but to you know like to know that I and in part that's because I haven't I've been too you know stressed out and busy trying to sort of like adapt my life to new circumstances and my business to new circumstances to to take care of it and so I you know knowing that there are things that I can spend time on that are positive even if I don't want to do them and having the people in my life to get me to do them is is really valuable you know this question comes from OF who writes dear john and hank I just listen to your episode where you discuss when it's okay to call a professor by their first name and I agree with your conclusion but you left out something important what happens when a professor signs an email with their initials what and why is that hmm hank uh-huh I have a confession to make which is that for many years I signed emails with my initials I know why I did this I did it to seem we have enough we have a report from the inside here's the report from the inside I did it to seem formal and to seem fancy but also to seem busy and dashed off like oh yeah I don't have time to write a whole name right now j-o-h-n yeah that's huge why not write j-m-g which saves me one entire keystroke and you put the middle initial of course I put the middle initial in wow oh that is so flash forward about six months after I start doing this my wonderful late great friend Amy Cross Rosenthal publishes a book in which she writes about how in her experience people are just a little bit self-important when they start signing off their emails with their initials oh god that's amazing and I was like oh man I really I really feel uh seen not in the good way but in the helpful way and that was the last day that I signed my emails with my initials yeah yeah it's nice to have a way to communicate with your friends that is really it's it is the that is the ultimate sub tweet just like imprint forever well yeah I don't know for sure that she was referencing me but oh I deal yeah exactly because it was also in that period of my life where I also fancied myself very busy and so she was she was calling me out for something that I was guilty of but she was doing it in a lovely and funny and kind-hearted way and my life is better for it absolutely yes you were told you were told that there was something in your teeth but um through through space and time yeah and uh in a loving way yeah so don't sign your initials I mean unless you love your initials I don't know but just know that it's gonna sound self-important to some people especially with the middle initial I often don't use my name at all and I feel that this uh this is a I don't know this is a bit much yeah and a bit of a signal of my I'm so busy I can't even write my name yeah but so something else I've noticed thank while we're criticizing you is that oh okay sometimes you sign with just H which is actually the word you do that so that you do so just so you know and I I'm not saying that I read this question so that I can tell you that story about any gosh so that I could offer you this advice but right because I didn't even consider that you were you were pointing this at me because to me a single initial is not is completely different from initials it is completely different in that it's worse like if you just sign H what that says to me is I am so busy I am on a totally different level from you busyness wise I can't write a second letter in my name that's how busy I am that's how important I am I'm h important I'm the only h you know you know who this h is the other strange thing about it is that like if you want to know who the email is from it's not like I'm like actually helping you know where the email is coming from right you are I think I assume aware yeah so what I'm recommending Hank is that you sign your emails best wishes comma return Hank just Hank not or even just return Hank I think you I think you write Hank Green if you're writing to someone you don't know well and I think you write Hank if you're writing to me okay all right okay well I will take I will take this advice under advisement and I'm sure we'll retain it for at least a week yeah well wait I've published my new book venial then you'll change for good John just so you know my neighbor yep is mowing his own so that's happening and it's the situation that we live in Luasc's deer Hank and John it is well known that the country of Italy is shaped like a boot so recently I was wondering what shoe size it would be if it was a real boot unfortunately I couldn't find the answer on the internet that is shocking to me yeah I wear size six shoes that I cannot believe that we don't know what size boot Italy is that is unacceptable so we know the approximate size of the boot do we um yeah well okay so Hank we know I think the approximate size of the shoe in question okay because if you look at the if you look at a map of Italy there's a heel to the boot and that heel is I think the giveaway because we don't know how far up the boot goes right it could be knee length it could go all the way up to your thighs sure sure yeah the but I mean the yeah shoe size isn't about where it goes it's about right it's about the flip part yeah and my argument is that that's about a four inch heel I don't think it's like an eight inch heel because there's not like a huge platform to the foot part of the foot so I would argue that's