H- Hello! And welcome to Dear Hank and John.

J- Or as I prefer to think about it, Dear John and Hank.

H- It a comedy podcast where me Hank Green and John Green that other guy answer you questions and give you dubious advice. And bring you all the weeks news from Mars and of course AFC Wimbledon. John how you doing.

J- I'm doing terribly thank you for asking. I broke my rib almost a week ago. It is extremely painful. Everything hurts, it hurts to stand, it hurts to sit, it hurts to lie down. I can't sleep at night. It just sucks! I don't even really want to talk about it but, I also can't think about anything else. So just tell me how you are doing.

H- I'm doing good. I'm doing good, you know pain is John, a sign that you are not dead. So there that going for ya.

J- I find that to be extraordinary cold comfort. I think that pain is the stupidest of all the human experiences. It is the one that I have found the least meaningful, but I am adamantly a little bit biased right now. Hank, we need to get to an important topic in re-last week podcast. Which is that...

H- Oh. Is it the spelling and punctuation of uzhe. 

J- It is the spelling and punctuation of uzhe. We have never experienced quite the deluge of emails...

H-Ya

J-..tweets etc. in re the spelling of uzhe. What I found most fascinating...This is how to shorten the word usually. ...What I found fascinating was how many people were completely convened that they knew the correct spelling of uzhe. And that all the other spelling were stupid.

H-Ya. Specially the one who were clearly wrong.

J- And yet everyone spelling disagree with everyone else except for the one person that was an actual linguist.

H-Oh ya. We had several. I felt that we had several linguist commenting on the matter, and indeed cringing at our armchair linguistness. What do you--linguicity? What is--what is the linguist version of philosophy?

J: I believe it's linguicity, I believe that's correct.

H: Armchair linguistics, I did it, I remembered.  

J: So somebody wrote in with a link to an extensive linguist conversation on this topic and I just wanna read a little bit of it.  We'll link to it on our Patreon, Patreon.com/DearHankandJohn.  The reason this problem arises is that the consonant in the middle of usual, which phoneticians call the 'voiced palatal velar fricative' and which is written in the international phonetic alphabet as this thing that isn't a letter, doesn't have a fixed representation in the English writing system.  Anyway, the long and short of it is that most of the linguists I heard from think that it should be uzh, or uzhe.

H: Uzhe.  Yeah, I guess I'd probably pronounce that uzhe.  U-z-h-e.  Ehhhh.

J: But I will say that Hank, on this website, there are lots of linguists, proper linguists, fighting this out about how to best represent uzhe in Latin letters, so we are not alone in feeling, you know, kind of lost in this conversation.

H: I also have to say that Katherine, I walked--I got home from work, I walked into my house, and I hear my own voice and yours coming from upstairs and Katherine is listening to this section of the podcast and she's sitting on the couch and on her lap is her laptop and she's looking at urban dictionary to see what the most common spellings on urban dictionary for uzhe are, and indeed, there are a number of different spellings of uzhe on urban dictionary.  U-z-h-e is one of them, but the most common one is the one that I suggested, which was just u-j-e, and so that was--that seemed to be, in terms of the colloquial, not necessarily the phonetician or the linguists correct spelling, but the colloquial spelling might just be u-j-e and I will say that was my call.

J: I'm gonna just stop you right there and point out that when you're trying to use urban dictionary to back up your arguments, you're in trouble already.  Uh, one more correction in the form of a short poem before we start the proper podcast.  A couple weeks ago, you talked about the Martian rover singing itself Happy Birthday alone on Mars and I've written a short poem in response.  "Six light minutes from Earth, alone on a red planet, which incidentally is not a shade of brown, a Martian rover does not sing itself Happy Birthday."

H: Oh, is this my--this is the correction that we received from--

J: This is the correction, Hank.  The Martian rover sang itself Happy Birthday once on its first birthday.  Since then it has not sung itself Happy Birthday, this is an urban legend that you have propagated.

H: My bad.  This is a correction sent to us by Michelle, who has a friend who works on the Curiosity rover and also linked to us to an actual article that from the--a Tweet from the Curiosity rover, confirming that it does not do this every year, but only on the first year.  John, do you wanna do any questions?

J: Yeah, sure, let's get to some questions from our listeners.  This first one is from Charlene who writes, "Dear John and Hank, My husband and I were discussing what we would do with lottery winnings of multiple billions of dollars.  I said that amount of money was too much for a single person to hold onto and that I would give away the majority of it.  My husband said he would never wanna give any of it away."  I mean, Charlene, any of it?  Really?  I--I'm concerned that your husband might be a terrible person.  Anyway, "I asked incredulously what he would do with all that money, and he said he always wanted to swim in a vault of money like Scrooge McDuck.  I wanna know what denominations of money would be best for swimming and how big of a room would you need to store the denominations of money so that it equaled just one of the billions he wants to keep swimming in." Uh, Hank, I thought this was an interesting question because I--if I were to win a billion dollars or get a billion dollars, however in whatever way, I have to tell you, I would give almost all of it away immediately.  

