Dear Hank & John - 200: Only If You Got Enough Life Jackets
Episode Date: July 29, 2019What is the setup for this joke? What's with people waving from boats? Why don't cartoons change their outfits? How do I tell someone I’ll be back but not RIGHT back? What is your self-care routi...ne? How do I follow soccer? Where are all the Bob Ross paintings? Why are flies?? John and Hank have answers! If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at hankandjohn@gmail.com. Join us for monthly livestreams and an exclusive weekly podcast at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn. Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.
What was up for the thing that dear John and Hank,
it's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions,
give me Dubie's advice and bring you all the weeks news
from both Mars and A. Sue and Bullen.
John, I was recently, I had a friend over,
friend from college, was really great to have her in town
and she came in order to our house and it came in
and we gave her a little tour of the downstairs
and then she said,
what's upstairs?
And I looked at her and she looked at the stairs
and we sat there silently and then I was like,
Melissa, stairs don't talk.
No, I mean, that's, that's,
what would you have tweeted this week, John?
That was even by your standards, exceptionally poor.
In news of what I would have tweeted this week,
I would have tweeted,
Hank and I will be live on tour
in Madison, Wisconsin on August 16th,
and in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 18th,
you can get tickets now at hankandjohn.com.
Really the only thing I miss about Twitter, Hank,
is promotion.
Like I miss telling people about things that I'm doing.
I do have your password.
I could tweet about it from your account.
No.
I could tweet a bunch of stuff from your account.
I could just go on there and be like,
boop, boop, boop, gotta code my hair, it's John.
Oh God, no, I don't.
Well, what if, what,
hear me out here, we made a new micro blogging service.
And it's just you, and there's no one else on it.
It's just, it's called John Guider, Gwitter.
It's called John Gwitter.
Yep.
And it's just, it's called Jitter Gwitter.
Yep.
And that's what it's called.
And go to jittergwitter.com,
you can follow John and only John.
Is this a thing?
Are we accomplished?
Are we achieved?
It seems like you've reinvented the blog.
Million dollar idea.
The blog.
So we're just like an email newsletter, yeah?
Yeah.
To be clear, I don't have any interest in ever returning to any part of the social internet.
That doesn't mean that I don't miss facets of it, right?
Like, in the same way that there are things
I miss about college, but I don't wanna go back to college.
Yeah, I feel that.
Oh yeah, that's a great point.
Yes, college, John.
I have not graduated yet.
I can't get out.
I know you haven't graduated,
but I will say that from my perspective,
you're like a sixth year senior,
when it starts to be like,
hmm, hey,
maybe it's time to fly the coop little birdie.
I love it.
I don't mind that at all.
Go ahead and compare me to Pauli Short and Son and Law.
He seems like he's doing fine.
I was gonna say you're more like Ryan Reynolds
in that movie Van Wilder.
Boy, that's a deep cut.
I dug that out of the recesses of my subconscious.
I wonder if Van Wilder holds up.
I'm gonna guess it's a little problematic.
All right, let's move.
Let's, for God's sake,
let's get to some questions from our listeners
before I talk more about Van Wilder.
This first question comes from Jennifer. I love it. It says Dear Hank and John.
Yeah. What's the deal with people waving at each other from both?
It's such a great question. It's so true. It's like, I'll keep reading.
I recently went to my parents camp. Apparently your parents have a camp where we went out on kayaks
and our neighbor's pontoon boat every day. And literally every single person we passed by would wave at us and we'd wave back.
Why?
It's weird.
You don't wave at other people in cars.
Explain please another green Jennifer.
How Jennifer green?
You've given us too much information.
Now we can Google you.
Except probably not because Jennifer green sounds like a pretty common name.
It's the John Green of ladies. This is wild. It's so true. I've I've also been in boats.
But I know exactly why it is, right? Like we all know why this happens.
No, I don't tell me why. It's the size of the community.
Like if you're a Liverpool fan and I am and you you're driving along and you see another Liverpool fan who has like the, you know,
license plate, LFC Jeep or whatever, you like wave at them and you rolled out the window
and you're like, go Liverpool, up the reds.
We wanted six times and, and, and both people, even though there's a lot of boat people,
all of them identify as boat people.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And they also have sort of like a shared group
of Margaritaville based values.
Where they all sort of like understand you and I,
we are boat people together.
And we, like, and I will say in rural Montana,
when you're driving around out there, people wait.
Like when you're in like, you're in a place where everybody knows each other
and ultimately, even if they don't,
they're still in the vibe, people wave.
And it's weird to be, to have,
they sort of like, they're holding the steering wheel
and the most minimalist version of it is four fingers
of your right hand to go up very briefly.
It's like, that's the car wave, it's just like fingers of your right hand go up very briefly.
