(melancholy music)
(melancholy music continues)
- [Announcer] And now, please welcome to the stage,
Hank Green! (audience cheering)
- Hello!
(Hank laughing)
Oh man.
So I got cancer. (audience laughing)
Thanks for that laugh line.
I have been in remission for this long.
(audience cheering)
That's why they make your hair fall out,
so that you have a measuring stick of how you're doing,
how long you've been okay.
Actually, no, the hair falls out because they say
any fast growing cell gets killed by the chemotherapy.
And I'm like, what are my hair cells doing
that they're growing so fast?
I've got lots of cells. Why are they special?
They're just secreting hair all day.
But that's not actually what happens.
I found out how hairs work, and it makes sense.
The problem is that it's gross,
and I'm going to tell you, and you can't leave.
(audience laughing)
So at the base of your hair follicles,
there's a bunch of little cells,
and they're constantly dividing, and as they do,
they push the cells higher and higher,
and as they get higher and higher,
they fill themselves up with the protein keratin,
and then as they get even higher,
they just eject all of their organelles,
and then their cytoplasm, and then they dry out,
and then they stick together and they become the hair.
All the lovely hairs, they smell so good.
It's just very long stacks of dead cells.
I find this super gross.
(audience laughing)
They were like, how are we going to make mammals happen?
And evolution was like,
(accent) "you're not going to believe my idea."
(audience laughing)
And then your hair can change.
I haven't quite figured this one out yet.
People argue about it, but you can get curly hair.
Mine came back curly,
so now I know what it's like for the curly haired people.
I get to be like you people, and here's what it's like.
I'm going to tell the straight hairs about it.
It's better, but it's harder.
I would tell you why it's harder,
but the curly hair people know, and the straight hair people
aren't my people anymore and I don't care about them.
(audience laughing)
When it started being curly,
I was thinking maybe I was going to get
that sort of Jeremy Allen White situation going on.
Like, swoopy-doopy.
I got the Mark Zuckerberg situation instead.
(audience laughing)
Which, I don't want to hate on Mark Zuckerberg
because of the way that he looks,
because there's all the other reasons.
So I'm just hoping it gets long,
and then I get to Jeremy Allen White eventually.
So I've been going to the gym a lot.
Nothing's happening.
I don't know, how much do you have to go to the gym
for something to happen?
So far, all it's changed is I can jump again.
Chemo's bad for jumping, but watch me now.
(audience cheering)
I know. (laughing) Feels good.
When you do a jump and you don't go anywhere,
you're like, oh, this is bad.
But that's not one of the good parts of cancer.
That's one of the bad parts.
But I got one of the good parts,
which is like, I got curly hair.
That's fun. But there's other good parts.
No one talks about the good parts.
Ah, what do I like about cancer?
I didn't have to do Zoom calls anymore,
(audience cheering)
which is amazing, because I've had cancer
and been on Zoom calls, and cancer's worse,
but I thought about it for a second.
People will do stuff for you.
You just ask, and they have to.
If they don't, they're a terrible person.
And if they do, they get to feel like a good person.
You ask somebody to drive you to the airport in this town,
they're like, how much cancer do you have?
(audience laughing)
I have a friend who tweeted,
I'm going to go get a big sandwich.
And I texted them and I said, get me one.
(audience laughing)
And then a half an hour later,
they were at my house with a big sandwich,
and then we sat on my porch in the Montana summer
and ate big sandwiches together
like it was a root beer commercial,
if root beer had commercials,
which it doesn't need to, so it doesn't.
But if they did, it would be like that.
And I was like, everybody should get cancer!
(audience laughing)
So, hair falls out everywhere,
but it falls out first anywhere there's a lot of friction,
which sounds kind of like, ooh!
But it's the butt crack.
(audience laughing)
When I had it, I was like, well, there's got to be reason.
I don't get what it could be.
It seems like a bad idea to have hair
where the poop comes from, but there's got to be a reason.
And then I didn't, and I was like, there's no reason.
This is better.
(audience laughing)
It's like a water slide down there, and it's awesome.
(audience laughing)
My job is to know this stuff, and so I'm like,
evolution, what are you thinking?
(accent) "There's a selective pressure towards
butt crack hair."
I'm like, I don't think there is. I did the math.
I've experienced the experiment.
"No, there is. I promise, I just like..."
Did you say you just like it?
"You cannot kink shame evolution."
(audience laughing)
"Do not yuck my yums."
"And can you even do a German accent anymore?"
Yeah, no, that's going to be the last one it's weird to do,
'cause you know what you did.
They give you a free therapist. That's fun.
I actually am not 100% sure that it's free,
because I did something really interesting.
I hit my out of pocket maximum.
(audience cheering) Yeah. Yes.
Yes, the traditional American out of pocket maximum.
If you don't know what it is, I won't explain it to you,
because it's too sad of an idea.
(audience laughing)
So I guess the idea is, basically,
if you spend enough money for like two months,
they treat you like a Canadian.
(audience laughing)
If you get sick early enough in the year, though,
when I first got sick, several times,
I would be at the hospital and people would be like,
well, at least this happened early in the year.
And I was like, did you have an office pool?
(audience laughing)
I don't know why that would be, but I guess you walk in
in February with a significant diagnosis
and a party popper goes off and a little siren.
(mimics siren) Congratulations!
We just want to add some casino fun vibes
to serious illness in America.
So those are some good parts.
There's also bad parts of cancer.
I don't know if you've heard about this.
The big concern with my cancer specifically,
the chemo I was getting, it's a blood cancer,
so they're going after your white blood cells.
So you have to be watching out
for any sign of infection at all, and I thought I had a UTI,
'cause my pee was cloudy and my dick hurt and that's it.
I think that's the things.
So I called my doctor and I was like, I think I have a UTI,
'cause my dick is cloudy and my pee hurts.
That's, nope. (audience laughing)
We're having a good time.
And he was like, come on in.
And I peed in a cup, and he looked at it in the light,
and then he gave it a little sniff,
and then he drank a little, just a sip,
(audience laughing)
and then he sent it to the lab.
That part was just for fun.
No, he's not into pee, my doctor. He's a good guy.
