Dear Hank & John - 453: Nobody Is as Good as Me

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Why is it so hard to do things? What’s next for Nerdfighteria? Do our brains know when our limbs fall asleep? Is it possible for a mirror to have never been used? Do John and Hank purchase each other's books in stores? …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/dearhankandjohnProduced for Hank and John Green by ComplexlySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Real quick, everybody, straight message. Here from Hank Green, I have had a really weird career. I've done a lot of really cool things. But by far the thing that I get thanked for the most in public and am most proud of and am most amazed by, because, of course, like, this is not a thing that I did. It is a thing that many people did that I helped with is Crash Course. YouTube.com slash Crash Course. It is really good.

It helps people learn in situations where they need that help. It helps lower the barrier to getting in information. information in your head. We've never charged anybody for it. We've never advertised it. We've never convinced a school board to buy it. The only reason people use Crash Course is because a student decides to use it because they think that it's going to help them, or a teacher decides to use it because they think they're going to help their student. That's how we want Crash Course to be. The only reason it's successful is because people are choosing to use it. And I know that sounds crazy, but in educational media, that is not often how things go. But there are two true things

about the world. Number one, making Crash Course is expensive. It's a lot more expensive than making the average YouTube video because you got to get things right. You got to have consultants. You got to have a lot of review. And a second thing that's true is that some people, and not most, but some people have extra money. And this is the only reason that Crash Course works. It is because some people who can pay for it so that not everyone else has to. And now that Complexly is a nonprofit, that's a thing that happened this year, Complexly, the parent company of Crash Course is a nonprofit. So we belong structurally, officially, to the public. And so that, That's going to help out with this situation. And the other thing that helps out is that right now,

the 2026 CrashCoursecoin is here and is only available until May 29th at CrashCoreScoin.com. Not everybody has the money to buy a CrashCoursecoin, but everybody has the time to consider whether or not they're the person who should. And if you just considered that, you've done the job because some of you considered it and said, you know, actually I am. And some of you considered it and said, no, I need to make responsible financial decisions right now. That's all I'm asking. Everybody who considered it did their job and the ones who realized that they could financially support CrashCores, those people, they are now going to CrashCorescoin.com, right? They are now on their way to CrashCorescoin.com to get these beautiful coins. Every coin helps us reach thousands of learners

and your purchase is tax deductible, which I am told I should mention. It also happens to be true. You could find more of the specifics at CrashCourseCoin.com because the 26 CrashCourseCoin is available for only a short window. If you could, support the work that Crash Course does. Please do. It is so great. They do such a good job and they provide so much value for the world. They should be able to do more. Go to crashcoursecoigne.com. You're listening to a complexly podcast. 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 B's advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AIFC Wimbledon. John, my friend's a lumberjack,

and he told me that he has cut 2,4007. trees, and he knows because every time he cuts a tree, he keeps a log. Oh, that's good. Did you get that jacket from the lumberjack? No, I got this from the fancy clothing store, but I'm glad that you think that it looks like I might have gotten it from a lumberjack. It looks like he might have gotten it from a lumberjack, but it's a good looking jacket. Oh, thanks.

You got a good looking jacket yourself. Go, AFC Wimbledon. We're staying up. Up to the cup, cup, cup, cup, up, and Dr. Seuss and et cetera. Yes, we're staying up. That's the important thing. I don't care how you celebrate it as long as you celebrate it. How are you, Hank? Hi, I'm on top of the world. Oh, really? I've had the song, it's raining tacos in my head for three days. So that's how I'm doing. It's raining tacos from out of the sky tacos. Yeah, that was a constant companion when my children were the age of your child. It just, I wake up in the morning and it's like lettuce and shells, cheese and meat.

That's, it's fredic taco. That's what my brain does. And I do wonder what the having of a song in your head is about. Yeah, I don't know. It feels like it's about something. I don't think it's like dreams being the waste products of the mind. I don't think it's about much of it. anything. But if you want to give it meaning, I think that's fine. Well, but even if it's a waste

product, that's about something. I don't mean that it's about like, why is it, why is it happening? How can I have like a bunch of thoughts and be doing a bunch of things in that whole time? Yeah. My brain's like, it's rain and talk, just like right in the back there. Yep. It's just the whole separate part of it is dedicated to the tacos song. The whole separate part of my brain that's dedicated to something else right now is dedicated to my book, Hollywood ending that comes out on September 22nd. September 22nd. And I just wanted to ask you if you've read it yet. I'm 20% of the way through. 20% of the way through. You're still in part one. It's, it's, things are occurring. Part one is most of what I'm working on. So some of it will change,

but not too much of it, hopefully. But if you have any notes for part one, let me know. If you have notes for the rest of it, don't let me know. Okay. You got it. You know, there's a a lot that I didn't know about Andy Warhol that I'm learning. So there's that. Are you learning more about Andy Warhol or about Hollywood? More about Warhol, huh? I mean, I know more. I know about Hollywood more than the average person. But like, I think I'm learning about how it, the, the way in which the people in front of the camera are objects to be moved around. Yeah. Like, really, they are the, they are both the stars and, you know, in like in a weird way completely powerless.

