431: The Complicated Dust of Earl Tupper

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Speaker 2 You're listening to a Complexly podcast.

Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to Dear ICAT John.

Speaker 2 Or as I prefer to think of it, dear John and hey, it's the podcast where to brothers.

Speaker 2 Answer your questions, give me TB's advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and and AFC Wimbledon. John.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oren asked me to name a country with no R in it, and I was having a really hard time, and then he just looked at me and he said, no way.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 Iceland. Where are you?

Speaker 1 That's the first one that comes to mind for me.

Speaker 2 Where have you been, John? What you been up to?

Speaker 1 I have been in England.

Speaker 2 Where are you going?

Speaker 1 I'm going to the Philippines tomorrow.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 But I've been in England traveling around with my family and Rosiana, seeing the beautiful English countryside, seeing Stonehenge, which was very moving. I saw

Speaker 1 the cathedral in Wells. Wells is where they filmed the film Hot Fuzz.

Speaker 2 Wells famous for three things, the cathedral, hot fuzz.

Speaker 2 And also, there's just a ton of wells.

Speaker 1 So many wells. You wouldn't even believe it.
They do have

Speaker 1 a lot of rain wells.

Speaker 1 That is literally what they're known for. So anyway, we were at this cathedral walking around.
It was a beautiful cathedral and ruined like everything by Henry VIII, founder of my church.

Speaker 1 Anyway, we're walking around the Cathedral of Wales, and there's all,

Speaker 1 you're basically walking on tombs, on gravestones. And it says, here lies the earthly remains, or blessed to the memory, or whatever, whatever.

Speaker 1 And one of them said, Here lies the complicated dust of so-and-so.

Speaker 2 Whoa.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 We're just complicated.

Speaker 2 Did you take a picture?

Speaker 1 I did take a picture. I'll send it to you.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I want to do something with that.
I don't know what.

Speaker 1 I know, me too. I wanted to name a band, the complicated dust.
I wanted to write a book. I wanted to incorporate that phrase into every aspect of my being.

Speaker 2 And also your tombstone, potentially.

Speaker 1 Here lies the complicated dust of John Green. He didn't want to be a bother.

Speaker 2 Here lies the complicated dust of Hank Green.

Speaker 2 I just want people to like me.

Speaker 1 I guess that's true for me, too. I mean,

Speaker 1 he was desperate to be liked. I mean, truly, embarrassingly desperate to be liked.
And he succeeded to some extent, but, you know, never with enough people.

Speaker 1 Never with enough people to fill the hole inside.

Speaker 2 Could always have been more.

Speaker 2 Could have been better liked. Now he's complicated dust that people don't have actually that many feelings about.
Yeah, or none, you know, eventually.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Now he's just complicated dust that mostly is thought about about by his grandchildren.

Speaker 2 Increasingly simplifying dust.

Speaker 2 That's where we're all headed.

Speaker 1 Oh, the complicated dust.

Speaker 2 I just thought it was dust.

Speaker 1 I thought it was beautiful. Also beautiful.
AFC Wimbledon won one of the games we went to and tied the other. But we'll get to that at the end of the podcast.

Speaker 2 We'll get to that at the end of the pod.

Speaker 1 But it was a lovely trip. And now I'm going to the Philippines for TV stuff, for a big tuberculosis meeting gathering,

Speaker 1 lots of ministers of health and different folks, and also to see some of the work that my family and I have been supporting in trying to bring comprehensive tuberculosis care to parts of the Philippines without the support of USAID because that has, of course, collapsed.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 it'll be an interesting trip. It's a long way to go and it's a very brief trip.
I'm only there for four or five days, but I'm really excited to go there and see some of the TB work up close.

Speaker 1 And that's what I've been up to. What about you?

Speaker 2 I don't know, man.

Speaker 2 I took it easy this weekend. Went to see

Speaker 2 a play at the theater. Nice.
Went to just hang out with friends. Just did that stuff.
Oh, that's great.

Speaker 1 So you were offline this weekend. I don't know.
I've gone offline.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't resolve.

Speaker 1 So you should have been offline this weekend.

Speaker 2 I did actually. During Pizzamas, I tried to not be using the major problem apps for me.
You know, Twitter.

Speaker 2 I don't really use Twitter, but like the Twitter, the Twitters, Boost Guy and Threads and Instagram and

Speaker 2 TikTok.

Speaker 2 And that was actually, I think that that was a good experiment that I enjoyed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you're not going to keep up with it. You decided to decide two weeks was enough.

Speaker 2 What I've done is I've locked them. I don't get access to these, but I can like open them for 15 minutes at a time.
Have I talked about this? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 This is nice for me because it means that I can like go in and do DMs and then I get sucked into it, but then it's like, hey, buddy, it's been 15 minutes.

Speaker 1 Is Is there any way, and I'm just going to throw this out there. And I know this is now primarily a podcast where Hank and John fret about technology,

Speaker 1 but is there any way that you could go to these people you DM and say, I have this other way of contacting me called an email address?