H: Just because you don't want to have that hanging over you and have everyone know that about you?

J: That, I don't think that it's good for your kids, really, to inherit huge sums of money, I think that it can be very distorting in their lives and not allow them to have their own lives that are independent of their parents.  I feel like it would be a weird amount of pressure, and I just--I don't feel like it would, in any way, make my life better.  Now, like, there are lots of sums of money that would make my life better, but I don't think a billion dollars is one of them.  

H: Well, uh, in that case, like, you might as well just fill a vault up with it and I have--but I have to say that if you fill a vault with coins, and you jump into it from a diving board that is, you know, any more than a few feet above the surface of the coins, you're gonna die.  Like, you're gonna hit that--

J: Yeah, you're about to die.

H: You're gonna break your neck, like, coins do not make a liquid.  Scrooge McDuck had special superpowers that allowed him to swim in money and indeed, I remember an episode of the DuckTales where Scrooge was swimming around and the boys, Huey, Duey, and Louie, jumped in and were unable to and were unpleasantly surprised by how they had run into a solid wall of metal.  So you would have to mix together, I think some, like, have some kind of system to mix together paper currency as well as maybe a little bit of coinage to give density, but you would have to have a system to constantly mix it, because they would fall out or you could create maybe some kind of origami shape, where you were putting some currency inside of a bill and then folding the bill up in a certain way that would create a density more suitable to swimming around in? I think that it's not impossible to figure out a way to make this work, but it is--it's not simple either.

J: Yeah, no, here's what I would say, Hank.  I would say that Charlene's husband is genuinely risking death by inheriting a billion dollars or winning a billion dollars and turning it into a pool full of coins, which I think is pretty metaphorically resonant in re: what it would be actually like to suddenly have a billion dollars.  

H: Uh, I, yes.  I would take a billion dollars though, because I'd have a lot of fun giving it away.

We've got another question, it's from Katherine who asks, "Dear Hank and John, I was in my backyard spray painting and I accidentally spray-painted a part of a bush blue while making some lovely squid art.  I tried spray painting the bush green, but the shades of green don't match.  What do I do?"

J: Hank, I don't know if we're gonna have the same response to this one, but um, you wanna just say on three what we think Katherine should do?

H: Yes.

J: 1, 2, 3 move.

H: Burn your entire house down.

J: Yeah, okay, so we're in the same direction here, like, this is a crisis and the only way to deal with it is to run screaming from this property.  Like, this should not be your house anymore.  You're never gonna be able to get that bush back the correct shade of green, you need to just probably move to a whole different city.

H: Yeah, I mean, I'd go to Mars if you could.

J: Well, you can't, fortunately, but I don't think you need to go to Mars, but I think you need to like, you need to reinvent your whole life. Just you and that one work of squid art need to walk out that door with no other belongings and just find a new life for yourself. In fact, Katherine, don't even name yourself Katherine. In this new life, like, you can have no connection to the person that spray painted that bush blue, like, you've gotta be a completely different person, except you'll always know that you're still you when you look up and you see that squid art. 

H: Alright, well, I think we've covered that one pretty well, John, do you have any other questions for us?

J: No, that was it, that was the end of--that's the end of the podcast.

H: Alright, I got one, though if you want me to keep going.  It's from Parker who asks, "Dear Hank and John, What the heck even is accounting?  I know it's important and there are a lot of really smart people who are great at it, but it just does not click in my brain.  Why do I have to take accounting for my management major?  Can't I just check a box that says 'I will hire an accountant'?  Can't I just take an accounting vocabulary class so I understand what my accountant is talking about?  Best wishes, Parker." 

J: Ow, it hurts to laugh, but the idea that you could check a box that's just--that probably the checking the box, Parker, is that if you check a box saying 'I will hire an accountant,' you're essentially checking a box that says, 'I'm going to give someone free reign to steal from me because I will have no idea whether they are telling me the truth'.  

H: There's that.  And in general, as a businessperson, it is always good to understand what all of the people in the organization are doing, even if you aren't doing it.  As far as the question, 'What the heck even is accounting?', I think you could Google that one, but you know, it's keeping account of what all the money is doing.  That's why they call it accounting.

J: Yeah, I mean, it turns out to be really important to know whether your business is losing money or making money, and like, for a long time in Hank and I's career, we did not pay attention that question, and it turns out, like, to be a deeply interesting and important question, and we sort of missed the boat by not giving it a little more attention early on, I think.

H: Maybe.  Also, I think that I enjoyed the way that we did it, but I, you know, there is--there are managers who don't know how to do accounting and I certainly am not an accountant or anything, but like, I think that you're in school to learn stuff and you should learn stuff even if you don't like learning it. Is that okay to say?

