Hank: Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

John: Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank.

Hank: It's a podcast where me and my brother John give you dubious advice, answer your questions, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. But first, we talk about...

John: What a week it has been for AFC Wimbledon.

Hank: Oh, well, we'll get to that. But first... 

John: Hank, I did meet Taylor Swift. She was incredibly nice. It was such a pleasure. She also said really nice things about me and my books from Atop the spinning stage where she performed.

It was a pretty magical evening.

Hank: Oh, like in front of the people?

John: In front of the 14,000 people at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. Yes, it was a pretty magical evening, and I felt so grateful to be there. I do have to say, I spent very little time with Ms. Swift herself, but I did spend a ton of time with her parents, who were just lovely.

Oh! such lovely people. And I realized that, you know, probably to Taylor Swift, it's appropriate for me to hang out with her parents because in her mind, we are all about the same age. 

Hank: Well, aren't you actually about the same age as Taylor Swift's parents? 

John: I am younger than Taylor Swift's parents, but I realized that to Taylor Swift and also just to Jon Streeter She just did a wonderful job. It was just an amazing night. It was really wonderful. Vance Joy, who's on the Paper Towns soundtrack, opened up for her and he was great as well.

And so it was a great week for me. And then on Monday I had this horrific oral surgery. So if my voice sounds a little weird, it's because there's all of this like cotton and stitches in my mouth and stuff.

So that was a bit of a bummer. But other than that, things are great. How are you?

Hank: I'm good. We had our company retreat this weekend, so I was very, very tired after that, and I maybe, maybe drank a little much, but it was great to hang out with all the people who help us produce SciShow and Crash Course and VidCon and Stensifel for DFTBA Records, and some of the people came out from Indianapolis and they were great, and we just. had a great time. So that feels good to be part of a good team. And then in addition to that, I did 21 interviews for a press junket for SciShow and our work with Emerson, an engineering company that supports SciShow's content.

And that started at 5 o'clock in the morning and was really hard! And it's the second one I've done, and I know you've done a thousand of them, but boy is that exhausting.

John: Yeah, I find that I cannot blame anyone for anything they say in a press junket interview. Robert De Niro got a bunch of flak last week for... walking out of an interview after saying that the interviewer was condescending. And I was really moved by the fact that the interviewer was empathetic toward Robert De Niro and was like, I don't think that I was being condescending, but to be fair, those things are horrible. And I don't really blame anyone for anything that they say in them.

And that's kind of how I feel. Now when I see that somebody said something You know problematic or off-color or whatever in an interview that's in a press junket I'm just you know, I. I want to.

I go to see if they apologize because if they apologize I don't even feel like you have a brain when you're doing those things. It's just absolutely. I feel like my soul is leaving my body Mm-hmm.

Yep, but we are complaining about the first worldiest of first world problems. Um, can I read? can I read a poem to you? Read me a poem John Hank, today's poem comes to you from George Bilger.

You liked the funny poem last week so much that I thought I would read you this one. You've heard it before, but boy do I like it. It's called The Return of Odysseus.

You're familiar with The Odyssey, right, Hank?

Hank: Yeah, I've heard of it. Did they make it into a movie? Was it a movie?

John: The too-long-didn't-read version of The Odyssey is that after a number of years at war, Odysseus goes home, but it takes him like 20 years to go home, hence it being an odyssey. All right, Hank, so here is The Return of Odysseus by Georges Belger. When Odysseus finally does get home, he is understandably upset about the suitors who have been mooching. off his wife for 20 years, drinking his wine, eating his mutton, etc. In a similar situation today, he would seek legal counsel, but those were different times.

With the help of his son Telemachus, he slaughters roughly 110 suitors and quite a number of young ladies, although in view of their behavior, I use the term loosely. Rivers of blood course across the palace floor. I too have come home in a bad mood.

Yesterday, for instance, after the department meeting, when I ended up losing my choice parking spot behind the library to the new provost. I slammed the door. I threw down my book bag. in this particular way I have perfected over the years. that lets my wife understand the contempt I have for my enemies, which is prodigious.

