401: Goodreads Therapy

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 in Darkness.

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

John, did you know that they also had an election in Sweden and the CEO of IKEA won?

Did he?

Yeah, he's still assembling his cabinet, though.

Oh,

takes a while.

Yeah.

Famously takes a while.

Yeah.

If he wants to have a real good argument, I suggest that he try it out with his spouse.

For a second, I was like, where is Ikea from?

Is Sweden right?

Sweden's right, I think.

Okay.

It's got Swedish vibes anyway.

They have got the meatballs there.

They got the meatballs.

That's

the giveaway.

They don't have meatballs in Norway.

Norway hasn't even heard about meatballs yet.

Nordish meatballs?

No, that's not a thing.

Wait, you call people from Norway Nordish?

What are they called?

Norwegian?

I guess.

I mean, you can call them Nordish if you want.

They are from the Great Nord.

Well, that's right.

It's called Nord, the North.

And also, it's Swedish meatballs.

They're not Swedians.

What's a Swede?

It would be what they were called if it was like Norwegians.

Oh, okay.

I got it.

I got it.

I got it.

Wouldn't they also then have to include the other one, Finland?

Finwegians.

Finwegians.

Finwegius meatballs sound delicious.

I'm glad that we're talking about something stupid.

Are Swedish Swiss?

No, Switzerland is Swiss.

Okay, of course.

Swedish people are Swedes.

That's a typical American problem there.

So just to clarify, people from Denmark are Danish, people from Switzerland are Swiss, people from Finland are Finnish, and people from Norway are Norwegian.

Do you know what Finnish meatballs are?

What?

Already done.

Do you know what Swiss meatballs are?

What?

They got holes in them.

Okay, let's do the podcast.

It's the little things that bring me joy right now.

Like the idea of Swiss meatballs.

I bet they have meatballs in Switzerland.

There's a 100% chance.

There's no way that the idea of circular meat hasn't reached Switzerland.

Yeah, you just ball it up.

It's like, oh, this is like a switch.

I feel like it's way easier.

I feel like it was a hell of a point by the Swedish people to try to take ownership over the concept of meatballs.

All right, Hank, our first question speaks to contemporary culture in a deep and profound way without addressing politics specifically.

And it's from Allie, who writes, Dear John and Hank, why are people on Goodreads so angry?

Potentially an ally, but always an ally.

I I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on this.

I didn't, first of all, didn't realize people on Goodreads are particularly angry.

I've read my Goodreads reviews of my books.

Some of them are certainly angrier than I would expect them to be.

You're more likely to get upvoted.

You're more likely to get upvoted for a low star review than a high star review a lot of times, especially if it's a really good low star review, for lack of a better term.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like entertaining.

The number one one on An Absolutely Remarkable Thing for a long time, it may still be, is one that was just like another YouTuber book.

And it was just, it was like,

really like, it was bad.

I found it to be intolerable.

I was like, this is a terrible take.

But if you hadn't read the book, I could see how it would land well.

Well, it is another YouTuber book.

It is.

And you're right.

Most of the people doing the upvoting haven't read the book.

So I think that's another factor, right?

Like they're looking to see if they should read the book.

And in many cases,

they do want to know the book.

When I'm looking at Goodreads reviews, I'm partly looking for reasons not to read the book because I already have plenty of books.

And so if somebody offers me an easy way, like another YouTuber book, I'll be like, all right, I got it.

Oh, man, it's still there.

It's still on top, John.

Well, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Let's read our top Goodreads reviews.

What a good idea for today.

I just want to, it's so snarky.

All right, here's the top review for the Anthropocene Reviewed.

It's going to be way better than mine, but okay.

It is way better, it's actually very, very, very flattering.

Ah, good for you.

Well, I'll read you my first one-star review if you want.

Those are those are always bangers, those are the only ones I'm interested in.

The solid one percent of people who really hated it, yeah, they so they can take up all the space in your head.

It's from Deborah, who writes, This is a collection of personal essays, personal essays by John Green, in which he basically just ponders humanity and rambles endlessly about arbitrary topics like scratch and sniff stickers, air conditioning, and the Nathan's hot dog union contest.

