H.I. No. 97: Tesla in Space

"H.I. #97: Tesla in Space" is the 97th episode of Hello Internet, released on February 19, 2018.
== Official Description ==
Grey and Brady discuss: reviews revisited, why Grey watches the airline safety videos anyway, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch, The Confession Tapes, and hotmail.com.
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== Show Notes ==
*Discuss this episode on the reddit
*It's still comic relief season
*SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch
*Duke of Venezuela
*Unofficial diagram
*Trophy Tesla
*The Confession Tapes
*Hotmail.com
== Other ==
I like this podcast. It's pretty cool. And if you're someone who met someone who knows Brady, I can confirm this podcast is legit. Brady and Gray have influenced real-world events, such as the New Zealand Flag referendum, and a poll on some radio website or something about top audio personalities. So rest assured, Reader. This podcast is legit. Five stars. We've been getting a lot of reviews, Brady. What was that you've met someone who knows someone? I didn't even get that. That was your call, Brady. You wanted acquaintances that your wife was talking to. When Hello Internet was mentioned in reference to you, you wanted that person when they went to go look up the reviews on iTunes to see that the podcast was a big deal. I've be quoted back to myself. This is the danger of this podcast. Sometimes when I make people who listen, they'll say some line at me like, and I'll be like, what are you talking about? They're like, but you said that. You think I remember the things I say on the show. You're missing out on your own in jokes. I say a lot of rubbish. I can't remember all of it. You asked for something, Brady, and to quote, Henry is cool one on iTunes. Five stars for Brady, so he looks more popular. Five stars. I appreciate the five stars. We have a ton of reviews. They're very fun to read through. There was a very consistent theme through all of them. Have I Hello Internet review numbers gone up high enough? Has there been a noticeable bump? Well, I mean, Brady, we're trying to quench your thirst for recognition. We're trying to feed your vanity here. I guess the question really, it's not for me to answer if the reviews are enough. I don't know if there is any number of reviews that will be enough for you. Look, Gray, I will go along with being stitched up like this, and you know, because I deserve it. Oh, yeah, yeah, stitched up. I'm pulling this just out of the air. I'm making up things. You were literally calling for this. That's the first. Yeah, but if we put it in the right context, like, I didn't know the number. I don't know the number now. It occurred to me that if anyone ever goes and looks and checks, will we look like we know what we're doing without even having looked myself? I just said, if you haven't left a review, go and do it because it'll look good for us. Like, I'm not there like sitting there watching a counter and like keeping a notebook of the scores and ringing people up and saying, have you looked at my reviews? It just occurred to me. Not like the radio times contest, right? Where that was occurring. Right. No, this is totally different. That kind of got a bit out of control, but I don't think that was my fault either. That was a perfect storm. There was nobody's fault. I mean, you can say what you want, Brady, but according to Raven Ho 27, Brady's vanity knows no bounds. Five stars. I'm just telling you what I'm reading here in black and white. So when we were having the discussion last time, there was a thing which I did not realize, which is that iTunes does the counting of reviews separately for every country. I feel like that's a bit of a strange decision to make. I don't quite understand why iTunes would say that, oh, UK reviews are going to be in a different group than US reviews. I don't quite understand that. They do that across the whole platform, great, because when I go and look at what the top podcasts are, it's always like 95,000 BBC podcasts, which I'll come to in another episode sometime because I have thoughts about that. And then there's like a couple of American ones. And then that's it. It's like, does anyone know what in the world make podcasts other than the BBC? Whereas I'm sure in America, it's not completely dominated by the BBC. I can get behind the idea of regional recommendations. Waiting. A bit of waiting. Yeah, a bit of waiting. So when we were talking about having whatever it was like 600 reviews, I think we were both looking at the iTunes UK store. And so we're now closing in on like 1100 reviews on the UK store. The US store, though, as you might imagine, that's where the big explosion occurred because it seems like most of our listeners are in America, or at least the plurality of listeners are in America. And we went from something like, I think it was somewhere like 2,000 reviews to 4,333 reviews on the US store. I feel like that's quite a bump. It's such a bump that while I am making fun of you for your vanity, that bump makes it feel like 10,000 is within our grasp. Like it's a thing that is possible. Here's calling for the numbers now, right? I'm just saying, look, before it never really crossed my mind. But now it's like, oh, I can see it on the horizon. It's not close, but it's within our grasp, rating. So I'm looking at this 4,000 number and I am finding myself thinking this needs to get to 10,000. I said 10,000 as a joke, but it's a joke that has lodged itself in my mind. So I can see that like we're close there. We're close. I would be willing to bet if you summed up all of the different country stores, we actually probably do have 10,000, it's pretty close to 10,000. But I feel like that doesn't count if your wife's friends acquaintances are looking up the show, they're not going to sum it up. That's not how that works. I would love to see it actually hit 10,000 on at least one of the stores, probably the US store. I feel like if we can get to 10,000 in the UK, it'll be like, we've cracked America. That's like every overseas entertainer's dream, isn't it? You know, yeah, sure, we've done well here in the colonies and that. But if we can crack America, we can make it anywhere. Meanwhile, we have eight reviews in the depot store. I'll take them. I'll take them. I hope we're doing well in depot. I hope we have a high five star reading over there. I was making that. I haven't like set up a VPN in a poll to say what are we doing there? I mean, wait, you can on iTunes, you can scroll down to the very bottom and click the little flag and then you switch to a different country to try to see how you're doing in different spots. But anyway, so yes, I have found it interesting. The reviews made me laugh. People are always funny on the internet. But aside from the reviews mocking your vanity, there was also a very consistent theme, which is people say, I love this podcast, but it's really hard to describe why. I have no ability to describe why I like the show and why I listen to it. But I really like it five stars. So I enjoyed those as well. I sympathize with you people because I have the same problem every time I tell someone I do a podcast, oh, I do a podcast. Oh, what's it called? And then I've got a let's say, hello, internet, which I'm a bit embarrassed about. And they're like, oh, really? What's that about? And then I'm like, it's kind of like, nerdy stuff and flags. I feel like we've fluid a lot of like, vexalology people in under false pretenses. We haven't been delivering lately. I think we need a flag bananza sometimes. I'll see what we can do. But in the meantime, I couldn't help but check and just load it up in the Paul store. Yeah, all right. What are we on? Let me guess. I'm going to go with two. You are exactly right. We have two reviews in the Paul. But the store is listing us as not having received enough ratings to display an average for this podcast. So get on it, Nepalese. Did they write anything? One review is from Nepal. And then they put the Nepal flag emoji, which I feel like is his on point. Not realizing that their review would only be displayed in Nepal. Come on, people of Nepal. We need to let's say I'm for a target in Nepal of 8,800 reviews because that's the height of Mount Everest in meters. I don't think we're going to get past 29,000, which would be in fate. Right now, Brady, that's insanity. Don't ask for unreasonable goals. Don't do that. Just the reasonable goals, the reasonable goals on the horizon. So close. So last time, Brady, we were discussing the airline safety videos. And since that episode went up, I discovered that it is still comic relief season in British airways, comic relief meaning they're taking a break from anything funny. I got to see the video twice. The space of like eight hours because I ended up flying out to the continent and back on the same day. And I was like, Oh my god, I can't believe this. Like here I am. And as I, oh god, it's so awful. I took a little video. I put up on Twitter, comic relief season. Maybe it never ends. Well, it's not even comic relief year this year. So they're clearly not bounded by any season here. They're just going for a really resent that video. It's like I can't stand watching it anymore. But anyway, the biggest universal piece of feedback that I received from people is, hey, why are you watching this anyway? Why don't you just put on your headphones like a normal person and not paying any attention to this? You know what? That's an excellent point. This is one of these moments where I realized that there is something that I have not re-evaluated in my life, which is as I have mentioned on the show, my mom was a flight attendant for many, many, many years. And like because of that, I always felt like when the flight attendants are doing the safety demonstration, you should pay attention because it's rude not to pay attention. I also feel like something I could be told off for. Like because being at airports and airlines is always a time of like, we've talked about before, you're like hyper conscientious. You answer all the questions, you know, did you pack any scissors? No, I didn't. You're very deliberate. And I feel like if I don't watch the safety video, I'm doing something wrong and they could like throw me off the plane or worse, yet tell me off in front of other people. So I feel like I kind of deliberately would take off my headphones and watch the video just to be like bit of a goody-two shoes and show the flight attendants that, yes, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. I'm a good person. Yeah, there is definitely a part of that. There's like such a different mindset when you're at airports and when you're flying. It's like you're a different person. And yeah, there is a, a deliberateness and showing that, like I'm a person who's paying attention. Yeah, you want to be sane to do the right thing. Right, I'm in the exit row and I'm not a person that you have to worry about flight attendant. I'm a reasonable person. I'm not going to cause any problems here. I also realized that a transfer had happened in my mind that when I was a kid and growing up and if I was on an airplane with my parents, you know, my mom would like, we take out the safety card and she'd look, you know, let's look at where the exits are. Let's make sure you recognize visually where the exits are because as she used to always say