383: The College Freaktacular

Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

Or as I prefer to think of it, dear ball of anxiety and Hank.

Dear Ball of Anxiety and Other Ball of Anxiety.

We're two brothers who answer your questions.

We're John and Hank Green.

We answer questions, give news advice, and we all do both Marvels AFC Women.

That's right.

That's right.

And today we're doing a college spectacular, a college freak tacular, a college wonderment to to talk about post-secondary education in the United States.

Hank, why are you a ball of anxiety?

I know why I am.

Oh, because I'm watching the Super Bowl.

It's happening right now.

It's still happening.

This has been such a long game.

Did it feel that way to you when you watched the Super Bowl?

Did it feel like it lasted forever?

Yeah, I think it's might be because the player's going to play, play, play, play, play.

Oh, it was a Taylor Swift joke all along.

Sorry.

That was such a bad joke.

I don't even even know what to, I don't even know what to do about it.

It wasn't just the fact.

The joke was fine.

I just wedged it in so unartfully.

I'm a ball of it.

So Project for Awesome is happening this week.

It's Wednesday.

So the Tiltify is open.

This is going to come out after the Project for Awesome, though there may be like four hours left where you can still get perks if you forgot.

Sure.

And

this is the first time that we're doing it.

Like we're sort of separating out of complexity, trying to simplify things and not make some of the mistakes we've made in the past,

etc.

So I'm anxious for tubercular reasons.

Yeah.

I don't think I can say more than that.

Tubercules.

Yeah, did you know that the word tubercular is based on the word tuber because tubercles, the

kind of

calcifying blobs that surround

tuberculosis bacteria look like potatoes.

And the word tubercle actually predates tuberculosis.

Tuberkal is

basically potato-shaped.

Yeah, we name a lot of things after food.

It turns out food was one of the more important things to have names for.

Sure.

Yeah.

Almost all of the colors are named for either foods or animals and plants.

Food and love, the things we need language for.

Hey, Study Hall is coming up, Hank.

Study Hall is a project of our company Complexly, where you can take a straight path from YouTube videos to college credit.

The next courses start on March 5th.

They include power and politics in U.S.

government, U.S.

history to 1865, rhetoric and composition, real-world college math, intro to human communication.

And it's going to be great.

You can learn more at gostudyhall.com or check out the study hall YouTube channel.

Did you hear about the time that at the University of Montana, a thief broke in and stole $20,000 worth of textbooks?

Is this another terrible dad joke?

Well, fortunately, the police caught him and were able to return both of the books.

Nelsie, why did you tell that horrible, nonsensical Super Bowl joke when you had that good joke ready?

Oh, no.

College is too expensive, and Study Hall seeks to partly solve that problem by making it so that you can take a course for just $25, and then at the end of the course, Only if you're happy with your grade, do you pay for college credit, and you pay much less than a normal college would ask you to pay and you get credit from arizona state university it's a pretty good deal those credits are transferable to hundreds of institutions in the united states they're good solid college credits and it's i'm really proud to be a part of that program which was really put together uh by people who were who like started with the question how do we make this better for the people who need the most help and uh and it's doing really well and i and we're going going to answer some college questions, John.

I'm excited to answer college questions.

I have to tell you, I'm barely able to function.

My anxiety level is so high.

So high.

I'm so sorry.

Tuberculosis is important, John, and I'm glad that you're focusing on it.

I'm also, as it happens, my microphone is directly on my like 16 pages of notes I've taken in the last like 18 hours of conference calls.

And I'll just tell you, I'll just read you a couple of those notes.

Need flexibility and get the rejection motive.

What?

Don't, yeah.

If you ever looked at, like, I keep my old notes from all of the things I take notes for, and they're just completely impenetrable.

It's like they were written by another human.

Yeah.

See money in bank.

What does that mean?

What money in what bank?

Where do I go?

You got to see the money in the bank.

See money in bank.

That's the goal is when it's in, it's in tuberculosis's bank or the not tuberculosis.

Yeah, I actually want to see less money in the bank and more money in the field dealing with tuberculosis.

I think there's entirely too much money in the bank right now.

Yeah, yeah.

Money in bank could be money

in

things.

Doing things.

Yeah, in touch and in treatment and in preventative therapy.

This first question comes from Saylor, who writes, Dear John and Hank, how should I choose what colleges to apply to?

I always hear you should base your choices off of aspects like geographic position or school size, but would it be crazy to base a big decision like this off of how cool the mascot is or how good their colors are?

This is such a good question because I don't know about you, Hank, but I genuinely think that you're about as well off choosing by color and mascot as you are choosing by like what the guide to colleges said.

Like in my day, there was a book.

It was like a 900-page book.

Uh-huh.

And it had one page for like every american college and you'd read the page and you'd be like that one sounds good yeah

i literally went to college at kenyon college in gambier ohio because i read the page in that book and i was like yeah i mean okay that's like that's kind of the vibe i'm going for english major quiet small i'm in

I yeah, I picked my has a 70% acceptance rate.

Yeah, I'm probably going to get in.

Yeah, I applied to two schools, which I know is very anachronistic.

Oh, yeah.

It's very strange.

I applied to two schools.

They both had high acceptance rates.

I got into both of them and I picked the one that was closer to home.

There you go.

Yeah.

And like, I don't know.

It's such a weird decision because it is, it is.

a high impact, low information decision.

