440: Barreling Ever Forward

you're listening to a complexly podcast hello and welcome to dear hank and john or as i prefer to think of it dear john and hank it's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions give you dubious advice and bring you all the news from both mars and afc wimbledon john there's a very famous rock group there's four members and none of them are singers and you know them hmm can you tell me who it is no who Who is it? Mount Rushmore. A rock group. Well, we don't know for sure that Abraham Lincoln never sang a tune. Right. He didn't get to go on Johnny Carson and be like, hey. Like, exactly. Four score in seven years. Remember when the biggest scandal in American life was Bill Clinton playing the saxophone? I mean, John, Bill Clinton had bigger scandals. Oh, yeah, that's right. Also, I don't think that was a scandal. I think everybody loved that. My memory is very unreliable. So I'm making a new podcast with my high school friend, Daniel Alarcon, who went on to become a famous novelist and win a MacArthur Genius Grant. And it's about football. It's about the World Cup and international football and the history of the game. and just to get people excited for the World Cup, if it happens, which it might not. And it's been a great joy to make. It's called The Away End with John Green and Daniel Alarcon. You can look it up wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you listen to it. We really love making it together. And we also get to make it with our other friend from high school, our producer, Sean Titone at iHeart. Ah, Sean. We're having a great time. Yeah, you remember him. He was a groomsman at my wedding. Yeah, yeah. So we're having a great time making this podcast. but um one of the things that's come up is that i have an unbelievably specific memory of things that are just wrong like i have like memories of things that just didn't happen like i remember being at the world cup with daniel in 1994 and daniel was like no i went to one world cup game and it was at the rose bowl and you weren't there i was there with my uncle yeah but it turns out that my memory of having daniel at a world cup game then i was like no we can call my dad my dad was there too and my dad called me and he was like Daniel was not there yeah yeah I probably have told this story in the podcast before but Catherine and I once had a very long conversation uh while watching a Bourne Identity movie about how I had never seen this movie and she was like no I've seen it and I think you were there and then uh and I was like absolutely denied it and then several months later found an old blog post where I blogged about this movie I like did a review of it wow and i watched the whole thing and i was in the dark the whole time i did not know what was gonna happen to be fair those movies do not live long in the memory you know like they're very enjoyable yeah right they're like they're a certain kind of food but they're not they're not like a three-star michelin meal no no they're not they're not meant to be a truly special experience but I did sit down at my live journal and write a review of it. So that happens. Let's not look up Hank's live journal, everybody. I bet it's gone. It's gone. It's gone. And also, even if you wanted to try and find it, you couldn't because it wasn't actually a live journal. Oh, nice work, man. Nice work. Smart man. Smart man. I have no desire. The internet footprint is very scary. I finally downloaded all of my tweets. Congratulations. Which you did a long time ago, and you deleted your archive, which I've considered doing because I have done some searches through, and I'm like, boy, I had that opinion? Oh, gosh. Wait, you haven't deleted your old tweets? No. Oh, I shouldn't have told the world this, but no, no, they're all still up. Yikes. You should delete those, Hank. There is no reason for them to be there. The only – literally only one person is benefiting from those tweets being up, and it's Elon Musk. and whoever and also potentially people who want to harm me yeah right elon musk and your haters are having a field day right now uh-huh yeah no no they do sometimes they're like they're like uh they'll drag out an old one and be like but you thought the covid vaccine was good and i'm like go pat go present tense with that boy you don't need to say that in the past tense i still i still want to get those when it's when it's appropriate i just got my my pertussis vaccine oh yeah which I get every 15 years because I had pertussis. Yeah. I did not enjoy having whooping cough. I'll tell you, almost all vaccine preventable diseases turn out to suck. Yeah. You know what I mean? Uh-huh. Like shingles. Yeah, no. I had shingles. It was so bad. You had shingles so bad that when you got cancer, I thought you just still had shingles. No, no. Literally, my doctors thought I just still had shingles. Yeah. They were like, ah, you got some swollen lymph nodes. but you had shingles three times this year, which maybe was a bit of a red flag. Maybe. To have had shingles three times in a row. A yellow flag, I would say. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's pretty unusual. Twice in a row happens. Here you are. Here I am. And we're grateful you're here. And when we say I, we mean whichever version of me does not include the one that watched the Bourne identity in 2002. Like that one isn't here. He's not part of I. No. So do I, am I really? The self is an illusion. John, what's your first question? This question's from Jackie who writes, Dear John and Hank, would liquid paint float off before actually drying in space? Not Chan, Jackie. Hank, could you paint the outside of a spacecraft or would that be a fool's errand? It would be, so a paint is a coating. And you could not paint the outside of a spacecraft, but you may be able to coat it. So paint is... Is that okay with you? No. You made a face. Yeah. That's a bunch of bull. I don't like it. I don't like you and your terminology. But go on. I'm listening. You know what I mean? So there's ways to coat things and paint it like a varnish, for example, would be another coating. But you couldn't varnish it either. No, you couldn't. Not least because it's not wooden. But those are not the only two coatings. So paint is very, and varnish as well, are both made to exist on Earth with all of Earth's situations with regard to temperature and pressure being the two big ones. Gravity, not a big one. So when you paint a wall, gravity is not yanking that paint down to the ground. I mean, it is a little bit, but the viscosity of the paint does not allow it to just fall down in the same way the viscosity of the paint would allow it to stick to the surface. Like if you were painting inside of the space station, that would be fine. And in fact, astronauts have painted inside of the space station. You can paint inside the space station. Yeah. But you probably can't do like really watery watercolors. No, I mean, I think that you could, honestly. And watercolor actually would be a better option than many paints because a big thing that you want to watch out for is you are in an enclosed space. So you don't want to do like spray paints or like high VOC paints. Okay, but if you did a spray paint, Hank, wouldn't in the midst of spraying the paint start to like float away? It would go in the direction. Just like when you spray paint on Earth, it doesn't go down. It doesn't like drop down. It has velocity. So it drops down a little bit, but mostly it's going straight because that overwhelms the. Right, right, right. I got it. I'm sorry. That makes sense. But yeah, space is weird. But the big problem with painting on the outside of a spacecraft is pressure because that's going to instantly evaporate whatever thing. So usually paints, well, all paints, they have a thing that they are dissolved in and then that thing evaporates away and leaves the coating behind. But that system is designed to work at Earth standard temperature and pressure. Space is either very cold or very hot. There's very little in between. and also it is famously very low pressure. So you have to create coatings that work differently. And as far as I know, I don't think that we actually have any coatings that actually are applied in space. I might be wrong about that, but I think that most coatings are applied on Earth and then they're expected to last the life of the spacecraft and we're not going to do anything else. But correct me if I'm wrong. But I think that that doesn't mean that we couldn't design one. I think that it would be possible to design a coating that would work in very cold or very hot and at zero pressure. Do you know the first artwork made in space? No. You should, because it was an episode of my podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, about- Oh, and I probably do. But you forgot about it. But much like the Jason Bourne movies. Yeah, just like The Bourne Identity, The Anthropocene Reviewed was meant to be heard and then immediately forgotten forever. that was you know john i loved it but it didn't leave a big impression exactly that was my dearest hope for that project is that people would be like well that was nice anyway moving on no uh it was uh it was a a colored pencil drawing i do remember this of earth rise of earth rising um uh that was made after the very first spacewalk and indeed i can i can picture it in my mind yeah it's like a it's a beautiful multi-colored uh picture of the sun rising but with earth between it i don't remember how it works i think i listen it's been a long time since i made that it was a different guy who wrote that essay earth rise color pencil art yeah god it's great it's great. So good. It's really good. It's a real, that thing is it's a major artwork. You know what I mean? Yeah. You know what that should be, John? A flag of earth. It's not a bad earth flag. It's not a bad earth flag. It's got a lot of good colors in it and it's vaguely flag shaped. So you could make a flag no problem. I like a circle and a flag, but this is like the circle in this is very small and then also sort of like connects to a different thing. I think that that could be really cool. If you're like a vexillologist and make flags. Yeah. Make us a flag. I'm not going to complain if that shows up in the inbox. Yeah. I'll even, you know what? I'll make a flag out of it and fly it if somebody sends me a thing You know, I know the guy who runs flags for good. I bet he could do it for us. That'd be pretty cool. I bet he could do it for good. I bet he could do it for good I just saw a comment on Tumblr oh no he looked at Tumblr was it bad or good or just funny it was very bad and very funny can I tell you what it says John Green you nasty why does it say that what did you do and ugly as hell no they couldn't stop themselves John Green you nasty was enough Sorry, I thought I was going over to the show notes. That's the second question, but the Google Docs and the Tumblr logos are pretty similar. Our eyesight isn't what it once was. Wow. All right, moving on. We got a question from Angie who writes, Dear John and Hank, I just left a voicemail for a prescription refill request, and I can't stop thinking about the voicemail prompt. Instead of the typical, we'll respond within X number of business days, it said they would respond within 48 business hours. What does this mean? Does this mean six days because of eight-hour business days? Some days they're open 12 hours. Does it mean four days? Do I need clock math to determine what I'm going to hear back? I need to ask them to change this absurd message, right? I appreciate your business hours, Angie. I think that they mean two business days. No. I thought they meant four business days if they're open 12 hours a day. I think that they mean two. I