Dear Hank & John - 456: Talking About a Book No One Can Read

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Why is the healing process always so itchy? Why are the acknowledgements usually cut out of audio books? How do I find time for writing as a busy and exhausted parent? When you look out an airplane window, why don’t the clouds look like they’re going by fast? How do I keep loving the media I love when it is being criticized online?…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.

Hello, everyone. Before we get started, I want to tell you about humans. Humans is a podcast where I talk to people about the questions that I have about being a person. And sometimes those conversations are with people who have just had experience being people, like my brother, or the editor of the New York Times game connections. These are just people who've like done it and tried weird stuff. And so I want to talk to them about how they do it. But I also am talking to people who have maybe some special insight into what's going on with humans. Like, Hannah Ritchie, who is a data scientist, who studies our impact on the climate, or Jennifer Schuba, who studies demography and what it means for humans that people are having fewer kids than they used to. I also just had a conversation with the author of the Warriors books. These are books about cats that live in the woods. I did not realize that this was a person who would have so much insight into humanity and also into the responsibilities that we have when we create content for children. That conversation was so good. It's going to be a while before it comes out.

But oh my God. So, yeah, I'm talking to authors and actors and astrophysicists, and it's cool, and it's really interesting and fun, and I've really been enjoying it. I'm so glad it's finally out into the world. The overall conceit is just that, like, it's good to take a little time to zoom out sometimes to understand that the thing that we are is very weird and unique in the history of our Earth and also the known universe. And we don't know how to do it.

No one's ever been the kind of thing that we are. and so we have to figure this out. And so I want to talk to people about figuring it out. New episodes come out every Thursday. You can find it wherever you get podcasts. All you've got to do is search humans. And then if that doesn't work, add my name onto the end, and you'll find it. First episode is with John Green, a guy you've probably heard of.

And I'm pretty sure it's out now. You're listening to a Complexly podcast. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Yours I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your question. give you to be advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, my supervisor told me that I was just terrible at my job, managing trains. And he said, what, have you been responsible for three derailments in the last year?

And I said, it's just hard to keep track. Oh, I did my best, you know. I was going off the top of the head there with that one. Yeah. Well, it never really hooks me when you imply that you have a real job. It can't. It can't be. It would be awfully weird if I was also managing trains.

So listen, we have some breaking news for our listeners to the last few episodes. Hank has read my book. It's true. It's true. I have. It's true I have. I've been overwhelmed with your book. It's as mom told me, I've never been so surprised by a John Green book.

There is great plot. There's great twists. There's great mattering, et cetera. Well, thanks. I hope that I don't know if it's good or not to be surprised by a John Green book, but... I feel like it's significantly plottier than a lot of your books. It is significantly plotier than a lot of my books. I decided to write a plot.

Yeah. There are things. there's like little things that people are figuring out. I almost called it the trauma plot. Oh. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, because it's about the trauma plot. I tell you, I don't know, you said something great to me recently, which is just like,

we've been lucky to avoid a number of fates. Yeah. And we've met a lot of people who don't necessarily feel as if. if they have suffered from the fates that they have met. But like it kind of feels like they have. And I don't know. I guess from outside, it's easy to feel different ways. But I'm just glad to be living in this life.

Yeah, me too. I feel like I got out of fame about as well as you can get out of it. And the kids in the book aren't quite so lucky. Indeed not. They also. you know what the book is really about in the end and I've been thinking about this because I've been reading first pass you know and that then then you read it sort of separate from yourself and you read it as a book for the first time because it's laid out as a book in the font and

everything and I've been thinking that like one of the hardest things about being a kid and learning too soon that adults are not always protectors is that when you're a kid the only thing you have to give is love, you know, like you don't have resources, you don't have expertise or whatever, but you have your love. And when that's misused, it's so destructive and devastating. But what Kai and Juniper are after in the book is the kind of love that sustains you, that is enough, that, you know, they're both giving it and receiving it, enough on its own. And that's what the book's about in the end, which is ultimately hopeful. But they have to, they go through some hard times for sure. Yeah. Yeah. We're very lucky.

Lucky, I mean, mom and dad are so good. Yeah, they're really good parents. We got, we won the, we won the parent lottery. We also sort of won the spousal lottery. It's true. Yeah. So that really matters, I think, because, you know, when I was a kid, I had that, you know, sustaining love for my parents that a lot of people, unfortunately, don't have. And then, you know, for the last 20 years of my life, I've had this other relationship that's been really key to me being semi-functional. Yeah, we also won the brother lottery, but let's not talk too much about that. It would be too cute. Yeah, it's true. We did win that one as well. So things are good. Life is. good. I'm really nervous about the book, but that's life, man. That's life. You got to put yourself

out there. You got to make stuff. I was hoping you were going to say, like, don't be nervous about this book, but instead you were like, yeah, I get it. And not because I don't think it's good. Right. It's heavy. Yeah. All right. I should say the name of the book. It's Hollywood ending. It comes out on September 22nd, signed copies are available for prurter now, wherever you get your books. Let's answer some questions from our listeners. This first one comes from Hollywood ending. No, sorry, Petra is their name.