J: Yeah, also it's helpful in your--I would argue it's helpful in your everyday life, like, for many many years, I did not know how to read an Excel spreadsheet.  I did not know how to balance my checkbook, and it--that stuff was really stressful for me.  It caused me a lot of stress and anxiety, and it turns out that like, in the end, it isn't that hard, I just had to do the work to learn how to be able to do those things and once I could, I suddenly felt like I had, you know, a little bit of control over my financial life instead of it being something that was happening to me, you know, my bank occasionally writing to say that I had overdrawn my accounting and I'm just like, thrown into a panic, like, I was--I was instead in a situation where I felt like, okay, I'm in--I have some control over this.  I know why this happened.  I know why that happened, and it's really empowering for me, so I actually--I think it's worth it to learn some basic accounting, no matter what you're gonna do in life.  

H: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that Parker's accounting class is more advanced than that, and that is why he's finding it particularly annoying, but those--yeah.  I--it's valuable.  I'm gonna just say it's valuable and that's gonna be--and in general, I feel like if you're enjoying more than 50% of your work, then you're good, and so maybe this is just part of the 50% that you don't love.

J: What uh, what percentage of your work do you enjoy, do you think?  
H: I probably enjoy 80 to 90% of my work.  

J: That's interesting.  I think--I think I'm in a similar--I think I'm probably like, 75%, but I feel really good about that, like, I didn't--there hasn't been a time in my life when I've enjoyed as high a percentage of my work as I do right now.  

H: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, because there's a difference between what I enjoy doing and what I enjoy thinking about doing, and what I dread so like, there are things that I dread that I enjoy doing. I don't know if that sounds insane.

J: Right.

H: But like, I'm like, uhh, I have to do that thing, and then once I'm doing it, I'm like, this is fine and great and I actually quite like it, but before I'm doing it, I'm--I spend a lot of time being stressed out about the fact that I have to do it.  

J: The big distinction in my life is there are some things I enjoy doing and there are some things I enjoy having done.  So I definitely enjoy having written much more than I enjoy writing, but that said, like, I do--I like writing enough to consider it in the 75% of stuff that I like doing.  The 25% of stuff is mostly paperwork and e-mails.  

H: Yeah, yeah.  It's mostly--it's a lot of e-mail for me.  It's also like, just when things go wrong, you know?  It's like, that's the stuff, and I feel like that percentage could increase dramatically if like, if it's a month where things are going wrong more, but that always makes stuff much harder when it's not going well and we're very--I've been very lucky to have things go very well, you know, for the most part.

J: Yeah, things are going pretty well these days.  Hank--

H: Failure is unpleasant as much as I try to say that it is just part of process and of course everybody fails and it's just part of--it's a thing that is going to be a part of your life, but it is unpleasant and I don't like it.

J: It is unpleasant but man, do you learn a lot more from failure than you learn from success in my experience.  

H: Definitely true.  

J: The problem with success is that it tells you that like, you know, things are always gonna be easy and you're a special snowflake and there's nobody like you and that's why you're gonna always succeed everywhere you go and then failure teaches you a lot.  

H: Yep.  

J: Alright, this question is from Hannah, Hank, who writes, "Dear John and Hank, I'm kind of very confused about why gas planets work. Are they just like really big clouds?  How do they maintain a uniform shape?  How do they have an orbit?  Do they have a surface or gravity?  How dense are they?  Okay, actually, ignore all those questions and just answer this one: if an airplane can fly through a cloud, could a rocket ship hypothetically fly through Jupiter?  They don't teach these things in my public school."  Hannah, that's a fantastic question that I've never even paused to consider.  

H: Uh, well, first of all, I'll say that if a airplane is going fast enough, it actually can't fly through air.  There comes a point at which air is dense enough, gas is dense enough, that it will tear the plane apart.  You see this as meteors are coming through our atmosphere at a very high speed.  They get very hot because the gases in front of them are being compressed and all that energy is being turned into heat.  They break apart, they're ripped into pieces, and they explode and that is one of the crazy things about gases.  They seem like they're hardly there at all, but if you're moving fast enough, they're basically a brick wall.  Just like Scrooge McDuck's coins.  So, a rocket ship could you know, fly into Jupiter if it was going slow enough, if it was going this speed that a rocket ship normally goes, it would totally be ripped apart by the gas.  But the way that it works is basically all, like, gas has mass, it's gas is matter, and it has a mass and it has a weight so it creates it gravity, and all of that gas altogether pulls itself together into this giant thing and at the very middle it's very dense because there's so much gas that there's all this pressure being pushed down on it by gravity, and down there in the center of Jupiter, we do not know what is there.  We don't know if ther--like, probably what's there is like, like, it's under so much pressure that the gas becomes metallic, it like, it goes from being a gas to being a solid or liquid, and you've got this like, metallic hydrogen core of Jupiter. We're not sure though, because it is a giant planet and we will never be able to go into the middle of it, because whatever we would send down there would totally get crushed by that tremendous pressure.  So it's just--it's a collection of gas in a sphere that is being held together in a sphere just like a liquid would or just like a solid would, our planet being solid, has been crushed into this spherical shape by the gravity, by the density of its own mass, and that's also what's happening with Jupiter.  

J: I find something about that just astonishingly beautiful, the idea that we'll never know what the center of Jupiter looks like and we have to like, live in a universe knowing that that's something that we can never know.  

