Dear Hank & John - 261: Not Pastable

Episode Date: October 12, 2020

Why is fire shaped like fire? What Halloween costumes work with a mask? Why do dumpsters all smell the same? How do I stop getting voting ads now that I've decided to vote? Will humans someday run out of dirt? Who had the idea for keys? Can you cook pasta in something besides water? Is it a bad sign if no ads show up in an ad break? Hank Green and John Green have answers!If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [e-mail] us for monthly livestreams and an exclusive weekly podcast at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn.Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn

Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Yours up for to think of it, dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your question, give you a DBS advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, do you know how the Romans would cut their pizzas? How? With little scissors. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha challenging week here at the Green Household. And that is also a top notch joke. Yes, so I'm glad to have some pizza jokes for you.

It is indeed pizza mess in our community, which means that it's a two week period where Hank and I make videos back and forth through each other on our YouTube channel Vlogbrothers every day, just like it was 2007 again. And we raise money for charity by selling a variety of different items featuring my face with a mustache.

In fact, tank, as I am making this podcast, I don't know if you can hear it, but I still have my annual pizza in this mustache. I don't know if it's affecting my intonation at all, but it's there. I remember the conversation with you when you were like, oh God, pizza is coming up. I have to decide if I'm gonna my intonation at all. But it's there. I remember the conversation with you when you were like, oh God, Pizmus is coming up.

I have to decide if I'm going to do the mustache. And then I seem to like have put it in my mind that you weren't going to do it and that that's why you didn't have, weren't like growing out of beard, which you have to do in order to get the mustache. But then like suddenly, it was there. It just arrived.

Well, at this point, I don't want to brag, but I've reached a level of maturity where I know how many weeks of beard I need to have a really horrifying mustache. Yeah. So if you go too long, the mustache actually looks pretty good. And if you don't go long enough, the mustache doesn't look like much at all.

Right. But if you're gonna get to that worst possible mustache, mustache, yeah, I'm relying on for pizza mess. Right. I know exactly how many days of beard I need and I don't want to brag, but I think I crushed it this year. You can go to youtube.com slash vlog breathers to see for yourself. But I think I think I think I hit it out of the park.

Yeah. What I've never seen, John, and what I want to see is you with the, like, the full year mustache, like the kind of mustache. Yeah. Where, like, the mustache shares on the top have to, like, sit on the mustache shares in the bottom. So there's, like, an inch of, like, it's just going out before it gets to the end of the mustache.

That's what I want to see on your face. And I don't think that it's ever going to happen. No. Because, like, you don't get one of those moustaches with a lot of commitment. Yeah. Well, also it would be really bad for my marriage. And also eating food, be hard, bad for that. And potentially for my relationship with my children, last night I was reading Alice a book and I said, on a scale of one to 10, Alice, what do you think of the moustache?

And she said, I guess a three. And then she paused and said, well, really a two, but I don't want to hurt your feelings. Yeah. Well, John, I'm excited for, for Pizzamas. And I, we are in the, in the midst of it now. And, and this is the last episode of Dear Hank and John that will remind you that you can go get stuff at pizzamas.com, which is our new pizzamas website. And if you wait until next Monday,

when the next episode comes out, pizzamas.com will be closed. It'll be over. This is a two week experience and then it ends. And you can never ever get any of the amazing 2020 pizzamas stuff ever again in your entire life, including the ridiculous and terrifying pizza mis 2020 mask. All right, John.

Here is a question from Molly who asks, dear Hank and John, why does fire have such a specific shape? When you make a fire, it almost looks like a leaf or as if it's climbing. Why is it like that? I'm staring at a fire right now and I can't stop thinking about it. Please help. Like the country, Molly. What? Like what is our country called Molly? Yeah, the one in West Africa. It's spelled differently. Oh, I see. Yes, there is. Yeah. John, looking at a fire is one of my favorite things and it is remarkable for how long

you can do it. Yeah. So one of my all-time favorite books, Parable the Sower by Octavia Butler, has in it a drug that causes you to want to do nothing other than to stare into the flames of fire, which does seem really just realistic to me because every time I stare into a fire, I think I do not get tired of doing this ever, which is weird because I get tired of every other form of staring in the natural world. And secondly, I think this is like the oldest form of human

