328: The Dear John Episode

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It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, provide you with dubious advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. But it's a little different this week because Hank is busy doing 75 of his 76 jobs and so he's unavailable. My spouse, the lovely Sir Euryst Green is on a work trip and the person who was supposed to co-host Dear Hank and John with me today has COVID. They feel okay, don't worry about them, but they do have COVID.

So it is a one-man band spectacular. It is an unprecedented episode of Dear Hank and John. It's the Dear John episode. The episodes that I for one have been waiting for for years and years.

Oh god, I don't know how this is going to go. It's going to be challenging for all of us. Nobody wanted to be in this situation, but here we are. I want to answer your questions.

I want to provide you with dubious advice and I don't currently have a co-host. There will be no dad joke today, by the way. That's the first unilateral action that I am taking as your solo advice podcast host. We are removing the dad joke just for this week.

I'm sure Hank will be back with it next week. Hank will be returning next week. This is not a permanent development or anything like that. Oh boy, I did have an opening bit this week because we got a question from somebody who was like, I don't ever care what you say.

I just like the sound of your voice. You could just read the back of the cereal box and I would be equally happy. There's no need to put all this work into telling jokes and answering questions. I thought I would maybe try that today.

I was going to read to you from this box of frosted mini-weets I have. In reading, you never really look at the text on a cereal box, but in reading this text, I find myself troubled by the marketing approach that frosted mini-weets has taken. Here we go. It's a new segment of Dear Hank and John where I read to you cereal boxes.

Kellogg's frosted mini-weets, original. One bowl and your good till lunch. Footnote. There's literally a footnote after one bowl when you're good to lunch.

Footnote. After eating a bowl with 2% milk, at least half of adults had a lower desire to eat than before breakfast. Well, that's not just true for frosted mini-weets. That's true for all food.

Frosted mini-weets on the front cover of their box. They just described the experience of eating and bragged that if you eat frosted mini-weets, you will feel as one feels after eating. Then we've got the back of the box. Sorry, I should have told a joke.

I should have just read the copy. One bowl and your good till lunch. It's also on the back of the box. They're so happy with that line.

They used it twice. Every bite. Delicious. Every bite.

Satisfying. 10 layers of wheat, 48 grams of whole grain, 6 grams of fiber. That's it. That's all they want you to know about frosted mini-weets is that it makes you less hungry.

If that's their big brag, if you eat this food, you will feel like you felt after it. That's it. That's their big brag. All right, let's answer some questions from our listeners beginning with this one from Frito.

And by let's answer some questions from our listeners. I mean, I will now be answering some questions from our listeners beginning with this one from Frito who writes, Cheers on a hank. Do the bees know what they're doing? Thank you, Frito.

Now, Frito, this is a great hank question, but Hank's not here. So I'm going to answer with a poem. Lines written in early spring by William Wordsworth. I love this poem.

There's so much you like about it. You may think that you don't like poetry, but just bear with me through the reading of this poem. And then we'll talk a little bit about it. I heard a thousand blended notes while in a grove I sat reclined in that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To hear her fair works did Nature link the human soul that threw me ran, and much of it grieved my heart to think what man has made of man. Through Primrose Tufts in that green bower, the Perry Winkle trailed its wreaths and tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hopped and played their thoughts by cannot measure, but the least motion which they made it seemed a thrill of pleasure. The budding twigs spread out their fan to catch the breezy air, and I must think do all I can that there was pleasure there.

If the belief from heaven be sent, if such be nature's holy plan, have I not reason to lament what man has made of man? Now there are some things I don't love about the poem. Like I don't love that William Wordsworth is imagining that humans need to return to the state of nature as if there's just one state of nature when in fact there was never really a time when humans organize themselves in purely utopian ways. Like from the beginning of human social orders, at least so far as we can tell, there were lots of different ways that people organize themselves and sometimes they were oriented around egalitarianism and sometimes less so.