Dear Anchorage, John, I recently bought new shoes, and I've ended up with a collection of scabs across my feet. It's made me wonder, why is the healing process always so itchy? I'm starting with a science question, John. It's almost like the body doesn't want to actually heal. Come on! Every time I scratch the scabs, sometimes I just can't help it, I end up with a wound,

and that has to start the healing process all over again, not to mention the risk of getting infected. Why are our bodies sabotaging us in this way? It feels like a huge evolutionary design flaw. Thank you for your answer. I've been really scratching my brain about this, Petra. Don't scratch your brain, by the way. That's really to be avoided.

God, that sounds painful. I actually bet you wouldn't feel it. Worse. That sounds worse. So, Hank, I have a theory about this, and you're going to come up with, some evolutionary reason why we have to itch or whatever. But like, I have a theory about this, which is that we often forget that evolution isn't finished. It isn't perfect. It got good enough.

It was like, this is good enough to sustain this form of life. And that's all we need to be. We don't need to be better than good. Yeah. No, I think that there's like, that is certainly one line of thinking on this topic particularly, where it's like, okay, so what's happening is there's a bunch of immune cells doing immune cell things. And when they do their thing, they release histamine and that has advantages for wound healing and stuff, but it also makes itchy. And, and, and, and, like, that should, like, in an ideal world, maybe those two things wouldn't be tied together, but they are. But there's, like, a reason why this itchiness happens, like, maybe just to call attention to, to a part of the body that needs some assistance. No. But it's just not a good,

it's just not like a good signal. I don't agree. No, because all it does is reopen the wound. Right. No, I don't mean in like the in the situation of a. Oh, you mean cellularly. Yeah, I mean like itchiness sometimes provides an advantage. Like if you get, if something's currently biting you, you want to be like, ah, and like,

like, know that that's going on. But then like your immune cells are just making a thing happen that is not in this case providing any value. There might be some value to sort of being aware of the injury. but like you'd think that pain would do that on its own. You wouldn't need itchiness to go along with it. I think the itch instinct is so overrated. It's so like it's so not understood. It is a real mystery.

And it's misery. Yeah. Like people who itch all the time, it's misery. Yeah. You know this because you've had shingles for the last couple months. My shingles continues to itch. And it is not so bad that I am in anything like misery. I can mostly not.

scratch it. But it's crazy. And it was so much worse. Yeah. It was bad. And indeed, I did injure myself through scratching, which is not uncommon with shingles. Wow. Yeah. Wow. But yeah, it's really, I mean, I'm sure it's possible to resist the urge to scratch an itch. I've just never done it. Yeah. I mean, I think it's possible to do it when the, like, when it's a mild itch. But like, eventually it gets so intense. Like, it's crazy. You're just, completely, there's no way to control the body. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a strong impulse.

You know what else is a strong impulse, Hank? Yes. The impulse to write acknowledgments when you write a novel. This next question comes from Hallie, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I just finished listening to the audiobook of the Glass House, the Glass Hotel, sorry. Sorry, Emily St. John Mandel, which is very good, and I realized that I have not heard the acknowledgments read as part of an audiobook.

Why are the acknowledgements always cut out of audiobooks? John said he might not do acknowledgements in his new book, Hollywood ending available for pre-order now. Thank you, Halley. But have all his previous acknowledgments already been cut from his audiobooks, thinking of all the people who have been thanked in print but not through audio. Halle, looia. I had never even noticed. I feel like sometimes there's acknowledgments and obvious. Very rarely.

Usually there are not acknowledgements. And I remember with the, if I remember correctly with the Fultner Stars audiobook, they had me come in and read the little author's note, which was like an attempt. to scold the reader away from reading my biography into the novel, which of course was wildly unsuccessful. Best of luck. I've thought about writing a similarly scold the author's note for this novel and realized that I have no chance of success. I don't know. I don't know. You can communicate something. But like you also don't want to end like ruin the end of the book. It's like the book should be about the book and not like turn the page and then suddenly I'm drawn out of it. That's what I would worry more about. That's why the acknowledgments in this book are very brief,

and I think they're going to be on the copyright page. Now, the copyright page is pretty full. Yeah. So I don't exactly know what I'm going to do. I put the acknowledgments at the beginning of looking for Alaska in my first novel, and I thought that worked pretty well. Because I just, what I don't like is you get to the end of a novel and you're having this experience, like, if it works, right, like the great thing about reading a novel is you get to the end of it and you wish you could spend more time with these characters and like you're really grateful to have met them and like you feel really moved and you feel like you're living in a fictional universe and you're inside of someone else's mind and it's just a magical feeling and then you turn the page and it's like my agent is amazing

I've got two I got two solutions for the problem that I'm excited about okay give it to me because I need this advice right now so one is you put the acknowledgments right in the middle of the book you're like all right so Just while, like, so we're in between part one and part two when you sort of like a huge cliffhanger. A huge cliffanger. Yeah, yeah. At a moment when you've got them. You know, you're like, I don't want to interrupt you at the end of the book.

