Mars News and AFC Wimbledon

Hello everyone. Before we get started, I want to tell you about humans. Humans is a podcast where I talk to people about the questions that I have about being a person. And sometimes those conversations are with people who have just had experience being people like my brother or the editor of the New York Times Game Connections. These are just people who've like done it and tried weird stuff, and so I want to talk to them about how they do it. But I also am talking to people who have maybe some special insight into what's going on with humans like Hannah Richie, who is a data scientist who studies our impact on the climate or Jennifer Schuba, who studies demography and what it means for humans that people are having fewer kids than they used to. I also just had a conversation with the author of the warriors books. These are books about cats that live in the woods. I did not realize that this was a person who would have so much insight into humanity and also into the responsibilities that we have when we create content for children . That conversation was so good. It's gonna be a while before it comes out, but oh my god, so yeah, I'm talking to authors and actors and astrophysicist s, and it's cool. And it's really interesting and fun and I've really been enjoying it. I'm so glad it's finally out into the world. The overall conceit is just that it's good to take a little time to zoom out sometimes, to understand that the thing that we are is very weird and unique in the history of our Earth and also the known universe and we don't know how to do it. No one's ever been the kind of thing that we are. And so we have to figure this out. And so I want to talk to people about figuring it out. New episodes come out every Thursday. You can find it wherever you get podcasts. All you gotta do is search humans. And then if that doesn't work, add my name onto the end and you'll find it. First episode is with John Green, a guy you've probably heard of, and I'm pretty sure it's out now. You're listening to a complexly podcast Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Yours I prefer to think of a dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you Dubious advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, my supervisor told me that I was just terrible at my job managing trains . And he said, What have you been responsible for three derailments in the last year? And I said, It's just hard to keep track . Oh , I did, I did my best. You know, I was going off the top of the head there without one. . Well, it never it never really hooks me when you imply that you have a real job . It can't it can't that can't be it would be awfully weird if I was also managing trains. So listen, we have some breaking news for our listeners to the last few episodes. Hank has read my book . It's true. It's true. I have. It's true I have. I've been overwhelmed with your book. It's as Mom told me , I've never been so surprised by a John Green book. There is great plot, there's great twists , there's great mattering , etc Well, thanks. I hope that, uh I don't know if it's good or not to be surprised by a John Green book, but I feel like it's significantly plottier than a lot of your books. It is significantly plottier than a lot of my books. I decided to write a plot . Yeah . There are things, there's like little things that people are figuring out. I almost called it the trauma plot . Oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, because it's about the trauma plot . I tell ya, I don't know, you said something great to me recently, which is just like we've been lucky to avoid a number of fates. Yeah . And we've met a lot of people who don't don't necessarily feel as if they have suffered from the fates that they have met, but like it kind of feels like they have. And I don't know. I guess from outside every it's easy to feel different ways, but I'm just glad to be living this life. Yeah, me too . I feel like I got out of fame About as well as you can get out of it . And the kids in the book aren't quite so lucky, but not . They also you know what the book is really about in the end . And I've been thinking about this because I've been reading first pass , you know, and that then you read it sort of separate from yourself and you read it as a book for the first time because it's laid out as a book in the font and everything. And I've been thinking that like one of the hardest things about being a kid and learning too soon that adults are not always protectors is that when you're a kid, the only thing you have to give is love , you know? Like you don't have resources, you don't have expertise or whatever, but you have your love. And when that's misused, it's so destructive and devastating , but what Kai and Juniper are after in the book is the kind of love that sustains you, that is enough that, you know, that both giving it and receiving it is enough on its own . And that's what the book's about in the end, which is, which is ultimately hopeful, but they have to they go through some hard times for sure. Yeah , yeah. We're very lucky. Lucky, I mean mom and dad are so . Yeah, they're really good parents. We got we won the parent lottery. We also sort of won the spousal lottery. It's true . Yeah . So that really matters, I think, because when I was a kid, I had that, you know, sustaining love for my parents that a lot of people unfortunately don't have . And then for the last