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239: Does This Have Walnuts or Pecans? episode artwork

May 11, 2020 41 min

239: Does This Have Walnuts or Pecans?

from Dear Hank & John

How do I connect with my siblings? Why do some cereals falsely claim nuts? Is it okay to call a professor by their first name? Are coffee machines a kitchen necessity? How do I format a scholarship essay? John Green and Hank Green have answers!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 Subscribe to the Nerdfighteria newsletter! https://nerdfighteria.com/nerdfighteria-newsletter 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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239: Does This Have Walnuts or Pecans?

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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 Moore 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've become a 501c3 nonprofit and we're doing something worth knowing as an in-person event that benefits Complexly and or 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. Welcome to Dear Hank and John. There was I prefer to think of it here, John and Hank.

It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be a advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon John to all the people out there about to graduate college with a degree in accounting but worried about entering into the job market. Might I suggest getting a second degree in dentistry? Then you can crunch numbers and numb crunchers. That was good man.

I like a pun where the consonants get switched. Yeah, Spoonerist puns. It's very common in the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle and it always delights me whereas I think because Sarah grew up with a Spoonerist father who loves a spoonerism. Whenever there are those puns in the New York Times, she's always groaning but I'm like, oh it's a delight.

It's not Ned Flanders. It's Ned Flanders. I mean, that's, it's weird to me. If you like that, I don't know how you'd hate any of my jokes here on Dear Hank and John.

They are all positive gold. They are not all gold. That's a factually inaccurate statement. Speaking of factually inaccurate statements, how about Twitter?

Ah, indeed. That's the end of the joke. All right, let's answer some questions from our listeners. Oh wow, we're going to jump right into it today, John.

This first one comes from Leona who asks Dear Hank and John, I'm home with my three brothers for quarantine. I get teased by them for being a bit of a recluse and being in my room all the time. The thing is, I don't know how to participate in a lot of their conversations. They really enjoy video games and Star Wars and a lot of the time that's what they talk about and I just don't know how to relate.

I have different interests, but even still I want to participate and laugh along with the jokes I don't understand, but I don't know how to do that. I'm worried this disconnect will continue and to when we're all proper adults. But all I want is to be close to them. Any to be as advice as appreciated.

I don't live in Montana. Leanna, thanks for helping me figure out how to pronounce your name correctly. We've had a few questions like this. People who are newly with friends and family and are trying to find ways to connect with them and to feel like they are part of a community with them because of course family is a very important piece of community when we can have it.

And this sounds especially hard because you have three brothers who are all into video games in Star Wars and there is one Leanna who seems to be less into those two things. And so it's sort of hard to break in, but my guess would be you got to try and chisel one of them off. Don't try to get them as one solid group that's all sort of into the same things. But be like, Matt and Steven leave them be, but be like, you Jeremy, I want you and I to do something and we will have a shared interest in them.

They will get they will get interested in whatever you have decided to do with Jeremy. And I don't know if that's going to be video games or Star Wars or if you're going to be something else. But that is my only way. You have to approach this problem not as a model with a block of brothers, but one brother at a time.

I think all of that advice was terrible. That's all I got. I know. And I thought it was what I liked is that you talked for a long time and that you didn't say I'm very many times.

But I thought the content of the message was awful. You don't like it? No. No.

Well, tell me your solution to this division among siblings is to create yet more division. I think that's exactly. Yeah, you need to create teams. You need to be on your own team, but you have somebody on it.

No, I also think every part about it is unrealistic. Like, I think you have to have an honest, earnest conversation with your brothers where you say, well, yeah, that sounds way more realistic. No, I think it is realistic. I think you say, look, when you all talk about Star Wars and Fortnite and nothing else, it doesn't leave a lot of room for me.

Are there things that we could watch together? Is there a movie we could watch together tonight that's from a new series that none of us has seen that can we watch Star Trek the next generation? Can we watch that one movie that had Mila Kunis in it in space? You know the one?

Yeah. Let's watch that. Because if we don't have all of us together a thing, I'm going to be in my room because I can't get your jokes about pod racing. And I don't really have like 5,000 hours to go into like Reddit's list of prequel memes so that I can become fully versed in your language.

