The Unmade Podcast - 21: Keeping Track of Cups (with Hank Green)

Episode Date: January 9, 2019

Ideas include intercontinental, things we're not good at, book writing, habits, and the Apollo moon missions. Special guest Hank Green, author of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. For 25% off your first order of the best seller variety pack, visit rxbar.com/unmade and enter promo code: unmade at checkout. Valid in the US ONLY, and for a limited time - https://www.rxbar.com/unmade Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/unmadeFM Join the discussion of this episode on our subreddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Unmade_Podcast/ USEFUL LINKS An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green - https://amzn.to/2sjeX4U PodCon - the podcast convention in Seattle - https://www.podcon.com Hank Green's non-controversial Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Green Hank's own website - including more links to his book, YouTube channels, and other stuff - https://www.hankgreen.com Who Moved My Cheese - https://amzn.to/2M04BQr Vegemite - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegemite The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal - https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/

Hank, is there anything specific you want me to bear in mind today or? Nope. No. Cool. Hank, is there anything you want us to not mention? No. Like, okay. I was going to ask Tim, what do you know about Hank that you could mention that he doesn't want mentioned?

He's given me the all clear, so I'm just going to sit on it. Okay. Welcome back to another episode of the unmade podcast now occasionally tim and i will have guests on the show who come to the table with their own eyes ears it's always good fun and i think today we've decided to give an opportunity to a bit of an up-and-comer that we like we like this person's work so we've got uh i've got it written down here. Hank Green. Thanks, Brady. Is joining us today.

Could you repeat that, Brady? Hank who, sorry? Hank Green. Oh, nice. So welcome to the show, Hank. What am I even up to these days? I don't know. But I would say I have plenty of things that I have had ideas for that have not gotten done. So this seems like this is my lane. I'm here. I've always thought of you as a bit of an ideas machine.

So having you on the show is a real privilege. For those who don't know who Hank is, and I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who don't know who Hank Green is, I will tell you from his Wikipedia page. Okay. I'm not going to read the whole thing. So don't worry about that. It's quite an extensive page, but William Henry Hank Green II is an American entrepreneur, musician, educator, producer, vlogger, and author.

He's known for his YouTube channel, Vlogbrothers, where he and his brother, John Green, regularly upload videos, as well as for creating and hosting the educational YouTube channels Crash Course and SciShow. Green co-created VidCon, the world's largest conference about online videos with his brother John. I'm going to skip some stuff and I'll also mention it says here that Green's debut novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, was published on September 25th, 2018, and it debuted as a New York Times bestseller. Not bad. That's not bad on a Wikipedia

page, is it? That makes you sound pretty impressive. I should really quit now. Like, one of my main goals in life is to die without them having to put a controversy section on my Wikipedia page. So, you know, like a lot of people have, like, you're like looking at their little table of contents at the top, and then it it's like like the second thing from the bottom is controversy and i'm like oh no what did you do what happened so that's all i want is just pause now like i don't want to have have done anything that could be my controversy section here's something to think about though hank one day there's going to be a section there entitled death. Yeah. And it'll say how I died, which I'm pretty sure I know already. So it's cool. That's my most read section on Wikipedia articles. It's normally the first thing I go to.

Really? That's like the least interesting thing about a person. Everyone dies. Oh, no. I will sometimes spend all night binging Wikipedia, just reading about like how US presidents died. And I'll just go through every US president and just go to the death section and compare how they all died. That sounds like a great idea for a podcast, Brady. All right, then. If it's all right with Hank, and if it's all right with you, Tim, I was thinking maybe I'll go first, get my idea out the way before you guys take the floor. You're in charge. That's good. A bit of a slow run in. That's good before we get to the meaty stuff.

Before we get to the good ones. Actually, before I tell you my actual idea, I've had a mini idea just a couple of minutes before we started recording. How cool would it be to have a podcast where every episode is hosted by three people and the podcast is called Intercontinental and all three people have to be on a different continent as we are right now. Okay, good. What would happen after that? I said it was a mini idea. I do need something else to tie it together.

Is it different people every time? Is there anything else? Like sometimes the problem with podcasts or any idea is you get pigeonholed and you can only do one thing. If you have a mathematics YouTube channel, you have to make videos about mathematics. If you do this or that, you're stuck. The thing about this idea is you're not stuck to any one genre or idea or topic. You've got a different constraint.

That's quite interesting. So today we're talking to butterfly experts from three different continents. Today we're talking to musicians from three different continents. So your theme is your intercontinentalness, and from there you can just go anywhere. I guess you're making one of the most difficult parts of doing a podcast is multiple people in multiple places, and you're basically making that a feature.

So this is going to be the most annoying podcast to make ever. Brady, I think what you have is a really great name for a feature. So this is going to be the most annoying podcast to make ever. Brady, I think what you have is a really great name for a podcast. Well, that's half the challenge, isn't it? Sometimes I feel like people do create things because they thought of a good name. I often make videos because I thought of a good title. Exactly. Well, anyway, all right, let's get to my actual idea for which I have not got a good name yet. I've been thinking about names and I haven't come up with one, but here's the idea. I'm going to give it the working title, The Thing I'm Not Good At. And this was inspired by reading your page, Hank, because you seem like, well, you are this

incredibly accomplished guy. You do all these things, music, video, business, and you've written a book. You're the sort of person who I think most people find pretty annoying because you're pretty good at everything. And I would love to have a podcast where people like you or other people that have had success in the world come on and for their time on this show, it is absolutely forbidden and taboo to speak about your strengths, your skills, any expertise or claims to fame. And all you talk about on the show is the one or two things in life that you've just never been good at, that you can't do, that you're embarrassed by. And that's what the whole show is. One or two. I feel like that's too limiting. We could go on for much longer than one or two.

If you were a guest on the show, what would be the things that you'd be fessing up to being like really, really not good at? I'm very bad at keeping track of cups. That's one of my wife's chief complaints. Hang on, hang on, hang on, on hang on let me just interrupt so you can make videos on youtube and you can publish books but oh i can't find my cups see i have faults that's just one of the weakest things i can't do i've ever heard hey i just i looked up and i saw five cups in front of me. And I thought if Catherine was in here, what would she say? And she would say, oh my God, that's where all the cups are. Hank, that's a total humble brag saying, oh yeah, there's lots of things I'm not good at.

