Dear Hank & John - 427: Ghosts to Fix the Housing Crisis

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Do dogs have a preferred direction to chase their tail in? Why do we put the dollar sign before the number? Why don’t we have a word for “dying of thirst”? How do I approach public notoriety? …Hank and John Green have answers!If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [e-mail] us for monthly livestreams at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You're listening to a Complexly podcast. Hello and welcome to dear Hank and John. Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, you know what the big problem with eating a clock is? What's that? It's very time-consuming.

Oh. You consume all the time. brother doing medium medium well i would say cooked on both sides for sure i i have been recovering from walking pneumonia which is a great disease oh my god yeah yeah yeah is that just mean that you're fine but you have pneumonia exactly it means that i can walk around but i still have pneumonia although i like the idea that the pneumonia is the one doing the walking well i don't think it's a good disease name I don't like to be critical of the doctors, but I think in this case, it's like an old-fashioned disease name.

It's like dropsy or something or consumption. It feels like in 30 years we won't have walking pneumonia. We'll have something that has a medical sounding name. Yeah, walking pneumonia. He's just walking around with pneumonia all the time. Did they diagnose you with that? They'd be like going and they're like, welcome to the doctor's office. You have, here are your walking pneumonia pills?

Yeah, no, they gave me antibiotics. Those are the walking pneumonia pills. and now I feel better, but I don't feel all the way better. So I'm still a little fatigued. More to the point, Hank. I have been feeling, and I think this is a conversation we've explored extensively on this podcast. I'm not sure that we need to explore it again. But I've been feeling like the Internet might be a bad.

Yeah. I watched an interesting little presentation recently from Cal Newport. On the Internet. On the Internet, I'm sure. Yes, I did. But I watched it on YouTube, which is, to me. me, that's just a Netflix. YouTube is like Netflix, but anyone can make stuff, which is a little bit better than

Twitter, Blue Sky Threads, which I think is like sort of peak bad. I agree. Twitter is peak bad. I mean, I went on Twitter recently to get some AFC Wimbledon news, and I felt like I had to take a chemical bath afterwards. Like, I felt dirty. Yeah. Twitter is very, very much the place where you would go if you wanted to become a worse

person, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if you wanted to be exposed to really toxic chemicals and see what kind of effect that would have on you. That's what, that is the Joker's origin story, you know? Bad chemical bath came out real, kind of, kind of twisted. It's just like a Joker factory over there. And this is kind of Cal Newford's point is that a, like, a lot of, like, how we imagine this is there's sort of like, there's like a part of it that's about distraction and a part of it that's about like losing and getting disconnected and alienated from the sort of like normalcy and only getting exposed to bad stuff. That's usually a problem for like people other than you. That's their problem. And then there's like the next step where you cross over into one of the

real bad places that you don't even really hear about. I don't even know how I would get gab, you know. But in fact, all of these things are like they're kind of on the same assembly line. Right, right, right. And you can, like, exit that assembly line at various points, but some people aren't going to. Some people are going to stay on that assembly line. I had an idea once for a social media platform, John. I was like, ooh, this would be such a good idea. It would be so fun and so interesting. And I, like, and I thought through it in, like, week two of thinking through it, I was like, this would be where people would go.

Like, when they get kicked off of another place and they wanted their own little spot to be evil together. And there'd be lots of people using it to, like, have their own little spot to be good. together. But I was like, in no way, even then, do I want to contribute at that level? And would I want to have that level of responsibility for something occurring in the real world? Which is, you know, Twitter isn't real life, but it's real life, you know? Yeah. I'm really glad that we didn't buy Tumblr, you know? What a great decision. On the table? Oh, it's always on the table, Hank. I think Tumblr's available for $5. We could buy it tomorrow. Somebody wanted it. Matt Mullenwig did buy it, which I hope someday he gets Twitter. I bet he'd sell it. I'd sell it in a hot

