Hey, so something worth knowing is a benefit for the nonprofit organization that makes Crash Course and SciShow Complexly. It's September 16th, 2026 in Los Angeles, California at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. Please join us. It's going to be incredible.
Friends have complexity like Mark Rober, Katie Max, Simone Yech, and more will share inspiring talks about what makes them hopeful and join Hank Green on stage for fun, interactive discussions. Complexly has been creating free educational content like SciShow and 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. Hello listeners of this podcast. In keeping with us generally always being behind a schedule, this podcast was recorded before the last weekend, which was a very bad one.
So if you're wondering why we don't reference the shootings in Orlando, that's why. I imagine they will come up in the next episode. Thank you for listening and DFTBA. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.
Or is that for the Good Dear John and Hank? It's got a podcast where me and my brother John, we answer your questions, we give you your advice and we bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon a third Dear English soccer club. I'm not tired of hearing that Hank. I believe it.
I gotta update the description of Dear Hank and John and I'm not entirely sure how to do it. Right because it says we talk about a fourth-tier English soccer team but we don't anymore. It's almost as if there was a planet discovered between Earth and Mars. We have the end of the podcast description as well but it turns out that AFC Wimbledon much more changed than Mars, no offense to Mars.
Yeah, no, agreed. There is kind of a planet between Mars and Jupiter but that's not going to help anything. How you doing John? I'm doing well.
I'm having a little bit of an existential crisis as a result of a book I'm reading that was recommended to me by our father called Sapiens. Are you familiar with this book Hank? I am. I just received it in the mail from our father.
It's a great really interesting history book but I cannot in good faith recommend it because it has sent me into an absolute spiral of fear and loathing. Fear and loathing. I feel as Robert Penn Warren once famously wrote that I'm a bubble on the tide of empire. More than ever I feel that I am not making any of the choices that are supposedly mine but instead I'm just a tiny dot in a much larger pointless painting that is being shaped by forces far, far larger than myself.
It's interesting to me that that's not how you felt previously. Well I have little moments where I feel like I have something approaching proper free will but no longer. That's that's ended. Yeah, actually we just recorded an episode of Crash Course Philosophy on free will and in general the philosophical agreement is that we don't we just don't.
There's it's very difficult to once you once you start down that rabbit hole to come to a conclusion that indicates that that we actually have any choice in the matter. However it feels like we do and that's the important thing. I'm not sure that is the important thing actually. I feel no you know as I've gotten it's interesting because as I've gotten older I find myself less and less convinced by the acts of my so-called volition and I feel more and more like you know people don't wield power so much as power wields people.
Oh my well that's not really what I was talking about but maybe we should have a poem before we just start talking about existentialism for the entire episode. All right this is another haiku from Richard Wright. I'm a huge Richard Wright fan and I've written a lot of good haikus over the years. You moths must leave now.
I am turning out the light and going to sleep. All right so the real you love that one Hank because it's short hold on let me crack open a delicious night. All right oh my goodness is there a better sound. I thought we were gonna stop with Dr.
Pepper stuff. Why would we stop with it? It's delicious. I love drinking Dr.
Pepper. Okay I see I see. We'll do this continue with the loving Dr. Pepper but we won't mention whether or not we would like Dr.
Pepper to sponsor. No I don't want Dr. Pepper to I don't actually want that Dr. Pepper to sponsor us and now that Dr.
Pepper follows me on Twitter I feel that we've kind of flown too close to the Sun on this one and I'm getting very anxious that Dr. Pepper might actually offer me money and then I would have to turn them down because my stupid brother doesn't allow me to take sponsorships so yeah uh-huh yeah so we have to turn off the light so that the moth that is Dr. Pepper will go home. That is correct we have got to turn off those lights to keep those Dr.
Pepper moths from floating about Dear Hank and John. All right John I have a question that I wasn't actually intending to ask but it became so apropos while we were having this conversation at the beginning of the podcast. It's from Ellen who asks Dear Hank and John Elon Musk said in an interview that we are probably all simulations of people rather than actual people. I feel weird when I think about this.
