Dear Hank & John - 305: No Manholes Allowed

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

How fast to you have to be to follow the sunset? How fast are mosquitos? Why does the solar system spin? Should a three-headed dog have three names? How does soap work? Why do car speedometers go so high? Why do YouTube thumbnails change sometimes? 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. Dores, I prefer to think of it dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you to be a advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, what was it? What was my joke? I had it before. Oh my god.

I'll tell you. I got a little bit of behind the scenes for you all. When Hank does the intro to the podcast, about 60% of the time, I can actually hear the moment when he realizes he has not prepared a dad joke. I'd like to tell you what the moment is. The moment is he says, hello and welcome to Dear Hingesja, a podcast where we review different, nope, that's my podcast, a podcast where we answer your questions, provide duties, advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Weveled and it is in the moment

before the end every week between Mars and and is the moment where he's like, oh, right. A dad joke. It's like a quarter of the time. Anyway, John, why does a toilet paper roll downhill? Why? It always rolls downhill because it just wants to get to the bottom. Mm-hmm. I'm really glad you prepared that one in advance. I want to simplify.

I feel like I've been trying too hard. I want him to be more dad joking. No, I know what you mean. Yeah. I agree that some of the setups lately have been convoluted. I think that was an example of not trying quite hard enough. I think there's a middle somewhere where there's a joke to the joke. Do you want it isn't? Do you want an alt? I have an alt this week. See, I'm double prepared.

I definitely don't. What I want is for you to take that alt and have it ready next week and we do the intro of the podcast. It's like 25% of the time that I forget. It's only in sure the podcast. It's like 25% of the time that I forget. Oh, overestimated. All right. Well, I'm working very hard and I appreciate it. I know that it is not easy to find these dad jokes on the internet, which like the internet to the extent that the internet is a useful tool and a productive tool for humans. It is mostly a way of having GPS and a repository of dad jokes. Those are the two primary productive functions of the internet. Whoa. You're right there. My computer just made a loud noise. I don't like that noise. That's the noise that means you have a meeting in one hour. So let's get going. Johnny wanted to answer some

questions from our listeners. There's a questions from our listeners. Beginning with this one from Samantha who writes, dear John and Hank, I'm currently reading the New York Times bestseller, the Anthropocene reviewed by critically acclaimed author John Green. Thank you Samantha. It's a great first sentence to a question. I'm on the chapter about sunsets and the question I have is if you wanted to continuously see the sunset, how fast would you have to travel? Sunsets and Salamanders, Samantha. It depends on where you are. That's true, because if you're at the equator, I believe it's about a thousand miles an

hour. Yes. But the correct me if I'm wrong here, Hank, if you're at the North Pole and it's the right time of year, it's zero miles per hour. Yeah, you just stand there. Because basically what you're talking about here is you want to be moving as fast as the earth is going. So you're like counteracting the spin of the earth by walking or walking a thousand miles

an hour in the opposite direction. Yeah. And, but like the earth spends at different speeds at different places because the earth has different circumference at different places. So if you imagine the widest part of the circumference of the Earth is the equator, and then it's thinner as it goes to the top until functionally, mathematically, the Earth has zero circumference at the very tip. So if you're just standing there, you are just sort of spinning in place. Right. Math. That's, I mean, that's Earth math. But if you're at

the North Pole, you couldn't continuously see the sunset, right? Because at some point, like the seasons will change and it'll start, it'll be the part of the year where it's dark all the time. So if you want to continuously see the sunset, I think your best bet is to go a thousand miles an hour at the equator for the rest of your life. Right.

And then, by continuously, you mean until you die. I assume Samantha, there's not like a, yeah, if you wanted to see the sunset for like six hours, that would be a whole lot easier. Yeah, but I love the idea of becoming a billionaire, you know, like working really hard to become a billionaire. And then instead of having your crazy billionaire project that doesn't help anybody, but you be the ones that have been picked so far, you pick as your crazy billionaire project that doesn't help anybody, but you be the ones that have been picked so far. You pick as your crazy billionaire project that doesn't benefit anyone except for you. The project of spending the rest of your life continually sweet watching a sunset.