And you know it's just like oversimplifies prehistory a little bit, although that's not really William Wordsworth's fault that he was living in the 19th century when that was the common way of talking about nature in Europe. But what I love about the poem, I love the idea that flowers enjoy the air they breathe and that birds enjoy flying through the air. Obviously animal emotion is complicated and we only know so much about it. I'm actually reading a great book about it right now by Ed Yong, the same person who wrote I Contain Multitudes.

It's really fascinating. I've never learned so much about the like inner lives of animals, but we've done quite a bit of research on this topic now. That said, I just really love the idea. I like the idea that bees know what they're doing on some level.

They may not know what they're doing like we know what they're doing, but I like the idea and I believe that they do. That is not a Hank answer, but once again, Hank is not here. All right, let's answer another question. This one's from Emily who writes Dear John and Hank, do you ever wonder if you'll run out of thoughts?

I have a tendency to get scared that I'll run out of thoughts or maybe that I've already run out. Has this ever happened to you before? And how do I stop this? Usually I just start consuming mass amounts of media, but then nothing sticks and I just obsessively think about when I'll stop thinking.

Hopefully this isn't my last thought, Emily. So I've never heard of this particular obsessive worry, but I find it really interesting because of its recursiveness. I do love a recursive obsessive worry. And this particular obsessive worry, when you can't stop thinking about the fact that you might be done thinking, chef's kiss for recursion.

It sounds very unpleasant to actually live with, but metaphorically resonance wise, it's perfect. I don't worry that I'm going to run out of thoughts, because Emily, the thing that I would encourage you to remember is that you are always having new thoughts or else new shades of thoughts. I do think that consuming media can help us to have new sets of thoughts, but I find for me, at least, that also walking in the woods can help me to have new thoughts, talking with a friend can help me to have new thoughts. What actually makes me have the most new thoughts is getting out of my comfort zone, getting out of my routine.

So if I'm just kind of mindlessly scrolling on Twitter, I'm probably not being pulled toward a really interesting or important new thought. Now, sometimes I am, like, sometimes you come across a tweet that you're like, wow, that really helped me. I found that quite useful, but not usually. Usually I don't feel like thinking in a new way or approaching a problem from a new angle when I'm on Twitter.

So I like to get out of my routine if I can, even though that's uncomfortable, because I find that's where the thoughts happen for me. So if I read something new, if I go someplace new, even if it's slightly new, like this morning, instead of going on my usual walk, I walked the same trail in the opposite direction, and because I don't have a particularly sophisticated sense of direction or place, it all felt new to me because I was looking at the same trees, but I was looking at them from the opposite side. The trail I walk is a circle. And so if you walk the circle in the other way, to me, it appeared to be a completely new trail.

It was full of unprecedented surprises. And I had more interesting thoughts, like I'm working on a story right now, and I had more interesting thoughts about the story than I think I would have had if I'd walked the path in the usual direction. So I would say read something new or try to see something new, even if it's on Google Maps, and see if that works. But you're not going to run out of thoughts.

I mean, you are going to run out of thoughts, but not until after you return to chemical equilibrium. Return to or reach. That's the kind of thing that Hank would work off of in a really interesting way. But instead, I'm just going to have to ask you the listener to decide.

All right, cool party. Let's answer this question from Emily who writes, Dear John and Hank, yesterday, while leaving the hospital where I worked, I paused to watch the medical helicopter land. I've always loved helicopters, and so does my mom. So I snapped a picture and some random pedestrian walked past me at that moment, somehow not looking at the helicopter and looked at me and said, is this your first time seeing a helicopter?

I abruptly said, no, louder than necessary and she left me alone. My question is, what is the wildest thing someone random has ever said to you, helicopters and hostility? Emily, you know, what is it about the rude things people say to us that stick in our heads so precisely? It's related to the feeling of mortification for me, but I have vivid memories of events like this, Emily.

