Pod Insights Dear Hank & John 422: We Got Another Brother (w/ Travis McElroy!) About this episode 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!
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Hank Green? You're listening to a Complexly podcast.
0:09 Hank Green? Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.
0:11 John Green? Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank.
0:14 Hank 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,
0:21 John Green? Yeah.
0:22 Hank Green? You know why you never play cards with Travis?
0:25 John Green? Why?
0:25 Hank Green? Cause he's always dealing with something. I don't know.
0:29 John Green? Oh, I get it. All right. That's pretty good. I'll allow it.
0:34 John 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.
0:41 Speaker 02 Yeah. In that third heat.
0:44 John 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.
0:52 Speaker 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.
1:10 John Green? Yeah.
1:12 Speaker 02 I'm going to play my heart out for, uh, this city and I look forward to a lot of new brand deals.
1:19 John Green? Yeah. We have some great relationships.
1:21 Hank 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.
1:30 Speaker 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.
1:47 John 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.
2:09 Speaker 02 What would you guys think about changing it to Dear Travis featuring John and Hank?
2:14 John Green? I'm in.
2:15 Hank 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.
2:22 John Green? Yeah, so.
2:23 Speaker 02 Okay, cool.
2:23 John 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.
2:33 Hank Green? Yeah.
2:34 Speaker 02 Okay, cool.
2:35 Hank 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.
2:46 John Green? You weren't even close, man.
2:47 Hank Green? Not even close.
2:48 John Green? Hank believed in this young upstart named Elon Musk.
2:51 Hank Green? That's not true.
2:52 John Green? He thought he was gonna get us to Mars.
2:53 Hank Green? Well, maybe a little true.
2:55 Speaker 02 Now you just believe in him for a lot of different things.
2:58 Hank Green? I definitely have a firmer understanding of the man.
3:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, off mic, Hank is a huge Elon Musk fan.
3:05 John Green? So true.
3:06 Speaker 02 He would never admit it here, but man, Hank won't shut up about that guy.
3:11 John Green? No, he thinks he's a genius.
3:13 Speaker 02 I'll make a bet with you that by 2030, they will reclassify Pluto back as a planet.
3:21 Hank Green? Ooh.
3:23 Speaker 02 And if that happens, we'll call the show The Travis Show with special guests Hank and John.
3:29 Hank 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.
3:42 Speaker 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.
3:53 Hank 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.
4:08 Speaker 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.
4:18 Hank Green? It's true.
4:18 Speaker 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?
4:26 John Green? Right, right.
4:26 Speaker 02 Their children.
4:27 John 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.
4:35 Speaker 02 I mean, my biggest claim to fame is occasionally my kids will be watching something and I can say, I know the person.
4:42 John Green? Yeah.
4:42 Speaker 02 Who's doing that voice, or I know the person who made this thing.
4:46 John Green? Yeah.
4:46 Speaker 02 And they're like, ah, dad's famous, which I think is a wonderful kind of transitive property.
4:51 John 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.
5:00 Speaker 02 He sure is. Yeah, I would say I'm very good at not being an expert.
5:04 John 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.
5:26 Speaker 02 I mean, has any pope except the current pope had a hot dog?
5:31 John Green? For sure, for sure. Pope Francis was a man of the people. He had a hot dog in his life.
5:35 Speaker 02 All right. All right. When were hot dogs invented?
5:37 John Green? Great question. So you Google that while Travis and I riff.
5:41 Speaker 02 If we're talking about like not counting like German, like, you know,
5:47 John Green? Yeah, not just a sausage, a real hot dog.
5:50 Speaker 02 We're talking like a hot dog.
5:53 John 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.
6:04 Speaker 02 I'm just going to guess post-World War II.
6:08 John Green? No, in fact, the word hot dog arrived for us in 1901.
6:12 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
6:13 John 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?
6:56 Hank Green? No idea what you're talking about.
6:58 Speaker 02 He was a John, wasn't he? I think he was a John.
7:00 Hank Green? Was he a John? Was he a John Paul? Was he a Jean Pierre?
7:03 John Green? He wasn't a John, Pope Benedict the Sixteenth.
7:06 Hank Green? Okay.
7:07 John 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.
