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Welcome to Dear Hank and John. I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you a advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. My friend, actually just one dentist of the year in Montana.
Congratulations, that's amazing. I was surprised by how small the award was though. It was a little plaque. Just a bit, just a bit of plaque.
No, it was a little plaque. It was a little plaque. It's a little plaque. Alright Hank, usually this is where we would riff a little bit but I'm not in the mood to riff.
I had kind of a rough week. So let's just get to the questions from our listeners beginning with this one from Lydia who writes, Dear John and Hank, I really need to know this. But what do y'all look like? Hank, you describe John, John, you describe Hank.
Is Lydia, do you think Lydia is not cited? I have absolutely no clue what y'all look like. My only way of seeing you is blurry pictures on the back of your books. I'm really interested.
I've got some news for you. This is the emotional energy that I needed. I just don't, like John is right. We can't riff right now.
We need to go straight in because it's just not been easy. No, that's the best way. But this is what I need. I need to know that there's a person who just listens to the podcast and reads the books and doesn't know about the rest of the internet stuff.
Doesn't know about Twitter, doesn't know about Instagram, doesn't know about YouTube, Lydia, Stagold and Ponygirl. Stagold. I mean, what a normal person would say to you is there's this thing called Google images so you can type Hank green into it. So I'm not going to say that because you need to add that complexity to your life.
Lydia, you're living our dream. Not reading books. Listen into podcasts, not on the social internet. You've cracked the code, Lydia.
If we wanted that, we could make it happen. So it's not precisely our dream. It is just the dream that we dream sometimes the way that you dream sometimes, you know? Maybe that's how you feel.
But I feel like it's my dream and I just haven't been able to achieve it yet. Yeah. All right, Hank, I'm going to describe you. I'm going to close my eyes.
I realize that I have a Fantasia, so that's not going to work. So instead I'm going to come back to the webcam. When I close my eyes, I see absolutely nothing. But when I look at the webcam, I see a middle aged man, white glasses wearing, curly hair, recent development, the curly hair, as a result of chemotherapy.
He wears a lot of t-shirts with a shirt over it, which doesn't sound like I'm describing him, but it actually is a description of his face because he has the kind of face that goes along with the person who wears t-shirts with long sleeve buttoned down shirts over them. I would say a pleasant, well-balanced face. He has lips on the slightly thicker side. He's got detached earwobes, nose, average, eyebrows, slightly sparse, but not as sparse as mine, and a nice strong jawline with a good solid chin.
Well, thanks, John. That's something I'm going to say. He's not a compliment. It's just a series of observations.
I pictured that guy and I was like, I like to look at that guy. As he was saying. He's doing okay. He's doing all right.
All right, I'm closing my eyes and I'm thinking of John and what I'm seeing in my head right now is Bernard from the movie Mastermind. Well, you're not the first person to make that observation. Do you ever think that maybe they knew that they were just fans? No.
And they were like, let's just start with John Green's face and then... First off, Bernard from Mastermind hopefully doesn't look that much like me. I'm Googling him now because I can't picture him because I have a fan. Mega mind.
It's Mega mind. It's the movie. Okay, thank you. That is helpful.
When I typed in Bernard, Mastermind, I got a lot of pictures of her face. Yeah, that guy does kind of look like me. Who am I kidding? No, I think we get my glasses falling down my nose right now.
Yeah, that's your head shape too. It's kind of my head shape. It was slightly elongated. Yeah, and like a pretty big forehead, big hair, and then like the head goes like in a little bit of the eyes.
Yeah. Well, it's mostly because of my glasses. Yeah, the glasses may look that way. Yeah.
Yeah. And then he's got a beard and then one, but he's like Bernard from Mega Mind but with a beard and also very briefly once a year a mustache. That's right. So you can just imagine me with a beard or a mustache lady, whichever you prefer.
But the main thing is don't go to Google Images, don't go to youtube.com slash vlogbrothers, stay golden. So do go watch Mega Mind. Do go watch Mega Mind. With some people call it the story of my life.
We have another question Hank, it's from James. Wait, I have a question for you John. It's from Hank. Oh sure.
