H.I. No. 86: Banana Republic

"H.I. #86: Banana Republic" is the 86th episode of Hello Internet, released on August 24, 2017.
==Official Description==
Brady and Grey discuss: co-first-personing, invincible and disappointing phones, self-checkout and payments revisited, a bench of moral quandaries, a bit of buzz, and, of course, the aftermath of the Radio Times election.
==Show Notes==
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Okka is not cutesy. You have not understood what Okka is. No. Okka wouldn't be cute. Okka would be like... Oh, the cash bastard. Have you used the cash bastard? Yeah. Yeah, I paid for my tools with the cash bastard. Hmm. I'm thinking like... Okka is like the... Ah, forgetting the word, but like the Japanese word for cuteness, that a thousand people will put in the comments. No. Okkaness is very masculine, and it's very unrefined. Not always obscene, but someone whose Okka is very likely to use a lot of swear words. Okka in my head, it feels like a koala with big eyes. That's what Okka feels like, Brady. Oh, no. You have not understood Okka. I'm gonna improve your education on that with some materials. I think I like this definition of Okka much better. Okka is like Australian cuteness. We have talked a little bit about Disney. We were talking about the fast passes, which... Yes. I don't even want to get into it, but... Boy, did I discover that fast passes work different everywhere. They work different in different Disney parks. We got explained in the Reddit. All of the various algorithms that exist with fast passes everywhere in the world. And I left feeling ten times more confused than it had started. But I am appreciative to everybody who wrote in all that stuff. But it's like, holy hell, fast passes are complicated. That must be in the top 10 or top 20 of most fed back things we've ever got. And I understand maybe we made some mistakes. And if you want to understand it, just go to the subreddit from that previous episode and knock yourself out. Fill your books. But one thing I did notice is obviously a lot of people who work for Disney, listen to Hello Internet because a lot of them got in touch. And one thing which I was obviously aware of before and was emphasized by these messages. And I just wonder what you think about it. Is the fact that Disney call their staff cast members. This is obviously a very Disney thing. And I think they're known for it. And the staff seem to like it too because they always like referring to themselves as cast members. What do you think of that? All right. Why are you giggling already, baby? Because I know what I'm poking. We've never discussed this. But I know you're well enough to think you must have views on this. And I think they will entertain me. I don't have views. Okay, sort of do. Of course you do. Because this kind of crap I hate when businesses do, when it's like, oh, we're a family. And you're a guest in our company here coming to visit us. And the like false familiarity and the false chuminess, it really rubs me the wrong way. Yeah. Except somehow, somehow the magic Disney tinkerbell pixie dust has gotten into my brain. And I feel like I'm perfectly okay with the Disney staff being called cast members. I'm perfectly happy with probably in Disney corporate lingo, them referring to the guests, like as guests, right, as opposed to customers. Right. So I feel like I'm perfectly fine with this with Disney. I'm not sure there are very many other companies in the whole world. I would be okay with this. But I'm going to give it a thumbs up. I'm perfectly fine with it. All right. Disappointed Brady. Do you think I'd be angrier? I did, actually. I'm a bit disappointed. I didn't think you'd give Disney such a pass. I didn't think you'd be so suckered by the corporate behemoth that is Disney into thinking it's like tinkerbell and stuff. Isn't that what Disney is? Aren't they small and vulnerable and charming like tinkerbell? And you just have to believe in them. Otherwise, they'll go away. And not one of the world's largest companies. Yeah. That's why I think it's funny. Like it totally shouldn't work on me. But for some reason, it just does. Tell me why that term though. Why cast members? Why would that have been chosen as the way to describe staff of the theme park? I just realized, is this supposed to refer to staff in addition to the people in the costumes? Like, does cast members refer to everybody? No, I think people like the person ushering you onto the rollercoaster is a cast member. Okay. But what about the guy doing paperwork in an office on the park? No, I don't know. No, you've got me wondering. Is that guy a cast member? But see the thing is, I feel like I can actually make an argument for him being a cast member. Because if you're putting on a big show, and it feels like a Disney park is kind of like a big show, even though it's really a machine to feed the mouse, it's kind of like a big show. So like on a Broadway show, are members of the crew? Are they called cast members too? I don't know if they are or not. I don't know. I imagine all the public facing people were cast members, not just the person dressed as Mickey. I will give Disney a pass for every person that a guest would see in the park. I think that's okay to call them cast members. Even if you're the person like saying, okay, you go and sit in that seat on the rollercoaster. Yes. I think I'm going to give Disney a pass on that one. But only Disney. Okay. Don't even think about it six flags. You're not getting a pass on this one for me. I'm only going to give it to Disney. I think that's the way this works. Am I a Hello Internet cast member? Yes. I think you are, Brady. However, I think our corporate policy should not be to use these terms. I think you are, you are better described as a co-host of the show. Do you want to think that's a more accurate way to describe it? Do you think describing me as a co-host rightly or wrongly is belittling? Like because if someone said they were the co-pilot, that doesn't sound as awesome as saying like you're the captain or you're the pilot. The other co-pilot makes it sound like you're the junior guy in the right seat who occasionally gets to land if there's no wind and stuff. Now, I know you don't describe yourself differently. You also call yourself a co-host. But do you think just the term co-host sounds like you're the vice president? Because I say sometimes, I'm the co-host of a podcast called Hello Internet. Does that make me sound less than if I said I was a host? I think what you've done here is that you've done like an anchoring effect that by mentioning pilots, which is one of the cases where the co-pilot does mean something else. I can't wait to hear from all the pilots. Co-pilots, they should be called sub-pilots. It's not the co-pilot because the captain is the pilot, right? That's the way that works. Well, I don't want to be called the sub-host of Hello Internet. I wouldn't mind being called the vice host. No, but that's worse. I know it's worse, but I just think it sounds funny. No, that's way worse. You can't be the vice host of the show. That makes no sense at all. That means if you ever incapacitated, I would be the host. No, pretty. It's not how this works. It's not how these titles work. So I think you have anchored it in bringing up maybe the one or very few places where co-actually means sub. That's fair enough. I hear what you're saying and I agree with what you're saying. But I still think co does have a slight belittling effect because it says you don't do it on your own. Like if you were the co-first person to step on top of Man Everest as opposed to being the first person, it's not as awesome. You've kind of lost a bit of your glory because it's not all yours. I will totally grant that if Hillary and Evers held hands and stepped on top of the mountain or at the same time. Tensing. I'm sorry, Brady. You're not going to let you, right? It would be amazing if the first person on top of Man Everest also happened to be co-everest. Yeah, like George Evers or whatever. That's right. That's who it's named after, but he never climbed it. Well, I'm spinning a tail of magic here. Okay. Hillary and Evers held hands and stepped on top at the same time or if Armstrong and come on. This is easy. Armstrong and... Buzz Aldrin. Aldrin. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Okay, I should have gotten that one. I should have gotten that one. If they held hands and jumped onto the moon at the same time, I would be going back through the footage and going frame by frame with like whose foot landed first. I'm going to disallow this notion that your co-first men on the moon, you're the co-first climbers of the mountain. That's not how this works. This is a debate that centers around the climbing of Man Everest. It was always an often discussed topic as to who actually led the way and stepped on the summit of Man Everest first out of Hillary and Tensing. It was like a huge debate and they never wanted to answer the question and talk about it because for all the sort of people of Nepal, they like to think it was Tensing and for people through the Commonwealth, I think they liked to think it was Hillary. And it wasn't until one of Hillary's late autobiographies came out that he actually put in writing that he was actually in front and got to the top first, according to him, Tensing's dead, so he couldn't argue with it. But Hillary's dead too now, by the way, but... Okay. It's an interesting time to weep, right? Yeah. We all know it was a Sherpa, right? That's the first person on the top of the mountain. That's clearly going to be the case. That's not what Hillary said in his book, but anyway, I don't even know how we got onto this topic. We were talking about Disney Christmas. The way we got onto this topic is, as always, the Brady wandering through the valley of misplaced metaphors and analogies. And I think, yes, you are correct that being the co-person to discover a thing or get to a place is a ridiculous notion. I don't think co in the world of podcasts has any kind of sub-meaning, because I think the most directly comparable thing is like companies, where people co-found a company, because you're not getting to a place, you're making a thing together. But even then, and as I said, it's still awesome to founder company, but isn't it more awesome to be the only founder rather than a co-founder? Like saying, I'm the co-founder of something means, I wonder who had more of the ideas and who was cleverer and who's richer. It just shows those seeds, their co-ness. It's like, you say you're the co-discoverer of that comet, but does that mean the other guy actually saw it first? And this is just a technical reason we have to call you the co-discoverer? You know what's really funny about this Brady? I think there is something I have recently really gotten an understanding of with you that I haven't had over these low these many years, which is your competitiveness. You've mentioned to me about your competitiveness, and we've talked about it on the show sometimes, like that you're a competitive person, but I feel like I have only recently actually understood this on a more deep level, and somehow this conversation about the nature of co-versus solo. I feel like I get this. Deep down, this is a question of competitiveness, and the Brady, there cannot be ties, right? Someone must win, and isn't it better to win than to tie? I think that's what's going on here, Brady. I think that's my interpretation of what's going on in your Brady mind. I don't think that's