And then, with great skill, she built a gin and tonic that would have pleased the very gods, and with epic patience she listened as I told her of my wrath and of what I intended to do to so-and-so and also to what's-his-name. And then there was another gin and tonic, and presently my wrath abated and was forgotten, and peace came to reign once more. in the great halls and courtyards of my house. The Return of Odysseus by Georges Bilgere, one of my favorite poems largely because of its last word in the great halls and courtyards of my house.

Not my home, not my palace, my house. The least pretentious word he could have chosen in that moment. Beautifully, beautifully written poem.

Just couldn't be better start to finish. And I thought that you'd like it, Hank, because you like a good funny.

Hank: I do. I find that maybe funny poetry is the right entrance for most people. It seems to be for me.

John: All right, well, don't worry. I'm going to get very sad and serious next week.

Hank: Okay. Make me feel things, John.

John: Hank, would you like to begin by answering a question from one of our beloved listeners?

Hank: I think that... It wouldn't be quite correct to call it beginning, but I will continue with a question from one of our beloved listeners. This one is from Anna who asks, Dear Hank and John, sometimes I'll notice that my idea of a person isn't who they actually are, but rather who I want them to be. For me, it can. be really hard to stop thinking about them that way and see them for who they actually are.

How would you suggest I do that?

John: Well, Anna, you've asked the big question of being a person, maybe the biggest one. Yeah, I mean inevitably we're going to project our own ideas of other people onto those people because we're stuck inside of our own consciousness and we can never quite imagine what it's like to be someone else. We can never quite, you know, do a perfect job of listening and stop projecting. I've been thinking about that a lot this week because my religion professor from college and my great mentor from college, Professor Donald Rogan, died this week.

He was 85 and lived 15 years longer than I expected him to. I figured that the old man would die within a year or two of my graduation because, of course, in my mind, my presence in his life was the center of his life. But in reality, he had a wonderful family, a loving wife to whom he was married for more than 50 years. beautiful children and then grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so Don had this you. know rich and wonderful life that I could only glimpse because I was stuck looking at his life from my own eyes and kind of seeing myself in the center of it.

That challenge I think of like doing a better job of listening to other people so that we can empathize with them better is like the biggest challenge of adulthood. We've talked about it before on the podcast but like I Yeah, I mean, that's something that I still struggle with all the time. Am I doing a good job of listening to this person or am I projecting my own feelings and ideas onto them?

Hank: Yeah, and I'll say, Anna, that the number one first step is to realize you're doing it, which I don't think most people even do, and oftentimes I forget that I'm doing it, and so that the real strategy is to just know you're doing it, and, you know, you can try to project, you can try to And I will say, what? Why would you have chosen to do that thing?". And she's like, what do you mean? This is totally a thing that I would do.

And I'm like, I. guess I guess I just have to work harder on understanding who you are still.

John: Yeah, I think, in fact, I just did this to you, maybe, Hank. Right before we started recording the podcast, we were talking and... I accused you of pontificating from a place of knowledge when in fact it's possible that you were just being yourself and I was feeling defensive about my lack of knowledge about something. and in general like it's all it's just so so hard to listen to even the people you're closest to. it's so hard to sort of put yourself out of it because of course like everything that you hear is filtered through yourself and through your consciousness And it's almost impossible to know when you're doing it, but just being aware of how much that's inevitably going to shape your worldview, your own experience, your own sense of self, I think sets you on the right path, hopefully.

Hank: Yes, it is a tremendous first step, and I am proud of you for making it.

John: All right, Hank, our second question comes from Emily, who's 15 and who writes, Dear John and Hank, do you have any advice for? someone who just got their driving learner's permit? I have a piece of advice, Emily. Don't drive too much. Don't drive too much.

Just drive a little bit because you, and I say this with great affection, are a danger on the roads. You are a threat to me and to my family.

Hank: Okay. Yes, and in addition to that, just know, this is very important, that you are not a good driver. This is fine?

John: Emily, I don't know if Hank and I are doing a good job of emphasizing this to you enough, so let me just underscore one other thing. You don't drive well. 

Hank: But what I mean when I say that you are not a good driver isn't that you might be a good driver, but the number one thing is to never think that you are a good driver. Because it's people who think that they are good drivers that are the most dangerous. Because they have never been in an accident because they've been driving for six months. And they're like, well, I have clearly an amazing track record.

I've never got a ticket. I've never been in an accident. I've never made a. single mistake.