So there are all these refueling planes that have to like dock with your plane as you're on this constant thousand mile an hour travel around the equator. They've got to cancel all the flights that are going to come through years because you're going Mach 1.4 or whatever, like you're in a hurry to keep this sunset going. And that's just how Samantha lives out the last 40 years of her life. I was trying to figure out if there's a space station place where you could do this, but there's not really sunsets if you're not on Earth. No. And in fact, your plane, I think,

would have to be fairly low to sort of get the full sunset effect. Yeah, you're right. You would lose the vibe if you got too high up. There is an orbital sunrise, which is actually what I wrote the last episode of the Anthropocene Reviewed About if you want to listen to that episode of the podcast. An orbital sunrise happens every 90 minutes on the International Space Station.

So every time the space station orbits Earth, the sun rises, or they experience the sun as rising from behind Earth's crust, which is exceptionally beautiful. And the first artwork ever made in space was made by the Cosmonaut of Lexi Lanov. And it was, oh, it was a drawing of that experience of seeing an orbital sunrise. But I don't think it's, it doesn't look anything like a earth sunset. Yes. Different because you don't get the clouds. That's the best part. I mean, it's the atmosphere that makes a sunset. And that makes so much else. I mean, it's the atmosphere that makes a sunset. And that makes so much else.

All of the, yeah, all the, oh man. That little thing, this thin whisper vapor makes everything possible. Speaking of which, John, I want to ask you a question about mosquitoes. Good, I hate them. It's from Jen, it's from Jen and Maddox, who asked, dear Hank and John,

we just got out of a car full of mosquitoes. Well, that sounds bad. Yeah, I don't like it. I wasn't too surprised when they were flying around and attacking us while we were parked, but when we got out of the highway and we were going like 70 miles an hour, they're still just casually flying around the car.

What's going on? Those mosquitoes find 70 miles an hour, blood meals on wheels, Jen and Maddox. I'm a little perplexed by what Jen thought a genematics thought was going to happen like where the mosquito is just going to get pushed pushed back against the back wall. Yeah, like the G forces were going to be so high that they were just going to be like thrown into the trunk. Yeah, no. Well, so like I've been trying to figure out

how to explain, how to like communicate effectively what's actually happening here, which is that like, and I haven't run up against a great way yet. So, John, imagine it this way. What if instead of being full of air, you imagine the car as being full of jello. And your car starts going, and the jello does like maybe push back a little bit

into the back of the car, but it's jello. So mostly it just pushes forward and then like, you know, it may be a little bit harder to get your car going because it was full of this massive, delicious, strawberry delight. But you're traveling 70 miles an hour and the back wall of your car has pushed the jello forward along with the car.

That's what happened except the jello isn't jello its air. Yeah, which is why if you'd rolled down the windows, the mosquitoes would have had a very different experience at 70 miles an hour. Because yeah, it would have been a turbulent situation for that. Yeah. Because you would have at that point had them interacting with air that on some level was

going 70 miles an hour. Now because of the way that cars work now, you don't necessarily feel all of that inside the cabin. But like, yeah, what you need is to roll down the windshield and the back windshield. Yes. And then you will not have any mosquitoes in your car. That's how you solve the problem. You roll down the windshield and the back windshield.

Yeah, you will not have any mosquito. You will have some mosquitoes in your teeth. Yeah. But not in the problem. You roll down the windshield and the back windshield. Yeah, you will not have any misgiv, you will have some misgidos in your teeth. Yeah, but not in the car. Yeah, yeah, you basically need to be traveling in a dune buggy. This was your first error. It was too attempt to de-esketify your car instead of just selling the car covered in misgidos because it's over for that car and buying a dune buggy, which is the best way to get around town and electric dune buggy. Everybody says that's the future. At 70 miles an hour, it's very safe. Hank, since we're answering a lot of questions about physics, which is certainly my area

of expertise, just ask my high school physics teacher. I want to ask this question from Elliott, who writes, and I do not know the answer to this question, Elliott's, boy or a word, Elliott writes, dear John do not know the answer to this question, Elliot's, boy, we're alert, Elliot writes, dear John and Hank, I am five. Well, first off, Elliot, very impressive, just that. Rarely, do we get emails from five year olds that contain anything but gibberish? Yeah. I am five, and I have a question.

Yeah. Why does the solar system spin from Elliot, great sign off, Elliot? I love it. That's supposed underrated sign off. Yeah. From. Yeah.

No. You don't see that much. It had a moment. Yeah. It's like I just wanted you to know because the emails generally start out like two, so and so, from Elliot. Yeah. It's like I just wanted you to know because the emails generally start out like two, so and so, from Elliot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's in there already. Hey, why does the solar system spin? Yes. Well, you said you had an idea. Why don't you give me yours? Okay, Elliot. Here's my guess. Here's my guess.

