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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. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.
Go ahead and I prefer to think of it Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions give you duties advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and ASU and building John. There's a very famous rock group that is four members and none of them are singers and you know them. Can you tell me who it is?
No, who is it? Mount Rushmore. A rock group. Well, we don't know for sure that Abraham Lincoln never sang a tune.
He didn't get to go on Johnny Carson and be like, hey, like, exactly. I'll remember in the biggest... Oh, and seven years. Yeah.
Remember when the biggest scandal in American life was Bill Clinton playing the saxophone? I mean, John, Bill Clinton had bigger scandals. Oh, yeah, that's right. Oh, I don't think that was I handle.
I think everybody loved that. My memory is very unreliable. So I'm making a new podcast with my high school friend Daniel Arcon who went on to become a famous novelist and went in MacArthur Genius Grant and it's about football. It's about the World Cup and international football and the history of the game and just to get people excited for the World Cup, if it happens, which it might not.
And it's been a great joy to make. It's called The Away End with John Green and Daniel Arcon. You can look it up wherever you get your podcast. I hope you listen to it.
We really love making it together. We also get to make it with our other friends from high school are producers Sean Teton and I Heart. Sean. We're having a great time.
Yeah, you remember music, it was in my wedding. Yeah. So we're having a great time making this podcast. But one of the things that's come up is that I have an unbelievably specific memory of things that are just wrong.
Like I have like memories of things that just didn't happen. Like I remember being at the World Cup with Daniel in 1994 and Daniel was like, no, I went to one World Cup game and it was at the Rose Bowl and you weren't there. I was there with my uncle. Yeah.
But it turns out that my memory of having Daniel in a World Cup game, then I was like, no, we can call my dad. My dad was there too. And my dad called me and he was like, Daniel was not there. Yeah.
Yeah. I probably have told this story in the podcast before but Katherine and I went on a very long conversation while watching a born identity movie about how I had never seen this movie. And she was like, no, I've seen it. And I think you were there.
And then, and I was like, absolutely denied it. And then several months later found an old blog post where I blogged about this movie. I had like a review of it. Wow.
And I watched the whole thing and I was in the dark the whole time. I did not know what was going to happen. To be fair, those movies do not live long in the memory. You know, like they're very enjoyable.
Yeah. Right. They're like, there are certain kind of food, but they're not like a three star Michelin meal. No, no, they're not meant to be a truly special experience.
But I did sit down at my live journal and write a review of it. So that happens. Let's not look up. Thanks, live journal, everybody.
I bet it's gone. It's gone. It's gone. And also, even if you wanted to try and find it, you couldn't because it wasn't actually live journal.
Oh, nice work, man. Nice. Smart man. Smart man.
I have no desire. The internet footprint is very scary. I finally downloaded all my tweets. Congratulations.
A long time ago. And you deleted your archive, which I've considered doing because I have done some searches through and I'm like, boy, I have that opinion. Oh, God. You haven't deleted your old tweets?
No, I shouldn't default the world this, but no, they're all still like, yeah, you should delete those Hank. There is no reason for them to be there. The only literally only one person is benefiting from those tweets being up and it's Elon Musk and whoever and also potentially people who want to harm me. Yeah, right.
Elon Musk and your haters are having a field day right now. Yeah, no, no. They do sometimes they're like, they'll drag out an old one and be like, but you thought the COVID vaccine was good. And I'm like, go present tense with that, boy.
You don't need to see that. I still want to get those when it's appropriate. I just got my pertussis vaccine, which I get 15 years off. When I had pertussis.
Yeah. I did not enjoy having Wolfincoff. I'll tell you almost all vaccine preventable diseases. Turn out to suck.
You know what I mean? Like shingles. I had shingles. It was so bad.
You had shingles so bad that when you got cancer, I thought you just still had shingles. No, no, literally my doctors thought I just still had shingles. Yeah. You got some slow and lymph nodes, but you had shingles three times this year, which maybe was a bit of a red flag.
Maybe two have had shingles three times in a row. A yellow flag, I would say. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's very usual.
Twice a row happens. Here you are. Here you are. Here I am.
And we're grateful you're here. And when we say I, we mean whichever version of me, it does not include the one that watched the Born Identity in 2002. Like that one isn't here. He's not part of I.
No. So do I am I really? The self is an illusion. John, what's your first question?