true. Like in the case of Hello Internet, I mean, Hello Internet was your idea. You came up with it, you did all the work at the start, so like, I would consider if we had to say who is the junior person, of course it would be me. I wouldn't doubt it for a second, so it's not like I'm thinking, oh, why am I co- it's not fair. I have no problem with that. It just gets me thinking about the word co. I think we are co-hosts. Because Brady, no we're doing here. Yeah, we're building a beautiful thing together. In the last episode, you mentioned that you had a new wedding ring that your wife got for you because your previously chubby fingers have been replaced with new live, a picture on 5,000 fingers. Yeah, that's exactly the way I phrased it. Yeah, that's my chubby chubby hands. So as someone who doesn't like to hoard objects, I didn't get the chance to ask because the topics I'd have moved on. What have you done with your old wedding ring, the original? I don't know where it is. All I know is that it is somewhere under the e-gis of my wife's protection. She has it somewhere. It still exists. It's in the house someplace. It hasn't been thrown into Mount Doom or anything like that. No, it hasn't been thrown into Mount Doom. I don't think I could throw it into Mount Doom. I would stand upon the precipice and resist where that the case. Speaking of dropping things into Mount Doom, you know I love my segway, so I'm just going to go with that. You know how I talk about how I'm invincible when it comes to dropping phones? I literally have dropped my phone off a cliff and it didn't break. I was listening to the last podcast of ours because I liked to check to see what made it into the final episode. I was just listening to that section about me saying how invincible I was dropping my phone. When I bumped into a lady I knew at the park walking dogs. So I stopped at the podcast and started talking to her. While I was fiddling with my headphones and trying to put my phone away, I dropped my phone onto the Asheville path we were standing on. I landed face down and went bang and the woman went oh my goodness, oh no. I said to her before I even picked up my phone. I said don't worry, there's no chance it's broken. I leaned over, turned around the face, pristine. Absolutely pristine. She was like oh my goodness, how did you know it wasn't broken? I thought my phone never breaks. No case or anything. Bang. I think with that story, all of the credit goes to your superpowers. And none of it goes to the hundreds of materials engineers who've been working on the magic, quote, glass that isn't glass at all that's on the front of those screens. Yeah, but my wife sneezes on her iPhone and it shatters into a thousand pieces. That sounds a little bit overblown as a description of what's occurring. Sound good, they did it. It does sound good. It would make a fantastic Android commercial like they hire your wife, she sneezes on the phone and it just explodes into a thousand pieces. Tell you what they since then and since I last saw you which wasn't long ago, I've changed my iPhone. Oh, tell me Brady, you were using the iPhone SE and you have changed now. I'm trying at the moment the newest one plus. You're trying the plus. I am. I'm trying. Okay, I can't remember now because I feel like we've switched phones a bunch of times in the course of the podcast. Have you ever used a plus phone before? No, it's my first plus. Okay, what do you think of the plus? Pros and cons. Okay. Pros and cons. It's a hell of a thing to go to after the SE. It is. And occasionally I go back to my SE for certain things still and it does feel very small now. Of course. But I'm undersided. I'm going to stick with it for a while because it's really expensive. I'm going to pay a lot of money for it so I'm going to use it for a while. Yeah, the plus is not cheap. No, so I'm kind of stuck with it now. But it's good for some things. The main reason I got it was because I found myself watching so much video on my phone that I wanted a bigger screen for video watching. Like whether it's just watching sports highlights or graphs of videos that people are editing with me professionally and stuff. And for that I'm liking it. It's nice to quickly watch the goals that have been scored in the football that day on the bigger screen. But the reaching around and navigating the screen with my mortal human fingers which I don't think I have overly small hands, but they're certainly no match for the plus screen. Nobody has hands that are a match for that phone. No, no, no man can do it. Only giants. I like using my phone while I'm walking like you know walking down the street and you don't want to use two hands when you're doing that. So I'm a big one-handed phone user. I find it very hard to switch to two-hand phone use. I just don't think it's a fit for me. And I don't think the plus is suited to one-handed phone users. So unless I get down with the kids and start becoming a two-handed phone user, I'm going to continue to be frustrated by... Is that what the kids do, Brady? The kids are the two-handed phone users? Apparently that's what someone told me. Apparently that's a young person's game. It's a two-handed phone use. Well, I do have a little bit of good news for you. Because I am running the beta version of the next operating system on my phone currently on my plus-size phone. And I've sent you a picture that they have finally conceded and acknowledged that this phone is too big for people's hands. And there is a scrunched over to the left keyboard in the iPhone Plus. That makes one-handed texting easier to do. See, the one thing I do want is a big keyboard. Because I was having problems on my small phone of mistyping all the time. I felt like I was making more typos. So I wanted my keyboard buttons further apart. That's the one thing I don't want to scratch. Okay. Then I have no good news for you, Brady. I'm sorry. I thought you were going to be happy. The top of the phone is just like a wasteland that I can't get to. I'm using the plus, you know. I haven't been happy with any of the iPhones really for like what? For years now with this rounded design that I've just been very sad and frustrated with. It is also frustrating that app designers and everybody keeps putting stuff at the top of the phone. It's like, hey, that might as well be a hundred miles away. Yeah. I can't reach that. Why don't you put all the controls at the bottom of the phone? The bottom of the phone is where the action is. Yeah. I need to do a big icon rearrange. I know there's all these little trick things, but I need to start putting my go-to apps like my Twitter and stuff like that. Download where my thumb can get to. Yeah. If you switch to the big phone, you have to reverse everything. Everything that's a frequent use that's got to go at the bottom. Yeah. Like my iMessages, Maps, calendar, all of that stuff. It's got to be at the bottom of the phone. You're right. I need to do that. And then I'll relearn it in a dioto. It is very hard to get rid of that muscle memory though. Yeah. I almost hate to bring this up, Brady, but you do know the time that we're recording. This is like right before new iPhones season. Are you aware of this? I do, but I'm like, uh, whatever. You just couldn't wait anymore. I don't think I'm going to like the new ones as much. I'm liking them less as they go. So I'm figuring they're going to do something else I don't like on the next one. You know, they'll remove whatever ports are left. They'll say, no, we don't think screens are the way of the future. Everything's just going to be smell now. Like, I don't know. You never know what they're going to do. So get in before they ruin it more. The rumors are to be believed they're taking away the home button on the next phone. Yeah. We'll see. But I wish you were happier with your phone. I wish I was happier with my phone. But it is a hell of a transition going from the little one to the big one. You've got to reverse absolutely everything. I'm sorry that this much over keyboard is of no assistance to you iPhones. They've been frustrating for the last four years. Yeah. Hopefully less frustrating soon. But I'm not necessarily holding my breath on that one. You remind me of those football fans whose team loses every season. And at the start of every season, they're like, this is the one. This is the year we're going to get it together and go all the way. And then yet again, disappointed. I am simply saying I am hopeful about the next phone. I'm not expecting to be happy. We'll see you in a couple short months. But big phones too big, little phones too outdated, middle phone, both too big and too small. And then the next one. I'm just going to say that I'm not going to be happy with this situation. Oh, and they're all made of soap. I've actually put a case on this one, believe it or not. Why have you put a case on these phones, Brady? You don't have to worry about dropping them at all. You have some kind of superpower. You can confidently tell ladies in the street. Don't worry. My phone is unbroken. Yeah. But the problem is the longer that goes, the more disappointed I'll be when I finally break one. So now I'm taking steps to minimize breakage so I can keep my... To keep your streak. Yeah. I'm not holding it the way I like with my safe one hand, one finger underneath for backup. I just know that more drops are imminent, so it'd be a bit of friction. I'm not worried, Brady. I have confidence in you. From now until the end of time, no broken phones. That's the Brady Promise. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Harry's. Are you a human with hair on your body that you want to shave off? Well, guess what? 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And if you want to get them for someone else, they have fantastic looking, packaging and branding. They really do make nice gifts. So Harry's is offering Hello Internet listeners a free trial set. Go to Harry's dot com slash H.I. Right now to get your free trial set, which includes a weighted ergonomic razor handle five precision engineer blades with a lubricating strip and a trimmer blade rich lathering shave gel and a travel blade cover. All that is yours for free as a trial for starting with Harry's just go to Harry's dot com slash H.I. Right now and sign up for razor blades over the internet. Thank you to Harry's for taking care of human hair problems and thank you to Harry's for supporting this show. Brady, last time you mentioned that you'd seen the Tim's come up with a bunch of words to describe their actions. Yep, there was Tim Foolery. Yes, there was Tim work. There was Tim work. That's right. A bunch of these different words going around that the Tim's like I've seen people really run with this with many different variations like a thousand, let a thousand Tim prefixes bloom as far as words are concerned seem to be what the audience has done. Yeah, and they've really rolled with that. There was like an explosion of Hello Internet creativity on the subreddit recently. And I just wanted to point out that related to all of this, one of my favorite things that a user put together, Munkantaurus is a Hello Internet pirate flag that I absolutely adore because I think it strikes an excellent balance of being adorable and intimidating. I think just like what do you think of this pirate flag that the Tim's have made? I do like it. It's sort of like a slightly comic jolly Roger, but with a few little Hello Internet flourishes like the famous grey glasses. My kind of side parted hair and like a robotic arm and a nail