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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. Called Open because the normal release day for Dear Hank and John, it came and went and you were like, what happened? And we were like, what happened too?
Well, it turns out I sent Tuna a file that was a total of one second long and then we had to go through a whole bunch of work. Thank you to somebody on Twitter who helped me with a little bit of tech support to extract the file from GarageBand and the episode is saved. But I also wanted to tell you that the subscription window for the Awesome Sox Club is open now and will be closing on November 14th. The Awesome Sox Club is an opportunity to get a delightful pair of socks delivered to you once every month designed by a different independent artist.
We work really hard to make these socks really lovely. We now have both ankle socks and crew socks and also 100% of the profit goes to charity. It goes to decrease maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone because there's a situation. You're going to have to buy socks from someone and is that somebody going to be some stranger who's going to get the profit or is it going to be in a way where 100% of the profit gets donated to charity.
It's a really lovely experience. Want the month to get to be happy? You can cancel anytime. Shipping is free.
It's at awesomesocks.club and if you go to awesomesocks.club slash dhj, do your hand on dhj, I just want to make it short for you. You'll get $5 off your first month. That's a deal. It's a deal.
So go to awesomesocks.club slash dhj right now. While you're listening to us, have a spooky extra spooky episode and also not know what the future holds for Twitter.com though, you know that future but we in the past, it's not. Anyway, awesomesocks.club slash dhj. Let's continue with the podcast.
Welcome to Dear Hank and John. Doors, I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, did you know that in Florida alligators can grow up to 26 feet?
Is this a Halloween joke or is this a socks club joke? That means they have to get 13 subscriptions to the awesome socks club. I shouldn't have seen it coming. Can alligators really grow up to 26 feet or did you make that up?
Like in length? Yeah, I just picked the number. Okay. I was like, that seems way too long because I've seen the world's largest alligator and I don't think it was 26 feet long.
You have also seen the world's largest alligator. It surfaced directly next to our canoe in childhood. Do you remember this? I do remember that.
Yes, I don't think it was the longest the Florida state record for a crocodile is 10 feet or 14 feet. So they only need crocodile. Well, no, that can't be I don't know why I said crocodile, John. I'm an alligator.
Yeah, I'm offended as a Floridian and very rarely do I identify as a Floridian. Let it go get offended. There's got to be a bigger alligator than that. So the awesome socks club is taking memberships now awesome socks club dot com is the URL.
No, Hank, it is the URL. Well, that's one of them. Yes, for an amazing reason. The reason awesome socks club dot com is the URL is because a fan of ours Buck noticed that it was redirecting to an unsavory site awesome socks club dot com.
And so he bought the URL and gave it to the awesome socks club 100% of the proceeds. Go to support stronger health care systems and impoverished communities. You can learn more awesome socks club or awesome socks club dot com. Also, we have two announcements.
One, it's Halloween. There's a lot of week. There's a lot of week announcement. There are two sock things that we're doing.
I don't even know if you know about this, John. Great. One, we're doing ankle socks. So you can choose between the socks that go up high and the socks that stay down low.
A lot of people are like, we want those socks that stayed on low and we listened. That's what they always say. We were listening to our customers. We heard you.
We heard you said that you are dis like liking the lack of a dislike button. We can't bring the dislike button back, but we can make shorter socks. And so we've done that and I've put them on my foot and they're nice. I like them.
Great. It's not for me. I feel rather stand up as having that much my ankle out. Oh, yeah.
No, I definitely want the lower calf socks. Yeah. But for many people, this is the ideal sock. And second, we are now shipping out of the European Union, which means that you can get the awesome socks club in Europe and not have to worry about weird customs charges.
Hooray. Hooray. That's great. Sign up and in Europe, they will ship from the Netherlands.
So it's Halloween. We're going to ship to the part of the podcast where we answer questions from our listeners. And we're trying to focus this week on some spooky questions, some fear based questions, although our producer Rosie Hana wrote, I tried to focus on questions about fear, but then I realized that almost all questions are about fear. Except for questions about socks, which is just be delighted once a month for getting a delightful pair of socks arriving just like to make you happy once a month from a different independent artist.
Maybe we should make it fear based. If I've heard anything from American politics, it's to make things fear based. Like, do you know what will happen to your naked feet if you don't become an awesome socks club subscriber? It will be brutal.
It's horrid out there. It's a terrible world for feet specifically. And and our socks will make it so that you are not socially ostracized by your in-group. Do you want to feel part of an affinity community?
If so, I mean, never feel alone again at awesome socks dot club. One of my favorite things about the socks is that when I see people wearing the socks, I can be like, Hey, and I pull them into my socks and then they're like, Hey, I know it's great. I just I just I just spoke at Harvard not to brag. And one of the students I met with before my talk, you know, like did the did the subtle pants leg raise and they were like, eh, and I got mine on too.
