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 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. Hey, quick cold open to let you know that I am on the podcast Work Life with Adam Grant.
It's one of my favorite podcasts. Actually, Adam is an organizational psychologist and I recently went on a show to talk about some of the ideas in the Anthropocene Reviewed book and also to talk about ideas about work and life and other things. So I've included a little bit of that conversation. I think about six minutes of it at the end of this show.
So enjoy the show and then at the end there will be a bonus at the beginning of my conversation with Adam Grant on Work Life and you can listen to my episode of Work Life or other episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, here's the show. Welcome to Dear Hank and John. Or is that preferred to think of it, Dear John and Hank?
It's a podcast for two brothers and your questions. Give me advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, it was a disaster. We were not able to upload a normal episode of the podcast the day after Father's Day and so I didn't have a Father's Day dad joke.
But it's actually become really clear to me when a joke becomes a dad joke, John, and that's when it becomes apparent. Oh, God. I mean, it was pleasantly meta, I guess. I'm trying to compliment all of your dad jokes just to try to emphasize to you the parts that are good in the hopes that you can maybe cut out some of the other parts.
Okay, but what I've noticed, and I say this with a tremendous amount of love, I've noticed that you have no desire to get better. I met a guy at the farmers market who actually opened up for the doors. This is true. He opened for the doors.
I was talking to him. He explained music and he was like, Oh, he was saying like, what are my son's favorite bands? You can play one of their songs. They're like, well, he likes the doors.
He probably doesn't do songs. And I'm not even like, this is all true. And he was like, I opened for the doors back in the 60s. And I was like, wow, that's amazing.
And then he said, yeah, yeah, we supported them on a short like the tour. Our band was called the hinges. All of that was true, except for the part that he was called the hinges. Oh, I bet he'd told that joke a number of times before.
But see, no, I made he didn't tell that joke. I made that joke. Oh, okay. Well, that I get there.
Oh, I'm sorry. I think I got confused. I didn't think that I'd signed up for two dad jokes. I don't know.
I'm gonna say that one for next week, I guess for me Father's Day is not about two dad jokes. Let's please move on. It was great seeing you in real life. It was such a joy.
I have not seen your son in two years, which is half of his life. And he is a completely different person now, of course, and my kids are completely different. And then being together was just the most. Oh, God, so sorry.
It was just so joyful. I felt, I mean, honestly, I felt I'd never felt like that before. It was just wonderful to say. I'm so proud of my kids for the way that they included and made space for Orin.
And I was also so proud of Orin for being able to interact with and play with in meaningful ways with these much older children. It was just it was just awesome. It's a great time with family. I knew in the abstract that I would be able to feel that way again at some point in the future, but actually experiencing it, experiencing that joy, experiencing being able to be with people I love together safely is an incredible feeling.
And I know for lots of people listening to this, it's an incredible feeling that is still not available to you. And I'm really sorry. But I'm sharing this joy in the hopes that it can be a reminder that that this is temporary and that the light soaked days are coming. Indeed.
And I felt so like a dad is the thing that I felt, which is funny, because of course, I'm always always a dad. But it was just like remembering the times when we would hang out with our cousins, because that was such a fairly unusual thing. It would happen maybe once a year. And that I was like, Oh, I'm watching that happen.
Like, I remember that. I remember that thing where you're like a cousin is an important person, you know, for some folks, it was for us. And like, you get this, this family relationship that is like not all the time, but is a peer relationship. And so like, having that for the first time was like, Oh, I'm doing like dad stuff.
And also, we could like let them sit together and just like hang out. Yeah, they didn't really want to. Yeah, they didn't want to talk to us really. Yeah, which was great.
They wanted to do that. They wanted to do their own stuff. I want to talk to you. Yeah.
Yeah. I remember that from being a kid too, like when your cousins are there, like you just want to hang out with them. And yeah, that was awesome. So I'm really glad that we got that time.
I'm also happy to be home as my longest I've gone without being in my bed since I think 2018. So, but it was a great trip. And I look forward to going back to as soon as possible. In the meantime, though, let's answer some questions from our listeners beginning with Jess who writes Dear John and Hank, my rabbit, Seamus is probably dying.
I love Seamus so much. I don't want to be sad during the time I have left with him. But I feel like I'm already grieving his loss. How do you keep yourself from grieving the living?
Who's that girl? It's Jess. Oh man, this is so true. And then in the sort of like end years, when you start to like, you can't have like just a pure joy of the relationship because you are seeing the end of the relationship.
And so you can only really have that. Yeah. If you are imagining that all that relationships have that arc and that they kind of have to have that arc. Yeah, but you could feel the same thing at the beginning of a relationship, right?
