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Tickets 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. Where's I prefer to think of it Dear John and Hank.
It's a comedy podcast for two brothers and to your question, give you a few advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Hi John, how are you? I'm all right. You seem a little sick.
I can tell even from your voice that you're just not feeling 100%. I'm not feeling 100%. I have a sudden onset intestinal discomfort and now I'm just working my way through. There's a bunch of pigeons that have decided to live on my house and they also seem to be in distress.
I don't know this time when you feel really sick and you just end up saying like, mmm, mmm, mmm, like you feel that bad. The pigeons seem to be making that noise all the time. They're just outside of my window. Either.
I don't know what's going on. I don't know if that's just them communicating with each other or what, but they do not seem happy. And I'm just thinking to myself, well, if you're not happy here, maybe go somewhere else with all your poop. So I have a recently come into possession of several thousand pounds of wood chips.
I'm covering my garden area with wood chips and then putting some soil on top of the wood. It's called lasagna gardening. I don't want to get into it too deeply. But the nice thing about being in possession of many thousands of pounds of wood chips is that it requires you to be outside moving those wood chips with a pitchfork almost 24 hours a day.
And so how's your bones and muscles and stuff? Bones are great. Muscles. I'm fine until I stop working.
And then as things start to seize up pretty quickly. But the point here is that I have been afforded the opportunity to do a great deal of bird watching in the area around my home. And we have a lot of pigeons as well. We have an almost, I would say an infestation of pigeons.
There's some chickadees and some beautiful doves that just kind of hang out on the ground. But then there are these pigeons. It's like the Piazza San Marco or something. They just descend and hang around.
And I agree with you. I'm a little bit over pigeons. Now to me, it's not a Canada geese level issue yet. But I'm a little bit over pigeons.
Hank, do you have a short poem for us today? That's not how this works at all. Okay. The pigeons at my window poop out many eggs.
They make whole new generations. That's going to have little eggs. That's good. That's very good.
That's very good. Speaking of babies, can I read you our first question? Oh, okay. That's really, we're really just starting now.
We didn't. Okay. That was our problem. I take our first question customer, Amanda, who writes, help three exclamation points.
I just found three baby hamsters at my hamster cage. No, I do. I wasn't sure about the sex of my hamsters, but now I know for sure I separated the parents, but I'm not sure what else to do. I don't know anything about baby hamster care.
Any do-be's advice would be much appreciated. Not a panda. Also, I should add she said in this question two months ago. So those baby hamsters are now like middle-aged.
So yeah, we can definitely not help, which is great. Because the only information I have for you is that pet stores will not take baby hamsters. Is that true? Yeah, no, they won't.
They're like, nope, we've had enough of those. I was going to suggest that Amanda get into the pet store business to see this as an unexpected business opportunity. I don't think that there's a shortage of baby hamsters in the world. I think Amanda, you now have three new hamsters.
Hopefully, that'll go okay. I guess you should put them with the mother if you can tell which one that is. I assume that you can. It's the one that's nursing.
And just be like, fingers crossed. And if it doesn't go well, then that's okay. They weren't going to die anyway, eventually. Boy, Hank's in a great mood.
Well, I'll tell you what, if you take your hamster to stick your hamsters in the pet store, they might be like, yeah, we'll take them, but I can't guarantee we're going to end up. Oh, good Lord, Hank. Okay, let's move on. You asked the question.
Amanda, if I were you, I would turn to my favorite veterinary advice podcast, not necessarily my favorite advice podcast about death, because I don't think we're going to be able to help with this one realistically. No, I mean, but the good news is that your hamsters are well on to wherever they were headed, because it was two months ago anyway. This next question comes from Jessa who asks, My roommate and I recently got into a debate about how to tip our pizza deliverer. I only had one dollar, I only had two $1 bills, but we have a lot of quarters.
I was always taught that it's rude to tip people with change and sit down restaurants. She argued that if she were a delivery driver, she would rather have more money than less money. That was correct. I'm pretty sure she's right.
Yeah, this got me thinking, are there different tips for different kinds of jobs? Also, can I tip my pizza delivery driver with my laundry quarters advice of the dubious and non-dubious categories both are appreciated? John, I think that even at a sit down restaurant, you can give change, right? You can't give just change.
I'll get the money back and I'll put $20 in and then it'll come back with my $5.25 change and then I'll just leave that and that's okay. Yes, that is acceptable. I don't think that you've ever been a restaurant server and I have been one, so I feel moderately more qualified to answer this question. When I was a server at a restaurant, I wanted money and I did not really care about the form of that money.