This question's from Jackie who writes, Dear John and Hank, would liquid paint float off before actually drawing in space, not Chan Jackie? Hey, could you paint the outside of a spacecraft, or would that be a fool's errand? It would be a paint is a coat on it. And you could not paint the outside of a spacecraft, but you may be able to coat it.
So so so paint is is is that okay with you? No, face. Yeah. That's a bunch of bull.
I don't like it. I don't like you and your you and your terminology. But go on. You know what I mean?
Like there's ways to coat things and paint it like a varnish, for example, would be another coating. But you couldn't varnish it either? No, at least because it's not woody. But that's not that those are not the only two coatings.
So paint is very and varnish as well are both made to exist on earth with all of earth situations with regard to temperature and pressure being the two ones gravity, not a big one. So so when you paint a wall, gravity is not yanking that paint down to the ground. I mean, it is a little bit, but the viscosity of the paint doesn't allow it to just fall down in the same way. The viscosity of the paint would allow it to stick to the surface.
Like if you're painting inside of the space station, that would be fine. In fact, astronauts have painted inside of the space station. You probably can't do like really watery water colors. No, I mean, I think that you could, honestly, and water color actually would be a better option than many paints because a big thing that you want to watch on for is you are in an enclosed space.
So you don't want to do like spray paints or like like like high VOC paints. Okay, but if you did a spray paint hank, would it in the midst of spraying the paint start to like float away? It would go in the direction just like when you spray paint on earth, it doesn't go down. It doesn't go down.
It has velocity, so it drops down a little bit, but mostly it's going straight because it's that overwhelmed. Right, right, right. I got it. I'm sorry.
That makes sense. But yeah, space is weird. But the big problem with painting on the outside of a spacecraft is pressure because that's going to instantly evaporate whatever things are usually paints, well, all paints, they have a thing that they are dissolved in and then that thing evaporates away and leaves the coating behind. But that system is designed to work at earth, standard temperature and pressure.
Space is either very cold or very hot. There's very little in between and also it is famously very low pressure. So you would have to create coatings that work differently. And as far as I know, we don't, I don't think that we actually have any coatings that actually are applied in space.
I might be wrong about that. But I think that most coatings are applied on earth and then they're expected to last the life of the spacecraft and we're not going to do anything else, but correct me if I'm wrong. But I think that doesn't mean that we couldn't design one. I think that it would be possible to design a coating that would work in very cold or very hot and zero pressure.
Do you know the first artwork made in space? No. You should because it was an episode of my podcast, the Anthropocene Reviewed about, but you forgot about it, but you forgot about it. But I was chasing porn movies.
Yeah, just like the born identity, the Anthropocene Reviewed was meant to be heard and then immediately forgotten forever. That was not, I love it. I didn't leave a big impression. That was my dearest hope for that project is that people would be like, well, that was nice.
Anyway, moving on. No, it was, it was a colored pencil drawing. I do remember this. Yes.
Of Earth Rising that was made after the very first space walk. And indeed, I can picture it in my mind. Yeah, it's like a, it's a beautiful, multi colored picture of the sun rising, but with Earth between it. I don't remember how it works.
Like I was a long time since I made that. It was a different guy who wrote that essay. Earthrise, color, pencil, art. Yeah, God, it's great.
It's great. So good. It's really good. It's a, that thing is, it's a major artwork.
You know what I mean? Yeah, you know what that should be, John? The flag of Earth. It's not a bad earth flag.
It's not a bad earth flag. It's got a lot of good colors in it. And it's vaguely flag shaped. So you can make a flag no problem.
I like a circle and a flag, but this is like the circle in this is very small. And then also sort of like connects to a different thing. I think that that could be really cool. If you're like a vexologist, flags, I'm not going to complain if that shows up in the inbox.
Yeah, I'll even, you know what, I'll make a flag out of it and fly it. If somebody sends me a thing, I know the guy who runs flags for good. I bet he could do it for us. That'd be cool.
I bet he could do it for good. I bet he could do it for good. Um, I just want to comment on, oh no. Oh no.
He looked at Tumblr. What it was a bad or good or just funny. It was very, it was very bad and very funny. Can I tell you what it says?
Yeah. John Green, you nasty. Why does it say that? And ugly as hell.
