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Friends have complexity like Mark Rober, Katie Max, Simone Yetch, and more will share inspiring talks about what makes them hopeful and join Hank Green on stage for fun, interactive discussions. Complexly has been creating free educational content like SciShow and PBSEons and Crash Course and Bizarre Beasts for nearly 15 years and 6 billion views. But this year, we have become a 501c3 nonprofit and we're doing something worth knowing as an in-person event that benefits Complexly and our impactful educational media. It's the first ever Complexly in-person event and it's a fundraiser to support our mission of inspiring curiosity and lowering barriers to knowledge building because curiosity builds understanding and understanding builds a better world.
Tickets go on sale to the general public June 30th at somethingworthknowing.com. So come build a better world with us on September 16th and experience something worth knowing you can get your ticket at Complexly.info slash something. And welcome, Drew Deere, Hank and John! What is up for the Think of It Dear John and Hank?
It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions give you to be advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC, Wimbledon and John. John, you know, because it's pizza miss right now, I ordered a pizza last night and Catherine asked me, will it be long? And I said, no, Catherine, it will be round. Well, sometimes they're long.
You know, there's like lean cuisine pizzas from when we were a kid? Yeah. Or even the rectangular school lunch pizzas. Yeah, those ones are freaking, they can be long.
Yeah, man, I especially, I miss commodity pizza. What's commodity pizza? That's what they call those rectangles. It's when pizza becomes a commodity and it's priced like a commodity.
Like it's sort of a, it's a- Just priced by the inch. Yeah. And I love it and I have not, I don't know, I probably would hate it now, but I think about it all the time. I had a piece of school lunchroom pizza, maybe like a year before COVID and it was all right.
You know, like it was a little bit worse than I remembered, but not much worse than I remembered. It reminded me actually of the nine month period. Oh God. Oh God, sneezing is never normal.
It's never normal. Oh, there he is. I never sneezed. John, I don't know what just happened.
He has had a moment of, I had a moment of weakness. Hank, I had a moral failing just now and I feel like I need to tell you about it. I'd claim that I didn't sneeze, but I did sneeze. I just don't know what to do about the fact that I'm sneezer.
John, I know this because we just had our Patreon live stream. So you currently do still have your pizza, John Mustache, as we are recording this. You can probably hear the Mustache in action. I've been saying all day that I look like somebody ordered Ted Lasso off Wish.com or I look like the Costco brand Ted Lasso.
And Sarah did a great job dressing me up this morning. She really is a talented costume designer and she was like, you're going to look most like Ted Lasso based on your wardrobe if you wear this. And I felt really good about it. And I even, even though like my, by the way, all the pizza stuff, some of the people at WhatPizza.com only doing pizza, all our proceeds go to charity.
But even when, even though my pants weren't going to be in the video, I put on Ted Lasso khaki pants anyway. Wow. Wow. Just to feel more like Ted Lasso, which reminds me, did you know, and I think I might have mentioned this to you, but I don't know if I mentioned all the podcast, that the guy who plays Jamie Tart, his name is Phil Dunster, the guy who plays Jamie Tart in Ted Lasso is a big fan of AFC Wimbledon because of me because of this podcast.
It filled my heart with joy to know that Jamie Tart is an AFC Wimbledon fan. And I hope someday our paths cross it play a lane. So anyway, go to pizzmas.com. If you have some spare money that you want to spend on just some absolutely ludicrous items and some really beautiful t-shirts, actually, it's interesting to see here.
Yeah. And questions of questions from our listeners. Okay, John, our first question is from Mark. It's a question that I have always wanted to know the answer to.
And so I'm glad that Daboki did the hard work of looking up the answer to it. Mark says, if you've ever gone use car shopping online, you will notice that many, many people either use their finger or an object to cover their license plates. Does that matter? Can anyone actually find information about someone using their license plate number?
Mark, so John, I, yes, but only certain people. Yeah. There is a, there was a thing past in 1994 that was the, the Driver's Privacy Protection Act. And you're not supposed to be able to, like, that DMV is not supposed to release information about you based on your license plate number.
If you are, if you work in a police department, you can get that information. The most that you can probably get, unless you have access, is like the making model of the car, not your address. But I feel there's so much, like much easier ways to find people's addresses. And mostly we're just like, have been taught to not share numbers associated with ourselves.
Don't share your social security number. Don't share your phone number. But this number is like literally in public all of the time. Yeah.
I feel like we're a little bit like one generation behind on what information we're told to protect everybody's always like, no, make sure you don't share your driver's license number that you drive around your car with all the time. But don't worry about sharing every single second of your location data with like a lot of apps that you're not even aware that you're sharing your location data with. Yeah. I mean, Google knows way more about me than I do way more.
