H.I. No. 89: A Swarm of Bad Emoji

"H.I. #89 -- A Swarm of Bad Emoji" is the 89th episode of Hello Internet, released on September 28, 2017.
==Official Description==
Grey & Brady discuss: mint condition, American news, X and the new iPhone, the Firewatch copyright strike against PewDiePie, being a TripAdvisor parasite, papercuts 'lightning' round, not The Buzz but rather bee emojis 🐝, and the movie version of The Circle. 
==Show Notes==
*Brady's unopened lego box with Audrey for scale
*Cassini-Huygens mission
*How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster
*iPhone X
*Calculator unboxing
*Brexit news, I guess?
*Firewatch
*PewDiePie
*Copyright strike basics
*Casey Neistat
*Objectivity
*CGPPlay
*Euro/America Truck Simulator
*RedLetterMedia
*H3H3
*TripAdvisor
*Contribute to The Wikipedia
*Podcast Apps and Grey's current podcast app of choice that allows different speed settings for different shows
*Hello Internet on YouTube
*Bee news, I guess?
*Honeybee Emoji on Emojipedia
*The Circle
 
Seeing as you and I are both wearing Hello Internet merchandise at the moment, you wearing a reunion swamp hand t-shirt and me, the mighty nailing gear, it does remind me of a question of emitting to ask you for a while. Yeah. I don't want to put you on the spot here, but I am. I had made for you and had sent to you a pair of Hello Internet limited edition sneakers. Oh, oh yes. I didn't really expect you to wear them, because you know, you're you. But I am curious as to what's happened to them. Well, I mean, Brady, I think you know, I'm a real sneaker head. I'm a big fan of collecting sneakers. Yeah. One of the things when you're in the sneaker head world or the sneaker verse, as we call it, is you want to keep your really special sneakers in mint condition. Yeah. Absolute pristine mint condition. Schoeniverse is a good name as well. Oh, Schoeniverse. I'll pass that on to the other sneaker head and see how you do it. I'll pass that on to the other sneaker head and see how you see how that gets. I'm the I.C.Q. Where we chat. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I have a pair I wear and a second pair in mint condition. So I have my mint condition pair. I'm just wondering where your mint condition pair is. Oh, you want to know where it is. Yeah. I don't I don't think you're wearing them. Okay. It's pride of place in the house, Brady. They're in a box, which is behind my laundry hamper. So that it is as safe and as protected an item can be in the house if robbers were ever to show up. They won't find the Hello Internet sneakers. I'm impressed they're in the house. I'm happy with that. I'll take that. Do you feel like that's a victory? Yeah. Did you honestly think, Brady, that I might tell you that I had thrown away the Hello Internet sneakers that you have lovingly handmade? Well, I didn't think you'd tell me your head, but I still think there was a chance you have. I think it's more likely you've regifted them. Like you sent them to a relative or someone who listens to the show. With my same shoe size, is that who I would send it to? Well, yeah. I imagine you must have some relative with the same shame shoe size as you. Probably. Yeah. Family trees are quite extensive. But no, you haven't regifted them. No, they're in my house. They have not been regifted. They're in mint condition. And shall remain so for ever, I think, maybe. I have bit of a mint condition conundrum at the moment because for my birthday, which was back in June, I really wanted the Saturn V Lego rocket that was released around that time with 1,969 pieces. It was one of the most impressive Lego things I'd ever seen. So I said to my wife, because she never knows what to get me for my birthday. I said, that's what I want. So she got it for me. I was over the moon. Sorry. I was very pleased with it. But I haven't made it partly because I haven't had time. But also, like, I like that it's in its box and in mint condition. And like, I kind of like the box and like knowing that all the pieces are in there are beautifully arranged. And I kind of don't want to make it. I'm seriously wondering if it's still on sale, whether I should buy a second one. So I can make one and keep one in mint condition in a box as like a display thing. I have some follow up questions here, Brady. So I feel like I have ended up with a mint condition item in my house through a series of extraordinary circumstances. That I started a podcast with a friend that podcast ended up creating merchandise straight from the brain of my friend who ships on right to my house. It's not ordinary circumstances that such a thing would exist. Yeah. You, however, are looking to intentionally have a mint condition Lego box. I'm imagining this is quite a big Lego box. Like, what's the size of this thing? I would say it's about the size of two cake boxes, two or three cake boxes. How do cake boxes compare to bread baskets? I don't know this measure. You know the Hello Internet Sneaker Box. Yes. It's about the size of three of them. Okay. I have a sense of that. But for the listeners, those who did not acquire Hello Internet Sneakers, how many Audrey's is the box? How many Audrey's could you fit inside the box? That's the standard measure we use here. You could probably fit three to four Audrey's in the box. All right. But Audrey has been packing on the pounds lately. That's going to say. My mental estimate here is you could fit ten Audrey's in, but she must be really, it depends on how tightly you pack them and how much she's been putting on the weight. Also, I am aware that these Lego things, if they're unboxed, have a greater resile value like years later. But I never sell these things anyway. So I don't really think that's my reason. I don't think it's a financial consideration. I think it's just liking the neatness and the beauty of an unboxed or something. Right. You're not investing in Legos here. No. No. And I just feel like the boxed rocket and made just feels like a new model. It feels like a nicer thing to me than if I made it. Like if I made it, I'm just going to have this big rocket that obviously is made of Lego. And like I don't know where I'd put that or how I'd feel about that. Whereas I really like the box. I just like how the box looks and I like knowing what's in it. I can't explain it. I know it's a bit weird. I'm trying very hard to understand. And maybe I have used this analogy before when I try to think of these kinds of things. But the closest I can come is the promise of unused stationary, like an unwritten in notebook. That is true. It is the promise of what you could write in there as opposed to what you actually do, which just doesn't live up to the ideal. That analogy is good beyond what you know. Because when I was at school in year three. So I must have been like around eight years old or something. That's about right. My year three teacher who I still remember was Mrs. Delbridge. And she had this diary, which was a five year diary. You could keep five years in it because of the way the pages were configured. Like a five years schedule. Do you mean like a calendar for five years? Yeah, it was basically. Yeah, basically what I was. And I had a little lock on it. And I was completely besotted by it. And it was the prize for the student who did the best work in their journal that year. We had like a daily journal. We had to write stuff in it. I was just obsessed with winning it. And it was going to be given out at the end of the year. And while most of the kids didn't care about their journal and would write stuff about like what they did last night or what they watched on TV or you know. What they did in the holidays. I decided to turn my journal into like a spy novel, which I just wrote each day. And it was this fictional story about this spy having all these adventures. He was called IJM. I don't know why. That's what I called him. Okay. It was this epic tale spanning two exercise books. And there was one other girl in the class who kept her really good journal. And she had much better handwriting than me. Of course. And she also really wanted to win it. And I was convinced that she was going to win it. And I still remember at the end of the year. Mrs. Delbridge saying, and the winner of the diary is and she opened up the page. And my name had been written in the front where it said this belongs to. And I'd won the five year diary, which I'd wanted all year. So I took it home. And I was like, this is amazing. This is I finally got it. It's mine. I've coughed at this for so long. And I never ever wrote in it or did anything with it because I was too scared to ruin the beautiful empty diary. I didn't want to sell it. So for the next three or four years, I just kept this five year diary thinking next year maybe I'll start it when I when my handwriting's better. So I went ruin it. As I said, your handwriting will never be good enough to live up to the idea of the diary. Yeah. Especially the longer you have it as it has gone on for two years, it becomes like, oh, well now I really need to have something great to write in this thing. Yeah. It's like if you're keeping a bottle of champagne for a special occasion, the longer you go without drinking the special alert, the occasion needs to be in order to drink that champagne. It's like, well, we haven't drank this for two years now. It has to be an amazing event. You sort of sacredize an object by not using it. That's it. That's what's happening to the rocket. I'm sacredizing it, aren't I? Yeah. I think that is what's happening. My strategy for this, at least with paper stationary because I used to use paper notebooks all the time. I used to always have a paper notebook with me. I used to write in paper notebooks for all kinds of projects. And like, stationary used to be a much bigger part of my life than it currently is. But I was always aware of feeling that feeling about, oh, my dumb ideas are not worthy of this pristine book. And so my strategy was to just every time I got a notebook intentionally just scribble all over the first page. They're like, okay, now it's fine because there's no this first page needs to be the opening lines of war and peace. I am, I was going to say desacritizing, but maybe it's like degrading the notebook down to my normal human level. It's like, okay, well, now I can write it. Sullying it. When I got my new iPhone the other day, the first day I had it, I happened to go to the gym. And when I go to the gym, I give my phone and my car keys and my wallet to my trainer. And he goes into like a back locked room and puts them in his gym bag. So I said, I've got a new phone and I handed it over to him. And I said, can you just be careful when you put it in that the keys like scratch up against the phone? And I never say things like that. He looked at me funny and I said, I just got the phone today and you know, I don't want to scratch it. And he was like, oh yeah, no problems. I understand. I'll be really careful when I put it in my bag. I went back to the gym two days later and handed over my stuffed him. And he said, I'll be careful and I said, don't care anymore. Seriously. There's the half-life of it was two days. The iPhone is sacred for a day. And after that, I don't care. But the first day you have it, you know, you're polishing it and you teach it all the time to make sure there's no fingerprints on it and making sure it's all beautiful. And then two days later it was like, yeah, chuck it in. It's just my phone now. So after this big conversation about how sacred your unopened box of Lego is, what do you think you're going to do here, Brady? It's still open. I don't know. What you might have to do is buy the second box, build the Lego Saturn rocket, and then display the Lego Saturn rocket on top of the box with the other one. What will I do with the empty box? Well, you'll throw that one away. Have you seen how gorgeous the box is? This is the point in these conversations, Brady, where I feel like I've tried to work with you, but now it's too far. I'm going to keep two identical boxes of a Lego construction set in your hat. Like, that's what you're going to do. That's the ultimate idea when you were going to buy the second one is that you're going to keep the two boxes because they're beautiful. Okay, that you know that's crazy, right? It would be a difficult box to throw away. That's all I'm saying. I don't know, man. I feel like we're getting close to an episode of hoarders when you're telling me that you're going to keep both of the boxes for Saturn 5 rockets. Hey, I haven't even got a second one yet. Don't tell me off. I haven't even bought a second one. Don't tell me that your plan is when you get the second box, you're going to keep it. I don't know, man. I could go along with the constructed rocket in front of or on top of the box of the unopened one. But I had to keep the two boxes. I don't know what to say to you. Yeah, I don't know what way it's going to go because while they are a nice bit is a nice box. It is a little bit childish. So it's not really in keeping with the look of my office, you know, with the nice green walls and lovely framed pictures. But it's your office. Your office is what you want to make it. You can have Lego rockets in your office if you want to. Yeah, but I want it to have a certain grown up look as well. Right, of course. Growing up look. Do you know quite often when I go through feedback like in the emails and on the Reddit and stuff like that? I do enjoy it and I am grateful for it. But it always feels quite like sometimes it feels a bit antagonistic. There is a certain heat to it that sometimes can rile you up or you don't enjoy. Especially when people are disagreeing on things or disagreeing with us. It's like, because you know, they feel frustrated because they can't get their say to us. And we feel a bit frustrated because we can't answer all their comments. I've been going through a lot of the feedback on which is better, the moon landing or the Mars landing. Oh, though, which is more impressive. And there's been lots of discussion about it. Yeah, they're hands the hands. And both of you have been put. And you know what? I've completely enjoyed it. I've enjoyed the tone of it. I've enjoyed both sides of the argument. I still think I'm right. Of course. And the moon landing is more impressive than the Mars landing. But I've enjoyed what the Mars landing people have had to say. I've enjoyed engaging with a little bit of it. It's been one of the more enjoyable bits of civilized feedback and discussion we've had as a result of the show. That's nice to hear, baby. There was also always the problem when you were going through feedback. If you've made anything online and then people are leaving comments. And I feel like this is also one of the fundamental problems of the internet. Is that there is no indication of tone of how the person is saying the other thing. I think it's very easy when you're reading feedback that is critical of you, that the narrator in your head