Gravity. I mean, yeah. I did it earlier. It's gravity. It's essentially. There's two components. Dang it. Gravity is one of them. Is the other one, like, isn't there a large black hole

at the center of the Milky Way galaxy that the whole Milky Way is kind of rotating around. Yeah. And we're kind of rotating around it because it's a big gravitational center. And, but why are we spinning, Elliot? Why are we, why are we rotating? Well, what, what, what happened if we weren't?

We would get sucked into that black hole. Yes. So what has happened to everything that's not spinning? It already got sucked into that black hole there it is. Okay, Elliot. So we're spinning because we haven't yet been sucked into a gigantic black hole. No, not yet. Not at all. We won't. It won't happen. We are spent. Oh, thank God. So it's great news for Elliott and for me. So, so like, so, so there is so back to the solar system. And not only the sun would be the black hole in our solar system. Instead, and if you were thinking of the galaxy, then you've got that. That sort of center of mass, the center of mass. So the sun is there, but it's not there as like a thing for us to spin around. We all, as a solar system, we have a collect, like every thing in the solar system has a shared center of mass, and that center of mass is inside of the sun. And a wiggle's around a little bit as the planets go by, but mostly it's the exact center

of the sun. Like over, over, you know, a significantly long period of you average it out. It's the center of the sun. So, um, yeah, I mean, we're explaining this to a five year old, right? So you don't have to get distracted by like whether or not it's like six inches to the left of the exact center of the sun. I did that. Elliot. We're all spinning around the very center of the sun. Yeah, and the sun is spinning around the very center of the sun, but there were things in the solar system that were had a direction.

So they had momentum in a direction. And those things, they did knock into each other and that would change their momentum. But a lot of that stuff just kept on going in that direction, but is sort of being drawn constantly toward the sun, but is also headed in a direction. So there is a direction that it's going and a direction that it's being pulled. And when those things cancel out into a nice circle, then you have or ellipse, then you have something orbiting something else.

That's how basically we are constantly falling into the sun, but we're going so fast that we miss it. Okay, I feel like we had Elliot and then we lost him. And when I say we had Elliot, I mean we had me. Okay, John, I'll explain it like you and Ellie are both five. Okay. It's spinning because it's always been spinning. So there's nothing there to slow us down in space.

And so we keep on spinning because we were spinning when it started out and we're still spinning even today. Unfortunately, Ellie, we weren't spinning when it started out. We were, but no, not at the very beginning. This planet was not orbiting a sun, and that sun was not part of a galaxy for quite a while, actually. Yeah. And so since the beginning of the solar system, it's just been a spinning time. For a long time, we have been spinning around a center of gravity, which is near the center of the sun. And for a long time, the galaxy has been spinning around a center of the galaxy, which is

near the center of the galaxy. Well, it is the center of the galaxy. It's near the center of a supermassive black hole. It is near the center of a supermassive black hole. We did it sort of. Elliott, please let us know how we did it from Hank and John. I don't feel like we did great. We did much better with the jello in the car. That, yeah. I felt like it made sense. Yeah. Can we answer a question that's not about science, please? Yes. This one's from Rosa who asks, dear Anconjohn, should Hagrid's three-headed dog Fluffy have had three names since he had three heads? Is it a he? I thought he thought Fluffy was a

she for some reason. Is he three dogs or one dog. I only have one head and that one's name is Rosa. Rosa, congratulations on in the vast geography of all of human imagination, finding the one hill that I am ready to die on. Oh, wow, all right. I'm excited about this because I don't have very strong opinions. Well, I guess I do.

I'm the, not I'm thinking about it, but you go first. Three heads. Three minds. Yeah. Three dogs. Yeah. Fluffy is not a dog.

Fluffy is one third of the three dogs that were protecting the Philosopher's Stone. Oh, so Hagrid only had one pet and the other two dogs was not his pet. No, I'm saying that Hagrid, and I don't mean to disparage him, but Hagrid failed to acknowledge the fundamental reality that he had three HET dogs that shared one set of legs. Yeah. And also shared one name, or was there just one of the dogs named fluffy? No. That what you're saying.

You got to have three names if you have three dogs. Oh, I agree with you. But in this like mess up that Hagrid did, did he name one of the dogs fluffy or did he accidentally wrongly imagine his pet he wrongly understood what was happening. I agree with you. John, what are the other dogs names? I think Buffy and Ruffy, Buffy and Ruffy. Buffy and Ruffy, in either of them are named Manhole, really? Stop trying to make that's named Manhole happen. It's not good.

