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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. Welcome to Dear Hank and John. There is I prefer to think of it, Dear John Hank.
It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be advised something you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon John. It's October, which means that I'm officially carrying around the pebble that I throw at people who sing Christmas songs before November. It's called my jingle bell rock. I enjoyed that.
I think there's like a 40-50% chance that I've said that one on the podcast before. I like that one because I didn't see it coming but at the same time it was a punch line which are really my only two requests of your jokes. Hank, before we answer questions from our listeners, there's something that we really need to get to. Very, very rarely in the history of Dear Hank and John has anything elicited the kind of responses that we got to the question of what happens if a person made out of a lemon standing on a scale puts one of their lemon hands into a bucket of water that's on a different scale.
Goodness gracious, our producer Rosie Anna had to create a separate document called Lemon People Bucket Problem. I'd like to think- Which is how long? It's 23 pages long, John. I'm sure that we've both read all of it.
I have read it. It is amazing. Y'all are wonderful. Some of you are wrong.
Most of you are right. There's still a little bit of debate out. There's not a lot of debate. If you are a lemon person, standing on a scale and you put one of your lemon hands into a bucket full of water that's on a different scale, the scale gets heavier.
That scale shows a heavier weight and you get lighter on your scale. Which is not what I expect. It's definitely not intuitive. I saw somebody who I follow on TikTok.
Tom Lum was like, oh, this is great. I'll do it. I'll do it. I got a scale.
I'll put my hand in it. It won't change, right? And it changed. And he was like, oh, no.
This is the outcome in Science that you want. Where you're like, I had a hypothesis and I've proven it to be non-intuitive. Yeah. Although it is intuitive, apparently, if you understand Newton's Third Wall.
Because all the explanations that made sense to me were- and the easiest one for me was from somebody named Michael who wrote, too long didn't read Newton's Third Wall means the bucket scale must go up by the same amount that the person's scale goes down since the force is between the person and the bucket must be equal and opposite. And I was like, I think I have it. Well, I get that. But that doesn't- they couldn't stay the same.
And that would not violate Newton's Third Wall. But then there's the other piece. There is the other piece, which is that Archimedes principle tells us that the amount is equal to the weight of the water displaced. Displacement.
Displacement. So it's not about the weight of the thing that gets put in. It's about how much of the water gets displaced. So just a volume thing.
Oh, goodness. It was extremely complicated. But we got there. If you are a lemon person, I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that I now know what happens to you if you put your hand in a bucket of water that's on a scale. The bad news is that you're made out of lemons. Yeah. The bad news is that we have a saying here on Earth among the humans.
Yeah. Life gives us you. We squeeze you and put sugar into you. Wait, whoa, whoa.
You weren't imagining the lemon people as aliens? Because I was definitely imagining the lemon people as like a, here's what I imagined. Okay. Where do you think- I was kind of thinking about a lemon person movie.
And what I was imagining is there's a lemon in a landfill somewhere that's rotting away and it's like turning. But then it encounters some sort of DNA. It encounters- Oh, no, I got it. It encounters an mRNA vaccine.
And in that moment, the lemon starts to become more like a lemon and then it sniffs out other lemons. And suddenly, there's like a lemon magnet kind of thing happening where all these lemons are coming together inside of the landfill. And then once they become a lemon person, that's the moment when they like emerge out of the landfill, they'll like emerge out of the garbage and like stand up to their full lemon height and are like, I need to put my hand into a bucket of water. It's what the vaccine told me to do.
There's so many- There's so many auto injectors that don't get used for people who have like epinephrine auto injectors. Sure. So maybe it was one of those anemoronae vaccine at the same time. Yes.
And then it's like, oh, just like that. Yeah, I don't know if you've ever actually ejected somebody with an epipenic, but I have. And it is, it's intense. For the person doing the injection?
No, for the other person. Yeah. Well, they do get that that epinephrine. Which it's a big yeah, I could totally see how that could bake a lemon person just want to stick hand in a bucket.
It's like an origin story, John. I hadn't really thought of it. I really, I do really want us to use more lateral thinking in this podcast. And we're trying to think of solutions to the problems.
All of us together on Earth. Yes. Almost every day, I think about my favorite example of lateral thinking, which was when Edmund Haley determined the size of England, like the government or whatever was like, Hey, Haley, we don't know how big England is. And Haley was like, I got an idea.
Here's what I'm going to do. We got a good map of England. I'm going to cut out the largest circle that I can cut out of England in this map. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to weigh the circle and then I'm going to cut out the rest of England and I'm going to weigh the rest of England.