And it's when you are in that space between knowing you're bad and being good. That you are the most dangerous person. That's the very dangerous place if you're learning how to fly.

That space between knowing that you suck and then actually being good. When you've stopped remembering that you're not very good, but you aren't actually very good, that's when you die. So, you're not a very good driver, and that's okay, because you're gonna get better, but carefully.

John: I never want to think that I'm a good driver. I'm always suspicious of people who are like, I'm a very good driver. The only person I've ever driven in a car with who said I'm a good driver and I believed them was a professional race car driver.

Hank: They are good drivers.

John: He was fundamentally different. As a driver from everyone else I've ever driven with.

Hank: Well, I'll also say that I've driven with professional drivers who are pretty amazing. Taxi cab drivers in London, I felt, are just amazing drivers. And we also were driven on John's Fault in Our Stars tour by Julie, who was an amazing driver. And she was for years a. truck driver.

John: And when you're with an amazing driver like Julie, one of the things that you recognize immediately is that You are not very good at this. It's not until you're with a driver like Julie that you realize that there's a whole world to driving. that you just don't understand. There's a whole world to being ready for any emergency that most of us just haven't reached yet. And so I think the number one thing that most of us who are bad drivers like Hank and Emily and myself, the number one thing that we can do is remember that we are bad and try to drive defensively and carefully.

Now obviously you don't want to drive in fear, but you should drive defensively and carefully and you should remember Never drive drunk, never drive when you are in any way impaired, and assume that everyone else on the road is a terrible distracted driver. Emily, I'm sorry if it sounds like our advice is a little firm on this one, but I just... 

Hank: What it comes down to is that driving is the most dangerous thing that we do, and we should be careful.

John: Driving is. not the most dangerous thing that I do, Hank, but you're not a risk taker.

Hank: All right, we got another question from Another Emily. Is that okay? Can we do two Emilys in a row?

John: Yeah, absolutely. Is either of them, you think, my most important ex-girlfriend or not?

Hank: Well, is your most important ex-girlfriend currently a sophomore in high school and also the smartest kid in school?

John: No and no.

Hank: All right. Well, Emily is, and if... If you go off grade point average in test scores at least, but she has this problem that she has become labeled as some and people don't notice her personality or frankly anything other than her test scores. How does she avoid and or deal with being objectified for her intelligence?

Thank you.

John: Well, I mean the first thing that I would say Emily, maybe this is the same Emily who's a driver because they're both 15.

Hank: Maybe. Well, They do seem to be roughly the same age.

John: On the other hand, my understanding is that of that generation of young Americans, about 75% of the women are named Emily. 

Hank: I think there may be a lot of Emilys, yes.

John: So Emily, the first thing that I would say is that you have to remember that intelligence is separate from test scores and really any other metric, right? To me, Test scores reflect not intelligence, but hopefully, if the tests are good, mastery of material. So it's not about potential, it's about achievement, although I don't think that what's easily quantified is often a particularly good measure of achievement or understanding. Assuming that we're talking about achievement and understanding and being able to contextualize your life better in the universe than most people, there's nothing to resent about that.

Well, 

Hank: I think that what Emily is saying isn't necessarily that she is the smartest, like she started out that way by saying she's the smartest kid in school, but what she's saying is she has this problem that Maybe she doesn't even think that about herself, but that's what everybody thinks. That's the niche she has taken in school.

John: Oh, right, okay. So everyone thinks, like, they look at Emily and they think that's the smart girl. She's the smartest, yeah. And they make all of these broad conclusions about Emily based on this idea that she's the smart girl.

Hank: Right, right. And so she's being stereotyped. And of course it's not the... Of the things to be stereotyped for, being a smart girl is certainly not the worst one.

And you actually also probably get a number of advantages because people assume that you are smart and they're probably not social advantages, but they probably get extra attention from teachers and maybe even the administration and your parents and probably a lot of support. But breaking out of that and being a little sick of just being this one thing to everybody in their mind, it can be very frustrating, I would imagine.

John: No, you're right, Hank. I think that any time the world sees you as just one thing, it's exhausting because you aren't just one thing. And it's very difficult to have to constantly meet someone's expectations for what they think the smart kid is or what they think any simplistic, less than complexly human. The definition of personhood is exhausting to have to live inside.