Instead, we need to build a new language together that includes all four of us. Yeah, yeah. I just think that's a lot. I think it's hard.

I don't think it's a lot. I think you say like the next time they say like, hey, you're in your room all the time. She's like, you want to know why I'm in my room all the time? It's because you guys converse primarily in Fortnite gibberish in prequel memes.

Like, I don't understand the words that you're saying. Like, I don't know what a John Wick skin is. And I also like don't have a burning desire to learn. So let's find a language that we can all be part of.

Right. I agree with that. To find something that's maybe not Mila Kunis's space movie or Star Trek the next generation, maybe something a little more in the present tense or I don't know. Maybe you do want to go and watch a bunch of old movies from the 50s and 60s and that'll be the thing.

But find a thing and that would be great if you could say, okay, you want me to be out of my room, then you're going to watch Drag Race with me. Boom. Ha, let's do it. I'll watch a prequel.

You got to watch Drag Race. Are we talking about the Courtney Force kind of Drag Race or are we talking about the RuPaul kind? No, we're talking about the Courtney Act kind of Drag Race. In the same way that I don't know who that is, I think that you probably don't know who Courtney Force is.

I definitely don't know who Courtney Force is. And I'm devastated that you don't know who Courtney Act is. Well, I'm a little hurt that you don't know who Courtney Force is. So, you know, suddenly we're in the same boat, where it turns out that we didn't have anything in common all along and I'm just going to spend the rest of this time inside of my room.

Forget you. I'm moving on. I'm only hanging out with people who know who Graham, Ray Hall and Courtney Force are now. I wonder if Courtney Force and Courtney Act know each other.

They look like they might. The Venn diagram of people who get both sides of our joke is that connecting point is very small. Please write us an email. If you are that person, there's a fair number of listeners who are like, I get half that joke and there's a fair number of listeners who are like, I get the other half.

Almost nobody gets both of us. You got to be both Hank and John to know who both of those people are. All right. This next question comes from Sarah who writes here, John and Hank, why are they called honey nut Cheerios when in fact there are no nuts in them?

This also applies to grape nuts. Is the cereal industry okay? Peanuts and lemons? Sarah.

I mean, I got to say the cereal industry cannot be 100% okay. I've heard that millennials are killing them. I feel like the cereal industry is doing significantly better at least in our house than it was six weeks ago. The amazing thing is that like, there've got to be lots of cereals that don't exist from the era of grape nuts.

Yeah. But grape nuts somehow held on. Right. And if there has ever been a better example of being first being better than being best, grape nuts has to be it.

Because grape nuts were like, we figured out how to make a thing that you can put in your mouth. That's the only that's all it is. It is acceptable to have this in your mouth. And they still exist.

Yeah. Grape nuts is like, only because they were first, they were first and like every cereal is better than grape nuts. But they're still out there being a tiny box that it takes six months to get through. Yeah.

Grape nuts is like the last surviving member of its genus. It's like the duck-billed platypus or tuatara of cereals where like, I bet there were a lot of things like grape nuts 150 years ago. But now grape nuts is like the only way we have of glimpsing the distant past. It's like a different fossil.

I mean, it is made of rocks. It is. I mean, that's the other thing. You said like, you can put this in your mouth and you can eat it, but not really.

But yeah, you need some assistance. You got to wait a while. Yeah, you got to wait. Your enzymes have to work on it before you can eat it.

Oh, there's a lot of people out there, by the way, speaking of people who don't know who court enforces who have no idea what grape nuts are. Yeah. Well, grape nuts is. I'm sorry.

I didn't know it's singular. Grape nuts is a cereal. And that's the end of the sentence. I can't say anything else about it.

Yeah, like the it's not like the individual thing. Like the individual nugget of grape nuts is a grape not. I think that that has been well and truly debunked by the people at grape nuts. They want to be pretty clear that this is not a grape not.

I don't know what they think it is. They also want to be clear that this cereal neither contains nor tastes like either grapes or nuts. Yeah. Hank, do you remember any of the 12 taglines for honey nutgirias?

