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 Yetch, and more 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 have 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. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John! Dores out for the Think of it, dear John and Hank.
It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you a piece of advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, how do you make an octopus giggle? I don't know. You give him tentacles.
John, octopuses have tentacles and I bring this up. Oh, Hank. Yeah? Hank.
Correct me, science man. Well, it's just that I don't know if you've seen the Nobel Prize that I keep in the background of the Vlogbrothers' videos. It's the Nobel Prize for being extremely pedantic and I won it the old-fashioned way which was by pointing out that octopi don't have tentacles, octopodes have feet. Oh my god.
So there are three ways to pluralize octopus. They are all fine. Octopi is probably the least correct of all of them if we're going to be pedantic. I agree.
But you were correct that octopodes are octopodes. God, octopodes. Octopuses is by far the best. In any case, this is all in reference to this conversation that has been happening around hibernation and how America has failed at students by teaching people that bears just sleep for four months.
Don't get, you really should not get Hank and I started on the topic of hibernation. Really? I just, I need everybody to know how mad I am about the hibernation discourse because it's, I can't be this mad on Twitter because it doesn't make any sense because you, for some people of Twitter, anybody's allowed to be mad on Twitter. That's the defining characteristic of the platform.
But it wouldn't, it wouldn't make sense because I'm the only one who's getting 30 hibernation hot takes in my like TikTok and Twitter replies a day. And I'm just so really over it. So this is a weird thing that happens on the internet where somebody points out that some piece of received wisdom is slightly wrong or oversimplified because indeed like much of received wisdom is oversimplified on account of how we're just trying to describe extremely complex experiences of being human in limited language. Right?
So like, yeah, there's language itself as an essentializer. And then you have the additional level of essentialization, which is that not everybody needs to know everything. Right? Experts in bear hibernation need to know more about bear hibernation than I do.
Yeah. The bear experts need to know. I need to know that they basically sleep for four months. The thing that drives me crazy about it though is that what happens on the internet is somebody says, Hey, a piece of received wisdom that you've been told is true your whole life turns out to be slightly oversimplified.
And then everyone concludes from this bears don't hibernate. And now it's even more wrong. Right. And so like if you think of like right being a two on a scale of one to 100, you've gone from zero, which isn't right, but is close to right, it's close to two to a hundred, which is very far away from two.
Much stronger. And so now there are millions of people walking around telling everyone else, Hey, did you know that bears don't really hibernate? Right? And you say that you're the only person who's been affected by this thing.
But in fact, I was recently reading an essay that one of the new essays that's going to be in the Anthropocene reviewed book, and it involves a groundhog. This I have a groundhog who is my great nemesis. Having a nemesis is one of the things in my life that I was missing until I became friends with this groundhog. And now I have a nemesis and everything is back to being good and right in the world.
And in the essay, which I was like reading to a small group of people just to get some feedback, I noted that this groundhog hibernates. And so many people were like, no, no, you're gonna have to change that because it turns out that groundhogs don't hibernate. Just learned about this. And two things, one, groundhogs are what's known as true hibernators because they actually do hibernate in the way that we think about hibernation.
And two, even if they didn't, he would still be underground for four months doing barely anything, which is our functional definition of hibernation. We need to live in a world where just because zero is not the exact same as two does not mean that 100 is the correct answer. Yeah, I mean, the thing about hibernation is, and this isn't just a thing about hibernation. It's this case with a lot of terms, it means different things to different scientists.
Like if you are in one scientific community, you are using a word differently than people in other, this is the case with tentacles. Octopuses have tentacles. But if you are a specific kind of stuffle the pod scientist, you need to differentiate between different kinds of tentacles. And so you have, you call some kinds feet and you call some kinds tentacles.
And that way you can talk about them without getting too confused. That is not an important distinction for me. I don't need to worry about that. And like, this is a problem scientists have to when they're communicating and they're like, well, we can't say that because I don't care how you talk.
The word tentacle doesn't exist to have your meaning. It exists to convey an idea. And if we're going to require a vocab lesson before we teach people about an octopus, people aren't going to learn anything. Finding a shared vocabulary for talking about stuff is actually pretty difficult.
