H.I. No. 33: Mission to Mars

"H.I. #33: Mission to Mars" is the 33rd episode of Hello Internet, released on March 16, 2015.
==Official Description==
Grey & Brady talk more about if Brady does or does not touch the microphone, Grey's animation and writing habits, productivity, the news, Brady goes to Dubai, skyscrapers, 1st world internet famous people humblebrags, accidental follows, plane crash corner, and should humans go to Mars?
==Show Notes==
*Igloo: An intranet you'll actually like
*Hover.com The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code VIEWJACKING for 10% off.
*Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month
*Listeners like YOU on Patreon
*Discuss this episode
*Grey's Twitter activity
*How Grey writes
*Elon Musk goes to IHOP, not the gym
*Destin & Tara's new baby
*James Morey: First Mc 10:35
*Llama chase
*Burj Al Arab
*Burj Khalifa
*The Shard
*The Empire State Building
*https://duckduckgo.com
*Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia
*Skyscraper News
*CN Tower
*Willis Tower
*The Black Stump
*The Black Stump as it was when Brady was a boy
*Grey's downloaded files on The Shard
*Grey's new Patreon goal
*The spiritual home of Numberphile
*James Grime
*Harrison Ford aviation
*Numberphile: Riemann Hypothesis
*Derek
*Henry
*Destin
*Red Mars
*Mission to Mars
 
Alright, so for those who don't know, Grey has just been telling me off like a schoolboy for my, what is it my sort of my microphone discipline? He claims that I keep doing things to ruin his recordings. All I was asking, all I was asking is that you don't fidget with the microphone by touching it when you're not talking and I could see you doing it on the video camera and then you're telling me how you don't do it. I refuse to believe I do it. I'm obviously doing it unconsciously. I refuse to believe I ever touched this microphone in front of me. And you claim to have saved me do it. Yeah, that's all you do. I will be listening extra intently during this podcast. See if I can catch you doing it while we're talking. If I can hear it over the headphones, be like, what are you doing right now, Brady? Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Passing a note, no, no. You will like activate all the cameras immediately. So yes, I saw you doing that and it was infuriating to edit out last time. But that's fine, you know, whatever. You know how we talk on the video first beforehand and then we start recording and you switch off the video. Right. It kind of like freezes in the last, the camera like freezes with the last shot I saw of you. Oh yeah. And you freeze at this time in the middle of you doing a big gigantic laugh. So I've got this big, happiest, smileiest CGP Gray I've ever seen, staring from the screen at me. It's really cute. Is that what you're going to look at the whole time I'm recording? It is. It is. It is. So no matter what happens for the rest of this podcast, I'm just going to think you're really happy at me and everything's good. Whatever works. If that works for you, that's great. The funny thing is that's a complete contrast to what you really seem to be like at the moment. You're going to be doing it on Twitter and that and you've been doing nothing but a wind and grumble and sigh and... Yeah, this is... I'm not going to deny that at all. I am... I am Mr. Complainty Pants on Twitter whenever I am animating and I've been animating for the past two days and yes, I just... I use Twitter as a steam vent to just release frustration whenever I'm in the middle of an animation. So I feel very badly for everyone who follows me during this time but that's just the way things are. So your Twitter usage goes through the roof when you're animating. I could always tell when you're animating because a lot of a sudden you're on Twitter all the time. That is without a doubt that is true and other people notice as well. If I am just like tweeting up a storm, there is a very good chance I am doing something that is terribly tedious and that is usually animation. The thing I don't understand and this is like part of the cycle of being friends with CGPGRA. Is that whenever you have your video come out once or twice a month or whatever you're whatever you think is. You go through this period where I'm animating and I can't do anything and I'm really busy and I'm really stressed and you're a real pain in the backside and I don't understand why this is the case because you're so leisurely about researching these videos. You're quite flexible and you take your time and you get everything just right and then you create this artificial mad rush deadline that you refuse to be flexible on and like I've got to get it done, I've got to get it done. This is the weekend from hell. This weekend that you've pulled from the ether and you put all this stress on yourself and I know occasionally there is a reason for a deadline if there's a particular event or maybe there can be other reasons but most of the time. This video has no real extrinsic deadline. I'm currently working on it. This is ridiculous. Why does this happen? Why do you suddenly? Why do you create these artificial deadlines and if you must do them, why do you then start animating so late if you're Mr. Organized? Well, historically speaking, I've always just done exactly what I'm doing now, which is animating over the course of two days if I'm lucky or four days if I'm unlucky to put together the video. I think I've always partly done it all at once because I just hate it. It's just so tedious. It just takes so long and the point at which I'm animating for people to understand the workflow is like, okay, I write the video. I record the audio and then the animation always comes last. But in my mind, my brain always feels like, oh, once you've recorded the audio, we're done now, right? You know, this is over? No, it's not over. There's actually many, many hours of work to be done. I don't know why, but I've always just found it somehow easier to chunk it all together in a big push. So it's like a really tedious, long pulling off of the bandaid. I am trying to condense that time. It just takes... Yeah, yeah. That's what I mean. It's as quick as it can be. It does take two days, but it is a pulling off of the bandaid. It's getting rid of the unpleasurable thing as quickly as humanly possible, just as quickly as humanly possible. What happens to be two days? That is the best it's ever going to be. Now, it's funny that you bring it up with this one because it just so happens that I have a whole bunch of projects going on at the moment right now. And I have read you Elon Musk. Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly it. I send people into space as one of my projects. No, but... So I've read jiggered some of the way that my schedule works for making videos, which I think is an improvement overall. But one of the things that I was thinking about with my work schedule is exactly this issue of, God, I hate those weekends when I'm animating. It's just the worst. Let me try to actually spread this out over a longer, more sane period of time. And so I have actually been animating this video since last weekend, but trying to do it on a reasonable time schedule of saying, okay, I'm just going to block out like a two or a half hour period each afternoon. And I'm going to try to just animate during that time to like move this part of the project forward without just dedicating a whole weekend to it. So I actually have been trying not to do it all at once, but it turns out I hate that even more that this has been just a deeply, deeply unpleasant experience because it feels like it does really drag out the animation for a much longer period of time. And it makes it more frustrating. And I think the cumulative hours is actually going to be longer of like, okay, sitting down to animating kind of getting into the flow and then letting myself stop. So I try to stretch it out, but I think that this is just going to be a part of the way that I work always, that I have to kind of do the animation all in one big batch. I'm not sure that I can stretch it out in a way that makes it easier or more pleasant. So I do sympathize. I mean, I don't animate like you do, but I do have animated sections in some of my videos and sometimes I do them. And I do find that it is a really time intensive process and it is not pleasurable. So I do, like I do, I do sympathize with you and agree. But the other reason I often find you have to just do it in one big whack is it kind of has a momentum to it and it's a kind of a where was I and what's the process for doing this. And if you stop and then pick it up again next week, sometimes it's a bit like, oh, what was my process for doing that and how was I layering that and how was it working? So sometimes you do it all in one big hit as well, just because of the sort of the momentum and the work flow of it. It seems to work better if you just do it while you're in the zone for lack of a less douchey term. No, I think you're totally right about that. And that's one of the reasons why I suspect because I've been feeling the whole time I've been working on this video in particular. I've been feeling like this seems to be taking forever. And I think it's not just the spreading it out over several days, but I also think it is those transition costs of getting back into it. Okay, where was I? And I mean, today I'm looking at transition costs. Of course, you would know the cool term for it. But yeah, but you know, it's any time you shift from one kind of task to another, there's a time period of ramping up. Yeah. And this famously comes from this whole notion that people think that they can multitask, but actually they can't. One of the things that happens when you're multitasking is that your ability to judge how well you are doing things is impacted in a negative way. So you still think like, oh, I'm doing great work. Just as if I was focusing on one thing at a time, it's like, well, actually no, you're very ability to judge how good your work is impacted. So you think you're doing fine, but you're doing terribly. But yeah, so every time you switch from one thing to another, it takes a little while to kind of get into it. And as we have discussed before on the podcast, this is one reason that why I do like to batch tasks together as much as I can and similar tasks as well. So if I have an unavoidable meeting on someday, I will do everything within my power to make sure that all of the meetings I may ever have in the next three week period, if I can, I will put them all together on that single day meeting with my accountants and like, oh, I also have a dentist thing. Oh, and I also have to go to the bank for something. Can I do all three of those on one day so I can just have a day where I'm out and running errands? And I find like that is much more effective or I do all my administration work on a single day. And I don't do very much else. I'm marveling at just how incredibly different we are yet again. Like I'm the exact opposite. I'll be editing something and then I'll be, oh, I'm a bit bored of this. I'm going to stop for 10 minutes and do my invoicing. And then I'll be like, oh, I'll look at Twitter and then I'll be like, oh, oh, I walk the dogs. Oh, I'll go back to editing what I was doing. And I know that silly for that very reason you say because of these kind of transition costs. I've mentioned before that I am kind of fascinated by people like you who are able to just work all day long, even if I might make fun of the particular ways in which you work. I still marvel at the number of hours that you can put into something. Yeah, but you're probably also marvel at the amount of wasted time in there as well. For everybody, everybody has wasted time. Let's not pretend, you know, Elon, the Elon musks of the world aside. Everybody has, although even Elon Musk, I want to my favorite tweets ever is Elon Musk. Put out the tweet where he said, oh, I'm going to go to the gym, but I went to Ihop instead. And like, you know what? Really, I love that Elon Musk. You sound somewhat more human now. So I really, I am really impressed and interested by people who can just work all the time. And I don't want people to have the false impression that I'm some kind of super productive person. I think I'm more productive than the average person, but I'm also really aware that I have to do a lot of this stuff to kind of trick myself into working or to try to like squeeze the most amount of productivity out of my brain, which is fundamentally lazy. Like, it doesn't really want to do stuff. And so I think that's one of the reasons why a difference between you and me is I think that I have to think about productivity more because I am naturally much less productive than you are. Like, you will just naturally gravitate towards work more than I will. And I am quite envious in some ways of that fundamental treat. I find it an interesting statement. And it could be a debated statement to say that you are more productive than the average person. Because, I mean, we joke about it, but it is also true that you don't, you don't, you're hardly flooding YouTube with videos. Clearly your videos are of an exceptional quality and that's, you know, that reflects the time you put into them. But you would hardly say, oh, that's CGP Gray, he's like a machine. Jeehy puts out so much content. So if you were to describe yourself as productive, what is this product that you are producing? Well, other than a video every few weeks, like I said, a really good one, but other than a video every few weeks and now the podcasts, you know, what's, or the secret projects. What do you think, what do you think about your productive? There's two things, there's two different things here, right? One is the statement that I think that I'm more productive than the average person. And I think that that is in no small part simply because the average person is horrifically unproductive. Right. Something here is like, let's take an average of the productivity levels of everybody in the civilized portion of the world. Right. I am above that average and I'm pretty well above that average. Of course, yes. But then when I say, okay, well, now let's, let's take a look at a different group of people. Like, like the five of us who went to random acts of intelligence. Yeah. I am definitely below the average in this much smaller group of people in terms of productivity. Right. And as we've mentioned many times, like, Destin is probably at the top of that group I would guess of the five of us. And so like you have a particular frame of reference. But then again, Destin is one of the most productive people probably on the face of the planet in terms of the number of things that he is able to get done. Like some people just not everybody can possibly be like that. He's also making an incredible number of babies