If you wanted to leave me a roll of quarters, that would be fine. I did mind is the money clean? Is it delivered to me in a way that is designed to embarrass or humiliate me? For instance, the person who left me a $20 tip, thank you, but covered it in the, I would call it the nacho cheese.
Oh no. But the restaurant that I worked at, I think we were not allowed to technically call it cheese because it didn't have any cheese in it, so we called it nacho cheese sauce. But they've been covered in the nacho cheese sauce and I was like, it's such that's why, why? Because now I have to clean this $20 bill and go through this whole rigmarole, which is humiliating.
And I, so don't, don't do that. Yeah, that's good advice. So if you're going to get somebody $6 and quarters, it's obviously not an ideal way to get tipped as a delivery driver. So I might put it in a Ziploc bag or if you can roll the quarters up so it's a little bit easier for them to deal with, but it is way better to be tipped $6 and quarters and two, and two $1 bills than it is to be tipped just two $1 bills for sure.
Well, you got to do, Jessa, and I'm just going to throw this out here for everybody load up that load up that laundry show with some second-jouleas. Oh my God. It's not trying to make second-jouleas happen. It already happened.
That's the whole, that's the whole point, John, is that it already happened. So I mean, like, if the laundry, like you, it may be that your 100 blaz doesn't take second-jouleas yet because they aren't here with the rest of us in the 21st century, but first of all, talk to them about that second. It's, it works in the parking meters in my town. That's good.
Yeah. So Hank's advice is to only tip in second-jouleas to try to make second-jouleas happen. So Hank's advice is to go to your local bank and instead of getting $100 in 20s, get $100 in the form of $101 coins and then a hand goes out like Ebenezer's Scrooge after his revelation. And then people be like, oh, oh, that's money, I guess.
No, it's the second-jouleas person. It's my favorite person to deliver pizza to. The person who tips me in $1 coins is it's like walking away, loaded down, weighing five extra pounds. Okay, let's move on.
I think we've solved this problem. We're going to move on to Jessica's question who asks, you're a bug and shrimp. I'm very proud to be the advice columnist of my college's newspaper. It's really cool to see Dear Jessica in print every few weeks and I love feeling like I'm able to help someone.
The problem is that hardly anybody asks me questions. As people who have a successful advice-giving platform, do you have any tips for how to get people to ask questions? Dear comma, Jessica. The situation, Jessica, is that like both with your advice column and like every other advice column that has ever gotten started from scratch is you make it up.
You make them up, Jessica. You make them up and that way you can ask questions that you know how to answer, which is nice. You can tailor it to your specific expertise or something that happened to you that week and be like, well, Melinda, thank you for writing in. Just this week, I was trying to figure out how to tip a pizza delivery driver with all of my second-year ways.
Right. I mean, do you think that was a real problem that someone had Jessica? Of course it wasn't. We made it up because Hank has made a solemn vow that he is going to mention second-year ways in every podcast we make for the rest of our lives and so he had to make it up.
Yeah. Yeah. I feel bad that I have skipped several weeks of not mentioning Ants Canada. So Ants Canada.
Yeah. I mean, I remember making up questions when I first started making question Tuesday videos, like 10 years ago, we would get some questions, but sometimes we wouldn't get the questions that I wanted to answer. And so I would find myself thinking, somebody would say, oh, what's your favorite color? And I'd be like, that's not that interesting of a question.
But if I asked, what's your favorite beetle first? And then I could say John Green, that would be funny. People would like that. And I, so I think there's nothing wrong with making up the occasional question, Jessica.
And in fact, I think that it will lead to people asking you more interesting questions over time because that said, I suspect that Jessica, because she's at a college newspaper and has certain obligations as a reporter, she's probably not allowed to fabricate facts. So here's what I would do, Jessica, to get around the issue of journalistic ethics. And this is probably deeply immoral. But you have to remember that Hank and I will do whatever we need to do to get a laugh.
I I would just say to my friend, hey, I noticed that you have this problem. Can you write me about this problem? And I would just talk to people in your real life and ask them to submit questions that are of interest to you and then start from there. And then once you get a following, the questions will come in on their own and they'll be fascinating, like questions about what to do about baby hamsters.
Yeah, or how to listen more questions for your advice column at your newspaper. Or also this next one from Veronica. This next question comes from Veronica who asks, dear Hank and John, I'm having an identity crisis. I'm a 25 year old Canadian named Veronica.
