375: The Water Episode

Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

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

It's a comedy podcast where two brothers answer you questions, give you dubious advice, and forget to look up a dad joke.

That's fine.

It's a whole new era for Dear Hank and John.

We don't need a dad joke at the beginning of every episode.

We don't need sponsors in every episode because it's not about meeting the expectations of a genre that we made up.

It's about enjoying each other's company for an hour each week.

That's right.

But don't you like my dad jokes, though?

Oh, I'm sorry if I didn't make this clear over the years, but I absolutely do not.

Okay, but people of the world, do you like my dad jokes?

Sure, they like them, but they're also on board with us.

By the way, the response has been very generous.

Thank you to everybody who's written in to let us know how much you approve of our new strategy,

the new podcast format, the post-cancer.

Hank doesn't like saying post-cancer.

The post-treatment

vibe is just different now and better, I would argue.

But there was that solar eclipse, John.

And Oren asked me, he said, Dad, can you explain to me what a solar eclipse is?

And I said, no, son.

Great.

All right.

Let's answer some questions from our listeners.

Which is ridiculous on on two levels.

First of all, he wouldn't need me to explain because he understands the solar eclipses so well.

He understands all of the celestial movements.

It's wild.

And second, I would absolutely explain it to him.

And I would do a better job of it than saying no sun.

Right.

No, it wasn't a good joke.

I agree.

But I appreciate you breaking it down for me so that I could understand a couple of different ways in which it wasn't good.

This first question comes from Miles, who asks, dear Anka John, this, and the answer is so good.

Why do we call non-salty water fresh water when most of the water on the earth has been there for billions of years?

There's no fresh water.

Why do we call it that?

Water and wondering miles.

Why do we call it that?

Because fresh, meaning fresh water as in not salty water is the original meaning of that term.

Oh, like that's the original meaning of fresh, meaning fresh meant not salty?

Yes.

Fresh meant water that did not have salt in it.

And then we took that and we made it to mean new

and, you know, like fresh fruit.

It's fruit that happened recently.

Oh, wow.

And fresh men are recent students.

Yeah, fresh men are just are just students with less salt in them.

Yeah.

I think that might actually be true based on my understanding of

Doritos.

Doritos and how you kind of get pickled over time.

I think of myself as being significantly more pickled than I was when I was a freshman in college.

Oh, yeah.

No, I definitely have been pickled.

Between the salt, between the salt and the alcohol, I feel like I'm and some, I've had quite a bit of vinegar in those years.

So it's amazing to me, actually, that saltwater continues to be toxic to me because I feel like I am saltwater.

Well, you are a little bit.

You are a little bit saltwater.

You're saltier than most, than freshwater, but you're fresher than saltwater.

Is it true that most water is billions of years old?

So we're all drinking dinosaur pea all the time?

Well, I mean, all the molecules are billions of years, like all the atoms are billions of years old,

or all the protons and neutrons and electrons anyway.

And so the

but like, yeah, like water mostly

just gets recycled through the whole system.

So it's, it arrived pretty much at the beginning, we think, of the existence of the Earth four-something billion years ago.

And

it's just been here the whole time.

We're not sure if it gets replenished over time, like if we sort of like, because we lose it to various processes, it gets blown away into space eventually.

And so, like, is it just being sort of re-delivered by comets or etc.?

But yeah, it seems like most of the water on Earth is old, though it's very hard.

There's no like way to tell how old it is.

And really everything on Earth is old because it's all made out of atoms that are really, really old.

It's all made out, like all of the particles were created during the Big Bang.

So

well, I actually, as somebody who's working on a podcast about astrophysics,

which particles weren't created during the Big Bang?

Well, it depends on your definition of during.

Okay.

Protons and neutrons and stuff were not in the,

we're not in like the first picosecond or anything like that.

Yeah, it's just like a soup of quarks or something.

It was just, yeah, it was soupy.

It was soupy, and then it got,

and then it got cool and calm enough for there to be some protons and some hydrogen, a little bit of lithium.

Yep.

Helium.

Helium.

Yeah.

So that's the, that's my understanding at least.

And that's a spoiler word.

