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Friends of Complexly like Mark Rober, Katie Max, Simone Yech, and more will share inspiring talks about what makes them hopeful and join Hank Green on stage for fun, interactive discussions. Complexly has been creating free educational content like SciShow and PBS eons and Crash Course and Bizarre Beasts for nearly 15 years and 6 billion views. But this year, we have become a 501c3 nonprofit and we're doing something worth knowing as an in-person event that benefits Complexly and our impactful educational media. It's the first ever Complexly in-person event and it's a fundraiser to support our mission of inspiring curiosity and lowering barriers to knowledge building because curiosity builds understanding and understanding builds a better world.
Tickets 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. You're listening to a Complexly podcast. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.
Yours I prefer to think of it Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, yep. Every morning, every morning I'm going out of the house, I'm taking a or into school.
I get hit by a bike. Well, it's a vicious cycle. You know, I actually did get hit by a bike once a bike messenger hit me and I never quite recovered from it. My mouth has never been the same since he hit me with his shoulder to my face.
I broke my nose, I got a concussion and teeth, teeth problems and teeth problems that have lasted for the last 20 years. That was 2003 I believe. Once there's teeth problems, man, it is hard to not have teeth problems. Yeah.
Hank, can I tell you what I did this morning before work that was much better than my usual strategy of scrolling? What'd you do? I made hot sauce with your mother. And we just like cut up the peppers and we chatted and we put the peppers to blender and we did all the salt and everything so that they can ferment over the next two weeks and then we put them all in the in the in the jars and it was great.
Why don't I do that every? Why don't I do something like that every day where I see someone early in the morning from like six to eight? Yeah. Why don't I do that or exercise or do something other than scrolling?
I don't know. It's hard to get out of bed. That's part of it. Like, you know, we're we've got our our our experiences, you know, and they're happening at a fairly deep level.
And one of our experiences is don't get out of this thing. This is great in here. Yeah. Well, you don't need something but like right next to you is a thing that contains the universe.
So grab on the mat. Well, it feels like it contains the universe. It actually contains a very small slice of the universe. My lizard brain thinks, can I tell you about my new strategy?
So hard's been working pretty well. Please. So I've set my phone to block all of the major social media apps, but I still need them as part of my like I need to DM people, if not else. And so what I've done is I've set it to block them.
But then there's like a little ignore your time limit for the day thing. But I only ever set it to let me ignore it for 15 minutes because what happens is I go on to DM a friend. And then I'm in the app and they know this. This is why they've done it this way.
I'm in the app and I'm like, well, I can't leave now the whole universe is in here. Who knows what's behind door number two? So I open door number two and then 15 minutes later, it's like that was your 15 minutes bud. And I could extend it.
There's a button that lets you extend it. But at least it reminds me that like I've been doing this for 15 minutes and stops me from doing it for another 15 or 45 minute like session on one of these apps where I'm like trying to like my subconscious brain is like, Oh, it worked, work is hard, work is bad. Just scroll, particularly it's worked well with the Twitters and the and the blue skies and the threads. I don't even know how to get DMS on those apps.
I can't I can't log into my Twitter anymore. Rosie on a change the password so that neither of us know it, which I think is kind of brilliant because when Rosie on a new one, I would just badger her until she would tell it to me. Yeah. Now neither of us know it.
And so it's over. My relationship with that John Green has come to an end. I've been thinking about whether I should delete all of my old tweets. Oh, I did that it felt great.
I backed them up so that I have them for posterity. You have a posterity folder somewhere in case anybody ever comes to my papers. You should sell a DVD of your TV. If I John Green tweets on a thumb drive, I mean, I looked at some of them from like 2000, you know, I mean, I was tweeting for a long time.
Oh, yeah. I'd be getting like 20 likes. Yeah. And I'd feel great about that.
Yeah. My tweets from like 2009 just do not hold up was my overall impression. And I was really going to be like combed through those 2009 tweets. That's a big, that's a big concern that I have because because it used to be that it was like really hard to come through somebody's tweets.
But now you can just ask an AI and say like, Hey, I go find anything this person has ever said that could make someone angry. Yeah. And I love that. That's a great fun world.
You should absolutely delete all your old tweets. It feels amazing. It feels even better than when you delete a post right after posting it. I've been doing this on Tumblr a lot where I'll tumble something.
Yeah. And then I'll immediately delete it. And people will be like, why did you delete it? And I'd be like, because the moment it became stressful and unfun I deleted it, which felt great.
I used to make TikToks that were had a set time limit and people love that. And be like, this TikTok is just for the people who are here this hour. So Hank and I are trying to embrace the slow internet. But one thing I've heard from a lot of our listeners is that they use this podcast to embrace the slow internet.
And it doesn't actually help them to hear us whining all day about our scrolling problem. Absolutely true. If I hear somebody say the word Twitter, I'm like, I'm going to check Twitter. It's amazing.
Really? Oh, when I hear somebody say the word Twitter, I feel a physical revulsion. Well, I got more with TikTok than Twitter. I'll be honest.