And because I can figure out the area of a circle pretty easily, I can therefore figure out what percentage of the weight the circle is, which in turn will tell me how big England is. Yeah, that's pretty great. That's a smarty pants move. You can't fault that one.
Very impressive. Now that's a man who could tell you about a lemon bucket situation. Oh man, he would have had no doubt. Man, you should hear dear Edmund and Isaac and Haley and Isaac Newton's podcast.
Those guys, they got it figured out. John, speaking of Isaac Newton, I want to ask our first question. Who asks dear Hank and John? My five year old is fascinated by rainbows.
Frankly, so am I. However, after reviewing the color wheel and kindergarten level color theory and comparing it to the weather phenomenon that is a rainbow, I have a question for you. What is indigo? Oh boy.
It's not a primary color. It's not a secondary color. What is it doing in the rainbow? Why doesn't the rainbow have six colors red or orange, yellow, green, blue and purple?
This makes sense. These are the colors that we talk about. This is me adding to the question, not Angela talking because I agree with you. And if indigo is a bluish purple, don't all the colors bleed into each other anyway?
Why don't we distinguish a reddish orange then as well? Percipitation and Pots of Gold, Angela. Do you know why Angela? Do you want to know why?
It's because Isaac Newton said so. Are you serious? Yeah. Yeah.
He was working with prisms and he was like, here are the colors. There are seven of them. Maybe to be complimentary because seven is a nice number or if it's complimentary with, I don't know, other things that there are seven of. Right.
It maybe felt a little bit like a proof of God's plan or whatever. Maybe. Maybe I have always felt when I actually see a rainbow most of the time that there are three colors. I think because I was told that a rainbow had seven colors, I'm always a little underwhelmed by actual rainbows.
I'm always like, ah, I guess. Yeah, it has. I'll tell you what it has. Color, which is incredible.
Very strange. Wild and wonderful. Yeah. If you look at a rainbow, like a really vivid rainbow really closely, here are the colors I see.
Brown, orange, a lot of brown, green, kind of purple and then kind of blue and then kind of purple and then kind of blue and then kind of purple and then kind of blue because there's this thing happening that isn't like the just the rainbow. It's like an additional like rainbow upon rainbows sometimes where you get like more rainbows. Like next to each other. So you'll see the latter part of the spectrum over and over again.
So you see like this like blue band, purple band, blue band, purple band, purple band, which is really cool. But not what you think of when you think of a rainbow. Yeah. I mean, honestly, Hank, I don't really remember what rainbows look like.
I don't know what that says about my imagination. Like it's lack of visual acuity. But when I close my eyes and try to picture a rainbow, I mostly see the letters that spell the word rainbow. Hmm.
Yeah. Well, I Google image search them, which made it easier for me. And having looked at them for a little while, I'm realizing that when you look at a rainbow, you might just be seeing a bunch of rainbows all stacked on top of each other. And they like go back.
Like there's, but you can't see them because they're all in a direction. But I'm just guessing right now, I don't know this. Here's the other thing I want to talk about rainbow stuff. So it's this color wheel thing that Angela brings up.
We think about colors in the way that we experience them, which is that they all bleed into each other. And when you get to purple, like you got blue and then purple in the red and purple is a mix between blue and red. We know this. This is definitely the case.
We can functionally do it. And but then there's this other, the way of like physically understanding rainbows where red and purple are opposites. They are, they are as far apart in terms of electromagnetic spectra as they can be before you get out of visual light and you get into the infrared and the ultraviolet. And so in our perception, color all bleeds into each other in a circle.
But in reality, there is no circle. There is a spectrum from red to violet, and violet is as far away from red as can be. They do not come back around to touch. Despite the fact that in my perception, they come back around to touch.
It's very weird. And that's not a human invention. It is a physiological thing. It is a it's a cells, it's like receptors, the way that we understand this is so cool to me.
And and it is just so indicative of the fact that like we can very functionally see the world in inaccurate ways. And that's okay. And like, and there are in accurate ways, but in human ways, I think that I think the inclusion from it is actually that we need to always be aware of the fact that when we are looking at something, we are looking at it from our particular perspective. And that, you know, this whole notion that somehow you can get outside of your perspective and approach a subject from pure objectivity is it's just over.
Right. There is no future for that way of thinking. That's that's why all my favorite nonfiction books right now are nonfiction books that acknowledge that specific perspective and how profoundly that shapes one's understanding and experience. Like even even books about physics that I love do that.
Like, John de Prescott Weinstein's The Disordered Cosmos does an amazing job of that of explaining cosmology and physics in the Big Bang. But while also acknowledging the particularity of their perspective, that's my that that's all I want to read right now. And this is such a good example of that because it's not like the fact that color isn't actually a wheel that goes around in a circle matters when you are trying to paint, you know, it doesn't like that's not like or even you're trying to understand color theory, like, you're trying to understand like how humans respond to color. It's just that it's not how the electromagnetic spectrum works.
