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Tickets go on sale to the general public June 30th at somethingworthknowing.com. So come build a better world with us on September 16th and experience something worth knowing you can get your ticket at Complexly.info slash something. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John! Nor is I perthic with your John and Hank.
It's a comedy pod task where two brothers and CX have asked you advice and may be well at least news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. How are you John? I'm doing well Hank. As you know, it's Olympic season which can only mean one thing in our family.
It's the MarbleLympics season! That is actually correct. Right now in our house we spend 12 hours a day watching the proper Olympics and 12 hours a day watching the MarbleLympics. To be clear I love the Olympics.
I think the Olympics is great and I love these times when this sort of feels a little bit more like we're living in a globally productive society and we're connected by things that we like rather than things that we hate and yes but also the MarbleLympics John. Oh the MarbleLympics it's just fantastic. Every year Henry and I go all in on the Savage Speeders and every year the Orangers break our hearts. So for the people who don't know what's happening there's a YouTube channel called Do You Know How To Pronounce This John?
Yellah? Yellah's Marble runs? Yeah. And they are it's it is a channel of marble races and other marble competitions and and this happens all year round but then during Olympic seasons both summer and winter there is a marble limpics where marbles compete against each other in various events like high jump and speed downhill speed runs and other.
It's just that they have a lot there's a bunch of teams. Yeah there's not marble curling. There's marble curling which apparently this year got they they canceled the marble curling because it was too boring and they're recreating it a second time. Yeah well I for one found every I find every moment of the MarbleLympics absolutely engrossing and I just it it is out landishly entertaining.
It impossibly entertaining and it's just going to show you that while times are dark on parts of YouTube on other parts of YouTube the marble olympics are showing us all how we can come together and hate everyone who roots for the arrangers. I've been I've been rooting for team galactic and that's not going super well so my backup team which is a new team this year the midnight Wisps have been my have been my team and they're actually doing quite well. Yeah our backup team is the Oceanics which also that's Catherine's team and they are not doing well. They have not had a good Olympic so far but the arc of history is long and it bends toward the savage speeders.
Well I'm really excited to see how the marble olympics goes this year it's it's fun it's especially good viewing for commercial times because when you're watching the olympics you can't skip the commercials because it's live and also it's the same commercials over and over again and like yes I'm aware that you want me to buy an exercise bike or whatever. Yeah there's a lot of Chevrolet commercials man. Yeah yeah they would like me to know that Chevrolet has won a lot of awards and and look good on you GM thanks for making cars that people use. I'm not gonna say that until and unless GM comes and sponsors this podcast I do want to say something else though of great importance you may remember the amazing amazing Tiger Poem I read written by a six-year-old last week here on the pod.
That poem is published in a book and you can buy the book the book is called You Will Be Able to Say a Thousand Words and you can buy it and it will support 826DC which is an awesome organization that brings free writing programs for students between the ages of 6 and 18 so we're gonna put a link in the show notes to that book so that you can buy it. I have bought a copy if that Tiger Poem is any indication the book will bring me so much joy and consolation. Cool. All right.
Sweet excellent and do you have a poem for us today John? Also you can find the Marble Olympics by just Googling MarbleLympics or Marble Olympics it's not difficult to discover if you would like to enjoy this piece of pure joy in which you can see marbles competing against each other completely free of you know any of the human story that goes into the Olympics. Right both the great thing and the problem with the Olympics is that it's a little human story. The great thing about the MarbleLympics is that you get to impose human stories upon marbles and that in general for whatever reason it just works much better.
I don't have a poem for today we're gonna skip right into the questions. This first question comes from Ellen who writes, Dear John and Hank I have two dogs and two cats. If my dog Winston brings me a ball to throw I throw it and both Winston and one of the cats chase it and the cat gets there first but Winston is ultimately the one who returns the ball to me. In this situation whose ball is it?
