Dear Hank & John - 293: A Fiction of Light

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

Why are printers so bad? When do you change the hair color on your ID? Does NASA fake the color of Mars? Why is Venus hotter than Mercury? How do I tell people I don't work for free? What do I do with peed-on lettuce? 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! Doors I've preferred to think of it Dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you BbS Advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon and John. I was a little bit surprised this year when you came in for our first reunion since getting vaccinated and you showed up and just I think just for the joke you did put an elephant in my living room and I was like what what what I guess thanks for the elephant and you said don't mention it.

I like that I like that mostly because when this is uploaded, like when you're listening to it, dear listener, Hank and I will be in the same place at the same time for the first time in a long time. But now we're not, like, it still hasn't happened. So it's just fun in the joke to imagine being together. And good news Hank, I am getting you an elephant. Oh great, I've heard they make great pets and that it's not at all problematic to have them in one's home. So they're very easy to acquire, no big.

Is your son, maybe a little one? Is it a little one? It's not a little one. It's a regular sized one. Hank, before we answer questions from our listeners, I think it's important to discuss a really troubling development on TikTok, which is that on June 3rd, 2021,

you made a TikTok. And the TikTok begins with you saying, Oh no! Orrin would like to say happy birthday. Orrin is Hank's four year old son. Orrin would like to say happy birthday, but we don't know anyone who's birthday it is. So if it's your birthday,

Orrin go ahead and then Orrin and this adorable little voice said, happy birthday. And it was a great TikTok. It did very well. It got a lot of traction. Lots of people were like, oh, it's my birthday. Orin, thank you for thinking of me.

You know, else's birthday it was Hank. It was your only niece's birthday. I mean, that's all this is true. I have no defense. I have no defense and obviously Orin knew like orin was like it's somebody's birthday He had the feeling and somehow you didn't have the feeling or anything like I don't know occasion to Google it because like it's not like you have to text me or something like you could just Google Alice Green's birthday I know because Alice and Henry are obsessed with the fact that Google knows who they are like like the

hey Google Google Home Assistant. Oh, you could Google Alice's birthday. It's available online publicly. So anyway, next time Orin's like, Hey, Dad, I feel like we need to be saying happy birthday to someone. Listen to him. Okay, I mean, he is very smart. He knows a bunch of stuff that I don't know. The other day he was outside and he was peeing. He was leaning against a tree and peeing like a good Montana boy. And he said, this is a walnut.

And I was like, what's a walnut? And he was like this, and he looked, and he pointed at the tree. This is a walnut. And I was like, that's a walnut. And he was like, yeah. And I was like he pointed at the tree. This is a walnut. And I was like, that's a walnut. And he was like, yeah. And I was like, what do you mean? It's a walnut tree.

And I was like, is it? I don't know. And then he was like, look. And he picked up off the ground. He was like, I thought it was a rock. It was a walnut shell from the walnut tree. Wow. From like last year, it was like a dried up old walnut shell. I'm writing a new episode of the Anthropocene Review right now. It's taking me a long time and it's about a tree and

Particular one. Yeah one particular tree, but in writing it I've come back again and again to the fact that like 20 year old me if 20 year old me found out that 43 year old me was writing an entire essay about a single tree 20 year old me found out that 43 year old me was writing an entire essay about a single tree. 20 year old me would be furious. 20 year old me felt that like trees in literature existed only when they were being interacted with by humans. Yeah.

I felt so strongly about this. I often think about the fact that when I was 20, I knew so much about writing. And now I know so little about it. And I wonder like, what is it that I know so much about now that I will know very little about when I am 66? They say in your yearbook, don't ever change and don't ever listen to your yearbook.

No, when they say keep in touch, just don't. It's good. It's fine. Let it go. Keep in touch with the people that you want to keep in touch with and change in the ways that you want to change. Or in ways that would surprise you, but are okay. Like discovering that you like writing about trees, even when there are no people near them. Oh man, I was probably the world's biggest believer in if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does not make a sound. Like that was like my foundational understanding

of being a human being in the world. And now I'm like, now I'm like, man, those trees, they're good. They're like with or without trees, they're good. They're like, with or without us, they're good. This is a, I have always been like, very confused by that sort of, I guess, philosophical question. Yeah, I think it's, it's never seemed confusing to me. And I think the fact that, like, and I imagine probably most people hearing this feel the same way. I think that that is just reflective of a change in how we understand our Place in the world. Yeah, I think that the original

Zen Cohen was trying to do A bunch of things that have been contextually lost in sure the kind of repurposing of it for a 20th century Thing to put on your wall or whatever. Yeah, we also have a more sort of physical understanding of what a sound is now. Like a sound is a real thing that exists. It's not just something that is perceived by your ears. Yeah, although there is still a double element of it, right? Like there's two meanings to the word sound.