Though they couldn't stop themselves. John Green, you nasty was enough. Sorry. I thought I was going over to the show notes.
That's the second question. But the two people talking to the Tumblr workers are pretty similar. Our eyesight isn't what it once was. Oh, wow.
All right. Moving on. We got a question from Angie. Right.
It's dear John and Hank. I just left a voicemail for a prescription refill request and I can't stop thinking about the voicemail prompt. Instead of the typical will respond with an X number of business days. It said they would respond within 48 business hours.
What does this mean? Does this mean six days because of eight hour business days? Oh, some days they're open 12 hours. Does it mean four days?
Do I need clock math to determine what I'm going to hear back? I need to ask them to change this absurd message. Right? I appreciate your business hours Angie.
I think that they mean two business days. No. I thought they meant four business days if they're open 12 hours a day. I think that they mean two.
I think that that's so weird. So they don't need 48 business hours. They mean 40 hours. Yeah.
Yeah. No. I think that they mean like if I got this at noon, it's not just going to be there. Oh, two days from now.
It's going to be there before noon two days from now. Okay. That's 48 hours. But if the weekend is there, then that's over.
Then it's not counting the weekend. It's 48 hours unless the business is closed for the weekend. Yeah. That would be my guess of what 48 business hours is supposed to mean.
But I don't know. That's very ambiguous. It's a lot of time during which we're not in business. But I don't know what your hours are.
It's like how biannual means both twice a year and once every two years. By monthly means once every two months, but also once every two weeks. Yeah. And inflammable means flammable and inflammable.
Wow. I didn't know that one. And that's an important one to know. It means both incapable of being burned and very easy to burn.
Okay. So it really, it's like the horseshoe theory of American politics. It's right there at the edge. It's right there at the other way or the other.
One thing it's definitely not is like kind of like a diversion to burn. You know, yeah. It's not like one of those big thick logs when you're trying to start a fire. Yeah.
It's either like newspaper or it's like Teflon. Yeah. No, not even newspaper. I mean, I guess.
New papers are more like gasoline. But yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely not a centrist. Inflammable. Yeah.
Well, who is these days? This question comes from Megan who asks Dear Hank and John, but mostly Hank. I'm a scientist. It used to be that when I told people my hairdresser or taxi driver or someone at a bar that I was a scientist, they would complain about their high school science class.
But now in the last year, every single person has started asking me about aliens. And if I have insider information, I do not. What is what is happening? Are aliens experiencing theories trending on the internet?
Have I aged into looking like someone with secret insider information? How do I turn questions about three? I atlas? Oh my God.
My hairdresser asked me about three. I atlas too. Recently into how they should be excited about potential potential microbial life, one of their planets asteroids and aliens. Megan, I mean, what is three?
Three? I atlas just out of curiosity. I don't want to follow down the rabbit hole, I suspect. Is the third interstellar object we've ever detected?
So in the last few years, our tools have gotten good enough that we spot objects, a lot of objects in the sky. Mostly we've built these in part, just a better unturned solar system. But in part, to be like, okay, we should catalog all the objects to make sure our number about the hit us. But that means that we are just catching a huge number of objects, including now some that are on trajectories that are clearly from outside of the solar system, they will pass through the solar system, and then they will leave.
So some of their planetary system kicked this object out. And this is very exciting because it means that we could potentially study physical objects from other solar systems without having to go to other solar systems, which we can't do, which we are not going to be able to do, certainly not in our lifetimes. That's what a wild understatement. Jonathan, we're not at office and tower by 2035.
We should change the name of the podcast of your journey. What a wild understanding. In our lifetimes, we'll be lucky to get to the nearest planet. Yeah, no, yeah.
I don't know. There's people who want to do it, but unlikely to, but even if we did, we wouldn't be able to get something back. And so this would be like, it would be coming from somewhere else. And these objects are exciting.
Excitingly, they're weird. And because they're weird, a lot of people who are good at getting attention and enjoy the part where you get attention are like, look, these aren't like any other rocks we've ever seen. Maybe they're parts of spaceships. And I'm like, maybe they're not like any other rocks we've ever seen because there's from other parts of the galaxy may have formed 10 billion years ago.
We don't know anything about this. The fact that they're weird is very exciting, but it would be very weird if one of the first three objects we saw from another planetary system just happened to be a piece of a spaceship. That doesn't make any sense. I made a whole video about this.