I purchased the ball Winston is keeping the activity going but the cat is the one on the other end of my throw so who is actually in possession of the ball? If a fight should break out between the three of us which one of us has the right to keep the ball? Oh not gelatin like a felon Ellen. Well Ellen I have heard it said and I don't know what this means that possession is nine tenths of the law so I guess there's a 90% chance that whoever is holding the ball owns the ball?
Well whoever is holding the ball in a moment probably owns the ball in that moment. The question is legally who like who has the right to sell the ball? Well I see so the situation Ellen is that you own both your dog and your cat. That would be my argument.
My argument would be that even when the dog owns the ball you own the ball because you decide like when you say Winston drop it and he's like no and then he say Winston drop it again and he gets that sad-eyed look on his face. That's because he knows he's going to drop it. Right or else you're going to sell Winston. God Hank don't take it.
Oh god. Don't say what if they just because he won't give you a ball. John the thing that interests me most about this question is the idea that can a ball be owned by no one? I mean I almost think that it has to be owned by no one in this case.
It's a bit of a Schrödinger's ball situation really. Okay I don't I think the ball is definitely not alive but also kind of not dead I suppose. No it's just that the ball is in more than one state at the same time. Right the ball the ball is both Winston's and the cats.
P.S did the cat not get a name? I don't think the cat was named. I think it seems it seemed to be that it was one of the cats and there's multiple cats and we're not like maybe it's a different cat each time it's unclear. That's pretty brutal Ellen you know to have one named pet in your home and just refer to your other pet as the cat that's brilliant.
Yeah can we name the cat can we name it like Sharpie is the first thing that I saw in my desk. That's great I love it. Yeah so I think the cat belongs to all of you together and you have to make votes about its future and it's a majority rule situation. The ball or the cat because the cat that everybody owns or is it the ball?
Yeah no Winston owns the cat the ball owns the cat and Ellen owns the cat and all three of them have to vote about the cat's future. That's a democracy now it's a co-ownership situation and everybody has to own exactly one third so that nobody has a voting majority there. That's right. So I guess if you get two out of three then you decide what to do with the ball.
I recently wanted to John do a project for Austin perk where I gather river rocks and I paint them and put handkerfish on them and then and then I realized that that I didn't own those rocks and that actually someone did that being the United States government. Oh boy. Because they own everything they own the land you can't just take stuff it's very strange that everything it's kind of like everything is owned by someone and there are these times when like suddenly objects transfer ownership from you and like sort of implicitly but also maybe legally like when you put an item in a trash can that item becomes owned by the garbage company it's not yours anymore kind of actually and if you take if like a stranger takes something out of that trash can they're actually are they stealing from the garbage company or is that owned by no I think that they're technically stealing from the garbage company. Can I ask you a follow up question Hank?
Yes please. If for instance there are two to three hundred thousand aluminum cans full back doors rubber tires that appear to have once belonged to four wheelers etc. In the White River at any given moment. Does all of that belong to the government?
I think so. I feel like it might belong I feel like it might be my problem. I was kayaking it got briefly warm enough for me to kayak here and when I say briefly I mean for like 12 minutes I was kayaking up river and I literally passed a door going down river. It had a doorknob in it.
Wait but John did you try to open the door because maybe if you'd gotten the right angle and you could just like open it up there'd be a learning a situation. Yeah that is exactly why I didn't open the door. I like my life. I'm not trying to fall into some other dimension.
I saw Outlander. I don't want to be removed from my family. No no I did not open the door. I did immediately think if I open this door I'm gonna lead a completely different life and go to a different dimension and live in a world probably where like I don't know Snicker bars or sentience or something but I didn't I didn't open the door.
Let's move on to questions from another question from our listeners. We've gone too far down the rabbit hole. Okay I'm also just googled who owns trash so I definitely feel like we need to we need to take a turn turn turn turn into what we call it last week. Hard normal or something.
Hard normal. This next question oh it's you ask it. It's my turn. This next question comes from desk who asks hey Hank and John.
