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Tickets go on sale to the general public June 30th at somethingworthknowing.com. So come build a better world with us on September 16th and experience something worth knowing you can get your ticket at Complexly.info slash something. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John! Dores everything with Dear John and Hank.
It's a comedy podcast where me and my brother John answer your questions, give you a abuse advice, and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon John how you doing? I'm doing all right VidCon has ended which is great because it's a significant stressor. Yeah, so it's also terrible because I am of course horrifically ill. Are you?
Me too! Well it's just the natural course of being with 26,000 people. Hank I don't know if you know this but until very recently in human history 26,000 people were never together. Oh yeah that's really well I mean how what's your definition of reasons?
Well if you look at the 250,000 year history of humans you're looking at about 4% of it where 26,000 people were together or could be together. Yeah I've been I was very impressed to know that that like the some of the like race arenas in the ancient Roman Empire I think this was like in the time of Nero. They had they had gatherings of you know that like rivalled the size of some of our biggest gatherings. Yeah but that was only 1% of human history ago.
Yes, yes correct. Human history is a long time. Indeed. Would you like a short poem for today?
Yes I would. But first I want to tell the audience the listeners of the pod that I have a bad cough so I'm going to do my best but if I sound gross or make bad noises blame viruses not me. Hank I don't want to say that you don't seem to be at your best right now but you don't. You don't seem I don't I don't feel like I'm getting 100% of that Hank Green pod energy that I come to the pod.
Well you know John what really gets me going is a short poem. It's short poems. Well this one's about depression and it's called Not So Far Is The Forest by Edna St Vincent Malay. Actually just part of Not So Far Is The Forest so as to keep it short.
That chill is in the air which the whys know well and even have learned to bear. This joy I know will soon be under snow. The sun sets in a cloud and is not seen. Beauty that spoke aloud addresses now only the remembering ear.
The heart begins here to feed on what has been. Night falls fast. Today is in the past. Blown from the dark hill hither to my door.
Three flakes then four arrive then many more. Not So Far Is The Forest by Edna St Vincent Malay. Long time favorite poem of mine. Hank I even put it in looking for a last guy like it so much.
Yeah that was good I liked that and also appropriate for post VidCon when I am often sick but always in a little bit of a cannot see the sunset because of the clouds funk do just due to I think psychology and coming down off a big high. It's always a wonderful moment when VidCon is over not because I didn't enjoy it but because the chances of something going wrong have reached zero and it does not reach zero until it's over but then the weeks afterward I'm always like what is life for? I'm no longer having that time. Alright well there's the news.
Should we answer some questions from our listeners? Yeah sure hit me hit me with a question John. Well Hank we got a lot of questions this week about sad depressing terrible things because I don't know if you've been watching the news but sad depressing terrible things feel as if they are everywhere despite in fact I would argue life on average for humans not having gotten dramatically worse this year even though it feels otherwise I hope I think maybe yes indeed I don't know I'm in a darkness. Hank this question comes from Meg who writes Dear John and Hank I'm addicted to reading comments on the internet Facebook YouTube buzzfeed I hate it yet I can't stop the more I do it the more frustrated I become.
There is so much set online that doesn't need to be said I love the internet but even within communities I love like Nerdfighteria there are always going to be people who use the shield of a computer screen to hide behind as they write things they probably wouldn't normally say to a person's face can we do something about this or do I just need to give myself an intervention and stop reading comments on the internet? Meg I think you need to give yourself an intervention. Yeah I don't think that there's anything we can do to uh to fight against this particular tide in the near term I think there may be an eventual solution which is that everyone realizes that this isn't making them happy. Right but it will have to be a structural solution Hank I don't think that it's going to happen right now.
Now I am actually thinking pretty seriously for the first time in many years of uh of really structuring my internet life so that it is more pleasant and less freaking terrible. Yeah yeah it has gotten bad and I also I don't want to say that I never want to say that like the internet is the cause of some of some problem that I'm seeing in society but it does seem as if finally the filter bubble is catching up with us and um and just and lies and misinformation are running rampant on every side and it's creating a sort of deep dissatisfaction not so much with the world as with each other and but also with the world and it's making everyone feel as if they are unheard and that they are the only sane voice in a room full of insanity and it makes me want to disengage in a way that I have never wanted to disengage. I think disengaging might be the right decision Hank I really do I think it might be time to say you know what like I can't do this anymore and I'm not sure that my participation in these spaces is helpful like I'm not I know it's not helpful to me but I'm also no longer sure that it's helpful to anyone. Right I mean I think that there are helpful places to be uh but I think that it is very you have to be very aware of the neighborhoods you go to because there are certain ones that are destructive to the self.
