John: What I think is actually significant is not the way that culture was shaped by TB but the way that TB is shaped by culture. Good morning Hank, it's Tues- you're here!

Hank: Good morning, John. Welcome to the DFTBA warehouse. 

J: Thank you so much. Uh, you don't have to say welcome, actually, because I am the CEO. [Hank laughing] And uh, it's been, it's great.

H: He's been doing it! He's been packin' socks all day, [H: Yep] meeting people-

J: awesomesocks.club. I'll tell you what, after spending a day at the warehouse packing the socks, learning about the processes that go into getting and shipping out the coffee and the socks, I believe more than ever in this company that people who work here are so awesome as you know Hank. I don't wanna sound like a CEO, but I've never been so enthusiastic about a for-profit for-charity venture in my entire life.

H: Thanks for coming out. Thanks for helping out. 

J: Yeah, it's great to be here.

H: I'm feelin' ok right now.  

J: Are you?

H: Yeah, right now. I'm about to feel worse in about four days.

J: I-So, I wanna stop you there, and I wanna ask you a serious question. And I know we've been jokeity-jokeity this whole time, and that's good. I wanna stay jokeity-jokey, [H: Uh-huh] but I do think, like, you and I both have this instinct to, in hard times, say, "Blabbity blabbity blabbity, it sucks but...." 

H: Yeah. 

J: We both have it-we put the positive spin on it 

H: It's very hard to not say "but." 

J: It's very hard to not say "but" when you're talking about difficulty, and, what I...what I guess I would wanna emphasize is that you are doing amazing, you are, as they say, "tolerating" the treatment brilliantly, et cetera et cetera, but, uh, this sucks. [H: Yeah.] Like you, this sucks. You get really sick, it sucks. 

H: Yeah, it's for... it's legit. Like the, the chemo has a reputation that it has earned... [J: Ugh.] is how I came out of it feeling.

J: I can count on two hands the number of times I've seen Hank take a nap [Hank laughing]

H: Not anymore.

J: And like, a bunch of times I've seen you take a nap it's because you're really, really seasick on a boat you don't wanna be on. 

H: Oh yeah, I do... it feels kinda similar to that. Like - 

J: You're on a boat you don't wanna be on, [H: Yeah] and you are kinda seasick. 

H: And that nobody else is on the boat, either. 

J: Right, you're alone on the boat [H: I'm alone on the boat] and there's a lot of people who are on shore like, "do you need anything?" and you're like "I'd like to not to not be on the boat" and they're like... [Hank laughing] 

H: "Stay on the boat!"

J: "That's the one thing I can't do! I gotta let- you gotta stay on the boat!" 

H: "You really, you're really inseparable from boat at the moment"

J: "We need you on the boat!" 

H: And I'm like, "I don't know a lot about boats!" 

J: And I'm like, "I don't either but you got this, buddy!" 

H: "Here's some YouTube videos about boats!" [John laughing] YouTube's like, "would you like boat videos?" And I do, like sure

J: YouTube's like "I see that you like boat videos... that means -" 

H: "You like boat disaster videos??"

J: "... I see how much you're enjoying these boat disaster videos. You know, planes also crash! [H: Yeah!] I'd like to show you some plane crash videos!" 

H: Yeah, I told you! That has happened [J: I know! Believe me] where I get like chronic illness of other kinds of illnesses...

J: Because we have the same YouTube, I also experience this. Um, and it's great in a way, right? Because it is [H: scoffs] What? 

H: Says the guy who's not in the boat! [John laughing] 

J: You see Dad out there just like, trying to save that tree 

H: Our dad is out and - 

J: Just making a phone call being like I don't know if this tree...

H: He landscaped a bit - 

J: To be fair, the tree doesn't look well. 

H: No, it's alive so it is worth his efforts. 

J: For sure, for sure. 

H: The tree is on its own boat. 

J: The tree is on its own boat. Except the difference is that it's not alone, it has Dad there on the boat...

H: I, I have Dad too. 

J: Yeah, not in the same way. [Hank laughing] Like, Dad can't just like, stake you to the ground and be like, "there you go. [H: No.] Standing straight up again." 

H: That's Dr. Carl's job. 

J: We love you, Dr. Carl! 

J: Because it's really the biases within culture that allow infectious disease to spread, right? Like, that's the vector... 

H: At this point, yeah. 

J: Right. 

H: We're fairly new to that [J: Yes.] experience. A lot of times in the, sort of, healthcare journey, people are like, "why is it so bad?" Um, and like - lots of reasons. But it's easy to forget that a hundred years ago, you didn't expect to be cured of a disease.

J: Right, the main thing the doctor told you was [H: like, what might...] which... which direction you were headed in. 

H: Yeah. 

J: So there's that, but there's also the fact that like, it does feel vaguely medieval a lot of times - like, the treatment [H: Right.] for chronic illness. Chemotherapy that like, destroys your immune system doesn't feel super 21st Century to me... [H: Yeah.] you know? 

H: Well, the thing is - there, the... it's, it's quite tricky, and we didn't know this until we did it, to distinguish between diseases that are easy, that turned out to be quite easy to cure...

J: Right.

H: ...and diseases that were very hard to cure.

J: Yeah.

H: So when people first started figuring out how, like, antibiotics worked, they were like "holy crap!" and like, you know, life expectancy increased by like 30 years over the course of 30 years.

J: Yeah. 

H: And, and then they were like "okay, well, let's do that with cancer." [J: Yeah.] and they were like, "turns out we can't." 

J: "Let's do it with viruses, let's do it with cancer." 

H: And it's like a conspiracy! 

J: Yes. 

H: But it's not, it's just hard! 