I used to. I'm not on TikTok either. Something inside of me broke. And I don't think it can ever be fixed.
Hank can I ask you a question? Yeah, please. It's from M who writes, Dear John and Hank, assuming I'm fireproof, how much harder would it be to swim in lava than water? Appreciate you, M.
Now, Hank, before you answer this question with science, I think I know the answer. Okay. I, I, there is a definite answer. I think it would be utterly impossible because my understanding is that it basically has the same density of rock.
It's just really, really hot. So it's liquid. Yeah. Yeah.
Like if you like, like, stood on lava, you might sink into it a little bit. But if you laid on lava, you would just lay, you just lay it on lava. Like, like, if you could, like, you could push your fingers into it because you would be putting a lot of pressure on a very small area. So you'd be increasing the balance.
You couldn't swim. There's too much of you for snow. You would. So if you're, if you're fireproof, one thing that's important to note is that you've, you've basically eliminated physics from the equation.
So you're saying, like, it doesn't matter how hot I am. So we could also just make you the same density as rock. And then you could swim in lava. Because we're basically the same density as water, a little different, but, and we actually, one of the fun things about water, you can change your density.
So that you can sink or you can float in hayo and exhale. Yeah. So that's fun. So basically you can make it like that, like, it's like that for rock and it would still be much harder to swim in rock because of the viscos or in lava because of the viscosity.
So water, obviously, you've seen it. It doesn't hold it's hold together as as thickly as maple syrup, but maple syrup holds itself together much less thickly than lava. Right. Right.
Could you swim in maple syrup if you needed to? I don't think you can go watch YouTube videos of people trying, which isn't okay. Of course you can. Of course you can.
Of course you can. I don't know maple syrup, but like people swimming with liquids of different density to get views. Why wouldn't you? Yeah.
I guess when you put an outdoor swimming pool of corn syrup in front of me, I try to swim in it. Absolutely. Butter, melted butter, oil. Yeah.
Absolutely. And with the process of getting myself back to my natural state, be a pain. Yeah. But would you do it for the views or would you do it for the experience?
I think, and I'm just going to tell you what I think your deepest heart is. I think you would do it for the views. I do it for both. You know, I do it for the, I do it for three things.
I do it for the views. I do it for the experience. And I do it because there'd be other people around egging me on. Right.
Once somebody eggs me on, there's sort of a lab that I'll do. You know, which is what a lot of the first year of my brothers was. You can't say that's not true, you, Mr. I wax my day to blenderize tapping me up.
Oh, Hank, I wanted views so bad. I'm a different man now. Nobody wanted to be famous more than I did in 2003. I wanted to be famous more than I wanted anything in the world.
I would have sacrificed my family for it, not you, but you know, the parents. They're not listening. They can't keep up with all the stuff that we make. There's no way that they're listening right now.
I would not have actually sacrificed you on the dead. But I would have sacrificed a lot to get famous. But then I got famous enough and I found out that there's no oxygen at the top of the mountain. It's not fun up there.
It doesn't feel good. And I don't want to go back. There's a Jimmy Carr quote that's like everybody's jealous of where you are, but nobody's jealous of how you got there. And I'm like, actually, opposite.
Yeah, I'm jealous of how I got here, but less jealous of where I am. Yeah, my path to the top was actually quite fun. Yeah, I know. But since the higher it has gotten it, it's gotten harder and harder.
Yeah, because there's no oxygen up there. Oh, God, what does that mean? Tell me what that means to you? Well, when you go up to the top of Mount Everest, I don't know if you know about this.
No, no, no, no, I know about other. What does it mean to have there be no air at the top of the fame pyramid? The tire you go up the mountain, the less oxygen there is, the harder it is to breathe, the more stressful it is, the fewer people who are up there with you, the less time you feel like it's sustainable to be up there, all that stuff. The more people who are like, what the hell is wrong with this person going to the top of the mountain, they must have made some deal with the devil.
There's all kinds of things that I don't like about being at the top of the mountain. Now being on the other side of the mountain. Oh, oh, so you can, it isn't just up and then back down. No, no, you go down the other side.
You're changed by the mountain where you are is different. Mm. You're changed by the mountain. And so on the other side of the mountain, I actually, I find it pleasant over here, but I have too many memories of what it was like on top of the mountain.
And so if, for instance, my brother announces that there is a nearby mountain peak that he would like to summit, I'm like, I don't love it for him. Oh, I thought you might be a little like, should I go with him? Oh, no, no, nobody. I thought that might be where we were headed, but that's not where we were headed.
No, I just worry about you up there. You're like, do you have an oxygen tank? Yeah, you have oxygen tanks. You're going up there raw.
But I've got all the experience from the previous summits. That's true. You watched me summit and you were like, that looks fun. I'll do that.
There is a lot of our career that is like you doing something and then being like, this isn't that great. I mean, being like, I will do it too. I'll try it. I'll bet I'd like it.
