415: Bombarded by Space Frogs

You're listening to a complexly podcast.

Hello, and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

Or as I prefer to think of it, dear John and Hank.

It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

John, there's this dog.

It's barking like 500 times a day in my neighborhood.

I mean, I don't know exactly.

That's just my rough estimate.

Ah,

because it's going rough, rough, rough.

You know, he's been barking 500 times a day and peeing in the house at least once a day is potato.

Potato does not shy away from letting his opinion be known.

Potato does not conform to the expectations of the social order.

That's not who he is as a dog.

Can you ever escape the expectations of the social order a little bit here and there?

What do you do?

Not really.

What do you do to show that social order who's boss?

God, I mean, not much.

You biked to the airport.

You biked to the airport.

That's showing the social order who's boss.

There were a lot of questions in our inbox about how exactly I biked to

the airport.

From Alex, for instance, can we have details on how John biked to the airport?

Where did your luggage go?

Where did you leave your bike?

Did you lock it at the airport?

Did you have to collect it on the way back?

All these are great questions, Alex.

Yeah, you didn't just show the social order who's boss.

You showed the infrastructure who's boss.

That's right.

I'm not living with your infrastructure.

No, we pre-parked a car at the economy lot of the airport with our bags in it, and then we biked to that car and then took the bags out and put the bikes in.

You have raised way more questions.

I feel like that was more work.

Nope.

It wasn't more work.

How did this make things better?

Because we were escaping 400,000 human beings.

The largest non-religious gathering of human beings on Earth, the Indy 500, we were escaping on our bikes so that we didn't have to deal with traffic.

Oh, the traffic.

That's right.

Specifically the Indy 500 traffic.

Which is the worst, literally the worst traffic, non-religious traffic in the world.

Oh, so, and that was literally you escaping the social order.

Yes, I refused to conform to car culture and instead biked to a car.

To a car that I had previously drove to the airport.

Which actually is not a bad summary of of my relationship to the social order, which is that even when I'm not conforming to it, I am a little bit.

Yeah, for sure.

I don't want to, but I do.

Like, I think of myself as this, you know, like I'm an artistic character and I'm a little bit depressive and forlorn and

I'm critical of the social order and everything.

And I live outside of it because I'm an artiste.

But then I also have like exactly two kids and live in the suburbs and have a lawn and everything.

Yeah, you know how I defy it largely through foods.

So, do you know about reverse quesadillas?

No, is that where the cheese is on the outside?

That's where the cheese is on the outside.

What's that going to be on the inside?

Tortilla?

You'd think, but that actually doesn't make any sense.

A reverse quesadilla is when you take a slice of Swiss cheese and you just grab with it a handful of instant mashed potatoes.

Uh-huh.

And then you eat that with the instant mashed potatoes on the inside and the Swiss cheese as a roll on the outside.

That's what I call a reverse quesadilla.

And it's very simple.

Well, that is certainly outside the social order.

That's for sure.

Yeah, nobody ever thought that would be a thing people did.

Yeah, how do I resist the social order's expectations of me?

I really don't.

And the other thing is that even though I'm an artist and everything, I want the social order to like me and think highly of me.

I want, you know, like my neighbors to think like, well, there's a stand-up guy who takes out the trash every Tuesday.

Do you ever look at your

ranked quotes on like Wikiquote, see where the best thing you've ever said is?

Can I do that right now?

You can.

What is WikiLeaks?

And

this is very, I don't know if it's, it's not, maybe not WikiQuote.

It's like, just type in John Green quotes.

The first one that comes up is: people die.

It's true in novels and it's true in life.

Dying is one of the very few things we all do.

To deny or ignore the omnipresent reality of death seems to me a disservice to human beings.

Where are you?

Are you on WikiQuote?

Yeah, that's the first thing that it says.

What I met was Goodreads.

Goodreads has them ranked by likes.

And with 46,000 likes,

that's way more than mine.

You know what it is?

What?

As he read, I fell in love, the way you fall asleep, slowly and then all at once.

It's a banger.

I go to see if my version of that quote shows up on my quote page on Goodreads.

Yes, I like your version of that quote even more, actually.

The next one, I did know when I was writing that I was going to be widely quoted.

Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together in less than until all living humans read the book.

That's like such a quote for book lovers that

I knew book lovers would like it.

My top one has 424 likes and I didn't even write it.

Oh, that's my favorite kind.

Who wrote it?

I don't know.

It's an internet meme.

Behold the field in which I grow my f ⁇ .

Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren.

Now we got now the editor has to use their magical bleep skills.

It's true.

You do have to bleep that, but I was quoting a quote that was not even my quote.

It's just, it was a character in my book quoting an internet meme, and everybody thinks I wrote it.

I wonder how many you have to go to me before you find one that I didn't say.

My fifth one down is also something I didn't say.

I had a very happy childhood.

I just wasn't a very happy child.

That's a John Green quote.

That's a John Green quote.

I said that to me in the car once and I was like, I'm taking that and putting that in my book.