twenty years of my life, I've had this other relationship that's been really key to me being semi functional. Yeah, we also won the Brother Lottery, but let's not talk too much about that. Would be too cute . Yeah, it's true. We did win that one as well. So things are good, life is good I'm really nervous about the book, but that's life, man That's life. You gotta put yourself out there. Gotta stuff. I was hoping you were going to say like, don't be nervous about this book, but instead you were like, yeah, I get it . And not because I don't think it's good. It's heavy. Yeah. Yeah . All right, I should say the name of the book it's Hollywooding. It E comndes out on september twenty second. Sign copies are available for Proter now wherever you get your books. Let's answer some questions from our listeners. This first one comes from Hollywood Ending No, sorry, Petra their name. Dear Anta, John, I recently bought new shoes and I've ended up with a collection of scabs across my feet. It's made me wonder why is the healing process always so itchy? I'm starting with a science question, John. It's almost like the body doesn't want to actually heal. Come on. Every time I scratch the scab s, sometimes I just can't help it, I end up with a wound and that has to start the healing process all over again, not to mention the risk of getting infected. Why are our bodies sabotaging us in this way? It feels like a huge evolutionary design faw. Thank you for your answer. I've been really scratching my brain about this, Vetra. Don't scratch your brain, by the way. That's really to be avoided. God, that sounds painful . Actually, I bet you wouldn't feel it. Worse . That sounds worse . So Hank, I have a theory about this and you're going to come up with some evolutionary reason why we have to itch or whatever, but I have a theory about this, which is that we often forget that evolution isn't finished, it isn't perfect. It got good enough. It was like, this is good enough to sustain this form of life. And that's all we need to be. We don't need to be better than good. Yeah . No, I think I think that there's like that is certainly one line of thinking on this topic particularly, where it's like, okay, so what's happening is there's a bunch of immune cells doing immune cell things and when they do their thing, they release histamine and that has advantages for wound healing and stuff, but it also makes it itchy. And like that should , like, in an ideal world, maybe those two things wouldn't be tied together, but they are. But there's like a reason why this itchiness happens, like maybe just to call attention to a part of the body that needs some assistance . No , but it's just not a good it's just not like a good signal . I don't agree. No, 'cause all it does is reopen the wound. Right. I know I don't mean like in the situation of a Oh, you mean cellularly? Yeah, I mean like itchiness sometimes provides an advantage. Like if you get if something's currently biting you, you want to be like ah and like know that that's going on. But then like your immune cells are just making a thing happen that is not in this case providing any value. There might be some value to sort of being aware of the injury , but like you'd think that pain would do that on its own. You wouldn't need itchiness to go along with it. I think the itch instinct is so overrated. It's just so like it's so not understood. It is a real mystery. And it's misery . Yeah. Like people who itch all the time, it's misery . Yeah. I know that because you've had shingles for the last year. Shingles continues to itch and it is not so bad that I am in anything like misery. I can mostly not scratch it, but it's crazy and it was so much worse than it was bad. And indeed I did inj ure myself through scratching, which is not uncommon with shingles. Wow. Yeah, wow . But yeah, it's really I mean, I'm sure it's possible to resist the urge to scratch an itch. I've just never done it. Yeah, I mean, I think it's possible to do it when the when it's a mild itch, but like eventually it gets so intense. Like it's crazy. You're just completely, there's no way to control the body. Yeah , yeah . It's such a strong impulse. You know what else is a strong impulse, Hank? Yes. The impulse to write acknowledgements when you write a novel. This next question comes from Halle who writes dear, John and Hank. I just finished listening to the audio book of the glass house, the glass hotel, sorry , sorry, Emily St. John Mandel , which is very good. And I realized that I have not heard the acknowledgements read as part of an audiobook. Why are the acknowledgements always cut out of audiobooks? John said he might not do acknowledgements in his new book Hollywood Ending available for pre order now. Thank you, Halley. But have all his previous acknowledgements already been cut from his audiobooks? Think of all the people who have been thanked in print, but not through audio, Halle, L uya I had never even noticed. I feel like sometimes there's acknowledgements in audio. Very rare. Usually not. Yeah. Usually there are not acknowledgements . And I remember with the, if I remember correctly, with the Fault Nar Stars Audiobook, they had me come in and read the little author's note, which was like an attempt to scold the reader away from reading my biography into the novel, which of course was wildly unsuccessful. Best of luck I've thought about writing a similarly scaly author's note for this novel