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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. Who was I prefer to think of it dear John and Hank?
It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you advice and bring you all the weeks from both Mars and A.S.E. Wimbledon. John, it's that time of year but you gotta make sure you don't let your kids eat too much pumpkin pie. You know why?
Why? Because they might get autumn-n-yake. Oh, you know what's funny about that? Nothing.
But you know what it reminds me of. It reminds me of the fact that Alice is actually allergic to pumpkin pie. So Alice will love that joke because it does give her autumn-n-yake and it makes her vomit. So try to avoid the pumpkin pie in our house as much as possible these days.
Hank, Hank, you gotta get to most important news of the week. I know it's so important. It's such a difficult two years. There is no getting around it but at last finally our long national nightmare is over and Apple has once more made a notebook computer with an SD card reader.
Oh, thank God. I think it's been like four or five years and I've this computer I'm using right now is really not built to do what I'm doing with it. It has been, it needs to be sort of let out into the field where someone will not treat it as poorly as I do. John, we bought this computer so fast.
Hey, guys. He and I both- John called me and I was buying the computer while he was buying the computer. We're like those Apple fanboys who are trying to be one of the first six people to purchase the new MacBook. I was so excited.
Yeah. Except I'm not excited at all about the computer. I'm excited for them to give me back something I had before. Oh, yeah, no, no, no.
The computer seems fine. But all I care about is that SD slot card reader. That's the business. I've- John, I have a friend who just bought the computer and hers is being delivered in December.
We got it good. Wow. We did. We got there right at the very beginning.
I essentially everyone who does what we do for a living, like everybody who edits video but like not great. You know, like everybody who edits video at the sort of vlog brothers level has been waiting for the Mac notebooks to put an SD card slot reader back in. So this is a huge deal. No more dongles.
I've spent the last five years walking around my house saying to Sarah, hey, have you seen one of the dongles? Because I at this point I have like seven of them. But even having seven of them, I somehow am never able to find one when I need one, which is every single Tuesday. Yeah, no, John even bought a PC.
I got a PC laptop. I did. I have a Windows device like it was 1987. Look, there's nothing wrong with Windows devices and I almost did it.
But instead I just bought a used MacBook. I actually really like this Windows machine. But that said, I'm really excited. So there's a phrase in the world of keyboards, key action.
This is the sound and the travel that is involved in pressing a key. Yeah. As you know, Hank, it's extremely important to me. I can't play the piano, but I can play the keyboard.
And I like it to sound a certain way. I like to type at a certain speed and I like to hear a certain like rhythm to it. There's like, by the way, if I sound weird, it's because I'm on my camera microphone this week because I'm traveling. I'm in Alabama with my in-laws.
And so right now, Hank, just to paint you a picture, I'm seated behind my wife's childhood bed, which is a double. And I am looking into this camera, but I'm very backlit. So I don't look good, but that doesn't matter because it's not a video podcast. We're not like Rhett and Link out here trying to make YouTube podcasts.
Just strictly, it's a strictly ear phenomenon. I thought about whether or not we should have a video podcast. We do after all have our roots in the moving image, but it would be really hard. Yeah, it's a lot of work.
Yeah. Part of the charm of our podcast is that you can tell in a deep way that it's just us in tune. Yeah. Yeah.
I think setting up like a multi-cam, like high quality with like lighting on me, and then like cutting back and forth between us. That would be so far beyond my capabilities, both technically and in terms of the amount of available time I have. Yeah. Although I will say, Hank, with this new Superfaz MacBook Pro or maybe hours of every week back, I've been wondering like, when am I going to have time to write a novel?
And the answer is with the computing power of it was just the one thing. There was just one thing sitting in between. That's, yeah. You always know that when you feel like there's one tool standing between you and great creative endeavor, that that is actually the thing holding you back.
Not any of like mental blocker, anything like that. Exactly. It's always the tool. I will say that I have not been doing delete this because my laptop has gotten so slow that it is a real bear to edit on that computer.
So I am very excited about this. I know that it's the stupidest, nerdiest thing to be excited about and also like, but like everybody, everybody we know has been taught. Yeah. It's the talk about this for years.