Totally powerless. Actors are cattle, as Alfred Hitchcock famously put it. So that is actually, I mean, I've experienced that directly, having been cattle. Yeah. And like they want you to feel like you're not. They want you to feel like you're very special. Yeah, but mostly they just need you to have your face and stare in the right direction and say the right thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And then do it 17 times. Right. And then you as an artist, as an actor, you have to find ways to turn that into art to create the very similitude that's so important to the actual product. Yeah. And that seems to me like the hardest part. On the fifth camera angle, the fifth time you do it at the fifth camera angle. Right. The 37th time you do it to bring your full self to. it seems really challenging.

It is a weird job, and it is not, the glamour seems to have nothing to do with the actual process of the art. Right. Oh, no, that's very true. Yeah. The glamour is more about the fact that it tends to attract people who are stereotypically beautiful, tend to get work. And also, I think that there's some glamour in the popularity of the art, right?

Like, it's an art. form that still has wide reach, which most art forms don't. Like, I often say that if you sell 100,000 books, you've had a tremendously successful book. And if you sell 100,000 movie tickets, your movie is a complete failure. Yeah. You know, it's just a whole different scale at which, like, the art takes place, a whole different kind of audience.

Right. And it has both the scale. It has both the reach and the cachet. Like, I don't know how else to talk about it, but like, like, it is just. Right. Like, YouTube doesn't have the. cachet. Yeah, I could get, I could get more, more views on a two-hour-long YouTube video than a two-hour-long movie would get, and like, nobody would think that those were similar achievements.

Right. Yes. Nobody complimented me on my hour-long crash course deep dive into tuberculosis and said, like, this really deserves an Oscar. No, no, nobody came forward thinking that it was going to be, I don't know, did it win anything? But what do you mean win anything? Did it get a Web? nominated for any. No, it didn't get a Webby. Ah, come on. You could have got a Webby for that. I'm not interested. I have to confess, Hank, and this is, I am interested in prizes, truly. Like, I don't want to be, but I am, but I'm not interested in Webby's. I think I already have one. Oh, yeah, yeah, I think we both do. I think we have a, we might have like a Lifetime Achievement Award Webby.

Well, what's the point of a second Webby? I don't want a second Oscar either. Do you have an Oscar? No. I don't want a first one. I bet you'd want a second one if you had a first one. Maybe. I don't know. Do you think, I don't think people who win MacArthur Genius Grants think, man, I wish I had a second MacArthur Genius Grant. I think they just walk around all day saying I'm a MacArthur genius.

Mr. MacArthur says I'm a genius. As you know, John, I am much, much more compelled by the market-based prizes of number one New York Times bestseller, number one app in the app store. 20 years of continuous relevance in the salience factory. All of those things are where I derive my feelings of I actually did a good job. It's a totally normal thing to want and an easy thing to achieve being relevant in the salience factory. Put it on his tombstone, everybody. Hank Green, he spent 20 years feeding content to the salience factory and he stayed relevant the whole time.

It's almost like an insult to say it's relevant the whole time. Did you do it with a normal healthy brain? Because that doesn't seem possible. That seems unlikely. I'll say. All right, let's answer some questions from our listeners, beginning with this one from Ella. It's kind of on topic, Hank. Dear John and Hank, why is it so hard to do things?

I look at people like you guys doing so many wonderful things for the world, and I'm amazed. I like to think I have some brains in my head and feed in my shoes. But when I start to think about actually making things happen in the world, I get totally stuck and I feel like I don't have the skills necessary to actually make anything happen. To complicate the matter, I graduated college last spring and have been suffering from no longer having consistent validation of my intelligence syndrome. When did you guys feel confident enough to start building businesses and making your work public? How can I unearth a little bit of the confidence in my own life? Ella. It's a great question, Hank.

I mean, first off, Ella, you are still really, really young and new in your career. So, like, you know, when I was your age, I looked in my doctor's chart and the first thing I saw was patient as a low-functioning young adult. They really shouldn't put that within reach. Well, she shouldn't have left the room, but on the other hand, I shouldn't have opened the chart. Okay. You didn't just glance. It was. No, I didn't glance.

I opened. Wow. Well, I was a low-functioning young adult, Hank. That's the kind of thing that a low-functioning young adult would do. And that's fine. That's what young adulthood is for. It's for functioning low. Yeah. I have had this conversation several times where people are like, you've got to understand. John Green uploaded his first YouTube video when he was 30.

