433: Making the Ice

Speaker 1 You're listening to a complexly podcast.

Speaker 1 Hello, welcome to Dear Hank and John.

Speaker 2 Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank.

Speaker 1 Podcast where Two Brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon.

Speaker 1 John, do you know how when you hold a shell up to your ear, it sounds almost exactly like the ocean? Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 Well, little-known fact, if you hold a squirrel up to your ear, it sounds almost exactly like getting attacked by a squirrel.

Speaker 1 There wasn't much to that one. That one I actually really do like.

Speaker 1 I think that whoever wrote that did a good job.

Speaker 1 We are two brothers who have done a lot over the last 20 years, John. And I don't know if we've said it on the podcast yet, but the ribbon was cut on the Maternal Center of Excellence.

Speaker 1 So everybody who has ever supported,

Speaker 1 been a part of the Project for Awesome, given a donation to that, bought something from GoodStore, all that stuff, one step at a time, it got there.

Speaker 1 And it is going to start seeing patients early next year.

Speaker 2 Hank, you keep saying that we raised $25 million, which is very generous of you to say because it's a huge understatement. In fact, we've raised almost $50 million.

Speaker 1 What? What do you mean?

Speaker 2 I mean, we had to raise $25 million to do the initial phase of construction. To get the Maternal Center of Excellence open was always going to cost $50 million.

Speaker 2 And we raised about about $40 million of that.

Speaker 1 I mean, I had a thought, and I'll be honest with you, and you are much more in touch with the Partners in Health team than I am. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I had thought that the other half was raised by Partners in Health and et cetera. But no.

Speaker 2 Well, a lot of it was raised by Partners in Health and et cetera, but about 40 million of it was raised by us, one way or another.

Speaker 2 Not just by us, but by people in our community reaching out to their friends and family and so on. And

Speaker 1 matching funds and all kinds of things.

Speaker 2 But we got there. I'm very proud that we got there.
And I'm very proud of all the money we've raised.

Speaker 2 I've also just gotten home from the Philippines where I was for this Top TB Partnership Board meeting. And

Speaker 2 I'm very,

Speaker 2 very jet lagged. Like

Speaker 2 I am out of time and space in a way that I've never been out of time and space before.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Philippines is interesting in that it is both plus and minus 12. It's one of the two.

Speaker 2 It's exactly 12.

Speaker 1 It's exactly 12. You are exactly 12 off, which

Speaker 1 is as much as you can get off.

Speaker 2 Well, it was convenient in some ways because when it was like 3 p.m., I would be like, well, I can't call home now. It's 3 a.m.
You just switch p.m. for a.m.
So that's nice. That's true.

Speaker 2 It was really interesting. I mean, I learned a lot.

Speaker 2 I was in a lot of interesting meetings, but the most important thing I got to do was spend time with people living with TB and those caring for them directly, both in the little island of Gimaras, where we're working on a small project with the Philippine government to eliminate TB from that island, and in a slum in Manila where I traveled with Doctors Without Borders, which is a very difficult place to receive care and where there were significant challenges, including drug stockouts and shortages of preventive therapy and all kinds of big challenges that were

Speaker 2 sobering, I would say.

Speaker 2 I was reminded that 40,000 people are going to get diagnosed with T B today.

Speaker 2 And that's a huge problem.

Speaker 1 What a world. I know.
I think that if you could get two facts in your head,

Speaker 1 it would really sort of revolutionize your ability to understand what's going on generally.

Speaker 2 Okay, give them to me.

Speaker 1 Well, number one is air is stuff. Yeah, I know that this is very important to you.

Speaker 1 This is a big deal for me. Air is stuff.
If you hold your breath, you die. Air is made out of stuff.
It's real.

Speaker 1 That explains a lot of different things. And number two is there are way more people than you think.

Speaker 2 Way more people than you think.

Speaker 1 That goes for your town. It goes for your state.
It goes for your country. It goes for your world.
There's just way more people than you think.

Speaker 1 And oftentimes, I think there's an instinct to sort of like the people in power are taking care of one person at a time, then like they're doing it.

Speaker 1 But if the, if like the president is taking care of one person at a time, that's not doing any good.

Speaker 2 He's actually not doing his job.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it really has to be. It has to be broad and it has to be systemic.
And that's really how it works because 40,000 people will be diagnosed with TB today.

Speaker 2 It's closer to 28,000 now that I Googled it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I was just bad at that.
That's most of the way there. You know,

Speaker 1 that's a lot.

Speaker 2 That's still a lot. 28,000 people is sure a lot of people.

Speaker 1 A physicist would say that those are the same numbers.