Like the other day, I was walking on the trail, not to make this all about my daily walks. The other day, I was walking on the trail and there was somebody else walking in the opposite direction. And I said, hello, or something, good morning, something innocuous. And they said to me, not you.

And I realized that they were talking on their airbuds to on the phone or whatever, like talking to someone else, and they had said something. And I thought that I was responding with good morning. And then they said to me, not you. And I have replayed this brief exchange tens of thousands of times since it happened.

And what is it about? Why can't we let it go? It's, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what that is, Emily.

But I'm sorry that this person was rude to you. And I feel like there is an element of people have a little, I don't want to sound like old man yells at cloud. But I do feel like there's a little bit of an element of people have kind of forgotten how to like talk to each other in person. Like also a few days ago, I was at a restaurant to pick up some food and somebody stormed in and said it would be 20 minutes and it's been 24 and like slammed down the thing.

And then I was, I said to the host person at the front desk, I was like, I'm so sorry that happened. And they were like, ah, goes with the job. And I was like, doesn't it shouldn't? Like, yeah, so I don't know if people have always been a little bit rude.

But we need to have, we need to, we need to channel our inner Paul Farmer and find a hermeneutic of generosity. We need to find ways to interpret the actions of others in the most generous lens possible and not in the worst lens possible. But even then I struggle to understand looking at it through a hermeneutic of generosity, why this person went out of their way to tell you have you never seen a helicopter before? Maybe.

All right, here's my attempt at an H of G in this situation. Maybe they maybe it triggered something in them, some bad memory that they have, some experience of being in a helicopter, maybe even being in a lifeflight helicopter. And they felt this sort of like anger rise up in them that they didn't know what to do with. And so they turned it to you.

Or maybe they didn't know how to modulate their voice for your expectations. And they were genuinely curious if you've never seen a helicopter before and wanted to start a conversation. Maybe it was that. I don't know.

But to answer your question, the weirdest thing a stranger has ever said to me is one time I was on the L in Chicago on my way to work one morning. And I was just reading a book and a woman walked up to me and got right in my face and said, son, you've got the devil in you. And I didn't know what to make it at. I still don't sometimes I think like, Oh, God, I do.

I do have the devil in me. And she saw it. Do you think we can have some like music breaks or something? Just something other than my voice, maybe like just a little bit of the intro music again.

That was nice. That was a good break. All right, back to the question. I've never, I've never missed my brother more in my life than I miss him right now.

This next question comes from Kate, who writes near John and Hank. I recently started my first full time job and quickly realized the only way to get everything done in addition to working 10 hours because we do four day work weeks is to get up at 5 30 in the morning so I can work out before work and then get off early enough to cook dinner and wind down before bed. I don't mind waking up early and going to bed early, but I've been wondering how should I sleep best during the weekends? Should I keep that same schedule or is it okay to sleep in?

Don't make me wait. Kate, Kate, you are a vastly more disciplined person than I am and I do not feel qualified to give you advice on this matter. When I have to wake up at 5 30 in the morning to work out, you know what I do? I don't work out 100% of the time.

If you tell me the workout is at 5 30, I'm not going to be there. Period. So I don't know. I would sleep in in the weekends, but like I also wouldn't wake up at 5 30 to work out.

So it's a little hard for me to fully empathize with you. I feel like you can sleep in on the weekends as long as it doesn't like overly interrupt your sleep schedule. I think you're going to be fine. Honestly, I think you're doing great and I'm a little bit envious.

All right. Next question. Emily writes dear John and Hank, I just watched Hank's TikTok about the laundry pod, laundry sheet beef and it made me wonder, by the way, you don't have to see that TikTok in order to understand this question. You don't have to get on TikTok at all.

It's highly addictive. Why are most advertisements so annoying? That's Emily's question. Is there point to annoy you or do they really think a computer animated voice with a song that makes me want to rip my hair out is going to make me want to buy the product?

It seems like most ad reads on podcasts that are read by the hosts aren't bad at all. Like John's policy genius reads. Oh, thank you, Emily. But once where it's some other company reading me a line, I just can't reach for the skip button fast enough.

