414: Tell Me What Your Pain Sounds Like
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You're listening to a Complexly podcast. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Nor as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon, apparently at pretty different energies. John, did you know why Pavlov's hair is so soft? No, why is Pavlov's hair so soft? Because he conditioned it.

Oh, yes, he did. He did. He reminded it daily that if it waited for a certain moment, it might just get a reward. And then it salivated all over itself. Yes. That made it soft. How glad are we that hair does not salivate? Oh, huge win. How much worse would that make everything? It does sweat. It is up there with a bunch of sweat. It will wet itself. Yeah.

Yeah, but it doesn't sweat itself. It's not like the sweat comes out of the end of the hair. No, but I bet if the body could have figured out how to do it, it would have. I recently did a tremendous deep dive on keratin, and I can't tell you all about it right now because you won't care. But when I set it up, it's going to be great in a Hank's Channel video that I'm going to make about life. Wow. Yeah.

You're going to love it. And that's that's really how you tease a video is like, look, I can't. This is so boring that I am going to have to tell you a huge long story before you will care about it at all.

People, by the way, people loved my 15 minute as if you weren't there and part of it you weren't there summary of AFC Wimbledon's journey to become a third tier English soccer team. You thought that people were going to hate it. They lapped it up, Hank. Yep. All of the people who didn't like it didn't write emails. That's exactly correct. They got bored and stopped listening.

So they did not write emails. Let me ask you a question from Rihanna, Hank. Oh, we're going to just do that. I love it. Yeah, we're going right into it. Because you sensed my feeling from last week that maybe the intros were a little too long. So this week, it's just hair sweat.

Just hair sweating right into it. Dear John and Hank, I've always been curious as to how people can say I have a high or low pain tolerance when they can't experience pain through the bodies of others. How do you know if you have a high pain tolerance? Can you ever know how your pain ranks on an objective level? Not the singer Rihanna. I think this is such an interesting question because as you know, Hank, I am obsessed with the fact that we spend all our time here inside of one consciousness.

and looking at the world through one set of eyes. And yet we think that we know what it's like to be other people and often can be quite presumptuous about their experience. And the thing is, this is like multiple levels, right? Because do you have a high tolerance for pain could mean that

the same amount of pain as you, but I tolerate it more. It could also, it could easily be interpreted as when we have the same stimulus, I experience less pain. Right. And,

And I have no idea which of those things we would be measuring. And I don't think anyone does. It's not just that, though. It's also that we assume that having a high pain tolerance, quote unquote, high pain tolerance is good and having a quote unquote low pain tolerance, which I'll be the first to admit, if insofar as there is a thing.

I'm on the low pain tolerance side of the scale. I actually, when I was reading this, I remember when I was a child, our father said to our mother, within hearing of me, he just has a very high pain tolerance. And I took that as objective fact because he wasn't saying it to me to compliment me. But I did hear it as a tremendous compliment and moved through much of my life believing I had a high pain tolerance. And now I realize I definitely do not.

And instead, what my dad had identified was that I just kept doing things that hurt me over and over again, despite the fact that it did hurt me. I just was bad at risk management. Right. Also, you were my little brother, and I'd set the bar so low when it came to pain tolerance. Ah!

That inevitably dad was impressed by you. Yeah. But I do think in general, Lank, there's a measure of judgment about people who experience lots of pain. Yes. There's this great quote that you've heard me say a million times, Lank, but it's from The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, where she writes that to have great pain is to have certainty and to hear of another's pain is to have doubt. Yes. And...

That is especially true when you're talking to like, you know, that can be especially frustrating when you're talking to like medical professionals and you're like, I have great pain. And they're like, I'm sorry. And some of that is because we have insufficient ways of dealing with pain. Like we have insufficient ways of confronting pain. Do you know about my...

my fix for the terribleness of the pain scale so there's the pain scale is like 1 to 10 right and they show you like the faces for the kids the faces on the 1 to 10 scale yeah I used it in the Fault in Our Stars my hit book uh huh

It's in a lot of the doctor's offices because you got to communicate about pain. It's very hard because, of course, you could always sort of imagine a situation that would be even more painful than the one that you were in. Totally. But here's my solution. I just don't think numbers are a good way and I don't think words are a good way. And what does that leave us with? Sounds. Yeah. You should be like, okay, can you tell me what your pain sounds like? Because if I go like...

You know that that's very different from like, which is very different from like, those are all like very clear kinds of pain that I have had. And I think that like, there's so much objective difference between different kinds of pain. There's like the amount of time that it lasts. There's, there's,

It's variableness as it lasts. There's where it's located in the body. There's how it limits movement. Is it just always there or does it happen when you do certain things? It's such a big, wide variety of stuff. There's a recent video where a bunch of people got bit by this bullet ant that's supposed to be the most painful ant ever.

