Dear Hank & John - 439: Division I Saint

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

What is a patron saint? Do we all get eaten? How do flames decide where to go? How do trees stay standing?  What happened to Hank’s hair? How do doctors decide where the needles go? ��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/dearhankandjohnSee 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. Hank, we're doing something a little unusual today. We're dedicating this episode to a longtime listener and nerd fighter named Braden, who died of cancer a few weeks ago, a lovely young man by all accounts and a listener to this podcast, and we just wanted to say to his family that we're thinking of you, and so we wanted to dedicate this episode of the podcast to him. We apologize in advance for how dubious our advice is. and how bad the podcast is.

But apparently, Braden found a way to enjoy it. A real testament to his perseverance and also to all of our listeners for dealing with this subpar crap. Indeed. 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 abuse advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and A.S. Wimbled and John, why can't you eat? Fried condor. Because of the rarity of it, I assume? Yeah, that's not legal tenders. Oh. Maybe, maybe, well, maybe, maybe, why can't you buy something with a fried condor?

Because it's not legal tenders. Is that better? We're working it out of everybody. Welcome to the show. I really, I slept terribly last night. I can tell him your low quality, low energy introduction that you didn't sleep well last night because you have a a viral video right now, and there is nothing worse for one's sleep than having a viral video. Hank, at some point, we're going to need in the same way that we needed to have an hour-long

conversation about 2014, at some point we're going to have to have an hour-long conversation about Hank's emerging celebrity and whether it is good news. No, I think probably the conversation that we'll end up having, if my guess is correct, is in 10 years, we'll talk about how I, I, fry. myself by pressing my face directly against the sun. Yeah, what you saw was me falling from the sky with my melted wax wings and you thought, you know what, I could do better. I feel like that that's not so bad.

There's a lot to recommend falling from the sun. Yeah, look at the wind in his hair. Oh, well, thanks to everybody for listening to that episode. We had a good time doing it. and lots of interesting responses to it. But today we're going to go back to old school dear John and Hank. We're going to do the show. We're going to do the show that we usually do.

If you're new, there's always new people. Is it true that there's like every episode, there's like somebody who's never listened to Deer Hank and John before? And if so, is your name Neil? Oh, is there a new Neil? Is there a new Neil? There could be. It's not impossible.

There's a beautiful snowstorm outside my, shed today. And so if you see me not looking at you, Hank, it's because I'm staring at the snowstorm. I love that your shed has so many books in it. That's not usually what sheds have. So yeah, we're going to go back to the way that we do the show, the show, the conceit of the show, if you haven't been here before, the concede of the show, is that people ask us questions. And then we do, we do three total things. One, we answer questions that are kind of sciencey. We try to give like good It's kind of sciencey answers. Two, we answer questions that are a little bit silly and we give silly answers.

And then very occasionally, we actually get sincere and we try to do a good job. Right. But please never think that we're, I don't know. It's strange because I desperately don't want to do to have people think that we're going to do a good job. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing to me how many people write in with serious questions knowing that this is not a serious question podcast except for occasionally.

We do do them. But I often feel like, you know what serious questions I'd be good at answering are like just about being a YouTuber? Like, I don't know how to date. Well, I actually don't mind answering dating questions. It's the questions that are like, what do I do with my one wild and precious life? I feel like it's slipping out from underneath me that I don't know how to answer because me too, buddy.

Yeah. Hank, let's start off today with a question from Teresa who writes, Dear John and Hank, here in Houston, Texas, we have St. Arnold's Brewery, which is named after the patron saint of beers. I think, to be fair, it's the patron saint of brewers. I don't know that the beer gets its own thing. Is the patron saint like one who gives like a small monthly donation to someone's YouTube channel? Uh, to even bigger. We'll get to that. It seems like there are patron saints for many niche categories. Who decides who can become a patron saint and what can receive a patron? Also, So if you could choose a patron saint of science or tuberculosis, who would that be in Y,

Pumpkins and Penguins, Teresa? So Hank, yes. There is a patron saint of toothache. So not of a person with a toothache, but of the thing? No, of people who suffer with toothache, not of toothache itself. But there's a patron saint that you pray to for intercession when, if you're Catholic, when you have a toothache. And now I'm not Catholic, but I have had some immense chronic mouth pain. And I'm not above saying that I've prayed to St. Apollonia for.

intercession on my behalf. So when you pray to a patron saint, the concept is you're not praying to them as a God because there's only one God and that would be a false idol or whatever. Yeah, they're not pretending to be gods. You're praying to someone who's in heaven who hangs out with God. But also theoretically, who knows what it was like to deal with the thing that you've got going on. Is that right? Exactly. So is this lady Apollonia? Yeah. Did she, Was she, like, tortured to death with tooth stuff? Well, Hank, I hate to inform you that she was indeed tortured to death with tooth stuff. Specifically, she had all of her teeth crushed by pinchers.

