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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. You're listening to a Complexly podcast. Welcome to Dear Hank and John.
Where's I prefer to think of it to your John and Hank? Podcast where two brothers enter your questions, give you dubious advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, do you know how when you hold a shell up to your ear it sounds almost exactly like the ocean? Well, little known fact, if you hold a squirrel up to your ear it sounds almost exactly like getting attacked by a squirrel.
It wasn't much to do that one. That one I actually really do like. I think that whoever wrote that did a good job. We are two brothers who have done a lot over the last 20 years, John.
And I don't know if we've said it on the podcast yet, but the ribbon was caught on the maternal center of excellence. So everybody who has ever supported been a part of the project for awesome, given a donation to that, bought something from Good Store, all that stuff. One step at a time, it got there and it is going to start seeing patients early next year. Hank, you keep saying that we raised $25 million, which is very generous of you to say because it's a huge understatement.
In fact, we've raised almost $50 million. What do you mean? I mean, we had to raise $25 million to do the initial phase of construction to get the maternal center of excellence open was always going to cost $50 million. And we raised about $40 million of that.
I mean, I had a thought and I'll be honest with you and you are much more in touch with partners and health team than I am. But I had thought that the other half was raised by partners in health and et cetera. Well, a lot of it was raised by partners in health and et cetera, but about $40 million if it was raised by us one way or another, not just by us, but by people in our community reaching out to their friends and family and so on. And actually funds and matching funds and all kinds of things.
But we got there. I'm very proud that we got there and I'm very proud about the money we've raised. I've also just gotten home from the Philippines where I was for the Stop TV Partnership Board meeting. And I'm very, very jet-lagged.
Like I am out of time and space in a way that I've never been out of time and space before. Yeah, the Philippines isn't interesting in that it is both plus and minus 12. It's one of the two. It's exactly 12.
It's exactly 12. It's you are exactly 12 off, which is as much as you can get off. Well, it was convenient in some ways because when it was like 3 p.m. I would be like, well, I can't call home now.
It's 3 a.m. You just switch P.M. for A.M. So that's nice.
Sure. It was really interesting. I mean, I learned a lot. I was in a lot of interesting meetings, but the most important thing I got to do was spend time with people living with TV and those caring for them directly, both in the Little Island of Gimmeraas, where we're working on a small project with the Philippine government to eliminate TV from that island and in a slum in Manila, where I traveled to Doctors Without Borders, which is a very difficult place to receive care, and where there were significant challenges, including drug stockouts and shortages of preventive therapy and all kinds of big challenges that were sobering, I would say.
I was reminded that 40,000 people are going to get diagnosed with TV today. And that's a huge problem. What a world. I know.
I think that if you could get two facts in your head, it would really sort of revolutionize your ability to understand what's going on generally. Give them to me. Number one is errors stuff. Yeah, I know this is very important to use it.
It's a big deal for me. It's a tough deal for me. It's tough. If you hold your breath, you die.
It's made out of stuff. It's real. That explains a lot of different things. And number two is there are way more people than you think.
Way more people than you think. That goes for your town. It goes for your state. It goes for your country.
It goes for your world. There's just way more people than you think. And oftentimes, I think there's an instinct to sort of like the people in power are taking care of one person at a time, but if the president is taking care of one person at a time, that's not doing any good. He's actually not doing his job.
Yeah. It has to be broad and it has to be systemic. And that's really how it works because 40,000 people will be diagnosed with TV today. It's closer to 28,000 now that I googled it.
Yeah. And I'll say that's most of the way there. You know, that's a lot. It's still a lot.
28,000 people is sure a lot of people. A physicist would say that those are the same numbers. Certainly an astrophysicist would. All right.
Let's answer some questions from our listeners before I get too tired. I'm beginning with this one from Lucy who writes, Sir John and Hank, you recently spoke on the pot about handiness. I'm a left-handed hairstylist and in daily salon life, I'm constantly facing just how uncommon it is to be left-handed. I know that being left used to be taboo, but why?