And they did their best to measure how much more painful that was than a control sting, which was just from a wasp. Fun. They did the math and all of them underestimated how – pretty much all of them underestimated how painful the bullet ant actually was because they simply –

I didn't feel rational saying that it was like 4,000 times worse. But it is 4,000 times worse. But it's 4,000 times worse. I'm going to try to avoid getting bit by a bullet ant. That sounds like it would be wildly unpleasant. I'm certainly not going to volunteer for a YouTube video where I get bit by one. It was a great video. They did it in a very, I think, clever way, but...

Yeah. I also am not going to get myself stung by a bullet ant unless you can guarantee me like 10 million views. Oh my God. And that's the thing is that's not a joke to me. I only, this is a fundamental difference between us is that like you're, you are a good YouTuber and I am not a good YouTuber. And also I take pride in not being a good YouTuber. Like it's very important to my career that you're not a good YouTuber. Like we need, we need that.

If I was a good YouTuber, we would have flown too close to the sun a long time ago. I'm flying so close to the sun on Hank's channel right now. You are. What's it like up here? Every time you make a new Hank's channel video and it gets a million views, I'm like, why are you doing this? Like you're flying too close to the sun. Like we all know how this ends. Like don't you remember Tumblr?

This sun is so tasty. Oh, my God. It burns my skin. Exactly. Talk about a pain scale. So anyway, I know that I'm not a good YouTuber, but you're a very good YouTuber and you need me because I keep Nerdfighteria going.

a little bit smaller, which is good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need a filter. Yeah, absolutely. We need to filter the audience in certain ways. There was a time when you made Nerdfighteria bigger, and then, you know... I know. Eventually, a lot of those people dropped out. It wasn't because I was a great YouTuber, though. It was because I had a hit book. He almost gave himself a compliment, everybody. Well...

Oh, because I almost said I'm a good writer. Yeah. You almost said a great writer, which you literally couldn't say even now. Yeah. All right.

All right, let's move on to this question from River. No, are you done with the pain question? Oh, I'm not. There are ways where we try to objectively measure pain. There's a few ways that we try to do it. There's a thing where you submerge your hand in cold water and see how long you can keep it there. And this mostly works for like testing pain for one person. So you have a person take a pain control medication and do it and then like...

when they'd like to take their hand out of the water when they can't keep it in any longer. It's surprisingly painful to have your hand in very cold water. And it's less useful when it comes to comparing different people because one person might just...

be able to deal with it better and be experiencing the exact same amount of pain. And we just have no idea how to, how to handle that. There's also like differences in physiology that can mess with this that aren't just like about the nervous system. If you saw something as being like way more red than me, that would just be like, Oh, interesting. But if you experience a pain that is way more painful than me, I just don't have a good way to understand that. Right. And so that just, it makes it very hard. We've got a great question from,

River, Hank, that's about us. And you know how I love a question about us. You know how I love a self-reflection moment. Dear John and Hank, I subscribe to the We're Here newsletter available now at we'rehere.beehive.com. And whenever I read the opening paragraphs, I feel like I can tell within a sentence or two whether it's Hank or John that's written it. And I don't recall being wrong so far.

My question is, can I tell the difference? Are you all aware of significant differences between your written speech patterns? And can you tell the difference between each other's written work? Paragraphs and psycholinguistics, River. Absolutely. Like I can – when I read Hank's books, I hear Hank's voice. Yes. And if I –

If someone tries to write something as me, like if they're trying to write a marketing email for a good store, and they're like, this is from Hank, and here's what it says. I'm like, thank you. I will now write it the way that I would say it. And I have no idea.

Like how, like what's happening. But I don't know. I just written a lot of stuff. You develop a voice eventually. Yeah. It's pretty specific. Having a distinct, like a distinguishable voice is valuable. Right. And in the business that we're in. And so I think that we, it just like ended up that way, but yes, it's,

We write very differently. Our sentences are different lengths. Right. They're structured differently. We have different habits, not to say that they're good habits, but like we have different habits. Exactly. We have different, different predictable flaws in our writing, which is what I think of them as, but also like different, like certain quirks, like the way that I use em dashes is very different from the way you do. And like, yeah, but your, your, your work just sounds like you and mine sounds like me. And that is not,

Something that was true for me when I was 23 years old. Yeah. It took me. It just takes time. Yeah. I mean, I think writing Looking for Alaska was the first time when I, and I finished that when I was like 27, 28.

That was the first time. And it was a five-year process. And through that five-year process, I found out what I sound like. Because I remember when I didn't get into the advanced creative writing class at my college. I'm so shocked that you remember that. When there were 15 applicants and 12 spots and I was one of the three people who didn't get in.

which I remember quite vividly and is sort of a defining experience in my life. When I didn't get into that advanced creative writing class, my creative writing teacher asked me over to his house to have a drink. And we sat there with, I sat there with him and his wife and,

And he was like, look, man, like the story that you submitted wasn't very good. But when you tell stories during the break in our seminars, those stories are very good. And so you've got to figure out how to write stories like you tell stories, like how to sound like you sound, not how to sound like bad Philip Roth, but how to sound like you sound. And.

