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Tickets 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.
Goers out for anything with Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two others answer your questions, give you dubious advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon John. What word becomes longer when you remove two letters? What?
Longer-er. It's true. It's true. How are you?
I'm still struggling. Hank, I have big news. I have a major announcement. Oh no.
Yeah. I've been keeping a secret from the Dear Hank and John audience for the last leg. Is it under your hat? It's under my hat, Hank.
He's bald, everybody. No, it's a new book. It's a new book, Hank. Oh, it's a new book.
It's a new book. It's under his hat. You can't see it because it's a podcast, but there it is. I have written a novel.
It is coming out September 22nd. Signed copies are available for pre-order now. It is called Hollywood Ending. Hollywood comma ending.
There's a comma in the title, Hank, a controversial comma. Wow. Why is there a comma? Hollywood ending.
Hollywood ending. It's about two people in their 20s who are stars of a movie and the movie, which is about Andy Warhol's last year, is kind of blowing up and alongside it. Their lives are blowing up in ways that are exciting and intoxicating and also terrifying and painful. And Hank, you haven't read it yet.
No, it's true. It's true. You got to send it to me. I know.
I feel like I need to prep you for the read before you read it. That's not how it works. Well, I don't know. I'm very nervous about it.
I'm very excited. I've never had this much fun writing, but sometimes that's a bad sign. Usually when authors like their books, I'm always like, Oh, no, I have an author friend who just told me like, I'm really excited for you to read my new book. It's my best one yet.
And I was like, Oh, no, that's a terrible sign. Like Mark Twain thought his best book was his biography of Joan of Arc. Did he do a biography of Joan of Arc? Yeah.
And there's a reason you don't remember it, Hank. Was it like, well, research, like he was just trying to do the work or no, it's like a fictional retelling of her life. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
At any rate, my book, when it's not, that's not spent too much time advertising Mark Twain, he's done fine for himself. My new book is available for pre-order now. And I'm really excited about it. And I hope that people like it out there.
I know that I don't, we shouldn't be talking about your next book after this book, but certainly not. If you could write a book that was a fictionalized retelling of the life of any person, would it or would it not be the man who invented Dr. Cover? Charles Alderton.
Oh, what a life that man had from treating tuberculosis and other illnesses at his pharmacy in Waco, Texas, to eventually developing the 23 special flavors that go into Dr. Pepper. I mean, it would be an incredible American story, Hank. And then he sold the formula for it because he just wanted to go back to being a pharmacist, which is so beautiful to me.
He's like us. He got to a point where he was like, I can't take it anymore, except instead of becoming a non-profit, he sold out. It didn't turn Dr. Pepper into a non-profit.
That would be awesome. I don't know if you could do that. I don't know if it's enough of a social good. I don't know.
I don't know. It would be awesome if he chose to run Dr. Pepper for like tuberculosis care or something. And Dr.
Pepper was still fighting TV. Yeah, sold it to a forest. Yeah, exactly. Hank and I used to work for a magazine that got sold to a forest.
It's the weirdest thing because it was like a fun facts magazine. And then it became one of the funnest facts. Yeah. Anyway, my new book, Very Excited About It.
I can't believe it's finally here. It's been 20 years since I published books in consecutive years. I've been working on this book since 2017, often in the background while working on other things. But it's finally done-ish.
It's finally here. I will say immediately after finishing this podcast, I have to go back to my copy edits. It's almost done. Well, right now I'm doing expert review edits.
I know that's exciting. I'm like deep in the mix of like a KRS is actually an intracellular messenger. You know the fact that I got wrong and everything is tuberculosis that haunts me. Yeah.
And it's nobody's fault but mine. But I said that when Robert Koch looked through the microscope at the TV basilisk for the first time, he saw a squiggling and TV is not motile. It doesn't squiggle. It doesn't squiggle.
That's hard. That's hard. Well, at least you're not the poor people from Project Hail Mary who loaded up an unbalanced centrifuge. Oh, did they?
They did. The poor, the poor people. No one's being chill about it at all. They're just- and look, some centrifuges are self-balancing.
But I will say, anybody's ever worked in a lab. You do it by habit. You just bounce your centrifuge. Right.
Well, I'm sure there are things that I get wrong in Hollywood ending about Hollywood and about love and about Instagram and the relationship between fame and trauma and what we give up when we give up our own memories and experiences to feed the content machine. I'm sure there are things that got wrong, but I have seen a lot of it up close, Hank. Yeah. I'm working on a video about this that's going to come out before this podcast comes out.
Is it going to come out after March 31st? Yes. Then you should advertise Hollywood ending in it. Well, it's already recorded.
