Dear Hank & John - 37: The Floridiest Place

Episode Date: March 2, 2016

How do you reattach John's head? Why aren't supreme court justices chosen more efficiently? How do you hug? Does Mars have seasons? Why don't people eat grass like cows?

Hello and welcome to, is that how it starts? Dear to Hank and John. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. What was that for the good dear John and Hank? It's a company podcast where me and my brother John answer your questions, give you to be advised and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC limbo den.

Today, we're in real life. We're together. There is no need for you to pretend that we are in the same room because we are in fact in the same room right now in the great state of Florida. It occurs to me that they might not even be pretending. They might actually think that we are in the same room. And in some ways maybe we are. We're just in some kind of third space that we visit on the phone. It is a other room. Yes. A room made of electrons. I'm fascinated by the spaces that we make up, or sort of like make physical, what was once

called cyberspace before it became so assumed that it, that we stopped thinking about it a space. Do you ever have that experience where you will have a very intense interaction in an online space and then later you will ascribe it to a physical place? No. That happens to me several times. Really? Where there are big moments that have happened in my life that were

happened on the internet, but I feel like they happened and I have put them in a physical space that I've been to before. So I think of them as occurring in that space. One of the only three times I ever vomited entirely from stress or fear or emotion was from a cyberspace interaction. Like with my girlfriend at the time,

we'd met on the internet and she, how do we look? They look good. Yeah, good. Hank is looking at the levels right now. My girlfriend and I were sort of like in the middle of this long six month breaking up process. And we just had a very tough conversation

and immediately after I like it was almost like hanging up back then because going offline was an action in a way that it isn't now and I just went to the immediately went to the bathroom and threw up at our house back in Winter Park for long or tough. Well that never has happened to me. I don't think I've ever puked from emotion. Really? Yeah. I've puked from emotion don't think I've ever puked from emotion. Really? Yeah.

I've puked from emotion a few times. I've puked from reading once. Wow. Yeah. I've never puked from drinking, either. I've also puked from drinking. I have puked for the other reasons. Just from illness.

Illness. Yeah. And motion sickness. Oh, you know, it's been a long time since I puked from motion sickness. I remember it being a very unpleasant puked though. It is not's been a long time since I puked for motion sickness. I remember it being a very unpleasant puko. It is not good. It is not a good puked.

Chad, should we talk about Florida or should we move on to the poem with the day? Well, yeah, I feel like we should do the how are you doing today, John? I'm doing well. I am in the midst of somewhat crazy few days for me. Yes. I was just in New York talking to Bill and Linda Gates for the launch of their annual letter,

which is fantastic. You can read it at gatesletter.com. And no, they didn't pay me to say that. Bill and Linda Gates, not sponsors at this point. They've got it. They've got the money to share. They've come sponsored it. They chose not to. They believe it. They're've got the money to share. They could've sponsored it, they chose not to.

They're spending their money in smarter ways. And then I'm here for about a day, and then I'm going on a trip to visit some refugee camps for the rest of the week, which will be very interesting. So you can actually talk about that. But on my way, I'm gonna stop off in London for seven hours and go to an ANC Wimbledon game. Your life exhausts me.

How are you doing, Hank? I'm good. I think I feel like I just going to Florida for a vacation is just an awful lot for me. You're like, the Florida vacation is just like sort of a six hour layover on your way to Tunisia or something. So we grew up here. I hate grew up here more than I did, but we both kind of grew up here. And every time I land in Florida, like when I'm flying over Florida and the plane lands and then I get out into the airport and everything,

I always think, and this is the stupidest thought, but I have it every single time I land in Florida. There is no place on Earth like Florida, more like Florida. Like it's just those... It's the Floridaest place in the world. It is very Florida-y. It's so Florida! Well, especially the Gulf Coast. Yeah.

Oh, everything's pastel. Oh, my God. And there's all kinds of kitchy sculpture gardens, and there's this... There's... There's Wimsey? Oh, there's so much Wimsey and C-shells. If I had to describe the Gulf Coast in two words, it would be Wimsey comma C-shells. Yeah, it's good.

Wim- Not Wimsey C-shells. No, no, no, because the C-shells are very serious. All right, let's move on to a poem. Okay. I wanted to read you this poem last week. It's, it was in a recent vlog where there's video. Have you read Octavia Butler?

Yeah. Have you read the Parable of the Sower? No. You've got to read that one. Okay. It's the best. I've gone on to now read like six Octavia Butler books in the last two weeks.

But this one was, this one was maybe my favorite. So it's from Parable of the Somer and it's a very short poem today. The shortest of the short poems. No, not the shortest we've ever done, but near. In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn. It's good, right? Octavia Butler, man. One of America's great novelists and one I hadn't even ever read until like six months ago. Yeah. Uh, yeah, Phoenix Burn. I never know what to say after poems. Just think about it in silence everyone together. I think it's not even really a poem. It's just an observation, just a fact about Phoenix's. You know what AFC Wimbledon's badge is? Is it a Phoenix? That makes sense. That makes sense because they had to burn

before they could rise from their own ashes. Absolutely, and I feel like just even, just because it's such a nice image and it's good colors that I would maybe want to wear an AFC Wimbledon scarf if it were cool out. Well, if that is the case, you can always go to dftba.com where AFC Wimbledon scarves are for sale and the proceeds from those scarves go to benefit AFC Wimbledon. A football club owned by its fans and arguably the greatest fourth tier English football club in the history of football. And maybe, maybe soon, the greatest third day of football.