I want you to have some time to think. But while I've got you, my agent is amazing. And then, but my second idea is for the audio book specifically. Here's my idea. I like this idea. You have the characters from the book to a podcast about all of the people. that you want to acknowledge. That's good.

It's good. It's like a 40-minute add-on to the original book. We just like hire some actors to play the part of the characters. You've already hired actors to play the parts, right? So like Hollywood ending has two narrators. Oh, okay. And there's going to be two narrators for the audiobook, I assume. And then so you just have them have a conversation about how great my agent is.

Jody Riemer, by the way. She is great. Exactly. Yeah. Yes, 100% that. But they could also talk about some other book stuff. It's like a podcast epilogue. Do you have a favorite audiobook narrator?

No, no. Okay, so I do. And I'm trying to get, I won't say her name, but it's her. I'm trying to get her to do the juniper parts of the Hollywood ending audiobook. And I am so stinking nervous. I feel like I'm trying to, like, cast a movie with, I don't, you know, Julia Roberts or Laura Dern or whatever in it, you know, like, like I'm going, I'm, I'm, I'm swinging for the fences here, Hank.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I sent Helen Hunt my book and I told her she would be great for the agent in that book, Jennifer Putnam. And she was like, I hate her. That would be great. I would love to play that part. She read the book?

Uh-huh. Helen Hunt read your book? Uh-huh. Oh, man. Yeah. So, so if, if, if, uh, so, so I guess whoever takes the book out next to try and get it made into a, has Helen Hunt already attached? Helen Hunt's attached.

I have, um, our shared agent in Hollywood, Cassie Havishemski, who's also great. Uh, she deserves to be in the acknowledgments, even though she won't be because there will be no acknowledgments. Maybe this is the acknowledgments. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're doing it. I want to acknowledge Hank Green, my parents. They did a great job, my spouse, my children who sacrificed so much in the writing of this book, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, Cassie is always like, why are agents in all books always such terrible people?

Because, you know, Cassie's not a terrible person. Cassie's not a terrible person at all. And in fact, like, she read my new book and she was like, She was like, well, I mean, I loved it. But I, and I did feel like you at least made the agent a human. And I was like, thank you, Cassie. And she was like, I didn't always like him, but I liked him occasionally, which is more than going to be said for most agents of books. I mean, I remember my VidConn's agent, Brent, reading my book.

And I was like, does this sound like something agents would do? And he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, no, I mean. I do any of that. Yeah. Yeah. Not just other agents. Me.

Yeah. What does Matthew Malone say in Hollywood ending? They're snakes, but they're my snakes? Yeah. But they're only your snakes so long as they think that you're worth it. Yeah. Well, Matthew Malone doesn't have to worry about that anymore. He sure doesn't.

He's got it all figured out. He's done it. He's done it. He made it. He made it to the top of the mountain. We're talking about a book no one can read for three months. But the pre-orders are very important. So if you're feeling it all excited about it. Pre-orders are very important. All right. This next question comes from Jess. He writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm a mom with four young kids. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. I mean, it's exciting. It's fun. Yeah, Benjamin Franklin's mom did it. Yes, but I think to get to to Jess's question, we'll find that Benjamin Franklin's mom had to make a lot of sacrifices in the

process. I've always been a writer in writing is such a bone-deep desire that I can't let it go, but how do I do it? I have no time. When the kids do go to bed, I'm exhausted so I can barely write or read or anything that would be deemed productive. I know y'all don't have four kids, but parent-to-parent, how do you do what you love when you also love your kids and want to give them your best? No rest, just Jess. It's a good name, specific sign-off. I have no idea what it would be like to be a parent or mother of for young children. But I do know the feeling of being like I thought I was going to write today, but I am so bone tired. It's just not going to happen.

And that's like that's just a truth. And that's like that can be a limitation of life. Sometimes a problem exists and it is not really there to be solved and there's other value. But it does sound that you really want to be doing this. I find with a surprising amount of creativity in storytelling, which – and almost like – I remember – I used to tell Orrin a story every night that I just sort of make up on the spot. And I recently asked him if he, like, missed those stories because he's, like, getting older and, like, we don't tell those kinds of stories anymore, and we read, like, chapter books. and he was like, yeah, like, no more bugs.

And I was like, oh, that's the one that stuck with you? And which was about a space station. And that was like literally me telling a kid version of a book that I was writing and probably will never finish. And that was like really interesting work to try and tell the kid version because it like set me up to explore the story in a different way and explore the universe. and explore the universe in a different way and like also the physical space of that world, you know, like of the space station. And it was like pretty inspiring to me.

