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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 Hegga Jot! Where's that for?
Thank you for your John and Hank. It's that comedy podcast where me and my brother John, I'm farting so I'm just going to let that go and I'm going to start over again. Great, good plan. It's the comedy podcast where me and my brother John, we answer your questions, give you some advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and A.F.C.
Wimbledon. How are you John? I'm a little bit stressed out to be honest. I've got just a lot of work stress.
I've got a lot of work stress. I blame you for this actually Hank because none of my work stress comes from sitting alone in a basement and trying to write a novel. It all comes from you. I think some of it comes from sitting alone in a basement trying to write a novel.
Well I haven't really written in about a month and a half so it can't be that at the moment. I didn't sleep very much last night. But I'm still a huge fan of my child. Sometimes when he's crying at night I'll go to his cradle and I'll go to try and soothe him but I don't want him to see me because that will wake him up more.
And so he'll be crying and then I'll try and sneak up to his cradle and then I'll look at his face to see what he looks like and I'll make eye contact with me and he smiles. I'm like no dude it is but like go to sleep. I thought you were going to say that he can sense you or hear you and he wakes up and starts crying. But yeah I mean it's very hard to get babies to sleep Hank.
There is no magic to it. I'm very sorry. That's all I can say. I'm stuttering and stumbling because I just feel for you.
It is really hard to go through the world extremely tired. Yeah you know John we actually have several questions from people who have had problems with their baby sleeping which is the first time I've noticed that. Which is fine but we don't want to get there yet. We've got to get to the short poem.
Thank you. I appreciate that. Today's short poem comes from Kobayashi Isa and it's a haiku hank. I know you love haikus.
I really love this haiku. Somebody sent it in. Listen to your hand and John thanks for sending it in. It goes like this.
The Ren earns his living noiselessly. It's good. Very good. It's everything I want a haiku to be.
Hank I have a question for you that's related to the Ren earning its living noiselessly. Are you going to ask how we could earn our living noiselessly because I think that would be really hard because part of what we do is make noise. It's like kind of our thing. Yeah that's what I was going to ask.
Is there any way we could move to sort of a John Cage four minutes and 33 seconds style podcast? Well we could do that once I think. We could put out of just a short poem and then it would just be silence for the rest of the podcast. People would love it.
People would love it. People would love it. Hank I want to read to you a question. Okay.
It comes from Crystal. Hank and I are both very tired. I don't know if you guys should tell. This comes from Crystal who writes Dear John and Hank I have a brand new four week old baby.
When does it stop sucking? Don't get me wrong. She's beautiful and magical and I love her. But it sucks.
Help a mama out. Give me a light at the end of the baby shaped tunnel. Crystal. I do think that when the smiling starts happening that does help quite a lot.
Smiling is great. You know what's even better is like talking once they can really communicate with you. Although you know that comes with its own set of disadvantages. I have a theory that like every part of parenting is both.
Every part of parenting is both difficult and magical and both exhausting and electrifying. And so you just have to kind of ride the waves of it and understand that it's a wave. I do think it gets a lot easier once they start sleeping at night. Which four week old babies usually do not do.
So it gets easier once you start to be able to sleep six or seven hours in a row. Crystal and I hope for you that's around 11 or 12 weeks. It might be longer. But that's my hope for you.
Yeah and in general I will suggest talking to other parents or people who have realistic feelings about this. Oftentimes when I've read parent things like the gloss over the fact that it's really hard and I think that's not the thing to do. Yeah it's really easy to catastrophize when you haven't slept much. The longer you go without sleeping the more minor problems seem to be existential.
I think you are right John. It is very hard. And especially when you are sleep deprived and everything. This morning I had to do the dishes and I was trying to do the dishes but I was so tired and I broke a dish and I truly felt like that was it.
You know? I'd reach the end of my experiment with humanness that my life was over. I just looked at it that the dishes just being like oh my god I've just added 15 minutes to my already busy day. Oh my god.
We've got a somewhat related question correct John that you would like to move on to. We do. David sent us a very long and wonderful email but I'm only going to read the end of it which reads I'm having a baby daughter next month and we haven't been able to pick a name. No we won't use Ryan.
Currently we have it narrowed down to Kira, Elena and Oriella, Ori for short. What is your opinion? We are open to other names that aren't Ryan. First off David I am deeply offended and also you're making a horrible mistake.
