Hey, so something worth knowing is a benefit for the nonprofit organization that makes Crash Course and SciShow Complexly. It's September 16th, 2026 in Los Angeles, California at the Wilshire E-Bell Theater. Please join us. It's going to be incredible.
Friends have complexity like Mark Rober, Katie Max, Simone Yech, and more will share inspiring talks about what makes them hopeful and join Hank Green on stage for fun, interactive discussions. Complexly has been creating free educational content like SciShow and PBS eons and Crash Course and Bizarre Beasts for nearly 15 years and 6 billion views. But this year, we have become a 501c3 nonprofit and we're doing something worth knowing as an in-person event that benefits Complexly and our impactful educational media. It's the first ever Complexly in-person event and it's a fundraiser to support our mission of inspiring curiosity and lowering barriers to knowledge building because curiosity builds understanding and understanding builds a better world.
Tickets go on sale to the general public June 30th at somethingworthknowing.com. So come build a better world with us on September 16th and experience something worth knowing you can get your ticket at Complexly.info slash something. Welcome to Dear Eigat John! Who is I prefer to think of it, dear John and Hank?
It's a podcast where two brothers answer your question to be to be surprised to bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, did you hear that you did actually? That someone beat Tetris? I did.
In fact, I broke this news to you. But I want to talk about it because I feel like there's a metaphor in it. Oh, there's so many metaphors in it. So for those who don't know, Tetris is a 35-year-old video game released in the late 1980s when Hank and I were at our absolute peak of video game prowess.
And Tetris' motto was from Russia with Love because it was designed by a Russian video game designer right at this interesting moment when what had long been the Cold War was beginning to thaw as they said. Yeah, they made a whole movie about it. It was a real blockbuster. Oh boy.
Oh boy. I thought that we were gonna, I thought, I was like, oh man, there's no dad joke this week, but you were just waiting for Bob's love. So anyway, people for about 30 years of the 35-year history of Tetris, maybe 25, people always thought basically the best you could ever do was get around a million points, which is when the game stops counting points. Okay, sure.
Sure. So that's one version of beating Tetris. Tetris is not designed to go past that point. Right.
So that's he playing, but it's not, but it doesn't even count your score after that. It's called a max out. Okay. And there was one guy's name is Thor and he claims his name is Thor.
Is his name? No, no, no, his real name is Thor and he claimed to have gotten a max out in like the early 1990s. And everybody was like, well, Thor is really good at Tetris, but that's probably didn't happen. Right.
And people are like, oh, this picture is photoshopped, whatever. This is before Photoshop, but you know, we've already got to do some images. Yeah. Yeah.
And then over the last like 10 years, people have gotten really good at Tetris because they can share information in a really open way through videos and stuff and also through computer programming, like reverse engineering, the Tetris code to understand what the game can and cannot do. And then a few years ago, a new technique for moving the pieces was invented called rolling, which is invented by a guy named Cheese. It's very weird. It's very weird.
It's just real name Cheese or is that a screen name? I think that might be a screen name. Great question. But rolling really changes the game because now the game becomes playable even at the highest possible speed, which was always called the kill screen because for years, it was believed that you couldn't really play on it.
And so it was the screen that kind of killed your game no matter what. Right. Okay. So so there was a period of time when you could max out, but you couldn't beat the kill screen.
Right. And so Tetris is still beating you at that point, even though you can get more points than it can count, it still can kill you. Yeah. And ultimately the way every game of Tetris until last week ended, I mean, every single game that's been played in all of the history of the game, the billions or whatever of games that have been played, they all end with Tetris winning.
You know, your blocks stack up to the top of the screen and the game is over because you can no longer place blocks because that's the end of the game and you lost. You always lose. That's always what's been beautiful about Tetris in some ways. Could you, is there a way to get to a point where you are good enough that you can keep like, you just get to level one speed.
I could just play forever. Right. Is there a way to do that to just play forever? Is that how you can be touched on?
That started to become the question. Can you just play forever at this incredibly, impossibly high speed with this new technique of rolling, right? And so, like a draw like you wouldn't be beating Tetris wouldn't be beating you. Right.
And Game Boy Tetris is like that. Like you can play the top level of Game Boy Tetris for hours. If you're really good at Tetris. And so, people started to think like, well, maybe NES Tetris is like this as well for the original Nintendo Entertainment System.
And then someone discovered that if you make it to like level 256 or something, like if you make it to having played over 1000 lines at this impossible speed, then is that like 1000 lines at the impossible speed is that basically like you could go forever? I mean, yeah, if you can go that long, you can go forever. It's just like, but you can't make even one mistake in 40 minutes. So eventually it'll get you.
That's always been the thought. But then somebody discovered that if you make it all the way to where the game starts to break itself, the game's code starts to not be able to handle what you're what you're throwing at it. Like you're so good that the game never imagined this possibility. Right.