instead of the two crossbones. It's worth a look. I'm sure Grail linked to it in the show notes. And I think you're right. You sum it up right. It's like it's the perfect mixture of cute yet it has got a slight menace to it like any jolly Roger does. I've got to say I really like it. It seems like a great little logo for Tim mischief that occurs. It's really greatly put together. This is one of the reasons why I do love having the Hello Internet subreddit where people just post whatever they're working on. And I really wanted to draw attention to this one because I think this is one of my favorite things to come out of the show artwork in quite a while. I really like this flag. It's adorable. And thank you for making it. And I hope you guys have fun with it. It's hilarious. It was made in the context of the recent voting hijinks which we might come to later in the show. And for that reason I like it because I think it was sort of made in the context of when you see this flying like when you see this coming over the horizon. You know something is going to happen. That's not necessarily good if you don't like mischief. And so I do like it as a kind of a warning sign like I can just see it striking fear into the heart of Wikipedia editors everywhere. Yeah, there's an armada of Tim's approaching. That's what it is. Quick serious one because I know that you have been giving me a hard time about basically how I neglected CGP Grey the penguin. Oh, yes, forgot about her. Basically until we found out about her demise. So I was trying to make it tragic. I was trying to make amends for this. And I contacted the zoo and I said I want to know how she died. Like I want details. Obviously we know she died on this trip. This foreign trip. She was going on to go to another zoo. Yeah, we were awaiting the penguin art apps. They were we know. Yeah. So I was kind of like I was tenacious. I was you know, I was reminding them I wasn't going to let this one slip through the cracks. I said I insisted on you know, they said okay, we'll have someone from like the penguin office call you when we know all the details. So I finally got the call. But the call came like while I was on holiday and having a nice time and I was just about to go down to the pool. And like my phone rings and I'm like this is I think this was when I was in Greece and my phone rings and I'm like, Oh, what's this? It's a Bristol number. I was like, ah, you interrupting my holiday. And then it was the lady saying art so and so from Bristol zoo. I'm calling with the details of the penguin death. Oh, it wasn't the right time for it. So I ended up being one of those phone calls where I was like, yep, yep, yep, fine. Appreciate that. Thank you. And now I feel like I can't contact them again asking for loads more detail because they called me like the person called me to give me all the details. So I feel like I failed again, basically. I like this because it feels like what you're basically saying is I didn't want this penguin death for which I am responsible to be a downer on my vacation. That's the story that you're telling me. Well, it sounds like you're the one putting words in people's mouth at start. I would never do such a thing. That's alright. But what I did glean because there was talk that maybe CGP Grey, the lady penguin had died from maybe like some kind of disease or virus that exacerbated when the plane travel happened. But I was told that's not the case. The penguin just died from like the stress of the plane travel. There were lots of penguins that did it two or three died from memory, which is bad. But it sounds like it was just like CGP Grey, the lady penguin, which wasn't made of as stern stuff as some of the other ones. The zoo lady also did tell me like, you know, they're taking lessons from this and other measures are going to be implemented to make sure nothing like this can happen again. So CGP Grey, the lady penguin did not die in vain. It sounds a little bit like you're saying that she wasn't hard as nails. Like if she was made of stern stuff, she would have survived the journey. Is that what you're saying there, Brady? I'm not going to sit here on a podcast and start bad mouthing a dead penguin. You're not going to get it right? Like, I would never try to get you to do that. That would be ridiculous. I'm not going to do that. I loved that penguin. And I still feel a bit sad when I think about it. But I don't know. I always had a feeling that it was like a softer penguin compared to the other ones. Maybe that's because I felt protective of it. But like if you were going to ship 20 penguins to another country, I felt like CGP Grey, the lady penguin might be the one that would have struggled. And it turns out that was true. Well, I mean, this is the thing with most animals pets in particular. We love them, but they're all just tragedies waiting to happen. A moment of silence for CGP Grey, the lady penguin. All right. I just want to talk a bit about shops. Been going to the shops lately. So I go to Tesco, the supermarket quite a lot these days. Like I go almost every day now as like a quick shop rather than doing like a one big shop. I like just going every day and buying two or three things. And we have talked about self-check out before. You like it and I don't. Right. I have now decided self-check out at the shops I go to is a mug's game. I see them queuing to use it, looking for the bar codes on their things and not being able to find it. They all look miserable. It takes them ages. And meanwhile, where I go, there are like 20 check outs that are staffed. Usually there's no queue at all. You walk right up to it. You don't have to have a conversation if you're a bit introverted. You can just say hello. They scan your stuff. They're so good at it because they know where all the bar codes are because they've seen everything before. They do it for a job. They're way better at putting things in bags than I am. Everything's so fast. And now with like contactless payment, like the interactions even less. Most of the time, I think self-check out is a bit of a mug's game. I keep having the feeling that this is like a suburban versus urban divide. Because your description of this, I find baffling and doesn't match my experience. Now personal preferences about which till to go aside. Like when I think of all the supermarkets I go to, even the big supermarkets around me, that I think might be more on the scale of what you would find in a suburban environment. They're always the case that it looks like the lines with the actual checkout people have long lines and people with shopping carts filled with three for 500 items in them. That to me looks like, boy, I feel sorry for you if you have to use the human line. Because this is the line for I have a thousand things that need to be checked out. Whereas the self-check out lines, they're fast. They're faster. They're smaller. There's a bazillion machines in the same amount of space that you could put a few checkout people. I feel like I almost want to go with you on one of your holiday excursions to pick up two items at the supermarket. See what's the situation the Brady's working with here. See how the other half lives. We'll arrange that. I know that we must be having different experiences. How does this country mouse go shopping? That's what I'm trying to find out here. It doesn't make any sense to me or description of what's occurring. But I have to say, while I am traditionally the advocate of the old-fashioned way of doing things and you are more the modern man, my goodness, contactless payment with cards, what a life-changing thing that is, how quickly I've become used to it, how much I resent having to even put my pin number in when I'm buying things. It is such a wonderful innovation. It's a much bigger step up from going from money to pin cards, which I don't think much of as a step. But step up from putting your pin into contactless is fabulous. And places that don't take contactless, I think, are barbaric. And they have to lift the limits on these things. Like, if I spend 40 or 50 pounds on something, it's like, I know you can't use contactless. I'm like, what are you doing? It's insane. I need to use my contactless. I don't want to touch things. I don't want to press buttons. I just want to do the thing. I think it's fabulous. Literally just before this show was starting, I was running an errand to pick up a few things from the local supermarket for the house. And the total bill went over 30 pounds, which at this store is the limit for using contactless. And it was something like 33 pounds or just barely over. And I caught myself, unfortunately, there's no self-checkout at this thing. I have to actually use a person. But I caught myself looking at the guy and almost saying, just ring it as two separate things so I can tap twice. Because it's also about like, I don't want to touch your buttons that have been touched by a thousand people. And the contactless is so pleasing. Like, you just, boom, it just goes. Like, I use it on my phone or my watch all the time. It's the greatest thing in the whole world. I'm with you 100%. I absolutely love the contactless. But this is a case where I feel like I have become so spoiled by it as well. And I did not realize until I had spent all of this time in America this past summer. Because in my world and all of the places that I go, I'm essentially 99.9% of the time using contactless payment because everything is under 30 or 40 pounds. And every single store that I go to takes it. And I can just use my watch or my phone everywhere. Like, I'm so ridiculously spoiled. And then going to America, it feels like stepping back in time 100 years. When they ask you for your signature on the card to do payments, it feels like, why don't you bring out that machine from my childhood where you like put the credit card in the thing and then you go, cunk, cunk, over it. And then I get like a piece of yellow paper and you take two pieces. Like, I don't even know what the hell that machine is. Like, what is this thing even doing? Like, I don't understand how any payment is getting processed by this analog thing. Yeah, I never understood that. And you need like the Rosetta stone to read what's on the bit of paper because it's so hard to decipher. I mean, I guess thinking it through that machine must be a mechanical version of an IOU. Like, is that what it's doing? Those things were obviously being sent off to like some head office somewhere. How could anyone read those carbon copy paper things? They were awful. It's ridiculous, but that's what it felt like in America where I'm using my card and they're like, oh, you have to sign for this thing. And I'm like surprised and angry every single time that I have to sign. And the signing is also like, it's just such a ridiculous force. Like, you're not checking my signature. Yeah. Right? I had a credit card that like for years went unsigned before anybody ever commented on it. Right? Like some picky rules following persons like, oh, you have to sign the card. But no, this stuff just feels so arcane and so ridiculous. And I felt so happy coming back to London and like, we write contactless payments everywhere. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Like, it just works. And there's a thing in America that I don't, I had heard people describe, but I sort of didn't believe it because obviously I know Americans, I listen to podcasts that have Americans on them. And people complain about these credit card machines that are being rolled out in America. And I heard people complain about them and I just thought, what is the problem with this? But there are these like weird, clunky, gigantic credit card machines that I guess are supposed to be the American version of the little wireless terminals that everybody in Europe uses except there, like twice as big and huge and confusing. And what is baffling to me is that when you make a successful payment, they make a noise like, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh. They have like an angry beeping noise, which is confirmation that everything went okay. Right? It's like, everything's great alarm. Like, it confused me every single time I used it and I was in a bunch of different places in America and I came across them in a whole bunch of different states. And I was like, oh, America, why are you so behind the times with payments? Like, why are you so bad at this? Like, there's a solution for contactless new payments, these little machines that we use over here. Like, why don't we use these in America? I don't understand. I don't understand at all. It was infuriating. Okay, people, here we go. I'm going to ask you some questions and just answer yes or no in your head. Not out loud because you might get some funny looks. Do you ever travel in planes, trains or automobiles? Do you ever walk places? Do you ever just lay in bed at night? Do you listen to podcasts? Now, if you answered yes to any one of those questions, then I think you might like audiobooks. And if you like audiobooks, today's sponsor, audible.com is where it's at. Now, audibles are leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment on the internet. That's what it says here and it's true. They've got an intimidating live-ass library of audiobooks and other products. And if you sign up as an audible listener for a low monthly fee, you'll get book credits and access to short programs now playing in channels each month. You can also get, and this and carefully, a free audiobook with a 30-day trial at audible.com slash hello internet. A free audiobook. Shall I recommend one? I think I shall. Today it's going to be Conclave by Robert Harris. This is a fictional account of the vote for a new pope. And for anyone fascinated by what happens in the cysteine chapel when the Vatican when a new pope is being elected, this is a great book for you. Plenty of politics, intrigue, mystery, but also a really easy listen. It really rips along. I got through this one pretty quickly. Desperate to know what had happened next. So that's my recommendation, Conclave. But there are countless others you may prefer as your free audiobook with that 30-day trial. I know the Tim's on Reddit even keep a list of previous recommendations from the show, both from Grey and myself. So maybe check that out. That address for the free book audible.com slash hello internet and hello internet is all one word. There'll also be a link in the show description. They help us make hello internet responses, but we're also just everyday customers and we really like them. You know that bench I sit on sometimes where I have lunch where I was sitting a few months ago when I saw someone crash into another car and try to sneak away. And I like we had this. Quondry about what do I do? Do I dob them in? Do I leave a note? That sort of stuff. You're wondering how much of a Samaritan do you have to be? Is there a good Samaritan law that you need to worry about in this area? What is the right thing? I was sitting on that same bench yesterday. Just minding my own business swinging your feet back and forth eating a sandwich. That's how I imagine it. In fact that is what I was doing. Perfect, okay. And something caught my eye on the ground, the little flash of red and silver glint. And it was a dropped visa card, like a visa debit card with contactless payment and everything like that. And I had the person's name on it. It was brand new in pristine condition, like it looked brand new. And the expiry date was like matched the month we're in. So it made me think maybe it was a brand new card. So I picked it up and I sort of looked around. And there was no one around. So I went and bought another sandwich with it. No, I didn't. I looked around. There was no one around. And I was like, what do I do? Like what are my responsibilities here? What is the right thing to do with this card? What would you have done? Hmm. It's one of those things that you're not entirely educated about best practices. I'm just pausing here because I feel like there is there's some version of an old school teacher in my head who is like, well, if you find a thing, you should take it to a police station. Yeah. I guess here's a complication. Which you didn't find is somebody's wallet. No. Right. Just the card. I mean, to find somebody's wallet, it feels like, okay, I guess I'll take this to the authorities. Yeah. And the police have a lost and found box in the station. Yeah. Or they get the new guy to try to track down the owner of a wallet in between solving homicides. Like, I don't know what's going to happen. I mean, to be honest, if I found someone's wallet, I feel like I would have enough information to probably find that person in 10, 15 minutes. And get it back to them. You know, I could Google them or if the address was nearby, I could just walk to their house. Like, that seems easier in many ways. But yes, if not, I probably would take it to a police station. But all I had was a surname, like, you know, Mr. Jones and a card. If you have address information in the wallet, that also makes it much easier. Right. That's a much clearer thing to do. I don't think there's anything in my wallet that actually lists my address on it. Like, if my wallet was lost, someone would need to take it to a police station. Yeah. Now, you don't have a driver's license or anything? Yeah, I don't have a driver's license. So there's nothing in there with my address on it as far as I know. Yeah. But an individual card... What we have here is something that's on the spectrum from how much burden do you feel versus personal inconvenience? Right. And a wallet feels like it's very far along that spectrum of it's horrifically inconvenient for another person to lose a wallet. So you feel like, oh, I'm doing a great thing by bringing the person to the wall. I'm saving them an enormous amount of hassle. Yeah. Like, if I happen to me, I'd be begging for someone to find it rather than may have to deal with all of that bureaucracy. Right. But a single card, a single card feels like it's sitting on that knife's edge of, is the personal hassle to me, worth this thing? Yeah. Or like, will the police officer laugh me out of the station if I bring them a single credit... Like, I think they would. I think if I go in there, officer of the ring, will be like, get the hell out of here with this credit card. Like, why are you wasting my time? They just take it out of your hand and cut it in half for the paracysers and say, thanks for coming. That is exactly what I expect would happen. Talking this through, I think that is what I would think is my level of responsibility. I would cut it in half and leave it at that. No further good, Samaritan action to be required than that. Okay. The question is brilliant. What did I do? What did you do? I'm a bit reluctant to say in case I broke some law or someone says I shouldn't have done it. We can just say that this is, of course, a fatterful story that is just being told on a podcast. There were one or two people in my vicinity. I did say to them, did you just drop a card? If they'd said, yes, I would have then said, what's your name? If they got the name right, I would have hand it in the card. What did the last word do you do? No one had. I walked into the sandwich shop where I'd gotten my sandwich and I said, has anyone come in here saying they'd lost a card? I don't know what I would have done if they'd said yes because I guess I would have said to have you got their details. I wouldn't have given it to st. people at the shop. But they said no. And the girl behind the check out said you should probably just cut it in half because they probably already canceled it. There were two restaurants right near where it had dropped, like an Italian restaurant and a Chinese restaurant. And I did think about going in and asking if I should make some kind of public announcement. Because there was 50 or 60 people. So it was a good chance that the person who dropped it was in the restaurant and needed it to pay for their meal or something. But I did feel like that was a high level of disruption for maybe not even success. So I decided not to do that. What I did was I went back to the bench near where I found it. And I sat there for another 15, 20 minutes just finishing my food and faffling around on my phone to see if I could see anyone walking around looking for a card. And no one knew when emerged who fit that description. So then I went home and I cut it into lots of small pieces with scissors and threw it in the bin. You didn't shred it, Brady. You do have a shredder that can handle a credit card? No. That shredder I famously bought right at the start of Halloween Internet hasn't worked for about two years and I haven't replaced it or fixed it. It just sits under my desk dormant. The very sadder number of levels. No, it's me. But anyway, that's not go there. Anyway. I'm much more interested in the shredder underneath your desk. Taking up your precious foot space that you haven't fixed after two years. Is it still there? I throw it away. No, it is still there. I don't need to throw it away and get another one. Because I did like it when I was running. I just got greedy and tried to put too many pieces of paper in it one day. It jammed and like no matter what I tried to do, I couldn't fix it. No, of course. That's the call of the paper shredder. Yeah. You want to push it to its breaking limit, right? You never satisfied until you get too many pieces of paper. Five. You could do six. Six. Six is for weaklings. What about seven? Seven? That's for cohosts. Why not eight? No. Yeah. That's what existence is for shredders. It's like some kind of hellish torment where no matter how much they can eat, like you're constantly upping the spectrum of like, Oh, but you're going to eat more. Yeah. Until it breaks. I'm sorry that you broke your shredder, Brady. I'm sorry that you had to manually cut up this credit card by hand. It's quite pleasant cutting credit cards with scissors. Because it's like a naughty thing. Like, it's quite fun. I liked it. I'm glad you got a naughty thrill out of cutting up that credit card into multiple pieces. It must have been very exciting for you. It's quite a pleasurable amount of resistance on the scissors when you cut a credit card too. Like, you don't normally get that level of resistance on a cut. It's nice. Cutting a credit card is a nice with scissors is a pleasant feeling. Don't people drop your credit cards around Brady. So you can get the naughty satisfaction of cutting up other people's credit cards. People have cut it in half before it even hits the ground. You'd be like, wait, wait, that's mine. No, bang. You passed the event horizon. You're going to be carrying scissors to that park just hoping, just bleeding. Who knows what moral conundrum will strike next on Brady's bench? And you know how you get those park benches where it says, you know, Gladys and Ron used to sit here and watch the sunset for 50 years. Maybe one day they'll put like a little metal plaque on the back of the bench saying, this is where Brady saw two cars hit and where he found a