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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. Mozart for Think of It Dear John and Hank.
It's a comedy podcast where me, Hank Green, and John Green, that other guy answer your questions and give you dubious advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and of course AFC Wimbledon. John, how are you doing? I'm doing terribly. Thank you for asking.
I broke my rib almost a week ago. It is extremely painful. Everything hurts. It hurts to stand.
It hurts to sit. It hurts to lie down. I can't sleep at night. It just sucks.
I don't even really want to talk about it, but I also can't think about anything else. So just tell me how you're doing. I'm doing good. I'm doing good.
You know, pain at John is a sign that you're not dead. So there's that going for you. I find that to be extraordinarily cold comfort. I think that pain is the stupidest of all the human experiences.
It is the one that I have found the least meaningful, but I am admittedly a little bit biased right now. Hank, we need to get to an important topic in re last week's podcast, which is that- Oh, is it the spelling and pronunciation of you? It is the spelling and pronunciation of you. We have never experienced quite the deluge of females, tweets, etc.
in re the spelling of you. What I found most fascinating, this is how to shorten the word usual, what I found most fascinating is how many people were completely convinced that they knew the correct spelling of you and that all the other spellings were stupid. Yeah, specifically the ones who were clearly wrong. And yet everybody's spelling disagreed with everyone else's except for the one person who was an actual linguist.
Oh, yeah. We had several. I felt as if we had several linguists commenting on the matter and indeed, crimging at our armchair linguist-ness. What do you- linguicity?
What is the linguist version of philosophy? I believe it's linguist. I believe that's correct. Armchair linguistics.
I did it. I remembered. So somebody wrote in with a link to an extensive linguist conversation on this topic. I just want to read a little bit of it.
We'll link to it on our patreon.com slash, Dear Hank and John, the reason this problem arises is that the consonant in the middle of usual, which phoneticicians call the voiced palatovilioar fricative and which is written in the international phonetic alphabet as this thing that isn't a letter, doesn't have a fixed representation in the English writing system. Anyway, the long and short of it is that most of the linguists I heard from think that it should be U-Z-H or U-Z-H-E. U-Z-H-E. Yeah, I guess I probably pronounced that U-Z-H-E.
But I will say that, Hank, on this website, there are lots of linguists, proper linguists, fighting this out about how to best represent U-Z in Latin letters. So we are not alone in feeling, you know, kind of lost in this conversation. I also have to say that Catherine, I walked, I got home from work, I walked into my house and I hear my own voice and yours coming from upstairs. And Catherine is listening to this section of the podcast and she's sitting on the couch and on her lap is her laptop and she's looking at urban dictionary to see what the most common spellings on urban dictionary for U-Z-R.
And indeed, there are a number of different different spellings of U-Z-H-E is one of them, but the most common one is the one that I suggested, which was just U-J-E. And so that was, that seemed to be in terms of the colloquial, not necessarily the phoneticiids or the linguists correct spelling, but the colloquial spelling might just be U-J-E. And I will say that was my call. Yeah, I'm going to just stop you right there and point out that when you're trying to use urban dictionary to back up your arguments, you're in trouble already.
One more correction in the form of a short poem Hank before we start the proper podcast. A couple weeks ago, you talked about the Martian Rover singing itself Happy Birthday alone on Mars and I've written a short poem in response. Six light minutes from Earth, alone on a red planet, which incidentally is not a shade of brown, a Martian Rover does not sing itself Happy Birthday. Oh, is this my, this is the correction that we received from?
This is the correction Hank. The Martian Rover saying itself Happy Birthday once on its first birthday, since then it has not sung itself Happy Birthday. This is an urban legend that you have propagated. My bad.
This is a correction sent to us by Michelle, who has a friend who works on the Curiosity Rover and also linked to us to an actual article that from the tweet from the Curiosity Rover confirming that it does not do this every year but only on the first year. John, do you want to do any questions? Yeah, sure. Let's get to some questions from our listeners.
This first one is from Charlene who writes, Dear John and Hank, my husband and I were discussing what we would do with lottery winnings of multiple billions of dollars. I said that amount of money was too much for a single person to hold on to and that I would give away the majority of it. My husband said he would never want to give any of it away. I mean, Charlene, any of it really?
I'm concerned that your husband might be a terrible person. Anyway, I asked him credulously what he would do with all that money and he said he always wanted to swim in a vault of money like Scrooge McDuck. I want to know what denominations of money would be best for swimming and how big of a room would you need to store the denominations of money so that it equaled just one of the billions he wants to keep swimming in. Hank, I thought this was an interesting question because I if I were to win a billion dollars or get a billion dollars however in whatever way I have to tell you I would give almost all of it away immediately.