Oh, what a relief it is. No. The one from 2013 to the present, which I definitely remember is based on Nelly's song Ride With Me. Wow.

Where Nelly says must be the money. And the time. Yeah, you do it. I can't do it, but you're going to do great.

I have total confidence in you. Okay. Hey, must be the money. That's exactly as I expected it to be.

And their tagline is must be the honey. Wow. Because it can't be the nuts. Because it ain't any.

So I think that this is a completely different situation from grape nuts. And you know why? Because there is nut in honey nutgirio. It is almond flavoring.

Yeah, there's flavoring. It just doesn't come from almonds. And it doesn't come from almonds because people are allergic to almonds. But it also comes, and this is wild, from peach pits and apricot pits.

But people who are allergic to nuts are also sometimes allergic to these chemicals from peach and apricot pits. So they still have to put contains nut allergens, even though it doesn't contain nuts. Wow. But they did have ground almonds in them until 2006.

And they stopped. I don't think for energy reasons, but just because they were too expensive would rather not. Thank you very much. Right.

Yeah. Usually when an organization makes a change that is ostensibly right for health reasons, it's really for money reasons. My favorite example of this is the orange juice that's 50% sugar free. So 50% sugar free orange juice is orange juice that's half water.

Yeah. Which by the way is how I drink my orange juice. I just get it. I just get it in concentrate, if you will, which is to say regular orange juice.

And then I add my own water. And in doing so, I save half of the cost of the orange juice. Yeah. And you have half calorie orange juice.

Another of honey nutgirio's taglines that I'm pretty fond of is little O big taste. It's never how I felt about a honey nut cheerio. I've never been like, whoa, my whole hand pop job. This is like a no shirt.

No, does that has a bigger taste than the non-honey nutgirios by the virtue of the honey? Yeah, but only marginally. Yeah. I feel like the non-honey nutgirios are for people who've temporarily or permanently lost their sense of taste.

I have those Cheerios. I actually, and you want to know we mix them with the honey nut Cheerios to create a low calorie honey nutgirios or low sugar. It's like watering down your orange juice a little bit. Yeah.

Like, what is wrong with my home? Or what is either there's something wrong inside of those four walls or is there something wrong outside of them? And I think that there's something wrong outside of them, which is that everything has too much sugar in it. But I watered down everything, including my Cheerios with more Cheerios.

Because there's too much flavor, John. My head. I can't be contained in this signal. Oh, I'm fine.

Good. You know, one of the other taglines for honey nutgirios I'm pretty fond of? Okay. From the hive that's nuts about honey.

What? Because now they're like, we don't have nuts. Yeah. In our Cheerios anymore.

So we're going to make it about being crazy for honey. Like, yeah. I'm honey nuts. These Cheerios are nuts for honey.

This isn't about nuts. God knows we don't have any of those allergens. We do. Yeah.

We do. Just for clarity. But we're going to print it in small letters on the box. Yes, John.

This is the the Cheerios for honey nuts. Yes. Exactly. That's it.

Yeah. That is that is what they are trying to transition to me. Yeah. Where they attempted to within their like, Hey, it must be the honey.

Yeah. They're like, if we stick with this for 20 years, we'll make the transition and then along comes Nelly. Oh my God. Well, somebody found the Wikipedia page for the honey nut Cheerios slogans, I guess.

Yeah. As you know, Hank, Alice has a nut allergy. It's not thankfully super severe, at least so far as we know, at least so far. Yeah.

But it has led to the cutest thing in the world, which is Alice will not eat anything without saying to the Cefu Walnut Supercons. This is a little bit less the case than it was when she was three or four. In some ways, like the first full question that she learned to ask was, does the Cefu Walnut Supercons? And so it made her seem extremely precocious at restaurants.

Yeah. She's like, I'd like the French fries. Yeah. Does that have Walnut Supercons?

Exactly. So she'd be like, yes, I have a question. The chicken tenders. Do they contain Walnuts or pecans?

