(?) **only one unidentified person left, toward the end**

Hank: Alright, we're headed off on our next leg of the Tour Because Awesome 2.0! Katherine, what's the name of today's operation?

Katherine: Jeffica.

Hank: Operation Jeffica.

Andrew: Jeffica? Jeffica?

Hank: Jeffica. Like Jessica, but with --

Andrew: I heard Deathica. I thought --

Hank: Operation Deathica.

Andrew: -- that you were more intense.

Katherine: Confirm.

(intro music)

Hank: Hello and welcome to Podcast Because Awesome. I'm Hank Green, and this is the hopefully daily tour diary of Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers, Driftless Pony Club, Harry and the Potters, Rob Scallon, and Andrew Huang touring, on Tour Because Awesome. Yesterday was our first show. Today is our second, we're going to be in Detroit, and this is when the tour actually begins, really, because it's the first time we get in a car and drive for a bunch of time. Everybody is exhausted and things are great.

(instruments playing)

Katherine: He doesn't need --

Hank: He doesn't need it, he's a parking god. How's everybody doing? Failed!

Katherine and Andrew: I am a Golden God!

Hank: There you go.

(all laugh)

Katherine: We're all fired.

Mike: What am I supposed to say? I'm a Golden God?

Hank: Yeah, it changes every day.

Tessa: There is a Dunkin Donuts just to the right here.

Joe: Ohh, see so you're Canadian, but we don't want to know that.

(all laugh)

Katherine: Ahaha, it begins!

Paul: It's not that they're Canadian, Rob likes Dunkin Donuts.

Joe: That's the only play we're allowed to eat is what I heard.

(Hank laughs)

Tessa: It was.

Andrew: He was, he was pretty into it.

Tessa: It was my first Dunkin Donuts experience.

Joe: And did you enjoy it?

Tessa: Oh. No.

(Hank and Katherine laugh)

Katherine: It's not good.

Hank: Joe is overconfident in his ability to park the van now.

(all laugh)

Paul: Do you need somebody to get out?

Katherine: What do you mean overconfident? Did you see what he did?

Andrew: I've got the camera.

(beeping)

Hank: It's beeping. Beeping a lot.

Andrew: That looks like a PT Cruiser though, so no worries.

Hank: He hit the curb.

Katherine: So?

Hank: Nobody question Joe's parking ability, he knows what he's doing.

(beeping starts again, gets faster)

Andrew: Somebody's heart just stopped.

(all laugh)

Katherine: You're recording it with your --

Hank: I'm making people imagine it!

Andrew: What? What!

Hank: This is crazy.

Katherine: Literally just did that. That is a spot, fantasized spot that the van is now in.

Hank: I would not have parked my Honda Civic in this spot.

(all laugh)

Andrew: Wow.

Joe: Wait, it stopped beeping.

Paul: It stopped beeping cause it knows -- 

Andrw: It's given up.

Paul: It knows you're a god.

Katherine: Help!

Hank: The question is whether I should have something that I -- you know, make a good decision, or make a (lower) good decision.

(all laugh)

Katherine: What's that first one?

Hank: That first one is, you know, something with vegetables or fiber.

Mike: Do you have vegetables? Oh, there's something...

Hank: Yeah, look, they got cauliflower -- oh this looks lovely to me.

(child yelling in background)

Mike: You don't come to a diner for broccoli though, do you?

Hank: Yeah, but I ate like -- 

Mike: Oh, your pizza bun?

Hank:  -- like, I had a pizza bun, and I had an actual piece of pizza, and I had a corn dog, and I had Combos, and I had brownies.

Katherine: And a sausage.

Hank: And I had a sausage.

Paul: And a pizza puff,

Hank: Yeah, the pizza puff was on the list.

Paul: Oh, it was? Okay.

Hank: (laughs) The giant pizza Pop-Tart.

Hank: I'll have the chicken and waffles, please.

Waitress: Sure, just the regular one?

Hank: Yeah.

(driving noises)

Hank: Significant urinary demand. That should be the title of this episode.

Hank: Alright, we've arrived at the the Majestic in Detroit, Michigan. Uh, Detroit looks like you'd expect. And, there's a dressing room. Is this us? It's very dark.

Tessa: Yeah, I don't know if --

Hank: It looks like a green room. It's got couches in it. More like what I have come to expect from green rooms than the last place.