I'm not good at keeping track of cups. Is that all you can come up with? I can give you more legit ones. All right. I sometimes am not great at considering the impact that my words will have on other people's feelings. And I will be too brusque. I often disrespect people by not showing up on time for things. And I think that this idea of like, I'm just not very punctual is like saying,

I just don't actually care very much about you. And I have worked my whole life to get better at that. But ultimately, ultimately, when I like deeply question why I show up late for stuff, it's like, it's because I'm prizing my time more than other people's time. Like, that's just what it is. And like, I'm a dick in that way. And I can't stop. I was thinking things like roller skating or baseball, and you just got into like a deep character floor. Hey, you didn't like the cups, so I gave you more. You know, there's going to be a new entry on your Wikipedia page that just says cups. I struggle to remember which yacht I left my Mensa certificate in.

Oh man, having a yacht is a huge flaw. That is indicative of something being wrong. What about you, Tim? What would you be coming on the show and admitting to? You know, there's some things that you're not good at, but you're happy to be not good at. And then there are things that you think you really should be. Like the things you've mentioned, Hank,

are things that I really should be much better at that, but I'm really not very good at it. But then there are other things like juggling five cups where I'm not good at that, but I have absolutely no need or desire to be good at it. So I'm forever thinking about, I think about things like bushwalking or gardening, but they end up being things that you don't really like.

It's got to be something you'd really like to do, but you're really not good at. That's what you're talking about. A genuine- How can you not be good at bushwalking? That's just like hiking, just walking. It's the easiest thing in the world. I was thinking gardening and then I was thinking outside and plants. And I'm thinking about a friend

who really loves that stuff and I don't get into it but my mind was going down the track of you know what I mean things you avoid doing or don't do a lot of but should do like exercise what about things that like most people can do but I can't and it's actually pretty inconvenient like cutting in a straight line oh yeah people seem to be able to cut a piece of paper roughly down like a 90 degree angle from the edge. I'm completely incapable of this. Every time I cut a piece of paper, it turns into a triangle. And drawing circles. I was going to say drawing circles too. Some people can just do it. It's amazing. I'm good at drawing ovals. All you do is try and draw a circle and it comes out as an oval.

I am very, very bad at cutting in a straight line as well. In fact, just wrapping presents after all this time, you'd think I would have gotten better at it. And if anything, I've probably gotten worse at it as time goes by. It's good. I like this podcast. I'm enjoying it. Would you listen to it if we made it?

Like many podcasts, it is a podcast that is contingent upon the quality of its guests. Yes. And even now, those kinds of podcasts are not doing as well because everybody's like, oh, it turns out that there are a lot of pretty cool people and I only have 24 hours every day and I'm going to sleep for a bunch of them. Hank, knowing lots of people who are like, you know, have some public profile, who are the people you probably want to get on this show, do you think this is a show that people would be happy to come on and open up to and, you know, they'd give you the good dirt or are people quite protective of the things that they're not good at? I mean,

obviously, like, you know, cutting in a straight line, I think most people are willing to admit to that. But do you think people would open up enough for this show to work? I don't know that it would. Definitely, I see people wanting to have a really pretty strict control over how they are perceived and seeing that as sort of an important part of how to be a notable or semi-famous or famous person. And letting go of that control, I have often found surprisingly hard to get people to do that. Are you good at letting that go? Do you control that much, you know, being a guy with some public profile?

I think that it is important to try and be more open about what it's like and about like the difference between a performed authenticity, even if it is authentic, it is still performed because I'm aware that people are listening and a like actual, like boring every day. Actually, I'm just probably gonna be watching the Great British Baking Show and not being interesting at all in lots of moments of my day. And so like trying to figure out where that line is between like, am I trying to create an idea

of like a credible source of information for the internet to perceive that like, that's Hank, he knows what he's talking about and you don't have to worry about it. And like, I think that's important to like my livelihood and my businesses. But I also like disrespect people by being not on time for stuff. There's like lots of pieces of this puzzle and I try to, but there's always going to be pieces where I'm like, definitely not going to be open about some stuff. I think this could be something that people, it becomes a thing that they embrace.

Like if you can get a couple of key people to come on and talk about, it could be like carpool karaoke or ballroom dancing shows or something. You know, it's like something where you go on and it's part of the humility and there's something artificial about that. Of course it's a performance, but you know, when the politician is humanized by going on a late night show and they're able to talk and laugh and they're made fun of a little bit and they laugh along with

it or they go on saturday night live and the mickey is taken out of them and that's you know they kind of are with an in on the joke it humanizes them this sort of show could do that something i'm not good at and come on and just laugh and talk about how you've tried and i think it could become a thing that actually really well-known people want to come on if it's caught on in that way. I think it's really interesting. It's a good idea. Like my celebrity farts idea from an earlier episode.

That's such a bad idea. I don't even remember it. By the way, people, for the record, Hank was on time to the minute for his appointment with us for the Unmade podcast. He did not leave us waiting. So he obviously respects us. I do my best. I was still eating food at the time.

I did leave that out. That's true. I'm going to eat some chips. That's fine, mate. It'll be crunchy. You do that. I'm going to do it now so I don't have to do it later. Hang on, Brady.

What about you? We haven't heard from your perspective. Apart from cutting paper, what's something you're not good at? Obviously, there are lots of things that I'm not good at. But something I'm not good at that slightly annoys me is I've never been able to get good at skiing, skating, roller skating, that genre of activities that involve balance and having things attached to your feet. Because I think I have quite good balance. I'm okay at sport and stuff like that. And you're not allowed to talk about stuff you're good at, Brady.

Stop. Oh, sorry. Yeah, sorry. I have never, ever been able to get good at skiing skating roller skating ice skating my sister and brother-in-law are incredible skiers which makes it even worse because when I go on trips with them to somewhere snowy right they're like world-class skiers and I am just absolutely terrible and I cannot do it I know everyone says our lessons and practice will make you good at stuff but this, I think there's something in my wiring that's meant that I've

never, ever gotten good enough at it. And also when you get to my age and you start becoming a little bit proud and not wanting to be bad at things, it gets to a point where you almost can't fix it because you're not willing to go through like the embarrassment of a ski school with a bunch of kids and stuff like that. Let me break in here and also like, it's not just about embarrassment. It's also about like the physical state of your body. Like I tried to learn how to snowboard. I was just too old. It was just too painful and dangerous. I was like, there's like a 30% chance that my knee is going to be messed up enough that I'm going to have a problem walking in like a year right now. I'm done with this hobby. It's too expensive and too dangerous.

Also, the thing with that, Hank, I agree, like your body can no longer do things, but also with age comes the fear of hurting yourself. Like even if your body could do it, you're just aware of the consequences of an accident. Like when you're young, you're still aware you could fall over and hurt your knee, but you don't care. But now I'm aware, gosh, if I fall over and hurt my knee, like that's going to be a real pain in the ass for months. It's going to affect my life and my business, my work, my health. And you just become unwilling to hurt yourself.