and realized that I have no chance of success . I don't know , I don't know. You can communicate something But like you don't, you also don't want to end like ruin the end of the book, you know? It's like the book should be about the book and not like turn the page and then suddenly I'm drawn out of it. That's what I would worry more about. That's why the acknowledgements in this book are very brief and I think they're going to be on the copyright page. Now the copyright page is the copyright page is pretty full yeah, so I don't exactly know what I'm going to do. I put the acknowledgements at the beginning of looking for Alaska in my first novel and I thought that worked pretty well because I just what I don't like is you get to the end of a novel and you're having this experience that like if it works, right? Like the great thing about reading a novel is you get to the end of it and you wish you could spend more time with these characters and like you're really grateful to have met them and like you feel really moved and you feel like you're living in a fictional universe and you're inside of someone else's mind and it's just a magical feeling. And then you turn the page and it's like, my agent is amazing . I've got two solutions for this problem that I'm excited about. Okay, give it to me. Because I need this advice right now. So one is you put the acknowledgements right in the middle of the book. , so just while like so we're in between part one and part two when you huge finger like huge jockey in yeah yeah at a moment when you got them you know you're, like I don',t want to interrupt you at the end of the book. I want you to have some time to think, but while I've got you , my agent is amazing . And then but my second idea is for the audiobook specifically. Here's my idea. I like this idea. You have the characters from the book to a podcast about all the people that you want to acknowledge. That's good. It's good. It's like a forty minute add on to the to the original book in which you just like hire some actors to play the part of the already hired actors to play the parts, right? So like Hollywood ending has two narrators. Oh, okay. And there's going to be two narrators for the audio book, I assume . And then so you just have them have a conversation about how great my agent is. Jodie Bremer, by the way, she is great . Exactly . Yeah . Yes , one hundred percent of that . But they can also talk about some other stuff, other book stuff. It's like it's like a podcast epilogue. Do you have a favorite audiobook narrator ? No, no, no. Okay, so I do. And I'm trying to get I won't say her name but it's a her. I'm trying to get her to do the juniper parts of the Hollywood ending audiobook and I am stinking nervous. I feel like I'm trying to like cast a movie with , you know, Julia Roberts or Wara Dern or whatever in it. You know, like I'm going I'm swinging for the fences here, hank. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I sent Helen Hunt my my book and I told her she would be great for the agent in that book , Jennifer Putnam and she was like, I hate her. That would be great. I would love to play that part. She read the book. Helen Hunt read your book. Oh man . Yeah . So so I guess whoever put takes the book out next to try and get it made into a Helenhard already attached Helenhond's attached . I have our shared agent in Hollywood, Cassie Evashevsky, who's also great because she deserves to be in the acknowledgements, even though she won't be because there will be no acknowledgements. Maybe this is the acknowledgements episode. Yeah, there were no two acknowledgements here. I want to acknowledge Hank Green, my parents . They did a great job, my spouse, my children, who sacrificed so much in the writing of this book, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway , Cassie is always like , why are agents in all books always such terrible people ? Because you know, Cassie is not a terrible person. Ty's not a terrible person at all And in fact, like she read my new book and she was like, she was like, well, I mean, I loved it. But and I did feel like you at least made the agent a human . And I was like, thank you, Cassie. And she was like, I didn't always like him, but I liked him occasionally, which is more than can be said for most agents . I mean, I remember my Vidcon's agent, Brent reading my book and I was like, does this sound like something agents would do? And he was like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, no, I mean all I do any of that. Yeah. Yeah. Not just other agents , me . Yeah . What does Matthew Malone say in Hollywood ending? They're snakes, but they're my snakes . Yeah , but they're only your snakes so long as they think that you're , worth it. Yeah, well, Matthew Moon doesn't have to worry about that anymore. He sure doesn't . He's got it all figured out . He's he's done it. He's done it. He made it. He made it to the top of the mountain. We're talking about a book no one can read for three months . But the pre orders are very important, so if you're feeling at all excited about it, pre orders are very important. All right, this next question comes from Jess, who writes dear J,ohn and Hank. I'm a mom with four young kids. Geno. That's great. I mean, it's exciting. It's fun. Yeah, Benjamin Franklin's mom did it. Yes, but I think to get to Justice's question, we'll find that Benjamin Franklin's mom had to make a lot of sacrifices in