for the comment that you're reading has, has like a angry tone. Which might not at all be what the person is intending. Which of course is why we have a proliferation of emoticons and smiley faces everywhere. But at least on Reddit and YouTube, like the emoji encroachment has not reached there to a full extent. So I think it can be hard to understand how did the person mean the comment. But I'm very happy that you've been enjoying the moon versus Mars feedback. I also enjoy all those comment threads. I still think that Mars is more impressive to me. But I felt myself a bit swayed by the idea that four humans on the long scale, the moon is objectively more impressive. I felt myself pulled in that direction by the feedback. Yeah. I think maybe the reason I've found it so easy reading the feedback is my assuredness that I'm right. Okay. Maybe it's that you're so confident in your opinion that it's just like, oh, there's no arguing with the Brady on this. Also, there was another big space event since we last recorded. And this was the Cassini space probe, which had been doing the business around Saturn for years now and sending back all these great photos. That mission finally came to its end and it was sent plunging into the atmosphere of Saturn for a big dramatic finale, because they didn't want to leave it just, you know, cruising around the orbit of Saturn. As a beast junk. Yeah, basically. And I have in the past been critical of hype and space cheer pressure and things like that. And admittedly, when this was happening, I did go on Twitter and I was a little bit naughty and made a few provocative tweets just for fun. But I will say overall, I thought the level of Cassini hype in my timeline, at least in the social media, I was saying was pitched just perfect. It was right this time. I was very pleased. I thought the mainstream media may be slightly underplayed it, but of course a space note is always going to think that. But the space cheerleaders around the place, I thought it was about right, you know, they were passionate and emotional and I tease them about it a little bit on the Twitter, particularly when I said that taking nice pictures of Saturn is low hanging fruit. But overall, I thought it was about right and I wish that all science events were treated at about that tone. It was a proportional response. You think taking pictures of Saturn is low hanging fruit? Yeah, it's a bit like, oh, well, isn't it amazing? We got all these beautiful pictures of Saturn. I mean, anyone with the 2005 Nokia pointing vaguely in the direction of Saturn could take an amazing photo of Saturn. But don't get me wrong. I did like Cassini. Preferred the Voyager missions myself. You were a Voyager man, are you? I said that on Twitter as well. I said I'm more of a Voyager man. But I was impressed by Cassini and it was a really cool mission. Is Voyager 2 still going? I'm just realizing. I don't know. Is that still going? Yeah, I think they're still getting signals from both of them. There's a new story every few weeks that they've finally left the solar system as the definition of the solar system keeps changing for PR reasons. Brady, you're so cynical. There hasn't been a Voyager left the solar system story for a few weeks now, actually. I'm sure we can redefine the edge of the Sun's magnetosphere once again as the true edge of the solar system so we can get that story. And just quickly, can I praise SpaceX for a minute? You're trying to win over our commenters, Brady? No, no, they did something I liked. Credit where credits do? They posted a YouTube video montage of their greatest failures and crashes. It was a brilliant montage of rockets exploding and everything that went wrong. And I really enjoyed it. I thought it was really cool. And I liked that they were able to take the Mickey out of themselves in that way. It hiked back to a famous scene in the film The Right Stuff where they show a whole bunch of rocket failures. So maybe my nest and the state I would just kick in again. But it was a really cool video. This was on the official channel. They published a compilation of their failures. Yes. Is this it? How not to land an orbital rocket booster? They probably is, yeah. You know what? I've got to give a company credit for doing that kind of thing. I mean, to be fair, if you've got that incredible sexy footage, why not use it? Because there's not many things more amazing to look at than a rocket going wrong. But still, some companies would not couch it in this way. So I good on them. I'm watching the video now. It's pretty good. And it certainly helps with these are all unmanned rockets. Yeah. It did occur to me that the first time something goes wrong with a rockup with a person on it, that this video is going to maybe come back to bite them on the back side, which is why the companies would do it. That's exactly it. You're putting something out there in the world for people to hold against you. But I'll give a company credit for doing that kind of thing. These are definitely some impressive explosions. Yeah, they're nice. Nice footage. I'll put it in the show notes for people to watch. Speaking of your approval of the Cassini news coverage, there's something I want to touch on from two shows ago. There was a topic that came up briefly. And it was when you were discussing the overhyped eclipse in America. The eclipse of the millennium, I believe, was what it was being called. I know when you're poking me on purpose, I'm not even going to bother. Is that not right? I might be mistaken. I don't know. By the way, I do realize when you'd like to deliberately say things wrong, like a dead, you know, who does it just to win the kids up? Like how you keep not understanding what Okam means. I do know you do that on purpose, by the way. Oh, I understand what Okam means, Fred. I think I understand Okam better than you. I think you're too close to it. And you can't understand what Okam really is. All right. But yes, I was critical of the eclipse of the century hype coming from our friends across the Atlantic. So you made some comments about the American centric-ness of American news. And speaking of feedback in the comments, there were about a bazillion comments in the Reddit where people were jumping on this bandwagon about how American centric the news is. And I am not one to defend the news. People might be aware of that. But this is one case we didn't touch upon it at the time. But I have to say, reading the comments where people were complaining about how American centric the news in America is, I'm fine with that. Of all of the myriad of things I could complain about American news, the fact that it focuses on America is like the most minor of complaints that could possibly be. I think it's actually totally justified. For example, there was a comment that I'm sort of picking at random, but I think works well as an example where there was someone from Brazil who was complaining about having moved to America that nobody in America knows anything about Brazil. That it never comes up on the American news. There were sort of making fun of Americans for saying Americans would ask him if he speaks Brazilian as a question about what's Brazil like or not knowing where in the world Brazil is. I was like, I kind of get that it's funny to make fun of Americans for not knowing these things. But what I was thinking about was I was trying to think, okay, what is to Brazil as Brazil is to America? How do we measure the different sizes of countries? And this may not be a perfect comparison, but I thought I think you could use the GDP of a country as a rough first order approximation for how important is it in the world. I'm not saying that's a perfect measure, but I think we can ballpark that. Yeah. And it works out just about perfectly that the Brazilian GDP is one tenth the size of the American GDP. And of course, United States GDP is the largest in the world by a pretty decent margin. So the country that is to Brazil as Brazil is to the United States is a country like the Czech Republic or Romania. And it just kind of would love to know how often the goings on of Romania or the Czech Republic are in Brazilian news. And if someone from Romania could be like, oh, the Brazilian news doesn't cover Romania as often as they think it should. But it would feel like, well, of course, it doesn't. How does the Czech Republic or Romania impact Brazil? Like not really a lot. And so I really feel like American news is American centricness. It's totally fine. And it's a thing that I am very happy to defend as far as American news goes. Well, maybe I didn't put my case properly. I think it is okay for news to be parochial. I worked on a newspaper in Adelaide and everything was about what's the Adelaide angle. If a huge disaster happens on the other side of the world, the first thing we wonder is I wonder if anyone from Adelaide was there. Parochialness is fair enough. I think the American news does go too far. Like I think they're too parochial. I think they could just turn that dial down just a little bit. But I'm alright with parochial news coverage because you've got to play to your audience. But my problem is they kind of, it's almost kind of like a, well, I hope it's a willful ignorance. For example, if a new building got built in America that was taller than every other building in America. But it was shorter than the Burj Khalifa, which is the tallest building in the world. And so it was built in Chicago. And then the American news and the Chicago news ran a story about this new building and called it the biggest building ever. I'd be like, no, it's not the biggest building ever. It's the biggest building in America. It's like how the finals of the baseball in America is called the World Series. That's the classic example, isn't it? This is not the World Series to decide the world champions. They crown the world champions of baseball every year based on who won a domestic US competition. Well, it does include Canada. This is more where my problem is, it's kind of this ignorance of the bigger picture. And I think that's the problem. I think you need to know how you fit into the world. I don't mind skewing the coverage and not covering every minor incident that happens in Romania. But I think it's degrees and I think America goes a little bit too far. There are some TV channels in the UK when they're covering the news and they try to be all high and mighty and be really international. And I get really bored. I think, oh, enough of all this boring stuff about stuff that's happening in other countries. This is so worthy. Tell me why there was a big traffic jam on my motorway today. You know, I want my local news. So you can go too far the other way and be too unsentric. But I think America goes the other way. It's too America-centric. I want my porridge just right. Is that too much to ask? I mean, look, as a man who wants to bend the entire world to his will, I understand you want your porridge just right. I can zip a thighs there. I think of a lot of this stuff in life like it. I don't know how to articulate this very well. But it's a bit like everything in life is a series of dials. And it's like, yes, of course, we would want the dial to be tuned just right. But you can never know when it's tuned just right. So you have to think about it in terms of like, well, what happens if this dial is tuned too much? And what happens if it's tuned too little? And think about what are the consequences in these directions? Because you just don't know where the exact correct setting is. And I look at the American centric-ness of American news and feel mostly like, well, of course, this dial is going to be turned way to one side. And it's because the United States is, it's like such an incredibly large and important economically and political country in the world. And very few other countries can impact the United States in any meaningful way. And essentially the only foreign news that Americans get is about the countries that may be able to impact the United States in some way. And that is a tiny handful of countries. And to expect that it's much broader beyond that, I think is kind of unreasonable. Stuff like the World Series is just funny. And that's why the Eclipse of the Century was a perfect example, because as you said last time, it's like, how is this being measured? Like, there's no objective way it's the Eclipse of the Century, except that it's happening right now in America. Like, that stuff is funny. My personal peeve is a kind of beating on Americans for not knowing about the world outside. And I think it's because it's such an asymmetric relationship. Like people in other countries know all sorts of stuff about America, because what America does affects those countries. But Americans don't know about the countries that their policies affect, because one, there's vastly more of them. And two, like frankly, those countries, their actions don't really affect the United States nearly as much. So like, I just think it's not surprising that this is the situation that we're in. That's a bit of a shame. I can speak of a shame that something so powerful and that can affect so many other people is so unaware of those people. But I hear argument. I guess it bothers me mostly, because I remember coming to the UK a long time ago and getting into conversations with people about how it's amazing how you don't know anything about all of our countries. And I was originally on the side of like, oh, I should feel totally ashamed by this. But then, eventually, I kind of changed my mind time. I'm like, wait a minute. Why would I know the details of how the politics in France works? Like, why would this ever be a thing that would come across my attention before having moved to Europe? Like, it never would in any meaningful way. So I shouldn't feel bad about not having known it when I showed up. So I think that's why it's like a little personal thing for me. I'm okay with you defending your countrymen. But I do think one should strive for more information and more knowledge in life in all ways. And that includes knowledge of the world. And we shouldn't know how the electoral system in France works. I don't. But I shouldn't be proud that I don't. I should say, I wish I did. I wish I knew everything. But I do feel like a statement like, oh, we should all strive to know more about the world. Like, it's very easy to say, but it's very hard to agree with the specifics of what exactly does that mean. Because there's an infinite amount of things you know about absolutely everything. And so if we accept that as a premise, we immediately have to start filtering out. Filtering out almost everything about everything. It's not possible to know about all of the things. So there has to be some sort of filter. Again, that's why I'm not surprised that Americans they know about America and maybe not very much beyond her borders. Hello, Internet. Are you looking to make a website? You have a great idea