Dear Hank & John - 466: An Argument with a Mouse

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Why do things get less blurry when you squint your eyes? Do the water particles in waves on the beach come from far away, or do they stay in the same area? Why aren’t there any legally binding concrete goals from governments about tuberculosis? Do I absorb any caffeine through my skin when I use soap that contains coffee grounds? Should I get married at the courthouse to save money? ...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/dearhankandjohnProduced for Hank and John Green by ComplexlySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You're listening to a Complexly podcast. Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Or as 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 then play the New York Times word game connections. Nope, that's Hank's channel. That's sorry, I made that up. And give you all the week's news from both of the Mars and AFC Wimbled and John.

What do you call two monkeys who share their Amazon account? Hmm, what? You can get there. Work on it. Work it. Work the problem. I don't want to. Prime mates. It's not in my heart. Prime mates. Prime mates. Oh. So they've signed up for Amazon Prime.

And they're sharing. They're sharing one of the worst. It's one of the, I can't give you all, but I need you to groan. I need you. Last time I gave you a good one, this time I give you a paddle. In general, I find with your jokes, and this is true for everyone's jokes, right? you need there to be a C-minus so there can be an A-plus. Yeah, I mean, that's also how I did college. As a wise man once wrote, without pain, how could we know joy? It's funny, I wrote that line and everybody quotes it all the time, but they're quoting it out of context.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hazel is making fun of people who say, without pain, how could we know joy? That's, that is, yeah, yeah. And you made a whole book about how the manic pixie dream girl trope is the thing that is fake and that actually these people are complex humans that aren't existing just to please people. And then people were like, John Green, the manic pixie dream girl guy. I know. Yeah. I remember that one too, Hank.

What are they going to think of Hollywood ending? We'll find out in three weeks or actually 13 days as we're listening to this. Yeah, as it's being released. Oh, my gosh, John. How are you doing? How are you feeling? What's it like? It's fine.

I had a lovely interview. There is something very strange about doing a press tour for a book that it's about how unpleasant press tours are. Have you started doing that yet? Have people read it and are asking you questions about it yet? Yeah, yeah. I've done quite a bit so far. And I've got more to come, which is great. I want to emphasize that I remember when my books would come out.

and on the day the books would come out, nothing would happen. And that was not as fun as this is. Okay, good. I'm glad. I'm glad that it's fun so far. I just feel like, I don't know, man. I'm going to feel overexposed, inevitably, Hank. Like, that's a side effect of writing fiction, is that, you know, it's autobiography and code.

What did Faulkner say, never let the truth get in the way of the facts? But people are very curious about how you got to whatever truth you got to. curious about whatever facts may lie behind a story. And that's very stressful and challenging for me to navigate. But we don't have to talk about that. Can I talk to you about a book I read that I loved? Sure. It's called Heart the Lover by Lily King. I've actually read the book before, but I read it on a plane. And something about the altitude caused me this time reading it to just weep uncontrollably, such that the flight attendant asked if I was doing okay. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, that's a good thing if a book can do that to, it's a, it's a,

it's a power of a book. But it wasn't just a sad book. It was also a delightful book, full of wonder and light and wit and repartee and all the things that I love in a story. I love Lily King. I can't believe that I get to be on stage with her in Portland, Maine. It is silly. silly, silly to think about sharing a stage with her. Also, some of the people I'm sharing a stage with are just ludicrous. Like, obviously there's Hank Green, Sarah Eurisd Green in Birmingham, Alabama. That's a little... Those are ones I can handle. But like, Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, Brandon Sanderson. Oh, uh-huh. He's written a lot of words. And... Oh, yeah. And try and wants to think that he could reach your record for the number of signature signed, but...

Well, there's no way that he can ever reach my... record for a number of books signed because he's too busy writing. He spends so much time writing. The key is to not spend that much time writing. You've got to focus on the signing part of writing. Yeah. Can I show you something and have you describe it to people? Yeah, great. For the audio listeners. Great. I am looking at a what appears to be a knife stuck into a piece of soap. Uh-huh. If I had to guess, that's what I would guess. Tell me more about this piece of soap, John. The piece of soap appears to be silver gray.

It could theoretically be a piece of foam, but I think it's a piece of soap. I actually think I can see the word sun basin on it. It might be a piece of sunbasin soap, our soap company that donates all its profit to charity. And it looks good, man. I mean, I love our soap. I'm a big fan. Are you missing a crucial detail here? Oh, there's a big part bitten out of it.

it. Yeah, what appears to have bitten that? A man? Was it a man? Did you bite a piece of soap? I did. I was inspired to record a number of promotional videos for Sun Basin soap yesterday. And by the end of it, I was getting a little loopy and I was like, would you go and check out good dot store if I ate this right now? And then I kind of made a deal with this imagined version of the person watching it. And I was like, you will, won't you? If I take a bite, you will. And I realized that they would if I did. So I did.

