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

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You're listening to a complexly podcast.

Hello, and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

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

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

John,

you know why you never play cards with Travis?

Why?

Because he's always dealing with something.

I don't know.

Oh, I get it.

All right.

That's pretty good.

I'll allow it.

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.

Yeah.

In that third heat.

We acquired a new brother.

His name is Travis McElroy.

We got him in a trade.

We traded a couple second-round draft picks for Travis McElroy.

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 um i'm gonna play my heart out for uh this city

and i look forward to a lot of new brand deals yeah we have some great relationships you get win 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 My assumption is that all of the partners that still sponsor our episodes flip the 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 that.

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.

Travis, with his brothers, hosts My Brother, My Brother, and me, or I should say, used to host My Brother, My Brother, and me before he was traded to the Brothers Green, and also has various other podcasts.

But for our purposes, today,

he is a green brother.

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

I'm in.

Yeah,

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

Yeah, so

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

Yeah.

This is cool.

This is a real wild bet that I made that's really not,

it's not so much the worry that the podcast is going to get renamed, but that we keep having to talk about what an idiot former me was.

You weren't even close, man.

Not even close.

Hank believed in this young upstart named Elon Musk.

He thought he was going to get us to Mars.

Well, maybe a little true.

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

I definitely have a firmer understanding of the man.

Yeah.

Off mic, Hank is a huge Elon Musk fan.

So true.

He would never admit it here, but man,

Hank won't shut up about that guy.

No, he thinks he's a genius.

I'll make a bet with you that

by 2030, they will reclassify Pluto back as a planet.

Ooh.

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

All right.

The problem problem with that is that it might happen in the next like four days, the way this country's going.

Anything that was away in 1990 is going to be that way again shortly, is how it feels.

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.

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.

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.

It's true.

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?

You know what I mean?

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

So do you know what we do here?

Travis is we give dubious advice.

Huh.

I mean, Travis is well experienced in the field.

He sure is.

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

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 with being from Chicago and everything?

If so, what are your thoughts?

Not like the fish, Nemo.

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

pope francis was a man of the people he had a hot dog in his life all right all right when were hot dogs invented great question so you google that while travis and i riff if we're talking about like not counting like german like you know

not just a sausage when we're talking

we're talking like a hot dog 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,

then that doesn't count because it wasn't a hot dog.

No one

called it.

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

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

Wow.

Oh, yeah, because 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 and Ida Handworker on Coney Island in the early 1900s.

So I should have known that, Hank.

But anyway, point being,

I think it's 263

or two, I think it's 265 to one.

I think it is, right?

Like, it's got to be 265 to one because

the

current,

I bet Pope Francis had a few hot dogs.

I bet Cardinal Ratzinger, what was that guy's name?

What did he go by?

No idea what you're talking about.

He was the one, wasn't he?

I think he he was a John.

Was he a John?

Was he a John Paul?

Was he a John Pierre?

Wasn't he John Paul?

Pope Benedict XVI.

Okay.

Pope Benedict XVI probably had some hot dogs.

In almost 30 years of being Pope, Pope John Paul II, I bet, had a hot dog or two.

Now, here's the no, this is an important clarifying note.

Are we talking about them as Pope eating hot dogs?

Because if you're telling me

in their lives,

that 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

is off of the chart.

I could not even begin to guesstimate.

Europeans,

they're having like baguettes with Nutella.

for breakfast.

I mean, my kids eat that too.

Your kids haven't had

bread with Nutella.

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.

What a great con you're running.

He doesn't listen to this podcast.

No, he does not listen to this podcast.

Hank, you got to get him to listen to the podcast.

We got to get our numbers up for the advertisers so we can get that stitch fix ad.

We got to get that stitch fix out.

I need my stitches fixed.

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

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.

But even if he had a hot dog a year,

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

That's a great point.

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 200 hot dogs.

Yeah, every sports game you go to, you have to have one.

It's a requirement.

I don't know.

This is a wonderful, what a wonderful thought.

And absolutely, I'm willing to call it

the Pope has had more hot dogs than all the previous popes combined, which is

the final

straw.

of weight in American dominance on the world.

And now

it all breaks.

here's what i want and i i think i think vatican city and and all them have the money to make this happen i want to see pope leo versus joey chestnut yes hot dog eating competition winner take all yeah um winner take all being like the presidency emperor of europe every whole thing winner take all i'm just saying i think it would be a battle for the ages 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.

I feel like that's true.

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.

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

Yeah.

Exactly.

I would love it if Joe, if Joey Chasnot won, if the stakes were like, if he wins, he gets canonized as the patron saint of hot dogs or the patron saint of eating competitions or something, I think it would be worth it for him.

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 got a lot of views.

And

I think the main conclusion from it is that I'm not Catholic.

