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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. More than I've ever been to think of it, Dear John and Hank.
It's a podcast where me and my brother John give you dubious advice, answer your questions, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon and Man is the Mars News Good this week. Oh big Mars News Week Hank and but I would argue an even bigger AFC Wimbledon news week. You know what we found in South London at AFC Wimbledon Stadium? You will not believe this.
Well maybe you should save it for the news. Occasionally Hank, not all the time, but occasionally there is flowing water in Kings Meadow in South London, AFC Wimbledon Stadium. They probably should level the field. Oh man, oh boy it's exciting.
That's exciting. All right John how you doing? I'm doing well. You know, how am I doing?
I don't know. I'm working on a story and I'm trying to stay in the story and hit a word count every day and so it's a little bit disorienting to try to interact with the regular world. I'm on the whole doing well. I can't, I've been writing a lot down by the river which has been lovely and it's just beautiful here in Indianapolis.
Ever since Taylor Swift left a few weeks ago she left but the weather that she brought has stayed. It's almost like as long as we can hold on to the memory of the Magic Night of Taylor Swift concert here in Indianapolis, winter will never come. How are you? I'm fantastic.
I launched a wizard school Kickstarter yesterday. I'm making a game it's called Wizard School and when I say yesterday I mean yesterday as of the recording not as of the uploading of this podcast. And it's going very well and I'm very excited and it's kind of taking over my life and has been for a while but at least now it's taking over my life and I can talk about it which is exciting. Yeah it's a really cool card game.
I have not played it yet but I was one of your first 10 Kickstarter backers. Oh thank you for that. I just I'm amazed by your ability to continue to make stuff and I know that you love card games so I'm psyched that you get to finally make one and I love like the idea of a wizard school that is not so hog wartsian that's like more like a normal high school that just happens to have a lot of people with special powers. Yeah I mean it's you know you're going about your daily lives and sometimes it's going to be a normal school thing that you might expect and sometimes it's going to be a score pelican that's loose in the school and it's affecting everybody's magical abilities and and you have to either kill it or you know do a number of other things.
There's a lot of choice involved in the game you know like a lot of things that you and then sometimes the game forces you do things and and then there's a lot of for me when I'm playing the game it's a lot about card management and figuring out like okay I could do this but do I want to do I want to do I want to save this for a better time and it's very it's a lot of tension it's really fun and I'm excited to be doing this. Yeah so you can go to Kickstarter and check out the wizard school card game that Hank has invented with some of his friends the first project from Hank's new company DFTBA games just go to kickstart.com and search for wizard school. I am genuinely excited about this Hank I don't talk about your projects that I think are less cool I just ignore them completely but I think this one is great. I would say that your two greatest achievements as an entrepreneur number one 2D glasses of course oh yeah of course you know that that render three-dimensional movies in a crisp two dimensions and then number two ahead of VidCon this card game I haven't played yet.
All right well I actually am excited that I made 2D glasses because the Martian is coming out very soon and we'll have come up at the time of the podcast upwards and it's in 3D and I want to see it in 3D but Catherine does not and so I'm gonna bring her with me but she's gonna get to watch it in 2D. Hank would you like a short poem for today? Is your short poem about 2D glasses? It is not it is about grief.
Okay sure. Sorry to ruin your day. It's by Raymond Carver. It's called grief woke up early this morning and from my bed looked far across the straight to see a small boat moving through the choppy water a single running light on.
Remember my friend who used to shout his dead wife's name from hilltops around Perugia who set a plate for her at his simple table long after she was gone and opened the windows so she could have fresh air. Such a display I found embarrassing so did his other friends. I couldn't see it not until this morning. Grief by Raymond Carver.
I love that poem really gets me like just below the solar plexus. That's a soft spot. I can tell that you prefer the funny poems. I was a little bit unable to keep the train of thought on that one.
My dog was being cute. Can I tell you a poem that I think is quite funny that's two lines long by Ogden Nash. Okay sure. I think it's actually four lines long.
Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker. That is those are some short lines if that's a four line poem. Yeah I thought you would like that one because it's funny but maybe you're just paying attention to your dog instead of listening to me. I did.
I know I did. I liked it. I've heard it before. In fact I didn't ever consider it as so much a poem as some people say.