You do not know what your life is going to turn out like

at one school versus another.

Like, even if you go to a significantly worse school, your life could turn out better.

Like, there's just no way to know.

It's a mess.

I know.

It's a mess.

Yeah.

I think my life would probably be worse if I'd gone to Harvard.

Now, that's completely conjectural because in no way, shape, or form could I have ever gotten into Harvard.

Like even if

even if my...

The last seven generations of my family had gone to Harvard and my parents gave $50 million to Harvard, the president of Harvard would have called my parents and been like,

I'm so sorry.

They'll let anybody in for 50 mil.

That's how Harvard works.

It's a good system we've got.

Yeah,

I agree with John that

you are not going to have, like, you're just not going to know what your life's going to end up like, but it does have a huge impact, but you just, there's no way to see into that future.

So, I think a very good thing to look at is the cost.

Cost is definitely important.

Comparing those, comparing that cost to, and I like, honestly, I think like the social vibe is very important.

Yeah, if you can afford to go for a visit for a day when you're picking a school, that helps.

If you're a non-traditional learner who isn't going to be like learning, like living full-time on a campus, I don't know why we call these people non-traditional learners when now they comprise the majority of learners.

Right, because they would, but traditionally they did not.

Right.

So if you're.

If you're someone who's not going to be living on a campus full time, then maybe the vibe matters a little less, but the vibe still matters some.

So I think it's like worth visiting the campus, going to a couple classes if you're able to, and just being like, what's the vibe?

Yeah.

The vibe is a really big deal.

I think that is important.

And,

you know, based on our two school experiences, like Eckard does have a very different vibe from Kenyon.

Like one is on the beach and the other is in a cornfield and that changes the vibe.

Yeah.

I went back to Eckard recently and the vibe was very different than it used to be.

It's a massive party school now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it like there were like party, there was like a party dorm, but now it's like people,

like the people were very, they seemed very cool to me in a way that we did not.

But maybe the uncool people were just inside like we always were.

I can confirm that you were not cool in college.

I was not cool in college.

No, I mean, you were a lot of things.

You were lovely and funny and sweet and had great friends, but you were not cool.

Yeah.

I was never going to be cool.

I think you're kind of, I think you're kind of cool now.

You're sort of popular.

Yeah, I turned out cool.

Yeah.

Think about where cool kids are, right?

Cool kids want to be big on TikTok.

Well, listen up.

Uncle Hank is crushing it on TikTok.

I think another consideration that when I look back at my own college choice, I made the choice for a lot of stupid reasons, but I had a couple of good reasons.

One was the size of classes.

For me, for what I was studying, it made a lot of sense for me to have a relatively small class size.

And that's just also kind of the way I learn best.

And so if you know something about the way you learn best or you know something about what you want to study, you can use that as a glimpse.

But like, I do think that we put a little bit too much weight on the decision, because like you said, Hank, it's a high impact decision, but also you'll probably be fine either way.

Yeah.

John, this next question comes from Enoch, who asks, hey, Green Brothers.

So really fast, I need some help.

For most of my life, I wasn't planning on going to college.

I had the mindset that it wasn't worth it unless you really needed it.

Well, now I really need it.

I know very little about college.

I need your quick help for college survival.

Any help would be appreciated.

Not the one in the Bible, Enoch.

Enoch, you got to tell us what happened.

Yeah, that sounds like an emergency emerge, but like a very specific and weird emergency.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now I really need it.

Like suddenly Enoch was like at a job and they were like, hey, we'll make you CEO of the company, but you need a degree in religious studies.

Yeah.

No, like this, like a, like someone came down.

from the ether and was like, I'm a genie and I will grant you wishes, but only if you go to college first.

Right.

I mean, maybe that's what it was.

Sabi is like a dead relative who's like, you can't inherit unless you do college.

I like that.

I like that a lot.

It's like a Brewster's Millions situation, except instead of having to spend millions of dollars, you just have to spend millions of dollars.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But again, that's why there's study hall.

Go studyhall.com.

Hopefully, yeah, hopefully tens.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Study hall does have

actually fast guides, what it's called, like fast guides to college that give you all kinds of information about different majors, about you know, asking for, not asking for, but applying for loans and aid and all kinds of other stuff.

That's the first thing I'd recommend.

But obviously, I'm a little biased, Enoch.

Yeah,

yeah, there's a bunch of them.

I think that the whole thing that one of the, you know, we looked at it and we were like, what are the barriers?

And one of the barriers was just lack of information.

So exactly Enoch's problem of like, I don't know how any of this worked.

Like, what is a credit?

Like that, like, is it?

And it's so hard to navigate.

It's so hard to navigate.

It's so confusing.

Like, I remember, like, I had the easiest, less, least bureaucratic college experience imaginable.

And yet, still, like, my junior year, my faculty advisor came to me and was like, You don't have a, you haven't taken enough English classes to get an English degree.

Yeah, no, yeah.

I had the same thing happen with my minor.

It was just like, no, this doesn't, this class doesn't count for that.

And I was like, why not?

It's in the art department.

And they're like, well, it's a visual art minor.

And that was not a visual art class.

And I was like, no one,

it's easy to make expensive mistakes, which is one of the big problems with school.

Right.

So I think the first thing I'd say is

once you've kind of gotten the lay of the land, whether that's through study hall or other stuff, I would go to the college you intend to attend

and I would start asking questions.