Even now when it is no longer looked down on, are there still so few left-handed people? Not writing a book. Lucy, this is a great question. I have no idea.
Well, and you probably won't be too surprised that we have no idea. So there's a bunch of different ways to ask this question. There's like, why did we evolve for some portion of us to be left-handed? Why isn't it 100% 0%?
And then there's also the question of why did we evolve handedness in the first place? Yeah. And then there's also one of those questions is what is the actual mechanism behind handedness? Right.
So because it is consistently 10% across people and other species also have consistent handednesses, so they might be like 45% right-handed or 60% left-handed or, you know, like they have consistent across species numbers. There's got to be some mechanism behind it that is being evolutionarily selected for. Now, the mechanism behind the evolutionary selection is interesting. In humans, there's this idea that there's some advantage to having some portion of the population that can fight the other way around and they might be very good at getting through the guard of the rest of the people.
But then if you sort of move beyond 10%, it evens out. And so it really only... So we've basically evolved it for boxing, like for South-pop cultures? Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. I like it. We are a little bit violent as a species.
Yeah. There's also an idea that like our jaws are shaped the way they are in order to take a punch, which is interesting. And our hands are also like extra strong in order to do punching. Wow.
But these are hypotheses, not facts. And then there's the underlying mechanism by which happens. And that's the thing that we have like the least idea about. There's something going on.
It's not random or else it will be 50-50. And it's consistent. Once handedness is no longer taboo. It got to 10% and it stayed at 10%.
And it's that way across cultures. So there's something, there's some reason why. And we just don't know. We have a couple of ideas somewhere about like microtubules, which are like literally like the things that hold your cells together.
So how would that be involved? But it seems like there might be a relation there. Like they looked like rare gene variants and handedness and saw some relationship between that gene. But like that's very hard to tease out for sure.
Yeah. Super weird. And we don't know. And we're going to get to the bottom of it someday.
But we have not yet. I don't know that we will get to the bottom of it. I don't know how much we're going to prioritize getting to the bottom of it to be honest with you. It's true.
It's not tremendously important to understand the mechanism of handedness because it's not like a thing you need to cure. It's not a thing you need to cure. It's not even a thing you need to address really. I mean, it's nice to understand.
You need to make sure that there are scissors for them. You need to make sure that they're left handed shears and that they don't cost any more than right handed shears, right? Because like that's part of how they get you. Yeah, that'd be better.
But you know, of course they do because everything's about bulk of 90% of your people are buying something. Many companies want to make them at all. But yeah, there's all kinds of, this is very weird. It reminds me that I am again, and maybe this is a third thing.
Yeah. An animal. Not just an animal. I think it's critical that we're mammals.
Yeah. I identify much more as a mammal than as an animal. Organism first, mammal second, animal third. And then where's human on the list?
I don't know, 83rd after AFC Wimbledon fan? No, it's a good question. Fair question. Human first, mammal second, animal third, organism somewhere in there.
Okay. Yeah, yeah, just a bunch of cells. I have to go to the bathroom, but I'll be back. Okay.
You got it. Host the podcast without me. I'm going to host the podcast without John. I'm going to do a science question because he doesn't need to be here for those.
We just did one. Let's do this one from Lucy who asks, dear, this is, do we just do a Lucy? We did. This is a different Lucy, dear Hank and John.
I was just watching a squirrel build a nest in my garden and it occurred to me that they just know how to do that. Did their parents teach them how or can instinct cause them to build such intricate structures? If so, I'm wondering which complex tasks a human can do purely by instinct in this guy with diamonds Lucy. Yes, the squirrel looked frantic.
They do do that. So the book he went and dove down a little bit. And one thing to be found was a Reddit thread about a person with a squirrel who had the squirrel since they were seven or eight weeks old. So not a lot of chance to learn anything from the parents, but did start to do some nest build something when given sticks.