Are you a beard guy now? Like I always sort of assumed when I saw you with a beard that you were working your way toward Pizzamas. You should have at least a little bit of grizzle on me, you know, like a 19th century Wild West outlaw. Sure.
They didn't have access to all those like easy access to razors. That's right. And indeed neither do either all the way upstairs. I can't do it.
I can't do it. I just like keep on the Wild West. I also suffer. As my hair was coming back, I let my beard grow just to see what it'd be like.
Yeah. And I had a little bit of scruff. It looked like, you know, a kind of a crappy little beard. Not the best beard in the world, but a little bit of a little beard and I could not handle the way it felt.
I like the way it feels. It feels like a little hug from my own face. Oh my God. It feels like I'm constantly being poked.
Oh, no, I don't have that experience at all. Now I'm starting to have it since you mentioned it. It feels like, yeah, it feels a little itchy. But no, I think I am a beard guy.
Maybe I have big feelings about it because I like myself clean shaving when I was younger. But the thing is I'm not younger. Yeah. I'm older.
I'm older. Getting older every day. I guess I'm a beard guy. It's funny.
I continue to get more beard as I get older. Like I have more beard now than I did when I was 40. And that's very weird. Like, I'm like, okay, I guess I keep changing.
I'm not a beard guy. I'm a beard guy. I feel like I can be a beard guy because when I was in my 20s, I couldn't be a beard guy. I didn't have a connector between my mustache and my beard.
I didn't either. Now I do. I got a nice little connector. So I'm feeling pretty good on the whole in terms of beard.
Otherwise mixed, but beard good. Yeah. If you're wondering, if you're young and you're thinking, I want a beard, but I can't grow a beard. Here's how John and I did it.
One, we got older. Second, we fought a bear every two weeks for two years. Yeah. That's dangerous.
No, weekly bear fights. Yeah. Some people would say bi-monthly bear fights. I wonder if bi-weekly could mean twice a week in which case that's real bad.
Fortnitely bear fights. Fortnitely bear fights. And not to the death. No, it was a pretty nice bear.
He really could. He could pull his punches. And indeed we could pull ours. Yeah.
No, I've ever killed a bear. You just fight a bear every two weeks. Fortnitely. Two weeks, I give a bear a black eye, but you can't really even tell.
It's great. Because they're all furry. I was already black. So think about bears.
There's a black bear, not a brown bear. We're not trying to try and smash. No. We're fighting a bear that weighs like 30 pounds more than I do.
Yeah. I'm not going to fight with a black bear because he's punching and then it runs as fast as it can. Why did you do that? That was so rude.
Very mean. I'm basically just a squirrel. Yeah. God, I'm just a fat raccoon.
Don't be mean to me. Do you think bears are raccoons would do a better job being the sentient species on Earth? Oh, bears. I think raccoons would have a lot more fun.
Oh, yeah. They'd be troubled though. Oh, yeah. They'd make trash just to eat trash.
You know, honestly, I bet a raccoon would vastly prefer a warm-coaked meal to trash. We don't think of them as like trash eaters, but that's because that's the option they have. So, I think that if you're going in there to get the stuff that's better than like even French fries out of the trash, I'm sorry, better than eating acorns. For sure.
For sure. That's a great point. And raccoons are smart. I don't know that I think it's 50-50 that raccoons become the sentient species after us.
If we die tomorrow as species and I wouldn't rule it out, I think that raccoons are really well-positioned. They're small, but they could get bigger. Like the evolutionary pressures could be on bigger brains. They're smart.
They've got those dexterous hands. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, I could see it being chimpanzees, but raccoons are everywhere. There's so many of them.
And I give them a lot. Yeah, they've already done the geographic distribution thing. I think it could be a good run for both chimpanzees and raccoons. So people are always like, oh, like the end of the world is coming.
The end of the world is coming. Repent. The time is nigh. And like for us, yeah.
Not for raccoons. How do we even leave a note for the raccoons? I don't think the podcast is going to make it. So we need to do something.
That's a great idea, Hank. We need to make a podcast for raccoons. That's the next episode. It's all going to be the raccoons.