in between all the other stuff he's doing. He's not only is he making loads of videos and stuff, he's making humans. Yes. He is. Destin has had a baby. Well, Destin didn't have the baby. Destin helped make the baby. Yeah. His wife actually did all the labor there of me. She did. She put in that. She did the hard work there. Yeah. I forgot about that. I had a brief lapse in my understanding of biology there for a minute. Yeah. I just, I wanted to make sure you were really clear on that, Brady. Yeah. Just. Okay. So obviously, congratulations to them. But then he sends me, he sends me text messages showing that he's at a monster truck rally and other stuff. I don't understand how he finds time. I'm saying him in Houston next week. He's just had a baby and I'm wearing an out in Houston next week. So I swear there's five of them. Yeah. They're really must be. All right. So we are saying you are productive, but only when we compare you with all the unproductive people of the world. Well, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I'm above average. Right. But this is in also when no small part is because people overestimate. But great. Just because you think about productivity a lot. Doesn't mean you're productive. I do not question. You are probably one of the world's leading thinkers about productivity, but that doesn't make you productive. My comparison here is I think about me from several years ago. How I first came across some of this stuff and past me was terrible. Past me was just awful at getting things done in any kind of organized way. And so like I, that's how when I think, okay, I like, I think about this stuff a lot and I've tried out a bunch of stuff and I see what works for me and I see what works for doesn't, what doesn't work for me. And I am like, I am definitely better than the me from 10 years ago. So a part of it is you're looking at just your own improvement over time as well. Yeah, because like just any human being, this is all you can do, right? You have to look at yourself and say, okay, what state am I in now and are there ways that I can make myself better? You know, from that perspective, it doesn't even matter what the average level of anything is in a society. It's just, okay, well, can you improve yourself in some way? Yeah. And you just want to have a different capability than the person next door, like, you know, yeah, capacity. That's exactly it. And it's a similar thing of like learning what you're good at and learning what you're terrible at. And this is one of the ways that I think school is terrible at preparing people for real life. Like spoiler alert, schools want you to be good at everything. But in the real world, nobody cares if you're good at everything, right? People care that you're good at something. And school seems to be all about mitigating weaknesses, whereas I think the real world is much more about amplifying strengths. That's what gets rewarded in the actual world. But in school, it's always like, oh, you have A's in all these classes, but you know, you got C's in these two. So let's put all of your effort into the two classes where you're getting C's. Nothing in the real world works like that. Or if you're like, oh, you know, you're doing great in these two areas. Do more of that. Figure out how to make this even better. Oh, this thing you're not good at. Who cares? You don't have to be good at everything. That's how the actual world works. That isn't how everything works in the world. Like take relationships, for example, if you're in a relationship with someone and there are some things you do really well, and there are other things you do badly that are hurting your relationship, your relationship doesn't improve by sweeping the bad parts under the carpet. If you've got problems with communication, but you're really generous with your wife, you can't say, well, I'll just give you even more presence and let's ignore the fact that the communication is really bad. In relationships, you do have to fix the weakness and not just amplify the strength. That's true. I think in my mind, when I was talking about that, I was implicitly thinking about the working world I was thinking about like being self-employed. But you're right, with interpersonal relationships, it's different, but not always wildly different in some ways. Like, you know, you have to accept if you're for interpersonal relationships that some people are just never going to change on particular things. That's just the way it is. Sometimes you can't always fix everything within interpersonal relationships. Yeah. I don't know how to say it as well. No, no, you're right. You're right. You know, we're both right. Are we both right? I'm not quite sure if we're talking about it except. I don't know. That just felt like a machine note to finish the conversation. No, it was a terrible machine note. I guess, as I always say, double down on your strengths people. That's the thing to do. Yeah. Like I said, with the productivity stuff with, oh, I guess, yeah, we can go back to answer your other question about what it is that I produce, what it is that I make. I make the videos, and I mean, now I do make the podcasts. And you Jay? I guess one of the things that I think I might just be a really slow writer compared to other people, I mean, because that's really what I spend most of the time on is actually just writing the scripts, and it's really rewriting the scripts. And I've spoken to other people who do similar work or to similar work. And I think it's just that I have to do many, many drafts of a video to make it better. And so it just takes a long time. And that, that for me is kind of how I'm measuring something is how much writing was I able to get done today? Was I able to sit down and work through an additional draft of this video? Like great, that's awesome. And I do that a lot for any particular video, and it just takes a while. So you're counting the 37 drafts of your script before the one that I see, you're counting that as product and fair and fair enough to. That's the way I look at it. And from the outside, yeah, it's like a long time between videos because I definitely have to kill videos. Like there was supposed to be a video for January that got killed at the last minute, or was like, you know what, this just isn't working. And so that's why I don't have a video for January. So that's the way I look. And it's surprisingly, I don't know, I find, this is getting a little airy-fairy, but I do find creative work is just different and hard in an unexpected way. I think probably the best thing to think about is, stop me if I'm boring you. But. That's okay. I just keep looking at your smiley face. Yeah, look at the smiley face. Yeah. One of the most interesting transitions in my life from being a teacher to working for myself is that when I was a teacher, I had a very large number of very small projects. So every class that I had to teach was like a little project, every homework assignment that needed to be graded was a little project. I had a huge number of these things that I tracked in my getting things done system at the time. And I got very good at being able to accomplish a very large number of very small projects. But the transition into being self-employed, I now find myself in the exact reverse situation where as much as as as possible, I've tried to outsource various portions of my life or try to not do things that aren't related to the core business. But it leaves me with a very small number of very large projects. So any particular video is, say, you know, a six-week project and maybe I'm dealing with two or three of those at once. And then as you do know, I always have one big secret project going on, which I spend time on as well. And that's that bag case that we're going to pull off in the next few months, isn't it? That is one of the projects, yes. There are. So I'm supposed to be sacred, sorry. It is supposed to be sacred. Just cut that bit. Yeah. I'll cut it right out. If I let it in. Cut it back to my section really. Yeah. But yeah, so I guess I just, I have found that this transition has been more difficult than I expected in going from to a small number of very big projects because it's not the same like with homework where I could sit down and say, okay, all I have to do is mark this one homework assignment from this one class and kind of go through it. And they're like, okay, that little project is done. And then look and see what the other project is like. So yeah, this is, this is what this learning process has been for me is trying to get better at this. And I think I have over time. I think I definitely have gotten better. But one of the other things to throw back to an earlier episode of ours is that I have also gotten better at not living and incredibly stressed out 100% focused on work all the time life. So like I have been turning up the health light bulb and I have been turning up, you know, the family light bulb a little bit over time. You haven't been turning up the shaving light bulb. You look very scruffy at the moment. I am really scruffy right now. That's, that was the first thing you said to me when I came on air and this is, this is the result of this past week being very busy. Well, you certainly won't be doing the Harry's ad. I will not be doing the Harry's ad today if we have a Harry's ad. I'm not sure who we have today. And we never know until the end. But anyway, speaking of small projects, now that we've got that little bit of light opening banter out the way. Oh, yeah. We do it with follow up from the previous episode. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. Let's go for it. All right. You seem to have, you seem to have, although you have not prepared well for this podcast, I have done nothing to prepare for this podcast. You have been the main contributor to follow up items. So you'd better take the lead here and tell us what you got. Last time you spoke about YouTube half-assery and it's a hard time with it. Half-assery. I can't say it. I can't say it. It's my Achilles heel. So, so do you want to talk to us about Cards and other issues? I just have a couple of very quick points. The first which was we had what, from my perspective, was a horrifically boring conversation last time about the technical details of YouTube, which was surprisingly well received. It seemed like I have a hard time judging this stuff, but going through the Reddit and looking on Twitter, it seemed like people were interested in the YouTube talk. I don't know. Did you get that feeling? I think you apologized for so much people were just trying to talk you back off the ledge by telling you it was all right. That may very well be true. That may very well be true. Yeah, anyway. It's hard to know what people were liking, what people were not liking. It seemed like people were interested, but yeah, it did get me to back away from the ledge of, we can't ever do this podcast again because that last episode was so terrible. The only little thing that I did want to mention was I was complaining about the inconsistencies with the cards and the way they work. You can listen to the last episode for all those fun details. I got just a bunch of feedback from people on various Android devices. It turns out that the way cards work is different on Android devices and it is different on different Android devices. I only got a bunch of screenshots from people showing who the heck knows, but it's always going to look different on Android and different spots. So just when I thought things couldn't possibly be any more inconsistent with the cards, turns out there's an entire ecosystem where it works just randomly, apparently, where the cards pop up and how they work and where you have to tap. Thumbs up YouTube. Well done on that. There you go. Even more half-assed than we thought. If that's possible. That's exactly right. The other thing is we mentioned the Mac1035, which was the breakfast burger sandwich at McDonald's. I have to admit, I was pretty excited by all the feedback on this one. Yeah. Do you want to describe the feedback in particular? Well, the thing was, I think within minutes of the podcast going live, people must have been in McDonald's when they downloaded the podcast because within minutes of going live, people were tweeting its pictures of Mac1035s and themselves in McDonald's buying these things. And we've heard from, I don't know how big our audience is, but I think at least 30% of it must work at McDonald's because every McDonald's employee on the planet has gotten touched with us and told us about this secret menu and some McDonald's employees said, yeah, of course, we know about it. It's totally a thing. And then other ones have said, there's no such thing. This is a figment of your imagination. You don't know what you're talking about. So I think McDonald's needs to get its house and order here. There's not a lot of consistency on this. Well, the inconsistency that I noticed was some employees saying, oh, yeah, we love doing the special menu items. And some people saying, don't you dare ever order those special menu items. There is such a pain in the butt and we hate to do them. And we will hate you for ordering them. So they're like, oh, I guess you're really rolling the dice when you go to McDonald's and say you want your Mac1035 about whether or not you're going to get somebody who's thrilled to do something different or somebody who spits on your burger patty because they hate you. Yeah. You just don't you don't know what you're going to get. But yes, we did get a lot of feedback on that. I did want to give credit to James Mori, who I believe was the very first person to tweet us a picture of himself eating a Mac1035 while listening to Hello Internet. And yes, I think this must have been within 30 minutes of the podcast going live. I was like, right. Impressive. Right. Impressive. I think that's what it was. All these people is a time traveler or he had a Mac1035 already on his phone that he could tweet. Someone was just, someone was just waiting or I guess it's like statistically speaking, there would be someone who had the Mac1035. I thought this is my moment, right? Yeah. Although some people also tweeted us receipts. So we had a time and a date stamp on it. Yes. Yes. This is the funny thing with the podcast audience growing is it's just like there's always somebody now who is just stepping on a plane when they're listening to Hello Internet. It starts getting a little weird when you look at the statistics of those things. But yeah, because I keep, I keep thinking, we've got such a jet setting audience like every single time a podcast comes out like 20 people say, I'm just about to get on a plane. I hope there's a plane crash corner like, oh, these people that are flying so much. But I guess it's just a sample source. Yeah. And it's also