And that was really, really great advice. And I think if he hadn't given me that advice, I would have abandoned my dreams of writing. So shout out P.F. Kluga. I mean, I have a similar story that I think takes less space in my head because of how it is a less significant thing. But I remember the first time I got rejected from a literary magazine and it was like a U.M.,

Environmental Studies Literary Magazine. And I went and I was like super into this and I worked really hard on it. I really thought that it was good. And what I needed to hear was this is all about you and it is for you. Like you wrote a thing that is 100% about your experience of the world for you in which you are the character who is just having smart thoughts. Yep.

Yeah, which is developmentally appropriate, I would argue, for someone in their early 20s. But it is real. It takes time to learn how to write for an audience. And one of the things I don't understand very well about myself is that I rarely write

except for an audience. Like I wrote everything is tuberculosis, not for an audience. Initially I was writing because I was writing because writing is my way of thinking and trying to understand something. But like, it wasn't until I realized I was writing something for an audience that I kind of kicked into high gear and got really excited about everything is what would become everything is tuberculosis because I love writing for an audience. And even when I was like 15 years old, um,

I didn't journal. I wrote stories that I imagined were for an audience. And I don't know what that says about me. I don't think it says anything great. It's not something I'm super proud of, but it's real. Yeah. I did the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. We, we, I don't know. We both have that bug, but let's stop talking about us writing because I was just talking about how

That's – nobody wants to hear that. Just a couple of guys. People don't like shop talk and they shouldn't like shop talk, right? Like I don't – Unless they're in the shop, you know, unless – Unless they're in the shop. Unless they're in the shop. All right. Let's answer this question from Anna who writes, do you agree – Let me do one. Okay. But this one is important. Okay.

You can do the next three. You do the next three. I'll do this one. Okay. Seeing as you are a top podcast for teens. Thank you, Anna. We appreciate you acknowledging the reality that this is a top podcast for teens, including a top sleep podcast for teens, a top workout podcast for teens, a top podcast for tweens.

Yeah. Somebody's told you that. Yeah.

Not sure that we're on the same page about the assumption at the core of the question, but we'll get there. I'll look back and miss being a teen, but right now it's very stressful and I mostly just want to grow up and gain more independence. How can I find more joy in my teenhood? Pumpkins and penguins, Anna. Here's what I'll say. Yeah. You will miss your body working as well as it does right now. Because it might be at its like near its like peak level of

It might not be. I was going to say, if you're like me, Anna, and you're smoking 40 cigarettes a day, which I hope you're not. Yeah.

But if you're like me when I was a teen and you're crushing 40 cigarettes a day, like you're actually not going to reach your bodily peak until your early 40s. Not because you work so hard, but because you set the bar so low. So there's that. I don't know. What do I miss about being young? There's a certain amount of just physical ability. There's also – here's what –

let me see if what you think of this. All right. There is something where the connections I had with the people, like my friends were so unquestioned and unquestionable that it was like, it was just like, this is where I belong. And these are the people that I have found and I'm going to be with these people. Whereas I feel like friendship in adulthood and, and you know, many relationships in adulthood are very like, uh,

You know, you're kind of sometimes you're stuck with people like work and you're like you just like deal with the ones and not necessarily are going to be loving them. Or, you know, you kind of like are thinking harder about whether these people are the ones you want to hang out with or not. I just like miss just valuing people because they're my people.

So I'm going to push back against everything that you've said. Okay. Hit me. Respectfully. Because my experience of being a teenager is that I wasn't very secure in those core relationships, even the relationship with my parents or the relationship with you or my relationships with my friends or my, especially with romantic partners.

Like I didn't feel that sort of like core security. And in adulthood, I do. And that's actually the main thing that I don't like. I wouldn't want to go back to being a teenager because of that constant feeling of like insecurity and insufficiency. And, you know, I felt very much like Anna. Like I wanted to just grow up and be independent and not have to like –

with all the newness of everything. The one thing that I recommend about being a teenager is that you're doing so many things for the first time that there's an intensity to that that is really thrilling. Now it's also like horrible, but it is thrilling, right? Like there's an intensity to falling in love for the first time or grappling with questions about suffering and meaning for the first time independent from your parents. That's really interesting and fulfilling for me anyway. But like, I don't, I,

I don't think you're going to miss being a teenager. I don't miss it. Who knows? Look, everybody's got a different, different, everybody's got a different journey, but I had, I, I enjoyed being a teenager. I had like, I had great friends like you. I had like deep, deep friendships that, that, you know, carried me through those years. But those years were hard, man. That was hard. My feet were always changing size. It was hard. So not the first thing on my list, but yeah. Yeah.