the process. I've always been a writer and writing is such a bone deep desire that I can't let it go, but how do I do it? I have no time. When the kids do go to bed, I'm exhaust ed so I can barely write or read or anything that would be deemed productive. I know y'all don't have four kids, but parent to parent, how do you do what you love when you also love your kids and want to give them your best? No rest, just jess. It's a good specific sign off. I have no idea what it would be like to be a parent or mother of four young children. But I do know the feeling of being like , I thought I was going to write today , but I am so bone tired. It's just not going to happen . Yeah. And that's like, that's just a truth. And that's like, that can be a limitation of life. Sometimes a problem exists and it is not really there to be solved and there's other value . But it does sound like you really want to be doing this . I find with a surprising amount of creativity in storytelling , which and almost like I remember , I used to tell Orange story every night that I just sort of makeup on the spot. And I recently asked him if he missed those stories because he's like getting older and like we don't tell those kinds of stories anymore and we read like chapter books. And he was like, yeah, like no more bugs. And I was like, Oh , that's the one that stuck with you. And which was about a space station . And that was like literally me telling a kid version of a book that I was writing and probably will never finish . And that was like really interesting work to try and tell the kid version because it set me up to explore the story in a different way and explore the universe in a different way and like also the physical space of that world , you know, like of the space station . And it was like pretty inspiring to me. Now it's not the same as sitting down and writing all that stuff down, but it is like kind of still doing the work . Well, hopefully it exercises some of the same muscle, right? And then also allows you to build a little bit of a world so that when it comes to or when you do have time to write, if you have time to write, then you can do that . Practically , you know, when my kids were really little and crash course was taking off and taking up a huge amount of time . And the kids were not , I mean, they're still not self sufficient, but like , they would argue that they're self sufficient , like and that was not always the case. Like when the kids were like two and six and I was spending all day on crash course and had absolutely no time to write, I did write less right. Like functionally, I think you're right, Hank, like I wrote less and that's okay . But the way that I kept the muscle exercising was one telling stories and two waking up early . And yeah, I woke up early because I wanted to . But it's really, really hard when the kids don't go to bed till eleven to wake up at six or five or whenever you have to wake up to get an hour to write. But I do find that an hour is often enough. If I can find an hour , it gets me that gets me the thing that I need in order, not necessarily about finishing a book or publishing a book or whatever, but the thing that I need to feel well, like just as I have a bone deep desire and can't let it go and like it would feed that need . Yeah . Also, speaking of Helen Hunt, she was on my podcast. It'll be the episode not this week but next , but I talked to her and she yelled at me for having never read Bird by Bird. So I've started reading bird by bird and I would suggest bird by bird. By Ellen Wamot? Yeah, when it when it comes to figuring out how to how to like make in a busy world . Yeah . Yeah, in that book, she talks about emptying the well, which is a metaphor I use a lot. Yeah , yeah . I was crazy getting yelled at. She yelled at me so much. Did she? Was she anti hank green? No. She what she what she said was like you know everything I don't know and I know everything you don't know. She was like , you know nothing , you know nothing about literature. It's I was like, you are correct. That is right. You do know nothing about literature. That's true. She kept feeling shocked by this. Yeah, you are not Well, I was going to say you're not well read, but in fact, you're just differently read, right? Like, it's not that you don't read, it's that you read different stuff than Helen Hunt and I read. And yeah, I don't think Helen Hunts read there is no antimetics division. Like that's just not . Exactly Exactly. So there's a different there's just a different canon, and that's okay. I'm not going to yell at you about that.. Thank you I appreciate it and I would not expect you to. This next question comes from Bailey who asks, dear Hank and John, I'm a flight attendant and I often find myself staring out of the windows of planes. I'm wondering why if we're traveling at such high speed s, does it not look like we are speeding past the clouds? On takeoff and landing, you can tell we're going extremely fast, but no matter how close the clouds seem to be, we just drift through them. Boeing really fast , Bailey . I have noticed this as well and yeah I have no idea what's going on because you're not always traveling in the direction the clowns are traveling. No , that's not it. Sometimes you're traveling the opposite direction. Yeah, like a wind you're going into a headwind or whatever. So not only are you going seven hundred miles an hour, but there's like a two hundred