Oh, no. That sounds horrible. The Catholic Saint Canon is the worst Pokemon. Yeah, so it's like if squirtle, was also like forever impaled upon something. Yeah. It really feels that way. Not all of them.

Certainly not all of them died terribly, right? No, no, not all of them. But a lot of them. There are a lot of martyrs because the thing about being a saint is that it's much easier to get there if you're martyred. Otherwise, you've got to go the Mother Teresa route of like being perfect your whole dang life or near perfect. I guess nobody's perfect. only Jesus, but you know what I mean. So there's a patron saint for everything. I mean,

I'm sure there's a patron saint for writers. Let me look it up real quick. You think Jesus ever lost his temper or like made a YouTube video just to because... Just to feel something? No, Hank. I don't. I don't. Yeah, so we got St. Francis DeSales. He's the patron saint of writers, the Catholic press, the death, journalists, and education in a adulthood. So the way that patron sainthood works is that you don't decide who becomes a saint, right? The church decides that. But patronage is a kind of a complicated, like a lot of power structures, really. Patronage is a complicated relationship between like official proclamation and popular devotion. Like popular devotion is really what gets you there. Like St. Apollonia

is considered the patron saint of people living with toothaches because that's what you. which she's been considered for a long time, and a lot of people have found comfort in whatever in praying toward her. I don't know the exact phrasing. All the Catholics are going to be so mad at me, Hank. I'm worried. I'm worried the Catholic theologians are going to come for me, and I fear them. So you only get this canon if you're Catholic. There's no like Episcopalian patron saints? There are Episcopalian saints, but it's not nearly as big of a deal, and there are not like saints in the Methodist or Lutheran Church usually, I think. Gotcha. Because a lot of Protestants see this as like false idol worship. Like you're basically worshipping St. Epilonia and you can't worship anyone but God.

I have great news about the patron saint of science who's a real guy. St. Albert. St. Albert, the Great, which is great. All of so-called Albertus Magnus. You know how he died? How did he die? Of old age. He was. It was in his late 80s. That's the dream. He got to be a saint and he died theoretically just like the same stuff that you and I are going to die of. Well, the patron saint of tuberculosis is St. Teresa of Lusu, who of course died of tuberculosis. But that was certainly true of most of the saints.

Yeah. The ones who didn't die of torture, probably mostly died of tuberculosis. A lot of them did for sure, for sure. She was 24, though. That's no good. That's pretty early. When did that happen? She was the pampered daughter of a mother who had wanted to be a saint and a father who wanted to be a monk. It sounds like a D1 baby in the making, if ever there was one.

Division I, one saint. There's a lot of them. And they, I mean, I guess because, like, if you make it, like, one every few years, it's been a lot of years. I want to see a graph of saints. When were saints made? Are they, like, how far in retrospective were they? So, like, when was the saint operating versus, and like, when were they finally made a saint?

Was there like, I bet there was like a really big peak at some point. There was like some point where they were like, we need a bunch of saints. We got like, we're doing the saint thing. Well, there was a lot of martyrdom early on. And so you got a lot of early ones. Like the other patron saint of tuberculosis is St. Pantelione, who died at the age of 28. presumably of tuberculosis. But he's also the patron saint of physicians, midwives, livestock.

I didn't know that you could be a patron saint of an animal, but apparently you can. And this is my favorite, Hank. Helper for crying children. He's not the patron saint of crying children. He's just, oh, no, he's the patron saint of helpers for crying children. I think he's the patron saint of when your child won't stop crying. I wonder which one of these, like, which one of the patron saints gets the most prayers, you know? He was the doctor of the emperor of Rome, and he converted to Christianity, St. Pantileone.

He was the doctor of the emperor of Rome. And then he became a Christian, which obviously was dangerous. When the emperor Diocletian, and I'm reading this from Catholic.org, by the way, began his persecution, Pantolione at once gave away everything he owned to the poor. Imagine, Hank. Not long afterwards, he was accused of being a Christian. See, imagine. Imagine if that these days led to an accusation of Christianity. I can make that joke as a Christian. He was given the choice of denying his faith or being put to death, and no torture could force him to deny his faith. So there you go. Man, I tell you what, Christianity doesn't seem like it's in a really weird spot right now.

having a weird moment. A lot of disagreement about what the gospels say. Yeah. You know, there's a line in the gospels. One time I was at church and the person giving the homily was like, everybody wants to take the Bible literally, except when it comes to this line about how it's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven when suddenly all the rich people

become experts in figurative language. I was some podcast person. I was like 3,000 mentions of the wealth injustice being bad in the Bible. Oh, yeah. Somehow that's like the main thing that is ignored. And then they try to tease out any little thing about the hot button issues of like today's society. Right, yeah, like there's no mention of any of the hot button issues, but there is mention of the last being first and the meek inheriting the earth. And also there's mention of wherever you see the poor or imprisoned or those who can't afford clothing, you see me, i.e. God.

