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Tickets go on sale to the general public June 30th at somethingworthknowing.com. So come build a better world with us on September 16th and experience something worth knowing you can get your ticket at Complexly.info slash something. Hello, welcome to Dear Hank and John! There's our further good at Beard, John, and Hank.
It's a comedy podcast about death where my brother John and I answer your questions, giving you advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. How you doing, John? I'm ill and unwell, Hank. I was unwell asked because my cold has settled into my chest for a small amount of what appears to be bronchitis.
I'm just not feeling great but I'm excited. It always lifts my spirits to be able to podcast with you. Oh good. Oh good.
I have an update for you, John. Last week we discussed the peculiarity and potential disgustingness of putting water on cereal. And I went to my house, got my frosted mini wheats out, put some water on it, and ate them. And do you want to know how I felt about it, John?
I do. Was it delicious? It was awful. It was so bad.
Oh, that's disappointing. It's just not a good idea. I mean, why? You really didn't like it with water?
No. So the thing is, like, yeah, it's milk is sweet. Milk has a sweetness, especially the milk I drink, which is almond milk. And I've gotten used to that over my entire life.
And when you put a thing that is not sweet, has no sugar onto your cereal, it just tastes almost bitter. But more than that, more than anything, it tastes empty. Like there's just no, like, there's no richness to the flavor. I encourage other people to try it, because maybe you will feel differently than I do.
And then you can have a lower calorie, less impactful breakfast meal. But it's not going to happen for me, John. That's disappointing, Hank, because I just, I stand by my original argument that cereal with water is a healthy and delicious solution to the how to moisten my cereal problem. Right.
And who knows, maybe if everybody used water on their cereal, all the world's problems would be solved, John. Maybe. Hank, would you like me to reach you a poem about death? That sounds like the kind of thing that you do.
It's poem is by W.H. Odd. And I've been thinking a lot about memoriam poems, like poems written in memoriam, memoriam to other people, just because there's been so much death. It's January still actually it's not it's February.
I guess now it's the least deadly now it's the least deadly month. January the deadliest month for humans February the least deadly month, but only because it has so few days. Anyway, this is a great, great poem by W.H. Odd.
And I apologize in advance for it not being shorter, but it's still fairly short. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, silence the pianos, and with muffled drum, ring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle, moaning overhead, scribbling on the sky the message, he is dead. Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, let the traffic police been wear black cotton gloves.
He was my north, my south, my east and west, my working week, and my Sunday rest, my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song. I thought that love would last forever. I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now, put out everyone, pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood, for nothing now can ever come to any good.
W.H. Odd. The poem often known as Stop All The Clocks, cut off the telephone. Thanks for bringing us up here, John.
Glad to start the podcast off on the upbeat note. Yeah, I know it's wrong about the title. It's actually called Funeral Blues. I really like that poem though.
It is a little dark. As I was reading it, I realized that it's a little bit sad. I did. I felt the sadness.
It was in me. It's still there, indeed. You know what I like about that poem though, Hank? Just real briefly.
What I love about it is that when people die, when people you love die, one of the things that I'm always struck by is that the world goes on. So I remember when we were burying our grandfather's father, I remember looking out at the street and just seeing all the cars moving and thinking, well, that's very strange that the world is going on as if nothing has happened. And that W.H. Odd and Poem, for me, is that clairin call of like, this is what death should be, but of course, can never be because it's something that people do every day.
Anyway, sorry to start on a dark note. Let's move on to questions from our listeners. Before we get to questions from our listeners, I have an idea that we should revisit a question we brought up a couple podcasts back, which is whether or not like how much oil could have been saved if we made DVD cases the appropriate size for fitting a DVD inside of and not the size that looks the shape of a book or VHS tape, this rectangular shape that is completely arbitrary. We had two people write in after having done significant research and or math to determine how much oil in fact we use.
We had a response from Alex who did this all with math. And Alex says that there have been approximately 24 million barrels of extra oil, mostly, but though equivalent, most of it is most plastic as apparently made with natural gas. I didn't know that. To produce the excess plastic in DVD cases since the inception of DVDs.