a four inch heel in which case by my rough calculations that is an American size eight and a half shoe no John I think you're deeply misunderstanding both how heels work and how shoe sizes work I'm not I'm not misunderstanding how either I'm about to I am ready to die on this hill what wait what we have to know is how big the boot is what do you mean we have to know how big the boot is we have to know how far it is from the toe to the heel yes size of the shoe yes but we can't yeah I realize that it's from it's the size of the shoe isn't from where the toe to the to the heel meaning the spike heel to where the humans heel like there was a giant who put on Italy yes how big would that giant speed be it would not be size eight and a half you fall right over no so what you need is the disc is no oh no no no no you've completely misunderstood first off Italy Hank and I know this is going to come as a surprise to you is not actually a boot okay this is the question John yes read me the question again because I am 100 correct I'm about to get in a fight well there's a lot of tension in the room I was wondering what shoe size Italy would be if it were a real boot yes is what Lou asks right so if there was a boot with that that from where the that was the size of Italy what size would it be okay so I think we have a different understanding of the phrase real boot yeah no a real boot the size of Italy with a 440 kilometer heel to toe distance okay that is your understanding of the phrase real boot my my understanding of the phrase real boot is a boot that exists i.e.a. real if you will boot and in any case I figured it out in the boot the size of Italy would be size around 17 million okay roughly okay between 10 and 20 million would be the size but if that's if that's a four inch heel Italy's about an eight and a half okay I like I like that we had two different approaches and we both came to very clear definite definitions but I do need Lou to email us back and ask which one is right yeah did you want to know the size of Italy or is or if you wore a boot yeah yeah that was shaped like Italy right no it's a great question Hank because like which one is more relevant how to make a 17 million inch long shoe we would we spent like a half an episode figuring out how to put googly eyes on the moon well first off you you spent half an episode figuring out how to put googly eyes on the moon and I asked some questions this next question comes from haley who asks dear Hank and john after watching grittiger wigs adaptation of little women multiple times i've come to the conclusion that it is the most scene i have ever felt by a work of fiction so i was wondering what is the most scene you have ever felt by a work of fiction like the comet depending on who's pronouncing it haley i assume and not hally because you didn't really give us or or a vision guide there yeah everybody i've heard it i've heard it both ways well he also spelled it all three ways throughout his lifetime and others people spelled it all three ways implying that while edmond haley was walking around trying to figure out magnetism on earth he himself was not sure of his own surname which to me gets to how weird the 17th century was well also how how you know weird it is now that everything's so standardized that you have to spell your name the same way every time yeah i don't sometimes i just write h okay but to the question Hank what is the most scene you have ever felt by work of fiction and i should say i think rosiana feels the same way about little women i also really liked little women but of course i didn't have that feeling of of being on the inside of it i don't know if this is an appropriate answer but kathryn was reading me the qualities of an enneagram three last night and i i know that like mires brigs and enneagrams and those sorts of things are you know it loosely dot dot dot limited yeah limited it's good they're limited but um but as kathryn sort of went down the attributes of of like enneagram threes at their best and enneagram threes at their worst and talking about how like you know you can be really effective and efficient but you can also put work first and be a little bit narcissistic and i was like okay stop i need to stop i need to stop reading about it i need to stop telling me about enneagram threes so that's i felt i felt deeply seen and also there were a number of times where it was like suggestions for enneagram threes you need to recognize that your feelings are as it or more important than your accomplishments and i was like ha ha they are though what and then i cried well that's good i'm glad that you're crying i mean not i'm not glad but i think it's appropriate that you're crying i've also yeah for me it's probably the movie rush more you know i went to a boarding school i was a screw up i was a screwed up kid i made a lot of bad choices and benefited from a lot of luck but more importantly from a lot of structural privileges and um i thought that movie captured some of the best and the worst of my high school self that's good i have completely lost touch with my high school self it's either that or looking for elaska the looking for elaska tv show i felt pretty i don't know if that's fair pretty seen i feel pretty seen by my own work well that that was really particular it was someone else's work about my work and somehow