Send in your raccoon specific questions that you want to communicate to the future of raccoon kind. I think the main thing we need to tell them is that we did our best and it wasn't very good. Yes. So if they feel like they're not doing well, that's because it's really hard to be what we are.
It's a tough gig. But also learn from us and don't do what we did. But also do do what we did. Do what we did in the sense that like pursue curiosity and pursue technology just not unto your own death.
And that's a hard line, man. We didn't nail it. And I'm not sure the raccoons will either. Well, look, maybe we did.
Maybe we're on the right path, John. Or a path. I'm sorry. That's implausible.
We've said some weird crap in this podcast, but that's the weirdest thing you've ever said. I did comedy last night. The show I'm trying to build right now is making a case that humans aren't bad. And so I got up there and I told a couple of jokes and then I was like, I'd like to make a do a hot take for you right now.
And I don't know how we're all going to feel about it. But I like to make the case that people aren't bad. And there was like one person in the room who was like, whoo. And then everybody else was like, no.
This is not what I came to the comedy show tonight. Yeah. Yeah. I really think that people don't want to hear that people aren't bad right now.
There's too much. There's too much bad. There's a lot of no. There's a lot of bad.
And the bad is super real. It's hard to balance that because when the bad is super real, it's hard to focus on the good as well. Can I just ask you this question from James? I'm sorry.
I'm going into a dark headspace and I don't like it. I don't want to go there. That's not why I make this podcast. I make this podcast to hang out with my brother and talk about James's concerns about Australia.
Okay. James writes, good day, John and Hank. I think that I said that wrong. Can you actually read this one?
Yes. It says good day Hank and John. No, that's not right. It's like that.
But it's more good. Oh, you want to do an Australian accent? I just want you to read it the way that James would say it. I thought you hated when I do ask.
I just want you to. Well, first off, I've never heard your Australian for all I know it could be brilliant. I think that the reason you've never heard it is I may not have one at all. I have worked on it, but I don't think that I've ever.
Okay. That's better. Actually, if you're in years, if you're workshop, I get that's even more exciting. Right, right, right.
Yeah. Yeah. Good. John and Hank, I'm from the Great Faraway Nation of Australia and I'm British immediately.
That was pretty good. That wasn't that bad. After this recent US election, I've been thinking about just how much Australians know about the USA. It's quite a lot.
We get most of our entertainment and news and social media from you guys. But to be honest, it doesn't seem very reciprocal. I mean, it seems like most Americans know very little about us, sure, like at all. But I want to set the record straight.
What do you guys think about us? Or just a nation of Steve Irwin's to you? Do you think about us at all? Mangoes and marsupials, James.
P.S. Hank better not do his awful Australian accent while reading this. I swear. You jerk.
You know that was there, didn't you? I read the question in advance, Hank. I had an advantage. Well, importantly, you pronounced Australia wrong.
It's called it's called in not Australians. It's called Shrayans. Australians. All right.
What do we know about Australia? Hank, who is the Prime Minister of Australia? Who's there Donald Trump? You want to try mail or female?
I'm pretty sure it's a guy. That's correct. I also don't know his name, but I know that his initials are AA. It's like Albert, Australia or something like that.
His name is very much like that. It's like Alfred, amiable or obvious. Yeah. I think it's just Alfred, Australia.
How could they not elect him, man? Yeah. Because it's his name. That's the comedy that I did last night about how it matters a lot what your name is when you're running for office.
You start thinking you might run for office. You need to change your name from Pete Buttigieg to something that doesn't feel like a spelling lesson. Let me tell you his actual name. Okay.
It's basically Arthur, Australia. It's Anthony Albanese. Anthony Albanese. I was on the right track.
If you'd given me a million years, if I was the proverbial monkey at the typewriter, I would have eventually gotten to Anthony Albanese. Anthony, Norman, Albanese. What else do you know about Australia, Hank? The impression I have about Australia is there's a bunch of people who are like there's like a creative vibe I get from it.
Okay. I'm sure a lot of great writers from Australia like Marcus Zuzak. Housing is very expensive. That's another thing that Australians seem to talk about a lot on the internet.