Right. It's like a Y2K bug, but for Tetris. So the first thing that happens is that the colors get really weird. There's all these new colors that have never been seen before.
The game gets pink, the game gets gray, the game gets orange, you know, the game starts to freak out. And then if you keep going through all these colors and you just keep playing and playing and playing, eventually, every time you get a single line, there's a 70% chance, at least on certain levels that the game will just crash. But only if you can't get a Tetris. You can't get a Tetris, you can't get a double, you can't get a triple.
It just freezes, it crashes, and you've beaten Tetris. Like instead of Tetris ending, when it gets to the top of the screen, Tetris ended because you broke it. Right. So Tetris, like, of course, Tetris is not designed to be able to be beaten.
There isn't like a you did it screen. Of course not. But this is the equivalent of that because this is the moment where instead of Tetris beating you, you play Tetris until it breaks. So last week, a 13-year-old boy named Blue Scootie.
And yes, that is his real name. At least for the purposes of this podcast, because we're not talking about the real names. We're not doxing a 13-year-old. A 13-year-old boy named Blue Scootie.
And by the way, I was there for this. Were you like in the room? Not in the physical room. No, I didn't show up at his house.
That's doxing, I was in the Twitch room. And Blue Scootie couldn't even be, he's not even old enough, I don't think to be a Twitch partner. So the only way to donate to him to celebrate this achievement was via PayPal. But anyway, Blue Scootie did it.
He did it on the last possible line. Like his screen was filling up and like your screen can't get very high when you're at these speeds because it just becomes impossible to move to pieces. And it's hard to imagine he was going to get another line after this line. And so we had a 70% chance of beating the game for the first time in human history and a 30% chance of just losing like all the other billions of dangerous that have ever been played.
And he did it and it froze. And he said, oh my God. And suddenly across the world of Tetris enthusiasts, which is a surprisingly large world, everything went quiet. As we realized that the impossible dream had come true.
And Blue Scootie, this 13 year old kid who by the way lost his dad just just a few weeks ago and who dedicated this to his dad, he achieved Tetris immortality, becoming the first person in human history, not to be beaten by Tetris, but instead to break the game itself. It was so beautiful. It was such a profound moment. And I'm just really grateful to have seen it.
That's fantastic. I got goosebumps all over. And I also feel like we just made an episode of Radio Lab. Or like a little more sound design.
We needed it to last 40 minutes. There's a lot of history I didn't get into, you know, that I would have gotten into if it was an episode of Radio Lab. But if Radio Lab wants to have me on to talk about the history of any estetris, like, I don't need to prep. Yeah, it's like when they have me on to talk about geoengineering, I was like, right, yeah, exactly.
Just like, call anytime. I am prepared. Actually, I'm prep for that. But I bet I bet I could even el lulu when I could make that happen.
John, that sounds like a fantastic story. I will tell it anytime. That's very, very cool. And also I feel like is a real good structure for a story.
That's the kind of story that if we were to remake the Nerdfighteria newsletter into an actual newsletter, it would be a great story for the newsletter. Yeah, John, that's true. And you've just been talking about remaking the Nerdfighteria newsletter. We were just talking about it because I have been thinking that it could be something that's more like thought through, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. What I want the Nerdfighteria newsletter to be really is like almost like a hub for Nerdfighteria, a way of checking in. And right now, let's be honest, we, it's mostly marketing.
Yeah, there's this problem. We've been doing this for a long time. You just made a video that we've been doing it for 17 years, which is older than many YouTubers. And that's enough time to sort of examine the actual reasons why I get drawn into creating and making things on different platforms.
And I was off friends who like make things only on their own platforms. So they've just got like a blog, they make a blog, they do it, they control it, or they have like their YouTube channel, but then they have their newsletter. And because they are better people than me. Because I like, I create that hit of that hit.
That's like hit of anybody could see this and they might hate it. And then they're going to be mad at me or they might love it and become a fan of me. I get to see how fast the numbers change in comparison to the last time I did it. Ooh, that's a good one.
That's a big, that's a big hit. Are they moving faster or are they moving slower? I kind of got over that part of being a tuberculosis influencer, Hank, is that you just have to get over the idea that the numbers are going to move fast. Like if I make a if I make a tick talk about tuberculosis that gets a million views, or if I make a tick talk about tuberculosis that gets 10,000 views, I feel the exact same, which is I made a tick talk about tuberculosis that got 10,000 views.
This is either of those or a lot more than the zero attention to birculosis was getting two years ago. Well, it was getting attention. It just wasn't getting enough attention. Yes.
So anyway, you were saying I so I understand this about myself now. And this podcast has actually like we get a lot less feedback about the podcast than we do about a YouTube video and certainly than about a tweet. And I think that like it's really true that social media, that like content platforms pay people to create in numbers going up. Like that's one of the primary forms of payment.