And I was bummed because I kind of wanted to use it in one of my books because it is a banger of a line.

Yeah.

I don't really see any that aren't me.

Lots of people quote, quote me incorrectly on Tumblr, but I don't see any of the most voted ones as

incorrect quotes.

I found it here pretty far down my list, their voice came out of the watch, slow, and then all at once, like ketchup.

The people who knew that I was referencing John Green in that moment.

Thank you.

Yeah, a lot of people did.

That was

such an author wanting to conform to the social order thing to go to your page and see what people liked about what you did.

So that is what we do.

Well, I mean, we're going to conform to the expectations of our podcast listeners because that's what we do by answering questions from our listeners, beginning with this one from Bea, who writes, hello frogs are quite small sadly this means that they would burn up on re-entry if they were flying toward the earth at a great speed from outer space they're quite small and would likely be too small for nasa to even notice how then do we know that earth is not constantly being bombarded by space frogs how many space frogs would there have to be for us to notice space pumpkins and space penguins be well i don't know that we would How big is this frog?

One of the

frog size.

I think the issue is that there's no way a frog could live in outer space.

Ah, well,

that's an outlandish statement.

You say that now.

Well, I guess if the frog had a little frog spacesuit, the frog spacesuit

could live in outer space for a while.

Yeah, if it was like a hyper-intelligent frog and like billions of them were headed to Earth from outer space, would we even know?

And I think the answer is probably not.

I've gotten distracted by the fact that there's a spider on my monitor, but he's going to live his life and I'm going to live mine.

Is that okay?

That's fine.

I think that we'd be able to see the frogs.

I think that when we see shooting stars they're smaller than many frogs so frogs are quite small but some frogs are not that those are like baseball sized i think that if a baseball sized frog hit the atmosphere we would definitely see that baseball sized frog okay well but but they might not look that different from a normal meteorite but i bet if we're getting hit by a lot of them yeah then eventually we'd notice but if there's like one a day yeah no that's that's just background noise wow so the space frogs could be trying to reach out to us burning up on re-entry over and over again and we we would have no way of knowing.

No way of knowing, over and over again.

And also, can you prove a negative?

Like,

you can't, like, is this happening?

Is this not happening?

It's very hard.

Yeah, it's hard to prove a negative.

The whole space could be filled with frogs, and we wouldn't be able to detect them.

For sure.

Yeah.

And by filled, I mean, you know, like one for every couple square miles of space, cubic miles.

Well, there's something sort of satisfying about knowing that at least if it was a bullfrog, we'd see it as a shooting star.

Hank, I got to ask you this question.

It's about our Uncle Mike.

You know, Uncle Mike.

Yeah, sure.

We got an Uncle Mike question.

I did an event

in Birmingham, and Uncle Mike came and somebody said, Is Uncle Mike here?

One of the podcast listeners was there and said, Is Uncle Mike there?

And I answered the question because he was there.

Uncle Mike, I got to visit with Uncle Mike.

It was great.

And two things about Uncle Mike that we know, of course, longtime listeners of the pod know, is that Uncle Mike does not use unnecessary words.

Unlike us.

Unlike us.

He's the opposite of us in many ways.

But also, when Uncle Mike is done attending a meeting, he leaves the meeting, which is the most heroic behavior I've ever seen in my entire life.

When Uncle Mike has decided the meeting is over, that meeting is over for Uncle Mike.

It can keep going for other people, but it's over for Uncle Mike.

That's defying the social order, right there.

That is defying the social order in the most beautiful, heroic way I can personally imagine.

Saying no to a meeting in the middle of a meeting is, I mean,

it's all of my wishes and hopes and dreams for my future.

So anyway, we got this great email from Emily who writes, Dear John and Hank, my my husband and I live in Birmingham and attended John's book event tonight for Everything is Tuberculosis.

We're longtime listeners of the pod, and we did not put it together until now that we go to church with Uncle Mike.

I met somebody recently who knows Uncle Mike.

Well, I mean, lots of people know Uncle Mike.

He's like, he and our aunt Gillian are wonderful, wonderful people and like really important philanthropists in Birmingham.

Can I do that?

And actually, I don't know if I've told you this story, but it's kind of amazing.

So I was having a meeting with the executive director of a science museum.

And he found out that before he did like a little research on Min, he was like, we have something in common.

I was also born in Birmingham and I worked there for a long time.

I worked at the science museum there.

Great science museum.

And then he said the most Birmingham sentence possible, which is, now, I'm sorry for saying this, but what's your mother's maiden name?

Oh, yeah.

We get a lot of that.

Get a lot of that in Birmingham.

And I said,

don't answer.

Don't answer.

Don't give away the clue to our credit cards.

That's why I said it.

And then he immediately named several members of our family.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, all of them.

That's how Birmingham works for you, man.

Yeah.

They're like, they know our cousin Braxton.

They know our Uncle Mike.

They know our Uncle Bill.

They know our Aunt Fran.