Good guys can be into pee.
(audience laughing)
He sent it to the lab.
It comes back, and he's like, you do not have a UTI.
And I'm like, dope, but still, dick hurts, pee cloudy.
And he's like, well,
the penis pain is a symptom of chemotherapy.
And I'm like, sir!
You gave me a list of chemotherapy symptoms.
It was very long, and I would've seen dick pain.
I read the whole thing, and even if I hadn't,
I feel like it would've jumped off the page, you know?
He was like, well, we don't put everything on the list.
It would be kind of overwhelming and scary.
And I was like, what?
Because it's not been overwhelming and scary at all so far.
And I was like, well, what about the cloudy pee, then?
He said, well, that's the cancer.
And I said, what?
The cancer makes your pee cloudy?
And he said, no. That's the cancer.
The chemotherapy kills the cells.
They explode, and then all their lipids and proteins
end up in the space between your cells.
That gets picked up by your lymphatic system,
and then dumped into the circulatory system,
and then filtered out by your kidneys
and put into your bladder,
and then you pee it out into the toilet.
And I was like, Doc!
You gotta tell people about that.
You gotta tell people about that! That's very empowering!
You're telling me that when I see the cloudy pee,
I'm succeeding at killing cancer?
And then I flush it into the sewer where it belongs?
Everybody who's taking chemotherapy or doing radiation
should get out of bed, but they should stand up to pee,
and they should do it like this. (screaming)
Fuck you!
I don't care what equipment you have. You can figure it out.
Feel like you can do it?
Yeah, all right.
(audience laughing)
Hi, I'm Hank.
Hi, Jolena. Nice to meet you.
So, a lot of people want to know how I figured out
that I had cancer, what's the story of the diagnosis.
People want it because it's going to help them
in their journey.
It probably won't, because every cancer's very different,
but I'll tell you my story.
I had a swollen lymph node in my armpit.
It was hard and weird, and I went to my doctor,
and she's like, well, you did just have shingles
right there, so it's probably that,
but I'll send you to get an ultrasound.
And it's like you got a baby in you, but it's cancer,
so it was wand-ing over the thing,
and she's very calm, the ultrasound tech.
Just clicking on the screen. I don't know what she's doing.
And at the end of it, I'm wiping up the gel,
and she says, I'm going to go see
if I can go find a doctor. (audience groaning)
Oh no. This is America.
I have to wait to see a doctor, I'm sorry.
But no, five minutes later, I was having
the first involuntary doctor's appointment of my life.
And he came in, man, I've never seen him before,
still never seen him again, he came into the room,
and he says all the things that the ultrasound tech knew,
but couldn't say legally.
He tells me that my lymph nodes are very large.
I'm like, thank you. I've heard.
He says that my fatty hilum has been lost.
I don't know where it went.
Still don't even know what that is.
And then he tells me that my vasculature is abnormal,
and I'm like, rude!
(audience laughing)
And then he says I need a biopsy immediately,
and we can do it in the room now, if I get a needle biopsy,
where they just stick a big fat needle in
and pull some cells out,
but we might not get enough cells that way,
so we should probably, and this is my choice,
we should probably just remove a full lymph node
and do a surgical biopsy that way,
so they have lots of cells, and we can do that tomorrow.
He was very matter of fact about this,
and he was like, and it might be nothing.
He didn't give me a percentage of chance
that it might be nothing, so I was like,
well, it might be nothing.
And he gives me the paperwork
to go down to the day surgery with, I fill it out,
I hand it to the woman at day surgery reception,
and I'm like, "Here," and she's like, "Oh, hand delivery!
You know you could just mail this in."
And I said, well, surgery is tomorrow,
so I figured I should hand it to you now.
And then she said, ah, procrastinator!
(audience laughing)
'Cause she thinks that I have
some kind of fun young man thing.
I'm here to get my vasectomy, or I lifted a log too hard,
like I played a sport too much, but look at me.
What sport am I doing?
Did I get yo-yo finger, that I need repaired?
(mimics yo-yo whirring) Ow!
Oh, it's still down there. It's sleeping.
Ah, yeah. (mimics yo-yo whirring elaborately)
(audience cheering)
Thanks. I'm not done.
(audience oohing)
(audience cheering)
Thank you. It's a lot easier when you don't have a yo-yo.
(audience laughing)
I didn't have yo-yo finger, and when I told her,
in fact, that surgery was scheduled today,
her face changed very fast,
and in a way that made me feel not great.
She knows that you don't get surgery
faster than that unless you have, like,
a piece of a Kia Sorento currently inside of you.
But I didn't know that, and when her face changed,
it's like you're on a plane and there's a lot of turbulence
and the planes making a funny noise,
and you look over at the flight attendant,
and they look fine, you're like, okay, it's fine.
It's like in that situation,
you look at the flight attendant, and they're crying.
And it's sort of weird that in this moment,
I am in the uncanny valley
version of the American healthcare system
where it starts to work really fast and efficiently,
and it's great that that part exists,
but it's terrifying and upsetting.
It's like you came home and your dog is doing chores.
(audience laughing)
It's like you walk in and he's like...
♪ He-mo-ni-mo, ba-doop bi-ga-boo-gee ♪
The dog chore song.
And you're like, "What are you doing?"
And it's like, "Sweeping."
Okay, you haven't really been
pulling your weight around here.
He's doing a pretty good job.
Not as good as a cat would do, but pretty good.
And you're like, okay, it's cute,
but then you notice he's got hands now,
and you're like, actually, I don't like that.
Your job is to cuddle, not chores.
I love it, but I need you to stop anyway.
That's what I felt like. I was like, the dog's doing chores.
He needs to stop doing chores.
And then the healthcare system goes back to being
a normal dog again for a while, and I also hated that.
It took like 10 days before I got the biopsy results back,
and so I called my surgeon, and I was like, hey.
When do I find out about this?
Because I've eaten my whole tongue.
I am not doing good over here.
And she says, okay, come in.
I want to look at your incision anyway.
I want to check and see if it's healing well,
and I'll call them in the meantime.
And so I do. She comes in.
She's poking my armpit, which is where the incision was.
