- 5/2/2025
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FunTranscript
00:00Let's bring up our first speaker.
00:05Wow, thank you so much.
00:07I think that there's something that we don't talk about enough in our society,
00:09something really lovely and magnificent and wonderful,
00:12and probably quite close to your house.
00:14It's the grocery store.
00:15It's a building that contains, at minimum,
00:17thousands of individual edible products,
00:20and also seasonally, sometimes water guns.
00:23But the problem with grocery stores is that they are all different,
00:27and they need to be standardized.
00:30Agreed. Agreed.
00:3499.99999% of all grocery stores are not my grocery store,
00:42making almost every grocery store in the world an unfamiliar grocery store.
00:47My grocery store, I can get in and out 15 minutes.
00:50An unfamiliar grocery store, that might easily exceed 30.
00:54Why does this matter?
00:56No.
00:57Oh.
00:57You're going to die.
00:59Yeah.
00:59And you do not want to spend what little time you have left here on this earth
01:04wandering the labyrinthine aisles or like some kind of modern Theseus,
01:08except instead of a minotaur at the center,
01:10it's your wife's preferred brand of cream cheese.
01:13Now, I will say that many grocery stores have figured out a fairly standard perimeter.
01:17The outside you walk in, there's going to be plant parts.
01:19Yeah.
01:20Mostly edible, though sometimes not.
01:22Oh.
01:23Additionally, you're going to run into animal parts.
01:25No.
01:25After that, you might find stuff that came out of animals.
01:29Uh-huh.
01:29Increasingly also plant-based imitations of stuff that came out of animals.
01:33Also plant parts processed into baked goods and plant parts processed into what I,
01:38internet science guy Hank Green, like to call mood-altering drinkables.
01:41Oh, my favorite.
01:43Yes.
01:43But then inside the middle of the store, there's an area that I like to call how to make my life worse.
01:50This area of the grocery store is organized in many different kinds of ways.
01:54Here are just five of them.
01:56Number one, like items with like.
01:57And this is how you think everything is, but it's not.
02:00You also have how they're used, like when you put the caramel with the apples.
02:04You also have where they are from.
02:06Oftentimes you might get a Hispanic aisle.
02:09Dale.
02:10Increasingly, occasionally, you'll find half an aisle that's dedicated to 60% of Earth's people and 30% of its land area.
02:18Asian.
02:19Thank you, Chris.
02:20You, sometimes, but not always, there is also specific need, like your vegetarian food, your gluten-free food.
02:30Increasingly, you might find an aisle that's called healthy food, which does ask questions about the entire rest of the grocery store.
02:37But last, our last category here, they paid to be there.
02:41There are many shelves in the grocery store where the people will pay to have their products featured.
02:46I actually reached out to some people who design layouts for grocery stores for this presentation because I don't fuck around.
02:53And do you want to know the thing that may be the most angry of everything that I heard in those conversations?
02:59There is a relationship between the time you spend in the grocery store and thus how much money you spend in the grocery store and the legibility of the aisle signs.
03:09Interesting.
03:10They used to put the aisle signs on the end of the aisle so that you could see as you were walking by.
03:14Now they put them in the middle of the aisle so you have to turn and look down and they make the sign just far enough away that you have to take a couple of steps into the aisle and then you turn and you're like, this is the wrong aisle.
03:26But am I the kind of guy who would eat chicken skin crisps?
03:30Wow.
03:31But now comes the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.
03:34Did you think you were going to get out of this store without a AA battery or a Rolo's?
03:38Get fucked.
03:39You're in the checkout aisle now, motherfuckers.
03:41This is the section of the grocery store where I think to myself every time, you know what, daddy does deserve a York peppermint patty.
03:48Did you want to know about the love lives of a celebrity that you can't quite place?
03:52I'm getting manipulated from the moment I walk in this store to the moment I leave.
03:56But this problem can be solved through standardization.
04:01You might be thinking, but Hank, grocery stores are all different sizes.
04:06There's tiny ones and big ones.
04:07They have a thousand items.
04:08Some have 50,000 items.
04:10There is an institution that's already solved this problem.
04:13Allow me to introduce you to fucking libraries.
04:16Wow.
04:17Tiny and gigantic.
04:19And all of them can handle way more items than any grocery store in the history of Earth.
04:24Not even the lost grocery store of Alexandria had more.
04:28That's cute.
04:30How'd they do it?
04:31The Dewey Decimal System.
04:33And that's right.
04:34I am proposing a Dewey Decimal System of food.
04:37Perhaps the Chewy Decimal System.
04:40Oh, boo.
04:41But yay.
04:42All the food.
04:44Stop it.
04:44I brought you merch.
04:46Yay!