Sure. It's both like the waves and the experience of the waves hitting the meat in your ears. How it's so weird. I can't, I just can't get over the fact that all of our media, I know, but there are there are meat parts or like even weird or hitting the bones in my ears. The tiny little like bone spurs that are rattling around in there and like helping me to keep my balance. And it's great. This is nuts. Our bodies are made out of chemicals. It's it's nuts. I feel like I feel like every new story on CNN tomorrow morning, every day for the rest of human history should be like, all our thoughts are made out of chemicals. That's it.

This is, I mean, TikTok found a great way to say this, which is, I mean, I don't know who originated it, but I've seen it on TikTok a bunch. Four billion years ago, a bunch of dirt, now Bluetooth. It's like, how did a bunch of dirt become Bluetooth? How are like, and understanding the answer to that question, because of course we don't understand it with any level of precision, but like we have understandings of, you know, a lot of the steps of that and like, base, like the mechanisms at least if not the actual events.

like the mechanisms at least if not the actual events, is really wonderful and also new. It's a new human experience. Super new and it's so much defines our understanding of those experiences or like recontextualizes them that I think it's difficult sometimes to empathize with the way that people used to think about that stuff. Oh yeah, totally. Can I tell you a version of this

that just came up in our home? Okay. So I was moving our KitchenAid mixer back to its place in the cabinets. And I was like, this is the densest, I don't know if you've ever held the KitchenAid mixer, but they're incredibly heavy. And the bottoms are very dense so that they don't like, you know, start jumping around when you start mixing stuff. And I was like, this is the densest thing I've ever held. And Sarah was like, all of the universe was contained inside of a pin brick of matter vastly smaller than that kitchen it mixer. It is not the densest thing ever. Yeah, that kitchen mixer was existed in

a singular point. Yeah. All of the atoms that are in it right now are all the particles that are in it right now. And yet and yeah, all right anyway, thanks for coming to stone to dear Hank and John where Hank and I are like dude The universe is mixers are really heavy They have they make them having on purpose, so they don't tip over as my assumption Yeah, it's so they don't start like dancing around when you're mixing stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's important. John, this first question comes from Morgan who asks,

Dear Hank and John, when we have such high tech gadgets and gizmos in our current world that are constantly advancing and working very well, why are our printers still so bad, your friend Morgan. They're so bad, John. I mean, they are and they aren't, right? Like, 600 years ago, people were using the Latin alphabet and they began using printers and they were like, hey, what does, what do words look like when they aren't

handwritten because no one had ever thought of that question before? Yeah, it wasn't long ago that a printer was a person in a small stone room with a pen. We just did that all day forever because he was the second born and so his father just couldn't be bothered. He was like, you are now a printer. Your job is to never talk and to write stuff

down for the church. So I guess it's better than that. So stop complaining Morgan. Printers are great. But I do. If we didn't have a printer, you'd need an extra person. You need a person in your home. Yeah, you have to very carefully drew letters. You'd have to hire a monk. It's a stark choice. Yes, printers are not as good as they should be, but they're way better than the monk and the basement. And Leopold, who you've got, doesn't even speak English. Right. You got Flavius down there and he's just copying things out one at a time. And that's got to translate into Latin for it. Yeah. I will say though that printers are not any better than they were 30 years ago. That is the thing. In some ways, they seem worse. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's hard to know if they're worse because printers 30 years ago were also super annoying.

And so, yeah, I think wireless printing is pretty cool, which I have not managed to get set up. Yeah, I mean, so to be totally honest, like, yeah, I'm engaging with Morgan's question, like it's ludicrous, when in fact, whenever I need to print something, I just forward it to my son like it's ludicrous when in fact whenever I need to print something I just forward it to my son and say, hey Henry, can you print this out for me? Wow, we are that old. John, John this week I, I sent a, instead of saving an image, I just did a screenshot of it and then I sent it to someone over text. And this person was, you know, sort of a cuspere Gen Z millennial and they were like, oh, so you're true old now. Yeah, because you couldn't figure out

how to download an image into your image, like into your meme folder and so instead you're like, let me take a screenshot of it for you. That's just, but hey, if we can turn the Morgan's question for a moment, sure. I don't have an answer. It's an astonishment to me that printers are still so bad. I have read a little bit about this, and it appears,