All right, let's get there. Let's go to some questions from our beloved listeners who emailed us at Hank and John at gmail.com. Hank, can we start off with me asking a question? Sure. All right. This question comes from Miranda who writes, dear John and Hank, it wouldn start off with me asking a question? Sure. All right, this question comes from Miranda, who writes, dear John and Hank, it wouldn't be dear Hank and John without some talk about death.

So with the recent passing of Justice Scalia, I realize I know nothing about how the Supreme Court selection process works. Don't worry Miranda, Congress also knows nothing about it. Why does it take so long to elect a new justice? They aren't elected, that's part of the reason. Why aren't their backups already lined up like a US Vice President? Has a vice president?

That's a great question. Maybe they should have thought of that when they were making the constitution. Why are there more specific guidelines in place as to who should select a replacement in an election year? Miranda, those are excellent questions. And they are all questions that I wish are founding parents, mostly fathers, had born in mind when they were writing the United States Constitution. Here are some other things I wish they'd born in mind. While we are discussing it, I wish they'd born in mind

that while we weren't going to be part of the United Kingdom anymore, their parliament is actually a pretty high functioning organization. And maybe we should have adopted a parliamentary system instead of adopting the absolutely bananas congressional system that we currently have. Some of this is about the fact that the Constitution is extremely vague about the Supreme Court. It says that Supreme Court justices will be chosen by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate. That's all it says. That's not really what it's that's pretty much. Advice and consent. And the Senate this year has interpreted that to mean over the years that has meant different things. It used to be before about

like 1960, I think. It used to be before about like 1960, I think. It used to be that the president just chose the Supreme Court justices and then Congress said as you wish. Or yeah, I guess that's, I guess consent implies that they could say no somehow. But they didn't actually figure out that they could say no until like 1960. One of the weirder things that happened in the US Supreme Court is that when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, he wasn't pleased with what the Supreme Court was doing and none of the Supreme Court justices were dying, so he just decided that the Supreme

Court should have more justices, and he appointed a bunch of new people to the Supreme Court, it was called packing the court, and that's how we got all of the new deal legislation through. So that would be really fascinating if we just kept doing that, because then there would be as many Supreme Court justices as there are Congress people. Or as many Supreme Court justices as there are Americans.

We could all be on the Supreme Court. So yeah, I want to back up for a second, I just bet that we're going to get a lot of feedback from our British viewers about how their parliament does not function well. I mean, you can say that their parliament doesn't function well, but come on. I mean, well, we're comparing it to America's.

Yeah, I mean, there's much. Well, I think what the idea of the parliamentary system that is effective is that the party that has the most seats in parliament is able to choose its leader, and that person becomes the prime minister, rather than potentially having a president and a congress who profoundly intensely hate each other and see there being a great de-arrête political hate to be made from hating each other. That's true. I hadn't thought about that.

Yeah, and it does seem like it does not work out super well because oftentimes you get the president from one party and then everybody pushes back and that's congress from the other party. Now the alternate argument is that basically the United States was set up to be a country in which it was extremely difficult to do anything and that it has been that and that it is often benefited from being that rather than you know going populist in this direction or populist in that direction. I mean essentially the US revolution was this extremely conservative revolution in which Yeah, one group of rich white land-owning men Exchanged control of the United States with a slightly different but largely identical group of rich white land-owning men

and largely identical group of rich white land-owning men. And I think a lot of both the, I think a lot of the problems of the United States since then were sort of sealed into the cake. We're sort of baked in from the very beginning. Right, but also, you know, it's gone okay. The United States has been an incredibly successful country and one of the reasons that our revolution

was a successful revolution is because it was a reasonably conservative one versus. And one of the reasons that our revolution was a successful revolution is because it was a reasonably conservative one, versus like you look at the French Revolution, which was so radical that in the end, it wasn't sustainable. And so, you know, they went from having one desperate named Louis to one desperate named Napoleon. Right.

So back to the Supreme Court. Yeah. The president gets to pick one one and the Congress gets to approve it, post Nixon. They get to advise and consent. Although in this case, they are refusing to advise and also refusing to consent. And they are preemptively refusing to consent. I think the proper response to this, to be honest, what I would love to have happen is I would love to have President Obama nominate a moderate, moderate justice, and then have

Congress approve it. That is not going to happen for a variety of reasons. Congress is able to make, is able to cite precedent for what they're doing. The president is able to cite precedent for why this is crazy. The truth is that we should have prepared an answer to this problem at some point in the last 230 years. And we really haven't. Now I think everybody brings their own bias to this. I think I would like to think that even if the president

were someone with whom I disagreed politically, that with 330 days left in office, that president should be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice. And I think I would think that regardless of my own political opinions, but it's hard to know because you can't see pasture imbiases. Yeah, well fascinating. Here's American history. The constitution is not perfect.

Nor, in fact, is it very clear a lot of the time? Yeah, there are also a lot of things that we're glad we've changed. I've got another question, everybody's glad we've changed about the Constitution. It's very weird to me when people think that the Constitution is some kind of, you know, like the founding fathers were gods of some sort, and they've passed down this document that is perfect in every way. Anyway, I have another question, John, and probably is time to move on. That was a pretty long one and as usual, packed with comedy.

