A Hot Dog Is a Sandwich - Is The Ocean A Soup? ft. Hank Green (Throwback)

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Today, we're joined by science communicator, author, Crash Course co-creator, and vlogbrother Hank Green to discuss: Is The Ocean A Soup? For these next 3 weeks, we’re taking a little break because we’ve got something big cooking up. But for now, don’t worry, we won’t leave you hanging. We’ve gone back in the vault to find our favorite episodes that we wanted to share with you again! This is one of our favorite guest episodes. It was a fun wild ride going down the philosophical rabbit hole with Hank Green, so keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times, here we go! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This, this, this, this is Mythical. right it is uh is the ocean of soup featuring hank green who is an incredible incredible guest yeah i mean he is absolute youtube og but he's also a science educator uh and just one of those people who you listen to and you're like oh you're way smarter than i am yeah and talking to people who are smarter than you especially talking about such a dumb topic as is the ocean of soup uh to me was incredible and this is one of my favorite conversations we've ever had and he took it like really seriously. Yeah. With respect.

We went down a philosophical rabbit hole of all of the options, ideas, opinions, philosophical debates. It was intense. It was really, really good. And very specifically, my favorite conversations are ones that are with people who are smarter than me, but I know more about one very specific thing than they do. Nice. So I can be like, aha, but if you were to actually make a soup out of the ocean.

This episode is really, really incredible. I hope you all enjoy it. Keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times. Here we go. Jacques Cousteau once said, the sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. But does that mean that man's only hope technically lies in a giant bowl of soup? What the heck are we talking about today? This is A Hot Dog is a Sandwich. Ketchup is a smoothie. Yeah, I put ice in my cereal, so what? That makes no sense. A hot dog is a sandwich. A hot dog is a sandwich. What? Welcome to our podcast, A Hot Dog is

a Sandwich, the show we break down the world's biggest food debates. I'm your host, Josh Ayer. And I'm your host, Nicole Handizadeh. And today we are joined by science communicator, book writer, YouTube crash course co-creator, vlog brother, and the guy that all of TikTok turns to for answers, Hank Green. Hello. Welcome to the show. Hello, Hank. Thank you for coming. Absolutely. Thank you for coming. Thanks you for coming on my podcast.

Yes. Yeah, you're officially a co-owner of the podcast. That happened. It was part of the terms. So, you know, the reason that we wanted to have you on here is we we've had is the ocean of soup on our list for so long and I don't since the beginning and there was pushback from both of us at different times. Anytime we'd actually meant to schedule it primarily for the reason of is too dumb. It's not dumb. We treat all these questions with a certain amount of seriousness. Sure, we always do, yeah. But ever since we asked the question of when you eat a hot dog,

does it technically become a hot dog inside your own intestines? We were like, maybe let's dial it back on the bigger things. But Hank, we saw your TikTok where someone asked you the question, is the ocean a soup? And you had a very, what I think is a profound answer. I mean, most of your answers to anything at least seem very profound to me. question is the ocean a soup and you had a a very what i think is a profound answer i mean most of your answers to anything at least seem very profound to me um and so we wanted to have you on to to discuss it to flesh it out i mean can you kind of paraphrase your views on it yeah

i mean i think i like ultimately and this gets to kind of the root of what you do here and i don't want to like uh say all right we've done we finished uh but but that uh you know all language is created by us and every you know in some way every word means a slightly different thing to every person and who gets to decide what a word means is of course us and uh but also we get to disagree about that so in addition to, it's me and it's you and it's you. It's, and so, so we, so if you want the ocean to be a soup, then it's a soup, man. You did it.

You can just do that in your own brain. You can make that decision. But of course, that's, that's, that's my way of being like, oh God, please don't, don't, don't involve me in these conversations anymore. And yet I have decided that I do want to come on the podcast and talk in a deeper way about whether or not the ocean is a soup. And also if that makes me a soup, like what? Soup is a strange idea straight up.

But like if the ocean is a soup, then I'm definitely a soup. Just in a big, a big skin bag. I think more of like a tartare with like the raw meat yeah if we're going in the culinary classification we were actually very worried that you wouldn't want to talk about this primarily because the tiktok answer it was a bit of like it was a somewhat of a punt it was a very like linguistically philosophically uh you know ethical sort of punt it was like look we all collectively decide as a society what words mean. But it also isn't that simple, right? Like there are a couple different theories in linguistics on when a word sort of becomes actualized. There's like the populist idea that once something becomes

popular enough, and this is what, you know, Merriam-Webster is like very active on Twitter. Yeah, sort of deciding. In absolute delight. That, you know, what was the irregardless was a big one that people were, you know, sort of mad about. That Merriam-Webster officially recognizes irregardless as a proper word. And then you get a bunch of old school copy editors and English teachers being like, there have to be rules in a society. We need gatekeepers. Weirdly, I was in the conversation about this this very morning. Wow.

I was in the conversation about this this very morning where there was a person who I don't know, but their tweet went through a couple of cycles and arrived at my eyes. And they were they had been criticized for using snuck instead of sneaked because sneaked is the create word. Like, you know, the past tense of peak is not puck. And this is like you can look all over the place. And this hasn't happened to very many other words. But snuck just sort of snuck in, which is lovely. But also, I think, for good reason, because snuck is so much better than sneaked. Yeah.