that that's the person that you hear from. Right. Because the one who tells you, oh, it's funny. I was just stepping on a plane while listening to Hello Internet. But when you start talking about tens of thousands of people listening, someone somewhere is stepping on a plane. How about we do a shout out? If you're listening to the podcast and you're not going on a plane today, send us a tweet of just, wait, you want to just to say, just to say, hey, I'm a listener and I'm not flying on a plane today. Oh, okay. Make sure to send these tweets to Brady. Like, that's a really good one. At CGP grad. At TV grad. At TV grad. At TV grad. You know they're going to at you. At CGP grad. The one who suggested this excellent idea. If you add it to CGP grad, he will retweet you. This is the policy of the show is all feedback goes to Brady. Tweet Brady and email Brady. That's the way. I'm saying all this stuff. All of a sudden realizing you're just going to mute me for that part. You're going to, we would your editing power here. That's right. And fairway. Yeah. You've got another item here that says, oh, okay. Actually, this actually does slide in quite nicely talking about people tweeting me. Yeah. So people now know that I don't follow the news who listen to the podcast. For some reason, people then feel compelled to tweet news events at me as though they're trying to keep me informed about what's going on in the world. Yeah, they're so sorry for you. They realize you're this ignorant guy and they're trying to help you. Right, but it is a cultivated ignorant. It's ignorance on purpose. It's not like, oh, if only there was some way I could access the news, but me sitting here in my house in front of this computer with my internet connection, the only thing I have access to is Twitter, yet I can't follow the Twitter news accounts somehow. But people just tweet news stories at me now. Like, oh, hey, I thought you should know that this is happening. I'm not interested in the news stories. Like, I do not want this. They're kind of like me sending you the occasional piece of email that I think you should say. Like, right. I'm not creating emails, but you should say this one. Right. Yes. But I'll just say, tweeting random, unasked for news stories at me. That's a fast way to get on my mute list. That's all that's going to happen there. It's like, let me tell you people, I've got a real itchy trinker finger on that mute list. And this is a fast way to get on it. Same thing if you tweet me just to let me know that you're not getting on a plane, tweet a Brady. What's that? Why have you written Lama News here? Yeah, this is where I wanted to go. So people started tweeting me about some Lama chase that was going on in Arizona or something. I didn't quite get all the details. I was just seeing the pictures. And surely you must have known about the Lama, the Lama, the day the internet lost their mind about Lama's. I have no idea what you're talking about. That is amazing. I know. I can't believe this. I know about the dress, but I don't know about the Lama. So it's amazing that you don't, you don't know about the Lama's because they happened on the same day where the internet was losing their mind about dress Lama gate or whatever you want to call it. Right. I was lying on a beach that day. No, there you go. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. But yeah, so anyway, people were tweeting me about the Lama. And the funny thing was is most of the tweets were saying, oh, I totally understand why you don't follow the news. Look at this dumb stuff that they're covering. There's some guys out in Arizona trying to last so a bunch of Lama's in a parking lot. We thought that I would agree with them about, oh, look how frivolous this is. And I thought this looks awesome. Right. I give the news was always like, dude, trying to last so down some Lama's. I would watch the news way more like from the pictures that people were tweeting me. Like this looked great. I wish I could watch it live, but I couldn't. So it was just it was funny to have people sending me a message where they thought I would be all like, you know, in solidarity with them on this point. I could not be further from the truth. The Lama story was perhaps the one story would have been really sad if I had missed it live on the internet. Hello, internet. We have a new sponsor today and that is igloo and internet you will actually like what's an internet you ask? Well, you're a lucky person if you can ask that question. You're probably a student or a small child or a baby or something. But if you're grown up in the working world, if you work in corporate or like me, if you used to work in a school, you have to deal with your company or organizations terrible, terrible internet. Well, igloo is here to solve those problems for you. They've made an internet that is actually a pleasure to use that makes everything nice and easy to access and just go to the website and just just take a look at the screenshots. It looks gorgeous. It is not some kind of Windows 95 looking system that you just you just can't even bear to deal with. You even know how to describe it, say on advertisement about internet because the horror of the internet is still in your mind. Igloo just makes everything easier. What are the kinds of things that you try to do in your company's internet? You're trying to share files. You maybe have some gigantic thing that you can't email. You just want to share a link. Igloo's all over that. You're trying to manage a project or keep everyone updated. Igloo's got you covered. It's the digital workspace where you can work, share and talk all together. It's a hosted and managed solution and their latest upgrade really revolves around documents and how you interact with them, how you gather feedback and how you make changes. So if you are listening to the sound of my voice and perhaps looking at a computer screen right now with some ugly, buggy, horrible old internet at your company, go to igloosoftware.com slash hello and you can sign up for a free trial. Check it out. See how it can change your company. Definitely give them a try. It's igloosoftware.com slash hello. I was in Dubai as I said, I said I was going there and I wasn't lying. I did it and it was lovely. I don't think people doubted that you were telling the truth about that. I don't know. I tell you what, if you ever happen to have any money in your wallet or your bank account and you want to turn that into not being money, go to Dubai. There we are. That place is expensive. Right, but you get services and goods for your money. They're not just turning it into an empty wallet. Well, yeah, you do get glasses of water for like 10 bucks or something. It's crazy. Crazy town. But it was, I had a really good time. I really enjoyed it. And the best thing about it is definitely the buildings. Yeah. Really impressive buildings. You know that one, what's it called? It's called the bird jarab is the one in the sea that looks like a sail. And where I stayed was right next to that. And that was far more impressive in real life than in the pictures. I thought you'd be the picture of that sail looking hotel and you were mojito and it seemed like you were having a good time. Yes. The one you go to see now is the Burj Khalifa, which is the tallest building in the world. And that is amazing. Oh, yes. That is the first time I've seen a building and it didn't look like it was real. Part of it because the sky so blue as well, things never look as real when you get a such a perfect sky. But I swear it looks like it's from a Star Wars movie. It looks like it should be on. You know, is it cross? How do you say the Coruscant? Coruscant. Coruscant, yeah. It looked like it should be on Coruscant. It looked unreal. It looked so tall you didn't believe it was real because I made a glass and it was so impressive. Did you go up to the top on the observation deck or whatever they had there? I did. Well, I went as high as you can go. You can't go to the top. It was interesting, actually. I kind of, I kind of mapped up a bit. But we went there. He'll four of us. And we hadn't booked ahead and it turns out if you book ahead and book a certain time, you can get quite an affordable ticket. But we didn't know that and I turned up and, you know, it was the communication wasn't very good and we said, oh, we want to go up the building and she said, oh, no problem. You want to go to the top and I think she was just saying, you know, I just thought she was saying, do you want to go to the top? But I think to the top is like an experience or something you pay for to go higher. And we were like, yeah, we want to go to the top. And then she told us the amount of money and I kind of handed my card over and paid it. And then when we looked at how much we just paid, it was like, it was a lot of money. It was a lot of money. You don't want to give me a ballpark here. The thing stopping me is the fact I don't know. But it was like, you don't have a word for that number. No, no. I have to use arrow notation. No, it was like in the, it was like, I think it was in the hundreds of dollars. Like it was a few hundred dollars it came to. It was crazy money. And it was like you went off into a special room and they gave you a cup of tea and you went up in a lift and, you know, you're a bit more away from the masses. But you're still in a huge group of people of like 60 people. So it wasn't like it was a personal trip to the top in a velvet elevator. Right. But, but this experience meant you did go to the higher observation deck. I think it's like 20 or 40 floors above the layman's observation deck. And like any building that tall when you got well, there isn't a building that tall, but like really tall buildings, when you get that high, it kind of means nothing anymore. You may as well be in a plane looking down at the city. So, so in that respect, that wasn't the best part of it. The best part of that building is completely free and that is just seeing it from all the different angles and, you know, seeing it from far away and seeing it from close up. It is, it is an extraordinary thing. I don't know. I just tall buildings. I love them. What, where do you stand on the issue of tall buildings? Oh, they're dreadful. They're awful. I just, I can't stand tall buildings. You don't know. Of course, they're awesome. Yeah. They're like, yet another example of, of like man's domination over nature. I got to look at this. There was some sand and some rocks and some ore in the ground and we built a mighty tower out of it. It's just, it's just awesome. I got to mind, all for super tall towers. People are like, oh, such a waste. People are just trying to build the tallest skyscraper. I'm sorry. Did you not hear the words the tallest skyscraper, right? Yeah. Whoever wants to build a taller skyscraper, you go for it country. It's, of course, it's awesome. I've never been to Dubai. I love the Shard in London and I love it. A similar kind of thing where you can see it from so many locations and every time I can see it, it makes me happy. I just, I look at that. Mickey Mouse. I know. It's so tiny. Mickey Mouse. I know. I'm not saying it's some huge skyscraper, but it's the biggest building here. Well, it's actually, it's the biggest building in the European Union. But tall buildings are awesome. They're just great. What's wrong with Europe? Why won't they get their act together and build a proper skyscraper? They're falling behind. Actually, what is, okay. I don't want to see a good character. If the Shard is the tolls in Europe, that's disappointing. The Shard is a half a kilometer shorter than the Burj Khalifa. Okay. I'm finding a, the Burj Khalifa is about 850 meters tall. And the Shard is 306 meters tall. Not even half. Not even nearly half. Well, maybe nearly. No, not nearly half, really. Okay. Now I need, for comparison, I know it's taller, but I don't know how much taller than what's the Empire State Building. Empire State Building. What is your height? No, website. I don't. Oh, God. The Empire State Building has an auto-playing YouTube video on, it's so claseless. Why, Jeremy, why aren't you just on the Wikipedia list of buildings? Wikipedia has great resources on buildings. Yeah, I know. You don't know why. I was trying Duck Duck Go. This is the first link. Duck Duck Go, I'm not super impressed. I didn't even know what you're talking about. Duck Duck Go is an alternate search engine that I'm trying out, but there, I was like, I want to like them, but their search results are inferior. Okay, for that Google one's good. Give that one a go. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing right now. This is what I'm doing for the past week is, as I set my default search engine to Duck Duck Go and I search for something and it's like, why are these results so crappy? Oh, right. Now I type in Google and search. And they're like, oh, okay, I've just added an additional step to my life here. So the tip of the Empire State Building is, oh, it's not that much taller. It's 440 meters is the Empire State Building. So, Burj Khalifa, two Empire State Building. Two Empire State Buildings. Awesome. They're building a kilometer high one now in Saudi Arabia, I think. Oh, really? Do you have any idea what it's called? No, but it's some, you can read all about, I spent ages reading about it the other day. I think it's in Jeddah maybe. I mean, it's 10 years away, but they have started it. It's a way off being built. Well, the tallest building coming to Saudi Arabia. I follow SkyScriper News on Twitter. I haven't seen this. I'm disappointed. SkyScriper News. Yeah, there's a SkyScriper News account on Twitter. They just, sometimes they just post awesome pictures of SkyScrippers, but they often have news about what's going on in the world of SkyScrippers. So I follow it and that's the kind of news that I want. We're building more massive structures, more monuments to men's domination over nature. Thumbs up. Let's do that. Look at all these pictures. Go to Empire State Building. I really like that building. It is good. It's a good building. It is good. Any other, any other tall ones? Have you been up to Ciant Tower? No. I saw that get hit by lightning when I was there, but I realised that's really common. I was like, oh, well, I just sort of get hit by lightning, but I think every man and his dog has a photo of a bit of hit by lightning. It's so common. I think it's rarer to go to Toronto and not see a get hit by lightning. Yeah, that's probably the case. It does have that has the best glass floor I've been on though, where you step on the glass floor and your brain, like just when that you do it. Yeah, that would be difficult to do. I guess the Empire State Building is the tallest building I've ever been in. I think you can't think of anything else. It's been taller off the top