A Recent Hello Internet

"A Recent Hello Internet" is the 105th episode of Hello Internet, released on July 20, 2018.
I find the one thing that you have to explain to people that don't understand technology very well is the difference between being connected to Wi-Fi and being connected to the internet. Right. And if they're connected to the Wi-Fi and they see all the bars, they're like, how come the internet's not working? I'm connected to the Wi-Fi. Right. They're two different things and you have all these analogies involving pipes and water and stuff. The thing that always pops to my head about. I don't want to name names, but I'll just say, I think everybody has the experience of FaceTiming with a particular demographic of person. Where their thumb always manages to be right over the FaceTimed camera. Yeah. Or they seem to have just no concept of what it is that you are seeing on your end. And you end up having a conversation with the ceiling or with the table. And no amount of reminders is even worse. You just give up at a certain point. You're going to see what you're going to see and that's what you're going to see. Yeah. Enjoy that lampshade. Brady, I have a question for you. What do you think is the legal status of the fastened your seatbelt indicator on the airplane? You know that little light that goes on, Bing, fastened your seatbelt. What do you think is the legal status of this thing? Is it like guidelines or is it you must do it or you will be arrested when you get to the other end? I'm asking because I've slowly come to realize that I think somehow airlines and all the things around airlines have got this tremendous world of authority in my mind. I know from growing up as a kid who's being on airplanes like my mom's a flight attendant. It's like, oh, be very good on the airplane and do all the right things and don't cause any problems. I think I have all of this like authority that is vested in these items on the airplane with everything and I ask about the seatbelt thing because when I was last flying to America, I was going London to Raleigh. It's a long flight. It's like seven hours and plane takes off. Of course, fastened seatbelt is on when you take off for very good reason. We get into the air, we reach what is obviously cruising altitude and we're just we're chilling at cruising altitude planes flying smooth as a piece of glass. But the seatbelt sign does not go off and I'm on a flight where the seatbelt sign stayed on for several hours into the flight. And you're just there watching it all like wide eyed. Well, I'm ready to burst out of your seat like a sprinter at the starting blocks. There were many problems. One of which was when I'm boarding the plane, I'm always sort of anxious about the people who are behind me. I don't want to be the person causing blockage on the plane. So I always have a sit down fast strategy, which is I get something out like my Kindle to have with me when I'm sitting down on the plane. So I can like read my little book and I can just like get in the seat throw my stuff in the overhead bin and be nice and good in an orderly person sitting down and reading. And then I figure, oh, that can maintain me until we're in the air and we're cruising altitude. And then I can go rummaging around and get out my laptop and like my wireless mouse and like all this junk so I can do some real work. But that plan depends on being able to get up. Also, there's questions of timings with regards to human needs of various kinds and the seatbelt sign. And on this particular flight, it was the human needs that eventually broke some of the passengers because maybe whatever it was, two hours into this, three hours into this eventually some brave passenger breaks the psychological hole that the fast and seat belt sign has and gets up and he goes to the bathroom. And then all of a sudden it's like bedlam on the airplane. Everybody suddenly has this psychological thought of like, are you kidding me? I'm going to get up. I'm going to get up and get my laptop. I've been sitting here trying to read a book for three hours. No human can sustain attention on a single thing for that long. It's unreasonable. People are like trying to get to the bathroom and forming a line and the flight attendants aren't stopping anything. And this happened to be a prelude to what my whole summer of travel was because I did two transatlantic flights and four trans coastal flights and I swear every one of these planes, the pilots wanted to leave this fashion seatbelt sign on for really long time after take off when there was no turbulence. And because of that first experience, I didn't always follow it. I thought I'm going to make my own judgments about whether or not I need to have this seatbelt on or not. So I was feeling like, what am I doing here? Am I breaking the law? How much do we need to listen to this fast and seatbelt sign? And maybe pilots should also be more respectful of how long they're going to leave it on when it seems like there's no problem. But I have no idea what the answer to this is. Do you think it's against the law or do you think it's just like a social convention? Well, there's a lot of things going through my head right now. Dealing with like your most technical question first, like the legality of all this. Obviously, I don't know since when do we know anything on this podcast? Yeah, like I specifically didn't look it up before the show. Because you can't look it up when you're just on the airplane. Who knows? Right. So let's speculate now as though we're on an airplane. My speculation would be that when you buy a plane ticket and you've agreed to the conditions of carriage, there will be something in the paperwork that indicates you are required to obey instructions from the pilot and crew. And that light is among those instructions. And I think if push came to shove and this like ended up in court, you probably do have to obey the light because that counts as an instruction from the pilot. And I have no doubt that you are required to obey pilot instructions. There'll be something in international law requiring that. Interesting. Yeah. You're right. It is like a proxy for a pilot instruction because I'm pretty sure in the safety video, it's something somewhere explicitly say that it's like a federal regulation that you have to comply with instructions from the flight attendants. I'm pretty sure that said somewhere. And I think maybe that's what I was like, oh, I think they say this with regards to the flight attendants. I'm like, oh, that fast and seatbelt sign. I don't think that counts. All right. So that's that part. In terms of actual practice, my attitude to that light is keep your seatbelt done up unless you need to get up for something, unless the plane is clearly in turbulence or is clearly in some kind of diagonal flight path by the taking off or landing in a way that it's obviously not cruising. Right. Because they do leave it on sometimes for a long time after turbulence. And if I need to go to the toilet, I'm going to go to the toilet. Or if I'm already walking to the toilet when it comes on, I'm not going to do a U-turn and go back to my seat. I'm going to go and quickly do the business and then go back to my seat. So my attitude to it is unless it is clearly seatbelt time, that light just means keep your seatbelt done up if you're sitting down. But if you really need to get up, you probably can. I don't think that's the law, but that's my attitude to it. But you do bring up another thing, which is one of my pet peeves. And that is there are two types of people in the world. After you've landed, there are people who undo their belts when the plane stops and people who undo their belts when the light goes off. And those people who leap from their seat when the plane stops undo their belt and grab their overhead bags, annoy the hell out of me. Because they're going nowhere like they leap out of their seat, they grab their bag, and then they stand next to their seat for the next 20 minutes. Those people annoy me a bit. I think we'd all do better to just chill the hell out when the plane lands and then when the plane stops. Yeah, but this is like a zero sum game theory moment, though, where everybody's trying to get that little bit of aisle space first so that they don't get stuck behind someone who is slow with their bags. And I always think the same thing where like, why don't we all just sit down and relax together in theory or at a concert. Why don't we all sit down and enjoy this concert instead of someone stands up or at the bag carousel. Yeah, or the bag carousel is a good example, right. It's all this non zero sum game. And you just have to accept that it's an inevitability that we're all going to lose this game together. Because I can't stop myself from jumping up and getting my bags out of the overhead because I'm always aware, like I don't want somebody else to even unintentionally or accidentally grab my bag. Especially if you're not like the first person on the plane. And so your bag is either ahead of you or God forbid your bag is behind you. That's maximum stress situation. So you're always going to get people standing up and trying to get there. And then as soon as that happens, it all collapses into, well, here we all are together standing up when there's nowhere to go on an airplane. You can't get around that. Perhaps even worse than a YouTube comment section. You do see humans at their worst at an airport and on point. It is why this comes up all the time. I mean, the one that I feel like could manage to not be a zero sum game if airports were willing to enforce it more is the boarding moment. And they're saying like, Hey, everybody, look at your ticket. We have numbers on your ticket. And we're going to board you in order of the number. Please don't everybody stand up and mill around the lane. And of course, everybody stands up and mills around the lane, including me because here's where we are. Like we're all trying to get near to the front of the line. That's one that I do feel like maybe through some kind of enforcement. We could actually have this work, you know, have someone coming out in spot checking tickets and being like, Hey, your group number five. Sit the hell down. Don't stand up here and block the whole like airport. And you're penalized. If you're caught, now you're going. Yes, yes, that would be even better. They could like, I'm taking your ticket off you and you're not getting it until everyone else is off. Yeah, or you get bumped down a number unless you're in the last number and then you get bumped off the plane. That's how that works. Right? It's like, we have groups one through six. And if you're in group six and you're standing up, boop off you go and you're not on the plane anymore. You're gone relegated. Like that could actually, it's all about enforcement and having penalties. And the reason the reason all that sad stuff