Dear Hank & John - 430: A Yawn Across Time

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Would it be harder to swim in lava or water? Why do I have one long white hair that grows from my face cheek? What would the stars look like if I were moving faster than light, like the Enterprise in Star Trek? What role do John and Hank play with Partners In Health? How does gravity impact digestion? What is the longest length of time a yawn has been spread? Why is everything so hard? Can you quell my fears about AI? …Hank and John Green have answers!If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [e-mail] us for monthly livestreams at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming November 3rd, it's the second annual Complexly Learnathon, a celebration of learning and the free content that we make at SciShow, Crash Course, and all of Complexly. We believe in making things that are free for everyone forever and that help the world lower barriers to access when it comes to learning. That's not always the easiest business model, but we do believe it's the best one. We're doing activities and videos during the Learnathon and live streams all month, and we have many opportunities for you to support. our shows, including some really cool new merch, so mark your calendars and go to Complexly Learnathon.com to check out the schedule of events. You're listening to a Complexly podcast. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

Yours, I prefer to think of it, dear John and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, every morning, every morning I'm going out of the house. I'm taking Oren to school. I get hit by a bike. It's a vicious cycle. You know, I actually did get hit by a bike once.

A bike messenger hit me. And I never quite recovered from it. My mouth has never been the same since he hit me with his shoulder to my face. I broke my nose. I got a concussion. Teeth. Teeth problems. And teeth problems that have lasted for the last 20 years.

That was 2003, I believe. Once there's teeth problems, man, it is hard to not have teeth problems. Yeah. Hank, can I tell you what I did this morning before work that was much better than my usual strategy of scrolling? What'd you do? I made hot sauce with your mother. Oh.

And we just, like, cut up the peppers, and we chatted, and we put the peppers in the blender, and we did all the salt and everything so that they can ferment over the next two weeks, and then we put them all in the jars. and it was great. Why don't I do that every, why don't I do something like that every day where I see someone early in the morning from like six to eight? Why don't I do that? Or exercise or do something other than scrolling. I don't know. It's hard to get out of bed. That's part of it. Like, you know, we've got our experiences, you know, and they're happening at a fairly deep level. And one of our experiences is, don't get out of this thing. This is great in here. Well, you do need something.

But like right next to you is a thing that contains the union. universe. So grab onto that. Well, it feels like it contains the universe. It actually contains a very small slice of the universe. That's what my lizard brain thinks. Can I tell you about my new strategy? So far, it's been working pretty well. Please. So I've set my phone to block all of the major social media apps, but I still need them as part of my, like I need to DM people, if nothing else. And so what I've done is I've set it to block them. But then there's like a little ignore your time limit for the day thing, but I only ever said it to let me ignore it for 15 minutes because what happens is I go out to DM a friend. And then I'm in the app and they know this. This is

why they've done it this way. I'm in the app and I'm like, well, I can't leave now. The whole universe is in here. Who knows what's behind door number two? So I opened door number two and then 15 minutes later, it's like, that was your 15 minutes bud. And I could extend it. There's a button that lets you extend it, but at least it reminds me that, like, I've been doing this for 15 minutes and stops me from doing it for another 15 or 45 minute, like, session on one of these apps where I'm, like, trying to, like, my subconscious brain is like, avoid work. Work is hard. Work is bad. Just scroll. Particularly, it's worked well with the, uh, the Twitters and the, and the blue skies and the threads. I don't even know how to get DMs on those apps. I, I can't, I can't log into my

Twitter anymore. Rosiana changed the password so that neither of us know it, which I think is kind of brilliant, because when Rosiana knew it, I would just badger her until she would tell it to me. But now neither of us know it. And so it's over. My relationship with At John Green has come to an end. I've been thinking about whether I should delete all of my old tweets. Oh, I did that. It felt great. I backed them up so that I have them for posterity. You have a posterity folder somewhere in case anybody ever comes from my papers. You should sell a DVD. You should sell a DVD of your tweets. You're like, do you know to DFTVA.com and buy John Greed's tweets on a thumb drive?

I mean, I looked at some of them from like 2000, you know, I mean, I was tweeting for a long time. Oh, yeah. I used to tweet. I'd be getting like 20 likes. Yeah. And I'd feel great about that. Yeah.

My tweets from like 2009 just do not hold up was my overall impression. And I was really glad that nobody like combed through those 2009 tweets. That's a big, that's a big concern that I have. Because it used to be that it was like really hard to comb through somebody's tweets. But now you can just like ask an AI and say like, hey, AI, go find anything this person has ever said that could make someone angry. Yeah. And I love that. That's a great fun world.

You should absolutely delete all your old tweets. It feels amazing. It feels even better than when you delete a post right after posting it. I've been doing this on Tumblr a lot where I'll tumble something. Yeah. And then I'll immediately delete it. And people will be like, why did you delete it? And I'd be like, because at the moment it became stressful and unfun,

I deleted it, which felt great. I used to make TikToks that had a set time limit, and people loved that. It'd be like, this TikTok is just for the people who are here this hour. So Hank and I are trying to embrace the slow internet, but one thing I've heard from a lot of our listeners is that they use this podcast to embrace the slow internet, and it doesn't actually help them to hear us whining all day about our scrolling problem. Absolutely true. If I hear somebody say the word Twitter, I'm like, I've got to check Twitter.

