H.I. No. 23: Call of the Postbox

"H.I. #23: Call of the Postbox" is the 23rd episode of Hello Internet, released on October 28, 2014.
==Official Description==
Grey and Brady discuss selfies at the world series and on the moon, driving on the right wrong side of the road, Brady's new subreddit, death by electricity, how to steal a 747, livetweeting rules, the event horizon of mail, the worst of both worlds, wallets, the worst city in the civilized world, Nobel laureates vs million-subscriber YouTube channels, forgetting what we've talked about, Grey switching to android, train travel, a mile of pi, and being a secret billionaire.
The most minor of spoilers for 30 Rock and The West Wing.
                                                                                                                                                                                                           
==Show Notes==
*Discuss this episode
*Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
*The World Series
*Accidental Armstrong photo
*The silent assassin
*Grey drives across the country in a Prius
*⌘X 22.1
*⌘X 22.2
*Brady's subreddit!
*Consumer Product Safety Commission Electrocutions Report
*Boeing 747
*747 theft tool
*CGP Grey post cards
*H.I. #22: 16-hour Search for Wallpaper
*Bellroy wallets
*Brady's wallet
*Free parking
*YouTubers with a million or more subscribers
*Nobel prizes
*_DavidSmith: Blank Icon Slots
*Another blank icon solution
*Such a mac user thing to say
*Dark Mode as iOS Accessibility Feature
*List of iOS text editors
*Switching costs
*1Password
*St Pancras
*Split-flap display
*A Mile of Pi
*The Making of a Mile of Pi
*Mile of Pi Music Montage (Grey's favorite)
*Matt Parker
*Brady at Plane Crash Corner
==Other==
I like the tone of the camera off first though, because you're like a gentleman. Well, I know how I'm doing, because you were looking at me on video a second ago, and you told me I looked dreadful when you're tired. You look terrible. I'm not gonna lie. You really look awful. What's going on? It's man. Well, as you know, I am back in California in Berkeley. San Francisco, right? That's San Francisco, yep. But I'm in the mathematical sciences research institute, which is the spiritual home of a number file, and I'm hanging out with awesome mathematicians. But more importantly, the world series is on at the moment. Oh, this is a baseball event, Gray. I know it's baseball. I grew up in New York. I know what it is. So the three games that are being played in San Francisco, the middle three, that's where the giants are at home, are as we record the third and final of those three. So the fifth game of the world series is being played tonight in San Francisco. And I have purchased a ticket. Oh, the last couple of nights I've had reason to be in San Francisco. And both nights I've seen the stadium all lit up and felt the excitement of the city, and I felt I felt bad to the point where I was actually gonna go and just stand outside the stadium, just so I could say I was near it. That would be really sad. Yeah, I know. Just moping around kicking the ground with your foot, listening to everybody on the inside, having a great time. Yes, that's your plan. Well, it kind of was actually, but remember we did a podcast not long ago where I talked about being in Bangkok when they had that big flitilla on the river. Yes, I didn't go and see it and it was a mistake. Yes, you learned an important life lesson. I learned an important life lesson and I have decided to not make that mistake this time. After today, I'll always be saying, oh, I was in San Francisco during the World Series, but I didn't go. So I said, no, that's not gonna happen. So I'm going to go, except there is a problem that is I need to print my ticket out because I bought it online and the institute's printers are down at the moment. So it could be a cruel falling at the final hurdle, but I'm sure I'll sort that out. I hope you enjoy it. Yeah, so do I. I'm a little bit excited about it. Well, I was excited about it. I was thinking, I'm going to go to the game and take a selfie and say, look here, I am at the World Series, but now you told me how terrible I look. I don't feel a bit bad now. I don't want to do it anymore. I just want to crawl under a rock and put on a face mask and keep what moisturize. Can you come over your eyes? Is that the idea? Yeah. Well, you don't have to take a selfie there. You can just take a picture at the World Series as your memory shot. But do you know what? Just to end you and me, there are actually some professional photographers at the game who will probably take better pictures of the stadium than me. So if I'm just going to take a picture of the stadium with my iPhone, like, why would I bother doing that? I could just download a really good picture. The whole idea is to have my own perspective on it. What can I add to it other than to say, look, it's me. I was there. You know, they didn't go all the way to the moon and not take a picture of any astronaut on the moon because I've got to show the astronaut was there. How was it on the moon? Mr. Armstrong and Aldrin, oh, good. Look at all these pictures we took. Oh, did you take any pictures of yourselves? Oh, no, no. That would be self-indulgent. We didn't do that. We just took some pictures of rocks and sand. We didn't want to spoil the scenery with like, showing that humans were there. I love how your go-to analogy is very often the Apollo Space program. Whenever we're talking about anything, it comes back to some kind of Apollo Space program metaphor. Pretty much. You're going out to a baseball game and taking a picture of yourself is just like astronauts on the moon taking a picture of themselves. It's the same scale. Do you know there is no proper photograph of Neil Armstrong on the moon? There is one almost sort of accidental one that was taken incidentally while Buzz Aldrin was photographing something else and Armstrong's off to the side. But there's no like posed picture or just normal picture of Neil Armstrong on the moon. Like still photo. Obviously there's video footage and stuff, but they just didn't take one. Like the classic one from Apollo 11 is of Buzz Aldrin, although you do see what Neil Armstrong reflected in his visor. But there's no real proper picture of Armstrong on the moon. Doing a moon walk. There is a nice picture of him in the module. They're in their little space outfits. You can't tell who's who anyway. It doesn't matter. It could be anybody in those suits. Yeah, that's true. They do. Sometimes in the later moon missions when they didn't have the gold reflecting thing down all the time, you see their faces a bit more. But you're right. It's hard to see their faces. That's why in the later Apollo missions, they started putting a red stripe on the helmet of the commander. So you could even