Yeah, sounds so much better. So they had been basically criticized for using snuck because that's the more uneducated uh past tense of sneak and uh and the person was like oh gosh uh what do what do i do when i'm getting emails like this uh the answer is of course ignore them uh and then declare yourself to be 100 team snuck which i am yeah i i think i'm willing to put all my support behind snuck yeah well this this happened with with my grandma who um is 99 years old she she's almost she's almost getting the centenarian yeah uh but she is also from south africa and she also you know south africa obviously um very politically divided and you know especially you know also between the dutch and the british and so she was in the era where it was like you spoke the queen's english if you wanted to be in a certain echelon society, you had to speak the Queen's. And so I use the term

dove as the past tense of dive. And she was like, well, it's dived. What are you talking? And I was like, granny, that sounds straight up ignorant. You saying dived like that. I don't know if you know. I say dived. You say dived? Yeah, I dived into this. I dove into it. Hank, what do you say? I also dove. Oh, no. Oh, no. Now I'm broken.

What British aristocratic grandmother raised you? My mom, Sheila, and my dad, Morris, I guess. I don't know. I say dived. But that's one of those things that it's like the spelling of judgment. Whether you add an E after the G, it's very much a British Commonwealth American split. Interesting. To which there's no right answer.

One might look intuitive to you but not to another person who grew up with another set of rules. Now, how does this apply to the ocean of soup? Because we're talking about who – No. Whether or not – okay. Because the general sort of claim that Hank made of who decides if the ocean is soup, it's you. If the ocean is soup to you, it is. But I think that there may be, we need to reach some sort of consensus, some sort of societal consensus to decide.

Right. And I'm like, so, soup, I think one of the main things about it is it is nutritive. And I feel like if I drink ocean, it is it is nutritive and i feel like if i if i drink ocean it is definitely not nutritious it is not like i'm not going from like okay i i have a i have a physiological need that must be satisfied ocean is in a very deep way not going to do that not only is it not going to provide me calories i'm sorry i'm coming down i'm coming down hard and early not only does it to provide me calories. I'm sorry, I'm coming down hard and early. Not only is it not going to provide me calories, it will make me sick. Like it will dehydrate me.

You can't drink ocean because there's so much salt in it that it's like sucks the water out of your cells. And then you need to go and, you know, if you ever dove into the ocean. Dived. And swim around for long enough, you know need to get on on shore and have a drink uh you gotta have a pina colada so what you're saying is the ocean is a condensed soup the way

that campbell sells condensed chicken soup so the ocean is both condensed and dilute soup so one you need to you need to dilute the salt, but you need to condense the nutrition. Well, it depends on what part of the ocean. There's definitely calories in the ocean. Like there's fish. That's a thing that is often in soup. But there's also like algae that maybe,

I don't know if we can get any of the chlorophyll out of that and make that into energy for ourselves. But there's all kinds of things. Oh, yeah, no, I mean, we certainly can. Yeah, well, I mean, there's tons of vegetables in the ocean. Lots of vegetables. I mean, people eat tons of kelp. You have kombu.

I mean, you have so many different seaweeds that people have been eating for generations that do provide a lot of nutrients. You can't just list one seaweed. I mean, we got spirulina. What's that? Ogo from Hawaii. That's my favorite seaweed.

That's a good one. You got sea grapes. You got sea fennel. Literally, you just put, this has been, so this is a big thing in the aquatic foraging movement that ended up in fine dining restaurants where they would put the word sea in front of like a normal land vegetable and then assume that we would know what it means. So there was a, do you remember sea grapes? I love sea grapes.

Sea beans. I'm very passionate about it. Sea lettuce. know what it means so there was a do you remember sea grapes i love sea grapes sea beans i'm very passionate about sea lettuce these were all things that ended up on menus and it was just like a green crunchy salty thing you guys remember menus i do i didn't realize restaurants are all just doing qr codes on your phone yeah they are which is my first restaurant experience back in society was um at a bj's brew house with my 99-year-old grandmother, fully vaccinated, first time leaving the home in a year. Oh, sweet. And she wanted pizza, so we took her to the BJ's brew house.

And then when she asked for the menu and they said, oh, hello, 99-year-old woman, this is a QR code. I was like, no, society has already changed so much since he went into quarantine. Blown right past us all. Okay. But if we're talking about taking the general proportions of the ocean and then compressing that into one microcosm, you know, one tiny microcosmic bowl of soup, then you'd be right

in that it would be both condensed, too salty to eat, but also nutritionally dilute. Yeah. But if you took the right slice of ocean, if you, if you just simply dipped a pitcher, this is the lengths that we are going to. Right. If you dipped a pitcher and you got a couple

little like mud crabs, this is, these things do not all live in the same tertiary level of the ocean, but you got some nice kelp. You got some nice little mud crabs

to create a stock. You got a sardine. Yeah. You got a little seahorse, you know, you could in theory take that. I love seahorse soup.