but there's a couple of things. One is that they're trying to have a more robust feature set than probably they need because it's easier to market a printer if you can say, you can print photographs with this, which you will not and should not do. Right. Because it will never be anything like, like it will be more expensive and harder and worse

than using any of the many services that will print photographs for you. Right. So a printer should have a scanner and it should be able to copy with that scanner and print something out. And it should, and it should be able to copy with that scanner and print something out. It should also be able to do all of its things and do it for a long time. In fact, if you had a simple printer that cost the amount that a printer should cost,

then it is likely you could actually end up with some pretty good printers. But if they're on the shelf in the office depot and you've got all these different printers, you're going to buy the one that has the most features and is the cheapest. And what you end up with is a printer that has a very small ink cartridge because they're going to price that printer lower than how much it costs to actually make the printer. Because they're in the ink sales business. Because they're in the ink sales business and so they will do everything they can to get the price, the cost of the printer is always possible, but also to further lower the cost so that they can get you buying ink for the rest of your life. So tiny cartridges that tell you that they're empty before they're empty and the printer

won't accept an ink cartridge from any other company. And they have all these features that can break because the printer isn't designed to be robust because it's designed to get you to buy it when you are making a choice between it and 20 other printers that are all in the same race to the bottom. Which iPhones aren't engaged in that. Like, they aren't racing to the bottom. I've apparently Apple can charge whatever the hell they want for a phone and I'll still pay.

Yeah, but also they make a lot of money. They have their own version of ink cartridges in the form of the App Store. Yeah, they have many, many of the ways to make money. And so what I mean, I'm a little bit surprised, frankly, that Apple hasn't been like, you want a good printer? Here's one, it costs $600. Instead of getting you subscribed to the the ink that you will have to buy forever and be

annoyed by and it goes dry every two months. Yeah. Well, anyway, thanks for coming to old people complain about how things aren't as good as they used to be. An exciting new podcast from Hank and John that's breaking ground in the field of old men yelling at clouds. This next question comes from Nate who writes, dear John and Hank, I'm sorry to ask this, but since you are older, oh great, it's happening. Since you are older, at what point do you change your hair color on official documents,

such as driver's licenses to Gray? Nate, I don't like this question. What about Bob? What about Bob? What about Bob? What about Bob? When do you change it to hair? No. Yeah.

Yeah, because you only get two letters. It's like, B.R. for brown or B.L. for blonde. And it's just, you know, it's like, Anno. I am bald, and so I need your dubious advice, Nate. I think that you, I think that bald, you still have your hair color. You don't get to be, no.

I think you should get to be no. No, I think you should, I think you should have the option then where you could say, like, I think you should get to be no. No, I think you should. I think you should have the option then where you could say, I think you should. Insofar as I have head hair, it's red slash on bald. So your question is as a situation. Zen masters put it a question wrongly asked. It's interesting to me that my license, that that is part of the process, where it used to be that on a passport, it would describe. So I know about this because I was recently doing research. So there was no photograph of them, but there were like reproductions of what they looked like because on their passport or travel documents, they would write what they

looked like because there wasn't easy way to put a photograph on it. It was like, so she had a chin dimple and her face was oval under her eyes were blue and like all that. So you have some idea of what the person looked like. But that is like held over even in a world where there's a photograph on the thing. Yeah. So it's like, what color is my hair?

I don't know, look at the picture. Well, also I might have dyed it and I don't want that to invalidate my identification. Yeah, but it is weird in a world of retinal scans to still have to list your hair color on your driver's license. I feel like Hank, you still have the hair color you always had, whereas I don't.

I have, you are more salt and peppery, for sure. Yeah, and so if people ask me like, what color my hair is, I think I'd still say brown, but I'm starting to say it's salt and pepper, because it is. Yeah, my lessons doesn't have my hair color on it. Montana's like, we're good, but you can't really tell what eye color is

with the terrible picture they have on this. And it says, eyes, bro, bro. So I do have eyes. Here's what I'll say and answer to the question though. In my experience, you never switch too soon. Like nobody ever says, like, I have gray hair before they have gray hair. So like if you're thinking about switching, go ahead and switch. Well, I imagine it happens when you go in, like, do you tell them what your hair color is? Or do they look at you? And then they write it down like they're the professional on what color hair you have. You go in to get your driver's license. They look at your face.

No. So I actually, I, I had a conversation at the DMV about this. And this is just one person. Okay. But I really, I genuinely don't know what color my eyes are. They're mostly brown, they're a little bit hazel. And so I was like, what do you think? And the person behind the counter, obviously in the middle of a fairly long day, was like, what color are your eyes?