It's amazing. Really? Oh, when I hear somebody say the word Twitter, I feel a physical role. evolution. Well, I get more with TikTok than Twitter. I'll be honest. I used to get it with I don't, I'm not on TikTok either. I, I, something inside of me broke and I don't think it can ever be fixed. Hank, can I ask you a question? Yeah, please. It's from M who writes, Dear John and Hank, assuming I'm fireproof, how much harder would it be to swim in lava than water? Appreciate you, M. Now, Hank, before you answer this question with science, I think I know the answer.

Okay. I will, I, there is a definite answer. I think it would be utterly. impossible because my understanding is that it basically has the same density of rock. It's just really, really hot, so it's liquid. Yeah, yeah. Like, if you, like, stood on lava, you might sink into it a little bit. But if you laid on lava, you would just lay, you'd just be laying on lava. Like, laying on a bed, but hotter. Like, if you could, like, you could push your fingers into it because you would be putting a lot of pressure on a very small area. So, you'd be increasing the pounds per square. It couldn't swim. There's too much of you for, you for No, you would, so if you're fireproof, one thing that's important to note is that you've,

you've basically eliminated physics from the equation. So you're saying, like, it doesn't matter how hot I am. So we could also just make you the same density as rock. And then you could swim in lava because we're basically the same density as water, a little different, but. And we actually, one of the fun things about water, you can change your density so that you can sink or you can float. Inhale and exhale.

Yeah. So that's fun. So basically you could make it like that, like it's like that for a rock. and it would still be much harder to swim in rock because of the viscous or in lava because of the viscosity. So water, obviously, you've seen it. It doesn't hold it together as thickly as maple syrup, but maple syrup holds itself together much less thickly than lava. Right, right. Could you swim in maple syrup if you needed to?

I don't think you could. You can go watch YouTube videos of people trying, which is amazing. Of course you can. Of course you can. I don't know if it's maple syrup, but like people swim in liquids of different density to get viewed. Why wouldn't you? Yeah. Like if somebody put an outdoor swimming pool of corn syrup in front of me,

I'd try to swim in it. Absolutely. Butter, melted butter, oil. Yeah, absolutely. And would the process of getting myself back to my natural state be a pain? Yeah. But like, would you do it for the views or would you do it for the experience? I think, and I'm just going to tell you what I think your deepest heart is,

I think you would do it for the views. I'd do it for both. You know, I'd do it for three things. I do it for the views, I do it for the experience, and I do it because there'd be other people around egging me on. Right. Once somebody eggs me on, there's sort of a lot that I'll do, you know, which is what a lot of the first year of Vod Brothers was.

You can't say that's not true. You, Mr. I waxed my chin and ate a blenderized happy meal. Oh, Hank, I wanted views so bad. You're a different man now. Nobody wanted to be famous more than I did in 2003. I wanted to be famous more than I wanted anything in the world. I would have sacrificed my family for it. Not you, but the parents, they're not listening.

They can't keep up with all the stuff that we make. There's no way that they're listening right now. I would not have actually sacrificed you, mom and dad. But I would have sacrificed a lot to get famous. But then I got famous enough, and I found out that there's no oxygen at the top of the mountain. It's not fun up there. It doesn't feel good.

And I don't want to go back. There's a Jimmy Carr quote that's like everybody's jealous of where you are, but nobody's jealous of how you got there. And I'm like, actually, opposite. Like, I'm jealous of how I got here, but less jealous of where I am. My path to the top was actually quite fun. Yeah, lots of good times.

But since the higher it has gotten it, it's gotten harder and harder, yeah. Yeah, because there's no oxygen up there. Oh, God. What does that mean? Tell me what that means to you. Well, when you go up to the top of Mount Everest, I don't know if you know about this.

No, no, no, no. I know about how there's no air, but what does it mean to have there be no air at the top of the fame pyramid? The tire you go up the mountain, the less oxygen there is, the harder it is to breathe, the more stressful it is, the fewer people who are up there with you, the less time you feel like it's sustainable to be up there, all that stuff. The more people who are like, what the hell is wrong with this person going to the top of the mountain, they must have made some deal with the devil. there's all kinds of things that I don't like about being at the top of the mountain. Now, being on the other side of the mountain. Oh, oh, so you can, it isn't just up and then back down. No, no, no, you go down the other side of the mountain.

Because you're changed by the mountain. Where you are is different. Hmm. Hmm. You're changed by the mountain. And so on the other side of the mountain, I actually, I find it pleasant over here, but I have too many memories of what it was like on top of the mountain. And so if, for instance, my brother announces that there is a nearby mountain,

mountain peak that he would like to summit, I'm like, I don't love it for him. Oh. I thought you might be a little like, should I go with him? Oh, no. No, no, no. Nobody. I thought that might be where we were headed, but that's not where we were headed. No, I just worry about me. I worry about you up there. You're like, do you have enough oxygen tanks? Yeah, you don't have oxygen tanks. You're going up there raw. But I've got all the experience from the previous summits. That's true. You watched me summit and you were like, that looks fun. I'll do that. There is a lot of our career that is like you doing something and then being like, this isn't that great and me being like, I will do it too. I'll try it. I'll bet I'd like it. It must be better than

even John thinks it is. Well, you, to be fair, handle that stuff better than I do. I think you have naturally more lung capacity than I do to extend this metaphor to absurd degrees. I think that my, as does tend to occur, my lung capacity has decreased with age. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, down here on the other side of the mountain, it's not bad. It's not bad at all. The only thing that I miss about being, like, properly in the center of pop culture famous is that I wish that when that had happened, I'd been obsessed with tuberculosis. But of course, if I'd been obsessed with tuberculosis, that wouldn't have happened. So anyway, you can't swim in lava. Anyway, you can't swim in lava. Another lesson that we all need to learn as humans. This next question comes from