she's like, if this plane is going down, my son is going to survive. Right. She's going to know where the exits are. He's going to get out of this and it's like, okay, yeah, I don't know if the plane's going down. I'm going to make sure I'm not one of the people who dies on this plane. And then that's also just paying attention to the flight attendants during the safety demonstration. But they were always people when I was a kid. And I never really thought about it, but there has been this very slow, very gradual transition over time to the frequency of getting a safety demonstration from an actual human going down and the probability of watching a video going up even on relatively small planes where it's been the longer holdout that there's a person doing the safety demonstration. Even on the smaller planes now, it's very, very likely that you're going to be watching an actual video. And somehow this transition happened so slowly and gradually that I feel like the respect that I felt I needed to accord a human being transferred to the machine that's just showing me this stupid comedy video. That's why the safety videos have bothered me is because I've always felt like I need to watch this out of some kind of respect. But I don't think I do anymore, especially not if they're going to be propagandizing me with 10,000 viewings of the same unfunny thing. I feel like, you know what, safety video that doesn't have specifics about this airplane anyway, I don't need to watch you. I don't need to pay attention. And I think if the flight attendant is just going to think worse of me because I put my headphones on when I don't want to watch this safety video, I think I'm just going to eat that in terms of social respectability. I think that's what's going to happen going forward. That observation you make is interesting, though, isn't it? Because even when they show safety videos now, on most of the planes I've been on, the flight attendants will still sort of stand in the corridor and they might wave their arms once or twice in the general direction of an exit. But they always seem to be sort of standing there unnecessarily. Maybe that's why they're standing there because they're tapping into that old emotion that if someone's standing there, like if they're making the effort, you have to make the effort. And if they just went about their business and made coffee and sat down and, you know, checked their hair in the mirror, you wouldn't watch the video, but because they are standing there and they're making the effort, you make the effort. It's probably like a row. I bet that they do have to stand there, even then the number of things that the flight attendants are actually doing has dramatically decreased. Oh, yeah. Or maybe the one of their jobs is to make sure people are watching, and that's a good place to do it from. That's why they stand there. They must have to stand there for a reason. I mean, the reason is not to tell off people with headphones on because they certainly don't. Then I'm the only sucker sitting there watching the safety video and thinking, oh, God, not again, don't make me watch the joke about the seat belt one more time. They don't tell you off if you're wearing your headphones. So, they don't know what you're listening to. You could be listening to that TV. I'm sure that's what I'm doing as I'm looking at my iPad with my headphones on and paying no attention whatsoever and clearly writing stuff on the screen. Oh, yeah. I'm making notes on the safety video. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm certainly not doing my own work. Crash notes. I do just want to be clear though that even though I am going to pay less attention to the safety videos in the future, I reserve the right to complain about safety videos in the future. Oh, yeah. Reserving the right to complain is like, hello internet. I'm Motto. Yeah, this is a hello internet subtitle. Well, it sounds like it's time to talk about SpaceX then. Hello internet. If you're someone who builds by the hour, you're going to need our next sponsor, FreshBooks. How much of your life do you lose by completing annoying paperwork and admin tasks? What happens when you add that up over a month or a year? 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So take back your 192 hours a year. That's 16 hours a month by using FreshBooks. To try FreshBooks for an unrestricted 30-day free trial, go to FreshBooks.com-hello and enter hello in the How Did You Hear About Us section. That's FreshBooks.com-hello and enter hello in the How Did You Hear About Us section. Thanks to FreshBooks for supporting the show and for saving freelancers so much time. I'm so not looking forward to this. Why not Brady? Because although I will battle on and will not cave to the cheer pressure, I know I'm going to get you know you're weeding in to a forest of cheer pressure. I know how people feel about SpaceX and they're starting to not like if I say anything negative more than they used to. So just to put it in context, at the time of recording it's just a day actually I think since SpaceX had this historic historic moment for the company where they did their first launch of the so-called Falcon Heavy, which is the more powerful rocket which can throw things further out into space and it's a big milestone in the efforts to you know get to Mars because you're going to need these bigger rockets to get beyond Earth orbit. Yeah my understanding is that this is like a cargo rocket. That's the idea of it is it's it's for transporting a non-trivial amount of stuff into space. Yeah I imagine it can also probably transport manned craft. I don't know exactly where that's heading but what they had in at this time of course was this Tesla Roadster car which resulted in quite a substantial amount of publicity. They used Elon Musk's red car with a mannequin astronaut at the wheel as like their test payload and it was all very successful. So how am I going to do this Gray? Do I get my gripes out the way first or do I do them last or do we go chronological I wasn't going to watch this live right I was aware it was happening because of Twitter but I was not paying much attention and I actually got a phone call from Duke of Venezuela and he said are you watching are you gonna watch her so I said all right I'll watch and I watched her. He didn't call me. No I totally missed out on this because I was busy watching a chick flick at the time. I really didn't have any idea that happened. Well I was in the bath when he called so I could top that. But anyway so I watched it. I watched the live stream along with all the other SpaceX diards and the rest of the world so I'm willing to talk about it on hello internet if you are because you have watched us well now Gray at my request haven't you but laterally. It's been a very busy week but yes you sent me the video you told me the relevant sections to watch and so I have seen the takeoff to reveal and the landing part of the of the launch. Mara from the outside let me say when people criticize things it doesn't mean they don't necessarily like it. Gray and I criticize Star Wars all day long but we're Star Wars fans. So just because I say negative things you know that just happens you know that's just part of being a critic right which is what we sometimes do. But my overall feeling watching the launch was one of very great excitement. More than I would have expected partly maybe because it was live and I knew you know something could go wrong and I felt myself really really hoping nothing would go wrong which was you know nice in itself and also for the first time I was sort of thinking do you know what we might actually go like to Mars and stuff while I'm still alive. That's a very exciting feeling. So I was very excited but I thought it looked fantastic. They're getting so good at covering these things now and coverage has improved so much that of course it's going to look fantastic but you know the shots were good and the tracking shots were good. The landing of the two boosters when they came back down like in sync and landed was remarkable. I don't think that will ever get old to the sight of those boosters landing like a couple of newborn giraffes trying to walk on ice and you think surely those things are going to fall over and they stuck at which was amazing. I know the one out to see had a big smash and didn't land properly but I think that is a fantastic looking thing and I think that's becoming the new kind of iconic image of launches like in the days of satin the iconic shot was always you know that one with there's like a camera on the on the gantry and you're really close to the rocker and you'd always see the fire and the ice falling off and you'd see us a go fast. I know the exact shot you're talking about that yes that is the iconic we're flying into space shot. Yeah. Funnily enough I think the iconic shot now is those are those boosters landing which is funny because it's not the launch but I agree that that is really impressive and it's way more impressive than the launch. Yeah. I found watching the launch much more interesting than I expected. It's one of those things where I don't really have any sense of scale like I don't actually understand what is the size of this compared to like a Saturn V rocket. I don't understand but on the video it just looks huge and it looks powerful with all of those boosters. It just looked like a hell of a thing taking off but I would say watching the two boosters then return to earth and land vertically simultaneously. I mean it literally gave me chills. I thought like that is just such a crazy technological achievement that it's it's just impossible to fathom. Obviously the launch of the payload is the part that really matters here but the booster landing is incredible and it's it's a thing that in our previous conversations about SpaceX I feel like I didn't really understand at that point in time and this one was like wow that is amazing to see. I don't get all excited about it because I think oh wow this is going to make space travel cheaper like that's just boring accounting. The thing that about that I'm amazed by is just how awesome it looks like it just looks like made so good on them but just one last thing about the launch and the coverage of the launch that I watched and this is where I will upset some people. The editorial decision that was made to give so much prominence to the cheering and hollering of the SpaceX employees who were watching this happen which made it feel more like a sporting event than a scientific moment or an engineering moment and I'm not opposed to them getting excited and cheering and like a lot of people said to me oh it added to the drama and I think a little bit of it maybe would have added to the drama cutting to them occasionally or showing them but I thought it was too much for me it was laid on too thick they were carrying on like a bunch of fat boys and from the shots they showed they were mainly boys so I don't feel bad saying that. They were carrying on like pork chops at one point I heard them go SpaceX, SpaceX, SpaceX like they were super bowl people drinking from a keg before the game. For me it was like it trampled all over the moment and it wasn't like a bit of like controlled excitement where the cool heads of the of the engineers were saying come on everyone let's calm down I know you're excited but this is like this is serious