422: We Got Another Brother (w/ Travis McElroy!)

Do you think the current pope has eaten more hot dogs than the previous popes combined? Does the atmosphere distort our view of the stars? How do I ask people to talk to me about my book? What does the space represent in the molecule diagrams? How do I manage to be reminded of my old work without wanting to burn it all down? …Hank and John Green have answers! If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [email protected]. Join us for monthly livestreams at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hank Green?

  You're listening to a Complexly podcast.

• 0:09Hank Green?

  Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

• 0:11John Green?

  Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank.

• 0:14Hank Green?

  It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you dubious advice and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and ASC Wimbledon. John,

• 0:21John Green?

  Yeah.

• 0:22Hank Green?

  You know why you never play cards with Travis?

• 0:25John Green?

  Why?

• 0:25Hank Green?

  Cause he's always dealing with something. I don't know.

• 0:29John Green?

  Oh, I get it. All right. That's pretty good. I'll allow it.

• 0:34John Green?

  It's the fastest Travis joke I could think of. There's something really weird going on here, which is that we got another brother.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. In that third heat.

• 0:44John Green?

  We got, we acquired a new brother. His name is Travis McElroy. We got him in a trade. We traded a couple of second round draft picks for Travis McElroy.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  I wasn't super pleased with what my brothers asked for in the trade, but I'm happy to be here. Don't get me wrong. Um, my new hometown. Um, happy to be here. Uh, I thought I was worth a little bit more, but it's fine. You know, it's fine.

• 1:10John Green?

  Yeah.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  I'm going to play my heart out for, uh, this city and I look forward to a lot of new brand deals.

• 1:19John Green?

  Yeah. We have some great relationships.

• 1:21Hank Green?

  You get way more brand deals than we do. We had a Stitch Fix ad like once, like eight years ago, and they were like, never again. And you guys are still fixing the stitches.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  My assumption is, is that all of the partners that still sponsor our episodes flipped a switch somewhere and the guy that has the key to get into that room to turn it off, got fired and they don't know where the key is. And they're like, oh, I guess I have to keep doing these ads.

• 1:47John Green?

  Yeah. So if you're not familiar with Travis's podcasting empire, just real quick, I'll give you a little bit of a history. Uh, Travis with his brothers hosts, uh, my brother, my brother in me, or I should say, used to host my brother, my brother in me before he was traded to the Brothers Green and, uh, also has, uh, various other podcasts, but for our purposes today, he is a Green brother.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  What would you guys think about changing it to Dear Travis featuring John and Hank?

• 2:14John Green?

  I'm in.

• 2:15Hank Green?

  Yeah, we have to have it. We'd have to have a bet that would result in that, that ideally involves another planet besides Earth.

• 2:22John Green?

  Yeah, so.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Okay, cool.

• 2:23John Green?

  So just so you know, the podcast is gonna get renamed Dear John and Hank on January 1st, 2028, if humans don't get to Mars in 2027, which is looking very unlikely.

• 2:33Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Okay, cool.

• 2:35Hank Green?

  This is a real wild bet that I made. That's really not, it's not so much the worry that the podcast is gonna get renamed, but that we keep having to talk about what an idiot former me was.

• 2:46John Green?

  You weren't even close, man.

• 2:47Hank Green?

  Not even close.

• 2:48John Green?

  Hank believed in this young upstart named Elon Musk.

• 2:51Hank Green?

  That's not true.

• 2:52John Green?

  He thought he was gonna get us to Mars.

• 2:53Hank Green?

  Well, maybe a little true.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Now you just believe in him for a lot of different things.

• 2:58Hank Green?

  I definitely have a firmer understanding of the man.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, off mic, Hank is a huge Elon Musk fan.

• 3:05John Green?

  So true.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  He would never admit it here, but man, Hank won't shut up about that guy.

• 3:11John Green?

  No, he thinks he's a genius.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  I'll make a bet with you that by 2030, they will reclassify Pluto back as a planet.

• 3:21Hank Green?

  Ooh.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  And if that happens, we'll call the show The Travis Show with special guests Hank and John.

• 3:29Hank Green?

  All right. The problem with that is that it might happen in the next like four days, the way this country's going. Anything that was, was away in 1990 is going to be that way again shortly, is how it feels.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Currently, it seems like anything that will distract a news cycle from actual news for even 10 minutes, they're willing to throw at the wall and see if it sticks.

• 3:53Hank Green?

  Absolutely. Not my favorite. It's really a bit of a source of, another source of shame for me, that we started a brother advice podcast without knowing about your previously existing, more successful brother advice podcast.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Well, to be fair, Hank, a lot of people have started a lot of things without being aware of us, so don't you worry about it. I would say more people are unaware of us than are aware of us.

• 4:18Hank Green?

  It's true.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Unless you ask my kids, at which point I'm the most famous person in the world. But they don't know who. A lot of people are. So what do they know?

• 4:26John Green?

  Right, right.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Their children.

• 4:27John Green?

  I am, I am like the, the biggest deal guy in certainly that my son is aware of just by virtue of being around all the time.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I mean, my biggest claim to fame is occasionally my kids will be watching something and I can say, I know the person.

• 4:42John Green?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Who's doing that voice, or I know the person who made this thing.

• 4:46John Green?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  And they're like, ah, dad's famous, which I think is a wonderful kind of transitive property.

• 4:51John Green?

  Yeah. So do you know what we do here? Travis is we, we give dubious advice. I mean, Travis is well experienced in the field.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  He sure is. Yeah, I would say I'm very good at not being an expert.

• 5:04John Green?

  So we're going to start out with this question from Nemo. And I hate to start it difficult Travis, but I think this is an important one for us to get to. Nemo writes, hi, John and Hank. I was wondering if you think the current pope has eaten more hot dogs than the previous 266 popes combined? What would being from Chicago and everything? If so, what are your thoughts? Not like the fish Nemo.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  I mean, has any pope except the current pope had a hot dog?

• 5:31John Green?

