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'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. And welcome to Dear Hank and John! George Ziper for to think of it, Dear John and Hank.
It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you a surprise and you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, this was from my mom. I was about to get real defensive. What did the nut say when it was chasing the other nut?
So this is from Mom? Yeah. Okay, that's helpful background. I don't know.
I'm a cashew! It's pretty funny. It's pretty funny. That's a good one, Mom.
That was a good job. She's been sending me dad jokes. She's like, I don't know. Maybe she doesn't approve of what's been going on in the dad jokes.
She told me. It was like her favorite section of the podcast and I was like, well, I'll try not to take that personally. John, I recently got a message from TGI Fridays, the restaurant chain restaurant brand, and they would like to work with me on a brand deal. So instead of that, we're going to, well, maybe I'll do it, but we have to idea it.
I'm not going to come to them and say, yes, I want to work with you. And for clarity, this was a mass email to like every Tiktoker. Oh. But I'm going to take this very seriously.
And I would like TGI Fridays to know how, so how do I make TGI Fridays? Look, the best that I absolutely can. Because right now, all I have is I have not been to a TGI Fridays since I was seven because they don't have them in Missoula. Well, would it be helpful or not so helpful if I told you that it's, in my opinion, not the best American chain restaurant?
Right. Well, so that maybe there's maybe a couple to understand something about the kind of culinary approach that TGI Fridays takes. I got a big one. Or are you looking for, because my feeling is that TGI Fridays, there's some executive TGI Fridays who heard that Applebee's on a date night song.
And was like, oh, we got to get out of TikTok stuff. Yeah. And I'm going to find a way. Yeah.
So I've seen a 40% increase in their monthly revenue and we're, we're no worse than Applebee's. And I genuinely think that's what he said in the meeting. He said, we're not that much worse than Applebee's. And so how do we, how do we, I viral moment?
Well, here's what you got to, how do we have, you got to position yourself in opposition to Applebee's. Now, I'm not going to be, and they know this. I'm not going to make, tell the story that they're better than Applebee's. So they have to make the case that like they're maybe more authentic or that you go to Applebee's maybe you're a little bit too, you know, refined to fancy, you don't want to be fancy Applebee's.
That's how the song goes, right? No, you're not fancy Applebee's. You're real like DJI Fridays. Yes.
This is made of food. We can guarantee that to you. And I had another idea. And I had another idea.
I just had a brilliant idea. I'm sorry. My idea is better than yours. It's very rare that I come in.
You was mine after yours. I just had an idea that is a, it's a, it's a level one idea. It's almost too good to give to teaching I Fridays. That's how good it is.
Well, maybe you shouldn't say it. I should tell you mine, which is fun. After not a good idea. After Wimbledon were promoted.
Oh my God. And then they're associating themselves with the people, with a fan owned club. They're associating themselves with not exactly success on the pitch because that's not their brand. Their brand is pretty good enough.
Good enough most of the time. You were going to get a lot of draws. You went up a lot of ones against Cheltenham. It's about loyalty.
Not about quality. It's about loyalty, not about quality. TGI Fridays is investing in AFC Wimbledon and we are asking you to invest in TGI Fridays. And what we're going to give you is not a fancy date night.
We're going to give you a date night. No adjectives. Oh God. I do want something dropped into hot oil right now.
Absolutely. I would love that. Here's my idea. So you know how sometimes Rihanna or whatever will do a special food at McDonald's and get the Rihanna, whatever Rihanna gets?
Sure. What would yours be at TGI Fridays? What is the special John dish? Because I got one ready to go.
Mine is a three course meal. Oh wow. You're going to take control of the whole evening because we're giving you a date night. Hank, no adjectives.
Mine is a three course meal. And what all three courses have in common is that they have all been dipped in hot oil. It's called the Friday Friday special. What?
I'm not going to eat that. Friday scream. That's just the appetizer. Friday, I'm going to eat that.
Friday scream. Friday. Friday. Friday.