It's not good. It's not as good as you think it is. It's not great. What about fluffy and fluffy and fluffy? I like ruffy. I've always liked ruffy as a dog name because they do make kinda, they ruffle a little bit. They're like rough, rough, rough, rough.

That's one of the notenoises, yeah. You know, my all time favorite dog name is Willie, his name and my dog because as the veterinarian said to me once, you call him Willie because he's Willie Willie cute. Oh my god. And I was like, that is, that's a great name. But I'm also very fond of extremely dignified dog names, you know, like if you name your dog after like a Roman Emperor. Yeah. I could see that. The thing about fluffy is not only was fluffy You know, like if you name your dog after like a Roman Emperor, yep. I could see that sometimes. Fluffy, the thing about fluffy is not only that was fluffy

three dogs, fluffy was not fluffy. Fluffy was a short haired, shiny, short haired dog, at least in the movie. Not fluffy at all. It's very weird, Hagrid. Yeah, for sure, but to me, like that's a little pedantic. Whereas, sure, if you do whatever you're a creature has three minds, it is three creatures. Like, what makes us us is a mind.

And what makes a dog a dog is its mind. I'm thinking of fluffy pancake and scooter. Why didn't you mention, why didn't you say pancake before? If pancake is a phenomenally good dog name. What about pancake waffle on fluffy? If you like that so much. No, I don't want to go too heavy on breakfast. And if we do go heavy on breakfast, I'd want to go a little more obscure like French toast or like omelet. Omelet is not bad, but you always want to be a little more specific. You know, I'm in Jesus' eye. Right, or I was thinking a little more like vegetarian, like ramp and spinach omelet.

And it was called rampy. Pancake and ramp and spinach omelet. Now I want this dog to have more heads. I love heads. Well, I mean, I don't actually know how three headed dogs work, but I feel like you're right. I don't want to, I don't want to read too much into this Hank, but I think, I think what makes a person a person is their mind. And not the four legs. And so fluffy has to be three dogs. Fluffy is three dogs.

I'm there with you, John. Do you have another question for me? Yes, this is from Jesse Hurrite. Steer John and Hank. At the start of COVID, one thing became clear to me, which is that I don't have any idea how soap works. I blindly trust it. And I'm a bit of a neat freak.

But what the heck is soap, hand sanitizer, alcohol, that makes a little bit of sense to me, but I'm still not even sure what that is. Don't burst my sanitized bubble, but does soap work, not messy, Jesse. Yeah. So super works. So good. So good. So good. So good. So good. Way better than hand sanitizer even. It's great. It's incredible. What? What a discovery. I mean, yeah. Well, and it's been around for a long time, but but more than like the discovery,

like the discovery of its own power. It's amazing how you can have a technology and not realize how powerful it is for a long, long time. Yeah, yeah, like we knew that soap made things better, but we didn't necessarily have the best understanding of why, but now that we've got a pretty good idea of it, it's incredible. So good, it's so good. Yeah, so soap is the basic idea is that there are two, there are things that are soluble in water and there are things that aren't.

And soap is very good and water is good at dissolving away the things that are soluble in water. But soap is good at helping water dissolve away the things that are not soluble in water. And it also makes water wetter. You have noticed this about water, you pour it into a it, it, like water, you, you have noticed this about water, like you pour it into a cup and then it, like, it's that bubble on top. Water's really good at sticking to itself. And so that can actually make it, because it's so busy sticking to itself, it can be worse at sticking to other things. So soap actually gets in, in between the water molecules a little bit, and it says, stop sticking to yourself

so much, let's stick to other stuff. then and that makes it much like water just much more effective at washing things away. You'll notice this, especially if you have something that's not water soluble on your hands like butter or peanut butter, like greasy stuff that just water will not do it. But the moment you put some soap on your hands, it's like, oh, they're it went away. But that is also true of lots of little things that are kind of hydrophobic or just, or just water's soluble and like water gets better at being wet when it has a bunch of soap in it. And that in turn allows the water to wash away dirt and viruses and bacteria and other stuff that you don't want on your hands or other parts of your body

