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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,

what's faster, hot or cold?

Neither is particularly fast.

No, no, no.

It's hot is faster because it's very easy to catch cold.

Oh,

okay.

It's also hot is actually also technically, thermodynamically, much faster.

Like that's faster.

It's faster because things are moving more.

As things get colder, they move less.

That's right.

Yeah.

So it's correct in both ways.

So it's a science joke that's also a joke.

I'm doing all right.

I'm medium.

How are you?

I'm good.

What's your favorite feeding strategy?

Grazing.

You like, yeah, grazing is good.

I think there's a lot to be said for grazing.

Well, were you talking about like for not according to the nutritionists?

Oh, no, no.

I was talking about for

just biology, like the best way that animals eat.

And grazing is a very good one.

Oh, I didn't know we were talking about non-human animals.

In that case, it's the one where you surround a cell, like you surround a bacteria as a bacteria and you just consume it.

Phagocytosis?

That one.

Where you just ooze a thing that your entire body becomes a mouth.

Yeah.

I like it.

Yeah, you just turn into a mouth and you're just like, I think I'll swallow that whole.

People are always like, oh, snakes are so impressive.

They can unhinge their jaws.

You know what's really impressive is a bacteria that can eat a bacteria that's about the same size as the bacteria.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I've seen it happen.

It's really cool.

I completely agree.

That's a great one.

I hadn't thought of that one at all.

This is, we've been asking this question in the complexity office for the last couple of days.

God, you guys are nerds.

I'm a big plunge feeding fan, like pelicans.

Plunge feeding.

Pelicans plunge feed.

Oh,

which is, which is a thing that at the moment, not very many things do, but has been done throughout the history of life on Earth.

But also, I just, I love a pouch.

I love a big, a big mouth that's half your body like blue whales have, where it's just, just like, you need to have the biggest mouth so you can do your like big gulp and then filter feed all and squish out all the water.

And then you got a ball of delicious shrimp in there.

I assume it's delicious for them.

I think I wouldn't like it at all.

Do you think they care about flavor profiles or are they just trying to stay alive?

You know, I thought about this because we've talked about feeding strategies.

I think for a whale, a big mouthful of krill is probably the best.

I don't like...

It's pleasurable.

Yeah.

I don't know if it like tastes good, but I bet

they get

neurotransmitters firing when they get a big mouthful of krill.

Yeah, it's like the random, randomized reward generation that keeps me on the internet all day.

Yeah.

Except with krill.

Except with krill, because they don't know about the internet.

They don't know about the internet.

The whales don't have internet.

No.

They don't even have dial-up.

So this was a tweet I saw the other day where

whales don't know about the internet,

but sperm whales probably know what it tastes like because sometimes they run into the cables

when they're doing their, because they have a feeding strategy where they just sort of like run along the bottom of the ocean with their mouth open sometimes.

That's kind of how I do it in the pantry.

It's a good audio effect as well there.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I am always a hand raiser as well.

I like to eat a lot of little things, which I don't know if that's good for the blood sugar or not.

I don't think that I'm doing food right, but

I...

You know, I don't need to judge myself.

I mean, on the one hand, of course not.

On the other hand, you're doing it exactly right.

Like, no blue whale is ever like, I don't know if I'm eating krill at the right times.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, you're doing it fine.

It's just that we live in a culture that's like become so obsessed with how we eat that it can be quite distracting from the business of just trying to be here on earth.

I know.

Because I think, I really do think that there are ways to do life well.

And I don't think that always worrying about

whether i'm extending the amount of life that i have or whether i'm uh

uh i don't know i like being healthy that's good that i think that is part of a life a well well i remember when you weren't healthy and it wasn't as good yeah no i definitely didn't like that as much yeah so not that i was extremely in control of that that is the other thing to to remember right i think actually food is an attempt to control the uncontrollable, right?

Yeah, I think that's what we're doing.

They're like, oh, if we just have the right nutrition and diet, we'll be fine, except that like every other thing that ever lived on earth has died.

Yeah.

I remember thinking that when I, like, when I was, when I was sick and I was like talking to my doctor and I was also seeing a bunch of sort of cancer content on Instagram or on TikTok.

And

when I was talking to my doctor, he was like, you don't have like ultimately, you don't have that much agency here.

Like the thing you need to do is your treatments and then like whatever it is that gets you through the day.

And when I was on Instagram, it was like, here's all the things you can do to, that will give you agency over your cancer.

And that was just selling me stuff.

And my, but my doctor wasn't able to do that.

He wasn't able to like give me the feeling of control that I craved because science said, like, all of the evidence pointed to the fact that I don't have that much control.

Like the thing that I need to do is just make sure that I stick to the treatment plan as best I can.

And then Instagram is like, but if you do all of these, like you fast for three days before your chemo and etc.

I feel very bad for the people who are currently trying to live forever, you know, those longevity influencers.