That's not just fun.
And she says, A+. You're healing so well.
And I'm like, A+? That's how you become my best friend.
Just give me a grade. I'm 43 years old.
Just trying to get As still.
I'm trying to get an A in cancer.
This whole thing is extra credit.
And then she says, and I called them,
and they say that you have cancer,
but they're not sure what kind yet.
(Hank retches)
I thought those two pieces of information
came at the same time, but here's the situation.
I had asked her to tell me what she knew, and she did,
which, my bad.
(audience laughing)
I didn't want that.
I didn't want, you have cancer,
but we're not sure what kind yet.
But she didn't know that. I told her.
But I, in my job, regularly know things and don't say them.
That's the only way to exist on Twitter.
Some people don't learn that lesson, though. Over and over.
You can buy the whole platform and not learn that lesson.
(audience applauding)
So, I had pictured this situation like I see on TV,
where there is a big desk and there's an oncologist
behind the desk, and there's books behind the oncologist,
and you're sitting at the desk,
and they're going to tell you the situation,
and then House walks in and he's like, Wilson!
And Wilson's like, not now, House!
I'm trying to tell this young man that he has cancer,
but we're not sure what kind yet.
And then House is like, Wilson...
Oh, actually, that's helped me figure out the key
to the diagnosis that we've been working on all episode!
But it wasn't like that.
It was a normal doctor's office with the little bed
that's not long enough to be a bed,
and the thing comes out of the bottom of it
and it's still not long enough to be a bed,
and there's the crinkled paper on top of it.
So I'm sitting on the crinkled paper
like the world's saddest Reese's Peanut Butter Cup,
(audience laughing)
and I find out I have cancer,
but we're not sure what kind yet, so I lean back to cry,
and the crinkled paper's like, crinkle!
And I'm like, fuck you! No!
That's not the vibe right now! And then she...
What does the paper do?
If you rip the paper, they're not like, quick, get up!
We've got to do new paper!
Paper does nothing.
The paper's there because in the 60s,
the man who owned the paper was friends
with the man who owned the hospital,
and then ever since then, if you get rid of the paper,
people will walk in and be like, what is this?
Is this a dentist? I don't trust this, there's no...
I need it to be wrapped, but badly.
(audience laughing)
It doesn't cover much of the space.
Maybe the paper will get thinner and thinner,
and in the year 2050,
it'll just be a thin strip down the middle.
Then they'll be like, this is silly.
We should get rid of it.
And that's how we can finally get there.
We need to start working toward that future.
(mimics paper whooshing) Paper.
So I'm on the paper, and she tells me some stuff,
very useful information about where we might go from here,
and then she's like, okay,
you can have the room as long as you want.
It's your place.
And then she leaves.
And 30 seconds later, I'm like, okay,
she said I could stay as long as I want,
but like, what's the right amount of time?
(audience laughing)
'Cause if I leave right now,
I feel like she's going to look at me and be like,
he's not processing this at all.
That's not an emotionally mature man.
But you also can't DoorDash Taco Bell
to the doctor's office.
(audience laughing)
Eventually they're going to be like,
okay, we got other patients.
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
(audience clapping)
Matchbox 20, fuck you! I didn't need to hear that right now!
I didn't think my beginning would be the beginning
that had to end for someone else's beginning to begin.
So I realize in this moment that I'm still me.
I have cancer, but I'm still me.
I just got told I might die,
and I'm worried about what people are going to think
when I leave the cancer room.
Is it going to be the right time or the wrong? I don't know.
Most of the people don't know anything.
There's rules around medical documents.
It's a doctor's office, not Mar-a-Lago.
(audience laughing)
So I finally get up and I try to exude normal vibes
as I walk out of the doctor's, but they're bad normal vibes,
so it's like, I'm normal!
Normal day!
I go downstairs and I sort of enter into the universe
that we all inhabit together,
beautiful universe that we get to have,
and I remember very clearly
that I wanted to have a big, nice thought.
I wanted to see something, see a butterfly float by,
and be like, that butterfly is beautiful, and temporary,
and we're just a part of the long story of life,
and it's been a long time, and it's going to be a long time,
and we were never going to be here for a long time.
I don't know how long butterflies...
I do. Live.
(audience laughing)
But, like, you know, it's short, and so is life.
Human life is short. Different shorts, but still short.
I don't see a butterfly, though, you know?
I see an office park.
I see, to the left, is the worst road in my town.
It's the one that has the meat processing plant on it,
and it's got a funeral home,
and it's got jail,
and also juvie co-located with the jail,
and it's got a mini storage,
and you know there's something bad hidden in there.
So I look at the road, and in between me and the road,
there's a ditch, and in the ditch,
there's cups, 'cause no one ever cares
about the world when they're on this road.
They just fucking throw things out the window.
And I look at the ditch, and I have one conscious mind.
I have this thing that I love so much
that I'm worried about losing, this existence that I have.
I don't really know what it is.
It lobs me up a thought, and I don't know how this works,
but it's like, yeah, have this one!
And I'm like, that fucking cup doesn't have cancer.
(audience laughing)
And, like, me now,
I'm like yeah, Hank, the cup doesn't have senses.
It's never eaten a pizza.
It's never heard the giggle of a child, or jazz music.
It's never heard the noise that pigeons make,
which I really like. (mimics a pigeon)
I love that one, and you can still impersonate pigeons,
'cause they know what they did.
But I'm in the office park, I'm jealous of a cup,
and then I look at my Chevy Volt,
which also doesn't have cancer, and drive home.
And I go see my wife, and Katherine tells me
that I don't have to Google everything it could be,
which is what I wanted to do.
But that was good. Talked me off that ledge.
And then I have to call my mom.
(audience groaning) Yeah.
Sort of widely considered to be
the worst part of getting cancer
is that you have to call your mom,
unless your mom is dead, in which case,
the worst part is that you can't call your mom.
So I get to call my mom. I'm happy to be able to.
And I call my mom, and she picks up the phone,
and she says, hello?
My mom is a spooky lady.
(audience laughs)
She's into ghosts. I'm not.
We're okay about it.
