Hey, so something worth knowing is a benefit for the nonprofit organization that makes Crash Course and SciShow Complexly. It's September 16th, 2026 in Los Angeles, California at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. Please join us. It's going to be incredible.
Friends of Complexly like Mark Rober, Katie Max, Simone Yech, and Moore will share inspiring talks about what makes them hopeful and join Hank Green on stage for fun, interactive discussions. Complexly has been creating free educational content like SciShow and PBS eons and Crash Course and Bizarre Beasts for nearly 15 years and 6 billion views. But this year, we have become a 501c3 nonprofit and we're doing something worth knowing as an in-person event that benefits Complexly and our impactful educational media. It's the first ever Complexly in-person event and it's a fundraiser to support our mission of inspiring curiosity and lowering barriers to knowledge building because curiosity builds understanding and understanding builds a better world.
Tickets 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. Oh, and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be a survivor of the next news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon John.
You know, when we were kids, parents would sometimes when one kid had chicken pox, they'd bring a lot of other kids over so that everybody would get chicken pox. This is a real thing that happened. Yeah, like real pox parties. Did you know what?
But obviously, so the kids can have pox parties, but adults, they gotta go to the shingle spar. Oh, I thought you were going to say they got to do shingle digs. Shindigles. Shindigles.
Shindigles. They go to the shingle spar. I have shingles. Hey, guys, shingles and goodness gracious.
I know that pink eyes shingles and I do feel really bad for you, Hank. I know that it's extremely painful. Yes. I'm going to say a but.
I am going to say a but. I am the sick brother. God, I've been so sick lately. I am the sickly one.
Yeah. And I don't think it's cool of you to try to move into my territory. It's been my whole thing though. That's what I've always been doing.
Like you get into the Mr. T experience. I get into the Mr. T experience.
You get into online video. I get into online video. Like you love Zay Frank. I love Zay Frank.
This is how it is. I'm a younger brother. You write novels. I write novels.
You get sick of Bunsh and our hypochondriac. I get sick of Bunsh and now John. There's a lump on my arm and I asked the doctor about it and he was like, that's a lump. And I was like, but like, how bad is it?
No, man. Now I'm worried. Now you got me worried. It's okay.
Hey, I don't want to hit you while you're down. But before we get to questions from our listeners, I think it's important to discuss an issue. Oh, which one I have so many. We have declared that this podcast will be renamed Dear John and Hank.
If no human steps foot on Mars by the end of 2027. Can we do the moon instead? Can we just change it? No.
And recently somebody wrote in to say, now we will know for sure that a human is not going to step on Mars. Irrelevant. I was just gonna stop you right there. Irrelevant.
That's not the bet. The bet is not whether it's when it's when that year arrives. So your argument is that it's not until December 31st, 2027 that we renamed the podcast to Dear John and Hank. My argument is that in fact, whenever that launch window closes in 2026, you don't know.
You don't know. I do know. History is full surprises. One of the benefits of having done this podcast with you for 10 years is that I actually do know how we get to Mars.
No, no, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, John. It could we could invent a thing right on right at 1158. That's like, oh, oh, we could just, you know, if I just if I just like shove this Sharpie up my nose, and at the right place in the right time in the right way, boom, I'm a Mars. I'll be honest with you, Hank.
No one's tried that. It feels like you're playing for time. Yeah, that's right. Of course I am.
Well, it's not even playing for time because playing for time is like maybe this was the way that we will win, but I don't expect to win. I'm just holding on to what I have for as long as I can. It's just because if it's the launch window, then it might as well be now. And now it's 2022.
Right. If it's the launch window, then at some point you might say, right, but realistically, could when could we get humans to Mars? And the answer is not 2027. So we might as well just start calling it Dear John and Hank today.
I actually find that argument more compelling that we shouldn't call it Dear John and Hank simply because it's this thing that is inevitable is inevitable, but it won't become official until January 1st, 2028. Right. We're not talking about things. We're not talking about things that will be worth it.
How come I think that are? Yes. Because if we were going to do more of, Oh, that is so true. That's so true.
