389: Dear Honk and Jane

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Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

Or as I prefer to think of it, dear Hank and the world's tiredest boy in tired town.

It's a podcast where one person who's doing okay and one person who's doing not as okay.

Answer your questions, give you dubious advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

John, did you know that some turtles pee out of their mouth and other turtles breathe through their butts?

I didn't know that.

That is just a fact.

We're not doing a bad joke today.

It's just facts.

Well, I appreciate learning that.

That's a wonderful thing to know, to go forth into the world with that knowledge is a beautiful gift.

I am very tired and emotionally and psychologically not in the best spot.

It's always destabilizing to talk about your mental health in the context of fiction, which is kind of what I've been doing nonstop for the last two months.

And

then there's just the inevitable sort of

release

of the movie coming out, which has been great, to be clear.

Like I couldn't have asked for a better reception to the movie.

It's 90% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with critics and 96 fresh with audiences so obviously we did something right and uh the responses to the film have been overwhelming and um just a source of absolute um just an absolute gift to me uh but full disclosure yeah i'm uh

uh

it's i'm clinging i'm like i'm like clinging to a branch you know and you're like and it feels like it's it's a long way down but it's not i'm fine uh i'm only gonna fall afoot if i fall but it feels catastrophic it just you know my brain doesn't work great at times like this.

There's also, I think I've had to learn for my own self when like big things happen in my life that like that the week after it kind of ends, I'm going to crash.

Like I'm going to emotionally be

not in a great way.

No, no.

I mean, even if it goes well, like

In some ways, it's almost scarier, to be honest, if it goes well, because now, like,

which is good, this was, of course, what we wanted.

Like, when you have a very, very small marketing budget, your dream is that the movie will catch on with enough people, that they'll share it with enough people, that they'll share it with enough people, that it'll have a good life.

And that's happening, which is great, but it also means like it's kind of not over.

Like, I remember, you know, and

I want to emphasize that I'm complaining about the world's best problem.

It just happens to be my problem at the moment.

And I'm not.

So, yeah, I have this like

horrible ache in my stomach all the time.

And I can't eat and I can't sleep and I'm not doing great but I'm excited to make a podcast with you and forget all about that and we have to begin the podcast by talking are we gonna do this zine because I think we

got I feel like we have to at this point we've gotten so many space turtles so we made this thing about how if a space turtle cuddled up to the moon it might change Earth's climate in interesting ways.

Yeah.

And we asked people to send in space turtles and people send in so many high quality space turtles, you can't even believe it.

We'll put some of them on the Patreon for free at patreon.com slash dear hank and john but like there's no way we can put all of them on the patreon for free or else there would never be other content on our patreon forever yeah we so we cannot we if we make a zine we are not going to include all of the space turtles in addition we also have people send in captions for what the space turtles might be thinking and we're going to match captions to picture yes but uh weirdly i feel like we got more pictures than captions.

Which is surprising because captions you would think are easier.

I would think would be easier.

Yeah.

So

we're not going to make it available for pre-order.

This one's so good.

What is it?

It's just, it's like a color pencil drawing.

It's a great, it's really good.

Yeah.

I mean, some of them are, some of them are brilliant.

Thank you, Charles.

Thank you, Charles.

Thank you, Charles.

Thanks, everybody.

But I don't think we can make it available for pre-order just yet, can we?

No, definitely not.

All right.

So you're going to have to wait for it safe.

You're going to have to wait for your Space Turtle zines.

In the meantime, we're going to answer some questions from our listeners.

I know that people are hotly awaiting their Space Turtle zines.

Yeah.

Okay, let's answer some questions from our listeners.

Beginning with this one from Quinn.

Dear Honkin Jane, dear Honkin Jane, it's raining on my walk to work.

How do you effectively hold an umbrella?

I'm holding it sort of in front of my head to accommodate for forward momentum, but now my back is wet.

Help the mighty Quinn.

I think your umbrella is too small.

This is the thing that you learn when you go to New York City is that people have umbrellas that are the size of, I don't know, what's the size they are.

They're the size of a space turtle.

They're They're space turtle size.

There's not much else that's that size.

No, no.

They're the size of a New Yorker's umbrella.