Speaker 2 Certainly an astrophysicist would.

Speaker 2 All right, let's answer some questions from our listeners before I get too tired, beginning with this one from Lucy, who writes, Dear John and Hank, you recently spoke on the pod about handedness.

Speaker 2 I'm a left-handed hairstylist, and in daily salon life, I am constantly faced with just how uncommon it is to be left-handed.

Speaker 2 I know that being a lefty used to be taboo, but why, even now when it is no longer looked down on, are there still so few left-handed people? Not righty tiny, but lefty.

Speaker 2 Lucy, this is a great question. I have no idea.

Speaker 1 Well, and you probably won't be too surprised that we have no idea. So there's like a bunch of different ways to ask this question.

Speaker 1 There's like, why did we evolve for some portion of us to be left-handed? Why isn't it 100%, 0%? And then there's also the question of why did we evolve handedness in the first place?

Speaker 1 And then there's also underneath both of those questions is the what is the actual mechanism behind handedness?

Speaker 1 Right so because it is consistently 10% across people and other species also have consistent handednesses So that they might be like 45% right-handed or 60% left-handed or you know like they have consistent across species numbers Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 There's got to be some mechanism behind it that is being evolutionarily selected for. Now, the mechanism behind the evolutionary selection is interesting.

Speaker 1 In humans, there's this idea that there's some advantage to having some portion of the population that can fight the other way around, and they might be very good at getting through the guard of the rest of the people.

Speaker 1 But then if you sort of move beyond 10%,

Speaker 1 it evens out. And so it really only

Speaker 2 evolved it for boxing, like for south punching.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. I like it.

Speaker 2 We are a little bit violent as a species.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's also an idea that like our jaws are shaped the way they are in order to take a punch, which is interesting. And it's, and our hands are also like extra strong in order to do punching.

Speaker 1 Wow. But these are, these are hypotheses, not facts.
Um, and then there's the underlying mechanism by which it happens, and that's the thing that we have like the least idea about.

Speaker 1 There's something going on, it's not random, or else it would be 50-50, and it's and it's consistent once handedness is

Speaker 1 no longer taboo. It got to 10% and it stayed at 10%.
And it's that way across cultures. So there's something, there's some reason why, and we just don't know.

Speaker 1 We have a couple of ideas, some are about like microtubules, which are like literally like the things that hold your cells together. So how would that be involved?

Speaker 1 But it seems like there might be a relation there. Like they looked at like rare gene variance and handedness and saw some relationship between that gene.

Speaker 1 But like that's very hard to tease out for sure. Yeah.
Super weird. And we don't know.
And we're going to get to the bottom of it someday, but we have not yet.

Speaker 2 I don't know that we will get to the bottom of it. I don't know how much we're going to prioritize getting to the bottom of it, to be honest with you.

Speaker 1 It's true. It's not tremendously important to to understand the mechanism of handedness because it's not like a thing you need to cure.

Speaker 2 It's not a thing you need to cure. It's not even a thing you need to address, really.
I mean, it's nice to understand.

Speaker 1 You need to make sure that there are scissors for them. You do.

Speaker 2 You need to make sure that they're left-handed shears and that they don't cost any more than right-handed shears, right? Because that's part of how they get you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that'd be better. But, you know, of course they do because everything's about bulk.
90% fewer people are buying something. Many companies won't make them at all.

Speaker 1 But yeah, there's all kinds of that. This is very weird.
It reminds me that I am, again, and maybe this is a third thing. Yeah.
An animal.

Speaker 2 Not just an animal. I think it's critical that we're mammals.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I identify much more as a mammal than as an animal. Organism first, mammal second, animal third.

Speaker 1 And then where's human on the list?

Speaker 2 I don't know, 83rd after AFC Wimbledon fan.

Speaker 1 No, it's a good question. Fair question.

Speaker 2 Human first, mammal second, animal third, organism somewhere in there.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah, man.
Yeah, just a bunch of cells.

Speaker 2 I have to go to the bathroom, but I'll be back. Okay.

Speaker 1 You got it.

Speaker 2 Host the podcast without me.

Speaker 1 I'm going to host the podcast without John. I'm going to do a science question because he doesn't need to be here for those.
We just did one.

Speaker 1 Let's do this one from Lucy, who asks, dear, this is, did we just do a Lucy? We did. This is a different Lucy.

Speaker 1 Dear Hank and John, I was just watching a squirrel build a nest in my garden, and it occurred to me that they just know how to do that. Did their parents teach them how?

Speaker 1 Or can instinct cause them to build such intricate structures? If so, I'm wondering which complex tasks a human can do purely by instinct. In the sky with diamonds, Lucy.
P.S.