They know everybody.

So anyway, Emily also knows Uncle Mike and says, here's our question.

How can we all channel more of Uncle Mike and our approach to life?

We would ask him, but we all know he's a man of few words.

Sincerely, Emily.

We should.

Next time you're with Uncle Mike, can you just bust out your like voice memo on the iPhone and ask that question.

Yeah.

Whatever, whatever three words you want to search.

We don't like, we don't want like Uncle Mike surrounded by paparazzi at church, you know, like people coming up to him, asking him for advice.

I don't know, John,

how to live a good life, but I know that I'm not doing it quite right.

Oh, same.

I mean, I at least have an idea in my, my, my, uh,

my quiver.

called forgiveness.

You don't even have that.

What?

Yeah.

I have forgiveness.

People forgive.

I forgive.

What are you talking about?

Are you talking about?

You don't have forgiveness from on high, though.

Oh.

That sweet, sweet, unearned grace.

Well, I don't want, I don't want that.

That's too, that's too much.

That's too much for you.

Yeah.

Okay, fair enough.

Fair enough.

Here's what we know.

We know from decades of research, almost 100 years at this point of happiness studies.

Like we started studying happiness almost 100 years ago in a scientific way.

And we know what delivers, which is personal betterment and community.

Yeah.

We know that.

Which Uncle Mike is great at.

I mean, that's the thing.

Uncle Mike has never stopped.

He's a church.

He's never stopped working on himself.

He's never stopped deepening his relationships with his family.

And he's never stopped, you know, going to those places that help him build community, whether that's work or church or whatever.

Yeah.

And I just, I am particularly,

I don't know, I think that there are lots of lots of elements of our society as it currently exists that alienate you from community,

that take you away from that thing that we know is the thing that delivers happiness.

Whether that's the sort of the weight that we ascribe to those interactions now, or it is, is the sort of the value that we place on economic

creation and all that stuff.

Or if it's like how exposed we are always to every giant problem that the world contains.

And so how could my community matter when X and Y and Z are all happening at the same time?

Right, right, right.

Can I tell you what I tweeted today?

Oh, is it going to be relevant?

It's relevant, I think.

I think it might be my last tweet.

And it's not on Twitter, of course.

It's on Blue Sky.

But I just, I feel less and less drawn.

to tweeting at the moment.

But today I had a good tweet.

I tweeted, every day I got to remind myself that when Christ said to feed the hungry, he wasn't talking about the algorithm.

Yeah, we're all hungry for the algorithm, but it's not, I don't think it's delivering, John.

No, but I'm trying to feed it as much as I'm trying to be fed by it.

And I find myself feeding it in ways that are unfulfilling for me and also like getting fed in ways that are unfulfilling for me.

Yeah, I don't know, though.

There are fulfilling parts.

Totally.

And like, this is something, one of the questions I had in Birmingham that I thought was a really good question was, how do you reconcile the fact that so much good advocacy and activism and community happens on the social internet with the fact that the social internet is a driving force in increasing loneliness, disconnection, polarization, etc.

Yeah.

And I didn't have a good answer for that.

People were asking you that question or you were asking it to yourself?

That was one of the questions I got in Birmingham and I don't have a good answer for it.

I had to ask myself that question all the time, but I feel like no one ever asks me that question because it was too mean.

Yeah, right.

It's like saying like, hey, I think your wife's work might have been bad.

Bad?

I have a long document of video ideas and one of them that's been on there for like over a year is called Am I Cigarettes?

Yeah, Am I Cigarettes?

It's a great video title for a Vlogbrothers video.

I'm worried about whether or not I'm cigarettes.

Yeah, I am also worried about whether I'm cigarettes or am I filtered cigarettes?

You know,

where people are like, well, no, cigarettes are bad.

Well, you might as well do it with the vlog brothers.

Look at these guys.

They're not so bad.

Yeah.

It's definitely better than the alternative.

Yeah, maybe we're Nicorette, you know, where people, where it's still not great for you.

And like, hopefully, it's getting people off some of the hard stuff.

But we're not.

I don't think we're Nicorette yet, but

I think we're thinking about it.

We're thinking about becoming Nicorette.

We're on a journey of Nicorette meaning.

Yeah, I'm like, I'm making this prompt journal that's all about how do you connect with people and go outside.

Yeah.

Making, making,

Maybe making a little less TikTok,

a little more long conversations with, I really want to do a long conversations series.

Oh, yeah, that's a good idea, Hank.

There aren't any of those on the internet right now.

We don't have any podcasts or conversations between an internet celebrity and an expert.

I don't even want to talk to experts.

I just want to talk about interesting stuff, but I don't know.

Look, I don't know.

Well, I would submit that you have a long conversation podcast where you talk about interesting stuff every week.

I know, I know.

And we're doing it.

This is the second week in a row we've done it, almost like it's a weekly podcast.

I know.

I was going to say, maybe make our weekly podcast weekly again.

Maybe that's

make weekly weekly again.

Yeah.