Well, then put a little Hollywood ending at the end of it, buddy. Okay. Well, say- I thought you loved me. Anyway, I just- the things that flag us, we don't realize how specific our knowledge is.
The example I use is that in Project Hail Mary, they loaded unbalanced centrifuge, but also in Project Hail Mary, the main character picks up a traffic cone from the surface of an aircraft carrier and pukes into it. And like nobody knows who doesn't work on an aircraft carrier that we would never have a loose traffic cone on the surface of an aircraft carrier. It's going to become like a projectile at any moment. Also, aren't those hollow, like, wouldn't it just sort of funnel your puke?
Also, there's a hole in both ends. Yeah. Usually, but maybe this one doesn't have a hole in both ends, but definitely you would never have one on this. It's like literally dangerous and like against policy to have something loose like that on the surface of an aircraft carrier.
But that's not the thing you notice because you don't have that set of experiences, but lots of people do. Right. And so you can't have every single one of those things get caught. And at some point it's just like, okay, but which things are good for making a movie?
Yeah. I think that we forget some- I mean, obviously you don't want to be pulled out of your immersion into the story by a fact that's so glaringly wrong. But like a lot of this novel that I've been writing is about the life of Andy Warhol. And there are times when I've cheerfully ignored things about the life of Andy Warhol because they're not useful to me.
Like the movie that they're in is about- is called Andy Warhol, never gets old and it's about Warhol's kind of end of life. And there's lots of things that are true to Warhol, but there's also lots of things I made up because that's- isn't that the joy of writing fiction? Like that's what I've missed for the last nine years is being able to make things up. Yeah.
It'd be interesting to see if I ever write fiction again what that would be like. I think you should, but I also don't want to put pressure on you. I think you should- I like your strategy of not signing a book deal until you've written the book. Yeah, I like my strategy of doing whichever thing is feels most pressing at the moment.
Certainly how you've gotten where you got in Lifeank Green is by following a constant urgency. It's just the urges. Yes. Many of the urgency is simply the urge.
It is not even external urgency. No, no, you have like your own internal urgency that tells you I must write a book about cancer now. I am really frustrated that it's taking as long as it has. It's hard.
It is hard. Writing- writing- writing- writing books is the best job in the world and so complaining about it is poor form, but I don't know man podcasts. We're gonna do this. It's gonna take an hour.
It's gonna be done. That's true. Making podcasts is easier than writing books. It's not the best job in the world.
This is the best job in the world. We have two of the best jobs in the world. This is a great one. Yeah.
This is a great job. We actually don't get paid for this. Yeah. But like I don't get paid for most of my jobs.
That doesn't bother me. That doesn't decide whether or not it's a job anymore, whether or not I get paid. It's about more than that now. Let's answer some questions from our listeners.
Okay, John. First question, John. What word becomes shorter if you add two letters? Short.
That's correct. Yes. Okay. I think I got it.
Reagan asks, Dear John and Hank, what is bubble gum flavor? This feels like it falls in the ranks of truly artificial flavors like Dr. Pepper, pumpkins and penguins. Reagan, this is such a good point.
Bubble gum flavor is another purely artificial flavor with no real world analog that I believe dates to the late 19th century when we were first experimenting with the idea that there could be tastes that had no real world analog. Yeah. We're just doing artificial flavors. We were finding these esters that had like- they were components of fruit flavors.
So there's are things that might be in a strawberry might be in a banana but are much simpler than the actual flavors of those fruits. They're just one of the many flavor components or smell components. And we're just like, which ones are easy to make and have strong flavors and can we have them be somewhat inexpensive? Let's mix them together.
And we ended up with a bubble gum flavor. I really like the word esters, but I think we should name some of these bubble gum flavoring, like methyl salicylate. That's a great- why don't they advertise that? But it's got that sweet sweet methyl salicylate in it.
Ethyl butyrate, then acetate. I mean, zisioso. Organic compounds. Yeah, I guess that's the truth.
Right? They're all organic compounds. It's not like we're getting this stuff from Mars or anything. It's made out of flavors.
Well, when I say when I say organic compounds, I mean carbon- organic. No. A lot of these are chemical distillates. They come off of doing chemistry to petroleum products, but they are also naturally they naturally occur in fruits as well.
You're telling me that bubble gum flavor is made out of oil, like oil from the ground? Oh, yeah. I'm telling you bubble gum is also made out of oil. It's rubber.
It's made out of petroleum? I don't I think that it is now. It didn't used to be, but I think that it is now. Oh my God.
Yes. Most conventional chewing gum is from a synthetic petroleum derived gum base. Oh my God. Actually bubble gum wasn't invented until 1928.