Does this mean that my choices matter less because they aren't real or does it mean that my choices matter more because they matter not only to me but to whatever entity is observing slash experiencing what I do. Do you have any advice for how to feel about possibly being a simulation of the person that I thought that I was? Well I wouldn't worry too much about it is my advice um though John is worrying quite a lot about it right now due to a book he's reading. It's hard not to worry about the problem is that it's just not particularly useful to worry about Hank are you familiar with the turtles all the way down thing?
Yes no I think you've talked about the turtles all the way down on this very podcast. For me it's just that for me the question of whether we are a simulation is a turtles all the way down type of issue. It is it is not something that can lead to productive lines of thought and I'm not sure as like I'm I'm not sure that it's worth thinking about things we can't fix. Yeah we just we just recorded an episode of Crash Course Philosophy about this topic it has not it has not come out yet but it will so I suggest that you go watch Crash Course Philosophy where we talk about determinism and free will and whether free will exists and all of the ways in which we have made those arguments over the years uh in some ways it doesn't even matter whether or not it's a simulation because even if it weren't there are there are you know logical uh trains that you can follow that will lead you to the realization that just based on how the Big Bang happened today was inevitable.
That's a very difficult thing to come to terms with I do feel like I'm making choices all the time you know many of the things that I do are clearly not choices but many of the things that I do are and I do feel as if I make those choices and I think that the way that we experience the world is in many ways the most important thing rather than the way the world actually is and I don't I don't you know I don't know that everybody's gonna agree with me on that but that is what I have come to believe done. Yeah I mean there's different kinds of realness right I mean there's the realness of uh you know there's the realness for instance of the theory of relativity like we know that these laws govern the natural world and then there's the realness of like the limited liability corporation or laws against murder like those things are constructed but they are also quite real you know they're real because we all believe in them together but that doesn't mean that they're not real and I think we have to be very careful about the things that we believe in together the things that we choose to make real by force of our believing in them but I think we will always have those things whether they're gods or corporations or laws against murder we have to have those kind of shared beliefs those are the things that I'm worried about I guess if we collectively decided that we were living inside of a simulation that would have a big impact on the human story but I don't think that's a likely shared belief and I don't think it would necessarily be a very helpful one. Yeah I kind of feel a little bit like Elon Musk is just just making the gamble and saying like I'm going to go ahead and say that we live in a simulation potentially we do and if we do maybe the person who's watching can be like oh Elon Musk he does so many interesting things in my simulation including realizing that he's in it. Oh what a great guy yeah that makes Elon Musk feel good about himself.
Right it's like Pascal's wager right except it's Elon Musk's wager he's betting that we're in a simulation and he just really impressed somebody. There's some 11 year old boy in some kind of super universe who's just like oh man one of them finally figured me out. All right John you got another question for me? Not really I'm still stuck inside of this existential loop that I can't get out of.
The whole problem with obsessive thinking heck is that it takes the form of these like ever tightening spirals from which there is no freedom until suddenly it does just go away and you're like huh that was weird anyway yeah I got a question this question from Jay Bella who writes Dear John and Hank my brother makes you listen to your podcast on the way to school every day and although I try very hard not to I started to like it though my brother claims I am now a nerd fighter I refuse to accept a title I do not understand do nerd fighters fight nerds fight for the term nerds or are they nerds that fight my brother says he thinks nerds that fight but fight what you can't fight without having something to fight that's just really bad slash weird dancing it's just a great observation Bella that if you're fighting without having something or someone to fight really you're just dancing and well I don't know that it's necessarily bad weird dancing maybe you're really good uh no person fight dancer yeah it could be it could be excellent dancing the point is that it is not fighting it's dancing she makes a good point there um well I think that it's possible that John and I are you know members of the community of nerd fighters and all we are in fact doing is bad slash weird dancing about things actually be I might be really astute insight yes but to answer your question Bella the idea is that uh nerd fighters fight for nerds in the same way that freedom fighters ostensibly fight for freedom um and as far as being a nerd fighter uh we've always said that if you think you might be a nerd fighter you probably are one there's no like initiation right or anything it's just uh one identity among many that you choose for yourself for the time that you consider yourself to be that and uh we would welcome you as a nerd fighter but we also welcome you if you don't consider yourself a nerd fighter yeah you could just be a