for something that you want to make. Perhaps you want to make a website where you can inform Americans about the world around them. Filled with relevant and interesting news from beyond their shores. But you're not a website designer. What are you to do? The answer is to use Squarespace. Squarespace is the easiest, the fastest way to create a website. Go to squarespace.com slash hello. And within no time flat, you can have your website up and running. Their beautiful templates created by world class designers are there for you to use and modify. And make your website exactly the way you want it to be. Squarespace has built in search engine optimizations that people can find your site, secure hosting, and my personal favorite. Nothing to worry about. You don't have to patch or upgrade anything ever. You simply have to worry about filling your site with content. Squarespace handles the rest. So when you need a website, make it with Squarespace. Squarespace is what I use for my websites and it's what you should use for yours. So once again, go to squarespace.com slash hello to get started. And also try Squarespace free for 14 days and receive 10% off your first purchase. That's squarespace.com slash hello to make your website a reality. Thank you to Squarespace for supporting the show. So Gray, since we last spoke, I know there's been another announcement from the temple. The temple. Apple has announced new iPhones for all the fans. And I'll tell you what, if you went to a dictionary and looked up unimpressed, you could put a photo of me watching the iPhone announcement there. Oh yeah. Yeah. As far as I can tell, and you sent me straight if I'm wrong. But this new iPhone, can I call it iPhone X? I'm supposed to call it 10. Okay. No, let's get this on the record here. I am boycotting the 10. I'm not going along with there. It's iPhone 10. I'm sorry. If you're going to put the big letter X there, I'm calling it X. It's not going to happen. Apple. But I feel like like pulling out the X in any branding time. It's like your big gun isn't it? That's like, okay, it's time. It's time for the X version of whatever we've got. So I expect it to be pretty awesome, like game changer. And as far as I can tell, this is not a game changer. This is just more faffing around the edges. And I think they've wasted their X. I think they've gone early on the X, whether it's out of desperation, or they were just running out of time because they were approaching them pretend. And they thought that was when they could you they had to use their X. Well, I would argue that they had if they didn't want to use the 10, they could have had several more years of not using the 10, right? Because they have their little S, their little in between years. So we had seven. They could have done seven S, eight, eight S, nine, nine S. And then gone to 10 so they could have had what was that six years? I heard there was some technical reason they couldn't use nine. I find that hard to believe, but okay, what do I know about this stuff? But anyway, I am disappointed from what I've seen so far. I'm not yearning to get one from a thousand pounds. Am I wrong? Should I want one? What would you want the X to have? What would make you feel like, wow, that's the kind of X you want to see in the world. Amogies that move when I move my face? No, wow. I have good news for you. I don't know. It feels like it should be like a new birth. It should be the monolith descending from the sky. If I knew the answer to that, I would either work at Apple or I would have a really trendy, cool design monochrome blog where I wrote about it every day. I'm not thinking of one in particular, by the way, because I don't know any of them. That's just what they all sort of seem like to me. All these really minimalist design blogs. I tell you another thing about podcasters that annoys me is when they refer to the fact that they wrote about something, like that's a big deal. Like, yeah, I can talk on a podcast or day, but actually, I wrote an article about that. Like suddenly that, oh, hang on, you wrote an article about that. Well, that's different. Political podcasts are really bad for this. Like political journalists who will just waffle about politics and they'll say, actually, I wrote an article about that this week. They're probably worse than the Apple people for that. Like it's somehow now it's scripture because it's written down and it's more important than just waffling. Don't you think it is, though, Brady? I mean, this is one of the things I like about podcasts is, I mean, you and I, we've just shown up, we're having a little chat here, even like we were just talking about the American centricness of American news. And I feel like that's a very different conversation than if I sat down and I was going to write an article defending that same topic. Yeah, of course. If you write something, I think it is a bigger deal than doing a podcast, because then the podcast you're just talking. Right? Yeah, okay. I see what you're saying, but I think it puts an importance on what's written basically just on a blog on the internet into some kind of important sphere that like it's not like it's gone through peer review and it's more right. You're still just some Joker who wrote an article on a blog. Well, actually, I wrote an article about that. So now, now what I'm saying, like has more credence or something like, no, it doesn't. You just also wrote down what you think. I guess, I know what you're saying, but I still feel like they're very different things. What is your, you don't like it when they're simply referencing that it's like, oh, I have an important piece of work and you're listening to a podcast and you're thinking like, hey, you're a guy, listen to talk about politics all the time. What's the difference if you've written it down versus you're talking about it? It just sort of seems irrelevant. It's like, okay, good for you. I'm listening to the podcast. Like, it's okay if they say, like, there's a lot of things about that, that, you know, I'm not going to say now. So you should read the article, but they just, they just sort of say it as an aside. Oh, yeah, right now they're talking about that. And then they go into regurgitate sort of the ad. I don't know. There's something about it that just rubs me up the wrong way. It's like a paper cut. The thing that's funny to me about this is I always feel like, we said before, everything we're talking about on this podcast is sort of off the record because we're just talking. Like on my Wikipedia page, I sometimes see quotes from things that I've said on the podcast, like on my own Wikipedia page explaining a thing. And I always feel like weirdly annoyed by that. But I was just, I was just talking. Like, but now this quote of a thing that I just said offhandedly is like the representative thing on this topic, whereas I would feel very differently about that if I had written an article and then the Wikipedia article was like quoting the article that I had written. It just, it does feel like they're very different things to me, Brady. Yeah, I know. I know you feel that way. That's fair enough. And also, like, it is also just cross promotion. And I mean, we often talk about things. And I'll say, I made a video about that. And it's completely extraneous to what we're talking about. So I'm guilty of it too. So me a culper. You should make a video about it, Brady. I should. I haven't made a video about the new iPhone or written article about it or seen one. You guys, do we have to do an unboxing, Brady? Do you have an unboxing channel yet? It could be more popular than all your other times. Actually, I make calculator unboxings. We'll put a link in the show notes. I think you should really spin that off into something else. It could be a full-time joke. You'd dwarf number file immediately. Is the iPhone X a big deal? This is the one time I feel like you're really asking the wrong person, Brady, because I didn't actually watch the keynote this year. I was in an extremely low internet area. So I haven't actually seen the presentation or anything. I just read a couple of those articles afterwards. People wrote down their thoughts to get a summary of what's going on. I'm not saying people shouldn't write articles are right down their thoughts, by the way. Like, technology articles and blogs are not only good. I like them and I read them. I'm not against writing. You heard it here first, people. Brady, cool in against writing. And there are some really good ones. There are a few people who we know who I think write really cool tech blogs. It's when someone's on a podcast saying, I wrote an article about this. I was like, OK, that's good. But I'm listening to your podcast at the moment. So let's talk. Let's have a little chat. I feel like I've misrepresented myself anyway. Let's move on to the new iPhone. But you know what? Thank God this is a podcast. And people can hear that in the conversation. As opposed to everyone was just transcribed and written in an article. And then it seems like it's something set in stone. Our confused thoughts about these matters. I don't know, man. Like, I'm not the person here who's going to try to sell you on an iPhone X. Have you ordered one? They're not able to be ordered yet. But I mean, yes, I will order one as soon as I can. But I think that is also for anyone who has listened to this podcast and has heard both of us do our various iPhones, which is over the years. The past, what is it now? Four years of this design. I have been unhappy with and frustrated with the phones at both sizes. So I am excited, far less because of the technology that is in the phone. And far more simply because, oh, thank God, it's a different size after four years. And maybe I'll like this size better than the phones that I've been living with in the past. What size is this one? What's at the size of? It's in between the two sizes. It's like a little bit bigger than the regular iPhone. And it's as if that iPhone was all screen, except obviously for that notch at the top. So I'm hoping the fact that the screen size is larger. If not the body size is much larger. We'll get rid of some of my typing frustrations that I've had with the phone. That is the reason that I'm ordering it. Is I feel like, please let me like this size. If you're looking for someone to evangelize how technically impressive the iPhone X is, you are with the wrong podcasting partner for this one. I'm sorry, Brady. I cannot tell you on this device. I'm worried about the lack of the home button because whenever I have to swipe things from the bottom of my iPhone as it is now, I'm so hopeless at that. I'm like, oh, it takes me about eight goes to bring up that swipey thing at the bottom. So if the home button is anything like that functionality, it's bad news for me. I mean, we'll look, Brady, we all know that the future is no buttons, right? All of the buttons go. I'm sure someday we won't have volume buttons on the side. It'll be nothing but swipe gestures all over the place. That's what's going to happen there. You're passing on the iPhone X. Yeah. 10. Would you like it more if it was called iPhone Pro Brady? I would suddenly be tempted if they cracked out the pro. I think this exact same phone if they said it's iPhone Pro. You might feel the call of Apple tugging on your wallet. Yeah, I'd be thinking, oh, well, I'm like supposed to be a professional person. Maybe I, well, I've not got a pro. Do you not, Brady? Literally watch videos professionally on your phone. Is that not one of the primary use cases? I probably will have to get the pro. When they do that, that's when Apple's going to get your money. Yeah. Do you hear that Apple? That's how you get a Brady on the hook. There's a few backs to be made over here in the UK. You got one customer waiting for the pro. Well, we'll say I'll have a look at yours when you get it and decide from there. I'll talk to you on the podcast about it, but I won't actually believe it. Would you say until you're written article on your blog? The one topic that relates to YouTube that never stops is copyright. Copyright on YouTube is the topic that never, ever ends. And we were talking about it two shows ago. We were talking about it last show with regards to H3H3 and their copyright lawsuit that has gone on. And I thought, oh, we've gone through the copyright topic. We probably won't talk about it again. But just recently, another thing has occurred in YouTube land with regards to complications over copyright. I thought was a tricky case that I just kind of wanted to bring up. Are you aware at all of what's been going on in the world of PewDiePie and video game copyright? Is this a story that's crossed your radar? What's your guess? I'm going to guess no. Correct. No idea what you're talking about. This is one of these funny little moments where I feel that we do live in these non-overlapping bubbles of what's going on in the world. Do you know what happened with bricks and negotiations in the last couple of days? I literally didn't know bricks and negotiations were going on. I love it. I love it. But you know all about what's happening on a video game channel on YouTube. This is the moment we're again. I can be very sympathetic to your position because I am sitting here thinking, I kind of can't believe that a someone who makes their living on YouTube. Like you haven't come across this thing that's going on in some way, shape, or form, but obviously you haven't. But you would be quite right to say you can't believe that a someone who lives in the UK and has professionally made videos about the politics of the UK. I have not heard anything about Brexit. Whereas bad is each other. Is there anything I need to know about Brexit? Is there anything I should worry about Brady just before? Just to catch me up. It's still a big buzz up. Oh, okay, great. So I haven't missed anything yet. No. All right. Well, let me tell you about something that really matters. No, okay. Tell me what's happening on YouTube and with PewDiePie. I'm going to do a very high level overview of what's going on here. Because in some ways, I don't think that the details really matter, but I think the broad point is more interesting. Okay. So PewDiePie, the largest subscribed YouTube channel at the time of recording. He's got 50 million something subscribers. Crazy number that makes no sense. He's also recently gotten into live streaming. So playing his games live on the internet. And he got himself into a whole world of trouble by saying a very bad word that he shouldn't have said. What was the word? It was the N word, Brady. Oh, okay, right. Yeah. That doesn't go down well. No, it doesn't go down well. He said a naughty word, but not the word naughty. It was even naughty than that. He said a naughty word, but it wasn't that N word. That's not the word that makes it. Yeah. So he got himself into a whole load of trouble. Yeah. So PewDiePie has made videos of a video game called