Wow. Well, you stumbled into a deep one. Hey, with shingles, he's a deep well when he gets when he gets jingles. I mean, I wasn't when it was bad.
When it was bad, I was a very shallow well in every way. I could not think straight. Yeah, my temper was extremely short. Like any like so much of my consciousness was taken up with trying to not feel the pain or trying to sort of like mentally wall off the pain or just sort of experience the pain on the side of consciousness.
Yeah. That I like anything that was extra hard, I just gave up and that was everything from work where like any extra challenge, I was like, my hand like that general motivation, but also like temper like or in doing something even a little bit normally I'd be able to handle. I just I was so I snapped so fast. Chronic pain is so debilitating and yeah, like I'm just so happy that it was as short lived as it was for me.
Yeah. So I think that's really true. We think of our personality as being completely separate from our circumstances somehow. But in fact, they're also interdependent.
I mean, I want to believe that about myself, you know, that I'm like, I'm very motivated person. I can work through this, but it's just not true. Like when I was sick with COVID, I could not do good work. When I was experiencing severe shingles pain, I could not do good work.
Yeah. So Yeah, I'm glad that you're feeling better. But I also really appreciate the empathy that you've long shown for living with pain. It is really hard for people who have to do it.
You've helped me about that. Thanks. Let's answer this question from listener Eli, who writes, Dear John and Hank, what's up with Ryan Reynolds and his new show about AFC Recsome? How do you feel about it?
Did he betray you? Did he copy off of you? Thanks for the dubious advice. Eli.
All right. Here's the thing Eli. Ryan Reynolds stole our idea. I mean, I think he did.
I don't know. We didn't. We had him on the podcast, but I didn't like what it just seems really unlikely to me that more than one guy like us, like American, but he's Canadian, isn't he? Well, first off, like half of all English football teams are owned by Americans.
So that falls apart right there. I don't know anything. To me, it's the weirdest character trait a person can have. So explain to me, John.
Explain to me how any of this works. I got an email recently from my mother-in-law who was like a group of people in Birmingham, Alabama here just bought a fourth-year English soccer team. Isn't that the league that Wimbledon play in? And it wasn't Ryan Reynolds.
It was other people. So anyway, Ryan Reynolds did call me when they first had this idea before they decided to do it, before they decided anything else, when the idea was first happening. He called me 100% on board. I think this is lovely.
And he said, I know that you've had this experience for years with AFC Wimbledon. My friend Robin and I are thinking about buying a football team and making a show about the experience of that first year together. And I was like, I don't really be betrayed because like, no, we're pre-trade, if anything. Yeah, he called me and he was like, do you have any advice?
Do you have any thoughts? And I was like, this is such a great idea. It's going to be incredible. I don't really have any advice except that it's going to be awesome.
And remember that some people who play for the rival teams or support the rival teams might like you a little less as I am indeed not the best-selling author in Milton Keynes. But the show that they have made is wonderful. It's so beautiful. It captures everything I love about soccer and you don't have to care about football to love the show because it really captures how of all the unimportant things football is the most important, how it brings communities together.
All that stuff that we love about Wimbledon is true for Rexham as well. And the show is amazing. Not only is the show amazing, but I'm in it. I'm in this week's episode.
Hey, I do a little crash course on the history of Wales. It's so great. And Complexly got paid for that. So no, we definitely did not get stolen from.
In fact, if anything, we did stealing. It's well, look, it was a collaborative effort and everyone provided value and received value. And that's the way that things should work. So the show is great.
Watch me in it. I'm so excited that my debut in some ways as an actor in a proper program, proper television or movie experience, is in a Rob McElaney and Ryan Reynolds production. It's incredible that I've never appeared in any of the adaptations of the movies of my books, but I it's just incredible. I'm thrilled.
Hank, I have a face for small screens. I haven't seen it. Is it out? No, it comes out on Thursday.
Amazing. Okay. It is out. So that's why it's just not for me.
Right. So yeah, the show is called Welcome to Rexham. It's so good. It's so good.
I'm just, I think Ryan Reynolds is the real deal. I just think he's also like a cool guy. All right, John. This next question comes from a lamp who asks, John, I live in an area where there are green and old and brown and old's.
