410: Too Weird to Fail
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You're listening to a Complexly podcast. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers offer you dubious advice and answer your questions and bring you all the week's news from both Mars, Nancy, Wimbledon. Hank, I'm in a very echoey space because I'm in a concrete... You're a little echoey.

I'm in a concrete box right now on vacation with my family, but I took the day off because they were going on a long boat ride. And I just got done with the tour for everything is tuberculosis. And there were a lot of planes, trains and automobiles, but blessedly there were no boats. Didn't need any more jiggles. I don't need another. I don't need another method of transportation this week. I've had too many. Yeah.

Yeah. Recently, Catherine wanted to go on vacation and I wanted to go on more of like a staycation. So we did a compromise and had an altercation. That's pretty funny. Yeah. That's not bad. I...

You just got back from vacation as well. I did, actually. And we, in fact, both of us very much wanted to go on vacation. Yeah, yeah. Well, the big news in my world is that my book, Everything is Tuberculosis, is out in the world. It's gotten great reviews. It's the number one New York Times bestseller. It's the first book, Hank, to be at the top of the New York Times bestseller list about tuberculosis in some time. Mm-hmm.

You know, previously you mostly launched books aimed at teenagers, but you had to stop because you kept hitting them.

Nope. Nope. We only get one of those per week, buddy. Because you're just pelting teenagers with books. And then if you try to do a second one, it's never as good. Your aim got too good. Your aim. See, this is the problem with you is that you tell a joke and if it doesn't land, you double down on it. And if it does land, you also double down on it. It's one of the things you need to learn as a young comedian. I guess. You always got to have another joke. Yeah. How are you doing in general, man?

Uh, yeah, I think, I mean, vacation was really good. I'm good. I'm, of course, when you do, uh, go and, and don't work for a while, you come back and then there's a bunch of work that you didn't do. This is the problem with working for yourself is that, um,

Yeah, I think a lot of people have that experience. Yeah. I mean, ideally, somebody steps into your shoes, right? Like the ideal situation is you're, say, a managing director at a firm that moves the pile of money around. I assume that seems like the best job in the world. Yeah.

Somebody else is moving the piles of money around. Exactly. And you get back and they're like, exactly. You get back from your vacation and they're like, hey, the piles of money have been moved left, right, center, front. They are larger as a result of the movement. And you're welcome.

Yeah. Whereas I get back and they're like, Hank, it turns out that only you are the one who can record this advertisement and the future Hank segments for Ask Hank Anything and also do the review to make sure that you said all the things that you wanted to say in this episode of this thing. And it's just like, those things is what I'm doing right now.

It's a lot of work, your job. My job is a little less work, but also a lot of work. I was very grateful to be on tour for the last few weeks. I thought that I would be exhausted because it was a different city every day, a different plane every day. And that is kind of tiring, but I wasn't exhausted. I was really energized actually, because I got to see 14,000 people in our community. And I got to be with people who are very active in the fight against tuberculosis and other diseases of injustice. And it was really exciting.

I instead of getting tired, I came away. I mean, I did get tired. Like I'm on vacation now and I didn't get to sleep in my bed and I miss my bed. I haven't been in my bed and I go for three weeks and I am a little, I am a little tired, but like at the same time, it was very encouraging and encouragement is a little hard for me to come by right now, but I was very encouraged by this. Yes. I've been, I've been thinking a lot about how, how, uh, we are both

I don't know. We're lucky to have found the sort of space that we have. I was in your podcast with Chris Hayes and, you know, just sort of like talking to like an MSNBC anchor and you're like just sort of offhandingly mentioning, you know, our community and the work that they that we have done to build this space.

to help build this hospital in Sierra Leone. And, and like, that is such like a weird thing that I don't think like, like to like the average Chris Hayes viewer, like, like what would they even think that meant? But it's such like a concrete foundational thing in my life. Right. And the way, and the way that it happened was just so organic and, but also with an eye toward, towards,

actually trying to be constructive and live in a society. Yeah, and in a long-term, open-ended commitment kind of way. Yeah. That you will never not live in the society. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like

We sort of like swung, like the pendulum has swung a little bit, like pretty far away from living in a society here for a moment. Yeah. I think maybe there actually is a swing back where like certain really antisocial behaviors are taboo again. Right. Yeah. That'd be great to see. Anyway, let's answer some questions from our listeners. Yeah.

Okay. John, this first question comes from Lydia. Dear Honk and John, Honk, so here's the thing. Wild geese by Mary Oliver is my favorite poem, and I've considered getting a tattoo to represent it, but this has led me to wonder, do you think the eponymous wild geese are Canada geese?