Speaker 2 Honestly, a lot of people who I DM don't email. It's wild.
Right.

Speaker 1 Because they're young and full of promise.

Speaker 2 And like, why would they? Right. So they just have like, they just have like five to 10 separate services where they DM people.
And I'm like, this is not better. Hank.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I have to ask you a question. It's from Amelia.
She writes: Dear John and Hank, I have a few questions about mold.

Speaker 1 This is what I know: mold is bad, mold is penicillin, penicillin is good, mold on bread is gross, mold on cheese is delicious. Why? How can I eat blocks of moldy cheese?

Speaker 1 And it's divine, but if I eat a moldy sandwich, I die. How does it work? Thanks, Amelia.
Amelia. Amelia, thank you for addressing this with the proper level of panic, which is that one time

Speaker 1 probably 20 years ago, I ate

Speaker 1 a piece of a sandwich and then looked down and saw there was mold on what remained of the bread. And I still think that's going to kill me.
I still think I'm going to die from that.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, mold, you can think of it like complicated dust.

Speaker 1 Except it's more alive than complicated dust.

Speaker 2 That's the whole thing, John. But there's so many different molds

Speaker 2 is the answer to the question. And through trial and error, we have found molds that make cheeses better, but are not dangerous to us.

Speaker 2 That's basically it. And, you know, wildly, like penicillin mold, like the mold that creates penicillin.
I think it's called penicillium, can be one of the molds that is like on moldy bread.

Speaker 2 But like, you don't necessarily want to put a bunch of penicillin in your body when you don't need it, but you also don't want to

Speaker 2 have all the other stuff that comes along with that. So like mold can create like special mold toxins.
They're called mycotoxins. They could be quite bad for you, but some molds don't make them.

Speaker 2 So that's that is why. And that is why it's like okay to eat the things that are moldy that we have honestly through trial and error figured out are okay.

Speaker 2 There was not like a scientist back in the day who did a bunch of math and spectroscopy. Right.
They just ate it. And if they got sick, then they didn't eat it again.
Right.

Speaker 1 Did you know that the vast majority of the world's penicillin stock descends from the mold on one cantaloupe in a Peoria Illinois grocery store?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Isn't isn't that cool?

Speaker 1 That's my favorite fact.

Speaker 2 It's also true of gerbils.

Speaker 1 What do you mean?

Speaker 2 The vast majority of gerbils in America are descended from like five gerbils that Cup brought over. Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 I thought you meant they were all descended from a gerbil in a Peoria Illinois grocery store. And I was like, what a coincidence.
What a productive grocery store.

Speaker 2 Peoria really needs to get on the map.

Speaker 2 We got to make up the biggest ball of penicillin mold and gerbils.

Speaker 2 Gross.

Speaker 2 That's probably a bad idea. I don't like that.
Well, it might be the worst combo I've ever heard of.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 1 Let's answer another question.

Speaker 2 Basically, in mold, you don't want chaos. You don't want whatever's around.
You want specific situations.

Speaker 1 That's my answer to you. Okay.
That's quite beautiful.

Speaker 2 This next question comes from Danielle, who asks, Dear Hank and John, I'm a longtime nerdfighter. And because of that, I can remember when John put out a Vlogbrothers video in 2013 called Perspective.

Speaker 2 That was a response to Hank asking how long people thought a million seconds is. In this video, John remembers what his life was like one million imagined seconds ago, 12 years ago.

Speaker 2 I can honestly say this video changed my life and is a piece of media that I come back to whenever life gets hard and I need a bit of hope.

Speaker 2 Recently, I was looking at this video and I realized it came out almost exactly 12 years ago. Wow.

Speaker 2 So now that we have millions more seconds of perspective, I wanted to see if there is any experiences from the last 12 years that you can now see shaped your future/slash current self.

Speaker 2 Thank you for the video. Always screaming and Danielling.

Speaker 1 I have never made a video that so many people responded to so generously over the last 12 years. So it's nice of you to go back to that video, Danielle.

Speaker 1 And I feel really lucky that I got to make that one.

Speaker 1 I was uncomfortable making it, I remember, because it was so personal, you know, and like usually my videos aren't that personal, but sometimes that's the stuff that people respond to the most.

Speaker 1 In fact, fact, often I think that's the stuff that people respond to the most, which is dangerous because it means that you can let go of pieces of yourself that you want to keep private in an attempt to, you know, have people like you or try to make something that's helpful or whatever.

Speaker 1 But I'm really glad I made that one. It's nice to hear that it's been helpful to you.

Speaker 1 The biggest thing that's happened for me in the last 1 million imagined seconds, and I think a million seconds is actually like 13 days, not 12 years.

Speaker 2 So just to be clear,

Speaker 1 don't use my math. But two things, the sort of parallel tracks of my life.

Speaker 1 One is going up to the top of the mountain and then down the other side of it, because the Fault in our Stars movie came out almost exactly 11 years ago.

