387: Hard Pivot to Beef

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 DBS advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

John,

we went to Racks, and while we were there, we did laundry.

Why did we do that?

Why?

So we could make a clean getaway.

That's a joke that your son told you.

Yeah, I remember.

Your seven-year-old son, and I was going to say, and his version was so much better.

But I like the idea that you need that

the implied, we went to Racks and robbed it.

Yeah, I mean, we finally committed to the bit.

We drove, it should have been a four-hour road trip.

It turned into a five-hour road trip because I drove for 30 minutes in the wrong direction because Hank and I got distracted.

We wanted to go to Wilbur Wright's childhood home.

We did.

And we did.

We went to Wilbur Wright's childhood home, the better of the two Wright brothers.

Well, the younger of the two.

And

then when we got back

on the highway and I went the wrong way on the highway

and I drove for 30 minutes before Hank was like, that sign said we're only 37 miles away from Indianapolis.

Are we on our way back to Indianapolis?

And I was like, oh, right.

Yeah.

That is what we're doing.

I mean, in an ideal world, we would have sat at the racks and we would have made an episode of Dear Duncan John.

But you know why we didn't have to do it?

It would have been a great episode.

Because there is no inside of the racks.

There's no inside of the racks.

The racks has no interior.

It's a drive-through-only experience.

Yeah.

Which, and like, I think the people at the racks did a great job.

I loved that the racks branding, like they had racks branded polos.

They had racks branded like sandwich wraps.

They had racks branded cups.

Like the racks branding was still there.

And it was the same branding as from our childhood, the exact same

thing, the logo.

Nothing had changed.

And so in that sense, it did feel like going back in time.

Now, to get the full experience, we would have had to be inside of a restaurant with a solarium.

I did wish that that was happening, but it did not happen.

Seated in the solarium, making a podcast for the people.

But instead, I mean, I will say it was a beautiful road trip.

It had been so long since I'd been on a road trip with my brother.

It had been since 2017 when the Turtles movie came out.

That part was perfect.

And then let's talk about the racks, man.

Well,

the food or the building?

The food.

So my experience of the food was that it was indeed very similar to what I remember racks being like.

It was good.

I mean,

so I had a roast beef sandwich.

We had to drive past so many dang Arby's to get to this racks.

We should have counted.

It was like 14 Arby's.

And you know what?

It tasted a lot like Arby's.

It did.

It is.

That's the thing about racks is that

I can't imagine that the racks and the Arby's don't get their roast beef from the same place.

Yeah, now there was a slight difference in taste.

I thought the racks was a little sweeter somehow.

Yeah, I think the bun was like sweeter and softer than an Arby's bun.

Yes, and I liked the bun.

I liked the racks.

I liked the vibe.

The drink was good.

It was a really good

Coke Zero from the fountain.

You know, we shouldn't do it, but it's nice to get a Styrofoam cup sometimes where you're like, ah, this brings me back to the 80s.

Right.

I mean, I did think as I was eating from that Styrofoam cup, Hank and I are going to see probably the last eclipse of our lives tomorrow, but this styrofoam cup has got a lot of them in front of it.

Absolutely.

But you kept your styrofoam cup, which I think is a

souvenir from Rex,

which I think is amazing.

And the Rex was popular.

There were other people in the drive-thru line.

There were also, we live streamed on the way.

And so there was also, the parking lot was full of people who were there to see us.

But it was like the perfect number.

Like if it had been like 50 people, it would have been very bad.

If it had been like two, it would have been like, aye, yeah, yeah.

But it was.

Like, we're not doing that good.

No, like, like, now we have two people to hang out with.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it was like 14, maybe.

It was the right number of people.

It was a great, and it was a great group.

Thanks.

If you came out to Racks to say hi to us, thank you.

Mostly we were just there to commit to the bit, but then we did get food.

And ate so much.

Oh, Hank, Hank got three sandwiches and he ate some or all of all of them.

I ate two and a half sandwiches.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I just ate the one sandwich.

The fries weren't great, I have to say.

The fries could have been better.

The thing that skeezed me out most about racks was when we pulled up to the sign and maybe 40% of the items were either coming soon or not available, but coming soon, yeah, with the paper that looked like it had been coming soon for years.

Yeah, like sun-faded coming soon signs and the not available signs, like they were laminated, but some water had leaked into the lamination, you know, so you could sort of, it was not great.

The drive-through sign desperately needs an updating.

I'm not sure that the capital is there to invest in a drive-through sign that's new, but wouldn't it be wild to live in it, the town of New Carlisle, and to have a racket.

I would go to Racks.

I would go to Racks a lot.

I mean, imagine having a Racks in your hometown and not taking advantage of it.

I was, I'll tell you what, I was impressed.

That would be my go-to fast food restaurant in 2024.

I thought the food quality was good.

I thought the people working in the restaurant were really friendly and great.

They seemed lovely.

They didn't even seem that overwhelmed by the fact that there were 14 people standing outside waiting to meet two customers.

