419: A Soup of Letters
Dear Hank & John
Complexly
4.9 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can you help my public image as a superhero? How does the International Space Station have different countries all in one station? How does sunscreen work? If I eat at a restaurant by myself, how do I go to the bathroom without the waiter thinking I left? Where have all the NFTs gone? Am I more likely to be struck by lightning because I’m sitting in a metal wheelchair? …Hank and John Green have answers!
If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [email protected].
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a Complexly podcast. |
| 0:09.4 | Hello! |
| 0:10.4 | And welcome to Dear Hank and John. |
| 0:12.1 | Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank. |
| 0:14.4 | It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions. |
| 0:16.6 | They give you dubious advice, and they bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John. Yeah. I put two goldfish in a tank, but neither of them knew how to drive it. It's a classic bad joke. It's a classic. I'm not even sure. I bet there's a better format for it somewhere there. But you didn't find it. That's the version I remembered. Yeah, that's a good one. I knew that there were goldfish in a tank. How are you? How are you? What's it like in there? What's bouncing around in the old John Green Noggin? There's not a shortage of thoughts. I would say that there's not an insufficient number of thoughts. Too many thoughts. I've got a lot of thoughts right now. I've been writing a lot lately, which is really fun. |
| 0:58.5 | But then the great thing about writing a story when you're really into it is that it has nothing. |
| 1:04.7 | I've realized in my old age that it has nothing to do with what I actually want to do, which is make a gift for people, |
| 1:11.0 | or whatever personal fulfillment I derive from writing, stories, and getting lost in them. |
| 1:16.5 | The thing that I love most about the actual, like, drafting of a story... |
| 1:20.8 | I cannot wait to hear what you were about to say. |
| 1:23.0 | Is that I don't have to think about anything else. |
| 1:25.9 | All the other thoughts are, like like kind of push to the side |
| 1:29.2 | because my main thought is, well, what should happen in the story? Or was that a good idea? Did I go |
| 1:33.7 | down a bad path there? How do you keep all the other thoughts out? How do you keep focused on that? |
| 1:39.7 | Well, when I'm really into a story, it's kind of the only thing I want to think about. So I'll be like, |
| 1:44.6 | I'll be thinking of a bad thought or like a, like a recursive thought that I don't like having. And I'll be like, well, let's try to distract myself with the story. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, here that works. Here we are. We're in the story now. Because you're just like, you're just, so many problems and you know it really well too. |
| 1:45.7 | Yeah. |
| 1:46.0 | Like you have this. You're just like, you're just, there's so many problems and you, you know it really well, too. |
| 2:03.4 | Yeah. |
| 2:03.7 | Like, you have this, you have this like sketch of what's going on in the moment that you are solving problems around. |
| 2:09.9 | And it's really complex. |
... |
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