fan of the pod yeah the only requirement is that you do have to uh fight but not fight against anyone so you do have to do the dance fighting that is uh that is a technical requirement of joining our club right right of even of being a listener of the podcast I expect that all of you are doing weird dance fighting right now yeah I know wherever you are uh two things that you need to know first oh my god it's burning second you better be dance fighting right now I'm doing it I'm drinking my die dr pepper and dance fighting in front of the microphone I am likewise dance fighting all right actually we move on to another question I don't even believe you by the way your dancing is too uh my dancing is very subtle you know it's something I do primarily from the elbow to the fingertip your dancing is a full body thing so there's no way you could be doing it in front of a microphone oh I but I could keep like I have an excellent body isolation so I could keep my head perfectly still while moving my the rest of my body vigorously oh which is what I'm doing right now I mean I would love to see that dance in real life the head still body vigorously moving dance all right this question is from Megan she asks dear Hank and John I'm pretty new to the podcast but a long-term fan of the vlogbrothers so I have been binging on all the old episodes to catch up I have a long-term history of talking nonsense in my sleep my boyfriend recently told me that I have been talking about Mars in my sleep and I attribute that to the pod do you have any dubious advice for how to stop talking in my sleep no I do not why would I make you stop this sounds great no talking in your sleep is a dangerous dangerous business Hank because you could say something that's true uh and secret so you definitely don't want to talk in your sleep unfortunately I know of no way to prevent yourself from talking in your sleep except to take um Ambien which does seem to work at least for me but not a great long-term solution I think I think that as long as you're just talking about Mars in your sleep there's no problem so make sure that you just continue to talk just about Mars the only way you can do that is to think a lot about Mars which is you know obviously a wonderful thing to do anyway and then have uh have your boyfriend take notes on the things that you're saying about Mars and uh send them to us we'd be interested to hear all right we have another question uh this one is from robin who writes dear John and Hank my name is robin stop trying to be Ryan robin my name is robin and I'm the germ conscious mother of a two-year-old who absolutely loves going to the library and checking out stacks of books as we sit and read through the books each week I can't help but wonder if they are actually virus and bacteria-infested things that I'm bringing into my home and allowing my daughter to touch and enjoy am I being paranoid or are other grimy kids leaving their germs on the books we're checking out great question robin and way to get to an issue that's right at the heart of my personal experience with the world uh well you aren't being paranoid robin those books are indeed covered in viruses and bacteria the good news is so is everything else and you're fine yeah the nice thing about books is that at least you're learning something while getting sick instead of just getting sick well uh let's say let's say that the world is alive with a thin film of beautiful and invisible organisms uh and they almost never kill you so that's good right no one thing I would say about this actually is there's a study done recently that a pretty pretty robust study that followed kids who went to daycare starting at 12 weeks of age and kids who stayed home uh followed them through primary school and one of the findings was that kids who go to daycare do get sick more often during the preschool years um than kids who stay home either with their parents or with ananny however over the course of the entirety of the study to the end of primary school the kids got sick an approximately equal amount because the kids who went to uh because the kids who stayed home just got sick more in elementary school so in the end I don't think there is any way you know wash your hands obviously encourage your kids to wash their hands use hand sanitizer if you want to but in the end there's no way to prevent your kids from getting colds and flus it's just part of growing up and it's actually an important part of being a kid yes we have uh we have powerful and amazing immune systems if you want to learn about those you can watch crash course biology my god hank is with the shilling today I wonder where you can get high quality active wear hank maybe at dftba.com it's possible dftba.com well for all of your high quality active wear needs oh man I don't even want to I don't even want to do the podcast with you if you're gonna be a seller all right let's move on then I apologize deep deep apologies we have another question this one's from Ben who asks dear hank and john my name is Ben and I've been and having a difficult time determining whether or not the amount of paper towels given to me by the paper dial dispenser in bathrooms is enough to fully dry my moistened hands please reply by podcast well first off Ben I'm gonna say the same thing to you that I said to robin stop trying to be ryan there's only one ryan and his name is ryan that's right uh second as an owner of a of a building I was surprised to discover that the uh the owner of the building determines how much paper towel comes out of the paper towel dispenser there's a setting on it that lets you do that and you can be like tiny amount or huge big sheet you can usually uh stop it if you're like hey that's enough paper towel just by repaying it off in the machine will be like okay you got enough but sometimes they do like these like