That's not the name of the podcast that was a little aggressive. Hey when you go somewhere and you accidentally take some ants with you at home when you go somewhere and you accidentally take some ants with you. They just fit right in to the ant colony wherever you end up or are they put in a constant state of anxiety because their loved ones are nowhere to be found. Worried about ants.
Deaths. Okay first of all do you actually think what what this note has a PS and you chose not to read the PS and that I cannot believe that you chose not to read the PS. Holy snood. I'm just bad at this John.
God the PS is can't wait to read an absolutely remarkable thing which is Hank's book it comes out in September and it's available for pre-order now and Hank just blatantly refused to read the PS about his own book and how somebody is excited to read it. Okay now go on do ants experience ant anxiety when put into a colony that is not their home colony. Well I also it seems that deaths frequently accidentally takes ants somewhere. Well that's true for any of us.
Do I? Oh yeah sure picnic baskets. Let's take the major way. Okay is this like hitchhikers on the cuff on the cuffs of your pants?
Yeah. I just answered the question you're the science person. So usually these ants die. Well that's nice.
Well to be clear every ant dies and that's just how it works. Ants have there are no immortal ants. We've determined this ants ants have a basically I don't know they think they could call it like a passport pheromone maybe is what they call it and and for some ant species the passport pheromone is species specific. So any ant can go to another ant colony and they'll just like hey what's up Steve how's it going?
You're an ant with us now but but many in fact I think most ant species have colony specific passport pheromones and if they show up at a new colony they will be killed as an invader. I think but sometimes ants with this actually happens sometimes with ant with passport specific colony specific pheromones get incorporated into a colony even though they probably shouldn't. The answer to sort of like oh I get it I see what this is it's not an attack it's just Steve who you know got here on the picnic basket from the lake but it this all does depend on the ant finding a colony of the same species to integrate into they don't find a colony they will die because they need the support of the colony to survive and if they find a colony of a different species of ants they will definitely get killed. Okay all right so you're saying there's a chance.
I'm saying there's a chance sometimes even two colonies will come together and form a single colony which is pretty unusual because usually when usually colonies consider each other antagonistic. Wow that's interesting I mean I don't want to get too deep into comparing ants to humans. Let's move on to the next question. But before we do that let's plug the YouTube channel AntsCanada because if you're looking for weird YouTube channels that are about very specific but amazing things AntsCanada is a really great one as well and there are different clans of ants that are taken care of by this guy and he's really excited and just it's one of my favorite ways to spend 15 minutes.
You plugged AntsCanada last week. Did I? Yeah you can plug out. Now you know what I'm talking about John.
You've now officially plugged AntsCanada more than you've plugged your own book. This next question comes from Beth through writes Dear John and Hank. My name is Beth and I'm an optical dispenser. My job is to help people choose new glasses and many people.
Wait wait wait optical dispenser definitely sounds like a machine. No it doesn't it sounds like a person. She spends the opticals. Like like a like is that a phrase from another country?
To be you dispense like there's two situations in which you dispense something. One you are a vending machine. Two it's marijuana. Oh no I think three it's glasses.
My job is to help choose new glasses and many people I help get a huge amount of anxiety when selecting new glasses. Yeah no joke Beth. Many people want to change their look but don't know what to look for. Whereas other people very much don't want to change their look and get upset when we don't have the exact same glasses.
So I come to you brother's green as Hank really hasn't changed the look of his glasses much and John has changed multiple times. I'm a big fan of your current pair John. They do good things for your jawline. Thank you Beth.
I feel like you may have some excellent dubious advice. How do I get people to feel more at ease when choosing their glasses? Oh it's not easy. I mean it's funny you should mention that Beth because I'm reading your question through lenses that I can just barely see out of because I like these glasses but I am nervous to even try to get new lenses into them because what if they break and then I have to get new glasses and it would be such a nightmare.
Yeah I'm looking at your glasses right now John because I could not call them to bind. Sure. And they do look nice. I think that they do look nice and they do do nice things for your jawline and I don't think that your neck is disappearing at all the way that some people and vlog with his comments for some reason are saying.