business here. It was just hollering and hooping and no I thought it was too much and it was an editorial decision because they deliberately injected it all the way through and they were cheering for every single step that happened which you know because they're engineers I get that they're excited and each step was another milestone for them okay we've now gone to full electronic control inside the rocket woo yeah right SpaceX SpaceX. Like come on man this is like this is undignified. Really you're such a party pooper. I'm not objecting to their excitement and a little bit other it was very American and it trampled all over the moment for me and I know how much that upsets people because it's all about the employees and they had their names written on the on the rocket and they're the heroes of the day but I don't think it was done with a very good sensibility. I also would love to know where their contingency was if the rocket had blown up like were they going to cut that feed or were they still going to show those people then fall in a heap. I'd love to know what the plan was but we'll never know because thankfully it didn't blow up. Yes thankfully it didn't blow up. Brady you like space exploration much better when it's boring guys and ties in Houston fighting a proxy nuclear war with the Soviet Union. No you like your space exploration. Oh well I mean obviously I'm a real fan of it but like I love the dignity of them. They were bottling it up because they knew they had a job to do and when they got excited they'd be told hang on don't be excited there's more to come. Come on. Well we're professionals we're scientists we're engineers we know the risks here and I know things people weren't like on shift. Yeah I was going to say I don't think this was like the people in the the crew right. I don't know. Yeah I'm like a bunch of people who were standing around once like it looked like engineers who had worked on the thing. Yeah and it's great that they were made so much a part of it. I just thought I don't know they were turned up too loud they were laid on too thick and it was a bit like can everyone just shut up for a minute I'm trying to hear what's going on and like I don't think they got the balance right of that part of the broadcast and here we're just talking about cosmetics of course this is just the broadcast this has got nothing to do with the accomplishment or the fate and yes I know they're happy and I know they're proud and I know they're responsible and I know all that stuff but I'm not the only one who thought that by the way. What did you think you watched it what did you think? I'm laughing because I had a bit of a different reaction. I was aware that there was a ton of cheering and that's obviously like an editorial decision. I didn't mind because I do think it makes it more exciting to watch than if they just had the audio feed from mission control and you were hearing the the people who were actually working just saying whatever they need to say. It's sort of like when we when we've discussed the audio logs from playing crashes I'm always struck by how professional those recordings are and how calm the pilots are under circumstances where I would be screaming and they're just like we're reporting the second engine is out on the right hand side and it's like oh my god Jesus Christ dude but that's what you need when it's a professional environment right I want a pilot who's able to just do that because it is like keep it together man. I'm fine with the yelling and the excitement because part of what SpaceX is doing here is almost like a recruitment video for like future engineers for working at SpaceX so like you want a thing that's exciting. So I totally get that at one point they had two commentators who just start talking and then for me that's where my thing like stop talking commentate you're talking over the thing like I don't want to hear whatever just show me the feed I can see it on the screen I don't need two talking heads telling me that I'm looking at a rocket going into space like obviously they turned it into sports coverage they had the hollering you know frat boys they've got the glitz he good looking young commentators who are sitting there at the desk giving us some punditry and filling time and that they're turning into like yeah it's the super bowl of space the thing that it made me think of this is an old rage comic which I wonder if anybody can find on the internet it's forever old but it always made me laugh so hard and it was a comic that somebody made when the royal wedding happened years ago and it shows a like a guy who's sitting at home who doesn't really care about the royal wedding and he just turns it on and he's watching it he starts getting more and more into the royal wedding and then Katie Kirk is doing the narration about what's happening on the wedding and like the caption is like shut the fuck up Katie Kirk I just want to watch this pretty princess getting married that was kind of my feeling with the space launches like when the two commentators start talking it's like shut the fuck up I just want to watch the rocket I don't really want to hear your comments on this so that's where it bothered me more it's like the words but the cheering I don't know personally I can see why some people might think it was a bit much because it was a lot but the cheering I was okay with I think it made it more exciting to watch so I can't get with you on this one I would have cut to the cheering as it lifted off the pad but all the other cheering throughout the whole process from like three or four minutes before to five minutes after it just belittled it and it you know what it did make it more exciting but open heart surgery would be more exciting if you had a thousand people cheering as it happened it doesn't mean it's like appropriate that's not what was really going on the people who were making this happen were like they're just I don't know I like the image in my head of of broadcaster Brady who's managing all the live streams for SpaceX and the rocket's going up you have your hand on the dial for how much crowd cheering we can hear and you turn it up as the rocket goes up you give it a second and then Brady turns it down that's enough of that people just turns it down and I would have had okay now's a good time cut to the frat boys let's see them jumping up and down give them there a few seconds like include it include them as part of it but it just overwhelmed it anyway obviously I obviously I'm in the minority here and so be it let's get to the business of the car in space okay there are so to the final stage we had bolted this Tesla roadster which I didn't realize of course I should have realized because of course it always has to be this way was going to like do some laps of the earth before it got flung out into the far reaches of the solar system and I have a few thoughts about it but the first thing I have to say is I was not prepared for how awesome it would look like when they started cutting to those shots and you had the live stream of it and like the thing was just slowly rotating and the earth was just like creeping into shot behind space man star man in the red car it was like I couldn't stop looking at it and I was like show like I had to show people I would like say to my wife on my goodness you just have to look at this and I would be watching it and she'd be like yeah okay I've seen it but like I found it completely hypnotic artistically it was like it looked impressive yeah I'll completely agree with you there this is how I was aware of the event occurred because when I was done watching my chick flick and I turned on Twitter really was like what are all these pictures it's from space of this like I had a weird experience of the pictures look so so in some sense of strange like I had a very hard time understanding out of context what is this actually a photograph of and so I had to do a little bit of digging around about like what does this situation actually look like not just from the camera that's on the front of this car but like what is what is the actual situation that I'm looking at but the pictures themselves they're very impressive but there's almost like sort of like the Maryland point where a photo can become so impressive it becomes unreal looking like I have a hard time looking at those photos and thinking of them as real even though I know they are it's just like I'm looking at a car floating above the earth my brain does not process this as a real image it looks very strange so should they have sent a cat a space or not yeah of course why not what could be the reason to well here's what I think about it it looked amazing as like an artistic project as a piece of art I think that warrants it like it just you know sometimes you have to do something I mean must himself said sometimes you just have to do something because it's fun and a bit crazy hmm and I think that completely justifies it and I think you know and whether or not they sent up a sculpture or a bright red car with an astronaut the wheel which was a bit more funny or whatever they decided to send up okay they they decided to make it an artistic project the main argument that burns on the internet about this was if they're going to spend all that money could they have used a payload that had a bit more scientific value like they didn't want to risk some billion dollar satellite but could they have sent something up that was like more useful and that's like you know I think your position that's clear from your noise I understand the reason why people want to go down that road yeah but like that road never ends okay well you could always in theory spend more money in a more practical way there's never a time that is not true that argument on its own I find never convincing oh this this money could have been spent in a more effective way of course all money that could be true so I just I don't find that interesting I agree with you and I think doing something artistic and fun is good here's the one problem I have with it though and that is the muddy water that is created by the commercial aspect of it because Elon Musk runs SpaceX and he's got grand plans for it he also runs Tesla which is you know losing a bit of money at the moment and they're trying to make a successful business out of it this was fantastic publicity and promotion for the Tesla company and I think that's where it starts getting a bit blurry a between doing something for fun and something artistic that just tickled the world and inspired people which is what it did without question it's a very inspiring thing to do and a very viral thing to do and to infernist to Tesla and to Elon Musk I do think they showed restraint you know they didn't have big bright Tesla signs everywhere and make it look too commercial I think they showed a lot of dignity in that respect the dashboard said don't panic it didn't say for 25% off your next Tesla offer code space man right at your local dealer right that's like that's not what they did so yeah there was not an overabundance of commercialness here exactly they they did show restraint but I do think it is still a little bit muddy I mean he's you know they're paying for it themselves it's not I don't know how much taxpayer money went into this whole thing I don't know if they you know are paying the normal rates for the use of the NASA facilities or not