And now of course that's a very round number, but that is the, you know, just sort of like back of the nap calculation, that is a huge amount of oil, John, or equivalent oil. That is a very large amount of oil. And then Aaron did a different set of calculation, and he came up with 200 million kilograms of oil, which is just under 1.5 million barrels. Regardless, it's an extremely large amount of oil that was used to produce the excess plastic in DVD cases.
And I do have to think that when future generations look back upon us, the thing that they will be most baffled by is our inefficient use of resources. And whenever anyone points to me, you know, some econ 101 model of supply and demand, I always want to reply by saying that like, you know, look at the massive, massive inefficiencies in our existing economy of goods and services. It's just absolutely astonishing when you pause to think of it. But yeah, I'm sure that we will be remembered for having produced so much unnecessary plastic, millions of barrels of oil that took hundreds of millions of years to make.
And we just use them to make DVD cases look like VHS tapes. I'm curious if you want to know the reason why Aaron and Alex's numbers are so different. And also why Aaron in his response said that it's possible that we in fact have wasted no plastic. I'm fascinated to know the answer to those questions.
It is because when you are making plastic from natural gas, there are you are not just making plastic for for DVD cases. You are making a bunch of different things. And all of those things have different uses. There's different kinds of plastic that get made.
There's also different byproducts that get used in other industrial processes. There's just a ton of different things that get so it's basically like thinking about instead of thinking about like, this is a barrel of oil, 100% of it is going to be turned into plastic. That's not how it ends up working because of chemistry. It's like a cow, where you have a cow and some of it's going to be ground beef and some of it's going to be liver and some of it's going to be bone meal and some of it's going to be steaks.
And all those different parts are going to have different prices based on different markets. And basically what Aaron is saying is according to a person that he talked to that works in this industry. His name is Chris, that this plastic was kind of going to be produced anyway because all the other things that were being bought of the byproducts of this natural gas were going to be bought anyway. So it's another way in which like, wow, suddenly the world is so much more complicated than it seemed.
Aaron also adds that there's a huge number of complexities like the plastic wrap that goes around the DVDs, which is not technically necessary. There's like the fact that DVDs sometimes are sleeved and cardboard for no reason other than product marketing. It turns out to be very complicated. Also, the big difference where those two numbers are so different is that Alex basically said every barrel of oil that was involved in the creation of the plastic, whereas Aaron only focused on the fraction that ended up becoming the plastic.
Hey, as you know, people come to our podcast largely to learn about plastic. I'm like, giddy, I think it's so fascinating. They come here. We're about plastic and to hear incredibly depressing phones about that.
And here we are already having delivered. I mean, we've still got most of the podcast. 10 minutes, you can turn it off now. Everything you ever wanted out of a comedy podcast has been delivered here on Dear Hank and John.
That was one of the funniest summaries of the use of plastic and DVD cases I have ever heard in my entire life. I, for one, feel that I have gotten an ab workout just from laughing. Okay. Now you can ask a question.
Our first question comes from Richard who asks, Dear John and Hank, I have at the time of writing 336 subscribers on YouTube, I'm happy and grateful for all the people that make up that number, but I often find myself daydreaming about all the things I would do if I had more than 2 million subscribers like you guys. So here's my question. What would you do if in a freaky Friday style body swap, you woke up and you only had 336 subscribers on YouTube? Would you still make the same kind of videos?
I think first of all, in that situation, my first concern would be my children and my spouse. Why? I would be like, why am I in another person's body? And who am I now married to?
And where are my children? And are they safe? Or did they also experience a body swap scenario? Yes, that is true.
I think maybe you want to think of it as not a body swap, but simply a channel swap. Simply. But I do like I want to like get to the mechanics of this because I want to figure out how the script of this movie will be written because I do want to watch it. But I feel like that's not Richard's question and we should focus on that.
