H.I. No. 51: Appropriately Thinking It

"H.I. #51: Appropriately Thinking It" is the 51st episode of Hello Internet, released on November 16, 2015.
==Official Description==
Brady and Grey discuss: 'Sir'ing, arbitrariness, team Uber, the inevitable auto revolution, YouTube Red, setting the flag referendum date, Fiji also referendums, a potential spin-off podcast is born, recognizing great acts in service of the podcast, not bi-weekly weigh in, Grey's Dialing Down article, and subvocalization.
==Show Notes==
I'm kind of minimized here because I'm getting distracted by your pretty face. Don't minimise me, Gray. You mustn't minimise me. I want you to take me seriously. You think that joke is funny every time? God, we are like a married couple now. Who would that joke before? You always say that. It's not funny. The one that drives my wife crazy is whenever the waiter comes and asks if you want to test the wine and he gives you just a tiny sip and you have like a little swig and then you say yes, that's fine, thank you. I always let pull a face and pretend it's disgusting. Like I go, oh God. Yeah. And like, yeah, she's like, yeah, that wasn't funny last time. It won't be next time. And it wasn't this time either. You do that every time? Most of the time. It's something fun. Oh, is it? Is it fun every time for the waiter? It's fun for the waiter. It's not fun for my wife. It's fun for the waiter every time because the waiter hasn't seen it a million times before. Do you think the waiter hasn't seen it a million times before? I think the waiter has seen it a million times before. Yeah, they had probably have actually. The waiter is being paid to be nice to you. It's part of their job. You shouldn't judge your humorous skills against someone who is paid to be nice to you. Or I should just pay more people to be nice to me. If you're in a restaurant, you're dealing with the waiter or you're you're interacting with a service person in general, like a hotel concierge or an Uber driver or any of these people in the world who are providing a service to some extent. Would you use the word Sir with them? I actually am more likely to call them Sir than anyone else. And I do that all the time. It's almost like a, it's almost like an overcompensation because of a not an awkwardness, but just a kind of a thing in the back of my head that they're kind of serving me. And I feel a bit uncomfortable with that power dynamic. I feel like maybe I overcompensate because I will always call someone who is serving me or doing something for me, which sort of puts me in the more powerful position. I always call them Sir. Thank you very much, Sir. Have a good day, Sir. I always do that. I will do it particularly with Uber drivers. They almost every single time. I normally don't speak to the Uber drivers, but then at the end, you just want to acknowledge the person. And so I would always say something like, thank you, Sir, as I'm getting out. To me, it feels like it's a nice thing. It's a bit of a sign of respect. You're acknowledging that this other person is a person too. And it's slightly more than a thank you. But I'm never quite sure in a place like England, if this is as standard. I don't really know if that is the case, but you do it too. That makes me feel a little bit better. I do it too. I think you're overthinking it, Gray. I think it's alright. I wouldn't worry about it. I don't think I overthink things. I don't think I overthink things. Gray, if there is one thing you do, it is overthink things. That is like your defined inequality. It's no. It is not my defined inequality. But there's sorry. But I haven't overthunk things, but there are two problems with the Sir though. One of which is I find the double Sir suddenly gets really awkward. So if I will say to the Uber driver or the waiter, thank you, Sir. And then they say back to me, thank you, Sir. Suddenly the Sir feels ridiculous to me. It doesn't work both ways. If the Uber driver beats me to it, if it says like, oh, have a nice day, Sir, then I always feel like I have to just say, oh, thank you. You too. I can't say the Sir if the other person has beaten me to it. There's something about it where it's like it's too many serves in too close of a time span is just no good. It doesn't work. I agree with that. Yeah, okay. So I have an overthought it. This is the correct way to think it. No, no, you have definitely overthought it. No, it's not that you're just you are just braving my point that you're just digging a deeper and deeper hole of overthoughtfulness here. No, it's okay, but okay. I had never thought about that before. Let me just be clear, Gray, just because I'm just because I'm agreeing with you now that you've put it out there. It doesn't mean I had thought about it before. You've never thought about this before. Not the double-surf first in best dressed suits you, Sir, problem. No. You have never thought near the end of an interaction in which you might use the word, Sir, I need to be the first person to get to the word, Sir. This hasn't crossed your mind. No, it's completely just instinct with me. It's just natural. There are things that I think about beforehand at the end of a taxi ride or an interaction with someone, but one of those things is not, I must make sure I get the first Sir in. It seems very natural to me. Okay, but so the only other problem, and this is the one that comes up much more frequently, is that there's no appropriate female version for Sir. There is no word for this in the English language. Now, if you are in Alabama, you can say, ma'am. This is acceptable. Just broadly across the South as the Sir equivalent for women. But it's like in the South, I would totally say thank you, ma'am, to a woman in a service position. But I do not think that the word ma'am in my very limited experimentation goes down well almost anywhere else. I never get the feeling like this is a word that say a waitress in her 30s really wants to have applied to her under normal circumstances. Like, do you ever say ma'am? Do you say Sir, do you say ma'am? Thank you ma'am in a restaurant. Would you say that? I think I possibly would, but I'm less likely to. I think you've assessed the situation correctly. I just see what comes out at the time. That's not always the best policy in life, I realize. Sometimes it gets me into a pickle, but I usually don't think too much about what I'm going to say. I just follow my heart. Yeah. See, the only way I would use ma'am outside of the South is if I could lay $1,000 on the table to say that the service woman I was interacting with is over 60. She's over 60 that I might use ma'am. But if it's less than that, I feel like no. If I can't be absolutely sure about this, I'm not going to make this bet. But we have the problem in the opposite way that the only other vaguely equivalent word is the word miss. But I feel like miss does not carry the same weight as Sir, and it also has its own weird problems. I don't know, Gray. I don't feel quite the same way you do about ma'am. And I think when you call someone Sir or ma'am, there's a kind of jokingness that's already going on. It's kind of already like a pretend form on us. There's a bit of a wink wink because neither of us here are particularly noble or important. So we're just using these formalities for fun. And I think that applies when you would use the ma'am. So I don't think a 30-year-old woman's going to think, oh my goodness, he's suggesting I'm much older than I am or he's doing it wrong. I think there's already like a little game going on where we're joking around. Thank you, Sir. Thank you, ma'am. Have a good day. I think there's already such a over-the-top friendliness going on that it's understood the whole things bit of a gag. Brady, this just goes to the fundamental jovial nature of your whole life. I can't imagine you going from place to place and just everything's happy, everything's a joke. Brady's just so happy and the sun is shining. Aren't we all just having a great time? And these are how your social interactions just naturally go. So you can do the little. Thanks ma'am and you give a charming wink and you scamper off and everybody's had a great day. Well, I wish that was true. In fact, I'm bit of a grumpy old man who's just sits around winging, having paper cuts. But I guess when it comes to that sort of thing, I am a bit more joky. I do like, when I actually do interact with people, I do like, I do like things to be a bit fun and a bit of a joke. I'm not an overly serious person. I think you can get away with more than I can, which is why I might appropriately think about these things to the level that they deserve. So now, do we have any follow-up, Brady? Do we have follow-up? We have no show if we don't have follow-up. I'm a first start with something I know you don't particularly like. And this is an arbitrary shout out to a fan. Arbitraneous. I know, I know. And you think this is the thin end of the wedge. It is. Yeah. But let me explain why we have to do this one. And you can like this. There's always, there's always some reason. There's always some reason, Brady. If I left you entirely to your own accord, the show would be starting with nothing but a long list of happy birthday wishes to everybody who's birthday it ever was. I'm like, I have to re-enew in on these things to some extent. Someone emailed me today, asking me, asking me, I'm not going to do it. Right, you're not going to do it, but you're going to mention it now. Okay, yeah, open that door a bit wider. Okay, yeah, go ahead. I'm going to mention it, but I'm not going to use the names. So I'm not going to serve its purpose. Well, sure. But basically, I think this, this male has bit of a crush on a female who he's figured out is also a Hello Internet listener. And he wanted me to ask her out on his behalf, because he thought asking her out via the show would be a novel way to sort of get in with her. And can I just say to that person, that is not a good idea. And you are lucky I'm not doing it for you. No, because that is a terrible idea. And also, Brady, you have just raised the suspicions of all of these single listeners who are female of the Hello Internet show. Like everyone who falls into that category, they're a little bit more on edge now thinking about the people in their life. That's brilliant though, because now everyone feels like involved in this segment. Like it no longer feels arbitrary and just one person. Everyone can share in the fear and terror of this moment. Right, right. We've just made a large portion of the audience slightly uncomfortable. Everyone's included. Well done, Brady. Anyway, the person I am going to give a shout out to is a young girl named Caden, who I met at a public event recently in her and her brother who I think was called Elliot. I'm guessing I'm so sorry if I got that wrong. And then and and Caden, Elliot's mother brought them along to this event because they wanted to meet me because I am one half of Hello Internet. Caden drew a picture on a canvas. She drew a picture of a Jamaican rice rat, which just between you and me looks a little bit like a cat. So it looks like a Jamaican rice cat. But I don't say that. I'm going to say Jamaican rice cat in the future. But Caden drew a lovely picture of a Jamaican rice rat in a field full of flowers with the sun shining and it was using a computer made of cheese. Made of cheese. A cheese computer as a rice rat would. Yeah, of course. Well, no, I don't think you would. Like we don't make computers out of things we want to eat because we would eat our computers. That's why we make them out of metal so that we don't eat them. Are you not supposed to eat computers? I didn't know that. Well, in fact, if there's one person who I would not be surprised to find out eats computers, it would be you, but anyway. So she gave me this picture. It was really nice, very, very sweet and cute. It's not a little canvas too. But then she said to me, can you please say on the show that I gave it to you and say my name on the show? And like, and she's just said that to me and like her mum's there and she's there and she's looking at me with a cute face and she's just given me this wonderful gift which I really love. So I just said, of course I will. Obviously, that's, no, that's boundary pushing, Brady. It's boundary pushing. I've taught enough kids to know about this. So you're saying if cute little kid and just gave you this wonderful picture and looked up at you with a cute face and said, can you please mention that I gave this to you on the show, you would have just said, nope, I'm walked away. I would have said, talk to Brady. That's probably what happened. That's what I got at. This is exactly it, right? I don't need, I don't need cute little kids harassing me with their gifts all the time, making, making very difficult, very awkward social situations where I have to say, no ma'am, I'm sorry, I can't accept this gift to a five year old girl because I'm concerned about all of the adorable five year old girls in the future who will try to cute black male me with their various gifts to mention on the show. You just, you can't open up your life to that kind of stuff, Brady. You can't open up your life to that kind of art portraying this. Well, I did, I did. So thank you, Ken. I tell you what, this was not the first time this has happened that I got a real wake-up call as to how young our audience is. There are a lot of very young people who listen to Hello Internet. First of all, we need to define a lot and we need to define very young. We need some parameters here. A lot is more than one. Okay, more than one. Got it. Great. Okay. And what's the other thing I've got to define, young? How young are we talking here? How many young Hello Internet listeners have you run across? Someone that you would not say a swear word in front of? Haven't we been through this before though? I find it very hard not to swear in front of children. You say that, but you're a pretty decent guy. It's nothing about decency. It's nothing about decency. Well, again, the trick is, if I'm ever around your children, don't tell me not to swear around your children. I will naturally be trying not to swear around your children. But if you go out of your way to tell me not to, then the evil part of my brain just wants to take over and just constantly curse. If you swore Brady, if you swore, which you don't, how old would it take for a child to be before you would feel comfortable swearing around them? Because you said