H.I. No. 49: Rabble-Rousing

"H.I. #49: Rabble-Rousing" is the 49th episode of Hello Internet, released on October 19, 2015.
==Official Description==
Grey & Brady discuss: London thinks about handicapping Uber, Swamphen and Rice Rat numbers, Brady just can't stop thinking about the Apple Watch, elevator design, continued developments in #Hotstoppergate, the discovery of water on Mars (again?), bi-weekly weigh in, the Cyprus flag, grasshopper penises, and reviews of The Martian and Everest.
==Show Notes==
Hello, welcome to the 4 day day course, I get all you say. Can I get a small skinny hot chocolate blows? Any cream on the top? No, thank you. And anything to eat? No, that's fine, thanks. Thank you, so drive around for me. OK. Yeah, get my love. OK, got it. There you go. Oh, can I get a hot stopper? We haven't got any stoppers. Like, give me a couple of steris. Which one's coming out? Do you have you run out? Or you just don't have them? We run out. Oh, OK, cool. No, that's OK. Yeah, that's OK. Thanks. How come you run out? Are they really popular, or? We've just run out and we ordered them for our Thursday delivery. And today they just not turned up. So I don't do it this time. Yeah, it's not doing them. Or we ran out on our Sunday. Maybe there's been some big run on them. Nationwide. That's what I am. So great. All right. Thank you. Sounds like it's going to nationwide. Shorty to hot stoppers. Woohoo! They're trying to take away my Uber. This was only a matter of time. Oh, yeah. You know what London's like. And you know what black cab drivers are like. They're mafia of London, aren't they? Well, I don't really know what black cabs are like, because I try not to use them, because they are hugely expensive and not that pleasurable of an experience. So no, I don't really know what black cabs are like. I take issue with one thing you said there. They are too expensive. But I quite like sitting in a black cab. Of the cabs that I have taken around the world, I will probably put the black cabs up pretty high on that list, possibly the top of cabs I have taken anywhere. They're very fun and communal when you're in a group. Like it's very fun getting in a black cab because you all face each other and they're really spacious. But also, if you're like me, and you've got like 18 camera bags and you're carrying them around, London like a sh- Like a sh- Like a sh- When a black cab pulls up and opens the door, it is good to sort of tumble in and all your bags can just scatter across the floor. And so they're very good for me. The black cabs are smartly optimized for large groups of possibly intoxicated people, because you can all just pile in. And also, the floor, it reminds me in the inside the black cabs of say, the interior of the New York subway system, where it looks like you have designed this so it is optimal to clean. And so that you have a bunch of people come in there, some of them possibly drunk. That floor is really easy to clean. It's like a nightclub. Yeah, never look at the nightclub with the lights on. Yeah. And it is also optimized for you have a ton of stuff and you just need to dump all of it in. Like they are quite spacious compared to other cabs. So basically, people who've been out drinking and people with lots of bags, basically they're made for me. Right. Right. Right. Which is why I am not surprised that seconds into our conversation, you are defending the black cabs. But as someone who doesn't drink very much, very rarely travels in large groups, I would say that the black cabs are not optimized for me. And the ubers are way nicer. So my familiarity with the black cabs is relatively low. But I'm a little bit angry today because I discovered that TFL, transport for London, which is the kind of transportation regulatory body here, has this proposal for a bunch of changes that they want to make to, what they're calling car hiring services, but are obviously aimed straight at making Uber worse. And I am real, I just found out about this just a couple days ago. And it has been on my mind and making me just absolutely furious. It's like there's this thing that has come into the world and it makes the world better. And because it is competing with a kind of established governmental monopoly, there's the, they want to put all of these regulations on it to limit it. And I'm like, no, Uber is amazing. I was walking around earlier and I was trying to think about this podcast. And I'm like, I was reflecting on the past 10 years of my life and thinking, what things in the past 10 years of my life have changed my life significantly for the better if I had to make a short list? Was I on the list? You're on the list now. Let's, last minute contender, Hello Internet podcast is of course number one on that list. Previously number one on that list was getting married, but maybe a podcast edges that out since I'm talking to Brady. Equal number one. Because I know your wife listens and you know, you gotta keep us right. Let's say equal number one. Let's say equal number one time. Okay. So I'm like, okay, so that's great. And I'm thinking, okay, what makes it else on this list? Becoming self-employed makes it onto this list. My life before and after an iPhone makes it onto this list. I'm trying to like rack my brains for other stuff. I would honestly say that Uber is one of the biggest changes in the last 10 years of my life that has just made so many things more convenient. And so that's why I am just having this, this visual reaction against the proposed changes from TFL. I'm very upset about that. Well, other proposed changes, great. The big one is a five minute wait time. If you want to book a private car in London, it will not be allowed to come to you for the first five minutes. That's so stupid, right? It's not making them carry huge sandbags in the book. Yeah, it's Harrison Bergeron, right? Like that's all this is here. Oh, we're going to weigh this down. And of course, if you're a normal mini cab company, this doesn't affect you at all because you're never going to be there right within five minutes. You're not able to book a car like this within a five minute window. So it affects exactly no one except Uber. And so I was looking through and I'm like, okay, what on earth is the justification for this? And the TFL proposal has this big paragraph about how this is for customer safety. Here's the little paragraph explaining this. A delay between the booking and commencement of a journey will reduce the risk of a customer getting into a the wrong car and or into an unlicensed vehicle. Now, I've taken Uber many times. I don't know how someone would get in the wrong car. Like they have the license plate. You have a picture of the guy. Has anyone in the UK ever booked an Uber and stepped into the wrong car and someone drives off? I highly doubt it. And any reasons that you would do that? Because I can see how you might walk up to the wrong car and if you're really unobservant, maybe try to open the door like because it's a common looking car. But how is the five minute rule going to fix that? Still, after five minutes, you're going to walk out to the straight and maybe open the wrong door if you're that dumb. Brady, the paragraph says it's going to reduce the risk. It states that so it must be true. That should just be honest about it and just treat it like tariffs and things like that. Like it's just, you know, this is a deliberate thing to give a fairer go to the established businesses. Just be honest about it. But the other thing about this delay and the safety, which I'm trying to think of is like, okay, what is the scenario under which it's bad? Let's say you walk up to the wrong car and you open the door. The person who's in the car, I guess they happen to be a kidnapper who's cruising around and thinking, oh, I was going to grab someone off the street. But boy, today's my lucky day. Someone just came right in the car. Thank you, Transport for London. Yeah, what is the scenario here? I don't understand. I don't understand. And yeah, so the next thing is it says, it's for passenger safety to make sure that the passenger and the driver are able to ensure a safe pickup location. Now here they try to justify themselves. If the pickup time was too short, the passenger may run into traffic to get the vehicle. How does making the waiting time longer fix this? It doesn't fix this. And what's more dangerous than hailing black cabs when it comes to running into the road and putting yourself at danger? This is exactly it. The only time I have ever endangered my physical safety, trying to get a car is trying to get a cab where I'm standing in the road leaning out face first into all the traffic, possibly trying to upstream other people getting cabs. You're moving around. The cabs are obviously manifestly more dangerous. But no, no, we have to fix Uber. The other little detail I like here is it's like, we're not targeting Uber in particular, but cab hiring companies must not show vehicles being available on any maps, on any apps they may or may not have. It's like, okay, I'm not quite sure who that is. Now, I have one more here which I absolutely love. They want to restrict automatic carpooling. So Uber has this service in London where you can say that you want to be able to share the ride with other people who are going in the same direction as you. So it's an optional carpooling with strangers. Now, you might think a city like London would be hugely in favor of this. Anything that can reduce the number of cars would be amazing, but no, no, they're saying, this is not allowed. Again, for customer safety. It's not as though the customers are able to decide if this is something that they want or something that they don't. Like, I've never used it because I can't imagine anything more uncomfortable than being in a car and pulling off and having a stranger get in and sit next to me. It's like, oh God, this is combining the worst parts of a taxi and a bus. Like, I would never do that, but obviously some people would want to do it. But this thing about restricting the carpool just shows me, it's like it's so clear they're targeting Uber to get rid of it or to impede it, I should say. And in a way that just, it just absolutely makes no sense. And I'm just infuriated by this. Well, obviously it makes sense. I mean, you're a smart guy. There are obviously two things going on here. There's the power of the black cab lobby and it's not insignificant. But also it costs an absolute bomb to get a black cab license. And that's obviously a huge income spinner for transport for London. And if all the black cabs go out of business, so does transport for London, maybe they're figuring. I say it doesn't make sense because I wish the world didn't operate in this way. Is really what I'm saying when I say it makes no sense. And also their justifications don't make much sense. They could have done a better job. No, their justifications are absolutely, absolutely ridiculous. For listeners who are already getting angry because they don't like Uber, I need to specify that Uber works very differently in the UK than it does in the US. In the UK, Uber drivers have to be licensed drivers with TFL. They are not allowed to just be like, hey, I'm a guy with a car in an app. I'm going to drive like you can in some other places. I didn't know that. TFL's other suggestion is that drivers are only allowed to work for one company. Now almost every single Uber driver I have spoken to, they are guys who were transitioning from some cab company that they worked for that they hated and they were trying out Uber. And almost without exception, every one of them said Uber was a better deal for them and that they were doing more and more time on Uber and taking fewer and fewer days with their other cab company. And I just feel like this is anti-competitive. They're trying to restrict the driver's abilities to try out a better system. It's just infuriating Brady. It's just infuriating. I'm sorry, Gray. I put Wix out for you. I hope it works out for me too because I'll tell you, taxis are just barbaric. The last time I took a taxi, don't you laugh, they really are. The last time I took a taxi was in Las Vegas and I had forgotten how barbaric they were. And the only reason I took a taxi in Las Vegas was because Las Vegas at that time was going through this same kind of thing that Uber had to temporarily withdraw from Las Vegas and they weren't allowed to operate because the taxi unions had pressured the government to make it so. And so I had to take a taxi and I was like, oh God, this is awful. I forgot how terrible this is. Like the taxi driver has no incentive to make his car good because nobody rates his service. You're just getting in the car with like a random dude who you will never see again, who doesn't care, who has no responsibility. And like the car is disgusting and there's ads blaring on the inside of the car. It's terrible. It's absolutely terrible. I don't know. I've just got this, you're not gonna like this but I've just got this feeling that Uber's only cool because it's new and it's doing well. And I think the time is not when Uber is gonna go down the poop tubes and become a rubbish service as well and everyone's gonna start complaining about it. I don't know what's gonna go wrong yet. I don't know if it's gonna involve advertising or some change in the balance of power between customers and drivers but I've just got a feeling in my bones that Uber is gonna go south anyway and maybe that's why I'm not like rushing to its defense. I just, I feel uneasy about Uber. I'm skeptical about its future. Well, we all know what the future of Uber is and it's self-driving cars. Always the self-driving cars. No, no, no, amazingly shockingly to me in a way that I always feel like, are you sure you wanna say that out loud? The CEO of Uber is very publicly openly into the self-driving car thing. He's always being really clear that he wants Uber to transition into a self-driving car company. And I just think like, hey guy, maybe you don't wanna say that out loud because of all your drivers. Yeah, are you trying to persuade to leave there are the companies and come work for Uber, yeah? Yeah, it's like, listen, I'm on board with you, Uber CEO. I think that you started this company with humans solely because you couldn't do it with robots and it will eventually be with robots. But your company has to last until the robots are available, right? Like, yeah, you can go bankrupt between now and then. There's no guarantee that you're going to make it to the point when the auto's takeover. That is so clearly and obviously the way that Uber is designed to be. I mean, I basically use it as though it is a self-driving car company because I have so little interaction with the drivers most of the time. By the way, don't take my kind of not calling you on the use of autos as some kind of tacit approval for that word. I'm just tacit approval. Yeah, okay. I have not given official approval to that word, but. Oh, I didn't know that I needed your official. No, and you've given me so many words that I'm, do I need to bully you into this? No, I've almost given you autos as like, as a thank you for all the ones you've given me. As a sub. Yeah. All right. You finished your little Uber rant? I've finished my Uber rant. All right. All right. Well, we might come back to it in future episodes. Once we've exhausted all the other campaigns and battles were waging at the moment, maybe we can start an Uber word, but we can't spread ourselves too thin across all these battle fronts. No, we can't. We can't. Now, let's do we do some follow-up? We might as well. We might as well do some follow-up. How are the T-shirt sales doing? You know the final numbers. The T-shirt sale has finished. The rice rat and sorry. Let me do this justice. The Jamaican rice rat. I was going to interrupt you there. It's a certain species as you corrected me at the time. It is. It is. The Jamaican rice rat and the reunion swamp hand. The T-shirt sale has now finished. Now, we, what I was going to say, when we set up this sale, of course, we didn't set up this sale. I set it up behind your back. But once this sale had started, it was never sort of our intention for it to be like a competition between the two. It was just, you know, which do you know? Get one, if you're like swamp hands, get this one, if you like rice rats, get this one. But very quick, oh yeah. Yeah, people were expressing their in-eat preference for rice rats over swamp hands over rice rats. And because sort of T-spring make these sales numbers quite public, it became a sort of a showdown. And amazingly, and I don't know whether there was naughtiness going on here, it would just happen naturally. But it was neck and neck. Like, and it was sometimes it was changing, they were never more than five apart. They were usually within one or two of each other. And right down to the final minutes, it was not known which would sell more t-shirts. It was astounding to watch. And I kept thinking of that neutral video on YouTube, which I have no feelings about this one way or the other with thumbs up and thumbs down, which I have massively heard back from people that it is not exactly the same all the time. But it is so close most of the time that you won't notice. Yeah. That's what this race looked like. But I have a theory. I have a theory as to why these numbers were so close. Please tell me, I'm dying to know. I think there's almost no one who prefers the rice rat over the swamp pen. I think almost everybody who was buying one was also buying the other. And when you went to look and see, oh, what are the two numbers doing? It's like you were catching it in mid order where someone had just placed their swamp pen order. And then they went to go place their rice rat order, but they hadn't done it yet. And I think that's why so many times it was off by just one or maybe two. I bet almost everybody who got one got both of them. I don't think you're up. I am right. Just let us know somehow. Don't like, don't, I don't know. Here's how you do this Brady. So you don't get overwhelmed with a million people, right? Your go to is Twitter, not Twitter. On the Reddit people, there will be some thread. You can reply to it on the Reddit. Let us know what you did with purchasing them. Don't tweet it. Go to Reddit. This is what Reddit is for. Okay, go to Reddit. But don't go one there if you got both. Yes, that's what we want to know. How many people just got one? And we'll just assume everyone we don't hear from got to. Did you buy one in the end? Be honest. No, that's not. It doesn't know. I bought two. One of