What's to give one star to, Deborah?

That book sounds awesome.

It's pretentious with a sparse sprinkling of insight here and there.

Again, you've described my favorite book.

I found myself thinking, who cares multiple times throughout the book?

You're welcome, Deborah.

You're welcome.

Well, here's the number one review, and it is a one-star review.

And I'm sure it's resulted in a solid

2% decrease in the overall sales of the book, this one guy, Tucker, who says,

a conversation between me and my publisher.

Publisher.

So, Hank, you want to write a book?

Hank, yes, my brother wrote a bunch, which means that I can too.

Publisher.

What do you want it to be about?

Hank, I want it to be about aliens.

Publisher.

So like the fifth wave?

Hank, kind of, but let's remove all the violent parts.

It's nothing like the fifth wave.

It could not be more different from the fifth wave.

I mean, that is the most ludicrous.

Like, that's a person who's only ever read two books.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, but they've only ever read your book and the fifth wave, and they compared those two books.

I've read the fifth wave.

I reviewed the fifth wave.

You, Hank, did not write the fifth wave.

It goes on for a long time.

I think we got the picture.

I think we got the picture.

I bet there's some solid one-star reviews of the fault in our stars.

Oh, yeah.

It's the

very first review is a one-star review.

Of the fault in our stars?

Yeah.

Wild.

This is good.

This is therapy.

Writing.

Cheesy, emotionless, terrible.

Want to hear some favorite quotes of mine?

Why compare your thoughts to stars and constellations?

It doesn't make any sense.

Wow.

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

How uninteresting.

That's the thing about pain.

It demands to be felt.

Yeah, that's the thing about chocolate.

It demands to be eaten.

What?

That's no, no, no.

In a very different way, does chocolate demand to be eaten than pain demands to be felt?

Yeah, actually, like, you can not eat chocolate.

That's one of the defining characteristics.

That's a great example of why pain demands to be felt is a great sentence because chocolate doesn't actually demand to be eaten.

It asks.

It asks, but it can just sit there.

Whereas pain, you can't not

feel.

Well, to be fair, the person who wrote this was probably angry and like didn't like the book, and that's okay.

And then they had to write.

I don't care about the people who wrote the bad reviews.

I care about the people who are.

What are they thinking?

It's the people who upvoted.

That's true.

It's true.

Here's the thing.

Here's the truth of why Goodreads is angry is the same reason why Twitter is angry, is the same reason why Reddit is angry, is the same reason why Facebook is angry?

It's not unique to Goodreads.

And like,

we're having a good laugh here/slash a therapy session.

Yeah.

But there is a structural problem with the social internet that rewards anger and outrage and horror and disgust over nuance.

And that is reflected on Goodreads as it is everywhere on the internet.

What if it's not?

So I don't think it's just the internet.

I think it's any media and it has it always been thus.

But I think that right now we have very few defense mechanisms when it comes to sort of like seeing the parts of our brain being manipulated by the internet because like it's so new and we don't have social circuits for it.

But like it has always been thus.

I do think that it is like it's it has always been thus and that's a great point.

But but I think that it is now like that at the speed of light.

So it's always been thus in the sense that like when I reviewed books for book lists, I reviewed hundreds and hundreds of books for book list.

And when I reviewed books for them, the books that I didn't like

always always got like flattering letters.

People would be like, what a great review.

And it would just be me like kind of snarking on a book.

And because there's something enjoyable about a takedown.

There's something lovely about it, especially the more something is revered, the more the takedown of it is pleasant to us.

And so that's another factor here.

I think you're right that it's always been thus.

And like, that's always been a thing.

But you haven't read me the first one-star review of A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor.

By the way, these are two of my favorite books.

You can't do it.

I'll do it for you if you don't watch out.

This one is too, it

feels too true.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

What?

First off, that book has a 4.7 overall rating on Amazon.

I know.

I love it.

I know.

And it's the reviews are all five stars.

Oh,

yes.

Five, four, three, four, three, four.

Somebody criticizing the cover, which fair enough, although I like the cover for the record.