I have been receiving emails for the past year from a British person named Veronica, living across the pond, living her best life. Every time I receive one of these emails, I kindly reply back that they've got the wrong Veronica. But lately, her life has gotten very interesting and I can't help but like read into her life. Things I know so far.
She's recently interviewed for a teaching position at a primary school. She nailed that interview and got the job. I know this because the head of the department sends me her lesson plans. Three, she dressed up for Halloween as sexy Mrs.
Claus. I got the order confirmation. Or she owns a yacht and frequency the Yarmouth Harbor Yacht Club. Soon she'll be doing a rally to Burmbridge Harbor plot twist.
That is a huge plot twist. It's a primary school teacher. And then I'm on one, I'm on one plot twist with sexy Mrs. Claus and apparently British Veronica doesn't know her own email address to which to send this email confirmation, which was a big surprise for me.
And then boom, she also owns a yacht. Yeah, I gotta learn more about the Yarmouth Harbor Yacht Club. Right. I mean, do we know what's a yacht?
Well, what is a yacht really? Are there little yachts? Can you have like a reasonable yacht? I just feel like, well, there's a white river yacht club here in Indianapolis.
I don't know exactly the same thing. But the white river yacht club, almost everyone owns some kind of small pontoon boat. But I have heard that if you are a member of the white river yacht club, they have reciprocity with like every other actual yacht club in the world. And so you can go to the Bermuda or whatever.
And you can go to the fanciest yacht clubs because you're a member of the white river yacht club. I, however, am not a member of the white river yacht club. My part of the river is completely non-navigable and therefore inaccessible to people in their pontoon boats. I gotta say, John, it appears that there are a lot of yacht clubs in England.
I guess the Yarmouth Harbor yacht club is on the Isle of White, interestingly. But it's surrounded by other yacht clubs. So apparently, I don't know if this person lives on the Isle of White if British Veronica lives on the Isle of White. That's very cool.
That would be crazy. Isle of White, is it in the north of the south? They don't have a team in the football league. It's in the English Channel.
Oh, it's like part of France. No, no, no, no, no, no. He said starting an international problem. It's definitely not part of France.
It is now. It's a crisis. People are calling it. People are calling it the next great thing in international relations.
France has just claimed the Isle of White. Veronica's got problems now. You're looking at living in Canada, Canadian, Veronica. I have a question.
He's headed to the Isle of White with their cheese and their wine. My big question is how is it that this Veronica apparently doesn't know her own email address? I mean, yeah, like the thing is, Catherine has this problem too because she has an email address that is an initial and then a last name. Yes.
And anybody who has that email address is just gonna get it. They're gonna get it from a bunch of different folks who are like, yeah, that's me. I'm pretty sure that's me. Yeah, I've also been through this where I end up with an email address that's one letter or two letters different from someone else's and that you become a sort of weird neighbor of them knowing a lot about their life and yet still not participating in it.
I would try to track down this British Veronica and I would try to become her friend. Well, I mean, it did not finish the question. At the end of the question, Veronica asks if it's okay for her to just take over other Veronica's life. No.
It does seem like becoming friends would be a better option, especially if you could be like, hey, so I heard that you're doing that rally to Burmbridge Harbor. I was wondering if I could just like bring a couple of Mike's hard lemonades and do that. The Hank Green Dream. What a tricky, tricky two Mike's hard lemonades is called becoming Hank drunk.
It doesn't take much. I mean, what I can tell you, John, is that the way that the Isle of White Works appears to be that Newport is just the geographic center and it is where all the people are. But if you want to go from Yarmouth to the to whatever that Burmbridge Harbor, you don't have to go around the whole island. So I don't know which way you go.
I don't know if you go around the top of the bottom, but it's pretty much the complete opposite side. So that's why the trip. How about you can get to a couple of Mike's hard lemonades on that trip? It's going to be a wonderful rally.
You should definitely look up Veronica, Veronica, and you guys should become friends. But don't take over her life. That's not cool. No, it's weird that you even thought about that.
Yeah, I don't think it's that weird, but it's not appropriate. You got to squelch that desire. Speaking of which, our next question comes from Ayushi, who's the speaking of which, by the way, is completely irrelevant. It's just the thing that I like to say.
How are we going to squelch this desire? I'm going to squelch Ayushi's desire not to have an apocalypse from space. Yes. Okay.