Firewatch. Right. In his past, he's recorded them. They're up on his YouTube channel. He didn't say any naughty words in those. It was just very typical. He's recording himself playing a video game and putting it up for his fans. Yeah. So then what happened was the company that makes that video game because of the thing that he said on his live stream. He decided to file DMCA takedowns against all of his videos featuring their content. Right. And he got a copyright strike against his channel. Now, in the YouTube world, getting a copyright strike, getting an official real strike against your channel is a pretty big deal. Because if you get three strikes, your channel is just totally removed from YouTube. All of your videos are deleted. The channel's just gone. I think they lapse after a certain amount of time. I'm not 100% sure about that. But getting three copyright strikes is a super big deal. Right. I feel like this is right in the heart of this complicated topic about copyright and also like YouTube getting into the business of controlling content on their channel. And it's like, while PewDiePie is very difficult to defend in this situation, I think there's something really, really dangerous and really chilling about a company being able to like selectively enforce the copyright on their content based on whether or not they like the creator or not. When PewDiePie first uploaded these fire watch videos, the ones that are not naughty, did he have their permission or had they just turned a blind eye to the copyright because it was great publicity from a really famous YouTuber. Like, did he have permission and they're removing it retrospectively? Like, what was the status at the time before this N-word thing happened? The short answer is the company that makes fire watch on their official webpage have an FAQ where they say you can make videos about our game. You can stream this game and you are allowed to monetize this game. Like, go ahead, go nuts. So the developers of the game did give sort of a blanket permission to the world of go ahead, you can record this video game and you can stream it. And that was just sort of given out to everybody. And that's part of what I think is this kind of dangerous thing that I really don't like YouTube going along with this of allowing the company to retroactively remove. Someone's content simply because they don't like that creator anymore. There's something about that that feels really dangerous as a precedent that sets on YouTube. And it makes me as a sometimes very rare game streamer, a bit uncomfortable with how that has worked out. I mean, there's a certain arbitrariness to how you can enforce your own copyright. Like, if the Daily Mail pinched one of my videos, I may go to town and try to get money out of them and kick up a fuss. But if another organization freeboats me, I might just be in a good mood one day and do nothing. I can see how you can be arbitrary on who you prosecute for lack of a better word for taking your material and fire watch could potentially be within their rights. If they hadn't said in the past, this is okay. So I don't think you can move the goalposts after you've done that. Like, if PewDiePie was taking a risk and fire watch had always said, this is our game and you shouldn't be streaming it, and it turned a blind eye to PewDiePie for years. And then one day he turned into a bad character and they said, all right, now we're going to enforce. Like, that would be a bit douchey, but like, it would sort of seem within the rules. But if they have already said, as you say on their FAQ, you can stream the game. And it was done in good faith. I think that is very unfair. It seems unfair. I really don't like that YouTube has gone along with that and has issued a copyright strike against PewDiePie. It seems like two entities deciding that for content reasons, not for the official rules reasons that they're going to enforce the thing. And that always just kind of makes me a little bit uncomfortable. But it's an interesting situation because let's plays and people who record themselves playing video games on the internet. This is like the greatest of gray areas when it comes to a question of what is fair use. And when we were talking about with the H3H3 lawsuit and I kept saying, oh, I think this is the bare minimum of what I might consider fair use under the rules as they were written. The live streaming stuff and the video game streaming stuff is like, oh my god, we're in this fog. And there's no ability to see in any direction where we're actually standing. And there is like this, I almost want to call it like a like a detente between most video game companies and video game streamers where nobody seems to want to bring up any kind of court case that would actually resolve this. Like it's, it is astounding to me that this far into YouTube and this far into game streaming as a hugely popular thing. There have been no court cases that have set any meaningful precedence on the concept of is recording yourself playing a video game fair use or not. No companies want to make this move and many, many companies take the policy sort of like what you were saying before of simply not saying anything publicly about it. It's very interesting. I kind of wonder if this thing between PewDiePie and the company that makes Firewatch might actually end up becoming one of the first precedence set in court cases depending on how far Firewatch wants to take it. But the very concept of should someone recording themselves playing a video game count as fair use is a thing that I feel like I have no ability to come to a decision on that. Even as someone who has streamed himself playing video games, I will happily acknowledge that that feels like it's in a really big gray area about how much of this content is like transformative versus how much of it is just showing what the game developers themselves have created. So Gray, as you know, I haven't been following this debate, but I do know that PewDiePie is not famous for being silent on such matters. Has he been kicking up a ruckus and saying this is an outrage and going to the mattresses? He's made a few videos about it, but of course that's his stock entry. He's a controversial character. And then he gets to make videos about his own controversies, which become popular as well. Said the guys that are still doing fade back an hour to the episode. Look, look, you know, everything feeds on itself in some way or another Brady. But yeah, of course, he's taken the position as well that it's that the copyright strike is ridiculous and that he had permission from Firewatch. But that's exactly the position that you would expect him to take. I mean, my initial thought, like a minute ago, I was thinking maybe this is just like for show, you know, like a PR thing. And it's just like a, you know, like when you get officially sanctioned and no one's really angry at anyone. But you said the videos have been taken down too. So his Firewatch videos were taken down. He got the DMC copyright strike. And the thing that I find a little bit, a little bit in this like threatening kind of way is that the developer of Firewatch was on Twitter and was calling for other people. And he was calling for other developers to issue copyright strikes retroactively against PewDiePie. And it's like, man, you only need two other people to do that. And if he gets three copyright strikes at once, like his whole channel goes, you did not going to do that to him. You cheap one. Let that happen to the biggest channel. Well, this is a topic for another time. But let's just say I would personally suspect that YouTube might not shed a tear if PewDiePie of all people were no longer the number one YouTuber on their planet. I don't think YouTube would be crying themselves to sleep at night thinking, oh PewDiePie, he was the one that we wanted to hold up our brand to the world. I think YouTube would be way more happy if someone like Casey Neistat became the number one person and was the representative of YouTube to the world. Objectivity. Or objectivity, of course, that's the final list is those two. It's which one do they think they should have represented YouTube itself? Keith, Keith famous. Everyone loves Keith. Yeah. So great. What are you going to do? What is this mean for CGP player, whatever you've called your gaming channel? Oh, my incredible gaming channel. Yeah, what happens now? Is this going to scare you off? Are you going to like a little frightened rabbit? Are you going to run back into your hole and not make any more of those truck things driving channels? Well, luckily my CGP place live streaming channel is a trivial portion of the massive empire that is gray industry. So from a personal perspective, I don't have to worry about that because it's a separate thing. It's not connected to my main industry. You've got it registered like on the Isle of White or something. That's exactly right. Oh, the Bank of Cancer, rough shore. Yeah. It's in a trust. It's in the Isle of White. That's actually owning a company in the Bahamas. Right. We have three trustees. Yeah, but it's a very secure situation. So the people who make Euro Truck Simulator aren't going to be able to get their hands on the main channel dollars. No, that's their requirement. Yeah, it's very quarantine. But it really is. Like when I started doing that just for fun, the whole copyright issue around this, I really do find sort of fascinating because a lot of the argument for why let's play video should be fair use is that the streamers will argue it's a kind of performance. It's like, well, yes, the thing that you're looking at on the screen is content that's created by somebody else. But there is a performance that is occurring on top of it. Like if I went out and bought Adidas juggling balls and made a video of me juggling, Adidas couldn't say, hey, those are ad juggling balls. Right. You know, I was just using their thing from our performance. Right. It's like, oh, they have a copyrighted sequence of colors on them or the pattern. Right. So it's like the Eiffel Tower at night. You know, you can't photograph it. Yeah, this is the argument that the performance makes it transformative. Yeah. But then of course, like with all of these things, there is this slider that goes from red letter media being totally transformative down to the H3H3 video, which is like minimally transformative. And you have stuff that's in between there. And Euro Truck Simulator or like driving American Truck Simulator. When I'm doing that, there are reasonably large portions where I'm simply not saying anything. Then all of a sudden we get into this very strange situation where it's like, okay, what is occurring on the screen here? It's like, well, a man is driving a pretend truck on a pretend road and he's saying nothing. Is this transformative? I would say it's not transformative at all. But it's also just a virtual representation of a real road. Like does anybody own the copyright to this road that we're driving along? Well, not really. It's so hard to understand is this fair use? And I think it's another another example of the internet really changing and distorting what these laws were originally written for. And you end up in all sorts of situations where it's hard to understand how this stuff should apply. And I can't come down with any clear decision in my mind about should stuff like let's plays be considered fair use or not. I think a lot of the companies that are making games don't want to push that issue either. I think they're very happy with this date hunt of not saying anything. But I think this fire watch thing is the first little breakdown in maybe this date hunt can't last forever. And at some point someone is going to have to force the issue and the courts will have to decide whether gameplay is fair use or not. Can I just ask a quick thing about the truck simulator game? Yeah. I've watched a lot of your playing videos, but I've occasionally dipped in once or twice when I've seen people saying, you know, you're always playing now on Twitter. Every time I look at you playing that game, you seem to be crashing the truck into stuff. Yeah. Like, are you good at it? Am I just happening to watch at times when you're making mistakes? Or because every time I've watched you play it, you're dreadful at it. Now, I want to give this on the record. I'm very good at that game. Now, the problem is that your truck, no, Brady. Although I will say if you ever want to see an actual demonstration of how much alcohol affects you play a truck simulator game, because sometimes I play the game on the couch, like when my wife and I are just sort of watching TV, and I like to have it as a mindless thing to do with my hands. And it is very noticeable, like hilariously noticeable that what I would consider to be a minimal amount of alcohol, like, oh, I have had a glass of wine. Surely I don't feel like I'm affected. This doesn't affect me at all. It's like truck simulator says different. Like, it is fascinating to say is, wow, I would not have guessed that my reflexes were different, but they sure are different. But no, when I'm live streaming, it's a different thing simply because there's a whole bunch of stuff going on. And they're people chatting, like they're people who are interacting with me. And so when I crash, it's because people have distracted me in the chat. You're like texting and driving. That is exactly what's happened. When you see me crashing on the Euro Truck simulator, I'm not drinking. It is an advertisement for how bad texting and driving is because that's essentially what's occurring there. Don't text and drive kids. You'll crash. Seriously, don't that's it's such a bad thing. Yeah, it's it's horrific. I'm serious, Gray. It's bad, man. I'm deadly serious as well. I've seen a bunch of studies saying that it is as bad or worse than drinking. A frequent topic on the podcast Uber. That is one thing I will give drivers really harsh ratings for us if they're texting while driving. Yeah, and I did it recently. I gave a dude one star and contacted Uber about the dude was driving dangerously because he was texting through an intersection. I was like, okay, forget it. I wouldn't put up with it if you were drinking through this intersection. So I'm certainly going to write it up if you were texting through an intersection. I'm off. We've been out, Gray. Oh, really? What are you doing? There's not lift in the UK. Are you walking? What are you doing? I don't know. Yeah. I just got in black cabs the other day. I was going to install lift. I didn't know I couldn't do it in the UK. But I hadn't actually got around to replacing Uber. Okay. So you're back on Uber. That's what you're saying. Well, no, I know. I'm not back on it. Yeah. And I'm not going to use it in America. Why are you off it? They didn't show me the respect I deserve. Oh, no. Do I even want to know, Brady? What happened? Yeah, it's a boring corporate compensation corner. Okay. All right. Yeah. We'll