Yeah. It's a tough one to get around, Hank, but people are managing to get around it. And by the way, I am also getting around it, okay? Like, I'm not casting aspersions. I am throwing stones absolutely from within my glass house. I need to pray to the patron saint of hypocrisy. Hold on. Hold on.

It was Hippocrates. No. No, I couldn't find one, but I did find a patron saint of rabies. Oh. Tubert. What? Hubert. St. Hubert.

That does sound a little bit like a Pokemon. Do they have trading cards? Do they have stats? What are the stats? I used to keep, like, miracles. I used to keep a card of St. Padre Pia. in my in my wallet for for consolation and good luck given to me by my Jewish mentor Eileen Cooper. And he is the patron saint of Pio.

I think he actually is the patron saint of Pio. What's that a place? I think it's a place. Oh. Let me look it up. Hold on. Oh, no, it's derived from from pious. Oh, that makes sense.

He was a pious guy. He had the stigmata. And what is the stigmata? That's where like you get blood coming out of your hands or your wrists in mimicking Christ's suffering. Gotcha. This next question comes from Talia, who asks. Oh, we're moving on. I thought we were only like one third of the way into patron saints.

No, no, no. We're all the way through patron saints. All right. Let's move on. And Talia asks, do we all get eaten? Mm. So logically, the answer would probably be yes to decomposition of dead bodies. But what about cremation?

Do we still get eaten or will nothing go near ashes or does getting eaten by fire count? And if people die in the ocean, then the body will get eaten away by the water. But does that count as being eaten? Talia, Talia, I have so many answers to this question. Yeah. First of all, people who get buried at sea often get eaten, like more so than most people. Right. Faster and more aggressively than most of us. And in more of a way that feels and looks like eating, you know, there's like things with teeth that are doing the actual eating. Now that, of course, doesn't always happen.

But commonly, the human body is made of food. And upsettingly. Yeah, there's something I really can't get behind. And that's my brain being edible. I just can't. I can't support it, Hank. I'm opposed to it. I'm opposed to it.

But do you get eaten if you're ashes? You don't really get, you can kind of get eaten if your ashes. Now, the main thing is that you don't get metabolized if your ashes because metabolizing something, like turning it into fuel for your body, is like just doing fire to it, but in a controlled way. So it's the same chemical reactions. Okay. And like sort of down at the root of them.

Fire has already been done to it. It has done the eating. But when Dubuque was looking into this, there's this thing where people will scatter. ashes and they'll be like, these ashes will be good for the plants and then they'll be taken up in the plants. But here's the thing about human ashes. They're bad for plants. They're alkaline.

So they're like, you know, the opposite of basic. They can, that can damage plants. So if you do too much, like if you pour it, like, there's some areas that like a bunch of people scatter ashes in the same area and then the plants all stop growing. Oh, my God. So there's a company that creates a supplement that you could add to your ashes that makes them good for plants. Of course there is.

So you can go. And I've got some problems with the sort of pitch of let your love grow, which is this company. I've got some scientific nits I could pick. But it's a fine idea. Basically, I think probably the majority of what it does is it adds some acid to it so that it becomes more neutral. And then they're not. And then it becomes like a thing. And absolutely the minerals from the ashes can be taken up in the past.

plants. But that's not really, I wouldn't call that necessarily eating. It's like taking a vitamin or like what you do to salt more than what you do to chicken. That reminds me, Hank, that the patient saying at funeral directors is Joseph of Arithmia. Arithmia? Like Arithmia? Arimma. Arimathea. I'm not sure, Hank. Are you saying Joseph of Arimathea? Jesus's dad? You know Joseph of Arimathea. Jesus's dad. Wow. Yeah.

I didn't know he was a saint. He's a saint. He's a saint. I mean, he did do a pretty good job when Mary was like, hey, I'm pregnant with God's baby. Yeah. He was pretty chill about it. I think so. He had a cool hat, at least in this photo.

Yeah. I don't know that that's a photo, by the way. Hey. He is, and he, you know who else he is the patron saint of? No one. No one. Just funeral directors. The stepdad of God just got funeral directors and undertakers.

That's everybody. But it makes sense because he was the one who requested Jesus's body from Pontius Pilate and so that it could be properly buried or I guess entombed. Oh, that's kind of nice. Well, it's sad. It's a sad story. That is the thing about your story. It's like a bummer.

God came down to Earth and everybody was like, actually, let's kill him. Yeah, he was rejected. It's a bit of a perfor of a story. And so he remains, John. That's not the end, by the way. Yeah, it does keep going. But like, that's a bummer. Like, I want to think that humanity would be a little more chill about God coming down to Earth.