but you know they're paying for it so to some extent I'm completely on board with them doing what they want with their rocket but you do know I worry about the commercialization of space and Coca-Cola billboards and things like that and this still was a little bit promotional and I think that's what left me with a little bit of unease about it like you can't just say oh I did this for fun because I thought it would be funny and I just needed some weight there's certainly a a marketing and promotional agenda at play here that is legitimate and no one's breaking any rules or anything but it just feels a bit like okay I sell in a few cars while you're there are you mate okay so yeah I feel like I don't understand the parameters of what you mean by muddied the only comparison I could think of here is like Steve Jobs being so involved in Pixar and Apple and so then you had like cross promotion between those companies but I feel like at least from what I have read about the greater musk empire like the solar city Tesla and SpaceX are companies that are sharing a lot of technology between them yeah so there's something to me that I do not think that these companies are as separate as normal companies would be so I guess I'm just I'm not quite understanding what you're saying muddy complaining about a lack of quarantining between his different businesses is it more like the humanity star it is just the fact that there's like a Tesla going around earth I feel like this was like a big milestone for space exploration certainly that's how it's been pitched and having a carried verdism bolted to the front of it feels like cheapening it a bit and by the way I'm also well aware that I wear an Amiga watch that was the one they wore on the moon and all the marketing involved with that as well so like I'm aware this goes back to the days of NASA too right this was a bit more overt obviously a bright red car with a mannequin at the steering wheel rather than oh we need a watch who we're going to get our watches from it's certainly easier to spot on the live stream than the brain of watch the astronauts are wearing when they landed on the moon yes that's for sure it just felt promotional it's a bit like did you have to try and flog your cars at the same time too don't get me wrong I like the whimsy of it and like the fun of it and I'm totally on board with that and it totally worked on me it totally worked on me but at the same time I was thinking oh yeah pocketing if you exit bucks there hey yeah let's push the business it's like if you know when if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Alderman went to the moon and they stuck a flag in the soil and it had the general motors logo on it instead of America because general motors had paid them you know 500 million you'd be thinking oh man that was a pretty historic moment to be plug-in cars I think that there is something interesting about your thoughts here that I can't quite grasp why I don't agree with you on this and I think like so the general motors one is an interesting comparison and it's like I agree under that circumstance if they got out and they put a GM flag on the moon because GM sponsored the NASA space flight it would feel like oh that's sad but I wouldn't feel that way if in an alternate universe of history the United States government wasn't actually the primary mover and the primary mover was GE like an NGE was the entity that was doing the space exploration in a much more direct way I guess this is partly like I don't really care what the entity is and in some ways like oh when NASA does a thing they're selling the idea that America has nuclear superiority during the Cold War and when SpaceX is doing a thing they are selling the idea of increased cargo capacity to space I don't see those things as wildly different I'll tell you where the problem comes from and I know there's a difference here between a businessman and a commercial entity and for example say governments and politicians right but people have a resistance or some people have a resistance to people in positions of great power and authority using that to give themself even more and the best example I could think of was say you elected a leader of a country you know you elected someone your president or prime minister and they happened to own a bunch of hotels or golf courses or something like that and when they became leader they started using all their facilities and their commercial interests in the duties of their political office you'd start to think hang on you're using that to your advantage to feather your own nest and like you shouldn't be leveraging that position of power yeah and I totally agree with you there right like that that's also a case but that seems much more like a like a conflict of interest yeah between the role of a civil servant and the role of a business person I said at the start I say a difference but he is leveraging a position of great brute force and power financial power and you know privilege and collaboration with the government and things that help SpaceX like the SpaceX has a lot of government contracts so he's like he's got into this position of great power and great influence and then bolting he is car from his other company on the front while he's at it feels in this in a similar vein it's not the same but it feels in a similar vein it's like okay so you've built this rocket company and you're getting all these government contracts and you're launching from a NASA facility and that and while you're there you think and oh let's chuck a Tesla on the front as well because that will help my other business it's not the same I don't think he's done anything well I'm sure he hasn't done anything in proper he wouldn't have been allowed to do it but it just has that feeling to it of okay mate enough's enough what else do you want to sell while you're at it that's just a little feeling in the back of the head about it I did think it was cool though I did love it I did love it okay so here's a question for you if we could go back in time and you're able to make the decision about what the payload should be would you change it would you say I think it would be better if it's not a Tesla if it's a different payload you know if the decision was totally down to you what's happening is like Elon Musk has brought you on an advisor and he's saying I may have lost perspective on this you Brady we all know from the podcast yeah you're hugely influential podcast that you are the number one pan of space what do you think we should do yeah I would say to him I think this is a good idea I think the visual of a cool sports car with an astronaut at the wheel will really capture people's imaginations but I think I mean he's in an impossible position that if you're gonna use a car because he owns a car company but I would say to him is there something else that would have equal impact and be equally clever and funny that hasn't got such a direct attachment to you a because of the commercial appearance of it and b because of maybe the slightly egotistical appearance of it I'd say to him I love the idea I probably wouldn't have said to him I love the idea because I was wrong I didn't realize how cool it would look but now that I do realize how cool it looked in the scenario you are both future Brady who knows how it looks and past Brady who's doing the advising right so my my advice with all this knowledge of hindsight would be brilliant idea it's gonna really capture people but do it in a way that makes you look a bit less egotistical and a way that looks less like you're trying to do something commercial is there something else is there another way we could do it and achieve all the same good things without that kind of ickiness to it I don't know if I'd have that idea but that's what I'd say the just listening to that all I can imagine is if I was the CEO of company and you were my advisor there I'd be going like okay great but I'm really busy what is your suggestion if you don't have another suggestion we're going with this well I'd say can I have more than the 30 seconds that great just gave me okay you can have until the next episode of Hello Internet that's how much time you have I don't know it looked fantastic and that ickiness like just to put things in the right context that ickiness is less than half-antastic I thought it was like on the cosmic scales of this there is no doubt that launching a Tesla into space means that way more people watch this launch than ever would have yes I'm not convinced that this actually sells a lot of Teslas but it's sure I can guarantee that this like increased the viewership of the live stream 50% 60% I bet it is some enormous amount versus a concrete payload because it just makes it such a thing and the subsequent coverage yeah I bet you it has sold cars I know people that are looking at the cars now as a result and also just increases like the brand awareness so which is also probably why the chief executive would have laughed at me out of the office when I went in there with my that's not so commercial hey are you aware that you work at a company you're in the wrong place but yeah the showmanship of it was very good do you want to hear my idea okay what's your idea if we're going to be icky and about money what do you think of this okay you know how I had that screen on it that said don't panic the display on the screen I'm assuming that wasn't actually being displayed on the screen and it was stuck on permanently like I don't know the answer to that but my guess is that that's like a piece of cardboard or something stuck on there with don't panic written on it but either way right if it is a functioning screen if they had some capability to change what was written on the screen and every second they could put another name on there CGP Gray Brady Harron Dirk from Verastableium Jane Smith Cindy Loper are cycling every second with the earth and the back ground and everything and a camera capturing it all and you could buy your name on that screen for a hundred bucks and you could screen grab the moment your name was on the screen in the car with the astronaut and the earth behind how many Dirk and they would have sold a million I mean they tell they'd sell a lot obviously you'd need an auction for that Brady you couldn't just have a flat price for that let's just say it's a hundred bucks each and they sold a million that'd make a hundred million bucks yeah I don't know but see like this now totally trips my like that's disgustingly commercial bringing oh okay it's good to know where your line is yeah that's why I find this conversation interesting because it never really crossed my mind about the commercial nature of it and I feel like I don't feel that for this at all I think it's just cool but then it's like oh but if you are auctioning screen time like now that cross was my boundary now it's too much that's completely what they did if there any differences they did an auction he just took it for himself with his car and gave himself all the screen time gave his car all the screen time it's exactly what happened yeah I don't know it just feels different I know I know this is what makes life interesting is it's fundamentally impossible to be perfectly consistent on all things like that way lies madness and lots of these conversations you just have to think like why do I think that or like why does this feel different and