394: I Think Very Highly of Me (Live at VidCon!)

You're listening to a complexly podcast.

Hello!

And with the songs, that's the ending song.

Greetings, friends.

I've never done the intro to the ending song before.

Hello, and welcome to Dear Hank and John, a podcast where we answer your questions, provide dubious advice, and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

I'm John Green.

I'm joined by my co-host

Hank Green.

John.

Yeah.

What do you call a YouTuber who's a werewolf?

A what, what?

A like and subscribe.

A like and subscribe.

A like and subscribe.

Some of the people got it.

A like and subscribe.

Like and

lichen?

You know, lichanthrope?

That's another word for you, for werewolf.

Oh, well.

No.

You learn something every day, friends.

Yeah, we're teaching.

It's a teaching moment.

Hey, so before we get to your questions, which by the way, you can email your questions to hankandjohn at gmail.com.

Thank you for that.

Thanks to Peyton, our long-time collaborator, for helping us out with this system.

But yeah, you can email us your questions.

And we're also joined by my daughter, Alice, one of my all-time favorite people.

So thanks to her for being here.

And thanks to the rest of y'all as well.

So Hank's going to be looking out for questions.

I will.

Are you just looking at Twitter?

No, no.

yes, John.

I really want to be looking at Twitter right now.

I bet you do.

It's not a great place at the moment.

I haven't been there in a few days, and I tell you what,

I feel noticeably better.

You are in a second suit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can I tell you the secret about this?

It's amazing suit.

Hold on.

It's got little airplanes on it.

Oh, it's got a secret.

Oh, who's in there?

Wow.

Describe.

This is the moment that AFC Wimbledon scored the goal to head up to League One to get promoted at Wembley when Wilde Taylor scored a goal.

And I had it sewn into my suit.

I got this at a place called Divine Trash.

It's in the back.

of a clothing store.

It's a little vintage section that smells like your basement.

And this is Tyler Thrasher.

Tyler Thrasher shirt.

I love a Tyler Thrasher shirt.

These jeans are from a store, and these socks are awesome.

Socks Club.

Bluntstones.

That's the full fit.

I'm wearing Hank's cancer socks and Adidas Sambas, not for the first time.

So listen, we got to tell you a story before we do this.

We answer your questions, which we are looking forward to.

Email your questions at hankandjohn and gmail.com.

It's a distractingly nice suit close-up.

Some of the buttons are different from each other.

I feel like this one might have some meaning.

It does.

They all have meaning, Hank.

So listen,

by the way, you want to talk about something that really resonates with a podcast listener is describing a suit.

What resonates is me being easily distracted, because so are they.

Right.

So we

got an opportunity, but it was an unexpected opportunity for one of us.

And we thought we would share that story just to start off.

So several weeks ago, Hank found out that he was going to throw the opening pitch at a Major League Baseball game.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the sport of baseball, this is a great honor.

It's been enjoyed by American presidents.

Now, admittedly, there are like 62 Major League Baseball teams.

They do play 161 games a season each.

So it's not like it's that big of an honor.

But it's an honor.

This is going to be a better story than you think.

It's going to continue being crazy.

So Hank is like,

does nothing to prepare because

this isn't true.

I do nothing to prepare for a long time.

And then at the last moment, I realize, oh no, I did nothing to prepare.

I call, I'm at my friend Jason's house.

He used to play baseball.

I'm like, I'm about to throw out the first pitch at the Angels game.

And he's like, Hank, what?

And I was like, he's like, have you practiced?

And I was like, no, I could throw rocks into the lake.

I do it all the time.

I throw rocks into rivers.

Sometimes I just throw rocks off mountains, though you're not supposed to do that.

There could be somebody down there.

And he's like,

it's not exactly like that.

You want to know how far you're going to throw a specific thing.

You're going to get one chance.

There's going to be a lot of people watching.

There weren't a lot of people watching.

Thursday at 6 p.m.

for the Detroit Tigers and the Anaheim Angels turns out not to be must-see television or in-person viewing experiences for the vast majority of Anaheim residents.

So I go out and I toss the ball around with my friend Dave, my friend Jason.

We mark off the distance to the mound.

We throw.

I do a lot of bad throws.

I do some good throws.

I learn my lesson, which is don't try to throw it fast because then it goes anywhere.

It's going to hit Jason's Vespa, and you don't want that.

And one time it went into a pond.

Jason went and got it out of the pond.

He's a brave man.

He drives a Vespa.

And then,

and I feel like I'm pretty ready.

I'm pretty sore the next few days, but I recover just in time to arrive at Angel Stadium with a group of my friends and my brother and my niece

We get there and we go through the little security thing and I'm like he's throwing out the first pitch like trying to like get you know just like get through the line faster.

I'm like he's throwing out the first pitch this first pitch guy first pitch guy over here.

We get through the little line and the other thing about this story is that maybe 10 minutes before this all happens we're in the car on the way to the Angels game and I say to quote myself directly, I wouldn't throw out the first pitch at a Major League Baseball game for $10,000.

That's what I said.

I learned something about myself that day.

He'd also been like harassing me, as he does as a good brother, to practice.

Yeah.

Like, you need to practice.

Get ready.

He's like, I will.

And then I was like, oh, VidCon is in four days.

Yeah.

I finally did it.

So.

We get through security.

This wonderfully nice man comes up to us and says, we're so excited to have you guys throw out the first pitch at at the Angels game.

And I was like, Oh, that was a weird phrasing.

And then he says it again.

He's like, It's just, you know, it's really cool for a lot of our staff.

They learned from Crash Course, and they're really excited to have you guys throw out the first pitch at the Angels game.

And I was like, I just got to stop you right there, sir.

On now, two occasions, you've referred to Hank as you guys.

And he's actually a single individual, you know.

Like, I don't know if you know about subject verb agreement.

