Dear Hank & John - 398: Organic Plastic

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

When do I stop using a bar of soap? What’s the current state of the first plastics ever made?  How do you best judge peoples’ character when dating?  What’s going on with bacteria in my math problem?  How do authors get health insurance?  Hank and John Green have answers! If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [e-mail] us for monthly livestreams at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn.Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn

You're listening to a Complexly Podcast. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Gors, I prefer to think of it Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you devious advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John? Yeah? What's faster, hot or cold?

Neither is particularly fast. No, no, no. It's hot is faster because it's very easy to catch cold. Oh, okay. Hmm. It's also hot is actually also technically thermodynamically much faster. Like that's the actual definition of hot. Faster because things are moving more.

As things get colder, they move less. That's right, yes. Like that's the actual definition of hot. Faster because things are moving more, as things get colder they move less. That's right, yeah. So it's correct in both ways. How are you? So it's a science joke that's also a joke. I'm doing all right. I'm medium, how are you? I'm good.

What's your favorite feeding strategy? Grazing. You like, yeah, grazing is good. I think there's a lot to be said for grazing. Well, were you talking about like- Not according to the nutritionists. Oh, no, no, I was talking about for just biology, like the best way that animals eat.

And grazing is a very good one. Oh, I didn't know we were talking about non-human animals. In that case, it's the one where you surround a cell, like you surround a bacteria as a bacteria and you just consume it. Fagocytosis. That one. Where you just ooze a thing

and your entire body becomes a mouth. Yeah. I like that. You just turn into a mouth and you're just like, I think I'll swallow that whole. People are always like, oh, snakes are so impressive. They can unhinge their jaws. You know what's really impressive is a bacteria

that can eat a bacteria that's about the same size as the bacteria. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I've seen it happen. It's really cool. I completely agree. That's a great one. I hadn't thought of that one at all. This is, we've been asking this question in the Complexly office for the last couple of days. God, you guys are nerds. I'm a big plunge feeding fan, like Pelicans. What's plunge feeding? Pelicans plunge feed. Oh. Whump.

Which is a thing that at the moment, not very many things do, but has been done throughout the history of life on Earth. But also I just, I love a pouch. I love a big mouth that's half your body, like blue whales have, where it's just like, you need to have the biggest mouth so you can do your like big gulp and then filter feed

and squish out all the water, and then you got a ball of delicious shrimp in there. I assume it's delicious for them. I don't think I wouldn't like it at all. Do you think they care about flavor profiles or are they just trying to stay alive? You know, I thought about this because we've been talking about feeding strategies.

I think for a whale, a big mouthful of krill is probably the best. I don't like pleasurable. I, yeah, I don't know if it like tastes good, but I bet they like they get, you know, neurotransmitters firing when they get a big mouthful of krill. Yeah, it's like the random randomized reward randomized reward generation that keeps me on the internet all day. Yeah. Except with krill. Except with krill, because they don't know about the internet.

They don't know about the internet. The whales don't have internet. No. They don't even have dial-up. So this was a tweet I saw the other day where like like whales don't know about the internet. But but like sperm whales probably know what it tastes like because sometimes they run into the great cables. Hmm. When they're doing their because they have a feeding strategy where they sort of like run along the bottom of the ocean with their mouth open sometimes.

That's kind of how I do it in the pantry. That's a good audio effect as well there. Thank you. Thank you. I am always been a grazer as well. I like to eat a lot of little things, which I don't know if that's good for the blood sugar or not. What I do, I don't think that I'm doing food right, but no, I, you know, I'm I don't need to judge myself. I mean, on the one hand, of course not. On the other hand, you're doing it exactly right. Like no blue whale is ever like, I don't know if I'm eating krill at the right times. Right. You know, you're doing it fine. It's just that we live in a culture that's like become so obsessed with how we eat that it can be quite distracting from the business of just trying to be here.

Yeah. On Earth. I know because I think I really do think that there are ways to do life well. And I don't think that always worrying about whether I'm extending the amount of life that I have or whether I'm, I don't know. I like being healthy, that's good. I think that is part of a well-loved life.

Well, I remember when you weren't healthy and it wasn't as good. Yeah, no, I definitely didn't like that as much. Yeah. So now that I was extremely in control of that, that is the other thing to remember. I think actually food is an attempt to control the uncontrollable. Right, yeah. We're like, oh, if we just have the right nutrition and diet,

we'll be fine, except like every other thing that ever lived on earth has died. Yeah, I remember thinking that when I was sick and I was like talking to my doctor and I was also seeing a bunch of sort of cancer content on Instagram or on TikTok. And when I was talking to my doctor, he was like, you don't have like, ultimately, you don't have that much agency here. Like the thing you need to do is your treatments.