That's certainly the only type of wild goose I see in my Midwestern city. John, I have a relatively low opinion of Canada geese, which does interfere somewhat with my interpretation of the poem. For example, I have a hard time reconciling the aggression of a Canada goose with, quote, the soft animal of my body. You do not have to be good, but you do have to answer me, Lydia. Lydia.

What do you think, John? Are they Canada geese? I've always assumed so. And I've always assumed that they're sort of the great poem that tries to rehabilitate the Canada goose, right? Yes. Do you know the poem in question? I don't. Is it in the public domain? It is today, buddy. It is today. Okay.

It goes like this.

Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

So what we know about the geese is that they fly very high in the clean blue air and that they are headed home again. So they are definitely migratory geese. Now, most Canada geese are migratory, although some now just live full time in Indianapolis crapping in my backyard. Yeah. The other thing we know about them is that like the wild geese, the call is harsh and exciting. Now, harsh, certainly. Exciting, I would say marginally.

Yeah, I'm going to go, having listened to it, and living in a place where I hear two different types of geese. Mm-hmm.

I would probably say that this could definitely be Canada geese, but it could also be snow geese, which also have a harsh and exciting call. And look, I think that on average, if you ask the average person, like, what's the better goose, Canada goose or snow goose? They'd say snow goose. But they're not spending time up close with snow geese.

If snow geese were in the park all the time, pooping their little logs of half-digested grass and defending their territory to you, you'd also hate snow geese. I don't get why we don't like Canada geese except that they are successful.

Right. Well, they're successful, but they also remind us of the fact that they are successful because we've built the world for them, which reminds us that we're terraformers of Earth, which is a horrifying reality that we have to confront that we don't like to confront. I think some people probably are having that reaction. I think a lot of people are just like, I'd really rather there not be little logs of half-digested grass all over the place. Yeah, there's that as well. So here's the thing. You're probably the average person. Yeah.

Mary Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Canada geese. Almost certainly Canada geese. Although there are occasional ocean-going geese that make their way to Provincetown and do fly high in the blue sky. And so it's possible. But I think it's almost certainly Canada geese. Yeah. And I think that we should love them.

For the successful species that they are. We're successful. They're successful. We're sharing a little bit of space. We have a soft animal part of our bodies. They have a soft animal part of their bodies. They have that belly that's exposed just like we have an exposed belly. And they are vulnerable and fragile creatures just like us. I guess the main difference is that we know what's keeping the stars apart and they don't. Yeah. As far as we know.

They do have that glint of intelligence sometimes. They don't. They absolutely do not have that glint of intelligence. I love a bird. I'm a bird enthusiast. But you're going to have a hard time making the case to me that birds other than like crows and ravens have that glint of intelligence. They do seem to have little families, though. So that's nice and cute. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's great.

All right, Hank, I have a question for you. It comes from Ani, who asks, Dear John and Hank, given the extensive nature of movie promo nowadays, well, I don't know, Ani, it really depends on the movie. Some movies don't get extensive promo, but I know what you mean. In addition to several iterations of strategically released trailers, what purpose do movie taglines on posters serve? Are they remnants of a bygone era? What do you think they add to the moviegoing experience? Also, what would the tagline for your biopic be? In a world...

Ani. So Hank, you may not know this, but the Fault in Our Stars originally had a tagline that they ended up scrapping. It was on the movie poster, but it was only on the first run of the movie posters. And then they took it off the movie poster because everybody hated it except for me who found it hilarious. Oh God. Who wrote this? Do you know? Somebody at a movie studio. And the tagline was one sick love story.

Oh, I've seen that. Yeah. Maybe I've seen an old movie poster that didn't get released. Do you have one with it? I think you probably did. I have one downstairs, so you probably see it when you come stay at my house. They didn't use that? They didn't use that. And it totally makes sense that they didn't use it because it's a very earnest... And I want to make art that's earnest. So I don't want to use that layer of irony to protect against the...

Yeah. You know, the expectations of people. But I also wanted the movie to be funny. And I think it is funny in parts. Obviously, it's not a comedy, but like it has its funny moments. And like because what I really wanted for that movie and for that book was for Hazel and Gus to be people with full, rich, complex lives that contained everything that a life can contain, you know, including lots of humor. Like I worked at a children's hospital and it was one of the funniest places I've ever worked. Yeah.

It was also by far the saddest place I've ever worked. Those aren't mutually exclusive. Like people can be funny and sad even at the same time. And yes. So anyway, it did have a tagline, but then they cut it, which was the right call. And I can't remember if Paper Towns had, I think Paper Towns had a call, had a tagline as well. It was get lost, get found. Yeah.

