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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 and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Yours, I'm Firthic at the Dear John and Hank.
It's a comedy podcast where me and my brother John, that's that other guy, answer your questions, give you dubious advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. How you doing John? You know, to be honest, I'm a little bit tired. Sarah's been out of town for a few days and I've been sort of running around trying to write and record stuff and make good videos and also sleep and take care of my children.
And the thing that fell by the wayside was sleeping, especially last night for some reason. I think I just got too sucked into watching the election returns when recording this on a Wednesday after so-called Super Tuesday. Named that because it's the fifth time that we've supposedly had a Super Tuesday because the American primary election system is just astonishingly inefficient and arcane. And so I stayed up to wait.
How are you? I'm good. I did not stay up. I was at a concert last night.
I did check my phone and it said the thing that you would find out if you would have just waited and that you could not have possibly changed. So I looked down halfway through and found out all the things. And then I went back in this morning. I found out that we have a nominee for Supreme Court Justice, which, uh, it's, uh, yeah.
And he's an elderly gentleman. He's elderly? Yes. He looks like he's like maybe 56.
He is the oldest new justice in 44 years, or he would be if he were to be confirmed, which he won't be. So it's irrelevant. And the next president will nominate someone far, far, far more liberal than he is. And that person will become the next Supreme Court Justice because of course Donald Trump is not going to be elected president, but he is apparently going to be chosen as the Republican Party's nominee.
Which is the first time that we've said Donald Trump on the podcast because I'd be really impressed if it was. Oh, God. I feel like it is. I feel like maybe that's been a little bit of a conscious decision because, oh goodness gracious, do we not want to live in this world?
I don't really want to live in a world where I have to talk about Donald Trump's policy positions as if they are serious or anything other than, yeah, I don't know Hank. I am frustrated by the quality of political discourse in the United States as I have been for a long time. I keep trying to remind myself that this is not in truth an entirely unprecedented turn of events. We've had periods like this in American history where in extremely polarized times populist candidates gained lots and lots of traction.
But boy, I'm not encouraged right now. I'm not encouraged by the way that we're talking about policy or the way that we're talking about each other. It's not a lot of fun right now to be an American living in the presidential season. It is, however, astonishingly profitable.
The ad rates for both Crash Course, SciShow, Vlogbrothers, everything that we do have gone absolutely through the roof, which should indicate maybe part of the reason why. This whole process drags out for so long and benefits the people who are the most media savvy, which is that this is a huge part of how media companies stay profitable. Yes, it is very frustrating. I wish I did not profit from it, but I'll tell you what, John, it's only going to keep going up from here.
The advertisements haven't even really begun. I know. The spending is just at its very beginning. We can already tell the difference and it is an amazing thing as a content creator.
Because of course, I think that traditional media don't really want that to be a thing that is known because it's terrifying. They seem to be wanting to hide it, but nobody watches CNN except when there are election results coming in. The more dramatic and crazy and shocking and upsetting those election results are, the more likely we are to be watching and therefore the better the ad rates are. But also just the number of political ads, because we have very little campaign finance oversight in the United States, the raw number of political ads that people are trying to get out forces, ad rates up higher and higher and higher.
So that in 2012, the two months before the election, we were getting three times as much money per view as we were in 2011 or 2013. It is a crazy situation. Yes, correct, accurate. Let us move on to questions from our viewers.
You probably have to do a short poem, John. I forgot to do the short poem. I even have a short poem. This short poem was actually sent to me by a Twitter from Julie who wrote, Have you read There Will Come Soft Raines by Sarah Teesdale on the podcast?
If not, I recommend you do. It's about death. If that helps, it does help. It does.
There will come soft rains by Sarah Teesdale. And I guess this is written about or in wartime. There will come soft rains in the smell of the ground and swallows circling with their shimmering sound and frogs in the pools singing at night and wild plum trees in tremulous white. Robins will wear their feathery fire, whistling their whims on a low-fence wire, and not one will know of the war.
Not one will care at last when it is done. The first one would mind neither bird nor tree if mankind perished utterly, and spring herself when she woke it dawn would scarcely know that we were gone. There will come soft rains by Sarah Teesdale. A nice poem about the apocalypse.
Alright, John. We have questions. We have so many questions and they're good questions, and we should try to do our best to answer them. I'd like to start with one.
Okay. Oh, you've got one ready. This question is from Claire who writes, Dear John and Hank, I am a 15-year-old Taiwanese female who is currently living in Taiwan. However, I am also a Canadian citizen, but I haven't actually lived in Canada in 11 years.