That's the question. People are not confused. It's tortured. Dear John and Hank, in my history class, we watch CNN 10 daily because my teacher wants us to be into current events.
I enjoy this bit, but the recent one was very distressing to me because it was about how we were going to go into World War three and how it will be a space war. What the hell is CNN 10? Well, he's a man. I had to look up with CNN 10 is this like a TV show for high school students in which it's like digital CNN, I think.
Oh boy. Oh boy. It's very dedicated to how we would all die if a hacking satellite interfered with one of our good making everything work satellites. Are we all going to die in a space war?
I find this highly improbable, but everyone in my class seems to believe it. Great job, CNN 10 and CNN is a reputable and trustworthy corporation or something. So should I be inclined to believe it? Should I be preparing for the fight of our lives?
It rhymes with sushi. Ayushi. Thanks for letting us know that. I, yeah, I mean, the thing is we might all die in a space war.
Well, to be fair though, we wouldn't all die in a space war. We would die in a space war that affects ground. Right. We wouldn't be in space when we die of the space war, but the space war will kill us.
Yeah, right. We would die as a result of a space war. Yeah, that's possible. I don't think it's guaranteed.
No, yeah, that's the thing is that like these these are are meant to be illustrative of a potential thing that may happen. And so we should be prepared to have that be a thing that does not happen is the idea I think behind why they terrify us so regularly. Oh no, I think they think they are they think maybe that they are achieving. I think that they know exactly what they're doing, which is trying to maximize audience retention.
And the great thing about predicting the future, Ayushi, and one of the great secrets to essentially all of contemporary linear television so far as I can tell is that if all you do is speculate and predict the future, no one ever comes back to say, Hey, wait, you've been wrong about everything because you're not talking about what is happening or what happened. You're talking about what may have happened and what might happen. And the magic of those verbs is that they allow you to never technically ever be wrong. Yeah.
Yeah. And but I don't think that it's I don't think it's bad to say like, Hey, look, what if what if something took our all of our good satellites and messed them up? How would that go? I think it's important.
Right. It's important. It's important to think about problems that we might have, but it's important to think about them so that we can try to prevent them rather than thinking about them so that we can just feel kind of vaguely afraid and you know, having this like creeping sense of dread that accompanies us through every minute of our day, especially when we are young and completely powerless in the face of space wars. I just don't know if it's that productive.
Yeah, I agree with you, John. I don't think it's going to be space war, but you know, I could be wrong. It might be there is there's a, you know, sort of the like things that humans might do that will end humans. And ever since we've had other weapons, of course, we've kind of had the ability to really mess up Earth pretty dang good, at least for us.
And and there's this one like nanotechnology, this idea that we could create like a nanite that would just multiply and turn everything on Earth into itself. And then I recently read about some scientists who accidentally made a flu virus that was the kind of thing that would kill 70% of people if it got out of their laboratory. And so they destroyed it and didn't know which their research because that was like, Oh, nope, that's real bad. We shouldn't and like the way that they made it is not technically complicated.
It's and I'm like boy, I bet wouldn't have to like go super deep into nanotechnology to get sort of a crazy like global level pandemic on you to apparently it's just flu. And like a flu virus has like eight genes, John. It's not complicated. It's a very simple thing.
And it's terrifying. It's so scary. That scares me. That's like that is to me.
That is that is my space war fear at the moment. Right. I usually since we don't think that you should be terrified at morning noon and night about space war, we're going to tell you what you should be really scared of a genetically engineered flu virus that is extremely easy to make and that anybody could make in their laboratory and that someone eventually will make and it will destroy 70% of humans. Great.
Hank, what's next? Do we should we cut that out? But the good news, the good news that you know we should keep it in. The good news is that you have a 30% chance of surviving this catastrophic flu and believe you me, the world that emerges from it will be great.
Lots of stability. All of our political institutions, which can just barely survive our prosperity, will be completely intact. Don't worry. And everything will be great.
People will be playing golf on manicured lawns and it won't at all be like a post apocalyptic health scheme. This next question comes from Ian who asks Dear Hank and John. Recently, as I grocery shop, I found myself having intrusive thoughts along the lines of what if I just take that bread from somebody else's shopping cart? I know I'm not going to do this, but it's got me thinking about who has a legitimate claim to the contents of a shopping cart.
The shopper hasn't paid for them yet. So legally, the store still owns them. So should I legally be allowed to take something from someone else's shopping cart? But if the store is, no, I mean, but legally though, are shopping carts like embassies technically the territory of the store, but the shopper has sovereignty over them?