I'm not here to pass a series of aesthetic judgments on you. I just need to know what to put on the piece of paper. I'm about to go get my driver's license renewed because it is about to expire. And at that point, I might just go ahead and say gray because it's not in Montana license this last like 15 years. So like for the majority of those 15 years, my hair will be gray.

I don't know though, you're holding up pretty well so far. Like I would say that you're balding more than I am, but you're way less gray than I was at your age. You used to. X. It's true. You don't think I'm bawling at all. No, your hair's a little thinner than mine.

It's okay. It's not a bad thing. It's not a values job. It's just a fact. All right. It's a little wispy up front. All right. I do, I feel like, I feel like,

I mean, I haven't seen you in a year and a half. I feel like it's, I don't know. It does look a little like that. That's it's gotten a little wispy over the years. Just like thinner hair rather than no hair. I don't know. Our dad has the most hair of any 70 year old man. I hope that we follow, follow after him. Should we keep doing the thing where we only answer two questions in the whole podcast or should we get to a third question? Next one comes from Katie who asks, dear Hank and John, I saw a photo recently that claimed it was a photo of Mars

without the effects of the orange lens that NASA uses. The picture was surprisingly brown rather than red. Is it true that NASA uses an orange lens that distorts the color of Mars? And it isn't as orange as we see it? If so, why would they do that? Not Earl Gray, not Orange Peaco, a little bit of Sleepy Time KT.

All colors distorted. Well, it's very, it's so it turns out it is a complicated thing. But I will start out by saying, NASA does not have a weird conspiracy theory that they want you to think Mars is more orange than it is. Right. But color is weird. And what NASA is trying to do with the photographs

that they are color correcting based on a bunch of stuff. So they have these little colored things on the surface of the rovers where they can look at them and say, we know what color this is. We had it on Earth. We took a picture of it. We know exactly what color it is. And then we look at it on the Martian light,

and then we can adjust based on that. But they don't want to show you what Mars would look like under Earth's sky or what Mars would look like under your bedroom lights. They want to show you what Mars looks like under Mars's sky. And so that is what they, that's what they calibrate to. They try and make it look like what it would look like if you were standing on Mars.

Whereas this picture that I think you saw Katie, my guess is that is what Mars would look like if you were standing on Mars. Whereas this picture that I think you saw, Katie, my guess is that is what Mars would look like if it were under Earth's sky, which does look much more Earth-like. Right. Unsurprisingly. Yeah, that makes sense. But it turns out it's super complicated

to figure out what color something is on another planet, or even anywhere, because light, like what light is hitting it affects the color dramatically. Yeah, there's a great task at a Dean line that I quote in the Anthropocene Reviewed book, color is a fiction of light, which is really beautiful and deeply true. Speaking of which, I should say, and I should have said this probably at the outset, but big, a huge thank you to everybody who pre-ordered the book and has been reading it and sharing it with their friends.

It's been an incredible first week of the Anthropocene Reviewed Books life. It debuted at number one on the nonfiction New York Times bestseller list. And it's just been so generously received. And I am really, really grateful. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Sorry if I spoiled the book by sharing that task to the dean quote, but I am to read it if you don't want to. I was just writing down notes for our potential sponsor, and I wrote down the word Indianapolis. So like a person who just, I guess, studies Indianapolis would be an Indianapolis. Yeah, or it could be like the name for enthusiasts of Indianapolis, you know? The way that like Taylor Swift fans are called Swifties, it could be Indianapolis. What's a person from Indianapolis called? Oh God.

So I hope that I open up a can of worms here. Well, there's a lot of debate within Indianapolis about. And I just think, say I'm from Indianapolis, it's not hard. You know, you don't have to, I don't, I don't need to be a Chicagoan or a New Yorker. I live in Indianapolis, it's not hard. You know, you don't have to, I don't need to be a Chicagoan or a New Yorker. I live in Indianapolis. Like, well, it's not a great word to end up with a, like an Indianapolisian, it's just bad. Or an Indianapolisite is, I would argue, maybe even worse. Is it Mizzulin?

Mizzulin, but look, I think an Indianapolis is the best possible collective down for a bunch of, for the, for the people of Indianapolis. I don't know. I would just, we together are the Indianapolis. Oh, God. No. I, I feel like one of the pleasures of being from a sort of mid-sized city is that you don't have to define yourself primarily by where you live.

