282: The Silly Brothers

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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 it, Dear John and Hank.

It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, I had a joke about the vaccines but I decided not to tell it because I was afraid not everyone will get it. That's pretty good. That's pretty the way you told the joke, betrayed a certain level of like frustration and fatigue.

You didn't like bring the full, hammy, Hank Green, get the crowd riled up kind of vibe that you usually bring but to be fair that's not where we are right now. Hank and I are both in a different place. It's a weird place of frustration and exhaustion. If I sound a little weird, it's because my computer just stopped working and so I'm recording on my handheld recorder and I can't see the questions and I had to remember that joke which I had written but I had forgotten and so it was lucky that it started out.

I was going to tell a joke. Yeah, that was good. Yeah. I'm going to have to ask all the questions because Hank's computer doesn't work and if I sound like a person who hasn't slept in 10 days, that's because I haven't because I'm trying to finish this book which by the way now has a cover.

That's something I always like to announce to the podcast because people love a cover reveal on a podcast. That's the best place to reveal a cover. That's how they tell you to do it. I find it very fascinating.

A cover of those are very cool to me. Sometimes the publisher people will be like we're going to do the cover reveal on this news site and I'm like correct. Are we still in a world where we have relationships? Yeah, no, my cover is being launched tomorrow afternoon on a online news site.

My computer turned back on, Sean, that's great news. That is good news. Oh, that's what that always was. I guess you will get to answer some of the questions.

Maybe. We'll see. I love the cover. It was designed by Grace on.

You can find it via well, just Google the Anthropocene Review book cover and you can see it. It's so beautiful. I actually Hank, if your computer restarted, let me send it to you so you can see it. Well, I mean, it is still working on something.

It decided that it needed to do a major update without my permission. And now a progress bar has appeared and the amount of the progress bar that is indicating progress has occurred is so small that I'm not sure it exists. You know what will never be finished progress? Speaking of progress, progress will never be finished.

I'm also pretty sure that my book will never be finished. It's been a long haul. I've been writing this book for three years and it's coming out in three months and somehow I'm still writing it. The area of the progress bar that is full is getting bigger, but so is the bar.

I feel that way about something. Yeah, that's that's basically summarizes human progress over the last five years. It's now like about a pinky fingernails width. So it is moving.

That's great. Moving extremely sporadically and with no actual indication of what is occurring. There's a great video if you want to search for why don't progress bars load normally. I think Tom Scott did and it helps me understand these moments that I'm in the middle of right now.

John, I'm getting my vaccine by the time I this podcast is out, I will have got my first dose of the Moderna vaccine. I'm very excited. Congratulations. I'm excited for you.

About 44 minutes remaining. It tells me. All right. I'll ask professional human.

I have to do things. For some reason, even though I've known what the cover looks like for like three weeks, I still want to I still want to show it to you. Like I have an urgent need to show it to you. So I'm going to FaceTime you real quick.

Okay, let's FaceTime. Hey, there he is. Hello. Yeah, for some reason my headphones don't work, but here's the cover ready.

Yeah. Whoo. That's not what I was expecting at all. Isn't it?

I also can only see half of it because you're a terrible camera operator. Sorry. There we go. I really like it a lot.

Yeah. We actually have a question that I remember reading on a document I can no longer answer. And that question was about what was it, John, the question that was about publishing? Who writes the author bio?

I like that one. Do that one. Okay, this will be fun. You just tell me which questions to read based on your memory of what the questions were and we'll do our best from there.

This first question comes from Emma with two M's who asks Dear John and Hank, who writes author bio is in the back of books. Do authors write their own smoke? I don't know why I said smoke because that's what's happening inside of my head? Books and bio is Emma.

I thought that someone else would do it. And then they were like, what's your bio? And I was like, I don't know. Like there are people who have whole biographers.

Can someone else get someone to do it? I want a biographer, but they're only going to write 150 words. Can we do that? No, you can't.

So yeah, I wrote my author bio and it definitely got feedback. It got edited. Because authors almost always do write their author bio. There's some classic author bio's.

If you ever go to like a publishing party and you get a few drinks into long standing publishing people, they'll tell you stories of like the bios that authors have submitted that are just epic. Like I won't name any names. My all time favorite author bio is iconic American novelist lives on several islands. That's the whole bio.

