Neutral Face, Pistol

"😐🔫" (pronounced "Neutral Face, Pistol") is the 101st episode of Hello Internet, released on April 26, 2018.
Now that I think about it, if anyone I know ends up being a spy, it could be you. That would be him. Yeah. I don't think being a spy temperamentally would suit me. That's why you're such a good spy. It's the best cover ever. Your cover is a public figure. Yet a public figure who's very cagey about like identity. You go to other countries all the time without telling where you're going or why you're going. In fact, I'm convincing myself right now that you're a spy. It's just suddenly hit me. I'm an idiot. I'm assuming if you are a spy, this part of the podcast will be kept. No, no. The genius will be you'll leave it in to build up this how double bluff cover you've got going. Look at this Kafka trap you are constructing around me, Brady. There's no move. It doesn't make it look much, much more like I'm really a spy. Yeah. The only winning move is not to play. So, Gray, there is a danger. This is the last podcast we ever do. How is it? Yeah, because I'm getting a new computer tomorrow and who knows what that entails. It's that traumatic time that happens once every few years. What's arriving tomorrow, Brady? Well, you know me. I like anything called pro. So, I'm getting the IMAX pro. Oh, very exciting. I don't know if this has been a smart move or not. I'm living in fear that all my software will stop working and I'll never be able to edit again. Yeah, because you use some ancient and obscure program to do all of your editing. Is that not correct? Well, I use avid media composer, which is like the industry leading editing software, but if that's how we're going to play it or not. Is it? OK, I didn't know that. I assumed that it was ancient and obscure because I have never heard of anybody else I know in YouTube who uses avid. But I guess that makes sense if this is like what news organizations use to edit their videos. And so that's why you know how to use this particular program. You think I'm here coupling together periodic videos on an Atari 2600 with a joystick. It's simply because I never hear anyone else say it. So I just assumed like, oh, yeah, Fred is using something quaint and very old because that's what he likes. Yeah, I never crossed your mind that I could just be at the bleeding edge of technology. You know what, Brady? That is correct. It did not ever cross my mind that you might be at the bleeding edge of technology. Fair enough. I can't blame you for that. So when you switch to a new computer, like how long do you set aside for this? And like, what's your thing? Because like I've been trying to find this natural break in my work where I'm not halfway through a project. And I feel like I'm at a good point now because I've just been in the States for the last two weeks. And I've got back. And so before I start any new projects, I'm going to say, all right, it's time. Computer swap out. I think that sounds like a good idea. I mean, I imagine it's quite difficult for someone like yourself to actually find a point in time where you are between projects. It is very hard. Whenever we discuss things, you are a man with many, many overlapping projects at once. So maybe today and tomorrow are the only days in the whole of the yearly calendar where you could try to do a swap over. But you know, like many things, however much time you think it's going to take, it's going to take twice as much time. And there'll be one cable that I need that I haven't gotten. What do you do? Do you set aside like a week and like, is it a big or a deal for you or is it quite seamless for you because everything V is so streamlined and appalized? No, it's always an enormous hassle. The computer that I'm talking to you on right now, I just recently set up as a dedicated podcasting only computer in the hopes that I would never have to touch it, that it would always just be set and ready to go for podcasting and everything would be nice and easy. That was the idea. The reality of course is always that it's a pain in the butt to get podcasting set up, even if you have a dedicated machine. And in general, like if I'm setting up a new computer, it's just, well, everything starting from scratch, I don't use any transfer programs or any of that kind of stuff. I feel like I like a nice, clean, fresh slate and then you install things as you need them. But that does mean that with a new computer setup, there is a very long half life of how long is it until you have 100% of the software back on the machine that you actually need. That's interesting. So you don't do the thing where you plug the two together with an unbilical cord and copy one over to the other. No, I don't do that. It's like a psychological move of house to set up a new computer. And let me just bring in the things that I need and let me not cart around a decade's worth of crap that I installed eight years ago to try a thing which didn't work immediately and so I just gave up. So no, I like to have everything a nice fresh start. That's interesting. And what about like actual files, like photos and documents and how do you get them across? Everything lives in the cloud these days, Brady. And the couple of things that don't live in the cloud, I just have as external storage. So you can just plug the drive over it, which I presume is mostly what you have 10 million, billion hours of video on external storage. Yeah. Every once in a while, I think of that time when I, I think maybe the first time I went to your house and you showed me these stacks and stacks and stacks of video cassette tapes of everything you had recorded. Yeah. And I think about that. And then I think about how long ago that was and I wonder what the current situation is for you with all of those stacks of tapes. Like are they just piled up absolutely everywhere all over your house now? No, they're in a trunk now. If there's occasionally one little bit of footage that was back from the tape days that I have to find, that's quite an interesting time when you've got to pull out all the tapes and go through them one by one, try to decipher my hands, scroll on the side of them, because they used to be in some kind of general order. But as they've been moved from trunk to trunk, they've all fallen out of order and it's not pretty. I'm sorry, Brady. You wouldn't like it. That's an interesting idea though. I'm going to try it your way. Oh yeah. Yeah, because I do feel like I've got a lot of crap on my computer and that's part of my problem. Why bring the crap over to the new computer? But I do wonder and I wonder this no matter what, how I do the transfer, how many of my bits of software am I going to be paying for again? Spoiler alert, it's going to be a bunch. This is part of the price of moving is there's the price of the computer and there's the price of having to rebuy software. But I feel like I'm happy to do that. I try to be pretty good about keeping track of what is registered to wear, but you always lose stuff like that. It's always just gone. But what are you going to do, Brady, if your precious industry-loved avid doesn't work on the new computer? Are you going to have to send back a pro machine and go back to an old non-pro machine that would sound very sad. It seemed very un-brainy like. Can you send back a computer because it doesn't run the software you want it to run after the fact? I don't know. Isn't there like a 30-day return policy on everything in the UK? Can't you do that? You can just put three envelopes around your iMac Pro, wrap it up with a bunch of tape and send it back to Apple and I think you'd be good. I think they take it back. I don't want to think about it. It's just filling me with dread. I know what an unhappy couple of days it's going to be. Well, if you need to, Brady, I can give you a very quick Final Cut Pro crash tutorial. If you need to learn how to use the differences. I'll show you data. I would. I would. I wouldn't do that. I would do that, Brady. I think you wouldn't. I would. I would be happy to show you the basics of Final Cut Pro if you want to switch over. I genuinely would. I'd come right up to your house and say hello to your doggies and I'd show you the three or four things that I know how to do in Final Cut Pro. Be all set. I am looking forward to the new machine in my head. My life's just going to be so much faster and better, but yeah, you know, I mean, it's just like every time we buy a new phone, right, Brady? It's everything in your life is just faster and better. That's how that works. It's the promise of a new, faster, better life with every purchase of technology. If you knew the things I'd been putting up with with my current computer over the last couple of years, it would really do your head in like the number of things that crash and the number of processes that take me five goes until it finally works and. Oh, Brady. Tell me this just in general, tell me if you ever have this with software. I imagine you don't put up with crashing software, but I've got some bits of software that do crash on me for various reasons. In the last year or so, I feel like I've picked up this sixth sense for when the crash is going to happen. And obviously what's happened is there's obviously like a sequence of actions I do that cause a crash that I don't consciously know, but I unconsciously know because I'll do a bunch of things and then I'll be, this is going to crash in the next 10 seconds, I know it and I'll quickly do a save. And then the next thing I do after the save causes the crash and I don't know how I knew it's this feeling and I'm not so superstitious as to think like, you know, I have supernatural powers. Yeah, computer ESP, that's what you have. But the two options and I don't know which one of the options is the case, is it a sequence of actions that I unconsciously have learned that I know is about to cause the crash or are there little somehow visual cues or cues the computers give me by like how long something will pause for or something. I'm not, again, I'm not totally conscious of that I'm picking up on. I don't know which of the two it is. It's got to be the second one, not that you unconsciously know, but that you're picking up on a little cue. Right. Particularly if I'm using some professional software, there's a thing where you like, click, click, click and you know you're pressing the buttons, you click it and it may take like two tenths of a second longer to pop back up after the click. Yeah. And that two tenths of a second feels like an attorney because you just know that there's something bad that's happening and you're like, uh oh, save, save, save, save, save, save, like, command, that's command, that's command, that's what it is. I think you're right. I think that's what it is. It's something I do where the feedback loop slightly delays and unconsciously I'm picking up on that and like 100% that's what it is, especially if it's some kind of repetitive task. It's a little bit like that terror that comes in when your iPhone freezes up for half a second and then you know that the whole screen is going to be covered with a phone call that's coming in. I think it's that kind of thing. You just notice that there's a little bit of a delay and then like, oh no, something's about to happen. Well, for anyone following me on Twitter, I think there's a strong chance of grumpy tweets over the next few days, but it's pro Brady. How can you go wrong with something that's pro? That's all that gives me hope. I'm looking forward to being able to work more quickly. Listen, if there's anything I've learned, it's that getting faster computer equipment means your output will go way up. Those two things are definitely proportional. My previous totally uncontroversial 100th episode. Which had an interesting surprise for me where you put in this like footnote into the podcast. Oh, I forgot you didn't know about that. Yeah, I actually hadn't listened back to the episode until I think I saw someone tweet or someone make a comment on Reddit about the fact that you had censored yourself saying the thing that had caused the controversy because you said it flagrantly throughout our recording. That's an interesting decision. And then you did cut it after I think I said the key phrase in the Nazi podcast twice. Like, we had a little bit of a meta discussion about it, but I did say it in the recording because as listeners of the show will know, like, I feel very, very strongly about this idea that is it goes all the way back to this idea about like, why is the word naughty a running joke on the show about if people start getting upset at mentions of the word naughty, like it gives that word more power than it otherwise would have. And it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And so I do think that it is important to be able to say the things that are the offensive things in society, like especially if you're having a conversation about those things, which is why I was perfectly fine saying the phrase in the podcast. But as my footnote made reference to when I was digging into the case more after the fact, I found that the law as written allows the ability for judges to ignore all context around the literal words. And so I thought like this reading of the law seems crazy to me. And this whole case seems really arbitrary. But nonetheless, like, I don't know how to interpret this ruling and the way that that law is written other than to say that some particular phrases that the guy said in his video about his pug are now like de facto illegal in the UK. I just didn't know how else to interpret that. So that's why I was like, I don't really want to cut this. But it would seem almost like pointlessly, personally reckless not to. That's why I ended up doing that. You didn't want to get threatened prison for the cause. Yeah, that's exactly right. It was such a strange moment editing that show because it really was this feeling of this episode has become an example of the very thing we were talking about that it's not just where problems happening, but it's like how far from the border of where problems are happening. Do you stand? Do you agree or do you disagree with