467: An Octopolis of Octopui

Dear Hank & John

Hank and John Green tackle a wide range of topics including pet ownership ethics, historical life expectancy myths, space communication chal

Key takeaways

• Life expectancy in pre-modern times was low primarily due to high infant mortality, not because people died young after surviving childhood.
• Modern society's advancements in medicine and infrastructure have dramatically reduced death rates across all age groups, contrary to popular myths.

Main topics

• Pet ethics and animal welfare
• Historical life expectancy misconceptions

Notable quotes

"The biggest reason why overall life expectancy was so low was certainly child mortality, but it wasn't the only reason."

"We have more knowledge that we don't implement. That's what makes this century unique and interesting and devastating in some ways."

Conclusion

Despite modern challenges, humanity has made profound progress in reducing

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) 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 the best advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, do you know why dinosaurs don't make good pets? Hmm. Speaker 2 (0:27) Extinction? Because they're dead! Oh, I was right. You were right. You were right, but also the joke is technically wrong. Because actually, many dinosaurs do make good pets. I had a pet. I had several pet dinosaurs as I was growing up. You loved having a pet bird. We had the finches. I had a conure. Rico. Speaker 3 (0:48) Your Speaker 2 (0:49) fascination Speaker 3 (0:49) with pet birds is almost repulsive to me. Speaker 2 (0:57) I really should have stayed at Finch's. The conure was too smart to be in that situation. Speaker 3 (1:05) Yeah, that was a- I felt guilty about Speaker 2 (1:07) it my whole life. Speaker 3 (1:08) Oh, I wouldn't feel guilty about it your whole life. But yeah, that bird could have had probably a slightly better life in Speaker 2 (1:15) the Speaker 3 (1:15) wild. Speaker 2 (1:15) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 3 (1:17) Whereas Potato, my dog, would not have a better life in the wild. Like, there's no question that Potato's life is better in captivity. Speaker 2 (1:27) I wonder, because we keep the cats inside, but one of our cats really wants to be outside. And I wonder if- Gummy Bear just would be happier not with us. I feel like he'd go out and come back. But like, I'm not 100 % sure. Speaker 3 (1:45) You know, I think it would be a prodigal son story. Gummy Bear would be interested to know what's out there and then would find out and be like, all right, that was good. That's enough. Reminds me of my all time favorite movie, Big Bird Comes Home, which I've never actually seen the end of because my son got so upset when Big Bird left home. Speaker 2 (2:02) Yeah. Yeah, there's a similar one where Big Bird gets lost at Christmas that Oren also really didn't like. And I was like, I bet this is going to work out. Well, it's not Speaker 3 (2:11) just that it's going to work out. As I kept trying to explain, the film is called Big Bird Comes Home. There is no way for the film to accomplish its stated goal other than for Big Bird to leave home. Cameo Speaker 2 (2:22) was actually a stray cat. Our previous cat was stray, lived in like a stray colony on the north side of Missoula. And man, she did not want to go back to that lifestyle. She was like, this is great. I lost a bunch of teeth somehow doing that and nobody liked that. I got diseases. Yeah. She was very happy. Well, this is my big Speaker 3 (2:45) argument with people who think that, including Kurt Vonnegut, a writer I admire deeply. You know, Kurt Vonnegut near the end of his life was big on the idea that we should have stayed hunter-gatherers or maybe we should go back to it. And I Speaker 2 (2:58) just couldn't disagree more. I Speaker 3 (3:00) don't want to be an outside cat. Speaker 2 (3:02) No. No, this is definitely better. Yeah. I like potting with my brother. Now there are pieces of stuff that we have lost that I think that we should rediscover, but yeah. I do think that we can cause problems for ourselves when we think that the goal of everything is to make everything as convenient as possible and to eliminate all struggle. Like, we got to not do that. There's reasons why doing stuff is good. But, man, I tell you what, I'm glad that there are dentists. Speaker 3 (3:34) I'm glad there are dentists. I'm glad there's medicine. I'm grateful for all kinds. I'm grateful for the ability to talk with my brother, even though he lives far away from me. Admittedly, in a hunter-gatherer society, you would live next