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191: The Engagement Duck episode artwork

May 27, 2019 43 min

191: The Engagement Duck

from Dear Hank & John

What is the dress code if there is no dress code? Where can I be anxious at work? What should I do with 72 tall vases? How can I avoid having to do dishes? How can I grow my own vegetables if the Sun is in the wrong place? How do I sort out my priorities? How do I tell my girlfriend's mother we aren't ready for a duck? Is there a polite way to ask someone to eat quietly? How and where should I conceal the dream rock? John and Hank have dubious advice! If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [email protected]. Join us for monthly livestreams and an exclusive weekly podcast at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn. Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [email protected]. Join us for monthly livestreams at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn. Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn

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191: The Engagement Duck

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Hey, so something worth knowing is a benefit for the nonprofit organization that makes Crash Course and SciShow Complexly. It's September 16th, 2026 in Los Angeles, California at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. Please join us. It's going to be incredible.

Friends of Complexly like Mark Rober, Katie Max, Simone Yech, and more will share inspiring talks about what makes them hopeful and join Hank Green on stage for fun, interactive discussions. Complexly has been creating free educational content like SciShow and PBS eons and Crash Course and Bizarre Beasts for nearly 15 years and 6 billion views. But this year, we have become a 501c3 nonprofit and we're doing something worth knowing as an in-person event that benefits Complexly and our impactful educational media. It's the first ever Complexly in-person event and it's a fundraiser to support our mission of inspiring curiosity and lowering barriers to knowledge building because curiosity builds understanding and understanding builds a better world.

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. Oh and welcome to Dear Hank and John. There's a cod past for two brothers and your questions.

Give you to be surprised to bring you all the weeks from both Mars and AFC Oneville and John. I just went on a trip to California and got back and my luggage was so damaged that I took it to a lawyer to show him and say I want to sue the airline and the lawyer said I'm afraid you don't have much of a case. I'll tell you what I liked about that joke. There was a tiny bit of misdirection in the form of California and so I'm thinking is it going to be a pun on Big Sur?

Is it going to be about the City of Angels? No that's just an unnecessary detail. Hank your jokes need more unnecessary details. Alright I'll work on that.

Here's what I would have tweeted about this week. I would have tweeted that the great Nicholas Jenkins is editing his last episode of Dear Hank and John. Nick the Nick. Y'all haven't heard Nick's name over the last few years as many times as Nick has heard his name when we say Nick please cut that.

Nick whatever happens don't let that get to the radio. Does this thing go out on the radio? Anyway Nick is a huge part of Dear Hank and John. Thank you so much for doing this with us.

Yeah for building it with us. We are so grateful and we are also so excited that you're going to be still working with Complexly and working on Crash Course and doing all the awesome stuff that you do and we're excited to have Tuna editing the podcast now. We're going to have to mentally stop saying Nick and start saying Tuna. Hopefully you the listener won't notice any difference and if you do notice any difference bear in mind that it's probably because of confirmation bias rather than because of actual differences.

Yeah I mean it also just maybe that John and I we're different. We keep growing up we keep getting older. Every day we're more mature we're less funny it's just great. It's so true.

Sometimes I watch old vlog for these videos and I'm like oh god that guy was hilarious. Where did that go? Well you need to make videos. I wish you make videos.

Why did he quit YouTube? Oh but Nick seriously thank you from day one Nick has been editing this podcast and he's also been you know even before that working on Crash Course and so we're just freeing him up to work on more cool projects at Complexly and excited to work with Tuna who is really fun and I like working with him on SciShow already so glad to be yelling at him to take things out of the podcast now. Every reference to Putin please Tuna just as a general rule. I'm talking about Vladimir Putin just cut that immediately.

He's tried to hack us before. Not a joke. This first question comes from Cassie who writes Dear John and Hank during the project for awesome John did an AMA on Reddit where I asked what my new passion should be and John suggested vegetable gardening. I love this idea but I just moved and my new apartment is facing north without adequate sunlight for gardening.

Is there any way I can work around this to grow my own vegetables? Potatoes and petunias Cassie. Yeah Cassie what you're going to want to do is get some grow lights which are usually used for the production of one particular agricultural product. It's going to look suspicious.

Yeah but they can be used for lots of things. Yeah I'm not going to name any names here Hank but I have a cousin who in college was living at home over a summer and managed to have a thriving vegetable garden in their bathtub supported by grow lights. Now it doesn't matter what this cousin was growing it was a plant and it was I think edible. It was happy.