young enough that you wouldn't swear around them. So what's the ceiling on this? Well, it depends on the relationship, obviously, Lila. If they're a complete stranger, I'd want them to be 18, maybe. Is that like the age of majority here? Well, it can't. It depends. But if it's a younger person, but it was like, you know, my nephew or something who would think, oh, it's so cool that Uncle Brady just did something a bit naughty. Cool, Uncle Brady. Yeah. I do like being cool, Uncle Brady, say. Just to say, we have a lot of very young listeners. And the one thing I wanted from Caden and Elliot and my goodness, I hope his name is Elliot. The one thing I really wanted to find out from them when I was talking is why on earth do you listen to Hello Internet? And I couldn't get, I couldn't nail down an answer. I don't know if it was because of their parents, but it seemed like they were bigger fans than their mum. My prediction for our very young listeners is that they are trapped in a car with a parent who is listening to Hello Internet. That's how we indoctrinate the next wave of Hello Internet listeners. So parents out there, if you're fans of the show, make sure to start them young. Speaking of indoctrination, I have joined team Uber. Oh, really? Yeah. I was out the other night and I was walking home from a dinner and it started raining and I got rained on a lot and there were no cabs in Berkeley. Most of the time. And I was just thinking, I wish I could just get out of this problem. So when I got home, I signed up to Uber and put the app on my phone straight away. I've been using it ever since. I think I'm in like my fifth day, maybe fifth or sixth day of Uber use. Yeah. And you're liking it so far? Grey. I love it. See? I told you last time. This is like one of the top five things that have changed in my life in the last ten years. It's amazing. Not only is it like, not only is it voodoo witchcraft with a technology. But it's so fun as well. That's almost gamified a bit because you can follow people's progress on maps and you don't have to ever think about money. Like the one thing I don't like about cab drive, the cabs is, you know, the whole money situation. That's just taken out of the equation. It does encourage a good relationship. So I always have really interesting conversations with my driver. And in fact, I was going to give it a 10 out of 10. Super duper amazing rave about how much I loved it. Except my Uber trip up to the spiritual home of number five today to record this podcast. I had my first Uber problem. Just as I was about to tell you how much I loved it. It went pear shaped for the first time. What was your Uber problem? Well, I got in. And I put in like this because another thing I really love about it is you don't even have to tell them your destination. They know where you're going and just start driving there. Yeah, this is why I said you can use it like it's a self driving car if you want to. Yeah. What happened was somehow and spontaneously a few seconds into the trip, my destination changed on on his screen. Really? He turned to me. Yeah, my phone was in my pocket. I wasn't. I don't think I was pressing it, you know, with my with my legs by mistake. Maybe I did. I don't know, but I don't know what happened. But a few seconds into the trip, he said, oh, did you just change your destination? And I looked at his phone and it was taking me somewhere completely differently miles and miles away. And then I looked down at my phone and it like spontaneously changed in front of me from one destination to another. And I'm like, I don't even know where that place is. I certainly don't want to go there. I don't know what happened. I think there was like, you know, a ghost in the machine. He could quite possibly have just started driving to this other place before I realized he was going the wrong way. When you do trust technology too much, things happen. And this literally happened before my eyes. So that's weird. You can definitely have, I mean, obviously, any technology is always going to be there. You have occasional bugs. I've never had anything like that happen. But what I will say is that I have always 100% of the time had the drivers question me about any route changes. They always confirm, like, is this what you want to do? The driver wants to take an unusual route from location A to location B because of traffic. They will always check with me first and they'll say something like, oh, I'm going to go around this way instead of going on the main route because of traffic. I get the impression that they have some customers who think that they are professional drivers and know the best way to go. And my feeling on that is I was like, dude, you do this all day. I'm just going to trust you about wherever is the best way to go at this time. So I've always had them check with me for that kind of stuff. But the one thing that I can see is a little bit dangerous about it as well is because you don't use money and you don't even see money. It does become a bit like monopoly money. You almost feel like you're getting all these rides for free. And I can imagine you could easily rack up some interesting bills just thinking, oh, jump in an Uber and I don't even need to get my wallet out. I don't even need to get my card out. It's all coming off on paper. And I can imagine it could come back to buy you. It also makes and that same reason makes me realize why having like free Uber as part of your job package or as part of an appurge for employees is quite a cool thing. I can see why you think that was awesome saying, oh, I've got this salary in this and I also get free Uber. I can imagine you'd quite like that. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's a huge perk. So the question I want to ask you, Brady, is if you are aware of a thing with Uber, which is that you know how when you ride ends, you read the driver up to five stars. Yeah. Are you aware that the driver's also read you? I am aware of that. Yeah. How do you feel about that? I don't really mind because I've been really, I've been asking my drivers lots of questions about Uber. Like every trip for me is like a chance to interrogate them about how things work and how they feel about it and stuff like that. Yeah, there is a joke about Uber that you haven't Ubered until you talk to the Uber driver about Uber while you're Ubering. Right? This is everybody has to do this. And yeah, while mostly I don't talk to the drivers now, when I started out, every ride was like an interview about how do you like this? How does it work? And they always seem pretty happy to talk about it. Like I think everybody likes talking about their jobs. Yeah, they do. And I've been making it clear, hey, I've only been on the platform for a few days. So I don't sound like an idiot. I sort of, I almost apologize for it beforehand saying, sorry, I'm really new to Uber, so I'm really curious. Sorry about these questions. And then I ask them all my questions. But it sounds like when they accept me and certainly when I accept them, the star ratings don't come into it. It's only after they're on their way that I know what their star rating is. And I was saying to them, when you get the request and this little clock comes up on their phone and they've got like 10 seconds to decide if they're going to take me or not, he was telling me, I don't even see a star rating. Or who you are. So while these star ratings exist, I don't know how they're being used to discriminate. Can people then cancel afterwards if they don't like your star rating? Or I don't know. The thing is to see the star rating, the driver might not have been aware, but you need to tap on the profile picture to see the star rating before the thing occurs. Okay. And so when you book a driver, you can tap on their picture and then it shows it's interesting because I've used Uber now in several different cities in several different places. And it works slightly differently in different locations. Like when I was in North Carolina using it, North Carolina has this bizarre rule, which is that cars don't have to have a license plate on the front of the car, which is crazy making to me. But it means that when you're trying to find an Uber car, you can't be sure that you're going to be able to see the license plate. But when you book a car in North Carolina, there and only there, the app shows you a picture of the car with the color. But when you do it in London, like it just shows you the license plate. So things vary from place to place. But anyway, you can see the star rating before you book. And the way it works with Uber is that you can cancel within whatever it is, like two minutes. I don't do it often, but every once in a while, like I will look at the star rating before a driver comes. And every once in a while, there's someone who is clearly about to get kicked off the system. It seems like there's a dynamic number, but roughly speaking, it's like if they're under 4.4, they're on like a warning system. So if I see someone who's like 3.9, that's someone who's about to get fired. And so I will actually cancel that ride. Can I find out what my star rating is? This is this thing that I think Uber should do for the benefit of human society. Because one of the things when I was first writing Uber that I like to ask the drivers is because some of them seem to work in different areas of the city or they do different sorts of things. They're like, oh, what are your, like what are your average customers like? Like who are you driving around? And some of them seem to specialize in areas where there were lots of parents taking kids around, some of them to help with businessmen. But I would also like to ask, like who, like what are the worst customers that you've ever had? Like tell me your nightmare story. And boy, do the drivers love to tell you about like the worst do they ever had in their car? I think that Uber should make the drivers ratings of the users visible to the user. Because as it is right now, there's no place for you to see what you are rated. If you ask the driver, I've had drivers, they'll tell me out of curiosity. So like, oh, what is my rating? Like I just want to know. And they'll let you know what it is. But it doesn't show you. I think that Uber would be providing like a service to humanity if they made the customers rating visible to the customer. Because one of the things that I've heard from many of the drivers is that the worst customers are business dudes, guys who expect everything to go their way all the way. All the time. And it feels like this is my rule of, you know, if you think everyone in life is an asshole, you're the asshole, right? It's not everybody else. But I think there's no feedback mechanism to let those people know that they indeed are the jerks in the world. And so I think if someone like takes a whole bunch of Uber rides and they see that the drivers are rating them two stars all the time, this is like a feedback mechanism to let you know in a somewhat anonymous way how other people view your actions. Like I think it's a possibility for people to correct themselves. How anonymous, Gray. Because this is the problem with your thing, anonymity. I've been talking about electronic voting the last few days with a few experts in electronic voting. And that is the one issue that comes up all the time as well. The importance of anonymity is something that comes up a lot. And I think what you're saying will cause problems in that respect. Obviously, you're not saying that I can see the driver who just drove me what they gave me. You're saying I should be able to see my overall rating. But surely I can reverse engineer from that kind of. So with the drivers, they get a report at the end of the week about how their star rating moved and they get a like a random selection of the comments that people have left. So they don't get to see everything and it's all bunched together, right? That here's your rating for the week. My feeling is for the customers because the customers obviously are doing way fewer Uber rides than the drivers are. I think it's easy enough to build into the system to say something like you are going to get a report, an email to you that says you're star rating. But do it only after every 30 rides and those rides have to have had a certain number of different drivers in them. Right. So if you took 30 rides and it happens to be the same three guys because you're in a little area, like it won't auto send you the report until you say have like it least, at least a pool of enough different people that you couldn't reverse engineer it. So I think there's a really simple solution to that just that the customers get it much, much less frequently than the drivers do. That's what I would do. Cool. This is the same CGP Grey who a few minutes ago was telling us how he doesn't overthink things. He's already come up with the feedback mechanism for Uber passengers. Everyone is going to want me to ask you. So I have to ask you. What has your rating been when you've asked them to tell you? I actually just had a guy tell me two days ago that my rating is 4.9. This means this means somewhere someone didn't give me a five star rating. And I would love to know why. I would love to know what was it. I'm very curious. But I think that knowing that the driver's rate you, it encourages both parties to be on best behavior. So I always feel like I never want to make the driver's weight. You know, I want to be a nice, simple passenger. I think this is exactly the kind of situation where it is helpful to have each person rate the other person. I bet you got a to star from a woman that you code, ma'am. Hello internet. This episode is brought to you by backblaze.com. I kind of wish that backblaze would actually stop sponsoring us because that would mean that everyone who should have backblaze does have backblaze. But the very fact that they keep sponsoring our show indicates to me that you, dear listeners, keep signing up, which means that there were some of you who weren't using backblaze. And if there's going to be a backblaze ad after this one, it means that some of you listening to me right now need to sign up because you don't have backblaze on your computer. This is one of the few products that everybody should just get. If you have a computer, you need online backup. End of story, no exceptions. If you're going to get online backup, backblaze are the guys to do it. 