Well it's fine it's good because the nice thing about people criticizing my appearance is that I don't actually worry much about my appearance but I do worry about like what horrible diseases I might have that are resulting in these changes to my appearance. So it's been a lot of time googling what might be wrong with my neck anyway. Oh no. I have I worry that my teeth have changed shape over the years and that they're moving around.
It's really actually pretty amazing to have at least one video of me talking every week for the last 11 years. So I can go and be like was my tooth like that before or is that new? It has very been that way for at least 11 years. So I think yeah.
Yeah no it is a very weird thing to look at your face for several hours a week while editing one's videos and I don't think that it is particularly good for one's overall quality of health but I like making vlog but there's videos and I'm grateful for the opportunity but to get to Beth's question Hank. Okay let's do it. What in your experience what have been things that people have said that have helped you pick out glasses? Well I think it helps to have somebody who you trust a lot so so in general like establishing yourself as an authority is actually something that that can go a long way and ways to do that are to say like hi I'm Beth I I this is this is what I do and my clients include Nicholas Cage.
No no that's terrible. What a what a what a class of Lindsey Lilhan. The last time Hank meaningfully engaged with popular culture it was apparently 2007 anyway that is terrible advice it is good advice to establish your authority but the way you do that I think is saying hi I'm Beth and I am an optical dispenser and for the last X number of years I've worked with people to get them glasses that fit well and that they like the look of and that's what I want to do with you and it may take a while but we'll be patient and we'll get something that you're really happy with and I think encouraging people in that way and then I really like the specificity you used even when talking about my glasses where you think you know what the glasses bring out what they help with what the downsides might be you know if the lenses are really small it might affect your field of vision etc just showing your expertise through calm generous kind readings of the situation I don't think that's going to make it an unanxious experience for a lot of people because it's a big choice it's it's you know the one thing that I wear every single day for years at a time so it is a big important choice in life. Yeah it's on it's on your face man it makes your face look different and when I take my glasses off people are like oh okay I always like that man yeah I don't look like myself without my glasses so yeah I mean I think one thing I like about your question Beth is that you obviously understand why your job's important and why it helps people and I think if you just bring that attitude to it that you're there to try to help people and try to be a calm presence in a difficult situation I think that's a that's that's the right track to me absolutely and uh and then you know I what helps me honestly is having Catherine there because Catherine I feel like is the one who has to look at me all the time and uh and so ultimately it's more her decision than mine sure this next question comes from Niv who asked dear Hank and John I'm a 17 year old girl and my parents at least my mom is hell bent on making me study math for my undergrad while my dad is a bit more cool not only a bit with me doing economics the love of my life I feel like I'm letting my parents down by not being enthusiastic about getting a degree in maths I love the subject but the syllabi for good math courses cover all the topics I utterly despise how do I break the news to my parents that I might not in fact be doing math and that I will be doing economics to go on to become like the president of a country or a successful business person with no regrets live long and prosper Niv isn't economics and math the same thing I want to say that his parents has come on yeah I mean your child could be studying 12th century French poetics by the way I know there are people in our audience who are studying 12th century French poetics and I thank you that is good and noble work but I mean from the perspective of of parents who are worried about you're never worried about yeah in business I'm just gonna be fine Niv just study economics just like a like a long history do you have like generations of mathematicians in your family like is your great great great grandfather like Gauss or like some other famous old mathematician Blaise Pascal yeah I mean even Pascal though wasn't just a mathematician can you make the case to your parents that you're gonna learn a lot of math along the way to your economics degree and also it seems to me that economics majors are very employable like I can you just promise your parents you're clearly not the concern focused economics yeah it's clearly not the concern if you're trying to get a job economics is definitely better than pure maths though and often if you have a math degree you're gonna end up working in something related economics like finance but in terms of like like put aside job training I'm not interested in that argument because it seems like your parents probably just want you to continue the line of the hundreds or possibly thousands of years