Yeah the happy edible plant and their parents never even found out until very near the end of summer when my plants in question were huge. So like I think that a good interior grow light garden situation is an herb garden. Yes turns out cabbage take up enormous amounts of space. They do.

You're going to want to grow like basil which is convenient to have and you take care of your basil and you love your basil and you make pesto with your basil. Yeah. You make those like tomato slices with cheese and basil things that is like the best food. Yeah.

What's that called? Caprese salad. That sounds right. And then you have maybe some time some parsley sage rosemary the whole Simon and Garfunkel salt.

I got a whole fresh spice thing going on and fresh spices are super expensive. Every time I buy basil at the store I'm like first of all this is way more than I need. Also I need to have a talk with the cilantro people about how you package cilantro. I need like three milligrams of cilantro and there's no way to buy more than eight pounds less than eight pounds and also that's one of the weirdest rants of although like impassioned faux outraged rants that you've gone on in the history of the spot gas that was the worst.

If anybody knows a cilantro person I need to talk to them about the situation. I'm a cilantro person actually I'm currently growing at least 20 cilantro plants and I can tell you from experience that you do need more cilantro. The issue actually is not with the way the cilantro is being packaged. It's the way you're preparing your food which is with inadequate cilantro.

That's Catherine agrees with you. To move back to the question the big herbs I would try to grow in my north facing apartment would be I agree with you Hank basil mint it's impossible to kill it's delicious in mint juleps and you can make mint tea from it and rosemary rosemary you can put it on pretty much anything. Those are just really delicious. I think are big big winners and then if you want to grow cilantro plant just to annoy Hank then that's worth doing too.

Welcome to gardening with Hank and John. All right, let's move on. All right John this next question comes from Emily who asks dear Hank and John both my girlfriend and I hate doing dishes not like sort of find it annoying but hate it so much that we go to lengths to clean the entire rest of the house just so the other person feels obligated to do the dishes. Help and please do not tell me to watch the dishes as we go.

Emily. Apparently that's that's something you've heard before Emily and I've not taken that advice kindly. That is what I would have said though. Yeah the way to minimize the number of dishes you have is to minimize the number of dishes you use and maximize the number of dishes you wash as you go but that's obviously not the problem here.

The problem here is that Emily needs to figure out a way to either do the dishes or get her girlfriend excited about doing the dishes. So I think that chore compatibility is a huge part of like relationship success that no one talks about. It's definitely like not on tinder profiles but probably should be. Right I don't mind doing the dishes.

People swipe in whichever way is the good way over and over again. Yeah the last thing I need to do is marry another person who does the dishes. Yeah I love that neither of us knows like really which way to swipe with the tinder but we try to stay young. I assume that right is the good way.

I don't know if people use tinder anymore for sure. Is it still happening? At any rate it doesn't matter because Emily already has a partner so yeah yeah yeah this is too far down the road to be helpful to them. Emily what you've got to do is you've got to train yourself to love washing the dishes.

Now I'll be the first to admit this is not easy but it is possible. I don't know how to do it. Here's what I do. Okay you go and then Hank you tell me what you do.

I have nice noise canceling headphones and I treat dishes time as John Time. John Time to listen to podcasts. John Time to listen to the new Mountain Goats album which is about Dungeons and Dragons is amazing. John Time to listen to an audiobook.

Yeah I'm doing the dishes. It's a little unpleasant. I don't like touching other people's like masticated food that they spit out in the case of my children because they decided that like that chicken nugget was somehow inferior to other chicken nuggets but it's okay because it's John Time. So basically same except I will say another strategy.

One save like a podcast that you absolutely love just for dishes and only let yourself listen to it while you're doing dishes and then like you will associate dishes with a thing that you like. Two try this out. I'm not going to guarantee it's going to work. Do the dishes together.

It'll go twice as fast. You're going to wash. She's going to dry. And then at the end of the process you will have like done an unpleasant thing together and it will have brought you closer.

There is research that shows that couples who do unpleasant tasks together are happier than those who do unpleasant tasks apart. Wow I didn't know that. There you go. Get on that dishes team together.