Like that you know, it's going to end and you're still able to enjoy it. So I think there's a couple of things for me anyway that are happening when I'm experiencing, you know, this sort of pre-grief or whatever. The first thing is that in many cases, like there are losses to grieve before the ultimate loss, right? Like, Seamus may not be able to play with you in the way that you or Seamus, you know, enjoyed the most because Seamus is sick now and maybe disabled or may slow down in some ways or whatever.
And so it's important to remember that like death is not the only loss in life. And it's obviously a really important one. And but there are other losses that we all go through and we experience and those need to be grieved and honored as well a lot of times. But the other thing for me is that even though, of course, the whole time you've had Seamus, you've known that Seamus was far more likely to die, you know, before you than the other way around, you've been able to sort of ignore that fact.
And then as somebody gets older or as an animal gets older, it becomes harder to ignore that fact. But there is still value and joy in the relationship. And that for me is the thing that I tried to focus on. It does not do me any good to try to push down my grief and not feel it.
It doesn't work. Maybe it works for other people. It doesn't work for me. But if I can allow that grief to coexist on like a parallel train track and then on the other train track is the joy that I experience and still seeing that cute little rabbit or the joy that I experience in the relationship that I still have with someone, then I can allow those things to coexist together and they can both be true because I think they both have to be true.
Like, yes, this person or animal or whatever is leaving and that's sad. But at the same time, they are also still here and that's wonderful. And you also have the opportunity to say that John has named this phenomenon, pre-grief or for short, pre-grief in that full-to-date talk a little bit. Yeah, we all experience a little pre-fear in there.
Oh, John, this next question comes from Monica who asks, Dear Hank and John. So I'm known as the Dr. Pepper Girl amongst my friends at work because I love Dr. Pepper like so much so last year for my 23rd birthday I flew to Texas to go to the Dr.
Pepper Museum for John's recommendation and it was one of the best museums I've ever been to. We got to stop the question. There's a lot that troubles me about the previous sentence. I feel like I need to set the record straight on about 75 different issues.
So I don't like to interrupt a question, but this is an emergency. Okay, number one, I, just to be clear, I do not recommend that anyone choose as their first post-pandemic trip a flight to Waco, Texas to see the Dr. Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute because when Foote's Clumets was setting it up, he wouldn't have a Dr. Pepper Museum unless there would also be a free enterprise museum on top of it.
Number two, number two, and I'm really happy that you enjoyed the Dr. Pepper Museum, but I'm just going to level with you flat out Monica. If it is one of the best museums you have ever visited, you need to visit more museums. I want you, I understand you had a great trip to Waco and it's a cool city and I'm really glad that you got to go there and everything, but you need to go to New York and you need to go to the Met.
You need to go to Chicago and you need to go to the Art Institute and I mean forget come to Indianapolis and go to, horrifically they renamed the Indianapolis Museum of Art for no reason, New Fields. So Jess, even, your name's not Jess, Monica, even come here to, oh god, New Fields and you'll have a really good museum experience. Okay, Hank, you can now go on with the question. I'm glad I'm going to get a Dr.
Pepper tattoo in the near future. No, I got to stop it again. Jess, I want you to think long and hard about that Dr. Pepper tattoo.
I want you to spend, I don't know, I feel like you're on the verge. I was thinking about getting a tattoo this week, but I haven't ever gotten one. So I think I might not. Wait, what tattoo are you thinking about?
The first illustrations of human neurons by Santiago Romone Call. That's on the Crash Course coin. Actually, which you could no longer get, I'm sorry. That would be very near the top of my list of tattoos.
It's very beautiful. Okay, obviously, if you want a Dr. Pepper tattoo, Monica, you should get it. But just bear in mind that you don't know what the Dr.
Pepper Snapple Curry company might do in the future because they're a private corporation and they could make a big misstep. Who knows? That would be my only concern is you're really hitching your wagon to that kurig Dr. Pepper Snapple group star.
Oh, none of this is the question. What's y'all's take Monica asks in the actual question now that John's done delivering free advice that was not asked for. What's y'all's take on Dr. Pepper zero?
Oh, I have not had a diet soda in eight years. I do not like them. I know, I think it's very admirable. It's something I really like about you.
I did try Dr. Pepper zero as soon as it came out. It's good. You know, it's okay.
The issue is that it's the reason like diet drinks like Coke zero and even like Mountain Dew zero sort of work is because diet coke and diet Mountain Dew are like distinctly worse than regular coke and regular Mountain Dew and Coke zero and Mountain Dew zero are like significantly closer to their full calorie analog, right? But the thing about Dr. Pepper that makes Dr. Pepper so interesting, the reason it's fundamentally different from every other kind of soda is that it doesn't taste like anything else.