All right.

We got to get to this question from Violet.

Okay.

Violet has an important question.

She's two.

Okay.

She writes, Dear John and Hank, do fish have bums?

Oh, Violet,

I have great news.

I have.

Yes, great news.

And also no.

Oh, I was going to say a hard no.

Well, this is the thing.

What is a bum?

What is a bum?

You take the yes.

I'll take the no.

We'll treat it as a like a policy debate.

I'm steel manning, yes, fish has bumps.

Correct.

I'm not saying that this is my actual personal opinion, but I'm going to pretend that it is.

Right.

A bum is where the poop comes from.

Yeah.

And they got a place where the poop comes from.

It's called a cloaca, and

it's a hole that they got where the poop comes from.

And there's one fish, Violet, if you could believe this, where the cloaca sits right up behind its head.

so it poops like right out of the back of its head.

And that's really weird.

So you're saying that just to be clear, that the bum is on the head of the fish.

The bum is on the head.

And that's a bum, even though it's on the head.

Head bum, because it's where the poop comes from.

Now, Violet, this is a great example of how not to debate.

When you're debating someone, you don't offer up an example that definitely disproves your point.

Bum.

Okay.

Violet, turn to your mom and ask ask if a bum is where the poop comes from or not.

Well, it is true that

all human bums are where,

not all, many human bums are where the poop comes from.

Okay?

That is true, Violet.

That is very, very true.

That doesn't mean that everywhere poop comes from is a bum.

That's the mistake that Hank has made.

In fact, lots of animals don't have bums.

Instead, they have different areas where the poop comes from, including from their heads.

Isn't that so silly?

There's also animals, and I am truly arguing against myself now, where the mouth hole and

the food-go-in-hole is the same as the waist-go-out hole.

And in that case, you would be hard-pressed to call that a bum just because of where the poop comes from.

You'd be hard-pressed to, and yet that's exactly what you're arguing.

That's what I have signed up to do.

So,

what is your bum, John?

Is it the shape?

Is it the two cheeks?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's the two cheeks.

It's the double cheeks.

Some frogs have bums.

Lots of animals have bums.

Not as many as you'd think, actually, if you look close.

I would argue that like a squirrel has a tiny little bum.

I would argue that dogs...

Squirrels don't have bums.

Squirrels have tiny little bums.

No, they don't.

They don't have butt cheeks.

They're almost invisible.

They don't.

They are invisible, but they're still there.

And then dogs don't have bums.

It's mostly, now that I think about it, Violet, and this is a really good question because maybe

dogs don't have bums.

Squirrels definitely don't have bums.

Horses have bums.

Horses have little bums.

They have gigantic bums.

And I will take the, I will strongman that argument.

You know what I'm thinking here, Violet?

I'm thinking that it's mostly primates and horses.

that have bums.

It actually is something, it shows up really more prominently when you go upright.

So people have more pronounced posteriors than most animals.

Yeah, Yeah, and then you've got like the vast majority of life, which is insects, Violet.

And you're going to be hard-pressed convincing me that a mosquito has a bum.

And if a mosquito doesn't have a bum, then fish really don't either.

Yeah.

Though I actually don't know what happens at the end of a mosquito.

I just not entirely sure what a bum is.

I think that we know, and I think that it's the end of the legs.

And I agree with you, Hank, that the more upright you're going to be.

The end of the legs is the feet.

No, the other end of the legs, my man.

Oh.

Yes.

One thing that we all know for sure is that bum is legs.

All right, we're not getting into that, Violet, because you didn't ask about that.

We're not going to cause that trouble today.

The part of the body that you sit on, it says.

Yes.

Well, in that case, like a mosquito, its bums would be its feet because that's where it sits.

Yeah, and fish wouldn't, definitely wouldn't have them.

Because what's not that you saw a fish sit?

No.

He was just like sitting down reading a little book along his little fish stool.

It must be tiring to be a fish.

No, it's not.

You get to float.

Oh, I guess that's a good point.

You get to float.

This is the thing about fish.

You could be as big as you want and not have to worry about it.

I would want to be fishing yourself.

But not for a whole day.

I would want like an hour and a half of being a fish just to understand like, do I have a bum?

What do I think about?

What do I feel?

What is the extent to which like I can suffer?

What is the extent to which I can like contemplate the mysteries of existence?

Is there a thing that it's like to be a fish is what I really want to know.

Yeah.

I don't know.

And I can't know

unless I become a fish.

I know that there's a thing that it's like to be a dog.

Yep.

And I know that there isn't a thing that it's like to be a tree, but I bet there's a thing that it's like to be a fish.

I bet there's a thing that it's like to be a tree, actually.

You think so?

Yeah, yeah.

You think you think trees have like a kind of consciousness?

I think they're really calm.

Yeah.

Just chill.

Yeah.

There's a thing that it's like to be a tree.

I don't.

Well,

I mean, maybe we should.

You're on a journey of meaning, and maybe you'll get there eventually.