Okay this next question comes from Jesse who writes, John and Hank how do you stop yourself from doing too much work when your work is something you love. I'm a high school English teacher and I love what I do reading books and being able to talk about what makes them awesome with students and planning what books we will read next year and how we'll talk about them but I spend too much time on my work as evidenced by the fact that I moved to a new apartment in September and still haven't alphabetized my bookshelves. It's May. The hard part though is that it's hard to tell when I have done enough work but enough planning into my lessons or enough thought into what my book list for next year will be.

I'll hung up enough posters in my classroom. So my question is at what point do you decide enough is enough turn off the switch and let things be. And more importantly what should I assign my ninth-rateers for summer reading? Analysis and anxiety Jesse.

Oh this is really great book. It's fairly nice. It's called an absolute remarkable thing. That's funny that you should recommend an absolute remarkable thing for summer reading for ninth-rateers.

I was thinking that a great choice would be the fault in our stars. Well that's just cruel. You're doing fine. I think that book has reached an audience of a size.

But hasn't reached an audience that includes Jesse's ninth-rateers? I'm going to guess probably not. Do you need that next generation? I need it.

I need it badly. Hey so Jesse I asked this question in the hopes that by asking it someone could email us the answer because Hank and I don't know the answer to how you stop yourself from doing too much work when your work is something that you love. Ultimately for me it's not like because what are you stopping in favor of doing? So for me it's like conscious prioritization and to say like am I prioritizing this task right now because it is something that just feels like it's sort of the natural thing to keep doing or is it actually helping or am actually enjoying it or are there other tasks that will be like sort of better for future me if I prioritize them right now.

For me tasks includes terribly everything including like spending time with my family talking to my brother about something that isn't work. I'm sorry for laughing but we haven't done that in like at least seven years. We do. We do.

We texted about not work stuff very recently. Oh yeah. It's weekend even. Briefly.

I mean one sentence from me and one sentence from you both about our anniversaries. Yeah. Bathing for example would be a great task that I tend to not prioritize but should because I tend to just be doing the thing that I'm already doing. So it's really about like remembering that those other things exist and that they also need to be prioritized.

And then if like if all those things are taken care of like do the thing that you like doing just because it's work in quotation marks doesn't mean you need to like stop doing it. Yeah. I find it very helpful never to say I'm too busy to do this or I'm too busy for that right now and instead to say I don't want to make that a priority because if I say I'm too busy to spend time with my children what I'm essentially saying is I don't want to make spending time with my children a priority and when I understand that I prioritize my time much more effectively and I remember that even if it isn't what pays the bills or what gives me a lot of like outside affirmation spending time with my children is the number one priority. And so if you frame it that way instead of I'm overwhelmed with work and so I can't do X, Y, or Z or I don't know when to stop working and instead frame it as I need to prioritize what matters to me with my time that can be helpful I think regardless of whether you love your job on the summer reading front I do have a recommendation that isn't a book written by either Green Brother I recommend having your kids read Parable of the Sewer by Octavia Butler it's harrowing it's definitely intense but it is a book that could change their lives and make them love reading so that's my recommendation.