Like when Charles Alderton, and you could read about this in the other video book, when Charles Alderton was inventing Dr. Pepper, he wanted to invent a soda that tasted the way that the soda fountain in Waco, Texas at his pharmacy smelled all of these artificial flavors kind of coexisting together. And that's why there's 23 different kinds of syrup flavors in Dr. Pepper.
And so it's really hard to make anything taste like Dr. Pepper. We know this because all the Dr. Pepper knockoffs taste so little like Dr.
Pepper. Is this why this why Hannah for her 23rd birthday went to the Dr. Pepper Museum? Very possibly to celebrate the 23 serves.
Oh, maybe Hannah's a genius Monica. I'll get her name right one of these days. So that was genius if you did it Monica. Anyway, diet Dr.
Pepper tastes like Dr. Pepper, which is a miracle because Dr. Pepper doesn't taste like anything else. Dr.
Pepper zero also tastes like Dr. Pepper. It's just that for me personally, it tastes a little too much like Dr. Pepper.
Like I kind of like Dr. Pepper because it's a slightly less intense sugary rush than a full flavor Dr. Pepper. And Dr.
Pepper zero is coming dangerously close to full flavor Dr. Pepper levels of sweetness, which I can't handle at my advanced age. Well, I mean, John, I shouldn't have been able to ask this question. Of course, you have both very robust and delightfully nuanced and boring opinions on this.
Well, you can call them boring, Hank, but I'll tell you what, in the Dr. Pepper fan forums, my takes are blistering hot, and everybody wants to either get on the bandwagon or take me down. Oh, is that really happening? Oh, yeah, are you kidding?
This whole audio bit is going to be clipped and put on the Dr. Pepper fan forums and people are going to be debating it for months. Are you? I can't tell if you're going to be wondering people who are like John Green continues to be the greatest brand ambassador, Dr.
Pepper has seen since Foote's Clemens himself, and there's going to be a whole other group of people who are like John Green's takes on Dr. Pepper have done more to harm Dr. Pepper than anyone since Foote's Clemens said that Dr. Pepper should be drunk hot instead of tea.
Okay. I really don't know both because you're doing a good job of telling the story and also the internet can no longer surprise me. I really don't know whether you've been sort of raked over the calls with the Dr. Pepper fan forums.
I have on occasion. Do you want to be worried for you? No, no, no, it's not. It's not a tumbler 2014 situation, Hank, but I have on occasion just as a prominent Dr.
Pepper fan. I have, I have been like, there are a lot of other people who really love Dr. Pepper and they have their own strong opinions about it and like they don't necessarily like me going on and like trying to like shape the public's opinion of Dr. Pepper.
We can move on from this conversation. Okay. Do you have a question for me? All right.
If you got another question from Lindsay who writes, Dear John and Hank, I've been rewatching the Marvel movies and I noticed that things are always blowing up in space. There's a big gas explosion and shrapnel flying all over. But like, correct me if I'm wrong here, but my understanding is that there's no oxygen in space. Is that like what would actually happen?
Would there be flames and fire and huge explosions? Would trap local flying everywhere help me understand fumes and flames, Lindsay? It's just flames and fakes, but that doesn't matter to me. I'm not a good reader.
Yeah, you absolutely have an explosion in space because as long as the fuel is contained in whatever thing is exploding. So theoretically, you got a spaceship up there. That spaceship needs to contain a lot of energy in order to move its own big old self around and whatever and whatever is containing that energy is a lot of energy stored in a very dense spot, like a gasoline tank, but probably even more so because it's probably fusion power or something. And if you blow up a gasoline tank in space, does it look like if you blow up a gasoline tank on Earth?
No, in fact, a gasoline tank would not blow up in space, but it would blow up on a spaceship because the spaceship has the oxygen. But in this case, it probably isn't going to be oxygen. It's probably going to be some futuristic fuel that isn't about combustion at all. It's about some kind of nuclear power.
And in that case, you could definitely have a nuclear explosion in space with no problem. Fusion explosions happen in our solar system a lot. And they're the whole reason why we can exist and are warm and not frozen, uh, solid and dense. So definitely came to us.
So you're saying that basically it's because a lot of spaceships are blowing up all the time on a nearby star called the Sun that we're alive. Just blowing up to subtract the spaceship from the equation. But yes, but there's the equivalent of a number of spaceships exploding all the time. Yeah.
And that's yeah. That's why it's warm today in Indianapolis instead of being dead. Yes. Correct.
And in fact, maybe that would be a good way to imagine the sun is just a lot of spaceships exploding. Yeah. But yeah, so that's probably what's happening. You could also just have a spaceship exploding space because there's going to be oxygen on the inside because we're going to have to breathe it.