I know I'm Canadian because I have a Canadian passport, but I also feel like I'm less Canadian than someone else who's currently living in the world. But I'm always quick to identify myself as Canadian whenever people ask me why I speak English so fluently. This makes me feel guilty since I don't have the same amount of exposure to Canadian culture as someone who's lived their entire life. And it got me wondering, as someone who has a Canadian passport but hasn't lived in Canada in a while, am I more Canadian than someone who doesn't have a Canadian passport but has lived in Canada longer than I have?
I just thought this was a fascinating question, Hank, and it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite novels, Ulysses, by James Joyce, which I read with my friend, Ransom Riggs, when I was a junior in college. Ransom went on to write Miss Peregrine's home for peculiar children, the movie adaptation of which comes out soon, the trailer looks awesome. And in that book, Ulysses, there's a great moment where the book is about this guy, Bloom, who's an Irish person, but he's also Jewish. And so he's seen by many Irish people as sort of belonging to two nations, the Jewish identity and the Irish identity.
And it's almost seen as a threat to his Irishness, that he's Jewish and in some ways a threat to his Jewishness, that he's Irish. And at one point, somebody in a bar asks him, well, what is a nation? And Bloom says, a nation is the same people living in the same place. And then he pauses and says, well, or different places.
Because of course, by then the Irish diaspora was such that most Irish people lived outside of Ireland and the Jewish diaspora had long since been such that almost all Jewish people lived outside of the traditional Jewish homeland, now known as Israel. And the book was written before Israel was a state. And I just find the concept of nationhood and national identity completely fascinating. And all I can say to Claire is, hold on to that discomfort, explore it, think about it, because it's a way into thinking about the identities that you choose, the identities that are thrust upon you, and what you're going to do with them in your life.
Mostly I'm fascinated that you could feel guilty about having a nationality. Yeah, I would never feel that I just have a hard time like... Well, I think it's more that she feels guilty that she feels like inadequately Canadian. Like saying I'm Canadian when you aren't truly, like that you don't have that inside the actual reality of Canadianness inside of you, and so saying it is a kind of lie.
Right. But what is any of that anyway? Yeah. Right.
What does it mean to have Canadianness inside of you? Like I know that Molson Beer has it. I know that Ice Hockey has it. But I don't know how people have it.
Well, I don't know that I've ever had Molson in my life. Here's another question, John. This one's from Megan who asks, Dear Hank and John, I love the podcast and listen to it as soon as it comes out each week. Thank you, Megan.
I have moved just recently and am completely overwhelmed by the unpacking processes. How do I prioritize what to unpack first and how do I keep my one-year-old from negating any progress I might make, finding spots for all the things? Any dubious advice would be appreciated. Well, the dubious stuff advice is to put your one-year-old into some kind of pen, which I believe they call it Crip, and just to lock it in there.
Well, not just that, but I mean, if I'm not mistaken, Megan is literally surrounded by boxes. Right. Yes. Just turn upside down one of the boxes and place it over the child.
One-year-olds, they're not very capable. You turn upside down one of the boxes. The kid will have a playpen for hours and you'll be fine. Yeah.
Sure. Kids like the boxes? Is what you're telling me? They're like cats?
They love box forts. Boxes. Cool, cool, cool. So how does she prioritize that, John?
Well, first off, I think that moving is just incredibly stressful. So I think just acknowledging that is important. The way that I unpack boxes when I move is I unpack my books first because it makes me happy and then I slowly unpack everything else as I need it for use it. And then after about a year, I find that there are still a bunch of things that I haven't unpacked and I throw those things away.
Or you just, if you have a big basement, you just put it down there, which I do. I think you got to unpack first, do the things that make you happy, that's important, and do the things that are going to make you comfortable. And let make you live liveable, like kitchen stuff. And I also think that it's really important and often the last thing that gets done is putting stuff up on the walls because that seems like a sort of like you're not actually unpacking you're decorating at that point.
And that's not unpacking. I need to unpack. But I think putting stuff up on the walls is how you make yourself feel like you're at home. And I think that that can be an important part of unpacking even though it doesn't feel like the most productive thing you can be doing.
I think that was extremely undobious advice. I think it was almost distressingly good. Alright, if you say so, I very rarely follow it. We only recently got our downstairs walls unpacked upon in the last few months after living in our house for about a year.
But it is something that I like to do and actually makes me feel like I live in a place. I think that's wonderful. Should we move on to another question? Yeah, sure.
This question comes from Stephen, who asks, do you hear John and Hank? I noticed earlier this year that the license of Vlogbrothers videos since September of last year were changed from standard YouTube license to Creative Commons attribution. I'm curious about what led to this choice for Vlogbrothers in particular. So for those of you who don't know, Hank and I are not just world famous podcast stars.
We also make YouTube videos. We have a channel of Vlogbrothers that we've been doing since 2007 and a bunch of other channels. And Creative Commons attribution basically says you can do whatever you want with this as long as you attract your channel. As long as you attribute it to us.
