H.I. No. 50: Queen of Spades

"H.I. #50: Queen of Spades" is the 50th episode of Hello Internet, released on November 6, 2015.
==Official Description==
Brady and Grey discuss: a first cup of coffee, Rice Rats vs Swamphen, Brady Travels, AirBNB and the sharing economy, first thoughts on the Hello Internet Flag Referendum, Brady's refuses to play games, Hotstopper awareness auction results, the county flags of Liberia, things people happen to be doing while they are listening to the Hello Internet podcast corner, bi-weekly weigh in (YOU SHOULD CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE TEAM!), YouTube Red, and answers to some listener questions for the fiftieth episode.
==Show Notes==
Well, here we are. Episode number 50. Amazing. You know, it sounds very amazing. So we're going to do some sort of 50th episode celebration stuff a bit later. So I guess we can talk about 50 and reminisce and talk about the good times and the bad times. And should we do what TV shows do when they need to cheap out, which we have a clip show? Lots of flashbacks. There's a music montage, a bit of green day time if you're laugh playing in the background. Yeah, yeah. We need to think of just the barest, the barest structure to hold together a bunch of clips of things that have happened into the past because the production budget is running out in your last episode. That's usually what TV shows do. Do you think you could edit something together that not only had sort of the key highlights and a few laughs and stuff, but you could you could ring out a few tears as well. Do you think you could get some emotion out? Or do you think we're too impersonal that there have been no moments where people would sort of tear up and go, I love those guys. I don't think the two of us are the kind of guys who have tear jerky moments. We're a bit emotion light, aren't we in that respect? We are unserious, unless of course it is playing crash corner. If it's playing crash corner, then it's deadly serious. Quite literally. Quite literally. We'll come to the 50th shortly, but I should apologise in advance for the poor sound quality on the 50th, but I am once again on the road with some dodgy sound set up going here, which is a series of ropes and rocks and things like that holding everything in place. Apologies, I'm not using my usual set up. Yeah, that's because you are at the spiritual home of number file. Oh, great. You know I love it when you say that. Then I always say to you, what's its actual name and you never get it right? Oh, I should have prepared. The, because I, the mathematical sciences research institute in San Francisco? In Berkeley. Oh, Berkeley. I am. I've been in New York for a week and now I'm in Berkeley for the next two weeks. Did I get that right though? Mathematical Sciences Research Institute? You did. Oh, I'm very proud of myself. No, no, no, I'm, I'm, I'm impressed. I'm impressed. That's where I am. I'm in a little, I'm in a little video room here where I camp for a couple of weeks when I'm filming all the mathematicians here. You have been a whirlwind traveler. I have. There've been some interesting adventures, but I think the highlight and the thing that everyone's going to want to know first and foremost is that I drank my first cup of coffee. I cannot believe that you drank a cup of coffee. Pretty amazing, hey. You've stirred up the people on the internet as well because there have been just, it's like a Russian revolution where people want to tear down the statue of you, being hard as nails and rejecting a cup of coffee. It's, it's like you are a, you know, you, you have failed to live up to that statue. Oh, great, great. If there's something you really, really don't like and then you go through and have it anyway, that is what is hard as nails. Having the coffee is what makes me hard as nails. I see how, I see how you're trying to play this, Brady. It seemed like in the video that you enjoyed your first cup of coffee. Is that a fair assessment? It was a little bit, it was a little bit hard to tell how much you really liked it and how much you were being polite. Well, to give people the little bit, little bit of background. I was it, I was at the house of a person called Marco Arment who is a very famous app developer and computer guy and also a very well-known podcaster. But he's perhaps most known for his love of coffee and being a complete coffee snob. So when I said I was, I was going to his house, he sort of, he knows I don't drink coffee but he joked, I'll make you a coffee, ha ha, but not really. And when I got there, he was offering me a drink and said, oh, do you want a cup of tea? And I've said, I'm not going to come to the home of someone who is famous for their love of coffee. And not, not have a coffee. That would be crazy. I think he was a bit taken aback but I'm like, no, I'm going to do it. I'm going to try. If I'm ever going to do it, why not do it? You know, if I'm going to lose my virginity, I'm going to lose my coffee virginity to someone who knows their coffee. Seems reasonable. So he brewed one up. He also recorded it. There is, there is a video of it. There is even an audio. So people can enjoy it, can enjoy it. For those who care about such details, it was some Kenyan coffee and Marco roasts it himself. So he roasts it to a certain level that he thinks is is just right and is not the norm. And it was made with an arrow press, whatever that is. I didn't really see what he was doing. There was, there was some contraption that look a huge siphon that I used to use to clean out my fish tank. But he was, he made it with that whatever that was. And he gave it to me. And he asked if I wanted milk or sugar, which normally would have been my thing, I imagine, because I like milky sugary things. But I said, no, I want it. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it properly. If I'm going to be a bear, I'm going to be a grizzly. And, and I part of the coffee. So the question is, are you going to drink coffee again? Was your first experience something that you would want to repeat? I'm not in a hurry to have another one. In many ways, it was what I expected. It sort of tasted like it smelled and it was quite bitter. I believe your exact words were it tastes like dirt. I was surprised how earthy and dirt like it tasted. There were definitely nuances of dirt. And I don't mean that in an entirely negative way. Right. It just kind of tasted a bit. I don't know if all coffees like that or just this kind of Kenyan roast that was done by the coffee guru. But you started in at the deep end. That's a pretty intense coffee. And without anything to dilute it at all, that's going to taste earthy. I mean, I'm drinking coffee right now. And I still haven't worked my way up to the no additives whatsoever to coffee. That's really intense. I did get a pleasantness from it. I didn't feel the effected by the caffeine or anything. It was quite a small cup. And I think I was being treated gently because it was my first time. It didn't feel like some crazy drink. And certainly, I certainly found it more pleasant than I find in tequila or sambuka, both of which I have quite unpleasant reactions to those. I certainly would drink a coffee before I did tequila shots. That's where it is on the hierarchy of drinks. Yeah. It comes in above sambuka and tequila, but and lychee juice, but below most other things. It was also I was given a very, very nice piece of apple pie by Marco Zwaff, who's a woman called Tiff, who more importantly was wearing a reunion swamp pan teasure. First one I'd seen in the wild. Well, you were wearing the Jamaican rice rat shirt. I was. That was the first time I'd worn it. I'd got a tip off that she was going to be wearing the reunion swamp pan. So I thought I'd be provocative and turn up in a Jamaican rice rat shirt just to have that thing going. I believe she put it up on Twitter, I think, yes. Yes. Yeah. We'll show the pictures. Yeah. Well, I was only asking because in that picture, you are pointing at the shirt. And I feel like on your travels, you have sent me just a series of pictures where Brady points at things. This is what it looks like for my hand when Brady goes traveling. It's a you've met up with several people and you have sent me pictures of like, here's you pointing at this person. Here's you pointing at this bag of coffee that you got from Marco. Here's you pointing at this other shirt over here. This is what Brady does when he goes on vacation. You point at things and he takes pictures of him pointing at things. Well, I've got to guard your eye, Greg, because you never when I press send you a text or a picture, you never get the point. And I have to explain to you why I sent you the picture. I think it's not a good point. If I start pointing at things, you'll at least know the point of the picture. What are you saying here that this is from my benefit that you can't even trust me to look at a picture and derive from it, the thing you want me to derive from it? Yeah. Yeah. Here is the statue of Liberty. It's the big green thing there. I think we have never had any kind of misunderstanding over a photograph that you have sent me. Not once, not ever. That's that's what I'm going to say. I'm sure we have. I don't need your pointing. I tell you what, I had a fantastic experience just just before we started recording though. Well, I had a terrible experience, but it turned fantastic. Oh, yes. I got a cab from down on the flats of Berkeley down near the university up here to the spiritual home in the clouds because the spiritual home is actually up in a mountain, very appropriately. And I left in the back of the cab a little important black case of mine containing all sorts of valuable equipment like gopro's and stuff like that. And then I didn't realize I'd left it behind. I was rather upset. And I thought, 20 minutes later, half an hour later, the taxi driver obviously found it, drove back up the mountain and returned it. There are good people in the world. There are indeed good people in the world. Of course, the hello internet relevant question is, did you tip him for his goodness? Well, unfortunately, he came in and dropped it at reception and no one told like the building, the people at reception knew I'd lost this thing and I told them, oh, I think I may have left it in the cab. He came in and dropped it off. So they knew exactly who's at was and what was going on. But they didn't tell me in the taxi driver who was in a hurry and left straight away. So I never got to see it. And then the receptionist just came and said, oh, look, Brady, you're bags back. And I was so happy. I was like, oh, is he here? Is he still here? Did you get his contact details? If I had his contact, you know, I would have given him, I would have given him a hundred, he saved me hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I would have had to rebile this stuff. I would have given him a huge tip. But no, but I will go back down to the cab rent that's after known and there aren't millions of cabs in Berkeley. If I see him again, I will give him some cash. You're going to try to track him down. I would love to track him down and reward him. I did give him a decent tip when he dropped me off in the first place. So maybe that helped, maybe he thought fondly of me in the first place. But right. If you hadn't tipped at all, all of that stuff would be on the black market right now. It would. It would. It would be on eBay. I was just looking up while you were talking where MSRI is because I can never actually remember where the heck Berkeley is in relationship to San Francisco because of the same place in my mind. And I wanted to see where you actually are at the moment. And you were in kidding. MSRI really is up in the mountains. So right on the summer, the views ridiculous. The view is over the whole San Francisco Bay, Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, all of San Francisco proper all down across the Berkeley campus. It's the view is ridiculous. The director of MSRI has the best view of any office I've ever been in, but none. Can you take a picture? Can we see the view? I will take a picture from his office and share it. Make sure you are pointing at the window so that I know what the point of picture that I'll do that just for you. The problem is though, you know, a picture never looks as good as the reality, but and everything looks really small because with your eyes, you're looking at going, I'm a goodness, it's the Golden Gate Bridge. And then you take a picture and it looks like five pixels, but actually with your eyes, looks amazing. Yeah, it never fails that when you hold a camera up to a scene. It's like, oh, everything is way further away than my brain. Yeah. So how long are you at MSRI for? I'm here for two weeks. I'll be saying all the mathematicians and couple of talks and this has become an annual pilgrimage for you, hasn't it? I come here a few times a year. Oh, semi, semi annual, by annual. Three or four times a year. So try to quad quadranual, four times a year, probably does the trick. So you got to fill up on all of your footage that you then added later. Yeah. I went to this conference in New York. It was really good. I haven't spoken to you about it since I went because we were talking about it beforehand. And I tell you what, I actually really enjoyed it. It was put on by this group called the Simon's Foundation who are really into education outreach. And it's the foundation run by this Jim Simon's guy we've talked about before, who's the the mathematician who became really rich by, you know, doing stock market stuff. Right, right. The guy who only puffs a single puff from each cigarette. Is that correct? I'm remembering that story the right way. You are misremembering it correctly. Oh, am I okay? Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, he gives a lot back. And one of the things is he runs his foundation. And so I was asked to go along and it was one of the main things was coming up with ideas about making society more interested in science and mathematics and stuff. Yeah, the impression that I got from what you were talking to me about it was it is about increasing science literacy in the general population or just more broadly. Yeah, increasing the sort of the other science and math literacy of society. You and I could talk about it for hours because this is obviously the topics that you and I are really interested in. But I did have a funny experience that I think you will enjoy. So we were broken up into these groups and it was kind of like brainstorming and coming up with ideas. I mean, you know, you know what these kind of things are like. And so I ended up in, you know, in a group and a subset of a group and you ended up in groups depending on your interests and what you want to talk about. And I won't even bore people with the details of that. But the upshot was we had to come up with a bunch of ideas and make them into these little posters, like little pictures that would be put up on the wall. It was actually it was more fun than it sounds. It doesn't sound like everyone's cup of day. It sounds a little kindergarten. It's what it sounds. Yeah, but they weren't like posters like with crayons. They had little pro-former sections in them, like what's your idea? What's it summarising in a sentence? What will it cost? You know, what are its weaknesses and stuff like that? And we sat around coming up with ideas and we'd come up with maybe, you know, our little group, our little group would maybe come up with tan also. And then we sort of looked at them and we thought, do you know what the problem here is? They kind of a lot of these ideas aren't like really new. They're like ideas that people have had before or just variations on what's being done. And I think we felt like we played a little bit safe. So I sort of said to the other seven or eight people in the group, why don't we for the next ten minutes just go crazy and come up with the craziest, stupidest ideas and see what comes from that? And everyone was like, yeah, let's do it. So I was throwing out all these hair brain, brody ideas, just all the first things that came into my head. And a lot of the people were going, oh yeah, that's really good, you know, that's actually quite good. And then I started thinking more about them and thinking actually, this idea is better than I thought and, you know, if you do this and that and and I became really enthused about them. So I picked up all these pro forma posters and I was riding down these ideas and I was giving them crazy attention grabbing names and things like that. And I was drawing funny pictures on them and being a bit wacky, but also sort of throwing all these curve balls up. And I put my posters up there with all the other ones. And then all the other groups will put their posters up. So there must have been 50 posters or something up on the walls of this big meeting room we're in. And then what happened next, which I didn't know was going to happen was the people running the conference gave all the delegates these red and green post at notes. And you had to put green post at notes on ones you liked and red post at notes on ones you didn't like and write little comments. So I went and sat down with a cup of tea and sort of watched what happened next. And for the next 30 minutes, I just watched my three or four posters just become this mass of red. Because I think a lot of the people there were maybe a bit more sort of conservative as well. And they were like, you know, serious people and administrators who look at an idea and straight away will see problems with it. But this is this is real life downvoting. Is what's happening to you? It was terrible. And like the facilitators who at the time were saying, oh, this is great, Brady, you're being so creative and prolific just kind of coming up and putting this consoling arm on my shoulder as sort of red post at note after red post at night with all of these comments and criticisms were like stuck up on all my ideas. And it was kind of watching. I imagine that has to be a bit of a dog pile effect though after a while where if you're looking at all of these different proposals and one of them is just covered in red downvotes, who's going to be the guy who puts the lone green posted on that one? No, no one's going to do that when you're voting like that so openly and so publicly. I mean, I was sort of saying to people I'm taking this a bit of a bad jivana because it shows I'm a cat amongst the pigeons and I'm, you know, I'm being disruptive. But if I'm 100% honest with myself, if I'd got a hundred green post at notes, I probably would have really liked that as well. Right. Yeah, you would have taken a picture of it and framed it somewhere. I took a picture of the of it with all the red just for like for my own memory and stuff. And for the show notes now? No, no, not for the show notes. I don't want everyone to see the ideas. I don't want to get I don't want to get red posted notes on red as well. Anyway, it was it was actually it was a really good conference. I really enjoyed it. Like I know before I went you and I were talking thinking, oh, this could be really challenging and difficult and that and actually it was a really it was a really great experience and I met some like I met some ridiculously smart and accomplished people. I was the red post at note in the room anyway. So it sounds like it was one of those conferences where they're just getting together a bunch of smart and interesting people in a room and brainstorming and seeing what happens. It