my from your perspective, surprise and unprecedented editorial decision to go back and put in a little audio footnote like that? I'm surprised. You did it. Like, I think you're like a cautious guy. So I shouldn't be surprised, but I still am surprised you did it. And I think there's no way if you'd left it in, you would have been in any danger. Okay. So here's the question. Why do you think I wouldn't be in any danger? Because I think the context was fine. You were just you know, I don't know. I ask because I think it's genuinely hard to construct an argument like you're just saying there. Or like, oh, the context is fine. Or at least I can say that I thought that the context was fine in the original video as well. Right? So then it just comes down to a question about a judge. I don't know. I think no one would prosecute you for an intellectual discussion of the merits of the case, whereas while I don't think what's his name, Count Dracula, I believe that's his legal name. Well, I also believe he shouldn't be in trouble. You know, he was being riskier and more reckless because he was making a joke of stuff that happened during the Holocaust. So while you know, perhaps he's within his rights to do that, but I don't think a discussion of the case itself. Like, I'm sure that phrase is being used in the court case. I'm sure the judges can grant themselves an exception for that kind of thing. Well, also is the media reporting of that case allowed to use the phrase? Surely it is. If it's said in court, you're allowed to report it. So I'm assuming newspaper reports about the case have used the phrase. Yeah. So it's interesting. But searching around, I would say that some have, but the overwhelming majority have done the thing which I think actually makes this kind of event even worse, where they give a description where they say like, oh, a man in Glasgow uploaded an anti-Semitic video to YouTube and he's being prosecuted in the courts for it. And it's like, oh, okay. That's a description of the thing, whereas I think it would be better to actually, you know, post a clip or a little transcript of what the actual thing is as opposed to like a summarizing description and especially a summarizing description that has the conclusion in it as opposed to laying out the situation there. But don't get me wrong. I agree with you that it would be shockingly unlikely for me to be prosecuted if I had left it in the original podcast. And I think that is part of the terrifying arbitrariness of the law and the situation. Like our whole conversation about, oh, well, it's a conversation about the case itself and blah, blah, blah. These are all ideas that we are putting on top of this, but is actually written nowhere in the law. We're assuming that people would be reasonable and there would be no one filing a complaint and all of these kinds of things. But you know, the law, as it is written, is the thing that you actually have to worry about. And that itself is very much part of the whole problem related to this case. Just as we're talking, he hasn't been sentenced yet, but I think the actual sentencing is going to happen. I think it's around the time this show is going to go up. So there hasn't been any actual forward motion in that case and there won't be until after we record. So it's probably a smart play for you to make the cut from the podcast as well, because if you ended up in court, that would cause your whole spy status to suddenly. It could be exposed in open court, you know, it could blow your cover. Again, I'm just sitting here if I say that I'm not a spy, it just makes me sound much more like I'm a spy. All the denials are evidence of the thing itself. I do just want to say that the discussion that happened in the Reddit after that show went up on this particular topic, I feel like it was a pretty well handled discussion, you know, on the internet, sometimes these things can spiral out of control and people can go a little crazy. But I feel like the Hello Internet audience was pretty good about the conversation, but there were two things that came up that I thought were a little bit interesting on this, where apparently I missed this, but there was like an internet argument a few months ago about whether or not it's okay to punch a Nazi on the street. I didn't quite know the details of this, but apparently there was like some crazy guy who was a Nazi and there's a YouTube footage of some civilian just going up and like punching him in the face for saying Nazi stuff on a street corner. And is that okay? Is that not okay? Brady, do you think it's okay to punch a Nazi? No. Okay, why? Well, the assumptions around this would be like, you know, whatever that case was, who cares? Let's make the assumption that it's like, okay, you're in the Western world somewhere in a civilized country and there's like a guy on a street corner with a sign and he's yelling Nazi stuff. Well, I don't think people should be physically attacked for expressing views, even if I don't agree with them. That's not to say that I couldn't possibly watch it and secretly think, well done. Like when Buzz Aldrin punched that moon or deny a guard in the face, like I was so thinking, yeah, I mean, I don't think Buzz Aldrin should have done that, but I think it's kind of cool that he did. You don't like it but you're cheering on the inside. That moon landing deny a guy really deserved that. Yeah, I think people should be allowed to feel physically safe in this world. Yeah, I totally agree with you on that one. Something's like dangerous about this idea that it's okay to physically assault someone that you don't agree with. I think it's concerning maybe that it seems like a large number of people think that it's okay to initiate physical violence against someone else that seems bizarre to me. It was extra bizarre to me because when people were bringing this up, I was like, oh, there's a guy in London who I see on the streets maybe like once a year who totally is a Nazi. I see this guy every once in a while. This crazy guy who stands on a soapbox who has on a Nazi looking uniform and he carries around with him a literal card that shows different colors of skin and he's yelling crazy Nazi stuff. The answer is always you just walk by him because he's either really dumb or he's really crazy and almost every single person on the street just like walks right by and pays no attention to the lunatic. I feel like there's a real lesson in there that it's like this is the thing to do. It's like if you think someone has terrible ideas, simply not paying attention to them is a much better option. If we haven't crossed over into the world of physical violence, you shouldn't be the one who initiates that no matter how bad you think the other person's ideas are. It was just really weird to realize like, oh, yeah, I've seen this guy in London probably like 10 times over the past 12 years and I've never once thought I should really punch that guy in the face. This would be the appropriate response as I'm walking down the street is to punch him in the face. I just don't think that's what we do in the civilized world. Do you think anyone should be allowed to just put down a box and get on it and start saying whatever they want? Yeah. Okay. So now that's a totally different thing because I think the police should totally be rounding up anyone who falls into the category of buskers, right? And I would put like crazy Nazi guy on his soapbox in the middle of the street. In the same category as like buskers, you are a kind of public nuisance. You're a hate busker. Perfect. That is 100% what he is. And so yeah, like that is basically my response is you are are just like the people who are pouring unwanted music into the streets like you're just a public nuisance and police should be able to move you on because of that. Like it would be just as bad if someone was standing on a soapbox and preaching love all day long on the street corner. It's like, Hey, people are trying to move around you. This is a thorough way. This isn't a place for you to just promote whatever your ideas are. You're equally opposed to hate buskers and love buskers. This is true. Yes. 100% that is absolutely true. One last thing about that whole Nazi pug thing, which we never really got to discussing, but was the whole reason I found the whole thing entertaining. And I think it's the whole joke that he was making that maybe some people have missed. And the whole joke of the video for me is the funniness of dogs and how it shows so perfectly how it doesn't matter what you say to dogs. It just matters how you say it. Right. Of course. That's what the joke was because like you know, he was saying such offensive words, but because it became just like a sound to a dog and a dog doesn't understand words. Right. A dog will get all happy and excited. And I kind of I think that was kind of lost in over debate. Like it was it was more a commentary on the stupidity of dogs. Not that I'm calling dogs stupid because they don't understand language. How dare you Brady. That's outrageous. That's absolutely outrageous to call dogs dumb because they don't understand spoken language. Hello internet. I'd like to introduce you to a new sponsor to the podcast. The sponsor here to solve a problem that everyone has, which is how on earth can you remember all your passwords. It used to be easy because you don't have a few passwords you needed to know. You needed to know your email and maybe a couple of other things. But in the modern world, you need to remember hundreds of passwords. 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That doesn't mean you go and take all five. That means you go and take one and leave the other four for the next four people. What do you say to that? Or are there no rules when it comes to hot stoppers of whimsy? Well, I mean, obviously there's nothing we can do to enforce these rules unless you're going to set up some kind of hot stopper sting operation in which you're going to film and then publicly shame the person who takes all five. Okay. So we've been just doing this on Twitter kind of posting randomly a couple of places that hot stoppers have vended up. And I realize we have a different assumption here because the few times I have done it, I have always left two hot stoppers. I have never left a cash as large as five. And I think in my mind, two is because a person would come and that they would take both and that they would have a hot stopper for their friend or partner perhaps. Like getting two tickets to a concert or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you get two tickets to a concert. There were two hot stoppers left in a random locker in an undisclosed location in Fino's Candida for your partner. Here look what Gray left me and one for you. I think people might appreciate that. So I guess the unstated rule in my head is no more than two, but how do you feel about that? I would accept the taking of two if your partner is like a team. Obviously, Brady, that goes a damn thing. I thought you were going to say take two so you have one for like actually using in your coffee and one for like commemorative framing purposes like me with my Lego sat in five. I mean, Brady, obviously I'm not going to encourage that kind of behavior. I mean, again, I have noticed a difference between us in that I seem to be much more concerned about the sanitary conditions of the hot stoppers than some co-host of mine that I could mention who seems to leave them sticking right out of the dirt in the ground or in all kinds of locations. I try to at least wrap up the hot stoppers a little bit with whatever materials I have to hand. You've already touched it though. So it's going to have to be clean no matter what. I try to touch them on the top though. And yes, of course, obviously the person who's receiving them, if they're going to actually use them, should totally clean the hot stoppers. And it doesn't matter if it's in the dirt. And that logic, you could stick it in top of the flag of like Lulu's poo and be like, well, you have to wash it anyway. What does it matter? I think it helps to try to keep a cleaner. I think you've done bit of a Brady there and like made an overstated example to make your point. Ooh, I mean, you could leave it in a Lulu poo and wash it, to be honest. I really like using a Brady in that way. You know what you're totally right? I did pull a Brady there. I apologize. I apologize for Bradying in that moment and I pull it back. I enjoyed growing you back. Okay. All right. I think I'm circling around an idea. Hmm. What do you think about this? If only two hot stoppers are left. Yeah. Then the first person to arrive, if they have a friend or partner who is a Tim, they can take both of them. If there are more than two hot stoppers, then the hot stoppers are individual items. So if there's three, three people should be able to pick them up. What do you think about that? So what if I left six and you arrive and there's only two remaining, but there were six originally in that cache? The clues that we have left to where the hot stoppers are have always indicated whether there are two or more than two. So the person who knows to go knows how many there were when they were deposited, spy-like at random drop locations all over the face of the earth. What about a different rule? What about if Brady has left the hot stoppers? He can only take one and if Gray has left them, you can take two. Hmm. Let's see. No, but I feel like if I leave a big cache of hot stoppers somewhere, people can take them two at a time because it was you. So if Gray left them, they can take a selfie holding two. And if I left them, they have to take a selfie holding one. Okay. All right. We can do that. I think that works. By the way, obviously if you go together, you can each have one if you go as a pair because that seems to happen a lot. Teams go and pairs and each take one. But now that we are discussing this on the show, I felt like I was keeping this as a thing on the side, like just for people who follow us on Twitter to be able to find these things randomly. But now that this is canon, now that it's part of the show, I have to say the few times I