H: Well, John, we don't even know what the, like, what the center of Earth looks like.  We have some ideas, but those ideas continue progressing and changing and yeah, we--

J: Now, I don't like to correct you on science stuff, but I am gonna have to just ask you to hit the pause button on that one, because in fact, I don't know if you've read Journey to the Center of the Earth, but Jules Verne has explored that in really, like, exciting detail, so if you haven't read that book, I truly recommend it, because it tells you exactly what the center of the Earth is like and it's awesome.

H: Do you wanna do another science question, John?

J: Sure, yeah, no, the less I have to talk, the better.

H: Alright, this one's from Andrea, who asks, "Dear Hank and John, According to a SciShow video that I saw recently, salt in the ocean is just a mix of minerals picked up over thousands of years and not sodium chloride, like table salt.  So what is the sea salt they put on my Wendy's fries?  Is that less healthy than table salt?"  Actually, I don't know if we misspoke in that SciShow episode or if you misheard, but it is a mix of minerals, the primary one being sodium chloride, so the sea salt that they put on your fries at Wendy's is mostly sodium chloride, but sea salt also has a bunch of other stuff in it like magnesium chloride and just, whatever other salts, which is what we call these ionic compounds in chemistry, whatever other salts got picked up as rivers flow down to the sea, and so that table salt is mostly salt. Table salt is all sodium chloride, sea salt is mostly sodium chloride with some stuff thrown in, and that other stuff might be beneficial, you probably get it in other ways, though, in addition to getting it in sea salt, which is why sea salt is mostly, let's be honest, it's just salt. 

J: Yeah, I very rarely hear of people who aren't getting enough salt here in--at least in the United States.  We don't have a huge sodium shortage.  
H: No, it's the other stuff that's in the sea salt that they think maybe you should be getting, like magnesium or phosphorus or whatever, but like, you get that stuff other ways.

J: I will say on the topic of salts, as you know, Hank, I am a committed bather.  I do not believe in showers, which are essentially just--

H: Oof.  Ugh.

J: --getting attacked by millions of pellets of water or very kind of sort of liquefied bullets shooting you millions at a time, uh, and so I take baths, and I enjoy nothing more than bath salts when I am bathing.  What a pleasure.

H: Is that--is that the whole story?  Is that just the thing you wanted to tell me?

J: Yeah.

H: What are bath salts?

J: Well, as far as I can tell, they're smelly salts, but I--there is a drug called bath salts, like a recreational drug.  

H: Yeah, yeah.

J: I know about this because I was--the TSA took my bath salts from my carry-on bag once when I was trying to get on an airplane and they were like, "What is this?" and I was like, "Those are my bath salts, I'm a committed bather, and you know, I'm gonna be out of town for two days and I looked up the hotel room that I'm gonna be in and I got a picture of its bathtub and everything looks like it's gonna be a great bathtub and I'm very excited," and they were like, "Why are you taking bath salts to New York City?" and I was like, "Because I like to bathe in hotel rooms and I use bath salts. Doesn't everyone who takes baths?" and anyway, it was a big miscommunication because apparently bath salts are also a drug but I have--I genuinely don't know if the bath salts that are the recreational drug are also the bath salts that you buy at Bed, Bath, and Beyond but if they are, I might accidentally be addicted to bath salts.  

H: Well, I think you might be addicted to bath salts, but only the kind that go in your bath, which are definitely different from the kind that people use as recreational drugs, though I imagine they look somewhat similar, which is why they got that name, but yeah, not the same thing.

J: I mean, I wouldn't say that my use of bath salts rises to the level of a recreational drug, but I will say that I really like it.  

H: It's probably especially helpful when--to soothe that aching pain of having a rib in several pieces.

J: Oh, it's just--so the kind of rib fracture I have is--it's not what's called a simple rib fracture, it's called a displaced rib fracture, which means the two parts of my rib don't line up perfectly.

H: Ohh.

J: But they're always trying to get back together.

H: Uh-huh.

J: And so when I move, they're like, moving against each other and it hurts so freakin' bad.  

H: That sounds awful and what I know about--'cause I recently separated some cartilage from a rib, which is a very different but still painful thing, and the doctor was like, yeah, there's not really anything you can do, it's a rib, just uhh, don't hurt it.

J: Yeah, my doctor was great in the ER, she was like, you're so lucky you didn't lacerate your liver and I was like, "I don't feel lucky," like, that's a very specific definition of luck, like, do you wake up every morning, doctor, and say, pff, I won the lottery today.  Didn't lacerate my liver!

H: Yeah, I have a--

J: No, I would argue that I was incredibly unlucky.  

H: Yeah.  Well, you know, there's always somebody who has it worse. My doctor, when I first was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, was like, if you're gonna be diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, this is the kind you want, and I was like, well, you know, that's something.

J: No.  

H: That's something to live for.

J: No.  No.  I don't--I'm not a big fan of that bedside--that particular bedside manner of like, you won't believe your good fortune, here's all the things that aren't wrong with you.  