Yeah, all right. I get three eye atlas now, and I get why people would be excited about it because, in the information economy in which we're currently living, all that matters is your ability to get attention. And the most interesting, surprising, outrageous, exciting, easy to grasp idea is always going to get the most attention. And so it makes sense in a kind of way, Megan, that you would be starting to hear about aliens here in the last year as what Hank calls the salience economy really kicks into gear, like really overtakes our overall discourse, like it becomes the primary way that we're talking to each other.
And by salience, Hank means the ease at which something can be understood. Right? No, that's part of it. But that's part of it.
Yeah, I mean, the salience is the ease with which something captures your attention. Right. So I'm very understood as good, but it might be that something is easy to understand, but it is also infuriating. You know, I don't have to be something that you agree with, though, something like if you agree with it, it's also easier to pay attention to sometimes.
But like one thing's for sure, if aliens built the pyramids, that's pretty cool. That's an easy thought to pay attention to. And I really think that that's it. I think that ultimately, at the root of it, it is because the salience economy has taken over.
And we talk about this in terms of attention. So we say the attention economy can sing this for a long time. But I just think that it's important to recognize that like all of our biases, all of our tendencies on the internet, all of the structures of the internet, they very much like, salience is a thing that exists kind of inside of the object that your attention is being focused on, like how beauty, we have, we say like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it's not really like, and hard it is. But it's like, also there's a bunch of cultural things there, there's a bunch of actual physical properties there that are universal.
And in the same way, there are some really salient stories and aliens are one of them. And because everybody, like it's a world of infinite content and finite attention, the war for your attention is being fought by creating ever more salient attention objects, objects on what your attention can be focused. And like I was recently at dinner with an executive at an educational media company, they were once an educational media company, and now our less so. And she said to me, she's an executive like, hi up.
And she said, like, what do you like that? That's one of the first questions she said to me, she was like, Oh, you're a science guy, what do you think about aliens? We produce this documentary documentary, we've used this documentary, and I was totally convinced. And I was like, you've asked the wrong person, because I'm not going to have fun in this space with you.
Like, what you're going to say is like, but there's all these credible people. And what I'm going to say is like, people are flawed. And then you're going to say, well, there's all these unexplained phenomena. And I'll be like, there are a lot of those unexplained phenomena in the world.
Like unexplained is normal 250 years ago, we didn't know why we needed to breathe. Nobody thought it was aliens. But like now we do like any unexplained thing can be explained by aliens. And so that's why we go with it a lot, because it's both, it's very good at explaining weird stuff that we don't currently have good explanations for, which often is just a lack of data.
It's not something that we're doing research on. It's like something somebody saw somewhere, or like a really blurry video. Yeah, it's two things. I mean, first off, if there were aliens here and we were capturing them over really blurry videos, that would be a heck of a coincidence, right?
It's really weird that it's always the blurriest video that's the one that's proof. It has a lot of explanatory power, and it's incredibly easy to pay attention to and want to know more about. And anytime something has that combination, whether it's aliens or another conspiracy theory or even a true vision about like how how like people are mistreated in society. Yeah, no, like I'll talk about one of my own various alien things, right, which is my religious faith.
Now, if you find that your religious faith never inconveniences or challenges you, never makes you do something you don't want to do, then it's an idea within a lot of explanatory power and tremendous attention grabbing power that also makes it easier for you to live your life and does nothing else for you. It does nothing in the way of challenge you. It does nothing in the way of inconvenience you. It does nothing in the way of putting blocks in your path and saying like maybe you're not on the right path.
And to me, those ideas are the most dangerous, whether it's aliens or not. And I've got to be very conscious of that because a lot of times I'll find myself like, you know, using my religious faith as a way to convenience myself or as a way to reaffirm what I already think is true rather than being challenged by it because it is a set of beliefs that exist a little bit outside of information. So I don't think that Hank or me or anyone else is immune to the salience economy. No, I am both a purveyor.
Like that's my kind of my job. That's like, use it, hopefully for good. And the other thing I'll say about science specifically is that this is now because of this, it is pitch is discussed often through the lens of scientists. So like there are, you know, influencers like science influencers who are like sometimes professors and like big universities who are getting attention by, you know, I think that they actually legitimately believe this.
