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Maximum Fun

Science communicators Ella Hubber, Tom Lum, and Caroline Roper learn about anything and everything interesting! Each episode they teach each other about a science topic, and learn about a miscellaneous topic. Whether it's bugs on drugs, temporal illusions, or fanfiction, there's so much out there, so let's learn everything! Join our Discord, email us, and follow us everywhere at www.LetsLearnEverything.com

Let's Learn Everything!

IT'S THE MAX FUN DRIVE!!! We kickoff with a crossover "Casters on Casters" with Ella chatting behinds the scenes with other Max Fun hosts!

For all the details about MFD perks, the livestream, and how to support the show, go to LetsLearnEverything.com!

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

MaxFunDrive Kickoff! Ella's Casters on Casters

Why aren't mushroom animals? Why is this mushroom growing out of a frog?? WHAT KIND OF MUSHROOM IS TOAD?!?! Well Sage the Bad Naturalist is here to answer all our festering fungus questions!

Things we Talk About:

Sponge Lifecycle
Fungus Lifecycle
Mushroom Growing out of Frog
Bunashimeji Mushroom
Blewit Mushroom

Timestamps:

 (00:00:00) Intro

 (00:06:50) Why Aren't Fungi Animals

 (00:24:55) This is Planet Chitin

 (00:30:01) The Frog Mushroom Mystery

 (00:52:47) Questions for Sage

 (01:19:16) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: Maybe some day I’ll get to be on this podcast, don’t ask scicomm dad! fungal anatomy, mushrooms are just the short lived fruiting body, fungi don’t have seeds or leaves or photosynthesize, Fungi were just the weird plant for a while - just Jerry, fungi don’t have vasculature their more spongy, fungi are genetically closer to animals so why didn’t Jerry come to our family? coral are animals, coral and fungal reproduction cycles, you’re going to learn so much in this one Tom, “that’s cant be the reason why”, consequences of the divergence aren’t the reason - the divergence is the reason, we should have been wrong more right!, this is planet chitin, dark fungi, fungus is made of bug, oh we’ve found the thing that actually makes me want to throw up on the podcast, protect our chitinous brethren, the mystery of the mushroom growing out of a frog, sage’s frog theory whiteboard, no one has ever seen this before, first time we’ve seen it does not mean first time it’s happened, mucusy coincidence, the return of amphibian chytrid fungus, the scientists have moved on but Sage hasn’t, botanical anarchy, slowly dropping out of grad school, odd jobs, its fucked up that make up affects views, Toad is a bunashimeji, remember toad with legs is made of bugs, blewits are underrated, drawing on the artist’s conk mushroom.

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

103: Sage The Bad Naturalist & The Frog Mushroom Mystery

Why are there so many vitamins, what even IS a vitamin?? Well Tom finally understands, and takes us on a tour through their infuriating past. And how did the cheerful fairy we know and love today, evolve into its current form? Well we'll only tell if you can answer our riddles three and- or you can just listen to the episode.

Things we Talk About:
James Lind Scurvy Painting
The Various Vitamin Bs
Vitamin Map
Brownie
First Fairy Image
Cicely Mary Barker Fairies
Cottingley Fairies 1
Cottingley Fairies 2
Illusion Spinners
Bitterbloom Bearer

Timestamps:

 (00:00:00) Intro

 (00:03:05) The Vitamin Saga

 (00:57:54) The Evolution of Fairies

 (01:48:20) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: Will vitamin c cure me or murder me? more people died of scurvy than combat on the seas, Lind’s biblical scurvy experiment painting, vitamin Pee, maybe oranges are the fifth humor, beri beri, the gelatin comission, come onnn man it’s the 1800s give me a break, we know proteins carbs fats and minerals but something’s missing, STUDY MINERALS THEY SAID - YOU’LL WIN A NOBEL PRIZE THEY SAID, vital amines but they’re not amines, wait are vitamins like fish?? drop the e just vitamin, *mymymymy* all the vitamins are completely different?, some vitamins only exist for a few picoseconds in a supercollider, a bunch of vitamins got pluto’d, Vitamins are like a title, vitamer, VITAMIN D IS A HORMONE, wait maybe hormones are vitamins too, we haven’t talked about how vitamins work because they do Too Many Things, “we’re trying our best but sometimes our best isn’t good enough”, lifting the shadow of death, fitnessgirl250 actually has a PhD, food science is an applied science, the LLE supplement has all the dropped vitamins, vitamins are perfect for capitalism, there is not silver bullet, you can’t supplement your way into a healthy life, an appearance from she/her Caroline, the rainbow magic fairy books, we support evil fairies, the fickle house brownies, realizing fairytales are fairy tales, both high and low class could blame fairies, dressing boys as girls to protect them from the fae, booktok loves hot Rumpelstiltskin, American leprechaun traps, fae - fatah - the fates, when did fairies evolve wings, distinguishing from angels through insectification, fairies may have shrunk to be less threatening, Tom doesn’t know what a panto is, Victorians established the modern fairy, fairies went from robbing cribs to being trapped in the nursery, Cicely Mary Barker’s flower fairies, the collectability of fairies, 350 fairy books in 5 years, the Cottingley fairy hoax, fairies went from being about protecting sons to empowering girls, spelling fairy or faerie, Evyn Fong’s insectoid fairies, the review corner riddle, weaponizing review corner to talk to us.

Semba: The Discover of the Vitamins
Royal Museums Greenwich: Scurvey
Science History Institute: Scurvey
Beriberi Review through Chinese Medical Literature
Drummond's Naming of Vitamins
Nobel Laureats in the History of Vitamins
Semba: On the Discovery of Vitamin A
SciAm: What Vitamins Really Do

---

Wiki: Parī (Peris)
JER Journal: Peri and Persian Mythology
Book: A Dictionary of English Folklore
BBC: Fairies, Leprechauns and Changelings: Ireland's Darkest Folklore
Blog: Fairy versus Faerie, and other names for the Fae
Harvard University: The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
This Is Gendered: The Fairy
Blog: An Overview of How Faeries Were Portrayed During Different Literary Periods
Edinburgh University: A Need for Belief: The Victorians and Fairies. 
Book: Trolls: From Scandinavia to Dam Dolls, Tolkien, and Harry Potter
BBC: When Britain was Gripped by 'Fairy Mania'
Blog: The Surprising Magic of Bad Books
Oxford English Dictionary: Fairy

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

102: The Vitamin Saga & The Evolution of Fairies

For episode 101, we're challenging ourselves to make a technically family friendly, swear free episode! Why is the sky blue? Well it turns out it took a lot of science to understand why! And what is speech disfluency? Well it's like... um... you'll see!

Images we Talk About:
Green Flash
Sunset

Timestamps:

 (00:00:00) Intro

 (00:06:43) Why is the Sky Blue

 (00:54:28) Speech Disfluency

 (01:40:45) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: it’s like playing mozart for children, mystery spires, atmospheric optics is responsible for all the bangers, they didn’t have a word for blue but they could perceive it, davinci and newton were on the right track, and thus the liberal lie of the greenhouse effect was born, Tyndell was just trying to clean an air sample and saw it turn blue, Baron’s used to be useful at least, Tom’s mind gets rocked by Rayleigh scattering, why isn’t the sky purple, When was the sky blue? the great oxidation event, sky is atmosphere, why is the sun so tiny OH ITS FAR AWAY, Ella pulled a Tom at the intro, Ella’s filler montage, no swearing no fillers challenge, there’s no fillers in the speech we watch on TV and movies, we actually um-dope our podcast in post, people used filler words in the past too, it’s found in poems and the earliest recorded sounds, the valley girl like, natural language corpuses, the 2 genders are uh and um, fillers in other languages, parasite words, uh is almost universal, the function of filler, backchanneling, measuring um reaction times, a visit from Gretchen, um is like a swiss army knife, like as quotation marks or hedging, right *slaps knees*, the power of saying something which technically means nothing.