H: It works for some people, not for others.  It works okay for me.

J: Alright, Hank, let's move on to another question. This question is from Natalie, who writes, "Dear John and Hank, I'm a first time e-mailer and new listener after my hairstylist recommended your podcast."  First off, I just wanna thank America's hairstylists for being such consistent supporters of the Pod.  Secondly, I will now read the rest of the question. "The question that has been the bane of my existence for quite some time is what is proper door etiquette?  How long do I hold the door open for someone?  When you open the door and someone is standing on the other side also looking at you with the deer in headlights expression, who goes first?  I really don't understand."  These are great questions.  They're--it's two distinct questions, Hank, there's the first, when you open a door and you look behind you and someone is coming, but they are in that middle distance where they are not about to be there, but they also aren't like, far away, do you hold the door open and for how long?  And then the second question, when you open a door and you see that there is someone about to come out of the door as you are about to go in it, who goes first?

H: I--John, I was in a very weird situation.  So in Montana, of course, we have double doors, so like, there's a vestibule to keep the hot air inside in the winter, and I was in a very weird situation where I was walking up to the bagel place, someone opened the door to go into the bagel place, then I was coming in behind them and they were kind of holding the door for me, though they weren't sure if I was going into the bagel place or if I was sort of walking abnormally close to the building headed somewhere else, and then inside, so they were looking at me, but inside, there was a person who had opened the other vestibule door and was holding the door open for the person who was holding the door maybe opened for me, but maybe not and everybody, and then like, like, and suddenly, everybody got very confused and they all just like, scattered, and people like, dropped doors, started running, it was--it was a very stra--and I don't know that there was any way to do it except for the way that we ended up doing it, which was just every man for himself. The rules have broken and we just have to deal with the situation as it comes to us.

J: It was basically the Purge, you know, like, like, there are no more laws.

H: It's the door holding purge.

J: Now it's just, it's just people on their own as animals, just trying to get through the day.  

H: Yeah, and I was just like, well, and now, now--but also the problem that I hate this, when you hold the door open for someone and then they go in in front of you, but then they're in front of you in line, and you're like, hey, like, I wanted to hold the door for you, but I wasn't giving you my spot in line!  I hate that.  So you've gotta walk in, and--

J: No, I disagree with you on that one, I think if you hold the door open for someone, that is a statement, I am now putting myself in a position where you shall be ahead of me in all the future interactions that we have. 

H: No.

J: The thing that I don't like is the double door situation where you hold the door open for someone in the double door situation and then they, of course, are the first to the next door, and then they hold the door open for you--

H: Have to--yeah.

J: --and you end up winning by trying to be generous, you end up being in first place.

H: I love that!  I think that that's the wonderful thing about the double door is that like, I can hold the door open for you, but then I still get my proper spot in line.

J: No, see, for me, like, I believe the last shall be first, not the last shall be first and then last again, so I think that's just a worldview difference, but I--so I'm gonna argue that in general, this door thing, both these door problems, boil down to the need to be kind and generous toward each other and also careful of each other. Like, ultimately, what it boils down to is that if you feel like somebody didn't hold the door open for you and you were close enough that they should have held the door open for you, you need to pause and say to yourself, "You know what?  That person probably had a brief moment of crisis and made the best decision that they could make in that moment.  They're not a bad person, they're not out to get me, they just--they made the call that they thought was right in that moment, and I don't think it was right, but I'm gonna be okay with it.  Alternately, if you are the person holding open the door, and you look and you're like, I think that person's a little too far away, just make the best call that you can make in that moment and assume that everybody is gonna be okay with it and not gonna be mad at you.

H: You know what I do, John?  I kind of--if--I sort of look a little bit before I open the door to see if maybe there's anybody around in a way that makes it clear that like, when I open the door and I feel like that person's too far away, I don't have to look back at them and acknowledge their existence before closing the door in front of them.  I can, I sort of like, know that they're back there and I don't look at all, and I just let it go as if I'm just an unthinking person, rather than someone who is intentionally closing a door on someone, so try and surreptitiously look.

J: You know what I'll do sometimes, if I feel like somebody's a little too far away, I'll just sort of--as I'm opening the door, I'll look back at them and I'll just sort of shrug, as if to say like, pfft, sorry man, but like, I don't know how to hold this door open.  

H: I honestly will sometimes slow down as I'm approaching the door if I know that there's someone who is a bit farther away, so that like, and I'll just like, take a real long time opening that door, like, oh, I got distracted by this newspaper stand and now I'm looking at that for a little while to make, like, to let the person catch up so that I--but I will say, John, so here's a thing that I do that I wouldn't mind if other people did, but I'm not saying it's a necessary part of being a polite human. When I have the door opened for me and it's a restaurant or something where there's a line, I will then stand by the door and let the person go in front of me so that they like, so that they are not punished for being kind and opening a door for me.

J: Yeah, I mean, I--

H: There's a lot of etiquette that goes with this!