It's like when Michael Jordan insures his feet because of his livelihood. What part of your body do you feel is going to ruin your life if you ruin it skiing, Brady? Is it like your hands? I won't be able to type online. These precious hands. No, but you know, if I do my knee in a skiing accident. You got to get on planes and like sit in the same place with your broke up knee. Yeah.

I've got to walk upstairs to my office. Oh, that's true. That's true. Yeah, yeah. That is a problem. We're all getting busier and busier these days, often finding ourselves out and about. So it often makes sense to be able to eat something quick, something convenient. Unfortunately, snacks like this are often, well, pretty unhealthy or don't taste very nice.

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So what do you say, Hank? You ready to share one of your gems with us? Yeah, I have two things that I would like to share, but I guess I'll do my first one now. Do one now and then one later. Don't want to blow it all at once. You want to pace yourself. All right. I recently wrote a book and I found the process of how that worked to be fascinating. I have lots of books.

I've read lots of books. I've always been very into this form of like a person did this complicated, hard thing and created this very powerful brain changing just list of letters that made me see the world differently. I finally was like, I'm going to do this thing. And of course I didn't and probably couldn't have. And there was a lot of other stuff going on, but I really wish I just like sat down every time and something interesting in that process happened and talked about it. Because at this point, I literally can't even remember the process of writing the book and also the process of like getting my first meeting with an agent and getting my first meeting with potential publishers and talking to potential

editors and then having an editor and having the first like really hard conversations about what was wrong with the book with that editor and then getting my first like non-us deal where my book's going to be printed in italian And all this stuff was interesting. And it reminded me a little bit of like, ultimately, I was not that excited by that Gimlet podcast startup. But I feel like a lot of people would be into the idea of seeing the nuts and bolts of how a book got made. So, Hank, is your idea to have a weekly guest, a different author each week and, you know, get some insight from them? Or is it one podcast following one man or woman's journey from start to finish as they

write their book? It's the second thing. I want to watch somebody who wants to write a book, go through the process of writing it, the process of editing it, the process of publishing it, the process of touring with it, and like talking about everything everything from copy editing to marketing. How did you not do this, Hank? If anyone was going to do it, it would have been you. You post blogs every week.

Thanks so much. I really appreciate you coming at me with a thing that I wanted to do and didn't. This is the whole idea. That's the thing that we're talking about. Maybe this is the thing you're not good at, Hank. How would you pick the person for the podcast? Because you have to know in advance that they're going to succeed. If someone falls over at the third hurdle, you've wasted all this time.

I mean, you have to be doing it with someone who's a bit of a banker, don't you? I wouldn't want to do it with somebody who's published books before. So I'd want it to be a debut because you have to see them be like, oh, that's what marketing is. I didn't realize things that people who've published books know already. My publisher put my book in the front of a bunch of airport bookstores. And I was like, you decide where books go in bookstores? And they're like, sometimes. Like, yeah, we pay to have books placed in certain parts in bookstores? And they're like, sometimes. Like, yeah, we pay to have books

placed in certain parts of bookstores. And I was like, dude, that is new information for me. Thank you, by the way, for doing that with my book. So, I'd want somebody who's a debut, but then you're in a world where this person hasn't written a book before and most people who start books don't finish them. So, that does become a bit of a hairy problem. So, maybe you start at the, I've got a manuscript stage. And the manuscript is good enough that we think an agent's going to look at it. So, Hank, for people who don't know, you have a brother who you're very close to, and who was also a very successful novelist. How were you able to be surprised by things? Like, surely, of all the debut novelists who exist, you would be one

who would be like best place to know everything that was coming. I guess I just didn't pay that much attention. That's another thing you're not good at. You don't want to be too into what your older brother is doing. Fair enough. I know you don't remember them all, but can you remember a couple of other things that just like completely blindsided you about the process? Because I'm finding it's fascinating. There are some things that like are completely blindsided you about the process? Because I'm finding it's fascinating. There's some things that like are weird because like you wouldn't have thought of them. Like when my editor came back with a manuscript and she was like, your protagonist is the wrong age.

And I was like, what? Oh, wow. She's her age. Like that's how old she is. My editor was like, I mean, or not. Like it's a book. You could change things. And so we had a very long conversation about why she thought the age was the problem and

how to actually effectively change that, which are three completely different things. Who won that battle, by the way? Oh, she did. Yeah. Okay. Right. I mean, she didn't start out by being like, this is wrong. She started out by explaining that this person was too grown up to be a 19 year old she seemed to have had a lot of different

relationships with a lot of different people and so it'd be weird for a 19 year old to have had that many serious relationships and to know that much about how she operates inside of romantic relationships so like that was a really important part of the book for me. So it made lots of sense. Also, I think that like it made marketing sense to not have it be a young adult book because it is a whole thing like where your book ends up in the store. You know, preference to be sort of like shelved

with science fiction rather than like in among young adult stuff, which has a lot of different kinds of science fiction and fantasy in it. So stuff like that, but also like weird happenstance so this wouldn't happen to everybody but there's always these strange moments like my copy editor a freelance copy editor didn't even work for my publisher who read my whole book and told me everything that was wrong with it from like you know i got the street that a thing was on wrong to every misplaced comma was the valedictorian of my high

school graduating class. Like not a person who went to my high school, not a person who was the valedictorian of my high school, but a person who I was in school with. We were in lots of the same classes. I know her, we were friends and I hadn't been in touch with her in the last 20 years. And like the note at the top of the manuscript was like, Hank, it's Mary Beth. It's so good to hear from you. I'm amazed. This is such a great book. I'm so excited for you.

We had Miss Gwynn's class together. Like that was weird. And I like not being able to like document that moment and share it. It was like, oh God, I should have done that podcast. How do you write, Hank? Like how did you write it? Do you sit in an office? Do you walk

around with a dictaphone walking the streets of New York? Do you lock yourself in a cabin in a mountain? What was the default process when you had to actually just put the words down? I find that writing is like any other creative activity for me where like, if it's not in my head, I'm not doing it. And then when it's in my head, it's sort of like the only thing I'm thinking about. So right now I'm like, PodCon is in a month, which is our podcast convention in Seattle. Yeah. That's happening in January. And like right now I'm in the headspace of like everything I'm doing, I'm looking at in the light of could this be something fun to do during our PodCon variety show?

Because we need like three more things for that variety show that we haven't planned yet. And we have a lot of great people to do funny things or interesting or poignant things. We haven't done it yet. So like every conversation I have is in that light. So because of that, I'm not working on the book at all. But when I'm working on the book, it's so in my head that like I'm having a conversation with Catherine and I'm like, pause this. I need to do a note in my phone.