I think that they've been, you know, sucked into it for the exact same reasons. And and they're getting a ton of attention on their salamats and books and they're going on all the big podcasts. And so that's now a lot of people's most direct touchstones with something that is being called science, even though it is like really explicitly not like it is losing touch with a lot of the of the, you know, really important work that science does to try and remove all of these biases that are very normal parts of being a human from from the activity that is actually trying to get toward the truth with less of that bias in there. Yeah, yeah.
I agree. It reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the biases inherent in the human experience that science tries to correct for but never fully can. Thank you for sponsoring the podcast. Yeah, not that you needed more attention, not that you need more control over humanity seems like you're doing fine, but the fact that it's also brought to you by business hours, business hours, who knows?
And today's podcast is brought to you by painting in space, painting in space, it's possible as long as you're inside the spacecraft and the podcast is brought to you by John Green, John Green, be nasty and ugly. Sorry, John. I love how last week I was like waxing poetic about how great Tumblr is now. And then I just like Oh, nothing's not nothing's perfect.
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All right Hank let me ask you this question from Lauren. Okay how do you deal with the ever-present weight of nostalgia and the knowledge that time just keeps passing pumpkins and penguins? Lauren I am fascinated Hank by humanity's ability to nostalgia size anything. Oh yeah oh yeah like the weight we nostalgia sized covid and I covid was great man.
I went on long walks. I had all this time. I was and millions of people died. Yeah.
It's so weird that we do this. It's also weird because I think that we like like opposite nostalgia fight current moment where like it always seems much worse than it actually is past moment. I'll always seems much better than it actually was. Right yeah it's like there was no time in American history where the rule of law was like just and fair right like that's that's kind of the nature of America is trying to move towards something that really genuinely struggles to move toward and that's just one example among many.
I mean I'm sure the same is true for like all the time in when I'm in the UK because I'm a because I look kind of like a conservative dude and because I'm American people will like share opinions with me and I'll just be a guest that they would never for instance like share with with most people. You know like that like it's a shame about the age of empire ending and I'm like yeah it's really not yeah it's really not like life expectancy at the end of the age of empire and Sierra Leone was like 30. Y'all did a horrible job. Yeah this was a bad thing.
Yeah it did not it was a it was catastrophic. Yeah you know and and what replaced it while flawed is better. I don't know but then there's like the person on the Stoucher. I think that's what we're talking about here.
Yeah I miss when my kids were little because they would they would squeeze on me. They would they would not be like monkey children hug monkey parents. Yeah the kid the kid in the Stoucher is way more potent than like my college in the Stoucher or like any other in the Stoucher I have like seeing little pictures of little or and I'm like I never get him yeah but I'm also romanticizing that because at the time it was hard. Yeah I do like to when I do the the family books like early on like the photo books that I've written at Christmas time.
I would like to include at least like one picture of him super sick with like a puke bowl and one picture of him crying like screaming about some dumb thing you know just like these also were things that happen. Yeah because like while they were like clinging on to me and hugging me and like never letting me go they were also like you know having an absolute fit about the fact that they couldn't watch a second episode of Little Lion's Dines. Well I've never watched that before. Oh my god I watched a lot of it.
I know the theme song. Do do do do Little Lion's Dines. Oh a lot of little lion's dines growing up. Disney Plus I think it was on maybe Disney Junior.
I'm gonna be on Disney Plus. Are you? I am. Soon is that announced?
September it's not announced but we're putting it in the podcast anyway because I'm not saying what it is. That's true. That's true. I got a new thing coming out not the podcast which I'm very excited about but another new thing since we're talking about things that we're doing that we can't talk about.
Yeah yeah I've been working on a thing since 2018 that's coming out hopefully yeah yeah hopefully soon. Good job John. I remember like talking to you in 2021 and you were like I'm done with that. I finished.
I was not done. I'm just not ditched. No. I had a long way to go back then.
You did. It is funny how that works though. That's another form of nostalgia that I'm fascinated by is that I look back on my books and I'm like well that was fun and easy. And easy.
That's true. I think it was easy. Yeah. I tell myself it was easy.
Yeah. I don't know man. I think that I mostly get over the weight of that by just by just barreling ever forward which may not be super healthy. No but you are a barreling ever forward type of fella.
