Hank: Good morning, John.

For a stretch of time I had the particularly wild gift of being a guy who wrote, recorded, and performed silly nerdy rock songs. Among all the lives I've lived I have three studio albums.

And all of those albums were recorded in the same studio with the same producer with work and music from the same guy whose name was Shmed or Shmedly or Ryan, depending on who you are. My first two albums were just me and Shmed. Everything you hear on it is either me playing a guitar or singing and everything else is him.

And then with my last album Incongruent, Paul and Joe DeGeorge, Rob Scallon, and Andrew Huang also came out and we recorded again with Shmed. And also on that album he had lots of tracks - had lots of weird ideas we did a lot of fun stuff in that recording session. When I started making music I had no idea how lucky I was that Shmed lived in my small Montana town.

He had this little backyard studio so many people recorded their stuff there. But the wild thing is the studio didn't just come with like "studio", it came with a producer and a multi-instrumentalist session musician. He had experience in so many genres.

You want to do something? He will do it. You want to do a polka with a live accordion?

Schmed will play the accordion. Do you want a weird bass riff or a slightly off-kilter two-bar piano break that makes people feel a little uncomfortable? Shmed!

Will do that! You want it to sound like classic rock? You want it to sound like punk?

You want it to sound like Ska? Shmed will do this! He taught me how to sing harmony, he auto-tuned me, he spliced my vocals, he'll let me played drums on tracks and then quantize it so that it would actually be on the beat.

And he had so much weird stuff in his studio that he had collected from who-knows-where. On "The Universe is Weird" you can hear the timpani that he had in there for some reason. And of course he also made his own stuff and had his like a whole career.

He did music for TV shows. If you've ever watched 3rd Rock From the Sun or That 70s Show you've probably heard some of Shmed's music. And he also had his own band, Secret Powers, that I feel like was always just inches away from getting like a cool weird cult following.

I learned so much from him and working with him is among the coolest experiences I've ever had in my life. And I think that he was quite proud of the silly stupid stuff we made together. We were both huge Weird Al fans, and it was like we were getting to like do a little bit of Weird Al stuff together.

I'm making this video because he died this week and I just want to thank him but I can't. And that's dumb, you know. It's not forever.

So think of somebody today for me and thank them. If you have ever heard a Hank Green song that is more than me and a guitar, you have heard his work. I remember him noodling out the piano solo for "I Know" right in front of me in like 90 seconds.

It felt like he was doing a magic trick. I've also spent this week listening to some Secret Powers, his band, and I put together a playlist. I got a YouTube one and a Spotify one linked in the description if you could take a half an hour sometime and listen through that.

And maybe you can have a favorite Secret Powers song too. I think that would be very cool. And if you want to let me know what your favorite Secret Powers song is, that would like feel like a celebration of Shmed which I think would be a good thing to have in the world cuz he was a weird amazing guy.

Thanks, everybody. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.