This guy likes me.

Like one of the biggest ones.

He's like a

fan of mine.

Yeah.

Well, I just feel bad for them because they're trying to do something that's fundamentally impossible.

Yeah.

And they're,

you know, like, here's, here's my example of this.

If jogging extended your life by the number of minutes you jog,

you shouldn't jog unless you love jogging.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, it happens that jogging extends your life by something like three minutes for every minute you spend jogging.

So there's an argument that you should jog.

Yeah.

But like

devoted to trying to live forever.

It's just, it's,

it only ends ends one way, which is in terrible, terrible tragedy.

A failure.

Yes.

Yeah, like you're going to fail and it's going to be so sad.

And I feel sad for you now because I have the pre-sadness of knowing that you will die.

And not only that, knowing that you will die around the time that you were going to die anyway.

Right.

And

I don't mean that as like judgment or anything.

Like I also, I also do not like the fact that I'm going to die.

I'm also freaked out by it.

It's something I spend way too much time thinking about.

I'm not trying to judge those people people at all.

I'm just saying that for me, it's a, it's a cause of sadness.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think my least favorite feeding strategy is probably the one where you eat dead animals that have just been sort of sitting on the side of the road for a while.

Oh, like scavenging?

That's it.

That's what that's called.

Yeah.

Buzzard style.

I'm glad somebody's doing it, but I wouldn't want to be involved in it.

Super grateful to the folks who are doing it, right?

Like super grateful to the coyotes, the buzzards, the turkey vultures.

They're doing great work.

Yeah.

Thanks, y'all.

It's not for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's not for me, but like, I'm also, how can I judge something that makes the world better?

Absolutely.

You know, they're just taking an animal that already died and turning it into new life.

Yeah, right?

That's the, it's the most sustainable way to eat meat for sure.

Hank, did you know that when you die,

your bacteria sort of eat their way out of you?

Yeah, yeah.

No, they, they, they sometimes try to do this before you die.

They're like, is this guy dead?

That happens during chemo because all of your white blood cells die.

And then you have to be careful that your bacteria don't wake up and say, wait a second, is this food now?

Is this a living organism that I'm sort of symbiotically living in concert with?

Or is this just a hamburger that I happen to find myself on?

Yay.

Didn't happen to me, but it does happen sometimes.

I know too much about cancer.

Let's answer some questions from our listeners.

All right, Hick, our first question comes from Anya, who writes, Hello, as men in the business of saponification, when do I stop using a bar of soap?

All the soap bars I have used in my life have disintegrated into tiny, annoying lumps.

It takes like five minutes to get any lather out of.

But I feel like I need to use everything to the last atom of soap.

Like, save the planet and kick capitalist consumerism in the nuts.

Hey, hey, hey.

Do not kick

sunbasin' soap in the nuts.

Okay?

Do not kick it.

Is it capitalist consumerism if you, one, need soap and two, all the profits are being donated to charity?

How big

does the bar of soap have to get before you're allowed to throw it away?

Dos vid Anya.

It's a it's a Russian joke.

Oh, it is.

I did not get it, but thank you for pointing it out.

I get it now.

John, do you throw away the soap slivers?

Do you give up at some point?

Because

I have a solution for Anya.

I think we have the same one.

And maybe this is a sunbasin soap-specific solution, because maybe not all soaps do this.

Anya, you take the little leftover soap and you put it on top of a new bar of soap.

Yeah, and then they become one soap, and your new bar of soap gets slightly bigger.

Yes, and you can do this forever.

In this way, soap never dies.

It lives forever, like those people who just want to live.

Right, right.

Just like how if I get eaten by a vulture, I will still be a little bit alive inside of a vulture.

I will just be a vulture.

You'll just be some vulture energy inside of the human energy.

I don't want to be a vulture, but I guess.

Yeah, well.

Yeah, well.

I mean,

what are you going to do?

But that is the thing.

Like, like, I like it works really well with the soap soap that we have.

Catherine, yeah.

Catherine is the one who always sort of like makes the call.

We use the same soap.

And she like makes the decision.

Like, now this bar goes, because otherwise I will keep using it and be like, I guess I'll just clean this corner of my shoulder.

But then she lays it down on there.

And I'm like, oh, it happened.

It's time for a new bar.

And it's fun because we have so many different scents of soaps now in our house.

And so a new bar is always an exciting new moment.

So do we.

And I love, I genuinely love sunbasin soap so much.

It has genuinely been a game changer in my life

because it's bar soap that just is so good.

It softens the skin.

I just took a bath, actually, and I feel

this is what happens when you get soap from people who live in a dry place.

This is dry land, and the entire winter here is all about.

preserving skin moisture.

And so we're serious about that out here.

I mean, the winter is your skin turns into paper.

I think that I'm not sure at this point whether sunbasin soap or the tea is my favorite.