of my head. Have you been up to, see, it was the Ciant Tower. I forget what it's called now, the one in Chicago. No, I've never been up to the one in Chicago, which is, it's supposed to be called the Willis Tower now. That's true. That's the actual name of it, but it'll always be the Ciant Tower. Yeah. Sorry, whoever you are, Willis. It's just, it's not going to happen. Stop trying to make Willis happen. You know, it's never going to happen. I was growing up in Adelaide, which has not got tall buildings. When I was growing up, there was the tallest building in Adelaide, which has since been surpassed, but when I was growing up, the tallest building in Adelaide was this, I think it's called the Grenfell Tower. It's just this black building, which is probably, I'm guessing, 15 to 16 stories high, like something ridiculous. Oh, massive. Yeah, but like, but on the Adelaide skyline, it was this dominant thing. And when you're little, like when I was a little kid, I would never go into the centre of Adelaide, like the CBD. I lived in the suburbs, but you would see it, like when you were driving towards the city or driving around. And to me, it was this mythical building. And it had this nickname, the black stump, because it just looked like a big black stump funnily enough. And it was like always my dream to like be nearer to go inside it. Like it was this amazing, amazing thing. And then like, years later, you know, when I grew up and worked in Adelaide, I actually worked like three buildings across from it. And it was like, it was nothing. I would go into it every day. And it was this really, and by that time, it's funny, like the mythology of it was gone. And like it was not special to me in any way. And whenever I switch into like childhood memory mode, it becomes really magical again. Like it, does that make sense? Like it's, it's this weird thing. Like the child me is still impressed by it. Right. The adult me is not. Because the adult you find it entirely unimpressive. Yeah. The child inside you still loves it. Grey, I'm looking it up. I want to look at it. The black stump. Is that what I should search for? Put Adelaide and black stump and see what comes up. Adelaide black stump. I get a Facebook band called black stump. Grenful center was the first result. I got, I'm going to search in here. I've got a, now I've got to go to Google. Sorry, duck duck go. Adelaide black. It's not coming up. Maybe it was just what my mom called it. Yeah, I'm seeing Grenfield center. Oh my goodness. It is even smaller than I am. I'm not sure I can find it. Okay, so I'm going to go, I'm going to, I'm on the map. I'm going to go to Adelaide. Oh my goodness. I found it. Hang on, I want to send you this particular image. Are you ready? Are you ready for the building that as a boy? Bloom me away. Are you ready? I'll, I'll send it to you here on a, I message. Here it is. This was my fantasy building as a boy. That is like every boring office building in London. I know. It couldn't be like, okay, so it is, it is darker in color than the buildings that surround it. But otherwise you could not imagine a less remarkable building. Oh, for me, it was so imposing. It was like this, it was this, it was like the Darth Vader of the skyline. It was the tallest building. And yeah, yeah. Just trying, I'm trying to, I'm looking at Adelaide. Oh, it's not, oh, Apple doesn't have Adelaide in 3D. Sorry, Adelaide. I guess you're not important enough for Apple to fly. Plains over you so I could get a sense of this building. Oh well, anyway, the picture is hilarious. The black stuff. Yeah, that's not, that's not super impressive. Birch Khalifa, very impressive. Isn't, it must be apartments at the top, right? It can't possibly be on the top. No, up that high, I don't even think it's apartments. I think it's like business suites and things like that. It's got a real mixed use. It's got a hotel in it. It's got an Armani hotel in it. It's got accommodation. It's got a bit of everything. And it's very business-y up that high. And a lot of the stuff above the observation decks are also like functional maintenance and things like that. What do you do with the branding of the building? Right, right. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but if I had infinite money, I would buy an apartment at the top of the shard. I absolutely love that building. And I would want to live in there gigantic apartments that are up there. So if I had infinite money, that's what I would do. I should put that as a like a Patreon goal. If I can end up getting a million billion dollars per video, I will buy myself a nice apartment in the shard. Do it. That would be cool. Then maybe you'd finally let me see your apartment as well. Yeah, I didn't invite you over. If I had an apartment in the shard, I would invite you over. I would invite everybody over. You'd still be like, no, no, I'm still working on it and getting it right. No, no, no. It's not ready for visitors. My billion, my billion have the apartment in the shard. Yeah, I would love to know how much those things actually are. I downloaded all the floor plans and details about them when the shard was first going up. And I'm glad I did because they took it down all that information once they sold the verb, and I didn't get a single million dollars, but I occasionally look at it like, oh, those apartments are just so cool. Well, that will also be a handy for that highest we're planning. Yes, the other highest. Just steal the apartment in the shard, I guess. No, to steal the diamond that's kept in there. Oh, right. And the secret map. Right. Oh yeah, you and your secret maps. The secret map that reveals the location of the diamond. Right. Perfect. Okay, we will get, we will get right on that. All right. And you know where they're going to find out that secret diamond is when we get the secret map. I do not know, no, top of the black stump. I wonder if there's anybody listening to this podcast in the black stump right now. Oh my goodness. If you, if you listen to Hello Internet, even if you just listen to Hello Internet and take a photograph of yourself in front of the black stump, I will retweet that, definitely. And I will, I will heavily pressure Gray to retweet it. I'm sure you will. I'm sure I'm going to hear about that. Yeah. Oh yeah, that'd be good. But you've got to, it's got to be, it's got to be like a contemporaneous picture. So you have to be holding a copy of the Adelaide Advertiser from that day. All right. I used to work for the Adelaide Advertiser, so I'm just also helping out with circulation there. Right. Yes, the circulation of plus one. Yep. But you know, newspapers, they got to take whatever they can get these days. A photograph holding the Adelaide Advertiser with the black stump in the background. You're in. You're in. I may even follow you for that. Man, you're really, you're really going all in on this. Yeah. I still want to know, someone is inside the building right now, listening to it. Really freaked out. I mean, that's ridiculous. If that's happening then, you know, you're the person and her name is Sarah. I think it's super freaked out right now. Do you know what would be even freaky? Is it turns out someone is and they're called Tim and you didn't use the name? You missed your chance. Yeah. All right. Anyway, enough of this. Enough of that. Complete and utter ridiculousness. Yeah. So you were in Dubai last week. And now you are in San Francisco, I believe, is that right? I am. I am speaking to you from my video room at the mathematical science research institute in Berkeley. Oh, spiritual home of number file. Yes, that's spiritual home. But I've taught you well. You say that more than me. I think it's a funny phrase. I don't know why. There's something about that just strikes me really funny. There's a spiritual home of number file. Good. That's where I am. And all as well. The... I wanted to tell you a few stories. Like, they're pretty humble, braggie. Yeah. But they're also... What forum could be better than this? Yeah. But they're also just interesting social situations that happens as a result of making YouTube videos. And I want to see how you would have reacted or what suggestion you have in these situations. So it's the first two to do with being recognized. Now, I don't get recognized a whole lot, you know, partly because my videos aren't that popular. They're not that big a deal. And also, I'm not in very many of them. Right. So, you know, I don't think I have a particularly recognizable face. But I'm in enough of them and I do enough for people to occasionally recognize me. And that was especially likely, if I'm somewhere where there's a very high concentration of nerdy people. Yeah. I don't mean to interrupt you here, but... Yeah. For a while, my dad was watching the number of file videos. And he thought that you were James Grime. And he was very confused for a little while. A few people think that because James was in so many of the early number five videos, especially they think he is number far. Yeah. And I guess they know that Grime's doing a podcast with a guy that makes number far, so they think. Yeah. And so my dad made some comment to me about how his, he goes, oh, Brady's voice and the way he looks, just don't match up at all. And it took me a long time to figure out that he wasn't talking about you. He was talking about James. Okay. Anyway, sorry. I wonder if many people, I wonder if James has people coming up to him saying, are you Brady Harron? I don't know. Anyway. Anyway, it doesn't happen to me very much, but it does occasionally happen if I'm somewhere where there's a lot of nerdy people. So it is slightly more likely to happen when I'm lurking around math department buildings and economics buildings that have placed that Berkeley. Yeah, I would say Berkeley might be an epicenter for nerds. Like your nerd flux density is quite high. Yeah. So it doesn't, it still doesn't happen very often, but it's happened a couple of times on this trip. And the first one is, and I found people do this more often than you think, they come up to you and they say, you're Brady Harron. What do you say to that? Are you asking for advice from, I'm the worst person to ask this advice of. If someone came up to you and said, you're CGP Gray, what am I supposed to say to that? Like, like, it's not are you, because that would be fair enough, because I think maybe you look a bit like that, but just telling me who I am, they've said like a weird thing. And now they've put me into a situation where I have no other option, but to say a weird thing back, which is usually, yes, I am. And that's quite often the end of the conversation. And. So the two of you just walk away at that point, is that what happened? Yeah, then they just stand there. And suddenly they've put the owner's on me to do something. And then I usually say something like, who are you? Or what's your name? And I start asking them questions about themselves. And like, suddenly there's a complete and utter stranger who I'm like asking all about themselves. And that anyway, I don't think that's a good conversation start. I'd to walk up to someone and just tell them what their name is. Right. Yeah, that doesn't, I would not receive that well. Yeah, so I don't mind. I love, you know, it's rare enough that I actually like people coming up to me and saying, you know, it's a it's a it's a nice little ego boost. And it's nice to meet someone who, you know, watch the videos because they're really important to me. But just that's a that's a weird thing. That's a weird thing to say. And it's not a criticism of the people who say it's just, I don't know, I don't know what I would say, but. Do you have a good say? Do you have a recommended approach? I think I think asking if I'm, if I'm Brady is a good thing to ask because, you know, you can never be sure. It's not like it's Tom Cruise. If you went up and said, are you Tom Cruise? That would probably be quite weird. But I think you're asking, are you Brady or, you know, anyway, anyway, but that doesn't seem like it's much better because then you say, yes, I am, which is the same response that you mentioned before. And then yeah, but then, but then, but then, but then I feel like the onus is back on them. Like conversational. I think it goes back onto them because now they've had their information confirmed. It's time for them to, I see this is like ping pong. They serve you hit back and now it's time for them to hit. Yeah, I don't know, it just feels that way. Anyway, this is a mind equipal. I had a more interesting one happen to me the day a couple of days after. There's a little shuttle bus that runs from the center of Berkeley University campus into town. It's probably a five minute drive. I got on this bus and this guy, he like looks at me quizzically. And you can tell, oh, he thinks, obviously, he thinks he recognizes me. Right. And obviously, most likely from the videos because we don't know each other personally. But he gives you that look when you look at someone like, I know, I know that person. And he kind of squints and turns his head a bit sideways. And I'm thinking, okay, he's either now just going to ignore me or he's going to come up and say, you're Brady, I'm, anyway, I sit and though I have nowhere to sit other than basically next to him by one seat with an empty seat between us. There's something going to happen here. And he keeps looking, and he looks over at me again. And then he turns to his girlfriend and starts like whispering and saying something. This is our supersetal. Like, you know, you know, well, yeah, not particularly subtle, but. But then he pulls out his phone and like starts calling up like my videos and like Googling me and looking for pictures of me and stuff like that. Obviously, him watching this guy Google you in front of you. Yeah. And it's really, really awkward because I don't know what I'm supposed to do. So now I can't look at him because if I look at him, I'm really curious. I want to see what videos he's looking at and what pictures he's found. Because I'm just curious. But I can't look because if he then looks at me and catches me looking at him, looking at me. And now this is really awkward. It was a slightly awkward before. That's super weird. So I'm kind of now just kind of looking away. But because I'm a bit curious, I'm trying to have sneaky glances at his phone to see what he's looking at. And then he's having sneaky glances back at me to see if like I am like, you know, the guy. Right. He's holding up, he's holding up a picture of you to your face. No, no, but he's trying to be subtle about it as well. But I've clocked what's going on. And he's super spy here. I'm following what's happening. It's so weird. And then like, but I don't know what to do. Part of me thinks, you know, because I can't then turn to him and say, yes. It's me. But also because then what if I did that? And that's not what he was looking at. Or like, or he was just checking and he's like, oh, that is bloody hair and I hate that guy. Like he's such a, he's such a, he's such a tosser. I can't believe great as a podcast with him. So I cut, so I don't know what to do. Something and then like, and then like the bus trip comes to an end and I get off the bus. And I don't know whether I should sort of run away quickly or I should go slowly to give him a chance to say hello. Because I'll be, you know, I love people saying hello, like I said, but then he just put his phone back in his pocket and he'd like, watch me get off and never did anything. So if you're that guy that was on the bus, say hello next time. Say hello. I don't mind. I once, I once got, I once, I once got on a plane with, with my wife. And I, I like the window seat. So, so my wife, yeah, I love it. Yeah. So, and my wife usually lets me have it. So I had the window seat and then she had the one next to me. And then the guy that on the aisle, well, yeah, okay. The window seat is better. If it's between the window seat and the middle seat, obviously the window seat is better. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I didn't realize that was the comparison here. Okay. Yep. So I had a window seat. She had the, um, the middle one and then there was a third one. And the guy that sat in the aisle, like just as the plane was starting to take off, leaned over and said, are you, are you Brady? Aaron, I really love all your videos. Oh God. And, and luckily it was only like a two hour flight or something. But he spent the whole flight talking, talking to me over, over her. Oh. And I think, um, we didn't swap seats for some reason. Uh, I don't know why. But your wife must have loved that. I think, I think what happened, I think she pretended to be a slope. Uh-huh. So, yeah. Anyway. One, and I've got one other awkward thing that can happen as a result of doing the job that we do. And again, I want to get your advice. Oh, I didn't get your advice on what I should have done on the bus. It sounds like you have none. Just, it was just a weird thing. Yeah. That would, that would just be really weird. The plane scenario. What would you do if the person sitting next to you on a bus was Googling what does CGP grade look like and looking for pictures of you and things like that instead of watching your videos? And I would almost certainly just get off the bus no matter where the stop was. That's what I would do. Yeah. I think, oh, how can I avoid this situation as fast as possible? I know that you are, Mr. Oh, hey, you're a very friendly guy and you want people to come up and say hello to you. And I am not that person. I, it's not that I don't appreciate having an audience of people who might know me. But it's just that I am not, if I'm out and about in the world, I am rarely receptive to strangers coming up and saying hello to me. And it is super weird if people know who you are and you don't know who they are. Like I just, I would not appreciate it. Presumably you never get that other than at something that is that it is known you're going to be at. Like if it's not an event that it's known CGP grades there like random acts or some YouTube environment, presumably you don't get that in the straight. Yeah. So I am fortunate enough that I have never had someone just randomly come up to me and be like, oh my god, you see, it's be great. That has not occurred. However, since we have started the podcast in particular, there have been a few scenarios where I am pretty sure that someone is trying to place my voice. Where are just just like you said, you can see when someone's looking at you and they're trying to figure out, oh, I know this person. Yeah. I have occasionally like, you know, been getting a coffee or at a restaurant or something. And you can tell like someone is listening to you and trying to place it. But no one has yet been able to place it, which is feeling like, oh, thank god. Or if they have been able to place it, they just pretend that they haven't, which is like, oh, what a relief. Either way, it's good news. So yeah, I'm just, I'm just, I don't know. I've mentioned before, like I have to like spin up a certain part of social part of my brain for this podcast. And I feel like I'm just not ready to meet strangers walking around or just living my normal life. So that's why I'm the one person to ask for advice. I had one other minor problem. And another of these first world are YouTuber problems. And this is one that has a bit more. Tell me more about how famous you are really. I cannot emphasize how rare this is. Okay, it's not, you know, but anyway, it's funny. It's happened just happened yesterday. So it's on my mind. But this last thing is a bit more your sphere. I use the Twitter app on my phone for which you can judge me and condemn me and whatever. But it's just the way life has turned out. And there are certain things about the Twitter app that I don't like that much about the design. And one is that it's very easy to follow someone without meaning to. And I followed someone who was just a viewer or someone who would probably had added me or made some comment and was in a list of people I was looking at. And I had accidentally followed this person. Oh, okay. Yeah, sorry. I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Yeah. I pressed that little plus person sign or whatever. It is too easy when looking at someone's profile to accidentally hit the follow button. You don't even have to be looking at their profile. You just could be looking at their tweet and start following them, I think. Okay. I'm not familiar with that on the app then. I know what you're talking about. It is. Anyway, maybe it was that same thing. I've done that same thing. It's too easy to accidentally click on the following. You're like, oh no, I just wanted to see who this person was. Whatever happened, I started following this person and didn't realize. And then they tweeted something a while later, basically along the lines of, oh my God, I can't believe number files following me. This is the best thing that's ever happened to me. And they were really, really, deeply happy. And they made this happiness very, very public and very, they really carried on about it. What do I now do? Well, you won't follow them. You can't, that's almost like someone coming up and saying it's nice to meet you and then punching them in the face. You can't unfollow someone immediately after they've said that. Okay, then you mute them forever. Mutem forever is your advice. Well, my actual advice is you unfollow them because right, but you didn't want my actual advice. And so, I'm now ratcheting it down and trying to find something that you might do. And so, I would suggest you mute them forever. So, if you accidentally followed some school girl that loves CGPGRA videos and she's here at, oh my god, I'm so happy. CGPGRA followed me. He's my biggest educational hero and he chose to follow me. And this has made me really happy. And my puppy dog died yesterday, but everything's okay now because CGPGRA followed me. You would then go, oh, I didn't realize I'd done that. PIP unfollow. I like this scenario. It's just really good. Her puppy dog died, huh? Yeah, that's right. And you've taken away the pain by following her. All right, I'm accidentally, I might give that a week and then I don't follow her. All right. I know for a fact that I have done that. And at least once someone has commented to me, they say something like, oh, that's really weird. CGPGRA followed me for three minutes. So, I know that that has happened, but not not with like, oh, my puppy dog just died. And all of my problems are now gone because of this thing. But I'm not going to have this person on my Twitter timeline forever. That's for sure. And even if you mute them, it's like, oh, but there's still on my list of followers. I go through and I try to prune the people I follow quite regularly. And so, what I'd have to always pass over, like, oh, right, here's the guilt trip that I'm going to just live with for the rest of the time that I have a Twitter account. Now, eventually they're going to get unfollowed. That's the way that works. We'd like to thank Hover for supporting this episode of HALO Internet. Hover is the service to look at if you're in the market for an all-important domain name. It takes all the hassle and friction out of registering these names. Anyone doing business online these days, now it's still really important to grab a good domain. In fact, many of my projects, including number file, deep-sky videos, have been partly named based on what was available. Hover makes the whole process of finding and registering those domains smooth and uncomplicated. And without all the problems that other registrars give you, like trying to upsell you other stuff that you don't want or need. Now, I'll be honest, since finding out about Hover, I haven't actually needed to register a domain name. But I am using them as my service to see what's available. And the website's really good. Really good search mechanism. Tills you what's available gives you really good advice as well. And I know that Gray, who does register a lot of domain names and is my guru for all things online, does use Hover and swears by it. And that's all I need to know. A few of the great things about Hover is you get free, who is privacy, to keep the weirdos and pests at bay, great customer support, custom email addresses and a free valet service. So you can take other domain names that you're a silly enough to register elsewhere and bring them under the Hover umbrella. Now, to reward your good taste as a Hello Internet listener, Hover are offering a discount of 10% of your first purchase by going to their website hover.com and using the promo code viewjacking. Yes, after the last code was free booting, I guess you saw that one coming. That's hover.com promo code viewjacking for 10% off. And in case you're a US based, this new and you're a bit bamboozled by my correct pronunciation, Hover is spilt h-o-v-e-r. Our thanks to them for supplying a great domain service, but also for supporting our podcast. We appreciate it. Enough humble breaking, let's get down to the real business of Hello Internet, and that is Plane Crash Corner. Hang on, this calls for an opening of a can of Dr Pepper. Excellent. This episode of Plane Crash Corner is brought to you by Dr Pepper. What is this with the Dr Pepper? Do I not know about the sponsorship? Because that sounds like it's quite lucrative. I first saw you have a private deal with that one. Yeah, I was hoping you wouldn't find out. I thought that was subtle enough, but oh well. Surprisingly, it was not. The thing that makes me worry about you opening up the can of generic brand name Soda, is it feels like you're really settling in for the long haul. I'm carrying down. That's exactly right. Let me pull up the chair, let me pull my foot my feet up. We're going to get out a nice drink and get my cigar, and now let me tell you all my playing crash stories at a nice leisurely pace. I'm going to light a pipe and have a red setter sitting by my feet. What am I going to get to hear about on Plane Crash Corner? I didn't want to do Plane Crash Corner, and I didn't want to do one last episode either until you stole it. I did not steal it. It was still your Plane Crash Corner. I promise you, I will never mention it again. Well, anyway, I didn't particularly want to do it. Also, I think people need to realise, if a Plane Crash is that doesn't automatically mean we're going to talk about it on the podcast. That's not what we do. We're not like the podcast of record for Plane Crashers, but so many things happened that I thought we need to talk about it. Each, there are four incidents I wanted to bring up. Four. And I'm going to bring up each of them, hopefully, with some kind of reason to bring them up, other than just to say they happened, because that's a good boring. The first one is a Plane skidding off the end of the runway at La Guadilla. Happened during the week. No one was injured. The reason I wanted to bring this one up isn't because of the Plane Crash, it's because of weather. And that's an interesting thing I'm finding about the US. Obviously, this happened in a really snowy environment, and I'm saying all this stuff about all the snow on the east coast of the US at the moment. And it just could not be any more different from the American experience I'm having here in San Francisco, where every day is magnificent sunshine and like shorts and t-shirts. And all these people are meeting here at the maths institute who've just flown over from the east coast to go, oh, the weather was so bad, I got snowy in at my airport. And this is an amazing thing about America that not many other countries I think have. This incredible diversity of weather in the one country. It's a strange thing, like do you, and especially California weather is amazing, Gray. But it is really good. Every California in the world makes sure that everybody from New York knows about, let's tell you about our weather, even when you don't care. Everyone from California will always tell you about the weather. It is a true thing though. I feel stupid because I keep getting in taxis and I'm amazed at the weather and I always say to the taxi driver, wow, isn't it a great day today? And they look at me like an idiot. It's just like that every day. I'm like, oh my goodness, the sky's blue and the sun's out. They're like, yeah. Well, San Francisco gets cold. No, it does. And today was actually a bit overcast, but even San Francisco is really good. And San Francisco is the bad weather of California. Right. Yeah, that's the worst part as far as I can hear. So anyway, what is the thing your comment here is that when you have a country that spans a continent, there's different weather. Is that what you're bringing up? Yeah, I just thought you should know that. Thank you. That's really interesting. I was unaware of this. Well, what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to go through each playing crash and have another point to make about it other than a playing crash happened. Okay. Work with me, right? I guess this is like a joint venture this podcast. You're not I do understand the German. I guess my question is, did the, the Guardia is the airport that is right on the water? Like how close is this plane to going into the water? Because I've flown in and out of La Guarde a lot. And that's a that's a clutch, clutch your seat when you're landing kind of airport. I mean, those runways are crazy right on the edge. Yeah, you're right. That's what I want to know. I do not want to know that California has great weather, which I've never heard before. So you sang you want more about the crash itself? It's just