Wait, well, then I will have the chicken. Oh, and that comes with French fries. Follow up question. Yeah.

Do they have Walnuts or pecans? Okay. Then in that case, I will have the chicken nuggets and the French fries. I would also enjoy a glass of chocolate milk.

Don't mean to repeat myself, but does that contain Walnuts or pecans? And you don't know these days with milk. You don't. You don't.

You made it anything. Plenty of pecan milk out there. Yeah. All right, Hank, this next question comes from Chelsea who writes, Dear John and Hank, in the present times, I am emailing my professors more when I would typically go to office hours or ask questions in class.

Sometimes they sign off with their first names rather than Dr. Suchon. So does this mean I can call them by their first name? Chelsea.

Yeah, I think they opened that door. I think that I think they did too. Yeah, but I don't like I don't know why they did. Like, if you could be called Dr.

Suchon. So you should do it. It's so much work to get to the point of being able to be called Dr. Suchon.

So and that's why I always call people Dr. Suchon. So here's the thing, Chelsea, I do think that they've opened the door. My own experience, even with professors I'm really quite close to is I still keep the door closed.

Like you open that, but I'm just gonna or it does that sometimes where we'll like open the door. If we're in the other room and he's like watching TV, they're like, come and close it. Yeah. I'm like, okay.

Yeah. Sorry, we were distracting you by doing nothing. Yeah, I think this is different for everybody, but I always felt like even when I was friends with my professors, they were still my professors. Yes.

Like there was still an authority role there. And that was my way of acknowledging that. Even like long after I graduated from college, when I would talk to my mentor, my religion professor, professor, who I still call professor Rogan even though he's dead. When I would talk to Professor Rogan, I would always call him Professor Rogan.

And I felt very uncomfortable calling him by his first name because that was the nature of our relationship. And it wasn't going to like stop being our relationship. Now for some people, I think that does change in transition. But for me, it was always going to be kind of a mentor mentee relationship.

Somebody I looked up to, somebody who, you know, I just thought of differently than I think of my friends. Yeah, I feel the same way. And I to this day, like I know the first names of all of my professors who I worked with very closely in college, but I would never think about calling them by their first name. But Chelsea, this is up to you.

If you're asking the question, does it mean you can call them by their first name? I think it does. You can. If you want to try that shoe on and see if it's comfortable, go ahead.

I think that my foot would protest personally. I do agree, though. I look to how someone signs off in how to respond to them. Yeah.

But then now that I think about it, it would be very weird if you signed off like best wishes, Dr. Green. What it? Like that would be a little weird.

That's a bit of a weird sign off. I can't say that because as you know, I have two doctorate degrees both honorary. What are they in? Are they just like, do they have a qualification?

Are you just like an honorary doctorate in giving commencement speeches? The arts. Oh, yes. Yes, quite.

I'm a doctor of the arts. And then I've seen people, you know, the worst people in the world. Yeah. Call themselves doctor after getting an honorary degree.

Oh my God. And the best part about it is that they call themselves Dr. Her such-and-so and then in parentheses, H-O-N period, which means honorary. Which means not actually.

Well, at least they put that in there. But now I wouldn't have known what that meant. I thought I would think maybe it was some kind of like Latin thing for like extra. Right.

Like an honors doctor. Doctor of the arts. Even more so. Like a double doctor like myself, honorary.

Well, I'm glad you've been honorary. Yeah. I'm licensed to practice medicine, but only of an honorary variety. I can participate in all the ceremonial medical services.

Yeah. Which include saying goodbye as they're leaving? All the pomp and circumstance, Hank. So I guess you could do that.

Yeah. The washing of the hands I'm allowed to do. Right. I'm allowed to put on gloves, but I'm just not allowed to touch anyone.

Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. Yeah.

And you could say goodbye when they leave. I can hold the scalpel. I just can't do any of the cutting. I can hold the scalpel and then they have to disinfect it before they actually use it.

Yeah. I'm allowed to listen to hearts with the telescope, but I'm not allowed to make conclusions. Oh, God. Are you an honorary doctor?