These are small wizards. If you don't know about them, when I grew up, I grew up in Florida, we call them a no lease, but now everybody tells me they're pronounced a no's. Anyway, wait, are the regular lizards in Orlando? Are those a no's?
They are. Oh, I call them usually. I call them lizards, but I know the green and the brown lizards. They're sort of two basic genres of Orlando lizard.
That's right. Yeah, there's green and brown. There's the big old browns and the kind of cute little greens. Right.
And the green ones are a lot faster and the brown ones look more like dinosaurs. Yeah. Yeah, they could be like a crest on the back. They definitely look like they could come get you and they will sometimes know the green and old's well, they will bite you if you let them.
Yeah, but it's not going to hurt. Okay, continuing. The green and old's love to listen to me sing. Every time I see one, it just stares at me like expecting something.
And then when I start singing a close, it's cute little eyes like it's listening. And then more of them start gathering like I'm doing a concert, but this only happens with the green ones. The brown ones just run away. The green ones listen every time.
I even had one crawl onto my hand due to brown and old's being an invasive species in the green and old population having been dwindling. But for some reason, they crowd around me like friggin pauper on see and it's only me too. Every time a friend or someone else comes by the lizards run away. Of course, I love the lizards and I always am kind and respectful to the green and brown and old's.
But why do they love me singing so much? You know, what lamp I don't care why they love it. But I do want to do science on you to find out. But more than that, I want to explore what kind of superhero you are and how you can use your powers for good.
Yeah, like it's like the pied Piper leading the children's crusader. There is a whole thing. What did the pied Piper do? I don't know.
Did he have rats? I think he had children. I don't remember. What followed the pied Piper, Google?
Children is children. It's definitely children. Before you get to your scientific analysis of this phenomenon, I also want to point out that lamp offered us an illustration of the giant cloud or and Mary Janet. And it's pretty.
It's pretty. It was like below the page break because it's big. Oh, yes, nice. The giant cloud or is kind of looking up at Mary Janet who is seated atop the giant cloud or and it's really good.
We're going to post it on Patreon at patreon.com slash beer hank and John. Mary Janet in this image is looking really like what would you say a little bit drowsy, but also just like I float around on a clap. It's my boyfriend. It's a big deal.
Yeah, I would describe this Mary Janet as Jessica rabbit scene at all. It's a niche joke, but it was perfect for Hank. This is this is a great. Yeah, this is an amazing question.
And the fact that it came with an illustration is really quite remarkable. Hank, yes, do lizards like music or do we don't know idea? I know. Okay, I don't want to do any research on this.
Like in a scientific way, it turns out to have absolute scientific answer. I have a scientific answer, John, and that scientific answer is we don't know many things about our universe, especially the living things in it. And the only way that we find those things out is people know to stuff. And then they test it.
So you need to do some science, like to try and remove your bias from the situation, maybe blindfold yourself, have someone lead you to a lizard, do do this in all kinds of different ways, do a recording of your singing and have it happen without you, have someone who's a better singer and a worse singer than you, sing different songs, etc. You need to figure out like, if there's a repeatable effect here, also, you could try it on different green and old populations, go try and find some other ones, you could reach out to some analogists, which is the actual name for people who study in holes, and be like, Hey, I've noticed this. Can can you adjust just for funsies? What would you suggest I do to learn more about them, etc?
I love it. There are also lots of other species of annoles that you could try this on. They're just not in Florida. I love the idea of lamp devoting themselves to trying to understand this phenomenon.
And it eventually ends with the global human realization that the little green lizards in Orlando have been making music all this time, just at a frequency we can't hear. Yeah. All right, this next question comes from Sage. You're right.
Stear John, hey, recently I had a concussion and I've been re-listening to the whole podcast. Sorry that we're not better Sage. I feel bad. I can't remember which episode it was because I'm concussed, but at some point you discussed how the human body is basically just a big tube circulating the digestive tract.
Oh, that was an all the episode. That's many of them. Yeah. We're just we're just tubes that have flesh and limbs.