I mean, in general, that like I would talk, I would speak out loud as much as possible, whether that's questions or whatever.

Like, I think that a lot of the experience of college of higher ed when it's in person at a school is about the social environment and about connections between people.

And,

you know, those friendships are really valuable if you get a chance to develop them.

And

I would also say that like, here's my biggest piece of advice to people going into college.

You're a grown-up now.

It's like you're like, you are making a bunch of choices and you have to, and like, you are now learning how to make choices on your own.

So, like, this isn't like delaying adulthood.

It's a thing you're doing as an adult.

And I'm sorry if that sounds a little bit paternalistic.

It sounds that way now that it's coming out of my mouth.

But yeah, it's like, it's...

Well, but I don't think it sounds paternalistic in this sense, right?

Like everybody talks about the real world, the real world, the real world.

The real world is something that's coming.

It's something that lies on the other side of high school or college or whatever.

But like the truth is the real world is not an event.

It's a process.

And you emerge from childhood into adolescence and you emerge from adolescence into adulthood.

And that's a process that takes a long time.

But in a lot of ways, you're doing...

aspects of adulthood when you're like 16.

My son is 14.

He's already doing aspects of adulthood, right?

Like

getting your driver's license isn't for many people, certainly not everyone, but for many people is an aspect of adulthood.

You know, learning how to do your own laundry for many people is an aspect of adulthood.

Learning how to do like cooking and cleaning is an aspect of adulthood.

With a, with a, like a way to cook in it.

Yeah.

I did not have that for the first two years of college, but for the second two years of college, I did, I had, we had like an oven and a stove.

Uh, and there was five guys with one stove and making that work.

Um,

and and you know, like figuring out what, how bacon grease works you cannot here's some college advice real world college advice here you cannot pour bacon grease into a plastic container

obviously i like that you called it baking grease bacon grease you called it bacon grease we can roll back the tape if you need me to

you cannot pour bacon grease into a plastic container

bacon grease you know bacon everybody's got that like 15 seconds back button on their uh phones, and they're doing it right now.

They're like, did he say bacon grease?

He did.

But yeah, that's true.

You can't put it in a plastic container.

That's a great, that's great advice, Hank.

I mean, you're just saying

so many people from, I mean, whatever, whatever the opposite of ingesting microplastics is, like, whatever the more extreme version of ingesting microplastics is.

It's basically pouring bacon grease on your floor, is what that is.

And also, if you have a grease fire, do not put water on it because that will just make it explode.

Another aspect of

adulthood that I had to learn is that it feels like, if you're me, it feels like if a bill is important, they're going to call about it.

Yeah.

That's actually.

That's actually a really bad way to conduct your personal finances because there's this thing called a credit score.

And if they have to call about it, they get mad at you on this thing called the credit score.

They're pretty far down the list of things that that they've tried to do by the time they're calling.

Well, but I kind of like, I always appreciated the call, you know, like I'd be like, oh, hey, thanks for calling.

I'm so sorry that I haven't paid the rent.

I will pay it now, but I also appreciate like having this extra like 60 days that I

was helpful.

It really helped me put it all together.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

I mean, but yeah, I think that like

adulthood is hard and you are doing adulthood in college.

And I think that's the main thing.

Adulthood does not stay as hard as it starts out, like any job, like anything, right?

Like it's incredibly hard at first, but in many ways it does get easier.

Now, I wouldn't say it's a straight line from hard to easy.

It's definitely

it's definitely swirly, but you're going to just take steps.

And I agree with Hank that in college, you are in many ways doing adulthood.

You are doing at least aspects of the so-called real world

and that's good news it's scary it's intimidating but it's good news because it's part of your growing up and growing into the person you're going to be yeah and i mean schools are aware that this is sometimes uh

not like a uh it's it's a new experience and and so they do try to like give you ways to like like be more clear about what you can do with your time or what you can do with your you know hours that you have purchased of school stuff.

And so

they will direct you.

But I think that it's best if you

are aware of that direction and aware of the things that you can do, but are making decisions for yourself for

what your goals are, what you're excited about, what you're chasing, what you're trying to develop, what you're

like the things that are sort of making your brain feel a little bit sparkly.

I think that every time anything, even if it's uncomfortable, if it

makes my

brain fizz a little bit i'm like i just need to go in that direction because if if i like let the if i let my anxiety get in the way of um

chasing that thing that's exciting to me then

i'll never know how i actually feel about that thing i was just thinking that today because i was um I literally thought I was going to throw up because I was so overwhelmed by anxiety.

But at the same time, I was thinking, but you know what?

Like, I'm also excited.

I like this.

I want to do this.

I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to do it.

This is right.

This is good.

And yet also I am very anxious.

I just, and I can't let my anxiety shut me down.

Now, sometimes I have to listen to it, but in this case, like, I can't let it shut me down because this is like a brain-fizzy, wonderful, fascinating

thing, you know?

Yeah.

So, yeah.

I got another question from Vivian who asks, Dear Hank and John, I took calculus in high school and I'm taking it again now that I'm in college.

However, I took two gap years between then and now and I found that I not only have forgotten everything I learned in high school calculus, but I also forgot most of pre-calc.

As I've gotten older, I've noticed I forget other things I used to know.

Am I gonna forget everything I've ever learned in school?

I'm paying a bunch of tuition for a degree.

Am I gonna forget all the stuff that I learned?

That's the point.