credit card. And I could become famous. I don't know if this is a national thing or if it's just in London, but do you have those blue badges that are the historical markers? It's more of a London thing, but other cities and parts of the UK do keep trying to co-opt it. So you do sick blue plaques around the place, yeah. There's historic markers, yeah. That is a thing that exists then where in your town you're walking around, there's a blue plaque. And it says, Bobby Thorpenton, the third. Yeah. Writer of something you've never heard of was born here. Yeah, but they're not usually as official outside. This is a whole, we could do a whole podcast about blue plaques, but yeah. There are a couple with near where I live, but they're not like officially sanctioned once. Well, I guess where I was going with this is these blue historical plaques that I see all over the place in London. You can hardly move in London for blue plaques. It's like wading through treacle. I do feel like, hey guys, maybe we should tone it down a little bit. Especially there's a couple that I love that aren't even like, oh, this famous person was born here. There's a few that kind of make me laugh every time because it's like, oh, this person you never heard of lived in a house on this site from 1832 to 1835. Yeah. What is this plaque? It's like, yeah, Jane Austen stayed in a room in this house for three hours while she was spell checking the second draft of Pride and Bridges. Yeah, that's what it feels like. Like the bar is just too low for some of these things. Like there's too many of them all over the place. And I feel like the number of times I have any idea who the person they're referring to is is very small compared to the number of total plaques. But I was just wondering because we touched on the idea of fame last time. Now that you're talking about this bench that you clearly want to be made a historical object. Do you think Brady that after you're dead, this is seriously. Yeah. You are famous enough to get a blue plaque on that bench that says this is Brady's bench. Brady sat here eating lunch and thinking about moral conundrum sometimes. Great. I could say with that a shout-off adult that I'm not famous enough to get a blue plaque anywhere, anything, anytime to do with anything I've ever done. I totally disagree with that. I think you should have a blue plaque. You're way more famous than most of the blue plaques I see where it's like, oh, some nobody 200 years ago, no one's ever heard of gets a blue plaque. Grey, I can promise you in 200 years I'll be an even bigger nobody. I don't know, man. People might be listening to the show in 200 years. Well, let's say, let's say it's not over yet. I could still make that light move into test cricket and become the oldest player ever to score 100 for Australia. Yeah, that's the thing that's going to make you the famous person. Yeah, that's what's going to be it. That's what I want to make me a famous person. No, I understand that, Brady. I understand that very clearly. Apparently, you don't want to be known as the mere co-host of the popular podcast. You want to be a man who strikes out and does his own thing. That's what you want to be remembered for. Not a co-host. Grey, I want us to introduce the term vice-host for my position. No, I am vetoing this. This is ridiculous title. It makes no sense for podcast co-host. This is Grey, the host of Hello Internet, and I'm his vice-host. No, that makes no sense. It's ridiculous. And I think it's self-demeaning, Brady. I don't agree with this. I'd be quite happy to be a vice-host. I think that's a really cool name. It would be really good talking point. How many podcasts do you know that have a vice-host? We might be the first. And that would make us special. It's like, have you heard that podcast? They've got a host and a vice-host. All right, I'm going to listen to that just to check that out. And then they'll listen and be, oh, I thought this would be boring, but actually it turns out they talk about blueplex penguin deaths. It's really cool. Contactless payment cards that have existed for two years. It's brilliant. Yeah. I thought they were just a couple of clowns, but cutting edge. Oh, okay. So that'll be your blue plaque then. World's oldest cricketer and vice-host of Hello Internet podcast. And I sat on this bench. I'll take that. Not world's oldest cricket. It's world's oldest cricket has to score a hundred. I have to score a test century. Just being old is not good enough. I have to score a ton. It probably is too late for me. Sports wise. But you can always be the world's first vice-host of a podcast. I don't like it. I still don't like it, Brady. It's out of the bottle now, my friend. I feel like I know you will enough that sometimes you get an idea in your Brady head, and there's just no dislodding it. This moment I'm ordering the embroidered t-shirt. Across my back in big red letters, vice-host. Until the buzz started, I didn't realize how many B stories were in the media every week. It's massive. It is. I feel the same way. I was on Twitter earlier, and I saw someone had made a little logo for the buzz with C2B Gray, like a cute little turning a microphone into B-Wings, a little bit of a logo. I was making a joke about how everybody seems really interested in all the B-News. They really isn't. The joke is over. There really isn't enough B-News all of the time to have any kind of regular segment that's the buzz. Then immediately people are like, oh, did you know this week there was a million dollars worth of B's stolen in a B-Heist? I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? Oh, so it's. It's like, oh, not only was this a B-Heist, but it's B-Heists are a thing that like stolen B's, this is like a whole underground industry. There are Bay wrestlers. Yeah, I know. I can't believe like this is really a thing that people go around stealing B's. So someone sent me this article about Fresno Police Officers find one million dollars worth of stolen B's in the great B-Heist. It's crazy. The guy who stole all these B's is facing 10 years in prison if he's convicted. You're a pretty even better one. You've got the American Bay Heist. There was a British Bay Heist as well just recently. There are multiple Bay Heists going on. I mean, of course, America's B Heists are bigger and better than a B-Heist in England. They're more small scale here. Yeah, go bigger, go home with American B Heists. I guess is the way that works. Today in the times, there was a story about a new nature paper that's just been published about some pesticide that we all use that's devastating bumblebees. They found that bumblebee queens that are exposed to this neoctynoid thing are 26% less likely to lay eggs and start a colony. Like how detailed is that research? They're like exposing queen bees to this chemical and then like that's detailed research. They go on hardcore. They are going hardcore. And it was in the times, you know, B-News is big. There's obviously like demand for it. The sub-editors of the newspaper are obviously thinking, what are we going to put in? Are we going to put in this yet another story about YouTube terrorism? Or should we just have a break from that and like put in this story about bees? And they put the B-story in. This kind of stuff is increasing like reading through the B-Hist news. My favorite quote so far is from Steve Godwin from the California State Beekeepers Association. He says, quote, there used to be a code of honor that you didn't mess with another man's bees. But the perpetrators of this giant high of heist broke that code. Something's just wrong. It's like the Wild West out there with bees. What's the security measures one can put in place to prevent one's bees being taken? I mean, foolishly, I would have assumed that the bees themselves would be the security measure. You know, I guess it's like cattle rustling. The bees are happy to go along with somebody who's giving them some smoke and then they'll get all sleeping and you can just take them. I don't have any idea. But I caught this guy. Apparently the police got him in an elaborate sting. Oh God, Brady. That was absolutely awful. I'm here awake. Hello, hello internet listeners. Are you two fascinated with bee news? Do you want to create some kind of hub to be the center of all bee news in the future? Well, then you know what you want to do. You want to make a website with Squarespace. Squarespace is the only place you should go for all of your bee website-related creation needs. Or any website creation-related needs really because they are the simplest, fastest, best way to make a website. They're what I use to make my websites and what you should do. Squarespace takes away all of the technical headaches that you would normally have to worry about if you were building a website the old fashioned way and replaces it with a rock solid, stable, and beautiful system that you can use. When you're creating your bee website, you'll be able to choose from a huge variety of templates that they have set up for you to start. And they've just added 16 brand new beautiful designer templates to their collection. Now all of these you can tweak and customize to make them look whatever way you want. Perhaps some sort of black and yellow theme might be what you want to go for. You can adjust the colors and everything about it that you possibly want to. And one of the great things is it will scale to any size. So people can check for your bee articles on their phone or on their gigantic computer. And it will resize the website so that it reads properly and looks good everywhere. With Squarespace there's nothing to install, patch, or upgrade ever. And if you need any help, they have award-winning 24-7 customer service that you can always easily get in touch with. If you ever need to sell bee merch, they also have an integrated commerce platform. It really is an absolute no-brainer. So whatever website you want to make, you want to make your next move with Squarespace. So just go to squarespace.com slash hello to get 10% off your first order and show your support for this show. That's squarespace.com slash hello. I caught up with Gray and Mrs. Gray a week ago, so it wasn't? Yeah, so are you in person? We had a lovely day together. And the day got off to a brilliant start because the moment your wife walked in the room, she was carrying this incredibly huge wrapped present for me, wrapped in gold paper with a big red bow. I felt a bit bad because like I hadn't turned up with anything. And you guys were bestowing on me this enormous gift, which I have to say is one of the best wrapped and ribbed gifts I've ever seen. I will put a picture of it wrapped in the show notes. And I couldn't wait to open it. And then you guys told me I couldn't open it until this episode. So it remains wrapped and it's sitting next to me right this moment. Fantastic, really. Yes. We got a little gift for you. And I wanted to wait. It's not little, it's massive. You have a picture I'll put in the show notes of the gift with Audrey for scale. So people can immediately understand how big the package is. Yeah, but yes, there's a present that we got for you that we wanted to have you open on the show. We thought it would be the best way to do it. So we've made you wait a week. The suspense has been killing me. Has it braiding? Has it actually been killing you? It actually kind of has. I've grown kind of attached to it now that it's been sitting in my office and it's such a beautiful object. You know, it's big and gold with a big red sash. I've come to quite