Morgan, who asks, Dear John and Hank and Hank and John, why do I have one weird, long, paper, white hair that grows out of my face cheek? I have one that grows from my collarbone, too, and my wife has one that grows out of their forehead. So I know it's not just me, but why? They get to be like an inch or two before I notice. It must grow really fast, only a mild inconvenience, but our body bodies are so weird. Harry pumpkins and furry penguins, Morgan. Yeah, what do you think, Hank? I mean, you know, you're right.

Our bodies are so weird. I mean, the basic answer, John, is that we're 30 trillion cells all working together and listening to each other in a bizarre and silent symphony of chemicals. And what a cell does, like, remember back when you were one cell? Vividly. And then, like, every cell that came later had to decide what part. of a body it was going to be. Right.

And then some parts became like meter long neurons and other parts became like the epithelium of the colon. And those are very different things. Like if your skin cells were like your lung cells, you would be wet and sticky and dead. The system that controls what turns into what and like, like, you know, as simple as like the skin of my forehead is very similar to the skin on the top of my head. But like there's a difference in that like a bunch of hairs come out of the ones on the top of the head. And also there are hairs on the forehead. They just are like really small and

different. So it's very strange. And one of the sort of cutting edge spaces of biology that we still are trying to understand. And sometimes things go a little bit weird. And you get like a weird hair that comes out of your collarbone or your middle of your forehead. And those hairs oftentimes are different. This is hilarious. For whatever reason, your computer thinks you're giving me a thumbs down constantly. Oh, sorry, I'll move my hand. I'm like, he doesn't like it. But I look at your actual hand, you're not doing a thumbs down at all.

Like, in what way, like, sometimes it gives me balloons and I don't even know how to do balloons. Yeah. It never works when you're trying to make it work. Right. Oh, you just got fireworks. Did I? Yeah. That's what I was trying to do.

I was trying to do thumbs up. Well, you got fireworks instead. Your whole screen turned black and it went full fireworks. I have one of these hairs. It's up here in my upper cheek, halfway between my eye and my beard. And I love pulling it. I love, I don't know what it.

It's a little bit of pain, but it's the right amount of pain for me, buddy. And I love pulling on it. So I don't shave it or anything because I'm always waiting for it to grow long enough that I can tug it out. So it's good to know that I'm not alone. There's Morgan, Morgan's wife and me.

I got one eyebrow that just goes forever, and Catherine loves yanking that boy out. Oh, yeah, those are fun ones, too. Yeah. All right, hair is weird, bodies are weird. We're 30 trillion cells in a complicated symphony, and if all of our cells were the same, we would be wet, what and dead? I don't remember what I said.

It was great. I might have said wet and dead. That's also what you would be like, by the way, if you tried to swim in lava. Yeah. Wait, what? Yeah, you'd be wet and dead. I'd be wet with lava? Hold on.

No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not allowing that to pad. Well, it's true. Lava cannot make you wet. Oil can't make you wet. It's a liquid. I feel like ethanol can make you wet, which is interesting.

Yeah. No, any liquid can make you wet. Liquid nitrogen can make you wet. They all make you wet. You cannot know. Yeah, if you went swimming in liquid nitrogen, you would also get wet. Everyone knows this. I'm going to need to do a pole.

Your proposal is that only certain liquids can make you wet. Only water makes you wet. No. That's dumb. That's dumb. If I pour vodka on myself, I'm, I am wet. Yeah, because 60% of that vodka's water. If I pour Everclear on myself, I'm wet. No. Yeah. Damn. I'm sure. No, but like still there's like 20% of that's water. No, no, like 3% of it is water, buddy. That's some high quality alcohol they got there with Everclear. That's for chemistry. That's not for food. I agree. I had one shot of Everclear in my life and it was more than enough. I did too. We, we,

but it was for like a SciShow shoot. Again, I was being egged on. You do love being egged on. I, yeah, I, I did, I used to do, we used to do a bunch of, like, weird props to fun SciShow, but yeah, I did a shot of Everclear for SciShow, and it made me very drunk. Yeah, no, it's got a lot of alcohol. This is a problem. I, like, I have to, I can't work anymore, but I also can't go home.

If you pour hydrogen peroxide on yourself or you pour alcohol on yourself, you get wet. That is a fact. I am. Is any liquid can make you wet? I feel like any liquid that makes you cold makes you wet. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Well, it's not because you can't detect wetness. You can only detect the sensations of wetness, which include the evaporation that happens

when a more volatile substance like water or ethanol is on your skin. When the warmer molecules evaporate away and what's left behind is the colder molecules and you've experienced that as the coolness of wetness. No, you can be warm and wet. Wetness is something that happens in your consciousness. It is not something that happens physically in the world. It's something that happens to my hair. I'm pretty sure.