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Putting it off and start getting backed up today at backblaze.com slash hello internet. There you can get your risk free, no credit card required trial and let backblaze know that you came from our show. We actually both put different articles about the same thing in the show notes and then I went to click yours and you have a dead link. You have a you put a link that doesn't work. There's no story there. Oh, I had to go find your story for you. I think you and can you tell me what it was about? I'm realizing is that not only did I have to find your story for you, but now I have to summarize it for you. I mean, you can obviously see why I put it there. Right. Of course. I mean, I don't care that much about the story. I just care about where the story happened. Brady and I both happen to put stories about the ever advancing frontier of autos into the show notes. But of course, Brady only cared because there was a tiny bit of frankly irrelevant and uninteresting auto news, but it took place in Adelaide. So it went into the show notes with an exclamation mark. Woohoo. Yeah. But the entirely unremarkable story that Brady put in the show notes was that on a test track in Adelaide, a self-driving car was tested. And this apparently was the first time that a self-driving car had been tested within the city limits of Adelaide. It was on the Southern Expressway, which is a public road, although they had closed the section off. Your dead link makes me suspicious about the accuracy of that first story because the story that I found about it said it was on a test track somewhere. But whatever. And happened in Adelaide, are you proud that your home city has autos now, or at least there has been an auto in the city? This is for people who have no idea what an auto is. Everyone knows what an auto is. Everyone knows what an auto is. This is a fabulous car. Quickly accepted word. I'm not sure the word is going to take off. Of course. I've told you before that I'm convinced that we're just going to call them cars. That what's going to happen is the self-driving prefix is. No, they're not. They're not. Yeah, but there will need to be. There's going to be a period of at least five to ten years where both of them are on the road. So how are we going to differentiate during that period? Let me get back to that for a second. The thing that I put in the show notes, which I thought was the much more interesting story, was that in Greece, in one of their cities, they're doing, it's what seems to me like the first public test of self-driving transportation technology and that they are having a, like, six self-driving buses that are going around the city. What was that big sigh for? Because Grace is the one country that needs to start putting people out of work. I didn't think about that. Well, they've got to cut their costs, these municipal governments, right? Isn't that how that works? This is what we call a downward spiral. But yeah, so they have six buses that they fitted with self-driving technology and that they're going around. It looks more like a golf car more than a bus, but anyway. Yeah, it's a bus, but it looks like it fits about six people in total. So the interesting thing is not the volume of this, but the interesting thing is that it is just on the roads and I was reading through it. What it reminded me of is, I don't know if you've ever seen these crazy, like, you can find these articles talking about the original rules for cars on the road, like when cars first came about in very many American cities, there were rules like, you can't drive at more than seven miles an hour. You have to file with the city in advance where you're going to go and the entire time that you're there. There's a man on the horse who has to wave a flag in front of you. I don't know if you've seen this stuff. There's just a, like, this astounding transition period between when cars were very rare and quite accurately thought as deadly technology being introduced onto the streets. And obviously, all of that went away very quickly, but this self-driving test in Greece to me reads the same way because the self-driving cars are limited to 12 miles an hour. They're not allowed to go any faster. They've been programmed to stay in this single lane that goes on a loop around the city, they're programmed never to change lanes, and they're programmed never to try to get around any obstacles, but just to stop dead in their tracks if there's any uncertainty about anything. So it's like, is the most cautious thing ever? But my feeling is that just like with cars and the super cautious rules around cars at the start, I think that once the change over starts, it's going to be much, much faster than people think. I think the transition from regular cars to fully automated fleets of cars is going to be very fast as soon as normal people can start getting their hands on self-driving cars. Yeah, but a lot of people's stupid and you car maybe only once every five years or ten years. But my prediction is that if you start having a significant amount of the fleets of cars capable of self-driving, I think you end up in a case where it very quickly makes sense to simply outlaw human driven cars. I think that's what's going to be the case here is that we're not going to end up in a scenario where you're waiting naturally for the whole fleet of cars to turn over. I think we're going to end up eventually in a situation where human driven cars are outlawed just to say like just starting on the highways to say like, okay, you can't drive a human driven car on the highways and expand it outwards. I don't know if you ever had something like mad, mothers against drunk driving. I don't know if you had that in Australia if they have it in England, but I know it is, but yeah. Yeah, this is like a big pressure group in the United States that was sort of omnipresent when I was a kid. Like they ran all these programs, you know, for when you're learning to drive about like, don't drive drunk and kill people. And I think that once you have self-driving cars around to some extent, my prediction is that there is going to be some kind of pressure group like mad, but for human driven cars, right? Like where there's going to be some pressure group that says the safety gains of self-driven cars are so great that we want to try to outlaw or severely, severely restrict human driven cars. Oh, great. You're in dream land, man. I don't think I am. I don't think I am. Because it's because it's because it's worked so well with gun control, doesn't it? Like you think you think the people who want to keep their cars aren't going to end the car companies aren't going to apply a little bit of pressure. You think that you think the the bleeding hearts who think that, you know, who want to make the roads a safer place are going to be more powerful than the people who make cars and the end of the road. No, no, no, no, no, no. I already have their cars. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. I'm aware that car companies are going to make self-driving cars. You don't need to explain that to me, but that's not mycı point. My point is the oil companies and things like that. I don't think that pressure groups in and of themselves are often very effective at causing change. So my thesis here is not that like, oh, some mad version for human driven cars is going to cause this to happen. But I think pressure groups are used by larger entities that are deriving economic benefit from other reasons. And so the reason that I think self-driving cars will take off so much is because I think there is more economic benefits for governments and for companies having them around than there is economic benefit for the losing team on the other side. Right? And I just think something like a pressure group is used as a political tool to make a thing happen. But I don't think it's the pressure group that causes this thing to happen. Okay. That's my bet. This is only why I'm so bullish on the self-driving car stuff is because I just think that the economics is on the side of the self-driving cars. There's just too many companies and too many institutions that massively benefit from dramatically driving down transportation costs. Like I just think that's the way it's going to go. I mean, clearly self-driving cars are coming. I mean, we see it every day. My bet. I don't care if I'm right or wrong about this by the way. I haven't got a really strong view on it. But I do not think that humans being allowed to drive their own cars will be banned while you and I are still alive. Oh, man. If you're putting the time horizon that while we are alive, I mean, I would take that bet. I would take that bet. Well, of course you will because what I mean is I would take a bet. I would take a bet on a much sooner time horizon. I'm not exactly sure what that time horizon would be. But I would put the within our life thing at like a near 100% probability. I'd be shocked about that. But the main reason that humans will be banned from driving their own cars. Yeah. Yeah. If the time horizon is our lifetime, yeah, I would put money on that without a doubt. Well, you're smart, guys. I may be right. Well, I always want to be clear. I always want to make it clear that I am open to the possibility that there is something I'm missing and something I'm not considering and that I may be wrong here. One of the reasons why that I am bullish on this as well is because there are big advantages to be gained once you don't have any human drivers on the road and those advantages have to do with traffic flow. When you can assume that all of the cars are self-driving, that has huge ramifications for how you manage traffic. And I mean, this stuff sounds crazy, but I've seen some very interesting computer simulations about it. When you have all of the car self-driving, you don't need traffic lights. Right? And that's the kind of advantage you can get once you say, look, we're just not going to have people here anymore. And now as a city, we don't need to maintain these traffic lights. And also because the intersections are super efficient now, we've massively reduced the amount of traffic in the city. I think everybody is all in on that as a goal. So that's why I think it would be effective. So one thing you never talk about when you talk about this is the fact that driving a car is a pleasurable experience. Oh yeah. People actually enjoy driving cars. So you talk about efficiencies and this and that and technology and economics. You never talk about the fact that humans like driving cars, like they like controlling the vehicle, like motoring is a pleasant experience. I know it's not pleasant when you have stationary on a LA. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But a lot of the time. And like so you think people are just going to let that go? Without a doubt, there is a pleasure to be derived from riding horses. A car does not replicate the pleasures of a horse, like riding a horse outdoors, the connection with you and the animal. Like I've written horses. It's a different experience. I always want to make clear. Like I haven't driven very much at all in the last few years, but some of my fondest memories of my life are related to driving. Like I understand the pleasure of driving a car. I really do. But I do not view that as a convincing counter argument to people like this thing, therefore this thing won't change. Like I'm absolutely sure there were lots of people who loved their horses and thought, well, I don't, you know, I never want to give up my horse. Right. This car is stinky and noisy and it's not even remotely as nice as this horse. This car can't take me home when I'm drunk like my horse can because the horse knows where it's going. So I think the question is not in the abstract, are there benefits from the current situation? Of course there are. Without a doubt, there are. The question is, do people appreciate the benefits of a car more than say the abilities that a self-driving car will give them? For example, the benefits of being able to relax much more on their morning commute. I think people will take that benefit of I can just kick back in my car and relax as it drives me to work instead of having to be really frustrated about this traffic. I think people will pick that over. Boy, the occasional road trip I did through the corn in Kansas was just an amazing experience. Like I don't think that works out in people, oh, I want to keep my car because of that. You have to compare what the benefits are on either side. So continuing with follow-up, we're cracking through the follow-up as usual because we're setting a fantastic pace. I don't know. I've got to say, Brad, I don't know why I constantly have this worry that whether just like, oh, there's nothing for us to talk about. What are we going to talk about? And it never fails that we have made it three lines into our show and it's like an hour in. Yeah. This is the advantage I have doing a podcast with one of life's great overthinkers. This is not overthinking. This is really irritating me. I do not overthink it. No, I know. Of course, you should never let me know that it's irritating you. That's why I keep bringing it up. Let's talk about YouTube, Brad. What's the latest there? Because we spoke about this at the length last time. Yeah, we spoke about it, perhaps a too much length. Well, we've got to, I think once every 10 episodes, we have to talk about the YouTube industry saying that is ostensibly what we both do. Yeah. It's in the show now. It's in the official show description that we talk about YouTube. But it's like, we've got to do it every once in a while. But yeah, so we recorded that episode before any of the earning stuff came in from YouTube bread. And as we are currently recording, the free trial, free quotation marks trial is going on with YouTube bread. There's a lot of complications around that that I don't want to get into, but we can summarize them by saying that yes, creators are to some extent possibly to a lesser extent being compensated for the lost ad revenue during this free period. But it occurred to me earlier today that we have a week's worth of some YouTube bread data. And as we discussed last time, it's very hard to know from YouTube what they are really doing with their algorithms for how they determine revenue split. But then I realized, oh, wait, I actually run two different YouTube channels that are wildly different in their watchtimes. So I have my channel, the CGB grade channel, where I mean videos