Speaker 1 Yes, the squirrel looked frantic. They do do that.
So Daboki went and dove down a little bit.

Speaker 1 And one thing Daboki found was a Reddit thread about a person with a squirrel who had the squirrel since they were seven or eight weeks old.

Speaker 1 So not a lot of chance to learn anything from the parents, but did start to do some nest building when given sticks. So maybe this is an instinctive question mark.
We know more about birds, I think.

Speaker 1 So birds definitely have some element of instinctual nest building, and they have some element of non-instinctual nest building where they actually learn techniques and skills.

Speaker 1 This is what we tend to find when we look hard at, you know, complex vertebrates and their instinctual behaviors is that some pieces of it are instinctual, but then also there are like refinements of that instinct that are learned.

Speaker 1 I think about this with flying, like birds fly, and it's like, they just know how to do that. They just learned how to fly, but they stink at it at first.

Speaker 1 So they're bad at flying at first, but they are also built for flying, but and they like do stuff that is flying like, and then they are able to sort of transition from the

Speaker 1 simple version of flying into the complicated version, and then they get good at it.

Speaker 1 And I think oftentimes we like discount that as viewers of other species because we're not like all caught up inside of their business the way we're caught up inside of our business.

Speaker 1 We see the flying occurring and we think, oh, they just like knew how to do that, but like they knew how to do a version of it and then they got good at it. by doing it a bunch.

Speaker 1 And I think that we're the exact same way with walking. John, we're talking about instinct and how the extent to which nest building is an instinct versus learned.

Speaker 1 And what we have discovered in looking at this is that many things that we think of as purely instinctual also have elements of being learned.

Speaker 2 Like nest building.

Speaker 1 Nest building, walking also is this way. We're like, we're built to walk.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 And we have to learn from other walkers.

Speaker 1 It takes a lot of practice. And it's not just learning from viewing.
That's part of it. It's also learning by doing.

Speaker 1 And so, like, you have this instinct maybe to build a nest, but you're actually learning what works, what keeps the sticks there when you're doing it. Even if you're just a squirrel.
Fascinating.

Speaker 2 I'm glad I'm not a squirrel, but I am a mammal.

Speaker 1 Yeah, as are they.

Speaker 2 What would you want to be mammal-wise if you had to be another mammal?

Speaker 1 Mammal-wise?

Speaker 1 Elephant, but like

Speaker 1 a safe one.

Speaker 1 What's a safe elephant look like these days? The zoo, probably.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you'd want to be a zoo-bound elephant?

Speaker 1 That's, I don't know.

Speaker 2 That sounds sad in its own way.

Speaker 1 I just want to be an animal that, like a mammal that lives a long time, but also one that has a good time, which I don't know that elephants have that much fun.

Speaker 2 I don't need to be here forever, personally. I know you do, but I don't.
I could be a dolphin.

Speaker 1 How long do dolphins live? A while. A dolphin

Speaker 1 fun, honestly.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Mostly swimming.

Speaker 1 They could live 50 years in the wild in captivity. Yeah.
Orcas, which are a type of dolphin, can live up to 90 years. I want to be an orca because that's like fun and also you get to murder a lot.

Speaker 1 And it's fine, though.

Speaker 2 Well, you do when you're a dolphin too I think it's true. It's true.
And you wouldn't be a good murderer, Hank. You talk a big game, but you wouldn't be.

Speaker 1 I bet if I if I was a dolphin I would be. Maybe, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 I mean you're you're you're from a fairly violent species and you're not that violent so I don't really buy it.

Speaker 1 That's true. It's true.
I'd love to see the dolphins

Speaker 1 evolve to have sort of more pro-social behaviors.

Speaker 2 Yeah, me too, man. I'd love to see us evolve to have more pro-social behaviors.
Why don't we evolve to have more like systems that include more people?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's my big complaint about China is that we do not act as if what we know is true is true, which is that all human lives have equal value. We know that's true.
We all know it's true.

Speaker 2 It's something that crosses all the different religions and all the different worldviews. Like we all know that's true, and yet we don't act like it at all.

Speaker 1 Do you think we've gotten better?

Speaker 2 Probably, marginally. You know, in the last 300 years, we're probably better than we were 300 years ago.
We probably include more people in our systems than we did 300 years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I once talked to a

Speaker 1 historian of prisons. I wish I had done this on the record.
It was a fascinating conversation that I'd love to share.

Speaker 1 But I talked to this historian of prisons and I was like, you know, sort of thinking that I would get that kind of answer. I was like, so are we better now than we used to be?

Speaker 1 And he was like, not really, not with prisons. No,

Speaker 1 I believe that.