No, that's actually true. So, okay, now we're picturing a shirt with oil on it. That shirt is not wet. That shirt has a stain. No, if it has enough oil, it's wet. Trust me. Wet with oil? Yeah, wet with oil.

It's wet with olive oil. Wet with oil. Are you Googling it? Are you asking Google what Google's AI thinks about being wet with oil? Hank, I just have to say something about AI very briefly. I apologize that this is going to offend a portion of our audience. And we can go back to the wetness issue. But I have to say this very briefly.

We are mammals, okay? We are mammals. And it's not speciesist to think that we should survive. We are mammals. AI is not a mammal. I think this is very important distinction. I was in a conversation about AI recently and all these people were having

all these highfalutin conversations about it. And I was like, you guys are mammals. You have a deep brain that experience sensations. You are an experiencer. Yeah. You can get wet. Yeah. With oil or liquid nitrogen or any liquid because that is the nature

of getting wetness. by the way. And don't get wet with lava. Absolutely do not get wet with lava. You will be wet and dead. All right, we've got a question from Sydney. It's a science question. This one's for you, Hank. Dear John and Hank, but mostly Hank. In Star Trek, when the Enterprise is traveling faster than light, the stars appear as little white or moves that move past the ship that move past the ship is pure white, wouldn't there not be any stars because the light they're emitting wouldn't be able to catch up to the Enterprise? Or would they be moving past so many stars so quickly that the light is sort of everywhere and the view of the ship is pure white? Would it look? more like weird light tunnel that happens in Hyperdrive from Star Wars? Do we have any way of knowing Pumpkins and Penguin Sydney? I mean, I don't know. You don't know? Oh, I thought you and Deboki would research the heck out of this question. This is a perfect question. We had to reschedule this podcast, so Devoki and I didn't get a chance to talk. Oh, I mean, there's no way you know. I can give you a thought. Let's have a lot of physicists who want. We over, we over index on physicists. And also we over-index on Hank Green should know the answer to every question.

So let's turn it back on the audience. Physicists, especially astrophysicists. Tell us the answer. What would it look like if we were traveling on the enterprise faster than light, which we know we can't do, but if we could, what would it look like? Come back to the next episode of Dear Hank and John for the answer to that question. I love this. I love this.

This is great. This is great. We should do this once an episode. We should do it once an episode. All right. Our next question comes from Ava, who asks dear Hank and John, Lumella from the Mountain Kingdom. I am a Peace Corps volunteer serving in the health sector in Lusutu. My clinic regularly partners with partners in health.

And I've realized that I actually do not understand the role you all play. Are you board members, contractors, very fancy donors, or another role? This is a great question. It's a little bit of all and none. What is your official role within Pih? Actually, I think, John, you do have one. I'd love to better understand how some of my favorite creators work in our shared field, not a gardener, Ava. Great, great, and ninth specific sign-off.

So I am on the board of trustees of Partners in Health and have been for a few years. Hank is not. I'm just some guy. Hank is a, I would say, designer of fundraising techniques for partners and health and also a major donor. So we both donate some money every year, but the most, the, the, lion's share of the money that gets donated from the community comes through good store and the Keats and Co and the Awesome Sox Club and other stuff that we do. Yeah, every year there's like a large pool of anonymous and non-anonymous donors and we are among the anonymous donors during the Projects

for Awesome. And then we also donate separately during specific campaigns. So we're mostly very fancy donors, but we do work some work with them some on strategy and communications and marketing with their marketing team, talking about storytelling, stuff like that. So we get to work with them in broad interesting ways, which is really fun for us. But I think the most important thing we do is raise money. What is a board of trustees? You got me, man. I mean, I don't know. I go to a meeting twice a year. There's a lot of nice people there. They have bagels in the morning. And P.A.H. has an interesting board because I think it's the board of people who look after the health of the charity, broadly speaking. But the PAH has an interesting board because a number of people

on the board are patients or people who have been served by at PAHs sites, people who've worked on PAHs sites, not just in the health part of it, but in maybe transportation or some other part of it. And so it's a really cool board because you meet lots of interesting people from all over the world. I'm happy to be on it. It's not. nice to be able to meet with folks who are really working on system-wide change throughout the year is really encouraging to me and a great reminder. And if anything, I think, like, part of what I wish could happen and maybe will happen down the road is I wish, like, everyone could get the kind of updates that I get from PAH's sites, because it's super encouraging, even in difficult

times, to see how people are finding ways to work together, work with governments, work with other folks like Ava, and it actually makes you feel not hopeful exactly, but less hopeless to engage deeply with problems in my experience. So I wish everyone could have that because I do feel like sometimes like, you know, my engagement with most issues is so relatively superficial because I'm just following it online or whatever. Like my engagement, for instance, with, I don't know, a problem like climate change is relatively superficial. I'm following it through Hank. I'm following it online, I'm following it through news stories, but I'm not like in the meetings with the people who are really trying to drive down carbon emissions. And if I were, I think I would