So if you if you had enough gasoline in there, you could probably blow your spaceship up because it would increase the pressure really dramatically as that as that oxygen and gasoline or whatever your fuel is turns from a liquid to a gas, you would have to you'd have an awful lot of exploding happening. And also, like, for example, you know, rockets have to have to sort of do their flamethin, but they carry the oxygen around with them. But if you mix those two with, there's like an accident where all that stuff mixed together, they could totally combust even in space before all that gas has a chance to spread out. Have I ever told you about the time I watched the movie Gravity with my beloved wife, Sarah?
Oh, God. Okay. So Sarah has a difficult time not talking in movies when there's something she feels strongly about like when we're in the movie theater. And so she'll start out just sort of like mumbling mumbling mumbling mumbling and then slowly the mumbling will grow louder.
And then I would say about like 20 minutes before the end of Gravity, I finally understood what she was saying, which is why is Sandra Bullock's hair not floating and flying all around her face all the time? Everyone knows what Sandra Bullock's hair would be doing in the vacuum of space. Why is it not doing that? I mean, there's an awful lot of this.
I mean, Gravity was a very difficult movie for me to watch John. As you might expect. I was very difficult. It was very difficult for me to watch as well, not because of any science stuff, but just because like I've got, you know, pretty bad vestigular system.
And so I need a camera that's like grounded somewhere, you know, I need to know what's up and what's down or my eyes, but this is just chilling their sockets. Yeah, I'll say, the beginning of that movie is very, very intense. It's very good filmmaking, but it is just hard to watch from, oh God, I'm watching that scene right now. I've just loaded it up.
I've just loaded it up. I can't do it. What is happening? What is happening?
Why? Who is being pulled in that direction? Does it make sense? Yeah.
She's going one way, and her hair is going down, always down. Because that's the whole name of the movie is friendly. Where is it going? Yes, but the only thing subjects to it is Sandra Bullock's hair.
Well, also just at random times, other things. Yeah, I mean, it just depends on whether it's convenient for there to be gravity. They added to they just attracted, they added this attract. I also really enjoyed the movie.
I don't want to take anything away from the filmmaking, which I thought was brilliant or the performances or anything. It's so hard to make a movie. It's so easy to criticize one. Yes.
But from my perspective, I guess to come out from more of a humanities angle, my biggest problem with the movie was not necessarily the hair, not adhering to the laws of nature. It was more the, how do you say, continual, convenient reappearance of a dead person? Well, you know, that's all I can say is that it's an absolute joy to watch a movie with Sarah in the movie theater. It really is.
She also like, she just won't whisper. You know, it's like she doesn't want to say it to just me. She wants to say it. I mean, I don't know what it's like to be in a movie theater anymore, John.
I forgot. Yeah, me too. I mean, I don't know that I'll ever know again, but there's a little part of me that misses movie theaters. I'm going to see Fast and Furious 17.
Special effects are going to be completely in line with the laws of nature. All right, this next question comes from Carly who writes, dear John and Hank, I'm a 22-year-old still living with my parents and my parents have recently started to make friends with several families in our new church. And subsequently, we've been asked to dinner by multiple families. Now, these families know I exist.
We'll even like share a greeting or very limited small talk. I also have a 19-year-old sister and she feels similarly like the friends are my parents and we are, you know, acquaintances. The problem is that these new families have been saying, we want to have y'all over for dinner. Now, who is y'all?
Am I included in y'all? It's not that I'm hoping for an invite. I just want to make sure that I'm not supposed to be there. When people want to have y'all over for dinner, do they want to have me over for dinner?
That's a great question and I don't think there's any way to know. This is the great shortcoming of y'all, which is an amazing word, a wonderful top 10 all-time word word. It feels to me like they're letting they're leaving it open. Yes, that's what I was going to say.
They're doing they're yalling it as... Yeah, this is an our call. It's y'all's call. Exactly.
Y'all decide what in this case constitutes y'all. So what y'all call... It's the y'all call. What they're saying...
Actually, now I like it again. I do too. It's not a limitation. It's an advantage.
You just have to understand it. You're right. That's exactly right, Hank. What I initially thought was a weakness if y'all turns out to be yet another one of its many strengths.
It's the y'all call. They're saying, y'all decide what version of y'all y'all want to bring to dinner. Y'all decide. Y'all know...
Y'all know who y'all is. Y'all know if y'all get along. Y'all know if Carly is good dinner company or not. Y'all decide.
Y'all is y'all's call. It's like a sentence out of Ulysses. That's actually... That might be the best sentence that's been written since James Joyce wrote Love, Love, Love in 1904.