Speaker 2 I believe that. Prisons are pretty bad.

Speaker 1 I believe that.

Speaker 2 And I mean, then I'm thinking, like, are we actually better or do we just have like way more tools and resources?

Speaker 2 I think we're marginally better than we were 30 years ago because we've cut the number of children who die by like 60%, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 Is that just because it's easier to do that rather than

Speaker 2 I think it, I don't think it was that easy to do. I think we actually did decide to value the lives of children more highly, but I might be wrong.
I've been wrong before.

Speaker 1 Well, John, I made all my windows go away and I didn't know how to get them back. Do you want to do another question?

Speaker 2 Yeah, let's do one. Let's ask this question from Michelle, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm the mother of a beautiful three-month-old girl.

Speaker 1 I love her. She's adorable.

Speaker 2 I'm exhausted. Michelle, it's very relatable.
I'm in, I mean, first off, I'm not in three-month-old baby pain, but I am in immense pain right now. Like my body does not know what time it is.

Speaker 2 It does not want to be awake, but it also does not want to be asleep. It wants to be, it wants to not, it wants,

Speaker 2 Hank, and we'll get to Michelle's question, but no mammal.

Speaker 2 was made for this. We were not made to travel 600 miles an hour across the ocean and then wake up the next morning and host a podcast with our brother.
We weren't made for that.

Speaker 2 We were supposed to go at best at the speed of canoe.

Speaker 1 Okay, fourth important thing to remember.

Speaker 1 Humans, our main ability is adapting to weird situations. Yeah.
Okay. Well, I'm trying

Speaker 1 an in-ear headset in right now? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like you're sting?

Speaker 2 Like I'm sting because I have to do this interview after I talk to you and they insisted that I have an in-ear headphone.

Speaker 1 Wow. I saw somebody else doing that the other day.
I was on like an Atlantic podcast and they had in-ears. And I was like, maybe I should do that.

Speaker 2 Maybe you should. Anyway, we got to get to this question from Michelle.
I didn't mean to dismiss your question, Michelle. I'm just kind of uncomfortable at the moment.

Speaker 2 I suppose evolution selects for favorable traits in offspring, not necessarily for parents' sanity, but why couldn't evolution bring us babies that sleep through the night?

Speaker 2 This is such a good question. I knew that people say you don't sleep when you have a baby, but oh boy, boy, oh boy, was I unprepared sleepily, Michelle and baby Abigail.

Speaker 2 Hank, I remember the first like three months after our son was born, and to a lesser extent our daughter, but especially our son,

Speaker 1 it was so horrible.

Speaker 2 Like, it's almost like I don't even want to tell people how horrible it was because I don't want to discourage them from having children.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was so horrible.

Speaker 1 It's just like one bit. It's like, that's the thing.

Speaker 2 And it wasn't even that horrible for me. It was like, it was horrible for me, but it was really properly horrible for Sarah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's bad. And, and it's, it's not like a, it's not like a week.

Speaker 2 No, no, it's months. And you do anything for months.
You, you, you, you have sleepless months, and and it affects you deeply.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's

Speaker 1 man. There's a lot here.
The thing appears to be that human babies are born a little bit earlier than

Speaker 1 they would be optimally. Like an optimal birth age would maybe be a full three months after they're actually born, which means that they call it the fourth trimester.

Speaker 1 This period of time when the baby is still very, very, very dependent on the body of the mother.

Speaker 2 No, I I mean, babies, real little babies, and I don't want to, I know some of them listen to this podcast. I don't want to hurt their feelings, but like, they're not impressive.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 No. They're not even very cute.

Speaker 2 They're not cute.

Speaker 1 They don't laugh. Yeah.
They cry a lot.

Speaker 2 They're not that fun to hang out with, if we're being honest. Like, they smell good when they're not pooping.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that's one of the things that that's what they got to make them smell good because otherwise.

Speaker 2 Otherwise, it'd be very difficult.

Speaker 1 But oftentimes they smell bad.

Speaker 2 They can do both. Well, when they've just pooped, they they smell exceptionally bad but man a good clean fresh baby

Speaker 1 that's a great smell so that's the primary thing there's also like the why is it so hard thing and part of that i think is because we raise babies very differently than we used to yeah it was a more communal activity in the past which might allow for more sleeping or

Speaker 1 this is definitely one of the things that i think is is worse about the modern structure of society is that we are not as tight and so we do not have the ability to lean on each other in the hardest moments in the way that we used to.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a real problem.

Speaker 1 But there is also, there's a science thing I found, an actual paper, which is unrelated to any of this, but there is a molecule that is about like sort of a part of the arousal cycle, like being awake and aware.