How did we live for 300,000 years with no bubble gum, no Dr. Pepper? What were we doing? I don't know, John.
We're about to celebrate bubble gum's 100th anniversary. Wow. We need to clear the calendar for 2028. But right around the same moment, we were discovering that other galaxies were other galaxies.
Yeah, like the smudges in the sky were other galaxies. Yeah, that we were many island universes is what they first called them. They should have stuck with that island universe is much prettier than galaxy. We had to figure out what to do about that.
We had to be like, okay, so you're telling us like the universe, as we imagined it, is much bigger than what it is, but it still makes sense to call the universe whatever there is. So that was like a process of figuring out how to name things, which is crazy that that's that young. There are so many stars. Yeah, like you can't get your head around how many stars there are more stars than there are chickens.
There are more stars just in our galaxy than there are chickens currently on the planet. And there are a lot of chickens that weird analogy because of how it's hard to. I think most people don't understand any chickens there are, but it isn't a frequent topic of the podcast. So listeners, listeners, no, listeners know how many chickens there are.
There are more chickens than there are birds. Yeah, if you don't include chickens. And there are more stars than there are chickens and birds combined, by a lot, just in our galaxy and our galaxy is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, maybe infinite. You know, there's like that Carl Sagan quote about like the number of stars versus the number of grains of sand on earth and what that kind of highlights in a way that you don't realize until you've been in it for a while isn't really how many stars there are, but how few grains of sand there are.
There's just like not as many grains of sand as you would expect. Yeah, but if you go to the beach, with a shovel and you like wet a handful of sand go through your fingers and you think that's one handful of sand out of millions of handfuls of sand and there are more stars in the universe and that does blow your mind a little bit. Yeah, but you people think that like the sand goes out forever, but it doesn't. It's really localized to beachy areas and deserty areas.
There's a lot of, we actually have a sand shortage if you can believe that sentence. I believe it. We have an everything shortage. If there is something, we will use it in extreme ness.
We really figured out some real uses for sand. We're making bubblegum from old dinosaurs, like, yeah, I believe it. That's what we should be doing with the dinosaurs, you know? There's like, we shouldn't be burning it.
There's anything we're learning. It's like, that stuff's valuable. We should be using it for like high quality, longer term uses than just lighting it on fire. And yet.
And yet. All right, let's move on to another question. I think we've answered that one pretty darn well. The next question comes from Maya who asks, Dear Hank and John, why do our voices change as we get older?
Not just puberty when the voice drops. Why do singers on reunion tours have less vocal strength than they had when they originally recorded those songs that they're performing? Maya, and papaya, Maya, because they're old. We're falling apart.
Why did you bring this up? Yeah, I mean, I go back and watch early vlog weather videos. And first off, I'm screaming at the camera, which is annoying. I wish that I just talked like a regular person.
But I guess that wasn't the style then you're screaming too, which makes me feel way worse than you. Yeah. But at any rate, aside from the fact that I'm screaming at the camera, my voice, the timber of my voice is so beautiful. And I remember hating my voice and thinking like my voice was so thin and reedy and weak.
And now I'm like, Oh, what I wouldn't give for that voice. Although I will say Hank, I will say I did just win an audio word for best book, audio book narrated by the author. Oh God, I want that one so bad. So maybe I have a beautiful voice.
Maybe in 20 years, I'll look back on my current voice and be like, Oh, he sounded so good then. I think that our voices have gotten better. No, our voices have gotten worse. I mean, even yours has to don't don't I'm not just throwing myself.
I have I have a piece of information that I think is correct. When I know it is it is spelled T I M B R E, but I believe it is pronounced tambour. No way, really? I think so.
Really? I got checked now. That's the kind of thing that you would think an audio award winning audio book narrator would know. Yeah, it's tambour tambour.
Well, I'm just exercising that entire word for my vocabulary that I never have to pronounce it never happening again. What a lovely little word tambour. But but why would they have their B and I if it was going to be pronounced tambour unacceptable unacceptable? I find that your voice changes as you get older in the way to deal with it is mostly to embrace it and see it as a sign of wiseening.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that it's hard for people who are professional singers. There's a certain kind like a certain set of singers who really I feel like we're signing up to have this problem like the scream singing feels like a 20s activity. Yeah, and then eventually like the muscles get looser, all the stuff that holds the voices a very specific set of complicated tissues. And those things are going to get less they're just going to change quality in various ways.
It's not like the muscles are weaker, the tissues are going to be maybe less strong or have less differentiation between like the soft and the hard parts. I don't know. But there are things that people do. So people can get sometimes there's tremors that you'll get and people get Botox injections when they're singers so that they don't get the unintentional tremor.