are almost always less than four minutes. But I also upload all of the stuff to the Hello Internet YouTube channel where the videos are vastly, vastly longer. And so what I decided to do is play around with some of the numbers and see, okay, if YouTube bread is distributing its revenue based on watch time, then the Hello Internet YouTube channel should have a higher percentage of its income coming from YouTube bread than my CGB grade channel does. And I went through and I ran through some of the numbers and I checked it and that is exactly the case that YouTube bread is currently 3% of the total revenue of the CGB grade channel and it is 12% the total revenue of the Hello Internet channel. So I feel like this is data that confirms, yes, it is really being distributed on watch time because otherwise there's no reason that that disparity would exist. It's interesting to have some confirmation in numbers of what we were guessing and what we were sort of told by YouTube. Well, you know what that means, Gray? What? More Hello Internet, less CGB grade rubbish. Oh yes, is that what you think it means? No, I have no idea what it means. I have it. I should say, because that's not what my spreadsheet say. My spreadsheet say more CGB grade and less Hello Internet. Right? That's what the CEO of Gray Industries wants. Oh, well, you got to follow your heart, not the money mate. So I should probably investigate what's happening across my fleet of channels at some point. But the thing is again, we're in this, we're in this funny starting phase and looking at, looking at the numbers, my, what I'm guessing is happening is that it doesn't seem like the revenue is to be clear to listeners up 12%. I'm saying 12% of the total revenue is coming from YouTube red, but the advertising revenue is down. And so it looks like these things are just balancing each other out for the time being, but we're also in this funny trial period. So we really, really won't know what's going on for several months until all the stuff shakes out. So we'll keep you up to date with the latest of YouTube news as always. Now, the Hello Internet flag referendum, which is the thing that has the whole internet buzzing, obviously. Yes, the whole internet. Everybody wants to know about the Hello Internet flag referendum. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm getting stopped in the straight and I'll see that's crazy. It's like a national celebration, an international celebration. It is. It's amazing. It's amazing. So I just occurred to me, the people on the International Space Station can't vote because they can't get postcards down. So we, we haven't really allowed for that. So we must, we must look into that. Anyway, we must look into that. There's always corner cases. Sorry, astronauts. We have set a deadline for votes. Yes. So this is, this is going to hopefully calm down some of the people who are just sweating because there was no deadline. And instead of going out and voting, they seem to be dedicating all their time to emailing me about why there should be a deadline. So my suggestion to those people is instead of worrying about it, just go and vote for good to see it. Oh, Brady. Oh, Brady. Brady, Brady, to me, the fact that this bothers you, it seems like such a Brady characteristic. Like, this really, you seem to get just constantly irritated at this fact that people are harassing you about the deadline. And to me, it's more just like, oh man, you've never been a teacher. If I set an assignment and I said, oh, the deadlines at some point in the future, I guarantee you 90% of the energy from everybody would be about harassing about the deadline. And no amount of like, why don't you work on your homework instead? But would modify the crowd. And it's just like, this seems so natural to me, but this is your, your, your workaholic hard as nails, Brady get stuff done tendencies, just don't, don't run this way. This is like you coming up against the masses. Okay. Well, so to all those people who have been emailing me about it, Gray has just described you as acting like a bunch of school kids. And I think that's probably fair enough. Yeah. Of course. I'd be doing the exact same thing. What's the deadline? That's why, like my sympathies are with these people. The deadline, the deadline, my friend, is December 3. The votes must be in the postal box, not the post box, not your post box. The votes must have arrived at my PO box, right in Brady's PO box in Bristol. And I know what you're going to say. You're going to say, oh, I live in the mountains in Western Bhutan and our postcards take three months to arrive anywhere. Well, then just like the people on the space station, I'm afraid your votes will not be counted in this election because there's, and I'm not, I don't care when your thing was post marked. I don't care when it was sent. That's when it has to arrive in the box. And if that discriminates against you, I really regret there. And I wish that it hadn't happened. But we have to count these votes. And we are doing that. We have decided a date that we're going to count the votes. And to do that, I need the postcards. Do you really regret it, though? I don't feel any any tiny sense of regret. You have to pick a date. No, I do. If someone sent their postcard, the day we announced it and because they live in some obscure place or Italy, which has the worst postal system in the world, because they live in some obscure place, their postcard doesn't arrive. I genuinely feel bad about that. I don't think there's anywhere on earth that if someone had sent the postcard, the day the podcast went up about the flag referendum that it wouldn't arrive in your postbox by then because it's like a month later. It's like a month later. It's more it's well over a month later. So I hope that's the case. By the way, if you're ever in Rome and you want to send a postcard, don't send it in Rome, go to the Vatican and send it there because their postal system is amazing. That's a little tip for new players. If you ever want to send mail from Rome, go and do it at the Vatican. I have to imagine that any place in the world that's going to take more than a month to get a postcard somewhere is not a place where there's a high number of podcast listeners. That is probably true. But I'm sure I'll be hearing from them. That's for sure. You know, Brady, just like how we still get tweets from people who tell us that they are not on a plane currently, you know, you're going to be getting postcards at that postbox until the end of time now. We know what's right. I'm totally cool with that. And I think that we should leave that hello at hellointernet.fm slash what's a cold flag vote? Flag vote. Yeah. I think we should leave the address there for future people that listen to the podcast and they can still send in a postcard and tell me what they would have voted for and do what they like because, you know, that we may use that postbox for other things. So you can still send something in. Don't feel excluded. And, you know, if you want me to see your funny postcard and what flags you'd like, go ahead and do it. But if you want it to count in the vote, it must arrive by 5pm UK time on December 3rd. Now you can get to work. And then Graham and I will scoop them all up and we'll be going through your votes and your postcards, which I'm, is going to be the highlight of the year for me, surely. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this. I'm really looking forward to this. Everyone is still tweeting pictures of themselves sending in their votes, which are really cool. I saw one person sent in sent me a picture of their postcard from in front of the White House and things like that. But my favourite goes to at T underscore animal who showed me the postcard that they've sent in. And basically what they've done is over the section where their votes are written. They've put like all these post notes in some configuration so that the, the postal workers can't see what they voted for. And over the top of the post at notes it says, secret voting information underneath seal may only be removed by hello internet staff. I love that. I love that. So that's a, is that a spoiled ballot though? Well, that's what they said in their tweet. They've written, I've put post a seal over my vote to keep at secret. Is that legal question mark? So, and that's a fair question. Don't anyone else do it because we may have to just start spoiling the votes if we get hundreds of people doing it because that's going to be a little pain in the butt taking off all those post notes. This is why we actually had the rule about no envelopes because we were trying to like, that kind of thing, it sounds ridiculous to say we have a no envelope rule because we don't want to open the envelopes. But again, we know from experience that this kind of stuff when you have to do it in the hundreds, opening the envelopes makes a severe difference. So, if there were hundreds and hundreds of ones with secret ballots on it, I think we would have to declare it as a spoiled ballot. This guy, T underscore animal, they're getting in with this one. But nobody else, nobody else. Nobody else. We're going to match it to the picture that was sent on Twitter to make sure it's the correct one. That one gets a special ticket for a non spoiled ballot. But nobody else do this because we've got to try to make it easier. I'm dying to find out how many you're going to be there with. I think we could get past a thousand here quite easily. There's not other own possibility. We're going to have so much data as well, Greg. We haven't discussed this yet and I'm sure you and I will discuss it and make a formal announcement soon. But I do like the idea of us somehow making all the data public as much of the data public as possible and people can manipulate it in all their own different ways. I think we should open source it in some way that works that we think is appropriate. So we'll see what we can do about that. But we haven't discussed it yet. I've already been thinking about this because... No. You haven't been... You haven't been... You haven't been overthinking it, have you, Greg? No, I have been appropriately thinking it. But I have been wondering about how to get the preference data into some sort of shareable format because when you're doing an alternative vote, it's actually quite easy to count the ballots physically. Like to physically move them around in piles is a very easy thing to do, which is one of the reasons why I selected this as opposed to some other methods. But the thing that to me is interesting is to see an aggregate amount of data about where do first preferences go, how do the second preferences break down. And so it's easy to count, but there's a much more complicated story to be told in the preference data itself. Yeah. Well, one of the things I've been thinking about, and again, I have not discussed this with you yet. So doing it publicly on a podcast for the first time might not be the smartest idea, but... You know I'm a good... ...with a flow kind of guy. You are. You are a spontaneous guy. But we did say, unlike the official page with the instructions, that what you write on the postcard may be seen on the internet. We made that clear because we're going to video the counting. So everyone is aware that what's on this postcard, it could be public. And we even said if you put your name on there, be aware. This could be on the internet. So we have said that. So we could feasibly just scare in the backs of all the postcards and just let's say to people sort it out yourselves. But I'm not entirely sure about that. I think maybe that's not fair. I don't know what you think. Because here's the... I'm trying to think about how do you actually get this stuff in a shareable format? Yeah. And I think that there are actually enough postcards where there's maybe a thing like we need to bring some extra people to help us. But there's the front of the postcards, which would be interesting if we can share them in some way. And then... Yeah. There's two sections of the back, which is potentially has something like a return address on it, depending on how people write a postcard out. So it's like... Yeah. We can't share that. But this is what I'm saying. Like, obviously that can't be there. But there's at least going to be half of the postcard, which is theoretically shareable, because it's just a list of preferences and then maybe a funny thing at the bottom. But that I think is going to have to be something that we see when we get closer to the day. But I'm honestly thinking like, do we need to hire someone to help us input all of the preference stuff into a spreadsheet to share on the internet? I think we might have to. Well, you think Brady Sniffy could be... Could be caching in here with the day's work, maybe. Oh, yeah. Look at that. I've put him... I've put him to work before scanning all my brown papers for number files. They may be this could be a job for him. Yeah. And rolling out the papers on the Million Pie Day thing, right? Oh, yeah. No, yeah. He was one of the slaves there as well, yeah. So... December 3. You've been told. And we will also tweet it on Facebook or whatever, however we share things. And then people will still complain that we didn't tell them, but... Yeah. Well, you'll tweet it. I'm not on Twitter. Well, we might come to that. This episode of Hello Internet is being released in November, and that is a big month in the world of facial hair. So how appropriate that I get to talk about today's sponsor, Harry's. November, as almost everyone knows, can also be called MoVemBER. This is a time when people raise money and raise awareness around men's health issues. They do this by growing moustaches throughout the month. It's normally men that do that from my experience. Now for some people, that means they end up looking really cool, or in my case, a little bit silly. I took part in MoVemBER a couple of years back, and as luck would have it, I recorded a video during that period, which ended up being really successful and having a really long shelf life. Unfortunately, every time I shout to someone, that also means I have to explain, oh, this was recorded in MoVemBER, and they kind of nod in an understanding way. But it is a really great cause, and it's really great fun. And MoVemBER is supported by Harry's. Harry's is the events official razor partner, and you know how I, among all people, love things that are official. They even have a special