And I don't, I think it's so fascinating to think about because my life is so, certainly my professional life is so focused on the existing audience that I have and that we have that community that we have and like that they are the reason why I push myself to make stuff, why I never don't do it and why, and knowing that there's that audience there drives me to make something that's not that's accurate as possible. Like I'm putting this out into the world, I'm affecting the world and I need to be responsible about that. And so I'm just so like affected by this in so many ways that trying to put myself into a world where let's say everything else is the same, but I just don't have as many YouTube subscribers, but I'm still making content. And I'm still a YouTuber and like I still care a lot about this.
I think that I would probably make similar stuff, but I don't think that I would be able to work as hard on it as I do. I think that it's like the reason I work so hard on YouTube videos is because the audience is there. I would not make similar stuff. I mean, I think that we had 200 subscribers or a little less than 200 subscribers after our first 100 YouTube videos back in 2007.
And I think I would have finished the year. I do not think I would have continued after that year. I think that it would have been like a cool experiment and I would have been really psyched about all the neat stuff that we'd done together and how much it had brought us closer as brothers. And I think I might have continued.
In fact, we sort of did that even with the 9,000 subscribers we ended up having at the end of 2007. We slowed way down. We went to a point where we were only making, you know, I would make a video one week, you would make a video the next week almost. And we did not have a schedule.
And I think that it would have kind of continued down that path until we were making videos very, very occasionally. I think you probably would have made more because you were always more invested in making videos part of making videos. And I was always more invested in the audience part of making videos. I mean, I've never been a good video editor.
I've never been a particularly good YouTuber. So I think I would have stopped. And in general, like, it's very hard for me to make stuff absent. If I don't have an audience or the hope of an audience, it's very hard for me to make stuff.
Right. The other thing I would say, like what you said just now made me think a different thing about my answer, which is that I would be making different kinds of content. And it would be more focused on the audience that was there. It would certainly be influenced by the audience that was there.
And back when we had a smaller audience, there was more of a feel that that, you know, not just because it was smaller also because it was early this YouTube and people were really excited about it. But the fact that it was smaller made it easier for there to be a stronger community. And I think that that would be like, I would still be focusing on that. Yeah.
And you know, and like still also focusing on growing that audience. But but having I was just thinking today while I was shuffling my sidewalk free of all the white stuff that falls out of this guy. And about how like there was a moment in 2007 when like suddenly, and I've never said this publicly before, there was like a week in 2007 when suddenly I realized what we were doing was like bigger than just like people like me making content for other people and then making content for me and everybody sort of on the same playing field. When I got like four different phone calls from people who said, did you know your phone numbers in the phone book?
Yeah. Because like freaky people could call you. And I was like, of course my phone number is in the phone book. I'm a person.
Right. Like that's what the phone books for. It's a book full of people's phone numbers. But but there were like, but something had changed in enough people's minds that a bunch of people, seemingly independent of each other looked me up in the phone book and were shocked to find that I would be publicly listed.
And and and that was a that was a thing that happened. I mean, I remember that week because it was the weirdest, freaky, Friday-est week of my whole life. Like I I mean, I remember that vividly where all of a sudden it felt like it went from this very personal project with a small group of extremely, you know, to kind of like tight knit audience members, essentially co participants in the project to us making something for a big audience. Right.
And and it was interesting because I think our content got way better, like in terms of being appealing to a broad audience immediately. It was almost like the new audience inspired us to think about making videos differently, but it also got in terms of it being, but it yeah, it just changed dramatically. And I remember that week more vividly than I really almost any week of my life because it just felt like this massive sort of somewhat terrifying wave cresting over us. All right.
I got another one. This one's from Emma Grace who asks Dear Hank and John, the other day I found a box of Mac and cheese in the back of my pantry. It looked and seemed just about the same as any other box of Walmart brand mac and cheese I've had. But it had been expired for about a year since it was just powdered cheese and noodles.
I ate it anyway. But many of my friends have since told me that I'm going to die. Am I going to die? Thanks.
I mean, you're not going to die, but you have made a terrible, terrible mistake. I disagree with John and so does science. No, I don't care what science says. They put that they put that they put that date there on a for a reason.