No, I cannot bring myself to write an hour long speech. Oh, okay. So first off, I don't know who told you that commencement speeches are an hour long, but that person is a monster. I thought they were.

I've watched a bunch of very long graduation speeches. Mine was very long. No, they are. I think the perfect commencement address, the greatest commencement addresses of all time are all every single one of them under 20 minutes.

Oh, all right. Well, that's still like four vaudeville videos. John, this next question comes from Ari who asks dear Hank and John after graduation, my girlfriend, and I will be moving in together. Neither of us drinks coffee, but our friends and family do.

Should we get a coffee machine anyway so that we can offer people coffee when they visit? Would it be all right to just offer guests tea if they want a hot drink? Beans and befuttlement, Ari. Man, our lives do appear to be controlled to some extent by these good beans, John.

The beans are a hugely important historical force for sure. They are. They continue to be a big historical force. That said, I don't think that you need to have a coffee maker if you don't drink coffee.

No, no, no. Not least Ari, because if you do have a coffee maker and you have beans or ground coffee and you only have like two guests per year who drink coffee, you're going to be serving them terrible coffee. It's all beans. Because the beans will be very old and there's just a bunch of reasons why you don't want to do that.

And it's not worth having an extra appliance in your house if you don't use it often. You can offer guests tea and you can also say there's a Starbucks down the street. I think both are correctable. Yes, there's two things that we have to get out of the way here.

One, do you live in a place where there's a coffee shop fairly nearby? But even if there isn't, if not, do you live in a place where your kitchen is very, very big and you have space to because this I was shocked by and continue to be shocked by how like you have to choose what appliances are most important to you because you do not have space for infinite appliances. You do not have money for infinite appliances. And there will always be more appliances that the world is inventing.

And so you should take your counter space seriously and do not add things to it that you're not going to be using on the on the daily. Yeah, which I mean, you need a microwave, you need a soda stream, and that's it. A toaster, you need a toaster. Right, I guess you need a toaster.

And then there are a couple of other things that you also need. You need a coffee maker. If you're me, at least not if you're sorry, but I need a coffee maker. Yeah, Catherine and I use what's called an aero press, which just goes with the cabinet.

Yeah, but it's like you make one one cup of coffee very slowly, which is a nice ritual for me when I want coffee. We have a plumbed coffee machine, a plumbed. Yeah, so it like makes it's built into the wall directly into it. It makes coffee, you know, I've seen it.

I've used it in fact, we call it Helga. It seems like the kind of thing that'd be like a huge pain of a broke. It's the only appliance in our house that has a name. I should name my soda stream.

And we have named her Helga because you know, she is the only thing in the kitchen important enough to have a name. Where is Helga from? Oh, Germany. No, guys, that a German name?

She's German. So you have a coffee machine named named Helga. This is good. I feel the same way about my soda stream.

I'm very connected to it. I've had a soda stream for longer than nearly anyone. And I would like to name it. And so if you would like to send in names for my soda stream, I will pick one and I will be excited to tell you about it next week.

That's a great idea. I do not have a name for my soda stream, which is maybe the problem. Maybe it would help me feel more deeply connected to my soda maker if I named it. But that reminds me John that this podcast is brought to you by Helga Helga lives in John's walls, spits out the good black juice.

Today's podcast is also brought to you by a grape nut. A single grape nut does not exist. The fuck I saw to brought to you by Jupiter ascending. Oh, that's what it's called.

That movie with Mila Kunis from space. It's kind of a great movie. And of course, this podcast is also brought to you by being nuts for honey Cheerios, nuts for honey Cheerios, almost honey, not Cheerios. We also have a project for awesome message from Rajan from Gothenburg, Sweden who writes, I wanted to say thanks to Tom for being a great friend and fellow nerd fighter all these years.

And to John and Hank for doing incredible work to fight world suck and especially infant mortality in Sierra Leone. Also shout out to my fellow Swedish nerd fighters as an American who recently moved here. This country has been incredibly welcoming and I'm so happy to call it my home. That's really lovely.

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See you website for more details. Yeah and thank you so much for donating to the project for awesome. Alright Hank we have another question. This one's from Emily who writes deerhank.