It must be better than even John thinks it is. Well, you, to be fair, handle that stuff better than I do. I think you have naturally more lung capacity than I do to extend this metaphor to absurd degrees. I think that my as does as tend to occur, my lung capacity has decreased with age.
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, down here on the other side of the fountain, it's not bad. It's not bad at all. The only thing that I miss about being like, properly in the center of pop culture famous is that I wish that when that had happened, I had been obsessed with tuberculosis.
But of course, if I'm obsessed with tuberculosis, that wouldn't have happened. So anyway, you can't swim in lava. Anyway, you can't swim in lava. Another lesson that we all need to learn as humans.
This next question comes from Morgan who asks, Dear John and Hank and Hank and John, why do I have one weird, long paper white hair that grows out of my face cheek? I have one that grows from my collarbone, too. And my wife has one that grows out of their forehead. So I know it's not just me, but why?
They get to be like an inch or two before I notice it must grow really fast. Only a mild inconvenience. But our bodies are so weird. Every pumpkin's in furry penguins, Morgan.
Yeah, what do you think, Hank? You know, you're right, our bodies are so weird. I mean, the basic answer, John, is that we're 30 trillion cells all working together and listening to each other in a bizarre and silent symphony of chemicals. And what a cell does, like remember, back when you were one cell vividly, and then like every cell that came later had to decide what part of a body it was going to be.
And then some parts became like meter long neurons and other parts became like the epithelium of the colon. And those are all very different things. Like, if your skin cells were like your lung cells, you would be wet and sticky and dead. The system that controls what turns into what and like, you know, as simple as like this, my forehead is very similar to the skin on the top of my head.
But like, there's a difference in that like a bunch of hairs come out of the ones on the top of the head. And also there are hairs on the forehead. They just are like really small and different. So it's very strange.
And one of the sort of cutting edge spaces of biology that we still are trying to understand. And sometimes things go a little bit weird, and you get like a weird hair that comes out of your collarbone or that you're literally your forehead. And those hairs oftentimes are different. This is hilarious.
For whatever reason, your computer thinks you're going to be a thumbs down constantly. Oh, sorry, I'll move my hand. I'm like, he doesn't like it. But I look at your actual hand.
You're not doing thumbs down at all. Like, in what way, like, like, sometimes it gives me balloons and I don't even know how to do balloons. Yeah, it never works when you're trying to make it work. Right.
Oh, you just got fireworks. Today, I was trying to thumbs up. Well, you got fireworks instead. Your whole screen turned black and it went full fireworks.
I have one of these hairs. It's up here in my upper cheek halfway between my eye and my beard. And I love pulling it. I love, I don't know what it's a little bit of pain, but it's the right amount of pain for me, buddy.
Yeah. And I love pulling on it. So I don't shave it or anything because I'm always waiting for it to grow long enough that I can tug it out. So it's good to know that I'm not alone.
There's Morgan, Morgan's wife and me. I got one eyebrow that just goes forever and Catherine loves ninking that boy out. Oh, yeah, those are fun ones too. Yeah.
All right, hair is weird. Bodies are weird. We're 30 trillion cells in a complicated symphony. And if all of our cells were the same, we would be wet, wet and dead.
I don't remember what I said. I might have said wet and dead. That's also what you would be like, by the way, if you tried to swim in lava. Wait, what?
Yeah, you'd be wet and dead. I'd be wet with lava? Hold on. No.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're not allowing that to pass. Well, it's true. A lot of it cannot make you wet.
Oil can't make you wet. It's a liquid. I feel like ethanol can make you wet, which is interesting. Yeah, no, any liquid can make you wet.
Liquid nitrogen can make you wet. They all mean. No. Yeah, if you would swimming in liquid nitrogen, you would also get wet.
Everyone knows this. We're going to need. I'm going to need to do a poll. Do other proposals that only certain liquids can make you wet?
Only water makes you wet. No, that's dumb. That's dumb. If I pour if I pour vodka on myself, I am wet.
Yeah, because 60% of that vodka is water. If I pour ever clear on myself, I'm wet. No. Yeah, I am.
I'm sure. No, but like still, there's like 20% of that's water. No, no, like 3% of it is water, but if that's some high quality alcohol, they got to every ever clear chemistry. That's not for food.
I agree. I had one shot of ever clearing my life and it was more than enough. I did too. But it was for like a SciShow shoot.
Again, I was being egged on. You do love being egged on. I, yeah, I do used to do a bunch of weird props to fun SciShow, but yeah, I did a shot of ever clear for SciShow and I made you very drunk. Yeah, no, it's got a lot of alcohol.
This is a problem. I like, I have to, I can't work anymore, but I also can't go home. If you pour hydrogen for oxide on yourself or you pour alcohol on yourself, you get wet. That is a fact.
Because any liquid can make you wet. I feel like any liquid that makes you cold makes you wet. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Well, it's not because you can't detect wetness.