No, in fact, it seemed,

that didn't seem normal, but it seemed like it was normal for people to be doing a nostalgia trip.

In fact, the guy who parked next to us while we were eating our racks, like filmed the racks, and then he like talked to his phone a little bit and then he like sent a video to someone.

Yeah, I was like, is he vlogging racks too?

He was, we weren't the only people vlogging the racks trip.

He was like, I'm here at racks, Susanna.

Amazing.

Well, remember when we went through the drive-through, we said we came all the way from Indianapolis just to visit this racks.

And the woman in the drive-thru said, You're the second person to tell me that today.

She's like working half at a fast food restaurant and half at like a nostalgia amusement park.

it didn't make

racks it's an amusing

on the way home hank and i who can't ever have an experience without thinking about how to turn it into a business we were both like now wait a second there seems to be there seems to be a hunger yeah there seems to be a world crying out for more rackses the world is hungry for racks people are driving from indianapolis to new carlisle ohio twice a day to visit racks like what that tells me is that the world wants racks back and john it's one racks how much could it cost

oh it's not that hank it's the idea that you and i would own a roast beef restaurant is like not just not in keeping with our overall vibe that is what we decided in the end is like i don't feel like the future is beef

and i wouldn't want to like have a vested interest in the future being beef yeah exactly like if people are like so what did they do with their lives well they wrote books and they made educational videos and they ran a roast beef restaurant to beef?

They just did a hard pivot to beef.

That's our new Kiss cover band.

They got really overwhelmed and so they did that classic pivot where they pivoted to a roast beef restaurant.

Yeah.

Sorry if you can hear some work going on in the background, by the way.

We're having a big party tonight.

Sarah

wrapped up a huge curatorial project that she's been working on with a group of people.

So there's a lot of hubbub as we prepare for the party.

There's a person chainsawing an ice sculpture of a big phoenix, just like a dragon ice sculpture that the Vike is going to run down and come out of its mouth and into people.

And there's the fire dancers are showing up as well.

They're constructing

the throne of swords.

from the Game of Thrones.

They're building.

These are all things that contemporary art curators have at their contemporary art curation parties.

Yeah, I watched an episode of Selling Sunset where they did a party once, so I assume it's like that.

It's just like that.

We are always selling sunset here in Indianapolis.

Let's answer some questions from our listeners.

Let's do it.

This first question comes from Brendan, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm going to hike the Appalachian Trail in a few weeks.

Well, Brendan, I've got some news for you.

You're not going to hike it in a few weeks unless you're really going fast.

No, a few weeks from now, he's going to start.

I know, but I was making a joke.

Okay.

I'm looking for audiobook recommendations.

So far, all my friends have been recommending sci-fi, which I love, but I'd also like some other genres.

I'm thinking about this as a time to work on myself and think about big ideas and small ideas.

So if you were going hiking for six months, what books would you bring to listen to?

Fiction, non-fiction, any categories, welcome.

I already have the Mountain Goat's Hole Discography downloaded, so I'm good on that front.

Trails are never ending, Brendan.

Nice.

First of all, Brendan, I highly recommend our work.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

You know, Going hard.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is available.

Big ideas.

Do you want to talk about big ideas?

How about an absolutely remarkable thing and its follow-up a beautifully foolish endeavor?

I mean,

those are big idea books and small idea books, but mostly big idea books.

Then you've got The Fault in Our Stars.

Boom.

Big ideas.

You want to be crying while you're walking?

Fault in our stars.

You want to be laughing while you're walking?

An abundance of Catherines.

I wrote it 20 years ago and I haven't reread it since, so I don't know if it's good.

Might be funny, might not be.

Not sure.

Might not hold up.

No idea.

No way of finding out.

Don't want to know.

Terrified to check.

Pretty sure Turtles All the Way Down is good just because I recently watched the movie adaptation and it was really good.

So I think the book, the source material must be at least okay, but can't make any promises about the stuff from the early 2000s.

I love being in the situation where you're like, I'm about to have a bunch of time to do a bunch of stuff.

And then the thing happens where you have the bunch bunch of time.

And then you look back and you're like, I did not do all of that stuff.

So, well, but prepare for that different.

Sure.

I mean, a lot of time you're going to.

You just want to be like listening to the forest.

The birds.

You want to hear the forest.

You want to be in the hike.

And a lot of times you'll probably be chatting with your friends who will have trail names like Long John Silver.

I don't know why.

Yeah, that's your thing.

They're all named after,

they're all named after restaurants.

There's a bunch of Captain B's.

Yeah.

Arby and Wendy.

Rax.

Mr.

Rax.

Dude, Mr.

Rax is actually a pretty good trail name.

I don't want to brag.

Brendan?

I was on

the screen.

Obviously, your trail name will find you, but don't rule out Mr.

Rax.

The only one that I remember was Grommet.

That's a good one.

It's a great trail name because it's also like a thing in equipment.

In addition to kind of being a name, yeah.