So I think the thing that I would recommend to Emily is just to remember that, that you aren't merely the smart kid, but also to remember that like the people around you. aren't merely the boxes that you would put them in, that in fact like you're all extremely complex and like these weird huge webs of personhood. You know what I was thinking about yesterday, Hank?

Hank: What?

John: How many organisms are there inside of my body?

Hank: There's a lot.

John: I mean, are there over a billion?

Hank: Uh, living organisms? Yeah, probably.

John: There's over a billion living organisms inside of my physical corpus right now?

Hank: Uh, I would guess yes.

John: But, like, given that, given that there are over a billion things that are not me, currently inside of me, like, how, how, what can we, what, what does that even mean? What does me mean? me is really like this gigantic petri dish hosting parasites.

Hank: yeah I mean you're also. there's also a lot of you and you as well.

John: sure there's a. I'm sure there's a billion cells that are me but there's a billion cells that aren't. there's something profoundly disturbing about that to me. anyway my point Emily is that um you are not one thing you are also like a bunch of amoebas living inside of your gut or whatever. but um But if you know that. at your core, then you will chafe against other people putting you in the box. But you will also make it ultimately, I think, make it harder for people to put you in that box.

Hank: Yes. But I would also say that the probably most common thing that people do when they find themselves in this place is that they rebel against that image of themselves. But I would say do your best not to do that because rebelling against being the smart Dont make yourself dumb, make yourself more complicated Badness associated with it, because you're smart, and you should be smart, and there's nothing wrong with that.

John: I totally agree, Hank. Can I ask you another question? Do it! Alright Hank, this question comes from Walker, who asks, Dear John and Hank, I've been having a problem lately where I feel annoyed at myself for watching and enjoying other people's creations without myself creating something worth sharing.

I feel kind of like a short sale, I guess. What should I do to start creating and to live with my human need for affirmation? First off, Walker, great question, and I like the fact that you acknowledged your human. need for affirmation.

I think a lot of times when I think about that question, I don't think about the affirmation side of things because in the last several years, I've been very blessed to have lots of outside affirmation for my work. I think it's really important to watch and enjoy other people's creations. I think it's really important to be an audience.

And I think that enthusiastic members of an audience are also creators. I don't think that creative work can exist independent of an audience. So don't sell yourself too short being a passionate member of an audience, because that is a kind of creation.

You are making up the things that you watch and read and enjoy. with the people who made them and they wouldn't exist without you in the sense that you sort of make it real in a different way when you read a novel than when anyone else reads the novel because you are translating the words into ideas in your head. But I totally understand that urge to make things as well. And I think Hank and I started out making uh. online video in large part because we enjoyed being. part of online video. uh audiences so much that we were like oh we should be on the other side of the camera.

Hank: yeah indeed that is that is. uh that is how that started. i yeah i think that the hard part of creation is getting past the part where you're doing it and no one's paying attention because you're not that good at it. um the great thing about Like the wonderful thing that happened to me and John is that online video was so new that even if we were pretty bad, we were better than the rest of what was happening, which was nothing. And so there just wasn't a lot going on, and so it was easier to stand out. And then as online video grew, we got to get better at making videos along with the growth of online video. And now we are fairly good at it.

And we got so lucky and nobody gets that lucky. And yeah, nobody gets that lucky. And so you have to push yourself to make things because knowing that some of the things you're going to make aren't going to be appreciated because maybe they just. aren't going to be that good or maybe because it's very difficult to find an audience for creations whether or not they are good sometimes in this world.

John: Yeah, I mean, you got to take a certain amount of pleasure and joy in the act of making something. And something that I've realized now that I have an audience is that, you know, at least for me, when it comes to writing, having an audience doesn't help me write. It doesn't help. It ultimately, I think, doesn't motivate me.

I have to find pleasure and joy in the act of making the gift regardless of whether I think that anyone will enjoy or appreciate the gift. I have to find a way to love making the thing or else ultimately I will never make it. So you've got to find some, at least to me, you have to find some pleasure in the process and some joy in the process.

And honestly, it's only been in the last couple of months when I really started Loving writing again and loving being inside of a story that I've been able To make. well what I hope anyway is real is real. progress Despite you know spending the last three years trying to work on a novel and like being very conscious of Of an audience and and which I'm very grateful for but I think ultimately you've got to find pleasure in the making of something.