That's one of my favorites. We are not eating seahorse. I really? You could, in theory, take that. I love seahorse soup. That's one of my favorites. We are not eating seahorse. I really wish I could go back to the old days when I could go to the restaurant and get seahorse soup. The worst thing is that if any show were to create it, it would be GMM. Yes, that's very true. And I'm so grateful every day

that they have not asked me to procure a seahorse. Can you eat a seahorse? Hardline. I almost want to cut this in the podcast, so Rhett and Link, don't eventually hear that. But if you took the right proportion of ocean and you were to boil that, you would...

Go ahead. Okay, I've Googled, can you eat a seahorse? No! And you know how Google now is making it so you don't have to click a link, it just like appears like a box yes and it says that it says unfortunately seahorses are edible and i'm like who decided that it was unfortunate i mean unfortunate for the seahorse certainly i suppose

yeah like uh but but fortunate for for the for the et the person doing the eating um but i guess i guess probably that that they uh have put pressure on them through the harvest of seahorses. So. That makes sense. Maybe be cautious about future seahorse consumption, everyone. Yeah, I'm not doing that. To be clear, this is a thought exercise. I don't intend to eat seahorses.

Yeah, no, I sure don't. I already made a video of eating octopus, and everyone who watched my octopus teacher really did not seem to enjoy that. Yeah. And I apologize. It happens. It's okay. It's a more sustainable seafood. Anyways, point is you could, in theory, take that perfect slice of ocean and then boil that down.

You could even potentially desalinate it a little bit. We've all had soup bases that are too salty, right? Sure. And I always run it through my pocket desalinate it a little bit. We've all had soup bases that are too salty, right? Sure. And I always run it through my pocket desalination plant. And I keep it in my home. That's fair. But I mean, literally, so the way that bouillon is created, right?

Chicken bouillon, if you ever use that in your home, it is literally stock that has been just dehydrated until it's a powder. So this would take a certain amount of culinary skill for the home chef to do, but you could boil that slice of ocean down until you's a powder. So this would take a certain amount of culinary skill for the home chef to do, but you could boil that slice of ocean down until you created a sort of bouillon, right? That you could, in theory, take to space, I'm just saying.

And then take some of that out. I mean, ultimately, to me, it only has to have a little bit of nutrition and it has to not be poisonous. That's a soup. But if you have to take so much, if you have to do so many steps to get it to that point then it wasn't a soup to begin with you made the soup yeah at what point did i

create the soup so the thing is well because okay it has to so now now i'm like backing up and i'm saying okay i think a soup can be so salty that it dehydrates me that's okay like i'm sure that there are soups like that that are yeah so it's very salty soup if i so the ocean is not a soup because if you just like took the ocean there's just way too much water and not enough food but if i if i like dip a spoon and in that spoon there is a sardine yeah and. And then I eat that. At that point, I feel like it's soup. Because it's nutritious, it's salty, and it's wet. And that's soup. That's just a wet sardine.

No. That's just a wet sardine. You guys are not accounting. Let me stop you guys right here. You are not accounting for how horrible we treat the ocean. It is full of trash. Where did we get the ocean. It is full of trash. Where did we get? No.

It is full of trash. You are a pollution denialist. Not you. I'm saying the human species. We pollute the ocean. There's so much oil in the ocean. There's so much trash in the ocean. There's so much sewage in the ocean.

If you had a bowl of ocean soup you would die no well you know you would have to go to the doctor and you just like get a mouthful and you swallow it well hold on because i feel like you would have to go to the doctor if you ate a bowl of soup from the ocean the ocean is the ocean is so big look there's a saying in environmental work, dilution is the solution to pollution. You can't get rid of pollution. And look, there's always been stuff. Like, in certain parts of the ocean, you can't drink it. Like, you can't go down to a hydrothermal vent and, like, take that.

And that's going to be poison nasty. It's just a hot soup. That's just a be poison nasty sauce. It's just a hot soup. It's just a nice pre-warm. But, you know, all of the fishes and whales are drinking the ocean, and they're okay. I mean, drinking. Drinking. They don't have to drink, really.

But the ocean is in and around them, and they're okay. I'm not worried about the poison. I'm worried about the salt. But there are soups out there that are so salty that I would compare them to the saltiness there are there are soups out there that are so salty that i would i would cut i would compare them to the saltiness of the ocean but i do i do like that's just a wet sardine i think there's a case to be made that that's just a wet sardine thank you do you think you're more likely to dip a spoon into the ocean and pull up a sardine or dip a spoon into the ocean and just

hit a bp oil spill honestly which one is more likely? Neither. It's a wet cigarette. Yeah, that is much more likely. It's a Yoo-Hoo bottle. It's a drinking Yoo-Hoo bottle, Josh. Growing up in the American public education system, I was raised to believe that the ocean is 90% the six-pack rings. The rings that the six packs of soda come in. It is 90% dolphins stuck in those.