I do have a podcast coming out about this, but it's not coming out for like six months.

So I don't think that now's the time to talk about it.

People are always like, why are you keeping it a secret?

It's because you don't want to know yet.

Yeah, you can't.

There's nothing to pre-save.

Yeah.

If that's indeed what you do with podcasts.

Yeah.

But I am curious about another water-related question, Hank.

Okay.

And I think in some ways, this is a, I mean, that was a great question.

Don't get me wrong.

But I think in some ways, Caitlin has gotten to the question that's beneath all other questions.

You know what I mean?

Like sometimes, like one of the things that we're trying to do in physics right now, for instance, is understand how,

you know, these forces of nature that are fundamental and seem different from each other might actually be aspects of the same force.

Sure.

And I think that Caitlin's question is kind of the question beneath all the other questions.

She writes, dear John and Hank, how long would it take me to drink a swimming pool?

Or rather the equivalent amount of water that is in, say, the average 20-foot 20-foot by 20-foot backyard pool.

Pool and ponderings, Caitlin.

A long time.

Well, Hank, I looked this up, and are you ready to have your mind blown?

Yeah, sure.

Do you, just based on your overall impression of a swimming pool and your overall impression of an average human lifespan?

Okay.

Do you think that it is less than one lifespan, about one lifespan, or many human lifespans to drink a pool's worth of water?

I think a small, like an above-ground swimming pool, you could get in a lifetime.

20-foot by 20-foot,

average 48 inches in the shallow end, six feet in the deep end.

So, like new pools, not the kind of pool that we grew up in.

Does it make differential calculus to figure out the volume of the swimming pool, or did you look up a table somewhere?

I did differential calculus.

I had somebody teach me calc B

so that I could determine how the slope affects the overall

you have to and then I also I decided whether or not I wanted the pool to be one or two inches below grade where the water is right like because you don't want it to be all the way up there's a chart there's got to be a chart John you gotta have please tell me you looked up a chart no why would I do that when I could have somebody teach me calculus I looked up a chart okay good how much water is realistic to drink in a day is the other question.

I figured it's like a half a gallon is what we drink in a day.

A half a a gallon is what you drink in a day if you're not trying to drink a swimming pool's worth of water.

Caitlin's question is, how long would it take me to drink a swimming pool?

Okay.

So I think a gallon a day you could do and stay in the safe zone.

Yeah, I agree with you.

I don't think you want to go to two gallons a day.

I think that's edging on the safe zone.

That's like you're going to have to supplement with salts and all kinds of stuff.

Okay.

I think you can drink a gallon of water a day.

I agree with you.

90 years.

So just a human lifespan.

Well, if you're lucky,

not a median human lifespan.

I'm skeptical of your math.

I think it's a lot.

I think it's definitely decades.

It's how many gallons did you find in a 20 by 20 pool?

It's 90 years because it's 30,000 gallons.

All right.

If it's 30,000 gallons, then it's 90 years.

Yeah.

I am aware.

Thank you.

I did the math.

I'm just surprised by how many gallons of water there are in that 20 by 20 pool.

It made me call my best friend Chris and say, man,

I don't think you should fill up this pool.

We need that water, bro.

But that's good because you've got it stored then just in case.

That's a great point.

And it's pre-chlorinated, over-chlorinated.

But I mean, that's the other thing, though, is like, could you drink, it would probably be bad for you to drink nothing but pool water for yourself.

Yeah, I think they probably don't suggest that.

I think there's probably rules.

They say, they say you can have a little bit in your mouth.

I just don't.

Anytime I swallow more than about one

teaspoon of pool water, I get really grossed out.

I feel it in my stomach.

And I don't know if that's real, but I definitely, I don't know if it's placebo effect, but I feel it.

How much pool water can you drink?

How long would it take to drink the whole ocean, John?

A while.

Yeah.

I mean, especially because you die like several times in the first month.

Yeah, it depends on which ocean you're trying to drink as well.

There are all kinds of things.

There's just one ocean, John.

So you're really asking, like, how much time would it take to drink all of the salt water on Earth?

And I think the answer to that is a long time.

Yeah.