Why do most ads have this effect? Annoyed with ads, Emily. So you have to remember that advertising doesn't just exist to give you a positive impression of the brand. It also exists to give you an impression of the brand, like a memory of the brand.

I'll give you an example of what I mean. There's an insurance company that isn't policy genius. It's called the general and they have a very annoying jingle. Go to the general and save some time.

And it plays during all of the soccer games. So like, I hear this jingle. I've heard this jingle every Saturday, two or three times for, I don't know, 12 years. And it's one of the only advertisements I see on a regular basis because I don't watch a lot of like linear television, except when I'm watching soccer.

And it is not effective in the sense that it is not for one second persuaded me that I do not have the right car insurance solution. But it is effective in the sense that I now know what that company is, what they sell, and how they are trying to present themselves to their customers. And so when I go shopping for insurance, which I don't need to do because I can just go to policygenius.com, but if I were to go shopping for insurance in some other way, I might be like, well, I know what they are. I know that they're an insurance company.

I have heard of them in a kind of public facing way, which makes me think that they're somehow legitimate. And so I think that we have to remember like the complex series of things that advertising is trying to do to us. And then the second thing we have to remember is that advertising works. It is effective.

And if it weren't effective, it wouldn't exist. Like if advertising couldn't directly increase the amount of sales that a service or a good can generate, it wouldn't exist. Like there are companies, Arizona, I see as a famous one, that spend basically no money on advertising because they don't need to. They've decided that like there's a different strategy that's going to work for them.

In the case of Arizona, I see they're available at every gas station. They're less expensive than every other iced tea, and they're quite good. And so they don't need to advertise. But most brands make their money from brand awareness.

We know what coke is. We know what YouTube is. We know what Netflix is. And y'all know what policy genius is.

And that's worth it to them. Like, I used to think that I was immune to advertising. I used to think like, well, they can show me all the advertisements they want, but I'm going to buy what I'm going to buy. But the truth is so much more complicated and nuanced than that.

The way that it impacts you is not necessarily in that direct, what a great idea. I think I'll go to policy genius.com and find out more about life insurance kind of way. The way it affects you may be over the course of the next five years, you think, well, gosh, do I need life insurance? And maybe it's like three years down the road when you realize, oh, yeah, no, there are people who are kind of counting on me financially.

And if I were to die, it would be a huge problem for those people. And I can make that situation easier for them. And so I think I'll go get life insurance. Well, where will I get life insurance from?

Oh, I've heard of a couple of places. So yeah, I think it's complicated. But I think the thing to remember that I always forget is the advertising works, and I am not immune to it. And if I think I am immune to it, I am in fact more vulnerable to it.

All right, to have another musical break, maybe this time something a little jazier. Oh, yeah, that's the stuff. All right, we got another question. This one's from Sydney who writes Dear John and Hank, my name is Sydney and I'm in high school.

And yesterday on the bus, someone I don't know asked me for a piece of paper, which I gave to them. And then a few minutes later, this person turned and gave me a tiny plastic baby. Now, Sydney, I am pretty sure I know where this tiny plastic baby came from, which is one of the reasons I wanted to answer your question. But I'm going to finish the question.

They didn't say anything. They just gave me the little baby. And I said, thank you. I'm still so confused.

What do I do with the baby? What about this person I met? Are we just friends now? Do be as advice as appreciated, not the place in Australia, Sydney.

I knew that's Sydney because my mother is also named Sydney. My mom is a high school history teacher and we both really appreciate your crash course videos. Thank you, Sydney. And please say hi and thank you to your mom as well.

And a big thank you to all educators everywhere right now. And also all librarians everywhere right now. Like it is not an easy time to have any job, but it seems like an especially challenging time to have those jobs. So thank you.

Thank you for doing the hard and important work to create young people who have a better understanding of themselves in the universe. What are we going to do about this baby? This tiny plastic baby. So Sydney, here's my theory.