happens or it's like, Oh, we all lose this game together is because you only get the negative consequence if you're the person who's trying to act well. If you're the person who stands back at the baggage carousel, if you're the person who doesn't jump up into the aisle immediately, if you're the person who doesn't try to get an early spot to board the plane, then you're the loser in all those situations. Like they have to be engineered so that the loser is the person who is making it worse for all of us, not the person who is trying to make it better for all of us who then feels like a sucker. Maybe the airlines could take a leaf from the book of Garth Brooks, the musician who I've mentioned before on the show, where at his concerts, he has a tradition of figuring out where the absolute worst seats are in the stadium, like behind a pillar or a million miles away. And he would not sell the front row of his concert and he would go and pluck all those people with terrible seats out and let them have front row seats. So maybe the airlines could do that and they could find someone who's just quietly sitting in the corner waiting their turn and they could say, you sir or you madam, you're a good passenger, you can go on the plane first. And then people would start noticing that and realizing, you know what, if I'm good, maybe I'll get promoted. You sir, you're going business class now because you've been a good passenger. You have a lot of belief in the carrot Brady, but I think airports are a situation for the stick. I think the stick is what you really need. I'm also in favor of the stick. I'm saying use both stick the bad people, carrots, good ones. Both would be better. You need the carrot and you need the stick to get the donkeys of humans and airports moving. But I think this is a situation where the carrot would not merely be enough simply because you also just have such an enormous number of people who are flying infrequently, like who will never learn this lesson. That is the biggest problem in airports. It's people's inexperience with airports. That's why you find people just like wondering aimlessly looking at the boards and the numbers and standing in the middle of the affairs when they should be getting out the way because look at that, which planes mine. What I can't, what's that, but what timesmife is it delight? What's that? And they're like standing in the middle of the busy zone. It's like move to the left. You don't stand there. We all need to get somewhere, not just you. I have to say Brady, I have done the greatest thing this summer, which allows me to avoid one of the biggest pain points with first timers at the airports. In theory, I should be against this thing, but in practice, I am not. I have signed up for the DSA pre-check in the United States. I have to turn over my fingerprints to the government and do all that. Whatever. I decided I've had enough, I'm flying enough. I signed up for the pre-check and it is glorious. It's absolutely glorious. I want to do that. I need to do that. A couple things about it though that I found interesting is they really build you up for this idea that there's going to be like an interview. I knew that the regular pre-check was already a joke for many people who had done it, but I was doing the global entry, which is the next level up. They're like, no, this one is really secure. You really have to go to only special airports can do the special interview. I went and it was just as the same thing as I have heard from everybody who does the regular one. You go in, you put your little fingers on a fingerprint scanning machine, it goes, boop, you haven't been convicted of a felony, and then that's it. That's end of interview and they're like, yeah, you're totally fine. It's glorious. You don't have to take your stuff out of the bags. You just walk through. I almost don't even want to talk about it on the podcast because I want to try to have it be a secret that nobody else knows that. I don't think talking about how they're going to cause like an international crisis of people signing up for it. I wanted to stay exactly as it is. I don't want it to change one tiny bit. Then you should be lying and saying how rigorous it was and how they did a cavity search and all sorts of stuff. And then people can go, oh god, I'm not signing up for that. I mean, I should read it, but this podcast, we're open and honest with the audience on this podcast. And we have to tell them the way things really are. And it was a total easy joke. It was basically you pay money to have them not look at you very severely at the airports. And I love it. Even though the many times I use it this summer, I kept thinking every single time. It doesn't seem like it's very secure. I don't know how me paying some money and doing a fingerprint scan allows you to not really look in my bags because I look at the X-ray scanners and I'm traveling with a laptop and an iPad. All the aluminum in the world, which completely blocks the X-ray scanner. And I see my bag go by on the X-ray machine and it's nothing but just totally blacked out. And then they're like, yeah, that's fine. Like, how is this secure? But it's like, whatever, I don't care. I want to get on this plane. And I don't want to spend 30 minutes in a security line. So I'm just going to keep my mouth shut and move right along through the system. Well, great. Speaking of flying, should we follow up on something that we talked about in the last episode, which was the great fly versus flies debate. Yes. This is the zipper on your trousers. Is it a fly or a flies? It seems that a lot of British people like to call it flies. Looking at the feedback, there was a lot of love for flies, a lot of support for it. But it was a little bit of a self-selecting sample when I figured people who just call it a fly, like you and me, probably wouldn't even bother speaking up. So I did run bit of a Twitter poll. And I got 3,386 votes. 89% went for fly and 11% went for flies, which is obviously a resounding victory. But 11% is enough for me to think, this is a thing. I like the idea. They're like, these Reddit comments are in scientific enough. They're too self-selecting. We got to really up the game into a Twitter poll. I am one to use Twitter polls. Don't get me wrong. I'm not looking down upon them. I like that. We got to really step this up. Well, I wasn't going to run a postcard fight. Was I? That's once every several years. That's a real serious endeavor. You got to make sure everything's coming right there. I don't know. It's always self-selecting. I think the Twitter poll does give you a better sense of it. I still, when I was reading through those Reddit comments, I did just keep thinking, I don't know who these British people are. They're no British person I've ever met in my decade of living in London. I've never really come across this. I have. The other thing though is I was realizing, well, I don't often walk around with my fly undone so that I would hear this word in this situation anyway. So maybe this is also a kind of self-selection that I remember to zip up my pants after the bathroom. So I'm not often hearing like, oh, your flies are undone. And then they'll be like, what the hell are you talking about? But you could be like a third party to someone telling someone else their fly is undone. I suppose I could. Do you tow people when their fly is undone if you notice? My God. Yes, of course. You have to tow someone. I thought maybe you wouldn't. I thought maybe you'd be like someone who couldn't handle the awkwardness of the growing discussion. Okay. Again, Brady. You immediately make me start finding the boundaries in where this is because fly always. I feel like you got to help a man out if his fly is open and let him know. But the food in the teeth, that's much harder. That's a much harder situation. Dandruff on the shoulders. With those, there's a key characteristic here, which is your hoping that the situation will just resolve itself so that you can move past this. That's true. Whereas a fly is not going to do it so far. Yeah, a fly is not doing itself up. That's never happening. But spinach in the teeth, if you hope and pray and attempt to use telekinesis, like maybe the situation can resolve itself. Maybe that's why it's harder. You know what the other thing is as well? The person can't see what the problem is. So you know it's going to be much bigger disruption, right? Where they're like, oh, over here, over there, where? Oh, excuse me. We have to stop this conversation right now. Whereas the fly is a quick fix. Just thanks, man. End of story. Yeah. And it's like a little wink, you know, we're in the brotherhood. Hope you're out there. I don't normally think that people wink at you when they fix their fly. But again, you live in this charming world, Brady, that sometimes I wish I could be a part of. You know, just last week I was having a discussion with my wife, who is a really lovely nice person, as you know. Quite assertive and assertive person as well. And we were talking about regrets and things in life. And she said to me, and it wasn't the first time she's told me the story. So I know it's really stuck with her. And it's like a 15-year-old story. She was once on the bus, and she was sitting near a lady who had left a hair roller in her hair at the back, and was going off to work. And she was looking at it and thought, oh, I must tell her. And just didn't do it, didn't tell her. And then the woman got up and walked away and went to work. And to this day, that decision haunts my wife. And she really, really regrets not telling that woman she had a hair roller in. And she brings it up often enough for me to think it's a problem. I think you've led a good life if that's your greatest regret. I mean, I'm not sure when she told you the story. She phrased it as her greatest regret. But yes, if one were to lead a life where that was your greatest regret, then that would be a pretty good situation to be in. Yeah. I probably may have got some of that story wrong, actually, but anyway. It was a good story. The hair roller thing is definitely true. Right. And she does still regret it. That is true. I like the idea though that in her mind, the size of the hair roller keeps growing every time it numbers it. That's why she keeps thinking about it is because every time in her mind it's a couple millimeters bigger, and over 15 years that really adds up. It's got to the point now where she's wearing one of those big hair dry things on her head as well. She didn't know. Yeah. The poor woman. Why didn't I say anything? I'm embarrassing. It was still plugged in. The cord was leading back to the house. Hello, Internet. Given pure statistics, a number of you right now are listening to this podcast while eating some fast food. And you're regretting it. It's so easy to do, but it's also so terrible for you. If only delicious and nutritious food could be easy to make. Well, listener, there is a way. You want HelloFresh in your life. HelloFresh is a meal kit delivery service that shops, plans, and delivers step-by-step recipes and pre-measured ingredients so you can just cook, eat, and enjoy. Now I know what you're thinking. I don't want to spend all day trying to make a meal. 