It's very hard. It's like a housing crisis that's like ours, what even worse. There's a lot of one thing that Americans think about Australia a lot is that it's dangerous. We think about, oh, there's got a big spiders and there's big snakes and almost dangerous animals are from there.
Yeah. One thing we don't know that I think that I have incorporated into my understanding of Australia but I don't think most people have is that it is huge and empty and that there's a very large area of Australia that does not have anything or much of anything in it and then there's a small area that has almost all of the people. But on the whole it is much bigger than you think it is. Yeah.
Okay. One thing I know about Australia is that it has universal healthcare. Okay. And they speak English.
Yep. It's a funny English but it's English. It's an English color. There's a queen on the money for sure.
They have the queen on the money for sure. They're still in the Commonwealth. I think and I think that in general I feel like Australia is significantly more progressive than the United States. Although these days that's quite a will bar to jump over.
Yeah. Though I think that has some things that maybe you could make the other argument. Like I don't think there's any policy with super great. But Anthony Albany's I know is from the Labour Party for instance whose name I just learned and we haven't elected a Labour Party member or a leader from the equivalent party ever.
We don't have a party that's left wing in the United States as the Labour Party is in Australia. We don't have a Medicaid for all party in the United States. We sure don't. The other thing I know is that they have a lot of coal and but they are becoming a greener nation but they are still exporting all the coal and that's contentious.
A lot of great artists in Australia. They're all extremely attractive. They do tend to be attractive across the line. It's true.
They're attractive and tanned and on surfboards. I remember the first time I met Marcus Zusak, the author of the book Thief and I just remember thinking my God that man is so good looking. There's the guy Troy Hunt. He's an Australian guy who's like an information security guy.
I don't know who that guy is but I know Troy Savon is. Troy Savon also not Australian but he was an Australia. Troy was in Australia. I'll bet you a million dollars.
I think it's from South Africa. Did I make that up? He was born in South Africa. Well, you can say that but he was born in Perth.
Nope, he was born in South Africa. Dang it. How did you know that about Troy Savon? I don't know.
What a thing to know. He is Australian though. I feel like I know Troy better than you do. I should be the one who knows the Troy.
Yeah, you know him as a person but I'm a bigger fan. That's probably true. I really like Troy's music though. I always try a lot.
I've always thought he was a really interesting guy. Really talented. Look at his picture on his Wikipedia. His second picture on his Wikipedia is him at the paper towns from here.
Look at that he said the paper towns from here. Aw. He was so young. Oh my VidCon.
Oh my gosh. He was even younger in 2014. We got to get some newer pictures of Troy Savon's Wikipedia page. That's weird man.
I feel like we're responsible for two thirds of Troy Savon's pictures on Wikipedia. Yeah. We're just power brokers John. Well you said it not me and when you said it made me made my stomach turn a little bit.
I bet it did. But yeah Troy Hunt is a very attractive Australian who I follow on Twitter to help me understand when there are bad things that happen in passwords on the internet. What? Like when somebody like somebody gets hacked and passwords get leaked.
What do you think the population of Australia is saying? Guess without googling. Guess without googling. Alright, let's do it.
This is great. I think the population of Australia I'm going to go 80 million people. First off that was never going to be the case. What do you mean?
Second off you're wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong. Well did you look it up? Well yes but I wish that I had it down.
No you didn't say first that's not fair. Well okay. I just try to remember. Well okay.
I'm just trying to think. I'm dumbing in. I'm dumbing in. I'm dumbing in.
I think you're dumbing. I'll throw out a guess. I'll throw out a guess. 26.6.4 million in 2023.
That's my guess. With a gross domestic product of 1.724 trillion so we're talking about a GDP of about $64,711. That would be my guess if I had to make a guess. Well it's $64,777.
Oh sorry I don't have a very good vision when I don't have my pifocles on. They have way fewer people than Canada. They have fewer people than California. Yeah.
Yeah. Alright. Well yeah I think they have fewer people than Florida which is frankly embarrassing. Well.
Not the same. Not the same. Alright. It's like the Florida of the entire ocean.