There's that thing that happened where it would be like lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, Dog and Cat. And you're like, Oh boy, yes. Oh gosh, because like, because like somebody at some point was like, put their kids in their bio. Right.

And they're like, well, I'm gonna put my cat in. And I totally it's like do that. I'm not ragging on it. It's like the back of a car.

You know how like people have like this is what our family looks like. There's two adults and two children. And then eventually somebody developed like, Oh, I could have like two adults and two children and a couple corgis. But people do that for their author bios as well as for their rear windows in their automobiles.

I think I wrote the author bio for looking for Alaska, but I don't think I have written an author bio since then because I can't I can't I can't when I'm asked for an author bio, I always just like I want to say like, I want to tell the truth about what is important to me about myself, which is that I don't know. Look, I don't even know what mine is. I'm curious. I sponsor AFC Wimbledon.

I am a father and I am married to Sarah Erskreen. Those are the things that I want you to know about my me. Like, if you ask me to tell you something about me, it's like, well, I the most important thing is that I'm a parent and a spouse. And then the second most important thing is that I sponsor a third tier English football team.

And the drop off from there is so huge. Yeah, right? Like, maybe the third most important thing about me is that I'm a writer and youtuber. But the distance between sponsoring AFC Wimbledon and being a writer and youtuber is so huge in terms of the actual formation of my identity that I don't even think I would mention it in my author bio.

I would be like, how did this how did this book? I don't know. I don't even I don't even like talking. I don't want to talk about it anymore.

I don't like talking about author bias. Well, now I've read mine and I'm horrified. And then I wrote this because it's well, this is the thing. I feel like you're supposed to be like establishing your credentials as a person who's like capable of writing a book.

Yeah, that's not what mine does at all. It's establishing my credentials. It's like a person who runs a company. Oh, and there's lots of stuff about Complexly and YouTube.

And there's also like about a third of it is taken up with a plug for Partners in Health. Well, that's actually quite good. I remember there was a long time where my author bio the last seven or seven. We're back.

We're on again. That was a very loud noise. Is your computer run by like a semi truck? Like, Oh my God, John, there's another one finger now wide again.

Okay, I hope it starts. I just got this computer like two months ago. I'm very concerned about this computer. I'm going to tell you the truth.

I don't feel great. But now we've got a ticking clock in our podcast, which is key to a successful part. So now we've got the listeners. They've got to find out what's going to happen with this semi truck of a computer that you're driving.

Well, the progress bar filled all the way up and now this is black. Oh, I hate that. That seems like really bad news. What is that noise?

It's like the bellowing back. But it started starting up over and over again. It's almost never a good sign. It's like the bellowing of a tugboat.

It is wild. God, I guess I'm kind of malware or something. What happened? It seems like it seems like you have a so let's let's stop.

It's at 44 minutes. It's not been 44 minutes. So maybe 44 minutes. It's like the amount of time it's going to take.

Yeah, maybe it just has to restart nine times. Maybe that's part of the process. It's like a cat. Okay, John, can you ask the one about why things don't burn up when they're leaving our atmosphere, but they do when they're coming into our atmosphere?

Yes, this next question comes from Lane who writes Dear John and Hank, why do things burn up in the atmosphere when coming down, but not when going up staying in my comma lane? I'm also going to say in my lane here, Hank, and tell you the truth, which is that I have no idea. Well, when we're shooting stuff through the atmosphere, we don't get it so hot that it will burn up very intentionally. Now, there are also maybe some physics things here that when you're coming from a vacuum to an atmosphere, which when you're going very fast in space, like a wall, which is a blast through, that also is a factor.

But you can get things moving fast enough that they will heat up like a rail gun in atmosphere. You can watch videos of rail guns shooting these like giant projectiles, and they are not made of anything flammable. They're just like a giant, lungo metal, but they will create fireballs behind them because they are like in the same way that a piece of space junker like asteroid will, if it's coming into our atmosphere. In general, we actually have to launch rockets more slowly than we would otherwise because of the atmosphere, because like if we didn't have an atmosphere, we could launch rockets faster and we would.