It's like a multi-celled organism kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of cells are going to be throwing out this first pitch.

You guys, this organized collection of cells and bacteria.

All 30 trillion of you are going to be throwing out a first pitch.

And I was like, what do you mean, you guys?

And he was like, oh, you're not throwing out the first pitch.

And I was like, who's me?

Yeah, no.

Like, only one person can throw out the first pitch by definition.

And then he was like, no, no.

We're going to have you co-throw out the first pitch.

Throw to two different catchers.

Get you on the mound together at the same time, throwing at the same time.

And John's like, I don't need to do that.

That's what I said.

And then he says, well, that's the script that the announcer has.

We can change it if you need us to.

And John's like, no, no, no, no.

Don't cause any trouble.

I just don't want to cause any trouble.

I don't want to be trouble.

I want that on my gravestone.

John Green, 1977 to 2133.

He was in any trouble.

Yeah, that's what all the pharmaceutical companies are saying these days.

I just don't want to be any trouble.

And so I learned that even though I wouldn't do something if you paid me $10,000, I will do something just not to be trouble.

And so

they give me a baseball, and I'm holding this baseball, and I realize I haven't thrown a baseball in anger in some 37 years.

Is this something you have to do in anger?

Well, I mean, by which I mean throw it 60 feet.

Right, right.

You know, like I've tossed a baseball with my kids a couple times.

Alice is actually a really good softball player.

So, like, you know,

I've pitched to Alice before underhand, but, like, I haven't thrown a baseball 60 feet

in a major league baseball stadium in my life.

We know what 60 feet is.

Yeah, it's like this.

It's going to be way longer than you think.

It's about the whole length of the stage.

Yeah.

It's maybe a little longer than that, actually.

So I'm literally...

On the field, okay?

Wait.

You have to tell.

Are we going out to the mound yet?

Because there's an indoor activity that occurred that makes this story even more amazing.

You tell that part.

Which is that as we get to the thing, there's another guy, and he's with us the whole time.

Oh, the other guy.

There's a guy and his family.

Because it turns out...

No, no, no, no.

I got it.

I got it.

I got it.

You got it.

You got it.

His whole family's there.

He's in an angel's shirt.

He's in an angel's hat.

His name is Bob.

He's the shape of a man named Bob.

He's got a glove?

He's wearing a glove.

His kid's got a glove.

And he's just with us the whole time.

And I'm like, what's going on with Bob?

And I can hear John listening in.

And John's like, maybe we don't have to do this.

It sounds like Bob's.

Bob's going to throw out the first pitch.

And we get up there.

And

Bob gets in the first elevator because the elevators are tiny.

And I ask, I was like, is Bob throwing out the first pitch?

And she's like, oh no, Bob's throwing out the first pitch, but you are too.

I'm like, okay, we need to talk about first.

And so we get out there, and Bob goes out to the mound to throw out the first pitch.

Yeah.

Turns out you can have as many first pitch throwers as you want in Major League Baseball.

Their definition of first is not like our definition of first.

And Bob gets to throw out the first pitch because he is a season ticket holder to the Angels.

Proper fan.

And Bob, who again looks like a guy named Bob,

his arms are as big as my legs.

Goes to the mound, you know, puts his foot up against the rubber like a proper Major League Baseball player, kicks his leg way up and hurtles a 65-mile-an-hour strike right into the catcher's mitt.

And I was like, oh, no.

It hits the mitt.

It makes a noise.

It's made a noise.

Like a thing happened when Bob hit, when Bob fits it.

Bob comes off and I was like, Bob, that was better than what we're going to do.

And he was like, yeah.

Yeah, because Bob knew that he was going to throw out the first pitch with more than 12 minutes' notice.

I think Bob knew he was going to throw out the first pitch with

45 years of notice.

He's been thinking about this the whole time.

So we get up there, and we're walking out there.

To co-throw out the second pitch.

Yeah.

It's a great honor and responsibility to throw out the second pitch.

To throw out the second pitch.

To be half of the team throwing out the second pitch

at an Angels game on a Thursday at 6 p.m.

How often I look at my title of co-founder of VidCon and I'm like, yeah, sure, I guess.

I mean,

you were there.

I'll tell you, I...

I held a lot of stress so that you wouldn't have to.

And I feel like my role as the guy who holds the stress is a little bit underrated.

I would also say that I did a lot of work to make you not own VidCon.

That's true.

That was a big win.

So you're welcome for me.

Anyway, moving on,

we co-throw out the second pitch at the Angels game.

And Hank, of course, does a little bit better because he had this practice session with Jason and Dave, right?

And I do

okay.

It's on target.

It was on target.

It did bounce once, but it only bounced once.

And I was more worried about sort of a bounce, bounce, bounce, dribble, dribble, dribble situation.

And so I was pretty thrilled with my one bounce.

We get out of there.

I will tell you this, though.

If you can find the footage online, they call down, all right, play ball.

It's like the voice of God speaks to you.

You'd think it'd be like terrifying.

And it was terrifying when we were on the sidelines.

But then like two baseball cheerleaders walked us up to the foul line.

and then we marched straight out there.

But like the moment our feet touched the mound,

God spoke, throw the ball or else.

And so both of us like lifted our legs and we put our leg down and like perfect brother synchronicity.

And we let go of the ball in perfect brother synchronicity.

And it was very cute.

And my ball in perfect brother synchronicity actually got there much faster than John's.

But all the body movements were in perfect sync as if we were

a couple couple of dancers on TikTok.

It was beautiful.

Yeah, I think we did a great job, and I'm really proud of us.

And the main thing that I learned is that I

am too concerned with pleasing people,

which is a really important lesson to be able to take away from a Thursday Night Angels game.

The Angels won 5-0, and it was a ton of fun.

It was fun.