Just because you don't want to have that that hanging over you and have everyone know that about you? That I don't think that it's good for your kids really to inherit huge sums of money. I think that it can be very distorting in their lives and not allow them to have their own lives that are independent of their parents. I feel like it would be a weird amount of pressure and I just I don't feel like it would in any way make my life better.
Now, like there are lots of sums of money that would make my life better but I don't think a billion dollars is one of them. Well, in that case, like you might as well just fill a vault up with it and I have to say that if you fill a vault with coins and you jump into it from a diving board that is, you know, any more than a few feet above the surface of the coins, you're going to die. Like you're going to hit that. Yeah, you're about to die.
Like your neck. Like coins do not make a liquid. Scrooge McDuck had special superpowers that allowed him to swim in money and indeed I remember an episode of the DuckTales where Scrooge was swimming around and the boys he would be doing Louis jumped in and were unable to and were were unpleasantly surprised by how they had run into a solid wall of metal. So you would have to mix together I think some like have some kind of system to mix together a paper currency as well as maybe a little bit of coinage to give density but you'd have to have a system to constantly mix it because they would fall out or you could create maybe some kind of origami shape where you were putting some currency inside of a bill and then folding the bill up in a certain way that would create a density more suitable to swimming around in.
I think that it's not impossible to figure out a way to make this work but it is it's not simple either. Yeah, no, here's what I would say Hank. I would say that Charlene's husband is genuinely risking death by inheriting a billion dollars or winning a billion dollars and turning it into a pool full of coins which I think is pretty metaphorically resonant in what it would be actually like to suddenly have billion dollars. Yes, I would take a billion dollars though because I'd have a lot of fun giving it away.
We've got another question. It's from Catherine who asks Dear Hank and John, I was in my backyard spray painting and I accidentally spray painted a part of a bush blue while making some lovely squid art. I tried spray painting the bush green but the shades of green don't match. What do I do?
Hey, I don't know if we're gonna have the same response to this one but you want to just say on three what we think Catherine should do? Yes. One, two, three, move. Burn your entire house down.
Yeah, okay, so we're in the same direction here. This is a crisis and the only way to deal with it is to run screaming from this property. Like this should not be your house anymore. You're never going to be able to get that bush back the correct shade of green.
You need to just probably move to a whole different city. Yeah, I mean, I go to Mars if you could. Well, you can't fortunately but I don't think you need to go to Mars but I think you need to like you need to reinvent your whole life. You need it just you and that one work of squid art need to walk out that door with no other belongings and just find a new life for yourself.
In fact, Catherine, don't even name yourself Catherine. In this new life, like you can have no connection to the person that spray painted that bush blue. Like you've got to be a completely different person except you'll always know that you're still you when you look up and you see that squid art. All right.
Well, I think we've covered that one pretty well. John, do you have any other questions for us? No, that was it. That was the end of the podcast.
All right, I got one though. If you want me to keep going, it's from Parker who asks Dear Hank and John, what the heck even is accounting? I know it's important in there are a lot of really smart people who are great at it but it is just not clicking my brain. Why do I have to take accounting for my management major?
Can't I just check a box that says I will hire an accountant? Can't I just take an accounting vocabulary class so I understand what my accountant is talking about? Best wishes, Parker. Oh, it hurts to laugh but the idea that you could check a box is just the problem with the checking the box, Parker, is that if you check a box saying I will hire an accountant, you're essentially checking a box that says I'm going to give someone free reign to steal from me because I will have no idea whether they are telling me the truth.
And there's that and in general, as a business person, it is always good to understand what all the people in your organization are doing even if you aren't doing it. As far as the question of what the heck even is accounting, I think you could Google that one but you know, it's keeping an account of what all the money is doing. That's why they call it accounting. Yeah, I mean, it turns out to be really important to know whether your business is losing money or making money.
And like for a long time in Hank and I's career, we did not pay attention to that question. And it turns out to be a deeply interesting and important question. And we sort of miss the boat by not giving it a little more attention early on. It's exactly maybe.
Also, I think that I enjoyed the way that we did it. But there are managers who don't know how to do accounting and I certainly, I'm not an accountant or anything. But like, I think that you're in school to learn stuff and you should learn stuff even if you don't like learning it. Is that okay to say?
Yeah, also it's helpful in your, I would argue it's helpful in your everyday life. Like for many, many years, I did not know how to read an Excel spreadsheet. I did not know how to balance my checkbook. And that stuff was really stressful for me.
It caused me a lot of stress and anxiety. And it turns out that like in the end, it isn't that hard. I just had to do the work to learn how to be able to do those things. And once I could, I suddenly felt like I had, you know, a little bit of control over my financial life instead of it being something that was happening to me, you know, my bank occasionally writing to say that I had overdrawn my account and then I'm like thrown into a panic.
Like I was, I was instead in a situation where I felt like, okay, I'm in, I have some control over this. I know why this happened. I know why that happened. And it's really empowering for me.