was that's pretty much exactly what it was. It was it was it was throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and and Brady stuff as well. Those are the best kind of conferences though. Yeah, and at the end we everyone got up and did a lot of pictures pictures to the rest of the group to try and make the case for their ideas and that was that was always good fun. I always like getting up and making a few jokes. Well, I'm glad you had a good time brainstorming but I'm sorry your ideas didn't go down so well. The people running the conference did keep everything so maybe who knows maybe it like a year or two one of those ideas will end up being a big thing and I'll be like, oh, what the heck? Hey, nice. You would have read post at note at my reunion swamp pen Jamaican rice rat idea. Yeah, without a doubt without a doubt I would have I would have read post at note at that but the people love their official unofficial official animals of the Hello Internet podcast. I have seen many a fun photograph of someone wearing those t-shirts in various locations around the world doing various things. That stuff is always delightful to see and just the other day I got my rice rat and Jamaican swamp hand t-shirt. So I now have them in my house freshly laundered and to be worn shortly. Brilliant. I've actually created like a little photo gallery of some people wearing them as well so we'll put that in the show and you can go and look at a whole bunch of people. I'm going to have to stop at some point. At the moment every time I see when I'm like, oh, I'll add that to the gallery and then I'm realizing at what point will I just say, okay, that's enough pictures. Is this your team rice rat and team swamp hand pages though? Yeah, I think I gave him some name like that. Yeah, don't pretend like you don't know. You love you love stirring up a little bit of competition between the two sides. That's why they're on different pages. Team rice head. Oh, team rice rat. Team rice hand. Yeah, swamp. Of a swamp rat, of course. Yeah, cool but rice hand helps so much. Yeah, but that's why you have those two different pages. You like to you like to rile up the crowd a little bit. You're such an old man how you always get reunions swamp hand and you make it rice rat mixed up. It's like my dad could never say Beverly Hills 902 when I used to always say, oh, are you watching that Beverly Hills 90382 you sound like such an old man when you do that. I have cut many more of me messing up trying to say the two of them at the same time than actually making it into the podcast. So for every one time you hear me do this, I have done it at least five times in real life. Yeah. So in the in the I did put at the top of the show notes here in the follow up a possible corporate compensation corner. Oh, the most exciting of the corners. It is. I mean, even I get bored by this corner and and and looking at it now, I'm a bit reluctant to do it, but I'll just give it I'll just give an executive summary. I don't. I didn't. An executive summary of corporate compensation corner. This is getting better and better. Yeah. I feel like you need a whiteboard in front of you where we can talk about circling back and tabling discussions. Low hanging fruit. Yeah. My corporate compensation corner relates to Airbnb. Now, I have a bad habit whenever I come to Berkeley of booking my Airbnb place too late and I always don't and they're all the good places are gone and I end up having to pick something I wish I didn't pick. I was really organized this time. Right? Before you go on with the story, I just want to remind the listeners either in case they're new or just in case they forgot that the last time you were out there, you booked a place that ended up having if I can remember correctly a crazy woman who had cats living in the apartment that peed all over the place that you were staying in some kind of hovel with the schizofrenic and cats all over the place was the was is the impression that I had of your last Airbnb experience. That was actually my first Airbnb experience quite a while ago and actually it was it actually remains the nicest place I've ever stayed in except for that problem except but no it was actually a really nice house. Oh, okay. Just one of the times I stayed there a second time. It was so nice but it just one a woman in one of the rooms. Yeah. She kind of decided to she basically kind of to start a squatting there when she wasn't supposed to be there anymore with her cat and then her cat peed everywhere and it just came in. Yeah. Anyway, that's that's a whole lot of story. I just can't believe you ever decided to use Airbnb after that if that was your first experience with it. I mean, I mean since then it's been okay. It's been okay. Except I always booked too late and I never get as nice a place as I want or I never get quite the location I want. So this time I got in really early. I planned ahead. I had so I could have my my pick of the best places in Berkeley. I picked one that I thought looked really nice and I was really looking forward to staying. What could possibly go wrong? And then two weeks before my trip I get contacted by the person saying I'm canceling your stay. Can they do that on Airbnb? Yes, they can. I guess they can obviously but is that within the terms of service? I guess is what I mean? Like I apparently I'm entitled to some kind of compensation and stuff but we might come to that in a minute but and also apparently they're not allowed to then relate it to someone else. But this person who did this to me was perfectly up front and said I basically the person who's staying wants to stay for six months. Basically she'd gotten off as she couldn't refuse. Right. Right. Maybe she was doing a dodgy and doing it outside Airbnb to get around this you can't shut off people thing. So I was really disappointed. I kind of understood because if someone offered me like a boatload of money and I just meant shafting one person maybe you would think okay I don't know. Anyway I got done over and I was really disappointed about it. I found another place which I've checked into and it's not as nice but it's fine and life goes on. But it has taught me a few things about Airbnb. People are really passionate about Airbnb like it's a real it has really zealous evangelists and if you criticize Airbnb it's like talking about gun control or religion or something. People get really upset when you say negative things about Airbnb and I don't know if these are like paid people because one of the people who absolutely went on a rant about it I went and looked at their Twitter account and they seem to spend 90% of their time attacking random people who attack Airbnb. That was a real interesting thing for me. I'm yet to encounter a brand that has such zealous advocates. Even today before the show I put out a little call to our listeners saying I think anyone's got a good or a positive story about Airbnb. Let me know. I just wanted to get you know I wanted to take people's temperature and a few people sent me their horror stories but a lot more people sent me really long sort of advocacy emails full of telling me how great it was. So it's a brand that a lot of people are really liking but I'm having problems with it and I think it's a really good example of the problems of the sharing economy. Yeah I think the sharing economy stuff is divisive or polarizing to people and it seems like like I think we were talking about Uber last time Uber falls into this category of people have thoughts about Uber right either they love it like I fall into that category or there's a contingent of people who really hate it and it seems like from your experience with Airbnb it is doing the same thing. I've never used it for a bunch of reasons but I can imagine that it would have the same the same reaction the people who love it really love it and that there might be some people who are just like oh it's awful and I hate it I never use it. I mean yes some people just seem to think the sharing economy is you know the savior of civilization other people think it's like amateur hour and the end of the end of all you know professionalism and businesses we know it and and I don't know where I sit in that but I do think the sharing economy has its problems I think the personal and it's funny to come from me because of the two of us you would think I'm the person who's or into more sort of you know personal relationships and one-on-one stuff yeah it would seem like Airbnb would be right up your alley yeah and I've and it's true I've met some nice people as a result of it and I kind of like that but this sort of personal nature of it does take away the unpersonal nature of businesses that in some ways lets them handle problems better and and kind of the right and and you know a big corporation or a hotel chain is able to while sometimes their personal service isn't good in other ways they're able to deal with a problem or they have they have the size to deal with a problem like if you've got a bad hotel room in a hotel for some reason if a cat has weed on the bed in a hotel they'll they'll move you to another room right there are systems in place it might be the way to describe it doesn't mean that they're great but there's there's a there's a three-ring binder somewhere which is filled with the DNA of the company and what to do when something happens yeah that's partly why I haven't used Airbnb is because I feel like when I travel I'm really trying to optimize for consistency and to minimize downsides like I'm very happy to go to a hotel where I think oh it's not going to be an amazing experience I know it's not going to be an amazing experience but I can also count on it not being an unexpectedly terrible experience like there isn't a schizophrenic with her cats across the hall from me I will do almost anything to avoid that and so that's why I always feel like I have stayed away from Airbnb for consistency's sake but if if I was ever doing what you're doing which is traveling to a location and you're going to be there for for more time than you probably want to stay in a hotel room that is almost certainly the time I would give Airbnb a try as well it's like okay I'm going to be in some place for two weeks let me see if I can find a place that I actually want to stay in for two weeks but I would be very nervous until I actually saw the room yeah explain to me as someone who has never used Airbnb what do you perceive of as the flaws like is is my perception correct or is there something else that's wrong with it no I think what you say is it it's a sort of a lack of consistency and not knowing what you're getting into and there's always there's always personal problems like it because it's such a human thing because people letting out their individual houses is such a human thing there's always there's always a problem you know how your friends have always got problems it's a bit like that you know the place you're staying always has a problem oh I'm sorry today's the day that you know my mum has to come around and iron the curtains and or this doesn't work or and you never quite know what you're getting into because you're quite often you're staying in the house of the person who's there or they're or you're in a building attached to their house and right it's just there's just a lot of there's just always a lot of stuff to deal with and then you'll hear from people who say I went and stayed in a wonderful place in Vienna and I had the time of my life Brady how do you say anything bad about Airbnb every time I've stayed in the Airbnb there's been something there's been there's been there's been something considerable that has you know has caused me a problem but also I've also I keep doing it I keep coming back because the price is good and the advantages are outweighing the negatives so I am to I am using Airbnb again I've used it every time I've come to Berkeley and this must be like seven or eight the time I've done it so I'm using it there you go shut your face Brady how is the flag referendum going the flag referendum I'm so excited about I still think it's I still think it's one of the most exciting things we've done everyone has been sending us pictures putting their postcards in postboxes from around the world which I have absolutely loved I love also that everyone's being really secretive about who they voted for like they'll always like obscure who they voted for with their hand or pixelate or they up and things like that I noticed that as well it's like everybody's being really coy I have quite enjoyed it yeah I can't wait to get all the votes but keep the photos coming the absolute winner of the best photo is the person who sent their postcard from the post box in front of the mighty black stump yes and then you can see them putting in their postcard with the their postcard with the building in the background that was fantastic yes and it is shot from an angle to make the mighty black stump look genuinely mighty it's it's a low angle so it looks like a tremendous tower in the skyline like it's or thank or something but it's actually just a regular building I haven't been to the post box because obviously I'm not in the UK but I did email them last night and I said have any postcards been coming in and they were like yeah they said they said basically your box is full and now we've just got a cardboard box on the grey hand that we're using to fill up keep filling it up I think oh they said over 500 votes have come in so far that's pretty good yeah but but keep them coming this is going to be awesome and grey and I going to go through every one of the postcards I'm going to look at every picture I can't wait to do the count when we announced the referendum we intentionally did not mention any deadline like this was a conscious decision to not mention it partly because you were going to be traveling we were a bit uncertain like oh you know when when is Brady going to be able to get back and to count all of these these votes so we didn't want to to say anything that might cut off when when someone was going to send the postcard but the flip side to me is the is the the mental image of this post box somewhere getting just overstuffed with postcards while you are away I find a very entertaining mental image a lot of people were very upset about the fact we didn't uh and still haven't at this point firmly named a deadline at what point we won't accept new postcards I find that a bit strange like I understand at some point we're going to have to say and make it really clear that the vote is no longer open and you know we would put that on the voting webpage we would say don't send in your votes the vote is closed but the fact we haven't said that yet people are so upset about it and that makes me a bit suspicious of them but as a teacher if you sit in assignment and then everyone just immediately said when is this due when is this due doesn't that just say to you are they want to leave it as late as possible and they're being be able to slacker just if you want to vote just send your vote as soon as possible and like why do you need a dead if you if you set a deadline that is just basically saying to people be a procrastinator yeah but people people know people know they need deadlines to motivate there's some portion of the population that requires this and uh I'm going to forget the details here but there's it there there's an example of of a study of like when you give students the option to set deadlines let's say it's a university class and you say oh there's five essays that you need to complete in order to pass this class you can either have them all do on the last day of class or you can set your own deadline that you will fail that essay if you don't hand it in by and a huge number of students opt for the option to set their own deadlines spreading it out throughout the year which just from a purely rational perspective doesn't make any sense because in theory it's like oh you would want to give yourself the maximum amount of time to work on these essays but people just know that like without a deadline and without a real consequence that some people are just not going to do what they're going to leave it all until the last possible moment so I think I think you are hearing from the people who know that they want a deadline to motivate their own actions that's who you're hearing from who's freaking out about when's the deadline but there are plenty of people who obviously just want to vote straight away and that's what we've been seeing on Twitter is all of the postcards going into the postboxes around the world. What's more motivating though than knowing there is a deadline because of course there's a deadline because we have to count the votes at some point. What's more motivating than knowing there is a deadline but not knowing what the deadline is? I just I think that's not motivating for some people. I don't think that's I think that's why you're hearing from them. They just give up hope and think oh the dog probably missed it any way so I won't bother. Yeah some people just feel that way right it's just like oh if I if I a lack of knowledge leads to inaction so we still we have no answer for those people right now we still have not firmly decided precisely what we're going to do but if you are hearing the sound of our voices and you're the kind of person who needs a deadline let's just pretend that the deadline is the day after you hear this this podcast. Yeah it's not really the deadline but we're going to pretend if that's what you need if that's what you need to to get your button gear and send in your postcard for the Hello Internet flag referendum. Yeah and you can't vote for this without going to the page because that's where the address is and if the vote is closed it will be on the page at the top that voting is closed so it's not like you're going to send it and not know that voting was closed. When you when you take the address you will see voting is closed. Yeah so that is hellointernet.fm slash flag vote. I'll just say my other favorite thing about this referendum so far is I've seen a number of comments all of which are along the same lines of people saying how they have spent more time agonizing over this election than they have spent agonizing over the actual elections in the various countries where they live. Like we we happen to do this right at the time Canada was having an election and I've seen from a bunch of Canadians saying that they spent way more time thinking about the flags and they did it about that election. Yeah. And a few other places around the world that have had elections have seen the similar things where people are like man I'm just agonizing over these flags but I cast my political vote without even thinking about it. Yeah and also I don't want to talk about the specifics because if we talk about it it will conflate the problem but I do like that they've been that little controversy is breaking out as well where people will say this shouldn't even be in the polls this reason or there's this you know this is insensitive or there are issues to do with this like like just like the New Zealand one there's all these little pockets of controversy and things like that so people are you know it shows you even having like that an election of the silliest thing in the world you know a podcast flag you'll still have all your things will still get inflamed and controversial. Exactly it's a microcosm of the bigger thing it's precisely what it is and at least my own my own final comment is when