each. Yeah, I bought one of each. This is how I came up with this theory. So did I. We have to coordinate our outfits, Brady. If we ever go somewhere, we have to make sure that we're both not wearing the rice rat or the swamp pen. It'll be so embarrassing. The final tally was Jamaican rice rat 240 40 shirts, reunion swamp pen, 240 five. Wow. So swamp pen wins by one. That's a photo finish. That's what that is. I have had some contact from people who didn't go into laughter the deadline, because they listened to the podcast late or they just disorganized asking if we're going to make them available again, because with teaspoon, you can have like a second chance to get things. Do you have any thoughts on that? I've shut it down for now, but I don't know. I kind of like that it was a one off, but I do feel a bit sorry for people who missed out. So I have no sympathy, no sympathy at all. You have to listen to the podcast when it comes out immediately and take advantage of what's going on. Everybody who got your rice rats and your Jamaican swamp pens, no way. And your reunion swamp pens. Yeah. It's an amazing limited edition shirt that you have. Yeah, that's awesome. You can frame it in your house. You can pass it down through the generations. You can store it in a trunk to make sure that the UV light never damages it. But these are limited edition collectors items. All right, that's settled then. I'm sorry. If you missed out, I'm sorry. If you missed out, listen to the podcast sooner. Contemporaneous is key. Yes. Of course, again, unless you're listening like years in the future, then I hope you got up. Or unless we changed our mind because we needed a few extra bucks for coffee. It's a real pleasure to be sponsored by a service we actually use. And one such sponsor is Hover. Hover is a domain registrar. You can go along, snap up the web addresses you need, or just ones you want. For example, I occasionally buy a domain just on a whim, like reunionswamphen.com. And JamaicanRiceRat.com. There's nothing wrong with having a few fun domains like that for a rainy day. For example, if either of those two animals ever miraculously come back from extinction, sort of Jurassic Park style, I am going to be a man with a red hot website, and I registered it with Hover. Now, if you're a bit more serious or sensible than me, you could just have a really cool business idea, just something you want to do. And it needs a fitting domain name right away. Hover is the place to get it. Book it now, even if you haven't got the website finished yet, you want that name before someone else gets it. I could talk for ages about why Hover's so good, all the great services and extras they have, things like custom email addresses and their valet transfer. But the best thing I can say is they've just got a super clean website. It's really easy to use. It's a real pleasure. They make everything simple and affordable. Now, as an added bonus and a way to support the podcast, you will get an extra 10% of your first purchase with Hover if you use an offer code when you check out. In this week in an unusual move, we've got a choice of offer codes. You can either have swamp pen, all as one word, or rice rat, all as one word. That's the key to your 10% off. Either of those two codes should work. And I'm hoping the people at Hover are gonna tell me which one gets used more times. It's another popularity contest. It's happening again. But don't do it for the swamp pen and don't do it for the rice rat. Do it for yourself and that 10% off. And our thanks to Hover for running a great service, but also for supporting our podcast. I'm gonna say something that's gonna make a few people hit the skip button. Oh yeah? Got three things to say about Apple Watch. Oh no, oh god. I'm sorry. You know, I feel like, Brady. I'm sorry. Brady, before you even say anything. Yep, listen, listen. People are different. Viva la Difference. Let me say my three things, all right? Just let me have my three things. Now, people need to understand that my main issue with the Apple Watch, if they haven't realized by now. Oh my god. Oh my god. It is. It is, um, Gray, you tell people what my main issue with the Apple Watch is. You tell them what's Brady's main issue against the Apple Watch? It's not the fact that computers on your wrist, it's not the fact they have sensors. Right. Your main issue is that they're reproducing the way old watches look and they're not doing their own thing. Is that a way to summarize it? I believe it's silly to have an, to pretend it's an analog looking watch. Right, okay. I have come up with two new examples in the last week that have given me that feeling again. I'm gonna give them very quickly because I want to and it's my podcast too, so do with it. You say that like I have no idea that this is our show. You do have that, you know, Apple X button. So you do have the ultimate Vito. I made a video this week about the physics and mathematics of drums and drumming. It's really good fun. I was doing it with Professor Phil Moriati, who I know is one of your favorites in my videos as well and he's a big music head. He's got these arrow drums where you just hook up a sensor to your computer and you can just got little sensors on your feet and on the ends of drumsticks and you can just sit in the middle of your room and drum away in mid-air knowing where the drums would be and it recreates the drum experience. It's like air guitar if you could still play a guitar with drums. It's a cool thing. And I see all the benefits of it. And he loves this toy. So he was like, when we make this video, Brady, let's do it all using the arrow drums. And I said, Phil, if we're going to do this video, we have to do it properly and get a proper drum kit and smash the drums because it's a great prop and it looks good and it's the real deal. And he was like, oh, do we need a real drum kit? Can't we just use the arrow drums? And I was pretty insistent. Do you agree with me? Okay, I feel like you're trying to trick me into agreeing with you on a different point than this specific. No, no, no, no, no. Okay, you've got an exemption from being tricked. I just, in the case of this video. In the case of you are doing a video about the physics of drums, you need a drum in the video. I will agree with you 100%. You need a physical drum that someone is hitting. But it was about the drummer and the rhythm that the drum uses and things like that. So you could conceivably have done it with arrow drums. But I'm agreeing with you. Yeah, I got it. That if you're doing a video, you need the thing, the physical thing. Okay. When we set it up and we had my mate Sean there playing the drums, it looked awesome and cool. And then, and then Phil set up his arrow drums and sat next to him and just started wafting away in the air. And the drum, and it sounded like he was playing drums. But I set that looking at him thinking, you look a bit silly. There's the real deal. That's what a real drum kit looks like. And you're sitting there with all your gizmos and gadgets and wires and sensors and little reflective things on your feet. Thinking, this is like drumming too. I just felt like saying, mate, that's not drumming. Those bad boys there. That's real drumming. That's how I feel about Apple Watchers and analog watches. When I see someone with their Apple Watch, turn it and look at the hands and feel all proud of their watch, I feel like saying, mate, that's not an analog watch. This is an analog watch. So you're playing knifey spoonie here. That's not a knife. This is a knife. That's what you're doing. Exactly. There's another example, which I wish to share with you that made me feel the same thing. I'm going to send you a picture. OK. Because I know you don't watch Formula One racing. How do you know that? I am a big fan of Formula One racing and I'm going to send you a picture of the racing gloves worn by the Mercedes drivers. OK, so I'm looking at a pair of gloves with a picture of a watch on the gloves. It's like a picture of a Swiss watch basically printed onto the glove so that when you see these drivers with their racing gloves, it makes me think of the t-shirts that look like ripped abs and packs. Yeah. That's what this is. The watch glove equivalent of that. Yeah. That's how I feel when I see an analog watch on your wrist on the front of an Apple Watch. I feel like you've got pretend abs on your wrist. It's like, great. You haven't got an analog watch. They aren't hands. They aren't moving. Like, come on, man. I will just point out that this man's glove watch does not tell him the tie. I know. Now, here's my third point, which I think you may find more interesting. Can I just, before we move on really quickly, these glove watches, can I just make sure I understand what's going on here? This is so that on TV, this is like a branding advertising thing. They wanted to look like they're wearing the watch. Yeah, the watch company wants to sponsor the driver, but because all the shots of him he's wearing racing gloves in the car, you can't see a watch. They paint a watch on his racing gloves, basically. OK, so that's why this is happening. OK, I just wanted to, otherwise, is this some kind of crazy-fashion thing that I don't understand? I just... All of that said, I think I'm going to get an Apple Watch. No! No! No! No! No, Brady. It's just been... It's just been niggling at my mind, lately. No! Listen, listen to me, man. Listen to me. Listen to me. You should not get an Apple Watch. I know you say that. I say it because I mean it. I say it because I care. I know. I'm just curious now. Christmas is coming, and my wife doesn't know what to get me for Christmas, and I've been thinking about it, and I'm getting a bit into my exercise now, and that's the one thing I do think is strong about the Apple Watch, the fitness aspect. And I'm just thinking, you know, I give you a hard time about it and hop on, but maybe I should try it, and I'm thinking I might get one. Okay, okay. I think this is a terrible idea. Yeah. I was doing some work on the HelloInchNet YouTube channel just a couple days ago, and the most recent video that we put up happened to be the one where we were talking about almost a year ago now, should Brady get an Apple Watch when they come out? And I happened to relisten to that section where I was encouraging you to not get an Apple Watch that I thought it was a terrible idea, and I was listening and nodding my head along thinking, yeah, that guy from the past, he has some good points. He's right, this is not a good idea from Brady. And so I feel the exact same way. I'll put the link in the show notes for people, but at the same time, current me is also now perversely curious to see since I've gotten over the initial shock. What happens to Brady when he gets an Apple Watch? I don't know. I think it's going to end up in a drawer within a few weeks. That would be my prediction, is that you get bored with it very fast. Maybe within the two week return window. I don't return things, Gray. Oh yeah? I'm amazed that you do return things. I always thought it was a male thing to not return things. If I buy something and it doesn't fit or I don't like it or it doesn't look good, my attitude is my mistake. Put it in a cup. You're going to bite the bullet on that one. Rather than go to a shop and return things, that's just not how I work. It is a hassle sometimes. So I do then just have to ask, do you have any idea which Apple Watch you're going to get? I know that you're not a fan of any of the designs, but of the designs they have available is there one that calls to you? I'm going to have to go and have a look again to remind myself, but I've seemed to remember when I tried them on, like just for fun, when they first came out. I did like the leather bands with sort of more normally buckles. I like the band and the buckle to look as old and authentic as possible to sort of contrast the watch. I don't like the whole kind of, you know, everything being plastic or space age and stuff. I do like some natural materials and a bit of old school. So I imagine going down that path. OK, so like the leather buckles, they have new leather buckles and they have one in particular, which is fairly all-de-looking. I do like a sort of a weathered, old looking brown leather, I think, is quite nice. I need a me to see if I can put it on. Or maybe it would like, because it looks better with what, I don't know. I don't know. Here, here, here. I want you to look at this one. I'm going to send you, here's my guess, for the most Brady-looking one that they currently have available. OK. So for the listeners, this is what they call the saddle-brown classic buckle, which looks like as old-fashioned of a leather loop man's buckle as you're going to find, probably. I think that is probably the most likely contender. I think my one reservation is because I'm looking at this as a possible fitness device and something I especially want to have when I'm doing fitness things. And that's sometimes be a time when I'm out running and getting sweaty, how good a mix is the sweat and the leather. But I actually think that's a good mix. I like my leather to get crapped up a bit. It's the Millennium Falcon aesthetic. It looks better, a little bit worn. And leather is a material that looks good a little bit worn. I may change my mind. This could just be a passing fad in my mind. But I'm thinking maybe I should do it. Do you have any preference between steel and aluminum or gold, maybe gold for Brady? Rose gold? More or no, not gold. But I don't know, whichever one is best is usually my attitude. My attitude when buying things is buy nice or buy twice. Wait, what? Is it going to get a buy nicer by twice? Buy nice or buy twice? It means buy the nice one. Otherwise, you're just going to end up buying two anyway, because you're going to buy the nice one later. Oh, OK. Or you will have to buy twice. I see. Yeah. Or you might have to because it breaks, or you might have to because you just don't like having the crap one. I think I originally interpret that as basically you thinking you should buy one steel watch or buy two aluminum watch. That's the way I interpreted that. That was a big confused. Although to be fair, I think that there is not a clear cut, which is the better one with the steel versus the aluminum. Probably I'll get whichever one looks more brushed and beat up and not too shiny shiny. If you don't want shiny shiny, then you want aluminum. That's what you want to get. OK. Well, very interesting. I look forward to following up on this in the future. I told you that you enjoy the second part of that rant. I was so shocked at first. Let's crack on with follow up. We got a lot to do today. Magnicator. Oh, yeah. We discussed how a copy of the Magnicator was flown to the US, and it was flown first class for sort of protection reasons and things like that. For perfectly 100% legitimate reasons. I never questioned the reasons of such. I just thought it was kind of milked for pay-out reasons a little bit. And you probably didn't need to have, anyway, let's not go there again. You may be right that they milked it for PR reasons. But did you see the poor koalas that somebody left us? It was like, Air Australia made some big show about flying koalas first class. But that actually was nothing, but a photo shoot that they did with the pair of koalas lounging around in the first class cabin. And they actually just put them in crates and put them in the hole for when they actually moved them. That to me is what I think of when someone says, oh, you did it for PR reasons, right? Is, oh, here you go. Let the koalas eat some eucalyptus in first class. Take some pictures down in the hole you go. But that's kind of what I think. I think in the case of the Magnicator, because they were there holding it in the photo and you could like see the paper and that. I would have thought surely the best way to do it would be to have it in like a locked steel case where you couldn't see anything and you'd slide it into some sort of shelf or cupboard like where the air hostesses put all their stuff and you'd have a guy with a gun in first class like right next to it. So if anyone even opened the door, he'd shoot their head off. Like you wouldn't like put it in the seat and put a seat belt on it. And that's kind of how they're portraying it. Like it has its own seat and they, you know, it's gonna get sort of drinks and stuff for most of life. It did look a bit like if you were careless, you could spill your champagne on it. Yeah, like who is that you sitting next to? Oh, have you not met my friend, Magna. Anyway, this is, anyway, let me read this email from Leigh Ann. Leigh Ann tells us, I was listening to the latest episode at Hallow Internet and I have some information about how historical documents in the UK travel that I thought you might find interesting. I recently graduated from the Archives and Records Management Program at UCL, at University College London. And one of the people that came to talk to us during our program was one of the head conservationists in the House of Lords, where the Parliamentary Library and Archives are held. All acts of parliament that leave the UK also fly first class in their own seat. Not only that, they have two caretakers, an archivist and a conservationist I believe, one of which must stay with the act at all times. The act is also kept in a special box that only a few people know how to open. The caretakers are also under strict instructions not to open the box while others are in the room. Hope you found this somewhat interesting. I found that very interesting. As did I. Thank you very much, Leigh Ann. Thank you. I have another email, Gray. You're very organized today. You were showing me before very proudly how you had color coded your printed out notes for today. Now, this Magna Cata was sent to the US, as we were discussing. This comes from Michael. Michael says, I went to the New York Historical Society today and photographed this picture. I'm going to send you the picture he sent us, Gray. Mm-hmm. It is the Magna Cata and someone listening to our episode grumpy about art on their iPhone. So they've gone and seen the Magna Cata and held up their iPhone in front of her and photographed their iPhone, showing Hello Internet in front of the said Magna Cata. I will never stop getting a kick out of these photos of people listening to Hello Internet in various locations. I always just love these. This one's pretty funny. The thing I love about it is, and we are not ignorant to this problem, listeners. It is not easy to photograph your phone listening to Hello Internet because