tell who was who. Because when they were both wearing the same white suits, it was hard to even tell who was who. So anyway, I'm going to the baseball. And I'm 50-50 about a selfie now. If you do a selfie, I want you to put a red stripe on your face. So you can tell it's me. Yeah, one other thing that's been new to me on this US trip. I mean, obviously I've been to the US before numerous times. And as you are aware, they drive on the other side of the road here. They drive on the wrong side of the road. As an Australian and English person. Yes, I am. The literal right side of the road. Yes. The literal right side, but the actual incorrect side. This has never really posed much for a problem before. If you were somewhere like New York, there would just cause all the time. It never causes a problem. On this trip for the first time is causing me a problem. I'm staying up in the hills this time. I don't know what you'd call it. Like a sort of a little quiet suburban tree area. Very, very quiet, very nice. And I'm walking to work each day, which is like half hour walk. But I'm walking through these kind of hilly tree streets with hardly any cars. I'll call them sidewalks because I'm in America. No footpaths. I'm having to walk on the road all the time. And there's not a lot of cars. And when you're not constantly seeing cars. And you have to walk on the road all the time. Around like all these blind corners and bends. Suddenly, I am always disoriented about where I should be walking. And will cars be coming from behind me or in front of me. And around the corner. And for the first time, I feel like I'm in peril on the roads all the time. And I'm always making stupid decisions. I find it ironic that when there's hardly any cars, that's what I'm in more danger than when I'm in a big city where there's just cars everywhere. That sounds exactly right to me. It's when danger is infrequent that you get lazy. As opposed to when danger is omnipresent, you are much more on your guard. So it makes total sense that it's much more deadly. It's also more dangerous to see it because everyone drives a Prius. And they're like silent assassins. You've got a podcast going like they come up behind you. You don't even know they're there. All these hippies and their Priuses. That's true. Especially if you are going around those curves so the Prius can't kick into high gear and use its actual gasoline motor. If it's on the electric motor, yeah, that is definitely silent, silent driving. I used to drive a Prius. And it was always remarkable about how quiet they are. You used to drive a Prius. Yeah, I drove a Prius across country twice. Hi, don't you do your own one? It was actually, it was my parents' car that I was driving. I don't really have a car in the States. I mean, this was years and years ago. But yeah, I drove that car so much it honestly felt like it was my car. Oops, sorry, Grace. Parents from my disparaging comment about hippie Prius owners. They won't mind. My parents are not hippies. What's up with you? You're right. You are. We got much to follow up from last time. What's the... We do have a bunch of follow-up. The first thing I wanted to say is, I wanted to apologize because I did cut one of your boring stories from the last podcast when we were together. I honestly, honestly, right now, I can't even remember what the heck it was that I cut. But the only thing I felt bad about was in the middle of it, you mentioned the existence of your new Brady subreddit. And so I just wanted to bring it up. And I was like, oh, I didn't want to cut that. I'm sorry for that one tiny bit of self-promotion. But it was in the middle of a bunch of nonsense or something. I don't remember exactly. But so I did want to start out strong by giving you an opportunity to tell the good people that there is a place now on the Reddit for your discussions of, is it all your channels? Is it going to be for everything? Nearly every video gets put there because I've sort of figured there isn't really one place to sort of follow where all my different videos, because I've got all these different Twitter channels and different Facebook pages and YouTube channels. It does become a bit... So there is sort of one place now, which is just Brady Harron as a subreddit. That's great. That's turned out well for me. So instead of being sort of buried in the middle of a boring story at the end of a podcast, I now get a big plug right at the start. It's practically the lead. How do you say like slash, slash, slash? Usually say it's our slash Brady Harron. Do it people. Do it. Go there, subscribe to the subreddits and participate in conversations about numerous videos. Actually, how many times a day do you post to that then? Is it twice a day? Twice a day. I try to only put one thing on there a day. So if I have like two videos go out in a day for some reason, I tend to put the other one on like a day or so later because... I don't spread it out. Yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to annoy people any more than I already do. So there you go. Thank you. You don't cut it, do you? Don't cut it. No, I promise I won't cut it this time, but I think you will like it. I don't like the Reddit conversations. It's good. Much more than the YouTube ones. So that's that. We will have a talk about more talking about Reddit. Comment threads one day because I know it's a close to your heart, you know? Oh yeah, it's a topic I've been putting off for forever, mainly because I never have time to prepare for this. Show, so all the prepared topics I think, oh, we'll do them later. And then of course that means we never do them. But except for those first three. And then after that it was all downhill. The next thing I wanted to bring up was something from a few shows ago. So this is now ancient follow up. I think this was originally in our monkey copyright one. But we got into a little bit of a disagreement over how many people in America die from electrocution in their bathrooms. Yes. Because the genesis of this conversation was that in the UK, to my eternal frustration, you don't have real electrical outlets in the bathroom. You have these wimpy, shaver outlets that's nothing is compatible with. You can't really use them very well. But so it means things like if you want to have a hairdryer or a stereo or whatever in your bathroom, you can't because there's no place to plug it in. Bathroom or place that is full of water as I also, now it is. Yes, yes, the place that is full of water. And steam and all this stuff, right? Yeah. So your position was that there must be way more people dying in America because America allows such nonsense. And we didn't know we were just kind of speculating. And I figured this has to be basically nobody dies from electrocution. And someone sent in some numbers from, let me see if we can