Oh, y'all's y'all is y'all's call. Wow, Hank. Wow. And look, now that's a conversation that you're going to have with your parents, which doesn't necessarily make things better.
Carly, I think you just sit down with your parents and you say, listen, y'all, me and my sister, we are... We love y'all. We support y'all. We appreciate being able to live in y'all's house.
But we're not y'all. We are more of a wheel, if you understand what I'm saying. We're a will and y'all have fun this weekend at the Hernandez's house, but we're going to wheel. Wheel.
Be on the couch looking at TikToks. That's such a great way of explaining to your parents that even though you all live together, things have changed a little bit, you know, that like it's like you have to make... It's like a coming of age moment when you say to your parents like, hey, moving forward, when people look at us and say y'all, they mean you and you, but not me or her. Wow, that kind of hits me in the heartstrings, John.
It's... Oh, I know some days, some days our kids, Hank, are going to look at us and they're going to say, I regret to inform you, I am no longer part of your y'all. I can't talk about it anymore. This next question comes from Jolene who asks, I thought it was fun.
I thought it was all fun and games. Dear us, Hank and John, can a box be round or oval? Won't take your man, Jolene? And then Jolene writes in a PS that they won't take your man due to being a lesbian.
So actually definitely not going to happen. This, my first instinct was like, no, of course, a box can't be round or oval. And then I was like, no, of course it can. So I don't know where I did I come down on this.
My first instinct was that Jolene would be a hard name to have, because everyone would sing the song to you all the time. I'm sure that's not something Dolly Parton intended. No. But I do feel like she kind of owes you some royalties.
Absolutely. So picture head in your head, John, a box. I see a box. It's definitely kind of cubical.
Yeah. Yeah. It's an extruded rectangle of some sort. If you show me a round box, I'm going to say it's a box.
It's a box. If you show me it, if it's made a wood and it's hard especially. Even cardboard. Even cardboard.
A wooden cardboard box? Here's what I'll say. Look, when I was a child, I had a box collection, an extensive box collection. Now I know what you're wondering.
It's true. He did. I forgot about that. I know what I know.
I sold it all on eBay. That is what people are naturally going to wonder. Did you treat my box collection the same way you treated my beloved baseball card collection and sell it on eBay? The answer is no.
Hank only sold the valuable boxes on eBay. That's not true. I have no first preclarity. I have no idea whether I sold your boxes on eBay.
I barely know whether or not I sold your baseball cards. I only believe that because I've been told. Okay. Well, we could we could talk to Bob and Dad after this.
And we could establish whether or not any of my boxes were ever sold on eBay by people other than me. But anyway, I still have a lot of this box collection, not all of it. And it's a lovely box collection that I maintained from the age of five until about the age of 15. And many of my boxes are round or oval.
And I consider them all to be boxes nonetheless. They were all inside of my box collection. So that is why I feel like as a former, or I guess I should say like a retired box collector myself, I feel like I have a level of expertise in this and that I can say around or oval box is a box. Now the number one definition of box is a container with flat base and sides typically square or rectangular.
But as long as it's not flat base, well, this is flat based and sides. Well, I'm just saying, I'm just saying typically, show me a round box ask someone if it's a box, they're going to say it's a box. Yeah. Oh, God.
Oh, oh, no. Oh, God. What just happened? I sneezed.
Oh, God, sneezing is not normal. Oh, my God. How long have you been sneezing? I need to go to see an allergist.
When did you start sneezing? Was it today? I think that I think that I had some I think that I had some yesterday and also the day before. Oh, no, probably all the holidays before those days.
Oh, my God. No, Hank, early detection when it comes to sneezing is one of the number one interventions that we can make. I got my sneeze journal here, John, you want to look and see how many times I've been sneezing? Yes, please.
I've been parking it down every sneeze because I know so not. And then do you write all the things that you like ate or ingested or thought about in the minutes before sneezing? That's very important because we're never going to be able to be able. It may be boxes, John.
Oh, no boxes. Is boxes the reason we're all sneezing? We got to move on. We can't we can't answer your question, unfortunately, because it's introduced a sneeze into this.
This is a disaster. I can't believe you. There's a box right here. Wow.
There's a box right here. Oh, my God. Oh, God. I can't believe you sneezed.
I can't believe you sneezed on the podcast knowing full well that sneezing is not normal. I can't believe you exposed yourself like that. Also, I can't believe you were able to sneeze without thinking sneezing is not normal because I was worried there's a number with your audio file. The number one thing panic that well, because this is a dramatic shift in my life over the last month for 43 years.