like it. To the point where unwrapping it is going to be disappointing because the beauty of it will be destroyed. I'm not a very neat unwrapper either. I wouldn't expect you're a very neat unwrapper either. I figured this could go one of two ways, which is that one you would obsess over once in the box. Or two, you might just totally forget about it. You put it in a room and it would out of sight out of mind. It didn't occur to me that you would place it in a spot where you could see it and gaze upon it all the time. And then just like it as an actual object in your office. The only slight problem with having a beautiful gold gift wrapped in your office at a time that like is not Christmas and stuff like that is over the past few days. I've had a few people visit my house. Some of them have been here for extended stays as well because they're like number file guests who sometimes come here and we make videos together for a day or two and then they go off. So all of these people, when they come into my office, they see this wrapped gift. And I'm a bit worried in the back of their head they've all been thinking, oh I wonder if that's for me as well. Thank you for doing number file and of course they never get it. And then I feel really guilty that all these people have been coming and thinking that the presence for them. And it's not for me. If people don't say anything, I think you can kind of assume that in the back of their mind they were hoping that the gift is for them. Because I don't go, oh what's the gift? Because you wouldn't say that. Yeah, exactly right? Like they're standing by it, like you know rubbing their toe into the ground looking at you and going like, so is it time to go now that the day is over? Oh big yes, I'll be heading off if there's nothing else. Nothing else that you need to discuss. I think that's the implicit social thing that's occurring there. Yeah, they're feeling like gifts are for them. So I'm sorry about that Brady. Maybe they just didn't notice it. Although it's hard to miss because it's gold and red. It's crazy. So should I open it? Okay, yes. You can open the gift now. Okay, just preface. Yes. That there is some assembly required just so that you know that you know that going into it. But yes, you can open the gift. You can open the gift now Brady. Okay, here we go. Oh, I'm putting it on my lap. And I'm undoing this. It's very secure. It doesn't contain bass. Yeah, surprise it's a bug full of live ears. That would make quite the podcast segment. All right, I've done the sides. Wow. This is a new microphone. It's called Sure Legendary Performance. 75th anniversary model. Limited edition. It's amazing looking like it. Funnily enough, it's the sort of thing that I would quite like the look of. It's almost like the people who bought it. New my taste. It's almost like we've been in your house and know how things look again. Top of the line early 1900s. Look for everything that's in your house Brady. This is gorgeous. I'm actually opening the box to look at the device itself now. This is what I was going to say is what you have to understand is that it is. It's not just a microphone that we got your Brady. Yeah. This is a symbol of something. What I want you to take a look at is the base. Because what we got you is not just a microphone, but it is a trophy is what it is Brady. Wow. It's got a numbered certificate of authenticity. That already excites me. It's like, wow, this is amazing. It's in like a little steel suitcase. You would see someone carrying if it was like if they had like, it should be handcuffed to my wrist. Yeah, that's exactly what that case totally looks like. The case that's handcuffed to a security guard kind of case. I'm going to undo the case now. Wow. There's the microphone like in all spongy sponginess. That's a good looking microphone. Now, it doesn't appear the base is there. It looks like the base is separate. So I'm going to open the other box with the base in it. Because you know, it's all about the base on the hell internet. Oh my God. Oh, here's the base. Oh, hang on. No, the base is engraved. There we go. Oh, wow. What does the base say, Brady? The base says, Dr. Brady Harron Radio and podcast champion, 2017. You're being naughty. Brady, we're not being naughty because as the audience already knows at this point, the people who follow Hello Internet intensely know, you won the Internet radio competition podcast voting extravaganza that the radio times put on that we were discussing in the last episode. Yes. You won that. You won that by an enormous amount. And what was there from the radio times, not but silence. And my wife and I thought, that's not the kind of respect and acknowledgement that Dr. Brady Harron deserves. We need to give him a trophy to embody this accomplishment and this award that Brady has won. So my wife went out on the Internet and we decided to find a trophy for Brady and there was nothing that was up to what we thought would be the magnificent standard that you deserve. So we found this limited edition microphone and we got it in graves, in London and the base. So this is the trophy to represent your triumph in podcasting Brady. Well, I feel like I should make a short speech at this point. I would just like to say, this is not just a victory for me. This is a victory for my co-host. Although he fell in the battle and was not able to make it all the way to the final stages, I felt like he was with me in spirit and he was certainly with me on Twitter. I was with you on Twitter every step of the way, buddy. But also, this is not about me. No. And this is not a victory for me. This is a victory for the Tim's and I mean that quite literally. Because as we were discussed shortly, they pretty much did it. And I was a slightly confused and bemused passenger for their mischief making. But before we talk about this vote and how it came to be that I am the radio time, which is really on podcast champion. And we will talk about it because it was fascinating. And also I need some of it explained to me. There is a group of people I want to thank. And these are not the people who are responsible for the victory really. But they actually are a really sizable group. And that is the group of people that sat at their computer and just clicked on a button and refreshed the page and waited and went ahead of coffee and clicked the button again. And I had like some friends that did it and like some friends wives and people like that who were oblivious to the technological firestorm that was taking place behind the scenes on both sides. Even people who were aware were still participating. There were many a manual vote cast in the Grey Household for Brady. I'll tell you that right now. And there were lots of people who used the conventional way of Malout's stuff. I think I've just voting over and over again on their computer. I seriously want to thank them because some people like spent a lot of time doing it. And it was really sweet. Like Alan, who famously composed the Hello Internet Jingle. The little sound at the start of our show called me up and said, oh my wife and I are so happy that you won. My wife stayed up really late and was just sitting in bed voting for you. Lots and lots of times. And then I sort of said to him like you realize like there was quite a lot of other stuff going on. And he was like, oh I didn't, I had no idea. So there are lots of people who were just like really sweet voting the old fashioned way. And like that means a lot like, you know, the whole thing doesn't mean anything because it's a silly vote. But I want to thank those people because they're like, you know, they're old school. I guess we better talk about what happened in this vote and discuss a few things about it. Because it had quite the conclusion. Let's talk about that vote. Just to finish my speech, thank you to Grey and Mrs Grey. Because this is actually a really lovely thing you've given me as well. Like actually does mean a lot to me. So thank you very much. And I will thank her in person. That's well again, we know physical objects mean a lot to you Brady. We wanted you to have an embodiment of this tremendous thing that we have all gone through together as a big, Hello Internet group. I mean, should I use this microphone now as my podcasting microphone or should I put it on my little shelf where I have like my favorite? Because I do have three or four trophies that mean so much to me. I do have them on display. So I could put that up there on my little, my mantle of fame. This is 100% up to you. It serves either as a trophy or it can be a hell of a internet microphone. It is a working microphone. It is a limited edition working microphone. It looks like the base needs to be honest. However, it's your trophy now. It is in your hands. However, it best serves you, Brady. I just don't want to sell it. It's so lovely. Like I don't want to scratch it and knock it. But maybe that will add, you know, charm to it if it's what you used in battle. Like it will increase its value if hello internet episodes were actually recorded on it. It's up to you, man. It's up to you. Alright. Alright. So let me very quickly recap what happened for people who are smart enough to have taken absolutely no interest in this debacle that happened a few weeks ago now. Just before you even begin with this, I just have to say I love kind of sometimes getting involved. In these sort of silly internet things, it really is fun to let yourself get swept away in an event like this. Something like that just really heightens the feeling of even like you were saying with Alan and his wife who were voting for you in the election. The people are just unaware of like to us what seemed like this incredible all-consuming maelstrom for a weekend. Yeah. There's Twitter and this coordination on Reddit and this message is going back and forth where I am. And it's like this this flurry of activity that seems so all-consuming, which you realize is like just one of like an infinite number of internet maelstroms that are occurring on every corner of the globe. It's like outside of this world, totally meaningless inside of this world to a subcommunity all-consuming for like 48 to 72 hours. I have followed no election in my life more closely than this one. So I'll give like a brief summary of what I think happened. Please do. You can explain some of it to me and tell me the parts of it that tickled your fancy. So last time people listened, if they listened to the last episode, they'll know the radio times around this poll for their radio and podcast champion. They ran all different polls for different categories like TV stars and comedians and there was a radio and podcast section. There was a huge big thing, very elaborate with all different groups and knockout section. And it got to a point where I was in this quarter final up against this guy called Steve Allen who, Grey and I thought was a bit dismissive of us within a tweet. So we sort of caused a call to arms to try and win the vote. Let me win the vote against this guy. And that's how the last podcast ended. And we deliberately released that podcast after all the vote is over because we didn't want to be seen to be like getting involved. Well, at least via the podcast. Let's back up that phrasing. We thought it would be better to drop the episode after the results were closed. Yeah, I mean, releasing the podcast to like 900,000 downloads would have felt a bit like we'd be bringing a gun to a knife. So it was like, let's just do it. They do this the old fashioned way. So I won this vote