entertainment. Just looking into the fire. Yeah. Yeah, we've been doing this for so long that like, I think it's deep. I think it's deep down that I like looking at flames. It does make me wonder if I did it every day would I eventually be like, ugh, another fire, but I don't know, maybe not. It's really cool, that's always different. It looks very interesting. Yeah, it's always changing,

but why does it appear to sort of lick up into the sky or to have that sort of leaf structure? Is there a chemical reason? It's a physical reason. So it's basically a reverse teardrop. So like the fire is going up and as it goes up, the convection currents, like sort of push the heat into a narrower and narrower band. And of course, this is because fire is made of gas,

not liquid, it's much less uniform than if it were, than like a teardrop is, or a raindrop in that very specific raindrop shape. But it's basically that, but like much more dynamic because it's a gas and convection currents are very stochastic, very random. So, which is why fire never looks the same ever. You go to once, you'll never see it look that way again, which is why fire never looks the same ever. You go to one, so you'll never

see it look that way again, which is great. But there's lots of air moving around and there's the certain air that is very hot wants to get up. So you're seeing the air currents that are created by the heat of fire. That's really cool. Now it's going to be even more fun for me to look into a fire. All right. This next question comes from Elise who writes Steer John and Hank. Obviously none of us are going out to Halloween into a fire. All right, this next question comes from Elise, who writes, dear John and Hank, obviously none of us are going out to Halloween parties this year. Write everybody. Write everybody.

Okay. Guess we're there Elise. But I work at a library, which will be open on that spookiest of holidays, and it's typical for staff working to dress up. I need to be wearing a mask while in my costume, obviously. But I feel like just a rubber party city mask is probably not gonna do the job.

Now dressing up as a doctor or a nurse could be in poor taste or maybe not. I don't really know. It's just sort of bleak though. What's a fun creative costume I can incorporate a mask into so that I'm not just a cartoon character who happens to also be wearing a mask.

I'm kind of low on ideas and I need something fun. When you rent an apartment, you sign O'Lease. Nice. Well, so first of all, I think that it's fine to be like, I'm gonna be Ted Theodore Logan of Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, but during the pandemic and so Ted is wearing a mask.

Exactly. Like Ted would wear a mask. Yeah. Because Ted wants people to be awesome to each other. So. I'm dressed up as the dude in Big Lebowski and just as the dude would in 2020, I'm wearing a mask. So I think that that's fine.

I think that there will be lots of Halloween costumes that incorporate masks intentionally and lots that are just like, look, I am Bart Simpson but masked. Yeah, or you could go with another hyper contemporary costume at least like Tiffany who's saying, I think we're alone now, but masked. That's a joke.

That's a joke just for Hank. Nobody who listens to this podcast remembers that song except for Hank. I love that song. It was my first, that was the first vinyl record I love that song. It was my first... That was the first vinyl record I bought with my own money was Tiffany's album. I desperately wish I still had it. Like, how come I held onto all this stuff from childhood?

But not Tiffany's classic, I think we're alone now, Cuffer. Oh, God. Who else? I mean, so there are some, like, the plenty of heroes who wear masks. Yeah. You can have all the people from the Watchman television show, Warmasks. There's that going on. And also you can wear things that have masks, but then wear a mask under the mask. And then no one will see the mask because you'll be like, you know, Richard Nixon or whatever, like those terrible rubbery masks

that people put on over their heads. That reminds me that a friend of mine has a kid who told them, I wanna dress up like one of those bird people, and the friend was like, what do you mean? Like where you have a big crow head. And the friend was like, you wanna dress up like a plague doctor? And the kid was like, you wanna dress up like a plague doctor? And the kid was like, is that what they're called?

Ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, plague doctor works. Yeah, ours. Yeah, so go, you know what, that's it. We did it at least. Go as a plague doctor. It's not appropriate for nine year olds, but you're gonna crush it out there as a plague doctor.

Oh my God. Oh, I think there's gonna be a lot of plague doctors this year, John. I mean, as long as they're celebrating in a safe and socially distanced way. Oh, Lord. That's great. The other thing I'll say, at least, is that I've just gone to a website where there are a bunch of masks that you can buy that are super weird and infestive and could incorporate easily into Halloween costumes. There's sequin to masks and there's studded masks. There's burberry masks and jackskellington masks.