Anyway, this got me thinking, is the stomach acid inside of our bodies or is it outside of our bodies, because it's inside of the tube, but my brain hurts, so my advice won't be very Sage. It's pretty good pun given the situation, Sage. Hank, of course, the concept of inside and outside of the body is a linguistic construct, not a real thing. But I think stomach acid is outside of the body.
I mean, so in the same way that you sweat onto the outside of your body, you excrete stomach acid onto the outside of your body. If we're going through the deer, ankle, john definition of outside, which means that everything from the mouth to the anus is just a tube of outside that runs through the inside, which I don't see. I don't see where it gets to draw the line. Don't see that even against it.
Exactly. So you're basically sweating out acid and actually what that leads me to realize, what I've never thought about before, that there's no reason that you couldn't excrete acid from any other part of your body. That's a logical reason. If it's possible in one group of cells, it's possible anywhere else.
Sounds like a terrible superpower. What's your superpower? Oh, I can I can melt my own skin. It's kind of a bummer, actually.
The acid sweat or yeah, it's not great to be a passive sweat or the giant cloud or a slap kick. Yeah, it doesn't do a lot of good for the world, but I do like him. Yeah, that's what our main responsibility in life is to never sweat. Yeah, the giant glider just keeps them cool.
Anything else I was even like relaxed to? He can't get nervous. Yeah, it's difficult sidekick stuff where the sidekick contributes absolutely nothing, except for a new problem for the superhero to solve. That's right.
Oh God, it is hard being the superhero with a younger brother sidekick, but I do manage. I suddenly have a lot of problems to solve all the things. I think the other nice thing about thinking about the inside of the tube being the outside of the body is that then I don't actually eat food so much as I have food run through me and I have my body kind of take what it needs and the rest of it actually never enters me. It only enters the tube, which is not me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that doesn't make a lot of sense that there's never like poop in your body, not unless you have a level one emergency. Yeah, agreed. Hooray.
This next one comes from Alyssa who asks dear Hank and John, when bats poop while hanging upside down, does the poop hit them in like the face first or something? Great. A group of 30-year-olds are wondering this while also discussing the best Tupperware on a Saturday night, but we need to know that Poop and Pyrex Alyssa, first of all, this can you email us and let me know what the best Tupperware is because I'm not satisfied. Unsatisfied with the Pyrex I have, but the lids last a maximum of a year and then I got a bunch of new lids or I don't and they're just like cracked and blood and air in, which is not what they're supposed to do.
Why can't a Pyrex thing have a lid that lasts more than a year? It's Pyrex. The glass will last forever. That's all.
Let me know what you think. John, tell me about bat poop. Well, I don't know anything about bat poop. Tell me about the time I've heard that John.
I don't know the answer to this question, but the moment it was asked, I was like, I know that bats poop while they were asleep or at least while they're hanging upside down, because I've seen a lot of bat poop and then looked up and seen a bat. I know that's more of a correlation than a causation thing, but it's a strong correlation. Strong correlation. And it never occurred to me if the head is below the butt, the poop must hit the head.
Yeah. Do you know what that book looks like? I do. I've seen it a good jillion times.
So why do you see so much bad poop? Well, Hank, I own a lot of 145 year old structures. Right. You have to go like barn.
I have it. I have an uncommon number of 145 year old structures compared to most people. Tell me about that poop, John. It's a little and it's hard.
Yeah. And there's a lot of little hard pooplets. Yeah. So they poop like they poop out little rice green pooplets.
I would say for the record, they're big rice pooplets. They're not little, but they're little compared to human pooplets for sure. Yeah. So bats, bat poop is hard and dry.
And if it does hit them on the way down, it doesn't do them any damage. Now, this would be a problem with P, but they P while they're flying, which is I don't know if they like do it right as they're leaving, or if they do like whenever, but I guess would be like, you've been holding it all night. The moment you're like not upside down anymore, like worried about peeing on your own face, use a P on the way out of your cave. Yeah.