And this is one of the reasons why people created on TikTok a lot is because you could see, oh my god, I got a million views on that TikTok, but like did you or did you get like a million people watched two seconds of it because that is the con for counting of you. And so sometimes that might be a million people watching a minute, but sometimes it's a million people watching for two seconds and then swiping and moving on. And so like this metric that meant one thing on YouTube, everyone was like, oh, that means the same thing on TikTok, where like that's how your brain feels. And so a lot of people started creating on TikTok because it felt like they could, it was, it was also it's a better engine for discovery than YouTube.
But it, that is the, like I recognize that even me a 43 year old man has been doing this for 17 years, I still, the numbers going up fast is a big part of why I do it. It feels good. It feels good. And obviously it's not particularly healthy.
And so like this podcast is a nice place. Books are a nice place. Like you've worked on it to getting feedback. Like I've been working on a book for, I don't know, six months now and I've had one person give me any feedback on it all so far.
And stand up comedy is a very different version of it where you spend a lot of time writing the show and then you get super immediate feedback on stage. And you cannot write a good stand up show without that. And so you take that feedback back and then you change and you edit based on the immediate, like really immediate. There's the, like everybody gets the joke at the exact same time and everybody gives you their feedback about the joke at the exact same time, which is, it's so interesting to have created in so many different ways.
But like I think that for my health, it is probably good that the sort of short form text platforms are kind of imploding. At the same time, I also get a lot of good stuff from them. There's a lot of good community there. There's a lot of connection.
There's a lot of good data. And I am a little bit loath to lose them. So I've been thinking about other ways that we might stay in touch if it looks like that's just not a healthy enough place for me, personally, like a different people are different, of course. But like I just, I think there's, I think there's not so much a problem with, of course, there's different platforms do different things and that matters.
But there is just also something that's a little bit wrong with the idea of short form text. Well, we are, yeah, so it seems like you're actually identifying two different problems. One is that your relationship with these platforms may not be so healthy, but you also recognize that we get a lot out of them, which is how I feel too, right? Like frankly, I think it's unlikely that Dan and her would have lowered their price of their tuberculosis test, resulting in 5 million more people every year getting access to tests if it hadn't been for Twitter.
And so how can I be opposed to Twitter when it helped? Probably the most important thing, maybe the most important thing that I've been part of in my life. And so how can you be opposed to it? That's on the one hand.
Yeah. On the other hand, how can you not be opposed to it? On the other hand, have you ever been on one of these places and seen what it does to people's brains? So there's the personal part of it, right?
But then there's this sort of almost like business part of it, where our whole 17-year career online has been highly, highly dependent upon platforms, the platform of YouTube, the platform of Twitter to a lesser extent, the platform of TikTok to an even lesser extent, the platform of Reddit. And that, we've known for a long time, is something Hank and I've talked about for more than a decade, that if something happened to YouTube, what we used to call, we used to say, what happens if YouTube my spaces in our private conversations with each other, we would be like, if YouTube my spaces, Nerdfighteria is in big trouble, and also like, complexly as a business is in big trouble because Crash Course and SciShow and PBSEons and everything else are in big trouble. And now YouTube hasn't my space, which is wonderful. And we're very grateful to everybody who works at YouTube for that hard work of keeping it from my spacing, because there's nothing guaranteed about that, as we have lately learned from Twitter's 75% reduction in value over 12 months, one of the greatest eliminations of value since Enron.
But Hank and I are both concerned about that, and it would be great to have a hub for the community that wasn't contingent upon a platform owned by a large media company. Now, of course, Gmail is still owned by Google, but email is less likely to go anywhere than anything else. On the other hand, I don't want to clog up people's inboxes unless I'm really adding value. And so this has kind of been the conversation that we've been having in the background.
I like how this has become not so much a podcast as it is to brothers working through what they want for the future of their lives and their community. It's the first one of the season, John. It's the 2023, wait, 2024, season has begun. And I don't know if you remember this, but I said a couple of weeks ago, what if the first podcast of the year is just sort of talking through?
You seem to have forgotten that I suggested that. I have forgotten about it because a lot happens since then. I haven't even told you. We haven't even talked about Christmas.
We talked briefly on Christmas, but we haven't talked about Christmas. I don't know what your kid got. You don't know what my kid's got. This is something that's wrong with our relationship.
If we're going to finish the Nerdfighter, what the future of Nerdfighteria looks like to us. But then let's talk about what the future of our brotherhood looks like to us. So on the podcast or afterward? No, on the podcast.
We've got to have these conversations in public or we'll never have them because there's something wrong with us as you've just done. Do you think Travis and Jason Kelsey have this issue? Do you think like they're like, you know what, let's just save it for the pod. I didn't know that Travis had a brother.