Like, this was not. Right. We didn't start out like this. Yeah. Though you had published a novel by that point and it didn't be popular with librarians. Yes, it had been limitedly popular. But even then, you know, like I spent five years writing that book from the time I graduated from college and stopped working as a chaplain to the time it came out was like six years and I was writing the book the whole time. But also like the kind of, you know, cultural relevance that we have is not something that all should aspire to because it is not like, it is very, very much so a game that is only like the status is in it being limited availability.

And it's not just that it's a rare thing. it's also that it's not entirely a desirable thing, which I don't think enough people talk about, like most people are not well equipped to this job, including me. You are pretty well equipped to it, but I think most people aren't. But I think Ella's real question is,

how do I go from feeling like I'm doing nothing to feeling like I'm doing something? And that's hard. Especially, like, in an amazing way, like you and I started on YouTube with a little bit of an audience. And that was so valuable because of your books. And so we were creating for each other. So we were holding each other accountable.

But we were also creating for this small audience. And we were able to make some things with the small audience. And we felt an obligation to that small audience. It's very hard to feel like you should create when you are creating for no one or nothing. So building a community of creation, a community of agency is great where you can sort of like compare notes. Or not necessarily building it, but just being part of it. You know, whether that's a writer's group or finding it, building it, maintaining it, however it works. But whether that's a writer's group or a painting class, you know, Sarah started out as a ceramicist by taking one pottery class, met great people, met great teachers, and now makes, you know, actually useful things in the world, not YouTube videos.

but mugs. I mean, intelligence is so interesting and weird and great. You talked about having that validated in school. But, you know, the thing that you're talking about now really isn't about intelligence. It's about, like, agency.

It's about, like, being, like, having the ability to do things in the world, being allowed by the world to do things. And also, like, doing things despite your brain being like, maybe you shouldn't do these things. And so like it's overcoming all of those barriers, some of which are like, there's no guarantee that you can overcome all of them. But that's the frame to think of it inside of.

Like how do I become a person who affects the world in some way? And, you know, work is the way that most people do that. And you affect your, you affect your company. You affect the work that they do. But it's not the only way. It's not the only way. Yeah. No.

I mean, I, you know, I think there are people who make big change in the, the world through volunteering. There are people who make big, you know, in fact, if I look at the work that I've done, I think a lot of the most impactful work that I've done has been outside the realm of so-called work. Yeah. I'm so grateful for people who are like friend centers who like, when I say that I, like they ask me to hang out and I say no, I can't today. And then they ask me again, I say, oh, I also can't that day. They still ask. They keep asking the third and the fourth of the fifth time. And eventually I'm like, yeah, it is, it's really not that I don't want to hang out. It is that life is complicated. And so we have like there are people in my life who are

this way and I'm so grateful for them. And I am not this way. And I like, I, that's one way in which I like wish I had more agency in the world where I could be that for people. And I think all the time about how I, how I would organize that. And then I simply do not do it. But there's all kinds of things like that where you act in the world and you become, you become in the world in a different way. And in feeling like you can't act in the world, like you can't affect things is very frustrating. Yeah, turns into a low-functioning young adult. Let's answer this next question from Nick. You writes, Dear John and Hank, what's next for Nerdfighteria? It's been incredible to see the maternal center of excellence come to life, powered by my silly socks. And now that is finished and

fully operational, I find myself wondering what the next big thing could be. Do we need to provide ongoing support to keep the maternal center of excellence up and running? Yes. Could we build something else in the Kono district to support the health care system in Sierra Leone? Is there some other big project somewhere else in the world we can support, pumpkins and possibilities, Nick. So first of all, the work is never done. I'll tell you that. Oh, yeah. There's, there's, you know, the gap between where we are and the just world is wide enough that we will not finish. I'll be busy for the rest of my life. I think my kids will be busy. Maybe their kids will be all right. You think that we'll just have a just world?

I hope we have a more just world. do you have a more just world? I mean? Well, not than last year, but yeah, than 30 years ago. The 70s, yeah, yeah, for sure. So the, yeah, I think that, I think, but I don't think that there will be a final just world. Well, that makes one of us. I do. The kingdom of God is coming for Earth, Hank. It's just taking a while. Anyway, we don't to talk about the olig. Am I going to have to wear sunscreen? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The sun isn't going to go away. We've already established that would be really bad, actually. So, like, I could see two things. The kingdom of God comes to Earth. I need to wear more sunscreen

because it's bright out. Or two, the kingdom of God comes to Earth and it's like, you don't have to wear sunscreen anymore. We fixed that. I think that there will always be, I see what you mean, like there will be no more place for suffering in the world. I don't think that the issue for me, and we're getting away from Nick's question, but the issue for me is not the existence of suffering, but the unjust distribution of suffering. I have issues with both. And that suffering isn't randomly unjustly distributed. It is unjustly distributed according to structures that were built by humans. Yeah. I mean, I don't like that it's randomly distributed either. I don't like that either, but I can't do anything about that. Yeah. Whereas I can do something, like we can do something about.

the human-built systems that are causing unjust distribution of suffering. That's my idea of the kingdom of heaven coming to Earth is like, you can't do anything about randomness, you can't do anything about bad luck, but you sure can do something about the fact that your zip code or the country in which you're born can determine so much of your educational opportunities and the effectiveness of your health care interventions. Anyway, Nick, this is one of the difficult things about, building a hospital is that the building of the hospital was very dramatic and interesting.

