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What was up for the first thing of a Dear John and Hank? It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you some advice and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and ASU and building John. You know why you never play cards with Travis? Why?
Because he's always dealing with something. 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. And that third heat.
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.
I wasn't super pleased with what my brother's asked for in the trade but I'm happy to be here. So I'm getting wrong. My new hometown. I'm happy to be here.
I thought I was worth a little bit more but it's fine. You know it's fine. I'm going to play my heart out for this city and I look forward to a lot of new brand deals. Yeah we have some great relationships.
You get one more brand deals than we do. We had a stitch fix. I had 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. 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, my brother, my brother, me or I should say used to host my brother, my brother, my brother. And he's been treated 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 mean 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 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's 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 hang on shut up about that guy. No I think he's a genius. I'll make a bet with you that by 2030 they will reclassify Pluto back as a planner.
Ooh and if that happens we'll call the show the Travis show with special guests Hank and John. Alright 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. Yes currently it seems like anything that will distract a news cycle from actual news for even 10 minutes.
They're willing to throw the wall and see if it's six. 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? Right.
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 thing 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. Yeah. And they're like oh dad's famous which I think is a wonderful kind of property.
Yeah. So you know what we do here at Travis is we give to you his advice. 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 would be from Chicago and everything.
If so what are your thoughts? Not like the fish Nemo. I mean it has any pope except the current pope at a hot dog. For sure.
For sure. Pope Francis was a man of the people. He had a hot dog in his. All right.
All right. When were hot dogs invented. Great question. So you googled out while Travis and I riff.
If we're talking about like not counting like German like you know. Yeah. That is a sausage. We're talking like 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 is going to call 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. And one of the things I learned is that the hot dog was really pioneered by 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 two sixty three or two I think it's two sixty five to one. I think it is right like it's got to be two sixty five to one because the current 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?
No idea what you're talking about. No I think it was a John. Was he a John Paul? Was he a John P.
John Pope Benedict the 16th. Okay Pope Benedict the 16th probably had some hot dogs in in almost 30 years of being Pope Pope John Paul the second I bet had a hot dog or two. Now here's that no this is an important clarifying note. Are we talking about them as Pope eating hot dogs?
Oh no no in their lives. No. If he even I think he didn't live in America for a long time he was born in Chicago. Yeah.
But if he even spent six years here as a child the amount of hot dogs and American child consumes is off of the chart. I could not even begin to guess me. Europeans well they're having like baguettes with Nutella for that for breakfast. I mean my kids eat that too.
Hank your kids have a I said, 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 the 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 at. We got to get that stitch fix at. 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 probes 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 you 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. So if they start eating hot dogs when they're like two years old, by the time they're at six, they've had over 200 hot dogs.
Every sports game you go to, you have to have one, this requirement. This is 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. I think Vatican City and all of them have the money to make this happen. Honestly, Pope Leo versus Joey Chestnut, hot dog eating competition, winner take all. Yeah.
Winner take all being like the presidency emperor of Europe. Everything. I'm going to take all. Understand.
I think it would be a battle for the ages. I mean, it would humanize the Pope a little bit, right? The problem with the Pope has is that he feels very distant from us because he's got a messenger on earth and everything. I feel like 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 Joey Chestnut won, if the stakes were like, if he wins, he gets canonized as the patron, patron, say the pog dogs, or the patron, saying 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. Yeah. It's got a lot of views.
I think the main conclusion from it is that I'm not Catholic. Not even not Catholic enough, just like, I don't think it's Catholic. Well, I'm not Catholic. So it's hard for me to feel, to feel deeply hurt, but it is true that my theology is fairly worldly and that was his big criticism anyway.
Yeah. I did a crash course philosophy and I got, I got raked over the coals for having a simplistic view of Thomas Aquinas' view or explanation of the necessity of the existence of God. And I'm like, man, I had, I had 12 minutes to do because God exists. I don't know.
We did. 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 with your intelligent, they're like, oh, my God, good job buddy.
Here's a lollipop. And that is great. All right. We'll take that on board.
I think that's important criticism. Poor 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, 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 a sort of 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, do you want 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 in so far 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 are in the direction.
I would be pointing. Yeah, that's a great point ahead and thought of that. But that is separate from Raquel's question. And that is, I mean the stars.
I don't know. They're even ice cars. That's what I'm going to say. 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 they're moving around pretty fast.
It's just they're moving around and we're also moving. Now I'm getting my head hurts, because we're moving around. We aren't moving around, but they move around separately from us. So like we're all sort of going around the center of the galaxy, but like there's some drifting up and down and around.
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 a milky 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, something looks going down, but it's all going in a circle together.
Got it. That's not because I know Hank. It's okay. We don't make all this stuff.
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 pointed the big dipper, but if it's down at the horizon, then if you pointed the big dipper, 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 what? And also it 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 line.
We're seeing the light. We're seeing the light get curved, curved up and back toward us. Wow. And the atmosphere exists and that space exists and there isn't just like a shell around us that has like a LCD screen on it.
Yeah. Thank you. I like that you guys are sect all viewpoints. Yeah, we try to make space.