So long story short Meg we completely endorse you having an intervention with yourself no longer reading the comments I mean I think that's the least you can do and then you have to have a long talk with yourself about how and whether you even want to participate in the existing social media models because I think uh right now at least for me they feel pretty broken so if you see less of me on Twitter that's why. All right uh we will not disengage from the entirety of the internet there are many spaces that we do enjoy however uh yeah no I'm still gonna be making vlogbrothers videos every Tuesday and uh Dear Hank and John as far as I know is still not available on vinyl so you're gonna have to stick with podcasting as well dude we should do a vinyl release oh yeah that's a great idea Hank that's exactly what this podcast needs to finally achieve financial stability we should do it no for the product for awesome we should do a special vinyl cut this would do well a special vinyl only episode of Dear Hank and John that is a dope idea you have to agree with me uh first off I want to go back in time to the time before you tried to sound hip and cool and yung by using dope as an adjective secondly that is a pretty dope idea all right here's another question that's from Nev who asked Dear Hank and John I need to know it has long been bugging me are bell peppers airtight are they waterproof how did air get inside them when they were growing is there just a vacuum inside of them until we slice them open please help me what a great question and I mean I want to live inside of this person's consciousness for a while because they're interesting and very curious and they clearly have the kind of life that I want to have where you're paying attention to the details of existence and I also have no freaking idea of the answer yeah I had to google this uh but I did and the answer is that uh there are so leaves and plant tissues of all kinds have to let oxygen and other other gases diffuse into them uh just for the processes of photosynthesis so the bell peppers have stoma on them that allow gases to diffuse and they can open or close those uh stoma as they wish and they actually let gases diffuse into them as they grow and they can and then after they grow after they reach full size they actually get covered in this wax that prevents uh prevents gas exchange and prevents uh you know pathogens from getting into those into those vulnerable areas so that that's how it works um other so they are airtight they are airtight after you buy them but airtight is a weird thing because uh because diffusion happens you know through through uh membranes that we would consider to be airtight like a balloon for example you think of that as airtight but if you leave it around for long enough eventually it deflates because there is some diffusion happening across that membrane it just takes a very long time and smother molecules do it faster than bigger molecules which is why helium balloons will deflate faster than balloons you blow up with the oxygen and nitrogen in your lungs um and also that's why uh that's why they will sometimes fill your tires up with nitrogen instead of oxygen and nitrogen because nitrogen will take less well diffuse more slowly than atmospheric gas which contains more stuff than just nitrogen um so you really don't want to fill up your car tires with helium no that would be bad uh though on interesting and fun experiment i would be interested to see how much less my car weighed if i filled my tires up with helium and someone i would love to see someone doing that math uh yeah but this uh yeah i had to look this up for sure but it would be interesting it'd be super cool if there was a vacuum in there and you cut you cut it open and it was like pop like it was some kind of like suddenly all the air rushed into the pepper but that is not what happens well thank you got to answer any question from one of your areas of expertise now i'm going to answer one from one of my areas of expertise this question comes from hoboon in norway who writes dear john and hank i remember john mentioning that he's quit smoking in the past i am now 20 years old and have been smoking for close to three years and i'm finding it difficult to quit i would like to quit for a multitude of reasons yeah i agree obviously but when the craving kicks in all those reasons dissipate and i was wondering if you could share some tips that worked for you and how you stopped hank i know of very few people who have quit smoking as many times as i have quit smoking i am an expert in quitting smoking and then about 12 years ago i had my first experience with staying uh i had about 12 years ago i had my first experience with remaining a quitter and i have not smoked since then so i've only successfully quit once but i failed at quitting many many times uh the number one thing that i would say is that for me the key was nikarett and do you remember like the five-year period when i shoot nikarett yes very very vividly i just i mean i came to like nikarett much more than i ever liked cigarettes um quitting nikarett was the real challenge but nikarett is so much better for youth than smoking so um i do think that like it's not that it comes without health risks because there are health risks to nikatine itself but um it is way better for you than all the stuff you put in your lungs when you smoke cigarettes so i would encourage you to use the patch or use nikarett or use any kind of crutch that works for you um there is no shame in using a crutch i don't even think there's any any shame in chu and nikarett for years like i did you know who choose nikarett hank no the president of the united states of america barack obama there you go there you go long time nikarett shuler also apparently still sometimes smoke cigarettes it's very very hard to quit i don't want to minimize how hard it is um but it is possible i actually think it's harder when you're younger i tried to quit smoking when i was about 20 as well and i did successfully quit for about 10 months but i ended up going back to it and as i got older even though my addiction was sort of a longer term problem i found it easier to quit i think psychologically but i would encourage you just to use crutches uh don't be afraid of that i think that's fine so when the craving kicks in instead of having a cigarette you chew a piece of nikarett and then you can worry about the nikarett problem in a couple years all right god that's dubious advice yeah yeah a little bit dubious but uh but better than the alternative i got another question from clara who asks is he or hankin john i've been