You know, like New Yorkers. And I lived in New York. city is that you don't have to define yourself primarily by where you live. You know, like New Yorkers, and I lived in New York. So I feel like I can say this a little bit. Like New Yorkers love being New Yorkers. Like they like, it's part of who they think of themselves as being. And I do think of myself as being from Indianapolis, but like it's definitely not core to my identity. Right. And yeah, and in Mizzizzula, it's kind of important

because it's very, as the bumper sticker says, I love Mizzula, it's only 30 minutes from Montana. Right. And so it is so different from the rest of the place that you do sort of end up with the identity or else people, if you call yourself a Montana and they're like, not really. Well, even Mizzula.

To be clear, Indianapolis is also fairly different from the rest of Indiana. I mean, actually, Indiana really contains multitudes. There's a lot of different states within our state, but yeah, I don't think of myself as being from Indiana. I think of myself as being from Indianapolis. What was the question? What are we doing?

What is the question? What is we doing? What is the question? We're talking about Mars, maybe. This next question comes from K. Nope. This next question comes from Holly and Hank, I don't know the answer to it. So I'm hoping you do it. I think you will. Dear John and Hank, my seven year old son told me that Venus is the hottest planet. Now I corrected him saying that Mercury had to be the hottest planet as it is closest to the Sun. But according to his favorite podcast, the Curious Kid podcast, which by the way is excellent. And Google, the hottest planet is indeed Venus. What am I missing? Holly and her son, that's a pun, it's two kinds of sun, Judah.

Ah, nice. What are you missing? So obviously Mercury is much closer to the sun, so it receives more solar radiation per square inch of planet, but there are two pieces of how hot something is, how hot a planet is. There's how much energy it receives and how much energy it radiates back out into space. Mercury has no atmosphere because it's been blown off by all of the tremendous solar radiation that it receives.

And so we can radiate back into space fairly efficiently. It is still very, very hot. You would die on the surface of mercury, no problem if you were in the in the sun, rather than on the shady side. You'd die on the shady side too because there's no atmosphere, but you'd die more painfully on the sunny side. Now, on the surface of Venus, similar story does still receive a lot of energy, but it cannot get away, because Venus is, the atmosphere is very thick, and it's mostly made of carbon dioxide, which you may have heard of as the chief gas that contributes to global warming, which is how we are trapping more heat around Earth right now.

Now, we don't have anything like the amount of CO2 that Venus has, that's a good thing if we did. We would be, not, we wouldn't exist. But the, so like, Venus is very good at holding onto its temperature. So even in the nighttime side of Venus, it is very, very hot. And, and then as it rolls around, it becomes

the daytime side, which of course we can't even see the surface of Venus because the atmosphere is so thick. Um, then it, you know, then it heats up even more when it's under the sun. But like, mostly it's pretty much the same temperature everywhere because the atmosphere is holding on to a tremendous amount of the energy that it receives from the sun, and it does not re-radiate a lot of that energy. And so it manages to be hotter than Mercury, which not by a lot, but by quite a lot. So hot that there are some metals that we would think of as really quite solid metals that would be liquid on the surface of Venus. That's wild.

That makes you really want to not go to Venus. Yeah. I mean, I didn't want to go any way. To melt some lead. Lead does melt, not that hot, but yeah, lead would be a liquid on, on Venus. Yeah, I don't want my lead suit that I'm wearing to like protect me from the sun's rays to melt as I'm stepping onto the service of you. That sounds like a bad party. I don't want to attend. Yeah, and it was just announced that we

are going to do our first missions to Venus in 30 years. So this is very exciting and we will sort of open back the door. We went to Venus and we were like, oh, this place is very bad. But we are we are headed back again, and I'm excited for the Venus missions that that NASA is working on right now. I am also excited. It'll be great. John, this next question comes from Shina who asks, dear Hank and John, I'm a promotions coordinator at a small TV station and I edit local promos and commercials. People are always asking me to edit videos for them and when I bring up my freelance pricing list, they get offended that I won't use my talents for them for free. How do I kindly tell my friends that I will not work for free, neither a punk rocker nor

the queen of the jungle, Shina? Wow. Ramones reference in there. John, I think that, like, this is a problem, but I think that there is a, there are ways to handle this. Like, if there is an opportunity here where you say, like, this might be a thing that someone would want to pay for, then you give them your freelance rates.