or sharpie which if you've if you've written sharpie all over your face. Yeah, it speaks to in fact to how effective soap is that it is able to yeah help water remove sharpie because it is not easy to remove sharpies without soap. I can tell you. It's amazing. This like after project for awesome, I will go and be like it's like three in the morning. I go inside and I just like soap the sharpie off my face so that my wife doesn't have to wake up to like Hank covering sharpies. Yeah, that is scary. I would be a frightening thing to wake up to. Yeah. So in summary, soap is an extremely effective technology. It is actually better at cleaning our hands and our bodies than even hand sanitizer is. It's amazing. Mm-hmm. I am very thankful for it. And we're not, and we're not

just saying that because our mom owns a goat soap making company. She's, she doesn't anymore actually. She's, she got out of the goat soap making business. So now we are truly disinterested observers who are no longer being funded by big soap. Which reminds me, Jonathan, this podcast isn't brought to you by Big Soap. It's brought to you by little soap, little soap. It's, it's like, it's like Big Soap, but like Waymore Chill. And they're really in favor of, of, of people doing it. However, they want to do the soap thing. Little Soap. That's the, that's the future. Today's podcast also, of course, brought to you by a Nissan Central, full of Jello and Nissan Central,

full of Jello, mostly a thought experiment. I hope so. This podcast is also brought to you by Samantha Sunset Chasing Spaceplane. The Sunset never goes down when you are Samantha, the billionaire in a space plane. God. When you're a billionaire, ask yourself this question. Yes. Does this disproportionately benefit me and people like me, or does this disproportionately benefit me and people like me, or does it disproportionately benefit

the people who are not like me? And then use that answer to guide your choices. I just, I know that very few of the people listening to our podcast are billionaires. I understand that we have never done well with the billionaire demographic, but I just ask yourself that question. Just ask yourself that question.

Today's podcast is, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go on a rant. Today's podcast also brought to you by naming your pet's manhole. It's a terrible idea. Don't do it. I should say, I feel like we should say that that's a reference to an old podcast episode. So people don't very don't think that like you just invented the idea of naming your pet, manhole. They all know about manhole. John, nobody, we don't have no new listeners. We do. We don't, we don't grow. We do. First off, we do. Secondly, we have new listeners all the time. I'm constantly shocked by the number of new listeners we have. And thank you, new listeners for listening.

I appreciate you. Hank doesn't even acknowledge your existence. Sorry. John, what are we doing? Oh, this is a project for awesome messages from Caleb. It's from Kayla fory to Sam and Regina Rodriguez. Thank you for accepting me when I came out to you. It means a lot to me to know that the people who have been by my side for so long and that I have always been happy to be there for are still going to stay by me as I begin my newest journey as I transition. You are the best found family a trans girl could ask for my eternal love to you. Oh, softly. That's very sweet, Kayla. Thanks for donating to the project for awesome. Yeah. Thanks for being awesome. Hank, let's answer funny. That's very sweet, Kayla. Thanks for donating to the project for awesome.

Yeah. Thanks for being awesome. Hank, let's answer a couple more questions before we get to the all important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Beginning with this question from Martha, who writes, dear John and Hank, why do speedometers on most cars go so far past even like the Texas speed limits? What are the chances that I'll be in a situation where I will have to drive 180 miles per hour? Not an old lady Martha.

I don't associate the name Martha with old ladies. I have to say I know a lot of young Martha's. I know some young Martha's too I feel like Martha. Maybe it's making a comeback So so here's the thing I didn't know that I found out while researching this question. A lot of car manufacturers use the same speedometer, no matter what car it gets put into. So they have these like fancy or faster luxury cars that are like part of the whole thing is you're not going to drive it 180 miles an hour, but you could. They will put that, they have that in there, just in case,

I guess you're going down a hill and you really don't care about your own life or the rules that you could do that. And then they put that also in the other cars that are cheaper and definitely not capable of going over 110. But do they do it so that you feel like your car is powerful and capable of great things even though you would never call upon it? Like, it must be some kind of psychological trick, right? I, yeah, I don't know.

Like, I feel like with a fancier car, you'd like want to feel like it. And also, there's sort of,, like I feel like if I was driving at like 80 miles an hour and my speedometer was almost near the end of where it could go, like that might stress me out a little bit. Like I kind of want it to be up near the top when I'm going at max speed, rather than all the way down to the bottom.

And I'm talking about the radial speedometers. Now a lot of people, and I have a car like this that just has like the number on the dashboard. Right. Mr. Fancy pants over here with his numbers on the dashboard. I, it was a Honda Civic. Thank you very much. I have only driven one car that I think could reasonably go 180 miles an hour. And it was driving the

pace car for the Indianapolis Grand Prix. I was really confused about where that was going. And I mean, even driving in a straight line on a race car track where people regularly drive 240 miles an hour, I was not able, like an empty, totally chill, utterly perfect condition situation. I could not bring my body, the car was willing, the car was able, but I could not bring my body, the car was willing, the car was able, but I could not bring myself to go more than a hundred miles an hour.