against Steve Allen and I had said on the podcast, that was it. This is a meaningless silly vote to just drive clicks to their website and increase their advertising. And I said, I'm going to have anything more to do with it. I wanted just to jump in here as well, that I too, at this point, felt, see she ate it in this internet, kerfuffle. I think my exact words were that I wanted your opponent crushed into the ground. I feel like that was in internet terms accomplished. It was victory and I felt like, okay, catharsis, it's all over. Oh, good. Oh, good. So in the semi-final, I was paired up with someone called Lyla Parsons, who is a DJ and a TV presenter and a model. And obviously very talented and successful. But it turns out I won that vote as well. I didn't even follow that vote really, but it turns out I won that vote. And that put me into the final. And the final was against, funnily enough, a colleague, a radio colleague of Steve Allen, like a co-presenter on the same station, like mates. And I was in the final against him. And he had taken an interest in this whole vote and had been tweeting about it and encouraging people to vote. Now, out of kind of a respect, I kind of looked him up and who he was and found out a bit about him. And I listened to his show and I just want to say from the outset, I quite like this guy. Like I listened to his show a couple of times. I've read some of the stuff he writes. He seems reasonably like-minded to me on some issues. A lot of people who follow him, hello internet, like him, I found out there was a lot of crossover. Seems a sound guy. And also before the vote started, he even tweeted me and like said, you know, good luck mate. And I sort of tweeted back. So no issues with this guy at all. Sound guy. Everything's good. Yeah. So the vote started and there was a bit of two and three early. And I think he had a lead. But what happened then was the Tim's took over at this point. And they got really, really into it. And I want to say radio times was really whipping this up into a frenzy. Their article on their website said in the blue corner and in the red corner. And they all the way through the whole thing. They were tweeting about it all the time. They were inciting people to vote. They were using language that made it sound like a real war. They were using language like rally, the troops. Oh yeah. They specifically said on their website and in multiple places, vote as many times as you want. Vote often because I think they wanted people to continually refresh the pages and up their ad impressions. Exactly. Yeah. That's 100% what it was. I realized they were, they were retweeting everything that they possibly could that was related to these internet fights. They were whipping it up. They were really whipping it up. And the teams took the gauntlet. Now I had decided to stay out of it. That was my decision. I wasn't going to tweet about it. I wasn't going to get involved. In the end, my only policy was to retweet whenever this James O'Brien tweeted. So if he ever said, come on everyone that's vote lots of times. I would just retweet his thing and let people decide what to do. But the teams, the teams got really into it. They created this like battle command station on reddit thread where they coordinated in ways that I still don't understand. They were clearly using automated voting and bots and things like that. They were creating pages where the voting could be done automatically by your computer. And clearly a kind of arms war started because James O'Brien fans, who I want to point out, were doing the same thing. And I have lots of evidence they were doing the same thing. And the vote wouldn't have been as close as it was if they weren't doing the same thing. But the James, some of the more old fashioned James O'Brien fans started crying foul. And because the teams were doing this so openly, they were doing it on reddit, they were explaining their tactics so that other people could do it. It was a real public communal effort. It wasn't clandestine. That's why the James O'Brien fans were stealing all the technology and codes that they were finding and using it to vote for their guy. So it was very open. But like the more old fashioned fans of James O'Brien, probably more typical radio times readers, I think when they found this thread, thought they'd found something from like the dark web or something, some great secret. And they were then tweeting it and sending it to radio times going, look what's going on? This cheating and they started crying foul. And they started saying some like inflammatory things like, I'm going to cancel my subscription and this whole thing's corrupt and they got really upset because they're beloved radio presenter, look like he might lose the vote. And at that point, radio times were like, oh my god, what have we done? We've created a monster. Yeah, there was definitely a tonal shift from radio times. They went deadly silent on the whole thing. They never said or tweeted another word. They still haven't to this day. Even though they're happily tweeting about other winners. They went completely silent. But they obviously started trying to implement technological solutions. Like at one point, they introduced captures to stop people from using the automated process. But when they did that, the lead I had actually started increasing, which makes me think maybe I had more manual voters than the other guy. I want to just point out a couple things as we're going along this road here. Automated voting started happening and escalating at a rate that almost felt like there's a self-learning artificial intelligence here that is pulling apart everything that has anything to do with how the entire system works and cranking out every advantage that they could possibly be. It was very interesting to see in the Reddit threads slightly terrifying to see what the audience can do if it could work. It's like, Jesus Christ, like these guys might be rigging real elections. It was amazing. It was very impressive. What I really liked is someone put together a data visualization of the percentage win over time, which made it much easier to follow the election. If I was the kind of person who would follow a real election, you'd be checking updates in the polls of the predicted wins of candidates once a day when the news publishes it. But there's a graph that's updating every five seconds with what the current exact tenth of a percentage edges. The technology. The technology was amazing. There's a few things about it I want to come to. Yeah, it was really interesting to follow. I kept refreshing the graphs and seeing how things were going. And once the graph existed, you could see more clearly that at some point as the bots were introduced, it became entirely a bot war because the graph just ended up being just too smooth. When humans are voting, it was much more spiky. But then at a point when you have bots that are voting, whatever it was, like hundreds and hundreds of times a second. And you have bots on both sides voting. It ends up becoming like a smooth curve because you're just looking at the difference between the bots on either side. And this is where I would have paid so much money to know what was going on inside radio times headquarters because they obviously built a click machine. Like they wanted this to be a bring your audience, bring advertising revenue to us, click machine for radio times own benefit. And much like a shredder in which you keep shoving in more paper until it breaks. This felt like the same thing. Like radio times you want votes, you're going to get votes. You're going to get millions and millions of votes. You're going to get more votes than there ever will be people in the universe. Like I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if in the end the results on that final vote were in the billions on either side. They made the percentages public, but they didn't make the number of votes public. They didn't make the number of votes public. You could only you could only see the percentages. So for me again, it's like just like in the first round where it's like, oh, LaDida isn't this fun. And then I got angry when Steve Allen tweeted the kind of dismissive of you tweet. Like please vote for me over this guy. I've never heard of thing. Then I got riled up. I was having the same feeling with the later rounds of the election. Like, oh, isn't this a kind of fun thing to follow over the weekend. Like, let's see if Brady wins. Oh, it's it's now become a bot war like it obviously would like L.O.L. it's hilarious. But then the thing that you just mentioned is where once again, I felt myself turn from like happy fun gray into like furious gray. And it was when very obviously someone at the radio times was looking at the numbers, looking at the monster that they themselves have summoned from the internet. And they wanted to turn it off, right? They wanted to stop it. And so they introduced the capture. So the captures are those those words you have to type in to prove that you are not a robot, right? Or that the pictures that you have to click, but they were using like a bargain basement word capture as the thing that they were using to try to determine that they were actually humans voting. This to me was when it's like, oh, okay, I see what's going on here. You now you've set up your dopey election, which has dumb rules in the first place where you can vote as many times as you want because it's not really an election. It's an impressions generating machine for you. Now this has gotten out of control because you radio times probably have like actual people on the radio being quite annoyed with you and your position is you're trying to be like this thing that radio people might care about. So like they suddenly found themselves in awkward position. Yeah, because the radio people didn't seem to take it as quite the joke we did. No, and I think obviously you know core business for radio times is probably radio. These people probably buy ads in their magazine. Yeah, they pay to have their listings on there. So the people they were pissing off and the people who were losing suddenly were like the people who actually put bread on the table. And the podcasters who they don't really care about and they just put in there to try and up their clicks by getting people with Twitter followers was suddenly winning and they're like, oh no. This is the structural problem they have is like this is why like it started to get into my brain like it makes me mad about the whole system because like you obviously included podcasters in some of these polls because you wanted to bring in like those juicy juicy internet clicks. But like none of these people are your business. You don't actually want any of the podcasters to win. And we know that's the case because like you said when they introduced the capture. It actually made things worse because like you said so many people were manually voting for you from Hello Internet versus the number of people voting for the radio people that when they introduced the capture for a couple of hours you could see on the graph that is like your lead just kept increasing even faster than without. And so after a couple of hours they pulled the capture and that was when it's like my blood is now boiling it's like, oh, okay, you're just being really open about this banana republic that you're running over here. Right. Like, okay, if you're going to put the capture on and then you're going to take it away because you're obviously trying to monkey with the results to get