have done this, it has been very fun to do because I try to bring the hot stoppers with me on the trips that I've been making and then think like, ooh, what might be a fun location to put them. It's been very fun to do that. And it has also been fun and very interesting to see just how quickly people are able to figure out where a location is based on very little information and then how fast someone can get to the hot stopper location. I've been very impressed by how quickly some of these hot stoppers have been acquired by people who know what the right location is and are able to go there straight away. So it's been super fun to distribute these hot stoppers a whimsy across the world. Long may it continue. You didn't leave any antartica did you, Brady? That would be terrible. No. Some penguin would choke on it. That's an excellent point. Do you know what? I saw an ad the other day while I was in America. This is Rhymes me of this. And it's so funny. Like I was on my own right. And I was watching this TV ad. And the ad had this like big, I think it was a whale shark swimming underwater. And it had somehow got some massive piece of rope or something like really tightly wrapped around itself near its fins and it looked really terrible. And these two divers went swimming towards it. And they're obviously like, you know, environmentalists or nice people and stuff. And they got out then knife and they got on the back of the whale shark and they cut the rope off its back. And then the rope fell off at like shackles and it swam away happily. And the camera panned back towards the two divers who you could just tell was so happy and had their hands up above their heads like celebrating that they'd helped this whale shark. And I'm not going to lie to you, Gray. I actually started tearing up. It made me so emotional. And I thought this is beautiful. And then the advertising strap came up. And it was for some scummy health insurance company. And I literally set out loud, you bastards. Like I can't believe you just manipulated me to sell your terrible health scheme or something like that. It was like, it was such an emotional rollercoaster. It was such a short amount of time. All of this happened in the space of 20 seconds. I don't quite know how to react to that, Brady, but I love it. That's fantastic. That's why I won't leave a hot stop for an Antarctica. Because I don't want some health company to capitalize on it when someone saves the penguin that's choking on my hot stopper. Oh, Brady. So the other day, I was on Twitter and was National Sibbling Day. And everyone was posting pictures of them with their siblings. I get sick of all these national days, right? So I was like, oh God, not another national day. And I was thinking, oh, I'm going to have a winch about this. But then I thought, no, don't be such a grump. A lot of people were posting really lovely pictures of them in their siblings. And some of them was quite sweet. And a lot of people were obviously enjoying it. So I thought, OK, I'm going to let it go. I'm not going to put winch about national days in the H.I. show notes. I'm going to let it go. Right. Right. Until the next day, which ended up being National grilled cheese sandwich day. Ooh. And I'm like, no, that's it. That's taken National Days to. You can't have National grilled cheese sandwich day. But what are people were posting really moving photos of them with grilled cheeses over the years that they have loved and that have been important parts of their lives? People were certainly were posting pictures of them. I wasn't about moving ones. Where will National Day madness end if we now have grilled cheese sandwich days? What about ungrilled cheese sandwich days? Do they have a day? Just normal cheese sandwiches? I guess they miss out. I'm going to guess there's no National Cheese Lobby that wants the ungrilled cheese sandwich is there. I think I'm going to guess that's what that is. So what lobby is getting the grilled cheese sandwiches on, but not the normal cheese? It's the people who make the grillers, not the people who make the cheese. I was just googling this because I want to find out more information. And the first link for National Siblings Day is a website called awarenessdays.com. It's just listing all of these days. And that does make me think who needs to be aware of the concept of siblings? Does anyone need to be made aware of this idea? I think not. No, well, I mean, you could say the same about Mother's Day and Father's Day. Wait a minute. Are you supposed to be buying a present for your siblings? Is that what the idea is? I don't think you are. Okay, because Mother's Day, we all know big flower and big chocolate is behind that. That's what's going on. I can. Father's Day, big tie is behind Father's Day. Maybe it's a long-term goal that they just want to establish the concept of siblings day. They get in there. And the 10-year plan is eventually you have to buy your sibling something. I tell you, if anyone deserves an annual present for putting up with me, it's certainly my sister much more than my mom and dad. So it might have stuff I did to my sister when I was young. Big brother torturing his sister. Oh, God. Good job, Brady. You're not protecting your little sister. She's definitely entitled to some restitution for the psychological torment she was put through. Just quickly looking through here, it looks like there was a person who started a foundation called the Siblings Day Foundation and then pushed for the creation of siblings day. I can't believe I told you about siblings day and grilled cheese sandwich day and it's the sibling one that's captured your imagination. All right. Let's look up national grill cheese. I can't figure out who's behind it. I don't see what the vested interest is that push this. Is it the cheese industry or the gorilla industry? I don't know, Brady. How real is this? Because it doesn't seem like there's a Wikipedia page on grilled cheese sandwich day. There's a lot of stuff about it though. Yeah, no, I mean, I see YouTube videos about grilled cheese sandwich day, but is this, has a nation actually recognized this or is this some dopey, like, you know, national hot stopper day that people just do when it becomes a thing on the national hot stopper day? Oh, great. I can't believe you beat me to it. What's national hot stuff a day going to be? Whenever this podcast goes out, that's when national hot stopper day is going to be. And what does one do on national hot stuff a day? You give hot stoppers to your partners, a bouquet of hot stuff is for your partner. I guess that's what you could do. All sorts of hot stopper related activities that big hot stopper can get behind. You know what I'm realizing? I'm realizing I'm coming at this from the reverse angle because I know that we totally decided that the hot stoppers are going to be a non-commercial thing, but the instant it has crossed my mind that there could be a national hot stopper day, it feels like, oh, you know what, we need to be selling to cash in on this national hot stopper day. We need to be selling hot stoppers. Maybe our nail and gear branded hot stoppers are the hot stoppers of whimsy and then we have a separate type of hot stoppers like a commercial entity. All right. Yeah. I'm not going into the business of hot stoppers that margins are too fine. And as we know, there's really only one day a year when you can even attempt to make any profits in that national hot stopper day. And that's today, Tim. That's today. Happy national hot stopper day, everyone. I don't think this grilled cheese sandwich day is a real thing. I think this is just an internet thing. But sibling one is real. The sibling one is real. Who has to recognize a day for it to become a day, a government of some sort, presumably? I'm looking at national siblings day. Who's recognized that? Carolyn Maloney, the US representative for New York's 14th congressional district officially saluted the holiday and introduced it into the official congressional record of the United States Congress on September 26, 2005. Okay. It's been voted on. Well, no, see, this phrasing though doesn't say that it's been voted on, right? That just means he said it in a speech. But what happens all the time? It says it's been introduced into the official congressional record. Oh, that just means she said the words in the Congress. That means nothing. Yeah, it means nothing at all. I think that's what all this was, right? But I'm going to guess that maybe there were some donations from the siblings day foundation to mention the existence of siblings day in a campaign to then be like, oh, it's an official thing because it's in the congressional record. All we need is some representative anywhere to mention national hot stopper day in a way that it will be minneted or recorded. And we've done it. And if it's like the local counselor in Mitchem City Council in Adelaide does a quick speech at the start of the meeting going, I just like to recognize national hot stopper day and talk about how important it is that we prevent burns among young people. That's our end to get to do it. Oh, yeah, that's good. That's good, Brady. You need some sort of bullsh** caring about the children angle, right? That gets everybody on board in the government. Yeah. Now more than ever, we must be careful about spilling hot drinks onto young people because you just give a few stats about burns and stuff. And then we've got national hot stopper day done. It's a real thing. That's great. And people have one year from the launch of this podcast to get that planned and executed, right? We can get done on the actual hot stopper day a year from today. If you'd know any representative of any authority or government body that's willing to do this, let's get it done. With the pinnacle obviously being the US Congress. Right, yeah. But we will settle for less. Oh, we will. We'll settle for less. Don't worry about that. It's dumb national days. This episode's been sponsored by Squarespace, the platform that lets you easily create professional websites in minutes. I run multiple sites on Squarespace, including my personal blog. And the Squarespace tab is always open in my browser. I use it pretty much every day, often multiple times. Whether you want to start a casual blog or a serious business or anything in between, Squarespace's huge range of templates and elegant interface mean all the website stuff is one less headache. You can just concentrate on the creative side of things. The template sites are a great starting point and they're ready to use right out of the box, but don't think you can't personalize them as much or as little as you like depending on how much you want to get into that side of things. Everything e-commerce into the site is also a piece of cake. If you decide you want to sell vinyl records, limited edition sneakers or pretty much anything else, everything's designed so your site will look good on both big grown up computer screens or tiny mobile phones. And you can also buy your domain with Squarespace with over 200 domain extensions available. If you want to give them a go and there's a free trial available if you do, head over to squarespace.com. And if you do purchase a domain or website, you can get 10% of your first order by using the code hello that'll also tell Squarespace you came from Hello Internet. If nothing else, have a look at the free trial. That's what won me over as a customer. That domain again, squarespace.com and remember 10% of your first order if you use the code hello. Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode. We've got YouTube news, Brady, YouTube. Always up to interesting new pilots and programs. Always the best at communicating what they're up to. And there's a new change coming at YouTube. And I think this one is interesting. So depending on what corners of YouTube you may end up wandering down. It's very easy to... how to put this. I think the algorithm can end up pushing people into the weirder corners of the internet. So you start out by watching some videos about earth science and then you end up watching some videos about orbits and the planets and then slowly but surely you can end up in a corner of the internet where you're suddenly watching videos about why the earth is flat. They're like these paths of related videos that people can end up wandering down. If you keep clicking the related videos. You understand this phenomenon. Have you seen this in your own YouTube? I want to ask you about Flare. I think I'm going to ask you about Flare. I've got a question for you about that. But you're right. You can end up in these places very easily. Even quicker than you just described sometimes. I think. Oh yeah. It's very interesting sometimes to see what pops up in the related feeds and you can just go like, oot, dut, dut, dut, dut. I'm just minding my own business. And I was like, oh, how did I end up here? How did I end up in this crazy corner of the internet where people are talking over other people's videos and shooting down arguments in this crazy way? So there's a lot of conspiracy theory kind of stuff on YouTube. Lots of, well, let's put this way. There's no shortage of crazy on the internet. And crazy can make videos. And so YouTube has those videos. Now YouTube is not going to take those videos down, which I agree with. I think people should be able to put up videos on YouTube even if they are about crazy conspiracy theory things. That is the YouTube equivalent of a punch in the face, by the way. Yes, that is the YouTube equivalent of a punch in the face. Yeah. Is it okay to punch a flat earther in the face? No, of course not. Why would it be? Why would you think that? You monster. But anyway, YouTube has announced that they're not punching people in the face or taking down their videos. But what they're going to do is, it's funny little quote, where YouTube is going to quote, show a companion unit of information from Wikipedia, close quote, on the videos for conspiracy topics. So YouTube has been really vague about what exactly is this going to look like, where on the video or on the page is this companion piece of information going to go. They