I think that I think it's going to be okay John. I think that David can make his own decisions. But what is the mistake you think he's making? No I don't agree at all.
Ori Ori which is a lovely name by the way Oriella or I don't know how to say it but it's a lovely name. Ori A-U-R-I is actually an anagram of the name I'm going to propose for this child R-I-A-N Ryan. Well but there's no N in Ori. Oh I'm not that good at anagrams.
It's funny because you heard a whole book about it. Yeah but I used an anagram generator. I'm not as smart as the kid in that book. Yeah that's the nice thing about writing books about smart people.
You can take all the time to make them smart and it seems like they didn't take any time at all. I guess you could just name the kid R-I-U. It's R-I-R-I-U-R-I. R-I-I-U-R-I-U-R-I-Oo.
What about like ROW. Or just R-I. You know when I was a kid Hank I had a acquaintance whose name I won't actually say. This is one of those names where it's so uncommon that it becomes very easy to google the person if I say their name.
All I'll say is that their name was an amalgam of the two colors in the parents favorite college football team. Oh man. So for instance if it had been the University of Alabama which it wasn't the name might have been like I believe it's the Crimson Crimson and White, so it might have been like a... Christ.
Cremite. That's a bad idea. But the actual name was so much worse than that, but I don't feel like I can out this person, so I can't tell the joke. But anyway, long story short.
We're so tired. We're so tired. Obviously name your daughter Ryan. You couldn't name your child Oriela and then call her Rye for short, and that's kind of like Ryan.
Or just call her Ryan for short. I mean, here's my case, David. When your kid asks inevitably, as they will, in like five to seven years, well, where did my name come from? You're gonna be able to look at that child and you're gonna be able to say, it was an inside joke on the Internet's 237th most popular comedy podcast.
And that's something that that kid is gonna take with them and it's gonna keep them warm on cold nights for the rest of their life. Yeah, and what you can say is it doesn't matter if you're popular, as long as you're funny and aware of the inevitability of your own demise. Memento Mori. We got another question, John.
It's also about children. We're just gonna, I'm picking all the children one. It's not really a question. It comes from Red.
I just wanted to tell you guys that one night when I was crying on the couch with my few weeks old son breastfeeding for the billionth hour, and I realized the baby's umbilical store was gone. The dog was chewing ominously. Seriously, Red. Oh, God, oh boy.
Thanks for that question. Lots of people do, you know, people cook and eat the umbilical cord. Well, I don't know that you can eat the umbilical cord. It's got a lot of connective tissue in it.
It's like fingernail. That was bad. Okay, time to move on. Sorry, I'm so sorry.
We're both very tired, and I feel like I inadequately answered that first question. And I want to say that everyone feels this way and it's terrible for everyone when you have a tiny child and you're not sleeping at all. And it is really hard. And it does one of the things that people did not prepare me for when I was having a kid that like, it is not easy.
It is hard. Hank, I want to read you a question that I need the answer to and I'm hoping you have the answer to it. It comes from Elena. She writes, Dear John and Hank, recently people have been telling me that eggs do not need to go in the refrigerator.
That seems silly to me as I work with them. I said, lies. Oh, eggs do need to go in the refrigerator? Well, I'll explain it.
It's actually kind of complicated. Okay, well, I won't even bother getting to the end of the question, although Elena had a lovely email. But you clearly don't want me to read it because you cut me off by saying lies. Why do you need to refrigerate your eggs?
It depends on where you live, remarkably enough. In the US, we are very careful about salmonella. Maybe because we like to eat our eggs pretty raw here. I don't know if that's the case in other countries, but we do like to not cook our eggs very much.
And so we, like the Department of Agriculture or the USDA, that's the same thing, whoever handles the food regulations in this country, requires that eggs are washed. And so the eggs come out of the chickens and then they get washed off so that there's no stuff on that that might give you a disease. But that also washes off a bunch of proteins that like clog up the pores in the eggs that make eggs last much longer and basically don't require them to be refrigerated. So if you get eggs from your chicken, you don't have to refrigerate those.
You can wash them beforehand or you can basically not wash them at all if you're not so concerned about it. In other countries, eggs are not washed in the same way and so they don't refrigerate eggs. And so sometimes people go to other countries and they say, look, I'll get all these eggs that aren't being refrigerated. Why do we refrigerate our eggs in America?