feel a mix of more frustrated but also more hopeful. Well, maybe a couple of years ago, that's how you'd feel. But now I'd just feel hopeless. That's also kind of the case in global hopes. I mean, it's always very hard when you're moving backward, you know? Yes, for sure. And in a weird way, this might resonate with you in terms of global health but the like progress continues to be made but but it is a mix of past action right is still having an effect in the world and it is because of in climate um to some extent like simply you know market forces the incentives have changed yeah like ultimately you know solar like a solar powerpoint can make money and so people build them to make money there isn't right it isn't like uh it's it's just that the technology

has gotten better. And also, like, we're benefiting from the climate decisions of China a lot. So the Chinese government subsidizes the development of these technologies, which is driven on the prices a lot. Batteries and solar panels particularly. And, you know, one of the wild things is the current administration is actively anti-green energy, anti-electric vehicles, anti-charging stations, anti-everything. But this year, there will be more charging stations installed in America than any other year previously. And at the end of the year, 35% of the charging stations in America will have been built in the last 12 months. Wow. That is mind-blowing. But that's just because people think they can make money. It's partially because people think they can make money. And it's partially

because when you pass legislation that makes it easier to make charging stations, that money takes forever to get out into the world. And so for the last, for like, four years of the Biden administration, it's just like, that's how long it took for the projects to get planned and approved and the money to get dispersed, and now they're being built. Right, right. That does resonate very deeply with global health. The only thing is that the incentives aren't changing nearly fast enough in global health, whereas they are changing fairly quickly in climate.

Yeah, ultimately, in terms of energy, they're changing quite quickly. There's a lot of other climate problems that don't have the incentives lined up as well. Which reminds me that today's podcast is brought to you by the incentives. The incentives not sponsoring any podcast despite being, a really powerful force in our world. Yeah. This incentives doesn't actually have to buy advertising to be the most important force in the world.

It wins every time. Turns out, oh man. The incentives are there when you wake up in the morning. The incentives are there when you're in the Peace Corps and the suit, too. They're tucking you into bed every night. This podcast is also brought to you by that one hair. That one hair.

What's going on? Stop reminding me that I'm just a bunch of cells. Today's podcast is also brought to you by mammals. Mammals, we are one. And this podcast is brought to you by wet and dead. Wet and dead, that's what you'd be without cell differentiation. And indeed, if you jumped into lava. I mean, definitely not.

It just doesn't feel wet in there. All right, Hank, we got an interesting question from Sarah. I don't know if you know the answer to this one, but I thought it was pretty fascinating. Dear John and Hank, how does gravity impact? digestion. I can't help but notice digestion tends to go downwards or at least down toward the center of the earth, as does gravity. I feel like there's got to be something there where gravity is at least helping a little. If I were upside down all the time or in space, would I digest differently? Pumpkins and Penguin Sarah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people kind of like intuitively

feel like if you were just hung by your feet that you wouldn't digest at all, like very obviously the food starts at the top and then goes to the bottom. No, but there's a lot of muscles involved. I know this because of my own motility challenges. So there's definitely a lot of like muscle contraction involved. Yeah. So there's this thing called peristalysis, which you experience a little bit when you're following. So you can sort of feel the beginning of peristolsus. I just felt it.

Which is, is imagine milking a cow utter except that happens to your entire digestive system and the muscles of your digestive system do it. I'd rather not use that metaphor. Okay. Well, that's basically what is happening, and it pushes the food through, and it's part of what causes the noises that your digestive system makes. And when you're having an intestinal cramp, that's the peristolsus locking in place and just grabbing constantly and pushing really hard. So you know that the feeling of a peristulsis cramp. But that does not mean that it is, that gravity isn't part of it.

And in fact, digestion is harder in space, which adds to the unpleasantness of being in microgravity. So the stomach contents especially can float. Oh, God. So that means that burping can be dangerous. Oh, panic at the disco. Panic, panic, panic. And heartburn is more common. Why would anyone?

Oh, I recently met an astronaut. Uh-huh. And it was so obvious to me. that she was fundamentally different from me, like in a deep, profound way. Every astronaut I've ever met, I was like, oh, you're like a kind of American that I don't meet. Right. Not only are you unlike me, you're unlike everyone I know. Yeah, fundamentally.

Yeah, just like a kind of what seems to me a very healthy ambition that I'm unfamiliar with in my work. Like all of the people I know who are ambitious are not healthily ambitious. the way that astronauts seem to be. Yeah. Or Peace Corps volunteers. Yeah. You know, what we should do more of as Americans is the Peace Corps. We should do more volunteerism in general.

But yes, I agree. It's a great way of continuing to build yourself, you know? Yeah. What do you think the chances are that I'll go to space? Zero. You really think so? Well, I mean, I think that there's some below zero possibility. that like death will get solved sometime in the next 40 years

and you will live for a thousand years at which point it will be a very low stakes thing to go to the moon. The idea that it's more likely that we're going to solve death than I'm going to go to space on my own in my natural lifetime. It's fascinating to me. Well, that seems right to you, doesn't it? Probably. Although I can see space travel getting vastly safer and becoming like intercontinental flight within the next 40 years as well. And then I might do it. I mean, let me tell you, that I don't think that we can handle the carbon impact of that form of travel. Great.