It was fun.

All right, we're now going to answer some questions from our listeners if Hank has any.

I don't actually have access to this email account because I don't have email on my phone anymore.

So you're going to be the question asker.

Tom asks, this is our friend Tom Lum.

Hey, Tom.

Would it take $10,000 or inconveniencing someone for John to perform stand-up?

Okay, so let's imagine a situation where I'm like with Hank at Caroline's Comedy Club and Hank is stricken.

And they're like, we need somebody to go on and there's nobody else.

I'd be like, oh, I'll do it.

I would.

I would.

And I'd go up with my tight five, which would be the story of the time I co-threw out the ball at the Angels game.

We basically just did it.

Wouldn't it be adorable if

we could co-stand up?

It'd be fun.

I mean, that has to have been done before.

Well, yeah, it would be fun.

I would enjoy that.

But if you said, hey, we'll pay you $10,000 to write 10 minutes of stand-up for Caroline's Comedy Club, I would definitely say no.

And again, this is an issue.

And maybe maybe $10,000 I would do it because that's actually a lot of money.

And I think I would throw out a first pitch as well.

But like,

you know, like,

I'm undervaluing

my sense of self and stability, which is a good, this is a great takeaway for me.

I feel like I'm in a therapy session.

I've been in a lot of them recently.

And

Hank, what are your core beliefs?

What?

Yeah, this is a question my psychiatrist has been rummaging through with me a lot.

What are my core core beliefs?

And you know what we've come to is that my core belief is that I'm kind of a piece of crap.

Like I like when he first asked, I was like, my core beliefs are that we all deserve to love and be loved and that we're here to understand and be understood.

And he was like, okay.

Is that really your core belief about yourself?

And I was like, about myself.

No.

Hmm.

All right, what's the next question?

They'd be like, what's your core belief?

And I'd be like, 30 trillion zeal is trying to do this is pretty weird.

And it makes sense that it doesn't work all the time.

But I actually think that is your core belief, which is a really healthy way of thinking about yourself instead of like, I am

a worthless person.

I have

an impetus in the other direction, so it's pushing back.

I think that

it could excuse a lot of behaviors if I needed it to.

Yeah, of course.

No, and

I think you're dead on there.

What's the next question?

I don't know why this got so dark.

We're cutting this out of the pod.

From Chemical Kim, everybody's seeing how much I need bifocals right now.

It says, if you could replace a historical figure with a dinosaur, who would it be and why?

William Howard Taft.

So that he could live longer?

William Howard Taft.

I don't actually know.

You know, I don't know much about William Howard Taft, and I feel like I'm going to get a type 5 on Taft right now.

Imagine if we had 45 presidents.

And 44 of them were men.

And one of them was William Howard Taft, the Stegosaurus.

You're waiting for a type 5 on William Howard Taft.

I don't know anything about the man, okay?

I know very little about his presidency.

He did okay.

Do you know a lot about stegosauruses?

I mean,

I know that they live.

Basics.

I know.

I'll tell you what, I could draw

a hell of a good Stegosaurus.

I could draw a Stegosaurus way faster than I could draw Taft.

Totally, totally.

If you asked me to draw a picture of William Howard Taft and a picture of a Stegosaurus, 99% of people would correctly identify the Stegosaurus.

Yeah, the rest of them would be like,

that's a man, I think.

That's a stick figure, but you gave him a little belly because that's the you sort of remember.

I remember that he may have been big.

He had a little belly.

That's all I remember about him.

I think he had good facial hair, but I can't remember.

Is he the one that died?

No, and that was William Henry Harrison, right?

Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

William Henry Harrison died after he ate all those cherries.

He ate a bunch of cherries, and he died a day later of cholera, which is a nice reminder that we think of infectious disease.

He should have been a dinosaur.

Dinosaurs can eat as many cherries as they want.

No, I mean, that's literally how they kept going for hundreds of millions of years.

Yeah, I don't know if cherries existed then.

Banging down cherries.

I don't want to be anachronistic.

Yeah.

That's the concern with turning William Howard Taft into a dinosaur.

There's the historic anachronisms associated with.

Harrison.

So

who would you turn into a dinosaur?

I think, well,

if it was if it was any, I think, well.

You know, I had a thought

that like something, that like being a dinosaur might hold a certain candidate back

in an existing

colour.

No, it wouldn't.

it wouldn't but I think it I think it might actually

be better for him

might actually be better for him people would be like he wants to make America great again and he's a triceratops

dang

don't mind if I do

he's I bet he can golf so far what about what about what

old men talking about their golf handicap is like

the last thing I want.

Anyway, I have one other idea about the.

What if you just turned one beetle into a dinosaur?

Like a bug?

No, no, no, like just George.

Right.

You know, and it was like,

there's John and Paul singing.

There's George on the base.

Wow, that's a surprise.

But he's not like a big dinosaur.

No, no, no.

He's like a human-sized dinosaur.

Yeah, yeah, he's like a large velociraptor.

I was even going to say a small velociraptor, but yeah, some of the other things.

Well, Velociraptors are smaller than you think.

I know.

You don't have to tell me.

They have like turkey feathers.

They're very unfair.

Yeah, they're like goose-sized.

But there were other related raptors that were

more human-sized.

All right, what's our next question?

Well, I was correcting your dinosaur effect, so I wasn't looking.

Oh, yeah, fair enough.

That's a great question, Tom Lum.

Thank you.

That wasn't Tom.

That was Chemical Kim.

Great question, Chemical Kim.

Thank you.

I'm going to credit all of the questions to our friend Tom Lum.

Hey, by the way, while we have you, our friend Tom Lum, who's in the audience, made this incredible video about carbon dating and

how we know how old humans are and lots of other things about our world because of carbon dating, which required an astonishing

cross-field way of cross-disciplinary way of looking at science and history.