So I actually, I think it's worth it to learn some basic accounting no matter what you're going to do. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that Parker's accounting class is more advanced than that. And that's why he's finding it particularly annoying. But but those, yeah, it's, it's valuable.
I'm going to say it's valuable. And that's going to be, and in general, I feel like if you're enjoying more than 50% of your work, then you're good. And so maybe this is just part of the 50% that you don't love. What, what percentage of your work do you enjoy?
Do you think I probably enjoy 80, 80 to 90% of my work? That's interesting. I think I'm in a similar, I think I'm probably like 75%. But I feel really good about that.
Like I didn't, there hasn't been a time in my life when I've enjoyed as high a percentage of my work as I do right now. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because there's a difference between what I enjoy doing and what I enjoy thinking about doing and what I dread. So like, there are things that I dread that I enjoy doing. I don't know if that sounds insane, but like, I'm like, oh, I have to do that thing.
And then once I'm doing it, I'm like, this is fine and great. And I actually quite like it. But before I'm doing it, I spend a lot of time being stressed out about the fact that I have to do it. The big distinction in my life is there are some things I enjoy doing, and there are some things I enjoy having done.
So I definitely enjoy having written much more than I enjoy writing. But that said, like I do, I like writing enough to consider it in the 75% of stuff that I like doing. The 25% of stuff is mostly paperwork and emails. Yeah, yeah, it's mostly, it's a lot of email for me.
It's also like just when things go wrong, you know, it's like that's the stuff. And I feel like that percentage would increase dramatically if it's like, if it's a month where things are going wrong more. But that always makes stuff much harder when it's not going well. And we're very, I've been very lucky to have things go very well, you know, for the most part.
Yeah, things are going pretty well these days. Hey, failure is unpleasant. As much as I tried to say that it is just part of process and of course everybody fails and it's just part of it's a thing that is going to be part of your life. But it is unpleasant.
And I don't like it. It is unpleasant. But man, do you want a lot more from failure than you learn from success in my experience. Definitely true.
The problem with success is that it tells you that like, you know, things are always going to be easy and you're a special snowflake and there's nobody like you. And that's why you're going to always succeed everywhere you go. And then failure teaches you a lot. Yep.
All right. This question is from Hannah Hank who writes Dear John and Hank, I'm kind of very confused about how gas planets work. Are they just like big clouds? How do they maintain a uniform shape?
How do they have an orbit? Do they have a surface or gravity? How dense are they? Okay, actually ignore all those questions and just answer this one.
If an airplane can fly through a cloud, could a rocket ship hypothetically fly through Jupiter? They don't teach these things in my public school. Hannah, that's a fantastic question that I've never even paused to consider. Well, first of all, I'll say that if a airplane is going fast enough, it actually can't fly through air.
There comes a point at which air is dense enough, gas is dense enough that it will tear the plane apart. You see this as meteors are coming through our atmosphere at a very high speed. They get very hot because the gases in front of them are being compressed and all that energy is being turned into heat. They break apart, they're ripped into pieces, and they explode.
And that is one of the crazy things about gases. They seem like they're hardly there at all, but if you're moving fast enough, they're basically a brick wall, just like Scrooge McDuck's coins. So a rocket ship could fly into Jupiter, if it was going slow enough, it was going the speed that a rocket ship normally goes. It would totally be ripped apart by the gas.
But the way that it works is basically all the gas has mass. It's the gases matter, and it has a mass, and it has a weight, and so it creates gravity, and all of that gas, all together, pulls itself together into this giant thing, and at the very middle, it's very dense, because there's so much gas that there's all this pressure being pushed down on it by gravity. And down there, in the center of Jupiter, we do not know what is there. We don't know if they're probably what's there is it's under so much pressure that the gas becomes metallic.
It goes from being a gas to being a solid, or liquid, and you've got this metallic hydrogen core of Jupiter. We're not sure though, because it is a giant planet, and we will never be able to go in the middle of it, because whatever we would send down there would totally get crushed by that tremendous pressure. So it's just a it's a collection of gas in a sphere that is being held together in a sphere just like a liquid wood or just like a solid wood, our planet being solid, has been crushed into this spherical spherical shape by the gravity by the density of its own mass, and that's also what's happening with Jupiter. I find something about that just astonishingly beautiful.
The idea that we'll never know what the center of Jupiter looks like, and we have to like live in a universe knowing that that's something that we can never know. Well John, we don't even know what the center of Earth looks like. We have some ideas, but those ideas continue progressing and changing. And yeah, we know I don't like to correct you on science stuff, but I'm gonna have to just ask you to hit the pause button on that one, because in fact, I don't know if you've read Journey to the Center of the Earth, but Jules Verne has explored that in really like exciting detail.
So if you haven't read that book, I truly recommend it because it tells you exactly what the center of the Earth is like, and it's awesome. Do you want to do another science question, John? Sure. Yeah, no, but less I have to talk to better.
