204: Quiet, Subdued, and Possibly Illicit

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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. Or as I prefer to think of the Dear John and Hank, we are here on a rooftop deck in Madison, Wisconsin.

We're actually at the Madison Contemporary Art Museum which has an excellent show. If you happen to be in or near Madison, Wisconsin, we're on the road right now but we're not going to let that stop us for making a quiet and somewhat subdued and possibly illicit version of Dear Hank and John. At some point we think a security guard is going to come up here and kick us off of the roof deck. But in the meantime, we're going to start out here on the roof with a sculpture card.

John, how do you kill an elephant? With an elephant gun. How do you kill a blue elephant? I know all of these jokes.

I have a child. Two of them in fact with a blue elephant gun. How do you kill a red elephant? You have to choke it till it's blue and then you shoot it with a blue elephant gun.

How do you kill a green elephant? You have to embarrass it until it's red, choke it till it's blue and then shoot it with a blue elephant gun. How do you kill a yellow elephant? I don't know.

There are no yellow elephants you idiot. That's good. It's good. How do elephants hide in cherry trees?

How do elephants hide in cherry trees? They have to paint their testicles red. What's the loudest noise in the jungle? What is the loudest noise in the jungle?

A monkey taken a bite out of a cherry. This is definitely a appropriate conversation. How do you, Madison Contemporary Art Museum? Yeah.

How do you know that there is an elephant in your refrigerator? You can't. So footprints in the butter. Foot prints in the butter.

That's one of my kids favorite jokes. They just, they can't get enough of it. They say they can barely get out the words footprints in the butter before they start laughing. Oh, there's a truck that's coming by.

I don't know if y'all can hear that. It's both a truck and a plane. We're being attacked from above and below. Not to mention the nearby crickets.

It's a soundscape. It's what they call in the radio business, the soundscape. I don't know if you can hear the wind, but there's also a very pleasant wind just wafting. It's a giant gentle wind in a cricket nearby as well.

This is the opposite of your usual episode of Dear Hank and John. What we're really trying to get you to do is just calm down. The world is loud and a little terrifying, but there are still crickets. There is still wind on the face and there are still apparently abandoned public spaces where you can just sit and see no one.

This is a really good art museum and I'm kind of bummed out that there aren't more people here right now. It seems like the time. It's perfect time for this. Please come to the Madison Contemporary Art Museum.

It's great. John, this first question comes from Kyle who asks Dear Hank and John. I'm studying chemistry at university and I love it, especially when I got to talk about my research with others. My parents both work in marketing and have accepted that much of what I'm studying goes clear over their heads.

But nonetheless, they're generally interested in what I do. When I tell them about a new project I'm working on, every time they ask without fail, are you safe? Yeah. There are many systems in play in my lab to keep me safe while I work with my nasty little friends, but I worry that the words flesh eating bacteria will override my parents' interest in my work.

Yeah, I mean they certainly override my interest in your work, Kyle. I was all on board with an answer where I was going to say, oh Kyle, your parents love you and they just want, Kyle, get the hell out of that lab. Kyle actually came to see us in Madison. So, that's coming.

Nice to see you last night, Kyle. I hope that you had a good time. Is there another way to communicate the gravity and excitement of my research on flesh eating bacteria that won't cause my parents worry? Well, you gotta carry out a euphemism for flesh eating bacteria, just like skin-lunching bacteria.

I was going to say something that's adequately technical that your parents won't also want to understand what it means. Sure, yeah. That's not a technical name. Necrotic fasciosius.

Oh, gabao, so that's worse. Yeah, that sounds bad. Is necrotic fasciosius a thing? If it is.

It's similar. You know about a thing called necrotic fasciosius. The words ring a bell in my head, but I don't know exactly what they mean. You know?

Yeah. I've done a lot of googling over the years. Yeah, that is it one day. Yeah.

I know. There aren't a lot of disease processes I haven't researched. At least a little. So, Kyle, the answer to your question is that you've got to talk about your work in a way that's adequately vague.

