276: An Onomatopoetic Wifi Explainer

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 have complexity 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 PBSEons 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 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. Hank, we're doing a cold open today. We only do cold opens on important occasions.

This time around, there's a couple things. I mean, I do have a new book coming out. It's called The Ethonpe Scene Review. It's available for pre-order everywhere, but that's not really the cause of the cold open.

We wanted to come here before the intro and just let everybody know that I made a TikTok. Oh my god. I make so many, I make way too many TikToks, but John Green, my brother John Green makes one TikTok every month, every couple months, every couple months, they all have in common, Hank. They have a variety of topics, but you know what each of them has in common.

I'm not a solid gold platinum banger TikTok. It's true. John, my TikToks go platinum, Hank. The only one that didn't is the one where you promoted my book.

You have 750,000 followers on TikTok after five TikToks? Yeah. So the whole reason I made this TikTok was because I was getting really close to 666,000 followers, which is a number that as you know, I find extremely stressful. And so I was like, I think I'll make a TikTok because then either a lot of people will follow me or a lot of people will unfollow me, but it doesn't matter.

Either way, it's the same result, which is that we are no longer near that number. And a lot of people follow me because of my really nuanced, hot take about how Joe Biden is the 45th president of the United States because we can't keep kind of Grover Cleveland twice. Hank, I want it on my tombstone. The Grover Cleveland can't be two presidents.

If I can make one contribution to this broken country, let it be that Grover Cleveland cannot be the 22nd and the 24th president of the United States. John Green, 1977 to 2077, Grover Cleveland is only one man. You know, Hank, now that you've said it that way, I'd like to amend my previous statement. John Green, 1977 to 2079, I'm giving myself a couple of extra years, then you gave me you miserly jerk.

He did not want it on his tombstone that Grover Cleveland was only one person. Welcome to Dear Hank and John. Go inside for a think of it, dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be as advice and bring you all the weeks from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

John, the people from Punxsutawney gave me a call because they were thinking about sort of spicing up this year's Groundhog Day. They were like, what are we going to do to make this a little more interesting? We really want to mix it up this year. And I said, I said, I told them, go for it.

And they decided to instead stick with the Groundhog. I have to tell you, they paid me so much for my advice, but they didn't make it. I love the idea of Punxsutawney like reaching out to America's influencers to be like, how can we rebrand Groundhog Day to make it hip and youthful? And of course, the first person they would reach out to would be you.

Oh, I know everything. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that Punxsutawney fill could make great TikToks, but I know I could make a great TikTok with Punxsutawney fill if he asks. Right.

I was recently, this reminds me of the thing I need to tell you about that I haven't told you about. I was reached out to by an influencer marketing person. And it was a very weird email. She asked me to sign an NDA before she'd tell me anything about the campaign.

And I was like, no, I'm not going to sign a non-disclosure agreement. So I had a brand deal that's too weird. That's just very strange. So we had a little discussion about that.

And I was looking at her job title. And her job title is lead campaign manager influencer execution. That's a great. And now I'm like, way scared off.

I'm like, I do not want to work with this person. What's in the NDA? What are you making me agree to? I do not, I don't love the word influencer, but I do not want to execute influencers.

The great thing about that job title is you wouldn't even have to change it like after the dystopian revolution comes, you're just doing the business of influencer execution just with a slightly different spin. Yeah, you just emphasize a different syllable. And suddenly it's a whole new job. I can count the number of NDA's I've signed in my life on one hand and I can count the number of NDA's I've regretted signing on the same hand.

I mean, that's what I said that I have encountered situations where this has turned out to be a problem in the long term. And so it seems a silly thing to do. Anyway, there's just some corporations out there that you can't say anything bad about, you know, contractually. John, do you want to do some?

We went all over. I slept four hours last night. In fact, I don't think I've opened the questions yet. Do you want to ask me one?

I mean, I also haven't opened them to be honest with you. I'm on Deadline right now. The Anthropocene Reviewed book is due in like 100 hours and I'm going to have to spend most of those hours working on it. So let's just, you know what?

Let's go random this time. Let's pick a number. Wow. And then go from there and see if that question is good.

And if it's not good, we'll shame the person who asked it. This first question comes from Grace because the first number I thought of was three. Okay. Dear John and Hank, I just read a Hank second book that science doesn't actually work in breakthroughs the way we are all taught.