think that that's so weird. So they don't mean 48 business hours. They mean 48 hours. Yeah. Yeah. No. I think that they mean like if I got this at noon. Yeah. It's not just going to be there two days from now. It's going to be there before noon two days from now. Okay. That's 48 hours. But if the weekend is there, then that's over. Then it's not counting the weekend. It 48 hours unless the business is closed for the weekend Yeah that would be my guess of what 48 business hours is supposed to mean But I don know That very ambiguous It's like there is a lot of time during which we're not in business, but I don't know what your hours are. It's like how biannual means both twice a year and once every two years. Also bimonthly. Yeah. Bimonthly means once every two months, but also once every two weeks. Yeah. And inflammable means flammable. and inflammable. Wow. I didn't know that one. And that's an important one to know. It means both incapable of being burned and very easy to burn. Okay. So if really, it's like the horseshoe theory of American politics. It's right there at the edge. It's right there at the edge, one way or the other. One thing it's definitely not is like kind of, like you would eventually get it to burn. You know? Yeah. It's not like one of those big, thick logs when you're trying to start a fire. It's either like newspaper or it's like Teflon. Yeah. No, not even newspaper. I mean, I guess. Newspaper is pretty easy to burn. More like gasoline. But yeah, yeah. It's definitely not a centrist, inflammable. Yeah. Well, who is these days? This question comes from Megan, who asks, dear Hank and John, but mostly Hank, I'm a scientist. It used to be that when I told people, my hairdresser or taxi driver or someone at a bar that I was a scientist, they would complain about their high school science class. But now in the last year, every single person has started asking me about aliens. And if I have insider information, I do not. What is what is happening? Are aliens conspiracy theories trending on the Internet? Have I aged into looking like someone with secret insider information? How do I turn questions about three eye Atlas? Oh, my God. My hairdresser asked me about three eye Atlas, too. recently into how they should be excited about potential potential microbial life on other planets asteroids and aliens megan i mean what is three-eye atlas just out of curiosity i mean i don't want to follow down the rabbit hole i suspect is the third interstellar object we've ever detected so so in the last few years we have uh our tools have gotten good enough that we can spot objects a lot of objects in the sky mostly we've we've built these as you know in part uh you know, just to better understand the solar system, but in part to be like, okay, we should catalog all the objects to make sure none of them are about to hit us. But that means that we are just catching a huge number of objects, including now some that are on trajectories that are clearly from outside of the solar system. They will pass through the solar system and then they will leave. So some other planetary system kicked this object out. And this is very exciting because it means that we could potentially study physical objects from other solar systems without having to go to other solar systems. Which we can't do. Which we are not going to be able to do. Certainly not in our lifetimes. I mean, that's what a wild understatement. John, if we're not at Office Centauri by 2035, we should change the name of the podcast to Dear John and Hank. What a wild understatement. In our lifetimes. In our lifetimes, we'll be lucky to get to the nearest planet. Yeah. No, yeah. I don't know. there's people who who want to do it but but uh unlikely to but even if we did we wouldn't be able to get something back and so this would be like it would be coming from somewhere else and these objects are exciting excitingly they're weird um and because they're weird a lot of people uh who are good at uh getting attention and enjoy the the part where you get attention are like look these aren't like any other rocks we've ever seen maybe they're parts of spaceships and i'm like Maybe they're not like any other rocks we've ever seen because they're from other parts of the galaxy may have formed 10 billion years ago. Like, we don't know anything about this. The fact that they're weird is very exciting. But it would be very weird if one of the first three objects we saw from another planetary system just happened to be a piece of a spaceship. That doesn't make any sense. I made a whole video about this. Yeah. All right. I get three-eye Atlas now, and I get why people would be excited about it, because in the information economy in which we're currently living, all that matters is your ability to get attention. And the most interesting, surprising, outrageous, exciting, easy to grasp idea is always going to get the most attention. And so it makes sense in a kind of way, Megan, that you would be starting to hear about aliens here in the last year as what Hank calls the salience economy really kicks into gear, like really overtakes our overall discourse. Like it becomes the primary way that we're talking to each other. And by salience, Hank means the ease at which something can be understood, right? No, that's part of it. Nope, that's part of it. Yeah, I mean, salience is the ease with which something captures your attention. Right. So very understood is good, but it might be that something is easy to understand, but it is also infuriating. You know, like it doesn't have to be something that you agree with, though. Yeah. Something that like if you agree with it, it's also easier to pay attention to sometimes. but like one thing's for sure if aliens built the pyramids that's pretty cool that's an easy thought to pay attention to and i really think that that's it i think that that ultimately at the root of it