Or it could be that like as you get older, you do have to pee while you're sleeping. So you just kind of like get up, fly around for a minute to pee and then lie back down. Has anybody ever done research on whether other animals have this like as they get older, they have to pee in the night more or is that a human thing? At any rate, we're going to learn at the end of the podcast that people do research on things that you would not ever imagine that people do research on.
The poop question is answered. Baths do poop on their own faces. It's just not a problem. The type of question is not answered, Alyssa.
I want you to let us know what conclusion you came to. Having said it's not a problem, and I don't want to overanalyze this, I am now imagining myself as a batch. And I think that it would be a problem. It wouldn't be a problem for me on the scale of peeing, obviously, because I understand they're very hard.
They're very small. It would still be a problem to have over the course of my sleep period, a certain number of poop pellets from my own body roll past my own face. I don't know if they actually hit. I don't know if you're a bat biologist.
I don't think that the people have paid much attention to this. Now, are you imagining that they shoot out their poops? Like red-green into the Nintendo, that they fire them? What I'm imagining is the worst-case scenario, where the poop comes out and on the way, it hits several times, and then the last hit is straight on the nose.
And I think, aren't their heads kind of the smallest parts of their body? So actually, I think it would roll across their stomachs or their wings and then not hit their heads. I think for it to hit their heads. I imagine the worst-case scenario, because I want to make the case that it's not that bad.
Because I think it is. I think the worst-case scenario would be, Hank, if I told you, like, hey, so you're going to have a nice, long, happy life, the only thing is that you're going to sleep upside down and all the way along, you're going to poop on your own face. At least one time, you're going to have to worry. It's really hard and it won't stick.
I think you'd be like, I don't love it. Yeah, well, first of all, I'm going to do two cases. First, you're going to agree with one and not the other. The first is that in this situation, I'm a bat, and bats are different.
And if it's not a harm to them, it's not going to impede their reproductive success. They will learn to not mind it, because it won't. Just like we learned to not mind all kinds of things that might objectively be a little bit gross. Second, you'll disagree with this one.
If you took some of those bat poops and threw them at me and hit me in the head, I would be like, ah, John, I would not be that upset. That's the mean that it's like any human. I can't even respond to it. I can't even, I can't even indulge that.
That is such a fringe opinion. That's like, if you said JFK Jr. is alive and well, that's how fringe your take just now was. I don't mind getting held in the face with that poop is a fringe opinion.
Hank, that is a that is a hard like that's one of those opinions. Like if I'm at a cocktail party, Hank, and somebody tells me that don't mind being pelt into the face by bat pooplets. Well, I'm pretty good at it. I know where.
It's a pretty good chance. The next thing they're going to say to me is something along the lines of and as you know, Hillary Clinton is a reptilian. Well, look, I'm not going to volunteer that. I'm just saying like it like I wouldn't be the way you said well, the way you said well, if you think that you were going to say well, there's a lot we don't know about Hillary Clinton.
I really did. I thought you were going to be like, I don't know. I've never personally tugged on her face. I don't know if a lizard would appear.
Anyway, anyway, anyway, all that reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by Hanks Fringe Opinions. Hanks Fringe Opinions. He genuinely thinks that a lot of you out there are going to hear the sentence. I wouldn't mind being pelt in the face by bat pooplets and just be like, Oh, yeah, no, that's a good take.
This podcast is also brought to you by the bat pooplets themselves. Larger than a grain of rice, but not like by a lot and dry. And don't worry. Yeah.
And of course today's podcast is brought to you by the bats that poop out the bat pooplets that hate green doesn't mind getting pelted in the face with the bats that poop out the bat pooplets that hate green doesn't mind getting pelted in the face with. They transcend all of this. They're literally and figuratively. The podcast is brought to you by me covered in bat.
I'm a head to toe swimming in it like I'm Scrooge McDuck. I got a vault full of it. I love it. I'm in love with bat pooplets.
That's what I say. They call him the guano king of Montana. Ringing bat poop to me. I will turn it to gold.
And he doesn't want to sell it. Oh, no, he doesn't want to sell that guano. He's got these he does stuff with it. You don't need to know about what now we have we have so ball fights.