have not been clear about this at all. But I think this sure is an interesting decision on YouTube's part to put counter-availing information from Wikipedia onto or next to videos that YouTube is saying are conspiracy theory videos. What do you think about this, Brady? I mean, the obvious danger to me, it seems. There's a few things. Obviously, there's the obvious question of which videos get these companion units and which don't. This is obviously some way of combating fake news and fake information, isn't it? So which ones get the unit is the first question? The second thing is using Wikipedia as that source seems interesting to me, because Wikipedia itself, as we well know here on Hello Internet, can be tampered with. So it's a bit of a moving target that you're using as your standard measure of truthness. The thing about this story that I like the best when this announcement was made is the tweet from the Wikipedia Foundation saying, oh, that's interesting. We were not informed that you were going to do this. Now I don't think that YouTube is under any legal obligation to inform Wikipedia, like their licenses allow this exact kind of thing, that's sort of the whole reason that Wikipedia is the successful monolith that is these days, is because of the permissive licensing that it has on the content. But nonetheless, I think that's an incredible thing that you might want to have given like a heads up to Wikipedia that some of their articles might be experiencing a thousand-fold increase in traffic at some point in the future. That might be a thing to note. So I feel like this is the thing where YouTube's heart is in the right place. Like I can see what they're going for, and I can see people at YouTube getting frustrated about, like you said, fake news or conspiracy theory stuff. But it's another one of these topics where there's one conversation that you can have about the topic, but the much more important conversation is the who gets to decide topic. And the who gets to decide which YouTube videos receive a little unit that basically says this does not have YouTube's approval for truthfulness? I feel like, oh, God. Here's yet another thing that is going to be impossible to nail down in any reasonable way that's going to cause a lot of yelling. And that I feel like poor Wikipedia, who even we with our podcast cause some problems with like poor Wikipedia is going to be dragged right into the beating heart of internet debate about some of these things. And to have their articles then really front and center receive this focus that not only do you have an article about like the truth of flat earth rhythm, but now that article is going to be front and center to everyone who's watching flat earth videos. I don't know how well it's going to be able to hold up under that kind of intense attention. But the other problem is it sounds like this companion unit or this link off to Wikipedia when a video is contentious or potentially has information that is incorrect in it is almost going to become like the anti verified checkmark you were talking about in a recent episode. This will be the official stamp from YouTube to say, Hey, this video you're watching, it's bull crap. Yeah. And as if that's not going to make the people who are making bull crap videos angry, it's going to make us angry when occasionally it gets put on one of our videos for some reason, suddenly like, imagine if someone went to one of your videos about something about great Britain and decided, he didn't explain it that well, he could have explained it better. Let's also link off to the Wikipedia article. Suddenly your videos tired with this, this wasn't good enough stamp, go and read something else. I also think just like how I always feel like YouTube's in a bad situation when they start deciding and they've recently taken the rules around this about what kind of videos they want to allow on their sites. So then by default also in the business of not exactly, but kind of condoning what is truthful, which is also a position that I feel like guys, why do you want to get into this? Why do you want to get into this fight? I think like the fight around this is much worse. Well, no, you can say exactly what they have to get into this fight because if they don't, they end up in the position of Mark Zuckerberg's in, not that I sympathize with Mark Zuckerberg, getting dragged up before Congress, being asked to explain why your platform has been used as a propagator of misinformation for the last few years. They can't win. That's what will happen. If they say, now we're not touching it and YouTube becomes the next platform for the Russian bots to try and swing elections, if that's what happened, then suddenly the chief executive of YouTube is getting caught up before Congress. Yeah. I guess maybe you're right. They don't want to get Zuckerberg and will have been in front of a congressional testimony Congress where the people asking you questions have no technical knowledge about anything, like getting interviewed by a bunch of grandpa's questions about how Facebook works. It seems to me this solution of having a companion link to Wikipedia is like, it's like the first idea you would have had in a brainstorming session. And then it would have been thrown out for like seven different reasons that you and I seem to have already hit upon. And I didn't even know about this until just then. I could think of 10 things wrong with it, but it seems like this didn't get kicked out by the brainstorming session and I've announced it. I've so prematurely announced it. You can tell they didn't even talk to Wikipedia about it. I don't want to go down a path where we start to lose our minds, but you really can get into some slippery, slippery territory. If you want to start really nailing down the idea of, but what is true? Like how much do we need to know about a topic to be sure that it is true, or to be sure that a thing is not true? I think there's a way in which you can have a superficial conversation where you can very easily say, like, oh, we know this is true when that's not true. But it doesn't take a lot of work to start making foundations, at least appear to be built upon sand. And that's why I really think this poor YouTube deciding that there's going to be a list of things and that these things are conspiracy theories. It's not a business that I would want to be in. And I feel even more depressed because it didn't really occur to me that this might be a preventative move on YouTube's part to not get pulled in front of a congressional hearing to defend themselves about why they're allowing false information to spread on their platform. That didn't occur to me either. And that makes me even more pessimistic because if that's part of the reason that this is happening, then you can feel like the thumb on the scale of which kinds of things do we want to officially declare are not true, right? Which kinds of things do we want to declare are conspiracy theories and then link to the Wikipedia article about them as a conspiracy theory? I don't like it. I think this is a super dumb idea that will get YouTube just an enormous amount of backlash. And I'm also reasonably convinced that this kind of stuff just energizes very often the groups that you are hoping to undercut by saying that they are illegitimate because I feel like people who are super into conspiracy theories, they will love nothing more than to be officially silenced by the system and still be able to put up their videos and then be able to say like, oh, look, they don't want you to know the truth. They don't want you to know the truth so badly that they're covering up my video with Wikipedia page text about how this isn't the truth. I feel like that's energizing to a certain kind of crazy person to be the person on the outside and to now get this like official outsider status. Can I ask you a question about flat earth movement? Please do. Sorry if this is naive and stupid. But the people behind this, like the people who are really into it, like are they like trolling and joking and like, I just taking the joke too far and like that person who like, you know, just keeps the joke going and like, come on man, like that was funny yesterday. But like, you can come out of character now. Is it fueled by a true belief? Okay. I've been thinking a lot about these flat earthers. This is a thing that has come up and here's Grace the area about flat earthers stuff. I remember coming across this kind of thing years and years ago on the internet in a way that I think was fairly obviously a joke that people were not being serious about it. Like, this is a funny kind of meme that spreads this idea of flat earth societies. Yeah. And I remember coming across flat earth society websites, I feel like this just looks like a joke. I can't know for sure that it is, but I think it is. And it was also really marginal. But as far as I can tell, and from what I know, not directly in my social circle, but one step away, flat earthers are a real thing and they are very serious about it. That the earth is flat. And Antarctica is a wall of ice around the perimeter of this flat earth. My theory though is that this is a joke that has bootstrapped itself into being a reality. And I kind of think that social media is not social media in particular, but like the increase in connectedness of humans has booted it into reality. That it was a joke. And then, like, let's be honest, people who are really mentally unbalanced would take it not as a joke. And then once you have people who are serious about it, it can start to spread as an idea. And then I think what happens is it gets traction in the wider world, all of a sudden, as like this thing that we're all talking about. And it spills over from just being people who are mentally unbalanced to people who just poorly educated. Exactly. Right? Yeah. Like, gullible in a very particular way. I don't think you can just say like you are a dummy or you are ignorant. I think there's a way that some ideas have a way of latching on to people's minds. And that this flat earth thing may be an example of this. But so I really think that this, like many other things in the world, is a situation that gets worse, the more people pay attention to it. It becomes talked about as a thing and then it's able to entrap more people into its orbit. So I really think it was not serious, but that we have made it into a real thing in like the last five years through the interconnectedness of humans. And then also gets to a point where you're talking about the kinds of people, there are certain kinds of people who are dumb, but who just have absolutely no interest in planets or science or physics and things like that. So I would never think about how we know that like the earth is a sphere and they will just happen to come across some flat earth thing one day on the radio or something. They would bring up a conversation, oh yeah, I heard that there's some debate now about whether the earth is flat or not. That just propagates it further. Like, oh yeah, I heard something about that just through the sheer volume of it put around. I thought maybe it was a joke that people just won't let go of. Like you know how like at the start of the show, I was like big silly and said, I'll raise a spy and then I find two or three things to prove that you're a spy. Like if I was then to run with that for the next 10 years and every single thing you did, I just wouldn't let the joke go and say, see this shows you a spy. Eventually you'd go, you know, okay, that was funny once Brady, but that's not funny anymore. That's what I thought was happening with like flat earth. It was like, yeah, okay, like it's a funny joke for a week, but like you can come out of character now guys like it's all right, we've had your joke. That's just all move on to the next joke. Yeah, but I don't think it is and I happen to have been looking into it because I was kind of curious as well. And again, had had come across this on this sort of like the surface bubble of my social circles of like people who have said that they've lost friends to flat earth or is them. They're like, this is a person who has become obsessed with an idea and has really lost the plot of how reality works. And then has has fallen into the once you believe that the world is flat, then you have to start believing all kinds of other things, right? That there's this active campaign to keep information away from you and it's like, okay, you boarded the train to crazy town and you are, you are on that journey. There are many things in the world that I don't want to talk about, but I do think that there are things, this is an example of a thing where the best response is to ignore it. But people who end up being on the other side of this where they're like, they intentionally want to disprove flat earthers. Like you'll see people make videos about like, oh my god, these flat earthers are so dumb. Like, let me show you all these ways that we can prove that the earth is round. It's like, I'm sorry. I think you're part of the problem to quickly jump back to the last podcast where we were talking about Nazis. I did make an offhand to comment where I said like, nobody believes this stuff, which people push back on in the Reddit. And I just want to acknowledge like, I don't think that it's literally nobody, but I when I say nobody, I mean, nobody within a rounding error. In the same way I could say like, nobody believes the earth is flat means 99.99% of the population doesn't believe that the earth is flat. So I think there's a similar thing though where nobody believes that the earth is flat. And so if you're making videos that are arguing for the concept that the earth is round, I feel like all you're doing is drawing more attention to this thing, which is trivial and nonexistent, were it not for the fact that you're paying attention to it? Like it's a debate to be had. Yeah, like it's a debate to be had. And you're giving it energy. Like I think there's a way that you can do it where you can make a video about, you could make a video called how we know that the earth is round. And I'm sure videos like that already exist on