Hank: John I have been thinking a thing and I haven't run it by anyone yet. So would you mind if I run it by you now?

John: Yeah, sure. No, it's not like anyone's listening.

Hank: I think that there's only two things. There's how you feel, and there's how effective you are. And those are the two things that we're all trying to craft for ourselves. The direction the effectiveness goes in, whether that's to make your family happy and healthy and stable, or whether it's to take over a company and become powerful and control other people's lives, or if it's to cure malaria.

Trying to make this irrelevant to morality, but just say there's two things. There's your mood and there's your effectiveness. And the goal is to maximize the number of days when you feel happy and pleasant and then at the same time maximize your ability to have effects on the world.

And ideally I hope that those effects are positive because that's the kind of effect people want to have. Do you think that there are more than those two things?

John: Yes, I think that is a radical oversimplification of human life. I also think that like a lot of your proposals for worldviews, it excludes the absolute obsolescence that everything that humans do and make and are will fall into. Like everything that we think and Do and Make and all of the love that we feel for each other and everything, everything about people, every human creation and every human being will fall into an absolute black hole and there will be no legacy from anything.

Hank: We're all going to die.

John: No, not just that we're all going to die, but that like...

Hank: Everything's going to stop exist. Right. Like, I mean, I'm not forgetting the entire theme of our podcast.

John: It's a comedy podcast.

Hank: About death.

John: Not just death, but the absolute universal obsolescence of all things, including the universe itself.

Hank: But I think that when we talk about effectiveness, like we talk about affecting the things that we care about.

John: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think like, so my argument, my counter argument is that you're oversimplifying because people don't want to be like capital E effective. They want to be effective in certain ways. And the reason they want to be effective in various ways is about more than mood and urge toward effectiveness.

Like I think that I think that culture and the social order shape. 

Hank: Well, what's the fun in that, though? Maybe we should just put that on a bumper sticker. This is a more complicated stew than you can fit on a bumper sticker, on a bumper sticker.

John: Right, my consciousness is a more complicated stew than you can fit on a bumper sticker. A bumper sticker available now at DFTBA.com. Today's podcast is brought to you by DFTBA.com, your friendly internet e-tailer for Dear Hank and John merchandise that does not exist yet. This podcast is brought to you by the smartest kid in school, the smartest kid in school Hank, I think we have time for one more question before we get to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

This question is from Alex. He writes, Dear John and Hank, what do you think of English class? I can wholeheartedly say that the only thing I've gotten out of all the classes I've taken is an increased vocabulary.

I don't think that reading anything that's been assigned to me has helped me with anything else in life. For some perspective, I just graduated high school and will be majoring in computer science at university. Maybe it just doesn't help me yet, but I can't help but feel like I've wasted a lot of time reading these books and I just see English class as someone telling me how to have fun.

Well, Alex, you're not going to like my answer. You might like Hank's answer. Everybody wants me to say that English classes are useless and that they like kill books by dissecting them and they take the soul out of reading and yada yada yada and I just don't agree with that at all.

I feel like if you haven't gotten anything out of English class that might be the fault of your English teachers but it's most likely your fault. Because, you know, we have this glorious record of human storytelling that stretches back more than a thousand years, where we can understand, like, what mattered to. people and why. What mattered to Nathaniel Hawthorne?

What mattered to Shakespeare? What mattered to Chaucer? And then, you know, what mattered to Homer when he was writing The Odyssey?

But even putting that aside, to me, the most important thing that we get from English class is an understanding of non-literal communication. And I would argue that essentially all of the most important communication is non-literal, that symbolism and metaphor are the main ways that we approach one another as human beings and the main ways that we seek to understand each other. I cannot really talk to you about my soul, about the experiences and I mean some would argue that like language is inherently symbolic and that when you for instance are engaging in computer science like you are essentially trying to use this symbolic language to translate ideas that exist in your mind into programs that can be useful to people which is what literature is trying to teach. but putting that aside because I know Hank will disagree with me there I think that like trying to understand how we use language symbolically to communicate ideas to each other is absolutely essential like that is. something that's really really important and the truth is that the books that you read in high school are very useful for that.