sometimes they really isn't any answer I mean it's also my professional upbringing coming out here and I'm aware of that I mean I worked for the BBC for a long time and the BBC is very sensitive to people exploiting its power for commercial purposes so I've someone calls you up at the BBC as a journalist says I've got a great idea for a story it's about a new car I've made do you want to come and make a film about it you very quickly have to make editorial judgments versus commercial judgments and is this person just trying to use the power of the BBC to sell cars is this a legitimate story so I do have a very sensitive radar to this so I guess when I see it happening in the world and I see people using spotlights to sell things which is a perfectly fair thing to do and a very American thing to do I'm perhaps more sensitive to it and I think ah you know everyone wants to make a buck any bit of spotlight or camera time as a chance to make a buck I feel like this is the perfect time for a commercial break this episode of halloween tonight has been brought to you by fracture now fractures this company you must know them by now where they will print your pictures onto bits of glass that you then hang on the wall they're ready to hang right out of the box this is the easiest thing in the world upload a picture to a website make a few little decisions press a button then in the post comes your box open the box bang on the wall before you're now it fracture prints make thoughtful unique gifts whether for yourself or for someone else it's become one of my go to places whenever I have to give someone a present because who doesn't like receiving a picture it's something you can easily 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art and they've got the original but they sent me a really really lovely high res version of it that I'd like to have on the wall so what I'm doing is getting a fractured and I'll have my own brilliant copy already on a piece of glass or maybe get pictures from other sources for example NASA have loads of amazing spacey pictures that are out there high resolution in the public domain and there's a real cracker why don't you get that put on a piece of glass and put up on the wall I remember years ago used to pay a fortune for all these high quality pictures of galaxies or the moon or space exploration now you can have an awesome one on the wall at a super low price even lower if you go to fracture dot me and use the offer code hello 15 when you check out that's going to give you 15% of your first fracture order go to fracture dot me and then use the offer code hello 15 and if you get the one question survey about podcasts make sure you pick hello internet so then I you came from here our thanks to fracture for supporting this podcast and my personal thanks to fracture for getting me out of a few jams when it comes time for buying presents but but it's not over yet with SpaceX is one last thing that Brady wants to talk about with this and what is that Brady well I have been unable to get the answer to this definitively and I think it's because SpaceX had deliberately being obscure about it obviously the car was bolted on to the stage of the rocket it had to be because when it was going around the earth it still had to do another big blast off to start its huge orbit through the solar system out towards the asteroid belt but obviously all the camera angles were quite artfully cropped so that we never actually saw any part of like that stage really did we most of the angles the idea was to make it look like the car was on its own because that was a better shot and I'm all right with that you know that's just prettiness and now obviously it's done its big burn and it's going out now towards the orbit of Mars and beyond as it starts this eternal loop around the solar system it hasn't been made entirely clear to me whether or not the car has been separated from the rocket after the rocket burn happened I suspect it hasn't been although if you look at the official Tesla animation of this whole thing the car is drifting on its own out towards Mars because that's like a beautiful thought isn't it that the cars driving on its own with David Bowie playing and things like that I don't know I don't know the answer yet it's interesting comparing how SpaceX treats this stuff compared to NASA I mean NASA drowns you in detail and tells you every single little thing that's happening to the point that it's almost overwhelming in too much detail and SpaceX obviously are coming at a lot of the time from a more PRE standpoint and what looks good on what sells well and I think the boltedness of the car to the rocket stage is a really good example of this they're very silent on it and this is where you see the PR coming into things more this was the thing when I was mentioning before that the image seemed unreal was my number one question upon seeing those images was what exactly is the physical situation here because I don't understand and I hadn't seen the launch at that point so I thought oh everybody who's seen the launch must just know and I don't have any perspective on it so I went googling around and trying to find it and I was really aware of the same thing like I can't find any information on is the Tesla just on its own or is it connected to something I couldn't quite find it and eventually in some reddit thread somewhere someone linked to this image which I don't think is an official image at all but they were trying to explain what the situation is and the thing that I have just sent Brady to look at shows that the Tesla is mounted on the top of a rocket almost like if you imagine if you had like a trophy at home someone was giving you a Tesla trophy there would be a base and then a narrower heart for the trophy and then they would have a Tesla on the top of it that's what it looks like and when I was watching the live stream after having seen this image I could see that they showed the rocket launching and then there's a very strategic moment where the live stream switches to a map they start playing the space man music and then it comes back and it just shows the Tesla as though it's floating in space and what I think happened there is that they blew the hood off the top of the rocket so that the Tesla is now exposed to outer space and then all of the camera angles are just from the side or just from the front so that you don't see the rocket that the Tesla is actually connected to and thinking about it it has to be connected to the rocket for that final push into the orbit and if it's connected to that rocket it's like well where's that rocket going to go if it's pushing the Tesla it's just going to be right behind the Tesla I don't think there's any point in separating them so no but I mean you would there would be things you would separate just so I'm clear on what I'm saying here I don't think they've been particularly unclear about what happened when it was circling around the and I've just sent you a link to a picture that Elon Musk himself put on Instagram that shows like the mounted trophy car that's never been a secret and the fact that they just had all the camera angles cropped so that it makes a better photo to showing the car in space I can live with that why make a messy photo showing the rest of the rocket when you don't need to the thing I'm less clear about is it would be common to do like an injection burst to leave the earth's orbit and then leave your rocket behind that's what they have to do with probes like you know the telescopes that they will send out fire into space as well they eventually have to get rid of that huge hulking rocket behind and you have a payload separation so I thought it was possible there's just like a tiny tiny little rocket or charge or something that will give the car an extra push and the rocket will like eventually start trailing behind that's what you would normally do because all the imagery and the official animations basics shows the car on its own like drifting past Mars and the cars on its own now it's no longer bolted to the top of the rocket but that they didn't show that happening and they haven't showed it happening they don't talk about it I don't think it's like a conspiracy or anything like that I just think from PR reasons they don't want the image that we all have to be a car stuck to a rocket for a million years going through space they want us to be thinking it's just the car with the astronaut on its own and whether that's the case or not I still don't know maybe that is the case it's suspiciously quiet to me at the moment maybe by the time this podcast goes out oh no differently you know I'll do a meoculpa but I think they're being a little bit PR at the moment yeah at the time of the recording it is unclear to both of us what the final situation is for this Tesla in space for millions of years someone just sent me a tweet then because I've been tweeting about this today someone just sent me a tweet from a tweet and a retweet so I don't know how legit this is but sounds legit already though someone with a blue tick tweeted I now have confirmation that the Tesla remains attached to the Falcon second stage which is being observed by asteroid experts it makes sense you'd want to attach to the main rocket because it'll be easier to track and all that sort of stuff but I'm becoming increasingly convinced until Elon Musk tweets me back and tells me otherwise that don't have an image of this car floating through space on its own there is a hulking great rocket stage attached to the bottom of it again it doesn't matter still awesome still made nice photos but it shows an interesting difference what's going to happen now with commercial space exploration and NASA's all wet is transparent almost to a fault aren't they they tell you too much and the commercial guys are going to be a lot more we'll just show you what we think's going to get us the most retweets well Brady NASA wants those retweets too you know they don't they don't yeah that's true everybody wants the retweets yeah forgot about you keep Spider-Man gate kid escape the retweets you know my little nephew listens to the podcast it's like his bedtime thing right I was with him recently and we were talking about when Uncle Brady spoke on the podcast about Spider-Man in space and he was like I think he said something along the lines I really wanted to see Spider-Man in space sounds really cool I sort of smuggly to smile to myself and thought well he's just a little boy he doesn't really understand what we're talking about on the podcast does he and I'm like yeah it looks pretty cool doesn't it what do you think Uncle Brady thought about that and he just looked at me really solemnly and said you didn't like it at all but I think it's good he knew exactly what I was complaining about but he still thought it was awesome put me in my place Uncle Brady party boober so Brady I've been getting into a lot of documentaries lately yeah and I recommended one to you to watch and I understand that you you've seen an episode of it and this is the Netflix documentary called the confession tapes it's about this thing that we have touched upon on the show which is my belief in the frailty and the easily manipulated nature of human memories and this documentary series it's like a series of TV shows I thought it was very very interesting to see but what they're doing in each episode