StellarNet: A Brief History of the Sky’s Blueness
Blog: The bizarre myth that Ancient Greeks couldn't see blue
2023 Paper: Revisiting the question “Why is the sky blue?”
Wiki- John Tyndall
The Conversation: John Tyndall: the forgotten co‑founder of climate science
Wiki: Rayleigh Scattering
NASA: The Electromagnetic Spectrum
Scientific American: Mirages
IFL Science: Orange Sky
The Great Oxidation Event: How Cyanobacteria Changed Life
Royal Museums Greenwich: Why Is The Sky Blue
Mars in a Box: Martian Sunsets

 ---
Wikipedia: Filler (linguistics)
Thought Co: Definitions and Examples of Filler Words
The Register: Why Do We Say Um?
Paper: Listeners' Uses of Um and Uh in Speech Comprehension
New York Times: So, Um, How Do You, Like, Stop Using Filler Words?
University of Colorado Paper: We, um, have, like, a problem
Guardian: Why Do People Say Like So Much?
NPR: Why Do We Say Um So Much?
BBC: Teen Slang
Paper: Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders
Cambridge: Hidden Use of Fillers
The British National Corpus 2014
Language Hat: The Mystery of Fillers
The Atlantic : “Men Say 'Uh' and Women Say 'Um'”
Language Log: Men and Women’s Use of Words
JStor: Filler Words and Floor Holders
THE CALIFORNIA STORY 1906 By Thomas A. Edison

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

101: Why is the Sky Blue & Speech Disfluency

Tom & Ella are out sick! So enjoy this recast of when Tom was healthy and on SciShow Tangents!

OR enjoy our 2 hours on the Project 4 Awesome livestream, basically a video podcast!

OR check out all our other stuff at https://www.LetsLearnEverything.com/

Thanks for your patience y'all! - Tom, Ella, & Caroline

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

Out Sick Recast: SciShow Tangents w/ Tom!

You asked, and we finally answered, today we are Finally, actually learning everything! Something that is definitely possible and easy to do. Caroline covers infinity, which can include basically anything, Ella covers what everything is made of, and Tom does the rest! Simple, right?

Images we Talk About:
Cantor's Diagonal Argument
The Bullet Cluster

 Timestamps:

 (00:00:00) Intro

 (00:04:28) Infinity

 (00:49:09) What's Everything Made Of?

 (01:29:52) Everything Else

 (02:08:54) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: 

Infinity is the amount I love you guys - oh I made such a noise of disgust, my infinity could beat your infinity, quoting The Fault in Our Stars, ancient Greeks had a horror for the infinite, Euclid refused to use infinity, we have no physical proof that any item can be infinite, turning water into wine and counting to infinity, next time someone says I love you infinity plus one call them a number annihilator, pre-scowling, we ask Caroline a million questions about sets, sets offer a new language for math, “actually Ella they use the word transfinite”, Caroline rage baits Ella, Ella loves Cantor’s diagonal argument but people at the time HATED it, Cantor was a “corrupter of youth”, the universe is everything, god dammit is there more than matter, pigeons and pizza and Ella’s giant gengar plush are made of quarks and leptons, ordinary matter is just 5% of the universe, 26.8% is dark matter and the rest is dark energy, dark energy and matter are not interchangeable - dark just means we can’t observe them, your MOM is massive, 1933 dark matter is theorized to make the math work, dark matter is not a theory it is an observation of missing mass, the differing mass of the bullet cluster, halos of dark matter around galaxies, red shift in every direction, don’t @ me about the accelerated expansion of the universe, dark energy is the mysterious force that keeps the universe expanding, heat death or re-contraction, dark matter and dark energy are warring siblings trying to pull everything together and apart and we’re stuck in the middle, list of all wikipedia pages, OH NO IT’S INTERESTING, monk stuff, the exclamation mark came during the humanist era of the renaissance, oh no we printed the ironic bible! inverted exclamation marks, exclamation mark haters, old comics had exclamation marks for periods! Making Beowulf Scream, Lo! per my last email, our show didn’t start with an exclamation mark - it snuck its way into being beloved, no one is sure how the exclamation mark ended up in programming languages, DO anthropomorphize the exclamation mark, please don’t be disappointed we didn’t stop the podcast, We Didn't Stop the Podcast.