It's just because we're crazy. No, maybe a little bit. But you can't not refrigerate eggs in America. American eggs do have to be refrigerated.
Well, just another example of American exceptionalism. Our eggs are cleaner than anybody's. We've got the cleanest eggs on Earth and the most refrigerated. Well, we're just trying to keep people alive.
And that's what we decided that was a way to do it. Samanal sucks. I am strongly opposed to Samanal. This next question we have is from Nayala, who asks, dear, green brothers, are like how you avoided the controversy there.
After listening to last week's pod and hearing the fantastic news of Beyonce's pregnancy to twins, it got me thinking. It got me and my wife thinking, how long until everyone alive on the planet is at least distantly related to Beyonce? Like how many generations do we have to make it before we've gotten to the perfect utopia where everyone currently alive is at least a tiny bit Beyonce? This question is very important as my wife and I desperately need some sort of plausible utopia to look forward to in these dark times, Quaffles and Guillowsa.
Well, I have good news and bad news, Hank. I also have good news and bad news. But you go first. Okay, so my bad news is that I'm pretty sure humans won't survive long enough for everyone on Earth to be related to Beyonce.
How long do you think that would take, John? So I know that all people of European descent are related to, are descended from Charlemagne. And also everyone else who was alive back then. I'm not sure that all humans are necessarily...
No, in Europe, I think. Oh, right, not, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know that all living humans are descended from Confucius, and I know that almost all living humans are descended from Muhammad. So it can't have been that long, but I also think those people from back then had a big advantage because the population was smaller.
Whereas, if you look a thousand years into the future, the human population is probably going to, it's pretty big now and it's probably gonna get a little bit bigger and then stabilize and then maybe slowly taper off. So I don't know the answer to this question, but I don't think that humans have a very good chance of existing in 2000 years, which is how long I think it would take. I think in 2000 years, it's a good guess. I mean, the things that are gonna mess this up, though, like the thing that could make it much less, is if there is some kind of apocalyptic event and we lose a lot of people, then it's much easier for us to all be related to each other quite quickly because there will be people.
Only if we make sure that Beyonce's descendants survive, which is key, I mean, obviously we need to prioritize that. It's key to this happening, but also it seems quite likely. I mean, it seems to me that Beyonce's descendants would have an above average chance of surviving just by where they are going to be on the socioeconomic spectrum. Sure.
But also because of just being amazing, I assume. I don't wanna put too much pressure on Beyonce's children. I was gonna say no pressure unborn babies. But I will say that to be clear, we are all distant related to Beyonce.
Like we are all already, like we share so much in common with Beyonce, far more than you could imagine really. We are so very close to being exactly Beyonce. But in addition to that, we are all related to everything on the planet that's alive. So that's not actually that exceptional.
That's true. That we are all related to Beyonce. We are also all related to like bananas. Right, we're significantly closer related to people of our species than we are to bananas.
But yeah, I understand your point. I think it's important to remember that, the main thing that's gonna be difficult about getting all humans to be descended from Beyonce is keeping humans around as a species for another thousand years. So I think if we just make that the focus, it will have this unexpected wonderful side benefit of all of us being descended from Beyonce in just maybe like, I don't know, like 3000 or 4000 short generations. Definitely not generations.
That's a long long long. I'm sorry, two or 300 generations. I think I'm so tired. I know that I'm gonna be very tired.
I have to ask you an important question. I'm not good at anagramming. I'm not good at any part of, I'm not good at any part of, I was gonna say video blogging, but that's not even what we're doing right now. So my important question is how long do you think it will be until all living humans are descended from at least one minion?
Do you mean like the minions in the movie Minions? Mm-hmm. Okay, so I've got good news and bad news, and it's actually the same news, and it's just in how you look at it like a lot of news, which is that minions are not real. I also think they don't seem to be, they don't seem to reproduce sexually.
Is a sentence that has created an awful image in my brain? Yeah, I mean, I wanna go back in time to the part of life where I'd never considered minion reproduction. What I like to think of is like the Hausian days when America was definitely not compromised by a lot of your Putin, and I didn't have to think about minion sex. I wanna write a whole book on minion sex now.
I just wanna know how it works. Please don't. Speaking of John. Yeah.
Speaking of, here's a question from Ruby. Who asks, do you hear Hank and John? I've noticed that a different household has different norms for toilet use during the night. In my house, we just flush, like all times of the day.