And now also turtles with the straws in their noses. Those are the only creatures in the ocean. 90% dolphins stuck in those. And now also turtles with the straws in their noses. Those are the only creatures in the ocean. As far as I'm concerned. Based on the YouTube content that I consume. To go to the wet sardine, I think people are talking about the wrong food when it comes to the ocean. Because I personally don't believe it's soup. If you have to take so many

steps to it to make it an edible soup, I agree with the fact that if you get one sardine in that, that is just a very weak sardine filled broth. But still, it doesn't have to be a good soup. It just has to be a soup. I would argue that the ocean is a giant jar of pickles. Because if you think about the salinity of the ocean, if you put cucumbers into just

straight up seawater, they would lacto ferment and they would become delicious Jewish half sour pickles. Oh my gosh. The ocean is a giant thing and also if you eat certain certain seaweeds if you eat i mean certain sea creatures think about oysters right yeah oysters have such natural salinity to them because they're swimming in pickle brine well yeah so i think that the ocean is the ocean is certainly has pickles in it the ocean has definitely brined some things but not all of the things and so like uh now now i get to be myself and tell you that that lots of organisms in the ocean pump salt out of themselves so that they are not as salty as the solution that they

are in and the whole point of pickling is that you have salt and vinegar and you like get it to seep into the pickle but that doesn't happen to all living organisms in the ocean. Though some, it does. That's actually, because I mean, I was wondering about that because certain shellfish tastes really sweet, like certain bivalves. I mean, clams are incredibly sweet, whereas oysters, they're natural. I guess they're what we would call their liquor in the culinary world. Is that just seawater?

I mean, what are they? That's a great question. I don't know. Uncle Hank, how do oysters work? Boy, I don't know what a liquor is. So it's a term for when you crack open a fresh oyster. I don't know if you're a fresh oyster guy, but if you crack open a fresh oyster, there's just a residual pool of liquid that is sort of surrounding the oyster flesh. And that's referred to as like the oyster liquor. And it's like very prized because it kind of has that seawater quality but i don't know if it's the oyster you know just it's natural juices and secretions i might be i think oysters open when they are doing their like stuff um and so that would that would i imagine but i don't know it may be that

that like there's space inside of it that is just like the seawater gets in there. Or it may be that they are processing seawater and that the liquor is some kind of excretion from the oyster. I don't know. Yeah, Google.com is saying it's the natural juice that you find inside of raw oysters. So whatever that means. Oyster juice. Oyster juice. Juice.

That's what that is. Okay, so we talked about the evolution of words and that certainly happens in the culinary world all the time. I mean, obviously we named our podcast after the sort of granddaddy of all of these debates, right? Is a hot dog a sandwich? And that is something that we have decided we will never talk about. Nope, I don't want to. It is merely the muse, the namesake of our podcast, but we're not ready to get into that. I don't think we ever- But one thing that people do often say to us is a hot dog is not a sandwich, it is a taco. And it got me researching the word sandwich in taco because everyone knows the foundational

myth of the sandwich, right? The Earl of Sand sandwich was playing a poker game. This is in the mid 17th century, I believe. Didn't want to get his cards dirty. And he was like, ah, bread has been around for 4,000 years. Meat has been around for 10,000 years. Never before now has a person thought to put them together except I, the Earl of sandwich. And so thus the sandwich was created. But before the term sandwich, people were obviously putting meat. They would have been fools. They discovered the heliocentric model, but they couldn't discover bread. Bread, meat, bread. What's going on?

And so once a term gets created, ditto with tortillas. Been around for 10,000 years. The term taco only dates back to the mid-1800s. But certainly they were describing- And it was the Earl of Taco? That is exactly what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is, you know, words, the concepts have existed forever,

but the words are very new. So ditto even for soup. The term soup is constantly changing. The original etymology of soup, it comes from Old Germanic. It's specifically referred to a dish of broth poured onto bread to rehydrate it on old bread i didn't know that yeah which i think is really interesting so even the original definition of soup has changed uh which is why i argue that soup does not exist much in the way that there is no such thing as a fish because it is a sort of broad, meaningless category that we have only used to like ascribe to things that kind of live in the ocean and don't give like live birth.

That is to me what soup is. It just doesn't exist. It's just wet food. But then some wet foods are called sauces. Some wet foods are called stews. And there's no defining characteristic. So part of me doesn't even want to entertain the is ocean a soup. Then what's the point of the podcast?

I don't know anymore, man. I'm just coming to have a good time. All right. First of all, some fish do give live birth, which continues to confuse our whole situation, including seahorses. Really? Seahorses, yeah. But the males give live birth, which is even weirder.

As a feminist feminist that's hot that seahorse really gets my juices flowing the uh yeah but but so ultimately it comes down to the to the utility of a word i think that you can't say that soup doesn't exist because there are, because I need a word for my wet foods. Why? Why do you need a word for your wet foods? Because I can't, I can't go into a restaurant and,

and like have the section of the menu with soups on it to say wet foods. Why? Why come? Why come, Hank? Why come you can't say that? You can just point to it on the QR code. It's not that I have to say it out loud.