Don't be caught without them. All right, this first question comes from Alicia who writes Dear John and Hank, I know we talk a lot about how human life expectancy has gone up in recent years. It's gone up so much. And not just in recent years.
In fact, in recent years, it hasn't gone up as much. I'm curious, is this because we just managed to stop dying of disease and starvation so much? Or were people actually dying of old age at 30 always aging? Alicia, Alicia, you've asked my favorite question.
Thank you for allowing us. We'll talk about it step or ever onto my soapbox. Can I tell you what I think? Tell me what you think.
People did it was not like there's two different things. There's life expectancy and there's life span. So life span is like how well I'm just going I'm not saying I know what I'm talking about. I'm just talking.
So there's there's an amount there's like a length of time that a human can live, which is based on a number of things. But one of the big ones is pure dumb luck. So so you can be in a society where the average person dies or 50 and someone makes it to 90 just because they didn't get hit by as many trucks or trains or wagons or whatever people got hit by back in the day. Right.
But like people always lived a long time, but they just like the things that could get them along the way they had to be luckier to get that far. That's largely correct. So for a long time, like when I was a kid, I was taught that basically old age was 40 in the old days. Like the old days were never quite defined, but that was the definition of old age.
Like if you live to be 40, it was some kind of miracle. Right. And that's not true. But the sort of popular belief that has replaced it is equally untrue, which is that if you survived to the age of five or 10, you were likely to live a long life like you were likely to live to 70 or 80.
And neither of those is quite the truth. So the main reason life expectancy was actually below 30 for all of human history until the last couple hundred years was because of incredibly high rates of child mortality, probably over 50%. And so for instance, from what we can tell in Iron Age, France, life expectancy was probably close to 10 or 12. Oh, God.
Because your chances of dying before the age of 10 were probably significantly above 50%. But certainly not much lower than 50%. And so that is the main reason life expectancy was low. And if you lived to adulthood, you had a reasonable expectation of living to be 60 or 70 or 80.
However, it is also untrue to say that life expectancy has not changed since 1800, four 10 year olds, it has changed a lot. Like even if you survived childhood, life expectancy has gone way up. One of the main reasons it's gone way up is that until 200 years ago, from like 1700 to 1800, around a quarter of all people died of tuberculosis. And they died of tuberculosis generally in their twenties or thirties.
And so that was a huge strain on life expectancy. Yeah. You know, the guy who developed blood transfusions, he was experimenting on himself, and he was trying to figure it all out. And like they didn't know about blood types.
So he was rolling the dice a lot. But he died probably because he took blood from a person who he knew had tuberculosis and put it into his own body. Well, he probably didn't know that tuberculosis was well, an infectious condition. Yeah, exactly.
He did not. Well, he was believed to be inherited by a lot of people. Somebody actually listened to this podcast recently sent me a fascinating, fascinating data set and presentation about the debate over whether tuberculosis was inherited or infectious. And it totally makes sense that people thought it was inherited.
Like, why else did all the Bronte sisters die of tuberculosis? But like, you know, somebody living two doors over, that family never got tuberculosis. It was it was a weird and remains a really weird disease. So anyway, it's both that we've gotten better at treating diseases and health care has gotten better and that we have gotten vastly better at preventing child mortality, although it's still much too high.
It's all it's all those things and it continues to be like people are living longer now on average. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the 60s in America, because of like better treatments for cancer and heart disease. Yeah, that's it.
That's it. Like stuff that stuff that like we've been alive to see happen. Absolutely. I mean, child mortality globally has fallen by more than 50% since I graduated from high school.
Yeah. So these are these are big changes and globally, despite the challenges of COVID and the setbacks associated with it, which aren't limited to COVID, life expectancy has continued to increase over the last three years and long may that continue. This next question comes from Diana who asks, dear Hank and John, but mostly Hank, probably, what happens to a human body if it gets buried on the moon? That's a good question.
Some days soon we'll be having people living on the moon. So probably they will die on the moon. I'm guessing there aren't all the usual creepy crawly things that help decompose bodies on Earth and no oxygen to help out all those icky processes. So does the body just hang around like normal, like forever?
A woman wondering, but not a wonder woman, Diana. Wow. Well, Hank. Yeah.
Is it a is it a mummy situation? It's a mummy situation. It depends on it depends what you do, what kind of mummy situation you get yourself into. So if the body was just on the surface, it would very quickly dehydrate and it would become like very much of that kind of mummy.
But I think there's probably a depth you can get it at where it's far enough outside of the sunlight that it's going to freeze before it has a chance for all that water to get to get out. And so it'll be down there. It'll be hard for the water to get out. So you just be a frozen body popsicle.