So maybe this is instinctive question mark. We know more about birds, I think. So birds definitely have some element of instinctual nest building and they have some element of non instinctual nest building where they actually learn techniques and skills. This is what we tend to find when we look hard at, you know, complex vertebrates and their instinctual behaviors is that some pieces of it are instinctual, but then also there are like refinements of that instinct that are learned.
I think about this with flying like birds fly and it's like, they just know how to do that. They just learned how to fly, but they stink at it at first. So they're bad at flying at first, but they are also built for flying, and they do stuff that is flying like and then they are able to sort of transition from the simple version of flying into the complicated version and then they get good at it. And I think oftentimes we like discount that as viewers of other species because we're not like all caught up inside of their business.
The way we're caught up inside of our business, we see the flying occurring and we think, oh, they just like knew how to do that, but like they knew how to do a version of it. And then they got good at it by doing it a bunch. And I think that we're the exact same way with walking. John, we're talking about instinct and how the extent to which nest building is an instinct.
We've learned and what we have discovered in looking at this is that many things that we think of as purely instinctual also have elements of being learned. Like nest building. Nest building walking also is this way where like we're built to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We have to learn from other walkers. It takes a lot of practice and it's not just learning from viewing. That's part of it. It's also learning by doing.
And so like you have this instinct maybe to build a nest, but you're actually learning what works, what keeps the sticks there when you're doing it. And if you're just a squirrel. Fascinating. I'm glad I'm not a squirrel, but I am a mammal.
Yeah, as are they. What would you want to be mammal wise if you had to be another mammal? Mammal wise elephant, but like a safe one. Wait, what's a safe elephant like these days?
The zoo probably. Yeah, you want to be a zoo bound elephant? That's I don't know. That sounds sad in its own way.
I just want to be an animal that lives a long time, but also one that has a good time. I don't know that elephants have that much fun. I don't need to be here forever personally. I know you do, but I don't.
I could be a dolphin. How long do you live? A while. I don't think it's fun.
Honestly. Yeah, mostly swimming. They live 50 years in the wild in captivity. Yeah.
You know, you're going to be in a work of because that's like fun and also you get a murder a lot and it's fine though. No, you do when you're a dolphin too, I think. It's true. It's true.
And you wouldn't be a good murderer Hank. You talk a big game, but you wouldn't be. I bet if I was a dolphin, I would be maybe, but I don't know. I mean, you're you're from a fairly violent species and you're not that violent.
So I don't really buy it. That's true. It's true. I love to see the dolphins evolve to have sort of more prosocial behaviors.
Yeah, me too, man. I'd love to see us evolve to have more prosocial behaviors. Why don't we evolve to have more like systems that include more people? Yeah.
That's my big complaint about is that we do not act as if what we know is true is true, which is that all human lives have people value. We know that's true. We all know it's true. It's something that crosses all the different religions and all the different worldviews like we all know that's true and yet we don't act like it at all.
Do you think we've gotten better? Probably marginally, you know, in the last 300 years. We're probably better than we were 300 years ago. We probably include more people in our systems than we did 300 years ago.
Yeah. I once talked to a historian of prisons on the record. It was a fascinating conversation I'd love to share. But I talked to this historian of prisons and I was like, you know, sort of thinking that I would get that kind of answer.
I was like, sir, we better now than we used to be. And he was like, not really not with prisons. No, I believe that prisons are pretty bad. I believe that.
I mean, I mean, I'm thinking like, are we actually better or do we just have like way more tools and resources? I think we're marginally better than we were 30 years ago because we cut the number of children who died by like 60%. But I don't know. Is that just because it's easier to do that rather than I think it was that easy to do.
I think we actually did decide to value the lives of children more highly. But I might be wrong. I've been wrong before. Well, John, I made all my windows go and I didn't know how to get them back.
Do you want to do another question? Yeah, let's do one. Let's ask this question for Michelle who writes dear John and take on the mother of a beautiful three month old girl. I love her.
She's adorable. I'm exhausted. Michelle is very relatable. I mean, first off, I'm not in three month old baby pain, but I'm in immense pain right now.