Well, then I won't do it. I'm out. I already create way too much carbon because of my obsession with AFC Wimbledon. That's right. Let's move on to this question from Jess, who writes, Dear John and Hank, I started listening to the podcast a few weeks ago and just got to episode 56 when Hank's child announcement is made along with John's Snickers announcement. You'll recall that I received 450-something Snickers the same time you revealed that you were going to have a child.

And I was basically equally excited about both. During the AFC Wimbledon news segment, Hank was understandably yawning. Jess, I'll try not to take that personally. And this caused me to yawn 10 years later. My question is, what do you think is the longest length of time a yawn has been spread? And given that you guys sometimes edit your own content, have you ever caused yourself to yawn across time, Jess? Oh, I've definitely caused myself to yawn across time. I, you know, I scrub through the yawns pretty regularly.

Like, I don't tend to watch the parts where I'm not talking when I'm editing a video, but it has happened. I'm sure it's happened to me, too. Over a thousand videos, so. So we know there's an outer limit on the longest period of time. A yawn has caused someone to yawn, right? It's got to be like 1920. Yeah, but it's going to keep getting longer. We have to go and find an old yawn.

Yeah, I think you've got to find the original yawn the first time somebody yawn. And you've got to be able to yawn audibly, right? So, like, that's its own complexity because yawning on a 1905 phonograph is not going to sound like a yawn. It's going to sound like nothing. You're right. So you've got to have a really good audible yawn. I think we're talking about 1920s probably. In terms of movies, you probably have a good audible and visual yawn by the late 1920s.

And so we've maybe got a hundred year gap between contagious yawns. That's exciting. But also, like, as we continue to develop, like that, it'll be, you know, if humans can hold on, we'll have like 10,000 year lawns. Well, yawns, yons. But also, John, it isn't. It isn't just hearing a yawn. You can read about a yawn, and it can make you want a yawn.

You can read about a yawn. So it could be Beowulf. We got to, let's make sure that Beowulf didn't yawn ever in there. It's got to be literature's first yawn. Does that true that you can get a contagious yawn from just reading about a yawn? Oh, yeah. I've been holding one back since we started this question. I've been holding one back, too.

I am quite tired. So, yeah, we got a, we got to stretch way back before the phonograph. And also, what about this, John? What if all yawns are actually contagious yawns? What if in some ways we're responding to the first yawn? Yeah, there was some monkey that yawned. I want to yawn so bad right now. I almost did it.

I almost did it. I had to hold it in. Well, yeah, we're working hard over here. Yeah. I'm suddenly aware of my own feelings. fatigue. I can take a nap right now. I'm having a wakeful yawn. Yeah, I don't have a ton of those.

All right. This is fascinating. It goes back to the first. The longest time is all the time that since the first yawn by the first primate, that's Hank's theory. Well, it could be. But I think that if anybody knows of some classic literature yawns deep in, you know, Servantes or Beiluf or something. Yeah. Yeah, let us know what the first yawn in literature was. Did Gilgamesh ever yawn? I bet he did. Did Gilgamesh yawn? Are there yawns in the Bible?

Are there old school yawns is our question? Send us your oldest yawn, and we'll see if it makes us yawn. We'll try to set a new world record. All right, Tara writes, Dear John and Hank, I'm a relatively fresh listener. In order to catch up on the decade of episodes I've missed, I randomly scroll and select each time. We're getting a bunch of fresh listeners. Yeah. This has led me to transporting different passages of time simply through the voices of two middle

middle-aged American men. I was going to take that personally, Tara, but then I realized I I can't. Soon enough, John, you'll be like, middle-aged, why thank you? Today, I found myself in 2017, listening to both you being very optimistic, particularly about the freedoms and growth we as a society have seen and will see. In 2025, it seems these outlooks are hard to come by. My question to you is, how do we approach opinions of such a large-scale changing? Is fear from backlash a factor in the Stark Division politically? And lastly, why is everything so hard? A rat backwards, Tara. So, I actually think that we have to hold competing ideas in our mind at the same time. Like we have to hold the idea that poverty is going to go down this year and that fewer children will die this

year than any year in the last 8,000 years. We have to hold that idea. That is real. That is exciting. That is the result of millions of humans, maybe billions of humans working together to make the world suck less with the fact that in many ways things are getting worse. Yeah. We have to hold those two facts together. And I don't know how to hold them together because the shininess of in many ways things are getting worse, which is very true. Like the things are genuinely getting worse, really for the first time in my lifetime. You know, we've seen American life expectancy go down three or four years in a row. We've seen, I mean, it's bouncing back now, but like only because it got so low. We've seen gains in health care equity stall out and in some

cases be reversed. We may see childhood mortality go up, probably not in the next couple years, but to Hank's point earlier that these things take a long time after policy changes to really start to see the effects, we may see it in three or four years. And so things are getting worse. And yet, when I graduated from high school or college, which I see as the great golden age of human history in the 90s or 2000s, 12 million children were dying under the age of five every year. And last year, fewer than five million did. So how do we hold those things together? I don't know, but we have to. There's also, and I don't know if this is worth the time it's going to take to say, but there are a lot of people who think things are bad that just actually aren't that bad.

There are things that are bad that we think are worse than they are. Oh, interesting. I was watching this video. It's just popped up on my YouTube. I was watching this video. And this guy makes an offhanded comment that, like, you know, say there's obviously a lot of hard things about the third world, but at least they eat real food. Oh, no, that's a bad take. And I was like, I was like, what's, what?