is they're talking about a trial where it is believed that the defendant has submitted into evidence a false confession for one reason or another I find this stuff personally horrifying on a variety of levels and I thought you might want to watch it before the show did you think it was good I watched one episode I watched episode three third one on your advice and yeah thought it was thought it was pretty good thought it was all right I don't know why that episode was the one you decided to recommend to me I'm sure you'll tell me but I love this stuff by the way and I'm going to watch all of them because I find it fascinating but I do feel like I'm getting a little bit jaded by like criminal stuff and podcasts and documentaries as all the rage at the moment it's everywhere you look and this sort of wrongly convicted people thing has become a big since serial has become a real big thing and everyone loves jumping on it and as far as those things go I thought this one that you got me to watch was a pretty standard run of the mill unexceptional case that made me a little bit that yeah yeah I wasn't outraged by it didn't move my emotional needle very much but I thought it was well made and good it has made me want to watch more and I guess in some ways the typical blandness of it maybe is a good reason that you chose me to watch this one because it was so typical of this sort of forced confession thing but yeah I wanted to mention it because I feel like it didn't have any particular special circumstances some of the other episodes have particularly the first one which is a two-parter have whatever regardless somewhat appalling special circumstances with regards to the confessions yeah but in this episode it is that like here is how just a normal person gets sucked into this thing it's a guy whose girlfriend is killed in a bar and then the bar is set on fire and he's brought into the police and as these things go the police start questioning him and he eventually gives a confession which he says is a false confession there are a couple of things that I was just thinking about watching this and and you say the crime stuff is very popular like it's very zeitgeisty at the moment and it's like man people sure do love crime it's a thing I'm aware like if I'm in a bookstore and he's always aware of like oh there's a whole section which is just called true crime which is a thousand books right just about criminal stuff and yeah it feels like there's a overabundance of crime podcasts that exist in the world but this is a thing that I I still wonder about is does the average person really have any idea about false confessions or how unreliable human eyewitness testimony is and in this episode in particular one of the jurors makes a few comments about not being aware of things or simply not believing like well someone had a confession like how could it possibly not be true who would ever confess to a crime that they haven't committed and I was watching this and I just kept thinking why don't we have professional jurors I don't understand why it's like an advantage to pull a bunch of randos off the street and have them being the one in in the trial circumstances well because here's the thing I feel like having watched a bunch of these episodes this idea kept coming into my head that part of the problem is not even just that you can manipulate a person into confessing a crime that they did not commit the other half of the problem is the way that the prosecution can manipulate the jury to get a win for the prosecution because the jurors are unfamiliar with what the system is surely it would be an advantage to have people who are professional jurors who are familiar with how the whole system works doing this who don't have to a new be explained every time here's what police procedures should be who don't have to a new every time be introduced to and convinced and sold on the idea that a confession is not as a reliable piece of evidence as you think it is it just blowing my mind thinking about the man hours as a society we must invest in re explaining stuff to every brand new pool of jurors that exist and I'm just what like is there something that I'm missing here is there an argument against professional jurors like I've never really thought about it until yesterday and today when I was watching these episodes but it's just like I can't get this out of my head why is this not a thing that we have now you're making my head explode I've thought of so many things to say I can't remember the long after well I'm sorry every jurisdiction is different and I can only talk about jurisdictions in which I've have experiences like a journalist and have lived in the first thing I'd say is in most of the places I've lived we do have professional jurors they're called judges and in a lot of jurisdictions you can choose if you wish to be judged by the judge the professional juror instead of a jury of civilians and the reason most people don't do that is because juries are actually in the defense's best interest in most cases and they would prefer to have a jury so it's suggesting that a jury is at too easily manipulated by the prosecution I think it's the exact opposite and they're too easily manipulated by the defense I think we could say that they're too easily manipulated right well fair enough and we have this thing that it's enshrined in law in some places that you can be tried by your peers and it's not enshrined in law that you can be tried by professionally appointed government appointed officials who are part of like the establishment and I think that would cause an even bigger problem if everyone was being tried by government appointees you can see that's the thin end of a wedge that's going to get really problematic really quickly I think when you say it like professional jurors you've got this nice idea in your head of like you know just smart super fair impartial people but they have to be appointed and who appoints them a government and as soon as you say government appointed officials are going to be deciding who's innocent and guilty you've totally lost this tried by your peers component of the law that is so sacred to so many people yeah I don't think the judge gets around that though like when you say oh you can be tried by professional juror who is a judge to me that the terrifying thing about the judge is that they are one person I feel like I would almost never want to roll the dice on a single person because a single person is too unreliable that's why you have multiple jurors there you do actually there are some cases by the way that can be heard by three judges oh okay that's much better we're splitting hairs now but no no but that does make a difference if I had to choose between like a trial by jury and three judges that is much more of a real consideration although that does start getting into again some of the America specific scary stuff where it's like but the judges need to be elected and then it's like oh god now that's a whole different affair or even a pointer but also I haven't got numbers on this but I'm almost certain that you get far more acquittals from juries than you do from judges so if you're like thinking of being wrongly accused CGP Gray I think you may want to consider the jury I think you do raise a good point that there may be a thin end of the wedge here which is how does a professional jury member become one of those people when you say like their government to point it I was like oh no but that they wouldn't be like it it's like uh but obviously ultimately the legal system in some way would need to be deciding who is able to become a professional juror and I haven't really thought this through I'm just I'm just thinking this out loud now but I mean I don't know how much you know about the UK justice system Gray but one thing they do this doesn't really apply to you know murder trials and stuff but you do have volunteer magistrates through the country and these are normally people who are like respected people in good jobs in there and they'll volunteer a couple of days a month to sit in the magistrates court and they become just like a judge doing like high volume stuff with people who you know had minor runnions with the law and they have like a professional little committee with them that advises them and tells them how the law works and things they can do but they sit there and show their own discretion and and make decisions so we mean like it like it's a civil court no it's a proper court like it's a criminal court but it's for more low stakes infringements I don't know a lot about it except I know a few people who do it an old boss of mine at the BBC was a magistrate for many years so once or twice a month she would have to go and do it and she would just sit there and people would make their case to her and she would decide whether they got a rough ride or an easy ride she had experts there they'd be like a magistrate's assistant that would tell her here's what you can do with here's what you can do you could sentence up to this or you could do that but they got to show the discretion and they were almost like community judges but I mean this is for low stakes stuff she wasn't sitting there deciding whether or not someone murdered their girlfriend yeah I don't know I feel like you have immediately thrown all of these monkey branches into my poorly thought out ideas but I still have this emotional response to what I view as like oh you're just gonna have 12 randos pulled off the street and they're unfamiliar with the whole process and because I'm watching the show about false confessions obviously my concern is about being manipulated into convicting someone but then again like my scales of justice are weighed very heavily on it's far worse to convict an innocent person than to let a guilty person go free by far so that's where my concern is but nonetheless their inexperience allows them to be manipulated by the defense as well I don't know it just it seems like it just in tremendous advantage for the jurors not to all be noobs at the job of handling people's lives I don't know away around this yeah I say what you mean you feel like we're having to reinvent the wheel every trial to my mind the problem is also that you're having these noobs go up against the experts and so the trial lawyers on both sides are able to see how jurors react to different things over time or different cases or different ways to present things I just I feel like it is extraordinarily asymmetric I just don't think this is good or even even things like you know my dad's a lawyer and that basically excludes him from ever being able to be on a jury ever like when he's been called into jury duty is like oh you're a lawyer get out of here right like we don't we don't want you on the jury have you ever been summoned for jury jury I haven't but I'm in a minute a minute bit of a funny situation living overseas but I received a summons and then there's like a form that you fill out that says lol I live 2000 miles away it's not it's not gonna happen I'm not coming back to North Carolina to sit on a jury have you I never have no I remember once being in a in a court covering a trial and there was like a fire evacuation in the court building and we had to go out through the jury room it was so exciting getting to go into the jury room and all their personal stuff was lying around and it was like oh this is so