I walked through life, blithely never thinking about sneezes for more than three seconds after they happen. But now, for the rest of my entire life, I'm going to have to think sneezing isn't normal after every single time I sneeze. And for those of you who are familiar with this, this is a reference to a previous episode of the podcast where an actual medical doctor told someone that sneezing isn't normal. And now I can't help but think sneezing isn't normal every time I sneeze.
And I am free from this due to it's a couple bucks. Is it what? A box is a couple bucks. If that's a box, there's a lot of boxes around.
No, no, a cup has to be a couple with a lid on it might be a box. Oh, God. No, no. Hank, we've done the thing again.
We've done the thing again where we try to answer a category question without saying the only true answer, which is that these categories are made up and they are not real. Hold on. I was tweeting. What did you say?
Cups are boxes. I said these categories are made up. They were invented by us. They are inherently insufficient because they depend on language which is itself insufficient and perpetually not up to the task.
And so that is why we have this confusion. It is not a failure of oval boxes or circular boxes or human imagination. It is merely a failure of categorization which always fails at some level because categories are made up. Cups are boxes.
Okay. I put it on Twitter. So it's done now. So glad that you tweeted that.
I work so hard on my tweets. I work on them for days and weeks, craft them with an anvil and a tiny mallet. I don't really know what either of those things is. And you write your tweets like wall were potted.
Yeah. That was like the second one I've done during the podcast, which reminds me, John, that this podcast is brought to you by our new brand of cups, waterboxes, waterboxes.com. Cups for the future. Today's podcast is also brought to you by the Y'all call.
Y'all's y'all's call. This podcast is also brought to you by Prief. Prief is the pre-grief and is a part of life. And today's podcast is also brought to you by another part of life.
The Dr. Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute, proudly serving Waco, Texas, and at least according to Monica, one of the best museums in the world. It is a really good museum. And also, if you love Dr.
Pepper, it's a really, really good museum. John, we have a product for awesome message from Ben Shramke, who says, I'd love to hear you both give each other a compliment. You don't think the other has ever gotten, well, that's no pressure. I'll be using this message as a reminder to do the same for everyone I care about and encourage all of Nerdfighteria to follow along.
After all, small encouragement to the ones you love go a long way, the FTVA. I really like your relatively recent embrace of a cool graphical t-shirt with a long sleeve button down but not buttoned shirt from like a second hand store. I think it's a really cool but age appropriate fashion thing. I have never gotten that compliment.
John, I know that you have never been complimented on your sneeze specific jokes. But in general, I don't feel like people compliment you on your humor enough and don't sort of see that as one of the top five things that you bring to the table, but I absolutely think it is. Well, thanks. That is very nice of you.
It has been really lovely to hear so many people say that the Anthropocene reviewed book made them laugh. I think, I mean, in general, I don't think it's any easier to make someone laugh out loud when they're reading a book than it is to make someone cry when they're reading a book, like both are borderline miraculous to me, that you can have this sort of real world inside your body reaction to a series of marks on a page. It's my favorite thing about reading, like when it can kind of come to life for me in that way. I love laughing out loud when I read.
And so it's been very nice to hear from people who felt like they laughed out loud while reading that book. This episode of Dear Hank and John is brought to you by Shopify. There are a lot of things that stand between I have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me. And that is what Shopify makes easier.
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And John is brought to you by Factor. 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 gonna do? Are you gonna get meal delivery that's gonna cost too much and maybe be a bit of a mistake or are you gonna go to the cupboard and just eat several fistfuls of peanuts?
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Head to Factor meals.com slash deerhank 50 off and use the code 50 off to get 50% off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. This next question comes from Alissa who asks deerhank and John lately my girlfriend and I have been watching a lot of ocean specific nature documentaries. Shout out to our planet with David Attenborough.
Oh, it is very good. And they keep talking about oxygen poor or oxygen rich sections of the ocean. How can water be oxygen poor when water is made out of hydrogen and oxygen? If water was oxygen poor, wouldn't it just be hydrogen?
O2 be rich. Alissa. O2 as an oxygen gas. B-rich.
Yes, yes, yes. B-rich. Because there's a lot of it. Hey, yeah.
Given that the ocean is partly made out of oxygen, at least in my understanding of it, how are there oxygen rich and oxygen poor areas of that ocean? Well, the water parts are always the same amount of oxygen. So it's two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. That's you got yourself some water.
But that's not the oxygen we're talking about. The oxygen is the oxygen that organisms, animals specifically need to metabolize. So they need to take in actual O2. So this is oxygen gas that is in our atmosphere.
It's like 20%. Let's just say of our atmosphere is wait, I think it's more than that. So in our atmosphere, we breathe it all the time. We suck it into our lungs so that we can squeeze in and have it help us metabolize fish and other organisms in the ocean.