But it is not made any easier or better by all these people racing in and celebrating ding dong, the witches dead hibernation never existed. And they can come in and say, look, you've been lied to, it's actually wrong. The thing about the hibernation example that really makes me angry is that they say, I used to think hibernation was sleeping for six months. And then that's it.
They don't talk about what we actually got wrong, why they don't, is because what we actually got wrong isn't that interesting because bears do just sleep for six months. They might stand up a couple of times, but I sleep for seven hours and I stand up a couple of times because I can't go without peeing for that long anymore. Yeah, exactly. Do I not sleep?
No one would say if Hank, like, oh, he's not a true sleeper. So much as he's taking three to four naps in the evening, interrupted by p-bricks. Right. This is anyway, no, I want to keep going, Hank.
I want to go one level deeper to make just one more point, if we may, which is that we constantly forget that language exists to try to describe experiences. And in that process, it will always come up short. Experiences don't exist so that language can exist, language exists so that we can understand and share experiences and understandings and imaginings. And the way that functions, and I, you thought we were done, but I'm not because I've got a really important point to drive home here.
That is, it's a really compelling thing to sort of grab onto that like you've been lied to, but it almost never is actually that you've been lied to. It's just that like the world is complicated and we have inexact ways for expressing reality. I also desperately want to be done with this, but I need to make one more point. I think that once you're done with your point, I'll make my final point and then we can move on.
Great. And then I will have one post script, but it'll be very brief. Okay, go, go, go. I lost it.
It was so important. It was critical. It was critical to our species being able to move on, but I lost it. Oh, I remember it.
I remember it. Part of the reason that these you've been lied to takes are so compelling to us is because they feel like a shortcut to true expertise and a superiority thing. Right. That's what it's about deep down.
It's about like wanting to feel like, Oh, I know the real truth of hibernation, but the thing is in trying to like, it's trying to shortcut your way there. You actually know less about hibernation than you did when you started. And this is not about hibernation. This is a metaphor for like all of our information feeds on the internet.
Okay. I feel like we actually did have a post script and a post script. So I think we've fulfilled our obligations. Okay, great.
One more thing about hibernation though. No. One more thing about the project for awesome. The project for awesome is coming up, John.
Yes, the project for awesome, as you are listening to this podcast, if you are listening to it, the date comes out, starts on Friday. It starts on February 12th at noon Eastern time, and it ends on February 14th at noon Eastern time. So please join us at youtube.com slash vlogbrothers. You can go to project for awesome dot com to learn how you can donate to support organizations like Partners in Health and Safe The Children.
There are going to be lots of great perks available, including including a P4A only episode of Dear Hank and John where we answer questions that are about octopuses. There will also be lots of other great perks available, including my my workout playlist, which is so much, I've been talking about this workout playlist, Hank, but you know that one of the great secrets of my life is that the quality of music I listen to is so much higher than people would think about me. My workout playlist is it's going to shock and delight you both with its beauty and with its profanity and all of that and much more is available at projectforawson.com slash donate. I have I have done something that John has never done in all of all of his years of writing, and I have written a short story that takes place in the universe of an absolutely remarkable thing.
Oh, and adds a little bit to the story gives you a little bit more Robin content. It takes place at VidCon. It's kind of a heist story of a kid-napped famous pig and April gets to use her pet detective skills and does she meet one of the founders of VidCon? Yes, she does.
And it's real weird. Wait, are you telling me that you cut me out of your absolutely remarkable thing, VidCon story? You're not. No, I didn't cut you out.
You were never in it. That's an example of how you get cut out of something. How can you have how can you have the meeting one of the VidCon co-founders and not the other one? I insist on a revision.
Also, I want to know. I want to know. I want to know. Maybe the reason that you cut me out is because when I read your first book for the first time, I gave you almost no notes.
And the one note that I did give you was I'm not sold on this pet detective backstory. It feels like it feels like one quirk too many and you were like full steam ahead. I was like, I appreciate that advice. I'm keeping it in.