It's the talk of the town. Our particular town. Yeah. Our little town.
I've gotten to the point with my current computer where I have when I'm editing a Vlogbrothers video, the way that the playback is, it's so slow that I have to, I just know that I have to edit two frames earlier than the sound because there's like a disconnect between the sound play and the video playback. Oh my god. And so nobody else could edit on this machine because you have to be careful. You have to know that to the difference between the video and the audio.
Yeah. It's like you learn how to play guitar on a guitar that no one else owns in the whole world. Yeah. Yeah.
Like two of the strings switched. Yeah. It's just a little behind the scenes. All that I ever talk about in real life is like complaining about how difficult it is to edit video.
You think after 15 years of doing something as a job, I would be good at it. But I actually, I have, you know, this really flies in the face of the 10,000 hours rule because I've spent 10,000 hours editing video and I'm exactly as good as I was in 2011. Yeah. You got better.
But then you stopped getting better. I plateaued really early. You haven't been like trying to do new things with video editing. Like I remember there was a time when I like, I'm going to make a kinetic typography music video for the quirk song.
And I like learn how to do that. But we are done with that. At this point, I am better at like going to story blocks and finding a bunch of clips to use than you are. But that's about it.
Like I don't, like there isn't much difference between how we edit videos because we're not, we're not video editors, Sean. We are video writers. That's so true. It's all time.
I feel like we have gotten better at that. Like I look at our own videos and like, I think that they're, they're not bad. There's a lot of, a lot of oversimplification, I think, at a lot of points. I think that's a generous way of putting it.
And I like it. I like it when you review our work generously. Let's answer some questions from my listeners beginning with this one from Nudge who writes Dear John and Hank, it seems like a lot of work to Terraform a planet. Nudge, before I get through the rest of your question, I just want to acknowledge the deep profound truth of this.
Like we're having trouble terraforming this planet, which our bodies were made for. We're doing it by accident. Yeah. And so given how I would say so far the results of the human terraforming of the human planet have been mixed, I wouldn't call what we're doing here terraforming.
It's more like we are attempting to terra, like maintain. Yeah, we can't even do that. Yeah, we are struggling. We're keeping earth, earth.
It's not like we're planting new turf. We're just trying to mow the lawn every now and again. And we can't even do that. So I share your concerns here.
Yes. Okay. Wouldn't it be better? With the rest of the question.
Nudge asks, to bioengineer a human who is specially adapted to Mars rather than to engineer the whole stinking planet just to support our silly human bodies. Check my badge, Nudge. I don't hate it. And there has been talk about this with regards to like in space living, more than on Mars living.
So like there are a number of challenges to in space living. Like, you know, you got a lot of cotton gradiation that's going to make you much more cancer prone. You've got the whole situation regarding weightlessness and how that affects its own density and your eyes and your blood and your blood pressure and all this stuff. So there's a lot of different health consequences.
And so like, you know, if we're going to have people living in weightlessness, we are going to have to engineer them to be good at that. There are ways to create artificial gravity in space, though, which is actually a lot easier than terraforming a planet. The problem with terra, like genetically engineering a human to live on Mars is that like maybe you could genetically engineer a human to live in a colder place, but you can't genetically engineer a human to not need oxygen and to not need like air pressure to force the oxygen into their blood so that they can metabolize. Like we are not, there is not a way of doing this without an, at least, you know, good honk, like 20% of an atmosphere of oxygen, maybe 10.
You mean at least 10% of an hour atmosphere of oxygen? Just like a good restaurant, you know, like you're never going to succeed as a restaurant unless you have some atmosphere. You got to, it's like, everybody's has that whole sort of, we have a lot of things on the wall vibe and the cheesecake factory has that whole vibe of like, you know, you're sitting on a, in a nice bank head and the menu 72 pages long, like you got to have some kind of atmosphere, some kind of vibe that works and Mars ain't got it. Just be clear, when I say 10% of the atmosphere, I'm not saying 10% of the oxygen were being now, but 10% of the unit of measurement of an atmosphere.