You don't listen to their podcast. It's incredible. It's like a podcast by brothers. It's Mabimbam, the Kelsey brothers, and then coming into getting a bronze medal, but like in a distant, distant third, like six left down, but just happening to finish third is Dear Nkanchon.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry that we don't don't have an amazing tradition where we named the year every year. And this year we named it Fun Fun 20 fungal or after a magical mushroom wizard, which was a real treat for me and Catherine.
Yeah, that's what Mabimbam named the year. But I think that I have two names for 2024 that I've been playing around with with my kids. Okay. 20 more.
This is the year of this is the year of doing more. And then 20 20 24, which means this is the year of digging deep. Oh, okay. Like my kids are like, Oh, God, how about just like 2024 and you stop like asking us about our feelings all the damn time.
So other so yeah, I don't know. We may or may not do something interesting with the newsletter. If you'd like to sign up for it, it's in the links of every of every vlogbrothers video. And I was a lot of people signed up for it.
And we have been using it mostly to be like, Hey, we've launched this new project or Hey, the cancer socks are for sale. And that feels a little bit extractive rather than adding additive and I'd like for that to change. And I think that in general that the whole end of the year had a bit of that vibe. You for a little bit like that in general.
But part of that thing, Hank, here's the thing. It's true that I felt it too. I was like, aren't we being extractive rather than additive, which is a big thing that we think and talk about all the time? Because we really don't want to try to extract more value from our listeners or viewers than we add to their lives.
Of course, like that's the number one goal. Yeah. But, but our efforts through the cancer socks and good dot store and the coffee and the socks and everything. And so yeah, pizza, yes, pizza, yes, raised three and a half million dollars for stronger health care systems and impoverished communities this year.
And in total, since 2019 have raised 7 and a half million, this was by far our biggest year. But like we've had big years before and so we're at 7 and a half million dollars total. And I just don't think there is another way to raise that kind of money. Yeah.
And while also providing good jobs and working with great teams of people and everything else that comes with it. So like, I get it that there were a lot of advertisements at the end of the year, but like one, it's Q4, I think people expect that's quarter four for all of you. That's the end of the year. As I said, I hated myself.
It's gift giving time. It's just like, this business is really taking off and it's doing a lot of good. And when something is taking off and doing a lot of good, you want to keep pushing it. And I felt I remember feeling like that about the fall in their stars.
Like the fault in their star started to do well and I started to talk about the fall in their stars much more and people started to be like, my God, this guy never talks about anything but the fault in their stars. I was like, I was like, you know what's happening? I see the snowball rolling downhill and I want to like, I want it to get the momentum. And then it turned out that I didn't want it to have that much.
And you're like, I'll give that one last push. I probably shouldn't have pushed. Slow it down. Yeah.
I saw somebody. So like I made a video that where I talked about how the goal is to eventually have good store, donate as much money as Newman's own has, which I consider Newman's on to be, you know, like a hero business. Yeah, they're the moon. They're the moon in our night sky.
Yeah. We're trying to get to hit it with a rocket. And somebody know we're just trying to become a bigger star. And no, I want to be a bigger moon.
I want to eat, what to use, what to build a charity death star and I want to blow up Newman's own. You want to buy Newman's own and then just ruin it like the must go to where you like my business is going to give all of my charity. Newman's own. Now you're going to give all that money to oil companies just for fun.
I'm just trying to, I'm just out here trying to ruin the good name of Paul Newman, a lovely deceased man. Yes. And somebody on the subreddit was, I said like that's like $600 million. And somebody on the subreddit was like from us.
I hadn't considered that it could be interpreted in that way. No. The thing that I like, we talked just a little bit about like extractive versus additive. And like I don't want anyone to buy anything because they feel like they have to.
That would be extractive. Like I want people to buy the socks because they're like, they feel good about the socks and they want socks or they want to give the socks as a gift. Like I want that to be like the very act of purchasing I want to be additive. I want it to be delivering value.
Like don't buy things if you don't feel like it's adding value. Like I'm not trying to guilt people into buying stuff. Right. If you want to donate to charity, just don't just don't just don't share that's much much more efficient.
But it's more like we're trying to find markets for socks and coffee and soap that exist already. People who are already buying that stuff and say, Hey, there's a better way to buy this. This episode of your Hank and John's Brown view by Shopify. There are a lot of things that stand between I have an idea and this is an idea that actually exists in the world and people are buying things from me.
And that is what Shopify makes easier. When you start with Shopify, the tools to design and launch and take payments, they're all there from day one. You don't have to build a whole machine before you can start building the business. And this is important because you also have to like look good and with Shopify's templates, you could get a site set up really quick that looks credible and professional without needing to code or duct tape a bunch of different tools together.
And when things look real, that works on my brain to be like, I'm doing a real thing. It also works on other people's brains to be like, this is legitimate. Shopify also has one of the best checkout systems on the internet. It's built to help customers finish the purchase effectively and efficiently without a bunch of roadblocks.