Now, it's not the same as sitting down and writing all that stuff down, but it is like kind of still doing the work. Well, hopefully it exercises some of the same muscle, right? And then also allows you to build a little bit of a world so that when it comes time to, or when you, do have time to write, if you have time to write, then you can do that. Practically, you know, when my kids were really little and crash course was taking off

and taking up a huge amount of time and the kids were not, I mean, they're still not self-sufficient, but like they're, they would argue that they're self-sufficient. You know, like, and that was not always the case. Like when the kids were like two and six and I was spending all day. on crash course and had absolutely no time to write, I did write less, right? Like, functionally, I think you're right, Hank. Like, I wrote less, and that's okay. And, but the way that I kept the muscle exercising was, one, telling stories and two, waking

up early. And I woke up early because I wanted to. Yeah. But it's really, really hard when the kids don't go to bed until 11 to wake up at 6 or 5, whenever you have to wake up to get an hour to write. But I do find that an hour is often enough. If I can find an hour, it gets me the thing that I need in order, not necessarily about finishing a book or publishing a book or whatever,

but like the thing that I need to feel well, like just as I have a bone deep desire and can't let it go and like it would feed that need. Right. Yeah. Also, speaking of Helen Hunt, she was on my podcast. It'll be the episode, not this week, but next. But I talked to her, and she yelled at me for having never read Bird by Bird. So I've started reading Bird by Bird, and I would suggest Bird by Bird.

By Ann Lamott? Yeah, when it comes to figuring out how to, like, make in a busy world. Yeah. Yeah, in that book, she talks about emptying the well, which is a metaphor I use a lot. Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy getting yelled out. She yelled at me so much.

Did she? Was she anti-Hank Green? No. What she said was like, you know everything I don't know and I know everything you don't know. She was like, you know nothing. You know nothing about literature. I was like, you are correct. That is right. You do know nothing about literature. That's true. She kept being shocked by this. Yeah, you are not, well, I was going to say you're not well read, but in fact, you're just differently read, right? Like, it's not that you don't read. It's that you read different. stuff than Helen Hunt and I read. Yeah, I don't think Helen Hunt's read there is no antimimetics division.

Like, that's just not. Right, exactly. Exactly. So there's a different, there's just a different canon, and that's okay. I'm not going to yell at you about that. Thank you. I appreciate it, and I would not expect you to. This next question comes from Bailey, who asks, dear Hank and John, I'm a flight attendant,

and I often find myself staring out of the windows of planes. I'm wondering why if we're traveling at such a time, high speeds does it not look like we are speeding past the clouds. On takeoff and landing, you can tell we're going extremely fast. But no matter how close the clouds seem to be, we just drift through them. Boeing really fast, Bailey. I have noticed this as well. And I have no idea what's going on because you're not always traveling in the direction the clouds are traveling. No, no, no, that's not it. Sometimes you're traveling the opposite direction. Yeah, like a wind, you're going into a headwind or whatever. So not only are you,

going 700 miles an hour, but there's like a 200 mile an hour headwind, and yet it looks like the clouds are just floating on past. They do, even when you're quite close to them. So like, so there's a few things, DiBoki and I yelled at each other about this. We could not figure out the answer to this question. You've been having a lot of fights with women. We didn't, we didn't yell. Okay. We disagree with a different, different set of language. Helen yelled at me. Helen Hunt screamed it. me. And then Duboki and I were having a massive argument. And I'm like, it's on a real blowup over cloud speed. So we're not sure. One thing to note is that you are not going full plane speed when you're

going through clouds pretty much ever. So cruising altitude is going to be way up above the clouds that you tend to fly through. You're going to slow down a long way a lot on the way down, or you're going to be in the process of speeding up on the way up when you actually go through the cloud layer that you tend to go through on a plane. So you're not going a full 500 miles per hour. Regardless, though, even on the ground, you're going much slower than that. And it feels like you're going very fast. I think that this is in large part because we know what it looks like to go fast on the ground. We know what all the stuff looks like when it's speeding past. But we don't know what clouds look like. Like we wouldn't, we don't know what clouds would look

like if we were going slow. They're weirdly structured. They're not human scale objects. What did DeBoki say? Because I'm inclined to agree with DeBoki. DeBoki said that it is difficult to find a reference point for your speed. That feels more right to me than we're used to because when I'm driving on the highway, the trees are going by very, very fast because I have a reference point in the tree. The cloud is so big and diffuse that I don't have a reference point within the cloud. If there was like, you know, a dot of pink within the cloud, it would zoom past the- Right. Yeah. The airplane, but there is no dot of pink. And these things are related in that, like, if, I think that if we kind of had a scale for what a cloud actually

looked like, yeah, then maybe it would feel faster. But they're so big that we don't get it. That's what I think. Yeah. I think you're entering into I mean, I think like I saw a TikTok, so I hate myself already. I hate myself three seconds into this. I know about to see a TikTok. Hmm. I saw a TikTok that a cloud weighed like 1.1 million tons. Oh yeah.