Oh, jeez. Oh, God speed. Oh, God bless you. We also have a project for awesome message from Brandon and the good newspaper crew.
We want to say thank you to Hank John and all of Nerdfighteria and a world of cynicism were incredibly inspired by this community, maintaining a meaningful sense of radical hopefulness while also acknowledging the heartbreak pain and injustice of the world. People who are able to do both are the people best equipped to make a positive difference grateful to be in this community. So thank you, Brandon and the whole good newspaper crew. That's lovely to hear, especially after an extended conversation on the topic of bat pooplets.
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 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 dftv.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 deerhank.
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This episode of Deerhank and John is brought to you by Factor. Imagine for a moment that you are absolutely immersed in some work where you're creating something beautiful or useful or useless and ugly but you love it anyway and you look up and suddenly you have a feeling and that feeling is that it is 2.30 pm and that you did not eat lunch. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna get meal delivery that's gonna cost too much and maybe be a bit of a mistake or are you gonna go to the cupboard and just eat several fistfuls of peanuts?
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With new subscription only, wild supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. John, this is a nice question. It's very important to me from Jupiter who asks deerhank and John, how do lacrois get their flavor?
The only ingredient that isn't water is quote naturally essenced and I'm confused. It's not even grammatically correct for it to be a verb there. What's happening? Help Jupiter.
Jupiter. I'm literally drinking the lacrois right now and I've never noticed it before and I was like, this can't be true. That doesn't sound legal to me but it says only carbonated water, comma, naturally essenced. That, how do they get away with that?
Well, that's not really it's a verb. Yeah, it's a thing that happened. Well, here is a an actual newspaper story on the topic. For years, lacrois lovers have been faced with a mystery.
What are natural essences? Well, I'd be fast action lawsuit filed against the brand's parent company claims that lacrois, all natural claims are false and that the natural ingredients are actually synthetic. In fact, as the filing states testing reveals that lacrois contains a number of artificial ingredients to which natural beverages responded in a statement that it categorically denies all allegations and says all essences contained in lacrois are certified by our suppliers to be 100% natural. Now, what is an essence?
It's a clear concentrated natural chemical. Okay, does that mean nobody really knows? Yeah, you can get a lot of chemicals. It's a big nature.
It's a big nature. It's got a lot of chemicals in it. If it's clear, I guess that's the only thing you need somehow for some reason that it seems like a obvious quality to me and anything can be clear if there's a small enough amount of it, but so on. Here's the process.
Essence is created. This is from a business insider story by eating items such as fruit and vegetable skins and rinds and remnants at high temperatures, which produces vapors and then those vapors are condensed and sold by the barrel and they are inserted into lacrois. So it's basically vaporized lime rinds and that's it. I still regardless of what's happening, I still take- Hey, has a grammatical concern.
If it said natural essences, I'd be like, but you've naturally essenced the water? Yes. That's no. No, no, no, no, no.
Because you made that up. That's not a thing that existed before a lacrois can. So nobody knows what that means. Right.
Well, I don't think they want to say like this contains tangerine rinds and other leftovers that we vaporize. It's natural flavorings is what every other thing says. I really am excited about this class action lawsuit. It sounds like it's going to be a barrel of naturally essenced laughs.
All right, we have another question from Matt and I really want to answer this one because I just went to the champagne region of France. And so I feel like I'm a newly minted expert in champagne and the way you only can after three hours of education. Dear John and Hank, if Miller Highlife is the champagne of beers, what is the beer of Champagne's met? I had what might be a beer of Champagne's recently.
You're going to know more than me, but it was just a it was a Bellini in a bottle. So Bellini is champagne and like fruit juice and fruit puree. It's amazing. Very good.
Absolutely delicious. That felt like a the the the lower rung champagne experience. It was like whatever was in there was not the highest quality champagne because it mostly tasted like peaches. Well, it probably wasn't champagne at all because it probably is not sparkly wine from the champagne region of France.
But but I think that we can all agree that when we talk about champagne, what we mean is sparkling wine. And when we talk about the beer of Champagne's what we mean is Andre. Andre is this amazing brand of sparkling wine that takes everything that is great about wine like grocery store products like Strawberry Hill from Boone's Farm and makes makes them sparkle. It is not good, but it is available.