  For sure, for sure. Pope Francis was a man of the people. He had a hot dog in his life.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  All right. All right. When were hot dogs invented?

• 5:37John Green?

  Great question. So you Google that while Travis and I riff.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  If we're talking about like not counting like German, like, you know,

• 5:47John Green?

  Yeah, not just a sausage, a real hot dog.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  We're talking like a hot dog.

• 5:53John Green?

  It well, it has to have been called a hot dog. That's the thing. Even if it was a hot dog before the word hot dog was invented, the, then that doesn't count because it wasn't a hot dog. No one would have called it.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  I'm just going to guess post-World War II.

• 6:08John Green?

  No, in fact, the word hot dog arrived for us in 1901.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 6:13John Green?

  Oh yeah. Cause there were all those Nathan's famous hot dogs. I read two books about the history of Nathan's famous, which is really one book too many. In order to write an essay about it for the Anthropocene Review. And one of the things I learned is that the hot dog was really pioneered by Nathan, Nathan and I, the hand worker on Coney Island in the early 1900s. So I should have known that, Hank. But anyway, point being, I think it's, I, I think it's 263. Or two, I think it's two sixty-five to one. I think it is, right? Like, it's gotta be two sixty-five to one because the, the current, I, I bet, I bet Pope Francis had a few hot dogs. I bet Cardinal Ratzinger, what was that guy's name? What did he go by?

• 6:56Hank Green?

  No idea what you're talking about.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  He was a John, wasn't he? I think he was a John.

• 7:00Hank Green?

  Was he a John? Was he a John Paul? Was he a Jean Pierre?

• 7:03John Green?

  He wasn't a John, Pope Benedict the Sixteenth.

• 7:06Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 7:07John Green?

  Pope Benedict the Sixteenth probably had some hot dogs in, in, in almost thirty years of being Pope, Pope John Paul the Second, I bet had a hot dog or two.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Now, here's that, no, this is an important clarifying note. Are we talking about them as Pope eating hot dogs?

• 7:23Hank Green?

  Oh, no.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Because if you're telling me-

• 7:25Hank Green?

  No, in their lives.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Pope grew up, if he even, I think he didn't live in America for a long time. He was born in Chicago. But if he even spent six years here as a child, the amount of hot dogs an American child consumes-

• 7:42Hank Green?

  Uh huh.

• 7:42John Green?

  It's true.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Is, is off of the chart. I could not even begin to guess me.

• 7:47Hank Green?

  Europeans, well, they're, they're having like baguettes with Nutella for, for breakfast.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  I mean, my kids eat that too. Your kids haven't had bread with Nutella on it?

• 7:58Hank Green?

  My son thinks that you can only get Nutella when you're in London because that's the only place he's ever had it.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  What a great con you're running.

• 8:05John Green?

  He doesn't listen to this podcast?

• 8:07Hank Green?

  No, he does, he does not listen to this podcast.

• 8:10John Green?

  Hank, you gotta get him to listen to the podcast. We gotta get our numbers up for the advertisers so we can get that Stitch Fix ad.

• 8:15Hank Green?

  We gotta get that Stitch Fix ad. I need my stitches fixed.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  See, now I have to look at how long did he live in America?

• 8:23John Green?

  He lived in Chicago for a long time until he was a priest. So I think that it's very likely that he's eaten more hot dogs than all the other popes combined. I'm just concerned because I just think of Pope Francis as being such a man of the people. I could see him eating a lot of hot dogs.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  But even if he had a hot dog a year-

• 8:40John Green?

  Right.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  I don't think that's as much as a six-year-old child has accumulated in America in their entire life.

• 8:47John Green?

  That's a great point.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  I would guess my children have one hot dog a week on average, right? So if they start eating hot dogs when they're like two years old, like by the time they're six, they've had over two hundred hot dogs.

• 9:01Hank Green?

  Yeah, every, every sports game you go to, you have to have one. It's a requirement. I don't know. I like, I, this is a wonderful, what a wonderful thought. And absolutely, I, I'm willing to call it.

• 9:14John Green?

  Okay.

• 9:15Hank Green?

  The Pope has had more hot dogs than all the previous Popes combined, which is the, the final, the final straw of weight in American dominance on the world. And now it all breaks.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Here's what I want. I, I think, I think Vatican City and all them have the money to make this happen. I want to see Pope Leo versus Joey Chestnut.

• 9:40John Green?

  Yes.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Hot dog eating competition, winner take all.

• 9:44Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 9:46John Green?

  Winner take all being like the presidency, the emperor of Europe, the whole thing.

• 9:50Hank Green?

  Winner take all.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, I think it would be a battle for the ages.

• 9:54John Green?

  I mean, it would humanize the Pope a little bit, right? Like, one of the problems the Pope has is that he feels very distant from us, because he's God's messenger on earth and everything. But if you just, if you had the Pope eating like eight hot dogs in 12 minutes, I'd be like, man, you know, that's, that's about what I could do.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  That's a Pope you could have a beer with.

• 10:14John Green?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  I would love it if Joe, if Joey Chestnut won, if the stakes were like, if he wins, he gets canonized as the patron, patron saint of hot dogs.

• 10:23John Green?

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Or the patron saint of eating competitions or something. I think it would be worth it for him.

• 10:28John Green?

  Hank, this may not be for the pod, but have you seen the viral video that a Catholic priest made criticizing my theology? Yeah, it's, it's got a lot of views. And I think the main conclusion from it is that I'm not Catholic.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Not even not Catholic enough? Just like, ah, I don't think he's Catholic.

• 10:51John Green?

  Well, I'm not Catholic. So it's hard, it's hard for me to feel, to feel deeply hurt. But it is true that my theology is fairly, fairly worldly. And that was his big criticism. Anyway, we can.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:03Hank Green?

  I did a crash course philosophy and I got, I got raked over the coals for having a simplistic view of Thomas Aquinas's view, or explanation of.

• 11:13John Green?