Hank. You should never say that kind of thing about Australia. We're allowed to make fun of Florida. We grew up there okay.
So we suffered. We can make the jokes. We can make the jokes. And maybe it's better now.
It doesn't seem to be. I'll tell you what not statistically it's not. I feel like frankly Florida is in danger of entering that territory that Alabama was in when I was a student there in the 1990s where people would often say that the state motto of Alabama was thank God for Mississippi because Alabama was 49th in everything. Anyway that's not to dig in anybody who lives in Florida except for their governor Hank.
What's our next question? It comes from Megan who asks hi Hank and John. It's not currently a cure for cancer but we have treatments that help and from what I understand some people after treatment have no more cancer cells. Is that not a cure?
I'm definitely not a doctor so I apologize if I got anything wrong about this. Pumpkin's and penguins and Megan. Yeah. So we do have cures for cancers.
We just don't have a cure for cancer. All cancer. Yeah. Because cancer isn't really one disease.
It's a lot, a lot, a lot of diseases. Yeah. And it's also different than every person. In a way we don't have a cure for anything because if you are in a specific situation you can be killed by the commonwealth.
We don't have a cure for staff infections because some people get the kind of staff infections that don't respond well to our existing tool to a kid of antibiotics. Yeah. But we have a cure for many people with staff infections are cured by their own immune systems. And others are cured by fancy antibiotics like this guy.
Like I've over and over again. Well, I have to get a lot of antibiotics because I get a lot of staff infections. I don't know. Yeah.
They just love you. So in that way, that's a great point that we do have like we cure many cancers. There are many cancers that have no cure, especially ones that are later stage. So that's another thing that like a cancer it's like a different disease at stage three than at stage one, which is why they do stages because it requires a totally different set of treatment and how you think about it when it's at a later stage.
It's not just that it is a more advanced disease. It's literally that it's different. Like cancers when they metastasize. So if a solid team of metastasizes, it's because it changed.
And when it metastasizes, that provides a number of advantages to it. One, it's in a bunch of different places. And so it's harder to just like cut it out. Two, as a cancer evolves in the place where it first formed, it only has one set of pressures on it.
And so it sort of maintains some amount of like similarity to itself. And then if it moves from, you know, from the breast to the lung or from the kidney to the brain, it's in a new environment. And so that new cancer colony in a different area of the body is going to be super different from the cancer colony in another area of the body, which means that the treatments, like one set of treatment isn't going to work as well on one of the colonies in another because it's literally genetically different. Because people are interested.
They move around the body. I don't think I fully understood that. That's really both interesting and kind of scary. No, yeah.
That writing this book is very much that. It's like, why is this fascinating and terrifying? Yeah. I love how interesting this is as long as I don't have to consider it as a thing that actually happens to people.
I'm very excited for this book, Hank, that you were supposedly writing and that I have read to be fair. So I know you're writing it, but I'm just excited to see where it goes and what happens with it when it comes out. Yeah. It's going to be a while, I think.
All right. Hank, we have another question from Sylvie who writes, I'm 11 years old and my question is that I have too many books and I collect graphic novels, but now I have too many and I don't want to give them away. What shall I do? Pumpkin's and penguins, Sylvie.
Sylvie, you've got to give them away. Oh, no. Or alternate. You create a lending library.
Hmm. Like with your school, fellow school kids or whatever. You're fellow nerds, I assume. Well, Hank, I think that Sylvie's parents had Sylvie write this email to us in the hopes that we would say exactly that.
Like, oh, you got to give them away, Sylvie. Nothing lasts forever. You got to let go. You know, if you love something, let it go and let it have another life with another person.
No, Sylvie. Hoard your books. That's my advice. Keep all your books.
The books that I have from when I was a child are absolute treasures to me and I can't get rid of any of them and I beg my kids to read them and they don't and yet I still can't get rid of them. Hoard, hoard, hold on to them, Sylvie. Hold on to every single last one of them. Cling to them as if they were life rafts and you were in a vast and empty ocean.