And I was like which cloud? Right. For sure. That seems like a, you know, I've seen, I've seen little clouds and I've seen big clouds. And so I googled it and I did a little bit of research. And it turns out like clouds can weigh 1.1 million tons. They can also weigh other weights because it depends a lot on the cloud. It sounds like you've looked at clouds from both sides now.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now. It's a big and small. So one of the things that you could do to see how fast are you going on a plane is if you find the plane's shadow on the ground. And then you're like, look at us going. But you can't do that if you're in the clouds, buddy. It's true. It's true. Yeah. But, you know, if you work on a plane, then you're going to get the out of

opportunity sometimes. I like the idea that the flight attendants are looking out of the plane and being like, oh, look at the world. Well, it's just nice to be in, to, to remember that flight attendants are also astonished by the miracle of flight. Yeah, I certainly am. I am. Every time I get on an airplane, I'm like, this is amazing. I hope I don't crash and this is amazing. I just want you to know, by the way, that if I die in an airport or on an airplane, I died doing something I hated. Something that, like, I did way more than almost every other human being, but I never really enjoyed. I do. I like being the part where you're pretty close to the ground, especially if you're over a city. I like that part. Yeah, it's nice to see the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from above and everything. But like, and I'm very, very grateful for the well-trained pilots and flight attendants who make travel safe and comfortable and everything.

It's not that I'm not grateful for it. I'm incredibly grateful for the fact that it no longer takes eight days and the entire Oregon Trail to get to Los Angeles from here. But more than eight days, actually, 40 days, whatever. I haven't played Oregon Trail in a while. Point being, I'm very grateful, yada, yada, yada, I am. I just have never learned to love being in a metal cylinder, 35,000 feet above the ground with 250 strangers.

Yeah, I guess I can see that. You want to know something amazing, Hank? Yeah, sure. Before we move on from this, and this will amaze Jess as well. I have a real shot this year of achieving the top status, like the diamond status, on all three major American airlines. Oh, God. United American and Delta.

I already have it on Delta. I'm already platinum on American, and I'm platinum on United. Oh, God. It's fun. Like, I only, I almost always fly United, and I'm nowhere near. What are you doing? Going to England. Oh, watching football.

Yeah, that'll do it. But also, like, I, you know, I'm going to go on a book tour, so I'm going to take like 40 flights in 30 days. Oh, you're not. You're not getting a bus? I asked for a bus. They said no. Oh. They said it's very inconvenient

to try to organize a tour around where a bus can go in eight hours. Oh, that's somewhat inconvenient for sure. Yeah. And I guess you don't have to bring all your musical equipment with you the way that bands do. No, I don't have that excuse.

Yeah. So no bus for me this time. It's going to be United American and Delta. You should have more paraphernalia. You should have like piratophiles. technically. You're sorry, I have to be in a bus. We got to bring the pianos. Remember in 2012 when we toured the country in a sprinter van and we had all that merch that we were using to essentially pay you because you weren't getting paid for the

month and a half or whatever that we were on the road? And so you would get the, you'd get the money from selling T-shirts and CDs. I loved it. Did you? I loved it. I did. Let's do it again, man. Let's see it wrong. No, I didn't love it that much. Oh, you didn't love it that much. We are going to be doing a fancy live event, and I'm going to be doing a fancy live event in Los Angeles coming up, but I can't tell you about it yet.

Whoa, I haven't heard about this. Yeah, you know about it. It's a complexly thing. It's the complexity thing. You know about this? No, don't know about this. And cut. Interesting.

Yeah. All right, cool. And we're back. Hank told me what it was. It sounds exciting. Yeah. I think that it will be a very good time. But it will also be a fundraiser, so the tickets will cost money. All right, which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by things Hank hasn't announced yet. Somehow, a list longer even than the things Hank has announced. This podcast is also brought to you by the miracle of flight. The miracle of flight. That's enough. And today's podcast is brought to you by being a parent of four kids. Being a parent of four kids,

you still need to feed the meter, but it's hard. And this podcast is brought to you by agents. They're snakes, but they're my snakes. This episode is brought to you by no CD. Have you ever had a thought pop into your head that feels so foreign or distressing that you just can't move on from it? Like suddenly wondering if your headache means you have a brain tumor and then Googling something. symptoms for hours or having the inexplicable urge to swerve your car while driving, feeling horrified, and then spending hours trying to figure out why you had that thought? Well, that's what OCD is like. It's nothing like the stereotype about enjoying things being neat. Real OCD causes relentless, unwanted thoughts that make you question everything about yourself and the world around you. It is scary and exhausting and can really take over your life. I have OCD and it is highly

treatable when you get the right care. I am living evidence of that. The thing is standard talk therapy, the kind you hear about a lot online, is not recommended for OCD and can even make it worse. OCD needs specialized treatment, and that's why I want to tell you about no CD, which is the largest provider of specialized OCD treatment, connecting people with licensed, highly trained therapists for convenient virtual sessions. Their therapy is covered by insurance for over 155 million Americans, and they provide support between sessions, so you're never facing this alone. If any of this sounds familiar, go to nocd.com and book a free call to learn how they can help. That's N-O-C-D.com. This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by Morning Brew Daily. I personally

have a complicated relationship with business news because it can feel like either it was written for people who already know everything or for people who want to be angry before 9 a.m. Morning Brew Daily, though, is trying to do a different thing. It gives you the biggest business stories of the day and a way that is actually understandable and also enjoyable to listen to. The hosts, Neil Freiman and Toby Howell covers stuff that actually shapes your day and your world. Tech headlines, housing costs, markets, companies, weird consumer trends, the economy doing whatever the economy is doing this week. It's witty, it's fast-moving, it's informative, it does not feel like homework. You can listen while you're commuting, making breakfast, exercising, walking around that house, holding one shoe because you cannot find the other shoe.

