Hank: Good morning, John. So I just finished talking with my therapist, which is a thing I do now, and I'm gonna do some open talking here, even though I do feel shame about showing weakness. I don't think I'm afraid to be weak, I think I'm ASHAMED to be weak. I feel like I don't have good enough reasons because, of course, I have it very good.

BUT I finished chemo around 18 months ago, and I think that I'm pretty much where I'm gonna get in terms of recovery. And it's pretty good, I got all my fingertips again… not—actually, now that I'm doing that one, still, still a little tingly, but I could feel— it's like, not a problem, obviously, for my everyday life, but like, a little reminder! For clarity, sometimes chemotherapies cause nerve damage, and I got a little bit of that.

I also have nerve pain where I had the radiation on top of the surgeries. That's very normal. But again, I don't feel that unless I'm doing certain activities, so I can sit here right now and feel no pain anywhere on my body.

Like, there's a little ache in my knee and then it turns out I have a little bit of a headache, but I didn't notice before I have checked, so can't be that bad. So body-wise, aside from an increased risk of secondary cancers, I am pretty much unscathed. I think sometimes people miss that, with cancer treatment, people almost always exist with a different level of ability afterwards, sometimes with serious disabilities.

Just because you're done with treatment doesn't mean you're done. You still gotta do stuff and work hard and get through it, and you should understand that about people in your lives who have dealt with cancer treatment. Just a tip!

Now I am still, at the moment, roughly at the peak of odds of relapse, which is not super fun. And one of the things I'm supposed to be doing during this time is not being too stressed out, which is a goal that I have not accomplished, but we don't accomplish all of our goals. But I am getting to the point where, in the future, my odds of relapse, pretty soon, are going to start going down, where it's going to get less and less likely that I will relapse.

That's, like, at month 24, so I'm close. This is actually a level of granularity I probably shouldn't have, but I have it and it does inform the way I move through the world. But of course, there's more to it than just the body, mentally, it's been a bit of a trial.

I am way more anxious and maybe have a little less energy than I used to, though I think those two things might be related. Like, if I didn't have as much of the anxiety, then I probably would HAVE more energy. And then also, like, noticeably, substantially worse short-term memory.

This is hard for me. Having a brain that does not function the way I expect it to is almost existentially weird. I'm, like, working with a different set of tools than I had before.

And that's an adjustment in terms of, like, how I deal with, like, life. You know, I have to do more note taking. I have to make sure I write stuff down really quick if I'm thinking of it or else it goes away forever.

So there's like, logistical ways I have to deal with it, but also just the—like, I don't like to think that my mind was changed by cancer treatment, but I have evidence that it WAS changed, and that's uncomfortable. But, you know... I'M NOT DEAD! And maybe we are all just a bunch of ships of Theseus pretending to not be ships of Theseus, but I feel like more of a ship of Theseus than I used to.

Whether the short-term memory loss or the anxiety are worse, for me, it's probably the anxiety. My therapist says that I may not have  an anxiety disorder. It is instead, totally possible that I'm just having  a normal response to a life that contains a lot of responsibilities and threats.

That seems right to me, though of course, we're gonna keep working on it, because the combination of work-anxiety and health-anxiety have resulted in a lot of less sleep than I'd like to be having. And that increases my health anxiety because I think "if I don't sleep, my immune system's gonna let the cancer come back" or something like that. And then that increases the lack of sleep, and then all of that makes me worse at work because I'm tired all the time and cranky.

But I'm working on it. One thing I will say, though, is coming back into it, coming back into work, I am, I'm a fan—like, I'm a fan of stuff. I love being a fan of stuff and then getting to, like, do stuff, like, I'm a fan of Dropout and then I got to do my comedy special on Dropout and I got—I'm, like, in the next season of Smartypants, very exciting for me.

But I am a huge fan of the stuff the teams at DFTBA and Good.Store and Complexly do in the world. And I feel very lucky that I get to be involved in that.