How does science work? Do scientists look through specific patterns in collectator or mess around until something cool happens? I've never been in a science lab. And I think that whatever goes on in one must be really rad is it's too late at night for me to think of a pun.

Grace. Oh, Grace, I've been there. I'm there right now. Yeah.

Though I did come up with that Puncetani field joke, which I have proud of. Good job. John, science. So science.

So a great example of this is a breakthrough that we are living in the middle of right now, which is an mRNA vaccine. Yes. So we now have two mRNA vaccines that are powerful. The thing to know about these is that the hard thing was not making them.

Usually the hardest part of making a vaccine is making the vaccine. For these mRNA vaccines, the hardest part was testing them. So to get them in and like, you know, to do all the normal stuff that we do to test safety and efficacy of any medicine, we had to do that and that stuff takes time. And that's what took time making it literally happened like within a month of the genome of the virus being published by Chinese laboratories.

So like that, that is the easy, easy thing. And then the testing was the hard part. But but it was only easy because we've been trying to figure out how to make mRNA vaccines for literally 40 years, just more than that, maybe 50. And it has been a slow process with lots of, you know, fits and starts.

Basically, we knew that if we could get mRNA into the cell, maybe the cell would make that antigen. So the protein that our immune system would wake up to and see as a potential invader. And then our immune systems would look at it and say, ah, this thing is bad. And we will prime the immune system to attack anything that has this antigen on it.

And so we knew that that was possible. But there's all kinds of complexities in terms of how do you get that actually into the cell? Because our bodies are always looking out for invaders like our immune system would break it down before it could get into a cell. And so we had to do all these things to figure out how to actually make an mRNA vaccine work.

And we did that for 50 years. And along the way, there were thousands and thousands of people who participated in this research. And there were also hundreds or even thousands of breakthroughs that led to the larger breakthrough. And that I think is the essential thing to understand about science.

Like when Newton famously said, if I have seen further than others, it is because I stood on the shoulder of giants, that's true. It's just like the giants are everyone. Right. There was no individual giant.

Yeah. And even Newton himself, it's no coincidence that Newton was working at the same time as Robert Hook and Edmund Haley and lots of other people. And it's no coincidence that the body of scientific literature was getting stronger, thanks to institutions like the Royal Society and the sharing of published results and stuff like that. We tend to, because we see history, including the history of science so much as a story of individuals and their great individual actions, we lose track often of the fact that almost everything that's really important that happens is a process, not an event.

And almost all of those processes involve the work and collaboration of thousands or millions or billions of people. Yeah. All right. It's time to answer another question.

Pick a number. All right. 50. We don't.

How hard do we go? It's 35 or something. 27. Big number under 35.

27. 27. We got from Andrea who asked, Steer and Gondron, is it rude to turn off the lights and leave while my dog is eating? Dan.

Andrea. You missed the solid gold name, specific sign of kind of rhymes with Pangea andrea. Andrea. Andrea.

It's okay. Gotcha. Sorry. Thank you.

Oh my God. I do this all the time. What a pandemic specific question. It is undoubtedly rude to do this to a person.

Yes. And we. So it's so rude. What is very clear to a person?

I think the dog's probably thinking, what the heck, man? I think the dog would prefer that you either stay in the room or leave the lights on. Right? Like I don't think you have to do both.

But I don't know exactly what it's like to be a dog. But I do know that when I'm in a room and the lights get turned out unexpectedly, I do not enjoy it. It's not a good feeling. Yeah.

But we actually have a button in our house that you can push. It's called all off. And you can push this button and it turns off all the lights in the house. Wow.

And occasionally, there's a phrase actually in our family called all offing someone, which is when you hit the all off button when someone is like reading in the bathroom or watching and suddenly you're in a dark room and the TV is off and your first thought is inevitably like, oh, they're here. The people who will bring about my doom have arrived. Yeah, they cut off the power first. That's what they do.

Yeah. Everybody knows that. That's what your dog is thinking. So I think the question is, do you want to give your dog that anxiety?

And the answer is like, probably not. That said, I don't think your dog notices if you get up and leave the room necessarily because dogs love eating so much. They do. Well, this is the thing I'm thinking is like, if I have my face down in a bowl of food and somebody turned the light off, I'd be like, this is very disorienting.