Yeah, but on the other hand, the pressure that the atmosphere exerts on the rocket. On the other hand, just interrupt you real quick, if we didn't have an atmosphere, we wouldn't be shooting off any rockets because we wouldn't be here. Right, right. Well, but like if we were shooting off rockets from the surface of Mars, it's even easier because there's less gravity.

It's also easier because there's less atmosphere. But my favorite example of a thing that probably burned up in the atmosphere is they were doing a nuclear test and the gas from the nuclear test got shunted incorrectly or the test went a little bit wrong. It's not what you want to have with a nuclear test. And there was a manhole cover that covered up like it was an underground test.

Should have explained that underground test. There was a manhole cover on top. The gas got shunted wrong and it went and it hit the manhole cover. That manhole cover well beyond.

We're not sure how fast it went, but it definitely went well beyond the escape velocity of Earth. And as it went through the atmosphere, it either burned up and became dust or is now in the solar system somewhere. But either way, it definitely created a big fiery streak as it shot out of our atmosphere. Now, when you say we did this, do you mean America?

I do, John, the United States of America. Darn. I was hoping that you met like we humans. We humans were just like me, me and Catherine, nuclear tests.

But no, it's not we humans. No, it's not we humans. It's we Americans. Oh, God.

Shooting manholes into space with our Pacific Island nuclear tests. This was actually on the on the US mainland. I am even better. That my progress is still opening up and it is not rebooted again.

But I do. I'm going to let you pick what John. Okay, great. Let's stick with space as a theme.

Hank, this next question comes from Maggie who read steer John and Hank, I saw a CNN story this morning about a space hotel officially opening in 2027. This is insanely cool. However, as a longtime listener, I am well aware of your conversations about when humans will be on Mars. I was just wondering if this changes your feelings.

Also, would you go not a Matty Maggie? Now in our day, Hank, you had to find that you were not a Maggie, but a Matty. But things have changed. Life changes.

Life moves fast. If you don't watch now, you got to define yourself as not a Maggie when you're a Mat. I can't even do it. You got to define yourself as not a Matty when you're a Maggie.

Hey, number one, does this change anything about humans going to Mars? I don't think it does. Number two, would you go to the space hotel? That's a hard no for me.

Yeah, it's probably a no for me as well. So I like that sometimes I'm watching a TikTok and I think to myself, if that person did that 10,000 times, would they still be alive? And I'm like, no, probably not. So that's a thing to not do.

If there's anything that you did at 10,000 times and you'd be dead, don't do that thing. And I think, at least in the beginning, getting on a giant rocket and going up to a space hotel is a thing that one out of every 10,000 times you do it, you might not come back. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the odds will be better than that.

But I don't know that they are. And so I'm going to stay right here. No way the odds are going to be better than that. I love my town.

I love my wife. I love my son. I want to be there for as long as I can be. I want to die on Earth.

If at all possible. Well, look, if I'm 250 years old and I make it to Mars, okay, sure, I'll die wherever. But I want to die of old. I want to die old.

I want to die old as well. But I just want to be very clear about one thing. I do not want to die at the age of 250. I mean, only if it's a really enjoyable 250.

I mean, I'm pretty sore for working out yesterday. And I'm 43. So if I multiply this times five, I don't know, maybe I haven't consulted with my 230 year old self to find out if he's excited about the prospect of being 250. Yeah, it's not worth asking.

This is the thing. It's not worth asking yourself now, because I know how I felt about things when I was 20. And that guy was an idiot. And I'm going to feel the same way about me now at some point.

Oh, yeah, I hope so. I mean, in my case, that that rollover is every three to five years where I look back and I'm like, Oh, John, do you want to update on the computer situation? Well, I feel like I have an update, because I haven't heard the sound of the tugboat in like 10 minutes. Yeah, it is now it has gone from a progress bar to a little very small, spinny wheel.

Oh, no, that's that's something that has occurred. Is it difference? So I want to tell you, I want to tell you that it's good news. I want to.

It's what I have a login. Oh, I can type in my password. Wow. I thought a spinny wheel was due for sure.

But that just goes to show you that there's my world view where every new development is a sign of catastrophe is not necessarily the best way to look at the world all the time. They even open up the questions. The questions are in front of me. Wow.