Yeah. And it's easy to get donors. There's definitely more dramatic, interesting things in the world, but... That's true. Have you heard about our incinerator and our laundry system? Yeah, it's true. It's not the sexiest thing that you can build. But it's not the most salient thing you could build, as Hank Green would say.

it's relatively salient. The idea that there wasn't a thing and now there will be a thing. Maintenance, the maintaining of systems and the slow, incremental building of systems through maintenance and support is much, much less salient. Oh, man, sure is. But also much, much more important. It's the thing. It's the whole thing. It's the whole thing. I have so many thoughts about it. I've been thinking about this like a time lately. Like all of the, how do you have how do you do the necessary boring technocratic work while also keeping people's attention? And that's like a little bit our jobs. So sometimes I think like, you know, we have to do like fun, grabby little things.

Yeah. Also. And not just because to keep people's attention, but because like, you know, everyone deserves joy and fun. And one of the things I've been thinking about is like how do we do science? together. Mm-hmm. This is a, this is a, like as a community. As a community.

I would be interested in this. I feel like there's opportunities there. I started this project and I really need to get back and like keep it moving, where I'm trying to figure out how many names the average person knows. Mm. And how would you, how would you figure that out? Yeah. Because I have this, I have this theory that about 10% or more of the words we know aren't.

names for people. Because a word, a name is just a word for a thing. Yeah. But I know like Alex Rodriguez and I know Dolly Parton. Yeah, you know so many, you know a lot of words, but you know so many names. Right. And so I want to know, like, is it like 1%? Is it like 50%?

Like how many of the words I know are for people? That's a very interesting thought to me and not something that anybody's ever done research on. There's people who've done research on similar things, but not quite this. And, and I'm like, I feel like nerd fightery could help with that. Yeah, no, I agree with you that having projects like that is very valuable for the, I mean, it's valuable because it's interesting, but it's also valuable for the connectivity in the community, right? The sense of connectivity. And I think the maternal center of excellence has been very

valuable for that. The question for me is how do I keep the maternal center of excellence very valuable for that, such that people are as interested in maintaining the place as they were in building it. Yeah. So if you're a maintenance enthusiast like myself, Go to P.I.H.org slash Hank and John right now and donate to partners in health or get your awesome socks. Because I do think that, you know, the big project to me is how many deaths can we avert over the next generation with this incredible new gift to the Kono district. Yeah. And the answer to that is determined primarily by whether or not the hospital is adequately supplied. staffed, has adequate space and systems.

I mean, so much of everything. Even being alive is about maintenance. Like, just like, I've got a body and I need to take care of it. And, like, it takes up a fair amount of my life, you know? Thinking about both how to take care of the physical part and the non-physical part, it's a lot. It's part of being a high-functioning older adult. It reminds me of the great Kurt Vonnegut line. Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do

maintenance. He stuck it right in my belly with that one. Yeah, I mean, leave it. Leave it, Kurt. I don't need to hear it. You really nailed Hank Green there. This next question comes from Emma who asks, Dear Hank and John, and the other day I woke up hours before my alarm and I got up instinctively to shake my leg, which had gone numb during my sleep. And when I say, got up, I mean, stumbled out of bed and nearly fell because of my absent leg. My question is, in the context of sleep, do our brains know when our limbs have gone MIA? And do they wake us in order to preserve our limbs? What happens if you don't wake

up and your limbs continue to go numb due to a traitorous hair tie or unfortunate sleeping position, legumes and armadillos, Emma. What's the deal, Hank? It turns out that you can create a problem for yourself. And as Topoki and I fell down this rabbit hole together, we found out about a thing called Saturday Night Palsy, which is a real condition that we do not, and there is argument over where the name came from. which is it could be that it is it happens after a Saturday night when you've been out drinking and it was

named after Saturday night fever and it is Saturday night palsy where you wake up on Sunday morning or on Saturday morning after partying and you have you know you've been you went so hard whether it was drinking or whether you just like stay it up real late that your body was not awake enough to move you when this happened and you can put so much pressure on your own arm for so long that you can have like weeks or months of weakness in that arm. Wow. Wow. That's not great.