But also like, just the circumstance is weird. So I don't know what it's like to be a dog. If your dog continues to chomp away, like it's probably not bothering your dog. But there's nothing wrong with extending niceties, even if the dog doesn't care about them.

Yes. All of this reminds me of one of my all-time favorite quotes that I've never been able to find a source for. Some anthropologists, somewhere at some point, at least according to one of my college professors said the following, the difference between dogs and humans is that dogs know how to be dogs, which makes me think that Andrea's question is actually a really, really good one because what Andrea's really asking is like, how do I be a person to a dog? Which is still a question of like, how do I be a person?

Yeah. And the truth is, Andrea, we don't know. We don't know how to be people. We're just making this crap up as we go along.

Oh, God, it's so true. And every time I'm like, here's how to be a people. I'm talking out loud, but I'm mostly talking to myself almost exclusively to myself, a little bit to Hank and then like, tertially to anyone else who's listening. Yeah.

John, do you want to pick a number for you? Pick a number for me. 17. I was worried you were going to pick a number I didn't like, but I love 17.

It's one of my favorite numbers. This question comes from Ellie who writes, do you're John and Hank, can you please explain for me how wireless internet happens? I can. Can you?

I mean, because to some extent, you're going to tell me that you can explain how wireless internet happens while just so the listeners of this podcast know we've had to stop and start five separate times because you can't get your phone to work, but you know how the air conducts internet. I know it conceptually. Great. But does not mean that I can fix a problem that happened.

Clearly. So there's there's two main things that are happening. One is we have figured out ways for things to communicate with each other. And two, we have figured out ways to speed that process up magnificently.

So there's very little difference on a conceptual level between what you and I are doing right now and how wireless internet works. And I don't mean talking over the phone. I mean, talking. Yeah.

Okay. That's like, that's like saying there's very little on a conceptual difference that separates the earth spinning around the sun and you sticking to the to the surface of the earth. Like it's true. The largest sense.

But yeah, there's actually a lot of difference. Let me explain what I mean. Right now, there are there are two radio transmitters in my office. Yeah, there's more than that.

But the two that are important are in my computer and in my Wi-Fi router. And they're going, boop, boop, boop to each other. And when there's a boop happening, that's a one and when there's no boop happening, that's a zero. And they're doing that to each other over radio waves.

So they're just radios talking to each other. But instead of going boop, boop, they're going, oh, so that we scientists and engineers have figured out how to make the boobs go so fast that they can transmit a tremendous amount of data. Now, this is basically the same as sending Morse code, right? Like, boop, boop, boop, doodoo, doodoo, except that in that case, I would be the person like a human being would have to do the tapping and the listening.

And we are just not very good at that. And one of the computers are very good at is understanding the difference between a boop and a not boop, which is like, we're okay at that, but not computers are quadrillion of times better at that. And that's the complicated part of how Wi-Fi works, how to compress it and have it be have the signal loss be very minimal. But conceptually, it's just two radios going boop to each other.

This reminds me a little bit. Do you remember when there was a hearing on the internet in Congress, and I believe it was a Senator from Alaska, said the internet is a series of tubes. And the whole internet was like, this is amazing. I feel like the internet is a series of tubesing me right now.

Well, it was a little weird for him to say because it was clear to him that someone had said this, it was clear to me that someone had told him to say that. But it's a good simplification. The internet is a series of tubes in that like only a certain amount can fit through it. Yes, it's true.

It's like a sewer pipe in that it can only hold so much water. It is also different from a sewer pipe in critical ways. I think that's the problem. When everywhere sort of creating analogies and metaphors around kind of complicated, especially technical topics, the risk is always over reading the metaphor.

Because when all you have to ground you in knowledge is the metaphor, you're like, okay, if the expanding universe is like a balloon filling with air, then is it also like a balloon in this way? No. And then you're like, oh, well, I still don't understand that because it's not really like a balloon filling with air. Yeah.

But in this case, it is really like two radios going boop to each other. Yeah. And then lots of scientists and engineers working really hard so they can go boop really fast. Anyway, while Hank and I were trying to answer your question, our internet break again, we don't know whose internet is the problem because we don't actually know how the internet travels through the air.

It's just boobs, it's real fast boobs. All right, Hank, I'm gonna give you a number and then you're gonna read the question. The number is four. Oh, no, one of my top five favorite numbers.