This question is from Lane who says, do you're hick-a-john? I need help with hugs. As I've gotten older, I've started to hug more people outside of my family and I can't say that I'm very good at it. I love a good hug, but I don't always know how to go about giving one. My question is this, when you go to hug someone else, do your arms go above or under the person's arms, or does it go over one shoulder, and under the other arm does it change with different genders and different situations?

I have no idea. Well, Hank is much more of a hugger than I am. I have lots of opinions on this. Yeah, and you'll recall that one time the president of the United States attempted to shake Hank's hand. And Hank said, no sir, we are going to hug. Well, he just hugged two other people. But he extended his hand to you and you were like, I'm coming in, Mr. President. Well, I figured I thought that people would say the president president is a sexist, if he hugged two women

and then shook the hand of a man. I'm inclined to agree. I thought you made the right call, but for sure. Yeah, and he's very fit, by the way. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha There's no wrong way to hug, but it is like a handshake in that you kind of can tell things about people by their hugs. And I think that in general, a hug should be firm and not uncomfortable. And where the arms end up going is almost entirely up to circumstance. And that often has to do with height.

If there's a great height differential, then you're going to go around the middle and they're going to go over the top. And that happens, and this doesn't happen to me very often because I'm fairly tall, but I have a friend who's like six eight, and when I hug him, I go, I don't try to get my hands up over one of their shoulders. Oh, I do.

When my best friend is six seven, and when I hug him, I go one hand over the shoulder. Even as dumb as it looks, I just don't. You can't even get it up there. It's not just that it looks dumb. I feel like I'm like at a middle school dance, which was the last time that my peers were so much taller than I was, you know?

And so the boys who were always shorter than the girls back then were supposed to be, we were supposed to have our arms on their shoulders and they're supposed to have their hands on our waist. And we just looked ludicrous. And I feel like that every time I hug Chris, I think to myself, I'm just a middle school boy at a dance together.

Yeah, so I will find myself going up on tiptoes when I'm hugging Adam and trying to get one hand over his shoulder. But, and I do feel a little bit odd, I will say, now that I'm thinking about it, when I give him a hug, because I feel kind of like a little girl, and I'm just like cuddling into his chest. But I think that it's mostly down to height, where your arms end up, if you're roughly the same height,

you do one over and then like, and you sort of like, you know, you, the whole process of giving a hug, you have this wind up where you pull your arms out while you're still a fair distance away. Yeah. And that's the time when you're using your weird monkey brain to figure out where my arms are gonna end up.

Yep. And if you do that dance and you're at hands keep matching each other, and then you gotta, like, you just eventually you will get close enough and there will be enough of a difference that you'll end up in a hug and it will be okay. Yeah, you know, Lane, what I would say is that I always let the other person

based on the way that they hold out their hands for the hug. I let the other person dictate and maybe this means that I'm too passive or I'm never gonna be successful in business or something, but I let the other person dictate the terms of the hug. And then if I find that they are like me and not a hug term dictator, what I do in that situation is I just go right arm up, left arm down.

Right. Just as a... That's sort of the natural. That's my in an emergency this person also doesn't lead lead the hug I'm gonna go right arm up left arm down so that would be my recommendation what do you think about body contact in a hug I'm not crazy about body contact in a hug I think hugs are mostly for arms and collar bones I deeply disagree I feel like I feel like your toes should touch your knees, your hips should touch, your chest should touch.

No, this is all the way down. I like to mint, I mean, if I'm hugging my wife, or my kids or something, but no, I like to minimize. Touching? Yeah. Just bodily contact. I do, just jetting. Can we move on to a question about Mars?

Yeah, sure. I thought I could get you off the topic of bugs by bringing up Mars. All right, I take this question from Netta, who asks, dear John and Hank, a few podcasts ago, Hank said, Martian winter. And that got me thinking, does all of Mars have winter at the same time, or is it like Earth

where the northern and southern hemispheres have it at different times? Does Mars have hemispheres, or an equator? I'd love to know what the seasons are like on Mars, and if it depends on where you are, I love the podcast, it is the highlight of my week, and I think absolutely hilarious. Neda, you do not have a very good sense of humor. Well, but we appreciate the sentiment anyways. Yeah, Mars is just like Earth. It has an axial tilt like Earths and thus it has seasons like Earth. It has a winter and one hemisphere and then while it's summer and the other hemisphere. And all planets have hemispheres. The equator

is defined by the spin of the planet. So where it's the, you know, when planet is spinning, I'm doing hand gestures now. So this is a visual thing. Look on the internet, you can see what a hemisphere is. It's halfway down. And the sphere. Yeah, halfway down the sphere. It's almost like it's the hemisphere.

Exactly. But there's not like, for example, Uranus spins on its side. And so it's it's it's it's hemispheres are left and right not top and bottom. You're never going to say Uranus without me laughing at you ever. That's fine. We need to rename that planet. But there would be so there would be planets that there could be a planet that doesn't have winners like that that would be perfectly 90 degrees

with the plan of the solar system. And I don't know if there are any planets like that. That probably are. But so I think Mercury's like that. Would you be better off? Like so you could do what you could do in the United States where you spend summer in New York. And then you're like, oh, it's starting to get cold. the United States where you spend summer in New York.