This moment we just had would be really great transferred into like book situation and then where do you sit and actually like pound the keys wherever wherever so you did it like on a laptop and stuff did you it was not like you've got you haven't got like a special creative space where you have to write i had a special creative space where i had to write it would never do it i feel like i just i don't have enough like full free hours for that. Tim, this sounds like a podcast you would love because you love books and reading books and you're really interested in creative processes. This sounds like a dream podcast for you. Oh, it is. No, I really love this. In fact, I go looking for interviews with authors just to hear

them talk about this kind of thing on the act of writing and what they're doing and whatnot. Can I ask, and one of the key questions I always am interested to hear, and I've read your novel, Hank, and I found it so addictive. Can I ask about the title? An absolutely remarkable thing. Is that something you had early on, like that was typed at the top of your Word document and then away you go? Or was it something the publisher came up with right at the end? Where did the title come from? That would have been such a great episode of this podcast, man. I had a title.

Every single person I told it to was like, that's bad. And they won't let you title it that. And then I was like, okay. And then I told it to my editor and they shared it around the office or whatever. That's what they say. Every time there's a thing that she doesn't like, she says, I'll share it around the office. And so they shared around the office and then it comes back that everybody,

it turns out also doesn't like it. They all agree with Maya. And so I then was like, okay, well, I will be thinking, I will put that front of my brain and be thinking about what to call it. And I'll like read the book with that in mind. And then Maya came back to me and was like, what about this? And I was like, I trust you. I wrote this book, but you are going to be the one who knows how to get it in people's hands better than I do.

The abandoned title. Can you tell us that? Or is it like a confidential title? It's fine. It's out there. I was going to, I thought it would be called April, May and New York Carl. Oh yeah. I like that. That's cool. Tim likes that. It's one of those titles that's perfect after you've read the book, but that's not the purpose of a title. Yeah. Do you know what I'd love to see? I'd love to see a book where you could, you only got to see the cover after you'd finished reading the last page. So, instead of judging a book by its cover, you've got to read the book and then it's like, oh, look at the cover. Oh, yeah.

No, that's great. That makes perfect sense. You judge a cover by its book. That's right. I thought that sounds like a great podcast, you guys. It does. It does. Can I ask you one last question about writing your book, Hank?

Because this is something I thought about specifically when I think about you writing, because you're like, you know, you're a video guy, you're a film guy and have been for many years. Your brother's books have been turned into films and, you know, shows and things like that. When you were writing An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, were you thinking of a film? Were you imagining it as like a TV show and a film as you wrote the dialogue and described people walking the streets and seeing that? I'm not saying, you know, you want it to be a film or you don't want it to be a film, but were you thinking of it as a film or were you thinking of it in a different way, in a bookie way? I might not wait for my garage door to go down.

That's your version of, well, I'm going to share it around the office. I'm going to wait for my garage door to come down. No, I never, I thought of it as a book the whole time. And in fact, I enjoy books more than I enjoy movies. I feel like now that I've said that, that was a dangerous thing to say, but I said it. It's done. So, yeah, I never thought about movie stuff. I still don't really think about movie stuff.

I'm very apprehensive about that whole process. I can see it as a movie. You want to do it? Yeah, the visual about movie stuff. Yeah. I'm very apprehensive about that whole process. I can see it as a movie. You want to do it? Yeah. The visual is so strong. Yeah. I think Hank just offered you the movie rights, Tim. All right.

I'll take it. We could do it as a podcast. That's my second idea. Just my book, but as a podcast. If any studios want to contact me to renegotiate, I'm happy to. I might sit on them for 50 years i don't know all right should we move on to an idea from you tim my i have a segue this is what a weird brag tim's just like i have a segue and it's like well i don't have i just have a car like a car fine

i'm actually on my segueway zooming through Central Park right now My idea, I haven't got a cool name for it I've been trying to think of one I have an abstract name for it Which is who moved the Vegemite But that's not really going to work I'll give you my idea and then you can tell me where to go with it That's still better than Hank's book title by the way

It's about daily rituals Like I've become increasingly aware, and I guess I've always been somewhat aware of how many rituals make up our life. And I mean, the little way we go about doing the things we do, but we do it exactly the same way every day. And so the reason the title Who Moved My Vegem, came about is because I like to think of myself as a real change agent. I like to think that at work and in different places, I'm an innovative, out-of-the-box thinker. I think of new ideas. I like to see the way the world is redeemed and changed and all those sorts of things, and that I'm a real catalyst. I guess everyone likes to

think of themselves that way. And then it's breakfast time and I go to the shelf and the Vegemite's not on the exact same shelf that it normally is. And it totally throws you like, who moved the Vegemite? Like you just say it out loud in the kitchen. Have a total meltdown. Yeah. And it's like, hang on, you know, like talk about paradigm shifts. Like if something's slightly different at breakfast, like I'm thrown.

So what's the podcast? Is it like- I think it'd be an in-depth analysis of some people just talking about the rituals that make up their life. So how you'd go about doing the things that we all do, but how do you do them in your unique way? Because there's lots of things we all do every day. You get up and you brush your teeth, but I have a feeling we do it precisely the same way every day. It's almost automated in the way we go about it. And I'd be fascinated to hear how some, not all people, but some people go about doing that. And the segue from the previous

conversation was about the writing. I'm interested in, I got thinking about this. I was listening to, I think it was Jeffrey Archer years ago, talking about his ritual for writing, which is incredibly methodic. He gets up in the morning and he does two hours writing, and then he does two hours break, and then another two hours writing, two hour break, another two hours writing, two hours break, and he does it again, and then he goes to bed. And that's what he does for like a year. Oh my God. And that gives him his first manuscript. And I just think, hey, that's fascinating,

but that's also incredibly organized. And he probably couldn't write a book in a different way. But people in all sorts of professions, how do you go about those intricate personal rituals every day? Hank, what do you reckon, mate? Well, my first comment is, do you know that there's a famous book called Who Moved My Cheese? Yeah, yeah. The leadership book.

Okay. Just making sure that you knew you were sort of honing in on Spencer Johnson MD's leadership book, which I know nothing about. But I did Google it to make sure I wasn't wrong about that. Well, hang on a sec. You seem to have forgotten. I didn't say cheese. I said Vegemite.

So this is like a whole other thing. It's completely different. And it's not my Vegemite. It's just the Vegemite. I don't think that guy like owns the word moved. Like, I think you'll be all right. Well, it seems my guess would have been that this was like a take on Who Moved My Cheese. Right. Yeah.