We're all the way back up here. It's from Claire who asks, dear Hank and John, sometimes I can remember my dreams other times. I can't. When I am sleeping, am I always dreaming and just can't remember them from Claire?

We don't 100% know the answer to this question. I think I feel like there are definitely times while I'm sleeping that I'm not dreaming. Right. It may have become down but that is what I would tell myself.

It may come down to what you consider to be a dream. Right. And so sleep scientists know for sure that during REM sleep, like dreams are different than during other parts of sleep. But there are still like dreamish things that happen.

Like oftentimes you'll fall asleep and wake up immediately and you will have had a dream like you will remember something of what was happening in that moment. And it may not be like a cohesive dream thing. It may just be sort of like images or shapes or, you know, speaking specifically about last night when I was trying to fall asleep at 3 30 in the morning and not being able to do it. For some reason, I'm very rarely having something up at the last night.

And there would be I would like get janked out of sleep by this sensation of, oh, I'm falling asleep. Yay. All right. Yeah.

The wars. Yeah. And then I'd be like, oh, and there was that weird like fish mouth. I just saw fish mouth and I'd be like, try and concentrate on the fish mouth.

It'll take you back and it wouldn't. But yeah. Just think of how that. I'm familiar with all of these tricks.

I've actually found it helpful. And this may just be a construction of mine, but I found it helpful because I do have quite a bit of insomnia to think of sleep as a continuum rather than like an event I enter into and then like emerge from some hours later. Yeah. Because then even if I can't like sleep, which I often can't, I can't tell myself well, I'm relaxing or trying to and I'm lying down.

I'm doing my best. John, what is another number that you really like? If we're just going to go through my five favorite numbers under the number 35, which would be just a thrill for me. I thank you in advance if that really is an opportunity.

My next one would be five. Okay. It's from Mallory who asks Dear Hank and John, so I'm going to be an adult the rest of my life. What do I do with this?

I'm so tired Mallory. Wow. This question is the whole rest of the podcast. Well, here's the thing, Mallory.

I remember being an adult, like a young adult out of school dealing with real life for the first time, the utter exhaustion of having to pay bills and doing taxes and living with the bureaucracy of adult life and all that stuff and the stress, the constant stress of keeping your job and getting your paychecks. That's not all of adulthood. I feel like when I was 25, I really wish someone had said to me, being an adult isn't one thing. You're going to be lots of different kinds of adult in the same way you were lots of different kinds of kid.

And there are going to be different things that are stressful and different things that are fun, different things that are hard, different things that are easy. A lot of the things that are really really hard about being 25 are fairly easy now. And a lot of the things that were really, really fun about being 25, they weren't that many of them, but the ones that they were for me, are not part of my life today. The things I enjoyed most when I was 25, I have not done in many years.

And I think that's normal. And I don't mean like, that makes it sound like I mean like hard drugs or something. But no, I don't mean like that. Just the way it's the way it's the excessive gambling.

No, I mean like going out late at night with friends. I haven't met out at one in the morning in a while. Yeah, not since VidCon. That's really the only time I do that anymore.

Yeah. And it's been a while since there was a VidCon. Yes. So like there's a lot of, I think, important advice that you can internalize and that you can listen to and decide whether or not it's right for you.

But the one piece of advice that I will give you that I think everybody, now it's going to be hard to follow, but everybody can do this. And everybody should do this. In your early adulthood, you need to floss. Yes.

It is just going to like prevent a whole lot of problems for future you. Please do it. And the reason that we're giving you this advice is because we look back and people are like, do you have any regrets? When you're you're a grown adult, answer the question, do you have any regrets with?

No, I don't regret anything. I always want to be like, are you kidding? You don't regret like all the times when you were 24 years old and you didn't floss before going to bed. Like you don't have any regrets.

Oh man. You don't regret like the money you spent on healies. John, I bought healies. People ask me if I have regrets.

Yeah, I got regrets. Hey, I would love it if you were like profiled at a major magazine and they asked you what your biggest regret was and you pause for a second and you're like, well, I guess it was the time I bought healies. I can't wait. I really do have to have a stock answer to that question because people are going to ask.

I mean, the funny thing is I've been asked that question so many times and I don't have a stock answer for it and I need to invent one loss because I hem and haul not because I'm like struggling to find a regret, but because I'm struggling to pick among the millions of them. What floss? All right. We're going to move on to another number.