And it's like a Crash Course lecture, except it's on Tom Lum's channel, and it's really good.

so you should check it out.

You should check it out.

This is Qua from Jasmine.

Who asks, if the internet were to disappear right now, and you could only save one piece of content, why would it be Tom Lum's lecture?

No.

What would it be?

What would you save?

GPS.

Oh, interesting.

I don't really think of that as a piece of content.

Well, I would just say GPS is like a lot of things about the internet.

I mean, almost everything about the internet, I feel pretty mixed on.

All a little mixed.

I do not feel mixed on Google Maps.

Yeah, I think that has been in.

You guys, like, a lot of you don't know what it was like.

Yeah.

No, I have, like, I have a first edition.

This is a true story.

I have a very valuable first edition, first printing of Toni Morrison's novel, Sula.

Okay, it's a beautiful book.

And you open it up, and there on the first page, it says, to get home in my handwriting, and then 17 lines of handwritten instructions from my grandma on how to get from her house to my home.

And that's how I did it because that was the only way to do it.

And so I ruined this book.

Beautiful book.

Well, if you do, if you could potentially, you could just become more remarkable than Toni Morrison.

And

then...

Do you think he knows?

What?

That she has died.

Oh, I could have.

I don't know things.

Oh, wait, you said, I thought you said you could become more remarkable to Tony Morrison.

No, no, no.

Than?

Than.

Than?

Than?

And then.

What?

In this theoretical world, or is it like a like a like a like a like a like you become a dinosaur?

And they're like this young adult author.

Yes.

Noted VidCon co-founder.

And dinosaur.

And co-pitcher of the second pitch at a Detroit Tigers Anaheim Angels game.

I'm sorry.

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim game.

Yeah.

Sorry, you guys aren't from Anaheim because that was a specific joke for Anaheim people who.

I'll tell you what.

When people listen to it in Anaheim, it's going to kill.

It's going to kill.

It's going to kill.

So anyway, I'm sorry.

It was so impossible that you would say that I'd become more significant than Toni Morrison that I literally misheard you.

Go on.

I think it's a special book.

I would pay not extra for it because your words are in there, but not less.

What is the content that you would save from the internet?

I mean, like,

how do you draw the line around what a piece of content is?

I feel like Wikipedia, you could just save all of it.

If I could call Wikipedia content, but I don't think that's the spirit of the question.

I think the spirit of the question is, like, what YouTube video, basically?

Yeah, or like what tweet?

Oh, yeah.

What?

The tweet I would save is the tweet where somebody said drinking a LaCroix flavor is like drinking bubbly plain water and then in the next room over someone shouts grapefruit

there's a god there's a lot of there's a lot of good tweets you know I had this idea and I love it I have a friend who works at the cemetery and one of the things that he does is engraves on stone

and he knows how to do this and there's a there's a machine that he uses and it's not like chisels anymore it's like that there's a tip there's a thing that happens with sandblasting and wax, and I don't understand it.

And I was like, what if you and I, in the dark of night, go out to trails and I shouldn't say, what if I actually end up doing this?

I was going to say,

you're ruining on yourself, man.

I'm ruining on

the side.

And we, I'll just do it because I shouldn't do it.

But we engrave the stones along the trail with the best tweets.

Okay, I want to riff on your idea because I think you're close to something beautiful.

Okay.

Twitter is going to die

like the rest of us.

And when it does, there should be a graveyard, a physical graveyard of the greatest tweets.

Yeah, that you can go to.

And you can go to it and you can walk around and you can be like, you can tell your children, this place was terrible.

You don't know what we went through during the Twitter wars,

little Johnny.

But we got these.

But exactly.

We fought and scrapped and

elected bad presidents and did many things so that we could have these 220 marble engraved tweets here at the great Twitter cemetery of Anaheim, California.

And

every little gravestone will have to have like a plaque with four paragraphs of explanation.

Yeah.

Like why it was funny.

Yeah, yeah.

So skibbity toilet was.

Yeah, this is actually, this is great.

That's a great idea.

It's achievable.

You're right, because even in my LaCroix case, you'd have to be like, so listen, LaCroix was like bottled water.

I mean, actually, there will be no bottled water in the future.

So it'll be like, LaCroix was a...

Yeah.

How do I even describe it?

It was like what comes out of the tap, except inexplicably more expensive.

Yeah.

Yeah, and also we dissolved carbon dioxide in it, so it felt like owl.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But like good owl.

Everybody's a little bit good owl, apparently.

So and John, I think the problem with this idea is that it's good and it's achievable and it's but the the only barrier is money and we like have some of that.

So I don't know that we have enough money to

also Twitter is we could raise it, but there are probably better things to

say.

I mean also Twitter is all like the thing of Twitter, like the Twitter part of Twitter actually is already ended.

So we could call it at X Day whenever X happened.

Oh, yeah.

It's already a Twitter graveyard.

Like to have that be the cutoff.

Oh, there has not been a good tweet since it became X, so that should not be a huge loss.

I've done some real bangers.

No, you haven't.

Respectfully.

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All right, what's our next question?

I don't know.

If we need another project, we're so much better off if we weren't on Twitter.

I hate it.

Ooh, Jack asks, if you could have someone, fictional or real, narrate your life, who would it be?

Can I hear them?

Like, it's like, because I wouldn't want that if they're like, and then

Morgan Freeman being like, he's on stage and he's panicking.

Yeah.

He thinks he's going to text his wife, but he opens Twitter.

But Twitter sent a notification, so he opens Twitter.

Why does he have his notifications on?

Because he wants it this way.

Because he likes this.

He chose this world.

There's an actor who looks kind of like me, but better looking, and whose work I really admire, named Mark Duplas.

And I really like his voice.

And I actually, I think he would do really good voiceover.