It's like, that's the car wave. It's just like, acknowledge your existence, which is nice.
It is nice. But it's not realistic in a city where you're surrounded by cars. It's all about
the size of the community and the sense of the shared values. When I'm on the white
river in my kayak, I don't just wave at everyone. I like say hello and potentially have a conversation.
Right.
The other day I was on the White River and I was paddling upstream and the guy was paddle
boarding downstream like, you know, on a surfboard with a long paddle.
Yes, it's a thing now.
And he said to me, how far is it to downtown?
And I said, what?
And he said, about how many, how far is it in it to downtown? And I said, what? And he said, about how far is it in hours to downtown?
And I was like, eight?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Eight, and more importantly, like two miles from here,
there's a very deadly damn.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
So you're gonna want to not.
Yeah, so I was like, go over there.
Listen, listen, man, why don't you paddle over to the corner there
and I'll give you a quick geography lesson.
And I mean, not to brag, but like, if I had it said hello,
what might have happened?
Right, they don't know.
The police would have had a whole thing to deal with.
Oh God.
You see like a sweet kid,
but I was like, first off,
you're gonna arrive at one o'clock in the morning.
Secondly, you're not going to arrive.
Secondly, it won't be you that arrives.
It will be your stand up paddleboard
and a big bag of lifeless meat.
Be careful, paddle boarding.
I mean, also don't paddle board on the white river.
My God, the place is made out of GRD.
Oh, man, it's wild to be like,
have been alive long enough that like,
a thing that literally didn't exist
is now commonplace.
I was walking home from the farmer's market this weekend
and there were people doing yoga on standupup paddle boards in the Clark fork river.
And I was just like, okay, all right, fine.
All right.
That's what we're doing.
Oh, live your life for the record.
Live your paddle boards existed before you were born.
Ah, they weren't everywhere.
Not everywhere.
No, there are lots of things that didn't exist before you were born like iPads and Uber, but paddle boards definitely existed.
Oh, I had never seen one. I saw one one place. I was on vacation and suddenly it was like stand-up paddleboard rentals.
And then the next month, there were people at stand-up paddleboards not even in water. They were just just going down the road.
All right. This next question comes from Micah, who writes, dear John and Hank, sometimes when texting my friends
and I'm about to leave for like half an hour,
I use BRB meaning B right back,
but I mean, that makes it seem like
I'm gonna be right back, which isn't the case.
I would use TTYL, talk to you later,
but this lacks the insinuation that I intend
to be back fairly soon unlike BRB.
I understand that you are both
not exactly fluent in internet abbreviations.
Micah, excuse me.
I mean, Micah, where do you get off?
Who do you think you are?
I was using internet abbreviations in all likelihood
when you were not yet in existence.
Jesus, we're not the Michael Bringer hands.
If you first type BRB in CompuServe in 1992.
All right, I think only my hand is up, Michael.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, good God.
Okay, continue.
Oh, okay.
Sorry, I gotta breathe it out and I come a little bit
annoyed.
No, seriously, I'm gonna be mad about this for a long time.
I will be.
I'll be thinking about this tonight when I'm falling asleep and bed.
I mean, how old is Micah think we are realistically?
Does she think that we're in our 80s?
Is it like, I remember being like 22 years old and when I would look at adults, they all
like, they all looked the same between like 37 and 92.
It was just like, it felt like a single thing.
Sorry, Mike, I'm getting off topic.
You have a question and it's important,
and also I didn't mean to say all of those negative things
about you.
I said them because I was hurt and I was feeling defensive.
The question is important.
It's very healthy, John.
And the answer is that when you are not going to be right back,
but and you aren't going to talk to someone later, you're going to be BS. Be back soon.
Yes, we're just confusing because a bulletin board system is also a BBS, but people get it.
BBS is the one. Especially now, Hank, since nobody has thought about bulletin boards in 25 years.
Uh, certainly not the BBS version.
Now bulletin boards have gone back to being physical things.
Right. They were a physical thing and then they were a digital internet thing.
And now they're a physical thing again.
Do you think that when Facebook ends, people will start printing Facebooks again and they'll
be like, oh, it's like that internet thing,
and I'll be like, no, no, oh, god, I'm so old.
De-
De-
De-
De-
Anyway.
I mean, definitely your sentences will end that way.
I shaved off a bunch of ear hairs this week, John.
And I just wanna, they were not all 100% normal, natural,
original hair color.
A couple of them were a little gray.
And I was, I was feeling it hard.
And then I looked up to see like what I could compare that to
and found out that the iPod came out 18 years ago.
So those people are adults now who were born before iPods.
Yeah, it doesn't, that doesn't bother me.
I, I'm very happy that there are still people being born
and among middle-aged, my middle-aged compatriots,
this seems to be something of an unusual perspective,
but I quite like that there are younger people
than I am and that they are like out there doing
interesting, cool things, even if some of those things
make me uncomfortable.