Another one of my favorite numbers. Seven. Oh, okay. Oh, God.

What a great number seven is. Yeah, this is it's barely even behind 17 in terms of it's almost perfection. This is just from Kate who writes, dear John and Hank. Okay.

My name is Kate. All right, Kate's not trying to be Ryan. I'm from Maine and I almost left some unopened can of soda in my car overnight, which would have been catastrophic because it's winter here and they can get down into the single digits at night causing my soda to freeze and explode. As I was filled with relief after remembering to bring them inside, I thought to myself, why is this?

I know that water expands when it freezes, but when I leave my water bottle in the car overnight, it just turns to ice. No messes to worry about. Can you explain this to me? Why do you carbonated beverages explode when they freeze, but my water bottle doesn't?

Ah, there's there's a bunch of different things going on here. There are two different questions in this question. One, why does the the bottle not break? And two, why in the case of soda, does it explode with force rather than just the bottle breaks and there's now like ice, right?

Because I'm having a chunk of ice in your car isn't a big deal, but when a soda explodes in your car, it isn't ice, it is wet and it's sticky. So first, why doesn't the bottle break? Now, I'm not entirely sure that there's definitely one piece of it, which is that a plastic bottle was just stretchier, and so can I handle that? If you had a glass bottle, it probably would break because they have very little stretch.

And then there's another piece, which is maybe that when a soda freezes, it kind of forces some of the dissolved carbon dioxide out of solution, which then creates even more pressure on the inside. I'm not 100% sure about that. But what I am sure about is when a soda does explode, a lot of it is still liquid because the water will freeze, but the corn syrup and a lot of the water that is in solution with the corn syrup will not freeze. What you end up with is basically ice crystals and then sugar.

So you can actually freeze soda and then suck the sugar out of it, which is something I used to do because that's the kind of youth I was. I love, I just like sweet stuff. And so that stuff will not freeze. And so when it explodes, it will be still wet, which is a big problem.

It will freeze. It just freezes at a much lower temperature. Correct. Yes.

It freezes at a different temperature than the water. Okay. Let's keep it going with my favorite numbers. Okay.

Are you ready? Yeah. How about 20? Okay.

For my son's birth date. This one is from Newton, who asks Dear Hank and John, I am in need of dubious advice. I've realized that my passion for science was born entirely out of spite for context. I'm trans and I've always heard the falsehood that trans people don't understand biology.

And that led me to make it my mission to learn as much as I can when it comes to the field of biology. And this led to a genuine passion in the subject. I'm a high school junior, meaning that I'll have to be thinking about college and what to major in soon. Well, I want to do something in biology and science.

I'm worried about picking a subject where my interests started out in spite. Should I try and pick something slightly less spiteful or go with where my interests are? DFTBA. Newton.

Oh, man, Newton, there are so many things I got into for the wrong reasons that I love the right reasons now. Go, go, go. Yeah, go. I completely agree with you, Hank, how you get started in an interest irrelevant if I hadn't gotten rejected from the advanced creative writing class in my college?

Yeah. I may not have been so like driven by resentment to try to write fiction. And eventually I had to develop a better fuel than resentment. But Newton, it sounds like you've already done that.

It sounds like you're already to a place where you're interested in the subject because you're interested in it. How it got started, not as important as where it's going to me. So I think study biology. I mean, you're a junior, so like, don't put too much pressure on yourself to study only one thing yet.

But if you want to study biology, do, yeah. And another thing I will say is when you're looking at colleges, if you're thinking about this kind of work, one thing that I didn't do in undergrad that I wish I had done is to look at schools and particularly professors who are doing research that interests you instead of thinking like, okay, what is the best school for biology? Like look at the actual professors who are learning about actual things, study their research a little bit, and then you actually like talk about that in applications and be like, I'm really interested in the research that some of the professors are doing, like these specific things shows that like, you know, you are interested in, in not just like being at a school, but in doing specific things and that you understand what they're doing well enough to talk about it. Now that that is a thing that I made a mistake of once in my career where I kind of didn't understand it and I fudged it and I should have taken some more time to understand it better because I did not get into that program.

And I think probably because I fudged it. But my experience Newton is actually very similar. I got it assigned because it made me feel superior to other people. And I had been made to feel inferior for a variety of other things and also including just being a human that's something that happens to all of us.