Now Hank is going to disagree with me because I know he didn't read any of the books in his high school English class and now he has this incredibly sophisticated symbolic imagination, which he absolutely does, but that's my own experience of the benefit of high school English classes. is that for me it was a way into reading about the ways that people who live lives very distant from mine approach the big questions of being a person and then secondarily learning about symbolism and metaphor as a way of communicating. 

Hank: Alex, I hope that I have a satisfactory answer for you as well as John's very satisfactory answer, but maybe one that will hit a little closer to home for your clearly analytical mind. We're really bad at knowing what affects us. We're really bad at knowing what builds us and what makes us who we are. I...

Felt the same way as you when I graduated from school, that I had gone through a lot of classes that didn't have a serious impact. on me. And yet, when I look back at how I felt and saw the world when I was a freshman in high school versus how I saw and felt about the world when I was a senior in high school, those things changed dramatically. And it was a combination of all of the classes that I took, a combination of all of the things that I learned, and also things that I learned outside of class.

I don't know that. we know how deeply we have been built by the things that we are asked to read or engage with in school or in life. I truly feel that I am constructed out of the conversations I've had and the stories that I've had and the thoughts that I've had and the things that have been shared with me. And hopefully in your English class as well as in other things like you have been constructed into a more full and interesting person and that might not help you with your computer science degree but it might very well help you with asking interesting questions about your past and your future and engaging with other people in the world. that you are going to inhabit for the next hopefully 60 or 70 years of your life.

John: So I was going to say at least 200.

Hank: Well, you never know.

John: Let's give the man some credit. He lives in a glorious future that you and I will never glimpse Hank because we are so much older than he is. I suspect I'm going to take the over-under on his remaining years at 100. You think so?

Hank: That's great news for Alex.

John: No, congratulations Alex on what will no doubt, now that I have gambled on you, be an incredibly long life.

Hank: All right, well maybe Alex will be the one who codes his consciousness into a computer for the very first time and then Alex's consciousness will become sort of the overarching morality of the entire world and will control all of our actions but in a way that makes us live happy and fulfilled lives.

John: No pressure, Alex. Let's get to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Hank, what's the news from Mars so that I can get to the amazing news from Wimbledon?

Hank: Well, John, as you know... On the surface of Mars are... Boring!

John: Sorry, what?

Hank: The news from Mars is that, as you know, John, there are these features called recurring slope lineae, which have been showing up in areas of Mars that are... Deep depressions, they show up in the summer months, so when it's warmer, and there's much debate about what these things are made of, and they look for all the world like water seeping into the sand of Mars. They come in the summer, they flow down the slopes, and then in the winter they seem to just sort of evaporate slowly. But they show up pretty fast, and these are an area of tremendous interest and stud- There's no super consensus, but most people think that it's probably super salty water, super salty liquid water pouring down the slopes of Martian craters and valleys.

And that is very cool. But now there is a huge amount of discussion going on, not just about what these things are made of and their properties and where they're coming from, how the water might be being recharged, but how we might And the potential problems that might show up when exploring them because it may be that these areas are very muddy and. so a rover would just sink right in. It's also if there's going to be an existing ecology on Mars then it's very likely that this is a place where that ecology would be thriving because there's liquid water.

And if there is liquid water and there is an ecology, then we have to be very careful about exploring that area because if there's any earth-born bacteria that is introduced to this environment that could potentially survive, that they could totally wreck the existing ecology and ruin our... One chance, possibly our only chance, to ever observe non-terrestrial life and how it might have evolved on another planet. So, there is a very heated discussion going on in the Mars community right now, particularly... particularly regarding the Mars 2020 rover that will hopefully land on Mars in the 2020s and whether that rover should investigate these things particularly because they might be an ecological place or whether these RSLs, as they're called, should be Preserved as a kind of like an area of Mars that should not be ventured into until we know more about it and until we have a better ability to explore without the possibility of bacterial. contamination.

So that's what's going on in the news from Mars today, which I just think is fascinating.

John: Well, let me just tell you that the possibility of bacterial contamination is a hundred percent, if I've learned anything today. It's that my body is crawling with trillions of bacteria, that I have more cells that are not me inside of me than I have cells that are me, so I cannot go to Mars and touch anything, or I will smear it in bacteria that is from Earth.

Hank: That is correct, John.