And then you're like, oh, it's starting to get cold. I'm gonna go to Sydney, Australia and enjoy more summer. Yeah, you could totally do that. Except that instead of summer, it would just be a little bit less frigid. You might get up to like, you might get up. I mean, in addition to never being able to go outside because there's no air, you would, you would, you know, you're never going to get up much up. You're not going to give it above freezing. I don't think ever on the surface of Mars. Really? Yeah. That

sounds miserable. Well, you know, I live in Montana where it doesn't get above freezing for quite a, quite a honk of the year. But, but does have air though. I just think air is such an important part of what makes earth enjoyable. It is a big part of what makes earth enjoyable. Do you want to know another part of what makes earth enjoyable? I do. The question is from Gavin who asks, dear Hank and John, cows eat grass. Yep. So why don't people? It's cheap and easy to grow so shouldn't everyone just eat grass. Grass. No. A thing that makes Earth great. No, they shouldn't eat grass and I'll tell you why.

So, humans need certain things, protein, fiber, all things items. So, is it also in grass? It's a calorie inefficient food versus like our agriculture staples like rice, potatoes. Yes. It is, it does not have as much energy in it. Okay.

Alternately, there is a reason. There is a reason. What is the reason? Well, first, we're not cows. Well, I understand that we're not cows, but what is a reason. There is a reason. What is the reason? Well, first, we're not cows. Well, I understand that we're not cows, but what is the reason if it is energy as energy intensive and as digestible, blinds? It's not as digestible. So that's the thing.

You have just as much energy in grass, which is why you can burn grass and there will be dry grass and there will be energy released. Basically, what's happening in our bodies is just a slow burn of all the things that we eat. But there are certain things that our bodies are not metabolically set up to digest. And cellulose is one of those things. Whereas in a cow's body, they can convert that cellulose, which is just made up of sugars, but sugars bonded together in a particular way.

They can break that cellulose down into those sugars and then use those sugars the way that we would use sugar as fuel. We cannot do that and we cannot do that because we don't have the same digestive system as a cow. And also because cows actually, I'm pretty sure, don't break down cellulose themselves. They do it with bacteria in their guts and that's why they have a bunch of different chambers because they have this whole fermentation thing happening with a bunch of different bacterial colonies that are turning that cellulose into fuel for a cow. So each of a cow is for different stomachs as a different is colonized by different bacteria?

I bet it is. No, that is not a thing that I know for sure, but it seems very likely to me. Follow up question, what percentage of a cow is actually bacteria? I would guess that the number of cells of bacteria, there are more bacteria cells than cow cells in a cow. Really? I would just get, certainly, by weight, again, by weight, it's going to be almost entirely cow, but by number of cells, because bacteria cells are much smaller than cow cells. But I don't think of myself.

I don't think of myself when I think of what constitutes me. I do not think of the number of pounds that the cells I think of as me weigh. I think of this number of cells that are me. And that's closer, I think, to what I am than a number on a scale that could fluctuate wildly. So the thought that I am actually, and yes, you're gonna see a lot of this in my new book. The thought that I am actually only half me is distressing. Well, here's the question, are you even half you? What sells count as being you? That's a great question, right? Because if you cut off your, you know, your pinky finger, you're still you, even though you've lost this part of you. So it's really, it's mostly brain stuff.

It isn't, but it isn't entirely brain stuff because that's why it's not something like if you had a crin system stuff as well. If you had a traumatic brain injury right now, like your personality would be different, you would be different in important and central ways, but I would still think of you as you. Right.

And you would still be you. Right. So the actual still be you. Right. So the actual, I mean, this is, it's just like, thiendishly complicated. That's all I can say about it. Yes, yes, that's probably, but I do sometimes feel like I just have all of these, like, sort of meat parts to the meat that are necessary

to like hold onto stuff and move around. Well, yeah, but I will remind you. I will remind you. Or mine your noises with my mouth. I will remind you that your brain is also made of meat. Okay, here's a question from Joanna who asks, dear John and Hank, my name is Joanna, I'm from Berlin and I'm not a native English speaker and only 13 years old so I apologize in advance for any grammatical mistakes that I'm going to make. You made none in that sentence. Here's my question, Colin, that's appropriate. I've been an herd fighter for two to three

years now and as the John Bobblehead first came out, I was just a little kid and didn't even know you existed. So when the John and Hank Bobblehead collection came out, I was really happy and bought them. This is the best email in terms of grammar. Yeah, I have ever read. I really love them, but John fell down yesterday and unfortunately his head fell off. Sorry for your head, X-John. She even put the parentheses and the period in the right place. I don't have the money to buy another set, so do you have any idea how I could fix John? Thank you for your dubious advice and don't forget to be awesome, best wishes. I mean, first off, never again apologize for your grammar, Joanna. In English or in German, because that was phenomenal.

That is, I can only hope that seven years from now, my son will be able to write in any language that well. Okay, so first off, how to fix the head falling off of a bumble head problem. Hank, we've talked about some big problems in this podcast. Whether you are you, whether there should be a Supreme Court justice over the next 330 days or whether we should just leave that seat empty inexplicably for an entire freaking year. Sorry, that revealed some bias.

We've talked about Martian hemispheres. We've never talked about anything as important as how to reattach a bubble head. Which all of that preamble makes me feel like you just have no idea. I do know. Oh, I do know. What's your thought?