Oh, yeah. I've forgotten so much stuff that Google knows about me. Yeah. It's why it's so, it's, it's, it's, it's occasionally a little lovely.
I can go back and see what I googled on the day that I got married, you know, like that's, that's a thing that I can insight into my life that I wouldn't, it's a kind of scrapbook, you know, but it's also kind of scrapbook that's being monetized by one of the large corporations in the world, which is terrifying. And you're right that you only told Google that information or you may have only told this place or that place, but potentially depending on what kind of, you know, what kind of settings you have online, potentially you're sharing information about where you go online with lots of people, potentially with thousands of different companies. And not only that, a lot of those places are going to share and sell information related to what you do online. And not only that, there are also places that are going to share information related to where your physical body was at certain times.
And like, so that to me is really distressing. And we need to take it way more seriously. I don't, I, but I also like, I don't know how to, it's, it's wild to me that our privacy regulations are in like 1996 and out, like license plate numbers. And yeah, but like your nose and one's name, which is much easier to get than someone's license plate number, you can find out a whole lot about them.
Yeah, even if you only have access to Google, and there are a lot of tools outside of Google that are vastly more invasive. And I just think it's something we need to think about more. It's stress to be out. Just talking about it.
Actually, something Sarah and I've been writing about recently, like we've been learning about it, about surveillance capitalism a little bit. And, ah, yeah, I, all right. And I want to ask you another question. This one's from mayor.
It's one that I've never thought about, but it's really getting to me now. Mayor asks, do you're John and Hank, is the piggy the person on top or on bottom during a piggyback ride? I have red hair. Mayor.
I have never, I have never thought about this. It is a piggyback ride. Yeah, I've never thought about it either. How did I make it to 44 years old?
Was that everyone's thinking about do you want it's the piggyback ride? It's the first one on the bottom. The key thing here, and I've never written a pig. Yes.
No, I mean, I, I don't like to predict the future, but the chances that I'm going to ride a pig are very similar to the chances I'm going to go to Mars. It's not, it's not very likely. I don't know how much you have to pay me to ride a pig, but it would be five figures. I'll just tell you right now.
I'm not, I'm not writing a pig for $9,000. I've got, I got better things to do with my life. Well, also the medical bills might exceed. I know.
Yeah, it's too risky. I mean, basically you're offering me $9,000. I know that my deductible every year is like 6,500. So I'm looking at, at, at best assuming everything goes right.
Yeah. So, so I just don't like the value proposition. But I bet that where the term came from is that riding on the back of a pig is also a rather jostily experience, just like a piggyback ride is. And so, I think the, the piggy would be the person doing the walking, not the person doing the desperate clinging.
Oh my gosh, John piggyback, it had nothing to do with a pig. Shut up. It converted from piggyback to piggyback. Are you serious?
Yes. I'm going to have nothing to do with a pig. Are you telling me? Wait, so first off, it not only am I not going to ride a pig, it turns out I can't.
Well, now I want to. You know what, I'll pay you $9,000. I want to ride a pig. Now that I know I can't do it.
Yeah, it's a piggyback ride was a ride up on the shoulders. I do not know where that came from, though. Maybe from like, maybe you have to pick a back, like, choose between you would climb up onto. Yeah.
And then it, you know, it's sort of like, because it sounded like piggyback. We turned it into a piggyback. Well, people do ride pigs also. Just because piggyback ride isn't the origin doesn't mean no one's ever written a pig.
Are you sure about that? Yeah, people have written pigs. I think they're doing a rodeos. No.
So the first Google result here, Hank, is not actually about writing a pig. It's about somebody who's imagining a science fictional universe and wants to know if it's possible to have pig-mounted cavalry, like instead of horse-mounted soldiers, pig-mounted. And then there's a lot of debate about that. But the long and short of it is you can ride a pig and now I don't want to again.
Perfect. That's what we needed. That's what we needed. Yeah, you could definitely get a pig.
Pigs get really big. I'm sure that the pig wouldn't like it. So don't, but I'm sure they've been done. Yeah, apparently you can do it in Minecraft, which is well, we've settled it now, everyone.
Come join Uncle John and Minecraft world for Uncle John's piggyback rides. This next question comes from Megan who asks, dear Hank, John, I currently live in a rural Indiana. I frequently find myself driving behind large farm vehicles. Why can't they drive more than 10 to 15 miles an hour?
If we could put a man on the moon and a rover on Mars, we should be able to build a better motor and a tractor. More importantly, how on earth do I stay calm and patient while I drive at a snail's pace for miles and miles missing Michigan, Megan? Oh, like this wasn't a problem in Michigan, Megan. Come on.