So weird. Very cool. That reminds me of this next question that comes from Jay who writes here, John and Nick, I was just reading an absolute remarkable thing. And when I got to a part talking about my and numerals, it got me wondering, do you all study for your books or do you just rely on past knowledge rhymes with me?
Jay? Well, I didn't have any past knowledge. Jay. I there, I was born knowing nothing.
You should have seen me as a baby. I was in, I didn't know how to poop in a toilet. Put it aside, my lack of my lack of understanding of my in history. I couldn't focus my own eyes.
I could know how to lift my hand. I don't know who my mother was. Who was that? I knew there was a person nearby.
I knew that that person was around the lot. I just knew that there was like a food source. That was my first awareness. Yeah.
But yeah, but the question is well taken. For me, the whole joy of writing is in discovery. And a huge part of that discovery is sort of like within the own recesses of my imagination, you know, taking taking stuff I've known or experienced or thought about and trying to like reshape it refashioned into language. But also a lot of it is new learning.
So I don't know about my in numerals saying what that was like for you. But for me, like I love, like that's one of the things I love about writing is I guess you would call it research, but it doesn't feel like research to me. It just feels like like learning alongside the characters or the essay or whatever it is I'm writing. Yeah.
I mean, sometimes you are, sometimes you have to know more than the characters. So you're not learning alongside of them in that way. But you, yeah, you're out there doing the, it is, it is, can be one of two ways. Sometimes it is, I encounter something that is really interesting and I'm like, I could be a tweet that could be a TikTok.
I could work that into a book. I could make it into a vlog video. I could talk about it in the intro to D.R. and John.
Where am I gonna put that one? Yeah. And sometimes it like this, I love this so much, it's gonna fit really well into the story that I'm telling. And so you work it in.
And then the other way is like, I need a mystery or I need a representation or I need this to, you know, I need something to fill this role. And then you just like, you just start to look around. And it's, it's very much the process of when I see a TikTok audio I would like to use. And I'm like, well, what should the joke be for that?
What is the way that I can use this TikTok audio in a way that is about science? And, and so I can sometimes think, ah, that would be good. Or I can sort of look around and like, have that be in my mind for a little while. And when I come across something, it is just more likely to fit into the frame that I've kept present sort of on the back burner.
And then you plug it in. Or you, and then you do deeper research and you find that there's actually something more interesting because that's always where the really cool little corners of the universe happen when you are actually rather than just being sort of exposed to whatever someone else has found when you're doing that research yourself. Yeah. To use a very straightforward, very old example in my own life and work, I remember I was trying to think of a name for the character in looking for Alaska for Alaska.
And I heard the Velvet Underground song, Stephanie says, where there's a lyric that's like, she's not afraid to die the people I'll call her Alaska. And then I was thinking Alaska is like very big and far away and I'll like often mis-imagined in the imagination of people who don't who don't live there. And I was like, that's interesting. And then when I was researching the history of Alaska and the history of the name and if is it a name that's ever been used for people?
And you know, because I never want to pick a name that's going to like make somebody's life worse. So I always try to make sure that the name isn't associated with the person or else that it's common enough that it's not going to be a problem for them. Anyway, but then I learned what the word means, like what the word that our name for the state of Alaska comes from and it means the place it means land basically, but in a more literal sense it means that which the sea breaks against. And I was like, well, that's also very good.
Yeah. And so then I locked in. And so then I had a name. But really like writing something or creating anything like I feel the same way about making videos or knitting whatever kind of creative work you do, it's always about trying to like fit in puzzle pieces.
For me, it's like a, it's almost a way of puzzling through consciousness, like trying to make some kind of map or some kind of sense out of something that doesn't for me have an inherent map or sense. And that's what makes it so fun. I agree. John, next question comes from Sophia who asks, Dear Hank and John, I recently watched an episode of Phineas and Ferb in which everything in the universe gets 10 times bigger.
And I assume therefore the whole universe itself. Anyway, my brother and I were wondering whether this would be noticeable were it to happen to our universe? Oh, no. Would it affect physics in some way, particular?
Because if it just happened, what if it just happened, Hank? What if I'm 10 times bigger than I was three seconds ago and I don't know, I don't have any way of knowing because everything else is also 10 times bigger? Does it matter philosophically? Does it matter physically?
Would it matter if everything just got 10 times bigger if nobody noticed? Do I even know how big I am or do I only know how big I am relative to other things? No, yeah, you have no idea how big you are, John. You have no idea.