You can also inject filler or fat to make the vocal cords larger and they're implants. And of course also there's lots of vocal therapy. And then like, lean the yarn when she's performing, she's like, I need the room to be like this temperature, this humidity. She's not messing around.
Yeah, I think the real pros know what they need. But I think I'm just going to slowly get huskier and fainter. Well, we should start smoking so that we can get that. Oh, yeah, that's what I need.
That's what it took me so long to get that out of my life. Let's welcome it back in. I'm not convinced that it's bad for you. Well, it's a take and these days, that's what matters most.
I have have read an increasing number of blog posts. No way. That seem very convincing. No.
Are you serious? No. Oh, okay. I was like, there's no blog posting smoking is good for you, right?
Like they haven't. Oh, no, there are. No, there aren't. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, nicotine. There's a lot of people who are like the health benefits of nicotine outweigh the health detractions of smoking because of course they do because the entire internet is run on having the craziest ideas possible.
Like, you can't get attention unless your ideas are silly. And so of course, every silly idea is having a moment. If nicotine is so beneficial, why not just two nicotine gum? Well, that's what they that's a lot of them.
That's what they do. Okay. It seems better than smoking cigarettes. They do zidens and also for clarity, nicotine has many, many health impacts that are not good all on its own.
Yeah, I remember when I went to the doctor and he was like, how much liquor are you chewing? And I was like, I don't know, like 20 pieces a day. And he was like, that's like three packs of cigarettes, man. And he was like, yeah, but it's just nicotine.
Nicotine's good for you. And he was like, no, it's not. I don't know where you got that. I don't know where you heard that.
But that's just not true. Let's answer this question from Avery who writes Dear John and Hank, why does moving suck? I have a lot of experience in this area. I'm currently packing for my 11th move in 12 years.
I've gotten fairly efficient at how to move, but it always sucks. Why? Not having a very good time. A very Avery.
I guess. I feel like Avery's way more of an expert on this than us. I haven't moved in a while, but like, you got to get all your stuff in the boxes. Yeah, it just sucks.
And you got to, especially if you're moving yourself, you've got to like then stack the boxes into a U-hall, which is its own unfun sweaty form of Tetris. And then you've got to drive to your new place. And then you've got to unpack and unpacking takes forever. People say that moving is like among the top 10 sort of discordances in a human life.
And it makes sense to me because I'll give you one example, Hank, because I don't have a very good vestibular system anymore due to lab anditis. I have to hold on to a piece of furniture while I walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night or I fall over because my vestibular system is very reliant on visual information. And I know exactly how many steps it is. I know exactly what to touch and where to hold, you know.
And if I moved to a new place, I wouldn't know any of that. Then you've got the actual like, if you're actually moving towns, you've got the unbelievable disruption of needing to find a new dentist. I think we underestimate how horrible it is to find a new dentist. Yeah, that's why you go to zachdent.com.
That reminds me of a podcast that's actually brought to you by zachdent.com, zachdent.com, a website that we are currently making in the background while making this podcast. We call the people at zachdok and we are like, look, you missed a huge opportunity. I'm sure you haven't thought of this already. Oh, God, this podcast is also brought to you by Esters.
Esters, they're an organic compound from petroleum distillates, but not that kind of organic compound. Not like they come from organic bananas, more like they come from organic petroleum. Yeah. Today's podcast is also brought to you by Hollywood ending, Hollywood ending, the new book for me.
I'm so excited. And this podcast is brought to you by your vocal cords and by my vocal cords, actually true. It's true. It's the rare sponsor message that is literally true.
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With new subscription only, while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See you website for more details. Avery though I want to keep answering Avery's question because I think inside of your like yeah there's a reason why it's bad but how do we make it less bad? And to me the obvious answer to this question is that you imagine yourself to be some kind of non-human animal or alien and this is and just extract yourself because this is like the moment where you extract yourself from your reality right?
Where suddenly you see all of these things around you for what they actually are and then when you're in a new place like you see them in a way that you you know after a couple of months you will no longer will. It's all going to be background but in these moments we understand that our clothes are like temporary exoskeletons that our books are our you know outsourced brains of other people that we keep on a shelf that our you know all the food in the fridge is just you know molecules that we will convert into movement and thought and anxieties. And poop. And then also poop.
And all of these objects like have their weird human utility that's based on our weird human activities and human behavior and then that's how I imagine it and then suddenly I am doing this extra bizarre activity. Yeah I like that. Use it as an opportunity to consider the anthropology of oneself. Yeah.
Probably only going to work once. Yeah but I like when I get out of my routine as a human being like there are obvious downsides to it. It's uncomfortable. It's exhausting.