You were like taking the principles of Who Moved My Cheese and making it more Australian. I once had a new boss at work and like, I didn't get along with this boss. And I knew we weren't getting along the day that she called me into the office and gave me a copy of Who Moved My Cheese. Oh man, giving your employees books is like the most terrible, like passive aggressive thing that you could, I did that once, like in the first six months I had employees, I gave somebody a book and she was like, I don't, what is this? What are you trying to tell me? And also like, I don't have to, like, am I getting paid to read this? Or am I just expected to?

That's only one step below, like, giving someone, like, deodorant. Do you want some gum? Yeah. Basically, what you're saying is, like, I want to talk about the least interesting part of your day. That's right. I'll tell you why this is interesting to me, though. And I'm sure, I mean, all three of us are married, so we probably will have experience with this.

But I have found one of the most interesting things about being married is it brings together and into conflict two lifetimes of doing mundane things a certain way and being utterly shocked and outraged and immovable about the other person's way of doing it is the most boring things. Like you do not keep that in the fridge or that is not how you make that food. That is not how you line up the pillows on the bed. And you can be married for a lifetime. And I think you will never persuade the other person to come around to your way. So, the thing I find interesting about this is when do these routines get locked in? It's obviously at some point before you get married.

Hang on a sec. Hang on a sec. I've got to pick you up on something there, Brady. So, when you were a single young man, how did you line up the pillows on your bed? It's just the other person's way of doing things. And then you will explain, this is how my family has always done it. This is what my mum did. This is what my dad did. And the other person is just like, no, that's so wrong. I find it quite endearing and sweet. I do see potential in this idea for

that reason. Because I think people like listening to how other people do things and vehemently disagreeing with it. Yeah, there is something to that. Yeah. Yeah. People always argue about, you know, what should and shouldn't be stored in a fridge and things like that. It just riles people up so much that if you got the tone right, I think it'd have to have a bit more of a fun tone than how Tim pitched it. I think Tim pitched it in quite almost like quite academic way. I think it would have to be a bit more like couples bickering type format, I think would be fun. And people listening in would feel like they're part of the conversation and have a third way of doing things. Like, you know, my wife still laughs at how I do up my shoelaces, that my technique for doing up shoelaces is all

wrong. And you know, I can't change that now, can I? So. I feel like my greatest, like my biggest routine, I don't, yeah, I'm not sure I have a ton. Like I'm very serious about putting the toilet seat down. I've always felt that not putting the toilet seat down when you live like two people in a house and one of them is a man, one of them is a woman. I don't understand at all the difficulty in performing this extra effort as a sign of like respect. And so that's something that like I incorporate habits very quickly and easily. And I love to reinforce my habits. Like you will never find me turning without a turn signal, even if there's no one a million miles in sight,

because you just got to reinforce the habit. I always put the toilet seat down because you got to reinforce the habit. But as far as routines go, like I almost intentionally define my life so that I don't have too many, but then I can really enjoy the ones that I do have, like walking to the coffee shop to get coffee with my wife. So what about at the end of the day, you don't have a normal ritual? Like one thing about being a couple is you kind of develop new ones as well. And at the end of the day, it's like, well, we get a cuppa and we sit down or this person has Milo, this person has a decaf coffee. You know what I mean? It's those kinds

of things. And I think the interesting part of this is the little things like, and it's always my mug on the left when I'm putting them in and theirs on the right. You know what I mean? I pick them up and hand them that way because they're sitting on that side. You know, there's these funny little things. And I think they're probably done the same way for decades. Well, I bet I had a lot more before I had a two-year-old. Now there are no routines. It's just, you just deal with the problems as they arise. there are no routines. It's just, you just deal with the problems as they arise. I tell you just on the writer's thing again, I know Bryce Courtney, an Australian author used to tie himself to a chair,

like with a, with a belt, like he'd belt himself to the chair and not leave the chair, you know, until he'd done his required amount of work. Otherwise it's so easily distracted. I know Jonathan Franzen as well, another author, great author. He, with the internet, this is back before wifi, is that he says the way to do it, you've got to glue your internet cable into the laptop and then snip it

off with scissors. But they're all about enforcing discipline. Maybe that's what it is, the rituals enforcing discipline, as opposed to other rituals, which come about because they're pleasures like making a coffee or going for dinner at the right time. Brady or Hank, do you have any rituals that you do? Because if you didn't do it that way, you'd never do it. I guess exercise is one of those, isn't it? I mean, mostly I sign up, like I have somebody who is going to be disappointed if I don't do the thing, which is why I go to the work every day. Like I would never leave my house if there wasn't somebody who was expecting me to be somewhere.

I got another podcast for you. This is all for Brady. I love it. It's called Apollo Uncut. And it is just taking one hour snippets of the recordings from the Apollo missions and publishing them. Maybe in order, like just start at the beginning and go pretty much forever. There is a lot of content there, but maybe pulling out particularly interesting ones and doing a little bit of commentary so that you know what the astronauts are talking about. But all these recordings are available and they are oftentimes pretty boring. But one of my hobbies is reading Apollo transcripts and finding these like little weird human moments or just scary moments or just a lot, you know, these people are going as far away as anybody's ever gone. And we have all of that data, but we don't have a good way to

internalize it, to consume it, and to share it, and have sort of it be a shared experience like it was back in the 60s and 70s. Houston, Roger, we copy, and we're standing by for your TV. Well, you're playing to your audience here, Hank, obviously. What do you think, Brady? How do you like Apollo Uncut?

Tim knows this because we're childhood friends, and he has seen what my bedroom used to look like in Australia, but I'm not sure Hank realises just how big an Apollo fan I am. Like my room back in Australia was like an Apollo museum with all the walls covered with Apollo photos and signed and I had all the patches and plaques made under all the pictures and like I'm a proper, proper, proper Apollo obsessive. Brady actually had the original lunar module in his room. It's a big room.

Funniest place. Can I ask a question about this? Are you talking about the, like, the radio transmitting conversations? Yeah. Just, you know, three degrees to the left. Check. Yep. At the foot of the ladder, the LAM footbeds are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches.

Although the surface appears to be very, very fine-grained as you get close to it. It's almost like a powder. The lunar surface stuff I'm imagining is more what Hank's talking about rather than the two or three day voyage, because that's when it starts getting more interesting. I mean, if you were going to pull stuff out, you could find stuff. If you're going to do the whole thing, it would be hard to justify. People would not necessarily be into listening to just the radio transmissions. But those conversations are interesting in a certain light. Yeah.

