Judge John Hodgman · John Hodgman and Maximum Fun

States Rights... and States Left

February 11, 2026·1 hr·4 clips

Brandon claims Stephanie never truly lived in Indiana because college towns are just 'liminal spaces' like airports.

1. Judge John Hodgman, with bailiff Jesse Thorne, arbitrates a dispute between married couple Stephanie and Brandon over whether Stephanie's college years in Indiana, Illinois, and Louisiana count as 'living' in those states. 2. Stephanie holds a PhD in media and communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master's in television, radio, and film from Syracuse; Brandon is a Delaware native who attended college entirely within his home state. 3. The episode's core question is what constitutes 'living somewhere': is it legal residency, driver's license address, emotional connection, or simply sustained physical presence? 4. Hodgman opens by quoting Asher Roth's 2009 rap single 'I Love College' — 'I want to go to college for the rest of my life, sip Banker's Club, drink Miller Lite on Thirsty Thursdays' — which neither contestant identifies; Brandon guesses Dazed and Confused, Stephanie guesses a Tim McGraw song. 5. Stephanie lists the states she claims to have lived in: California (birthplace), Japan (technically a Japanese prefecture, not a state, during her father's Marine service), Maryland, Pennsylvania (a commonwealth, Hodgman notes), Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Illinois, Louisiana, and Delaware. 6. Brandon's core argument is that attending school in a state is not the same as living there because, if something happened, a student would go back to their parents' home state rather than stay. 7. Hodgman tests this theory by asking whether Jesse Thorne, who attended UC Santa Cruz and received a traffic ticket from a cop who cited him for not updating his California driver's license after 30 days, 'never lived in Santa Cruz.' 8. Brandon holds that the driver's license criterion is 'one of the main criteria' for residency — but Hodgman, who lived in New Haven for four years attending Yale, notes he never changed his license there and still considers himself a former New Haven resident. 9. Brandon concedes that living in Alabama for high school counts as residency, narrowing his argument to specifically undergraduate (and possibly graduate) college enrollment. 10. Stephanie explains that she moved 11 times partly because her father was a Marine for the first six years of her life, then continued moving because her parents 'got bored being in one place for too long.' 11. Stephanie describes feeling like an anthropologist without a home base and says that whenever she tells people she has no hometown, 'it makes them upset' — they want to assign her a place she belongs. 12. Brandon reveals that his dismissal of Stephanie's college states is partly motivated by emotional protectiveness of Delaware: he feels that people who attend University of Delaware and then leave should not be able to claim Delaware residency. 13. Hodgman observes that Brandon waited until he and Stephanie were already married before contesting her state count during a road trip to visit her sister in Philadelphia — a detail that draws pointed laughter. 14. Stephanie says Indiana and Illinois being 'taken away' was particularly painful because those were places she spent real time and built genuine connections, unlike states she passed through briefly. 15. Brandon admits he partly raises the objection because he feels sad that Stephanie has no hometown she can claim as her own and wishes she could point to Delaware as her real home. 16. Stephanie acknowledges that she does feel sad about having no hometown and describes envying people with regional accents because 'it shows they have a claim to a part of the country' that she lacks. 17. The episode has a warm, gently probing interview style, with Hodgman drawing out increasingly honest admissions from both parties through patient Socratic questioning. 18. Delaware receives sustained affectionate mockery throughout — including its reputation as a state people drive through without noticing and its pumpkin chunking festival — while Brandon defends it earnestly. 19. People who have moved frequently, lack a strong hometown identity, or enjoy gentle marital dispute comedy will find the episode resonant. 20. Listeners looking for a high-stakes or purely comedic episode may find the middle section's state-counting logistics tedious before the emotional payoff arrives.

As heard by us

A marital state count turns into a funny, oddly tender fight over Delaware pride, college residency, and who gets to claim home.

Stephanie says she has lived in 11 states. Brandon says the number is nine, and the case quickly becomes a tiny courtroom fight over what "lived in" is supposed to mean.

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Why you'd press play

You want a state-counting dispute that turns into a joke about home, hometowns, and who gets to count as local.

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