And so you can build your costume around your mask. That's great. Or just where I'm asking be like, that's my costume. I didn't want to work hard. All right, Johnny, here's another question. This one's from Caroline, who asks, do you hear Hank and John? Why do dumpsters all smell the same

even though they all have different stuff in them? Some dumpsters can smell worse than others, but all generally smell the same to me. Is there some explanation? Pumpkins and cow. Wow, Caroline. I never knew that until it was pointed out to me, but it's so true.

There is a dumpster smell. Garbage can, to like the largest dumpster I've ever been near, they all have the same smell. They have a, there is a smell that is dumpster, which is interesting. Yeah. I would not say that all dumpsters smell the same, having been a person who spent a fair amount of time around them. I... Thank you, Mr. Rescue Electronics and textbooks and repurpose them and sell the money. It was part of the business that we here at Dear Hank and John know best for the part of the business where he's still all of my baseball cards and sold the money back. So I did not find

those in a dumpster. But yeah, I like you found them inside of the package, laminated because they were all in mint condition, including the entire starting lineup of the 1986 Chicago Cup. What were you talking about? You really got me started on my business career and I appreciate it. That's the kind of, well, that's the kind of assistance that big brothers do and that little brothers appreciate for their whole lives. So thank you. You're welcome.

There, see? You're welcome. All right. So there are certainly dumpsters that don't smell bad at all. Like office building dumpsters don't tend to have much of a smell. And then like a sushi place this dumpster's gonna smell terrible.

And I actually found a Reddit thread from a garbage person who talks about all the different smells of different kinds of dumpsters, and that, you know, restaurant dumpsters tend to have stronger smells than, you know, the average dumpster. But I think there is something to the dumpster smell, and I, here's what I think the dumpster smell is. I think the dumpster smell is a lot of food that's a little bit old, so like that smell, and add on to that a little bit of food that's very old, right? Which is just the stuff that's like stuck to the bottom.

It's the cake, the stuff that's caked. Yeah, it doesn't come out. To the various walls. Yeah, right. When I guess dumped. So I think it's mostly that smell actually. Because for reasons we don't need to get into the exact details of, I once had about a third of a Big Mac underneath my bed for about nine months.

Uh-huh. And it smelled similarly. It smelled like a dumpster, but in a smaller package. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Speaking of which, if at all possible, someone could have a talk with the worms that crawl into my office to die, that would be great.

Because they don't smell good. Yeah, I have that same issue actually in my basement. It's like the worms think to themselves, well, it's time to go. And I know how I want to do it. I want to do it in a way that slightly inconveniences John. Yeah. Like every once in a while, I come to my office and I'm like, it kind of smells in here.

I wonder, I guess I'm just a funky dude and then I clean, because you know, it smells all clean. And then I'm like, no, it was all the goddamn worms in the corners. Yeah. I look forward to all the emails that we're going to get about how the fact that we have worms in our basements are symptomatic of some horrible disaster. Anyway, this next question comes from Kavita who writes, dear John and Hank, I'm a sophomore

in college and I've been 18 for less than a year. First off, Kavita, no bragging. Are you bragging just because it's just being young bragging to you now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, don't brag about V&A team, okay? Don't come to me with your age. Yeah. You've already heard my feelings, Kavita,

and we're not even a full sentence into your question. Not since my daughter said that my mustache was a two, have I felt so called out? I've been 18 for less than a year and I've been excitedly and not so patiently waiting till the day when I can vote and I very much plan to do so when I get my mail-in ballot. Yet still, on every social media platform I use, they keep telling me to vote. I understand that it is important to reach the young people and whatnot, but it's getting quite annoying. How can I make it known that I am going to vote so

that the FBI agent who is watching over me and presumably personalizing my ads for me sends other ads my way. A newbie nerd fighter, Kavita. Oh boy. This is so just as an example, I recently bought a Chevy Volt. John, I went ahead and did it. Congratulations. I got a 2015 Chevy Volt. It hasn't arrived yet, but it's on its way. It's a good year. And yeah, no recalls on that one. And... Yeah, it's good vintage.