I feel anxious Emma just just from the overall situation, you should not eat out of date Mac and cheese. You should not eat Mac and cheese that you have cooked and left in the fridge for more than a week because that is a problem. But when what you're concerned about is bacterial growth. This is not going to happen in dry macarutian cheese.
It's what what will happen is that the ingredients will oxidize. They will taste less good. So there will be things in there that were once one chemical that will have become other chemicals. Both of those chemicals are safe to eat, but one of them might not taste as good as the other.
So you are going to lose some flavor. That's what on dry goods the sell-by date is usually about. Same with the same with sodas. So does how to sell by date, but they're not going to become unsterile on the inside.
They are going to become less tasty. And that's what you want to watch out for. What you want to watch out for in terms of health is anything where a bacteria could grow, which seems extremely unlikely inside of powdered macaroni and cheese. Emigre's I want to emphasize that Hank is wrong and that you should not eat out of date macaroni and cheese no matter how confident he sounds in his sciencey talk.
All right. This is such a great comedy podcast. I just I can't tell you when I look at the iTunes comedy top list, I just think like of them, we are the funniest. Absolutely.
We got a question from G John who says, Dear Hank and John, my cat is asleep on my stomach and I'm late for work. However, I don't want to move because he looks so comfortable. Plus it is the known rule of cat owners that if the majestic animal decided to name you it's bed for a period of time, you lay there and enjoy it. However, I'm still late for work.
Does this count as a valux used for my tardiness? No, but in a just world it would. I mean, I think this might be the difference between people who have a deep underlying affection for cats and people who don't understand why we chose to domesticate that particular animal. Yeah, I have a deep underlying affection for cats and I totally sympathize with you, G.
This happens to me all the time. Sometimes I'll be laying in bed and I will have to pee really bad and then the cat will come and lay on my bladder and I'm like, okay, I love you. I'll just lay here with you. Just stop.
Oh my God. But you just lay there. That's what you gotta do. However, that's so weird.
I can't even tell you from the outside how weird that seems. That seems weirder to me than me eating my cereal with water probably seems to you. I can't imagine that that's the case, but I will trust you. Yeah, I think you need to try it with Raisin Brand.
I think that might be the issue. I think that maybe you need to do it with like a good, pre-sweetened cereal, like Raisin. Maybe the next time we do a Patreon livestream, which we did before recording this one, we did a livestream with our Patreon patrons at Patreon.com. I will have that Patreon livestream while eating Raisin Brand with water.
God, that just sounds delicious. What I wouldn't give for some watered down Raisin Brand right now. Today's podcast is brought to you by watered down Raisin Brand. Water down Raisin Brand.
John's number one way to eat Raisin Brand. This podcast is also brought to you by the complexities of the production of plastics. The complexities of productions of plastics, making life better for everyone through science. Today's podcast is also brought to you by expired macaroni.
Expired macaroni. I don't care what science says, throw it away. And today's podcast is brought to you, of course, as always, by dubious advice. Dubious advice.
The specialty of a couple of guys who are obsessed with death and not being funny. Don't forget, our advice is dubious. I just don't want to get in trouble for dispensing such terrible advice. This episode of Your Hank and John's Bronte is brought to you by Shopify.
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With new subscription only, while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See you website for more details. Guys, we have another question. It's from, it's from AJ who asks deer John and Hank, my friend and I were wondering what would happen if you had a body of water as big as a star and you dipped the sun into it?
Would the energy of the sun just evaporate all the water? Would the water put out the sun? We are very curious. Oh, AJ, I love this question.
I love this question so much that I want to call a plasma physicist and be sure that I'm going to give you the right answer but I'm going to give you my guess. I love, I love, wow. Okay, so if you had a ball of water, a body of water is big as a star. That would be a sphere of water in space and it was the size of a star.