it is because the salience economy has taken over and and we talk about this in terms of attention so we say the attention economy we've been saying this for a long time but i just think that it's important to recognize that like all of our biases all of our tendencies on the internet all of the structures of the internet, they very much like salience is a thing that exists kind of inside of the object that your attention is being focused on. Like how beauty we say like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it's not really like in part it is. But it's like also there's a bunch of cultural things there. There's a bunch of actual physical properties there that are universal. And in the same way, there are some really salient stories and aliens are one of them. And because everybody, like it's a world of infinite content and finite attention, the war for your attention is being fought by creating ever more salient attention objects, objects on which your attention can be focused. And like I was recently at dinner with an executive at an educational media company. They were once an educational media company and now are less so. Now they're mostly an alien. And she said, she said to me, rumor spreading company. Yeah. She's an executive like high up. And she said, like, what do you like that? That's one of the first questions she said to me. She was like, oh, you're a science guy. What do you think about aliens? We produced this documentary documentary. We produced this documentary. And I was totally convinced. And I was like, you've asked the wrong person. Because I'm not going to have fun in this space with you. Yeah. Like, like what, what, what's what you're going to say is like, but there's all these credible people. And what I'm going to say is like people are flawed. And then you're going to say, well, there's all these unexplained phenomena. And I'll be like, there are a lot of those unexplained phenomena in the world. Like unexplained is normal. 250 years ago, we didn't know why we needed to breathe. Nobody thought it was aliens. But like now we do like any unexplained thing can be explained by aliens. And so that's why we go with it a lot because it's both. It's very good at explaining weird stuff that we don't currently have good explanations for, which often is just a lack of data. It's not something that we're doing research on. It's like something somebody saw somewhere or like a really blurry video. Yeah, it's two things. I mean, first off, if there were aliens here and we were capturing them over really blurry videos, that would be a heck of a coincidence, right? It's really weird that it's always the blurriest video. That is the one that's proof. It has a lot of explanatory power and it's incredibly easy to pay attention to and want to know more about. And anytime something has that combination, whether it's aliens or another conspiracy theory or religion about how people are mistreated in society. Yeah. No. I'll talk about one of my own very salient things, right? Which is my religious faith. Now, if you find that your religious faith never inconveniences or challenges you, never makes you do something you don't want to do, then it's an idea with a lot of explanatory power and tremendous attention-grabbing power that also makes it easier for you to live your life and does nothing else for you. It does nothing in the way of challenge you. It does nothing in the way of inconvenience you. It does nothing in the way of like putting blocks in your path and saying like, maybe you're not on the right path. And, and to me, those ideas are the most dangerous, whether it's aliens or not. And I've got to be very conscious of that because a lot of times I'll find myself like, you know, using my religious faith as a way to convenience myself or as a way to reaffirm what I already think is true rather than being challenged by it. because it is a set of beliefs that exists a little bit outside of information. So I don't think that Hank or me or anyone else is immune to the salience economy. No, no. I am both a purveyor. Like, that's kind of my job is to, like, use it hopefully for good. And the other thing I'll say about science specifically is that this is now, because of this, it is pitched is discussed often through the lens of of scientists so like there are you know influencers like sciencey influencers who are like sometimes professors at like big universities who are getting attention by you know i think that they actually legitimately believe this i think that they've been you know sucked into it uh for the exact same reasons and um and they're getting a ton of attention and they're selling lots of books and they're going on all the big podcasts. And so that's now a lot of people's most direct touchstones with something that is being called science, even though it is like really explicitly not like it is, it is losing touch with a lot of the, of the, you know, really important work that science does to try and remove all of these biases that are very normal parts of being a human from, uh, from the activity that is actually trying to get toward the truth, uh, with, with less of that bias in there. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the biases inherent in the human experience that science tries to correct for, but never fully can. Thank you for sponsoring the podcast. Yeah. Not that you needed more attention. Not that you needed more control over humanity. Seems like you're doing fine, but- The podcast is also brought to you by Business Hours. Business Hours! Who knows? and today's podcast is brought to you by painting in space painting in space it's possible as long as you're inside the spacecraft and this podcast is brought to you by john green john green he nasty and ugly sorry john i love how last week i was like waxing poetic about how great tumblr is now and then i just like Oh, nothing's perfect, Hank. Nothing's perfect. This episode is brought to you by NoCD. As you likely know, I have what the television commercials call moderate to severe OCD. And so I have many times experienced having a thought pop into my head that is so weird and so distressing that I just cannot move on from it. Like, maybe you suddenly wonder if your headache means you have a brain tumor, and then you're googling symptoms for hours. Or maybe you have the inexplicable urge to swerve your car while driving, and then spend hours trying to figure out why you had that thought. Well, that's what OCD is like for many people. 