What's the point of school then?

Thank you, Vivian.

So, Vivian, get this.

Not only are you going to forget everything you've ever learned, you're going to cease to exist.

It will have all been for nothing, man.

The sun is going to boil the oceans, my friend.

And all worldly knowledge and evidence of everything that we thought and said and did and learned will disappear with it.

And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't learn.

All right.

I have to say that.

Sorry,

did I go too far down the rabbit hole?

I'm just saying that like we should still learn.

Like there's still value in learning, even though we're going to forget everything.

Well, and in addition,

you will find, I hope, that it's easier to learn calculus the second time because that that stuff is like there are there are impressions left behind.

Things will start to click into place.

Yeah, a lot of the memorization.

So a lot of the like, here's what you do in this situation, like you're presented with a thing and you're like, I don't remember any of that.

But you, but you like, ultimately, I think a lot of what higher ed is actually about is learning how to learn.

So like getting the frameworks in place so that you get better at figuring out new information.

More.

Yeah.

And so that you can, and so that on some level, you can also, you learn how to learn, but you also learn how to remind yourself of things.

Oh, for sure.

You learn how to relearn.

So maybe I don't remember.

the presidency of John Tyler very well, but I can, I know how to get.

Is that that actual name of a real president?

Yeah.

I know.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

There you go.

You picked the least.

You know, I'd like to know who the least known president is.

I bet it's John Tyler.

No, no way.

John Tyler has a living grandson.

Yeah, I mean, he's remembered by that guy.

I agree.

John Tyler's grandson knows about John Tyler.

I don't think John Tyler.

I know about my granddad.

I don't think John Tyler and his grandson overlapped.

You know, I think John Tyler was gone by the time the grandson entered the picture.

But I know when your point is well taken.

I think that lots of people remember John Tyler, but the point is that if I need to remind myself of aspects of John Tyler's presidency, I now know how to do that.

And I'll be like, oh, right, right, right, right.

And that fits into this.

And this fits into Millard Fillmore and that fits into Martin Van Buren.

And this fits into the War of 1812.

And that'll, and so I'm able to make connections that I couldn't otherwise make.

And I think that's a lot of what relearning is about, is about like like remaking those connections or deepening those connections.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, two years of not thinking about calculus, you're going to lose a lot of it, but there's, there's frameworks there.

And also, I have great news.

There's a ton of YouTube videos on calculus and you can freshen up those pathways real fast.

But I.

I think a lot of people,

I know a lot of people who came out of school and then they did not do the thing that they majored in and now have like really interesting, cool jobs.

the

the thing ultimately a lot of people are like is it just like to prove that I can do college and it's like a little bit I think it's probably a little bit to prove that you could do college there's an

hazing to it yeah I but I think that it's there's also a like a set of systems for both having what John's talking about which is like I think of it as like a tree that like the more bushy my tree is the more ornaments I can hang on it like all these things are connected together and they're all sort of like have a central trunk of like the the knowledge that i've built um but also it's having systems for for acquiring and like it's going to be different for every person so like the way that your brain works is different from how the way my brain works and so uh but having the systems for how to get information into your head and then like synthesize it and connect it to other stuff and then output something useful with it that becomes

something that everybody does all of the time.

Right.

Yeah.

Like I didn't study infectious disease in college.

And in fact, if you told me in college that I would one day write about infectious disease, I would have been like, well, I understand that I'm concerned about it, but I'm surprised to learn that it's become an area of academic interest.

But the tools that I learned in college about not just how to acquire knowledge, but how to share information, how to synthesize information, how to process it, how to understand

what's an important or interesting or sparkly detail.

Those tools I use all the time, even though I don't remember, for instance, like, I'll be honest, like, I don't remember a lot about the Scarlet Letter.

I don't remember even that much about Moby Dick, which I've read twice.

But I think like the lessons I learned about critical reading and writing about reading are very useful in my life.

Yeah.

But you will absolutely, I have read books and been like, at the end of it, I was like, I was, I'm pretty sure I read that book before.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wild.

Wild.

Especially as I get older.

It barely bothers me.

Yeah, if I told my like young self who had read one or two novels, both of which were like hugely impactful on me because they were the first novels I ever read.

If I told that guy that I would read a book someday and like not remember anything from it.

Yeah.

That sounds, that sounds like nonsense, but it happens.

All right, we've got a great question from Katie Hank, who writes: Dear John and Hank, all I will say is with a Toddwear at home and a baby on the way, saving for college is an absolute nightmare.

It's unbelievable how rapidly the cost is increasing.

It was bad enough when we were in college 10 years ago.

I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on the future of college and student loans.

Is there some sort of bubble that is going to burst or wall that we're going to hit, re-college costs?

Are we going to see a fall in private institutions and an increase in people going to community college?

Are certain career paths going to move in the direction of offering associates degrees instead of bachelor's?

Years and anxiety, Katie.

Since 1980, when I was born, the like inflation overall is 228%.

And inflation of the cost of college tuition is 1,184%.

Wow.

So five times the cost of college has grown five times faster than the rate of inflation.

And what I

say whenever I am on a stage in front of people who are in the higher education industry, and it is, and they call it an industry.

It's the second biggest, like education is the second biggest industry in the U.S.

Behind healthcare.

I say to those people, behind healthcare.

I say to those people.

Which is also

done a similar thing.

There is a point at which it stops being worth it.

