380: GreenChat 2024

Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John.

Speaker 2 Or as I prefer to think of it, Dear John and Hank.

Speaker 1 It's a podcast where two brothers answer your questions, give you DB's advice, and bring you all the week's news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon. John, did you hear that the

Speaker 1 you did actually? That

Speaker 1 someone beat Tetris?

Speaker 1 I did.

Speaker 2 In fact, I broke this news to you.

Speaker 1 But I want to talk about it because I feel like there's a metaphor in it.

Speaker 2 Oh, there are 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.

Speaker 2 And Tetris's 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they made a whole movie about it. It was a real blockbuster.

Speaker 2 Oh boy. Oh boy.
I thought that we were going to, I thought, I was like, oh man, there's no dad joke this week, but you were just waiting for blockbuster.

Speaker 1 That was a slow burn.

Speaker 2 So anyway.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Okay, sure, sure. So that's one version of beating Tetris.
Tetris is not designed to go past that point. Right.
You can keep playing, but it's not.

Speaker 2 But it doesn't even count your score after that. It's called a max out.

Speaker 2 And there was one guy, his name is Thor,

Speaker 2 and he claims to have gotten a map.

Speaker 1 His screen name Thor is his name.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Right. And people were like, oh, this picture's Photoshopped, whatever.
This was before Photoshop.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there was already a doctoring of images. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then a few years ago, a new technique for moving the pieces was invented called rolling. Yeah.
Which is invented by a guy named Cheese. Looks very weird.
It's very weird.

Speaker 1 Is this real name Cheese or is that a screen name?

Speaker 2 I think that might be a screen name. Great question.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so it was the screen that kind of killed your game no matter what.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 Tetris is still beating you at that point, even though you can get more points than it can count, it still can kill you.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's always what's been beautiful about Tetris. Could you

Speaker 1 could, is there a way to get to a point where you are good enough that you can keep, like if I, like, if you just kept it at level one speed, I could just play forever, right? Right.

Speaker 1 Is there a way to do that to just play forever? Is that how you beat Tetris, John?

Speaker 2 That started to become the question.

Speaker 2 Can you just play forever at this incredibly, impossibly high speed with this new technique of rolling, right?

Speaker 2 And so a lot of times.

Speaker 1 It's going to be like a draw. Like you wouldn't be beating Tetris, but Tetris wouldn't be beating you.

Speaker 2 Right. And Game Boy Tetris is like that.
Like you can play the top level of Game Boy Tetris for hours

Speaker 2 if you're really good at Tetris.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so people started to think like, well, maybe NES Tetris is like this as well, for the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

Speaker 2 And then someone discovered that if you make it to like level 256 or something, like if you make it to having played over a thousand lines at this impossible speed, then...

Speaker 1 Is that like a thousand lines at the impossible speed? Is that basically like you could go forever?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Eventually it'll get you.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 what you're throwing at it. Like you're so good that the game never imagined this possibility.
Right, right.

Speaker 1 It's like the Y2K bug, but for teachers. Exactly.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The game gets pink, the game gets gray, the game gets orange, you know, the game starts to freak out.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 But only if you get a single line, like you can't get a Tetris.

Speaker 2 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 beaten Tetris.

Speaker 2 Like instead of Tetris ending when it gets to the top of the screen, Tetris ended because you broke it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 So. As of

Speaker 1 last week,

Speaker 2 a 13-year-old boy named Blue Scooty, and yes, that is his real name. At least for the purposes of this podcast, because

Speaker 1 we're not going to be talking about the real names of, we're not doxing 13-year-olds.

Speaker 2 A 13-year-old boy named Blue Scooty.

Speaker 2 And by the way, I was there for this.

Speaker 1 Were you like in the room? Uh-huh. Not in the physical room.

Speaker 2 No, I didn't show up at his house. That's doxing, Hank.

Speaker 2 I was in the Twitch room. Okay.
And

Speaker 2 Blue Scooty 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.

Speaker 1 But anyway,

Speaker 2 Blue Scooty did it.

Speaker 1 He did it on the last possible line.

Speaker 2 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 the pieces.

Speaker 2 And it's hard to imagine he was going to get another line after this line.

Speaker 2 And so he 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 games of Tetris that have ever been played.

Speaker 2 And he did it and it froze. And he said, oh my God.