Are we still talking about whether Applebee's has a good vibe or are we talking about whether we can live on Mars, which is irrelevant? Like it's not like we're, it's not like we're super close to being able to have create an atmosphere around Mars that has all of the oxygen. Yeah. We're not number challenges.
We are not in the neighborhood. Like, so when you say like, oh, I don't think we could ever genetically engineer human beings that not need oxygen, like me neither, but we're not in the other neighborhood, like we're not in the neighborhood of terraforming Mars or in the neighborhood of engineering humans. Now you could imagine a Mars on which there is, you know, a little more atmospheric pressure and you walk around with a breather instead of walking around in a whole suit. And that would be better.
But the idea like the terraforming, terraforming Mars project requires a, a outlook that is not on a human's like lifetime scale. Like you have to be thinking about the human experiment scale where there have been humans for 200,000 years on the scale of 200,000 years, if we have 200,000 years to terraforming Mars, we could probably do it. But that's what we're looking at. Like, like, it's going to be a thousands of years long process.
If we, if we decide to terraforming planet, I think, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's a way to do it that, you know, is based on technology that we don't really understand yet. But what are you saying, John? I'm saying that if we're taking a 200,000 year time horizon, then I think nag is questions completely legit.
Like, nag, we don't know which of these things that we cannot do and that will take many thousands of years to even consider doing in any serious way is better. Like we don't know. Yeah, we don't know. We don't know.
We don't know that like what's essential to humans is our ability to make oxygenate blood. Like it's definitely essential to me. I would be bummed out in a really significant way of my body loss, the ability to do that. But 150,000 years from now, Hank, for all I know that we know the humans of the future could be the size of my thumbnail.
It's true. It's true. And they could maybe could just be like colonized by photosynthetic bacteria that generate all the oxygen we need. Maybe.
Speaking of that, Hank, and I think we have finally answered nag is questions. We can begin to transition away from it. I have a question for you, which is, would you rather be one of these photosynthetic beings that just has green skin? Or would you rather be a photosynthetic being that's colonized by green algae, like covered in green algae, like the swamp thing?
Well, yeah, when you said colonized, I pictured like inside of all of everything, not like dripping off of us. But here are the two options. You can either have green skin or you can have your entire body be full of photosynthetic algae. I'm gonna green skin.
Which they did recently, John, two tadpoles. They put photosynthetic cyanobacteria into the tadpoles and they found that in a zero oxygen environment, they were able to survive when a light was shining on them. So we're not that far away. So we know maybe I was wrong.
Maybe we just have to create photosynthetic people. Maybe there's enough light on Mars, but instead, you just create giant, extremely bright lights that shine onto your chest all the time. And you can't see them because they're just like a patch that's there. And it's just generating oxygen in your blood without having to breathe.
We don't need breathing anymore. The future is now while the future is still the future. So just to summarize, you started out saying, there's no way we can genetically engineer you as not need oxygen. And you landed in, this is probably much better than terraforming Mars.
That was a good party. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for inviting me. It would be hard to create that much.
It's all going to be hard. What are you talking about? We can barely fly a helicopter there. Like, of course, it's going to be hard.
It's true. John, this next question comes from Annie who asks, Dear Hank and John, I am nearsighted. I have terrible vision. The other day I was doing my makeup in front of a large living room mirror without my glasses.
And I realized objects far away from me in the room are still blurry when I look at them through the mirror. When my nose is two inches away from something, as it was to the mirror, I have 20 vision. So therefore, the mirror must be reflecting the image of objects in the room and the distance of those. How is that possible?
How do mirrors work? If you don't know the answer, can we still talk about this because I'm kind of freaked out, but I'm also okay. Mirrors, John, can I explain to you? I will try to explain this in as few words as possible.
Yeah, because I've often wondered this myself. I mean, I think I have an idea of why, but explain it to me in fewer than 100 words. Okay, I'm going to do it in less than 10. Mirrors are not pictures.