Remember everything. Oh, hopefully is the thing with feathers that purchase in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. Please don't sue me, Emily Dickinson's estate. I know that it's not in the public domain, which is ridiculous.

Don't include that, Tuna. Yeah, I mean, actually do include that. Yeah. Yeah, take that Emily Dickinson.

Yeah. The state. How could somebody? We don't, we don't, we don't, we obviously don't need to get into it.

Hank, but like Emily Dickinson has been dead for 150 years with all due respect to her descendants of whom there are none. Oh, wow. There is no need for her work to be protected. Wow.

My copyright. Wow. She has been dead. Here's how long she's been dead.

Hank. You know, McDonald's. I do. I love it.

You know, Wendy's. I'm also a big fan. You know Burger King. That's a little less honestly.

Yeah. Wendy's McDonald's and Burger King combined have not been around as long as Emily Dickinson has been dead. Is that possible? There's not a public domain.

She's a very dead person. She nobody, nobody needs her work to not be in the public domain, except for the nameless university that owns and controls her work and profits from it in a tremendous way, despite the fact that they are themselves a ridiculously elitist institution. It's Harvard. It's the one he's talking about, by the way.

Well, no need to name names. But as for how her work is not in the public domain, it's because a lot of it wasn't published, at least wasn't published well, like wasn't published the way she wrote it with all of her lashes and everything until after 1925. It's like when my, my drug company is like, well, stop making that one and we're going to make a new one. Yeah.

That's got 0.2 extra milligrams. You won't be. It's a whole new drug and now you can make it generic out of it. No, you sure can't.

We're not in the, the Prilis Act business anymore. We're in the Nexium business until we can't be in the Nexium business and then we're going to be in a new business. Yeah. Anyway, there is a purpose to intellectual property, but the purpose of intellectual property is not to enrich the world's richest university via the work of a poet who has been dead for 150 years.

What is our next question? John, let's, let's stay deep. This question comes from Iris and you did not highlight it. And so you may not want me to ask it.

But dear Hank and John, I've just read the news that the $1.9 trillion stimulus package is on its way to President Biden to be signed into law. Where is all of this money coming from? And if you can just create this money, why didn't you do that sooner? Do they have that kind of money sitting around or they just print more?

If so, isn't that like maybe bad for the economy or inflation or other economic things that I don't understand, not the flower or the thing in your eyes, Iris? This is, to what extent, John, am I correct in saying that we are living in the middle of a pretty big economic experiment? Well, we are living in the middle of a really big economic experiment in the form of capitalism. Right.

I guess we sort of thought very, very big. Yeah. And we've only been involved in it in this way for like about 90 years. Right.

And in some ways, you can say that capitalism is only like 60 or 50 years old. Right. Different people argue different times for when this kind of monetary policy became prominent. The previous way of doing monetary policy was very bad.

Okay. Can you tell me about it? Yeah, but I can't tell you about it without like infuriating some percentage of our audience. So, so just might not do it.

But the previous way was having the amount of money that a country could use backed by some kind of commodity, usually gold. And that led to a level of inflexibility of monetary policy that this is going to make some people mad, but it's true, contributed to slash made much worse, the Great Depression. Right. So now we have a different way of having monetary policy where basically money, well, it's very important to understand that money is made up and that money is something that we believe in together.

But we believe in lots of things together, like limited liability corporations and intellectual property and nation states and human rights and lots of other things. So the fact that it's made up is not in and of itself an issue, as long as we all believe in it. The United States has never defaulted on its debt, which means that lots of people believe that the United States will always pay back its debt, because it always has. That is contributed or is one of the reasons why debt is very, very inexpensive for the United States.

So like we can borrow and people ask like, well, where do we borrow the money from? The answer is a little complicated. We mostly borrow it from ourselves. Right.

To some extent, we borrow it from our current selves, to some extent, we borrow it from our future selves. But anyway, because people have a lot of faith that the US will pay back its debt, it's very, very inexpensive for the US to borrow money. Like right now, I think that it costs the federal government 2% annual interest rate to borrow, say, a billion dollars. Well, the economy is going to grow by more than 2% a year.

So some people would argue that that actually like that's free money or more than free. Other people would argue, hey, you can't have 10% of the US's GDP in the form of an aid package without a strategy for paying for it. I don't know which of those people is right. I actually think there are pre-solid arguments on both sides.