Because I want to write this VidCon pet detective story where a famous pig gets kidnapped. Yeah. And somehow John Green's just like not there. I guess he's like having a sick day.
We're never together at VidCon. I feel like we're around constantly together at VidCon. No, I don't feel that way at all. I mean, maybe because I got a lot of VidCon's you don't go to.
But you know who did make it in is Colin Hickey. So Colin's in the story. Great. Okay.
Well, let's hear more about all the people who you didn't cut out of your VidCon story. Go to projectrossin.com.donate and get Hank's story that I'm not in. This first question comes from Felix, who writes here, John and Hank, I've just bought a beautiful fairy tale themed calendar for my kitchen wall and I love it so very much. But I'm Swedish and my calendar is American.
And there is a clear difference between Swedish calendars and American calendars. Swedish calendars start every week with Monday because that's when the week begins. American calendars start with Sunday at the beginning of the week. What?
Why? I find this highly illogical and totally confusing. Please explain Felix. Gosh, Felix, it does seem like you do it better than we do.
I mean, the reasons for this in some ways make the reasons like with everything on the internet, there are a lot of like, yeah, hypothesized reasons that are not super well sourced. But the reasons may predate Christianity and go back to the Egyptian calendar where the Sunday was the day of the the Sun God. Yeah. And where and that was treated as as the beginning of of the week.
My understanding of it has always been that it's the beginning of the week because in America, the week begins on Sunday. It's only begins on Monday because of the 40 hour work week, which is a relatively recent invention, right? Like I would argue that Felix's calendar is like more up to date with the world we live in now. But ours is more like historically accurate because the well accurate, but more historically inspired.
Here's the thing. Okay. Like there are lots of reasons why things are the way they are, but mostly they are the way they are because they are the way they are. Very true.
So like you tell me that like we wanted to start the day on Sunday because Sunday was the day of the Sun God and you start with like that's that's not why the day of Sunday now. The day of Sunday now because we start the week on Sunday because we start the week on Sunday. Here's the analog I would point to we have these weird keyboards. I actually made an NFC interviewed episode about this where the top row of letter key starts Q, W, E, R, T, Y, and for a long time everybody would make fun of this because it was so obviously and wildly inefficient and there were all of these other keyboard layouts that were far better and more efficient and you could type faster and with more accuracy and increase efficiency and grow the size of the economy and blah, blah, blah.
And the most famous of these keyboards was the Dvorak keyboard. There's just one one problem with the Dvorak keyboard, which is that the most rigorous studies show that it is not meaningfully faster than Querty and that in fact, like mostly by accident, Querty is a fairly efficient keyboard layout. Like it's closer to peak efficiency than it is to peak inefficiency. So the reason it lasts is because it's good enough and changing would be a huge inconvenience.
It would be way harder. Yeah. Which is why we're stuck with feet in America. Yes.
And you don't mean the appendages at the bottom beneath an ankle or in the octopus is eight of them. You're referring to feet and miles and just yeah, Imperial units, I guess is what they're going. We don't always have the best systems here in the United States, but you know what we do have. Okay, please tell me, barbecue, we have the Koreatown oddity.
One of the artists on my workout playlist, Project Frost dot com slash donate. How much do you know about the Koreatown oddity? I don't know what that is. That's wonderful.
Well, you should give my workout playlist. Okay, John, this next question is from John who asks Dear Hank and John. I feel like we don't get a lot of questions from John. It's true.
I was thrown off a little bit. I actually sent this one in. Okay. My house is the only one on the block that still has the lights on the bushes and the Christmas tree up.
My mom says it's staying up until my sister sees it, but she lives out of state and hasn't left her apartment in like six months. How long do you leave up Christmas decorations? Best wishes, John. I'm glad that we're getting to a practical one here because I also need advice on this as a person whose Christmas lights remain up.
Oh, yeah. Well, okay. I can tell you our policy in this family, but I also don't want to prescribe other people's Christmas lights. There's nothing I find more annoying than when one of my neighbors will come up to me and say in a conspiratorial tone, like, have you noticed that this family hasn't taken down their Christmas lights?