And then like whatever it is that gets you through the day. And when I was on Instagram, it was like, here's all the things you can do to that will give you agency over your cancer. And that was just selling me stuff and my but my doctor wasn't able to do that. He wasn't able to like give me the feeling of control that I craved. Because science said, like all of the evidence pointed to the fact that I don't have that much control. Like the thing that I need to do is just make sure that I stick to the treatment plan as best I can. And then Instagram is like, but if you do all of these, like you fast for three days before your chemo and et cetera. I feel very bad for the people

who are currently trying to live forever. You know, those longevity influencers who are me, like one of the biggest ones. He's like a he's like a fan of mine. Yeah. Well, I just feel bad for them because they're trying to do something that's fundamentally impossible. Yeah. And they're, you know, like here's my example of this.

If jogging extended your life by the number of minutes you jog, you shouldn't jog unless you love jogging. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, it happens that jogging extends your life by something like three minutes for every minute you spend jogging. So there's an argument that you should jog. Yeah.

Or find some similar. But if you're wholly devoted to trying to live forever, it only ends one way, which is in terrible, terrible tragedy. A failure, yes. Yeah, you're going to fail and it's going to be so sad. And I feel sad for you now because I have the pre-sadness of knowing that you will die. And not only that, knowing that you will die

around the time that you were going to die anyway. Right. And I don't mean that as like judgment or anything. Like I also do not like the fact that I'm going to die. I'm also freaked out by it. It's something I spend way too much time thinking about. I'm not trying to judge those people at all. I'm just saying that for me, it's a cause of sadness.

Yeah. Yeah, I think my least favorite feeding strategy is probably the one where you eat dead animals that have just been sort of sitting on the side of the road for a while. Oh, like scavenging? That's it, that's what that's called. Yeah.

Buzzard style. I'm glad somebody's doing it, but I wouldn't wanna be involved in it. Super grateful to the folks who are doing it, right? Like super grateful to the coyotes, the buzzards, the turkey vultures, they're doing great work. Yeah, thanks y'all. It's not for me. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's not for me, but like I'm also, how can I judge something that makes the world better? You know, they're just taking an animal that already died and turning it into new life. Yeah, right That's the it's the most sustainable way to eat meat for sure Hank did you know that when you die? Oh Your bacteria sort of eat their way out of you. Yeah. Yeah. No, they sometimes try to do this before you die. They're like, is this guy dead? That happens during chemo because all of your white blood cells die and then you have to be careful that your bacteria don't wake up and say, wait a second, is this food now? Is this a living

organism that I'm sort of symbiotically living in concert with, or is this just a hamburger that I happen to find myself on? Mm-hmm, yay. Didn't happen to me, but it does happen sometimes. I know too much about cancer. Let's answer some questions from our listeners. All right, Hank, our first question comes from Anya, who writes, hello,

as men in the business of saponification, when do I stop using a bar of soap? All the soap bars I have used in my life have disintegrated into tiny annoying lumps. It takes like five minutes to get any lather out of. Yeah. But I feel like I need to use everything to the last atom of soap, like save the planet and kick capitalist consumerism in the nuts. Hey, hey, hey, do not kick Sun Basin soap in the nuts. Okay? Do not kick our hip soap brand. Yeah, well, is it capitalist consumerism if you, one, need soap and, two, all the profits are being donated to charity?

How big does the bar of soap have to get before you're allowed to throw it away? Dos Veed Anya. I it's a Russian joke. Oh, it is. I did not get it. But thank you for pointing it out. I get it now. John, do you throw away the soap slivers? Do you give up at some point? Because no, but I have a solution.

Yeah, I think you I have a solution for Anya. I think we have the same one. And maybe this is a sun basin soap specific solution, because maybe not all soaps do this. Anya, you take the little leftover soap and you put it on top of a new bar of soap. Yeah, and then they become one soap and your new bar of soap gets slightly bigger. Yes, and you can do this forever. In this way, soap never dies. It lives forever, like those people who just wanna live.

Right, right, just like how if I get eaten by a vulture, I will still be a little bit alive inside of a vulture. I will be that vulture. You'll just be vulture. You'll just be some vulture energy instead of being human energy. I did say I don't wanna be a vulture, but I guess. Yeah, well. Yeah, well.

I mean, what are you gonna do? But that is the thing. It works really well with the soap that we have. Catherine is the one who always sort of makes the call. We use the same soap. And she makes the decision like now this bar goes, otherwise I will keep using it and be like, I guess I'll just clean this corner of my shoulder. But then she lays it down on there and I'm like, oh, it happened. It's time for a new bar.

