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 Complexly like Mark Rober, Katie Max, Simone Yech, and Moore will share inspiring talks about what makes them hopeful and join Hank Green on stage for fun, interactive discussions. Complexly has been creating free educational content like SciShow and PBSEons and Crash Course and 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. Welcome to Dear Hank and John. Course I prefer to think of it Dear John and Hank.
Hold on, my mic stand is weird. What the heck? It's always something with this guy. You know, some of us come to the podcast week after week after week, except for this thing for me to in a row.
There's music playing. You can't do that. I thought I was. I adjusted something.
Oh, well, welcome to Dear Hank and John. I'm not doing it again. You didn't ever say your part, though. I did.
Not only did I say it. You missed my amazing joke where I said some people come to this podcast week after week after week prepared, except for the last three weeks when they weren't here. That's a great joke. That was a great joke.
And I was trying to fix this. I was trying to do the intro. There was a lot going on. Okay.
Now the music's over. And John, I would like to tell you a fact, okay, which is that the name Lance isn't very common these days. It's not, but back in the middle ages. I used the name Lance a lot.
Oh, yes. You know what I think is funny about Sir Lance a lot. And I just realized this, you know, like 45 years into my life. Yeah, they called him Sir Lance a lot because he used his Lance a lot.
He was always using the Lance because he was such a good night and he was a good man's guy. Or maybe he's like grandpa was really good at your plants and that's something that's surname Lance a lot. But anyway, that's somewhere. There's a classic Nepo baby, but somewhere if you dig back deep enough, there was somebody and all the people in town was like, man, Joey put down his legs.
Joey sure uses his Lance a lot. Wait a second. We just stumbled onto something. Hey, what's up?
Joey Lance a lot. And he's like, Oh, you don't do it that much. It's like, it seems like it's telling me. Yeah, if you don't do it that much, why don't we go your Lance a lot?
Hey, Joey, guys, I'm getting better though. I'm getting really good. You know, this isn't that big. Why are we called?
Why are we called you Johnny Big Nose? Because my nose is so little. Well, that's the other that's the other possibility, right? Is that it was ironic.
Oh, yeah, they call us a Lance a lot because he's always negotiating. I thought it was gonna be because he like to use a treble shake. No, I can't. Those people.
Yeah, he's always like, guys, let's just talk it out. Okay. I mean, we don't need to let this come to a lot. Mr.
Lance a lot over here will never let us use our lances. Gotta be there were really ironic back then. Oh, God, they loved an ironic surname. You know, that's why they called that's why they called our ancestors green.
Yeah, because they own cold powered plants. No, it's because we're so bad at farming. I know I know we must have been bad at farming because you should see me garden. I'm a catastrophe.
It is something it is a site to behold your garden. It is it is a lot of plants who are they just like, you know, not supposed to be there, but really well taken care of. Yeah, I mean, they're really big plants. They're technically weeds, but they're incredibly successful weeds.
Yeah. And I people are like, Oh, it's bad for the pepper plants if they have to like fight it out with these really effective weeds. But I don't agree, man. I think I only want ever plants that are strong enough to hold up to the reality of Indiana, which is that we're going to get a lot of weeds.
That's right, John. And really, it's about what I've learned is it's about whether what you say sounds right, so whether it's true. So and I think that it's like they'll get spicier if they have to work harder. That sounds right.
That sounds true. That doesn't matter if yeah, absolutely. Here's a question, Hank. It's from Thai who writes, Dear John and Hank, I was just thinking about the nothingness of space again.
And then I thought about how turning a rocket ship, would that be hard or easy? Like if you needed to do a 180, you'd have to totally push against your speed. You probably need to take really wide turns to keep any type of speed up, right? I don't know.
I'm going to bed. Turns all the way down. Thai. It depends on what you mean by, look, there's what speed, everything's relative to something else out there.
But yeah, if you were like halfway somewhere and you were like, we got to go back, it would be very bad. Probably impossible. Though, I don't, yeah, probably impossible. So yeah, the thing you have to do is like, is just turn your engine off and then you're floating out the speed you're going in the direction you're going.
And then you just flip your spacecraft around and then you just start firing your big engine in the other way. And you're and you have to do a bunch of slow down from your current speed, because you don't got any air to slow you down. There's no friction to slow you down. And so you've got to blow mass out the back of your spaceship to slow you down and then eventually you get back to zero and then you start working your way back up to moving actually toward the place where you want to go.