It probably would on its own change dramatically before you were able to get it to interact with a star. So the moment that this thing appeared into existence, it would crush down the weight, the density of the gravity pulling all of those molecules of water together might be, I don't know that this is definitely the case, but might be enough to to initiate fusion and that ball of water that you are going to try and put out the sun with would become its own star. Now, I'm not certain that this would happen because there's a lot of oxygen in there, oxygen is much more difficult to fuse than hydrogen. It might, because of the density, contract a great deal when plasma began.
It might also, though, I'd be interested to know the density of the sun. I should have looked that up, but I haven't. It might also expand in size and actually become a larger star than the star you were trying to quench. This is the marvelous nature of the universe, that a ball of water, the size of the sun, is not going to be a ball of water for long.
It is going to undergo some magnificent and truly substantial changes. You know, sometimes I think like, but then if you dip the sun into that ball of plasma, they would just become a much bigger star together. You know, I find your genuine enthusiasm about science actually infectious. Like, I start to glimpse how great teachers get students excited about science.
Like, you seem to genuinely love that question. Whereas I only asked it because I wanted to make some jokes about taking the sun to the beach. Like, you know, like, I took the sun to the beach, but oh, my, the sunburn. Yeah.
Yeah. I see what you take. You take, you take, bring it to a body of water and you're just like, hey, I like it on the beach. Do you as well?
Giant ball of plasma? Oh, man. All right, John, we got a question from Collette. This is definitely an opportunity for some dubious advice.
Remember our advice is dubious. She asks Dear Hank and John, my older sister is currently dealing with depression and has left high school, the same high school that I attend. It's been hard for me to understand what she's going through. So I haven't told anyone.
People at school sometimes ask me why she isn't at school or if she's coming back. I'm not really ready to start telling people about what has happened. So I don't know what to say. What do you do when someone asks you a question that you aren't ready to answer?
I mean, this is a tough one, not least because when you say the truth, it only makes people ask more questions, right? Because the truth is I'm not ready to talk about it or it's a family matter or it's private or, you know, it's more I want her to be able to talk about it. I don't feel like I should be talking in her place. And all of those answers are only going to make people gossip and and chitter and chatter.
And that's difficult. I mean, I, you know, I took a semester off from college partly because I had whipping cough, but partly because of mental health problems. I suspected if I hadn't had whipping cough, I still would have had to take the semester off. And and when people ask me why, you know, later I was able to talk about it, but you know, that's a that's direct experience versus, you know, a siblings experience.
If people had asked Hank why I was taking a semester off from school, you know, it's not really my place, thanks place to answer, you know, and I mean, maybe that's maybe that's something that you can say is just like, I don't feel like it's my place to talk about it. You know, I love my sister and she's, you know, getting, getting what you know, getting what you need. I don't know. It might also be something that would be good to talk to your parents about because obviously they're more familiar with the situation than people at school than, you know, anybody, hopefully anybody else in a situation aside from your sister.
And also asking your parents, it would be a good idea to talk to your sister about it. The, you know, it might not be it might just be adding stress to this already very unpleasant situation. But yeah, I think that I think that there is no good answer. And when you when you when you the problem being that telling the truth in the situation, which is the thing that you kind of have to do is going to create a little bit of drama, it's going to make people feel a little bit uncomfortable.
And yeah, people are going to people are going to probably are going to guess now I don't know how supportive your friend group is at school. I don't know how supportive supportive her friend group is at school. But yeah, that it's a for my memories of of school. It's always difficult to to deal with stuff because people are, you know, people are all dealing with difficult things.
But but but they are not always kind. I mean, I think that that's one of the issues is that, you know, if you can count on your friends to be kind and discreet, then that's one thing. But a lot of times you can't, I know, certainly for for large swaths of my school life, I couldn't and that that makes everything harder. So we're sorry.
I'm sorry that you're going through that. We're sorry that your sister's going through that. And it is tough to hold on to it can be tough to hold on to those secrets and deal with those family struggles as far as empathizing with people with depression. I mean, I think that's a that's a huge challenge to be honest with you.