in my first jobs since graduating college for about one year i just volunteered for a new team on this team i get to write blog posts and make infographics the problem is that the team leaders want to publish the work i do under the name of a co-worker who is the lead of the team they say they don't want to confuse the audience with who is writing the content and they want a single point of contact the team lead is also a fairly new graduate and has been at the company for only a couple weeks longer than me so i know it's not about seniority or authority on the subject is it wrong for me to not want my work published under someone else's name i wouldn't have a problem if it was just posted under the company's name without someone specific attached to it but i can't get over the feeling that i don't want my writing attributed directly to someone else should i get over it and just contribute anonymously to the team or should i insist that my name gets published with my work i mean i would insist that a different name gets published with the work like i think it's ludicrous that someone else an actual human being is being credited with your writing yes if they want to have a single point of contact and not confuse the readership then you've got to invent a person everybody knows that yeah you you either invent a person or you just create an info at whatever dot com email address like this is pretty unacceptable yeah by the way how bad do you never want to work at a company where there are teams and team leads i mean we have kind of teams and team leads at my company no no no no anytime somebody in this office uses the word team i shush them i like teams teams are good teams are people who work together uh it makes me physically sick well what makes me more physically sick is the idea of someone writing some something and someone else getting their other human getting their name on it because they're the lead of the team like that is yeah you clearly you need to invent a pseudonym and then give them a full rich complicated life as i have given leon's at twitter user leon must number four earth you know you've got to like give someone a rich and complicated back story so that you can have a proper fun pseudonym i can back without revealing like too much of a secret i have worked under the name of a pseudonym uh who i have given in my mind a complicated back story and who at at least at at one time had an email address and answered email from that email address etc and i was totally comfortable with it i'm not opposed to being dishonest with your readers i'm just opposed to someone being credited for your work like down the road if that's under their byline are they gonna like claim it when they're applying for their next job it's just a very weird situation yeah i mean it it just does not make any sense at all either there should be no name or a fake name but a real person should not be getting credit for the work that you are doing clara and i don't know how to solve that problem except to have your co-workers listen to this podcast yeah just like really subtly be like you know what my favorite podcast is it's called deerhank and john they've got a new episode out that uh it's just really funny uh john reads an edison event with a poem hank has no energy it's great you should really listen to it yeah just but but just for the first like one quarter of the podcast that be great i'll just make sure that you make it to like minute 30 just in case there's anything that's like real relevant to our particular interest but i mean not like i submitted a question or anything by the way sorry for using your real name clara i mean i don't feel bad calling these people out at all that is not how it works yeah that's not how it works um speaking of uh not how things are supposed to working we got about 75 000 questions about uh brexit yeah do you want to do you want to read an one of one of the questions sure this one comes from ray who writes deer john hank i'm a uk citizen and i'd like your dubious advice on the following topic how do you react when your democracy makes a decision probably a permanent one that you deeply disagree with right now i'm just feeling anguish and frustration as well as an overwhelming sense of powerlessness how do i escape this spiral well ray the good news is that soon you will be asking yourself an even more important question which is how do i escape this spiral of uh deflation and increased debt that my country chose for itself uh when it decided to exit the european union i'm just kidding ray uh it's possible that this won't be as bad as everyone worries it will be uh you know norway for instance has a really good relationship with the eu without being technically part of it so if there's a norway style solution to the uk's exit from the eu i don't think it will be uh catastrophic uh but that would require a lot of the things that the leave vote was voting against including free movement of people uh and i share your concern and i don't know what to tell you the other i would also say ray um that the feeling of anguish and frustration um and the overwhelming sense of powerlessness is a part of democracy and it is the way that 50 of the population of your country would be feeling if you had uh if if your side had one and that's always a very difficult thing to appreciate and feel especially when uh you know we we are so certain of our rightness and i'm not saying that i'm not certain of your rightness i am but for example we have had a lot of people in the u.s feeling tremendously disenfranchised and powerless because uh now people have rights that like that like gay people have the right to marry in my country where they didn't and people feel like that is a betrayal of their values and that their voice isn't being heard and that makes them more and more angry and disenfranchised um and and feeling like feeling like their perspective does not matter um and that and it really is a part of and like every time a vote has not gone my way i have that feeling um but it is important to to recognize that more important than winning any election is the idea of democracy and the success of democracy and um and sort of the the beauty of that system um getting and i think that that helps me like believing in the system of democracy not not america's system of democracy but the idea of democracy helps me get over that feeling of of you know as you put it anguish and frustration and powerlessness don't agree with you about this particular vote because this is not a vote that should have occurred this is not a thing that should have been put to a vote uh and i think part of