Absolutely.
I do not like having to shave off my earlobe.
I wish that you would not tell me that.
I feel like we should put that in a place
where you deal with it in therapy or something
instead of mentioning it on the pod.
All right.
Thank you.
I feel like frickin Yoda over here,
but all right.
All right, next thing.
We should say Hank that our live shows shows and yes, I am aggressively transitioning
are going to be like live dear Hank and John's only I won't let Hank talk about what he just
talked about. But also there will be a live version of my podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed
and a live mini version of your podcast with Catherine Deletus, and it's just gonna be a great, fun, weird time,
and you will not regret it.
And at least based on past tours that we've done,
there is a small chance that you will meet your future spouse.
That has happened a few times.
It has. It has.
Not all of those marriages have lasted, but some of them have.
I also wanna say that our Sunday show in Minneapolis is at 2.30.
It's a matinee because you have to be at work in the morning, probably.
Yeah.
So we didn't do an evening show.
We did an afternoon one.
Yeah, we're not trying to ruin your Sunday night.
I don't want to confuse people.
I don't want people to show up at 7.30 and be like, wait, what?
So information for you.
Yeah. Also, if you go to the ticket booth, you don't have to pay ticket master fees.
All right, Hank, what's our next question? This question comes from Eric, who asks,
dear Hank and John, why are flies? It feels like every day for the last month, when I go out for a
run, I have flies following me buzzing around me, landing on that spot right between the
base of my neck at the top of my tank top. Because so bad three days ago that I took out my shirt off and was like waving it around
my head like a crazy person in an attempt to keep the flies at bay.
How do I tell these flies to buzz off instead of bugging me so I can focus on running?
Fli-mento-mori, Eric.
Remember flies.
You must die.
Eric, you can do one of two things.
You can either run much faster, because flies do you have a top speed?
I don't know what it is,
but you have to run faster than flies,
which might be very fast,
but you must be able to run faster than flies, right?
It has to be possible.
Run faster than flies,
or two, run extremely slow
by which I mean don't leave the house,
which is what I do.
No, both of those pieces of advice are terrible.
The true advice is that you should wear deep end of story.
You can, you can you not run faster than flies, John?
Theoretically, but Eric and I aren't going to,
so we wear insect repellent,
and there is this like long time pervasive,
inaccurate belief that insect repellent
is somehow a huge health risk.
But in fact, insect bites are a much larger health risk
than insect repellent because getting a mosquito bite
can cause West Nile virus.
It can cause all kinds of other health problems.
I don't want to sound like a shill
for the deep industry, but we use all kinds of things on our bodies,
like face creams, shampoos, all kinds of other things.
But for some reason, we really freak out about this one
because of one deeply flawed Swedish study
from like 30 years ago that has been debunked
dozens of times since.
So just wear insect repellent.
Deed it up.
Get that deep.
Oh, I mean, you can't get deep poisoning for the record,
but you're not going to get deep poisoning
if you're a normal person using like 10% deep solution,
couple squirts on the ankles, couple squirts on the wrist,
couple squirts on the neck, no big whoop.
All right.
Well, John, don't spray it in your mouth.
Don't drink it.
Don't spray it in your mouth. That's also not with shampoo either. Yeah. Face cream don't spread in your mouth. Don't drink it. Don't spread in your mouth.
That's also not with shampoo either.
Yeah.
Face cream doesn't go in the mouth.
That's, I mean, right, exactly,
but like nobody says like, oh man,
you really shouldn't use shampoo
because if you eat it, it can be bad for you. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha You found the hill that I'm ready to fight and die on Hank. It's the deep hill. Give me another one, John.
All right, this is a semi-related question
from Anna who writes, hello friends.
I feel like we are friends, me too Anna,
but I mean, like don't come to my house, kind of friends.
Yeah, when we see each other at a grocery store friend.
Yes, that kind of friendship.
I'd like to know what your self-care routine is.
What do you guys do to fill up your cups?
Mm, baby giggles is my big one right now.
Just wrestling and playing gonna get ya.
I say, gonna get ya.
And he says, no, he runs away like that.
That's pretty cute.
That's my big self care.
My kids call that the daddy monster game and they sometimes
still like to play it.
But I find that I am getting too old to really,
really enjoy chasing after this much as I did when they
were younger.
My and slower.
Yeah, exactly.
My main self-care is to write, which works out nicely because it is also work.
But there does come a point before we start recording the pot.
I was telling Hank that I've been working every night for like 15, 18 nights, and that
is not great for me. Even if I'm writing because it fills up my 15, 18 nights, and that is not great for me.
Even if I'm writing,
because it fills up my cup a little bit,
the cup is getting drained by just not having enough sleep
and stuff.