And oftentimes are conversations rather than just like, you know, here's what we're doing and why we're doing it. My first reaction to Hank's idea is not as positive as you would initially think. Okay. Like, obviously, I think it's cool and I love Apollo and I've got things to say about it. But I often go through Apollo transcripts as well. But going through the actual audio is actually really a lot more boring. A, because of all the silence. There's a lot of time when they're not talking.

I realise you can edit that stuff out. But the other thing about listening to the audio is it's actually like really hard to hear properly and it's always really hard to understand what's going on. I know you can get around that with commentary and sort of exposition, but there's a lot of cognitive load involved in listening to those staticky, muffly transmissions. And I don't get a lot of pleasure from listening to them. I much prefer reading it when someone's done all the hard work for me and already put it into words.

So there would be challenges. But on the other hand, if you had good narrators and commentators and you were cherry picking enough good stuff and cutting enough of the boring stuff, I think it would work. I don't think our almost unedited chunks would be massively popular. I think it would start getting a bit boring. I think you would have to like zhuzhi zhuzhi it up more than you think. Looks good to me, Flight. I don't know.

What does anybody else think? Looks good to me. He's out as far as he can get. I think that's okay, Capcom. Or it's not about being massively popular. It's about having a serialized version of this where you ride along over the course of a fairly long period of time and get that connected experience.

With an idea like this, which is pretty easy, if you're not going to do if you're not going to zhuzh it up at all yeah it's something that you could set up a lot of stuff and have it all sort of like get done and there's something two ideas like that where yeah you've got competing things when you're creating you've got how hard is it to make and how much you know like benefit is going to come from it in terms of like connecting with audience and whether you can monetize or whatever that is. But if it's really easy to do, you don't have to have as big of an audience and you can just sort of like have it be out there as more of maybe even an art project.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of that stuff kind of already exists in that respect. I'm looking at right now on the shelf in my office at a whole stack of DVDs, which is exactly what you just said, except it's also all the footage from the cameras on the moon. It's like, you know, I've got like a 20 DVD set from Apollo 15 and you can just sit there and watch everything that was filmed on like a three-day visit to the moon. Oh my. It is great.

It is great. I told you it was great. You're right. Ooh. Fantastic. Hey, hold this. Wait a minute. I can't put this out of the bag yet. Look're right. Ooh. Fantastic. Hey, hold this. Wait a minute. I can't put this out of the bag yet. Look at this.

This has got to be something. I can't. Roger, 195. And it sounds green to me. I'll tell you about something interesting, though. This is something that already does exist and I have like a tangential connection to it in a funny way and Hank probably knows this. There's a website

called the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal which was put together by a guy called Eric Jones and he did transcripts of everything that was said on the moon. Hence you know Lunar Surface Journal. So you can go through this website he's made and you can read every word and it's all time coded, you know, two hours,

three minutes and 48 seconds. Neil Armstrong says this. If anything interesting happens, like a photo is taken at that point, or there's a piece of audio that's interesting, there's a little hyperlink annotation that will take you off. So, it's this ultimate sort of journal of everything that happened on the moon. It's existed for ages. And when I was in Australia, I saw, oh, who is this Eric Jones who made it? I was so interested about the person who had created this thing. And it turned out he'd retired to Australia. He's American, but he was living in Australia. So I went and met him.

And this was in my newspaper days. And I did like a whole newspaper feature with him. And not only has he got all these transcripts, but almost all the moonwalkers came and met with him for like a few days at a time. This is everyone, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, he got them all. And they like, as he went through the transcript with them, they like commented on it.

And he's put like in, you know, in brackets and italics all the way through the journal, retrospective comments from the astronauts saying, oh, this is why I said that, this was what was going on. And it's one of the all-time great internet resources, especially if you like space and Apollo, that hardly anyone knows about. Yeah, the Apollo Lunar Service Journal.

It's like director commentary on a DVD. It's like, yeah, that's fantastic. That's really cool. This is where I go to read Apollo transcripts. I knew nothing about how it got created or how these annotations got made. I assume there's some kind of Wikipedia like effort. And also like something that is very interesting to me is that when you're doing research on Apollo or on, you know, any kind of like early spaceflight stuff, you find so much like really good information on forums from the 90s and it's just like back when the internet was just nerds and then it just like got frozen in time and

i go back to one of those forums and i'm just like oh yeah that's what it used to be like before twitter and yelling and everybody being so sad and mad and funny. Yeah. Yeah, there was a time when the internet wasn't that funny, but we were also not mad at all. Yeah, and there's a lot more reliable information on there too. You kind of trust that old stuff a bit more than what you read now. Yeah, absolutely.

I do like this idea. This is as a non-Apollo expert, I'm not a fan. I do appreciate it, much more so having been Brady's friend and I've been exposed to more of it than I probably would have been otherwise. Or would like to have been. Tell me that Apollo story again, Brady. I do like the idea of, because I imagine listening, the audio experience as being, you know, you can close your eyes and you can be laying there and just listening.

You know what I mean? I think that it could be done in a way that's quite evocative of what you're imagining rather than sitting and watching a documentary, which is a very cognitive kind of experience. It could be an ambient kind of slow podcast kind of experience. I imagine, oh, here I can- Like your sleep aid even. Just like, I'm going to listen to the Apollo transcripts and go to bed. Like comfort ambient noise or something like that. Yeah, I don't know. But, I'm going to listen to the Apollo transcripts and go to bed. Like comfort ambient noise or something like that. Yeah, I don't know. But maybe I'm underappreciating how poor the quality is.

I know even though, you know, that's one small step for man. I know even that the last part of the quote is all blurred. We're not, you know what I mean? You sort of, you realize how poor the quality is. It's not that relaxing because every time a transmission starts and stops, there's those like grating beeps that happen all the time. Here's what it is. What if Brady and I and one other person, maybe Tim, who knows, just do a reading?