Okay, so you're telling me that a mirror is not a photograph that my eye sees? If yes, if the mirror took a picture of you, like if it was a video, like if the mirror took a video and we just reprojected the video, then you would be able to see everything. It was like a retina display and everything was perfect. You'd be able to see everything as if it weren't blurry.
But that's not what happening. The light is bouncing off the mirror and then spending all of that photon time to have those different wavelengths separate out from themselves because your lens is not perfect in your eye and they all get fuzzy the same way that it would if it was actually far away from you because the light is actually traveling, which is why mirrors are so important mythologically. You know, they are kind of like portals into another world. It's just that the other world is happens to be what is directly behind you.
Yeah, they're magical. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. So basically mirrors are not photographs. And if they were, then I could see everything crisply, but they aren't, so I can't.
What would you see in the mirror of air set? Oh, I think in the mirror of air set, I would probably see me holding my next book that I have finished instead of not even started. That's really interesting, though. I would have thought something else.
I would have thought you are holding some prize or some diamond play button or something. But no, you have a literary, your deepest ambition is literary. I don't know. That's what I spend most of my time thinking about when I have time to think.
Yeah. Well, it's my preferred hobby. I mean, if I could only do one thing with the rest of my life, it would definitely be right. Mm hmm.
Yeah, I don't know. I did recently. This is so this is weird, John. I don't know if this was, I don't know.
I don't know if this is weird or not. I recently wrote a song. I wrote a chorus to a song and I looked at it and I was like, this isn't really a hand green song. And I so I sent it to a band that I like.
I was like here, if you want this, that it seems more like your a u-song than it does a me song. And they they wrote back and they said, interesting, we'll see. But I so I have not but I like I liked that so much where I was like, I wrote this and now I've let it loop free. Yeah.
And if they want it, then they can use it. And if not, then but like if they like recorded that song, it would make me very happy. Yeah. Well, so I think what you're saying is that you would like to write a book, but you don't want to publish it under your name, you're just going to give it to me and let me make all the royalties.
I say yes, Hank. I say yes. People would be like, wow, this guy discovered plot. Where did that come from?
Oh my god. I'm reading a book right on the such a good plot. And I'm like, I'm just very, I feel very inadequate. No, I'm reading really good books.
Yeah. Well, I guess when I read really good books, I don't, I used to get that feeling of like authorial jealousy where you think like, Oh, I wish I could do that. And now I don't. Now I'm just like, Oh, I mean, what are you going to do?
Like some people are just better. And there are probably things that I can do at least in a small way that they can't do. But also, you know, the other thing that I've come to in as I've gotten older, or this is where I've landed for the moment anyway, is a feeling that different, different works of art serve different purposes in people's lives. And the big part of my jealousy, especially when I was younger, was about thinking that art was one thing.
And there was one continuum and the continuum started at bad and ended at genius. And that everything fit on the exact same continuum in the exact same way. And that's just not how art works. Yeah.
Yeah, which is why I only like get get that feeling when somebody is doing something I'm trying to do better than I can do it. Yeah. Whereas a lot of times I read a book and I'm like, well, I'm not trying to do any of these things. And so I can just enjoy it as a viewer, a viewer.
Yeah. All right. We have a vitally important question to get to you from Jennifer, who writes, Dear John Hink, I have been summoned for jury duty. I plan to double mask to reduce the risk of exposing my family to COVID.
Now, if I wear my pizza mask from last year over my 95 mask, am I sending the wrong message about whether or not the lawyers should select me for the jury masking mitigation? Jennifer, a little bit of context for people who did not see this mask. It was a mask that essentially tried to recreate my moustachee face at scale so that when you wear the mask, it appears that you have my face and my mustache, at least there's the bottom half in the mask area. Yeah.
But because the scale was slightly off, I would say, what it actually depends on your size. Yeah, I guess it depends on your size. For most of us, what it actually looks like is like a very slight kind of joker, a mustachio joker mask. Like it is, I'll tell you what, Jennifer, I think you didn't answer the most important question inside of your question, which is, do you want a message?
Are you trying to send me on a jury? Look, I think, I think that jury's need a diverse candidate pools. And you are sending a message, I am, you know, maybe not your average, Jennifer. I think you should do it.