What I do know is that we were in a big mess. And I think the people who say we know the long term consequences of this, both the people who say it's going to be a big problem and the people who say it's going to be no problem. I think they're both, they have a level of certainty that I don't think is justified by the data. But some people will eventually prove to be right and inevitably those people will be lifted up as prophets who understood the secret meaning of the universe when I would argue that to some extent they got lucky.

Oh yeah. And you know, the wild thing is also that like what we think is going to happen really deeply impacts what happens. Yes. So if we think there's going to be a bunch of inflation, then there will be a bunch of inflation.

There may be some inflation anyway, but yes, it's very true that what we like when we if we start believing that the United States might not pay back its debt, that would be catastrophic. Right. Like it would be so catastrophic that I don't want to say it on a podcast that not that many people listen to. It's that big of a fear for me.

We really can't default on our debt. I sort of imagine through the lens of so if that is very cheap, then you can create and you can create value with the money. Yeah. Then that's worthwhile.

What I'm concerned about is that we don't end up creating value with the money because the money mostly goes to people who just put it in their stock savings or bank accounts or creating any like building something, doing something, spending it so that other people will be building or manufacturing things and then it'll just sort of sit there. And at that point, then the entire economy is just kind of a bunch of people putting money in the stock market so that other people can eventually take it out and have more money than they used to, which doesn't really seem like an economy. Yeah. This stimulus bill definitely has more actual stimulus in the sense of stimulating economic activity and consumer spending and stuff than the last stimulus bill did.

Or what I think how much is still to be determined. Right. Yeah. I mean, it is a it is an interesting moment to be around in and we will see.

John, this next question comes from Indy who asks Dear Hank and John, I was reading about land restoration practices to better capture carbon dioxide emissions. And I was wondering, is it actually likely that humans will reduce our carbon dioxide emissions enough to make a difference in time or should we be relying on or investing in carbon sinks like forests and grasslands to pick up a lot of the slack that we will not achieve ourselves? I guess I want to know if I should be paying more attention to land restoration work than fixating on carbon neutral plans, not a rock, Indy. Uh, gosh, we need to do both.

We there is not a tool in the in the climate change tool kit that we are not going to have to utilize. Okay, but that said, it's really important that we're not going to plant trees our way out of climate change. Oh, yeah. We are not carbon capture and storage, whether it's like natural through through like methods that people will use to do a good job of.

It's one of the things you have to remember, there's always been trees and trees, you know, like they tie up the carbon dioxide, but not forever. Not many things do type the carbon dioxide forever or else there wouldn't have been anymore in the atmosphere. So like mostly it's a cycle and the carbon dioxide comes back out eventually. Now, there are things you can do to make it not come out and we will do those things, but it's going to basically require, we will not do those things unless we create a system that rewards people for doing them, which we don't have yet.

And that can actually like lift people out of poverty for doing them or, you know, help people create businesses that do them. And there will also be carbon capture and storage that is more industrial scale. Like how do you actually turn carbon dioxide into something that might be useful, like drywall. But the main, that's going to be like the last 10%.

The main thing we need to do is get is like make steel production as close as possible to carbon neutral as we can make power production as close to carbon neutral as we can make concrete as close to carbon neutral as we can, which is basically impossible. So that's why we need things that we're going to need some carbon capture and storage to hit neutral, because if you want to keep using concrete, it requires the release of carbon dioxide. It's not like moving it around is the problem. The actual chemical reaction that produces concrete, which is a really wonderful material that I don't see us finding a way out of using really for not in the next year, 10 years, not in the next 100 years.

I don't know. There might be better materials that will someday pop up, but it's, you know, it's hard. Yeah, we need a lot of concrete. It's a very difficult thing to shift because we know how to build buildings away and figuring out a new way to build buildings is really dangerous.

And you have to be really careful about it because people live inside them. Yeah, and it's not just that it's also that we're not only thinking about the richest countries in the world, like in middle income countries and low income countries, the need to produce concrete is really profound. So it's important to emphasize that the first 90% is from reducing the carbon emissions associated with power production, steel production, that kind of thing. Transportation, and also agriculture.