mile an hour headwind. And yet it looks like the clouds are just floating on past. They do, even when you're quite close to them. So like so there's a few things Duboki and I yelled at each other about this. We could not figure out the answer to this question. You've been having a lot of fights with women . We didn't. We didn't yell. Okay , we disagree with a different set of language. Ellen yelled at me. Ellen hunted screamed at me. And then Duboki and I were having a massive argument and I',m like, real a blow up over cloud speed . So we're not sure. One thing to note is that you are not going full plane speed when you're going through clouds pretty much ever. So cruising altitude is going to be way up above the clouds that you tend to fly through. You're going to slow down a long way a lot on the way down or you're going to be in the process of speeding up on the way up when you actually go through the cloud layer that you tend to go through on a plane . So you're not going to full five hundred miles per hour. Regardless, though, even on the ground, you're going much slower than that, and it feels like you're going very fast. I think that this is in large part because we know what it's looks like to go fast on the ground. We know what all the stuff looks like when it's speed and past . But we don't know what clouds look like. Like we wouldn't we don't know what clouds would look like if we were going slow. No, they're weirdly structured . They're not human scale objects. What did Duboki say 'cause I'm inclined to agree with Duboki ? Duboki said that it is difficult to find a reference point for yourself. That feels more right to me Then we're used to because when I'm driving on the highway , the trees are going by very, very fast because I have a reference point in the tree . The cloud is so big and diffuse that I don't have a reference point within the cloud. If there was like, you know, a dot of pink within the cloud it would zoom past the right . The airplane, but there is no dot of pink. And these things are related in that like if I think that if we kind of had a scale for what a cloud actually looked like ? Yeah , then maybe it would feel faster, but they're so big that we don't get it. That's what I think. Yeah. I think you're entering into , I mean, I think like I saw a TikTok, so I hate myself already. I hate myself three seconds into this lock . Do you TikTok? I saw The cloud weighed like one point one million tons . Oh yeah. And I was like witch cloud for sure . That seems like a , you know, I've seen I've seen little clouds and I've seen big clouds. And so I googled it and I did a little bit of research . And it turns out like clouds can weigh one point one million tons. They can also weigh other weights because it depends a lot on the cloud. Sounds like you've looked at clouds from both sides now. I've looked at clouds. Oh no, hot sides now . Yeah, it's big it's small. So one of the things you could do to see how fast you're going on a plane is if you find your plane's shadow on the ground and then you're like, look at us going . But you can't do that if you're in the clouds, buddy. It's true. It's true . Yeah. But you know, if you're on, if you work on a plane, then you're going to get that opportunity sometimes. I like the idea that the flight attendants are looking out of the plane and being like, oh look at the well it's just nice to be in to remember that flight attendants are also astonished by the miracle of flight . Yeah, I certainly am. I am. Every time I get on an airplane, I'm like, this is amazing. I hope I don't crash and this is amazing. I just want you to know by the way that if I die in an airport or on an airplane, I died doing something I hated . Something that like I did way more than almost every other human being, but I never really enjoyed . I do I like being the part where you're pretty close to the ground, especially if you're over a city. I like that part. Yeah, it's nice to see it's nice to see the Indianapolis motor speedway from above and everything. But like yeah and I'm very, very grateful for the well trained pilots and flight attendants who make travel safe and comfortable and everything It's not it's not that I'm not grateful for it. I'm incredibly grateful for the fact that it no longer takes eight days and the entire Oregon trail to get to Los Angeles from here , but more than eight days, actually, forty days , whatever. I haven't played Oregon Trail in a while. Point being, I'm very grateful, yada yada, yada, I am . I just have never learned to love being in a metal cylinder thirty five thousand feet above the air ground with two hundred and fifty strangers. Yeah, I guess I could see that . You want to know something amazing, Hank? Yeah, sure before we move on from this. And this will amaze Jess as well . I have a real shot this year of achieving the top status, like the diamond status on all three major American airlines. Oh God , united American and Delta. I already have it on Delta. I'm already platinum on American and I'm platinum on sil on United . Oh God . It's funny. Like I only I almost always fly united and I'm nowhere near. What are you doing? Going to England? Oh , watching football . Yeah, that'll fit. But also like, you know, I'm gonna go on a book tour, so I'm gonna take like forty flights in thirty days. Oh, you're not you not getting a bus? I asked for a bus. They said no. Oh , they said it's very inconvenient to try to