You can either get a larger umbrella or you can get exceptionally good at reading winds and tides and whatnot, such that you, and then you hunch.

You got to stand up very straight, but at the same time, get very small.

Yeah.

And the umbrella is close to you.

It gets you, like, make it as close to you as possible, right?

Yes.

You have it basically, it's part of your head.

Ideally, you want to get one of those umbrellas that actually fits on your head.

Oh, yes.

But here's the thing.

John has already started to walk down the path of the ultimate expression of this, which is first you get good at sort of like not taking up as much space, and then you read the winds and you read the, and then eventually you sort of get aligned enough with the storm that you don't even need an umbrella and you just walk through the drops.

That's right.

Like

a master of weather.

Like keanu reads in the matrix instead of dodging bullets you're dodging drops and your body can shape and shift form as needed to avoid all the drops and that's the reason i feel like it's totally possible like could you like there's got to be like a time when it was raining outside and somebody was like walking from their car to their house and just like every drop missed them you know what is so in my experience thrilling is when you're experiencing what Quinn just went through and you're getting your back wet and then you're getting your shoes wet and then you're getting your knees wet and then you're getting your left side wet.

And then eventually you close the umbrella and you realize that you are alive in a world that is raining

and that's where you're supposed to be and it's who you're supposed to be and you're supposed to be getting wet right now and that's just that's just what is happening and you just accept it like like like we accept that we are floating down a river of fate that we have very little say in

yeah Yeah, we go out of the world the way that we come into it at the mercy of some BS that we cannot control.

We become the uncarved block of wood that the Tao Te Ching celebrates us as being.

Yes.

Next question.

John, this next question comes from Molly, who asks, hey, y'all, love the show.

Here's my query.

I'm an older listener, perhaps.

I'm 34.

So old.

How do you get around all day, Molly?

You must know how to use an umbrella so well.

I'm fortunate enough to be a first-time homeowner.

I've had a lifelong love for

I've had a lifelong love for Shaquille O'Neal.

I didn't see it coming.

When you said, I have a lifelong love, and then you paused

so many things came into my mind of what one could have a lifelong love for that would make you laugh like that.

And none of them were Shaquille O'Neal.

Yeah, I grew up in Orlando when he played for the Orlando Magic.

Same.

Same.

And I named my first pet a female rat, Shaquille, in his honor.

At the same time, my mom somehow got a life-size cardboard cut out of Shaq that I brought to my first grade classroom, and we loved it.

Okay, so you are younger than us.

But when we started being Magic fans, Shaq wasn't on the team.

But we were actually pre-Shaq.

Yeah.

A few years back, my mom gave me the awesome Christmas present of finding the same

young Shaq in his Magic 32 Jersey cardboard statue as a present.

And I love it.

But what exactly am I supposed to do with it as a 34-year-old?

How unadult or inappropriate is it to want to display a seven-foot three inch cardboard cutout of Shaquille O'Neal in my living room now that I have my own home?

It seems like the most logical choice.

I certainly don't want him to get all moldy in the garage, but is it also juvenile?

Never been a baller, just a mauler, Molly.

Dice, I got so many thoughts.

First, I'm glad that you specified that it was indeed life-sized because sometimes those cardboard cutouts, you know, they're just cardboard things.

They shrink you down a little bit.

They shrink you down a little bit so that you're easier to ship.

Yeah.

But with Shaq, that's part of the deal.

Can't shrink you.

is that he's a big boy.

So you want it to be Shaq-sized.

That's a lot, though.

It's a lot to ask.

And now it does finally, at the end, make sense that you mentioned that you're a first-time homeowner before telling us you are.

It reminds me of when you try to put a Christmas tree in your house and it's only like three inches shorter than the ceiling.

Yeah.

And it starts to feel real crowded in that room.

And I imagine, but also on the other hand, isn't that

Shaq's experience of being in such a room?

And aren't you here to celebrate your love of Shaq and the fact that Shaquille O'Neal, who, by the way, for new listeners who may not be familiar with Shaquille O'Neal's work, is a basketball player and pundit and spokesperson for Capital One credit cards?

Isn't it kind of beautiful to acknowledge what the room would be like to Shaq?

And movie star, we should add.

I think also, here's what, here's my feeling, John.

I think that Shaq classic multi-hyphenate.