Yeah, you have no idea how big you are. I could be very small. Yeah, you are. Or I could be very large.
You are. Oh, God. This is a thing that happens in high school, where you watch some kind of film on a TV that talks about powers of 10. And they were they existed when my science teacher was in high school, when I was in high school, they've always been around.
But there are a bunch of them. And they take a lot of different forms now. But the idea is like you start out at the smallest thing and then you go like 10 times, 10 times, 10 times, and you see how big everything is. The very strange thing about this is that we are right in the middle between the smallest thing and the biggest thing.
We are kind of right in the middle. We are not as close to in the middle. I also watch that. And we are not as as close to in the middle as I would like.
Like we're not right, right in the middle. I feel like narratively I want to be right, right in the middle. But also we don't we don't really know how, you know, like, right, what's the biggest thing? We don't really know what the biggest thing is.
And we may not really know what this ball is. We have some better ideas about what the smallest thing is. But you're right. We don't know.
We've been wrong before. Especially like we've been wrong about what this ball is big was several times. So I'm not willing to. Hey, I can't believe you've just been talking like nothing's happening when I could be increasing and decreasing and size by factors of 10 every second.
And ever since you mentioned that to me, I have had a feeling of profound vertigo come over me and the only hope that I have, and please tell me that this hope is grounded in reality. The only hope that I have is the speed of light because the speed of light is constant no matter what. And and and and and maybe that's something that I can hold on to. Well, there are a bunch of constants.
So I think it would matter. So if we all if the constants remained constant and and like every atom so it's like functionally what does this mean? If we get 10 times bigger does that mean we have 10 times more atoms? Because if that's the case, it definitely matters.
If we get 10 times bigger and we are 10 times more massive and we are experiencing the same gravity or even more gravity because the earth is 10 times bigger, then we're pancakes like we are in a bad situation. We're not gonna survive. So you would notice that if just the atoms got 10 times bigger, but the particles stayed the same. So if if the neutrons and protons and electrons all stayed the same size, the atoms got bigger, everything would instantly evaporate and nothing would exist because the you know the strong and weak nuclear forces would would not have changed.
But there would be a space feel better. Well, at least you know it's not happening. If I love the idea of instantaneous evaporation of all life, that's a fun one. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It's just a good one. There would no longer be things.
Yeah. You know, let's take let's take that off the table. I'd rather I'd rather not I'd rather not consider it. I'd like to remove that from the list of options.
But but if you can just make it like if you can make all the particles bigger and you can also compensate all of the fundamental forces of physics to also match then yeah, maybe we could just be getting bigger and small. I don't know. Maybe this is the one thing I haven't tried yet. Like maybe physics suddenly makes a lot of sense if you just take into a camp that we might all constantly be changing size.
And all the constants aren't actually constant. They just look constant because we keep changing size along with them. I love I love that you're you're proposing a novel idea in physics as if like I am 100% sure that that has thought of that. Yeah, that's that's that's been looked into extensive.
So yeah, just go ahead and do the math math nerds and tell me whether or not we're changing size all the time. I don't understand any of your fancy integrals. So I'll just be over here. Make a podcast then thinking about frogs.
Okay, Hank, if we could put aside gravity and we could put aside all the other things that would turn into all the problems. Yeah. But but Earth was the same size and all the other creatures were the same size. And you had to be and all you had to pick for all of humanity.
We're either getting 10 times bigger or we're getting 10 smaller. What do you pick? Oh, 10 times smaller every time. Me too.
Because most of the problems that we're creating, I feel like would be 10 times smaller if we were just 10 times smaller. Our houses would be 10 times smaller. Our cars would be 10 times smaller. The crops, the foods.
And at this point, like the question is, would we get eaten by our cats? Like that is the probably. Yeah. And so if you have a cat or maybe a dog, but definitely a cat, this may end up being a bad situation for you.
How small is 10 times smaller? I'd be 20 pounds. So I feel like I could take a cat. You could like it would be a great fight.
I mean, people would pay good money to see 20 pounds. You were a if you were a hundred times smaller, that would be a big problem. If you're a smaller, you're probably figured out like we'd have a lot of infrastructure changes we have to make. Well, that goes without saying yes.
A lot of things would be different. But I think that we wouldn't get eaten by cats, which would be nice. I feel like the immediate problem though would be predation. Like we would have to very quickly develop strategies because all the coyotes would be like, Oh, guys, great news.