That's a bad take on a lot of levels. The use of the phrase third word is the beginning of the bad take. It was from start to end. And it was a very sort of progressive-ish-feeling video. And it made me think about, you know, there's two stories about like food and health in America. And the one that is like being told right now is our food is poisoning us. And the other one is, this is the first time in human history that Plenty has been the problem. And that has been the case for maybe 50 years.

Right. And so we're not good at it yet. And we're getting better at it. We're figuring it out. But like the first thing we figured out is how to have enough food. And like for 99.999% of human history, that's not the situation we were in. Almost everyone was food insecure. And the immediate flip from, okay, we.

We have enough food to the biggest problem in the world is that is our unhealthy relationship with all of these foods that we have now engineered to be hyper palatable and, you know, the capitalist push toward making something that you literally cannot resist. Like, that's a problem. But like, it's a kind of an understandable problem given the situation that we have ended up in. And it also seems like a solvable problem. If we interface with it as a problem and not as like us being poisoned. And I just, like, I feel like there's a lot of people walking around dealing as if every aspect of modern life is a harm that has been perpetrated on us. Right. Instead of a series of choices that we made for, in some cases, bad reasons for sure, but in some cases, really good reasons.

Like, we had a green revolution that, you know, led to way, way more food being available. And that was really good news for humanity. It was really good news for the number of children who die. It was really good news for the number of people who are experiencing misery day to day. And to me, the failure of that revolution was that now we have plenty and we do a bad job of distributing those resources such that there are still lots of people who go hungry every day. Now, that's a failure. And it's a huge failure.

And it's, to Hank's point, a failure that, sort of by definition, has only been around for the last 50 years. But we need to understand that, like, the progress is also real. Like, the new problem is a difficult problem, and it is a horrifying problem in many ways. But it is better than the problem that we replaced it with. Right, right. The new problem is created by the old solution. Like, climate change is a problem largely of providing people with things they wanted. I think at this point, not anymore.

Like, we could have moved past that by now. But, you know, the first, you know, like, I'm glad of refrigerators, you know. Oh, me too. I mean, talk about food security. Nothing spells food security like a refrigerator that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And, like, we just have, we just, of course, we don't think about it. Well, those of us who have access to refrigerators don't think about it. But yeah, lots of people don't.

So that's our hopeful message is that we are going to create new problems with new solutions, but those new problems will hopefully be better than the old problem. Yeah. Sometimes I think we make problems, we create solutions, and then the solution is actually worse than the previous problem. I think that happens as well. I think that's happened some with social discourse, with attempts to address loneliness. I think we've seen some of that. But I also think that a lot of times when we're solving a problem, we create a new problem that's not as bad. Yeah. I think there's a lot of solving problems that don't really exist going on, solving the problems of the subconscious is immediate needs rather than the whole need.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we don't like to be uncomfortable. We don't like to be bored. And the internet is really good at making us feel comfortable and not bored. And in the moment, less lonely, the problem is, at least in my experience, is that it makes me more lonely in the long run. Yeah. And that's really hard to address.

Like, making friends in adulthood is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Yeah. It's incredibly uncomfortable. It shouldn't be so hard. It shouldn't be so hard. There should be better structures for this. But it's a problem that we didn't have to figure out for, like, most of human history because it was solved very naturally by living in tiny communities. But now we've got to figure it out.

Yeah. All right, John. Well, a related question, if we can do one more before the news from A.S. Wilburne and Mars. Sure, sure, sure. Okay. It's from Olivia, who asks, to the equally awesome Green Brothers, I'm fairly terrified of AI. Not in a Skynet Matrix robot's fight of the Concord's kind of way, but in a toddler with a loaded gun sort of way.

I don't think humanity is capable of having this thing without inevitable tragedy. Is there anything you know or believe that might quell my fears? Nerdfighter since the 50 Jokes in Four Minutes video and still 100% here for the puns, Olivia. That makes one of us, Olivia. Well, Olivia, here's what I'll tell you. At least there are puns. But also, AI can do puns. Sometimes it can't.

It doesn't know what it's doing. That's one thing that seems certain. I can't really help you. Me neither. My biggest source of hope is that, like, humanity and individual human groups have been confronted with existential crises many, many times that they have overcome. And that's like my basic source of hope. In terms of the specifics here, it's very hard because the future is going to be very weird. And so I can't get specific about solutions because I can't get specific about the problems. I don't know what's coming. It's very big and weird. We don't know what's coming. We

know that AI is getting faster and better and cheaper and more efficient over time, and we think that we'll continue. But we actually don't have strong evidence for the idea that it will continue until it becomes something vastly smarter and more powerful than we could possibly imagine. We don't know that. We are guessing that based on a curve of change that we've seen so far, but we don't know that that curve of change lasts forever. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who are very worried.

So there's people who are like hype men who think that that's going to happen. But there's also people who are like the opposite of hype men who are worried that that is going to happen. It seems like the closer you are to it, the more you think that that is fairly inevitable. It's just sort of a matter of when. But I also don't think that we need to get to superintelligence for it to become a big problem. I think we are already suffering the effects of a society run by AI, which is that our realities are defined by recommendation algorithms that are designed to keep us on websites. not designed to increase human thriving. So those are actually, those systems are actually quite optimized.