Which is not really the moral of the story. No, and that's not what the book or the movie is about. But, you know, there is some getting lost in it. And I guess there's... Not really. But, like, whatever. It seems like a movie tagline, you know? I don't know why they do them now. Because it seems, like, totally irrelevant to the contemporary movie experience. Unless it's, like...

Unless it like feeds into socials the way that like the Avengers end game most ambitious crossover of all time tagline fed into socials where people were like, no, the most ambitious crossover of all time is Hank Green and Dan Howell making content together or whatever. So are we supposed to try and figure out like our life story tagline? Yeah. What would your bio, what would the tagline be for your biopic?

He came, he saw, he forgot why he came or saw, and then had to walk back to the other room to remember what he was doing in that room. That's pretty good. I mean, it's not succinct. That would be my only criticism of it. Well, this is a difficult copywriting task.

Mine, I think, would be something definitely hypochondriacal. Like, does my eye look funny? Oh, really? Yeah. Does my eye look funny? Something in that category, you know? Something where it's like, this guy's clearly struggling with his mental and his physical health. That's what I'd want to communicate in my tagline. I want to communicate like...

Like just that, just that like special combination of, of just like haphazard energy, like, like an ambition, but for nothing in particular. Right. Yeah.

Right. Like not like ambition to take over the world, but ambition to do weird stuff. Like the real ambition that you and I have is an ambition to do weird stuff. Like part of that is like there's and there's ways in which that's cool and super productive. Like building a maternal hospital in Sierra Leone is the greatest example of that. Right. Yeah. Like.

That happened in part because you and I had ambition to do something weird and different. But then like there are other ways in which our ambition to do something weird and different is not at all productive. Like, for instance, if you have an ambition to see AFC Wimbledon become a third tier English soccer team and you devote resources to that, like that's a weird ambition, you know, and like people will be like, oh, that's kind of weird and cool. But they won't be like, oh, that's a good use of resources. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh-huh. Yes. Too weird to fail. Too weird to fail. That's a great tagline. You got there. Because that's great, because it actually makes sense. Because if you're just trying to be weird, you kind of can't fail. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's like, well, that's weird.

Right. If it succeeded in being weird, it succeeded, right? Yeah. Like having a podcast for the last eight years where we literally unironically share the news from AFC Wimbledon and Mars. Yeah. And the podcast is still kind of a hit is proper weird. Yeah. Yeah. We got a lot of that. You remember when we, for like, like eight months only titled our videos lines from a smash mouth all-star. And our views didn't go down at all.

We were like, you know what, YouTube, everybody's talking about title optimization. What if we can prove that thumbnails and titles don't matter? What if we can prove that you can really do it a different way? Yeah, I mean, they matter, but what if you can prove that there's another way? This is what I want everyone to be doing, honestly. There's just not enough experimentation, not enough weird. Yeah, I agree. We need to lean harder into weird, especially weird stuff that doesn't hurt anybody. Yeah.

Because we've got a fair amount of weird stuff that does hurt people. Yeah. But that's not the kind of weird we're looking for. In fact, this reminds me of our next question, Hank, from Taylor, who writes, Dear John and Hank, does Joe Lewis, who I helped pay for, he was a real-life AFC Wimbledon player, get specially made shorts? Does he take them to a tailor or do the normal shorts that the rest of them wear just look like that on him? Taylor. Taylor.

I think that that's just, I think his body does it to the shorts. I don't think the shorts do it to his body. That is correct. He gets the same shorts. Yeah. But his body does that to the shorts. And what his body does to the shorts is magnificent. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know Joe listens to the podcast. So, hi, Joe. Oh, wow. The other day we couldn't, a friend of mine and I couldn't think of the

The name of the band, Greta Van Fleet. And, and so, so we are asking a friend and, and I said, you know, the cute little guy with the weird voice. And he was like, Oh, Greta Van Fleet. So like, you just like, you just do what you do, what the first thing, and he put it, put ideas into other people's heads. I don't think though that I've ever done anything very special to a pair of shorts. No, no, nothing worth repeating on a podcast. For the immediate response.

Well, I just know you have colitis. Man, I basically don't own shorts. It's been a long process for me with the visible legs. Yeah, I'm wearing shorts right now, but they always make me uncomfortable. I always feel like I'm performing as someone else, like I'm cosplaying a middle-aged man who's on vacation. Yeah.

That's so weird, isn't it? It is. The personas that – and we, of course, think about this way more than anyone else. So on our vacation, we were in Ireland. We did a bunch of cool stuff. And Catherine was like, you should get a flat cap, like a wool Ireland style. And I put it on. And I was like, that looks pretty good. And Catherine was like, I love that. And I was like, but I can't wear it. I can't buy an Irish style hat and wear it around Ireland. Right.