YouTube. Yeah. But the proper way to do it would be to make that video and not acknowledge that there's an opposite side to this, which is trying to convince you that the earth is flat. To simply say like, here's some experiments that you could do to try to figure out that the earth is round and how big it is. I strongly feel that there are many things like this where like the debate creates its own opposition. And I think the flat earth thing is exactly that. Like it was a joke. And then maybe some crazy people took it seriously and some super intense science types couldn't let that go. And so they started arguing with legitimately crazy people on the internet. And you do that enough and you birth the thing that you are afraid of. And now it exists in the world, right? It's like you've said beetle juice three times and now he's here. And if you just kept your mouth shut, we wouldn't have a problem. Yeah. It could be totally off base about this. But that's my personal theory about the current weird flat earth situation. I've totally gone that way because obviously I'm really into the moon landings as we all know. Totally fake. Well, that's it. And people, you know, for years have baited me about that. But years and years ago I stopped even responding. Yeah. Or if someone says, oh, you know, I've got this friend who thinks that the moon landings didn't happen. What should I say to them? I just sort of say, let him go. If people go back to the earlier shows, I used to try to make little like digging comments like I didn't believe that the moon landings were real. And you did the totally appropriate thing, which is like, I'm just going to ignore Gray. I'm not going to respond to him. And I let it go. The other thing there when someone asks you, like, oh, what do I say to a person who believes X? You have to understand there's almost nothing you can say in no small part because the person who thinks that the earth is flat or whatever, they're going to have a million way more well versed arguments than you can possibly bring to the table. Because I think about it. Exactly. Exactly. Because they're thinking about it constantly. Like if someone came into my flat right now and they said, hey, oh, there's a debate down the street. We've got a flat earther. We need someone who can debate against him. You have a degree in physics, right? You taught physics for a number of years. Could you come in and do this debate and they grabbed me and they put me on stage? I would lose. Like I would totally lose to the flat earth guy because he's going to come prepared with responses to everything that I say. And my response is going to be like, we have pictures from NASA and you can put two sticks in the ground and you can use trigonometry to calculate the size. And we'll be like, what's the trigonometric formula you need to know? Like, I don't remember. I don't know if the top of my head what it was. But the other hypothetical situation, which makes the other point about this that I'd like to make is if someone rushed into your flat and said, gray, there's a flat earther and a physicist down on the sidewalk right now and they're having a big fight about whether the earth is flat or not, you'd probably open the window and watch because it's a bit of a spectacle. Right. And that's the other reason you shouldn't really enter the debate because everyone loves an internet fight. Other people will just get come with their popcorn and watch the battle. And again, that's just giving more and more oxygen to something that probably needs a pillow put over its face. I feel like this is the biggest example of a bunch of these things that I've seen where if everybody could just calm down and not pay attention to a thing that everyone agrees as outrageous or dumb, it would slide off into obscurity or not have any power. But your human attention on the thing gives it more power than it has otherwise. Hey internet, chill out, calm down, doesn't matter. Something I've observed on flights, which I have decided I'm uncomfortable with, and that is just before you start a flight when they come on the public address system until you how many people are on the plane. There were 238 people on board. What? I think I have never heard that. Oh, I've noticed that a lot. Really? I've done a few flights lately with Virgin Atlantic and they did that and I haven't heard on other flights, but maybe some airlines do it and some don't. Virgin Atlantic do it. At the start of my flights, they say there were 238 people on board. There were 307 people on board. 307 souls on board. Well, that's worse if they say souls, but let's not even go there. I was going to mention that actually, but I don't think they should announce the number of people on the plane. I don't know why they do it. They can only be stating the curiosity of those nerdy people who are thinking, oh, I wonder how many people are on this plane. I don't think those people's curiosity needs to be stated because I think the only time you ever talk about the number of people that are on a plane is when they're dead. Yes. When it crashes, that's the only time I wonder how many people are on a plane. Oh, I heard a plane just crashed in Alaska. Really? How many people are on board? Right. I think saying that at the start of the flight is just like sowing the seed of, oh, that's the number they're going to have to give to the press in 20 minutes before we go up the end of the runway. Right. Right. Don't announce the number of people on the plane, plane people. If I ask, tell me, but don't let put it on the PA system. It doesn't make me nervous. You know, I'm not a nervous flyer, but I just think it's a bit weird. And the only context it can matter in is it's like, this is the stakes people. This is the number of lives that are going to be dangling from the sky hooks. Right. Okay. I've never heard that, but I think in general pilots are oversharers. The pilots always telling you all this crap that I don't want to know. Like, when we land and the pilot tells me what time it is in the place where I've just landed, I'll give you, there's like, is there anyone on this whole airplane that doesn't have a phone or a watch that is automatically adjusted through the time in the place where we have just landed? Yes, Brady. I actually find that really useful and wind my watch. But you have a phone on you, right? You know where time it is, right? You don't need the pilot to tell everyone. And the pilots tell you, oh, we're going to be flying up to 740,000 feet today at 300 miles an hour. Like, or whatever they say. I feel like, yeah, that's unnecessary. Yeah. Why are you telling me this? Are they like, oh, it's going to be a sunny day in our destination. We're going to land. Cool breezes coming in. People care about that. That's that's tradition and people care about what the weather's going to be like where they're going because most of them are going on holiday. I know you're usually not, but most of them are going on holiday and they really care about the weather. I do think they should tell you the time. The weather I also think is useful information because everyone wants to know what they're going to do when they get there. I do agree it's unnecessary to tell you all the stats about the flight, but I think that's just about portraying competence and that's can be reassuring. If you're a nervous flyer and the person at the front sounds like they know their crap, you're like, oh, yeah. Hey, you're she sounds like like really, really good at flying planes. And that's what I want to know. But I agree it's a bit unnecessary. I'm just going to disagree with that. I don't think it conveys competence. I always feel like, why are you talking to us? Don't you have pilot stuff to do up in the front? Like, if you leave that door open, I see there's a million switches and buttons. Shouldn't you be checking that all of those switches and buttons are in the right spot? Shouldn't you be checking that the auto pilot is all booted up and ready to take over at a moment's notice? The pilots are just so chatty. I find it annoying. Of course. This is the general noise pollution of being in airplane before you're taking off. I hate that. The one thing that drives me absolutely crazy is when they interrupt everything to announce that they're going to be coming through to sell duty free stuff. Selling duty free stuff on planes needs to be banned. Who actually does that? Like I reckon twice in my life I've seen someone say, oh, yes, please. And they come out and bring them like a sample of watchers to Peru's. Like who's shopping on a plane? It's just first, because I feel like, hey, we're all in this airplane. It's a tense situation. Maybe we could just have some black-sing chill-out music over the speakers. There's music specifically designed for this, right? Like play some Brian, you know, music for airports. And just leave it at that. Don't constantly interrupt. Because it also feels like there's that anxiety when it clicks on and they're about to talk to you. It's like, what is it? What are you going to tell me? I don't want to hear anything from you. I just want it to be nice and calm. Keep all of the chimpanzees you're loading onto this plane. Keep them nice and calm. Keep everybody relaxed. And we don't need to be doing all this chatty stuff. You don't need to be selling duty free. You don't need to be coming through collecting pennies for some charity that I'm going to resent forever because it's on your safety video. And I will never give them a scent if it encourages this kind of thing. Like just, can it just become, can it just be quiet? That's all I want. That's all I want in the airplane. I had a good one on my most recent flight, actually. We were taking off out of San Francisco and literally a minute after takeoff while the plane was still at a really steep angle. A pilot came out and just walked down the aisle. I think he needed to go to the toilet urgently. But you didn't know that. You just know that the plane is like literally only been off the ground for a minute. It's still steeply rising. And this pilot urgently walks out of the door and goes walking down the aisle. And for all we know, he could have been sent down to go and check the engine that's on fire or something. Right. So everyone was looking at him with these great big beam like, why not? I was like, what are you doing man? And he sort of saw the look we all had on our face. And he just said, don't worry, there's loads of us up there. And then he went off to the lure, I think, so I hope. That one he had to go, he got to go. Couldn't you have gone before we took off Roger? I feel like that doesn't get to the heart of the sentiment when you've got to go. You've got to go. So quantus the national carrier of my home nation have launched this new flight that they really proud of with the Dreamliner, where they're now doing nonstop flights from Perth to London. Oh, my wife mentioned this to me actually. She saw this. So Perth is a city on the west coast of Australia for those who don't know. This is a flight of 14 and a half thousand kilometers that takes about 17 hours. 17 hour flight. Even I winced at that. What are you reckon? Could you do a 17 hour flight? I'm just trying to think. What is the theoretical longest flight? The longest flight, there's one from Auckland, that's the longest that you can do. It was a slightly longer one. So what I'm trying to remember is the longest flight that I've ever done, longest direct flight, was New York to Hong Kong. And I'm trying to think about how many hours that was. Oh, that's long. It seemed like infinity hours. What does that do? That goes over America, does that, and then over the Pacific? It goes over the North Pole. Funny enough, I forgot the Earth was round. I was looking at the flat map thinking, what way do you go? I forgot you could do that. Fly me, that's a long flight. Didn't you hit the Antarctica wall when you did that? Hong Kong to New York, it looks like it depends a little bit on the exact plane that they're using, but it's about 16, 16 and a half hours. About that. I can't say so. Just under the seven. So just under the 17 for London to Perth. It is a long, long time to be on a plane. And the only reason I did that flight was because when I was doing it, my mom was actually on the plane. And there's this whole complicated logistics about the priority ranking order of people flying standby. And so my mom was working that flight. And I was there with her. And the way it works in the ranking is like, you are 100% guaranteed that you're the top person at the list if you have a crew member working on the plane, which guaranteed that I was able to get into a first or a business class seat on that flight. I would not have gone otherwise to be like in the middle row in the back on an airplane going from New York to Hong Kong, I would rather die than do that. So that is the only way is that we're like, extenuating circumstances for how I could greatly increase the comfort level during that trip. But even then, I remember feeling like this is forever on a plane. It's a bizarre amount of time to spend on an airplane. Yeah. I feel like if you're flying to Perth, you must have to do a connection, right? Because I mean, how many people actually want to go to Perth? Doesn't everybody want to get to the other side of Australia? Isn't that like another, what, three hours, four hours, five hours? How long does it take to get from Perth to Sydney? Actually, yeah, that's probably four, maybe I'm not sure. Because Perth to Adelaide, I think, is about three. Australia is big. It's the same way in which in my head, every time I'm going to fly from East Coast to the West Coast, every time I think, all right, I'm going to settle in for this three hour flight, three hours is long, but it's doable. And every time I'm surprised that it's five hours. I don't know why I can't mentally place that the coasts are much further apart in America than they actually are. If you're not going directly to Perth, you're right, and you're going to have to change planes anyway, your mayors will change planes roughly halfway, right? You know, it's got to be four hours or at least three