It's that the chefs of the world need a good brand for that category of food. And just like salad, you know, like apparently a potato salad is a salad for some reason. Like, no, it's not it's mayonnaise and potatoes just like that's that's more a soup than a salad yeah depends where you get it from but no i totally agree well talking about the soup the soup breakdown of menus a thing i'm always sort of fascinated with is uh especially a lot of chinese restaurants there is a section of soups that will be you know if it if it's an American Chinese restaurant, hot and sour, egg drop, sizzling rice, corn. And then you will go to the noodle section.

And a lot of those noodles are also coming in soup. Right, right. And curry is also often soup. Like in the curry section, you're like, oh, that's, you know, that's a curry soup to me, American. I would agree. But again, these are these cultural lines where everything's very blurry on what a soup is and if we want to create what is it like the Kantian world state

you know? I don't even know. Globalization? I heard that in one. You know like if we want to all come together we need to create one defining you know sort of modality for soup and I don't think we have the ability to do that. Right but I also don't know that we, I also don't need that we all, we do need to come together in one world that in which all we're all like everybody agrees that

because part of the part of the joy and the beauty of being a human is this diversity where like suddenly you're like well i don't know is is that curry a soup uh like it's like if it was if it was on the menu at an american like steak, they probably would call that a soup. But we are so diverse as a species that, hey, we have such cultural diversity that it's not going to... That word isn't going to apply in the same place every place. Which brings me back to fish. Yes. To put this in, for people who aren't aware of the there is no such thing as a fish argument, we are more closely related to some fish than other fish are to other fish.

So the sort of, like, common ancestor of all fish also includes cats. Wow. bats wow so so if you're if so either i'm a fish or taxonomically some fish are not fish but we also look and we say okay fish are a certain thing they look a certain way they behave a certain way and and just because like just because taxonomically there isn't a there isn't a way that we can uh sort of define fish and the ways and and by the way we can do this with like birds for example like birds are a thing birds are all commonly related to it's like they they all share a have a shared ancestor whereas like the so it's it's not always this way but but we still need the word fish like we still

need to we still need a name for that thing that looks like a fish even if they aren't closely related to each other, they just converged upon the right shape to be a good water animal boy. It's like you sort of have to make concessions for the convenience and communicability of it, in a sense. You have to make certain scientific concessions. This happens a lot with the concept of red meat versus white meat. When the pork board had the single greatest, most manipulative advertising campaign of all time.

In the 1980s, the pork, the other white meat campaign, that, you know, it got people to believe that pork is quote unquote white meat. They literally bred pigs to be leaner, to have less red flesh, to look white. But I mean, the split between white and red meat was typically to describe, you know, nutritional value, levels of saturated fat. White meat has always had a connotation of being healthier. And so for people to, you know, now think that pork is quote unquote white meat, which is, I mean, almost entirely limited to like poultry and birds.

It was a great way to sort of trick people because it physically looked lighter. And they were like, well, that can't be red meat because it's quite grayish pink it must be good for me must be yeah but it's like no the you're misunderstanding the point of the taxonomy yeah just to describe levels saturated fat etc right so it's a way that like the you know the literalism was taken over the side of like utility right right so you take a word that has a utility and you want to associate with that utility and that's the like very specific goal is to associate with a particular utility even though it actually doesn't apply to that thing and at that point it's a trick of like

of advertising of marketing but this can also just happen like like that that is a thing that was kind of done done intentionally but it's also a thing that could just happen and especially when you have a word uh uh i've lost my train of thought oh dang it welcome to the podcast hot dog is a tangent so i i think i think we can all i don't mean to speak for the group but i think i think what i have noticed in summation of the argument of you know is the ocean a soup is that the ocean as it stands right now is not a soup. You would maybe need to transmute it using some sort of culinary skill to get it to be an appropriate soup. There is the chance that you could get a bite. At that point, you're making a soup.

And like you can't make a soup out of a soup. I guess you could. True. Well, actually. You add the right amount of water to condense cream of mushroom. I was just about to say, yep. All right. Okay, Hank.

So you are, I use the term the patron saint of sagacity on TikTok, and people have been coming to you for answers for so long. We have discussed many other questions on the show. I want to do a quick lightning round just to get your initial thoughts on some things we've discussed in the past. Do you feel prepared for that? I do. Alright, cool. So I mentioned many of them are soup related. One, is cereal soup?

No. Okay. Are Pop-Tarts ravioli? Definitely not. That's correct on that. If you eat a hot dog as it travels through your intestines, does a part of you actually become a hot dog? Think about it. Like I'm the bun?