But also when I'm outside of my routine is when I'm most reminded of the strangeness of consciousness which I kind of just take for granted most of the time. I think any doerids said once that we spend almost all of our lives in some sort of insensate waters and I like those moments that snap me into awareness even if they're kind of unpleasant in the moment. Good luck moving. I know it sucks man.
I did it like 10 years ago and I don't ever want to do it again. I think I'm going to die in my current house. Yeah or you know on the moon. I'm not going to die on the moon.
There's a zero percent chance or in Titusville. I really don't want to die in Titusville. As you know one of my big ambitions is not to die in Florida. I just don't want to know my Wikipedia page.
Which would you prefer? Moon or Titusville? The moon for sure. If I'm in Orlando and I'm dying and there's a space to a space.
Moving on to spaceship. Crash me into the moon. Remember when you were in the hospital with me in Orlando and the doctor was like I think we're going to keep you for the night and I was like I'm not dying in Florida buddy. You're not keeping me for the night.
Put me in an ambulance and drive me to the Georgia line. Yeah you were like drive me to that. I'm like John you're fine. Oh it was a little worrying.
It was a little worrying. I remember one time when I thought I was dying it's witches. I mean I'm laughing because it is a fairly common experience but it feels super real when it's happening. But I remember one time I thought I was dying and I said to Sarah if this is it know that I've had a good life and she said you're 28 and you haven't told me eight.
This next question comes from Ben who asks Dear Hank and John. My neighbors have a huge tree stump in their backyard that they use as a table. I got sad thinking about the fact that since the tree is dead the stump will eventually rot away as well. However I wondered will the stump die?
Can a tree live without the top of the tree? How long does it take for the roots of a tree to realize that the top of the tree has been cut off not being Ben? I so John yeah usually getting the top of your tree cut off if you're a tree is a world ending event for the tree. Sure it's also a world ending event for people.
Death and always always for people. Yeah usually for trees. Oh so this is interesting there was a stump in New Zealand that was discovered to be a both a stump and alive. This doesn't usually happen but the fact that it happens once means that it happens you know there's a lot of trees so it happens a lot.
And what happened was this tree was actually connected through root systems to other trees. Tree fell tree die but the stump was connected like all these roots were valuable to the other trees around it so the other tree has kept feeding this root system and that actually kept the stump alive and the scientists were like this stump it's not just like not rotting it is actively maintaining itself and they could see that it was like had like the xylem and phloem act like with stuff moving around inside of it. So it was still being fed and was able to sustain itself because of the trees around it continuing to sustain it so not always do stumps die just because their tuckets cut off but usually. This fascinates me I've been thinking a lot about the phenomenon of crown shyness where trees choose not to grow together.
I have a chapter in my book about crown shyness I hope you don't. I don't. I don't so you're safe but I've been thinking about it because there are these two trees that have actually grown together near my house in the forest near my house and when the wind is blowing it makes quite a racket of these these two trees like pushing against each other and it's a real wine almost like a wooden version of metal machine music and if trees didn't cooperate and make space for each other and allow for space in the canopy and everything else if the world were as you know so many long argued it was where it's merely a story of competition and merely a story of might makes right the forest would be so loud it would be excruciating to walk in a forest we would hear nothing we would have to scream to be heard over the sound of the trees fighting each other. That's a fascinating thought and yet we don't have that because trees cooperate and collaborate just as much as they compete the story is so much more complicated and interesting than mere competition.