The feet have maintained the same size for a long time, and there is a convenience to that. There is. One thing I'll say in that vein also is I –

For so many years, I feel like I had my hair figured out. And then when I lost my hair and then I came back curly, I was trying to figure that out. And now it's straight again. And I'm trying to figure this out again. And I feel like I haven't had a haircut I liked in years. Do you feel like it's a second adolescence, this new world that you live in with a new body? Yeah. Yeah.

A little bit. And like new – and like how do you prioritize? How do you figure out? I don't know. Because it's not just the new body. Is that what a midlife crisis always is though? It's just like please let me go through adolescence again? Maybe. I don't know. Again, I –

I really don't want to romanticize adolescence, which I find to be like one of the core things that adults do unjustly. Like if they can actually go back and be a teenager for a day, they'd be like, oh, no, no, not this, not this. I just think that there are some teenagers, I think, who – and I was at times one of them. Yeah. Probably not all the time. But we're just very confident and comfortable with it.

And I think that's the thing that we are all seeking. And if you find that in school, that can actually be quite hard because then that structure goes away. Right. And you're like, now I am without it. Right. So maybe there's like a joy and a benefit in never quite finding it in school so that you can try and settle on it in a more stable system that is –

the whole rest of your life that you will have outside of school. Yeah, certainly you don't want to be like that character, Tom, and achieve the kind of limited excellence at the age of 19 that smacks of anti-climax, as Fitzgerald puts it in The Great Gatsby, one of the most damning disses of all time. I was like, who the hell is Tom and why is Tom being so mean to him? Yeah.

Well, he's a very careless person, Hank. He caused a lot of harm in that story. Which reminds me, actually, that today's podcast is brought to you by Tom Buchanan. Tom Buchanan. You know, I wouldn't necessarily get in a car with him. This podcast, I don't know if you know this, John, but it is also sponsored by Tom Hardy. Tom Hardy. Tom Hardy.

He's got that shape of a head. Yeah, for sure he does. And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by Tom Brady. Tom Brady, he was surprised when he drove the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 to be booed, but he has hated here. Oh, man.

We all gotta know that. And finally, this podcast is brought to you by Tom-a-sedison. Tom-a-sedison. Tommy Edison. Little Tommy Edison. Hey, Tom. Brought you the light bulb. Brought you the movie projector, maybe. The telephone. No, that was a different guy. Yeah, he didn't actually bring you any of those things, but he- He definitely electrocuted an elephant. Okay, did he really? Yeah. Wow, what a-

What a thing to be remembered for. The phonograph and the electrocution of an elephant. The phonograph! That's what I was trying to think of. What I love about that joke is that I've never once in my long life thought of Thomas Edison as good old Tom. Yeah.

Yeah. Thomas. He's definitely a two-namer. He's a two-name kind of guy. I even know his middle name weirdly. Like why do I know that his middle name – Alva? Alva. Why do we know that his middle name is Alva? What is wrong with our education system that somehow you and I ingested that Thomas Edison's middle name was Alva but we never ingested, for example, how limits work? No, you're correct. I didn't.

And the horrible thing is will – and I'm sorry to bring it here, but will this be the case for people –

Who today are influential people who are industrialists. Will they be remembered the way that we were sort of taught as Thomas Edison is just like a good old guy who made a lot of good stuff happen when we were kids. What a smart American industrialist. I wrote my third grade essay.

biography on Thomas Alva Edison. And I remember that I re I use the word interesting several times because it took up a whole line when I wrote it in cursive and it had to be like a seven page paper. So yeah, yeah. Thomas Alva Edison. I wish him well. And you know, for today's industrialists, uh,

I would just remind you that history comes for us all. Even Thomas Edison eventually got eclipsed by Nikola Tesla. Unlike my brother, vertical video sensation Hank Green, I've just never been that good with money. I've had a lot of overdraft fees in my life, some missed payments, etc. But Chime understands that every dollar counts. That's why when you sign up for direct deposit through Chime, you get access to fee-free features like free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit,

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This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by ZocDoc. There has probably been a time in your life when you've been like, I should see a doctor, but it'll probably go away on its own. And then a little bit later, it didn't go away, and you're still not going to see the doctor. At that point, it's

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All right.