But at that moment I'm like, whoa, okay.
Is the ESP thing working?
Did the ghost tell her about my cancer already?
She seems worried.
But then, quickly, I realize that in fact what has happened
is I've called my mom at five o'clock in the afternoon
on a Friday without having previously told her
that I'm going to call, and I've never done that before,
and she knows that I don't do that,
and so she thinks someone's dead.
So I find myself in the really weird position of,
in this moment, being able to give my mom good news.
(audience laughing)
Mother, Katherine and Orin are fine.
Everyone you think is alive is alive.
And then I got kind of caught up in it,
and I was like, and I...
Oh no.
I have something I need to tell you.
The Roman Stoics believed...
I'm going to go on a...
We'll get back.
The Roman Stoics believed in the power of something
called negative visualization.
If you imagine terrible things happening,
you will appreciate the good things in your life.
You imagine the death of your child so that you can
appreciate the time that you have with your child.
I just don't think that the Roman Stoics
had ever met their moms, 'cause that's not how moms work.
Moms worry, and then they follow that up with more worry.
They imagine the death of their child, and then they imagine
a more different-er death of their child
while they're staring at the ceiling at night,
and then a third death of their child, followed by,
if they're not asleep yet, a fourth death of their child.
That's how moms fall asleep, is they count child deaths,
(audience laughing)
instead of sheep.
And this practicing half of Roman Stoicism,
granted, my mom, very few superpowers,
but she was really good at this conversation.
10 out of 10, no notes.
My dad was great, my mom was great, Katherine was great.
I cried like a total mess, and they all cried,
like, little cute way, and were very supportive,
and I loved it, and I am very grateful for my family.
(audience applauding)
And then we have to tell my six year old son.
It's okay, you can do that louder for the microphones.
Then I have to tell my six year old son.
(audience aw-ing)
That was a little much, honestly.
(audience laughing)
So, we explain it to him as best as we can.
It's kind of hard, with a six year old.
He doesn't have all the baggage that we have with cancer,
so that's actually probably pretty good.
We finish up telling him that I'm going to be sick,
and we're going to be upset about stuff,
and then he, this is a quote burned into my brain,
he says, Dada, did you know,
that if you touch a magnet to a piece of metal,
sometimes that metal will also become a magnet?
(audience applauding)
And I was like, yeah.
I'm fucking Hank Green. (audience cheering)
I knew that.
First half of that really is true. That's what he said.
He's processing it in his own way.
But I did not say that to him.
That night, we get the call from my surgeon,
and she's like, amazing news.
I mean, as good news as you can get.
It's Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is the one you want,
if you're going to get it, and so I call my parents,
and they are on a walk when they get the news,
and they are crossing over a bridge when it happens,
and they now call this the good news bridge.
And she painted it for me, and it's hanging on my wall.
Very sweet. So, get cancer.
It's really touching. Very heartwarming.
You get to find out how much people care about you.
Don't.
Do that other ways. Just tell people you care about them.
Tell people you care about them!
(audience laughing)
Do it, now! Right now!
People at home, take out your phone.
Find a person who you think it would be super sad
if they died, but you also wouldn't, like,
ruin your life or anything.
Not your son, not your best friend, not your wife.
Just take a look and be like, who's a person,
just one of the hundreds of people in your life
that you'd be super sad if they died,
but four or five days, you'd be pretty over it?
Text them and tell them how much you love them!
Not, like, totally over it.
(audience laughing)
So then I have to go to the hospital and sign up
to be a cancer patient, which is a process.
So I go into the cancer center and they give you paperwork
to fill out to be cancer person,
and the first page is just all the diseases that exist,
and you have to check the ones you have.
That's just to make you feel good, that you're like,
oh, I only got 1% percent of the diseases.
I'm doing pretty good.
And then the next page starts off, it says,
have you, in the last couple of months,
considered committing suicide?
And I'm like, yeah, but only in the fun ways.
So I check no.
My wife's like, what does that joke mean?
And I'm like, don't worry.
(audience laughing)
It's not a problem, it's just like,
I watched too much anime in high school.
Visualize cutting my arm off.
But, like, in a fun way.
And the next question on the list says,
have you, in the last couple of months,
wanted to go to sleep and not wake up?
Oh-ho-ho! All right!
The cancer paperwork has two suicide questions!
They're like, yeah, you don't want to do that,
but what if we came at it from this way?
And you're like, actually,
I hadn't thought about that one yet!
I super want to be alive for as long as possible,
but now that you mention it, it has an appeal.
I want to go to sleep and not wake up for a while.
If you're wondering why it sucks to wake up
with cancer so much, I have a way of explaining it.
Imagine the nightmare that we've all had, right,
where you've been hired by the mafia
to kill the Baltimore Orioles, all of them.
The sports team, not the birds. That'd be fucked up, right?
(audience laughing)
And you've done it. You did it.
They were all at the sports game together.
They were in the locker room,
and you were like, (mimics blade swooshing) all at once.
But what you didn't account for
is that there are a lot of retired Baltimore Orioles,
and now they are very mad at you.
And you are in an abandoned mall,
and they can smell you.
I don't know why, but you know.
And so you duck into the Hot Topic.
You get in there and you get between the first aisle
that you can find, and you're down on your knees
hiding in the aisle, but you realize
you've gone into the aisle with the jingly pants
that they wear to the Insane Clown Posse concerts,
and so you're trying to hide,
but you also have to not jingle the pants.
But the aisle is getting more and more narrow somehow,
and the ceiling is getting lower,
and now it's just like a tunnel of jingly pants
and you're trying very carefully, very seriously,
not to make any noise at all.
But you can't help it.
You bump a jingle, and it jingles,
and you hear the Orioles outside
stop moving and turn toward you.
(audience laughing)
And I don't know if you know this,
but group of Baltimore Orioles is called a murder.
(audience laughing)
And so you get down, and you're just like,
they're coming, but I'm gonna hide as best I could,
like maybe someone will save me.
So you're laying down in the aisle with the jingly pants,
and then coming around the corner you see a man,
and he's got a catcher's mask on, and he's looking at you,
and you're like, holy shit.