Also need to do this. And oxygen gas dissolves in water. And there is an amount of it that can be, and that concentration can vary significantly and can vary for the reasons. The big reason being that it gets consumed by other organisms and it doesn't replenish.
So basically, near the surface, oxygen concentrations are always at the maximum, like you couldn't get anymore in. That is mostly what fish need in order to survive. They need a lot of dissolved oxygen. Now, different temperatures of water can also contain different amounts of oxygen.
So colder water can contain more dissolved oxygen gas. You know, this intuitively, because if soda heats up, it loses a lot of its dissolved gas. Now in that case, it's carbon dioxide, not oxygen, but it's the same rules apply. And so colder water, one of the problems we have out in the west is when our trout streams heat up.
They can't hold enough oxygen for the trout to be able to like breathe effectively. So colder streams are better for trout. And that is also true elsewhere. In fact, this is a super weird fact.
There is a species of fish that has evolved to not have blood, because they don't need blood, because water is so cold that it's pretty good at holding oxygen on its own. So it just pumps water around in its veins instead of blood. Whoa, but it's got to be cold water. It's got to be cold water.
Yes, it's an Arctic fish. Wow, that is that is very cool. Can I tell you, can I and I know that if I'd thought about this, I could have pieced together that I was wrong, but can I tell you what I just always assumed? Okay.
I just always assumed that in the same way that I always assumed that Mars was kind of hot on account of it being red and deserty. I always just kind of assumed that the way that fish breathing happened was that the water goes through the gills and some of the oxygen gets extracted. And that's how they keep on doing their fish stuff. But then, of course, it immediately occurred to me now that I'm thinking about it.
Well, then that would lead first off, that'd be hard work. Second rate. Very hard work. Secondly, it would lead to much too much hydrogen.
Yes, it would lead to a production of a lot of hydrogen gas, which we would notice. Yeah. But yeah, but that was my thought about how it happened. It is kind of counterintuitive that gas can dissolve in water because we watch solids dissolving in water.
We do that. We dissolve sugar and salt. We see that happening. We know that it can happen.
But if we didn't see that happening, that on its own will be counterintuitive. Like, how in the world do you take a gas or a solid and put into water and have it just disappear? It's just in there. Yeah.
And it's just in there. That's part of how water works. It's one of the great things about water. It's really good at dissolving stuff.
That is weird. But I am a big fan of water. It's yes. My second favorite liquid.
After dying, Dr. Pepper. Yeah, that's why there's no water museum. Hank, you don't see me go to Texas at the Museum of Water and Free Enterprise Institute.
Oh, man, we got to do a water museum. We got to celebrate that like giving stuff. The Museum of Water. I'm going to celebrate it.
I think thank you. And it's not free enterprise. It's just like free. It's just like the ecosystem did this for you.
Appreciate it. Okay. It didn't do it for you, though, just to be clear. The ecosystem did not make clean, drinkable water available in communities of over a million people.
We did that. It was the single together. I mean, it was the single. It was the single most important public health intervention in human history.
It has saved more lives than all medicines combined. And the fact that that most people have clean, drinkable water is the best, I think, testament to what humans can do when they work together. And the fact that hundreds of millions of people still don't have clean, drinkable water is the best indictment I know of of humanity's ability to ignore the needs of other people and to treat lives that feel distant from ours as fundamentally different from ours. So I think that actually we should have a museum of water that celebrates the astonishing and millennia-long history of humans and water interacting.
But of course, Hank, we don't have like many billions of dollars in revenue like Dr. Pepper has to start such a museum. Yeah, do you think the Department of Museum turns a profit or is it sort of a... No, I think it's a brand.
Yeah, it's a brand building exercise. Yeah. I went to the Spam Museum on the way out here. We're at some point well with the Montana.
And it's great. I was a little bit impressed. Yeah, I've heard good things about it. Was the best museum I have ever been to?
Well, I went to the Louvre with you. So I know that's not true. Look, but the Lou doesn't have that vibe that the Spam Museum has. It doesn't.
You're right. It's really missing that vibe. All right, Hank, before we get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, I want to answer just one more question from Marney who writes, Dear John and Hank, have either of you ever read a book that you cannot stop thinking about and you feel like you cannot read another book ever again because it would ruin the feeling after reading that special book? I cannot read another book because I keep comparing books to this special book.
What do I do? Not the Purple Dinosaur. Marney, you can't ask the question and not say the special book. Gosh, yeah, I'm so curious.
I needed I needed to ask this question on the podcast because I need you to email us again and tell us what the special book was so that I could have this experience. Yeah, because no, not really. I definitely have books that really stick with me, but I guess I read a lot of different kinds of books. And so it's very hard to compare like a nonfiction popular science book to like a, you know, like mystery prime novel.