tiny little sheets and I'm like okay yeah I kind of do more than that uh there's a great video on the internet about how to properly dry your hands yeah like just like like fast like it turns out that drawing your hands is really important part of washing your hands because wet hands uh have more bacteria that stick to them so it's best to dry them as quickly as possible after washing them um and uh and the most efficient way to do it uh turns out to be to quickly shake them dry like 12 times uh and that gets off like the vast majority of the water and then uh and then use a small piece of paper towel folded over and when you fold it over this uh increases a capillary action that will pull water off of your hands more quickly um and there's a video that you can watch it's quite short about that yeah it's a TED talk actually it's about four minutes and 30 seconds long and it's this brilliant guy joe smith who tells you how to use exactly one paper towel while getting your hands entirely dry and of all the videos I've spent four minutes and 30 seconds watching it is the one that probably has had the biggest impact on my life because ever since then I have only used one paper towel and I've gotten my hands completely dry and it's a game changer it is it is I'm not going to disagree with you john uh you know we're gonna put the video up on the patreon so everybody can check it out patreon.com slash jr. hink and john I apologize for the shilling but you don't have to give to look at the video you can just go to patreon.com slash jr all this stuff all that stuff's open open to the public's uh you got another question for us it's your turn speaking of bathrooms we have a question from emma who writes dear john and hank if someone knocks on the bathroom door what is the least awkward way to let them move the bathroom is occupied this is a great question because it's such a late question because we have all been in a situation where like somebody knocks on the door and then you don't know what to say sometimes I say I'm in here yeah sometimes I inexplicably speak spanish and say avocado you know what I almost I almost always say and this is awful I almost always say just a sec and then it's like but no no not just a sec which might be a false promise I mean you need to there are times when when just a sec is actually almost always as soon as I say just a sec I'm like in my head I'm like who am I kidding it is not going to be just a sec it is going to be many sex and yeah but then you can't say that you can't be like just a sec by which I mean probably about four minutes so I get the same way that we have established a rule for proper armrest usage in movie theaters and on airplanes I think this is the moment you know we have a chance to really affect culture here I may not believe I may not believe in free will but I do believe that a group of committed people working together can come up with one word or phrase to express I am in this stall of the bathroom that you are attempting to occupy yeah I mean really all all you have to say is anything they know you're there so you could just be like yeah but you don't want to say that because then people will be like well that was an odd encounter right you want to have something where it's just a kind of a universal okay I got it it you want to have basically you want to have that's a socially acceptable phrase that's why I'm quite fond of but what if what if what if you want to convey more information than that if you like you want to if you do if you are in fact just washing up and you're about to be out you could you could say just a sec but if it's going to be a while you could be like four minutes or just it'll be a bit I'll be in here for a bit longer I think four minutes is a terrible idea I think four I still like occupy because I think it's I think it's I think it's like a universal language everybody knows what occupy means oh man if only like why don't all bathroom doors have those locks that when you lock them it shows whether there's somebody in there it's a physical mechanism that's like occupied and it's not it's probably an expensive issue so to summarize Emma Hank and I are struggling between two competing ways of saying I am inside of this bathroom one is to shout occupy dough the other is to shout four minutes or or two minutes or eight minutes or whatever you think is appropriate what I like about the not shouting a number of minutes is that then you aren't making a potentially false promise right all I can say for sure in this messed up crazy world is that right now I am in the bathroom I have no real way of knowing if I'm going to be in there forever frankly once you once you read sapiens you'll agree with me I might be in the bathroom for 30 seconds I might very well die inside of it so I feel like saying occupy dough is just a way of saying like I am describing the current situation right okay I I I can get behind a kupado unless I hear a better unless I hear better from someone you can always send us some tweets at Hank Green or John Green with a hashtag Dear Hank and John if you have a better suggestion than occupy all right we've got another question this was from Scott Scott asks Dear Hank and John I have had a nagging fear about money lately purchasing anything has left me feeling stressed out even though I'm out of college have good income and graciously I'm not in crippling debt and I feel like I'm becoming obsessed with saving money maybe it's my unconscious desire to fund the Wimbledon stadium or a fear that I won't have enough money to survive the apocalypse which is very irrational since the currency probably won't be accepted then how can I learn to relax and not let my spending be a source of anxiety this is an interesting question Hank because I think most of us struggle more with saving than with spending you know I think it's