I made some Earl Grey tea this morning that I like, I finished it and I was mad.

Yeah.

I was like,

I should have made three times as much.

That was so freaking good.

You and I are having this conversation privately.

We're not trying to sell sunbasin soap and Keats and coat tea right now.

Genuinely, the one thing that I'm really proud of is that our products are so good, which is why our retention is so high.

Like eventually people tend to tend to get enough socks.

So maybe the Awesome Socks Club isn't as high.

But with the coffee and the tea and the soap, like people just stay forever.

Right.

Because why wouldn't they?

We have solved their coffee and tea and soap problems.

I never have too much tea because if I start to feel like I have too much tea, you know what I do?

I just make a big thing of iced tea.

And then I have Earl Gray iced tea with a little bit of sugar in it.

I'm classy.

I'm classy.

It's classy.

People People come over, they're like, what's this?

And it's like, don't worry, you're going to think it's delicious.

This next question comes from Sam.

It says, Dear Hank and John, I hope this missive finds you well.

As it is an inescapable staple of life in the modern world, I often wonder how far plastic has gotten.

We're often given a statistic that plastic will take a staggering amount of time to biodegrade.

Given that the oldest production of plastic is traced to the early 50s, what's the state of the oldest plastic?

Oh,

is it likely still functional in its initial intended form?

How about the stuff that's been left out in the elements?

Yours and polyethylene, Sam.

Wow.

Hank, how is this plastic doing?

You know, it doesn't turn.

The thing about plastic is that it kind of turns into micro plastic.

Weirdly enough, the reason we first made plastic was to make billiard balls.

That's not the first, very first reason, but this was one of the big reasons.

So it was like a, there was like a competition to try and figure out how to make billiard balls without having to kill elephants, which

is a sort of ridiculous thing to think.

Like, oh, how are we going to make billiard balls without having to grow a whole elephant?

That's the situation we were in.

And there was, and there was like a, like an X prize, basically, for trying to get people to make billiard balls out of something where they could like continue making them without having to go and get elephant tusks

and or make them from other various kinds of ivory.

So the

and then we figured that out which was the sort of first first plastic type things and those those would absolutely still be around they're like very sort of these uh these these hard plastic balls uh that we made and and like that's what you know we still don't make billiard balls out of elephants.

Yeah, but I don't think we make them out of plastic now.

They are in fact very kind of plastic.

They're a hard, really.

They're a dense hard plastic.

Yeah.

Like people will argue about what like actually is plastic.

And sometimes people are very specifically trying to say, no, our product isn't made of plastic.

But if it's a polymerized organic compound,

organic polymers are basically what plastics are, and

billiard balls are still made of that.

So I could say my plastic is organic.

Unfortunately, that word has two meanings, but yeah, you could.

It would not mean what people think you mean, though.

No, I would just be like, don't worry, this is organic single-use plastic.

It's different.

They're all organic.

So anyway, that stuff's going to be in landfills for a long time.

Yeah.

I mean, the sort of single-use plastics we use for like cola bottles these days, those will, uh, those will, they degrade, but they just degrade into smaller plastics mostly for a really long time.

So they, they are not usable for very long, but they are, they are around for a long time.

Basically what happens is the like long chains that are all, that are all binding together to make the plastic, those start to break apart.

And so the plastic like becomes more brittle.

It becomes,

it does not bend as easily.

And

you could break it with your fingers after decades, but it still is just breaking into yet more plastics.

Okay.

And it's kind of like what happens with the human body then.

It just becomes brittle and old.

Youth grows pale and specter thin and dies.

Yeah.

And it also depends on where it is.

If it's like buried in the ground, like a human body, it would last a lot longer than if it was like sitting on the ground getting hit by the sun, which does a lot of good.

Great, because I do intend to be buried with a nice plastic bottle of Diet Dr.

Pepper.

I think it's a great idea, John.

I'll make that happen.

In fact, maybe I'll get a glass one, just so it's a little more classy.

No, no, I mean, just one from the fridge.

Bury me with the people and bury me, bury me with plastic Dr.

Pepper.

This next question comes from Abby Rose, who writes, Dear Green Brothers, my name is Abby Rose.

I'm 26 years old.

I've recently sworn off online dating.

It's horrible.

Do not recommend stay married.

Lately, I've just been getting really hurt in my interactions with people on dating apps, being ghosted, love-bombed, led on, and kind of cruelly rejected.

While no one likes rejection, I don't really mind that piece of it.

Figuring out compatibility is a hard process, and I don't have any hard feelings towards someone who just isn't vibing with me.

Abby Rose seems like a real catch, Hank.

Yeah.

What bothers me is the lying, the ghosting, and the general lack of respect and empathy a lot of people, men mostly, seem to have in these settings.

It has me thinking about how we get to know people.

What advice do you have on judging people's character?