Like my body does not know what time it is. It does not want to be awake, but it also does not want to be asleep. It wants to be it wants to not it wants Hank and we'll get to Michelle's question, but no mammal was made for this. We were not made to travel 600 miles an hour across the ocean and then wake up the next morning and host a podcast with our brother.
We weren't made for that. We were supposed to go at best at the speed of canoe. This OK fourth important thing to remember humans, our main ability is adapting to weird situations. Yeah, OK, well, I'm trying near an in your headset in right now.
Yeah, you're like your sting like I'm sting because I have to do this interview after I talk to you and they insisted that I have an in your headphone. Wow, I saw somebody else doing that the other day. That was I was like Atlantic podcast and I had in years and I was like, maybe I should do that. Maybe you should.
Anyway, we got to get to this question from Michelle. I didn't mean to dismiss your question. Michelle, I'm just kind of uncomfortable at the moment. I suppose evolution selects your favorable traits and also bring not necessarily for parents andy.
But why couldn't evolution bring us babies that sleep through the night? This is such a good question. I knew that people say you don't sleep when you have a baby, but oh boy, boy, oh boy. Was I unprepared sleepily Michelle and baby Abigail Hank?
I remember the first like three months after our son was born and to a lesser extent, our daughter, but especially our son. It was so horrible. Like it's almost like I don't even want to tell people how horrible it was because I don't want to discourage them from having children. Yeah, it's just like one bit.
It's like that's the thing and it wasn't even that horrible for me. It was like it was horrible for me, but it was really properly horrible for Sarah. Yeah, it's bad. And it's not like a it's not like a week.
No, no, it's months and you do anything for months. You you you you have sleepless months and it affects you deeply. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's man. There's a lot here.
The thing appears to be that human babies are born a little bit earlier than we can get their heads out. They would be optimally like an optimal birth age would maybe be a full three months after they're actually born, which means that they're they call it the fourth trimester. This period of pregnancy is still very, very, very dependent on the body of the mother. No, I mean babies, real little babies and I don't want to I know someone listening to this podcast and heard their feelings like they're not impressive.
No, they're not even very cute. They're not cute. They don't laugh. Yeah, they cry a lot.
They're not that fun to hang out with. If we're being honest, like they smell good when they're not pooping. Yeah, I think that's one of the things that that's what they gotta make them smell good because otherwise otherwise it'd be very difficult. But oftentimes they smell bad.
They can do both. Well, when they when they've just pooped, they smell exceptionally bad, but man, a good clean, fresh baby. Mm. That's a great smell.
So that's the primary thing. There's also like the why is it so hard thing and part of that I think is because we raise babies very differently than we used to. Yeah. It was a more communal activity in the past, which might allow for more sleeping or it's not one of the things I think is worse about the modern structure of society is that we are not as tight and so we do not have the ability to lean on each other in the hardest moments in the way that we used to.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a real problem. But there's also there's there's a science thing I found an actual paper which is unrelated to any of this, but there is a molecule that is about like sort of the arousal cycle like being awakened aware and babies that died of sids. They looked at their heel sticks that were still on file and they found that they had less of that molecule.
And so there might be some amount of like just like that arousal is kind of good for making sure the baby is able to around itself if it's in an uncomfortable situation or like, you know, able to like move around and etc. So there's there's also that element of it. But I think the biggest piece is simply that both babies evolved to be in a more communal environment and also we evolved to get babies with big heads out. Yeah.
That meant getting them out a little earlier. We wanted that head as big as possible because that's where all the fancy stuff happens. That's what we had. It does appear to be where a lot of our abilities lie, including our ability to just somehow get to the Philippines back.
Yeah, barely barely. I mean, shout out to the pilots. They did the real work. I was just sitting there.
But yeah, I am tired. Which reminds me that today's podcast is actually brought to you by talking over your brother talking over your brother since 2016. This podcast is also brought to you by squirrels. Gross.