organize a tour around where a bus can go in eight hours. Oh, it is somewhat inconvenient for sure. Yeah . And I guess you don't have to like bring all your musical equipment with you the way that bands do. No, I don't have that excuse . Yeah . So no bus for me this time. It's gonna be united paraphernalia. You should have a you should have like pyrotechnics . Yeah, sorry, I have to be in a bus. We got to bring the pianos . Remember in twenty twelve when we toured the country in a sprinter van and we had all that merch that we were using to essentially pay you because you weren't getting paid for the month and a half or whatever that we were on the road . And so you would get the you would get the money from selling t shirts and CD's. I loved it. Did you ? I loved it. I did. Let's do it again, man. No, I didn't love it that much. You didn't love it that much . We are gonna be doing a fancy live event and I'm going to be doing a fancy live event in Los Angeles coming up but I can't tell you about it yet. Whoa, I didn't I haven't heard about this. You know about it. I heard about it. It's the complexity thing. It's the complexity thing. You know about this? You know ? No . Don't don't know about this. And cut Ooh, interesting. Yeah, cool . And we're back. Hank told me what it was. It sounds exciting. Yeah , I think I think that it will be a very good time. But it will also be a fundraiser so the tickets will cost money. All right, which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by things Hank hasn't announced yet. Somehow, a list longer even than the things Hank has announced . This podcast is also brought to you by the Miracle of Flight, the Miracle of Flight, that's enough . And today's podcast is brought to you by being a parent with four kids, being a parent of four kids. You still need to feed the meter, but it's hard. And this podcast is brought to you by agents . They're snakes, but they're my snakes. This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by Morning Brew Daily. I personally have a complicated relationship with business news because it can feel like either it was written for people who already know everything or for people who want to be angry before nine AM. Morning Brew Daily though is trying to do a different thing. It gives you the biggest business stories of the day in a way that is actually understandable and also enjoyable to listen to. The hosts, Neil Freyman and Toby Howell cover stuff that actually shapes your day and your world. Tech headlines, housing costs, markets, companies, weird consumer trends, the economy doing whatever the economy is doing this week. It's witty, it's fast moving, it's informative, it does not feel like homework. You can listen while you're commuting, making breakfast, exercising, walking around the house, holding one shoe because you cannot find the other shoe. However your morning happens. 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That's LESA. com promo code dear hank for twenty five percent off select mattresses plus an extra fifty dollars off. Show your support for the show. Let them know we sent you after check out Lisa. com promoco deer hank . Somebody observed me a wedding recently where there were a bunch of ag ents and all the agents looked exactly like agents like sure. You know, some of them were in suits and some of them were in dresses, but they all looked exactly like agents . That no one looks more like themselves than an agent , which is interesting. I just think is so deeply true . But it's for a limited audience. We're being very we're being mean, but at the same time, they're doing fine . Yeah, by the way, agents listening to this are just nodding along, hank . In their literal suits with their haircuts they got in the last two weeks My accountant is like that, I've never seen him without a fresh cut. I'll tell you what, I am impressed against my will by people who always have a fresh cut. Yeah. I gotta ask him. I've never really thought about that before, but I saw him at the grocery store yesterday and I was like, there he is looking fresh. Alright, we got another question. This one's from Mary who writes, Dear John and Hank recently a book I liked was called out on Tumblr. It's not my favorite book and some of the criticisms are reasonable, but it's very clear that a lot of the criticism is bad faith or more generously people who don't understand that their opinions are not universal. It's been bringing up a lot of unpleasant thoughts, like what if the author chooses not to write the sequel to what if I try to make something I like and end up being dog piled for it being imperfect? To if there's any point being on the internet at all when it always seems to turn out like this? It does always seem to turn out like this, doesn't it, Mary? Like no matter how much a book is loved , or how much a TV show is loved, or how much an actor is loved, it does seem like there's always a dog pile on the other side of it unless your dolly partner Keanu Reeves they figured it out. Yeah, but I bet it's very possible that in between in the five days between when we record this and when it gets uploaded dolly partner Keana Reeves will do something terrible and everybody on Tumbl willr hate them. Anyway, Mary writes as experts on Tumblr hate , and experts on seeing someone you care about get hit with unfounded criticism. Do you have any dubious advice? I wish this topic was more Mary . Aw , cute. Well, Hank, what