You can only detect the sensations of wetness, which include the evaporation that happens when a more volatile substance like water or ethanol is on your skin, when the warmer molecules evaporate away and what's left behind is the colder molecules and you've experienced that as the coolness of wetness. No, you can be warm and wet. Wetness is something that happens in your consciousness. It is not something that happens physically in the world.
Something that happens to my hair, I'm pretty sure. No, that's actually true. So, okay, now we're picturing a shirt. Yes.
Oil on it. That shirt is not wet. That shirt has stain. No, if it has enough oil, it's wet.
Trust me. Wet with oil? Yeah, wet with oil. It's wet with olive oil.
Wet with oil. Are you gluing it? Are you asking for Google? What Google's AI thinks about being wet with oil?
I think I just have to say something about AI very briefly. I apologize if this is going to offend a portion of our audience. We can go back to the wetness issue, but I hope it's in our opinions. We are mammals, okay?
We are mammals and it's not speciesist to think that we should survive. We are mammals. AI is not a mammal. I think this is very important distinction.
I was in a conversation about AI recently and all these people were having all these high-filute conversations about it and I was like, you guys are mammals. You have a deep brain that experiences sensations. You are an experiencer. Yeah.
You can get wet. Yeah, with oil or liquid nitrogen or any liquid because that is the nature of liquid nitrogen. Don't get wet with lava. Don't get wet with lava.
Don't get wet with lava. You will be wet and dead. All right. We got a question from Sydney.
It's a science question. This one's for you, Hank. Dear John, and Hank, but mostly Hank. In Star Trek, when the Enterprise is traveling faster than light, the stars appear as little white orbs that move past the ship without streaking or doing anything weird, which doesn't seem right to me.
Wouldn't there not be any stars because the light they're emitting wouldn't be able to catch up to the Enterprise? Or would they be moving past so many stars so quickly that the light is sort of everywhere and the view of the ship is pure white? Would it look more like weird light tunnel that happens in Hyperdrive from Star Wars? Do we have any way of knowing pumpins and penguins?
I mean, I don't know. You don't know. Oh, I thought you would research the heck out of this question. This is a perfect question.
We have to reschedule this podcast. I didn't get a chance. I mean, there's no way. I can get a lot of physicists.
We over over yes on physicists. And also, we over index on Hank Green should know the answer to every question. We do. So let's turn it back on the audience.
Physicists, especially astrophysicists. Tell us the answer. What would it look like if we were traveling on the Enterprise faster than light, which we know we can't do, but if we could, what would it look like? Come back to the next episode of Dear Hank and John for the answer to that question.
I love this. I love this. This is great. This is great.
We should do this one. We should do it once an episode. All right. Our next question comes from Ava who asks Dear Hank and John, Loomela from the Mountain Kingdom.
I am a Peace Corps volunteer serving in the health sector in Lesotho, my clinic, the regularly partners with partners in health. And I realize that I actually do not understand the role you all play. Are you board members, contractors, very fancy donors, or another role? This is a great question.
It's a little bit of all and none. What is your official role within PIH? Actually, I think John, you do have one. I'd love to better understand how some of my favorite graders work in our shared field, not a gardener.
Ava. Great, great name, Civic sign off. So I am on the Board of Trustees of Partners in Health and have been for a few years. Hank is not.
I'm just some guy. Hank is a designer of fundraising techniques for partners in health and also a major donor. So we both donate some money every year, but the lion's share of the money that gets donated from the community comes through Good Store and the Keats and Faux and the awesome socks club and other stuff that we do. Yeah, every year there's a large pool of anonymous and anonymous donors.
We are among the anonymous donors during the Project for Awesome. And then we also donate separately during specific campaigns. So we're mostly very fancy donors, but we do work with them, some on strategy and communications and marketing with our marketing team, talking about storytelling, stuff like that. So we get to work with them in broad, interesting ways, which is really fun for us.
But I think the most important thing we do is raise money. What is a Board of Trustees? You got me, man. I mean, I go to a meeting twice a year.
There's a lot of nice people there. They have bagels in the morning. And PIH has an interesting board because I think it's the Board of People who look after the health of the charity, broadly speaking. But the PIH has an interesting board because a number of people on the board are patients or people who have been served at PIH sites, people who've worked on PIH sites, not just in the health part of it, but in maybe transportation or some other part of it.
And so it's a really cool board because you meet lots of interesting people from all over the world. I'm happy to be on it. It's nice to be able to meet with folks who are really working on system wide change throughout the year. It's really encouraging to me and a great reminder.
And if anything, I think like part of what I wish could happen and maybe will happen down the road is I wish like everyone could get the kind of updates that I get from PIH sites because it's super encouraging, even in difficult times, to see how people are finding ways to work together, work with governments, work with other folks like Ava. And it actually makes you feel not hopeful exactly, but less hopeless to engage deeply with problems in my experience. So I wish everyone could have that because I do feel like sometimes like, my engagement with most issues is so relatively superficial because I'm just following it online or whatever. My engagement, for instance, with I don't know a problem like climate change is relatively superficial.