Yeah and we don't we don't really understand what you know evolutionary pressures are at work with crown shyness if we have not explained this it's the situation where trees don't encroach on each other's space they yeah work up to each other and then they just stop and so you can see these like little threads of sky through mature canopy and there are some species that don't actually respect crown shyness and they are often sort of more there's like certainly parasitic plants obviously like kudzu isn't gonna respect crown shyness it'll move from tree to tree no problem but matcher trees do this we don't know what the evolutionary pressures are that is is making them do it and we also don't know what the sort of mechanisms that allow them to do it are like how do they know when they are bumping up against another tree yeah the idea that this would if this was not the case it would it would fundamentally change the experience of being outdoors during a windy day i'd never thought off before and it really would i mean we might have evolved differently since we evolved in forest we might have evolved language differently we might it would be so freaking loud all the time no muckas are pretty loud that's true it's a good point it's a good point monkeys are pretty loud maybe it wouldn't completely change human history that much but it would make the forest annoying most of the most of the language languaging we did was after we moved out of the forest i think too that's fair all right we got another question from anonymous you write steer john and hank i live in the provo area of utam but i'm not a practicing woman my family stopped going to church in person during covid and we just kind of never went back that was actually a huge relief for me as i never believed any of the stuff that we learned so i was able to stop pretending to feel the spirit in church or whatever however i'm moving in the fall for college and i'm looking for other forms of community i'm tempted to attend a different church but i still have a problem of pretending to believe in something i don't believe do you have any suggestions for things to do to find a third place outside of work slash school and home and anybody is awesomeness anonymous what do you think about like folks go into church even if they don't have a strong faith and let me tell you there are a lot of people who go to a lot of churches who do not believe in god there are a lot of agnostics go into church and i think that's fine and i think it's interesting like my best friend goes to church even though he is a very staunch atheist and not the fun kind of atheist but like the old school i can't believe you believe all that crap kind of atheist back one of the first times one of the first times we hung out i was like less than man i gotta go to bed i gotta go to church in the morning he said i don't want to be rude but like you don't actually believe that stuff do you and i was like we barely know each other sounds like he met three times i could hear him say those exact words yeah totally totally and anyway but he goes to church because his because his daughter goes and you know it's interesting like i don't think it's that uncomfortable for him he does like complain sometimes afterwards he's like i can't believe it's a physical church he's like and i'm fiscopan and he's like i can't believe you guys still say the nice thing creed i'm like it's 1600 years old man it is cool to say something that is 1600 years old even if you don't fully embrace all the nuances of it but he has a different perspective so that that's one option yeah i uh what what i'll say is do something and work hard at it it's a project and it is work the nice thing about churches that it's less work like people are gonna be there you got like there's a system in place the people they got they got a they got a building for it oftentimes you have to build them yourself which is harder yeah but i'm not sure that it's entirely that much harder let me give you one example sarah works at a local food pantry here every week and that's the same kind of community you know like it's still a strong sense of community and connection and you see the same people week after week and you're uh working together and doing stuff together and you're you're doing real service together and i think that also works in much the same way that church does i don't think that you need a religious context in order to bring people together but it's funny that you're always the one defending religion and i'm always the one being like careful now this is this stuff is dangerous this is how we are when the first episode of my new podcast comes out people can hear that conversation in depth yeah really really we're going hard for religion and i was going pretty hard against it and i was like what is going on to me that'll happen in june everybody we're recording now i'm excited hey no no disrespect but you're not allowed to promote something in this podcast i have a book coming out i have not coming out for the first time in nine years we need clear focused messaging it's a big deal you guys i mean it's it's exciting it's exciting and it's like it's hi are you scared oh yeah yeah okay i'm really scared because so both of my previous books since turtles all the way down anthracian reviewed was not that scary because everyone had already heard it and it had already been fact-checked by thousands of listeners and everything is tuberculosis wasn't that scary because i'd already made that hour-long crash course deep dive into tuberculosis and so a lot of it had been um seen and heard and and confronted and everything in ways that were super helpful for the final book and this is something i haven't experienced in almost a decade where people don't know anything about it and they're just gonna read it it's terrifying and you don't know how people are gonna respond and you don't know if people still care about the idea of your writing fiction like if it's been that long or people still interested it's there's a lot of feelings at the same time but i enjoyed it so much i think like that's the thing i haven't had since i wrote the fault in our stars is that feeling like i this isn't this isn't just something that i made as a gift for other people even though it is like it is also something it is child's plate it's something that i've been doing for fun since i was a little kid and i felt that i felt like that feeling of just getting to live inside a story being joyful in and of itself is it is a lot of it for me i remember the the joyful parts being like the problem solving of it all totally that feeling of like when when in fiction when things click together yeah when you have an unsolvable problem and you're very frustrated and then you solve it it's like playing wordle but on a bigger scale yeah yeah it's like one of the hardest puzzle games you could possibly imagine like you're making a book work and you made it up yourself so like