It was terrifying to be going that fast. It was so scary. I was going that fast on this long straightaway, and then right behind me, Simon Pagino, it's just, he was tailgating me within inches, within inches of me. And I was like, we are going way too far. You are not, you do not have a two second following distance, Simone Pagino, like this is much, much too close. This is, so I understand letting people throw out the first pitch at a baseball game, but

having watched people throw out first pitches at a baseball game, why would you give them a car? I know. Why would you let them drive a pays car? And then I, I was like, I was telling myself before this all started, I was like, okay, well, look, they obviously it's not a big deal because they're letting me do it. So any dummy can do this.

And I'm going to be just fine. And then I read that once a payscar driver at the Indian app was 500, like ran into a photographer's stand and like, seriously harmed a lot of people. And then I was like, oh no, oh God, I could mess this up. And the consequences could be extreme. That fast forward one week. And that's part of the reason I didn't go very fast much to the annoyance of Simone Pagino,

who apparently was like on the radio being like, what's wrong with this peace car driver? And the answer is that I'm a cautious driver. I'm a defensive driver. I believe in following a two second following distance. Okay, like I'm not, there's a reason that I didn't choose race car driver as my career. And Flash forward to the next week,

there's a race in Detroit, and they have another like, you know, 17th tier celebrity, payscar driver. And he freaking crashes. Oh, he freaking spins the car and crashes into the barriers. And then it's on like the sports set of not top 10. Everybody, everybody's talking about it. Oh, my God.

And all over Twitter. Not worth it. I dodged a bullet. Not worth it, man. So I mean, you do a number of things that I would, I'm surprised by. Like for example, that time that you were in a, like an automotive race with Maggie Steve on her. I was, that was just a weird phase of my life, man.

It was very strange. I was so confused. I know. I did, I, I a weird phase of my life, man. It was very strange. I was so confused. I know. I did a, I did dirt track racing with her, although to be fair, I wouldn't call it racing. I would call it losing. I was, yeah, not in anywhere near the same capacity that the brilliant novelist and semi professional race car driver, Maggie Steve Potter was bringing to that event like she brought talent and skill and pluck and a good car and I brought nothing.

You brought the guy said, when if you get in a crash, just stay in the car and then you got in the crash and everybody was like, why are you staying in the car? And you're like, that's what they told me to do. And they're like, not if the car is on fire. Oh God, I don't, I really don't like reliving that memory. I did get a trophy out of it though.

There's a lot that I'll do for a trophy in this world. I don't know about you Hank, but I love a trophy. All right, John, do you wanna go behind the scenes about what it's like to be a YouTuber with this question from Evan? Great. Dear Hank and John, Evan asks, on a recent vlog with this video, how we fixed the climate, the thumbnail changed like five times. First it was a screen grab of Hank, then it was a little graphic that sort of looked like

Earth, and then there was another that I can't remember. And now it's a picture of the globe. And it says, there is good news. Why did it change so much? Who changes it? Why did people change their thumbnails? Do they get more attention and clicks that way? Not a YouTuber, Evan. Yeah, that was me.

That was me. I worked really hard on that video. And I wanted a lot of people to watch it. So I was trying to find a thumbnail that more people would click on. Yeah, and it worked, by the way. Thumbnails are incredibly ridiculously important on YouTube. And the way that Hank and I choose almost all of our thumbnails

is ever since 2007. Like back when we started on YouTube in 2007, the thumbnail was the center frame of the video, the exact middle frame. And so you could thumbnail cheat like some people would put up, you know, something salacious or really visually interesting on that middle frame. So as to like try to get more clicks, but most of the time. You know hank and i would it would just be whatever image of us happen to be the middle image as we were talking in the video. And we basically still do that we generally don't upload custom thumbnails even though we know that if we did it could it would like. It increase views because.