Anyway,

I have some suggestions.

I'm sure John does as well.

John would like you to read everything ever written about tuberculosis, and he can tell you all of the books.

No, just to be clear, Brendan, I want you to read everything ever written by us.

Okay, or that.

And by the time you finish, hopefully that will include my new hit book about tuberculosis.

There's a book coming out soon.

I don't know if it'll be out when you go on the trail, but I got a pre-release version of it called Becoming Earth, which might be a really nice read to while you're close to the earth, which is about the sort of parallel paths of the geology and biology of Earth, because we think of those things as separate from each other, where there's like, there's unalive Earth and then there's a live Earth and there's their

separate categories, but they like are in constant connection with each other.

Like in the first chapter of this book, he just sort of like plops down the fact that the sky is only blue because of life.

And I was like, wait, what?

Wow.

Because, like, before life, there were all these like, you know, nitrogen and methane molecules and sulfur molecules in the sky.

And all of that got eaten up by life and turned into just oxygen and a little bit of carbon dioxide.

And then you can do nothing with the nitrogen because it's not very useful.

We're just like super chemically stable.

But that's super cool.

I loved that book.

There's a book.

What's the Hannah Ritchie book called that we both just read?

Oh, I can't remember what it's called.

I'll look it up.

I'm going to recommend that you read John McPhee.

Oh,

great nonfiction writer of Earth, in my experience, Earth and Humanity's Place in it.

He's got a great book on oranges called Oranges.

The Survival of the Bark Canoe is a banger.

And the one that you might really enjoy since you'll be living outside of the normal expectations of society is Coming Into the Country, which is a book from the 70s about people who chose to move to the bush in Alaska.

That's awesome.

That reminds me of,

oh, shoot.

What's it called?

I don't know.

Give me some hints.

Into the wild.

Oh,

the memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Miller.

I feel like no one knows about this book.

I only know about it because Catherine gave it to me.

It's so good.

So good.

The Hannah Richie book is called Not the End of the World.

Another interesting one might be God, Human, Animal, Machine, which is about like

what are we

in the age of AI and with machines and

might be an interesting one to like experience while being human in a more human way than we often are being human.

Yeah, I like that.

There's a lot of good books out there, John.

Oh, there's so many good books and there's not enough time to read them.

And also, I don't focus my time around reading them as much as i should because i'm scrolling and the scrolling is bad for me and i can't stop doing it yeah this next question comes from emi who asks dear hanka john i've had tooth pain for almost two years and i've only been able to chew on the left side of my mouth for that time now i've had dental work and there is no more pain yay i can finally use my whole mouth i was just eating a sandwich when i realized that my mouth didn't hurt anymore the only downside is they can't break the habit of only chewing on one side of my face i'm too scared to use my teeth how do i reteach myself to chew like a regular human being?

Painfully aware of my chewing habits, Emmy.

I feel like you do need to start chewing on both sides.

Like you can't just live that life.

Yeah.

I've had this.

I feel like I'm uniquely qualified to answer this because like Emmy, I have had chronic mouth pain.

And like Emmy, I have rearranged my chewing and then they solved the chronic mouth pain.

And then it took me forever to go back to being a quote-unquote regular chewer.

I found it helpful to chew very slowly and intentionally and think like this.

And I would think as I chewed, this isn't going to hurt.

This isn't going to hurt.

This isn't going to hurt.

I would even, I can't quite bite into an apple.

I don't think I'll ever be into bite into an apple territory, but sometimes I would like bite into like a something a little, like a, like a red bell pepper, which I do enjoy doing.

And interesting.

And I would be like, I can do that now.

And I couldn't do it before, but I can do it now.

And just the intentional practice of that worked for me.

And then over time, it becomes natural.

Yeah.

I had the, you know, anytime you have like a surgery, it's a similar thing where you have to like, you have to convince your body after the, you know, you have to like be in concert with your pain, but like you have to teach your body to do it again.

And also that it's okay.

I get signals that it's going to hurt when it won't.

And yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that prevents me from using the brain.

Yeah.

And then that actually makes the, that makes the pain, or that makes the like progress

like

worse.

It makes the progress slower.

So

I actually did, like, this is not related to this, but like, maybe there's some learning here.

But I like went to massage therapists to be like, touch me, like, massage very carefully the areas of my body where I.

have my injuries and

uh and also the radiation fibrosis and the

that worked it was super scary very emotional like i cried like during massages um but the

uh

but like just having somebody touch on it was good but it like felt weird to ask i couldn't do it um

and then it felt weird to ask anybody who wasn't a professional to do it right

that's a beautiful story hank it's weird uh it's weird that you had cancer

i know man it's i i was just doing the taxes and i was like why did i fly to missoula so often

i was like oh right

yeah and then i would be like all these other things and i'd be like oh right it's because hank had cancer less than a year ago yeah my taxes have a lot of reminders as you might expect as well i bet i bet it's a weird it's so like one of the wildest things i was just watching some content from a from a person who's been recently diagnosed.