I think you should do it too. But I am also in no, and I should say that I think serving on a jury is a real privilege. And it's also one of the great responsibilities of being a citizen of the United States and other countries where these things happen. And I think it's a real honor and that you should take it seriously.
I'm a big believer in answering the questions honestly. And if you're chosen to serve on the jury and performing that service, but none of that has anything to do with whether you should wear a pizza John mask. And if you like your pizza John mask, and it's the kind of thing that you might wear sometimes, I wish you were. Absolutely.
And who knows, maybe one of the lawyers is a nerdfighter like that. We're old now. People have been around that pizza John is going to be a teenager soon. Yeah.
Yeah. No, we have people who watch our videos who are younger than pizza John. Oh, this is a man usually doesn't get me anymore. Usually I'm like a place where I've accepted that we are both old and have been doing this for a long time.
But they occasionally there's some frames that just do make me. The one that gets me is that we were making YouTube videos before there was an iPhone. Like, I just, what the hell was going on with this? I sometimes don't think about this too.
What was going on with us in 2007? Where like, how were we in a position professionally or personally to make 230 YouTube videos in a year when the first 150 of them were only watched by like 400 people each? Like, I don't know, especially me. Like you had books out, right?
Yeah. I was making a living by traveling. So I'd like go to Europe and make some money for a few weeks, like talking to schools and stuff. But yeah, what were you doing?
Where was your money coming from? Actually, so some of you do your taxes. You can see your income for like the last 10 years. Oh, yeah.
So in 2017 or something, I actually was able to see what my income was in 2007. And I made $17,000 that year. And I think I made it mostly doing freelance graphic design and web design and making money from my blog. And I think I just, you know, scraped by and I'm pretty sure that I dipped into savings, John.
Yeah, you did. I never thought about it. It was so exciting. I knew it was valuable.
Yeah, that's how I felt too. I could tell that it was a lot cooler than the world was recognizing. Like, I remember going into like Hollywood meetings, you know, and they would want to talk about adapting my books or whatever. And I would talk to them about adapting my books.
But then the whole time I would be thinking, you know, there's this other thing happening that is very, very interesting. And frankly, a lot cooler than any of my books. And if anything, you should be like thinking about how to make an abundance of Catherine's as a YouTube series. But yeah, then it turned out that we were able to ride that wave.
And it's been fun and strange. And I'm really, really lucky to still be doing it 15 years later. Yeah. And I want to say what a great pizza mess because we haven't had a video since podcast, it's pizza mess.
Everybody who bought some pizza mess merch. But also, I just love making a video every three days. But I just love making a video all the time and like being constantly needing to be in that space of like, what the heck am I going to talk about? Yeah.
It's really inspiring. And also, it lets me take a work break from my work, which I need. Yeah, I loved it too. And I think what 2007 had for us that no time since has had was a sense of profound clarity in the sense that every other day we were making a video.
And so the question of what am I going to do today? Always have the same answer, which in some ways gets old for sure. But yeah, it was really clarifying. And so I think it's fun to go back to that for a couple of weeks.
We both think it would be fun to go back to that longer, but I suspect it would get older in your life. Yeah, I think maybe I could go to two, two a week, but I don't think I could have that third one. That third one doesn't make it a lot. I don't know.
I think it get old. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad I'm glad to have it for two weeks a year.
Yeah, sure. Which reminds me actually that today's podcast is brought to you by Pizzamas. Pizzamas, it's no longer happening. So you can't buy anything.
It's you can't have participants just 50 short weeks away, though. Mark your calendars. The podcast is also brought to you by mirrors. They are not pictures and light hits them and continues to travel.
And wherever it is, it's going. And of course, the podcast is most importantly brought to you by Hank's journey from terraforming a planet to micro engineering humans. Hank's journey. We all witnessed it earlier today.
I don't know what I'm doing. No, none of us do Hank. And of course, this podcast is brought to you by the new 2021 MacBook Pro. It has a little place where you can put a SD card.
And that's all we wanted. It's all we wanted, Apple. You make a lot of people excited. Take it.