hours to get across Australia, to go from Perth to Sydney or something. It is, yeah, I think it's probably four. Or I guess really the important thing is Perth to Adelaide. That's the best. That's less. So are you going to be taking this on the next time you go out to Adelaide? Are you going to take this as long non-stop? Definitely not. Definitely not. Why not? Isn't there a big advantage to doing the non-stops though? What's the advantage? If I'm going to have to just swap planes in Perth anyway to go to Adelaide, but also like most airlines in the world, Quantisers Fountains, way onto my list of airlines, I'm not very happy with that. Oh, okay. And also you can go direct into Adelaide if you fly Emirates. You can just change it to Dubai and then go to Dubai direct to Adelaide so you can actually do your change in Dubai. Ah, split it in half and Emirates planes are really, really nice. Okay. Makes sense then. That makes sense. I mean, in general, I will do anything in the world to, you know, a non-stop flight versus having to do the change, a heat doing the change over. If I was going to Perth for something, which I have done before, then I'd consider it. But why is Quantis on your, on your bad list breeding? What did they do? I can't even remember now. You know how you just get into your head there? A certain airlines you like and other ones you don't like. Not really, Quantisers. No. The only one I can think of is there's some airline that I don't fly anymore. Is there orange, easy jet? I don't know. Well, Ryan A is worse than easy jet. Yeah, maybe it was Ryan Aire. Whatever it was, they don't do with sign seats. And I found that out the hard way. Yeah, that's Ryan Aire. Yeah, that's Ryan Aire. Everybody just has to, um, over each other. Like your George Costanza exiting a party with the, with the rumors on fire. And just like run in and grab your, I did that once and I was like, never again. Like, I don't care how much I need to be somewhere. I will never step on an airplane without a sign seat. Like that was brutal. It was like loading cattle into an airplane. Ryan Aire was the ones who considered charging people to use the toilet. Like Ryan Aire like a very unliked airline. I mean, you know, you got to give an airline credit for doubling down on what they are. That is like their marketing tool, isn't it? They're because they charge you for everything. They appeal to cheap people because they think, oh, if I can just not go to the toilet and not carry luggage and not have an assigned seat and you start thinking, and not eat any food, you start thinking of all the ways you can save money. And then like you start to think, oh, this could be a real bargain. It never ends up being a bargain, though. And also Ryan Aire like the airports they have deals with are usually actually about like a six hour bus ride from the destination you want to go to. They must have been the ones that a couple years ago were under some, some lawsuit for false advertising about. Oh, it's London to Paris, but actually have to drive to the middle of England. And they drop you off in the middle of France. That's right. You can't call that a London to Paris flight. They're a funny old airline. Okay. So I have one then that's on my list of, okay. I don't like you airlines. That's Ryan Aire. They will not be a sponsor of this episode. Hello, internet. This episode is brought to you by Audible. Now, I listened to a lot of audiobooks, but I've been listening to even more audiobooks because as you may be aware, there is a Mr. Trumpers in my life. And you know what's great on a beautiful afternoon while you're walking a little doggo in the park or in my case, a not so little doggo who is built like a brick listening to an audiobook while you're doing it. Because while walking a dog in the park is great, it's not as mentally engaging for a human as it is for a dog. So this is the perfect time to listen to audiobooks. There are so many spaces in your life like this that can be improved with audiobooks. An Audible is the place where I get all of my audiobooks from. One of the reasons that I love them is because they have this whispersync technology with your Amazon Kindle, so that both of them keep in place at the same time. And you can pick up on your physical Kindle to read your book and then go back to listening to it on audio. And it's all one seamless experience. Now, if you're like me, you might be thinking, I would never do that. I would rather just listen to a book or read it but not both. I used to be that guy too, but now this is the thing that I do with some books. Particularly the one that I mentioned last time and I have now just finished, which was called Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday. That was one of my listen to it and read it and listen to it back and forth books. And I really enjoyed the experience. And I'm mentioning it again here because I thought that book was just so good. I've actually suggested it to Brady and he's thinking that he might read it as well, so it could come up as a topic of discussion on Hello Internet. So I really recommend that you go listen to it on Audible. It is just a fascinating story about Galker and the billionaire Peter Teal and Freedom of the Press versus Freedom of Speech and what should be able to be said online about people. I think it's a really well written book about a very important topic in the modern world. And what I always really like in books is I found it pushing back against some of my own ideas on this topic. So I highly recommend it. That's Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday. And when you give a book a try on Audible, if you don't like it, you can just return it no questions asked, which I know for me makes me way more likely to try more books. You give the book 30 minutes. If it's boring as all get out, which, you know, is for someone who reads a lot of nonfiction can often be the case, just boop back it goes. What's the reason? It was boring. I didn't like it. Audible doesn't care. Audible doesn't ask. They just refund your credits and you can use them towards another book. It's great. So to start your 30-day trial and get your first audiobook free, maybe it will be Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday, go to audible.com slash Hello Internet or text Hello Internet to 500-500. That's Hello Internet all one word. So once again, audible.com slash Hello Internet or text Hello Internet to 500-500 to get started. No one has a wider selection of audiobooks than Audible and no one makes it easier to listen to those audiobooks everywhere you want to listen to than Audible. So go give them a try audible.com slash Hello Internet and thank you to Audible for supporting Hello Internet and keeping my mind mentally engaged during all those long dog walks in the park. Let's talk about money. Let's talk about money, Brady. So I saw a competition that I didn't know it was a competition but I think it's fantastic and this is the bank note of the year. I like the sound of this one. Bank note of the year competition. I think just recently we've had the latest winners announced. I'm looking at an article called Sharks, Artors and a Man Playing Rugby, the most beautiful bank notes in the world. So this article I've sent you has all the the finalists but at the very bottom of the article it also does have the winner. The bank note of the year. Okay, let's take a look at this. This is decided by a global organization called the International Bank Note Society. Man, their end of your party is crazy. They're dedicated to cataloging and critiquing the world's notes. And almost certainly pushing for a national bank note day. That's probably one of the things they're doing as well. Every year, the IBNS is that can be snappily cold. Holds a global competition to find the best bank note released in the last 12 months with surprisingly fierce competition for the coveted title of bank note of the year. So the results for 2017 were announced recently in 2018. So the runners up included the 100-coronor note from Norway. Yeah, we've discussed Norway's money before. Yeah, because I've seen this one. This is indeed one of those notes that has like a cool picture on one side and on the other side it's got like the pixelated identity protected version. So that was one. Oh, interesting. It's not even just who has the best currency but it's a specific note. Yes, it's a note. So it has to be a note that has just been released that year. Right. Okay, so it's Norway's 100-coronor note. We will link to this list but Greg, give us a quick one or two sentence summary of the 100-coronor note from Norway. What do you think of it? Okay, 100-coronor notes. It's very red. Boat on the front. A boat facing you. Very viking looking boat. Like it's coming out of the note. And then like you said, on the back they have this pixelated version of the same image from the front. Apparently that pixelated version on the reverse side according to the right up is a container ship. It's a pixelated container ship. That makes sense. I can see that. I would say it's a very modern looking note. Like they have big numbers. Like modern fonts seem to like big numbers or banners that have the same number in them. And yeah, sort of very geometric in places. I like it. I like it a lot. I think it's a good note. Also, I run her up. We have Djiboutis 40 Frank note. Is it Djibouti? I thought it was Djibouti. I don't know. Did you? I feel like it's Djibouti. All right. Djibouti, you can let me know. What do you think of that? On one side they have this really striking picture of what is that? It's like a tiger shark. It's a whale shark. It's a whale shark. Can you believe it? We've gone a hundred episodes. And in episode 101, the whale shark comes up twice. That's the way the world works. So we have a whale shark on one side. Very kind of like photo realistic picture of a whale shark kind of cruising amongst a coral reef. And on the other side, we have cranes and construction stuff. What do you think of that one? I'm going to give this one a big thumbs down. Yes, me too. I do not like Djibouti's Frank note. Why do you give it a thumbs down? What do you not like really? I give it a thumbs down because on the reverse side, it has this colorful little logo celebrating the 40th anniversary of something. Oh God. I didn't even notice that. That's gross. Yeah, it looks like something temporary that's put on there like a little ad. It's like an as seen on TV sticker. Well, you're looking at a new note. Why don't you also be aware of, we're hosting the Olympics this year or something. It looks unnecessary and tacky. I like the front side. I think the reverse side is a bit of a dog's dinner. I'm going to say I don't like the whale shark on the front because we reached a point with banknote technology where designers don't ask if they can. There's so much that you can do. And I think that the image of the whale shark is too realistic looking. In my design manual of money, I would say that you need some level of abstraction. And that picture on the front has crossed over the level of abstraction. Particularly the carol in the background is a bit too detailed. Yeah, it's very detailed. I don't like it at all. I also don't like a thing that a lot of modern banknotes are doing, which this one has done as well, is they have a section where there's a transparent security feature. So you can hold it up to the light and there's an image that you can see. And depending on how the bank notes do it, it usually ends up leaving what seems to be a big blank spot on the bank note. And this one has I think a very ugly area to show where is the transparent security feature, where it's all just white on the one side and white on the other side. So I think that's pretty ugly. Like if these were the finalists for the most beautiful bank notes in the world, there must not have been a lot of money released in the world this year because I think this one is pretty ugly. It's pretty ugly. 40 Djibouti Franks is worth 20 cents by the way. That's 20 cents worth. You look on out there. Okay. Well, then that's also a very useless banknote and very frustrating. Now our next runner up is interestingly, Fiji has a $7 note, which is interesting in itself. This is also an example of a kind of banknote that I have seen spreading the world, which is the vertical banknote. This is like, you know, should videos be done vertical on your phone or horizontal, the same controversy spreading into the banknote world. Should our bank notes have the writing say that they are correctly orientated when you're holding it vertically or horizontal? They've hedged their bets on the Fiji $7 note and done it both ways. This is the worst. This is the worst of everything. Whatever you think about the great vertical banknote debate, you got to pick a team, Fiji, and I'm going to give you double thumbs down for not being consistent about, is this banknote vertical or is this banknote horizontal? If you try to do both, all you get is two thumbs down for me. I do not like this banknote for many reasons, but that is definitely one of them. I feel like that is a dumb design decision for when you're flipping through your money and you haven't pre-sorted it all in the right way. It's like intentional obfuscation of money. I don't like it at all. It's like, you fail as a banknote to flip through. Fiji, get out of here. I don't like this note. For those who don't know, this note features the Fiji Rugby 7's team. That's why it's a $7 note. Idiot. Rugby is normally played with 15 players a team, but there's another version of Rugby where you have seven players per team. It's called Rugby 7's. They trialled this sport at the last Olympics for the first time and Fiji won. This was like a big deal to the people of Fiji. They won the Olympic gold medal in this Rugby 7's. That's why it's a $7 note. The pictures got Rugby players all over it. On one side, it's got a Rugby player running with the ball. On the other side, it's got the whole team celebrating with their gold medals. Wait a second. Wait a second. This is the currently living Rugby team. It was very recent. Last Olympics. This is like a special