pull it up here. I have a suspicion about who was right on this. Well, you know, I'll bring this up. But when the other way, this is just, oh, we don't need to talk about it. On my computer, I think you'll be happy to know is in a different location. I'm in my office as opposed to my house. So it is not as easy for me now to browse the internet. My laptop isn't a slightly awkward position. So I'll be listening to you with 100% intensity throughout the entire duration. I'll play you that when I have things for. So anyway, there's just some numbers from the US, where was it? Oh, shoot, I just took the screenshot of it. But it was a federal agency. They unfortunately don't break it down by rooms in a house. But their estimate was that about 50 people a year in the United States die from electrical-related injuries. Well, that's 50 more than they should, Gray. It is 50 more than they should. But it is much, much lower than I would have guessed. I must have. Whatever the word should means in this situation. And yes, so they run, but basically, this is a, you can round this off to zero in a population of more than 300 million people. But your chance of dying from electrocution is basically zero. And so even if we pretended that all of those happen in the bathroom, it's just, this falls under the category of completely freak accident. Tell that to the person whose brother died by electrocution in the bathroom. Well, it would still be a freak accident, but it would be an insensitive thing to say to that person. But it's, you know, it doesn't change the reality of the situation. It is low. It is low. You Americans obviously know how to handle your electricity. I'm sure death by wild animal is approaching that number. If we add up all the grizzly bear and allocating out. Well, you shouldn't have wild animals in the bathroom either. That is entirely true. But yes, so yes, it is basically nothing. You win that one. They do have just a couple of little interesting points here saying that the age was relevant. If you are 40 to 60 years old, you are twice as likely to be one of those 50 people. And if you are male, you are six times as likely to be one of those people. So this to me sounds like dad zone. Right? We're talking about males who are 40 to 60. They're working on something. And then of course, at the bottom there, it mentions that the most likely cause for the fatal electrocution is power tools or large appliances. So this is the cause of those 50 deaths a year. So anyway, that's the follow-up from several shows ago. It does beg the question, why the UK has introduced this kind of nanny state overprotective. You can't have electricity anywhere near your bathroom. Like, was it just born of a couple of freak accidents and they got a bit draconian? Or like, there's obviously a story here. Well, I know that the UK redid their electrical system after World War II. They changed a whole bunch of the electrical codes at that point because the whole country had been bombed into oblivion. And then, well, if we're going to rebuild everything, let's redo the whole electrical code. And there are many, many things that I like about the UK wiring system and how it works. I think it is very interesting. I used to have to teach this as part of GCSE physics. My guess is it's just one of those things when people are updating the code. They say, well, why don't we just make it safe for in the bathrooms? It just sounds like a reasonable thing to do. And who's the guy who votes against safety? No one. So I can easily see that being just almost an afterthought. And then it just becomes part of the electrical code. I'm sure somebody out there knows. But score one on the gray versus Brady. Who's right, Chart, I guess. Well, do you know what? What, I'm going to give you another point. Oh, boy, I'm starting out strong. I'm giving you one for free here. Because for various reasons which might come up later on in the podcast, you and I, I think it was you and I. We're having a discussion recently about how you start a 747 plane. Well, that was us. That was us. Yeah, because there was a 747 plane next to us. And we were like, I wonder if someone could just jump in and take off and steal a plane if it was, you know, if it had fuel. And your position, I think, was pretty much you reckon you probably could just get in and start her up and go. Here's what the question was. Is there any additional security in the inside of the cockpit to prevent someone who just walks in there from taking off with the plane? Yeah, like is there a K or a code or a secret code or something, a secret handshake with the airplane maybe? I don't know. My position was no, that I was going to guess that the entire security is based on the fact that 747s are huge and in inconvenient locations. So you don't need a key as additional protection because the 747 in an airport is its own kind of protection. Whereas my position was perhaps reinforced by the post 911 environment where it has been shown that terrorists are willing to learn how to fly planes and use them as weapons. I thought perhaps maybe they had introduced some kind of at least like keypad code or something to start the navigation system or something. And I did mention to you that my friend was a 747 pilot and very obeyed with the controls of a jumbo jet. So I did happen to ask him the other day and you are right. He said as long as you can probably read a checklist, you can easily start a 747 to the point where you could then fly it down the runway and take off. He said, I think he said it would take two turns of a switch to get the engines running, two nil to you. And I am very surprised. I can imagine before 911 how that would be the case. But now that they've put all these fort knock style doors on the cockpit and all these sort of things, I would have thought the least thing they would do would be to put like a pin code on the start pad of the plane or something. I'm not saying you need to have a set of keys or something because obviously you could lose keys. And boy, with that pilot be sure, Grind. That should be bad. I can just imagine him doing the pat down of his pockets. Yeah, we're the keys to the plane. That's exactly right. But no, as long as she's fueled up and ready to go, it's all yours. Two nil to Gray. Oh, thank you. Thank you for giving me that one. Yeah. It's next. Oh, tweeting, tweeting. I was having a, was it my paper cut? I think it was my paper cut was. You were complaining about people live tweeting TV for your paper. People who live tweet TV like, you know, there's some show I plan to watch later. And someone did make the point. And I think this is, I think maybe this is what I, what we were grappling with but didn't say out loud. Maybe the rule of thumb should be, you can only live tweet TV if the TV itself is live. So if what you're