So there's this special kind of cake. It's big in New Orleans. I don't know if you're from New Orleans, you might not be, but it's big in New Orleans and it's called a king cake. And I have a suspicion, I might be wrong, but I have a suspicion that your tiny plastic baby, which used to be this other person's tiny plastic baby came from a king cake just based on when you sent your question in.

So this is a kind of cake. It's big in New Orleans in the US, but I also know they make them in other places. And it's a sort of cake. It's I don't really like the taste of the cake, but that's neither here nor there.

The point is that there's a tiny plastic baby in this cake. I think it's supposed to represent the tiny baby Jesus if I understand it correctly. But at any rate, the idea is that if you get the piece of the cake that has the tiny plastic baby in it, you get a prize. And when I was a kid and even into adulthood, I would eat these cakes because my mother is from the south and went to school in New Orleans.

I would eat these cakes and the whole time I would just I would be closing my eyes and I would just be thinking, please God anything but the tiny plastic baby. The thing I most don't want is to bite into this cake and discover a tiny plastic baby Jesus. That is a nightmare scenario for me. Even if you win a prize, I don't want the prize.

I want to have a piece of cake that doesn't have a tiny plastic baby. So I think my most most tiny plastic babies in this world, at least that I have seen come from king cakes. So what I think happened is this person quote unquote won the prize, ended up with a tiny plastic baby. They've got this tiny plastic baby that they're carrying around in their pocket.

They need a piece of paper. You give them a piece of paper, which by the way is very generous of you. You didn't ask anything in exchange. It was a pure gift that came from the best possible place.

This person took the piece of paper back to their part of the bus and then used it in whatever way they needed to use it. And then they thought to themselves, what an extraordinary gift I've just been given with no expectation of any kind of return. A person I barely know gave unto me something of theirs. That is so lovely.

I am so grateful. How will I express this gratitude? And then they felt in their pocket the tiny plastic baby Jesus from the king cake. And they thought, I will give freely of myself unto this person.

So they walked up. They gave you the tiny plastic baby. Now this is the point up until now. This has been an amazing exchange.

Everyone has won capitalism. The fundamental idea of it has been challenged because people are doing things that they have no financial incentive whatsoever to do. It's a beautiful exchange of gifts between two lovely people. But now I think that the person who gave you the tiny baby Jesus from the king cake made a significant mistake, which is that they handed you the tiny plastic baby and then they walked away.

What they should have said is here is a tiny plastic baby from a king cake that I want to give to you because I am grateful for your gift. Naturally, you know, now that I'm saying that out loud, maybe the best thing was just to give the tiny plastic baby Jesus to Sydney and walk away. Maybe that, maybe everything went perfectly, actually, Sydney. Maybe things went exactly as they should have gone.

And now, now, you are at the beginning of an amazing friendship, potentially like a game-changing friendship. Like you're at the beginning of a buddy comedy friendship or it could be a romantic comedy friendship. It could be, it could be, a suspenseful drama kind of friendship. I don't know the kind of friendship, but I know that it's extraordinary because of the way that it began.

So yes, you are friends with this person and you should play them this part of Dear Hank and John and laugh about it together and discuss where that tiny plastic baby Jesus came from. And if indeed at one point it was in that person's mouth, in which case I hope that they washed the crap out of it before they gave it to you. But at any rate, I think you should have that conversation after listening to this section of the podcast and Sydney, we fully expect an update on what kind of buddy movie it turns out you two are in. I love this question.

I love this story. I wish Hank were here to enjoy it with me. In fact, that reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by tiny plastic baby Jesus, tiny plastic baby Jesus. It's hard for me to get excited about having a piece of cake with you inside of it.

Additionally, today's podcast is brought to you by Hank Green, Hank Green, unavailable. And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by COVID, making this show a one man band for the first time ever and God, hopefully the last time. And today's podcast is brought to you by Emily's thoughts and Elise thoughts, you're not going to run out of them. We also have a project for awesome message from Kerber and this is a challenging one.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it friends. This is not going to be an easy minute for any of us. I don't know much about words. So here are some words from people I love.