Well, I just had one thing and it could be included in the Friday Friday which is I want baked beans, deep fried. Oh, deep fried baked beans. That's Hank Green's deep fried baked beans. Maybe Hank Green's special is deep fried baked beans and a corn dog.
Simple. It's sexy. What if TGI Fridays, when they're on a date night, you know, you're hoping that it's going to go back to the car and then maybe if everything goes perfectly back to the apartment and that is when you definitely want to eat three courses of fried food. I don't know if this is possible, but if anyone can do it, the scientists at TGI Fridays can, can you make me a corn dog that somehow has baked beans in it somewhere?
Oh, it's a great idea. That's a great idea. That's a great idea. That is the Doritos logos tacos of TGI Fridays.
That is what gets them out of the doldrums and brings them back to relevance. So I'm going to write back to this message I got on TikTok and be like, first of all, you didn't tell me what the rates were. So I'm going to need to know that information because nobody does. Nobody ever does.
And you need to say, listen, TGI Fridays, I only have one kind of idea, million dollar ideas. And I only accept one kind of payment, million dollar payments. And I've got, I got some goodies for you. There's three.
And I'm going to tell them to you and you're going to give me the money after I tell them to you. That's how good they are. One, you're going to associate yourself with a losing third tier English soccer club. Hey, hey, hey, hey.
I'm tying mostly at the bottom of the league. And that's where they always are because it's not about quality. It's about loyalty. Secondly, you are going to create TGI Fridays, Friday days.
No one's ever thought of that at your company. No one ever thought of that fun before. No one in the history of the world has had that joke. And thirdly, you're going to get baked beans into a corn dog.
I don't know how you're going to do it, but you're going to do it. And nothing will be the same ever again. I mean, here's the thing, Hank. If TGI Fridays really does team up with Tiktokers to come up with an all new menu where it's not like it's just an all new menu of stuff Tiktokers love.
I mean, you and I won't be anywhere near the list, of course, but that could actually be very successful. You know, if you get young people back in the doors here, you know, after having this conversation with you, Hank, I can't help but think two things. One, we missed our call. We should have been.
We should have been mad men, like Don Draper in the 1950s. And secondly, I don't understand why more brands don't want to work with us. I feel this way all the time. I feel like I don't want to brag, but like I love policy genius and I love life insurance and I believe I believe in selling policy genius as life insurance because I believe lots of people need life insurance and policy genius doesn't exceptionally good job of getting it to you.
And I think policy genius gets good value for their money. And frankly, I think TGI Fridays would get good value for their money with our bean corn dogs and Friday Fridays. I don't, I mean, we have a lot of good ideas. Why aren't people paying us to have them for them?
Just allow it to happen. What do you call a baked bean corn dog? Just a baked bean corn dog? A hand green baked bean corn dog?
You call it a hand green baked bean corn dog. Yeah. The hand green baked bean corn dog. And then it's the Fridays John Green frat.
No, I think forget me. I don't need to be in a hank. I'm not a narcissist unlike some of us. I could, it could just be Friday Fridays and I'll just consult on the menu.
I don't need it named after. I don't need naming rights. Is it Fridays Fridays or is it Fridays Friday's Friday's? Well, Hank, you got to leave a little bit of room of interpretation so that the market people can feel like they're doing something.
You know, you know, you give them three pitches. One of them is Friday's Friday's Friday's Friday's Friday's and one of them is like a really garbage. So they feel like, yeah, you always give them a third option that's just terrible so you can point them in the right direction. Yeah.
Okay. Great. Um, yeah, Fridays, Fridays, where they only fry things that are shaped like a they won't like that at all. That's the bad.
I would eat it. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, I think it's time to transition to questions from our listeners beginning with this one from Katherine who writes Dear John and Hank, my friend just told me that Betty White was actually basically a hundred when she died because of all the leap years that she slipped through. She died just a few weeks before her 100th birthday, but if you count all those leap days, she would have been a hundred if we hadn't had those leap days. So that makes me wonder, did we really need to have those leap years that robbed Betty White of so much joy in her life?