The last 10% is figuring out carbon storage solutions. This is another thing that our economic system is not great at. Our economic systems are not really good at understanding long-term value, especially like 100 year long-term value. And I don't know how to make them good at it.

I think there are a lot of people with a lot of good ideas, but I don't know how to, I don't really know how to solve that problem. I don't know how to solve that incentive problem, except with government regulation and international regulation. There will be a technology component and regulation component. In Europe already, they have systems that are like, you have to pay money to release carbon dioxide.

And so if you release less, you pay less. And also if you're in an industry where you're already producing it, if you can reduce it, then you can actually get money from your competitors who will have to basically pay you because you did it and they didn't. So it creates good economic systems. We almost had a carbon trading system in 2009.

We almost did. And yeah, and you're a password. I think it's easy to say that Europe is doing everything better than the US because it's easy to rag on us. We do something better.

They do something better. But we need to look at the systems that are working and use them because when it comes to carbon dioxide, there's no reason to not release it into the atmosphere unless you create regulation to prevent it from happening. If you do not put a cost on that thing, we'll just keep doing it. Why wouldn't we?

Yeah, you either put a cost on it or you have a tyrannical government that says no more carbon. And I prefer to put a high cost on it. Yeah. This has gotten a little heavy and I want to emphasize that we're going to be okay.

I think people feel like civilization is collapsing, Hank. I think some people do too. And I definitely don't. I don't say.

Yeah. I don't think it's worth it. I might be wrong. I've been wrong before.

I'm off and wrong. But I really don't think that we are on the edge of a dramatic decline in the human population or the level of complexity and human systems. I don't think any of that is in the near future. I do think we need to take active steps to prevent it.

But I think we can take those steps. I believe in the I really do believe in our ability to do this. Yeah. And I also what I really do believe and we need to internalize this and get used to it is that every disaster is a primarily a justice problem.

Yes. And the climate disaster will absolutely be a justice problem. And of course, like everyone will be negatively impacted by it. And just like this disaster that we are currently in the middle of, everyone is impacted by it.

But it is clear that the way that those impacts are distributed is unjust. Yeah, I think all the time about partners and health mission statement of being a social justice organization that enacts that justice through offering a preferential healthcare option for the poor. Yeah. Because the maternal mortality crisis in the world, the child mortality crisis in the world, these are our social justice problems at their core.

They are not caused by anything other than human choice. Like there was a time when a huge percentage of children died before the age of five because we didn't know how to prevent that. But that was many decades ago. And so now it is primarily an issue of justice and equity.

And the same is true for climate change, same is true for COVID, same is true for our economic systems. Like all of these things are expressions of either moving toward a more just and equitable world or moving away from one. John, will has a question that's going to seem really, if this is your first episode of the podcast, it'll unaccurate. Okay, little asked to be your handkerchief John, my daughter Willow.

Oh, this, I mean, maybe I don't know, maybe they're both named Willow. I might have this question is full of surprises already. I love that we've taken a real hard turn. And I don't know where we're going, because I've definitely never been on this road before.

Okay, here we are. Willow has a daughter named Willow who has a problem. No, no, not even. Oh, okay, Willow and Willow listen to us every night.

Hello, Willow. When it's bedtime. Great. And so I'm sorry if this has been an arch one.

Geez. And she calls you to the silly brothers. Well, not so much for the last five minutes, Willow. Do you know how to make cake?

She wants to ask. Please also let us know what are your favorite cakes sincerely? Willow. I mean, all indicators point to both of them are named Willow.

Willow, what is our what is this podcast? What are we doing? It's the silly brothers. It's the silly cake brothers.

The silly brothers just trying to be the serious brothers and it's uncomfortable. I agree. Willow, let's go back. We're the silly brothers.

John, what kind of do you not make a cake, John? Yeah, I do. Not to brag. I don't want to make a cake in that there's a box at the store.

No, no, no, I can make a cake from scratch. Oh, wow, wow. I can make a cake from a box. And it's good.

The thing is like box cake is pretty good, Willow, but I can also make a cake from scratch if if called upon now I can't make like a like a, you know, official wedding cake. I would make it as a cake decorator. Let's put it that way. But I could make a cake that's delicious.