So yeah, with space travel, you really do want to know for sure where you're headed. And that is why they call it rocket science. That's the hard part. So you don't actually take a kind of like big turn.
You actually take the smallest turn possible. You just turn 180 degrees. You want to just, you could have your engine on the whole time you're flipping and then you kind of take a turn, but you don't have to. Right.
Okay. And then you would just try to get all of that mass going in the opposite direction, which would take a lot of energy probably more than you have. Yeah. It's probably better to just go where you're going and use like turn off your engine, get to where you're going, use the like the atmosphere there to slow yourself down with some friction and then get yourself back.
But I don't know maybe not because you got to do the whole orbital injection thing. And that's going to be a lot of work. It just don't you want to just slingshot it though. Isn't that what they do in the Martian?
There is I believe is a documentary. I don't know if you could definitely slingshot. And if you have an option to do a good slingshot, then that's great. But I don't know that you can usually I don't think that you can slingshot back where you came from.
I think that you slingshot you can slingshot into a specific direction. But I don't know if you could do a whole 180 slingshot. You could maybe I'm just I don't know. I like it here.
You know, it is simpler. Yeah, it's not just simpler. Hank, this is great. Earth is amazing.
Like sometimes I feel like we get out of touch with how stupidly good Earth is. There's a lot of exploring to do right from here. You know, you put a space telescope up there. It's doing its stuff and we're like, Oh man, we can see that about that.
See that the forget about first you got exploring. No man, there's a lot of exploring to be done within stroke interior exploring the depths within the the the axe to break the frozen sea within us as Kafka put it. I did once I did recently sign off an email. What a time to be whatever it is we are.
Hank, yeah, because I don't know what to even think about us anymore. I was with a people talking about consciousness a lot right now because of AI and I'm like, Oh, I just make me very uncomfortable. Yeah, because I'm not sure I have it. Yeah, you know, people are always like have a eyes and chief consciousness and I'm like, what's that?
What's that? And we figured that out? Yeah, if you thought hard about whether you've achieved consciousness because I'm just a moth flying to the light. Yeah, if I don't think about it too hard, I'm like, yeah, no, I'm definitely conscious.
I know exactly what that is. And then if you think about it too hard, when I do start to think about it, I'm like, yes, the only time and to add to that, I would argue there are times when I'm not conscious, for sure. Like when I'm on TikTok, when I'm in TikTok, when I'm in the metaverse, I'm not conscious, I'm a dolphin swimming through the water. Yeah, it feels good.
It feels bad. I don't know what it feels like, but it feels like I'm just doing dolphin stuff. Yeah, I got my like, sort of stamina for doing conscious work is not what it once was I need some of that time where I just am scrolling now and maybe this is a problem of too much scrolling or maybe it's just getting old. But I need that recharge.
And boy, are there some companies out there who want me to have? Oh, yeah, they will provide that service for sure. There's only a couple things they need. And one is the ability to change how you think and feel without you being aware of the change.
The main thing that they need to happen is essentially their job. Hey, Hank, do fish get thirsty? This question comes from Riley, age eight, parentheses, practically nine. That sounds like a big birthday going up there.
I don't know because I am not and have never been and will never be a fish. So this is well, that is presumptuous. Well, well, I kind of am a fish. For talking about important.
Right. Your land fish. Your land fish that carries the water, the ocean around inside of you. But I'm saying that it's presumptuous because you don't know what you will be.
It's true. Maybe I'll be a fish someday. I haven't thought about it. You have no idea.
You could become a fish. Yeah, it's not. Are you kidding? Look at the rest of Earth.
This whole thing is nuts. Their crabs keep happening independent of other crabs. Yeah, I think fish might have, well, I guess not. But I bet whales took on a lot of the fish flavors.
They figured out a lot of fishy ways to be. It's not the same. But maybe, maybe what is anything? What I'm saying is we don't know what the subjective experience is a fish.
They can't tell us. We can't know. What we do know is that mostly fish don't have to think too much about drinking because they're always kind of drinking. And so probably they're not thirsty, but there's a situation where either a saltwater fish will enter into sort of a more brackish area where there's some freshwater or a freshwater fish will enter into a more brackishish area where there's some saltwater.
And in those situations, they do have to carefully balance their salts. And that's really what drinking is. So that you can have more ocean in you to make sure your salts are correctly balanced and they don't get too concentrated in your body. And you have an impulse to do that.