But at my friends' houses, they don't, so that no one is woken from the noise. My question is if I'm staying at someone else's house, should I flush or not? It makes me uncomfortable to leave it un-flushed, but then again, perhaps I should just do what is the norm in that household. Thank you for making the podcast Ruby.
So this, I wanna answer this question because it brings up a question that I'm curious about. This is someone else's toilet, definitely. But the water in the toilet is kind of public property. I understand that it's been paid for, but it's kind of a public service.
But the thing I put in the toilet, that's mine. I made that. So where's the line between what is mine and what is not mine? Like is the toilet handle, the toilet handle is not mine.
So should I not touch the toilet handle because that's the not mine area. But I'm not trying to push a toilet handle. I'm trying to eliminate the existence of the thing that is mine. And so the toilet handle is just sort of a mechanism through which I would like to do that.
Yeah, I don't think anybody would ever welcome you into their house and say also don't touch any of the things that are mine in this house. Because then you'd have to be like, wait, but I'm currently at my feet or on the floor. What do I do with my feet? So I don't think you have to worry about that.
I think the answer here is pretty clear, which is I can't remember the exact rhyme from Campank, but perhaps you will. If it's yellow, just stay mellow. If it's brown, flush it down. If it's yellow, let it mellow.
If it's brown, flush it down. I agree that you can't leave a doaker there for somebody to find in the morning. Definitely not. Right.
No, I think if it's yellow 100% of the time, you just let it mellow. Well, I think that's probably good advice. I believe that, by the way, in general, there's so much unnecessary flushing of toilets in the United States. This is a somewhat off-topic rant, but the amount of unnecessary flushing of toilets in the US is just baffling to me.
And that's spoken from the perspective of a committed and extreme germaphobe. It's just ridiculous how often we flush after a small pee. It's just a little bit of pee. Now, if you have a dog or a small child that drinks toilet water, then maybe yes, then maybe.
But other than that, there is no reason. Anyway, let's move on, Hank. I'm going to otherwise I'm going to lose my time. No, I have an addition.
I have an addition to make, which is that if it, I think that rhyme needs an addition. If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down. If it's yellow and poop or brown and pee, you go see it.
It's OK to have a little bit of somewhat brown pee on occasion as long as you're dehydrated. But honestly, if you're getting your health advice from Dear Hank and John, you've made some terrible life choices. Oh, God. OK, John, you got another question for me.
Not really. I think I can find one. But the answer to it did I have one already? It's no.
No, I didn't. Oh, this question is from Adam. I thought this was pretty interesting, Hank. He writes, hello, best brothers.
That's too high of a compliment, Adam. Unfortunately, we're not able to accept it because of the Gregory brothers. And also, the Wright brothers. I mean, without them, we wouldn't have air travel.
Don't get me wrong. I think we're extraordinary. But let's not blow it out of proportion, Adam. Anyway, sometimes I feel like the only way to have an impact on the world at large is to first become rich and then use my fiscal power to help people or influence government.
However, until I acquire wealth, what are some ways to help steer this great American ship toward kinder, gentler, and more accepting destinations, receptively yours, Adam? So Hank, you don't know a lot of rich people. Like in your day to day life, you don't like hang out with rich people. I am like not to brag an anthropologist of rich people.
I hang out with a bunch of rich people. And I am like a student of their ways. And Adam, I will tell you a secret about rich people, which is that rich people also believe that they need to get rich in order to have an influence on the world at large. But they find, as they get richer, as if by magic, that they are never quite rich enough yet to have that influence that they're waiting to have.
So you're already there, my friend. You're just on a hamster wheel that is long as you believe that one day you will be rich enough to make a difference. You will just stay on that hamster wheel trying to get richer and richer and richer and richer and you will find over time that you have more things to spend money on. You'll start to think, oh man, I actually need to belong to this country club.
And then if you get stupid rich, you'll start to think, you know what I need? What would be better for everyone including the world? Would be if I had a private jet or a yacht or whatever. Oh my god.
If you worship money, it will never be enough. Whatever you worship, it will never be enough. And so that is my theory. I think if you try to make money to make a difference in the end, you're just gonna stay on the hamster wheel.
Yeah, so try to worship making a difference rather than making money. And, but like Johnny do see that like, there are a lot of super rich folk that do have this oversized influence on politics. Yes. There are certainly more rich folks than choose to do that.