Yes.

Oh, yes.

One of the, one of the, he's a Renaissance man.

I think Shaq should be displayed, but secretly.

So there should be a way to see Shaq, but you should not see Shaq immediately.

For example,

if you can find the highest room, like the highest ceiling in the house and just tape him to the ceiling.

I was thinking more, and this is an expensive solution, but I was thinking more you build a built-in bookshelf, but it has a secret three-foot room behind it.

And you can open the bookshelf and instead of with seven foot four by three feet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's seven feet four inches tall, but only three inches wide and deep.

I mean, three feet wide and deep.

And then you open the bookshelf.

And instead of there being like a proper secret room, there's just shacks.

Secret shack.

That would be great.

You could also build a shack shack in the backyard.

Shack shack.

It's a specific, very small, somewhat tall shack shack in the backyard.

A tiny home, but it's not a tiny home because because Shaq lives there.

And, but my, here's my thought.

You might end up getting a fold out couch that turns into a bed.

Shaq should go get full, Shaq should be folded into the bed.

So when you have visitors, you're like, it's a fold-out couch and you're like, okay, you could set up the bed.

I'm going to sleep.

And then they are setting up the bed and they get delighted and surprised.

It's going to have to be a very long fold-out couch for that bit to work.

It's going to have to be an extra long fold.

It's the witch.

But I think you're right about the width being a problem too.

I think everything's at the same time.

Jack, why'd you have to be so big?

Well, I mean, that's also why he's such a genius.

This is the conundrum we all find ourselves in, Hank.

The thing that makes us strong is the thing that makes us weak.

The thing that will save us is the thing that will kill us.

The end of man is knowledge, but there's one thing he can't know.

He can't know whether that knowledge will save him or kill him.

Yeah.

I'm going to take every single question to this energy level.

You cannot stop me.

This is the energy level where I'm living, and I'm going to force you to live in it with me.

Okay.

There's no point, Molly.

We strive and we struggle and we row against the current and still there is an emptiness.

Alternate solution, you grind up Shaq into little bitty pieces and then you make a tiny Shaq Shaq and put Shaq in the tiny Shaq Shaq.

That's like an urn, but for Shaq.

I mean, that's, that's, I'm just going to say it.

That's really up.

It's really up to cremate

Shaq.

Shaq is still with us.

Shaq is still with us.

So that's like it's

imagine like people being like, What's this?

And you're like, oh, that's the Shaq Shack.

What's the Shaq Shack?

The Shaq Shack is where I keep Shaq.

They cut Shaq up into little tiny pieces because I love him so much.

And I put him inside this urn, which is a totally normal thing to have in your home.

Ah,

yes.

You've You've really like the whole idea of having Shaq in your house is making sure that it's the most funny way possible.

And I think grinding them up on a little basis might be it.

I think you should consult with Shaq, Molly.

I think you're asking the wrong people.

It's true.

You got to get my new podcast, Dear Hank and Shaq.

It's going to be amazing.

This next question comes from Nola, who says, Dear John and Hank, no time for chit-chat.

Are humans a superorganism?

I was watching the Texas bee lady on TikTok.

You know, the one who scoops up bees with her bare hands.

Anyway, she says that that a hive of bees are a superorganism, meaning a collective of individuals working in synergy for the good of the whole.

Don't humans do this too?

Not all the time, Nola.

Not all the time.

Not all the time.

Homo hominy lupus, Nola.

Man is a wolf to man.

Man is also a man-to-man, homo, hominy, homo.

That's true.

And to be fair, we're way worse than wolves a lot of the time.

I mean, sure, we don't exclusively communicate through pheromones or other physical biological means, but how else would you define humanity other than a collective of individuals working together for the good of the species?

I can think of a few other definitions, NOLA, actually.

Are we or are we not a superorganisms out of many one, NOLA?

Hank, what do you think?

Are we a superorganism?

I think we, on some level, are, because I think the coolest thing about humans by a very wide margin is our capacity for collaboration.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that we are.

I think that we would be seen that way by an outside observer.

Very,

like, very obviously.

I, I have a hard time seeing it from the inside being one of the pieces of the super organism.

I don't feel like a super organism.

Right.