talking about people who are indecisive over the flags and thinking thinking about it long and hard. I actually find myself in this category because when we recorded that episode in my mind I had an idea of what the order was going to be not exactly but roughly I had a pretty good idea of how I was going to vote but the instant the episode went live I found myself just filled with doubt and uncertainty and even now I keep thinking about my own vote how am I going to vote I have thought about this so many times I don't have a I don't have an idea in my own mind of how I'm going to vote I might miss our own deadline. Maynard I honestly don't know what to wait for I'm like I'm really conflicted about it. Yeah it's one of these things where as soon as it's real it's somehow different and so as soon as the instant it went up all of my certainty was was cast to the wind and just gone now I'm now I am entirely unsure about what to do. Why do you care that you're always the guy who's like oh one vote can't make a difference anyway say. I care because it's fun obviously the one vote doesn't matter but it's a fun thing to do and I feel like I should probably vote in my own election or maybe I should abstain maybe it's it's like the queen all right she's not allowed to vote in the elections maybe I shouldn't vote in this election maybe you shouldn't vote in this election. You consider yourself more like the queen than the president of Hello Internet. Yes I guess I am CGP Gray the queen of Hello Internet. Yeah there we go I'll take queen that's fine what are you what are you Brady what do you think of yourself as a court jester you're the court jester yeah that works. No I don't know what I am I'd be I'd like to be I'd like to be something a bit cool. Wouldn't that I'd like to be like maybe you're the queen and I'm your hard as nails night. Who like goes and josts I'm thinking more like in a deck of cards the jack but I don't ever really know what the jack is. Yeah but he looks hard doesn't he's got a sword and stuff. Yeah he does I'll take that I'll be the jack. Yeah what does the jack do. If you're the queen if you are the queen of Hello Internet and you're in a deck of cards what suit would you be if you were a suit what would you be just in general what suit do you do you feel like best represents you speed yeah I would have said spade for you I'm not pretty enough to be the queen of hearts you seem like a club kind of guy. No I think diamonds I'd like to be I wish you'd said diamonds I'm sorry I didn't say diamonds but it's never like I've never like the clubs I just think they're a bit flurry and curvy I just don't I want to be a diamond okay we can say we can say that you're the diamonds if that's what you like although I do like the idea of being a black one so I kind of wish maybe like a black diamond the black diamond but now you're just making up things here you are let's be honest if I was going to be any card I'd like to be the draw for from Uno the what I don't know oh no all right the draw for card from Uno is like I still get excited when I say one because if you get one it's a really powerful tool oh you know players would know what I'm saying okay we should play Uno sometimes I have no idea no I don't play I don't play games I don't know you you are you are just here's the thing okay listeners you use the background you need to know about this there have been several incidences at conference where Brady in theory could play a board game but he always backs down he always says no I'm not going to play a board game and you're reasoning if I can try to say it for you is that you get too intense about the rules of the board game and winning yeah winning but also that there are people who are sometimes wanting to play fast and loose with the with the rules or they're trying to optimize for like oh let's everybody have a good time and let's have fun and you know that when you play you can't deal with that is that is that correct assessment yes okay see here's the thing this is precisely why I would want to play a game with you because I can never stand it when people are like ah you know whatever is that the rule most of the time we're like no we have to follow the rules this is why the rules are here this game this game makes no sense unless we're following rules like that's that that is the whole thing that it is if if there are no rules what are we even doing we're just having imaginary play time together you can you can't just do this stuff but it's lose lose great because say you and I would sit down and play a game together there are only two things that are going to happen right I'm going to win and then I'm going to feel like oh well what's the point of that we're supposed to have fun and all I've done there is beat my mate and made my mate a loser or the other option is I'm going to lose and I'm going to hate that even more because I was sitting down supposed to be having fun and I've just become a loser so like I'm a loser whether I win or lose I guess the problem is I think that fun can be derived from following the rules precisely of the game and it just seems to be many many board players who disagree who they're trying to optimize for fun first and bend the rules to their fun and it's like no following the rules is fun I love I love that you dislike following rules just that I did a I I made a film with a friend of mine who actually lives in San Francisco and then he's like a game developer and I was talking to him about when he was a child like what he was into did he always think he'd be a computer programmer and one of the things he used to do as a little kid was make like the instruction book or the guide for like pretend games that he would like to make and he couldn't make the game and he didn't know what the game would look like but he would just like making like the rule book and the instructions for the game just because he loved game rules so much I mentioned you would like that just making up instruction books rule books yeah I didn't I never did that that kind of thing but when I was much younger I played not dungeons and dragons but there was a game called heroes quest which was basically like a baby's first dungeons and dragons and uh in that game I always took the role of the dungeon master which means that it was my responsibility to design the board and the level through which the other players would move and I always found that very appealing so I think that's in the same universe of I'm not playing the game but I'm setting out all of the spaces through which the other players are going to move and like what traps are going to be where and what creatures are going to be where and having to do it in in such a way so that it is it is fair so that hopefully the players win but they feel like it was a challenge so I think that's in the it's in the same universe of this let me tell you some other stories about games one day I could talk for a long time about games I used to play as a kid that you'll find that I think we're really a penalty but but we are in follow-ups that we better crack on oh yeah is this still is this still follow-up I still say pretty you and I should play some games sometime yeah all right all right we'll sort something out just a really quick update out the hot stopper awareness auction raising money for the children's burns trust has ended it's it sold for a very impressive somewhat impressive 920 pounds for our fracture of a reunion swamp in so one very generous buyer will be receiving that signed by us and and we are very grateful they have raised the hot stopper awareness and they've also raised a boatload of money for a really good cause thank you very much and also I also created a page where people could just make donations to the children's burns trust in the name of hot stopper awareness if they chose to and some people have been doing that as well and both great and I really appreciate it and they'll be going to them soon and also what I want to do now is I want to talk to maybe we'll talk to the the the Bank of Heller internet or whoever does our banking for us and I need a giant check now because obviously I'm just going to electronically transfer this money to the children's burns trust but I want to we need a giant check for publicity purposes so we can really increase the pressure on on Starbucks so we need to let you know we need we need hard copy photos of this giant check for 920 pounds and hot stopper awareness written on it so if anyone knows where we can get one of those giant checks they use for charity options and stuff let me know I'm in the market for one yeah I'm looking I'm making a note now giant check from back I mean they come from somewhere right well they just stunted up out there by printing companies surely but I always assume that they were real that those things were legitimate that it's oh yeah I mean because the whole if you ever look into how checks work there's all these crazy rules around what is it still there let's talk let's let's talk to our bank yeah I think that's why I'm making an I'm making note of it I want to see if we can get a gigantic legitimate check oh that would be amazing and like we'll then we'll see if that we'll see if we can hand it over to someone outside of Starbucks or something I can already I can already hear my bank manager getting irritated by this request one last little bit of follow up yeah CGP Gray the penguin oh yes we have never actually known the gender of CGP Gray the penguin this is the penguin at Bristol Zoo that is named after Gray in his honor as a little thank you for our fundraising efforts there but it's not until a penguin is about six months old or so that they do the tests to find out if it is a boy penguin or a girl penguin the penguin section yes I now know the gender of CGP Gray the penguin oh yeah you know hold us in suspense here Brady I'm trying is it working I feel like we win either way so I got not I'm not on a I'm not on a particular team here well we we were referring to you as a queen of Hello Internet a moment ago and I'm here to announce that CGP Gray it's a girl oh there's that nice there we go so that that famous penguin bearing your name is a lady penguin oh nice little lady penguin yep I hope she likes the name CGP Gray yeah I don't know how do you feel about this you're you're pleased with that yeah yeah of course I am and also if it's a girl it's just funnier this way right the girl penguin is named CGP Gray so I think it's I think it's totally a win there we go it's a girl there we go so people can go visit her in the zoo do that more updates to follow as and when they come in sometimes listeners there are coincidences you you just can't believe last time I was talking to you about our dear sponsor back plays I mentioned in the ad read that between then and the next time I was going to talk about back plays just statistically speaking we were guaranteed that someone in the Hello Internet audience was going to have a catastrophic computer disaster that's just the way things work when you start talking about large numbers well little did I know that the person who was going to have a catastrophic computer disaster was me that's right between the last back plays ad and this one I had my main computer the computer that I record this very podcast on go from a beautiful working functioning machine to an unusable brick in the space of about 15 minutes now if you make your living on the internet or just on a computer in general having your computer break is an extraordinarily stressful experience but almost always it's the data on your computer that matters way more than the physical device itself maybe you're working on a video for YouTube maybe you're working on a podcast for something maybe you just have photos of your baby that you can't ever replace if they're lost this is why I run backups is precisely for this moment and if you don't have a backup system running on your computer as far as I'm concerned you're not running a functioning computer this is just something that you have to have because you never know when disaster is going to and back plays is the service that I can wholeheartedly recommend for when you have a computer disaster I have hundreds of gigabytes of data with back plays so that when my main computer goes up in a sad little puff of smoke I don't have to worry about the data itself I just have to worry about replacing the machine back plays just couldn't be simpler you're going to go to back plays dot com slash hello internet you do have your browser open right now yes to type that in back plays dot com slash hello internet you're going to download just this little piece of software and it's going to run on your computer silently and visibly in the background just keeping an eye on all of your files and uploading all of the changes all of your work to the cloud for safekeeping along with their 150 petabytes of everybody's data these guys are the pros they've restored over 10 billion files for their customers they have iPhone and Android apps so that you can access your data from anywhere and if you have a total total failure like I do and you need to get up and running immediately you can place an order for a USB hard drive from them to be shipped right to your door with everything on it I mean if you're not in a rush you can read down though to your hundreds of gigabytes of data that's totally an option but if you need it now to finish the project that you're working on this is something that they can do there's no add-ons there's no gimmicks no hidden charges it's just five dollars per month per computer for unlimited unthrottled backup so you can get a risk-free no credit card required trial by going to backblaze.com slash hello internet get backblaze and protect your data today now I don't know if you saw this Liberia stuff gray like I put up one or two podcasts ago I sprung a flag on you that you would like us to look at and kind of review on the spot the Cypress flag yeah that was the Cypress flag as a result we've been contacted by someone who asked you to cast an eye not over the flag of Liberia which is a perfectly serviceable flag but the Liberia County flags now have you seen the the Liberia County flags yet before you look at them no I have I mean I'm I was typing into Google right now but no I have not seen them so I haven't pressed if you go if you go okay so if you go to a flag of Liberia on Wikipedia okay at the at the top you'll see the Liberian flag it looks a lot like the American flag except it has one star instead of 50 right but if you scroll down you will see the County flags of Liberia now I thought this was a joke but obviously not and I think this is this is worthy of people's time just to have a look at the Liberia is apparently subdivided into 15 counties each of which has its own flag these obviously like states you know things like that each County flag bears the national flag of Liberia in the canton so in the top corner you see like a miniature version of their flag and then obviously they're free to do what they want with the rest these are awful yes it is extraordinary what these people have done I would like to say they've used clip-out but I don't know where you would find clip-out that bad yeah that's that's the best way to describe this so all of the flags have the already very busy Liberia flag up in the corner up in the corner very small I might add so it looks yeah it looks it looks odd the proportions of it if you think if you think of for example the current New Zealand flag that has the Union Jack in the upper corner it's maybe half that size it just it almost looks like a stamp on on the wrong side of a post card it looks like a little poed on menu or something sitting up there in the corner yeah yeah so they all have it in the corner except as I'm scrolling through just one of them grand cape mount County doesn't put it in the corner like everybody else they have a little bit away from the corner so that's always great not even consistent with everybody a good job there grand cape mount County but yeah they're just it's so like I'm I am struggling to describe this for someone who's just listening in audio form it's a space they like a child using MS paint yeah not even a pit and not even one who's very good at it like like an unusually unusually artistically untalented child using MS paint to draw pictures yeah I think that that's that is exactly right it is every one of these things is childish in a way that is quite surprise I mean okay so let me let me try to let me I'm gonna put you on the spot here Gray yeah I'm gonna put you on the spot I'm gonna lay down the challenge here and now for you to name which one you think is the worst and beautifully there actually is a county called Maryland County in Liberia and and their flag is a candidate for worst in the worst in the bunch so but don't let that bias you I mean I'll just but I okay let me just try to describe something for the listeners here and I'll take the Maryland County flag as an example okay so I'm like once again I will paint a beautiful audio picture for you listeners of this disaster in front of me Liberia flag in the upper left hand tiny corner yeah the flag is is divided it's like a tricolor in horizontally right so there's three horizontal stripes the top and the bottom one are yellow the middle one isn't a stripe though it's just a picture yeah okay so there's like there's a picture of a of a I'm presuming it's a lighthouse that someone has drawn the windows on the lighthouse are uneven one of them is touching the top in a way that wouldn't possibly work the very tip of the lighthouse is floating above the lighthouse a bit a bit like the eye on the US one dollar bill like it floats on the top of the pyramid it kind of looks like that and then presumably they've drawn like lines coming out from the lighthouse that I presume are supposed to be the light itself but they're all uneven some of them are joined at the base some of them aren't and so this lighthouse is all white it's on a green hill I guess maybe but the green is very bright it's it makes you think of MS paint because it's it's like when you select the default color green and a painting towards like this green is just a green that doesn't look good on anything right no one should use this color green but it's the default color green for everything you ever do on a computer okay next to this lighthouse and 25% larger than it is a tree right like a like a like a sort of a palm tree-esque but not quite a palm tree yeah yeah okay so the imagine a child has drawn a tree and they've made it look saggy so it so it has leaves that are coming down the thing that amazes me is this this drawing is just flat colors except one part of the drawing is shaded which is on the tree part they've they've shaded in the bottom of the tree so that the leaves are I guess they're trying to make the leaves look round but nothing else on the drawing is shaded and then in the background is a just flat blue sky which again is a horrible color blue that doesn't go with the green of the ground and remember listener this is just a a one-third of the flag size strip in the middle above and below is bright bright yellow and there's also another flag on the top it's awful you're picking such minutia to criticize as well I mean I mean because like you can't take in the whole thing at once like it's just too much I'm trying to think about how to describe this this is amazing it's like the president of Liberia asked his like ten-year-old kid to design some flags and put