I was a little writer recently, and he was like, I loved your book so much, and you named them so poorly.

And I was like, Oh, okay, thanks.

Oh, it's somebody who loved the first book and didn't like the second book.

It's boring.

This book took me about a month to read.

Nice sleigh books, but this one I could barely get through 15 pages at a time.

Fair enough.

I mean, I think it's so like the voice is very similar to the voice of the first novel.

Yeah, no,

I know.

I don't agree with that.

I respectfully disagree.

But yeah,

that is at least a thoughtful take.

That's a thoughtful one-star take.

It is the experience they had, unlike Tucker, who appears to have not tried hard.

Yeah, well, or like went into it ungenerously, because here is the truth of any book in any media, right?

We need the reader or the viewer or the listener or whatever to be generous, to bring their whole self to it.

And that's asking a ton.

And a lot of times you can't bring your whole self to a book because you're feeling snarky and angry and you're disgusted with the world.

And so, like, that seeps into your reading experience.

I bet also that, like, you may, maybe you sort of like get a reputation for doing the snarky Goodreads reviews for a little while, you know?

And you're good at it.

You, if you're, if you're good at writing snarky Goodreads reviews, you're good at it.

Yeah.

So I do think that there is a

human nature thing to like looking at the takedown and being like oh i gotta upvote that especially when it's of like and i get it like i also i knew going in that i was you know i was gonna be seen as a youtuber writing a book i wasn't like john you wrote books before you were a youtuber right right but even so i'm often seen as a youtuber who writes books because people don't know that i wrote books before i was a youtuber that's funny

which is fair i mean i i'm fine you are a youtuber who writes books yeah yeah yeah like writing nothing slows me down quite like YouTubing.

So I want to be known as a YouTuber who writes books.

Otherwise, I'm wasting a bunch of my time on YouTube.

If I'm an author who YouTubes, then I've got

I'm real slow.

I'm going, I'm definitely doing everything backwards.

I do love making a YouTube video, though, John.

I do too.

I do too.

But I don't know.

It just like, it does, I

don't know.

I've been thinking a lot, and this video video hopefully will be out by the time this podcast comes out, but I've just been thinking a lot about how the current, like how any big change in media in like the in how human communication works

has an inevitable backlash against

kind of everything, you know, just like anything that is perceived to have power or

anything that is perceived to be a threat.

Yeah.

And

whenever

technology democratizes,

there is an anti-intellectual, anti-institution response to it that we've seen, you know, going back to the invention of the printing press

that we are experiencing now.

And

I'm not enjoying it very much.

As a member of the intellectual class,

I don't like it.

I don't really think of myself as like a liberal.

This is a

college professor.

I'm not a member of the intellectual elite.

I'm a dad in Indianapolis.

As a soft-handed man in his basement with his art collection.

Well,

I mean, I guess guilty.

Do you want me to talk about the enmulae piece behind me?

I got some new art recently, but

it's not in this room.

It's the viral hippo, the viral, the pygmy hippo, but being piloted as a submarine by other viral baby hippos.

It's just

very good.

That sounds great, man.

You and I have different tastes in art, it sounds like, but I'm glad that we both find stuff that meets our needs.

Yeah, it's the same person who did Beanie Sandferbs.

Oh, I love Beanie Sandfurbs.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great.

I love that you're buying art.

It makes me so happy to hear.

I always say this, but like art does not have to be expensive.

It does not have to be fancy.

It only has to bring you joy.

Yeah, no, I mean,

Sophie's work brings me great joy.

It is not very expensive.

It's sort of, I think it's in the hundreds, you know.

Yeah.

But the just, which is expensive, just to be clear.

But it's not, yeah, I think that there's much more.

But it's not like it's not like buying a war hall or something.

But so much joy.

So much joy.

Yeah.

And I guess art doesn't have to only bring you joy.

It can also bring you curiosity or interest or intrigue.

But if it brings you something, whatever it brings you, that allows you to keep coming back to it and like experience richness from it, like living with it for years, then like that is good art.

That's the definition of good art.

Like good art doesn't have to be like valuable to the market.

And also, if you love art, you should let the artists know that you love it because their top goods review probably is mean.