I wouldn't take a sponsorship from Apple until now, but now we will. Now we would be open to Apple. Give us a call. Give us a call.
We felt like we could not take money from you because it was impossible to put a memory card inside of your computers. But now now we've forgiven you. We also have a project from a message from Michelle Brennhogg to my daughter's Lily and Mira. I've been a Nerdfighter since 2009.
And I think it's cool that I've been part of this community for your whole lives. I remember watching the P4A livestream in 2010 when I was very pregnant with Lily, Lily meeting John at the Festival of Books in LA. I love that now you girls enjoy watching Hank's science TikToks and listening to the podcast with me and Daddy. I feel so blessed to get to watch you girls growing into thoughtful, creative and kind human beings every day.
You both make me feel so lucky I get to be your mom. I also wanted to say to John and Hank that seeing your kids be part of P4A this year was really special to our family. It made it feel like a big party that we were all having together. Thank you Michelle.
Yeah, that way for us too. This episode of Dear Hank and John's 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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See website for more details. John this next question comes from Ren who asks Dear Hank and John how do you get good at being bad when I first read this. I thought that it was like just like you know breaking the rules. Yeah how do you get good at being an air well.
But no in fact that's not it. I know conceptually that you need to be bad at things before you learn how to be good at them later. But every time I try something new it is hard for me to keep going if I don't get better quickly. This is normally fine but I'll be student teaching next semester and real teaching after that and I'm really really scared that it's going to be hard for me to knock it all torn up at not having to hang up it immediately.
Do you have any tips for getting through the beginning stages of learning something not Kylo but Ren. The research seems to say that the thing that drives people through the parts where you are bad at something is the process and the recognition of getting better. The time that you spend noticing that you are getting better at something is very important to the process of going from bad to not bad at something. Right that's an interesting observation that makes that makes a lot of sense to me.
Yeah yeah so focusing on the fact that everybody's bad when they start isn't actually that helpful. What you need to focus on is that you're getting better and there have to be thinking about how bad you are at the beginning right so that you remember that. Yeah yeah and then you're also motivated to continue to see that progress if you focus on the progress. There's an exercise that that so I do Pilates because I'm a big nerd and and there's exercise in Pilates that the first time I did it I couldn't do one without getting a cramp like an immediate cramp and I just wasn't strong enough to really do it and now whenever I'm doing that particular exercise and I'm better at that exercise than almost anything else because I remember like that I couldn't I used to not be able to do it at all and now I can do like 20 of them and and I feel like part of the reason I can do 20 of them is because I'm like I'm good at this one whereas I'm good at all of them I just didn't have that experience of like literally not being able to do it when I first tried other exercises and this is the same thing with like learning a language where I always feel completely out of my depth in in Spanish but if I go and I like take the lessons that I took when I was first learning I'm like oh I know all of this back and forth like none of this is confusing to me at all and that is always true of the stuff that I learned like two months ago I just have to keep remembering it because I always feel like I don't know anything but I know much more than I did.