in making it they made it uh much more reflective of god it's so weird of what my life was like you know what my not just not just the character budge who you know probably isn't the character i mostly identify with all in some ways but not in every way but just there was something about it that felt very um much like alabama in those years oh it's so i mean i only went to it springs like two or three times but like it's on canny it feels like yeah they didn't like rebuild the campus they rebuilt the feel you know like it just feels like it yes it was hard it was hard to be there because i have never had an experience like that before where i felt um yeah inside of the past yeah this next question comes from malcolm who writes dear john and hank i'm a high school senior in quarantine and i spend the vast majority of my time in my basement by myself my deceased grandfather's guitar has been down here untouched for years and i was inspired by a previous episode of your podcast i think it's the episode of the podcast where the person was secretly wanting to play the fiddle yeah i was inspired by a previous episode of your podcast is secretly learned guitar using my grandfather's old acoustic i now know the d a and e chord so far good what song should i play for my family to let them know that i have surprisingly learned to play the guitar it has to be something that they would all recognize secrets and string instruments malcolm uh and i have to do something you can play with just the d a and the e i feel like malcolm can maybe learn two more chords if necessary well if you learn two more chords then you're basically got it all wrapped up oh wow if you can if you can add the c and the g which are admittedly harder than all of those ones that you've learned so far to your repertoire um you probably gonna have to learn enough eventually uh but that and that's that's sort of another level of hard above above gnc but if you had gnc on there you can basically do anything so let's just assume and if you got a cape out let's just assume you can we can play anything um so i'm just gonna go ahead and say think about things by that islamic group that should have won um eurovision this year but didn't because eurovision didn't happen because that's a really sweet and fun song i feel like not all of malcolm's family is going to pre-know the song that should have won eurovision this year except that eurovision was canceled now i happen to know it because you've watched the youtube video so many times that it's my number one recommended video every time i love onto youtube i was thinking something a little more classic like for instance marvin geese let's get it on no that's perfect john you really hit the nail right on the head there that's what the family wants to hear oh what about what about if you see kami by um by goodness beers that's actually a really really fun song to play on the guitar not that i know because i played on the guitar all the time but it is really fun so uh if you want to my my my experience of learning instruments is that um is that the you have to find good fun songs to play and then you get better because it's fun to learn um so i do want to recommend that one to you it might not be appropriate for your whole family i have an actual recommendation in fact i have what i believe to be the only actual recommendation which is that you play smash-mouth cell star of course oh god that's the only song i know all the lyrics of yeah i mean you're gonna have to learn c and g and a minor but look a minor is super easy you basically already know it because you know e um and g and c you're gonna have to get at some point anyway but the nice thing about all-star is that it like the chord progression does not change through the whole song it is the same in the chorus it's the same in the verses you just do the same thing over and over again and you good okay this next question let's say let's answer this authorial intent question this next question comes from maxine who asks steer hankan john has being writers affected your opinion of authorial intent in any way do you to see eye to eye on the subject or do you have different opinions not particularly mad maxine i think we do have some with differing opinions john somewhat although i have moderated my opinion in the last few years so when i was in high school i thought that authorial intent was extremely important and that when my english teachers were slaughtering these books by making us hyper analyze them they were dishonoring the authors who didn't intend any of this stuff anyway and so what does it matter you know that the green light across the bay represents hoozy what or that the white that you know the white whale represents the terrifying blank whiteness of of uh natures indifference to human endeavors etc that was my like number one pretty fairly standard pretentious high school student thing and then as often happens to me hank um i staked out the most radical opposite position i possibly could you know i i i went from like i tweet 400 times a day to twitter is bad for the social order and i will never use it again except one day i might break it go on sports twitter for 12 hours and then quit again so i adopted the belief and very loudly i might add that books belong to their readers and that authorial intent is completely irrelevant it does not