watching is a live event, being broadcast live, then it's okay to be tweeting at live. If the event you're watching is recorded in any way, then you shouldn't be live tweeting it. I think that's not a bad rule of thumb. So the first time that breaking bad is broadcasting that does not count as live because it is not literally live. It has been recorded. Exactly. Whereas if by some amazing thing they decided, oh, for the finale of Breaking Bad, let's like act it out live and transmit it live. Well, actually, I think the thing that popped right into my head was 30 Rock did a actually live episode of their sitcom on TV. And so that would be the example that maybe breaks the rule here of can you live tweet the 30 Rock episodes since they actually like crazy people did it live. And I can't even even watch that show when it's been recorded because I'm so anxious for them knowing that it was done live. The West Wing election debate between Matt Santos and Arnie Vinnick, I think, was live, done live as well. Before that, I happened to watch that a few days ago because I've just been rewatching the final series of the West Wing. I think that was done live as well. And it's so interesting because you know, Aaron Sorkin dialogue is like, you know, West Wing dialogue is so amazing and snappy. And to see the actors even stumbling a little bit was amazing. I think that was, I don't know if it was, yeah, I'm pretty sure that was live. People will tell us. Anyway, good rule of thumb. I'm sure we can find little exceptions like 30 Rock, but I think that's a good rule of thumb. I agree. If the thing is happening live, like the humans are doing it live, then you can, then you can tweet it live. I think, yeah, I agree. That is a very good rule of thumb. Thank you to whoever in the subreddits and guests of that. Another thing we discussed was the call of the void. I hadn't heard it call that before, but you talked about that feeling when you're standing on like a ship at night and you think, I could just jump off the ship into the water and no one would ever know. Yeah, so I usually hear it in terms of, you're standing on top of a cliff and you're feeling like, I could just leap. That is the call of the void. I thought of another time, because straight after the podcast, I had another experience where I experienced a similar emotion and I just wanted to bring it up to see whether or not you ever have that feeling. And the other time I feel something that is comparable is posting a letter. You know, there's that moment where you put the letter into the mailbox and once it goes in, you cannot get that back. Like it's like, have I got the address right? Did I put the right thing in the envelope? And there's that final second where you're holding the envelope where it's teetering on the postbox and you're like, shall I let it go? And then when you finally let it go, there's a weird moment of terror that, okay, I'm done now, I'm done. If I've written something wrong in that letter, or I shouldn't have sent it, or I got the address wrong. So I think those little red pillar postboxes in the UK have their very own call of the void. But it's the call of the mailbox. Yeah, but it's a reverse call of the void because it's a, this cannot be undone feeling. But that's the feeling, that's kind of the call of the void thing, too. It's like, if I jump off the ship, I can't jump back on. There's like a permanence. There's a permanence to it. If I do it, that's it. If I do it, that's it. I guess that with posting a letter, what's I've done at that's it? Once I've done it, it's gone. It's gone. I'm only laughing because I agree with you 100%. And this is just, but this feels like such a tiny call of the void, or it's call of the void scaled down to such a mundane level as to be almost laughable. Yet I feel the same way every time. And you might think I'm not a person who mails very many letters, but one of my suburbal perks is sending out postcards. And every time, every time I drop a bundle of postcards into there's a red postbox by my office, I feel that exact same feeling of, oh God. Did I write all those things out correctly? Did I mess it up? On my spreadsheet, did I get the lines wrong? And I wrote the wrong thing to absolutely everybody. You're all these postcards are going to the wrong places. And I do have that feeling. And now I will not ever be able to disassociate that from leaping off a cliff as well, but this is the call of the void. So I have to thank you for that. All right. The call of the postbox. Yes, that's what it is. I'm just imagining a little voice inside now going, come to me, come to me. Have you got the postcode correct? I still say that's why there's something about it that to me is the reverse of the call of the void, but it's the same feeling. It's the same emotions. It's a scary thing. It's a vortex into which you cannot go. And it's a point of no return. It's an event horizon for mail. It is an event horizon for mail. And yes, I definitely do pause for much longer than is necessary. Yeah, I do that too. You're just having a little last thing and a little. I do with some of the automated deposit things that the bank as well. I'll have to use one of them. I don't use them. Yeah, those are scary because they are really big bins almost that you can pull out and put in a whole bunch of deposit slips. And the thing that I worry about is that at my bank, when I pull open the automatic deposit drawer, I am afraid of my glasses falling off my face and into the drawer. My glasses have never fallen off my face in any kind of normal situation. But it's the same feeling. It's like this big gaping maw. It's just waiting for me to drop important things into it. And then accidentally let go of the handle and it's snapshot. And then on there, half blind trying to explain to the bank people that my glasses are in there and I won't be able to get home unless they can get my glasses. Like, this is what I worry about this every time. And so I actually, I shouldn't even say a sound like that. I often have one hand on or just touching my glasses, but this is crazy, right? Because that almost certainly increases the chances that my glasses are actually going to come off my face. But it is the exact same feeling. So that is another call of the Void scenario. This is the world is full of perils for just normal guys like us, you know? It really is, it really is. Forget like astronauts and firemen and stuff like that. We've got to like put mail in post boxes and deposit slips. I think we've probably exhausted the dangers of mailboxes I don't know, I don't know. You talked in the last podcast at some length about where to store your wallet and things and what's going on there. Okay. So the end of the last show, if anybody made it past my first world complaining about my iPhone, there was another