Returning customers can check out with a single click. That means less friction and fewer abandoned carts and a smoother experience for everybody. That stuff gives you confidence early on and it gives other people confidence in what you're doing. You're not wondering whether the payment system is going to work.
You're not wondering whether customers can get through the process. Shopify handles that foundation so you can focus on the thing that you're actually trying to do. It's really kind of amazing to me that Shopify is a tool that works from the first day your store launches when you're just starting to get customers all the way up to being the size of good.store or dftv.com or being the size of like Mattel and Jim Shark. When you build a Shopify, you're building with tools that already work at every scale.
All you need is the idea Shopify handles the rest. You can start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash deerhank with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details.
This episode of Deerhank is brought to you by Factor. Imagine for a moment that you are absolutely immersed in some work where you're creating something beautiful or useful or useless and ugly but you love it anyway and you look up and suddenly you have a feeling and that feeling is that it is 2.30 pm and that you did not eat lunch. What are you going to do? Are you going to get meal delivery that's going to cost too much and maybe be a bit of a mistake or are you going to go to the cupboard and just eat several fistfuls of peanuts.
Those are my two choices unless I have a factor in the fridge. You can get smokey barbecue chicken breast with potato mashed cream corn and peppers. You can get creamy lemon pepper chicken with veggie rice peel off broccoli and carrots. This has the fiber I need.
It has the protein I need and it has the deliciousness I need. What about garlic herb roasted baramundi with potato zucchini and burr blanc sauce? I don't really know what that means but it sounds delicious. What about a black bean taco bowl with corn salsa and cilantro crema?
A delicious high fiber high protein meal that no animals had to die for. Any of those can be ready in two minutes. Fresh, never frozen, over 100 rotating weekly meals including globally inspired flavors like Mediterranean and Asian, Factor shops, preps, cooks and delivers straight to your door so you have more time for everything you love this spring. Head to factormeals.com slash Deerhank 50 off and use the code Deerhank 50 off to get 50% off and free daily greens per box.
With new subscription only, wild supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. You know one thing that Catherine got me for Christmas? What is tea and it's so good.
No, that's great news. That's great news. Is this a good time to have the fight that we have about tea or do you have that in private? Yeah, let's have the fight in public.
Everybody let's throw it. Okay. So do you want to finish your point before I yell at you? Yeah, yes, great.
I will. The point is that by adding value to folks who we have a close relationship with, we can do a few things. We can learn what's working well. We can hone the sort of packaging and the marketing and the customer support and all that stuff with people who are maybe a little bit more forgiving than the average customer which our customer support team very much appreciates.
Thank you. We certainly are not perfect. We're growing quite quickly. We're not going to grow as fast as we did last year this year.
And so there were definitely some gigs to work out. So we like and then the idea is hopefully, you know, there's way more people who sort of have like a vague positive association with John and Hank Green than they know that they've ever listened to an episode of Deerhank and John or has have like seen, you know, one of our YouTube videos on vlogbrothers. You know, they probably some crash works or they seem to tick tock or whatever. And so hopefully like the thing can become much bigger as we get good at figuring out the perfect like the great products and how to market them and etc.
And then the much broader audience will be the one that you know, obviously we're not expecting to make $600 million off of 150,000 people. I am in fact not expecting to make $600 million. But I love your ambition as always. It's fun to watch it happen and I wouldn't bet against you because I've learned not to.
I do want to say one thing about that, which is that it's starting to happen and not just with people who have a vague positive association with you or me, but just with people who are like, wow, that's a cool business model and I like those socks or that's a cool business model. And my friend says that's really good coffee. And as evidence for that, I would point to the fact that our Facebook ads are working in a way that none of us imagined. And we're Hank and I just to say the obvious are not on Facebook.
So for what reason, we don't know why. The thing that Facebook does does not hook into my brain. Like I don't feel compelled by it. It just doesn't give us the feeling.
The way TikTok gives us the feeling and like to be clear, I don't think that it's good to follow the feeling. I think that it means to a bad life. But I want to figure out ways to not follow the feeling. Good luck getting me to stop.
Right. So let's briefly fight about tea and then we can talk about something else. Okay. So Hank maintains that we should sell loose leaf tea to start only loose leaf tea.
Yep. I maintain that since the vast majority of people who drink tea, drink bagged tea, that we should make something that they can use. I think that we should sell to the majority of people. And I might be wrong because like here, let me just counteract my argument before you against yourself for me to argue against myself.
I remember there was a period where all the book covers that they designed for my books that my publisher designed for my books were aimed at the YA market. And they were like, the YA market likes pictures of girls, faces, and or pictures of girls with their heads cut off, which is even more common at the time. It was a huge thing in the world of YA book covers. And so they made me some of those covers and they didn't do as well as the covers that were more sort of figurative or more text-based.