Let's answer some questions from our listeners, Hank. Why don't you ask a couple? Yeah. This next question comes from Will, who asks, Dear Hank and John, why does it seem that astronomers are so uncertain about when and where space stuff will hit other space stuff? I feel like I'm always reading articles about asteroids that may or may not hit Earth or the moon. Aren't

the motions of our celestial bodies constant and easy to predict? Why aren't they more certain about their calculations? Looking at the sky in terror, Will. Will, I have... Look, you have no idea, no idea how accurate these measurements are. It's amazing. It reminds me of a joke that an astronomer told me once. An astronomer gets pulled over by...

police officer and the police officer says, do you know how fast you were going? And the astronomer says, somewhere between 10 and 100 miles an hour. Which is so accurate. Which is so incredibly accurate, right? Like, from the context of...

space-time between 10 and 100 miles per hour is incredibly impressive. If you can get it within an order of magnitude, you've basically got it. Yeah. That's for stuff outside of the solar system especially. With stuff in the solar system, we know this stuff with such a huge degree of precision, and I can talk you through many of the reasons why it's very hard to get that level of precision in

and why we are always constantly working toward higher precision. There was recently like a asteroid that might hit earth. It was like, it went from like a less than 1% chance to an above 1% chance. And everyone was like, oh, and it kept going up, you know, for a couple of days before it went down. And what you have to remember is that when we are looking at these objects, especially at first, we are looking at a dot, right?

on a background of stars that has moved from one place to another in on a flat plane we don't have like a top-down view of the solar system where we can see all this stuff we can only look at it from one direction so we have to do all kinds of crazy stuff with like brightness and like how it's moving compared to the background stars as we move around the earth because as we move we

These things also move, but the stars all stay in the same place. So we can kind of use that effect to see them from different angles. And that gives us more data. So you have to do a lot of observation of a lot of different objects. And they're just dots. And you can't use brightness because they can be made of different stuff and they can have different levels of brightness just because they just happen to be darker, not because they're closer or bigger. And so all those things matter.

So we have to figure out how big they are to figure out their orbit. And then if they get close enough, we can actually bounce radar off of them. And that gives us their distance. And this has to be within like millions of miles. So it can't be more than millions of miles away. And when we get a radar signal, that tells us how far away they are to within meters. Wow. Yeah.

Wow. So that's when we can be like, this one's probably going to land in the Indian Ocean. Yeah. But it's still tricky. Of course. You have to get a bunch of measurements. And so what often happens is you start getting lots of measurements on – or you start with getting a few measurements on lots of objects. And then you look at the objects that have the highest probability and you get more measurements of those objects to get more specificity on where they're headed. Yeah.

So it's just a tremendously difficult problem. And the thing I try to remind people when we hear about an asteroid that might hit Earth is if this was 10 years ago, we wouldn't have any idea until it hit us. That sounds better, actually. I feel like we've regressed as a species. I want to not know. Well, there are things we can do. So it feels like a good idea to know. Wow. Mind-blowing. If we didn't know 10 years ago, we would have just gotten hit by it.

Yeah. So much stuff like that. Six weeks of stress. Where we have to worry because we're just better at knowing about stuff. The same thing with pandemics, where for so many years, pandemics just happened or didn't happen. And now we're all thinking about bird flu four years before it happens or doesn't happen. Thanks for that, Hank.

This next question comes from Miranda, who writes, Dear John and Hank, initially, I was thrilled to become a new mother. And my daughter appeared nearly perfect. However, it has come to our attention that she sneezes a lot. Oh, no. As a mother and newly minted pediatrician, Hank, can you imagine? You're a doctor.

And you've got a sneezer. You know how abnormal it is for people to sneeze. That's exactly what Miranda says. You can understand my serious concern as this is not normal. To make matters worse, she refuses to stop sneezing when politely requested. I'm afraid she doesn't grasp the severity of the issue. Any advice is appreciated. As you know, newborns are terribly challenging to refund or exchange. You have the right, Miranda. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

You're saying that we don't have to comment on this absolute banger of a question? We can remain silent? What would you do, Hank, if you had a child who was a sneezer? I think Miranda makes a great point. They are not refundable. No. So here's the thing, and this is going to be hard, but you have to psychologically trick your brain into thinking it's cute.

So you have to remove yourself from the understood, rational, objective knowledge that this is never normal. And be like, actually, maybe that's kind of cute. Okay. I bet newborn sneezes are

more easy to cuticize than adult sneezes. What you don't want to do though, is to let that cross over into an acceptance of adult sneezes, especially as a pediatrician. Right. Or child sneezes. Every time a child sneezes in your office, you need to tell the parent that is not a normal experience.

And what the child is going through is concerning. I was actually going to recommend that you seek out Dr. Never Sneeze or Scrooge, the original doctor who said that sneezing is never normal. He never sneezes. Because maybe Dr. Never Sneeze or Scrooge has some insights into how you can stop your newborn from sneezing. Do you think this person, this original person, has a disorder and doesn't sneeze because there's something wrong with their brain? No.

It's possible. Do they have the weirdest stroke ever? Yeah. I think it's more likely that Dr. Never Sneezer Scrooge sneezes on occasion. And when he does sneeze, it feels immense shame. Just feels like, oh my God. Like worry. I've failed again. What did I do? Like –

Yeah, I think that's more realistic to me, is that there's an element of just like horror and shame and a feeling of like, I can't believe that happened to me. I must hide it. It is a totally unacceptable phenomenon. But fortunately for you, Miranda, you are yourself a trained physician. And so if anybody knows if this situation is creeping into the pathological, it's you. Yeah.