It's interesting that a lot of rich people choose to do other things with their money, whether that's, you know, make more money with it or do good things with it or, you know, like get it put it into like trying to get candid selected. But I don't even know that that works that well. No, I don't think it does. I think like spending money to try to influence politics has not been particularly effective in the United States in the last 50 years.
Now I do think that you can influence like state and local politics a lot, but yeah, I sort of buying campaign ads doesn't work. I think lobbying works. Yeah. But yeah, I just think in general, if I think you said it perfectly, if the focus is not on how can I get money so I can change the world or how can I get money so I can make life better for the people around me, but instead on how can I make life better for the people around me, it's a much more fulfilling way of living.
And I was, I know I was like being way oversimplifying in my little rant, so I wanna be clear about that. I do really, really believe that it's just never, it's never enough if it's the end. Like, so make, like Hank said, make the end something that never having enough of it will be good. Hank, is there an inherent meaning to human life or is it constructed by us?
Is this a question from a listener, John, or is this just, you've decided to ask the big one? No, I just wonder what you think. Is there like an inherent objective meaning to human life or are we just here to turn oxygen into carbon dioxide? Well, certainly not the second, because you can't say is there an inherent objective meaning or is there no meaning at all?
Because there's a second thing. I think that there could be a case to be made that there is an inherent objective meaning to life and which is the continuation of life. That is a, it is a natural process. It is a, it is beyond natural, it is a physical process.
The way that life is a physical process is very complicated and cool. And I like, I want to get into it, but not right now. But I think that there's also something to be said that like if you want to, if you want to create a sort of like an easily objectifiable purpose for life, you can. There are a number of things that you can put it on.
I like to put it on complexity. I think that like the, the work that is being done by all organisms, but by humans better than any organism is like organization of things, like putting, putting molecules together in ways that would not happen without a life to put them together in that way. Fighting against entropy basically, like the, kind of the goal against life is to kind of catch entropy on its way down and be like, while you're crashing down toward a state of disorder, we're gonna do something interesting with this. And so there's like, that's like a way of talking about the purpose of life in a way that like is fundamental to physics.
But I think that really it's all internal to humans. And I, but that doesn't make it not real. Right. And I, like, so yeah, I mean, like I think that we both agree that there is a purpose to life, but it is decided upon by the things that are doing the living.
Right, one of the things that, and there's nothing, that doesn't make it less real. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is how there is something beautiful and heroic and fascinating about the process of humans, and also other animals, but especially humans making something in a place where previously existed nothing. Like that's what a great story or a great work of art or a great poem does, right? It's like it creates inside of you an experience or a space where there was previously nothing.
Like takes, there's a line from William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech that I don't want to butcher, so I'm going to Google it. Because I'm no dummy. Right at the beginning of this Nobel Prize speech, the greatest Nobel Prize speech I think in the history of the universe, Faulkner said, I feel that this award was made not to me as a man, but to my work of life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory, and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. And that process of making things from essentially nothing, making something that didn't exist before, that is a cool thing that all humans do.
And we do it like directly. Actually other animals do it too, but humans are really good at it. We do it directly into each other all the time. Like that's what communication is, is like this creation of a thing and like our conception of ourselves even and of the people that we know well enough to conceive of is pretty cool.
I mean it like. I'm starting to feel a little hopeful. I know me too. Good job, John.
Today's podcast is brought to you by the meaning of life. The meaning of life, we think there is one. That's fantastic. It's also brought to you by the P and the toilet.
Just leave it. It's fine. P and the toilet just leave it. That's a good song.
Did you write that just now? Oh yeah. It's part of my new ad campaign that I'm working on for P and the toilet. We really need better market incentives to preserve natural resources.
And so I actually think that's a pretty good idea. And of course today's podcast is also brought to you by Beyonce's Descendants. Beyonce's Descendants soon enough, hopefully God willing all of us. Oh, so this podcast is brought to you by the weird lumpy stump left behind when your baby's umbilical cord falls off.
It's real gross and your dog loves it. It's probably my least favorite sponsor we've ever had. It's right up there with mating minions. And the least fun things that have ever happened on our podcast.
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Now available in Canada too, that's q-u-i-n-c-e dot 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.
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With new subscription only, while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. This question is from Nicole John, who asked deerhankajon, I'm trying to write high fantasy. I wanted to talk a little bit more about creating things in your brain.