Probably so.

Anyway, thanks, Allie, for giving us that opportunity to work through some of our Goodreads-related trauma.

All authors have some.

And I apologize to the people who gave my books one-star reviews on a couple levels.

First off, that I disagreed with your review so vehemently.

And secondly, I apologize because I'm sorry that you had to buy a book you didn't like.

I feel guilty.

I hope you like my new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, more signed copies available wherever books are sold.

Nice.

I'm not afraid to get in some promo.

Don't ever be afraid.

He's signing like mad, everyone.

Like mad.

I am looking right now at 29,300 signed sheets of paper.

That's good.

You're doing 100?

I'm doing 100.

You're almost at 30%.

Long way to go.

What's our next question?

This next question comes from Jess, who asks, Dear Hank and John, I just emailed the good people at good.store about this, but I figured I'd ask you as well.

My partner, Peter, and I are hoping to add a coffee subscription from the delicious Keats and Co.

Coffee and Tea Company, available at Goat.store.

You know how to get your question read, to our wedding registry so that we may enjoy delicious coffee.

Congratulations, Jess,

every morning while supporting efforts to fight tuberculosis and Lesotho.

I was wondering.

if you are planning to add a way for people to gift a subscription for a set period of time.

Thank you for all that you do.

Coffee and Quandries, Jess.

We don't have a way right now, and we probably won't for this Christmas, but I think that we've got some ideas about for how this is going to work in the future, and I'm pretty sure that there will be options like that soon.

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And all the profit goes to make the world a better place.

Or shopping for other holidays.

It's true.

I do tend to say Christmas.

Yeah.

No, I'm part of the war on Christmas, Hank.

You're an atheist, so you're allowed to say Christmas.

But as a Christian, I think I have to say that there's lots of other winter holidays.

All right.

This next question comes from Sarah, who writes, Dear John and Hank.

And Rosiana notes there have been several questions about like about this.

I'm excited to read Everything is Tuberculosis, available for pre-order now.

Y'all really do all the promo for us.

However, I don't do well with descriptions of blood, guts, and/ed.

So I was wondering if you would recommend this book to somebody who's interested in the history, social justice, and public health spaces, but it's a little squeamish.

Pumpkins and Penguins, Sarah.

Sarah, you have nothing to worry about.

I am also very squeamish.

If there is anything, like the only thing that I put, there was a squeamish paragraph in the book, but I cut it and I replaced it with the sentence, surgery was generally fatal.

So I was like,

that's like,

why get into it when I can just say surgery was generally fatal?

Yeah, I had a moment like that when I was writing

while I've been writing my book about cancer, where I got feedback from Catherine that was like, you can't can't put that in.

That's too bad.

Yeah, it was, it was, it's a little more squeamish than everything is tuberculosis, but it's still not that squeamish, your cancer book.

Yeah.

And anyway, that's not available for pre-order, so why are we even talking about it?

There's some squishy bits, but there's not like the thing I, yeah, I took out a thing that was just like, I wanted to make it clear how bad cancer has always been.

And it used to be worse.

It is still real, real, real bad if you don't get treatment.

Yes, it's extremely bad if there is no treatment available.

Yeah.

It is also bad no matter what.

I was just talking with a friend about you having cancer.

Me too.

And he was like, it's so weird that Hank had cancer.

And I was like, I know.

That's what everyone says to me is that it's weird.

And I'm like, yeah, no, it is.

It was weird.

That's one word for it.

I don't know if he experienced it as weird, but I did from the outside.

No, there were definitely moments where I was like, this is happening?

Question mark.

That seemed wrong.

And now, even now, I have that where I'll have a moment where I'll be like, God, last year

feels like it was hard for some reason.

It didn't get as much done as I would have liked to.

Why do I have this

of last year just being really hard?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's weird how the mind works.

It is weird, especially how we remember pain and trauma and how like we call it to mind, but also can't.

It's very and also that our bodies continue to carry around the history because like I now have a bunch of problems I didn't have before.

I know.

And also I have problems that I used to have that I don't have, which is wild.

I know.

It's a whole new body.