You can increase views and decrease the quality of the experience for the community and that's something that we don't want to do because a lot of times, you know, if it's people who are sort of casual viewers or people who maybe come from other corners of YouTube, they may not come in with the best intentions and it can just be kind of a bummer. So we generally just still use whatever thumbnail is algorithmically generated and don't come up with custom thumbnails. But on videos that we want people to view that we do want the public to look at,

like Hank's video about climate change and what actionable things need to actually happen in order for the situation to get better, Hank was trying to find a good thumbnail so that people would watch the video and by the way, it totally worked half a million people have watched the video. Yeah, yeah, and also it's 16 minutes long, which helps because YouTube really likes it when videos are longer. So we are spending more time on the website. But yeah, there is, I think, I mean, I know, Veritasium put a great, did a great video on

why this happens. And, you know, we don't do it a lot on vlogwriters, but we do it on SciShow. And crash course. And we do it to an extent. Some times. And like, lots of you, and it's not great. Like, it's not a great user experience because it's like, did I see that video already? I feel like I did, but it doesn't look the same.

So you, and some people think that people are trying to trick people and to click on it twice. So like watching the second time, that is not what's happening. In fact, when that happens, it's actually bad for the video because it means that you click on the video and then don't watch it, which YouTube kind of marks

is a negative, obviously. Yeah. And yeah, but it is because the click-through rate of a thumbnail matters a great deal. So the number of people who are exposed to it and then go on to click on it, is sort of the thing that videos live and die by on the platform. I will confess that it is such a big deal that sometimes when a creator who I really like has uploaded a video that I don't particularly want to see, I will nonetheless click on it and I will watch the 7 Minute Video only to tell the algorithm, even though I didn't want to see this one, I do actually want to see the next one. Yeah, and other people also should see this.

Maybe not me. But other people. Right. Yeah. It is, especially now, you know, it's a huge percentage. Like Hank and I are outliers on YouTube and in a lot of ways.

And we're especially outliers in the number of our views, or the percentage of our views that come from subscriptions and subscribers. But these days on the platform, like subscribers matter so much less and how many people the video is exposed to matters so much more, that the click-through rate essentially decides the fate of the video is exposed to matters so much more that the click-through rate essentially decides

the fate of the video. It does absolutely. It's the click-through rate and how long people watch that's basically all it is. Yeah. And so we have a very high click-through rate with our people with our people and an extreme, which is click through rate with people who are casual YouTube viewers. And I think that's okay most of the time. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why, like, honestly, it works better for us to just have it be our faces. So people are like, oh, there's the new vlog brothers video. Yeah. And if we do a thumbnail that doesn't have our face in it, people are like, oh, there's the new vlog brothers video. And if we do a thumbnail that doesn't have our face in it, people are like, I don't know if that's taken, that's something just weird. Yeah, they'd have to notice that it's a vlog brothers video.

So the main takeaway there is we are so grateful to have an audience that's stuck with us. So we, yeah. And also we want to continue to try and make that worthwhile for both sides of the equation. So we do try to make good videos. Yeah. I mean, we are so, so fortunate to still be able to do this after 15 years. And that Nerdfighteric continues to be such a productive, interesting, cool community.

It is the great luck of our lives. And I honestly don't think it has that much to do with us. Yeah, so we're really fortunate. Agreed. John, do you have some news from AFC Wimbledon? I do. I do. AFC Wimbledon lost a football game. It's not my favorite. I have to say I'm so deeply in love with this team that when we lose a football game, I'm mostly just confused. How can this have happened to us, the greatest football club in the world?

But more than losing a football game, the biggest surprise was that we didn't score any goals. We went down one hill and I was like, well, that's good because that's how you always goes. That's how we win. First, we start losing and then we come back to win. But it was a game against Plymouth, Argyle, the same team that we played in the playoffs final at Wembley, um, the game of the year that we became a third tier English soccer team. And that was very exciting. Um, and honestly, if we lose to Plymouth, Argyle, every time we play them for the rest of all time,

I don't care because we won the time that mattered the most. Yeah. So it was a little bit of a disappointment. I mean, honestly, it was a really poorly refereed game. Rosiana was there. And it was just a weird game. We looked pretty good, but we just never were able to put it together in the final third or get really good shooting opportunities. Ayuba Saul had one one on one opportunity

with the goalkeeper and just couldn't quite get around him. And so yeah, we lost a football game, but I will say this after eight games, we're in seventh place, which is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird that the franchise currently applying its trade in Milton Keynes. That's not right. You did. It's in third.