Yeah, you're the bun. I mean, well, we also call bunless hot dogs hot dogs. Yes, that's correct. You just eat a hot dog. I eat hot dogs out the pack. Well, then am I not just a hot dog all the time then? Well, I mean, I think it depends on me so actually there are legal requirements for uh so a hot dog oh has to be at least 50 plus meat and no more than 30 fat to satisfy the fda requirements for

a hot dog so it depends on the contents traveling through your intestines at the time so if you've eaten a balanced breakfast of oats etc uh that's filler and hank you're trying to cheapen your intestines uh to sell to consumers i'm definitely not a hot dog i'm not a hot dog i'm not a hot dog i'm a hot dog a part of me is a hot dog okay i mean a lot of this that's fine comes down how you view yourself you know i do like when things are actually legally defined my favorite uh one mendeleev the man who made the periodic table, you may remember him from chemistry class, also worked for the Russian government and he legally defined what vodka is. So vodka is always the exact same thing. Now, there are people who will tell you that they can taste the difference between different vodkas, but legally they are the same. They are 60% water, 40% ethanol. That's what vodka is. Interesting. But also vodka is like the, uh,

I didn't know that about Mendeleev. That's really fascinating. But vodka is, um, everyone thinks it's made from potatoes, but a vast majority of the world's vodkas it's made from just grains. Yeah. So there's like very few legal protections just outside of mendeleev well it's yeah i mean it's just that he defined it that way and so it just sort of like stuck and so that like you can make ethanol out of a number of different you can make it from potatoes you can make it from grains uh interesting but uh it's it's sort of wherever the ethanol comes from now there will be very very small impurities that are probably different from in potato vodka versus grain vodka.

But I cannot imagine a person who could taste them. But maybe that person exists. I have lied to a Russian waiter at a fancy restaurant and said that I could taste the difference between their vodka flight. But I was just having a really great time. I was playing into it. I was like, oh, my God. I can taste the terroir of Poland.

Yeah, go to Kochka in Portland. Unreal restaurant. Cool. That sounds good. Okay. I can taste the terroir of Poland. Yeah, go to Kaczka in Portland. Unreal restaurant. Cool. That sounds good. Okay, I have one more. I have a few more questions for you. If you stack one lasagna on top of another lasagna, does it become one lasagna?

Yes. That's a good one. Are Cheetos chips? No. Is tomato really a fruit? Yes. Tomato is absolutely a fruit fruit i don't like that both i think both botanically which is definitely but also in terms of how i consume them they are fruits in terms of how you consume yeah i feel like you're making fruit sandwiches what well i was gonna say i could put a pineapple on a sandwich that's delicious i just realized

after i said that i ate a banana sandwich this morning. So I'm like, okay, dummy, let's back that one up real fast. All right, is Kit Kat technically lasagna? Uh, no. Is cheesecake a pie? Yes. Are muffins unfrosted cupcakes? Yes.

I love that you look like a kid in the spelling bee who was like reciting you know trying to like mouth out the words all right uh hank i i feel not only great about the is the ocean a soup but also about a lot of our previous discussions not that we needed your validation well the only one i the only one i feel uh that i'm sort of moving back on is cereal being a soup and i'm sort of now i'm sort of more on the table of potentially cereal being a soup oh soup this is where we ended up too that was a long and emotional one for us we both cried after yeah all right nicole and hank we've heard what you and I have to say. Now it's time to find out what other wacky ideas are rattling out there in the Twitterverse.

It's time for a segment we call... Opinions are like casseroles! We've got to standardize if it's a song, if it's just a sing... It's sing-songy. We're going sing-songy for now? It's sing-songy. We're going sing-songy for now? It's sing-songy. Sing-songy. Okay, but not a song.

All right. First up, Nicole, you want to rock it? Sure. Card underscore tag says, cream cheese is great on pizza with ground beef. The cream cheese will melt but retain its form. Little pockets of melty cream cheese make for an interesting textural experience. Okay. Take it away, Hank.

I'm sorry. I got distracted and I got confused. I was like, I heard the beginning and I thought that I would understand what was going on, but then I like lost my train of thought in the middle and I felt like a spell had been cast on me. That's what my voice does on people. It's not the first time. It would appear they're making dolloped pockets

of cream cheese on their pizza with ground beef. Yeah, that's what the first time. It would appear they're making dolloped pockets of cream cheese on their pizza. Yeah. With ground beef. Yeah, that's what it sounds like. Any cheese belongs on pizza. Like the first time I had a barbecue pizza, it was like cheddar cheese and barbecue sauce. I was like, this is an insane idea. And I had it and I was like, well, turns out cheese on bread is good.

So, yeah, I think, so one of my favorite pizza toppings in the world is goat cheese. And this seems very similar to that. I actually think cream cheese might have an advantage to goat cheese in certain forms, only because goat cheese, when you bake it, it gets chalky. On the top.

On the top, yeah. It kind of, it loses that moisture and there's so much acid in goat cheese that it kind of almost curdles and gets chalky and you lose that creaminess. So if you're going to bake On the top, yeah. It kind of, it loses that moisture and there's so much acid in goat cheese that it kind of almost curdles and gets chalky and you lose that creaminess. So if you're going to bake it on top, if hot cheese is important to you, cream cheese is a great way to go. And you get more flavor than ricotta.

Yeah. To me, this is a beautiful, like very American innovation on pizza. Yeah, I put cream cheese in my Italian-esque recipes a lot. I kind of throw a dollar to my pasta sauces and it helps with the texture 100%. The first time I realized that the line between cream sauce and

tomato sauce didn't have to be a hard line was like I'm free! And this happened to me in Italy. I was in Italy and I got like this amazing lasagna that was creamy tomato-y sauce.