Not a whole new body, but it's definitely different.

I ship of Theseus to the whole thing.

I replaced every molecule during chemo.

It's just a whole new body.

It's a whole new you, except it's, to me, it's a very recognizable version of you.

Yeah, I know.

But to get to the point,

can we do it?

What What am I?

Can we?

What am I?

Is that a question for the pod?

Well,

one of the things that I noticed during cancer was

when sort of looking more directly at my mortality is that a lot of the me's that have existed in the past are already dead.

Yeah.

That's true.

And there's no bringing them back.

No, they're gone, gone.

I can't.

There's so much of my life I do not remember, the majority of it.

Not just that, but even if you, whatever you do remember, you can't return to that self, right?

Like you can't, it's the old problem of like you go back to your high school, but the problem is that the high school is still there, but you aren't.

Yeah.

I don't even know if my high school is still there, John.

I suspect it is.

My middle school isn't.

They knocked that book.

Don't take this the wrong way, but Florida isn't exactly like carving up with new school buildings, right?

You're right, it is there.

I did check recently.

I went there.

I went there on my book tour.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, that was weird.

It was weird.

It changed.

Everything had changed.

Like, all the doors were in different places.

It was very disorienting.

I just remember, like, I got within like 500 yards of that place and my armpits started sweating like crazy.

And I never even went to school there.

Oh, man.

The last time I went back to my old high school, I ran into a friend of mine from high school who was walking her dog on campus because it's this like big, sprawling boarding school campus.

And she said the most profound thing to me.

She said, this place saved my life.

And then she paused and said, and also it did a lot of other things.

And I was like, yes,

that's it.

I've been waiting for somebody to explain my relationship with high school, and it's just been explained.

A lot of other things.

A lot of other things as well.

Which reminds me that this podcast is actually brought to you by a lot of other things.

Yeah.

Additionally, today's podcast is brought to you by One Star Goodreads Reviews, One Star Goodreads Reviews.

They will be read by the author,

Especially the top, the top-ranked one.

Oh, I've read all of them.

I sort by one star so that I can read all the one-star ones.

I'm not interested in the five-star ones.

They're not true.

They're just being polite.

They're just being polite.

They're not telling me the secret truth that I'm worthless.

And anyway, the funny thing about one-star Goodreads reviews is that they're not trying to tell you that you are worthless as an author.

They're just trying to say that they didn't like your work.

But I'm conflating that, which is unfair of me.

Yeah.

What else is this podcast brought to you by?

This podcast is also brought to you by Good.store.

It's actually brought to you by Good.store.

The coupon code save 10, save 1-0 to get 10% off any order over $50 and save 2-0 for 20% off any order over $100.

Good.store.

And finally, this podcast is brought to you by the new book, Everything is Tuberculosis.

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All right, Hank, we got another question from Zinnia who writes, hi, John and Hank.

I'm eight years old and I'm sending this from my mom's account with her permission.

In school, we have been learning about photosynthesis, and my teacher said that trees suck the chlorophyll from the leaves into their trunks during the autumn so they can survive the winter.

This is why the leaves turn colors and fall off.

I think leaves are responsible for releasing oxygen, too.

Does this mean there's less oxygen in the air during fall and winter?

How do we breathe without leaves?

Not a tree, but named for a plant, Zinnia.

Yeah, I mean,

so the way that it works, and I'm going to give you secret insight that you will not get until you go to college, Zinnia.

Wow.

Which is that the amount of oxygen in the air is actually really well balanced and does not tend to go up or down that much in any given moment.

Because what happens is the trees suck

carbon out of the air and they build themselves out of it.

So trees are largely made of carbon molecules and they build themselves out of that carbon.

And then the carbon in the air is connected to oxygen.

So they keep the carbon and they let the oxygen go.

But when the trees fall down and they rot or burn, that carbon gets re-released and the oxygen from the atmosphere either rots or burns that wood, recombines with that carbon and gets released as carbon dioxide.

So there's this constant cycle going on.

And the actual sort of like stable amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is because of the very rare circumstances where the carbon doesn't get re-released.