  The necessity of the existence of God. And I'm like, man, I had, I had 12 minutes to do, does God exist? I don't know. We did, I think we did a good job.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Listen, now that I'm here, let me tell you guys, one of your mistakes is that you are intelligent people who make, like, make people aware that you're intelligent and then they start holding you to a higher standard. You just gotta be dummies all the time, like me and my brothers. And then if you even say something the least bit witty or intelligent, they're like, oh my God, good job, buddy. Here's a lollipop. And that is great.

• 11:48John Green?

  All right, we'll keep, we'll, we'll take that on board. I think that's important criticism.

• 11:52Hank Green?

  Or advice, I think is what it is. John, do you have another question for us?

• 11:55John Green?

  I do. It's from Raquel who writes, Dear John and Hank, when you look at the sky and see the stars, are they actually right there in the direction, straight shooting? Or does the atmosphere in such distort our view of the stars like looking at water in a glass? So that the stars at the edge of the sky are sort of off from the angle they should be at? Star from afar. Raquel.

• 12:13Hank Green?

  What do you think, John? Or do you want, do you just want me to tell you the true answer?

• 12:17John Green?

  I, I have a pretty strong theory about this, which is that if I point at the Big Dipper, I am pointing at the Big Dipper in space. The Big Dipper is up there in that quote unquote direction, insofar as directions exist when there is no up or down.

• 12:30Hank Green?

  Do you want to take the alternate case, Travis?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  I'm going to say that having something to do with the fact that it takes so long for the light of the star to actually reach us. There's no possible way the stars are there. Like, maybe the light from the star is there, but like, the star is an indirect action I would be pointing.

• 12:50John Green?

  Yeah. Oh, that's a great point. I hadn't thought of that.

• 12:52Hank Green?

  But that is separate from Raquel's question. And that is.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  I mean, stars, I don't know. Why are even our stars? That's what I meant to say, sorry.

• 13:01Hank Green?

  That's probably, it's, that's, that is, that's probably a little bit true. They're moving around, they're not moving around that fast, though. As you can tell by them having been in the same place for quite a long time. So like the.

• 13:12John Green?

  Well, they're moving around pretty fast. It's just they're moving around and we're also moving. Now I'm getting my, now my head hurts, Hank, because we're moving around.

• 13:19Hank Green?

  We are moving around, but they are, they, they move around sep. Both with us and and separately from us. So like, we're all sort of going around the the center of the galaxy. But like, there's some drifting up and down and around.

• 13:31John Green?

  So all the stars I see in the sky are from the Milky Way. They are from our galaxy. And they and we're all rotating around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. So we're all sort of rotating together. But then we're also rotating a little bit separately because we're rotating at different speeds based on whether or not they're closer to the center or something.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Like a record.

• 13:51Hank Green?

  Not really based on how close they are to the to the center, more like if you could imagine, like if you've got like a milk you just put in the coffee cup. But also the the water is is going around in a circle. So like some of the milk's going up, some of the milk's going down, but it's all going in a circle together.

• 14:09John Green?

  Got it.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Just say you don't know, Hank. It's okay. You don't have to make all this stuff up to say, I don't know.

• 14:15Hank Green?

  More important, more important to Raquel's question, it actually depends on where the star is in the sky. So if the Big Dipper is straight above you, if you pointed the Big Dipper, you're pointing at the Big Dipper. But if it's down at the horizon, then if you point at the Big Dipper, you're you're off by a little bit. To the extent that when the sun goes down, for you, it has already actually gone down if light was going in a straight line. Because the atmosphere does bend the light. So when

• 14:43John Green?

  And also Goes down, when I see the sun disappear over the horizon line, the sun has in fact already gone down.

• 14:50Hank Green?

  Has already passed the horizon line.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  The light.

• 14:53Hank Green?

  We're seeing the light get curved curved up and back toward us.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  This is assuming that the planet is round, which

• 14:59Hank Green?

  Is and that the atmosphere exists and that space is exists and there isn't just like a shell around us that has like an LCD screen on it. Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yes, thank you. I like that you guys respect all viewpoints. I appreciate that.

• 15:13John Green?

  Try to make space. We try to make space on this podcast. That's the liquid crystals up there. Yeah, so it's pretty cool. And we know that. And there, there's actually a guy that wants to make a telescope using that. So our atmosphere bends light. If you can get a telescope farthest, far enough away, you could use it to collect light that's coming from a very distant spot. And it would be like the Earth's atmosphere is a giant telescope lens.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  So you could see around the planet?

• 15:42John Green?

  Yeah, you could see, you could see something that would, would actually be blocked by the planet by looking through the atmosphere and having it bend the light to focus on something that is behind the planet.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  That would be the ultimate like, like beating hide and go seek. To be like, I know you're back there. You're hiding on the other side of the planet. Got you.

• 16:01John Green?

  And I can see you now. Thanks to my giant Earth telescope. All right. I'm going to ask you another question, Hank.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:08John Green?

  It's very important.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:11John Green?

  It's from Ian who writes, Dear John and Hank, my first book is about to be published with a real press and everything. Now, Ian, I want to stop you right there and just say that since you're a first time author, you need to learn something important, which is that every time you say my first book is about to be published with a real press and everything, you then say the name of the book and the date on which it comes out. It doesn't matter.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  This took me forever to learn.

• 16:32John Green?

  You have to say the name of the book and when it comes out. My first book, Pirates of the Caribbean, coming out March 27, 2026.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  He's gonna have a, Ian, you're gonna have a lot of legal issues. Good luck.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  A pirate of the Caribbean.

• 16:50John Green?