Thank you. Yeah, basically. And we made that change, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, nine years ago, it's just that YouTube didn't update their settings until recently. Well, kind of.
YouTube didn't nine years ago have a thing that let you identify your content as Creative Commons. They introduced that sometime in the last nine years. I don't know when it was, but we noticed it in September. And I believe that happened after I posted a video of my Yellowstone trip and then I posted on Hank's channel.
And I said, here's all the footage from my Yellowstone trip. It's Creative Commons. Anybody can use it. And somebody said, you don't have to put that in the beginning.
You can just click that button in the YouTube license. And I was like, oh, and then I made that the default switch for Vlogbrothers video. So all Vlogbrothers videos are Creative Commons, though they are not all labeled that way. On YouTube, just because we can't go, there's a lot of clicking necessary to make that happen.
And we want that basically because who cares. And we love it. We have always loved it when people have done cool things with our content. And we can't do that for Sideshow and Crash Course for various funter reasons but are happy to do with Vlogbrothers because we don't even really know what we're doing still.
And it's still just like the connection and interaction between the people who connect with our content on Vlogbrothers is the most important part of that channel for me. Yeah, I mean, I think that copyright law is pretty broken on the internet, obviously. And insofar as we can stay out of people's way and help them make stuff, that's what we want to do. I even think that copyright law is pretty broken when it comes to books as evidenced by the fact that my work will be copyright written until like 95 years after my death or whatever.
I am very uncomfortable with that. And although I don't expect my books to be read in that distant future, if I find that it's looking like they might be, I definitely will put it in my will that stuff gets released into the Commons. Because I think it's so important for art to be able to work off other art and to be able to respond to other art and to be able to quote liberally, even to be able to, you know, lift whole passages or rewrite it so it's pride and prejudice and zombies, whatever. I have to say that you might die at any time.
You should probably put that in your will now. Yeah, well, if I died now, thank you for the reminder. If I died now, I would want my work to remain copy written for some time because it would help my kids with their education and everything. But Sarah is under instructions.
She knows it's all written down. You don't have to worry. Everything is fine. I am going to die.
You have a will, don't you? It's, I think it's called Hanks Will. It's a folder, in fact, and it also contains instructions for what to do with like how to access all of my files and such. Mine is called, Have I Suddenly Died?
And if you log on to my computer as a guest, it's the only file that you have access to? I love that so much. Oh my God. That's so wonderful.
That's so, yeah. So, yeah, if you log on to my computer as a guest, there's just one file in the center of the screen that says, Have I Suddenly Died? You're so prepared. It's actually, but most of it is like Sarah has all of the passwords.
If she has also suddenly died, we all better hope that Rosie Ann is around. Never let John Sarah and Rosie Ann on the same airplane. Exactly. No, it's too dangerous.
All those passwords. Yeah. Fascinating. Glad to know that you've got that all taken care of, John.
In line with that, that line of questioning, of thought, I have a question that I would like to find. It's somewhere. Here it is. It's from Jessica who asks, Dear Hank and John, I don't know why Jane Austen's Mr.
Darcy is one of the most revered romantic men in literary history. He was a jerk in the beginning of Prettitus and that somehow makes his change of heart more endearing. Like, what? Why is that?
I know you're both familiar with Prettitus, so I thought I would ask you to share some of your thoughts. My husband and I love your podcast. Well, you've come to the right place for a guy who's going to defend William Darcy to his dying day. So, do you want to start John or should I?
You start. I think it's because he shows that he can change, not because he can change from a bad guy to being a good guy, but because he has a worldview and when he gets new data, he doesn't change his worldview. He recognizes that he should change in light of his worldview and the data that he has. The pride in Prettitus is Darcy's, but the Prettitus is Lizzie's.
And she has all of these opinions of him, but she also has incomplete data. So he's being a jerk for a number of different reasons. Some of them are bad reasons and some of them are good reasons, but a lot of those reasons are not known. They are hidden.
And when they come to light, both his reasons, which helps Darcy overcome her Prettitus and the sort of how the world is functioning outside of that, that helps Darcy overcome his pride, is a process of change and of listening to other people and having a good, strong worldview that you believe in. That turns out to be filled with thoughtfulness and kindness, but you couldn't share all of the information and you didn't have all the information because the world is complicated and overcoming that. It shows that two different people with different upbringings actually can have very similar worldviews if those worldviews are about thoughtfulness and kindness. And that's a wonderful thing.
I think it's really important because I hear a lot of guys, particularly saying that Lizzie doesn't fall in love with Darcy. She falls in love with his house. And I don't like that's just not true. Like if you read the book, that's not what it's about.