But

I bet somebody's going to do the math and send it to us.

You know, I bet all of the water in the ocean has been drunk at this point.

Not by a person.

No, not even a cloak.

Certainly not by a person.

What do you mean has been drunk?

I think that it's all been inside of a body at some point.

No.

Yeah.

No, not unless, I mean, are you counting amoebae as bodies?

Yeah.

All right.

I don't, I don't count them as bodies.

You got to be a mammal to have a body.

Turtles don't have bodies.

They don't got to be offended on behalf of turtles, but you were ahead of me.

They don't have bodies.

Look at them.

You know, you know why you have to be a really brave turtle to reproduce?

This is another dad joke.

You really have to come out of your shell.

Do you just like have them on standby, like thousands of them?

That's just like what you, instead of learning French, you just have like a thousand dad jokes in your mind at all times?

I don't know.

I don't know where they come from.

Like if you asked me to just come up with one, I can't.

But if we're talking about turtles, I'm like, yeah, I got some turtles.

I wonder if you drank

all

the water.

Like,

I wonder if it's realistic to drink from one source.

I wonder if you could drink from a pool your whole life.

That's what I'm wondering.

From birth, you know, and you just like, that's your pool.

And that's how much, that's how much water you get.

That's your 90 years of water.

And you sort of watch it get lower and lower.

And if you got, if you got too thirsty, if you just did too much, if you were too greedy, you reach like 78 and you're like, I'm running low.

This is a problem.

You'd have 180 years of normal water consumption, but you're right.

Like maybe, maybe knowing that you have a finite amount of water

makes you greedier, makes you like thirstier.

I don't know how it works.

So then, yeah, you're just like watching your life drain away in this very sort of literal way.

Right.

And then like one day you have a heart attack and you're like, well, it's not my day, though.

There's a lot of water left in the pool.

And then you die and you were like, oh,

that's not what that meant.

Dude, you've gotten so dark since we did this podcast.

It used to be me.

That was my job.

job.

Now you're the one who's

telling you that you get like 80 or 90 or 70 years.

But

maybe.

Do you remember when on this very podcast, somebody was like, if if

you were given 78 years guaranteed, would you take it?

And you were like, no way.

Absolutely.

No way.

Crazy.

Why would I do that?

I intend to live to at least 110.

I'd take that deal now.

Jesus.

I'd take 78 in a second.

Yeah.

I mean,

you're probably going to last forever.

No, no, no.

No, I just kind of look at me and I can tell.

Nah, you don't know.

The most common age at death now, globally, is in the 80s.

I know.

Wild stat.

But wild stat.

That is wild.

It's great.

You know what I was just looking up is the,

because I was thinking like, we have a real pedestrian traffic problem here in Indianapolis.

Like, a lot of pedestrians get hit by cars because

we have the least friendly pedestrian city I think that you could design.

Like, I think if you were trying to design a city to make pedestrians miserable, you would make Indianapolis.

That's how we do it.

And

did you know

that the rate of pedestrian and cyclist death in the United States from cars is almost 90% lower than it was in the 1970s.

Huh.

I was shocked.

That's really interesting.

I would love to know why.

And because it didn't confirm my prior hypothesis, I didn't tweet about it.

You were like,

that does not align with the narrative I'm trying to portray.

But you know what it is?

That doesn't feel true to me.

It's that people don't do it as much because it's more dangerous.

Well, maybe.

I think that that's.

Listen, I'm going to just throw it out there, Hank.

I don't know that we're experts on this matter.

And one of the things that I'd like to change about the podcast moving forward is I think we should acknowledge when we're not experts, because I feel like there's not enough of that happening on the internet right now.

In an emergency, you should drink your pool.

Well, in an emergency, you should.

No, I think even in an emergency,

you should recognize that the pool water is not safe.

Depends on the scope of the emergency, I mean.

There's definitely some emergencies where you should drink your pool water, especially if you don't have access to any other freshwater.

You haven't drank water in a day.

Yeah, drink your pool.

Well,

we're not experts.

You know what?

We're not experts.

We're not experts in how to survive a pool-related apocalypse.

What's the apocalypse where your pool still works?