So, when I ask Hank to explain concepts to me in the sciences, which I genuinely have a third or fourth grade level understanding of. But also an interest in. But also an interest in. It's the same way I feel about skateboarding.

Very interested in it. Not a lot of talent for it. Yeah. I usually ask Hank to simplify more, and then if I need him to simplify less, that makes me feel good.

So, I would start with being like, so listen, mom and dad, there are, believe it or not, things that are alive that are too small to see. And just go from there. Or Kyle, maybe you can convince your parents that you don't have flesh. And be like, no, I'm immune.

No, don't worry about it, mom and dad. I am as it happens in artificial intelligence. Yeah. When you sign up to work in this lab, they replace all your flesh.

That's the first step. They took out all my parts. This next question comes from Elliot, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I live in a small house with six other college students. We love each other a lot, and I'm very grateful to this found family that we've built together.

Oh, that's great, Elliot. However, one of my housemates really wants to get a crockpot, an idea that I hate. I have no idea why I can't stand the thought of having a crockpot in one of our cabinets. How do I tell my housemate that they cannot, under any circumstances, purchase a crockpot?

I think that you may be confused about what a crockpot is. It's not just like the shoes. Well, I just pop for those crock shoes, the sandals. Oh, yeah.

It's not just for cooking crockes. No, it's for cooking lots of different things. The other thing that I'm concerned about, Elliot, is that you might think that a crockpot is some sort of like a very small nuclear weapon. Or a drug thing for meth.

Yeah, it's not. A crockpot is just a wave. Just an item for cooking food. It's better if you call it a slow cooker because they started doing that.

They were like, I don't think people like the word crockpot. I think people are upset by the word crockpot. The crockpot people. Yeah.

And then the people were like, I know what's up. We should call it a slow cooker. Which to me is like, I also hate this because I want food pretty much immediately the moment I start to cook it. Well, the great thing about a slow cooker though, is you just like put it in the slow cooker, you go to work, you come back and it's all whatever.

The people who can think that far ahead astound me. Oh, I can think that far ahead. I love to plan out what I'm going to eat in a day. It's one of the highlights of my day.

Alright, so what you're going to do Elliot is you're going to let your housemate get the crockpot. Because you're being the weird one here. Don't ruin your amazing found family over a crockpot. Like I literally can't think of a worse reason.

Yeah, you seem really into your found family. I think that you support them. I feel like Hank is much further from the mic than me. I feel the opposite.

Let's just have some quiet time real quick. Let's just listen to the sounds. You know what I was thinking about? I was thinking about how this place must have been amazing and full of birdsong before people ruined it.

I was thinking about how the cricket was listening to us and was like, okay, I will also be quiet. I got the message guys. I'm in. I like it.

I've been working so hard all morning. Thank you for five minutes off. Alex says, Dear Hank and John, I finished the first draft of the first novel I've ever written about a month ago. Congratulations.

And this novel. I'm this novel. And I'm this novel. Oh god.

Wait, this person is inside of the book. Hey, it's happening. He met himself in. Metafiction has gotten so metafictional that now somebody has trapped in there.

And they can email though. So that's nice. Well, yeah, of course they have access to text, but that's all they have access to. I think what they mean to say is in this novel, I've based the main character off myself, because why wouldn't I?

Almost immediately I sent it to my best friend. She told me that she loved the book, but hated the main character. How should I deal with this information? Does she secretly hate me?

Or is it just the way I've portrayed myself? Funkins and penguins, Alex, I think many different things could be happening here. One is that we imagine ourselves differently than people around us. Imagine us and we tend to be more negative about how we imagine many people, probably most people tend to imagine themselves more negatively than people around them.

I think that's fair to say. I think that is probably going on. I don't think that your friend finds you annoying. I think your friend found this character annoying for the character's choices.