Like they fall in love with each other after considering each other's thoughts and words. That's what happens. It's not just about what they look like. It's not just about how much money he has.
And I think it's a, you know, like his rude behavior in the beginning turns out to have had a lot of motivations that couldn't be shared and for good reason. And when those things come to light, you know, everybody realizes that they were kind of in the wrong and then are able to come to a place of agreement and beyond agreement, you know, love and marriage and presumably babies. I knew you were going to answer that question. Well Hank, Pride and Prettitus truly is your Irish nationalism.
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Very interesting question particularly in this historical moment. Dear John and Hank, I'm a huge supporter of bipartisanship or multi-partisanship as I live in Canada and we have a multi-part political system. Quick side note, Claire, please let us into Canada. Well, you know John, I've been looking into it and it's not that hard but apparently so have a lot of people and additionally I don't actually want to move to Canada.
I want to do this America thing. We can make it happen. I love the United States so much. I love its chain restaurants.
I love its broken dysfunctional medical system that I know how to navigate. I love like I am so American, so incurably American. When we move to the Netherlands for a few months thinking that we might make it a permanent move, I immediately realized that I can't. I can't live in Holland because I am too American, but I might be able to live in Canada anyway.
I'm sorry, that isn't Claire's question. I think our repulsion from bipartisanship is what's slowly destroying Western politics. However, when I meet with someone who has different political views from mine, I'm immediately turned off from them. How do I reconcile myself with my own hypocrisy and move toward accepting a more politically diverse group of people in my life?
Oh, Claire, I thought you were going to answer that question. I have no idea. So I'm reading a book right now about this actually, which is fascinating. It's called the Reunited States of America and it's by Mark Gerson.
It just recently came out like this month and it has a lot of high quality reviews on Amazon, but it does have one star review on Amazon. I would like to read you that one star review, John. That one star review says, Dr. Phil?
It is just the words Dr. and Phil followed by a question mark. I do not have any idea what's going on, but it's the number one new release in government. Can I tell you?
I've ever told you about my favorite one star review for the Fault in Our Stars. Oh sure, go ahead and tell me that. In addition to being a world famous podcaster and YouTuber, I am also a part-time novelist and I wrote a book called The Fault in Our Stars. It has a lot of one star reviews on Amazon, all of them gold in their own way.
It's hard to say what's my favorite one because I've read all of them so many times. But my favorite is from a user named Catherine, presumably not your wife, who says, item was not received as described. And I don't know if she's talking about my novel or the shipping process or what, but I can't tell you how many things in life I feel are described by the sentence. Item was not received as it was described.
I think the United States of America may in fact be one of those items, or at least Congress. I have not received the Congress that was described to me. I have received all Congress, but not the Congress that I was told about in seventh grade civics. So this book has been a fascinating read.
It is about that process. How do you come to talk to other people and present yourself in a way that is not immediately dehumanizing other people or immediately demonizing, vilifying them, thinking that they're either ignorant of something or evil, or, you know, like dissolving into an audience. And so it's just dissolving into an argument or a fight every time you have a conversation with someone who disagrees with you. And we have become very sort of tribalistic in the way that we think about our parties.
One of the points that was made in the opening chapter of the book is that a majority of Americans don't want their children to marry into the other, marry someone of the other political party. And that's like, wow, that's, I mean, like, I get it. And I think about myself and I'm like, yeah, yeah, maybe. But like the fact that we're there feels really, really wrong.
It feels like there is something like we're driving along in a car that has had the oil light on for a while. And we, like, for decades, and we need to take this thing in for service. But it is a very, I'm only like a quarter of the way through, but so far, and it's a short book. So far it's really great and I suggest it, the United States of America, to sort of like think about this very thing, because I don't think there's an easy answer.
But I think that answering that question is important for every single person right now. Yeah, I mean, we've just got to find a way to talk about things better. I mean, one of the, I've been thinking a lot about the support that Donald Trump has, which, you know, is a minority of American voters, significant, but it's a significant minority of American voters. And just trying to understand that.
And I think I understand some of it. I certainly understand why lots of people feel that they have been left out of the so-called economic growth that the U.S. has experienced since 1990, or even really since 1980. Because a lot of that growth hasn't been particularly inclusive, and so it doesn't, so it isn't experienced as growth by the vast majority of people, which kind of means that it isn't growth.
And I certainly get why people feel like the country has changed in ways that they aren't comfortable with, or like we've been, you know, we've sort of been left behind in some way. But I find it really difficult to have discussions about policy statements like we should not allow Muslim immigration into the United States. Because that's incorrect. Right.