And it just made me so grateful that during the process, I wasn't thinking that much about money.

Yeah.

Which is like, like adding that on top of it is just like, what a, ugh.

Well, it's a double punishment, right?

I mean, the system punishes sick people for getting sick when

sickness is something that will happen to all of us and it's nobody's fault.

Yeah.

And it was like, like, there's like wild things.

Like, you can't get like you have to like have your insurance approving it all along the way.

And, like, it slows down the process.

Right.

If you're, if you're like having to worry about that.

And like, you can't, you have to get this diagnosis and then like this to have happen.

You can't like pay for the biopsy before the thing happened.

Like, you, yeah.

And so you're having these conversations with your doctor that, that aren't about how to best treat you, but how to best treat you without

incurring like massive amounts of medical debt, which is like,

that's not the conversation you need to be having.

And I'm just very grateful that that's not how I had to have that happen to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I mean, you're very fortunate in that respect.

But, but I would say unfortunate to be in the situation, period.

Yeah, for sure.

Someone reminded me of that.

Like, I was having a conversation yesterday with someone, and I was like, I'm sorry that I didn't,

that I, that I wasn't like more present during this particular time at a company that, you know, I work with.

And she was like,

you were doing cancer treatment when that was happening.

And I was like, oh, yeah, that's why I wasn't around for that.

Yeah, I think I

think we both keep forgetting it.

I know I see times when you forget it all the time.

Yeah.

But

it's,

it was a real, it was a real curveball, you know, like,

yeah.

uh and it's still it's still curving too like i i i was gonna say and like and by the way the pitch has not been caught yeah like it's still curving i

i have like times when i'm like really on top of it but i have like i definitely my brain is not the brain like all the way back to being the brain that it was which is

troubling for me emotionally but like oftentimes i feel like i really got it um so

wait what do do you mean when you say your brain isn't all the way back to being the brain that it was?

Like I get fog moments.

But also your brain isn't back to being the way that it was in the sense that you're...

Oh, the anxiety is a totally separate thing.

Yeah.

But it's not totally separate.

It's part of being a cancer survivor.

But John, don't you understand?

I must think of it as totally separate.

Okay, okay.

Fair enough then.

I'll let you.

Then I'll let you.

I'll allow you to.

Yeah.

I, yeah, for sure.

I, but like, I've, I feel like there's like physiological stuff that I'm still dealing with with pain and brain fog.

But, um, but like it's weird because it goes in waves.

And I also have this thing that where I will have a sudden, like for like six hours, I will feel like I'm getting super sick.

So I'll feel the like the brain fog of an illness, like my muscles will be sore, and then it'll just clear up.

And I'm like, this seems like a chemo thing.

But I don't know, man.

Life is weird.

It's weird.

It's really weird.

And you're still in it in the sense that this was all less than a year ago.

Yeah.

Like a year ago, you didn't know you had cancer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was just talking to so I've, I first got worried while I was in LA for a business trip and that that conference happens once a year and it just happened again.

And I was like, wow, we're getting close.

Like, it could happen a little earlier this year, but I was like, we're getting there.

We're getting, we're getting, we're getting back to, we're getting, we're going to move into some anniversaries soon.

Cause I got diagnosed the day before my birthday.

So I remember.

I will like, so I'm actually having a birthday party this year, which I never do, which is also going to be a celebration.

That's great.

Are you going to have, are you going to have an ice dragon that the Jaeger meister pours down?

Yeah.

No, but it is going to be cool.

That actually reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by ice sculptures that the Jaeger meister pours down.

Of course, ice sculptures that the Jaegermeister pours down.

It's the good juice.

It's the good juice.

I think the entire rental will be less than one Jaeger dragon for my birthday party.

But I don't know if it's a Jaeger dragon cost, so maybe not.

This podcast is also brought to you by the vlog brothers Hard Pivot to Beef.

I couldn't get through it.

You don't need to say anything else.

It's good.

It's good.

Hard pivot to beef.

Hard pivot to beef.

Hard pivot to beef.

Holy crap.

Hard pivot to beef.

I mean, we got to make something out of that.

It's not, it's too good to just be on the podcast for three seconds.

We need to have like a whole album called Hard Pivot to Beef.

We need to have like the best of Dear Hank and John released.

And the album is called Hard Pivot to Beef.

And it's only

available on vinyl, and there's only like 65 copies of it.

Hard Pivot to Beef.

Holy crap.

Today's podcast is also brought to you by walking through the woods for six months, listening to all the John and Hanks books.

Oh, that's a good one.

And this podcast is brought to you by chewing on one side of your mouth.

Chewing on one side of your mouth, inspiring a very long conversation that's not about dentistry.

We also have some Project for Awesome messages to read.

First, from Nidhi to Deepa, Celine, Cindy, and Iris.

I'm having our cool uncles relay how thankful I am for you all.

From Nerdfighter Club Club meetings in college to Harry Potter World dates in med school to virtual game nights in residency.