I am still getting ads for Chevy Volt, and I'm like, look, I know these aren't cheap ads, because car is a big purchase, and so these are expensive advertisements. And like, if you are so all knowing internet, notice when I buy something and stop because I'm not getting another Chevy Volt. This reminds me of my all-time favorite tweet from April 6th, 2018. Some would argue the peak of Twitter,itten by someone named Jack Rayner dear Amazon. I bought a toilet seat because I needed one Necessity not desire I do not collect toilets

I'm not a toilet seat addict No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think. Oh, go on, then. Just one more. I'll treat myself. Yeah, like the ads are so good. You know, they're so perfect except when it comes to knowing that me buying one toilet seat is actually sure evidence that I am no longer in the market. Yeah, yes. And I'm not gonna be in the market, hopefully, for many years.

But Kavita, we have no idea. We have no idea if you're gonna vote or not, just by your social media profile. And that's good. This is good. We want to live in a world not, just by your social media profile. And that's good. Right. This is good. We want to live in a world where the government and the social media companies don't know whether or not we're going to vote. Boy, do we.

But yeah, so you are experiencing us trying to reach or us, people trying to reach people like you. And there are other people like you who are not made up their mind about whether they're going to vote or they don't have a voting plan. And so we have, and so they're going to continue to try to reach them. I know it's annoying. It will end. It will end in less than a month.

But in the meantime, maybe if you can't take the opportunity to try to make sure that people who maybe aren't seeing those ads are aren't affected by them also have an opportunity to vote. This next question comes from Evette, who writes, dear John and Hank, I'm a high school government teacher, Evette, thank you. While we're talking about voting, high school government teachers are incredibly important

to the future of our country, or another country, if you live in a different country, Evette, I don't know why I presume you are American. But anyway, thank you. Occasionally, my students will ask me a question that both makes me marvel at their curiosity and also makes me question everything around me. The other day, a student asked me if humans will one day run out of dirt. I, of course, had no idea how to answer this question and told them that I would get back to them ASAP soil and soil and event. Oh, well, I mean, in some ways, yes, and in other ways, no, it depends on what you define as dirt. Topsoil is renewable. Like it is a thing that is created by the biosphere and geosphere of Earth. So it is something that is constantly being replenished and there is more and more of it.

However, at the same time, various agricultural techniques decrease the amount of topsoil. That topsoil will run off. And right now we are kind of using it in quotation marks. It's not like it gets sucked up into the planes and we eat it or anything. It's just like through the process of agriculture, there is less and less topsoil when you do certain kinds of agriculture. We are using it faster than it is replenishing itself. It takes a long, it's surprising.

Dirt is actually very complicated. It takes a long time for dirt, especially what we consider to be top soil to be created and kind of create itself, because it needs like dirt is more, it's easier to create dirt when you already have some dirt, and stuff like that. And so this is a concern. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that like we could run out of top soil in the next 60 years. That affects how water works, it affects carbon dioxide absorption, it, of course, affects how much food we can make. Great. Sorry to give you another thing to worry about. I didn't have that on my bingo card, but I'll be sure to put it on there. But there are a number of ways to have top

soil reduction happen less. And I think that, you know, I think in the next, in the latter half of my life, which I'm entering, that we will see a lot of new ways to make food that will be a lot more sustainable and might even open up some land that was once agricultural to being natural again. I disagree with the notion that you are now entering the second half of your life. What, because I entered it a little while ago? Well, because you don't know. It seems very presumptuous.

It's true. I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just... second half of your life like six or seven years ago. It's true, John. Thanks for bringing it up.

But it's also possible that you're not going to enter the second half of your life for another like 13 years. Yeah, but like, it's not possible that I'm going to enter the second half of my life in like 30 years. I mean, it is possible. It's just very unlikely. Let's be honest.

My point is only that you don't know where you are in the timeline. I don't. Like, we don't know where we are in the timeline of our species. Oh God. You don't know where you are in the timeline of your own life. Your country. We don't know. Yeah.

We need to, oh, your boy, your boy. He went there. First he sells. I mean, you went plenty of places first. You know what I was thinking about recently, Hank, and I don't want to take it to too dark of a place, but I was thinking recently that the last tweet, the last Facebook post and the last email will almost certainly not be sent by a person. Oh, it's probably true, huh? Anyway, we got another question.