How do you get to know someone as they truly are rather than what they project?

A very tired librarian, Abby Rose.

Plus, Abby's a librarian.

I mean,

wow, catch.

Wow.

The men of the apps are really failing here.

Look, you're coming to the wrong folks to talk about.

I've never been on Tinder.

One time, Rosiano lent me and Sarah her Tinder so that we could see how it works.

Yeah.

And so that we could see what the pool of suitors looked like in Indianapolis.

And we were like, yeah, you probably should move back to London.

I get a feeling.

I get a feeling that

there is some, I mean, look.

Obviously, the apps work for some people, but I do get a feeling that the, just in the same way, that TikTok does not tie me more deeply to creators in the way that YouTube did, where I can just sort of like move on to the next, move on to the next, move on to the next.

But there is a sense that

a lot of the

more mainstream apps, I think that there are a bunch of them that work different ways, but the way that like Tinder Grinder work, you basically, like you get a feeling of the disposability or of the sort of next level opportunity.

Like there's always something next.

There's always something else on the horizon.

Yeah.

That

I think sort of breeds this.

Yeah.

And that I do feel like it's not good for people.

Well, and I think that Abby Rose makes a really good point, which is that when the barrier to

ghosting and showing a lack of respect and empathy gets low, like we tend to be less empathetic, right?

Like when there's no cost to not being empathetic, we tend to be less empathetic.

And there really isn't a cost right now because you're not going to see that person at the grocery store.

Like, like I remember I broke up with this person between my junior and senior year of college.

I have misstated the reality.

She broke up with me.

And

we live next door to each other, man.

You know, so like we come back to college and we have to live next door to each other.

We had a class together.

We had to figure it out.

You know, we had to be, we had to be civil to one another.

There was a cost to not showing empathy and respect.

And

she paid that cost.

Can I say that?

Yeah, well, no, I mean, like, that's how I feel.

There's, there is a, there is, there's a reality there.

Actually, I think the better way to say it is she was good with that cost.

Yeah, she was,

she understood it and she was like, I'll pay to pay that cost.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

I mean, I live in a small enough town that like my friends who date,

they have, they have this.

Like, in Missoula, if it's an age cohort and also sort of a demographic, sort of, you know, the kinds of people you want to date,

that's a small enough pool that you're going to see that person at the grocery store.

You're going to see them at the bar.

But, like, that's not really how the, like, most of the world is structured right now.

And I think you were right that the, the cost of empathy is lower.

And so, like, it sucks to pay it.

So, yeah.

So, like, might as well just ignore it and move on.

Right.

But it's hard work to be empathetic.

It's it's a little more work to be respectful.

It's a little more work to not ghost someone.

Yeah.

And I've never even heard the term love bombing, but I know exactly what it is having

having dated.

I've been on both sides of that coin.

Yeah.

And it, you know,

we're messy.

We're messy.

We're just animals.

And so like, there are times when you're like, oh my God, I am all the way in and this is it.

And then like three days later, you're like, well, what neurotransmitter was I high on?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've never had that experience, but I believe you.

Yeah.

I tend to stay pretty high.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, we wish you luck, Abby Rose.

Please wish you luck.

Yeah, I do not have.

I'm sorry that it's so hard.

It does just sound hard.

It sounds really hard.

We have another question, Hank, from Leah, who writes, hi, why does my math problem say, given that bacteria triples every hour, help Leah?

Oh, yeah, yo, it triples every hour.

Well, Leah, I think it's about E.

coli, which does triple every hour.

Well, yeah, it triples every hour because it doubles every,

I'm pretty bad at math.

That's hard.

I also can't do that off the top of my head.

It doubles every 20 minutes.

So maybe it more than triples every hour.

But at any rate, Leah,

that's in a laboratory environment, okay?

Like if you have like one E.

coli on your finger, it's not going to be three E.

coli an hour later.

It's going to be three E.

coli like two hours later.

Or it might be one E.

coli like an hour later.

Yeah.

So this is the situation in an optimal perfect temperature with infinite food,

E.

coli will

grow, will double every 20 minutes.

Yeah.

But like, is this

horrifying?

But, but it might be that this is just a math problem and they're just trying to get you to do math.

For sure.

For sure.

Leah was trying to get us to do math, which we're not going to do.

Instead of doing that.

I didn't go to Kenyon College to do math in adulthood.

I have to do math sometimes.

And I'm like, I guess I like, I am like,

I need to open a Google sheet right now.

There's no way this is happening in my brain.

I will just go to Google and I will say, hey, what is 13% of 200?

I mean Google will tell me.

The thing that I have the hardest time with, I like don't have a good system for is like

13 is what percent of 52?

Yes, I also have a hard time with that.

But Hank, if you go to Google now and you say 13 is what percent of 52.

It just does it now.

It was for for 15 years.

It couldn't do that.