Not even not Catholic enough, just like,

I don't think he's Catholic.

Well, I'm not Catholic.

So it's hard for me to

feel deeply hurt.

But it is true that my theology is fairly worldly.

And that was his big criticism.

Anyway, we can all,

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

or explanation of

the necessity of the existence of God.

And I'm like, man,

I had 12 minutes to do, does God exist?

I don't know.

We did

a job.

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.

All right.

We'll keep, we'll take that on board.

I think that's important criticism.

Or advice, I think is what it is.

John, do you have another question for us?

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 and 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.

What do you think, John?

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

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.

Do you want to take the alternate case, Travis?

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 stars isn't in the direction I would be pointing.

Yeah, oh, that's a great point.

I hadn't thought of that, but that is separate from Raquel's question.

And that is, I mean, the stars

even are stars.

That's what I'm saying.

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.

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 hang because we're moving around.

We are moving around, but they move around separate, but both with us and separately from us.

So like, oh, God.

We're all sort of going around this center of the galaxy, but like there's some drifting up and down and around.

So all the stars I see in the sky are from the Milky Way.

They are from our galaxy.

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.

Like a record.

Not really based on how close they are to the center, more like if you could imagine like if you've got like milk you just put in the coffee cup, but also the water 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.

Got it.

That's not been a word.

You don't know, Hank.

It's okay.

You don't have to make all this stuff up.

I don't know.

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 point at 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 off by a little bit 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.

When the sun goes down, when I see the sun disappear over the horizon line, the sun has in fact already gone down.

Has already passed the horizon.

We're seeing the light get

curved up and back toward us.

This is assuming that the planet is round, which

that the atmosphere exists and that space is exists and there isn't just like a shell around us that has like a lscd screen on it yeah yes thank you i like that you guys respect all viewpoints i appreciate it yeah we try to make space we try to make space on this podcast yeah that's the liquid crystals up there uh yeah so It's pretty cool.

And we know that.

And there's actually a guy that wants to make a telescope using that.

So our atmosphere bends light.

If you can get a telescope

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.

So you could see around the planet.

Yeah,

you could see something that 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.

That would be the ultimate

beating hide and go see to be like, I know you're back there.

You're hiding on the other side of the planet.

Got you.

And I can see you now thanks to my giant Earth telescope.

All right.

I'm going to ask you another question, Hank.

Okay.

It's very important.

Okay.

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.

This took me forever to learn.

You have to say the name of the book and when it comes out.

My first book, Pirates of the Caribbean, coming out March 27th, 2026.

He's going to have a, Ian, you're going to have a lot of legal issues.

Good luck.

A Pirate of the Caribbean.

It's something I've worked really hard on.

I would love to hear what my family, friends, and colleagues think of it, but it's non-fiction, and I know that not everyone will be interested in reading it.

Or if 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 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 are entering into an exciting new world of not knowing what people don't do or don't know about you.

My recommendation is just to wear a t-shirt all the time that says the name of your book and the data comes out.

Yeah.

Just get a tattoo of it across your forehead.

I have found this is something I struggle with a lot because I

listen, I come across as so cool and confident.

I get you do.

But

when I'm excited about something, it takes very little to knock me off of that excitement where I'm like, I'm feel 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 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 be like, yeah, it was great.

And that doesn't really help you.

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

Yeah,

that not everybody would be interested in.

Yeah, is it like molecular biology or something?

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 it has been confirmed,

I'm like,

I crave your thoughts.

Do you really?

I do not.

I crave,

I mean, I crave positive thoughts is what I do.

I mean,

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

Oh, wow.

That is

still looking.

Still looking.

And people's opinions vary.

Sure.

I'll tell you, the thing that I have tried to teach myself as I make things that I

subject the public to is

to think of getting feedback like aggregating information.

Yes.

Right.

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, it was so interestingly written, right?

And four people are like, I just didn't get it.

Then overall, right, 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.

I agree with you in the abstract, Travis, but when somebody says something negative about my work, especially when it's like or about me as a person, especially when it's super piercing,

it sticks with me and it becomes my favorite thing to say about myself.

Oh, yeah.

So like

recently somebody commented on a YouTube video that we made, When Did John Green eat John Green?

Not kind.

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

Yeah.

Stuck.

And I will say not that recently.

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

No.

No, I mean, the comment wasn't that recent.

You say it was recently.

Oh, it wasn't that recent.

It wasn't that recent.

I thought you were referring to something else, but

Sarah's favorite is

when did millennials get so old?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

I mean, that's true.

See, 100%.

No one's ever said anything mean about me at all.

Yeah, so you can't relate.

That's

not understand what that's like.

Yeah, it's hard.

Well,

some of us get to be golden children, and some of us have to live with the reality.

We didn't have to stick our noses out, but we did.