The people are finally edible. You know our biggest problem not only has it been solved, but they're food now. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I think that's a lot of the reason why we're this size. I have maintained, you know, so we can even buy coyotes and also so that we can eat and fight with things that, you know, will become our food. People have heard me talk about this before, but I have always maintained that people should be much smaller. I look at my son who is five, got to be five years old very soon.
And I am like, that seems great. Look how close his head is to the ground. It's much harder for him to hurt himself. It's such great solution to climate change to have us all be 10 times smaller than we currently are.
Like, almost all of our problems are because we're trying to fit these ridiculous sized bodies into cars and trucks and things that go. And we're having to like eat all of this stuff that we wouldn't have to eat if we were just 20 pound little creatures, you know, and like, listen, we could still be the dominant species on that. We would have we would have guns. Don't worry about that.
Believe me, the first thing, the first problem that would get solved is how do you make a gun for that's 10 times smaller. Somebody would be like, hours into this phenomenon. I think you're thinking that everybody's first thought was, will they still get to have a gun though? Well, I am very worried about coyotes, Hank.
Like that's my number one concern. Coyotes stay the same size. I get 10 times smaller. I live in a place with a lot of coyotes and I have looked into their eyes and they want they're ready to eat me.
Okay, so I'm going to need a gun that's 10 times smaller or some kind of system. What are you going to do to the coyote, John? The thing we would do, Hank, is we would immediately build these like mechanized suits that would make a six feet tall again and we would go back to using all of our old infrastructure and we would continue to burn fossil fuels out the wazoo. That's what we would do.
No, that's my bet. We would people. Well, it's not like people are driving around in cars that are like the right size for them now. That's a great point.
Like we're trying to imagine this highly hypothetical world when, yeah, people are going to just be in there's like, no, they're getting in a big truck. We know bigger. We know exactly what would happen if people were dead down smaller, which is that they would develop incredibly sophisticated strategies for driving current sized minivans. Yeah.
All right, this next question comes from Jacob. Be right there, John and Hank, whatever I go to the dentist, I always find it awkward staring into my dentist eyes as he works on my face. But if I close my eyes, I still feel awkward because every five minutes he asks, are you okay? Should I leave my eyes open or keep them closed?
Sincerely, Jacob. I try to look at my feet. You know, like, I try to look at my shoes. My eyes are open.
Yeah, I can look down. You can't look down. You're looking up. You gotta tilt your head up and open your mouth real big.
No, you can't see your feet. I'm going to the dentist soon. So I haven't been in a way. Why slow down?
What? You can't look down? No, I'm not going to dentists in my mouth. What?
I don't understand. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. So your eyes, they're on top of my nose and nose and mouth. When your face goes up.
Okay, no, I want you to tilt your face up toward the ceiling. Now, I want you to look down at your microphone. You see how you're doing that? You're looking down.
That's very good. I'm very proud of you, but you can look down when your face is up. Yeah, I can barely see it. I can see my cheeks moving around when I talk.
I just try to look down. That's my strategy so that my eyes are open and the dentist isn't like is he dead. But at the same time, I'm not making eye contact because I find, I mean, I find eye contact uncomfortable in the most normal experiences. So that's my strategy.
I want, I just want a VR headset that I wear while I'm at the dentist that does two things. Number one, it tells me whether my mouth is open enough because I always think this time, I'm going to be so good at keeping my mouth open that the dentist will not have to say, he can you open up a little because I always get distracted and my mouth starts to float close. And then the dentist is like, Oh God, another another one. I can't see any of the teeth.
And so I feel like I'm a bad dentist patient. The second thing I want it to do is give me just an episode of Star Trek the next generation that I can watch because I don't want to be here. I want to be on the USS Enterprise in the 24th century. Yeah, I've spent way too much of my life at a dentist's office.
Yeah. But not enough for the last year and a half there. I do not want to tell you how long it's been since I've been to the dentist. Don't tell me it's going to stress me.
I can't really. I can't handle it. I'll tell you right. We're moving on.
This next question comes from Trento Rice, do you John and Hank? Not that I was planning on doing this anytime soon. But if I fell through a cloud, would I get wet? Oh, I have a great answer for this question, John.
Great. What is it? So during the last, so when we recorded this, I have just gotten back from celebrating my 15th anniversary with Catherine, our 15th anniversary. And we were in California and we were in a giant grove of of redwood trees, these giant beautiful trees of varying ages.
It's really intensely beautiful. And it was raining. And I was it was raining, but it was raining very sort of nicely. And so we were walking through this rainy redwood forest on sort of a sort of half path, half road.
And then suddenly we came out from the redwood trees and it wasn't raining anymore. Because it was not raining, John. It was just foggy. But the redwood trees were getting wet.