Thank you, Katherine. Take them out. Well, the so over the long term, this does create a problem, which is that the year begins to start, begins to not align with the seasons, which is one of the thing that's awful great about the year. The solar year.
Yeah. Yeah. And the lunar year, like you got a lunar year. What's a lunar year?
Yeah, but some people date with lunar years and seasons move through the years and they don't have any problems. They do. That's true. But I know what you mean.
But I know when July comes around, it will be warm. Right. Unless you're in Australia, in which case it would be cold. Right.
All this stuff is arbitrary, Katherine, but the idea of the leap day is that it helps us to keep January 1st cold and July 1st hot unless you're in Australia. And in but, but which is more important. Honoring the memory of the great Betty White or it being warm in July. Like who cares?
I'm telling you this. So I don't want to speak for Betty White. I don't know what her position on this would have been. I suspect that her position on it would have been.
This isn't very important. Yeah. She was a person who had a lot of passions in life, did a lot of good. I never saw in her philanthropy an orientation toward calendars, but I might be wrong.
Yeah. Or we could just we could switch it so that instead of counting everything like on intense, we just kind of think nine and then she definitely made it to 100 because there's only nine digits per 10 instead of being 10 digits and 10. Right. We could just have a completely different counting system.
I'll just count base to base nine instead of base 10. That's going to be. Yeah. That's not going to create any problems.
Alternately. And I've often thought this was a great idea. We should not have a leap day every four years. Oh, right.
Yes. Wait for it. We should have a leap fortnight every 48 years. And then that's just that's the purge.
It's a full purge situation. No. That's common. It only comes around once in a lifetime.
And that two weeks is just like it's the other world. It's the 48 years you spend thinking about what the other world might look like. Like what might it look like if things were turned upside down? They often did this in like medieval Europe.
Like what if things were turned upside down and search for lords were surfs. They would have these like four minute parties where that would be the case. And then all the lords would be like, ah, just kidding. Go back to killing you.
And I'd like to extend that out without the word and serve stuff to a leap fortnight that occurs once or if you get lucky twice in a human lifetime. Right. And I think that you only get one or two. Yeah.
Yeah. And that most people get one. And that's great. I like that.
I don't like I think that we that period of time should be like, all right, no screens only fires. We're going to just talk to each other. And wait, isn't that what the purge is? I haven't seen any of the movie.
Yeah. No screens only fires is also kind of the purges of the scale of the fires would be bigger. I was thinking campfires. Not yes.
Yeah, me too. I was just thinking like, yeah, like people like sleep out and right. They just like we turn off the electricity maybe even so people just have a radically different experience of life and everybody has to walk everywhere. Yeah.
Yeah. That's that's my point. We need more. We need more like large scale.
Everybody does the thing and just like everybody and it's like, why? It's like, stop asking questions. Because if we don't do things together, it's going to be trouble. We need to do it together.
Yeah. It doesn't actually matter what rituals we invent, but we need to invent some rituals that we can all share or else. We have a fairly limited window in which to get some rituals on the books that we can all share and that make us all less lonely and that help us to understand that even crazy uncle Nick is kind of a good guy at times. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. I don't know if it's our mom, but it could be. It seems like a question our mom might ask.
In fact, the more I read this question, the more I'm confident I am. It is our mom. You're John Hanks. I was thinking about how there are a lot of liquids that are thicker than water, for example, milk and also milkshakes and also blood and you can add things to water that make it thicker, but I don't think you can add anything to water that makes it thinner.
Are there any fluids that are thinner than water or is water the thinnest liquid of them all? I know people sign off pumpkins and penguins, but I have never listened far enough back into the archive to know why Sydney. That sounds very much like our mom. She didn't become a fan of the podcast until like 2019.
Yeah, she's new. She really liked the bad jokes. This is so interesting because you don't really think of it this way. Of course, a lot of the things that we think of as thicker than water are just water with stuff in them, but there are also things that are liquid that are thicker than water.