really really important to save money especially when you're young I really believe that even if you don't have a lot of income if you can save even very small amounts of money in your 20s it makes a massive massive difference much later in your life especially after retirement but there are people who begin to treat saving sort of obsessively and become very anxious about trying to save more and more and more money and just like anything it's never enough I don't have a great solution for this I think that it's better than the spending problem but I don't want to minimize it because I think it is still a problem yeah I actually this is something that I struggle with it is a it's it's less now but I like anytime I you know as a younger person when I was making a significant purchase I would get sweaty my chest would clench up especially right afterward and I would feel like like you know like a significant amount of anxiety which is pretty unusual for me but this is a thing that I have experienced anxiety about I still do though generally with business spending than with personal spending now and and it is so so that is it is an anxiety and things like that tend to get better with experience of course don't run out and like have a lot of spending experiences just to get over your anxiety because that could have other negative consequences but my my strategy and this is just my strategy among many strategies is to think about it economically and in a in sort of a analytical businessy way of the return on the investment of the thing that I'm spending and this is called an ROI analysis it's a thing that you do in business so if I'm if I'm getting a new computer I have always had this feeling when getting new computers even now I'm like ugh but if I think about like okay my current computer is wasting my time because it is broken it is slow and fixing it would take a lot of my time getting a new one is the value that I am spending money on is the time that it's going to free up so the value when I'm buying a new car like what's the value there the value when I'm getting gasoline what's the value there getting car insurance or getting health insurance like under like we're buying healthier food what's like like the value of being a healthier person is worth the money that I'm spending understanding the value transaction that's happening helps me get over this this hurdle of like always having felt weird about money and about spending money and always knowing that like that is a like it is a thing that you can't undo and it is it is a money that you can't get back which is kind for me often the source of the anxiety I think also probably just a weird relationship that I have with money for lots of different reasons. You know the other thing you can do Hank is that I would suggest is that you can have a brother who steals your money and spends it. Then you know I feel like that's been useful for you over the years really starting when I was about 14 and Hank was 11 I noticed that Hank had hundreds and hundreds of dollars that he'd saved over the years from never having spent any money and I liked spending money so I didn't have any money and I thought well that's not fair that Hank has you know 400 dollars that he's rolled up into these these tiny tight bills that he's then stuffed inside of his soccer participation trophies and I just remember thinking it's just not fair you know that Hank has all of this money and then I have none and I would complain to my parents about it and they would be like but you we gave you the same amount of money it's just that you spent it and Hank saved it and I was like right right I understand that but the point is that he now has money and I now don't like we can't do anything about what happened in the past.
The current situation is that there is this extreme unfairness of Hank having hundreds of dollars stuffed into soccer participation trophies that he has no there is no way that Hank is ever going to spend any of that money. I mean the truth is Hank still hasn't spent that money. I bet if you go to his childhood soccer trophies and you unscrew them you'll find a bunch of $10 bills wadded up in there and so I started spending Hank's money and let me tell you it felt great. It wasn't even really stealing because again it was a question of it being our money that Hank had just failed to spend.
So what John is saying is it's important to note that you can't take it with you. Sometimes you can't even take it with you to middle school. Well okay all of that noted when I was in college one summer you decided that I didn't need my baseball cards anymore and you sold them all on eBay. Well you did just leave them home.
Yeah but you sold them on eBay and then you saved the money and never gave it to me. So I don't remember that. I don't know if that's something that happened. That is absolutely a thing that happened.
That is 100 percent. I mean we can call mom and dad if you want but that is 100 percent a thing that happened. You sold my baseball cards just as surely as Tuggle is not dead. How about let's move on to another question then.
This one's from Ari who asks here Hank and John do you have any dubious advice on how to enjoy physical activity? I've been going to the gym more lately but the thing is I hate it. I listen to your podcast helps pass the time but it's still not enough to make it remotely enjoyable. How can I make exercising more fun?
Well Ari podcasts are my only trick. So John. Hank to be honest I don't even find podcasts adequately distracting because there's a lot of dead air in podcasts when I can hear my labored breathing and during that time I become aware that I'm inside of a you know a slowly decaying vessel and that's very distressing to me so I usually just listen to music. All I can say is that in my mind at least the benefits of exercise are back-ended.