You had to go to Wolfram Alpha.

But now Google can do it.

Now Google can do it.

But now Google can't do everything else.

It could do that.

But would you like to know anything?

Because it will give you an AI auto summary that may or may not be true.

And then it will also link you to an article that does not have the information you wish to attain.

What happened to the internet?

No, that part is really bad, but the 13 is what percent of 52 part is really good now.

Yeah.

Really good.

An interesting thing about you, of course, is that you don't spend any time thinking about bacteria, but I would actually argue that it's good news when a bacteria

triples really fast or doubles really fast, because

in general, the immune system is pretty good at fighting that, right?

Like,

the

death rate from cholera, which triples really fast, or E.

coli infections, is actually much lower than, for instance, the death rate from a much slower-moving bacteria like tuberculosis, because the slower-moving ones have much better defenses.

They're not just trying to like like attack with

waves upon waves of bacteria.

They're slowly building a beautiful fortress.

That's how I think of it anyway.

It's remarkable.

I mean, like, I just,

it's become so clear to me that, that life

is just what works.

And,

uh, and, and

my brain wants it to be different.

It wants it to be intelligent.

It wants to be like some guiding force.

But like the guiding force is just what works.

And that makes it very messy and weird.

And so you get to bacteria.

And we think, ah, these must be similar, but they can find entirely opposite ways of working.

Yeah.

No, it's weird.

Life is very weird, which reminds me actually that today's podcast is brought to you by the thin film of life life on or near Earth's surface.

The thin film of life on or near Earth's surface, sort of one system.

This podcast is also brought to you by 25%.

It's what percent 13 is of 52.

It turns out I picked an easy one.

But you would never have known that you picked an easy one without.

When I said it, I was like, that's just 13 times 4.

Oh, yeah.

All right.

That's good.

I'm glad you were able to think that.

I thought that you happened into a prime number catastrophe.

Today's podcast is, of course, also brought to you by the inescapable staple of life that is plastic.

Plastic.

It's organic.

And this podcast is brought to you by those guys who are trying really hard not to die.

They

don't need our help.

They seem to be doing fine gathering an audience on their own.

But here we are, giving them some attention anyway.

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All right, Hank, we have another question from Allie, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I was crying about health insurance last night.

I know, how very American of me.

So true.

Do you know that Canadians never cry about health insurance?

They cry about other things,

but they don't cry about health insurance.

No.

What do they cry about, do you think?

Well, they probably cry about,

you know, illness generally, potentially wait times.

I hear about that.

Oh, yeah.

If you're also wasteful, we also cry about those.

We cry.

I was going to say.

This doesn't seem to have really solved the problem for us.

Anyway, I've been thinking: how does health insurance work for full-time successful novelists like yourselves?

Oh,

I realize that you are probably insured through Complexly, although I don't understand how

corporations obtain health insurance packages.

But what about regular authors?

Do they go through the ACA?

Does their publisher offer benefits?

Do they like make themselves a business?

I don't know how anything works.

Feeling blue, cross blue shield, out.

Yeah, I mean, everybody does it.

Everybody does it different.

Not everybody.

Well, I went through the ACA.

There's a bunch of different ways.

Yeah, you went through the ACA.

I went through the ACA for the first few years before Complexly started doing health insurance.

Now Complexly has health insurance.

I mean, we have 80 employees.

And so we have a large health insurance plan.

And you basically buy that from a broker just like you buy other insurance from a broker.

Yep.

But

I find it very weird.

I thought, I don't know why, but I thought that there was probably like

once like companies were doing it because they got a deal, but you don't.

You pay the same amount, basically.

You maybe pool it together so that some person who would be paying a much higher rate,

like you like everybody down on average.

But like,

I don't know.

It's weird.

And like, if you're a company that has a bunch of older employees, you pay more than if you're a company that has a bunch of younger employees, which

because they older people get sick more.

And it's so strange.

And in general, it's very strange to tie health insurance to employment.

It's just a bad strategy because it discourages entrepreneurship.

It discourages people going out on their own and trying to build new businesses, which is really the core of how economic growth and job growth works in the world.

And so there's just

the sort of

to me, the like nakedly capitalist argument is you're discouraging economic growth by doing this.

And then there's the human element where,

you know, we don't live as long as people in Canada.

Nothing against people in Canada.

It's just that I think we should at least be able to tie you.

So,

yeah, so the ACA is like how people who don't have health insurance through.

Yeah, but you didn't do it through.

Most of my author friends are insured through the ACA.

A few of them are insured in other ways that involve like guilds or unions,

which sometimes works, especially if you do a lot of work in Hollywood.

But most of them are insured through the ACA.

And before the ACA, a lot of them were uninsured.

Yeah.

Including for a time, me.

And me.

Yeah.

Yes.

I literally couldn't get insurance.

They wouldn't let me.