Like I I don't I don't feel like people empathize particularly well or even like it's possible to empathize particularly well because because depression is so specific and interior. I think that it's really, really hard to it's really hard to empathize with and in general, I think it's hard to empathize with people's pain. There's a great observation in this book that I was given by Mike Rignetta called the body and pain by Elaine Scar. I think her name is and she says to be in pain is to have certainty to hear of others pain is to have doubt.
Like your own pain. Nothing is more certain than your own pain. But other people's pain is kind of inherently dubious, right? Because like you don't know what they're really going through.
You don't know how it hurts or whether it hurts or where it hurts really. And it's just incredibly difficult to bridge that that empathy gap. And I think like it's even difficult in art. Art is one of the places where people connect the most in terms of, you know, finding ways into empathy and even in art.
I think it's difficult. God, this is a funny comedy podcast. I mean, I just we just kill it. All right, John, I have what I think is an important question that I want to get to.
It's from Emma who asks Dear Hank and John and the last episode of the podcast listener, not the last one, but in a previous episode, a listener wondered if there was anything in the world that wouldn't lead to widespread death and John replied, yeah, Purell, but in biology class that I had years ago, we learned that overuse of hand sanitizers could in fact be working against us if hand sanitizers kill 99.99% of all bacteria, that 0.1% that survived would have some genetic property that helped it live on and would pass that immunity on down the generations until it evolved an antibiotic resistant super bug so no hand sanitizers in the world would be able to combat the idea. So in the end, couldn't Purell lead to our widespread death after all? Sorry, John. No, I have wonderful news, which is that Purell does not work the way that like antibiotic soaps work.
So the 0.01% of bacteria, it doesn't kill, it doesn't kill because it doesn't touch. And the way that alcohol based hand sanitizers work is different from the way that other like antibiotics work. And while it is possible that someday, I guess, bacteria could develop resistance to alcohol, they have not shown a great resistance, a great ability to do it over the millennia. So that's good.
Yeah, yeah, it's based on how alcohol affects bacteria, the physical way that it affects them, it's impossible for bacteria to develop a resistance, it affects them physically. It's not most like antibiotic that you take or the antibiotics and antibacterial soap work in various chemical ways, but this is a physical reaction. It's basically the same thing as boiling them or heating them up a lot. It actually causes their cell membranes to rupture.
And that is a thing that happens. And that's why if you get alcohol in a wound, that hurts very bad because it's doing the same thing to your cells and it will do that to any cell on Earth, unless a bacteria evolved like a cell wall and then it would not be a bacteria anymore. Speaking of which, Hank, we should point out that several listeners have written in to say that Purell does cause widespread death, of course. It causes the extremely widespread death of bacteria.
Huh, that is a great point, John. It's just it's absolutely terrible for them. And seemingly, in a way that they have no defense against. No, never, and never will, which is excellent news because I am in favor of the widespread death of infectious bacteria.
I guess I am too. Yeah, I mean, I just I find infectious bacteria to be one of the least likeable organisms. It's all my all-time top 10 least favorite organisms. There is there is infectious bacteria that damage you.
There is some complexity here in that some of the bacteria that cause disease also are part of healthy balanced microbiomes as long as they don't get out of balance or as long as they're in the right place in your body. So there is complexity. You don't want all of infectious bacteria to not exist. You know, E.
coli exists in our guts all the time and E. coli causes disease, but also is just a normal thing to have in your body. I also I also have another update. We've had a lot of updates, but I feel like I need to get to this one because it's been a few episodes now and I feel bad about it.
A few episodes back, someone asked if there were Earth eclipses on the moon and I did not I waffled on that and I wasn't sure. And I should have just said, what is the obvious truth is that yes, obviously it does happen. There are Earth eclipses on the moon all the time. They are what we call a lunar eclipse.
Some people said that that happens every new moon, but that is not in fact what's happening during a new moon. That's just when the side of the moon that's being lit up is facing away from us. But when a lunar eclipse happens, that is when the shadow of the Earth passes over the moon. And during that time, if you were on the moon, you would be seeing the Earth come between you and the sun and the Earth will be blocking out the sun and that would be a tear in it clips, I guess, and you would be getting you be shaded by the Earth.