The garden is really good for my brain,
doing projects outside.
Like I built a brick-lined path recently,
that was fun.
And then the biggest thing is taking bath.
God, I love to take a bath.
I've been so busy the last couple of weeks
that I haven't been taking as many baths,
which is a real bummer for me.
I'm sorry about that.
I love to watch 8 out of 10 cats just count down
with cats around. Oh my God, I've noticed
that you love to watch that. It is all over my YouTube recommendations.
You cannot complain to me 800 different messy highlights videos green.
For me first off, the last couple of weeks it's been almost exclusively tour to France stuff.
And then secondarily, best boxing counter punches that will always be remembered.
I mean, maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the reason that we get so many messy highlight videos now.
I think it might be. I think it might be when I just went to our watch history just now. I see a bunch
of things that are sports related that I did not watch. I can't stop. Done this to me.
Oh, man. Oh, God, there's such good kicks, John. God, you so many interesting kicks. You watched
a lot of YouTube videos since the last time I watched a YouTube video. That's the main thing.
Oh, I'll tell you what happened. I got home from VidCon and I was like, I need to relax
seriously. Yeah. And with really not complicated YouTube content. Yeah, that's why I love
that the tour de France stuff. It's just people riding their bikes.
And they're, oh, it's so hard.
They're working so hard.
Yeah.
And I want to like, I want to whisper in their ears.
I want to be like, you guys know it doesn't matter, right?
Like it doesn't matter who gets up the hill first.
We're all going to die.
It's all for nothing in the end.
That's what I've realized about soccer.
So I didn't like, it's been to a really sort of tortuous path
for me to like some, some level of appreciation of soccer. But what I've realized about soccer. So I didn't, like, it's been to a really sort of tortuous path for me to, like,
some level of appreciation of soccer.
But what I realized is, it's almost all kicks.
Yeah.
But they're really good kicks.
Incredibly high quality kicking.
Even the little kicks are very good.
Yeah, sometimes they're the best.
Like, that's, I didn't get that.
Like, sometimes you see those big kicks
and it's like, oh, when in the go
and it bent around a bunch of people,
but like, like, just the little kicks can be really amazing.
And I'm like, wow, that was a tiny kick,
but what a good one.
Yeah.
It reminds me of William Faulkner quote
from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Of course it does.
He was talking about writing,
but he might as well have been talking about football
or boxing or really anything.
I feel that this award was made not to me as a man
but to my work.
A life's work and the agony and sweat of the human spirit,
not for glory and least of all for profit,
but to create out of the materials of the human spirit,
something which did not exist before.
That is what soccer is about.
It's about people surprising you with kicks that are
made out of the materials of the human spirit, which did not exist before. Yeah. I also would like
to ask a related question. Sure. It comes from Deegan, who asks, dear Hank and John, but mostly
John, but maybe not anymore. I have listened to your AFC Wimbledon news for as long as it's been a thing, and always
I enjoy it, and hope for great success for the team.
But still, I'm not much of a sports fan.
Until the US Women's Championship game, listening to Megan Rapino, I have felt inspired to start
following soccer.
Now, I feel totally overwhelmed.
Are there any apps you use to follow it? Any specific news site? I figured I'd try to follow AFC Wimbledon, Liverpool, and
Rain FC. Help a newbie find their footing, Deegan.
Yeah, well, there's an AFC Wimbledon app. If you want to follow AFC Wimbledon, and it's
great, if you just go to the app store and you search AFC Wimbledon to say that it's
the first result is an understatement. And then when it comes to women's football in the US, a lot of those games are now being
televised on ESPN or ESPN2 and the ones that aren't, I think, are all televised on this
ESPN3 app.
And then you just have to find the communities that work for you.
For instance, the Liverpool subreddit is amazing.
It's really well moderated.
It's lovely people.
I'm looking forward to December when I can be back there again.
It's the only thing I miss about the internet actually.
Like, I think it's the only thing that I will go back to.
Like, I won't unblock all of Reddit,
but I will unblock the Liverpool and soccer
and AFC Wimbledon
subreddits that I like because it feels like good positive community building there.
And maybe the Nerdfighter subreddit, since that also felt that way to me.
Yeah.
So I think those are the places that I would start with.
Also, Deegan, if you want to do my route, just watch one YouTube video soccer and then
just let YouTube continue to suggest
more of it to you forever.
All right, John, I have another question.
It's from Aman who asks, dear Hank and John, why don't cartoons change outfits every day
like the rest of us, not the supermodel in man?
I never thought of it.
What is happening?
Why?
That's what a world we forced them into
where they have to wear the same clothes every day.
Okay, so my assumption has always been
not that they wear the same clothes every day,
but that they're in a Mark Zuckerberg style situation
where they have many copies of the same outfit.