But in either case, it's going to be either too dry or too cold. So if you're in the sunlight, you can stay warm, but you will lose all your water. If you're buried, you'll be too cold and you'll keep your water. But either way, the microbes will not be able to do their micro thing because they will either be dead, and desiccated, or frozen, and waiting for some future where they would get warmed up.
All right. So either way, though, it would be bad just to be clear. You don't want to die on the moon. You want to die here.
Well, I mean, it's equally bad. No, no, no, wait, how are you going to get buried at Crown Hill? There is no Crown Hill on the moon. Yeah.
Well, I don't want to be. It's up to you, John. The whole joy of being buried at Crown Hill is getting to join all of the people whose tombstones I've walked past low these many years. If I just die on the moon, I'll be dying with strangers.
Here's what we're going to do, John. Yeah. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to go with a coring rod, and we're going to core every gravesite in Crown Hill, and then we're going to move just the bits of the core that went through the part where the coffin was.
Oh, wow. We're going to take those all up to the moon. We're going to recreate Crown Hill on the moon, and then all future vice presidents have to go to the moon before they die. That's the whole.
Wow. Once you're not a vice president anymore, you go to the moon. It's like, we don't trust you to be here on Earth, getting involved in our business. You're a vice president.
You can get up to all kinds of nonsense. Just go to the moon. The vice president of America after leaving office automatically becomes the vice president of the moon, but there's a bunch of vice presidents of the moon. Right now.
They don't have any powers. It's a purely symbolic role. It's like being the Duke of Wellington or whatever. The monarchy.
Yeah. I love that idea. Also, I think the idea of moving 80,000 coffins to the moon is just the kind of thing a billionaire would love. That's the most inefficient use of capital since Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter.
I mean, John, by the time this podcast comes out, the deadline will have passed, and so we will actually know whether or not that happens. To all of you in the future, honestly, right now, we're not even thinking about it. It doesn't seem that important anymore, but I'm sure it will then. It will totally seem important.
I mean, it's the best way I've ever heard of to turn $44 billion into $0. I mean, less than $0 because it's like you just bought something really annoying. It's like buying a $44 billion rooster and putting it in a cage in your house and you can't get rid of it. It doesn't even lay eggs.
No, it doesn't have nothing but scream. It's upset. It's sexually frustrated. It's angry.
It's imprisoned. Yeah. It's in a permanent state of outrage. It cannot believe the horror, the existential horror of its situation.
And you know what's funny? You agree. Everyone's on the same page. You are completely empathetic to the rooster's position of like, I don't want to be here.
Why am I here? This is weird. No, no, no. Nobody wanted this rooster.
No, be like woke up in the morning in 2006 and said, I think I'll create a situation in which a human has to cohabitate with a miserable rooster. And yet, and yet we can't find a way out of the bind rooster. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, yeah, the strange thing is that every morning I wake up and I turn on the rooster. The first thing I do this morning is check to see what the rooster crowed overnight. Yeah. What does the rooster have to yell at me right now?
Well, the great thing about this analogy is that in the analogy, I am equally the person who is confused to be living with a rooster. And I am the rooster who is confused to be living with a person. I am both people. Like I get on, I get on drutter and I, and I crow all kinds of, all kinds of panicked outrage.
And then I look at other roosters and I'm like, why are they growing so much? Why can't they, why can't they just be quiet? But at least I'm wise enough to know that I don't want to own all of the roosters. Like, I don't, I don't think it would be better if only I was in control of the roosters.
You know, like, exactly. I don't want to fix this problem. If I was the dictator of this rooster farms, the world would not be better. That's what exactly he was like, I really, I want to pay $44 billion to be the dictator of the world's largest rooster farm.
And like, what a bad deal. Once again, they don't lay eggs. It's not a farm, it's a community. It's a community of roosters and none of them are happy.
They all choose to be there. That's right. They wake up in the morning and they leave their like comfortable rooster lives to live inside of like a tiny miserable rooster fence off all buildings. Inside of you on left's house.
Like it's so bad. Don't do that. I don't know. I might not, I might, it might be difficult.
I mean, I have not thought hard about this because I don't know whether or not it's the thing, but I don't know how I will feel about, about, I guess I will, I will not be about my supposition as it will not be about who owns Twitter. It will be about how that person's decisions impact the experience and how I think that it is affecting me in the world. And so I will just, I guess have to see, but I don't, I don't know. I don't think that I'm being well served by Twitter.
Yeah. Being a part of my life. No, one of the weirdest things about Twitter is that everybody on Twitter knows how terrible it is. Right?
Like, yeah, Twitter is a huge problem. TikTok on the other hand. That's going to solve all our problems. No issues at all.