because I happen to know this airport very well. Next, me really happy. It is podcast as a joint venture and I'm trying to ask follow up questions. I'm trying to find a picture of it now. I can't remember what happened. People can look up a picture. Let's not get let's not get bogged down. Okay. The other one of the other. My question is only quite time I ever had a question about any plane crash. The next one is a similar incident. I think it was a Turkish plane. I'm not even listening to. I know you're not. There was a Turkish plane that also had a coming off the runway no one dead crash at Kathmandu, which is always of interest to me because of how much I love Nepal and having gone to Kathmandu airport many times on many flights to go to Mount Everest. The reason I'm bringing this one up is I'm imagining it is another dent at my attempts to get you to one day come to Mount Everest with me to Base Camp. Am I right about that? I think this is so far out of the realm of my consideration. I didn't even realize this was a campaign of yours. You want me to go to Base Camp? It's early days. It's very early days. I'd love to get some of you guys to come along to Base Camp. Spoiler alert, that's never going to happen in a million years. Is it absolutely impossible? I can't conceive of any reason I would ever go to Base Camp in Nepal. It's very far away. It doesn't seem like there's a nice hotel there. There are some decent ones on the way there. It's only the last one on the way there. It's on the way there is very different from there. Maybe you're only in the grim ones for a few knots, two or three knots. Okay, but I don't have to be in grim ones any nights now. There is a price to be paid for seeing amazing things. Are you not willing to pay the price? Well, I'll not say a second. Mount Everest. Don't tell me you can look at a photo of it and you've seen it. No, I'm not. That's not actually what I'm trying to do. I just was just trying to put it on. Okay, so there's this why why convinced me to go to Mount Everest and Base Camp? Like what do you what do you want to gain out of this? Well, I want to gain seeing you have a great experience that would give me pleasure. Okay, if you want to see me have a great experience, it I think probably taking me to Mount Everest into Paul is a terrible idea. I'm actually I will at the end of this month be going on a trip and I'm going to be going to Las Vegas. That will probably be a great experience. If you want to come to Las Vegas with me sometime, that would be great. It's different, Grah. You're not going to in 30 years, you're not going to say remember that time I had a soda and a hot dog and in Las Vegas, you're not going to remember that. Like you'll have a great time and you're right to do it. But sometimes you've got to do things that and I I believe and I've even seen it from you if you get dragged out of your comfort zone, it's good for you. You enjoy it. You just need to be yanked out of it. No, I decide when I leave my comfort zone. Yeah, I acknowledge that you don't want to spend every single day just living like oh boy, everything is just perfect. Just the way I want it. You do need stuff that's different. But Nepal is a big ask. I'm going to fly to Nepal. I don't like to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. I imagine the tiny plains like the one that almost killed you. No, no, it didn't almost kill me. It was fun. It did kill some people that were on that later. Right. Yeah. That's I'm going to count that as almost killed you. Right. Okay. In my book, that's close enough. So I didn't realize it was a campaign of yours. But I there may be other things that you can get me to go see and I think that Nepal is one of the ones that's probably that you're not going to get some good bang for a buck out of that one. What if I can get destined and Henry and Dirk and all those guys to come along? See, that's more convincing. If everybody's going accept me, then it's like, oh, I guess I'm just the sad monkey who's sitting at home. That's a bit different. Yeah. That's the key then. I see my in there. Yeah. I just need to get some people you like more than me. No, it's not. I like everybody the same. But it's like, oh, the the the the the influence is cumulative. Right. I was like, Oh, okay. There's more people here. Now there's more of a reason to go. What if what if I can convince your wife to come with me? Will you then come? You would never convince my wife to come with you. Not in a million years. I can't say that. I think I think she seems like a good sport. There is no way you would get my wife to go with you to Nepal. I can't say I'm pretty confident. I am really confident about that. And and the situation in which you and my wife are traveling to Nepal together on your own is also a situation where it's like, well, I'm probably going to stay back here and file the divorce papers. Oh, I don't think this is this is a good strategy either. All right. Well, we'll come back to this. I've got it. It sounds like I got to do some negotiating with the other guys to get you there. We do a we do random acts of intelligence base camp edition. Yeah. Yeah. I shouldn't have said that. Descent's going to hear that now and start organizing it. I know it. He will hear that within 20 minutes. He will have booked all the flights and everything. I've spoken to I've spoken to a guy at base camp and he said he can organize this for us. Yeah. He'll have one of those companies that set up gigantic tents for outdoor events like, oh, they're already flying equipment there. Yeah. I've hired 90 Sherpas. Right. Yeah. That's the way it's going to be. All right. I thought we'd be playing crash corner now. We know that's two out of four. Oh, we still got another two. 50% of the way there. Yeah, we're 50% of the way there. All right. I just thought it was worth mentioning that because of I think it's the one year anniversary of this MH370 Malaysia Airlines disappearing plane thing. They put out the Malaysian government put out their big report on it today and you can read it and Gray might link to it in the show notes. And I would recommend not reading this one. Why would I put it in the show notes if you don't even recommend reading it? I'll just yeah, okay. It's a bit boring. They don't do it as well as NTSB. They're still the masters of the plane crash report. So but it's worth maybe it's worth reading so that you can compare their style of plane crash reporting to the NTSB. So I just I just have to I just have to interject here. Yeah. I love that you love this stuff. Right. I just I just want to be I want to be clear on this even though plane crash corner is not my favorite section. I love how into this you are. And I love it like you know, well, we have these two companies. We're like the style of this one is not as good as the other like you know, that gets nothing but a thumbs up from me. They were clearly trying to be like the NTSB with there. I do it has always been a frustration of my the way that bureaucracy and government organizations sterilize language. You know, police were always the master of it aren't they? You want to get a quote from a policeman for your newspaper article and instead of saying, you know, they'll say the alleged offender decamped in an easterly direction instead of saying the burglar ran away that way. And plane crash plane crash reports are really good at that too. They are really good at sterilizing things that are completely extraordinary. But anyway, this is a this was the this was a wannabe into NTSB report. And I don't think they quite cracked it. Still have to not to link it them. Still an amazing mystery. I did read something about that crash day actually that made me wonder what you would think. And that was I was reading about some relatives who still believe and I can and of course we can understand why they would believe this that maybe the plane was hijacked and taken to an island and everyone's still alive and they're being held ransom or something. And I know that's really implausible. It was the worst ransom ever if nobody cares about it. Yeah, of course. Terribly terribly organized. You can see how someone clings to clings to hope though. Oh, yeah, of course. If I loved one of yours was on the plane that went missing. I mean, how you're this uber rational guy. Do you would you are you someone who would be capable of clinging to that kind of hope or would you be the super rational guy that's like it's all over? I'm moving on. I mean, here's the thing. I would hope that I would be capable of being rational. But this is exactly the kind of situation that is very difficult to be rational under. So yeah, I can I can easily imagine that that I would irrationally cling to an incredible long shot because that's just that's just very human thing to do. Like that's just what people do under those circumstances. So you know, it's it's like it's like hypothetical situations. It's super easy to give the correct answer when you're sitting comfortably in a chair somewhere. But that ignore is how people actually react under difficult circumstances. And yeah, losing a loved one in an ambiguous way definitely counts as a very difficult circumstance that you can't expect people to react rationally to all the time. Last playing crash. And I'm really just brazing this one to see if you heard about it. You know, I heard about this. Yeah, I know about this one. This is the Harrison Ford one. I heard about this. This was impossible to miss on Twitter. How how how do you have to tell because you've been on Twitter a lot lately. So certainly I have. Yeah, I saw a bunch of people even tweeting me about this one. But oh, you have to mention the Harrison Ford. Did you then go and look it up? Like have you looked it up and read about it? I know literally nothing about it. I just saw people tweeting me about it. You went, is there anything interesting to know? I guess Harrison Ford was in a plane crash. He's fine. This is amazing to me though that you know this happened. Someone has said to you Harrison Ford, who I know you like. You love Star Wars. You like Indiana Jones. I'm imagining you like Blade Runner. You know, this is this is an actor of some import to you. This is someone who has is a is a figure in your life, whether you you know, you have to admit that. You know, this is someone who's part of your childhood and you're upbringing. I have definitely seen his movies. Yes. Yeah. So he's an interesting as far as celebrities go. He's as close to an interesting celebrities they could be for you, I would imagine. No, I wouldn't I wouldn't say that at all. Who would be the. I think if Elon Musk was in a plane. No, that doesn't count. That's not the count. Why does not I'm talking about frivolous celebrities. Not people are actually doing stuff. Okay. Okay. All of that aside. All of that aside. All of that aside. You're telling me that you became aware that a famous person who plays hand solo had a plane crash was in a plane crash and you didn't think I might look that up and like go to Google or duck duck bang or whatever that thing is you're talking about. Dr. Glamour. You didn't go and have a look just like oh, that's interesting. I wouldn't mind reading a couple of sentences on that. You just saw that and thought, hmm, back to back to whatever. Whenever I saw it on Twitter, I saw enough things in a short enough period of time where people the relevant information was conveyed to me. Harrison Ford was in a plane crash and he's fine. You know, he was you know, stable at a hospital or something. Well, saying you don't know anything about it. Tell me what your imagination is. What are you imagining happened? Tell me what you think. Like you've just said to me, okay, Brady. Tell me what happened. Like you're humoring me. What do you think I'm about to say happened? Well, I'm imagining because now this I may have this celebrity wrong, but I thought Harrison Ford was like well known already for having a pilot's license and that he was like he volunteered in like some rescue scenario a few years ago because I vaguely remember this on the internet people saying like how weird would it be to be rescued and it turns out it's Harrison Ford flying the plane. So I'm just imagining it's in a some very small private aircraft that he was flying for pleasure that had some kind of mechanical problem. That's that's my guess. Is that far off? No, that's pretty much on the money. Well, there we go. Okay. So it was like a World War II sort of replica plane. The only interesting thing is he had some problem and he he kind of half crash landed, half safe landed on a golf course on the fairway of a golf course and then people playing golf all rushed and rescued him. So there's some pretty cool footage in photos, but now you're pretty much on the money. Oh, there we go. Who needs the news when Gray just knows it naturally? Of all of the celebrities who could possibly be in a plane crash. This is the only one who I have some dim knowledge of oh, they fly planes. John Travolta flies like proper commercial jets. What does it in his spare time? Yeah, I think he's got like a big like you know, I don't know if it's a bowing, but he's got like a huge, he can fly like airliners. He was an ambassador for Quantus for a while. Oh, yeah. I was just looking this up here yes, that's right. Harrison Ford was involved in the rescue of a lost hiker in Wyoming at some point. He's got a helicopter license too. So was that a helicopter job? Are you? No, it's a Bell 407. Oh, no wait, that is his helicopter. That is a helicopter. Hey, I think he's had, I think he's had three crashes now or three emergencies of note. Well, you know, someone should be counting up all those points on his license and take away his flying body at some point. Well, well done. I'm really pleased with you there. I think I'm impressed. Oh, don't, Gray. There's nothing to be impressed by here. I'm still a bit proud of you. This doesn't make any sense. I just don't know. It's feel a bit happy. And maybe it's because I'm still looking at that huge smiling face of yours. I'm going to take a screen grab at this just for you so that I can show you what I've been looking at the whole podcast. You should save this and just look at it every time we record a podcast. So I'm going to make it the picture of you that comes up like when you text or phone, like it's going to be my icon of you now. Whatever you want to do, man, you know, it ever works for you. What image do you have come up when you get a message from me? At the moment, I have like the gray symbol, you know, your CGP gray symbol. Oh, I have, I use that picture where you're holding Audrey, the very first picture that you sent me. Yeah. You know the one, but I just, I just cropped it so it's just your face. It hasn't got Audrey in it. There, I sent it to you, but that's