And then you realize there's a gun in your ankle holster,
'cause you're an assassin.
You pull it out. Click.
But it's out of bullets!
And Cal Ripken Jr. pulls off his catcher's mask,
looks down at you, and he says,
strike three, motherfucker.
And baseball bat rains your face, and then you wake up,
and you're like, holy shit, you guys.
I've never killed anybody.
(audience cheering)
I'm from Florida, so I've killed, like, fish and bugs,
and crabs, which are like fish bugs.
That's what happened, Aristotle said,
is just a bug had sex with a fish.
That's how we got crabs.
So that's what it's like
when you wake up and you have cancer.
You're like, holy shit,
I am both hunting and being hunted by the Baltimore Orioles.
Except the Baltimore Orioles live inside your body,
and they eat you, and you have to poison their food.
So I go see my doctor about that, and he's like,
so good news is, Hodgkin's lymphoma, great.
It's one of the good ones.
Now that we're staged and we know where you're at,
you have a 5% chance of being dead,
just a 5% chance of being dead in five years.
And I'm like, mm! Seems bad, I don't know!
And he's like, well, I see people with cancer all day,
and I got one who's probably going to make it.
This is great, I love it.
And I'm like, I see people doing TikTok dances
inside of my phone all day, and they seem fine.
(audience laughing)
Doc, nobody does anything with a 5% chance of killing them,
no matter how fun the thing is or how stupid the person is,
unless they're a billionaire who wants to visit the Titanic.
(audience laughing)
Oh, I didn't know. Did something happen?
Actually, interestingly, the summer I was sick
was a particularly bad year on Mount Everest.
The death rate of trying to summit Mount Everest,
depending on how you count,
approached the death rate of Hodgkin's lymphoma,
and I don't know if you've ever lost anyone
in a mountaineering accident, I'm sorry about this,
but I did find that to be a source of comfort.
And I'll explain to you why,
because that's a monster thought,
but look, you got monster thoughts all the time,
but especially when you're sick.
But going up Mount Everest is like the hardest thing.
That's why you do it,
so you can say, I did the hardest thing!
That's why I spent all that money and took all that danger,
so I could do the hardest thing.
But it turns out it's about as hard
as having Hodgkin's lymphoma,
and I get to do that in bed watching "Taskmaster".
(audience laughing)
I did the math.
It's actually cheaper to get cancer,
as long as you only do it for one year,
and you have health insurance.
And also, another perk, if you die of cancer,
no one thinks you're an idiot.
(audience laughing)
So, cool.
(audience laughing)
This first appointment with my oncologist
is a wild experience.
It's so cool, because he's not busy at all.
It seems like he could talk for an infinite amount of time.
We talked for so long. Me and my wife were there.
We talked for like an hour,
and then he was still volunteering questions
we didn't even have to ask him.
At the end, it was like an hour into the meeting,
and he was like, a lot of people want to know,
why did they get cancer?
And I was like, Doc, I know why I got cancer.
And he was like, oh no.
Which conspiracy theory am I about to hear from this man?
I didn't think that he was one of those.
Is it the chemtrails?
Does he think the voting machines gave him cancer?
And I'm like, no.
Doctor, sometimes ants
have wings.
And he's like, oh, extra no. I've not heard that one yet.
Is that a lefty or a righty?
Why can ants sometimes have wings, doctor?
And he's like, I don't know. Why are we talking about ants?
And I'm like, it's weird, right?
If anything should be able to sometimes have wings,
it should be giraffes,
not because they would work, but it would be cute.
(trills)
But no, ants get to sometimes have wings, and that's bad.
They should be confined to surfaces.
How can ants even grow wings?
Wings are complicated structures.
I don't get to sometimes have the little Shrek horns
that giraffes have, and those are very simple,
just bones and skin.
You know what I'm talking about.
The knobs on a giraffe,
that control the volume and the temperature on a giraffe?
But ants get to sometimes have wings.
Why do ants even have wing genes, Doctor?
Do you know why, Doctor?
And he says, I don't know why.
And I said, ants are descended from wasps.
Yeah, bees too.
Bees and ants are just wasps
that decided to suck a little less.
So he was like, are you telling me that Ant-Man and Wasp
is just like Specialized Ground Wasp Man and Regular Wasp?
And I'm like, yeah! That's what I've been saying!
And he was like, this is super cool.
I was like, I wrote a letter to Marvel!
And he said, what did they say?
And I said, they said that I needed
to stop writing them letters!
(audience laughing)
Ants sometimes have wings, but the wild thing is,
they're not specialized for life in the ground.
They're specialized for colonial life.
And my doctor's like, colonial?
Like churning butter in early America?
And I'm like, no. Living in colonies.
See, ants are optimized for a weird way
of getting their genetic information passed on.
But here's the thing, they work together
not to get their genes passed to the next generation of ant,
but to get their genes passed
to the next generation of ant colony.
Doctor, I would like you to imagine for a moment
that you are just a bunch of ants.
And he's like, finally.
(audience laughing)
Because look, for basically half of the history of life
on Earth, everything on Earth was single-celled organisms.
They passed their genes on by just having one cell
become two, and both of them had the same genes, roughly.
But then, a bunch of different times,
several cells would get together,
and they would optimize not for that,
not for getting their genes to the next generation of cell,
but getting their genes passed
to the next generation of colony of cells,
and that's multicellular organisms.
That's us.
We are just a bunch of cells
all working together in marvelous little symphony
that we totally take for granted,
and we've only begun to really understand as a species,
working together to do all the wild and weird things
that we do, trying to get us
to correctly do the Cha-Cha Slide at the wedding
so that my wife will look at me and go, I guess!
(audience laughing)
And then we can have a child.
And he is now the new colony of cells
that have some of my genetic information.
That's wild. But here's an extra weird thing about ants.
When they started becoming ants,
when they were descending from wasps,
that moment that happened, a single gene copied itself
a bunch of times in ants with minor variations,
and that gene was in the ability to smell stuff.
Why do ants need all this ability to smell?
Because that's how they control the colony.
Ants don't know what they're doing, right?
They just have this remarkable set of pheromones
for all kinds of different activities,
and they smell each other, and it makes them do stuff.