you need a second camera to photograph your phone which you probably use as your camera. So this is a two camera operation for most people and we appreciate that. I will guarantee there are people who intended to take a picture of their phone with Hello Internet on it in front of the thing but didn't realize the exact logistical problem until they arrived at the place and took out their phone and went, oh, I guarantee that it has happened. Dear Brady and Gray, today I solo ascended Mount Everest listening to your podcast and got to the top. But unfortunately I can't take a picture because I was listening on my phone and it's the only camera I had. So Michael says, now you can say that Hello Internet has seen the Magna Carta. Well done, Michael. Well done. We spoke about unlucky numbers recently and how the number four in China is considered unlucky because of its associations with death. Right, because in Chinese, the word for four sounds like the word for death. Yeah, there were some similarity in the way they said or written, I think it said, many, I don't know. Anyway, this came from Joel who sent us another picture with reference to the picture below, the flaws in my apartment, which has the number, which have the number four in it, such as 24, for example, are replaced by placing an A behind the previous floor. Therefore, the 14th floor of my apartment is notated as 13A, which is a good example he chose because there are so many apartment buildings that don't have a 13, but anyway. This phenomenon is prevalent in apartments in my state of Panang in Malaysia, as most property groups here are owned and managed by Chinese people. So if you want to tell it, you got that picture there, Gray? Yeah, yeah. This is a picture of the floor selector panel in the elevator. And the floors are listed as 2335, and then going over a bit, it's 1213, 13A, 15, 22, 23, 23A, 25, and so on. What a mess. I wonder if that building goes into the 40s and that it'd be a real trouble then, wouldn't I? I just... I cannot stand stuff like this. Oh, I love it. I love it. I love all that quickiness. I bet you would, but if I were to build a skyscraper, it would have a 13th floor. It would have floors with the number four in it. You can't cow-tow to this pointless human superstition. You're just encouraging it. Yeah, but then when a ghost haunts floor 13, it's going to be entirely your fault. I'll accept the burden of that possibility. I just... I don't think this kind of stuff encourages people to assume, oh, superstitious people, right? Not rational people, but people who are bent this way anyway, it validates their fears of the number four. Oh, if apartment buildings don't want to put four in, it must be bad, or if they don't want to put 13 in, it must be bad. I'm never a fan even of when elevators do the the mezzanine basement, lower basement. And you can't... Yeah, and you can't tell where to like, do I want to get out of L or J or... Yeah. Where do I get... How do I just get out of this building? Listen, elevator developers, I have the solution for you. This is how this should work. The floor, which is level with the earth, that's at the ground level, that is floor zero, and you start counting up from that. So the floor above where you walk in is floor one, two, three, four, five, six, and so on. And then all of the floors below the ground are negative numbers. So the basement is negative one, and then if you have a lower basement, it's negative two, negative three, and so on. This is the only way to number elevators. This is the way all elevators should be numbered. What if it's one of those buildings that has like split entrances though? Like on the north side of the building, because it's on the side of a mountain, you go out to the ground floor on one floor, but to go out on the south side of the building, it's like a floor lower. I knew you were going to ask this. I knew I was going to ask this. I could feel you waiting, right? So the monkey wrench into my plans. And what do you do that? Every single building has a main entrance. An entrance that is on a busier road. I'm just thinking of buildings that would usually have this multiple level problem or something like a hotel. When I was in Hawaii, you'd see lots of hotels that were on hills and could have multiple levels that are exposed to the ground, but wherever it is, that the vast majority of people coming to the building for the first time are going, that is floor zero. The end. Okay. Tweet, gruy, or your exceptions, people. No, there are no exceptions. There are. You was the building owner. You was the building owner. It is your responsibility to set an axis, to set an origin point at whichever floor is most sensibly the main floor, floor zero. If there's any doubt, you choose the door that would have had the ribbon that was cut by the queen when your building was open. Which entrance are people going to take their picture in front of, which is the entrance where people come in? I don't think it's hard, but more importantly, it just matters that you pick one. You just pick one and then you have a consistent numbering on the inside. But everybody should get into an elevator and know that if they press floor zero, they can exit the building on that floor. Speaking of appealing to people's emotions, Audrey is looking up to me with such cute, sad eyes right now. That I'm going to have to banish her from the room. Oh yeah, is there a cuteness to distracting for you? I can't handle it. And like, she's also going to start getting restless. But just so that you know that this, I'm not lying to you, I'm going to send you a picture of how cute she looks right now. And we'll put this in the show notes so that people can know what I've been having to put up with for the last 10 minutes and we'll understand why this has to be dealt with. Because this is hard to take. We're having a cute intermission now. Have a look at what I've been looking at while we have been podcasting. I'm going to leave for two seconds while you tell people what the picture's like. Come on. Okay, this is pretty cute and it is pretty distracting. Listeners, you should go to the show notes and take a look at this little doggy photo. And I have to admit that were I trying to podcast under such circumstances, I too would find it difficult. I'm back great. I know what a hardcore, cold, harder robot you are, but if this one thing that stimulates your emotion chip, it is Audrey. How cute is that? I agree with you that her cuteness is so great that you were under adverse working condition. I know, was it was her harassment? Yeah. So there you go. I can't take that level of emotional blackmail. So cracking on like we do. It is time for us to come to the burning issue of the last fortnight. Oh. Now people will have heard that the start of the show hopefully, a little moment I had today when I went to Starbucks. The drive through, drive through Starbucks is the one place in the UK where supposedly you can get hot stoppers. For those who don't know hot stoppers, these little sticks that you put in your takeaway, coffee lids so that the hotness doesn't spill out of the hole. And burn you. Yeah. Hot stoppers is a word invented here on Halloween to net by the way, but taking the world by storm as all our words do. I tried to get my hot stopper at the drive through today and I was told they didn't have any as people may have heard. And they have been trying to order in new ones for the last few days and they haven't been coming in. And I can only assume the pressure that we have been bringing to bear on Starbucks to put hot stoppers in all of their outlets has caused a run on orders. And the suppliers are now thinking, what the hell's going on? Why do all the Starbucks suddenly want to buy our hot stoppers? And there is a shortage. They haven't ramped up supply in time. And it's causing problems. See, you are an optimistic man, Brady, because when you say that they don't have any and they haven't been able to get any, I automatically assume that Starbucks vindictively and foolishly is pulling hot stoppers. They're saying no to hot stoppers everywhere. Yeah, you are taking the pessimist line there. They're going to go for a corporate consistency over this crazy, frustrating, inconsistent system that they currently have. There have been a lot of tweets. You must be happy with how people have been getting on board with your tweet campaign. I have been very happy with a number of people who click the Twitter button and harass Starbucks. But Starbucks has been suspiciously mute on this entire topic. They have been. I don't know where to take this campaign from here, Brady. Well, I do. I've been giving a bit of thought to this. Even though it's your baby and your issue, you know me, give me an inch and I'll take a mile. And so you will take a mile and also, Brady, being the newspaper media man that you are. You have a certain media manipulation skill that I lack. You think about things in a way that I just don't. You are the media manipulator. As some people may know from our previous episode, if they listen to our advertising moments, I had fractured, I had printed onto a piece of glass and a picture as a gift for Grey of the reunion swamp pen. And this created some interest. In fact, one of our listeners who lives near the factory before they were able to dispatch it to me actually went to the factory and knocked on the door and asked if they could see the item and said to the company, our apparently Brady from Hello Internet has had a reunion swamp pen fractured and it's in the factory. Can I see it? And it was still there and he went and had his photo taken with it. This is amazing to me, Brady. It is, it is amazing. You have imbued this thing with a fame that it has no right to have. Well, this is like you have Mona Lisa this fracture. Exactly. So this fracture is now an item of considerable value. I would say so. Yeah, and it has made it to my house. It is here. It is a wonderful item. It's actually my first fracture I was very impressed by. Now, it is a gift for you, but let's be honest. It was never going to make it into Grey's house because well, Grey doesn't really decorate. Well, let's put this way. It might make it into the house because I would think, oh, what's this package from Brady? I wonder what's in here. Would open it up. And I would go, oh, it's the reunion swamp pen. But it would not make it onto the wall. No. That's the key thing. Yeah. So with Grey's permission, the decision has been made that we are going to auction the Mona Lisa of fractures, the reunion swamp pen, the one, the very one that was made, and Grey and I are both going to sign it. And it will be auctioned in the name of Hot Stopper Awareness. Now, one may be thinking, how can you raise money for Hot Stopper Awareness? And what exactly is Hot Stopper Awareness? It is raising awareness for the need for Hot Stoppers. It's Starbucks outlets. All Starbucks outlets, not just the drive-thrues. So you're probably thinking, well, what are we going to do with this money? Like, we can't give it to Starbucks, because that would be insane. Right. So what we're going to do with any money that is raised is donate the money to the children's burns trust here in the UK. And when we do, we're going to make a big song and dance about it to put more pressure on Starbucks, basically. Now, you're probably thinking, well, that's a bit unfair. We're exploiting the children's burns trust for our own purposes. And that is 100% correct. Yeah. We are doing that. We are doing that. But this is not as stupid as you may think. And if I can be serious for a minute, if you go to the children's burns trust website, which I have opened in front of me at the moment, there are three main objectives. And the one they list first is working with others to raise the awareness of burns and skulls, including prevention campaigns. And then if you look on the side panel of their website, at the moment, as I look at it now, they have an animation of a steaming cup of coffee and a campaign that they call drink responsibly. And they have these bullet points here on their website saying, a hot drink can still scold a small child up to 15 minutes after being poured. Over 50% of children admitted to hospital, presumably admitted to hospital with burns, have been burnt by hot drinks. Burns and scolding accidents often require extensive skin grafting and plastic surgery over several years. So the children's burns trust is very into awareness about the risks of hot drinks, as is CGP Gray. I'm not making any link between hot stoppers and Starbucks and children burning themselves. But whatever happens, we're going to auction this picture. And any money we raise is going to be given to the children's burns trust, which are doing excellent work for a very good cause. And I do think there are some synergies between their campaigns to get people drinking hot drinks responsibly and Gray's campaign to have hot stoppers in all Starbucks in the UK. Yeah, I think it's brilliant, Brady. I think it's brilliant. We're raising money for a good cause, hot stopper awareness. I have not spoken to children's burns trust, by the way. They're not like endorsing us or anything. They don't even know the money's coming. I'm just going to donate the money to them when we've got it. So don't think that they're their rabble rousing with us against Starbucks. But if we're going to rabble rouse, they may as well get a few dollars out of it. And if you tried to call them and explain what the situation was, I think that might be a rather long phone call. We'll just send them a link to the podcast and they can make what they want of it. Yeah, so you're going to put the link up on eBay. Yeah, it'll be in the show notes. It's for a good cause, raising money for the UK burn center and the winner gets the Mona Lisa of fractures. Signed by you, signed by me. And we will be letting Starbucks know that we have done this. Yes. Hot stopper awareness. Hot stopper awareness. So, Grey, I know you're not a news hand, but maybe because you bit of a science geek, you saw there was a story this week about NASA yet again announcing water on Mars. I did see this on Twitter and the way you have started this conversation is exactly the feeling I had, which was everybody was super excited that water was discovered on Mars. I saw people rushing to push out YouTube videos and I said, like, all of this fury over it. And I thought, wait a minute. Again, didn't this happen when I was in high school a long time ago? Like, I swear I remember this exact same thing happening before by NASA. You know I love space and I love NASA and I'm a real space nerd. And I don't want to be like Mr. Pupo. But let's leave the cynical side of this aside for a minute. Let's not talk about public relations. Let's not talk about funding. And NASA always wanting funding and money to justify things and mass things. Let's not talk about the incredible coincidence of this being announced when a big Mars movie is out, which we'll talk about later anyway, which is a wonderful piece of serendipity. I did think that's amazing. I wonder if they held whatever this announcement was until then. I just think NASA is turning a little bit into the boy who cried wolf when it comes to finding water on Mars. And one day some rover is going to go over the crest of a hill and they're going to find a lake full of fish and trees and everything. And they're going to say, you're not going to believe what we found. And we're all going to go, oh, yeah, I found water again. Have you? The rover is going to splash down into the lake and the camera will just be showing all the amazing Martian fish swimming by. And no one will believe. No one will listen. They're going to be going, water, water. And we're going to be, yep, check out the Wikipedia article called Chronology of Discoveries of Water on Mars. No. There is a link in the notes and you will see a great big long. There's a separate article that's just called Water on Mars on Wikipedia. I didn't notice this link. I can't believe this is real. Dating back to Mariner and Viking. And I spoke to some astronomers the other day and they would say, oh, it's different this time. This time the waters, you know, this is a long article. I know. I know you don't need to email me and explain to me why this time's different and it's not like historic. It's time the waters there and all this sort of stuff. You don't need to email me. I know. I still think NASA is turning into the boy who cried a wolf and they need to maybe they're paying for their past sins or something. I don't know. And I know science is a gradual process and the discovery of water may be a series of huge press conferences at NASA. But even me who loves space is getting a bit jaded by it. The only thing that announced more often than water discovered on Mars is Voyager Probes leaving the solar system, which I think the Voyager Probes must be on some kind of rubber band or giant yo-yo because they have left the solar system about 40 times now. Okay, so I don't follow this stuff as closely as you. And I'm just looking through this enormous list of announcements of discovery of water on Mars and about a thousand pictures. So here's my question to you as someone who does follow this more closely. When they have a press conference like this, how do they treat the previous press conferences that have happened? Do they just pretend like it has an occurred or... Well, if they were talking to you or me, I don't know, maybe they'd have some explaining to do. But because they're talking to a bunch of journalists that just want to put water on Mars, they're maybe life on the front page of their paper. I don't think they really need to worry about that very much. Okay, so this is a case of everybody's in on it. It's just a bunch of goldfish with no memories in the audience going, oh, it's found water on Mars, have you? Oh, it's a slow news day, that's good. We'll use that and maybe we could tie it in with Matt Damon somehow. Okay, so that's what's happening here. It's this media cycle. We will publish something that will help you sell newspapers and you don't look too closely at the details or the history of it. This is different this time. You don't need to get angry at Grae and I, but I'm just a bit jaded by it and I'm being grumpy. Call it a paper cut, maybe. That'll justify me being grumpy. But... Oh, I like that. We haven't had a real Brady's paper cut in a while. Well, that's today's paper cut. I like that. So, what's your on Mars? Constant announcements of water on Mars is today's Brady's paper cut. I'm announcing at the end of the section. Too be clear to people. Actual water on Mars, amazing. The paper cut is the constant discovery of the water on Mars. Maybe. I mean, maybe this one is the discovery. Maybe this is the big one. But I don't know. It seems to have died away over the last week or so as it always does. So let's see what happens. Today's episode of Hello Internet is brought to you by Harry's. Harry's offers high quality razors and blades for a fraction of the price of the big razor brands. Harry's is a company that was started by just two guys who wanted a better product without having to pay an arm and a leg. And one of the things that the internet and modern technology allows us to do is to cut out all of the various middlemen. And this is how Harry's makes great razors and can get them to you much more cheaply. Because they own their own factory that makes their own blades and they ship them straight to you. What's not to like? Their high quality precision German blades they're shipped straight to your door. So if you are a social recluse, you don't have to leave your house and possibly talk to someone at the local drug store awkwardly while they unlock the dangerous, dangerous razor blades. And they have a great modern retro design. Now it's not just razor blades, it's the shaving experience. They have a starter kit that you should check out. For 15 bucks, you get a razor, you get moisturizing shave cream or gel, whichever you prefer, and three razor blades. 