And that was not a good reason to be into science. And I'm really glad that I moved away from it and now love it for its own sake and from the sake of my curiosity and helping to understand the world and understand the world myself. So I am the same boat. On the other hand, Newton, I got really into rush because there was a girl that I liked who was really into rush.

And then once we were no longer in a relationship together, I stopped listening to rush because I didn't like it. So I can go both ways. Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by rush. Rush.

Hank doesn't like them. I'm sorry. It's not I just don't. This podcast is also brought to you by messenger RNA.

Messenger RNA is that RNA that shuttles genes to your protein factories so that your body can exist and we've been able to use it to make our bodies better at being healthy. And today's podcast is brought to you by Go4Day. Go4Day, a rebranding from your friends in Puxitani. And also this podcast is brought to you by just being people.

We don't know how. We don't know how to do this. But we're doing it anyway. People trying our best for 250,000 years and then asterisk.

We know we could do better. I think we all know. 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.

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Are we out of your favorites? Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a couple others that are secret favorites. I'm not willing to share with the listeners of this podcast.

The numbers that are too important. So I should avoid no, no, no, yeah, of course you should avoid 13. Okay. Yeah, anything, anything in that category, you get the vibe from a number like 13.

How do you feel about 28? Oh, fine. I have no opinion. It doesn't do anything to me one way or another.

This question goes from Maxine who writes Dear John and Hank, any tips for working from home? This past fall, my office closed down permanently and I've been struggling ever since. At first, I thought it was the work itself, but now I'm realizing how much of my burnout is from a total lifestyle change, PTO and per my last email, Maxine. I got to search my email for per my last email to see how many times I've made a big enough mistake to get one of those or just following up here.

I get a lot of just following up here emails. John, you and I've both worked at home for a long time. Now we have a mixed situation sometimes too where we do both. Yeah, but I've worked from home most of the time since 2007.

And at first, it was really, really difficult for me. I was coming from an office environment where I work nine to five days a week. And suddenly I had deadlines, like I had work. I was working for mental floss at the time and also writing my second novel and doing a few freelance things here and there.

But I didn't have the structure that I had depended on to help me get worked on and also to create a sense of separation between work and not work. Like my friend Shannon, she's working from home, which she's not used to doing. And I love what she does. She wakes up in the morning, gets up, gets dressed, walks around the block, goes back to the apartment and starts working.

And then at five o'clock, she goes back outside, walks around the block again, comes up upstairs and stops working. That's great. I give yourself a little commute. I think structure is the most important thing to me.

And so I think scheduling, especially I don't know if there's people in your life who might need to know what you're up to at any given moment, because if there's nothing on my schedule, then like Catherine might say, hey, you want to go out for lunch? But if there is, then and like in that moment, I'm like, yes, I do badly, deeply want to go out for lunch. But maybe that actually I couldn't. Right.

And so I will have set myself up for a problem in the long term. And so I schedule things that don't need to be scheduled. And this was a huge breakthrough for me, especially when I started to schedule things, it was just meetings. So meetings were scheduled, but all of my non-meeting activities, which are important, were unscheduled.

And so they would not get done, because they weren't on the calendar. So now I schedule the things that I know I'm going to have to do. So like, journey to the microcosmos recording the schedule, even though it's just me and this chair. But also, I find it helpful to also schedule the things that I don't need to do that I do need to do, like exercise, for instance, or watching AFC Wimbledon.

I put on my calendar when every AFC Wimbledon game starts. So I'll be like, okay, well, I can't watch that game today, but I know what's happening. Or I can be like, oh, great, I can look forward on Saturday morning to watching AFC Wimbledon and other Wimbledon football games. Yeah, sorry about that.

That's okay. I'm accustomed to it. Also, having a to-do list, I find that very helpful as well. That said, there are a million tasks I'm currently behind on.

So I'm probably not the person to be answering this question. All the people to whom I owe emails currently are like, what is he talking about? I am in no way like a brilliant user of my time, especially when I'm on deadline like this, because really, the only thing I'm thinking about is the book. If I have a spare five minutes, I'm not thinking about anything other than the book and what stands between where the book is now and where I want it to be and how do I get there.

That ability to obsessively focus around one thing is very useful to me, but it can be a problem. Like anything, if properly harnessed, it's good and improperly used, it's bad. So, yeah. In fact, even while I was saying the sentence, Hank, because I mentioned the book, I am now there.