And I was just like, what are we doing in America? And this was the 90s. So we have learned since then. The less libertine 90s. All right. At jbush53, my grandmother in Southern Alabama would serve us a dish called pear salad. It was a canned pear half with a dollop of mayo sprinkled with cheddar cheese on a leaf of iceberg lettuce because it's still a salad.

Hank, you were talking about the salad term earlier. I'm curious. I don't. So first of all, I don't think that's a salad. Second, it sounds. Look, I don't know. It sounds like a food that you eat when necessary. Yeah.

It sounds like, you know, there are rations. We don't know exactly what foods are going to arrive at the house. And so we will put canned pear on iceberg lettuce. Yeah, it's like the food that launched a holiday for like, you know, a major religion. It's like, look, times were hard. This is all we had. This is what we made. Now we make it every year.

I just don't get it. I just don't get it, just don't get it guys i don't understand this i i think so part of this i mean my my dad sort of grew up in that like baby boomer post-war like a space race era where they were so fascinated by modern food production technology and so there was this huge fascination with commercial canned items there's a huge fascination with uh preserved mayonnaise that There's a huge fascination with preserved mayonnaise that was shelf stable. And so that's how all this stuff ended up in these recipes where you're like a canned pear half covered in mayonnaise that I bought at the grocery store. And now I'm starting to enter the workforce. There's a sort of fascination with all these foods. Also ditto

with tropical fruits because of American neocolonialism into Hawaii and Guam and Puerto Rico. So that's why we see all these weird, quote unquote, banana and pineapple recipes. And so this, I don't know if it would taste good, but it's kind of a cool slice of history. For sure. Canned pears, I feel like, do have an advantage, which is that they last for more than 12 hours. Yes. Between being not ripe and being too ripe. I've given up on pears.

I've given up on fresh pears. I love fresh pears. They're so good. They're worth it if you can make it happen. You just have to pay a lot of attention. I've been burned too many times. How do you ripen a pear appropriately? I just buy them and then I touch it and I go, okay, I can eat it now.

It's very simple for me. I love a good pear. If you push at the top next to the stem so you don't bruise it and then you're like, ah, that's eat it now. It's very simple for me. I love a good pear. If you push at the top next to the stem so you don't bruise it, and then you're like, ah, that's not quite hard. I just kind of cradle it and I slightly see how much give there is.

Get the suppleness of it. Canned pears remind me of hospital food. Oh, definitely. Or like cafeteria lunch. Yeah. Well, they remind me of a very fancy pear preparation that I love and you hate, though. Poached pears? The poached pear. I hate poached pears.

That's very close to a canned pear, but you'll pay $18 for it at a restaurant. I like hot fruit. Like a Bananas Foster? Oh my god. I love hot fruit, but poached pears just taste like wine soaked. Yeah.

I don't like it. No, I can't. I can't. I can't. Luke of the Tori says sous vide heaters are great at keeping the bathtub a comfortable temperature. This is some big brain stuff. Hank, are you familiar with the sous vide movement? Yeah.

You like seal up a meat in a bag and then you heat it up. And that way the water never touches it but it still gets cooked i guess yeah so so the the i guess supposed proprietary technology of the immersion circulator is the name of the actual tool and some people are very pedantic about not calling it a sous vide cooker someone slid in my dms the other day and they were so mad that i said sous vide cooker instead of immersion circulator interesting but anyways uh all it does it's a stick that you put into a water bath and it circulates the water at a controlled temperature. And so that's the big thing. It

circulates the water so it heats evenly. But a lot of people have found out that if you kind of just like heat anything to a consistent temperature, it's going to keep that food at that temperature. So if you just find the right setting, like between the three and the four on your stove, you basically got a sous vide cooker without any of the mess. So I think this person's kind of taking the piss a little bit and being like,

sous vide is great for keeping the bathtub at a nice temp. Could it, would it, that's a lot of, there's a lot of water in a bathtub. Would it be able to, I guess it, it might, so like you got your heat loss

because the water is, you know, warmer than the environment. So you got your heat loss to the water is warmer than the environment. So you've got your heat loss to the air and the tub and et cetera. And so once the water is at a temperature, it's easier to keep it at the temperature. So you just have to fight against the heat loss. You don't have to heat it up. Yeah.

But it seems like that would be hard just because there is quite a lot of heat loss. Just the sheer volume. Yeah, there's a lot of water to try and keep it the the right temperature but i don't know it would definitely help we actually did something at mythical before before my time where they tried to cook something sous vide in a kiddie pool interesting and i believe they had about eight sous vide eight immersion circulators strapped around the side yeah but still you're fighting a big i mean we've tried and failed at a couple big construction things that is not our strong suit we tried to turn a whole gutted car

into a pizza oven and that did not turn out well I mean it was a very fun episode we just made a bad pizza I still ate it oh I like this one at our la durell our whole lives are just looking for ways

to justify our consumption of dips and sauces. I mean, I think sauces are deeply underrated. Even at their current level of like, I think they're more highly rated than they once were. You know how everybody hates Arby's? My dad loves Arby's. It's my dad's favorite restaurant. I'm familiar with the general concept. It's cool to hate Arby's, dad loves Arby's my dad's favorite restaurant it's like with the general it's cool