I'm following it through Hank. I'm following it online. I'm following it through news stories. But I'm not like in the meetings with the people who are really trying to drive down carbon emissions.
And if I were, I think I would feel a mix of more frustrated, but also more hopeful. Well, maybe a couple of years ago, that's how you'd feel. But now I just feel hopeless. That's also kind of the case.
You certainly feel frustrated. I mean, it's always very hard when you're moving backward. Yes, for sure. And in a weird way, this might resonate with you in terms of global health, but the like progress continues to be made, but it is a mix of past action, right?
It is still having an effect in the world. And it is because of in climate, to some extent, like simply, you know, market forces. The incentives have changed. Yeah, like ultimately, you know, solar power point can make money.
And so people build them to make money. It isn't like it's just that the technology has gotten better. And also like we're benefiting from the climate decisions of China a lot. So the Chinese government subsidizes the development of these technologies, which is driven on the prices a lot, batteries and solar panels, particularly.
And you know, one of the wild things is the current administration is actively anti green energy, anti electric vehicles, anti charging stations, anti everything. But this year, there will be more charging stations installed in America than any other year previously. And at the end of the year, 35% of the charging stations in America will have been built in the last 12 months. Wow, that is mind blowing.
But that's just because people think they can make money. It's partially because people think they can make money and it's partially because when you pass legislation that makes it easier to make charging stations that money takes forever to get out of the world. And so for the last four years of the Biden administration, it's just like, that's how long it took for the projects to get planned and approved and the money to get dispersed. And now they're being built.
Right. Right. That does resonate very deeply with global health. The only thing is that the incentives aren't changing nearly fast enough in global health, whereas they are changing fairly quickly in climate.
Yeah, ultimately, in terms of energy, they're changing quite quickly. There's a lot of the climate problems that don't have the incentive lined up as well. Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the incentives, the incentives not sponsoring any podcasts despite being a really powerful force in our world. Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't actually have to buy.
It doesn't be the most important force in the world. It wins every time. Oh man. The incentives are there when you wake up in the morning.
The incentives are there when you're in the Peace Corps and the suits are there tucking you into bed every night. Spide guess is also brought to you by that one hair. That one hair, what's going on? Stop reminding me that I'm just a bunch of cells.
Today's podcast is also brought to you by mammals. Mammals, we are one. And this podcast is brought to you by wet and dead. Wet and dead?
That's what you'd be without cell differentiation. And indeed, if you jumped into law I mean, definitely not. It just doesn't feel wet in there. This episode of Your Hank and John is brought to you by Shopify.
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With new subscription only, wild supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. All right Hank we got an interesting question from Sarah. I don't know if you know the answer to this one but I thought it was pretty fascinating.
Dear John and Hank, how does gravity impact digestion? I can't help but no digestion tends to go downwards or at least down toward the center of the earth as does gravity. I feel like there's got to be something there where gravity is at least helping a little. If I were upside down all the time or in space would I digest differently?
Pumpkins and penguins Sarah. Yeah I mean a lot of people kind of intuitively feel like if you were just hung by your feet that you wouldn't digest at all. Like very obviously the food starts at the top and then goes to the bottom. No but there's a lot of muscles involved.
I know this because of my own motility challenges. There's definitely a lot of muscle contraction involved. Yeah so there's this thing called peristalsis which you experience a little bit when you're swallowing so you can sort of feel the beginning of peristalsis. I just felt it.
Which is is imagine milking a cow utter except that happens to your entire digestive system and the muscles of your digestive system do it. I'd rather not use that metaphor. Okay well that's basically what is happening and it pushes the food through and it's part of what causes the noises that your digestive system makes and when you're having an intestinal cramp that's the peristalsis locking in place and just grabbing constantly and pushing really hard. So you know that the feeling of a peristalsis cramp but that does not mean that it is the gravity isn't part of it.
In fact a digestion is harder in space which adds to the unpleasantness of being in microgravity. So the stomach contents especially can float. So that means that burping can be dangerous. Panic the disco.
Panic panic panic. And heartburn is more common. Why would anyone? I recently met an astronaut and it was so obvious to me that she was fundamentally different from me.
Like in a different sound way. Every astronaut I've ever met I was like oh you're like you're like a kind of American that I don't meet. Right. Not only are you unlike me you're unlike everyone I know.
Yeah fundamentally. Yeah just like like a kind of what seems to me a very healthy ambition that I'm unfamiliar with in my work. Like all of the people I know who are ambitious are not healthily ambitious the way that astronauts seem to be. Yeah or Peace Corps volunteers.
Yeah you know what we should do more of as Americans is the Peace Corps. We should do more volunteerism in general but yes I agree. It's a great like way of continuing to build yourself you know. Yeah what do you think the chances are that I'll go to space?
Zero. You really think so? Well I mean I think that there's some below zero possibility that like death will get solved sometime in the next 40 years and you will live for a thousand years at which point it will be a very low stakes thing to go to the moon. The idea that it's more likely that we're going to solve death than I'm going to go to space on my own universal lifetime.