No, you have a very bad preexisting condition, and we don't want to give insurance to people who are going to use it.

Yeah.

Well,

especially, because it's not like I was signing up just because I was sick, right?

That's the argument they use.

No, I was signing up because I graduated.

So I was on the student plan and then I got diagnosed and was sick on that plan.

And then I couldn't keep on.

So, like I did the math, it would have been cheaper for me to go to school than to pay for my medication.

Right.

It would have been cheaper to just go to grad school and stay in grad school forever than pay the $20,000 a year that your medication costs.

Yeah.

What a system.

What a system.

Now, let's try to turn it, Hank, and make it funny again.

I mean, in a way, that's funny.

I'm really glad you had health insurance when you got cancer.

Were they cool about it?

Yeah, well, I actually got a really cheap cancer

special.

Congratulations.

Yeah, the most expensive part was the scans, which is not usually how it is.

Right.

Yeah, they were cool about it.

I mean, I hit my out-of-pocket max for a year

and then they paid everything else for than that.

Good.

That is their legal obligation.

Nice of them to do what they're required to do.

Yeah.

I mean, it is like it is a weird thing.

Like it's like with cancer, the doctors are like, yeah, we're putting him on the cancer drugs.

We're doing the standard cancer treatment.

And they're like, yes, type in all the correct codes and we'll do it.

This next question comes from Kyle, who asks, or is this a response?

I'm a tuna scientist, and my good friend, also a tuna scientist, recently documented mostly digested seabird remains in bluefin tuna stomachs.

Article currently in peer review.

Tuna aren't just pescatarians.

DFTA.

Don't forget tuna are awesome, Kyle.

That's wild.

Wow.

I can't, how, how would it not?

I have this problem where I think fish are dumb, but they're not.

I don't know why I think this, but my brain has a hard time thinking of fish as smart.

Yeah.

I'll be honest, Hank, I don't think of any animals as being that smart, including us.

Like, I don't think it would be hard to outsmart humans.

Like, no.

People underestimate how much smarter than us aliens who showed up here wouldn't be.

No, yeah.

Like, I use a computer program that regularly fools me into thinking it knows stuff.

And like, Which computer program?

It's called ChatGPT.

And like it's just constantly telling me things that I'm like, oh, all right.

And then I'm like, I'll check that fact.

And I feel like, well, it turns out that restaurant wasn't founded by that man.

And you just told me a lie.

You just made up a man.

But ChatGPT says it with such confidence.

It's like the ultimate man splaner, you know?

That's all it takes.

Yeah.

If you speak with confidence, I believe you.

I will say, I recently used ChatGPT to create a spreadsheet, and it did a great job.

So

let's be fair.

And someday our robot overlords are going to be in control of us.

And I, for one, wish to welcome them with open arms.

Yeah.

I think that they are already a little bit in control of us.

We've just given them a weird task, which is to keep us occupied.

Yeah.

Well, we've also given them a weird task, which is to sort and order the information that is available to us so that we can understand how to feel about the human species

and our own selves, too.

And mostly, the conclusion seems to be that we should feel real bad about both.

Yeah.

I've become a big believer in that.

It's very engaging to think negatively of our species and ourselves.

We've got to write this book, John.

We do.

We do have to write broadly in favor of humans.

But I

have only one piece of advice for young people really in 2024, which is to develop a sense of the value of all human beings,

including yourself.

Yeah.

The inherent value.

So that it's not about what you accomplish.

It's not about what you do.

You are valuable because you are here with us, because you are an important part of this astonishing 250,000-year-old story.

And if you have value, so does everybody else.

And if everybody else does, so do you.

So do you.

That's it.

That is my advice.

And as I have tried to do that over the last four months, I have become vastly happier.

Oh, good for you.

Because I'm a valuable person.

What was the voice inside my head that was telling me that I was a piece of crap?

What was up?

That was so weird.

What a bad way to think about life.

Just today, Hank, I was working out with Chris and he was like, man, your negative self-talk has really declined.

And it's true.

I used to say terrible terrible things about myself in front of my best friend while I was working out.

And now I'm just like, how did he do?

What did he do?

This is good for my body.

Yeah.

I love, like, Catherine and I work out together.

And I love,

I, I, I love

seeing Catherine do a hard thing.

And I'm just like, yeah, freaking lift that thing.

Get it strong.

I, can I tell you, since you just told me a story, can I tell you a completely unrelated story of a thing that's happening to me right now?

Please.

So I love to swim.

I love to swim in rivers and lakes.

And it is summertime, and it is the end of summertime.

And so

it's actually autumn now, shockingly.

And so I'm taking every opportunity I can get.

And I recently went swimming in Flathead Lake, which is a big, beautiful lake in Montana.

It's one of the, I think it might be the biggest lake west of the Great Lakes.

uh but maybe not and i so i was swimming and i know this about flathead lake sometimes you get swimmers itch.