matter whether herman melville intended moby dick although he obviously did it doesn't matter if herman melville intended moby dick to be a metaphor for natures indifference to us that's what moby dick is and that what makes a book good is its readers and i still largely believe that like i still believe that readers reading a book generously can make it better and i also believe for the record that readers reading a book ungenerously uh can keep the book from becoming the best or most useful version of itself so i don't want to like say that readers aren't important but i i now think that that that the author especially now especially in the 21st century the authors in the book whether you want to be or not and this is something i didn't understand for a long time and my books changed when i began to understand it and i think the first time that you see me understanding it at all is in the fault in our stars where there's a character who's a writer and you know i was aware by that point that people were reading my biography into my novels which was something that like in my early books i couldn't have imagined because how people are going to know my biography right and then in turtles all the way down that went yet another step further where like the author is you know in some ways like you know can be constructed as a few of the different characters in the book and yeah so i think authorial intent is not totally irrelevant it is still a little uncomfortable for me and i'm not here to tell anybody else what to do but it's still a little uncomfortable for me when i hear writers make big pronouncements about their books that are outside the text like i do not feel comfortable commenting in a authoritative way on anything outside the text right i feel the same way and it's it's very interesting it is very similar to writing a song where i don't it's a very big deal to change the lyrics to a song after it's on an album or has been released in some way and i think it's very interesting when artists do that like when i go to a live show and i like and they say different lyrics than the ones that are on the album i think like that's like a very intentional and sort of big decision whereas changing the lyric before it gets recorded is like you do that constantly like that's that's like an everyday occurrence as you're recording an album like you're still working on the songs basically up until they're recorded very much the same with the book and then like the text is locked um and you theoretically will never change anything in the book again and almost like can't because you want everyone to be talking about the same text but there are some things in my work that like i do know and have known the whole time that i think are interesting to to have an answer to when someone asks like what is what is that like why wasn't that discussed or you know what what are what are those people like actually thinking about in that moment but you didn't put it in the book and like i didn't put it intentionally because like during the book experience it's important but but you do feel like you know you know the truth and you feel you feel like you can answer yeah it's very weird uh it was very weird to have like my editor um talking to me about like you know asking questions about the book but like i was like well obviously it's this and but like of course it's only obvious to me and because like i have all these like i have a lot of the stuff sort of like written out in a in a you know explanation to myself so that i can make sure i don't mess things up that aren't in the book but are reflective of the reality there and i feel like sort of more comfortable talking about all that stuff and i well i will once the second book is out because like a lot of that stuff was designed to inform the second book yeah i think it's somewhat different when it's a series and i also think it's different writer to writer and of course part of why i don't feel comfortable with my previous kind of radical position on authorial intent is that i don't know what works for other people like i don't even really know what works for me i i only know what what is kind of working for me right now creatively and yeah i'm not yeah i'm over the days of making grand pronouncements about about that stuff because i have entered an age of profound uncertainty in my life and i i hope to be uh to be able to remain in this place of uncertainty for the rest of my life because even though it's uncomfortable it feels more accurate i guess or it feels more true to me i'm trying insofar as possible to stay in the uncertainty these days yeah and that's hard in a world that is sort of like asking for for a certain deal of yeah of course and and there are times you know there are times when it is really important to make declarative statements uh but yeah for me right now there are some things i think i know but there's a lot i don't know um and there's a lot i still have to learn so i'm trying to i'm trying to get comfortable with that so that i can get learning instead of constantly being defensive and acting like i already know when i don't which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by everything john doesn't know everything john doesn't know almost everything uh speaking of which this podcast is also brought to you by 68 million 68 million the actual shoe