there's also the feeling that you created both the challenges and the opportunities and it's just it was stinking fun it was other things too it was painful and hard and i cried and everything but it was it was also it's also been really nice i'd forgotten that joy of pure purely getting to make something and uh yeah but i am terrified now i've transitioned away from this is fun too this is scary but of course i want to share it i want people to read it i'm excited for people to read it and yeah that's why i'm signing my name 82 000 times well i consider this a formal request for a pdf all right unless you unless you want to chat after the podcast and tell me things you want to prepare me for but i i'm excited all right okay i mean i'm nervous to share it with hank that means i must be exponentially more nervous to share it with the public i mean i've always been yes it's always been a very supportive reader it is a it is a crick that's not gonna say but it's a crazy vulnerability to like make especially in the world of you know you and i having experience where we make things and then we get immediate feedback but also the world is so set up that way now right whereas a book is like you have to make this thing you have to lock it in place and then you have to tell people about it and show that's so hard this next question comes from anya who asks dear hank and john how do i get better at speaking in class i found that when i have to participate in a discussion in class give a presentation answer a question even ask a question i get super nervous and i feel like whatever i say sounds dumb or doesn't contribute anything i've tried making like a little script of what i want to say but i always end up cutting it shorter messing up dasvid anya i was so confused that i said it out loud anya you are not alone in this i think everyone who speaks in class either does feel a little bit like an imposter or else should feel a little bit like an imposter you know what i mean like the people who are hyper confident when they're talking in class those are always the ones where i'm like hmm yeah and they have so much to say yeah gosh i wish you would temper that confidence just a little bit mm-hmm yeah yeah i mean i think that like there's something to be said for very little things so so if you're just like speaking up in class it might be just like as simple as you know i found this idea was related to this other idea or um asking like do you think that this idea was related to this other idea and let the teacher taking it on from there so like you don't even have to save very much necessarily to be adding like a substantial amount of impact or insight and then the other thing and this is important and i don't know i don't know any other way to do it but like you have to get comfortable in your like speaking voice and the only thing that i ever found that worked for that was finding time alone and talking out loud yep 100 i agree i do that i still do that reading stuff i had written down reading other people's stuff like reading the declaration of independence out loud just like spending time using your voice because it's a complicated thing and then imagining you know imagining like you're not just talking like one-on-one but talking to a room of people and like seeing how that changes the tambour of your voice or whatever else nicely done i think that's good advice i spent the last three weeks walking around the house talking out loud about what i would say about hollywood ending because i feel so uncomfortable talking about it and i feel like i don't know how much to reveal or what's a spoiler or all that stuff and how to get people interested without you know harming people's reading experiences yada yada and uh and i found it really helpful to just talk out loud i will say at one point sarah heard me talking out loud and i had my airpods in and she mouthed are you on the phone and i had to say no just chatting with me yeah i mean a real hard part about this can be finding this the place where you actually do it right and and like there's oftentimes there just isn't one and i remember in college you know doing this i i also remember one time being in a hotel room practicing for a speech and the hotel security came and were like you need to stop that the people next door had called them and i was like that is embarrassing that is embarrassing but i was preparing to interview the literal president so and you were doing it at very high volume you were shouting mr president sir and then they're like this guy's got a eye psychosis next door i think he's interviewing the president that's just clod this is before clod yeah i think that's good advice i also think that we can learn something from our grandfather and our uncle mike both of whom rarely spoke in meetings but because they rarely spoke in meetings when they did they were taken very seriously yeah it does not take a lot of words to get the idea across and the other thing like i'll say then this is this kind of silly but just take a deep breath beforehand you're not like a big visible one but like just have enough air in the lungs to do the job yeah because man it's hard like this is one of my hardest parts is when i first get up on a stage i often find myself lacking for air yeah because like your breathing strategy changes for some reason right it's great thanks physiology for making me have to pee for making me breathe weird for making me want to talk really fast for some reason that's all very helpful yeah but you've gotten better at it as you've gotten older yes just practice i think that'll be the case for onion as well it's the case for most of us most of us uh become calmer as we get older like i used to throw up before like a lot of events and now i never do yeah people are i was like you still get nervous and i'm like oh yeah every time yeah but your nervousness is weirdly processed such that you don't seem to be nervous when you're on stage in fact sometimes when you're on stage you don't seem nervous enough no i mean sometimes i'm not nervous enough sometimes i am i get nervous before i go on stage once i'm on stage i'm not nervous and still things start going wrong and then i become very nervous very quickly yeah i think that's pretty common so you lose the room and then then then it's like oh and now i have no way of getting you back that's why standup is fun because at least you've got some jokes written yeah but standup is so intimidating precisely like ask aunya or me to do standup and we couldn't do it even with all the jokes written in the world like even if mike verbiglia wrote all my jokes i couldn't do it because there's nothing between me and the audience um except for like and and and the job is not to interest them it's to make them laugh and then you know for sure whether you're succeeding or failing based on whether how the room it vibe is whereas like when i'm reading something or giving a speech or a talk or having a conversation