And now people have thoughts on our noses.

If I ever write a biography,

an autobiography, I'm going to title it Travis McElroy, Easy to Love, Hard to Like.

Yeah, apparently.

That's my view.

Hey, do you have a favorite criticism?

Of me?

Yeah.

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.

My favorite that I get a lot, it's a pattern where someone will, especially as we post more and more like

clips of like the podcast and so, and someone will 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 one 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.

Easy to love, hard to like.

That's what I'm saying.

Can 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.

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.

Right.

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 then if we don't keep going, we won't have time for it.

We do have a hard out, and I do really have to pee.

Can I go and you guys can banter?

Sure.

Yeah, we'll do the

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

Okay.

We'll do ours.

Don't just know how those work on our volume.

I'll explain it.

Okay.

I'll explain it.

All right.

So we do like, I'll do the first one and then that'll give you a feeling for it.

Okay.

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.

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.

If you need to.

If you need to.

Yeah, you just be like, I could go pee right now.

Yeah.

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 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 all right?

And I was like, I'm fine.

I'm just kind of bored and I sort of need to pee.

I could pee.

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 pee 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 whatsoever.

it's a completely unnecessary fight and that movie as you said is like three hours long maybe more and there's so much in that movie you could cut there's oh i was 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 uh for those who aren't familiar this is an action adventure series that's now like 17 movies old and 61 61-year-old Tom Cruise plays a

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 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 sorry to say.

But the only thing she ever says in a movie theater is, oh, come on.

And there were about three times in that scene where she audibly audibly said oh come on there's also my other favorite thing about the last mission impossible movie was um they had uh just a metric ton of chekhov's guns but if it was like if chekov'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 in the first plane and Tom Cruise is in that second plane.

I'm like, oh, okay, thank you.

Thank you for establishing that there were two planes.

Because if you hadn't, I'd be so confused right now.

Yeah, it's an interesting movie.

But anyway, we didn't finish the sponsorships.

Today's podcast is also brought to you by the Hot Dog Pope.

The Hot Dog Pope.

The current one.

The Hottest Dog Pope.

And this podcast is also brought to you by A Pirate of the Caribbean, a pirate of the Caribbean, or impossibly Caribbean, just whatever gets us free of the copyright.

Hank's back, by the way.

I'm back, by the way.

Also, my new book movie franchise, Impossible Mission.

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Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.

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.

So are you picturing like a ball and stick model?

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 models.

That's fine.

That's what I'm saying.

That's just my question.

Yeah.

So you're picturing a ball and stick model and like, what does the stick represent?

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

The center of the

ball.

The center of the ball.

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

no that's kinder egg sorry that's

i got confused yeah sorry sorry sorry those kinder egg 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 isn't 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 uh and if it's like the ones where like the the molecules actually like overlap and there's just like space being represented by the the ball itself that's just sort of like a a a vibe about the

the the electron cloud which wait so is it more like magnetiles where it's like you put them together and they just like are just touching and there's yeah

they overlap the molecules actually in an actual molecule overlap with each other so hank correct me if i'm wrong but like a a a a proton and a neutron and an

they all they're all ball-shaped, right?

Yeah,

we could say they're balls.

They're not cubes.

So, like there's space in between them.

Even if they're touching, there's still space.

Sure.

What is the space?

The space between a proton and a neutron?

Or the space between a hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom that are connected?

It's space.

What do you mean it's just space?

It's space-time.

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

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

Air is made out of molecules.

It's just space.

It's space.

It's like the same space that's in space.

It's a vacuum.

No, that's all.

Yeah, it's all the same.

It's not a vacuum.

It's not a vacuum.

Vacuum is

a separate symptom of spaciness

or a quality of space.

If I was Ant-Man and I could slip down small enough,

I could pass between

in that space, there would be nothing there.

That's just empty.

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.

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,

that's just nothing.

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

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

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.

Just say, I don't know.

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

I don't know what it is.

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

Yeah.

I believe the same thing

because

people who work very hard to know what they're talking about assure me that space time is what the universe is.

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

Oh, really?

I can't believe that we haven't talked about this before.

Yeah.

And I still,

but she didn't get into this in particular because she was talking about 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.

Yes.

Great.

That changes my life forever.

Thank you for that.

It doesn't change my life for the better, but it changes my life.

Yeah, well, I'm sure that

there's some YouTube video you could watch that would 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.

Have you guys ever read Einstein's Dreams?

No.

A great book.

I think I have.

Yeah.

Okay.

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

Yeah.

Right.

Obviously, yes, they are.

Yes.

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

Well, you wouldn't exist.

Duration is

like the

dimension in which we all exist, right?

So without time, there would be no space.

Without space, there would be no time.

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

easier for me.

I will take that under advisement.