It's non-toxic. I will say when I was a kid. I wouldn't call it non-tile. Look, it's all high-quality natural ingredients before the soap part gets made. But all soap is not good for you to put in your body. Don't do that. And it tasted not good for me to put in my. body. I remember when I was a kid, I cursed in front of one of our friends' parents and they made me

wash my mouth out with soap. Yeah. Wow. And they weren't even my parents. I was like, wow, I can't believe someone else's parents are making me wash my mouth out with soap. When in our household, no, cursing was frankly encouraged. What, what, how did our parents feel about this? I don't think we've had this conversation on the podcast before. I think we've had this conversation on the podcast before. I think we might have. Probably while promoting sunbasins. All right, let's do questions from our listeners before we fall down a rabbit hole of promoting our promotions within promotions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, let's begin with this question from April who writes, hi, John and Hank. Why, when you don't have your glasses on, do things get less blurry when you squint your eyes? Thanks, April.

Now, Hank, I have a guess for this. I bet you have science for this, but I have a guess for this. I think that near-sightedness and potentially far-sightedness as well are actually problems with the shape of your eye and when you are squinting your eye, you are changing its shape. That's my guess. That's wrong.

Dang it. I mean, there's certainly shapes that are wrong here, but you're not changing the shape of your eye when you squint, you're changing the amount of light. that's getting in. And when you've got a bunch of light, that can go in all kinds of, like, it's coming from a lot of different directions.

This is how I understand it. When you're getting a little bit of light, it's only coming from kind of the one direction. So effectively, you're kind of like making your pupils smaller. You're letting less light in. So like the flesh becomes artificial pupil. And so that lets fewer light rays in. that might end up getting to the wrong part of your eye,

and so you're only letting the very middle part in, I think, is how I understand it. What? Here's what Duboki wrote. Hank doesn't understand anything about optics, man. I hate optics so much. It's true. Just read that again, Hank, because Deboki just confirmed my guess. Okay, squinting helps focus light on your lens.

Also, it helps make sure we don't get too much light in our eye. Also, yeah. But I don't know. Maybe there's some effect where it's actually changing the ship of your eye. I don't think that's what's happening. You can do it the same thing if you just look through a little hole in your fingers, though. So like I know that it's not just that. Like if you if you yeah, yeah, that totally works.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That works great. I can absolutely see what my computer screen says even when I can't if I do a tiny hole with my finger. I can't. But then again, I can't see anything. I am so unable to see past the end of my own nose, both metaphorically and literally,

that it's a real hindrance. It's a real hindrance, Hank. Look, here's what I'm going to say, April. There's diagrams on the Internet. I can't explain this with words. But there's diagrams, and I can't give you one of those here. I love that if Hank comes within a mile and a half... I wanted to start with this question,

because I know that if Hank comes within a mile and a half of optics, he gets very stressed out. I don't like it. Devoki's moving right now, so we didn't get a chance to have a pre-call about the facts. She was probably going to say how good a job I did with my guess. You did great, John. But nobody write that on your term paper or anything, okay?

I've got another question. It's from Colleen who writes. Hi, John and Hank. I'm a listener from Taiwan, and I've been a fan of Vlog Brothers in John's book since 2014. I'm currently at the beach looking at the waves roll over and over again, And I was just wondering, do the water particles from really far away eventually reach the shore, or are the ones washing up on shore always the same water particles?

If some do come from far away, roughly how much of the water is actually new. Thank you. Currently curious, Colleen. Now, this is a great question. I know that some of the water must be from far away because sometimes, like, you know, things from hundreds of miles away or thousands of miles away wash up on further shores, right? You get wetters in bottles that have gone 10,000 miles or whatever across the Pacific Ocean. But how many of the water particles in like a wave lapping against the shore are the same water particles from like six weeks ago lapping against the shore?

You know, I don't think anybody's like done the math on this. I think that there's, it mixes, but it's slow. And this is like a wild thing to think about the ocean. And the way that it makes this is so important to life on Earth. So one of the things that you really want is for like the cold water from down low that contains a bunch of nutrients to like come up and be able to because you can't. The ocean has so much light that all the nutrients will get used up pretty quick. So like the top level of the ocean, it's like there's like, there's like, The limiting factor is not the fuel of the sunlight.

The limiting factor is the nutrients. And so that nutrient availability is a huge deal. And so there's not just like the top of the water. There's the depth of the water. And all of this mixing matters so much because that water carries stuff around. I was just reading about how, you know, we killed most of the whales, like a lot. We're nowhere close to the old whale populations. Right.