Hank should we answer some questions from our beloved listeners. Let's do that. We've got one from Sienna who asks Dear Hank and John. I've recently joined the model you went at my high school.
I'm super excited but kind of nervous. I've never been ashamed of being a nerd but I was wondering how to not be pressured or hurt would be will make fun of you doing nerdy things. I know being a nerd is wonderful and you should embrace your nerdiness but high school is hard and scary and full of peer pressure. So before we get to Sienna's excellent question, Hank I just have to tell you that I was in the model UN in high school for those who don't know the model UN is a it's a thing where young people pretend to be in the United Nations pretend to represent certain countries and have sort of a model United Nations and I was a really bad model UN person.
One of my problems in high school was that I wasn't able to like empathetically imagine what it was like to be anyone else other than myself. So it was really difficult for me to like be told to play the role of you know whatever country I was being told to play the role of and my most memorable model UN tournament or whatever it was called I was Turkey and I really liked the girl who was Russia. She was great she was funny she was really smart she had lots of ideas and so I co-sponsored a lot of her resolutions because I thought they were just excellent even like she would be like I think that that Russia which at the time was a new nation that emerged out of the Soviet Union should have access to some Turkish ports and I was like you know that's not a bad idea. Why are we hogging all of our ports?
You know like it's not we're not poor Russia has no warm water ports and we're just sitting here on the Mediterranean you know it's not like we can't share. So yeah I am not the person to tell you how to be good at model UN but I am really nerdy so I can't say something about that but Hank you're even nerdy or so you answered the question. I don't like I felt that and I rebelled against trying looking nerdy and tried to not look nerdy while also trying to not lose my identity. But like yeah I think that what I noticed was no matter what skin I put on no matter what you know click I was a part of no one like there weren't any because I would do a really big high school there weren't any that were under the radar there weren't any that were above everyone else everyone made fun of everyone else at my high school and nobody was cool there may have been some groups that were that were ignored and that was probably the best that you could be but there was there was even like the people who everybody sort of like saw as the popular powerful people in school even they got ripped apart in terms of like people tearing them down and I I don't know if that's something that happens only at big schools or if that's something that everybody experiences but what I've noticed is that it's not it's not about trying to figure out how to not get torn down it's about trying to figure out how to be confident enough in the stuff that you like that it doesn't you know ruin your day when it happens.
Yeah and also how to not be a tear down but instead to be a builder up and I think you know if you focus on stuff that you love and stuff that you feel excited and passionate about and you know try to not focus so much on that like fear and negativity that is a huge part of any social order but especially probably high school social orders I think I think things get a lot better because you love the stuff that you love and you know something about why you love it and you have friends and lots of other people who like make make your life better who share some of those interests and what people outside of that think matters less when you can find that real pleasure and passion in the stuff that you do. Yeah and that's where a lot of that confidence to sort of like to like shrug off a unpleasant interaction comes from when you really when you really believe in the coolness of the thing and if somebody else disagrees with that then that's because they disagree with it and if they're being mean that's because they're mean nothing wrong with you. Good for you Hank I love that answer it we have another question this one is from a grown up like a proper adult listener of your John and Hank we love our adult listeners. There's lots of those.
I know in fact it's mostly adult listeners they don't send in as many questions. All right it's anyway the question is from Amber who writes Dear John and Hank marriage is hard work I love my husband more than anything but as my career is taking off I'm traveling for long periods of time and it's difficult to stay connected and communicate effectively. My husband is extremely happy at his hometown nine to five job but I work for a large corporation that sends me all over and sometimes requires I work from dawn to dusk since both of you seem to travel and work for a large majority of your life. Do you have any advice on ways to stay connected while apart?
Sorry for the serious topic but who are we kidding your podcast isn't always comedy. Thank you Amber for your wonderful question. First off our podcast is hilarious. That Raymond Carver poem that I read earlier today was riotous.
I would describe it as riotous. The part where he talked about the dead the guy opening the window of his dead wife could have air to breathe is just. Yeah I mean this is I think this is a really difficult thing in a lot of marriages is balancing the needs of one's career or the urges one's career ambitions and business ambitions with one's personal ambitions and I think a lot of it too is for me a ton of it is being respectful of your partner and their choices and so not trying to judge the person who has a nine to five hometown job not trying to see one or the other of those ways of being as better. That can be very difficult when obviously you like your way of being and want to defend it but I don't think that those kind of like defenses of my way is the best way necessarily make relationships better.