Yes, that's exactly what it's like. Good analogy. You've answered your own question. That is a brilliant analogy.
A shopping cart is a traveling and this is like the embassy of the of the ownership of Hank. And it's still on the sovereign still sovereignly owned by Safeway, but right, right, right, under my control. This this bread belongs to Safeway, but it is currently being administered by Hank. And Hank has reserved the right to purchase this bread from Safeway.
And that sacred contract is being expressed by the fact that it is inside of Hank's part. And let's all just enjoy the fact that we can go to a grocery store and get food, because believe me, after some people are destroyed by Hank's flu virus, we're all going to be gardening. My little wood chip garden is going to be all that stands between whatever surviving descendants I have and complete destruction. Hank, I can't get over this.
I'm sorry, but if I could just ask you to turn, are we still going to make a podcast? Like, what is this future going to look like? Are there going to even be podcasts? Well, that's the thing.
We'll hold on to some technology. Podcasts might actually be more stable than like food systems, which is a problem. Yeah. So what I want to say to dial back the fear factor a little bit is that this is something that's known by people who study these things.
And part of the reason they study them is so that like we can anticipate changes flu viruses might make naturally, because eventually these things might even happen naturally without somebody with malicious intent. And so that we can create vaccines for those things so that we can treat them so that we can treat them so that we can, yeah, all that good stuff. So the reason that scientists are working on this is so that it isn't someday a problem. And hopefully that will be a thing.
And also they're doing it intelligently enough that they realized once they did it that they should undo it. Yeah, they did. I don't know that I trust every group of people who stumble upon a discovery to be equally. It just worries me.
It's a little it just freaks me out a little bit, but I'm going to assume that everything's going to be fine because I've been alive for 40 years and everything as well. It hasn't really it's been a really good four decades for humans. And I believe that the next four decades can be even better. And I know that I talked about how I was completely abandoning optimism for pessimism and that I still believe that this was the best year yet.
But I also believe that it would be the best year ever. But I'm back to optimism. I believe we are good at solving problems and we will find a way to solve them, which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the people who chose not to share that flu with the world, the people who chose not to share that flu with the world, saving actual billions of lives. This podcast is also brought to you by the Yarmith Harbor Yacht Club, the Isle of White, serving up Yachts and Mike Sarthe lemonades to American and British Veracas.
Also Canadian, she was Canadian. Sorry, Canadian. And it's podcast, of course, brought to you as always by second Jawaias. Second Jawaias just on the cusp of happening since their release.
And additionally, this podcast is brought to you by the Space War. The Space War. It's coming for you. I had to say before we move on, how much I like the cover of your book, an absolutely remarkable thing, which is available for pre-order now.
It's a really, really cool book cover. I hope that you're happy with it. It's pretty rare to get a book cover on a first novel that is so good. Yeah, I like it so, so much.
I have been thinking obviously a lot of book covers lately and there's a lot of different directions you can go and you start from this sort of infinite number of possibilities. And I think we ended up in a really great place. I'm looking at it right now, John. I have never been more obsessed with a piece of design in my life.
Well, the weird thing, healthy relationship with how much I like this book cover. The weird thing is that you do as the author have to live with it so much and for so long and in a way that nobody else has to, right? Because it's going to be, you're going to show it to your kids and hopefully one day you'll show it to your grandkids. And our great, great uncle wrote a novel and there are hardly any copies in circulation, but you and I have seen the cover of it.
And so it's something that survives in a weird way. And as the author, I mean, I know that like the cover of Looking for Alaska, I never could have imagined how much time I was going to spend looking at that cover and thinking about it over the next 15 years. But I'm very grateful that I ended up with a cover of a book that I like. And actually these days all of my book covers are ones that I like.
So that is a real blessing and a rare one. So I'm glad that you like it. I really like it. I'm really happy for you.
And also John, not me, John with no age, donated to the Project for Awesome to get us to say this message, which we are happy to say because we are really interested in the work that this organization is doing. So this is John's message that he donated to the Project for Awesome to get us to say. This message is a plug. For an organization, I'm a really big fan of Give Well, a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities through in-depth analysis.
Thousands of hours of research have gone into funding their top-rated charities. These charities are evidence-based, thoroughly vetted, and underfunded. If you want to know more, check out Give Well dot org and check out their research. So again, that's Give Well dot org.