  It's something I've worked really hard on. Would love to hear what my family, friends and colleagues think of it. But it's nonfiction. And I know that not everyone will be interested in reading it. Or if they did, they try, they might not have the patience to finish it. How do I ask people who actually read my book to talk to me about it without making it seem like I assume everyone has will or even should read it? Mostly vowels, Ian. Well, this is a problem for me as well, Hank, because all the time someone will come over to my house and I'll, I'll, I'll, I mean, I never know whether to reference my own books or like reference the fact that I'm an author. I don't know if they know. I don't know what they know about my work. And so Ian, in this respect, you are not alone and you're entering into an exciting new world of not knowing what people don't do or don't know about you. My

• 17:31John Green?

  recommendation is just to wear a T-shirt all the time that says the name of your book and the date it comes out.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Just get a tattoo of it across your forehead. I, I have found, this is something I struggle with a lot because I, I, listen, I come across as so cool and confident. I get

• 17:49John Green?

  You do.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  But when I'm excited about something, it takes very little to knock me off of that excitement where I'm like, I'm feeling like if I have an idea for a thing and I tell somebody and their response is even a little bit like lukewarm or like, oh, that's not something I'd be interested in, but I'll tell you who would love that. I'm like, oh, okay. This is a bad idea. Never mind. But this is why I suggest, especially since you know that this book subject might not be for everybody, that you talk to the people who you know, share that interest with you, right? That those are the people who would be interested in it. So those are the people that you want to get the feedback from. And in general, I have

• 18:31Speaker 02

  found that if you're looking for feedback on a thing, having like specific questions instead of yes or no questions is the best way to approach it because like, what did you think? Isn't as good as, you know, the subject matter, like tell me what you got from it about that thing or like was what of, what of interest or something new you learned about this subject, that kind of thing, instead of like, was it clear? Did you like it? Because then they can just like, yeah, it was great. And that doesn't really help you.

• 19:06John Green?

  I'm curious what Ian's book is about.

• 19:09Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 19:09John Green?

  That not everybody would be interested in.

• 19:11Hank Green?

  Yeah, is it like molecular biology or something? That this my my experience is I never bring it up. And then the moment someone brings it up, I'm like, tell me everything you thought. Because I don't want to assume, but once, once it has been confirmed, I'm like, I'm like, I, I, I crave, I crave your thoughts.

• 19:30John Green?

  Do you really? I do not. I crave, um, I mean, I crave positive thoughts is what I.

• 19:36Hank Green?

  I mean, I, I last, last night I was reading reviews from my comedy special a year and a half after it came out.

• 19:43John Green?

  Oh, wow. That is, uh.

• 19:45Hank Green?

  Still looking, still looking and people's opinions vary.

• 19:49John Green?

  Sure.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  I'll tell you, the thing that I have tried to teach myself as, as I make things that I uh, subject the public to is to think of getting feedback like aggregating information.

• 20:05John Green?

  Yes.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  That you're looking at it like someone, instead of think of it like the stock market, instead of following a specific stock, you're looking at the economy overall by trying to aggregate the information of how all these things are going. Because it's very easy. Like one person says they liked it and you feel really good about it. And the next person says it wasn't for them and you feel really bad about it. And you let your kind of reactions to it, ride that roller coaster and it is exhausting. But if like 20 people read your book and 16 of them are like, I found the information so clear. I've it was so interestingly written, right? And four people are like, I just didn't get it. Then overall, right?

• 20:49Speaker 02

  The aggregate of that information is it's clear and well written. Right? Like aggregating kind of the response to it will give a better overall picture than trying to read individual comments on everything.

• 21:05John Green?

  I agree with you in the abstract, Travis, but when somebody says something negative about my work, especially when it's like, or, or about me as a person, especially when it's super piercing, it, um, it sticks with me and it becomes my favorite thing to say about myself.

• 21:20Hank Green?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:20John Green?

  Um, so like, uh, recently somebody commented on a YouTube video that we made. When did John Green eat John Green?

• 21:29Hank Green?

  Not kind.

• 21:30John Green?

  It's not kind, but it's stuck.

• 21:32Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 21:32John Green?

  It's stuck.

• 21:33Hank Green?

  And I will say, not that recently.

• 21:37John Green?

  No, no, John Green ate John Green in like 2013.

• 21:40Hank Green?

  No, no, I mean, that the comment wasn't that recent. You say it was recently.

• 21:45John Green?

  Oh, yeah, it wasn't that recent. It wasn't that recent. I thought you were. I thought you were referring to something else. But Sarah's favorite is, um, when did millennials get so old?

• 21:57Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 21:59Hank Green?

  I mean, that's true.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  See, I guess it's just that no one's ever said anything mean about me.

• 22:05John Green?

  Yeah, so you can't relate.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  That's, yeah. I just don't understand what that's like.

• 22:09John Green?

  Yeah, it's hard. Well, some of us get to be golden, golden children and some of us have to live with the reality.

• 22:16Hank Green?

  We didn't stick, have to stick our noses out, but we did. And now people have thoughts on our noses.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  If I ever write a biography, I, an autobiography, I'm going to title it Travis McRoy, Easy to Love, Hard to Like.

• 22:34Hank Green?

  Yeah, apparently.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  That's my deal.

• 22:37John Green?

  Hank, do you have a favorite criticism?

• 22:38Hank Green?

  Of me?

• 22:39John Green?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Hank Green?

  Oh, great. I don't know. I don't think about them. Or if I do, if I do, it's just like, it's like, oh, yeah, sure. Okay, I can see how you might think that.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  My favorite that I get a lot, it's a pattern where someone will, especially as we post more and more like, uh, clips of like the podcast and stuff. And someone go like, I don't usually like Travis's jokes, but that one was funny. And a lot of people will post that or people will post it on multiple things, which I want to be like, maybe you do like my jokes. Is it possible if every time you're like, I don't like them, but that one was good, but you say that about like 30 different jokes? Maybe you do like them. Maybe you just don't like me, but you really like the jokes that I make. That's okay. That's fine. I get that.

• 23:26John Green?

  Easy to love, hard to like.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying.

• 23:29Hank Green?

  Could I ask you an inside baseball question, Travis? Since you have three podcast hosts? Is it ever the case that one of you just like steps away to go pee or take care of a child or something and you just don't even mention it? And they just don't talk for a while?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  There are times, I mostly ad reads. When we get to the ad reads, there will be times where somebody's like, I really need to go to the bathroom. And it's like, okay, great. We'll just do the ad read and you go to the bathroom.