This is the kind of slow talky podcast where the music doesn't have

a recorder in the beginning of it.

And instead, it's like just like sort of a slow thumping with like piano plinks.

And then at the end of it, we're like, you know, I haven't deeply looked at whether or not I think fish have little bumps.

That's right.

Yeah.

One thing about this podcast is that it kind of covers all podcast genres because it depends on the vibe.

Like some days, even when we have a somewhat silly question from Violet Age 2, there are some days that we can't help but take it seriously.

And then other days, somebody will ask us a very serious question and we'll be like, have you heard this bit about Alfin and the Chipmunks we've got?

Man, I forgot about the Alfin and the Chipmunks bit.

And so we kind of cover most of the major genres.

I think that's why we're a hit podcast for teens and a sleep podcast and an exercise podcast is because we contain multitudes.

Why don't you ask this question from Ignatius?

This next question comes from Ignatius, who asks, Dear Hank Hank and John, I hope you are well.

I was wondering what your experience of beef days has been in a year since you first talked about it.

If you are still continuing with it, what has been the moments of stretch or comfort?

Oh, that's a nice way of asking that.

Has the introduction of a new ritual made the time pass differently?

What is the experience of introducing and sharing something new like this into a larger group?

Any and all insights are appreciated, Pumpkins and Penguins, Ignatius.

Yeah, it's a big one, Hank.

It's a good question.

And also, like,

honestly, I felt like when we introduced beef days, we ran up against the limits of our power.

Oh, yeah, because you can't change a norm.

That's what I learned.

Except you can change a norm for yourself.

And I've done beef days.

So here's what I've done.

Here's what I've learned.

One, this thing where like you celebrate certain holidays as beef days doesn't work for me because it just doesn't work for me.

Like it doesn't work for me to say like, oh, July 19th is going to be a beef day.

Instead of

celebrate a person.

Once every like two months, I'll be like, oh, I think I'm going to have a beef day today.

And that has worked much better for me than like, because like my first beef day was July 4th, and I was like, oh, it's July 4th.

Like, we'll make it a beef day.

And then at the end of the day, honestly, I kind of felt sort of bad because I'd eaten a bunch of beef.

Doesn't make you necessarily feel very good.

So what I've noticed is: one, I just eat much less meat overall because

every time I have a choice, I'm like, ah, well, I'll just get like an impossible burger or something.

Or

I just make a vegetarian meal, like we'll make

vegetarian chili or whatever.

So that's one thing I've noticed.

The second thing I've noticed is that I probably

don't eat more of any other meat because it's been about a year now, hasn't it?

Oh, yeah, it's been a year since beef day started.

I don't eat more of any other meat.

I just eat less meat overall.

And then I have probably eaten beef on, I would say, between five and seven days.

I've had five to seven beef days this year.

And it's been great.

It has not been hard.

It has not been an inconvenience.

The times I've had beef, like I remember one time we were at a steakhouse and

we were at a casino in St.

Louis when I was on tour.

And we went to a steakhouse, Elise, my publicist and Sarah and me.

And I was like, I'm at a steakhouse.

I think I'll have some beef.

And so I had a beef day then.

And I've had a few other beef days throughout the year, not that many.

And I haven't missed beef.

Yeah.

I think I had been not eating a lot of beef before beef days got interested.

I missed.

I always

ahead of the curve.

We still, we still, sometimes

a beef will happen, you know, usually when there's some kind of recipe that's a lot easier with beef.

We do have a rule.

It reminds, I probably had beef more than seven days because we have a rule that if beef is being served at like a place where like if some, if we're going to somebody's house and beef is being served,

we're not going to turn it it down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I haven't, that maybe happened once or twice this year.

To be honest, I felt a little disillusioned by beef days.

Like, when I, what I feel like when we had the idea, we're like, this is going to, and this started on the podcast.

We're like, this is going to be, people are going to be excited about this.

This is going to make sense.

It's going to be like a way to add ritual to our lives that are more increasingly devoid of rituals.

And maybe there will be a community aspect to it.

And it just seemed like the reception

was a mix of like people who are just like, eh, and then a bunch of people who are like kind of mad at us

for not seeing a complexity with beef that they saw, which I honestly, having looked at the data, think that those like those arguments that were presented to me were not good arguments.

They're like, oh, but if you do beef this way, I'm like, no, not really.

Like all beef is like a huge problem for climate change.

If we can reduce the amount of methane being produced right now in any way possible, that that would be great.

And we are doing way too much.

And cows in particular are a really inefficient way to create protein.

There are arguments you can make.

I just don't think any of them are that good.

But I didn't feel like having the arguments.

Sure, sure, sure.

Especially because a lot of these people were from

places where their livelihoods are tied up in

ranching,

which I totally get.

So the.

yeah, I mean, as somebody who makes cigarettes for a living, we get it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's no fun to need to question the overall impacts of your profession on the world.

Of your work.

Believe us.

And

yeah, so I've, I, I just kind of like, um, I put it in the category of failures and

didn't want to think about it.