I thought a lot about the magic system and the history and the big ideas of the world, but I keep running into minuscule problems, like what they eat and how they mark time passing and how do they get from place to place? The real problem is I feel like in order to create a world, I need to know sociology, psychology, history, biology, astronomy, if I'm making a planet or moon, politics, basically everything. So my question is, how would I go about learning absolutely everything about how people and the world works? Rebel forever, Nicole.
People are taking the sign off seriously and I love it. Yeah, I love that people are really trying to find a good sign off, although you'll never find one better than Memento Mori. I mean, ending all of your emails Memento Mori, it puts you into a next level of person. Like it just means that everybody you know is gonna be like, oh wow, that's my Memento Mori friend.
Anyway, my mentor and first editor, Eileen Cooper, who worked with me at Bookless Magazine and helped me write and rewrite looking for Alaska many times before it was ever published, used to say that the hardest thing about writing is getting a character to walk through a door. And there are times when you can be paralyzed by the complexity of trying to use language to get another person to imagine walking through a door. You almost like get stuck inside of that. And I don't write high fantasy.
I'm not good at world building. Almost all of my novels are set in places where I have lived. But I do think that there's an element of trying, when you're writing, of trying to see it from the perspective of the reader, rather than from your own perspective, what's gonna make the reader feel like this is real? What's gonna immerse them in the world?
Which are the details, whether it's psychology or astronomy or whatever, that's gonna make it feel real to them rather than being obsessed with trying to make it as real as you can for yourself? That's a hard line. But I think like that active empathy of trying to imagine the reader's experience is like the essential thing about writing. Yeah, Patrick Rothfuss talks about this and has talked to me about it several times just cause I've been interviewing him for something or another thing cause we're friends.
And his advice is like, you don't have to talk about all the things you have to talk about the things that you know well. And so he talks about the fact that he's kind of obsessed with currency, like in his normal life, he's obsessed with how money works. And so the money is a really fleshed out thing in the Kingkiller Chronicles. Like they talk about making change and all these different countries have different money and they have to like figure out how to like have one kind of money work in another place.
But like, you know, for example, Georgia R. Martin clearly doesn't know anything about how planets work because oftentimes things will happen on the planet that doesn't make any sense. And that's fine because it's fantasy. And like maybe there's some way that this like the winter would last much longer sometimes than it does other times.
But like that doesn't, it doesn't like make sense based on how we think about how planets work. But it doesn't really matter. He doesn't really go into why the winter gets longer some years than other years. Or why winter can go on for years.
He just says that it does and that's a thing. And that's okay to not have that part of the world be fleshed out because like the politics of that world are extraordinarily fleshed out and that makes it seem real. So you have to like focus on one thing and you don't have to like be like, all right, well I'll have to make a new kind of animal for them to eat because they have to eat food but I don't want it to be a deer. I'll just have it be a deer.
Right, in general. The magic of world building for me, like the way that I learn about it is from reading about it. Like the way that I learn about good world building is from reading books with good world building. In general I think that reading is such a good apprenticeship for any writer.
So I would look at your favorite high fantasy novels and I would see how are they doing it. What is the stuff that they're glossing over and I don't even think about it or worry about it as a reader because they're focusing on this other stuff so well and it gives it that granularity and that texture that makes it feel like you're inside of the story and feel like these are real people. And a lot of times for me, like what really makes a novels world building stand out is its character development. Like I will believe almost anything and never even occurred to me until just now that winter can't be long hang.
Like that never crossed my mind. Because I'll believe almost anything if the characters are developed well and really like what sets George R.R. Martin or Patrick Rothfuss apart from the vast majority of authors including me is character building. Or you know another, before we go, another writer who I would highly recommend on the world building character building front is N.K.
Jemisin. Have you read any N.K. Jemisin books? I have not.
Oh my God, so good. And I don't even, as you know, I'm not huge on the SF fantasy world but oh my gosh. Well, I gotta write it down because I'm looking for good stuff right now. But boy, do I want something to read that isn't the news.
John, do you have news from AFC Wimbledon? I do Hank. And you know, it is complicated news. It's, so here's what happened.
Okay. A couple of things happened since we last visited, checked in with AFC Wimbledon. First off, they played Charlton. Charlton Athletic, so Charlton's coach is a guy named Carl Robinson.
And he used to be the coach of the franchise currently playing in Milton Keynes. And he's said some very disrespectful things about AFC Wimbledon over the years. He's been very much kind of like a Bond villain in the way that he talks about the club. And he's just, he's an extremely unlikable person.