Speaker 1 Then secondarily, raising kids from the age of, in Alice's case, one to the age of 12, which has been way more interesting than all the fame in the world.

Speaker 1 Way more instructive, way more difficult, way more fulfilling, all that stuff. The highs are higher, the lows are lower, all that.

Speaker 1 And I think the biggest thing I've, I've learned is that the thing I thought I always wanted, which was to be really properly famous, I don't want.

Speaker 1 And the thing that I do want, which I always thought was kind of cliche and lame, is to have a family and spend lots of time with them.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, the biggest perspective shift for me was definitely having a child

Speaker 2 for the last 12 years. And, you know,

Speaker 2 there's this thing that I read a dad say that like when after he had a child, he was like on the floor, like on the like the little play mat, you know, that's just there to keep him off the carpet and

Speaker 2 pick up any drool.

Speaker 2 And he was just like looking at this kid and he like noticed, he like looked back on like the last, you know, 15 minutes of his life and he was like, wow, this is like the first time I felt like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be and maybe in my whole life.

Speaker 2 Like since, since being a child You know like as an adult I've never really known I was doing the right thing but like right now I know I'm doing the right thing that like

Speaker 2 Resonates a lot and yeah, and so there is something something super very nice about having things like that in your life Yeah, I think having organizing principles in your life is super important and obviously like kids don't exist primarily to be an organizing principle nor are the the only one.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Nor are they the only one. Yeah, exactly.
But they can be one.

Speaker 1 And then they're also a site of, you know, joint rapture and shared attention, which is, you know, which again, kids are not the only form of joint rapture, but for a lot of people, they are one.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, that's been the biggest,

Speaker 1 I guess, perspective shift in my life is that what I thought I wanted, I got a lot of. And usually if you get a lot of what you think you want, it's good, right?

Speaker 1 Like you want money and you get a lot of money and that's good.

Speaker 1 I wanted fame. I got a lot of fame, and it wasn't so great.

Speaker 2 Very similarly, the sort of moments when I was like worried that I might not have like as much time as I thought I was going to have.

Speaker 2 Oh, right, I forgot. It's always got to come to this.

Speaker 1 Oh, you always got to bring up having cancer.

Speaker 2 It's cancer this. It's cancer that.

Speaker 2 I remember really specifically noticing at one point that I wasn't worrying at all about any of the stuff that I thought I might be worried about.

Speaker 2 I wasn't worried about like, oh no, I won't get to see like the new scientific advances, like what, what gravitational wave detection will allow us for the understanding of the Big Bang or, you know, what interstellar objects will allow us for the understanding of other, other star systems.

Speaker 2 And I, so I thought I might have been worried about like missing stuff in terms of like the progress of humans. That wasn't on my list at all.
I thought I was going to be worried about like

Speaker 2 my like the sort of legacy of the businesses and of the, you know, the YouTube stuff and all that. I wasn't even worried about that.
I was was worried about my son not having a dad.

Speaker 2 That was 100% of it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the wild thing is,

Speaker 2 he doesn't get a dad as much as he'd like one,

Speaker 2 even though I'm going to be fine. Right.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 that's very clarifying. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 Clarifying is a good word.

Speaker 2 And sometimes he doesn't get the dad that I'd like him to have because I'm stressed out. And so

Speaker 2 my fuse is shorter or,

Speaker 2 you know, my capacity for paying attention is is smaller or I'm like looking down at my phone too much.

Speaker 2 So like all that stuff I'm like, it's it's really nice to have had there's look, everybody wants to like make a good thing into a bad thing. And so I recognize that I'm doing that.

Speaker 2 But it is nice to have had a moment where I have that clarity.

Speaker 2 I really did have to ask myself, like, what, what does a

Speaker 2 shorter time, like, what would it mean to me? And,

Speaker 2 and the answer was very clear in terms of like what actually mattered to me.

Speaker 1 And yet,

Speaker 2 I just uploaded one just now. Oh, God.
I can't.

Speaker 2 I wonder how it's doing.

Speaker 1 Oh, no. I mean, at least I'm not uploading.
At least I'm just downloading.

Speaker 1 I'm just ingesting, which is its own problem for sure. But

Speaker 2 at least I'm not also feeding them.

Speaker 1 Let's answer this question from Lark, who says, Dear John and Hank, every time I do the dishes, I feel as if I'm walking into the infernal pits of hell to fight a battle in which I will never triumph.

Speaker 1 Washing Tupperware is my Sisyphian task.

Speaker 1 Even with the cleaning gloves and a long-handled sponge, it still feels impossible to get things clean enough in a reasonable amount of time, and I end up scrubbing forever.

Speaker 1 How do I make doing dishes less horrible? Is there something wrong with me, soap suds, and Sisyphus? Lark. I can relate to this.
I now enjoy doing the dishes, but I used to hate it.

Speaker 1 I used to put it off. I used to delay it.
I used to like it.