And so I trust your judgment even more so because you acknowledged in your email that your daughter sneezing is not normal. Yes. Oh, I don't know what – I don't know how to handle it. It sounds hard. It sounds like a difficult life that we all have to live here. But I think that if you can just for the infancy, just try and accept – try and make your – convince your brain that it's actually just like a cute little –

I also remember when my children were very young, trying to make rational arguments to them about their behavior. And I would be like, don't cry. It's three in the morning. Yeah.

I hope there's nobody listening who does not know the lore and is worried about their sneezes right now. I think that we should become so post-ironic that we ourselves don't even know whether sneezing is normal. Like by the time this podcast becomes Dear John and Hank in 2028, I want us to be in a space where nobody even remembers the war. All they know is that sneezing isn't normal. We got to go back and listen to the episode and figure out, does this happen on the first day of 2028 or does it happen on the last day of 2028?

I think humans have to be on Mars by the end of 2027 in order – By 2028. No, because if you land on Mars on May 18th of 2028, you're on Mars during 2028. Right. But isn't there some rule where like Mars is further away every other year and so it's got to be 2027? We don't know what technology is going to –

happen in 2028 could be teleporters. There could be, except I'm pretty sure that the initial bargain we made was that by the end of 2027, there would be humans on Mars, which is the most ludicrous thing that you could have ever imagined. Like,

That makes you look like such a techno optimist. It does. It makes you look like one of – it makes you look like – The problem is that the wager matters and so we're still talking about it where most of my stupid thoughts that I had back then have been forgotten. But this one we had to hold on to and now every time I say anything about what the future might hold, people are going to be like, yeah, people are going to be Mars in 2027. Yeah. We got to listen. We got to listen because if it was by 2028, then I have one more year than you think.

That's true. That's true. But it wasn't. So we'll find out. We got another question from May who writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm 12 years old. We're privileging the tween and teen questions right now in an attempt to become a hit podcast for teens. Yeah.

I am 12 years old, about to be in seventh grade, and I have been listening to the podcast for a few months, and I've heard a lot about your book, and they sound good. But I'm not sure if I'm old enough to read them yet. How long should I wait to be able to read your books, and what book would be best for me to read? I hope your books are amazing as they sound, May. It's a really good name-specific sign-off, May, and it tells me that you're great with language, and probably you're certainly intellectually ready to read my books.

I don't know. What do you think? She's May's ready to read your books too. I have no idea. I have no idea. I have no idea. I feel like I cannot give someone's 12 year old advice on books to read. May, to be honest with you, I'd have a conversation with your parents. Yeah. And here's the conversation I have with your parents. I would say mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, auntie, uncle, whoever, whoever's in the house, I would say, Hey, it's me, May. Um,

am thinking about reading these books by John and Hank Green, mostly by John Green. He needs the money more because he'll actually spend it, unlike Hank Green, just donate it to Partners in Health. So I'm thinking about reading these books and would you mind reading one?

And telling me if you think I'm ready to read it. And then you can kind of get an insight from the people in your, the grownups in your family. That's the first thing that I do. I will say, ironically, the only book I've really definitely published for adults, everything is tuberculosis is the one that I'm least concerned about you reading. Yeah, no, that makes sense. You'll learn a lot about tuberculosis and, um,

It's going to be way ahead. Way ahead. Yeah. So I don't know where I'd start. People ask where to start reading my books. I mean, with Hank's books, it's pretty obvious. You start with the first one because it's a two-book series. With my books, I don't know. I wrote those books like 20 years ago. I have no memory of them.

Who knows what they're like? Yeah, exactly. Can I really recommend them in good faith? I genuinely don't know. This next question comes from Soma who asks, Dear Hank and John, my brother and I recently went on a trip to Finland. And as longtime listeners of the podcast, one of the items on our to-do list was to go to Rax Roast Beef. But upon arriving in Finland, we discovered that all the Rax's are Rax Pizza Buffets and not Rax Roast Beefs.

Are they the same thing? We must know for our next time. Did you go? Did you not go? No, I think they did go. They had to have gone because it is a completely different Rax. So the Rax in America, Rax roast beef. It's just the same letter used for a different restaurant? Absolutely. It is the exact same letters in the same order used to describe an entirely different phenomenon. Like bear with it and bear, oh my God, there's a bear. Okay. Yeah.

It's very similar. It's very similar to that. So Rack's Pizza Buffet. But they are both restaurants. Hank and I have never been to because we've never been to Finland. But interestingly, Hank, I am going to Finland in 2027.