Great. This next question comes from a team who asks dear Hank and John I just got accepted for a job position in a tech company in a different country which I know has very hot weather I asked my boss what is the company's dress code and he said there is no dress code uh what does that mean can I wear a t-shirt and jeans do I have to wear a nice shirt am I allowed to wear flip-flops or shorts when it's really hot I would much rather have him tell me what I should wear but this is apparently not going to happen before I have to pack in need of dubious advice pumpkins and penguins and seam so I think the right call here is to show up at work on day one wearing just underwear and then kind of work your way up from there so be like hey boss is this uh is this the dress code no all right see you tomorrow and then tomorrow you got a pair of shorts on and you're like is this the dress code no all right are we there yeah and you put on a t-shirt and you're like what about this and then your boss would probably be like yeah that's all right and you'll be like great only took three days this does annoy me because like what this means what there is no dress code means is like dress normal which is not the same for everyone right especially if you're moving countries and yeah it's so it's basically saying like just have the normal cultural understanding of everybody who is the same right of the general homogeneity of the world which doesn't exist right so probably what this means is wear a button-down shirt and shoes and pants uh probably yeah actually I just had an idea hey yeah instead of starting with underwear instead of starting with like definitely too little clothes that's the way to like rub it in the face and say like this is not an acceptable thing to say in a job interview situation you need to tell me what the frick I should wear to my job I've realized that what you should actually do is start a little bit too well dressed yeah right and then it's way easier to work your way down than it is to work your way up so or or naseem I hear that you have expertise in some kind of tech thing by the job that you have just received what you're gonna want to do is hack them and then turn on all their webcams yes before you move countries yes and take pictures of them and see what they're wearing right you got hacker security systems or their their computers just get some good malware in there yep do some social engineering and the problem solved alternately you could wear a button-down shirt tucked into a pair of khakis and some reasonably nice shoes and you know if that's too much by midday maybe you untuck the shirt and roll up the sleeves you gotta have a bunch you gotta have like a complete three-piece suit that's tear away so you can just go right you walk in the door and you're like wrong you're just in your gym shorts and then underneath your button down shirt you have a t-shirt and then underneath your t-shirt you have a tank top and then underneath your tank top you just have kind of like a tube top that bears the midriff because you know super cash right yeah naseem so basically you're gonna want to wear like nine outfits on top of each other and then just kind of declo as the day goes it occurs because they probably have pictures of some other stuff on the website look and see what they're wearing the pictures i mean that's not nearly as good as hacking all their webcams all right this next question comes from jacob and it's a big one hank jacob right steer john and hank my girlfriend and i recently found out that her mother plans to give us a live duck as a present when we get engaged with why do you put it on the registry that's on you jacob if you don't want a duck don't register at ducks.com for 400 ducks both my girlfriend and i agree that we're not ready for a duck and likely won't be by the time we get engaged i mean of course i mean maybe what's this i like that jacob is open to the idea that they will be ready for a duck someday yeah but they're just not there yet how do we tell my girlfriend's mother that we don't want to duck without hurting her feelings or revealing the sources of our information oh yeah you can't reveal your sources that's like textbook ethics can you imagine like jacob's girlfriend's dad calling jacob's girlfriend and being like so listen you know your mother she's so wonderful um we all love her very much you know how she loves her ducks i don't know if i believe it why don't believe it's not possible i i sometimes we get questions that are obvious goofs and this has to be a goof there's no way where do you live like you know a place where you can have a duck where do you keep a duck you don't keep it inside it poops do you i mean maybe you do keep a duck maybe maybe people have like demesticated ducks that like pee in the potty and everything because kind of take it for walks i guess oh god that would be so cute actually taking your duck for a walk all right now i'm on board maybe maybe here's the solution you are ready for a duck no you're ready for a duck you're ready for a duck just believe in your relationship believe in yourself you're getting engaged no that getting not mean also acquiring a third member of the family hey what if instead of engagement rings we had ducks wouldn't the world be a better place it's actually true wouldn't it be amazing you go to like a football game and like the jumbo trot and then the guy gets on one name just like thrusts a duck out a woman will you marry me and this ducks like squawk and then the duck like flies around the whole stadium's chasing the duck and they're like we gotta get the duck and you go to the mall and there would be these kiosks where you can buy a duck but you have to spend like two or three months of your salary on a really really good duck so your partner will know that you're serious oh you don't want to get your partner this does it's like too many of a ducks yeah i mean your your partner is going to live with this duck for the next like 12 years this duck is going to remind your partner of you forever do you really want to get a substandard duck or do you want the highest quality duck available yeah you got to wear this duck on your hand for years jacob you you