I'm currently in the stage of my high school career where I spend all of my free time writing scholarship essays as by the way that's not free time as such anyway but I get what you mean. As a future teacher in Oklahoma I really need these scholarships or else I will be in debt literally until I die. A few of the scholarship applications have essay requirements listed as quote one to two pages which is rather vague like what size should my font be? What font should I use?

Should I double space or single space? Does this include the title slash header? Please help not the owner of a big red dog Emily. Oh my god this is deeply frustrating to me as a person who assigns stories and editorial assignments a very kind of the idea of giving a page count.

Yeah well some people- I do that. I used to write by page count for many many years. I would say I have no idea how many words this is. I only know how many pages it is and I would even figure out how many words something was by multiplying the number of pages.

So like by 250 or something? Yeah people would be like it's about 300 words per page and I would be like in that case my novel is 60,000 words long about. Oh god well yeah I mean I guess with something long if there wasn't like an easy way to count words like there is now. Right yeah.

So I think that's where it comes from. I think it comes from a past where it was relatively hard to count words and relatively easy to count pages but we no longer live in that past. No. So the scholarship application should say how long it wants the essay to be not how many pages it wants it to be.

That said I do have feelings here. Okay I mean I have like I have a guess. What's your guess? I guess I guess if you're going to want to like hit 12 point times in a room an aerial something like it and do like 1.5 space.

I think that's exactly right. I think you can single space it if you want to. I think 1.5 spacing is ideal and I think double spacing just isn't right. Doesn't look right.

No it doesn't look right. Yeah. It's not the right vibe. It's not the vibe that you're going for in your scholarship application.

Now it may be that we are completely wrong and that every scholarship application in the world requires everything to be double spaced and the reader of those scholarship applications will be like oh my god I'm blinded by this 1.5 spacing because really what it's about is expectation. Like really when you're reading something you want it to look like what you read looks like. Everything else you read. Yeah.

And that's why when it comes to picking a font I am a big believer in opening Google Docs or Word or whatever you're using and beginning to type. Yeah. Use that they picked that. Somebody worked long and hard thinking about which font Google Docs uses.

And it's not that it's the best font because it's not. Yeah. And if fonts are extremely important to you you probably look at the default Google or Microsoft Word font and you're duly horrified and disgusted by it. Got thoughts.

But for most of us most of the time what we want in a font is a kind of transparency. So we're not thinking about it. And that's why I like to use default fonts is because when I'm at least when I'm writing something before it's published in a book I want it to the font the design to just kind of disappear off the page. And so the reader is just inside of what I'm writing.

Yeah. It's wild. Like when I'm writing I actually switch from one word process or to another word processor at a certain point in the process. And when that happens the font and the font size and everything changes and it takes me forever to get back into the flow of just having it blend away again.

And it's like it's wild to me. It's just words but it really does affect me. No, I mean it's like anything. The tools that you use are important.

Yeah. But it should tell you the word count. Not only should I tell you the word count it should tell you whether it should be single space or double space. Like why wouldn't they do that?

Yeah. Well, here's the thing is probably you're going to write this thing one to two pages and then you're going to copy and paste it into a form because it's the year 2020. Right. And so they should just say 600 to a thousand words is what they should say or 500 to it.

They should say how long they want it to be because nobody reads a certain number of pages. They read a certain number of words. Yeah. But we have to set the problem is with the system.

The system is failing you and not just because somehow it's acceptable to us to create a lifetime of debt so that people can become teachers of profession that we so sorely need more of. But also because of word counts and essays and spacing is probably the smaller piece of the problem. Okay. Before Hank and I fall all the way off the cliff of being super frustrated with systemic failures.

We want to let you know some updates including this critical update. Remember that person Hank whose 13th birthday was totally ruined and they cried and their hair died didn't arrive on time. Yeah. And everything was a disaster.

They have written us an update. Hank. Yes. Your John and Hank being 13 has been awesome so far.