There's a flat worm that will, uh, that will dig its way inside of you, and then you have allergic reaction to it.

It's like a mosquito bite.

Yes.

It's pretty gross.

Is it fatal?

No, no, it's itchy.

It is itchy.

You itch for like five days.

And I've gotten swimmer's itch plenty of times and I'm just like, whatever.

And I'm

go swimming in Flathead Lake.

And, you know, the next day,

I got a little itchy spot on my arm and one on my leg and one on my collarbone.

And

then the day after that, my, I start to feel

very itchy on my right nipple.

Oh, and

I have swimmer's itch on my right nipple and it itches

so much.

It like to the point where I can't itch it because it hurts.

Like it's like an it is surpassed itch into pain.

And,

but, but like just wearing a shirt, man, it's like on the nipple part of the nipple.

It's they got right on the spot.

And I like I didn't sleep well last night.

I'm just moving through it.

I'm like, this is changing my relationship potentially with lake swimming.

I love what you said though, which is that you're just moving through it because that's all you can do.

And so you're not, you're just moving through it, but you're moving.

This is a very, I think this is a very good way to think about pain and illness and stuff is that you're still moving.

You're moving through it.

Can I tell you a related story?

There might not even be the other side, but you're moving.

This is like dying.

There might not be another side.

You might not get through it, but you're moving through it.

Yeah.

Can I tell you a related story?

Okay.

Is it about your nipples?

It's worse.

It's the John and Hank Nipple Spectacular.

So I got poison ivy.

Yeah.

I was clearing a big area in my yard to build a little path.

And I guess there was some poison ivy down there.

There was so much English ivy.

That stuff creeps and crawls everywhere that I couldn't even see.

But it was stupid to do it.

I was doing it with gloves, and then I got annoyed by the gloves.

And I took off my gloves and was doing some of it by hand.

And then I peed.

And then the next day, now I'm fortunate that I have a very good friend.

One of my closest friends is a dermatologist.

And I called my close friend who's a dermatologist.

And I was like, I can't send you a picture of this, but I'm going to describe it.

Because you don't know for sure what's happened.

No, I just know that there's a crisis.

And then

I know that there's a level one emergency, but I don't know what

you're like, as far as I can tell, there isn't a way that this has happened to me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was real confused.

And I did also have poison ivy all over my arms, but I somehow like didn't connect these two phenomena.

Yeah, yeah.

And so my dermatologist friend was like, have you done anything where you might have gotten poison ivy?

And I was like, oh, yeah, I have poison ivy on my arms.

And she was like, oh, well, it's probably that.

It's probably that.

And I was like, how did I get it?

And she was like, probably peeing.

And you were like, oh, I did, I did pee.

Yeah, I mean, it gets on your outside.

It's like the oil.

It's on your hands anywhere you go.

I once had poison ivy on like a handprint on my face because I like put my hand on my face.

Oh, that sounds terrible.

That doesn't sound as bad as mine, but it sounds real bad.

Yeah.

No, I had to get steroid shot.

Yeah.

I love, you know, I love a steroid shot.

And you just like, go eat.

Great.

Yeah.

You eat and you feel, you feel like.

Yeah.

I get a little aggressive.

It's a reminder.

It's good to think

for like a day.

It's a reminder that whatever I think of as my personality is, in fact, just a bunch of like hormones and chemicals swimming around.

And if you change those hormones and chemicals swimming around, suddenly my personality feel different.

It's so weird.

It's also like, it's also thoughts, though.

Like I can have new thoughts and it changes who I am.

Somebody was recently saying like, you know, the, the, you know, your fat cells and your skin cells, they replace all the time, but your nervous system doesn't.

Like most of the nerves in your body, you have for your whole life.

And they're like, and that's the part that makes you you.

And I'm like, no, it's not.

It's not.

Because those same nerves could have a totally different set of thoughts and values and feelings about the universe.

And I just am a different person now than I was 10 years ago.

It might all be the same nerves, but it's like they all think

and feel different ways.

Which is.

Yeah, no, I read my writing from 20 years ago and I think that is a different person.

That's a, yeah.

Sometimes I'll like read a journal entry that I wrote in college and I'll be like, I do not remember that man.

Yeah.

It's much closer to having been acquaintances with someone than it is to having been someone.

Yeah.

And yet, I was.

It's crazy.

This is crazy.

The one that's craziest to me, Hank, this is going to blow your mind.

I wrote The Fault in Our Stars.

I know.

Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people have that realization where they're like, that's the same guy.

And then you'll have that realization too.

I do.

Every time I'm like, oh, right.

Yeah.

No, I guess I did.

This happens to me when I listen to to my music, where I'm like, what the hell is that, man?

Well, you were just, you just did a video where you played They Might Be Giant song at the end of it, and I was like, oh, right, Hank is a good musician.