I feel like a person who has my own thoughts and feelings and, and has figured all of this stuff out myself, but that's like definitely not true.

Like, it's just definitely not true.

And, and so like, like, I actually talk about this in my comedy special, which hopefully people will get the chance to watch eventually.

It's a, it's a lot about cancer and ants and, and humans.

And

that is very much the conclusion that I come to: that, like, instead of signaling each other with pheromones, we signal each other with something else.

And that thing, that else thing

is

basically culture

and society.

But also love, like, also just like human-to-human connections within a family, within small groups.

And it just like all sort of like stretches out.

and like it's it's made of stories and it's made of words and it's made of feelings you know

yeah i also think there are other things that just connect us practically that aren't just made of stories but you know we have practical needs for each other where you know my expertise and your expertise are have to complement one another because if we only if we all only become experts in one thing then we're doing um the human story a great disservice

yeah and there's also the part where there's like a built environment around it.

Like, just like bees have hives, we have cities and towns and we have roads, we have things that we build to connect ourselves to ourselves.

And it's very superorganism-y.

Well, I think you're right that, like, if

I have this long-standing thing that I'm sure I've told you about, where I'm fascinated by what the history of humans and the history of the earth would look like to an organism that is 30,000 feet above sea level and cannot move.

Right, right.

And that person would definitely think that we are a super organism, but would also think that, like, man, this superorganism gets mad at itself a lot and causes itself a lot of unnecessary suffering through that bad behavior.

Yeah.

Especially, like, I feel like in the 18th century,

the observer might have been like, I'm not sure this is a super organism, actually.

I think these guys might hate each other.

Yeah, I mean, the thing about bees is they definitely work a lot.

They're better at it than us.

But

it's also taken a longer time for them to get to where they are.

That's true.

We've only had 250,000 years.

Yeah.

And we're better at it than we used to be.

We're better at super organisming than we used to be because it used to be that we couldn't pass along knowledge nearly as effectively as we can now.

Yep.

Do you think Shaq is part of the superorganism?

Definitely.

I think he's the head of it.

I think he's the queen bee, man.

i think almost definitionally beyonce is the queen bee but well no no no no nothing against beyonce but shaq shaq is the glue that holds it all together i'm pretty sure because imagine a world without shaq

imagine our world you can't do it i can't do it it's not there it's not you can't do it everything disappears it's i can imagine the world without anything else except for shaq that he wow there is wow weird there's no space jam wow everything is different

I think it's not that I can't picture space jam without Shaq.

It's that my mind turns into blankness.

Yeah.

It's a powerful man.

This next question comes from Brent, who asks, hi, Hank and John.

I've got one of those weird questions for Hank to hopefully answer.

We have an espresso barista machine at home, and it has a tray that collects both coffee grounds and over pressure water from the steam wand and the espresso pump, which builds up.

However, when I empty the tray, there's a bunch of slimy algae bacteria fungus stuff at the bottom.

And when that is exposed to air to empty the tray, it smells like burnt hair.

Why?

What chemical are they releasing?

And why is it only when you expose it to oxygen, I presume, that it smells like that?

Wow.

Before you answer this question, and I am fascinated to learn the answer, can I just tell you something that I was just thinking?

Yeah.

I was thinking, I hope I get to write a policy genius ad for this episode.

Oh, good for you.

Because I can really take it.

Dark advertising.

I can take it dark today.

You're ready for it.

Yeah.

Sorry, what was the question?

Do you know why it smells like burnt hair?

Is there a reason?

Well, I mean, it's going to smell like burnt stuff

because that coffee is roasted.

So I think that there is an amount of it that is that.

Do you know the smell of burnt hair, John?

You smelled burnt hair.

You went to the same summer camp as me.

Oh, yeah.

The first time I ever French kissed someone.

I don't think I've heard that story.

Yeah.

Well, we were, it was the last day of camp and it was a candlelight ceremony, as you well remember.

You went to the same camp.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I figured it was the camp thing.

That's what, that's how I know the smell of burnt hair because the freaking candlelight ceremony where they didn't, they never say beforehand, don't give each other hugs until you blow out your candles or else we'll have more burned hair like we do every single session.

Nor indeed do they say, hey, if you're getting ready for your first French, just prepare.

that you might get your hair burnt.