Okay, yes.
And they have so many demands on their time as the leader of massive companies that they're
trying to decrease the number of choices in their day because they don't want choice
fatigue.
If you're Elmer Fud and you've got to spend 16, 18 hours a day failing to shoot Bugs Bunny,
right?
Right.
Right.
You're going to want to wear the same color overalls every day.
Like, why should that be a thing you think about?
Alternate explanation.
Okay.
The clothes are actually their skin.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
I think that their clothes might be their skin.
Like, I don't know how, how like,
things work in cartoon land.
But like, have you ever seen Donald Duck
without his shirt on?
So what you're proposing is that like,
most of the time when we're watching Mickey Mouse, he's naked.
Well, he's a mouse. Yeah. My sir usually naked. Like that's not weird for a mouse. I would like to
confirm like a number of things have happened since I started talking. One of them is I have now
officially Googled Donald Duck without shirt. So Google knows about that. Not just Google,
but also the Russians. But the weird thing is that there is a picture of Donald Duck not
wearing a shirt and he's covering his bottom half with his hands, which is I will remind everyone
the half that usually doesn't have anything on it. Yeah. Well, I wish that we could go back in time
to before this question.
Like, if I had a time machine, that's the only place I'd go to is like eight seconds ago,
and I would just not have to think about all of this. So I think I've just proven my theory,
though. I don't think that the Mickey Mouse's skin just happens to have pants on it.
Right. No, they're all, they're a bunch of Mark Zuckerbergs. You can tell that they're all
super high achievers.
One of the things that I find really,
really distracting when we meet with Silicon Valley people, Hank.
I mean, there's two things.
One is that like they believe their own BS on a level
that you almost never see.
Like they have no sense of self awarenessawareness. They watch the HBO television program
Silicon Valley and they think, what a great documentary. But the other thing is that a lot of them
do have very specific, sartorial strategies. It always makes me want to barf. I feel bad saying that because I know that we're
listen to by a lot of Silicon Valley CEOs, but that's it. I'm saying it makes me want to barf.
Well, I decided to Google what Sartorial meant because you do have an element of maybe a little bit of
the bourgeois in you, re-saying the word Sartorial. Okay, yeah, but do I also hopefully have like a tiny measure of self-awareness?
Yeah.
If I said the sentence, I don't want to just make a billion dollars, I want to make a
billion dollars while saving people from all manner of suffering about a compression algorithm.
Would I be kidding? Yes, would I be kidding?
Yes, I would be kidding.
Would I, yeah, would we be aware of the situation?
Yes, I hope so.
I feel like that's what Indianapolis gives me
because I do like go there sometimes, like I do.
I do say that stuff out loud, but then like Chris Waters
will be like, what the, shut up.
Yeah, we definitely provide that check for each other too,
because our pretensions are in different directions.
It's true.
To some extent.
It's true.
I will say that wearing clothing
as a value signal can work.
Like it worked for Gandhi.
Okay, so,
and I think trying.
Yeah, it's not even a value signal.
But I think trying to like, trying to dress oneself in a way that reflects one's values
and beliefs is good and a useful thing to do.
I think what I'm trying to say is that the way Mark Zuckerberg dresses makes me want
to barf. What about the way that Donald Duck dresses?
To get back to a mom's question, I feel all right about that.
Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you
by Donald Duck's shirt.
Donald Duck's shirt.
Not skin.
This podcast is also brought to you by Stand Up Paddleboarding
over a dam in the white river.
Not gonna go great.
And today's podcast is also brought to you by Deet.
Deet.
Of course it is.
It's fine.
You can't stop himself.
I can't.
And also this podcast is brought to you by the goodest little kicks.
Oh, those little ones are real good.
Well, for future reference, what you're referring to
is called a dribble.
Ha ha ha!
All right, we also have a project
crossing message from Dan from Galita, California.
Thanks for donating to the project for awesome Dan.
Dan writes, I hope this doesn't come across
as too sacronically shea, but I want to assure
those listening possibly myself included
who are going through a period of self-doubt
or high anxiety or depression,
you're worth just as much as the next person and you're not alone and you will be okay again. Please be kind to yourself
because you deserve kindness and of course don't forget to be awesome.
What a lovely way to spend your project for awesome message. Dan, thank you. I think there
are a lot of people out there who probably needed to hear that. So thank you, Dan.
Yeah.
All right, Hank, before we get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon,
we really need to get to this question from Adam.
It's one of those emergency questions that's extremely time sensitive.
Oh, perfect.
Dear John and Hank, on the 17th episode of the fifth season of the television program
Friends, Rachel has an interview with Ralph Lauren,
or as I believe I am supposed to say Ralph Lauren.