So I would pick that, but it would have to be in a movie.

Like you said, it couldn't be in real life.

In real life, I already have that voice in my head, and it's plenty loud, and I don't want it to be anyone else's voice.

It's annoying enough.

Is it my voice?

Or is it like...

It's sort of...

It's like your voice, but like, meh.

Yeah, it's my voice, but like, if I said the things that the voice says, I would be not only like canceled, but maybe arrested.

You're not your thoughts.

I know.

You're not your thoughts.

Thank God.

Because if I was, I'd be in even worse trouble.

I think

I've thought about doing voice acting myself.

Of course you have.

And I think it'd be a sort of a great

first endeavor.

You're going to do your own damn voice?

Yeah, because it is me after all.

So there's a certain amount that makes sense there.

And also, I just, I think very highly of me, and I think I'm great.

How did we come out of this?

How did we emerge from the same family?

Like, it really is amazing to me.

It's like, it's like,

it speaks to the power of genetics, I guess.

But, like, it's incredible.

I love what you're putting down, and I want to be able to pick it up.

That's my goal for July.

Okay.

Meredith asks, Nerdfighteria is great at community organizing.

How do we get dropout to win an Emmy?

Okay, I don't Meredith.

I love you

But how do we get complexly to win an Emmy?

How do we get Crash Course to win an Emmy?

Hey, I do want Dropout to win an Emmy, but I want us to win the second Emmy.

If there's one thing that I know nothing about, it's how to get something to win an Emmy.

I've talked to Sam from Dropout about this, and I'm like, what are you doing?

And he's like, trying to get get an Emmy.

And I'm like, why?

And he's like, oh, there's lots of reasons.

Is there really?

Yeah.

And I, you know, it's, there's, there's lots of reasons.

Does he know that you have an Emmy?

I don't know that he does.

Yeah, because it's not something that I think about.

I felt like when you won an Emmy, our lives changed zero.

It's like our lives changed as much as when I won an MTV movie award.

Yeah, I for best kiss, by the way.

They said

it was a good.

you didn't even do the kiss.

I know.

That's what's so funny.

I

they they said Lizzie Benatires is voted for an Emmy, and then they said it wasn't like during the main ceremony, so I just got an email that was like, we won the Emmy.

Do you want one?

We only get four.

We're going to give them to these four people.

We figure you don't need this.

They need it more than you to have it on the shelf.

I mean, certainly in terms of sense of self-worth.

You know, like, they're like, you don't need this, Hank.

Yeah.

You're good, man.

It's incredible.

It's awesome.

We love it, but you don't need this.

Yeah, they're also like, you're not in the industry the way that these folks are.

But then they let you buy one.

And they were like, do you want to buy one?

It's $600.

And I was like, nah.

Now I'm like, yeah.

No, can we go back?

I don't know why I said no to that.

Yeah, can you?

Well, you had less money then.

That's probably why.

All right, I'm going to ask the next question.

Hold on.

Oh, you you have a million Adam?

I don't need to.

Okay.

I don't need to.

I'm ready.

You don't know which ones I've already asked.

Hey, Hank.

Yeah.

Do you think AI will take over the world from CRISA?

It's a great question, man.

I mean, and what's the time scale?

200, 250 years.

Oh, probably.

I mean, parts of it,

I think that

that's a long time scale.

I think that we are not done figuring out how human societies organize themselves.

So if but what you mean by take over the world is that like the actions of a lot of people will be heavily influenced by the sort of advisings of artificial intelligence that hopefully have our best interests at heart.

I think probably.

I think AIs have already kind of taken over a lot of the world.

I don't know if you use

a content platform, but they tell you what to watch.

Some of them sort of offer you things to watch.

They're like, hey, here's a selection of 30 videos that you might want to watch from the 30 trillion that are available.

And some of them are like, you push a button and then it's like, here's the next video.

Here's the next video.

Like, you don't make choices on TikTok.

It's hard to overtake.

It's in charge, not just of what I watch, but in many cases of what I'm thinking about that day, what I'm paying attention to, what my biggest worries are, and how I feel about the world and other people in it.

Like they are in charge.

Their goal isn't to achieve anything in particular except to keep me on the platform so the platform can make more money, but they are in charge of me.

They're like I've given them that power to have that power over me and I like giving away that power because it's relaxing because I don't have to think about making choices, which is, I think, probably a bad decision.

So I

have been thinking about this a lot because as you say, Hank, TikTok decides how I feel or Instagram or whatever it is that I use to scroll.

And that's an interesting power to give an algorithm.

And I've watched a lot of TikTok, probably more than almost anyone in this room, because I have an

addictive personality.

And

I have never once been, never once, in all of my time of watching TikTok and Instagram and even YouTube Shorts, I have never once received in that feed a TikTok that said to me, hey, you know what's amazing?

This year, 2024, fewer children will die under the age of five than any year for at least the last 4,000 years.

Since 2000 BCE, when the world population was like 100 million, that was the last time that fewer children died than will die this year.

At no point have I received a TikTok about that, which should, of course, be the most important news story in the world, right?

None of this, of course, is to minimize or dismiss the so-called poly crisis, which I really do believe that we're in, or to like minimize or dismiss all of the suffering.

It's just that like there has long been unjust suffering, and like we actually are doing work that means something and matters on at least some of those issues.

On other issues, of course, we aren't doing doing anything, or we certainly aren't doing nearly enough.

But, like,

letting this algorithm, letting this artificial intelligence decide how I feel distracts me from knowing the things that I also want to know to be able to engage complexly with the world and to understand that, like, that

no simple story is ever going to tell the whole truth.

And I just think it's really, really bad for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sometimes I hear people saying, like,

nothing nothing there's nothing like good has happened in a in a while.

It's like this is like it's only been bad news for so long.

And I'm like if there were good good news where would you hear it?