And it's funny because we have so many different scents of soaps now in our house. And so a new bar is always an exciting new moment. So do we. And I love, I genuinely love Sun Basin soap so much. It has genuinely been a game changer in my life because it's bar soap that just is so good. It softens the skin. I just took a bath actually and I feel, oh. This is what happens when you get soap from people who live in a dry place. This is dry land and the entire winter here is all about preserving skin moisture.

And so we're serious about that out here. I mean, the winter is your skin turns into paper. I think that I'm not sure at this point, whether sun basin soap or the tea is my favorite. I made some Earl Grey tea this morning, that I finished it and I was mad. Yeah. I was like, I should have made three times as much.

That was so freaking good. You and I are having this conversation privately. We're not trying to sell Sunbase and soap and Keats and Co. tea right now. Genuinely, the one thing that I'm really proud of is that our products are so good, which is why our retention is so high. Eventually people tend to get enough socks,

so maybe the Awesome Socks Club isn't as high. But with the coffee and the tea and the soap, people just stay forever. Right. Because why wouldn't they? We have solved their coffee and tea and soap problems. I never have too much tea, because if I start to feel like I have too much tea, you know what I do? I just make a big thing of iced tea and then I have Earl Grey iced tea with a little bit of sugar in it.

Classy. It's classy. People come over, they're like, what's this? And it's like, don't worry, you're going to think it's delicious. This next question comes from Sam. It says, Dear Hank and John, I hope this missive finds you well. As it is an inescapable staple of life in the modern world, I often wonder how far plastic has gotten. We're often given a statistic that plastic will take a staggering amount of time to biodegrade. Given that the oldest production of plastic is traced to the early 50s, what's the state of the oldest plastic? Is it likely still functional in its initial intended form? How about the stuff that's been left out in the elements?

Yours and polyethylene, Sam. Wow, Hank, how is this plastic doing? You know, it it doesn't turn. The thing about plastic is that it kind of turns into micro plastic. Mm hmm. Weirdly enough, the reason we first made plastic was to make billiard balls. That's not the very first reason, but this was one of the big reasons. So there was like a competition to try and figure out how to make billiard balls without having to kill elephants, which is a sort of ridiculous thing to think.

Like, oh, how are we going to make billiard balls without having to grow a whole elephant? That's the situation we were in. And there was like an X prize, basically, for trying to get people to make billiard balls out of something where they could continue making them without having to go and get elephant tusks or make them from other various kinds of ivory. And or make them from other various kinds of ivory so the And then we figured that out which was the sort of first first plastic type things and those Those would absolutely still be around there like very sort of these these these hard plastic balls That we made and like that's what you know, we still don't make billiard balls out of Elephants. Yeah, but I don't think we make them out of plastic now.

They are in fact a kind of plastic. They're a hard, really dense hard plastic. Yeah like people will argue about what like actually is plastic and sometimes people are very specifically trying to say no our product isn't made of plastic but if it's a polymerized organic compound um organic polymers are basically what plastics are and uh And billiard balls are still made of that. So I could say my plastic is organic. Unfortunately, that word has two meanings, but yeah, you could. It would not mean what people think you mean though.

No, I would just be like, don't worry, this is organic single-use plastic. It's different. They're all organic. So anyway, that stuff's going to be in landfills for a long time. Yeah. I mean, the sort of single-use plastics we use for like cola bottles these days, they degrade, but they just degrade into smaller plastics mostly for a really long time. So they are not usable for very long, but they are around

for a long time. Basically what happens is the long chains that are all binding together to make the plastic, those start to break apart. And so the plastic becomes more brittle, it does not bend as easily, and you could break it with your fingers after decades, but it still is just breaking into yet more plastics. Okay. It's kind of like what happens with the human body then. It just becomes brittle and old. Youth grows pale and spectre thin and dies.

Yeah. And it also depends on where it is. If it's like buried in the ground, like a human body would last a lot longer than if it was like sitting on the ground getting hit by the sun, which does a lot of great because I do intend to be buried with a nice plastic bottle of diet. Dr. Pepper gets a great idea, John. I'll make that happen. In fact, maybe I'll get a glass one just so it a little more classy. No, no, I mean just one from the fridge. Bury me with the people and bury me with plastic Dr. Pepper. This next question comes from Abby Rose who writes, Dear Green brothers, my name is Abby Rose. I'm 26 years old. I've recently

sworn off online dating. It's horrible. Do not recommend. Stay married. Lately, I've just been getting really hurt in my interactions with people on dating apps, being ghosted, love bombed, let on, and kind of cruelly rejected. While no one likes rejection, I don't really mind that piece of it. Figuring out compatibility is a hard process, and I don't have any hard feelings towards someone

who just isn't vibing with me. Abby Rose seems like a real catch. Yeah. What bothers me is the lying, the ghosting, and the general lack of respect and empathy a lot of people, men mostly, seem to have in these settings. It has me thinking about how we get to know people. What advice do you have on judging people's character? How do you get to know someone as they truly are rather than what they project? A very tired librarian,

Abby Rose. Plus, plus Abby's a librarian? I mean, wow. Wow, the men of the apps are really failing here. I look, you're coming to the wrong folks to talk about how the apps work. Never been on Tinder. One time Rosianna lent me and Sarah her Tinder so that we could see how it works. Yeah.