J: I think in general, in human life, almost all the time, unless you are in a true, like, Wendy's emergency where if you don't get your Wendy's as soon as possible, you're gonna faint, like, if you're on the edge of a diabetic coma or something.  I think it's almost always the right thing to do to just say to the person who you held the door open for, "Why don't you go first?"  I am a big believer in like, those little tiny acts of kindness making life bearable.  Like, I try--this is hard to do, but if you can imagine in the 99% of time when you aren't in a tremendous hurry that like, you are not actually in a rush, and you can treat other people as if they are in a rush, their days get so much better.  Like, they go home and they talk about this person who was nice to them, because th--I really believe like, it's made that much of a difference in my life in those times when I've been in a huge rush and people have been kind to me, like, it makes a lasting difference.  Like, we talked in a recent episode, remember, where I was jogging and I say good morning and the person said it's 12:02? 

H: Yeah.  Yeah.

J: That made a lasting difference in my life, like, that stranger had a lasting impact in my life, it's just kind of a negative impact.  I think if you try to find those little moments that have that positive impact, it's huge!  

H: Mhmm, no, I completely agree, and I also really enjoy doing it. Like, I feel like increasing the amount of appreciation in the world is--it makes me feel better as well.

J: Yeah, so you win!  You win when you hold the door open for someone and let them go in line first--

Which reminds me, Hank, that today's podcast is brought to you by Wendy's. Wendy's: you don't have to get there first to get those delicious sea salted fries.  

H: That's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. Today's podcast is also brought to you by accounting: it's necessary if you want to run a business and there are parts of your job that you're not gonna like and it might be one of them. Accounting!

J: Oh, God, laughing hurts so much. And today podcast is also brought to you by bath salts. Bath salts: the kind that you put in the bath.

H: And finally, this podcast is brought to you by Charlene's husband, who doesn't want to help anyone and just wants to Scrooge McDuck his neck broken. Charlene's husband.

J: Wouldn't it be great if our podcast was actually sponsored by accounting, like as an abstract idea if like, the American Association of Accounting sent us a huge check every week, and we could just like, find different ways to work accounting into the podcast, or alternately, if our podcast was actually sponsored by Wendy's, or anyone?  Wouldn't it be great if someone paid us a bunch of money to talk about their product and/or service on our podcast?

H: I was recently on Twitter trying to get LaCroix to send me--or LaCroix, sorry, to send me 378 twelve packs of LaCroix, which is, you know, would make my life better.  I'd talk about LaCroix all day on this podcast if they'd send us some--

J: God, I love LaCroix, like if there's one thing--one way that my life has changed demonstrably since the success of The Fault in Our Stars, it's that I now buy as much LaCroix as I want, which is a lot.

H: You know, John, this--there's a thing about the world that I kind of dislike right now, and that is the sparkling Dasani and Aquafina that I'm starting to see at grocery stores, because LaCroix--

J: Yeah, strong agree.

H: --found this thing and they were like, oh my gosh, we found a niche, it's calorie-free beverages that are flavored well and that are refreshing when cooled, and they found a niche that like, that Coca-Cola and Pepsi missed.  How weird and amazing is that opportunity?  And LaCroix does not have good graphic design, their logo is very weird. Their--the copy that they like, their packaging copy never makes any sense and always makes me just like crave to like, hire a good copywriter for them, I feel like their CEO writes it or something, because it's very, like, disconnected from reality, and then, but like, it works.  It works so well and it has become so popular and it frustrates me to no end to know that somebody at Coca-Cola tried to buy LaCroix and LaCroix was like, no, we're gonna do this on our own, and so they just came out with these, like, beautiful sparkling Dasani beverages, sparkling Aquafina beverages, and are trying to take on LaCroix and I'm like, no.  No, you will not!  You cannot have this, there is one thing that you can't have and it's LaCroix.

J: Yeah, Hank, I totally agree with you, but on the other hand, if delicious sparkling Dasani water wants me to drink 378 of their beverages and receive a huge amount of money in exchange for talking about how much I love sparkling Dasani water, I'm more than happy to do that.

H: Yeah, I totally agree with you.

J: It's so funny, Hank, like, I--the difference is that I am serious.  I want to sell out so bad, and you don't.  You genuinely don't wanna sell out.  It's so annoying.  You guys don't know about this because, like, you don't have to deal with Hank in private, but like, Hank will never sell out, even in tiny little delightful ways.  It's super annoying.  

H: That's not necessarily true.  I sell out some ways.

J: No.  No, you don't.  You really don't.

H: I struggle.  I struggle, and I go one way some days and another way other days. Just not with our sort of core properties of like, the brother stuff, because I feel like who needs it?  It's--this is the thing.  We're just messing around and it doesn--like, that's why we have fake sponsorships, even though I kinda feel bad, because of course, many podcasts need real sponsorships because they need to make it work, because they put in a great deal of effort and they wanna be compensated for the great work that they do, but we don't have to do that.