That's like when Henry was three years old and we watched a movie called Big Bird Comes Home and he got really upset when Big Bird left home. And I was like, well, Henry, the movie is called Big Bird Comes Home. I got a good feeling about how this is all going to work out. But he wouldn't watch till the end because he was too upset. That's how you are with the Jesus story. You stop when he dies and you're like, this is terrible. What are we up to? That wasn't even like a nice way of doing it.

No, certainly not. All right. Enough theology. We're moving on. People don't come here for that. People come here for reasons that are unclear to me. Joy asks, Dear John and Hank, how do flames decide where to go? Not in terms of what burns, but the shapes the flames make as they flicker upwards. I'm staring at the fire in my fireplace right now and trying to determine if there's a pattern. There's some level of consistency in back and forth flames, smaller, and larger flames and swirls, but no true pattern that I can determine. Do flames have patterns or are they just random, just feeling warm and content, joy? Oh, that's kind of a nice little moment for us all. Yeah. Let's just pretend that we're by the fire. Yeah. And I'm going to tell you about fluid dynamics.

Oh, great. I mean, are you going to tell me that fire is actually a fluid? Because that seems like the kind of thing you would tell me. What fire is very, is like, it's more of a phenomenon of, an experiential phenomenon rather than a physical one is what I can tell you about fire. So what you see as fire is a bunch of different things all happening at the same time. But one of them is that there's a bunch of like heat being produced. And so when heat is produced, the air molecules like bump around more and they get farther apart.

When they're farther apart, they become less dense. And when they're less dense, they get pushed up by gravity because it's the opposite thing that's happening. It's like a helium balloon, basically. And as that happens, lots of air is like doing lots of weird stuff. So it's rushing in to take the place of that air that is moving upward. And fluid dynamics is extremely complicated because it's made of trillions of atoms and molecules. Mostly molecules, it turns out. But those molecules are made of atoms.

And so they're bumping around. They're moving around the sticks. They're moving through your house. And there's never really any moment where all of the molecules are made. moving the same way as they were just a moment ago. And they will always be moving slightly differently. And also the shape of the fire is changing. The amount of energy being produced is changing very slightly.

The air currents in the room have an effect on this or outdoors or wherever you are. All of this matters. And so fire kind of, I feel like, will never look exactly the same in one moment as it did in the last. But certainly there can be patterns. and also you can do things that will actually structure fire. So candles are built to control fire and put the fire into a structured shape so that it doesn't get chaotic and waste a bunch of wax. Well, the patron saint of fire prevention is Catherine of Siena from the 14th century. I don't want to know how she died.

Actually, she died of a stroke. I looked it up while you were rattling on. Oh, God. This is our, oh man, what's the patriot saint of dear Hank and John? We don't get to choose tuberculosis in science. That's a real thing. If I could choose the patron saint of dear Hank and John. Yeah.

Dolly Parton? Sure. That's a good one. Keshah is good. I think I'm not completely up to date on Keshah Hank. Keshah could not be a saint. I don't know. That's outside of my realm of Mexico.

Well, I did it did. So for clarity, I assume some saints did some naughty stuff at some point. All saints did naughty things, right? Like that's the, that's the nature of being a human, is that you're, you're sinful. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that that's okay. Sure. Well, we'll have to decide between Dali Parton and Kesha another time. Yeah, we also probably should choose a dead person. Isn't that one of the requirements? Great point, Hank. Really, really, really good point. You do have to be deceased to be a saint. Yeah. Okay. Charles Darwin. That's my proposal. Charles Darwin because he appeals to you for his science stuff and me because of his chronic stomach problems. So you can intercede to him and say, oh, please, Charles Darwin,

help me with this science problem. And I can be like, Charles Darwin, I can't stop puking and neither could you. My belly aches. Oh, love Charles Darwin's chronic stung problems. Yeah. Yeah, he was always going to the hot tubs to deal with it. Yeah. I love that. Well, that's how they did it back in the day. All right, we got another question from Kate who writes, hey pals, my two-year-old asked how trees don't fall over.

He was confused because his towers always get smaller as they go up, but trees have huge branches. I explained that he can't see the strong roots under the ground, and I showed him diagrams and such, but he's not convinced. Honestly, I'm not sure I'm convinced either. I need more science. Help. Kindly, Kate.

Yeah, there's a bunch of different things going on here. One is that the roots are often bigger than the tree. Right. Don't the roots extend like out often beyond the crown of the tree or whatever? Yeah. And unlike the crown of the tree, they can actually like intermingle with the roots of other plants. So crowns don't tend to intermingle for actually somewhat mysterious reasons. Yeah. I was just thinking because occasionally you'll hear the sound in a windstorm of tree branches rubbing up against each other from other trees. but very rarely, you would think it would be a cacophic. And usually it's the same tree that's rubbing up.