naughty because they're so sacred to the jury right getting to go through their room was like a real treat I imagine it was there really and it was like also often in the lunch break I would go out into like the markets and get food and like jurors from cases who I was covering would be you know out getting themselves a hot dog and a milkshake as well and a bit like at the airport when you're like really conscientious about doing the right thing I would make such an effort to not look at them or talk to any jurors or be seen going anywhere near any of them it was crazy because you're very responsible very responsible member of the media unlike in America all the crazy stuff that can happen where you take a bewildered guy and you put him up through a purple walk right in front of some cameras and tell him to apologize to the world for the thing that he's done it's like how absolutely crazy that that kind of thing can happen in American media with juries but if I was ever called I mean of course I would do everything within my human power to not sit on that jury the number one thing being is I would be like I will disregard all I witness testimony no matter what I'm pretty sure just that would get me disqualified from a jury immediately like I will not listen to any of your I witness testimony I really wouldn't want to be in a jury because I think I would just freak out at the idea that like I have to sit in this little box when they tell me to sit in the box and I can only take breaks when they tell me it's time to take breaks I feel like no if I want to go to the bathroom I'm going to go to the bathroom and I don't care what you guys are doing I would make a terrible juror so no I wouldn't I wouldn't want to be in the box I would do and say anything to not be on a jury so I don't think that that's going to happen anytime soon there was a case in Scotland just recently that I've just called up on my screen I was reading about it where it was one of those nightmare white collar criminal property fraud type trials and the jury had to sit for 20 months for the case I mean you might as well be in prison if that's happening apparently they needed like counseling and psychological treatment afterwards to go back to the real world and because of Scottish laws really strict about the 12 jurors thing and there were 12 of them if one of them like left or something the whole trial would collapse so they all had to like make sure they could see it through so the trial didn't fall in a heat this is why I don't want to be on the jury I would forget I would like screw your trial I'm going home right this is what happened to those people didn't you have them have like did they lose their jobs or like did they just lose a bunch of money did they employ I have to pay them all that time it's a long time it's a big chunky alive 20 months yeah I know at least in the US you're basically screwed if you get on a jury there's some amount of compensation that you get that is insultingly low like here have a dollar a day I feel like you know what keep your goddamn dollar don't think like you're paying me and we're even now you take this dollar and you shove it up your ass for me losing a day of my life so your employer doesn't have to pay but presumably they can't sack you like you you must be allowed to go back to your job I hope or yeah I don't know I don't know how it works with it work like that I don't know but it doesn't sound fun one last thing though that again watching the show just hammered into me as thoroughly as an idea can be hammered into a person even someone who is the son of a lawyer is the idea of just like the police are not your friends never talk to the police hmm ever for any reason it's like the world shouldn't be this way but it it totally is and it just makes me feel bad seeing people get caught up in the idea like oh I'm just trying to help the police because they need to clear me as the boyfriend so they can move on and find who the real killer is but it's like that's not really the police's motivation the police's motivation is to close this case as fast as possible and you're sitting right in front of the clearance up on the board yeah exactly like you are a file that's a stack of files that needs to go away and yeah if I was ever pulled in to talk to the police about anything it's like I will say nothing unless my attorney is here and be like oh we just want to talk to you because the queen was assassinated and you were in the crowd we have you on CCTV we know you didn't do it we just want to know if you saw anything that could help us it'd be like I'm not saying a goddamn word until my attorney is here I know how you people work I wonder if it would be any different though if someone like you really loved like had something had happened to them whether or not you'd be like more eager to help the police instead of can't some kind of devotion to obviously it's different if the person started but but say you know someone you loved was kidnapped and you were thinking well I've got to do everything I can to help the police to you know get this person back or I'll do that yeah I mean and I kidnapping said not pretty rare but kidnppings are rare but it puts you in a really difficult position as the only thing which I think you never the details of it never quite crossed my mind but watching this documentary it also really solidified is in every episode it's somebody who has lost a very close loved one right it's it's a girlfriend or it's parents or it's a child or it's a spouse and it never really quite occurred to me how horrible the situation is where it's like okay you you have lost your wife and then you're going to spend 16 hours a day for the next three days being interrogated by the police while you're in the middle of the worst emotional event of your entire life and I think I just it had never really crossed me the true horror of that like you're in a days but you also have these people who are just asking you questions about absolutely everything and you're obviously the number one suspect of what's going on it's like it's not bad enough that you've lost a loved one but you're also getting like bullied at the same time that this is going on obviously the police have to talk to the people who are the most likely suspects because when someone dies it's like well let's put that family up on the board like it's probably one of these people so I don't know how to resolve that but it just seems inhumanly cruel to immediately start questioning someone when you find out like oh their girlfriend has died let's take them to the station right now to do an interview I can't imagine talking to anyone under those circumstances to be like I'm sorry I need to go curl up in a ball and just cry for days for a while like you can call me in a week and maybe I can put together a coherent sentence like I can't talk to police officers now it just seems so cruel but you do need to obviously you know that you need to try and sort out crimes as soon as possible after they happen before evidence vanishes but let's put that to one side because it is an interesting conflict do you think that you are being naive to think that you can get a confession or someone to tell the truth just with logic or catching them out in a lie or do you think like in a real world where bad people do bad things and then lie about that you need to use some dark arts to get to the truth sometimes and it's unrealistic to expect this sort of goody two shoes fairs fair approach and when you're dealing with bad people sometimes a bit of tricking them can get you to the truth I think that the legal system is so important that you can't have it be the system that uses the dark arts I mean that that to me is like okay professional jurors maybe there's a thin end of a wedge here where the government starts appointing the people who are going to decide who is innocent and who is not innocent but if you say like oh the police can use tricks to try to catch the bad guys I just can never get behind that because I feel like it sullies the entire system and also just my own personal belief here that I just don't I don't think those tricks are meaningful because of my disregard of human memory I don't think it's meaningful I think it is too easy to get people to talk about things that they just remember very poorly even in trivial ways that documentary that you had me watch episode three I'm sure I'll bring a link to it if people want to watch this specific one I watch that and obviously there was no recording of the second day of questioning of this guy so I don't who knows what happened but if we're just going on what we saw in the documentary I love what I saw that policeman doing was just kind of like building a rapport even though he's faking and being insincere and I can't believe the guy didn't say through it like do you think it's wrong for a policeman to try and build a rapport with someone who they think is a suspect build up a level of trust even he likes insincere in the hope that you get to the truth I think that's a that's a trickier question have you happened to see also on Netflix there's a series which they fictionalized series but it's called mine hunter have you happened to watch I just finished it last night yeah so nose boilers for mine hunter for the listeners but this is a mean plot device in mine hunter is like building up insincere rapport with criminals the big difference there is I feel like in that show the FBI agents are talking to convicted criminals so I think there's a big difference when you talk about someone who has already been convicted at that point like do you want to build a false rapport with them to get information like whatever I don't have a lot of problem with that but I do have much more of a problem when you're talking about someone who is presumed innocent someone who is just a suspect and I have even more of a problem with it when the rapport that you're building is all pointing in a particular direction so the police officer is saying things like well we all get into fights with the people we love the most and he's like well I've never thought about divorcing my wife but I sure have thought about strangling her to death you know what I mean and it's like that's not building rapport that's how you start planting ideas in the mind of someone going through trauma it seems like it's rapport building and if the person was guilty maybe it would be which is also partly why I selected that episode because I feel like of all the episodes that is maybe the most ambiguous one but it's it's rapport building but it's rapport building that's pointing toward something so that's why I can't go along with it because it's also a person who is presumed innocent I mean we discuss this issue a bit I always feel like you see it in very black and white terms I don't feel like you sort of see some of the shades of gray involved but in some ways I think maybe you're right to be that way when the stakes are so high and it's important that a system retains so much integrity so it's it's hard to argue against you although I think in practice like I feel like a lot of crimes might go unsolved but I know you're kind of you know I'd rather have 10 unsolved crimes than one falsely imprisoned person but yeah I mean again this is this is where the criminal justice system to me is the most perfect example of this way I think about a lot of