I got my hair dying in the mail as well as a DFTBA hoodie that I wasn't expecting and it's a very good hoodie. You're welcome. The only problem after having turned 13 was that I had so many Google Classroom classes. I have eight classes a day plus Model United Nations plus photography plus this sounds horrible plus playwriting plus podcasting all online plus my extracurricular literature class plus student government plus Shrek and the Tempest.

I'm designing costumes for Shrek and writing an adaptation of the Tempest. Oh my god. This anonymous 13 year old has accomplished much more in the last week than I've accomplished in my life. Like are you adapting the Tempest for podcasts?

Because I'm in. Tell me more. I'm also I am very or for YouTube. I am interested in both of those potential ways of adapting the Tempest.

If you can make the Tempest in a socially distant way as a YouTube series like the Lizzie Bennett diaries but it's the Tempest. I'm interested. Being a teenager has been pretty good on the whole. I also get to rub it in to my mom's face that she will have a teenager for the next 10 years because my brother is 10.

Sign anonymous human. It's great stuff. Oh boy. You're gonna be on that boat not too long from now.

Me? Got no. I have a whole decade of teenagers. I am gonna have a whole decade of teenagers.

I'm gonna have 11 years of teenagers. Oh no. Yeah, you'll be okay. I also wanted to let you know Hank about this email from Val who wrote to say, Dear John and Hank, your discussion of the average height of waves and troughs in yesterday's episode made me think of the famous John Maynard Keens quote from Attract on Monetary Reform which you'll be surprised to learn Val that neither Hank nor I has read in detail.

You know we've read the first couple chapters. Sure. I did the Cliffs notes. Yeah, I paged around.

I got the gist of it. Yeah, I have a PhD in Keynesian economics but HON. Both in substance and in style, you came so close to invoking John Maynard Keens's famous joke about the idea of being on a boat in dangerous seas. In that book he wrote, but this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs.

In the long run, we are all dead. He really was my kind of guy that John Maynard Keens. Econists set themselves too easy, too useless a task. If in tempestuous seasons, they can only tell us that when the storm is long passed, the ocean is flat again.

Great mind. That's a great couple sentences right there and it made me want to read the rest of Attract on Monetary Reform. Not like a lot though. Not right now.

Not like so much that I'm going to do it. But like I'll have the thought and then I'll think more highly of myself before discarding it. You know what? I'll report back next week, Hank, on my review of Attract on Monetary Reform.

You can get the audio book. Well, right now I am listening to the last of Hillary Mantell's three books about Thomas Cromwell. It's like 39 hours long and I was doing the dishes last night and I'm about four hours and 45 minutes into the book and the narrator paused for a moment and then said in his beautiful British voice, chapter three. And I was like, wait, what?

I've been listening to this for nine days. What page are we on here? Give me some sense. I need to feel the thickness of what I have left.

We also got a couple of people right in about putting googly eyes on the moon. One great suggestion was smaller, very reflective patches spaced out and then from here, it would appear that that would be averaged out into less reflective patches. So that would be a way to make that happen more effectively. Tyler also wrote in to let me know that this happened, of course, in the 1994 animated series, The Tick, which I, not googly eyes, but Chairface Chippendale tried to carve it into the moon with a laser.

I'm well aware of that. I was referencing just for you, Tyler. I was referencing that and hoping that you would know. I know, of course, everything there is to know about the tick.

Oh, Hank is a proper tick superfan. I am. I do love, I do love, love the tick. And then some people let us know that sea level is not level and that it is different, heights in different places, which is indeed true.

I've looked it up. It's very strange. It's a big ocean and sea level, of course, changes with the tides, but also with a bunch of other things like winds and heat and warmth and like warmth and cool cycles and stuff like that. Super cool.

Hank, it was a year ago today as we are recording this that Mission Impossible was completed by AFC Wimbledon one year ago today from Wimbledon's incredible survival in League One, one of the greatest escape from relegation stories in the history of professional football. Ten points from being in second to last place at Christmas and survival on the last day in the most anxiety provoking nil, nil, draw away at Bradford that you could ever possibly imagine. And I have been really enjoying reliving that day. Aaron Ramsdale, the 21 year old goalkeeper who was largely responsible for Wimbledon staying in League One that season made a couple of amazing saves on that last day.