do you think? I mean, when a book I love gets called out on Tumblr, I just I have to confess that I love the book a little more quietly because I don't want I don't want to be that person who get catches all the strays as the kids say. Yeah, no one likes catching strays which makes it harder to love things in public generally like even if even if you haven't heard criticism of something, you're like, I don't know, is there somewhere a bunch of people who like are telling me that this is actually a bad thing? Right. And so that can be tricky and then you don't, you don't ever get to love stuff in public. And I've certain ly posted about like my appreciation for something and then been told that in fact I shouldn't be appreciating it . Though I am very online, everybody. You probably don't have to worry about this, but it's a messy world. The first step for me is like checking in and being like, okay how do I actually feel about this? This is very hard, of course, because if it's inside of the sort of circle of , you the know m,osch pit of of frustrations and good and bad faith criticism. It's like one of the hardest things about being an internet person is knowing when the criticisms are good faith and even when they're bad faith when like, you know, nonetheless, maybe there's like a nugget of truth there that you have to take seriously. Right. A bad faith criticism that you can learn from , that you need to learn from is actually not that rare . But it's really hard to disentangle all those threads when someone is being kind of kind of mean . This is so there's something that I think about in this space. When somebody is like a really big and powerful deal in the world , it's there's both incentive and like reason to ask, you know, is this like could this could this be , you know, having a harm that we don't wouldn't initially imagine? Yeah , but it feels like that now happens at every level . Like or that people think that that like a book is a big deal when it's not, you know, it could be a big deal in a very small community and then you end up sort of treating something like it's the DaVinci code when it is in fact , you know some example that I'm not going to give because I don't want people to think I'm pointing out a bad book it can also seem like this is the kind of content that's just easier to pay attention to, like hearing this thing you thought was good is actually maybe bad. It's just something it feels like I must be compelled to check on that. Yeah . And so that stuff thrives and it grows and people find that they that like, you know, when you're making on the internet, the things that you feel compelled to make do tend to be the ones that get viewed more . And that's a frame that gets viewed more and it just feels like it feeds itself in a way that is not productive and also like makes the universe scary . It makes it scary for the creators. It makes it scary for future creators. It makes it scary for people who love things . Right. Not and great. I don't know what to do about it, but it's not great. It also becomes a barrier to creativity in a profound way that you know, you have the little b ird sitting on your shoulder whispering, don't cause harm . And yeah, some of it is like good, right? Like you don't want to cause harm, especially when you're going to write a book that's going to have outsize impact or that might have outsize impact. And you don't usually know if you're going to do that when you're writing a book. So like it's not just that people say, Oh, this book is bad, which is what used to happen, right? It used to be like in the eighties and nineties people would fight over whether books were bad, whether or not they achieved their literary ambitions, whether or not but now they more we more discuss whether or not a book is harmful . And that's a much harder conversation to have because if you're saying that a book caused harm, it becomes much harder to defend the book , but also it takes it out of the world of a literary conversation and into the world of you're either making someone's life better or you're making someone's life worse. And if you're making people's life worse, it's not just that your art is bad, it's that your art probably shouldn't exist . Right. Yeah, I mean, it's it's like everything on the internet, I feel like it's pushing it to the to the highest level of intensity . Yeah, well, which makes sense, right? Because it's at the highest level of intensity that we pay the most attention . And especially because these sort of like semi professional provocateurs who the only way they get attention is by pushing the envelope by claiming increasingly sort of out there arguments or whatever. Like I think about this in the context of my lieutenant governor, my nemesis, Mike Ebeckwith , who recently said that schools teaching that hate is bad is one of the worst things that ever happened in America because because I guess he's he's pro hate broadly speaking. Mike Beckwith is one of those like fourth tier Tucker Carlsons that wants to be Tucker Carlson when he grows up but like when he goes to sleep at night he secretly knows that he doesn't have whatever meager talents Tucker Carl son possesses, so it's not going to happen for him. Yeah . And the only job he's ever had literally is a library board where he banned books all day, and then he somehow finagled that into being the Lieutenant Governor of Indiana and sorry I lost my temper. I think