I put it in the category of failures from the perspective of building a community around it because

what we've learned is, of course, what we already knew, which is that it's incredibly hard to change behavioral norms of the social order.

It's so hard.

What you can do is opt out a little bit and not meet the social order's expectations, which takes us back to the beginning of the pod.

And in that sense, I actually think that we've done a pretty good job.

So I'm kind of proud of us, which reminds me, of course, that today's podcast is brought to you by defying the expectations of the social order.

Not always a good thing.

Sometimes the social order has really good norms, like don't kill people.

That's a good one.

That's a good one.

But then sometimes you have to defy the norms of the social order occasionally.

That's right.

And speaking of, this podcast is brought to you by the reverse quesadilla.

The reverse quesadilla.

Give it a try.

Cold or hot.

And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by Violet's Fishbums.

Violet's Fishbums, they don't exist.

And they're sitting on their little stools reading a book or their fins.

And also, this podcast is brought to you by Frogs in Space.

Frogs in Space.

They're extraordinarily advanced technological civilization of space frogs surrounding everything in the solar system, constantly bombarding into planets just for fun.

That's how they do it.

They don't care about their lives.

They're free.

Free to do whatever they want, including violently crashing into a atmosphere and creating a fiery ball for us to observe from from land down here on earth.

This is a really, really great outro, Hank.

It felt really strong it didn't nothing it didn't at all feel like you kept the voice right but you lost the you lost the plot this episode of dear hank a john is brought to you by factor there's so much going on and if there is a strategy available to you so that maybe you can outsource a little bit of the labor to somebody else that's something i might want to take a look into well factor helps me eat smarter with tasty chef prepared meals that are dietician approved and delivered right to my door and now with more than 65 weekly meals made for how I live and what I like to eat, I've got more ways to get a real meal regardless of what has been tossed into my inbox.

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All right, we got another question.

It's from Anne.

Anne writes, Dear John and Hank, does the Earth, I have always wondered this and I have no idea what the answer is, does the Earth receive a uniform amount of energy from the sun at all times?

Like are hot days hot because of weather patterns here on the planet?

Or is there a heat wave because the sun sent over more energy that day?

It is very hot today, really quite hot, and I am uncomfy.

Please advise sweltering Anne.

Oh, boy, it's a big, messy mess, Anne.

It's a complicated.

It's a

very complicated.

And

so

as you have no doubt noticed, you get less energy from the sun in the winter and more in the summer.

Now, if you're nearly far from the sun.

Well, it feels that way, but is that a earth thing or a sun thing?

Well, the sun is emitting the same amount of energy, roughly,

at all times.

There are long-term fluctuations, but they are not.

But I'm a little further from the sun during winter.

Is that it?

You know, you are not further from the sun during winter.

The sun is hitting the earth at an increased angle.

So if you like, hold up your hand to a light source and it's perpendicular, all that light's going to be hitting your hand uh at the maximum amount of of light per but if you tilt it yep then the same amount of light is going to be hitting uh across that whole hand and a lot of but a lot of the light that would normally be hitting the hand is going to get past so it's going to get less of the light and the earth is a sphere and so right when it hits at 90 degrees is the maximum amount but as it curves up to the pole At the pole basically if you were right on the pole would basically get no light because it would fly right over the top.

And then, you know, I meant it halfway down, you're about at a 45-degree angle to the sun, and you're getting roughly half as much energy per square foot of the Earth's surface.

Okay.

And that angle changes throughout the year as the Earth goes around the Sun.

And so

where that point at which the 90-degree angle is happening moves around the surface of the Earth and it moves northward during the summer.

So that's the biggest thing.

You'll also notice that the sun

for these reasons goes down earlier in the day.

Sure.

And so you're going to get less because the sun's going to be up for less time in the winter.

But then also you have the atmosphere, which is doing all kinds of crazy things.

It's carrying heat around.

It's moving heat from one place to another.

There are all of these currents that are both on a macro scale very predictable and on a micro scale very chaotic.

And so you end up in a situation where you're going to have a day in the the middle of the winter when it's, you know, surprisingly warm, unseasonably warm, or a day during the summer and it's unseasonably cold.

And so the, but the, um, the amount of heat that is being released by the sun is very consistent.

The amount that is being absorbed by the earth, depending on where you are,

is going to be very inconsistent, both because of the seasons and also because of the of weather and of and like clouds.

Obviously, we know that it's going to be less warm on a day when the clouds are reflecting away all the light right

it's always fascinated me that they aren't reflecting away all of the light right because it's still daytime but like darker clouds reflect more of the light and and lighter clouds reflect less of the light and it's weird it's the earth is weird yes earth is weird it's a weird situation that we found ourselves in that were just a bit tilted you know that we happen to be this distant of course it doesn't it happened this way because this was the only way it could have happened.

I understand that, but it's still weird.

It's still, it still blows my mind.

Yeah, I, I was talking to a stellar physicist once, and as you do, it's good job.