So that's exactly what happened, Hank.

I'd heard through the, through the grapevine that this young woman wanted to French me,

which is what it was called at the time.

This is what they said back then.

Yeah.

This is what they said back then.

We're not making that up.

And I said,

well, I would also like to French her.

I'm looking to lose my Frenching

virginity.

And

so

we met at the end of, we'd been dating for almost the entire camp.

We were close.

And

I don't know what grade I was in, fifth, sixth, young, young.

But anyway, wow.

Point being, we wrapped our arms around each other and we began kissing.

W Riz.

We kissed.

It happened.

I got my first kiss.

And then I smelled the smell of burnt hair because I'd wrapped my candle all the way around

back to my head and I'd lit my own hair on fire.

And that was my first kiss.

That's, I love that.

Yeah.

I have, I have a similar story that I'm not going to tell because it's not my first kiss.

Well, what's your first kiss?

You're not getting away away without that well my first kiss is bore is just boring normal kiss stuff did you get word in advance that somebody was looking to french

uh or did you just go for it tell me more god i actually i can't i'm i have to remember who it was oh okay i got it i got it yeah no we it was like uh it was like hey come over to my house like me and we'll watch a movie with my friend you and your sister can come over and then we just

uh

you know we had we did not watch the movie.

You just Frenched instead.

We Frenched instead.

I find that word, by the way, so disgusting.

That's why I keep saying it is because it horrifies me so thoroughly.

It's so weird.

But at the time, there were two kinds of kisses.

There were like pecks.

Yeah.

And then there were Frenches, as they were called.

And I think it's a wonderful, people are always like, oh, like we missed this.

We're impoverishing our language by going into emojis and saying L-O-M-L or whatever.

Language is so much better than it was in the 1980s.

In the 1980s, we described a certain kind of kissing as Frenching rather than just calling it what it is, which is kissing.

So for all those negative Nancy's out there, and I realize that I'm bringing a lot of negative Nancy energy to the pod today, and I'm sorry about that.

But for all those negative Nancies out there, just know that in fact, like language is richer and more interesting than it's ever been in all of human history.

There are so many things to say, and we have so many ways to say them.

True.

But it is a little awkward because this podcast is actually brought to you by the word Frenching.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

Well, we said what we said.

I don't accept money from anybody.

Frenching,

it's not French.

I mean, maybe it is.

It's no more French than it is anything else.

I'm pretty sure Frenching existed before France.

That's a great argument.

It's a great point.

Today's podcast, of course, is also brought to you by Shaquille O'Neal.

Shaquille O'Neal, the glue holding it all together.

This podcast is also brought to you by the Texas B lady, the Texas B lady, convincing humans that we are all just a bunch of bees.

And, of course, today's podcast is brought to you by the new hit movie, Turtles All the Way Down, streaming now on Macs.

It's the last time I'll advertise it, I promise.

Maybe not.

It's also streaming on things that aren't Macs, but are Max-affiliated.

That's right.

Globally, it's streaming on

whatever they decided to abandon the perfectly good brand of HBO for.

That's where it's streaming.

Oh, my God.

I can say that now.

What are they going to do?

Take down the movie?

We got a Project for Awesome message.

This one is from Tim to Colleen.

We took a detour last year so we could add to the ball of paint.

By the time this gets to you, I can't know the exact shape of our life, our hopes or our fears or what our little family looks like, just as I can't fathom the layers of paint above ours.

But I know that we are here for each other hand in hand.

Our layer is number 28,170.

It's blue and it is still there.

Every bit of it is real, even the lumps, and we made it together.

That's just lovely.

Jesus, Tim.

That's gorgeous.

We also have a project for awesome message from Laura to Nick, who says, these last few years have been so hard in so many ways.

Thank you for the abundance of love, patience, and understanding you've given me for being being there for me when I couldn't be there for myself and for always looking out for me.

You are truly my better half and my favorite person.

Here's to many more years of finding the small joys in life together.

I love you.

God, both just make me want to cry.

Beautiful.

Thank you, Laura.

Thank you, Tim.

Thank you to everybody who donated to the project for awesome this year.

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So we gotta get back to this burnt hair smelling coffee stuff.

Oh, is there another reason?