second. It's working for you, though. I've been enjoying Tumblr, which is a sentence that I never thought I would say. Never, ever, ever thought I would say. The cycles. It's kind of the only healthy, productive social media platform for me. And it's only healthy and productive because I'm not John Green most of the time. I'm an unpaid intern for the awesome coffee club, or I guess now called Keats & Co. You're doing amazing. It's doing so much better than the tea and it makes me infuriated. Well, I think it's because I'm so effective as a Tumblr marketer. It really has been, it's really a lot of fun. And then when people are like, they say nasty things about me, I just respond like, why are you talking so bad about a coffee company? They donate all the

profit to charity and they sell coffee. Yeah. I'm in the coffee business. If you're going to be mad at a coffee company, there's others you can be mad at. Yeah, yeah, yeah, get mad at black rifle coffee or something. Don't get mad at me. All right, let's answer some questions from our listeners, beginning with this one from Jubilee and Clara, who write, Dear John and Hank, I was watching my dog chase his tail, and I noticed that when he switched from going counterclockwise to clockwise, he was a lot worse at it, and it made me wonder, is it kind of like how humans are right-handed or left-handed? Like, different dogs are just better at chasing their tails in different directions? I don't know if this makes any sense, but I hope you can help. the greatest sibling duo other than you guys, Claire and Jubilee.

All right, John, you're going to have to narrate what's about to happen. Okay. Because this is an audio podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless you're a subscribe to the Patreon. Okay, so I'm watching Hank. He's standing up. He's leaving the room.

Oh, he's turning. He's turning left. He's turning, I believe that's counterclockwise. And now he's turning clockwise. And he's, you know, he's not as good at turning. He's definitely harder one way than the other. He's not as good at turning clockwise. Now, this is what is known as a rigorous experiment.

I believe that scientists would be impressed. I feel like I undid my dizziness a little bit. Like, I'm not that dizzy. Oh, that's interesting. Does that work? I don't know. I feel like I would have been dizzier if I had just done one. I think there might be two things at work here.

I think it could be that the dog is tired after running in the dog's preferred direction, and that slows the dog down. Also, the second one, I got to do it again, where I would start. with the other direction, because I was a little dizzy when I started. And then the other thing is a dizziness, right? Like, even dogs get a little dizzy chasing their tails. Now it's still fun, but they get dizzy. I think that's probably, if I had to guess, I would think that's more responsible for

it than anything else. But I imagine that all mammals have dominant hands, right? I don't know that that is true. I didn't do research on this. What would be different about us, like, than a dolphin? Oh, well, I don't think dolphins have dominant hands. tell you that due to the lack of hands. So the thing about people is that we have, like, we have a limited amount of, you know, brain to devote to a task. And there's a lot. There's a lot to

devote. Like, obviously, you can do less with your feet than you can do with your hands. That's partially physiology, but it's partially neurology. So there's just like less neural circuits going there and sort of less established circuitry devoted to that. But our hands have a lot of circuitry devoted to them, but our dominant hand has the same, like, physiological surgery, but, like, our brains have developed in such a way that it's like, I can only do so much in terms of developing dexterity. And so I'm going to devote that to one hand because I have a limited amount of dexterity to have. But if, like, you're, if you got paused and they kind of all do the same thing, then that wouldn't be so much the case. Dogs probably have a lot more

in terms of, like, mouth stuff. Sure, this would be a very compelling argument. Except that studies have shown that most dogs and cats have a dominant paw and can be right or left pawed. All right. And also, horses have a dominant or lead foot for tasks like cantering, and primates have varying degrees of handedness, with interestingly, chimpanzees typically being right-handed, whereas orangutans are typically left-handed. Wild. Whales have been observed with right-jawed preferences as a form of lateralization as well. Right jaw? Yeah, yeah, you know, you chew with your right jaw a little more than with your left jaw.

I think I do that. Yeah, well, you're probably, well, aren't you left-handed? No. Oh, are you sure? You're thinking of mom. Oh, I'm thinking of mom. She's left-handed. Now, you're right-handed.