It's like high school.
(audience laughing)
So that's why they need all those ability to smell.
They need ways to communicate,
and our cells are the same way.
Our cells are constantly communicating
with all these chemical signals.
You can't cross this tissue boundary.
Here's where the blood vessel should go.
All this stuff, it's amazing.
But imagine, Doc, an ant who, one day,
decides he's an individualist.
He wants to be more like a wasp.
His name is Trent.
And Trent, because he has decided
that instead of getting his genes
passed onto the next generation of colony,
he's just going to pass it onto his clone.
He's gonna clone himself, make a little extra Trent,
and all his descendants are the Trents,
and the Trents can all signal the pheromones
to tell the colony to take care of Trents
at the expense of the rest of the colony.
They're going to have so many resources.
The ants don't know what they're doing.
They're just smelling stuff, and it's making them do things,
and so they start taking care of the Trents,
and the more Trents there are,
they're all going to have this same trick
to signal the ants to bring them food and take care of them,
and so they're going to have so many resources,
and they're going to multiply exponentially
until there's so many Trents that the colony
can't support itself anymore, and it collapses,
and all of the ants die, including the Trents.
Doc, that's what happened to me.
One of my cells is a goddamn Trent!
(audience cheering)
I got one cell that figured out
how to confuse all the other cells into taking care of it
at the expense of the rest of my body.
And the weird thing is that this cell
is basically a reversion to a single celled lifestyle.
This is a new organism that isn't me anymore,
but its nearest ancestor is me.
A single celled organism whose nearest ancestor is me,
and the only environment it knows is my body,
and it loves it, and it's growing inside of it,
and it has no idea that at the end of this process,
it will go extinct along with me,
and Doctor, our job is to drive the Trents into extinction
before they extinct themselves by killing me!
And he's like, actually, I do have some other appointments
I need to get to today. (audience applauding)
So how do we kill the Trents? First step, chemotherapy.
I go to get my first infusion at the infusion center.
It's the nicest room in the hospital,
big picture windows, it's got recliners.
There's a nurse who's assigned to you for the day.
She's like, hello. I'll be your nurse today.
We have cold yogurt and warm blankets
and room temperature poison.
One of those things is mandatory.
I sit down, I get hooked up. She stabs me in the chemo port.
They install a port in your body,
like you are a space station.
And so she gave me the first chemotherapy bag and she says,
now, as soon as you're done with this one,
you're going to want to try to pee as soon as you can,
because they don't like this stuff
hanging around inside of you.
And I'm like, if you don't want it inside of me,
why are you putting it inside of me?
But once it's through the tissues and in your bladder,
it's just going to be in there irritating
the lining of your bladder and making your dick hurt,
so you get it out as soon as you can.
And then she says to me, for the next few days,
nothing that comes out of you should go into anyone else.
(audience laughing)
And,
okay,
we had just been talking about pee,
me and this woman, and I look around
at all the 80 and 90 year olds in the infusion center
you know, people who get cancer when they were supposed to-
(audience groaning) Oh, aw. Oh.
And I'm looking around and I'm like,
this doesn't seem like a community
that engages in a ton of watersports.
Like, she met my wife earlier. Did she get a vibe?
She's looking at me, and I'm looking at her,
and we're both waiting for the other one to break, right?
I'm just like, you say it. I don't know what it is.
And she's like, you'll get it.
You taught me anatomy and physiology on YouTube.
I'm like, I don't know that I will.
I don't see it. (audience cheering)
I break first, and I swear to god, I say, like pee?
(audience laughing)
Like pee?
Like pee! Everybody in the room got it.
I was doing a show, and there was a 10 year old
in the front row, he got it!
I just want to say to all the people in the world
who made it necessary for my nurse to say that, wow.
You just leave the chemo center
with a little twinkle in your eye
and you're like, let's go home, honey!
I don't know. And I'll shield you from my poisoned semen!
I don't know, that is very strange.
That's great, that my nurse thought
I might be a person like that.
That's very kind of her, thoughtful,
to think that I might possibly do anything
but just lay in bed and feel very sorry for myself.
So there's lots of bad parts of chemo.
One of them, we were talking about earlier,
the white blood cell thing,
so I'm super susceptible to infection,
so I'm basically on lockdown, shouldn't leave my house,
but I have been told that I might die,
so I feel like I need some very comfortable pants.
So I go to a place called Scheels,
which is like a sporting goods store
that fucked a Chuck E. Cheese.
(audience laughs)
One thing you need to know about Scheels
is that if you let it, it would definitely vote for Trump.
If you put it on a talk show and it was a pundit,
it would sort of imply subtly and lightly
that my cancer was caused by the vaccine.
That's the Scheels vibe. But it's great.
I love it there, except for that part.
So I was shopping for pants,
but then I had to go pee my cancer out,
and so I went into the bathroom, and I was washing up,
and there's a guy in there and he looks and me and he says,
out loud, with his own mouth,
why are you wearing that?
And I was like, what the fuck am I wearing?
Did I accidentally wear
my Joe Biden is so cool shirt to Scheels?
Is it just like, gays!
(audience laughing)
This is a weird thing to say to a person,
and I realize I'm wearing a mask.
Most people, I think, in this situation,
would be like, ugh, god!
Now I'm dealing with this situation. Very upsetting.
Why is this person acting like this?
I hate this, and I'm very stressed out.
But I am me, and so I, again, my brain tossed me this one.
It said, this is going to be the best part of cancer.
(audience laughing)
Because he was over here in discourse-ville,
and I was inhabiting normal person land,
and I was like... (squeaks)
I can be in discourse-ville! I do that all the time!
And I hate it, and I shouldn't, but I do, and I know how.
I was wearing a beanie, and I got to take my beanie off.
That's the fastest way, right?
And it's not like this. It wasn't just bald.
It was in between bald and the 80 hairs
that were still growing had grown out some.
It was like a small wedding of hairs.
And I pull of my beanie, and he's like, whoa!
He sees it immediately. My skin is the color of the ceiling.
And he's like, oh gosh.
And I got to watch him as he formed a memory.
(audience applauding)
We all have these memories, right?