I love every time I believe this, though, Hank, like every time I'm like, this one solved the major issues. And then about six months in, I'm like, no, Bereal has its own problems. Well, oh, really? Bereal has its own problems?
Sure. That one did seem like it would mostly be okay. I haven't used it. It's got its own issues.
All right. But I don't need to know about it. Here's in reality. Like fun, fun time over.
No more rooster fun. God, that was great. Why don't we go back to the bit? I think that we solve a lot of problems and then in the process of solving them, we create a lot of problems.
And I think that there's obviously value being delivered to me and others by social media platforms or else we would not use them. Now, is that value commensurate with its costs? I don't know. Especially when we look at the costs on society as a whole.
I don't know. A lot of people live from people have a lot of different theories about why we are, where we are. And I think they're probably not just Twitter. No, I got one of the emails we got this week was from somebody who was like, Hey, I'm listening to old episodes of the podcast.
And I noticed that John made not being on Twitter his entire personality for about a year and a half. Why is he on Twitter again? And to that, I can only say what you don't seem to understand is that I'm a rooster and every morning I wake up and for reasons that are mysterious to me, I begin crowing and I cannot stop. Now we can move on to the next question.
There's questions from Mary Beth who asks, Dear Hank and John, I'm wondering where in the world I could live that would be farthest away from any venomous creature, not Antarctica. That would not really be viable for me. Is there anywhere else where I can live without fear of venomous creatures? I guess I'm not so concerned about poisonous things.
Though, if I think too much about it, maybe I should be. Yeah. Watchful and waiting, Mary Beth. So poisonous things are things that hurt you when you eat them venomous things are things that hurt you when they bite you.
Right. Just for clarity. Right. And worst of you, otherwise poisonous things, it feels more like a mistake or a choice.
Whereas venomous things feels like you have a complete lack of agency. Yeah, just in your bed one morning. And I think the lack of agency is a big part of what freaks us out. Yeah, I think that's a huge part of all fears.
This is this is why we are constantly trying to impose thoughts of agency onto our our lives, which when we do not have them, but we like to impose them. Right. So this question reminds me of when my daughter was younger, and we would be like, where would you like to go visit? And she would be like, well, not Hawaii.
Yeah. And I would be like, well, Hawaii's great. And she would say, yeah, but the volcanoes. And also, I don't want to go to California because of the earthquakes.
And I don't want to go to Florida or the entire East Coast because of the hurricanes. And at some point, Indiana starts to look pretty darn good. Suddenly you're like, Hey, do I live in the best place? There's no fire season like there is in Missoula.
It's not bad here. But anyway, Hank is and by the way, relatively few venomous creatures, very few venomous snakes, nice, no scorpions that I know of. I feel like we don't have tarantulas. Well, I think the answer could be Indiana.
It's not. But I'm sure that you're doing great on the list, but the boke did a bunch of work and the boke has come up with a place that does not have mosquitoes. It does not have ticks. It does not have snakes.
Whoa. Oh, any venomous snakes of any kind. Wow. And this place is a lovely place that you have been to.
Yeah. And many people like to visit. Oh, but that does experience a fair amount of income at weather. It is Iceland.
Iceland. Yeah. The home of the world's greatest hot dog and the fewest venomous animals. I was I was shocked.
I was like, no mosquitoes everywhere as mosquitoes. But apparently the the way that they're well to be fair. What it is. The fact that you were I was not surprised where they don't have mosquitoes because when I visited there in August and the tour guide in without a trace of irony said in their sweet Icelandic accent, as you can see, Iceland should be called Greenland and Greenland should be called Iceland because as you can see, the weather here is quite nice as the like 40 degree temperature was made well below freezing by a 50 mile an hour wind that was causing rain to hit us completely horizontally.
Like it appeared that the rain was coming from the ground and this woman's face was being like completely distorted, like like a hundred meter runner going 30 miles an hour or whatever. And with absolutely no self-awareness was talking about how great the weather is in Iceland. Well, apparently it's not just that it's cold. It is so although it is.
Although it is. But in Alaska, for example, lots lots of mosquitoes with Catholic mosquitoes. So it is that they have several large freeze thaw cycles throughout one year. So what what mosquitoes like happened to find themselves in Iceland, they it gets cold, they lay their eggs, and then and then it gets warm and the eggs hatch and then it gets very like it gets extremely cold again.
Yeah, yeah, there's like one of those August freezes. Yeah, they're never able to figure out the weird freeze thaw cycle of Iceland and so it doesn't have mosquitoes, which sounds lovely to me. And Iceland seems quite nice. I loved it.
I think it'd be a tricky language to learn and but you know, there's 300,000 of them. So you can basically hang out with everybody. Yeah, I feel like you can get by in English, but I would probably become an impediment to intimacy at some point. Yeah, to close friendships.