Sylvie will be the dragon of the book world. Just poised to top a mountain of graphic novels, listening claws, Keith dripping with ink, just murdering anyone who approaches. That's right, Sylvie. That's what we're dreaming for you is that one day you'll have a vast adult library that goes all the way up from when you were reading like a cat kid comic club all the way until you started reading, I don't know, Watchmen and Mouse.
And you'll have the greatest graphic novel collection on earth. And people will go in shell approach. There'll be scenes in there. From all corners of the earth, Sylvie, when you're 16, you're going to get so many disease.
There's going to be weird manga. The kind that's not even that interesting where bad stuff is happening to people but not in any kind of unusual way. Just the everyday misfortune. I've read a couple of those and I'm like, why am I doing this?
That actually reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the everyday misfortune. The everyday misfortune, they're right around the corner. This podcast is also brought to you by Sylvie's Hoard. Sylvie's Hoard, stay back.
No dude on approach. Nonchalant, nonchalive. If you come in, you cannot go away. I will turn you into books.
This podcast is also brought to you by Troy Savon. Troy Savon. He's handsome. My guest is also brought to you by the State of Florida.
The State of Florida just sort of wiggling off at the bottom there. I take an alternate name for the State of Florida is Florida. There's less and less of it each year. So we're going to have to learn to share, right?
Right? Right? Sell their houses to who? Men?
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Best, Scott? What a good question that we had to figure out the answer to on the fly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We also have been asked this question before but as far as I can understand it's got a business It gives 100% of its profit to charity, funds good work, and charity does good work.
Exactly. This took me a while to figure out. I was like, why can't we just turn good store into a charity? And they were like, because it doesn't do charity stuff.
Right. It does selling tea and coffee and soap and undies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, there is like a buzzy line there where, you know, like the arts community center in Missoula puts on shows.
Like they have comedians coming to town, and that helps to fund the community center. But that's not like, that's like what a comedy club does, and a comedy club is a business. And so they have to like, but the way that they do that is that the shows are run by an external organization that then pays for the space, and that money goes to the budget of the community center. And that, you know, but like the majority of the work that they do is they help.
They like provide services for all the people of Missoula to like, or how to do art and hang out. And so they're doing that work, whereas the majority of the work that Goodstore does is just selling, it's like e-commerce. That's all, that's really all we do. And then we give all that money away.
So we have to pay taxes. Like a big thing there is like what you don't want is for a company to pretend that they're not a company, so they don't have to pay taxes. And Goodstore still has to pay taxes. That's the important thing to understand.
That's the big difference is the tax exempt status. But we set up Goodstore, which by the way, you can visit Goodstore and solve all your holiday needs. But we set up Goodstore with the idea of funding in a long-term open-ended way impoverished healthcare systems. And so the idea is to provide recurring ongoing long-term revenue to those healthcare systems.
And it's going great so far. We've raised $1.25 million this year, but I think we'll probably get to $1.5 million before the year is over. That's my hope anyway. Yeah, which is a little smaller than last year.
And the balance of that, and I think the big reason is that I didn't do the cancer socks, which was a huge thing last year during chemo. But I think that the other parts of the business are growing and that it's definitely sustainable and cool. And we just have to figure out the right way. We just have to figure out how to get bigger.
Yeah, well, I mean, I also want to figure out how to not have it be smaller, because that's always hard when the business is smaller. That's a great point. We have to make it bigger specifically so that it doesn't become smaller. Yeah.
Yeah. And we have to do ideas for it, but we don't know if they're going to work. Yeah. And we've struggled to scale goods store at the rate that we thought we could scale it.
Like we've struggled to scale it outside of Nerdfighteria. So one of the reasons we're giving away less money this year is because we spent money on paid advertising, which is becoming a better investment for us over time, but started out as a pretty hard, a lot of money per customer acquisition, as they say. Yeah, we have a significant CAC. That's the customer acquisition cost, to be clear.
I try not to ever use those words, the shortened words. They're terrible. But anyway, we're making progress on the CAC front. And we're also making progress on other fronts.
So we're hopeful that goods store and goods are a pretty good holiday season, which I have to say is a massive relief. Yeah. But we could still have a better holiday season if you go to good dust today. Yeah.