have to stop this now this is an emergency i don't want to overstate it but if this is not a goof it is a very serious problem and the way that you address it is the next time you are with your girlfriend's mother you and your girlfriend say to slash in front of the mother i love your ducks i'm so glad you have ducks i'm glad that these ducks bring you joy but we are young people who are not looking to bring a duck into our lives at this juncture we want to be able to travel duck free right we want to be able to be able to be duck without feeling weird about we want to be able this is the life we want for ourselves right now and we need you to respect that yeah you got maybe you could just say like oh we're really looking forward to after we get engaged to doing a bunch of traveling it's one of the only times in our lives and we're not gonna have a dog or a cat or a duck or a kid and he's like put the duck in there just sneak it in put it third in a four and we can just travel completely without any responsibility yeah and not have to worry about like how sitters and like having a duck sitter etc etc and you know what the mom is probably gonna say what she's probably gonna say oh don't worry you can travel with a duck oh yeah they love travel yeah they love it but i'm a camber fan you haven't seen your 70 till you've seen your 70 with a duck you think you've been to paris but wait till you go to paris with a duck john here's our next question it's from Maggie who asks dear hank and john i'm getting married next year and i wanted to be proactive in planning so i bought 36 tall vases from dolbertree.com to use this table decorations this was after my friend who runs a wedding business told me that she had given away her 36 tall vases turns out her 36 tall vases were not actually given away and they offered them to me for my wedding dolbertree doesn't have returns for online orders so i have 72 tall vases at my disposal what should i do with them vases and virtues Maggie obviously you should turn them into little duck homes very very small ducks how big are these vases are there's a link here is that gonna take me to see what the vase looks like or is that gonna take us to their wedding or is that gonna take us to their wedding oh no it's a wedding registry we've shown a weakness for registries before yeah no it's not happen and now people are starting to exploit it hold on let me look at this registry and see if i want to buy anything i don't i don't like that we've been tricked by our viewers into buying stuff off their wedding registry on the other hand there is some excellent stuff here that you do need when you're starting out of life together yeah but you don't need oh my god this is like the difference between this wedding registry and the college registry school registry is so dramatically dramatic the lifestyle inflation that has occurred yeah in the last few years of this person's life yeah the college registry i would say if you combine all of the items together they all together cost less than the one kitchen aid mixer on this person's registry college gives no how to live man i will say i have that kitchen aid mixer and it's excellent and we've had it since we got it for our wedding so i mean i'm not gonna buy it for you because i don't have that kind of money but i will buy your little mixing spoon things this bath mat looks real nice it's like squishy oh hey we can't keep doing this because then more people's and it's more registries and pretty soon we'll be bankrupt john i have actual advice for maggie great i have a friend who runs a forest shop and they buy lots of vases all the time and they will actually take vases from people back and they're happy to take those and reuse those vases i think they even get a discount on future orders if they do that or they pay them like a dollar per vase or something so you could come back with your vases i don't know if your florists will do this but like generally forests need vases and they're happy to have some and it's wild because like you get these flowers and they come in a vase and then just like oh like every time i get new flowers they come in a new vase it's too many vases so i always bring them back to my florist friend that's that's smart there you go proper advice hank i can ask a question that i have proper advice for oh okay go this question comes from mia who writes dear john and hank i tend to be really good at managing my anxiety and dealing with it when it crops up in a situation like a class or concert or something but there's one place i don't know what to do when i get anxious work like i could go to the bathroom or something but that feels kind of weird and i definitely don't want to stay in my little cubicle where everyone can see me being anxious dubious advice is appreciated mia so first off mia if you're concerned about your mental health you should not talk to podcasters you should talk to a mental health professional i really encourage you to seek help we are not psychologists i'm just going to share with you something that works for me and that has been shown to work for other people which is to go into the bathroom at work turn on the water spout and run cold water over your wrists it can also work for some people to kind of splash their face with really cold water but for me running cold water like over the inside of my wrists really does help and there's some you know quasi science behind this that i don't understand but it works for me and nobody thinks you're weird if you wash your hands they think you're good they're happy they're proud of you so it doesn't look weird also i would say that 99 percent of the time nobody at work will notice that you're anxious because everybody's do self-involved that was gonna be my advice that if you're like in your cubicle being anxious probably no one will notice i mean the extent to which nobody notices what's going on with you is hard to overestimate honestly i think it's a pretty good chance that the seams going to walk into work on the first day wearing a tuxedo and everyone's gonna be like kind of seem nice to meet you here's your seat you never get a second chance to make a first impression sometimes you also don't get a first