We Didn't Stop the Podcast Lyrics

Sources:
Wikipedia: Infinity Symbol
Wikipedia: Infinity
Polytechnique: A (Very) Brief History of Infinity
Britannica: Infinity
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Infinity
1983 Paper: The Realization of Infinity: On the Philosophy of John M. Anderson
Scientific American: Some Mathematicians Don’t Believe in Infinity
2017 Paper: Actual and Potential Infinity
Schechter: Potential versus Completed Infinity
Medium: Infinity Isn’t Just a Number — It’s a Mind-Bending Universe of Paradoxes
Youtube: minutephysics
Youtube: Jim Fowler
Blog: The Math of Dr Who #4.2

 ---
Etymonline: Etymology of Everything
Wikipedia: Everything
NASA: What is the Universe?
EBSCO: Leptons
Harvard: What is the Univer Made Of?
ESA: What is the Unvierse Made Of?
Astrobites: ΛCDM
NASA: Building Blocks
ESA: Dark Matter and Dark Energy
Angela Collier: Dark Matter is Not a Theory
NASA: Dark Matter
Forbes: Who Really Discovered Dark Matter
Harvad: Dark Energy and Dark Matter
NASA: Bullet Cluster
ESA: Gravitaional Lensing
ESA: Redshift
ESA: Comsic Microwave Background

 ---
Wikipedia List of All Pages
Florence Hazrat's "An Admirable Point: a Brief History of the Exclamation Point"
Florence Hazrat Interview
The Irony Mark
Stan Lee on Comic Book Exclamation Marks
Marvel End of Exclamation Mark Announcement
Making Beowulf Scream
History of Factorial
Figuring out the Origin of ! in Computer Science

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

100: Everything

The author, historian, and person of many fascinations Iszi Lawrence teaches us how to get into ancient Egyptian heaven! Plus we learn about a bit of everything else from dinosaurs to medieval almond milk!

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:14) Getting Into Ancient Egyptian Heaven
(00:45:31) Questions for Iszi
(01:08:59) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

Images we talk about:
Anurognathus
The Tring Tiles

We also learn about: Todays question is how to take on two attackers, “I really recommend violence if you have neurodiversity”, Ma’at, getting into the Egyptian afterlife is an escape room, why Egypt was geographically perfect, I’m going to put a mastaba on my mastaba, there were ancient Egyptian archaeologists of ancient Egypt, you don’t think with your brain that’s weird, Allan’s mummified body in the King’s College London library, the mummification industry, dodgy ibis mummy dealers, pyramids were a giant sign that said “ROB ME IM RICH”, King tut also packed too much underwear, Anubis guides you through a video game level of challenges, the hall of two truths and a lie, weighing your heart in court, Ammit has the head of crccodile body of a tiger legs of a hippo my perfect woman, your heart has to way no more and no less than a feather, the scarab is a pay to win heart silencer, pubs were public houses when you brewed too much beer and it was women’s work! almond milk was around during the medieval times, we are story brained and we pay attention to the weird things not the boring ones, he showed me his whip scorpion, nanotyrannus, why do you like dinosaurs - why do you like eating? Anurognathus, toddlers comes from drunken walking, sad means not sober, the suffragette jiu jitsu dojo, the tring tiles was teen jesus.

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

99.5: Iszi Lawrence, Getting to Ancient Egyptian Heaven, and Storytelling

While we take some time to rest and plan out the new year, enjoy our episode of Escape This Podcast as the three of us use cleverness and chaos to solve this escape room!

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:05) The Escape Room
(01:20:19) Puzzle Talk Back

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

Images we talk about:
The Spa Controls
The Spa Sign
Ring Toss
The Spa Sign with Sun
The Full Room Write Up

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

Recast: Escape This Podcast - Oceananigans

It's the new year! Which means it's time to learn about the most interesting thing... ourselves?? We answer YOUR questions with OUR answers, so learn a bit more about us, science, and the show!