I already have a trip on the books to Finland. And when I go to Finland, one of the main things I want to do is eat at a Rax pizza buffet because you'll recall it was at a Rax pizza buffet that that listener of ours had their pants ruined. Yes. No, that's where you go to get your pants ruined. That's where you go to get ruined pants. I'm not exactly sure how the ruination occurred.

I also don't fully remember the story, but Hank and I were waxing poetic about Rax Roast Beef, this restaurant from our childhood that still has a couple places open in like Ohio. And Hank and I went on a road trip and went to a Rax Roast Beef. It was pretty good. I was surprised. I enjoyed my trip. Oh, yeah. It was very similar. It tasted just like the Rax Roast Beef from my childhood. But several people from Finland wrote in and said, we also have a Rax Rax Pizza Buffet. And one of them wrote in and said –

Rack's Pizza Buffet is best known in my family for having ruined my pants. And went on to tell a story about the ruination of their pants. That was solid gold. And so I think that the next time you're in Finland, Soma, you have to go to Rack's Pizza Buffet. One, give us a review. Let us know how the pizza is, for God's sakes. And then two, you know, see if you can get your pants ruined. You never know what's going to happen at a Rack's. Yeah.

I'll tell you that. Well, one thing that I didn't expect to have happen at the racks that we went to is to not be able to go inside because it was full of boxes. It is drive-thru only. And because the inside of it is being used for storage. The dining room is just where they keep the old cups. Yeah.

It was a weird experience, John. I'm glad that we did. I've been wearing my Rex t-shirt. I got a Rex t-shirt. And I get comments on it all the time. People are like, oh my god, I grew up with Rex. People love Rex. Anybody from the Midwest or the South who is in their 40s is very excited to hear that.

All right, Hank, before we get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, we need to answer a question. Okay. It's from Sabina, and it is a sports-related question to sort of ease us in to the discussion of AFC Wimbledon. Sabina writes, Dear John and Hank, Timothee Chalamet, an American actor, Hank, just for context, recently got—

Kylie Jenner. And Kylie Jenner is an American entrepreneur and a reality TV star. Timothy Chalamet recently got Kylie Jenner to come to Indianapolis on a Saturday for a New York Knicks game. What is the most outlandish thing your wives have ever done as a result of your interest in sports? No offense to Indianapolis, Sabina. Now, I want to be very clear about something.

Kylie Jenner was psyched to come to Indianapolis. And who wouldn't be? This is the white hot center of American culture. This is where it all goes down. This is where it happens. I am living –

We talked earlier about Hank flying too close to the sun when it comes to the popularity of Hank's channel. I fly too close to the sun just by living in Indianapolis. This place is too cool for regular people like me. So Kylie Jenner was delighted to be in Indianapolis. The weirdest thing that my spouse has ever done for my love of sports is sign off on me paying the contract of AFC Wimbledon player Marcus Brown. Yes.

I mean, if Timothee Chalamet did that for a New York Knicks, I think that Kylie Jenner would be duly upset. I'm kind of stuck on Kylie Jenner and Timothee Chalamet at a New York Knicks game. They go to all the New York Knicks games. Are they a couple? Or are they just like really good friends? Yeah, they're besties. No, they're in a romantic relationship. Oh, okay.

Hence the question, what is the weirdest thing that your spouses have ever done? Did you see that Billie Eilish was kissing Nat Wolfe? I did. I did. Yes, I am.

I don't know. I don't want to talk about my friends. But yes, I saw that picture. My friends' private lives should be able to be private. Well, Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner's private lives aren't private, but that doesn't matter because Timmy Chimmy ain't John's friend. No, he is not. I've never met Timmy Chimmy. He seems like a lovely, very ambitious young man. Yes.

I don't – what – do I like sports? I mean the first thing that comes to mind is during a vacation in Ireland. Yeah. I made Catherine go to an industrially harvested peat bog. But that's not sports. That's just my interests.

Yeah. In the same way that you are into football and being like, come on. But I'm like, I – Catherine, I don't want to go see a – like when I like told people I wanted to go see a peat bog, they like suggested all the like the nice ones. Right. That were pretty. No, you're not into that. And I was like, I want to go to one of those. But what I really want is to go to one that's been industrially harvested. And they were like –

they don't put those on display. And I was like, yeah, but like they're around. So just, I just want to like find one. And they're like, okay, you'll have to probably like,

Walk through a bunch of branches and brambles. I was like, that's cool. Wow. Just take me to the bog. Yeah, I think that your fascination with bogs and my fascination with sports are very similar. They come from similar places, which is that we are trying to build community in a world where community is not natural anymore.

And the second thing about it that's the same is that most people would find it very, very boring. Yes. And then the third thing is that it can make your shoes muddy. Oh, absolutely. I went to an AFC Wimbledon game that was a nil-nil draw. And at the end of it, one of the people I brought with me to the game, a friend from Indianapolis, turned around and said, so they can just not score?