But there are also things that are liquid that are thinner than water. Really? Yeah. You know, like the meniscus, when you pull up water and it gets to the very top and then it makes a little bubble on top.
It doesn't go over the edge, but just barely. Yeah. I didn't know that was called the meniscus. I thought the meniscus was something very different.
That's a part of your knee, is maybe the part you're thinking of. Yeah. The reason for that is that there's little tiny bonds between hydrogen and oxygen. So like water has part like a little part of its molecule.
It's a little bit positively charged, a little bit negatively charged in those parts line up. So they like hold on to each other a little bit. And there are other molecules that do not have that, that they don't have as much intermolecular interactions. And so they will pour they will not have the same height meniscus or they basically will have no meniscus in all one.
They'll just go right over acetone is like that, methanol is like that, benzene is like that longer, bigger molecules that are liquid tend to stick together more, which is why oil is so thick. Cooking oil, that's what I'm thinking of. Interesting. Yeah.
Okay. So there are liquids that are thinner than water in the way that we think of thin and thick and blood and water and whatnot. Yeah. And it's like measurably like if you touched it, you wouldn't probably notice that much, especially because all those things are really volatile.
So they evaporate from your skin really fast and that would, the majority of the sensation you get would be that's cold because they would be stealing heat away from you. Yeah. So there you go, mom. Thank you for asking me a question because I know I'm favorite son and you really want to throw some bumps to me because everybody talks about John Green all the time.
No, first off, there's no favorites. Secondly, I don't think you can any longer defensively say like, Oh, nobody ever talks about me and my seven million TikTok followers. I still haven't. John, do you probably don't do this because you're not, you have different sets of problems than I do, but I always pick somebody who's like a little ahead of me and whatever social we give up on.
No, no. And then I like race to them to see if I can answer whether I know you don't do you really do that. That's so 2009. I know.
I remember doing that, but you cannot do that as a full grown internet adult. I only pick a dog. Oh, what? Oh my God, this is terrible.
Okay, are you willing to say who the person is or would it be too humiliating? It's his name is Derek Huff. He is one of the dancers from Dancing with the Stars. Are you still there?
Yeah, I'm looking at his profile page. I've got a couple of comments for you, Hank. First off, I have been on TikTok. I don't know, 18, 20 hours a day every day for the last month.
I've never seen this guy. Never once. Well, that's the first thing I need you to know. And the second thing I need you to know is that you have more followers than he does.
Do I? Yes. I get to tell you this. I did it.
Really? How does it feel? I mean it. Yes, by several thousand.
You can't. How does it feel, Hank, to have 6.4 million TikTok followers to this seemingly perfectly innocuous person, 6.3 million TikTok followers? It feels good. Is the whole inside of you filled it last?
I haven't chosen him for a long time, John. He is growing. It's not like he's stagnant. He's moving.
Is the void that you believed you were only one achievement away from finally filling filled? Well, no, but this doesn't mean I get to pick another person. That sounds like fun. That sounds like it'll be a good time.
That's right, Oprah. Step aside. Hey, Queens coming. I mean, I don't have a lot of faith in my ability to keep growing on TikTok very quickly.
I have to pick somebody who's like relatively close. You know what? What would get me to retire from TikTok? What?
Is if Oprah Winfrey called me and was like, I want you to be my social media manager for TikTok. And you would say yes. I got you. Yes.
I need you to move to Missoula, Montana, because I'm not leaving here. But once you're here, we're going to make so many great TikToks. We're going to have 100 million followers in no time. Wow.
You would stop. You would put aside your own TikTok career for the benefit of Oprah's TikTok career. Oh, yeah. That'd be so much fun to help Oprah do TikToks.
I have a follow up question. Okay. How much would you sacrifice to, for instance, help your brothers TikTok? You're doing great.
You don't need help. Hey, while we're on the topic, we got a question from a Larissa who writes, Dear John and Hank, do you remember during the episode of the podcast that was recorded with Hank and Zack at VidCon Australia when Hank said that he wanted to create one TikTok and have it go viral and then never do anything else on the platform? What happened? Well, you almost did that.