Speaker 1 And babies that

Speaker 1 died of SIDS, they looked at their heel sticks that were still on file and they found that they had less of that molecule.

Speaker 1 And so there might be some amount of like just like that arousal is kind of good for making sure the baby is able to arouse itself if it's in an uncomfortable situation or like, you know,

Speaker 1 able to like move around and et cetera. So there's, there's also that element of it.

Speaker 1 But I think the biggest piece is simply that both babies evolved to be in a a more communal environment and also we evolved to get babies with big heads out.

Speaker 1 And that meant that meant getting them out a little earlier.

Speaker 2 We wanted that head as big as possible because that's where all the fancy stuff happens.

Speaker 1 That's where, yeah, that's it. It does appear to be where a lot of our abilities lie, including our ability to just somehow get to the Philippines and back.
Yeah, barely,

Speaker 2 barely. I mean, shout out to the pilots, they did the real work.
I was just sitting there.

Speaker 1 Um, but yeah, I am tired.

Speaker 2 Uh, which reminds me that

Speaker 2 today's podcast is actually brought to you by Talking Over Your Brother. Talking Over Your Brother

Speaker 2 since 2016.

Speaker 1 This podcast is also brought to you by Squirrels. Squirrels?

Speaker 1 What's going on there?

Speaker 2 And of course, today's podcast is brought to you by Hank's three to four to five rules for remembering that you are a human.

Speaker 2 You're just an organism, buddy.

Speaker 1 And this podcast is brought to you by left-handed scissors. Left-handed scissors available.
Thank goodness. It's a great end.
This is a great tagline for them for left-handed scissors. Available.

Speaker 1 Available. Available.

Speaker 1 We exist.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. Come used to.
Hank, we got a question from Ryan.

Speaker 2 Ryan asked, Dear John and Hank, we all know ice breakers, questions at meetings or whatever to break the ice and ease the tension as people get to know each other.

Speaker 2 But I want to know if there are ice makers out there, questions that, when asked, make people feel less connected and less inclined to mingle with each other.

Speaker 1 Cold pumpkins and regular penguins.

Speaker 2 Ryan.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, there's pretty easy ones out there. I can think of a couple.
Go around in a circle, everybody. How much do you make?

Speaker 2 Oh, that's a good one. I was thinking more along the lines of, let's dig into politics.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. How's everybody feel about how that election went?

Speaker 2 That's a good one.

Speaker 2 Did man in fact walk on the moon? That's going to be a divisive one. Surprisingly divisive.
It used to be less divisive, but it's back to being divisive again.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I try not to think about that as being a thing.
It's a thing. You could do it the way that parents and grandparents all around the world do.

Speaker 1 When are you going to have kids?

Speaker 2 Ooh, or do you know where you're going to go to college? Asked critically of a sixth grader.

Speaker 1 What really shuts me down?

Speaker 1 What's your sign?

Speaker 1 That's a typical one that actually

Speaker 2 shuts Hanks down a little bit.

Speaker 1 I feel like it comes with like a judgment. I'm like,

Speaker 1 I don't want you to be judging me about that.

Speaker 2 Well, whenever I tell people my sign, they're always like, oh, man, that's too bad. Oh, I think I got a bad sign.
I got to say that.

Speaker 1 Are you the one with the twins? You're a Sagittarius, right? Nope. Keep trying.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I was born on August 24th, if that helps.

Speaker 1 That's not going to help at all. No.

Speaker 1 Is that like a cusp? Is that one of the?

Speaker 1 It's a cusp. Yeah.
Okay. I got that.

Speaker 1 So you're between

Speaker 1 Juno

Speaker 1 and Mercury.

Speaker 2 Nope. I'm between Leo and Virgo, but I'm a Virgo.
And whenever I tell people I'm a Virgo, they're always like, ah, yeah, all right. Yeah, you know, what are you going to do?

Speaker 1 It's not your fault. And I tell people I'm a Taurus, and they're like, yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, do you seem like a Taurus? Do you have typical Taurus?

Speaker 1 I don't know if I seem like a Taurus, but like, it's cool to be like a bull. That's a cool thing.

Speaker 2 I guess so.

Speaker 1 It's cool as a Virgo virgin.

Speaker 1 And then there's like 112 of them just out there being cancer. That's not fair at all.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think just a crab or a woman with water.

Speaker 2 Point being, that shuts Hank down. It doesn't shut me down.
The one that shuts me down more than anything in terms of an ice maker is

Speaker 2 if somebody asks me a leading question

Speaker 2 that they know the correct answer to about

Speaker 1 me.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 2 Like, I'll give you an example.