One of the things that they had discovered that was a big surprise, because when you only have one sun to study close up, one star to study close up, like you assume that all stars like the sun are like the sun.

But one thing that they have found is that most stars that are like the sun have much more fluctuation in the amount of energy that they give off over

periods of time.

And so the sun appears to be an unusually stable sun-like star.

And

so far.

Well, for billions of years.

And

that could

have had a very

positive impact on the ability of life to keep doing its life thing for a long period of time.

Yeah, I would imagine if the amount of energy coming out of the sun was radically different week to week or year to year or century to century, it would be a real problem for the demonstrative life.

Yeah, it can also be a real problem for water to stay

as a lot of water on the planet.

One of my chief beliefs about the Earth being special is that we have both a lot of water and a lot of land, which

some folks have done some research indicating that that might be pretty unusual.

Yeah, it is nice to have a lot of water and a lot of land.

There's a lot to recommend

Earth.

As I've said before, I think it's a really extraordinary planet.

If we had like 20% more water, there would be no land.

Wow.

That's fascinating.

That's so weird.

Yeah.

You know what else is weird?

What?

Owen Goodman leaving AFC Wimbledon.

Why'd he do it, Hank?

Are we taught?

Is that what time it is now?

He was playing for the best team on Earth.

It's time to transition to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

Owen Goodman, already playing for the world's best football club, somehow got his head turned by a different football club.

It's so fascinating and problematic.

He was my favorite goalkeeper we've had since Owen Ramsdale.

No,

he was my favorite goalkeeper we've had since Aaron Ramsdale.

And now he's gone.

Owen Goodman.

Sorry.

Gone.

Just signed a contract for some other team.

Whatever.

Goal's easy.

Just

play with your hands.

He signed for Huddersfield Town, Hank.

Huddersfield Town?

Come on now.

Are they in the league that AFC Wimbledon is now in?

I don't know.

According to,

yeah, they're in League One, but they're like a very ambitious League One team.

I'll tell you what his Wikipedia says right now, and this probably will be edited at some point.

He plays as a goalkeeper for League One Club Huddersfield Town, the home of northern football up the Toffies.

I assume that won't stay.

Two bleeps, two bleeps in this episode.

That's wild.

A little Wikipedia vandalism for you.

Owen Goodman's gone.

Josh Neufill is gone.

James Tilly is gone.

So both of our wing backs are gone.

Marcus Brown, it's not looking great.

How are your wing fronts?

Our wing fronts.

We've got, I would say we've got half our wing fronts at the moment.

Maddie Stevens is staying.

Marcus Brown looks likely to leave.

And so the Nerdfighteria is owned.

Marcus Brown, it was a six-month signing.

Looks to have been a six-month signing.

And yeah, so we've got some rebuilding to do.

And as of recording this podcast, we have signed, and I think this is a bold decision, zero players for our League One season.

Oh, boy, that's interesting considering that a bunch of your players have been signed by other teams.

Yeah, but it's okay.

Craig Koch, our director of football, he's working on it.

He's doing stuff behind the scenes.

He's got his mojo going, and he's going to find the right solution for us.

That's right.

And

he's not going to abide by the social norms of

signing players right away.

No,

that's just a norm.

No,

that is a norm.

And the fact that our preseason trip to Spain starts in eight days is fine.

We will have 11 players and a goalkeeper for that preseason trip.

I'm confident.

We currently have no players.

I'm worried.

This is very worrying.

Yeah, I mean,

we have to just revel in the fact that we got promoted and understand.

Like, I got on the promotion team.

It feels really good.

I'm going to go get a bigger, better job.

Yeah, I'm going to go take my big opportunity since I'm from a promoted team.

And I totally understand that.

And it's not like AFC Wimbledon's going to get promoted next year.

Well,

no, but maybe.

But no, no, probably not.

But you never know.

I mean, things happen.

Weird things happen.

Lester won the Premier League.

Anything's possible.

What's the news from Mars?

Hey, hey, I have a suggestion for Mars News based on some recent feedback we've gotten in the inbox.

Okay, hit me.

Fewer bummers, please.

Oh,

well, here's...

So there was a period of time.

Here's how I'll pitch it.

There was a period of time when the social internet was a place of joy and weirdness.

And one of the things about that period of time is that we'd give every mission its own little cute little Twitter account.

And like the Curiosity rover would tweet and the Insight Lander would tweet.

And the

orbiters would tweet and they'd all tweet at each other and it was cute.

Oh,

they would reply to each other.

It was adorable.

Yes.

And

it felt like we were in a special moment in time.

And that special moment in time has passed.

It has passed in two different ways.

One in which

maybe we just don't feel the same sort of joy in seeing these things tweeting, especially maybe a lot of the more science-focused people have just left Twitter or gone to Mastodon or Blue Sky or whatever, just maybe realized it was all cigarettes the whole time.

So

there's maybe a little less demand for that kind of thing.

And then in addition to that, there's maybe a lot of people who are losing their jobs over there.