12 Harry's blades are only 20 bucks and for comparison, the gelette fusion blades which are roughly comparable cost about 41 bucks for 12. So it's half the price. So with Harry's, you get great packaging, nice heavy handles, classy designs, and the convenience and ease of ordering online. Now when you go to Harry's to get your first order, perhaps that starter kit that I mentioned before, you can use the promo code HI to save $5 off your first purchase. $5 off a $15 purchase is a pretty good deal. So go to harries.com, check them out, get some razor blades, and get your face nice and smooth. Buy weekly weigh-ins. Well, there's no surprise here. You know exactly what's going on. Grey, I have not looked at the grey, but I have no idea what your status is. I don't know if you've lost or gained weight. I have no idea what you're about to announce. See, I guess this is one of the many cases that comes up between us all the time, where each of us is not able to understand the mind of the other because... If you were... That's basically the subtitle of Hello Internet. Hello Internet. To-do's talking, neither understanding the other. That might be the growing title of our show. Subtitle of our show. Plus flags. If you were publishing your weight on Twitter every day, there is no way I would not be following it. There is no way I wouldn't have my own spreadsheet of scrapes data from your Twitter feed to compare constantly against mine. That's because you're obsessed with me. That's right, Brady. I'm totally obsessed with you. You're lucky I'm not in the tree outside your house with my binoculars trying to see how much you weigh when you're doing it in the morning. I don't know that you're not. You don't. Yeah, maybe I do know exactly how this is going. Since the last podcast, what has been your change in mass? I am down 1.8 pounds, which comes out to be 0.8 kilograms. And Brady. Since the last podcast, my mass has decreased by 2.7 kilograms. Whoa! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's the all-time record. I have been in advantage because I'd kind of not been working very hard, so I'd got myself into a bit of a state. But I have hit the calorie counting hard. I've been doing a bit of running. I've made a bit of an effort, and I'm feeling pretty good about it. I mean, that's basically 6 pounds. That's amazing. Well, how does Niles, mate? This is the top record, and you blew my last week one, which I thought was amazing. 4.4 pounds. You blew that out of the water. You absolutely blew that out of the water. Well done, Brady. You were work the based. You were work the dieting based. Yeah, I apparently did. So you're crediting it to calorie counting? Is that what you're doing? Calorie counting, exercise. The fact that I had put on a bit too much weight that put me over to start with and being hard as Niles, yeah. Well, we all can't be as hard as Niles as you. That's a thing that's just intrinsically part of what you are. I have found it very motivating. I'm now thinking, because I'm going to the US in three weeks, I'm thinking if I could get to a certain target and wait by then, I can then set myself a golf staying at that weight while I'm in the US and things like that. So it's quite, it's quite, I'm quite pleased. I don't know. I don't know. These things with me sometimes I just lose interest and it could fall apart. But as of today, I'm thinking, wow, that worked. I'm going to crack on. I have done it successfully before doing this. So it's making me think, hmm, maybe. I'm really proud of you, Brady. Thanks. I'm still not going to start a bot. I figured you're not going to start a bot, but no, that's absolutely, that's absolutely great. I'm really happy about it. And now this gives me a chance to pull out my suspicion slightly that I was going to mention earlier, but I felt slightly sabotaged on this round because of this podcast. I went to see not one, but two movies. And I would find life not worth living if I couldn't go to a movie theater and not eat popcorn and other junk while I'm there. And so for this podcast, since the last time we did the weigh-in, I went to the movies twice and I've probably been to the movies five times in the last five years. So I definitely way overindulged at the movies to the point where I felt the need to make a note on my spreadsheet so that people would understand what happened to the spontaneously gain some weight. One of those movies I had no intention of seeing, which is Everest. And I was honestly thinking, I wonder if Brady's trying to sabotage me by convincing me to go to Everest. But the thing is, I'm still quite pleased that I was able to have two days where I told myself I was going to blow it and still be down overall. Like I'm pretty happy about that. That is true. But I am, I am super impressed by your weight loss. Thank you. If you don't have a few naughty days, then you know, life's not worth living. So you've got to give yourself naughty days as long as you get right back on the horse. Yeah, I wouldn't call them naughty days because that's obscene. You do have to have times where you can feel alive. My feeling that I was able to be down at all with two ridiculous days is pretty pleasing. But this is great. Every weigh-in that's down is a victory. So good stuff. Now, speaking of weigh-ins, you know how when I say something and I say that I haven't told you about and like I've got a picture or something, you get really nervous. Yeah, yeah, I always do. All right. Well, you're about to get really nervous. Okay. That doesn't help, Brady. No, no, no. This is not going to help, but just hold onto your butts and you'll get through the other end and everything will be all right. Because I have an exclusive photo people. I have a photo of a CGP-Grey weigh-in. And while I send this photo to Grey, which he's a... I am like, now here's the thing, Brady. Yeah, but... Before I made a joke about standing outside your window, watching you weigh yourself. Exactly. Now I'm wondering, are there cameras in my house? You made reference to last time not knowing what I'm up to without cameras. Yeah. What have you done? Things are about to get kind of weird. So, okay, let's move on with this. While I send Grey a photo of the CGP-Grey weigh-in, we are going to cut to some sound effects, which we'll give you, because I haven't just got pictures. I have audio of this weigh-in. So... The hell are you doing? So you listeners can enjoy the audio while I send the picture to Grey and all will be revealed in just a few seconds time. What the hell is this, Brady? Queue the sound. Here comes the picture, Grey. BELL RINGS Yeah, 8205-830 and the body-conditioned score of this penguin is pretty good. I think it's ideal, so 5 out of 9. And... It's so pretty. Oh, it's nice. Oh, no! I think I'm going to get it. No, no. I find it easy. I've got more control of it. Yeah. You'll check the feek, sometimes they get bumbled foot, but... What else? I pre-england. These can get pre-england abscesses, so... Ah! Jesus. Jesus, Brady. Okay, can I tell you something? Yeah. Can I tell you something? Yeah. I just wanted to pull up, because I was curious. My half-a-watch heart rate is 115 beef per minute right now. Just waiting for whatever the hell is coming through from Brady Land. You know what comes through? C-G-P-Grey the penguin. Which I'm presuming, because I have no idea what you're up to. I'm presuming you had penguin noises playing in the sound effect. No, no. I've got a video of the whole thing. So what people just heard. So they knew before you. Right. They knew before you. Okay. It was C-G-P-Grey the penguin had his big health check the other day. And the people, which included a way in. And the people at Bristol Zoo recorded it for me. How is that little penguin doing? Well, he is... I don't want to speak ill of anyone. But some of the people helping me out with the communications at Bristol Zoo have not moved as quickly as I would like. So they sent me this footage and said, oh, someone would be in touch this afternoon to explain it to you and give you all the details. Nothing. I've sent all these follow-up emails. I mean, it's not like we're like major benefactors of the zoo now. So... So I actually don't know what he weighed. I don't even know if he's a heirishie yet. We still don't know what gender he is. I think the gender test was part of this process. So what I do... All I'll say is C-G-P-Grey the penguin. From the photo. Looking pretty good. Looking pretty solid. And also looking much more like a penguin. Yeah. Because last time he was all brown. He was still like... He looks like... He looks like his parents now, doesn't he? They grow up so fast, don't they, Brady? For people who have not or cannot see the picture, basically the penguin is like... It looks like it's hung itself. It's sort of hanging from a noose. But the noose is like under its wing. And obviously they just dangle it to figure out what it weighs. And it was weighed back in May. And I think it weighed about 2.9 kilograms then. I don't know what it weighs now. I do know that its body condition was 5 out of 9, which apparently is good. That's what it was supposed to be. It was checked for bumble foot and it had some mild thing on its foot, but it was okay. There was some mild bumble foot, okay. There were no abscesses on its preening glands. And the eyes and the mouth were checked. And I also learned from watching the video that penguins don't like humans fiddling around with their mouths. Who is a fan of someone else fiddling around with your mouth? Shoveing their fingers in your mouth? Nobody. Grey, now you're being naughty. I am only being naughty if that's the kind of thing that you're into, which you have just revealed your handwriting. So penguin 820583, named CGP Grey in honor of CGP Grey, has had its health check. I still don't know if it's a boy or a girl. There is still much information that is unknown, but watch this space. So look, even the penguin has weigh-ins. He's got to go in the opposite direction. He's got to put on some weight, gain some muscle, drink some protein shakes. Only to a certain point. Yeah, of course. Of course only to a certain point. That's how that works. Yeah. I don't want to hear CGP Grey, the penguin suddenly making excuses that I had to go to the movies too many times. I'm not making excuses. I'm not making excuses. I walked into that theater. This wasn't one of these things where it's like, oh, I fell down on the job and I'm really ashamed of myself. It's like, no, I'm walking into this theater and I'm understanding what's happening. And I'm going to pay the consequences. In terms of weight and, as I have discovered, if you don't eat many carbs, your body sometimes reacts very poorly to a sudden influx of popcorn. And I learned that the first time at the first movie, and then a week later, I walked into the second movie and said to myself, I'm going to pay these consequences. I'm not going to sit in this movie theater and nod to popcorn and damn the gastrointestinal repercussions. Do you know, at the end of Everest, I decided, because where I saw it is right next to a five guys, like Burger joint. So at the end of the film, I decided, I'm going to treat myself. I'm going to blow the calorie budget today and go and get myself a hot dog. And I'd like, I'd steal it myself. I'd mentally prepared myself for the naughtiness. And then I got to five guys and the cue for a hot dog was so long that I couldn't do it. It was like, I would have died in that cue. This would kill us. The cues, the cues, that is not fast food. I don't know. I know this stuff's good and I do like it, but I've got to sort that stuff out, man. It's not supposed to be fast food like McDonald's is fast food. I know, but and I know you've got to wait for them to cook up, but you shouldn't have to wait 20 minutes to order it. Well, I mean, this is how popularity works. They're popular. They make good stuff. They are perhaps the only good burgers available in the whole of the United Kingdom. That's a big call. Yeah, it is a big call, but I have spent years, I just realized, it's going to say, I have spent years in London, which again, in my brain is like the whole of the United Kingdom. I was searching for a good burger and it was like Jesus descended from the heavens when five guys opened their burger place in London. And I have to say one of the main advantages of doing a low carb diet is that technically a five guys burger without the bun instead in a weird thing called a lettuce wrap, which does take some getting used to is still a okay and is still on the menu. So I can actually eat five guys burgers on my diet, which I'm pretty happy about. Because again, makes life worth living. I don't feel like a starving rabbit all the time. Could we do a few listener emails? Yeah, yeah, listener emails. Okay. First of all, I mean, we don't always answer questions, of course, but there was just a question that just tickled me. So I and it was a good one for you. So I thought I'd put it to this comes from Tassos. As a big fan of Halloween, Internet, I'd love to hear your opinion and grays, I guess, on my, I mean, let's be honest. He only wants yours. I don't know why he wrote it like that. On my country's flag. I am from Cyprus and I personally think our flag isn't that good. It would be great if you two could share your thoughts on the podcast. Yeah, and I know the Cyprus flag off the top. Of course we do. We're flag nuts. We don't even have to look at it to talk about it. Yeah, I'm pulling it up just to make sure I get all the details right. Okay. But, uh, make your first Brady. What do you think about the Cyprus flag? Do you know what? I shouldn't like it, but I do. Yeah. Yeah. And I think before we describe what it looks like, maybe we should discover it looks like first. That's only fair, isn't it? How would you describe the Cyprus flag? Well, you don't, don't, not how would you describe the Cyprus flag? The Cyprus flag is all white background. And then it has the island of Cyprus in orange in the center as in the shape of the island of Cyprus. Quite, quite detailed, too. Quite detailed map of it, like, you know, the coastline. Yes, it is not simplified at all. It is very detailed Cyprus. It's like a, it's like someone took the outline of a topographical map of Cyprus. And then they colored it in an orange. And then below it, it has a green, green olive branches. And the same kind of branches that they use for, like, oh, this is an award-winning film, right? And they put the little olive branches below it. That's a bit what this looks like. It's not on the sides, but it's, it's below and kind of reaching up around Cyprus a little bit. That's what the flag looks like. Yeah, a little, a little lower london aeth or something. Yes, a loral, thank you. That's the word I'm reaching for. And that's sort of, yeah, that's a green color, of course. So my view on the Cyprus flag is it should not be liked. It should not be considered a good flag. But I do like it. And I think, I think the reasons are, it's just kind of iconic for me. It's always been the kind of oddball. It's always been the weird one that has its own map on it. And a bit like how you could have a group of friends and you just got one weird friend that always wears a top hat. Like you accept you have that one weird friend. So when you look at a whole bunch of flags, I think there is room for a few weirdos. Like you can have an appol with their weird triangles and they can be the oddball that wants to look different with its shape. And you can have Cyprus as the one oddball that wants to have the map and that. And I think if everyone started doing it, it would be unacceptable. But it's okay if one does it. And Cyprus got in so they can have it. Well, Cyprus isn't the only one. No. Flag of Antarctica has Antarctica on it. Well, that's different. And I'm sure there are. How is that different? Well, Antarctica is not its own thing really, is it? Okay, it's not the only one anyway. But Cyprus is, Cyprus is the guys who got it for me. It feels like they own it. Or is it, or maybe what I'm saying is this is one of those flags that wraps around on itself? Yeah, that it passes the Maryland point. Yeah, it passes the Maryland point and it's so bad that it becomes good again. Because it does look like someone with a not much style designed on MS paint. And then thought, let's base the flag somehow on this and someone didn't get the memo and thought that was the finished flag. Yeah, I'm not a fan of the Cyprus flag. But I'm looking at this flag and I'm realizing that I am... I am unfairly biased against this flag right now for a reason that is going to sound crazy. But I'm really disliking the Cyprus flag not so much because of what it is. But because it's making me think of all of the apps on my iPhone in the past several years that have transitioned into app icons that have a central logo on a white background. I have so many apps on my phone that have done this and I just think it looks hideous. And so now I'm looking at this Cyprus flag and just thinking, oh, you look like these app icons I have to deal with. Where it's a bunch of white backgrounds with a central logo