And even a lot of times, at least in my early experience writing when I wrote sort of autobiographically, even when I would write about characters, I felt like I knew intimately because I felt like pretty closely connected to them. They would still make different choices from the choices I would make, because they would make like narrative choices. Right. Because it would be important to the plot.

Yeah. Yeah. And so like they would do things that I wouldn't do that maybe weren't likeable, because I wanted the character to come across a certain way. The real question is, did you intend for the main character not to be likable?

Because if not, that may be a problem, or it may just be one reader read it that way. Yeah. I also think that we sometimes hope for more out of book characters than out of real people. That's true too.

And then when book characters act like real people were like, well, that I'm analyzing that in a way that I wouldn't be a real person. Yeah. And I find often times when characters are portrayed realistically, they start to be like people say like that that was an unsympathetic character. And I'm like, well, I mean, we all make bad decisions.

Yeah. I don't know when we introduced this idea that characters exist primarily on a likeability, unlikeability spectrum. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I don't find that spectrum that interesting or that important, like is Hamlet likable is not the most interesting question that Hamlet has to offer us. Yeah.

I think that there's a lot of sort of superheroes and fiction. And when a person isn't Jason Bourne, it's like, oh, well, I want to kind of want to see like an ideal person, not like a real person. Yeah. And that has its place.

I just think that it's really important. I want room for lots of different kinds of reading and lots of different kinds of storytelling. And I worry that when we put everything on that axis of likeability, unlikeability, we lose a lot of the richness of what story can do for us. Yeah.

This next question comes from Veronica who asks, a little bit, Grün Blüder. Oh, yeah. That would mean it was the best. I got, are you fluent?

I moved out of my best friends. Do you know what it means? I imagine it says it means dear green brothers. I think it means hello, idiots.

I moved out of my best friends and my shared flat last year because I had the chance to get my own place close to my work. So I did. My best friend was fine with it saying that she'd just get another roommate. And sometime later, she told me that a girl called Catrin would move into a mild room.

However, I've never seen Catrin at the flat or any proof of her existence. I've even asked my friend if her roommate was a ghost and she only laughed a bit too loudly for my taste. Ghost roommate. So does my best friend actually live with a ghost?

Of course. No. What's happened is that your roommate has cracked the ultimate roommate code, which my friend Shannon and I cracked in the year 2002. I still remember the day.

We were interviewing potential new roommates and Dan, the architect came over and he interviewed. And I hope, I hope Dan you'll forgive me for telling the story. He said, listen, I am Catholic and my girlfriend is Catholic and our four parents are Catholic. And therefore, I need to rent a room in an apartment.

And we were like, my parents, look at my finances. And we were like, so you're saying that you're going to use this room. Oh my God. Only when your parents visit.

And he was like, correct. And I was like, welcome to the family. You still have to do the dishes once a week. Now, I mean, Dan spent maybe five nights in that apartment in three years.

Holy crap. And he paid his. We felt bad charging him a third of the rent. But he was like, that's the thing.

You could have somebody else paying a third of the rent. You need that third of the rent. Right. You have to.

Yeah. Oh my God. I love it. Yeah.

So that's what's happened. She cracked the roommate code. She cracked the roommate code or well, the thing about ghosts is they never pay rent. No, they're terrible with that.

That's at like 100% of the time. Or when they do, they pay, they're like, oh, I only have ghost currency on me. Right. Absolutely.

Just like paying all in pennies from the 1800s. Oh, no. I don't have cash for you, but I do have this 19th century blood spattered dress. Great.

I've got this out of tune, piano. You know, take that to the pawn shop, see what I can get for it. Drop it from the ceiling every once in a while for you. Can a ghost be like my roommate in college and accidentally leave a piece of chicken between the newspapers and the recycling for three months?

I mean, no, is because they don't exist. Yes. And. Sorry.

I won't. Okay. Yes. Ghosts can leave chicken and I hate improv.

Both are true. I had a big Mac under the bed of my freshman dorm that arrived under the bed of my freshman dorm in October and departed from under the bed of my freshman dorm the day that I moved out of that dorm in May. It was a seven month big Mac. That's amazing.