I forgot that we can do that. There's so much good stuff. That's one of the reasons I think we're, you know, there's a lot of stuff that's sort of selling itself at the moment. The coffee, tea, especially, such and the soap, all have such high customer retention, because people get it and it's really good and they like it.
And so they keep getting it. All right, if we have to answer one more question before we get to the onboard news from Mars and AFC woman in this question is from Carmen who writes, hello, green brothers. I'll cut right to the chase in episode 413 minutes, 17 seconds. People talking about a dead author, Hank says, well, he's dead.
So he's the same age as all the other dead people. Listen, that how it works. And is that how it works? You become an ageless object in the form of a body for the rest of eternity?
Or are you frozen if the age you died? Or do you age continuously as time goes on time as weird? I'm afraid of dying, ticking time, Bob. Carmen.
Ooh, I think I'm right. All the dead people are the same age. Yeah. I think that's right.
Are they some like? No, they're not an age on our spectrum. They're a different age. It's not like a number.
It's a different thing. But I do think of them. And I know that you're not going to like this. There's like 120 billion people of whom about 112 billion are dead.
And it's like, what does that mean? Like about 22 dead people for each of us, living people? And I think of it as them. I mean, we inherited their world on every level, right?
Even though the majority of them died before the age of 15 years old, they still contributed through their love and being loved to the world that we share now. Like they loved us up into the world literally and figuratively. And I think of them as like kind of trying to hold us together. Yeah.
You know how I think of them, John? I think of them as well. What? As a bunch of femurs.
I thought you said beavers. And I was like, no, but that's awesome. Maybe I should. Yeah, just damn force.
I just want to imagine all the dead people as beavers. Like the cutest beavers. That is a little weird when I think grandma is a beaver. It's 112 billion beavers.
Just playing in the stream of time. How do you seriously think of them? I think of them as all the words. All the words together.
I think of them, I think of the words. And I think these words were not made by any person. Like the words that we use were not made like no word. No one word was made by any one person.
No, a couple words. Except for Shakespeare's got a bunch of twist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then we like, you know, we took those and we kept on messing around with them.
Even Shakespeare's. Yes. And we will continue to mess around with them. And the thing that is communication and the tremendous number of words that we get in all of the different languages that then get shared between languages is how we do the thing that is the most human thing, which is put ideas into each other's heads and put stories into each other's heads.
And so without, and like there was a time when there weren't very many words and so we were less good at that. And now there's just like more and more words. And those are the things. Well, there's both more words and all the words in the sense that there are fewer languages.
And so. It's true. But in my, in my, in my communication, I just think about like the ghost of all of the people and all of the things that I say. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like I didn't come up with these words. No, they, they brought the language to you. And then you inherited it and did what you could with it and added you a little bit.
It's a little bit like the world's largest ball of paint, right? Everybody gets to add their own layer and your layer effects the next layer, but it's not like your layer is by any means the last or most important layer. Yeah. And I like this because like words aren't a thing that exists.
They're just like. Yeah. Breath. Yeah.
Anyway, that brings me to AFC Wimbledon news. America's favorite fourth year English soccer team, which is made ultimately out of language just like the rest of us. Ideas. AFC Wimbledon played A crington Stanley during the weekend.
I was actually at the Partners in Health board of trustees meeting and rather heroically chose not to stream the match during that meeting. And then it was feeling really good about that decision in the 75th minute because we were down to nil. And I get little updates on my phone. So I would glance down at my phone and see, oh God, we've given up another goal.
And I was like, well, what a perfect game not to watch. And then in the 89th minute, Alistair Smith scored a goal. And I was like, well, but probably not. And then in the last kick of the game, 97 minutes in James Tilly with an outside the box banger two, two draw, beautiful come from behind Ty.
The second most glorious result of them all, Hank, a draw. That's right. We tied A crington Stanley. We're currently eighth in the league two table, but we still have a game in hand.
So theoretically, we could be good enough to get into the playoffs if we were to win that extra game that we have. And I don't know. I mean, it's only about a third of the way through the season. Yeah.