I mean,

the pool doesn't stop working immediately.

It totally does.

It totally.

You wonder how many pools work.

It's just like they use gravity.

Yeah, it's just water is being held there by gravity.

Where's it going to go?

Okay.

Things inside of your drink water.

Can you drink pool water in an emergency?

Superprepper.com.

This guy seems like he knows what he's talking about.

I'm on the same website, literally.

My name is John Walter, and I'm your typical family man, except for one thing.

I'm also a passionate prepper.

Well, good to know yourself, John.

It's good to know the truth of yourself.

Is it safe to drink pool water in an emergency?

Not that safe.

Yeah, seems like not.

But there are some ways to make it safe to drink.

You know what?

Just go to superprepper.com if you're in an emergency, okay?

That's why you come to us.

And also, this says that a 12 by 24 pool has only up to 13,000 gallons.

I know, but Hank, I was not talking about a 12 by 24 pool.

I was specifically talking about a 20 by 20 pool.

That's true.

Okay.

Who has a 12 by 24 pool in 2023?

It's all about luxury.

It's about doing it a little bit bigger than you need to.

I always forget about pools because they don't exist in Montana.

I tell you, there's not a lot of them in Indianapolis, but my buddy Chris is the only person I know who has one.

Yeah.

Can I ask you another water-related question?

Oh, this is the water episode.

I didn't know it, but it seems to be.

It's from Tiarna, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm in the deep end with this one.

See, it's water.

I recently got a fish, and I don't know if you know this, Hank, but fish actually live in water.

Yep.

Fish's name is Toby.

He's a beautiful red beta fish.

Whenever I go up to his tank to say hello, he swims to the top of the water and blows a bubble.

Nice.

I looked it up, and this turns out to be a mating behavior.

Uh-oh.

He doesn't do it to anyone else.

So I think he's chosen me.

How do I gently reject my fish's mating advances?

Not the princess, Tiarna.

That's a really good.

That's a, you know what?

That's a brand new sentence, Tiarna.

I'm going to put this one in quotation marks and put it into Google and confirm.

Yeah, that's first time.

I mean, there is a Quora question that's, how do I politely decline someone's romantic or sexual advances in a way that won't upset them?

But that is not with regards to a fish.

Nope.

That seems to be a someone, not a some fish.

Yeah.

I mean, this is a classic use your words situation, right?

Yeah.

I mean, this, this from Quora is quite good.

Stay polite.

And if they can't respect that, block them from your life.

Hey, Toby,

I'm not going to be able to mate with you for a bunch of reasons.

One, not interested.

Don't, I just don't feel a spark.

Two, don't actually know how that works.

I don't know.

I actually don't understand your physiology or your life cycle.

So what we're looking at is something that's impossible that I also don't want.

And that's a, you know,

what not, wait, the way that the noise I just made is not the noise I had intended to have made.

But that was quite a noise.

What if you just are like, Toby,

yeah, sure.

Can you convince the, can you convince the fish that it's just a very long courtship?

No, no, Hank.

This is classic Hank Green kick the can down the road.

Bring him along.

Look,

your life is longer than Toby's life.

You have a budget crisis in six months.

No, we've got to deal with this Toby thing now, Hank.

All right.

I want to yes and you, but you're wrong on this one.

You can't just say, like, oh, Toby, I'll let you know about my real feelings later.

That's how you end up in a, you might.

Don't do that.

I agree.

Don't do that to a person.

But this is, I think, just blow some bubbles back and Toby be like, I'm going to live on those bubbles for the rest of my life nope you gotta make it dramatic you gotta be like like love like love is is love and uh but sometimes oh

ships passing in the night uh we've always got someone else at the wrong time when i'm single you're not when you are i'm and then that just never worked out but i just i just feel like i've always

i've always been your plan b toby i've always been your backup you know i think if it came right down to it you'd prefer a a beta fish.

And I just can't get over that.

No, no, you have a firm talk with Toby where you say, Toby, I value our relationship, but our relationship is owner and pet,

not peers.

And so because of the power imbalance, the interspeciation, and many other factors, I'm going to need you to stop blowing bubbles because it's suggestive.