And so in those situations where a fish is in, it's non- like native, like it's not specialized for the salinity of the environment that is then in. It has to do things physiologically. And so its body will do things on its own. But also the fish might make choices to do certain things because it is feeling an impulse to do that.
Because it's salt concentrations are wrong in its body, which to me probably means it's, and I hope that this is a good answer. It feels good to me. It probably feels a little bit like thirsty, would be my guess. Yeah.
Yeah. But okay. But is the fish making a choice or is the fish responding in a way it was always going to respond to a stimulus? You know, John, I think that if things move toward, if things respond to stimuli, I think that that's, you can't really call that a decision.
Maybe you can call it wanting just very abstractly. But that does not really a choice. No, but do, yeah. But like, again, now we're going to be here where I know where I know the sort of layer on top of that is can we choose what we want as conscious beings?
Yeah. And I think sometimes we can. Sometimes we can't. I'm not convinced that sometimes we can.
It's the great Schopenhauer quote that begins my novel turtles all the way down. Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. Yeah. It's a time to be thinking a lot about that.
But I don't know that we're going to come to better conclusions because it's not like we have new that much new data. I guess we have some new data, but mostly we have a little bit of new data. We've mostly been consciousnesses aware of our own consciousness the whole time. And so we are getting like new experiences of consciousness.
Like we it's always been like this. And it's always been really. I think it's just this whole situation is so weird being inside of a body. I know.
So weird. Yeah, it's very wet. Oh God, I'm getting kind of panicky. We got to move on.
All right. Well, let's try to do one that's not going to freak you out as much. This one is from Madeline who asks, dear Hank and John, just wondering if John has seen the dancing man with a hammerhead shark mask around Indianapolis lately. Oh, yeah.
So I'm going to work and it was quite something. Madeline. Yeah. I've also seen him.
And here's what I'll say about it. Indianapolis as a city is not known for its eccentricity. Right? Like it's just it's seen as a practical, you know, like Mitch Daniels called us the state that works.
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, you know, but it's the state that wishes it worked. That's how I would describe it. And so whenever I see a proper, a properly eccentric person, like that person, I'm always like, this is great. This is good.
We are becoming more like a city. Like, you know, there's that guy I think is in Miami who's rollerbladed on the boardwalk every day, or maybe he's out in California who's rollerbladed on the boardwalk like every day for 67 years or something. Right. Yeah.
We don't have anything like that. Nobody has done anything every day for 67 years in Indianapolis, except like wake up, brush their teeth, go to work, take care of their family, all that boring crap. Yeah. And so I'm delighted, really delighted when we get a little dose of eccentricity.
Maybe that'd be a job. Yes. Yes. Well, I think it used to be a job, Hank.
I think that, you know, like in a lot of, in a lot of communities, the, you know, like the community eccentric, or the community, a different person who was a little different, instead of like being cast out of the community or being seen as other, they were just like, oh, that's going to be, that person's going to have this job. They're going to be our storyteller. They're going to be our dancer. They're going to be our person who interprets the stars.
Yeah. We used to have a guy in Azula who had various grandparents and he would, he was just dancing around everywhere. Mr. Smallpants.
Yeah. We call him the Dancin Mange was what he was called around. Smallpants. And he, I don't know if he went somewhere or if he just sort of danced his last dance, but we don't, we don't have, we have a chess champion who walks everywhere in town.
He's called the Oskopus because he can win eight games at the same time. And we have got aggressive. There's also a old Greek guy who's like in the family of the people who own the Greek restaurant and he walks everywhere. And so they're like a couple of characters around town still, but I like they're, they're aging.
So we need some young ones. We need some new young walking around towners, maybe get a unicycle, maybe get a shark mask. I don't know. I'll throw it out that like, I think you'd be great at that show.
Yeah. I think I would too. You know, as, as you get older, and as you start to think like, well, what does my professional life look like if I'm not the CEO of 17 companies, simultaneously, maybe the answer is I need to put on a shark mask and ride a unicycle around the Zula and bring some joy to the people. And then I'll go to the city council meetings and I'll be like, look, I can't tell you who I am, but I am definitely a resident of this town.
I mean, need more housing. So stop whining about everything. I'm Batman. I'm perfect.
Yeah. He's like, exactly. And then Hank Green goes to all the fancy Missoula parties and shark face, unicycle boy, strolls the streets in the evening. Anybody need anything?