It was a dark time. I am so glad you made it through, John. Oh, that me. What a weirdo.

All right. Let's answer this question from Sydney. I don't know if this is our mom or a different Sydney, but Sydney writes, Dear John and Hank, how did conspiracy theories get created and circulated before the internet? Like now we have Reddit and Tumblr and fake Instagram videos for it.

But how did conspiracy theories get bigger than a few people before the internet? P-Shiram and 42 Well Be Way, Sydney. So it's a top class finding Dory joke. Oh, good.

So I was just at the farmers market here in Madison, Wisconsin. There were a number of people who wanted me to stop by their booths talking. They weren't really booths. I think that they are sort of free speech and it down there talking about one thing or another.

And that's not really an internet activity. They were really, there was a dinosaur found at the bottom of the deep sea that disproves evolution. They wanted to mean it about it. So there's that strategy.

There's a phrase called getting on your soapbox that comes from people really standing on soapboxes and saying whatever they wanted to say, which sometimes would be like people need human rights, including the right to free expression, and sometimes would be like the moon landing was fake. And so in a world of free expression, you have all of those voices together. And then once information started to be distributed differently, all of those vehicles were used for disseminating incorrect information. That was the case in newspapers with many newspapers sponsored conspiracy theories.

It was the case in on radio, like on early radios, AM radio, half AM radio during our childhoods. Like that's how you found out that like Nixon was married to an alien and Nixon's daughter was half alien. And it's the same, you know, like it's funny to be like, how did you spread before the internet? Same way.

Like books, people wrote books about how the kind of thing of assassination was faked and people talked about it and like information spreads. Like, it doesn't like information spreads more efficiently now. Yes, right. Always spread.

And like the story of the human is like the story of being able to spread information more efficiently quickly. Right. And that's really the thing that like freaks me out about right now the most. Like, you can say that like weapons technologies are kind of the scariest thing, but communications technologies are the thing that shifts society the most.

And we've never had a revolution in communications technologies like we are having right now. I think we had a talk one before, but it was also very, very destabilizing and it was when the printing press was introduced. Yeah. And within 50 years of the introduction of the printing press, the number of books went up by like a factor of a million or something.

Yeah. Crazy like that. And it was very destabilizing. I think that we are going through a weird time and it is partly because our ways of technology are changing.

And that means the systems that we've built up over the last few centuries to kind of deal with incorrect or misleading or sensationalized information, those systems aren't working very well right now, because those systems are built for communication strategies that most people aren't using. I remember when I was a kid, somebody gave me like I was walking around Lake Iola. Oh, yeah, that's how many two in Orlando. And somebody gave me a book that was essentially like a book of conspiracy theories.

Yeah. And 12 year old me just ate it up. Like, I remember one of them was that Stephen Hawking, the physicist, had actually died in 1972 and had been replaced with a different physicist. And the evidence for it seemed so overwhelming and obvious when it was presented in this conspiracy theory format.

And you see how, especially in a world of lots and lots of data, you see how you can find data points that support your feeling that there are like big forces at work in the world trying to make things bad for you. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like it's very appealing to be able to think you know something big that other people don't.

It's sort of like a shortcut to being powerful, right? Or at least in your own sort of like comfortable in your own power and a sort of shortcut to feeling smart. Yeah, well, you're in on something that other people don't know about. It's the phrase in our childhood was sheeple.

You know, they're like, yeah, they still use that one. They still say that. Sorry, I haven't. I'm not familiar with what the kids are doing.

This is a really important question, John, that I don't think that we were really covered. Okay. That's how to quickly. That people, it probably, many people have it.

Dear Hank and John, I was recently scrolling through your most popular vlog for this video is a notice that nine of the 14 of your top videos have to do with giraffe mating or another type of animal. Yeah. I found this particularly odd as you have both made in my opinion much more interesting content. So I guess my question is why are your most viewed videos all about giraffes?