I can make a good solid chocolate or vanilla cake. I can't make like a fancy, I can't make a carrot cake, you know, I just not that good at shopping carrots, to be honest with you, Willow, but I can make I can make a standard cake. Yes. Okay.

Can you make a cake? I can make a cake from a box. And I've never needed to nor been especially interested in trying to figure out how to make a different way. Why?

Why? They know what they're doing. It's the same ingredient. They're a little, they're a little bit better.

I mean, it's like a little bit better if you make it. I mean, if you're a really good cake maker and you make it is way better. Yeah, sure. If you're me and you make it is a little bit better.

But I wouldn't I wouldn't win Great British Bake Off. Willow, let's put it that way. Like maybe last year for Sarah's birthday, Alice and I baked a cake and then I decorated it and Sarah came home that afternoon and she saw the cake and she was like, Oh, it's so sweet that Alice decorated the cake. And I was like, no, no.

It was me. Yeah. I wrote I wrote Happy Birthday Mom and that shaky jittery cake handwriting. Not even the oldest child she thought.

No, no, no. I had to Google how to write Happy Birthday and cursive. Why wouldn't you? Who knows how to do this anymore?

I was like, I was like looking at the Google image of how to write Happy Birthday and cursive and it was like I was trying to like, I don't know, write in German or something. I was like, Okay, and then there's a curve there. And that's a straight line or whatever. Okay, that works.

Sure. What's your favorite cake, John? Carrot cake by a country mile. What's yours?

Oh my God, I can't believe you are such a cereal water eating monster. Carrot cake. It's not like having water in your cereal. Well, a lot of people like Carrot cake.

By the way, Willow, if you haven't tried water in your lucky charm, check it out. It's incredible. I mean, chocolate cake with chocolate icing or possibly mint icing or like, not like mint icing, but like the stuff that's on the inside of a peppermint patty, like that stuff, it's not like denser than icing is what I want. I wanted a lot of mint flavor and I wanted to be really chocolatey, but also just like a hot chocolate cake.

Like when you go into the inside of it at Chili's and it's got a bunch of hot chocolate sauce in there. One of those we don't have chilies in this town. Well, I apologize. I apologize for not being adequately sophisticated in my cake choice.

I didn't realize that you were going to have such a high quality cake in mind as the Chili's molten chocolate love. They're really good. They are good. I'm not saying anything bad about Chili's chocolate cakes.

They're incredibly good. I'm not saying that they're not good. But in fact, I'm reminded that today's podcast is brought to you by Chili's. Chili's it may or may not still exist.

I think at least at some point wanted their baby back. Oh, yeah, it was a huge restaurant when we were kids. It was very fancy when we were growing up. Like our parents would take us to Chili's on very special occasions.

And I don't know if it's I think I haven't been outside in like on a car trip in nine months. I have no idea what's out there. What is it like out there? Oh my God, John's podcast is also brought to you by the progress bar.

The progress bar is going at its own pace. Thank you very much. My guest is also of course brought to you by Harvard University, Harvard University in desperate need of your donations, which are astonishingly tax deductible. Oh my God, and his podcast is also brought to you by the Anthropocene Reviewed book.

The Anthropocene Review book doesn't cover. Now you can go look at it. It's very pretty. And it's also got a lot of words inside of it that John's been working very hard on.

And you can pre-order it wherever books are sold. Yeah, including some words by Emily Dickinson that I had to pay a pretty penny for. Wow, Harvard. Gee.

This episode of your Hank and John is brought to you by Shopify. There are a lot of things that stand between I have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me. And that is what Shopify makes easier. When you start with Shopify, the tools to design and launch and take payments, they're all there from day one.

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Imagine for a moment that you are absolutely immersed in some work where you're creating something beautiful or useful or useless and ugly but you love it anyway and you look up and suddenly you have a feeling and that feeling is that it is 2.30 pm and that you did not eat lunch. What are you going to do? Are you going to get meal delivery that's going to cost too much and maybe be a bit of a mistake or are you going to go to the cupboard and just eat several fistfuls of peanuts? Those are my two choices unless I have a factor in the fridge.

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See website for more details. John, when you have a question before we get to this from Marzane, this one is for me. When you order Arby's on DoorDash, how do you get sauces? So I disagree with your premise.