them up on the fridge and then someone said actually why don't we make them the actual flags yeah I mean these are these are just and I love how the Liberia flag in the canton in the left corner like doesn't quite fill up the whole yellow section but it looks like it should but they didn't quite do it yeah it doesn't I mean just just jumping over is another there's another one with trees on it which is rivergy county flag oh that that is my I think that that's in my top two for the worst okay but this has what is literally the exact tree that every kindergartner in the world draws where you have a trunk and then there's there is a green cloud shape on the top of the trunk and there's three of these trees and well you have to look at this flag you have to look at the flag of rivergy or rivergy county in Liberia you have you have to stop the podcast now you have to if you don't have the internet you have to walk into the nearest shop or whatever you're near and say please please can I use your internet and look at the flag of rivergy county in Liberia do it right now yeah I mean there's a hill there's three trees on this hill one of the things that I like here is the tree on the top they didn't even draw it entirely on the ground and so the way it works is there's a tiny bit of sky poking below which should be the roots of the tree because they just didn't draw it low enough to the ground again like when a kindergartner draws stick figure people and they're just floating above the actual ground they're not actually they're not touching the ground I mean is this a joke great is this like it's someone taking the Mickey has someone hacked this side and because flag of Liberia's quite obscure no one would look like I can't and like the green of the leaves of the tree is the exact sand green as like the hill and because one of the trees is on the hill right you can't say and then there's a river flowing which is just like a hand-drawn river which is flowing like from the trunk of one of the trees yes these are they are so bad but perfectly but not bad like Maryland where it you know it hits the Maryland point like oh this is amazing this is just crap like it is just absolute crap there's no way there's no other way to describe it yeah but I honestly hope this is just masterful trolling that this is just joke and that yes someone did this because the flag of Liberia wiki page probably doesn't have a whole lot of people really on top of it to make sure that nothing like this gets slipped in and then you try and look for a secondary source yeah this is I was just opening up my own web browser like can okay like Liberia if we have been taken for a ride it this is the best ride I've ever been on this is great they say I'm seeing some of them in other sources but they're kind of also like sometimes they're a bit different like but still bad because it says on the wiki pedi article that they do fly it this you can see them flying it like the sun palace and I'm now saying photo of them all flying oh so I think this is real it's amazing that's amazing they are special and looking through some pictures here looks like other people have cotton onto the joy of these in the past as well so do yourself a favor check out the county flags of Liberia grey what are you going to throw out there is the worst I think the worst comes down to there are three candidates for worst in my opinion they're all so bad it's they are it's hard to pay special worse river G river G I think has to has to perhaps get it but but boomy county the first one there I think you could make a strong case for that one as well and you could also make a strong case for Gabar Polo County which is the one with the diamond and a and a tree which is just bad in in many ways that the others haven't quite accomplished as well like it has a very special special levels of badness I can honestly say I am just overwhelmed looking at these I find this impossible to select among it's it's almost like someone served me up several plates each with a turd on them and they went and they wanted me to know like pick which one is the worst to eat it's like well they're all terrible oh what I what a small luck I'm saying which one are you unwilling to eat which turd is so bad a turd that you won't eat it and you're like well I don't want to eat any turds yeah the only one I'm looking at here is is a sinoe county which is on the bottom is a flag that under normal circumstances I would probably make fun of but it seems like it is a glorious bastion of good design yeah and like as a as a second option here there's grand baza county another flag that I would totally make fun of under any other circumstances which which just looks amazing they're just the guy the guy that designed sinoe counties like the Johnny I of Liberia for the listener it's just the Liberia flag in the corner and then it's it's just a green cross across the flag and the grand baza county one is just a blue background and then there's a couple of red and white stripes on it it's awful but it looks amazing in comparison these are great so they're a real trait yeah listeners you do you do have to go look at these if you're listening in Liberia and want to share more information with us maybe maybe make the case for them I mean I mean it's a completely different culture to what Gray and I are from I mean maybe in sort of Liberian culture there's something there's something about Liberian visual culture that makes these a real trait and these have gone through years of iterations and that they are the pinnacle of I mean that is just not possible Brady that is just not possible I mean look look at the Lafay county one the one that has a disembodied arm holding what holding like a rod of some golden thing across a river right it's holding a cylinder but here's the thing someone has done a 3d gradient effect on the cylinder gradients always excellent on flags by the way right they just look amazing but the gradient has spilled over onto the fingers that are holding onto the cylinder if there's no way this is a refinement of anything this is just astounding this is astounding this is like the opposite universe version of the Japanese prefecture flags that that's what this is right they're really good are they the Japanese I think I've say in the day I good aren't yeah you you will have seen them they're very good but this is yeah this is the reverse of that probably not the best way to come down but let's do a bit of listener corner yeah what's in listener corner I've been getting loads and loads of messages and photos of people and because I'm on the road it's been a bit hard to get organized so I will revisit revisit your emails again soon but I thought I'd share just a couple that have caught my eye some recently some less recent but so this picture has been sent to us by Dana Dana says hello internet was an invaluable companion to me on my recent month long trek through the desert of Kenya for which I thank you both although I had other podcasts only listening to hello internet could make the six hour walks through the scorching heat feel more like three hour walks it was also refreshing to hear interesting and varied conversations in English as most of my traveling companions were more comfortable speaking than native language of Swahili I believe Dana who is a university student from Canada was in Kenya with a small organization of helping them understand family planning and birth control the better in sort of some of the more underserved areas of Kenya so she was there for a really good cause but the picture she has sent us is of her holding her phone playing hello internet and there's a bunch of camels behind her and she's in the desert and I think that's just a really awesome setting to see see us in yeah it's a really great photo is she's at the it looks like she's at the head of the camel train and that there's a big big camel just looming right behind her she's listening to hello internet it's a really good photo I really like this she says that that's a picture of her on the last day of her trip listening to hello internet she says Brady given your adventurous inclinations I really think you'd enjoy a similar experience Gray I'm not sure you'd need to be told this but I would not recommend that you travel through the deserts of Kenya there were no nice hotels there no man that was on my list but if a listener says it's not a good idea I have been to Kenya I'm not surprised what were you in Kenya doing well I I went on a safari there in the mess I'm aara and I did it quite luxuriously I stayed in that really posh luxurious tents and I had a really good experience there I was not walking through a desert for six hours so that I could go to underserved communities and teach them about family planning so I think Dana will probably be going to heaven and I will not but but I have been I have been to Kenya but I did not do it in a particularly adventurous or hard as nails way which Dana definitely did Dana you are today's hard as nails person here's another picture from a viewer this comes from Jesse I'm a listener of hello internet podcast that you do with CGP Gray which is handy to be told thank you Jesse I do not know what how the internet is but I like that I like that you explained it and recently you talked about cool things that your listeners do as well as you being tough as nails Jesse says I'm a college football player at Bloomsburg University in the United States and I regularly listen to the the podcast during injury treatment or cardio recently I was injured in one of our games and when I went down I thought to myself I need to be hard as nails here so Brady so Brady you managed to get me up and after a nasty injury and recompose myself now I'll be able to listen to more h i while I get treated for the injury and and he and Jesse sent a picture of him in the locker room in his kit he he does look hard as nails yeah he's looking very serious in this photograph and he's holding he's holding his phone playing hello internet as an awesome photo Jesse you also are hard as now we have a lot of hardest now is this is today I'm feeling particularly unhard today yeah but you are the inspiration for some of this hardness Brady I have yeah I have I can now I can now sort of soften up a bit knowing that I've done my job right I've done your job acting as a as a beacon for everyone I know I was an ambassador if they really knew how unhard I was that all be there'd be a lot of disillusioned people now oh this is a very special one just for you Gray I'm going to send you a third picture that has been sent to us by a hello internet listener okay and I won't tell you what this is but I think you may know the person who sent this has said that they have sent it from a historical podcast landmark they believe this to be a hello internet landmark we'll see if you agree hello internet landmark or historical landmark well a historical hello internet landmark oh historical hello internet landmark yeah we're 50 episodes long now we can have historical landmarks yeah I guess we can yeah I guess we can okay what am I looking at oh I know exactly where they are I know where they are they're on one of the at ats at Dallas Airport that's where this photograph is taken for yeah so I would recognize that horrible horrible space anywhere in the world where lots of people are packed in lots of poles to lean against while that giant tank of a construction shuffles you around the airport Anthony says I'm sure this is in nowhere original but I found to entertain that when I went to the dread a Dallas airport for the first time I was listening to the podcast and I entered into the famed at at people movies it was such an honor to see this historical podcast landmark the Anthony has held up his phone showing the podcast playing amongst all the crowded people in the at at I can recognize that from even just a tiny corner of the room I know it's precisely what that is good stuff all right Brady are we gonna do the bi weekly weigh in we are now the I haven't got scales with me but we were going to record this episode the other day and we had to cancel at the last minute for various reasons and I had weighed myself that day which was four or five days it was four or five I don't even remember when it was so I think we decided we were going to use the weights from that day as opposed to the weights now because I think my weight may have gone up somewhat since because I've been indulging in New York so this bi weekly weigh in definitely is a bit of a historical one for practical reasons in that it's more difficult to consistently weigh yourself while you are traveling and we have a weight measurement just before you left and then also just for practical reasons of maybe we'll just do the next way in when you come back from America and see see what the damage done is dilute dilute dilute right back in time to when we were so so last Saturday was it when we were going to record which was what date was that that was that would have been there 24th of October and our previous measurement was on the 10th of October before so how did you do in that period of time breeding? I again went down oh yeah in that period I went down by 1.2 kilograms hey very good very good breeding thank you and you I'm pretty comparable to you I went down 1.6 kilograms so slightly ahead sorry it's very close and of course in real measurements that is minus 3.5 pounds is the way that works in nice work actual measurements hey both did well yeah I have to say I have to say we're both doing well I think this has been a good streak for us of consistent down measurements and I have now I've crossed the boundary of like being under 210 pounds and I'm actually just now kind of hovering around 205 206 and I've been seeing this on the scale but there was something that happened which finally made some of the weight loss feel really real which was I was walking around one day and I realized like boy my watch is just so loose like I do not like having a loose watch at all I always like having the watch rather tight and I realized that I had actually lost enough weight that I needed to take a link out of my Apple watch and that was just one of those moments where it's like boy this feels really this feels really real like I know that the the composition of my body is actually changing and I'm actually feeling pretty good but that that is definitely much more real when when something like that happens that's nice man that's some nice master well done you and you one and so I'm happy to move on to the next topic now should we talk about shirts we just talk about sure go on then speaking it I was just I'm just being a bad loser yeah I believe it you're not being bad loser we both win and besides it's anyone actually keep track of these points I'm sure someone's got some spreadsheet going somewhere yeah you know what I like I have no idea what the points are but somebody some nerd out there has to be keeping track of the spreadsheets let's see it in the reddit whoever whoever's actually been following from the beginning how we're doing there's been there's been that many exceptions and caveats and things that I don't think there actually is like a score sheet I think it's just basically it's it's more just like one off moments of glory rather than a long term right but still I'm sure I'm sure someone out there is keeping track of things but so one of one of the things that has been on my mind is I have seen enough feedback from people who are joining in with us on this hello internet fidothon fit marathon thing that we're doing here this weight loss fit I thought come on that's terrible okay this is why it's my job to invent words no I'm amazing at inventing words okay I'm sorry I'm sorry you don't like it lost cast what lost I'm trying to come up with something that's got podcast in it and like you know it's the hello internet fit a tron 5000 that's what we're doing fit a tron fit a tron 5000 that I like there we go right all right and I think this machine that is the hello internet fit a tron 5000 there are many people who want to get on board this contraption yeah like there's a guy I know who is who I saw talking to the gray health bot saying that he's in a race to try to beat me to 200 pounds and I've just been I've been hearing from a bunch of people who have taken this on board as a time to try to get more healthy in their lives in one way or another whether it's losing weight or exercising more and so I thought let's let's make this official in some way it's the official life goal of Hello Internet I didn't realize what I had just walked into there but yeah so I like the idea of trying to do something official about it even though now I'm just realizing that it is yet another official thing with the podcast and so let's try thing like what what can we do and at least at the very start of this we've decided that we are putting up a hello internet exercise shirt yeah this is this is team hello internet fit a tron 5000 is it too late for you to put fit a tron 5000 that's under the logo there I think you have to now don't you just under the late show how also with that look that because you would wear that it's not like embarrassing because it's just a little secret you're gonna do that yeah you think we should put fit a tron 5000 underneath it oh yeah yeah so you can get your official hello internet fit a tron 5000 exercise t-shirt to show sort of solidarity so when you're out on your run or sweat in the gym you can just look down and think fit a tron 5000 yeah that you're not doing this alone that there are other people out there in the world listening to the podcast who are also taking this this moment into their hands and deciding yes I'm getting on board and I am going to increase my health whatever that may mean in your personal circumstances if you want to lose weight if you want to work out more whatever it is that you're trying to do there is a hello internet fit a tron 5000 team shirt for exercising in and podcast go along with exercising so maybe you will be wearing the hello internet exercise shirt while listening to the hello internet podcast while feeling the burn awesome 50 episodes ago there's no way you would have just made up something like fit a tron 5000 and then agreed to slap it on a t-shirt within eight seconds if anything has changed about you while doing the podcast it is that you've brought out my wild side breeding that's what happened yeah I'm getting one I want to fit a tron 5000 shit now I hope people do decide to take this moment on board I mean maybe just because I'm I'm feeling like I really have crossed a bit of a of like a milestone where I really can feel different like I know it when I when I first started talking about losing the weight you know I was low energy and I was not feeling really good but from the time that we started getting really serious about this I'm down 10 pounds in total and it's enough that I can really feel like it has actually made a difference and I'm really glad that I have done this and as I expected my energy levels have largely evened out since the beginning so I'm feeling really positive I'm feeling like I am on the other side of this like I went through it like a difficult time and I've lost some weight and I'm feeling really good and if I can lose like six more pounds that will be absolutely amazing if I can get under 200 like that that'll be just unbelievable but so I'm feeling really positive about this and I I genuinely hope that other people listening take this moment to decide that