Right. So world's greatest hot dogs, no mosquitoes. Not bad. Not bad.
This next question comes from Radu who writes, Dear John and Hank, how do we know that knocking an asteroid as NASA's dark mission recently did would for sure make the collision with Earth less likely? Like, due to the huge distances involved, surely we don't know 100% if and where the asteroid would hit us only probabilities. Isn't there a chance that had we not messed with it, it would have scraped by but because of the intervention the asteroid would hit the Earth full on without further, Radu. I think that this is the best way narratively for humanity to end.
We calculated that there was a 98% chance that this was going to save all humans and a 2% chance that was going to kill everybody. And we took the gamble because it was the right choice. You got to roll the dice. You got to roll the dice.
Like we made the objectively right choice, but sometimes you'll roll two ones in a row. Sometimes the house loses, you know? I mean, yeah. So is there is this a possibility, Hank, because obviously I love humans.
I think we are profoundly underrated species, but we are going to go out at some point. And this would be a hell of a way to go out. So we do know, well, first of all, this particular, the Dart mission in particular was designed to understand this better. So the Dart mission was not designed to protect us from an asteroid that is never going to hit us.
It's still never going to hit us. But we wanted to hit an asteroid with something and see how much its direction changed. We know the mass of the dart probe. We know how fast it was going.
We know roughly the mass of this asteroid. And we know where it would have gone. But we don't know how it's going to respond to being hit by a thing because asteroids are like, they're still a bit of a mystery. They're made of like, sometimes they're like a pretty loosely like held together pile of rubble.
That's just like the gravity and electrostatic forces are making it stick together. But like, is there something strong and hard deep inside? Or is it just like loosely held together all the way through? Those things behave differently in different simulations.
So you want to try it out. Just do a real life mission and see if it works. And that's what the mission was designed to do. But and is there something strong and hard deep inside?
We don't know yet. The data is yet to come. You know, making it easier. So but we are aware that this that this asteroid like, there is some variants.
It's not 100%. But we have a really good idea of where things in space are heading because there isn't that much that changes their direction. It's not like they're in an atmosphere where the wind is blowing a different way every moment. There are some gravitational thing like effects out there that that are going to have very small impacts and at a very long distance that matters.
But as they get closer, we have a really good idea of where these things are going to head. And we do know that like that nudging them could like would decrease the odds at the same time, even going very fast, an object the size of dark, which is not very big, isn't going to have a huge impact on the direction an asteroid is going. But we do want to have a better idea of how that is going to be affected. So that's why we did the mission.
And we're still waiting to see how like how much it did change the trajectory of the asteroid. But we're not in any imminent danger of a asteroid apocalypse. No, in fact, we are in less danger right now than any moment so far in human history in that we now know where all the big asteroids are. So we're in the same level of danger.
We just didn't know. Now we know that we're not in any danger. Follow-up question, in terms of non-astroid apocalypse, where are we? Well, in terms of space, comments are a whole different story.
And it could be a bigger deal because they come kind of out of nowhere. Thanks for that. Because there's much farther away. But then in terms of various other non-space-related apocalypse.
Things inside the atmosphere. Where's your vibe for that? Yeah, yeah. You know, like I'm pretty optimistic about humans, but less about any individual institution these days than I was once.
Right, yeah. A lot of things felt really solid there for a long time. It's so solid. In my life.
And it does feel a little bit more up in the air at the moment. You would wake up in the morning and you would get out of bed and there with the floor would be. And you would be like, oh, just like always, there's the floor. And then as Emily Dickinson put it, a plank and reason broken, I dropped it down and down.
Here's another question. I've always been afraid of going outside when it's dark, says Rebecca. But now that I'm moving into my own place for the first time, I need advice on how to beat this fear. As a wheelchair user, I constantly feel vulnerable and worried that I could easily be kidnapped or something.
How do I make myself brave enough to leave my front door after dark with love? Rebecca. Rebecca coming to the world's number one source for advice on going outside in the dark as a wheelchair user. Dear Hank and John.
Well, yes, obviously, Hank, we're not qualified to answer any of these questions. You're also not an astronomer. But I do have advice here. Number one, like bring your phone.
I'm a big believer in accommodating fears, and share your location with a friend or loved one. The other thing I was going to say, I do that. Share your location with a friend or loved one or several. I have like three people who can find my location at any time.
And so I have backups, Hank. It's like the, you know, like how there's the president of the vice president and then the speaker of the house in case anything goes real, real south. I'm going to check and see if I can see where you are right now. I'll share my location with you.
I definitely should. Thanks. But I have that is that's like way more intimate than giving someone a key to your house. Just enough on him.
That's weird. Sorry. Sorry. I don't have one of your other.