All right, this one's from Andrew who asks Dear Hank and John, according to a SciShow video that I saw recently, Salt of the Ocean is just a mix of minerals picked up over thousands of years and not sodium chloride like table salt. So what is the sea salt they put on my Wendy's fries? Is that less healthy than table salt? Actually, I don't know if we misspoke in that SciShow episode or if you miss heard, but it is a mix of minerals, the primary one being sodium chloride.
So the sea salt that they put on your fries at Wendy's is mostly sodium chloride, but sea salt also has a bunch of other stuff in it like magnesium chloride and just whatever other salts, which is what we call these ionic compounds in chemistry, whatever other salts got picked up as rivers flow down to the sea. And so that table salt is mostly salt. Well, table salt is all sodium chloride. Sea salt is mostly sodium chloride with some other stuff thrown in, and that other stuff might be beneficial.
You probably get in other ways though, in addition to getting it into sea salt, which is why sea salt is mostly, let's be honest, it's just salt. Yeah, I very rarely hear of people who aren't getting enough salt here in, at least in the United States. We don't have a huge sodium shortage. No, it's the other stuff that's in the sea salt that they think maybe you should be getting like a magnesium or phosphorus or whatever, but like you get that stuff.
I will say on the topic of salts, as you know Hank, I am a committed batheor. I do not believe in showers, which are essentially just getting attacked by millions of pellets of water, very kind of liquefied bullets shooting you millions at a time. And so I take baths and I enjoy nothing more than bath salts when I am bathing. What a pleasure.
Is that the whole story? Is that just the thing you wanted to tell me? Yeah. What are bath salts?
Well, as far as I can tell, they're smelly salts. But there is a drug called bath salts, like a recreational drug. I know about this because I was the TSA, took my bath salts from my carry-on bag once when I was trying to get on an airplane and they were like, what is this? And I was like, those are my bath salts.
I'm a committed batheor. I'm going to be out of town for two days and I looked up the hotel room that I'm going to be in and I got a picture of its bathtub and everything looks like it's going to be a great bathtub. I'm very excited. And they were like, why are you taking bath salts to New York City?
And I was like, because I like to bathe in hotel rooms and I use bath salts. Doesn't everyone who takes baths? And anyway, it was a big miscommunication because apparently bath salts are also a drug. But I genuinely don't know if the bath salts that are the recreational drug are also the bath salts that you buy at Bed Bath and Beyond.
But if they are, I might accidentally be addicted to bath salts. Well, I think you might be addicted to bath salts, but only the kind that go in your bath, which are definitely different from the kind that people use as recreational drugs. Though, I imagine they look somewhat similar, which is why they got that name. But yeah, not the same.
I mean, I wouldn't say that my use of bath salts rises to the level of a recreational drug, but I will say that I really like it. It's probably especially helpful to soothe that aching pain of having a ribbon several pieces. Oh, it's just so the kind of rib fracture I have is it's not what's called a simple rib fracture. It's called a displaced rib fracture, which means the two parts of my rib don't line up perfectly, but they're always trying to get back together.
And so when I move, they're like moving against each other and it hurts so freaking bad. That sounds awful. And what I know about, because I recently separated some cartilage from a rib, which is a very different but still painful thing. And the doctor was like, yeah, there's not really anything you can do.
It's a rib. Just don't hurt it. Yeah, my doctor was great in the ER. She was like, you're so lucky you didn't lacerate your liver.
And I was like, I don't feel lucky. Like that's a very specific definition of what like do you wake up every morning, doctor and say, I want the lottery today didn't lacerate my liver. Yeah, I would argue that I was incredibly unlucky. Yeah, well, you know, somebody who has it worse.
My doctor, when I first was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis was like, if you're gonna be diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, this is the kind you want. And I was like, well, you know, that's something that's something to know. No, no, I don't. I'm not a big fan of that particular bedside manner of like, you won't believe your good fortune.
Here's all the things that aren't wrong with you. It works for some people, not for others. It works okay for me. All right, let's move on to another question.
This question is from Natalie who writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm a first time emailer and new listener after my hair stylist recommended your podcast. First off, I just want to thank America's hair stylists for being such consistent supporters of the pod. Secondly, I will now read the rest of the question. The question that has been the ban of my existence for quite some time is what is proper door etiquette?
How long do I hold the door open for someone when you open the door and someone is standing on the other side, also looking at you with the Dear and Headlights expression, who goes first? I really don't understand. These are great questions. They're two, it's two distinct questions.
Hank, there's the first, when you open the door and you look behind you and someone is coming, but they are in that middle distance where they are not about to be there, but they also aren't like far away. Do you hold the door open and for how long? And then the second question, when you open a door and you see that there is someone about to come out of the door as you are about to go in it, who goes first? John, I was in a very weird situation.