Speaker 2 And suddenly, across the world of Tetris enthusiasts, which is a surprisingly large world,

Speaker 2 everything went quiet as we realized that the impossible dream dream had come true. And Blue Scooty, this 13-year-old kid, who, by the way, lost his dad just

Speaker 2 a few weeks ago and who dedicated this to his dad,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I'm just really grateful to have seen it.

Speaker 1 That's fantastic. I have goosebumps all over.
And

Speaker 1 I also feel like we just made an episode of Radiolab or like this American Lab.

Speaker 1 Like if this had had a little bit more sound design.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. We needed 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 Radiolab.

Speaker 2 But if Radiolab wants to have me on to talk about the history of NES Tetris, like I don't need to prep.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like when they had me on to talk about geoengineering, I was like, right,

Speaker 1 exactly.

Speaker 2 You're just like, call anytime. I am prepared.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I actually did prep for that.

Speaker 1 But I bet I could email Lulu and I could make that happen, John. That sounds like a fantastic story.

Speaker 2 I will tell it anytime.

Speaker 1 That's very, very cool.

Speaker 1 And also, I feel like is a real good structure for a story.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 John. That's true.
And you've just been talking about remaking the Nerdfighteria newsletter.

Speaker 1 We were just talking about it because I have been thinking that it could be something

Speaker 1 that's more like

Speaker 1 thought through, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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, it's mostly marketing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's this problem.

Speaker 1 We've been doing this for a long time. You just made a video that we've been doing it for 17 years,

Speaker 1 which.

Speaker 1 is older than many YouTubers. And that's enough time to sort of examine the

Speaker 1 actual reasons why I get drawn into creating and making things on different platforms. And I also have friends who like make things only on their own platforms.

Speaker 1 So they've just got like a blog, they make their blog, they do it, they control it, or they have like their YouTube channel, but then they have their newsletter.

Speaker 1 And because they are better people than me,

Speaker 1 maybe.

Speaker 1 Because I like,

Speaker 2 I created that hit of

Speaker 2 hit of anybody could see this and they might hate it and then they're going to get mad at me or they might love it and become a fan of me.

Speaker 1 I get to see how fast the numbers change in comparison to the last time I did it.

Speaker 2 Ooh, that's a good one.

Speaker 2 That's a big hit.

Speaker 1 Are they going to move numbers faster or are they moving slower?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like if I make a, if I make a TikTok about tuberculosis that gets a million views, or if I make a TikTok about tuberculosis that gets 10,000 views, I feel the exact same, which is, I made a TikTok about tuberculosis that got 10,000 views.

Speaker 1 This is, either of those are a lot more than the zero attention tuberculosis was getting two years ago.

Speaker 2 Well, it was getting attention. It just wasn't getting enough attention.

Speaker 1 Yes. So anyway,

Speaker 1 you were saying a big gap.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And, 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.

Speaker 1 And this is one of the reasons why people create it on TikTok a lot is because you could see, oh my God, I got a a million views on that TikTok, but like, did you?

Speaker 1 Or did you get like a million people watched two seconds of it? Because that is the cutoff for counting a view.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 so like this metric that meant one thing on YouTube, everyone was like, oh, that means the same thing on TikTok. Or like

Speaker 1 that's how your brain feels. And

Speaker 1 so a lot of people started creating on TikTok because it felt like they could, it was, and it was also, it's a better engine for discovery than YouTube. But it, it,

Speaker 1 that, that is the, like, I recognize that even me, a 43-year-old man has been doing this for 17 years.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 still, the, the numbers going up fast is a big part of why I do it. It feels good.
It feels good. I don't, and obviously it's not particularly healthy.
And so like this podcast is a nice place.

Speaker 1 Books are a nice place. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like where you create without the, yeah, books have the slowest possible

Speaker 1 like you've worked on it to getting feedback. Like I've been working on a

Speaker 1 book for, I don't know, six months now. And I've, I've had one person give me any feedback on it at all so far.
So yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you cannot write a good stand-up show without that.

Speaker 1 And so you take that feedback back and then you change and you edit based on the immediate, like really immediate, there's a, 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,

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 so like 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 good 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 if it looks like that's just not a healthy enough place for me

Speaker 1 personally.