And it's based on this very circular reasoning of we will be safer if we don't allow Muslim immigration into the United States, which I've seen no evidence for. And it's not, it's kind of not a provable date of night, followed by the circular reasoning of, and we must do everything that we can to be safer without considering, you know, what, like, what do we mean when we talk about safe. What do we mean when we talk about, yeah, what do we mean when we talk about safety in the US when. And what do you mean when you say everything?
If you're talking about, we must do everything we can to make ourselves safer. No one believes that. Right. But, but, yeah, no one actually believes that.
Right. So then, so then you get into it, you get into these very circular logic loops and you don't get to have discussions about like a really interesting topic, which is, you know, should the income tax rate for income over $500,000, the 39%, 42%, 37%. Those are things that we can talk about and disagree about without it feeling like our lives are in line. And I think part of the problem here is that, you know, to try to get elected, to try to get attention, politicians and frankly the media have made it sound like our lives are on the line for who gets elected president.
And when the stakes feel that high, it becomes very, very difficult to talk about policy with someone because what you're really talking about is, wow, if the top marginal income tax rate is 42%, everyone I love is going to die. And that's like, you know, it's that. We're not going to be able to have a conversation. We've also tied our ideology so very tightly to our identity that we feel when our ideology is being threatened, that our personhood is being threatened.
And when I listen to the conversation, what I'm trying to do now is hear not whether or not this sounds objectionable to me or sounds awful to me or I disagree with the policy statement, but to think about whether the statement is designed to create a division. And that's what a statement like, we should not allow all Muslims to, we should ban Muslim immigration to America. That statement is not a policy statement. That is a statement designed to create division.
And all politicians do this. And so I'm trying to listen as hard as I can to statements that are designed to create division on all sides. And right now the person who is best at not doing this is of course Barack Obama who doesn't need to care about getting elected. And so it's sort of remarkable to hear, but you can definitely hear in everybody, in every single candidate, statements that are designed to create division.
And being turned off by those first and then by policy second is not an easy thing to do. So there's this thing in the liberal world, which is like if Donald Trump is the nominee, that's probably a good thing for the progressive agenda because he probably won't get elected and he'll probably get a lot of people out to the polls, a lot of liberals to the polls. And we might get more control, more power to do what we want to enforce our agenda. And that's a good thing, right?
Because we want to do as we believe that this agenda will make the world better. But I think that that view of this situation is kind of terrifying because what you're saying is I don't care how torn up this country gets as long as I get to enforce my agenda. And I can see that point of view, but 100% you have to say do I care more about America not getting torn up and dragged the steering wheel of this country being dragged in every direction by people who just want this control or do I care about the nation feeling like a nation and healing itself and not getting these wedges driven deeper and deeper between people who do not actually differ that much ideologically but who have been convinced that we do. Yeah, no, I think that's a hugely important point that in a lot of cases there's a lot of ideological crossover.
There's also a lot of policy, opinion crossover. It's really the way that we approach it. And just so we're not lambasting only the Republican Party. I have to say that in the Democratic Party there is a very similar, us, them, dichotomy created, which is the phrase the billionaire class that you hear over and over and over again, which is some vague other, these 50 or 100 families in the United States who supposedly sort of control the future of the US.
And I would admit that if this were an actual oligarchy, those 50 to 100 families, the vast majority of whom are Republicans would have found a way to get literally anyone on Earth other than Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee. I don't think that they think it's in their best interest to have Donald Trump be the Republican nominee, the billionaire class. But I think any time that we're trying to create this sort of vague villainous other, even if it is a somewhat villainous group like billionaires, I think we need to be very, very cautious because we need to be very cautious. Because the truth, I think, turns out to be a lot more complicated than...
Says a guy who's really good friends with a billionaire. I am not good friends with a billionaire. I do not know any billionaire intimately. I am good friends.
It seems like he would Bill Gates just hang out all the time. Bill Gates and I do not hang out a ton. However, I do suspect that my having met Bill Gates a few times has humanized billionaires for me in a way that perhaps most people have not experienced. And I realize too that I'm coming at that whole conversation from an extremely privileged perspective and probably a somewhat defensive one.
But the truth is, I think the big underlying truth that is a cross-party problem that needs to be acknowledged is that the growth in the United States, the economic growth in the United States, since about 1980 has been very, very unevenly distributed. And that is a problem. It's not going to be solved by, quote unquote, negotiating with China. It's not going to be solved by emulating Putin.
It's not going to be solved by somehow bringing down the billionaires because it's not that easy. The truth is that it's a really complex problem that's born of a globalization that has been in many ways beneficial not just to the world, but also to the United States. And not in every way, but in some ways, acknowledging that complexity and trying to start from there. Like, how are we going to get better jobs in the United States?