of mathematicians in your family yes and and what you say to that is I want to do the thing I want to do and you didn't have a child because you wanted the child to become one particular thing you had the child because you wanted the child to be able to decide and make good things happen that they wanted to do that level of that level of control either is is sort of out like outsized in your own mind Niv and and you are sort of perceiving to like more pressure than they intend to be putting on you to choose one specific career path or it's just it's just too much and they should not be doing that and you should be choosing to do the thing and being and feel free to and excited about doing the thing that you love and you want to do alternately I don't know if there's a double major in your country I know a lot of places there aren't double majors but it seems like it'd be easy to do a double major in math and economics because half the classes are the dang same like I took an economics class in college and it was all flipping math I mean I maybe I don't understand what math is but it felt like math to me there were a lot of numbers and I had to use those numbers to create a lot of geometrical curve shapes so I don't know it felt very mathematical anyway we wish you luck Niv I'm sorry that you're going through this difficult time I hope that you get to pursue all of your passions in life I want to get to another question though Hank this one comes from hella yeah all right she writes dear john and Hank my name is hella and I grew up on a farm that my family has owned for over 300 years wait is this like the mathematician question except with farms instead yes I am a second of four children all of whom are now adults according to older threat my older brother has first dibs on the farm then me and then our younger sisters older threat by the way which I'm very sure I'm mispronouncing is the ancient Scandinavian thing where that decides how land it gets passed down through families is very good and it has its own Wikipedia page of course my older brother has first dibs on the farm then me and then our younger sisters it has always been expected that one of us should take over the farm as it is the norm but all of us have moved away and I'm pretty sure none of us actually want to be farmers I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being a farmer it's just not really for me our father brought it up a few years ago that we should decide who gets to take over the farm and well is it wrong to want to sell a farm that has been in our family for several hundred years do we owe our forefathers to sacrifice enough to keep this farm in our family there's no guarantee that we would be able to find a buyer that would keep the farm a farm but I know that I really do not want to be a farmer ever since I was a little girl I've been quite squeamish around a lot of the stuff that happens on a farm and I really have not grown out of it but have you seen how many movies there are where the people who want to sell the family farm are the villains no silent ease hella I feel like maybe in Norway there are more of those films because I haven't seen that many I've seen a few but it would appear that like this is a pretty important and big part of Norwegian culture that I had no idea about just from reading the Wikipedia page for oldest rhett which I think I just knocked that pronunciation out of the park and it is a fascinating law and it is the actual existing law in Norway and if somebody who isn't in the family buys the farm the family members have the right to get it back which is currently about 10 years so they can just buy it for the additional price plus the cost of any improvements if you sell if you like get rid of the farm you could get it back potentially though there are also rules about making that not a thing but I bet we have different opinions about this well I've ever since I came to to Montana I have had a different sort of feeling about farms and families and and like the seriousness of this not that like I think that this should like this is how you know should it impact you it's just like my understanding of this has changed a lot having known farmers been friends with generational farmers and also new farmers and seeing the kind of like the difficulty of that job it is a very difficult and not particularly thankful job in which you have to live far away from population centers and that is pretty isolating and it is it is a difficult difficult thing to do for a living and and also the strife and difficulty that it creates within families when you have this extraordinarily valuable thing but you don't like the way of turning that you know that huge amount of land you know compared to what most people own in terms of land into money is is a really stressful difficult thing because you're always taking out loans to buy the seed and to work the land and at the end of the season hopefully you can pay those loans off and that happens every year and it's just really intense but also like that responsibility that people feel to their to their ancestors to and to the institution that they have been raised in and part of for their whole lives but also for like their entire sort of like imagined cultural history which is a very real thing it's the intensity of that is you know like I wouldn't have understood it if I hadn't seen it you know I certainly didn't have an experience