size of italy now that i realize that there's four sizes per inch not one size per inch because i didn't know that until just now it depends on your measuring system sure they do it differently in europe they do i guess probably it would be the european size probably was an italian boot but also today's podcast is brought to you by a size eight and a half black leather boot which is the actual real italy boot that's what they call it they call it the italy boot because it has the same dimensions as italy just a little shrunk and of course this podcast is additionally brought to you by the letter h letter h that's it that's all you get very busy i just dashed off this 800 word email this episode of your hand can jump to you by shop if i there are a lot of things that stand between i have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me and that is what shop if i makes it easier when you start with shop if i have the tools to design and launch and take payments they're all there from day one you don't have to build a whole machine before you can start building the business and this is important because you also have to like look good and with shop if i was templates you could get a site set up really quick that looks credible and professional without needing to code or duct tape a bunch of different tools together and when things look real that works on my brain to be like i'm doing a real thing it also works on other people's brains to be like this is legitimate shop if i also has one of the best checkout systems on the internet it's built to help customers finish the purchase effectively and efficiently without a bunch of roadblocks returning customers can check out with a single click that means less friction and fewer abandoned carts and a smoother experience for everybody that stuff gives you confidence early on and it gives other people confidence in what you're doing you're not wondering whether the payment system is going to work you're not wondering whether customers can get through the process shop if i handles that foundation so you can focus on the thing that you're actually trying to do it's really kind of amazing to me the Shopify as a tool that works from the first day your store launches when you're just starting to get customers all the way up to being the size of good.store or dftv.com or being the size of like matel and jim shark when you build a Shopify you're building with tools that already work at every scale all you need is the idea Shopify handles the rest you can start your free trial at shopify.com slash deer hank start your free trial at shopify.com slash deer hank with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27th 2026 see website for more details one thing i love about summary is how easy everything feels the days are a little more relaxed my kids don't have to wake up at five in the morning and i find myself reaching for the same comfortable go anywhere pieces again and again which is why i keep coming back to quince i often wear either a long sleeve or a short sleeve button down from quince and it fits well and i never have any complaints in fact sometimes i get compliments about it i was at the airport a couple days ago i often find myself in airports and someone said i like your shirt and i said thanks it's from quince quince is 100 percent european linen pants and shirts are breathable easy to throw on in the summer upgrade your rotation needs starting at just 34 dollars their teas are soft enough to live in all day and the lightweight cotton sweaters are exactly what you want when those summer nights cool down so that's why i'm wearing quince this summer and you can make your summer wardrobe easier by going to quince.com slash deer hank for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in canada too that's qunce.com for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash deer hank this episode of deer hank a john is brought to you by factor imagine for a moment that you are absolutely immersed in some work where you're creating something beautiful or useful or useless and ugly but you love it anyway and you look up and suddenly you have a feeling and that feeling is that it is 2 30 p.m and that you did not eat lunch what are you gonna do are you gonna get meal delivery that's gonna cost too much and maybe be a bit of a mistake or are you gonna go to the cupboard and just eat several fistfuls of peanuts because those are my two choices unless i have a factor in the fridge you can get smoky barbecue chicken breast with potato mashed cream corn and peppers you can get creamy lemon pepper chicken with veggie rice peel off broccoli and carrots this has the fiber I need it has the protein I need it has the deliciousness I need what about garlic herb roasted barramundi with potato zucchini and burr blanc sauce I don't really know what that means but it sounds delicious what about a black bean taco bowl with corn salsa and cilantro crema a delicious high fiber high protein meal that no animals had to die for any of those can be ready in two minutes fresh never frozen over a hundred rotating weekly meals including globally inspired flavors like Mediterranean and Asian factor shops perhaps cooks and delivers straight to your door so you have more time for everything you love this spring head to factormills.com slash deer hank 50 off and use the code deerhank50 