J: Right. It feels like cancer should have been easy to cure in the same way that strep throat is easy to cure.

H: Yeah. 

J: It's not even one disease. Like, strep throat is one disease. [H: Yeah.] Cancer is... a lot of them. 

H: Well, yeah, I have started to think that it's silly of us to think of cancer as one disease. It's like saying a virus - like, the idea of a "virus" - is one disease. 

J: Someone in our family just got diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, which sounds like a cancer because it has "carcinoma" in it - and it is a cancer, except that because the survival rate is a hundred percent, nobody really says they have cancer. 

H: Right. 

J: Because we associate cancer... [H: They don't even...] with jeopardy. 

H: They don't even include it in the cancer stats. 

J: I've learned a lot about cancer in the last couple months. Um, and one of the, I mean, one of the big things we both learned is how, uh, unequal access to treatment is. Like, both in the United States or like, in rich countries, but especially between rich countries and poor/middle-income countries, it's shocking. 

H: Yeah. Even with a disease that's very treatable and we know exactly the drugs you need to get. 

J: Right. And they're not that expensive.

H: They're not! 

J: Like, the Hodgkin's drugs are not that expensive.

H: Yeah, yeah - my chemo is the cheapest part of my treatment. 

J: Really?

H: It's cheaper than scans. 

J: Wow. 

H: Now, if I had to switch over to the new one, because of a lung problem, it would go from $300 a treatment to, mm, I think $15,000 

J: Wha wha wha wha?! 

H: Yeah. 

J: What a good system! Um... 

H: [laughs]

J: Dr. Carole Mitnick recently had an idea for me that never crossed my mind in my 45 years of being alive, which was: what if we treated illness not as an opportunity, um, to maximize value, but as an opportunity to extend the quality and length of human lives - and like, I was like, "well what - how, how would we do that?" And she was like "oh we've done it before. Like, what's Wikipedia, except an effort to extend the quality and length of human lives?" 

H: Yeah. 

J: In a not-for-profit kind of way. 

H: Certainly in the quality, anyway. I don't know if it's the length - like, I don't know! 

J: Oh I feel like Wikipedia has already extended the length of my life. Wikipedia was like, "here's a concept for you called 'micromorts,' which tells you every activity you do, how many minutes of your life does decrease?" 

H: Wow. What's the worst ones? Boats, I bet... [John laughing]

J: Both kind of boats have a lot of micromorts. Lotta micromorts in boats these days. [Hank laughing] Um, boats aren't great. Motorcycles?

H: Up there?

J: Not the best. You know what's got more micromorts than parasailing, actually, is uh, free solo rock climbing. 

H: Oh I bet! 

J: That's a heavy micromort. Even if you're good at it! Which I'm not. So for me, it would be like, a million micromorts. [Both laughing] 

H: It would... yeah, it would add up to one mort. A full mort. 

J: Exactly, however many micromorts you need to get to, to get to one... 1.0 morts. Which reminds me, Hank - 

H: Yeah? 

J: At Vidcon, there was a pit that you could jump into to get a Squishmallow, okay? 

H: Yeah, I remember 

J: And my children jumped into the pit, and they each got two Squishmallows. In the pit. 

H: Oh wow! That seems like a lot. 

J: And it was like a full- I watched them jump. It's like 15 feet down, and I was like, "This is so great because now you have a Squishmallows and you have a Squishmallows, and you can both give your lovely cousin Orin a Squishmallows." And they said, "If you wanna give Orin a Squishmallow, you've got to jump into the pit." And so I did. I looked like an eagle in flight. You've never seen something or someone so graceful. And the best part is after I go down through all the Squishmallows, land deep deep inside the bottom of the pit of Squishmallows, the first thing you hear my squeaky little coward voice say is, "Well that was thrilling."

H: [Both laughing] Hysterical. I have a new chemo symptoms, very weird. 

J: Oh, what is it? 

H: I, for the first time in my life, have gotten two ocular migraines. 

J: Ohh, like with the auras?

H: Yeah, with no pain.

J: I had that once. 

H: Pain came after.

J: So like, I had that once. 

H: When it was happening, no pain at all-

J: Yeah, that's what it usually is. It's like warning of the pain to come.

H: And it did hurt very bad. [J: Oh, Hank] But, I mean, much scarier than what it is because I was like-

J: Oh yeah yeah, because it feels like you're hallucinating.

H: It feels like I'm hallucinating [J: Yeah], it was in both eyes, [J: Mm-hmm] so it wasn't like an eye problem. It's a brain problem [J: Mm-hmm-hmm], and I'm like, "Ok, well I'm having a stroke." [J: Mm-hmm]

J: So you got the ocular migraines [Yeah, that's a real- it was weird], very unpleasant-

H: Happened while I was watching Wipeout.  I was like, I can't see Wipeout.

J: You know, there's a lot of things that I used to think sucked. Wipeout is a good example. But it turns out that, like, they're just a gift of a different kind. [H: That's right] They're a show for a different moment than the moment I'm in maybe [H: Mm-hmm], but they're not a bad show. They're just a show for a different person at a different time. I watched like a 19-minute video, probably because you're messing with my algorithm so much, uh, that was just every person who's completed Wipeout over like 25 years. [H: Wow] And it was [John wheezing], they weren't-they weren't all gazelles. 

H: But they all did it.

J: They all made it. Dad's just doing-he's still at it. You know what, I think is that the last shot of the video has to be the extraordinary work that Dad is doing. Hank, you may be alone on the boat, but how many people are trying to right that ship. If I extended the metaphor too far anyway, Dad, you're the best. We love you. Hank, I'll see you right now.