And they looked at this and they were like, well, the krill population must have skyrocketed because these whales weren't eating the krill anymore. And what they found was that the krill, actually, they were fewer krill than now, then there would have been back then when the whales were eating them, which made no sense initially. But it turns out that the whales were part of nutrient cycling. They were bringing nutrients to the surface and that was allowing more phytoplankton to be created, which was allowing more krill to. survive, which was allowing more whales to do their whale stuff. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let me stop you. So the whales were creating nutrients by dying and falling to the bottom of the ocean. By pooping.

Yes, by pooping at the surface of the ocean. By pooping. And then that would help create some nutrients, which would allow for phytoplankton, which would allow for krill, which would allow for whales, which would allow for more pooping. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whoa, brother.

That is crazy. Yeah. So they're like partly, like weirdly part of the non-living part of the ocean. Like you don't think of just like nutrients, like like. Whale poop? Like potassium and magnesium and calcium, you know, minerals as, as, you know, that's like geology almost. But the whales were moving that stuff around. And now we're starting to get that back.

But like, it's wild to think that the whales are kind of feeding themselves with their poop. My mind is a little blown to think about whale poop being indirectly the food that whales eat. Yeah. I guess that's true for humans, too, at least according to the Matt Damon film The Martian. Famously entirely historically accurate film The Martian. But yeah, I mean, we're all part of the cycle. They're all part of the cycle. I don't like that idea at all.

I don't like the idea that whales are indirectly eating their poop from krill that ate phytoplankton and ate their poop. I don't like that one little bit. That displeases the part of me that really has what I think is a very justifiable poop aversion. Well, and what? Yes, as we've discussed on the podcast before. The thing that gets me about it is not so much the eating poop. It's the how many whales there were. Like, my instinct is the ocean is very big.

There's no way that animal, like, a species pooping could have that much impact on it. You know, it's just like the dilution is so dramatic. But because the ocean is so, like, has so much energy coming into it in the form of sunlight, that phytoplankton's, like, biggest thing that they need is any amount of, you know, nitrogen and this good stuff that, you know, they need to build their own DNA and stuff. They're like any amount of it immediately spikes the amount of production of life. And whales were producing a huge amount. Right, right.

This reminds me of something important that I don't think we've ever talked about in the 12-year history of this podcast, which is that I have a somewhat, I don't know if it's kind of a minority opinion. This is like an 80-20 issue, but I'm pretty opposed to the ocean. Oh, that's, I am hugely in favor. You're really wrong about this one. No, no, no. Unless you're like... I understand that the ocean is essential for life and that I crawled out of it and that I carry an ocean around with me inside of me that allows me to be a person and yada, yada. I understand that there is no earth without ocean.

I get it. That like everything that is good and noble about life on earth is ocean dependent. I understand it. I'm opposed to the ocean. I think the ocean, I guess what I should say is I'm opposed to humans on the ocean. I think in the same way that I think. You don't want to interact with the ocean. I think mice, this is what I had an argument recently with a mouse actually because a mouse came into my office. And I tried to explain to it that what I've offered the mouse is all of outside.

Like I've, I'm willing to tell the mouse everything other than this 600 square feet belong. belongs to you. And the mouse is like, no, I want that too. It's warm and you got crumbs and all kinds of good stuff. Whatever its reasoning is, it's a bridge too far. There's also crumbs outside, right? So it's just a bridge too far. And I try to explain this.

That's how I feel about the ocean, except where the mouse. Right. Don't make unnecessary journeys. Don't take risks on treacherous roads and don't swim in the sea, as the great newscaster once said. I've never heard that before, but it's a good line. Did you make that up just now? No, I'll send it to you.

It's great. It's like this, I don't know, I think she may be Scottish woman during a storm. She's like, don't make unnecessary journeys. Oh, yeah, now I've got it. You had to do your bad Scottish accent to lock in for me. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Which absolutely, at this point in my life,

There's plenty of excitement for me without unnecessary journeys without swimming in the sea. And I'll swim in the sea. But like, not really. You know, the first 20 feet, that's not the sea. Yeah, exactly. That's the shore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything where you can stand.

If you can stand or even if you can like go on your tiptoes and kind of scrape the sand, that's safe. Anything beyond that is the sea. And that's not for us. man, I tell you what, I'm not going, I want to be able to stand up and have my shoulders out. Oh, you do? Yeah, because that's where I know I can like get good leverage when I'm punching the shark. I don't want to punch a shark if I'm just going to move backward. I don't have anything to push off of.

I love a swim in the ocean, like looking at coral reefs and stuff, like when I'm when I'm snorkeling. But I don't like it to be, I like it to be close enough to shore that I can be rescued easily. I was swimming in the sea actually recently, and I take it back. This was, I don't know. I don't think I could have stood up here. And I went face to face with a barracuda, and I was like, actually, I hate this. Yeah. And they're not even, they're not even sharks.