These ones that we lay in bed and we think about,
like the time that I told a girl
she had a nosebleed, but it was a mole.
Yeah, that was real. That's a real story.
And here's the thing, he was super nice about it.
And also, I was super nice.
I knew that if I was mean, it would be better for him,
but I knew that the nicer I was for him,
the worse it would be.
That's the only reason I was nice.
I'm not a hero in this story.
I wasn't trying to take the temperature down.
It was just the best strategy for making it bad for him,
and I knew that that night, he would be staring in bed.
We'd both be in bed that night, staring at the ceiling.
Not the same bed.
(audience laughing)
I don't know, that'd be a weird way for the story to go.
And then we kissed.
But I did shield him from my poison semen.
(audience laughing)
It's a beautiful story.
We made it work. We healed America.
Then I have to get radiation.
That's the last step in my cancer journey.
Lucky enough to be able to get radiation,
because it was in the right spot, basically,
so I didn't have to do extra chemo.
I could do radiation instead.
So I go get radiation, and my oncologist is like,
there's a separate one for this,
and she's a nice, sweet little southern woman,
and she says to me,
how're you feeling about the whole process?
Are you comfortable?
And I'm like, yeah, no, I'm into it.
I unfortunately did, because I'm me, do the math,
and I don't love what I discovered.
And she's like, what do you mean?
I was like, well, if you gave me
all the radiation you're going to give me in one day
instead of spaced out over a couple of weeks,
I would die of radiation poisoning.
And she was like, oh, honey. Yeah.
That's why we spread it out over 12 days.
No, I wanted you to tell me I did the math wrong!
That's not what I wanted to hear!
So you go to the place to get radiation.
You go every day, and you walk in,
and there's, they call it the labyrinth.
Literally, that's what it's called.
It's a room that is structured in such a way
so the photons cannot escape and hurt people besides you.
Labyrinths, not traditionally great for protagonists,
but I'm here, lying down,
and there is a particle accelerator with me,
most expensive machine I've ever been near,
going to do ridiculous things to my body.
If I got this level of radiation exposure at work,
I could sue them for so much money,
but I'm doing it on purpose, so it costs money,
and so I lay down on the thing
and it sort of moves around me,
this giant robot particle accelerator laser thing,
and then I know that it's going to be
one of the most impactful things
that ever happens to my body, and it happens,
and it feels like nothing, and it makes this noise.
(Hank beeps)
Then it moves to a different spot, and it's like...
(Hank beeping)
It's the future. We have arrived in the future.
Fucking make it sound cool.
Now they make electric cars go like... (ululating)
Give it a space laser noise!
So I do the radiation, and then I'm officially cancer free.
It's weird. Being in remission is weird.
I know that you want to cheer for me.
That's good. You can do that. (audience cheering)
So, are there any Cancers in the audience?
Star sign, not disease.
What's up, Cancers? What's up?
This is the part of the show where we all apologize to you
for having clearly the worst name possible for a star sign.
The names of the star signs, really,
it reads like a list written by a person
for whom the mushrooms are kicking in.
In the beginning, they're writing down the list,
can you put a lion on there?
And he's like, Leo, great. Leo, lion.
Can you put scorpion? Scorpio, dope.
That's also a cool animal. We're making a cool animal list.
And it's like, bull. Taurus, I love...
That's great, cool animal.
I love this cool animal list we're making. What's next?
Fish. Well, fish is Pisces.
That's like half of vertebrates.
Can you be a little more specific?
You can't just be fish. And he's like, no, fish.
I want to put fish on the list. I don't know why.
Okay, fish. What about human twins?
(audience laughing)
That's weird. I guess that's also a couple of animals.
What about a woman carrying water?
Aquarius.
Can you...
I've got an idea.
This is cool. I'm seeing...
I'm going to call it Capricorn,
and it's going to be a goat fish.
We don't have goat on the list yet!
We already have fish, we could just do goat.
I want to do a goat fish!
Goat fish.
I want to do Libra now.
What's Libra mean?
Scales.
Like fish scales? You're doing a lot of fish stuff.
No, like the device. I want to do the device, scales.
(audience laughing)
Like for weighing things?
And Cancer! I want to put Cancer on the list!
Belshazzar, are you all right?
They're ancient Babylonians.
So yeah, as a person who tells people stuff
about how things are, I would like to tell the Cancers
why their star sign is the same
as the name for a bad disease,
but I can't, 'cause no one knows, and we'll never know.
Obviously, both comes from crab, but why?
So, Hippocrates thought this up.
Hippocrates, you might know him from the Hippocratic Oath.
That's his most famous work. It goes like this.
It's an oath that doctors take. It's really weird.
I promise not to hurt people on purpose,
unless I have a good reason.
And I'm like, okay. Me too.
(audience laughing)
I like that, but I don't love
that you had to take an oath about it.
I read the Hippocratic Oath, the original one,
because I was curious how it went down,
and I will tell you, the second bit is even weirder.
(accent) "Number two." This is Hippocrates.
"Number one, don't hurt people unless you have good reason."
"Number two, if you are doing house calls,
do not seduce the slaves of your patients."
(audience laughing)
Steve! There's a guy for every rule, you know.
Somebody's the reason that's in there.
(accent) "Number three, do not, under any circumstances,
treat kidney stones."
Why? That seems like a good thing for a doctor to do.
So I looked that up,
and it turns out that in Ancient Greece,
there was a whole class of professionals
who just treated kidney stones,
and Hippocrates was making his little doctor cult,
and he didn't want to have a turf war over people's kidneys.
And that seems very weird to us in the modern day,
until you remember that we find ourselves
in the same situation with regards to teeth.
(audience laughing)
If you go into a normal doctor's office and you're like,
"I got a problem with my teeth," they're like, (scoffs)
"Why did you bring those in here?
I took an oath! Do you want to start a war?
(audience laughing)
You gotta go to the mall!"
(audience laughing)
And then the next one down is, (accent) "Number four."
"There's only four, maybe. I don't know."
"Do not drink wine. Only drink blood.
"I am vampire, very bad guy."
"That's why you can still do my accent."