Speaker 2 Teach me your ways. All right.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing: you got to be in a house. First off, you have to be somebody that doesn't love being overstimulated,

Speaker 1 which you probably can't relate to, but I don't love being overstimulated.

Speaker 1 Then you have to live in a home with two loud children that are overstimulated.

Speaker 2 You have to, you have to.

Speaker 2 You have to make the not dishes part worse, and then the dishes part will be better.

Speaker 1 Gets better. Gets better.

Speaker 1 And then you have to have these

Speaker 1 miracle devices called Bluetooth headphones

Speaker 1 that shut out the world and allow you to just listen to a podcast while you do the dishes.

Speaker 2 That is the main thing. And like, here's the other main thing.
I cannot allow myself to think about how I have done the dishes a billion times in my life and will do them a billion more. Right.

Speaker 2 Like, that's that's like textbook. Um, I've just made my life worse with a thought I didn't need to have.

Speaker 1 My whole, that's, I mean, that you could put that on my tombstone.

Speaker 2 Yeah. yeah that's all I do all day

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 so I'm sorry I probably do that uh to myself a fair amount but just like the reality that they that will I will always be doing dishes it's just there's always going to be dishes in the in my future but yes I do think that a pair of headphones and a nice YouTube video where I learn about like some things that prehistoric humans did or like what's up with the climate.

Speaker 1 hank and i both love a 45-minute youtube video uh analyzing the remains of one prehistoric human yeah oh man of course give me that put that stefan milo in my veins it's the only thing that's in both of our algorithms that we definitely agree on like i'm watching afc wimbledon highlights he's watching climate change videos yeah but we're always both watching those prehistoric human videos man we love them

Speaker 1 we love what was what was going on with neander talls and modern humans hmm i don't know let's spend 45 minutes speculating.

Speaker 2 What's all the stuff? What's all the data we have, and what different guesses can we make from that?

Speaker 1 Well, that was the coolest part of my trip to England, Hank.

Speaker 1 Was the, and I know we're getting away from the dishes here, but was the history of it-like walking on a street that people have walked on for 800 years, and largely it's the same street, and the houses are the same houses.

Speaker 1 Going and visiting the Roman baths and seeing that, you know, 2,000 years ago, people were engaging in community in these interesting, odd, ritualized ways.

Speaker 1 And here we are still trying to do that, although now mediated by large corporations instead of by empires.

Speaker 1 All that stuff. I mean, it was just so, so cool to be in the places where those things happened and like learning about them.

Speaker 1 It was, it felt like a prehistoric humans YouTube video, but that you can walk through.

Speaker 2 What if

Speaker 2 we could feel that way about Tupperware?

Speaker 1 That's a great idea, Hank. What if, Lark, instead of thinking about how terrible it is to watch the Tupperware, you think about what a gift it is to watch the Tupperware?

Speaker 2 What a magnificent thing

Speaker 2 that exists and didn't used to.

Speaker 1 Lark, do you even know the fascinating history?

Speaker 2 Yeah, let's talk about Mr. Tupper, John.
Oh,

Speaker 1 Tupper was a fascinating guy.

Speaker 2 You Googling right now?

Speaker 1 Earl Tupper.

Speaker 2 We know so much about Tupper. Give us a second and we'll tell you about all the the things we know about Earl Tupper.
He was born in Brewing, New Hampshire. Give me one moment.

Speaker 2 Just, it's coming to me. It's coming to me.

Speaker 1 Steady, Steady worked for the DuPont Chemical Corporation.

Speaker 2 It's all coming together.

Speaker 2 There was,

Speaker 2 did you know about the story of Brownie Wise?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 Brownie Wise was the person who made Tupper wear works. So Tupper created these things.
He was like, look, look, look, we've got this plastic. We've got this need.

Speaker 2 I can make these beautiful works of art, these like lovely objects that are also very functional. But like, how do you sell them when you're just a guy?

Speaker 2 Well, Brownie Wise is the one who figured it out, is the one who like started the Tupperware Club thing, where like you, a woman, gets to go to other women.

Speaker 2 Of course, because this is the era that we're in right now and say, look at this thing that can make your life better and it's lovely and it's easy. Right.

Speaker 1 And then the host of the Tupperware Party would make a little bit of money selling Tupperware, but the Tupperware Corporation would make a lot of money selling tupperware that was the and i remember like even when we were kids our mom would host a tupperware party like when she needed a little bit of cash

Speaker 2 i did not know that oh yeah and like sometimes like melanie would have a tupperware party yeah i believe that or like avon yeah it's probably before your era um

Speaker 1 but like with avon you had to make a kind of commitment there was a multi-level marketing aspect with tupperware you're literally just selling tupperware and you get a percentage of the proceeds and they bring in a tupperware salesperson a brownie wise if you will and um because you host it you get a little bit of the cash that's what i remember anyway and it worked great it was so think about that think about the fact that we used to we used to not have refrigeration and i don't mean like used to like 600 years ago i mean like used to in the living memory of some humans yeah almost It turns out that this was like all Brownie Wise's idea and she did it without even the Tupperware people knowing about it.