Yes fascinating to me. Well that thing's right to you doesn't it? Probably although I could see space travel getting vastly safer and becoming like intercontinental flight within the next 40 years as well and then I might do. I mean let me tell you that I don't think that we can handle the carbon impact of that form of travel.
Great well then I won't do it. I'm out. I already create way too much carbon because of my obsession with AFC Wimbledon. That's right.
Let's move on to this question from Jesse Wright. Dear John and Hank I started listening to the podcast a few weeks ago and just got to episode 56 when Hank's child announcement is made along with John's Snickers announcement. You'll recall that I received 450 something Snickers the same time you revealed that you were going to have a child and I was basically equally excited about both. During the AFC Wimbledon news segment Hank was understandably yawning.
Jess I'll try not to take that personally. And this caused me to yawn 10 years later. My question is what do you think is the longest length of time a yawn has been spread and given that you guys sometimes end your own content have you ever caused yourself to yawn across time? Jess.
Oh I've definitely caused myself to yawn across time. I you know I scrub through the yawns pretty regularly. Like I don't tend to watch the parts where I'm not talking when I'm reading a video but it has happened. I've never happened to me.
It's over a thousand videos so we know there's an outer limit on the longest period of time a yawn has caused somebody to yawn. It's got to be like 1920. Yeah but it's going to keep getting longer. We have to go and find an old yawn.
Yeah I think you got to find the original yawn the first time somebody yawned and you've got to be able to yawn audibly. So that's its own complexity because yawning on a 1905 phonograph is not going to sound like a yawn. It's going to sound like nothing. You're right.
You got to have a really good audible yawn. I think we're talking about 1920s probably in terms of movies. You probably have a good audible and visual yawn by the late 1920s and so we've maybe got a 100 year gap between contagious yawns. That's exciting.
But also like as we continue to develop like that it'll be you know a few humans can hold on. We'll have like 10,000 year longs with yawns yawns but also John it isn't. It isn't. It isn't just hearing a yawn.
You can read about a yawn and it can make you want a yawn. You can read about a yawn. So it could be Beowulf. We got to make sure that Beowulf didn't yawn ever in there.
It's got to be literature's first yawn. Does that true that you can get a contagious yawn from just reading about a yawn? Oh yeah. I've been holding one back since we started this question.
I've been holding one back too. I am quite tired. So yeah we got to stretch way back before the phonograph. And also what about this John?
What if all yawns are actually contagious yawns? What if in some ways we're responding to the first yawn? Yeah there was some monkey that yawned. I want a yawn so bad right now.
I almost did it. Almost did it. We had to hold it in. Oh yeah we're working hard over here.
Yeah. I'm suddenly aware of my own fatigue. I can take an app right now. I'm having a wakefully on.
Yeah I don't have a ton of those. All right this is fascinating. It goes back to the first. The longest time is all the time that since the first yawn by the first primate.
That's Hank's theory. Well that could be but I think that if anybody knows of some classic literature yawns deep in you know Cervantes or Beowulfor something. Yeah. Yeah let us know what the first yawn in literature was.
If you'll give me a shot I bet he did. Did Gilgamesh yawn? Are there yawns in the Bible? Are there old school yawns?
Is our question? Send us your oldest yawn and we'll see if it makes us yawn. We'll try to set a new world record. All right Tara writes, Dear John and Hank.
I'm a relatively fresh listener in order to catch up on the decade of episodes. I've missed a random we scroll and select each time. We're getting a bunch of fresh listeners. Yeah this has led me to transporting different passages of time simply through the voices of two middle aged American men.
Oh my god. I was gonna take that personally Tara but then I realized I can't. Soon enough John you'll be like middle aged. Why thank you.
Today I found myself in 2017 listening to both you being very optimistic particularly about the freedoms and growth we as a society have seen and will see and 2025 it seems these outlooks are hard to come by. My question to you is how do we approach opinions of such a large scale changing is fear from backlash a factor in the stark division politically and lastly wise everything so hard a wrap backwards Tara. So I actually think that we have to hold competing ideas in our mind at the same time. Like we have to hold the idea that poverty is going to go down this year and that fewer children will die this year than any year in the last 8,000 years.
We have to hold that idea that is real that is exciting that is the result of millions of humans maybe billions of humans working together to make the world suck less with the fact that in many ways things are getting worse. Yeah we have to hold those two facts together and I don't know how to hold them together because the the shininess of in many ways things are getting worse which is very true like the things are genuinely getting worse really for the first time in my lifetime. You know we've seen American life expectancy go down three or four years in a row we've seen I mean it's bouncing back now but like only because it got so low. We've seen gains in health care equity saw out and in some cases be reversed we may see childhood mortality go up probably not in the next couple years but to Hank's point earlier that these things take a long time after policy changes to really start to see the effects we may see it in three or four years and so things are getting worse and yet when I graduated from high school or college which I see as the great golden age of human history in the 90s or 2000s 12 million children were dying under the age of five every year and last year fewer than five million did.