I believe that's what the Zen Masters would call a question wrongly put. But then the answer is that I would I would go ahead and use my own barbecue sauce is the answer. I would I have not to brag better barbecue sauce in the home than Arby's can offer me. But they got the horsey sauce, John.

The horsey sauce is good. But again, you can make your own horsey sauce. I'm very busy speaking of struggles. Let's move on to the news from Marzane, FC Whimbleton.

I'll go first. Oh, yeah. Yai. AFC Wimbledon have sunk sunk sunk to the last place, last place in the league one table with a stirring goal difference of negative 24 for the season.

There's 13 games remaining. So the weird thing is that even though we're in last place, I still kind of like our chances because there's two things going on right now. One is that we've got this new manager, Mark Robinson, who I love and everybody loves. And he's just a straight shooter.

He's playing the kids. He's doing everything he can to figure out a way for us to stay up. And then the other thing is that we have two games in hand. So we've played two fewer games than almost all of the teams around us.

So maybe, maybe if we win and tie those two games, then maybe we wouldn't be so much in the relegation zone anymore. It's incredibly crowded. Just that you're in the relegation zone. Is that you are last?

We're in last. We're last. We're also the only team in the bottom half of the table that hasn't won a game in our last five games. So it's not a great situation.

Yeah. On the other hand, we are only one good run of results away from hope. Right. I'm little bit of found away not to get relegated for so long that I just I kind of believe we're going to find a way.

But I will confess that the way is not clear at the moment. Is there advantages to being in the up in the league that you're in for as long as you've been in it? Oh, you mean like more money or something? I don't know.

No, not really. I mean, maybe modest financial advantages. But so like, oh, it's just what it's just better for you to be relegated to seek a win more games and people would like go to the games more and be more excited. No, I don't, I really don't want to get relegated because it's so hard to get back up.

I just also am see within has never been relegated since the resurrection in 2002. I'm quite proud of that record. I don't know. I think the thing is, I think if we could survive this year, we could have a really good season next year because we'll hopefully have fans in the stadium at last, which means our match day revenues will be much higher, our budget will be higher.

There's there's real hope on the horizon, but we've got to find a way to survive this season. Yeah, well, John, in Mars news, have you ever wondered what a laser sounds like when it's being fired on the surface of Mars? I did until I heard it. Well, okay, I want to play it for you right now.

Anyway, I'm too much of a Mars fan. You can't break these to me anymore. So that's what it sounds like, John. So there's a laser on the surface of Mars.

The nice thing about this laser is nuclear powered laser is that it can shoot rocks and vaporize them, not the whole rock, but like some of the surface of the rock from from 20 feet away, it can do this. So it's like, wow, I can't quite reach that rock or I don't want to go over there I'm busy. It can still zap a rock from 20 feet away. And that sends up some rock dust and then the super cam can study it and figure out its chemical composition.

And also by the noise that it makes, when the laser hits it, you can sort of test a little bit, you can know a little bit about how hard the rock is, which also tells you something about what it's made out of. So the super cam also is this like the thing that has all these tools on it. The super cam also puts some of its other equipment to work, including its ramen spectrometer, which tells us the different chemical bonds in a rock. And that is the first time ramen spectroscopy has been used on a place that is not Earth.

Wow. I like to think of it as like this super cam has a kind of sniffer. Yeah. And it just like kind of all these tools together amount to a sort of like sniffing out of the Martian geosphere, but it's not a geosphere.

It's a marzo-fir. Oh, the super cam. So cool. So cool.

NASA, by the way, it's done a great job of naming things lately, the super cam, the Octavia, butler landing site, Perseverance. I feel like they should, the people who are doing the naming should get some big credit. What a joy to think that Perseverance is there on Mars with its super cam. Great branding.

John, thank you for making a podcast with me. We are now off to record our Patreon only podcast. This week in stuff. I'm sorry for the low quality of my audio this week, if you could tell that at all.

At least my computer is turning on now, a full hour and 10 minutes later. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Manage. It's produced by Rosie on a halcero house in Gibson. Our communications coordinator is Julia Bloom.

Our editorial assistant is about the drug of artie. The music is hearing now and the beginning of the podcast is by the great gun of rollout. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.