leave it. We'll leave it at that with the risk of leaving it for another day. We'll leave it for another day. I'll let you know. Once it's resolved. If it's interesting, I'll let you know. Okay. For now, Uber are on my black list. Okay. The Brady black list. Beware companies. You don't want to be on that. Hi, everyone. Welcome to my bathroom. I'm just going to be running you through a Harry's shave while I talk about them. It's some water going here. I've got my Harry's or weaponry ready here. I'm holding in my hand the handle. I've gone for this weighty silver one. You can't see it, but you can hear it tapping against the sink here. Very nice looking and looks very expensive, although it's not. And now just let me put my blade onto the handle. Always very satisfied as a new one clicks into place. Lovely. Harry's is a company that's so confident that you're going to love their shaving products that they'll send you a free trial shave set when you go to Harry's.com slash H.I. All you have to pay for is shipping. Now they're all about a great shave, but they're also about a fair price. And that's why over three million guys have started using them. The blades are made in Germany, so you know they're going to be made to the highest quality. They're going to be super precise. And they're also going to be pretty good at taking penalty kicks in soccer tournaments if my experience of Germans is anything to go by. Let's get things moving here. Bit of cream. Not much of an audio experience. This is it. Rubbing it on my face. Getting things rid of a row here. Now Harry's products are all backed by a 100% quality guarantee. You can buy replacement blades over the web. And they are at a way better price than comparable rivals. I think I've had a concentrate here. Let me move the microphone so you can get some shaving noise. Listen to this quality. Harry's shave. That's done the job nicely. So let's be clear on the offer here. Harry's.com slash H.I. short for Hello Internet for a free trial offer. That's $13 a value for free. When you sign up you just got to cover the shipping. And that set's going to include a weighted ergonomic razor handle. I'm holding such a handle in my hand at the moment. Just getting in there on the neck. I'm not lying. It's a good shape. I'm literally shaving right now. In the set you're also going to have five precision engineered blades with lubricating strips, trimmer blade. You get a rich leathering gel. I actually use the shave cream. I like the Harry's shave cream. But the gel apparently is really good too. That comes in the kit and you get a travel blade cover. That's Harry's.com slash H.I. Go and have a look at their website because they've got some other nice products as well, including sort of lotions and potions for your face. And I know a lot of people like years ago, who are always complaining, they could only really get their Harry stuff in North America. But I know for a fact they're shipping in the UK now. So go and have a look at their website and see what's available. They're great for you. They also make really great gifts. I'm going to finish this shave and let you get back on with Hello Internet. Is TripAdvisor on their blacklist? No. TripAdvisor is not on my blacklist. But as you have seen in the notes, that is what I would like to ask you about next. I was trying to do a segue there, I'm reading. You took a leaf out of my book there? I'm proud of you. You're learning from your vice host. Don't say that, Brady. It's awful. It's already a thing. That genie's out of the bottle. You degrade yourself when you save my host. Don't do it. I already get emails from people calling me vice host now. No. All right. What do you want to know about TripAdvisor, buddy? So you use TripAdvisor presumably like you know from your game places. And so do I. It's a useful resource. My question is a simple one. Do you ever contribute to TripAdvisor or are you like me? A parasite. I am not like you. A parasite. Yeah. But it's just by a technicality. Let me tell you a little story, Brady. Please. Two summers ago, my wife and I were driving across America. We're going to a family reunion. And we wanted to get some breakfast. And at that point in my life, breakfast was a very important meal to me. At that point in your life. Yeah. I don't do breakfast anymore. Okay. Turns out breakfast is bullshit. You don't need it. It's a lie. But two years ago, Gray, it was real grumpy if he didn't get his breakfast. Okay. So my wife and I, we look up on TripAdvisor. We're trying to find a place. And we eventually pick a place that looks like it's nearby and has a reasonable TripAdvisor reading. So we go into the restaurant. And you know, when you're with another person, sometimes it's a little bit hard to judge what's going on in the other person's mind. And you know, when you're traveling, you want, you have a certain amount of like you want to go along with things. Yeah. But I walk through the door of this restaurant and I just immediately thought, I don't know about this. I can't put my finger on what it is. Something is a miss here. And where I on my own, I would have turned around right then. But you're with someone. And there's like an inertia that you, the two of you have rolled through the door together. And so you just don't say anything. It was like unsafe or unhygienic or like what was the feel? It's hard to say what it was. Just a little bit of something's not right. Okay. The decor in the restaurant was I would say quirky, but something just seemed off and I couldn't place it. I hope this is going to end up that from dust to dawn and it was like a vampire hang out or something. I'm afraid it was not a vampire hang out. Right. But there was nobody else in the restaurant, which is objective thing one. Yeah, that's a problem. It's not a good sign. There's a little bit of confusion. The waitress eventually shows up with what I presume is like the owner who's sort of standing nearby by the counter. Like I can't quite figure out what the situation is. We're looking at the menu. We order what we're going to order. And they go they disappear off back into the kitchen, the two of them. And I'm realizing it's super warm in this restaurant, like uncomfortably warm as we're sitting there. And then suddenly a fly lands on my wife. And then I noticed there's some flies on the window and all of a sudden your senses just tune into it immediately. Like there's flies everywhere. There's a fly in her hair. There's flies in my hair. It's like this is disgusting. What's going on in this restaurant? And then as I'm like looking at my wife, she's looking at me and she's recognizing all the flies all of a sudden. And we're getting to that moment of like, uh-oh, what have we done? And then we hear from the kitchen. The two people are arguing. And they're arguing about how the things that we just ordered were supposed to be made. There's some kind of like great disagreement occurring in the kitchen. And so my wife and I, we got up. I took her hand and I said, we're getting out of here. And we essentially just ran to the car and drove away. There's so many flies. This place is so disgusting. There's an argument occurring in the kitchen. We're just getting out of here. No explanation required. We're just leaving. That was the last time we ever went to Big Joe's sloppy buzz. Yeah. That restaurant is the only time I have left a review on TripAdvisor. I gave them one star and I wrote a review warning everybody else away that I could. So that is my one and only contribution to TripAdvisor. Which is now big, desperately sought by Tim's across the internet. Aside from that one incident, I'm essentially a parasite. I have, I have not reviewed anything. I, I think you've read too much parasite. And the funny thing is, I can't think of a nice holiday that I've been on where my wife and I haven't sat over like a lovely meal or a cocktail saying, Oh, what would we write on TripAdvisor about this place? And we go through all the different things we do. And like the lovely review we write. And we always say, we must do that when we get back. That would be really useful. So many people have helped us with reviews. That's right. A really useful review of this place. You get home. Never do it. Just forget about it. You discuss the theoretical TripAdvisor review that you would write. Yeah. Like we don't like, you know, craft the wording. Yeah. You're not writing an article about it. Now are you? You're just having a conversation. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, yeah, they're two totally different things. I completely understand. Writing an article about it would be, would be a much more important thing to do, wouldn't it? I don't know. I feel like people have been doing asset service and we could return the favor. Because it's not always just like praise, you know, Oh, this would be a useful thing to know. But we don't do it. I don't think you should feel any kind of guilt about this though, Brady. Because one of the ways all of these kinds of things work, like obviously they are the same. But there is a part of it, which is that if you are writing a review for TripAdvisor or Yelp or any of these kind of services. In that moment, you're essentially doing advertising work for the place that you were visiting. Well, I don't think you were advertising Big Joe's Slopey Bands when you wrote that really good news. It was a bit of a little bit of a big deal. But I think you're going to be able to do it. For the place that you were visiting. Well, I don't think you were advertising Big Joe's Slopey Bands when you wrote that really negative review. Or you're anti advertising. You're kicking sand in their face. I have had reviews where they've said things like, you know, try to get Ward of Hill number seven because it's got the best view of the sunset and stuff like that. You can get useful information in these things. Yeah, but see, that's a different thing because I feel like if I go to a place and there's, Oh, this is the thing. This is the good thing to do. I feel like that's like a trade secret that I want to keep for myself. I don't want to let people in on what the secret is when they, when they visit the place. I'm going to keep the information to myself. Yeah, I mean, that's, yeah. But you've benefited from it when you read the review in the first place. Of course. Yeah, of course. Yeah. That's a bit selfish, isn't it? Fine. It's okay. But that's where the guilt comes from. I don't feel any guilt about that kind of thing. I'm not sitting here wrecked with guilt. And I don't like, you know, I'm not, I'm not thinking like I'm the world's worst person. And it's fine. I think TripAdvisor would be more useful if more people like me wrote reviews. It's like when you're really angry at Uber. And by the time you record the podcast, you've like, you've just lost the fire in your belly. It's the same with a holiday. Once you're back home, you've, you've lost your creative flame for writing a bit of purple prose about how lovely the place was. Yeah. I don't feel any guilt here because there's, there's like what's occurring here is the interaction between two corporations. And while TripAdvisor and, and services like it, they're obviously useful. To everybody. It is also to totally the fact that it's, it's because of all of the user contributions that TripAdvisor has any value at all. And so even if you don't feel like you're doing advertising work for the restaurant that you have just visited, because you're, you're writing about how there's flies everywhere and they argue in the kitchen. Yeah. Whatever you write, you are still then doing a kind of unpaid work to build up the value of the company. Yeah. Okay. But the thing is, you're willing to extract that free value. You're just not willing to put any back in. Right. Which is fine. It's selfish, but it's fine. And it's okay. And they get their value in other ways. I mean, they are running ads and, you know, I'm not feeling sorry for TripAdvisor here. Again, this, this is a kind of company that can exist very differently in the internet than traditional companies could. Yeah. And it runs a ground of some of these things. And don't give me up. I totally get what you're saying. And I will be the first to admit that I am like a parasite on the review systems of the world. Like I just, I rarely contribute. And I constantly extract value. But I don't feel bad about it because I do think these companies, part of the way they're able to do it is that like they themselves are trading on a kind of social expectation of the world. I just can't feel that way about the company where it's like, well, you company are making this available to me for free. And I am happy richtig to enjoy your free resource. So I think the difference between you and I in this conversation though is that I'm not even thinking about TripAdvisor as a company. Like to me, that's an abstraction. I think you're making this available to me for free. And I am happy to enjoy your free resource. Like to me, that's an abstraction. I'm thinking about the other holiday makers and me as a holiday maker and the relationship between us. Right. I feel a bit like, you know, if I stumbled and fell down a pot hole in the street and then just walked away quietly and didn't tell anyone else it was there. And the next person fell on the pot hole. I feel like, ah, maybe I should have told some people about it. I'm not thinking of TripAdvisor. I'm not thinking of the businesses that run holidays and the restaurants and the hotels. I'm thinking about my fellow. Your fellow men. Internet citizens. Yeah. I totally get it. And actually, the pot hole comparison is great because I think it runs parallel to what I was going to say would be a different situation. So the different thing with the pot hole is we are all members of an involuntary corporation, which is the municipal government. Like we're all paying taxes into it. Like we're all here as part of society. Like this is a coordination that's occurring between the large number of people. And so the like reporting a pot hole kind of thing. I would totally do that. I know that I have done that kind of thing. Something like TripAdvisor, it just feels different because it's a for-profit entity. If TripAdvisor was something kind of different, if it was like a not-for-profit open source collaborative thing, kind of like the Wikipedia is sort of, like I would feel more guilt about it, which is why like my wife and I do contribute to Wikipedia because it feels like it's so much more on the end of like a social good. And people have tried to get distributed review systems off the ground or things like distributed social networks off the ground. They've never really taken off because I think this is a space that just ends up being one where commercial interests will naturally dominate. But for me, there is a part of it that I cannot ignore that it isn't just a direct interaction between me and fellow citizens. That