• 23:55Hank Green?

  Right.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Right? Not all the time, but it's. It's usually if that happens, it's like we have a hard out at a time and if we don't keep going, we don't have time for it.

• 24:07Hank Green?

  We do have a hard out and I do really have to pee. Can I go and you guys can banter?

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 24:11John Green?

  Yeah, we'll do the, um, we'll do, we'll do the, we'll do the, uh, sponsorships while you're gone.

• 24:16Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 24:16John Green?

  We'll do our version of the ad reads.

• 24:18Hank Green?

  Know how those work on our, on our?

• 24:19John Green?

  I'll explain it.

• 24:20Hank Green?

  Show?

• 24:20John Green?

  Yeah. I'll explain it. Alright, so we do like, uh, I'll do the first one and then that'll give you a, a, a feeling for it.

• 24:27Hank Green?

  Okay.

• 24:27John Green?

  Which reminds me that today's podcast is actually brought to you by Hank peeing. Hank peeing, a surprisingly common phenomenon during the recording of the podcast.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  I'm also sponsored by turning 40. I'm 41 now and I'm not as young as I used to be, you know? And maybe you're not as young as you used to be, but the good news is, once you turn 40, you kind of could always pee, you know, like if you really thought about it.

• 24:53John Green?

  If you need to, if you need to.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  You just be like, I could go pee right now.

• 24:56John Green?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  And I find this a lot watching movies where I'll go to a movie theater, I'll have just peed and the thought will cross my mind, oh man, I hope something boring happens in the movie so I can go pee now. So thank you, turning 40 and always needing to pee. Not always needing, but you could if you needed to.

• 25:16John Green?

  Yeah, I peed three times during the most recent Mission Impossible movie. Now admittedly, it is 17 hours long, but I got up three times to pee. My wife was like, are you alright? And I was like, I'm fine, I'm just kind of bored and I sort of need to pee. I could pee.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  That's like when I was a child and I used to tell my parents I was hungry and they're like, are you really hungry? Are you just bored? And the answer most of the time was bored. And now I do, now that you said it, it does kind of, now that I'm 41, it's like, no, I didn't need to pee, but I was bored and wanted to get up and do something. And peeing felt like accomplishing something. Also, speaking of the latest Mission Impossible movie, there's a point, spoiler alert, where he gets into a fight in the submarine with a dude while he's like super aerating it and it has no impact on the plot. What's, uh, it's a completely unnecessary fight. And that movie, as you've said, is like three hours long, maybe more. And there's so much in that movie you could cut. There's so much.

• 26:10John Green?

  I was cutting it as I went. I was like, Tom Cruise must have had final cut on this and he must have said, every shot that has my face in it must be kept, no matter what. Because yeah, there was the sub, the whole submarine scene. So this is, for those who aren't familiar, this is an action adventure series that's now like 17 movies old and 61 year old Tom Cruise plays a secret, secret agent and it's a great movie series. I have nothing against it. The people who made it, I'm sure are lovely people who work hard at their jobs and everything. But this, this particular one had this 45 minute scene that took place in a submarine. And I am married to somebody who talks in movie theaters. I'm, I'm sorry

• 26:50John Green?

  to say. And, but the only thing she ever says in a movie theater is, oh, come on.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:57John Green?

  And there were about three times in that scene where she audibly said, oh, come on.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  There's also my other favorite thing about the last Mission Impossible movie was they had Joseph Metrick ton of Chekhov's guns. But if it was like, if Chekhov's gun was like, ah, my gun, let's use it now. And there was a moment near the end where he said like, then I'll take, I'll take the plane that I have. And just in case, I brought two. And it's like, oh, okay. Cool, man. Yeah. Just in case something happens in that first one, I did bring a second one. And it's like, okay, cool. And then five minutes later, that guy takes off with the first plane.

• 27:38John Green?

  Tom Cruise is in the second plane.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  And Tom Cruise is in that second plane. I'm like, oh, okay. Thank you. Thank you for establishing that there were two planes. Cause if you hadn't, I'd be so confused right now.

• 27:47John Green?

  Yeah, it's an interesting movie. But anyway, we didn't finish the sponsorship. Today's podcast is also brought to you by the hot dog pope, the hot dog pope, the current one.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  The hottest dog pope.

• 27:57John Green?

  And this podcast is also brought to you by a pirate of the Caribbean, a pirate of the Caribbean, or possibly Caribbean, just whatever gets us free of the copyright. Hank's back, by the way. I'm back, by the way. Also, my new, my new book movie franchise, Impossible Mission.

• 28:17John Green?

  All right, Hank, I have a science question for you. This is from Derek who writes, "Dear John and Hank, at school last year, we looked at molecule models where molecules are represented as balls. And I don't know why this is bothering me so much, but what's between those molecules? Like, what does the space represent, Derek? This is something I've always wondered, Hank."

• 28:32Hank Green?

  So are you picturing like a ball and stick model?

• 28:35John Green?

  I'm not picturing a ball and stick model because I know that I'm not supposed to, but I also can't help but picture a ball and stick model because it's what I was taught.

• 28:42Hank Green?

  That's just my question. Yeah. So you're picturing a ball and stick model. I'm like, what does the stick represent?

• 28:47Speaker 02

  If it's all stuck together, right, then you have the empty space inside of it, the center of the ball.

• 28:54Hank Green?

  The center of the ball, all the-

• 28:55Speaker 02

  That's where they keep the toys. You get the toys in one half and the candy in the other. And it's a little snack for you in every molecule.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  No, that's a Kinder Egg. Sorry, that's a Kinder Egg. I got confused. Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. Those Kinder Egg.

• 29:10Hank Green?