Sauded, Abra Cadaabra, lilacs, dreams, yes, anti-disestablishmentarianism, indigo shadows, unequivocal resilience, scandalous sassafras, sumptuous roly poly, petricor, meringue, crumble, tontine, radiant haberdashery, color, arrow, earth love, spring, flower sleep, chantrell, possum on a half shell, semae, clementine crumble, history, chakzilla, shimmering guacamole, techno-mancer, booty judge, serendipity, luminary, viking, dragonfly, wiggyz, baliar, mikaela, napsec, unoia, swallow music, snuffleupagus, preposterous family, sunshine time, love composition, trust, adventure food. What a great collection of words, Kerber. I think my favorite is Earth love, a word that I've never heard before, but I think should be like a quasi-religious focus of our species for the next few decades, at least. Earth love.

Earth love. That's lovely. So many of them were lovely, but Earth love was so good I have to Google it. Oh, of course, it's a subscription service.

You know what really loves the earth, only subscribing to things you need. All right, well, this episode of Dear Hank and John is brought up 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.

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That stuff gives you confidence early on it. 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. It's really kind of amazing to me that Shopify is 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. 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 you website for more details. One thing I love about summary is how easy everything feels.

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With new subscription only, wild supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. Before we do the on-port news from AFC Wimbledon and to a lesser extent, Marz, let's answer this one from Lena who writes, John and Hank, sorry to be such a downer, but how do you do anything when it feels like the world is ending all the time and nobody with the power to actually prevent it from ending is doing anything about it? How can I continue to feel motivated to compete my silly university degree when environmental scientists keep saying that we have 10 or 15 good years left until the environment is so messed up that things are irrevocably bad?

I can't stop my mental worrying Lena. We get a lot of questions along this line and this is something that Hank and I have thought a lot about and we've been working to address in a meaningful way with our community. Hank calls this the sad gap, that there's a time in between when you find out about a problem and find out about the scope and breadth of the problem and the time when you can kind of journey through the complexity of that problem to begin to imagine some of the ways that we will address it. So the environment will be irrevocably harmed in the next 10 or 15 years.

It was also irrevocably harmed in the previous 15 years, but this isn't going to be by any stretch of the imagination of the human story and nothing about the future is set as Margaret Atwood beautifully wrote very little about history is inevitable and I really believe that and I also really believe that we are seeing changes. For the first time in the last 10 years, economic productivity has been decoupled from carbon emissions. That is a huge change. It indicates that further change is possible without dramatically shortening the quality or length of human life.

We have seen since I graduated from high school, Lena, the chance that a child will die before the age of five has declined by more than 50% globally. Kids are twice as likely today to survive to adulthood as they were when I was a teenager. And so I think that there is absolutely cause for despair. I have never been as worried about the human situation as I am right now and I don't want to like be all Pollyannaish about it and say like the problems aren't real or the problems aren't potentially catastrophic or are even likely catastrophic.

What I do want to say and what I really, really believe is that we can make change. We can't make it alone, but we can make it together. Like I understand why and I often feel this way even with a lot of power and I'm conscious of the fact that I'm coming at this conversation from a really privileged position, but I often feel powerless in the face of these changes. Like as I wrote in the Anthropocene Review book, like how am I going to do something about the problem of deforestation when I can't even get my kids to eat breakfast and it's a struggle to get them to school on time?

But the answer is that I'm going to help my kids eat breakfast and I'm going to get them to school on time and through the way that I spend money, through the way that I vote, through the way that I live my life, through my values. I'm also going to try to do something about deforestation. And we all, none of us have enough power to solve these problems on our own. And I certainly share your frustration that a lot of the people with the most power seem uninterested in solving them or uninterested in selling people on the sacrifices that are necessary to solve them.