So in Montana, of course, we have double doors. So like there's like a vestibule to keep the hot air inside in the winter. And it was a very weird situation where I was walking up to the bagel place. Someone opened the door to go into the bagel place.
Then I was coming in behind them and they were kind of holding the door for me, though they weren't sure if I was going into the bagel place or if I was just walking sort of abnormally close to the building headed somewhere else. And then inside, so they were looking at me, but inside there was a person who had opened the other vestibule door and was holding the door open for the person who was holding the door, maybe opened for me, but maybe not. And then suddenly everybody got very confused and they all just like scattered and people like dropped doors started running. It was very straight and I don't know that there was any way to do it except for the way that we ended up doing it, which was just every man for himself.
The rules have broken and we just have to deal with the situation as it comes to us. It was basically the purge, you know, like there were no more laws. The door all the purge. Now it's just it's just people on their own as animals just trying to get through the day.
Yeah, and I was just like, well, and now like now but also the problem that I hate this, when you hold the door open for someone and then they go in front of you, but then they're in front of you in line and you're like, hey, I like I wanted to hold the door for you, but I wasn't giving you my spot in line. I hate that. So you've got to walk in. No, I disagree with you on that one.
I think if you hold the door open for someone, that is a statement. I am now putting myself in a position where you shall be ahead of me in all the future interactions that we have. The thing I don't like is the double door situation where you hold the door open for someone in the double door situation and then they of course are the first to the next door and then they hold the door open for you and you end up winning by trying to be generous. You end up being in first place.
I love that. I think that that's the wonderful thing about the double door is that like I can hold the door open for you, but then I still get my proper spot in line. See, for me, like I believe the last shall be first, not the last shall be first and then last again. So I think that's just a world view difference.
But I so I'm going to argue that in general this this door thing, both these door problems boil down to the need to be kind and generous toward each other and also careful of each other. Like ultimately what it boils down to is that if you feel like somebody didn't hold the door open for you and you were close enough that they should have held the door open for you, you need to pause and say to yourself, you know what, that person probably had a brief moment of crisis and made the best decision that they could make in that moment. They're not a bad person. They're not out to get me.
They just they made the call that they thought was right in that moment and I don't think it was right, but I'm going to be okay with it. Alternately, if you are the person holding open the door and you look and you're like, I think that person's a little too far away, just make the best call that you can make in that moment and assume that everybody is going to be okay with it and not going to be mad at you. You know what I do, John? I kind of I sort of look a little bit before I open the door to see if maybe there's anybody around in a way that makes it clear that like when I open the door and I feel like that person's too far away, I don't have to look back at them and acknowledge their existence before closing the door in front of them.
I can I sort of like know that they're back there and I don't look at all and I just let it go as if I'm just an unthinking person rather than someone who is intentionally closing a door on someone. So trying to surreptitiously look. You know what I'll do sometimes if I feel like somebody's a little too far away, I'll just sort of as I'm opening the door, I'll look back at them and I'll just sort of shrug as if to say like, sorry man, but like I don't know how to hold this door open. I honestly will sometimes slow down as I'm approaching the door if I know that's someone who's a bit farther away.
So that like and I'll just like take a real long time open in that door like, oh, I got distracted by this newspaper stand and I'm looking at that for a little while to make like let the person catch up. So that like, but I will say John. So here's a thing that I do that I wouldn't mind if other people did, but I'm not saying it's a necessary part of being a polite human. When I have the door opened for me and it's a restaurant or something where there's a line, I will then stand by the door and let the person go in front of me so that they like so that they're not punished for being kind and opening a door for me.
Yeah, I mean, I there's a lot of a lot of etiquette that goes on. I think in general in human life, almost all the time, unless you are in a true like Wendy's emergency where if you don't get your Wendy's as soon as possible, you're going to faint like if you're on the edge of a diabetic coma or something, I think it's almost always the right thing to do to just say to the person who you held the door open for, why don't you go first? I am a big believer in like those little tiny acts of kindness making life bearable. Like I try this is hard to do, but if you can imagine in the 99 of time when you aren't in a tremendous hurry and like when there isn't huge pressure on you to get something done, if you can remember that and remember that like you are not actually in a rush and you can treat other people as if they are in a rush, their days get so much better.
Like they go home and they talk about this person who was nice to them because I really believe like it's made that much of a difference in my life and those times when I've been in a huge rush and people have been kind to me, like it makes a lasting difference. Like we talked in a recent episode, remember where I was jogging and the I said good morning and the person said it's 1202. Yeah, yeah. That made a lasting difference in my life like that stranger had a lasting impact in my life.
It's just kind of a negative impact. I think like try to find those little moments to have that positive impact. It's huge. No, I completely agree.