Oh, sorry, I just threw up in the back of my mouth,
but I'm okay.
It's not what's, it's a man's name.
He can pronounce it how he wants.
No, I'm not.
I didn't do anything to do with Ralph Lauren.
I was just remembering Mark Zuckerberg's shirt thing. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Jackets, trust me, it was very funny. I watched his episode two days ago,
way to keep up with the Times Adam,
and I have not been able to think of anything else ever since.
What in the world could that dude have said
to set up that punchline?
Please help me up and Adam.
John, I have sent you the script for this episode,
like the line by line script for this episode of Friends.
Do you wanna do a table read with me real quick?
Shhh, I mean, not, no.
Ha ha ha ha.
All right, well, in any case, open up the script.
Yeah, okay, yeah, let's do, okay, let's do,
let's do, let's do this part.
I will be Chandler and Joey.
Mm-hmm, and I'll be Rachel.
And you'll be Rachel.
Okay. So what happened?
Ugh, it was horrible.
And the interview part went so well, you know?
I even made him laugh.
He said something about a boat and I was like,
well, yeah, if you've got enough life checkets.
Chandler and Joey are not amused.
Trust me, it was actually, it was very funny anyway.
So we were saying goodbye and,
what happened?
By the way, that was also my previous line.
Yeah, but now you're Joey.
We see a flashback as Rachel describes what happened.
All right, we were shaking hands
and he kind of leaned toward me.
Maybe he was gonna open the door, but I totally misread him and I,
you kissed.
The flashback shows that she, yeah, exactly. Well, I didn't know what else to do.
Well, you could have tried not kissing him. Thanks, Chandler.
God, there really is a reason we weren't cast as the leads and friends. This has been
a performance that reminded
the world why my cameo and the fault in our stars was cut.
I feel like we could do this whole thing and it would be gold every step of the way, but
there might be some copyright concern, so we should probably stop now. So now we have
the whole context for this boat show. Yeah. Any idea, I thought about this for a long time.
I even tweeted about it and I tried to get some suggestions
from the broader audience.
I'm still a little lost as to what possibly could have been
the lead up to the boat joke.
So here's the thing, and I love the television show friends.
It was one of the greatest accomplishments in the history
of the human story.
But this particular brand of joke where you tell a punchline without a setup and you make
the punchline as like ludicrous as possible and you never reveal the setup, this is like,
I hate this genre of joke and it's everywhere.
Like once you start noticing it, it's like, it's the ultimate cheat because like, it's
very easy to come up with a punch line.
The hard part of a joke is the setup.
Yeah, like Melissa saying, what's up stairs?
No, that joke had both a bad setup
and a bad punch line.
Like during the setup.
I think it had a good setup, it had a bad punch line,
but I don't work on it.
No, during the set up, I was like,
this joke has gone on for 30 seconds too long,
and that's coming from someone, by the way,
whose favorite joke is 14 minutes long.
Oh, it's so long.
Do you mind if I tell you?
No, everyone's heard the mock joke, John.
So I'm not crazy about this joke.
That said, I do think that there are a few setups
that could lead to that joke.
I feel like if there was a good setup for that joke,
they would have written it.
They would have put it up,
but they were just like, we don't have to.
We don't have to, like, ah, I don't know.
It's just, because we gotta write so many jokes.
There's like 45 laugh lines in a 22 minute episode
and you just can't do it. I think the obvious setup for the joke would be something along the lines of if
your references check out, we would love to bring you a board. And then Rachel says only
if there's enough life jackets and that's a pretty good joke. Ah, that's a good joke.
But it says in the script that he was talking about boats before that.
You've made a good argument.
That's great.
That would have been a good, good thing.
All right.
That would have been a good joke.
All right.
So he's talking about boats.
I mean, it's talking about boats.
It makes it not funny.
Like there's no way to make it funny like to bring up life jackets when we're already
talking about boats.
Yeah.
Like do you, do you want to come and do acrobatics on my boat, Monica?
Only if you've got enough life jackets.
It is a good punch line.
That's the thing, I mean, the more I say it,
the more I like it as a punch line.
Well, John and I are just going to start saying that,
like people are going to be like,
are you going to make it to the crash course meeting today?
Only if you've got enough life jackets.
Oh, it's really good.
I mean, it's a great punchline.
Like, yeah, do you mind if we film the podcast 30 minutes late today?
Only if you got enough life jackets.
Hank, are you gonna have your next chapter of your book into me on time?
Only if you got enough life jackets.
Oh, it's a great, actually, it's a great punch line.
It real, that's what happened.
They wrote the punch line and they were in the writer's room and they just, they were
like, how great is this punch line?
Everybody agreed it was the greatest punch line they'd ever heard.
The problem is, it's only not funny if there's a boat.
If it's like, Hank, do you want to go for a boat ride?