chance that's so true which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by tuxedos at work duxedos at work people probably won't even know this podcast is also brought to you by engagement ducks engagement ducks it's the new fads going everywhere those are very expensive ducks but they're worth it to show your love apparently hey i'm just gonna throw this out there's a concept before we move on with the sponsorships engagement ducks.com is available and i know that we own too many websites for instance i know that we own what we could have do with engagement ducks john hey we're gonna sell engagement ducks and make a mitt you know what we the whole point is that no one wants a duck the mom in the situation isn't giving them a duck because like she thinks it's a lovely gift she has too many ducks she doesn't want all the ducks she has they're not physical ducks i think that would be crazy oh i like it i'm on board virtual engagement ducks their virtual ducks and all the money goes to partners and health Sierra Leone and you go and you buy your engagement duck and that's how you know you're really engaged today's podcast also brought to you uh by chore compatibility chore compatibility why isn't that on tinder tell me which dishes you like to do so i know whether or not we're a long-term match because that's what i'm looking for on tinder i assume and this podcast is brought to you by tuna tuna editing the podcast and also a fish two separate things brought to it's two different sponsors oh okay you slipped in an extra sponsor i did i was sneaky i well you know we got to make a living got to get that money we also have a project for awesome message read from emir to ea i saw me like him i just wanted to use this opportunity to have hank or john tell you something very important i only have 70 words to say it though while that seems like a bunch of words sitting here trying to think of the perfect way to tell you what i want it seems far too few words how can one even begin to describe what i want to say i want to say i love a mirror you only needed three words it's all gonna be okay you only need this episode of your hank and john is brought 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 it 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 can 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 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See you website for more details. One thing I love about summer 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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Imagine for a moment that you are absolutely immersed in some work where you're creating something beautiful or useful or useless and ugly but you love it anyway and you look up and suddenly you have a feeling and that feeling is that it is 2.30 pm and that you did not eat lunch what are you going to do are you going to get meal delivery that's going to cost too much and maybe be a bit of a mistake or are you going to go to the cupboard and just eat several fistfuls of peanuts because those are my two choices unless I have a factor in the fridge. You can get smoky barbecue chicken breast with potato mashed cream corn and peppers you can get creamy lemon pepper chicken with veggie rice peel off broccoli and carrots this has the fiber I need it has the protein I need it has the deliciousness I need what about garlic herb roasted barramundi with potato zucchini and burr blanc sauce I don't really know what that means but it sounds delicious what about a black bean taco bowl with corn salsa and cilantro crema a delicious high fiber high protein meal that no animals had to die for any of those can be ready in two minutes fresh never frozen over a hundred rotating weekly meals including globally inspired flavors like Mediterranean and Asian factor shops perhaps cooks and delivers straight to your door so you have more time for everything you love this spring head to factormills.com slash deerhank 50 off and use the code deerhank 50 off to get 50% off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only wild supplies last until September 27th 2026 see website for more details in three words it was all gonna be okay anyway we wish you both well this next question comes from Madeline who asks deerhankajan is there a polite way to ask someone to eat quietly I'm tired of leaving the room every time my roommate's boyfriend decides to have a snack in two straight lines Madeline uh I want to ask this question because maybe it's the politest way I can talk to my brother about the way he eats I think I eat very quietly maybe not super loud but like occasionally fairly visibly oh yeah I don't uh yeah no that is a problem I agree that that's a good way to bring it up like have it come up naturally in conversation and then be like I wish that you wouldn't eat with your mouth open or whatever I also think that sometimes it's helpful to frame this stuff as a kindness that really chewing with your mouth shut is about taking an opportunity to slightly inconvenience yourself so that you can show the people who might be watching you eat some kindness how do you like ask for that kindness I think like from a person who is a loud eater you try to get it to come up in conversation and then you begin to discuss it but I actually don't think that's the issue I think the reason that you find my eating annoying is that almost 100% of the time we're eating together we are in high stress situations and you're already have a base level of frustration and I think what's really going on here is that this person doesn't love their roommate's boyfriend and the boyfriend's like constant presence on the couch is a little bit not what I signed up for on the lease and is a little bit frustrating and therefore slightly loud eating becomes much louder in my years because I'm so annoyed that's my guess so what you got to do you know those like sweat bands that you put around your head is when the boyfriend starts eating just go up to him and put that on except over his mouth no what I would do is even more passive aggressive which is that I would take out my noise canceling headphones and turn them on but look the long-term solution here is very simple you've either got