And I also really enjoyed doing it. Like I feel like increasing the amount of appreciation in the world is it makes me feel better as well. Yeah, so you win. You win when you hold the door open for someone and let them go in line first, which reminds me Hank that today's podcast is brought to you by Wendy's.
Wendy's, you don't have to get there first to get those delicious sea salted fries. That's absolutely true. That's absolutely true. Today's podcast is also brought to you by accounting.
It's uh, it's necessary if you want to run a business and there is parts of your job that you're not going to like and it might be one of them accounting. Oh god, laughing hurts so much. And today's podcast is also brought to you by bath salts. Bath salts, the kind that you put in the bath.
And finally, this podcast is brought to you by Charlene's husband, who doesn't want to help anyone and just wants to scrooge McDuck his neck broken. Charlene's husband. Wouldn't it be great if our podcast was actually sponsored by accounting, like as an abstract idea if like the American Association of Accounting sent us a huge check every week and we could just like find different ways to work accounting into the podcast or alternately if our podcast was actually sponsored by Wendy's or anyone, wouldn't it be great if someone paid us a bunch of money to talk about their product and or service on our podcast? I was recently on Twitter trying to get La Croix sorry to send me 378 12 packs of La Croix which is you know would make my life better.
I talk about La Croix all day on this podcast if they've sent us a podcast. I love La Croix. Like if there's one thing, one way that my life has changed demonstrably since the success of the Fault in Our Stars, it's that I now buy as much La Croix as I want, which is a lot. You know John, there's a thing about the world that I kind of dislike right now.
And that is the the sparkling, Dessani and Aquafina that I'm starting to see at grocery stores because La Croix found this thing and they were like, oh my gosh, we found a niche. It's it's calorie-free beverages that are flavored well and that are refreshing when cooled. And and and they found a niche that like that Coca-Cola and Pepsi missed how weird and amazing is that opportunity. And La Croix does not have good graphic design.
Their logo is very weird. The copy that they like their packaging copy never makes any sense. It always makes me just like crave to like hire a good copywriter for them. And I feel like their CEO writes it or something because it's very like disconnected from reality.
And then but like it works. It works so well and it becomes so popular and it frustrates me to know and to know that somebody Coca-Cola tried to buy La Croix and La Croix was like, no, we're gonna do this on our own. And so they just came out with these like beautiful sparkling Dessani beverages and sparkling Aquafina beverages and are trying to take on the Croix. And I'm like, no, no, you will not.
You cannot have this. There's one thing that you can't have in its La Croix. Yeah, I totally agree with you. But on the other hand, if delicious sparkling Dessani water wants me to drink 378 of their beverages and receive a huge amount of money in exchange for talking about how much I love sparkling Dessani water, I'm more than happy to do that.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. It's so funny. Like I the difference is that I am serious. I want to sell out so bad and you don't.
You genuinely don't want to sell out. It's so annoying. You guys don't know about this because like you don't have to deal with Hank and private but like Hank will never sell out even in tiny little delightful ways. It's super annoying.
That's not necessarily true. I sell out some ways. No, you don't. You really don't.
I struggle. I struggle and I go one way some days and another way other days. Just not with our sort of core properties of like the brother stuff because I feel like who needs it? It's this is the thing.
We're just messing around. And that's why we have fake sponsorships even though I kind of feel bad because of course many podcasts need real sponsorships because they need to make it work because they put in a great deal of effort and they want to be compensated for the great work that they do. But we don't have to do that. I mean but it's clear to Hank, Hank, none of our listeners, just in case you're concerned about this, none of our listeners labor under the delusion that we put in effort in this podcast.
So you don't have to worry about that. No one's out there thinking God they're working hard and not getting paid for it. They're out there thinking I wonder when they're going to answer the next question and the answer to that question is now. This episode of your Hank and John is brought 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 could get a site set up really quick that looks credible and professional without needing to code or duct tape a bunch of different tools together.
And when things look real that works on my brain to be like I'm doing a real thing and it also works on other people's brains to be like this is legitimate. Shopify also has one of the best checkout systems on the internet. It's built to help customers finish the purchase effectively and efficiently without a bunch of roadblocks. Returning customers can check out with a single click that means less friction and fewer abandoned carts and a smoother experience for everybody.
That stuff gives you confidence early on and it gives other people confidence in what you're doing. You're not wondering whether the payment system is going to work. You're not wondering whether customers can get through the process. Shopify handles that foundation so you can focus on the thing that you're actually trying to do.
It's really kind of amazing to me that Shopify is a tool that works from the first day your store launches when you're just starting to get customers all the way up to being the size of good.store or dftba.com or being the size of like Mattel and Jim Shark. When you build a Shopify you're building with tools that already work at every scale. All you need is the idea Shopify handles the rest. You can start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank.
Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank with new subscription only. Wild Supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See you website for more details. One thing I love about summary is how easy everything feels.
