Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.

So this is the story of how our educational media company—Complexly—came to sponsor a world-class athlete. Specifically, a Tetris player in Oklahoma. Okay, so this is video of me playing Tetris, a game where the goal is to make complete lines of blocks. I've been playing this game since it came out 34 years ago for the Nintendo Entertainment System and I'm pretty good, like, I start at Level 9 speed, which you're seeing here. If you get over 100,000 points before dying, your end screen is a cool space shuttle taking off next to the Kremlin, a reference to the game Soviet Programmers, and if you get over 120,000 points, you get the best end screen of them all: The Kremlin taking off while a UFO is on the launchpad.

I can usually reach the highest end screen in the game. A couple times I've even gotten over 300,000 points. This is 13-year-old Willis Gibson, also known as Blue Scuti, playing Tetris. Willis usually starts at Level 18 or 19 and then keeps playing long after mere mortals like myself would die. He can even play after the so-called "kill screen" of Level 29 where the pieces start moving so fast that most of us can't even move them to the left or right. Willis uses a special controller technique called "rolling" to move the pieces super fast and he is ludicrously, wondrously, stupefyingly good at Tetris. I, in 34 years, have gotten over 300,000 points, I don't know, maybe 30 times. Willis's top score is over 6 million.

The defining feature of Tetris has always been that you don't beat it. Hank, you made a song about this many many years ago called The Man Who Throws the Tetris Piece, all about how you cannot beat the god behind Tetris because he will just keep throwing pieces at you faster and faster until eventually you cannot go on. Indeed, each of the billions of Tetris games played over the last three and a half decades have ended the same way, the player loses. Until that is a few weeks ago when Willis became the first person ever to play Tetris until the game crashed. Freezing, not at Level 9 or Level 29, but at Level 157, at which point he had been playing Tetris at this speed for something like 35 minutes.

Willis: Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Yes, oh my God. Oh my
God.

This clip made national news. Willis became known as the person who beat Tetris, who finally defeated the man who throws the Tetris piece by causing the game's code to break in the face of his extraordinary brilliance. And that, Hank, is when you called me and said, "Do you know this kid who beat Tetris?" and I said, "Yes, of course I did. In fact, I was watching live when it happened because I am a massive fan of classic Tetris," and then you said, "Should complexly sponsor him?" and I said, "Yeah." So I reached out to Willis's mom who's a high school math teacher and asked her what she thought of the idea, and she loved it as did Willis, who watches some of our stuff now and again; And that is how we came to be the lead sponsors of Willis's Twitch and YouTube livestreams with Complexly's beautiful logo prominently featured. I don't want to brag, Hank, but I believe that Complexly—which makes Crash Course and SciShow and Eons and much more—is now the first ever online media company to sponsor a world-class Tetris player.

Now lest you worry that your Patreon dollars are going to support this lovely silliness, I want to be clear that Hank and I are paying for this sponsorship out of our pockets. But, while Willis's livestreaming does not reach billions of viewers or whatever, I do think it's kind of a good investment. The brands within complexly—Crash Course and SciShow and Study Hall and Eons and so on—are really strong, but far fewer people know about Complexly itself, the company that makes all that stuff. And we've been looking for ways to increase awareness of the overall company. We think it's important to get the word out not just about what we make, but about who we are, and we are Complexly—a production company that now employs over 70 people who work on a huge variety of educational content.

So through this sponsorship, we get to do that, while also encouraging and supporting an extraordinary young person. Also Willis is kind of like a NASCAR driver when it comes to thanking his sponsors on stream, which we appreciate.

Willis: Thank you. Thank you, Complexly.

No, thank you, Willis, and thank you, Hank, for the idea of sponsoring Tetris players. Sometimes your ideas, Hank, they are just ludicrous and terrible, and sometimes, they are ludicrous and awesome. I will see you on Friday.