Yeah I think for me part of the motivation to get better is also the that there is a feeling of joy or satisfaction or something when things start to click in together and you have to have the feeling of frustration right like this is perfectly captured in video games where you have to get frustrated by not being able to finish the level in Super Mario Brothers in order to experience pleasure when you finish the level in Super Mario Brothers and so while I used to get frustrated and then I would stop when it came to writing or when it came to other things if I'm able to work well now it's usually that I'm able to work through the frustration and recognize that like the point of frustration is often or the point of intense frustration overwhelming frustration is often the point right before something clicks in. This is especially true with writing where I will feel especially if I'm working on an essay or something or vlogbrothers script or even an all seen in a novel I'll feel like this isn't going to work I can't find a way through this and then I'll stand up and I'll get I'll get mad and I'll get frustrated and I'll walk around a little bit and then I'll think oh oh I'm not really writing about orbital sunrises I'm really writing about why we make art and what we sacrifice to make it so the ending doesn't have to be about orbital sunrises it can be about what I'm actually writing about and those moments of understanding and I think you have them in teaching I've had them in chaplain see I've had them in every career that I've had those moments are so fulfilling that they make a frustration that comes before worth it so that is another thing I look for is have I had any those moments of things clicking in clicking into place and feeling that satisfaction and if so then I can remind myself well there are probably other ones that await me if I keep working. Yeah yeah I don't like I've never I've never done this in a normal teaching environment but public speaking is absolutely this way where you just get better at it when you do it and teaching is it's wild that like we have an entire profession of like public of like public speaking it's scary that is the number one fear that people have and and it is very very necessary for teaching I think it's totally normal to feel intimidated by it so but you get better and like I'm so much better at than I used to be. You are so much better at it than you used to be so am I but I feel like I've seen more progress than you I don't know I don't know I look at like that works yeah I look at speeches I made in like 2006 like the the speech I made to after I won the Prince Award like I wasn't able to stand so nervous and then also like I don't know the speech was the speech of a much younger person who has a what you know Hank unshakeable beliefs now now I have nothing but shaken beliefs I'm just a collection of highly shook up beliefs all right Hank before we get to the all-important news from Mars and A.F.C.
Wimbledon how about one more question all right this is a question I have for you because I don't know the answer it's from K to ask dear Hank and John but mostly John why do football goalies wear such different costumes from the rest of their team and why don't the colors even have a loose relationship whatsoever to the team's colors? Gorgeous yours Kate yeah so this reminds me of something that happened when I was first pitching the A.F.C. Wimbledon movie which is I was trying to get people excited about the prospect of making this movie and it all culminates in a penalty shootout where you know A.F.C. Wimbledon and Luton Town are in a penalty shootout and only one can go to the football league and Wimbledon wins said Brown saves two penalties that's the big moment in the movie and some of them where you feel all the feelings and one of the producers said I don't understand why there are four teams and I said what she said there's the blue team there's the white team and then there is this pink team and this green team and I am confused and I was like oh no the goalkeeper's just wear different colored uniforms but then as I was saying I was like which is weird like I mentioned it I get why you are confused so the idea and it's usually a very bright color right yeah so the idea is that they need to be easily identifiable to a lot of different people they need to be easily identifiable to their own defenders who need to know need to be able to glance back and see where the goalkeeper is to maybe make a pass to the goalkeeper but they also need to be like easily identifiable by referees and everything right like if they had the exact same uniforms on and they picked up the ball because they're the only player who can pick up the ball as long as they're inside of their goalkeeper box if and they picked up the ball like the referee might be like below the whistle and be like you can't do that oh wait sorry that was the goalie so that is the basic reason and goalkeeper kids tend to be very loud and very easy to see in your peripheral vision for that reason so the word is kit not costume yeah or jersey but the whole the whole kid in kaboodle is called a kit like with the shorts and everything okay so yeah and you can buy like you know you can put a fcwimbledon.co.uk and buy nigsanev's goalkeeping outfit and wear it in your house i i know i do good for you john that's adorable we're all happy for you so does that mean you want to tell us to do this for me i fcwimbledon this week yeah let's talk about nigsanev um you know a fcwimbledon over the weekend went down to nil at home to Sheffield Wednesday as they like to do and then as they like to do they came back and tied the game to to this is i think the fourth time we have come from two nil down to tie football game almost all of our overall points this season have come from losing positions a fcwimbledon are actually more likely to win a game so far this season if we don't score the first goal than if we do which is uh weird um yeah it's a topsy turvey uh wild and willy season and you know these two draws that we've just had in a row have been not great obviously like it would be better to be winning games but i've been encouraged i think there are encouraging signs um i think on the whole we still look a lot better than we did this time last season