We try to make space on this podcast. The liquid crystals up there. 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 you could see something that would actually be blocked by the planet by looking through the atmosphere and having it bent the light to focus on something that is behind the planet. That would be the ultimate like like beating hide and go see to be like, I know you're back there hiding on the other side of the planet. Got you.
I can see you now. Yeah. I can see you now. Yeah.
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 published with a real press and everything, you then say the name of the book and the date on which it comes in. Yes. It doesn't matter.
This took me forever to burn. 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. You're going to have a lot of legal issues. A pirate of the Caribbean.
It's something I've worked really hard on. We'd love to hear what my family friends and colleagues think of it, but it's nonfiction. 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're entering into an exciting new world of not knowing what people 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 date it comes out. Yeah. Just going to tie it to a bit of cross your forehead. I have found this is something I struggle with a lot because I listen, I come across as so cool and confident.
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 like, if I have an idea for a thing and I tell somebody and their response is even a little bit like little warm or like, oh, that's not something I'd be interested in, but I'll tell you who would love that. I'm like, 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've 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 do 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 interest or something new you learned about these subjects, 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.
I'm curious what Ian's book is about. Yeah. Not everybody would be interested in it. Yeah, is it like molecular biology or something that this might my experience is I never bring 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'm like, I crave, I crave your thoughts. Do you really? I do not.
I crave, I mean, I crave positive thoughts. Is what I mean. Last 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 very sure. 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, 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. 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, 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 a 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. 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. And I will say not that recently. No, no, John Green ate John Green in like 2013. No, I mean, the comment wasn't that reason you say it was recently.
Oh, yeah, it wasn't that reason. I thought you were I thought you were referring to something else. But Sarah's favorite is, when did millennials get so old? Yeah.
Wow. That's true. See, I guess no one's ever said anything mean about me. Yeah.
You can relate. Yeah, I just can't really stand with that slide. 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 up, but we did. And now people have thoughts on our noses. If I ever write a biography, I, an autobiography, I'm going to title it Travis Mackereli, 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 him. Or if I do, it's just like, oh, yeah, sure. Okay.
I can see how you might think that. That I get a lot. It's a pattern where someone will especially post more and more like clips of like the podcast and so 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 all the things.
Which one I want to be like, maybe you do like my joke. 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 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 add reads when we get to the ad reads there are times where somebody's like, I really need to go to the bathroom.
Yeah. It's like, okay, great. We'll just do the ad read and you guys about that. Right.
Right. Right. Right. Not all the time, but it's usually if that happens, it's like we have a hard out at a time and 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. I'm going to do the sponsorships while you're gone. Okay. We'll do our best to know how those work on our on our show.
Okay. All right. So we do like I'll do the first one in the middle and give you a feeling for it, 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.
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 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.
You just be like, I could go pee right now. Yeah. So watching movies where I'll do 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 then I'd go, you really hungry or you just bored and then after most of this time was bored. And now I do now that you said it does kind of now that I'm 41.
It's like, no, I didn't need to be, but I was bored and wanted to get up and do something and pee and felt like accomplishing something. Also speaking of the latest mission possible movie, there's a point, spoiler alert, where he gives into a fight and selling the submarine with a dude while he's like super airy 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 of that movie you could cut this. Oh, 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. Yes.
No matter what. 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 agent and it's a great movie series. I have nothing against it.
The people who made it, I'm sure, are watching people who work hard at their jobs and everything. But this particular one had this 45 minute scene that took place in the 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 said, oh, come on. It's also my other favorite thing about the last mission of possible movie was they had a metric ton of checkoffs guns. But if it was like, if checkoffs gun was like, ah, my gun, let's use it now. And there was a moment near the end where he said, like, I'll take, I'll take the plane that I have.
And just in case I brought to and it's like, oh, okay. Cool, man. 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, Tom Cruise is in that second plane and I'm like, oh, okay, 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 sponsorship. So this podcast is also brought to you by the hot dog pope, the hot dog pope, the current one, the hottest dog pope. And as fast as it's 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.
Thanks back, by the way. I'm back, by the way. Also my new book, movie franchise, impossible mission. This episode of your Hank and John is brought to you by Shopify.
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I'm not picturing a ball in stick model because I know that I'm not supposed to but I also can't help but picture a ball in stick model. That's just my question. Yeah, so you're picturing a ball in stick model and what does the stick represent? If it's all stuck together, then you have the empty space inside of it.
Inside of the ball? The center of the ball? That's why they keep the toys. You get the toys in one half and the candy in the other and it's not a little snack for you in every molecule.
Sorry, I got confused. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. You can only get those in London. So we could, I'm not sure what the question asks her if it's the stick.
In which case the stick is just the, 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 ball itself, that's just sort of like a vibe about the electron cloud. Wait, so is it more like magnetiles where it's like you put it together and they just like are just touching and they're just in the middle? They overlap.
The molecules actually, in an actual molecule overlap with each other. So Hank, correct me if I'm wrong, but like a proton and a neutron and a, they're 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, 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's connected? It's just space. What do you mean it's just space? It's space time.