whole section about me complaining about how I arranged things into my pockets, which I'm sure it was thrilling for people to listen to. But I know people made it to that section because I ended up getting inundated with feedback about how other people want to solve my problems. And there was a consistent theme to a whole bunch of the feedback that I thought is worth touching on. And so the problem was I have this too many things in my pockets, right? That I don't know where to put my phone and my wallet. And then I have a pen and a stylus that I've always carrying on me. That's right. And you're a big phone sort of put you over a tipping point and now where yes, it's just, they're a chaos. Chaos, chaos. It's not, it's not. Anyway, I'm not gonna dignify that. Anyway, tell me, just give me the feedback. Then what's the follow up? What's the latest? So the consistent theme from people was pointing out the existence of two things. One of which is combined style I and pens. So you can get some style I that have a style I in one end and then when you flip it over, it's a pen on the other end. And the second thing people pointed out was these iPhone cases that are also wallets. And so people were sending me these, like every dual wallet iPhone case in the world, I've seen people send an email me. And then the same thing with every stylus stroke pen in the world, people have sent to me. It's kind of a sort of a nerdy swisham enough. Yeah, sort of. But the reason why I just wanted to bring this up is this to me is a perfect example of the kind of thing I see very often, which is a worst of both worlds solution where someone says, oh, hey, you want to turn these two things into one thing? Well, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take the worst parts of both of them and make one thing out of them together. And this is why when I obsess about reducing the number of things in my life, you can imagine you very often come across worst of both worlds kind of problems. So in one of those cases, like, give me an example there about how they've made the worst, like I've taken the worst elements. And I don't know, choose one and explain to me. Just for example, the wallet iPhone case. Now this is twice as cumbersome for getting anything out of my pocket, twice as often. So now if I'm getting out just my credit cards, I also have to take my phone out at the same time. If I'm getting my phone out, I have all of the bulk of my credit cards as well. And also, just one action, it's still like, it's still one action, but it is twice the weight. And also when you start talking about a pretty strong guy, I'm sure. This is not a strength issue. You know that perfectly well. It's just more awkward, right? And then also with these things, the wallet doesn't work very well as a wallet. It because you have to put a whole phone inside of it. So you have to give up all of these other features that a wallet can possibly have. Like I spent forever trying to find my latest wallet. As you can imagine, I might be very picky about these sort of things. Yeah, that can imagine. I spent years trying to find a wallet that would work for me. And I finally found one and I'm very happy. I love for you for taking a long time to choose things. But I agree choosing a wallet is very difficult. Yeah, it is very difficult. It's so personal and you have particular needs of what you want. I finally found this company I like. They're called Belroy. And if anybody is like me, if you were a picky person and trying to pick a wallet, I highly recommend them. They have a cute little owl logo. I'm gonna look into that. They are, I do, I really recommend them. They are quite good. So the combined wallet iPhone cases I have seen are just terrible. They're terrible at both things. And then it's the same thing with the stylus pen is I'm very picky about my pens. I'm very picky about my style eye. And now you're trying to find a device that matches both of my needs for these two things. Like the weight of the pen has to be just right, but if you also have to stick a stylus in it, now it's just terrible at both things. So that is a, if you are a minimalist, the worst of both worlds is a kind of problem that you're going to come up against a lot, where combining a thing is actually worse than just having the two separate individual items. So. Do you ever occasionally stumble over a gem that's the best of both worlds? Yeah, you can. You can definitely find best of both worlds things, but it, because life is eternally disappointing, worst of both worlds is way more common than best of both worlds. Okay. I see you put here in the follow up something also about. No, my wallet. What's going on here? Are you about to say something that does not cast me in a positive light? Well, I'm sure we'll talk about later. We met up recently, and I did get a chance to see your wallet very briefly when you took it out of your pocket at one point. And I have literally never seen a human being with a larger, more stuffed wallet than yours. I have quite a small wallet, which is why it looks so stuffed, because I am a big believer in having a small wallet. And because I always want a small wallet, it always is bursting at the seams. If I had a big wallet, it would look quite streamlined. You must have had 60 pieces of paper in that wallet. That's ridiculous. And that's accounting all those 20 pound notes I had. It's still re-flowing with money. Now, I don't know what it was, but I look when you folded over your wallet, there was big clear receipts, or I don't know what the heck it was, but this big, thick white seam down the middle of your wallet that you're trying to press and crunch together to get it back into your pocket. Your wallet was absolutely just overstuffed. And all it made me think of is the famous castanza wallet from Seinfeld, which was supposed to be a joke, but your wallet really did look like that. Well, I probably hadn't done my monthly receipt clean. Oh, okay, there's only some reason. There's always some reason, but that's what it is. I was just, I was surprised that you were able to manage that wallet, so. Do you know what? I manage fun. I get by fun. I'm glad you do. I'm glad you do. But I was just, I was surprised to see it in person. You're so judgmental. I know. No, I am not judgmental. I'm not judgmental. I was just, I was surprised to see it. And I couldn't live like that. But if it works for you, that's great. That's not judgmental. I was surprised to see it, and I couldn't live like it, but I'm not judging. But I'm not. If I was judging you, you would know it. But I just, you know, I'm glad it works for you. Well, no, you know, I agree. A streamlined wallet is better, but, you know, I've got better things to do in life than sit around, field stripping my wallet. That's what it's totally fair. I