the thing that is financially in your own best interest. Like, why don't you just make up the results at this point? Like this whole thing was a ridiculous shard like before it even began. Now you have made it into like an even more ridiculous thing that the person who clearly has more people manually voting for him like you kind of wanted to have happened in the first place. But you don't want him to win. So you're switching it back hoping that the radio personalities bots will somehow win or that it won't be such an incredibly crushing defeat if you have the bots fighting it out versus having the actual people fighting it out. So it made me furious to see this election where they wanted to change the rules to get the result they want and when it wasn't working and it was actually worse for them to like, whoop, I guess we'll go back to the other way and like change it back. So the whole thing was just ridiculous, but my like my blood was boiling after the capture incident in this election. It's like it's still like it still riles me up. That's when you started marshalling a few troops and started encouraging people on Twitter because I was trying to be like president. Yeah, and like stay out of it. And I never linked to anything that encouraged multiple voting either manually or automatically. I was trying to rise above it, but then you energized an already very energetic group. My feeling of it was like radio times you made me do this like I didn't want to do this, but you made me do it because after the quarter finals with Steve Allen when you won, I felt like, oh, we're done. And this is just a fun thing to follow and see what happens over the weekend. But after the capture thing, it was like, you know, Brady has to win this like I'm going to come in on Twitter and try to make sure that like push as much as I can. Like I want this thing to go a particular way because radio times is like shown their hand with this vote manipulation that they wanted to have happened but didn't happen. You want to blow past the capture thing, but if it's like to me, this is like one of the major events in the great election of 2017. Well, there's a few other things I want to ask you about and talk about, but just to kind of finish the emotional story first. I didn't want to care, but as you have pointed out, I have like this naturally competitive, you know, streak like most Australians. I didn't want to win because it would be a little bit embarrassing, but I also really didn't want to lose. So it got to a point where I was really like consumed by it, but trying not to be. And I kept, I would look at the numbers and like I would see myself like going up and holding a lead. But as the O'Brien fans got more savvy with the automated voting, sometimes he would claw back some ground. And I'd be thinking, that's it. I'm going to lose now. This is the start of the precipice and it's all going to end. And I would, you know, and it got to a point where I was so like worked up about it over days because they made the final last more days. Just to prolong the cruelty and their revenue. Of course. It got to a point where I was like just going for walks like I would just go for a walk out like to the sea so that I didn't have to think about it. And like, then I would get my phone out and just quickly check the score. And I'd be like, oh no, I've gone down another point, one of a percent. And when, whenever a trend started, it would continue. You know, you would drop up, you know, a point, one of a percent every minute. And then someone else would do something technological and it would, it would change. So anyway, I decided I thought the best thing for me would be to win, but to win narrowly so that everyone saved face. But that's not what happened. No. And I ended up winning about 80%. But never a word was spoken about it by radio times. They like, they completely disowned the whole thing, which is again exactly, exactly shows you that this is not what they wanted. On all of the other things, they're very happy to promote the winners. And then suddenly this is like silence. I'm kind of a little bit glad because like if they'd made a big deal about it and stirred it up again, then all the O'Brien fans would have come back online and said that it was a fast. And that would have riled me up again and it would have riled you up. And I just would have, I'm quite happy for it to sort of fade a little bit out of existence, but still happy to have won and like to have my trophy from you and Miss Gray. But there are a few things that I observed and liked about it and a few questions I've come out with. First is, I said thank you to the people who like voted manually, but also thank you to the people who did all this technological stuff because like it was awesome. Like they were awesome. And it was really interesting to watch as like an outsider, all the discussions they were having and all the tactics they were coming up with and all the things they were doing. Like the camaraderie they were having and like the two camps of like nailing gear and flaggy flag got together to work together for other stuff. So there was a, it had a real fun spirit to her. And I've got a few friends who are like just casual hello internet observers. And they went and had a look at like that subreddit what was going on and they said to me afterwards I didn't realize like hello internet had so much. Like law about it like so many in jokes and so many things and like all of that stuff really bubbled to the surface in a really fun way on that subreddit. I did enjoy that. But an important question is I'm not going to say is this cheating because I think that's not even a valid question. It's not cheating because it's not prohibited in the rules. But the thing is is it morally right. And if you think it's morally shady to be winning the election this way. Is it any more morally shady than anti doris who likes listening to the radio sitting there with a cup of coffee and the lamp clicking over and over again because they were told to you know with a sore finger clicking a thousand times like is that more legitimate than the people who say well I'm not going to get sort of finger when I can just automate this. Like are there moral shades here is it the wrong thing is it the right thing what do you think about that I have zero moral qualms about this whatsoever right radio times asked for as many votes as humans could give them. And just panic when when more votes were being shoved down their throats than they expected right but I don't think there's a moral problem with this right that's why again like there's something about this in my mind that it's just like a perfect little storm of antagonism is. A vote that is so obviously intentionally set up to be an illegitimate vote by an organization that is sort of pretending like it's a real thing you're taking a bit of shine off this trophy right now by the way great. No let's see this is why I wanted to get you this trophy is I think like the trophy is a manifestation of like the thing that the hello internet audience did that's my question is what did this vote. Measure because it hasn't voted who's a better radio presenter or podcast or champion of anything in terms of us as individuals like me or James O'Brien or Steve Allen or anyone what has this vote established has established that hello internet listeners are the most technologically savvy and determined or has established that this size of them what do you think this vote has has established what has been one I think what has been one is a kind of audience intensity. I think that's what has been established here this is why I have such a fun feeling about this meetingless vote because precisely what you were saying before that it was enjoyable and engaging to see everybody on the subreddit like working toward a thing yeah and working toward a thing in a complicated intricate manner one of the things that was happening just before the radio. So it was a couple of hours in but there was like 30 minutes before they actually ended up shine the thing off was people who didn't have technical skills were asking like what can I do to help in addition to just manually voting someone was was essentially running the capture through like a mechanical turk system so that people could decode what the words were and then have a bot do the other parts of doing the voting automatically. So I just got that system set up like right before the capture got shut down that was the equivalent of internet users saying like and you have my acts right like I don't I don't have programming skills but like what else can I bring to this table to help and people building a system so that there was something that was that was there to help so I think it's a real indicator of audience intensity and interest that's why like when the radio times double down on their silence it felt even more intense to me like I don't know what I'm doing. There needs to be some acknowledgement of this that's why this trophy exists right is like radio times you thought you were doing something you were not remotely doing what you thought you were doing something far more interesting happened around this that's what this trophy is about there Brady it was just a very very fun and interesting weekend and terrifyingly impressive to see what an internet community can do. So I guess the next big question is when they do it again next year and I think they will because it seems to be something they're quite proud of will you and I be put in again I mean I'm the defending champion. You know Brady you are the defending champion it would be outrageous if you were not included next year it will be interesting to see how they conduct the vote next year I imagine it will be different it would also be really interesting if next year we were both put in because this kind of slipped under the radar before the teams were really onto it and you got knocked out by the very zealous Steve Allen fans before you know without us rallying the troops so if you if this time we were ready and troops were rallyed before the vote. We could get our longer way to show down no no no I don't want there to be a showdown I'm like I will promote no polls until after I have been a limiting that is my policy. So that's the way that's going to work. I want to win these things but when I won it was so sweet I was like I saw some of the like teams and that was saying this is so great that we're really pleased I wonder if they're going to do like a magazine spread with Brady and an interview and like a photo shoot like I think they genuinely thought like I was you know so I have seen someone mock up a cover of radio times with me on the cover but I think they genuinely thought like you know there would be some celebration of the win as opposed to the stony stone cold silence that it's been. Yeah well again if it was how could we phrase this a more legitimately intended poll like yeah of course they would have some some kind of photo shoot with Brady you know you an Audrey they'd have pictures the trophy my new trophy like just that launching with the trophy yeah trophy they do all this kind of stuff but of course no absolute silence on their end but again that's why that's why you needed you need a physical tangible symbol of this thing Brady this thing we will never forget. We will never forget you my friend our radio and podcast champion you deserve that trophy.
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Category:HelloInternetEpisode
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