Well, where Megan was in Michigan? As an Indiana resident who's driven behind his fair share of tractors. Let me tell you, I live in Ohio, same issue. Like it's not like you're not one stayed away from solving the problem, Megan.
There are a number of tractors all over this beautiful land of ours. Hank, why can't tractors drive fast? Tractors cannot drive fast because they are built, not for speed. They are built for torque.
So one of the things that we average person who has not worked on a farm often forget about tractors is that the tractor doesn't just power the tractor. It also powers whatever you hook up to the tractor. So you see these big things that do a bunch of stuff. They're like doing lifting and cutting and multiple.
Yeah, it's conveyor belt and sorting. All of that stuff is powered by a little attachment on the back of the tractor that turns something on that piece of equipment that makes all of the stuff go. So tractors have to prioritize torque over speed. And so that means lower revolution of the wheels for increased stability to pull something.
So that's what they're built for. They're not built for speed. They're built for strength. And that means that they're never going to be fast.
It would need a bunch of extra gears to move more quickly. And that would make the tractor more expensive. And it's just not worth it for at least for them. Especially it's not worth it for anyone because you have podcasts.
And you have to worry about that because you got us delightful people making just informing you of delightful things about pig rides that you didn't know before. And can you think in the future that this will make it easier to electrify tractors at some point? I'm only basing this on the fact that my electric car is extremely torquey. Right.
Well, kind of. Yeah, it has what we call instant torque. You don't have to ramp into the torque at all. But there is a problem, which is that it is good for tractors to be in operation for a very long time.
They have to have a lot of energy for that whole time. Gasoline is good at that. Diesel is good at that. And lithium ion batteries are getting better at it.
So electric tractors definitely going to happen. It might not be the first thing on the list. But yeah, they definitely already exist. And I'm sure that there will be more of them in the future.
I think before we get to an ad break, I want to ask this question from Robin about advertising. I like to undercut the value of our advertising anytime we have a chance to. So this question is from Robin Rastu-John Hink. I've always said that radio recently has opposed to streaming or podcasts.
Fascinating choice, Robin. I make fun of Robin, but actually I also listen to terrestrial radio. I listen to the radio when I drive my kids to school in the morning because there is a particular radio station here in Indianapolis that they love and I want to support that. So maybe that's Robin's deal as well.
I noticed that there's just a lot of ads and that the ads are often for big chain jewelry companies. And I remember that growing up, there were a bunch of those ads too. What's up with that? Why do I hear about zales on the radio so often?
I'm no thief, but I am Robin. The advertising industry. Yeah, here's the thing, Robin. If you think about what has to be advertised, like what needs advertising to sell it?
One, pizza, miss, pizza, miss.com. Here's the thing. That's why we buy it on all the terrestrial radio stations. You'll hear us on Z100.5.
I'm sure. Every hour on the hour. That's right. Q95 play in the hits and share the good news about pizza, but what I think ultimately needs a lot of advertising money behind it to sell you on the concept is the concept of decoration.
Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely an inevitable human, wonderful thing to be celebrated, but particular kinds of decoration saying like this kind of decoration is the really valuable good kind of decoration that you need to be doing. If you're going to be the kind of person and partner that you want to be, that needs marketing dollars behind it.
That is true. The other thing is that jewelry is very high margin. So converting one person from one jewelry store to another jewelry store, so they're going to be buying something. You want them to go to your jewelry store and it is worth spending a lot of money per person who switches from one place to another place.
And that is one of the reasons why jewelry continues to be high margin because watches are also this way. Like these expensive products, they are, they're single purchase. People don't buy them very often, but they spend a lot when they do. And there's, it tend to be a fairly different, fairly wide gap, both in terms of percentage, but mostly in terms of dollars because there's expensive items between the cost of the item and the purchase price of the item.
So a jewelry store can stay in business selling like two things a day, which is just not the case with almost every other retail experience. Yeah. And if you think about the big luxury brands, whether it's Rolex or Dom Perignon or Tag Heuer or whatever, like a lot of what they're doing is not kind of econ 101. You have to find the place where the amount of supply meets the amount of demand and that's the cost.
A lot of what they're doing is like everybody knows that they charge much, much more than the product costs. But the weird thing is part of their marketing budget is actually going to support the people who already bought the thing. Like a huge portion of Rolex's marketing budget is going to people, going to sort of try to benefit people who already purchase Rolexes so that they can feel really good about their Rolexes and where their Rolexes. And then when other people see that they're wearing a Rolex, they'll be like, wow, you know, that person bought a really high margin item.