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So you're not paying the brand markup. I don't know if you know this, but a lot of the major brands out there, they're working with all the same factories. And so what if you just bought direct from that factory? Well, Quince gets you a step closer to that. Just well-made clothing at a price that makes sense. everything's built to hold up to daily wear and still look good season after season which is kind of the whole point and quince only partners with factories that meet high standards for craftsmanship and ethical production so you can feel good about how your clothes are made not just how they look refresh your wardrobe with quince go to quince.com slash dear hank for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in canada too that's q u i n c e.com slash dear hank free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash Dear Hank. This episode is brought to you by Factor. So if you're anything like me, you'd like to eat better. And also you have zero time and zero energy to make that happen. I've been doing a little bit better, but Factor is so helpful because Factor doesn't ask you to do the meal prep or plan ahead or watch an Instagram video recipe and then port it into a separate recipe app that is trying very bad to make you subscribe to use the features of the app despite the fact that it's marketed as a free app. But don't worry, if you want to build a grocery list from your recipe, you can watch a bunch of ads and then maybe it'll work. Not that this happened to me recently. With Factor, two minutes, real food, done. It's really that easy. I can do some meal planning, but Factor makes it so that I don't have to do all of the meal planning. Sometimes I've made a mistake and the only solution is either just eating a bunch of chips or Factor. With Factor, you get lean proteins, colorful vegetables, whole food ingredients, and healthy fats. Some upcoming meals from Factor include smoky gouda chicken with cauliflower, peppers, and tomatoes, or Korean style salmon with gochuchang sauce and rice and sesame bok choy and carrots, or you can get golden corn and shrimp risotto with Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and peppermintly. Head to factormeals.com slash deerhank50off and use the code deerhank50off to get 50% off your first Factor box, plus free breakfast for a year. Offer only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase make healthier eating easy with factor all right hank let me ask you this question from lauren okay how do you deal with the ever-present weight of nostalgia and the knowledge that time just keeps passing pumpkins and penguins lauren i am fascinated hank by humanity's ability to nostalgicize anything you know yeah oh yeah like we like the way we nostalgicize covid and like COVID was great, man. I went on long walks. I had all this time. And millions of people died. Yeah. It's so weird that we're able to do this. It's also weird because I think that we like the opposite nostalgify current moment, where like current moment always seems much worse than it actually is. Past moment always seems much better than it actually was. Right. Yeah. It's like there was no time in American history where the rule of law was like just and fair, right? Like that's, that's kind of the nature of America is trying to move toward something that it really genuinely struggles to move toward. And, um, that's just one example among many. I mean, I'm sure the same is true for like all the time in, in, uh, when I'm in the UK, because I'm a, because I look kind of like a conservative dude and because I'm American, people will like share opinions with me and I'll just be aghast, um, that they would never, for instance, like share with, with most people. Um, you know, like that, that like, it's a shame about the age of empire ending and I'll be like, yeah, it's, it's really not. Yeah. It's really not like life expectancy at the end of the age of empire in Sierra Leone was like 30. Y'all did a horrible job. Yeah. This was a bad thing. Yeah. It did not. It was a, it was catastrophic. Yeah. You know? And, and, and what replaced it while flawed is better. I don't know. But then there's like the personal nostalgia. I think that's mostly what we're talking about here. Yeah. I miss when my kids were little because they would, they would squeeze on me. They would, they would hug me like monkey children hug monkey parents. Yeah, the kid nostalgia is way more potent than like my college nostalgia or like any other nostalgia I have. Like seeing little pictures of little Lauren, I'm like, ah, I never get him again. Yeah, yeah. But I'm also romanticizing that because at the time it was hard. Yeah, I do like to, when I do the family books, like early on, like the photo books that I print out at Christmas time, I would like to include at least like one picture of him super sick with like a puke bowl and one picture of him crying like screaming about some dumb thing, you know, just like these also were things that happened. Yeah, because while they were clinging on to me and hugging me and never letting me go, they were also having an absolute fit about the fact that they couldn't watch a second episode of Little Einsteins. I would never watch that before. Oh, my