And that happens like four to like more than four times a year, four to seven, I think. So what happens all the time? So the one thing I'd just like to point out Hank is that when that question came up, I very confidently stated that indeed, there are such eclipses and then you were wibbly wobbly waffly waffly. And as usual, I was right on science and you're wibbly wobbly did nothing and accomplished nothing.
All your wibbly wobbly accomplished is you having to post this update. And in six weeks when you have to come back to the podcast and say, turns out that you shouldn't eat macaroni a year after it is expired, because some poor soul out there got botulism because if you're extremely dubious advice, I will again look like the genius that I am. Hank, I am in no great hurry to move on to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, but I am afraid that we have reached the point of the podcast when we must. I think that is correct.
Well, I have only terrible news, so perhaps you should give me news. Oh, no, I'm so sorry to hear that. Well, I have good news. I think, though, of course, as with, you know, interplanetary science, it turns out to be complicated news and maybe not news at all, but basically there's been a formation on Mars that's been studied for years now, because it looks a lot like the kinds of formations that we see around hot springs on Earth.
And this is probably an area that was geologically active and that had hot springs on Mars at one point. And hot springs, of course, are an excellent place for life to exist. There are multiple different ways that life in hot springs can get energy. They can get it from the heat of the water.
They can get it from minerals in the water that have themselves extracted in one way or contain the heat from, you know, geothermal processes. And you can also, of course, just get it from the sun. The, so these are very interesting areas. They're worth, worthy of a lot of study.
There are microscopic features on some of the rocks in this location on Mars that look, they call them cauliflower-like. So imagine a cauliflower, little tiny cauliflowers all over these rocks. And they've been studying these and have been trying to find analogs of these kind of formations that have formed on Earth through geologic processes. And they haven't found any, but they do find at hot springs that there are very similar shaped rocks, shaped crystals that form, that are formed by biological life, by microorganisms.
And the fact that they have seen these very similar shaped rocks on Mars and near hot springs and around hot springs on Earth, and that we cannot find a geologic way where those same similar structures would be formed, is very exciting, as you might imagine, and has been, is being discussed very actively right now. Of course, there's really no way to tell for sure, unless we are able to bring a sample back from Mars, study that more carefully in a laboratory, or take a person to Mars along with a laboratory with which to study those samples. But it's very exciting. And sort of continues to point to the, you know, what we often find in interplanetary science, and what we continue to find as we look for, as we look for and discover more exoplanets, that, you know, there's obviously something very special and unique about planet Earth and the life there, and humans in particular.
But things turn out to not be as rare as we think they should be, and the possibility, and the fact that there has been, now we've seen flowing water on Mars, and the possibility that there was once life on Mars could really be the kind of thing that we are going to find out within my lifetime, and that is extremely exciting. So what you're saying, Hank, is that there is a small possibility that there are living cauliflowers on Mars. There's definitely a small possibility, a very, very, very small possibility that there are living cauliflowers on Mars. That's just incredibly exciting.
I don't blame you for having gotten excited over that news. Meanwhile, on Earth... To be clear, when I say very small, I mean just astronomically, the more zeros than you could put in your brain, after the decimal point kind of probability. Yeah, no, you just described to me, Martian cauliflower, and it does...
I guess my main concern is that it doesn't sound delicious, but I'm suspicious of any food grown near a hot spring, but I'm excited to find out what develops. I will say that I am deeply concerned if there is life on Mars, that it's just going to completely take over this podcast. That's my main concern. I think that it would be bad for our podcast if there were life on Mars, but time will tell.
Meanwhile, on Earth, life has evolved to such an extent that there is a species capable of knowing itself and fathoming the universe. That species is called Homo sapiens. It is so far as we know unique among all the species that have ever lived in the entire universe, and that species is capable of intense and profound collaboration. And one of the ways that it collaborates, one of the most beautiful and interesting ways, is football.