They are what they would call aligned with what we want them to do. It's just that we have aligned them to a terrible purpose, which is to keep us on a website rather than to make our lives better. Yep. Preach, brother, literal brother. I think we can change those alignments, but it's defining reality in profound, profound ways. Like there is no way Donald Trump becomes the president without Twitter,

and there is no way Donald Trump becomes the president without Twitter's particular physics and algorithms, which were designed by AI on some level. And so, yeah, I mean, we live in a vastly different world because of AI and algorithms than we did 10 years ago. We will live in a vastly different world 10 years from now. I think the question is, what do we optimize for? And when we optimize for things that are socially destructive, we get a less socially productive world. But if you optimize for things that are socially productive, then is there like some board of directors in Silicon Valley who is defining reality for America. And is that?

How's that feel? Not great. No, I'm pretty freaked out, Olivia. I'm pretty freaked out. And years ago, Facebook did experiments where they were like, we could tweak the algorithm and it makes people happier. And everybody was like, oh, no, don't do that. That seems very weird and bad.

Well, and also people didn't use Facebook as much. And also happy people use Facebook less. Yeah. Yeah. Why would they use Facebook? Facebook is, I mean, you know, these tools are functionally distraction tools. And what they're distracting you from is some kind of like boredom or pain or psychic pain that's way down deep. Yeah. Anyway, thanks for coming to the party, Olivia. Sorry we can provide you with nothing except for the reality that humans have solved every existential problem so far. No one thought we were going to get through the Cold War, you know? Yeah. And like, here we are. That was, you know, 80 years ago. Yeah, we made it 80 whole years. I'm not actually encouraged when people are like, oh, we figured out nuclear weapons. I'm like, did we? Or have we just made it 80 years, one human lifetime

during which there has been some proliferation? There has been a great deal of proliferation. So I'm not feeling that good. It's slow. Yeah. All right, Hank, we got to get to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. Let's start with the news from AFC Wimbledon. AFC Wimbledon's women's team is in the Third Division, the F-A-WPL Premier Division. They've had a rough start to the season. There's no getting around it, two losses, two draws, but they just won their first game of the season, which is very encouraging, because there are some really big teams like Watford, which used to be in the Premier League, they're in the third division with us, and we just won our first game of the season. So I wanted to call that out. We got beat by Watford, but then we beat Billericay Town.

They haven't won a game yet this season, nor have they. they tied a game. But anyway, we beat them, which is important because there are only two teams that get relegated out of this league, I think. And so if we can just make sure we're not in that bottom two, which right now we're not, then we should be fine. Great. What's the news from Mars? Well, it continues to be Three-I Atlas news. So as if you were listening last week, you heard Three-Ey Atlas is this very weird interstellar comet. So it's a thing that's not from our solar system. We've been starting to find these objects. They've always been there. But we've didn't have the tools necessary to detect them or to understand their orbits well enough

to definitively say that they're not from here. But now that we can, we've tracked several of these. And this one's special and weird, and we don't know what's going on with it. It's acting particularly strange, which is making scientists think that it's made of strange stuff. And that is exciting because we're not going to be able to go to other solar systems and examine them. Like, that's just, that's not, that's not in the cards for the next, you know, 500 years.

But, I mean, I'm going to take the over on that. That's like you saying that we're going to make it to Mars by 2028. There's no way we're making it to another star by 500 years from now. I don't mean a human. I don't mean a human is making it to another star system. But in 500 years, I would not be surprised if we still exist that we were able to get a probe to Alpha Center. I would be surprised. For the record, when I am alive because we've cured death, I want to rename the podcast, Dear John and John and Hank.

500 years from now. Yeah. Okay. Somebody write down what that date is. Yeah. So we want to look at this thing, but we are in a situation where Earth is increasingly unable to observe this because the sun is in the way. But Mars is on the other side of the sun right now. And so all of the Mars instruments can still observe this comet, which is so cool.

Yeah. And last few, there was, we were talking about the rover that was taking pictures of it. But now there are a bunch of orbiters around Mars. So there's the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which is an ESA, a European Space Agency orbiter. And it is usually focused on getting images from the surface of Mars. So it points down. And this object in the sky is anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 times fainter than the surface of Mars, what it's usually trying to take a picture of.

But they were still able to get a few pictures of it. And they turned it into a little jiff for us that you can look at on the Internet. And Issa is planning to keep looking at these images to see what else they can learn about the size of the comet and what it's made of, because that will help us understand what other solar systems are like, I should say, planetary systems, because in fact, there's only one solar system. We've got the only one. Yeah, it's the system that is the star of the star soul. Yeah, it's cute that our star has a name that isn't the sun. Yeah, soul. And then it's cute that solar system is like, oh, that's us.

Yeah, that's ours. That's just us. That's sweet. Just us, Jupiter, Mars, et cetera. And the ord cloud. And then an ord cloud. Love a good ord cloud. Well, Hank, thank you for potting with me.

Thanks to everybody for listening. You can email us your questions at Hank and John at gmail.com. This podcast is edited by Ben Swartout. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna Meddish. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosian. Halse Rojas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is to Boki Chok Rivardi. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by

the great Gunnarola. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.