Thank you, John, for donating to the P4A and for taking the opportunity to try to decrease world suck. Totally dope. That was very cool of you, John. I thought that was going to be about me, but it wasn't.
It was about a different John. I've always just wanted to say that about me, but it's never happened. Let's answer some more questions. You're also dope.
Uh huh. Is that what you wanted to hear? This question comes from Will who asked Dear Hank and John. My girlfriend and I just moved in together for the first time.
I am ecstatic. However, I do have a slight qualm. She has these lamps and tables that are bright periwinkle. How do I express to her that they don't exactly go with the rest of the decor and that I would rather go with simple white?
Her mom painted them and I don't want to offend my possible future mother-in-law. Her mom can be a bit standoffish at times. Any dubious advice would be greatly appreciated. Where there's a way there's a will.
Um, Will? Yeah, Will. I think John and I have the same piece of advice for you. You're gonna learn to love those bright periwinkle tables and lamps because people who you care about, who are important to you and your life, worked hard to make them and made conscious, careful, thoughtful choices about that color and you're gonna incorporate it into your life.
Yep. That's it, man. I mean, let's see. Is there another, is there more to say about this or is there just another way to say it?
Uh, yeah, I, yeah, I mean, aesthetically, just paint the other stuff white, right? And so, so the periwinkle becomes the pop of color in that room. Just have, have your bed be neutral or your carpet be neutral. I think I'm not an expert in this field, but I think it is a bad plan to repaint that lamp.
Yeah. And I think, I think it's a weird conversation to have to, to some extent, like you may imagine this as like emotional labor on your part, like a thing that you are doing. Um, and that it means that you're like your living experience isn't the exact way that you would imagine it. Um, but that it is, it is a, is a part of being a part of this new thing that you are creating with your S.O.
I took me a second to figure out what an S.O. was. But now I realize it's a significant other. I was just gonna highlight that for people who might have struggled with it the way I was struggling with it.
We have something in our house that is somewhat similar to this. There's a painting in our house that there's stuff that we once you once you form a partnership, I think you start to pick out stuff together, right? But then there's some stuff that you bring into the relationship that you bring into the first apartment that, you know, like you picked out on your own and it might not suit the other person's interest and that you may not have picked together. And here's what I tell myself when I see this one painting, someone I love loves this painting.
That's what I think. And I find it very helpful. And it makes me like the painting. And I think eventually you're gonna like those periwinkle lamps.
Actually, to me they sound nice. I think Will you might be wrong on every level. I think these periwinkle lamps might be a winner. But even if they're not on every level, I think you might end up in the pod for I'm just trying to level with you, Will.
I think I think you're headed down the wrong path. Hopefully we saved you in time. All right, Hank, this next question comes from Megan who writes, do you John and Hank, I must know where does the phrase the world is your oyster come from? And how does it make any sense?
If the world is your oyster, does this mean the purpose of life is to discover your pearl? What if your oyster doesn't have a pearl? And if a pearl is actually just made up of irritants and calcium, isn't it more like a kidney stone? Are you allergic to shellfish?
Doobious answers are welcome as my friends and I have been plagued by this question for a long, long time, although apparently not long enough to Google it. Was that part of the question? Did you add that in? No, I added that in.
So I don't want you, are you gonna tell me the actual answer to this question? I am gonna tell you the actual answer, but go ahead and speculate first. Well, I'm just gonna say that like, what I know about oysters is that they're ugly and like gross and like scraggly on the outside and then inside the inside of the shells are nice, but then there's like this goopy, soupy thing that is the animal itself. And so I don't even really know where the oyster begins and where the shell begins.
I don't like, not entirely sure. Like the world is my oyster meaning you can open it up and see what's in there, I guess. But in general, I just feel like, no, no, first of all oysters, very small, very simple and goopy gross. I don't want my world to be any of those things.
And indeed, the way that it is currently used makes no sense, especially when you find out where the phrase came from, which is from William Shakespeare's The Mary Wives of Windsor. And in this scene, Falstaff says, I will not to pistol, I will not lend you any money, I will not lend you a penny. And then pistol replies, why then the world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open. And then Falstaff says, not a penny.
So what pistol is saying is, okay, you won't lend me any money. I get that. I know how to get money out of you by using a sword, i.e, I am going to rob you. I am going to force your pocketbook open with my sword the way that I would force an oyster open with my sword.
So it has essentially no relationship to the idea that the world is your oyster, because I mean, I guess maybe the world is your oyster if you already have money. I think I did it. If you have a sword. Oyster is sitting there waiting for you to open it up.