What is, what's next? That I start speaking in a very good Irish accent all of the time? Yes. You and your Irish brogue. I'm sure it would impress me. The fact that you were able to go to Ireland for two weeks and come back, not with an Irish brogue is impressive, actually. Very proud of you. You've matured a lot.

But yeah, I think we are probably more hyper aware of performance than most people that like all identity is performative because we've been performing our identities and living our identities for a long time. I think everybody's kind of like that though. Here's what I think. I think you can go into a store and you can see a shirt and be like, I could never pull that shirt off. And then you could put that shirt on and no one would even think for a second about that shirt.

Well, they wouldn't think that you can't pull it off. They would think the fact that you're wearing it indicates that you can pull it off. Yeah. So they would think about the shirt. I honestly think that for the most part, they kind of wouldn't think about the shirt. I think that the shirt probably wouldn't even be that weird. It depends on how good the shirt is. It depends on the shirt.

For example, we have another question from Sarah who has a pot, who has a bumper sticker that says honk. If you're letting the small animal of your body, love what it loves. I guess this is the Mary Oliver special. And, and that, if you put that on a t-shirt, right? Like everybody would look at the t-shirt and be like, I love your Mary Oliver t-shirt.

So people would notice it, but they wouldn't think like, oh, you can't pull off a Mary Oliver t-shirt. The mere fact that you're wearing it means that you can pull it off. Yeah. That's my contention. And I experienced this when I go to a casino, Hank. You can be a person other than who you are. What? You know? Yeah. Like I go to a casino and I have a made up name and a made up identity. I've never told you this before. Maybe you have, but we've had a lot of conversations. It's true. That's just a weird way to say that. But you only do it in casinos? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd be weird to do it anywhere else. Who are you? What's the name? Is it like Bennigan's McShane? No, no, it depends. So Sarah and I will create a character. Like one time we created this character who made research beyond meat, like meat alternatives for salmon. Sure.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And so when I got into a conversation about it at the blackjack table, I was just like, yeah, you know, the texture is really challenging. That's one of the things that's really hard about it. The flavor profile is relatively straightforward, but the flaky texture of salmon is hard to recreate with a vegetable-based protein. And I mean, I had a whole conversation where I was this guy and then the money part of it was at the end of the night when I was wrapping up at the blackjack table, the dealer came up to me and said, it's nice to meet you, Mr. Green. Yeah.

Now, this is why they're not recruiting you to be in the CIA. No, no. But I think I had the other table mates trick to the people who were in their 70s and 80s. I love that. I love that. I love that for that person. Can I tell you a little story about a little thing that happened to me today? Please. I got a burrito, but in a bowl because I didn't want to have the whole burrito part.

And the guy who made the burrito, as he was handing me the burrito bowl, he said, I would try to make this one look like it was good enough to go on the website.

And I was like, I love that. This is the greatest little, this is a great little moment. I'm going to really enjoy looking at this burrito bowl. Yeah. That's lovely. I was like, that's, thanks for, you might say that to all the guys, but like. It still matters though. It, it, it, yeah. Yeah. Just like I, some care and attention went into the making of this.

Yeah. Hank, that reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the Burrito Bowl on the website. The Burrito Bowl on the website getting recreated in Missoula, Montana every single day. This podcast is also brought to you by The Fault in Our Stars. The Fault in Our Stars, one sick love story. Because we always do taglines, but now I get to do the tagline. Today's podcast is also brought to you by Joe Lewis's Shorts. Joe Lewis's Shorts, it ain't the shorts, it's the man.

And this podcast is brought to you by the soft animal body of the goose, the Canada goose. Hey, so a few months ago, I got my first bit of clothing from Quince. It's not my first bit of clothing ever, but it's my first bit of clothing from Quince. And I genuinely love it. I think everyone needs Quince's Mongolian cashmere sweaters from $60. Like, they are...

top-notch sweaters. I'm astonished by how much I like my Quinn's clothes. You've probably seen them on Vlogbrothers, actually. I've been upping my wardrobe game lately where it's not just about the polo shirt anymore. I've got sweaters. I've got button-downs. I've got all kinds of great clothes. And that's thanks to Quinn. So you can upgrade your closet this year without...

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All right, John. Another question comes from George who asks, Dear Hank and John, how do people come up with alphabetical order? Why is A, B, C, D, E, F the order and not like B, Y, F, L, K, M, W? Rhymes with orange, Jorange. Sorry, I mispronounced your name at the beginning there, Jorange.