7:15 Speaker 02 Now, here's that, no, this is an important clarifying note. Are we talking about them as Pope eating hot dogs?
7:23 Hank Green? Oh, no.
7:24 Speaker 02 Because if you're telling me-
7:25 Hank Green? No, in their lives.
7:26 Speaker 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-
7:42 Hank Green? Uh huh.
7:42 John Green? It's true.
7:42 Speaker 02 Is, is off of the chart. I could not even begin to guess me.
7:47 Hank Green? Europeans, well, they're, they're having like baguettes with Nutella for, for breakfast.
7:52 Speaker 02 I mean, my kids eat that too. Your kids haven't had bread with Nutella on it?
7:58 Hank 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.
8:03 Speaker 02 What a great con you're running.
8:05 John Green? He doesn't listen to this podcast?
8:07 Hank Green? No, he does, he does not listen to this podcast.
8:10 John 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.
8:15 Hank Green? We gotta get that Stitch Fix ad. I need my stitches fixed.
8:18 Speaker 02 See, now I have to look at how long did he live in America?
8:23 John 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.
8:36 Speaker 02 But even if he had a hot dog a year-
8:40 John Green? Right.
8:41 Speaker 02 I don't think that's as much as a six-year-old child has accumulated in America in their entire life.
8:47 John Green? That's a great point.
8:48 Speaker 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.
9:01 Hank 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.
9:14 John Green? Okay.
9:15 Hank 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.
9:29 Speaker 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.
9:40 John Green? Yes.
9:41 Speaker 02 Hot dog eating competition, winner take all.
9:44 Hank Green? Yeah.
9:46 John Green? Winner take all being like the presidency, the emperor of Europe, the whole thing.
9:50 Hank Green? Winner take all.
9:52 Speaker 02 I'm just saying, I think it would be a battle for the ages.
9:54 John 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.
10:12 Speaker 02 That's a Pope you could have a beer with.
10:14 John Green? Yeah, exactly.
10:16 Speaker 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.
10:23 John Green? Yeah.
10:23 Speaker 02 Or the patron saint of eating competitions or something. I think it would be worth it for him.
10:28 John 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.
10:47 Speaker 02 Not even not Catholic enough? Just like, ah, I don't think he's Catholic.
10:51 John 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.
11:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:03 Hank 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.
11:13 John 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.
11:23 Speaker 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.
11:48 John Green? All right, we'll keep, we'll, we'll take that on board. I think that's important criticism.
11:52 Hank Green? Or advice, I think is what it is. John, do you have another question for us?
11:55 John 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.
12:13 Hank Green? What do you think, John? Or do you want, do you just want me to tell you the true answer?
12:17 John 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.
12:30 Hank Green? Do you want to take the alternate case, Travis?
12:32 Speaker 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.
12:50 John Green? Yeah. Oh, that's a great point. I hadn't thought of that.
12:52 Hank Green? But that is separate from Raquel's question. And that is.
12:55 Speaker 02 I mean, stars, I don't know. Why are even our stars? That's what I meant to say, sorry.
13:01 Hank 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.
13:12 John 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.
13:19 Hank 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.
13:31 John 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.
13:50 Speaker 02 Like a record.
13:51 Hank 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.
14:09 John Green? Got it.
14:09 Speaker 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.
14:15 Hank 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
14:43 John Green? And also Goes down, when I see the sun disappear over the horizon line, the sun has in fact already gone down.
14:50 Hank Green? Has already passed the horizon line.
14:52 Speaker 02 The light.
14:53 Hank Green? We're seeing the light get curved curved up and back toward us.
14:56 Speaker 02 This is assuming that the planet is round, which
14:59 Hank 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.
15:08 Speaker 02 Yes, thank you. I like that you guys respect all viewpoints. I appreciate that.
15:13 John 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.
15:39 Speaker 02 So you could see around the planet?
15:42 John 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.
15:52 Speaker 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.
16:01 John Green? And I can see you now. Thanks to my giant Earth telescope. All right. I'm going to ask you another question, Hank.
16:07 Speaker 02 Okay.
16:08 John Green? It's very important.
16:10 Speaker 02 Okay.
16:11 John 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.