Yeah.

For everyone except for the people who have the most.

And so what college originally was, was a way of re-emphasizing social caste and class and making sure that certain people had access to certain kinds of

futures and other people didn't.

And then the idea was we can open up, we can open that up to more and more people.

We can have public universities.

Yeah.

And that will allow for socioeconomic mobility and for people to be able to educate and work themselves out of poverty.

And that will be good for everyone.

That would be great for the social order.

It's great for the social order to have a well-educated population.

It's great for employers to have a well-educated population.

And it's great for people to be educated.

And so everybody wins, right?

Like

that was the idea and the promise of the expansion of access to post-secondary education.

And if the cost of college keeps increasing faster than inflation, like

mathematically, there's a time when it breaks, like when it does not, and like where every year it becomes less worthwhile for more and more and more people.

And like we are on that curve now.

It like it has occurred.

It's like it is less, it is not worthwhile for folks to get, for certain folks to get certain educations.

And

like,

so is there like going to be some day of reckoning?

I don't know.

I don't know if it gets, if it gets fixed like one day at a time or whether like it breaks.

But it feels like it like it's one of those two things.

The path that we are on is not working.

Right.

Right.

There's this.

Yeah, right.

Right.

No matter what you think about whether college is worth it, we can say factually that it is less worth it every year.

And that is a failure of the system.

And what we wanted to do with Study Hall and what I know lots of other people are working on is find ways to try to reform that system.

Some people are working within the system, some people are working outside of it, some people are thinking about, you know, corporations offering their own accredited degree programs that you get while you work for the corporation, which I think is kind of a different dystopia rather than an escape from dystopia.

And lots of people are trying to solve this problem.

But from my perspective, it begins with the universal acknowledgement that it's a problem.

And at least at certain sort of the classy institutions, you know, the ones that,

as you say, Hank, like long preserved the model of aristocracy, of de facto aristocracy that was used in the 19th century in the United States, like

that,

if that is coming back, that is very bad news.

It's such bad news.

It's not just bad news.

It's not just bad news for

individual people who are oppressed by those systems, although, of course, like

those are the people who are most centrally and most proximal to the bad news.

It's also bad news for the entire social order.

It is bad news for society itself.

It is bad news for the country.

It is bad news for the world.

Like having fewer people who have equal access to educational opportunities is bad news hard stop.

Right.

Yeah.

So we I don't know if there is some kind of bubble.

I don't know if there's some kind of break.

I don't know if there is like, because like there's a lot of infrastructure in place that is good.

Like that's the thing that I try to remember is like there's a lot of college that's awesome of this that works well.

Yeah.

It's it's just that like there's weird incentives that it's taken me a long time to start to understand around like, you know, students are less sensitive to cost because they're looking at paying off their loans in the future, not right now, or their, you know, parents are wealthy enough that they can pay for it.

And so people aren't thinking about cost when they are buying a very expensive thing, which is also a healthcare thing.

And in that situation, then you end up in a, you end up with like, why would, why would you charge less?

You would provide more and better services.

So you get like extraordinarily nice waiting rooms at the GI clinic, which I have.

Oh my God, that fish tank

at my GI clinic.

I'm like, God, that is a well-maintained fish tank.

And I just, I wonder if they have that in Europe.

I wonder if they have

really, really nice brand new carpeting in the GI clinics of Europe, or if they just have

vaulted ceilings

or do they have like another space to do more procedures?

Yeah, it's a huge room, too.

There's no one ever in it.

Despite the fact that they're always booked solid.

So I don't know.

Right.

Yeah.

Even though you have to have have any six months wait, it's always empty.

You, you get the same pressure in college where, where like you provide more services, you have more things that are like saleable, cool things that students will be like, oh, there's like this program and that, there's a rock climbing wall.

There's all these different things that you may or may not use.

And that,

you know, it

makes the...

It makes the purchase decision easier.

Or like when you're choosing between two schools, it makes it easier to pick one over the other.

And these schools are competing with each other to try and attract new students.

in that they spend so much money on marketing and on, you know, things that are services, but are primarily marketing.

And

I, yes, I worry a lot

that I don't know how to break, like that incentive structure is the thing that I don't know how to disrupt.

And like Study Hall is like, here's one way to lower the price for some people.

But overall, it feels a little bit like we're probably

headed to a world where we create two different kinds of college experiences.

Yeah, which is such a bummer.

I mean,

yeah, where we kind of create a second class college experience.

And we really, that's, that's what we're trying to fight against in study hall.

Like we're trying to give a really good quality experience.

People like to get their foot in the door so that they can then

have the rest of the experience with a lower upfront cost.

But I think it's safe to say that Hank and I don't know the solution.

No, yeah.

And I don't know that I can't predict the future either, but it worries us a great deal, which which is why we think about it so much.

Yeah, it's in my, I would say it's in my top

17 worries.

This next question comes from Olivia, who writes, which is very high.

I have thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of worries.

Olivia writes, dear John and Hank, so I moved away from my husband's medical, for my husband's medical school before I could finish my computer science degree.

I'm finishing it up now, but I feel like I'm not sure I still like computer science.

Like I'm trying to get an internship because maybe I just don't like school, but job hunting isn't going that well.

And I guess my question is, what do I do once I graduate?

Like, should I look at other fields?

I've been volunteering at a food pantry and I really enjoy that so far.