But it's something that I struggle with a lot and one of the big reasons that I travel a lot less these days. I mean Sarah travels a lot for her work with the Art Assignment and I still travel you know a fair bit but I used to travel 150 days a year and that was just too much for me because it was difficult for us to stay connected and I just felt like I wasn't as much a part of my family's life as I really needed to be and wanted to be so I cut way back on travel in the last year and it's been great. But you know it seems like Amber you want to you're in a part of your life and a part of your career where you want to be taking those opportunities and you want to be traveling the world and doing whatever you do working for that large corporation and you know and then you've just got to you've just got to keep the lines of communication open. I believe that it is basically impossible to have like really high quality conversations in a marriage when you got you're on the road and you're just doing like fundamentally different things.
Actually I don't know if I believe that. I don't know. I should let Hank talk. Why am I just talking?
You did. Yeah I mean you got to most of the points. I mean I'm a little concerned when anyone says that they're working gone to dusk because I you know in the same breath of saying that their marriage is the most important thing to them or they love their husband more than anything else. I mean like I try so hard to not have the people who work for me do that and sometimes they want to and but like you know for me I don't think that I try to not ask that of people and if I was in a situation where my employer was asking that of me I would not want to be in that situation.
But I also like you know when I am my own boss I absolutely sometimes work that way and so like there's there's you know validity to that and excitement and that and as long as it's not personally draining or draining in your relationships. But yeah I think John hit most the important part of this which is like you know you guys have to like recognize that both of you want to do a thing and and being open and allowing for that is great. And I you know I think doing it while apart is hard and so like the best thing you can do is when you're together have you know consistent and high quality interactions where you don't have your phone out and you are you know talking about how like not just what happened but how you feel about what happened and how you feel about life and how you feel about the place where you live and how you feel about you know the next five ten years the things that are going to happen to you and like the things that the things of deep relationships. Yeah and taking each other's work and concerns seriously and with like equal seriousness I think that's really important like in it I had this like weird period in my career where like there were movies being made and I was like what did you do today at work well I talked to the today show and you know and it's easy to imagine that like that is like more interesting or more important than what someone else did and if you do that it's your doom.
I just start to believe that I really think you're doomed and like I felt like I almost had to pull back from some of that stuff because otherwise it was just like I was going to start to believe that that stuff was inherently more important and more interesting than like you know Henry going to soccer practice like the other day I took Henry to his soccer game and it was great he played great I know that you're curious Hank he played amazingly the kid is just he's gonna he's a future star of AFC Wimbledon but after the game he was like going through every single time he touched the ball and I realized that like to Henry it was incredibly important like it was as important to him as an AFC Wimbledon game is to me and I really needed to like listen to him and try to treat it seriously even though it's five year old soccer and like they're all you know technically horrible yeah the other thing I would say Hank is I'm a big fan of Google Hangouts like I believe in Wookieing Someone in the Eye I think it just makes a difference. We've been on this question a long time but I want to add one last thing which is that we have many projects in our life and John was just saying like how do you like Hank has so many things and he does all the things and and I think that it is important to not think of your relationships in your life is something that just happened and that are there but that our continuous projects that you are working on and in many ways the most important projects in my life are my relationships and I want to cultivate them I want to build them I want them to be interesting and different just in the same way that I want to cultivate and make interesting and different and successful my businesses so like like just in the same way that I want to focus on my career I think that like focusing on relationships as a project and like focusing on you know child rearing as a project like obviously making it like creating a human is probably the biggest project that people ever engage in you know any individual I don't care if it's Elon Musk or if it's John Green or if it's you know you like like those things that we do like that's how the next like it's not just that's like you know this is something that we're building for people this is like we're creating the next generation of people and without that there would be no more people anymore. Yeah it is overwhelmingly the most important part of my life and the most important kind of project in my life is my family now I'm very lucky that like for me you know Hank is part of my family and we get to collaborate together on a lot of work stuff and that feels like both work and family stuff but there's also a lot of like private family stuff in my life you know I don't talk a ton about my kids or my marriage and but that's by far the most important thing I mean there's yeah and I think you have to remember that it's hard to prioritize particularly you know because there can be some excitement and and intrigue and kind of joltingness around around work and professional success and you get a lot of outside encouragement and outside affirmation but for me at least like the family the family projects those have to be in the very very center of things. All right John we got another question this one is from Numiara who says, Dear Hank and John I'm finding it harder and harder to form an opinion of a lot of compelling political problems in the world because I keep imagining complexly my opinion keeps getting split both ways.