and I don't think it looks good. So I'm feeling unfairly harsh against the Cyprus flag. It's not fair, but that's what it is. I'm just scanning the article about how the flag was designed and a proposed alternative flag that may come into being at some stage in the future. And it's pretty fascinating, like any flag stuff. Oh, yeah, maybe this is a topic for another day. But if you go and have a read of the Wikipedia article, we don't want to get bogged down by the Cyprus flag. Because that eats into good New Zealand flag time. Yeah. No, there's always stuff to talk about with flags. I think you could make this flag way better if you just stylized the island slightly in my vector drawing programs. There's a command which is simplify as you can hit. I feel like this Cyprus island needs about four or five levels of simplify. So you could turn it into more of just an abstract shape. Just doing that I think would make the flag much better. Or just go in hard with more detail and put all the towns and topography and everything on there. Like if you're going to be a baby, a grizzly, go all the way. That's actually in some ways it's not a terrible idea. Just make your flag a map. Just go all in. Alright. So, and let's quickly crack on to things that people do while listening to the Hello Internet podcast corner. This I had an email from Rob who talks, who apologizes for not flying fighter jets or driving road trains. I'm a senior in high school currently applying to several universities to write the many required tedious essays. I listened to hi and the words fly by one prompt for the University of Southern California asked my favorite thing on the internet. And I naturally chose your wondrous podcast. I was listening to Hello Internet while writing about Hello Internet and remembering my favorite parts of Hello Internet. It gave me a smile. That's from Rob. Did you have to write like essays supplying to universities where you talk about stuff like that? Sorry, my brain is just blown because I cannot imagine me. I cannot imagine listening to a podcast while trying to write anything. No, I know. I couldn't either. I couldn't possibly do that. And I cannot imagine that this person can do it either. Well, maybe Rob can maybe Rob should say in his applications. By the way, I'm writing this while listening to a podcast and the people at the University will be so impressed by that. That's how he'll get a place. Well, it depends on the quality of the essay now, doesn't it? Yeah. Because they might say, oh, this makes sense. Yeah. Right when he gets at that line. That's true. Maybe he's writing it in crying. Did I write it? All I can remember is that my application to university was different because I was going on a different track where in New York state, if you knew which university you wanted to go to, which college you wanted to go to, they had a way that you could apply to just one school way early in the year. Okay. And I did that system. But I don't remember really what the application was like. I just remember that I was accepted to it sometime in, and I want to say late November, early December, it was before Christmas. And so then I spent the whole rest of my senior year feeling like, ugh, what's the point of this? Like, can I go on to college already? Why do I have, I've been accepted into university. And it was a huge, it was a huge relief while everybody else was stressing out towards the end of the year about the university applications. And I already had it sorted. But the trade-off was it did make senior year rather boring and probably feel twice as long as it should have. I mean, you're also an exception because you're on an athletic scholarship, obviously. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was, I mean, you were tossing out between whether to even go to university or just sign that NFL contract. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the pros could have been a whole different life if I had been in the pros, if I had played in the Super Bowl. Yeah. And one, if you had to take in that arrow in the knee, hey. No, Brady, you're not allowed to make that joke. Wow. I was trying to, you know, I was just trying to show that I'm, you know, in touch with whatever. No, listen, listen, the very fact that you made that joke that shows exactly how out of touch you are. That is a thing that got so beaten to death that it is forever banned from all jokes for all of the rest of the time. Okay. Well, I have been suitably reprimanded by the joke police. Can we move on to that? You know me, I like things that are retro. I'm going to, if you're not careful, I'm going to start a campaign to bring it back. And by the end of the week, we're going to have arrow in the knee, hello internet t-shirts. So just watch your step. How can it happen? You can't stop me. You can't stop me. I've shown already. Here's another email. This can't work with power. I'm not drunk with power. The internet is just bloody wild west. Anyone can do what they want. In fact, I didn't talk about that when we talked about the t-shirt thing or the t-booting that was going on, where people just start there. People just take your design of a t-shirt and start selling it as well. It was crazy. Those swamp-in and rice-wret t-shirts, other people were just saying, oh, that's a nice design. This put slap was trying to slap it on t-shirts and sell it. It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy, but they didn't sell any t-shirts. No, no, no, but let me ask you this for a second. Let me, let me, on that subject, on the subject of people who do dodgy things. It could be free booters. It could be T-booters, like I just spoke about. GIF booters. People who are basic, you know what I'm talking about. People who are taking things and trying to make a quick buck by riding on other people's ideas or popularity. And there are many, many ways to do this. And it's just a part of life and it's become an even bigger part of life because of the internet. Right. The thing I was just thinking the other day in a quiet moment is there are people who almost make their living in this way. But there are still people who like eat hamburgers and walk the dog and love their family and go to the movies and have feelings, right? They're human beings. Right. Of course. What do they, what do they feel about their job? If your job is stealing other people's stuff and trying to make money out of it quickly. Like, do they feel bad? Or do you think they've created a paradigm in their mind where it's like this is completely justified? Or is it like their guilty secret and everything else about them is fine? But this is just a dodgy thing they do. Or do you think they sort of think like have they convinced themselves this is okay? Do you ever think about them as people like that? These naughty people who we often talk about in the podcast. Do you ever think like, you know, they're just like they're probably having cuddling their dog at the moment. I have never literally thought, oh, they're probably cuddling their dog at the moment. Here's another difference between you and me braiding. I may be wrong about this because I have track record of being wildly wrong about what you think about things. But as an outside observer, it seems to me that you and some other people that I know get really, really emotionally involved in this about, I'm very, very angry about infringements on various intellectual materials, intellectual property materials, I should say. And I can totally understand that feeling because I think the best way to explain it to someone who doesn't create things for a living on the internet is when you see people do this, I think the best comparison is the feeling of somebody else in school cheating off your test. A sort of powerless frustration, but it's also a weird situation because in some ways you haven't lost anything really. Like nothing, there's nothing less out. Nothing has been removed from you, but it still feels unjust. I think that that's the kind of feeling of it. I don't totally agree that nothing's removed from you, but I think that is probably one of the nearest comparisons you can make. Yeah, it's the nearest comparison possible. And again, this is the whole reason why you originally invented the word free-booting. Is this point of disagreement between us? Yeah. You feel that it's much closer to stealing. Yeah. And every time you say the word stealing, I cringe because I just can't ever think of it that way. Because I am less emotionally involved when these things happen. It's still frustrating, and it's more frustrating the larger that the institution is. But for example, the tea-booting, which happened recently with the rice rat and the swamp pen, I gave that basically zero seconds worth of thought because my perspective on it was, oh, someone's trying to rip off the t-shirt designs, and they've sold none, and I care exactly zero. It doesn't really phase me, and so I end up not really thinking about the person very much. The closer comparison is I do wonder about people whose lives or livelihood is based to some degree on deception and trickery. And I do wonder how do they think about their lives? And I just presume that they have built a mental model where they are acting in an appropriate way. Because nobody ever thinks that they are the bad guy in their own life. I don't even think that talking about people in terms of bad guys or good guys makes sense. We are all good people under some circumstances, and we are all bad people under other circumstances. Okay. Interesting. Do you not agree with that? Do you think there are good guys and bad guys? Yeah, I do. I think there is... You probably, I think there is right and wrong. Anyway, I just want to get into it because... Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Bad guys are people who do wrong, and good guys are people who do right. That's just... I just want to back up a second there because you always do this to me pretty. In no way am I arguing for the non-existence of good things and bad things, right? I'm arguing people's actions are heavily influenced by the circumstances that they find themselves under. And that even varies from person to person and day to day. Yeah. Just to be clear, torturing someone is a bad thing. And someone who commits torture to me is very likely to be someone who I'd be quite comfortable calling a bad guy under many circumstances. But that's exactly it, right? You can imagine circumstances where you wouldn't be immediately assuming that the person engaged in torture is a bad person. We can construct easily a scenario under which you would think that. Yeah, you can construct a lot of things to justify a lot of things. But let's crack on. You're making sense. I'm not disagreeing with you. Although I do disagree with you a bit. No, disagree with me, Brady. This is good. This is good. It is good, but we got... We'll just go with it, Brady. Go with it. What do you mean? Grey, you told me it was my job today to keep us on schedule and get to the main part of the podcast. I feel I would be failing if we start a discussion about... We just found the main part of the podcast. No, we have not found the main part of the podcast. Let's do this another day. The main part of the podcast. We've got to review these two movies. All right, we'll move on. But we've been going for like an hour and 50. We can move in, that's fine. That's fine. Go ahead. No. I'm sure the people are interested in that. I'm not in the mental state to talk about the fundamentalness of right and wrong tonight. You were the one who brought up. What do I think about people in their internal lives and rightness and wrongness? I was just having like a passing thought about someone cuddling a dog. No, okay. Well, we'll do what you want. We'll do what you want. It's your show, Brady. I guess we'll go on. All right. Good. Now, I don't know if this was deliberate or not because the person who sent it was Dutch. This comes from Nenke. This was a very good subject field to get my attention. Job as well listening to Hello Internet, Cricket, Penises, Dear Brady, I've been a faithful Hello Internet listener from the start of the podcast and I would like to tell you about the work I do while listening. I'm an MSc student in evolutionary biology and I listen to Hello Internet when I have to do tedious and sometimes boring work. I'm currently preparing hundreds of Alpine bush crickets to go into the collection of a Dutch Natural History Museum. This involves piercing them with a needle and positioning them with more needles for support. However, I also need to take out their genitals. So you could say I'm fiddling with bush cricket penises while listening to your smooth silky voices. Why does he take out the penises? I did ask this question and I actually engage in a bit of dialogue with Nenke. It turns out the penises are taken out because they are the best way to determine what species of cricket it is exactly because apparently these vary from species to species. If you are interested, great. I can now furnish you with various diagrams of cricket penises that have been sent to me, showing said differences. And also, Nenke then sent me some fabulous microscope pictures of cricket penises. And we will share some of these in the show notes for people who wish to see them. Okay, but wait, why does he have to remove it though? Why can't he just examine the cricket penises in situ as it were? If the penises the best way to identify the cricket and he's removing them, this is like you're taking all the labels off of the very items that you are trying to archive. You should leave the labels on. Great, that's an excellent question. I just replied, why do you need to remove the genitals? Nenke replied, to determine which species it is. They look quite alike, but their genitals can be different. Some scientists decided that is what made them different species. I'm going to look at the genetics to see if the species really are different. I've included two pictures of the male genitals I have to remove. These are called titulators. These parts are hard and made of chitin. The rest of the penis is soft, so there is no use in removing that because the shape is lost. It sounds to me like you've got to get in and pull them out because they're in these titulator pincer structures. Wow, this gets pretty hardcore in this email. How many emails did you send back and forth about this? Just a couple. It goes really hardcore into how the males and females have naughty time together. It sounds like it's quite a bruising affair. What do you think about the morality of capturing crickets for museum study and preservation? What do you think about that breeding? Is that a morally right thing to do? Is it a wrong thing to do? I'm all right with it. That ends our listener feedback corner. Regular listeners will know all about our next sponsor. It's Fracture and these guys are great. You just go to their website, FractureMe.com, upload a photo and they print it onto the back of a piece of glass. This glass is then mounted onto some really light kind of foam board which can then be hung on a wall or put somewhere else in your house or your office. They're really light. It's easy to hang them and they look really good. They look the finished deal. Ready to hang right out of the box. This is really something you should consider because it's getting all too common just to leave our pictures buried in our phones or on folders in our computers. Never to be seen again. Choose the best ones, put them somewhere where you can enjoy them. It could be something scenic like that panoramic of Adelaide you took from Mount Lofty Summit over looking the mighty black stump. It might be a personal shot. Like you and Gray posing in front of the Clifton suspension bridge. Wasn't that a nice moment? Or maybe a favourite astronomy photo? How about the Crab Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope? That's a great one. Now as I record this in October you should be paying special attention because now is when you should start thinking about Christmas presents. Not on December 23 like I do. But don't think you can just put in a quick order at the last minute because they are very popular especially at this time of year and all their orders at their Florida factory are hand assembled. So if you're too late you might miss out. I think it's an absolute no-brainer. You're probably right now maybe even sitting at a computer. You could knock off all your Christmas presents in one fell swoop. You've already got all your favourite pictures there. Fractureme.com just a few keystrokes away. You don't even have to stop listening to the podcast. You can keep listening and place your order. That's how easy it is. Now if I haven't sealed the deal yet, how about this? You're going to get 15% of your first order if you use the code HelloInternet when you check out. Fractureme.com use the code HelloInternet. They'll know you came from here. Great service. Our thanks for their support. Do it for your family and do it for yourself. Your own stress free Christmas. Get it out the way now. Is this the time where we talk about spoilers and tell people what course of action they need to take? People are very funny about these moments where we review things. And this seems to cause a real speed bump in people's Hello Internet listening. So what are we going to say here? This is why if we are talking about stuff that is in the world of spoilers, we put it at the end of the show. So if you are listening to the show and we're ever going to talk about something that has spoilers, we put it at the end. So we're going to talk about the Martian movie a little bit and we're going to talk about the Everest movie a little bit. So spoilers a hoi turn back if you don't want to. I'm sure I think what's the appropriate naval metaphor? Run a ground on the spoilers, I guess. Yeah, icebergs right ahead. And there was not going to be any little gems and goodness after this. Because I think people are worried that we're going to do the spoilers and then we're going to say something amazing. Like we're going to tell people where they can buy their neatie shirt or something like that. Right now it's just the end of the show. That's all it is. Basically things are going to peter out from here. So if it's a nose, it has a good time to stop. Even for regular listeners. So let's talk about the Martian and Everest. These are two movies that we saw recently. Did you see it through stuffing your face with popcorn the whole time? Honestly, barely. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie because I have to explain a slightly awkward situation. One of the reasons that I saw these movies was because they were both playing at, as I have mentioned on previous podcasts, this fancy movie theater that's nearby me where you can pay about 50% extra on the ticket price. And you get these these nice cozy seats. And it's a much smaller theater. And ever since I went in there the first time I have decided I will never see a movie again unless it is in a similar environment. Right. Because I hate movie theaters. And so had these movies not been playing there, I wouldn't have gone. Okay. However, the one downside of this is that in this movie theater they don't really let you buy a gigantic bucket of popcorn to bring in with you. They have this system where it's almost like you're on an airplane and you know you can press the flight attendant button and to get the person's attention. So there's a button on the seat which brings over a waiter who you then have to tell what you want and then they bring it to you. Right. The thing is you feel a bit awkward when the guy is getting to know what you want before he gets to the seat because you keep saying more popcorn. I know I know that I have seen you four times in this space of this movie and you have brought over these frankly far too small bowls of popcorn. But I'm going to keep asking for another one. I was going to say how small these containers or how much popcorn do you eat? The containers are small and my hunger is large. Popcorn is one of those foods that it does absolutely nothing to say C.H.U. It's just a positive feedback loop of wanting to eat more. Do you go sweet or savory? Salty popcorn. Salty, okay. That's the only way to go. I used to go to the movies with someone who would pour a packet of motases into that popcorn. That was quite a nice mix. That works quite well. I can see that working. The other complicating factor here is that in this theater you can get an alcoholic drink. I think this is nice. Maybe this is more common in Europe than it is in America. But this is the only time I've ever had a drink with watching a movie. This also just means that my judgment is additionally impaired. So that any restraint that I may have had just goes totally, totally out the window. Because it's like, yeah, keep bringing those martinis over. Yeah, more popcorn buddy, just keep it coming. This is my experience of the movies. They're going to be glowing reviews. Oh man, I loved it. I loved it so much. It was my favorite movie ever. Maybe we should talk about it now because in addition to my enormous gluttony, there is one other common experience to these two movies, which was watching a movie in 3D. Right. Now, did you watch the movies in 3D? I watched Everest in 3D and I watched the Martian in 2D. Do you have any thoughts on 3D movies, Brady? I do not like them. Okay, why don't you like them? Tell me. I find it an unnecessary gimmick. I spend the first 20 minutes of the movie thinking about issues of 3Dness. Before I kind of eventually suspend 3D, believe it or whatever you call it, when you no longer notice the 3D. Occasionally, as occasionally things will still come along that will then jolt me back. It could be just some string or ribbon hanging from the tent. It's like, oh, this is 3D. I wonder how they film that. I wonder what this looks like with my 3D glasses off. I also sometimes think they look a bit like a bad photo shop where someone has defocus to the background way too much. So I find it distracting. It doesn't ruin the movies for me. And I occasionally find things I like about it. But given the choice, I will choose 2D. What about you? I had never seen a 3D movie until the Hobbit, which we talked about many podcasts ago. That was the first time I ever saw a 3D movie. And then I saw the Martian and I saw Everest as well. My expectations were that I would totally, totally hate 3D. I was kind of surprised that I don't hate it. But I also am completely baffled about the whole 3D thing. Because it obviously has to add more trouble when they're filming the movie. And my perspective as an audience member is, this adds exactly nothing, 95% of the time. That the experience is not enhanced by 3D. I don't find it distracting the way that you do. But it's like most of the time I just don't even notice this. I just don't think about this at all. And the only time I notice is when something screws up the effect. If you are a director, you have to think differently about filming a movie in 3D. Because the thing that will ruin the 3D effect every time is, let's say you have a character in the mid-ground who is in focus. And closer to the camera, but on the edge of the screen is someone in the foreground who is out of focus. The way the 3D looks in the movie, there's a thing that's clearly wrong. Because the person in the corner is supposed to be closer, but the 3D effect falls apart at the edge. And so every time you do a classic like AB camera shot of looking over someone's shoulder as you're talking to another character and swapping back and forth, like you just can't do that in a 3D movie. It looks wrong every single time. So I just don't know why they bother with 3D movies. I just think it adds nothing and it is occasionally distracting. What says are you agree with me? But what I mean is, I'm not constantly sitting there thinking like this is awful. I'm not constantly thinking it's awful. I'm just distracted by it in much the same way you said. Like technical aspects of it distract me. Like what you just said, I think, oh, I wonder how they did that. Or I wonder if that's not working properly because of this. Maybe it's because of my job making videos. I'm a little bit more interested in it than other people maybe. But I just, like I said, it doesn't ruin the movie. It just doesn't enhance it much and it distracts me because it gives me all these other things to think about. That's your curse being a video maker. I never think of the technical aspects. Well, you're having just talked about A.B. shots and the edge of the thing. It sounds to me like you're looking at it like a video maker. The only reason I ever think of A.B. shots is because of the red letter media videos. It's camera A, camera B. That's that we shoot a movie. And then I only other, complained about 3D movies is it always feels like they're a little too dim. I know there is a technical aspect where it's hard to make those movies bright. Anyway, I just like, if I could watch movies in 2D just like you, I would definitely take it. I will give a slight note jumping ahead to Everest and say that of the movies that I have seen in 3D. Everest did have a few shots where it felt like, oh, okay. This is cool to see in 3D. I have a sense of this mountain and this place. I'll pay that. Overall, I would say like movie makers, you should pass. You should totally pass on this. Basically, so people at home understand we were just going to do the Martian. But I went and saw Everest because as regular listeners to the podcast, we know I'm really interested in Mount Everest. And I've been to Basecamp a couple of times and I always tell Gray he should come to Basecamp with me on a trip. So I'm a real Everest nut and we've talked about it on the podcast. I went and saw it and then I said to Gray, if we're going to do the Martian, why don't we do Everest as well? Would you be willing to go and see it and you added it to your list? You said, okay, and you went and saw it. It was going to be the Martian. I don't ever, it probably wasn't on your to-do list, but you did it for me. Definitely not. Definitely not. Let's talk about the Martian. We have reviewed the book, of course, as people will know. Gray was very negative about it. I am not negative about the book, the Martian. But people seem to think I was because I jumped on with you and gave it a few punches in the ribs as well. But I remember, I did like the book and I have recommended the book previously. So I am not anti the book as much as Gray. No, you're not. Someone did a Photoshop from that episode where we talked about the Martian and they put two quotes from us on the cover as though they were reviews. I cannot remember what your quote was, but they selected the little segment where I said, it wasn't bad, but it would have rather read almost anything else. It's a TV Gray. I was like, oh, I kind of summed it up. And yeah, of the two of us, I was definitely much more horse. So I walked into this. I made a prediction on Twitter right before I went into the theater, which was that I predicted that this would be a much better movie than it was a book. And since I know you don't like it, when I build to something, I'll just reveal it ahead of time that that prediction was definitely correct. I watched the Martian and even had I not been drinking alcohol, I would have thought this is a fun movie. I like this movie. I think it definitely exceeded expectations. And this was an interesting case because I think I liked it way more because I read the book. And I kept finding myself watching various scenes and glad that I had a lot of the background from the book enhanced the scene a little bit. And I suspected that might happen just being constantly aware of the book versus the movie. So I actually brought along my wife in no small part because she was super excited by the trailers and she wanted to see the movie. But I also wanted to use her as like a control in an experiment. Yeah. She had not read the book. I wanted to see how does she react to this movie not having the background information. There were a few times in the movie where I was wondering, I was trying to look over at her face and try to see, is she confused now? I think maybe the movie is skipping over too much detail. Maybe this isn't obvious to someone who hasn't read the book exactly what's going on. But her as the control was also very successful. She liked it a lot. She thought it was fun and she had a great time. And she never felt like they were skimming over stuff or she was missing, missing detail that was necessary. It's funny, I took my wife as well who also had not read the book. Oh yeah. And I was the same on the drive home. I said to her, you know, I said, you haven't read the book and you're not really into Mars and NASA. Did you feel like there were times where you wish more was explained to you or you didn't understand what was going on? And she said, not once. Not once was that a problem. I think I probably came across rather condescending. But she was just like, no, no, it was fine. I followed at the whole time. I did a similar thing where at one point as we were walking home from the movie, I asked my wife, I said, did you understand what was going on with the different Aries missions? Did you understand why there was a spaceship already on Mars that he was going to and how that got there? And she gave me a look like, what do you think I'm stupid? Do you think I can't follow the movie plot? And I was like, okay, very sorry. I regret even asking that question. So I think we may have had a similar experience there. She was taking it as, do you think I can't follow a movie? And I was just overly concerned because when you know all the details from the book, you're aware of how much is being left out versus how much is in there. So yeah, definitely I would say way better movie than book. I would recommend the movie. Even though I didn't like reading the book, I am glad to have read the book because it enhanced the experience of watching the movie. I expected to not like it very much. Oh, interesting, interesting. I don't know. And at the start, in the first few minutes, when the big storm happens on Mars, that is sort of precipitates the whole catastrophe. And it was all loud and there was and there was big winds. I was thinking, oh no, this is going to be one of those films that's really loud and noisy and action-packed. And I was feeling a little bit like, oh dear. And that scene was very short and very necessary. And from then on, including that scene and from then on, I thought the film was superb. I've got a couple of mine in it picks to you, but I thought the film was way beyond what I expected it to be. My wife also thought it was really, really good. At the end, she had a big smile on her face and said, I really enjoyed that. So I think it was a total win. I thought the cuts they made, they cut several of the bad things that happened to Mark Watney when he's on Mars, the little catastrophes that keep happening to him. They cut quite a few of the really big key ones that were in the book. I thought those cuts were excellent. Those cuts were good decisions, but I couldn't help but laugh when I realized we'd passed something that we referenced on the podcast. When we were talking about the trailer and all the spoilers. And you said on the last one, oh, they didn't show the scene where the rover flips over as he's going down the ramp in the Martian crater. And he said it's probably because they didn't film that one. And I was like, yep, that's exactly what happened. If they didn't show it in the trailer because they didn't film it. I thought the film had obviously had a slightly different tone to the book, but also it was quite true to the book. It's the things that I liked about the book. I think came through. I think Mark, the character of Mark Watney being funny, came through like his occasional corneaness, his sense of humour, which I think was the key to the success of the book, was also a part of the film that really shone through. I don't know what you thought of that, but I know I liked it and I know my wife really liked the character. He was incredibly likable. And the thing that I thought was the weakness of the book, which was the sort of two-dimensional crappy characters back on Earth and on the spaceship, was corrected in the film, partly probably because they pulled in some pretty heavy hitter actors. They got quality actors to play those roles and I think that really salvaged and improved that part of the film. I told you when I read the book all the stuff set back on Earth, I was like, get me back to Mars, that's where Watney is. But this time I quite enjoyed going back to Earth because I liked the people there. Yeah, the ground cast was really strong. Yeah, I felt one of the things that I guess I didn't think of when I read the book but was really noticeable in the film and maybe I didn't like it that much, was the amount of technology everywhere. It was really, really techy. And of course, I'd future Mars mission will be super high tech because it's the future and already space travel is super high tech. But just kind of the technology everywhere I found a bit. What do you mean just the look of the tech on Mars? Yeah, there were cameras everywhere and gopro everywhere. And to be fair, the use of those cameras in the filmmaking was actually quite clever. The cutting to the GoPro shots and helmet cam and all the CCTV type cameras actually was a really useful filmmaking device. But just that I did find it slightly distracting that they were actually gopro's because I just can't think like what's the battery life on those things? How are they charging? Who's changing those SD cards? I know exactly what a GoPro is. It shouldn't be there. Yeah, so that was just something that I remember occurred to me like I kept being distracted by laptops and computers and technology everywhere. Sometimes when it didn't feel entirely necessary. But the production values on the film were superb. But it looked expensive and it looked like they'd paid a lot of attention to detail making the film. And that old just made the film even better. It was really well made. I found myself a couple of times looking around. Because since I read the book, you know what's happening. And just noticing stuff in the background that I probably would have under normal circumstances watching the movie. And they definitely paid a lot of attention to the details. I really liked even just a lot of the camera overlays. If you looked at them, you could tell some nerd spent a bunch of time making sure that the camera overlays look good that are displaying the scientific information on the side. They definitely were people paying attention to the details who cared. And I always appreciate that kind of stuff in a movie. There's a feeling that kills movies for me, which is this feeling like nobody on this project cares when you just see stuff being sloppy. And this was the total opposite of that. It felt like every little detail of everything somebody thought about. Even the coffee cups on the spaceship is like some prop guy spent a lot of time trying to find the right looking coffee cups for the spaceship. There was definitely some heart put into this movie. Yeah, that Ridley Scott guy. He's got a future. I think he should make more movies. He sometimes makes terrible movies though. Yeah. The last alien one was awful. He had a good day this time. So the couple of nitpicks I've got some but you go first because I imagine that probably won't be dissimilar. I just want to get it on record first though that I did like the tone down Matt Damon humor. I found Matt Damon in this role. He was a better Mark Watney than Mark Watney. That's the way I would put it. I just found him extremely likable in the role. I found that I did not find him corny. He just struck me as a guy with the sense of humor in a bad situation. So yeah, definitely Matt Damon thumbs up. Matt Damon full marks. He did well. I mean, I joke about Matt Damon but he is often very good actor. I think he did a very good job on this one. I really do. He's good. So give me your nitpicks because I only have one which is a ridiculous nitpick. But you tell me what you're saying. I have two minor ones and they both pertain to the ending of the film. I do think they played up a little bit too much the celebrations all over earth at the end. Like, hooray, he's alive. I didn't think they needed to go quite that schmultsy at the end and it felt a bit corny and a bit beneath Ridley Scott to have gone that way. To have gone that kind of let's all celebrate around the world. Everything's great. Hooray. We saved our fellow human. Really? Yeah. I thought it was a bit. I found it a bit cringy and completely unprovoked. My wife said the same thing. Maybe it's just our sensibility but we both thought that the montage of celebrations around the world was a bit made me feel a bit awkward. Then maybe my judgment was severely impaired by this point. You were standing up cheering as well. Yeah. On your third martini in eighth wine as a quick side note. I find movies much more affecting in this special movie theater when