And they were dripping all the water off of them because they got they got all wet. And that's part of how redwoods are able to grow so high is because they can get water up at the top without having to pull it all the way from their roots, because they can get it from the sky. So you would if you just sit in a cloud for long enough, you'll get kind of damp for sure, especially if you're, you know, cool, I think, I think you have to be like, like, like more stuff will condense on you if you're cooler, but clouds are just a little drop of water. So yes, you will get damp the more time you spend in a cloud, which is just fog.
So you can spend time in a cloud if you would like to. I feel like the question was more like, if I fall at terminal velocity through a cloud, will I get wet? In which case the answer is no. You'll get a little bit wet.
What is wet? Yeah, you won't you won't be like, first off, you won't be like anything. But to the extent that you are like anything, you won't be like, I just got so wet, like that's not going to be on your list of concerns when it's negative 43 degrees Fahrenheit and you're falling at 224 miles an hour. Sure.
I want to assume that there is a parachute involved. If you fall through a rain cloud, you definitely get wet. Yeah, yeah, you would. It's a rain in there.
It's true. So who's smart depends now? I just wanted to tell that story about the Redwoods because I was so amazed. I was like, why did it stop raining?
Why is it? Because it's usually the opposite. Like you go under a tree to get dry when it's raining. Yep.
But it was only raining under the trees and not out from other trees. Yeah, that's really beautiful. I'm sure that was a lovely experience. I wish I had gone somewhere from my 15th anniversary.
What did you do? Sarah and I went through for a walk through Crown Hill, the cemetery here in Indianapolis. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, because that was fun because we've been married for fairly similar times, huh? Yeah, just a few months different, which actually reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by 2006, 2006 of the year that many great marriages were formed. This podcast was also brought to you by Dear Isaac and Edmund, because you're podcast coming at you from Isaac, Newton and Edmund Haley, as they take on all kinds of thought problems that do and do not involve lemons. And of course, speaking of lemons today's podcast and all of our podcasts for the rest of all time will be sponsored by the Lemon Man.
The Lemon Man formed in the pit of a landfill. And now I'm auto injectors. And now running rampant through the streets of, I believe, Pittsburgh. Ah, I think that that's correct.
This podcast is also brought to you by pizza. Yes. We didn't talk about it in the beginning. It's the first day of pizza.
It's right now, John. And if you go to pizza, miss.com, there are all kinds of amazing products available for purchase. There are there, there's a piece there too. At least there were.
I don't know if they've sold out yet. Two pizza, miss blankets, which are so nice. And one of them is beautiful. And the other one is a very statement piece, one would say.
There's a lot of great stuff at pizza.com. It's available only for two weeks, only during pizza miss this weird time of year where for some reason Hank and I celebrate my mustachioed face from 2008. And as always, all of our proceeds and royalties go to charity. So check it out, pizzemas.com.
So many astonishing, truly astonishing designs this year. And objects. It continues to amaze me year after year. Go to pizzemas.com to see all of the weird and wild pizza miss designs that are only available during this year's pizza.
It's two weeks and also making videos on Vlogbrothers every weekday. Like we did back in 2007. I really love pizza miss John. I do too.
I'm clearing out my calendar and being like, you know what I'm doing now? I'm just being a YouTuber. Like I used to be. And it's fun.
It's a lot, but it's fun for sure. Yeah, it's a great time. So check out YouTube.com slash Vlogbrothers too, if you want to, but no pressure. There's lots of videos.
We also have a project for us a message from Johannes to Andrea or Andrea. I'm going to guess Andrea. Yeah. Okay.
I love you so much. Yes, John. We're still together two years later and still send cheesy messages to each other via podcast. Wow.
That's so sweet. Thank you, Johannes. And thank you, Andrea. And thanks to everybody who donated to the project for us in this year.
It's been lovely to read your messages all throughout the year. 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.
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Now available in Canada too, that's qunce.com slash deerhank for free shipping and 365 day returns, quince.com slash deerhank. It's 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 p.m. and you did not eat lunch. What are you going to do?
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Head to factormeals.com slash deerhank 50 off and use the code deerhank 50 off to get 50 off and free daily greens per box. With new subscription only, wild supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. John, this next question comes from Kitty who asks deerhank and John, why can't I melt wood?
I was told in school that anything can be in any form of matter if it's hot or cold enough. So by that logic, the solid that is wood should turn into a liquid if it is heated enough but it doesn't. Instead it just catches on fire. I've been thinking about this for years.
Kitty, Kitty is a great question. It's a great question. I thought about it a lot and I am fairly certain that you cannot melt wood. It's Subamour.