You guys have helped me stay sane and a healthy amount of insane.

I'm honored now to have you amazing, accomplished women as my bridesmaids.

Love you lots.

And of course, don't forget to be awesome.

Oh my gosh.

That was a brilliantly written needy because I did not see it coming.

I did not see it coming.

That's great.

Oh, I'm so grateful that y'all are bridesmaids and doctors.

And I hope someday that you'll

see

me and you will take my hypochondria seriously.

We also have a message from Johannes to friends, both old and new and unexpected.

Thank you all for helping me through the winter, for encouraging me to find the professional help I needed to help me fight my depression.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Johannes, for doing the hard work to get the help that you needed.

That means the world to us and to your friends and family.

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Emily.

Another question, John.

It's from Maggie who asks, dear John and Hank, I don't know why I should put you first.

How do vitamins get assigned by their letters letters and numbers in some cases?

It's because it's my area of expertise.

For example,

how did whatever compound that makes up vitamin B12 become known as vitamin B12?

Why does vitamin C not have numbers?

Wake up, Maggie.

Why does

I think I got something to say to you?

That was quite good, actually.

Better than I expected.

Isn't it only bees that have numbers?

I feel like vitamin D doesn't have numbers.

Yeah.

And

why is there no vitamin F?

Here's the situation.

This is all you really need to know.

No one was thinking when they did this.

None of it makes sense.

And we didn't know what was going on.

So like, there's a vitamin B12, but there's not a vitamin B11.

We thought there was, but it turned out we were wrong.

Like, that wasn't a vitamin or it was the same as another vitamin or something.

I don't know the story.

But like, and then vitamin K like is way down, but that was one of the first ones that got named because it was named like in order.

It was named for a thing, which was like, it helped with coagulation.

And it was in German.

So like, none of it makes sense.

That's what you need to know about vitamins and the names that they have.

It's not, it's broken.

We were doing the best we could with very imperfect knowledge, and we ended up with a system that doesn't make any sense.

There you go.

It does not

help you understand.

Like, knowing the, like, the names of the vitamins does not help you understand what, like, anything about the vitamins.

Is there any way that we could invent a vitamin G that's named after us?

I think that we're like, we kind of got all the vitamins, but maybe not.

I don't know.

But maybe, maybe we can make a supplement and call it vitamin G.

Yeah.

Because apparently there's no rules about naming things.

And based on my relationship with the TikTok shop and its supplements, there's also no rules around what you can sell as a supplement.

Oh my gosh, John.

Don't don't even get me stopped.

I got an email recently from somebody who I work with who was like, not like at one of our companies, to be clear.

I want to absolve them of worrying.

This was not you guys, but it was somebody who I work with.

And they were like, I think that you would be such a great fit for athletic greens.

And I was like, oh my God,

what impression did I leave?

What did I do wrong?

What did I do wrong?

That I, that, like, you think that I want to pitch people on things that pretend to be medicine, but aren't.

That like constantly say on their website that it's like clinically proven and then like asterisk.

It's not.

Yeah, this is not meant to treat any disease and these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA.

Right.

Well, and the clinical trials involved, if you read the clinical trials, are often not, I think it's safe to say, up to snuff in terms of the standards that we would expect.

Yeah, they're all funded by the company and they are all designed to have likely good outcomes.

They're all designed for it to be easy to find effects that wouldn't actually be there.

Right.

A lot of it relies on self-reporting.

A lot of it doesn't involve double-blind trials.

yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's the Wild West.

And I actually looked at one of the studies recently of one of the supplements that it was said it was clinically proven.

This one wasn't athletic greens, but I looked and it, it was like, it was like clinically proven to help people sleep.

And it just has melatonin in it.

Like, right.

They didn't test it versus melatonin.

They like, it's like, okay, yeah, I mean, we knew that melatonin was likely to help people have a more, like sleep more.

That's not new information.

You just put melatonin in your supplement and you did a test on your supplement and showed that it was better than placebo when melatonin is better than placebo.

Right.

You know what's so awkward about this conversation, Hank?

Yeah.

And I don't really know how to get out of it now is that I just took a brand deal with a supplement company.

Did you?

What company?

No, I'm kidding.

I just wanted to make you feel that like surge of adrenaline.

Like, well, I mean, until you told me what it was, I wasn't going to feel it because, like, there are some.

Oh, I should have told you what it was.

If it's Metamusal, then that's great.

Metamusils is so good.

All right.

That's great.

That's great info for next time I trick you.

That I need to go a little bit further and make your anxiety ramp up a little bit more before I resolve it.

This next question comes from M, who writes: Dear Brothers, Green, How do I ask for the $600 a mom I babysat for owes me?

The kids were twins and they were hard to babysit for.

The problem is that I was their babysitter when I was 16, and I am now 27, but I still think about this at least once a week.

Pumpkins and penguins M.

Well, first of all, you need to look into how much interest rates have been this long time.

Exactly.