And if you lowered the price of Rolexes, it might be that you would actually sell fewer Rolexes because the value is not in the like cost of making the good, the value is in something else, something more ethereal. Yeah, I agree with you, John. There are two questions that I really want to get to because they are both very important to my life. This first one is from Megan who asks Dear Hank and John, I can sleep in anything including bras and jeans and I'm a night owl and I will do anything to make my mornings easier.
So I'm wondering whether there is any real reason I can't just change into my clothes for the next day, the night before. Thanks, Megan. You and my son are both wondering this. I mean, Megan, there's no reason reason for anything.
You know, like, I mean, we're just on a big ball, Megan. We're just tiny. We're on a big ball that's orbiting a bigger ball that's orbiting a black hole. Yeah, this is the problem I have when people tell me that like something is silly or irrational and I'm just like, why is the reason?
And I'm like, we made it all up. It's all they only it only matters because it matters. Stop asking so many questions. It's fine.
Like, like, give me one example of it. You can't I can't walk around town in an outfit from Star Trek the next generation without attracting attention. If I wear t-shirt and jeans, no attention. If I wear my outfit from Star Trek the next generation, attention, there's no reason why we could all be dressed like John Luke Picard.
We just aren't, we just we made that decision together. Yeah. And so, Megan, you could do whatever you could put on your Star Trek the next generation uniform the night before you wake up and then you could go to work like that. It's loud.
Well, it depends on your particular place before. It may not be allowed. You may have to wear a uniform that isn't a Star Trek the next generation uniform. But what I mean, I did this for years when I was in my 20s.
Like, I did when I was a hospital chaplain. Like, when I would be on call for 24 hours, like, you think I would like in the 30 minutes, I would have to sleep. You think I would like put on pajamas? No, I would lay down and sleep.
And then when I woke up, I would stand up and go to work. Like, yeah, I did sleep in your shoes, because I did for a while sleep in my hiking boots. And I would not turn that I wouldn't sleep in my shoes. I would actually put my shoes really like rigorously and ritualistically next to the bed right one on the right, left one on the left.
And I would try to make it so that when I had to get up, like when the beeper went off and told me that it was time to go to a call, I would like sit up, turn sideways, be on the bed. And then my shoes would be right where my feet were. That was always like the dream situation. Like you save like three seconds that way.
And you can maybe, you know, get where you need to be a little bit faster. But I mean, I'm sure that there are going to be people who tell you that there are health reasons for this or whatever, Megan, but no, it's fine. It's fine. Yeah, we're Megan.
I mean, I don't want to get too dark here, but we're not going to be here for that much longer. You know, like we're talking about like, I mean, I don't know how old you are, Megan, but you seem like you're an adult. We're talking about eight, seven decades at the most. God.
Yeah, sleep in the way. That's not worry too much about what you're sleeping in. If you're comfortable and you're happy, Godspeed. Yeah, might be a little wrinkly when you get up, but it'll, you know, it'll fluff out.
We're not going to be here that much longer, Hank. Okay, here's my other important question that I need to know the answer to John. It's from a steel who asks, I love maraschino cherries, but can you maraschino other fruits? And I need to know the answer to this because I think I would love a maraschino pineapple or a maraschino pear or anything.
That sounds great. I mean, I'm not sure that it's the exact same process, but the process through which cherries are turned into maraschino cherries is basically this. It's a way of preserving food and you do it through a mix of, I think sulfur dioxide calcium chloride, I assume, and some syrup, some like shimmery syrup. And then if that's the question, then the answer is yes, you can do it to other fruits.
Like, in fact, we grew way too many strawberries this year. Some years we have good strawberry crops. I don't even know why. If I knew why, I would be a strawberry farmer.
But also, this reminds me, actually, I do know why it's because the groundhog died for the groundhog. That was my great nemesis that I wrote an entire chapter of the Anthropocene Reviewed book about celebrated that groundhog celebrated the release of my book, The Anthropocene Reviewed by Freakin Dying. And I was surprisingly devastated at the loss of my great nemesis. But anyway, it meant that we had a really good strawberry crop and we had too many strawberries.
So Sarah looked up this way of like preserving strawberries that they taste like sort of like strawberries plus just the way maraschino cherries tastes like cherries, but like more explosively sweet and they're delicious. So I know you can do it with strawberries or at least something fairly similar with strawberries. I don't know about other fruits. Yeah, you I think you definitely can.
I have done a while you were talking, I did a little bit of research on maraschino cherries. Maraschino is a cherry liqueur originally. So it's an alcoholic like 32% alcohol and they put cherries in that cherry like they made cherry liqueur and for drinks and then they're like, oh, we can preserve the cherries and the cherry liqueur and then they'll be like these little alcoholic cherry bombs that we can put into things. And then up until prohibition, there was a little bit of a like there were some that were like a version of maraschino cherries that were non-alcoholic and they were becoming more popular and just as a preserved cherry that wouldn't get you drunk.