And that happens either when stuff gets buried so deep that the oxygen can't get to it, like the carbon and the oxygen can't meet up again, or if it ends up at the bottom of the ocean and there the oxygen also can't reach it.

So, those rare circumstances are the only reason why we have an excess amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and that allows all animals to exist.

Wow.

That's pretty mind-blowing.

Now, is there anything that we could do to mess with this incredibly complicated sweet-sweet balance that nature has managed to achieve,

resulting in there being too much, for instance, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Yeah, but that actually doesn't result in there being not enough oxygen in the atmosphere, interestingly.

Oh.

So, what does happen is that in the past, old carbon got buried and didn't get access to oxygen, and so it stayed there and it turned into coal mostly, but also a lot of things that we burn.

And we burn them combining oxygen, and then that creates more CO2

than we

have previously had.

And CO2 is is

opaque to infrared light.

So certain wavelengths of light get blocked by it.

It gets absorbed like a black t-shirt on a summer day, and that increases the temperature of the atmosphere and of the planet.

But that's

so the amount of oxygen is pretty steady right now?

The thing is that like the amount of carbon dioxide is extremely low, so adding a little bit has basically doubled the amount, whereas the amount of oxygen is extremely high.

So taking a little bit out hasn't really had any effect on

it.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's helpful to understand.

I have one last question related to this.

None of this has addressed Zinnia's question.

What was the question?

Oh, there is a little bit less oxygen at some times of the year and a lot more.

Is it because the leaves turn colors and fall off?

It is because the plant isn't doing photosynthesis.

And also, as they

fell off, as the leaves rot, as they get broken down by funguses and microbes and stuff,

that results in oxygen combining and creating CO2.

There's two things that blow my mind about this.

First, that trees are made mostly out of air.

They're mostly made of processed air.

Absolutely bizarre.

And that implies, of course, that air is a thing and not just a thing.

Like air is made of stuff.

Air is a soup.

It's just a very thin soup.

it's a pretty thin soup and thicker than than you realize when you're driving at 70 miles an hour down the road but the the weirdest thing about air being a thing is that we didn't figure it out until like after america existed yeah well why would we it doesn't make any sense that air would be a thing it makes sense that air would be the opposite of a thing because you can't smell it or smell

i guess but if you stop breathing, you die immediately.

So that makes me think that air is definitely something because because if I don't put it into me, I die faster than any other way.

Also, now that I think about it, you do smell it.

A little bit, sometimes.

Yeah.

No, I mean, that's what smell is, is

scent that traveled through the air

into your nose.

I don't know how they thought about scent back in the day.

I don't know what the natural historians

originally.

But yeah, it's fascinating they didn't know that air was made out of stuff.

But then on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute basis, I don't think about the fact that air is made out of stuff.

I assume air to be kind of the opposite of a thing.

Yeah.

And when I do think about the fact that air is made out of stuff, you know what I mostly think about?

I think about the fact that air is alive.

It is alive with bacteria, but especially alive with viruses.

And I am inhaling thousands of them with every breath, and they just don't happen to be viruses that make me sick.

Yeah,

that doesn't tend to enter the brain for me.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

No, I don't.

Well, I recommend thinking about it as often as you can.

I wonder how many viruses get lifted high enough in the atmosphere that they could.

They're pretty heavy compared to most molecules.

So I doubt they could get like pushed out of the earth.

But it makes me wonder.

How many viruses do I inhale a day?

Well, I mean, that's going to be a

you're not going to.

Every day you breathe in over a hundred million viruses.

Yeah, you're not going to have a good scale for how many that is, though.

That sounds like.

That's a lot, Hank.

I don't need to know what it's a hundred million.

The fact that I don't get sick out of any of those hundred million viruses most days is miraculous to me.

Well, most viruses aren't human pathogens.

You're telling me if they were, I would have 100 million of them in my body every day.

You also, I mean, but it is still the majority

of the people.

You inhale 100 million viruses a day.

That is objectively weird.

If you told that to somebody from the 18th century, they would be like, what now?

And they like, what?

You would be like, yeah.

And then they would be like, are viruses alive?

And you would be like, well, that's complicated.