they too want to try to get more healthy like don't don't do the thing that you're tempted to do which is tell yourself oh I'm gonna wait until new years to do that no that's that's the suckers game right is is post-poning this kind of stuff that is not the Frida Tron 5000 way it is not the Frida Tron 5000 way in some ways this is a very hard time to start this thing but you know what it's always going to be a hard time we're going into the holidays whatever it's only hard when it's hard so I'm really I'm really hoping that some people do decide to take this up get an exercise shirt get your butt to the gym join the team great that was our emotional moment for our montage as well yeah we talked about how you know I'm really serious and this has made a difference that's beautiful yeah when we get up to 100 episodes we can have we can have the montage of people looking fit if you'll still be doing a 100 episodes hashtag Frida Tron 5000 just a little warning that this advertisement is aimed more mature audiences but it will be kept family friendly see one of our sponsors today for this 50th episode are our very good friends at audible.com they are the leading supplier of audiobooks and other spoken material you must know all about them by now both grey and i use audible and their service is first class can't recommend it highly enough go to audible.com slash hello internet and when you sign on you can download your first audiobook for free now this is normally the part where myself or cgpo will recommend one of our favorite books but this time I've done something a little bit different in honor of our 50th episode and my collaboration with grey I decided to download the audiobook 50 shades of grey not something I would normally have done now this is a book for grown-ups it is not for our younger listeners and even for adult listeners I'm not entirely sure this would be one I would recommend I'm about eight chapters in so I can't speak to the whole book but here are some reasons I think maybe you should listen to it now number one is the title character is called grey and he's often referred to just as grey now this always brings a smile to my face and in fact sometimes he's even referred to by his initials ct grey the character of grey is bit of a control freak he has an office in a huge glass steel building he runs this thing called grey enterprises holdings it is very fun to listen to if you're a friend or fan of cgp grey I have often found myself laughing out loud picturing him as the main character the second reason is this is a very famous book it's been made into a movie it has sequels it's sold a boatload of copies it's really entered popular culture I think it's good to have sort of a grasp of books like this to know what's in them to know what they're about so you can have an opinion yourself when they come up I think that pretty much ends the reasons you should get this book if you do give it a go please bear in mind I have not recommended this based on its story its content or its writing instead let me recommend another audiobook covering the whole idea of relationships the mathematics of love is by a friend of mine Hannah Frye it's a mathematician's perspective on everyday things like love and marriage relationships dating it's really good fun really smart somehow I think it might be a better fit for the average hallow internet listener and more appropriate for the younger ones it's also read by Hannah herself I think she does a really great job it's always good to hear a book read by its author and Hannah has a really fantastic broadcasting voice you can actually hear a little preview if you go to the audible website before you've even committed to buy or signed up to audible or anything so maybe go check it out that's the mathematics of love Hannah Frye but look whatever you're into whether it's 50 shades of grey or the picture of Dorian grey audible is going to have it they've got a huge range don't forget there's that free audiobook when you sign up go to audible.com slash hallow internet make sure you use the slash hallow internet so they'll know you came from here on the podcast that's extra brownie points for grey and I and our thanks to audible for being part of our 50th episode now I've got to decide if I'm actually going to finish 50 shades of grey I think maybe I might I don't know I don't know so the next topic is the thing we have to talk about that everyone wants us to talk about and even people I've been meeting the last few days have wanted me to talk about to them in person and I just can't be bothered with it I know I know exactly what you mean the the elephant in the room for this episode is YouTube bread that has been the talk of the town in YouTube circles and I feel somewhat the same way that you do of like oh this is you know like it's an important thing it's it's a big deal and I also feel a huge amount of do I have to like do I have to deal with yet another thing I really don't want to have to deal with yet another thing but we know we were asking people you know what do they want us to talk about and by far and away YouTube bread was the number one thing that people wanted us to discuss this episode so we have to at least talk about it a little bit I've been trying to do some information gathering because I know that that you just you really really couldn't at all so I've tried to put together some stuff on it but it's it's a weird conversation it's a weird conversation to have right sans that you've been a little journalist on this one you've been even like making inquiries and talking to humans and all sorts by the sounds of it yeah I have had more conversations with actual humans than I would normally like in any research topic but okay so let's before we get before we talk about the talking to humans part of it let's just let's just back up for a second and pretend like someone listening has no idea what we're talking about right so so like for historical context you know for people listening a hundred years from now who are really interested in the details of what was going on in YouTube at the time YouTube just last week launched this product that they call YouTube bread and the executive summary of it is it is YouTube's subscription service so they want people to pay YouTube $10 a month and in exchange for paying $10 a month there won't be any of the YouTube ads so none of those pre-rolls none of the annoying pop-up ads that appear on videos that's the main thing that they're pushing but it's also bundled with several other features google has some music streaming service that I am entirely unfamiliar with and that also comes with this YouTube bread service they're also allowing background audio to play in apps on phones they're allowing you to download videos for offline use onto your phone say if you're going to get onto an airplane and you want to listen to something while you're in flight something you can do if you are a YouTube red member and then the the last thing is they are allowing some creators to have exclusive behind-a-paywall content as part of YouTube red so that you can have it's I'm not clear if it's just individual videos or channels but there is some some production of things that is going to be behind-a-paywall right incentivize people to stump up some the money exactly the example they keep using is that PewDiePie who is currently the number one youtuber he has made some TV show with the people from the walking dead and this is their their flagship example of if you want to see PewDiePie screaming and zombies and walking dead people like you need to pay YouTube in order to get access to that it feels a bit like it's their Netflix move like they want to have exclusive content and they want you to pay to get access to that content that's a fair summary and obviously some of what I think we're going to talk about is what's happening with money now what does that mean for the creators and I think we'll come to that in a second and can I just ask you for just a second to take off your hat of being a creator and pretend you've never made a YouTube video in your life but you do watch YouTube videos because you do watch some YouTube videos I think you watch more than me um is that an appealing product that's being offered like is that something you're thinking I'm going to sign on to that I like the sound of that like is this does that have appeal to you just as a consumer before we talk about all the other implications and things going on yeah so I actually don't watch a lot of YouTube videos I think I actually tend to watch YouTube a bit like a bit like someone who is unfamiliar with YouTube culture watches YouTube videos as in I find popular videos on places like Reddit and so I will watch those videos but I'm not like I'm not deep into the YouTube culture of watching videos but but nonetheless I might as well say straight up that when YouTube red becomes available in the UK which it currently isn't it's as we're talking it's just available in America I will probably sign up for it and the main reason is I would just like to be able to have videos play on my iPad and on my iPhone immediately I find it really annoying if I click on a link to watch a video or or what happens quickly if someone sends me a video and then it's like oh look at this what do you think about this thing and I just find it really irritating when I click that link and then I get a 30 second unskippable ad like I just like I'm not going to use their music service I don't really care about their exclusive content I don't really care about the offline use the background audio is nice like I'll probably use that but I would pay the $10 a month just to get rid of unskippable pre-roll ads in front of videos so I will probably sign up for this when it is available from the consumer perspective and there's no ad blocker that stop can stop those unskippable pre-rolls as that job anyway so that's why I mentioned on my iPad and on my iPhone like on the computer you can get ad blockers that'll block that stuff but even though Apple has recently introduced ad blocking technology to their platform it doesn't work because the YouTube app is this totally self-contained space where they control everything so you can't run that stuff so if I didn't use my iPad and my iPhone as much as I do this would be a less attractive option but since I do an enormous amount of work on both of those devices getting rid of the inbuilt ads is something that is worth it to me to do just to get rid of that annoyance like I never want to think about this again yeah that is my 100% IME consumer what is in it for me I don't care about anything else perspective okay so there we go what do we go yeah I think I may sign on for for the same reason I think the only thing that appeals to me is the not having to watch ads all the time I don't add blocking software on my computer so I get ads everywhere I'm not judging or anything I just it's probably more laziness and cave madness than anything but so I do spend a lot of my time not watching videos because of an ad like someone everyone's talking about some cool video I'm read or something and I'm like oh we could all have a look at that and then I start it and there's like a 30 second unskippable and I'm like oh and I just go off and do something else and forget that I was going to watch it so so I will get value out of it and I also like I'm just someone who likes having you know I do like having like the nice version of something yeah so if there's two you know if there's a if I could have a MacBook and a MacBook Pro I like having the Pro because I feel like I've got the good version even if I didn't need it that's a bad example because I don't need a MacBook Pro but so I'm I'm a sucker for the upgraded deluxe version of something and if and if it exists for YouTube even though I don't particularly like the name it might come to that later but so I think there's a really good chance I'll get it and that's not that's doesn't that's not test approval or disapproval of of the whole concept because I don't really know where my head's at with that yet but I do I do find ads and annoyance and I realize I contribute to that annoyance as a YouTube maker who has ads on videos but I get I get that it's an annoyance so yeah it's it's definitely it's definitely an annoyance and making them unskippable was the naughty part you know I think I try not to have unskippable ads on my videos because I think I don't like that I make them skippable when I have when I have that fine grand control yeah this is this is where everybody has their own preferences about what counts as annoying and what doesn't count as an annoying yeah yeah anyway there you go okay so before we have this conversation it is the case that both of us will almost certainly get YouTube bread when it comes to the UK yeah I would say 80 percent 70 percent maybe it's very possible I won't like I'm not my position is not firm yet well yeah well you're not knowing much about it is is is a bit of the thing so I went back in time because this whole project the idea of a YouTube subscription service is something that we first talked about on the podcast six months ago when YouTube started sending around notices to the creators that they wanted us to agree to this new terms of service and to sign on to this thing that was coming which was the subscription service and so I will put a link in the show notes to us talking about it six months ago and the reason I bring that up is because there was a little comment when we were trying to go through like the contract that we had at the time and how YouTube back then had a little notice about agree to this now but don't worry we will share more details with the creators closer to launch was the thing that we heard from YouTube six months ago and the meta story from a creators perspective and I think one of the reasons why so many YouTubers are talking about this why there's so many videos and so many articles about YouTube bread is because of this massive uncertainty that promise from six months ago about sharing more details was completely unfulfilled by YouTube this thing was just suddenly launching and YouTube may be good at some things but communicating clearly with the people who create content for its platform is something that they are terrible at they are not good at clearly communicating what is going on and so I think a lot of people found themselves in the situation of basically YouTube says oh tomorrow we're launching a service that might radically change how you make money on this platform and we are going to offer no details on how that will be trust us you'll make more money but just you know if you want any details we have none of them for you that that's a bit of the meta story from the creator perspective of of how this seems to have gone down there's just no real information for the creators do you have a theory about that do you think it's because of the people you have access to don't know or do you think it's like a deliberate obscuring of it or I mean do you have a do you always just something about the the skill of the company do you have a do you can you expand on that or it's just it's just the way it is I don't know why I don't know why this is the case here's the thing like all I really want from YouTube is some official link that I can go to that's like a policy page that explains to people who create things what is happening in the system and that seems to exist nowhere and and for lots of things with YouTube about like what is allowed and what is not allowed it's very hard to ever pin down an answer to some of these things and let's just say broadly speaking I I have spoken to several people at several different levels inside YouTube trying to get answers about this and the feeling that I have come away with is that one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing inside YouTube and it's not just me that has been doing this so again some some of the like slightly behind the scene stuff is almost every large creator that I know and if you go search for videos on on YouTube where creators are talking about YouTube bread almost every creator has done the same thing where they're trying to reach out to whoever they happen to know inside YouTube to get answers to their questions and everybody knows different people on YouTube and then they're coming back with totally different answers about how this system is going to work behind the scenes and then this just contributes to this crazy rumor mill where everybody feels like who knows what's going on so it's like Tim's secret guy on the inside of YouTube has said this thing and Tameeta's super secret guy on the inside of YouTube has said this other thing and you just don't know what to go with and so like I guess I've spoken to several people inside of YouTube who have told me mutually contradictory things or like it's just it creates this whole feeling of untrustedness like surely inside YouTube somewhere there is a document that says how this is going to work or maybe they just haven't really decided yet and they're just throwing stuff out and seeing how people react I don't know what it is but I just get this feeling like YouTube is this big thing and there are parts of it that are not in communication with other parts of it internally that's my impression of what's going on. All right so what is going on? Before I say anything I'm going to say this really clear listeners because I always see when I try to explain something like the opinion gets distorted when people are talking about it later on so I want to say this really clearly I expect that under the new system almost certainly almost every single creator will make more money with YouTube bread than without it. YouTube would have to really really screw the pooch on this one to make it not work and one of the reasons is if you can convince even a very very small subset of your users to directly give you money which is what YouTube bread is trying to do they literally count like a thousand times worth people watching ads. So yeah you I think people always imagine like what is the success of this service in terms of how many people sign up like what percentage of the of the audience do they get as like you cannot imagine what a minuscule percentage they need to get in order to make this financially successful. Yeah when someone sort of emails us or something else says to us hey guys you know do you want me to watch your ads all the way through on YouTube videos because does that help you more? I don't I mean I usually don't reply but if I was going to reply I'd say do what you want because that north point not not not not one of a cent is you know that's that's your contribution. Your greatest contribution is just your attention I'm watching the video don't think that you're making a huge financial contribution just by watching you're only make a big financial contribution if you you know give on Patreon or buy a t-shirt or something that that's when it actually starts to yeah it difference to my pocket yeah that's exactly right and again some of the YouTube specifics are we're not exactly allowed to talk to them but I will reference something that is in the public domain which is John Green made a video talking about YouTube bread and he he mentioned a number in there which I'll just talk about which is saying that one person giving you a dollar directly according to John I'm not saying anything is worth a thousand to two thousand people watching your video I'm like that's just I'm just I'm just commenting on a