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Again, it gets you $30 off your first meal. Let's them know that you came from the show and start your new, better culinary self. Thanks to HelloFresh for supporting HelloInternet. So great. Speaking of self-selecting samples and very non-scientific studies, which tends to be something we talk about a lot, well I certainly do. We spoke about the YouTube subscription feed, which is not easy to say, last episode. And you were very dismissive of the feed. And I noticed in the subreddit comments a lot of people were speaking up saying, well, speak for yourself, say DP great. I really like the YouTube subscription feed. I use it all the time. It's really important to me. And there was a lot of love being shown for it. So I sort of came away from the last episode with the impression that, oh, Gray knows what he's talking about. Obviously no one uses this thing. But I saw lots of our listeners saying, I do use it. Did you notice that? Oh, yeah. Now I think I heard from literally every person who loads up the subscription feed on their home page, pulled from the volume of feedback and the vociferousness of it. I think all of them were captured in that subreddit. Now you're being non-scientific. Maybe we were just hearing from a small sample of them and it's an incredibly popular feature. Well, I mean, again, I'll just go to the data on my YouTube channel, which is something like 5% of the views come from people on the subscription feed. Yeah, but your YouTube channel, you run a big mega viral channel. You're not a YouTuber of the people. Are you a YouTuber of the people, Freedy? Is that... I think some of my channels could be described that way. Okay, so who are the channels of the people, Freedy? I don't know. The channels that don't get as many views. Right. But we're now talking about views, are we? We're talking about percentages here. So let's load up percentages of views from subscription feed versus not subscription feed. I don't know how to find that information. You know, I don't look at data. It doesn't help that YouTube is totally changing their analytics platform in the background right now. So half the time when I load it up, it's the old way and half the time is the new way. Like, here we go again, YouTube. But I know the small of the channel, the high the percentage of views are subscribers. That's almost by definition got to be true. That the percentage of views that come from subscribers has to be bigger if the smaller a channel is. If that wasn't the case, it's almost like the channel obviously wouldn't have any views or subscribers. Right? Like when a channel is smaller, it has to have like viewers that are more intense. Than a channel that is larger. Well, it sounds like the YouTube subscription feed then is like a necessary stepping stone for small channels to turn into big channels. I keep saying subscribers as opposed to saying the subscription feed. Again, those are two very different things. It's like in the database that YouTube has for this user is the Boolean of subscribers set to true. That's the way I mean it when I'm saying subscribers. As opposed to like did the person load up the subscription feed? And that's where they watch their views. Yeah, but I'm saying a lot of people were saying they'd like the feed. Anyway, we don't need to rehash it because we just have the same conversation made last time. Basically, you think that was just a vocal minority and you're like poop-pooping them? Well, I'm not pooping them. I'm happy for them to use YouTube however they want. I simply think that also like the people who are listening to this podcast are vastly more likely to be YouTube power users than the general YouTube audience. So like those are people who are going to be clicking over to the non default option. Most people who use anything their computers or YouTube or Facebook like no one ever touches the settings. And that's borne out very well in the data. So it's like a very small group of power users are the ones who use it and get super upset about things. I am definitely not a power user of YouTube, which is ironic because I'm at my living out. I think you are a power user of YouTube, Brady. I know you want to define yourself as a man of the people. But someone who's running a couple dozen YouTube channels is no longer like not a YouTube power user at that point. Ignoring the fact that I upload videos to YouTube, right? Ask me five questions that would define me as a YouTube power user and see how I answer them. Now you're asking me a question which is saying ignoring all my domain knowledge, ask me about my domain. What would you ask a normal person to find out if they were a power user or not? I would ask them if they use the YouTube subscription fee. That would be a question number one. No, I don't. I don't even know where it is, Gray. And that's the truth. How much YouTube do you actually watch? Like how many channels do you think you're subscribed to or watch regularly? I don't watch YouTube videos. Yeah, see, this is interesting. Has that always been the case for you or do you think that's something that's changed? I think it's always been the case. Like the only ones I watch are some of the ones made by like my mates. Like you guys. Even then I can't watch all of them. Those ones I usually find out about via your tweets. Right. I just don't have time. And obviously for video, it goes viral or everyone's talking about it or I find out about it around the place. I'll watch it. I like to know what other YouTubers are doing and what their channels are like and stuff. But I don't have a lot of time for it and it doesn't give me lots of pleasure. I get far more pleasure from creation than consumption. I'm asking because I think just come from VidCon. I was talking to a bunch of other creators and I wish there was a way to do like a poll backwards in time for this. But I was very aware that the, oh, I don't really watch YouTube answer to talking about YouTube seemed to me like it was way dramatically up from previous years. Can I just qualify what I said? I don't say it like as a brag either. I know some people might say that like in a braggy way. I don't watch much YouTube. I'm too good for that. I'm actually a little bit embarrassed to admit I don't watch a lot of YouTube. Like I actually think it counts against me. Like I think I should. So answering that question is not something I'm doing to say. I'm like snooty. I'm actually a little bit ashamed about it. That is definitely a thing that can be answered in snooty and non snooty versions. But yeah, there is a way you can give that answer that's almost humble braggy. Yeah, I guess when I said, oh, I'm too busy. That is a humble braggy way to answer it. And I did kind of come across that way. Here's the thing. For many people, if they gave the answer that way, I would say like I kind of is. But for you, I don't think it is when again, you're running a lot of YouTube channels. But I mean, I'm not too busy to watch Love Island. Then a whole bunch of Netflix. So. Yeah, but when you say you think that you should watch YouTube, the YouTube that you feel like you should watch is YouTube. You should be watching because it is related to your work in some manner. Yeah, a lot of professional interest and professional knowledge. Yeah. That's why I think it's a different sort of thing when you say that you're busy, because that is almost like taking time from what is the working time. Right? And it's like, well, sitting down and keeping up with the YouTube channels that you feel like you should watch is a very different thing from sitting down and be like, oh, I'm going to watch Love Island. Because there's no part of your brain which thinks I should watch Love Island. It's much more like, well, I guess I'm going to watch it. No, I'm not watching Love Island. That's like this pure addiction. I tell you what's like, not watching YouTube does give you a slight cloak of immunity as well though. What do you mean? Because I make a lot of videos about a lot of subjects. And lots of other people make lots of videos about a lot of subjects, often the same subjects. So you get the inevitable, oh, I can't believe you made a number of our videos about this. Do you not know that Infinite Series did that three months ago or Veritasium did that six months ago? And I'm like, well, actually, you know what? No, I didn't know they did it three months ago. I'm quite happy to say it. And it gives me kind of like, at least in the back of my head, like a defense against this whole stupid thing that people have that you can't make a video of. It's been made before. So I'm like, well, okay, no, I didn't know it had been made before. I'm just plowing my own way and what I make is what I make. And if it doubles up with what someone else did, then well, I hope they did it well. That is totally a real thing. Plus also part of it is simply not to be influenced by the way somebody else describes or explains a thing. There are many topics where there's sort of a default explanation, but then sometimes you can think, oh, here's a different interesting way to visualize this thing that's being explained. Or like, oh, here's a different way to talk about it. I've heard you talk like this before. You think you'll somehow be corrupted by someone else's explanation. It's not a corruption, but it's the same reason that you feel like you rather not know that somebody else did a video. I think I said it on this podcast a couple of years ago now, but I was very aware of stopping watching educational videos on YouTube because I felt like I just don't want to know and I don't want to have that feeling like all of these topics being closed off, that means inevitably I'm going to be the guy who uploads a video on the same topic that somebody else does two days earlier. That's obviously going to happen at some point. But I know I feel the way that you do. I would rather not know. And then also I just think that hearing someone else explain something in a unique and novel way. It's just like, oh, okay, well now if I'm writing an explanation, I have to intentionally try not to think about it in that way. That's why it's like I don't really watch educational stuff on YouTube and I haven't for a while. And that totally does sometimes make me feel the same thing that you feel like, oh, I should watch that. But I've come to the conclusion that overall better off not doing that. Even if sometimes it's a little bit awkward where it's like, oh, I don't really know the details of like the video that this person has