Did you hang up on me while you were trying to find your phone? I'm trying to find your location. So I'm an Indianapolis. Wait, whatever.
But the other thing, but the other thing that I so so there are those so there are those just functional things. But when it comes to the fear itself, like obviously, I'd encourage you to talk to a therapist or some professional like Hank and I are not psychology professionals. But I can say one thing that works for me with fears, which is, oh my god, he did it again. All right.
That's the last time you get to hang up. Sorry. I was in the middle of saying something important. I know.
Just stop working. You can figure it out. I did it. Can you see me?
No, but you can see me now. So those are like practical things. But the other thing is that if you're concerned about it, I would really encourage you to talk to a therapist or a professional about it like Hank and I are not psychology professionals. I can tell you something that works for me, which is instead of denying the fear or saying like, this is a silly ridiculous fear, acknowledging the reality of the fear and that like the thing that you're afraid of is scary.
It's just not likely and that there's a difference between the size of the likelihood and the size of the scariness. And if I can be aware of that, I find it a little easier to keep from catastrophizing because like that your fear is real. It's rational. And sometimes like I can get down on myself and feel like all of my fears are just like crazy and irrational.
And the way they express themselves or like the size of them is often not rational. But the underlying fear like is real. It would be a huge bummer for me if Earth got hit by a comment, which I just found out is possible. We probably spot it like it couldn't just happen right now.
The way I get my reverse code. Oh, so I'd have like a week notice. That's my dream is to have a week notice that everyone on Earth is going to die. Well, I agree that that would be bad.
What I'm saying is like you don't have to worry about being obliterated right now. This very moment by a comment. I would think that would be fine, obviously. I guess you're right.
I'm not afraid of being obliterated instantaneously without any warning by a comment. I'm literally afraid of warning. Well, if I if look, if I'm ever in a position where I know you're about to be obliterated, I won't tell you. I don't know.
Maybe maybe I want you to tell me actually now that you're putting it like that. Well, I don't want like important information kept. Well, if okay, if it's if it's more than a week, I'll tell you. If it's less than a week, I'll just let you live your life and we can play fog guys until the end.
I like how you're imagining that in this hypothetical scenario, you're the only person I speak to regularly. Like we're in a no, no, no, I'm the only one who knows in this. Oh, okay. Okay.
So I won't have a hit except that you're going to call me up and say, Hey, I'm going to need you to play fog guys for the next three days nonstop. Oh, as John, I'm coming to Indianapolis. I'm not going to tell you why. I'm on the next flight.
I want to spend a little time with you and mom and dad. And it's just because I love you. We're just going to play fog guys. No big deal.
Like that's gonna be that Spider-Man game. It's the last thing I do. And it might be it. Oh, golly, that reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by fog guys.
Fall guys, it's apparently the thing Hank would do if he only had a few days to live. He would just be like, shut it all down. It's time to play fog guys. This podcast is also brought to you by the the Plankin reason, the Emily Dickinson's Plankin reason.
Get it at Home Depot today. Oh, it's going to break. It's already broke. Yeah.
And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by Elon Musk's rooster. We are all about to be Elon Musk's rooster. And also this podcast is brought to you by Vice Presidents on the moon. The Vice Presidents on the moon.
They disagree with each other about everything and have no power. I love the idea of like a house of lords that's just the old vice presidents and they meet every now and again and they they hub up. They just say, hub up about stuff and then they issue statements. Yeah.
Oh, oh, to be a powerless royal, the dream. This episode of Your Hank and John is brought up 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 it easier.
When you start with Shopify, the tools to design and launch and take payments, they're all there from day one. You don't have to build a whole machine before you can start building the business. And this is important because you also have to like look good and with Shopify's templates, you could get a site set up really quick that looks credible and professional without needing to code or duct tape a bunch of different tools together. And when things look real, that works on my brain to be like, I'm doing a real thing.
It also works on other people's brains to be like, this is legitimate. Shopify also has one of the best checkout systems on the internet. It's built to help customers finish the purchase effectively and efficiently without a bunch of roadblocks. Returning customers can check out with a single click.
That means less friction and fewer abandoned carts and a smoother experience for everybody. That stuff gives you confidence early on and it gives other people confidence in what you're doing. You're not wondering whether the payment system is going to work. You're not wondering whether customers can get through the process.
Shopify handles that foundation so you can focus on the thing that you're actually trying to do. It's really kind of amazing to me that Shopify is a tool that works from the first day your store launches when you're just starting to get customers all the way up to being the size of good.store or dftv.com or being the size of like Mattel and Gymshark. When you build 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. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank with new subscription only while supplies last until 27th, 2026. See you website for more details. Are exactly what you want when those summer nights cool down.