Who finds that appealing giraffes and geraniums? Christina, who finds that appealing? First of all, giraffes are fascinating. And giraffe mating habits are especially fascinating because male giraffes hit female giraffes in the bladder and then drink their pee to find out if they're ovulating.

Like that's the kind of stuff that in 2007, America's 14 year old sound irresistible. Yeah, no, not just America either. We were at that video, it's huge all over the world. It's true.

It's really our only global hit. It's the only time we've really broken out of the English speaking world. So Christina, one of the things that you'll notice if you look at a giraffe is you'll think to yourself, wait, how? Yes.

Right. And so I think that's part of it. People sitting around a table just like we are right now at a contemporary art museum will talk about giraffes and be like, wait, but no, how does that work? Yeah.

And then they Google it. And our video comes out. Right. And it's the same thing with the other animals.

So back when Hank and I were trying to get lots of YouTube views, it was very interesting to try and do that. Yeah, it was exciting. It felt like it felt like it felt it felt important in a way that frankly today, it doesn't. But back when we were really obsessed with that, we noticed, of course, that people responded to these videos and the videos that they responded the most to were the ones with weird mating habits.

But more than that, the ones with like anatomies that would make you say, how? Wait, what? Does that like tortoises, it's santras. Yeah.

And also there was a time when YouTube rewarded a click much more than it rewarded a watch. So a lot of people clicked on the phone because they wanted to watch and giraffe do it. And then they were like, Oh, this man is talking about giraffes, not really interested in the details. I just want to see it happen.

Right. Right. That's very true. The other thing though, is that there is a small subset of viewers of those videos, one of whom left a comment that is seared in my memory in a way that no other YouTube comment ever has.

Can you please do more videos of animals kissing and other? It's the and other that I can never forget. I really like it. The last thought I'll ever have will be and other.

All of my other memories will be gone. I'll be alone in a nursing home and my eyes will flash open. And those will probably be my accidental last words and other and other actually pretty good last words, not in the context. No, no one will know what I'm going to have forgotten.

And someday someone will listen to this podcast and be like, Oh, you guys thought it was some deep thing. No, he was thinking about giraffes boning. Right. Yeah, it'll be like the rose bud of my life.

By the way, I just want you to sit in Caine. I know that it's the best movie of all time, but it is very good. Like everybody talks about how it's the best movie of all time. And so I assumed that it was going to be kind of torture to watch.

Right. But it was great. It is really good. I get what you were talking about.

Oh, it's really good. I have the thing spoiled. It's not like the sixth Harry Potter movie or anything. Like the spoilers to Citizen Caine are not especially devastating, which reminds me actually that today's podcast is brought to you by Citizen Caine.

Citizen Caine John recommends it. The podcast was also brought to you by your ghost roommate. Always a little bit late with the rent. Always late on the rent.

And also inflation is so much that they just can't get it together. This has been a lot. What do you what do you need? I got 12 cents.

That's a lot. Right. And my day that could buy you a Model T and a Picasso. Today's podcast also brought to you by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the unwitting hosts to our episode of Dear Hank and John.

And this podcast is brought to you by Skeem Munchy bacteria. This episode of Dear 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 easier.

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Back to your eyes. Cute. Necrosis. John, this question actually comes from our show last night we didn't get to it but with somebody in the audience who sent this one in from Tricia who asks, Dear Hank and John, Mamma Mia is my favorite movie and it's slowly becoming my only personality trait.

How can I stop relating every situation in my life to the plot or songs of Mamma Mia? That being said, my ambulance song would be SOS by ABBA. Here's the thing. This is actually a pretty easy one to solve because I've been in this boat before where you love something so much that it becomes difficult to talk or think about anything else.

So the key to this solution is watching the movie Mamma Mia 2. Here we go again. Because then you'll never talk about Mamma Mia again. I believe it's called Mamma Mia 2.