And then during prohibition, the alcoholic one went away permanently. So we no longer have that and now we just have this particular thing. So if you made maraschino pineapple, it would be cherry flavored pineapple because the maraschino preserve is definitely a cherry flavored preserve. But I think still that'd be amazing.
That might be good. But you could also make like a strawberry preserve that's strawberry based. It's just like a brining and sweetening process. And you make it so sweet that microorganisms can't eat it basically.
Yeah. It's really good, man. I mean, I'm a big fan of these strawberry preserves that we have that are just explosively sweet. I get the feeling that they're not great for me.
But then we're not going to be here for that much longer. You know, John, if you had to guess what century is maraschino from? 15th. Wow.
Okay. It's 16th. But you only guess that because I asked you. No, I would have like I would have thought around that there were so many brining and preservation techniques around food that emerged in that period.
Like just, you know, after the European Renaissance in case, you know, I guess you know a lot about history. I know a weird I know a fair amount about food history. I don't know a lot about anything to be clear. Like whatever I read a book by an actual expert in the subject, I'm like, I don't know this much about anything.
Like I don't even know this much about myself. Oh boy, that's the we are we are definitely generalists. You and I I mean, that's the generous word for it. Maraschino comes from Croatia, but at the time of its creation, that was part of the Venetian Republic.
Mm. You know, those were the good old days when Venice ruled the world. Now it's, you know, having said that, I feel like I need to add a correction. Those were not the good old days.
Just for clarity. I was a facetious good old days. Anybody I get I'm not great back then. Oh, I'm really over the narrative that like life was so much better just 500 short years ago.
It was at worst in almost every way. Which reminds me that this podcast is brought to you by the Venetian Republic, worse in almost every way. And they're not around to argue. So I don't expect to get any emails about it.
Today's podcast also brought to you by Z 100 point three Z 100 point three playing all the hits in the order of our choosing. And this podcast is brought to you of course by Uncle John's Minecraft pig back rides, my pick at Uncle John's Minecraft farm. Today's podcast also brought to you by Long Pizza, so much better than circular pizza goes off forever. We got also a project process message from John F of Boston who says the P phrase awesome because I can donate to help make the world suck less and to get silly perks such as making Hank or John say, uh, Buddha Buddha Buddha.
I think it's trying to think you're looking for is Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, Abba, or oh my god, it's burning. Oh my god, it's burning. Yes, the social internet allows us to organize awesome stuff like this, but it could also be pretty harmful to yourself a favorite and take a break from it today. Well, it's funny because the day that we're recording this Facebook is still down.
Yeah, maybe you did that, John. No, I think the call is coming from inside the house on that one, Hank. I'm so curious. If I had to make a prediction, that would be my prediction.
But who knows? I mean, we live in strange times and I will spend the rest of my life hoping for normal boring times. Oh boy. Oh boy.
Oh boy. I mean, the fact that Facebook is still down is kind of giving me the creeps now. Well, we're only here for a little while, Hank, and by we I also mean Facebook. That's true on a geological time scale for sure.
I mean, companies go bankrupt. Maybe today's Facebook's day. Probably not though. Probably not.
Probably pull through. This episode of your Hank and John is brought to you by Shopify. There are a lot of things that stand between I have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me. And that is what Shopify makes easier.
When you start with Shopify, the tools, to design and launch and take payments, they're all there from day one. You don't have to build a whole machine before you can start building the business. And this is important because you also have to like look good and with Shopify's templates, you could get a site set up really quick that looks credible and professional without needing to code or duct tape a bunch of different tools together. And when things look real, that works on my brain to be like, I'm doing a real thing.
It also works on other people's brains to be like, this is legitimate. Shopify also has one of the best checkout systems on the internet. It's built to help customers finish the purchase effectively and efficiently without a bunch of roadblocks. Returning customers can check out with a single click.
That means less friction and fewer abandoned carts and a smoother experience for everybody. That stuff gives you confidence early on and it gives other people confidence in what you're doing. You're not wondering whether the payment system is going to work. You're not wondering whether customers can get through the process.
Shopify handles that foundation so you can focus on the thing that you're actually trying to do. It's really kind of amazing to me that Shopify is a tool that works from the first day your store launches when you're just starting to get customers all the way up to being the size of good.store or dftba.com or being the size of like Mattel and Gymshark. When you build a Shopify, you're building with tools that already work at every scale. All you need is the idea, Shopify handles the rest.