We do not know, of course, why the original people put the alphabet into alphabetical order. But it was done a very long time ago, and we have been using it in the same order for a long, long time. Yeah. There isn't a sense to it. All the vowels are mixed in. There's a sense to some of it. Like U and W and V are all close to each other because they came from the same letter. So we didn't used to have all those letters, and so those are all descendants of the same letter. Yeah.

What? That's the letter. Oh, yeah. I thought you were just making an upset noise. No, no, no. That's how people express their dissatisfaction with the same. And it's all those letters when you put them together. I think I got there. Yeah. That was the original letter. It was the drink to which letter.

And I can't stop. People are not going to like that. I know, but I can't stop. I want to believe me. You think I want to be doing this? All right. We're going to move on then. I was talking to Deboki about this before because we have a little call where we talk about the science stuff. And she was like she told me that in Bengali, which her mother speaks and she speaks a little bit of that, that alphabetical order actually has an order.

Oh, so it, it like I, and I, I like, of course cannot tell you the order, but it's based on, it's based on a logic. There's a logic to it. Yes. And, and like, she did it for me and I was like, Oh, that like, that sounds very logical. So like, like certain, like, like,

There's a rhythm to the sort of beginning of each letter and then the sound after the letter. And so you do all of those in order and then you start with a new beginning and then the same sounds and then a new beginning and the same sounds. That's smart. I like that more than just random. Let's separate out the vowels. But we don't separate out the vowels by like the same number. There's no consistency at all about our alphabet. Yeah.

Yeah, we do have A-E-I-O-U. Like we have a separate order for vowels, which is, is it the alphabetical order of the vowels? It's the alphabetical order of the vowels. But like, again, the alphabet doesn't matter. So it could be U-O-I-E-A. It wouldn't be any different. Yeah, right, right. Except we have to keep the U, the W, and the V together. We do. We could, I don't know how we'd do it. I'll be, here, maybe. Maybe.

I could figure out if we took the English alphabet and we did it more the way that Bengali does it, what would it be like? I can't do that for you right now, but I bet I could with a little bit of time. So let me work on it.

Okay, Hank, come back to us. You don't seem busy enough. So please work on recreating alphabetical order, which is exactly the kind of weird, highly specific project that I love for you in your retirement. Like, I really hope that you retire someday and you call me and you're like, yeah, so listen, man, it starts with D. Who knew? Who knew? I didn't expect it either. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Yeah. Well, it also is inconsistent in how the letters work, right? So like W is just a word. It doesn't have anything to do with the sound of W. Yeah. Like in Bengali, it would be like W. And then like D would be D and T would be T. But instead we have like a bunch of different ways of doing it. Well, and in other languages. A lot of them are like C, T, but then we have F.

Right. Which should be phi. In other languages, a lot of the letters are pronounced differently. So like that is in no way consistent, even in languages that use the Latin alphabet and put it in the same order that we put it in. No, Hank, the only solution, and I've been saying this for years, is for you to retire and devote yourself full time to coming up with a new order to the alphabet that is based on reason and logic. Right.

I'm going to standardize everything and I'm going to do it with an iron fist after taking over everything. That's going to be my first step. Like Robespierre in the French Revolution. You'll be like, this is year one. You heard me, year one. How do I know? Because I'm doing it. And there's going to be 100 seconds in a minute.

It's year one of what turned out to be three. Hey, look, that's a last. He lasted a while. Yeah. I don't know that he was alive for that entire three, but the calendar was. Oh, man. It was a bad time to be a politically powerful person in France or really anybody in France, come to think of it.

Avoid the French Revolution. Maybe that'll be the tagline for my biopic. That's my recommendation for you. Just trying to avoid the French Revolution. Don't go full French Revolution. Yeah. That's my world historical advice as a student of world history. This next question comes from Bella, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I live in the northeast of the United States, and I always take great joy in watching the migrating Canada geese. This is our geese episode, Hank. That's gooses. In the spring and fall.

Whenever I see a lone Canada goose flying by itself, I always experience some amount of worry about its fate. Will it just find another flock to latch on to? Does it need to find its original flock? Do geese have families? Are we ultimately all alone on this cosmic journey between Canada and slightly south of Canada? It's great, Bella. That is our preferred designation these days, South Canada. Be geese and goslings, Bella. They're going to have so many provinces.

They're not going to know what to do with all their provinces when they take over America.

Oh, man, they're going to have so many – they're going to have a North Dakotan province and a South Dakotan province. I bet the logic up and make one Dakota province actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're going to – first they'll do the alphabet. Then all of the north, south, east, west, that's just going to be one state each. There's just one Virginia. There's just one Carolina. Yeah. And then they're going to make Tulsa the capital of Oklahoma. Yep. Each one of the Hawaiian islands is a different state now.