what you look like on my contact book. Oh, yeah. Okay. It works pretty much like that's a lot like my Twitter, my Twitter everter. Yeah, I think it's like Twitter avatar. I'm going to send you this picture that I've been looking at for the whole podcast because I want to hear your reaction. Okay. Are you ready? I'm ready. Obviously the, I'm sorry, this is obviously you're not going to get to see this for obvious reasons, but there's gray. There you go. That is a terrible photograph of me, but look how happy you look. That is, that is a horrifying photograph. That is, you should not have that be my picture in your contact book. Well, that really annoy you if I do. I just don't think that's good for you. It's like, oh, I would not want to look at that all the time. That is terrible. Okay. It's your contact book. I'll stick with the gray symbol. I'm used to it now. And there was something nice about you just being this faceless, soulless icon rather than a, rather than a human. Everyone else is a face and then I just have this black and white symbol come up to start talking to me this cog from space telling me when I have to record a podcast. Perfect. That sounds, that sounds about right. Okay. Listen, I'm about to recommend something. And if you don't have it, you need to promise me you're going to sign up right now. That thing is online backup. And that service is backblaze. Everybody needs online backup. Do you want to know why? Because everything important in the world is on your computer. Do you have financial documents on there? Do you have personal writing on there? Do you have photos of your family on there? So much stuff. So much stuff. Of incredible value to you. And all it takes is one broken hard drive to just lose it all. Oh, but gray, you tell me I use time machine. I'm really prepared. Yeah. I have time machine too. But you know what? How's this burned down? It happens. People get robbed. Online backup means you just never have to worry about that kind of stuff. Everything that is digital and important to you is saved somewhere else, not physically where you are somewhere else. When you sign up for backblaze, all of this stuff is just going to be protected for you automatically. It's just a little program. It runs in the background and it looks and it checks for files that have changed on your computer. And it uploads them to a service. You get over 100 petabytes of data backed up. Do you know how big a petabyte is? No, you don't. Well, guess what? A hundred of them is really big. It's going to be bigger than anything you can reasonably have. So you sign up for backblaze. You go to backblaze.com slash hello. You install their program and it just magically makes sure that everything on your computer is protected. How do you know? Well, you can access your files anywhere. You can use an iPhone app to get any file that's been backed up by backblaze anywhere in the world. You can restore just single one off files if you accidentally delete them and time machine hasn't caught them yet. And let me tell you, I have done this. This is a life saver. And backblaze really knows what they're doing. They just recently crossed the six billion files restored mark. Six billion files is huge. It's a huge number of people's term papers or baby photos that would have otherwise been lost. But backblaze saved them. It's a great program. It's a company founded by ex Apple engineers. It runs native on your Mac and on Mavericks. There's no add-ons, no gimmicks, no additional charges. How much is all of this protection? Just five dollars a month, five dollars a month. You crazy. If you don't sign up for this. There's really no other way to put it. So right now, pause the podcast. Go to backblaze.com slash hello internet and sign up for a risk-free no credit card required trial right now. Just do it. Pause the podcast backblaze.com slash hello internet. Did you do it? Do it right now. We get lots and lots of suggestions from listeners of things we should talk about, which we appreciate and look at and mostly ignore. I think I ignored a million suggestions today. Yeah. Everybody wanted us to talk about the dress, which I guess we did mention offhandedly. Yeah, but we're not talking about the dress. Let me read, by the way. Let me read you this email. I got a fact at number four. This is quite common, but this one, for some reason, this one tickled me. It says, I believe I've come up with a proof of the reman hypothesis. However, I can't seem to get it review or publish to the fact I'm not a PhD in mathematics. Do you have any recommendations on how to publicize my proof? I love your videos, by the way. Thank you. What should I do about that? This is the for those who don't know the reman hypothesis is like the holy grail of mathematics. And that is the, I mean, how can you explain that? That's the, that's the, the most crucial thing in all the mathematics. And if that gets proven, it's well changing. I don't remember what the reman hypothesis is off top of my head. It's quite hard to explain, actually, but. That's one of those things where I know I have looked this up several times. And then I just forget. I'll send you an excellent number five video all about it. But it's probably watched that video a couple times. I'm like, what was the thing? All right. Just slide that of your mind. Yeah. It is a bit like that. But I did like that. It's just someone just said, oh, like, but it's written in a really, usually when I get an email like this, it's followed by that page after page after page of symbols and and stuff. But this guy's just written in just like he's just like he's saying, you know, do you want me to order that pizza? I'll see you on Tuesday on, by the way, I've solved the reman hypothesis. Like I list of the casualness of it. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about this other. I feel like I totally lost the thread of that. What was great. You've got to keep up with me. You know, I've got this I've got this electric brain. It's amazing. You know, I'm popping all over the place and you've got to keep up. Yeah, I've just I've got all these rusty old gears in my brain. And I just cannot. I'm this dynamic person who's just full of ideas and like, you know, I mean, it's quite possible. I will solve the reman hypothesis before this podcast is over just just in the boring moments between sentences when you speak. That's that's how my brain works. But getting back to this thing, getting back to whatever. I don't even know what's going on anymore. There's something in this Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper. There's something in this Dr. Pepper. Basically, I can't find the really hope you're getting paid for that. It's got to a point now where you just hope I'm getting money. Otherwise, it's just sad. You don't even want to anymore. You're just like, keep the money. But for God's sake, I hope you're getting some. I can't find the email. So I can't name check this person. But for once, we're going to talk about something that was suggested because I thought it was a good suggestion. And this person suggested that we talk about going to Mars. And one of the reasons they thought it would be an interesting thing to discuss with you in particular is the whole debate of whether or not we should be so preoccupied with the idea of sending humans to Mars or whether or not with robots the way they are. Should humans even apply to get to Mars? Oh, we could use the clever. Yeah, that was nice. I just thought of that just then. It's from saying, man. It's just you know, I know. So anyway, like, so I was really curious about where you stand on the idea of human exploration of Mars. Are we clinging to the old-fashioned days of Apollo? And does it make more sense to send super advanced robots and artificial intelligence? Or does even, does even gray think there's merit to sending humans? Your thoughts, please. Oh, yeah, you just want me to open up on this one. You can start. Okay, so I think there are there are two separate questions here. And the first one is just a question of we are trying to learn stuff about the solar system and the history of this planet, like basically a scientific inquiry question. Sort of die together. Right. Like we want to know stuff about Mars. We want to know stuff about the solar system. And no doubt about it. Hands down. If you if you want to get the most amount of scientific data per dollar spent, it seems like robots are obviously the way to go. Right. You can get robots to Mars much more cheaply than you could possibly get humans to Mars. So in terms of an efficiency question, I was like, yes, there should definitely be NASA and space exploration time and money spent on robotic exploration of the solar system. I'm going to stop you. I want to stop you on that for a second, because I'm not 100% convinced it's a no brainer. And the sort of the famous the famous story about that to borrow from Apollo is you know, I love to is Apollo 15 famously came back with a particular rock called they call it the Genesis rock that one of the astronauts found on that mission. And that was considered a real game changer for that understanding of the origin of the moon. They think it might be like a piece of original crust. And we won't go into all the details partly because I don't know all of them. But that's right. It's very famous. It's very famous. And Dave Scott the astronaut on Apollo 15 and the others involved always said, you know, a robot wouldn't have been able to identify and see it for what it was. And there was like a real human aspect to the finding of it, whereas if you just went and did random samples and rakes and areas and I know robots are getting cleverer, but there is, but so humans. And I think there is still a component of, I don't know, I still think us sometimes doing science, even doing field works, science, there is a component of a little bit of outside the box, and a little bit of not following the algorithm that can lead to real important discoveries and breakthroughs. And I do think having humans doing field work, whether it's on Mars or not, does have an advantage. And there's a really good argument to be have about, where does that, how big is that advantage compared with the incredible costs of getting the humans there? Yes. And I guess that's how you are about to reply. But I do think you get better quality, you do get a lot better quality data from humans if they do their job well. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's funny because I actually, I also think that the Apollo program is a particularly interesting moment in the history of, the history of humans and also the history of technology. I sometimes kind of idly speculate about, about its role. But that's kind of a question for another time. But the only point that I want to make is that at the time that we did the Apollo program, well, actually humans were more cost effective if you wanted to get something on the moon because we just did not have the robotic technology at the time to do that. Yeah. Right. So it's like, maybe if you want to put a remote controlled robot on the moon that had the same kind of capabilities as our current Mars rovers do, it's like, well, I hope you have a trillion trillion dollars to do that. It's just, no, it's just not possible. And a robot besides of a chip nizy. Yeah, that's exactly. We're still using vacuum tubes and all this other stuff. So humans were the cost effective option. And it turned out that the moon was an achievable goal with a cost effective option compared to something like robotics. But of course, as time goes on, robotics gets cheaper and cheaper. And Mars is a much more difficult goal. And so yeah, it's the cost effective question and calculation is very different between those two scenarios. Yeah. I mean, clearly, clearly, you're right as well because that is what we're doing. You know, we're sending all these robots to Mars all the time. And yeah. And the advantage, of course, with the robots is that they are, they are expandable in a way that humans are not where I think that some of the really interesting programs are the like the deep space robots. Like, hey, we're going to land a robot on a comet, right? And it's going to take a sample from the surface of a comet. Like, we, did you say expandable or expandable? Because that's, or both, or both the valid actually, they're both important points. They are both important points. You know, like, you can, you know, we lost a robot like, well, I guess that costs some money. But, you know, the robot wasn't anybody's father, you know, it's like, that's, they're, you can just, you know, write them off. And so, but you did say expandable. Did you do that? That's what you meant. I think, I think that's what I meant. That like, whatever we do for getting robots on Mars, well, in, we can apply that to getting robots in places where we just can't even dream of sending humans. Like, we're never going to land a human on a comet that's swinging by in the solar system. Probably for a couple hundred years, we're not sending any humans to Neptune, right? That's just not going to happen. But so the robots are able to go further. So you kind of, you get more by, by investing in the robots in a way that you just don't with humans. Like, Mars may be the only human reachable target for a very long time. So it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like franchiseable. If we make a good probe that works on Mars, we can, we can be with the same one everywhere. Yeah, that's exactly right. And you do things you couldn't possibly, like, hey, we're going to send a probe. Just, we're just going to take a very expensive robot and we're just going to throw it into the sun, right? And have it just record data on the way down. Like, you know, you couldn't do that with a person. It'd be very tragic. And, you know, it probably wouldn't be very good at recording data in the last moments, which is the most interesting time. Yep. Okay, so from science standpoint, you're saying robots all the way. Yeah. However, however, I am also totally behind a man program from Mars. I think you can do both of these goals at the same time. In no small part, because when you look at how much money you spent on NASA and space exploration just in general, it's not like it's some huge amount of money relative to governmental spending. It's a tiny amount of money. And I'm a big fan in like, hey, maybe we should have an offsite backup for the human species, right? This might be a good thing to do. This might be literally the most important project that humanity can possibly undertake is having humans on more than one planet. So I think that that is like, that is definitely a very important but very long-term goal. But you don't reach long-term goals unless you are progressively working towards them a little