J: But, I mean, but it's clear that Hank, Hank, none of our listeners, just in case you're concerned about this, none of our listeners labor under the delusion that we put in effort in this podcast, so you don't have to worry about that.  No one's out there thinking, God, they're working hard and not getting paid for it.  They're out there thinking, "I wonder when they're going to answer the next question?" and the answer to that question is now.

Hank, this question comes from Allison, who writes, "Dear John and Hank, Hello, my name is Allison."  Allison, I really like it when people repeat their names, so thank you. "My ice maker broke, so I, Allison, am currently using an ice tray. My question is, when is the best time to refill this ice tray? Do I, Allison, wait until all the ice is gone, or until there are 2-4 cubes left?  I would love to hear your opinions." Hank, I think that this is one of those there's two kinds of people in the world questions.

H: Mm, nah, I think there's one kind of people in the world, or maybe two kinds of people in the world.  One who hasn't heard about the right way to do it, and then there's the other kind who just does it the right way.  

J: Okay, well, why don't you just tell me what the right way is, as you usually do.

H: Well, okay.  Well, in that case, I absolutely will, thank you, John.  You put an--a separate container in the freezer and you empty out the ice tray into the bucket and then you refill the ice tray long before you have used all the ice cubes.  You don't take individual cubes out of the thing.  You break the thing and then you take all of them out at once.

J: I mean, I will tell you something, which is that that is a brilliant solution that I have never thought of in all of my many years of not having an automatic ice maker.   I--let me tell you the way I do it, and then you can tell me whether you think your way or my way is better.  The way I do it, and I've done this--we don't have an ice maker now, I haven't had an ice maker in my fridge most of my adult life, and the way that I do it is that I have a couple ice trays that have ice cubes in them.  I take those trays, I use all of the ice cubes, I put empty trays back in the freezer, and then I go in to get ice cubes and I'm like, dang it!  Why did I not take three seconds to fill up this with water six hours ago, you idiot?  And then I get mad at myself, I drink a very warm LaCroix while I'm waiting for my new ice cubes to become ice cubes and then I'm finally able to enjoy delicious refreshing sparkling grapefruit LaCroix, available now at grocery stores everywhere.

H: Um, you know, John, they recently--I don't know how recently, but they have coconut LaCroix now, and I have stayed well away from it for a while, thinking--and I'm not a big fan of coconut, I like Thai food though, and I like cracklin oat bran, which has a lot of coconut in it, but for the most part, I prefer to not have--to not interact with coconut too much, and I drank it and I did not like it.  Somebody got it for a party I went to, it was the only thing available, I had some and I was like, ehh.  But then I mixed it with orange juice and I liked that quite a lot and then I put some lime juice in the coconut LaCroix and that was very good and it--I thought to myself, my goodness, I just the lime in coconut and mixed them both together and drank it all up, and I thought that was a wonderful moment in my life.  

J: It hurts to laugh.  It's so terrible.  It's like this--oh God, it's extremely painful to laugh.  Okay. I'm glad that you got that lime in the coconut joke in there, it only took you four minutes to arrive at.  It was one of those jokes where the moment you said coconut LaCroix, I started to be like, is he going to put the lime in the coconut and drink it all together?  And the answer, of course, was yes.  Hank, before we sell out any further to a company that has given us no money or any delicious beverages in the form of LaCroix, let's get to the news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon.  

H: Alright, do you wanna give us some AFC Wimbledon news, or should I tell you about the fascinating news from Mars?

J: Tell me the mews from Nars.  

H: Okay, here's my Nars mews.  So, NASA has a pro--a program, it's called the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, and it helps sort of give small amounts of funding to ideas that would be revolutionary and would totally change space flight, but probably aren't gonna turn into anything particularly useful and one of the things that have got money from NIAC recently is a research project to induce a hybernation-like state, a state of torpor, in astronauts allowing them to basically sleep all the way to Mars, and the way that they would do this is--

J: Whoa.

H: --is using--I know, it's like--we talk about this in science fiction all the time, but they're actually like, they are looking to take an existing medical technique called therapeutic hypothermia, and actually apply that to healthy people who just are taking up too much space and eating too much food, making it impractical to get them to Mars, and the application this would not be for the first missions to Mars, it would be if we wanted to send, like, hundreds of people to Mars, and to basically actually create a sustainable another human world in our solar system, and it would dramatically reduce, cut by a factor of 40, the amount of space that the people would need on their trip to Mars. Basically, the technique works like this. They take your body temperature down like five degrees and then they give you some drugs and basically put you into a kind of like suspended animation state, and that is a thing that they currently do for people who have been badly injured while they're working on repairing their bodies.  It is a thing that exists.  It is not particularly safe and we don't, of course, we've never tested in in microgravity, but it is a thing that people are interested in doing and would potentially be safer for astronauts, because they could put more shielding on the containers.  They could also--their muscles might degenerate less in the time that they're traveling to Mars than it would in a normal microgravity environment while having, like, being awake.  They would eat less food, and they would--it would be easier to get them there, but it is definitely a thing that is for the future, but I was fascinated to know--oh sorry, they decrease the body temperature by nine degrees Fahrenheit, five degrees Celsius--and yeah, it would make it a lot easier to get a bunch of people to Mars, though, to be clear, it is just--it is one of those things that is a high payoff if it works, but probably won't work kind of thing. 