I'm also having alcohol. It's like, oh, all your cheap movie tricks. Like they work after a few drinks. Like this is why this is why people do it. Also, I've noticed the same effect happens when I'm in an airplane for some reason. If I want an airplane on a movie, I am way more susceptible to all of the emotional heart-pulling moments or heart-string moments in a movie. I don't know why but I'm just more susceptible under certain environments. But yeah. So the celebrations at the end didn't phase me in the slightest. Oh, I'm happy he's rescued. Of course the whole earth is happy too. I was happy. I didn't mind mission control or celebrating and having their meaningful looks and hugs. But I just thought it was laid on a bit too thick. And my other complaint is sort of similar in general terms. I don't think they nailed the ending. Like a gymnast that does a great routine and has a little stumbles at lands. I thought the ending could have been better. I do acknowledge you couldn't end the way the book. And from memory, the book just ends with what he being pulled into the ship. Right. Yeah, it just ends. He's on board and it's just. And that was a classy ending for the book. And I don't think you could have ended the film that way. I do think because there's so much peril about getting home, I do think we needed for a film we needed to see what knee back on Earth as we did. But I just think I don't know. I'm not saying I've got a lot of better ideas, but I just think the end could have been better. There are a few things about the ending I liked. I liked the moment when all the trainees were jogging past Matt Damon as he sort of sat reflective on a bench and they sort of stopped with the reverence. And I like I liked the idea that when what he does get back to earth, he is this like superhero. He is this Neil Armstrong that everyone wants to meet and hear from. But I just think the ending was a little bit flabby and they didn't nail it. They did well. It didn't ruin it, but they didn't nail it. Yeah, I don't agree with that. It was fine. Yeah. I was watching it thinking I'd probably cut this down by half. Yeah. I think you could do the exact same thing, but just edit it within an inch of its life. And you'd be fine. Because the movie is over. It's like we need to just get out of this theater as fast as possible. Yeah, tie up the loose ends quick smart. And because you know when when Matt Damon then goes into the room with the astronauts and gives them a little lecture, there are a couple of humorous moments. And the end of that same where they all put their hands up is really good. But there was still there was a little bit too much preaching to us, a little bit too much message and you know use your science and use your brain. Yeah, that's already come across in the film. You don't need to hammer that home. We're not idiots. I think you could do that exact same scene, but where where Matt Damon is looking up and the cadets are walking past, you could start the voice over then. Yeah. Show him walking, have a quick ending of it with him talking and then say any questions, hands go up, roll credits. Yeah, yeah. Right. You do it. Do it in a quarter or a half the time. And I think it would be more effective. But it's pretty nitpicky. It is nitpicky. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, yeah, what's your nitpick? Okay, this nitpick is ridiculous because it would not be practical to do this. I kept being distracted by how Martian gravity is exactly the same as Earth gravity. I was just aware of this in all of the scenes when he's moving around or picking stuff up. It's not an unreasonable decision to make that you just can't constantly show that stuff is lighter or that a person would move differently on Mars. But I was just I was really aware of this feeling of it. You just cannot walk like that if you are in point 4G. I don't know. It was something I just kept being aware of in all of these outdoor scenes. But it may be partly because when I read the first book in the Mars trilogy, they are constantly harping on that book about how things are different on Mars, about how people have to walk differently, about how the structures can be built differently, about how you move things around differently. And so I was just I was just aware of that. I think had I been directing the movie, I would probably have made the exact same decision to know with the special effects team of like, look guys, we're not even going to try because it's too much of a hassle and we'll never get it right all of the time. So we're just we're just not going to bother. But that was my nitpick was no Martian gravity special effects. That didn't bother me in the slightest, but that is perhaps the nitpickiest of nitpicks that I have ever had or will ever have. I mean, that was when the film came at when people, you know how whenever films have this come out, there is obviously all the cheerleading, but then there's also the science community pointing at all the mistakes. That was a bit that was a pretty common thing like I read articles where people were saying, well, the gravity wouldn't be like that. That was like that was that was not an uncommon talking point at the time of the film was released. I don't know this this nitpick to me is almost almost other level of well your average astronaut isn't as attractive as your average person in Hollywood. Right. It's like, okay, but they're making a movie. It's just it's just that you got to change some stuff sometimes. But also I remember the film that I've said before that I think it's the worst film ever made mission to Mars. Right. They tried to be really honest about a few things like when there was a crisis in space and they had to like repair the ship as it was approaching Mars. Because I think I think I did a little little meat meat or hit it or something, but they had I don't remember the plot. On the way to Mars something hits their ship and there's like a crisis and they have to like repair it. And they tried to be honest to what like doing space walks would be like and how slow things have to move and how silent things have to be. And it is some of the most tedious, tedious filmmaking in the history of filmmaking. And that made me realize and similarly in mission to Mars when they are making a few last minute changes to their ship and they have to blow something up and do something to help get closer to Mars. To say what they I think they deliberately sped that up a bit and made space walking a bit less realistic just for the sake of the pace pacing and I'm pretty comfortable with it because anyone who has watched a real space walk like on live and asset TV or something like that. Oh my god. It is like having teeth pulled. So you have to you can't you can't be honest about that. I know this is the pinnacle of human achievement in some ways, but it's also so boring. So now Brady, I get the sense that you would love for me to at some point travel to Everest with you. I think going I think it would be a good fun trip. I did it with my brother-in-law. I went to base camp with my I went with my what I went to base camp with my wife the first time and that was the trip of a lifetime. And I later I later on went with my brother-in-law and that was a really good you know really good bloke bonding trip with my brother-in-law as well. And I just think it's a great trip and I'd love to do it with more more friends and you know you're a good friend of mine. And I think there's lots of things about it that would interest you. So I think we should do it one day. I think we should do the trek to base camp. You realize sending me to a movie like Everest. It does not increase your odds of me ever agreeing to this sort of trip. I know that you want to share your Everest excitement with me but I'm not sure that you are able to perceive this movie through my eyes because just as the film was about to start you sent me a text message which was something along the lines of don't forget I only want to take you to base camp. The first 15 minutes of the film is really what that would be like. It's not the whole rest of the movie. Yes. Because after that on you it was going to put the fear of going into it. Right. But the thing about that is I don't think you perceive the first 15 minutes of that movie in the same way that I do because one of the opening shots is a helicopter flying over a slum in Catman do to go to a rope bridge. It's just like no not in a thousand years am I stepping in that helicopter going to that bridge in that country never it says never going to happen. But from your perspective is like oh the first 15 minutes it's like it's like a gentle ride on the ferry go around. What I met yeah okay but what I really meant was the first 15 minutes the first 15 minutes is a semi it was a very accurate depiction of what that walk from look to base camp is like so yes I realize it's scary and there are high bridges and you have to you wouldn't get a helicopter to look like we'd fly but it is not it is not flying that airplane that crashed or they have to you were there that one I'm not saying there are many many obstacles between you and a trip to Everest and it probably will never happen I acknowledge that but but just what I wanted to make sure didn't happen was that all the stuff that happened above base camp on the mountain did not add to those obstacles. The first 15 minutes was upstickly enough okay okay well that's a discussion for many many other days and I'm sure I'm sure we'll both I'm sure this discussion will be continuing until we're both too old to do the trip so and then it will no longer be a problem I'm actually just trying to run out the clock on you here breathing yeah I think we're probably getting pretty close as it is now. Anyway anyway that aside that aside it what I didn't send you to see this as a as part of my campaign or tourist brochure basically I went to see it because I'm an Everest enthusiast and I wasn't going to see it and it just suddenly occurred to me I will have to see this film at some point I may as well see it on the big screen yeah well we had a conversation about this when I went to visit you a while ago yeah and you internally seemed deeply conflicted about whether you should go see the Everest movie yeah and as we were walking around and and you were hemming and hawing and thinking about it my thought was this is a man who doesn't know he's going to go see the Everest movie and quite soon probably you you were quite conflicted about it but it was just inevitable that you were going to go yeah I guess you couldn't not go no that's true and then after I'd say that I thought oh well you know whether you like something or don't like something whenever you've seen something you always want the people closest to you and your friends to see it and so you know I thought I would want my fellow podcast make to see it just so just so I could talk to someone about it right because your wife didn't go to this one she didn't know she didn't say it it's pretty it's pretty hard for us to find good spaces of time we can go to the movies these days we're both pretty busy but and I thought she would like the Martian and I thought she would not like Everest so I I used my wife time on the Martian and I used my personal time on Everest that was probably a good decision probably a good decision there so as as the Everest enthusiast what is your review of this movie well I went in pretty confident that I was going to be disappointed but like anything you kind of you know a lot about or you know more than the average person about you know you're going to pick holes in the movie and it didn't it didn't seem to get a lot of good reviews and there wasn't a lot of hype about it and and I don't know I just I thought it might come across a bit tele movie and a bit crappy so I did go in with low expectations and you know what what I thought it was really good yeah yeah I really liked it it exceeded my expectations all the things I thought it was going to do right and upset me it didn't do it wasn't flawless and there are things I didn't like about it it wasn't like you know it's not it's not my favorite movie ever but I think because my expectations had gotten so low that in fact you know it did really well and if I went in thinking it was going to be the greatest movie ever made I certainly would have walked out I've very disappointed man but because I went in just thinking I'm seeing this almost as a chore and I kept going and I kept going and I was like I'm going to be a little bit more careful to chore and I kept waiting for it to fail and disappoint me by the end I thought good really good really liked it and I give it I really approve of it I give it a thumbs up movie expectations are always so critical the best way to enjoy movie is to think it's going to be terrible yeah that's probably true what about you what's your where do you stand so the ever movie is based on crack hours book into thin air well actually it's not it's it's it's based on that incident that that fame store you said this to me before but I'm so confused by it because I said to you before I went into the movie I said I wasn't this based on crack hours book and you went oh no it's not based on crack hours book and then John crack hours shows up in the movie yeah he's a great doesn't know what he's talking about John crack out besides being a journalist who wrote a book about it was a key character in this is a 1996 I think it was 96 in this 96 disaster and Everest crack hours it was a character so the film is about that incident and therefore John crack out is a character in the film right but he didn't like authorize the film I think he's not a fan of the film and quite a few people depicted in the film or relatives of them and not 100% pleased with this film crack out but he but it's the same incident as the book that he wrote right yeah okay yeah that doesn't mean he that that but basically I think they didn't buy the rights to his book they did say he made no money of it so when you say is it based on crack hours book I would say the answer to that is no it's not based on crack hours book but it's based on the the 96 disaster that crack out wrote about right right but I think we can like the copyright thing before we can fairly assume that the script writers are drawing extraordinarily heavily from his book about this incident I think for legal reason reasons they would say they didn't and to and just quickly there are other books written about this incident like that it's not crack out wrote them the best selling book about it but it's other people have written about it and have different versions of her and so you can very easily describe and write about this incident without using crack hours book of course of course they read everyone's in that book but yeah but I guess that's why I was just so thrown in the movie when crack hour shows up I'm like oh Brady doesn't know what he's talking okay it's like okay you're using this narrow legalistic sense in which nobody cares about like oh yes it's not really based on that book but I'm sorry I probably this is this is your Everest Nurteree showing through it's my Everest Nurteree and our infamous miscommunication of text messages okay so it's based on the 96 disaster and Everest a bunch of people died on the mountain John crack our later who was on the mountain at the time to write a magazine article about Everest climbing ended up getting the story of his life and he survived and wrote a very famous book about it called into thin air right yeah upon which this movie is obviously based okay so I had I had read into thin air as an audiobook actually years ago on a road trip with my wife and we both really liked it because I read it years ago I had a dim memory of the events of what was occurring but it was not like the Martian where I could remember all sorts of details and pick up on little things in the Martian movie that are references to the book like always in a clever they put the Chinese astronaut in the montage at the end for the next scene for the next area's mission like that I was not that level of detail with Everest but I did have a dim notion of it yeah and I would say overall I really like the Everest movie I enjoyed it I had a good time I did not think you would why didn't you think I like it I didn't think the story would speak too much I didn't think you would get you'd be very engaged by the narrative and as far as I know you're not a massive lover of mountains so I didn't I didn't know what you would like about it but I guess I'm about to find out even though climbing Mount Everest is not a thing that I am interested in doing I can completely sympathize with people who have the drive to do something like that yeah and I can understand I can understand wanting to achieve a goal like that and the characters and the people are are sympathetic and you know like the one the one guy who has tried before and hasn't succeeded you you you you want someone like that to succeed so you're naturally on that guy side yeah feel like okay come on we gotta get you to the top of this mountain they did they did a pretty good job didn't they sort of flushing out quite an ensemble of characters quite quickly so you you engage with because the problem with these sort of stories are there are so many people scattered through it and they're all over the mountain and it gets to a point where you're thinking who's who so to get me to get sympathy quickly I think they did that pretty well yeah and they characterize people pretty well yeah and this was even though my wife and I really did like the book hour one complaint about into thin air was there are so many people and John crack our as an author had a bad habit of switching between first and last names right and there's like okay there's too many people already you can't half of the time refer to them by their first name and half of the time by their last name essentially doubling the number of things that I need to keep track of but yeah so the movie had a number of people in it and I think it did a better job of having a sense of who's who and of course doing a good job of picking primary color snow outfits for the main people that you need to keep track yeah they did that actual moving they did that well because I thought often with films like this is very hard to tell who's who and they did that well didn't they like you always even though they're all in these suits and I've got masks and goggles a lot right they did that well letting you know who was who and they also got to take their masks off a lot to have little chats which also