I don't like to say, you know, like judge people, but like he is like not liked by a wide swath of the footballing world. And AFC Wimbledon, we're losing one deal to Charlton in the 94th minute when Tom Elliott, England's greatest lyric poet and also AFC Wimbledon's current best-breaker hit a stunning, tying goal, thank goodness, to tie that game. And then in the aftermath of that game, something was said by someone to Carl Robinson and Carl Robinson reacted very violently and had to be restrained and, yeah, I don't know. So there's a lot of hullabaloo going on with it.
A lot of people discussing if the person who said something, I don't even know who it was, somebody who worked with the club on a volunteer basis should be suspended or fired or whatever. And a lot of other people saying, but Carl Robinson is a Bond villain and sometimes you have to say bad things to Bond villains. It's complicated. I don't, I don't think it does the club any good obviously.
To verbally abuse opponents. But also, even the way Carl Robinson talks about AFC Wimbledon and interviews about that, it just makes me so mad. I can barely focus. I'm so like, I kind of get it.
And I'm not somebody who got my club taken away by these jackasses anyway. Then on Valentine's Day, AFC Wimbledon played Coventry City who were currently last in League One and they're last by a lot. And it was a home game, which is the kind of game that you have to win when you're playing the last place team. And we were down one-nil in the 94th minute.
Again, again, and again, it got bailed out this time by a goal from Paul Robinson, a center back who I believe is 117 years old now. So it was a very impressive performance from him. But it does mean that AFC Wimbledon has slipped a little further back. Now, after 30 games of the 46-game season, they have 39 points and are currently 14th.
The critical number is that the team that is in the relegation spot at the moment, the last four teams all go down. And currently, Barry or Burry, it's spelled like the word like to bury a human. All these place names are made up. But they're in 21st place on 31 points, having played 32 games.
Basically Hank, if at the end of the season, at the end of the 46-game season, AFC Wimbledon has 50 points, they will probably stay up. If they have 52 points, they will almost definitely stay up. So the key is to get 13 points from the remaining 15 games. That should be doable, but tying Coventry City 1-1 in the last second of the game is the kind of development that makes me a little nervous going into the last part of the season here.
I understand your trepidation, John. I wish the boys all the best. Thank you, we appreciate that. What's the Mars news?
You know what the United Arab Emirates are, right, John? I do. I actually read this Mars news. Hank, I am getting so good at Mars news.
Well, they, as you might know, have a lot of money. And so in a weird way, it's sort of like a hotbed for what can be done if you have a lot of money to throw around, all that good oil money that's coming in right now. And a little bit of like, boy, we should probably figure out how to grow our economy while we have this money, so that because someday we won't have it anymore, because oil runs out. And they have launched a sort of announced, like sort of a, like it's the plans, it's the actual plans to build a city on Mars by 2117.
Now I know that's nowhere near 2028. It's quite a distance from 2028. It's the kind of time when I will definitely be dead. But it's, you know, it's- I wouldn't say definitely.
That's right. It's positive. What do we be 140? I'll be a hundred and thirty seven.
Yeah, I mean, I don't love your odds. I would say that it's under 1%. But I bet that by 2117, somebody will be alive at the age of 137. Really?
That's not a nice thing to think. I thought you were going to say somebody will be alive. And I was like, yeah, that's my brother's pessimism. Come on out.
I bet you that in 2017, someone will still be alive. But Shik Muhammad, the Dubai ruler, on Tuesday announced the Mars 2117 project, which aims to build a miniature city on the planet Mars by one within 100 years. Also the vice president and prime minister of the UAE, Shik Muhammad. He said, they were currently among the world's top nine investors in space science, which is true.
It gets a long tail there. In a series of tweets accompanied by photos of what it describes as the planet's first miniature city, he said 2117 Mars proudest and to build knowledge and scientific capabilities involve the con conversion of local universities into research centers. The project launched the world government summit. We'll focus on parallel research into exploring the means of mobility, housing, energy, as well as speeding up the time it takes to travel to the planet.
So there we go. Go off. All right. I mean, I would love to see a city on Mars in 2117, mostly because it would mean that I'm still alive.
Yeah, no, I would definitely also love to see it. I'd love to see anything in 2117. I don't know. Yeah, I do a little bit about my quality of life if I'm alive at 137 years old.