So I guess if I don't find a job, I can just volunteer more to code or not to code Olivia.

So Hank, I majored in religious studies and I thought that I needed, now it's different from computer science, obviously, but I thought that I had to find some kind of religion job.

That's why I worked as a chaplain and thought I was going to become an Episcopal priest because I was a religion major and it made sense.

that's a job that people have i've i i know episcopal priests and i knew i knew that that job existed and that you know you could do it for your life and make enough money that you would be you know not

certainly not wealthy but you know like you could have a life

and

It was really only after I got into the world of that, like doing chaplaincy and stuff, that I was like, hmm, like I like the other jobs at this hospital more and I don't like them that much.

You know, like, I would look at the social workers and I'd be like, I like that job more.

I don't like that job.

That job seems extremely hard and sad, but I like it more than this job.

And I know we talked about this earlier, Hank, but like, we both know so many people like that, like us.

Well, not like you, but like most people I know who studied one thing and do something else.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I also, I mean,

it, you know, doing the work of

computer programming

can be different kinds of work.

Yeah, I was thinking you can program, you can code at the food pantry, probably.

Like they probably.

Well, there, I mean, yeah, there's like Code for America is a amazing organization

that

it basically says, like, look, there's a lot of people trying to make a bunch of money at this, but also there's like a lot of coding that needs to get done for

just getting services to to people.

And that might feel more rewarding.

And it also might be hanging out.

Like most workplaces, though this might be changing with the advent of workplaces not being as physical anymore, but like

even in a more virtual world, I think that most workplaces are down to the people that you're working with.

And

of course, working in doing coding for government agencies is going to be like bureaucratic and annoying, but like there's going to be lots of well-meaning people who are trying to make the world work better.

There's also an organization, I think it's called like 10, 80,000 hours, maybe.

And it's basically an organization that it's like tries to get people a direction, like a place to work that is going to have a positive impact.

And the idea is

you spend 80,000 hours in your career over the course of like the time that you spend working.

That's going to be a much bigger impact in the world than like recycling or how you donate your money, like how you actually, like what you're working on with your, your time is a huge impact.

And so this is an organization where it's like, can you choose to, like, are you able to choose to work for an organization and provide that value?

Yeah.

And you can

do that and still make a living, right?

Like I think about the people who code for partners in health.

Like there was a huge project a few years back that I think was an open source project to figure out how digital medical records can work in impoverished communities.

And that's like incredibly complicated, challenging coding that is also, you know, having a massive, measurable impact in the lives of the most vulnerable people in the world.

So I don't think it's, I don't think it's necessarily either or, but I also think like if you just aren't interested in coding and you're like, then, okay, you take that experience and what you learned and the rigor and discipline that it gave you and you apply it to something else in your world.

And you'll find, you'll, you'll find that that can be fulfilling as well.

So I definitely don't think that you have to, this is part of the reason why I think, yes, it is a big decision, where you go to college, what you study.

These are very big decisions that can have massive impacts on your life, but

they aren't necessarily final.

You know, like I think about my,

think about my friend David, who went to medical school when he was like 31.

You know, because he decided he wanted to be a doctor and now he's a doctor, you know?

And like, yeah, it was, it was a little bit of a different path for him.

And he had to, he had to do a lot of work and take out a lot of loans to make that dream come true.

And he's going to have a shorter career than most doctors and yada, yada, yada.

But like, he got to live his dream.

And he didn't know what his dream was until he was 31.

And that's okay.

Which reminds me that today's dream, today's podcast is brought to you.

by dreams, 31-year-old dreams.

They're still dreams.

You're still allowed to have them.

This podcast is also brought to you by everything you ever learned in school that you then forgot.

Everything that you ever learned in school that you then forgot.

It's still in there doing something.

You just don't remember it.

Today's podcast is also brought to you by the sun boiling the oceans.

The sun will boil the oceans and everything you learned will have been for nothing.

But except it won't have been for nothing because we're not here.

to live forever.

We're here to love and be loved and to know and be known.

Oh.

this podcast, of course, is also brought to you by Study Hall.

If you enjoy learning on YouTube, why not get credit for it?

With the Study Hall channel, you can start taking courses right on YouTube.

You can watch the course videos on the Study Hall channel for free.

You can sign up to take a course with a cohort and an instructor for just $25 and apply what you've learned.

And if at the end of that course, you're happy with your grade, you can pay $400, about a third of the cost of a normal college course, and have three transferable college credits on your transcript.

Whether you're trying to learn new skills, earn college credit, or just prove to yourself that you could do it, Study Hall can help you reach your goals without as much financial risk.

Pick between common gen ed college courses like modern world history, code and programming, human communication, and more on the study hall channel at youtube.com slash study hall.

You can learn more at gostudyhall.com.

We also have a project for awesome message hank.

It's from Carl to Carl.

I don't know the situation here, so I'm just going to read this and then we're going to discuss the situation.

Okay.

Carl, you're about to graduate, and I will miss our drives to school listening to podcasts.

Thank you for sharing them with me.

We don't know what the future holds, and you may not have figured out what you're going to do for a living, but that's okay.

A lot of people don't know what they're going to do when they graduate, like John Green.

I didn't.

Even more end up doing something they never planned on.

What's important is that you have good values and you know that you're loved and that you should have the courage to go out there and find your path.

I love you, Carl.

Now, I think there's a chance, Hank.

I think it's probably different Carls.