Like if the government did something that was like oh that's a net neck a net

a net positive for all of for like America like where would you why would you hear about that?

Is there like a is there like do you think that someone would be incentivized on TikTok to make that content?

And if they did, would that content be watched and liked enough for it to hit your For You page?

No.

Like that's not the things that do well.

Like the things that get created are the things that do well.

And even if the things that don't do well get created, they don't do well.

So we have to like,

like, so we end up in a world where it's like cat video, cat video, terrible thing.

Cat video, cat video, terrible thing.

You get cat videos?

I just get terrible thing, terrible thing.

I didn't know there were cat videos.

Well, sometimes it's, when I say cat videos, sometimes it's like like

a person writing a cool song or doing a good dance, you know?

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I get a little bit of that.

They give me just enough of that, you know.

But in general, I'm pretty distressed by this.

So, will AI take over the world?

I think we have to worry about the ways in which it already has.

I think that is a good focus to have.

I can't predict the future.

Is Pluto a planet?

No.

Here's this thing:

it's in the name, dwarf planet.

I don't know why everybody's so mad about Pluto not being a planet.

It's a planet.

It's a dwarf planet.

Like it's there.

It's not, they didn't name it.

They didn't say Pluto is now a dwarf.

No, it's a dwarf planet.

It is a small planet, and it is among other small planets.

We did not decrease the number of planets in the solar system.

We increased it.

Ceres is a planet.

Haumea is a planet.

Eris is a planet.

We got a bunch of planets that we didn't know we had.

I don't know why we get so mad about it.

It's not just a planet because it's too small.

It's a little boy out there in the far away.

It hasn't cleaned up its orbit, so it's not a big boy planet.

But it is a little boy planet.

It's a dwarf planet.

They should have just called it little boy planet.

Maybe we all had a bit of a little mess

about it.

We could have changed planet to big boy planet.

And in fact, we probably should have changed it to there being two kinds of planets, rocky planets and gas giants, because they're not similar.

Those aren't two types of things that are close together in kind.

And it's not in our solar system, all the rocky planets are close up and the gas giants are far out.

It's not always like that in other solar systems we see.

I think that it makes sense to have there be a classification for gas giant and for rocky planet.

And also, there are planets that are just like and as big as planets in our solar system that just happen to be moons.

I think they should be moon planets.

They are big, they have atmospheres, they have more water than Earth has.

They're very important.

And I think we ignore them sometimes because we think, oh, that's just a moon.

Ganymede?

Ganymede?

Titan.

These are important places.

There's water volcanoes in our solar system spewing liquid water out into space.

What's down there?

We're not thinking about it because it's a moon.

No,

it's a planet.

That's a moon planet.

Wow.

That was beautiful.

That was like a

high school football halftime team talk.

You know, like I'm ready to go out there and run through walls for coach.

That was lovely, man.

Lovely.

There you go.

You asked the next question.

All right.

Oof.

Hank, it's interesting to me that when Hank really gets going, he says, unless

you should just always be going like that.

Bring that energy to every answer.

I feel a little bit.

I can tell you're tired.

You're tired.

That's what it's like for Coach Hank when he's got to give everything to the team.

He's got to get out of himself and give everything to the team.

I was watching the Tour de France this morning, which, as you can imagine, Alice just loves.

And

one of the team managers was crying on the phone, like, give it everything.

And I was like, that works, though.

That works.

Like, you don't want to disappoint the people who love you, or the people who are paying your bills, or the guy from the Anaheim Angels.

You just don't want to disappoint people.

Like, that's the nature of being a person.

So we threw out the pitch, and then the catchers caught the pitches.

And then the cat, then, and I'm like, okay, we're done.

But no, the catchers walk up to you so you can like meet a baseball player.

And I meet the baseball baseball player and I, I swear to God, I say, so you play baseball?

And he, and he interpreted this because, of course, that's an insane thing to say to an

MBL player, to an MLB player.

That's probably what it is, the major baseball league.

And

he interpreted this as, are you playing tonight?

And he said, well, I'm on reserve.

And I was like, I don't.

And I was like, so you don't play baseball

and then he said I'm a relief pitcher so we'll see no catch and

yeah and whatever he said and then I was like how is this happening

meanwhile my guy was like six foot eight and signed huge signed my baseball and then came in for came in for a picture and and I just sort of found my like head like kind of just snuggling into his shoulder as he pulled me in and I was like this is this is gonna look weird in the picture but it was nice it was a nice moment for me.

Yeah, it's nice to know what it feels like to be small.

All right.

I have it.

Okay.

The next question

comes from Amanda, who asks, how do you solve a problem like Maria?

I've had some time to think about this.

You know the song, How Do You Solve a Problem?

Yeah, thanks very much.

Kinda.

Theater kids are going to keep going, so we're just going to let them.

So here's the thing.

i don't know yet how to solve a problem like maria but i have a seven-year-old and someday i will have some kinds of problems like maria but their name will be orin and i and i think from what i've seen the the only way that you can you have to if you you have to let them go if you love them but you also have to listen you have to be there with them you have to like love their loves you have to like you have to follow follow their infatuations and if like you're involved and like aware of what they're what they're into I think that that would help to.

You can't solve a problem like Maria.

Maria isn't a problem.

Everybody has problems, and Maria's maybe making choices that you wish Maria wouldn't make.

But we have to be there with them, and we have to be listening and part of their lives as much as we can.

Yeah.

But I'm talking a big game for a guy with a seven-year-old.

Right now, I solve a problem like Oren by being like, yeah, Geometry Dash is pretty cool, buddy.

I will also watch those Molpan videos.

But that's great.

I I mean, the fact that you're able to be into and like and watch what Oren likes and watches, I think is a huge deal.

And I think it makes a big difference.