Yeah, they like respect each other's space, which is very weird. Very weird. But their roots can intermingle certainly with lots of different plants. And so this has a very stabilizing effect on the ground. So if you just had a tree with a bunch of like big, thick roots going into sand, this would not be particularly stable. And in fact, there are sandy places where trees are more likely to fall over because sand doesn't bind stuff together as well. And like trees that are adapted to grow in sand do it differently.

But one of the things that is sort of an underrated phenomenon here is that it isn't really the big branches that do the majority or the big roots that do the majority of this work. There's like a tap root that's doing a lot of that. So it's like sticking straight down into the ground. But then there's like a lot of little tiny fingers that are all doing the absorption of the water and the nutrients. That is very important to the life of the tree. But because they create so much surface area, these very delicate. little root lits actually do a lot of grabbing in a way that like you can kind of imagine like a chameleon's finger works by just having a ton of surface area that gets into every little nook and

cranny or if you imagine a sponge like if you stick like a couple of like chopsticks in there you can kind of just pull them out but if you imagine like a billion spikes come out from inside of the chopstick they would then be stuck into the sponge wow that makes sense i mean that's kind of beautiful to think about that like underneath us all the time there is this web of life that we don't see that that holds up trees and other. It reminds me actually that of the patron saint of tree teas between popes and Frankish emperors Petronia. What did you say treatise? Yeah, the treaties between the popes and Frankish emperors in particular. Petronia. That's what Petronia does. When you need a treaty between a Pope and a Frankish emperor, you better.

to be fraying like crazy to Petronia for intercession. There's no patron saint of like lumber or something? Oh, there's a patron saint. There totally is. There totally is Saint Gumar. That sounds like a Pokemon. It's actually Gummeras, which is even more Pokemon-like. Gummerous, wow.

Yeah. I think it might be Gumaris, but I'm not here to judge. I'm not here to judge. Also Pokemone. John, actually, importantly, I should now say that this podcast is brought to you by chopsticks that have a bunch of spikes sticking out from them. The chopsticks that suddenly explode with spikes makes it easier to pick stuff up, I guess. Yeah, for sure.

Today's podcast is, of course, also brought to you by John the Apostle, the patron saint of lithographers. Oh, my God, he's got a website open. And this podcast is brought to you by Kesha. Keshah, not the patron saint of dear Hank and John, because she's alive. And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by Little Saint Cards of Padre Pio. Little Saint Cards of Padre Pio in my wallet until I no longer had a wallet because now you don't need a wallet. Oh, oh no. And now you have to just have like a screenshot of him in your photo roll.

Somewhere in your photo reel. Next time I upload like a carousel on Instagram, I'm going to make the last picture of Padre Pio with no explanation. Always the last one's Padre Pio. It just means father pious. Geez. Bragg. He was a very pious man. This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by Factor.

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What happened? And how does the same person's hair change between straight and curly like a book, read. I don't know. And more than that, neither do we. So I've certainly looked into this, but we're at the stage of understanding how curly hair works. We kind of understand how it works when people's hair is always curly. And it is weird that sometimes when you have chemotherapy, your hair comes back curly,

and it is weird that then it will eventually maybe sometimes, but not always, go back to being straight again. And why this happens, we've just got what we call hypotheses. And we haven't really done much work testing those hypotheses because in cancer research, there's a bunch of money to spend on stuff that matters more than that. Yeah, which is almost everything. I do feel like there's a way to figure this out. So the big leading hypotheses are one, your cells grow back unevenly because they've sort of died off. Or they've gone into dormancy and they like emerge.

from dormancy unevenly. And when they emerge unevenly, they like literally form curls and waves and stuff. Right, right. So like one piece of the hair follicle will be making more hair than another piece. And then there's another idea that. So curly hair we know is created when the hair follicle is more at an angle to the scalp. And rather than straight up and down. And so there's an idea that like when the hair follicle gets empty, like it doesn't have

anything in there, it sort of like changes shape a little bit. And then after a while of the hair growing through it, it physically changes the shape of the hair follicle. But I don't know which of those two things it is. And it may yet be a third thing or an effect of both of those things together. Wow. But it initially came back not just curly, but like very fine. So I had like baby hair at first. It was curly. It was fine. And it was sort of mahogany. It was like a different color. It also was a different color. It was kind of Auburn. I remember when I first started seeing videos of you with your new hair thinking it doesn't even look like Hank. It looks like somebody like cosplaying Hank.

Yeah. Yeah. And now I go out. And now you look exactly like you used to look. Yeah. Yeah. Which is so weird. I look at the Hank with the curly hair in it.

I feel weird about him. Yeah. You know what he looks like? He looks like all of our cousins. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you came back with our cousin's hair. The first time my hair follicles grew hair for the first time, I also had curly hair for a while.