or in public or whatever i don't feel that precisely because i'm not trying to make them laugh all the time oh man i was the last time i did stand up i had this like you know a lot of times you're working toward a punchline and you like introduce a lot of little punch lines along the way so that you can get there yeah and i had this great punchline i can't tell it because it's not a clean joke but uh but i was working up and none of the like half halfy punch lines were landing very well and they shook me so much that i forgot to do the real punchline completely and i just moved on to the next topic and i was like i was like man that part really didn't work and then i was as i was walking home from doing this i was like oh it's because i didn't get to the joke i think i forgot to tell the joke i was so mad i was so scared i forgot that the job was to joke uh-huh yeah i guess i could get on stage and do like a 12 minute version of the best eat a pig joke but that's about it i mean i would you could do it you could do it i don't know i don't know on you one day i'll do stand up and one day you'll stand up in class and feel comfortable but that day is not today but we get there through practice one day at a time all right john what's going on with afc Wimbledon well afc Wimbledon tied a football game that's great that's half of a win it's a third of a win it's a third of a win and it's it's a big third because this puts us on 50 points and theoretically in past seasons 50 points has been enough to stay up so we now have eight games left and very little risk of relegation and very little risk of making it to the playoffs i would say those are both equally likely and most of the teams are in the middle john we are going to be somewhere in the middle which is great if you told me at the beginning of the season we would be somewhere in the middle i would be duly surprised with the second lowest budget in the league yeah so i am delighted to be somewhere in the middle it does mean that for the next eight games we are sort of as they say on the beach where there's not a ton at stake gotcha but i kind of like being on the beach i'd want to be on the beach most of the beaches are great you know i don't think the beach is norman d the beach is the beach yeah let's enjoy the beach and people are always like oh they're not playing very hard they're on the beach and i'm like yeah great we're not gonna injure marcus they played hard all seasons so that we didn't have to worry about relegation for the last eight games this is a miracle let's enjoy it so i'm just going to enjoy the last eight games we're playing like all the best teams we're probably not going to win a lot but as long as we squeeze out one or two points we should be totally safe from relegation great i'm happy for you thank you i'm so proud of how we've done this season um marz news continues to be weird would you like to hear the weird marz news please so nasa had just announced it's like uh plans like what are we gonna do and they're like this is not it's it's a little frustrating because one of the things that happens because leadership changes and leadership is weird is that like nasa just changes priorities maybe a little bit more than it needs to right and then like you only stay on one track for four years and then you are suddenly on another track but anyway here's our new track nasa announced that it's gonna be launching a nuclear powered spacecraft to marz by the end of 2028 now john what don't think that i'm not an optimistic guy when it comes to marz for example i bet the name of my podcast on humans getting to marz in 10 years which is not gonna happen uh also we're not gonna launch a nuclear power spacecraft to marz in 2028 like well maybe we can dream big like remember when we weren't gonna go to the moon within nine years and then we did like that was very impressive this would be very impressive it's march of 2026 yeah with this would be the first time in interplanetary space mission would be powered by nuclear propulsion if it happened it would be very exciting uh it would allow us to maybe travel further or differently into space currently the only spacecraft we have that is able to travel the outer parts of the solar system uh use batteries or solar power because they need uh too much liquid fuel to get that far so the idea is that if we could make nuclear propulsion get to marz maybe we can apply it to future missions that can go further away from that'd be great now is this gonna be this theoretical nuclear powered spacecraft is this gonna be this isn't gonna have humans on it right it's gonna have some kind of space probe on it yes yeah yeah yeah can i tell you the name of the spaceship john please it's called space reactor one freedom no believe i mean i think i think they should work shop it i'll just tell you mass that has not given a lot of details on how this thing will work yeah everybody i know who's in the business is not optimistic well here's what i'll say hank even if it happens we're still renaming the podcast because there's still won't be humans on marz that's for sure that's for sure it keeps getting closer john every every year it gets closer every year it gets closer it's looking real bad for your bet but we we don't give up on what we have i think that i think that we'd have that something's very strange would have to occur uh it turns out that you like you can you can have a lot of data centers full of ai and it doesn't get humans to marz and so things are not uh tightly related no and i think you sort of overestimated the extent to which uh people are really able to marshal resources without assistance of governments it'll be interesting to make that episode when we make the the official deer hank of john switch where i get into what i overestimated i think that the main thing i uh that the main flaw in my reasoning was well who knows ten years ten years is like a long time it sounded like a long time ten years ago yeah to be fair it's been a long decade yeah no we've put a lot of resources toward a lot of things yeah it's just very few of those things have involved space travel yeah um but lots of lots of cool stuff going on you know i'm into the europe eclipse remission that's happening yep that's great you know that's exciting ultimately europe might be more interesting than marz we'll see we'll see i mean we probably won't see but someone will see in the future humanity will see humanity we'll see well thank you for pausing with me thanks everybody for listening you can email us your questions at hankandjohn at gmail.com this podcast is edited by britain kennison it's mixed by cali dishman our marketing specialist is brook shot well it's produced by rosionna halzerowassen hanhane west our executive producer is steth radley our editorial assistant is the bokei chakra vardy the music you're hearing now and the b-lid podcast is by the great ganarola and i say say in our hometown don't forget to be awesome