I think, you know, the joy of something like, I mean, VidCon is a joy for me because I've been to everyone, and I get to see old friends, and I get to reconnect with people.

And I know there are people in the audience who've been to every VidCon, or at least nearly every VidCon.

Woo!

Thank you.

Good to see you guys.

And

that's nice for me, but also it's really wonderful to see VidCon through Alice's eyes, to experience it as she experiences it, for her to get to see her favorite creators, a lot of whom are animators who tell funny stories from their lives and just make great content.

And

it's a wonderful thing to watch your kid grow up because

one of the joys of it is that they start to get into stuff that you can get into too.

Lemon asks, what's your screen time?

Do you know how to do this?

It's a lot lower than it used to be.

If we did it from like two weeks ago, you guys would be like, you've got a problem.

And I did.

So I cut it, but it's still pretty bad, I'm sure.

My screen time, it's going to be wait.

It's two hours and 22 minutes.

Is that good?

That's extremely good.

That seems terrible.

That's extremely good, John.

Do you want to

wait?

Do you want to reclaim?

Oh, no!

What the f?

Whoa!

What

is happening?

No!

Oh my god!

Hank Green!

What do people do all day?

Hank!

I'm worried about you.

Hank, you spent 10 hours and 44 minutes this week on X

that sounds right

that is shameful that sounds right

Hank yeah what else what else hit me make me feel bad messages which is good messages is good that's real people that's you talking to people which is good

Seven hours you spent an hour a day messaging people?

I message a lot of people.

Well, that's the difference between you and me is that I have 1,300 unread text messages.

Oh, I got more than that.

Because I'm not

looking to respond to everyone that comes in.

Instagram is second for me.

It's third for you.

I actually spent even, but I spent less time on my most,

by most thing than Hank spends on his third most thing.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ, Hank.

How did you spend two hours a day on X?

You know, here and there.

I mean,

I feel great right now.

I feel like the Dalai Lama.

I mean,

I mean, yesterday was amazing.

I basically didn't open my phone at all.

So you're telling me that...

Because I was a VidCon all day.

You have 11 hours of screen time, even though you didn't open your phone.

I also didn't open it.

Yeah, yeah.

No, the average.

There's something went wrong here where my phone thought I spent all day on my phone last Thursday, so something broke and the screen time wrapped.

So the average is slightly inflated from where it should be.

But I don't know what that was.

That's not why the Twitter average is inflated.

The Twitter average is correct and very consistent day to day, and I do have a problem.

Jesus.

I mean,

that's disturbing.

Like,

I,

oh, God.

I'm really worried about that.

My first used app after pickup is Google Calendar.

Yeah, that's impressive.

Because I'm like, where am I supposed to be right now?

Yeah.

Wow.

All right.

I mean, even last week, I only had five hours a day, and I thought I was in the pits.

You're great.

You're doing great.

Oh, sorry.

I forgot that we are still making a podcast of that answer.

Gracious.

Oh, Hank, we have to get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon in a minute.

But let's quickly, before that, answer one more question.

I did not prepare anything.

What do you mean you didn't prepare anything?

From Mars, I didn't prepare any Mars things.

Don't you just know things from looking at Mars news all the time, like I look at AFC Wimbledon news all the time?

That maybe I'm not as big of a Mars fan as you are, an AFC Wimbledon fan.

Oh, a confession.

It's possible.

Mark asks, how do we foster a love of mathematics in today's youth?

I think you probably know the answer to this better than I do,

because you're at VidCon and you're asking a math question about fostering love of mathematics in today's youth.

I mean, I just don't think that the things that we teach about math are

the interestingest, or maybe we carve some of the interesting parts out.

When I look at people who are excited about and good at math,

they aren't excited about and good at the parts that you learn in high school, which is just a lot of

ways of

solving an algebra puzzle.

I mean it can be really fun to solve an algebra puzzle once you build up all of those skills and tools.

It's almost like math is just sort of like puzzle solving, but we make the puzzle as boring as possible.

by doing out so it's like imagine if like sudoku sucked no one would play it right?

Like we people like volunteerly, voluntarily go play Sudoku because it's fun.

But I feel like oftentimes we don't figure out how to actually make the math puzzle fun.

We also don't talk about the context of math and where it came from very much, or the philosophy of it.

Or

I remember talking some about proofs, but I never

was given

a reason to care about it.

So

I think that there's a lot of stuff missing there.

But you've probably read

Paul Lockhart's measurement.

I think that is a great place to start.

And if we sort of start, like we started from measurement and we built a curriculum around that, I'd be really

interested to see how American 10th graders would react to it.

Yeah, the college math class I took

through study hall focused on sets and I found that a helpful way into learning about math.

But yeah, it's hard.

I don't envy the job.

I'm somebody who really, really struggled with math.

And I think I struggled with it because of the way it was taught, but I also think I struggled with it because of my inability to conceptualize, like visually conceptualize ideas in my mind.

I have something called aphantasia, and so like, I think that was part of why I struggled so much with math: that

there was an actual

paucity of ability to process that way.

And I don't know how I would teach math to me.

I've kind of learned calculus a little bit over the years, but just by being really interested in it and by having friends and stuff explain stuff to me that I don't understand.

So I think

some people are always going to struggle.

Same's true in reading, same's true in writing, same is true in other basic skills.

And you have to make space for them too.

Sweet.

I've been talking too much.

Okay.

Do you have Mars news?

I mean, AFC Wimbledon.

I have both Mars news and AFC news.

I've got some Mars news.

I looked.

I've got AFC Wimbledon news.

So listen, our fixture list came out this week.

This very big deal.

This means we know who we're going to play.

Our local rivals or like somewhat local rivals got promoted and we play, I don't know.

Look, the truth is there's one interesting game, one game that I look for on the calendar.

And I know that I shouldn't look for it it because I shouldn't even think of them as a real football club.