MoVemBER shave set. You can check that out on the website. I'm sure you all know the Harry story by now. This is a company started based on selling high quality razors and shave sets, but not at the stupid prices you find in most stores. I've got a Harry set myself. It's called the Winston, a lovely waiters silver, classy looking handle, and high quality replacement blades available at the click of an internet button. So why not get a starter set delivered to your door? It's free delivery. And that comes with a razor handle, three blade cartridges, and your choice of shaving cream or foaming shave gel. And it comes in really cool packaging too. The Harry's packaging is spot on. Harry's will give you $5 off your first order if you use the code H I. So go to Harry's dot com H A double R Y S dot com. Pick out what you like. I like the Winston. You might like something different. And then enter that code H I on checkout. It's H I for Hello Internet. Then they'll know you came from the show. Our thanks to Harry's for their continuing support of Hello Internet. And why not also check out what they're up to this November. Really good cause. I don't know if you're aware of this. Obviously there were two flag referendums going on in the world at the moment that have captured the imagination. The Hello Internet flag referendum being the most important. Obviously. And there's also the New Zealand situation, which I think New Zealand situation is probably inappropriate name for it after the debacle of their flag gate. Hmm. Yeah. It's real shame. It's real shame what they're doing over there. If only there was a shining example of how to run this sort of thing for them to follow. Yeah. It's too late. It's too late for them. I don't know if it's too late for Fiji because I have only just been made aware of the fact that it seems Fiji is another country which has got fed up with having a union jack in the corner of their flag and a going for a new flag and they're going through a process as well. Why are you saying it in this weird way? Isn't it Fiji? Oh no. This is one of those words that you and I are going to say differently. Why do you say Fiji? I say G. That's weird. I think it's an Australian thing. Maybe it's just a Brady thing but I think maybe it's an Australian thing. But I say Fiji. I say Fiji. Now you're saying it more like me. I think I just polluted your brain with it cause I say Fiji. You said Fiji or something in the beginning. No, no, no. I say Fiji. Yeah, you could say that. Yeah, I split it up more than you whereas you sort of say it more continuously. We could spend a long time talking about the pronunciation of this country if you want or we could cut to the flags. I just find your pronunciation wildly distracting. I'm sorry but it's just bizarre. It's just absolutely bizarre which is why I had to comment on it. Well I think it's crazy that you say Emo but I've had to do with it so you could do it. You have to do it. You have to do it with Fiji. So weird. I know. Well come to my rescue Australians and say that we'll pronounce it incorrectly together but maybe it's just me. I don't know. Whatever you want to call it, country F. Let's call it country F. No. They get a new flag. I was not aware of the Fiji flag referendum that was going on. So there seems to be an official website that the government is running or it seems like it's the official website. I am not going to recommend that because it is a bit like waiting through treacle even trying to find the pictures. So I've put this other link in the show notes for you Gray which seems to be some third party that has put them all into one place so you can run an eye over them at once. I think that's all of them. Am I allowed to click this because you have a note here that says I'm not allowed to click this. Well that's because I wanted people to hear your first reaction to saying them and now people can hear you because we're recording a podcast. You may now click on it so people can... The thing is I have to admit that I do not have any idea what the Fiji flag currently looks like. Should I look that up first? Yeah go and go and Google the current Fiji flag first. Yeah you should explain to people what the current flag looks like. Sorry Fiji I can't think of your flag off the top of my head. See I grew up with it. I know it. Yeah you grew up with the flag of Fiji. Yeah. Because it's on my doorstep when not on Australian. Yeah it's just one of these standard British territorial places flags. So there is the Union Jack in the upper left hand corner, much like New Zealand. The rest of the flag is light blue, almost cyan. Yeah it's like too light. It's not the same blue as that's in the Union Jack. I've given it... It's like a light blue. Yeah the Union Jack isn't light blue. The Union Jack is navy blue. Exactly. But on the Australian flag and the New Zealand flag, the blue of the flag is the same as the blue of the Union Jack. So it fits in more nicely in my opinion. But on Fiji it sort of stands out a bit, doesn't it look... It doesn't quite look right. Yeah Fiji picked a different blue, a light blue. And then they have a shield in the corner where they're... Or on the right hand side where there is space with a lion on the top and some... Looks like some local flora and fauna in the bottom, quadrants of the shield. Quite complicated, quite busy shield. I'm being... Less harsh on this flag than I would normally be because this to me just fits in with this whole universe of flags that look exactly like this of all of the various former British territories or dependencies in one way or another. So it's not a good looking flag but there's a ton of flags that look just like this in their own way. Okay. Okay. Can I take a look at the link that you have here for me? Okay. Have a look at the candidates for a new flag for Fiji. Now I don't know what the situation is. I don't know what's what, if there is like a referendum, I've read a bit about it and it seems like it's an official thing that the government's doing. So I think we're heading towards a new flag and there are some candidates there. Just glancing at it. I mean I would say most of these are probably better than the current flag. Again, because the current flag is not great. But these look like I would be curious to know the design process by which these came into existence because these are a lot of very similar looking flags. So all of them have that same cyan light blue color background to them. And almost all of them have a triangle on the left hand side pointing across the flag or they have a ship design somewhere else. It's a bit like in the New Zealand flag referendum where they had the two choices of flags that were the same except for color palette swaps. And with these Fiji flags, there are a lot of them that are very similar with a small design change. It makes it harder to pick out which one you immediately like because many of them are so similar. I'm looking at a couple of them like at the bottom design 56 and design 57 are cyan background and then a kind of brown sale in the center with a flower design in the middle of the sale maybe. And as far as I can tell the only difference between these two designs is the number of petals on the flower design in the center like that's quite specific. 57 has a little palm tree in the middle of the flower and 56 doesn't. Oh, is that what it is? I'm looking at this page has done a smart thing which is reduce them down to the size at which they're going to look when you're seeing them in real life. When you're looking at a flag in your visual field, it's really only two inches across. So I'm looking at this overall gallery that has shrunk in them down. And when you shrink them down 56 and 57 are almost impossible to tell apart as are many of the others. Yeah. And like 54 and 55 is funny because it's like a boat sailing on the water and just the boat has been moved a bit to the left and one of them. So they're like giving you every possible little variation and variant and permutation to vote. Do you like your boat in the center of the flag or do you like it more towards the left? Yeah. It's like hanging a picture or something. So anyway, anyway, I think maybe we should take a bit more time to digest and figure out what's going on here because this is new information to both of us and we don't want to go rushing in talking about a flag referendum. We don't fully understand because we of all people. We of all people understand how important a flag referendum is. And it is so much about the details. Like I want to know how are these flags created? How is the vote going to happen? There are many, many things to know here. There are many things to know here. Yeah. I'm just looking at them. I'm just seeing which ones catch my eye. I don't really do catch my eye though, which I think are better flags. That light blue is a real anchor for them because it's a really unfortunate color and combining it with brown as they have in a few variations here is just out of the question as far as I'm concerned. Brown is a difficult color to work with at the best of times. Combining it with cyan is not a good choice. Not a good choice. Some of the boats are a bit complicated, but some of the more stylized, sail ones look too much like a corporate flag of a local council and things like that. I haven't got a position yet. I like you more time. I also want to understand some of the meaning behind this stuff as well because meaning is important. Let's come back to it. But it's just exciting to know there's another flag referendum going on. This is an exciting time to be alive for flag enthusiasts. So we will put a link in the show notes for these designs for the Fiji flag and I look forward to discussion in the Reddit for which ones people like. I think so. I'm hoping that the Fiji government will fly over some consultants from Liberia to help out with some more designs because I think they need some more Liberian influence in their flag design. I thought you were going to say what should really happen which is that Fiji should hire us as consultants. We can start a whole side business Brady as flag referendum consultants. Can you imagine anything that would be more awesome than that? I would do that just to do that. Normally, normally, we're like, oh, well, let me plug this into my spreadsheets. Let me make a business decision about whether the return on investment for my time in this project is really worth it. But if there was some nation that said, listen, we need, we need someone just to talk to. We need some consultant for our flag referendum. I'd be like, sold. I'll just do it. Years ago, I went to Ethiopia and made some videos about chemistry in Ethiopia. Like as a little thank you, the Ethiopian chemical society made me an honorary fellow. I am actually an honorary fellow of the Ethiopian chemical society. I got a certificate and things like that. For me, that was one of the greatest things that had ever happened. To be able to say yes, I'm an honorary fellow of the Ethiopian chemical society. That's awesome. That I think that could only be topped by being an official flare consultant to the Fiji government. Or anybody, there's plenty of flags out there that could use updating and governments that could use some consultants. So one other little quick bit of follow up in the last podcast, you mentioned a film that I know you like Mean Girls. And I said, we should watch it together. I have like a upper jammer pad or something and watch it together. But I couldn't wait. And I'm having some pretty lonely nights here. So so I went ahead and watched it on my own. I am so disappointed, Brady. I thought I thought we were going to have a slumber party. Going to be braiding each other's hair. Doing our nails, watching Mean Girls. I was looking forward to this evening with you. We could have painted the county flags of Liberia on each other's night. We could have. We could have. There were so many things in our slumber party, which I thought Mean Girls might be a nice kickoff too. But you just couldn't wait. I'm disappointed. I truly am. I truly am. So I'm not going to discuss the contents of the film. They were going to be no spoilers. I won't even discuss whether I liked it or not. But it will give it away a little bit to say that I then recommended to my wife that she watched. She was, she was having a slumber party. A friend of hers was staying over last night and she said, I were going to watch some TV or a movie. We don't know what to watch. And I said to her, I'll watch Mean Girls. I just, I just watched that. So they watched it. And I was talking to her this morning about the film. And then I said, she said, you know, why did you watch it? Like, where did that recommendation come from? And I said, you're not going to believe this. But the reason I recommended it was because of CGP Gray. Why is that so unbelievable? She, she almost fell off her chair when I said that that recommendation to come from you of all people. And the one question I have for you is, why did you first watch it? Well, how did you first come? How did you cross paths with this film? You may not know this about me, but I am, I am almost an expert in chickflicks. I have seen so many chickflicks in my life. Now I cannot give the details under which I have seen these. I cannot name names that might implicate anybody who would be the reason why I have seen so many of these movies, but I am like, I am like a serious expert on what makes a good chick flick. And what doesn't make a good chick flick? Because I have seen so many. I actually have seriously debated writing a script for a romantic comedy at one point. I was like, oh, this is not a bad idea for romantic comedy. I know the rules. I know how this works. I know what makes a good romantic comedy and what doesn't. I think I could do this. What was the odd love to know your romantic comedy script? Did it invite me? I am genuinely not going to tell you because I might use this one day. I know what's I know I already know it's about a computer programmer who keeps getting the same Uber driver over the course of a few years and that relationship develops from there. That doesn't know. See, that doesn't work. That's that's not. No, that's not good. That's not good. You know, I was making joke. I like I really love chickflicks too. So we should have a we should have a night and compare notes and watch if you. Yeah. Because you know, there's when you've watched a lot, you pick up on the rules. Like they