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Now available in Canada too that's qunce.com slash deerhank for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash deerhank. This episode of deerhank and john is brought to you by Factor. Imagine for a moment that you are absolutely immersed in some work where you're creating something beautiful or useful or useless and ugly but you love it anyway and you look up and suddenly you have a feeling and that feeling is that it is 2.30 p.m. and that you did not eat lunch.
What are you going to do? Are you going to get meal delivery that's going to cost too much and maybe be a bit of a mistake or are you going to go to the cupboard and just eat several fistfuls of peanuts? Because those are my two choices unless I have a factor in the fridge. You can get smokey barbecue chicken breast with potato mash, cream corn and peppers.
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I don't really know what that means but it sounds delicious. What about a black bean taco bowl with corn salsa and cilantro crema? A delicious high fiber high protein meal that no animals had to die for. Any of those can be ready in two minutes.
Fresh, never frozen, over 100 rotating weekly meals, including globally inspired flavors like Mediterranean and Asian, Factor shops, Preps, Cooks and Delivers, Straight to Your Door so you have more time for everything you love this spring. Head to factormeals.com slash deer hank 50 off and use the code deerhank50off to get 50% off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See you website for more details. I Hank this question comes from Allison who writes Dear John and Hank hello my name is Allison.
Allison I really like it when people repeat their names so thank you. My ice maker broke so I Allison and currently using an ice tray my question is when is the best time to refill this ice tray? Do I Allison wait until all the ice is gone or until there are two to four cubes left? I would love to hear your opinions.
Hank I think that this is one of those there's two kinds of people in the world questions. I think there's one kind of people in the world maybe two kinds of people in the world one who hasn't heard about the right way to do it and then there's the other kind who just does it the right way. Okay well why don't you just tell me what the right way is as well as you usually do. Okay well in that case I absolutely will thank you John.
You put a separate container in the freezer and you empty out the ice tray into the bucket and then you refill the ice tray long before you have used all the ice cubes. You don't take individual cubes out of the thing you break the thing and then you take all of them out at once. I mean I will tell you something which is that that is a brilliant solution that I have never thought of in all of my many years of not having an automatic ice maker. Let me tell you the way I do it and then you can tell me whether you think your way or my way is better.
The way I do it and I've done this we don't have an ice maker now. I've had an ice maker in my fridge most of my adult life and the way that I do it is that I have a couple ice trays that have ice cubes in them. I take those trays I use all of the ice cubes. I put the empty trays back in the freezer and then I go in to get ice cubes and I'm like Dang it!
Why did I not take three seconds to fill up this with water six hours ago? You idiot and then I get mad at myself I drink a very warm liqueurois while I'm waiting for my new ice cubes to become ice cubes and then I'm finally able to enjoy delicious refreshing sparkling grape liqueurois available now at grocery stores everywhere. You know John they recently I don't know how recently but they have coconut liqueurois now and I stayed well away from it for a while thinking and I'm not a big fan of coconut. I like Thai food though and I like I like crackle note brand which has a lot of coconut in it but for the most part I'd prefer to not have to not interact with coconut too much and I drank it and I did not like it.
Somebody got it for a party I went to was the only thing available I had someone I was like eh but then I mixed it with orange juice and I liked that quite a lot and then I put some lime juice in the coconut liqueurois and that was very good and I thought to myself my goodness I just put the lime in the coconut and mixed them both together and drank it all up and I thought that was a wonderful moment in my life. It hurts the lab it's so terrible it's like this oh god it's extremely painful to laugh okay I'm glad that you got that lime in the coconut joke in there it only took you four minutes to arrive at it was one of those jokes where the moment you said coconut liqueurois I started to be like is he going to put the lime in the coconut and drink it all together and the answer of course was yes Hank before we sell out any further to a company that has given us no money or any delicious beverages in the form of liqueurois let's get to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon all right do you want to give us some AFC Wimbledon news or I should I tell you about the fascinating news from Mars tell me the the news from Mars okay here's my here's my NARS news so NASA has a program it's called the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program and it helps sort of give small amounts of funding to ideas that would be revolutionary and would totally change spaceflight but probably aren't going to turn anything particularly useful and one of the things that have gotten money from NIAC recently is a research project to induce a hibernation like state a state of torpor in astronauts allowing them to basically sleep all the way to Mars and the way that they would do this is using I know it's like we talk about this in science fiction all the time but they're actually like they are looking to take an existing medical technique called therapeutic hypothermia and and actually apply that to healthy people who just are taking up too much space and eating too much food making it impractical to get them to Mars and the the application this would not be for the first mission to Mars it would be if we wanted to send like hundreds of people to Mars and to basically actually create a sustainable another human world in our solar system and it would dramatically reduce cut by a factor of 40 the amount of space that the people would need on their trip to Mars basically the technique works like this they take your body that temperature down like five degrees and then