It's problematic.

I don't know that Toby's going to get it.

So.

Dude, don't underestimate Toby.

Toby contains multitudes.

Toby can absolutely understand this.

I don't know exactly how to translate it.

Do you know how Betafish signal that they don't want to mate with a male who's blowing bubbles?

How?

The female will not allow herself to be squeezed and thus will not release her eggs.

So that's all you really have to do.

Just don't let Toby squeeze you.

And I think he'll get the point.

I still think you should have a talk with him.

Just lay it all out on the line.

Yeah.

Either way,

Toby's going to have to get over this because this is not about you, Caitlin.

This is not anything that's wrong with you.

This is Toby's issue.

That's correct.

I just, that's something that I think maybe Toby doesn't need to hear, but like 19-year-old me definitely needed to hear.

This next question comes from Tessa, who asks, dear Hank and John, I know that there are some things that are orders of magnitude incomprehensibly bigger than us, like the universe.

There's also things that are way, way incomprehensibly smaller than us, like a proton.

What I want to know...

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, is this not a water question?

Look, all this stuff's got water in it.

Fair enough.

Universe got water.

Fair enough.

Protons?

Water's got protons.

Fair enough.

What I want to know is,

are the bigger things bigger than the smaller things are smaller?

This is great.

I love that.

As in, are we closer in size to the proton or to the observable universe?

The human brain is bad at this stuff.

What's like the mean or medium size of things?

How do you even go about calculating something like that?

My name backwards is my most valuable asset, Tessa.

Oh, that's good.

Asset.

That's great.

Surprise.

Man, name-specific sign-offs.

I do have a vague answer, yes.

Because I would like to know what the median-sized object is.

Can I guess what it is?

Yeah, give me a guess.

I'm looking around the room.

Okay.

I've got a t-shirt.

I've got a small tree that lives in the corner.

It's weird that you're sort of like focused on stuff that's like in your room.

I got a LaCroix can.

All those things, anything that's in your room, in terms of like the scale of the universe to a proton, is, and don't take this the wrong way, exactly the same size.

Sure.

I'm going to say it's the LaCroix can.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm going to say LaCroix can is the median sized object of all things.

You know, it's not that far off, honestly.

So people have done this math various ways, but the big, the main one is to sort of take the observable universe, which isn't really

that like the size of the observable universe is a function not of the universe's size, but of the universe's age.

And so it's just a like a snapshot in time.

But if you take that as the biggest thing and you take the smallest thing as like the Plank length, which is as small as physically something can be, then the thing right in the middle is about the size of a fairly large eukaryotic cell, like

a little

wiggly thing that you would see under a microscope or on Journey to the Microcosmos, the YouTube channel, which seems small, but on the scale of those two things,

the fact that like of like in the middle is a living organism, um,

and because those two things are so far apart from each other, you know, the whole universe and the plank length, basically, we are the same size as that eukaryotic organism.

Like, we're so close, like, it's only a couple of order of magnitude away from each other, sure.

But you know what's closer?

What?

But LaCroix can.

It's true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, I am not that surprised by that, but I will say that it's it's pretty likely, if I'm not mistaken, that the observable universe, well, it's almost certain that the observable universe, while it's all we can ever see, is

not,

I mean, it potentially is orders of magnitude away from the size of the universe.

Oh, I mean, could potentially, and in my perspective, probably.

an infinite number of orders of magnitude away from the size of yeah but once you start to get into infinities i get very i feel very squiggly everybody does except me i'm like i don't understand why you can't like what's wrong with just a line that goes forever what like that seems fine

um well first off no line goes forever except in theory

yeah yeah yeah

well like like because everybody's like physicists are always talking about how everything's made of fields and i just don't have any like problem imagining an infinite field

I have a problem imagining an infinite anything.

I think that imagining breaks down in the face of infinity, but I know what you mean.

And it reminds me, actually, that today's podcast is brought to you by the infinite field of yearning, the infinite field of yearning.

A field that shoots through the entire universe, observable and otherwise.

This podcast is also brought to you by Toby, who contains within him an infinite field of yearning.

I'll say.