made. It's also mildly depressing when one of you might make some masterpiece you know you could never make. So I'd rather not know about those ones. Yeah, that's the worst. When someone's like, oh, look at that perfect gem you have crafted. You bastard. Well, I'm cheering that some piece of rubbish. Great. Gath the deer. This is yet another piece of follow up for a Brady's bylines. So I haven't gotten you Brady byline for you because I'm still following up endlessly this Gath the deer saga. You're being a very good investigative journalist. I am. Now this is partly because we've had a big delay in recording. Great. Did his summer bemuda triangle thing. Yeah. And also we're a bit out of sequence and stuff like that. So this is quite old feedback. But I want people to know what's going on because I have had developed. I'm just going to stop you there. I'm very much enjoying that you're preparing the people for. Oh, this is old feedback. We're old feedback spans a time span of something like four weeks. And the story itself is what 20 years old. Over 20 years old. This thing has been lying in the Brady's home, unlooked upon by human eyes for two decades. But suddenly four weeks is a time period. But you wait till you hear the trait I've got coming for you now then. So the main reason I qualified with that is I don't want people to think that this wildlife park at Cuddly Creek has like gone months without contacting me. Their feedback was reasonably timely. Okay. But I'm only just getting to read it now. And I did get a second email from the people at the wildlife park. They gave me a second email. They gave me a first one, which was a bit scanned in detail. I asked for more information. They didn't reply. But then I think they started getting more inquiries or should I say Tim Quiries? Because I had the following email. Okay. Hi Brady. Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier. I've had a couple of people inquire about what happened to God. Good work, Tim. Unfortunately back then we didn't keep individual records on dear. So I really can't confirm what happened to him. I also kept and bred quite a few dear. So he could have been transferred elsewhere. Due to what his age would be now, I would presume that he wouldn't still be alive. So I mean, I think we have to treat Garth the dear that I wrote that story about all those years ago as now deceased. And I just want to remind you about what Garth has looked like in my mind all this time. Again sending you, I'll send it on the in the internet tubes. The article that I wrote with the headline, he's a jolly good fellow because he's a fellow dear. And there's a picture of Garth the dear, newly born with a little piece of tinsel around his neck because it's Christmas and it was a seasonal happy Christmas story. Right. A seasonal puff. And I just wrote like a nonsense caption underneath and I got to name the dear. Right. Which was then edited and then modified by the sub editor. Well, I was young. I probably wasn't very good at writing that. Now, when you look at that picture, tell me what you notice about it. I mean, I noticed that it's a dear. Yeah. And on more technical level, what do you notice about it? It's seepia toned. Well, it's black and white, although the age of the paper means it is now a bit seepia toned. You're quite right. Okay, it wasn't printed on seepia toned. Like it was cut white paper. 20 year old piece of paper. No, okay. That's how long I've been in this game for that when you look at my old work, it's that looking at the dead seeing scrolls or something. So anyway, the photo is black and white. Most pages of the paper when I first started out were black and white. I think only like the front page and a couple of other pages were printed in color. That's expensive. It is expensive. So anyway, I contacted my friends back at the Adelaide advertiser. I still have a few mates who work there in positions of some influence. And I was able to get them to go back through the archives. And I may not be able to bring him back to life. But I can bring him back to color because I have found the original color photo that was taken by the photographer on the day that's been sitting in the advertiser archives for like 20 years. And I can now present to you for the first time. And the first time for me, I had never seen this either. Garth the fellow deer in full color. How's that for digging up new information? Oh, wow. It's like I brought him back to life. It is. Suddenly Garth looks so vibrant. So vibrant in this photograph. I didn't even really notice that he not only had the tinsel around his neck, but there's a fabulous multi-colored shiny ornament dangling from it. Yeah. This is an amazing world exclusive we have here on Hello Internets. I know. I mean, I guess if anywhere is going to keep a 20 year old photograph of a deer, it would be a newspaper. I like to imagine that the archive is like the Indiana Jones, Tumon, they're going down there. And they should keep all of the stuff that's occurred. Well, they never knew. Who is to know that maybe in 20 years time this deer won't be plucked from obscurity by a world famous podcast on the other side of the world? Exactly. Now, here it is. Well, Garth may no longer be with us. But now his vibrant memory always can be. Hopefully this picture will be in the show notes, depending on how diligent Grey is. He's been a bit slack with him lately. I'll give Garth the respect he deserves. I don't know if this is the end of the Garth story. I've had numerous emails, including from a listener who has experience with another deer called Garth, but that's a whole other story. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. We don't need like Garth the deer corner, which just generally refers to all Garth deers. I did get your email, Alex, and it was really interesting. And I read all about your Garth the deer. It was a touching story. Thank you. But I won't share it here. We're going to have some constraints. There's got to be some constraints. I've also heard from people with like relatives that work at the wildlife park. So we could even have undercover information being smuggled out at some stage. Okay, good. I look forward to this. I don't want to name names, though. You know, you've got to protect yourselves. This is like watergate. I still think is it clear that they don't have any deer at the sanctuary anymore? That part still seems a bit like unaddressed to me, but you know, maybe we can leave it for now. We'll say I may be back and add a later this year. And you know the first place I'm going to visit straight from the airport. I want to see your records. Where's the archive? I can just see you punching cuddly creek into your GPS right now. And probably there will be other waypoints from Brady's byline on the trip by the time that happens. Oh, where's the store that sold the first Sony PRX Mark one phone, right? And it's who knows who knows what nonsense there will be. That phone does count as one of my silly purchases. Anyway, even I regret that one. If you're any kind of creative person, a website gives people a window into your world, whether those people are fans, friends or customers, and an easy, affordable, professional way to create a gorgeous website is with Squarespace. Designing and customizing your website is so easy. Ideally, you start from one of Squarespace's many templates, which are specially created, to look really good both on computers and mobile devices. They cover every step of the process. It's clear and easy no matter what your level of experience from caveman, newbie to hyper-advanced super user who wants to tweak and power up every last little bell and whistle on your site. I use Squarespace literally every day to maintain a few websites and my blog. It just makes my life simple and easy, so I can concentrate and spend my brain power on the more important parts of my job, like making videos and high quality podcasts like this one. I'm not sitting around worrying about why my website is not working or doesn't look quite right. That stuff is taken care of. Squarespace also integrates domain registration, so you can use them to buy your domains, literally everything taken care of in one place. So if you've got a great idea, don't just sit there thinking about it. Make it and make it with Squarespace. Head to Squarespace.com slash hello internet for a free trial. And when you're ready for liftoff, use the offer code hello. You'll save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash hello internet. The offer code, remember, is hello. And our thanks to Squarespace. Well, great. Let's continue with me sending you pictures. By the way, if you are listening to this episode via YouTube, I will endeavor to put all these pictures we're talking about, including the dear ones that have come before and what is going to come next on the video. And we'll also put stuff in the show notes and I'm just saying, if you want to see this stuff, you'll find it. Are you taking over the video this week, really? I am going to take over the video because there is some amazing stuff about to be discussed that people have to see. Again, I find myself filled with dread anticipation about how many things it is that you want to show me when you're like, well, I'll do the video this week. Uh oh, I know this sounds like nothing. This is a bit like the person who's just come back from holidays making you look at their slideshow. First of all, I want to show you a gift that was sent to, well, I guess technically it was sent to us to commemorate the 100th episode, but you don't like stuff and I do. And I'm the one who goes and checks the mailbox and pays for it. Oh, I forgot. He's not. He doesn't have that mailbox. Yeah. That's a thing that still exists. Who knows what treasures are being sent there that I'm just squirreling away for myself? Well, you're about to find out because I'm going to show you what. If you switch back on your FaceTime, I want to show you something that was sent to us by Connor. Connor made this, I think, for a university project. Whoa. That is amazing. Brady is holding up. It looks like it's milled out of aluminum. A nail and gear. It is. It's a big thick chunk of aluminium as we call it here in the UK. Right. Yeah. Aluminum. It looks fantastic. It's amazing. It's huge too. Yeah. It's like the size of your face. It is. So this is a huge nail and gear that has been. Hune from a solid piece of aluminium using a water jet cutter. A water jet cutter. Yeah. I think Connor did it as a university project. And the best thing about it, which is hard for me to show you this on the FaceTime. But it just sits just perfectly and balances on its base. Oh. You can have it on the mantle. I have it sitting on my mantle piece. It's just a gorgeous piece of shiny metal. It's weighted to sit on those two gears. That's really nice. That's a nice touch. It's a very beautiful object. It