They're not even that threatening. Yeah, I don't ever hear about people getting hurt by barracuda. I mean, I guess it happens. But like, I was like, I'm out of here. This is his, you know, this is their place. Exactly. This is their place in the same way that my office is my place. where mice aren't welcome.

Yeah. All right, let's answer another question from our listeners. It's from Jan, or possibly Jan, given that Jan signs off in a very Dutch way. So I think it's John. All right. Dear John and Hank,

why aren't there any clear deadlines or concrete goals set by governments or international organizations regarding tuberculosis? For example, I live in the Netherlands. No bragging, Jan, where we have a goal of achieving a smoke-free generation by 2040.

The government has introduced many measures to reach this target, and we seem to be actively trying different approaches. Similarly, there is the Paris Agreement on climate change. Even though we may not be doing enough to fully meet its goals, I would argue that the situation would likely be worse without it. So why isn't there an international treaty in which countries come together to set clear concrete, legally binding goals for reducing tuberculosis worldwide?

DFTBA, or as we say in Dutch, Verguet, not om, gaulding, ted zine. Wow, John, I can't believe you figured out that this guy was Dutch. I know. It really took a That's a huge That was like amazing detective work. Sherlock Holmes over here just piecing it together using context clues.

Like saying I'm Dutch. I'm from the Netherlands. All right. So this is a great question. The answer, you always try. You always try. Let me do it. You always try science ones. Let me try a tuberculosis one. You do it.

I'm going to go, I'm going to go, we as a society don't care in are terrible. That's wrong. Okay. I'm glad to tell you that is wrong. Okay. In, I don't know, like 10 or 15 or eight years ago, there was a UN high-level meeting on tuberculosis, and the nations of the world came together and they said, this is ridiculous. We have known how to cure this disease since 1950.

We are losing at the time, you know, over 1.5 million people to it every year. This is absurd, absurd, absurd. We can't go on like this. We can live in a world where tuberculosis has ended as a public health threat by 2030. And so people started saying, yes, we can. And then other people would say NTB. And then other people would say by 2030. And this was a whole thing.

It was a thing. Okay. Yeah, multi-part chant. In fact, at the most recent high-level UN meeting on tuberculosis, they were still saying we can end TV by 2030. And they had all these specific goals for what that would look like. Really, practically, that looks like a 90% reduction in the burden of disease. So like ending TB when one out of every three or four people is infected with tuberculosis

is not probably going to happen anytime soon. But you can have a lot. fewer people suffering. And you could have almost no one dying, right? So you could have a world where like very, very few people die of tuberculosis. Like here in the United States, tuberculosis accounts for way less than 1% of death. And you could have that worldwide. Yeah.

So the key to Jan's question is clear, concrete, legally binding goals. We have clear goals. We have concrete goals. We do not have legally binding goals. There is not much of a stick that, happens if we fail to meet these goals, especially in terms of rich countries making big pledges, which they made, that they then fail to actually deliver on, which they have failed to actually deliver on. So, like, funding for TB research and TB treatment, they made all these pledges

at this big UN high-level meeting and then just, like, didn't do it. So we need to figure, so what you're saying is we need a stick, and I want to propose one for you. Propose me a stick. I have a stick. 1.25 million people die every year. What a stick. But it's not me. It's not the leader of the country. So we need a stick that really affects the leader of the country.

And here's my proposal. If they do it, then after they die, they get to go to like a really cool place. And if they don't do it, after they go to a bad place. And then we create like a guy who kind of like chooses. Yeah. based on whether or not TB was cured. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Instead of like the current version of the guy,

which is very, seems very nebulous, meaning like a specific guy who talks to us about this stuff. Yeah. I'm going to throw it out there actually if this guy, this theoretical God type of figure who decides whether you're going to be good place or five ways. Yeah, probably not actually gendered would be my guess. Yeah.

This person is not a person. This entity obviously. transcends gender. For sure. Super non-binary. If you can't conceive of that, I'm so sorry. Your life is so impoverished in so many ways. So this entity, let's call this entity God.

Probably. Yep. This entity, if this entity is going to reward the improvements in human health and punish worsening of human health, which I love the idea. idea of, I think this entity, and this is going to be a controversial take coming for me, actually shouldn't start with tuberculosis. This entity should start with heart disease, cancer, like chronic illnesses that are causing a lot of suffering and death around the world. But there's a hard. Yeah, those are harder, but like there's lots of treatments that much harder.

A lot of, a lot of treatments that we have in the U.S. are not available in other places. Right. You could really reduce the number of people dying as a result of high. hypertension, for example, like dramatically. So I think that we need to think bigger than just tuberculosis and say this God figure, every year that the life expectancy of humans goes up, extra people get to the good place. And every year it goes down, extra people go to the bad place. And whether you go to the good place or bad place is decided entirely by how much power you have. Oh, yeah.