John: Well, Hank, that put me in the darkness, but I'll tell you what put me in the light. Last weekend... AFC Wimbledon were playing Notts County, League 2 rivals Notts County. Hank, I know you're familiar with Notts County.

It's where the Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin Hood, etc. lived. Of course. So Notts County Football Club is a well-established club in the Football League.

AFC Wimbledon, of course, has only been in the league since 2011, and they were down 1-0. to Notts County in the 85th minute. You could just imagine the darkness, Hank, as we were looking down the table thinking, are we going to be? in those relegation spots? Are we going to be leaving the football league?

Are we going to be relegated to the conference so that we're not even a full-time professional team anymore and you won't see us in FIFA 17? Or instead, are we going to go from 1-0 down to 2-1 up? That's what happened, Hank.

In the 85th minute, we were down 1-0. But then, a miracle happened, and we scored two goals in the final five minutes of the game to come from behind before 4,000 people, 2,000 of whom were in the John Green stand, and win 2-1 against Notts County. You'll never guess who scored the second goal, Hank.

Just kidding, you will. It was the Beast, Adubayo Akinfenwa. Our greatest player, the largest man in professional football, the strongest player in FIFA 16, the beast!

Adebayo Akan Fenwa scores in the 90th minute. AFC Wimbledon come from behind to win against Notts County. Suddenly we are 12th in League 2.

We have a zero goal differential, which means we've scored as many goals over the course of the season as we've given up. I am full of hope. I am beginning to dream.

Oh, it was beautiful.

Hank: That sounds really exciting, John.

John: Oh my God, you can't even, it was just, it was incredible. Two goals in five minutes to secure the victory and everything is better and different and hope springs eternal. Hope, that thing with feathers. Oh, the irrepressible, audacious thing at the heart of all human experience.

Hope emerged. That Morning in South London. I would also like to say that AFC Wimbledon, the club, this week welcomed aid workers from around the world who have been working, especially on the refugee crisis, that Wimbledon welcomed a bunch of aid workers from from around the world to South London and gave them a great experience over the weekend.

So that speaks, I think, to the kind of club that it is owned by its fans. Hank, now, now one 5600th owned by you, because I just made you a member of the Don's Trust. I just bought you a membership.

You can Google AFC Wimbledon Trust if you want to become a member of the... Hank, you can't do that because I already made you one.

Hank: Oh, thank you very much. I'm honored. What did we learn today, John?

John: Well, we. learned that it's just incredibly, incredibly important for 15-year-olds to drive carefully. And if at all possible... with an adult at all times.

Hank: We learned that both Hank and John actually think that English class is important even if John thinks that it's important in different ways than Hank does.

John: And of course we learned that the human body is not really a human body at all. Instead it's a large container of bacteria. It is essentially just a sausage casing in which the sausage is not a person but is a teeming mass of Parasites. Hank, do you remember when you tried to comfort me by telling me that there was only like eight to ten pounds of bacteria inside of my body at any given moment?

Hank: I said three to eight.

John: 3-8, oh sure, there's only 3-8. First off, that's an incredibly wide range. How do I get one of the bodies that has 3 pounds of bacteria? I don't want one of the bodies that has 8 pounds.

Hank: Well, people are very different sizes, I don't know if you've done that.

John: That probably means that I'm on the bigger side, so great. I probably have 6 pounds. of bacteria inside of me right now. 6 pounds of not me inside of me. Now whenever anyone asks for my weight, I'm going to give my weight minus 6 pounds. Because that isn't my weight, it's the bacteria inside of me.

Hank: Oh man, I hope that I'm right about this 6 pounds of bacteria thing.

John: Whatever, if we're not, we'll correct it in next week's podcast. Our podcast is edited by our good friend Nick Jenkins.

Hank: The theme music is from Gunnarolla.

John: And if you want to email us, you can do so at hankandjohn at gmail dot com. We'll try to answer as many of your questions as possible. You can also follow us on the Twitter Twitter, Hank Green and John Green, or on Instagram, where Hank is HankGreen and I am JohnGreenWritesBooks, the worst Instagram username ever. Sorry.

Hank: Well, I haven't been using Instagram at all lately, so you can follow me on Snapchat, it's hankgre.

John: God, I wish you would get over Snapchat.

Hank: I love Snapchat so much.

John: Thank you so much for listening, and as we say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.