really is. If Gray forgets to put a photo of it in the show notes, you can go to the recent number file video called Try Perfect Numbers and it's sitting in the background or through the video. Many people noticed it. That's really nice. Very nice, Connor. Thank you very much. It just takes pride of placing my office now. Your first show will tell us very successful that really. So the next thing I want to tell you about started with an email from someone called Jan Jan Jan J. A. N. I'm not sure of the pronunciation because you know, yarns European. Yeah, I would go with the yarn. I don't know. I think yarn sounds more exotic. I'm sending you pictures of the smallest nail and gear ever created. It is 30 micrometers by 30 micrometers image engraved on a five Eurocent coin roughly in the area of London. So the five Eurocent coin for people who don't know has a map of Europe on it, which includes a little UK. And obviously not very long. London is somewhere on that map. Now, yarn included a bunch of pictures. I'm going to send you the first one just to remind you what the five Eurocent coin looks like. And Jan has included a little red box on the image to show roughly where the nail and gear has been engraved. Oh, that's right. Yeah, that's what the five Eurocent coin looks like. It's a pretty small coin, right? Is it the smallest one? Yes, it is a very small coin. And then Jan who works with the technology that can engrave these things using iron beams and things sent more pictures. So I'm going to send you them and we're getting closer and closer. So here's the next picture. And here you can see Europe is becoming a bit less distinguished. This is more of a microscopic image, obviously. But I think if you look closely at this photo, indeed, if you look closely at this photo, you can see the nail and gear engraved in the metal. Hold onto your butts. This is going to get better. Whoa, whoa. Yeah. Here is another picture. This is much more zoomed in. And again, this is supplied by Jan. Oh, wow. How cool does that look? The scale on this thing is, yeah, it's like 30 micro meters across. We've got a photograph with a scale of 10 micro meters. It looks sort of alien, doesn't it? I mean, here it's got to the point where it's so zoomed in. It's almost hard to recognize it as the nail and gear. It's almost like you're too close to a painting. No, I disagree. It's so iconic. You can tell what it is immediately. Fair enough. My mistake. You are right, yeah. But it does have that alien landscape look. When you're looking at things that are so small, you don't have any sense for the scale of it. It can almost look big. Is this a tiny microscopic nail and gear or a geographic feature? Yeah. Or part of Iceland. You do get a sense from this image. Again, it will be on screen on the YouTube video and we'll link to it in the show notes. But you do get a sense from this image of how it was created. Because the way this nail and gear has been created is basically pummeling ions, atoms at incredibly high speed at the metal and basically just punching it into the metal. And at the like the base of the canyon, the base of the nail and gear, you can see kind of the roughness of where the atoms have been smashing in that. And this looks like there are tentacles coming up from the bottom of the canyon. Like it's a saw-lack pit or something. It's like, it's a really interesting image. Yeah, we're a bunch of stalagmites. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they do look like stalagmites at the bottom as well. Boy, that is very, very cool. Now, of course, we 100% believe, Jan, that this is a real thing that he did. I'm going to count this as picks and it happens. Yeah. But you don't have to, Gray. Okay. You don't have to. I mean, I have some experience with this technology because I've made videos where we've engraved things before, like this, like periodic tables on a human hair and things like that. So I have access to the technology. And Jan said to me, do you want me to send you the coin? So in the post, Jan sent me this, which I'll show you on the FaceTime now, the actual coin. It's still mounted on its microscope. Oh, wow. And then he's thinking me on its like little stand that you use in microscopes. So I have the coin. He literally sent me the physical coin. Now to look at it, it just looks like a normal coin. The things that have been done are at such a scale. But I took this to the University of Nottingham. And my very good friends, Mike and Chris, who I've worked with many times before, they work at the nanoscale and microscope research center at the University, I said, apparently, if we zoom into London, we're going to see something on this coin. So we put it in the machine and started to zoom again to London. So I'm going to show you the series of pictures of what we saw at the other end when we went looking for this thing. It's funny when you say, oh, you have the coin. I don't know why somehow I just assume like, oh, you must be able to like, if you squint real hard, at least see that there's a spec, right? Pretend like, not even scratch. Not even a scratch. You don't even see a scratch. But I've sent you the first picture. Okay, right. The coin sort of filling. And you can sort of see the map of Europe there on that first picture. It's already, you know, a very washed out image of Europe when you started zooming in. And we're only at the five millimeter scale here. Yeah. And so then we zoomed in a bit more. And this next one, we're zoomed in on the UK. And I think if you look closely about where you think London should be on that map, the UK is a bit like a chicken nugget. Yeah. A chicken nugget. Yeah, look. It exactly looks like a chicken nugget. Yeah. You can just start to make out where the nylon gear is just. Yeah. So we're at the one millimeter scale. If you know there's something there, you can see where it is. But you'd never pick it out on its own. I've sent you another one. This is the first time you can actually make it out as a nylon gear if you look really closely. Right. So yeah, so we're at 500 micro meters now, half a millimeter. And yeah, now you can actually see it. Just, it's about the size of London, where London is. I think it's almost perfectly London to scale there. Here we go. Here we go. And it's even closer. I don't know why I'm surprised that this is here, but it's almost like magic that it's still on the coin. And we were able to go back and find it like a hot stop. I left it a secret location. It's like, oh, wow. It's there. It's just cool to verify. This really is like a secret. Right. It's on a coin. You'd never know unless you have the right equipment to be able to check. I like that even at this picture that you've sent, which is now at the 100 micro meter scale. Again, if you know what the base of it looks like, what the ground, the stamped out part of it looks like, you can see like, oh, yes, there's little bumps on the inside, even though the nylon gear. The next picture goes in even closer. Unlike yarns picture, we're sort of looking at it from almost like a 45 degree angle. Oh, yeah, there we go. Yeah, perfect. Perfect replication. You can see the stalactmites a lot more clearly now and looking at it from this angle that we're looking at it from now as if you're looking at it from a nearby hill. I don't know. It feels even more three dimensional. Yeah. Like the grand canyon or something. And here's just a final picture where they've put a few scale bars on there so you can also see how deep the canyon is. It's about four micro meters deep. This is very fun. I like the idea that there is at least one and maybe more object. Objects in the world where there's a hidden super secret nail and gear on them. Do you think I should put it back into circulation? I kind of think you should. And people could check every five euros and coin they have with an electron microscope to find out if it's the one. I mean, obviously, if it had been sent to me, I for sure would put it back into circulation, not just because I would want to, but because I think it is a whimsical idea that is out there floating around. I'm not telling you to do it, Brady. I would not want to make you part with this amazing thing. But I do find that an idea full of whimsy that it would pass through the hands of almost certainly at least another timber too in the course of its life because coins last a really long time. I need to think about it, Gray, because the other thing is I've got another identical container like these official microscope containers with a little hair and which has got the periodic table engraved on. Sitting on my shelf and I like the idea of having them next to each other, but I also do like the whimsy of it being out there. I would wonder what like the erosion factor of something like this is because it's interesting looking at the zoomed in pictures of the coin. I know nothing about this obviously, but all of the features that look eroded on the coin in the magnified pictures. They seem like they're smaller than the nail and gear. Like I can actually see it surviving. It's not like it's a thing that if it was just out in the world would be immediately eroded away. I imagine it could actually last in circulation, but who knows. Anyway, this is delightful. I love that you verified it, Brady. I'm sorry if that was not the most riveting piece of podcasting without visuals, but the pictures are well worth going and having a look at people. Okay, now you may remember a little while back, there was a marriage proposal where a chap proposed to his, well then girlfriend presumably, out in a field or in some romantic location. And he did it wearing my Marty Blackstump Hello Internet, tall building t-shirt, which was the t-shirt you dared me to make because you thought it was such a bad idea. Did I dare you? I don't think I dare you. You did. I think I encouraged you in a friendly manner. Anyway, it's the t-shirt that's taken the world by store. Yes, of course. I've seen it everywhere I go. I see Mighty Blackstump t-shirts. It's really astounding. I have seen it a couple of times. Anyway, Tom liked it. He proposed. And at the time, we joked, oh man, you're not going to have to wear that for the wedding as well. So we've had a follow-up picture from the wedding day. The wedding of Tom and Megan or Megan, I don't know how Megan likes to pronounce her name, but she looks very beautiful in her wedding dress. And Tom is cutting a mighty fine figure in the Mighty Blackstump t-shirt, which I hastened to point out he did not wear for the entire wedding or ceremony. I think it was quickly thrown on for a comedy picture to keep the t-shirts happy. But there you go. He wore it on the wedding day. He's there with his bride. Oh, smiles. Mighty Blackstump looking over. There's a great photo. I believe the Hello Internet t-shirts. They bring luck to any marriage on which Hello Internet t-shirts are worn in any