He is now a goalkeeper in the Premier League for Bournemouth. He is starting in the Premier League just one year later. He's going to go on to great things. It's incredible to have had him at AFC Wimbledon.

All the players from that year have been posting about how it felt on that day, that the great escape was confirmed. But yeah, it's just been nice to go back in time to this joyous occasion for Wimbledon. And be reminded that football is in our future. I don't know when, but it is in our future.

Indeed. John, does this, is it possible that if this season would have gone on that you would have been relegated and this is good for them at least staying up for another season? If they stay up. Oh, they might not stay up.

There are a lot of different ways to calculate who would go down if there is even relegation this year. So I believe the Dutch League just declared the season null and void. The teams that were going to get promoted aren't going to get promoted. The teams that were going to get relegated aren't going to get relegated.

The season did not exist, whereas the French League has done it differently. And it's hard. Obviously, this is not the biggest problem. In fact, it might be the smallest problem, but it's not really fair to freeze the season because not everybody has played the same teams.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So it's hard to figure out what's fair, but I mean, what the heck do I know about the future, Hank? I feel yeah.

So enough months ago, I was at Harry Potter World with my children and 57,000 million people. So who knows? Well, in this week's Mars news, there is going to be a helicopter carried to the Red Planet and the belly of the Perseverance Rover. And that helicopter has been named.

I don't know if they intended to name this thing, but then they decided to because they got all these great names submitted in essay contests. And on 11th grader, Vanessa Rupani at Tuscaloosa County High School in North Port, Alabama, submitted an essay suggesting ingenuity. And in her essay, she wrote, the ingenuity and brilliance of people working hard to overcome the challenges of interplanetary travel are what allow us to experience the wonders of space exploration. Ingenuity is what allows people to accomplish amazing things.

And it allows us to explore our horizons to the edges of the universe. So there will be an ingenuity helicopter on Mars. Now this helicopter isn't going to have any science instruments on it. It itself is the experiment to see if it can do its thing.

It's going to try and fly off and fly back and fly off and fly back several times just to test and see how possible it is for a helicopter to operate on the surface of Mars. And if it does well, then we will have future missions that will have more sensors and stuff and be bigger helicopters doing that stuff. But it's super, super cool. It is amazing the things that continue to be done and the ideas that we continue to have and continue to pull off.

So very excited about the launch and landing of a perseverance and looking forward to that. I'm also looking forward to it. I have a bit of Mars news this week, which is that the rover took a picture of the hole that's been digging. I don't know if you saw the picture.

It looks deeper when you see the picture. It's more impressive that we've dug as deeply into Mars as we have, even though we haven't dug as deeply into Mars as we were hoping to. When you see the picture, you're like, that little digger has been doing some digging. And also, I did not know that a quarter inch underneath the surface of Mars, it totally stops being a red planet and it becomes like the moon.

Yeah, it's not oxidized down there. It will turn it will turn red as oxygen reacts with the stuff there, but it's right because it has another surface that has not a chance to. So I recommend checking out that picture of the hole that humans dug on Mars. It is amazing to me that we have dug a hole on Mars.

I know that that's probably not the greatest accomplishment science wise of our Mars exploration, but we dug a hole on that planet, y'all. We did it. We did it. Okay.

Thank you for pausing with me, Hank. And thanks to everybody for listening. It's a pleasure to be with you. You can send us your emails at hankandjohnadgmail.com.

I'm sorry about all the emails we don't reply to. They're great. We love getting them. So please email us at hankandjohnadgmail.com.

Yes. And also thank you for the well wishes. We've had several people run into say you seem like you are handling things fairly well, but we can kind of tell that you know you got that quarantine brain. Agree.

Yeah. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna-Maddish God bless him. It's produced by Rosie Annalas Arraz and Sheridan Gibson. Our communications coordinator is Paolo Garcia-Priato, the music you're hearing now and the beginning of the podcast is by the Greg Conerola.

And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.

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This episode was published on May 11, 2020.

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