And I should think of them as the despicable franchise currently plying its trade in Milton Keynes that they are.

But I still want to beat them.

And when we beat them last season, it was the best feeling I've ever had in my life.

Sorry, Alice.

It was great when you were born, but I knew it was going to happen.

I did not know that we were going to beat Milton Keynes in the 94th minute.

It was an absolute unadulterated thrill.

And so I looked, and it turns out, Hank, I can't go to the game.

It's on September 14th.

I have pre-existing plans.

And I asked asked Sarah if I could cancel our vacation together, and she said no.

So that's the highlight of the fixture list.

Our run-in, like our last five games, looks pretty manageable.

Like, makes me think that we could be okay.

But we still haven't really signed any players.

For instance, preseason starts in, I believe, two weeks, and we do not have a goalkeeper of any kind.

And I don't know how much soccer you've watched, but even if you're not super familiar with the game, you might know that goalkeepers are important.

They play a role.

So hopefully, we'll sign a goalkeeper at some point.

Otherwise, I feel like I could do it.

I know you do.

I know you do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just get big.

That is the job a lot of times.

If you're in a one-on-one, you just get big.

They do a lot of this.

Yeah.

A lot of foot, a lot of

Jesus Christ.

I thought the physical comedy in

your comedy special was really good.

And it just reminded me that you've always been kind of a funny guy.

I just didn't know that you could be funny in that way.

I thought you were mostly kind of cringe-funny.

It turns out,

and I don't mean that as an insult.

I love cringe-funny.

But it turns out...

That's what I was just doing.

I know.

You were doing that on purpose.

But it turns out you contain multitudes just like the rest of us.

It was beautiful to see, man.

I love that comedy special so much.

And I just couldn't, I genuinely couldn't believe that it was you

now you know what it's like to read one of your books

yeah it's just very it was very accomplished

yeah so that was great what's the news from Mars do you remember the Mars Insight lander of course It was a relatively short-lived mission.

Tried to do a bunch of stuff that

turned out to be harder than we thought.

Yeah.

But it did do a bunch of, it was a seismometer, a primary mission.

Sit on there and feel Mars shaking.

And one of the things you can get from feeling Mars shaking is when is it getting hit by meteorites?

Right.

Mars is going to get hit by more meteorites than Earth just because it doesn't have as thick of an atmosphere.

So they don't burn up as much.

Yeah.

But also it seems like it just gets hit by more because it's like closer to the asteroid belt or some other phenomenon of the solar system.

And InSight was able, from all of its data that it collected over its mission, to be able to feel those impacts and sort of have a rough gauge of how fast and how big those are.

And we now know that Mars is being hit by hundreds of basketball-sized rocks every year.

Oh, thank God.

I thought you were going to say every day.

And I was like, we cannot put people on that planet.

They're going to get hit by basketball-sized rocks.

It's true.

It's too big of a rock to get hit by.

Too big of a rock.

I mean, I would think any rock is coming from space

to get hit by.

In a room this size,

probably one of us has been hit by a meteorite.

No.

I know.

If you go onto the roof of any Walmart in America,

that was a weird segue.

This is going to be about meteorites.

With a large magnet, and you drag that magnet across the roof, you will find tiny micrometeorites.

And we are not each the size of a Walmart, but together we're pretty close.

Now, you're also inside a lot.

Maybe even more than average, one might guess.

But there's a lot of us, we've all been outside some.

These little meteorites, they mostly burn up, and then there's just like basically dust, and it would just land on you, and that would be being hit by a meteorite.

Whoa, whoa, but like its terminal velocity, because its dust is really slow,

you wouldn't even feel it.

You wouldn't even feel it.

It would be any other piece of dust.

Whereas a basketball

has a higher terminal velocity.

Yeah.

And I think it would hurt.

I'm going to put the terminal velocity at bad.

Yeah, yeah.

And it doesn't bounce like a basketball either.

No, it doesn't even really slow down.

Right, it just goes right through you.

Yeah.

So hundreds of those a year.

As I said in my book, like dropping a knife into a glass of water.

That's good.

It's good.

Another thing about you and your confidence is that you're willing to quote your own work unironically,

which I can't do.

I had a really lovely interaction earlier at VidCon where somebody came up to me and they were like, there's a couple things that you wrote in Looking for Alaska and I read it 15 years ago and I still think about them all the time.

And they quoted me the lines.

And I was like, that's so sweet.

But also, as I'm hearing that, I'm like, I hate both those lines.

So I got to do some work.

I got to do some work on myself to learn to love those lines.

But in general, I have found VidCon to be a wonderful salve.

I hope it has been for y'all as well.

And it's wonderful to know that we're getting hit by meteorites all the time, but that they don't hurt.

Like, that's there's something kind of lovely about that.

We're part of the space-time continuum, whether we want to be or not.

Yeah, they're just sort of gently caressing one of us

once.

Yeah.

And we don't even know who it is, but we know that it's one of us.

One of us has been struck by a meteorite in this room, and among those listening, thousands of us have been struck by meteorites.

It's kind of beautiful, actually.

I'm going to go outside during the month of July and see if I can't get hit by a meteorite.

Make as much surface area as you can make.

Get as big as I can be.

Make sure that there's there's no trees overhead, you know, and just trying to get hit by a meteorite.

Yeah, I like that.

John, thank you for making a podcast with me.

I don't have the show notes in front of me, so can I do it by memory?

This podcast is edited by Joseph Tunamedish.

It's produced by Rosianna Hall's Rojas.

So our communication...

Oh, I don't remember what we call Brooke anymore.

Brooke Shotwell is a very good person.

Brooke Shotwell is a person who helps with things.

Our editorial assistant is Taboki Jakravarti.

The music you're hearing now at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gonarola.

And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.

Thank you guys.