There's a laundry room. That could be useful. Can I do laundry while we -- I can! I can do laundry. All venues should have laundry rooms. It says band only, but it's locked. We don't count. Other bands only.

And that goes up onto the stage. Excellent. 'Absolutely no smoking. Violaters will be escorted out without a refund.' I wasn't planning on smoking, but now I definitely won't. Uh, my voice is still a little ragged, which you may have heard just now. And --

(sound check in background)

Hank: Getting things set up here. It is a really cool venue. The ceilings have got to be, what? 30, 40 feet high?

Joe: 5, 4 and a half.

Hank: 4 and a half feet.

Joe: I'd say.

Hank: It's a good stage diving height, but we won't do that. When was the last time you stage dove?

Joe: Uhh, it was a long time ago. I wouldn't do it. It's dangerous.

Hank: Yeah. Yeah.

Joe: It's inadvisable. You gotta ask consent before you stage dive.

Hank: Before you just on a bunch of strangers? Yeah.

Joe: Yeah.

HanK: I uh, I think the last time I stage dove was VidCon, probably? VidCon 2011?

Joe: VidCon you did that? Did they surf you?

Hank: Yeah, a little bit.

Joe: How far did you get?

Hank: I got out and then I got back. So, I spent a little time getting out, maybe like 3 feet from the stage, and then I came back.

Joe: If you stage dive, can you, like, go stage diving for pearls?

Hank: Yeah, you might find some pearls. Find various other pieces of jewelry.

Joe: It a sea, the sea before you.

Hank: More likely to find, like, sunglasses.

Joe: Oh, yeah.

Hank: Or, like, hair. Very likely to find hair. But the only reason that hair isn't valuable is because we have so much of it.

Joe: I see -- there's a sign in my town, where I come from, Hank, that says 'Human Hair $10' that's outside of a shop. So, $10.

Hank: That's not very expensive. That's a lot cheaper than pearls.

Joe: It's as much as a unicorn hair in Harry Potter, if you exchange Galleons --

Hank: For one!

Joe: Right.

Hank: For one unicorn hair.

Joe: One, yeah. One.

Hank: But if you're buying $10 of human hair, you're not getting one hair.

Joe: It doesn't say that explicitly on that sign.

Hank: You should go in there and be like, I have a lot of hairs, and I need money.

Joe: Human Hair. $10. Here's a human hair.

Hank: I've got, like, 10 thousand human hairs.

Joe: But I don't know if they're buying, they might just be selling it. Who knows if that's the buying price or the selling price.

Hank: Katherine was in Les Mis, Les Miserables, the musical. And her character was a buyer and reseller of hair. She's an old chrone, she buys Fantine's hair.

Joe: They put it in a wig?

Hank: There she is right now, the buyer and seller of hair. My wife.

Joe: Oh, you want to find the one for today?

Katherine: Yeah.

Hank: Oh, you want to find the right posters? Okay, let's do that.

(all laugh)

Hank: Oh no, this is awful. You can tell by the tone of my voice that this problem could not be possibly fixed. I'm recording this.

Craig: Oh, you are? Okay.

(Chyna laughs)

Hank: How are we going to fix this problem? We've lost a speaker cable. If this were a reality TV show, this would be like the major point of tension of the episode.

Craig: There'd be like a 'duummmmm.'

Hank: Yeah, like 'What will they do?' And then go to commercial break. We'll probably go to Guitar Center and buy another one, and we need to get some stuff there anyway.

Chyna: But will we get back in time?

Hank: But will we get back in time? I don't know!

Craig: Probably!

Hank: It's 20 minutes away and the show starts in 2 hours. I don't know! Let's create some --

Craig: But traffic is not bad!

(music playing in background)

Hank: I just had some super weird stage banter. I went out there before Harry and the Potters, and they weren't really ready to go on, so I was like 'well I'll just go up there and I'll say, what's up, hi, here's some funny, and then leave, and then they'll come up whenever.'

And then I kept accidentally saying like 'I'll go now' and then people would be like 'Oh just stay, I don't care what you say, just stay and be weird!' And then you're up there and you don't know what you're gonna -- like I had no material prepared. Some of -- I was able to like, yeah.