You got close to being like, I only do bangers. I had this policy that I only make solid gold platinum TikToks as I referred to them, which are TikToks that get more than 500,000 views. And then, and then, and then, and then the broke, and then it broke me. My first nine TikToks all got more than 500,000 views, in fact, my first 10.
And then it roped me in. Now I have an unusual TikTok strategy, which is working great for me where I delete almost all of my TikToks about 10 minutes after uploading them. And that's been wonderful. And I can't recommend it enough.
But I do still have some non-solid gold platinum TikToks that are publicly available. It has happened. Yeah, I made a video about this, Larissa, basically, because obviously it did suck me in. It is a rewarding place to create.
But I do also have problems with it, which I have also made videos about. And also, it's very difficult for, it will eventually happen, but it's difficult for me to see something very interesting happening in social internet land and not to understand it. Yeah. And maybe this is the last time I really go all in.
And for example, I don't understand Snapchat at all. So it's certainly not everything. But I do really like to understand cultural phenomena. Yeah, I do too.
Let's move on to this other question. Take it away from TikTok. OK, great. We got a question from Tanvi who asks, Dear John and Hank, I really like flowers so much that I often have a vase of two or three fresh cut flowers in my living and dining room.
But sometimes when people come over, they ask me why I like flowers, given that cut flowers die. How do I politely tell these people that they are alive right now and really pretty and in my house and going to die just like my flowers? I mean, I don't think you say that. I think that's the most polite way you could possibly say.
I think you say like, you know what else is really beautiful and destined to die? You. I mean, I cannot imagine I cannot imagine walking into someone's house and seeing a design choice they have made and being like, I'm going to remind you about mortality. I'm going to like, it seems like a weird judgment.
It's like if they have a pet dog and their little puppy comes up and you start petting and you look up at them and you say it's an interesting choice to get a dog when they die. I mean, it is a different timescale. I understand it's a different timescale. You know, you've got flowers for maybe like two weeks of the outside.
If you got really robust ones and take care of them really well, cut flowers. But like, I don't know, like people do a lot of weird stuff. This seems low. That's the right answer.
Maybe the right answer is I don't know if you've noticed, but people do lots of weird stuff. Like we are so strange. The whole thing. Listen, I understand it's weird that I have dying flowers in my house, but lots of people have like collections of 5,000 Funko pops.
Yeah, I have a friend who has a room that is full of things that you found in a river. Yeah, it's just a river room. I have 135 bottles of fermented grape juice that like all tastes pretty similar. But when I drink them, I'm going to act as if they taste vastly different from that.
I have next to me a lot, a lot of words printed on paper that I'm not going to read again. Some of them I haven't read once. Like, I'm currently holding like a piece of aluminum that was made just for holding liquid. Okay, yeah.
And the liquid it was holding was designed in the early 19th century by a chemist in Waco, Texas. Yeah. And it's bubbly and it contains purportedly 23 separate, but all artificial flavors. Yeah.
You got it. You got it. Next time somebody says that to you, you got to say Hank Green doesn't have flowers instead. He has a rubber duck in the shape of pioneering vlogger Zay Frank.
He has that on his table. Yeah. So like, I'm not the weird one. Yeah.
And it's all great. Everybody is, everybody is great in their own ways. I would definitely focus on the, we're all going to die aspect of it. I would definitely focus on the, you are also as beautiful to me as a flower.
Yeah. And as fleeting. But don't say it in a serial killer way. And I'm not sure.
Right. Not in a not serial killer way. Yes. Yes.
Great point Hank. Great point Hank. Don't like take the flower out. Yeah.
Like pluck one of the pedals and say, you know what else is beautiful and about to die. Very slow. Go ahead, turn. That's not cool.
That's not cool. Yeah. Which reminds me actually that today's podcast is brought to you by not being a serial killer. It's the best way to be the podcast is also brought to you by Derek Hough.