Like so how do we hold those things together I don't know but we have to. There's also and I don't know if this is worth the time it's going to say but there are a lot of people who think things are bad that just actually aren't that bad like there are things that are bad that we think are worse than they are. Oh interesting I was watching this video it's just popped up on my YouTube I was watching this video and this guy makes an off-handed comment that like you know say there's obviously a lot of hard things about the third world but at least they eat real food. Oh no that's a bad take and I was like I was like what's what.
That's a bad take on a lot of levels the use of the phrase third is the beginning of the bad take. It was from from start to end and it was a very sort of progressive ish feeling video and it made me think about you know there's two stories about like food and health in America and the one that is like being told right now is our food is poisoning us and the other one is this is the first time in human history that plenty has been the problem and that has been the case for maybe 50 years. Right. And so we're not good at it yet and we're getting better at it we're figuring it out but think about like the first thing we figured out is how to have enough food and like for 99.999% of human history that's not the situation we were in almost everyone was food insecure and the immediate flip from okay we we have enough food to the biggest problem in the world is that is our unhealthy relationship with all of these food that we have now engineered to be hyper-powtable and you know the capitalist push toward making something that you literally cannot resist.
Like that's a problem but like it's it's a kind of an understandable problem given the the situation that we have ended up in and it also seems like a solvable problem if we interface with it as a problem and not as like us being poisoned and I just I feel like there's a lot of people walking around dealing as if every aspect of modern life is a harm that has been perpetrated on us. Right. Instead of a series of choices that we made for in some cases bad reasons for sure but in some cases really good reasons like we had a green revolution that you know led to way way more food being available and that was really good news for humanity it was really good news for the number of children who die it was really good news for the number of people who are experiencing misery day to day and to me the failure of that revolution was that now we have plenty and we do a bad job of distributing those resources such that there are still lots of people who go hungry every day now that's a failure and it's a huge failure and it's to Hank's point a failure that sort of by definition has only been around for the last 50 years but we need to understand that like the progress is also real like the new problem is a difficult problem and it is it is a horrifying problem in many ways but it is better than the problem that we replaced it with right right the new problem is created by the old solution like climate change is a problem largely of providing people with things they wanted I think it's not anymore like we could have moved past that by now but you know the first you know like I'm glad of refrigerators you know oh me too I mean talk about food security nothing spells food security like a refrigerator that works 24 hours a day seven days a week I mean like we just haven't we just of course we don't think about it well those of us who have access refrigerators don't think about it but yeah lots of people don't so that's uh that's our hopeful message is that we are going to create new problems with new solutions but those new problems will hopefully be better than the old problems yeah sometimes I think we make problems we create solutions and then the solution is actually worse than the previous problem I think that happens as well I think that's happened some with social discourse with attempts to address loneliness yeah I think we've seen some of that but I also think that a lot of times when we're solving a problem we create a new problem that's not as bad yeah I think there's a lot of solving problems that don't really exist going on solving the problems of the it's the consciousness immediate needs rather than the whole need but yeah for sure I mean we don't like to be uncomfortable we don't like to be bored and the internet is really good at making us feel comfortable and not bored and in the moment less lonely the problem is at least in my experience is that it makes me more lonely in the long run yeah and that's really hard to address like making friends and adulthood is one of the hardest things I've ever done yeah it's incredibly uncomfortable shouldn't be so hard it shouldn't be so hard there should be better structures for this but it's a problem that we didn't have to figure out for like most of human history because it was solved very naturally by living in tiny communities but now we got to figure it out yeah all right john well a related question if we can do one more before the news of premade mars sure sure okay it's from Olivia who asks to the equally awesome green brothers I'm fairly terrified of ai not an askynet matrix robots uh fight at the concords kind of way but in a toddler with a loaded gun sort of way I don't think humanity is capable of having this thing without inevitable tragedy is there anything you know or believe that my quel my fear is nerdfighter since the 50 jokes in four minutes video and still 100% here for the puns Olivia that makes one of us Olivia well Olivia here's what I'll tell you at least there are puns but also ai can do puns sometimes it can't it doesn't know what it's doing that's one thing that seems certain um I can't really help you me neither my biggest source of hope is that like humanity and individual human groups have been confronted with existential crises many many times that they have overcome and that's like my my basic source of hope in terms of the specifics here it's very hard because the future is going to be very weird and so I can't get specific about solutions because I can't get specific about the problems I don't know what's coming it's very big and weird we don't know what's coming we know that ai is getting faster and better and cheaper and more efficient over time and we think that will continue but we actually don't have strong evidence for the idea that it will continue until it becomes something vastly smarter and more powerful than we could possibly imagine we don't know that we are guessing that based on a curve of change that we've seen so far but we don't know that that curve of change lasts forever yeah I mean I there's a lot of people who are very worried so there's people who are like hype men who think that's going to happen but there's also people who are like the opposite of hype men who are worried that that is going to happen it seems a bit closer you