addition note because then I like it even less if this is actually an currency. I was thinking like, oh, Fiji, they must use some strange base seven counting system. That's the only reason you would have a $7 note. That's why I thought I'd first tell you, but no, it's because of the Rugby 7's. I cannot tell you how big a deal this is to the country, though. It's entirely feasible to me that they have changed their number system because of how happy they are to have won the Rugby 7's. They've changed from the decimal system to some sort of septus-imal system or something. But also the thing is they've chosen kind of crummy pictures. If you look at the vertical side of the note, you'll see a guy in the bottom corner just sitting there like in his shorts. Funnily enough, he's an English guy called Ben Ryan who was the coach of the team and he's been seen as a bit of a messiah there because he sort of took them to this title. So he's not even Fiji in. He's this English guy who Fiji is just love because he coached the team. Well, I mean, if you're going to put out a bill with a team on it, I think it's fair to put the coach on there. That makes sense. But yes, he's like photoshopped into the corner sitting looking pensively. It's like, I don't have enough hands for how many thumbs down I want to give this note the more I look at it. There's a lot of things wrong with it, I would say. I mean, these last two are really lowering my opinion of the international banknote society. I have to say, I held them in high regard before, but this is a lot on their copybook. Yeah, this is a real dog's breakfast. That's what this is. One day I want to have a talk to you about having people from other countries as coaches of your national sporting teams because that's a holy shoe. I find very interesting. But let's move to another runner up. The Canadian $10 note, I will describe this as a breath of fresh air compared to the last two. I'm not sure what I would think about this note if I was just seeing it on its own. If I was just doing some work and someone lead down a Canadian tenor on the table and said, what do you think of this? What do you think of that purple bad boy? I mean, having looked at particularly the Fiji $7 before, I feel like, oh, what amazing work has been done here. I think it looks good, but I feel like I'm very biased compared to what I have just seen. Just before our Canadian business get too carried away, by the way, this isn't the new Canadian $10 note, which is also a vertical note, which I've had in our notes to talk about for some time now, but this is not that note. This is the one that was released to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the creation of the Canadian Confederation, and it features some of the country's greatest figures. There seem to be four people who have made it onto the note. So what do they have two different versions of the $10 note? I don't know. It looks like this is like a one-off bonus note. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Or I don't know if that $10 one's come out since. We've got Sir John McDonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir George Etienne Cartier, the father of Canadian federalism. Sorry for my pronunciation. I'm sure he's a really important person. Agnes McFale, first woman elected to the Canadian Parliament. So they've listed three of the four. I'm looking at the description like, who's the fourth person? Ah, whatever. Probably some hockey player. It was the guy who invented Maple syrup. No, it's Tim Horton. That's who it is. There you go. Purply. I don't like this one, particularly. I think it's a bit too busy. It's a bit designed by committee. Yeah, yeah. It feels like committee design. They couldn't decide what people would have put on it. They couldn't decide what landscapes to put on the reverse side. So they put four. Yeah. On the reverse side, there's four different landscapes in four different colors. On the front, you're right. You have the four people. But even in the transparent watermark section, there's three or four different elements, depending on how you want to count them. It does feel very designed by committee. If everyone has their... Ooh, I like the mountains. It's like, well, I like fields of wheat. Well, why not compromise and let's have both? Well, because it makes uglier bank notes. That's why. Our final runner-up before we do get to the winner if you're still listening. Oh my God. We have another runner-up. It's the Royal Bank of Scotland's Scottish 10-pound note. A lot of people from outside the UK might not realise that in Scotland, they do print their own currency. But it is the same value as the currency in England. It transfers across the border. But you do have some notes in English notes. Transfer is across the border in theory. But no one in England wants to take those notes. What is this? What's this nonsense? In London, you're going to have a really hard time passing off your phony Scottish 10-pound note. It's not going to happen. So here we have a 10-pound Scottish note. Ugly. UGL. Why? Quite ugly colour. It's kind of a ready brown like it. It's ready brown. But here's what makes it ugly. There's, okay, so you have regular design elements. It could be fine. But I don't know what's in the background here, but they have like lined paper almost going across the back like there's all these black lines stretching across the reverse of the image. There's two, or those two otters. What the heck are those two things? Yeah. There's two otters battling with each other on the back of the note. It's all muddy and gross and very black. And the numbers are not easy to read. This is genuinely depressing for the world of design. There's this to real opportunity here too, because the person on it is Mary Somerville, who is a pioneering female scientist, first female member of the Royal Astronomical Society. Oh my god, why not space stuff? There's some space stuff. I looked at the picture and didn't recognise her. And I saw writing a verse, I thought, oh, is this some like power to something? Yeah, some otter specialist perhaps? Or not a specialist, yeah. But this is a chance they should have really spaced to that and made it like, you know, but here they've made her, you know, they've given her like a hat fair enough if they have to put her in the hat from the time, but they've kind of made her look demure. And I think this should have been a more muscular note. You know what I'm realising? They should have gone more black. If you're going to make a note for a space person, make it all black. And then the design elements would be the bright colors. They'll be really eye-catching. Good on them for putting Mary Somerville on a note though. She's good choice, but I don't think they executed it well. And those, yeah, what are those otters up to? Are they fighting? Are they mating? They're in a very weird pose. I think it's the fight to the death. You don't think they're having a bit of romance? I don't think they're having a bit of romance. I don't know what it looks like when otters either have romance or fight. So I've seen plenty of otter fights to the death. That's exactly what I'm like. It's brutal. So our winner, and for a second consecutive year, it is a Swiss note, is Switzerland's 10-Frank note. And it's a vertical note. Well, at least it's vertical on both sides. So, yeah, competence in that department. Unlike some other Fiji and nations I could mention. It's the first new design of the Swiss National Bank has released in 20 years, which confuses me in how they win the previous. Anyway, it includes images of human hands conducting an orchestra with a globe showing time zones and the punctual Swiss rail system. You said the Canadian one has designed by committee? In the bank notes that I have seen in the past many years. There's a feeling of designed by Photoshop to a lot of them. That is, this is a generation of designers who are not used to doing print design on small spaces. That their designers used to doing Photoshop work on a big screen. And I feel like that actually covers a lot of the things I don't like about a bunch of these notes. It feels like, oh, I can see those giant hands conducting the orchestra as a layer in Photoshop. And then you bring in, there's some negative space here. Let's put a little globe beneath it. And someone drags the globe and re-sizes it to be just the right size to fit underneath the hands. And the back reverse with some of the train elements in the gears, it feels the same way. Yeah, I think that's what is. A lot of these notes, they're too photorealistic and it feels like designed by Photoshop. Do you think maybe also a problem they're having is they try to get too much complexity into the notes to stop fraud? I mean, that's possible. Like one thing that has definitely made bank notes look worse. And you can see very clearly on this 10-frank note. So on the side that has the hands and the time zone globe and also all the clocks in the background. At the bottom, there's that sequence of yellow circles. And this is a security pattern that almost all of the notes have somewhere. And that little sequence of circles is instructions to something like a photocopying machine. So that if it sees that sequence of circles, it will not reproduce the note. And it's like, okay, that's a great security feature. Once you tune into it, you notice it on all of the different notes everywhere. But almost without exception, it makes all of the notes uglier and you have to fit it somewhere. And the only real exception to this was the Darwin 10-pound note, which had a little bouquet of flowers. And they hit all of the circles as part of the flowers, which I thought was like a nice design. But lots of other places just slap it on somewhere or they put it in the background. So I will agree that security features can make a note uglier, like the transparent windows. They can make the note uglier. But those security features don't require this complexity. I don't think that the intricacy of the design is a meaningful security feature currently. We wind the clock 50 years. And yes, trying to reproduce a complicated design on a piece of paper would be a hard thing to do. I think that's a trivial thing to do now. And the security feature is like the holograms or like the special threads that they weave through the bills are all like those are the security features. Not the fact that you have these ugly hands over a globe with time zones and also clocks and also a little cross and also trains and also gears. I don't think that stuff is a security feature at all. It's just ugly. And also the first prime minister and the first female MP and the first person to do it like all right, just pick one. Yeah. So man, this is terrible. The clear winner is Norway's 100-kroner note by a mile. That's what I'm going to say about this. Does it matter what money looks like in air and increasingly cashless societies? I think it does. I think money is an identity building token. It's a thing that helps build a nation as a unit. On my last trip to America, I was really aware of just the smell of American money. I was actually kind of going to ask because you just came from America, but I was wondering is this a thing that I'm just tuned into from having grown up with it or do you visiting America? Are you aware of the particular smell of American money? I think I am, but I don't think it sters in me what I imagine it sters in you. Yeah, it sters avarice. That's the smell of money. It's a really visceral thing. I think smell memories in particular feel like a very base memory. They're hitting a lower part of your brain. Do you have a good sense of smell? Do you have a terrible sense of smell? Which is partly why I was aware. I just tuned into and noticed it because I hadn't thought about it in a while. The particular look of American money, I think American money looks very different from other bills around the world. American money looks like what money looks like. Because you've grown up watching movies and TV shows in America. That's default money. It is, but I genuinely think that it has a distinct look to it that makes it different from other monies around the world. It's also interesting that it hasn't been modernized. Australian money from when I was young had very traditional old-fashioned designs and that was on paper. It went through this modernization of looking cool and going plastic and they didn't go quite as overboard as Norway. But America never seems to have done that. It still seems to have Roman columns and paintings of people who were dead and they've stuck with it. I like that. America has done what I think is a very good job of very slowly modernizing the notes. This has been a process over my lifetime to see that they've slowly just changed some of the elements. The $10 bill that I grew up with had Hamilton in a portrait. Now the new one pulls him out so they get rid of the portrait. But they still keep the basic look of it. Again, I'm not saying that if you were starting from scratch, this is the way you would design the bills. But they've done a great job of American money is green, but they have ever so slightly colorized the bills. They've mostly colorized it by trying to use elements that were already present in the bills. The $10 note, I think, is the best example of this where they've made it 10, but it's a kind of 10 that existed in the old ones. I think it's not nothing to have money that feels like a place and has some kind of distinctiveness. I really think it is a tool of building a national identity. The American money has done something with that. I just think that the smell of American money is also something that means something in the minds of Americans as a real identifier. I was just thinking about how the UK is in the process of switching over to these polymer bills. The UK money has a very faint smell. I'm not tuned into it, but polymer bills have no smell at all. That's a thing that is totally going away. I wouldn't argue for necessarily keeping it, but I just think it's an interesting thing to note. But I do think that the design of bills matters, that it's part of building a nation. I