Well, no, I mean, I just like, I, so basically, of the things that are gonna be in that tray, coffee has some stuff still that microbes can metabolize.

Uh, so like we're basically looking at at what's feeding the thing.

But also, there's probably going to be some like milk from the milk wand.

And that's like milk is like the stuff for microbes.

And so, what you might have is like a mix of a milk curdling smell, which is kind of a sour, sweet smell, which is kind of similar to, I'm just guessing here, similar to a burnt hair.

And then you've got the burned smell of the coffee, which is going to add the burning smell on top of the sour, sweet of the milk.

But I don't know what compounds hair makes when it burns, but definitely it does not smell like normal smoke.

Hmm.

Okay.

Interesting.

This next question comes from Alexis, who says, hi, I've never been very good at wearing sunscreen every day as I have pretty sensitive skin.

I've finally found some that I'm able to wear each day, but now I'm in the ripe old age of 26.

Is it too late for me?

Is my skin already too damaged?

Is there any point to start wearing it now?

Alexis.

I had to answer this question because I have to say three things to you.

The first is that yes, there is a reason to start wearing sunscreen now.

That would also be true if you were 60.

The second is that I can't tell if you genuinely think that 26 is old.

Is it too late for me?

I'm 26.

Because you're just getting started in this broken world, Alexis, and everything is going to be okay.

Your skin is not too damaged, okay?

You're going to be okay.

You're going to be okay.

And there's always a point to starting now instead of starting and instead of saying it's too late.

There's no point.

Yeah,

it's true.

You got to take that the whole way.

Yes.

The second best day to plant a tree is now.

I mean, I got people, I know people who are kind of on the way out and they are 100%

like still wearing sunscreen, you know, like it's.

No reason to rush yourself out the door, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

And also,

you know, starting new things.

And I think that's really beautiful.

And it's not something I'd really confronted much

that like

there was this, there's this feeling that like, well, if I'm not going to be around, then why do the thing?

And that really, like, that, that's a real cause of, of a lot of

hard things to deal with when you're sick.

And the,

and the, experience I've had seeing people who are who know that they're, uh, the thing that the disease they have now is the thing that's going to kill them.

Um, it's seeing those people

start

new things.

It's like, oh, right.

Like, I'm also, I also have a thing that's going to kill me.

It's called being alive.

And I'm starting new things.

And like, why?

Like, a person who's going to die is alive.

And that's true of every person who's alive.

So it's really, it's strange how I see the sort of act of doing new things from something that's about some

future thing to it being about some now thing, you know?

Right.

Yeah, it's really important to remember that there is no forever that we're striving for in art or in anything else because there is no forever for us, not as an individual, not as a species.

And so we're not making stuff for posterity.

We're making stuff for each other.

And like, maybe if we're extraordinarily lucky, some of those each others we're making, making that stuff for don't exist yet and will be part of the future.

But like, you're not making it to last forever.

Like even Shakespeare wasn't, Shakespeare wasn't writing to us.

Shakespeare was writing to his time and it just happens to still speak to us.

And

that for me is a great reminder of what we should be up to, which is not like trying to establish a legacy that lasts forever when there is no forever, but instead trying to do do cool stuff with cool people while we're here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like I thought about that a lot when you had cancer, man, because

you were starting new stuff left and right.

You were writing a stand-up special and you were designing socks and you were inhabiting all kinds of identities that you'd never inhabited before.

And that didn't feel like foolishness or naivete to me.

It felt like the most human, reasonable thing that you could possibly do.

There was

a moment when it was like, you know, there's various moments, but like at one point I messaged a friend of mine who had also been through cancer treatment.

And I was, I, I was like, I just don't, like, I'm just not done yet.

And he was like,

nobody's done yet.

Yeah.

And, but it did sort of make me feel like, well, I got to get a couple of these things done.

Like the things that are in progress,

I really want them to be, I want them to be done.

And I love getting done.

Done is great.

And I'm, I, I'm bad at it.

I'm, I'm bad at getting done because oftentimes I make things that are perpetual.

Right.

Right.

I also.

But I love things that get done.

Yeah.

Maybe I should think about it that way.

Maybe I should think like the reason I

don't feel so great is because I finished a big thing that was hard.

You did.

You finished a big, hard thing.