to break up this couple or you've got to get your roommate to move out and on that front I have one word of recommendation ducks just start having a lot of ducks in the apartment yeah people be like I can't live here anymore and you're like oh no sorry you're gonna leave me alone yeah no sorry my girlfriend's mom got me a bunch of ducks I love them yeah what am I gonna do give them back that'd be impolite these are the apartment ducks now yeah I mean they reside here as much as your boyfriend does do they eat too loud for you I wouldn't know what that's like Hank and John giving aggressively passive aggressive advice since 2014 all right we have a question from piri who writes dear john and Hank I just had a dream where I was holding a little piece of rock and if that rock got exposed to any light an ancient demon would grow stronger in power how and where should I seal this piece of rock when I return to the dream so that humanity can sleep safely in my dream for as long as possible I mean I love I love like interesting plot devices and dreams so much yeah usually dreams are like the one I had last night where I was sharing a hotel room with my wife son and the macaroon brothers and there was a volcano outside that was slowly like pouring lava into the hotel room and I called the hotel staff and they were like no that's normal and all the macarons were like why are you so worried about this like that's not a good like short story to write but like a rock that when it gets exposed to light a demon somewhere gets stronger that's a great story like you are charged with preventing this demon from from gaining in strength and have to like prevent photons from touching something which is not easy they're everywhere that's right no this is the beginning of a wonderful epic fantasy novel yeah whereas all of my dreams are like me eating a banana worrying about crash course like most of my dreams are getting up getting the baby up shaving taking a shower yeah yeah I know there's nothing less interesting than other people's dreams except for period dreams but I did recently have a somewhat interesting dream with Keanu Reeves in it which is always welcome like I always take that as a good omen when Keanu shows up in my dreams but anyway in my dream Keanu and I were at the same party and he came up to me and he was like it seems like you've been having a hard time and I was like oh I have yeah and then I woke up and I wondered if you walk up to anyone in the world at any time and you look deeply into their eyes and you say it seems like you've been having a hard time I wonder if like 99 percent of people would be like oh yeah I have oh actually thank you so much yeah and then there's like the like one percent of people who are like nah it's been going good no I'm good and I was doing good till you walked up and asked me that weird question now I've got to worry yeah wait yeah it's you it seems like that that's how it seems right it's like when somebody says you look sick and I'm like well I feel fine am I sick oh god I'm sick oh god it's something happening but back to your dream which was incredible Hank what do you do in the situation it's not enough to bury it I think maybe this is what's in the the Patrick Rothfuss box in the in the name of the wind maybe but like I don't know like the thing about like the one ring is like you throw it into the river but it always comes back like you can't get rid of it it has a mind of its own so like you have to kind of maybe give this if it's a narrative give this rock some agency yeah so that like no matter what you do it will always come back and that's kind of true on earth and the scale of billions of years like the stuff that goes underground comes back to the top like it got old old rocks with ancient 500 million year old fossils and I'm suddenly getting exposed on the side of a river in China so things never really go away so you have to find some way to store something forever which as we've found with nuclear waste is very hard and like we're bad at it and aren't are just doing a terrible terrible tub so no I don't know what to do like there are things that are opaque you can wrap it in a bunch of tin foil probably a good place to start it's like a bunch of bunch of bunch and then you've at least got like a manageable thing that you can put into some other object to like bury it or throw it into the deep deep ocean which is a pretty good place yeah deep deep ocean is the obvious place here yeah and you have to be very heavy because like you don't want it to like get ocean current it away right go straight down super heavy super dense so it's tin foil wrapped in like gold wrapped right platinum wrapped in lead it's expensive the expensive stuff probably let us the one you want to go with just because it's like you got you want a lot of it and let's cheap well I mean I'm assuming that if pry has access to this rock there's also a level of access to tremendous amounts of resources right okay but also who's to say that the steven's a bad demon oh great point what if you drop it to the bottom of the ocean and then you notice that things start to get worse on earth and you're like oh I forgot about good demons or I forgot about how sometimes demons are complicated and then you've got to go on a new journey the journey to the bottom of the ocean and yeah it turns out that you don't need it to get no light you need it to get like the right amount of light right that's good yeah that's why you write the plotty books like some kind of flashlight that turns on only a little bit every day in the dark room like the hallway where you go when there's a hurricane oh that's good that's good that's all good all right I think we've given you plenty to work with here and before we get to the news from ours and if we'll then we need to discuss some issues that came up in previous podcast beginning with the water bed issue we made fun of water beds we said who sleeps on water beds joshua writes dear john and hank i suppose you never would have guessed that the owner of new england's largest waterbed store is an avid listener to your podcast after your episode this week i'm ready for an all water bed all the time podcast you can call it drifting