I like that. So if you will, Hank, let me just throw this out there as an idea. You don't like go to the bad place because you didn't have a lot of power, but there's like a thing. Here's my concept, Hank. There is a god figure who maybe comes to Earth. Oh, yeah, yeah. And preachers about a world where the last shall be first. Oh.

And the poor will be especially blessed. And the most marginalized and vulnerable people will actually be the people who we should pay the most attention to and devote the most resources to their care. I like that. And it'd be cool if, like, the guy, like, spent all of his time healing people. You know, while he was here, he was like, I'll do it the way that you should. And hanging out with the most vulnerable people, like sex workers and tax workers and taxes. collectors and lepers. Yeah.

This is my concept. I know just enough. Yeah, you really participated in that bit. Yeah. Considering your total lack of understanding of Christianity. And also, to be fair, many Christians. Total lack of understanding of Christians. It's not the version that you hear.

Yeah. Oh, God. thing, John. What a thing to be religious. Must be interesting. It's fun. I recommend it. I mean, do I recommend it? I don't know. It's fine. The truth is, you can have a moral compass either way. Turns out, I hope so. And you can also, by the way, have a bad moral compass either way. Yeah, I don't know. In terms of the actual stick, this is very hard. We've had this exact same problem with climate change, where it's like everybody's sort of signs up to hit the targets. And they can work really hard to hit the targets. But the moment the hitting of the target starts to hurt, which does, like it's not free, then suddenly the target becomes less important. If it seems like you're not going to be able to get voted in next time

and your opponent is like, I don't care about those targets, vote for me instead, it's very hard to have the targets continue to matter. Which reminds me actually that today's podcast is brought to you by The Stick. The Stick. Hank and I are bringing it back. Yes, we need to abuse the powerful, John. This podcast is also brought to you by your pupils. Your pupils, sometimes they're a little too big. And today's podcast is brought to you by whales. Wales essentially indirectly eating their own poop.

Also, John, this podcast is brought to you by the Dutch. The Dutch, not pretending to not be Dutch. They're putting it right out there. If I were Dutch, I would be so proud. I would wear orange every day. Yeah, I spent some time in the next. Netherlands because that's where we did VidCon Europe for a little while. And one of the great things about me being in the Netherlands is everybody thinks I'm Dutch.

Oh, yeah, you do look a little Dutch. That's got to be, he's got like light-colored hair and he's tall. That's got to be a Dutch person. And they just ask me Dutch questions. And I'm like, Sestisinae Pasoompeep. This episode is brought to you by NoCD. Have you ever had a thought pop into your head that feels so foreign or distressing that you just can't move on from it? like suddenly wondering if your headache means you have a brain tumor and then Googling symptoms for hours,

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my family and I are avid users of Good Dutts Store's sunbasin soap, available now at Good Dutth Store. Don't eat it. Don't eat it. Don't eat it, even though it does sometimes contain food, which is Al's question. We are particularly fond of forager, which has exfoliating coffee grounds. When I wash my hands with forager soap, do I absorb any caffeine from the coffee grounds through my skin. Recently, we got a kitten

whose favorite pastime appears to be gnawing on fingers. Does she get at all cat-finated by chomping my digits? Kittens and caffeine, Al. I mean, you're not getting none in you. Really? You can have transdermal caffeine?

Yeah, I mean, certainly. Like, on the hands, probably less. You know, they're pretty thick, hard to get through. But the backs of the hands that can be a little thinner. But yeah, caffeine's small enough that it can pass through the skin.

there are in fact caffeinated soaps. And I think that the marketing of these caffeinated soaps is, but the thing about like... Is what? Finish the sentence. BS? Look, I've not tried it. I think you got to put it on some pretty sensitive areas of the body to have the skin be thin enough for a substantial amount to get in there. But I tell you, you know, more power to the marketers, I guess.

It's so weird I had this conversation with a guy who's the CEO of a big e-commerce company and I was like, what can we do a good store to do a better job? And he just like pitched me on a series of manipulative tactics that I find completely morally objectionable.

I just don't, we just don't include this actually. No, do include it. He's not going to listen. He's not, there's only one billionaire who listens to this podcast. Everybody knows that. He was also like up front with it. He's like, you probably wouldn't want

to do what this company is doing, but this is working really well right now. And I'm like, you're right. I wouldn't want to do that. So he had good ideas too. But it is crazy the extent to which the world of e-commerce is just largely a system to give money to Facebook in exchange for converting a tiny amount of ad spend into profit. So we are, you know, we don't want to do that too much. but we want to have really effective advertising, which is mostly what we have, thank goodness. But we wouldn't want to tell people that this is one way to like get your pick me up in the morning is to have coffee soap. But ground up coffee, like the coffee grounds also like are going to be holding onto a lot of

their caffeine. You're not going to be steeping it through hot water. So I wouldn't be thinking that much of this is going to get into your body. And even less of it's going to be getting into a cat's body. And I also did no research on whether cats actually get caffeinated. This is what happened when Duboki goes out of town. I just... Wait, no, I mean, cats, just to be clear, Al, your cat is not getting caffeinated from gnawing on your finger that was washed for the shirt that contained coffee grounds.