So that's why I'm wearing quince this summer and you can make your summer wardrobe easier by going to quince.com slash deer hank for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too, that's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash deerhank for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash deerhank. For more details. Alright, let's do a thought experiment real quick.
If we owned Twitter, first off, I would hate you so much. If we still owned Twitter, if like we'd start in Twitter and you made me still own Twitter, I would be so resentful. That's the first thing. It would devastate our friendship because every time we talked on the phone, I would be like, how's the family?
Also, more importantly, when can we sell Twitter? Why are you forcing me? But imagine if we owned Twitter and someone, anyone came to us and said, we will give you a billion dollars, which is one 44th of what the company is apparently worth. And in exchange, you don't have to own Twitter.
I would be like, oh, wait, I don't understand. I thought I would hate you for that. It's like one of those situations where you really have to like try and pretend like you're still negotiating. Right.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Alright, Hank, that is the last time that we mentioned how much we don't want to own Twitter on the podcast.
Okay. Today. Look, look, 10 years from now, when Twitter doesn't matter anymore and is completely culturally irrelevant, then I would. That's when Hank and John snap it out.
I would buy it. Yes. And it's just a stock sales platform. That's all it does.
Absolutely. There's your only allowed to tweet about the awesome Socks Club. Yeah. There's an Autobot that's been trained by late stage artificial intelligence that if your if your tweet is not about the importance of Socks subscription services that generate money for charity, it just gets deleted instantaneously.
What I feel like we could already do this with some like already defunct where like, can we give ask Jeeves a name at like ask Jeeves socks ask socks, Jeeves. Ask Jeeves anything about the awesome Socks Club. How much could it possibly cost to buy Ask Jeeves right now? You know how much it cost to buy my space like two years ago?
It was incredible. So first off, who do you think owns my if you had to guess who owns my space today? Isn't it like some some like music company owned by Justin Timberlake or something weird? Okay.
So it was first bought by Justin Timberlake for $35 million. Wow. And then in 2016, it was sold to Time, Time Inc for $87 million. I know you're wondering, Hank, what's all my God happened to my space between 2011 and 2016 that made it worth twice as much money.
And the answer is nothing. That's horrifying. And then eventually, Time was bought by another media corporation and then spun off to a holding company that then sold it to a related holding company. And so we don't know how much it's worth today.
But the fact that in 2016, it was purportedly worth $87 million is a shocker. Oh boy. I mean, it's it's here is hanging out. What year can we buy my space for less than $1,000?
Less than I mean, because of inflation probably never. Maybe in 2200, you know, when after the collapse, oh, be worth it won't be meaningful then. I love the idea of Hank and John crawling out of the rubble. Yeah, at the age of 78, you know, post-apocalyptic.
I just want to keep goofing. Let's go. Let's get my space and name it my socks. The first thing that we do is we connect one computer to another computer to make what is technically an internet.
And then the first thing we do on this new internet is register inside of this new internet, a web domain, MySpace.com, which redirects to the awesome socks.club. Look, there's always another. I want our third act to be so weird. That's my biggest ambition.
Like we had a great, you had a wonderful career. It's been beautiful. But the only thing it hasn't been yet is as weird as we set out for it to be. It hasn't been truly, truly pure goofs.
Right. We haven't, you know, we haven't adequately committed to some of the goofs. Like, there's a there's a world where our third act is literally running racks. Is that like we go to racks?
It's like what would it take instead of visiting racks back? We decided to call Mr. Beast and say, listen, if we got an idea for you. It's like Mr.
Beast's burger, but it's about my childhood. I don't know if you've read Gatsby, Mr. Beast, but you can go back to the past. And we are going to get in our little rowboats and we are going to be just row and row and row until we can get back to racks in 1987 in Orlando, Florida.
Can you make this happen for us? And he'd be like, yes, with with point zero five percent of my net worth, I can buy every racks. Because I'm I'm now Jimmy, president of America, richest man in the universe. Yes, and we'll be like, thank you, God, King Jimmy.
And then we will go to the corpse of Elon Musk in the anti-chamber of God, God, King Jimmy's office. Then we will retire happily to racks management. Right. Yes.
But in order to leave the anti-chamber, you do have to walk past eight million roosters. And they're all very loud. The only way to like ask a question directly of God, King Jimmy is to run a rooster obstacle course, where you have to run right through eight million roosters and anyone who can make it to the door gets to ask for one thing. And most people ask for a billion dollars or they ask to live forever.
They ask for a beautiful spouse and we ask for six racks. But if you don't make it, the roosters are very hungry. Well, they haven't eaten in years, anything other than human flesh. No, very spooky episode.
Dear Hank and I, it's Halloween. This is my favorite one we've ever done. All right. Before we get to the all important news from Mars and AC, I have no idea how long we've been recording.