OK, so you got to do Joanna's. You got to glue the very top of my neck. You've got to put super glue on the top, not on the sides, on the top of the neck, because that's how they do it in the first place. And then you put the head very carefully back onto the neck, and you should be able to retain a percentage at least of the bubble. Right.

I would say close, but I'm going to suggest instead of superue, which has no flex, it dries extremely strong, but hard. I would say something like rubber cement or caulk so that you can get something that will be happy moving around a lot. Yeah. Alternately, just get a new bubble head set at dfba.com. I don't suggest that definitely repair rather than replace when possible.

Today's podcast is brought to you. By John and Hank Bobbleheads, available now at dftba.com for the low, low price of just $35. Might be 40. We're not sure. Something around there. Today's podcast is also brought to you by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Supreme Court Justice Stacking, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Supreme Court Justice stacking responsible for the new deal and possibly all of current American prosperity.

That's a bold, bold statement. Doofius. Doofius, I mean, some American prosperity, some percentage American prosperity might be able to be traced back to that. It's one of those things where if it had gone wrong, we would remember it. As like, you know, this power grab by the first president to be elected four times,

he was essentially president for life. Yeah, it was basically a power grab. And today's podcast is also brought to you by Martian Summer. Summer on Mars. Still incredibly cold. And finally, this podcast is brought to you by Cellulose. That component of grass that's made of sweet and tasty, wonderful sugar, but is somehow yet still inaccessible to us because we are not sufficiently made of bacteria.

I got another question this one is from Alain who asks, dear Hank and John, I'm a listener from the French speaking part of Belgium. Like most of my friends, though, I consume a lot more English-speaking media, be it books, TV shows, movies, YouTube videos, etc., than French-speaking ones. For my point of view here in Europe, it seems that especially in the internet-era culture from the English-speaking world, mostly the USA, automatically has a wider reach and is seen as cooler, more relevant, or simply better. This is making it more difficult for non-English speaking creators to compete and reach an

audience I'm worried about what this means for diversity. While I love the American and other English speaking media I consume, I still want to hear about other cultures including my own. This is a great point, and I forget about it because obviously we do have a big, you know, you and I have a big audience overseas, especially in Europe in places where they don't speak English as a first language, but a lot of people speak English nonetheless. Yeah, I feel like the number of people in Europe speaking English just continues to rise. Yeah, but I think it's a big problem for internet culture in general because the internet feels so big and it feels so inclusive.

A lot of times we forget that the vast majority of people can't participate in online discourse, at least in the internet's language, which is currently English. So, you know, when you know, internet discourse, we're excluding people who don't speak English, at least when we're talking about the kind of internet discourse that I engage in, I'm excluding people who don't speak English. I'm excluding people who don't have regular access to the same internet tools that I use, which most of which are dependent upon broadband. And so you end up excluding most people. Yeah, as you feel like you feel like you're being inclusive, you feel like you're listening to voices that are, you know, systemically silenced, but in fact, like you're participating in a tool that is furthering the systemic silence of many voices, and in many cases, the most vulnerable voices, not the French-speaking part of Belgium, thinking more of places where poor countries, communities where people don't have access to those tools. I think the first thing that I'm in favor of

is more content and more languages. I spoke to, when I was in Davos, Switzerland, I spoke to a lot of internet entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the number one thing that they shan't was that, yes, we need internet connectivity. We also need content. We need something to connect to. We don't have a ton of content. We don't have a ton of high quality content.

That's, I have a friend who has gone over to several places in the developing world to, and we actually, NerdFeder community a long time ago, work together to get some equipment for her, to bring over there so that they could, like, so that she could teach people how to make content. And that was sort of focused on photojournalism at first, but then also documentary film, and like documentary film in sort of internet style, which becomes just, you know, another kind of YouTube video. And it was amazing to me, both like sort of like what she was able to do in terms of teaching people who then taught other

people and also how inexpensive it was for her to go do that. I mean, obviously like there's more than the dollar cost, like also it's just a difficult and time-consuming thing to do to take a piece of your career away to go and spend this time doing some of these. Obviously, I'm not going to make you a bunch of money. But it was a fascinating to see. Now, and I'm really excited about hoping that more of that gets done.

And that there are a lot of people who have more experience creating for the internet. And hopefully those people will share those tools with the rest of the world. Now, it was really interesting to me in this question. Something I hadn't even thought about is that Alain says it's cooler to watch English stuff. Right. Which is really interesting to me, like how that might get tied up. and says it's cooler to watch English stuff. Right. Which is really interesting to me, like how that might get tied up.

But like I have noticed, as I've been trying to watch the YouTube communities of other countries, that a lot of places in Europe don't have that many native YouTube, like interesting YouTube things happening. There are some, but not tons. Yeah.

And that's, I think partially because European culture and American culture are different, but much more similar than other cultures are across the world. And so there's probably a lot of connection that's pretty easy, and then there's also, you already see that this stuff is popular. You know that people are liking this, they have a ton of subscribers, whether it's Dan and Phil or PewDiePie. And you like, of course, it's like the easiest path is to go with the thing that's already popular. There's also a culture built around those creators as well. You know, like there's fan art that you can have access to. Like, and that makes the world

a part of the thing. Yeah, it makes, and it makes the whole world more enjoyable. It makes the fan community more enjoyable if you don't have to build that stuff from scratch. Yeah, I think there might be something special about watching somebody who's a little bit different from you in the same way that people like watching PewDiePie because like, you know, he's a really talented, funny guy who also has that extra spice of not being American.