You can start your free trial at Shopify.com slash Dear Hank. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash Dear Hank with new subscription only, while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See you website for more details. So that's why I'm wearing quince this summer and you can make your summer wardrobe easier by going to quince.com slash Dear Hank for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.
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See you website for more details. Oh, all right. Let's answer this question from Katie who writes, Dear John and Hank, something I don't fully understand is TV static. Wait, Katie, are you writing to us from the 20th century?
Maybe she's just heard about it. Okay. What exactly happens and why does it make that horrible sounding noise? If the TV doesn't have a signal, then why wouldn't the screen just appear black?
Thank you for curing my curiosity, Katie. So this is the antenna is picking up electromagnetic radiation because there's all kinds of places that that can come from the cosmic microwave background. So the leftover energy of the big bang is part of it. There's also localized radio waves.
There's Wi-Fi. There's all like that. And it's going to pick up something and the amplifier is going to amplify it to show you something and it's going to be precisely random. And that is what you are seeing.
You're seeing random noise picked up by the antenna. And that is what you're hearing too. You were also that the piece of the signal that is being would normally be interpreted as the sound channel, you know, addition to the video channel is also being picked up as random noise. If you like took a like a text file and like played it as an audio, it would also sound like static.
And if you took a text file and you like, you know, had it be picked up, like the information from a text file and had it be picked up by an antenna that would also appear to be random to the to the observer. Yeah, that is very cool. And Katie, I wanted to ask this question because I find it fascinating and kind of beautiful that when we look at TV static, we are in part looking at the remnants of the big bang in the form of cosmic background radiation, which is one of the reasons we know that the big bang happened. Yeah, that's the wild thing.
There was like an antenna and they were like, why can't we get it to not pick up anything? We should be able to block all radiation from getting to the antenna. And they're like, clean and pigeon poop off of it. And they're like, there's still a signal.
We're still picking something up. And it's like, oh, it was the big bang. Yeah. And it's everywhere because it's everywhere.
Because we were once we were once all pretty tightly packed together. Isn't it weird that the universe used to be very tightly packed together, but still may have been infinite in size? It's pretty weird. That's a tough one for me.
I got to say, I've had a little, can you come up with an analogy that will help me? No, not really. No, no, not a lot of examples. Just imagine squeezing everything down, but also there's still everything outside of it.
It's great. Yeah. Anyway, the next time you see static on a TV, which maybe never, actually, but the next time you do, think about the fact that you are in part seeing evidence of the big bang. Can I tell you, this is a tangent, John, but there was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, there was this conversation about how we are broadcasting out from our planet a detectable signal of radio waves.
And that's like, TV broadcasts and radio broadcasts. They're strong signals, and they escape our planet. And so we thought, if we looked up in the space up there, that we might see other planets broadcasting those radio signals at us. And that if there were other intelligent civilizations out there that they would also have discovered the same technology, and if they were around for a long time, then we would just be able to detect them by looking up at the sky.
But now, as we enter into the latter half of my life, we realize that the period of time during which we will be broadcasting that way, maybe an extremely short period of time before we find more efficient, better ways of transmitting information. And so it's not like there will be a sphere of those signals. It will be more like a very thin shell of those signals. And so it doesn't mean that there isn't a civilization in a star system, if we're not getting radio broadcasts from them, it may just mean that they moved past radio broadcasts over the course of 50 years, which is a very short amount of time, or 100 or 200, which are basically the same amount of time when you're talking about the universe.
Not the same amount of time to me, though. As a 44 year old, I find the notion of 50 years and 100 years to be very different. That's the thing. That's the thing.
Okay, before we get to the all important news from Mars and Nancy, well, then I want to ask one more question. This one's from David writes, Dear John and Hank, your recent discussion about Hagrid's dog fluffy being misidentified as one dog when fluffy is in fact three dogs, sharing one set of dog legs was mind-blowing in a way that no hypothetical conversation about mythical creatures should be. But it caught me wondering, what if you lived near Lake Lima, and what if you had a one-headed pet, Hydra, named fluffy, whose head was then cut off by a guy called Hercules, then the Hydra grows back two heads. At that point, do you now have two pets, or do you still just have one pet?
Now, this is a great question, David, where I should say it would be a great question if it weren't about Hydra's. What do you mean, John? Because Hank, as I am sure that you are familiar, a Hydra is a snake at its core. I mean, it's a mythical creature, but it's based on a snake.
Is it? Yep. Okay. I don't know.
What do I know? I'm going to get a picture of a Hydra right now. It looks very much like a snake to me. And as I'm sure you are already aware, snakes don't have souls.
So it doesn't matter. It's one snake. It's nine snakes. It doesn't matter because snakes don't have souls.
Everybody knows snakes. With a heated hot takes. I like the idea. No, it is.