off to get 50 off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until september 27th 2026 see website for more details and you know I just dashed it off because h this next question comes from anonymous who asks steer hank and john I'm an opera singer and I'm beginning to realize that I'm extremely driven in my life and career because I constantly crave attention and love when people are impressed by me I'm worried because sometimes I think my love of attention might be bigger than my love for the music and I'm not sure if that's a sustainable motivation for a long-term career an opera you're in your prime by 35 to 45 so you need to be in it for the long run if you're to be serious I've tried to change my ways but it's hard should I do okay with this or is it a sign that I should change my path. Ela fuy la de de de de de anonymous. No it's some really good french I thought that was gonna be Italian and so I thought it was gonna be Italian you know and it could be.
Ela fuy la de de de de de de de de de de de de de it appears to be french. Here's the thing when I was a kid I wasn't good at much as a student I was not a very good student but I was told that I was good at writing stories and I really liked that I really liked being told that I liked the approval of adults especially because I didn't get it in a lot of other times from my teachers and I liked you know getting to ride in the big yellow school bus to Tampa, Florida because I won an elementary school creative writing contest that's why I liked writing like realistically yeah you know I liked writing because adults told me that I was good at it and I just wanted to be good at something right I mean and I did like reading and I did like you know and I did like telling stories right and I had an affinity for it but I the idea that passion is somehow pure to the thing that like a professional football player is successful primarily because of some deep love for placing a sphere inside of a net I think that's just an oversimplification. I agree and and I also think that it is it's kind of like a dangerous idea that like if you're doing it for the wrong reason stop doing it but like we're all out here searching for meaning right and you know continue like continuing on a process of mastery is a way of getting meaning and receiving praise from outside is a way of getting meaning as well so I don't think it's I think it's fine but especially because like and if you can drill down and like find those specifics of what is interesting and what is good about a performance or a piece of music or you know an entire like entire opera which is not something I know anything about I mean no in fact there's nothing I know less about I disagree name I know less about I know more about quantum mechanics for sure well there I mean there's all kinds of fields that we don't know anything about because no one knows anything about them John and that for me is opera but who knows maybe in the second half of my life I'll become a big opera fan I do like some rock operas did you know that Smash Moth's All-Star is a part of a rock opera John yeah of course it is I haven't finished writing it yet but that was a good joke that that was honestly that joke made me happier than any joke has in several weeks it was well set up it was kind of a dad joke but it was very well set up and then I tried to yes and you and then you hit me from a totally unexpected direction and I greatly enjoyed it no thank you for it thank you I mean that's the kind of approval that I deeply deeply need so I thank you all I've done now is encourage Hank to tell more bad jokes all right this next one comes from Raiden who writes to John and Hank John often talks about AFC Wimbledon having the smallest stadium in the league I've been wondering for a while what does stadium size have to do with the quality of the football played great question right this is a great question and I have been too afraid to ask so thank you so if you're playing in the Premier League and you're on TV every Saturday in like 175 countries most of the revenue your team gets is from TV rights and that's true for most sports but if you're in the third tier of English football or the fourth tier almost all of the revenue you get is Match Day revenue so it's people coming to the stadium on the match day they pay for their tickets maybe they buy a pie or two maybe they purchase a plane of beer yeah they have like a pie like those meat pies you know oh that's even better yeah oh yeah you should really go to an AFC Wimbledon game Hank anyway well I mean you know in the future anyway that's where most of the revenue comes from ticket sales concession sales etc if you have a small ground and AFC Wimbledon until now has had the smallest stadium in professional English football it's impossible to maximize it's impossible to compete with people who are selling two or three times as many tickets now AFC Wimbledon sell out almost all of their games but that means that they sell 4800 tickets a team like Swindon Town for instance has a stadium that seats 12 or 13 000 people now they're not going to sell that out but they're going to sell 8 000 9 000 tickets a week they're going to have twice as much money and so that has been one of the huge limiters of AFC Wimbledon's growth and really it's an incredible success story with a stadium so small to