I mean, you can buy it almost anywhere. It's easier. And so I think that is the beer of Champagne's. But then there is a great sparkling wine that I love that costs $10 called freshenet.
Freshenet. Yeah, it's spelled like F-R-E-I-X-E-N-E-T. Okay. You drank it at my wedding.
And it's great. Tell you what, this Andre is this Andre is inexpensive. Oh, yeah, it's like four bucks. You know what we ate in college all the time?
What did you eat in college all the time? We drank Praseco. Yeah, Praseco is a huge range of wine. God bless him.
That was like another brand. Yeah, no, just seal him up. Just put him in a trophy case. Cover him in bubble wrap.
Make sure that the gods protect him forever. We liked it a lot. It's very tasty. There's two dollars and 49 cents.
There's two Praseco's and there's bad Praseco's. It's like saying like I love soda. Right. Which I do.
And I'm getting down to Dr. Pepper. Yeah. There's a bottle of Barefoot Bubbly here, extra dry California champagne American sparkling wine for two dollars and 49 cents.
Oh, yeah, that's a little too big. It seems like less than the bottle would cost. Yeah, I mean, wine can be very inexpensive, but it can also be not very good. I like inexpensive wines and I don't want to learn enough about wine that I only love expensive wines.
That's one of my big goals of life. We got to talk about wine, but I do want to tell you the top review on the Barefoot Bubbly page here. It's a four star review. It says as expected.
I love you. Which is so much of what we want out of life. You know, like if I get one review to every McDonald's hamburger I've ever had, it would be as expected, which is a run achievement. Yeah, for sure.
It's not easy to deliver the product as expected over and over and over again. Yeah. Bang. All right.
Alright. Before we get to the all important news from Mars and AC one of them, I want to let you know about a couple things. First off, Mark wrote us to say, Dear John and Hank, I come to you today, not with a question, but instead of the fun fact during a recent episode, you discuss the idea of how Superman should be a cloud instead of an attractive man, since he's an alien and whatnot. To my knowledge, there is no cloud Superman, but there is a sentient solar system, Superman, called Superstar, who patrols the Milky Way galaxy.
He is mentioned in a single issue of a comic from Mark, and then he includes this mention. And that is really extraordinary. I love the idea of a sentient star system patrolling the Milky Way galaxy. Magnificent.
I love the idea that too bad. Barely. Like, it's that's like the most important scientific discovery of all time. And it's like two frames of one comic and then they're like, moving on.
But we've got earth problems. The other thing, or super like eight Superman in this picture. Why are there so many Superman? I don't know.
Couple couple other things I want to bring your attention to. First off, 50,000 different speech therapists and linguists wrote in to let us know that there is a letter that means the T H sound. Yes. One was Anne who writes, I'm sure I'm one of the speech language pathologist who wrote to tell you this, but there are letters for the T H and in fact, there are different letters for when it is voiced differently, which I thought was wonderful.
So it turns out that the name Nathan, if written in the right alphabet is a palindra, massive relief to Nathan's everywhere. Finally, Sarah wrote in to say that she has a PhD student studying psychology and philosophy. And some of her research is about how potlids become symbols. Oh, like, like this was a thing that happened.
Or when the pastor potlids are symbols and when potlids are symbols, Sarah writes, the answer in my analysis is no, potlids are not symbols. If say John were to use his potlids once as symbols, but if John and Sarah and Alice and Henry all started using some particular potlids as symbols and collectively agreed that they are usually used for symbols, then the potlids are symbols because because collective recognition of a whole community can change something's purpose and thereby change what it even is. Wow, it's beautiful. So much fascinating research happening.
So this isn't this isn't like about whether or not potlids became symbols historically, but about how we come to define things as the things that they are when they transition from being one thing to another thing. Yes. Wow. So potlids can be used as symbols, but potlids can only become symbols if over time we collectively declare them to be primarily symbols.