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

Water?

Don't drink it out of the pool.

And this podcast is brought to you by Peepee.

Good.

Great job.

No need to have a tagline for Peepee.

We also have a Project for Awesome message from Megan to James.

James, it has been the greatest privilege of my life to watch you grow up into the incredible kid you are today.

You're so funny, genuine, and empathetic, and I could not be more proud to be your mom.

Being a preteen is hard, but you have so much life to look forward to.

I love you.

P.S.

Thank you, John and Hank, for making this pod and giving my son and I one more way to connect and laugh together.

That's very, very sweet.

James, middle school, middle school can be really hard.

I've got a kid in middle school.

I was a kid in middle school.

It's a struggle,

but it is also temporary.

And

I hope that soon you're nestled happily in high school.

And

yeah, it's hard, but you're doing great.

We're proud of you.

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I got another question, John.

It's from Bailey, who asks, Dear Hank and John, if food is delivered to my home by accident and the bag doesn't have the correct address on it, and I can't find the person whose name is on the bag and it's been sitting out for a bit and not claimed.

Is it my food now?

PMP Bailey.

Oh, yeah.

That's your food.

Yeah.

That's

just, yeah.

I mean,

it's going to do.

It's one of the great things about modern life is sometimes you get sushi when you didn't mean to or ask for it.

And

this has happened to me a bunch,

which I don't know what that's about, but I,

yeah, I sort of like feel as if I am

being

loved by the universe.

There you go.

That's a beautiful, that's a beautiful sentiment.

But what I will say is, mostly it happens when I order one thing and get a different thing, which is also a kind of surprise from the same restaurant, you mean?

No, no, no, no.

Like, DoorDash will have like multiple food orders in the car, and they will bring me the wrong one.

And then I'll call and I'll be like, I ought to eat the wrong thing.

And they're like, that's yours now, buddy.

Yep.

I can't.

I are,

it's too late now.

And I'm like, right.

Okay.

Though sometimes they will take it.

So definitely call your dasher if that happens.

They will come.

Yeah, especially if you notice it pretty quick.

A lot of times

they'll come and they'll round it up.

But

yeah, I mean, my policy is that if they tell me that they don't want it, then I almost have to eat it.

It's almost like a moral obligation to try something new.

Every time it's happened, it's like, oh, I would never order this.

Yeah.

But here we go.

No, I mean, our go-to Chinese place over the last few weeks has been a place that we found out about because it was misdelivered to my house for lunch.

And I was like, it's pretty good.

I like this broccoli chicken.

They should just do that.

They should.

That's the new advertisement.

It's like, hello, broccoli chicken has arrived in your life.

Surprise.

Sounds like an expensive campaign, but it does sound a little expensive, but it's a good idea.

It worked for this place.

I like how Bailey is just really dedicated to making sure that they're doing the right thing in this situation.

But like, that was your food a long time ago.

Right.

I hope that you didn't wait the full eight weeks since we first saw your question.

Yeah.

It's now it is no longer your food if it's eight weeks old.

Yeah, that belongs to the raccoons now.

One time I

I ordered pizza late night when I had a couple drinks coming home from a party.

And I was like, oh, Sarah, we're going to love having the pizza when the Uber gets back to the house.

And she was like, yeah, well, whatever.

I'm just going to go to bed.

And I was like, not me, man.

Not me.

I'm going to eat pizza and watch late night television.

And woke up the next morning and the pizza was still on the front doorstep, but it had been just absolutely destroyed by raccoons.

Like you fell asleep and left it there?

Mm-hmm.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Totally forgot.

God, best day for a raccoon ever.

I've heard this story.

I hope it wasn't on the podcast, but I think it might have been on the podcast.

As I was telling the story, I was like, I think I've told this one before.

But

yeah, it was great.

Great raccoon day.

Great raccoon day.

What am I going to have after this?

I am so hungry.

I'm going to have a nap.

I didn't sleep well last night because you know that thing that you can do to your neck where I know that stupid thing.

It gets so, it hurts so bad.

And then once it happened, it happened at 3:12 in the morning.

And then once it happened, I took Advil and I thought I was going to be able to go back to sleep, but I couldn't.