God. I watched a lot of it. I know the theme song. Do-do-do-do-do, Little Einsteins. That's a real bar. Oh, a lot of Little Einsteins in my house growing up. Disney Plus, I think it was on. maybe Disney Junior. I'm going to be on Disney Plus. Are you? I am. Soon? Is that announced? September. It's not announced, but we're putting it in the podcast anyway, because I'm not saying what it is. That's true. That's true. I got a new thing coming out. Not the podcast, which I'm very excited about, but another new thing, since we're talking about things that we're doing that we can't talk about. Yeah. Yeah. I've been working on a thing since 2018 that's coming out. Hopefully. Yeah. Hopefully soon. Good job, John. I remember like talking to you in 20, like 21 and you were like, I'm done with that. I finished. I was not done. I'm just about finished. No, I had a long way to go back then. You did. It is funny how that works though. That's another form of, of nostalgia that I'm fascinated by is that I look back on my books and I'm like, well, that was fun and easy. And easy. That's true. I think it was easy. Yeah. I tell myself it was easy. Yeah. I don't know, man. I think that I mostly get over the weight of that by just barreling ever forward, which may not be super healthy. No, but you are a barreling ever forward type of fella. You just are. And I like to look back. I enjoy recalling days gone by, and I don't mind a little bit of nostalgia, Lauren. I think a little bit of nostalgia can be productive. I think where it gets destructive is when you start to think that those times were inherently better than these times, although some of those times were better. Yeah, we are definitely – nothing is straight lines. It definitely turns out that things get better. I don't mean macroeconomically. I just mean personally. Some things were better. My knees were better. When I'm running now and I'm romanticizing and nostalgicizing how I used to run, I'm right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was faster. It hurt less. All that is true. Yeah. And the the the true like you cannot escape biology. The true the true course does does get worse. It gets physically worse. Like there are some things that, you know, hopefully there's some level of of security in the self or or security and like having having some having figured some stuff out. A measure of wisdom, perhaps. Yeah, perhaps a measure of wisdom. But yeah, no, the aches and pains and then the eventual deterioration unto death is not like dope. No, it's so overrated, if anything. And I know it's rated lowly, but it's still somehow overrated. Yeah, yeah. Oof. Thank God those tech guys in Silicon Valley have solved for death because I was worried about it for a long time. Good thing we had kids so that we could seal their blood. Yeah, I mean, how do you think this face looks this good at 48? Okay. Sun blood, of course. Sun blood. I want to do this question. It's from JD who asks, Dear Hank and John, I have a physics question. Let's say you went skydiving and you brought a tennis ball with you. When you reach terminal velocity, if you throw the ball towards the ground as hard as you can, Would it keep falling at a distance away from you based on how far you threw it? Or would it like hit you in the face once it reaches 55 meters per second, which is the terminal velocity of a human body? If my friend jumped from a plane before me, could they catch the ball? What about throwing it back to me? Can you add energy to something traveling that fast? My high school was too small to have physics. So you're my only hope. Terminal philosophy, J.D. Oh, J.D., you've come to the right place because, boy, do I know the answer to this question. Do you? from all your skydiving experience? Or high school physics where I got a famous, famous C minus. And by the skin of my teeth, I mean the minuses of minuses. Good job. Good job. It's always a lot of work there at those last percentage points of a GPA. So I suspect, assuming that a human and a tennis ball have the same terminal velocity. They do not, importantly. I know. I understand that. But like a better question might be if you pushed a human. Right. If you're falling with a human and you push the human as hard as you could. Well, interestingly. How much distance would be created between you? Yeah. An even closer approximation of this would be if you created a tennis ball that fell at terminal velocity. So an assumption in your question, J.D., is that terminal velocity is equal among all things and it very much is not. Right. So a tennis ball is much lighter than a human, and the surface area to mass means that it will have a much lower terminal velocity. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The lightness doesn't matter, right? Because it's all – Yeah, yeah. I mean it's the surface area to mass. Surface area to mass, right. Okay. See, I do remember a little bit from physics. Good job. So if you're traveling with a tennis ball, you throw it – for a second, it's going to be going faster than your 55 meters per second. But then very soon, it's going to be going less. So it will, in fact, go away from you and then fly back up into your face. But they know about this in the skydiving world, and they want to toss things to each other because they're weirdos. And so they've invented a ball. There's a ball that they have that they can throw to each other, and it has the same terminal velocity as a human. What? Yeah. They invented a ball that has the same terminal velocity as a human? They did. It's called the Vladiball. I don't know why. You're telling me that we could have done anything? we could have we done many things we could have cured tuberculosis a thousand times over and instead we invented a vladibol I mean I tell you the Vladibol doesn seem very complicated And in fact before they invented the Vladibol what they would do is just tape