Speaker 1 Is that true?

Speaker 2 Yeah. She like went and sold, because she was selling brooms.
And she was like, this product is better. And so she like bought a bunch of Tupperware and started selling it.

Speaker 2 And she made like $150,000 in the first year. And then

Speaker 2 she also had a bunch of complaints about them. She was like, you guys send me the wrong stuff sometimes.
And the like Tupper was like, okay, come over. We'll talk.

Speaker 2 And she was like, you guys need to do parties. Yeah.
So it's all Brownie Wise, man. Yeah, there you go.
We're going to make a whole podcast for you.

Speaker 2 You're going to do the dishes and all you're going to hear about is Brownie Wise. Also, what a name.

Speaker 1 He died on vacation. Got to watch out for that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, that's what happens when you gamble too much. They kill you.
Did he gamble too much? Yeah, the

Speaker 2 gambling debts caught up with him and I'm making this up. Oh, okay.
I was like, what?

Speaker 1 This isn't on Wikipedia at all.

Speaker 2 He had a heart attack.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was poison. They poisoned him.

Speaker 1 Big plastic got to him.

Speaker 2 It turns out, yeah. And now it says, here lies Earl Tupper, the complicated dust of Earl Tupper, in a coffin that goes boop,

Speaker 2 in a coffin that burps, patented burp.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, you could do worse than a plastic coffin. The truth is, the coffin doesn't matter much, Hank.
The complicated dust will find a way.

Speaker 2 I don't know. I wonder if he's particularly well preserved, having been buried in a giant Tupperware.

Speaker 1 Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the giant Tupperware that contains the earthly remains of Earl Tupper.

Speaker 2 Can I get one? Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 you'd have to design it. And if you call the tough ware company and you say, hey, I'm Hank Green and I want to be buried in Toughwood.

Speaker 2 I want to do a brand deal. It's going to be so weird.
I want to do the last brand deal of my foreshortened life.

Speaker 2 This podcast is also brought to you by Chaotic Mold. Chaotic Mold, the bad kind.

Speaker 1 And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by the Cathedral at Wells. The Cathedral at Wells.
They call it that because it's got a lot of wells.

Speaker 2 And this podcast is brought to you by Complicated Dust. Complicated dust.
Everything Everything you care about.

Speaker 2 Boy, thanks, Hank.

Speaker 1 A quick correction coming out of the ad break.

Speaker 1 Earl Tupper lived in Costa Rica at the end of his life.

Speaker 1 He didn't die on vacation. I just am terrified of dying on vacation.
That's what that's about.

Speaker 2 Let's get into it. What's worrying about that to you, that they have to put you on a plane in a bag?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and just like, it really ruins the vacation for people. It might even ruin the idea of vacationing for people.
And as we've previously discussed, I don't want to be a bother.

Speaker 1 And I feel like it would be a tremendous bother if they had to put me on a plane and whatnot.

Speaker 2 There are probably certain vacations where they have like solid procedures for this.

Speaker 1 Cruise ships.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that's a good place to die because they got a whole system.

Speaker 1 I don't want to die at sea. If I die at sea, then on my Wikipedia page, not to make this about legacy, but on my Wikipedia page, it's going to be like died, like Southern Pacific Ocean.

Speaker 2 That's dope. That is

Speaker 2 so dope. That is so dope.

Speaker 1 I wanted to say that I was born in Indianapolis and I died in Indianapolis and make it seem like I lived here my whole life.

Speaker 2 Listen to this sentence. John Green, born in Indianapolis, died in the southern Pacific Sea, buried in Indianapolis.
That's

Speaker 2 amazing. James Whitcomb Riley could never.

Speaker 1 That's the guy who's buried at the top of the hill in Indianapolis, the highest point in Indianapolis,

Speaker 1 until I get buried on top of him.

Speaker 2 Because you love him so much.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, no. He's my great great rival.
He wrote Little Orphan Annie.

Speaker 2 Enemies to lovers, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Enemies to buried right next to each other.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 No, I

Speaker 1 do love the idea of being buried on top of James Whitcomb Riley. It would be the ultimate comeuppance, literally.

Speaker 2 And then someday at 2300, there's some big Indianapolis author. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They bury him on top of me.

Speaker 2 Like, nobody even knows who John Greed is.

Speaker 2 They've forgotten about James Woodcomb Riley at this point. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's inevitable. It's inevitable.
And that's what that's what time does, Hank.

Speaker 2 It's inevitable. It is, it is, uh, it is both

Speaker 2 horrifying, but also freeing. Yeah, it's beautiful.
All this stuff I worry about. Everybody's going to forget about this.
Just trying to do the things. Got to stay focused and not let the

Speaker 2 little boy who got bullied in middle school always be in charge.