Right. But in the scene, what's happening is that pistol is threatening Falstaff with theft. Well, aren't we all stealing every time we eat an oyster? Because that was the property of the oyster.
Yes. The body of the oyster. I find it to have been essentially like a mistranslated phrase that it must be the way that it the way something, maybe it's I am pick or something. There must be something about the phrase itself that feels true to us, even though the more you investigate it, the less true it becomes, which is maybe also reflective of something about how we actually think that we have a lot of control and sovereignty over our lives and what happens to them.
But in fact, the world in truth is almost never our oyster. Right. The world is your oyster in the sense that maybe the world is just like some oyster somewhere far away. You can't control and that you have you'll never be able to find and it may or may not have pearls in it.
It's just like every person has an oyster and it only exists for a limited amount of time. You like no one ever actually gets it. There you go. Thanks for listening to Dear Hank and John.
Next question. I'll just add one more question before we get to the news from Mars and Dave so John. It comes from Aaron who asks Dear Hank and John, I've recently been invited to join a small weekly critique group, which is fantastic. But one of the members looks almost exactly like Ryan Gosling.
The resemblance is eerie. I can't look at him in the eye. It's like looking into the sun. How do I have to spend one evening a week in his presence?
This guy has a reputation for being professional and kind and honest. He's a good contact to have. I can't risk weirding him out and yet I'm sure that I'll either say something idiotic or else avoid interaction to the point of unfriendliness. I could do with some dubious advice right about now.
Trial and Aaron. So my best friend Chris looks a lot like Vince Vaughn. I realize this isn't the exact same problem, Aaron. It looks more like Vince Vaughn.
In some ways he looks more like Vince Vaughn than contemporary Vince Vaughn does. Like Chris looks more like Vince Vaughn in wedding crashers than Vince Vaughn looks like Vince Vaughn in wedding crashers. And the way that I dealt with this, Aaron, is by the first time I hung out with Chris, I had a few drinks and then I looked over at him and I said, you know, you look exactly like Vince Vaughn and you also talk like Vince Vaughn and it almost seems like kind of a performance. And he paused and he said, I usually get Vincent de Nafrio.
And then that then it was over. A different Vince who's Vincent de Nafrio. He was in like law and order criminal intent. I think he I think he had a long and storied career before that but I most recently saw him in law and order criminal intent.
Yeah, no, that guy looks like Chris. Yeah, essentially every Hollywood actor named Vince looks like Chris Vincent de Nafrio the guy who plays Edgar and Minn Black. Possibly? And then the alien puts on the egg or something like we're stumbling into this week's this week in Ryan.
So let's not get ahead of ourselves. Yeah, I mean, I have you had ever had the problem where you are sort of like someone is so like, I don't know, beautiful to look at that it interferes with your ability to have a normal human relationship. Oh, is that the question? I thought that it was so distracting.
I thought it was just so distracting to have somebody who looked like a celebrity. I think I misinterpreted the question. Well, I think it's a little bit of a so one. It's this person looks like Ryan Gosling.
Second, have you seen Ryan Gosling? Yeah, no, he's he's got a very symmetrical face. Yeah, I don't know how to solve that second problem. I only know how to solve the problem of making making it normal to announce to someone that they look like a celebrity.
I suppose if that celebrity is Ryan Gosling, it is a form of it is weird to say you look like Ryan Gosling right because Ryan Gosling is widely perceived to be the definition of hotness. So maybe you just say, Hey, has anybody ever told you you look like Ryan Reynolds? No, you got to go with you got to go with that. Hey, has anyone ever told you you look like a dolt muckily?
Coughin. Here's the thing that you should do actually, Aaron, is you should just wait because eventually this person will start to look like themselves. It's totally true. It'll be that is that is my advice.
Yes, in my experience, people start to become themselves and they start to become people and what they look like fades a lot. There you go. That's our advice. Hank, we've got to get to the important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.
But first, I just want to say a quick thank you to everybody who supports Dear Hank and John on Patreon. You can get our weekly terrible podcast this week in Ryan's where we've discussed, I believe both Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds. But you can go to patreon.com slash Dear Hank and John and get you don't have to actually sign up to see the content. But you can if you want donate and then the money goes to Complexly to support SciShow and Crash Course and the art assignment and the other shows that we make at Complexly.
So thank you to everybody who supports on Patreon. You can listen to this week in Ryan's. After you listen to this podcast over at patreon.com slash Dear Hank and John. But Hank, what is the news from Mars this week?