So you want to know more about this John? Well, I want to know if it's just not true that everything has three states of matter because I've always kind of assumed that it's just not true. It seems to me that a lot of things don't have three states of matter. Give me another example.
Well, now I'm struggling but only because you've put me on the spot the same way I struggle with somebody says like, well, what's a book that you've read recently that you enjoyed it? I just arrived here on Earth and I have only existed for one nanosecond. Just give me one thing besides wood that you don't think can evaporate. My first idea was books but then I was like books are made out of wood.
What can't evaporate? I feel like there's some kind of rocks that can't evaporate. Well, here's the situation, John. You can melt the stuff that wood is made out of.
Okay, but wood is a complex bunch of lots of different organic molecules. And some organic molecules are fairly simple and they can indeed carbon-based molecules like methane is a great example. You can have gaseous methane or liquid methane or solid methane. You can do that.
But wood is really complicated. And so especially if you got some oxygen around it, it's going to catch on fire before it melts. But what if you say no oxygen? You cannot oxidize, no fire, we're going to put you in pure argon and we're going to just get you hotter and hotter and hotter and see what happens.
In that case, I'm pretty sure what would happen is so these molecules have been built by the intention that these molecules have been built by energy coming into plants and being used to construct molecules that are very stable but they are not at chemical equilibrium. There are component pieces of them that would be at lower energy states. And as they get hotter and hotter and start jiggling around, before they reach the melting point of wood, they would dissociate from each other. Some gases would be released.
I think that it would probably look a lot like char, like burned wood, even if it wasn't actually burning. And you would end up with carbon and low molecular weight, organic molecules that would eventually melt and then evaporate and it would just be gas. So yes, you can melt the things that wood is made out of, but you can't melt wood because by the time you get it hot enough, I think that it would probably, I'm fairly certain, that it would break into lots of different smaller pieces because wood molecules are huge, huge, carbon change that would just break apart. I think I've jiggled too much by energy.
What about bones? I feel like bones don't melt. I can do this all day. I don't know.
Bones might melt. Don't you feel like bones are kind of the wood of us? Yeah. I absolutely have to explain it further.
I think that bones are the wood of us. Yeah. And so that's why I think bones probably don't melt that well because they're like, they're what we have instead of wood. Yeah.
So I think that like wood, lateral thinking would fall apart and then they would melt after all the pieces fell apart. All right. Let's answer another question. This comes from Katie who writes, dear John and Hank, I just reorganized my bookshelf and I was admiring my work when I noticed that John has had three different publishers speak, Penguin and Dutton.
Several other series I have are also published by different publishers. Why is this? Do publishers sell the rights of individual books to each other? Do you switch publishers?
Like one might change jobs copyright and categorization? Katie. Oh boy, you just opened up a whole bag of bones with this one. These bones don't melt.
So the short answer is that actually all those books are published by the same company. The long answer is lots of people do get their books broken up between different publishers and why it's very complicated. Did I get it right? Basically Hank and I are two of the only authors who haven't changed publishers actually.
So Penguin, Speak and Dutton are all different versions of the same publisher. My books are published by Dutton, but then when the paperbacks come out, for a long time, I don't think it does anymore actually, but for a long time, Penguin had paperback specific publishers and Dutton wasn't one of them. So it would have a different set of letters on the spine, but functionally for me, the publication experience was the same. And both of Hank's books are published by Dutton on the adult side, just as my book that he had the machine reviewed was.
A lot of these names don't really mean much to people outside of publishing. And sometimes I have to explain that to people inside of publishing. Outside of publishing, nobody really cares that much about the name, but it can matter a little bit. Now most authors do change publishers the way that people change jobs or they change publishers because their editors move or because they're unhappy with the way that their previous book was published or because they can't get their next book published with the same publisher.
It was all kinds of reasons. But the thing that's really nice about having had one publisher and Hank and I have both been incredibly fortunate in this way, and it's mostly down to luck. But the thing that is really nice is that when you have a new book come out, the publisher is highly motivated to also sell your old books because they also published them. Whereas if you have all of your books at a bunch of different publishers, it can be a little hard to get everybody organized around supporting a new book.
And so I think there's some advantages to it, but there's a lot of different ways to have a writing life. And I don't know if ours is the right way. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, it comes down to a lot of different individual decisions and like opportunities and working relationships between people. So yeah, you are right.
It often comes down to a lot of luck. I mean, I would say that publishing like the rest of life, some people ask me like, say like, how much is luck? How much is skill? And I want to say like, it's 137% luck and like, 46% skill.
Right. Yeah, because you can't, even if you had like a maximum amount of all of it, you still can't anticipate it actually happening. Yeah, it's definitely more than 100% luck. So the news from AFC Wimbledon.