think countries should have really distinct notes that look like they're part of a country. Before the European Union came along, I always really liked when I was a kid the Dutch money that I had from going over to the Netherlands and having some of those bills. I mean, this is Dutch money. It feels like a different thing. It has tool ups on it. The designs were really nice. So I do think it's important and some of these bills. It's like they're going too hard on being modern or just putting a bunch of crap from their country all over the bills without looking nice. It's too gimmicky. So sometimes, I don't know. I feel this way about stamps as well. Stamps are like these nice things. And when they start going crazy and releasing 10,000 different stamps every year, this week we're releasing Star Wars stamps and things. I'm like, I just want the queen's head. That's all I want. It's like marketing for the country when you send out a postcard and it has the different colored queen head stamps on it. It's sending a message of the country abroad. I don't know. These notes are ugly. They're hideous. Obviously, I kind of like the smell of American money and I like the way American money looks even though it looks super old. And I do just want to say, while we're talking about cash, I freaking love the new polymer notes in the UK. Now that we have two of them, it's not just the five, which was a gimmick. Now that we have the five and the 10, I feel like itchy about getting the 20 onto this polymer train because it's so pleasing and so clean feeling to have the five and the 10 pound notes as polymer notes. I was sad to see Darwin go on the bill, but it's like, whatever. These polymer notes are so great. I cannot wait until the 20 goes polymer as well. If I have a 20, I want to spend it immediately because the only notes that I want in my wallet are polymer notes. I don't want these disgusting paper notes in my wallet, not one tiny bit. Do you think America should go polymer? Well, that's the thing. That's kind of what I'm wondering is how important is the smell of the money. But I really do mean that. My guess is that America might not go polymer anytime soon. Unlike what other countries do, America recognizes its legal tender forever. So if you find like a suitcase full of 20s from 50 years ago in your grandma's attic, the United States Mint will still accept that. I didn't know that because that was my next question. I was wondering if they went polymer because the thing that has struck me in the UK is when they announce a new one, how short a time you've got to get rid of your paper ones. And if they did that in America, the whole country would be dug up by mobsters. Wouldn't that with all their notes wrapped in plastic buried in backyards that I've seen all the TV shows in the movies? Yeah. So my understanding is after a certain point, you have to go through a different process. Like you can't bring it into a bank. I think you need to bring it to like a specialty place, but it will still be accepted. Whereas like you say, in the UK, man, they give you whatever it is. Like you've got six weeks or something between when the new notes come out and when you need to get rid of all your old notes, which I mean, I honestly think in the long term, that's a much better thing to do because of course, the whole process for counterfeiting US money is how old can you counterfeit it and still get away with it. Right. So it's like bringing out newer technology in the notes is less helpful for American money than it is for UK money where they can just say like no more Darwin's after the first of April. It's over. If you have them, they're instantly transmuted into worthless paper and only the polymer money counts. Is that true? I can't believe you can't take them somewhere and get them changed if you find some oldies. My understanding is that you can't at all. I could be wrong about that, but my understanding was that you can't even take it to a bank that is just done. I'd be curious to know if I'm mistaken about that. But nonetheless, I do think that America being in the position where it's such a global currency and particularly American $100 bills as this international currency sometimes used for good and sometimes not used for good. I do think America is in a position where it would be detrimental to many things to say we won't accept older notes. I really do think that would be a kind of problem. And because of that, I could see it being a very, very long time before America goes to polymer notes because like there's less of an advantage technology-wise and then you'd end up with notes that seem really, really different. I don't know. And I do really like that smell. I'd be very sad if that smell ever goes away. Okay, Brady. Do you remember maybe it was two years ago now? Apple changed their gun emoji into a water pistol. Does this sound familiar to you? Do you know what? I didn't know they'd done that. I reckon the last time I used it, it was still a metal gun that fired bullets. Okay, if you open up your phone right now and you go look for a gun like a cowboy six shooter, there is nothing for you there except a water pistol emoji. I never clocked that change and I used to use the guns sometimes. Well, the most useful thing with the gun is in combination with the, I think the official name is the neutral face emoji. The guy with little lines, horizontal lines for his eyes and a horizontal line for his mouth. Yeah. And so you use the gun against his head and this is the universal symbol for I'm in a really boring meeting. Everybody knows this. That's what that was for. Okay. So Apple a couple years ago changed the gun into a water pistol. Right. Do you have any thoughts on this? Having just learned this piece of late breaking information? I'm very, very belatedly outraged. Why are you outraged? I don't know. It's like the whole safety, political correctness like gone mad, isn't it? It's just like, come on. I'm with you 100%. I was really angry at it at the time because it felt pointlessly political. I don't really want the technology companies that rule our lives to be super political. Like you can say whatever you want about children or whatever, but like the gun emoji, it's clearly a political thing on Apple's part to change it into a water pistol. Because we don't want to be seen to be advocating gun ownership or suicide in boring meetings. Or suicide in boring meetings, despite the sweet relief that it would be. We have to, we have to still make it through. Or boring podcasts. We just have the pistol emoji and the face guy is the title for this episode. That have worked across all platforms beautifully. Yeah, no, that's exactly it, right? So I thought it was dumb. I also hated how it became a political thing because at the time a lot of people were kind of celebrating this as though like they have taken away a thing from people who like guns and it's like, okay, great. Now we're just being pointlessly spiteful and vindictive. Like, ha ha ha. People who like guns won't be able to use a gun emoji, screw them. But replacing it with a water pistol kind of makes it worse. Like if they've just taken the gun away, I'd be like, oh, okay, you're a bit bleeding heart, political, whatever. But then to replace it with like a silly water pistol, it's almost like making it worse, like belittling it even more, making it more. I completely agree. If they wanted to do something in the name of the children or whatever, you could just take it off the keyboard in a restricted iPhone mode. Apple has all of these features now for setting up a phone or an iPad for kids. And I feel like, okay, yeah, flip the iPad or the phone into kid safe mode. And then it just simply wouldn't show the gun. Like that just wouldn't pop up on the emoji keyboard. Again, I don't know what you think you're accomplishing by that. But whatever, like if you feel like you need to do something or be seen to be doing something, do that. It also doesn't make any sense because they still have like the middle finger emoji. Is that, you know, are they going to change the middle finger emoji to be something entirely different? And what about that knife? That's clearly a weapon knife because it's in the same part of the keyboard that's got like tombstones and the bomb. And the bomb, there's a bomb that's in there, right? There's still the bomb. Yeah. Yeah. There's a cigarette too. Yeah. Let's start arguing the relative merits of smoking cigarettes versus shooting guns. But that is why it bothered me because it felt clearly political because if it's like, oh, if your concern is about what precious children's eyes see in this emoji keyboard, I would argue you should probably start with that cigarette far before you start with the gun. But anyway, like this whole argument is stupid and adults use keyboards. Like you shouldn't change it all over this thing. But anyway, Apple did. I thought it was super dumb. And we were in the position where for two years, only Apple's emoji was a water pistol. And everybody else's was a regular six shooter gun. Yeah. And also just in a little bit of background here, the way emojis work is that each emoji has an official description. And it is up to each of the companies for how they want to draw that description. And the description for this emoji is gun. Right. That's the description. If you say the word gun, nobody thinks of a water pistol. Nobody. I tell you what emoji decks. Again, I still don't know what emoji decks is, but their gun is badass, man. Oh, yeah. Moji decks got a really cool gun. Yeah. Don't mess with emoji decks. That's for sure. They're not pulling out of water pistol. But so we didn't talk about it at the time, but I had been talking with the number of people and like, my guess was that this change was a bit like some of the safety stuff that we've talked about before, that it's a ratchet that only turns in one direction so that if someone makes a water pistol, it may take a little while, but everyone's going to be a water pistol eventually because who wants to be the only company that doesn't care about this important issue, right? Moji decks. Moji decks. That's it. Don't change your gun, man. You're a cool one. Yeah. So we're getting water pistolization of the gun emoji. Yeah. So essentially, since the last time we have recorded Samsung and the big one is Twitter have just changed into water pistols. And like total pansies, they've just copied Apple's design as well, right? So they're just like, oh, we're going to make it a green water pistol too. And it looks pretty much exactly the same. I just hate this. This kind of stuff really bothers me, but within a year like 95% of the emoji market mind share will have switched over into the water pistol. I think we have Google and LG and Facebook. Those are like the big holdouts still. I feel like it's just a matter of time that this is what's going to happen. And I find it annoying. I just find it irritating and annoying. I find it annoying that they've changed from a gun to a water pistol that's stupid. And I could talk about that all day. But if this change is going to happen, the one thing I will disagree with is that I think they should do it the same way. They should all be green. Obviously, they should all point the same way. The one thing I don't like is when they all completely diverge because then you have this communication problem like I used to have with my Lulu and Audrey emoji with the wolf. And I thought I was sending people pictures of a dog that looked like my dog. And I was to other people, I was sending them like a grave forward facing wolf. So I think you should feel confident that when you're communicating across platforms, everyone's getting the same message that I shouldn't do it. I should always use guns. Doug, I agree with you there. I just think that Twitter and Samsung look particularly like sheep because of how much their guns look like Apple's guns. Whereas WhatsApp has at least gone with something that's a water gun, but it looks a little bit different. It's a different color. But I, you know, this gets into the weird emoji fragmentation, which I feel like is a whole other argument. But now we're in the situation where it's all inconsistent and it's extra dumb. And the more inconsistent it is, I feel like the greater the pressure is on the remaining holdouts to switch over into water pistol territory. Maybe just emoji decks will hold out with their pistol. It's funny when you call up the old iOS versions and you just see it, this gun got gun, gun, gun, gun, gun, gun. And suddenly it just turns bright green and turns into water pistol. It's like, yeah. I wonder what happened. I wonder what if it was a particular incident, was it like a particular shooting incident or a political moment or I don't know if there was a particular incident. But even still it feels like, well, I guess when the next bombing happens, I'm going to get all up and in Apple's face on Twitter and complain about the fact that there are bombs in their keyboard. This kind of like new speak editing of the emoji dictionary of like, oh, we don't want you to be able to express this thought, this thought that guns exist. I just feel like it's dumb on every level. Like it's dumb because it doesn't do anything. It's dumb because it creates pointless anger in people and a pointless sense of victory in others. I feel like it's just, it's a total waste of human time and efforts across every level. And it is also this ratchet that only turns in one direction and will go to infect all of the other versions once it gets started. I'm scrolling to see if there's a bit mojie that has a gun but I can't find one. You got to stop sending me those bit mojie Brady. You got to stop sending them to me. I did like, I regret bringing it up on the podcast because now you send me all the mojie. I've only sent you a capo. Each of them dilutes my soul. They're awful. They're terrible and your bit mojie is terrifying. I deliberately choose ones that I'm going to upset you. Thank you, which is all of them.
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Category:Hello Internet Episode
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