"Number six."
"Six, what a wonderful number! Ha, ha, ha!"
(audience laughing)
That's the Hippocratic Oath portion of the show.
But I didn't tell you anything about cancer.
So he had a separate document he wrote down.
"And I will call this disease carcinos,
which is Greek for crab,
and then will later be translated to cancer,
which is great, because otherwise,
we'd be calling it a rare form of brain crab."
"That would be not good."
"We don't want people to get prostate crab."
"And I will not tell you why, because 2,500 years from now,
I want you fuckers to be arguing about it."
"An extra special fuck you to Hank Green,
who will tweet about this, and then people are like,
no, it's because the cancer,
it grabs on like crab, it won't let go."
"No, it's because the veins of the cancer
are like the legs of the crab."
"No, these are interpretations from Galen,
who is also old guy, but lived 500 years after me."
"Not all old guys lived at the same time."
"Hippocrates."
"PS, since we are having good time,
my name, Hippocrates, is two words."
"Hippo, which means horse.
Current hippo, just big fat horse."
"And crates, which means power."
"So my name is horsepower!"
(audience laughing)
"Which in the future, will be very cool. Vroom, vroom!"
"But right now, it's just kind of cool."
"Power of one horse. Clop, clop, clop."
"But that is all we have."
"Hippocrates out."
(audience laughing)
So, we don't know. We don't know why you're called Cancer.
It sucks, you're either a disease or a bug fish,
and that's what we know.
But you did get the 69 as your little logo.
That is dope. It's a nice little constellation prize.
(audience laughing and applauding)
So, here's how I'm going to end this show.
There's a lot of things that people say
to people who have cancer, you know?
I heard a lot of different things,
and most of them are amazing and lovely,
so you don't have to worry too much.
But there's something, a thing that I heard
a number of times, that I want to warn you away from.
It goes like this. "How are you doing?"
And I say, I'm okay.
And they say, "but how are you really doing?"
Do you want to come to my standup special?
I can tell you how I'm really doing.
What was your name again?
Jolena, can I use your name? It's not, like, in a nice way.
(audience laughing)
You say that after the yes.
Jolena, there's a 5% chance
that I'm going to be dead in five years,
and a 0% chance I'm going to tell you how I'm really doing.
My mom is a Roman Stoic, and my dog is doing chores,
and the flight attendant is crying, Jolena.
I'm a bunch of ants.
I'm like a bunch of ants, and one of my ants is named Trent,
and he's a real dick hole.
Speaking of dick holes, my penis hurts, Jolena.
Is that what you wanted to know
when you asked how am I really doing?
You want to hear about the penis pain?
Let me tell you about constipation.
I thought it was like a fun little thing
that happens sometimes.
No, the last step on the constipation journey
is they cut you open and take it out.
Jolena.
(audience laughing)
You want to know how close I am? I got close.
Here's what it said in my symptoms journal.
Here's an exact quote.
When it finally happened,
it was like a 12 foot long sisal rope
with knots tied in it every six inches.
(audience laughing)
Is that what you wanted to know?
I'm a very private person, Jolena.
(audience laughing)
But also, people are showing up for me
in big and little ways, like they're bringing me sandwiches
and they're not making me go on their Zoom calls.
It's really amazing to finally be in a place in my life
where I feel like I can be the one who's getting support,
and not doing the supporting,
and that was hard for me at first,
but it took some adjustment, but now I'm doing it,
and it feels really good,
and it feels good to be part of a community that matters.
And Jolena, this butterfly! Look at that butterfly!
It's beautiful, and it's temporary,
and it's part of the same 3.7 billion year long history
of living chemistry that has been roving across this planet
finding life in every single crack and crevice.
And 3.7 billion years, that sounds like a long time,
but it sounds like a longer time when you realize that
that's almost 30% of the entire history of the universe.
That's how long it took to go from one cell becoming two
to, like, this, to all of you.
Jolena, I'm jealous of cups,
but also, I'm not a cup.
Almost all of the universe
can't think or see or feel or know anything.
I get to be one of the tiny slices
that gets to do that stuff, and that's absolutely wild.
That's how I'm really doing, Jolena.
And when you look at an ant colony, Jolena,
the unit of the colony is the ant.
And when you look at a person,
the unit of the person is the cell.
Ants and people work the same way,
where we use chemical signals to control
how the colony behaves, but the unit of a humanity
is a human, and we don't get to use chemical signals.
We have some other way of doing it,
and I don't understand what that is, and it's wild.
It's wild that 8 billion people can live together
on the same weird little rock and make it mostly work,
but what are we signaling with?
What's the thing that holds it together?
Is it that this person loves this person,
who loves this person, who loves this person,
all the way down the line forever?
I'm thinking a lot about the Baltimore Orioles lately,
Jolena.
(audience laughing)
And either they're going to get me,
or I'm going to get them.
But either way, what comes next,
I think it's going to be beautiful.
Thank you, everybody.
That was my show. (audience cheering)
(cheerful music)
So, like any good standup comedy show,
this one has corrections.
The Titanic, if you go visit it,
you actually have a lower death rate
than just getting Hodgkin's lymphoma.
250 people have visited the Titanic,
and only five have died.
Fuck.
Cal Ripken Jr. is not a catcher. He's a shortstop.
He was wearing a catcher's mask because that's scary.
A murder of orioles is not real.
A group of Baltimore Orioles, not quite named,
but someone has suggested to call it a pitch of Orioles,
which is, I think, very clever.
Ass crack hair may have a use.
It's provides resistance
to the friction between your butt crack,
and this can help for distance running.
Matchbox 20 did not write "Closing Time".
(audience laughing)
I had to keep that in the show, though,
because when I looked up Matchbox 20,
I was like, I wonder where their name comes from.
And I Googled it. The story is so boring.
If you find out, it will make your life worse.
But I also know that some of you, having been told this,
are going to go home, and you're going to go into Google,
and you're go type in, "Matchbox 20 name come from,"
and while your life gets worse, I want you to remember
that I told you it was going to make your life worse,
but also I told you that because I knew
you were going to do what you are doing right now,
and that makes me feel very powerful.
Think about me.