This one's from Lydia, who writes, dear John and Hank. Oh, God. Who had the idea for keys? Oh, I was thinking about keys and how cool they are actually are and how like before them you couldn't lock your dwelling. I assume doors came before keys,

so how did people protect their homes? Key and to know the answer, Lydia. Well, John, they have the, when do you think, can you give me like a rough like century or even millennia when you think keys happened? So I know that like a thousand years ago, if you lived in a French village, yeah, like one way that people would check in on you

would just be to like lift up your roof. And they'd just like lift up your roof and it'd be like, how's it going? And you'd be like, oh, pretty good. You know, it's a... Asian Paul. Just another, just another full moon here in ninth century, France.

So I'm gonna guess that keys were invented, but on the other hand, like castles, maybe had keys. I'm going to guess that keys were invented in the year 622 CE. 4,000 BC. Oh, I was really close. I was on the right track. Yeah, the oldest key lock we know of is from Mesopotamia. It's a modern day Iraq. Key lock we know of is from Mesopotamia. So modern day Iraq, it was a pin lock, it had the key itself was wooden, but the pins were brass. And to make the key, you would cut you,

like how to artisan that would carve the key. Now, it's wild to me that locks happened in concert with civilization, with like first food storage, the first concentration, like, you know, seat like real, like leaps and concentration of power that happened in Mesopotamia. And yeah, and before that, your lock was just a armed guard, but yeah, they made a lock.

Wow, and it worked, and it is extant, like it still exists. I've always said extant, but I think that either way is probably acceptable, which reminds me, actually, that today's podcast is brought to you by Keys. Keys. There's one from 6,000 years ago that is extant or extant. This podcast is also brought to you by Fire. Fire. Look at me. We're only having podcast sponsors today from the broadest possible. Today's podcast is also brought to you by targeted toilet

seat ads, targeted toilet seat ads. No, really, once I've bought one, I have the one that I need. And also this podcast is brought to you by Vote. Vote. Please vote. If we can get one email from one person who's voted as a result of us asking them to vote, oh my God, I will be so grateful. Yes. Every email we get from somebody who's like, yes,

that will fill my heart so much. That's like a day of life that we need right now. Yeah. Like you will be the thing that makes our day better that day. Yeah. So if you don't have a plan to vote, make a plan to vote if only to make Hank happy. We're so happy. Make my day.

We also have a project for awesome message to read. It's from Jared from Ohio to Dwayne, Christina, Jason, cat, Adam, and Aaron. All three of my older brothers are getting married this year. So I guess they weren't a shout out. Congratulations, Bros. to each of you and your wonderful brides to be on finding love and companionship. May you only grow closer as the years go by through thick and thin. May this new chapter of your lives be the best one yet. Also, hi, mom and dad. Wow.

Hi, Jared's mom and dad. That's wild. That is wild. Three brother marriages. I hope that's all gone as expected. I'm sure no hitches were in anybody's get a up. I hope it's gone as well as can be expected and safely. Yes, exactly.

John, this next question comes from Aileen, who asks, dear Hank and John, we commonly use water to make pasta, presumably because it's widely available. Correct. Non-toxic. But is there enough? That's not the only reason.

But is there another substance we could safely cook spaghetti in? This stresses on the A and the E. Asylum A. Lean. Yes, I can only think of two edible liquids that aren't water. Well there's a lot of edible liquids that aren't water and you could make pasta with Gatorade. Well you could. Gatorade is water.

Okay. I mean, it's not water. As anyone who's ever drank both water and Gatorade can tell you. Okay, I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure that Gatorade is not water. Like when I turn on the tap and my home, orange Gatorade has yet to come out. So I'm approaching this as a premise. What you're saying is that the liquid part of gatorade is the water. I agree with that in the broadest strokes, yes. Whereas there are two liquids that I could come up with broadly that are not made out of water.

Milk. Milk is also made out of water. Okay, what do you got? There's oil, which is also in milk. So like liquid fats, and then there's ethanol, which is pure grain alcohol ever clear, is what we're talking about. And that burns off pretty fast if you're trying to boil.