But we all have some power. And we can work together to create real change. And I know that because I've seen it over the last decades that I've been an adult. I've seen meaningful improvement in a lot of areas in life.

Now I've seen places where things got worse too. But if I look at the long arc of history, if I look at how things were 500 or 800 or 1200 years ago, I think that things on average are better for people. And I think that they can be better still. And so I understand feeling despair.

But I really believe that despair never tells the whole human story. And the real work that needs to be done, not just to solve, address the climate crisis, but to address the other big problems that we share, healthcare and equity, economic inequality, to address the scourge of poverty, that's not easy. The work is complicated. People in good faith disagree about how best to achieve our aims.

But I think getting into the nitty gritty of that work, getting into the complexity of it is for me anyway, like where the real fulfillment comes and where the despair kind of stops. So that's my kind of selfish motivation for wanting to do what I can in the areas where I feel like I can make a difference, which, you know, for us is in child and maternal health in the most impoverished communities in the world. There is the motivation to want a more just world. But there's also the motivation to not want to feel mere despair, to want to feel like I'm doing something.

And so that's what motivates me. And I really, I've never been more sympathetic to despair, believe me. But I continue to think that it's not the whole truth. Okay, hey, how about one last music break?

I like that one. All right, it's time for the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, beginning with the news from AFC Wimbledon, which is not great. But that's standard at this point. AFC Wimbledon still still have not won a game in 2022.

And they are running out of games with which to win this season, very frustrating, very frustrating draw at Plow Lane against Milton Keynes over the weekend. I mean, Milton Keynes are in second place in the in league one and are likely to be promoted up to the second tier of English football. And so in that sense, getting a tie is a good result. But not beating them is always a discouragement.

And we don't need to talk about the behavior of their fans and how a bunch of their fans got arrested for being utterly without class. We can just talk about what happened in the game, which is that it was a one one draw with four games left in the season. AFC Wimbledon now are in 22nd place, which might sound hopeless, except we are only three points away from being in 19th place. So if we can win a couple, maybe three, maybe two of those last four games, we might just pull off another miracle.

Now, this is this would be the most miraculous of all of AFC Wimbledon's five miraculous savings from relegation, because there has been very little evidence since January 1st that this team can win a game, if we're being honest with ourselves. But I mean, if we win two, maybe three of our last four games, I think we will stay up. It's just whether we can do that. Because again, we have not won a game in 2022.

Four games to go, Hank will be coming back just in time to console me and or perhaps somehow celebrate yet another miracle. In Mars news this week, some very exciting news from our friend, the Perseverance Rover, having such a huge fan of Perseverance, like both the value system and the Rover. On Sol 404, the 404th Martian day that Perseverance has been on Mars, Perseverance has spotted for the first time its own parachute. It found the parachute that it used to land so comfortably and safely on Mars so that it could drive around and be the sweet autonomous semi-autonomous vehicle that it is.

So there is an image that Perseverance has taken of its own parachute kind of floating and fluttering in the distance. And then beyond that, you can see like yet another set of Martian mountains. I just find looking at the Perseverance image is phenomenally beautiful. They're just, I mean, first off, they're the cameras really good.

Like it's significantly better than the first Rover camera was. And Mars, I mean, it doesn't look fun. It looks a little bit like the movie Dune, the recent one, but it is really, really beautiful. So I'm very grateful to my brother for introducing me to the beauty of Mars.

I don't think otherwise I ever would have found out about it. Life is like that. Sometimes speaking of my brother, God, I miss him. And God, I look forward to reuniting with him next week.

Thank you all so much for listening to this, the one and God help me hopefully only one man band episode of Dear Hank and John Today's podcast was edited by the incredibly hardworking, especially today. Joseph Dune, who met is produced by Rosie Anna-Hoss Rojas. Our head of community and communications is Julia Bloom, our editorial assistant is the Voki Chaka Vardi, and the music that you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarolla. Thank you all again for listening.

And as they say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.