That's interesting. I'm also right-handed. Yeah. Well, there you go. We can't all be special. John did the research, but I guess that makes sense. I mean, I don't know if it makes sense, but I guess it's true. Handedness is a great word.

Yeah. Like, there are scholars of handedness. Imagine if you're, like, at a party and you walk up to someone and you're like, hey, what are you doing? They're like, I'm a professor of handedness. I'd love to talk to that person. I bet they'd have so many facts for me. You know, talking to people who, like, have a deep set of knowledge, so good.

That's what I love about tuberculosis people. They know so much about tuberculosis. They know so much. Yeah. There's so much to know. What is the best kind of professor to meet at a cocktail party? This is a great question. Bats. Bats.

Like baseball or creatures? Baseball. Professor of baseball also would be pretty interesting. I got a bunch of questions for them. But I was recently, and people may have seen me talk about this on a podcast that was not this one. But I talked to a bat scientist at a party, and it was wonderful. And I learned a lot. And I said, what's the weirdest thing about bats?

And he said, in Montana, we don't know where they go in the winter. Wow. That's pretty interesting. Yeah. The ducks in the pond and catcher in the rye only, we really don't know. We really don't know. We just don't know. Yeah.

It seems like they spread out. Oh. Like they don't all like find like one place to go and hang out together. They like to treat avities and like little like space between rocks. Yeah. Oh, I have to confess that while I like spending most of my time with people, I would love to be able to spend the winters alone underneath a rock. Just in the space between rocks.

It looks so peaceful right now, everyone. The space between rocks. I mean, it'd be a rough place for me personally to run out the winter, but I don't know, my ancestors did it. If you weighed like five grams, you know, it couldn't hurt that bad to lay down on something if you weigh five grams. I'd like to weigh five grams and be able to fly, but I don't want to be a bat. You just want to be like a little human who weighs five grams and can

fly? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a little flying five gram human. Man, my house would be so big if I were five grams. I would feel like it was very big. Yeah, exactly. We would need so much less stuff. This goes back to your longstanding argument that humans are too big. Like, imagine how easy it would be to get carbon neutrality in a world where we all weighed five grams. Oh, my God. We, like, what would we do with all the land? Our cars would weigh like 20 grams. We wouldn't have to have all the land for agriculture and stuff. We wouldn't need cars. We could just fly. We could just fly. It's a great point, Hank. Really good point. That hadn't occurred to me. Did I ever tell you about the time I was going to buy a house? I was really excited about the house. Sarah and I looked all through the house and we were like, this house was wonderful. And then I went into the bathroom to pee and inside the garbage can was a dead bat. And I was like, well, maybe not. What? Yeah, dead bat. I actually, I've been working on, this is unrelated, but I've been working on a housing crisis policy suggestion. And I want to hate you with it.

Great. This is just what people come to your Hank and John for. So there's only one situation where you find a house that is, like, surprisingly cheap, that's in a nice neighborhood and it's a good house. Okay. Do you know what this situation is where you find a way below market rate house? That's in the trash can. Close. Haunting. It's going to, there's a ghost in that house and it's murdered people. So you've got a murder ghost in the house. So my suggestion is that 10% of homes in America get not a murder.

ghost because nobody's going to move into that house, but like a mean ghost, like a pretty mean ghost. Okay. So now you're probably thinking, how do we decide which 10% of the homes to give pretty mean ghosts to? That's not the only thing I'm thinking, but yes. I have a policy suggestion here, which is that it is anybody who's ever purchased an NFT gets a house ghost.

And this is appropriate because they spent all this money on something that doesn't exist. So we should give them something that shouldn't exist, but does, like a Victorian child who will not leave their crawl space. Is this a good time to confess to you that I have purchased in NFT? You're getting a gos! It wasn't very expensive, but I did buy one. I wanted to be in on the craze. I wanted to be in on the craze. They were talking some sets.

It made sense to me. It's not a monkey. It's an abstract design. And it's mine. You can't have it. I own it. Uh-huh. You own an NFT.

