467: An Octopolis of Octopui

Key takeaways

• Writing two narrators requires real distance, not just effort. John explains he wrote Kai's perspective for Hollywood Ending first, then set the manuscript aside for roughly four years (writing The Anthropocene Reviewed in the meantime) before he felt capable of "turning the camera around" to write Juniper, a 22-year-old actress with a reputation for being difficult because she's a perfectionist.
• There is more air than water on Earth by volume, but not by as much as expected. Responding to a listener's debate, Hank calculates that if Earth's atmosphere were compressed to sea-level pressure, it would form a layer about 8 kilometers deep versus the ocean's 2.7 kilometers—roughly three times more air, not orders of magnitude more.
• Book tour routing depends on publisher-wide bookstore support, not just an author's preference. John explains that publishers track whether a given store has already hosted a major touring author that year, and try to avoid oversaturating markets or repeating the same cities annually so authors can reach new fans (like skipping Texas in favor of Boise or Portland, Maine, this cycle).
• Historical "average age of death" statistics mislead people in two directions. Hank breaks down that early death was driven by child mortality, but even people who survived childhood didn't reliably live into their 70s; death rates stayed elevated at every age from accidents, infections, and poisonings, with no sudden "cliff" at any point in life.
• American media and politics rarely reference how other countries solve shared problems, a habit Hank ties to nationally broadcast weather segments that almost never mention conditions outside the U.S. unless there's a catastrophic death toll elsewhere. Both hosts note exceptions exist (gun control debates cite Australia, healthcare debates cite universal coverage models) but argue the instinct to look outward is weak compared to reflexive American exceptionalism.
• John shares a self-deprecating running joke about his own worst-attended events: a nearly empty World Economic Forum session in Davos and a half-full planetarium talk in Miami; illustrating that audience turnout doesn't always track an author's overall popularity.

Notable moments

• John jokes the dinosaur pun is "technically wrong" because he had a pet conure growing up, sparking a tangent on whether domesticated animals are better off in captivity.
• "This broken world is very bad... but the idea that this broken world is somehow more broken than the previous broken worlds is ludicrous," John says, rejecting the notion that modern life is worse than pre-modern subsistence living.
• Hank calculates on air that Earth's compressed atmosphere would form an 8-kilometer layer versus the ocean's 2.7-kilometer layer, settling the listener's debate about air versus water volume.
• The brothers debate the correct plural of octopus, eventually inventing "octopui" and a fake Vatican encyclical to justify it, then settle on "octopolis" as a term for a group of them.
• On thank-you card etiquette, Hank proposes sending a card that looks like "it has been to hell and back," while John counters with gifting a book from your own shelf inscribed with a note of gratitude.
• John recounts bombing at a World Economic Forum talk in Davos meant to raise awareness about global health, calling it "a great opportunity to talk about global health to an empty room."
• Nine-year-old listener Winnie asks what "it" refers to in "it rained," prompting Hank to explain that English grammar requires a placeholder pronoun even when there's no specific subject; John riffs that "it" stands for "the whole considerable sensorium."
• The hosts discover mid-episode that their own podcast logo contains a hidden Nerdfighteria crest designed by Vondel Swain, which John says has been there since he created it.
• Mars news: Blue Origin wins a NASA telecommunications contract worth up to $700 million to build a Mars orbiter relay by the end of 2028, prompting Hank to explain that bandwidth, not just launch capability, is now a bottleneck for deep-space missions like the Roman Space Telescope and Voyager.

Time saved: 45 minutes.