What a shark sound like. I think it's not what a shark sounds like. It's also not what a bat sounds like though. I will point out if Batman was trying to sound like a bat, he'd be like, I'm actually, he'd say on Batman, but you wouldn't be able to hear him, you know, like the mouth would move and you'd be like, what?
I'm sorry. But like two feet behind you, like a dog would be like, God, shut up. I love that idea. Oh, God.
Hard science Batman. Hard science Batman. Hard science Batman is not audible. Okay.
You can choose Bruce Wayne. Do you want to be Bruce Wayne with the sexy voice or do you want to be Batman powerful, but nobody except for bats can hear you. I come on the night. Ever since my parents left me, I've been a little lonely.
I'm not in touch with my emotions. So I mostly express it through physical violence. I'm just a rich guy with an affinity for bats. I'm not an actual Batman.
Great. All right. This next question comes from Libby here. I see John and Hank.
My roommates and I are looking for a firearm free alternative to the phrase, suns out guns out. We wanted to have the same cheeky enthusiasm for revealing your biceps in the summer, but we wanted to be weapon-free. And suggestions are appreciated, unarmed and unanswered, Libby. I mean, I have heard suns out buns out for sure.
That's good. But that's I was going to say, suns out, suns out, mums out, but that's sort of a British mom specific one. I like suns out buns out a lot more. Yeah.
We, yeah, we we we we. Turns out Tom's out kind of works. Turns out Tom's out. I once said, uh, suns out guns out to my son and then Catherine said, it's on the mom's out and then Oran said, very cute.
He said, suns out, suns out. That's great. That's a good point. He's got his is much funnier than most of his father's dad.
Okay. Let's think about anything that rhymes with arms. Anything rhyme with biceps. Yeah.
Arms. A muscle words. Yeah. Biceps.
Yeah. Well, but there's no biceps rhymes. Tri-seps is an obvious one. That's the big one.
They suggest triceps. Tri-seps. Tri-seps. Biceps.
That's not good. Daytime, slatetime. No, that's the whole volume of crap. What about like, uh, suns up, funs up.
I don't know. Sun's out, bun's out. Wait, but it's not that. Blue sky.
Blue sky. This guy. And then you flex pointing at yourself with your thumbs. Blue sky?
Blue sky. This guy. Yeah. Blue sky.
This guy. Yes. Blue sky. So we got blue sky.
This guy. We've got suns out, buns out. Mm-hmm. Probably suns out, buns out.
Is that it makes it sound like there's only one bun. Ooh, John, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Solar power bicep hour.
Oh, there we did it. Okay. Teamwork makes the dream work. Solar power bicep hour, everybody.
Um, suns out, prance about. That's nothing to do with bicep. But I think solar power bicep hour is... Probably as good as we're going to get.
Okay. You're welcome. I mean, I was on the far edge of what could have happened from that question. Um, 99% of the time, the best one is suns out, suns out, which is written by your five.
Thanks. Actually, which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by solar power bicep hour, the thrilling new renewable energy alternative to suns out guns out. I think we, I don't know, remarkably well. This podcast is also brought to you by a probably thirsty fish.
It probably thirsty fish. It is in the wrong salinity and is being physiologically pushed toward doing something about it. And is that a choice? We don't, we'll never know.
The world will never know. And of course today's podcast is brought to you by hard science batman. Hard science batman. You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the valent.
Tony's, when he runs away, like, uh, like Commissioner Gurd doesn't know where he is. He's like, where did he go? But he hears like, I can still hear him. He's got to echo locate.
You know, how else is he going to figure out where he is in space? How is he going to drive that? That movie? Yep.
And this podcast is brought to you by a spaceship that has gone halfway in the wrong direction. Everybody going to die on that spaceship? Well, everybody's going to die everywhere. It's just everybody on that spaceship is going to die sooner.
This episode of Dear 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 different tools together. And when things look real, that works on my brain to be like, I'm doing a real thing. It also works on other people's brains to be like, this is legitimate.
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.
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 website for more details. Again and again, which is why I keep coming back to Quince.
I often wear either a long sleeve or a short sleeve button down from Quince and it fits well and I never have any complaints. In fact, sometimes I get compliments about it. I was at the airport a couple days ago. I often find myself in airports and someone said, I like your shirt and I said, thanks.