It's the, it's the fabric of the universe. So it's not, it's not air obviously because like that's what 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. It's all. Yeah, it's all the same.
It's not a vacuum. Vacuum is a separate, a separate symptom of spaceiness is 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. Well, so as far as like the electron cloud goes, which I think is not like the space between a proton and neutron, but the space of the, of the, of the vast majority, 99.9 blank, blank, blank, blank percent of an atom 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. Yes, right here, right?
Where they're not touching? Uh huh. That's just nothing. Yeah.
It's space, which is, which is not nothing exactly. But you just said it was space time, the fabric of the universe, which implies that in addition to 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. You can 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'm not saying it's 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. But 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. 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. Great book. I think I have.
Yeah. Great book. Okay. Now what I'm reading here, Hank, is that space and time are not the same thing but parts of a whole.
Yeah. That makes me feel better because the 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 easier for me. I will take that under advisement. I'm saying 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 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 ratio of built up huge scaffolding, still to houses, right?
And 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 that they aren't concerned with it as much. And so it's a bunch of different ways to think about the movement and existence of time based on these theories. It's really great.
I love learning about different perceptions of time and ways to express time and what time travel would look like in different forms of 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 a meaningful way, I have to ask you one more question. It's from Grace who writes, Hello Brother's Green, as another person who's online footprint has spanned literal decades, places like meta and Google thinks that I want to look back on things that I posted as a youngster using social media. But I don't know thank you. 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? DFTB, Invest, Wishes, Grace.
That, I, Grace, I think, and the Brother's 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 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 yeah, 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 just 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. Yeah, 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, I would have that hate, I'm confident. No, I mean, I look back at 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 I feel terrible. We're like, ah, yeah, I finished packing this so future Travis doesn't have to worry about it. And it's almost three separate interviews 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 idea, 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. Right. 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 the 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, it wasn't. You haven't gotten better since then? Oh, no.
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 anti climax. Oh, again. That was 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 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 the word that gives gives me strength with stuff like that is curate. Yeah. Curate.
Yeah. You're right. Yeah. You're right.
Yeah. You're right. Yeah. You're right.
You're right. Because that in itself is also a form of like self projection and not 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, but like I don't know what pieces of that are going to be cringing the future as well. I just save it and then delete it.
Save it and delete it and then give it to when right before you die, write a will that gives it all to your local historical society. Yeah. So we've got save and delete we've got curate and we've got just just believe that everything you've ever done is not cringeing. Great.
Okay. How wonderful it would be to reach a point in society where like a great grandmother pulls s their kids in and choose like me all the tweets. I've saved I'm putting them out and she just has a big like scrapbook full printed out tweets. Here's one I said, Lord wouldn't say that now.
You know what I mean kids? Oh, we were real mad. I 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 have this one up about how Elon Musk was smart. Oh, that's pretty great.
Oh, a lot about crypto. Oh, that's the monkey I bought. It was not a cheap monkey. That's why you couldn't go to college.
If I had just bought the S&P 500 index button, it all would have been okay. Anyways, back to the cyber minds. That's what I assume is happening at that point. They're working in cyber minds for the robots.
Yes, yes. Our old tweet, scrapbooks are all we have. Now we must burn them for fuel. The future's going to be great, guys.
All right. It's time for the on for news from Mars and AFC Wimbledon. I'll go first. AFC Wimbledon played a game yesterday in the Carabao Cup.
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. This is football. This is football football.
For example, then, and I am the other thing about it. We didn't think of tennis. A lot of people do, but in fact, it is a football team. What is that?
You're a big ping pong. Big ping pong. The biggest of ping pong. Yeah.
And instead of having a paddle, all you have is your feet and your head. I love that. So AFC Wimbledon played jilling ham or possibly gilling ham. 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 one one, but then we won on penalties thanks to two heroic saves by our goalkeeper, Joe McDonald. Are they in the league below? You are above you. They're in the league below us.
Well, that's not 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, 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 the 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? And this from Mars back in 2023, a rich person, an 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. Wait, 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.
Okay. I thought that it listen, I've seen those home tours of rich people with an old barn door. I don't know why. That would have been cooler.
That would have been cooler. 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 turned out. It's a mini martian meteorite. A martian meteorite means a piece of Mars that flew off Mars and hit Earth. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, that's what it let out. Yeah. That's something escaped.
So somehow this ended up at a private gallery in Italy. Sciences from the University of Florence had a chance to look at it. And then it was sold at a Sotheby's Oxygen for $5.3 million. Whoa.
Both the buyer and the seller remain unnamed. So two anonymous Richie Ricci's. It was for me. I should be right now.
I'm a rock and 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 five is made with 20 bucks.
I thought I was going to drive the price up and I jumped way too hot. We have $30. 5.3 million. 5.3 million.
I'm looking at the other guy. And he was still in? That's 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's above board. How did a thing that ended up in a European country was it legal?
Yeah. Well, some of these says that everything was done by the book. Of course they do. And not for their book.
They're book. They're book. Our book. The only guy who says it's cool.
It's a lot. It's many pages, but it's only two words. So there is a murky world of who gets to own media rights. In the US, rocks that fall in private land belong to the property owner.