Yeah, I just don't even know if, like, caffeine has an effect on cats. Like catnip, for example, has an effect on cats, but has no effect on us. So, like, but I assume that it would. I think that caffeine is a fairly, like, cross-mammal thing. Man, I used to know this guy who liked to drink with his dog. It was really sad. And the dog would like drink a beer out of a dog bowl while the guy drank. Yeah.

Dogs can get drunk, man. Oh, caffeine is toxic to cats. Everybody, I googled it. Don't let your cat have caffeine. There you go. Give him toxic to cats. But just to be clear, forager soap is not going to cat. your skin in a way such that your cat is going to have any negative or positive effects.

Yeah. That's all marketing lies. I'm sure that you can get a little bit. Certainly if you do like a coffee enema, that's a thing people do, and that can get you jazzed. Yes, indeed. If you enemaize forager soap, you might be in a different situation. Don't do that. A further disclaimer.

For external use only. One of the other ways you shouldn't use our product. Don't eat it. I want to make a video that's like, okay, we're going to talk about all the things that you should not do. Yeah. Don't snort it. Don't snort it. Yep.

Don't throw it at people. I said it a thousand times. You know what you should be snorting? Uh-huh. Very little. Air. Just air. 100%.

Nothing should go up there but air. Occasionally some saline. Maybe saline, but not aphrine. Man, this bad stuff gets you addicted. Oh, my God. I'll tell you what. You can say a lot of bad things about Afrin, but that first hit of Afrin when we're fully blocked is a wonder.

I mean, I'm not here to tell people to abuse drugs that can make you dependent upon them, but oh my God, when Afrin hits, it hits. Wow. You ever think about what you ever think about like what you are truly susceptible to? Like I know I need to stay out of casinos, you know? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I know what I'm like. I'd be like, I figured this one out. Oh, would you? I'm, I, uh, no, because I know that you can't, but I would think that I could and I need to stay out of casinos. You'd create a system for yourself? I personally love a casino, but I never lose more than $100 in one. I also never lose less than $100. John loses $99 every time he goes.

No, I bring it $100 and I walk out with nothing, guaranteed, every time. Every time. Yeah, because I play until they don't... Do you remember that time that we went... We were in Vegas for your bachelor party, and your friend needed to go to the ATM to get more money at one point because of the way that he was gambling. Yeah, we were having a good time. This made me so uncomfortable. I remember that Hank gambled exactly once, and it was at a game called Casino War, which is the worst odds.

It's the one they put right in front of the elevators. It's bad odds. It's also dumb. Like, it's also uninteresting. You're just playing war. And so you turn over two cards and whoever has the higher card wins, except you lose most of the wars. That's how the casino makes money. They make the war mechanic casino slanted, yeah.

And so Hank, like, turned over a 10, and the dealer turned over at 10, and the dealer turned to over a four and Hank won 20 bucks and he was like, great, I'm done. So based on my observation of you in a casino, I'm actually not at all worried that you would be a problem at a casino because I've seen you in a casino and you bet $20 once won and walked away, which I've never done. Well, you haven't seen me trade Bitcoin, John. I'm kidding. Oh my God. You're kidding, right? Yes. I just had a flash of panic. Yeah, no. There's a, there, the world, the world can can take it all away if you let it. I'm blessed not to be a gambler,

but I do have other weaknesses like Afrin. You and mom. Oh, man. Mom and I love Afrin. We've got, we just love it. All right, Hank, before we get to the all-important news from AFC Wimbledon and Mars, let's answer this question.

Less importantly. Yeah, sorry, did I reveal my bias there? Let's answer this question from Ethan. We've gotten a lot of questions in the last few weeks from folks who have been laid off recently. And so I just wanted to answer this one from Ethan who says, hi, John and Hank. A few days ago, I was told that I was getting laid off for my job that I've put so far my entire adult career into. It was the first job I got right out of college and almost exactly a decade later I'm being let go. That sucks.

This unfortunately is due to a company-wide decision and almost the entire department I'm in is in this situation. The hard part is I just bought my first time a month ago. And on top of that, my fiancé and I've already started wedding planning. If worse comes to worse, I may need to hold off on the wedding to make sure I can financially support myself and my fiancé. We don't have a date yet, but it was going to be a 2027 wedding, which is quickly approaching. Because of all this major events, should I delay the wedding? Should we just go to the courthouse and then host a party later? Yes is the answer.