It's from Quince. Quince is 100% European linen pants and shirts are breathable, easy to throw on and the summer upgrade your rotation needs starting at just $34. Their teas are soft enough to live in all day and the lightweight cotton sweaters are exactly what you want when those summer nights cool down. So that's why I'm wearing Quince this summer and you can make your summer wardrobe easier by going to Quince.com slash deerhank for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.
Now available in Canada too, that's qunce.com slash deerhank for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash deerhank. an Asian factor shops, preps, cooks and delivers straight to your door so you have more time for everything you love this spring. Head to factormills.com slash deerhank 50 off 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. Well, Hank, since we've been talking a lot about consciousness, how about this question from Hannah who writes deerhank, how worried should we be about artificial intelligence? Like sometimes it feels like a nightmare dystopia situation but other times it's kind of buggy and stupid. I want to believe nothing bad will happen but isn't that how all horror movies about exactly this topic start?
How actually realistic is an AI-fueled collapse of society, pumpkins and penguins? Hannah. I think that people, so here's broadly, I've seen a lot of just just complete steaming piles of poo uninteresting things be celebrated by the tech world in the last 10 years where it just felt a lot like somebody was like, man, we made the iPhone and then we did the social internet and something's next. So maybe it's this thing and it's just like obviously wasn't like from my perspective.
It was like, that's not going to be the thing. You're not understanding. I have no idea what you're referring to. But this definitely seems like a thing.
It seems like a thing. So there's like the worries around, I can see directly how this could be useful for people in ways that might change the shape of society. And then there's the, I can see how this could be used by bad people who want to do bad things. And then there's the, when something like this happens, we are bad at predicting what's going to happen with it and what it means.
And then there's also the, this seems to be getting better very fast. What does that mean and where is that going to go? And that last one is the one that I'm least comfortable with because like lots of people seem to have very different opinions on whether you should even use the word intelligent and all of these things are, they're just tools. It's like saying that a car is smart because it can run faster than a person almost.
But other people who also seem to know what they're talking about are like, we are very close to that being as good at everything cognitive as a person. And that is a totally, that's a totally wild thought. But I do think that it's going to change stuff really fast. And I think that we, I think that they are, they are compared to what they're going to be there relatively, you know, not, they're not as powerful as they're going to be.
So now is kind of the right time to be thinking about it from a regulatory perspective and also from a society perspective. We really didn't do that when it came to the, like many to many nature of the internet, like the regulations around the internet have always been doing it with the phone either. We did it. Right.
Or with the, you know, if you, we ended up regulating books and radio pretty well, but it took a long time. It took a long time and they didn't change very fast. So it was possible. Yeah.
I agree with you that any predictive take is it is kind of inherently bad. Like some of those predictions will end up being true and some of those predictions won't end up being true. But the ones that end up being true are not necessarily going to be true because they were like better, yeah, observed or are just because a lot of predictions are made. Exactly.
But because of chance, mostly. Yeah. And so I don't, I think anybody who's speaking with a great deal of confidence about artificial intelligence, even if they're an expert, should be discounted a little bit. Yeah.
And I think the people I've seen with the most expertise are speaking a lot of times with the least confidence, which is what I want. Yeah. That said, I agree with you that it's a huge deal. Like, yeah, it's it.
But if you look back at what we thought were going to be the problems that came from smartphones, right? Like, you could think about think about the wonderful things that smartphones have given us that they have dramatically reduced the number of people who who die from accidents, because they can now contact emergency people. They have on the other hand increased the number of people who die as a result of distracted driving. They have made it so that we can, you know, communicate more efficiently across time.
I mean, they've made it so that we can communicate more efficiently across space, which is amazing. It means that people can be in touch with their family members in a way that was impossible 10 or 20 years ago. Like, I remember when I was dating my college girlfriend, it cost us 10 cents a minute to talk on the phone, right? In that sense, things are much better.
However, they have also made it so that we have these sort of adult pacifiers with us at all times that I am not convinced is great for our brains. Yeah. Yeah. It's like good, good part.
But we didn't know any of that when we started out. Right. Right. Like in 2006 or 2007, like we started our YouTube channel before the iPhone came out.
And when the iPhone came out, I remember people being like, this is going to change everything. And they were right, but they were totally wrong about what it was going to change. Yeah. So and I think it's really with something big like this, I think it's almost more important to like dissect the kinds of things that we're looking at just to have like a landscape of how things might change and think about them in sort of silos where there's like, there's bad actors and then there's like, how does it change the economy?