Now I've got a new disease to worry about. But there is also the idea that this was actually from the phrase saturnine palsy. Oh. And that's funny. And that's actually a different thing that is to do with lead poisoning. And apparently lead and Saturn are connected. It's like Saturn is the god of the metal lead, which if you look, into the alchemy stuff,

which I stopped after a little while, but I did read some Wikipedia about this. And that that just got egg-corned into Saturday night palsy as a separate problem. But there have also been situations, like I think one of the members of Megadeth fell asleep with his arm like draped over a chair. And he like forever now.

has like his hand doesn't work properly. Really? Yeah. Great. Makes me think that he, it wasn't just like a normal sleep. It was a sleep that had some contributing factors to it. I mean,

I don't usually fall asleep with my hand over a chair, but on the other hand, literally and figuratively, I feel really bad for that guy from Megadeth. I imagine that his hands are pretty important to him. Yeah, I actually don't know which guy I was if it was a guitarist. And they probably mostly,

are. Or drummers. Also, yeah, that's the other, the other kind. Yeah. I mean, is there any other, is there any other member of Megadeth? I don't think they have a timpanist. Do they have a floutist? Plays the Glock and Scheele? I mean, all of this is going to require a lot of fingers stuff. That's true. There's very little in the way of, I mean, I guess Death Leppard has a one-armed drummer, and he's done pretty well. He made it work. He made it work. But it does, it does feel like saxophone. I'm trying to think of things that you play primarily with your mouth, but even those, you also play partly with your hands. Yeah, maybe he does the little harp.

Bow down, d' down, ding down, down, bachadown, d'am, bougham. I mean, is that just scat singing? Is that what you just did? No, that little mouth harp. Oh, maybe. Sorry, that was so distractingly bad. I lost track of what you were talking about, which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to by Hank's Mouth Harp.

Hank's mouth harp. Yes. Bind-d-Dick-Dong. This podcast is also brought to you by David Mustaine, who is the front man of Megadeth and is the guy that we've been talking about this whole time.

And indeed, he does play guitar. Does he or is he just a singer? If he's the front man, isn't he just a singer? He also plays guitar. I don't know if he plays guitar as much anymore. Okay. All right. Today's podcast is also brought to you

by the Maternal Center of Excellence, the Maternal Center of Excellence in Conno District in Sierra Leone, still in need of your support. And this podcast is brought to you by low-functioning young adults. Low-functioning young adults, what would we do without them? We're here. We're tired.

Get used to us. This episode of Deer Hang It John is brought to you by Quince. I doubt you have noticed, but I do like to be somewhat intentional about what I wear on any given day. There's a lot of hoodies that get thrown in, you know? There's a lot of decisions that I'm not super proud of. But help has arrived in the form of Quince because I want to be. want to open the closet and have there be not a lot of work for me to do, but a lot of things that work well with each other and look good and almost like maybe I'm doing a good job

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and 365-day returns, quince.com slash dear Hank. I got a question from Katie, Hank, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I was aimlessly scrolling through Facebook Messenger just now when I came across a post for a mirror that was described as, quote, never used. And it got me thinking, is it possible for a mirror to have never been used, given that it is always reflecting and surely the person selling it looked, themselves in it at least once. This feels like false advertisement.

It's all smoke and mirrors, Katie. I love this. When is a mirror? Like, you can't, like, is there a, did, do they make the mirror factory so that they're like always face down so that the employees of the mirror factory, do not look at the mirror so that it does not arrive at Bath and Body Works having been used? But then they put it up on the wall and it immediately is used. No, no, no.

Okay. So here's how you never use a mirror. mirror. You build it upside down. Build it upside down. You've got to build it upside down. So the only thing it's reflected, even then it's being used. It's just like a tree falls in the woods and nobody's there to hear it kind of used. It's being used by whatever it's laying on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's still reflecting the floor, but it's, this is how you keep it from being used from being used by a person. Is it being used if it's not being used by a person? Not really.

Well, that's the tree falls in the forest question, right? Like, it is being, I mean, if a bird comes up to the mirror and is like, hey, look at me. And it's being used. You're like, God, we've got to throw this one away. It's sullied by a cardinal. Never been used. So I think that you build it upside down, you put it in a box, and then you don't unbox it until you, maybe it's never been unboxed.

Maybe that's what they mean, in which case it's never been used because it's never been seen by a human. You never know. You can't know. You can't know what happened. It's true. You can't know that it's never. been used. So I need a mirror that's a mirror and it's acting as a mirror, but then I get the mirror

and it turns out that there was a mirror film on top of the mirror, and I get to very satisfyingly peel that mirror film off. And then I know that I'm the first person who used the mirror. Right. And that is, of course, essential. Never been used. The experience of a mirror is to know that you're the first person being seen in it, that nobody else, nobody else's body has been exposed into this mirror. Mirrors are so weird. I know. You are always talking about it.