What do you think I should do about that? Oh Numiara I think you should celebrate. Yeah that's great news Numiara congratulations. I mean it might make it harder to figure out who to vote for but that means that you are that most valuable and interesting of constituents the swing voter.
Yeah No we need more swing voters we need more like high interest really dedicated knowledgeable thoughtful swing voters. People who don't know which way to vote despite knowing lots of things and to some people that might sound completely impossible if you are educated then you must know but look 50% of America votes one way and 50% votes the other way. I mean not exactly obviously but pretty much and so what you're saying is if you're educated then you're definitely gonna fall on one of those two sides no you're gonna like some people are gonna fall in the middle and I often find myself thinking you know like if I'm really paying attention not to the news and not to the you know not to read it not to the blogs I follow but to what candidates are saying I will occasionally be like yes no that makes sense when I'm listening to someone who on other subjects I'm like you need to pull your head out of your butt sir because that is an inexcusable way to think and it's interesting that I could think that way about a person that some of their ideas are good and some are bad but of course you can because that's how people are. Yeah we have such a personality driven political culture and I understand why that's valuable in good in a lot of ways but we never talk about actual policy like we so rarely talk about actual policy positions you know we're constantly having these arguments about the underlying ideologies but like let's talk about what you would actually do and I think when you talk about what you would actually do you find that a lot more people are swing boaters you know and so I think that if we focus on policy then you do see that this is it's not as black and white and it becomes a lot more of an interesting conversation now political candidates are reluctant for many reasons to focus on policy for one thing I don't think they think that it gets them votes but also you know it puts them in the position of wakley breaking campaign promises down the road but I think I think that when you focus on that when you focus on like what people are actually proposing and what the implications of it are the conversations can get a lot more interesting and also less like heated and rhetorical yes okay this question is from katie who writes dear john and hank after struggling for a few years out of college I finally managed to find a full-time job congratulations katie I'm grateful to be able to support myself but it's for a business market I think is pretty morally ambiguous how do I help myself justify going to work every day supporting something I don't believe in oh that's a big one oh boy the first thing that I would say is that every business is a little morally ambiguous right like I try very hard and I know hank tries very hard to to create an environment here where we're working on you know crash course and SciShow and Metal Floss video and art assignment like stuff that people can feel really passionate and good about but make no mistake lots of things about my work are morally problematic like there's a lot of things about the book business for instance that are that really trouble me particularly some of the business practices of the largest booksellers in the country Walmart Target and Amazon I know that it is alarming that those are three largest books stores in the US but they are and I and yet I still believe in writing novels and I still and I still go to work that said like that's so I don't want you to think that there's some like shimmering city on a hill out there where you know you can work in a field that's totally removed from any kind of like ethical problem but like one of my good friends is a rocket engineer who is designing engines for warplanes and that is very troubling to him and I definitely understand why it is troubling to him and I don't have an easy answer for that so hopefully Hank will you know I don't know any specifics Katie of where you're working what you're doing I you know if you're if you're working for a drug kingpin killing people then I would definitely be concerned but if you're working for you know Walmart as a as like a you know logistics person how to get food to one place to from one place to another like you know Walmart is troubling in some ways but it's also it also solves problems and there's a reason why Walmart is successful and there's a reason why people go you know like there's reason why people work at Walmart there's the reason why people go and shop at Walmart and you know the there's definitely I think you should probably ask Numiura about this because she might or he I'm guessing she because it ends in an A would have a good a good set of thoughts on you know like the you know the ambiguity of it like there is good being done and there's bad being done the question always is is the good outweighing the bad and like I as a person who is you know really really concerned about climate change hate the fact that I get on a plane like once a month to go to a place to have a business meeting or to like hang out with family or you know to go to LA to talk to a bunch of my YouTuber friends you know that is troubling to me and you know when I ask myself is this you know is it worth that you know adding to the tremendous problem that we are going to have to face with climate change I'm never quite sure and like and and that's just a like moral ambiguity is part of I think being a human definitely part of being a human in today's society so yeah the other thing that I would say is that a lot of times you don't have good choices you know like it's not your fault if you don't have good choices in this situation and like it's it's an easy choice to make if you're choosing between you know jobs that pay the same amount and allow you to take care of yourself and your family where where one is you know like doing development work somewhere in an underserved community and the other is like you know like a murderer for a drug kingpin but like the truth is like almost all of us like live in the middle and we have limited choices and you have to make like the best choices that you can make while still acknowledging the fact that you have to take care of yourself so I think it's more of like a spectrum than it is an easy yes or no I'm reminded of the great resignation letter that the novelist William Faulkner wrote to the United States Postal Service when he when he quit his job working for the post office in Mississippi.