Well, that was not the best musicianship I've ever.

I mean, I thought it was good.

It was better than I could do.

Listen, we got to get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

All right, let's do it.

Hank, AFC Wimbledon are

good,

really, really good, I think, maybe.

This seems impossible, but it seems like we might be really good.

We beat a Premier League team.

You might remember the last time we recorded this podcast, I was like, just in a few minutes, we're going to kick off against Ipswich Town, which is where Ali Alhamedi plays now, and we have a 0% chance of winning.

We won that game.

What the heck?

We beat a Premier League team for the first time since 2019.

And then at the weekend, we beat Cheltenham, which might not sound impressive because Cheltenham sounds like a made-up place, but no, we beat Cheltenham and we were so calm.

And the way we played was so good.

We've won three of our first four games in the league.

We've won now two Carabao Cup games.

So we get to play Newcastle United, a proper big club.

They have to come to the Cherry Red Record Stadium at Plough Lane, which is pretty exciting.

Cherry Red Record?

What does that mean?

It's like a goth label.

It's freaking awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That stadium's named after a record label.

The owner of the record label is a big Wimbledon fan.

It's not dissimilar to why they wear a DFTBA on the back of their shorts.

So am I, should I, should I start listening to some Cherry Red tracks?

Please do.

Kim Wilde, Toya.

Yes.

Whoever Cherry Red has signed in the last 30 years, please listen to them in support of AFC Wimbledon.

But yeah, we are

we're we're scoring a lot of like a lot of good goals and I thought we played so well against Ipswich like we were good value for that win and then we went on and beat Fleetwood beat Fleetwood 1-0 and like that was another game where like we didn't look amazing, but we just we just played it.

We played really well and now

in just 12 days

we will be taking on the franchise currently plying its trade in Milton Keynes.

So this will be a test of like

they're like a league up, right?

No, no, no, they're in our league.

But they spent so much money this summer.

They got a new ownership group.

Okay.

And they spent so much money that they are, everyone thinks they're going to win league two, but they lost three of their first four games, so maybe they're not going to win league two.

At any rate, we're going to find out how good we are.

Yeah.

I mean, what do the standings mean three games in?

Not a lot.

Yeah.

But I mean, I really like the way we're playing.

Even the only game we lost this season was the one that I went to.

Oh, that's a bummer.

That's all right.

I love going even when we lose, to be honest with you.

I don't really, that doesn't really matter that much to me.

Yeah.

That's a lie.

I like it better when we win.

What's going on in Mars?

So we like to look at the surface of Mars.

At least I do.

We like to know what the surface of Mars looks like.

And the way that you talk about the images we have of the whole surface of Mars.

So we can take like small pictures of individual areas that are super high resolution, but we we also sort of do whole Mars maps.

And we've done a bunch of these.

And the way you talk about like whole planet maps is by the number of meters per pixel.

So if there's like 500 meters per pixel, that's less resolution than if there's 100 meters per pixel.

Sure.

And we've done a bunch of these over the years.

And

so it, and these are the maps of the

surface of Mars that you've seen.

Like the Viking mission took one that was 925 meters per pixel.

And then there is a really fancy one that's five meters per pixel, but it's grayscale.

So there's no color.

It's just scales of

white to black.

But we have a new most

highest resolution color map of Mars, which is from the Tianwen One Global Color Map.

It has a resolution of 76 meters per pixel.

So now there's a map that you can go look at that is from a Chinese mission to Mars that remapped the surface surface in the highest resolution ever.

And you can zoom and zoom and zoom and zoom like it's Google Earth, but it's Mars.

And you can see all the cool, weird features on the surface everywhere you want to look.

And that's a that's a that's a very useful thing to have for geological studies, for future missions, for

understanding change.

So like if the more resolution you have, the more you can see if like one map is different from another map because of weather or because of like weird,

you know, there's like lots of weird geological things that happen on Mars.

And so it's just good for research and also good for future missions for picking landing sites and having the data so that you can actually land and not trip over something when you're landing.

That's so cool.

I feel like it wasn't that long ago that Google Maps had a pixel of 76 meters per pixel or something.

You know, like, yeah.

It's crazy how fast that technology is improving.

Yeah, it's really cool.

And

it is also just like cool to look at.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Well, Hank, thank you for podding with me.

Thanks to everybody for listening.

You can email us your questions at hankandjohn at gmail.com.

That's also where you can email us your corrections like the fact that tuna, it turns out, are not strictly speaking pescatarian.

This podcast is edited by Linus Ovenhaus.

It's mixed by Joseph Tunamedish.

Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell.

It's produced by Rosian Halls, Rojas, and Hannah West.

Our executive producer is Seth Radley.

Our editorial assistant is Debi Chakravarti.

The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarola, as they say in our hometown.

Don't forget to pick awesome.