the frustration is that one particular historical moment uh became incredibly important because the particular population alive at that moment was allowed to vote about something that had broad repercussions both for people who are yet i just i i don't think it ever should have been allowed to come to a vote there are lots of things in a democracy that we don't vote on there are reasons that we have a representative democracy instead of direct democracy and i i don't agree that this is an example of democracy working to me this is an example of uh you know populism at its at its worst that it's most dangerous and i absolutely feel the same way about the denial of rights to people like that should not be something that we vote on we shouldn't vote on whether or not uh we can deny people entry into this country based on their religion we shouldn't vote on whether or not people should be able to get married to the person that they love um yeah i i think it's a weird difficult time and i think the internet is part i know we don't like to blame the internet for problems i'm not blaming the internet for the problems but i think the internet is part of the issue i think uh the echo chamber that we're all living inside of has made it very difficult uh for us to see the other well and that includes me not understanding really not having a good understanding of the arguments in favor of for the uk leaving the EU it's not my decision it's not my country i understand that but um i do not think that it should have been put to a vote perhaps we should move on to another question yeah uh i don't know if we have helped ray at all or anyone no we haven't helped ray there's no helping ray it gets better with time and hopefully the actual repercussions will be less dramatic than the repercussions that we all fear i think that's the other thing is that a lot of times things aren't as bad as they seem nor are they as good as they seem you know it's it's always somewhere in the middle yeah and there's nothing wrong with incremental human progress um and sometimes things go down and then but the goal is that um the march of human progress is is one that uh you know life gets better for for everyone on average which has happened and has happened yeah i think the long arc of history still definitely points toward unity i mean it was only not to get too much into like broad historical context but 25 000 years ago you know most most groups of human beings numbered in the dozens not in the hundreds not in the thousands not in the millions and certainly not in the billions and so over the last 25 000 years we've seen again and again that humans unify when they have the opportunity to they go to cities when they have the opportunity to even when it frankly doesn't make sense for them to be in cities they go to cities they people want to be with each other they want to be in ever larger groups they want to be better connected to more people and over time i think that will continue to be the trend and i think that has been good for the species and i think it will continue to be good all right we have another question uh from barker who asks dear hankan john i'm in europe for a summer abroad and i've noticed something tomatoes in the old world taste so much better than tomatoes in the united states i hate tomatoes at home won't eat them on anything but here i could probably just eat a couple raw i was wondering if there was a scientific explanation like the environment they were cultivated in or is it just because my environment has changed is it all in my head well it's important to note that tomatoes did not exist in the old world until there was a new world because tomatoes are a food from the americans yes that is that is important to note the other other thing that you are noticing is that in the u.s we have uh we mostly eat tomatoes that are very specific varieties of tomatoes that are very easy to cultivate in mass quantities and they're very durable and they're very uh symmetrical and pretty and they look good on grocery store shelves and they last a long time and there are other varieties of tomatoes that we don't see as often that taste very different and have much more taste and aren't just sort of a watery sourness which isn't nothing i like a tomato like an american tomato on my on my hamburger but uh but heirloom tomatoes as they call them these older varieties of tomatoes or varieties of tomatoes that are um hey when we say older they're not necessarily not like actually an older species they're just what people used to grow before more industrialized farms of agriculture they're harder to grow but they have much more flavor and are they just eat i am totally with you and i had this exact experience not when i went to europe but when i moved to montana where they grow these tomatoes and you can get them at the farmers market and they are delicious it's ridiculous i had no idea yeah i don't think parkers eating the tomatoes in my garden because the tomatoes in my garden are 10 out of 10 i mean like a different a fundamentally different food than the tomatoes that i buy uh on the grocery store shelf so i definitely think come back to the united states and enjoy our many varieties of aeroim tomatoes parker and you will be glad to be an american again yeah i mean you won't have health care uh there are a few other problems that we haven't solved but we've got this tomato thing down yeah all right i'm glad we uh had a good answer for that question at least Hank we've got another question this is an important one and it comes from taylor who asks dear john and hank i'm just sitting here breastfeeding my brand new two-week old baby and wondering why is it that newborn babies smell so good is it just because i'm a mom that i enjoy that distinctly swedish baby smell whereas something sciency are going on here well taylor i cannot tell you something sciency is going on but i can tell you that nothing smells better than a baby until and unless they poop i mean i remember my dear friend shannon who i've talked about on the pod before after my son henry was born shannon was like i need to get to see henry in the first few weeks and i was like why you know it's not really doing much and she was like because nothing smells as good as a fresh one and she's right there is nothing nothing smells as good as a fresh baby it's just an amazing thing uh they just you want to be with them all the time and i do think probably ultimately something sciency is going on there because it is the smell of the baby that makes the otherwise unbearable bearable uh well i can tell you that uh two things one we don't know what the