However your morning happens. You leave each episode knowing more than you did before, but you don't feel like you've been hit in the head with a blue. Bloomberg Terminal. Millions of people already listen because business news does not have to be boring. Tune into Morning Brew Daily every weekday morning wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by Lisa. I want to talk to you for a second about being a parent and discovering accidentally that your child has been quietly tolerating something extremely fixable for years. Many parents, I think, can relate. Lisa offered me a mattress. I did not need a mattress, but I asked around, and my friend Aaron mentioned to her teenage son at dinner,

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Show your support for the show. Let them know we sent you after checkout. Lisa.com, promo code Dearhank. Somebody observed to me at a wedding recently where they were there for a bunch of agents and all the agents looked exactly like agents. Like, you know, some of them were in suits and some of them were in dresses, but they all looked exactly like agents.

That no one looks more like themselves than an agent, which I just think is so deeply true. But it's for a limited audience. We're being very, very, we're being mean, but at the same time, they're doing fine. Yeah, by the way, agents listening to this are just nodding along, Hank, in their literal suits.

With their haircuts they got in the last two weeks. My accountant is like that I've never seen him without a fresh cut. I'll tell you what. I am impressed against my will by people who always have a fresh cut. Yeah. I got to ask him. I've never really thought about that before, but I saw him at the grocery store yesterday.

And I was like, there he is. Looking fresh. All right, we got another question. This one's from Mary, who writes, Dear John and Hank, recently a book I liked was called out on Tumblr. It's not my favorite book, and some of the criticisms are reasonable. But it's very clear that a lot of the criticism is bad faith or more generously, people who don't understand that their opinions are not universal. It's been bringing up a lot of unpleasant thoughts. Like, what if the author chooses not to write the sequel to what if I try to make something I like and end up being dogpiled for it being imperfect to if there's any point being on the internet at all when it always seems to turn out like this? It does always seem to turn out like this, doesn't it? Mary, like no matter how much a book is loved, or how much a TV show is loved, or how much an actor is loved, it does seem like there's always a dog pile on the other side of it unless you're Dolly partner, Keanu Reeves. They've figured it out. Yeah, but I bet it's very possible that in between, in the five days between when we record this and when it gets uploaded, it's Dolly partner Keanu Reeves will do something terrible and everybody on Tumblr will hate them.

Anyway, Mary writes, as experts on Tumblr hate. And experts on seeing someone you care about get hit with unfounded criticism. Do you have any dubious advice? I wish this topic was more. Mary. Aw. Cute. Well, Hank, what do you think?

I mean, when a book I love gets called out on Tumblr, I just, I have to confess that I love the book a little more quietly because I don't want to, I don't want to be that person who gets catches all the strays, as the kids say. Yeah, no one likes catching strays. which makes it harder to love things in public generally. Like even if you haven't heard criticism of something, you're like, I don't know. Is there somewhere? A bunch of people who like are telling me that this is actually a bad thing. Right.

And so that can be tricky and then you don't ever get to love stuff in public. And I've certainly posted about like my appreciation for something and then been told that, in fact, I shouldn't be appreciating it. Though I am very online, everybody. You probably don't have to worry about this. but it's a messy world. The first step for me is like checking in and being like, okay, how do I actually feel about this?

This is very hard, of course, because if it's inside of the sort of circle of, you know, the mosh pit of frustrations and good and bad faith criticism, it's like one of the hardest things about being an internet person is knowing when the criticisms are good faith and even when they're bad faith, when like, you know, nonetheless, maybe there's like a nugget of truth there that you have to take seriously. Right.

A bad faith criticism that you can learn from, that you need to learn from, is actually not that rare, but it's really hard to disentangle all those threads when someone is being kind of mean. This is, so here's something that I think about in this space.

When somebody is like a really big and powerful deal in the world, it's there's both incentive and like reason to ask you know is this like could this could this be you know having a harm that we don't wouldn't initially imagine yeah but it feels like that now happens at every level like or that people think that that like a book is a big deal when it's not you know it could be a big deal in a very small community and then you end up sort of treating something like it's the da Vinci code when it is in fact you know,

some example that I'm not going to give because I don't want people to think I'm pointing out a bad book. Or it can also seem like this is the kind of content that's just easier to pay attention to. Like hearing this thing you thought was good as actually maybe bad, it's just something it feels like I must be compelled to check on that. Yeah.

And so that stuff thrives and it grows. and it grows and people find that they, that like, you know, when you're making on the internet, the things that you feel compelled to make do tend to be the ones that get viewed more. And that's a frame that gets viewed more. And it just feels like that feeds itself in a way that is not productive. And also, like, makes the universe scary. It makes it scary for the creators.