I also own an NFT. I'm getting a ghost as well, but I didn't buy it. It was given to me by YouTube. Oh, okay. No, I bought mine. They'll, like, give you a thing, you know? I bought mine for a little bit of my Bitcoin, which I also have. That was probably a terrible thing to spend your Bitcoin on, but okay.

No, man, what are you talking about? That thing's only appreciated. That NFT has gone to the moon. Oh, I believe it. To the moon. I think I paid $50 for it, and I don't know that it has any residual value whatsoever. No, no. This next question comes from April, who writes, Dear John and Hank,

why do we put the dollar sign before the numbers? If we always say the word dollars after the amount, we write dollars 20, but we don't say dollars 20. What's up with that? Thanks, April. Oh, my. So, Topoki and I worked on this one, man. We went as deep, like, we tried.

And if you know more about this than us, please let us know. But this is an unclear convention. And it's weird because this is the only unit that we do this with. If you like sense, for example, that goes after. And that's also currency, but also all the other units. Inches, feet, yeah, milliliters. But pounds, the currency goes in front. However, it must be noted that in Quebec, in Quebec, it is $1.20.

You put the dollar sign after the amount because it's French and you put the euro sign after in France. So in addition to discovering that, the main thing. that we found was that probably the earliest version of this is Pounds, and it goes back to the 17th century, probably, and also potentially medieval scribes did all units this way. So there was a time when it was mostly like this, where you would put the unit you were talking about, and then you would put the number, and that was maybe easier to read or to understand when you were a scribe, or it was just the convention of the time. but then after a while because of the way that we speak,

we put it afterwards. So you'd say 20 inches and you put inches after. But with currency, for whatever reason, it never changed. Now, there is also what I think is probably just a myth that you would put it first so that when you're writing a check,

you can't, like, add an extra one in front. So if you're writing like, you're writing like $100, you couldn't like you put the dollar sign in front to like mark out so that you couldn't put an extra one in there and have it to be $1,100 or something. And that, but that seems like it, it is far predated by these other instances of pounds being first in the 16th century or 17th century. Fascinating.

That's what I got. But I had like noticed this, you know, that like we, like, we say it differently than it is written. But I never really thought about how weird that is. It is weird. It's like the only, like, unit that we do that with. And money is a unit also. I hadn't really considered. Also, it's a construction, just like inches.

Well, like inches, but even more so. Like, at least an inch is like a thing, you know, that exists. There is, distance exists. Currency is all in the head. Distance exists, but inches don't exist. Value exists, but currency doesn't exist, would be my way of saying that. But there's many kinds of value that are not, cannot be measured in dollars, but Like what?

Like love? Like love, John. Jeez, Louise, come on now. Like excitement and passion. Come on. If you can't exchange it for our ice cold dollars 20 bill, what's the point? Difficult to monetize, as they say, the love? I don't know.

I don't know. Instagram's found a way. You hit that heart button. It matters. Oh, boy. I'm so sick of it. I'm getting pretty sick of it, John. I'm so, I'm, I'm tired.

I think we're sort of canaries in the coal mine because we've been online since 1993. Are we? I feel like a number of people have led us on this position. That's true. You're right. You're right. We're not on the leading edge of figuring out that the internet, the social internet is maybe not so great. In fact, like, I could go back to my 2018 self who was like, hey, I don't think the social

internet is so great and maybe just listen to him. Yeah, totally. But I don't know what to do about it, though. I don't know how to respond. And this is what's so interesting to me. This is why I keep coming back to it and keep worrying about it and it occupies so much of my brain space is I don't know how to respond to it. The things that really get me are the things where I feel like there's an intractable problem

that I just don't know how to solve. And the more I think about it, the less I know how to solve it. I mean, this is true for some things in the world, but it's also really true for like my relationship. with the internet in particular, and it's also true with, like, things in my personal life. And those are the things that I just, like, that literally keep me up at night because I don't know how to react to knowing that the internet is bad, not just for me, but, like, hard stop. Yeah, I mean.