Speaker 1 Different people are different, of course, but like, I just,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, we are.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it seems like you're actually identifying two different problems.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Like, frankly, I think it's unlikely that Danaher 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.

Speaker 2 And so, how can I be opposed to Twitter when it helped, you know, probably the most important thing, maybe the most important thing that I've been part of in my life? And so,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 how can you be opposed to it?

Speaker 2 That's on the one hand.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, how can you not be opposed to it?

Speaker 1 On the other hand, have you ever been on one of these places and seen what it does to people's brains?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 there's the personal part of it, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that, you know, we've, we've known for a long time, this is something Hank and I have talked about for, you know, more than a decade, that like if something happened to YouTube, if YouTube, what we used to call, we used to say, what happens if YouTube MySpaces?

Speaker 2 In our private conversations with each other, we would be like, you know, if YouTube MySpaces, Nerdfighteria is in big trouble.

Speaker 2 And also like, Complexly as a business, is in big trouble because Crash Course and SciShow and

Speaker 2 PBS Eons and everything else are in big trouble. And

Speaker 2 now, YouTube hasn't MySpaced, which is wonderful.

Speaker 2 And we're very grateful to everybody who works at YouTube for that hard work of keeping it from MySpacing because there's nothing guaranteed about that, as we have lately learned from Twitter's 75% reduction in value over 12 months.

Speaker 2 One of the greatest eliminations of value since Enron.

Speaker 2 But, But, you know, Hank and I are both concerned about that. And we're, you know, it would be great to have a way.

Speaker 2 It would be great to have a hub for the community that wasn't contingent upon a platform owned by a large media company.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so this has kind of been the conversation that we've been having in the background.

Speaker 2 I like how this has become not so much a podcast as it is two brothers working through what they want for the future of their lives and their community.

Speaker 1 It's the first one of the season, John.

Speaker 1 It's the 2023 season. Wait, 2024 season has begun.
And

Speaker 1 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 us sort of talking through?

Speaker 1 And you seem to have forgotten that I suggested that.

Speaker 2 I have forgotten about it because a lot happened since then. I haven't even told you.

Speaker 1 We haven't even talked about Christmas.

Speaker 2 Like we talked briefly on Christmas, but we haven't talked about Christmas.

Speaker 1 What was I going to say? There was a lot of people.

Speaker 2 I don't know what your kid got. You don't know what my kids got.

Speaker 1 This is something that's wrong with our relationship.

Speaker 2 If we're going to, let's finish the Nerdfighter, what we're going to do, what the future of Nerdfighteria looks like to us.

Speaker 2 But then let's talk about what the future of our brotherhood looks like to us.

Speaker 1 On the podcast or afterward?

Speaker 2 No, on the podcast. We got to have these conversations in public or we'll never have them

Speaker 2 because there's something wrong with us, as you've just identified.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 I didn't know that Travis had a brother.

Speaker 2 You don't listen to their podcast? It's incredible. It's the second best podcast by brothers.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 2 It's Mabimbam, the Kelsey brothers, and then coming in a getting a bronze medal, but like in a distant, distant third, like weeks locked down, but just happening to finish third is Deer Hank and John.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
I'm sorry that we don't have an amazing tradition where we name the year every year. And this year we named it

Speaker 1 20 Fungal Or after a magical mushroom wizard, which was a real treat for for me and Catherine.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what Mabimbam named the year. But I think that

Speaker 2 I have two names for 2024 that I've been playing around with with my kids. 2020 more,

Speaker 2 like this is the year of, this is the year of doing more. And then

Speaker 2 2020 bore, which means this is the year of digging deep.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 okay.

Speaker 1 Like I'll be.

Speaker 2 And my kids are like, oh, God, dad, how about just like 2024? And you stop like asking us about our feelings all the damn time.

Speaker 1 So other, so, so, yeah, I, I don't know. We may or may not do something interesting with the newsletter.
If, if you'd like to sign up for it, it's in the links of every. of every Vlogbrothers video.

Speaker 1 And there's 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.

Speaker 1 And that feels a little bit extractive rather than adding, additive. And I'd like for that to change.

Speaker 1 And I think that in general, that the whole end of the year had a bit of that vibe. Q4 can be a little bit like that in general.