Like the benefits of exercise mostly come you know 10 or 12 or 16 weeks into the process and for me at least once that happens it gets way more fun but you've got to put in all of that time before it happens. I have also heard people who are you know experts in this saying things like you have to trick yourself as if you are a dog so give yourself rewards for doing a thing that you don't like doing and then you will start to like them and not really know why. So do your best to make going to the gym some kind of positive experience and I do not know how to do that but you know if give yourself some kind of chew toy or playtime or doggy biscuit that makes that will make it feel as if it is a positive thing in your life. I don't know how to actually do that.
That is a piece of advice I've heard from other people and not been able to implement in my own life. So I've got another question if that's okay with you John. No no no it's not okay because I would just like to say a word from our sponsors. Today's podcast is brought to you by tricking yourself like a dog.
Tricking yourself like you would a dog. I don't really tricking tricking yourself like you would a dog the fastest way to enjoy exercise. This podcast is also brought to you by weird slash bad dance fighting. Weird slash bad dance fighting.
It's uh it's the only thing that you're allowed to do while you listen to your hand good John and it's also probably exercise kind of so good. This episode of your hand good John is brought 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 dftv.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 Dear Hank.
Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash Dear Hank. With new subscription only, while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See you website for more details. John is brought to you by Factor.
Imagine for a moment that you are absolutely immersed in some work where you're creating something beautiful or useful or useless and ugly but you love it anyway and you look up and suddenly you have a feeling and that feeling is that it is 2.30 pm and that you did not eat lunch. What are you going to do? Are you going to get meal delivery that's going to cost too much and maybe be a bit of a mistake or are you going to go to the cupboard and just eat several fistfuls of peanuts? Those are my two choices unless I have a factor in the fridge.
You can get smoky barbecue chicken breast with potato mash, cream corn and peppers. You can get creamy lemon pepper chicken with veggie rice, peal off broccoli and carrots. This has the fiber right it has the protein I need and it has the deliciousness I need. What about garlic herb roasted barramundi with potato zucchini and burr blanc sauce?
I don't really know what that means but it sounds delicious. What about a black bean taco bowl with corn salsa and cilantro crema? A delicious high fiber high protein meal that no animals had to die for. Any of those can be ready in two minutes.
Fresh, never frozen, over 100 rotating weekly meals including globally inspired flavors like Mediterranean and Asian, Factor shops, preps, cooks and delivers straight to your door so you have more time for everything you love this spring. Head to factormills.com slash Dear Hank 50 off and use the code Dear Hank 50 off 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. This has just been such a funny podcast.
We should do this more often. Okay now you can get to your other questions. All right this is from Naina who asks Dear Hank and John. I recently started thinking about how we as humans never stop growing and changing every year, every decade, every century we surpass unimaginable milestones that are simply incredible to witness.
What makes me sad though is that I will know what existed before me but I will never truly know what will exist after me. I think of how Ostrac and Jane Austen would have been if she had had a chance to look into the world where the world is today where Mahat McGondier, Isaac Newton or anyone else. How do I overcome or manage this gloominess caused by the by the unknown slash unknowable? I would say we actually don't know that much about the past you know like there's 2.5 million years of hominid history and we only know anything about like the last 10,000 years of it and we only know much about like the last three or 400 years of it and if you look outside the realm of the like most noted or or famous people the people who had access to the kind of power to tell their own stories we really only know the history of like the last 150, 200 years at the most.
So I actually think that we're living in a kind of a on a weird island where we don't know very much about what human life was like on a day-to-day basis before relatively recently and of course we know nothing about what it will look like in the future but we don't know what hunter-gatherers were like we don't know much about what life was like in early agriculturalist communities. I would say that I would say that ultimately we kind of only know ourselves. Yeah I think that this is one of the sad things about death John and not just on a macro scale but on a micro scale you know when you die if you die in the sort of correct order that the sad thing will be that you will never get to see you know who your grandchildren fall in love with and what they become and when you lose you don't get to find out all the things about the people that you love that you wish you could find out it just it ends and it's a super bummer and the fact that you're thinking about this you know on a you know a humanity wide scale means that you believe in humanity and you have a lot of interest in faith in humanity and that's good and this is a side effect of that feeling of you know appreciating all of the things that humans have come together to create over the years that have made your life better and and appreciating that and not and knowing that there will be things that will come after that you won't know about that it's a symptom of you know your appreciation for the work of other people and a symptom of the fact that we're all going to die and it's a bit of a bummer there's not really much to do about it though except to recognize that it comes from mostly from good places. It's a bit of a bummer but on the other hand to me at least there's something beautiful about the fact that we're all sort of collaborators in this massive sprawling story and that we're going to be in the middle of it.