What's going on there? And of course today's podcast is brought to you by Hanks three to four to five rules for remembering that you are a human. Just an organism, buddy. And this podcast is brought to you by left handed scissors left handed scissors available.
Thank goodness. It's great. And it's a great tagline for them for what's in it's is available available. We exist.
Oh, man. I'm used to this episode of your Hank and John's Bronte by Shopify. There are a lot of things that stand between I have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me. And that is what Shopify makes easier when you start with Shopify the tools to design and launch and take payments.
They're all there from day one. You don't have to build a whole machine before you can start building the business. And this is important because you also have to like look good and with Shopify templates. You could get a site set up really quick that looks credible and professional without needing to code or duct tape a bunch of different tools together.
And when things look real, that works on my brain to be like, I'm doing a real thing. It also works on other people's brains to be like, this is legitimate. Shopify also has one of the best checkout systems on the Internet. It's built to help customers finish the purchase effectively and efficiently without a bunch of roadblocks.
Returning customers can check out with a single click. That means less friction and fewer abandoned carts and a smoother experience for everybody. That stuff gives you confidence early on and it gives other people confidence in what you're doing. You're not wondering whether the payment system is going to work.
You're not wondering whether customers can get through the process. Shopify handles that foundation so you can focus on the thing that you're actually trying to do. It's really kind of amazing to me, the Shopify as a tool that works from the first day your store launches when you're just starting to get customers all the way up to being the size of Good.store or DFTBA.com or being the size of like Mattel and Gymshark. When you build a Shopify, you're building with tools that already work at every scale.
All you need is the idea, Shopify handles the rest. You can start your free trial at Shopify.com slash Dear Hank. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash Dear Hank with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details.
This episode of Dear Hank, a John is brought to you by Factor. Imagine for a moment that you are absolutely immersed in some work where you're creating something beautiful or useful or useless and ugly but you love it anyway. And you'll look up and suddenly you have a feeling and that feeling is that it is 2.30pm and you did not eat lunch. What are you going to do?
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With new subscription only, wild supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See you website for more details. Hank, we got a question from Ryan. Ryan asked deer shot and hank.
We all know ice breakers, questions and meetings or whatever to break the ice and ease the tension as people get to know each other. But I want to know if there are ice makers out there, questions that when asked to make people feel less connected and less inclined to mingle with each other, gold pumpkins and regular penguins. Ryan. Yeah.
Well, yeah, that's a pretty easy ones out there. I can think of it. Go around and circle everybody. How much do you make?
Oh, that's a good one. I was thinking more along the lines of let's dig into politics. Yeah. Yeah.
How's everybody feel about how that election went? Mm. That's good one. Um, did man in fact walk on the moon?
That's going to be a divisive one surprisingly divisive. It used to be less divisive, but it's back to being divisive again. Yeah. I try not to think about that as being a thing.
That's a thing. You could do it the way that parents and grandparents all around the world do. When you got to have kids or do you know where you're going to go to college? Asked critically of a sixth grader.
What really shuts me down? Uh, what's your sign? That's a difficult one that actually takes that a little bit. I feel like it comes with like a judgment.
I'm like, I don't want you to be judging me about that. Well, whatever I tell people my sign, they're always like, Oh, that's too bad. Oh, I think I got a bad sign. I got to the twins.
You're a Sagittarius. Right? Nope. Keep trying.
Yeah. That was one of August 24th of that. That's not going to help at all. No.
Is that like a cusp? Yeah. Okay. I don't know that.
Yeah. So you're between Juneau and Mercury. Nope. I'm between Leo and Virgo, but I'm a Virgo.
And whenever I tell people I'm a Virgo, they're always like, Oh, yeah. All right. Yeah. You know, what are you going to do?
Not your fault. And I tell people I'm a tourist and they're like, Yeah. Oh, do you see my guitar? Do you have a paper called?
Tourist. I don't know if I seem like a tourist, but like it's cool to be like a bull. That's a cool thing. I guess so.