form or fashion. A wedding. Wedding is a busy day. There's a million, billion things going on. So even if it was thrown on for but this photograph is still quite an accomplishment because your list of things to do is not short on a wedding day. I love this. This is really cute. This really makes me smile. I can't believe that we have a Hello Internet marriage here now. This is fantastic. Excellent work. Apparently Megan Megan is not an official listener to the show, but she has to put up with a lot of talk about it after each episode. So she knows what happens each episode even if she doesn't hear it. That's what happens in some relationships. Yes. I have one more tale to share and this is perhaps my favorite. Because my sister is currently traveling in Western Australia with her family in the north of Western Australia. And this is close to about as remote as you can get in the world almost as a place for a holiday. In fact, if you quickly Google map a place called circular gorge in Western Australia, this will give you some idea of where she is in the world. This is a place where you're lucky if you see other humans and they're doing like, you know, camping and fly fishing and having entire beaches to themselves. They like those kind of holidays. Real isolation. It is remote that Google maps doesn't know where it is. I mean, you probably don't know because you don't know Australia that well, but that top left corner of Australia is very empty of humans. I read Bill Bryson's book a long time ago. I know Australia. Okay. Yeah, this is very red and very sparse. My sister was in circular gorge and amazingly they did bump into another human being there. And I'll send you a picture of the person that they bumped into while they were there who is a young guy from Melbourne. And Melbourne is like the whole other side of the country. He was there on a similar get away from the world holiday. This is a young lad called Alex. And he is wearing a hello internet, Phidotron 5000 t-shirt. And apparently throughout the whole holiday, he was saying to his mum all he wanted was for someone to recognize his t-shirt. And my sister walked into circular gorge and saw this t-shirt with the H.I. Lego on it and knew what it was and went up to him and said, I like your t-shirt. And obviously he said, oh, do you know about hello internet? And my sister said, yes, I'm Brady's sister. Oh, that's amazing. I'm a believer. He spent his whole holiday in the middle of nowhere hoping someone would recognize his hello internet t-shirt and he bumped into my sister. Wow, I really like that. I really like that for so many reasons that it's a remote location. He's not just bumping into like another random fan he's bumping into your sister. I also feel like this ties in with your past tales of wanting to one up your sister in some way. So that even when she's on vacation, she's confronted with Brady fandom wherever she goes. So this is just perfect. I love this. I love this on many levels. It is very perfect. She was like, I just want to get away from the world. She works like surrounded by students and some of them are like, you know, watch my videos and stuff like that. So word has got out that she's like Brady sister. So she goes on this holiday to get away from the world. And there's a team in circular gorge. Oh, that's amazing. Alex from Melbourne. I like that she said hello and she said who she was. That was very nice of her. It was good. That was good. Meanwhile, I keep walking right on by those hello internet t-shirts. I went to a show at Royal Albert Hall the other day. And it was like a science geeky show. So there was a fair probability of timid. I did bump into a couple who said hello. Right. It wasn't a random selection of the population. No, but halfway through the second half, I looked across the other side of the hole and Albert Hall was like full of people. Yeah. And all the way across the other side, like leaping out at me was this guy wearing a hello internet shirt like a nail and gear shirt. I couldn't take my eyes off it. It was like so obvious. Like it stood out. Like it was amazing. I took a picture and tweeted that. The beauty of the design calls to you, Brady, no matter where you are. I don't know if just my eyes have become attuned to the nail and gear or it is like. I think it's that our audience selected an amazing bit of iconography. So of course it's going to catch your eye. Too right. I mean, flaggy flag you wouldn't notice in a crowd would you? No, you would never notice it in a crowd. Oh, that's that guy over there. He's wearing some stripes. Garbage. One of the strangest and most counterintuitive aspects of the universe is how things work on the small scale. Sure, when you zoom into say a coin far enough, the rugged features and the atoms that compose them, it can start to look like it's a big geological feature. And you can kind of have this thought that oh, the world on the small scale and the world on the large scale, they must be the same thing. But they really aren't. Once you start getting down into the smallest of places, you start getting down into the quantum world. And as one of today's sponsors, Brilliant says in their course on quantum mechanics, when stuff gets small, stuff gets weird. If you want to learn and better yet intuitively understand as best as humans can the quantum realm, you are going to want to watch brilliant videos on quantum mechanics. They do a great job of trying to help you understand this counterintuitive realm with all sorts of puzzles and problem solving and presenting things to you in a sequence to help you really master the subject. Now Brilliant doesn't just offer quantum mechanics, they offer lots of different courses in science and math. They're really focused on these areas to help figure out the best way to present the material so that you can actually understand it. And I suspect that there are many courses in Brilliant's library of science and mathematics that lots of Hello Internet listeners would be interested in going through. So if you want to check out that quantum course that I mentioned before, so you can find out more about what's going on with the individual atoms that are being used to pummel a tiny nail and gear onto the surface of a coin. Or if there's anything else that you want to learn in the realm of science and math, you can go to brilliant.org slash hello and sign up for free. And the first 200 people that use that link brilliant.org slash hello, they will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. So to help support Hello Internet and to learn more about the natural world, go to brilliant.org slash hello and sign up for free. Thanks to Brilliant for supporting the show and thanks to Brilliant for helping to educate the world about science and math. So, Brady, I've been on the Instagram for a while now. Yeah. With my official name finally gotten so I can really give the grams ago. I thought you called it snap Instagram snap Instagram, isn't it? No, snap Instagram is social networks that I don't know or that existed theory. Instagram is a real thing. Look at you now you're being all you used to mock it and now you're like not letting me give a crap name. You're like, no, this is Instagram. Here's my username. Well, no, don't mock it. Do we call snapchat snap Instagram? I don't remember because I just I didn't really know anything anyway. That's the one that's gone now and who cares? And everyone was like, oh, it was so important and then it poof gone and away. I never gave that a go because I thought I don't understand what this thing is for or why we'd use it. You gave snapchat a real college try and you were on there for a while. Yeah, I was still on there. I still post on there occasionally, but the redesign and the way they changed its emphasis, I think, killed it for me at least. I maybe put one thing on there or wake or something maybe. That counts as active monthly users, which I think is the way that Silicon Valley likes to count everything. So I never really tried that one because I wasn't really seeing like, what's the value proposition here? Whereas for years, everyone's been hounding me about the Instagram and getting on it. Yeah. And so I thought like I really want to give this a try. So I wanted to check in because as you can see from my Instagram, I've been furiously posting the grams I have 12 photos up there at timer recording. I don't think I've seen. I haven't been following you. How outrageous Brady. Do you follow me? I bet you don't follow me. I do follow you, Brady. Why wouldn't I follow you? Then I better follow you. You don't have to follow me, Brady. Doesn't life doesn't work like that. You've been verified. Are you not verified? Yeah. It was not easy to get verified. Oh, I don't know. It just appeared. But of course I would follow you. Why wouldn't I follow you? I don't know that many people on the Instagram. And also, I feel like if I'm going to follow people on Instagram, on like Twitter, which is much more like, oh, I'm following a bunch of people who either find interesting or I know professionally in some manner is sort of how I use Twitter. Instagram, I realized very quickly like, oh, I want to actually follow people who take pictures of things that I want to see. So of course, I want to see pictures of your dogos. So that's why I followed you on Instagram. Oh, you're following a adorable lottery. Let's see how you're happy now, Brady. Yeah. Right, but it's like, I realize very fast. I was like, there's plenty of people who I know where, I mean, there's no nice way to say this. Like, I don't want to see photos of their boring life. Like, I don't really care. I was like, oh, you don't have dogs and you just like a person. And like, I don't understand why I would follow you on Instagram. And you just take regular photos of things. So I feel like I'm sort of a meaner and more selective on Instagram than I am on Twitter. But it's been an interesting experience because this is the first social network that I feel like I've used. And I feel the way it seems other people sometimes describe how social networks make them feel. And that like I posted a photo and I want to go like, oh, how many people like this photo? Whereas I'm very aware on Twitter. I don't pay really any attention to the likes or the retweets. Yeah. But I was like, oh, I post a photo and I'm like, how many people liked it? Or did people leave comments on this photo? And it's just very strange. Like, I found myself just checking it a bunch. Why do you think that's happened for this and not Twitter? Well, I think part of it is, would you point it out that it only really exists in a useful way on the phone, which I didn't like one tiny bit. But I left it on there over the summer. But I was like, oh, you're on my phone. Now you can tug at my brain in a way that I don't have Twitter to tug at my brain. Twitter is very much like, oh, there's a thought