Yeah. I'm going to stop you right there, Ethan. Well, or you don't have to get married right now. Yeah. No, I just, I think that weddings are the worst investment personally. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, no, for sure. And they're so expensive now.

Yeah. They're so expensive. And like all you get, you are just as married at the end of an expensive wedding as you are at the end of a cheap wedding, Ethan, is what I would say about this. I want to talk about being laid off, but first I want to talk about weddings, which is that you are equally married either way. Like, I had a big wedding with like 300 people at it. blessedly, it was very important to my in-laws, and they were willing to support it. They're amazing people. It was a great party, whatever.

It was great. My friend Stan, who started a crash course with me, got married at a courthouse in New York City, and 15, 20 years later, we are equally married. Yeah. You know what I mean? Exactly, yes. No, the wedding does not have much to do with the marriage. Really doesn't.

Yeah. So I think throw a party, you can even throw a party where you don't pay for things, where you ask people to bring their own beer or whatever. And there's all kinds of ways to have a wedding or a wedding party at all kinds of different cost points. And don't get sucked into big wedding. And I apologize if like the knot is sponsoring today's episode of Duranchen John or whatever. But like it's such, it's just, it's so easy to feel like this is a really important. thing. And what's important actually is to have as many people or to have people you love there with you, I think can be important. I think that can be meaningful. Like it was very meaning. The part of my wedding that was meaningful was being in the church and looking out at the assembled crowd and thinking so many people who love me are orienting their love for us in our direction right now. That was what was meaningful. Yeah. Well, I also think like you have to figure out what's important to you in this. Like it's,

for you, I remember realizing the extent to which it wasn't entirely for me, where there were things that I was doing for my wedding that were not about my preferences, but about other people involved. Parents, yeah. Yeah, particularly parents. But I think that if what you want is to be married, get married. And then if what you want is like a big experience, nobody even needs to know that you're already married. Like, yeah. So, so, So like have the thing and do the thing the way that you want to do it. But like don't, don't put yourself in a hard situation because you feel like you've already made this choice. You know, you have to respond to the world as it exists. And more to the point about the getting laid off part of it, I'm just so sorry that you put so much of yourself and your time and your energy and it ended this way. But here's what I would remind you of.

Hopefully you earned a lot along the way. You're going to be a great, you're going to be able to contribute in ways that you couldn't have contributed before to a different organization. But it's tough, man. Like, I remember, like, when I've had loved ones get laid off or leave jobs or get fired or whatever, it's so heartbreaking because you've invested so much in that institution and that institution says, we don't need you anymore. and that's just such a bad, like that's such a bad feeling.

It's so hard not to conflate that with your own sense of well-being and worth, but that isn't your well-being and worth. That's like a corporation that ultimately has told you a series of stories, but what it actually exists to do is to make returns for its shareholders. Yeah, yeah, it, it exists, yeah. And it's just disappointing when that is laid bare in a way that profoundly impacts your personal well-being. Right.

And when we are sort of told by society, the extent to which, you know, our value is how we can provide and how we are, you know, valued by that system. Yeah. No, I mean, I, yeah, it's really, really hard.

So mostly you have our commiserations and sympathy by as far as the wedding goes, I think get married when and how you want within the confines of what's realistic. I just, I look back at it and I think almost every day of my marriage has been more important than my wedding day.

Yeah, the wedding can be super fun though. It was super fun, no, it can be super fun. And I totally understand the urge to have a party and to be with people who love you and to be celebrated and to celebrate this union. I understand all of that. And I understand being denied that, being very frustrating. I just think like the industry around it has just built up to such an extreme.

It's crazy. That I think it's important to note that like you said, a wedding is not a marriage. Yeah. Yeah. And the cool thing about marriage is that it deepens over time. time, right? So, like, you know, I'd almost rather have a party now. Like, I'd almost rather have a party for our 20th anniversary than have a party for our wedding day. Even though that was an important accomplishment, like the bigger accomplishment is now. It's funny because

Catherine and I had been married for, we'd been dating for seven years when we got married. Right. And so it did a little bit feel like that. It also felt like a billion years, like seven years felt like so long. Right. Because it was like a huge portion of your life. Yeah. And it felt like we had late waited forever, you know? Everyone was like, why aren't you guys married? And the, uh, meanwhile, you were like 24?