number of the John that's that's all I'm doing here but so still creators want to know how is this how is this going to be working out now I've done a thing where I have spoken to a few people who are not in the industry but are familiar with the existence of something called YouTube bread and I asked them how do they imagine this works like what is the impression that you have gotten from YouTube bread and interestingly everyone has the same response so they're thinking oh okay if I sign up for YouTube bread I get these features and then some of my money about half of the money is going to be split up among the YouTube channels that I watch yeah so most people are imagining that this is not only just for these features but it's it's like many of the fundraising things that exist it is also a way to support the channels that you watch and I just think it's interesting that this is the impression that outsiders seem to have and this is one of the things I was trying very hard to get confirmed and I would say I have satisfactorily confirmed is that this is not really how YouTube at this moment is planning to distribute the money so if you sign up for YouTube bread yeah YouTube says you know they're going to keep half of the money and half of the money is going to go to creators but it is not going to go to just the creators that you watch so if I sign on and all I do is watch CGP Grey and Smarter Every Day it's not like CGP Grey is going to get five bucks and Destin's going to get five bucks and that's the way it is like that's not how it's split it's not like your views go to pay people you like right that's not how it's going to work the way YouTube is running it is they're running it as one gigantic pool of money so they're taking half of the red subscription money and putting it into a gigantic pile somewhere right the norm is pile of money and then what they're doing is they're taking all of the videos across the whole of YouTube and saying you dear creator what percentage of the total watch time of all videos on YouTube were your videos and so of course obviously that's a very small percentage of it but it's a very giant pile of money if this works out well and so everybody gets a percentage of the total pile relative to the percentage of watch time that their videos were compared of all across all of YouTube yeah that is the way that this money is going to be distributed as best I can tell from the various people that I have spoken to inside of YouTube are there different pools though for example like it's Taylor Swift just gonna get all the money or are they making separate like genres almost or categories like does or is it is everyone competing on the same the same footing in our episode many months ago we made a comment about how there was some language in their contract about dividing people up into different slices and different pools yeah so far I have heard nothing about that that it's just one gigantic pool now Taylor Swift is an interesting example because I still think that the music stuff is in is the only thing that's in a different category but I am not sure and I don't know the answer to that given that YouTube is also combining this with or Google is also combining this with their music service this is just one of the very many things that is unclear because if they are doing it by watch time and they are including music in that pile it's like well all of the money essentially will be going to musicians because in terms of of watch time like the listener numbers on those music videos are just crazy high they're absolutely just crazy high but I that I don't know the answer to I don't know how that's gonna work out the thing with watch time that's also interesting and it's it's where I know some doubt has come into things has been people thinking how does this benefit me due to the length of my videos you know someone who does very short very short videos obviously he's only going to get you know a minute or two of attention and someone who has a long rambling video that goes for eight hours of them playing through a video game is going to have more of the watch time is that going to give them a huge financial advantage and maybe it should give them a financial advantage if it does I don't know but there is a feeling that just making short high quality content get penalized versus people who just keep you watching for a long time yeah that mean this is this is why all the YouTube creators care a lot about the algorithms because the way they decide it affects the way the income distribution goes but but even still like like let's take my channel as an example right very short videos very infrequently uploaded that are contributing almost certainly to a a tiny tiny portion of the total watch time on YouTube compared to other stuff yeah so I'm probably on the losing end of this but I'm losing on the I should say I'm on the losing end of this in quotation marks because I still expect that because of how poorly YouTube ads pay versus someone giving YouTube money directly even someone that the algorithm does not favor I expect will still work out earning more in the end with YouTube red than without it like that's that's my prediction right now like I am someone that this system is not very well optimized for but I still think I'll probably be better off after then before that's just my guess just given the relative numbers of for ad money it's fast like you've drank the cold light grey I'm trying to think about how to phrase phrase the next thing right so despite saying that despite saying that I expected I'll probably make more money after than before the thing that I find baffling about this whole process is like we discussed on that episode six months ago it's the whole thing doesn't feel like a system that I want to encourage that that I would like YouTube has not set up a business venture here that I would feel like boy I would love to with the end of my video tell my subscribers you should sign up for YouTube red I will never do that under the the circumstances as they are today because I think you can only ask your audience for a limited number of things like you can't at the end of every single video ask your subscribers to do a bunch of things you have to pick a small number of things to mention infrequently I think if you really want to have maximum impact yeah and so my feeling is okay at the end of my videos most of the time I mentioned something and I have a few things that I rotate it's like okay sometimes I mention my email list sometimes there is an ad at the end of my video that I've put there sometimes it's a link to go do something else or sometimes it's merchandise like there's a rotation of things that I think are worth mentioning at the end of my videos YouTube red will never make that rotation and I just feel like YouTube is missing out on something like they should design a system such that I feel that yes I should recommend to subscribers to use it and I think the way people think YouTube red works is a situation under which channels would tell their users to subscribe to YouTube red and so you can imagine say a channel that is smaller that has a dedicated following of subscribers if YouTube divided the money up among just the channels that you watched smaller channels with dedicated followers would have an incentive to recommend YouTube red but under the current system they don't they don't have an incentive to recommend it and I just feel like it's a strange way that YouTube has set this up like you are a platform that depends on this enormous community of content creators to constantly make something and there's a way in which you can build this business system so that people would recommend it but you chose this option that makes it very hard for anyone to recommend it to their own viewers isn't that what you would want YouTube but there's never a situation under which if I had the decision to like okay what am I going to mention at the end of this video am I going to mention patreon or am I going to tell people to sign up for YouTube red I'm never going to pick YouTube red under that scenario because if someone gives me a dollar on patreon it's a it's a thousand times better than getting one one millionth of a percentage of the total watch time of my videos on all of YouTube from their YouTube red subscription I mean that may also be the case if they did do the other model if if people signed on were directly paying you may still be better off on them giving money on patreon but it just feels closer you feel more attached to it if you feel there's like a kind of a user pays model and there's a there's a direct link between the people who've signed on and you if YouTube had a built-in system like that if they could make it right there on the page like there there may be a case under which getting people to sign up for YouTube red under this alternate model would actually be better because they're already there like they're on the YouTube page like maybe Google already knows their account details like they could make it super easy to sign up whereas anytime you send someone to a different thing like go over to patreon and now there's this whole other system and now you need to make an account over there you always lose a surprising number of people when you ask people to go somewhere else so I can imagine that even even if the ratios were different like that the YouTube red option under this alternate model might still work out better but so I guess like that's my fundamental feeling of this is is I just I like business arrangements where it feels like everybody wants to be a part of it and wants to recommend it and this YouTube red thing is a story of having been bullied by YouTube over the past six months to agree to this contract that we had no other choice but to agree to and like getting emails from YouTube about why haven't you signed this contract and like constant pop up notifications on our channels about sign the new contract you have to sign the new contract and so just this feeling of like getting bullied into this thing and that now that it's here that I would never recommend to my subscribers to do out of my own self interest is like if you want those features like go sign up for it I'm probably going to get it but it's just I don't know I just like I feel like I want a business I want a business arrangement with YouTube where I feel like we are both benefiting from helping each other well great I mean in a way what you've said is kind of redundant at first because you will always benefit more from someone doing something directly for you like your Patreon or your t-shirts or going and joining your email list there is never ever going to be there's no model possible that is like YouTube bread where you would prefer that over people going and just giving all their money direct to you so I think I think in a way it's asking too much for YouTube to create a model that is so good that I'm going to recommend it over all my other ways of making income that I think that's unrealistic but what you say that I do think is true is the feeling that we were a little bit railroaded into it and even if it does end up being far and good I do think it's left bit ever bit a taste in our mouths that we were kind of that we were given no choice and a wise man said to me and that wise man was you is that when only one party in a contract once the contract to be signed that usually means it's not a good contract yeah I think a better test for whether or not this is really good or not wouldn't be so much will I recommend it to my viewers it would have been do I want to be in the program they should have made a program called YouTube bread that was voluntary and I should have been knocking banging down their door saying oh gosh I hope I get lit in I hope I get to be on the YouTube red list yeah because because it's so obviously beneficial but they didn't do that they made a suspicious by saying we can't explain what this is trust me it's for your own good sign here yeah and that has created doubt and you make me think maybe it's created doubt wrongly but that's that's where I think the problem has been in the birth process and not that any of this matters to the viewers but that's where the problem has been for us yeah but people listen to this podcast to get up to the deep behind the scenes and news about the YouTube I don't know I'm not saying I'm not saying we shouldn't listen to it I'm just saying there aren't there aren't two billion people in the world really worrying about whether or not you know their particular creators are going to get a fair cut of the pie yeah but it's definitely that feeling of of railroadedness of no one likes to be forced into a thing and I think the reason why people don't like that feeling is yes even if YouTube red works out better for creators which I suspect that it might the fact that they can railroad you into the thing and that they have railroaded you into the thing it's just a reminder that they can do this at any time with anything else yeah yeah and I mean I got I got an email from someone at YouTube that they were talking about how like you have to sign this thing otherwise we're going to take all your videos down like they're going to be private and nobody can see them and it was like a total mafia shakedown email like it was literally like it would be a real shame if everything you've worked for on YouTube went away because you didn't sign this contract and like oh come on like really like this is really the email that you're sending me you got to be kidding me it feels a little bit like the mob is visiting my corner deli that I own making sandwiches for the neighborhood and they're like it'd be a real shame if this place burned down wouldn't it like yeah it would be yeah I mean it's really going to affect your livelihood if your place burns down so maybe you should give me all that money yeah yeah no you're right it was it was not I mean I don't I don't know I mean like I guess I guess they just got frustrated because no one was signing and they had decided I'm absolutely sure that the emails that we got from various people and that I've heard lots of people being contacted was entirely because everyone I know was playing this game of chicken with the agree button of yeah nobody was clicking it I'm sure their agreement rate was less than 1% for the previous six months and then only in the couple days right up before it did anybody actually click agree I think I'd almost every single sign up at the absolute last possible moment I mean I'm assuming have you clicked the button you must have I actually didn't have a button I had to I had to print out and scan this tremendously large document which was a bit of a bit of an ordeal but I have I have signed the agreement I had to although I would that would my videos wouldn't be watchable in America anymore right be a real shame Brady I mean what I mean what if they said you know we're changing all your videos to black and white and putting a heavy metal track under the moon now and if you don't want us to do that that's fine but they'll all go to private and won't be visible in America right they could do that tomorrow as well yeah yeah over a barrel but we always have been that's why nobody likes to be reminded of of that scenario yeah and so I just think it's like YouTube is the biggest player in town they can obviously do this but it like hey YouTube if you wonder why sometimes very many of your large creators are very vocal in their criticism of the whole system it's like stuff like this is why right this is just the way the way that this is is handled in a very forceful manner is that inevitable gray like you know how almost everyone hates their boss in a way you know is it inevitable to do does every creator and hate the platform they're on you know we listen to podcasts that are made by app developers and they're always winging about how Apple what the latest thing happens to me app store and I mean is it just human nature that every creator hates the platform they're on people who have got massive Twitter following hate the new thing that Twitter's doing and are we just all a bunch of winters I mean do human beings like to complain yes I think human beings do like to complain that's for sure the only other thing that I just wanted to to touch on which was the main thing that I wanted to get confirmed is I think there's there's this weird fundamental conflict in the YouTube red business and the creators business and this has to do with embedded ads in the videos yeah so like you do with the end of your videos you say oh you know thanks to audible or for square space or whoever it is Harry's you know at the end of a video for sponsoring the video I've done this in in two videos in possibly not the next video but the video after that I'm planning to have a sponsor in that video like this is a thing that creators do to a greater or lesser extent yep and we were wondering a while back like well what does YouTube red mean for this because if users are being sold pay ten dollars a month and you won't see any ads but creators are putting ads in their videos like essentially burning them in making right can't get rid of yeah like what like what is YouTube's position on this and the thing that made me particularly curious about this is one of the very many reasons I haven't put ads in my videos for the the large part is this has been against the letter of the law for YouTube for forever that this is not allowed according to their official terms of service like I had the my lawyer look over the contract like and I had some people confirm inside YouTube like no this is against the rules but so many creators do this that the impression that I have gotten over the past couple years is that YouTube's real policy is we don't agree to this but we are turning a blind eye to this yeah it's more honored in the breach than the observance but yeah but yeah because YouTube is aware like oh well our own ads don't pay very well and the inbuilt sponsors pay much better and okay fine like we're just gonna we're gonna turn a blind eye to this and we're just gonna let it slide even though it's against the letter of the law but so I was wondering like okay well what is what is the what's gonna happen with YouTube red like isn't this a conflict with the with an ad for YouTube yeah and again as best I can tell YouTube has had an official policy change saying that burned in ads are okay as long as they follow a couple of guidelines and the main guidelines there are it can be no more than 30 seconds at the end of the video and it has to be a static image so that it can't be like the person talking to camera you can't be doing something but it can't look like part of the video and it also can't look like a post roll ad so this is now the letter of the law according to YouTube is that they are sanctioning these things in a limited manner which should also limit their value I'd imagine you know with those conditions wouldn't you know half the appeal of them is that they are they have the authenticity of being spoken by the people in the video and you know looking out at you and stuff but yeah I mean you can still talk over the static image yeah of course yeah yeah they don't require it to be dead silence no no no just a picture of audible yeah no comment yeah just the 30 seconds of silence yeah I have seen I have seen creators do very interesting things with the ads at the end and I like I found out like one of the things that I did on my videos according to the letter of the law is