If it's something where it seems like they're probably discussing you for a favor, you say, and I quote, I edit video all day at my job, I don't wanna do it when I get home. And even if that's not totally true, like even if you do love editing video, like you don't wanna do it for free because it's a little bit weird

and people should know that it is your job and so you don't wanna do it just as a favor. Unless you do wanna do it as a favor. But I think that like, it's to some extent understandable when it's a friend, if they don't understand the amount of work that goes into something or your relationship with that activity that they might ask not understanding

that this is more of a job than they might think it is. Exactly. So I have a really good friend who's a dermatologist and sometimes I'll be like, Oh no. Hey, Dr. Hyatt, what do you think of this mole? And Dr. Hyatt will be like, I think it's fine. And I am using an absurd amount of talent

and education and expertise in that moment that I'm not paying for. And I think that you have to be careful not to remain aware of that and also not to depend upon your friends. So like ultimately, I got a dermatologist, right? Because like my friend shouldn't be my dermatologist. Yeah, they should be my friend. And I think blurring those lines can get really messy, but part of what makes it complicated is that sometimes it's fine.

Sometimes it's helpful. Sometimes you need a quick outside word about something or you have a friend who can help you with something and they're grateful to help and it's good for everyone. Yeah. I like, so like I edit videos for friends sometimes and I like doing it precisely because it's not work. But other times I get asked to edit videos and I'm like, you have no idea how hard what you are asking for is to do. Yeah. And it's only because you don't understand

how hard it is that you are asking. Exactly. If you had any idea how hard it was, you would never ask like, hey, can you do this 100 hour job for me real quick? Right. Right. And like, when nobody, when you don't know, you don't know. But, but, but trying to, to sort of parse out when like somebody is saying something where like this might be a thing that they need done, and they're willing to pay for it versus when they just don't understand the amount of effort

that's gonna go into it. And so they're asking for more than they think they're asking for is very difficult. You don't actually know that. Because, and it is weird to like, for people to get offended that you're trying to value your work. Yeah. But like also,

it's also understandable that somebody might not understand the amount of work that goes into something. Yeah, I mean, it's so complicated because transactional friendships or friendships that are kind of based on transactional approach to the relationship are so empty for me and so unfulfilling and so unpleasant Really to to feel stuck in yeah But then in a healthy

Productive friendship you are also reliant upon your friends sometimes and you do turn to them So like is it you know with with our best friends? it's not at all transactional for me to say, hey, I'm going to be a little late, will you order me some pizza? I just think it's a case by case basis, and we each have to decide, is the friendship feeding us outside of this sort of like sense of mutual obligations or whatever? But the thing is Hank, I feel like in a good, healthy friendship, you can say to somebody, nah man, that's a lot of work and I'm not gonna do it.

Yeah. Yeah, I just think that the people need to know that. I don't wanna. I need to get that. Yeah. But anyway, Hank, can you edit this video for me? I got a good question Tuesday. I just need somebody to kind of hash it together.

I've got great raw footage though. I mean, I do like editing video. What I want to edit, John, is a reunion video. Oh, me too. Where we answer questions together. Yes. It's always so much fun to edit those videos to be like, all right, we got 30 minutes of us being idiots. Yeah.

How do I turn this into four minutes? Yeah. Four. It'd be really interesting to have us each edit one of those and see like the different product each of us came up with. But that would be twice as much work and we're not gonna do it. No, there's no way I'm gonna do that.

Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by knowing the value of your time. No, you know, your time. That's an important life skill. This podcast is also brought to you by NASA. NASA trying to convince everybody that Mars is actually orange for nefarious reasons that no one understands.

And today's podcast is brought to you by laser printers, laser printers actually using nefarious reasons that everyone understands. And finally, this podcast is brought to you by the Indianapolis. The Indianapolis coming to a local music venue near you. What a, that's a good band. It is a pretty good band name, actually. John, we got a project for awesome message from Calvin in Seattle to Emily.

Shout out and Happy Birthday if this is around April 23rd. Otherwise, happy whatever holiday is close by. So it's not, and I have no idea what holiday is close by. Let me, let me, it's national, it's national bourbon day, John, the day that this is released. So have a cup on us. Or not. Actually, have a cup on Calvin. not. Actually have a cup on Calvant. It's also flag day, Hank.

I feel like you maybe could have led with the fact that it's an actual holiday in the United States. All right, Hank, we have a question from Laura who writes, dear John and Hank, I just had to buy a $10 pot of lettuce because my dog peed on it at the market. It's ahead of lettuce and a pot with dirt in it. What am I supposed to do with it?

It looks fully grown to me, but am I supposed to plant it? Am I supposed to take a few leaves off of it at a time? Do I just cut the whole thing off to have the freshest salad ever? I don't want to ask the seller because he's pretty mad at me on account of my dog peeing on his lettuce. Do be a advice and be greatly appreciated since celery, Laura. Really good. Wow, almost missed that.