bit every day. And so yes, I think we should have in development an active program to land people on Mars. No doubt. I think that that is important enough that if I was in charge of the government, I'd be willing to double NASA's budget on something like that. So hey, take everything you're doing now, put it into robots and also we're going to double your budget and let's send some humans to Mars. Like this is however long it takes, let's just get started on this and make sure that this is a real project that's happening. Just to pause for a second on Mars and come back to what you just said then. Why do you think that so? I always think of you as a kind of rational and when I'm dead, I'm gone and all that sort of stuff. Why do you care so much about this kind of seeding of humanity and this insurance offsite backup as you called it? Like, I know you don't want everyone to die in a common impact. We've discussed this before. But unlike you who would be moved by the beauty of the experience, right? That was your position if I remember. You thought, oh, it's like you're twisting my words for a change. I'm enjoying that. But I was twisting your words at all. That was exactly what you said. So I understand, you know, you don't wish ill upon your fellow humans and you know, you want it. But why do you why are you so invested in the future of humanity if you're one of these guys who, you know, when I left my mortal coil, nothing matters. Why do you think we should be investing billions in that? You know? Well, because I'm thinking about it from a different perspective. When you're asking a question about a Mars program, well, me living in my individual life, there's nothing that I can really do to get us on Mars sooner. But when you're asking the question about Mars exploration, I think implicitly in that question is thinking about it from the perspective of something like the government, you know, should a government undertake this kind of project or should a crazy tech billionaire undertake this kind of project? This is a worthwhile thing for people to do. And I would say, yes, I think that it is a worthwhile thing for people to do. That's why I'm thinking about it from, you know, from like the King Gray perspective, you know, would I would I think that this is, this has enough value over the long term to invest in, yes. And that's a different question from just lots of other questions you asked me. I'm thinking about it just from like, oh, it's just me and my personal life. Should I follow the news or should I not follow the news? Like that's a very different way of thinking about stuff. Yeah. So that's why I'm, I'm big on this is let's get people elsewhere. I think that that is, that is a good goal to have. Tell me what you think about these people who there's been a bit of it in the news lately, but, but you'd be familiar with the concept anyway, these people who put themselves forward as people who would be willing to go to Mars with no return ticket, people who are willing to be these sort of sacrificial lambs in a way. Do you understand those people? Do you think that the nutters could you be one of those people like, what do you think of those people? I mean, you know that I would never be one of those people. Not, no, forget it. The immortality of being the first wouldn't appeal to you? Again, this is now asking me about my personal life and I would definitely trade living 50 additional years on earth of my own actual life versus cutting that down to a two or three year lifespan, but getting immortality in the textbooks. But immortality in the textbooks means nothing to me when I'm dead. So that's a very different question. Yeah. Would you do it? Would you go on a one-way trip to Mars? Do you know if you'd asked me five or six years ago, you would have got a shaky answer? I don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. But now, as I get older, it's more of a no. Oh, it's more of a no. Interesting. Why? Why? Yeah. Don't want to leave my wife. Don't want to leave my doggies? So Audrey is your answer there, really? And Lulu. Yeah. But I don't know. I think you maybe you just get a bit older and cynical. And while I still think Neil Armstrong's awesome, I do realize that he's just a guy who's dead himself now. And well, I'm envious of what he got to do and his legacy. He's just a guy. What does it all mean? So, but I don't know. But if you said to me, Brady, will you go to Mars and there's a 50-50 chance of coming back? It might be a different story. Yeah, it's a different story. And also, it might be a different story as you continue to get older when you're looking at the ever shortening event horizon of your life. Yeah. Then it's a different story. Oh, well, I'm 75. How much more time do I possibly have? I might as well do something really interesting because then the calculus on this is different. I'm like, well, how many years am I giving up versus spending the last two years of that doing something interesting that nobody's ever done before? Would you go with you wouldn't go with the risk? I feel like I must code you up and said, well, let's not say all the masks because you'd love him so much. You'd do anything. I would not do anything. No, I would still look again. It's just like, oh, I'm an important person. It's asking you something. The importance of the person should not change your calculation on whether or not you do something. That's a terrible way to make decisions. You just told me you'd consider coming to Mount Everest if the other guys come. That's a different, that's totally different. Okay, well, let me put it to you this way. If there was a 50-50 chance of you dying going to Mars, right? That's a special mission. That made a ship. It's all good. Except for the 50-50 chance. Except for the 50-50 chance. It's all good except for the death. Would you go? No. Would you go if Dirk Henry destined an all of us would go? No, I would not. That's no brainer. Well, guys, I'm going to monopolize the educational market in just a few short months. This is a strategy. Yeah, he'll use what we've got. Yeah, it's not only is there a downside, but there's actually an upside. It's like a hedge in the market here. I was like, well, can I have your login details before you go? Exactly. Just to preserve your legacy. What would it take to go to Mars? You would have to be commonplace. If it was like... I kind of assume that I will never not be on planet Earth. It's not exactly a wild assumption, but there's a question of thinking forward into the future. Is it possible that within our lifetime travel to Mars becomes... If not exactly common, not uncommon? Yeah, I think in the course of our life, that's a possibility. That's why I say that question the way that I do. Do you mean this in the gray possibility sense of, well, of course, anything's possible? Or do you think like there's a likelihood? Because I'm not convinced humans will go to Mars while I'm alive. If I had to put money on the table, I would bet that yes, within my lifespan, there are humans who step on Mars. Really? I would be surprised if that was not the case. Wow. A year ago, I would have said no. Now I'm a bit more 50-50, but... So that's why when I'm projecting forward, I can imagine... I can imagine a place where we could say something like travel to Mars is more frequent than travel to the International Space Station is today. People go to the International Space Station, but very few. I can imagine a scenario where travel to Mars is more frequent than that. That's why I'm also saying I can also think like, well, I don't like flying on a jet airplane across the Atlantic. So I can't imagine there's ever going to be a scenario in which I would go to Mars, even if it was a common-ish in the future. I don't know. What are you thinking over there? It sounds like you're mulling something over. I don't know. I worry. I think sometimes I think sometimes I think you're too happy to watch what other people do and you don't want to do it enough yourself. But on the other hand, you do like doing stuff, you know, and you're driven across America a couple of times and you are a guy who goes and does things and sees things. So I can't figure that aspect of you out. You're interested in science and exploration and you've got a fascination about nature and yet... I don't know. I guess you're just a bit nervous. No, I'm not nervous. I think it might be better to say that I'm calculating with this stuff. If you could say that travel to Mars was as safe as air travel is today, then that's a different question. Then I say, okay, now I can imagine a scenario under which I traveled to Mars. But I'm not imagining that within the scope of my probable life that travel to Mars will reach that kind of safety level. That's kind of how I'm thinking about this here. But again, it's also a different thing where, you know, imagine again, I'm like an old person, then the calculation is also different there. But right now, I'm in the prime of my life, Brady. Mars seems like a terrible idea. What do you think of it as a planet? Here, it's pretty cold there. That's what I hear. It's very cold in Mars this time of year. It's chilly. And every time of year. It's never been one that has, it's never been a planet that has excited me a lot. Like, I'm really into, like, you know, I'm really into astronomy and space and I'm really into the solar system. And Mars is always this glamour planet, isn't it? It's like the cliched other planet that people love talking about and writing stories about and stuff. And I've always found it almost the least interesting of the other planets. Well, it's the most similar to Earth. That's also the thing that's why people talk about going because it's the most similar. But that also kind of makes it the least interesting. Yeah. I did lessons on the solar system with the kids that I used to teach. This was just a regular part of the curriculum. And I was always aware that the most interesting thing to talk about with Mars is the possibility of humans going. But other than that, yeah, there's not, like, you can't talk about like the amazing kind of weather or the interesting, the interesting extremes on the planet because it's not that. Basically, you've got Olympus Montenegro. That's the thing. Yeah, let me tell you a room for 15-year-old kids are not super impressed by Olympus Montenegro. You can do your best with that, but there's no way to make that capture the imagination. The highest mountain, three times higher than Mount Everest. Again, even the notion of Mount Everest to a room full of kids is it's like an abstract notion. And see, there's a thing that's really big and it's three times bigger than the thing that's really big. It doesn't connect in a way. But you can talk about, what might it be like to try to fly through Jupiter? And like, oh, that's, they can kind of imagine this idea. There's nothing really solid in this planet. It's like a lie. It's a planet. It's a gas giant. But with Mars, always the most interesting thing was just talking about people possibly going there. That would capture kids' attention. The particular physical features of Mars are not really interesting. Yeah. So that's why I think you are also don't find it super interesting. Because from a geological perspective, it is probably the least interesting of all the planets. Now we're going to hear from everybody who knows everything about Mars geology. No, that's pretty. It's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty. Oh, I can't. I should be able to remember. I cannot remember her name, the geologist in the Red Mars book. I don't know. Have you not read, have you not read Red Mars? I have not. No. There's a really grumpy geologist. Oh, yes, I have. Is that the one where they have like a festival on Olympus? Yes, yes. I have read. Stanley Robinson. Yeah, I have read that one. John Boone. I tell you what, what? The movie mission to Mars with Gary Seneis and Tim Robbins and those people. Have you is my worst movie ever made? When people ever say, what's the worst movie ever that you've ever watched? I always say that one. And yeah, I've watched it three or four times. But I think that is the, I think that is my worst movie ever. Oh, I know that. That is a terrible movie. Yeah, I do know that. Actually, I don't know, I don't know any other time to bring this up. I'll mention this. Here's a horrifying thing about teaching kids and realizing like, what do people know about the world? And the answer is way less than you think. Whenever I would do the thing about the solar system. Yeah. Okay, so now I would teach many classes, like a whole bunch of kids. So let's say out of maybe 150 kids that I would teach in a particular year, when I would get to the part about Mars and humans maybe one day visiting Mars, without fail, there was always at least one kid every year who was confused because they assumed that humans had already been to Mars. Not in like a pulling my leg kind of way, but because this always happened. Right, like every year, I just knew after a while this question was going to come up for someone, someone's looking confused in the back. And I think this is an example of where it's easy to overestimate how much people know about the world and like versus how much people have seen in movies. I'm absolutely sure that Mission to Mars or other Mars related movies are the reason why some people actually do think we've already been to Mars. I never underestimate how stupid people could be when it comes to space stuff. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's because you talk to everybody about the Apollo program. I do. I do. You're touching your microphone right now by the way. You're right. I did. I did. Oh, look at that. I write it to the base. You're amazing. Yeah, I can hear it on my headphones. Did you look down and you saw your hands were touching it and you didn't even know you were doing it? It was a bit of a fidget. Yeah, just like your phone just went off right now on vibrate as well. This is the other thing I can hear. Yeah, I'm sorry. That is my fault. But nothing but noise on your end all of a sudden. I'm not going to apologize for having my phone on because I do need to know what's going on. But you are touching your microphone. It was and it was completely just fit. I am a bit of a fidgeter and that was a complete fidget. It was just an unnecessary rotation of the base. Yeah. And I can hear it over here and I'm going to have to edit it out later on. Well, you can't now because it's become a whole thing. We're living dangerously. I don't question those annoying. I don't question I'm doing something that's creating a noise, but I do not touch the microphone.
==Episode List==
==References==
Category:HelloInternetEpisode
__NOTOC__Category:ArticleCategory:ArticleCategory:ArticleCategory:ArticleCategory:ArticleGroup1