Inflation, baby.

Inflation.

It's not 600 bucks a month.

That's like 1100 bucks a month.

So you, yeah, you need,

I have done this not with that.

I thought like, first of all, I don't.

With an 11-year gap?

No, not with an 11-year gap, but with a long gap.

And okay, what'd you do?

Because I'll tell you what I did.

And what I did is definitely better than what you're doing.

Okay, well, I sent them an email and I was like, I was like, this matters to me.

And I think that it's important that we get it squared away.

And did they pay you?

They did.

And this was a time of my life when I needed that.

Like, it was a time when I like needed money.

And I was like, oh, well, there's that money that that.

company in this case owes me and they haven't paid me and I like kind of let it slide and I was like well now I will not let it slide slide.

And I will tell them that I'm angry.

I realistically don't think that's going to work for M.

I don't think M can go to this mom who didn't pay a 16-year-old for babysitting and say, hey, I'm 27 now and I need my money back.

It's a lot of babysitting that you didn't get paid for.

Alternately,

it's one mom who offered a really attractive rate

knowing that she had no intention of $200 an hour.

Gone over.

I'll pay you whatever it costs because I'm not paying you.

No, here's what I would do.

I would use this as fuel, M, because that's what I do.

I have, I'll just tell you.

I don't think I've ever talked about this before publicly, but one time I was hired to write something for somebody, somebody who's very successful and famous.

And I was hired to write something for a...

Spill the T.

Say

the name.

No, I'm not going to say the name.

I was hired to write something for a large movie-based corporation by a famed executive at a large movie corporation.

Oh boy.

And I wrote it and I rewrote it and I rewrote it again.

And the person did not like my work and did not feel that I had met

the requirements of the contract and didn't pay me my last $5,000.

Now, this was strictly, entirely a power play.

This was about nothing other than I don't need to pay you this last $5,000.

And so I'm not going to.

The $5,000 is less than a rounding error to this company and to this person.

It wasn't about that.

It was about everything else, right?

And I made it about.

So I made it about everything else.

I didn't make it about the $5,000.

I was like the kid in Better Off Dead, that old movie who wants his $2 for his paper route.

I would do anything to get back at this guy.

And I don't want my $5,000.

I want my revenge.

So you have to figure out what this mom does for a living, and then you need to get better than her at it.

Because this person

at a premiere of my movie,

and I got to shake hands with them and lean in, Hank, and put one arm around their back and say,

I remember the $5,000.

Yes.

Wow.

I would

never ever.

Do you know how it felt?

How did it feel?

It felt amazing.

It's like surfing the biggest wave ever.

Surfed

perfectly.

You know what it felt like?

It felt like $5,200.

It felt like you were being, like, for those,

like, for the for that like

13 seconds, you were being paid like a million dollars an hour.

I felt fairly compensated for my work.

Okay.

Well, that's a different way of handling it for sure.

I like, I think, I can't remember what the story is, but there is an uh some Eli Lilly person who was once like being strong-armed by a bank, and he just bought the bank and fired the guy who was strong-arming him?

And I'm like, that's like, okay.

So, you also got to buy the mom.

Oh, yeah.

Or

that actually would be the ultimate power move if I bought the movie studio and fired the person in question.

Unfortunately,

that would require a different level of capitalization than the one that I'm currently living with.

So, Em, what you have to do is adopt these twins.

They're yours now.

Technically.

All right.

That's too dark.

I don't like it.

I don't like it.

I mean,

it seemed like you did not like them, but you have to do it anyway.

Also, they're probably adults.

I was going to say, yeah, they're like 23 now.

Dear John and Hank, I'm a high school student with a fear of worms.

It's gotten to the point that I can no longer garden or walk walk outside in the rain.

Touching them causes me severe panic.

The issue is that this is so utterly irrational, no one takes it seriously.

Welcome to Obsessive Thought Spirals, Hazel.

People my age use it to tease me, and many adults I talk to try to tell me that I will grow out of it.

But it's been over 10 years.

Will it ever happen?

If not, how can I make people understand?

And is there anything I can do to manage the fear in the moment or in general?

Thanks.

Not Hazel Grace, just Hazel.

Hazel, first off, you are not a freak.

Yeah.

This is not weird.

Okay.

Okay.

This is real.

And

anybody who has obsessive thought spirals about things,

often they kind of weasel their way in by being like, oh, only a freak would be afraid of this.

Only a weirdo would be afraid of this.

And like, that's how it gets, that's how it gets at you.

That's part of its strategy.

And I know Henkel say, like, these things don't have strategies.

They don't.

It's true.

But like, that's, that's how, that's how your brain starts to kind of work against you on this front.

Things do kind of have strategies.

Like, we have the thoughts that are possible to have.

And they

and so and so if thoughts here, this is like how evolution works, right?

If something can make more of itself, there will be more of that thing.

So if a cell can make more of itself, there will be more of that cell, but also of the strategy that helped the cell.

make the new cells.