And the reason for that is that like what the YA market wanted was not what my readers wanted. And that appealing to like the people who were going to be my core readership actually led to more overall sales because word of mouth was better than just trying to like appeal to the broadest possible readership. So that counteracts my argument. But I still maintain that since most people drink their tea in a bag and there's nothing wrong with that, it's not like it's like evil or anything unless I'm missing something.
Then like, why don't we just make bag tea? Yeah, I mean, so there are a couple of things that are a little harder with bag tea. Because obviously another step, you have to get the tea out of the bag. So that adds some cost.
There are, so we charge a little more. You have to be at a different scale to start bagging tea. But it helps to be at a different scale. So like because of that added cost, there's like equipment that is required.
And to invest in the equipment, you have to have to be selling a certain amount of tea. I think, and I can't explain to you why, but when I make tea with a loose leaf tea, I feel like I am engaging in a higher quality experience than when I make tea with a tea bag. And I don't like this doesn't make any sense. I recommend it doesn't make any sense.
But it's like the ritual of it. And it's like the seeing of the leaves and that I get to choose how much tea goes in. So you can't put in half a bag of tea. And so like if I wanted to be a little bit stronger, I can do two and a half teaspoons instead of or I did one and a half teaspoons instead of one.
Or if I want it, sometimes I want to make it go. Where they got the phrase teaspoon from? That's how much tea goes in tea is I want tea. What?
That's right. Next, you'll tell me that 12 ounces of diet, Dr. Pepper doesn't weigh 12 ounces. They did it on the subreddit.
It weighed like 12.9. I thought it weighed like 12.09. But maybe some I don't know it was more. It didn't weigh 12 ounces.
So anyway, I'm going to argue against myself again, because that's my specialty. When we made coffee, I think like 70% of the coffee market is ground coffee. And so when we first made coffee, we made 70% ground coffee, 30% whole bean. And that's what was for sale.
You know, we had like 300 bags of whole bean and 700 bags of ground and about 80% of people bought whole bean coffee, because it turns out the people who are wanting to are really conscious of the supply chain and care about the farmers who were involved and the agricultural practices involved in all and care about every part of the polymer more to like, you know, like whole bean coffee is definitely better than ground coffee, not to be a snob, but it's fresher, you know, whatever. It's better. And it turned out that like the people who really cared about that stuff were the people who were most likely to be our customers, because if you don't care about that stuff, then you're probably, you know, more likely to buy something at the grocery store, which is fine. Yeah.
I'm not here to tell you not to buy grocery store coffee. Hell yeah. But if you can afford awesome coffee, I'll just tell you flat out straight up 100%. It's better.
Can you taste the difference? Yes. Like if you do a fine taste, can you taste the difference? Absolutely.
You can taste the difference. It makes a huge difference. But whatever, drink your coffee, how you want to drink it? Good not store.
For sure. That's where you get the stuff. Now I'm in my marketing mind. So like maybe you're right that like, it's true that most people drink bagged tea, but like people who drink loose leaf tea are more likely to want to be customers of this tea company.
I think that there's like a there's an experience to making it the way that I make it. But I just think that everyone's like you. Sure. Yeah.
Yeah. For sure. And I also think that like here, like the reality is we're not going to be cheaper than twinning. We're not going to be cheaper than Tetley.
And right. And so like you have like there's a different experience. So you're selling like a better product. And to have the better product look different and act different in a specific way kind of expresses the fact that it's a better product.
And like, trust me, it's a better product. Like I have had a lot of black tea in my life. I like tea. And it's just like so delightful to have tea that is actually good in the United States of America, which is not easy.
I agree with you. But whole bean coffee is better than ground coffee and we still sell ground coffee because lots of people use it and need it. And it's better for them. And I don't want to I don't want to tell people what's best for them.
I don't think like down that road lies good marketing. I think we provide people with choice. But I hear you that we're not going to be able to compete on price, especially with bag tea. And so what are we competing on?
We're competing on experience. We're competing on taste. We're competing on it just being better overall. And maybe that's the only way we can win is with loose leaf tea.
Yeah. And I mean, eventually, like the cost will get lower. Right. Well, you might be surprised.
The cost of coffee is not gone lower. No, it's true. It's hard. It's hard.
I think that I think that there are ways we, you know, we're still at the beginning. Hope, who knows? Maybe we're not. And I'd be fine if we weren't.
I think that we are still at the beginning of this whole idea. Yeah. I think we have to be. I mean, if you look at the fact that it's already raised seven and a half million dollars for charity, like, you have to think it's it has the opportunity to keep growing.
And if we do a good job, it will keep growing. And so we need to it's something we definitely need to focus some of our time and attention on. But I also don't want to lose sight of the fact that Nerdfighteria is not primarily a testing ground or a customer base or anything like that. It's primarily a community.