And so that we could see what the pool of suitors looked like in Indianapolis. And we were like, yeah, you probably should move back to London. I get a feeling that there is some, I mean, look, obviously the apps work for some people, but I do get a feeling that just in the same way that TikTok does not tie me more deeply to creators in the way that YouTube did, where I can just sort of like move onto the next,

move onto the next, move onto the next, that there is a sense that a lot of the, you know, more mainstream apps, I think that there are a bunch of them that work different ways, but the way that like Tinder or Grindr work, you basically, like you get a feeling of the disposability or of these sort of next level opportunity. Like there's always something next.

There's always something else on the horizon. Yeah, that I think sort of breeds this. Yeah. And that I do feel like it's not good for people. Well, and I think that Abby Rose makes a really good point, which is that when the barrier to ghosting and showing a lack of respect and empathy gets low, like we tend to be less empathetic, right?

Like when there's no cost to not being empathetic, we tend to be less empathetic, and there really isn't a cost right now, because you're not gonna see that person at the grocery store. Like I I remember I broke up with this person between my junior and senior year of college. I have misstated the reality. She broke up with me and we live next door to each other, man. So we come back to college and we have to live next door to each other. We had a class together. We had to figure it out. We had to be civil to one another. There

was a cost to not showing empathy and respect. And she paid that cost. Can I say that? Yeah, well, no. I mean, like- That's how I feel. There's a reality there. I know. Actually, I think the better way to say it is she was good with that cost. Yeah, she was. She understood it and she was like, I'll pay that. She was willing to pay that cost. Yeah.

And I mean, I live in a small enough town that my friends who date, they have this. Like in Missoula, if it's an age cohort and also sort of a demographic sort of, the kinds of people you wanna date, that's a small enough pool that you're gonna see that person at the grocery store, you're gonna see him at the bar. But like, that's not really how the,

like most of the world is structured right now. And I think you were right that the cost of empathy is lower. And so it sucks to pay it, so might as well just ignore it and move on. Right, right, it's hard work to be empathetic. It's a little more work to be respectful. It's a little more work to not ghost someone. I'd never even heard the term love bombing,

but I know exactly what it is having, having dated. I've been on both sides of that coin. Yeah. And, and it, you know, our we're messy. We're messy. We're just, we're just animals. And so like, there are times when you're like, Oh my God, I am all the way in and this is it. And then like, there are times when you're like, Oh my God, I am all the way in and this is it. And then like three days later, you're like, well, what neurotransmitter is where I was I high on? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've never had that experience, but I believe you. Yeah. I tend to stay pretty high. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we wish you luck, Abbey Rose.

We wish you luck. I do not have great- I'm sorry that it's so hard. It does just sound hard. It sounds really hard. We have another question hang from Leah who writes, "'Hi, why does my math problem say given that bacteria triples every hour?

Help, Leah.'" Oh, yeah, yeah, it triples every hour. Well, Leah, I think it's about E. coli, which does triple every hour. Well, yeah, it triples every hour because it doubles every, I'm pretty bad at math. That's hard. I also can't do that off the top of my head.

It doubles every 20 minutes. So maybe it more than triples every hour, but at any rate, Leah, that's in a laboratory environment. Okay, like if you have like one E. coli on your finger, it's not gonna be three E. coli an hour later. It's gonna be three E. coli like two hours later. Or it might be one E. coli like an hour later.

Yeah. So this is the situation, in an optimal perfect temperature with infinite food, E. coli will grow, will double every 20 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. But like, is this just a math? Which is horrifying. But it might be that this is just a math problem

and they're just trying to get you to do math. For sure, for sure. Leo was trying to get us to do math, which we're not gonna do. We have instantly reversed. I didn't go to Kenyon College to do math, which we're not going to do. We have instantly reversed. I didn't go to Kenyon College to do math in adulthood. I have to do math sometimes. I don't.