Because I am an internet person. Right. For me, specifically, it's really hard because I, like, this, it's like, it's a little bit, and this is, I don't know, this is going to probably sound like an exact, kind of a cringe exaggeration, but it's a little bit like, so you want me to leave my country. That does feel like a cringe exaggeration. Way to see it coming. Well, and this was another thing that was that they talked about in this Cal Newport video,

which it will probably have been in a previous edition of we're here, where they're like, what ultimately needs to happen is this behavior needs to become cringe. Right. There has to be like a social norm where we say like, hey, lack of nuance and outrage culture is actually super cringe. Yeah, and also like the just the going of the people onto the Internet. But that itself is so hard because I think what the Internet gives us, and this is aside from like Wikipedia, right? Like we're not talking about the dissemination and implementation of information for which the Internet has been incredible and like one of the greatest accelerators of human progress in history.

We're talking about the social internet where, you know, you sort of, through these large multinational corporations, you agree to exchange pieces of yourself so that you can communicate with other people in a many to many way. And that is hard to get out of because we benefit from it so much, Hank. I think one thing, we don't talk about how privileged we are in this conversation because we're some of the very few people who have, like, definitely, definitely benefited from the social. internet. Even if it's making society worse, it like bought my house. And that's not true for most people. So I don't know how to respond to it and I don't know what to do about it, but I do think that I need to change my relationship with it pretty dramatically. Now, I haven't been making content on what I think of as the social internet. Like I'm making podcasts and YouTube videos and writing books and everything. But like, I haven't been making content on the places that I feel uncomfortable, but I'm

still using them. You know, it's the infinite jest. Yeah. It's this, it's, it's, it's this form of distraction that's so good, that's so complete, that's, you know, makes you feel like you don't have to grapp with the world as it is. But at the same time, like, you do, and it's making the world worse. So I, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, man. It's stressing me out. I don't know how to handle it. I'm sure lots of people with good ideas are going to write in and tell us exactly how to handle it. But I just, I don't, I've thought hard about it and I don't, I don't know that there's an easy way. Which reminds me, John, that this podcast was brought to you by thinking hard about it and not knowing that there's an easy way. We had to talk for a little while about whether

or not we wanted to take this sponsor because, you know, we're careful about the sponsors we choose here at Dear Hank and John, but we decided that I thought hard about it and I'm not sure that there's an easy way, was actually a sponsor that we did want to take $20 per thousand downloads for. Why don't companies ever come to us with concepts like that? They always, always come to us and they're like, hey, sell our stuff. And I'm like, what's the most boring thing that I could possibly do? Why won't you have it be the concept of the moon? Why? It's not the concept of the moon, by the way. I wanted Dr. Pepper to sponsor humanity's relationship with the moon, which continues to be a great idea. It is a good idea. Today's podcast also brought to you,

of course, by House Ghosts, House Ghosts, Hank's really bad solution to the housing crisis. It's going to lower prices like crazy. This podcast is also brought to you by wherever the bats go. Wherever the bats go. The space between two rocks? Yeah. God. Send me there.

And today's podcast is brought to you by walking pneumonia. Walking pneumonia. It's just chugging along. This episode of Deer Hangagen is brought to you by Factor. Fall. It's here. It's lovely. It feels like a reset.

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Anyway, layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look. Go to quince.com slash dear hank for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash dear hank. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash dear Hank. All right, John. This next question comes from Grace who asks Hank and John, why don't we have a word for dying of thirst or just being really thirsty? People say I'm starving all the time, but there isn't an equivalent for being thirsty. I understand it's not that big of a thing to say, I'm so thirsty or people are dying of thirst out there. But I really, really want there to be a dedicated melodramatic word, drinking lots of water just in case, Grace. There's kind of some melodramatic thirsty words, parched. Oh, I'm parched.

But parched doesn't communicate a sense of impending doom. No, no. And the way that starving does. Well, I mean, you could make the case that, like, the problem with starving. And I believe Dave Matthews once made this case. I don't know why I remember that. Panic at the disco. I'm experiencing intense anxiety.