Derek Hough. Boy, those don't follow on. You should go bring me back down. Take it.
Take me down. It's your opportunity right now to take me down. And of course today's podcast is brought to you by TGI Fridays Fridays. It's self explanatory.
It's self explanatory. And also today's podcast is brought to you by the leap Fortnite. Either we're going to get together and have a real chill time or is going to be the end of everything. We're not sure.
I feel like the word Fortnite has been very successfully co-opted. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't being used a bunch for other stuff. I was, man.
If you look through my novels, there's so many times Fortnite's pass. Yeah. Not really. But I like that you believe it was possible.
It's absolutely possible. It's totally possible. What's the thing? Deadpan?
Deadpan. I use Deadpan once every book. But anyway, we also have a project for us a message from Emma to AJ who says, I couldn't be happier to have spent three years with you. I love how much we are able to share interests.
I love cooking new foods for you and writing music together. Most of all, I love you. Everything hasn't always been roses, but that just proves we can navigate storms as well as clear whether I'm so glad you sat in my seat. I bet that's a kind of inside joke reference, but I can tell that it's a sweet one.
Thank you. Thank you. And by the way, the project for awesome is coming up between February 25th and February 28th. Sure.
Hank and I will be part of a live stream extravaganza and you can get as a perk. If you donate to the project for awesome and support great charities, you can potentially get one of those project for awesome messages that you can read to your loved one. It probably won't be as sweet as Emma's to AJ, but it could still be sweet. Yeah.
And there's lots of ways to get involved and go to projectforawesome.com to find out more and we very much appreciate everybody who gets involved. However, they can't. It's a ton of fun. I've been on Amazon trying to think like, what am I going to buy that's going to make this weird?
Because that's one of the most important things that I just have a big box full of things that might get weird. I like that. I can't believe that this is the 15th project for awesome. That's crazy.
Just really remarkable. The P4A has raised $15 million in 15 years and we just want to see that continue to grow this year. We're so excited. It's just an awesome thing to be part of.
So grateful to everybody who volunteers and makes it work and it's going to be a great time. It is. It is. This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by Shopify.
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And this is important because you also have to look good and with Shopify's templates, you can 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. 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 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. Shopify handles that foundation so you can focus on the thing that you're actually trying to do. You can also use 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 dftba.com or being the size of like Mattel and Gymshark.
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Okay. It's from Abby who writes, Dear John and Hank, I was just thinking about how small our little planet is in the grand scheme of things. And now I'm wondering if my cells have families that resent me for not drinking enough water? Is it plausible that my cells might be at least sentient enough to be annoyed with me for not drinking enough water?
Dehydrated Abby. What I like about this isn't just that the cells are annoyed with you, but they have like caring, loving parents and brothers and sisters who are like, I can't believe they got Abby. They have to live in Abby and Abby never drinks. Right.
Why don't you take care of my good self-friend family member? And I don't know how they probably, their names are chemical signals rather than words because I can't talk. I can't believe Abby won't take care of my 337,000th clone. Yeah, cells are so weird, John.
The whole idea that I'm just a bunch that like all of these billions or trillions of little goobers work together to make me have like thoughts about TGI Fridays, little unacceptable. Like I don't feel like I'm doing them doing them proud. Not only that, half or around half of the cells that make you up, which some of which contribute to what you think and what you want. But they aren't actually you.
Yeah. They're bacteria colonizing you. Yeah, those aren't me though. They influence me for sure.
But in the same way that like. They contribute to how you're doing. Yeah. Well, it's in ways that you don't know and aren't conscious of.
Yeah. Well, same with like strangers on Twitter though and they're not part of my body. That's true. But the difference is, and I think it's a significant difference is that like for example, the gut microbiomes of people who have OCD are different from the gut microbiomes of people who don't.
Now that may not be causative. We're not there yet. But that's a weird correlation. That is pretty weird.
That's pretty weird. For sure. So is it me or is it my microbiome or is it both? We are a complex.