And I want to be like, well, maybe they've got some stuff going on, you know, like it's been kind of a rough year. And like, maybe they just want to have some lit up bushes in the evenings and I don't care. And please, God, let's just let them be. It's hard enough to be alive in this world without having the condemnation of your neighbors.
But our family's personal thing is that we keep the tree up for the 12 days of Christmas. So for 12 days after Christmas day, and then we dispose of the tree, which is always a, it's always a wonderful experience, Hank, because every year I'm like, this year, I really am going to take the tree to Broad Ripple Park where they have the big tree pickup and everything. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it.
I'm going to do it. And then like three weeks later, I'm like, it's going where all the other Christmas trees are, which is what done the ravine is going to to its home in the bottom of the forest. When you got a yard, like, I got a yard that has space for it. Yeah.
I see why not do that. The reason you don't do it is because then you're every day when you take your same walk in the woods, you walk past like nine years of Christmas trees. Yeah. Every single day.
And then you remember, like, how great each one of them was. And you're like, man, how high does the river have to flood to take care of this issue? You could just throw them in the river, John. Oh, that feels, for some reason that feels wrong.
Whereas if the river rises up and takes them, that's what can I do? The other thing here, and it's just hinted at in your email, but I think it might be a big thing is that your mom misses your sister, and this has been a huge disruption in her life and their relationship. And this is a way that she has of marking that, and maybe just let that be okay. Yeah.
The broader advice from my perspective is that they are not Christmas lights. They are winter lights. Yes. That's a great point, Hank.
I love that idea. And you know what, John, if they need to be spring lights or they need to be summer lights, that's okay too. Let's just get through this. Speaking of which, we have another question from Liz who writes, dear John and Hank, how does one deal with the groundhog day like quality of pandemic life?
I'd never heard it described that way, but it's so true. Right down to waking up at the same time every morning and having the same song play every morning because Sarah really likes waking up to the Beatles, whereas I'm like, what is there an emergency? There's help. It's waking up to a wall of sound.
It's zero to 60. How does one deal with the groundhog day like quality of pandemic life? I know the end is in sight with the vaccines. I hope you write, Liz, and that I have it a lot better than many people, but I'm having a really hard time saying motivated and not bummed out all the time when I'm stuck inside of 500 square foot apartments.
It doesn't allow pets. I'm trying to exercise and eat healthy and talk to friends, which all helps. But what are some other safe ways for me to add variety and novelty right now? I appreciate you guys so much novelty.
It's a nice novelty. Gosh boy, novelty is in short supply right now. That's a great point. I have found a few things to do novel things that I find really helpful.
Some of them are weird, but I'm just going to weigh them out. Number one, Sarah and I have begun attending virtual artists talks on Zoom. So you can like go just like look up like fancy commercial art galleries in New York City question mark on Google and look at a bunch of those galleries and they all have hugely successful contemporary artists doing Zoom talks while they walk through these exhibitions that no one can see or are only available by appointment or whatever. And it's just so interesting to learn from artists how they're responding to this time and what kind of stuff they're making in this time.
And you can just kind of do it in the background. The great thing is you don't have to really listen because you're not like in a meeting that you're participating in. You're in a talk that you're listening to. Right.
I have found that actually to be the thing that feels the most transportative to me where I feel like, oh, I'm not stuck inside of the same house. I'm actually doing something new. There are a lot of like activities out there that work for a little while puzzles work for a little while. Yeah.
I think that mom actually got us I think got us this subscription box that's a watercolor subscription. She got you a prescription box. When I say us, I mean me and Kathy. Yeah, yeah, no, I got cut out of that just like I got cut out of your story.
And it's it has all the tools you need and like you are surprised at the end of it that you have made a thing that looks quite good. Though always Catherine's looks quite a bit gooder than mine. But like, you know, that costs money. There are also ways to do that without a subscription box.
You know, there are tutorials online. There are products and there has been more and more research about how the different kinds of content consumption behaviors that we have these days affect our overall level of well-being and listening to music maybe unsurprisingly remains one of the best ones. Can I make one more recommendation? Yes.