  You can only get those in London. So, so we could, it could, I'm not sure what the question asker, if it's the, if it's the stick, in which case the stick is just the, that is, that is entirely for your mind to be like, these are two molecules that are now joined together. And the stick is an easy way to do that. And if it's like the ones where like the molecules actually overlap and there's just like space being represented by the, the ball itself, that's just sort of like a vibe about the, the electron cloud.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Wait, so is it more like magnetiles? Where it's like, you put it together and they just like, are just touching and there's nothing in the middle?

• 29:51Hank Green?

  They overlap. The molecules actually, in an actual molecule overlap with each other.

• 29:55John Green?

  So Hank, correct me if I'm wrong, but like a proton and a neutron and an, they all, they're all ball shaped, right?

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, we could, we could say they're balls.

• 30:09John Green?

  They're not cubes. So like, there's space in between them. Even if they're, even if they're touching, there's still space.

• 30:16Hank Green?

  Sure.

• 30:16John Green?

  What is the space?

• 30:18Hank Green?

  The space between a proton and a neutron?

• 30:20John Green?

  Or the space between a hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom.

• 30:24Hank Green?

  It's just space.

• 30:25John Green?

  It's space. What do you mean it's just space?

• 30:28Hank Green?

  It's spacetime. It's the it's the fabric of the universe.

• 30:31John Green?

  So it's not it's not air, obviously, because like that's what air is made out of.

• 30:35Hank Green?

  No, it's space.

• 30:35John Green?

  Made out of molecules.

• 30:36Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 30:37John Green?

  It's just space?

• 30:38Hank Green?

  It's space.

• 30:38John Green?

  It's like the same space that's in space. It's a vacuum?

• 30:41Hank Green?

  Well, it's all, yeah, it's all the same. It's not a vacuum. It's not a vacuum. Vacuum is a separate, a separate, a separate symptom of spaciness is or a quality of space.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  If if I was Ant-Man and I could slip down small enough, I could pass between in that in that space, there would be nothing there. That's just empty.

• 31:04Hank Green?

  Yeah, I well, so as far as like the electron cloud goes, which I think is not like the space between a proton and a neutron, but the space of the of the atom, the vast majority, 99.9 blank blank blanks percent of an atom is is the empty space. That's like places where electron could be, but probably isn't.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Okay, so here's I have two pieces of leather here making a bracer, right? They come together like this, right? They overlap. This right here, right where they're not touching?

• 31:35Hank Green?

  Uh huh.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  That's just nothing.

• 31:38Hank Green?

  Yeah, it's space, which is which is which is not nothing exactly.

• 31:43John Green?

  But you just said it was spacetime, the fabric of the universe, which implies that in addition to it being space, it is also time.

• 31:50Hank Green?

  Well, space and time, and I don't ask me to explain this because I don't understand it, but people who do are quite certain that space and time are just the same thing.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  You can say, I don't know. Just say, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  I believe that they're the same thing because I don't know any different.

• 32:10Hank Green?

  Yeah, I believe they're the same thing because because people work, people who work very hard to know what they're talking about assure me that spacetime is what the universe.

• 32:20John Green?

  Just to just to confirm real quick, because this is gonna, this is gonna change my life.

• 32:24Hank Green?

  Oh, really? We I can't believe that we haven't talked about this before.

• 32:28John Green?

  Yeah, I still I but but she didn't. She didn't get into this in particular because she was talking about like the whole history of the universe or whatever. But like, you're telling me that space and time are, to quote you directly, the same thing?

• 32:43Hank Green?

  Yes.

• 32:45John Green?

  Great. That changes my life forever. Thank you for that. It doesn't change my life for the better, but it changes my life.

• 32:51Hank Green?

  Yeah, well, I'm sure that there's, there's, there's some YouTube video you could watch that would help, help you wrap your mind around a little bit, but like it's the kind of thing that I'm like, oh, I get it. And then immediately afterward, I'm like, and it's gone.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Have you guys ever read Einstein's Dreams?

• 33:05John Green?

  No.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  A great book.

• 33:07Hank Green?

  I have.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:08John Green?

  Okay, now, I'm, what I'm reading here, Hank, is that space and time are not the same thing, but parts of a whole.

• 33:14Hank Green?

  Yeah. Right. Obviously, the, yes, they are, yes.

• 33:18John Green?

  That makes me feel better because if space and time are the exact same thing that like, I, I understand that I can't move through space without moving through time.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Well, you wouldn't exist. Duration is, is like the, the dimension in which we all exist. Right? So without time, there would be no space and without space, there would be no time.

• 33:39John Green?

  But you can also warp time with really heavy objects. I get that in the abstract, but like, understanding them as parts of the same whole rather than as the same thing is more, is, is, is easier for me.

• 33:50Hank Green?

  I will take that under advisement.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Einstein's Dreams is a really great kind of philosophical. It's like taking Einstein's theories on like time and relativity and stuff and expanding them out to if a world worked in this way. So for example, there's one about that people have learned, you know, that the farther you are away from the surface of the planet, the slower time moves for you, right? Because you're rotating slower. So the rich have built up huge like scaffolding stilted houses, right? In a constant desire to build higher and higher and age slower. And then meanwhile, you have the people just living on the surface of the earth who are just living their lives

• 34:32Speaker 02

  and enjoying themselves, even though they, they will age at the normal rate, right? But they aren't concerned with it as much. And so it's a bunch of different like ways to think about the movement and existence of time based on these theories. It's really great. It's, I, I like, I love learning about like different perceptions of time and ways to express time and like what time travel would look like in, in different forms and formats and everything. Einstein's Dreams, it's a great book. I enjoy it.

• 35:05John Green?

  Hank, before we get to the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon, which of course Travis is going to participate in in a meaningful way, I have to ask you one more question. It's from Grace, who writes, "Hello, Brothers Green. As another person whose online footprint has spanned literal decades, places like Meta and Google think that I want to look back on things that I posted as a youngster using social media, but I don't, no thank you. However, I do recognize that this is still my footprint, and as a history nerd, I do want to preserve that footprint, as stupid as it looks, for human posterity," or something. "I know I feel more cringe about it because it's public, but I don't feel that way about old diary entries. How do you manage to be reminded of your old work without burning it all down? DFTBA and best wishes, Grace."