the first time but I've seen it second hand yeah I mean my feeling is that you should wait hell you shouldn't make the decision now if you don't have to you know maybe your father's saying I want to know what the future holds but I think you can say well you know right now you you have the farm and we're so grateful that you do and we love we love it and we want to support you in any way that we can and when it comes time to make a decision we will make a decision because I also don't think that you can really know how you'll not only how you'll feel but how you're at least three siblings will feel when the time comes to really make the decision about you know if there comes a time when your father feels like he can't do the work or can't oversee the work then you have to have that hard hard conversation but I think you have to have it with all of your siblings because it is it is so complicated as you say I mean there is something very powerful about knowing that this is the place where your ancestors bones are in many cases literally and certainly that you know you're doing the same work in the same place that they were something powerful about that and something comforting about that but at the same time it's very easy to romanticize that and hella having grown up on a farm knows that in fact the actual work is utterly unromantic yes can confirm having our farm reference yeah I mean yeah yeah you you have to slaughter exactly one animal before you completely lose the sense of romance yeah I agree with you and it doesn't sound to me like you've had a ton of conversations with your siblings about this especially and I would suggest definitely having those conversations sooner rather than later which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by conversations with your siblings affect conversations with your siblings it's the whole podcast podcast is also brought to you by generations of mathematicians stretches back deep deep into your family history and you can't go into economics because of it I guess maybe and today's podcast is also brought to you by Ants Canada Ants Canada Hank won't stop promoing it and of course this podcast is brought to you by the MarbleLympics MarbleLympics available at Yell is Marble Runs on YouTube where you can spend your commercial time while watching the Olympics watching non-human competitors made of glass this next question comes from Crystal who asks dear Hank and John why should I pre-order Hank's upcoming book an absolutely remarkable thing comes out September 25th available for pre-order now seven months in advance I could pre-order the book in early September at the meantime use that $20 to like I don't know invest in the stock market put it in the bank for a small interest or dig a hole to bury it in the ground p.s it comes out September 25th and it's available for pre-order now best regards crystal oh crystal thanks thanks for doing the hard work for me all right Crystal I want to offer you a couple of futures in which you're going to be very grateful that you ordered Hank's book seven months in advance future number one the entire world economy has collapsed everything the stock market the has collapsed but not only that all of the savings accounts people there was a bank run and people tried to get their cash out and it turned down the FDIC couldn't ensure all of the deposits sure and suddenly the money that you hadn't in the bank is worth pennies on the dollar but you know what you have Crystal you have a physical a really beautiful physical object a hardcover book that you can use not only for reading and consolation but also when it becomes necessary to beat off the invaders that are attacking you because the social fabric is completely disintegrated or if it's an absolute emergency to start a fire or or or barter because everyone knows that this book is worth the amount that it was when you purchased it so it was when you bought it was worth you know twenty dollars or whatever and then now it's still worth twenty dollars actual money even though twenty dollar bill might be only able to buy you like a stick a gum so this thing is the new currency of the future that's right in the future people are just going to be handing around hardcover books in exchange for eggs and tomatoes that's not hardcover books john my just the one just the one book it's basically bitcoin it's my book is it's a cryptocurrency that's right it's a great as well as a book crystal get in on the ground floor of this exciting new cryptocurrency that comes with a physical book it's it is in no way yet it is in no way a pyramid scheme crystal but if you don't get in at the very beginning you will lose all of your money crystal real reason isn't crystal the real reason to order hanks book now is so that you don't forget to do it later and also because it helps the publisher measure enthusiasm and excitement about the book and it is very helpful to both the future of the book and the book's author when the publisher believes that there are lots of people who are excited about it so really if you have been considering pre-ordering hanks book please do please do it now really it's it is and i'm not just saying this i wouldn't just say this i would find ways to talk about it uh that that weren't dishonest but i wouldn't be as effusive as i'm about to be it is a really wonderful book and it explores what now feels like so fascinatingly and it explores what