In news from Mars this week, John, the Mars Curiosity rover, as we have discussed previously, has a drill on it that broke. So it's the only way we have to get samples from the interior of rocks on Mars. And that's a big deal because the exterior of rocks on Mars has chemistry that happens to it and is thus going to be different from the interior. So you can drill in there and then scoop a little bit of the sample up and then take it over to the onboard science laboratories on the Curiosity rover.
But more than a year ago that drill broke. One of the will motors that keeps it in place broke and we've been troubleshooting it to try and get it to collect dust to figure out how to drill into rocks ever since then. And we got it like an earthbound one that we had been testing to get it to figure out how to do this and it figured out how to do it. And then we sent all that software up to the Curiosity rover.
And just this week, it made its first drill on the surface of Mars and over a year successful test drill. The next step is to try and figure out how to actually get that dust that drilled up from the rock to the onboard laboratories. And that also, that part of what broke is the system that would get that there. So what they're thinking about doing is actually using the drill bit, moving the drill bit over to the laboratories, basically tapping the drill bit to get the dust to just fall off of it.
And that works with the one here on Earth, but obviously, you know, the atmosphere and gravity are different on Earth. So hopefully it will work on Mars too, but we don't know. But it has done its first sample test drill since it broke and it worked and everybody's very excited. And I basically, I could watch a documentary film on the year of work that these engineers have done to get that drill back up and running.
You should have made that documentary. That sounds properly interesting, especially if you have the right soundtrack. I find that in general, mostly need a good score. So speaking of scoring, we haven't been.
AFC World and America's favorite third-tier English soccer team lost their most recent game. Well, actually, their most recent game was canceled because of weather. I don't know if you heard about this, but there was this huge storm in England. They called it the beast from the east because it originated in Russia, and it was very cold there.
And there was a frozen pitch so they couldn't play. So there's that. There are now 11 games remaining in the League One season and AFC Wimbledon is clinging by one point to safety right now. In 19th place, 21st through 24th go down.
AFC Wimbledon is just barely safe in 19th place on 38 points after 35 games. There are 11 games left to ensure safety. Wimbledon will need 52 points. So that's 14 points from their remaining 11 games.
That's a lot. I don't want to minimize how nerve-wracking it is. I want to be hopeful and optimistic, but it is very scary. And obviously, the stakes are extremely high.
It's hard to get up to League One. It took Herculean effort and a little bit of luck for Wimbledon to get up to League One. And it would be pretty devastating to get relegated. So right now, one point clear.
And also, the franchise currently playing at Straight and Milton Keynes is in the relegation zone, 32 points after 35 games. So there is still the distinct possibility that those two clubs are going to be vying for safety at the end of the season, which is terrifying. And yes, boy, I'm worried. So the game you lost was to the team that was going to beat you probably no matter what, right?
That is correct. And they did beat us no matter what. They beat us three-nail and it was not close. But next we play Oxford United and then a huge game against, we have actually three of our remaining games are against teams currently in the relegation zone.
So those games are obviously all massive. So we'll see. Yeah. Okay.
Well, so that, yeah, that's really interesting. So that's coming up in the next weeks or the next week? No, the game, March 17th, St. Patrick's Day is a good game.
You don't want to talk about must-win games because I don't want to put pressure on the team. I don't want to put pressure on the team. But I don't think they listen to this. So I'll tell you the truth.
It's a must-win game. All right. Well, we're all rooting for you, John. Thanks, Hank.
What have we learned today? Well, we learned that the inside of your shopping cart has diplomatic immunity from the rest of the shoppers. We learned that the Yarmouth Harbor Yacht Club is your number one Yarmouth Yacht Club. Actually, probably not.
I think it's the number one Yarmouth Yacht Club. I think there's just the one. It's only a top five. It's not five.
We learned that baby hamsters, we don't know what to do with them and I don't know why you're asking us. And we learned that space wars might kill us, but not if the flu does first. John, thanks for making a podcast with me. Always a pleasure.
I don't remember how we end the podcast. But usually you read the credits. Oh, this podcast is edited by Nicholas Jenkins. It's produced by Rosie Annalles Rojas and Sheridan Gibson.
Our head of community and communications is Victoria Pangiorno. This music that you're hearing now ends at the beginning of the podcast and during this week in Rines is all about the great Gunnarola and as they say in our hometown. Don't forget to be awesome.