have very clear rules about how things work, how things don't work. There's so many bad ones that it's kind of delightful to find a good one. I mean, I wouldn't call me in Gelsar romantic comedy. It's there are different genres of chick. There's sub genres of chick. This is why I use the word chickflick, right? Because a romantic comedy in my mind is large. It's largely not exclusively, but it's largely a sub category of chickflick. Although I will say romantic comedies can sometimes straddle the line for more broader audiences. I would say love actually is a good example of that. That it's a romantic comedy, which is a bit outside the then diagram of a traditional chickflick. But I think let's take something like the devil wears product is another good example. I'm like a chickflick that is also not a romantic comedy. Yeah. Like the romance is almost no interest in that movie. Like it's almost tangential to that. But devil wears product also quite good if you haven't seen it. Hey, fellow in that is also Vinnie Chase from untrush. Isn't he? He's in that in a very, very monorail. I have no idea who that is, but I am impressed with your knowledge of this person. So you've seen this movie too. I loved devil was proud. I've seen that a few times. Yeah, it's good. It's quality. Very good quality. It is. It is. It is very good. It is very good. We have to find another good chickflick to watch on our slumber party. Yeah, maybe we should have maybe we could have a chickflick episode of how they will internet where we just review review a few of our favorites. Compare if you. Yeah, I have. I have. I have many thoughts. I have many thoughts on chickflicks. So do I. So do I. Wow, look at this. Look at this unexpected similarity we have discovered. Maybe we could collaborate on a script. Oh, you could write a script and I could come in and do a polish at the end. Maybe, I mean, honestly, it sounds like this is fertile territory. We might have a whole spin off podcast, which is that's that's reviewing chickflicks. Dude, I'd be so up for that. Yeah. I would be totally up for that. Oh, yeah, we can, you know what? You know what? We could actually become like major voices and influence on the chickflick industry. If the podcast became big enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like our reviews make or break the release begins. I love this idea. I'm all on board. I don't know if we could fit that in between airplay consultancy business. Man, yeah, it's just this is the problem. You know, there's so many, so many things to do. So little time to do them. I know you're not on Twitter at the moment because of your weird, weird, kind of science thing you're doing weird about it. Yeah. But anyway, I sent you these pictures because you had to see them. Yeah. And one, one was of two people. One of them is a gentleman. I don't know who the second person is. I don't know if it's a gentleman or a man because they, their identity is concealed. But they have dressed up as CGP Grey, the robot and Brady, the caveman for a Halloween party. And the caveman, I guess the caveman guy looks a bit like me because he's got like sort of my color hair a bit. And you know, he's a pretty handsome guy. But the CGP Grey outfit is incredible. It is like it is one of the best Halloween outfits I've ever seen. He's and the CGP Grey is even giving a flower to the caveman, presumably an emoji flower. But you have got to see this CGP Grey Halloween outfit is outstanding. Yeah. Well, we'll find the link for the show notes. But yes, I have to say seeing that, seeing that Halloween costume just was amazing and bright in my whole day. I cannot believe there are one people who were dressing up as us for Halloween. All right. This is like a weird moment to cross in your life when someone you don't know is dressing up as you. You know, definitely in Halloween, sometimes friends dress up as each other. That's a fun thing to do. But to have a stranger dress up as you is a weird barrier to cross. But they did such a great job on this. I think I think both costumes were just great. And the CGP Grey one must have taken a lot of effort to do. And it's based on the animated, the Halloween, animated dofsky version of the CGP Grey, the robot. And it just, it looks astounding. It really does. And I have to say the flower, the flower emoji gift was definitely the cherry on top of that amazing cake, like it was just such a nice little detail. So thumbs up to those costumes. Those were really good. Now one other listener email, and this was our friend Chris who worked with Air Force one. Right. Right. So this comes from Chris. Now people will remember Chris. He worked, he drives the stairs for Air Force one. And he took a picture of his phone playing Halloween tonight with Air Force one in the background. And he goes to the podcast while waiting around for the president to come and go. Now the first that said news is that he is moving, he's moving to a different station. They call this a permanent change of station in the military. And he's leaving sort of the, the, the Washington area. So I think his days on Air Force one have come to an end like any job does. But what happened was as part of his like going away, he got invited to the White House for sort of a, you know, a meat and greet or, I don't know why he got invited to the White House, but he did. And the president wasn't there, but the first lady was in. He got to meet the first lady in shake hands and spend some time in the White House. I'll read a little bit of what he wrote. Unfortunately for me, President Obama had a day trip. I didn't get to meet him formally. Of course he's seen him lots of times getting on and off the plane. But I did get to meet the first lady and had a picture taken with her, which he is shared with me. While waiting for her, we had a bit of time to look around. And I could not pass up the opportunity to snap a picture of the H I logo inside the White House, which I'm going to send to you now, Gray. The hello internet is just getting everywhere. Absolutely everywhere was taken in. What's this room called? The diplomatic reception room, which is one of the oval shaped rooms in the in the main residence. It's on the ground floor. Oh, yeah, there we go. Hello internet in the White House. Yeah, with a portrait of George Washington in the diplomatic reception room. I like it. I like this idea of hello internet. I don't want to say sneaking, but it almost feels like sneaking into places around the world. Gray, I know you get a bit sick of all my corners and my official things. But I have to come up with all the time. Do I? Do I, Brady? Yeah, well, obviously you do. But I want to know, I totally do. I completely do. I know. But Gray, I want to put another one out there. And I think it's time we, I think now that we've been going over 50 episodes, it's time for us to do this. I think no, come on, be positive. Be positive. Come on. I can't be, I can't, no, no, here's the thing. I can't be positive. I can't be positive just in the abstract. What's going to, I'm always just, I'm always cautious. I'm always cautious about something that we're going to be doing potentially for forever. That's how I have to approach this. Well, you don't have to worry about this. I will maintain it. I will look after it. You have to have nothing to do with this except you have to, you have to be in on it, like as the, as one of the judges. Oh, yeah. Because I think the time has come for us to start. And this, we're going to take this seriously. This isn't like, there's no Mickey Mouse here. I think we should start the Hello Internet whole of fame. For people who have gone above and beyond the call of duty for the betterment of Hello Internet. And this is not an easy thing. This is, this is I'm talking metal of, I'm talking metal of our Nobel Prize type level here. People that have, people that have done, fit selfless things to make Hello Internet a bigger and better thing. And I'm going to propose to you now that Chris, who not only had got Hello Internet picture with Air Force one, he has also now got Hello Internet into the White House. We'll be the first inductee into the Hello Internet whole of fame. Will you second, will you second that? All right. I can get behind that. I can get behind that. All right. This, this definitely feels a bit like nation building is what we're doing right now. Yeah. Started to pass out metals and awards for those who have done great service to the nation of Hello Internet. Exactly. So there we go. We have our first inductee into the Hello Internet whole of fame. Now, this is not an easy thing to get into people. I don't want you all to start emailing now with some picture of, you know, Hello Internet or, you know, and you cannot ask to be inducted as well. If you asked to be inducted, that defeats the whole purpose. This is a decision that we will take at appropriate times. But we will start the Hello Internet whole of fame. And our first inductee is Chris. Congratulations. You have served the podcast with honor. Do you have a future vision for, for the kinds of things that could be done to earn this medal? Or are you going to take this on a case by case basis to get into the high office. It's called the Hello Internet whole of fame. I would say, I mean, I'm talking, you know, the first person who flies the Hello Internet flag on top of Mount Everest, they will have a strong chance of being inducted. Yeah. The first person to listen to the podcast on Mars, for example, I think we'll have a strong case. But I don't want to, I don't want to pull it in a box. And I'm sure this doesn't, this doesn't just go to great achievers. This, this, this, you know, the common man can get into this. I don't want to put any constrictions on it. I don't want to put rules here, Gray. I think this is just something that will happen organically. Right. Right. You have got me thinking, you have got me thinking, we should have metal struck. Yeah. So we see if we can get metal struck. Yeah. I think that would be nice. That's not a bad idea. That's not a bad idea at all. I see, I, when you say striking metals, now I get much more behind this. I like this because then also that also puts constraints on us about how many, how many were actually going to give out? Yes. But it makes it much less frivolous if we have to send a box with a metal somewhere. I think it needs to be an exclusive thing. I, you know what? This is, this is done. Yeah. Okay. The metal. I'm now sold on this with metals. We have to figure out how to get metals made. Is it okay? Look, is it okay to have a call the Hello Internet Hall of Fame? What does it need a different name? Like does it need something that sounds a bit more, you know, because Hall of Fame is a bit rock and roll and a bit gimmicky. Should it, should it be the, should it be the Hello Internet Medal of Honor? Or, or I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to piggyback on the medal of honor because that's such an important thing. But, yeah. But there's, there's something, there's something here. I think at Hall of Fame, Hall of Fame is now suddenly not the appropriate thing for this. Yeah. Yeah. It cheapens it a bit, doesn't it? What should it be? Yeah. The Hello Internet. Okay. Here's, here's what we're going to have to do. Here's, here's what we're going to have to do, I think, because this is a momentous decision. This can't be like a fit of tron 5000, right? Well, we just, we just decide live on the show, right? This can't, this can't be that. I think we need to, we need to seriously think about what this is. But yes, I like the idea that we will actually send medals somewhere. Yeah. And that it needs a, an important sounding name. So I, I think this is also something that the Hello Internet community needs to help us with here. So I, I will be looking for discussion in the Reddit for, proposed ideas on a name. This isn't a vote, right? This isn't a referendum. This is Brady and I as the Jack and Queen of Hello Internet. We will be making a decision about this. The Jack of Diamonds and Queen of Spades. Right. Of course, of course. But we are soliciting input from the community and we will be making some decisions about this. And what, and whatever it is, the first one will be going to Chris, who got Hello Internet onto the runway with Air Force One and into the White House. Yes. Selfless X for the betterment of Hello Internet. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. All right. It's happening. Now you did, you did mention fitter on 5000. This week we are doing the not by weekly weigh in because you don't have access to the regular scale. And I do have access to copious amounts of pizza, which I've been eating every night. There's a place in Berkeley called the cheese board and my goodness. That place is going to be responsible for my early death. It's delightful. It's this pizza place, great. And it's really, really popular. And every night they have like the pizza they've made and that's the pizza you have to have. There's no choice. You can't go and say, you know, hold this or add this around on this. It's just tonight. This is the pizza we're serving and people queue around the block to buy this pizza. Turn up and you just, and you just have what they're serving. And it is really good. This is an excellent way to start off our our section on the five weekly weigh in. I may have mentioned before, but there was a pizza place that my wife and I discovered in Las Vegas, which was called 800 degrees pizza, which was by far and away the best pizza I've ever had in my life. And as someone who's grown up in New York, like I've tried lots of pizzas in different places. I'm a fan of, of many different kinds of pizzas, but this was just the best by a lot. And like I may have gone there for several meals in a day. At some point I may, I may have had the staff very well in a short period of time, recognize exactly who I am and what my order was. These are things that may have occurred. But I said to my wife at the time as I was stuffing my face with this delicious pizza. I'm going to be honest here. If one of these opens up in London, I may just have to accept living a shorter life. That the train off route could this pizza is like, I might take 10 years off the end of my life. Right? They're the worst years. They come off the end anyway. So while we are discussing our renewed efforts on a healthy lifestyle, we're also going to, of course, discuss delicious pizza. Yeah. It's like I said, your renewed efforts, my renewed efforts have taken a massive blow. But I'll get back on the horse when I get back to England. I promise this is one of the things that I really think about this kind of stuff. What do you overthink it? Or just think about it. Damn it, Brady. No. I think with anything like health or any kind of long, long change, long term change that you want to make, I find it very helpful to think about it, not in terms of, oh, I'm doing this thing and I'm going to make a change. And then if I fail, then that's bad. I think it's best to focus on it in terms of getting back on the wagon is actually the skill that you need to develop, that you should expect that many times, especially when you start something new, you are going to fall off the wagon. And the thing that matters is the getting back on, right? It's not the falling off. Yeah. True, true. And because that's always my problem. As we've discussed before, I always have this attitude that, oh, I failed. I may as well fail completely. And what you're saying is don't have that attitude, except, accept your lapses and don't just throw it all in, like, you know, keep playing. Don't never give up. More importantly, I think it's, it's not even accept your lapses. It's understand that this is part of the process. And the question is over the space of a long period of time, are you getting better at this or not better at this? But the individual lap is like, this is just a thing that happens. Like this, this just occurs. And I first started thinking about this when I was reading about, I was reading about people who quit smoking and some research on like, what is effective and what is not effective? And that one of the things that was coming out of this research was that almost nobody is successful quitting smoking the first time that people who actually quit smoking for long periods of time require four, five, six serious attempts at quitting smoking before they're actually successful at it. And that what the research was showing is that the process here is that it's the attempts at quitting that they are learning what their own failure conditions are, right? They're learning what are the kind of things that cause them to fall off the wagon and that they're getting better at this. So that's why I just why I think we're not doing the weekly way in this time. But I just felt like I wanted to mention just a couple of things about like for anybody who wants to join us on the Fititron 5000. I think this is a useful thing to keep in mind. Yeah. That's good. That's really good advice. Yeah. Really good. And I also wanted to mention because I totally forgot to say it last time. Got some feedback about this. The exercise shirts that we have so that you can join team Fititron 5000. They're actually exercise shirts. Yes. Right. They are made of polyester. Where I should find the actual description of them. But they got wicking hasn't had to sweat. Right. They have the moisture wicking. These are not the regular cotton t shirts that you happen to be able to exercise. I especially asked the FTBA if they could make real exercise shirts for us. And this is the thing that they were able to do. So this is their serious, serious exercise shirts for people to get started with. But there was some confusion over that last time. This is how that incident man. We don't mess around. Yeah. We don't mess around. We're going to be minting metals soon. Right. Yeah. No, it's it's it's it's real stuff. And two other just minor points then, which is that I don't know if there's going to be anything necessarily done with it. But I did make the Fititron 5000 subreddit in case people want to discuss the Fititron lifestyle with others. Oh my God, what have I done to you? And I also feel like we need to settle on an official Fititron 5000 hashtag because on Twitter, since you're so constrained for space, actually writing out Fititron 5000 takes up a lot of what you want to do. So I think the official hashtag should be hashtag FOT5K. That's what that's what we should do. Uh, I'll let you do that. I'm not I'm not I'm not as enamored with that, but I can say the logic of it. And it is quite funny that you've done it. So let's do it. Yeah. Hashtag FOT5K. Short for Fititron 5000. Yeah, because you can't actually write for the fit of Tron 5000. You've lost 20% of your words there with Twitter. I know. And that's half the joke to me. But yeah, you're right. You sometimes you've just got to be practical. Yeah, you had to be practical sometimes. So anyway, I'm just throwing that out there. If people want to talk about getting started or, you know, discuss whatever strategies, not that I want to encourage more people onto Reddit. Cause I think you're already the poster boy for Reddit too much. But what are you expecting people to put on the fit of Tron 5000 sub Reddit, sub Reddit sub Reddit sub Reddit like like their like their their stories, their inspirational stories, the pictures of them with their shirt off showing how fat they are. I don't know. I don't know. I'm viewing this as the opposite of the CGP Grace sub Reddit. I keep really locked down like I'm the only one who can post to that. And I make I make the discussions official. And there are advantages and disadvantages doing it that way. Whereas for Tron 5000, I'm just throwing it open to the wins. Like this, this one is this one is for the community. So I'll be curious to see what if anything people want to post there. But like I was just thinking like for me getting started with this stuff, like it's it's useful to see different strategies that people use or different things that people try. Like there's a lot out there and it's hard to say like what's going to work for everybody. Like the thing that I have been really aware of that has been successful for me is totally startling, which is, which is doing weight training that yeah, even though that is not actually directly related at all to weight loss, I have found that the that lifting weights in the gym, which is a thing I just never thought that I would do. I'm just not that kind of guy. But having that has been this surprisingly helpful through line that has made for me like getting back on the wagon consistently easier when it's like, Oh, there's this other area of my life, which is health related. It's not weight loss related, but it's also an area where it's like, Oh, okay, I can see that I make consistent progress as long as I do this relatively simple thing. Yeah. And like that's something that has been totally surprising to me, but has definitely been one of the things that has has helped me a lot with getting started. So like that's one of my little pieces of advice for some people. Like if like me, you think of yourself as like a nerd and not the kind of the person, not the kind of person who would go to the back of the gym where the free weights are, like I was this guy and I have, I have found that surprisingly effective for me anyway. Yeah, trainers and that personal trainers and that always tell you lifting weights is a good way to lose weight. But I tell you what I think is going to happen on the fit of Tron 5000 subreddit. It's going to be just lots of people talking and not a lot of people listening. Everyone's going to go on this swearing by their method and saying, this is the only way to do it and everyone else is doing it wrong. And you shouldn't pay attention to this and you should do this. And then the next person will say, this is how you should do it. I don't. But anyway, that's cool. People could just go and read them and the internet is for arguing, Brady. Right. That's the purpose of the machine. It allows people to argue with each other. If you think, oh, I want an internet community, but I don't want people to argue. It's like, well, you need to take your ball and go home. Right? There's no way you're going to have that. Today's episode is also brought to you by Hover. Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names. Let's say you're kicking around an idea with a friend and suddenly you come up with something that you want to make or a website that you want to build or a product that you want to ship into the world. Well, you need a website to promote that thing. 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They have a valet service where you can turn over to someone to log in information for wherever else your domains are. And their experts just go in and liberate your domain names, bringing them into the Hover world. So if you have an idea in your head right now for something that you want to make real, go secure your domain name for it right now before somebody else gets it. And when you do, I want you to use the offer code, Queen of Spades, all one word. Yes, that's the offer code, Queen of Spades, all one word to get 10% off your first purchase at Hover. Thanks to Hover for supporting the show. Well, having just told people to go to a subreddit and given them a hashtag for Twitter, let's talk about the CGP Gray weird kind of silence where you just cut yourself off from all these things for the next however long you want to talk about this pretty. Well, just quickly because I think you've I think this is vintage gray overthinking and overreacting. Like I read you a little article about it. And which was which was really cool and like all your articles were very well thought out and well written. And I understand I understand the logic of it. But I just think I just think you're overdoing it. This whole, you know, because the other day there was a nice tweet. And so I texted it to you and said, I'll gray have a look at this tweet. It's really nice. And you couldn't even open it because like you said, I can't look at it because it's on Twitter. And so presumably you have some technical ban in place that stops you even being able to look at Twitter if you want to. And I think I think that's a bit extreme. Yeah, just as just as quick background for the listener, I did I did write this article. It's up on my website called Diling Down where I talked about a bunch of things in my life that I want to reduce to some extent over the next month. And intentionally a little bit vague on precisely what I'm doing when I wrote that article because I feel like this is a process that I am going through. But yeah, I wanted to reduce some of the things. And so one of the things that I have done is on all of my devices now, reddits is blocked and Twitter is blocked. So yes, when Brady sends me a link and he's like, look at this tweet. If I tap on it, it just opens nothing. It just opens a blank page in the browser on the machine that I'm on. I haven't posted anything directly on Twitter for, well, it was this. This is the eighth of November. So since the first of November, I think I haven't posted anything directly. And yeah, I'm dramatically dialing back on Reddit and a bunch of other things this month. So yeah, I don't I don't think it's I don't think it's overthinking anything. I don't think you're dialing down though. I think you're hanging up or switching off. You know, I've said this before about you and you do you disagree with me strongly. And as is your right. But I think this is another example of CTP grade binge behavior. It's like it's like opposite of binging. It's like anti-binging. You've gone from using something to just not using at all. There's no, there's no sort of tempering or just modifying. It's just like, no, I'm gone. I'm gone. That's it. I'm turning it off. And I don't know. I just think it's, you know, I see the benefit to it. And I see how much time I bleed away to Twitter and Reddit and things like that. And I admire you for for taking such strong action and you know, and grasping the nettle to use a term that you know, I like. But I just think I just think it seems like overkill. I just think it seems like you just you go to your far. I don't know. My feeling on it is. I don't know. I'm having a hard time expressing why I wrote that article and precisely what I'm trying to achieve. But I think one of the things I'm trying to figure out is how much of the external world do I want to let into my life? And I mean that in the broadest of all possible ways. So like I'm also not listening to podcasts on my phone this month, which is another thing that I used to do just a lot. And I think in trying to find like, what is the appropriate level of external stuff coming into my life? It's useful to try for a while what I think is a level that is too low to try. Like I'm trying to find, I'm trying to like calibrate what is the level at which I want to have external stuff come into my life. And so I'm trying to have it be too low to get a better sense. Well, where is the median point? Okay. So it's like you've got music and you want to decide what the best volume is. So you've turned the tile all the way down to zero and you're just gradually going to turn it up until you find the level you like. Yeah. In some ways that might be what I try to do over the next little while. And so this month, I'm intentionally lower than is reasonable. I do not live a life where it is possible to not be on the internet. Like that might be on the internet is a huge part of my personal life and also my business life. So I am very aware that this is not a level that can be maintained for a long period of time. But yeah, maybe the volume analogy is a good analogy that you're turning it lower and then trying to turn it up to see what's to see what happens or to find where is the comfortable place for this. But I don't know. It's been weird. Like I've been doing it for about seven days now. And in some ways, my life doesn't feel all that different actually. Like I missed Twitter much less than I expected I would. This is also why I felt like I want to commit to this to commit to this for a while. Commit to it say like trying this for a month. Because I also kind of thought this behavior would manifest itself in myself. That's like, oh, doing almost anything for a week is easy. The question is doing it for more than a week. Are doing it for a slightly uncomfortable amount of time is where you really figure something out. Anyway, yeah. So that's the thing that I'm doing. But yeah, it does mean that I'm not seeing what people send me on Twitter. And I am going on Reddit, but only when I'm posting something. So like when this podcast goes up, I'll be on Reddit for a little bit to see the feedback from people because that is important. But I'm not just like hanging out on Reddit like I used