That's, yeah, so I think that it won't be possible to boil pasta. They're actually pastaable. It will not be possible to boil pasta in oil and get pasta just because I think that because oil is non-polar, I don't think that the pasta would dissolve in the same way. No, I feel like if you do that,

you get deep fried pasta. That's how you get fried pasta. Oh dang, deep fried pasta. That's how you get fried pasta. Oh, dang deep fried pasta invented today. It's the potato ship of tomorrow. I did not invent it. Oh, sure. I'm sure that it's been done a lot in a lot of state fairs around this great country. You probably were correct. But, but I am more interested in the ethanol question of whether I can have just like extraordinarily intoxicating noodles. Oh God, that would be so gross.

And you are right that it would boil off really fast. Ethanol is a really low boiling point. So you'd have to do it. You would need a gigantic that. No, I think you need a pressure cooker in order to get the ethanol hot enough to actually cook it. Okay. You have to increase the pressures hot enough to actually cook it. Okay. You have to increase the pressure so that the boiling point goes, the boiling temperature

increases. Okay. And so you need a pressurized vat. Problem here is that do not do not do not do this with a pressure cooker in your home because that pressure cooker is designed for water. Don't do any of this. Alcohol is super flammable. Alcohol is super flammable. It is very flammable.

Everything about this idea is so bad. Yes, but there's no part of exploring this that should be done by anyone who does not have a PhD, not just in chemistry, but in this kind of chemistry. So I would like that person to make me booze noodles. No, no, I don't even want to put that person at risk. Listen, if you know the SOPs for how to get ethanol to a high temperature and pressure safely, put pasta in it for me. Thanks. Give it up on the whole thing about how he'll be really happy if you just vote.

Now he'll be happy if you find a way to boil noodles in pure grain alcohol. But no, seriously, do not do this in a home pressure cooker because I'm pretty sure that it would create an explosion. So just for clarity, this isn't not like a, uh, wouldn't it be fun if we tried this? No, it wouldn't. But I do want to boost noodle. Okay. Before we get to the important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, I want to answer this question from Daniel who writes, dear, John, and Hank, I spend multiple hours a day listening to podcasts to help me cope with my anxiety. And recently, I've noticed a theme of people cutting

for an ad break, but no ads showing up. I assume this has something to do with the pandemic and the recession, but does this mean my favorite shows are at risk of disappearing altogether? Pre-order the Anthropocene Reviewed Book now. Daniel, thank you, Daniel. That's very, that's a great, I really like your sign off. Well, first, you do not have to be worried about this podcast, which is extraordinarily inexpensive

to make. Also, the money that it makes almost all of it through Patreon and through advertising goes to Complexly to help make stuff like Crash Course and SciShow and Eons and all those shows. But yeah, so the way that this works is like a lot of podcasts have switched over to dynamic ad insertions, which is how like YouTube ads work. And instead of like baking the advertisement into the podcast, which is, this is the case on our podcast,

you like we just sort of like stop. And then we record advertisements at different times and based on who you are and based on who you are, based on where you are, or just based on whether we have an ad to sell that week. Oftentimes, we just don't have, our inventory is not 100% full. Then a piece of software will insert an ad into the episode. It seems to me that since that's taken over, I've had more experiences of just not getting an ad. And what that says to me is not so much

that like this podcast doesn't have any ads, it's that like they didn't have an ad for me right at this moment. And that's probably, that's probably okay. I think that the podcast advertising ecosystem, if you're worried about that, is mostly all right right now. There's definitely, there was a pullback in the beginning, but there's a lot of businesses that are sort of like trying to figure out how to adapt to a new moment and they have to communicate about how they might be changing

or businesses that are well suited to this moment. They wanna communicate about their services. So our experience is that the podcast business is not hurting too much right now. Certainly compared to a lot of other businesses. That said, Hank and I are considering buying out all the inventory on our own podcasts. That's not a joke.