People love their snakes. You could love a snake. I'm not saying you can't love a snake. I'm saying it doesn't have a soul.
There's a huge difference. I love a lot of things that don't have souls. But that's the white river. I also don't know much about souls, I will say.
But that is not a single organism. It doesn't matter. I like the idea that the next Hydra, so you cut off a Hydra's head. But the two Hydra's come back.
You got two snake heads now. And that sounds scary. But they're little babies. They don't know anything yet.
They haven't learned how the world works. They don't know up from down. They don't know what they're looking at. So they're just like useless little babies.
They need to be taken care of now. I'd like to update my argument. I've found some flaws in it. Okay.
Which is that like you can't say that just because something doesn't have a soul. It's irrelevant. Right? Like for example, I don't think the sun has a soul.
But if it stopped existing, it would be a real problem for me. And yep. Everybody else I know. I agree with you on that.
So my new argument is that they're clones. And so you can have an infinite number of Hydra and they're still you got to treat them like clones. The same way you would like that famous forest of spruce trees that's just all clones of each other. You got it.
So I'm hearing you say that a hydrate is a plant because if it's it's that's not the it's not a clone of something. It's still a completely separate individual. I'm saying it's a tree in which case maybe it's not. No, well, because it's all interconnected, right?
So like the rune system is interconnected and you're seeing a lot of different trees, but it's all part of one organism. But it has a mind. Hydra has a mind. Does a hydrahabim mind?
Does it does a tree have a mind? I mean, kind of. Well, so let me get you out of your predicament that you put your own self in. Yeah.
The the hydra's brain is in its body. That's the only thing that makes sense. The hydrogen the hydrogen snake brain is inside of the hydrogen body. You caught off its head.
It grows a new two new heads. But those heads don't have brains in them. Now, it's just like, I got more teeth. That way doesn't have to learn everything over again and be a useless baby Hydra.
It's very big, but it doesn't know anything about the world yet. So it's like, like, Google Gaga. So your argument is that a hydra is mind regardless of where its brain is, it's like soul or its being whatever its ground of being as paltill, it could say not to get theological is somewhere inside of the part of it that Hercules didn't cut off. Yeah.
Okay. So now it's got two those two Hydra heads don't have to like relearn on any deep level, like how to be a Hydra, because they they remember because they didn't lose their ground of being when they got their head cut off. Yeah. So it's still one Hydra with two heads.
So the definition of whether it's one or two is about where is about being? Uh huh. Yeah. There is a Hydra's brain.
No one knows the answer to that question. And so we get to decide congratulations on asking Google something novel for the first time in years and years. Um, I, I feel like I'm having a little bit of a revelation right now, which is that good potentially, uh, even things that don't exist, like a Hydra still have some kind of ground of being. They still have some, some being about them.
And so now I think maybe, maybe Hydra's do have souls. And that makes you think that maybe snakes have souls and I've been wrong this whole time. Maybe snakes do have souls. Just because they're dead eyed creatures that only want to eat you, that doesn't mean that they don't have souls.
It just means that they're, Oh, man, I'm going through a hard time right now. I'm having an intense moment. I'm going to bring you back around and I'm going to say if you keep cutting that Hydra's head off, over and over again, and then eventually it's heads are going to be so heavy, it will not be able to go anywhere and you will have solved the problem. Like it doesn't take that long because it's exponential.
So you cut off one, you got two, you cut off like not long after that, you got 64 heads and they got 120. By the time you got 128 heads, that thing, it's just heads on the ground incapable of moving its legs anymore. It's just way too heavy for it to move around problem solved. Now you've just got an art installation.
You want to know the way that it actually happened because I know you and I both like you, the great one of the great things about being Hank or me is that we both know so little about Greek mythology that whenever we hear stories, whenever we hear stories from Greek mythology, it's as if we're like, we are hearing them for the first time. So I'm always like, Dang way as far as I can. That is incredible. What a story.
Geez Louise. I didn't expect you to get that violet. You know the way that Hercules and his nephew actually like dealt with the Hydra eventually? They cut off, they kept cut off heads and cut off heads and cut off heads.
But then in the end, they burned the neck. So we know actually where a Hydra is, you call it a mind, I call it a soul. It's the same thing. We know where a Hydra's mind is.
It's in the neck. Would it be like an infinite source of food if you could just tie it down and cut off its heads? Great idea. That is, I mean, finally, a solution to the fundamental problem of being a person, which is that resources are limited except for Hydra resources.
That's right. You got to just don't touch the mind. Leave the mind. It's only you can only eat Hydra head muscles.
It's like, grow like trees. I'm glad we saved this bit for the end. So only the dedicated listeners who get through our blueviating can get this kind of high quality Hydra content. So what's the difference between what then John?
