426: The Hank Green Twitter Memorial Garden

October 1, 2025·42 min·3 clips

John Green reveals he never sees ads on Instagram, while Hank gets targeted for toilet seats.

1. Dear Hank and John hosts Hank Green and John Green open by discussing Instagram Reel ads, with John noting that Twitter's algorithm serves him Hank Green content alongside 'the scum at the bottom of the barrel of humanity.' 2. John is a YA novelist and AFC Wimbledon co-owner; Hank is a science communicator who markets his charitable coffee company Keats & Co. on Tumblr under an incognito account. 3. The episode's thematic throughline is the brothers' conflicted relationship with social media — as creators who benefited enormously from it, who have long since concluded it is harmful, and who are trying to figure out how to respond. 4. Hank proposes creating a physical contemplative walk — inspired by the Garden of a Thousand Buddhas near Missoula, Montana — with dumb classic tweets inscribed on stones, including Britney Spears writing 'I love Lady Gaga' and British politician Ed Balls tweeting only the words 'Ed Balls.' 5. Hank says he genuinely grieves for Twitter and wants 'a little walk where you go and you're like, God, we're dumb' — then immediately acknowledges 'that's the stupidest thing I've ever said.' 6. John expands the concept to a memorial for the entire social internet — 'we should stop, and we're all very sorry' — and compares it to the Nixon Presidential Library: an honest but overall memorial that doesn't pretend it was good. 7. John frames the social internet using the tobacco timeline: 300 years of smoking, 50 years of knowing it was bad before acceptance — 'we're in that part now with the social internet, the part where we knew, but we didn't know, know.' 8. Gwen asks about sports commentary language that makes players sound like racehorses; John explains the dual reality — the player is simultaneously a person and a saleable asset — and says when he announced 'buying a player' for AFC Wimbledon, people pushed back on the phrasing. 9. John's professional footballer friends are 'highly cognizant of how messed up it is that billionaires are trading millionaires for their physical assets,' even as the contracts benefit players financially. 10. He contrasts English football, where players often have significant say in transfers, with American baseball, where a player can be assigned to a minor league team without warning. 11. The hockey player interview format — asked 'why are you excited to move to Seattle?' when his family is being uprooted — is offered as a particularly vivid illustration of the emotional labor required under the current system. 12. Clarissa asks whether a Bloody Mary actually helps a hangover; both brothers find Bloody Marys disgusting, and Hank says the core ingredients — B vitamins from Worcestershire sauce, electrolytes from tomato juice — could be replaced by a Gatorade with B vitamins. 13. John's best hangover prevention advice, credited to his friend Chris Waters, is 'nobody ever regrets not having the last beer.' 14. Laurel asks why wet dogs smell distinctive; Hank explains it is a combination of short-chain fatty acids, bacteria-produced earthy musty odors, and yeast byproducts — evolved as communication signals between dogs. 15. Ismar asks whether the brothers watch each other's non-Vlogbrothers content; both watch all Vlogbrothers videos but only partial coverage of each other's other channels and almost no TikToks. 16. John reveals he has stopped making TikToks and is now focused on content for 'extremely small audiences he is really interested in' — a deliberate pivot away from participation in what he calls 'the discourse.' 17. Hank notes that 85% of Vlogbrothers views currently come from John's videos, while Hank's content attracts existing nerdfighters — framing their approaches as two different valid responses to the same moment. 18. John reflects that he has traced why he wanted fame so badly as a lonely kid, but has not yet traced why he finds attention simultaneously repulsive and intoxicating — comparing it to cigarettes: 'disgusted by my desire for attention, horrified by wanting it, but intoxicated by the attention itself.' 19. The episode's tone is meandering and self-reflective, with extended digressions that feel like an honest private conversation between two brothers who have been doing this together for nearly two decades. 20. Long-term fans of the Green brothers' Vlogbrothers-era content and anyone interested in how online creators reckon with fame and social media will find this episode particularly resonant.

As heard by us

A funny, digressive take on ads, Twitter, and football economics.

Dear Hank & John starts with an ad-algorithm joke and keeps circling through social platforms, football contracts, player power, and the uneven leverage of different markets.

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Why you'd press play

You want a funny tangent that eventually lands on football labor markets and why player power works differently across leagues.

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