smell is we don't know what the smell is composed of where it comes from if it's like a leftover uh thing from like the sort of the wax that covers a baby upon birth and that gets washed off but maybe there's a little bit left or if it's a if it's a consequence of the degradation of that wax by microbes or if it's produced from the sweat but we do know that that smell has a cognitive effect upon people who smell it uh the study has only been done on women it's been done on both mothers and people who have not had kids and in both groups but more strongly in mothers it has an effect on the brain that is very similar to the effect that dopamine has and it creates bonding it is it uh and it also just uh is just sort of like a pleasurable sensation so we do know that that smell which only lasts for a few weeks is a uh does have a measurable cognitive effect on the brain of humans so that's pretty cool so i don't want to oversimplify this or anything but you're basically saying that like babies smell like heroin feels yeah a little bit i i mean i'll tell you what i i do not want to have another child i found having babies to be extremely difficult and i didn't even have to have them uh and yet yeah nothing smells like a freshy well the good news is john that if you want to get that sensation back all you have to do is go out get some heroin all right chan this one is from kori who asks dear hankajan i'm currently an animation major who loves the world of character design lately i've been lucky enough to be hired on several different projects developing and illustrating characters a lot of the people in my life are supportive of my goal to work in the art industry but there are still a good amount of people who see my work as just a hobby and constantly ask when i'm going to get a quote real job how do i explain to these people that my freelance work is a real job personally i'd like to shove my money in their face while yelling see look at the money that i earn from i quote hobby but i don't think that would be socially acceptable yeah so i mean for many years when we especially after we moved to indianapolis people assumed that sarah sort of provided for me with her work at the museum while i had this hobby writing books that no one read and making youtube videos which was not a thing that you could turn into money uh and it did bother me at first but then something switched inside of my brain and i realized that i was making my life and my self-worth about what other people thought of my work rather than just doing the work uh like i remember my uh my neighbor after the first time i mowed the lawn i was really excited to mow a lawn hank because i grew up with dad mowing the lawn and i thought you know now i'm going to be a proper adult and mow their own lawn and everything and my neighbor came up afterwards and i was just drenched in sweat because it turns out that i'm not well suited to mowing a lawn surprisingly enough and he said um you know when the coffins lived here this was the best lawn in the neighborhood and i was like well they don't live here now and he was like and it seems like you've got time to take care of it dot dot dot um and it did hurt my feelings but i was giving them way too much power like if you get to live your dream and make money it doesn't matter why do you have to prove to these people that you live your dream and make money yeah it's fine just live your dream and make money congratulations on like winning the absolute life lottery yeah i mean i'm very happy uh for you kori uh that's really fantastic and i want to see some of your work uh and what a cool thing to get to do and if this is one of the prices that you pay for your job then that's one of the prices you pay is that uh because like i think most of the time when you're when you're uh meeting somebody and they ask you what you do and you say you do freelance character design for uh for animation like for animated things people will be like oh that's cool tell me more about that and that's that's great they're not gonna be like that's not a real job um and i uh i think that the people who don't who are wondering when you're gonna get a real job just maybe have a different conception of how life is supposed to be than you do and that's fine and it's it's fine to have that difference today's podcast is brought to you by not having what some people consider to be a real job not having what some people consider to be a real job downright pleasurable today's podcast is also brought to you by heirloom tomatoes not just available in europe also in america they're like tomatoes except they taste and today's podcast is brought to you by clara clara who wrote all of that stuff that's being attributed to sara and finally this podcast is brought to you by putting helium in your car tires putting helium in your car tires it will make your car way slightly less which will make it more efficient even if your tires suddenly and rapidly deflate alright this episode of your hand can jump to you by shopify there are a lot of things that stand between i have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me and that is what shopify makes easier when you start with shopify the tools to design and launch and take payments they're all there from day one you don't have to build a whole machine before you can start building the business and this is important because you also have to like look good and with shopify's templates you can get a site set up really quick that looks credible and professional without needing to code or duct tape a bunch of different tools together and when things look real that works on my brain to be like i'm doing a real thing it also works on other people's brains to be like this is legitimate shopify also has one of the best checkout systems on the internet it's built to help customers finish the purchase effectively and efficiently without a bunch of roadblocks returning customers can check out with a single click that means less friction and fewer abandoned carts and a smoother experience for everybody that stuff gives you confidence early on it gives other people confidence in what you're doing you're 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All right Hank, slightly related question. How big of a monster truck would I need to have in order to build a floating car? Like if I filled the tires with helium and I want the car to just float all the way to the stratosphere, how big do the tires have to be? Can we just say off the ground because atmospheric pressure changes a lot as you get up into the stratosphere and that would make the tires have to be immeasurably different?