I know. It is weird. It is weird. It's uncomfortable. I would like to see them closer to 20 second or 23rd. But the season is long. We play them in October. Let's see how things go. Okay. What's the news from Mars? In Mars news, John, we've got some new information about collapsing ancient super volcanoes. So there are these craters on Mars that for a long time we

thought were just impact sites, but it there's been debate about whether they are impactors or whether they are volcanic calderas. So like the collapsed area that falls down after a bunch of stuff explodes out of a volcano. A team of American geologists were studying the creators in Arabia, Terra, which is a region, and they wanted to figure this out. So they created a mathematical model of the pattern of volcanic ash that you would expect to be dispersed as those volcanoes erupted. And then they studied images of the surface of Mars to see if they could see ash in the places

that the model predicted they would be. And indeed, they found ash there. Oh, so they were able to determine that these craters are indeed old volcanoes. So about 500 million to 4 billion year old volcanoes. And they probably released a bunch of water vapor in carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide when they erupted, and they would have had a really big impact on the climate,

possibly making the atmosphere thicker or blocking up the sun during this sort of like tumultuous early history of Mars when it was a probably wetter warmer place than it is now. And it would have had a thicker atmosphere as a result of those volcanic eruptions, the same way that like our atmosphere has gotten thicker during periods of intense volcanic activity. Yeah, and there's like there's sort of like a double, like a weird double effect. One right upon the eruption, usually there's a period of like much less like like colder period where the sun can't reach the surface. Yeah, it sounds like it. And then, and then afterward you have, you know,

all this water, vapor and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that's going to trap the heat and so it gets warmer. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Mars, just finding out more things about our go-to-all point at friend. It's a good planet. I mean, it's my second favorite one. John, how fast did Indie Cars go? In the Indie 500, they go up to 240 miles an hour. That's too fast. I agree.

And they're also, you know, like a lot of times, three to six inches away from each other. It's not just how fast they're also, you know, like a lot of times, three to six inches away from each other. It's not just how fast they're going. It's also how close they are. Oh, man. That's intense, that's intense. That makes me uncomfortable. Well, I drove in the two-seater while I didn't drive.

I rode. I rode in the two-seater, which is like an Indie car that has been refashioned to have a backseat. And the Indie car driver, Sarah Fisher, drove me around the track at 180 miles an hour, which is significantly slower. And I was in the back there. Thankfully, she couldn't hear me because the car was traveling 180 miles an hour, I was behind her. So my sound waves were getting flown backwards pretty quickly. But I mean, pretty much for the first turn, I was like, stop, stop the car.

Stop the down, stop the vehicle. And then my girlfriend, Chris did it too. And he was like, he got out and he was like, the whole time, I just couldn't stop thinking, I'm such a big person. They don't know how big I am. It's going, I'm going to be the reason that like the car like wiggles out in the back end

and then just slams into the wall. And I was thinking that too. I was like, there is no way a car going this fast can stay on the track. And that was 60 miles an hour slower than they usually go. And like, by the way, they're not like, they're not riding in the back screaming, stop the car, like they're driving it.

Like they're making choices. Oh, God, wow. That's a special talent. Enjoy your hobby, I will enjoy, special talent. Enjoy your hobby. I will enjoy mine. Yeah. And that goes for everybody. Enjoy your hobbies.

We're not here to, we're not here to yuck on your yums. We're here to celebrate yums, whether they be martian or, or wimble-donian. That's right. I have just, I'm just much more comfortable podcasting rather than speed driving. Yeah, me too. How would they call it?

I think that is. Yeah, that's what he do for living on the speed driver. Who is Hamilton says whenever he's interviewed, Max Verstoppin is always like, I'm a speed driver. Did you say his name is Max Verstoppin? If his name is Verstoppin, he should stop. Oh, you should be slow. Oh, God, man, if you like that pun, you'd love F1 Twitter.

Ha, ha, man, if you like that pun, you'd love F1 Twitter. Ha ha ha. I like that you could be like maximum first stop it. What is his name? What did you say? Max first stop it. Okay, it's Max first stop it. And all I hear is Max first stop it. But I guess that's what you say.

I think that's pretty close to his name. Okay, yeah. John, thank you for making a podcast with me. You can send us questions at hankanjohnadginal.com where the entire Reasons Podcast exists is and it is your input in the form of great questions. And we're off to record our Patreon only podcast this weekend stuff, which will be a little

short this week because I need to go to a meeting in four minutes. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tuna Metash, produced by Rosiana Halsey Rojas and Sheridan Gibson. Our communications coordinator is Julia Bloom. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chokravarti, the music you're hearing now, and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnar Ola, and as they say in our hometown. Don't forget to be awesome. the podcast is by the great gunna rola and as they say in our hometown don't forget to be awesome