have found a way through sponsorship revenue and through the membership model that AFC Wimbledon uses so it's equally owned by all of its fans all of those strategies have allowed Wimbledon to kind of compete above their level for the last few years but Hank and this is a nice transition to the news from ours and AFC Wimbledon all of that is changing because now Wimbledon are going home to their historic place back to Plow Lane back to Wimbledon it is the final chapter of this 20 year saga to get a football league team back where it belongs and just in the last few days the final approval for the final last piece of construction happened on the news stadium the news stadium will see I think around 9 000 people to start but it has the potential to grow up to 15 or even 18 000 people which is what some from your league clubs out for now and in order for this to happen especially given the circumstances you know construction has slowed everything is uncertain at the moment somebody had to come in at the last second and make a significant investment in the club and somebody did that it's a guy named Nick and his investment in the club it does not affect the ownership structure of the club and also the ownership structure of the club is still it's 75% owned by the Don's Trust everybody who pays 25 pounds a year gets to be a member of the so he just came in and generously invested in the club as thousands of other people have done over the last few months to get the stadium built but he did it on a bigger scale and made it possible so it's happening and I am so relieved and excited I mean to people who care about this football club in many ways this is more important than getting back into the football league than getting a promotion this this is is the end of the story this is you know it took 20 years but they got back home you know I told you before Hank but Wimbledon fans ever since they were forced to move out of Plow Lane their old stadium their stadium for over a hundred years they were forced to move out of it and they've been singing a song called show me the way to Plow Lane that goes I'm tired and I want to go home I had a football ground 30 years ago and I want one of my own and they have shown the world the way to Plow Lane and it just makes me so proud to be a Wimbledon supporter and fan and sponsor and so grateful to the thousands of people who have worked together to make this happen and meanwhile at the same time the AFC Wimbledon Foundation continues to do just tremendously important work in COVID-19 response around South London and I'm so grateful to all the volunteers who are making that happen it it's just very heartening at a time when I need that yeah well in in Mars news there's there's two two things I want to talk about first of course the SpaceX first crude flight went up to the space station and that was a step on the way to more and further space exploration so that's very exciting or in was over the moon about it he wants to watch the video all the time and I don't really even understand why because it's not like it's a good video but like like we've looked at lots of rocket ship videos but he's really stuck on this one I think he kind of gets it which is touching for me and but then also in sort of more direct Mars news just to talk a little bit about perseverance there's a bunch of instruments and experiments on the rover including these two and they're this is all going to make sense at the end scanning habitable environments with Raman and luminescence for organics and chemicals and then there's the wide-angle topographic sensor for operations and engineering both of those really good names really bad names shorten them they are Sherlock and Watson oh like that yeah I mean but this is a long-standing issue I have with the initialists of the world and acrylamizers of the world like why not give the thing its clearest name yeah I don't know it's I mean scanning habitable environments with Raman and luminescence for organics and chemicals is bad but the experiments scope out the rocks basically Sherlock is going to like measure how light scatters off of stuff to measure the composition of things figure out what minerals and organic compounds are inside Martian rocks and that might give us clues into the possibility of ancient Martian microbes whereas Watson is a camera that takes pictures of all the rocks that Sherlock is going to be learning about and that actually feels pretty true to the Sherlock Watson relationship yeah exactly yeah Watson sort of is watching and documenting and then and also Sherlock is going to be doing experiments on five samples of different potential space suit and helmet materials that are being sent along with perseverance and Sherlock is going to be measuring how they do over time and exposed to the Martian elements mmm it's pretty cool I'm very excited for perseverance me too I need that thing to get off the ground and on its way to Mars ASAP yeah well John thank you for potting with me this week thank you it's always a joy to talk to you yeah I'm glad that you're my brother same really glad this podcast is edited by Joseph Stoona Medish it's produced by Rosie on a Hulph Row-Hosom chair to Gibson our communication coordinator is Palak Icya Prieto the music you're hearing now is by the great granola and as we say in our hometown don't forget to be awesome