completely agree. And I wish in very many ways I could be a more easy-going person, but such is not my lot in life. There are, I guess, sort of two more things that I wanted to follow up on. Yeah. The first one was we made an off-handed comment on, or I think I made the comment on the last show about there being far fewer Nobel prizes than professional YouTubers with a million or more subscribers. Yeah, we were sort of saying, you know, of course the Nobel Prize has more cash, because there are fewer winners than there are. Right. Million plus subscriber people. Right. Yeah, you can't swing a dead cat in San Francisco without hitting a whole bunch of people who have a million subscribers on their YouTube channel. You know, so the Nobel Prize just seems so much smaller. Do you know what? Just to quickly interrupt before we finish that point, I was actually out with a few YouTubers in San Francisco the other night, and they were saying there were very few YouTubers in San Francisco, and anytime any of them become quite big, they always moved to LA. No. To the point where they were all clinging to each other and said, we've got to start a little community here because there aren't many of them. So I don't know, I mean, I don't know, but they were kind of listing on one hand all the YouTubers, the YouTube, like really big YouTubers with, you know, I don't know how you define it with big YouTubers. Yeah, but I know these, I know this is all very siloed as well, and probably there's probably a whole bunch somewhere else, but I'm just saying, these people were bemoaning the lack of a YouTube community in San Francisco. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, that's actually, that is totally fair enough. I just, I think I said San Francisco because I just don't even like to think about LA, because it is obviously the worst city in the civilized world, it is horrible. But if you want a career in the media, or in entertainment in its broadest of forms, yes, you want to move to LA. And so if anyone follows the YouTube professional world at all, you know the pattern of someone starts a YouTube channel, they become relatively successful, and then at some point they're, oh, I'm moving to LA, and they don't even necessarily specify why the answer is, because they want to be professionally in the entertainment world. They want to do TV or other things. That's the only reason anybody moves to LA, because otherwise it's a horrible, horrible place. On the other hand, Nobel Prize winners, you do get a lot of San Francisco. In fact, Berkeley, where I'm at, the University of Berkeley, has, I think I've said this before, has car parking spaces that have NL written on them, which means they are reserved for Nobel laureates. So they have so many Nobel Prize winners at Berkeley. They even have their own car parking spaces. That is great. That is really great. The thing you were saying, that the Nobel Prize winners, we have since shed more light on this. Yeah, so let me just pull up the exact... You're not supposed to say Nobel Prize winners, by the way, because it's not something you win. You're a laureate. I thought laureate was like nominee. No, no, the laureates are the people who have them. They never, they don't reveal like the other people who were nominated until like 50 years or something. So the laureates are the winners. Oh, I did not realize that. After our last show, Fezmobo in the Reddit comments looked up the numbers. And at the time of the last show, there were 876 Nobel laureates. And there were 848 YouTube channels with over a million subscribers. So actually just under the number of Nobel laureates or YouTube channels with over a million. And then, okay, so we recorded a little while ago. And so just today, I thought, oh, let me look it up and see where it is. And as of our time of recording, NobelPrize.org now says there are 889 Nobel laureates. So I guess a few more were awarded since the last time we were there. Yeah. And there are 870 YouTube channels with over a million subscribers. So by the time this podcast goes out, it may well have crossed over but at the moment we are still more prestigious than Nobel Prize winners. Yes. Just by 19. It is, I have to say, I'm surprised and it is remarkable how close that number is. There's just 19 different. But yes, by the time I edit this and the time it goes up, it may very well be that we have just done the crossover point because the channels that are below the million subscribers are not below by a lot. And once you start getting up in those numbers, your subscribers tend to grow quite quickly. So yes, by the time you dear internet listener are hearing this, there may very well be more YouTube channels with a million subscribers than Nobel laureates, which seems like that's the way it should be in the world. But I'm gonna talk to the Berkeley people and see if they're gonna give me a cup of ice space. You let me know how that goes. Yeah, that big YT or something for YouTube and, you know. Wow, whoever's parked there must have like a million YouTube subscribers. Awesome. There you go. I wonder how many people have been to the summit of Mount Everest? Can you Google through that for me? How many people? No, one time it's difficult for me to Google stuff. You explicitly ask, okay. How many people have so much at Everest? I feel like I'm surprised you don't know there's not the top of your head. Yeah, no, I'm a bit of Everest buff, but I don't know. How many people have stepped on the moon? You must know that at the top of your head. 12. Let's see, there we go. I can name all the people who've walked on the moon. I collect their autographs. Last stupid Yahoo answers. I don't trust anything you say. Well, I'm guessing it's over a thousand for Everest. Yeah, it's gotta be. I mean, those shippers are shuffling people up there like nobody's business. Yeah, carrying them on their backs. Yeah, by the truckload. By the truckload. I thought you'd be quick a grow. No, I'm finding numbers, but they just don't agree. And that's the thing. Whatever it is, it's gonna be higher than the YouTube millionaires isn't it? So we also have more prestige than someone who's summit at Everest, in my opinion. Well, again, because of the shippers, I might actually agree with you. Yeah. Did you not have a shrip? I hate what you get a million subscribers. You made that joke last time. Did I? You made that exact same joke. Did I? About shrapers helping you make your YouTube channel. Why don't you remember making that joke? Was it as unfunny that time as well? It was better the first time. It was better the first time. Okay, I'm gonna run with Wikipedia here. Okay. By the end of the 2010 climbing season, there had been 5,104 cents to the summit by 3,142 individuals. Okay. So I guess there's a lot of repeat business on Everest. Yeah, yeah, imagine