And one of the ways you see that expressed, you see it expressed in lots of different ways. You see it expressed in memes, right? And like, discords and Reddit's and everything else. But one of the ways you see it expressed is that it's not only raising money that does good.
It's not only shifting buying habits that leads to societal good, right? Like, that's not the only way to engage with big society-wide problems. And, you know, the Global Fund, I don't know how much to talk about this. I'm going to talk about it a little elliptically.
But the Global Fund gave a big talk recently where they were like, how much money has been saved by the lowering of prices of tests and treatments that the Global Fund negotiated. Okay? Okay. So that's the lower price of Badakalene, the drug made by Johnson and Johnson, and the lower price of these tests made by Seffiad, which is owned by Danar.
Now, the Global Fund did negotiate those deals. I would say they negotiated them with a little bit of help. And the answer is, it's like more money than it's like $70 million. Yeah.
And it's like $70 million that goes right, very efficiently into expanded access to tuberculosis treatment, right? Because it's $70 million that Global Fund was going to spend that now they're not going to spend. And so instead, they get, but the money is still there. So instead, they get to spend it on more tests and more treatment availability.
And that was accomplished. Nerdfighteria is part in that, which was, of course, only part of that. And in the case of Badakalene, a small part. But Nerdfighteria's part in that was accomplished through collective action, through working together, through having that kind of, you know, ability that I think is almost unique to Nerdfighteria and online communities to stick to something, you know, for longer than 24 hours, or longer than a week or a month or whatever.
Like, once we get our teeth into something, I mean, I almost feel bad for Dan and her because our teeth are into something. And like, they think that it's over and it's just not like, it's going to be over when we win. It was just what, you know, I think eventually Johnson and Johnson realized is that like, this ends, this ends when the activists win. And so we're going to back down.
But yeah, I think like that's an incredible talent that that this community has. And it's one of many that like, exists way outside concepts of economic productivity. Yeah. And I think that's really important to remember and the real reason we want to maybe do the newsletter is that we want to encourage those parts of the community to be able to have a new place to thrive.
Yeah. I mean, I'm glad that you're that you're into it. And well, I don't want to do any work on it though, Hank, because I'm so I have too much work. I know I got a book about tuberculosis this year.
I think it's going to come out this year. I know I hope it does. I hope it does. My book is not going to come out this year.
I wish it would. It's it's hard. I know, man. Yeah.
The, the, the only thing that writes a book is time and the sitting down and and it's funny. Like I did this like I do every time where I was like, here's what I'll do. I'll just take the stuff that I wrote for the stand up. It's going to be like slightly modify it into a book.
And then this one is going to be easy. I tell my, I need to tell myself that every time. Yeah. I've written this story.
It's just the story of my cancer. And I'm not going to try to do anything more than that. And then the creep, the mission creep immediately said that and I'm like, what if and this would be really cool. And if I did this alongside that, then it would actually be like a really interesting and it could be really useful.
And here's another way it could be helpful to people. And here's one way where I think like, Oh, what if you like think about it as, you know, the cancer, like the science guy, not the cancer guy, the science guy got cancer. And so like, how does it feel as a guy who knows a lot and thinks a lot about science and how science works and how like humanity has progressed in its ability to treat disease? How does it feel when like you're suddenly the story when the story becomes you and all of the research that has been done over the last hundred years is in your veins right now.
And like all that and like, ah, that's so much better than what I could do, you know, in 45 minutes on a stage. And I could get much deeper into it and could be so helpful. Yeah. And then, and then, you know, and now I really have to be like, okay, but I cannot talk about every way that a cancer treatment could possibly work because of course there are, you know, hundreds of cancer treatments and they work in dozens of different ways.
Right. It turns out cancer is very complicated. And so I can't tell the whole story of cancer. I was not intending to, but now I have to find where to draw the lines.
It's really hard. Yeah. So you have to make space for mission creep because that's where the ambition in the project lies. Yeah, is very similar.
Although I don't have TB, I just got tested. It's very similar to my relationship with that book, which is that I started off thinking, um, I'm going to write a history about TB that's going to be about why the period where we romanticize tuberculosis is not that different from the period where we stigmatize tuberculosis. And that's pretty straightforward story. It takes place in the mid 18th to early 20th centuries and Bing, Bing, Bing, boom.
But then I was like, except that like you can't really talk about tuberculosis without talking about how it's always been an expression and form of injustice. Yeah. Once you're doing that, you've got to talk about the present, right? Like you can't leave that in 1922 because it's more, it's a more pressing issue now than it was even in the early 20th century.
And then you're telling a contemporary story and exactly, but then you have to decide, you have to let that mission creep happen because that's what makes, I'm sure your book about your cancer is going to be amazing. And that's what makes the book good. But then you have to also say enough. Yeah.
You have to find a way to say that's, that's good. Yeah. And also, once you've done that, then you have to go back through the book and make sure that it all makes sense. Right.