I guess I'm like, I need to open a Google Sheet right now. There's no way this is happening in my brain. I will just go to Google and I will say, hey, what is 13% of 200? And Google will tell me. The thing that I have the hardest time with, I don't have a good system for, is like, 13 is what percent of 52? Yes, I also have a hard time with that. But Hank, if you go to Google now and you say 13 is what percent of 52 it tells you. It just does it now. It was for 15 years, it couldn't do that. He had to go to

Wolfram Alpha, but now Google can do it. Now Google can do it. But now Google can't do everything else. It could do that. But would you like to know anything? Cause it will give you an AI auto summary that might, may or may not be true. And then it will also link you to an article that does not have the information you wish to attain. What happened to the internet? No, that part is really bad. But the 13 is what percent of 52 part is really good now. Really good.

An interesting thing about you, of course, is that you don't spend any time thinking about bacteria. But I would actually argue that it's good news when a bacteria triples really fast or doubles really fast because in general, the immune system is pretty good at fighting that, right? The death rate from cholera, which triples really fast, or E. coli infections, is actually much lower than, for instance, the death rate from a much slower moving bacteria like tuberculosis, because the slower moving ones have much better defenses. They're not just trying to attack with waves upon waves of bacteria. They're slowly building a beautiful fortress. That's how I think of it anyway. It's remarkable. I mean, like, I just, it's become so clear to me that life is just what works.

And my brain wants it to be different. It wants it to be intelligent. It wants to be like some guiding force. But like the guiding force is just what works. And that makes it very messy and weird. And so you get to bacteria and we think, ah, these must be similar, but they can find entirely opposite ways of working.

Yeah. No, it's weird. Life is very weird, which reminds me actually that today's podcast is brought to you by The Thin Film of Life on or Near Earth Surface. The Thin Film of Life on or Near Earth Surface, sort of one system? This podcast is also brought to you by 25 percent.

It's what percent 13 is of 52. It turns out I picked an easy one. But you would never have known that you picked an easy one. Actually, I did. When I said it, I was like, that's just that's a 13 times four. Oh, yeah. All right. I'm glad you were able to think that. I thought that you happened into prime number catastrophe.

Today's podcast is, of course, also brought to you by the inescapable staple of life that is plastic. Plastic. It's organic. And this podcast is brought to you by those guys who are trying really hard not to die. They don't need our help. They seem to be doing fine gathering an audience on their own. But here we are giving them some attention anyway. All right, Hank, we have another question from Ali who writes, Dear John and Hank, I

was crying about health insurance last night. I know how very American of me. So true. Do you know that Canadians never cry about health insurance? They cry about other things. But they don't cry about health insurance. No. What do they cry about, do you think? Well, they probably cry about illness generally, potentially the wait times, I hear about that. Oh, yeah, for a newer place we also cry about those. We cry, I was going to say. It doesn't seem to have really solved the problem for us. Yeah. Anyway, I've been thinking, how does health insurance work for full-time successful novelists

like yourselves? Thank you. Oh, plural. I realize that you are probably insured through Complexly, although I don't understand how corporations obtain health insurance packages. But what about regular authors? Do they go through the ACA? Does their publisher offer benefits? Do they like make themselves a business?

I don't know how anything works. Feeling blue, cross blue shield, alley. Yeah, I mean, everybody does it different. Well, I went through the ACA. There's a bunch of different ways. Yeah, you went through the ACA. There's a bunch of different ways. Yeah, you went through the ACA. I went through the ACA for the first few years before Complexly started doing health insurance.

Now Complexly has health insurance. I mean, we have 80 employees and so we have a large health insurance plan and you basically buy that from a broker just like you buy other insurance from a broker. Yep. But yeah, I find it very weird. I thought, I don't know why,

but I thought that there was probably like, once like companies were doing it because they got a deal, but you don't, you pay the same amount basically. Yep. You maybe pool it together so that some person who would be paying a much higher rate, like you, like everybody down on average, but like, I don't know, it's weird. And like, if you're a company that has a bunch of older employees, you pay more than if you're a company that has a bunch of younger employees, which, because they, older people get sick more. And

it's so strange. And in general, it's very strange to tie health insurance to employment. It's just a bad strategy because it discourages entrepreneurship. It discourages people going out on their own and trying to build new businesses, which is really the core of how economic growth and job growth works in the world. And me, the nakedly capitalist argument is you're discouraging economic growth by doing this. Then there's the human element where we don't live as long as people in Canada. Nothing against people in Canada. it's just that I think we should at least be able to tie you. So, yeah, so the ACA is like how people who don't have health insurance through, yeah, but you didn't do it through the guild. Most of my author friends are insured through the ACA. A few of them are insured in other ways

that involve like guilds or unions, which is sometimes works, especially if you do a lot of work in Hollywood, but most of them are insured through the ACA and before the ACA, a lot of them were uninsured. Yeah. Including for a time, me. And me. Yeah. Yes.