So and that new strategy will become like common in the population or even take over the whole population.

And that's like, I think this kind of can be true for thoughts.

Thoughts that

if thought, if a thought can make more of itself, there will be more of it.

And so you end up in situations where thoughts that can make more of themselves become so common that the strategies they're using, like to like the tricks that they're using to exist in your brain are

happening.

Like they become more populous in your brain.

So anyway, I think that they kind of do have strategies.

Yeah, I really, I really like that.

I think that's, that's certainly true to my experience.

So Hazel, there is, so the first,

I mean, first off, I think you should ask your parents to talk to a therapist and ask your parents to talk to a therapist who has experience in OCD and especially in something called ERP.

Okay.

Because this is, this is, is treatable.

It's very, very treatable.

And I know that you'll think, like, oh, I don't have to get it treated.

Like, but it seems like it's actually causing you a lot of anxiety.

And it's really, if it's difficult to garden, if it's difficult to walk in the rain, like this is starting to get to the point where it's really,

it's making decisions for you that you don't want to make and so that's a problem and if you if you if you do this exposure response therapy which can be very scary to talk about but like when you do it it's it's it really does work i've done it and it really works um it really works for the vast majority of people What you'll find is that over time you you will have to go through some anxiety for sure, but on the other side of that anxiety is freedom from being controlled by this thought.

And that's that's very powerful.

So that's what I recommend.

I recommend seeing a therapist who has experience in dealing with OCD.

And because this is very treatable and you don't have to live with it.

All right, John.

I want to get to one more question before we go to the news from Mars and Nancy Wimbledon.

Great.

It is from Laurie, who asks, dear Hank and John,

I know how paint dries.

There are solid pigmented particles mixed with liquid solvent and the solvent evaporates when exposed to the air because the liquid is volatile and it turns into gas.

This is an amazingly complex understanding of paint, and you are correct.

What's left behind is a solid layer of pigment coating

the wall or whatever the surface was you wanted to paint.

What I want to know is how does gel nail polish work?

And why does UV light cure the liquid into a solid?

And why does it sometimes have a sticky residue that you need to wipe off?

And sometimes it doesn't.

What is going on?

Looking for a cure, Lori.

That's great.

Looking for a cure.

Deboke and I had like a half an hour long conversation about nail polish this morning because of this question.

And it's so cool.

So I have a friend who works in like aerospace paints for the government.

And he can't talk about his job because

he like works on like paint for fighter jets.

And like, I don't know why, but.

it's very advanced and complicated and it military secret.

I think that there is every chance that nail polish paint,

like the people who work on nail polish paint and my friend go to the same conferences to talk about paint.

Like nail polish paint is so complicated and weird and cool and wild.

But the way that gel nail polish works, you can sometimes like buy a gel nail polish at the store.

that says it's a gel nail polish, but it's not really.

When you get it done with like UV light, what is happening is that the energy, the high photons from the UV light, that radiation is actually causing the polymers in the individual like monomers, the like pieces of the chemicals to polymerize to each other.

So that energy goes in and it causes those monomers to form bonds and form these super long chains that are, it's like stronger than a traditional paint would be.

So it's actually creating the

like the basically the plastic, the polymer that becomes the gel nail polish.

And the areas that are exposed to oxygen polymerize slightly differently.

And so they become that sticky outer layer that you sometimes have to wash off.

And sometimes you don't have to do that because

some of them cure faster and they don't have the same polymerization with the oxygen in the atmosphere.

So like, isn't that like, that's just wild that there is

like, and like figuring that out and the process of getting there is, there's so much science that goes into it.

And there are a lot, there are many people who dedicate their entire careers to like new

excitements in nail polish.

And it made me like want to work with a nail polish company to have nail polish on Good.store.

Like that was just like DeVoki and I having the time of our lives

learning about

a few corrections before we get to the news from guys and AFC Wimbledon.

First off, from Tremor Kale, who worked on the James Webb Space Telescope a little bit and

in general seems like a very well-informed person.

You were wrong about sailing and the solar sail in ways that I cannot explain because they are too smart for me.

But my favorite thing about his email is that he wrote, Dear Hank and John, for now.

Clearly, somebody knows something about the future of Mars exploration.

Also, it turns out that humans have peed more than one of our great lakes, Lake Erie.

Oh, okay.

Humans, over all of human history, have peed more than one Lake Erie.

And lastly,

lastly, there is a Lego house.

And it was built for less.

Oh, I bet.

The world's first Lego house exists.

It is very small, but it was built for less than $100 million.

Yeah.

I imagine if it's been built, it definitely wasn't $100.

billion dollars.

Exactly.

So it is possible to build a Lego house.

It's not that small, but it is small.

It's a bit of a tiny house.

Yeah.

But it's nice.

You could live there.

And in fact, I think someone does.

And it should be an Airbnb because I want to stay there.

I do too.

Let's get to the news from AFC Wimbledon, most importantly, and then we'll get to the news from Mars.