kept reinforcing who was who yeah yeah but it so all of that all of that worked really well yeah and yes I found myself I found myself getting wrapped up in in the movie and I enjoyed it the one thing which is very hard to do in a movie and that I remember being better in the book it is that probably about halfway through the disaster when you have people stranded all over the mountain and various things are going on it's hard to have a sense of the relative location of these people yeah and so I was like okay I know where base camp is I know where everyone they're radioing down to is but then okay we're at which camp are they trying to get to is it camp for and then okay we're talking about the top of the Hillary step or the bottom of the Hillary step and when he says he's at the Hillary step they think he's at the bottom but he says it's at the top and that's a big deal and so I'm guessing these must be very far apart but I don't know if you could have stylistically done it but there were a few times I wanted a bit of a bit of a thing like in Lord of the Rings when they get together and they're like hey we need to talk about where every where this battle is going to take place and the camera is going to focus on a map and people's hands pointing I did feel a bit like I needed some someone at some point needed to show me a map of exactly where these things were I mean maybe they could have done a bit of exposition down at base camp couldn't I was saying oh Joe's up there and bills down there but well the thing was they actually had something which I wonder if it got if it got cut but in the base camp section of the movie they had in the background a pinboard with people's photos and they were moving them about where they were on the mountain but the camera never zoomed in and never used that to help me as the as the viewer think of like where are these people but it might just not have worked it might have just slowed things down but I would have honestly even just loved a little overlay on the screen like a heads up display like and someone show me where this is but it just might have been it might have been too distracting so that was perhaps maybe my my main complaint it's hard to me to comment because I do understand all that quite well and therefore you have a ridiculous unfair advantage which is you know exactly where these places are but I actually thought they did that okay like I thought basically what they did was they just stripped it all away and it did get to a point where I felt like they just had base camp which we all knew was far away and nothing to do with anything the summer of man Everest this thing called the Hillary step which was a tricky little bottleneck and then the some medium camp that they were all trying to get back to and I think they did away with camp 4 and camp 3 and camp 2 pretty quickly and there was just this other camp that they were trying to get down to that was safer so I thought they kind of did simplify but you are evidence that they didn't yeah I am aware that they simplified it yeah but yes I would say that it was I don't think you could have simplified it further without losing what's actually happening right without just having to change the whole situation I just would have I could have used a little bit more handholding about the precise locations of these of these various people yeah but I get it that's a relatively minor complaint and it didn't get in it didn't get in the way of my enjoying the movie it was just a bit of like oh something I feel like something missing here slightly yeah I don't know if this next thing is a complaint or not but when I read into thin air it completely changed my opinion of people who climb Mount Everest and took it from the level of say astronauts like people who walked on the moon and people who have climbed Mount Everest are pretty close in accomplishments and it took it down so many notches to basically slightly above fancy adventure holiday that that's where this now ranks in my brain that this is this is a high high on the level of adventure holiday but you know what it's something that if I really wanted to I could prepare for and possibly do yeah way less impressive and the main reason of course is Sherpas right I basically didn't have any notion of Sherpas before I read into thin air and it's because people who climb Everest often leave out this detail about Sherpas I think I may have mentioned on the podcast previously we had a woman who climbed Mount Everest come give a talk at one of my schools and I'm sitting there in the back listening to her give the talk and she gives the impression as though she was there with her ice picks pulling herself up by her arms all on her lo and some making it to the top of Everest and she made a critical mistake which was offhandedly referencing the ropes at one of the point at one point in her talk and a clever girl in the audience picked up on that and asked her who put the ropes in and then she had to explain Sherpas and it was like all of the energy got totally sucked out of the room like oh you're not really climbing this mountain you're following a path that someone has carved for you into this mountain still difficult but not remotely the same as the image that is often portrayed of this I mean that's the real message of the book into thin air and also this movie though I mean this is the 96 Everest tragedy is considered the moment that this was exposed wasn't the fact that taking tourists up the mountain is all well and good and they do just follow a path and hang on to the rope to put it simply but then when things go wrong if you're not a mountaineer and haven't got certain skills then that's that's when those people get found out this is sort of the famous thing isn't it that's the that's that's the moral of the story isn't it yeah that was really the thrust in the book of these people possibly shouldn't be on this mountain and it was the setup of the film I mean it was the the little text at the start we pretty much was about that wasn't it and then we there a couple of failed references to it through the film about you know it's not my style to drag tourists up the mountain like it is you I mean that's that's why Rob Holt dies Rob Holt dies because he he was dragging an amateur up the mountain because that was what he did and that's why they both died so I mean I mean you should come away I don't I don't think that's glossed over by the film oh no I don't think that's glossed over by the film at all but my my reason for bringing up the Sherpas is just that the Sherpas are such heroes that I felt they should have more on screen time like it's obvious that the Sherpas are doing a bunch of stuff but even in this movie this feeling of like I don't think you really understand how much these Sherpas are doing yeah because the camera is focusing on the main characters yeah and they kind of give orders to the Sherpas and then you know the Sherpas are going out and doing stuff and then when they're going to climb like there's ropes and things there again there's not time to show all of this but if anybody gets short-changed relative to the amount of work they're doing it is the Sherpas by by by far that I'm sure of course that's true yeah so more Sherpas than every ever is moving I don't I don't think this film needed more characters I definitely do the best the Sherpas are absolutely heroes of Everest oh yeah without a doubt without a doubt so the only thing I wish I could have remembered the book better when I was watching the movie because in addition to Sherpas are heroes as one of the big takeaways from reading the book my main other memory of reading that book was that this disaster was an excellent example of how a number of very small problems none of which are problems on their own can compound into a total disaster and when I was watching the movie I was I was kind of hoping to be reminded of what the details were of how this went wrong and how this went wrong and how this went wrong and the movie didn't have that and it's it's maybe it's not a fault because again a movie can't possibly cover anything but I did find myself after the movie wondering like I should go back and look up what those details were that like they were they were just slightly short of oxygen at this point and they were just slightly far behind at this point and you know there was just one too many people crossing the gap and like none of these things on their own would have been a problem but all of them together were a disaster at least that's at least that's my memory of the book from a long time ago but I don't know if that actually if that actually was the case I think I think the the movie I have got buried in minutiae if it did that but you're right that there you know a lot of information is lost in this film I think in the movie you got the feeling that this was 95% the storms fault and yeah my my take away from the book was the storm happened but all of this could have been avoidable if these other minor problems didn't also occur and I just think those those are very different feelings to have of like this ever movie in some ways felt like the mountain version of a perfect storm that there like there's a big storm that's coming and it's humans versus the storm yeah and that the book the book's perspective might have been much more that this is a man-made disaster yeah that is a tragedy of small errors yeah it didn't dwell a lot on the folly of humans it did a little bit but not much not as much as the book did the the trek to the mountain at the star I as I pointed out a second ago I particularly enjoyed because it was a bit of a memory lane thing for me and I liked all the shots of the walking and napcheap as I so I was very I felt very nostalgic about that part of the film but I did a couple of nerdy points there obviously like an Everest nerd can sit there and think oh you shouldn't have done that or you should have done that oh I don't like that there was only one real nerdy moment that I that made me unhappy and it made me unhappy because it was so incredibly unnecessary like a lot of things the nerd and you can say can say oh that's not accurate but I know why they did it but this just seems so unnecessary there was a line early on in the film when the rep when the people arrive at base camp and someone says something along the lines of yep it's the same view that George Everest had and that line really bugged me because it didn't add anything unless they wanted to make it clear that oh maybe the thing they were trying to add was that Mount Everest is named after a person called Everest and that's where the name comes from maybe that's the reason the line was in the film but George Everest or Everest is his name is actually pronounced never actually saw the mountain that's quite a famous thing yet alone go to base camp he never even apparently he never even saw it with a telescope for miles away so so to have put that line in almost felt like it was a deliberate wind up because that's like a famous piece of trivia and even if he did see it which I don't think he did even if he did see it he most certainly did not go to base camp I mean you can't see Man Everest from base camp anyway but that's another nerd there anyway yeah see I'm sitting there in the theater drinking in hand upcourt in the other hand thinking oh yeah it's named after a guy okay well then you make you make my point then but another thing before I saw the film I think I had read that Scott Fisher Scott Fisher was one of the the two guides of the two companies both these guys guides died guy called Rob Hole and a guy called Scott Fisher who were leading teams there and I read an article by Scott Fisher's wife before hand it was a very well-written article I will I she's she's very eloquent and has really interesting things to say about it and she's very negative about the film for lots of reasons and one of the reasons she it's really interesting article she also writes a lot about how if you become like a character a character who's famous you lose kind of all rights to yourself and the film company could just say what they want about him with the defense of his a public order so it's a really interesting topic but I won't go down that path but one of the things she said was she was unhappy with the depiction of him and reading between the lines I think she was worried that he was depicted as a bit a bit of a stone or something you know bit of a you know hippie dude who was careless and so I went into the film quite attuned to that and the way that Scott Fisher was depicted he was played by a Jake Gillinghole in the film and I think he was depicted a bit that way as bit of the the wild child and the hippie but I thought he was depicted okay I think the depiction of Scott Fisher whether as accurate or not I mean it could be a million miles from what he was like as a man I don't think I came out of the film thinking really negatively about him I just wanted to say that because I thought it was going to be really unfair on him and make him look like a real idiot and I think I came I came I came out thinking I locked the guy and you know I'm sorry he died I've no idea what he was like in real life but I don't think he got a really raw deal in the film did you yeah again as the person with much less background on this my take away from of the character was like maybe he was a former hippie yeah or he was still a bit of a hippie but he was also clearly in charge of the more serious team yeah I think that's that's the way that the movie portrays him that I came away with the impression that he was maybe the more competent climber and team leader of the two main characters yeah I got I came across as a bit more of a maverick but he had it where it counts you know he was he was a good climber and when when the crunch came he could he could do a lot of stuff yeah I I came away with nothing negative about this character yeah so yeah I mean yeah whatever I just I just thought it was interesting because the wife had made such a song and dance well within her rights too it's her husband that died on the mountain yeah of course but but but I just thought he didn't I didn't come across come out thinking scot Fisher you know you you've been an idiot another gripe I had was the way some of the exposition was done early on at base camp like I know you need stuff for dummies and you need stuff for people who have no interest oh no I put you I put you slightly above dummy level but like when they get to base camp and it obviously needs to be explained to people that when you climb a mountain you go top you go up a bit to a camp one then you come down and you go up to camp three and you come down and you move up and down to a climatize and that needs to be explained to people because otherwise early on in the film you're going to be really confused as to why people are going up and down and crossing over each other but the way they chose to explain it was all of these climbers who are about to go up Mount Everest have arrived at base camp and they go into the tent and the woman who's sort of in charge of base camp sits them all down and she explains to them that's what's going to happen and that is ridiculous because all these people have climbed many mountains before they have spent months and months preparing for this trip they know everything that's going to happen it's completely unrealistic that the head of the mission would wait until they arrived at base camp and then explain to them okay this is what we're going to do we're going to go up to camp one then we're going to come down they know all this stuff and I know it needs to be explained using exposition but surely they could have come up with a more creative way to explain it like not not not insult our intelligence by having all the experienced climbers being told how a mountain is about to be climbed she's just she's just going over the schedule that's all that that's all that was she was always this is so you can acclimatize these people know you always have to go over the schedule Brady it doesn't matter it doesn't matter how many times people have gone through the schedule the person in charge needs to go through this schedule one more time I would have been much more comfortable if they used you know a trekkah or a journalist or something asking a question and they put in having it explained to them that would have seemed more realistic that that that just that bothered me and after that because I don't think this film insulted our intelligence but that little bit insulted my intelligence other things I thought the film one thing I do think the film did well was convey the size of everything really well and that's where CGI really came into its own didn't you know you couldn't have made this film you know a while ago and done such a good job of it's the first time I've thought oh yeah man everything's big and because they're able to do those shots where you start on a person and pan right out and show how small they are in comparison and that's often lost in a lot of mountaineering films and that there's the scale of things I thought this did a really good job of conveying scale oh yeah and that's what I was saying before with it this was the best use in some ways of the 3d effect of to add to that scale I also think it was still the worst use of 3d in some ways because of the sheer number of people in the foreground on the edge of the screen but this is the only movie I can say where like oh yeah for these parts 3d definitely added to it and having that sense of scale helped the reason I didn't think I was going to like this film as I thought it was very quickly going to turn into one of those films where a big storm hits every like I said with the Martian everything was going to turn dark everyone was going to start shouting at each other you were going to have no idea who was who in all the swirling snow and it was just going to become a mess and I was going to be like oh no idea what's going on just make the noise stop I want to go home but I thought they did a really good job of just I sound like an old man here but they didn't make it too loud they didn't make it too complicated and they they they made the storm look bad and scary but they didn't make the storm this epic howling wind that just completely made the film impossible to follow they kind of toned it down pretty quick and let us concentrate on the people and the problems they were having without having to shout the problems out of snow all the time it's a good movie for old man Brady
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