not allowed which is that I had the ad at the end but then there was like a five second thing for people who stuck through the ad like as a little reward yeah and they're like no no no that's not that's not allowed it has to be the last 30 seconds yeah you know you can't have anything else and so all I can think of is like okay well once again I doubt how much YouTube is actually going to stick to this right like okay this is their policy like we'll see if they actually decide to crack down on it but I just think this is this is a bizarre thing like if your headlining feature is no ads on YouTube I think your average user is going to be confused by that like like I'm paying money to not see ads and there are ads in the video still like I'm not sure how much people care about the difference between a pre-roll ad or a post-roll ad and an ad that's burned into the video if they're also the kind of person who is paying to remove ads like I'm just I'm going to be very curious to see how this goes yeah we'll bring it to a head yeah YouTube is in a very difficult position here precisely because those ads pay way more than the YouTube advertising does I mean some some creators are dependent on them I would imagine oh yeah definitely definitely some creators are dependent on them and I imagine even even under the most optimistic of scenarios of YouTube red I don't think they'll be able to match those inbuilt ads so YouTube is just in a really difficult position here and I think it is really interesting that that as far as I can tell they have officially sanctioned this and I'm just very curious to see a couple months from now like how does this how does this shake out my only ask risk on this is again it's always like I would love somewhere to see an official document somewhere in YouTube like saying this is the policy and this is the thing instead of just having to talk to people but you know you never get that with YouTube you never get that the proof of the putting just can be in the tasting isn't it just people are going to look at their figures in a few months time not this first month because of that whole other debacle to do with the free trial but but after after all the dust has settled if people are earning more money I guess they'll shut up yeah and if and if they aren't they'll scream bloody murder so I'm going to be depending on you to tell me how it's worked yeah because I'm not very good at following that kind of thing yeah I mean we can just mention it in passing that YouTube seems to be pulling the same thing that Apple tried to with their music service of everybody gets a free trial and then the creators going hey wait a minute what like what happens to our ad revenue during this time I think it's no small part because the ad revenue is the highest in this quarter so people wonder like what like what's going to happen there's a feeling that you have had Brady that I have I've definitely come to agree with over time that I didn't use to agree with and I feel like this YouTube red thing and all of these details about like you know getting paid during the free trial and like what's happening here and I just I just have this feeling in my mind of like I just hate all this business shit I just you you've said a while ago like you just want to make videos and I feel really the same way that over the past few months I've just been aware I like more and more of my time has been sucked up in in like business related stuff and talking about ad rates and and I just like I find it just I've just found it exhausting after a certain point and when you talk to other creators it's very very natural that stuff turns toward business like we we've even done it that we start talking business like if we're just hanging out and I have I have thought sometimes have you ever seen mean girls Brady I have not I know you like it it's a classic it's a classic Brady I should watch it you should watch it we should have a slumber party and watch mean girls oh that'd be awesome maybe we'll do that with me count the votes maybe we will maybe we will but there's um there's a very minor scene in mean girls that I have thought of a few times when I'm talking business with other creators and the main character hates the the nemesis girl in this movie but she catches herself always talking about the nemesis to everybody and there's a scene where she's talking to somebody else about the nemesis but her internal monologue is she saying to herself why do I keep talking about this I am boring myself talking about this I don't want to talk about this but I can't stop myself from talking about this and I have felt that way a little bit with just some of this business stuff over the past few months is like man I just want to focus on videos like I don't want to have to worry about all of this stuff but as the industry gets bigger and bigger it just it naturally becomes more and more a part of it and I used to think like people who would hire social media managers to like deal with all of the backend stuff for the business I always used to feel like oh that's ridiculous like it's just so easy to deal with YouTube directly and just manage this stuff yourself and I feel more and more like I can totally understand that of just wanting to try to firewall you off from all of the behind the scene gears of the business and just focus much more on the on the creative end now I totally agree I totally agree it's one of the nice things about doing a podcast in some ways although I mean I'm at the moment obviously we're talking about business but one of the nice things about doing a podcast is for like for two hours or so all you doing is like making a thing like yeah it's two hours and like it's even better than like editing or animating or organizing or maintaining a website it's it's like quite an intense period of just like hand-to-mouth making like the only time I get anything like it is when I'm filming someone or videoing because like that's almost all got a one-to-one relationship between what you're doing and what ends up as output but even that has like a higher threshold a higher amount of stuff that gets thrown away and editing is obviously really labor intensive and animating for you is really labor intensive but the podcast has got a really good ratio of the amount of time I spend doing it to the amount of content that gets created at the other end it feels like a really like rewarding use of time oh yeah yeah I completely I completely agree and I have that same feeling that when we are making the podcast together like I am very focused on this thing like I'm very focused on the conversation that we're having and what we're talking about and on the screen you know I just have the show notes and a reminder that we're alive and I watch the wave forms come across and it feels like oh we're making this thing that people are going to listen to and we're focused on it now and this is this is nice like there's a big audience of people who enjoys it and it's relatively it's relatively simple business-wise compared to something like YouTube you know the back end stuff of it like it's very rewarding it's very rewarding this 50th episode of Hello Internet is also brought to you by our friends at igloo igloo is the internet you will actually like they allow you to share news organize your files coordinate calendars and manage projects all in one place and igloo's latest upgrade Viking revolves around documents and how you interact with them gather feedback and make changes they've even added the ability to track who has read critical information to keep everyone on the same page is like read receipts in your email but much much less annoying when you're working with a group of people you want to be able to know who has read what who has seen what who has ticked what boxes and igloo helps you do that you have a legal agreement you want everyone to sign you want to know that everybody has actually signed it that's not the kind of thing that you can just let some people slide on now most intranets are awful I have used many awful intranets at the schools that I have worked at but igloo is like a breath of fresh air it just looks so much nicer than those horrible legacy internet systems that look like they're built on windows 95 because many of them still are so if you want to give igloo a try sign up for a free trial at igloo software.com slash hello this lets igloo know that you came from our show that's igloo software.com slash hello to have an internet you'll actually like because it's our 50th episode we invited people to send us questions yeah let's let's so to to end our 50th podcast we're going to answer and talk about a few things that you the listeners Tim and Tim etts what do you say Tim itinas I think it's a Tim Amita I don't know what I said I had I actually had a a listener email this week I think offering to increase their patreon pledge to our show if we would replace Tim is a generic viewer name with their name that's not for sale that's not for sale I don't know there were no figures there were no figures thrown in and I can't remember what the person's name was but I thought that was I thought that was one of the best product placement ideas I've ever seen yeah so we'd be talking we'd be talking about like oh Nike wrote in to tell us about whatever is that what you're trying to ignore yeah we hope we hope you're enjoying the show forward focus look we're back at business again ready we're right back at business that's what I was sorry yeah you're right sorry but I just though I did think that was quite ingenious and it was it was sent in amongst all the emails questions so I thought what you were going to mention is my my favorite Tim related comment that I've seen so far which is that Tim should be the collective noun for a group of Hello Internet listeners yeah a group of Tim right right a Tim is a collection of Hello Internet listeners I like that yeah that's not bad that's not bad oh yeah and that was like yeah like like how you have like node fighters and all you different armies as was like the Tim's right yeah so it's not for sale it's not for sale but make an offer but Brady still has a price so I think probably the most common question that we've been asked by a mile was how did we meet yeah do you remember how we met Brady I remember the very first time we met I remember where you were sitting I don't remember what you were wearing uh-huh but I remember I remember the first time I laid eyes on you see this is this is so romantic I don't remember anything about this so what was you're gonna have to tell me the story do you not remember I know I I know the broad strokes of the story of how we first met but I have no recollection for the specific moment so I am just as curious as the Tim's are to find out the answer to this question all right this one's for you Tim's the well there was a conference in Heldham Waterloo in Canada was organized by Henry of Minute Physics fam and he invited various educational YouTubers and so you were invited and I was invited along with numerous other people and I remember I arrived at the hotel we were staying at the day before and I didn't know anyone I'd never even met Henry I don't eat emailed with Henry I knew no one I'd come over from the UK and I told Henry that I'd arrived and he said I come and come and meet in my hotel room I'm here with I'm here with Dirk a Verastableam although I think he pronounced it as Derek from Veritasium at the time but he said I'm with him and I'm with CGP Grey so I went to the hotel room and I knocked on the door and the door opened and there was Henry and there was Derek and from memory I think I sat on the bed maybe or on a chair next to the bed with Derek and he was like showing me some camera he had and I was meeting everyone for the first time and you were sitting in the corner well yeah okay yeah I remember this now now that you bring it up I remember this I don't know if I knew because I'm not someone who like researchers who everyone what so I didn't know who was big and important and who wasn't and who but I do remember I don't think I knew who you were like I don't think I knew oh that's that's the guy whatever because I wasn't like I'll watch trivia videos but I do remember there were a lot of people at the conference like it's quite reasonable to not know who the vast majority of the people were I'll tell you a funny story about John Green at that conference later if I remember because there's a brilliant example of that but but but then I remember you spoke and at one point I connected your voice with the UK video because I was very familiar with the UK video which is not a big famous you're a big famous first breakthrough video and because my brother and I really liked that and sent it to me and I do remember at one point saying oh man yeah I do know you're and I remember commenting where your voice is just like it is in the videos because a lot of other people aren't necessarily like that yeah but I do remember I do remember at one point saying now I know who you are because I recognize your voice from the UK video that's my only memory of that first meeting and then obviously you know we hung out at that conference loads and loads yeah but is that what's your memory of that well the thing that I'm reminded of is yes I now remember that hotel room because that was when I first met Henry and Derek Iveritasium but the main memory I have of that moment was of going into that room and strategically realizing that I needed to secure the chair as fast as possible right that there was one chair in the room and there was a bed and it was a bit of like oh it's just a hotel room where people are going to meet and I have gotten much better than I used to be but like I'm never good at meeting people even at my best and I was worse headed than than I am now and so I just remember like I walked into that room and it was like okay I need to get the chair and I need to get the corner of the room so that my back is to the wall so that I can like I can see everybody coming in and I also have I don't have to deal with any of the awkwardness of standing or like moving around or shuffling it's like no I'm going to anchor myself to the corner and I'm going to be able to see everybody and this is how I will deal with a parade of new people that is my primary memory of that you gave the impression of having of being that guy I am I am not surprised at all that conference was for for me as it was for you where I met many of the people that I now know on YouTube and would count as friends and associates it was a great conference that Henry put together and the backstory for me on on that which Henry knows very well is that I was having a really hard time securing whether or not I was going to be able to go to that conference because that was actually happening a month before my contract was up as a teacher and I had quit my job but going to this thing or sorry not a month before it was two weeks before because that's right the conference was just a few days but I you know I had quit my job long ago the way it works in teaching is that you have to resign months and months and months before you actually leave so my resignation letter had been in for forever but my boss at the time just refused to have me be able to to take some time off and go to this thing like it was a really really big deal and it came down to this big fight about like I was going to have to break my contract as a teacher to go because they're like oh you can't just go to this thing there's no legitimate reason for you to go and it was a really stressful time in my life and I was trying to make this decision like man if I like if I break my contract and go and go to this conference and then this YouTube career doesn't pan out it is going to be really hard to go back into the teaching world when the last job is like oh yeah he just left irresponsibly at the end and he's a teacher with a broken contract that all eventually got resolved but it was just it was one of these things where I had to make a very difficult decision to go to that conference and I look back on that as that was definitely one of the best decisions that I made was like damn the torpedoes and damn all the problems that are happening around this this conference represented the future career that I wanted and if it meant screwing around with the past career that I had like that was a that was the correct decision to make even though it was very hard to do that at the time it was a chance to make Brady Heron for you and look what that led to but that this is exactly what I mean I guess that is no joke because of that conference we have this podcast I think it would be much less likely we would be doing this podcast now if I hadn't met up then definitely not before I talk about because we were also asked about how the podcast started but before we sort of fast forward to that in our friendship my favorite story from that college yeah yeah when it comes to who knew who I didn't know anyone I don't know who I didn't know who's a big deal and who's not I wasn't into like much green brother stuff at that point although they were like massive but I had figured out who John Green was and John Green was already a really big deal then not as big as he is now because of all the movies and stuff like that so I mean you know he's like a big mega star now but he was like a really big deal already then in YouTube land and my favorite thing was I was I was at reception and John Green walked in and just sort of loyalty and reception and no one there knew who he was and I walked up to him and said I hi I am Brady and I think he made of known you know I hi Brady and he probably had looked up who I was and knew that I made chemistry videos and stuff and he was like how I am we're having a little chat and then some other people at the conference came up to us and for whatever reason they were very familiar with me and whom I work and my work and had no idea who John was and I know that's really uncommon but that was just what happened and they were like and they were like oh Brady it's so great to meet you and they were like oh I'm even like a little bit star struck I've been watching your stuff for so long and it's really nice to meet you and I'm like that's you know thank you it's really nice and then they they turned to John and like just put their hand out and said you know hi I'm Sandy who are you and he was like John I'm John Green and I'm like oh it's nice to meet you and then which I find really funny because you know John's such a big deal and but the best bit was then we all got on the bus and I was like we were sitting we're all sitting together and these people who still hadn't didn't didn't know who he was we were all talking about what we were doing next and a whole bunch of people were going from this conference onto VidCon which was being held like the next week in California oh yeah and they love that they turned they'd sort of turned they were asking they said to me are you going to VidCon after this and I'm like yeah yeah I am and then they turned to John and said are you going to VidCon and that that must have put John in the most awkward position yes because and he sort of I don't think he knew how to answer it and he said he just sort of he was a total gentleman but I just think he kind of froze about what to say so he just kind of went yeah yeah I am actually I own VidCon right and and I gave him such a hard time about that and for the rest of the conference I was always hi I'm John Green yes I own VidCon