Speaker 1 I do think that you and I would be vastly different people if we hadn't been severely bullied in middle school.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yes. It is amazing the extent to which so much of my skills were built specifically to deal with that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, I don't think Vlogbrothers would exist.
I don't think Crash Course would exist.

Speaker 2 I don't, I, I,

Speaker 2 I don't

Speaker 2 know what happened. John Green, pro-bullying.
That's all I'm hearing right now. Put it on Twitter.

Speaker 1 Oh, God, please don't put it on Twitter. I'm hard anti-bullying.

Speaker 1 I think the world is better with less bullying. Don't put anything about me on Twitter.

Speaker 1 Don't tweet.

Speaker 2 You know how they like that, like the new AI slop videos, like some people like Brian Cranston had to come forward and be like, you need to stop letting people make things with my face.

Speaker 2 I want that, but like just for all of Twitter. Like you can, you can write about me in the news, but oh my God, how do I keep my name off of that website?

Speaker 1 Oh, there should be the right to be forgotten on Twitter. Anyway, this next question comes from Mindy, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I am a sleep-deprived new mother.

Speaker 1 I am currently staring at a box of diapers that says up to 100% leak proof. Meanwhile, my washing machine is washing a load of clothing that in fact was leaked on.
I'm confused about this wording.

Speaker 1 I seem to see it a lot for diapers and feminine hygiene products. Is this some kind of marketing legal lingo? Is it supposed to be tricking me? Is there some kind of statistical jargon they're using?

Speaker 1 Are they taking advantage of my sleep-deprived brain? Up to 100% leak proof. Might as well say our diapers might not leak at all, or they might.
Pumpkins and pooping penguins, Mindy.

Speaker 1 What a phrase, up to 100% leak proof. Also potentially 30% leak proof.
We can't make any promises. And so we're just going to say up to.

Speaker 2 The version of this that is the most like magical to me is that Geico could save you up to 16% or more in your car insurance.

Speaker 1 Up to 16% or more.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I just have to call out the,

Speaker 2 of all of those words, the one that is most interesting to me is 16.

Speaker 2 Because apparently that number could have been anything.

Speaker 1 Because it also could save you up to 14% or more.

Speaker 2 Or probably 17% or more. Sure.
They always say up to 16% or more.

Speaker 1 And I'm used to say up to 15% or more, but they've recently gone up a notch.

Speaker 2 Oh, did they? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And soon it'll be 17. This was part of the plan the whole time.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's classic inflation.

Speaker 1 Up to 16%.

Speaker 2 Yeah, up to 100% leak proof is definitely saying these diapers sometimes don't leak,

Speaker 2 which is, I think, a pretty low low bar.

Speaker 1 That should be the bare minimum.

Speaker 1 If your child has a small pee, this may not leak. Well, thank you.

Speaker 1 That is what I was going for.

Speaker 1 Up to 100% leak-proof. Incredible.

Speaker 2 Incredible.

Speaker 1 If I were sleep-deprived and a new mom, like you are, Mindy, I would be apoplectic at that language. I would be writing huggies, an angry letter,

Speaker 1 and it would just say, up to question mark, question mark, question mark.

Speaker 2 Sincerely, Mindy.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You're going to have to set up like an auto emailer that says that

Speaker 2 for all 18 years of your child's childhood life.

Speaker 1 Up to, up to 100% leak proof. You come do my freaking laundry.

Speaker 2 Was there a space on the package that you felt like should have words on it? That's all that seems like to me.

Speaker 1 Mindy, I have known my spouse for 24 years,

Speaker 1 and I have seen her happy and sad and tired and not tired. I've seen her jet lagged.
I've never seen anything ever like those first few months of taking care of a child. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think that you need to take all of the difficulty that you're experiencing right now and all of the sleep deprivation and you need to take it on a mission to destroy the Huggies corporations up to 100% leak-proof language.

Speaker 1 I think you need to go hard on this one.

Speaker 2 And it can't be a legal thing because that's the reason why they've done this. You know, they specifically made it fine to put on the packaging.
Instead, it just has to become cringe.

Speaker 2 It has to be embarrassing and they need to feel bad. Exactly.

Speaker 2 Catherine and I were just having breakfast and there was a mom with her three kids and one of them was very small and they had their dog and the dog was tied up outside, which is, you know, there's a whole situation at that place for that specific use.

Speaker 2 But then she left without the dog because, of course, she did, because she got a baby and two kids. Oh, yeah.
And then they were like gone. And then she had to come back from wherever she was

Speaker 2 and get the dog. And I was like, that is absolutely where you're at.
You know, it is so hard.

Speaker 1 I tried to stay up with Sarah for like the first few nights after Henry came home. And like when she was feeding, feeding, I was like, Oh, just stay up with you.

Speaker 1 And I think on like night one, maybe, maybe night two, she was like, This is worse. Having you here is worse.
Um, because now you're complaining about being tired.