It seems like different Carl's, but the chance is there that it's just Carl.

I'm going to say it's a one in three chance that it's Carl speaking to Carl's self, and a two-in-three chance that there are two identically spelled Carls who drive to school.

with each other.

Possibly a father and son duo, a sort of Carl Sr., Carl Jr.

Yeah.

It's beautiful both ways, but it's, I think, a little more beautiful if it's just one Carl.

I think it's great both ways.

And it's actually, it's apt for today's conversation, isn't it?

Because we've been talking so much about what happens when you're, I bet Rosiana did that on purpose.

I bet she did.

She's so good.

What a producer we have.

So you know when a new shirt just becomes your go-to?

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Quince.com slash dear hank.

All right, Hank, I want to ask you one last question before we get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

Big news.

Big, so much.

I don't understand.

We only do this podcast once every two weeks, and there's so much AFC Wimbledon news.

I need to start a new podcast called AFC Wimbledon News that no one will listen to.

But this question comes from Carmen, who writes, well, well, well.

We meet again, Green Brothers.

We have never met.

I've just gotten a position in a research lab at my university as an undergraduate freshman, and I'm terrified because it's just me and the lead professor working on this project.

So there's no graduate student to tell me how to do things.

I was like literally given my own laboratory and a key to it on the first day with an induction furnace that can heat up to 2,000 degrees Celsius and a bunch of other things.

How do I function on my own like this?

I'm 18.

I've been given state-of-the-art technology and I'm doing research that no one has ever done before just because I pestered some guy a few times to let me do research and now I'm in way over my head, not a car or a man, car man.

Oh, man.

I remember this moment when the first time like my professor turned to me and was like, what should we do next?

And I was like, I don't, that's not how this works, man.

I, I, my education has so far been doing what people tell me to do, not telling them what to do.

Yeah, there is this really intense moment in education where like you're basically learning about the contours of a wall.

You're like examining every part of the wall, and people are telling you this part of the wall we discovered in 1803 because this person did that.

And this part of the wall we figured out

this way.

And this part of the wall, we figured out that way.

And then they're like, hey,

this is going to sound wild, but we need you to add to the wall.

Yeah.

We need you to

get some mortar and some bricks.

I've only been educated in wall studies, not in wall additions.

You don't understand.

I touch wall.

I don't build wall.

I observe.

It's super weird.

And like, I think the only thing you can do is do it.

Like, don't like burn your hand off, but like, do it.

And

like, like, have, try and find a question you don't know the answer to and try and figure out how to get to the answer.

And I, like, I think that the first thing I said in that situation was a bad experiment that didn't go well, right?

Like, of course it is.

That's kind of the point.

Like, they're not going to expect you to be perfect at this at first.

Right.

And there was like, I did lots.

Oh, I did, I spent so much time in labs getting zero result, you know, just like, sure.

Just so much time.

And then you get the spectrum back from the chemical that you made.

And it's like, that's not what it should have been.

That's the wrong, like, I got it too hot hot and I polymerized it.

Great, great.

I guess I'll just go die.

But yeah, I mean, like, that's, that's, that's the work, man.

And no professor is going to be surprised that, you know, it's awesome that you're getting to do that research as a freshman, but no

professor is going to be surprised that a freshman doesn't do everything exactly right the first time.

So just do it.

Yeah.

And look, Carmen, we all have imposter syndrome.

None of us deserve to be doing what we're doing

because deserving isn't the right framework through which to consider human experience.

So you've got this opportunity and enjoy it.

And don't stress out too much if

everything you try burns up in that 2000 centigrade induction furnace.

Yeah.

Hank.

John, before you get to the all-important news from Mars and Apesy Wilmoton, someone asks you what your go-to meal is at the Gambier cafeteria.

I feel like you need to answer.

Well, one thing I do remember about that 900-page guide to colleges was that

they had like a 1 to 100 ranking of everything.

And Kenyon...

Oh, it was Kenyon College asked the question.

Oh, that's hilarious.

Kenyon at the time, their food score out of 100 was 17.

One set.

Sure, sure.

That makes sense.

The food was very bad.

It was

three three times per day.

If you missed it, you missed it.

And now, of course, everything is different.

And college kids eat Chick-fil-A all day off their meal plans or whatever.

But in my day, you ate what you ate and you didn't say no.

But there was a salad bar and I think there was a sandwich bar.

But you know what I ate most days was popcorn.

This is very similar to my go-to order.

I ate popcorn and then I had a microwave back in my apartment and I would make or my dorm room and I would make hot pockets.

So I thought you were going to reheat the popcorn.

That's how crazy my brain was in that situation.

I thought you were going to take the popcorn home and make it hot again.

So I was really, I was not well, right?

I was not, not, not doing healthy OCD wise.

And I had this thing where I was like, look, it's very hard and it's not fun, but you have to eat a thousand calories a day.

And the good news is these two Pop-Tarts are 780.

Two hot pockets, not pop-tarts.

Oh, sorry, hot, hot, hot pockets.

We've both now made errors in today's podcast.

And

I don't know why I felt like pointing back to your error, but I did.

And

then I would just eat like popcorn and a little bit of salad.

What about you?

I, when nothing else looked good, like there'd be things around that were like, you know, by hot barcoops.