it's cool to hate Arby's but it is don't tell Morris don't tell Hank don't tell my dad um but so there was an Arby's in my wife's hometown that uh in Connecticut and and I like if all Arby's were like this i think everything would turn around for them where there was a sauce bar so arby's right now has more sauces than the average restaurant they have a horseradish sauce which is called horsey sauce and they have arby's sauce which is like a weird not very good barbecue sauce um like uh and then they have ketchup and mustard and and so that's like more than you'd usually get um more than necessary really no i disagree i like all of them i get all of the

sauces i have so much horsey sauce at my house guys i mean more than like a restaurant is required to serve they don't have to give you right more than they do and more than is required yes but but at this one in connecticut, there was a sauce bar. And it was like with pumps. And you could like choose and you could mix. And I'm like, this is the revolution we need. Because like, look, there's only so many ways I can enjoy a roast beef sandwich. But if I have a lot of different sauces to choose from, I can like mix it up every time.

I can be a connoisseur. This can be like wine tasting so anyway what was the question that was it man you i mean we we have no less than like 35 hot sauces in our but i mean not not like not like scorch your butt off hot sauces but i mean like flavors yeah just different flavors and you mix those with different mayonnaises and vinaigrettes and you know people say that you know the the arts are what gives life context and makes it worth living to me like you know the the meat the grains the vegetables are what gives your body nutrition it is the sauces that make the food worth eating some people like their foods a little saucier than others though have you ever hung out with

somebody that just drenches their subway and like sauce or like when they go to sushi, they just dip it in like spicy mayo, ponzu, eel sauce and a bunch of other sauces. Just like, what are you doing? It's like when I was a kid and I got all of the sodas in one cup. Yeah. I think there's a fine line when people are just like, there's too much sauce. And then there's some people that's like not enough sauce. I think we all fit in that category of perfect amount of sauce. I don't know.

I can go overboard. My favorite genre of food. I think we all fit in that category of perfect amount of sauce. I don't know. I can go overboard. My favorite genre of food... I can go hard, for sure. My favorite genre of food are wet sandwiches. Salads! I like, well, wet salads when I'm, you know, trying to eat healthy, but I mean, like a French dip. Oh my god, Philips. I was just going to say Philips.

They physically drop the sandwich in the broth and then lift it out and it sops and you eat it with your hand. You can get it double dipped! Yeah, you can get it double broth and then lift it out and it sops. You can get it. And they have the spicy mustard. You can get it double dipped. Yeah. You can get it double dipped and then you just get it. I want it extra wet. Is a sandwich a soup is where we have arrived.

At that point, you could potentially put a straw in it and suck it up. You could. I am 100% on that. Well, Gabriel Iglesias has that whole bit about Chico's Tacos where he said, it was the first taco that I could drink. And if you look at it, it is three taquitos floating in a quart of sauce. It's like, that is a soup, sir.

That is a soup, which is also the ocean. Man, this podcast makes me very hungry. I'm also getting hungry. I'm about to go to a point. What's your favorite sauce? Spicy mayo is my favorite sauce. Any sort of hot sauce plus mayonnaise is my favorite sauce. All-purpose sauce. Favorite sauce. I mean, hot sauce plus mayonnaise is my favorite sauce. All-purpose sauce.

Yeah. Favorite sauce. I mean, I have long been a ranch dressing fan. I grew up eating it, putting it on pizza, on chicken. I would put it on spaghetti and lasagna. But that said, I think I'm now a sauce-free agent.

Where, you know, I think, you know, actually there's a Vietnamese condiment called Nuc Trum. That's like a prepared fish sauce. It's fish sauce, lime, garlic, chilies, and sugar. And to me, that's probably number one on my death chart. What about you? I'm between just melted butter because I don't know what we did when we made butter, but it's amazing, I think, but ultimately really barbecue sauce.

I have a theory that ketchup is technically a barbecue sauce. All right. On that note, thank you for listening to a hot dog as a sandwich. To enjoy more, you got to start talking so no one can respond. To enjoy more Hank Green, you can tag him in TikToks and follow him on YouTube by subscribing to the Vlogbrothers channel. You should also read his New York Times bestselling books, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,

or the sequel, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor. Hank, where else can the listeners check you out? I think that's good. I have a podcast called SciShow Tangents, which is very fun and weird, where it's a science podcast that is not dissimilar from this, where we hit each other with science facts

and then we just make jokes about it. That's my new commute home podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me too. If you want to hear more from us here in the Mythical Kitchen, we got new episodes for you every Wednesday. If you want to be featured on Opinions of Like Casseroles, you can hit us up on Twitter at MythicalChef

or nhandizadeh with the hashtag OpinionCasserole. And of course, if you want to share pics of your dishes, hit us up on Instagram at Mythical Kitchen. See you next time. Hank, thanks again for stopping by. Thanks, Hank. I had so much fun. Thank you, Josh. See you next time. Hank, thanks again for stopping by. Thanks, Hank. I had so much fun. Thank you, Josh.

Thank you, Nicole. This was so cool.