And I was so uncomfortable all night long.

And you know, I'm always a pleasure to be with,

as you know,

just because of my sunny disposition.

But when I'm in pain and it's four o'clock in the morning, I'm especially fun to be with.

And so Sarah was like, hey,

could you just shut up?

Is there any way I could convince you to stop

telling me how much your neck hurts so that I can sleep?

And I'd be like, but it hurts so bad.

So I'm going to take a nap.

Which reminds me, it's time to get to the news from Mars at AFC Wimbledon.

Oh, my goodness.

This is how it works.

This is how it works now, Hank.

It's all, this is how it works.

We're on a new schedule.

All right.

Okay, but I'll also say to the person who asked about spaghetti, if you don't want your spaghettis to fly all over the place when you break them in half,

you should twist them first and then break.

And for some reason, that makes them not fly, like break into three.

It makes them break into two.

And then also you can point it down at the pot as you break so that any extra things fly into the pot instead of, or just don't break them in half.

That is also, you just need a bigger pot.

Okay.

Good job.

Great.

Way to

offer some practical advice on this bad advice podcast.

I love it.

Do you want to go first or you want me to go first?

I'm happy.

I'm always happy to go first.

We lost.

You go first.

Oh, no.

We lost a football game.

We lost to Bradford City.

For some reason, we've been very good away from Plow Lane this year.

We're undefeated away from home, but we've had a hard time in our home games.

I think it's that we put pressure on ourselves to perform well because the stadium is so new and beautiful.

And we know how much it cost because we paid for it ourselves.

And we're deeply indebted to the fans because the fans ultimately loan the money to the club to build the stadium.

I think all that combines to just create a lot of anxiety.

And I think, so I think that's our, that's our issue.

We lost to Bradford City.

I mean, it was the goal that they scored was a little bit of a whatever.

We had the most possession.

We had the most shots.

I thought we played well.

We were definitely missing a real

scoring threat up front.

And I'll tell you why we were missing a scoring threat up front.

It's because Ali Alhamedi, our star striker, was playing for the Iraqi national team.

Oh.

Which is great.

I'm really, he, like, he, he was born in Iraq, but then he had to leave when he was a year old because his father was a political prisoner under the Saddam Hussein regime.

And so it just means a lot to him to play for his country, the country of his birth.

And also he starts, he plays,

which is really cool.

Like it's rare that a player in the fourth tier of English soccer

plays for their national team.

Like Lyle Taylor, you might remember, played for Montserrat,

the Caribbean nation.

But the Iraqi national team's pretty good.

And Ali Alhamedi starts for them.

And he scored a goal.

He scored a goal from open plate.

It was a good, quick, standard Ali Alhamdi goal where you didn't even think he was going to have time or space to kick it, and then somehow it's immediately in the back of the net.

So I'm almost encouraged that we lost because it's just a reminder of how much we need Ali Alhamedy, which hopefully is something that the powers that be at the club are thinking about because the transfer window opens on January 1st, and I sure would like to keep him.

Nice.

All right.

Well, you remember the Mars Insight Lander, John?

Sure, of course.

It was there measuring Marsquakes, trying to figure out what's going on inside of Mars.

I'm pretty sure it's still there.

It is still there.

Yeah.

It is still there.

I don't know that the mission is still going.

It turned out it was very hard to dig into Mars.

Yes, it had that problem.

But in its time of measuring Mars quakes, it measured the largest Marsquake ever measured.

I should probably, I think that it

was also the first thing to ever measure Marsquake.

So the first one it measured was the largest one ever measured.

And then from there.

You measured a series of increasingly larger ones as it broke its own record.

And yes.

It's like one of those

stand-up arcade video games where one person is really, really good.

And so the top 10 scores are all just the same initials.

That's right.

And it's all insight, insight, insight, insight.

Love it.

We were curious.

So this, like, the strongest one I measured, we're like, what the heck is this thing?

And the, you know, if it is, if it was a,

like, generated from the planet, that would be more interesting and more useful than if it was something hitting the planet and creating that tectonic signature or that seismic signature.