16:30 Speaker 02 This took me forever to learn.
16:32 John 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.
16:40 Speaker 02 He's gonna have a, Ian, you're gonna have a lot of legal issues. Good luck.
16:48 Speaker 02 A pirate of the Caribbean.
16:50 John 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
17:31 John 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.
17:38 Speaker 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
17:49 John Green? You do.
17:50 Speaker 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
18:31 Speaker 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.
19:06 John Green? I'm curious what Ian's book is about.
19:09 Hank Green? Yeah.
19:09 John Green? That not everybody would be interested in.
19:11 Hank 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.
19:30 John Green? Do you really? I do not. I crave, um, I mean, I crave positive thoughts is what I.
19:36 Hank 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.
19:43 John Green? Oh, wow. That is, uh.
19:45 Hank Green? Still looking, still looking and people's opinions vary.
19:49 John Green? Sure.
19:49 Speaker 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.
20:05 John Green? Yes.
20:05 Speaker 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?
20:49 Speaker 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.
21:05 John 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.
21:20 Hank Green? Oh, yeah.
21:20 John Green? Um, so like, uh, recently somebody commented on a YouTube video that we made. When did John Green eat John Green?
21:29 Hank Green? Not kind.
21:30 John Green? It's not kind, but it's stuck.
21:32 Hank Green? Yeah.
21:32 John Green? It's stuck.
21:33 Hank Green? And I will say, not that recently.
21:37 John Green? No, no, John Green ate John Green in like 2013.
21:40 Hank Green? No, no, I mean, that the comment wasn't that recent. You say it was recently.
21:45 John 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?
21:57 Hank Green? Yeah.
21:58 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
21:59 Hank Green? I mean, that's true.
22:01 Speaker 02 See, I guess it's just that no one's ever said anything mean about me.
22:05 John Green? Yeah, so you can't relate.
22:06 Speaker 02 That's, yeah. I just don't understand what that's like.
22:09 John 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.
22:16 Hank Green? We didn't stick, have to stick our noses out, but we did. And now people have thoughts on our noses.
22:20 Speaker 02 If I ever write a biography, I, an autobiography, I'm going to title it Travis McRoy, Easy to Love, Hard to Like.
22:34 Hank Green? Yeah, apparently.
22:35 Speaker 02 That's my deal.
22:37 John Green? Hank, do you have a favorite criticism?
22:38 Hank Green? Of me?
22:39 John Green? Yeah.
22:40 Hank 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.
22:49 Speaker 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.
23:26 John Green? Easy to love, hard to like.
23:28 Speaker 02 That's what I'm saying.
23:29 Hank 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?
23:44 Speaker 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.
23:55 Hank Green? Right.
23:56 Speaker 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.
24:07 Hank Green? We do have a hard out and I do really have to pee. Can I go and you guys can banter?
24:11 Speaker 02 Sure.
24:11 John Green? Yeah, we'll do the, um, we'll do, we'll do the, we'll do the, uh, sponsorships while you're gone.
24:16 Hank Green? Okay.
24:16 John Green? We'll do our version of the ad reads.
24:18 Hank Green? Know how those work on our, on our?
24:19 John Green? I'll explain it.
24:20 Hank Green? Show?
24:20 John 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.
24:27 Hank Green? Okay.
24:27 John 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.
24:36 Speaker 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.
24:53 John Green? If you need to, if you need to.
24:54 Speaker 02 You just be like, I could go pee right now.
24:56 John Green? Yeah.
24:57 Speaker 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.
25:16 John 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.
25:30 Speaker 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.
26:10 John 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
26:50 John Green? to say. And, but the only thing she ever says in a movie theater is, oh, come on.
26:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:57 John Green? And there were about three times in that scene where she audibly said, oh, come on.
27:01 Speaker 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.
27:38 John Green? Tom Cruise is in the second plane.
27:39 Speaker 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.
27:47 John 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.
27:56 Speaker 02 The hottest dog pope.
27:57 John 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.
28:17 John 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."
28:32 Hank Green? So are you picturing like a ball and stick model?
28:35 John 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.
28:42 Hank Green? That's just my question. Yeah. So you're picturing a ball and stick model. I'm like, what does the stick represent?
