465: Weird Trajectory

Key takeaways

• Hollywood Ending, John's first novel for adults since Turtles All the Way Down, drew a starred Booklist review calling it "a YA fiction supernova" and "a spellbinding, tender, incisive, funny, and compassionate story of love and creativity." The book tour is sold out in New York (a 3,100-seat theater) and other cities but has tickets left in Boise, Tucson, Nashville, Gainesville and elsewhere; John plans to livestream events on his YouTube channel for fans like Cody, who was shut out in Salt Lake City.
• On collagen: the molecule is too large to absorb through skin, so collagen in face serums mostly sits on the surface. Collagen peptides (pre-broken fragments) that you eat have modest evidence behind them, mostly for joints rather than skin, and other serum ingredients are likely more useful. Skin creams broadly are not a scam, but the collagen part is oversold.
• "A million miles ago" has no single answer because it depends on the reference frame: Earth's spin at the equator is roughly 1,000 mph (about 40 days), its orbit around the sun 66,600 mph (about 15 hours), the solar system's path around the Milky Way 515,000 mph (about 2 hours), the local group's motion against the cosmic microwave background 1,390,000 mph (about 43 minutes), and near light speed only about 4 minutes.
• To read the Bible as a nonbeliever, know it is a book of books with chapters and verses whose constant embedded numbers aid lookup but interrupt narrative flow. You can read in any order, and a study edition with margin notes helps decode references. John rates Job the best book overall, with Matthew the strongest of the four Gospels.
• Wind turbines use three blades because that count balances the rotor, keeps it stable and quiet, and stays reasonably cheap. Two blades would cost less but shake more, run louder, and wear out faster; adding blades makes the machine heavier, slower, and more expensive.
• Following episode 463, thousands of listeners wrote in to say Snapchat was bad advice for Ollie, a college freshman with no social media. The consensus: having no social media is fine and possibly cool, while owning an iPhone matters more for staying in group message threads.

Notable moments

• John explains he has "written at least some of all of my books" in a Lazy Boy recliner in his home office.
• The brothers recall their long-standing bet that humans would not reach Mars by 2028; if Hank had won, the show would be renamed "Dear John and Hank."
• Hank floats the theory that humans won't get sick in the future, citing near-eliminated illnesses like mumps, rickets, and scurvy; John responds simply, "Incorrect."
• Both promote charity soaps at good.store: John commissioned one called "Memory" designed to smell like his high school dorm room, and Hank's "Garden Party" is based on the Pimm's Cup.
• Listener Ella opens her collagen question as "a woman of a certain age, 25," prompting a run of jokes about being "a newborn baby."
• Meru from Estonia writes that they do not like the USA and that "the R's are shy in my name"; the hosts then fail to recall Latvia and blank on the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, with John marveling at "a country that doesn't have a name."
• A listener's mashup poster retitling Brokeback Mountain as "Backcountry Pass" gets called "one of the greatest accidental jokes" in the show's history.
• Hank reports rereading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, one of the first novels he ever read, and recommends revisiting childhood favorites to notice how your own reactions have changed.
• News from Wimbledon: AFC Wimbledon has not scored in two League One matches, sitting 23rd with a minus-three goal difference, though John is attending this weekend with his parents.

Time saved: 44 minutes.