Sure, I really just need to be. I want to build a hover monster truck with helium tires. All right, well I don't know the question to that answer yet, but I bet somebody will maybe help us do that math. I also don't know the question to that answer.
You're really not bringing your A-game today. I'm bringing my C-game. I've actually been pretty impressed by my ability to do this earlier this morning. I couldn't go five seconds without coughing so I'm quite pleased.
Oh man, I just, I can't stop thinking about how good babies smell. I just, oh babies, babies are amazing. They are just absolutely, the thing that gets me most about babies is that despite having essentially none of the things I associate with humanness, they're little people. They're like tiny little human beings.
Yeah. I don't know man. I'm getting a little baby crazy Hank, we need to answer another question. I can't believe the spot cast wasn't brought to anyone by baby smell, but I guess nothing smells like a fresh one.
Nothing smells like a fresh one. Let's answer this question from Nick away, Hank. You're right, you're doing it Hank. I've been wondering what to call your style of music.
I went to one of your concerts about a month ago and I brought a date, but she and her friends would ask me what type of music you'd be playing prior to the concert and I was never able to come up with a clear answer. You've frequently called yourself a punk rocker, but I've never really associated your music with punk rock. I'd like to thank you and band such as Harry and the Ponder's have created a type of sub-genre called Nerdpunk similar to pop punk. And I now refer to your music as Nerdpunk.
Do you accept this term as valid? And John, how would you describe Hank's music style? You go first. Quick side note.
Quick side note, Hank, your set at VidCon 2016 was not just the best 30 minutes of music I've ever heard you play. It was like among the best 30 minutes of music I've ever heard anyone play. It was, I don't want to sound paternalistic or like I didn't used to like your music, but it was so much better than you were in 2008 or in 2012 when we toured together. It was like you were doing a fundamentally different thing than the thing that you were doing a few years ago.
It was beautiful to watch. Well, it's very nice to have a band. I've seen you play with that band before. Usually it is not that good.
It was a very tight set. We just got off to her, so we've done that a very similar set a bunch of times. And we have a really good time. And it's funny because I, in the work up to that, you don't know this John, in the work up to that set, I had gotten what might, if you were not an adult, would be considered diaper rash quite badly.
Walking around VidCon, just due to the life that is Hank's. And so during that entire set was quite painful. But I had gotten some medicated cream thanks to my assistant. Julie, thank you.
But yeah, it was. So I really had to work through the pain. Maybe that was good for the art. Maybe it was.
You were moving quite freely. I mean, I always forget that you are a good dancer because you would think that because we are so closely genetically related that we would have something in common. And yet we don't. We really don't.
You can dance. You can sing. You know science. It's like we are holy opposite people.
We are a lot of music nerd punk. I like that label. I also often go with Nerdpunk. I think that it is, yeah, I often have a hard time describing it myself, but nerd punk is fine.
And I think the best way to do it in two words. All right. Hank, we need to answer one more question before we get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Huge news out of AFC Wimbledon this weekend.
Oh, big news from Mars as well. This one is from Elle who asks, Dear Hank and John, I've only ever lived in port towns and I've only ever spent time in port towns. Tell me, in landlocked cities, what constitutes downtown? In my city, downtown is always around the harbor and is often the oldest part of town.