And how are we going to find ways for wages to go up, which they haven't really done in a long time? That's a big interesting question. I don't think we're going to solve that problem by, you know, villainizing the Chinese or lionizing Putin or villainizing billionaires. I just don't think that's going to solve the problem.
Like, if we raise income taxes on billionaires to 95%, it would represent, like, I figured this out the other day. It would represent like something like half a percent of our income tax going up. Like, there just aren't that many billionaires. Yeah, there aren't.
And they have a lot of the wealth, but they don't have that much of the income. Yeah, and they have a lot of the wealth, but even they don't even have a lot of the wealth relative to the overall wealth. Like, they do. But, yeah, it's complicated.
It's complicated. We should make a video. You got Hank and I off on a rant in which we never actually answered your question. Well, I suggested a book at least, which will, I think, help.
But I do hope that this has, like, as we get closer to the election, we're going to do our best to make this podcast open to people, and interesting to people who are not Americans. And I apologize for the amount that we're going to be talking about America, but we're not going to do it as much as we would be inclined to. I don't know. When I was in Jordan, lots and lots of people asked me about Trump.
That's awful. That's terrifying. That is terrifying. I'm terrified and want to run away.
Yeah, they asked me if he was going to be president. They shouldn't know. God, can't we just like keep this one under wraps and be like, ah, that didn't happen. Alright, can we move on to another question?
Yes, we can. I have one from Adam. John who asks, dear Hank and John, I have an urgent life or death question. Why do we say yes, please?
And no, thank you. Why don't we say yes, thank you. And no, please. Oh, because when I say yes, I'm generally saying, please give me that thing.
Yes, I will take that thing. Please. No, I guess I could say thank you too. Actually, now the more that I think about it, the stupider it is.
Adam is right. We've been doing this wrong all along. No, no, no, because you can't say no, please. Because no, please is what you say when you're being tortured in a movie.
That's true. That's true. Yeah. That's when like Putin shows up in his bare costume and he's got like a car battery or something and he's about to shock you.
No, please. Yeah, you're right. You can't say no, please Adam. You can say no, thank you.
And yes, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's because of what those words mean as the reason that we say them.
Bluey do. I have a question, Hank, that I want to get to before we get to the news from Mars and the news from the dark lightless cave that is AFC Wimbledon. This question is from Aisha who writes, dear John and Hank, I'm a Christian and it can be rough. I believe the main Nerdfighter Facebook group because their hate of religion is so strong there, although I love some of the other Nerdfighter groups.
I'm not an evangelist, I'm not an evangelist, but I get so much backlash once people find out that I'm a Christian. I know that I'm not being persecuted, but I don't feel like defending my belief system every time I speak to someone who doesn't share my faith. But I also don't feel like I should have to hide something that makes me who I am. How do I handle this negativity?
I think that's a really interesting question Aisha. The internet is sort of on the whole pretty strongly anti-religion in my experience. At least that is my feeling about it. I'm also a Christian.
I handle it mainly by talking about my religious faith but not trying to defend it. When people ask me to defend it, I generally just say that I'm not really that interested in defending it. It just doesn't interest me much because I don't think that it's going to be a productive or interesting conversation. Yeah, that's really good advice.
As a person who is not religious, it has become more and more perplexing to me the way that some non-religious people approach religion as a source of badness. There's some really fun thing out there that is the attempt to argue and put on the defensive a religious person and make them have to defend their faith. It's so tired and uninteresting to me. I mean, it feels tired to us because we were part of that first wave of internet discourse in the late 90s or early 90s that was doing the exact same thing.
Yeah, no, absolutely. It does feel tired to me. I had printed out and kept in a binder some stuff from my old old IAG email address. One of them was a literal email debate I had with another 12-year-old about the existence of God.
I thought that was important enough for me to save, I guess. If it's about helping you define who you are and what you believe and how you enter the world, but if it's about you trying to feel superior to other people and to have this view that certain kinds of people are responsible for all the evil in the world, then you are like, there's an issue. There's an issue. And it's not that, it's you.
I remember the awakening moment for me was I was talking to someone on the internet. I think I was probably in college, so I don't have the excuse of being 12. You did talking to someone on the internet. They were pointing out all of these things in the Bible that contradict themselves, especially things in the Gospels.
There's four different Gospels that tell four different accounts about the life of Jesus. They often at least appear to me and to most people to speak contradictorally about the life of Jesus at times. He has three different last words, for instance, in the four Gospels. Someone was pointing this out to me and I was like, yeah, no, yeah, I get that.
And they were like, well, that means that you can't believe in God. And I was like, I still do. So I think I might have just disproved your point. At some point, it ceases to be productive, or to me at least, it ceases to be like a fertile ground for exploration.