Speaker 1 But part of it. But here's the thing, Hank.
Yeah. Here's the thing.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Because we really don't want to try to extract more value from our listeners or viewers than we add to their their lives, of course. Like that's the number one goal.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 our

Speaker 1 efforts

Speaker 2 through the Cancer Socks and Good.store and the coffee and the socks and everything.

Speaker 2 So Pizzamas raised $3.5 million

Speaker 2 for stronger healthcare systems in impoverished communities this year.

Speaker 2 And in total, since 2019, have raised $7.5 million. This was by far our biggest year, but like we've had big years before.
And so we're at $7.5 million total.

Speaker 2 And I just don't think there is another way to raise that kind of money.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And while also providing good jobs and, you know, working with great teams of people and everything else that comes with it.

Speaker 2 So like, I get it that there were a lot of advertisements at the end of the year, but like, one, it's Q4.

Speaker 1 I think people expect that's quarter four for all of you. That's the end of the year.
And as I said,

Speaker 2 I hated hated myself. It's gift giving time.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I felt, I remember feeling like that about the fault in our stars. Like the fault in our stars started to do well.
And I started to talk about the fault in our stars much more.

Speaker 2 And people started to be like, my God, this guy never talks about anything but the fault in our stars. But I was like, I was like, you want to see what's happening.

Speaker 2 I see this snowball rolling downhill and

Speaker 2 I want it to get the momentum.

Speaker 2 And then it turned out that I didn't want it to have that much.

Speaker 1 Then you were like, I gave that one last push. I probably shouldn't have pushed.
Slow it down. Not that you had any control over it at that point.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I saw somebody, so like I made a video

Speaker 1 where I talked about how, you know, the goal is to eventually have Goodstore donate as much money as Newman's Own has, which I consider Newman's Own to be,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 like a hero business, like a business. Yeah,

Speaker 2 they're the moon in our night sky you know

Speaker 1 and we're trying and we're like we're trying to get it to hit it with a rocket um and somebody no we're just trying to become a bigger star

Speaker 1 and uh no i want to be a bigger moon i want to eat i want to use i want to build a charity death star and i want to blow up newman's own

Speaker 2 you want you want to buy newman's own and then just ruin it like musk on

Speaker 1 be like my business is going to give all its money to charity newman's own now you're going to give all that money to oil companies just for fun

Speaker 1 i'm just trying to i'm just out here trying to ruin the good name of paul newman a lovely deceased man

Speaker 1 yes um and somebody on the subreddit was i so i said like that's like 600 million dollars and somebody on the subreddit was like from us

Speaker 1 and i had i hadn't considered that it could be interpreted in that way um no uh but the the thing that i like we talked just a little bit about like extractive versus additive.

Speaker 1 And, like, I don't want anyone to buy anything because they feel like they have to. That would be extractive.

Speaker 1 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 gift the socks as a gift.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm not trying to guilt people into buying stuff.

Speaker 2 Right. If you want to donate to charity, just donate to charity.
That's much, much more efficient. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 You want one thing that Catherine got me for Christmas?

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 1 Is tea. And it's so good.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's great news.

Speaker 1 That's great news.

Speaker 2 Is this a good time to have the fight that we have about tea?

Speaker 1 Or should we have that in public? Let's have the fight in public. Everybody, let's fight.
Let's do it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 So do you want to finish your point before I yell at you?

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 yes, great. I will.
The point is that

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 customer support and all of 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so there were definitely some kinks to work out.

Speaker 1 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 Dear Hank and John or has have like seen,

Speaker 1 you know, one of our YouTube videos videos on Vlogbrothers. They've probably seen Crash Course or they seen a TikTok or whatever.
And so hopefully

Speaker 1 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 et cetera.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I do want to say one thing about that, which is that it's starting to happen.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Or that's a cool business model and my friend says that's really good coffee.

Speaker 2 And as evidence for that, I I would point to the fact that our Facebook ads are working in a way

Speaker 2 that none of us imagined. Yeah.
So, and where Hank and I, just to state the obvious, are not on Facebook.

Speaker 1 So for whatever

Speaker 1 reason,

Speaker 1 we don't know why.

Speaker 1 We genuinely, it's not like it does does not hook into my brain. Like, it's not that we're above it.
We don't feel compelled.