Here we go again. The subtitles should have been Mamma Mia 2. All the dads. Every dad.

Mamma Mia 2. Hank actually didn't realize that the dads were going to show up and that 100% surprised him so much and he cried. I'm concerned that I might have still in that joke. I'm searching for Mamma Mia 2.

All the dads. I'm not seeing anything but if I stole that joke, I'm sorry to whoever I stole it from. But do you have this in your life sometimes where you get so into something that everything seems to relate to it? That's the music video for Smash, Mazzall Star.

Of course, for me it's usually a breakup. You know, like I'm sure you remember this thing after my big breakups for six months to a year. No matter what someone said, I would be like, oh that reminds me of my heartbreak which is ongoing and omnipresent. One time I saw someone open a car door and I thought to myself, she opened a car door just like that.

So that's the key though, is just get your heart broken, you'll stop thinking about Mamma Mia. As we have said before, diversify your identity. There's more in the world than Mamma Mia. This next question comes from Iris.

We did meet last night I remember. Yes, they were nice. Iris, it was great to meet you. Who asked Dear Hank and John, how would fandoms and online communities be impacted by a devastating worldwide apocalypse level event?

Oh, that was a great question. How would different fandoms respond to the apocalypse? Yeah. So I'm going to reveal my bias here and say that I genuinely think the Harry Potter fandom would come together and work.

They do the spell that goes up into the sky and they'd be like, everybody gather around. I think it's called Periculum, which is something that I shouldn't know. That's a deep cut. Yeah.

Then you gather at Joe Rowling's house. Hey, we're big fans. We hear you have stuff. We believe you have resources, which are now in short supply.

Then there's the contemporary young, usually shirtless, you two are the guy who's like, so y'all, wild day yesterday, right? So many people died. It was like super sad. Hey everybody, what's up?

Really? I mean, half the human race gone in one. Yeah, it's crazy. So merch link in the bio.

Well, man, I just it's a tough, tough day for everybody. But you know, if we're looking at it honestly, also kind of a great day, right? Maybe a good day to get today is a great day t-shirt. I think the AM radio fandom would do really well.

Oh god. They would, I mean, the AM radio people would just be, they would get on AM radio and they would be like, I told you so. Oh my god, I've been talking about this for 50 years. They would have that like weird glee that sometimes people have when bad things happen, that they've been predicting.

Oh, yeah. That's the worst thing about thinking something bad is going to happen is that when it happens, you're like, see, and it's like, I shouldn't have a good feeling today. No, you don't want to be, you never want to be gloating in the face of tragedy. It's the worst book.

But no, I think the AM radio community would crush it. Also crushing it, of course, the survivalists who would live in extra three weeks, but then still die like the rest of us. Yeah. I think that Iris, you are optimistic about the ability of internet systems to survive an apocalyptic event.

Yeah. The cloud would cease to be cloudy very rapidly. Right. One of the weird things that would happen is that the last YouTube video, it's very possible that the last YouTube video would have absolutely nothing to do with whatever the cataclysmic event was.

The last YouTube video ever uploaded might be somebody like, Hey, you'll never guess what my cat did today. Yeah. And then like, click. Well, I think that we're not going to go extinct as a species.

Yeah, I do sometimes feel like I need to reassure people about this because there is this eschatological anxiety that I remember, I remember happening before. I remember it happening in the 1980s when I was a kid and we would have to do these drills where we literally got under our desks to prepare for a nuclear bomb attacking Orlando Florida. Yeah. And there was an expectation that at some point in the next few decades, there would be a cataclysmic nuclear war.

And there was a lot of anxiety about the end of the human species and people feeling like they didn't want to have kids when the human species was about to end. And now we are facing a lot of that same anxiety. And I do not in any way want to minimize our problems because I think our problems are real. And in some cases, they are existential.