And then there's like, as it ramps up and gets much better, you know, that's like the big mystery land. Because I think that like, how does it change education? How does it change healthcare? I think it's a change our relationship with ourselves and our understanding of consciousness.
Like you said earlier that we don't have any new data points about consciousness, but we are getting some, or at least we're being asked to think about them in a different way. Yeah. And you know, I think that I heard it's a big deal. I heard a great point the other day that like humans sort of defined their humanness by how good they were at more complex and challenging cognitive tasks right up until the moment when it seemed quite clear that computers were going to be good at that.
And now we're like, but those aren't those aren't like people. No, it's really feelings because it's about feelings. And then it's like, so the dogs for love. Like what about the, yeah, yeah, no, I'm I'd actually much prefer dogs to be conscious than a programmable artificial well, it also seems much more likely to me.
Yeah, I agree with that. Although on the other, I mean, it depends on what I think what it really is to do is the same thing that we're asked to do over and over again, which is to take these things that we've imagined as dichotomies and instead understand them as spectral. And so it used to be that we thought that consciousness was on and off. It used to be that we thought being a mammal was on and off.
And it turns out that it's a spectrum. Yeah. Even being a human we thought was on and off. And it turns out that like, no, there's been a bunch of human species.
And parts of some of them are still with us. It's very true. What a wild time to be whatever it is we are. This next question comes from Darren who asks, dear Hank and John, I am in the heart of Michigan.
And whenever spring break comes around, everyone just happily makes their way to some beach in Florida. So this sparked a question in my head, where do Floridians go on spring break? Do they just go to the motel on the other side of town? Or do they swap places with the northerners?
I can't really think of a sign off, Darren. You know, I used to live in Florida and I don't know if we're allowed to tell you what we do on spring break. Like, if you live in Florida, everyone knows what you do on spring break. But I feel like once you leave, you have to like, it's a secret when you're there for sure.
But I think even once you leave, you have to continue keeping it a secret. Yeah, that's correct. It's private. Yeah.
So it's, yeah, it's not really for Michiganders to know. Yeah. I mean, it's great. I mean, wow.
The best. I can't. Yeah. People often say that living in Florida sucks.
And that is correct. But man, one week a year. The way Florida does spring break, which is a secret. Oh, God.
It's really good for your feet too. Yeah. It's my gosh. Your feet feels so much better afterward.
Everything does. I just, I mean, it's almost like you're, it's almost like all of your bodily pains go away. Like you're not even totally in. Actually one, this is wild one year after spring break, I got home and I needed to go back to the optometrist because my vision got better.
Yeah. That's very common. Yeah. That's why there's something I'm talking about.
It's like, because they like, that's why there's no basic surgery in Florida. They don't need it. Yeah. Until you get out of like the spring break cycle, because I do know some older Floridians who just don't go on spring break anymore.
And then I'm like, why do you live there then? Yeah. Why just stay? Yeah.
Just get moved to Indianapolis or Missoul or something like a regular person. Yeah. It's really cool. I'm like my benefit of Florida spring break.
There's no reason. One of my favorite things about Florida spring break is that if you're on spring break in Florida as a Floridian, you can get a tattoo, but then when spring break ends, the tattoo goes away. Goes away. Yeah.
It's so cool. I mean, but it's not a temporary tattoo. No, it's a tattoo. But then like you go to school on Monday after spring break, you wake up and it's gone.
But it only, but it does show up under the black light. Yeah. I went full post Malone and you can still see it under black light. Like I've got like three or four face tattoos.
I don't even know how many. But they're really subtle and they're just, they're kind of like, yeah, it looks so cool. Yeah. They look like kind of almost like white line drawings or something underneath your skin.
It's really super awesome. So it's a bull face tattoo. Yeah. Kind of a sparkle to it.
Yeah. Do you have any that say anything or is it just like figures? I got, I did a lot of like, there's supposed to be six shapes that you can see without any visual information, like without any light. Oh, interesting.
Or sort of like intrinsic to the human eye, like some of them are structural, like you see eye structures. And so I did all six of those shapes. One of them is sort of spiraling. One of them is like the sort of splintering of roots or veins or whatever.
Yeah. I did those six shapes. I've got, I got two, one on each bicep and one that says solar power and the other. Yeah.
Bicep power. Oh, that's really, I love that. That's brilliant. I actually have all of Emily Dickinson's hope is the thing with feathers, time to cross my back.