Speaker 1 Here's an example.

Speaker 2 You're not comfortable with ambiguity, are you?

Speaker 2 Ice made.

Speaker 1 Ice unbroken.

Speaker 1 You know? Ice made.

Speaker 1 We're going to have to work a long time to make this shave ice.

Speaker 2 Anytime you make my personality into a question, but you think you know the answer to the question, I don't like it. I don't like it.
But I do like this question from Anonymous.

Speaker 2 Dear John and Hank, how do you decide whether you want to have kids?

Speaker 2 Some of my friends are starting to have kids, and others know for sure that they don't want kids now or ever, but I just can't work out whether I want one one way or the other.

Speaker 2 I'm 30, and now I feel like I barely look after myself. I still feel like I'm a kid in an adult's body.
I'm doing okay financially, so that's not a massive factor.

Speaker 2 But the idea of deciding what to make for dinner every day for the rest of my life is daunting enough without being responsible for feeding someone else. They just eat what you eat anonymous.

Speaker 2 I know I still have plenty of time to work this out, but I worry I'll just keep putting off making a decision until one day it's too late and I'll regret not having done something sooner.

Speaker 2 So how do I work out what I want? Bye-bye, baby, anonymous.

Speaker 1 Boy.

Speaker 2 That's a good question for Hank Green because Hank Green made the call pretty late in life.

Speaker 1 I did. I did.
Yeah. I'd like to make a video that's like, why is this good?

Speaker 2 You know? We should say having kids is not inherently good. We're not saying that everyone should have kids by any stretch of the imagination.
If you don't want to have kids, don't have kids.

Speaker 2 I know lots of people who have fulfilling lives and no kids.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 there's all kinds of fun parts, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 2 One thing we should have said to Michelle earlier, Hank, is that like the first three months are the least fun three months.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, there's probably some circumstances where there's some less fun three months, but I have a lot of fun. That's true.

Speaker 1 That's true.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's very true.

Speaker 2 15 is not that easy, but like the first three months are exceptionally challenging for most people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 It really does. It can clear up and become quite a lot easier.
At some point, like at six months, Oren started sleeping like 10 hours a night. And I was like, oh, man.
Yep.

Speaker 1 That's a that's a lot of time. Or like 12 hours.
Yeah, like 12 hours. And then in that

Speaker 1 amount of free time. Yeah.
And now he sleeps once a day. Terrible.
I know. They sleep so much in the beginning, but also not right at the very beginning when you'd like them to.
Right.

Speaker 1 Sleep when they sleep is what they say.

Speaker 2 So, Hank, how did you decide that you wanted to have kids or a kid?

Speaker 1 I wish I'd been journaling. I was pretty like, I don't need a lot of people.
You were a kid in my

Speaker 1 body. I felt like I didn't need it for a long time.
There's just like so much interesting stuff going on anyway.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, honestly, what did it was like watching other people with their kids?

Speaker 1 We were like the last people in our friend group to have kids and, and, and seeing how it went, like going and hanging out with them and like liking the kids. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I just hadn't like every kid I'd ever seen, like, either was invisible or having a tantrum. You know, like, strangers' kids are either not there or they're being annoying.

Speaker 1 Like, those are the two ways that you notice strangers' kids.

Speaker 1 But the more I like hung out with the kids of friends and like watched them grow up and and saw how my friends were dealing with it you know the hard parts and the easy parts and um and the fun parts and

Speaker 1 i was like oh that looks like kind of great you know and i i kind of felt like um i think catherine also specifically felt like there was like uh you know kind of a continuity to the uh

Speaker 1 you know the process of having family. You know, you have family up, like you have your parents, but then you like, there's also like, you know, sometimes you want family down to some extent.

Speaker 1 To like add family down. Yeah.
And I just kept like seeing like the interesting parts of my friends' relationships with their kids. And I was like, that looks really interesting, actually.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, we decided to have kids because we were like

Speaker 2 27 and other people were having kids. Yeah.
Which isn't the best reason, but I'm really glad we did. But I think like I take a lot of my social cues from around me.

Speaker 2 So like when my best friend had a kid, I was like, oh,

Speaker 2 guess it's time.

Speaker 2 I'm not really a leader when it comes to that stuff. I'm definitely vulnerable to peer pressure, you know, like when it comes to having children or smoking cigarettes or whatever.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm very, I'm very much like, oh, is that what we're doing?

Speaker 1 Okay. All right.
We'll do it. I think that's like most of how humans go.
Oh, yeah. So much of how I see the world is just like, ultimately, it's a lot easier if I just kind of go with what's normal.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yeah.
Yep.