And I'm like, oh, you've got five jackets.
It's like, that's just a safety jacket.
Right, you're just not in joke.
I actually want to know if you got enough life jackets.
The boat is the problem.
Because the moment you introduce the boat,
then my mind is like, well, did they have enough life jackets
or not?
Yeah, I hope that, yeah, because the white river is full of
Giardia. Oh, God, I mean, what a life jacket ain't going to save you because once you're
in the water, you're done. Right. It's the flesh eating bacteria is already in your
nose. No, I mean, you know, you're, you're going to survive probably, but you're, you're,
you're, your gastrointestinal system isn't gonna be the same for several months.
And I want it to be the same.
All I'm asking from my colon is consistency.
Anyway, I didn't think this was gonna be as good
of a question as it ended up being.
Slightly out topic, but one of my all time favorite bits
in Dear Hank and John is when somebody asked us
where we wanted to be when we were 50 and I had like a long
Winding answer about all the things that I would like to have accomplished and moved on from and whatnot
And then you said I just still want to have a colon
It's a really good like it's it's one of the ways to focus on your health is to actually think about like where do I want?
This container for my soul and psyche
to be in 10 years?
Like I want it to be functional, man.
Right.
Only if you got enough life jackets.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha, it works. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha That's the dumbest thing.
We should, okay, we should, honestly, we should delete all the previous questions and
we should just answer this question for the next 45 minutes.
Yeah, and just upload a one question in the episode of Dear Anchor John.
That's no reason not to do this.
Come see us on tour.
I don't even know why it's funny. Sarah has a piece of information that Sarah needs to share
with us. I saw this. Yeah. And I don't know if you've heard about it, John. Oh, the Bob Ross.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sarah says doing a previous Dear Hank and John,
a question Asker asked, where are all the Bob Ross paintings are,
whether it's possible to buy them.
The New York Times just published a delightful video investigation.
It is really delightful.
And it turns out that most of them are owned by one particular charming couple.
It's the people who run the Bob Ross painting,
like supply people.
And they've just had the like boxes of paintings
in the back of their office,
like in their warehouse where they send out the paints
and they didn't want to tell anybody
because they get stolen probably.
And they don't want to sell their expensive.
Like they have no interest in selling them
and they don't think Bob Ross would have wanted to sell them
and that's the end of the story.
But now they can tell everybody that that's where they've been, because they're no longer there.
They are in their part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
So, boom! Congratulations, Bob Ross.
Yeah.
And also, all just humans.
Yeah, what a great achievement it is for humanity to have created museums in general.
Yeah, and little kicks and paintings and all of that, all of it, John.
Life jackets.
Tosh also wrote it to say, hey, Hank and John, I wish to inform you that the avocado has become real life.
We did it.
You're going to have to pronounce avocado.
So the avocado,, the everyone knows. So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows.
So the avocados, the everyone knows. So the avocados, the everyone knows. So the avocados, the everyone knows. So the avocados, the everyone knows. So the avocados, the everyone knows. shaped, it's as far as I can tell, and there are no interior pictures, which I find highly suspicious,
but as far as I can tell,
it's like a nine foot long trailer
that is avocado clad.
It is like clad in avocado green.
And it is a, no, not avocado green.
It is, the shaped a whole avocado around us.
Yeah, it is available.
And I assume it has a door somewhere.
Right.
It is available for like three nights.
So right in the center of Sydney, Australia.
So if you've ever thought to yourself,
I want to sleep in the middle of like a large public square
in Sydney, Australia,
in a tiny avocado-shaped trailer. Well, but it's a very,
very large avocado, a very, very small place to live. Yeah, as you would expect from an avocado.
So it does, it does exist, albeit as a marketing gag. Hank, what's the news from Mars? John, in news from Mars, you may have heard that it's a terrible place
there and not an easy place to make food, particularly.
And there are some hopes that we could, at some point, maybe heat the
planet up enough that like water could exist on the surface.
And there were some initial ideas that we could like vaporize all the carbon
dioxide on the planet. and that would create enough
Gas in the atmosphere to have enough of a greenhouse effect that water could be liquid on the service
But we've done math and it looks like even if we turned every atom or every molecule of CO2 into gas
It wouldn't be enough to heat up the planet. So
Instead of trying to heat up the whole planet,
a team of scientists from Harvard,
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
and the University of Edinburgh
decided to aim for a more focused strategy,
testing aerogel, you know what aerogel is John?
I don't.
It's the least dense substance we've ever created.
Oh cool.
It's made of silica, but it's 99% air.
So it's, you know, like air can't pass through
it, but it is, like, it's pretty hard, and it's extremely light because it's almost all air.