In a place with no harbor, what's the place marker for downtown? Is it a river, a park, a very large shoe? I'm very confused about this. How is there a downtown with no harbor?
Please help. There are some Midwestern cities where I feel like the downtown was created more or less at random. Like there was one store there and a street and somebody built a second store and then a third store and then a 10th store and then you had your downtown. But in Indianapolis, the whole city is built around the White River because the planners of the city believe that the White River was gonna be similar to what the Chicago River is in Chicago.
But in fact, the White River is only like six inches deep, so it's a totally non-navigable river. And it turns out to have been a completely useless body of water from a commercial perspective. And yet the downtown is all sort of structured around it nonetheless. But yeah, I think it's usually around bodies of water.
In fact, as you know, Hank, Indianapolis was for many years the largest city in the world, not on an navigable waterway. So I think it usually is somebody of water. And oftentimes it is the intersection of two large streets. It can also be where the railroad depot was built.
In my town, it is sort of both of those things. There's the railroad where the railroad station was and then there's where the river is. And the road that went from the railroad station to the river is sort of how downtown happened. But yeah, it's all these different things.
But it almost always is indeed the oldest part of the city unless it's sort of suburb that's being built and they sort of construct a downtown through very intentional urban planning. Right. If you go to Celebration, Florida, the town built by Disney, there's a downtown there. But it's just made up.
Well, I guess all things are made up. But it was made up all at once, which makes it feel more made up. Yeah, but no, I've never seen a town built around a very large shoe. Not yet, but the arc of history is long and it does bend toward shoes.
Hank, what is the news for Mars this week? Well, it's so hard to pick. We had two really big Mars news this week. What do you do, John, when you have two big AFC Wimbledon newses?
Just tell me both of them. I'm excited. OK, let's do all the news. So first, Mars was once much, much more oxygen rich than we thought, which is a bit of a mystery.
So curiosity has done some new chemistry on some new rocks that we could tell had some interesting properties. But we found a bunch of manganese oxide. And that stuff can only form through two mechanisms. One, it can be formed by microbes.
Or two, it can be formed in the presence of both a lot of water and a lot, a lot of oxygen. So obviously, there must have been more oxygen than the current surface of Mars because it's covered in iron oxide, which is what gives it to their rusty color. And iron oxide, as you might expect from the name, composed partially of oxygen. But the manganese oxide requires much more oxygen to form than iron oxide, which means that there was a period in Mars' history when there was a ton of oxygen.
And we've had some thought in the past that the presence of oxygen is impossible without life. But the immediate thought is like, well, how else could we explain this? And the current explanation for how Mars once had both a bunch of water and a bunch of oxygen is that when its magnetic field first shut down and the sun's high energy sun beams could finally hit the surface without being interfered with, there was a bunch of water on the surface of Mars. Those high energy radiation hit the surface of Mars and broke much of the water molecules apart into hydrogen and oxygen.
The hydrogen being very light, it's the lightest of all the elements, was able to float up higher into the atmosphere where it was pushed away out of the atmosphere of Mars by the solar wind. The oxygen was then left behind. That's very interesting because oxygen is a very reactive compound. It can actually be quite a negative consequence for the potential for life because it can break down, we call it oxidizing.
It can break down complex molecules very easily and quickly. However, it can also be utilized by life very effectively, allowing for a great deal more interesting chemical processes that wouldn't be possible without life, which is why there was sort of a life explosion when life on Earth first started utilizing oxygen after it had been produced through biological conditions. So almost all of the oxygen on Earth is produced by plants and then is consumed by animals. And animals weren't really possible on Earth until plants had created a huge amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
So that's very exciting news that tells us maybe something about Mars's history. And also, having this period of time where there was a lot of water and a lot of oxygen shows us a potential Mars in the past that was very, very similar to Earth. Wow. So just to clarify this here, there's going to come a day probably in the next 10 years.
But we don't know when the solar winds will just blow away Earth's atmosphere. And then whatever, if there are some kind of people eventually in the future, they're going to be thinking about and talking about Earth the way that we are currently thinking and talking about Mars. Well, let's hope not. Our magnetic field seems to be pretty robust.
So let's hope that it sticks around for a while and that we don't have all of the water on Earth split into gases that we can no longer drink or bathe in. If Mars was really like Earth a long, long time ago, is there a possibility that fairly complex life evolved on Mars a long, long, long, long time ago? And of course, we don't have any record of that. Yeah, there is.