But I also think that we are not about to go extinct. Civilization is not about to end barring something, you know, very unforeseen, like a, you know, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, stone super volcano or a disease that spreads quickly through the world because we refuse to fund primary health care systems in impoverished countries because we don't think that people are people. Short of that, I really do think we are going to be able to adjust. Every other time people thought the world was about to end and they have thought it many, many times they have been wrong.

Now eventually they will be right, but not today. So the wind, the wind starting to pick up as you may be hearing, and that means that it's time for the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Hank, I'll go first AFC Wimbledon played maybe the only team in League One that's definitely worse than us. Atkinson and Lee got a red card and we tied.

We tied. We got our first point of the season. There's two ways of looking at this. One way is that after three games we've only got one point.

Another way is that we are in 18th place well out of the relegation zone. In No Small Park thanks to Barry and Bolton Wanderer's having respectively negative 12 and negative 11 points. So AFC Wimbledon not doing well, definitely alarm bells going off. I would say at this point we're looking at a level nine crisis.

So it's not catastrophic. It's not cataclysmic, but boy, I want to stay in League One for one more season. And a news from Mars, John, Elon Musk really apparently wants to nuke Mars. It's back.

It's a sign of the tremendous stability he has as an executive and as a person. He just tweeted, nuke Mars with an exclamation point. It's got up to $239,000 likes. So apparently that's how you get big on Twitter.

It's just you want to nuke Mars. Of course the plans of nuke Mars is to introduce a lot of energy to the system, potentially evaporating a lot of the carbon dioxide ice, which would create a large greenhouse effect, which would increase the overall warmth of the planet and also potentially atmospheric pressure, which would make it easier to live on the planet. It certainly wouldn't make it so that we could walk around or anything. That's the idea.

No one has any idea if it would work, but there's only one way to find out, which is to nuke Mars. I mean, can I just say on a personal note that if we nuke Mars before sending people to Mars, that will be the most both the most Elon Musk thing imaginable and the most human thing imaginable. That like, all right, we do we do want to settle this planet, but first nukes. I understand the reasoning behind it, but it just seems to me like we don't have nearly enough information to make that even a remotely good idea.

Yeah, well, we've never engineered a planetary system, except for the once we're doing it a little bit right now here on Earth, not on purpose, but it's happening. My worry is that if we nuke to Mars and it worked, we just nuke everything else. This one worked on Mars. Maybe we could live everywhere.

Hi, come over to say hi. Yeah, so that's the news from Mars. We've we've we've just been spotted by some friendly people who I think are going to come over and say a quick hello, hold on. Come say hi.

That's your name. I believe we'll tailor it. Hey, how's it going? Hi, Monica.

Hi, Monica. Nice to meet you. How's it going? Good.

How are you guys? Good. I feel like I've seen your necklace before. Oh, I mean, I know where it's from, actually.

Oh, cool. I'm checking it out. I haven't really got to the picture. Oh, yeah.

You're not allowed to take it in there. You think we should nuke Mars? Oh, you want to musk? Yeah.

He's informed. I don't think it'll work because I think it'll evaporate over time. It won't actually form the atmosphere. It's yeah.

Oh, wow. He's up to date. Taylor knows. Taylor knows.

We should replace. Tank with Taylor. Awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. You're going to meet the next one. No, well, it's great to meet you. Really pleasure.

Yeah, take care. Thank you. And with that, John, thank you for plotting with me today. It's been a pleasure.

And also thanks to Taylor and Onika for dropping by. Yeah, absolutely. If you want to send us your questions, you can do that at Hankandjaun at gmail.com. Thank you to everybody who sent them in.

We had a great show in Madison yesterday. That'll come out as a podcast sometime in the future. We're doing a mini-appolis tomorrow. And that also will be a podcast sometime in the future.

And we're going to be doing more of this touring over the next year to support our community's project to reduce maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. So look for tour dates coming up. Thank you again for listening. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna-Medish, our head of community and communications at Victoria Bonjour.

We're produced by Rosie on Hall's Rojas and shared in Gibson. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. The music you listen to right now is by Greg Gunnarola. And as they stay in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.