I don't want to be at the end of the human story you know like I don't want my life to be like the last human life. I want to be in the middle of the story and I want to try to you know in my infinitesimal way shape the story so that it makes it more possible for it to go on longer and better for as many people as possible. So in a way it's good news. I have a really quick question from Ray who asks Dear Hank and John.
In the past John you have okay tattoos inspired by your books so long as they are not somebody's first tattoo. Hank do you have a similar request for tattoos inspired by the things that you create? I'm getting a Hanklerfish tattoo next month and I want to know your thoughts. Love from your brother with the last name of another color Ray Brown.
Uh yeah I don't know it's your body man do whatever you want. That's how I feel. I think that's great. The only reason I'm concerned about people getting their first tattoo with a quote from my books or something is I just worry that later they'll regret it but if it's a second tattoo I somehow feel that I've been absolved but you're right it's not my body so why am I trying to intervene?
Indeed. Adam writes Dear John and Hank if nothing sticks to Teflon how do they get Teflon to stick to a pan? All right I'm not I'm gonna do this and not I assume that John doesn't have much to say on the subject. Correct.
All right Teflon is a chemical it's actually it's a brand name for a chemical and that chemical it's basically a carbon chain with so every carbon is bonded to two other carbons that makes the chain and then on you know sort of the top and bottom of the chain it's bonded to fluorines and fluorines love the bond stuff and carbon also less than bond stuff so that bond becomes very strong those electrons become very sort of occupied with that bond and they don't interact with the rest of the world at all. They hate the rest of the world they're super happy and never want to talk to anything which is why nothing sticks to it so you have that problem then if it doesn't want to stick to anything how do you make it stick to the pan they do chemistry on it so once you make this sort of Teflon coating it will have sides it will have a top and bottom side the top side is what's going to be facing the world so you want that to remain all Teflon-y the bottom side you do chemistry on it to make those fluorines go away and when you do that it actually gets super sticky because suddenly those carbons want to bond to stuff so you knock those fluorines off of the bottom layer of the Teflon you do that either with like they really don't want to get knocked off so you have to do pretty intense chemistry you either like bombard it with high energy plasma or like really strong reducing agents and then those fluorines go away and the carbons want to bond something else and they bond to whatever the pan is made of and that's how that works thank you for the science question it's been a while since i got to talk about science on the quad i don't know why more science questions people i don't actually know if we need more science questions that was interesting but i kept zoning in and out the way i almost like uh i don't know it was intense ink it was intense for me well you know i it's it's just you know teflon is just another example of the tiny the tiny changes that we make in our world that make life better for everybody and how to make teflon stick to a pan they had to figure that out and who figured that out yeah i don't know mr teflo probably not somebody somebody who mattered to the world well i think it's great i think it's beautiful hank is there any news from mars this week oh is there ever there's always news from mars don it's just i have to pick which which bit to cover um so this week 40 people have been selected from over 200 000 applicants to be finalists in the quest to die on mars mars one is a ambitious and probably impossible plan to send people on a one-way trip to mars and they will eventually from that pool of 40 people select 26 people that they want to send uh sort of four people at a time and it's it's a uh mars one is one of several existing plans right now to get humans on the surface of mars in my opinion if you wind those those uh projects out from most to least likely the bottom of the list but but still interesting still things they're trying to do um and they want to build a permanent colony on mars so it would be a one-way trip and hopefully those people would live their natural life spans on mars and not get killed by mars which is pretty likely but uh they live their natural life spans on mars and even maybe have children on mars and raise generations on mars and start the process of having there be a sort of second second humanity out there um and uh they plan to partially fund this effort with a reality tv show and they want to use space x's falcon heavy rocket to get to the red planet uh so they're not like developing any of their own technology they're just trying to figure out how to fund it which i just i don't understand how it's going to work but it is interesting to me and they do have these people who have uh you know are talking about like why they are people who uh you know like they see this as a thing that they want to do with their lives and i find that