And they would be like, the idea of being alive is complicated.

And you'd be like, yeah.

Yeah.

Turns out once you get low, everything turns into a fuzzy line.

That's what that song, Get Low by Flowrider, is about.

I believe that is correct.

Yeah.

What is the course of that song?

Shorty had the mapple bottom jeans and the boots of the fur.

And that's about

the boots of the fur are about the fuzziness of the lines between things.

Like, is it boot or is it air at that point?

Let's answer this question from Ben before we get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

Ben writes: I really like hearing Hank talk about trees like a lot.

I figured this was on the bottom.

We have the episode for you.

I just read in a textbook that Ponderosa pines can't reproduce without wildfires, which seems a little far-fetched to me.

Is it true?

Can you explain the process that makes these fires necessary for their reproduction?

Never currently am, Ben.

That's good, Ben.

That's good.

So, when there is a fire, it's a good time to be a seed.

So that's why this happened.

So

there is an evolutionary pressure towards only releasing your seed from a pine cone when there is a fire, because otherwise most of the seeds will not be able to get any sunlight.

So if they only pop out right when there's a fire in an area where there are frequent wildfires, which a lot of the mountain west is like this, then

the seed will only release when there's a fire.

And that means, bloop, suddenly

all of the seeds all at once get to try it out at the moment when there's actually space in the canopy for sunlight to reach them.

Because if you're getting, if you're just doing it all the time, then you're wasting those seeds because there's no way any sunlight's going to get down there because it's a crowded little business in a forest and it takes hard work to become a big old tree.

Wow.

So yes, that is the case.

I don't know if there's like never been a Ponderosa pine tree that grew without a fire.

Like that, that's, that does seem maybe maybe a little bit far-fetched to me, but like the cones are designed to release their seeds when there is a fire.

Wow, fascinating.

Designed.

Evolved too.

Well,

two schools of thought, and you're apparently part of one of them that surprises me.

All right, Hank, it's time to get to the all-important news from Mars and ASU Wimbledon.

Beginning with the news from ASU Wimbledon, I have to add a correction.

Okay.

I actually looked deeper into this, and it looks like ponderosa pines aren't actually particularly like this.

There's lots of pine trees that are like lodgepole pines, but ponderosa pines tend to uh release their seeds when with other environmental triggers besides fire.

So, oh, correction.

So,

so that was just you corrected yourself mid-podcast.

I did.

Well, I was like, I gotta, I gotta check that, and I did.

Oh, okay.

You were talking about something

I was talking about AFC Wimbledon, which is when you usually do your fact-checking.

And fair enough.

America's favorite fourth-tier English soccer team lost 1-0 to Grimsby Town over the weekend.

But before that, we played of all teams Milton Keynes in the first round of the FA Cup.

The FA Cup being, of course, a win-or-go-home knockout competition that involves all the teams in England and is separate from the league campaign.

And in that game, we won 2-0.

And not only did we win, but also Milton Keynes got a red card.

And who should get that red card but our former player, Connor Lemonhai-Evans, who left our team for their team,

thereby becoming a villain of the highest order.

It's a heel turn for the ages, and he got a red card, and we were delighted to see him sulk off the field in appropriate misery.

It's our first win at the Stadium MK.

The quietest place on earth, some would say,

in a number of years, and I am very excited about it.

So, yes, we lost 1-0 to Grimsby.

We lost 3-2 to Port Vale.

We're only 13th in the league.

We don't look likely to make the playoffs, but we've already beaten Milton Keynes twice this season, and it's only November.

All right.

You're just going to keep doing that.

It feels like a success, Hank.

Every time you beat the franchise, it was red card-centric that win?

It was very yellow-card-centric.

I would say there was a fair amount of tackling going on.

Okay.

We don't like them.

Like, it's not like a

joke.

Like, our our players are told to not like them.

They go harder than they would normally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot.

Yeah.

And they celebrate the way they celebrate, like, the way they celebrated the first goal was epic trolling.

Like, I think it was Maddie Stevens, and he just like held his arms out in front of the smattering of Milton Keynes fans who filled that three quarters empty stadium.