in my head. I'm just going to toss it out to the world. And hope it doesn't explode in a tremendous amount of blowback, right? That's the Twitter universe. Like you just casually say something. And every time potentially invite an enormous storm into your life that you weren't expecting. And I've been sitting on a great joke for two or three days. No, I'm not willing to make in case people take it the wrong way. I've typed at least three times and then she'll do. I'm like, I get white funny, but other people will take it the wrong way. I better not make that joke. Can you tell the joke on the podcast, Brady? No, I'm not going to take a vote. No, not even on the podcast. Wow. That must be some weapons grade jokeery you have going on there. You weren't like anyway, involves sport. Oh, okay. Yeah, then maybe it's just boring. Okay. But I think that's also partly why like on Twitter, you don't really care about the reaction to any particular sentence. You're just sort of talking on Twitter and you know, you say things to people and you talk to them. Whereas Instagram is kind of more already and you do want to post a photo that looks somewhat nice. And maybe that's part of what it is. Like, oh, I have much more care about an Instagram post than I do anything that I've ever posted on Twitter ever. Yeah, I was like, oh, it's a photograph and I wanted to look nice. So it's just, it's interesting that it's gotten into my brain much more than a thing like Twitter. It's your art. It's your art, right? Well, yeah, like photographs are totally artwork in a way that Twitter sentences just aren't. I'm spake for yourself. I'm sorry, Brady. I'm sorry. Every one of your tweets is a little sentence that has fallen from the heavens and into our eyeballs. It's like Shakespeare. Right. In 256 character form. I was going to make that check, but I couldn't remember what the number was anymore. Did I get it right? I don't even know. No, I didn't. It's 280, not 256. It's not even a good number. Yeah. But yeah, so I've just been aware of that. And I don't like that. I don't like it at all. I don't like the way that Instagram kind of pulls on my mind. And the other thing that's interesting is like I wasn't really sure who to follow on Instagram. So I ended up also just following some cool photographer dudes and like the US Department of the Interior, which posts these amazing nature photographs of like the national parks in America. And then some like minimalism architecture accounts and just some random stuff. I was trying to find like, who do I want to follow? And like we rate dogs like dog accounts and all that. Like doing all these things. And I just everyone talks about Instagram as being, oh, this is the one that makes everybody feel great. But I'm very aware that after like a month of playing around with Instagram, maybe I need to change what I do on it. But it's the one social network that actually makes me feel kind of bad. I think this is how people describe Facebook where they're like, oh, you always see your friends on vacation. And then you have that little bit of a feeling of, oh, I'm not on vacation. And they are. I think Instagram's much worse for that than Facebook. I think real social media has its advice, right? It has a reason you don't like it. Like YouTube has, well, maybe it has some of the videos you don't like, but it also has its like, you know, comment section, which can be a bit of a sewer. And Twitter has its like, shoutiness and its fightingness and its politics that people don't like. Instagram has that kind of vanity, vaculessness that you kind of in years gone by, you would criticize fashion magazines about, oh, they airbrush all the models or they make everything look so beautiful. They give people unrealistic expectations of what their life should be like. Instagram is that that's the problem with that. It's like, Posey, it's look at me, look at me. And I wonder for everything's been made to look too perfect. And that can either repulse you because you just don't like that trait in people or it can just make you feel bad about yourself because you're not beautiful and having an amazing holiday. So you think Instagram is worse for that than Facebook? Yes. Because Facebook has just become like a mess. And people do pose on Facebook and say, you know, look at my wonderful holiday. But they also do stuff like, oh my god, look what the dog did to my house. In put on the carpet or are you going to the birthday party or don't I look terrible this morning? Or I loved the football last night. Did you see the result or I can't believe what the US president did today? Like Facebook's just got everything. It's just like a seething mess of the best and the worst of everything a social media can be. Whereas Instagram isn't that. Instagram is just beauty. You know, it's like the beautiful people. It reminds me of when I went on holiday to Miami on the main beach that I'm Miami. Everyone is so good looking and wearing their swimsuits with perfect bodies and tans and they all look amazing at the beach parties on the seafront and I'm they're going, oh my god, what am I doing here? This is like I'm just going to go back to the room because I'm pale and pasty and just going to soak away. Don't look upon me. Like, whereas if you go to New York, you'll see everyone. You'll see beautiful people and ugly people and fat people and thin people. And like you just get a bit of everything. But Miami is everyone's posing and they've probably been working out for six months beforehand and they've had their spray tan and they've bought their best outfit and it's like now I'm going to go and parade myself along the seafront. And that's what Instagram's like. It's like it's a parade of showing off. Don't get me wrong. I actually quite like Instagram and I use it a lot and I like following people on it and I post a lot on it. That's its negative side. The posiness. That's an interesting way to put it. I think the particularly thing about the voice is interesting because one of my thoughts was Instagram needs a better version of a Twitter mute. How does it work? I've been wanting to mute people for ages and I've only just got the power in the last week but I haven't used it yet to see how it works. It's quite new to mute feature on Instagram and I've been pining for it. Oh is it? Okay. Well, at least my understanding of the way it currently works is it simply hides your updates from appearing on that user's feed. It doesn't still stop someone from coming in and actually just leaving comments all over your stuff. It's not a mute feature. It's much more like a hide feature. I want to in the party that is Instagram, I always want to be on the opposite side of the room from wherever that person is. Yeah. But they can still come over and corner you and talk on your comment. So it doesn't seem like it's a great solution. I haven't used it yet. I'm sorry if I'm wrong but I got the impression it's been used so that you can not see people posting thousands of photos without offending them and unfollowing them. So you could just say, I look, I really like that person. They're my friend but they post way too many pictures of their cactus and I don't want to see all these pictures anymore. So I'm going to mute them. Whereas I don't really want that power as much as because the people I follow are kind of am friends with. I want the power more to yeah, not have to see idiots commenting because although the round as many as there are are another social media, you do start to get idiots leaving comments and I don't want to block them because that just creates a saying. But I would like to mute them so I don't have to read their comments. That is what works so well with Twitter is exactly this like the blocking causes a scene and then the person like, oh my god, you block. And I don't want to deal with any of that. Doesn't take long before you start collecting people who are like, oh god, you're just an idiot and I don't want to see you here. And I just want to mute you and I don't want to block you. And so this feature just seems to like hide your updates from their feed, but it doesn't actually stop them from just manually going to your page and commenting on your stuff. Even that's more powerful than a Twitter mute. No, Twitter mute is all powerful because it's like the person just disappears from your existence. But you don't disappear from their existence. I think that's better. So you've got some idiot who always leaves stupid comments on your posts on Twitter. To me, I always feel that's a bit like vandalism and like muting means well, at least I don't have to see the graffiti anymore. But everyone else does still see it and I sometimes wish that wasn't the case. I'm like, I'd love to post this nice picture or this nice comment I've made, but I know that at Billy Blogs, 548 is going to be the first commenter. He always is. Always something stupid that I don't like. Everyone else see it. It'll be the first thing everyone sees. No, well, I won't see it. But I know everyone else is still saying it and that blood disappoints me. Okay, so you want like a mute plus that hides that person from the replies. I want to be able to block people without them knowing their blocks. Yeah, right. I'm trying to figure out like what is what's the sale to Twitter here? But I can actually see what you're asking for. You're asking for a more powerful version of mute. This is like shadow banning on Reddit. Oh, yeah, that would be the best. That's what you really want. So they're still there, rabbating away with their stupid comments. Right. That's what you want. Whereas I feel like, oh, they've disappeared from my universe problem solved. Right? That's just great. It's also an interesting comment about like each platform has its own vice because that also makes sense about why I don't really feel that way about Twitter because I was beginning to not like Twitter. And then I don't know, maybe about 18 months ago or so. I finally broke and I'd never used the topic mute features in Twitter before. I think the features where you can say like any tweets with these words just hide them. I don't care and I don't want to see. And I gave up and I started using those things. And ever since that, I've been like, oh, Twitter is nice. Can you tell me any of the topics you've muted or is that like, would that be unwise? Like, obviously, you wouldn't want to talk about some. But is there one example you can give me? I'd be curious on a topic that you would just like, I don't want to hear this. It's, you know, just noise to me. Here's what I think dramatically makes Twitter better. There's two things. One is muting topics you don't want to hear about. And shock surprise for me, that's a lot of news, politics stuff. And I find it particularly frustrating on Twitter because I always feel like that is the worst case of people just telling people who agree with them what they all