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Grace, I think, and the Brothers Green might disagree with me here, but I think that that is a flawed supposition. I don't think that stuff you posted online is the same as writing in a diary.

• 35:59John Green?

  No.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Because one is inherently outward-facing toward, like that you're, that's the you that you're trying to be, to be cool, or be seen, or like express something about yourself to others, whereas a diary you've written is more true to yourself, even if it's not 100% accurate. That's looking back to see the you that you really were versus the you that you were projecting.

• 36:25John Green?

  Yeah, the you that you thought people would like. And yeah, the you that, the you that was trying to be good at being you, rather than just like you that's trying to work through what it's like to be you.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:38John Green?

  But I also think that like you don't have to keep that stuff public if you don't want to. You can just archive it and then have a copy of it on a hard drive somewhere or in the cloud somehow. Like he doesn't, I, I, I took all of my tweets offline, but I didn't like disappear all of my tweets forever. I kept them, I have them in a little file called Tweets. Oh, good for you.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  I just forgot all my passwords for everything over time, so I can't access hardly anything anymore.

• 37:04John Green?

  That works too. I have a third way, which is that everything I've ever made is really great. And I am like, cool.

• 37:12John Green?

  Oh, to have that Hank Green confidence.

• 37:15Hank Green?

  No, I mean, I look back, there's a lot of stuff, particularly music, that I can look back on and be like, ah, I thought that was good enough to put on the internet.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  See, this is why I have, and this is now, I reference it so much that my wife now also references it. A concept of past Travis, present Travis, and future Travis. Where it'll be like, man, past Travis stayed up really late last night, and now I feel terrible. Or like, ah, yeah, I finished packing this, so future Travis doesn't have to worry about it. And it's almost three separate entities that, at my best, they're operating in conjunction with each other. But most of the time, they are at odds. And that's a real problem. So when I look back at something stupid I did like 10 years ago, I'm like, yeah, past Travis was an idiot.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  And that's fine, I can celebrate that, because in many ways, I don't like that guy. I don't relate to him anymore.

• 38:11Hank Green?

  Right.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Not present Travis.

• 38:13John Green?

  You don't want to be him, right? Like, it would be, it would be a tragedy if, if past Travis and present Travis were the same person, because that would mean there was no growth in those interim years.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  There we go. The fact that you look at it and cringe is good, right? I think that people who look back at their, like, high school lives, and they're like, that was the best time of my life. You're like, oh, no, no, was it? You haven't gotten better since then? Oh, no.

• 38:43John Green?

  Yeah, there's that great line in The Great Gatsby about Tom Buchanan, that he achieved the kind of limited excellence at the age of 19 that smacked of anticlimax.

• 38:53John Green?

  One of the ultimate burns in all of literature. I think that you should be able to look back on your past self with a measure of cringe. But I think in order to do that, it actually helps to kind of delete your digital footprint as you go. Because otherwise, you find yourself having, like, somebody will retweet something you said 10 years ago, and be like, I can't believe that John Green thinks this. And then I'll be like, but I don't. That was past John. Past John was an idiot, we all know that.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  The word, the word that gives, gives any strength with stuff like that is curate.

• 39:24Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Curate.

• 39:25Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  And didn't feel so responsible and like, oh, so mature, so sophisticated to curate. And not like go through and be like, oh, that, that, I can't believe I said that shit. Okay.

• 39:37Hank Green?

  I guess.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Delete, delete.

• 39:39Hank Green?

  I just wouldn't want to like get obsessed with it because it, because that in itself is also a form of like self-projection. And that's your current version of this is like, okay, so me today thinks that this is the version of me I want to put out there. Uh, but like, I don't know what pieces of that are going to be cringe in the future as well. I, I definitely. Just save it and then delete it. Save it and delete it and then give it to the, when, right before you die, write a will that gives it all to your local historical society. Yeah. So, so we've got save and delete. We've got curate and we've got to, uh, just, just believe that everything you've ever done is not cringe and great.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Those are the three options. How wonderful it would be to reach a point in society where like a great grandmother pulls her kids in and she's like, these are all the tweets. I've, I've sent out, printed them out. And she just has a big like scrapbook full of printed out tweets. Oh, here's one I said, oh, I wouldn't say that now, you know what I mean, kids? Oh.

• 40:39Hank Green?

  We were real mad.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, we didn't know any better. It was a different time.

• 40:44Hank Green?

  In 2012, as you can see in this screenshot, Taylor Swift liked one of my tweets about Taylor Swift.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  It was the best damn my life. Coming down here since then.

• 40:56Hank Green?

  I don't know why I kept this one up about how Elon Musk was smart.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  I read this. Oh, he's like pretty cringe. Oh, a lot about crypto.

• 41:07Hank Green?

  Oh, that's the monkey I bought. It was not a cheap monkey.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  That's why you couldn't go to college.

• 41:15Hank Green?

  I bought this monkey. If I had just bought the S and P 500 index fund, it all would have been okay.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Anyways, back to the cyber mines.

• 41:26Hank Green?

  That's what I assume is happening at that point. They're working in cyber mines for the real odds. Yes, yes. Our old tweets, scrapbooks are all we have.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Now we must burn them for fuel.

• 41:40John Green?

  The future's gonna be great, guys.

• 41:42Hank Green?

  Yeah, it's gonna be terrific.

• 41:43John Green?

  All right, it's time for the all-important news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. I'll go first. AFC Wimbledon played a game yesterday in the Carabao Cup, Hank.

• 41:50Hank Green?

  Oh.

• 41:50John Green?

  The Carabao Cup is one of the winner-go-home competitions. The great thing about this particular cup is that if you win in the second round, you could potentially play the likes of Chelsea, or Arsenal, or Tottenham, and make like a million dollars just by playing the game.