Hank are you familiar with this letter? No well this letter is the best advice I can I can give I guess because it acknowledges the fact that we are all going to be influenced by capitalism but also acknowledges that at least in Faulkner's case a limit had been reached this is the letter in its entirety as long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of money to people but I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp this sir is my resignation my last piece of advice for Katie is that is to not lose sight of the moral ambiguity to know that it's there and as you rise as you have more career opportunities as you're able to do more as you have access to more resources recognize that there are other things that you could do or inside or outside of your organization to make those places to make those organizations better and like as really you know we talk a lot about how capitalism is the thing that drives everything in America but it is really a mix of both capitalism and human culture that are the the thing that shapes what this country is and like the fact that this you know this weird you know divorced from reality market thing has such a massive effect it's kind of can be terrifying but but it really it cannot it cannot make us make decisions we make decisions and every you know every decision everything that a corporation does is a decision made by a human being and so like be a good human being even if you are in a place where the thing that you know you might not believe in the thing that your company is doing be a good human being within that and that that will that that can this episode of your hand comes on to you by Shopify there are a lot of things that stand between I have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me and that is what Shopify makes easier when you start with Shopify the tools to design and launch and take payments they're all there from day one you don't have to build a whole machine before you can start building the business and this is important because you also have to like look good and with Shopify's templates you could get a site set up really quick that looks credible and professional without needing to code or duct tape a bunch of different tools together and when things look real that works on my brain to be like I'm doing a real thing it also works on other people's brains to be like this is legitimate Shopify also has one of the best checkout systems on the internet it's built to help customers finish the purchase effectively and efficiently without a bunch of roadblocks returning customers can check out with a single click that means less friction and fewer abandoned carts and a smoother experience for everybody that stuff gives you confidence early on and it gives other people confidence in what you're doing you're not wondering whether the payment system is going to work you're not wondering whether customers can get through the process Shopify handles that foundation so you could focus on the thing that you're actually trying to do it's really kind of amazing to me that Shopify is a tool that works from the first day your store launches when you're just starting to get customers all the way up to being the size of good.store or dftba.com or being the size of like Mattel and Gymshark when you build a Shopify you're building with tools that already work at every scale all you need is the idea Shopify handles the rest you can start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank start your free trial Shopify.com slash deerhank with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27th 2026 see website for more details one thing I love about summary is how easy everything feels the days are a little more relaxed my kids don't have to wake up at five in the morning and I find myself reaching for the same comfortable go anywhere pieces again and again which is why I keep coming back to quince. 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code deerhank 50 off to get 50% off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27th 2026 see website for more details and change hey guys we have to move on to the news from Mars at AFC Wimbledon I think that we'll do the news from AFC Wimbledon first because from what I understand it was a big week on Mars um now thank you may remember that in 2011 the AFC Wimbledon having risen from the ninth tier of English football was on the cusp of returning to the football league the full-time professional football leagues of the top four weeks in England are full-time professional teams and then below that it's amateur semi-pro a couple professional teams but mostly sort of varying degrees of amateur uh that fifth tier the one that you have to win or finish uh or win the playoffs in to get to uh to get to league two which is the the bottom wrong of the football league um is called the conference uh or it was at the time anyway and AFC Wimbledon made it to the last game the playoff final and they were playing luton town and it was a nil-nil draw at the end of 90 minutes there was 30 minutes of extra time then it was still a nil-nil draw and then there was a shootout and 19-year-old Seb Brown the goalkeeper for AFC Wimbledon saved two penalties uh Danny Kedwell the 33-year-old journeyman who'd never played a game in the football league and his life scored the decisive penalty AFC Wimbledon's captain he ran to the fans who own AFC Wimbledon together collectively it was an amazing amazing moment AFC Wimbledon were back in the football league after the horrors that had befallen them at the beginning of the century it was one of the greatest moments in sports history well a couple years later luton town got promoted to the football league as well