I mean, it's good and it's bad. Hank, here's the thing. AFC Wimbledon have lost now three straight games. And one of those games, one of those games we lost to Arsenal, which doesn't really count.
I thought we actually played pretty well. We lost three nil, which is a pretty good result. But I'll tell you what, we lost three nil in front of 56,000 people. Yeah.
And that's a 300,000ish pound payday for AFC Wimbledon, which is massive. Like it makes the rest of the season a lot easier. And so that's obviously would have been great to win the game, but playing the game was its own victory. And again, I thought we played well in places.
It was a really stark contrast. A couple of years ago, we played Tottenham, another big Premier League team. And we just looked awful. And in this game, there were stretches of it where we really looked competitive and where we were trying to like express our own identity.
And I thought that was great. We then lost to Shrewsbury or Shrewsbury, I guess they say, in the UK, although that seems impossible to me, who were in the relegation zone and it was their first victory of the year. And it was a really disappointing win on a bunch of levels. Like I just, we just played like we were off the pace all day long and I was frustrating.
So the kettle is off the boil. Did I say that correctly? Yeah. When you scored first, that's the problem.
We should never score first. I agree. It is a huge issue. We only come from behind.
But yeah, so we, that said, after nine games, we're in eighth place. So I'm not in a position to complain. It's good, but you need to win some games. Yeah.
And the dance are in third. When that's going on there. No, the franchise currently playing at Straight and Milton Keynes is in third. The dawns are in our in eighth.
But I know what you mean. And yeah, yeah, they're good this year. We played them in a couple of weeks and hopefully we can take them down a peg. Well, we just, so he just have to do whatever the teams that are winning a lot of games are doing.
So get to that. And that is the key, Hank. You've cracked the code. All right.
Well, that's going to, I think that that's really going to help fix things for you all. Not that you need to fix that. You're doing great. It's not an emergency just yet.
So John, do you remember the insight lander? Of course. Do you remember that it's solar panels got covered in dirt? Yes.
It was like, is this mission going to end? We thought it was going to end, but we were waiting because maybe there was going to be a nice big Martian wind that was going to clear up those solar panels. Yeah. Well, and yeah.
So we've been waiting for this. But one of the problems is this dust that's coating the solar panels is really fine. And so it's just like a tiny, tiny, thin layer. And so the moment a breeze comes over, if it might knock a few bits off, but it just like sort of coasts over the rest of it.
And so it's become a problem. And it was worrying a lot of scientists. So what they did is they sprinkled some sand. So they picked up sand and they put it on the solar panels, which seems like that would make it worse because now you got bigger rocks on there.
So they sprinkled sand onto the solar panels. But now when the wind comes by, that sand makes it more turbulent and scours away some of and as the sand blows away, because the sand isn't so even as the dust is, it is able to push away some of the dust along with it. And that has made it possible for insight to continue gathering data. And it has been able to measure three quakes that are bigger than any it's ever measured.
So that before the summer, the largest quake that landed had recorded was a 3.7 in 2019. On August 25th, it recorded two quakes with magnitude 4.2 and 4.1. And then September 18th, which also happened to be insights 1000th Martian day. So it seems like this thing has been there for not very long time to me, but it's been there for 1000 days.
It measured a 4.2 earthquake that lasted for almost an hour and a half, making the longest and biggest quake the mission has detected. Yeah, an hour and a half hour and a half on earthquake. Do I understand how that works? No, don't ask me any questions.
That sounds uncomfortable. That's a little one. I don't think you'd even be able to feel it if you were a person. I don't know.
We had a 4.2 earthquake in Indianapolis like 14 years ago and people still talk about it. So there's children to figure out where all these smart earthquakes came from and what they are going to tell them about Mars. One of them came from 5,280 miles from the lander making it the most distant quake recorded and opening up the mystery of exactly what region the quake originated from. So like it's far away, but like we don't know exactly where it was when it happened.
Well, I was able to make those measurements because of that cleaning and without that cleaning, it wouldn't have been able to do it. So smart engineers solving problems in whatever they can from a very, very, very, very long way away. I love the idea of eventually deciding the only chance we have to make this problem better is to first make it worse. Yeah.
There's so many things like that in life. Cleaning my office is the main one. Yeah, exactly. Maybe I need to like come and spray it down with something and then you'll be like, Oh, now I got to clean it.
Smells like fish eggs in here. Oh God. Yeah, I mean, it's just like everything ends up on the floor when I start cleaning. But boy, is it not great in here?
Also, I may have to make my teeth worse before they get better. We'll ask the dentist when I get there. Oh, yeah. Well, thanks to everybody for listening.