apart with hank and john here's a fun fact cows that sleep on water beds have increased milk production love the pod joshua i mean that's pretty great joshua works at the all sleep store if you are in the market for a water bed also god casket who the heck put a cow on a water bed did science gasket he wrote to say dear john hank i just wanted to let you know that my mother and i both have water beds in 2019 my mother has had water bed for as long as i can remember and i've had mine since i was 11 my mom has a king size which is huge and i have a full size they're super nice if you have back problems and very warm on winter nights so there you go yeah that does that makes sense we've also got a science response from adam who says dear hank and john and episode 188 hank said that there was absolutely no chance of earth being ejected from the solar system that sounds like a great thing to go on with my life believing and not continue saying what adam said but he says i actually just handed to my master sneeces on this exact topic and i found that if a planet around a host star undergoes a disturbance by way of a passing fly by like if a star passes by there's a non-zero chance of being ejected from the system 6.2 percent of the computer simulations i ran ended with a planet being ejected from the system though the likelihood of escape is dependent on the distance between the host star and the orbiting planet the survivability of an earth-like orbit was 98 percent i don't subtract them i adam okay it's very good name specific sign off but i think that the good news is that we would see a star fly by coming a long way away i assume this is a star fly by he doesn't actually say that and not a planet fly by like a rogue planet fly by which would be more likely but less likely to be gravitationally significant all right there you go well Hank it's time for the news from afc Wimbledon the season mercifully over which means it's the beginning of the silly season the beginning of trying to sign some new players trying to deal with the players who have left trying to re-sign the players who say they might re-sign but haven't signed yet it's also however a huge shift in afc Wimbledon's history because simon bassy has left his role as the first team coach after 17 years with afc Wimbledon played for the old Wimbledon as a boy it didn't work out he became a cab driver and then when Wimbledon reformed he showed up to those tryouts at the public park on Wimbledon common he got a place in the team he was in the team for a few seasons never scored a goal uh it took a penalty in his last game and skied it but he became a club legend for his commitment to the club he would drive the cab all day um and still find time to help coach the team up through the ranks when we were a non-league side and then into league two and then into league one he is just an extraordinary person and a real hero of mine and uh he'll be desperately desperately missed at afc Wimbledon and you know people talk about club legends all the time but simon bassy is a proper legend for Wimbledon and they often sing his name at games and i know that they will continue to do so we'll certainly miss him and i wish him the best in whatever comes next for him well john and news from mars the 2020 rover is getting really ready to start doing its thing uh to get to get on the way to mars and that means a few things they're doing a lot of final tests uh they're testing the actual like entry system that like has about the heat shields and the rockets and all that stuff uh but also it means that they're getting ready to get all the instruments done to put on the rover and that means that they are inviting the public to submit names to fly aboard the rover so they have some little chips that they like do electrons stenciling onto and they're very very small names and you can put your name inside the mars 2020 rover and it will go to mars and be on mars and you also get a little boarding pass that says here's your boarding pass from mars 2020 you know launch site kick and a rival site gesaro creator mars atlas v541 rocket and suddenly you're gonna get 313 million miles that you can use to trade in for theoretically something i've just got one for orin so his name's gonna be on mars with mars 2020 rover lands wow in 2021 how much are they they're free what how do i sign up you got a go.nasa.gov slash mars 2020 pass and uh you can be one of the i think already like 750 000 people who have signed up to put their name on mars uh that is so cool i'm doing that for henry and alice nice amazing the countries most represented are the united states uh india and turkey i gotta tell you india has almost as many names submitted to go to mars as the u.s which i love that's great one of the things i love about space travel is that it's one of the it's one of the goals that brings us together as a species we need more of those goals we need more goals that are about us that don't require or create a them and the good news is that thanks to climate change we've got one that's yeah yeah whoo yay climate change thanks for giving us that i just uh looked up my previous sporting passes and in 2015 i submitted my own name uh and it is currently on mars but now i have a baby so he gets to go no that's great that's great i hope that he never actually goes to mars because i don't want to stress out about my nephew being able to plan it but that would be so stressful oh my god no yeah i mean i could barely handle it when they go to north carolina well thank you for potting with me it's a pleasure as always thanks to everybody for your questions sorry for all the wonderful questions we don't get to but you can email us at pankandjohn at gmail.com we really love reading your questions this podcast is produced by rosianna halserow hossum shared in gibson it's edited by joseph tunan vedish our head of community and communications is victoria bonjourno the music they're hearing now and the beginning of the podcast is by the great enrola and as they stay in our hometown don't forget to be awesome

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This episode was published on May 27, 2019.

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