are to it the more you think that that is fairly inevitable it's just sort of a matter of when but I also don't think that we need to get to super intelligence for it to I think we are already suffering the effects of a society run by ai which is that our realities are defined by recommendation algorithms that are designed to keep us on websites not designed to increase human thriving so those are actually those systems actually quite optimized they are what they would call aligned with what we want them to do it's just that we have aligned them to a terrible purpose which is to keep us on a website rather than to make our lives better yep preach brother literal brother I think we can change those alignments but it's defining reality in profound profound ways like there is no way Donald Trump becomes a president without twitter and there is no way Donald Trump becomes a president without twitter's particular physics and algorithms which were designed by ai on some level and so yeah I mean we live in a vastly different world because of ai and algorithms then we did 10 years ago we will live in a vastly different world 10 years from now I think the question is what do we optimize for and we optimize for things that are socially destructive we get a less socially productive world but if you optimize for things that are socially productive then are you that is there like some board of directors in silicon valley who is defining reality for america and how's that feel not great no i'm pretty freaked out of you i'm pretty freaked out and years ago facebook did experiments where they were like we could tweak the algorithm it makes people happier and everybody was like oh no don't do that that seems very weird and bad well and also people didn't use facebook as much and also people people use facebook glass yeah why would they use facebook facebook i mean you know these tools are functionally distraction tools and what they're distracting you from is some kind of like boredom or pain or psychic pain that's way down deep yeah anyway thanks for coming to the party olivia sorry we can provide you with nothing except for the reality that humans have solved every existential problem so far no one thought we were going to get through the cold war you know yeah and like here we are that was you know 80 years ago yeah we made it 80 whole years i'm not i'm not actually encouraged when people are like oh we figured out nuclear weapons i'm like did we or have we just made it 80 years one human lifetime during which there has been some proliferation there's like a great deal of proliferation though i'm not feeling not feeling that though yeah all right i got we got to get to the news from rz and a c one let's start with the news from a fc women a fc women's women's women's women's women's team is in the third division the f a wpl premiere division they've had a rough start to the season there's no getting around it two losses two draws but they just won their first game of the season which is very encouraging because there's some really big teams like wokford which used to be in the premiere league there in the third division with us and we just won our first game of the season so i wanted to call that out we got beat by wokford but then we beat biller k-town they haven't won a game yet the season nor have they tied a game but anyway we beat them which is important because there are only two teams that get relegated out of this league i think and so if we can just make sure we're not in that bottom two which right now we're not then we should be fine great what's the news from rz well it continues to be three i atlas news um so as as if you were listening last week you heard three i atlas is this very weird interstellar comet so it's a thing that's not from our solar system we've been starting to find these objects they've always been there but um we didn't have the tools necessary to detect them or to understand their orbits well enough to definitively say that they're not from here but now we we can we've tracked several of these and this one's especially weird and we don't know what's going on with it it's acting particularly strange which is making scientists think that it's made of strange stuff uh and that is exciting because it you know we're not gonna be able to go to other solar systems and examine them like that's not that's not in the cards for the next you know 500 years but i mean i'm gonna take the over on that that's like you saying that we're gonna make some bars by twenty twenty eight there's no way we're making it to another star i don't mean i don't mean i human is making it to another star system but in five years i would not be surprised if we still exist that we were able to get a probe to i would be surprised for the record when i'm alive because we've cured death i want to rename the podcast dear john and john and hank 500 years right now yeah okay somebody write down what that date is yeah so we want to look at this thing but uh we are in a situation where earth is uh increasingly unable to observe this because the sun is in the way but mars is on the other side of the sun right now and so all of the mars instruments can still observe this comet which is so cool yeah and uh last week there was the we were talking about the rover that was taking pictures of it but now there are a bunch of orbiters around mars so there's the xm r's trace gas orbiter which is a uh isa a european space agency orbiter and it is usually focused on getting images from the surface of mars it's only points down and this object in the sky is anywhere from 10 000 to 100 000 times fainter than the surface of mars what are you trying to take a picture of but they were still able to get a few pictures of it and they turned it into a little gif for us that you can look at on the internet and the isa is planning to keep looking at these images to see what else they can learn about the size of the comet and what it's made of because that will help us understand what other solar systems are like i should say planetary systems because in fact there are not so many solar systems we've got the only one yeah it's the system that is the star of the star soul yeah it's cute that our star has a name that isn't the sun yeah soul and then it's cute that solar system is like oh that's us yeah that's us that's just us that's sweet just us at Jupiter mars etc and uh the oort cloud and then an oort cloud love a good oort cloud well thank you for plotting with me thanks everybody for listening you can email us your questions at hankandjohn at gmail.com this podcast is edited by ben sort out it's mixed by joseph our marketing specialist is brookshot well it's produced by rosion house rohas and hanna west our executive producer is sath radley our editorial assistant is debokhi chakra vardy the music you're hearing now and the beginning of the podcast is by the great gunerola and as they say in our hometown don't forget to be awesome