they give you some drugs that basically put you into a kind of like suspended animation state and that is a thing that they currently do for people who have been badly injured while they're working on repairing their bodies it is a thing that exists it is not particularly safe and we don't of course we've never tested it in microgravity but but it is a thing that people are interested in doing and would potentially be safer for astronauts because they could put more shielding on the containers they could also their muscles might degenerate less in the time that they're traveling to Mars than it would in a normal microgravity environment while have like being awake they would eat less food and they would uh it would be easier to get them there but it is definitely a thing that is for the future but i was fascinated to know oh sorry it decreased the body temperature by nine degrees Fahrenheit five degrees Celsius and uh yeah it would it would make it a lot easier to get a bunch of people to Mars though to be clear it is just uh it is one of those things that is a high payoff if it works but probably won't work kind of thing follow-up question and i don't mean to be insensitive in any way but do they have the technology to blow your body temperature by nine degrees Fahrenheit and let you sleep off say a broken rib injury yeah maybe um i think usually you said it was you said it was risky so i assume that it's not something i probably want to do myself but i would love it if they could develop that for the next time i break a rib because this is i you know john i don't want to be insensitive to your pain but i need you i need you not in a hypothermia induced torpor uh to do all the things i feel like i feel like things would be moving swimmingly if i were in a hypothermia induced torpor right now um speaking of hypothermia induced torporous afc wimbledon uh continue their league one season uh as a third tier english football team hey can you remember that i said last at the toward the end of last season if by some miracle afc wimbledon were promoted it would likely be a sort of a one-year venture up there in the uh you know the third tier of english football uh so far that's looking so smidge prophetic uh afc wimbledon very nearly uh won their first game of the league one season against rockdale possibly rokedale nobody knows for sure how to pronounce it uh they were up one-nil um in the 95th minute which is five minutes longer than the game should have technically gone on uh it was an injury time when rockdale scored to tie the game meaning that afc wimbledon are now on two points uh two points the the bad news um about that is that rockdale are also on two points uh they are down there just above us at the very very bottom of the table we are last there second to last so that is a game that we would have needed to likely probably would have been nice to win that one but we didn't so here we are on two points uh having played five games that's not where you wannabe um but i don't really have a butt that is not where you want to be i'm sorry uh who's who's been scoring for you john well uh in in in summary no one um which is a bit of the issue you you have isolated there's sort of two issues which is that we are not scoring enough goals and then there's the second issue which is that we are giving up too many i feel like if we address either of those issues it might it might lead to a significant improvement in the results um listen i'm not a football commentator but i feel like if we were getting more goals in and letting fewer uh in that we would you know be be scoring uh more um there is some good news george frankam the frankam's nine is coming back uh after almost like five months away uh wild taylor has scored a couple of goals there's a new there's a new guy who's doing okay polion uh he's been scoring some goals uh dom polion but uh no it is not uh it's not great at the moment but there's still a lot of season left it's only five games in we'll see it just googled a fc Wimbledon and to say august 30th Wimbledon won against swansy city 30 yeah no uh that's the swansy city under 23 side not the grown up swansy city and it's in a uh it's in a competition called the uh it's not the league one competition and indeed or is it the facup it's this uh sort of it's the football league cup which i believe right now is called like the change away cup or something because it has a sponsor that's some betting site i don't know it's great to get a win in i'm not sure that really counts as a uh as a proper victory though i would agree with you uh i agree uh and i see uh now looking at the league one table that indeed you are 24th of 24 yes that is correct uh sitting comfortably in 24th but i will remind you if we finish 20 nope if we finish 20th i don't think that if we all we have to do is finish 20th well or above you know that's not nothing and then you can you can stick it in there and maybe maybe you can get against the don's and you can you really only got to win one game this season john and it's against the mk don's i prefer to think of them as the franchise currently playing in milton keen since they have no right to use uh the nickname of the don's but yes uh i'd like to win a bunch of games this season but there's certainly two uh that i have circle on the calendar all right well john what do we learn today well we learned that accounting is important even if it's boring uh we learned that you probably don't want to dive head first into a vat full of coins so instead you should fold them up into origami dollar things and of course we also learned that hank has a significantly better way of dealing with ice trays than john does and finally we learned that the marz rover does not in fact sing itself happy birthday every year uh after a year it's been another year it's been on marz which is really too bad you think they just like have it have it go with that what what what harm is come on let it sing itself a song alone on a dark decilic planet until that wonderful moment when a human comes up and says how you doing buddy good work and that's gonna happen in 2027 i can't wait uh for that to happen in 2029 our podcast is edited by nicholas jankins our intern is claudia marallis rosianna hals rohas helps us out with the questions our theme music is by gunerola hank i think i told people were to email us but just in case if you want to email us uh you can do so at hank and john at gmail.com i believe that covers it except to say hank yes as we say in our hometown don't forget to be awesome