things in society where you can just there are outcomes you want and there are dials that you can turn on this big machine to try to get the outcomes that you want but you don't know exactly how far to turn all of those dials you don't know where to precisely tune them you can only have answers about tuning too far in one direction or tuning too far in the other direction and so yeah I'm particularly with criminal justice I'm always leaning on the side of if we have to tune too far in the direction of letting too many people go that is a vastly preferable option to convicting innocent people but there are shades of gray here but I just I feel like I can't sign below the document that says I'm okay with using dark arts and tricks in the pursuit of justice even if you have the most noble of police officers behind that pursuit I hope you don't use any of these techniques on me when you lull me into talking about SpaceX and Elon Musk and get myself in trouble but I'm the I'm the interviewer here coming like you're the cop you're the cop I can see why you think that ready tell me more and I'm just digging myself deeper and deeper yeah and I have an inbox full of Elon Musk hands now I'm making casual comments about the commercial nature of of Tesla just unrelated to build report are you ready? Listeners don't know that we we did discuss the commercial interests of the world for 20 minutes before we started recording so I was trying to prime baby I did like that Falcon heavy stuff you know I know I know I know I thought it was good everybody knows don't worry the people know hello internet this episode is brought to you in part by Harries Harries is the company that's all about a great shave at a fair price which is why over three million guys have switched to Harries razors Harries is the company that lets you get everything you need to shave without having to leave the house which is my favorite thing about any company or the internet not leaving the house you can just sit at home and the razors come right to your door no effort required no talking to people required it's very nice the company was started by Jeff and Andy two guys who were fed up with getting charged an arm and a leg for razor blades so they started Harries they stripped out all the unnecessary features that you get in dumb razor blades like vibrating handles which do nothing and they took out all of the unnecessary middleman costs of delivering the razors to a company to then sell them to you no Harries sells you the razor blades directly and so you get those savings because Harries owns their own factory they're able to deliver amazing quality blades for just two dollars each compared to probably four dollars or more you're going to pay at the drugstore to also get a dumb vibrating handle that you don't need all of Harries products are backed by a 100 percent quality guarantee and they're so confident you're going to love their blades they'll give you their trial shave set for free when you sign up at harries.com slash hi all you need to do is pay for the shipping Harries equipment is just so nicely packaged so good looking and so convenient you're crazy not to give them a try so claim your free trial offer from Harries today it's a 13 dollar value for free when you sign up at harries.com slash hi just cover the shipping cost your free trial set will include a weighted ergonomic razor handle five precision engineered blades with lubricating strip and trimmer blade rich lathering shave gel and a travel blade cover so right now go to harries.com slash hi that's harries.com slash hi and thanks to harries for supporting the show. Let's talk about hotmail for a second. Okay let's talk about hotmail. Let's talk about hotmail great I actually have a lot of thoughts about hotmail okay I know I thought you might I thought you so there was a story going around the other day about insurance companies and profiling they were using to set people's insurance rates and I think the original story was if people had a name that sounded though of a certain ethnicity they were having higher insurance rates set and that was obviously considered quite unfair by most people but then the second day is the story rolled on it emerged that insurance companies were setting higher rates for people who were using hotmail addresses than other addresses they thought if you use hotmail you're obviously a greater insurance risk and you would have to pay higher premiums to ensure your car insurance or is just an insurance company in general if it's car insurance I have a theory about this think it was car insurance in the story I read what do you think about that profiling by a choice of emails service this is kind of light full because I think these stories come up with insurance okay this might be the most boring thing I ever say but I think it is fascinating the constraints that we want to put on insurance companies versus their actuarial knowledge of the world right so if anybody has accurate actuarial knowledge of the world it is insurance companies they will know correlations and expenses that is their their whole job but then there is this intersection where insurance companies run into the real world where we say like oh no no oh no insurance company this correlation is not okay you can't use this and I feel like insurance companies are just at this this real intersection of these two things where it's like they can know things but we force them to pretend like they don't know things well I thought was it will get to a point where they're no longer like sharing risks right well yeah if they become all knowing insurance cases to be insurance it just becomes paying for sure yeah but that's exactly like that is the super fascinating thing right because the only reason insurance exists is because they don't know everything but as their knowledge increases you are 100% right that the insurance company just trends toward the cost of the thing right and then it's like wait there's no business here at all right so it's like insurance companies can only exist in a world that has some amount of uncertainty and then we want to enforce uncertainty on them as well and like the hotmail thing my total guess here for car insurance is that I'd be willing to bet that hotmail users trend much older on average than the general population and I'm gonna say that much older people are going to have higher rates of car accidents than the general population that's not true I think older people get cheaper car insurance I think it's young 21 year old males that are most likely to wrap their car around a tree that to me is the prime example of do you allow an insurance company to do this is the teenage boy driving a car if a car is going to be destroyed a teenage boy is going to do it and this is legal or not legal in various jurisdictions to say something like can you charge a teenage boy higher car insurance and some places say yes some places say no I was just suspecting that you would also have a higher incidence of accident for older drivers I'm at least thinking of places in America where I'm always horrified by people who are like wildly unqualified to be drivers who still have drivers licenses that is just my theory of like what might hotmail be correlated with I mean you probably are right because you usually are but that wouldn't have been my guess I hadn't thought of hotmail users as being older I can see why you would say that but I thought it would be more the case that they were figuring hotmail users were less professional and therefore maybe less likely to be very responsible people yeah or just like you know anyone who's using hotmail has obviously made poor decisions in their life so they're going to make poor decisions on the road could also just be the correlation yes I do have my account I've had it since the internet was invented I had it since you're a boy right yeah no of course so I've just kept it so I do have my hotmail account I do have other I do have numerous other ones of course you do but don't use that when you're applying for your insurance right that's that's what you don't want to do this is another dial of society that I don't really know how to adjust because in in general I feel like I'm okay with insurance companies charging different rates to different people but there would come a point where it's simply not insurance anymore if you just know too much about everybody so that like there's going to need to be something like that but I think the hotmail thing is funny and I personally don't have any problem with it whatsoever I don't know how people would react to this but I suspect that there are going to be vastly more and more things like this that come to light through big data analysis and through through this kind of thing where some of my favorite examples of this are innocuous questions you can ask people that will very rapidly zero in on things like who did they vote for in the last election and so you ask people questions like do you like dogs better than cats and questions like that that seem like they have nothing to do with anything and if you are picking really well chosen questions that have been developed from enormous databases of people's preferences you can surprisingly quickly zero in with a very high confidence interval on what did a person vote for in the previous election or all these kinds of things where again like people imagine that they are vastly different from other people but they're not like there are patterns that exist here you know how they traditionally have some problems with political polling because people are always honest about who they vote for do you think it will ever get to a stage where those companies will ring people up and say do you like dogs do you like hamburgers where do you go on holiday and not even ask you who you voted for and say thank you very much and say okay Democrat voter well I wonder if it'll ever get to that point where they just don't trust your answer to who do you vote for and they use the other stuff to get to the truth instead I haven't seen something like that I have some come across some research which which does things like using similar methods to estimate voter dishonesty right where you are looking at some information that you can gather about a person and then looking at their actual response and you can't know obviously perfectly but you can put higher or lower confidence intervals on was this person reporting the truth and it becomes very quickly very unlikely or very likely if you can gather enough information on this kind of thing so I do kind of think that that's the case I mean again this is this is much more an issue in the United States where you have to motivate people to go vote but this is this is a real science now of trying to drill down to very very particular individual people and knowing like when do you want to send them stuff in the mail to try to motivate them to to vote and you can do that because you're highly confident about who they will vote for with the information that you're sending so I think that that is kind of a thing already but either way I think insurance companies are going to be at the forefront of this because they they are the ones who are at the bleeding edge of being able to extract value from knowing more and more about what data represents about a person's actions in the world.
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