So we are closing down all of these cute little mission

Twitters.

And instead, we'll sort of consolidate under the main NASA accounts.

Oh, man, that's such bad news.

It really is like the end of a kind of internet.

It's like,

it's a huge bummer.

It's like the end of a certain sort of internet.

It's like the world saying, like, hey, how cute that was.

Remember the fun internet?

That's dead now.

yeah yeah you know what we have instead of the fun internet i guess just have a conversation with an ai by yourself yeah no just talk to um i watched a video recently about a person who's in a relationship with

an ai

and feels very warmed by that relationship

and i didn't know how to conclude i didn't know what to conclude from that i didn't know whether to feel good or bad or somewhere in between.

I do know that humans are great.

And the more we can talk about our problems to other humans

in real space, the better we feel.

There is a lot of evidence for this.

Humans are great.

And

get out there and

talk to some.

Can I hit you with something

for the people who stuck around this long?

Yeah, please.

So just for y'all,

because I know a lot of people maybe don't stick around for all the news, and also because I had to deliver you more Mars bummers,

I will try my best to dig up some less bummering Mars news in the future.

For years,

well, I'd say I was for like for a year, I was working very hard on a novel that takes place on a space station.

And the space station is run by an artificial intelligence that is an important character in the story.

The people

who live on the space station,

one of the tropes of the novel, there's a bunch of like weird things about this space station that are like ostensibly it trying to solve problems about humans being sort of often in non-ideal situations that they kind of weren't

well set up for

by modern society.

When you live on Earth, you can kind of have any AI you want to be like your guide through the world.

And also you can have none, but most people choose to in this future world.

When you go to this new space station, you have to discard any AI you have lived with, which is a very difficult and personal decision that these people have to make.

And then you get a collective AI that everybody has the same one.

And it is,

you know, ostensibly because the space station is a less safe place.

There has to be some kind of central authority.

Anyway, I had this whole thing set up.

It's a murder mystery.

This sounds great.

Why aren't you,

why aren't I reading it?

I'm going to tell you.

So we, we, I set this little world up.

Um, I mean, a number of things happened.

I got cancer.

There's a lot of stuff has happened since I was working on this book actively.

And what, but what happened was AI happened.

So this was all written before GPT-4.

And then I was like, oh, this, like, if, if this book is published on the sort of speed at which books get published, by the time it comes out, it will be wrong about a a lot of things that I do not currently understand.

But I have recently started working on it again because I feel like I might have enough of a grip on

what

AI might end up looking like or being like for people that I can at least like, or like, I have a, like, it's, it's at least a lens through which I can say things that I think are interesting.

Yeah.

But the sort of the central premise of, of the book is that someone on this like space station where this same AI is basically monitoring every person on the space station, someone manages to do a murder, which starts to drive the AI kind of insane because it can't solve the murder.

And so it brings up three people from Earth to try and solve the murder because it feels like nobody,

there's no way that people from the space station can do it.

Wow.

That sounds really cool, Hank.

I'm in.

It's a little murder mystery, but murder, it turns out murder mysteries are hard, but I'm in.

Very hard.

Very hard.

I won an Edgar Award once, and I'll tell tell you what, the biggest surprise of it was that I'd successfully written a murder, a mystery novel.

Yeah.

Where it turns out there wasn't even a murder.

There wasn't a murder, but there was hopefully a mystery.

And I wanted it to be a mystery novel, but I always thought that I'd kind of failed at that.

You know, one thing, just in hearing you talk about this, one thing that I've noticed is a difference between you and me, and I'm not sure which of us is more

in line with the social order's norms and expectations here is, but when you're talking about a story that you're working on, you always refer to it as a book, which I've always felt like is so bold because, like, how do you know it's going to end up a book?

How do you know it's going to be between covers?

Whereas, like, when I talk about a story I'm working on, I always call it a story because I'm terrified to call it a book.

Until it's like, until my editor says that she will publish it, I'm terrified to call it a book.

Well, I'll tell you what, if it's not a book, it's a, it, as is, it's a good short story.

Like, all right, well, there you go.

I could publish what I have right now as a short story, um, but uh, it would not have a solution to the murder.

It would just have a murder.

People do like that when they read mysteries.

AI going insane.

Yeah.

Yeah.

People do like that.

Well, I look forward to reading it, but I know you're working on lots of stuff, but I hope you find time to write because I love your writing.

Yeah, it's fun.

It was interesting to go back and read what I had written three years ago and be like, well, some of this is, but some of this is good.

Good.

One last bleep for you at the end.

Yeah, that was just Hank's calendar telling him that he has to go.

So why don't you read the credits?

All right.

This podcast is edited by Cheiton Whaley.

It's mixed by Joseph Tunametish.

Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell.

It's produced by Rosiana Halls-Rojas and Hannah West.

Our executive producer is Seth Radley.

Our editorial assistant is Daboki Chakravarti, and the music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarola.

Thank you, John.

And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.