and so on the whole i am still feeling optimistic ayupa sol continues to be a problem that no league one defense can solve we are getting goals from lots of different players uh rudy rudoni uh is is really coming into his own he's an academy graduate who's been playing for Wimbledon and he's had a great season so far so i am feeling hopeful at the moment uh even though we have slipped down to 17th place after 12 games although to be fair i would be overjoyed to finish in 17th place yeah that would be um well it's great it sounds yeah it sounds like this is uh i don't know we we weren't gonna stay up as high as you were uh probably not and like it's a long season i feel like we've gone through a difficult period we've got some injuries will Nightingale unfortunately he has a very serious injury and is out for three or four months and he's not just one of our best sexual defenders he's also somebody who understands the club so deeply because he's played there since he was nine years old and that's a bummer so some of the injuries are worrisome all he paulmer is injured again but at the same time if we're getting results with against good teams with things not going our way i feel like okay i can feel i don't know hopeful yeah i hear that how's mars mars is good uh one of the great things about mars is it's just really hard for it to have a exceptionally bad day as a planet um since you know the swings aren't very broad but i don't know man the sandstorms it seems like mars had some rough days when like the seven-year sandstorm attacks so yeah that's that's fine where the sun is like six mars quake i mean i feel like somebody just like somebody tussle on your hair he's a planet mars is fine um but uh as for our work on mars so when perseverance uh landed and jesserill crater and started to do all this research one of the first things we heard was like we think this is a lake bed and then when we landed it was like this is a lake bed now the you can look at these rocks and like say these are sedimentary rocks you can see channels where water flowed um and so like the people talking about this we're like this is a lake bed but then the process of sciences then you actually go through and you write papers and you document like specific clues as to how it is the way that it is and one of those papers got published this week in science um it is the first paper that was published using data from perseverance um and it's catalogs a bunch of different uh images that are taken um so some of them are like wider images and some of them are like like micro images there's actually something called the remote microimager um and the rover took pictures of long steep slopes in escarpments or scarps and using all those images they could they could see how the rocks and the scarps was layered and they found how that they were inclined horizontally uh and they found and they found that the horizontal layering was very similar to what we see in deltas on earth so like we are looking at a river delta of sorts um that's probably formed by uh repeated flash floods rather than like a long sort of Mississippi river kind of situation so it's not like it's not like uh New Orleans river delta or the Nile river delta it's like a river delta closer to somewhere in the American west state that doesn't get a lot of water or consistent water flow but then has really high volumes of water from through it occasionally yeah and there you know there are lots of different stories of how Mars could have been but but one of the things it seems likely is that it was sort of like warm and wet and then as time went on you had sort of these periods of freezing but then like the these giant glaciers melting and that would that you know glacier melt often creates big dams of ice that then break and you have flash flood situations like this um but I don't know uh you know there the uh the the research is continuing and it is a complicated story that covers uh hundreds of millions of years uh but we now have the paper that actually says the thing that we've been saying for a long time which is this is a lake bed uh and there was a lot of water here and that did a lot of things over a long period of time is there a chance and I think I've probably asked you this before but is there a chance that like 800 million years ago Mars was a better place for life than Earth and that maybe complex life flourished and then when extinct on Mars I mean yeah there's definitely a chance I don't know exactly what would make Mars a better place than Earth but you know one of the one of the things that will be very exciting if we ever find um ancient or current you know single-celled life on Mars is we will then be able to check very easily to see whether it is closely like whether it is related at all to Earth life and um and there is a lot of thought that that is sort of as likely as not um yeah that life even even if we have it multiple times in our solar system still only evolved once and I was able to jump from place to place once it did yeah I mean that would be Martians it could have happened on Mars first right like I don't know I don't know which would be more astonishing to me I guess would be more astonishing to see a whole different path for life to evolve and be able to imagine a different model of life like which we kind of can't even do now because it's so there are so many unknown unknowns about it but it would also be very cool to find out that we're all Martians yeah it would I guess that would be the more disappointing outcome but it would be I it would still be a really interesting Tuesday you know if NASA may be announcement and they're like yeah we think this is older than all the Earth life so we think that we're Martians yeah that'll be pretty cool all right well thank you for probably gonna be thanks everybody for listening we're off to record our patreon link podcast this week in stuff at patreon.com slash your hand can jump this podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Menish it's produced by Rosie Anna Hoss our communications coordinator is Julia Bloom our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti let me see you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast it's by the great gunerola and as they say in our hometown don't forget to be awesome