And it becomes personal and complicated and nuanced in ways that you don't really necessarily talk about well with strangers. And I think accepting that for me was the turning point. I have one more question that I want to ask before we get to the news from Mars. John, are you ready for that?
Yes. All right, this one's from Lizzie who asks, Dear Hank and John, I'm going to ask you to talk about nuclear weapons and how terrifying they are and how many exist in the world. I was wondering if there were a way for we could even ever hypothetically get rid of all the nuclear weapons that we currently have. Oh, there's a way.
You know, totally, totally destroying the planet, like shooting them into the sun or et cetera. But, yo, no. Yes. Oh, wait, that was my way.
Indeed. Yes. There are easy ways to get rid of nuclear weapons. And we do it all the time.
Mostly we do it through nuclear power plants. Really? Yeah. Well, that's nice.
We take the fuel from nuclear weapons and we put it into nuclear power plants. And then when we decommission nuclear weapons, this works for most nuclear fuel. We are able to actually take that, put it in the power plant and make power. I see that.
So that's where that's where a lot of the current fuel of nuclear power plants comes from. And we're actually running out of that fuel, which is a problem. So we have to get more of it again. I have an idea.
What? We could decommission more nuclear weapons. I like it. I like it.
Just throw it out there. Yeah. I will also say, John, that our nuclear power plants are also a source for nuclear weapons. And indeed, when we were designing our nuclear power plants, we made it specifically so that some of the byproducts of the nuclear power plants could be used in nuclear weapons.
And if we had not had that alternate goal in mind, we probably would have ended up with a better system for generating nuclear power that would have been safer because it wouldn't have produced all of these byproducts that could potentially be used in weapons. So that's a bummer. Wow. So I guess that knife cuts both ways.
Yeah. Yeah. It's bummer. Instead of a knife, it's a new.
Yeah. I guess I guess I guess I can use the phrase from now on. I guess that nuclear weapon cuts both ways. That really seems like a double edged H bomb.
Today's podcast is brought to you by double edged H bombs, double edged H bombs, sometimes used for fuel. Sometimes not so much. Today's podcast is also brought to you by the complexities of Mr. Darcy, handsome, rich, and additionally with a complex, thoughtful worldview that makes people who take the time to get to know him really, really falling in love.
And today's podcast is brought to you by Vladimir Putin wearing a bear suit holding a car battery. Vladimir Putin wearing a bear suit holding a car battery. Please, please, no, please. And this podcast is finally brought to you by placing your one-year-old into a cardboard box so you can get some freaking work done.
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We should also thank our Patreon subscribers who actually bring Dear Hank and John to you. If you want to get a monthly livestream, which is inevitably disastrous, Hank spent this week talking almost exclusively about his struggles to get an appointment with his gastroenterologist. If you want to, if you want that kind of hot hot content, check out the Dear Hank and John Patreon.com. You can become a patron of our show and get a livestream, but mostly you just help out with Claudia and Nick and their work on the podcast.
Also, you can choose between AFC Wimbledon and Mars, which you want to support. It won't actually matter because the money goes to the same place. But right now, AFC Wimbledon is losing by a lot and it makes me sad. Well, you know, maybe we should get to the Mars news then.
Alright, what's the news for Mars, Hank? The first component of the ExoMars mission, a joint project between the European Space Agency and Roscosmos launched last week. And it's now on its way to Mars and it will arrive there in about seven months, eight months-ish. There are two components to this first mission.
There's a lander, which is mostly just designed to test a landing system, but it's going to do a little bit of experiments, but mostly it's just testing the landing. And the other is an orbiter, which has the main job of detecting trace chemicals in the atmosphere because the goal of this two-part ExoMars mission is to actually, like, actually they're biological goals, which we've been really sort of wary about at NASA, but ESA and Roscosmos is just going after it. So the orbiter is going to be looking for to detect methane in the Martian atmosphere, which we've detected before, and we're a little bit confused about where it's coming from. So here on Earth is often generated by biological processes, so we are very interested in where that methane's coming from.
The orbiter will be able to figure that out and then take pictures of areas where the methane concentrations seem to be originating from, and then use that to find a good landing site for the next component of the ExoMars mission, which will launch in 2018, which is a rover that will land around where that methane is being produced, theoretically, and do science and explore that area to see where what's going on with this mysterious methane. That is a giant spider. That is a giant spider. Wow, that is a big spider.
On Mars? Wow. No. I was not looking at Mars.
I don't know what to do. It's so big. Oh, take a picture of it and put it on the deer hank and John Patreon. It's so big.
Oh my, I can't see it anymore. It's like all the way across the room and it's going really fast and now I can't see it. Take a picture of it. Take a picture of it for our Patreon, which you can find access to for free.