there is an entity that is profiting from the interaction between me and fellow citizens. And if it was more peer-to-peer in the way that I think a government interaction would be, or the way a different sort of system would be, then I would genuinely feel more guilt for being like a parasite upon the system. Again, you just can't get your brain away from the company and the money. I will totally agree. That is a thing that is unignorable for me. The owl watches over us all, as we're contributing those reviews. I don't agree with you, right? I feel like I'm the same as you. I'm a parasite, but I feel like that defense doesn't work for me. And I feel like to me, that's not an acceptable position that you're taking. I don't care if you write reviews or not. But to me, that argument doesn't hold water as you make it there. But if you then said to me, I once wrote a review on TripAdvisor for my fellow man. And it was removed by TripAdvisor, or they edited it, then I would completely agree with you and think, I'll hang on a second. This is just a company. This isn't between me and the other holiday makers. They're editing things because their customers are unhappy in that. And then I would totally agree with you. And actually, I think that does happen on TripAdvisor. So I kind of probably am on your side in a way. But the single argument that this whole system was set up by a company that makes money, doesn't stop you taking the value from it. There is also a similar thing, which I totally changed my mind on, which is when self-checkout machines were first introduced, my initial reaction long ago was, this is ridiculous. They're having me work as an unpaid employee bagging my own groceries here. I guess it's outrageous that the grocery store wants me to do free work for them. I will do no such thing. And now, of course, as listeners know, it's like I couldn't be happier to be bagging my own groceries. So not perfectly consistent on this issue. But yeah, that was a place where I felt the same way. I was like, I can't ignore the commercial interaction that's taking place here. Like, look at you grocery store, so cynically saving money on wages by deferring the labor to the actual customers. And now I'm very happy to be part of that system. Got time for a quick paper cut blitz. We haven't done Brady's paper cuts for so long. I feel like every time we do paper cuts, you say we haven't done paper cuts for so long. But it seems like we do paper cuts all the time. Maybe one of my paper cuts is you not letting me do paper cuts enough. Have I ever stopped you from doing paper cuts, Brady? No, never. No, you haven't. I stopped you in the edit sometimes. In the actual moment, have I ever stopped you? No, I never have. No, you just go make a cup of tea and let me waffle for a few minutes. Yeah, I throw down a delete marker and then I come back. Yep. All right, I'm going to do a lightning round. Lightning round. Lightning round so that people won't get bored. One of my paper cuts is when I get an email from someone, usually wanting some kind of commercial or work interaction. And they will make a really big point of saying, what a huge fan they are of my work and they have been for a really, really long time to try and like, carry my favor and then they get to what they want. And then I go and look at their Twitter and they don't follow me. And there's no indication that they have any idea who I am whatsoever. Because I would do that. If someone makes a big enough deal about how much they're personally engaged by me and how they've loved my videos for so long. Right. And I'll go and look through the four or five hundred people they follow on Twitter. And none of my Twitter's or channels or anything I do is there. That's like a, well, you're not getting a reply now. If you ever want to trick me into thinking you really are a fan who wants to do business with me. At least follow me on Twitter a few weeks before you send the email. Like, I'm not stupid. I'm going to do my homework. What if they follow hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter? Does that change in this situation? Well, yeah. Do you feel less special then? Well, I can't go through and check that. No, but sometimes they'll make a really big deal of it. You can tell they've even gone and done a little bit of like sneaky homework. Like, oh, I loved your recent video on Graham's number, which is obviously they've just gone and had a quick look at the channel and seen the first title they could, you know. I'm going to investigate you further than that before I do business with you. And if you're not following me on Twitter, well, you're following at the first hurdle. Fair enough if you're not a fan and you just say, I want to do a deal. Okay. All right. We don't have to be mutual appreciation society here. But don't tell me you are. Like, don't lie. Oh, the problem is the breathing has to deal with. As someone who gets these kinds of emails, they are hilarious sometimes. Another funny one you get when you do a podcast is when people who say they listen to the podcast obviously don't, because they're wanting to suggest like one of their clients is a guest for your next episode. Yeah. Like, like, like, oh, yeah. We'll put them on that queue of guests that we've had recently. I've gotten that one so many times. Yeah, it's great. I love the show. You should have my client on as your next guest is like, I've got some bad news for you. Because it's unless your client's Brady. I don't think it's going to be on the show. I'll tell you another pro tip for the people who have that spammy, sad job. And I can't I feel sorry for them because, you know, it's a pretty soul destroying thing to have to do. When you're like copying and pasting all the stuff you're plagiarizing from the net to create this impression that you know who I am, go through and fix your formatting. So it's all like the same font size and color and type like the same. Like, don't make it like painstakingly obvious that you've copied this from that because that's bold and that's in italics. And that's four points bigger than the word before. Like, if you're going to do this cobble and paste, like, at least make it look like you wrote one coherent sentence. I have a unique situation that occurs that is hilarious to me every time where I can tell that some sort of algorithm has been involved in creating this business email that's coming to me because the email will be addressed, DR CGP Gray. And it's CGP, like the way I write it on the YouTube channel altogether and then Gray. But it's capital C, lowercase G and P and then capital gray. Because it's like nobody would write three initials together. All capital. That's crazy talk. Like the computer just thinks like the CGP must be a name. So the first one must be capital and then the G and P must have they have to be lowercase because that's like your name is. Yeah, good book. Gray. And it's like is hilarious every time. I was like, oh, okay, I can see your inner workings here algorithm. Like this is the first line of the 10,000 emails that you have sent off and you are just scraping data from YouTube or Twitter. And this one, the way I happen to format my name just doesn't fit your expectations of how the form email is going to go out. All right. Well, that was supposed to be a lightning paper cut, but we seem to have gone on a bit of a rant there. Do we ever do any topic very quickly? I don't think we do. No, it's funnily enough though. It's a segue to my next lightning paper is to do with things being done quickly. This is dangerous territory because people who do this are really proud of themselves about doing it. But my next paper cut is people listening to podcasts, particularly our podcast at a higher speed than it was recorded at. This is not a paper cut about people who have put the feature into their app. I'm also talking about the ability to remove silences and stuff like that. Like, you know, there's these, I don't know, they've got all different names and stuff. And it's very clever and I have no problem with people putting it in their apps because that's what the customers want and you have to make your apps. But I think it's counterproductive to do it. And the best example was in a recent episode where you called for a moment silence for CGP Grey, the lady pink one. And we were both silent for a few seconds. And anyone listening to it with the silence remover, just then got the start of the next sentence straight away. And I also think like speeding things up or removing pauses, like just tramples all over things like comic timing. And like a motion can be lost. Like if I say something to you that you can't believe because it's just another stupid analogy. And there's like a few moments of silence from you. That speaks more than a thousand words. And yet someone listening with all of that stuff snipped out is missing out on that. They're missing out art. Oh. Is that what is that what they're missing? So do you think that the people who listen at higher speeds or with silences snipped out? They're only cheating themselves from the full podcast experience. I think they are. I think they're missing out on the true human experience. But I also know the people who use these features love the fact they use these features. So I'm not I'm not going to convert them. But it's just a mind. It's an annoyance of mine. You know, I do this, right Brady? Yeah. And I know you edit. I listen to this very podcast at 2X. Although I think that's not that's not quite a fair comparison. But I have occasionally by accident sent you the 2X version. Yeah. And I know you always enjoy when I make that mistake. But that's okay. You know, you do what you want. But I think you're missing out. And I have seen some people who say I listen to podcast X at high speed, but not podcast Y. Those people. Okay. I think maybe you are using these features the way they should be used. Maybe, you know, some picking and choosing is good. But overall, I don't do it myself. Because I feel like I'm missing out on really knowing. Because I like the people who's podcast I listen to. And I want to know what they're really like. And I think you really know what someone's like when you've. You hear everything about them. It's all about nuance. Yeah. These things are nuance removers. I know what you're saying. Obviously I can't get entirely on board because I don't do this. I use silence removal. And on my podcast that I have, I will crank some podcasts up to about one and a half speed, which when you also then add in silence removal gets it very close to 1.8 or 2X. But I am also in that category of it depends on the podcast. So I have like I have different settings for different shows. Are there ones that you will leave untouched because you want to hear it, you know, as God intended? If a show is a funny show or if like if I just personally find the hosts funny, I do genuinely think that removing the silence messes up some moments. It does mess up the way the timing comes across. But I think that like the higher speed stuff is totally like I listen to a bunch of shows that are sort of like tech newsy kind of shows. And there I think it's way more appropriate to crank up the speed a little bit on that because it's not quite the same thing. It's like I want to listen to a show, but maybe I don't want to spend an hour on it. I want to spend 30 minutes on it. I guess it says something about my podcast listening to then because I like long podcast and like the longer the better. So the last thing I want to do is like, you know, I don't feel like I'm like number five needing input and having to read, get everything into my brain as quick as possible. My podcasting is like, it's sort of leisure time in a lot of ways. I wouldn't like the idea of just cramming it in as fast as I can so I can get onto the next one. It's why I like having different settings on different shows and it depends on what the kind of show is. Obviously people who are listening to this very show right now at three X with the with the silence removed. If that's the way you want to do it, as totally fine. I'm okay with that. I will not look down upon your choice. Although if you ever if you ever meet Brady and I in person at some event someday, it may seem like we are the slowest talkers in the world. Listening us at at super high speed and I do see that comment very often when people jump on the YouTube version of the show. Because it doesn't have whatever their podcast app settings are stuck at look like, oh, I thought the two of these guys were drunken and I realized, oh, I'm just listening to it at one X speed on YouTube instead of reacts like I normally do. So I've had my paper cuts, you know what that means? I think we need a quick episode of the buzz CGP gray. Have you got a buzz for me? I don't really have a an episode of the buzz because there isn't that much B news. Rabbish with people. I tried to always tell me that there's tons of B news. There is. It's not necessarily the case. I'm just I'm googling B. No, no, no, you don't need to go. Clicking the news tab. There is a lot of B news. No, there's no there's no B news. We don't need to do that. I could read you seven excellent news stories from the last five hours that are all at the base. It's not true. The B world is very calm. It's very stable. But. Okay. I did just want to bring your attention to the emoji PDF page for the honeybee emoji. I've sent you the link in iMessage. I'm looking at all the pictures of the base. We have brought up emoji fragmentation on the show. Yeah. Primarily in the context of you being upset that the wolf emoji no longer looks like Audrey, which is of course the way it should be because it should look like a wolf, not like a little Chihuahua, but I've got to say this page for what do bees look like? So we've got all these different bees for like Apple and Google and Microsoft and Samsung and LG and Facebook and Twitter and yeah. I don't understand why everybody has to have a totally different set of emojis. And these B ones, some of them are like unspeakably terrible. Can't we get our act together with the different emojis? Can't we consolidate them? Why do we have to have these different ones? Why do we have to have different communication between people? If I want to send someone a picture of a bee and I think I'm sending them like a cute little bee and then I actually end up sending them something that just looks like a bug, we need to consolidate these things. Yeah. There is some differences in tone that could cause problems. The question I have is if you were in charge of emojis, who's emoji on this list would you use as the default for bees? Ooh. While I have an iPhone, I have to say personally, I have always thought that apples emojis are terrible. I've never liked Apple going for this little 3D emoji space. They're like too small and yet too detailed. I have never ever liked apples emojis. Yeah. I think for on a small scale, you should have