It makes it scary for future creators. It makes it scary for people who love things. Right. It's not great. I don't know what to do about it, but it's not great. It also becomes a barrier to creativity in a profound way that, you know, you have the little bird sitting on your shoulder whispering, don't cause harm. And some of it is like good, right? Like you don't want to cause harm, especially when you're going to write a book that's going to have outsize impact or it might have outsized impact.

And you don't usually know if you're going to do that when you're writing a book. So like, it's not just that people say, oh, this book is bad, which is what used to happen, right? It used to be like in the 80s and 90s, people would fight over whether books were bad, whether or not they achieved their literary ambitions, whether or not. But now we more discuss whether or not a book is harmful. And that's a much harder conversation to have because if you're saying that like a book caused harm, it becomes much harder to defend the book. But also it just, it takes it. it takes it out of the world of a literary conversation and into the world of you're either making someone's life better or you're making someone's life worse. And if you're making people's

life worse, it's not just that your art is bad. It's that your art probably shouldn't exist. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's like everything on the internet, I feel like it's pushing it to the to the highest level of intensity. Yeah. Well, which makes sense, right? Because it's at the highest level of intensity that we pay the most attention. And especially because these sort of like semi-professional provocateurs who the only way they get attention is by pushing the envelope, by claiming increasingly, you know, sort of out-there arguments or whatever, like I think about this in the context of my lieutenant governor, my nemesis, my nemesis, my Quebec with, who recently said that schools teaching that hate is bad is one of the worst things that ever happened in

America because I guess he's pro-hate, broadly speaking. Micah Beckwith is one of those, like, fourth-tier Tucker Carlson's that wants to be Tucker Carlson when he grows up. But like when he goes to sleep at night, he secretly knows that he doesn't have whatever meager talents Tucker Carlson possesses, so it's not going to happen for him. And the only job he's ever had literally is a library board where he banned books all day, and then he somehow finagled that into being the lieutenant governor of Indiana. and sorry I lost my temper I think I think he's probably thought about this some everybody I'm sorry I lost my temper so he was so so yes he came out pro hate Hank he came out in favor of hatred a bold political position but one of those things that when you're a professional provocateur you have to push it further and further and further and eventually you push it there right you push it to the place where you're because because ultimately he's just a moth that flop

to the light of power. And the light of power tells him push it further and further and further, no matter how far you have to push it to continue getting attention because attention is the currency. I was talking to a professor at a fancy business school. And she was saying that, like, this is the first time, this is like the worst it's been with kids not feeling that they can speak in class. Like they're scared to have opinions out loud. And I remember being like, you know, not quiet, but like scared to have opinions out loud.

Like it's always a little scared to speak publicly. But now she's just like, it's increasingly difficult for her to inspire conversation. There will be times when like two or three kids will come to her. Like they can have those conversations where it's like very small groups. But in front of a whole classroom, people just don't feel safe to do it. And I bet it's not, but I bet, like, I worry that we have been trained by the internet to keep our dang mouths shut. Because we never, we never quite know what could be the fiery pit that we kick. Yeah, I mean, look, some of it is good.

Yeah, for sure. Push back against that. Some of it is good. Like, you don't want to be hurtful. You don't want to cause harm with your comments in class or in a book or whatever, right? I think that like you in a book, like, but in class, like, I think that I think that you should be able to say a dumb thing and learn why it's dumb. Yes. Instead of just keeping it to yourself and holding onto it and feeling like, like this loathing that you can never say the true thing.

Because when you say the true out loud, often, or the thing that you think is true out loud, oftentimes what you find is that it's more complicated than that. Yeah, but you have to be able to say it out loud in order to understand that it's wrong. and yeah i think to some extent that's true in making art as well right like you have to be able to take risks you have to be able to be wrong you have to be able to be dated um because you you're trying to speak to your moment not to any other moment and so i think that's what we've sacrificed in the pursuit of you know that that we we cause less harm with the way that we talk about each other and ourselves yeah Yeah, and I've certainly read things, read a book and then read out analysis of a book and been like, oh, wow, I bet I would have seen this through different eyes if I wasn't a white guy. And so I'm glad that I got that perspective. Right. Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean, I, you know, the way that I read has changed so much and in such a positive way as a result of being exposed to different lenses of literary criticism.

But that only happened because I was allowed to be wrong, because I was allowed, because I was allowed, because I had a, because I was allowed to have a starting point, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I do hope that the sequel gets written, Mary. And I do think that there's some value to being on the internet, I suppose. I also hope the sequel gets written, but I'm not sure about Hank's second point. I'm genuinely not. No, I agree.

I mean, look, here's what I think. I think that the internet is very dangerous and in 200 years will be glad that it happened. But for now, it's a real mixed bag. I don't think it's good to be. I think if you can not be on it, you should not be on it. But I know that you think it's more complicated than that. But it's interesting. I'm willing to say my opinion about the internet in a way that I'm not willing to say my opinion about a lot of things.

Isn't that interesting? Yeah. I was just thinking about that with spot up. So I was like walking up the stairs of my house. And I was thinking about Spotify and how people are like mad at Spotify for not giving enough money to artists. And I think. Are you coming in with a hot take?