It's because you don't understand optics, Hank. Like your... It's not just that. No, you have a blind spot. You have a place, you, like some mirrors, have a place where you just can't reflect the truth. I guess that just means that it's never been, like, hung up. Maybe it means it's still in the box,

but I think the critical thing is that it's been used. Yeah. Like, you use a mirror. is used the moment an organism with eyes sees into the mirror. Right. How complex does the eye have to be for the mirror to be being

used? Is it just like a sort of light detection spot? I guess probably. If the light bounces off of there and then... Light bounces back at you and you're like, well, that was weird. Like, oh, I got to move away from that or toward that. Yeah. And I think that there's microbes probably on the not used mirror, in which case it's used from the

moment it's made. I don't know how mirrors. get made, they're probably pretty hot at first. You know what would suck is being a little bacterium on a mirror. How I'm like, being a bacteria would be confusing already, but then you've got the double confusion of being like, well, what's that? Oh, it's me? It's me.

Huh? You think you don't understand optics, Hank. Imagine being a bacteria. I feel like mirrors are a place where bacteria do not last long. They're very like, oh, there's a smudge. Got to get rid of that. That's true. That's true.

It's a lot of windex headed, headed towards them. Yeah. That's true. Well, a little guy. Katie, I think you need to follow up with the seller and be like, I'm going to question your... I filed a complaint with the FCC. You've clearly used this mirror. I can't help but notice that you took a picture of the mirror that has your camera in it. Ergo, the mirror is used.

I don't know why it's the FCC. I guess because Facebook's involved. Yeah. I guess so, but at any rate, it seems like they're super responsive to consumer queries at the moment. Let's move on to another question from Mariah, who asked, Dear John and Hank, I just preordered Hollywood Ending from Fountain Bookstore here in Richmond, Virginia, after John's visit. And it made me wonder, do you guys purchase each other's books in stores? I know you probably give free copies to give out to advance to friends and family and stuff.

But if my brother had a book in stores, I probably couldn't resist buying a copy anyway. Pumpkins and pre-orders, Mariah. Mariah, you're a better brother than I. I don't think I've ever bought a John Green book. Are you serious? I love... They're around. Well, that's true, but I like buying a Hank Green book in the store.

I like the thing of being... Let me check. Is the books that are going to ask me? Are they going to be like, oh, I hear this book is great. And I'll be like, it is great. It's by my brother. That's worth $25 bucks right there. That if that happens, and I'm glad that it apparently did.

And you do get a very little. limited number of finished copies. You only get 20 usually. So you negotiate the number of finished copies you get in your book deal and then they send you your 20 books or whatever. And so, you know, Hank's in my top 20, but I don't know that he's in my top five. Oh, but I get the book before it comes. I don't get like the final book. No, usually, but you don't get an advanced,

they haven't made advanced readers copies for my book since 2011. Oh, wow. 2008. Oh, I just get a PDF. You just get a P-D-F. Walking around PDF in it. They haven't made... Why haven't they done... I got ARCs. I know.

It's because my books were considered to... Oh. The threat of piracy was too high. Yeah. Choo. Fancy pants, McGee, over there. Don't have a MacArthur Genius Grant, that's for sure. I really hope you win a MacArthur Genius Grant at some point so I can complain constantly about not having one. I feel like, here's what I think.

I feel like giving me a MacArthur's... or Genius Grant would be a waste. I don't need that. What do you mean you don't need it? Like, what is it? It's a grant. I don't need money. What is it? Well, no, you would give the money to partners in health. Oh. Did they let you do whatever you want with it? How much is it? I don't know, like $600,000 or something. Oh, my God. It's a lot of money. Why don't we just start our own? Be like, ha, ha, ha, ha. Vlog Brothers Genius Grant. And then the first, it's $800,000. It's $800,000. thousand dollars. It is. It's gone up. The first, uh, the first winners would be Hank and John Green. Yeah. It's like there's this, uh, famous, do you ever read that book of the island of the blue dolphins? No, I did not. The book about, uh, a person surviving alone on an island of blue dolphins. Anyway, the writer of that award endowed a, an award for historical

fiction in children's literature called the Scott O'Dell Award. And my favorite fact, about the Scott O'Dell Award is that Scott O'Dell has won it, I think, three times. What? Yeah. You can get it more than once? Not only that, you can get your own award. That's what we should do with the vlog for the genius grants. We should start it.

We should do a big press release. We should make a big announcement. Yeah. And then we should, I love this idea. And then we should announce that the first two winners are Hank and John Green and never do it again. It costs us nothing. Punked.

Well, we just could be like. Listen, we keep looking for geniuses. We can't find any. Yeah, nobody's as good as me. They've all got weird opinions that aren't exactly like mine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. They're all problematic in some way. Not like me.