It is paced at all in any sensical way. Has an arc has a narrative drive so that people want to keep reading and set. Yeah. So I want you to do that this year really badly for me, for the world.
I don't want to lose the opportunity to have that hand green book because Hank gets busy with a million other things. And that's always the tension. Like we're so lucky to be in a place where we have enough work that we get to make choices, but we do have to make those choices. Yeah.
Stricy. So what choice are you going to make? What's the next year look like for you? Or are you not ready to make a commitment here on January 3rd?
Yeah. I don't know. I admit at the beginning of 2023 was that I was going to take it down a notch. And five months later, I was the CEO of two mid-sized American corporations.
I think I don't know if I've mentioned this on the Five Guys before, but I was reading through all of the survey responses from last year. And before I had gotten cancer, there were so many people saying, I'm worried about Hank's health. Yeah. I think I did say that last time.
Well, what I will say is I've already looked at the calendar and it's remarkably full. I am, for example, going to Southern California to do five-ish nights of stand-up followed by the one that will get recorded to be released as yet. I cannot talk about how it will get released. Can you tell me?
I can tell you. What? How? Okay.
Well, we're going to cut to and don't put this in. What do you think about that, John? Are you guys so cool? I already have a subscription, so I don't even need to sign up for anything.
Can I say that? I don't know if you can. I didn't know if you can anyway. I'm subscribed to freaking everything.
I even have a Paramount Plus membership. I'll say it's not Netflix. No, don't think that I don't think that I've got some that happening. I don't.
But I didn't know how it worked. So I said to the guy who does, I was like, how does it work? And he was like, you're not going to happen for you, my man. Maybe in 30 years.
Yeah. It's like when I asked Mark Watson if he thought I could ever be on Taskmaster. And he said, well, you could do like, you could start out with a with like a small set at Edinburgh Fringe and work your way up from there. And I was like, thank you so much for putting me in my place.
I really enjoyed that. That's, I really needed that. Thank you. I think you'd be great on Taskmaster for the record.
You know, who else thinks he'd be great on Taskmaster is me. Hank Green. Hank Green. God, to have Hank Green's confidence to wake up every day and be like, you know what?
This world needs my stand-up special and my book. Anyway, if you want, if you're in the Southern California area, I'm going to be everywhere from like Oxnard down to San Diego if they are not on sale yet for all of those shows. They are for some of them. And you can find that in the link of my most recent Vlogbrothers video.
Wow. This podcast that was going to be all about how we need to focus on being additive instead of being extractive and suddenly become a little extractive. Well, the two shows that I'm doing that I'm getting filmed are free. So there's that.
Okay. All right. We have to go. I believe to realize.
So I'm going to give you the news from AFC Wimbledon real quick. I hope you enjoyed this podcast where Hank and I just talked like we regularly talk to each other. Next week, we'll be back with dubious advice and more question-ask answering. But the news from AFC Wimbledon is mixed.
We lost to Sutton United, our South London rivals, which was unfortunate because they're at the bottom of the table. But then we absolutely flummoxed. I believe Colchester, five, three. We scored some phenomenal goals, including one by Ali Alhamdee.
And I know what you're wondering. It's January. Is Ali Alhamdee going to leave AFC Wimbledon? We don't know yet.
The word on the street is maybe, but it's not yet certain. So we cling to hope like a buoy in the open ocean. Yeah. But do that because several of those other goals certainly had him involved in them.
Oh, yeah. He's he's overwhelmingly our best player right now. Hey, what's the news for Mars? It's looking like it might be more volcanically active than we once fought.
Oh, Mars does not have tectonic plates, which is why the volcanoes are so big because they just keep happening in the same spot over and over again. It's sometimes thought to be because there's no plates. It's sometimes we think of it as being geologically inactive. But as we learn more about Marsquakes, that does not seem to be the case.
Last year, scientists were studying the Elysium Planitia region and that showed that hotter magma under that area could have driven seismic and volcanic activity to further study that. The University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory has been looking at images and data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to reconstruct what the area below the surface, like like 500-ish feet below the surface might have looked like in the past, finding evidence of more than 40 volcanic events. These are... We certainly are very interested in volcanic stuff on Mars because one thing that Mars has is water and another thing that it has is heat.
And so if those things can come together, then they wouldn't be ice. So there could be ways that that might harbor, have once-harbered life, or even could continue harboring life. So that's very exciting because it certainly appears that in the distant past, Mars didn't just have oceans. It also would have had hydrothermal vents, which are the kinds of places where life maybe can get started.
That's where we got it. That's what we think. It's looking more like that. That's one of the big arguments going on.
We still don't know where the life came from, John, or all of the stuff. Yeah, well, we don't even know why there's stuff in the universe. So yeah, thanks for potting with me. Thanks for potting with me, John.
I hope that everybody liked this one. Sorry, it was weird. Back with normal next time.