Speaker 2 It just doesn't give us the feeling.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The way TikTok gives us the feeling. And like, to be clear, I don't think that it's good to follow the feeling.

Speaker 1 I think that it leads to a bad life. But I want to figure out ways to not follow the feeling.

Speaker 2 Good luck getting me to stop.

Speaker 2 Right. So, let's briefly fight about tea and then

Speaker 2 we can talk about something else. Okay.
So, Hank maintains that we should sell loose leaf tea to stand

Speaker 1 only

Speaker 2 loose leaf tea. Yep.
I maintain that since the vast majority of people who drink tea drink bagged tea,

Speaker 2 that we should make something that they can use.

Speaker 2 I think that we should sell to the majority of people. And I might be wrong because, like, here,

Speaker 2 let me just counteract my argument before you.

Speaker 1 Argue against yourself for me.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they were like, the YA market likes pictures of girls' faces and or pictures of girls with their heads cut off, which was even more common at the time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just the torso of a girl.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the reason for that is that like what the YA market wanted was not what like my readers wanted.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So that counteracts my argument.

Speaker 2 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 bagged tea?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, so there are a couple of things that are a little harder with bagged tea.

Speaker 1 There's obviously another step. You have to get the tea into the bag.
So that adds some cost.

Speaker 1 There are...

Speaker 1 So we charge a little more. You have to be at a different scale to start bagging tea.

Speaker 1 You don't have to, but like, it helps to be at a different scale. So because of that added cost, there's like equipment that is required.

Speaker 1 And to invest in the equipment, you have to have a, you know, you have to be selling a certain amount of tea.

Speaker 1 I think, and I, I don't, I can't explain to you why, but when I make tea with the loose leaf tea, I feel like I am engaging in a higher quality experience than when I make tea with a tea bag.

Speaker 1 And I don't, like, this doesn't make any sense. I recognize that it doesn't make any sense, but it's like the ritual of it.

Speaker 1 And it's like, it's like the seeing of the leaves and that I get, and I get to choose how much tea goes in. So you can't like put in half a cup, half a bag of tea.

Speaker 1 And so like if I want it to be a little bit stronger, I can do two and a half teaspoons instead of, or I did do one and a half teaspoons instead of one. Or if I want it, sometimes I want to make it.

Speaker 2 Is that where they got the phrase teaspoon from?

Speaker 1 That's how much tea goes in tea is a one teaspoon. What?

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 Next, you'll tell me that 12 ounces of diet Dr. Pepper doesn't weigh 12 ounces.

Speaker 1 They did it on the subreddit. It weighed like 12.9.

Speaker 2 I thought it weighed like 12.09, but maybe something.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It was more than it didn't weigh 12 ounces.

Speaker 2 So anyway,

Speaker 2 I'm going to argue against myself again because that's my specialty.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 you know, wanting to are really conscious of the supply chain and care about the farmers who are involved and the agricultural practices involved and all, and, and, and care about, you know, every part of

Speaker 1 the flavor more too. Like, like, you know,

Speaker 2 like whole bean coffee is definitely better than ground coffee, not to be a snob, but

Speaker 2 it's fresher, you know, whatever. It's better.
And

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 blank taste test, can you taste the difference?

Speaker 2 Absolutely. You can taste the difference.
It makes a huge difference. But whatever, drink your coffee how you want to drink it.
Good.store. For sure.
That's where you get this stuff.

Speaker 2 Now I'm back. I'm in my marketing mind.
So, like, maybe, maybe you're right that, like, it's true that most people drink bagged tea, but like people who drink

Speaker 2 loose leaf tea are more likely to want to be customers of this tea company.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I just, like, I think that there's like a, there's an experience to making it the way that i make it um

Speaker 1 and i but i but i just i think there's a risk in thinking that everyone's like you sure yeah yeah for sure and i also think that like here like the reality is we're not gonna be cheaper than twinnings we're not gonna be cheaper than tetley and right uh 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 so delightful to have tea

Speaker 1 that is actually good in the United States of America, which is not easy.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And 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

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 1 choice.

Speaker 2 But I hear you that we're not going to be able to compete on price, especially with bagged tea. And so what are we competing on? We're competing on experience.
We're competing on taste.