pennies to a tennis ball which was bad because sometimes the pennies would fell off and then they'd be falling down to the ground and that's not safe. No, it's not ideal. So somebody was like, we got to get a better ball. So let's just make a heavy tennis ball. But then they invented the Vladibol, which has a number of advantages. Again, the heaviness of the tennis ball is not the issue, right? Yes, but it increases the mass per unit of surface area. Oh, I see what you're saying. Got it, got it, got it. Okay. So I wanted to talk about that because Deboki discovered the Vlada ball and I just could not give it to myself. That's great stuff. So they can toss balls. And everybody's going terminal velocity, but it's not an issue because- Yeah, yeah. And so what would happen is if you throw the Vlada ball downward, it will travel for a while and then it will reach terminal velocity and it will be going the same speed as you far away from you. And so you will have to decrease your terminal velocity by tucking your arms in and going to get it. But you can also increase and decrease your terminal velocity by like going into a dive or spreading your arms or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you could probably catch up with that tennis ball if you needed to. It is designed so that you can catch up to it. Okay. Yeah. I mean, all of this makes me wonder like how broken, and I say this with love and respect, I don't want it to sound like a diss, but like how broken are the amygdalas of these folks? I don't know, man. That they're like, I do. Jumping out of the plane was fun, but I wish I could play air hockey. John, you say that as if I didn't tweet at JD Vance this week. Oh, that's true. That's worse than skydiving. I know. It's certainly more dangerous. I probably felt very similar. Yep. Yep. Gave you the jolt. Certainly had a jolt. People will do crazy stuff for the jolt. People will do any, whatever gives you the jolt, like you're going to do. Yeah. Yep. Oh, I can't believe you tweeted at JD. How did it go? Did he respond? No, no. I think that they've moved past responding. I really wanted to ratio him and only got like a third of the way there. I mean, I would say my condolences, but actually my condolences that you got on Twitter. Yeah, my condolences that you had that thought and also that you felt comfortable sharing it. I heard that you were on Twitter again. And so I got on Twitter as my old alter ego, Leon Musk. Thank you. Yeah, I saw you on there. And usually I only use Leon Musk to get up to date on any AFC Wimbledon crisis. But I went on Twitter because you were on Twitter and you were just, you were cooking, baby. you were on yeah you were inflammable in both senses yeah in both senses yeah yeah i felt i felt very i felt very invincible and i also it felt it felt like i hadn't been on twitter in so long it felt yeah a little like what it might feel like to relapse uh and i i was i was like i was like ah well i'm doing it so i might we'll keep doing it and yeah yeah and i didn't experience any like significant negative outcomes i was a little like i bet i could do this in a smart way from i could i could do it but i could do it in a safe way i would i won't go over and immediately i went over you did go over i was like i mean you deleted a bunch of them which was a good call but i was like watching it in real time And I was like, oh my God, he's doing it as fast as he can type. Yeah. For about six hours, you were tweeting like Trump truth socials, like just like nonstop. It felt like there were a lot of people who hadn't seen quality opposition in a while. and I was like oh you you think you think that like the people who like nag you on twitter are your opposition but I'm your opposition and I know how to do this really well yeah it felt like it's what it felt like I don't think that you know how to do it as well as you think you know how to do it I think oh yeah no I think that's a pretty a pretty common thing uh yeah out there on the twitters yeah well the everyone's looking forward to the why does Hank still want to be famous episode. We're going to hold that one in the can for a while because, you know, when we need a ratings boost, we'll do it at the end of the year or something. Oh man. All right, Hank, before we get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, I want to ask you a real quick question. Okay. Why do humans like stickers? This one's from Becca who writes, dear John and Hank, why do humans love stickers? As a kid, it was always the biggest deal to get a sticker. I would spend days agonizing over where to put it and even kept a sticker notebook and as an adult nothing has changed though instead of a notebook i now have a laptop yeah so what's going on with becca and all of us hank why do we like stickers why do we like adhesive labels i don't know oh i thought you're gonna have a scientific answer i don't i definitely don't have a scientific answer but i do i do like stickers i i love to customize a thing you know i like to put like like label the thing is like everybody has the same computer basically now, you know, they're all gray flat. Yep. Clam shells. Yep. But I don't want the same computer. I want my computer. I want to know what it looks like. I want it to look different than everybody else's. And I wanted to show all the things that I care about. I want it to be like Mars and fish and my, and my own YouTube shows. I remember once I had a sticker on my laptop back in the day that said, this machine kills fascists. Oh boy. When I had the narrow, narrow and completely incorrect view that open and free access to information through the internet would end fascism. Yeah. And I was going through a Homeland security, uh, at the airport. And one of the guys was like, uh, there aren't any fascists anymore. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, well, we'll see. It's interesting. It's interesting because it turns out that fascism turns out to be more of a process than a thing. Almost everything, Hank, is more of a process than an event. You think it's event-based, it's actually process-based. You think historical events are events, they're actually historical forces pressing in on people and places and times. Everything that appears to be a dichotomy is in fact a spectrum, and everything that appears to be an event is in fact a process. Great. We did it. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. All right, it's time for the all-important news from ours in AFC Wimbledon, Hank. AFC Wimbledon winless in their last, I don't know, 5,000 games. Yeah, but you tied one. We tied. We tied against the second worst team in the league. I know, and you almost lost. Well, they had lost nine straight games and we had gone winless in our last 11. So it was truly a stoppable force meeting a movable object. Who would emerge victorious in this war between two terrible League One football clubs? And the answer was no one. Marcus Brown scored a goal in like the 78th minute to tie the game. and we emerged with a point from Doncaster Rovers, but that's not nearly good enough to where we need to be. The truth is we need to win at least five more games, maybe six more games in this season. And that doesn't sound like a tough task until you look at how things have been going and then you start to say, well, maybe it is hard. So we have 20 games left. We need to win five or six of them. And goodness gracious, I hope we find those five or six wins. yeah uh it seemed it seemed quite achievable not long ago but now it seems less well it's now seem quite a bit more scary you won a lot of games in the beginning of the season um we were so good in the beginning like a like a weird suggestion for like a football thing so whatever you were doing then i know we should do again yeah yeah the thing is we have the exact same players playing in the exact same formation we have a couple injuries but not only a couple and yet somehow the same people doing the same thing in the same way has become vastly less effective this is also known as the Democratic Party phenomenon what? Spicy! I like it I like it, we should get spicy in the Mars News and I assume all the news when everybody's gone, and I don't like Bill Clinton I think he should retire I think I don't want to hear from him anymore Alright, what's the news from Mars? It's from Mars Mars has an impact on Earth A pretty important impact on Earth Which we are only now discovering So our climate goes through cycles These cycles are affected by Earth's orbit And the tilt of the Earth's axis So there's this grand cycle that has shaped how the Earth's orbit shortens and lengthens over the course of 2.4 million years. This is a regular cycle that goes, it's very long, and it affects how much sunlight we get. And those cycles affect the timing of ice ages, how intense seasonal changes are. They're shaped by the gravitational pull of the sun. Yes, primarily, but also other planets. So scientists wanted to see how important Mars was to these cycles. And they ran simulations to see if there was like zero Mars or if Mars had like less mass or all the way up to like 100 times more mass than Mars has. And they found that when there was no Mars, the grand cycle goes away. Now, that doesn't mean that like life wouldn't be possible on Earth or anything. But like the Mars is like one like it would not happen without Mars. And they also found that Mars helps to stabilize our tilt as well as a smaller Mars would actually make the tilt more wobbly. So the reason – Whoa, whoa, whoa. If we had a wobbly – a wobblier Earth, would it still be habitable? Oh, for sure. Yeah, it would still be habitable. It would be a little less ideal. The wobbles aren't great, but they tend to – they're not like super fast. They tend to take a long time to happen. So there's one of the salient science stories that is fake that has hit me several times is the idea that the Earth is about to wobble and that the climate is going to shift extremely rapidly. But these wobbles take many, many thousands or tens of thousands of years. And so they don't tend to produce rapid shifts the way that I don't know, say, like a bunch of new CO2 in the atmosphere might. So let me ask you a question. these wobbles that take tens of thousands of years could you come up with a different name because wobble does sound like it happens fast i know yeah salient people well i in in fairness and in fairness to the scientists tens of thousands of years is is very fast um okay just like that's not how people think about it it's very fast to the people who are doing it but yeah i don't know that they do call them wobbles they probably call them something else but we're just trying to tell people things and then they freak out. But like it's literally some guy, you know, who like is getting attention on the internet and then he gets on the podcasts and which podcasts does he get on? He gets on the ones where they talk about stuff that's dumb. But like they get a lot of views because they're salience factories. Yes. Anyway. Yes. Salience factories and UFC analysis factories. Those are their two major... I said less of that second one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Hank. Well, thank you for potting with me. Thank you for saving the spicy stuff for the end. Yeah. And I appreciate being with you every time that we get to do this together. Thanks to everybody for listening. You can email us your questions at hankandjohn at gmail.com. This podcast is edited by Linus Obenhaus. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna Medish. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halcerojas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarolla. And as they say in our hometown, John Green. Don't forget to be awesome. He nasty.