It's cool. Where's Virgo? Virgin. And then there's like one 12th of just out there being cancer.
That's not fair at all. Yeah. I think it's a crab or a woman with water point being that shuts hand down. It doesn't shut me down.
The one that shuts me down more than anything in terms of an ice maker is if somebody asks me a leading question that they know the correct answer to about me. Oh, like I'll give you an example. Here's an example. You're not comfortable with ambiguity.
Are you? Oh, I made I said, you know, I just made. I just made. We're going to have to work a long time to make this shave ice.
Anytime you make my personality into a question, but you think you know the answer to the question. I don't like it. I don't like it. But I do like this question from anonymous.
Dear John and Hank, how do you decide whether you want to have kids, some of my friends are starting to have kids and others know for sure that they don't want kids now or ever. But I just can't work out whether I want one way or the other. I'm 30 and now I feel like I barely look after myself. I still feel like I'm a kid in an adult body.
I'm doing okay financially. So that's not a massive factor. But the idea of deciding what to make for dinner every day for the rest of my life is daunting enough without being responsible for feeding someone else. And they just need what you eat anonymous.
I know I still have plenty of time to work this out, but I worry I'll just keep putting off making a decision until one day it's too late. I'll regret not having done something sooner. So how do I work out what I want? Bye bye baby.
Anonymous boy. That is a good question for Hank Green because Hank Green made the call pretty late in life. I did. I did.
Yeah. I'd like to make a video that's like, why is this good? You know, we should say having kids is not inherently good. We're not saying like everyone should have kids by any stretch of the imagination.
If you don't want to have kids, don't have kids. I know lots of people who have fulfilling lives and no kids. Yeah. But the there's all kinds of fun parts, you know.
Yeah. One thing we should have said to Michelle earlier, Hank, is that like the first three months are the least fun three months. Yeah. I mean, there's probably some circumstances where there's some less fun three months, but that's true.
That's true. I mean, that's very true. 15 is not that easy, but like the first three months are exceptionally challenging for most people. Yeah.
Yeah. It really does. It can clear up. It become quite a lot easier.
That's some point like at six months or started sleeping like 10 hours a night and I was like, oh man. Yeah. That's a lot of time. We're like 12 hours.
Yeah. Like 12 hours. And then that's 12 hours with amount of free time. Yeah.
And now now he sleeps once a day. Verable. I know. He sleeps so much in the beginning, but also not right at the very beginning when you'd like them to sleep when they sleep is what they say.
So Hank, how did you decide that you wanted to have kids or a kid? I wish I'd been journaling. I was pretty like, I don't need kids in my life. You were a kid in my life, buddy.
I feel like I didn't need it for a long time. It's just like so much interesting stuff going on anyway. And then, you know, honestly, what did it was like watching other people with their kids, really the last people in our friend group to have kids and seeing how it went, like going and hanging out with them and like getting the kids. Yeah.
I just hadn't like every kid I'd ever seen like either was invisible or having a tantrum, you know, like strangers kids, right? They're not there or they're being annoying. Like those are the two ways that you know, strangers kids. But the more I like hung out with the kids of friends and like watched them grow up and saw how my friends were dealing with it, you know, the hard parts and the easy parts and the fun parts.
And I was like, oh, that looks like kind of great. You know, I kind of felt like I think Catherine also specifically felt like there was a kind of a continuity to the, you know, the process of having family, you know, you have family up, like you have your parents, but then you like, there's also like, you know, sometimes you want family down to something to like to add family down. Yeah. And I just kept like seeing like the interesting parts of my friends relationships with their kids.
And I was like, that looks really interesting actually. Yeah. I mean, we decided to have kids because we were like 27 and other people having kids, which isn't the best reason, but I'm really glad we did. But I think like I take a lot of my social cues from around me.
So like when my best friend had a kid, I was like, oh, guess it's time. I'm not really a leader when it comes to that stuff. I'm definitely vulnerable to peer pressure, you know, like when it comes to having children or smoking cigarettes or whatever. Yeah.