I literally couldn't get insurance. They wouldn't let me. No, you have a very bad preexisting condition. And we don't want wanna give insurance to people who are going to use it. Yeah. Well, especially, cause it's not like I was signing up

just because I was sick, right? That's the argument they use. No, I was signing up to get graduated. Yeah. And so I was on the student plan and then I got diagnosed and was sick on that plan and then I couldn't keep on. Like I did the math,

it would have been cheaper for me to go to school than to pay for my medication. Right, it would have been cheaper to just go to grad school and stay in grad school forever than pay the $20,000 a year that your medication costs. Yeah. What a system. What a system. Now let's try to turn it Hank and make it funny again.

I mean, in a way that's funny. I'm really glad you had health insurance when you got cancer. Were they cool about it? Yeah, well, I actually got a really cheap cancer. Oh, congratulations. Yeah, the most expensive part was the scans, which is not usually how it is. Right. But yeah, they were cool about it.

I mean, I hit my out of pocket max for a year and and and then they paid everything else for that. Good. That is their legal obligation. Yeah. Nice of them to do what they're required to do. Yeah. I mean, it is a weird thing.

It's like with cancer, the doctors are like, yeah, we're putting them on the cancer drugs. When we're doing the standard cancer treatment and they're like, yes, type in all the correct codes and we'll do it. This next question comes from Kyle who asks, or is this a response? "'I'm a tuna scientist and my good friend,

also a tuna scientist, recently documented mostly digested sea bird remains in bluefin tuna stomachs.' Article currently in peer review. Tuna aren't just pescatarians. D-F-T-A. Don't forget tuna are awesome, Kyle." That's wild. Wow.

I can't, how would it not? I have this problem where I think fish are dumb, but they're not. I don't know why I think this, but my brain has a hard time thinking a fish is smart. Yeah. I'll be honest, Anka, I don't think of any animals as being that smart, including us. Like, I don't think it would be hard to outsmart humans. Like, people underestimate how much smarter than us aliens who showed up here would be. No, yeah, I use a computer program

that regularly fools me into thinking it knows stuff. And like- Which computer program? It's called ChatGPT. And like, and I- Which computer program? It's called ChatGPT. And like, it's just constantly telling me things that I'm like, oh, all right. And then I'm like, I'll check that fact. And it's like, well, it turns out that restaurant wasn't founded by that man.

And you just told me a lie. You just made up a man. But ChatGPT says it with such confidence. I know. It's like the ultimate mansplainer, you know? It's all it takes. Yeah. If you speak with confidence, I believe you. I will say I recently used chat GPT to create a spreadsheet and it did a great job. So let's be fair. And someday our robot overlords

are going to be in control of us. And I for one, wish to welcome them with open arms. Yeah. I think that they are already a them with open arms. Yeah. I think that they are already a little bit in control of us. We've just given them a weird task, which is to keep us occupied. Yeah. Well, we've also given them a weird task, which is to sort and order the information that is available to us so that we can understand how to feel about the human species. And our own selves too. And mostly the conclusion seems to be that we should feel real bad about

both. Yeah. I've become a big believer. Yeah, it's very engaging to think negatively of our species and ourselves. We got to write this book, John. We do. We do have to write broadly in favor of humans. But I have only one piece of advice for young people really in 2024, which is to develop a sense of the value of all human beings, including yourself, the inherent value. So that it's not about what you accomplish, it's not about what you do. You are valuable because you are here with us, because you are an important part of this

astonishing 250,000 year old story. And if you have value, so does everybody else. And if everybody else does, so do you. So do you. That's it. That is my advice. And as I have tried to do that over the last four months, I have become vastly happier.

Oh, good for you. Because I'm a valuable person. What was the voice inside my head that was telling me that I was a piece of crap? What was up? That was so weird. What a bad way to think about life. Just today, Hank, I was working out with Chris and he was like, man, your negative self-talk has

really declined. And it's true. I used to say terrible things about myself in front of my best friend while I was working out. And now I'm just like, how did he do, this is good for my body. Yeah. I love that Catherine and I work out together, and I love, um, I-I-I love seeing Catherine do a hard thing, and I'm just like, yeah, frickin' lift that thing! Get it! Get it! Get it strong!

I, can I tell, since you just told me a story, can I tell you a completely unrelated story of a thing that's happening to me right now? Please. So, I love to swim. I love to swim in rivers and lakes and it is summertime and it is the end of summertime. And so I, uh, it's actually autumn now shockingly.