The point is that we are a weird collection of cells that don't fortunately have feelings. Yeah. There may be a level of annoyance that they feel when you are dehydrated, Abby, in the sense that there may be things that they can't do. But do they worry about it?
No. Yeah. Or yeah, I think they're a little less good at thing. This is a very tricky question because like what is, if you look at this trick definition of sentence, then they are, they can't sense things.
They react to stimulus and so you must admit that they can have a sensation. Can they feel a feeling about it? No. Probably no feelings.
But they definitely have a way of caring, which is that if there is a situation they will act differently and thrive more and move in directions to try and get things to work. The wonderful amazing thing about the cells in our bodies though, and maybe this will make you feel a little bit better about the whole situation, is that they are the most selfless cells in the, like the cells in our body are the most selfless cells of all the cells because they regularly are like, if something starts to go wrong with the cell and it's like, I don't know if I'm doing everything right now, they just pop themselves. They're like, no, it's not worth it. They can make another one of me.
And that's how it's the only way that it works because we all have to work together to make it a larger organism. It's amazing that they can and do so effectively in not just us but in all of the organisms, multi-cellular organisms on Earth. Yeah. Yeah.
It is a pretty remarkable plot. It's one of the weirdest things. Yeah. Because they don't think of themselves, this is a cell inside of an organism.
I mean, it doesn't think of itself at all. Correct. It doesn't understand itself as... Still not working, but okay.
Still not working. But you know what I mean. You're right. I actually, I don't know how to approach this because it doesn't, a cell inside of an organism does not act as if it is the organism.
Unless and until it becomes cancer, that is the moment it starts to act like an organism. Right. When a cell starts to say, oh, natural selection is supposed to make about success about creating more of me and I'm going to create more of me and I'm going to overcome all of the systems that prevent me from overcoming creating more of me. That is what cancer is.
Yeah. And that's why cancer is such a weird disease because there are lots of ways for that to happen, which makes it many different diseases. Right. Which is really cool.
There's a great book about that. Is it called The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee? No, but that one might be another one. Great book.
It was very important for me when I was writing The Fault in Our Stars and understanding how to write about cancer without romanticizing cancer or people who live with it. It's called The Cheating Cell. So this is a cellular biology perspective on cancer. Interesting.
Yeah. The Emperor of All Maladies takes a sort of historical book, but it's written by an oncologist. So obviously also has a lot of detail. It's a really fascinating book.
And I know we're way off topic now, but if you're interested in reading more about human responses to cancer and historical human responses to cancer and how catastrophic they've often been for both the patient and families of patients, I really recommend reading Susan Zontag's Cancer and its metaphors. All right, John, I want to know how AFC Wimbledon is doing. Oh, oh, not great. We dropped into the the relegation zone for the first time this season, albeit briefly.
We were saved by a goal by Bolton Wanderers that put more come back in the relegation zone. But AFC Wimbledon, out of their last five games, we've drawn three and we've lost two. We scored first. I had a great conversation with Alice, actually.
It was a really lovely moment where I realized that Alice, you know, is achieving sentience as an AFC Wimbledon fan because I said, Alice, Ethan Chislett scored for Wimbledon in the third minute and were one nil up. And she said, how many more minutes? And I said, what? And she said, how many more minutes in the game?
And I said, 87. And she said, Oh, no. Correct. Oh, no.
We lost that game. We lost that game three, two and didn't look great doing it. So it's been we have signed a striker to replace the striker that Ryan Reynolds bought from us. So I guess that's a bit of good news.
But in terms of the results on the field, it has not been very good. Look, AFC, you know, I say this all the time, but for Wimbledon fans, the most important thing is not the result of a particular game. It's making sure that the team is in a financial place where it can stay fan-owned and have its stadium and build from there. Losing that would be much worse than losing any game or getting relegated out of any league.
And so when I look at what's hopeful about AFC Wimbledon right now, I think about the Plough Lane Bond in which all these Wimbledon fans are coming together and loaning the club money and you get your money back and with an interest payment, but the interest payment is smaller than what the interest payment would be for a bank. And that kind of creative finding creative ways to have the community own the club is how Wimbledon got to the third tier of English football. And so that's where I find hope at the moment. As for our new striker, I'd like to tell you a little bit about him.