Oh, really? Yep. That's what Canada is going to do that too. Even the one that Larry Ellison owns. Can we have, can we have one not owned by a person? Yeah, that one's going to be, we're going to kick him off though. Oh, great. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to just, it's actually just going to be beavers now. And. But they, can they vote?

Yeah, of course. They vote by like whether or not they come out of their little huts. Oh, they vote like Poxitone Phil. Yes, exactly. Well, I love it. You know, like the face of each prime minister candidate to a tree and then whichever one they nibble on. And actually that decides it for the whole country. We're getting out of the humans voting business. Yeah.

We're getting into the beaver voting business. And it's year one of the era of beaver. But anyway, as for the geese...

I love the idea that humans can do all the steps like we nominate the candidates. We like have the political parties. We do all the steps up to the last step and then we're like, listen, we can't be trusted with the last vote. That's why we give it to the beavers. I mean, one of the real problems is that there are times when it does feel like it's just a beaver.

It does. It does. It feels like – I want fewer 50-50s going on in American politics because I just feel like – Yeah, we need more 80-20s in American politics. We need more 80-20s and right now we don't have a lot of 80-20s. But anyway, Hank, should we worry about the lone Canada goose –

Probably not. So Canada geese are certainly very social. They travel in family groups. It isn't like they're just like sort of flying around and glomming on to whatever group of geese they see. They hang out with a specific group that are often, you know, in some way have like familial relations. And they also mate for life. So if you do see a lone goose, it may be that they –

Sure. Yeah.

But you do often see them together, and that is why. So there is a potential that if you see a goose all by itself and it's sort of like always by itself, that that is a sad situation for that goose. It's a lonely goose. But oftentimes when you see a lonely goose, in fact, there will be other geese that it is going – either going away from or coming back to.

And it will return and reconnect with them. Because these family units don't – they tend to be self-perpetuating. And so they don't like die out. So there's – but like there also might be like a male – like a young male thing, which is often a thing in like a social species is that young males will sort of head off into their own and maybe pick up a new – Forty nights in the wilderness and all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

All right, Hank, before we get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, I want to ask you one more question. And believe it or not, it is a goose question.

It comes from Kelsey who writes, Dear John and Hank, your CBC interview with Matt Galloway this morning was fantastic. My pre-ordered copy of Everything is Tuberculosis is arriving Monday and I can't wait. That's great. Thank you for listening. And I should also mention, Hank, I was on another podcast that I really enjoyed. Is Matt Galloway a goose? Is that why this is looped back to the goose thing? Hold on a second. Okay. It was Wild Card with Rachel Martin and it was probably the single best interview I've ever done. I love that Chris Hayes podcast. I had so many great interviews on this tour, but...

That Rachel Martin podcast was incredible. She just like gave me so many gifts in that conversation. But anyway, Kelsey goes on to say, however, I am also reeling from listening to your podcast, episode 259, Infinite Bird, where you suggested that Canada is secretly part of the US. Given the current political situation, are you sure about that? Take it back. And just checking in as a non-51st stater, Kelsey. So Hank, I didn't ever realize that I would have to be in this position.

Yes. But I would like to state for the record that I was 100% serious. 51st state, baby. Red, white, and blue. Kelsey, I think Canada, and again, this is a weird situation to be in, but I think Canada is a sovereign nation.

No, John. The 51st state is a maple leaf. They get that. That's all they get. Put that on the – there are going to be 50, 51 stars on the flag, but actually just 50 because one of them is a maple leaf.

Yeah. Anyway, right. 50 stars and one maple leaf. That's how we're going to settle this thing. I'm sorry, Kelsey. We're honoring you with one single maple leaf. I'm sorry if my joke about the United States and Canada having a deeper than usual relationship was misinterpreted into a political movement where Canada becomes the 51st state, which obviously it shouldn't become. And now we know that Donald Trump is a listener to the pod. Yeah.

Yeah, longtime friend of the pod. Unfortunately, we seem to have given him the wrong idea. And we just like to say, Don, we think that there's a number of mistakes you've made. Yeah, and also just like how did you listen to the podcast and take that away, but not the values of the podcast? Yeah. That the last shall be first and the first shall be last and the meek shall inherit the earth and et cetera, Don. Anyway, moving on, Hank.

God, I watched three football games while I was on vacation and they were all infuriating. That's not good. Oh my God. Is this the new Swayze Wimbledon? The last six goals that AFC Wimbledon have given up have been given up in the 85th, 90th, 95th, 90th, and 96th minute. What the? We were winning one game 2-0. That's why they created that letter.

We were winning another game 1-0. We were winning another game 1-0. And in two of those occasions, we tied the game. And in one of those occasions, we managed to lose the game. So we went from a potential nine points down to two points. And this is the run-in. This is when we have to be good because the teams around us are good.