Maybe it'll be OK. The onsays twins will only be 99. They've got a chance. They've got a good chance.
They might go to Mars. They might go to Mars. They've got a chance. Hank, do you think there's any possibility of you going to Mars?
No, no, no, no, no. No, definitely not. All right. I have too many disorders.
I wouldn't be among the first, the cream of the crop. Yeah. They don't need anybody who has to use the toilet as much as me. I feel like having all sort of colitis on Mars would not be fun.
No, no. I think I want to say where the medical infrastructure is. Yeah, yeah. I've been thinking about that recently because I've been thinking about lovely places where I could move because it's just so cold here all the time and also flat.
But then I'm always torn because I have a doctor here and a dentist and a good relationship with the hospitals, which provide excellent care. Anyway, Hank, that's the oldest person thing I've ever said. I have officially entered late middle age. Hank, before we go, I just have to share a few quick corrections.
First, in our last episode, I said that AFC Wimbledon had been promoted five times in their brief and illustrious history. As several people pointed out that in fact, they have been promoted six times in their brief and illustrious history because I was forgetting about last year. Also, in a recent episode, you mentioned the twin astronauts Mark and Scott who took part in his study on the effects of spending extended period of time in outer space on the human body by sending one of them into space. Hannah pointed out that you got the twin name Mark Kelly was not the twin that spent a year in space.
It was Scott. Sorry Scott. And also Mark. Also, Lang wrote in to say that in a recent episode of the podcast, we said that mammoths and mastodons have hooves.
They don't. They have feet like elephants. And then Lang sent in a very attractive photograph of the bones of mammoth feet, which we will put on the patreon. I mean, you can just picture the feet from the bones.
I made me very glad that I was not alive during the same time that they were alive when humans were not at the top of the food chain. I love being at the top of the food chain. And lastly, about 500,000 people wrote in on the topic of what would happen if gravity was suspended from Earth for 15 seconds. And I have to say, the answer is varied wildly.
Yes, Calvin though, I've been looked at this, and I tried to figure out who was most correct. And I feel like Calvin showed his work and centered on sort of a consensus area, which is that the height, the fall would range from around 4.4 meters to around 1.6 meters if you sort of, like, the Earth turned away from under you as you floated out, depending on where you are on the Earth. Though, of course, you were at the pole. You wouldn't move at all.
And 4.4 is enough to hurt you pretty bad. I will say, though, that if you're in a building, you're only going to go as high as the ceiling. You'll just hit the ceiling and you can like push yourself back down. So that's good.
So that, from what I have learned from this exercise, is don't go outside. Calvin uses the sign off protons and pulsars. And we're going to put the math that he or she, I think, has done on the Patreon so that you can see and compare notes to see if we are correct at what would happen if gravity turned off for 15 seconds. OK, Hank, what have we learned today?
Well, John, we learned that you have to refrigerate your eggs if you're in America because of weird stuff. We learned that David should definitely name his child Ryan, or possibly just Ry, or possibly. Ooh. I just came up with that one, but I like it.
And we learned that we are all ready related to Beyonce, as well as to minions somehow. I think. Not related to minions, they are not real. Hank, I mean, we learned one thing for this podcast is that we were going to stop talking about minions because if they were real, we're going to treat them as fictional characters forever and after, period, end of story.
That is the one thing that we learned from this podcast. I'm not even going to continue with it, what do we learn bit? Because that is the thing that we learned. We have learned the thing that we learned.
We should be treated as a fiction, and like many other fictions, as a fiction that does not reproduce. Thank you for listening to our podcast. Literally, if you listen to our podcast, do not do what I just did. I don't even tell you what I just did.
But don't do it. I used to be involved. I used to be involved in it, and I did a thing you shouldn't do. Don't talk to us.
Obviously, never use Google in a situation like that. Anyway, moving on, you can email us at hankandjohnatgmail.com. We never talk about minions on this podcast ever again. We talked about minions over the last time.
This is a demenient podcast from here on out. You can email us at hankandjohnatgmail.com. You can send us your tweets as well if you want, with the hashtag your hank and John, and you can tweet us directly on John Green Hank is Hank Green. This podcast is produced by Rosie Hall-Frohausen, shared out of Gibbs and our editors, Nicholas Jenkins, Victoria Bonjourner's Ahead of Community and Communications, and our music is by the great Gunnarola, and as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.