so now luton town and AFC Wimbledon are in the same league and they just played their first game against each other since that magical night in Manchester when AFC Wimbledon were promoted to the league um and luton town won and AFC Wimbledon lost let's move on to the new streamers oh man uh well uh that was some really long brief news job i uh yeah so so first i do want to say that uh as of the release of this podcast the martian is in theaters i haven't seen it yet because as of the recording of this podcast it isn't out yet i'm very excited about it though and i'm probably going to like it and so you should go see it uh that's kind of mars news but in addition there's an actual very exciting mars news which is that uh they have uh they we really the human race has found that there is a super salty flowing water on the surface of mars it's it's not like a river it's more like a sort of trickles through wet sand kind of muddy stuff it's coming out of really steep uh you know cliff sides uh creators gli uh and and valleys and it's uh the the big question is you know where is this stuff coming from and the the you know most obvious potential answer is that it is in fact flowing out of uh liquid water that is below the surface of mars now there are some other potential mechanisms for this but it's probably that there is a lot of liquid water below the surface of mars and it just happens that in these places and in these particular circumstances it's able to flow out and persist for a large amount of time on the surface so there's a lot of water on mars and it turns out that it isn't just ice there's there's quite a lot of liquid water on mars and that is very exciting um you know it doesn't change how uh how livable the planet is to us because we could you know there's always been ice there that we could turn into water but it does change the potential for existing martian biologies and ecologies which is uh exciting because boy if we found life somewhere else and that life was substantially different from life here on earth now of course it might be that life was seeded from earth to mars or from mars to earth and uh and the life will be actually very similar but if it was a completely new set of biology that was based on different chemicals and different like no DNA and no proteins but a different kind of building block that would be the kind of science that would just be unthinkable to do right now to be able to observe that to be able to understand and uh and and put that puzzle together would be one of the great endeavors of humanity and so it's the kind of thing that people get really excited about and wait wait wait wait for good reasons yes what you're telling me that all human all life on earth is is dna rna based right correct and you're saying that it's possible that martian life is not dna or rna based that it's completely separate that it evolved completely and it might be totally different yeah yeah i mean that's like what's like how oh we don't know that's the thing we can't imagine another system because the system that we have is so ridiculously cool and complex and took us so long to even figure out how our system works and we have it all around us to be examining and understanding whereas trying to come up with from scratch with another another way to have life work is uh is difficult is not that's that's hard and and so like that that's one of the you know really exciting things about you know you know mars and europa that we could like observe not just life somewhere else but life that is like if life happened somewhere else it would not be based on the exact same system as us like that that you know it you know my guess is that uh that our you know the way that our rna and dna function is an accident of chemistry um it's just the way that it happened to happen for the first life warm on earth and if it had happened a different way then all of us would be very very different not just uh you know not just chemically but you know physically and in different places where different where there's different chemistry different uh different temperatures different pressures different stuff in the water um then you might see a completely different set of chemistries that would define the life all right that's pretty cool actually that's kind of exciting no god it's very exciting i mean even if there's no life involved it's very exciting because getting to observe a different hydrology and a geology that's based on different chemistry and on different amounts of gravity on different like different atmospheres different chemicals in the crust uh you know the fact that like mars probably doesn't have a liquid core but probably still has magma somewhere underneath the surface because the most recent volcanic eruptions were very recent like there's a lot like just having a second sample you know we have the earth and we can study the earth but mars is very different and so getting to getting like the fact that we get to have you know we could do like increase our sample size from one to two that's pretty massive in terms of studying anything and so like you know hydrologists and geologists of the world maybe a little bit less exciting for the average human but like those people are like uh that is it is the most exciting thing in the world that that there gets to be another world for us to study can we back up a little you mentioned something about Europa what is Europa i know that Europa League Europa in in in in Europe is like if you're not quite good enough to get into the champions league like liver pool is then you play the Europa League is it similar or is it different uh this is different Europa is a moon of Jupiter uh and tell me more about tell me