You had curly hair when you were a little kid. And then mom's theory, and I don't think this stands up to scrutiny. Sorry if you're listening, Mom. But mom's theory is that when you got scarlet fever, your hair stopped being curly. Could be. I don't know. Oran also started out curly and now straight. So he didn't get scarlet fever.

Do people still get scarlet fever? I don't hear about scarlet fever anymore. Did we fix that one? I don't know. I'm not an expert. I didn't write a book about scarlet fever. Google it, and I'll find out who the patron saint of scarlet fever is. Scarlet fever is making a comeback.

Of course it is. It became rare because of antibiotics. Oh, okay. So it's treatable, but it still happens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't find a patron saint of scarlet fever, unfortunately. Oh, God, it was bad. I did not enjoy scarlet fever.

Yeah, you were really sick, I remember. And it's interesting that we've taken on, you talked about this in a vlog brother's video recently, that we've just taken on this assumption that I'm the sick one and you're the healthy one, even though, like, you did have scarlet fever and cancer. Yeah. Uh-huh. And also ulcerative colitis. And ulcerative colitis.

You had chronic health conditions, but I seem sickly. I come across as sickly. I communicate a certain fragility of my constitution. I've got a certain sturdiness, you know? Keep hitting me. I'm fine. You do. You do have a sturdiness about you that I just don't have.

It's okay. I think we're like equally physically sturdy, but it's not about the physics. No. God, I want you to out with me so bad. Yeah, I know. Oh, that would suck. Whatever happens happens. Well, that's one way to think of it.

But my way of thinking about it is that I like to think of what would be better. Yeah. And I think we can all agree that younger brothers are just better equipped for that kind of business. Yeah. Yeah, I, you know, I just don't want to have to do the thing where I stand up in the church and tell everybody. You don't have to do that. You don't have to do that if you don't want to. I know, but like I'm going to do it anyway.

Yeah, I get it. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. Yeah. You feel an obligation to do it, but it doesn't seem like it would be fun. Look, John, maybe we won't die. The Silicon Valley guys are working on it. You know, they're really figuring some stuff out.

Putting young people blood into them. Nobody tried that before. Literally, literally thousands of years ago. They're doing legit vampire stuff. Yeah. Yeah, they're doing, you know, Transylvania Prince activities over there. Catherine, the great things. Yeah, maybe we won't die.

That would be a great, but then that would also be a bad outcome. Yeah, I'll eulogize you when they upload you to the computer. I'll be like, if he was a great physical form. That would actually be the worst outcome. I think I've made this very clear, but to me, the only thing worse than dying would be being stuck as an artificial intelligence or like having my consciousness uploaded or whatever. I would not enjoy that at. All, as much as I despise the idea that my brain is made out of meat,

I do not like the idea of my brain being made out of ones and zeros. Yeah, yeah. Instead, I'm going to turn you into a non-conscious chatbot that keeps making videos with me. It wouldn't be that hard. No, no, no. I feel like we're not that far away. I mean, God knows there's plenty of my voice on the internet to cut around to make... Don't tell people.

Yeah. Don't do that. We wouldn't even have to do AI. You could just edit together all of the things we've already said. Yeah. People have done that occasionally, like edited together, like things to make it sound like I said something I didn't say. But now with AI, you don't even have to go through all that hullaboo.

You can just tell an AI to make John Green say something horrible. Yeah. It's great. The horrors. Yeah, I mean, that's just really the tip of the horror iceberg. So we don't have to get into all that stuff. All right, Hank, before we get to the all-important. news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. I want to ask you this question from Caitlin, which I genuinely

don't know the answer to. Dear John and Hank, how come when doctors need to take blood out of us, they poke us in the inside of the elbow? But when they need to put something into our bloodstream, they poke us in the wrist. Your fellow walking blood bag, Caitlin. Oh, Caitlin. I remember when I was first in Missoula trying to get a job. There was a lot of phlebotomist jobs. Sure. And they were higher in phlebotomists and I thought, should I get trained up to be a vein poker and I could not bring myself. I was like way too scary. Can we just acknowledge before we go on that the difference between an average phlebotomist and an excellent phlebotomist is almost incalculable. Like there is a, like when you get an excellent phlebotomist, it's game changing. It's like nothing ever,

it does like nothing happens. It's painless. It's like nothing ever happened. Well, I will say, having got poked not just a ton of times in my life, but sometimes by the same people. Sometimes the same, like, I think that there's like nerves involved and sometimes they just hitting slightly the wrong spot and it hurts more. But there is like a,

I have also been poked in situations where a vein was missed or it went through the vein and like, so I've had lots of, I've had a lot of blood draws in my life. And I looked into this, and I don't think that this is how it works. So I don't, I don't, I, in fact, do not think that they have, have, like, one spot where they do it to put things in you in one spot for taking things out.