Links we Talk About:
Our Top Songs Playlist
Magnetic Fields Tiny Desk
Anni DiRusso Tiny Desk
Doechii Tiny Desk
Dr.Cal Whale Cancer TikTok

Timestamps:
(00:07:06) Welcome to the Q&A
(00:31:45) Science
(00:52:28) Fun
(01:04:26) Making the Podcast
(01:27:06) Personal
(01:45:55) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: 

I was in the recording I know how long it took, tick correction corner, Caroline you gotta wrangle us, the ugly stepsister, City the Animation, Superman, playlist linked above, The Mars House, Levinia, Peak, Megabonk, Animal Crossing, Despelote, duck wraps, I’m an anytime burrito fan, falling out of and back in love with sciences, the Vera Rubin Observatory, lysosome mitochondria and ribosome, organelle astrology, AI and carbon pedantry, Ella’s PhD journey, solar system chocolate bar, our horror movie archetypes, experimenting on our cohosts, pride and prejudice romance, centaur anatomy, researcher blogs rock, scheduling and actually starting, what we hate and love about the show, we don’t have to be friends, podcasting is good for the brain actually, dream guests, Caroline runs, the rhythm game search, burnout planning and accepting mistakes and communal burnout watch, collecting magnets and yarn and weird pokemon figures, Dalek on a trampoline, why Tom wears a hat, bingo cards over resolutions, Ella’s getting marri- WELL TOM’S GOING TO MAGIC CON VEGAS BABY.

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

New Year Q&A 2026

The HaLearnDays are here!! And with it come learning, laughs, and fun facts from us and friends of the show, as well as a few surprise new friends!

Images we Talk About:
Bat Carrying
Bristol Stool Chart
Lego Head Diagram
The Praise the Lord Show

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:08:10) Bats
(00:19:45) Livingston's Body
(00:25:18) Pi & PIE
(00:34:45) Lego Head Passage
(00:44:02) Bird Brains
(00:56:04) Tomatoes
(01:10:35) Alpha-gal
(01:16:27) Rice to Riches
(01:26:37) Mission Impossible & Backmasking
(01:42:29) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: 

As Hank always says: wah wah wah wah wah, it says that I should complain in the script but I like it, Egg nog is just raw eggs right? redacted is such a beautiful name, rock paper scissors video content, drunk bats slur their echolocation, bats carrying bats, weekend at burniesing Livingston, I’d carry any of you for nine months, Pi and PIE from father and son, do you think J and Gretchen got their gifts at the same store? philology, proto-indo-european, the FART of the lego head, Ella’s heart grows 3 times its size for bacronyms, lego heads pass in about 2 days, chickadees growing and shrinking their brain connections, testing bird barcoding in the chickadome, I wish I could delete part of my brain to watch eternal sunshine again, davinci would have made that flying machine earlier if he had red sauce, tomatl is nahuatl not even proto-indo-european, we can all agree tomatoes smell evil, 150 years before tomatos and pasta combined, alphagal syndrome from ticks, once bitten twice allergic, Tom Scott gifts a can of rice pudding for us to open, allegedly LLE is a money laundering scheme, Mission Impossible morse code, the hidden code in LLE’s theme, Edison was the first to notice backmasking, the Eligibles Car Trouble, here’s to my sweet satan, winners don’t do drugs, raise a cup to our sweet satan.

Sources:

Bats Flying Drunk Paper
NYTimes Tomato History
Smithsonian Mag Tomato History
The Incredible paper: Sixteenth-century tomatoes in Europe: who saw them, what they looked like, and where they came from
Records of Tomato Reactions
Atlas Obscura Backmasking History

More sources will be added soon!

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

99: The HaLearnDays! 2025

Tom threw out his voice screaming about the new Zelda game (not actually) so we're delaying the next episode. But! We're not shifting the release schedule so the next episode will still come out the Thursday after!

In the meantime, check out the episode of Veritasium that Tom researched and wrote! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw

Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/joinlearn

Tom-nical Difficulties: Back in a Week! (And the week after that!)

Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst

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