I am now trying to figure out this problem that I have in this whispering essay. Yeah, it's like I want to answer that question about sodas. I heard you in the background open up a can of Dr. Pepper.

Yeah, it was funny. I actually went upstairs. Thankfully, you were doing a fairly long monologue. I felt pretty confident in my ability to get upstairs and get a Dr.

Pepper. But when somebody mentions soda, it's like I used a long time ago with smoked cigarettes. And I'm nervous about even saying this because I don't want to trigger someone's desire to smoke cigarettes. Don't smoke.

It's really hard to quit. When I used to smoke cigarettes and I would see someone smoking a cigarette on TV, like the animal I am, you know, like the the mid-level ape that I truly am on the inside, I would be like, I want to cigarette like that silverback gorilla smoking a cigarette. And I want to be like him when I grow up. I want to be more like James Dean.

I guess I'll go smoke a cigarette. I mean, we're not going to meeting and like somebody brings up TikTok or Twitter either. It's very hard for me not to like open up the app. It is like, I am not in control of my mind.

This is a thing I know. But it's not a thing that I know, you know? Yeah, it's weird. Humans are weird.

That said this night, Dr. Pepper is delicious. I know I'm going to cook so bad right now. I thought you're talking about it.

Yeah. Sorry. I wasn't really listening to what you're saying. I was on TikTok.

Hank, so many people wrote in to the podcast to on the subject of whether Grover Cleveland can or cannot be both the 22nd and the 24th president of the United States. Yes. All of your responses that disagreed with me were wrong. And all of the responses that agreed with me were right, except for the ones where they agreed with me, but tried to have a caveat and those caveats were wrong.

Grover Cleveland is one man. He cannot be two presidents. Joe Biden is the 45th president of the United States. Some of you are like, Oh, but he has the 46th presidency.

No, he doesn't. He has the 59th presidency of the United States. We had 59 inaugurations. Yeah.

So I'm ready to leave it behind. But in case you're wondering, if any of you convinced me that Grover Cleveland can be two people, you did not. There were a couple of people who like had like very small issues with the fact that you said it was going to be the 22nd or 24th, but in that case, he would be the 22nd or the 23rd because if he didn't count the first time, he wouldn't be 24th. But like, that was just that was a good point.

Yeah. That was just like a small mistake. I liked how you were about to say that's just a small semantic detail. And then you had to stop yourself because you realize that the whole thing is just a small semantic detail.

None of this matters. I recognize this. But you got to pick the hills, you're going to fight and die on. And for me, it's that Grover Cleveland was not two presidents.

Hank, the news from AFC Wimbledon is that AFC Wimbledon are winless in 10 football matches now, but we tied one. So one tie against crew Alexandra. It was not a great, I know what a name. It was not the best performance I've ever I've ever seen us get up to.

We did score way, way, way too early. Joe Pickett scored in the second minute. There was no way that was going to work. And sure enough, it didn't.

But we got a point out of the game, which as things stand is not the worst thing that could have happened. In fact, at the moment, thanks to that single point, we have emerged from the relegation zone, albeit only on goal difference. Oh, God. Well, John, are you?

Are you still scoring too early? Or are you just not scoring? Well, for a long time, we weren't scoring. But then we decided that that was just a disaster.

Like we lost one game four to nothing. And so not scoring, not scoring is even worse than scoring too early. So we went back to scoring too early with Joe Pickett. And you know, that got us a tie.

So I guess scoring too early is back on the menu, basically. But it's better than not. Yeah, scoring is very hard to win a football game if you don't score goals from my understanding of the process. You've nailed it, Hank.

That's one of the central things to understand about football is that the team that scores the most goals almost always wins. All right, John, in Mars news this week, it looks like Mars has gone through not one, not two, but at least six distinct ice ages. Whoa, really? Yeah.

So this has been a big question people have been curious about for a long time. And Mars has a bunch of debris covered glacier deposits. We've known about them for a long time. So there's big pieces of ice with stuff on them.

But what we didn't know is whether those glaciers were the result of multiple ice ages or if there's just like one long continuous ice age, like it started to get cold, got colder, and is now as cold as it is now. And this is a really interesting question for several reasons, but in particular, because of its the planet's tilt on Earth, our axis has a tilt and that creates our seasons. And this is true for other planets as well. But if you change the tilt of that axis, it can lead to the onset of an ice age.