more about this moon uh Europa is uh made of ice probably entirely so it's just a big bottle of ice and below the surface because of tidal pressures from Jupiter it is liquid ice so water oh so it's like got an icy crust but then there's some warm ice underneath there's a giant massive subsurface ocean on on Europa and uh and we would very much like to be there and to check it out uh because like it's literally like probably the the water of Europa if you were under the surface and you had swimming a swimming tank like it would be awesome it would be like you just be like you know 80 degree water really yeah i mean there there would be areas of the of the planet where it would be much hotter and much colder than that but there would be you know bands of uh of you know perfectly tropical feeling water can i ask a couple stupid questions um yes sir why is Europa's water warm when Europa itself is so far from the Sun uh Europa's water is warmed by tidal pressures from Jupiter so as it goes around Jupiter and spins uh the uh Jupiter actually like stretches the planet out a little bit and that causes a friction and that friction is transferred into heat which uh which uh basically makes the entire surface of Europa look like this weird puzzle piece thing that has like these big cracks and rifts in it because it's basically has like plate tectonics because it's the solid crust on top of the liquid the liquid water inside that's kind of cool um it's super cool but we couldn't live on Europa because there's no land we could live in Europa if we wanted to be inside of submarines all the time we could also live on Europa if we wanted to be inside of uh you know controlled habitats as well okay like floaty controlled habitats or just like how they do it on in Antarctica where they build like a thing on an island device yeah i mean it would have to be a little more advanced than that you'd have to have it have to be airtight there's no atmosphere on Europa as far as i know okay you know where we could also just stay here yeah no absolutely i wouldn't suggest going to live on Europa uh unless like we run out of like we really run out of resources and space but um but i would definitely want people to be there to do science on Europa i don't think that it's a place to go to chill yeah no i mean you've i have to say Hank you've kind of gotten me excited i did not i did not get that into this Mars news but now you've got me excited thinking about um the idea that life could have fundamentally different building blocks elsewhere than it does here that's pretty mind-blowing indeed it is not however as mind-blowing as that moment when Seb Brown a virtual child took 5600 people's lives in their hands went the wrong way on a penalty and then held up his huge glove his right hand it was almost like i don't i don't believe that it was supernatural like obviously i don't think that god has an interest in the outcome of football games but it felt that way when his hand reached up the wrong way and just got enough of the ball and then his celebration was just immense and then i mean the weeping these these these grown men and women who'd had their football team taken away from them by this you know just corrupt organization and then built it from scratch and then just the them dissolving into tears as they realized that they were back in the football league that they had a professional team that there was going to be football in Wimbledon it was amazing you know so like lots of things are amazing lots of things are amazing and i want to say that Europa i said that it was a ball of water it is in fact i'm mostly a bob of rock but with a with a full full water covering over it i had that wrong so i corrected myself before next week i feel like you might not have been listening to me when i was talking about how great Seb Brown's second penalty save was well you know i've heard the story before oh boy today's podcast is brought to you by Europa Europa made of ice possibly rock today's podcast john is brought to you by children's soccer games they're a monument to understanding value in human psychology and of course today's podcast is brought to you by the nation of turkey the nation of turkey inexplicably friendly with russia russia sure is cute just they couldn't be any sweeter um Hank what did we learn today before we we we depart for the fair shores we learned that the american swing voter is in great need of cultivation and appreciation we learned that marriage is hard work and the most important work in many people's lives we learned that all businesses john are morally ambiguous and of course we learned that there is occasionally flowing water on mars as long as you define flowing and water very generously it's water it's just just like the ocean is water it's just salty water and it's not salty in the ocean to be clear at some point it stops being at some point it stops being water and it just becomes wet salt yeah that is kind of true they call it hydrated perchlorates and people tend to think when you say salty water they're like oh like the ocean so if i put it in my mouth it would taste salty but salts are any ionic compound and the salt in question is not sodium chloride it is magnesium calcium perchlorate different perchlorates which are not good and you don't want them in your mouth do not put martian salt in your mouth do not put that in your face one more lesson from a comedy podcast by two brothers thanks for listening our podcast is edited by nick jenkins the music is from gunnarola if you want to send us questions you can do that at deer hanken at nope at hankenjohn at gmail.com no deer just hankenjohn at gmail.com and as we say in our hometown don't forget to be awesome