You just are. And I like to look back. I enjoy recalling days gone by and I don't mind a little bit of nostalgia more and I think a little bit of nostalgia can be productive. I think where it gets destructive is when you start to think that those times were inherently better than these times although some of those times were better.
Yeah we are definitely. It's not like a straight lines you know that definitely turns out. Yeah. Things get better.
I don't mean like macro economically. I just mean personally. Like some you know some things were better than like my knees were better. Like when I'm running now and I'm romanticizing and nostalgia sizing how I used to run.
I'm right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That's faster. It hurts. All that is true.
Yeah. And the the true like you cannot escape biology. The true the true course does does get worse. It gets physically worse.
Like there are some things that you know hopefully there's some level of of security and the self or security and like having having some having figured some stuff out. A measure of wisdom perhaps. Yeah perhaps measure of wisdom but but yeah no the the aches and pains and then the eventual deterioration unto death. That is not like dope.
No it's so overrated if anything. And I know it's rated lowly but it's still somehow overrated. Yeah. Yeah.
Ooh yeah. Thank God those tech guys in Silicon Valley have solved for death because I was worried about it for a long time. Good thing we had kids so that we could seal their blood. Yeah I mean how do you think how do you think this face looks this good at 48?
Okay. So of course. What's on what? I want to do this question.
It's from JD who asks Dear Hank and John I have a physics question. Let's say you and Skydiving you brought a tennis ball with you when you reach terminal velocity. Yeah. You throw the ball towards the ground as hard as you can.
What do you keep falling at a distance away from you based on how far you through it or would it like hit you in the face once it reaches 55 meters per second which is the terminal velocity of your body. If my friend jumped from a plane before me could they catch the ball. What about throwing it back to me? Can you add energy to something traveling that fast?
My high school is too small to have physics. So you're my only hope. Terminal philosophy JD. Oh JD you've come to the right place because boy do I know the answer to this question.
Do you? From all your Skydiving experience or high school physics where I got a famous famous C minus and by my teeth I mean the minus is of minuses. The good job. Good job.
It's always a lot of work there at those last those last percentage points of a GPA. So I suspect yeah assuming that a human and a tennis ball have the same terminal velocity. They do not importantly. I know I understand that but like a better question might be if if you pushed a human right if you're falling with a human and you pushed the human as hard as you could.
Well interestingly how much you just even created? Yeah and even closer approximation of this would be if you created a tennis ball that fell at terminal velocity. So an assumption in your question JD is that is that terminal velocity is equal in all things and it very much is not. So tennis balls is much lighter than a human and the surface area to to mass means that it will have a much lower terminal velocity.
So wait whoa whoa whoa the lightness doesn't matter right because it's all it's all yeah I mean it's the surface area to mass. Surface area to mass right okay I see I do remember a little bit from physics. So if you're traveling with a tennis ball you throw it for a second it's going to go in faster than your 55 meters per second but then very soon it's going to be going less so it will in fact go away from you in the five-up of your face but they know about this in the sky-diting world and they want to toss things to each other because they're weirdos and so they've invented a ball. There's a ball that they have that they can throw to each other and it has the same terminal velocity as a human.
What yeah they invented a ball that has the same terminal velocity as a human. They did it's called the Vladiball I don't know why. You telling me that we could have done anything? We could have we've done many things.
We could have cured tuberculosis a thousand times over and instead we invented a Vladiball. I mean I'll tell you the Vladiball doesn't seem very complicated and in fact before they invented the Vladiball what they would do is just tape pennies to a tennis ball which was bad because sometimes the pennies would fell off and then they'd be falling down to the ground and that's not safe. No it's not ideal. So somebody was like we got to get a better ball so let's just make a heavy tennis ball but then they invented the Vladiball which has a number of advantages.
Again the heaviness of the tennis ball is not the issue right? Yes but it increases the mass per unit of surface area. Oh I see what you're saying. Got it got it got it got it.
Okay so I wanted to talk about that because de Boqui discovered the Vladiball and I just got that. I could not get that stuff. So they can toss balls and everybody's going terminal velocity but it's not an issue because yeah and so what would happen is if you throw the Vladiball downward it will travel for a while and then it will reach terminal velocity and it will be going the same speed as you far away from you and so you'll have to decrease your terminal velocity by how can your arms end and go in to get it. But you can also increase and decrease your terminal velocity by going into a dive or spreading your arms or whatever.