And potentially, multicellular life, certainly not. A lot of people hold on to the hope that there was advanced life, maybe even what we would consider civilizations. That's not a thing. We would see evidence of that.
But it's possible that there was millions and millions of years ago? Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah.
If it was anything like our civilizations. But of course, maybe it wasn't anything like our civilizations. But the possibility that there was, it's always very weird when you're talking about life on other planets. Because if it was based on entirely different chemistries, if it was based on not based on DNA and RNA, our life is, it becomes very difficult to even know what that would look like or how to look for it.
And yeah. So when I say multicellular life, maybe life didn't even exist in a way that we would consider to be cellular or multicellular. So it's very difficult to say. But yeah, it was absolutely possible that life existed on Mars.
Yeah. I mean, I think about the fact that we don't really know much about the human species that predated homo sapiens. We know very, very little about them, despite sharing a planet with them and it not being that long ago. We only have a fossil record that we wouldn't have access to if we could only see the surface of the planet.
So I don't know. Maybe. I mean, life can have a pretty substantial impact on a planet. I don't know what you're talking about.
Humans haven't had a substantial impact on this planet at all. We're doing fine. Everything's fine. Well, I mean, not just humans.
But the way that the whole planet biology of Earth has affected the chemistry of the Earth's surface has affected how erosion happens. It actually affects the geology of the planet as well. It affects both the composition of the planet and the structure of the planet. And I wouldn't know what a planet that had life, a whole life ecosystem, and then didn't have it anymore would look like.
But my guess is that that would be an easier thing to detect than the kind of more algae-matte kind of life that was very prevalent on Earth for a really long time. Right. Well, Hank, before it's going to happen. This all sounds like it's going to be really interesting stuff for the first humans on Mars to explore in 2028.
The other news is that NASA actually just tested its gigantic biggest ever solid rocket booster that will, if all goes to the plan, be the solid rocket booster that takes humans to Mars. And they're planning on that happening sometime in the 2030s. So not no help for me. Whoo, that's great news.
I can't wait for the 2030s and all of the Mars stuff we do then. Hank, the news from ASE Wimbledon. Very, very exciting. Wimbledon have signed one of their big signings of the summer, a new winger named Chris Welpdale.
Hopefully we'll be saying his name a lot this season. Chris Welpdale, you'll never guess where we signed him from, Hank. Was it from Welpdale? No, it was from your beloved Stevenage.
Oh, my goodness. Sorry, Stevenage. We showed up to Stevenage, and we just ransacked the place, and we left with Chris Welpdale. So Stevenage stuck in League 2 for another season, which means Hank, you won't even get to hear the news from Stevenage twice the season, because we'll be playing the likes of Swindon Town.
Yeah, Chris Welpdale is going to be playing in League 1 next season for ASE Wimbledon, the third-tier soccer team sponsored by Nerdfighteria, and sponsored by this podcast indirectly. Really, everything that we do at this point goes to sponsor ASE Wimbledon. So yeah, we're going to be rooting for Chris Welpdale. Go, Chris.
All right, Jon, what do we learn today? Well, we learned that nothing smells as good as a fresh one. We learned that Nickerrat Gum has only one of the toxic chemicals that will destroy your life, while smoking has hundreds or even thousands. We learned that Hank plays nerd punk music and plays it astonishingly well.
And we learned that if you're writing a thing, and someone else's name is on it, that's not cool. That's not cool. No, that's a problem. That's an issue.
It's time to invent a new person who can share the both of you. All right, Jon, thanks for podcasting with me today. I hope that next week you bring your A game with somebody else, because I'm going to be on vacation for two weeks. Oh, man, me and somebody else, or possibly no one, including not even me.
Yeah, we might take a week off. It depends on how things fall out. It depends on how long I feel like I've been destroyed by four invaders inside of my body. Oh, those are the worst invaders.
Well, no, no, they're very worst invaders. I've read some world history. Thanks for podcasting with me. Thanks to Nick Jenkins for editing today's high quality podcast.
We really killed it on two consecutive episodes. Hank, Gunnarollarutter, theme music, our intern is Claudia Morales. Rosie Annalas-Rihan, who helps out with questions. Thank you again for listening.
And as we say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome. And you can email us at Hankandjanagmail.com. Ah, right, you can email us at Hankandjanagmail.com. Anybody who made it to the end of the podcast should get like a privileged email address.
But that's the only one Hank and Jon at Gmail. That's us. All right, thanks for listening. Bye bye.