I'm very, I'm very much like, oh, is that what we're doing? Okay. Oh, yeah. So much of how I see the world is just like, ultimately, it's a lot easier if I just kind of go with what's normal.
Yep. Yeah. That's a good rule. Not always a good rule.
It's not a necessarily good way to go through life, but it is the way that I've gone through life. Yeah. Well, it's not entirely the way you've gone through life. You've been all over the world.
Pretty much. Pretty much had two children and a picket fence. Yeah, but you didn't. You also became like a writer and youtuber, which is not like super typical path.
Yeah. But then like, as you know, Hank, I think the obsession with what people do for a living is like way overblown and like not the most interesting thing about them. I actually think like my life is very similar to my friends who are school teachers or self-dental supplies or whatever. Yes.
There's also the element of I think that it probably to a lot of people would have seemed like a weird pivot from young adult novelist to YouTuber in 2007. Yeah. But I think that we were following very normal incentives that other people like lots of other people would have followed, I think. Totally.
We were just we just happened to be into something and it wasn't a weird pivot. Just like it's not that weird of a pivot to go from a young adult novelist to a tuberculosis writer. Like it seems like a weird pivot from the outside, but if you've lived my life, then it doesn't seem like a weird pivot at all because I've always been interested in young people in illness. Yeah.
I'm still interested in young people and illness. Yeah. I'm still writing about them, just writing about them in a different context. And so to me, it doesn't feel like a pivot.
But of course, like when you pitch the idea, young adult novelist turns into tuberculosis historian. It seems like a big pivot, but this is true for most of our pivots. I think they're smaller than they look at first. Yeah.
All right. Hank, before we get to the important news from Mars and ASU, we need to talk about the physicists. The physicists have responded, Hank. Oh.
What happens when you go near the speed of light? Does it look like Star Wars or does it look like something else? Yes. So first we have this physicist.
And you'll be surprised to learn that physicists do not totally agree. No interesting. Okay. You can make your own decision based on their bona fides.
Dear John and Hank, US professor, Mr. Question, I heed the call. I'm a particle physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and frequently zoomed things around at near the speed of light. You're listening to what you would see if you moved faster than light like in Star Wars or Star Trek.
The listener is right that it would not appear like it does on TV because the reality is more bleak. You would not see much. Oh. Ignoring other physics problems, you would zap past things so fast, most of that light would never catch up to your eyes.
Hence, you would see black. The only light you could see is very narrow cone in the direction you are moving, which is just the light in your way as you crash through it. Now, you'll notice that Grant says ignoring other physics problems. Yeah.
It turns out that some people did not ignore other physics problems. So maybe that's part of the reason why people disagree. But anyway, what is more interesting is what happens, Grant writes, as you approach the speed of light, both your perception of space and time would change and a fun way to see this is through a free game developed at MIT. I can see it giving both or either of you the giggles or vertigo.
I did the game and it gave me vertigo, not a source of funding, Grant. So thank you, Grant. That was very helpful. However, Adam writes, Dear John and Hank, as someone with a PhD in mathematical physics, I would like to emphasize the correct answer to the question about how stars look when you move faster than light is we have no idea.
If anyone tells you differently, they are making some very big assumptions. Oh, wow. I really like coming for Grant here, as Grant apparently was. When determining how objects look when moving at a certain speed, we typically use special relativity, which gives us very good answers for anything that moves slower than light.
Now it is possible to plug those speed larger than light into those equations and get an answer. Maybe you can even get rid of the imaginary numbers that pop up, but there is no good reason why physics should behave the same way on the other side of the light barrier. That's Adam's perspective. Oh, going faster than the speed of light.
Okay. Kevin's perspective is Dear John and Hank, I am a physics PhD student and I bet there won't be any universal conclusion on what a star looks like when passing above this beautiful light. Man, that's a good answer right there. Really thought through it.