AFC Wimbledon's season is hurtling toward its end.

There are three games left in AFC Wimbledon's 2024 league campaign.

Unless.

Unless.

If we win all three of those games, they're all three against teams below us in the table, although that doesn't mean much.

If we win all three of those games, I think we have a chance to make the playoffs.

We're currently in eighth.

The team in seventh will make it to the playoffs.

Now, that's Crawley Town.

They've had a very good season and they've been playing well of late.

But if they lose two of their remaining games and we win all three of ours, then we would make the playoffs probably.

There's also a couple of teams behind us that have a chance.

So it's a very complicated,

the machinations are always complex here at the end of the season.

But my big hope is that we make it to the final day still with a shot to get to the playoffs because that itself would be fun.

And then if we did make it to the playoffs, we would almost certainly be playing Wait for It, the franchise.

I don't like it.

There's no way I'm going to, like, that's way too much stress.

You're going to go and you're going to have a great time.

It's too much stress.

It's too scary.

You're going to go.

Hey, it's like I always say to Henry and Alice before the games.

We're not here to see AFC Wimbledon win.

We're here to see AFC Wimbledon play and to drink beer.

I'm sober right now.

Do they have non-alcoholic beers?

I didn't know you were sober.

Yeah, I don't.

It doesn't feel good to drink anymore.

It feels like I'm getting chemotherapy.

Well, then you shouldn't drink.

It's like it like reminds my body of chemo and I just want to like have a half like I have a half a glass of wine and then I want to like curl up in a ball and be like, why do I feel so bad?

Well then don't drink.

Okay, well then in that case, we're here to watch AFC Wimbledon and drink Sprite.

What do they do they what's like the the food that you have at a football game in England?

Pies.

Savory pies.

Oh yeah, My London Pie has a food truck at Plow Lane and it is people say it's the best

People say that AFC Wimbledon has the best food of any of the 92 teams in the football league.

Oh my God.

People say that?

Or do people actually say that?

No, people actually say that.

All right.

For real.

Then that's that, like,

I have gotten significantly more interested.

We don't do pies well in America.

Don't we don't have a great meat pie situation?

It's true.

I mean, for clarity, we do great dessert pies.

And we have a good meat pie.

I would be very upset if people thought that I thought we don't do good dessert pies.

No, we make a great key lime pie, but we don't have a great meat pie, hand pie.

Yeah, that's what they serve.

They serve hand pies.

I love a hand pie.

They're so good.

Okay.

It makes me want to move to England full-time.

Okay.

Well, you don't have to move to England full-time.

It's just if we make the playoffs, you do have to come with me.

And I don't mean like, nope, nope.

I mean you're coming with me.

It doesn't matter.

We're not going to make the playoffs.

But if we did, you would be there.

I'm, I'm staunchly rooting against the South Coast.

You're busy, but this is going to, this will be a, you remember when we were really busy and we had no time to drive to Rax and we drove to Rax and it was the best thing.

It was great.

It was great.

It's going to be like that.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

What's the news from Mars?

Well, there's rock mysteries on Mars.

So

they are careful about looking at rocks when they're studying the

surface of Mars from Curiosity Rover.

No, this is Perseverance.

And they found 4,000, which is a relatively small proportion of the rocks.

4,000 light-colored rocks.

So they're like all similar to each other and they're all over the crater, but they're like not similar to the other rocks around it.

And they are like all about pebble-sized and they are what's called floats, which means that they're not from round there.

So they were transported somehow from some other place, which is interesting.

Interesting.

We don't know where that place is.

So we would like to know where they are.

Is it Mars or is it different planets?

It's some other part of Mars.

And they've studied them and they know like what's in them.

And

they know that they don't have...

They're dehydrated, which not like they don't have, like there are ways for water to bind to things where they become hydrated salts.

And all of these are dehydrated, which means that they got heated up probably somehow.

So maybe they were from a lava, like they got heated up by a lava flow or an asteroid impact or something, we think.

But

the rover is currently heading toward the rim of the crater, and it is showing more and more of these rocks as they get closer, which might give us opportunities to study them and figure out where they came from.

Hmm,

fascinating.

Little rocks.

I love the idea that

every one of these rocks is labeled in a computer somewhere.

It's just like, yeah, can we look up

like rock, like

light-colored pebble number 496 and compare it with rock number 200

2342.

Just like someone's like, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

They got all their rocks labeled.

They're just trying to

take care of the rocks.

Yeah.

That's beautiful.

And because it's the only way that we have of closely observing what's happening over there.

Yeah.

We just look at the rocks and they tell us so many stories.

It's a reminder that the rocks on Earth can also tell us stories.

Yes, they tell us so many stories.

We will never stop learning from the rocks.

Hank, thank you so much for podding with me.

Thanks to everybody for listening.

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

This podcast is edited by Joseph Tunamedic.

It's produced by Rosian Halls-Rojas.

Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell.

Our editorial assistant is Taboki Trochrivarti.

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

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