Even after my Micah Beckwith hot take, that wasn't enough. You're coming in with a secondary hot take? I think that there's every legitimate reason to. You're going to come out pro Spotify? To critique Spotify, though I think that we should also critique the labels that take a lot of money when maybe they don't so much deserve it. But I just compare that to the critiques that we gave to Napster, which did not exist and gave artists literally nothing. And when Metallica was like, you guys need to stop stealing music, it's bad.

We were like, Metallica sucks now. Yeah, we were like, Metallica is a bunch of sellouts. I know. I know. It's true. We were really, like in college, I was really strongly pro Napster. Yeah. And now we're like.

I can't believe a company pays artists, but not enough. And Napster destroyed a lot of careers. It really did. There's so many people who got distribution on Napster and thus have like a little piece of the cultural imagination, but like made a whole fat goose egg from it. Yeah. Yeah. And I would be resentful if I was one of those people, right?

Like, I mean, my books are widely pirated, but only because they're widely sold. And in the case of Napster, stuff. was widely pirated that also wasn't widely sold. Oh, for sure. Yeah. So many people were just Napster artists. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not like they were selling like a million tickets to shows and stuff like that either. There was really- How would anybody find out about them? Yeah. I don't know. That's not what we were doing. Yeah. Right. It's just that that parallel is interesting to me in as much as like we should understand, one, you know, that critiquing a corporation is valid. But two, like the structures that make us not like something are different

from the structures of whether or not they cause harm. And also the times change so much. Yeah. Like so much changes in different moments and with different perspectives. And it's easy to lose track of that and think that like my current time and my current worldview is the only worldview I'll ever have and is completely and totally in line with reality. Sure. And that's just not the case. Right. Like we were wrong about Napster.

And I hate saying it. I hate saying it. But we were like, I was like, no, this is fine. I can tell because I like it. And I was just, like I was wrong. I was. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. No, lots of things that feel good are bad. Take it for me as a former smoker. Lots of things that feel good are bad and really, really hard to quit. And the Internet is one of them, for me anyway. All right, Hank, it's time to get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. What's the news from Mars this week? In Mars News, scientists have used crystals to learn more about changes in Mars's ancient climate,

and they did it by holding the crystal up to their heart and asking. What? That's not what they did. Curiosity rover has been collecting samples from Gail Crater for a long time, and scientists have studied these samples and found that they had a crystal called hematite, which was not surprising because these crystals tend to form in the presence of water activity. But they also found that the crystals were bigger in samples collected from lower elevations compared to ones at higher elevations. It is crazy how much we can learn from all, like, such tiny amounts of data that we get from these rovers. So they found that at lower elevations, there was less of a mineral called geothite than usually forms alongside hematite. And together, those results suggest that the deepest parts of Gale Crater probably had warm groundwater that could be, that could have been present for up to 4.7 million years.

Wow. And at these lower elevations, the warmer water would have caused geothite to turn into hematite, accounting for the lack of geothite in the samples. Also, the warmer water would have also caused smaller crystals to dissolve and drive the creation of bigger crystals, which means the upper layers of Gale Crater were probably colder and had less water, which we see in the smaller crystals and the increased geothite. So we can kind of like see what it was like in the crater millions of years ago. Wow. That's really cool. And it was wet and warm in the bottom. That's really cool.

That's really cool. Well, the news from AFC Wimbledon, I want to focus on the women's team in this update because two absolute AFC Wimbledon legends are leaving the club this summer. First, Ashley Hanks, who scored 145 goals in 135 appearances, Hank. Ooh. Incredible. An incredible return on her goal scoring exploits. Just incredible.

After five seasons, Ashley is leaving AFC Wimbledon, I assume, for bigger and better things. A number of the women's players are leaving, but I wanted to highlight that one. It's going to be tough, man. I mean, AFC Wimbledon's women's team just barely stayed up, and they are also losing their coach, their longtime coach of 10 years, Kevin Foster, who was actually nominated for manager of the month in April for basically keeping them up. And when you lose your manager and your best player, or at least one of your best players, or a couple of few of your best players, it can be hard.

The hope that I have is that, you know, it's also an opportunity to refresh, to make new investments, to find, you know, the next generation of StarWomen players, but it's hard to replace 145 goals and 137 appearances. Oh, wow. That's crazy number. Yeah, it's crazy numbers. That's proper, proper good. Proper good. So very grateful, very grateful for 10 years of Kevin Foster and five years of Ashley Hanks. And I know that we'll still have a good tier three team next season somehow. And they will definitely wear partners in health on the back of their shorts, Hank, because Rosiana and I sponsor the women's team. Everyone listening, if you've ever sent a question into Dear Hank and John, thank you for your question. I'm sorry that we don't answer most of them, but we answer many of them, and we need a pool to draw from.

So please send your questions to Hank and John at gmail.com. This podcast was edited by Linus Obenhouse. It was mixed by Andrew Smith. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Hals, Rojas, and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Toboki Chakravardi, the music you're hearing now, and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarola. and as they say in our hometown,

don't forget to be awesome.