interesting and cool uh to hear people talk about it it's not a choice that i would make but it is interesting to hear people talk about it um and of course space x uh which is making falcon heavy rocket has its own plans or elon musk at least it does to send humans to mars and actually get them back but i'm not going to judge uh let's send people to mars i'm into that let's let's investigate possibilities i i myself would want to die on earth i know john i know but not in just i just want it to be clear in case like in case i happen to not die on earth i just want the world to know that was not my wish all right thank the news from afc Wimbledon is that as you know afc Wimbledon is now a third tier english soccer team uh this is both an opportunity uh in that we find ourselves in the third tier and a massive problem in that uh you know we would like to stay there uh and afc Wimbledon which used to have the smallest stadium in league two now has the smallest stadium in league one um as a result uh Wimbledon fans are raising money uh for the playing budget through the we are Wimbledon fund uh you can you can learn more about it we are Wimbledonfund.com basically uh it's a trust that's set up to uh increase the playing budget uh it's been working for several years but because the club is owned entirely by its fans uh money for the playing budget and stuff has to come primarily from its fans uh so they've been raising money and in other in more personal news last week was my daughter's birthday and as is the case with every birthday afc Wimbledon sent her a card signed by a bunch of players and most adorably there was a long letter in it that was really really thoughtful about how great a season it's been as i read the letter to alla she was of course just enraptured by it uh but my favorite part of the letter was when they were like so we're in the playoff final uh i waited as long as i could to send this letter but in order for it to arrive by your birthday i had to send it before i found out what happened so hopefully we won um but every member of the dawn's junior trust uh which by the way it only costs uh uh ten pounds per year and you get a birthday card signed by the players um so that's like eighteen dollars or something uh every member of the dawn's junior trust gets a birthday card and uh you can also join the trust if you want the dawn's trust.org if you want to become a member of a an owner of afc Wimbledon like me and hank against his will and my children and my wife and hank's wife against her will um you can become a member of the dawn's trust at the dawn's trust.org uh for adults uh that is people over the age of 16 we're actually people at the age of 21 um it's uh 25 pounds per year so around 42 dollars and i'll tell you what it's the best 42 dollars you'll ever spend it's an amazing organization it's so fun to be a part of it and uh yeah want to encourage people to become owners of afc Wimbledon all right thank you john we have a one note before we get to what we learned today from katie who says i'm a former pizzeria employee hoping to solve the slice versus pizza piece debate all slices of pizza all slices are pieces of pizza but not all pieces are slices a slice refers to a individually purchased piece of pizza if you would like to get a whole pie a cut off of that would be referred to a piece hope that clears things up thanks for all the work you do i don't know i'm not convinced i don't know i'm not sold i'm not a hundred percent sold on that although i am not a former p3 employee so katie has more authority on this topic than i do okay so what are we going today john well we learned that there are a bunch of people who want to die on mars but who probably won't we learned that it would be a total bummer like a super bummer to know how the human story ends because it would mean that you were the last human so that's actually worse than not knowing you know it's funny when you phrase it that way i don't actually seem that optimistic we learned that when you're fighting but don't have an opponent you're actually just dancing just weird bad dancing and of course we learned that if you were in the bathroom and someone would like to be in the bathroom you are in john would like you to just shout out aqua pado aqua pado the thing happened just a sec not though not just a sec just don't don't don't make false promises if anything maybe you should just under promise so you can just say like just 12 minutes you should probably come out three minutes later they'll be like what a wonderful turn of events you should probably go next door to a different restaurant all right thank you for being on a podcast with me it's always a pleasure oh it's it's fun for me as well our podcast is edited by nikos jakins Claudia Morales is our intern we get help with questions from rosianna halls rohan's our theme music is by gunner roll it you can email us your questions concerns or complaints at hank and john at gmail.com or you can just go to the twitter where i am john green hank is hank green you can use hashtag dear hank and john you can also follow us on our preferred social media snapchat where hank is hank gre and i am john green snaps uh green he's just taking naps thank you everybody and as they say in our hometown don't forget to be awesome