04:48What?
04:49Chewy Decimal System shirt.
04:51Chewy Decimal System hat.
04:53Up here.
04:53In the rafters.
04:54We're throwing shirts.
04:55Everybody likes it when you throw shirts.
04:57I have nothing so far.
04:58That's just my outfit.
04:59I have nothing so far and I want it the most.
05:01There's mugs.
05:03I am so easily convinced of anything.
05:06Now, you might not be familiar with exactly how the Dewey Decimal System works, so I will
05:10explain it to you.
05:11There's zero to 999.
05:13Every 100 digits is a different category.
05:15100 to 199, that's philosophy and psychology.
05:18In a bizarre twist, all of literature is in the 800s.
05:23You can fit everything in because the Dewey Decimal System, unlike the fragile earth that
05:28we for now get to call home, can handle anything.
05:31Let's look up a cookbook.
05:34How would you find it?
05:35Well, cooking is a technology, so it's going to be in the 600s.
05:38Why is cooking a technology?
05:39You can find out in a book.
05:40It's 025.431, which is where books about the Dewey Decimal System are categorized according
05:46to the Dewey Decimal System.
05:48So 600 for technology, 641 for food and drinks, 641.5 for cookbooks, 0.56 for specialized cooking,
05:550.563 for healthy cooking, 0.562 for cooking for kids.
06:00Now, you might be thinking, Hank, who's going to figure out how to categorize all of these
06:05foods?
06:06I already did it.
06:07Yeah, I knew it!
06:08I knew it!
06:09Oh my God.
06:10I'm not going to go through all of this for you right now, but I will say that when I
06:14first put pets and babies in the same category, I felt a little weird, but the more I thought
06:17about it, the more sense it made.
06:19That's our baby.
06:20They all take care of itself.
06:22That's right.
06:23Does this solve all of the problems I have with grocery stores?
06:26Yes.
06:27Yes.
06:28Wow!
06:29Wow!
06:29That's actually that.
06:31No.
06:32You don't know where jelly goes in the grocery store because you're not really quite sure
06:36what jelly is.
06:37Yeah.
06:37But what we do know for sure is that jelly isn't really food.
06:41It goes on food.
06:43And that is the 600s in my system.
06:46So you might go to 610 for spices, 620 for salsas, 630s for salad dressings.
06:52You've got to go to 670s for bread toppings specifically, 675 for jellies, 675.0 for grape jelly because
07:00that's the default, 675.1 probably raspberry.
07:03You're so right.
07:05I have to emphasize, this is like this everywhere.
07:09At every grocery store in America, you've got spices, salsas, dressings, mayos and aiolis,
07:13nut butters, jellies, honeys and syrups.
07:15In that order, in the 600 aisle of every grocery store, if you hit a nut butter and then a honey,
07:22you know there's no freaking jelly in that store and you can stop looking.
07:27Wow.
07:28Some of you might be thinking, but does that mean that the salsas aren't going to be with
07:33the chips anymore?
07:33I was thinking that.
07:34That's the world we live in now.
07:37Fair.
07:38Some of the time the salsas are with the chips, but probably only the name brand ones that
07:42paid to be there.
07:43Some of them might be in the Hispanic aisle.
07:44Some might be with the dressings and the condiments.
07:47In increasingly unhinged situations, they're with the produce.
07:50We can change this for our children and our children's children and most importantly for
07:57me.
07:57Oh.
07:58Any questions?
07:59Wow.
08:00Hank, what an incredible presentation.
08:05What about salsas that are fresh that need to be in the refrigerated section and salsas
08:11that are shelf stable and could last 300 years?
08:14Yeah.
08:14What do we do?
08:15There's a, this is also the case for any refrigerated item.
08:17So with the refrigerated items, you're going to have a separate section that is for just
08:22refrigerated.
08:23And then the code is going to take over from that one digit.
08:26So if the salsas are, for example, 620.5, then it would have the refrigerated digit in
08:33the first and then push all the other digits over.
08:35I'm being completely honest.
08:36This is the only thing that's ever made sense to me.
08:38So when you go to the grocery store, do you go to a bunch of drawers and pull out cards
08:45and look for what you're looking for?
08:47We don't need to, but we should anyway.
08:49Yeah.
08:49There are so many niche products in grocery stores these days.
08:52How, how many decimals do you tend to go out?
08:55You can go out as far as you want.
08:56Wow.
08:56I, uh, sometimes buy books, periodicals, Archie magazines at the grocery store.
09:03So would there be like a separate Dewey decimal system within the Chewy decimal system?
09:08You're in charge of that.
09:09I'm on it.
09:10Oh my God.
09:11Hank, thank you so much for this enlightening information.
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