28:47 Speaker 02 If it's all stuck together, right, then you have the empty space inside of it, the center of the ball.
28:54 Hank Green? The center of the ball, all the-
28:55 Speaker 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.
29:04 Speaker 02 No, that's a Kinder Egg. Sorry, that's a Kinder Egg. I got confused. Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. Those Kinder Egg.
29:10 Hank 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.
29:43 Speaker 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?
29:51 Hank Green? They overlap. The molecules actually, in an actual molecule overlap with each other.
29:55 John 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?
30:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, we could, we could say they're balls.
30:09 John 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.
30:16 Hank Green? Sure.
30:16 John Green? What is the space?
30:18 Hank Green? The space between a proton and a neutron?
30:20 John Green? Or the space between a hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom.
30:24 Hank Green? It's just space.
30:25 John Green? It's space. What do you mean it's just space?
30:28 Hank Green? It's spacetime. It's the it's the fabric of the universe.
30:31 John Green? So it's not it's not air, obviously, because like that's what air is made out of.
30:35 Hank Green? No, it's space.
30:35 John Green? Made out of molecules.
30:36 Hank Green? Yeah.
30:37 John Green? It's just space?
30:38 Hank Green? It's space.
30:38 John Green? It's like the same space that's in space. It's a vacuum?
30:41 Hank 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.
30:50 Speaker 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.
31:04 Hank 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.
31:24 Speaker 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?
31:35 Hank Green? Uh huh.
31:36 Speaker 02 That's just nothing.
31:38 Hank Green? Yeah, it's space, which is which is which is not nothing exactly.
31:43 John 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.
31:50 Hank 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.
31:59 Speaker 02 You can say, I don't know. Just say, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is.
32:07 Speaker 02 I believe that they're the same thing because I don't know any different.
32:10 Hank 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.
32:20 John Green? Just to just to confirm real quick, because this is gonna, this is gonna change my life.
32:24 Hank Green? Oh, really? We I can't believe that we haven't talked about this before.
32:28 John 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?
32:43 Hank Green? Yes.
32:45 John 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.
32:51 Hank 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.
33:03 Speaker 02 Have you guys ever read Einstein's Dreams?
33:05 John Green? No.
33:06 Speaker 02 A great book.
33:07 Hank Green? I have.
33:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
33:08 John 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.
33:14 Hank Green? Yeah. Right. Obviously, the, yes, they are, yes.
33:18 John 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.
33:26 Speaker 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.
33:39 John 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.
33:50 Hank Green? I will take that under advisement.
33:52 Speaker 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
34:32 Speaker 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.
35:05 John 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."
35:43 Speaker 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.
35:59 John Green? No.
35:59 Speaker 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.
36:25 John 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.
36:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:38 John 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.
36:58 Speaker 02 I just forgot all my passwords for everything over time, so I can't access hardly anything anymore.
37:04 John 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.
37:12 John Green? Oh, to have that Hank Green confidence.
37:15 Hank 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.
37:23 Speaker 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.
38:06 Speaker 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.
38:11 Hank Green? Right.
38:12 Speaker 02 Not present Travis.
38:13 John 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.
38:23 Speaker 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.
38:43 John 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.
38:53 John 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.
39:18 Speaker 02 The word, the word that gives, gives any strength with stuff like that is curate.
39:24 Hank Green? Yeah.
39:24 Speaker 02 Curate.
39:25 Hank Green? Yeah.
39:27 Speaker 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.
39:37 Hank Green? I guess.
39:38 Speaker 02 Delete, delete.
39:39 Hank 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.
40:16 Speaker 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.
40:39 Hank Green? We were real mad.
40:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, we didn't know any better. It was a different time.
40:44 Hank Green? In 2012, as you can see in this screenshot, Taylor Swift liked one of my tweets about Taylor Swift.
40:51 Speaker 02 It was the best damn my life. Coming down here since then.
40:56 Hank Green? I don't know why I kept this one up about how Elon Musk was smart.
41:01 Speaker 02 I read this. Oh, he's like pretty cringe. Oh, a lot about crypto.
41:07 Hank Green? Oh, that's the monkey I bought. It was not a cheap monkey.