But if they want to put something in you that might be, like, not great if it leaks out, they really want to put it in the inside of the elbow because that vein is sturdier. It's, it's thicker. And so that's, that's like your, that's oftentimes the preferred place. But sometimes they want to go into the hand. One, those veins are really accessible. Like, they're right there on the surface. They're easy to see. they're so those those are good ones it can also allow for some greater freedom of movement

for you the patient if you're if it's in the hand versus you know sort of like not being it not wanting to close your arm and as long as they tape it down it's it's pretty fine but like it really often does come down to like what what looks the best right now for this specific circumstance oh and with chemotherapy they have actually moved to not doing it into like direct into the arm at all they used to but because those drugs can be so bad if they slip out of the vein even a little bit that they

install a catheter that goes straight into one of the big thick veins in your chest that then they can poke into through what they call a port and that port you had installed I remember you had a surgery to get that port put in

yeah yeah yeah and then I had a so that one I was asleep for but then when they take the port out you're just awake and they just yank it out. Oh, I would be such a bad phlebotomist, Hank, that I have almost passed out from this conversation. Yeah, and what I'll say, having had it done a ton, I will occasionally have a new phlebotomist, and I'm like, my friend, I'm the perfect person for you to practice on.

Like, I've had it go every possible way, and it's like I know what it's like for it to go all of the different ways. And I had a person who recently, they were like, can't see your vein, but I can feel it. And I've never put a needle into a vein that I can feel but not see. And I was like, girl, do it. Like, if you mess up, like this matters to me not at all. And she's like, yeah, I'm not going to do it, though. You're Hank Green. I was like, right. And it's like double the pressure. That's why you don't want to become more famous, Hank, because then all your phobotomists will be panicked when they try to find a vein.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, shout out to blood donors and indeed also to their patron saint, Our Lady of the Thorns. Oh, my God. It's just still happening, Hank. A lot of leaking going on with the thorns. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's maybe how they got there. All right. It's time for the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Hank, what's the news from Mars this week?

In news from Mars. There's a bunch of, like, bummer Mars news. We didn't find that orbiter. Yeah, I heard that. It's gone. We didn't find that orbiter. And also, it seems to be well and truly the case that Mars sample return is dead. So the idea was Rover, pick stuff up, put it in little vials, and then later we pick those vials up and we bring them home and then we can figure out whether all kinds of stuff. But I was about to say whether there was life on Mars, which is a thing that we actually probably could potentially tell from a Mars sample return mission, certainly.

not a high chance of it happening. But yeah, it's just got too expensive and we're prioritizing other things as a nation. That's the understatement of the week. We're prioritizing other things as a nation. Yeah, we've decided to spend our money in other ways. Worse ways. Yeah. And I'm not even that big a fan of Mars sample return missions.

He's not. No, I am. I think it'd be really cool to have a piece of Mars. I know we have pieces of Mars on Earth from like meteorites and everything. But like I think it'd be really cool to be able to bring back something from Mars and examine it. And I know that like the science that we could do, you know, it's one thing to do science for millions of miles away. It's another thing to do science up close. And it would be game changing.

And it's very frustrating that it's, that it's been canceled. And I'm sorry. It's expensive. It's, it's, the costs went up. up to about $11 billion. And to that, I say, just get a billionaire to pay for it. You know? I even know one who's interested in Mars.

But he's not interested in Mars for a sample return. John, he's interested in Mars for the planet he could be king of. Yeah. Yeah. Which is different goals. Well, the news from AFC Wimbledon isn't much better. AFC Wimbledon have won only one of their last 11 league games. It's not going great.

However, there is one of these silly kind of somewhat unimportant cup competitions that are all sort of knockout competitions where you either... An important cup. It's called the Virtue Trophy, and it might as well be called the Unimportant Cup. However, we did beat West Ham United's children. They fielded an under 21 team, and we beat them. And now we are in the final eight of that trophy. And if we make it to the final, we would play a game at Wemble. which would be really cool and also frankly kind of lucrative, which we need because we have no money

because we got knocked out of the other cup competitions early so we didn't get to play a Chelsea or Manchester United or whatever. And so getting to the final of that competition would be meaningful. And now it's clear that we're trying. We put out our best 11 against West Ham's kids and we beat them four two. The two goals we gave up were not great though. I actually wasn't that impressed with our performance. against West Ham's children. I felt like maybe when you're playing actual teenagers, you should maybe do a little bit better.

But at any rate, we won, and that's good news. Overall, AFC Wimbledon are currently right in the middle of the table, 13th out of 24 teams. We would take that at the end of the season. We do have a negative six goal differential, which reveals that we lose a lot of games by multiple goals. But, yeah, I don't know, Hank. As long as we get to 52 points and we stay up, the season is a tremendous success.