I thought it was a typo at first. Wow. This, so first of all, it's a little weird dope to sell a full grown lettuce while it's in a pot. So like at that point, you just cut it off and sell it. But you can't- Not just that. It's weird to have it on the ground at a farmer's market when everybody brings their dogs

to the farmers. Like, what do you think's going to happen? I don't know. I think you can, I think that that's a little bit the dog's fault. I'm not going to blame anybody. Like, also, my farmer's market's in Mizzou, you can't bring a dog in. I think probably for this very reason. Mm, okay.

It's wild to me to think that you could bring a dog into a farmer's market, just like it's wild to lots of people in other places that you can bring a child into a bar, whereas in Mizzou, there are no bars without children. Yeah, no, where else are they gonna be? Yeah. I go to a bar that has a play pen area to put your child in.

I'll tell you, I don't mind that in a non-COVID moment, but I mind it in a COVID moment. Yeah, no. I have not been to that bar in a, at least 18 months. I hope they've closed down the play pen just for the moment, but we'll see. Yeah, my guess is yes. I think I've done this that you can take leaf off one at a time

and maybe you can prolong the life of the lettuce. And what the lettuce is gonna wanna do is something called bolting, where it's gonna send up its flowers to produce the seeds for the next generation of lettuce. The moment that that happens, something occurs inside of the lettuce that makes the leaves taste bad.

And so that's the thing to watch out for. If that looks like it's starting to happen, you're gonna want to cut that lettuce and make yourself a real good salad immediately. Yeah, you don't want it to get even close to bolting really. Yeah. So I'm a big fan of just eating it the moment it looks like you could eat it. Yeah.

That's when it's freshest. That's kind of my guide, that's kind of my guide with the garden when the lettuce looks like, oh, I could, I could probably eat that lettuce. It's a little softer, a little more pleasant, little sweeter even maybe. So it's, in my opinion, it's almost never too early to start cutting lettuce. Yeah, but lettuce is happy to be harvested while it is still in a pot. It doesn't mind getting its leaves hanked off. I think it's pretty used to that. But if you want to let it bolt and have a bunch of flowers, you'll be surprised by what happens, which is that the lettuce has flowers.

And then it will have seeds. And then you can take those seeds and plant them next year if you want to grow your own lettuce. That's fun. We had our asparagus bolt this year because we didn't know that there was asparagus planted decades ago near our garden. And we were walking around one day and I was like, that looks kinda like an asparagus spear. And it was.

So next year we're gonna to have a spare guy. Asparagus has some kind of like weird growing season, doesn't it? Or is that the thing? Is the thing that grows up, is that the flower and it used to have like catch it before it? Does it's branching? I don't really know, but I know it takes a while to grow asparagus, like it takes a few years and that's why I've never planted it before. But then it turns out it was here all along. Hey, nice. By the way, we've had a great year in the garden, as you would expect, from being fairly homebound and not to brag or anything.

But this weekend, I harvested and processed over 2000 strawberries. Wow. Yeah. 2000. How did you count them all? Well, Hank, I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm a counter. I always have been. I love it. I love accounting. I love a good count. The irony is that I'm a terrible accountant, but I do love to count. So yeah, well, basically, you freeze them in trays and each tray fits 175 strawberries. So it's easy to figure out how many strawberries you've harvested. It was amazing though. The cherry harvest here in Montana is looking really good right now, but we'll see what

the squirrels have to say about that. But if I unfortunately think that you will miss the cherries while you're here. They will not be ready yet. That's okay. I feel like I've had my fill of fruit for some time. God, I love cherries. So I love strawberries. I mean, strawberries are my, they're my favorite thing that we grow in the garden because it's a me like, I understand how you grow potatoes and lettuce and peppers and everything because it tastes, all that stuff tastes

at least a little bit like dirt, you know? Like lettuce tastes enough like dirt that I believe it came from dirt. Strawberries taste nothing like dirt. It's just, it's, I can't even get my head around the fact that strawberries grow out of dirt. Well, I mean, there are lots of fruits that don't taste like dirt and they all grow out of the dirt. I know mean, there are lots of fruits that don't taste like dirt,

and they all grow out of the dirt. I know, but it's like if you told me that ice cream sand which has grown on a vine, I would be like, wow, that is surprising. Yeah. I maintain, I've said it probably four times in this podcast that if candy manufacturers came up with grapes, everybody would freak out.

Yeah, that's so true. They'd be like, I cannot believe that you made that. It explodes in your mouth and it's so sweet. Yeah, I would like to try to grow grapes someday, but it seems like it's a lot of work. We have neighbors who have a grapevine on their fence. It's like Concord grapes, like big, big hunk and seeds in them. Yeah.