Go on. It did once make the case that starving should maybe be left for situations where starving is actually occurring, not for when, like, we've postponed, owned dinner for a couple of hours. Oh, I thought, wait, I thought you were going to quote Dave Matthew lyrics to me. You just happened to remember an observation Dave Matthew made on a podcast like 20 years ago or something? Yeah, and then he said, a little baby. Like that.

I knew it was coming. God, I got hit with it unexpectedly. I knew it was coming and I got ready and then you completely derailed me and I thought that I was safe and then it came. What would you? You say, John. Gosh, I would say that the reason we don't, I have an actual theory for this, which is that the reason we don't have a word for this is that dying of thirst occurs quite

quickly. Yeah, you don't have a lot of time to talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're too parched for the conversation anyway. I think that's why. But I kind of, I have to say, and this is going to make me sound like a real do-gooder, even cringier than Hank was earlier and say that I kind of agree with Dave Matthews

that, like, starvation is, I mean, I hate to be a downer, but like maybe the least funny thing in the world. And the inflation of language that we use does drive me a little bananas sometimes. Like 100%. This is the best example. And we've used it before on the podcast,

but when you agree with someone and you say 100%, I agree. And then that's not enough, though. eventually you say a thousand percent. And then eventually you say 100,000 percent. I agree with you. It's lost all meaning. Yeah, I agree with you a million percent, John. But this is part of language. Like, terrific used to mean inspiring of terror. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Originally meant like filling you with awe, which is not an entirely like uncomplicatedly great emotion. Yeah, right. But very different than like, you know, the wheels on a car being awesome. This is awesome. Rims.

Friend is how I say it when I see somebody. Sure. I've heard you say that before. Yeah. Awesome rims. Friend. Yep. You're somebody who pays a lot of attention to rims on a car wheel. I wouldn't say that.

You notice a great rim. You're a car guy. Oren loves any car that is non-standard. Okay. Yeah. So do my kids. He's a real big fee. He's like, custom car.

Yeah. But even if it's like spray-painted, in somebody's backyard, like, halfway done. He's like, custom car! This kid just wants any car that is doing a little something. He just wants people to do work, which we don't do anymore. We've just stopped. It's so, it's like everybody's got to have a car that's like either, you know, like something monochrome.

Like even a little bit of blue these days, people are like, I don't know, I'd rather just have the simpler situation where it's gray. Yeah. I don't know. Now, I've never been very expressive with my car. cars. And you're right, I'm losing an opportunity to express myself, either through bumper stickers or through paint or indeed through customizing the car in other ways, like giving myself those cool neon lights along the runners. Yeah, hover lights. Hover lights.

Haveolites. See, you even know the lingo. Yeah, sweet hoverlights. They're awesome, friend. Yeah, that does sound like you. Sublime. Sublime is another great example of language inflation. I mean, that used to mean something very, very specific. And now it means like anything that feels Nice. Yeah. All right, we've got another question. This one comes from Jeffrey, who says, Dear John and Hank, I'm reaching out to you to ask about how to approach public notoriety. Well, Jeffrey, it's complicated, man. Oh, generally at a local level, it's getting better. I'm considering running for local office in a mid-sized city, and I know that as soon as I start a campaign, I will get criticism, even mean comments, even if there are minority of the comments.

Historically, I don't respond well to people being mean to me. That's the case for most of us, Jeffrey. Yeah, it's good thing to know about yourself. But I'm getting better. want to avoid making my community better just because of a few bad beans. Do you have any recommendations or tips on how to deal with people being not nice to you at a public level? Land of the brave, home of the Jeffrey. I have a private theory that this is why so many politicians are lawyers, because they're used to people being mad at them. Oh, like they're used to being yelled at. Yeah. Yeah, I had a conversation recently with an exceptionally famous person, and I said, it must have been difficult being criticized by, I'll just say who criticized them, by RFK Jr., because

then you're much more in the public eye, and it must have been very difficult. And they were like, it was. And I didn't know how to follow that up, because, like, it would just be difficult. And, like, having the head of health and human services for the United States government hate you would be uncomfortable. One of the things is just like we're kind of unfamiliar with it. Like we're not super familiar with the idea that anybody would sort of publicly dislike you because it doesn't happen. It's very uncommon and unpleasant when friendships go that badly that you have that kind of situation in your personal life.

