Good morning, John. So I was on TikTok a couple of days ago, and let's be honest, all of the other days as well.

But on that particular day I witnessed a lie, or at least a misinformation. It was one of those things where you say, "I was today years old when I found out __ ". This particular person was today years old when he found that the "News" stands for "Notable Events, Weather, and Sports." This is what we call a "folk etymology".

People come up with origins of a word that makes sense but aren't real and they spread around because they make sense and they sound good to people. My favorite of these is "hangnail", because it sounds so extremely straightforward. Hangnail; it's a hangy part off the side of your nail.

The nail in question, in "hangnail" isn't a fingernail-- it's a nail. Like a nail that you would hammer into something. And that's what they'd call like a corn, because it was a patch that was very hard, like someone had nailed a nail into you, I guess?

And then "ang" is a prefix that you put on something to say that it's painful. This is where "angry" comes from. So any, like, painful foot or hand condition was called an "angnail". And probably because it makes more sense for a hangnail than other painful foot and hand conditions, it stuck around as "hangnail" for just that one condition. Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today.

While "news" does not stand for "Notable Events, Weather, and Sports", there is something we can learn from the etymology of the word "news".

The actual source, it will be unsurprising to hear, is from the word "new". We took an adjective and we noun-ed it. It's just a pluralization of "new". So like, "what's new with you?" That's your "news". But over time it became "The News". Not like, my new informations, just "The News".

And we need to understand that "The News" is not necessarily "The Importants".  So let's say, for example, that like, suddenly one day two thousand people in America die of a disease. That would be news. But if two thousand people die in America of a disease every day, it's not news anymore because it's not new.

And this isn't a function of all the terrible people in the news industry. This is human nature. And probably for a good reason. Like, the new stuff is the stuff that you understand the least; that you do not really necessarily know how to deal with or live with or how it will impact you. But our bias for the new can break us a little bit. Like it can make it so that we are not properly understanding the world.

This definitely hurts us when it comes to how we interface with ongoing crises. As an example, in most of the places where this video is being watched, the number of infants who die per thousand births is below six. In Sierre Leone, it is eighty.

And I understand sometimes not wanting to sit with a statistic like that. It is kind of devastating. And it is also not news. In fact, it is down from a hundred and sixty deaths per thousand when I was born, in 1980. And if you want to talk about it in terms of "news", going from 16% to 8% of infant mortality is good news. Regardless, 8% infant mortality is a bad situation. 

John, humans have a lot of biases that prevent us from understanding our world correctly. That's just a thing. And personally I didn't get this until you, like, spent the time with me and helped me understand that we are just bad at dealing with ongoing, long term crises.

But because you did that, and you also did the work to figure out the best ways to interface with problems like these, we now have raised tens of millions of dollars for Partners in Health. And if you have donated or you've been a member of the Awesome Socks Club, or have bought stuff during Pizzamas, or have just been a member of this community, you have been a part of that! Because that is a thing that strong community can do; it can look past what is new to see what is important.

And yes, Pizzamas starts Monday, in which John and I make videos like we did in 2007: five days a week. Am I excited or overwhelmed? ¿Por qué no los dos?

Honestly I am extremely excited, and I am doing a thing. So, we have text message updates this year (you can sign up, there's a link in the description). People who sign up for that, you will get messages from me throughout Pizzamas but then never again, so don't worry about that, it will not be an ongoing thing.  Every day you're going to get one Pizza-themed dad joke from me-- I will make this happen! I've got a fair number. I'm not all the way there, I'll get there! But also if you sign up for the texts you might get some, like, special access to some stuff. And if you want to get that text message pop-up every time, you can open up pizzamas.com in an incognito browser, which I know is a very, very weird sentence.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday-- MONDAY! MONDAY! I'll see you on MONDAY!