And so I'm taking every opportunity I can get. And I recently went swimming in Flathead Lake, which is a big, beautiful lake in Montana. It's one of the, I think it might be the biggest lake west of the Great Lakes, but maybe not. And so I was swimming, and I know this about Flathead Lake. Sometimes you get swimmer's itch. There's a flatworm that will dig its way inside of you

and then you have allergic reaction to it. It's like a mosquito bite. It's pretty gross. Is it fatal? No, no, it's itchy. It is itchy, which for like five days. And I've gotten swimmers itch plenty of times and I'm just like, whatever. And I'm sort of a go swimming in flat at Lake.

And, you know, the next day I got a little itchy spot on my arm and one on my leg and one on my collarbone. And and then the day after that, my eyes start to feel very itchy on my right nipple. Oh, and I have swimmer's itch on my right nipple and it itches so much it like to the point where I can't itch it because it hurts. Like it's like it is surpassed itch into pain. And but like just wearing a shirt, man. It's like on the nipple part of the nipple. It's they got right on the spot.

And I like I didn't sleep well last night. I'm just moving through it. I'm like this is changing my relationship potentially with lake swimming I love what you said now, which is that you're just moving through it because that's all you can do And so you're not you're just moving through it, but you're moving This is a very I think this is a very good way to think about Pain and illness and stuff is that you're still moving you're moving through it And you might tell you a related story. There might not even be other stuff is that you're still moving. You're moving through it. Can I tell you a related story?

Yeah, there might not even be another side, but you're moving. This is like, dying is living. There might not be another side. You might not get through it, but you're moving through it. Yeah. Can I tell you a related story?

Okay. Is it about your nipples? It's worse. So. It's the John and Hank nipple spectacular. So I got poison ivy. I was clearing a big area in my yard to build a little path. I guess there was some poison ivy down there. There was so much English ivy that stuff creeps and crawls everywhere that I couldn't even see. But it was stupid to do it. I was doing it with gloves and then I got annoyed

by the gloves and I took off my gloves and was doing some of it by hand and then I peed. Ah! And then the next day, now I'm fortunate that I have a very good friend. One of my closest friends is a dermatologist and I called my close friend who's a dermatologist and I was like, I can't send you a picture of this

but I'm going to describe it. Cause you don't know for sure what's happened. No, I just know that there's a crisis and then I know that there's a level one emergency but I don't know what kind. And you're like, as far as I can tell, there isn't a way that this has happened to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was real confused. And I did also have poison ivy all over my arms, but I somehow didn't connect these two phenomena. Yeah, yeah. And so my dermatologist friend was like, have you done anything where you might have gotten poison ivy? And I was like, oh yeah, I have poison ivy on my arm. And she was like, oh, well, it's probably that. It's probably that. And I was like, how did I get it? And she was like, probably peeing.

And you were like, oh, I did pee. Yeah, I mean, you're outside. It's like the oil gets on your hands. It gets on your hands. I once had poison ivy on like a handprint on my face because I have like put my hand on my face and yeah. That sounds terrible. That doesn't sound as bad as mine, but it sounds real bad. Yeah. No, I had to get steroid shot.

Yeah. I love, you know, I love a steroid shot and then you just like go eat. Great. Yeah. You eat and you feel, you feel like, yeah, I get a little aggressive. A lot of it's a reminder. It's good for like, ooh. Yeah. I get a little aggressive. A lot of it. It's a reminder.

It's good for like a day. It's a reminder that whatever I think of as my personality is in fact just a bunch of like hormones and chemicals swimming around. And if you change those hormones and chemicals swimming around, suddenly my personality. You feel different. It's so weird.

It's also like, it's also thoughts though. Like I can have new thoughts and it changes who I am. Somebody was recently saying like, you know, the, the, you know, your fat cells and your skin cells, they replace all the time, but your nervous system doesn't. Like most of the nerves in your body you have for your whole life. And, and they're like, and that's the part that makes you,

you and I'm like, no, it's not. It's not because those same nerves could have a totally different set of thoughts and values and feelings about the universe. And I just am a different person now that I was 10 years ago. It might all be the same nerves, but it's like they all think and feel different ways. Which is so weird.

Yeah, no, I read my writing from 20 years ago and I think that is a different person. Yeah, sometimes I'll like read a journal entry that I wrote in college and I'll be like, I do not remember that man. Yeah, it's much closer to having been acquaintances with someone than it is to having been someone. Yeah.