But it's extremely common and like, you know, unavoidably common once you're living some kind of, especially a political life in the political sphere. you're going to have that. Now, my experience to some extent is it's a lot easier to discard and maybe too easy to discard the criticisms that are very clearly in bad faith and from people who don't really have any interest in and would never really be supportive of you. So there's just like a group of people who it's kind of easier to sort of like have it roll off your back a little bit because it's like, well, yeah, we disagree on some really fundamental stuff. Of course, you're going to like be mean to me. And then it's a lot harder when it comes from people who feel like they are more your people.

And I think that one of the hardest things about our job, me and John's job, is like knowing when the criticism is valid and it's something to take seriously and knowing when it's just like, I just have to not exist in the same world as that. Like that can't be part of how I approach things or I will never be able to move through it because like that isn't in good faith. that is intentionally designed to, not really even to attack me, but to attack, like, ideas that I think are good. Like, they're going for the idea more than they're going for you. So it's very, it can be very hard to actually tell the difference between those two things. And then the second thing is, like, when you have decided to take it seriously, like, how do you actually take it seriously?

Or when your subconscious decides to take it seriously, spend some conscious time going down the path and saying, like, okay, why is this landing so hard? is it something that is an internal conflict with myself? Is it something that I actually think is a problem? Is it something that I'm being like held back from speaking on because of like, you know, the sort of difficulties of politics? And then once you understand that, just saying it to yourself, just being like, okay, I have made my decision and here's why. And just like knowing that and trying to feel comfortable with the choices that you have to make because you're going to have to make hard choices, even if it's a tiny town, with not a tremendous amount of responsibility. You're going to have to make a lot of hard choices. Well, and there's still a lot of responsibility in a tiny town, right? I mean, because you're responsible for all those people and those people are your neighbors, which in some ways is harder than what we do, right?

Because most of the people in our core audience are not also our neighbors. I mean, this is something I struggle with very, very heavily, and I've been struggling with it for 20 years, and I haven't won out over it. I haven't figured out a way to deal with it well. Hank is really good at differentiating between bad faith criticism and good faith criticism. I just feel like I touched the stove and it hurt, you know? And then I have to do this long analysis of whether or not it hurt because I touched the stove or the stove touched me or like, did, you know, did the stove have a good point and it just like didn't do a good job of making the point? or did I actually like enter into the stove's room in a really loud and unpleasant way

thereby making it inevitable that the stove was going to, you know, it just the list of considerations and concerns goes on and on and like that's why I don't sleep well at night. But I still think it's worth it. That's what I would say is that like I think it's worth it if you're, if you believe in what you're doing and you're trying to do something that you think is interesting and important and, you know, you hope can be useful for people, I still think it's worth it. At the same time, like, my therapist always says it takes five positive comments to make up for one negative one, and there's no way that's true.

Hilarious. That ratio is so, I mean, it doesn't matter how many positive ones I get. If there's a negative one that lands, it's the only thing I hear for a week. Yeah, well, the truth is the positive ones don't land because I'm like, no, I know that I'm a monster. So there's no way you're going to convince me otherwise. And then when somebody convincingly makes the case that I'm a monster, I'm like, yeah, I've been trying to tell you. I knew that. Yeah, but it is so important.

It is so important. And I'll say to everybody who is listening, like public service, like running for office is not something that you can't do. Like, I mean, depending on your citizenship status or wherever you live, like maybe this. But like, this is a thing that is open to people and should be considered to be a thing that you might do. Like, we, nobody's happy with the way things are. And one of the worst effects of the internet, I feel like, is making everyone kind of feel like there is no way to do anything about any of these problems. It is just, like, more and more hopeless. Like, that's with the assembly line that I feel like you kind of can get put on.