And he just like held his hands out and just like listened to the abuse being flooded his way and just smiled.

Well, John, news from Mars.

I don't know if you know this, but one of the chief proponents for getting to Mars very fast is now basically going to be president of the United States.

So that's that's great for everybody, right?

Can we double the bet?

Is there some way that I can get more money by

people not making it to Mars by 2028?

Uh,

and other Mars news.

So we know that the Ingenuity helicopter did a ton of missions.

It did over 70 missions.

It was all over that planet.

And one of the things that it did, because it could, is it flew over to the place where the thing that lowered the

actual rover onto the planet went and crashed after successfully lowering the rover.

And it went over there and it took pictures of it.

And those pictures, we got some of them, but now they have like time to send more.

And we, so like, uh, there's just really great pictures of the crash site with the parachute stretched out behind it and the

just gorgeous.

I mean, it's very weird to see like wreckage on an alien planet.

And that wreckage, because Mars is geologically stable.

and not at all geologically active, it will be there and also further away from the sun than us.

It will be there for a very long time, just being proof that we were here.

Yeah.

It's nice to think that two million years from now,

sentient raccoons might make their way to Mars and be like, oh my God, guys.

Yeah.

Have we got some news?

We haven't found life on Mars, but we have found humans.

Yeah.

They went to Mars.

Maybe they know a little bit about us, but they didn't realize that we were that good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They'll be super impressed.

They'll be like, it's incredible that this species that went all the way to Mars then

collectively

ended itself so spectacularly.

And then they'll learn from our mistakes and they will become the great civilization that takes over the galaxy.

Yeah.

From your lips to God's ears, buddy.

We got to hope, Hank.

And one way that we hope now is in other species becoming the dominant species.

John's been having a not great

couple weeks, guys, if I'm being honest.

I'm not sure if either of us have been doing super great.

Doing that good, but I feel like I've been winning the Suffering Olympics for the last 10 days or so.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Not to brag.

But here we are, and I'm glad to be with you.

Thanks for potting with us.

I'm only winning the Suffering Olympics in comparison to Hank, just to be clear.

I'm not winning them overall.

Good, John.

It's a two-person Olympics.

I either have gold or silver, and right now I have gold, but next week, I'm sure Hank will get gold again.

Yeah.

The We're Here newsletter last week, I wrote about.

You wrote so beautifully in the We're Here newsletter.

It was one of my favorite pieces of writing that you've ever done.

Oh, thanks.

Well, the one after that, I wrote about how

I constantly, because of the structure of the internet, I'm like on the lookout for some, like a way I could make someone mad.

Oh, interesting.

Like, I can't talk about raking the leaves without like making an excuse for why I'm raking the leaves because some people think you shouldn't rake leaves.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I understand what you mean.

And so like when I said that I'm winning the Suffering Olympics, I immediately corrected myself because somebody's going to write in and be like, in fact, you are not winning the Suffering Olympics, which, to be fair, is true.

Yeah.

I feel like

we have been so trained by the top reviews on Goodreads

that we are incapable of ever just freaking talking without also being scared.

I can't even fully criticize the

reviews I don't like on Goodreads because I feel bad for the people who who wrote them who are probably nice people who didn't expect to be in the situation that they ended up in.

Yeah, for sure.

I did a video where I analyzed a bunch of bad takes on Twitter and at the end of it I was like, I really should have blocked out those people's names.

You should have.

All right, Hank, thanks for podding with me.

Thanks to everybody for listening and more importantly, thanks to everybody for listening generously.

We do really appreciate it and we recognize that it makes a big difference in the experience of the podcast, not just for its listeners, but also for its creators.

Yes, which then has loops back around.

And again, if you haven't gone, it's good.store, and the coupon codes are save10 and save20.

This podcast is edited by Linus Obenhaus.

It's mixed by Joseph Tunamedish.

Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell.

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

Our executive producer is Seth Radley.

Our editorial assistant is Daboki Jakovarti.

The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the Great Gunnarola.

And as they say in our hometown,

don't forget to be awesome.

It's just Gunnarola.

Everyone thinks that his name is the Great Gunnarolo.