Speaker 2 We're competing on it just being

Speaker 2 better

Speaker 1 overall.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 maybe that's the only way we can win is with loose leaf tea.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I mean, eventually, like the like the cost will get lower, which is a great way.

Speaker 2 Well, you might be surprised. The cost of coffee has not gotten lower.

Speaker 1 No, it's true. It's hard.
It's hard.

Speaker 1 I think that there are ways we, you know, we're still at the beginning. Hopefully.
Who knows? Maybe we're not. And I'd be fine if we weren't.

Speaker 2 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 $7.5 million

Speaker 2 for charity, like you have to think

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I also

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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? In like Discords and Reddits and everything else.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Like that's not the only way to engage with big society-wide problems.

Speaker 2 And, you know, the Global Fund,

Speaker 2 I don't know how much to talk about this, so 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

Speaker 2 by

Speaker 2 the lowering of prices of tests and treatments that the Global Fund negotiated.

Speaker 1 Okay. Okay.

Speaker 2 So that's the lower price of badacoline, the drug made by Johnson and Johnson, and the lower price of these tests made by Cepheid, which is owned by Danaher.

Speaker 2 Now, the Global Fund did negotiate those deals.

Speaker 2 I would say they negotiated them with a little bit of help.

Speaker 2 And the answer is it's like more money than it's like $70 million.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's like $70 million that goes right very efficiently into expanded access to tuberculosis treatment, right?

Speaker 2 Because it's $70 million the 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.

Speaker 2 So instead, they get to spend it on more tests and more treatment availability.

Speaker 2 And that was accomplished.

Speaker 2 Nerdfighteria's part in that, which was of course only part of that, and in the case of Badaquiline, 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 like, you know, for longer than 24 hours and, or, or longer than a week or a month or whatever.

Speaker 2 Like once we get our teeth into something, I mean, I almost feel bad for Danaher because our teeth are into something and like they think that it's over and it's just, it's just not.

Speaker 2 Like it's going to be over when we win, which is what, you know, I think eventually Johnson and Johnson realized is that like this ends, this ends when the activists win.

Speaker 1 And so we're going to back down.

Speaker 2 But yeah, I think like that's an incredible talent that this community has. And it's one of many that like exists way outside concepts of

Speaker 2 economic productivity. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think that's really important to remember.

Speaker 2 And the real reason we want to maybe do the newsletter is that we want to encourage encourage those parts of the community to be able to have a new place to thrive.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I'm glad that you're, that you're into it.
Um,

Speaker 2 and well, I don't want to do any work on it, though, Hank, because I'm so, I, I, I have too much work.

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 2 I got to finish a book about tuberculosis this year. It's, I think it's going to come out this year.

Speaker 1 I know. I hope it does.
I hope it does. My book is not going to come out this year.
I wish it would.

Speaker 1 It's, it's, it's hard.

Speaker 1 I know, man. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The only thing that writes a book is time

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 the sitting down. And

Speaker 1 it's funny, like, I

Speaker 1 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 easy. I'll just slightly modify it into a book.

Speaker 2 This one is going to be easy.

Speaker 2 I tell myself, I have an incredible capacity. I need to tell myself that every time.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the creep, the mission creep immediately sets in. And I'm like, well, what if? And oh, this would be really cool.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And here's one way where I think, like, oh, what if you like, think about it as, you know, the cancer that like the 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

Speaker 1 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 i'm like ah that's so much better than what i could do you know in 45 minutes on a stage.

Speaker 1 And I could get so much deeper into it. It could be so helpful.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then, and then, you know, now I really have to be like, okay, but I cannot

Speaker 1 talk about every way that a cancer treatment could possibly work. Because of course, there are, you know,

Speaker 1 hundreds of cancer treatments and they work in dozens of different ways. Right.

Speaker 1 Turns out cancer is very complicated. And so I can't tell the whole story of cancer.
I don't, I was, was not intending to, but now I have to find where to draw the lines. It's really hard.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so you have to make space for mission creep because that's where the ambition in the project lies. Yeah.
It's very similar, although I don't have TB. I just got tested.

Speaker 2 It's very similar to my relationship with that book, which is that I started off thinking

Speaker 2 I'm going to write a history about... TB that's going to be about why

Speaker 2 the period where we romanticize tuberculosis is not that different from the period where we stigmatize tuberculosis. And that's a pretty straightforward story.
It takes place in the

Speaker 2 mid-18th to early 20th centuries and bing, bang, boom.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And once you're doing that, you've got to talk about the present, right? Like, you can't leave that in 1922 because

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 you have to find a way to say that's that's good Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.
Is paced paced at all in any sensical way.