So you have to spit the seeds out, but they are so good. Yeah. And they're like right on the road. So you just kind of take them right. It's like, well, I mean, like, hey, like they're on, they're on your side, but they're also on our side. So we're gonna take I've got a policy that if if you're walking by my garden and you're in need of a strawberry, please God, take one. Last thing my God. The last thing I need is another strawberry. Oh, God. Right now. Yeah.

It is, I mean, it also just to state the obvious, it is wild to me that strawberries, until quite recently had to be eaten in like a two week window. Like, you know, like a nurse. Yeah. 150 years ago, you know, like a nurse. Yeah. 150 years ago, you had strawberries two weeks a year and the other 50 weeks a year, you thought about having strawberries. I mean, that's what that's what cherries are like

in Montana. Like it's either it's either you have too many cherries or you have no cherries. Those are the two states of being. Yeah. But God bless those too many cherry weeks. They're real good. All right I think we need to move on to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. What's the news from Mars this week?

Well, excitingly, so the insight lander has figured out a way to get a power boost. You may have heard that it is having having some struggles. It's covered in Martian dust and it has learned a new way to clean itself. So, we're getting a little worried that insight is going to basically end its mission because it's so covered in dust. It's also that Mars is at its Apehelian right now, which is the furthest point from the Sun.

During that time, the lander goes without its science instruments so that it can serve power for its heaters and other important parts. But the team behind the lander wanted to see if they could get a few extra days with their instruments by clearing dust away from the solar panels and getting a boost. So they did a very weird thing. They made the solar panels dirtier. They used the scoop on the insights robotic arm to pour a bit of sand onto the solar panels. They poured the sand at the windiest time of the day so that the wind blew the sand, the bigger chunkier sand across the solar panel and that took some of the bits of dust with it.

This worked boosting the power on the insight. So that's like really good news for the insight mission, which has been a little bit plagued with problems. But the, that they have this new way of saying, okay, it's going to be windy. Wind is coming up, put a little bit of sand on there. The wind's going to be able to blow the sand because the sand is bigger than the dust, which is has such a low profile that the wind just goes right over it. And, uh, and so they've been able to boost the power on insight.

Great news. That's pretty cool. And a very interesting counterintuitive solution. Yeah, sometimes the thing you got to do is put more dirt on your dirt. It's like, it's so dirty. What should we do? More dirt. It's also a situation where the only tool available to you is dirt. So why not try to use it? The news from AFFC Wilburden this week is that a long time AFC Wilburden CEO, Eric Samuelson, who was chairman of the club for over 10 years from the very bottom rungs of amateur football all the way up to being a team in the third tier of English football.

And as one of my personal heroes, I have have to say because he ran the club all those years for no salary just as a volunteer, like so many other people volunteer their talents and time to the club. He has written a book. It's called all together now, how a group of football fans righted a wrong and brought their football club home. And it's a wonder. I mean, admittedly, I am hugely biased as an AFC Wembleton fan, but it's a wonderful book. It's such an, it first off, it's just a great story. And so, but it's also a really interesting insight into how communities that need money to run, run, because it made me think a lot about our community

actually, because our community also needs money to run. At certain times, we obviously don't have like a playing budget and a facility's budget and all that stuff. But it's a really interesting look at how do you make an amateur football teamwork, and then how do you make that amateur football team work, and then how do you make that transition to being a professional organization? What does that look like? And what are the challenges in it?

And I really, I just thought it was really fascinating, really fun, and I loved it. Now, I mean, every night I would get into bed and start reading this book, and I would have a smile on my face. And Sarah would be like, I've never seen you so joyful when reading a book. And I was like, I love every page of this thing. It's just incredible.

It's great backstory, great insight into what everyone was thinking, you know, as these big events were unfolding. And I just thought it was awesome. So it's called All Together Now. It's right in time for the off season. So if you want to become a more invested supporter of AFC Wimbledon, I really recommend this book. In addition to Nile Cooper's book, This Is Our Time, which I guess is what Danny Kedwell,

the captain of AFC Wimbledon, said to his teammates immediately before walking up to score the winning penalty to send AFC Wimbledon back into the football week. Nice. What kind of guts do you have to have to turn around to your teammates right before the most pressure-packed moment of your life and just say, this is our time. Oh God. not my kind. Ah, I'll tell you that. John, thank you for making a podcast with me.

This podcast is edited by Joseph Tunemet. It's produced by Rosiana Hallsborough-Hossam, Sheridan Gibson. Our communications coordinator is Julia Bloom. Our editorial assistant is Debuky Trucker-Vardy. The music you're hearing now, and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great gunorola. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.