J: Follow up question, and I don't mean to be insensitive in any way, but um, do they have the technology to lower your body temperature by nine degrees Fahrenheit and let you sleep off say, a broken rib injury?  

H: Yeah, maybe.  I think usually--

J: But you said it was risky, so I assume that it's not something I probably wanna do myself, but uh, I would love it if they could develop that for the next time I break a rib, because this sucks.

H: You know, John, I don't wanna be insensitive to your pain, but I need you. I need you not in a--a hypothermia induced torpor to do all the things you have to do.

J: I feel like things would be moving swimmingly if I were in a hypothermia induced torpor right now.

Speaking of hypothermia induced torpors, AFC Wimbledon continue their League One season as a third tier English football team.  Hank, you may remember that I said last--toward the end of last season, if, by some miracle, AFC Wimbledon were promoted, it would likely be a sort of--a one year venture up there in the, you know, the third tier of English football.  So far that's looking a smidge prophetic.  AFC Wimbledon very nearly won their first game of the League One season against Rockdale, possibly Rochedale, nobody knows for sure how to pronounce it.  They were up one-nil in the 95th minute, which is five minutes longer than the game should have technically gone on.  It was an injury time when Rockdale scored to tie the game, meaning that AFC Wimbledon are now on two points, two points.  The bad news about that is that Rockdale are also on two points.

H: Oh my God.

J: They are down there just above us at the very very bottom of the table.  We are last, they are second to last, so that is a game that we would have needed to likely probably would have been nice to win that one, but we didn't so here we are on two points, having played five games.  That's not where you wanna be, but I don't really have a but, that is not where you wanna be.  

H: I'm sorry.  Who's been scoring for you, John?

J: Well, uh, in summary, no one.  Which is a bit of the issue, you have isolated--there's sort of two issues, which is that we are not scoring enough goals and then there's the second issue which is that we are giving up too many. I feel like if we addressed either of those issues, it might--it might lead to a significant improvement in the results--listen, I'm not a football commentator, but I feel like if we were getting more goals in and letting fewer in, that we would, you know, be scoring more.  There is some good news.  George Frankham, the Frankhamstein is comin' back after almost like, five months away.  Lyle Taylor has scored a couple of goals.  There's a new--there's a new guy who's doing okay, Poleon.  He's been scoring some goals.  Dom Poleon, but no, it is not great at the moment, but there's still a lot of season left.  It's only five games in.  We'll see.

H: I just Googled AFC Wimbledon and Tuesday, August 30th, Wimbledon won against Swansea City, 3-0.  

J: Yeah, no, that's the Swansea City Under-23 side, not the grownup Swansea City, and it's in a competition called the--it's not the League One competition, and indeed, nor is it the FA Cup, it's this sort of, it's the football league cup, which I believe right now is called like, the Changeaway Cup or something, because it has a sponsor that's some betting site, I don't know.

H: Right.

J: It's great to get a win in, I'm not sure that that really counts as a proper victory though.

H: I would agree with you.  I agree.  And I see now, looking at the League One table, that indeed, you are 24th of 24.  

J: Yes.  That is correct.  Sitting comfortably in 24th, but I will remind you, if we finish 2--nope.  If we finish 2--20th, I don't think--if we finish--all we have to do is finish 20th.  

H: Well.

J: Or above.

H: You know.  That's not nothin'.  And then you can stick it in there and maybe you can get against the Dons and you can--you've really only gotta win one game this season, and it's against the MK Dons.  

J: I prefer to think of them as the franchise currently playing in Milton Keynes, since they have no right to use the nickname 'The Dons', but yes, I'd like to win a bunch of games this season, but there are certainly two that I have circled on the calendar.  

H: Alright. Well. John, what did we learn today?

J: Well, we learned that accounting is important even if it's boring.

H: We learned that you probably don't wanna dive headfirst into a vat full of coins, so instead, you should fold them up into origami dollar thingies.

J: And of course, we learned that Hank has a significantly better way of dealing with ice trays than John does.  

H: And finally, we learned that the Mars rover does not, in fact, sing itself 'Happy Birthday' every year after a year it's been another year on Mars, which is really too bad.  You'd think they'd just, like, have it have a go at that.  What harm is it doing?  Come on.  Let it sing itself a song alone on a dark desolate planet until that wonderful moment when a human comes up and says, "How you doin', buddy?  Good work."  And that's gonna happen.  2027.  

J: I can't wait for that to happen to 2029.  Our podcast is edited by Nicholas Jenkins, our intern is Claudia Morales, Rosianna Halse Rojas helps us out with the questions, our theme music is by Gunnarolla.  Hank, I think I told people where to email us, but just in case, if you wanna e-mail us, you can do so at hankandjohn@gmail.com.  I believe that covers it, except to say, Hank--

H: Yes?

J: As we say in our hometown

H&J: Don't forget to be awesome.