you get a bit of that. That was worth it just to hit my joke again. Yeah, no, it was great. I'm really scary now that I can't even remember Coney jokes, I've made a lot. Did you know what the terrible thing is? Since we started this podcast, I feel like I cannot remember for the life of me what we have talked about on the podcast or what we've talked about just in person or what we've, I am terrified of telling the same stories again on the podcast, like an old man. Yeah, that's not what has been inevitable. Oh yeah, that will happen. Well, we're only like 23 episodes in. What's going to happen if this thing goes on longer? Just the last two podcasts, I feel we've reached that point where I've used all my good stuff. And let's say like, now every time I go to say something, I'm like, sure, I was told this before. It's also a damning indictment of how interesting I am that all the stuff that's come before is classified as my good stuff. This is where it's so very different doing something like a podcast versus talking with your friends because everybody knows with friends and family, you let people tell the same stories again. You'll hear the same stories from your family a hundred times and that's fine, everybody's cool with that. But on a podcast, it's not cool anymore. You can't tell the same story every time. The people need to be entertained. Yes, the people do need to be entertained. That's probably the reason it's so good to do so much follow up. Yes. Because then like, if we're just reacting to what people we've never met are saying, there's a good chance, you know? Yes, at least the thing we'll be talking about is new if not the jokes about the thing. That joke was new to the listeners, hopefully. I think you said it on the last podcast, but this is again. Now I don't know. Did we say this? Oh, no, this is just in person. Let's move to the next follow up. I've come before I dive embarrassment. Hello, internet. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, or online store. For free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use offer code hello internet all one word. 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It is the solution for everyone and it is just a total no-brainer. So many of my problems that I used to have when I ran my own website have been just completely eliminated and Squarespace solves all of those issues for me. I really recommend them very, very highly. And you've heard me on these ads mentioned it before. They have all of their designs. They've been around for 10 years. They have this amazing support team who again, I'm just constantly surprised at how fast they respond to any emails I send them. No matter what time of day it is, they're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They have the little iPhone app that I use all the time to update little typos and mistakes that I've made or I can post new articles from that way. It's just an incredible, complete solution for all your websiteing needs. So you can start a trial today with no credit card required and begin building your website. And when you decide to sign up for Squarespace which you definitely will, don't forget to use the offer code HelloInternetAllOneWord. This gives you 10% off and it lets them know that you heard about them through our show, which helps support us. So once again, we want to thank Squarespace for their support, Squarespace. Everything you need to create an exceptional website. This has probably been one of the most sent links I have yet received. But the well-known internet guy, underscore David Smith, who makes a bunch of iPhone apps for a living, he's a professional developer. He actually made something which is sort of a solution to one of my complaints about the iPhone from last time, which is that the icons are too far up for me to reach comfortably with one hand. And I will put the URL in the show notes, but he set up a thing where you can basically have blank apps at the top. But the cost is that you need to have a purely black background on your iPhone. So you can lower the apps, but you cannot have a wallpaper background. But if the lowerness of the apps is vitally important to you and you're willing to sacrifice your wallpaper, then this is a potential solution. So I will put that in the show notes if people are interested. And that is a very cool thing from underscore David Smith. So they become like kind of like stuffing or filler that will force the usable icons down into within thumb range. Yeah, so he's basically using the trick of how iOS allows you to put bookmarks as kind of fake apps on your phone. Yeah. So that's the way he is doing that. But yes, you still can't have purely transparent ones, but he's done a clever little trick so that it doesn't even have to have anything in the name either. So it is a blank icon. I tell you what, talking about Apple in the podcast, that we have the last couple of episodes has taught me that I'm gonna add Apple products to the list of politics and religion of things that you should not talk about. Oh my God, have you gotten feedback from the people? Oh no, I've just been, I haven't got, I've just sort of been following a bit of what, you know, people say on Reddit and Twitter and that. Like, do people like, does it matter that much? Like, you know, I know we talked about it a lot, but I mean, we spent an hour talking about flags and no one complained. And we talk about an iPhone that lots of people actually own and like we use and we're like, you know, internet-y people on a podcast called Hello Internet and people like outrage that we would dane to talk about the release of this like a world famous technology product that everyone's buying. Yeah, so I actually, I put this, I screenshot at this little moment because I thought this summed up things very well. This is from one of our old shows, but I had this interaction with an anonymous internet person where they said in response to one of the shows, I can't believe you're a Mac guy. And then I replied, I can't believe anybody cares, which really is my opinion on this. And then he immediately replied, that's such a Mac user thing to say. It's like, you can't win. There's no way. That's like, I know you are, but what am I? Yeah, it's just like, oh, only Mac users would say that they don't care that other people, it's like, oh God, there's no winning on this. I mean, I can see why that person has replied that. That's like, that's playing to the stereotype that Mac people are all snobby and like, who cares, you know? Like, I can see why that reply was replied to your reply. But I also understand what you mean, like, you know? Yeah, I guess the thing, I'm surprised people care so much, people care intensely. And I think I don't mind that people have a preference, like I don't mind that people strongly feel