Like, that's so cool.

It's done.

Yeah.

And now, like, that's, that's out there in the world forever.

Yeah.

And you have other things that you can apply your energy to

when you want to.

All right.

right, let's answer one more question before we get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

This question comes from Astra and Moss, who write Deer, Potato, Chester, and Gummy Bear.

Those are our pets, just so everyone knows.

What do you recommend doing when your people sneeze?

It isn't normal.

And my person sneezes like at this time of year a lot.

And I run away every single time, even though I've been with my person for seven years now.

Do I keep running away?

Do I try and get over it?

Sneezing and scramming, Astra the cat, and Moss the person.

This is the great, this is the kind of question that I've been just dying to answer because it begins with a premise that is correct, which is that sneezing is not normal and it is not normal to sneeze.

Yeah.

And cats and dogs know this about us.

They are horrified by our sneezing.

Astra, I think it is so rational for you to bolt out of the room when this happens because you are a cat.

And

it is very, it is, I think that like we can all agree that it is weird that you live in this person's house anyway, right?

Right.

Like you're a cat.

You're not a dog.

You're not like some like little pet animal.

You're a wild animal.

Even if you were a dog to have.

Even if you were a dog, it'd be very weird.

Yeah, but not like it is for a cat.

I don't know.

When I sneeze, my dog runs out of the room.

My dog is like, what the hell just happened?

Something happened.

Something happened inside that person's soul just now.

When Red Green would, if you farted, Red would run away.

Yeah.

He hated farts.

Like he knew.

He didn't like the smell.

He would fart and he'd be like up and out.

Yep.

But yeah, I think, look,

Astra, you have to do what your cat soul tells you to do.

You are not a pet.

You are a person who lives with other people.

You are just a different kind of person.

A superior kind.

I'm speaking as gummy bear.

This is gummy bear now speaking.

You are a superior kind of person.

That's true.

Those are those weird people over there.

And they do weird stuff.

And when they do weird stuff, you should leave and go find a more comfortable place.

Yeah, that's true.

From Gummy Bear's perspective, it's like these servants do a pretty good job of serving me, but then sometimes they act weird.

Yeah.

And I don't know how to explain to them that they are not fully fulfilling their role in my life, which is to meet my needs.

Yeah.

So yeah, you should run away when someone isn't meeting your needs by sneezing.

Yeah.

That's you know you're you're a wild animal, not dubious at all.

Great advice, Hank.

Let's get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

AFC Wimbledon's season wrapped up on the men's side, uh, and we ended up finishing like ninth,

whatever.

Uh,

we kind of collapsed at the end of the season.

We missed out on the playoffs, but we also had a number of games where we weren't afraid of relegation, which for me anyway is an absolute delight.

Uh, but the women's team, Hank, uh, did secure promotion and then played their final game of the season on May 5th at Plow Lane in front of over 2,500 fans, the largest crowd AFC Wimbledon's ever had for a women's team and one of the largest crowds in the fourth tier history.

And most excitingly, that was also our last game in the fourth tier because Wimbledon women's team won their league.

There's only one promotion spot.

We got it.

We're headed up to the third tier of English football.

Very exciting.

So while the men's team missed out on promotion, the women's team secured it.

And I think have a very bright future sponsored by Rosiana and me.

They wear partners in health on the back of their jerseys.

They're an extraordinary group of young people.

One of them

actually went from having a really severe stroke during a brain surgery and experiencing basically total paralysis on one side of their body, and fought their way all the way back to being a footballer again and getting to participate in

this season's incredible promotion campaign.

So, they got to lift the trophy in front of 2,500 people at Plow Lane, including over a dozen nerdfighters and Rosiana, who went to the game.

It always just means the world to me when nerdfighters go to celebrate AFC Wimbledon.

So, thank you, and congrats to the women's team on their amazing season.

This week in Mars News, John, there's another weird rock.

Oh, boy.

Is it a pretty weird weird rock?

Is it identical to the last one?

No, it's a different,

it's a number of different rocks,

but they all have something in common.

So, obviously, Curiosity studies rocks.

Been doing that for a long time in the middle of Gale Crater using the ChemCam, which vaporizes the rocks and then it uses a laser to figure out what is inside the rocks.

Right.