Right, this is a big issue in my other life in publishing because in the US, very, very little is published in translation and even less is read in translation. Americans are just wofl at reading books translated from other languages. Interesting. Except for the girl with the dragon tattoo. We're good at that one. Yeah, we do, in general, we actually do Scandinavian mystery novelists fairly well. But everything else were really bad. We also converted the Harry Potter novels into Americans.

That's true. We took the U out of color. And made it sorcererous to just confuse everyone in the whole world. I hear a lot from my readers in Europe that they want to read the books in English. They like reading them in English because they want to read them the way that I intended them to be read. My counter argument to that is that if you don't think in English, you kind of can't read it in the way that I intended it to be read. And in fact, like, in some ways, that idea, the way I intended it to be read, is to me,

at least, a flawed idea. Like, I don't think that I wasn't thinking of it being read in an intended or an unintended way, exactly when I was writing it. And people always talk about how translation makes books worse. I would argue that always talk about how translation makes books worse. I would argue that lots of times translation makes books better too. It's just as possible that a translator can improve a novel as make one worse. And I see that in my career. I see there are places where my translators are so good that my books are compared to books that are much, much better than mine. Like in Germany, especially, you know, a lot of times Sophie Zaits is my translator there,

and she's a brilliant translator and one, you know, and so my books there are compared to Philip Roth and Jonathan Franz and Tony Morrison and so on, but I'm just like, what did you do? Yeah, clearly, like that's not me. You know, clearly, like Sophie is doing something to my novels that's making them very, very good. So, I think, I guess what I would encourage you to do is to find content in your language and celebrate it. Right. And interestingly, Canada actually has rules with national broadcasting that you have to

include a certain amount of Canadian content. And that's not something you can do with the internet. You can't force a certain amount of people to watch a certain amount of content from inside the country. And the problem you run into is all of these European single language markets, non-English markets, are going to be definitionally smaller than the English language market, which is huge because of America. It's also because lots of people who don't speak English as a first language do speak

English. And so if you have a smaller market, it's harder to make money and then it's harder to make a living and it's harder to, you know, like to increase your production values. And so a lot of what, you know, it's just a much more difficult path for creators. And kind of what we need is people to like content specifically because it's less popular. And when people, whenever somebody like is sort of gives that that sentiment a hard time for being like hipster-y, I'm like, well, how else is anything new ever going to get discovered?

Because you have to like something that's different and new. And there's something wonderful and freeing creatively about not having a huge audience that allows for interesting things to happen creatively that we have to have an audience, a certain percentage of people who are always looking for something that isn't the mainstream. Not just because it's not the mainstream, but also because more like creative, interesting creative things happen more easily outside of the mainstream. Yeah, I totally agree.

The last thing that I would say about this is, I have a friend who calls this the Lithuanian Poet Problem that if you are a Lithuanian poet, your chances of winning a Nobel Prize, your chances of finding a wide audience are so infinitesimally small compared to if you're writing in English or even in German or French, that it's, it can be hard even if you find success to make a living because there just aren't that many potential customers for your work. And this is a kind of privilege that we almost never talk about, but it's an intensely important kind of privilege.

And like one of, I would argue, like one of the most important but but because it's so important and because it's so omnipresent It's easy not to look at like air like it's easy to just feel like it's in the air But it's not in the air writing in English is a massive structural advantage And you know being able to read in English is a massive structural advantage and those are things that we have to be conscious of. All right, John, this is the part of the podcast where we talk about news, I think. The news from AFC Wimbledon.

Well, that, and also the news from Mars. A cold dead rock in the middle of space? Correct! Or maybe not dead, maybe not, but probably dead. from Mars. A cold dead rock in the middle of space? Correct! Or maybe not dead, maybe not, but probably dead. Well, but if it were alive, John. Yes. That would be to be clear, the biggest news ever in the history of humanity. No. That's not the news today though.

Also, I would argue that it would not be the biggest news in the history of humanity. No. That's not the news today though. Yeah. Also, I would argue that it would not be the biggest news in the history of humanity. Really? Yes. And the history, you think that life on, that life we are not alone in the universe would not be the biggest news? No.

What if there was a person who was not a human? A sentient person. like a wookie. If Mars had wookies that were living in underground tunnels, that would be the biggest news in human history. Okay, let's make a sure. Mars once had bacteria that might have come from Earth. Well, we'll be able to figure that out. Alright, if Mars has life separate from Earth,

then evolved separately from life on Earth. Right. Would it be the biggest news in human history? I'm going to say hard-know, but I'm going to say it would be in the top 200 news stories in human history, but I would also argue that AFC Wimbledons return to the football league in 2011

was one of the top 200 news stories of all time. I mean, that's the thing about arguing. The printing press. You can literally argue anything. Yeah. The agricultural revolution. The Colombian exchange. AFC Wimbledons victory over Lutentown in the 2011

conference playoff final. You know, like, the problem is there are a bunch of big stories, right? So it's hard to pick which is the biggest. All right, do your news. No, you do yours first. I have important news. The bad news is that I somehow, while walking up the stairs, you lost the news from our into the internet list area of this house.