Speaker 2 That's a good rule.

Speaker 1 Not always a good rule.

Speaker 2 It's not necessarily a good way to go through life, but it is the way that I've gone through life.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, it's not entirely the way you've gone through life.
You've met all of them.

Speaker 2 Pretty much.

Speaker 2 I pretty much had two children and a picket fence.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you didn't, you didn't, you also became like a writer and YouTuber, which is not

Speaker 2 like super typical path. Yeah, but that, like, as you know, Hank, I think the obsession with what people do for a living is like way overblown and like not the most interesting thing about them.

Speaker 2 So I actually think like my life is very similar to my friends who are school teachers or sell dental supplies or whatever.

Speaker 1 Yes. There's also the element of, I think that it probably to a lot of people

Speaker 1 would have seemed like a weird pivot from young adult novelist to YouTuber in 2007. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I think that we were following very normal incentives that other people, like lots of other people would have followed, I think.

Speaker 2 Totally. We were just, we just happened to be into something and it wasn't a weird pivot.
Just like it's not that weird of a pivot to go from a young adult novelist to a tuberculosis writer.

Speaker 2 Like it seems like a weird pivot from the outside, but if you've lived my life, then it doesn't seem like a weird pivot at all because I've always been interested in young people and illness.

Speaker 2 And here I am still interested in young people and illness and still writing about them, just writing about them in a different context. And so to me, it doesn't feel like a pivot.

Speaker 2 But of course, like when you pitch the idea, young adult novelist turns into tuberculosis historian. It seems like a big pivot.
But this is true for most of our pivots, I think.

Speaker 2 I think they're smaller than they look at first.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right, Hank, before we get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, we need to talk about the physicists.

Speaker 2 The physicists have responded, Hank, to what happens when you go near the speed of light. Does it look like Star Wars or does it look like something?

Speaker 2 Yes. So, first, we have this physicist.

Speaker 2 And you'll be surprised to learn, Hank, the physicists do not totally agree.

Speaker 1 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2 So, I'm going to tell you what

Speaker 2 everybody's

Speaker 2 bona fides are so that you can make your own decision based on their bona fides. Dear John and Hank, you asked for a physicist to answer a listener question.
I heed the call.

Speaker 2 I'm a particle physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and frequently zoom things around at nearly the speed of light.

Speaker 2 Your listener asked what you would see if you move faster than light, like in Star Wars or Star Trek.

Speaker 2 The listener is right that it would not appear like it does on TV because the reality is more bleak. You would not see much.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 2 Ignoring other physics problems, you would zap past things so fast most of that light would never catch up to your eyes. Hence, you would see black.

Speaker 2 The only light you could see is very narrow cone in the direction you are moving, which is just the light in your way as you crash through it.

Speaker 2 Now, you will notice that Grant says, ignoring other physics problems.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It turns out that some people did not ignore other physics problems.

Speaker 2 So maybe that's part of the reason why people disagree.

Speaker 2 But anyway, what is more interesting is what happens, Grant writes, as you approach the speed of light, both your perception of space and time would change, and a fun way to see this is through a free game developed at MIT.

Speaker 2 I can see it giving both or either of you the giggles or vertigo. I did the game, and it gave me vertigo.
Not a source of funding, Grant. So thank you, Grant.

Speaker 1 That was very helpful.

Speaker 2 However, Adam writes, Dear John and Hank, as someone with a PhD in mathematical physics, I would like to emphasize the correct answer to the question about how stars look when you move faster than light is we have no idea.

Speaker 2 If anyone tells you differently, they are making some very big assumptions.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. All right.
Really coming for Grant here. As Grant apparently was.

Speaker 2 When determining how objects look when moving at a certain speed, we typically use special relativity, which gives us very good answers for anything that moves slower than light.

Speaker 2 Now, it is possible to plug O speed larger than light into those equations and get an answer.

Speaker 2 Maybe you can even get rid of the imaginary numbers that pop up, but there is no good reason why physics should behave the same way on the other side of the light barrier. That's Adam's perspective.

Speaker 1 Oh, going like faster than the speed of light. Okay.

Speaker 2 Kevin's perspective is, dear John and Hank, I am a physics PhD student, and I bet there there won't be any universal conclusion on what a star looks like when passing above the speed of light.

Speaker 1 Man, that's a good answer right there.

Speaker 1 Really thought through it.

Speaker 1 Personally, I think it's like Star Wars, though.

Speaker 2 So there are your answers. from real physicists, real proper physicists have weighed in our physics question, and you've got some answers.
Now, Hank,

Speaker 2 we have long known that the AFC Wimbledon juggernaut simply could could not last forever. That Icarus was melting its wax wings, Hank.