But also, all those ideas have been incubated right here in Nerdfighteria, and they have sprung forth from the values of Nerdfighteria. And I just want you to know that the energy for their initial existence and a lot of their energy for their perpetuation come from this community right here. It's a small community of people that have done really big things in the world, and I'm really happy to be a part of that, because I'm a fan of this community and I'm a fan of all that stuff that got happened.

But, a quick example of how this small group of people makes, like, really big things happen. You might think that when we do, like, a call to action on SciShow for a SciShow fundraiser, that would convert a lot of people to give money to SciShow, but in fact, WAY more people in this community actually respond to calls to action. And I'm not saying everybody does. It's still a minority, of course, because most people don't have the money to spend or want to spend it other ways, but the response rate is much higher!

And I think that is in part because the people here understand that SciShow exists because we made it exist! And it is not an inevitability! You understand that it's not inevitable if you are part of the creation of the thing!

To people in the SciShow audience, they only came in after it started existing. They don't understand that it's not inevitable. They don't understand in the same way that a world without it could easily exist.

And that world would be worse because we desperately need accurate, well-crafted science information that is also popular so that it can bring people into a respect for the power of scientific tools and scientific thinking. And of course, that work is hard. It's harder than I think a lot of our audience thinks it is, and the people who do it should be able to focus on that work.

When I tell you that  we definitely need crowdfunding to make SciShow possible, you know that's true. And you also know that our money is where our mouth is, because you know that all the ad sales from Dear Hank and John— which, I have not yet recorded my EveryPlate ad, but I'm going to right after this—all of them, that money goes instead of to us, which would be the normal way for a podcast to go, if two guys hosting a podcast, the money would normally go into their pockets, instead, that money goes to Complexly. At some point, ideally that wouldn't be the case, but right now, Complexly needs that money.  And you also know that half of the money from this channel goes to support up-and-coming online educators and the other half goes to Partners in Health.

Or maybe you don't know that, but you know that now. But also you may not know that, right now and until the end of next week, we're selling SciShow postcards signed by me and the rest of the hosts. There are four of them and you don't know which one you're gonna get and each one of them contains a link to a different exclusive video from me where I tell you one of my four favorite frog facts.

Which frog fact will you get? You do not know, unless you get all four and then you get all four frog facts. I just want to support what they do so bad, and if you have $25 to spend, you can get that postcard, or if you have $60, you can get all four.

Plus, you can help us keep driving to model good scientific thinking to a whole world of people far beyond Nerdfighteria. It's just, like, a long list of amazing things we have built together. Like, I can't even go through all of it.

But also, one of the things is the Project for Awesome, which is coming up soon. And separately from SciShow, if you are the kind of person who can donate more than $500 and would like to join our matching fund, there is a form linked in the description, and when you click “send”, that will go to—I'm not kidding—our dad, who runs the matching donor program. Matching donors are proven to increase donations overall and we are so grateful to all of them.

It's a big deal. I am really proud of what this community has created. Even if it all just stopped today, it would be one of the coolest things that has ever happened on the Internet.

And even though it is hard and I never quite know if I'm doing the right thing the right way, you gotta do what you can. We do not do these things because they are easy. We do them because we thought they would be easy and now we care too much about them to stop, but if they would be, like, a little less hard for a couple of months, no one would complain.

Please and thank you, Jesus. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. Again, SciShow postcards and matching donor links in the description.

Don't let the video end without clicking and when you click, you consider, you know, you go and you consider and you are always most obligated to make responsible financial decisions. Thank you again. John, I'm doing okay.

I could use a break. But I'm not gonna get one for a while. But then I will get one and that will be good.

Also, I want to show you this. Made this during break while trying to recenter my brain. And I would like you to see who sits in this beautiful little building that I created with Catherine.

It's Beanie's office. You see him in there? The little guy?

Isn't that a nice little place he's got there? Well I love it.