I guess you need more than three people because you got to have mission control and you got to have fun, like all the people. But like. Yeah, it'd be interesting. That's way more work. That is so like we went from like the easiest podcast to make to like the hardest podcast to make i wonder if you did that if it could become funny or entertaining well there's definitely funny moments i got the parts again i've got them again charlie i don't know what the hell give them to me certainly not i think they haven't thrown i really do i haven't eaten this much citrus fruit

in 20 years can i tell you one thing in another 12 days i ain't never eating anymore if they offer to sub me to pass you with my breakfast i'm gonna throw up my problem with this idea is it's so close to something that I love, but it's not there. It's almost like I'm too attached to it, and I think there's something special trying to get out, and I don't quite know what it is. I just think having just uploading all the information again is like,

I see merit to it, like the art project of doing it as a podcast, but I just think there's something else there, and I don't know what it is. And I don't know if it's just, I think it also goes beyond just a few nerds commenting on the stuff while it plays. But I think this is Brady's problem with everything to do with Apollo,

which is that Brady is one of like the leading experts on the Apollo missions and he can't get it out of his brain because he knows too much and you cannot imagine the perfect way to share it. And all I want in the world is for somebody to give you infinite time and money to get the information in your head into my head in entertaining ways. That sounds like quite a nice thing you said. I don't think I know as much as you probably think, but I do have a passion for it that is very hard to put into words. With infinite time and money, we could

recreate the conversations in space with better quality audio. We could just go to the moon again. I love it. It's good. I like this new podcast. It's called We're Gonna Go to the Frickin' Moon. Moon 2. And instead of having our own conversations which would be history making in themselves right we've decided to recreate conversations from 50 years ago hank why do you read apollo transcripts like just because you're a nerd and find space interesting or what well i don't know it's just such a i mean obviously like

it's this really important thing and i think like now years later, we forget how big of a deal it was. And also, here's probably the real thing. Never in my lifetime, and in maybe most people's lifetime at this point, has there been a thing that happened where everybody knew where they were when it happened, but it was a good thing. Hmm. where they were when it happened, but it was a good thing. And so I think I'm trying to sort of live that vicariously by being like, I'm going to like immerse myself in how amazing and interesting this was. And like, and especially the later missions that like, we don't think about them at all now, but then they were of course news and being able to sort of immerse myself in that that spirit of like

the future and the greatness of human accomplishment and how it wasn't you know it was an american thing but it was also a global thing and also like when you're sort of like immersed on it in it in that level and then there are these dumb human moments like this i was reading the other day there was this great moment where like the pilot just pointed the module in the wrong direction, just went the wrong way, and everybody was like, you're going the wrong way, bud. You've got to point it toward the moon. Toward the moon.

You had one job, go to the moon. Oh, I thought I was going to the sun. I thought we were done here. I thought this was close enough. How many Apollos were there? I can't remember. They're just called Apollo if they went to the moon, isn't that right?

No, no, no, that's not true, no. There's Apollo 7, 8, 9, 10. It goes to 17. 17. Yeah, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 landed on the moon. Obviously 13 didn't. Yeah. You know, the first ever time that who wants to be a

millionaire went to the million dollar question in Australia. It was like, they did it as like an overnight teaser. Oh, tomorrow you're going to do the million dollar question. So, the whole country was talking about what's the million dollar question going to be. And then the show started the next night and here was the guy here for a million dollars here's your question and the question was how many people have walked on the moon oh and like i couldn't believe it and also you know how people when they know the answer to the question they like you know tease it out a bit i could have had so much fun with that i could have named them all and talked about each one i could have pretended i was figuring it out by naming them and stuff right i was like, ah.

So, I don't know that the guy got it. I think he may have passed on it as well. I don't know the answer, but I'm going to hazard a guess at 10 or 12. Yeah, it's 12. 12. There we go. Yeah. So, six landings, two people per landing.

So, anyway, there you go. Hank, two things I want to touch on based on what you've said just in the last few minutes. The comment, Hank, you made about not being these moments, where were you when this happened for a good moment? We've got like terrible things, obviously, like your 9-11s and stuff, but not good things. Do you think that is because good things don't happen anymore or because we emphasize bad things or because more bad things happen? What do you think's changed that means we don't have those Apollo 11 moments anymore and we just have terrible moments that you remember? Well, I don't know that we had many Apollo 11 moments before Apollo 11 like, it was such a, you know, unique moment of humanness and was like, sort

of like contingent upon there being global communications infrastructure, which there wasn't much before that. What's the next one then? Is Mars the next one? Is there something else that can happen to unite the world? Oh, I mean, yeah, Mars would be one. Yeah. If a man or a woman stepped out of a thing onto the planet Mars, that everybody would be watching and we'd all be rooting for that person.

And so like, yes, because like one of the problems with good news is that it's not a good story usually because you have to have like some kind of overcoming of adversity. So you have to have like a bad piece to the good news in order for it to be interesting at all. Bad news is a story all on its own.

Like you don't like news is a story all on its own. It's a story immediately, whereas something good happening is kind of just what happens every day oftentimes. So I don't think it's a function of the news being bad at telling us how the world really is because ultimately they're telling us things that are interesting. I think it's a function of good news

just not being very interesting and the path necessary to tell a big story that's very good. It's just a hard path. Here's a hypothetical question for you. If tomorrow China announced, look, we've kept this quiet, but we've been doing pretty well with our space program and we're launching a rocket to mars tomorrow and like in a month or two they put the first human on mars and they televised and everyone could watch this chinese astronaut stepping off the ladder onto mars how would that go down in america that's a great question like would americans unite and be rooting for this chinese astronaut as he or she walks down the ladder? Or would it be swept under the carpet? Or would there be resentment?

I mean, we're talking from a very, even though Tim and I are Australians, we're talking from a very American-centric perspective about the moon landing. What if the Chinese did it? You're right. It would be more complicated. And thank you for taking me out of my American-centric worldview. But three months ago when that person stepped out of that rocket, I would be glued to whatever device was having the live stream. And I would be listening and I would be into it. And I think, honestly, it would probably do a lot of good for us feeling like a species

instead of a bunch of angry tribes. Yeah. It may do. I'd like to be that optimistic too. I'm not, but I'd like to be. Like I think man landing on the moon was probably bigger news and might be more of a catalytic event because of the advent of television. It was the fact that it was so new.

In some ways, no pun intended, it was a bigger step for mankind than going to Mars because Mars feels like a logical extension. It feels like, oh, yeah, we could probably do that at some stage. But in terms of how the world would respond to it if it wasn't or how America would respond to it if it wasn't America, I wonder how they responded when Russia had, now I'm going to mispronounce his name, Yuri Gagarin,

was the first man in space. So they beat America to space and that was in the context of a space race. Do you know what I mean? Was that celebrated? Was that heralded? Do you know, Brady? Or was it seen as just a, well, now we've got to get one better? I think that's when America kind of moved the finish line.

That's why we went to the moon, basically, because America got beaten to the actual finish line. So they went and created another finish line that they could get to first instead. So I don't think there was a lot of love and affection when Yuri Gagarin went into space in the United States. Was it a televised event? No. So it wasn't like everyone was waiting now?

Because going to space isn't sort of like an exact line. It's not a step, is it? It's a process. Is that right? So it's not like he's not in space. Now he's in space. There he is. He's in space, you know.