Speaker 1 And like, I don't want to hear it at all.

Speaker 2 There's a future in which, like, maybe it will be nice if one of us as well rested during the day.

Speaker 1 Oh, God. It was, I mean, I've just felt

Speaker 2 for her.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's, Hank, we got to get to the all-important news from Mars and AC Wimbledon, but first we got to do something else, which is that we knew how to read this email from Robin, who writes, Dear John and Hank, Hank is not

Speaker 1 pivoting to balls. He has been obsessed with a big ball for decades.

Speaker 2 It's called Mars.

Speaker 1 Do not pretend he has newly expressed interest in big balls when he has, in fact, downgraded into an interest of much smaller big balls. Pumpkins and spiritual penguins, Robin.

Speaker 2 I mean, I guess, but Mars is really not the biggest ball of anything.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true. It's not the world's biggest ball of anything, except for it is the world's biggest ball of Mars.

Speaker 2 It is definitely the universe's biggest ball of Mars. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 People have written in with many suggestions for balls for big balls that we could make.

Speaker 2 Tell me your balls.

Speaker 1 Bren suggests the human experience cocktail ball, hope and despair. You write your biggest reason for hope and your biggest reason for despair on two separate sticky notes and add them to the ball.

Speaker 2 Yeah!

Speaker 1 Scott suggests the world's largest ball of existential dread on a piece of scrap paper, write what's troubling us about being a piece of the universe that knows it's part of the universe and glue it to the ball.

Speaker 1 This is so good.

Speaker 2 So this is like taking the 1950s version of big balls and making it like upgrading it for that 2025 mind. You know, it's not just, I don't just want tin foil and rubber bands.

Speaker 2 No, let's have it be a human collaborative experience, the biggest ball of dread in Minnesota. The biggest ball of dread in Minnesota.

Speaker 1 Vanessa proposes the world's largest ball of band-aids, unused. Okay.
They're self-adhesive, so low work for Hank. Bring a bandage, stick it on, done.
I like that as well.

Speaker 1 And Rebecca suggests, I think Nerdfighteria should work toward creating the world's largest ball of stickers. This is another very collaborative one.

Speaker 1 I love that with the world's largest ball of paint, people who visit can add their own layers. And stickers can work similarly, each sticker telling its own story.

Speaker 1 Someone could add a sticker that they've had since they were a kid, but never found the right place to put it, a sticker from the banana.

Speaker 1 they ate that morning, a bumper sticker from their university, or all of those Yeti stickers that were sent to them when they registered their fancy new coffee mug in 2021.

Speaker 1 What sticker would you add to the world's largest ball of stickers if you needed to add a sticker today? Best wishes, Rebecca.

Speaker 1 I think my answer would be one of my remaining Olivia Rodrigo stickers that I received as a Olivia Rodrigo super fan from Olivia Rodrigo's publicity team.

Speaker 2 Dive Mola. What? Dive Mola.

Speaker 1 I don't know what that means.

Speaker 2 This is the dive MOLA. It's the dive flag, but it's a MOLA MOLA.

Speaker 1 Oh, sorry.

Speaker 1 You're doing something visual. This is an audio podcast, Hank.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was expecting you to respond to it, look at it, and tell me what it looks like.

Speaker 1 No, I was reading the document, but yeah, it looks like I can't really see it because,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 it's Dive Mola. It's Dive Mola.

Speaker 2 It's made by my friend who works at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Speaker 1 It's cute. I love it.
I think we should make the world's largest ball of stickers and the world's largest ball of post-its containing reasons for hope and despair.

Speaker 2 I think that I think we're, I think that it's, there's not enough weird. I think there's more weird.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I really like some of these ideas. I do not have the bandwidth to execute them right now.

Speaker 1 But if you out there want to make the world's largest ball of stickers, I think there has never been a better time.

Speaker 2 Put together the project plan.

Speaker 2 What do you need?

Speaker 1 You need a place to put it.

Speaker 1 There's a place to put it. That's number one.
But that's really all you need.

Speaker 2 Well, you need some amount of engineering prowess to have a way to have a ball that stays there.

Speaker 2 And even if it gets very large and heavy, you're still good. Maybe even even a way to get it out into a bigger building eventually.

Speaker 2 I think the large balls have that problem several times where they're like, this ball is now too big for this building and we don't know how to get it out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the world's largest ball of paint has its own dedicated building, which I think is a smart solution. All right, Hank, we got to get to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.
I'll go first.

Speaker 1 AFC Wimbledon, what is happening? I rode the train back from Plymouth, where I went to an away game with my family. I rode the train back with Johnny Jackson, AFC Wimbledon's coach.

Speaker 2 You were hanging out with Johnny Jackson?

Speaker 1 He just signed a new contract.

Speaker 2 He's too big of a deal to spend time with you.

Speaker 1 Oh, no. No, he was on the train with all the fans.

Speaker 2 Amazing.