Oh, we, you know, AFC Wimbledon love to come from behind. It's how we have achieved, I believe, 12 of our 13 points this season. And so when we went one nil down against Burton in the 66th minute, my immediate feeling was thank goodness, because we sure weren't going to get anything if we scored first. And sure enough, in the 90th minute, again, again, in the last minute at home with Rosie Anna and actually many other Nerdfighters in attendance at Plelane, Luke McCormick scored a goal.
We tied one one. We only had two shots on target the entire game, but we did have most of the possession of the game. We did. We were passing more.
I mean, I think we looked pretty good on the whole. It's such a stark contrast from just a season ago. Like, the results aren't that much better, but the football is so much more pleasant to watch. So after 11 games, Wimbledon are on 13 points and in 14th place.
This is about like just under one quarter of the way into the season. So like, it's starting to be a significant portion of the season. And I feel really pretty good at the moment. But a long way to go, we are, you know, still not that far off the relegation zone.
One of the big problems in League One this season, usually in the past, the main way that Wimbledon has stayed up is that there have been like at least two and often three teams in League One that are just dreadful, that are like in some kind of financial crisis or are just awful, you know, and that's been a key to our success. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. This season, it seems like so far anyway, there aren't any teams that are really, really terrible. And that's unfortunate. So we'll see.
Long way to go. Long way to go. As long as we're scoring 90th minute equalizers and winners, I'm going to be enjoying this season. Yeah.
Well, it is nice to see you in the middle of the pack. I'd like to see a couple green check marks. Yeah, great to win a couple of the four games. Yeah.
That's always what I'm looking for is some green check marks in the last five. Yeah. Well, in Mars news, you remember the ingenuity helicopter? It's a helicopter on Mars.
It said, I don't want to, but that's a good thing. They were like, can you take off? And it was like, I think, no, I think I'm going to say I'm thinking I'm going to turn you down. It was it was, it was doing what it was designed to do.
So it's been very good. It's scouting around. It's helped her experience figure out where to go. But things are going to change as Mars gets colder and the atmospheric pressure goes down, creating conditions that are going to require the helicopter to change how it flies and the compensate, the helicopter is going to have to spin its rotors faster.
So the team behind the ingenuity did some initial tests to make sure this high speed spin could work. And it seemed to be going fine. But then on September 18, when ingenuity was getting ready for its first test flight with all these changes, the helicopter said, and I don't think so after finding some irregularities in the motors, the team did some more tests to figure out what those irregularities were. And so far, they've identified some issues with some series of motors that help keep the flight stable.
They're very important, even though they're a little bit boring, which is why they're automatically checked off before every flight. And some tests have shown that those motors are a bit wobbly. So it seems like right now this probably isn't a huge deal, and hopefully after the solar conjunction, which is a period of time during which the sun is between us and Mars and we can't talk to anything over there, the helicopter will fly again. So it will not fly before the solar conjunction is over, though.
Yeah, but the conjunction is only like two weeks. So it's not that big of a deal. I just, I always feel worried having a little helicopter on Mars for two weeks without being able to talk to it. That is the worrying period.
It's very strange. It's like, all right, goodbye. And then everybody just takes a break, which they all need desperately. It's a lot of work to run.
And of course, they're not catching up on other things. But potentially they get to start living. I think a lot of people, most people are already living on Earth time rather than Mars time. But you get a chance to take a little bit less pressure while you can't talk to your robots on Mars.
Well, hopefully that helicopter will, I don't know why I imagine it this way, but I hope that that helicopter just kind of like takes that two week vacation. We should all take two week vacations and then comes back at the end of it and is like, oh, it turns out that my motors were fine, but like my mind was the problem. And now I'm good again. Yeah, I just had to get myself straight.
Yeah, I just needed a little time away just to like, oh God, get a breath. I was just thinking about how the universe is both changing size and infinite. Yeah, it's still a lot, you know? Yeah.
And then I was thinking about the fact that like in some ways time is just everything getting further apart from everything else. And that was heavy for me. That's a lot. Yeah.
And I was like, I don't feel like I can fly today. I mean, not with that. Not with that weight. Yeah.
On a Martian time scale, I barely exist. I've existed for basically no time at all. And will exist for basically no time at all. Anyway, they should come to your favorite comedy podcast.
I realize that there are a lot of people back on Earth rooting for me. That kept me going. That's where does meaning come from? From each other.
This podcast is headed by Joseph to an advantage. It's produced by Rosie on a Hoss Roos and our communication coordinator is Julia Bloom, our editorial assistant, just a bookie, Drucker Vardy, the music you're hearing now, at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarolla and as we say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.