Fortunately for us, our planet's axial tilt is pretty stable, thanks in part to the moon. So big ups to the moon, boy. Thanks, man. Mars changes its tilt a lot.

And scientists has estimated that it can be as low as 10 degrees as high as 60 degrees. Wow. And that could help set off multiple ice ages to see if Mars has a big wobble. It's a big wobble.

It's a scary wobble. Like it's not the kind of wobble you'd want to be around for. Yeah, that makes me not want to inhabit Mars. I mean, as if I did have other reasons.

You really can't like prevent a planet from wobbling either. It's not like, oh, the wobble has begun. Everybody leave. Yeah, I guess you could make a big artificial moon.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot of work. But who knows, the future holds many, many unknowns.

So to see if Mars even had multiple ice ages, researchers studied images from the Mars reconnaissance orbiter using artificial intelligence to identify, count and measure how rocks were distributed on the glacier deposits. It turns out that was a lot of work for the AI. So they also recruited 10 humans to count and measure about 60,000 large rocks over two summers. So thanks to those 10 students who did that.

And from that, the researchers concluded that the rocks were dispersed in a way that corresponded to multiple distinct ice ages, somewhere between six and 20 of them over the last 300 to 800 million years. Wow. Giving us an idea of how often Mars's axial tilt might have changed in that time. So Hank, the atmosphere of Mars is now very thin, as I understand it, but it used to be quite a bit thicker.

When it was much thicker, would those ice ages have been like water ages? You know, would the amount of water have increased or just the amount of surface water? Because I guess what I'm asking is less water would have been sucked up into space because the atmosphere was thicker. So is there a possibility that at some point Mars was a water planet?

I mean, they're definitely Kevin Costner's Waterworld. Maybe not that watery, though. Who knows? But I think that the like Mars has not had a thick atmosphere for three or four billion years, so somewhere between there.

Oh, this would have been after that. Oh, the good old days. Yeah. Yeah.

The real three to four billion years ago. Those were those were the days. That's when we're talking about there being a life maybe, but for clarity, the golden age, we have we have fossils of old life on Earth that is billions of years old. So it's not like it couldn't happen, which is wild.

I mean, it is so weird to me that it took less time between the formation of Earth and the emergence of life than it took between the emergence of life and the first eukaryotic cell. Yeah, that was a big that was a big jump. That's just blows. There's a lot of my mind.

It was harder to make eukaryotic cells than it was to make life. Yeah. Wow. We are so weird.

Like we are what a weird, what a weird branch of the life story humans are. Oh, I know. People underestimate how weird we are because we are ourselves, you know, and so we don't seem that weird to us because we're used to being us, but like, oh my god, so compared to like, first off, we're very weird compared to viruses or bacteria, right? Like, that's obvious.

But we're the bacteria. We're the bacteria. We're the bacteria. We're the compared to viruses like viruses are nothing.

If you pitch the idea of bacteria to a virus, the virus would be like, that makes no sense. It's way too complicated. We could destroy them, which they do. They do.

But then if you pitch the idea of humans to bacteria, the bacteria would be like, that's crazy. You can't have organisms with trillions of cells inside of them, including trillions of bacteria. It doesn't. It just doesn't make any sense.

Yeah. It's wise. brains are going to be made of meat. Their stomachs are going to decide when they're anxious, but only sometimes.

Yeah. And they're going to need to sleep in order to live. Yeah. But sometimes we won't let them like last night.

Yeah. They're going to have to sleep, but sometimes they won't be allowed to sleep. It's great. We've built the best system.

Thanks for potting with me. It's always a pleasure. Try to get a nap if you can. That's not going to happen for a while.

John, thank you for making a podcast. I got him so confused. This is my guess. We're off to go record our Patreon Only Podcast This Sinking Stuff.

And we're going to have a great time. And I don't know what I'm going to talk about. I actually do. I think I do.

Now that I've said it. It's at patreon.com slash your handcon. John, this podcast is edited by Joseph's going to manage its produced by Rosie on Halston Sheridan Gibson. Our communications coordinator is Vueley of Bloom, our editorial assistant is the bookie truck.

We've already the music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great controller. And I think it's saying our hometown. Don't forget to be awesome.