like the minute it came out of his mouth he was like oh no that just did not come out how was supposed to come out right like I gave him a resin the rest the rest of the conference about that but that's your specialty reading yeah yeah so anyway that was that was funny no one knowing who anyone else was and anyway so that was kind of I don't think I was humble bragging then I'm trying to figure out if I was bragging humbling you were just telling a story that's all you were doing you were just telling your story all right there's no there's no humble bragging this in it or anything it's just it was just a story that's all so anyway to for people who asked how the podcast started which we have discussed before but we sort of but we would we didn't become bosom friends as a result of that but we started seeing each other at various conferences and also because you and I are the two guys who lived in the UK right we would occasionally see each other in London if I if I was coming to London for the day I would like sometimes contact you and we'd just go for a drink or something and yeah very occasionally though because I think we originally saw each other more in San Francisco there were two YouTube education conferences that happened in the subsequent years and that's where I mean like I feel like if we hadn't met at that first conference we wouldn't have been as friendly at those subsequent conferences and I think that like that helped things along like oh I know this person from this other thing and you feel closer than you would have if you were just meeting them for the first time yeah it was a bit like the people that went to the water thing were almost like a little subset of that that that extra history wasn't it yes exactly that's exactly right you have a bit of an extra history and yeah so then we met occasionally in London but not very not very frequently no so what's your perspective on how the podcast started well I didn't I know our podcast is but I was not a podcast listener and and I didn't know that you particularly into podcast because it was not something we would ever talk about so I didn't and I didn't know you were actually a bit of a podcast fan and a big devourer podcast it's just not something I knew about you but I was making a video for number file at one point and it was all about the different perspectives that Americans have on numbers and sort of the way numbers are said and the way we deal with numbers in every day life and I'd interviewed an American woman about it but I felt like the video wasn't quite strong enough and I wanted to sort of juice the video up a bit and I knew that you I think I had talked about this sort of thing with you before and I knew it was a sort of topic that would be of interest to you so I asked you if I could do a little interview with you and you I had interviewed you before for other videos sort of you know with your face obscured and stuff yeah just as you know as sort of meta type things that YouTube is do together so I said to you could I interview you just over you know over Skype or on the phone or something or I'll come to you in London and I won't show your face or anything and just talk to me about it and then I'd have you animated so they'd be like an animated gray so you would be like the second interviewer you on the topic and I thought this was going to be quite a hard sell because you know you're always pretty cautious and reluctant to do new things and you were like really up for it like straight away you were like yeah I'll totally do it and I was like I think I was I was probably saying you want me to come to London for it or something and you were like no no I'm going to record it at this end and I'm going to record it on my computer while we do the Skype call and you were like really proactive with all the ideas of how you do it and like you were unusually agreeable for you and I was suspicious in retrospect no well I wasn't yeah I wasn't suspicious but I was surprised so like you know I phoned you up on Skype and I asked you the questions I wanted to ask you and you chatted about them in your usual way and it made for a really nice video I think the video is actually made may have got to a million views now so you know it made it made for a really nice watchable video you know mainly mainly thanks to you and and you did that and then I don't remember how you approached me after that you didn't you didn't mention a podcast at the time then at all but subsequent to that at some point you you brought up the idea of doing a podcast and I sort of said to you I'm always up for doing anything new and you know I enjoy doing things with you so I was I'm sure I was agreeable from the start but I did say I don't listen to podcasts very much so you gave me a couple of podcasts to listen to you gave me probably a list of five or six but I do remember there were two you said in particular I should listen to and the thing that's funny about that is the two you suggested I listen to I remember were the accidental tech podcast with you know Marco Amit and John C. Rekusa and Casey Liss which is just guys talking about technology and the talk show with John Gruber which is again it's another Apple-y one this reflects that you're quite into Apple-y stuff you suggested listening to that as well and I listened to a few episodes of those and and I and I quite like them and the reason I find that's quite funny is that now at our 50th episode the last two days I actually spent visiting both Marco Amit from ATP and John Gruber from the talk show so it's kind of like really fitting that just as we're doing our 50th I've actually spent some time like in person with with two of those people that I listened to around the start to kind of get an idea of what a podcast is and how it can work and and things like that so I listen to a few of them and we talked more and rest his histories and I just pulled up because I wanted to check the dates I pulled up the video that we did and the video that you have renamed now British numbers confuse Americans a number file it's at one and a half million views all right and that was July 25th 2013 right and then the first episode of Hello Internet went up on January 31st 2014 so about half a year later roughly speaking right and and yes as as as listeners may have picked up in in that story I had always been thinking of a podcast as something that I might want to do even before my YouTube career started like I always listen to a lot of audio my whole life and I thought oh maybe a podcast is something that I could do but it's a thing that you just can't do it alone like it it the kind of thing that I thought maybe I could do it requires someone else to work with it like it's a team effort it can't be a solo thing and so what I'd always been in the back of my mind and yes in in the beginning of 2013 when I had been doing YouTube for a little while I was much more seriously thinking about okay I do need another side project here I want to have something else to work on in the afternoons when I'm not very productive at YouTube work and so I was getting more serious about the podcast and I was trying to think about who who would make a good host and essentially that was a list of one person which was you I don't know why but it just seemed very natural to me that you would be the person that I would try to do this with even though I couldn't clearly think of any reasons except for you are a very good interviewer and I am not very good at talking so it seemed like if I'm going to work with someone I have to have someone who can help the conversation go along and the listeners don't know but like I have to edit myself to make myself sound way less awkward when the show goes up versus when we record it I have to give you a lot of credit Brady like you do a lot of heavy lifting of of keeping the show going and I really do appreciate that well that is very kind of you but it's also a gross exaggeration and I will say hope that great doesn't edit out that he doesn't edit himself out in that way and he actually does what you hear in the final show is quite a quite accurate depiction of our conversations I make I make it much less awkward the thing you are better is asking me questions yeah but you're getting better at that too it's awful it's I really do I we've talked about it in private I try so hard to get better at this but I am just so bad at it I just this has never been a skill of mine but yeah so that's why when when you asked about the me doing this video I saw it as the perfect opportunity to test a podcast with the exact person that I thought a podcast would work great for and so that that's why I was like oh yeah let's do this no no I don't want to do it in person I explicitly don't want to do it in person we're going to do it over Skype and then over the next few months yeah we started talking more seriously about doing it and recording the few episodes in in advance and then whatever was half a year later it finally went up live and so that's that's the full story of how of how this show came to be I think a more important question that we've been asked by a few people is would you rather fight 100 Jamaican rice rat sized reunion swamp hens or one reunion swamp sized Jamaican rice rat the thing is more than one person asked that question yeah and some people got it wrong so some people were like would you rather fight 100 reunion swamp hens sized Jamaican rice rats or one Jamaican rice rat sized reunion swamp hens I mean that's a no brainer obviously but what are your thoughts on that 100 100 rice rat sized swamp hens or one swamp hens sized rice rat maybe one one rice hen I'd fight one rice hen is what I would do yeah this is not this is not flag to you oh yeah I'm getting these mixed up is like I swear as soon as you finish that sentence I forgot which way around it went and when you said oh some people got wrong the other way I was like how was that different from the first one I I think these creatures must be roughly the same size I mean we're not talking about a horse sized duck or a duck size horse here no it's not that extreme but they're not that similar size I mean a rat a swamp hen is a is a big bird I mean but how big big like a turkey or big like a duck big like a turkey it's like a turkey yeah like big bigger than a turkey I'd say small but smaller than what you would call an e-moo and I would call an e-moo e-moo e-moo don't start don't start me on your pronunciation of e-moo it's an e-moo not an e-moo okay so the question is it's a rat the size of a turkey or a hundred turkeys the size of a rat not yeah yeah a turkey's relatively big I think a rat a rat the size of a turkey sounds a little intimidating yeah it does doesn't it a bunch of turkeys the size of a rat but they could they got those bakes they got bakes and there's a hundred of them yeah I think this is not an easy question I think it's I think it's I think it's it's maybe worthy of further consideration I don't think it's a sort of question you can you can just rush into it's like voting and the hallow internet flag referendum this needs consideration and because it's killing a hundred of anything is a lot yeah and they do and they would have their little beaks yeah I think if I have to pick I think I would fight a rat the size of a turkey rather than a hundred turkeys that are rat sized hmm but I think there's a there's a bigger downside though with the rat the size of a turkey like I think that thing could actually kill you yeah whereas you can just kick away little things I always like to think just like keeps keep kicking them and yeah but like but a hundred of anything is a lot like if a hundred toddlers rushed you you can kick them all away like no matter how small and useless they are you can't kick it well that way where I'm not going to discuss if I would kick a hundred toddlers if they're attacking for them right okay I'm saying okay yeah anyway maybe maybe we need to discuss that further that's a topic for another show I think I think they're going to discuss this I think they're ready to have a big conversation about the strategic advantages and disadvantages of both you go next what do you like uh someone asked about our Myers-Briggs personality types do you know about Myers-Briggs breeding yeah kind of do I think my mom got into them at some stage when I was young and stuff say yeah do you have any idea what your Myers-Briggs personality type of thing are these the ones that are like called like JNT's and yeah yeah yeah that's the that's the thing I don't know I I did it when I was like a boy which would mean nothing but you know when my mom was into all that sort of stuff I think she got me to take one I'm like what are you reading mom she said I'll take this test yeah um and I don't remember what I was then and so obviously I don't know what I am now yeah I can I mean there is almost certainly not a teenager on the face of the earth who hasn't at some point done the Myers-Briggs personality type tests that exist of various qualities around the internet uh my feeling on Myers-Briggs personality types is that this is astrology for smart people like this is just like it's the same kind of thing that there are these broad categories that everybody just can read something into and I mean astrology is just obviously bunk and lots of people still get sucked into it but there are plenty of people who are like oh yeah some totally into Myers-Briggs but astrology oh no I would never get into that was like you know what dude this is the same thing that's what that's what this Myers-Briggs stuff strikes me as just broad descriptions that everybody is going to match up with so that is my verdict on Myers-Briggs so another thing that we've been asked about a lot over the last 50 episodes but we were asked a lot of it especially for this anniversary episode is about the issue of guests on the podcast yeah that comes up a lot people like oh you should have because obviously you know we've got lots of interesting friends who we talk about all the time obviously right or just guests in general um it's not something we've ever done it's not something we really discuss so we at the very start we discussed that it was an option you know there's no there's no ban on it we've never said we wouldn't do it but it's something we've we've never done we don't we talk about it much either though do you need thoughts on that you wish to share with the group are we having like an official policy about no no I mean I think I think the most important thing about this is we've got a policy on nothing because right we're guys you like changing our minds but the thing I think about it is be careful what you wish for and I've never quite understood why people want it so much because my attitude to that is like I really like ice cream and I also really like ketchup but I don't like ketchup on my ice cream mm-hmm so like and I think there's an ornament I think there's almost become like a culture of assuming if you like one thing and you like another thing the two should be mixed and I don't I don't see that at all like I listen to podcasts that don't have guests and I'd be really disappointed if I tuned in one day and there was someone you want it because I've kind of bought into bought into one thing so I don't know what it would be like if we had a guest and and we may find out one day when you least expect it but I'm surprised I'm surprised that people think it's such a such a big deal and I think it's and I think I think we've partly created the culture in the YouTube world especially by doing like collabs all the time yeah almost like there's almost like this expectation that like oh if I like this person and I like this person and they do a video together that's the most awesome thing you could ever imagine right but like I I don't completely buy into that I like I quite I think it's perfectly nice to have and I would also say among a among a couple of the people that people say oh you should always get them on the show some of those people who I've spoken to have always said to me don't ever get me on your show like that would you shouldn't do that that would be crazy so anyway what do you have anything to add to that I think it was asked enough times to be worth answering oh yeah it's always it's always asked and it kind of ties into another question that I saw some people ask which is like what do we think of the show now versus when it started you know because if you go back and you listen to those first few episodes they're very different from what the show is now you know they were much shorter and they were much more focused on on a topic yeah and now the show is a very different thing and my feeling was always that those first few shows were never what I thought the show would eventually be I thought that if if it was going to succeed what it is now is exactly what it would be it would be the two of us being able to talk about whatever hopefully in interesting ways that people want to listen to so where we are now is what I imagine that the show would be from the start and I viewed those first few episodes as well we have to do something or we have to start with topics you know it has to be cut in this particular way but these are almost aberrations these first few episodes yeah you can't do follow up in shows where there's nothing to follow up yet right there's it's just that the whole structure of it doesn't exist and as the show goes on like you just you build up this whole world of of in jokes and past references and that to me as a person who listens to a lot of podcasts is one of the very special things about what a podcast can deliver this conversation that continually flows and continually builds on itself and my view on on guests is like you I'm not ever going to rule out something I'm not going to say oh no we'll never do this ever but I just think that this show is so much the two of us the changing who is on the show or adding people even if those people are great it just fundamentally changes this feeling from the listeners perspective of they are a friend sitting at a table listening to a conversation between friends and they just happen to be a mute partner in this like that is the feeling that I often have when I listen to podcasts is like okay I know these people and I'm I'm listening to them talk about interesting things and I just happen to not be contributing in the conversation and my own experience as a podcast listener is when shows change like sometimes shows will bring on like a guest every once in a while or they'll change hosts or whatever I just never like that I always react negatively to that even if they're bringing on someone who's interesting or who I like in a different context so I would be I would be very hesitant to to bring on a guest because I just think that that that changes what the show is and it's very different from what the show is is providing for people if it if it provides anything at all so that's that's kind of my feeling on it I saw a comment I'm sorry I can't remember where it was it was probably red or something this someone someone said something that did tickle me they were trying to describe to a friend what how the internet was and the way they described to their friend was it's two guys on a podcast talking for a couple of hours about what they spoke about on the last podcast I think that sums it up that is beautiful Brady that is exactly what we do here
==Episode List==
==References==
Category:HelloInternetEpisode
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