The Deringa Johnine box is one of the best places in the universe. It really is. I mean, it is an endless fountain of fascinating information, almost none of which we share with the public. Because we're not very good at our jobs, but we do share news from AFC Wimbledon.
Now Hank, I don't know if you heard this in the news, but the Queen of England died. Yes. And this led to the postponement of AFC Wimbledon's game versus late in Orient. Probably a blessing for AFC Wimbledon as we've been losing game after game after game and an extra day of rest and preparation probably ain't going to hurt us none.
But that's the update for AFC Wimbledon. All the football was canceled and among the football was AFC Wimbledon's game versus late in Orient. You know, I kind of felt like, and don't take this the wrong way, going down a league would mean that you would be like one of the best teams in the league. I also kind of thought that.
Yes. I think a lot of Wimbledon fans kind of thought that. But instead, we are enjoying weeks off. I'm sorry.
I'd like to see you win some more games. You and I are on the same page. What's the news for Mars? Well, on board the Prezeference Rover is a lunchbox nice device.
It's called the Mars Oxygen in-situ resource utilization experiment better known as Moxie and researchers have been testing out Moxie's ability to produce oxygen by drying out seven experimental runs by the end of 2021 under different weather conditions and different times of day to see whether they are able to make oxygen. The device works by just taking air from Mars running it through a filter to clear out contaminants. And then Moxie pressurizes the air and heats it up to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit to break the CO2 in the air down into oxygen ions and carbon dioxide. Then that separates the oxygen ions out to combine them into O2 and then it measures the quantity and purity of that product before it then just releases a pack of the atmosphere because they don't need it for anything.
And they found that Moxie was able to make around six grams of oxygen per hour, which is about the same as a small tree can do on Earth. And that is great for the future of Mars missions to for people because it will have astronauts breathe stuff and help missions. Wait, how many grams of oxygen per hour do I need? A lot more than six.
I thought so. It feels like that, right? Like, I don't actually know how much six grams of oxygen is, but I feel like I need more than that. It seems low.
Yeah, let me see. I don't actually know. 8.4 kilograms per day per human according to NASA. Okay, so six grams per hour, not enough.
But you can make a bigger Moxie than the one that we put on the back of the Prosevarys Rover. Okay, so I'm just gonna tell you, I need the bigger Moxie. And secondly, I'm not sure, and I know that we've been here before, but this planet doesn't seem great for us. Look, it's not about it.
We definitely don't put it in your head that we go to Mars for a better life. That's not right. We're not making we're not going to Earth to here. We're not going to Mars for a better life.
We go to Mars. It's not a backup Earth. Yeah. Understand it.
That is the critical thing. It's not a backup Earth. We are going to Mars to understand the universe in our place and it better. There is no backup Earth.
No, and to the extent that people talk about backup Earth, I think they're talking on the scale of tens of thousands of years, which I'm not comfortable talking on. But interestingly, Moxie isn't just so that we'll have stuff to breathe. It will also potentially be part of how we fuel the missions that return the astronauts to Earth. So we don't have to bring all the oxidizer with us because that stuff's very heavy.
That's kind of cool. So you need that. You don't want to bring all the oxygen with you if you can make it on Mars, you got to make it on Mars, which it looks like we can definitely do. Look at us.
So I guess the concept then is that in 2024, we're going to send a lot of Moxies to Mars in an unmanned mission. And then in 2026, those humans are going to follow up that those Moxies. It's all right around the corner, Hank. It's all about to happen or not.
Right. Or not. Or maybe some grand revolution in physics. We'll just let us teleport straight there.
Oh, I do love a grand revolution in physics. That doesn't really happen for clarity. We've had like one. I think you mean it hasn't happened yet.
There it is. Well, Hank, thank you for partying with me. Thanks for overcoming the discomfort of shingles to make the pod. And I hope you feel better soon.
Thank you, John. It helps to have something to do. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tinemesh. It's produced by Rosie Anna Hals-Rohas.
Our communication score in here is Brooks Shotwell, a editorial assistant, is the bookie truck of Artie. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by The Great Gunnarola and as they stay in our hometown. It's going to be awesome. Don't forget it.