The New York Times has a daily puzzle. I think it's free. It's at least free to start. It's called spelling bee where they get it's like a honeycomb and they give you seven letters and you have to make as many words out of the seven letters as you can.
And I'm not sure how I would be doing on this earth if it weren't for the spelling bee. And my final suggestion is to walk around as much as you can because and go yeah, you can walk places you've never been before and there's always something new to see. In fact, I just got the every every day on the spelling bee. There's at least one word that's called a pan Graham that uses all seven letters and I just I just scorched the pan Graham while you were talking Hank.
Oh, wow. That was a good job. I feel a little bit slighted but okay. Oh, oh, oh you feel slighted.
You feel slighted. Call me the next time I write a VidCon story that doesn't have you in it. I feel slighted. You have so many characters and you'll not have siblings.
The story that I've been writing lately actually does have a brother in it and he's a younger brother in everything. You've been writing a story lately? Yeah, that's news to me. Well, you know, here and there it'll come out in 2030 right after this podcast is written in beer John and Hank.
I don't know John. There's a lot of good Starship launches happening lately. Oh, which reminds me actually that today's podcast is brought to you by that Starship launch that resulted in a fiery flameball of doom. The Starship launch that resulted in a fiery flameball of doom.
I'm sure that we're on the cusp of Mars. It's exactly when exactly is planned. I got all the data they needed out of it. Great.
This podcast is also brought to you by the pedantic tentacle. The pedantic tentacle. It's a new publication from your friends at Awful Industries. And of course, it is brought to you by hibernation.
Hibernation just because it's not zero doesn't mean it's 100. And this podcast is also brought to you by the pile of nine Christmas trees at the bottom of John's house. The pile of nine Christmas trees at the bottom of John's house. The White River refuses to accept.
I don't live close enough to the river. I got to work on that. All right. This episode of your Hank and John is brought to you by Shopify.
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 Shopify makes easier.
When you start with Shopify, 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 Shopify's 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 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. Shopify 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 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. Shopify 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 dftva.com or being the size of like Mattel and Gymshark. 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 deerhank. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank. With new subscription only, while supplies last until September 27th, 2026.
See website for more details. It's from Quince. Quince is 100% European linen pants and shirts are breathable, easy to throw on, and the summer upgrade your rotation needs starting at just $34. Their tees 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 deerhank for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too, that's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash deerhank for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash deerhank. This episode of Deerhank, 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 pm 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?
Those are my two choices unless I have a factor in the fridge. You can get smokey barbecue chicken breast with potato mash, 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 and 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 100 rotating weekly meals, including globally inspired flavors like Mediterranean and Asian, Factor shops, preps, cooks and delivers straight to your door so you have more time for everything you love this spring. Head to FactorMeals.com slash Deerhank50off and use the code Deerhank50off 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. All right, this next question comes from Kira who writes, we've gotten a version of this question a lot over the years, but I like to this version. What is a failure that you consider a success because of what it meant to you? Pumpkins and Penguins Kira.
For me, the one that stands out is when I was in college and I applied to the Advanced Fiction Writing class and there were 12 available slots and 14 applicants and I was one of the two people who did not make it into the class because at the time it felt very final. It felt like, well, if I'm not one of the 12 best fiction writers in this particular class at this particular college, I'm probably not going to have a life in the arts, but I learned so much more from not getting into that class. Like for one thing, I learned why I didn't get into the class. Like, I learned that the stories I was writing weren't very good and it wasn't because they weren't bad because I was inherently a bad writer.
That's kind of the wrong way to think about writing, I think. They were bad because I was like imitating other writers I admired instead of trying to understand how I really wanted to tell stories and how I liked to tell stories. And so that was probably the failure that I learned the most from. It still stings a little bit.
It stung immensely at the time. It's one of the only times I went to bed sobbing over something related to not a personal problem, but a person. Yeah, I was brutal. I mean, it was really painful at the time, but I also did learn a lot from it.
I'm highly suspicious of bright siding. I don't think most clouds have silver linings. I think that most of the lessons we learned from suffering can be learned more cheaply and that in some ways it can seek to make suffering worse to tell people like, oh, at least you're learning important lessons from all this pain you're going through. But I did become a better writer because of that experience and probably more than I would have from taking any single college class.