And it's just been devastating. So right now we're still in the playoff hunt. We are still in, I believe, fifth place. And so fifth place, sixth place and seventh place, they all go to the playoffs. But I don't want to go to the playoffs, Hank. I wanted to go up through the automatic promotion ranks so we don't have to worry about the playoffs. But that looks like a distant dream. Now we're five points off the automatic promotion spots with only six games to go. So it's not looking...

It's not looking perfect, if I'm being honest. Just win all those games. Well, if we won all those games, if we won all six of those games, we would indeed be promoted. In fact, if we won four of them, I think we would be promoted. But I don't think we're playing – Are they against bad teams?

It's a mix. It's a mix. There are some bad teams. So the next team we play, Harrogate Town, is not very good. So there's some hope there. And then I'm going to see us play. They're like Hank Green in shorts. Not very good. They're like Hank Green in shorts. They don't fill out the uniform, if you will. Yeah.

Not like Joe Lewis does. Then you got Doncaster, who are promotion candidates, Chesterfield, Gillingham or Gillingham, depending on your worldview, Port Vale. And our last game is against Grimsby Town. So that game against Port Vale could be huge. They're currently in the playoff spots. And then that game against Grimsby Town on May 4th is going to be huge.

I'm going to be at the game on April 18th. If anybody's there, please say hi. But in the meantime, it's looking tense for AFC Wimbledon. Only one win in our last five games. Well, the news from Mars, the Curiosity rover has found the largest organic molecules on Mars ever found. Now, what does that mean? Does that mean life? No, not necessarily. There are ways that these molecules can be made geologically. So, but

They are made in interesting ways geologically when they are made geologically. So it was analyzing a rock sample called Cumberland. Remember Cumberland Farms, Sean, when we were growing up? Sure, of course. It was the one that I was a little bit more worried to go to. Yeah. Yeah.

Rather than 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven felt safer than the Cumberland Farms. Yeah. 7-Eleven felt like Cumberland Farms was across the street. And so you actually had to cross the busy road twice to get to Cumberland Farms, whereas 7-Eleven, you didn't have to cross the busy street at all.

Yeah, but it also just- It was like literally safer. But also it felt a little- There was a vibe at Cumberland Farms where you'd be like, don't drink the milk from there. Yeah, it was a little more cigarette centric of a store. It was more of a cigarette shop than a convenience store in the old fashioned sense. Do you know that there's still Cumberland Farms out there? Look at that.

It's colloquially known as – Where's the nearest one to me? Cumbies is its colloquial name, which I do not love. No, that's terrible. There are no more in Orlando. There's three in the state of Florida. They are almost entirely in – it looks like New England area. Yeah, they're on the beach out there in Florida. There's one like if you drive straight from Orlando to the beach. There's a couple Miami cumbies.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a Cumbie in, uh, Rockledge. That kind of, that's the kind of vibe. Oh boy. Cumbies. I wish I didn't know that. I've got, I've got a lot to go back in time to before I knew that. I look against a deer, Hank and John Cumbies edition. Uh,

All right. What's the news from Mars? Right. So we don't know that these are living organisms. These aren't living organisms, but they're large organic. They're large organic molecules. And the rock is called Cumberland, and I don't know why. But they were looking for amino acids, and they did not find any. But they found small bits of decade, undeccane, and dodeccane, which are basically just 10, 11, and 12 carbon, long carbon chains. And they hypothesized that these are actually fragments of fatty acids. Right.

And so what they did is they mixed some fatty acid with, I think, an 11-carbon chain with Mars-like clay and then heated it up and found that decane was released from that. They did that here on Earth to see if... Indeed, it's probably these fatty acids. Fatty acids are very important for life. Your cell membranes are made out of them. And so... And we think that...

That they when they are made geologically on Earth, they are made when water mixes with minerals from hydrothermal vents. So we are continuing our little little trek down the journey of Mars, early Mars being more and more Earth like in its infancy.

Yeah, because we had hydrothermal vents, right? And that's probably where life first emerged. That's what we think, yeah. That's the leading candidate. That's where I'm at. So the idea that they also had hydrothermal vents means that probably life would inevitably emerge there. We don't know. The thing about life...