• 42:05Hank Green?

  This is football.

• 42:06John Green?

  This is football, football. So for a team like us-

• 42:07Hank Green?

  You said Wimbledon, and I and me are just thinking about tennis.

• 42:11John Green?

  Thinking tennis. A lot of people do, but in fact, it is a football team.

• 42:15Hank Green?

  Or as they call it in Europe, big ping pong.

• 42:17John Green?

  Big ping pong. The biggest of the ping pongs.

• 42:19Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 42:21John Green?

  Yeah. And instead of having a paddle, all you have is your feet and your head.

• 42:24Hank Green?

  I love that.

• 42:25John Green?

  So AFC Wimbledon played Gillingham, or possibly Gillingham. We're not in the same league as them anymore, but we still got to play them, which always makes me happy, because I don't know how to pronounce their team name. And we tied 1-1, but then we won on penalties, thanks to two heroic saves by our goalkeeper Joe McDonnell.

• 42:42Hank Green?

  Are they in the, are they in the league below you or above you?

• 42:45John Green?

  They're in the league below us.

• 42:46Hank Green?

  Well, that's, that's not a great sign.

• 42:48John Green?

  It's not great that we, we had to go to penalties to beat them, but the important thing is that we beat them, which means that we're now in the second-round draw, which means it's probably gonna be someone boring like Bromley, you know? But it could be somebody thrilling like Chelsea. And again, we don't want Chelsea at home. That doesn't do us any good. Then we just lose that game. We want away, so we can play at their stadium in front of 50,000 people and get half that money. That's the news from AFC Wimbledon. What's the news from Mars?

• 43:16Hank Green?

  News from Mars. Back in 2023, a rich person, unidentified rich person, purchased a 54-pound stone that was found in the Sahara Desert. And is it Niger, John? Is that how I pronounce this word?

• 43:31John Green?

  Yeah, or Niger.

• 43:33Hank Green?

  Yeah, well, I'm American.

• 43:35John Green?

  Okay.

• 43:36Hank Green?

  It was found in the Sahara Desert in Niger and the it turned out to be the largest Martian meteorite ever found.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  Wow, wait, hold on.

• 43:45Hank Green?

  Yes.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Without knowing it was a meteorite, a rich person paid a bunch of money for a big rock?

• 43:52Hank Green?

  Sorry, I I I said that sentence incorrectly and thank you for calling me out on it. It was found in 2023 and then it was recently auctioned off separately.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  I thought that it, listen, I've seen those home tours of rich people when they're like, this is an old barn door. I don't know why.

• 44:09John Green?

  That would have been cooler. That would have been cooler.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  It was just like, there was a big rock and I thought, that's a big rock. And ever since I've been a kid, I wanted a big rock, so I bought the big rock. And it turned out it was a meteorite.

• 44:20John Green?

  Martian meteorite. Martian meteorite means a piece of Mars that flew off Mars and hit Earth.

• 44:26Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. We should put it back.

• 44:28Hank Green?

  Well, that's actually not.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Who knows what it let out?

• 44:32Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  That's from Mars is rock. Something escaped.

• 44:35Hank Green?

  So somehow this ended up at a private gallery in Italy. Scientists from the University of Florence had a chance to look at it. And then it was sold at a Sotheby's auction for 5.3 million dollars.

• 44:47John Green?

  Whoa.

• 44:48Hank Green?

  Both the buyer and the seller remain unnamed, so two anonymous Richie Richies.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  It was both me. I should have made this now. I found a big rock and then I sold it to myself. And here's the thing that they don't tell you about winning an auction that you're selling. You don't got to pay yourself back. The next highest bid was 20 bucks.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  And I thought I was gonna, I thought I was gonna drive the price up and I jumped way too high.

• 45:17John Green?

  Do we have $30? 5.3 million, 5.3 million.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  And when I'm looking at the other guy and he's like, no.

• 45:24John Green?

  Definitely not.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  That's why I never revealed it was me. I was so embarrassed.

• 45:28Hank Green?

  The question, though, it turns out is, how did this rock get from Niger to Italy? And was that above board? And now the government of Niger is looking into this.

• 45:40John Green?

  I'm gonna take the under on whether it was above board.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  How did a thing that ended up in a European country, was it legal?

• 45:49Hank Green?

  Yeah. Well, Sotobie says that everything was done by the book.

• 45:53John Green?

  Of course they do.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  What book?

• 45:55John Green?

  And not for their book.

• 45:56Hank Green?

  Their book.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, their book. Our book, it says, it's cool.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Don't worry about it.

• 46:05Hank Green?

  It's a lot. It's many pages, but it's only two words.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:09Hank Green?

  So, so there is a murky world of who gets to own meteorites. In the US, rocks that fall on private land belong to the property owner. Niger has laws that could establish rare minerals as a cultural artifact that the government of the country owns, or all the people together of the country own. But they have to prove that, that that applies to this rock to get the meteorite back. So.

• 46:33John Green?

  Wow.

• 46:34Hank Green?

  What a world.

• 46:36John Green?

  What a world.

• 46:37Hank Green?

  We got a big piece of Mars.

• 46:39John Green?

  And we can't do any science on it because it's sitting in some rich guy's house.

• 46:42Hank Green?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  I said I was sorry.

• 46:48Hank Green?

  All right. Well, Travis, Hank, thank you so much for podding with me. Travis, it's been great to have you as our secret third brother. It's been an absolute delight. Appreciate you making the time and committing to the bit.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you. That's if there's one thing I know how to do, is commit to the bit.

• 47:04John Green?

  That's what I love.

• 47:05Hank Green?

  If you want to send us questions, it's [email protected]. We don't have a podcast without them. This podcast is edited by Chris Angico. It's mixed by Joseph Tuna-Medich. Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell. It's produced by Rosiana Halsrojas and Hannah West. Our executive producer is Seth Ratley. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Trukravarti. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gonna Rolla. And as they say in our hometown.

• 47:27John Green?

  Don't forget to be awesome.