Yeah. Well, we were 26. Right. And I think that the, uh, because we had been together for so much of our adult lives, um, it really did feel like a celebration, a relationship that already existed. Not like a celebration of a new joining. It was like a confirmation of a joining. When you guys celebrate your anniversary or think about that stuff,

do you think about it from the wedding date or do you think about it from when you started dating? We think about it from the wedding date. I think that's just cultural, though. Like, I'd like to. But, like, it was messy, you know, it wasn't like a non-messy seven years. There were times in that seven years when we broke up. Right, right, right. So that, yeah, I think that that, that,

It makes sense to celebrate that day. But I think about when we first got together as like an anniversary as well. Yeah, I think about the day that we committed to getting married as a bit of an anniversary because that was the day was pretty locked in.

You know? Yeah, not that it had ever not happened for you. That's true. I had been, as my friend, And as my friend said at my rehearsal dinner, after John came home from his first day with Sarah, he said, I'm going to marry that girl. And it was only the seventh time he'd said that. This is how we were built for some reason. All right, Hank.

It's time for the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. The news from AFC Wimbledon is that mom and dad got to go to Plow Lane. Mom had never been to Plow Lane before. And over the weekend, I took my parents and my best friend from college, Shannon, to Plow Lane with Rosiana. And we got to see AFC Wimbledon play. It was really, really special, you know, for my mom to see my happy place for her to see the stadium, the fans built, for her to see this, you know, great professional team playing not the most beautiful football in the history of the world, but professional level football. It was just really special. You know, I love sharing AFC Wimbledon with people in my life because it's such an important

part of my life. And then like these people are so important to me. And so, you know, making that connection is very valuable. That's why I'd love to take you to a game someday. But it was awesome. And best of all, in the 88th minute, Miles Hippolyte scored our first goal of the season. And we won the game one nil. You only need to score once.

You only got to score once. And it felt so good like hugging mom and dad in that moment. felt so good. I was just, ugh, exuberant. And then I was in a great mood after the game, had a couple beers, got some Mediterranean food, went to bed immediately, and flew home. Wow, weird, crazy. And here we are. And that was yesterday. Oh, man, that's not how I live. You're always like, why have you never been to an ASE-Libolid game? It's because I cannot imagine doing that. It's easy.

Friday to Sunday, man. You land on Saturday morning. You leave Sunday morning. It's not the best use of resources. I don't confess. No, we had a couple extra days in London, so we went to the Tate Modern, and we saw all kinds of cool art stuff,

and it was great. Good. In Mars news, Mars has very weird insides. So we tend to just kind of, because this is how we model it, and we don't have any evidence. Otherwise, we imagine planets to be pretty spherically symmetrical. So, like, you know, it's just like ball, ball, ball all stacked on top of each other.

But scientists have found that the interior of the southern hemisphere of Mars is way hotter than the northern hemisphere is Mars. The interior. The interior. Yes. What? How is that even possible? There's weather on the inside? Parts can get up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. What?

This is weird. So this is based on results from the Mars Global Survey, the Mars Odyssey, and the Mars reconnaissance orbiter. So the researchers did this by feeling how the gravity of Mars was affecting the spacecraft. So as the spacecraft orbit Mars, their orbits change very slightly because of the difference in the gravity, like the density of Mars at different places. This is called tidal tomography. And it helps them image, kind of image the inside of. Mars, and that in turn, helps you create a model of the structure and temperature of the inside of Mars.

And the data suggests that the mantle beneath the southern hemisphere must be quite a bit warmer than the northern mantle. And we do not know why this difference exists. That is so weird. Yes. But it could explain some of the weird things that we've seen about Mars, like the shape of the northern and southern hemispheres. So the Insight lander seismometer also recorded that seismic waves were usually dissipated faster in the south, which could be connected to this difference.

Well, yeah, different things going on. And also, Mars has had a weird life. I've always imagined that the interior of a planet is very consistent throughout. I've got news about Earth, John. Yeah. That's not true for Earth either. No, we got a real weird inside, probably because we got hit by a Mars-shaped, a sized thing early in our history, and it still makes it weird in there. We've still got like hunks of Thea hanging out inside of our mantle.

That's very metaphorically resonant. Is it? It is, yeah. I might have to think over some of the resonances, actually. But in the meantime, these things stick with us, huh? In the meantime, I want to thank you for potting with me. And thanks to everybody for their questions. You can email us at Hank and John at gmail.com.

I'm Hank He's John. That's right. This podcast is edited by Linus Obenhouse. It was mixed by Joseph Tuna Meddish. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halsrowh, and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Radley. Our editorial assistant is Toboki Chalk Rivardi.

The music you're hearing now, and at the beginning of the podcast is by their great gunarola. And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome. Can I tell you, John, something I just saw on the Nervator Subbreddit as a last part. of this podcast with the people who listened through their credits. Yeah. This person was listening but was distracted and came back in a few hours after having stopped and heard me say mice have not had balls since the early 2000. And quote, I'm like, have we been chopping off mice's genitalia?

What the actual heck? And then John answers, I wouldn't know I've always used a track pad. That's good stuff. Good stuff. Good stuff.