Yeah, I mean, there are books when I read them, I think I want to hold on to this feeling for a long time, you know, like I don't want to read something because I want to be able to keep this sort of wistful, longing, loving, engrossed feeling that I have after reading that book. They've only been a very few times when I read a book and thought like, wow, I want to take a little break from reading to just enjoy, you know, being with that. One was The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Schaven, which I read when I was in high school and it had such a huge impact on me, like, you know, like what Kecherin there I was to kids in the 60s, that book was to me in 1993. And another that I read more recently, but that had a huge, huge impact on me was Mountains Beyond Mountains, the story of the formation of Partners in Health by Tracy Kitter.
And it's a really, it's just a really beautiful book. And I did have that feeling a little bit. But then when I go to go back to reading, I'm always happy to go back to it. And I think to myself, well, look, lots of different books do lots of different things.
That is very right. But I love that feeling so much of specifically when I'm like three quarters of the way through a book and I'm just like, please stop ending. I just want you to keep going on. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. You feel like you could live in that world forever and it's sad to have to leave the world. But the thing is you couldn't live in the world forever and you always in the best books, you leave the world at precisely the right moment, which is like one minute too soon.
Yeah, that's right. So it's no. I was like, well, I'm done with this now. Yeah, right.
That's why I like the best books don't like Peter slowly to a conclusion after the conclusion after the conclusion. Yeah. Speaking of which, it's time to move on to the conclusion after the conclusion. It's the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.
In this week's Mars news, we got more helicopter news, John. How's it going? Ingenuity helicopter has been kicking up dust because that's what it does. It takes off and it like blows air at the ground and the dust goes up in the air.
And we've been learning about dust through this and have discovered things that we didn't expect. So engineers had planned for the dust. They designed the helicopter to be able to operate in all the dust. But during the helicopter's fourth flight where it flew 133 meters while surrounded by a dust cloud, the video of the flight suggests that dust on Mars can get lifted up much more easily than scientists had expected.
And that's exciting because it gives them a new tool to study Mars's atmosphere and to understand how dusty tornado-like events, called dust devils, are able to lift so much of that dust into the air, also maybe gives us a little bit more insight into how dust gets blown off of the solar panels of some of the other Martian experiments. So that's important just for a practical reason, but also for a broader Earth science, Earth science, Mars science reason of understanding how exactly this dust moves around and gets everywhere because that's going to be important to understand when we're there because the dust might be a significant problem because it will get everywhere. And as Anna there have been now seven ingenuity flights, the helicopters blades are spinning at more than 24,000 revolutions per minute and it's going to keep flying along with the rover as the rover moves, so sort of like stay with it because it's how it communicates back with Earth until August unless something goes wrong and that's when its operations are scheduled. Okay, well, it's pretty cool to fly anything on Mars, but it seems like it might be hard to fly a lot of things on Mars over a long time.
Yeah, well, yes. The dust is going to be a problem, Jenna. Yeah, it seems like that. If only there were like a lot of water to tamp it down.
But that is also going to be a problem. Nonetheless, I remain optimistic. Speaking of optimism, AFC Wimbledon have a new name for their pub Hank. So there's a bar at the new Plowlane Stadium, which is going to be opening up to fans hopefully everybody in the UK keep getting those jabs.
Let's get fans back in the stadium. They're doing good, but you know, let's keep it rolling. The Plowlane Stadium will hopefully have fans when the season begins in August and the pub, which is at the stadium and it's really, really cool. It's got like full glass floor to ceiling.
So you can look out on the pitch and then during the game because it's not legal to see the game from a pub. The glass turns to I don't know, like frosted glass. It's pretty cool. Anyway, it has a name and the name for the pub is the Phoenix.
It was voted on by the fans like everything because the fans on the club is somewhat contentious. A lot of people wanted some other titles, but I quite like the Phoenix. It is, you know, it is a club that rose from from the ashes. It reminded me of that great deciline.
I'm the Phoenix and the ash. Oh, God, it's such a great line. But the Phoenix is going to be the Plowlane pub. I really hope to see lots of you at Plowlane.
It's actually been really wonderful. People have been sending me lots of pictures because Plowlane is a vaccination site. And so people have been sending me lots of pictures of themselves getting jabbed at Plowlane. That's cool.
It's really awesome to see. But what would be just as fun would be to see some football there. And so next season, I really hope that I'll be able to go to at least two, maybe even more games. And I would love to see some of y'all there.
So season tickets are available now. If you live in London and you're like, what am I going to do with my life post-pandemic? I have a recommendation. Start going to AFC Wimbledon Games and see if that sparks the same joy for you that it sparked for me.