41:12 Speaker 02 That's why you couldn't go to college.
41:15 Hank Green? I bought this monkey. If I had just bought the S and P 500 index fund, it all would have been okay.
41:23 Speaker 02 Anyways, back to the cyber mines.
41:26 Hank 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.
41:35 Speaker 02 Now we must burn them for fuel.
41:40 John Green? The future's gonna be great, guys.
41:42 Hank Green? Yeah, it's gonna be terrific.
41:43 John 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.
41:50 Hank Green? Oh.
41:50 John 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.
42:05 Hank Green? This is football.
42:06 John Green? This is football, football. So for a team like us-
42:07 Hank Green? You said Wimbledon, and I and me are just thinking about tennis.
42:11 John Green? Thinking tennis. A lot of people do, but in fact, it is a football team.
42:15 Hank Green? Or as they call it in Europe, big ping pong.
42:17 John Green? Big ping pong. The biggest of the ping pongs.
42:19 Hank Green? Yeah.
42:21 John Green? Yeah. And instead of having a paddle, all you have is your feet and your head.
42:24 Hank Green? I love that.
42:25 John 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.
42:42 Hank Green? Are they in the, are they in the league below you or above you?
42:45 John Green? They're in the league below us.
42:46 Hank Green? Well, that's, that's not a great sign.
42:48 John 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?
43:16 Hank 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?
43:31 John Green? Yeah, or Niger.
43:33 Hank Green? Yeah, well, I'm American.
43:35 John Green? Okay.
43:36 Hank Green? It was found in the Sahara Desert in Niger and the it turned out to be the largest Martian meteorite ever found.
43:43 Speaker 02 Wow, wait, hold on.
43:45 Hank Green? Yes.
43:46 Speaker 02 Without knowing it was a meteorite, a rich person paid a bunch of money for a big rock?
43:52 Hank 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.
44:02 Speaker 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.
44:09 John Green? That would have been cooler. That would have been cooler.
44:11 Speaker 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.
44:20 John Green? Martian meteorite. Martian meteorite means a piece of Mars that flew off Mars and hit Earth.
44:26 Hank Green? Yeah.
44:27 Speaker 02 Yeah. We should put it back.
44:28 Hank Green? Well, that's actually not.
44:30 Speaker 02 Who knows what it let out?
44:32 Hank Green? Yeah.
44:32 Speaker 02 That's from Mars is rock. Something escaped.
44:35 Hank 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.
44:47 John Green? Whoa.
44:48 Hank Green? Both the buyer and the seller remain unnamed, so two anonymous Richie Richies.
44:54 Speaker 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.
45:10 Speaker 02 And I thought I was gonna, I thought I was gonna drive the price up and I jumped way too high.
45:17 John Green? Do we have $30? 5.3 million, 5.3 million.
45:21 Speaker 02 And when I'm looking at the other guy and he's like, no.
45:24 John Green? Definitely not.
45:26 Speaker 02 That's why I never revealed it was me. I was so embarrassed.
45:28 Hank 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.
45:40 John Green? I'm gonna take the under on whether it was above board.
45:45 Speaker 02 How did a thing that ended up in a European country, was it legal?
45:49 Hank Green? Yeah. Well, Sotobie says that everything was done by the book.
45:53 John Green? Of course they do.
45:54 Speaker 02 What book?
45:55 John Green? And not for their book.
45:56 Hank Green? Their book.
45:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, their book. Our book, it says, it's cool.
46:04 Speaker 02 Don't worry about it.
46:05 Hank Green? It's a lot. It's many pages, but it's only two words.
46:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:09 Hank 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.
46:33 John Green? Wow.
46:34 Hank Green? What a world.
46:36 John Green? What a world.
46:37 Hank Green? We got a big piece of Mars.
46:39 John Green? And we can't do any science on it because it's sitting in some rich guy's house.
46:42 Hank Green? Yeah.
46:43 Speaker 02 I said I was sorry.
46:48 Hank 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.
46:59 Speaker 02 Oh, thank you. That's if there's one thing I know how to do, is commit to the bit.
47:04 John Green? That's what I love.
47:05 Hank 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.
47:27 John Green? Don't forget to be awesome.
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