There are like criteria you can put to it that Eureka Garan clearly passed, you know, not just in terms of altitude, but like- I'm not doubting he went to space. I'm just saying there's no, it's not, there's not like walking down a ladder and standing. You're right. There's not, yeah. There's not like a physical thing you can touch like the surface of the moon. That's true.

There is something a lot more final about a footstep. Yeah. It's a lot about the story. It's a lot about like, like a journey to a place. It's a much easier thing to like have it fit into your brain's understanding of like what a human story is. Like we went to a place rather than we went to. High. Ugh.

Like what is like spaces? Like one piece of space is very like another piece of space. And there's a whole lot of it. I think this is the thing about Apollo I love most. And it's not the thing people talk about the most. And that is like, we went to the moon, but like how special the moon is. I think the reason I love Apollo so much is because I love the moon so much. It's like this companion that we have in space. And it's this beautiful pearl that just has been that is

attached to us and floats around with us and we've looked at it since humans existed we've looked at this beautiful thing every single night and then one day like one day we stepped on it like after thousands and thousands and thousands of years of looking at it and wondering about it and what's it made of and how far away is it? And then as a species, we just said, you know what, maybe we can actually go to that thing. After all that time, we actually went there and stepped on it. It's such a beautiful thing that we did as a species. lived on the side of a lake and on the other side of a lake, there was a mountain. And for generations and generations, everyone had just looked at the mountain. And then one day, someone built a boat and went across and climbed up on the mountain. It's like, that's what we did as an entire species. And I think that's a really good point as to why like a Mars mission might not be as visceral, because we look up at the sky and Mars is just another star. It's not like the moon which like my two-year-old son freaking obsessed

with the moon yeah he like last night it was like 20 degrees outside and i was like i'm going inside and he was like standing staring at the moon in the dark in his hoodie and i was like do you want to come inside and he was like big moon and i was yeah, it's a big moon. And the clouds were going by and he was like watching it come out. And I just left him out there. And then like I came back 10 minutes later and he's just staring at the moon. This is a two year old. He is not enthralled by anything. And the other thing, touching on something Hank said before, like you said, when that Chinese person takes the first step on Mars, you'll be glued to your device. But not everyone will be. And we live in a time now where there will be 400,000 other things that you could be

looking at when that happens. There'll be a new PewDiePie video. There'll be 19 different channels. There'll be a football match on. There'll be all these different things that you can watch. There'll be a lot more competition. You know, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I don't know what was on the other channel, but there was probably only one other channel you could watch I imagine they just went off air

they were like hey we know what you're watching Brady why you gotta make some moon stuff the other channel was thinking I knew we should have bought the rights to that moon landing I reckon they're probably playing planes trains and automobiles and I still would have been tempted to watch that instead because I love it so much. It's just another rerun. Oh, I love this. Yeah.

The moon is amazing and the amazing thing is that they came back. Yeah. When I think about going to the moon, I'm tempted to wonder if it's true and I know there's a whole industry in this and I know you're aghast at it, Brady. But for a novice mind, when I think about the moon, and even the idea that we could go to the moon and then we'll come back from the moon, we'll blast off, that seems such, it's such an enormous practical application on theory that, well, the moon has this gravitational pull,

we'll be able to land on it. We won't go through it. We'll be able to blast off from it. Just the idea that that all happens feels so unbelievable that I'm tempted to believe that it still hasn't been done, even though I know that is crazy and I don't entertain conspiracy theories. It does seem so incredible that it happened. But then I'm also reminded, like sometimes when I go to catch a plane, you're driving to the airport going, it does seem ridiculous that this thing is going to fly today. Like it's going to take off and then you get on and, of course, you do it. So some things just, they do defy logic or reason and yet they happen day after day after day.

For a minute there I thought you were going to say that you don't believe planes can fly either. No. I mean, that's a real good conspiracy theory. I'm sure somebody's got it. I had an idea for a short story once, and it was based on the premise that the reason things could fly, like planes could fly and birds and all that sort of stuff, was because the majority of humans believed it was possible.

And that's why the Wright brothers at the time when the first flight happened were able to fly. It's because there was a critical mass of humans. And in my short story, a conspiracy theory gets out that flight isn't possible, even though we have planes and birds and things fly. And there's just this madness takes over humanity that people stop believing. And it's getting closer and closer to reaching this 50% threshold again of people not believing in flight.

And it comes down to one individual having to decide whether or not they believe and like that person's just sitting there thinking about it thinking it is amazing that planes can fly how does it work i don't get it and finally they say no i just don't think it's possible and at that moment every plane and bird and everything all just falls out of the sky and crashes to earth that's cool and i have the film rights to that as well yeah absolutely or podcast rates i think we just made the podcast. So Hank, before we let you go to whatever you're doing next, is there anything else you want to tell us about? Anything that's going on that people should know?

Obviously, they should buy your book. I don't want to know too much more about the book. I haven't finished it yet. I'm listening to the audio book on my morning runs. Nice. And I'm about halfway through. So don't spoil it for me. It's called An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Hank Green.

Yeah. It's about a girl getting famous because of really weird things happening to her and then dealing with that. And it doesn't go great, but it's fun. I'm also going to be, I don't know when this stuff is going to come out, but I'm also going to be at PodCon, which is a conference for people who have podcasts. Yeah. January 19th and 20th.

It's in Seattle, Washington, January 19th and 20th. You can go to podcon.com to find out about it. We got lots of cool people there. We got Hello from the Magic Tavern and the McElroy Brothers and the Night Vale people and lots of cool creators. And I'm so excited to be there. You have got an impressive list. And these are people who have actually made their podcast ideas. So they're like next level from creators and I'm so excited to be there. You have got an impressive list. And these are people who have actually made their podcast ideas.

So they're like next level from Tim and I. That's right. I mean, making a podcast about the podcasts you want to make is just, if that was the next level, then this is the next level after that. Super. Hank, man, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tim, I'm sure you've enjoyed having him on as well, haven't you? He's done well, hasn't he? Oh, he's done very well. Fantastic. It's been a real pleasure, Hank. Lots of fun. Thanks very much. Thanks, mate. Thank you. All right.

Again, our thanks to Hank for joining us. It was great to have him on the show. And if you want to check out his bestselling book, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, it's pretty addictive. I'll put some links in the show notes and I'll also have a link in the notes to PodCon. If you can make your way to Seattle at the end of January, that's going to be a real who's who of podcasters at that. Also, thanks again to RxBar for supporting the episode. If you want to go and check them out, you'll be doing the podcast a favor. And you can also check us out on patreon at patreon.com slash unmade i gotta admit it really looks green to me too jim but i can't believe it's green oh it's a good story so i'm with that green

cheese i never believe it i hope it's green when i get it home