And

so what we had to do is sort of triangulate where we thought that

like seismic event happened and then look at that area of Mars and see if there were any new impact craters.

And so, that's not like a quick job and took a little bit of time.

And we have

not found any.

And so, we think this strongest of all Mars quakes was likely

tectonic.

So, it was the planet itself doing stuff within Mars itself.

So, there is, even though it is tectonically locked, like there aren't, it's not like plate tectonics like the Earth where things are still floating around and moving, and someday we'll get another supercontinent.

Yeah.

It does seem like there is some activity in there, which isn't sober a surprise because it seems like the most recent lava flows on Mars are not billions of years old.

Like they're millions or hundreds of thousands of years old.

So it seems like there's still

tectonic activity on Mars.

And someday in the future, probably a long time from now, just because it seems like these are rare events, there will still be maybe some things happening.

You know, there could be another volcano on Mars someday, which is wild.

Yeah, that is wild i have a couple follow-up questions

number one i'm not sure i agree with your premise that we will have a supercontinent again oh well we earth will

yeah

i don't know that we will though you know what i mean yeah well we never had one right and i don't know that we're gonna i gotta do you know what john i i think that we will because i don't think that humans is what we are.

I think that we are the system of life.

And I think that life will still be around then.

Making it work one way or another.

Well, I definitely think life will still be around.

So I guess I agree with you.

I kind of like us, though, as a species.

And I like us to hang around.

Yes.

My second question is, what is a big Mars quake like

compared to an earthquake?

You know, you'd think I'd know.

I think this one was like a four.

uh like comparable to a four i would feel that so like feelable yeah but i might be wrong about that.

I felt a

4.7, it says.

I had a 4.7 once

and it kind of rumbled underneath Indianapolis and I woke up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I had close by.

Have you ever experienced an earthquake before?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, you say that like it's so obvious.

When did you last experience an earthquake?

We have them in Montana.

I did not realize this, but like Montana buildings have to be built to earthquake codes, which

we've had three,

like

three or four like noticeable earthquakes and like one that I was legitimately scary where like the house was making noise and yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've only been in one scary one.

That was in Alaska.

But also I don't know if it was actually a scary earthquake or if my like scarometer is just way off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like the part where the house was like,

I was like, that doesn't, but then nothing was damaged anywhere in town.

So it was not obviously not a big, big one.

Yeah, but it doesn't take much of of the earth shaking beneath you to be properly frightening.

It just doesn't seem like something it should do.

Doesn't.

It seems like the ground should be stable.

Yeah.

And then when it's not, it's pretty upsetting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was, I was like, no, that's not how this works.

But it is.

On some level, that's why we had to take six months off from the pod.

Yeah.

You think that things are like stable, but then they're like,

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

Thank you for listening.

Hank, thanks for making a pod with me.

Yeah, you're welcome.

This podcast is

edited by Joseph Tunamedish.

It's produced by Rosianna Halls-Rojas.

Our head of community and communications is Brooke Shotwell.

Daboki Chakovarti is our editorial assistant.

And Hank Green is

a tiny little man.

I'm just a little guy.

He He lives inside of like a top hat.

Yeah.

And then he comes out sometimes and he sings and dances like

Jiminy Cricket.

Yeah, and it's wild in there.

You'd think that it would be boring to live in a top hat, but there's like a whole house in there.

Yeah, it's like the TARDIS.

Yeah, so much stairs.

It's much bigger on the inside.

The wallpaper is very intricate.

Especially if you're a tiny little Hank Green.

Yeah.

But the wallpaper is kind of like an MC Escher painting, you know?

Yeah, yeah, but it's like, it's like velvety.

Oh, it's actually textured.

I do love it.

I love a textured wall.

That's how you know you're in a classy joint.

Or in this case, a classy topic.

It's a classy joint, but it's also you're allowed to smoke cigars.

Of course, but they're so tiny.

They're tiny cigars, so they're not bad for you.

And instead of being filled with tobacco, they're filled with bubblegum.

They're bubblegum cigars.

But you do smoke them, but then the smoke you chew instead of breathing it in.

Which everybody knows is fine.

It's fine.

It's fine.

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