fame feels like and the way that it distorts your worldview and the way that our general worship of fame has distorted the wider the wider culture in really fascinating moving brilliant ways it is a special special novel so you will also be grateful to have been in on the ground floor of the story of an absolutely remarkable thing but the biggest thing that you can do is help the book and its author by communicating to the publisher the people are excited about it yeah and that has happened and uh and so the you know the people i'm working with are at penguin are have been so supportive and excited and uh so i really appreciate everybody who has pre-ordered it really does help and whether you do that online or whether you go to your bookstore and if you're wondering how you pre-order something in a bookstore you go in and you say i would like to pre-order this book and they will say okay uh call you when it's in and that's that and it works all right we've got a question from mp who writes dear john and hank when you're on the phone with someone in the call drops who's in charge of calling back the originator of the first call since they started it or should you think of it as taking turns i often panic and quickly try to decide if i'm the more adult person in the conversation oh so i should take the reins and call back but even i know that's not a great method please help me to adult better bad at avoiding social awkwardness mp what happens when when we drop a call it's usually like we both do it right we both call back at the same time and then sometimes we both get busy signals and then a lot of times i'll be on your voicemail and i'll be like why don't you pick up your phone we were talking 30 seconds and i'll see and i'll be like oh right he's trying to get to me too okay yeah yeah we need a system for this hank but like what is the inner fish system is it like the younger person because you have to have some like objective thing because the call drops for both of you at the same time so it's not not something to do with the context of the phone call that's basically beyond that so like whose name comes first to the alphabet kind of thing i like that it's who's the name that you usually use to refer to that person so not necessarily their given first name whatever you know if you call them shrimp then shrimp if you know if you call them apple then apple whatever it is the first letter of that name that you use to talk to the person the person whose name is closest to the beginning of the alphabet is the person who who does the call back caveat if more than five seconds pass then it's a complete free for all because then you start to worry like well did they hang up on me on purpose or did they get in some kind of horrible accident like are they is there an alert that's what my that's where my head goes immediately right is there an emergency so don't like don't say oh well you know apple hasn't called me back i guess that apple just thought the phone call was over do call them back because for all you know they might be at the you know like out of the bottom of a crevasse i once called sarah after badly injuring my knee while trying to walk up the hill after kayaking and if sarah hadn't answered the phone i probably would have just stayed down there for a hundred twenty seven hours john what if the phone call is between our cousin mike and our uncle mike oh that's a great that's something i hadn't thought of and that's a great point hank what if they have the exact same like yeah not only the say that same last name too i think it goes to the middle goes in the middle name i think it goes to the middle name now in the case of our cousin mike and our uncle mike unfortunately that is not a tiebreaker so then i think you got to go to junior or senior and since jia comes before so in the alphabet i think our cousin mike calls back our uncle mike in that situation that that also would happen just by virtue of the fact that our uncle mike would be like mike's gonna call me back oh yeah no i can't see our uncle mike really rushing to do anything phone call yeah just i love my uncle mike so much he's an amazing amazing person i really i just i admire so much about him he is the coolest he's such a cool guy um however if if there is a disconnected call the chances that he's gonna call me back are well below zero negative negative chances that you're gonna get the call back from from uncle mike speaking of negative chances hank can i share with you the news from a epsi with oh no oh no oh i'm sorry i've been following and i feel like i'm i shouldn't be am i in my bad luck i don't know so good in january so very very very bad in february a fc one with an if slipped back into the dreaded relegations oh currently in 21st place uh just ahead of the franchise currently playing its trade in milton keens hank i am not a professional script writer of third tier english football yeah but if i were if i were writing the narrative of the 2017-2018 season i think we all know where it goes from here it comes down to the last game of the season on may 5th and either the franchise is going down or the dawns are going down and the pressure is unbelievable and i vomit 35 times that morning having flown from the united states to england the night before and i'm completely unable to enjoy myself and really regardless of the outcome i don't know if i'm gonna be able to be happy that that is where