to. I'll be curious to see how it unfolds. And like, your art, Grae's article is definitely worth a read people. So, grab a link to it in the show notes for sure and go and have a look at it. But I do think, I don't know. I just think you sort of make you're making yourself this kind of virtual hermit and doing things sort of in your extreme way. But that's good. I mean, it's good that you do it so the rest of us can benefit from the results. Point in laugh is what you mean, pretty. No, not pointing that. I find it endlessly frustrating because it just makes you harder to communicate with. But it hasn't made a problem. You have been replying to my emails and texts in sort of the usual time frames. So I guess I can't complain. It's a shame that it's I think you need to tweet what the new deadline is for our vote because you've got a lot of people follow your Twitter that don't follow the other ones. But okay, I'll do that. I'll do that through because the system that I'm using is something called buffer. Even though I can't access Twitter, there's this website where indirectly I can post something to this website which then posts it on Twitter. So I have access to that. So okay, maybe you've convinced me right. I will post the the deadline for the Hello Internet flag referendum through buffer. Yeah, this is this is crucial information. It is crucial information. It's vitally important. It's vitally important. All right. Well, well, watch this space. I'd like I would like to talk to you about it again because although I joke about it and I talk about your bitjiness and I think you're overthinking it and overcooking it as usual, I think it is, you know, I think this is one of the real professional problems for people like us and it's a huge problem for me. And so I do it my your ability and discipline to do this even though I think maybe you're taking it a bit far. So I'll be really curious to find out the results. This to me felt very much like the the the the day that I set up the great Twitter Healthbot where some part of my brain said this is a good idea. I don't exactly know why, but it feels like it's a good idea. Let's do this really quickly before we think ourselves out of it. And so that article was was a similar thing of like something about this feels like a good idea. Let's put this article up as fast as possible before we can think of all the reasons why we shouldn't do this. Okay, so I have a question for you because this just came up in a conversation earlier with someone else today. And the question is, do you sub vocalize? That is an interesting question. Do I sub vocalize? I guess my first question would be what on earth does that mean? Right, so I only recently learned what the word sub vocalize means as well. I came across this thing. I just realized what I'm just about to say and that you're going to make fun of me. But I was reading a book on how to read books. Maybe someone might think is overthinking. But yeah, so a few weeks ago, I thought I read a lot of books. I should think about how to read books better. And so I found a book about how to read. So you already finished that other book you're reading about how to breathe in. Wait, had you? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I finished a long time ago. Okay. All right, I just I'm walking right into that one. But you're reading a book about how to read books. Yeah. So anyway, I came across this little section which talked about this thing that they called sub vocalizing. And what this means is when you are reading something, if you're reading an article or read a discussion thread, whatever it is. So now I'm directly asking you, Brady, when you do this, is there a narrator in your head that you hear reading the words to you when you read? I don't think so. I don't know. It's like one of those things that when you think about how you do it, you suddenly forget how you do it. Okay. So here is the conclusion I've come to with this because I've asked a few people about this since I came across this. And my conclusion is the the fact that you are doubting is an indication that you generally don't. Because when I ask people, you get either get the answer, people immediately say yes. Or you get exactly what you do, which is like, do I hear a voice? I don't think I hear a voice, but the people who hear a voice when they read, they know, they're not uncertain in the slightest. It's very obvious. Well, then I don't because I'm definitely not certain. This blew my freaking mind because I didn't know that anyone could read without hearing a narrator in their head the whole time that they're reading. This is astounding to me that such a thing is even possible that a person can look at the words and not hear someone in their head reading the words to them. So you do sub-vocalize. I do sub-vocalize. And I did not know that it was possible to read without doing this. This is just astounding to me. Who's doing it? What do they sound like? It sounds like me reading in my head. So you sort of hear your voice. Oh, that's nice. You've got a nice voice. At least you've got a nice voice reading to you. But so I don't know. Now I'm wondering if I do it or not. So when you're reading a book right and it's been written in, like, say the third person, and then there's a quote mark, John walked up to the bank teller and said, could I have $20 plays? Could I have $20 in quotes? What voice is that in? That's in my voice. It's still in my voice. That's your voice too. That's okay. So it's not like you're a narrator, but when there's quotes, that's in like, no, like, like, tone compass. Right. Right. My own voice doesn't put on a voice for itself reading a book. It doesn't try to do the girl parts in a girly voice. Right. This is not what's happening in my head. But it is as though I was just reading something out loud in my normal voice. Now, of course, when I, what I mean is I don't hear it like an auditory hallucination here a voice. But this is the kind of words like there's a voice. Okay. So here's where I'm going with this, which is the other thing that then this has led on to me with some other people, which is like, so when you think thoughts, do you think thoughts in words or do you think thoughts in not words? And so that's always really hard to answer. I always ask people who speak too language is too, I say, do you think in English or do you think in German? Right. And I always say they'll always have an answer. They'll always say, I think in English or I think I had a teacher who said, I think about physics in German because I learned physics in German. But I think about just telling you a story. I think in English, say. The more accurate way to say it is it's not really like I'm hearing my voice like with my ears in my head. But the voice that is reading the book in my head is the same as the voice that thinks the thoughts in my head. But it's also this realization that like it seems like the same people who don't sub vocalize. They're the same people who seem to not think thoughts in words. Like when I focus on it, I am pretty sure that I am not capable of having a thought that is not verbally expressed inside my own brain. Yeah, but the it's like, you know, highs and birds on certainty and all that. It's the act, the act of observing your thoughts, I think immediately puts them into words. So I think I think I think it's the minute you think about it, like the whole the wave function collapses and suddenly all your thoughts are in words. I think that's quite possible. And when you're not thinking about it, are they around? Like I see that's exactly what I would expect a non-sub vocalizer to say. It's just like when I look at it, it forms in words. Because I'm very much aware, like if I'm walking around, it's like parts of my brain are talking to other parts of my brain. Like there's like there's a little narration that's going on in there about this is how thoughts are expressed. They are expressed in a very vocal way. And at least in my thoughts with reading, it seems like this matches up pretty clearly that the same people who when they read a book, they hear a thought they hear a voice in their head reading the book to them seem to be the same people mostly who when they think thoughts, the thoughts are very verbal thoughts and they don't seem to think thoughts that are not so verbal thoughts. But I just, I guess, like my I would have predicted that you were a non-sub vocalizer just because we're so different in absolutely everything that it seemed like it would be astounding to me if we were the same on this one. But this is one of these things where it just you come across a thing and you think, how did I not know about this difference between people? Like this is, it almost reminded me of like when I was a kid and I got glasses for the first time. And I was blown away by the way normal people can see. It's like how did I not know that the world existed like this? You can recognize a person from across the street by their face, not by how they walk. That's amazing. And I feel like the sub vocalizer thing is the same thing. Like I can I just cannot understand how anyone can read without hearing the words in their head. That is unbelievable to me. My instinct here is that in fact we do do the same thing and we just describe it differently. Like my I just find it so hard to believe that we would do think we would think or read so differently. So my instinct is what I do when I read is the same as you but you describe it as hearing the words and I just haven't given up that description. But my other question is if we do do it differently and you do have this voice, this this narration going on in your head and your brain is talking to different parts of your brain all day. Do you think it slows your thinking down? It's like it sounds to me like that would be a slower process because it's having to go through this extra level of abstraction. I feel like I am a slower reader than other people because of it. I wouldn't be surprised if on an objective reading test if I am reading slower than other people because of it. And it's sometimes almost feels like it takes longer to read than maybe it otherwise should. I don't know if that's if that's really true or not. But yeah, I would be willing to bet that you read faster than me at a comparable level of comprehension. On comprehension tests where we scored the same that you would have read something faster than I would have read it is my guess like if this is if this is the case. But the only thing you know you just you just mentioned is and the only thing where you're saying oh you're surprised that if we're actually doing something different. It does remind me the only thing I can think of it similar to this is in one of Richard Feynman books which are always excellent. Everybody should read them. They're great. He mentions I forget the exact details of the story but it is him talking to some other physicist and somehow in the course of the conversation they run into the question about whether or not someone can count in their head while someone else says random numbers out loud. Yeah, I remember this. Yeah. And Feynman says like always like he can't possibly do it and the other guy is like what do you mean you can't do it? It's so easy to do it. And then over over the course of the conversation what they discover is that when Feynman counts he is doing it auditorily in his head in the same way that I would do it right when I counted my head there's a voice in my head going one two three four five and that the other guy is visualizing numbers when he counts in his head that there's no auditory part there. And so someone saying out loud random numbers doesn't mess him up in the way that it messes fine enough. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me people are doing things different but when you get like an email from me and you're reading it you're reading my words in your voice. It's like CGP grades reading Brady's email to CGP grade. You don't hear that in my voice. The answer is for the most part no but I am aware that every once in a while if I read something that someone has written that is particularly in their style it will switch to that person's voice. And this is the reason why I would expect that the people who hear a voice in their head they're so universal is there's a standard reddit joke where people will write something like you are now reading this in Morgan Freeman's voice right like they'll be writing a comment and they'll throw that in and it works every time with me it's like oh yes now Morgan Freeman is in my head reading this sentence for a little while like it totally activates this but I might like oh there's some subset of people who just think that's a joke but it's not really working on them as I guess what's happening but yes I always just assumed that everybody did the same thing I did but that's not the way it's not the way it is. The world is a strange and unexpected place. I still don't believe it I still don't believe it because when I ask you a question and you react to me you react so quickly and we'll say the next thing so quickly that I can't believe you're having to go through all these like levels of no no that's that's different that's different when you're talking when you're talking it's not that's not the same thing so it's only read no but you said it's true for thinking as well so if I ask you a question like I asked you a question like Gray what do you think about this controversial subject you don't have to think what do I think about this controversial subject let me think what do you think about it Gray now I need to come up with an answer to Brady's question no no no because because nobody does that nobody's meta thinking about it when you ask me a question the voice that you hear is the voice in my head using the mouth parts to express sound to you so that you correct right that's what's happening that's what talking is yeah but it's not it's not like my thoughts are talking to someone who then's like oh great now we've got to work the mouth and make this happen okay there's not there's not an extra level of a filtering going on no there's not an actual layer of filtering going on there it's definitely not happening wow well this is interesting stuff I I don't know if I'm looking forward to reading the Reddit comments about it but I'm sure there will be a lot I'm I'm expecting there will be minds blown in the subreddit
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