It's just popular mechanics asking me to submit my email address for some reason. Can you just go to No Thanks? Just hit the X. Oh, thanks. Oh, wow. Thank you, John. I'm so good at navigating the internet. You're really good at the internet.

We've got a new story here. The class is investigating what's called photonic propulsion, which could potentially send a spacecraft to Mars in as little as three days. And current technology, we'd be looking at like a year to get there. A little less than a year. Depends on the time of year you leave,

and depends on the route you take. Sure. But so big problem in space travel, as we all we say, is you have to have the fuel to move the fuel to move the fuel, to move the fuel, to get to Mars. That you need to get to Mars. So you're mostly pushing fuel around.

The nice thing about photonic propulsion is that you don't have to move the fuel around. The nice thing about photonic propulsion is that you don't have to move the fuel around. You are shooting the fuel at the spacecraft, kind of. So imagine you've got a hose, and then at the other end of the driveway, you want to move some stuff off the driveway, some leaves, you spray the hose at the leaves, and want to move some stuff off the driveway, some leaves. You spray the

hose at the leaves and all the leaves go, fff, right off your driveway and you're like, ah, good old clean driveway, the neighbors are going to be so envious. So it's like that, except instead of a hose of water, it's a hose of photons, a laser beam, that you pointed a mirror and the photons which do not have mass, but do have energy and momentum remarkably enough can transfer that momentum onto a spacecraft from a centralized place where those photons are being generated by some extremely powerful laser. And then that laser will shoot at the reflectors

on the spacecraft, which would have to be fairly light, at least to start and move it to extremely fast speeds with this extremely powerful laser. Now you got to build a really powerful laser and you're probably not going to be shooting it from the surface of Earth. There's a problem here, which is that the laser would evaporize some of the atmosphere. We would have a hard time getting out of the atmosphere, so you probably want the laser to be in space. But you wouldn't have to carry this fuel because the fuel is made of photons and photons do not have mass. But you wouldn't be carrying them with you, it would actually be shooting the photons from a place probably in orbit around Earth or on the moon.

And they've been doing research on this, and it's a system that works, that functions, they've done it in the lab. But what you have to, and NASA is currently, you know, obviously thinking, worrying, trying to figure out how this will work. But you have to build a really massive laser. And probably you would be for this initial step, you'd be sending fairly light things thing like maybe like a 200 pound or a hundred kilogram spacecraft to Mars. But you could do it really fast, which would be amazing because the solar system is really big. So big that you know Voyager 1 only just left the solar system after being launched in 1977. So if you wanna get, and also because this is a good way of transferring energy and you don't need to haul your fuel along with you, this would be a sort of the way

if you wanted to send a probe to another star. Mmm, that's exciting. Yeah, but not as exciting. As ASC Wimbledon's heroic one-new victory against Carlisle United, Hank, you will remember that we were supposed to play Carlisle United a couple weeks ago. Right, but the soggy pitch. That game was won by Waterlogged Pitch.

Waterlogged Pitch was at a great season in League 2. They're in second. But we beat Carlisle United. You'll remember in the game before that, we beat Barnet, and in the game before that we beat barnet and in the game before that we beat lute and town the same team we beat in two thousand eleven that means i'm not good at math and but i believe that means that a city winbill that is one three straight games

is that unusual it is unusual yes is it unusual for everybody in the league is unusual to win three straight games. Here is the most exciting part of this. AFC Wimbledon are currently in fifth place in league two with 15 games to go. Wow.

So what are the top three don't have to compete at all? The top three automatically go to league one. Do they still play in the playoffs just for fun? No, they choose not to. They take those days off. And then four, five, six, and seven enter into a playoff, and the winner of that playoff goes up to League 1. Oh wow.

Only one team from four, five, six, seven goes up to League 1. But right now, AFC Wimbledon is in fifth, and crazily, they are not that far behind third. So I'm officially dreaming, but I'm starting to think about dreaming of automatic promotion. But this has been an amazing, amazing run that Wimbledon have been on. They've had a great season. So some other teams have had some bad games.

We have benefited from other teams having some bad games, but also Wimbledon is just winning all of their games. And like if you win all your games, you go up. And so I'm starting. Now here's the crazy thing, Hank. I actually looked the other day. So the third tier in English football is called League One, hopefully. And I actually looked at the average attendance for all the teams currently in League 1. And they are all at least 3,000 more than AFC Wimbledon's stadium can contain. All of them? Yeah, every team in the world.

The least one is 3,000 more than AFC Wimbledon's stadium can contain. The highest one is like 20,000 more. So you got to get that new stadium built. So obviously we have to get the new stadium built, but also it makes me think that if we were to go up to league one somehow, that would be a wonderful season. But I can't imagine how it would be sustainable, but I mean, who knows?

I mean, you know, obviously no one thought that AFC Wimbledon would go from the ninth tier of amateur football and be promoted five times in nine years. So who knows? Who knows? Who knows? I am starting to dream.

It is incredibly fun. It's so exciting. The goal, by the way, was scored by 34-year-old Paul Robinson, a journeyman center back who was up for a free kick. I myself am only 38 years old. Meaning that Paul Robinson scored that goal. I began to dream that perhaps in addition to sponsoring AFC Wimbledon, they might have

a place for me on the club. You know the great tragedy is John. We're in this house that our parents have rented. And it has an Xbox. But you didn't bring FIFA. I had no idea that they would have, it was one of the like ancient Xboxes from way back in 2008.