Speaker 1 He was just on the train on the way back home. And he's a lovely man.
His coaching team is lovely. I got to talk to Bezo, the goalkeeping coach.
It was great. Anyway,

Speaker 1 I was like, what do you attribute this to, Johnny? Because we have the lowest budget in League One. We have basically the same players who finished fifth in League Two last season.

Speaker 1 What do you attribute this astonishing success to? Because we beat Plymouth 2-1. We tied the previous game against Port Vale 1-1.
We're unbeaten in seven games, Hank.

Speaker 1 We're in fourth place, one point off first place in League One.

Speaker 1 And we're a third of the way through the season. This is impossible.
What is happening is just impossible. And he said, I attribute it to togetherness.

Speaker 1 But he said it while looking at me with his ice, cold, steely blue eyes. And I believed every word that came out of his mouth.
I love that man so much.

Speaker 1 Hope he's not listening.

Speaker 2 It'd be awesome.

Speaker 2 So the togetherness is working. Several times you've gone from 1-0 down to 2-1-up.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So in that game, we went from 1-0 down to 2-1-up.
And it was

Speaker 1 my son Henry's eighth AFC Wimbledon game and his first ever victory. So when we went 1-0 down after six minutes, he looked at me and he was like, I knew it.
And I was like, don't give up.

Speaker 1 We can come from 1-0 down and win 2-1. And that's exactly what we did.
Goals from Omar Bougil and Nerdviteria's own Marcus Brown.

Speaker 2 It was beautiful.

Speaker 1 It was beautiful. I just, and then to be on a three and a half-hour train ride home, it was a long train ride.

Speaker 1 My kids didn't have the best time, but I had the best time because I was just talking to all the Wimbledon fans.

Speaker 1 I would go from car to car and like chat with people and get their thoughts on the game. And it was just, oh, God, it was so awesome.
I love that football club so much.

Speaker 1 I wish for everyone in the world something that means to them what AFC Wimbledon means to me.

Speaker 2 I wish we could put it in a ball and make it.

Speaker 1 I wish we could put it in a ball. The world's largest ball of love orienting in the same direction.

Speaker 2 There's so much happening in Mars news. I'm going to, there is still 3i Atlas Mars news, but I think that it's, I think I've done so much of it.
I want to talk about volcanoes instead. Okay.

Speaker 2 So there's some new research. It's looking at

Speaker 2 some weird stuff about Mars. So particularly like a bunch of mice, mice?

Speaker 2 Whoa. There's a huge ball of mice.
It's a real real big surprise uh ice ice at the equator ice so the the research is suggesting that that ancient volcanic explosions on mars

Speaker 2 left huge ice deposits hidden at the planet's equator which is not where you would expect water to persist because it's like under the surface yeah yeah under the surface i think it got buried after like various things so this was really early uh relatively early so like four to three billion years ago um it would have blasted water vapor up into the sky, and then it would have like fallen back as snow or rain and then turned into ice.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 even a single three-day eruption could blanket lots of nearby regions with up to 16 feet of ice. And over millions of years, many eruptions

Speaker 2 that might mean a lot of buried ice near the equatorial plains, which would explain a bunch of mysterious hydrogen detected by orbiters near Mars's equator.

Speaker 2 So the signals could mean that there's there's a lot of ice down there, or it could just means that there's like hydrogen-rich minerals.

Speaker 2 Either way, if the ice exists, that would be very helpful if ever people were there, because equator would probably be a slightly better spot than other places on Mars.

Speaker 2 And you do want there to be ice if you're going to be living on Mars.

Speaker 1 Just because it's warmer?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so the equator is a slightly better place because it's a little warmer.

Speaker 1 I would submit it's still not a great place. I would submit it's still not, it doesn't have much of an atmosphere.

Speaker 2 Really, one thing we're learning as we learn more about Mars is

Speaker 2 even worse than we thought in terms of places you want to hang out.

Speaker 1 Less desirable for humans even than we initially imagined. Yeah.
Well, I wish you lots of luck. I still think that we've got a good chance, one of us, of living to see a human on Mars.

Speaker 1 I do not think it's going to happen in 2028.

Speaker 2 I think you're right, John. It's 2025 and like barely.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Speaker 1 The window is closing. I wouldn't put it past certain billionaires just throwing somebody up there

Speaker 1 as a sort of Hail Mary, but hopefully that won't happen because that would be very dangerous.

Speaker 2 That does seem dangerous, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, Hank, thank you for podding with me. Thanks to everybody for listening.
You can email us your questions at hankandjohn at gmail.com.

Speaker 2 I'm Hank, and he's John.

Speaker 2 That was great.

Speaker 1 We've never done that one before.

Speaker 2 People who don't watch us on YouTube have been wondering for years.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 This podcast is edited by Ben Swordout. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna Medish.
Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Hall Srojas and Hannah West.

Speaker 2 Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti.
The music you're hearing now at the beginning of the podcast is by the Great Gunarola.

Speaker 2 And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.