Einstein's dreams is a really great kind of philosophical, it's like taking Einstein's theories on like time and relativity and 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 uh 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 and enjoying themselves, even though 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.

I love learning about like different perceptions of time and ways to express time and like what time travel would look like

in different forms and formats and everything.

Einstein's Dreams, it's a great book.

I enjoy it.

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.

Grace, I think, all right, 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 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.

Yeah, the you that you thought people would like and the and yeah, the you 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.

Yeah.

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 you doesn't 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.

I just forgot all my passwords for everything over time.

So I can't access hardly anything anymore.

That works too.

I have a third way, which is that everything I've ever made is really great.

And I am like,

okay.

Oh, to have that Hank Green confidence.

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.

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.

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.

He's not present, Travis.

You don't want to be him, right?

Like,

it would be a tragedy if Past Travis and present Travis were the same person because that would mean there was no growth in those interim years.

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.

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

Absolutely.

It's 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.

Like, that was past John.

Past John was an idiot.

We all know that.

The word that gives me strength with stuff like that is curate.

Yeah, curate.

Curate.

Curate your digital footprint.

And it feels so responsible and

so mature, so sophisticated to curate and not like go through and be like, oh,

I can't believe I said that shit.

Okay, I guess

I just wouldn't want to get obsessed with it.

Because that in itself is also a form of like self-projection.

And that's your current version of this.

It's like, okay, so me today thinks that this is the version of me I want to put out there.

But like, I don't know what pieces of that are going to be cringe in the future as well.

I guess you 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.

So so we've got save and delete.

We've got curate and we've got just

believe that everything you've ever done is not cringe and great.

Those are the three.

I don't know 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 saved them.

I've printed them out.

And she just has a big like scrapbook full of printed out tweets

oh here's one i said who wouldn't say that now you know what i mean kids oh

we were real mad yeah we didn't know any better it was a different time

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

It was the best day of my life.

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

I remember

a lot about crypto.

Oh, that's the monkey I bought.

He was not a cheap monkey.

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

I'm this monkey.

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

Anyways, back to the cybermines.

That's what I assume is happening at that point.

They're working in cybermines for the robots.

Yes, yes.

Our old treat scrapbooks are all we have.

Now we must burn them for fuel.

The future's going to be great, guys.

Yeah, it's going to be terrific.

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 Care About Cup, Hank.

The Care About 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.

This is football.

This is football football.

So for a team like Wimbledon, and I am

thinking about

thinking tennis.

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

Or is they called in Europe, Big Ping Pong?

Big ping pong.

The biggest of the ping pongs.

Yeah, I think.

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

I love that.

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.

Are they in the league below you or above you?

They're in the league below us.

Well, that's not a great.

It's not great that 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 going to be someone boring like Bromley, you know?

Sure.

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 a way 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?

Good 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?

Yeah.

Or Niger.

Yeah.

Well, I'm American.

Okay.

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

Wow.

By the way, hold on.

Yes.

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

Sorry,

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.

So, okay.

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.

That would have been cooler.

That would have been cool.

If it was just like, there's 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.

It's a Martian meteorite.

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

You should put it back.

Well, that's.

Who Who knows what it let out?

Yeah.

That's from

Mars's.

Something escaped.

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.

Both the buyer and the seller remain unnamed.

So two anonymous Richie Richies.

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.

And

I thought I was going to drive the price up and I jumped way too high.

I went back.

I recognized that.

Do we have $30, 5.3 million?

$5.3.3 million.

And I'm looking at the other guy and he goes.

You got it?

He was still.

Definitely not.

That's why I never revealed it was me.

I was so embarrassed.

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.

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

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

Huh?

Yeah.

Well, Sotheby's says that everything was done by the book.

Of course they do.

What book?

And not for their book.

Travis their books.

Sotaby's book.

Our book.

The older government says it's cool.

Don't worry about it.

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

So there is a murky world of who gets to own meteorites.

In the U.S., 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 applies to this rock to get the meteorite back.

So

what a world.

What a world.

We got a big piece of Mars.

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

Yeah.

I said I was sorry.

All right.

Well, Travis, Hank, thank you so much for ponding with me.

Travis, it's been great to have you as our secret third brother.

It's been an absolute delight.

I appreciate you making the time and committing to the bit.

Oh, thank you.

That's if there's one thing I know how to do, just commit to the bit.

That's what I love.

If you want to send us questions, it's hank and john at gmail.com.

We don't have a podcast without them.

This podcast is edited by Chris Angiko.

It's mixed by Joseph Tunamedish.

Our marketing specialist is Brooke Shotwell.

It's produced by Rosiana Halls-Rojas and Hannah West.

Our executive producer is Seth Radley.

Our editorial assistant is Duboki Chuck Revarti.

The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarola.

And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.

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