I don't know, I don't know if we're gonna make it happen, but I do see why you would want it to happen. It's an interesting idea. It's not just that I want it to happen. I feel like people who listen to our podcasts want ads that are targeted to them very specifically in the sense that they are about our work. Indeed, we hope to be able to do that at some point, but obviously that's a lot of revenue that's coming in that's supporting other of revenue that's that's coming in that supporting other educational projects that

Complexly so we've got to do it carefully, but I really like the idea of only selling ad space on this podcast to me Well see what happens John is it time for the all-important news from Mars and I've see one will do it is Would you like to go first this week? I would happen. I would be happy to do that. This, many people thought this was going to be last week's Mars news, but it came in just a little bit too late. So Mars, as you may have heard, John, two years ago, scientists reported that they had found a large saltwater lake under ice and Mars's South Pole. But we weren't sure exactly what it was. So researchers went back gathered more data from the

European Space Station to use Mars Express, which has ground penetrating radar that bounces off the surface, but also off of stuff beneath the surface of Mars. and by studying how those waves bounce back, we can learn what's underneath the surface of Mars, which is amazing. We use that on Earth all the time for lots of different reasons. Find subsurface glacier lakes is one way, like we could find water that way on Earth. We can also use it for like mineral exploration kind of stuff. But from this, researchers were able to not only back up the 2018 discovery, but they found three more lakes. The lakes cover about 75,000 square kilometers. The largest one around 70 kilometers across.

So there is some, a lot of discussion going on right now about what these lakes are. Are they actually lakes? Like there's still a little bit of debate about like, what other things could represent this kind of finding, but it seems very much like this is water, like liquid water. There's also how are they liquid? Because this is cold.

So either either it's maybe some combination of warmth from geothermal activity. Like maybe there was like some kind of volcanic activity that happened down there, warmed some stuff up a million years ago or something, and it still hasn't re-frosen. Because there's also all of these different salts in the water that raise the freezing temperature, that lower down the freezing temperature, so that even if it is very cold,

it is hard for it to freeze. Right. So it is not a good place to find water that astronauts would use, because actually the frozen water on the surface is more pure than this water that would be, you know, and it's easier to melt water than to purify it. But it might be a good place to look

if you're gonna find any signs of prehistoric life or even currently- It could still have life or even current life. They could still have life going on down there. That's right. I mean, it would have to be very resilient to live at those temperatures and at those salinities, especially because this isn't like sodium chloride, table salt, which is also hostile to life,

but this is like even more hostile to life salts. Still, those are some big lakes. They are big lakes. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, if you think about the way that we understood Mars, Salts. Still, those are some big lakes. They're big lakes. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, if you think about the way that we understood Mars, at least the way I understood Mars, when I was a child, and the way we understand it now, it's just mind blowing.

It gives me so much hope about the future. Yeah. Speaking of hope about the future, Hank, AFC Wimbledon suffered their first loss of the League One season to Ackrington Stanley, a team that we are better than, but keep losing to. They've always been a team that we struggled against, no matter how good we are and no matter how bad they are, they always find a way. And I felt like, especially in the first 30 minutes of the game, we were playing so well. We scored a goal, Ryan Longman scored a second or third goal of the season.

It was a beauty. And then we just, at the very end of the first half, we scored a goal, Ryan Longman scored second or third goal of the season. It was a beauty. And then we just, at the very end of the first half, we gave up two goals and quick succession and we were never able to play well in the second half, never able to get back into the game. Akronk's Stanley killed time really effectively and we lost. So frustrating to go from one nil up to two one down. That said, there are still, I think, promising signs about this year's Wimbledon's team.

Like, we look like we are playing as a team more. We look more effective and attack than we did last season. Like, last season, whenever we would score a goal, I would think to myself, well, that was borderline miraculous. Or like, thank goodness for that random deflection. And now I see actual plays, you know, like players running into space passes meeting the players where they are. I see hope for lack of a better term. Wimbledon are now in 12th place in league one after four games.

Obviously, it's still the beginning of the season. We've got 42 games to go if we end up playing all the way through the season, which fingers crossed, but five points after four games and in 12th place, I will take that all year long, especially if the table freezes right where it is right now, because Wimbledon would finish in 12th and the franchise currently applying its trade in Milton Keynes would finish in dead last. Oh, John, so wild. Wild story you've got us all invested in. It's crazy that they still exist even. Let alone that they're in the same league.

Anyway, thank you for body with the Hanket. Thanks to everybody for your questions. You can email us at hankandjohnatgmail.com. We're off to go record our Patreon only podcasts this week in stuff where we talk about something that is making us feel good right now. And that's available at patreon.com slash steering and john. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuneimettish,

produced by Rosiana Halsey Rojas and shared in Gibson. Our communications coordinator is Julia Blum. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chauk-Ravardi. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarola. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome. you