Not like me. I've transcendent. I agree with myself on everything. Oh, man. I do really hope you win one. That would be so funny to me. They just like, you don't have to apply. They just like pop you with a money.

See, now you want one? Who's this MacArthur guy? I was some rich guy from the from the early days. What did he do? Something bad, I bet. I mean, it's never clean. The other day I was like, it's never clean. And Sarah was like, I don't know, your money's pretty clean.

And I was like, no way, man. I cut down so many trees printing the fault in our stars. Oh, my God. I did. I'm going to get up to the gates of heaven and they're going to say, St. Peter's immediately going to say I have two comments. And I'll say, I'll preempt you. The trees from the fault in our stars. And the LaCroix.

And the good. That's, I think you're pretty clean, John. You just don't have MacArthur money because MacArthur made way more than you through the mail order insurance business and massive strategic investments in Florida real estate. Yeah. I don't know. Hopefully his mail order insurance business was a good one. I can't imagine it was. Well, not if he made that much money.

But maybe we shouldn't be criticizing MacArthur, Hank, since you're up for a MacArthur Genius Grant. I definitely am not. They look for people who are like, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like my friend and co-host of the away and Danielle Alricone. Daniel is going to... Huh? He got one or you think he's up for one? He got one.

He got one. Yeah. Amazing. All right. And recently deserved. He's a brilliant, maybe like three years ago, he's a brilliant writer. Andy created Radioambulums. which is like this the most amazing radio show is this like what it's about like are people making this like

this high class cool sparkly uh not going to make any money uh content for like elites because they're like i'm going to get that 800,000 no no no no no I don't think anybody thinks about that to be honest with you I think people make stuff for that's sparkly and fancy because they're they like sparkly and fancy stuff themselves. It's the same reason we never wanted to be on television, right? Like all of our early YouTube friends wanted to be on TV and wanted to have TV shows, even though they were going to make less money making TV, because that was their dream when they were young.

Yeah, it's where the status, just like with, there's cachet, just like with the movies versus a YouTube video. But there was no cachet for us. Like, we weren't interested in it because it wasn't cool to us. Yeah, but then Scientific American sends me an email and I, like, have a very strong emotional reaction. Yes. So it's about what's cool to you, what was cool to you when you were a kid. And like, when I was a kid, you know, I wasn't reading lots of popular books. I was reading, you know,

books that I considered to be quite fancy. You know, Daniel and I were reading Tony Morrison and Zorah Neal Hurston and we were reading Shakespeare and, you know, we wanted, we wanted to be part of the canon. Like, that was the cool thing back then. And so when the canon comes calling, it still feels really good. Yeah. Yeah. Even if the canon is no longer relevant. And it isn't, to be honest. I mean, like, I don't even agree with the idea of a canon anymore, you know? Like, I think art is so much bigger and broader and more interesting than that, than merely, like, establishing a set of like cortex that define a culture like that's obviously you know hugely problematic in lots of different ways um and even so when the authorities from that world come calling i am always

delighted i have this this ambivalence about this because like one i don't think that there should be a canon and there shouldn't be like this thing that defines everything and at the same time like i'm kind I kind of miss the days when everybody read the same stuff. And we had these touchstones that we could share. It's almost like it's not about which things you pick. It's about that you pick. But at the same time, you have to pretend that there's a reason why you picked. Pretending that there's no difference in quality between, and I say this with a lot of affection

for my novels, like no difference in quality between a John Green novel and a Tony Morrison novel does a great disservice to the overall quality of discourse in the world. Yeah, right. You got to pick something, you got to pick something really good. But there's like some, but there's lots of really good, I mean, lots, but there's enough really good stuff that there's too much to be in the canon. Yeah, but I think that traditionally the canon was used as a way of excluding people who didn't come from backgrounds that were seen as worthy of the canon, which meant that the canon was

very white, it was very male, it was very dead. and that made literature feel cold and distant and turned a lot of people off from literature. Whereas if you were educated, the way I was educated in high school, where we were reading Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and we were reading Vonnegut, and we were reading Tony Morrison, who was just winning the Nobel Prize, like, when I was in high school. You know, we were reading Alice Walker. Like, that stuff was really invigorating and felt really alive and present in ways that have been very helpful to me as a reader in person.

Right. And that probably felt to some extent like that when the canon, the original canon was being defined, which wasn't that long ago. It's not like we've had one canon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shakespeare's always sort of been hanging out in there for a lot of time. But, yeah, he's usually been in the conversation because he is the best in English. He did English really good.

He's the best at English. Yeah. He won English. But you know what, he never won, Hank. He never won a Nobel Prize. Not even one of them. He will. Very unlikely.

They don't give it to dead people. Well, he won't be dead anymore. He'll be AI Shakespeare and he'll be writing new stuff. And you can hang out with him. You can write him a message and be like, Shakespeare, my girlfriend is being really upset about the way, the faith that I didn't turn the light off before I got into bed. And I thought that she was going to get back up and brush her teeth. Turns out she was done. do I do?