the narrative of the season is headed there are still 14 games to try to avoid that narrative but yeah i mean it's been a very very very bad uh february that's really the only thing that can be said about it it might change hopefully it will change but the dawns lost four two to Plymouth argyle three one to north ampt in town and that was after a two one loss to berry so it's been a difficult week we've got a game against bristle rovers coming up and then peterborough i don't know i it's just been a bad month man yeah yeah i mean your scoring goals too like none of these are our nil numbers yeah it's like the most recent was like two four and it's like two would have been good enough in the first half of the season to win like every game yeah i know i know i know it's just been it's it's just weird are they pushing the all they pushing the defense up to try and increase i watched i watched all three of these games that we've lost so maybe i'm bad luck actually although we also lost a uh rotherham rotherham roderham i know everybody's criticizing my pronunciation of it but i'm not going to back down anyway i watched all three of these games and they just like they don't look they just look like behind the game like they don't look like they're running at the speed that the opponents are running at they they just look kind of confused at the back i don't know it's frustrating and pretty scary but uh we'll see where it goes from here i mean i just really have to hope that the don's find a way to stay up yeah well um i don't know i feel like i feel like i feel like just having a run of bad luck and it's gonna come back i hope you're right i hope you're right what's the news from mars uh john so you know the mars 2020 rover uh getting ready to go to mars you also know uh that sometimes pieces of mars actually end up on earth and this is one of the ways that we've actually we've been able to study a little bit more about how mars what mars is like because we haven't ever been able to like bring a piece of mars back for us to hold but because of you know asteroid impact uh and you know various times in the history of the solar system pieces of mars have actually been blasted into space and then occasionally one of those pieces of mars will land on earth and we will find one now we've done a number of times and these martian meteorites are extremely prized and all of them are uh all of them are you know inside of the constitutions and being studied a piece one of those martian meteorites piece of it is actually going to be sent back to mars wow mars 2020 rover wow this is not like uh this is not just a reunification to say hey mars you lost this uh we found it and we wanted to bring it back to you because uh you know possessions nine tenths of the law so i'm not saying this is yours but uh you know it's not exactly ours either so but uh because there's this instrument it's called the scanning habitable environments with raman and luminescence for organics and chemicals which if that sounds like a really awkward acronym it's because it is it's acronym for sure lock oh that comes out in the end um it needs a calibration target to uh to like basically to know exactly a bunch of things about this rock and thus it can like calibrate on the rock and then it can like get better more precise data about the rocks that it's measuring on the surface of mars and they wanted to use a rock that was mars like and so instead of like picking a rock that on earth that had a lot of martian like mars like properties they are using a piece of mars that we found on earth wow wow this is pretty freaking cool that is pretty freaking cool man that is yeah science so uh yeah i'm only about 200 martian meteorites have ever have been uh confirmed to be only 200 meteorites have been confirmed to be from mars so this is a pretty uh pretty you know next level uh thing to do but it's very cool that is cool that is cool well congratulations on uh your forthcoming mars reunification project uh huh i can only hope that in 2020 when that happens afc windland will be playing in the third tier of english football in their new home at plow lane uh but time will tell in the meantime what did we learn today john we learned that ants have special passport pheromones that allow them to know whether or not an ant should it be friends or you kill them we learned that the marble olympics is arguably the best olympics but definitely in the top two and we learned that my new book an absolutely remarkable thing comes out september 25th and is going to be the next big thing in cryptocurrency and lastly we learned several ways not to pronounce oldest threat all this let's all right thank uh thank you for plotting with me thanks everybody for listening we're gonna record our patrons only podcast this weekend ryan's right now over and you can find out more patreon.com so to be your hank and john but thank you again uh for plotting with me and everybody who listens and sensing your questions i'm sorry we don't answer more of them they are an absolute delight to read so much joy to be able to do this every week and thank you john this podcast is produced by rosianna hals rohasen sharid and gibson it's edited by nicholas jinkins our head of community and communications is victoria vonjorno our music in the beginning and the end and for this week and ryan's is by the great venerova and as they say in our hometown don't forget to be awesome