Is that it happened one time, and so you can't actually learn very much from it happening one time. You know, if it happened twice, you can say something about how common it is. But when something only happens once, you can't really say anything about how common it is. So we've only – so life has only emerged on Earth once, we think? As far as we know. That's why. If it emerged a separate time, then the version of it that we have now consumed and out-competed it, the other forms to extinction. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

That's wild, though. I mean, first off, it's wild that life emerged here. I mean, I guess it's probably common. Life is very strange. We don't, we have no idea. And we do not, we still do not have a chemical explanation for how it happened, like a physical explanation for how it happened. We're working on it. We're closer than we were when I was in school. Don't we sort of...

not fully understand even what life is like don't we not really have a strong definition of life because you know i think there's lots of things that challenge it like viruses and whatnot

Yeah, I think that, I mean, there's different ways you can draw the line, but like life is definitely a thing. And we have, we have an understanding of what that thing is like, like, there isn't like a fuzzy line between like a rock and you, like you are definitely alive. And so we know that like life exists and is a thing.

And there are just – there are like several different – in different disciplines, there are different ways to draw that line. And some of them kind of do draw it where virus is included and some don't. Right. Okay. But that doesn't mean that we don't know whether life is a thing or what thing life is. Because we – it's like some of it is vibes-based. Right.

Some of it is pretty unambiguous. Like viruses might be vibes based, but the rest of it's kind of unambiguous. Yeah. My, my opinion is that like the, the fuzziness of a border between things, like there's, there's fairly really fuzzy borders between some things. Like there's a really fuzzy border between like what's a shrub and what's a tree. Like there's very fuzzy, but there's a little bit of fuzz when it comes to life, but it is not, but like there's fuzz everywhere.

It's always a little fuzzy, but it's pretty, it's actually sharper than maybe you might imagine. Okay. Well, I just imagined it as fuzzy because I imagine like all human built language categories as fuzzy. Yeah.

So like I imagine the category of fish is fuzzy. But there's different amounts of fuzzy. Well, fish is extremely fuzzy. Yeah. Fish basically doesn't exist. Fish don't exist. I read a book about it called Why Fish Don't Exist. Fish only exist in the sense of like you look at it and like that looks like a fish, which is also like a fine categorization system. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right. This is helpful for me. There might be life on Mars, but we don't know. Life has only evolved once that we know of. And so it could be common or it could be rare. We just don't know yet. Yeah. I mean, the big question, I think that when we end up on Mars doing science, the thing that will probably answer, well, if we answered, it will be answered in the positive. Otherwise, we'll just keep searching and not know for sure, is whether life existed in the distant past there.

And there's probably, you know, based on how, based on the fact that like Mars isn't geologically active, so it's not like chewing up its own crust all the time, like Earth is, then we'll probably actually be able to figure that out because the old stuff is still there. The evidence is probably still around. Right. We just need to dig down and get those sweet Martian skeletons. Yeah. Or probably like fossilized bacterial mats. Yeah.

Yeah, that's not going to be quite as exciting for me, but it'll still be cool. Yeah. I mean, based on how life went on Earth, there's a really, really low chance of a skeleton, of any kind of hard multicellular organism. It took so long to get from one cell to two. It took a huge amount of time. It took more time to get from one cell to two than it took to get from two cells to humans by a wide margin. Basically, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And you like hear about like, like life on earth at the outside, maybe 4 billion years old. And, and like every time you look up how old something that you think of as a life form, it's never more than a billion, you know? Cause like before that, it's like just not much going on. Yeah, I know. We are very unlikely and very valuable as a result. That is something to remember about humans. Yeah.

It could be that life is quite common, but life like us is quite rare. I don't know. I was never hit with this as like a young, interested in science kid, but it's really wild that it took almost a third of the life of the universe for life to go from existing to capable of making a hat, you know? Right. Or capable of understanding what a star is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a long time for life to need to exist uninterrupted. Yeah. And we are one of the only life forms in the history of the known universe that knows what a star is.

Yeah. Yeah. I'd be interested to know if there are any – I mean, I think it seems like other animals can appreciate beauty in a way. Yeah. No, I believe that they can look at the stars, but they can't know that the stars are suns in another part of the galaxy. We're the only currently existing life form that –

that could is capable of knowing that i think yeah maybe neanderthals could have known that but almost definitely yeah but they don't know it now they didn't because we killed them maybe maybe yeah there's a there's been some there's some good debate about that one yeah for sure i just don't trust us personally but anyway we gotta that is how i podcast i feel like it would be really unusual like we're pretty big impact on on most environments we exist in it'd be weird for us to not have played a part

Yeah, that's how I feel too. But we'll see. We'll see. That's something that we'll figure out in the future too, I think. I hope so, yeah. All right. Good podcast, John. Thank you for hanging out with me. This was fun. Thank you, Hank. Thanks for the Goose Spectacular.

So many geese. If you want to send us your questions, that's at hankandjohn at gmail.com. This podcast is edited by Linus Ovenhouse. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosianna Hals-Rojas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Devokitra Kravarti. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarolla. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome. ♪