I think he's probably thought about this everybody I'm sorry I lost my temper. So he was so hees. He came out pro hate hank. He came out in favor of hatred, a bold political position. But one of those things that when you're a professional provocateur, you have to push it further and further and further and eventually you push it there, right? You push it to the place where you're because ultimately he's just a moth that flies to the light of power and the light of power tells him push it further and further and further no matter how you have to push it to continue getting attention because attention is the currency. I was talking to a professor at a fancy business school and she was saying that like this is the first time this is like the worst it's been with kids not feeling that they can speak in class . Like they're they're scared to have opinions out loud . And I remember being like, you know , not quiet, but like scared to have opinions out loud. It's always a little scared to speak publicly . But now she's just like she can't it's increasingly difficult for her to inspire conversation . There will be times when like two or three kids will come to her , like they can have those conversations where it's like very small groups, but in front of a whole classroom people just don't feel safe to do it. And I bet it's not, but I bet like I worry that we've been trained by the internet to keep our dang mouths shut because we never we never quite know what could be the fiery pit that we kick . Yeah, I mean, look, some of it is good Yeah, just push back against that. Some of it is good. Like you don't want to be hurtful. You don't want to cause harm with your comments in class or in a book or whatever. Right. And I think that like you in a book like, but in class, like I think that I think that you should be able to say a dumb thing and learn why it's dumb instead of just keeping it to yourself and holding on to it and feeling like this loathing that you can never say the true thing because when you say the true thing out loud, often or the thing that you think is true out loud, oftentimes what you find is that it's more complicated than that . Yeah, but you have to be able to say it out lou d in order to understand that it's wrong . And yeah, I think to some extent that's true in making art as well, right? Like you have to be able to take risks, you have to be able to be wrong. You have to be able to be dated because you're trying to speak to your moment, not to any other moment . And so I think that's what we've sacrificed in the pursuit of , you know, that we cause less harm with the way that we talk about each other and ourselves. Yeah , yeah. And I've certainly read things, read a book and then read an analysis of a book and been like, oh, wow, I bet I would have seen this through different eyes if I wasn't a white guy. And so I'm glad that I got that perspective. Right. Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean, you know, the way that I read has changed so much and in such a positive way as a result of being exposed to different lenses of literary criticism . But that only happened because I was allowed to be wrong, because I was allowed because I because I had a because I was allowed to have a starting point, you know? Yeah . Yeah . I do hope that the sequel gets written, Mary , and I do think that there's some value to being on the internet , I suppose. I also hope the sequel gets written, but I'm not sure about Hank's second point. I'm genuinely not. I agree. I mean here's what I think. I think that the internet is very dangerous and in two hundred years, we'll be glad that it happened. But for now, it's a real mixed bag. I don't think it's good to be on. I think if you cannot be on it, you should not be on it By I know that you think it's more complicated than that . But it's interesting. I'm willing to say my opinion about the internet in a way that I'm not willing to say my opinion about a lot of things. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. I was thinking about that with Spotify So I was like walking up the stairs of my house and I was thinking about Spotify and how people are like mad at Spotify for not giving enough money to artists and my God are you coming in with a hot take even after my Mike Beck with hot that wasn c'take, enough're coming. in You with a secondary hot cake. I think that there's everyone going to critique you going to come out pro Spotify. To critique Spotify, though, I think that we should also critique the labels that take a lot of money when maybe they don't so much deserve it. But but I just like compare that to the critiques that we gave to Napster, which did not exist and gave artists literally nothing. And when Metallica was like, you guys need to stop steal ing music. It's bad. We were like, Metallica sucks now. Yeah. We were like Metallica's a bunch of sellouts . I know . I know. It's true. We were really like in college I was, really strongly pro Napster. Yeah And now we're like, I can't believe a company pays artists but Napster destroyed a lot of careers. It really for so many years. So many people who got distribution on Napster and thus have like a little piece of the cultural imagination that like made a whole fat goose hig from it. Yeah , yeah. And I would be resentful if I was one of those people , right? Like I mean , my books are widely pirated , but only because they're widely sold . And in the case of Napster