Yeah yeah yeah so you could probably catch up with that tennis ball if you needed to. It is designed so that you can catch up to it. Okay yeah. I mean all of this makes me wonder like how broken and I say this with love in this fact.
I don't want it to sound like a disc but like how broken are the amigdolas of these folks. I don't know man but they're like jumping out of the plane was fun but I wish I could play air hockey. John you say that as if I didn't tweet at J.D. Vance this week.
That's true. That's the worst in skydiving. I know. I know.
I probably felt very similar. Yeah. Yeah. Gave you the jolt.
Certainly. People will do crazy stuff for the jolt. People will do any whatever gives you the jolt like you're going to do. Yeah.
Yep. I can't believe you tweeted at J.D. How did it go? Did he respond?
No no no I think that they've moved past responding. I really wanted to ratio and I only got like a third of the way there. I mean I would say my condolences but actually my condolences that you got on Twitter. Yeah my condolences that you had that thought and also that you felt comfortable sharing it.
I heard that you were on Twitter again and so I got on Twitter as my old alter ego Leon Musk. Thank you. Yeah I saw you on there. And usually I only use Leon Musk to get up to date on any AFC Wimbledon crisis but I went on a I went on on Twitter because you were on Twitter and you were just you were cooking baby.
You were on. Yeah. You were inflammable in both senses. Yeah in both senses.
Yeah. Yeah I felt very I felt very invincible and I also it felt it felt like I hadn't been on Twitter in so long. It felt a little like what it might feel like to relapse. And I was I was like I was like I'm doing it so I might as well keep doing it and yeah yeah and I didn't experience any significant negative outcomes.
I was a little like I bet I could do this in a smart way from I could do it but I could do it in a safe way. I won't go over and immediately I went over. You did go over. I was like I mean you deleted a bunch of them which was a good call but I was like watching it in real time and I was like oh my god he's doing it as fast as he can type.
Yeah. For about six hours you were tweeting you were tweeting like Trump truth socials. Like just like there's a non-stop. It just felt like there were a lot of people who like hadn't seen quality opposition in a while and I was like oh you think you think that like the people who like Maggie on Twitter are your opposition but I'm your opposition and I know how to do this really well.
Yeah. I felt like it's what it felt like I don't think that you know how to do it as well as you think you know how to do it. I think that's a pretty common thing out there on the Twitter's. Yeah.
Well everyone's looking forward to the Why to Thanks Don't Want to Be Famous episode. We're going to hold that one in the can for a while because you know when we need a ratings boost we'll do it at the end of the year or something. Oh man. All right Hank before we get to the all-important news from ours and AFC one will then I want to ask you a real quick question.
Okay. Why do humans like stickers? This one's from Becker who writes Dear John and Hank, why do humans love stickers? As a kid it was always the biggest deal to get a sticker.
I would spend days agonizing over where to put it and even kept a sticker notebook and as an adult nothing has changed instead of a notebook I now have a laptop. Yeah. So what's going on with Becker and all of us saying why do we like stickers? Why do we like adhesive labels?
I don't know. Oh I think you're gonna have a scientific answer. I don't. I definitely don't have a scientific answer but I do.
I do like stickers. I love to customize a thing you know. I like to put like label the thing is like everybody has the same computer basically now you know they're all gray, flat, clamshells. Yep.
But I don't want the same computer. I want my computer. I want to know what it looks like. I want it to look different than everybody else's and I wanted to show all the things that I care about.
I wanted to be like Mars and fish and my and my own YouTube shows. I remember once I had a sticker on my laptop back in the day that said this machine kills fascist. Oh boy. When I had the narrow and completely incorrect view that opened in free access to information through the internet with end fascism.
Yeah. And I was going through a homeland security at the airport and one of the guys was like there aren't any fascists anymore. Yeah. And I was like well well we'll see.
It's interesting. It's interesting because it turns out that fascism turns out to be more of a process than a thing. More of almost everything Hank is more of a process than an event. You think it's event based.
It's actually process based. You think historical events are our events. They're actually historical forces pressing in on people and places and times everything that appears to be a dichotomy is in fact a spectrum and everything that appears to be an event is in fact a process. Great.
We did it. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. All right. Time for the all important news from Mars and AC Wimbledon Hank.