a flatter design for what your emojis look like. You've clearly thought about these loads. I love how you think about this stuff. But don't you think that makes sense? It does make sense. Yeah. It does make sense. I agree with you. I think typically emojis are looked at... Well, that is changing how small we look at our emojis. Okay. Yeah. Apple embigued their emojis last year and they made them three times larger. But they're still not huge icons. They're drawn with a lot of detail. What do you think of the Apple ones? I don't mind Apple emojis. I'm not someone who would necessarily favor cuteness and Apple maybe is going a little bit down the cutesy path. But I can see why you would favor 2D. But in the case of the B, I don't know. You haven't answered my question yet. Which one are you going to favor of the ones on the list there? Because I have to say, that's a bad bunch. There's nothing that's really great here. It's a swarm of bad emojis. At the top we have Apple with a fat B that looks like no B. I have ever seen yet it's still trying to be like a drawing of a B. It's like if you had a yellow balloon and you drew a couple of stripes on it and you said, Ah, that's a B. Great. You nailed it. You're not going to let me say this. But that's almost the best of the bunch though. It almost is though. I agree. Looking down at the bottom, there's like emoji decks and emoji one Bs that are terrible looking. Although I've never come across those things. I don't know what they are. The emoji one is okay. The emoji decks one. I don't even know what emoji decks is, but I've got a terrible emoji for a B. Whoever is out there using emoji decks, I'm sorry, that's what your thing is. I can't even invent what that is in my head. What emoji decks is like from the name. Whatever it is, the representation of a B is like a man and a B costume wearing a mask, stealing some honey. Oh, that's honey. You said, okay, yeah. What is emoji decks? I do not know. Anyway, come on, pick one. The Facebook one's all right. It's ugly though. It's sort of 3D, but not really. Too much brown and not enough black. But like the Mozilla one looks like I designed it. That's how bad it is. The Twitter one is also terrible. The Microsoft one, like, I don't know what's going on there. Someone went crazy with the Stroke tool in Photoshop. Microsoft is a big fan of thick strokes on their emoji. Now, here's the thing. I'm actually going to have to say that I would probably go with Microsoft or I would go with Twitter. But part of that is the overall design aesthetic of emojis. So if you click on the icon for the Microsoft B or you click on the icon for the Twitter B, it'll bring up what all the Microsoft emoji look like and what all the Twitter emoji look like. I feel like it is inarguable that the flat designs look more consistent as a bunch together than the 3D designs of emojis. They definitely are more consistent. Yes. I really like Twitter's emojis. I think the Microsoft emojis are very good. I think the Apple emojis are terrible and I don't like them every time. And as my wife often points out to her great frustration, the Apple emojis are also really biased towards everything being happy. Like the Apple ones, it's hard to express a wide range of negative emotions with the Apple emojis. It's like we're all locked in some kind of black mirror future where smiles are the things that are best for us to express. Does your wife feel she wants to express a bit more negativity and how that is? Yes. Yes, that is exactly correct. She's the most positive texture I've ever met. Like, she's the most positive texture you ever met because she's doing it through the Apple system. And so it was nothing but smiley faces. That's the range of expression that she is limited to. I'm going to say if I had to pick a B emoji, I would go with Twitter or I would go with Microsoft. But that is in the context of them looking better as a series of consistent flat emojis. That wasn't what I asked you for. I didn't ask you to appraise the whole system. I just wanted it to be like a B versus B. The Google one though. The Google one. What's going on here? I'm trying to, I'm trying to writhe the whole world into the way I wanted to be. Right? So it's like which B emoji is it going to be? I want to change all of the emojis. The Google one is like, what are they doing? Like because the eyes are on the same side of the face as like the wings. Yes. So it's like it's head spin like yanked around. Like, do they even know how B works? Yeah, the Google B emoji is an exorcist emoji. Right. It's the B should be looking the other way, but they've given it human eyes and it has rotated its head 180 degrees to be looking at you as you select it. The same sang one is like a cute image, but it's not an emoji. It's like a little drawing. So I'm going with Microsoft. I'm going with Twitter. That's what I'm going to have to go with here. And although I generally agree with some of your sentiment about the apple emojis, I'm going to go for the apple emoji. Really? I like that B. I'd like to watch it fly because it's kind of fat and so it looks like it would struggle to fly. I'm kind of rooting for him a bit. I feel sad. I can see what you mean. It almost looks like it's a bit dopey. This is also a case where if it's going to be this detailed, I feel like it should be fuzzy. Like, like, B's actually are. It's not enough detail. It just looks like a balloon. All right, Graham, throwing it out there. I want to see Tim's design a B emoji. Put them on the subreddit. See if someone can come up with a B emoji that is worthy of Grace Praise. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you by Hover. Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names. Whatever you're doing online, you need a central place that represents you. And that means getting a great domain name. And that's what Hover is for. 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So if you have a domain name that you want to get in your head right now, go grab it at Hover before somebody else does. Go to hover.com slash hi and get 10% off your first purchase. That's hover.com slash hi. And thanks to Hover for supporting the show. Gray, just to finish up, we're going to quickly talk about a film, which obviously means there'll be a little bit of spoiler analysis, but we like to do that at the end of shows. So there'll be nothing else in the show except you and I talking about a film called The Circle, Starring Emma Watson or Hermione Greyja. As my wife said, every time she came on screen for the first 10 minutes of the film, I was going to say, well, why was there such a question mark at the end of her name? But that's what it was. You were trying to think of what is her actual name as opposed to Hermione Greyja. And also starring Tom Hanks and quite a few other good actors starring the guy from Star Wars, who's near my don't know. Yep. And I'll tell you what, you will be happy. I went into this as spoiler free as a human could almost be because we were thinking, what film we're going to watch tonight. And my wife said, I want about that new Netflix one that's got Tom Hanks and Hermione Greyja in it. And I said, yeah, okay, that can't be bad. That's got Tom Hanks in it. And I had no idea whatsoever what the film was going to be about. No idea. That's interesting because you must have forgotten that a while ago on Hello Internets, we were talking about Tom Hanks in a passing way about how he always plays a good guy. And there were a bunch of comments on that episode about how, oh, there's a movie coming up with Tom Hanks where he's going to play the villain and it's called The Circle. Well, we'll come to that then. We'll come to that issue. But no, I didn't remember that. That did pass me by. Tom, and even when Tom Hanks is playing a bad guy, he's still a good guy. Like in that one where he's like a killer for the mob or whatever and he's still like a good guy. Tom Hanks, this is lovely. But anyway, so I watched this film knowing nothing. And at the end of it, I thought, I wonder what Grey thinks of this film. So I like to send you a text saying, Grey, you need to watch this film because I think we should talk about on Hello Internets. And you told me you'd already watched it. Yep, yep. I watched it a few weeks ago with my wife. It was the same thing. She was looking around on the Netflix thinking, ooh, what should I watch and thought? Oh, here's a movie with Hermione Granger. This looks great. Let's watch this. And I was happy to go along. This is a case where I had actually read the book. It was originally a book. And sometimes I read a book and I have a very hard time getting into fiction. I have a very hard time finding fiction books that I really like. And there is a complaint that I would say I've had more frequently about fiction books that I have picked up, which is fiction books that feel like they are begging to be turned into movies. Like it feels like less like I'm reading a book and more like I'm reading a sales proof of concept that a thing should be turned into a movie. Yeah. And I read the circle. It was fine. But that was one thing that I felt intentional or not felt very strongly in that one. I was like, I think you really want this to be a movie. Yeah, yeah. And you've actually just written a book that you can sell enough of to convince someone to turn into a movie. I get you know, I haven't read the book, obviously, but I have read books like that. So I understand. So you watched the film, but you had you obviously went in with considerably more knowledge than about at least what the film was going to be about. One could say I had a lot, I had a head full of spoilers about what might have been in the movie unless they took a dramatically different term, which they mostly didn't. So for people who are listening who have not seen the film, but want to hear what we have to say about it, do you want to kind of just like encapsulate what the film is about in the nuttiest of nutshows? It's a movie that is very much of its time right now. And the basic plot is that Hermione Granger gets hired by a company that is clearly a kind of Google stroke Facebook amalgamation. And she is working at this company. And the purpose of the company is to spread these very small high resolution video cameras all over the world. So that's their new product. Yeah, that's their new product. Yeah, like you say, they're like a Facebooky social mediary, Appley, Googley. Yeah, it's a bit unclear precisely what this company called the circle does right now. But it's like, oh, there's a search engine social network-y kind of company with lots of money. Everything in one. Yeah, exactly. And the driving force of the plot is that they are manufacturing these video cameras that they're going to put all over the world that will eventually then be able to record all of the information that's occurring everywhere. That is the driving force of the plot. Okay. And then Hermione Granger, although she's been of an underling at the company, gets heavily drawn into it all by a series of coincidences and becomes a real linchpin to the whole marketing campaign. And she also then becomes like the subject of a test run with these cameras where everyone in the world follows her life and stuff like that. So, Gray, you know early on I like to get a thumbs up or down, of course, which way is the thumb pointing? This is one time I'm very happy to just say it at the beginning because I thought this movie was terrible. Gray, I think you are overrating it by calling it terrible. This film almost made me angry taking time away from my life. I don't know why I kept watching it. I just sort of felt like, oh, I guess I have to know how it ends. It was very interesting having read the book, which again, I would describe as kind of a meh, but like fine book. But it was so interesting to have read that and thought like, oh, obviously this should be a movie. So many of the things that are happening in this book would be much better as a movie turns out not, turns out you really wanted this to be a movie and movie is terrible. And it's funny that you say that because I would say that my wife and I have watched a very large number of movies that I would fairly describe as terrible. But my wife was also in the kind of like angry that she had spent time in her life on this film. Mine too. Mine too. It was the angriest I've seen her for years. I'm not even joking. She was like really mad at this film for being so just for being bad, not because it raised issues that upset her or anything, just like that just the badness of it. Like it was insulting that it came into our lounge room. Yeah. So this movie was shockingly awful. And I think it was also interesting that it's movie with two pretty big stars that was just terrible because I felt like you like, oh, they've taken a book that was begging to be a movie. They put Tom Hanks in it. They have Hermione Granger as the lead. They must be super confident about this. This is going to be great. And it was not. Did I read the script? I mean, did Tom Hanks read the script? That's a thing I always wonder. I would love to know. Do actors know that they're in a terrible movie? This is a question I find myself asking all the time. I suspect not because I think there has to be so much that happens after the production. Like a movie must depend so heavily on the edits, how things turn out in post production. Sort of famously, a lot of the documentaries about Star Wars say that this was the case. That the first cut of the movie, John Budger's Lucas, was unwatchable and bad. And it was totally saved in the editing. And when they were filming it as well, I think some of them thought, what is this nonsense? What are we doing? Ben Canovie has these letters that he wrote home to friends that I was on this terrible movie called Star Wars, which is hilarious to say. We can't believe we have to do this nonsense. It's ridiculous. So I do wonder and I just have to assume that you don't know as an actor, that you're filming a thing and you just, you hope it comes out well, but you don't know for sure. Do you think they know when they watch it? What do you think when they sat for the first viewing? They were like, oh my God, well, that turned out bad. Or do you think maybe they're so invested in it, they kind of can still see it through rose tinted glasses? I think everybody knows bad movies. I think Tom Hanks was probably slinking down in his chair at the premiere going like, oh God, this, this ended up being terrible. Yeah. I think you would know, don't you? I don't know. Maybe you don't. Maybe when you're in something, you like you just get like starry-eyed and think, oh, wow, look at me on the screen. Like, I'm awesome. But anyway, if you had to just give a couple of key reasons to why it was bad for the sake of having reviewed it, what were your main thoughts about it? What made it bad? Here is why I think you are a wife, my wife, you and me. Don't just think