It is an old Xbox. But I could have brought at least FIFA 10 or something. Yeah, I could have just absolutely schooled you. Yeah. And yeah, it would have been fun. Well. But instead we'll just play that bad Mario Kart ripoff. Yeah, over and over again.

Sonic the Hedgehog Mario Kart ripoff, that is, I don't like to criticize, because I know that a lot of the developers for Sonic the Hedgehog's racing game are big fans of Dear John and Hank, but boy, it is a not a great game. You guys should have worked harder on that one. Feels like you might have phoned it in. It's a pretty obvious Mario Kart. It seems a little bit like you've got took every single thing that Mario Kart has and just did that. But maybe with a little

bit more terrible, terrifying colors. Just worse in every way. My favorite thing in that game is that instead of green and red turtle shells, there are green and red boxing gloves, but they do the exact same thing. And the red one is heat-seeking, just like in Mario Kart, and the green one just shoots straight

and bounces to the end. It's like a shell. It's beautiful. So I am actually going to ANFC Wimbledon's Game Against Oxford United this weekend, which will be in the past when this video was uploaded, but I'm incredibly excited because it's just AFC Wimbledon are suddenly there in fifth. So we'll see. This is a huge Game Against Oxford United because Oxford United is third. Oxford is sitting there in that automatic promotion spot. So if they win that game,

the math, even with, you know, so many games left, like, it doesn't, doesn't work in Wimbledon's favorite. If we win that game, I'm going to be properly dreaming. All right, that's exciting. We've got a couple of updates from the last time we had a podcast. Many people, from the last time we had a podcast. Many people wrote in to say that when we said that if you were bleeding out of any orifice you should go see a doctor. They wanted to remind us that in fact about half of the people have that happen regularly and it is a healthy, normal thing to have happen. So I apologize for being so dudes.

We were blinded as we so often are by... The patriarchy. By the patriarchy, if by our own experience. Yes. We also got a comment speaking of places where we were blind from social, about social identity from Rachel, who points out that when I say,

in the same, by the bell question, last week, you can't actually separate who you are from how people see you because identity is something that is hashed out in social same, by the bell question, last week, you can't actually separate who you are from how people see you because identity is something that is hashed out in social spaces that that may be true of ego identity, but that stereotypes about how people see you, obviously that can be extremely destructive. And she says, I think it is possible and positive

to be able to separate who you are from the stereotypes that other people have about you or your group. For example, all of the research about a phenomenon known as stereotype threat is basically about the benefits of separating yourself from how people see your group. So that's an important and interesting kind of correction comment. And we also had a bunch of, we had two different people who wrote in about the phrase turn of the century. Yes. First, someone who is a linguist and has access to linguistic databases and was able to identify the first time turn of the century, I appeared in print and it was in the 1890s to refer

to the turn of the previous century from 1700 to 1800. Wow. And it was only used like three or four times, though in that entire century to refer to that. So obviously just a clever turn of phrase. And then in the 1920s, it became used much more frequently. 1921, I believe. You're allowed to use it in 2021 and not until then.

But Jacob has suggested that since we do not have the opportunity to do this very often, we should in fact be using the phrase turn of the millennium. And there's no reason not to, we can, why not do that in order to avoid confusion in this one century when we can. Yeah, we probably won't be around for the turn of the next millennium,

so we should enjoy the phrase while it is available to us. Also, we got this comment from Andrew, more of a question, but a very interesting one. Dear John and Hank, I dropped my four-sided banana in the sewer half a year ago, but fortunately managed to fish it out. It's been in my cupboard ever since, so it's several months past its expiry date.

Part of it has been eaten by mold, but the rest is still intact, if a bit worse for wear. Is it safe to cut the banana up and put it in my cereal? Also, I collect water from stagnant pools around my neighborhood and use that instead of milk. Thanks, Andrew. That sounds wonderful. I bet you could have packed at least three or four more

deer-hunga-john references in there, speaking of which, oh my god, it's burning! All right, John, what are you doing today? Well, nothing. This is not a podcast where we learned anything. We learned that there is winter on Mars. We learned that only recently did Congress decide that they, that they're the Constitution for Quest for Their Consent meant anything at all. Which I did not, I honestly did not know, and I'm fast.

I probably, I've talked to you more about the Supreme Court. I probably got the decade wrong, but it was sometime the 20th century. There were a few things before that, but it was really only then that they got the real, a real, a, I want to say bug in the bridges, but I'm not sure that that's actually a phrase. But I think it should be. They got a real bug in their bridges about supreme court nominations. Is that a phrase? It sounds like it should be. I googled it, but the internet doesn't work up here.

What else did we learn today, Hank? We learned that 13-year-olds in Germany have better grammar than the average American. And we learned that John is not a real hugger. No. I mean, I like hugging, but it should be most, almost exclusively an arms event. Yes, we learned that John believes that hugs should be almost

exclusively involving arms and potentially in extreme intimate circumstances. Call of events. Yeah, I'm okay with call of events. Thanks for listening to our podcast, which is edited by Nicholas Jenkins. Our intern is Claudia Morales. You can email us at hankinjohnatgmail.com or use the hashtag on Twitter. Facebook, wherever you hashtag.

Deer Hankinjohn. Uh, our theme music is from Gunnarola. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome. Thanks for watching!