And it has some really great properties for Mars. It's a great insulator, which could let some,
like, sunlight pass through it, but then not let air escape from it. And they did a proof of principle experiment that showed that when they shined a light
approximating Martian sunlight onto a 2-3-centimeter thick arrow gel, they were able to heat the
area under the gel over 50 degrees Celsius.
And being able to get the surface temperature to that, like that much warmer, going up 50
degrees would be enough to get ice water to melt and create
pools of livable areas on Mars. And so that's a thing that they were doing some research on.
Wait, so we'd have like domes?
Right. So yes, domed areas domed with instead of like blasts with arrow gel that would hold the
air in but also hold the,
like it would be a really great insulate.
Right.
So light could actually pass through it.
Most good insulators are opaque.
Right.
So light could pass through it.
It would get warmer and then there could be some liquid water.
Right.
So we wouldn't have to actively warm it.
There could be passive warming on Mars.
Well, that's promising.
Maybe we could do that here on Earth.
And because as we all know, it's getting so cold.
Is there any way, has anybody come up
with a real good strategy for, for instance,
cooling the average global temperature?
There's some ideas, yes.
Okay, I think we should invest in those.
Not you and I personally, but I mean,
as a species.
The big, the big one is release less carbon dioxide
of the atmosphere.
It's a good one, it's a great idea.
I like it a lot as a concept.
Well-hank in good news.
Oh good, I'm glad.
AFC Wimbledon have played six, six preseason friendlies.
We went to Germany, we went to Brentford, we went to most of the major places.
How are the kicks? Well, of those six games, we won none, but we also tied none. We lost
to Brentford, Bristol City, Kickers Off and Bok, which, you know, that's fun. It's always
fun to lose to a German team.
Kickers off in Bach.
Yeah.
Kickers off in Bach.
We also lost to a team named FC Kaiser Sloutern.
Kaiser Sloutern.
FC Kaiser Sloutern, who I believe play in the 17th division of a German football.
You make them out.
I think they're comprised entirely of nine year olds.
And we lost to them one nil.
Then we lost to Bournemouth,
who are a premier league team. So that's, that's to be expected. Then we lost two nil
to Plymouth, our guy who are a league below us and league two. So the good news is that
preseason doesn't matter. They call it preseason for a reason. We're just learning. We're trying
to figure out which players to play. Do we play the very handsome young man with the master's degree?
Do we play Joe Piggit, etc?
Do you still have a Joe Piggit?
We still have a Joe Piggit.
And in fact, despite the rumors linking him to a championship side, it appears that no
championship side is particularly interested in him at the moment.
So good hands off our Joe Piggit championship sides.
Oh, okay. Is it, is that really bad, though?
Is it really bad that we have lost six out of six preseason games? I mean, I would have
rather have won six out of six. Yes. Is it a bad sign? Is the kicking not good?
It's hard to know if it's a bad sign. Look, the season starts on August 3rd against Rotherham. And if we lose to Rotherham, I mean, obviously it's too soon to panic, but
that's not going to stop me. Sounds about right. Oh boy, AFC Wimbledon's next season really
can be summarized with the phrase, only if you have enough life jackets. And you know they don't.
It's gonna be such an adventure.
Hank, we stayed up on goal difference last year
and the year before that, we stayed up by one point.
So, you know, we can't get any closer to relegation
literally without being relegated.
As you spent more time in Ligue 1,
is there some way to like build the buffer?
The solution to this problem is not playing in the smallest stadium in the football league.
And to do that, we have to build the new stadium. All right. Well, I hope that that's happening
and that lots of good people are getting their urinals named after them. John, thank you for
making a podcast with me. I enjoy it and I missed it last week.
Also, Johnny, do you know this is our 200th episode?
Wow, God, we've been doing this a long time.
Thanks to everybody who's listening to
even to four of these.
Yeah, well, I hope it was this one
because I think it was good.
Yeah, I put it in the top 50.
Yeah, of the 200.
It's in the top 25th percentile. You can, you can come see it live too.
We're going to try to get those edited up and released as as podcasts in the feed as well,
but you can see us in Madison or Minneapolis in August. So that's coming up soon. So that's
that I'm on the way. Get your tickets now. Thanks everybody for, you know, having this podcast be a real thing.
I really, we really like it and we like that you're all part of it and thanks so much for all the
questions you send in. They're so good and weird. Yeah thanks. You can email us your questions at
hankinjohn.gmail.com. The podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Mettish. Our head of community and
communications is Victoria Bonjorno. It's produced by Rosie on the House of Rohawson, shared in Gibson.
The music that you're listening to right now, and at the beginning of the podcast,
is by the great Gunnarolla.
We're off now to record our Patreon-only podcast this weekend,
Ryan's over at patreon.com slash deer, hand-kin-john.
Thank you again for listening, and as they say in our hometown,
don't forget to be awesome.
you