AFC Wimbledon win-wiz in their last I don't know 5,000 games. Yeah. We tied one. We tied.
We tied against the second worst team in the league. I know. We almost lost. Well they had lost nine straight games and we had gone win-wiz in our last 11.
So it was truly a stopable force meeting a moveable object. Who would emerge Victor or this war between two terrible league one football clubs? And the answer was no one. Marcus Brown.
Marcus Brown scored a goal in like the 78th minute to tie the game and we emerged with a point from Doncaster Rovers. But that's not nearly good enough to where we need to be. The truth is we need to win at least five more games, maybe six more games in the season. And that doesn't sound like a tough task until you look at how things have been going and then you start to say, well, maybe it is hard.
So we have 20 games left. We need to win five or six of them. And goodness gracious. I hope five or six wins.
Yeah. It seemed quite achievable not long ago, but now it seems less. It seems quite a bit more scary. You won a lot of games in the beginning of the season.
We were so good at the beginning. Like a weird suggestion for football thing. So whatever you're doing then. I know we should do it again.
Yeah. The thing is we have the exact same players playing in the exact same formation. We have a couple injuries, but not only a couple. And yet somehow the same people doing the same thing in the same way has become vastly less effective.
This is also known as the Democratic Party phenomenon. Well, spicy. I like it. I like it.
We should get spicy in the Mars news that I see what everybody saw. I don't like Bill Clinton. I think he should retire. I don't want to hear from him anymore.
All right. What's the news from Mars? It's from Mars. Mars has an impact on Earth, a pretty important impact on Earth, which we are only now discovering.
So our climate growth through cycles, these cycles are affected by Earth's orbit and the tilt of the Earth's axis. So there's this grand cycle that has shaped how the Earth's orbit shortens and lengthens over the course of 2.4 million years. This is a regular cycle that goes with very long. And it affects how much sunlight we get.
And those cycles affect the timing of ice ages, how intense seasonal changes are. They're shaped by the gravitational pull of the Sun. Yes, primarily, but also other planets. So scientists wanted to see how important Mars was to these cycles and there were simulations to see if there was like zero Mars or Mars have like a hundred like less mass or if all the way up to like a hundred times more mass than Mars has.
And they found that when there was no Mars, the grand cycle goes away. Now that doesn't mean that life wouldn't be possible on Earth or anything, but like the Mars is like what would not happen without Mars. And they also found that Mars helps to stabilize our tilt as well as smaller Mars would actually make the tilt more wobbly. So if we had a wobbly Earth, would it still be habitable?
Oh, for sure. Yeah, it would still be habitable. It would be a little less ideal. The wabbles aren't great, but they tend to, they're not super fast.
They tend to take a long time to happen. So there's one of the salient science stories that is fake that has hit me several times as the idea that the Earth is about to wobble and that the climate is going to shift extremely rapidly. But these wabbles take many many thousands or tens of thousands of years. And so they don't tend to produce rapid shifts the way that I don't know say like a bunch of new CO2 in the atmosphere might.
So let me ask you a question. These wabbles that take tens of thousands of years. Could you come up with a different name because wobble does sound like it happens fast. I know yeah.
Well, in fairness and in fairness to the scientists, tens of thousands of years is very fast. Okay, that's true. But like that's not how people think about it. It's very fast to the people who are doing it.
But yeah, I don't know that they do call them wabbles. They probably call them something else. But we're just trying to tell people things and then they freak out. But like, it's it's literally some guy, you know, who like is getting attention on the internet and then he gets on the podcasts and which podcasts does he get on?
He gets on the ones where they talk about stuff that's dumb. But like they get a lot of views because they're salient factories. Yes. Yes.
Anyway, it's factories and UFC analysis factories. Those are their two major less of that. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Well, thank you for pausing with me. Thank you for saving the spicy stuff for the end. Yeah.
And I appreciate being with you every time that we get to do this together. Thanks everybody for listening. You can email us your questions at hankandjohnatgmail.com. This podcast is edited by Linus Ovenhaus.
It's mixed by Joseph Tuna Metich, our marketing specialist is Brooke Schott. Well, it's produced by Rosie Anna Halzer of House in Hanawest. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is W.
Chakravarti. The music you're hearing now at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarolla. And as they say in our hometown, John Green, don't forget to be awesome. He nasty.