I've done a bunch of different things that have failed in sort of like the traditional business sense where all of my first projects that no one knows about were business failures. One that people do know about is NerdCon Stories, which was like, let's have a conference for people who love storytelling, which is very broad and also like not writing a super present wave of interest the way that VidCon was when we started that. What we did have was two years of like the best coolest, weirdest experience that I could imagine. And did it fail in that we couldn't keep doing it because it was losing money and like it went a little bit bankrupt and it almost went bankrupt.
It didn't end up going bankrupt. It failed in the sense that we lost money on it. Right? Yeah.
Anytime you start a business, you aim for it to either break even or make a profit and it did neither. And in that sense, it fails. But I think that you would agree with me that you've spent worse money. Exactly.
Yes. The value of NerdCon Stories for me was immense. And I think for the people who were there, it was immense. And I felt like Hank, you and your team put together a really amazing program and it felt really special and it felt very unlike anything else I'd ever been part of.
I think it was a success. It's just a success that lost a bunch of money. Yeah. It's so easy to measure everything by the sort of default units of measurement and the easiest ones to count.
And we should definitely not only measure things that way. This question comes from Kaitlin who asks Dear Hank and John, if given the stationery as a gift, is it expected that you use the stationery to write the thank you gift to the giver? Does that show how much you love it? Or does the willingness to use something or does the will it or does this willingness to use some of it so quickly look like a dismissal or you're inherently gifting it back to the gift or fountain pens and prairie heads.
Kaitlin, this is a tough one. This is a tough one because I can see both sides. If you're an anxious person and I am, I can see how you could walk all the way around this problem and never see yourself to anything other than more worry. This could go wrong no matter how I act.
Yeah. Eventually this person just gets a text. Thanks, Hank. Look, obviously I'm not an etiquette expert, but I think it's nice to use the stationery.
I think it does too. I think it's like, hey, I like the stationery so much that I decided to write my first thank you card on it to you to say thanks to the stationery. Here's some other people I'm planning on writing thank you cards to after I'm done. I don't know.
Look, you didn't buy this so that I would keep it on a shelf for 20 years, which is what Hank does with his stationery. Most of us or many of us anyway are sitting on some gifted stationery that is desperately wishing that it could fulfill its purpose. But we just haven't found our way to it yet. Yeah.
So yeah, I think you should do it. All right, Hank, it's time for the all important news from bars and AFC will then I'll go first because there's a lot of news from AFC Wimbledon beginning with the fact that after losing at the new Plow Lane to the franchise currently playing its trade in Milton Keynes, our 11th league game without a win, it was finally decided that AFC Wimbledon had to part ways with manager Glenn Hodges and a point as their interim manager, Mark Robinson, who's been with the club I think from the very, very beginning or at least from the early, early years and who's been the 18s and under 23 coach, really likable guy deep, deep relationship with the history of the club. No experience managing at the senior grown up pro level. So, you know, I don't know how it's going to go for him, but I really wish him the best.
I would love to see him succeed and be able to get the job permanently because he's just such a nice guy and so talented and has done such great work with so many Wimbledon youth, not just on the football field, but also just in life. So he's a great guy. I really hope it works out for him, but man, it's now 11 games without a win. 538.com just published a list of the 637 best professional football teams in the world.
And AFC Wimbledon was like 623rd. She hasn't great. We were behind. You're on the list.
We were behind like the Philadelphia unions B team. So that was a little discouraging, but it's obviously from here, it's going to be a difficult road. I think we have good enough players, but every year it feels like we are just desperately trying to scrap another season in the third tier of English football. The problem is, and I've heard a lot of people say like, Oh, well, it's not the end of the world if you get relegated, because you'll be a good fourth tier team, but that's not actually clear to me.
It's not clear to me that we would have one of the biggest budgets in the fourth tier. I don't think we would. And so if we can stay in league one, we really, really need to, at least until we can get fans back at Playa Lane. But this is just such a hard time.