door. So that would be kind of convenient. Yeah, but we wouldn't have Speaker 2 (3:48) Snickers or Pop Speaker 3 (3:50) -Tarts. Not just that. I mean, we wouldn't have blueberries in January. And not just that, we wouldn't have an infant mortality rate hovering below 1%. That Speaker 2 (4:02) is a crazy thing. The, you know, this sort of like moment when we crossed globally, the infant mortality rate that we had had the whole time, you know, just like they stayed pretty steady there for, you know, 100,000 plus years. Yeah. Yeah. This Speaker 3 (4:21) is my big argument with people who are like, how can you bring a baby into this broken world? I'm like, this broken world is very bad. Don't get me wrong. It is a complete catastrophe. It is. Yeah. really worrisome in many important ways. But the idea that this broken world is somehow more broken than the previous broken worlds is ludicrous. Just differently. Speaker 2 (4:43) Would I bring them Speaker 3 (4:45) into a world of absolute monarchy where they would live on subsistence wages as agricultural workers until they were 30 and died of tuberculosis? Speaker 2 (4:56) Yeah. A really interesting thing I want you to do this. Can you make a video about the average age at death thing where everybody's like, people died when they were 30. And it's Speaker 3 (5:08) like, Speaker 2 (5:08) well, no, the infant mortality rate dragged it way down. But then there's the opposite version. So if you take that myth and you're like, no, people didn't die when they were 35. They died when they were older. But then the... A further myth gets created that if you made it through childhood, you'd die when you were 70, which is also not true. The rate of death was high the whole time. Every age was an age at which you were more likely to die than you are today until you reach, you know, the 80s. And then it starts to even out some. But people were dying in their 40s, in their 20s, in their 50s, in their 60s. They were dying the whole time. Speaker 3 (5:51) Yeah, the biggest reason why overall life expectancy was so low was certainly child mortality, Speaker 2 (5:57) but Speaker 3 (5:57) it wasn't the only reason. Speaker 2 (5:59) Yeah. But there was no, like, cliff at any point? No, there was no Speaker 3 (6:04) cliff. You were, you did, I think, the most common decade of death if you made it past the age of 10. Speaker 2 (6:14) was Speaker 3 (6:14) in your 70s. Yes. But you still had an elevated risk versus today of dying in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, et cetera. Speaker 2 (6:21) Right, right. The most common decade of death was the 70s, but at the same time, you were unlikely to make it, like you had a less than 50 % chance of making it to your 70s. Speaker 3 (6:33) Well, much less than 50 % chance because you had a less than 50 % chance of making it to 10. Even Speaker 2 (6:39) if you don't include the children. Yeah. Even if you are only looking at people who... make it to 10. Because there's just like, people had a high rate of death at every year of their lives. Oh, they died from Speaker 3 (6:49) accidents all the time. Oh, yeah. Accident death rate was high. And the infection death rate was high. Poisoning, infectious, Speaker 2 (6:55) yeah. Yeah. I mean, we just had Speaker 3 (6:57) so little understanding of what was causing human suffering and so little ability to alleviate it. I think what makes this century unique and interesting and devastating in some ways is that we have more knowledge that we don't implement. Speaker 1 (7:12) And Speaker 3 (7:13) so I think people are heartbroken and the unjust were more alive to the injustice because we understand it as injustice, which we didn't always in the past. Speaker 2 (7:27) Well, and also like people, wealthy people did have more opportunity to not die, but also, you know, kings would have eight children and two would survive to adulthood. Right. Speaker 3 (7:39) It Speaker 2 (7:40) wasn't a... That was a shared Speaker 3 (7:42) burden. In some ways, the kings would have it worse off because there would be all these doctors giving advice that was bad advice. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. You know, like, have you tried rubbing a frog on it? Worse than that, I think. Yeah. But don't rub frogs on it. I'll tell you that. That's not good. Oh, I should mention, my book, Hollywood Ending, comes out in six days as you're listening. Six days. Six days. I'm pretty nervous. The next podcast, it will be out. I know. This is the last one. You should come see me on tour. I should say that. Birmingham, Alabama, New York City, Tucson, Arizona, Portland, Maine. Come see me on tour. The other ones are sold out, except for Nashville. I don't think Nashville's sold out. Los Angeles is not sold out. Speaker 3 (8:29) Gainesville, Florida, as of recording anyway, is not sold out. So check it out. Hollywoodendingbook.com. You can also pre-order a signed copy, although those are harder to come by, Hank. Amazon is out of their allotment. Yeah, this book has got some buzz behind it. People are saying good things. Booklist Magazine called it a triumph. And what else could you want? Yeah, I mean, if Speaker 2 (8:52) you don't want to read a triumph, what's wrong with you? Well, I mean, mostly I want to have written a triumph. All right, John. Well, this first question is from Emily, who has read the book. I don't know how they got. I don't know how she got one, but there's a few out there. The dual narration in Hollywood ending must have been a bear to write. How did you approach writing dual narrators and what were the biggest challenges? Voice, continuity, even plot structure. Do you have advice for writers who might also be writing? for multiple narrators. I was so bad at this. I shouldn't say that, but I hated it. Speaker 3 (9:25) I had the great advantage of taking four years between narrators. And so in those four years, I became a different person and writer. And that allowed me... So Kai, who narrates about a little over half the book, is a guy who... is on his first movie set, really. He doesn't have a lot of experience. He's very charismatic, but very raw. And Juniper, the girl in the book has been, I mean, the woman, she's 22, has been working on sets since she was six years old. And she's extremely... ambitious and hardworking and dedicated and kind of has a reputation for being difficult. But the reason she has that reputation is because she's a perfectionist. And like, why shouldn't you be? Why shouldn't you want to create art that's better? That's the best art you can possibly make. And I wrote from Kai's perspective first, and I thought the whole novel was going to be from Kai's perspective with sort of looking at Juniper. Yeah. And then I realized a couple years in that I needed to turn the camera around. And I was like, oh, that seems like a big challenge. So I just put it to the side and wrote The Anthropocene Reviewed. So it feels like more than four years then. Speaker 3 (10:44) Well, maybe four years later, I was like, all right, time to turn this camera around, see if we can write from Juniper's perspective. And I found that I could, but only because so much time had passed that I was like, I'd done something else, you know? Like I was getting, I was getting a bunch of outside feedback for writing as myself, for writing nonfiction. And I felt like, I don't know, I just felt like I could do it suddenly. And Juniper's voice. Speaker 3 (11:11) was harder for me, but also more fun to write. Sometimes like we, we get confused about something fundamental about the human experience, Hank, which is that we think, and I did this when I was in high school. I, I, I still do it sometimes. We think that the opposite of fun is hard, Speaker 1 (11:30) but Speaker 3 (11:32) in fact, Speaker 3 (11:35) Hard work is often also very fun. It's just difficult. Speaker 2 (11:41) Yeah, there's like this thing where if it's hard, but you still feel good at it, you still feel like you're making some kind of progress. Maybe not good at it, but like getting better or like creating something that feels. I don't know, like satisfying in some way. It can be any kind of satisfying. That that heart is really good. And that might be climbing up a mountain or it might be learning to play the piano or it might be writing a character who's outside of your comfort zone. Speaker 3 (12:14) Right. Right. Exactly. It's not easy, but it's fun. It's fun because it's difficult. Easy is boring. It can be. Easy can be boring. That said, I do a lot of things that are easy. I spend a lot of time on Instagram, and Instagram's pretty easy for me. Speaker 2 (12:36) Yeah, and it's not boring. Speaker 3 (12:38) It's not boring. It's Speaker 2 (12:39) really designed to not be boring. If the one thing that they would like it to not be, anything Speaker 3 (12:44) but Speaker 2 (12:45) boring. Speaker 3 (12:46) Yeah. Speaker 2 (12:47) All Speaker 3 (12:47) right, Hank, I want to ask you a science question. Most of our questions this week are about Hollywood ending. Thank you, Rosianna. But we're going to ask one science question. Okay. Ayumi writes, hi, John and Hank. I'm Ayumi! Exclamation point. My boyfriend and I got into a heated discussion about whether there is more air or water on Earth by volume,