And we're on pace to get there. Yeah. You've got 50? We've got 31. Oh. But we have 22 games left in which to get the remaining 21. Okay. We only have to win five.

You get a point for a tie. You get a point for a tie. We have to win five or six more games to stay up out of the last 20. Yeah. Yeah, it's that simple. John tried so, I'm going to London for a work thing, and John tried so hard to make it into an AFC Wimbledon trip. I was ready to, and by the way, I am so busy right now.

Like, I am working like 12-hour days right now, and I was going to throw everything away to take you to an AFC Wimbledon game, and you wouldn't do it. Well, it's, I mean, it's literally not possible as far as I can tell for me to do it. All right. Well, that's what cowards say, Hank. I opened up the possibility, but then the games were on the wrong days. Oh, it would be so wonderful to take you to an AFC Wimbledon game. I really, and I know this probably isn't true, but I really believe that you would like see the light.

You don't think that would happen to me at church, but you do think that would happen to be a football. Absolutely. I understand it's not going to happen in church. And indeed, I don't need it to, but I do need you to see the AFC Wimbledon light. You've got a different idea of souls and how they shall be treated. And I like yours very much. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's fine. That doesn't bother me at all. You not wanting to support AFC Wimbledon financially is baffling to me. Man, I tell you what, I do think for the people who've stuck around, because I know a lot of people stop it at the news from AFC Wimbledin and Mars. Yeah, this is for the special people. I just think there's so much money out there. And it should be doing, I think that it should be doing the stuff that we do, which is like really focusing on.

But I think that like some money, in the same way that a lot of money goes to just like movie theater tickets and concerts and soda pop. I think more like there should be like a good fair amount of money giving away that is about just doing fun, weird stuff. Yeah. Rich people should do more weird stuff. But not bad weird. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Morally neutral weird.

Chaotic neutral weird. You know how Paul DeGeorge has that stapler museum? Stuff like that. Yes. Paul DeGeorge has a store in Lawrence, Kansas that only sells staplers. He's not rich. He's not really. Just for clarity, Paul DeGeorge is not a billionaire. He is a former wizard rock musician who now owns an art supply store in Kansas.

But he also has a stapler museum. It's also a store. You can buy things there. I bought a stapler t-shirt. It's basically is a t-shirt that says we sell staples here in Warren's Kansas. Yeah. More things like that. Yes. There's a rich guy in Indianapolis who built something called the Idol, which is this like weird walkway that you go through off a highway bridge and you walk through this like, you know, thicket of honeysuckle trees. And then eventually you come to this lookout point where you look out at a spaghetti junction in Indianapolis and it's so loud from all the cars and trucks that you can't even hear each other talk. And there's like stadium seating there where you can sit and watch the cars. We need more weird stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you know that the Carmex, the lip balm stuff? Yeah, yeah. The guy who started Carmex also is super into pipe organs. And so the largest theater pipe organ in the world is at the Carmex factory. And sometimes they have like exhibitions where they play the organs. There's a bunch of other organs there as well. That just seems so much more.

I mean, look, obviously nobody should be allowed to accumulate wealth to the degree that we've allowed it to happen. But like that seems so much more interesting and useful to me than like. Right. Yeah. Dot, dot, dot. Mm-hmm. Yeah, like the biggest ball of paint should absolutely be worth a lot to a billionaire. You know, they should be like, you did a good job and now you can retire.

Well, that person should have a patron, right? Like, they shouldn't be somebody buys the ball of paint. It should just be somebody patronizes the ball of paint. Somebody should pitch, yes. Like, it's very hard to say, don't do the thing where you're educating people or where you're helping get medicine to people. Instead, ball of paint. goofy staple museum.

But like, we spend money on ridiculous stuff. They're buying yachts. Yeah. They're buying yachts that go in the ocean. That they don't use. They've got a yacht for their yacht. Well, you need to for some of those bigger yachts. Yeah, you need support vessels.

Some of the yacht yachts need yachts. Oh, God. I just got sick to my stomach. That was worse than you brought up the fobotomy. If you're like a cent-a-millionaire or above, send us an email. Send us an email. We've got so many good ideas for you. We can fight tuberculosis.

We can improve science education. We can give you credit or not. We can support AFC Wimbledon. Yeah. Yeah. Look, maybe we just want to like build, like just dig down in the center of Missoula, Montana and build a giant catacomb. Why not? Better than a yacht.

Better than a yacht any day. That's our new non-profit organization. It's called Better than a yacht. dot org This podcast is made possible by everybody who sends us questions at Hank and John at gmail.com. It's Hank and John at gmail.com. Thank you for everybody for sending us questions. It's edited by Linus Oban House.

It's mixed by Joseph Tuna Manish. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halso, and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Dubukey Chuck Rivardi. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarola. And as they stay in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.