And yet I was. It's crazy, this is crazy, the one that's craziest to me, Hank, this is gonna blow your mind. I wrote The Fault in Our Stars. I know. Yeah, a lot of people have that realization where they're like, that's the same guy

and then you'll have that realization too. I do, every time I'm like, oh right, yeah, no, I guess I did. I was, this happens to me when I listen to my music or I'm like, what the hell is that, man? Well, you were just, you just did a video where you played a They Might Be Giants song at the end of it and I was like,

oh right, Hank is a good musician. Well, that was not the best musicianship I've ever. I mean, I thought it was good. It was better than I could do. Listen, we gotta get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. All right, let's do it. Hank, AFC Wimbledon are good, really good, I think. Maybe. This seems impossible, but it seems like we might be really good. We beat a Premier League team. You might

remember the last time we recorded this podcast, I was like, just in a few minutes, we're going to kick off against Ipswich Town, which is where Ali Alhamedy plays now and we have a 0% chance of winning. We won that game. What the heck? We beat a Premier League team for the first time since 2019. And then at the weekend, we beat Cheltenham, which might not sound impressive because Cheltenham sounds like a made up place, but no, we beat Cheltenham and we were so calm and the way we played was so good. We've won three of our first four games in the league. We've won now two Carabao Cup games. So we get to play Newcastle United, a proper big club.

They have to come to the Cherry Red Record Stadium at Plough Lane, which is pretty exciting. Cherry Red Record? What does that mean? It's like a goth label. Like it made like- I used to think that's fricking awesome. Yeah, yeah. That stadium's named after a record label?

One of the owner of the record label is a big Wimbledon fan. It's not dissimilar to why they wear a DFTBA on the back of their shorts. So am I. Should I start listening to some Cherry Red tracks? Please do. Kim Wilde, Toya. Yes. Whoever Cherry Red has signed in the last 30 years, please listen to them in support of AFC Wimbledon. But yeah, we're scoring a lot of good, and I thought we played so well against Ipswich. We were good value for that win. Then we went on and beat Fleetwood.

Beat Fleetwood 1-0. That was another game where we didn't look amazing, but we just played it. We played really well. Now, in just 12 days, we will be taking on the franchise currently applying its trade in Milton Keynes. So this will be a test of like, are we actually good? They're like a league up, right? No, no, no. They're in our league. But they spent so much money this summer, they got a new ownership group. And they spent so much money that everyone thinks they're going to

win league two, but they lost three of their first four games, everyone thinks they're gonna win League Two, but they lost three of their first four games, so maybe they're not gonna win League Two. At any rate, we're gonna find out how good we are. Yeah. I mean, what do the standings mean three games in, but. Not a lot. Yeah.

But I mean, I really like the way we're playing. The only game we lost this season was the one that I went to. Oh, that's a bummer. That's all right. I love going even when we lose, to be honest with you. I don't really, that doesn't really matter that much to me. Yeah.

That's a lie. I like it better when we win. What's going on in Mars? There, so we like to look at the surface of Mars, at least I do. We like to know what the surface of Mars looks like. And the way that you talk about the images we have of the whole surface of Mars, at least I do. We like to know what the surface of Mars looks like. And the way that you talk about the images we have of the whole surface of Mars, so we can take like

small pictures of individual areas that are super high resolution. But we also sort of do whole Mars maps. And we've done a bunch of these. And the way you talk about like whole planet maps is by the number of meters per pixel. So if there's like 500 meters per pixel, that's less resolution than if there's of meters per pixel. So if there's like 500 meters per pixel, that's less resolution than if there's 100 meters per pixel.

Sure. And we've done a bunch of these over the years. And so, and these are the maps of the surface of Mars that you've seen. Like the Viking mission took one that was 925 meters per pixel. And then there is a really fancy one that's five meters per pixel, but it's grayscale.

So there's no color, it's just scales of white to black. But we have a new, most highest resolution color map of Mars, which is from the Tianwen-1 Global Color Map. It has a resolution of 76 meters per pixel. So now there's a map that you can go look at that is from a Chinese mission to Mars that remapped the surface in the highest resolution ever. And you can zoom and zoom and zoom and zoom

like it's Google Earth, but it's Mars. And you can see all the cool, weird features on the surface everywhere everywhere you wanna look. And that's a very useful thing to have for geological studies, for future missions, for understanding change. So like, the more resolution you have, the more you can see if like one map is different

from another map because of weather or because of like weird, you know, there's like lots of weird geological things that happen on Mars. And so it's just good for research and also good for future missions for picking landing sites and having the data so that you can actually land and not trip over something when you're landing.

That's so cool. I feel like it wasn't that long ago that Google maps had a pixel of 76 meters per pixel or something, you know? Like, it's crazy how fast that technology is improving. Yeah, it's really cool. And it is also just cool to look at. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Hank, thank you for potting with me. Thanks to everybody for listening. You can email us your questions at hankandjohn at gmail.com. That's also where you can email us your corrections,

like the fact that Tuna, it turns out, are not, strictly speaking, pescatarian. This podcast is edited by Linus Ovenhouse. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosianne Hals-Rohas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Deboki 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, don't forget to be awesome.