And inside these rocks, they found a lot of manganese oxide, which is interesting because manganese oxide on Earth only forms in the presence of there being a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere, which is not how Mars is like today.

So this might suggest that Mars had oxygen levels similar to Earth in the past.

No way.

Yeah.

Like a full atmosphere and

proper oxygen and all that.

And like, yes, and also oxygen is weird and unstable.

And so

this would be like, if if we could confirm that there was like a thick atmosphere of oxygen there are situations where that could form without biology but it it did not form without biology on earth we didn't get a thick oxygen atmosphere until until biology happened um but

uh

the uh uh

we do not know if that's how these happened there are some there's debate of course there's debate there's a 2022 study that found that maybe other things could convert manganese into manganese oxide in various ways

just in water.

But, you know, and we know that Mars had water.

So for now, it is still a mystery, but it is a clue.

And

we need to do more chemistry to figure out whether, like to the extent to which it would be possible for it to happen without oxygen.

And we also need to find other things that would confirm that Mars had an atmosphere of oxygen before we agreed for sure that that is the thing that happened.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's fascinating.

I mean, that raises the possibility that there was relatively complex life on Mars.

Not necessarily complex, but a lot of it.

Right, right.

I guess more like it would be about the quantity, not the quality.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

And like, who knows?

Like, if it, if life evolved in a different way

versus having been seeded from one to the other, um, Then

this is one of my big questions, Hank.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

We,

as far as we know, life only evolved once on earth.

Oh, yeah.

And yeah.

And so it must be kind of hard for it to happen.

Well, I mean, it could have, it could have happened more than once at separate places, and then one probably would have taken over the other.

So like all of all of the life that we have right now descended from one kind of life.

There's not like two systems of life on Earth.

That is surprising to me if it's so likely

that on other planets there

life

seems to have emerged in other places even very close to us, life seems to have

likely emerged at some point.

Like we have sort of like tentative evidence of it both on Venus and on Mars, the two planets closest to us.

Like that's pretty wild.

I mean, I know it's tentative, but like we have tentative evidence is a strong word we have like tentative possible indications of it yeah i mean i so my where i'm kind of getting to is it's probably

probably not that weird for life to happen but why didn't life happen more than once here

Well,

it may very well have.

It's just that one system was better than another and out-competed it.

And I think that would be kind of inevitable.

So if you have two systems that are like isolated from each other, and then like one is able to

like in these early like scenarios of life on Earth, mostly what you're thinking about is hydrothermal vents,

though people will argue that there's other opportunities, but it looks increasingly like it was hydrothermal vent-based.

And so they would be in these pockets that would be separate from each other.

And they would also be very reliant on that environment around the hydrothermal vent.

So leaving that environment would be very hard and also would require like a huge step in evolution of sort of creating the membrane around around yourself to carry the environment that you evolved in with you.

Right.

And so the first like thing that was able to do that was probably able to go and like see those things and be like, wow, you know what that is?

It's food.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

That makes, I guess that makes sense to me.

I mean, it's just the thing that it's just kind of baffling to me if it's, if it's, if it's that easy relatively.

Yeah.

How come we haven't observed it?

And I guess maybe we've only had 200 years to look for it.

But like we haven't had a ton of time.

And the the other thing is that we underestimate how long 3 billion years is,

which is how long like life has existed on Earth for longer than that.

And

the fact that you can have like one single unbroken chain of life

work that long

probably is pretty unusual because

we're used to hearing that number, but we're not used to hearing it as like a third of the life of the universe.

It's a long time.

So we might actually be early.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We might be early in the history of life in the universe.

And also

it might be unusual for a planet to stay stable enough for the life to last

a long time.

Sure.

Yeah.

Just a nice indication that

we could be at the tail end of that stability.

You know, we could be.

We probably aren't.

Thanks.

I needed that.

Thanks for ponding with me.

It's been a pleasure.

I really appreciate it.

And

it's good to chat with you.

Thanks for taking the time.

Thank you.

And you can send us questions at hankandjanagmail.com.

Thank you very much to everybody who sent in questions.

This podcast is edited by Joseph Tunamedic.

It's produced by Rosiana Halls-Rojas.

Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell.

Our editorial assistant is Daboki Tracervarti.

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.