You can see Hank's spider pictures for free. I just, Hank, we need to do more content outside the podcast. So Hank, do you remember that I, on my way to Jordan, I stopped by AFC Wimbledon at all the players out of Wonderfultime. They lost to Oxford 2-1.
You can still give him a podcast, can't. Oh, apparently the podcast can't hear Hank because he has run away from his microphone because he's afraid of a spider. Is that correct, Hank? That is correct.
Well, can you hurry back? I can't, I can't pod without you. You told me I have to take a picture of it. Well, I didn't think that it would involve getting out of your seat to take a picture of it.
It's really big. Can I deliver the news from AFC Wimbledon? It is important. Yes, you may.
Hank, you will recall that I went to visit AFC Wimbledon on my way to Jordan with Rosiana and we saw them lose to Oxford 2-1. Uh-huh. Sadly, unfortunately, I seemed to have cursed them while I was there. I met all of the players and I accidentally put a hex on them.
Since then, things have gone from okay to terrible to yet worse than terrible to unbelievably bad. Uh, lost to Oxford 2-1, tied leading Northampton 1-1. That was a great result actually. Nail Nail Draw against Akington Stanley, then lost to Bristol Rovers and then a lost to Moore Camby in Moore Camba.
Ah, ah. There's a game to give you a sense of what it's like to lose to Moore Cam. There, like a mascot, is a shrimp. An actual shrimp.
They are known as the Shrimping Team. They come from the Shrimping Country in the far northeast of England. I mean, I have exceptionally bad ability to distinguish between East and West. You don't know how good a shrimp would be at soccer.
Maybe there's like a super long history of shrimp soccer. Maybe, but given the size of the ball and the size of shrimp, I'm a little dubious. Anyway, we lost to Moore Cam. It was devastating.
I don't want to make it seem worse than it is, but they're 18th in League 2 and we are now down to, I believe, 9th. Possibly 10th, which is just, it's very bad. We're 9th. We're 9th on 53 points.
And we need to get up into the top 7 spots in order to have a shot at the playoffs. There are now just 10 games remaining in AFC Wimbledon season. So they would have to go on an incredible run to make the playoffs. That is the update.
I wish it were better news, but instead it is like walking all the way into a cave so deep down into that cave that you turn around and you find that there is light neither behind you nor in front of you. It's called cave darkness. There isn't a single lumen of light. That's how I feel right now.
So I look at the table and you're in 9th though and you have to be in 7th, right? So you're only 2 out. Yeah, it's just the way the results have been going, though Hank. It's like, are you familiar with the concept of momentum?
Yeah, but I do not think that it applies to phenomenon such as this. I think if you pass performance, as they say, is no guarantee of future success or future failure. It's all just dice. I'll just dice being thrown on that football pitch, John.
You just got to keep throwing those dice. It's not all just dice. It's not all just dice. Or Northampton would win fewer games.
Yeah, I guess the reason that I feel so hopeless. I mean, look, it's always great news. AFC Wimbledon staying up and leading to his great news. That's the main goal for every season.
But the reason I feel such despair is that I let myself feel such hope. By the time of the Oxford game, by the time that game kicked off, I was properly dreaming of League 1 football. I was imagining it. And that was a big mistake.
I would have just been that one season anyway, as you said. That's true. But what a season. Wouldn't have been able to travel the country, visiting the likes of Swindon Town.
Oh, Swindon Town. I know. I know. It would have been great.
It ain't going to happen. Or maybe it will, but it looks less likely than it did a few weeks ago. So that's the news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Hank, what have we learned today?
John has a lot of complicated thoughts about nationalism and Ulysses, which is a book. Yes, I guess we learned that. We also learned that both Hank and John are clearly distressed about the quality of political discourse in the United States so much that it kind of derailed the podcast. We learned that you should unpack your boxes in order of what stuff you need.
And then if you don't need it, just don't unpack it. And it'll just have like four forks. And just a bunch of boxes. Our advice is so good.
Hey, hey, Megan, how come you got four forks in your house? John and Hank told me to stop unpacking four forks. I have a needle on it. That's also one-year-old child is in this here box.
And of course, we learned that if a lot of you are Putin wearing a bear suit approaches you with a car battery, you should say not no thank you, but rather no please. That's important linguistic advice from here at Dear Hank and John. Thank you for podcasting with me, John. And thank you to all the people for Pod listening, which I think is what that's called.
I believe that is the technical term. Our podcast is edited by Nicholas Jenkins. Our hard-working amazing intern is Claudia Morales. Thanks also to Rosie on the host for the questions.
Our theme music is from Gunnarolla. You can email us at HankandJohn at gmail.com or find us on Twitter at HankGreen at JohnGreen or UnsnapChat. I'm Hank GRE and as they say in our hometown, don't forget to join us.