And I really feel for all the Wimbledon fans out there, between the lockdowns and having to watch on your phone as your team gets crushed every week, it's a little dispiriting. So it's a new day, a new management team, it may be temporary, there may be a permanent manager within the next few weeks. But who knows if Mark Robinson can put together some results, anything is possible. Well, John in Mars news, which you've already referred to, there was a launch of the SpaceX Starship prototype.
It was the SN9. The SN10 is also sitting out there ready to take its test flight. This is the heavy lift vehicle that SpaceX is hoping to use to get crewed missions to Mars. So like they're learning a bunch of stuff about this.
They want this like to be a reusable heavy lift vehicle goes up, lands down, they've become very good at this with some of their other rockets and is not going as well with this. So the goal of this is to sort of like what you have to do is you launch up and then you this thing has like fins on it. So basically flies its way down, dropping through the air back toward where the launch pad was, which is really nice. So you don't have to like go somewhere and then grab it far away.
It actually comes right back to where it launched from. And then at the very last moment, because it's going to fall much more slowly when it's sort of horizontal to the earth than when it's vertical at the very last moment, it has to kind of make itself vertical again, come down and land. That part is turned out to be very difficult. It has to do that because that's where the engines are.
So that's the only place that's going to slow it down. The last two times, it looks to me, I'm no expert, that it is sort of overshot the the vertical and it started to go horizontal in the other direction. And then you're in a, you're just not getting the thrust you need to slow down enough. And then you have a big fireball.
Yeah, the starship slows down a good bit and then it explodes when it hits the ground. Orin is not happy about this. We watched the launch together and he was like, why did it explode? And I was like, well, it was a, it didn't go as planned.
And he just kept asking why it exploded. And I kept emphasizing that it is a test flight and is meant to work out problems. But he was really unhappy about the last part, and he was like, can they fix it? And I was like, yeah, they'll do another one.
And he was like, but that one, can they fix that one? I'm like, no, they can't fix that one. That one's not doesn't exist anymore. He's really into things not getting broken.
He's not like it when things are broken and can't be fixed. It's a real bummer when something stops existing when you're a kid because you've, yeah, you imagine a lot of life into that thing. Yeah, and have you haven't experienced a lot of things stop existing. So even it's even like you haven't experienced that many things like you even notice them even go away.
Like maybe they do stop existing, but they like he's sometimes get attached to trash. Right. He's like, no, I can't throw this away. Right.
But anyway, so the idea of the starship program and the SN10 is on the launchpad to try again soon is to get humans to Mars. Elon Musk says that he is still highly confident that the first crew flight to Mars will happen in 2026, John. Highly confident. Highly confident.
The first flight will be in 2024. First crew crew flight to Mars in 2026. I like, I like, you know, just saying stuff, even if it has no connection to reality. Yeah, that does seem to be one of the primary discord strategies in the here in the first quarter of the 21st century.
Yeah, sort of like manifest it by tweeting it off in an off world view. So who knows what you want to manifest? Let's tweet that. Like, how about just cheaper college education?
Yeah, or like renewable energy now. I have a little manifest section of my 2021 vision board that I put up at the end of each vlog weather's video. It's in the bottom left corner. And my most recent manifestation is the manifest of live action penguins of Madagascar film, which has not happened yet.
But you never know, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed. All right. Well, thank you for plotting with me. And thanks everybody for listening.
We're off to record our Patreon only podcast this week and stuff over at patreon.com slash dear Hank and John. You can sign up there if you want. Don't feel obligated to though. We won't get mad at the content.
The project for awesome is coming up on Friday. So get ready. If you want to be a part of it, you can go to projectforus.com if you've made a video submissions are open now, but they close fairly soon. We're doing it different this year.
We have to submit beforehand not doing the project. So get it going. Do it. Join us and see you all on Friday.
I can't wait. I'm very excited. It's going to be a lot of fun. You will be.
This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Medish. It's produced by Rosie on a house row, has some shared and Gibson. Our communication coordinator is Julia Bloom. Our editorial assistant is the book each record for already the music you're hearing now.
And to be in the podcast is by the great gonna roll out. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.