Oh, God, I forgot that I did all of Lord of the Rings on my leg. Oh, yeah. Because they can get real small. Yeah.
It's a special thing. No, it's part of, you know, it's part of, you know, you, you get so big. It's actually not that hard during sportous spring break. Like your body is hundreds of times bigger than.
See, I'm partly getting to tell people that. Oh, God, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm part of the thing and I'm supposed to tell people about. Oh, I don't know what the thing is because I well, you told them the tattoo thing and I thought that was right. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, and then we need to stop talking about. Yeah. We could get in big trouble with the Exploity and Council and you do not want to mess with those people. They will ban your books.
They will, I mean, they will ban your books and they can also make one toe disappear every day for the rest of your life from your body. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Which you would think would be over after 10 days, but not that they do it. It's not. It's forever. I had a lot of fun with you there.
This is a question comes from Gillian who writes, dear John and Hank, if I remember correctly, before COVID, we were aware that we were due for a big sickness and a virus was probable. But what do we think the next one will be? Is a fungal infection capable of causing an apocalyptic type scenario? Is there another vector for disease besides those in viruses and bacteria?
Just try and prepare Gillian and or Gillian. Yeah. We don't know in the next one. We don't know in the next one.
I thought for a second that you were just going to say, yeah. And then move on. Yeah. That's kind of that's the other way.
Yeah. There are some other ways that it could happen. Here's the thing, Gillian, first off, like, this was not an apocalyptic bad disease pandemic. Unfortunately, it was very bad.
And obviously, it was extremely destructive to the social order and caused millions of people to die and tens of millions of people to grieve. And I don't want to minimize COVID in any way, but it's nothing like the Black Death when 50% of all humans in Europe and parts of Asia and North Africa died within a four-year period. It's nothing like even the flu of 1918, where probably around 100 million people died within 24 months. And so this is a pandemic, but it's nowhere near the worst version of a pandemic.
And we do not know when the next one will be. There was a chance that 10 or 15 years ago, the SARS epidemic that emerged could have become a global pandemic if we hadn't gotten it under control or if it had been slightly better at transmission or we'd allowed it enough time to get good at transmission as we did with COVID. And so it's not like, oh, these things happen every 100 years. It's like these things happen when they happen.
Is that fair to say Hank? Yes, absolutely. And the other worry is like, is there something out there that's worse than viruses and bacteria, which are our main concerns. And I think that there is like narratively, it's interesting to say, okay, but what about the other things?
Because of course, there are fungal infections, different things like we are full of great, tasty stuff. And I get that we're full like we're a good environment for a lot of things to live inside. If we didn't have an immune system, we just be food, right? So we have that and things are trying to, are evolving toward being good at taking advantage of the nutrient-rich environment of our bodies.
But virus and bacteria are the things that have been the best at that and they are going to keep being the things that are the best at that. And so I like- Oh, they've been so good at it for so long. Yeah. And I think I don't know if there's like reasons why fungus is a little bit worse at, obviously, fungus is going to infect people and do, but they seem to be a little bit worse at it.
So I think probably they will remain a little bit worse at it, but you know, knock on wood. Yeah. I mean, we just we cannot predict the future. Yeah.
That's exactly what we can do. What we can definitely do is make the next pandemic less bad and make it more likely that the next epidemic doesn't become a pandemic. And the way that we do that is we get better at identifying novel diseases early and we have better, stronger healthcare systems in the places where those novel diseases are most likely to emerge, which tend to be poor in middle-income countries. And every dollar that we invest in a healthcare system is a dollar that we are investing in our shared human future.
Yeah. And it's infuriating to me that despite the obvious and profound global interconnection of all people, we act as if some communities deserve a healthcare system and others don't, and like there will never be any global consequences to that expression of injustice. Yeah. Yeah.
And also that we have a really good reason right now to be thinking about how to strengthen healthcare systems everywhere and also be very conscious of how pandemics start and spread, and we have a bunch of new data on how that works that we didn't have before, and that's good. And we should be using that to have early warning systems for these things. And there should be a lot of resources that go toward it because we see how much it costs us. It is expensive in every way to have a pandemic.
So why not try to have fewer of them? It seems like a pretty whatever. I'm tired of making that argument. I just want to tell you this, Hank.
Do you know how long humans have had tuberculosis? Has it been the whole time? Not only has it been the whole time. Also, we had tuberculosis before we were us.