Yeah, totally, totally. And this is true even in like when I, in my very narrow world of tuberculosis, like it is news when the government is holding up tuberculosis funding and it is not news when that tuberculosis funding thanks to the hard, dedicated work of TB fighters and other activists starts moving, right? Like that's just not news. It doesn't show up in the news. And that's happening. Like we started to see real money move. And it's really exciting. And it's only happening because of advocacy. It's only happening because of elected officials. and the people pressuring them. And it's not where we want it to be, of course. It's not what we wish it would be. It's not where it ought to be, et cetera, et cetera. But, like, that progress is real. It just largely goes unobserved.

And, like, of course, you know, of course, like, the news is the bad news. Like, it makes sense in terms of the incentives of the structure and also, like, we need to be paying attention to the problems. But when the problems are infinite and there is a crisis for, like, there's every kind of crisis all sort of lined up next to each other. I think the sort of net effect is that you can really sort of like lose faith that anything can be done at all. But like when you get into it, I think when you get in there, you actually see that like the reasons why things aren't getting done is because they are hard, which is actually like kind of something hopeful and lovely when it's like, oh, I see. So like a thing is bad and not ideal because there isn't an easy solution.

Well, that's a little de-radicalizing. Yeah. And also a little encouraging because then we can work. together on finding solutions, and you can actually believe that other people want to find solutions. I will say, in my experience, getting close to the problem is not always de-radicalizing, but your point is well taken. It can be. Hank, we've got to transition to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon real quick. You may remember that AFC Wimbledon do not go one-nill down unless they are going to lose the game. That is the rule. It has always been the rule. If we give up the first

goal we're going to lose or at best tie until two weeks ago when we came back from 1-0 down and 1-2-1 and then guess what happened again this week we were losing 1-0 and I was like it couldn't happen again could it it did it happened again we won 2-1 what's going on unbelievable what team is this what team is this as as our we went like 600 games without doing that and did it twice in a row we did it twice in a row we've we've won two on the bounce as they say in England, and we find ourselves stunning, in the stunning heights of ninth place, somebody stop the count.

This season is over. Let's call it a day. Ninth place in League One. Are you kidding me? I don't know. Just keep winning games, John. You could go up to League Zero. We could be a League Zero team, the real dream, be in the championship. Hank, I say this with all the love in the world for AFC Wimbledon.

If we were in the championship, we would get demolished. Would you make a bunch of money for one year? We would, and we would save it all. We would not spend any of that on players. We would just lose every game and be like, thank you for the money. And then we would build an add-on to the stadium, and then we could be sustainable. But, yeah, no, I mean, ninth plays in lead one. It's incredible.

I don't even know what to say about this team. The way they're playing together, it makes me so proud to be a Wimbledon fan. Well, we got a new team at the U.S. government as well because it's the, the Asterner The new astronaut class, the first new class of astronauts since 2021, there were 8,000 applicants, probably all of them pretty high-quality folks, are whittled down to 10 people who will begin training soon and they will graduate in two years, at which point they will be astronauts. If the Artemis program continues, question mark, they might end up being part of future missions to the moon. These people might also be the first NASA astronauts to go to a commercial space station in low Earth orbit after the ISS retires, which is going to be around 2030. And most importantly of all, it is possible that some of these people will still be astronauts if we get our act together and someday go to Mars.

Some of these people could be the first people on Mars. That's pretty exciting. And as long as it happens after 2028, I'm all for it. You're safe. Okay. All right. You're safe. So congratulations to the new class of astronauts.

That sounds intense. Yeah. It's never a place I was headed. I've never been in a situation where there were 8,000 applicants and 10 people accepted and I was one of the 10. Let's put it that way. All right, Hank, well, thank you so much for potting with me. Thanks to everybody for listening.

You can send us your questions at Hank and John at gmail.com. We don't have a pod without them and we appreciate them so much. This podcast is edited by Ben Swartout. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna. Meddish. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Schottwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halse Rojas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is to Bucky Chalkravardi. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarola. And as we say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.