agree about. Right. And it's like, who are you talking to when this no one who follows you disagrees that this bad thing is bad. Why are you screaming about it? So like, I have a lot of blocks for just like political related stuff. That phrases and words that you know are going to be politics related. Yeah. And phrases or words or names are like, okay, there's no way that like this name is ever going to pop up in a non-political context. Right. Seems to be like, okay, go away. And I feel like that makes like, oh, look how civil my Twitter is. It's like, oh, right, because I'm blocking like half the comments. But then the other thing which I've really taken to doing much more liberally, which is a great feature that Twitter has, which is the ability to disable retreats from people. So I'm very aware that retreats, I'm almost never interested in the thing that someone else has retweeted. So you could like say follow me and see Brady's pure tweets, but anything I retweet, you won't say. Yes, that's right. Hyper-thickly. I wouldn't do that to you Brady, of course. No, of course. Like I've over the past years of using Twitter, like I've been doing both of those things. Does that disable their retreats if they're commentating on it or just their pure retreats where they're being lazy and they press retweet? But don't add their own value to it. Like if I retweeted, if I just press retweet and you'll say it or I say, oh, this was really interesting, but I disagree with this. And does it disable both kinds of retweet? I'm not 100% sure, but I am fairly sure that I still see the ones where the person at least comments. Okay. Unless, of course, that's been gets tripped up with one of the like topic filters. Right. You got these two hurdles one right after the other for these things. It's like Indiana Jones trying to get to the Harley-Greyle. You've got to get through all the text. That's what you get to. Crazy. Yeah. I find Twitter useful and I still like it because like one, it is just professionally useful to me in a way that no other tool is. I can always say that Twitter is going to be the hardest one to ever give up because of that professional utility. But then also I feel like, oh, I kind of like it because it's at least my version of Twitter is like this casual place where people are just saying things and you can talk to people and it's mostly fine. You've been able to tailor it in quite a good way for your purposes. There's one area of the world where it's like I don't care. Then like everything else is still there and it's nice. That's why the comparison to Instagram, I find super interesting because in theory like Instagram is even the nicer part of the world. There's no like, oh, I need to put a filter or anything on Instagram. It's like, oh, I'm following people who take nice pictures and they're showing me their dogs or what they're up to in their life. And it's like, oh, I like this stuff. I like to see and there totally is a way on Instagram that I know how to put this but like some friends have made comments like, oh, you're sort of missing out on what I'm up to in this passive way where people don't tend to post photos of their kids on Twitter in the same way that they'll post photos of their kids or their pets on Instagram. Okay. A more aware of what some of my friends on Instagram are up to in their lives than I ever have been on Twitter. Sometimes too aware. Yeah, sometimes too aware. But for the most part, it's like, oh, this to me is a little bit like what a social network should be like this passive awareness of what people are up to. That's what Facebook used to be for me as well. Facebook used to be quite nice saying what my friends in Australia are like, oh, my cousin's on holiday. His son grown up to be a handsome young man. But now it's just like full of too much other crap on Facebook like news and or fake news and my Facebook feed is just useless to me now. It's just useless. Whereas Instagram is how I know what people I care about are doing. Yeah. So it's like, this is why I have these complicated mixed feelings about Instagram on one hand like, oh, people are totally right that there's this. There's very nice aspect to it that is different from other social networks. But then I particularly with some of like the photographer accounts or travel accounts that I felt like I've never had a stronger feeling sometimes of the like, oh, this sort of makes me sad to see this because I'm not doing whatever this photograph is doing right now. Like I thought this awesome travel photographer. And he posted this picture of just this cabin in the woods in Appalachia that I swear to God, like it made my heart ache to be there. Instead of that in airports waiting to board a plane like that was one that just really made me aware of it like wow have this really strong feeling about this gorgeous photo because it is a photograph of a thing that I would want to be doing right now. And it's hard to say like that's not really a net positive or like architectural photographs of houses that are more minimalistic than any human could reasonably expect to live in. And it's like, oh God, like could a greater thing of beauty exist in this incredible minimal house like perhaps not. And then it's like, oh, I can't get my house to be like that. And it's like also it's like wildly practical to live in a house like that. But it doesn't matter. Right. It still like causes this feeling inside of you. Is that a negative aspect of the media, the medium or is that like an unfortunate trait of humans like, you know, jealousy and envy and like should a better person. Not feel that way and just be glad that such beauty exists and enjoy it. Is that your floor or is that a floor of the medium, by the way, I have the same problem. I'm not judging you. Well, again, I like I'm not interested in like what theoretically better built people would do. I just think it's interesting to note that I'm a person who has been deep on the internet for a long time in very many different ways. And even a lot of the stuff that I follow on Instagram, like I follow the equivalent subreddits and it's never quite been the same like I've never gotten the same feeling. And I can't quite figure out what the difference is. I think like maybe it's because it's adjacent to pictures from my friends. It feels more intimate and direct. I don't know. But I think it's obviously just a combination of those two factors. There's the no human can see their friends like having a happy time on a vacation and not in some way think, well, I wish I wasn't in front of my computer right now working like and goofing off on Instagram. Or I wish I wasn't in this airport right now. I wish I too was on vacation. Like I think everybody thinks that to some extent. And then Instagram is the delivery method for that. So I just mentioned all of it because I find it interesting that I have these more complicated feelings about Instagram than I have for other social networks is like, oh, it pulls on my mind a little bit more. And it kind of makes me feel sad in this way. But I also like seeing the pictures and I do enjoy it. So what are you going to do? Are you going to persevere? I'm going to keep using it. Obviously I want to get the grams. I want more of the grams. I learned a word from Instagram culture that has now permeated like how young people speak. You know when you're young and like when you're like a kid and adults try to use the cool words. Almost to tease the kids, but also to try and use the lingo and you're like, man, dad, you don't understand. That's not how you say it. You don't, you know, you don't understand my language. Right. Like no, go, oh, is that cool Brady? Is that red? Is that XO and all the stupid words that I said when I was young. It's now got 12 Bunga. Yeah. Bulk was one that I always got teased about by adults when I was young. Oh, that's Bulk. Cool. Oh, that's going to be bulk excellent. Everything was bulk. Anyway, if I was an adult, I would tease the child. It was using that. That seems like it's begging for a teasing. So anyway, I was talking to some youngsters was talking to the parents of some youngsters the other day. And basically my main question was, is cool still like a word they use? Because I thought that was the one word that just seems to last forever. That was the one word that everyone uses cool. Apparently the word cool is not cool anymore. That's really because I was going to pick that one out in the list as cool seems eternal. Yeah. But maybe not. I said, do they still say cool? They're like, no, you don't say cool anymore. But do you know what the one of the really cool words is that all the young people say that makes me feel a million years old? If something's really good now and something you want to describe something as cool, you say it's recent. That was recent. Oh, yeah. And I was like, where does that come from? And I did a bit of research and tried to find out. And it comes from the Instagram culture where it used to always be, have you seen my recent as in my recent picture or my recent Instagram? Oh, have you seen my recent? You haven't liked it yet or you haven't left a comment on it. So just referring to recent was a thing. And then the word has evolved away from that to just mean something is good. I'm on board with the concept of nouning reasons to mean the latest. I'm on board with that. I think that's cool. That one. That's right. But it's gone much further though. It has gone to just mean like cool now. There have always been additional words to cool. But it never really crossed my mind until now that if anything was going to be able to kill the word cool, it's the corporatization of the word cool. I'm suddenly thinking about all the times I have heard business people talking about, you know, generating cool for their brand. And that kind of thing. And it's like, wait a minute. There is like a saturation point at which even though it has been a word with unusual longevity, almost by definition, the concept of what is cool. Like that word can't last infinitely long because as it seeps into every corner of the culture, it becomes what it isn't anymore like it undoes itself. Cool did well cool had a good run. Here we go. Urban dictionary recent like the number one definition is used to advertise a newly added photo on Instagram like my recent. But number two definition and adjective to describe something of great quality or a high standard does not refer to time when used in this context examples. Yo, that movie was recent or mark just got a recent new Lexus. Man, I think that is going to be a hard one to incorporate into my language if it really catches on. And that latest episode of how the internet was recent that Brady Revitzon a bit but gray is recent. No, the hard path.
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Category:Hello Internet Episode
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