And the species has evolved in ability to not only play football in a collaborative manner, but also to own football teams in a collaborative manner, as AFC Wimbledon is owned in equal parts by all of its fans. You, Hank, can join the Don's Trust at AFC Wimbledon's website. You're going to get there eventually, right? You're going to get there.
You're going to get to the news. It's only $35 a year, and you can be an owner of AFC Wimbledon just like I am. You'll earn the same percentage of the club that I do. I am getting to the news from AFC Wimbledon.
It is not great. We played Yovil town, which is right down. It seems like I believe is a fictional place. I believe it's in middle Earth, but they do not play Yovil town.
They're not a high in the table, John. Yovil town. They are not a they are not high in the table. They were lower in the table, but then they beat us.
It was a three, two game in the end. We led on two separate occasions, but Yovil came back from one, nailed down, came back from two, one down, and then one, the game three, two. This is bad for us on many levels. It's the kind of game that we're expected to win, playing Yovil town, a fictional place at home.
You would expect to win that game. It puts us 10th in the table. Look, we're 22 points clear of relegation. The main goal for the season is of course to stay in the football league, but we're now three points off the playoffs.
So it's definitely a disappointing result, not what we were looking for, but the arc of history is long, Hank, and it bends toward Wimbledon. Well, and also you have a lot of time to make up those three points, right? Yeah, but I mean, if you can't get three points against Yovil, there's some deeper concerns. Yeah, well, there's also just the universal dice.
Sometimes first seed's lose to 16 seeds. It happens. That's right. No, it's definitely true.
And I think we've got to stay hopeful. I'm sort of perpetually in a state of concern over AFC Wimbledon. I'm not the kind of person who, I don't know. I'm a warrior, Hank, and I can't help but look at AFC Wimbledon's remaining fixtures and feel, for lack of a better term, deeply concerned.
We play our next game against Bristol Rovers this weekend. That will have already happened by the time this podcast is uploaded. So people of the future, I can only hope that we have gotten a result against fourth place Bristol Rovers, but time will tell. Yes, that would be excellent.
You can move them down in the rankings while moving yourself up. It's a big game. It's an important game. Everybody get excited about the game and check on the results of the game when you hear the podcast ending, as it is doing right now.
John, what do we learn today? Well, Hank, we learned that you really try hard to care about AFC Wimbledon, but you just didn't go. I did my best. I'm sorry.
Did I step on your news? Was there more? Was there more to come? Oh, it's fine.
We learned that we waste a lot of plastic, making DVD covers, and we are an inherently wasteful group of people on this earth right now, but also that due to the nature of the manufacture of plastics, it's complicated. And we learned that Purell is different from antibiotic hand soap in ways that are very encouraging to John. That's true. And finally, we learned that while the world is not yet at a place where a cat sleeping on your stomach is a proper excuse for the tardiness of your arrival at your source of employment, it may one day.
Nope. Why are you late for work? Oh, because an animal that we chose to domesticate several thousand years ago that weighs about 12 pounds didn't want me to stand up. Yeah, it's never going to be an acceptable excuse here at the Indianapolis branch of Dear Hank and John.
Yeah, no, I mean, if a person said that to me, I would, and I believe them, I'm not going to, you're not allowed to have this excuse every day, but I would be like, I understand, I absolutely understand. And they're so comfortable. They look so comfy. They just, I mean, if anybody at the Indianapolis office is of Dear John and Hank shows up with that excuse, they aren't just, it isn't just an unexcused absence.
They're fired. Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, you're out.
All right. Well, we operate our businesses very differently. It's good. It's good to have different ways of doing things to see which way is more productive and which place people enjoy working more.
And everybody can discuss which office is best. Anyway, Hank, this podcast is edited by the hard working underappreciated and overall brilliant Nicholas Jenkins. Our theme music is by Gunnarollah. We're laughing because we screwed up so many times in this podcast that the hard working underappreciated to kick and basically has had to craft a podcast from scratch using just like previous incidences of our voices.
He's molding it from the raw clay. Thank you all for listening. Scratching the waveform into Cuneiform. Thanks to everybody for listening.
And as we say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.