Speaker 2 We've always known that AFC Wimbledon was flying way too close to the sun. And sure enough, AFC Wimbledon played in the FA Cup, a tournament we really needed to do well in because we need money.

Speaker 2 I don't know if I emphasize this enough, but AFC Wimbledon is, as football clubs go, desperately, desperately poor.

Speaker 2 And we really needed the money from a big cup run where you get like Liverpool away and you get like $500,000 just for playing Liverpool.

Speaker 1 We needed that.

Speaker 2 Instead, we lost to Gateshead.

Speaker 1 Well, you know what they always say about Gateshead.

Speaker 2 What do they always say about Gateshead?

Speaker 1 Oh, I don't know either.

Speaker 2 We also lost to Burton Albion, the 21st best team in League One.

Speaker 2 So in our last two games, we've lost to one of the worst teams in League One and a team currently plying its trade in the fifth division of English football. So

Speaker 2 not covering ourselves in glory at the moment.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 How many of those count toward your standings?

Speaker 2 Only one counts toward the standings.

Speaker 2 The other just means that we don't get to play in the FA Cup anymore, which is really unfortunate because we needed that half million dollars we were going to make if we made it to the third round.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 2 yeah, it's a bit, it's a bit crap, Hank. What else can you say?

Speaker 2 Yeah, we're out of the FA Cup. We're struggling down, I think, in sixth place in League One.
But I don't know. I'm just kidding.
I'll take that all day. Sixth place in League One.

Speaker 2 You got to be joking.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, as long as you can hold on to it and look, it probably means you're going to stay in the league at least.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the main thing is to stay in the league. That's job number one.
Job number two is to miraculously get promoted to the championship and lose 100% of our games the season after.

Speaker 1 Well, we'll try that.

Speaker 2 All right. What's the news from Mars?

Speaker 1 The news from Mars, John, is that we're going back. No.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, a probe. Oh, so.
Oh, we're probing back. Yeah, we've never gone with people.
So we're just probing back. Probing back.

Speaker 1 This is called the Escapade Probes. This is

Speaker 1 a dual spacecraft mission, and it's going to launch in the next few weeks at some point.

Speaker 1 So this was actually supposed to launch in 2024 using Blue Origins rocket, New Glenn.

Speaker 1 But NASA was like, this thing doesn't look 100%.

Speaker 1 ready.

Speaker 1 So there were some more test flights. And now it has been prepped for launch with the Escapade probes, which are going to go to Mars.

Speaker 1 And I will will continue to look into the deep details of what Escapade is going to do.

Speaker 1 But they're basically trying to, I think, understand Mars's weird, weak magnetic field, how it interacts with the solar winds, how it became a desert, lifeless place with no atmosphere.

Speaker 2 Or at least a desert. I wouldn't go so far as to say lifeless just yet.

Speaker 1 Oh, thank you. Yeah.
Also, it has some atmosphere.

Speaker 2 Thank you. Yeah.
So this is my big question, Hank. And it's not about Mars.
It's about about my home planet, which I much prefer.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's autumn right now. It's beautiful.
The sky is blue. There's planes in the air.

Speaker 1 You know, the robins are all emerging mammals

Speaker 1 in nests.

Speaker 2 We're all just a bunch of mammals breathing air, which is stuff.

Speaker 2 Is there any chance the solar winds are going to blow off this atmosphere and leave this place like done and dusted?

Speaker 1 No. I mean, if we've gotten four and a half billion years into this,

Speaker 1 we're going to hold on to our atmosphere. We could do some stuff to the atmosphere that's not ideal.
And by could, I mean, are.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 No, I know we are doing that, but we're going to have an atmosphere for the foreseeable future.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Great.
I'm not worried. That's a big relief to me.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're good. Keep breathing, buddy.

Speaker 2 All right. I got to figure out these headphones before I do my big interview.

Speaker 1 I'm so hungry right now. All right.

Speaker 2 Well, hey, Hank, that's a good reminder that we need to end the podcast because Hank needs to go eat.

Speaker 1 I've got to get a snack.

Speaker 2 Thank you for podding with me. You can send cool listener questions, can be sent to hankandjohn at gmail.com.
I'm sorry I was so tired today. I swear I'd do my best.
Did my best.

Speaker 1 You did great, John. This podcast was edited by Ben Swordout.
It was mixed by Joseph Tuna Medish. Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell.

Speaker 1 It's produced by Rosianna Hals-Rojas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley.
Our editorial assistant is Dabooki Chakravarti.

Speaker 1 The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the Great Gunnarola. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.