I have no idea what's happening. I tried to look up how long we've been recording the podcast, but unfortunately you've hung up on me so many times I have no idea. It's time to move on to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. I'll go first because I have good news.
So I went to AFC Wimbledon's game. I got to see Plow Lane. My kids got to see Plow Lane. It was incredible.
It was, I mean, the fact it's an amazing stadium. It really is, like especially compared to King's Meadow. It's just incredible what has been built. It is a world-class stadium.
It seats 9,000 people. It was packed. It was packed. It was a set.
It was a sellout. And it was just an awesome experience. Going to the pub was amazing. The food was really, really good.
It was just awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome. I cannot, if you live in London or go to London, I really recommend going to Plow Lane. You'll have a great time.
Tell people that you're a Nerdfighter and you'll have an awesome time. We lost that game. We lost one nil. We played horribly.
It was terrible. Alice just yesterday, Alice and I went to see our local college butler, their women's soccer team play. Afterwards, I was like, how does that compare to the AFC Wimbledon game? And Alice said, oh, those girls are much better.
And they certainly keep it on the ground more. It was not a good performance, is what I'll say. Even so, at the end of the game, at the end of the AFC Wimbledon game, and getting to see Plow Lane and knowing that those players had signed her birthday cards since she was two years old, Alice looked at me and she said, that was amazing. And it really was.
But, unfortunately, we lost. And however, our next game, we won. It was a big game against Rochdale or possibly Roachdale, nobody knows for sure. And there at the bottom of the table, we're a little closer to the bottom of the table than I would like for the fourth beer of English football.
And we really needed to win that game. And we won two won goals from a Ubisoft and James Davison and looked pretty good. I mean, not great, but looked steadier. Well, when you were here, John, we had Mark Watson on.
And he's a big follower of a not great football club that is, I think, a tier or two ahead of AFC Wimbledon. But he looked at your situation and he was like, oh, they're doing great. That's great. They're fine.
Yeah, I'm glad that he feels that way. It is critically important not to get relegated out of league, too, because there's only two relegation spots. It's so hard to get back up. It's the bottom tier of professional football, like full-time professional football.
So it's really, really important. So I'm sympathetic to Wimbledon fans who are really, really scared because it would be so bad. We have a lot of debt. It would be really bad.
So I agree that we're probably fine, but I would rather be fine. Yeah. Yeah. And some games.
Yeah, it's a tough situation. And I think a lot of fans feel like we're running up against some of the inherent challenges of fan ownership. And that's a really interesting, complicated, difficult time. For me, fan ownership is essential to what AFC Wimbledon is.
But that's also easy for me to say when I don't have to go watch us lose every week. What's the news for Mars? Well, NASA wants to save money by crashing into Mars. The idea involves a device called SHIELD, which stands for Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device.
It looks like a collapsible upside-down pyramid. It would absorb the energy from a hard impact on Mars. If SHIELD works, it would make landing on Mars way cheaper, possibly open up a bunch of landing sites for future missions. The idea is that you land your craft on Mars by just crashing it into Mars.
Now, it's not going to work for a number of different kinds of things, but for some, maybe it will. The design is based on NASA's Mars Sample Return Campaign, which involves future spacecraft crash landing on Earth with samples from Mars. Scientists want to see if they could use the same idea, but in reverse with a SHIELD system that would protect all the necessary electronics during landing. And they tested a full-sized prototype made out of metal rings set up in an inverted pyramid shape by taking it out to a 90-foot drop tower that has a launch system that can send things to the ground at the same speed that they would hit Mars at, which is around 110 miles per hour because of atmospheric drag slowing it down from the initial speed of 14,000 miles per hour.
And they used the drop tower to launch into a two-inch thick steel plate just to put it through conditions that would be harder than crashing on actual Mars, which is softer than a steel plate. And it worked! Wow! Scientists were able to see that the impact hit the shield at a slight angle.
It bounced three and a half feet into the air and then it flipped over. The bounce was probably caused by the steel plate because it didn't happen in other tests that used dirt instead of a steel plate. Importantly, shield was able to protect the electronic devices on board the prototype, including a smartphone. So if your iPhone can survive it, then a Mars probe can survive it too.
Wow. So we're just going to crash off onto Mars. No need to worry about landing. It saves so much weight and so much worry if you could just just hit it like a bullet.
Wow. That's fascinating. So it would be a way to get rid of the parachute, get rid of the, you know, all the... Retro rockets, get rid of all the like sequence of...
Which is a lot of the... Yeah. A lot of the weight. So a lot of the weight.
It's also a lot of the worry and it's a lot of the engineering that you need to do. Yeah. Cool. Yeah.
That's awesome. NASA blows my mind. NASA's pretty great. Well, Hank, thank you for potting with me.