Shakespeare's epitaph is one of my favorite little poems. Don't you dare make me into an AI. That is literally what he said. Oh, yeah. Good friend for Jesus sake for bear to dig the dust enclosed it here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones and cursed be he that moves my bones. He did not want his bones move, Tank. He did not want his bones reanimated by AI.

in the 21st century, he specifically asked us not to do that. Don't you move my bones. Don't move my bones. And I'm sure somebody's already done it. It's time to get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, Hank. So there's the Psyche spacecraft. It's traveling to an asteroid, which is also called Psyche, and it's in the asteroid belt, which is between Mars and Jupiter.

And so this mission has to go past Mars. But since it's doing that anyway, they decided to use Mars as a gravity assist. So Mars is involved here in two ways. First, it's speeding up this probe. So basically, Mars is going around and this probe gets close enough to Mars that Mars starts to pull on it. And then it pushes itself off of Mars and it gets a little bit of a speed boost. So that's great. It gets there a little sooner with less fuel.

But also, as it's doing that, it's going to take a bunch of pictures of Mars. Not really because we need pictures of Mars, but because it gets something to take pictures of, which allows the scientists to mess with the, calibrate all of the instruments on board so that they're all ready for the moment that it arrives at its actual target. So that's happening soon. That's pretty cool. That's exciting. Yeah. And it'll get to Psyche in 2029, whereas it has already passed Mars as of this coming out, not as of the recording, but as well. I'm concerned that we're not going to get any humans there next year. Yeah, well, you know, singularity. I don't know.

that means. The singularity is the point at the center of the black hole where physics breaks down, but it is also, it also applies to the point at which intelligence can manufacture itself and then all of our systems for understanding how fast anything can move breakdown. And we immediately ascend into the world where we no longer get sunburns. Okay. Well, the kingdom of God. The kingdom of, the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, depending on which gospel you're reading. That's your next reading assignment for after you're done with Hollywood ending. All right, Hank, AFC Wimbledon have released their retained list, which is who is going to be with the team next season?

Both of our goalkeepers, Joe McDonald and Nathan Bishop, are under contract. Ryan Johnson, our captain is under contract. Marcus Brown is coming back for another year. He's under contract. Maddie Stevens, our goal scoring extraordinaire, is under contract. Junior and Kang is under contract, although I will be surprised if you're not. if we hold on to Starboy Jr. and Kang because he is so young and so good. I would not be surprised if somebody came along and purchased him in the summer. But let's keep our fingers crossed

that that doesn't happen. Two of our best players, in my opinion, are not currently signed up for next season. Steve Seddon, who is the player of the year this season, created more assist than any other player and did a great job tracking back as well. And Joe Loo, Lewis, our long-time defender and talismanic tall guy. Small bottom big. Small bottom big. Those two guys have not signed on yet. It's not clear if they will.

And a lot depends, I think, in terms of the quality of the team next season, on whether they do resign. In general, I feel like there is hope here. You got to remember, this team survived by three points this season. season. So if we're going to get better next season, which is not going to be easy, we're going to have to find ways to not only hold on to our current players, but get better ones. And that is pretty challenging. We're going to have to, as Craig Cope explained to me when I saw him at the end of season awards, he said, we can't buy stars, so we have to make them. Oh, and then they'll

just leave us. And then they will leave us. But hopefully for a big fee like Ali al-Hamody did, because if Ali al-Homody hadn't come to Wimbledon, we wouldn't be in League One, not because he did anything to get us there, but because of the million bucks that we got for selling him to Ipswich Town. Sometimes it's great when they leave fairly soon after joining. Like, in my opinion, Ali al-Hamody will always be a Wimbledon legend for what he did for the club, and a lot of what he did for the club was leave. Fascinating. I'm glad that we don't fund space missions this way.

It'd be tricky. Just trading scientists to China. Yeah. How did you get your new crop astronauts? Oh, well, let me tell you. Jeez, we got this guy on loan from India. We got this guy. This guy, he's got no chance of staying with us.

He's going to be sold any day now. But we got him for now. Yeah. No, it's not like that. We're going to get a big boost for. They're going to sell all of our astronauts and just do robotic missions. are going to do so much more science. That would be really, really bad for your ability to get a human on Mars by 2027.

I don't think actually it would change the odds at all. John, thank you for potting with me. Thank you, everyone, for sending in your questions at Hank and John at gmail.com. I love to see him come in. This episode was edited by Michael Polk. It was mixed by Andrew Smith. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halls-Rohas and Hannah West.

Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Toboki Chuck Rivardi, The music you're hearing now at the beginning of the podcast is by the Great Gunnarola. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.