The most important thing, the thing that you've got to remember is that we needed, Ollie Palmer was a classic small bottom big, a big person with a small bottom. Right. And we needed to replace him with another small bottom big. And we did.
All right. Same as Sam Cosgrove and he's huge. He is the biggest person I have ever seen play for AFC Wimbledon except for Audubai Walken then one. And he's just has a tiny bottom.
He's perfect structurally for the job. He's only 25 years old. That seems to be a good age for a soccer player. Yeah.
The only downside to having Sam Cosgrove on our team is that we already have a player named Aaron Cosgrove. And I find that problematic. That's not bothering me. I found a great picture of his bottom.
Yeah. Yeah, it's not big. It's barely there, which is ideal. As I said, that is exactly what we need.
But I bet he could kick a ball. So has he not just that? He's also six foot four. Six foot four.
Has he played for you yet? Yeah, he played a little bit in the three, two loss. He looked good. He looked good.
I mean, we were off the pace as a team, but I thought, you know, I have a lot of hope. All we need to do, I say this every season, but all we need to do is do what we've done for the last five years, which is finished 20th. And it would be nice, but he's not going to happen for us to do it with some games to spare. It'd be great.
It'd be great to do it even with two games to spare because so far we've only ever done it with one game to spare or zero. All right, John. Well, in Mars news, it seems that helicopters might glow in the dark on Mars. Oh, what?
That is a prediction provided by scientists using some lab measurements and computer models to study how drones on Mars might set off small electric currents in the atmosphere. Wow. This is cool. It's called turbo electric charging when friction moves electrical charges between two things, like a person running a balloon on their head on Mars.
That might happen when the blades of a Martian drone like the ingenuity helicopter spin around and they get dust grains on their surface. And as the blades hit the grain, there could be a transfer of charge and an electric field building up on the blades, which would then get the atmosphere to start conducting electricity, which would then maybe make a current that would offset the charge and basically be like sparks in the air to us that would look like a purpley glow, but we would only see it if it was dark. And unfortunately, the ingenuity helicopter doesn't fly at dusk. So we won't see it glow in the dark ourselves, but maybe we would in the future, which would be cool to see that drones doing their Mars things and be like, oh, there's some drones going by.
You can hear them and you can also see their little purple glow. Yeah, like almost like an Aurora Borealis, but the Martian version. Yeah, this is also a thing that can happen on Earth when helicopter is flying dusty environments. Oh, I don't think I've ever seen that.
I don't either. I'm trying to see it right now. Yeah, that'd be cool. Well, that's exciting, Hank.
It's very cool to think about a world where there are lots of people on Mars looking up at their sort of like ghostly purple drones flying by. Yeah, I gotta say, I feel like if nothing else, it's great for science fiction. That's right. That's very true.
All of the science fiction writers will now incorporate that into their Mars stories and it will be great. Yes. Well, John, thank you for making a podcast with me. As always, and thank you everybody for sending any questions without which this podcast would not exist and be really boring because we just talked about TGI Friday's level time.
Hey, we're off to record our Patreon only podcast this week in Wertle where Hank and I attempt to do Wertle together live as a podcast at patreon.com slash your hank and John. And also get access to our monthly live shows where Hank and I really do some therapy on each other. We just did it today and man, we went real deep talking to some stuff from the past. Yeah.
Yeah. So yeah, patreon.com is a shank and John. Thanks for everybody for sitting through that. I think a lot of the people are a little bit like I don't remember any of that stuff you're talking about right now, but very much.
They're not it for a while. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Medish. It's produced by Rosie on a Hoss. Our communication coordinator is Julia Bloom, our editorial assistants to book a truck of Artie.
The Music Hearing Now at the Begin of the Podcast by the Great Canerola and I think they say in our hometown. Don't forget to do it all.