Yeah. You know, that's also true of a more rectus had tuberculosis. They also had lice. And we have chosen.
And so we had to live with this disease, we being hominids for 500,000 years. And then for about 60 years, we've chosen to have this disease. And that is a very interesting choice. So interesting that it makes me wonder, are we in fact making a choice?
Well, I mean, or are we just doing what seems obvious to us, which is to invest resources in diseases that affect the rich world and not diseases that infect other worlds? Well, I mean, so this is a very interesting distinction and a sort of supposition you've made, which is that we make a choice. And so are we as humanity, can humanity make a decision? Or is, because I kind of think it is, I think that we are, I think it can.
And I think it can. But in that way, like no one thinks that humanity is conscious. We think that humans are conscious. Right.
Right. But we should maybe start thinking about if you sort of like saw, if you really sort of stepped back and you saw like the way that humanity acts upon earth, in the same way that you might see an artificial intelligence, I think it might be kind of hard to not ascribe consciousness to that entity. Yeah, if you zoom even 10,000 feet up, right, you don't know the names of any individuals. Like if you're looking down at us and we're just like, you're like in a plane 10,000 feet above earth, and that's the only interaction you have with humans, I don't know that you would conclude that each of them is an individual or like would have a name.
I think you might conclude instead, look at all these people working together and look like there's that there's the amp that has that job and there's the amp that has that job. Yeah. And I kind of find it helpful to think about us that way, because when I stop thinking, like when I start to realize that like, we don't know the names of anybody who we have before 6,000 years ago, we don't even know for sure if they have had names, maybe 1,000 years ago, whatever it is. Then like, my name or like what I do is not nearly as important as playing, you know, being part of the connective tissue, which is the really interesting work and opportunity of being a person.
Right. But it's very hard to see it that way. Very hard because we are ultimately like you have to be taught about all of that because otherwise, like the experience all comes out of these two eyeballs, you know. Yeah.
So yeah, but yeah, I don't know. I don't think that humanity is conscious, I think that individual humans are conscious, but like, how do I know? Well, Hank, speaking of beautiful sprawling collaborations, how about AFC Wimbledon? The fans club.
Yeah, owned by its fans borrow 10 million pounds from its fans to build a beautiful world-class stadium in South London. Yeah. And really, really, really need, not want need to stay in the football league in order to not have like a proper crisis. And how's it going?
We're bad. Yeah. Aren't you all your people injured right now? We do have probably a stronger injured starting 11 than a current healthy starting 11.
But we just lost to the worst team in league two, at home, at Plow Lane. We lost to Rochedale or possibly Rochedale, only the scientists know for sure. And we were so bad. It was awful.
The only thing we've got going for us is that there's seven games left in the league two season. And we are currently 11 points clear of relegation. Surely, surely, we should be okay. But we are bad.
Do you want a game though? You beat it. Last week, we talked about how you beat a team that was better than you won the standings. Yeah, well, so yeah, that one.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks to Ali al-Homadee and Will Nightingale, who I would argue are not just our stars of the season. They're kind of the only real standouts right now.
There have been times when I played middle school soccer. I'm sure I've told the story a million times. And the coach let me start one game, even though it's terrible. And I was like, this is amazing.
This is my big chance. I finally made it as a soccer player. And then at halftime, the coach was yelling at all the players. And he said, you know why I let green start?
Because at least he tries. And I realized that I'd just been used as a motivational tool rather than a soccer player. There have been a couple of games where I felt that way about Will Nightingale and Ali al-Homadee. They're trying.
And I'm sure everybody's trying. It's just so frustrating right now. It's been really difficult. Ali al-Homadee, who joined us in January, is 20 years old.
He's an Iraqi refugee who came to the United Kingdom via Jordan after his family had to escape because his father was imprisoned for protesting Saddam Hussein's regime. And he is a star. He's an awesome guy. He's gotten so involved in the community.
He understands the values of Wimbledon. He's amazing. Like, I'm kind of in love with him. He's probably the first person I think about when I wake up most mornings.
And then you've got Will Nightingale, who's been playing for us since he was seven years old, and who is now 27. And has a real chance of being one of the only one club players in all of English football. He's just, it feels like he was made for us and we were made for him. So, you know, we're two-elevants of the way there.
Yeah. I bet there's a lot of teams there. It's just a bunch of them are going to leave this summer. A bunch of them are going to go to bigger clubs.