I just felt like I was up there for a long time and I was not partic -- but like I bet they were fine with it. Second guessing myself's not worthwhile. But. I think people had a great time. But there's always definitely moments where, like, if I don't have enough to say, like the audience starts like -- like the people start being like 'this thing, you can sign this for me' and I'm like, well this is the, this is the performance part of the show, I shouldn't be signing things right now, cause then like, you know, one person's getting something signed and then 600 people are watching, um, something get signed which is not compelling content.

So I was just feeling a little bit like that didn't go too well. But I think that that will not be a lasting impression. It's funny how I like, I like think about like all the different moments of the show that people are going to take away, and have as part of their, you know, part of their experience of the show, and part of like -- you know, even if they don't remember it, it's just part of something that influenced their opinion of it.

Like, the fact that the doors didn't open tonight until like a half an hour until they should've, like just sort of sets it off on a bad tone. And you're thinking you know, the, like, 'it's raining, it's cold, we're stuck out here, we're supposed to be inside of the venue' and it kinda ssssu -- puts you on the wrong foot.

But. It's not probably gonna be the thing that you remember about the show, you know? You remember, I think, you remember a lot of like the first moments it starts, which is why its really great that I get to go out there and I have some material prepared for like the first little opening monologue thing. And then you remember how it ends, and like the climax is always going to be amazing. And the encore is great. And then people who stick around and get stuff signed, for those people I think that that's a good experience too. They get to hang out with other people they might not even know, but they're into the same stuff. And that's good. And then hopefully I get to say hi. Hey, how's it going?

Hank: So last night was bigger than Seattle?

Andrew: Seattle was fine, guys.

Hank Oh I guess, we split the show.

(?): Why is Seattle -- 

Craig: More people came last night, uh, 936. We played two shows in Seattle.

Hank: Yeah, we played two shows. They were both sold out.

Craig: Yeah, we played two in a row.

Joe: Oh, I thought the second one was slightly --

Hank: Oh, maybe the second one was -- you're right, the second one wasn't sold out. The late one wasn't sold out.

Joe: -- 300 something.

Hank: The late one wasn't sold out. Um, we do well in Se -- we do well in places where there are lots of nerds.

(?): Seattle is a big nerd town?

Craig: DPC does well just by ourselves in Seattle and San Francisco.

Hank: Yeah, lots of nerds in San Francisco.

Craig: Lot of, lot of nerds, lot of -- 

(?): That part I get, that one makes sense.

Hank: There's lots of nerds in Seattle, yeah. It's a nerdy place. Lots of comic book culture. They have -- Emerald City Comic Con is huge. And they have...Boeing? They have.

Voice 3: Boeing's in Chicago now.

Hank: Yes, it is Boeing.

(?): Airplanes and comic books, it's like a Venn diagram.

Hank: Well, nerds work for airplanes. It's like, engineers. Nerd people. Like, jobs for nerds. And you got, Microsoft and Amazon are in Seattle.

(?): Oh, well there you go. Okay. That I feel like is a tighter tie-inthan Boeing, but I don't know.

Hank: (laughs) That's a little start -- I mean, Silicon Valley started because that area was where, like the semi-conductor industry started. So, like, now it's all tech startups, but it was like manufacturing then.

Katherine: Was it?

Craig: Yeah. Silicon.

Hank: Yeah. And Xerox. Xerox was like a huge original Silicon Valley company.

(?): Xerox was?

Hank: Xerox was a huge deal. They're like one of the first computer companies, but like they lost their sort of edge.

Craig: And then everyone tried to copy them.

(all fake laugh)

Hank: Hey. Whoa. Wow.

(audience chanting in background)

Craig: How you doing?

Hank: Good, how are you?

Craig: I'm good, good show, having a good time -- are we recording this conversation?

Hank: We are, Ghostbuster Craig's talking to me about the show.

Craig: Yeah, any ghosts around? Or are you -- 

Hank: I think I saw some, yeah.

Craig: Oh really?

Hank: You should get them.

Craig: I will go after them. Real hard.

Hank: Okay. Go bust a ghost. 

Craig: Oh yeah!

Hank: Alright, we're going back out. We're going back out.

(audience screaming)

Hank: We are now at the pizza place after the show. Because you always end up at a pizza place after the show, I don't know why. My voice sounds awful. I'm worried that it's not going to come back by the time we get to the next show, but it's not the thing I need to worry about right now. Right now I need to worry about pizza. And chilling. And not standing on my feet anymore. It's gonna be great. I love not standing, it's awesome. Alright, thanks for listening, this has been Podcast Because Awesome. DFTBA.