When that didn't look good, which was many days,

there was a pasta bar and I would get pasta with butter and salt that sounds great i mean that's the dream pasta with butter and salt if it works for ourselves why not us

and then bread and butter if i got scurvy i got scurvy

and i had an orange once a month like a like a 17th century mariner

All right, John, let's do some NFC one with him.

Oh, God.

I don't know, Hank.

We're one point out of the playoffs.

So we're having a great season.

We've signed these, we've signed a couple new guys at the end of the January transfer window who are looking pretty good, including this guy, Ronan Curtis, who's just like way too good for league two, but he was rehabbing his ACL injury with us.

And kind of as a favor, since he got to rehab his ACL injury with us, he signed for the rest of the season just to like get himself back fit and in shape to go crush the championship or whatever he's going to do next.

And And he's been great.

He's been scoring goals for us left and right.

We're undefeated at home.

Most interestingly, in the last like eight games, most interestingly, every time we've gotten a lead, the last 15 times we've gotten a lead, we've held it, which is essentially unprecedented in AFC Wimbledon history.

Like we're famously the team that gets a lead and then loses it, but we've been holding our leads, not least thanks to a last-second center back signing named

named Kofi Balmer.

And Kofi Balmer, Hank, has the one thing that I believe that AFC Wimbledon has been missing low these many years.

He has a proper long throw.

So this is a guy, every lower league

English soccer team needs a long throw guy.

This is my theory.

Because the long throw guy,

if it's a throw in down in the opponent's area, the long throw guy can basically turn it into a corner kick where he throws it it so long that it goes all the way in front of the goal.

And it just, it gets in the mixer.

It causes problems.

People stress out.

And so finally, we have this proper long throw guy.

And we haven't scored a goal from it yet.

And we look terrible every time we have a long throw.

But I just love having a long throw guy.

I just feel like we're a proper football club now.

We got a long throw guy.

And

this is, it just feels good that like losing

the guy.

Ali Alhamedy.

Ali Alhamedy.

Yeah.

You got somebody else.

It hasn't been catastrophic.

It hasn't been catastrophic.

Because, not least because of this long throw guy, Kofi Balmer, who's kind of become a little bit of my hero.

It's weird to think that a guy who can throw the ball.

Throw it so far.

You can't throw it.

You can throw it so far.

You can't throw it.

It's like a big deal.

This guy can throw it.

This is like Joey DeCord.

Do you know Joey DeCord of the Seattle Kraken?

No, does he have a trick?

Well, we lost this legendary goalie for the first half of the season because he was injured.

He's back now.

But so we like had to rely on and he turned out to be amazing and a weird thing happened when the goal and joey's on the ice they are more likely to score goals which is like that's that's a goalie how are they like how is he offensive but he's just like very active he gets out of the crease a lot he he has good stick work he passes he's got good distribution that's what you in soccer you need to you need a goalie with good distribution as well

distribution I think that's key.

That's key.

We talk about, we used to talk about goalies needing to be quick with their reflexes, which they still do, but now they need to be, as they say, good with their feet.

Got to be good with their feet.

Joey DeCord is good with the stick.

Got to be good with the stick.

What's the news in Mars?

In Mars news, John, I have geology news.

So Mars is not thought to be currently volcanically active, though I maintain that it may yet be again.

Okay.

But that's an opinion.

Researchers have been on the lookout for volcanoes to better understand Mars's geological past.

And they've got like probes.

got, they've been doing a lot of research.

They looked at 63 different volcanic structures in the Eridania region, which is located in the southern hemisphere.

And they've also been trying to figure out if basin, like looking at these basins in the Eridania region, to see how they formed, because it seems like a long time ago, they were formed by something called crustal recycling, which we, of course, have here on Earth, right?

Because we have plate tectonics, where like the crust we have now has been used before.

So like the rocks aren't the age of the earth.

They're new rocks that have come up again from the earth.

But Mars doesn't have plate tectonics, but it does appear to have some regions of crustal recycling.

Not a ton, but some.

And that means that the area was

a kind of crustal recycling called vertical tectonics, where land masses move upwards.

And we think that on Earth, vertical tectonics was the thing that happened first before plate tectonics took over.

So it looks like Mars did like the first step, but it got froze in the middle of the first step.

So studying that could help us understand Mars, of course, but also might be a way to better understand how Earth's history of early crustal recycling through vertical tectonics happened before plate tectonics took over.

Super cool.

Makes me want to really not get frozen in terms of our current tectonics.

Would not like, would not like to become a geologically inactive planet as much as that would be good for fewer earthquakes.

John, I have a surprise for you.

Great.

I got in the live stream for the Dear Hank and John patrons five minutes ago, and they've just been listening to the end of the podcast.

Oh, that's great.

I love it.

All right.

That's amazing.

Thanks for thanks to everybody for being part of this at patreon.com slash dear hank and john.

They can't hear you.

They can't hear you.

Right.

Sure, of course.

I don't know why I didn't put that together.

Go ahead and read the credits.

Yeah.

Thank you, everybody.

If you want to see, check out Study All.

It's at youtube.com youtube.com/slash study all.

If you have people in UI who you think might benefit from it, please let them know about it.

And thanks to everybody who's worked so hard to make that project work.

It is a labor of love from many people at YouTube, at Arizona State University, and of course at Complexly.

This podcast is edited by Joseph Tunamedish.

It's produced by Rosiana Halzarojas.

Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell.

Our editorial assistant is Dr.

Davoki Trokravarti.

The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the Great Narola.

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