Speaker 2 It has an arc, has a narrative drive so that people want to keep reading, et cetera. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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 Hank Green book because Hank gets busy with a million other things.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's tricky.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 Because you'll remember my commitment 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.

Speaker 1 I was, I think, I don't know if I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but I was reading through all of the survey responses from last year. And

Speaker 1 before

Speaker 1 I had gotten cancer, there were so many people saying, I'm worried about Hank's health. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.
Um,

Speaker 2 can you tell me?

Speaker 1 I can tell you, yeah. What? How? Okay, well, we're gonna cut tuna.
Don't put this in.

Speaker 1 What do you think about that, John? I think that is so cool.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 I already have a subscription, so I don't even need to sign up for anything.

Speaker 2 Can I say that?

Speaker 1 I don't know if you can, but leave it in anyway.

Speaker 2 I'm subscribed to freaking everything. I even have a Paramount Plus membership.

Speaker 1 I'll say it's not Netflix. No,

Speaker 1 don't think that I've got some

Speaker 1 that happening.

Speaker 1 I don't. But I didn't know how it worked.
So I said to

Speaker 1 the guy who does, I was like, how does it work? And he was like, you're not going to, that's not going to happen for you, my man.

Speaker 2 Maybe in 30 years. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like when I asked Mark Watson if he thought I could ever be on Taskmaster.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I was like, thank you so much for putting me in my place. I really appreciate that.
That's, I really needed that. Thank you.

Speaker 2 I think you'd be great on Taskmaster for the record.

Speaker 1 You know, who else thinks he'd be great on Taskmaster? It's me. Hank Green.

Speaker 2 Hank Green.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Anyway, if you want if you're in the southern california area i'm gonna be everywhere from uh like oxnard down to san diego if the romance

Speaker 1 are not on sale yet uh for all of those shows there they are for some of them and you can find that in the links of my most recent vlog brothers video Wow.

Speaker 2 This podcast that was going to be all about how we need to focus on being additive instead of being extractive has suddenly become a little extractive.

Speaker 1 Well, the two shows that I'm doing that are getting filmed are free. So there's that at least.
Okay.

Speaker 2 All right. We have to go, I believe you realize.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 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 talked to each other.

Speaker 2 Next week, we'll be back with dubious advice and more question answering. But the news from AFC Wimbledon is mixed.

Speaker 2 We lost to Sutton United, our South London rivals, which was unfortunate because they're at the bottom of the table.

Speaker 2 But then we absolutely flummoxed, I believe, Colchester 5-3.

Speaker 2 We scored some phenomenal goals, including one by Ali Alhamedi. And I know what you're wondering.
It's January.

Speaker 2 Is Ali Alhamedi 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Let's do that because several of those other goals certainly had him involved in them.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 He is

Speaker 2 overwhelmingly our best player right now.

Speaker 2 What's the news from Mars?

Speaker 1 It's looking like it might be more volcanically active than we once thought. Oh, Mars does not have tectonic plates,

Speaker 1 which is why the volcanoes are so big, because they just keep happening in the same spot. over and over again.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 To further study that, the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory has been looking at...

Speaker 1 images and data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to reconstruct what the area below the surface, like

Speaker 1 500-ish feet below the surface, might have looked like in the past, finding evidence of more than 40 volcanic events. These are

Speaker 1 this,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 harbored life, or even could continue harboring life.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 maybe

Speaker 1 can get started.

Speaker 2 That's where we got it.

Speaker 1 That's what we think. It's looking more like that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, we don't even know why there's stuff in the universe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's... Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Thanks for potting with me.

Speaker 1 Thanks for potting with me, John. I hope that everybody liked this one.

Speaker 1 And sorry, it was weird. We'll be back with normal next time.
This podcast is edited by Joseph Tunamedes. It's produced by Rosiana Halls-Rojas.
Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell.

Speaker 1 Our editorial assistant is Dabuki Chakravarti. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast is by the Great Guinerola.
And as they say in our hometown, don't forget to be awesome.