Personally, I think it's like Star Wars, though. So there are your answers from real physicists, real proper physicists have weighed in our physics question and you've got some answers. Now Hank, we have long known that the AFC Wimbledon juggernaut simply could not last forever. That interest was melting its wax wings, Hank.
We've always known that AFC Wimbledon was flying way too close to the sun. And sure enough, AFC Wimbledon played in the FA Cup a tournament we really needed to do well in because we need money. I don't know if I emphasized this enough, but AFC Wimbledon is as football clubs go desperately desperately poor. And we really needed the money from a big cup run where you get like Liverpool away and you get like $500,000 just for playing Liverpool.
We needed that. Instead, we lost to Gateshead. Well, you know what they always say about Gateshead. What do they always say about Gateshead?
Oh, I don't know either. We also lost to Burton Albion, the 21st best team in League 1. So in our last two games, we've lost to one of the worst teams in League 1 and a team currently playing its trade in the fifth division of English football. So not covering ourselves in glory at the moment.
No. How many of those count toward your standings? Only one counts toward the standings. The other just means that we don't get to play in the FA Cup anymore, which is really unfortunate because we needed about half a million dollars we were going to make if we made it to the third round.
So it's a bit crap, Hank. What else can you say? Yeah, we're out of the FA Cup. We're struggling down, I think, in sixth place in League 1.
But I don't know who I'm just kidding. I'll take that all day. Sixth place in League 1. You gotta be joking.
Well, I mean, as long as you can hold on to it and look, it probably means you're going to stay in the league. At least. Yeah, the main thing is to stay in the league. That's job number one.
Job number two is to miraculously get promoted to the championship and lose 100% of our games this season after. Well, we'll try that. All right. What's the news from Mars?
The news from Mars, John, is that we're going back. No. Yeah, a pro. So we're probing back.
Yeah, we've never gone with people. So we're just going to probe it back. It's called the Escapade Brobes. This is a dual spacecraft mission.
And it's going to launch in the next two weeks at some point. So this was actually supposed to launch in 2024 using Blue Origin's Rocket New Glenn. But NASA was like, this thing doesn't look 100% ready. So there were some more test flights.
And now it has been prepped for launch with the Escapade probes, which are going to go to Mars. I will continue to look into the deep details of what Escapade is going to do. And they're basically trying to, I think, understand like Mars is like weird weak magnetic field, how it interacts with the SolarWinds, how it became a desert lifeless place with no atmosphere. Or at least a desert.
I wouldn't go so far as to say lifeless just yet. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Also, it has some atmosphere.
Yeah. So this is my big question, Hank. And it's not about Mars. It's about my home planet, which I much prefer.
Yeah. It's autumn right now. It's beautiful. The sky is blue.
There's planes in the air, you know, the Robins are. We're all merging mammals. We're all just a bunch of mammals, breathing air, which is stuff. Is there any chance the SolarWinds are going to blow off this atmosphere and leave this place like a done-dusted?
No. I mean, if we've gotten four and a half billion years into this, we're going to hold on to our atmosphere. We could do some stuff to the atmosphere that's not ideal. And by could, I mean, are.
Yeah. No, I know we are doing that, but we're going to have an atmosphere for the foreseeable future. Yeah. Great.
I'm not wearing a big relief to me. Yeah. You're good. Keep breathing, buddy.
All right. I've got to figure out these headphones before I do my big interview. I'm so hungry right now. All right.
Well, Hank, that's a good reminder that we need to end the podcast. We need to take needs to go eat. I'm going to get a snack. Thank you for pausing with me.
You can send cool listener questions. Can be sent to Hank and John at gmail.com. I'm sorry I was so tired today. I swore I'd do my best.
Did my best. You did great, John. This podcast was edited by Ben Swordout. It was mixed by Joseph to an American communication score in Nader's Brook Shot.
Well, it's produced by Rosie Anna Halzerowas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakra Vardy. The music you're hearing now and it begins with the podcast is by the great Gunnarola.
And as they stand our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.