that the movie is bad, but sort of are angry at it. So I have this policy when we watch movies in the house, which is when you start watching a movie, movies don't change. Whatever happens in the, like, the first five minutes of a movie, that's probably what you're going to get for the next 90 minutes. Whatever the tone is like, or if the first few minutes are really bad, like, that's not going to turn around. Some movies manage to have a very clever, strong opening and then they kind of lose it, but if a thing is bad, like, you are, you are going nowhere in this movie. What makes the circle kind of frustrating is it feels like it stayed at the level of being just sort of mildly interesting enough that you wanted to keep watching it while failing to deliver on any of the satisfaction that good storytelling would actually do. So it's like, if the movie was worse, we would have stopped watching it sooner and just been like, well, that's terrible and turned it off. But it was just at that threshold of, I'm still watching this, but it is awful. It is absolutely awful, but I can't quite make it stop. I think that's why the movie is angering. Yeah, I mean, that's not my opinion, but yeah. Why do you think it was so terrible? The classic reason of bad storytelling is key. Like, the motivation of the characters, particularly the main character, is so utterly baffling. Like why she says the things she says and why she does the things she does. She just changes, like, one minute you think like she's like me and she can see that this is all wrong. Like she's doing these look, she's got this look like this seems so wrong. You know, you think she's going to be the crusader. And then suddenly she's like becomes the villain and like she's saying, oh, yeah, we need, you know, we need to do more of this and this is really good. Like, I completely do not understand her as a human being. She's so poorly written that I'm not blaming Emma Watson, you know, she was just my cat. She just she read the lines. But like the motivation of that character and all the other characters is so completely unrealistic and crazy. And like the villains, like the villains of the peace, who I guess is supposed to be Tom Hanks and his off-sider who hardly ever speaks, but I think we're supposed to hate as some kind of villain. But we never know anything about them. So like at the end when they're supposedly get their come-up and get stitched up, I'm like, what did they do wrong? Like, in fact, they were kind of nice. Like when things started going bad for Emma Watson, they were like, you know, take some time off, you know, do whatever you want. They were in villains. They were just like guys who wanted to be successful in business and thought their product was pretty good. So I didn't dislike the villains. The hero I thought was just a complete lunatic who like, I never knew what she was going to do because I don't know what she was. But also just the whole idea and the way like technology and the internet and social media was portrayed. It was like it was written by some corporate executive that just learned about Facebook. Like it felt like it was written by like an old person who doesn't get it. It kind of had this feeling of like it's about like five years too late. And all like these like, hmm, how thought-provoking ideas you're posing about surveillance and social networking and the way relationships work in the online world. This is so fascinating. These insights you're putting before me. It felt like naive. Like have you got anything else to say? It was just poorly executed in so many ways. I've actually had some money and like I kind of looked alright. Like the sets were good and the campus where it was filmed, like the Apple campus type place where it was filmed was okay. It was in focus. The sound levels were good. I can see the movie poster now. It's the circle. Pictures of the actors. And then it was in focus. Brady Aaron has the review on the bottom. The whole art of making a movie is a thing that I find kind of fascinating. I'm like why is a movie good? Why is a movie not good? It's often harder to articulate why something works or it doesn't. This was a movie where I felt like okay, you're premise. I am so ready to get on board your premise that a global surveillance society might not be an un-mitted, heated good. If we have cameras that are recording everywhere in public all the time and everybody is also live streaming their life all the time that maybe there are some downsides. It's like I am so ready to get on board but then I'm watching this movie where the whole premise is this is a bad thing. I feel like you're not selling me on it movie. I feel unconvinced. But also there was no understanding how anyone was motivated by anything. Like her old friend who's like the guy that lives in the cabin in the woods. Why is he so anti-internet? What happened to him that made him so against it? To a point where he drives off a bridge because he's scared of being filmed. I don't get why you were so scared of cameras. Your reaction made no sense to me. I know it's not nice but you just overreacted. The other guy, the genius lurking in the shadow zoo, was he always able to hack into everyone's emails like all the bosses like he does at the end. And what was he motivated by? What happened to him that made him so want to go off-grid and be so anti his invention? And how did he get access to all this stuff? When they announced this invention and they're saying we're going to film everyone in the world 24 or 7 everything they do. That's so obviously like a pantomime villain idea. But no one ever questioned it. It would have been a bit more realistic if someone said, yeah, I know you're going to have some privacy concerns and we understand that but we've looked into it and we've got this and that. That would have made it realistic. But it was so unrealistic that everyone had just like be all gooey-eyed and go, oh, what a great idea. Let's all clap. It was like a parody of an Apple launch event. You needed some kind of realism, some kind of questioning, some kind of grittiness to it. Something was just such a cliche. It was so cliched. Like I said before, it was so lacking in any nuance that it made, well, it didn't make it unwatchable because I watched the whole bloody thing. That's what makes it worse. That was the fear. You couldn't turn it off either. I should have turned it off. Yeah. You'll never get those hours of your life back. But it was an impressively bad movie. And they said things made no sense or Hermione Granger, most of the time I feel like she's just like with the trip advisor stuff, she's like being a chump who's doing all this work for the company and becoming like this spokesperson of their huge product. She like, do what benefit to her? It's never clear at all why she would want to do this. It's like it makes no sense at all. She's sitting in some board meeting that's been live broadcast to the world. And like all these ridiculous things are being said. And she suddenly pipes up with, let's make every single person in the world be a member of our Facebook circle, like a make it compulsory. And like, where the hell did that come from? I don't think even Tom Hanks was thinking of that. Like, obviously he was. That was supposed to be like the set up. But it was like she was so nutty. Like all the things you, and the end of the film, do you understand the end of the film? It makes no sense. Like she brings down the supposed villains who, as far as I can tell, have done nothing wrong. They've just been normal company owners, right, with products that they're trying to sell. Except it turns out they have secret email accounts. So obviously that's been up to maybe their arch villains. And I don't know what they were doing. And like, you know, maybe they were putting bad things in the water, whatever. But then she says to everyone, come with me, like, you know, I'll lead the way. And I think I don't want her leading the company. She's the one who's been coming up with all the terrible ideas. And then at the end, she's like being filmed and everything's being filmed. And it's like, okay, so. This is the confused premise of the ending. Hermione Granger is live streaming her entire life, which is portrayed as a thing which is kind of ruining her entire life. It's ruining her family relationships. It's ruining her personal relationships. But she loves it and it's great and it's fantastic. Yeah. She's like, this is great. And rising up through the company as the spokesperson for how live streaming should work. And the come upence that she gets the villain Tom Hanks is by just sort of tricking him on stage to agree to live stream his life as well. But this is all just part of everyone will live stream all of their lives. So that is the conclusion is like, ha ha ha. We got what we pulled one over on Tom Hanks. We're going to make him live stream his life. But as part of just making everybody live stream their life, it's like, what's the victory here? I don't understand. I don't understand how this is supposed to be like, ha ha ha. Like the music is telling me that we've won, but I don't understand at all what's occurred here. It's terrible. And also again, so lacking in nuance, like if tomorrow Apple came out with this invention and said everyone, you know, you have to wear a camera so we can watch every single move of your life. Right. It would be five seconds before someone said, well, I hope Tim Cook is going to be the first person to wear one. Right. That would take five seconds. Like that's such an obvious thing. But here it was like, but you never saw that one coming and you've got no no answer for or no like way to wiggle out of it. The CEO of a company using their own products that's never occurred to me. Like if he doesn't want to wear it, like surely he would have already thought about this a million times and had all these clever answers. And yes, I'd like to wear the camera, have I any grandeur, but for legal reasons and to do with the, you know, share price of the company or like, you know, I'm sure he could come up with a thousand reasons to not wear it and not just sit there like a stun mullet and think, yeah, oh, you've got me. Like I'm pretty sure broadcasting some of those secret meetings would be like an SEC violation, right? Like I think they would take about two seconds to come up with legitimate reason why he couldn't do it. And who hacked all the emails has always had the ability to get like because she goes to him, doesn't she? She goes to this mystery handsome man and says, I need you to help me. Like she obviously just said to him the night before, can you go and get all the boss's secret emails? Well, if he's like really worried about this company anyway and he's always been able to do that. Ah, some sorry, Gray. This is what bad movies do to you, right? They bounce around in your head and you feel like you need to vent them out. It's like kind of get rid of this terrible movie. This one upset me in a different way to say the Hobbit. Mm hmm. I think the reason maybe is because it's such a black mirror wannabe and black mirror is so good. Like, you did all this stuff so well. Yeah, it's like daytime TV, black mirror. I also personally feel like it's a horrifically wasted premise and opportunity because I genuinely think there is some interesting discussion to be had about these kind of giant technological companies that run our lives in a very different way from what's occurred before. Do you not think that's been a hackneyed like cliche discussion? I know what you're going to say, but it's like, I'm very fortunate that I've had the experience of being on the campuses of a bunch of these companies and it's just deeply weird in a way that is hard to articulate. There is something that is interesting there to be discovered and to be explored. I do know what you're saying about it being a hackneyed conversation about like, oh, you know, Wayland, Utah, and he is an evil company that's trying to destroy all of our lives. But I do think that there is something different in the world now about really living in a place where a very few companies have such tremendous power and influence going back to just touch very briefly on the copyright thing. But it is one of the reasons why the goings on of how are people able to express themselves on a place like YouTube or on Twitter. It's so central to the conversation because those places are so incredibly important and silencing people on these platforms is like, I think we're way past the point where you can just say, oh, oh, it's just a company and they can do whatever they want. These are companies with power that rivals governmental powers. So I really do think there could have been a much better version of this movie which might have had something to say on these topics. The setting of like in real life like Facebook is such a surreal setting for a movie to take place and that there's a way to show the viewer how this place is so different and I almost want to use the word cult like than normal company experiences. But that's where the circle just failed to deliver across all of these areas. And so it just feels like, oh, you wasted a great premise and you wasted a great setting on a movie that makes no sense, which is what makes it twice as infuriating as it would be if it was just a bad movie. It feels to me more like, oh, it's this could have been great, but it was terrible. Do you disagree? Yeah. Okay. I mean, to sort of slightly exaggerate what you've just done. It's almost like you've watched a really, really bad detective movie and you're saying, oh, this could have been a good detective movie. It was good. Yeah, but it wasn't. It was bad. Like, yeah, okay, I agree that you could make a really good film and you're right. There probably hasn't been a lot of films about that sort of thing. No, no, no, I wouldn't believe it. I think you can make a good movie about anything. I find myself more frustrated when I feel like there's a particular setting that has been kind of wasted. So you feel like there hasn't been or there haven't been enough or any really good movies really critiquing the culture of these big mega tech companies. Yeah, I think this is a cinematic universe that has not been portrayed in a way that I feel like. You know what, this really nails what's so deeply weird about the Facebook campus. I feel like that is an area to be explored that has not been explored properly. Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. So you're not going to recommend that people watch the circle if they've made it to the end of the podcast. I'm going to do whatever you do for the love of God. Go and check out some objectivity. Oh, is that what they should watch instead? Get some Keith. Watch some Keith. Watch a couple of great videos, two of you want.
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Category:HelloInternetEpisode
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