And I was like, yeah, yeah, you can fly all the way from Indianapolis to London just to see no goals. Nothing. Yeah. Look, the whole game happened. The whole game happened. I mean, just think of all the events that occurred. Thank God.

Oh, boy. Yeah. And also Peat Bogs and English Soccer about a preservation of the past and our histories. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to the news from AFC Wimbledon. The news broke an hour ago. Oh! Who broke it? The club. We don't really have reporters beating down our door. Who's going to put it back together? Well, maybe no one because Josh Neufeld –

arguably our best player, our player of the season last year. Wow. I have not, I don't know this guy's name. You don't care about him, even though he's your best player. This is why he's leaving because you didn't talk about him on the pod enough. It's possible. It's possible. He, uh, had the opportunity to sign another contract for Wimbledon. Um, and he has chosen not to, he has signed for Bradford city, another team that's been promoted from league two to league one. But, um, uh,

A club with a bigger budget, I think it's safe to say. And you can't, of course, you cannot begrudge a player signing a bigger contract. These are short careers and it's not like we're talking about billions of dollars here. So I wish Josh the best, but I am a little bit personally devastated. Yeah.

Well, what you got to do is get a loaner from Mansfield United. There you go. Mansfield United? Is that one of them? There is a Mansfield town. Oh, what's Mansfield United then? Are you thinking perhaps of Manchester United? Sure. That's likely. We'll get a loaner from them. Okay. Okay.

For the wing. For the wing. That's right. We got to get somebody who can play wing back. And it's not going to be Josh Neufeld because he's joined Bradford City. I don't like him in any way. We used to call him Joshy Ninetown because Neuf means nine and Vil means city. Yeah. That's cute. I like that. Well, not anymore. Bradford City will have to come up with their own nickname for him. They're going to love him as much as we did. Yeah. Okay. We wish him the best. Well, I don't know. Let's just...

talk to somebody with a couple hundred thousand dollars to spend on a player. Is that how much they cost? That's about how much they cost. Really? Yeah.

I guess it's a job, you know? Some of them, yeah. They'll get paid between $200,000 and $300,000, the average League One player. But again, like... League One, and this is the league you're in now. That's the league we're in now, but you've got to remember... Even all the players get that much? Most of them do, but you have to remember this is a short career, right? So if you're lucky, you play for 15 years. No, I'm just doing the math. It's expensive to run this team. Most people play for 10 years. It is expensive to run this team. But the thing is...

They're not in the good leagues. Well, I think that we are in the good leagues, Hank. I think all the time about how we used to be a ninth tier English soccer team. There's nine? There's 11 tiers? No, there's – yeah, there's actually – there are 11 tiers. We started in the ninth tier, but yeah, there's 11 tiers. Okay. League one is the third tier. Yeah. So we're actually doing great. Okay. Great. Great.

Yeah. What's the news from Mars? Well, wouldn't you know, it's still out there doing Mars stuff. It still is.

It continues to orbit around the sun. And there's an orbiter orbiting around Mars as it orbits around the sun. It's called Mars Odyssey. And it got a rare glimpse of Elysium Ons, which is one of the biggest volcanoes in the solar system and also on Mars. It's around 12 miles tall and has a diameter of 270 miles long.

And it's almost twice as big as the largest volcano on Earth, which is Mauna Loa. And the thing is, Orissiamans is usually covered by clouds because there's air blowing up the sides and then it gets cooled and that forms clouds. And the clouds make it hard to get a picture of this volcano. But in early June, the orbiter was able to get a picture of the peak of the volcano through the clouds and you can go see it. And it's wild that like we've taken so many pictures of Orissiamans.

Mars, but to actually be able to see the top of this volcano is very rare. Wow. It's sticking out above the clouds. That's pretty crazy. That's hard to get my head around. I don't think of Mars as being that visually stimulating, I guess. Oh, it's changing. There's weird stuff about Mars. Wow. You know about the spiders? No. No.

Not the David Bowie ones. Maybe I'll tell you about the spiders next week. And now I just want to state for the record that if there were spiders on Mars, as I understand spiders, that would be the biggest, that would be the moment where you get to spend the first 15 minutes of the podcast talking about the news from Mars. Yeah.

Yeah, no, that would be big. That would be big. And also really unfortunate, you know? If the first life that we found on another planet was very spider-like, I would be a little bummed. I'd be like, but are they cute at all? No? Okay. No, there are these things that happen on Mars. It's a geological thing that happens, but it's very weird and it is active. It happens every year. Wow, that's cool.

Well, Hank, thank you for podding with me. Thanks to everybody for listening. And we're very grateful to the folks who helped make us help us make this podcast. And Hank is now going to read their names. I am. And they include Ben's Ford out who edited the podcast, Joseph tuna, who makes it to it. Our marketing specialist is Brooke shot. Well, it's produced by Rosianna Hall. So Hassan Hannah West, our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. 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.