that Android is better than Apple or, you know, the Yankees are better than the Giants or whatever. But like, you know, there's nothing wrong with just talking about it. I don't know, anyway. We have complained a little bit about some iOS stuff on the podcast. And I don't know if you saw, but I wrote an article a little while ago complaining about some particular problems that I have with iOS with things that I want Apple to change. And I've done these a couple times. And always with these things, I get nothing but an enormous amount of feedback from people saying, switch to Android. And let me, let me, let me, let me encapsulate what, because I've followed a bit of what they're saying to you. And it is something you should address. It is a fair question. Because everyone knows you are incredibly fussy. You like things just the way you like them. You spend months looking for a wallet. You spend hours deciding on a wallpaper for your phone. So you're a guy who likes things the way he likes things. And yet you are. You do like Apple products. And they, you very much get what you're given when you buy Apple stuff, whether you know, you happen to like it. But you do get what you're given. Whereas there's this lack of custom, you can't customize things as much. How do you justify that? Justify that. And then let's move on. OK, well, I guess my coming to Apple Story, or really my coming to the iPhone story, let's just constrain it to that, was when I was originally thinking about getting a real cell phone, as opposed to my little, like everybody used to have the little flip phone that you can just send text messages. But when the time came where I was thinking, oh, I'm going to get a smartphone, I assumed knowing myself that I was going to get an Android phone. For exactly the same reason, which is, well, I know that I like to have an incredible amount of control over the way everything looks in the way everything operates. And that is not what Apple gives you. So it just seemed very obvious to me, like, well, I'm going to buy an Android phone. And I always just assumed that that's what it was going to be. But when it actually came time to pick a side on this team of Android versus iPhone, when I went to look, this was, and for the record, this was around the time of the iPhone 4. The Android stuff to me, yes, it was more customizable. But I found everything just more hideous and awful. Just the default way everything looked, the apps that were available at the time, how they worked, how they interacted with things. And on the iPhone, yes, you had far fewer choices. But my perception was you were starting from a much better place. And so I was actually quite surprised that I ended up with iPhone. I always just assumed that I would end up with Android. And to this day, a huge portion of the reason that I use iOS now as my primary platform is the strength of the apps that are on iOS. So it's really easy to complain about the operating system because everybody has problems with the operating system. I wish it did this. So I wish it, let me put icons over this way. I wish it had a real dark mode. But the operating system is really just a gateway to the applications. And now this is where my fussiness can come back into play because on iOS, you have an enormous choice of applications that are both very high quality and maybe subtly different or do things in little different ways. I should put a link to someone put together a big chart of all of the iOS text editors and all of the various features they have. And the list is just forever. And I spent a long time going through that list and selecting, OK, I needed to be able to do this. And you used to be able to do this. And you used to be able to do this. And oh, by the way, I also need three of these apps because I want to use each of them for different things. So the incredible strength of the app ecosystem is why I use it. But the operating system complaints are universal to everybody. But I just think the apps are very useful tools to me. But just like with talking about your wallet or keys before, I don't judge people who use Android devices. If it works for you, that's awesome. And I'm always really curious when I see people using things that are different from what I'm using, oh, tell me why do you use this? What do you like about it? I cannot help but always be very curious and interested in what everybody else is using to get their own work done. But so that's, I guess that's partly why I'm on iOS. But I think the question that, oh, the thing that people will want to ask you, or the Android people will now have, is how often do you dip back into the world of Android to see how things have changed? Do you like, do you, every six months, do you really have a proper look and think actually have things improved? Is it worth a switch? Do you do that? No. So I probably haven't touched an Android phone in the last six months. It's going to be my guess. When the last time I've actually looked at one. And this is exactly a people want to argue with you about, oh, well, you know, back when you were looking at the iPhone 4, sure Android wasn't that great, but you don't know how awesome it is now. And this is just irrelevant. This is not, this is not, like, it is not my responsibility to keep on top of these things all the time because of something called switching costs where to move from one platform to another is an enormously costly and time consuming affair. And, I don't know how to put this, but one of the things I have noticed from the replies that I normally get on Twitter is that the people who just tell me, use an Android phone. They seem to be college age people or much younger people. And it reminds me of the old joke about Linux that Linux is only free if you don't value your time. And I used to use Linux in college and I loved Linux and I used to think, why doesn't everybody use Linux? It's free. All you need to do is constantly put in an enormous amount of time to make sure that it is always working. But now that I am an older person and I am self-employed, you get into the situation where, like you were talking last time, you don't wanna upgrade your Mac because you don't want avid, the editor that you use to change. And there comes a point at which, when once you start valuing getting things done or your work much more than your time, switching costs become a much, much bigger deal. And so even if, let's say, we could just measure which operating systems were better in some possible way. And let's say we knew for a fact that Android was 20% better for me. I don't think it is, but let's just say that we knew that it was. Yeah. Well, iOS is the foundational level on which I get everything in my whole life done. I spend most of my working time on an iPad and that synchronizes back with my iPhone and I have a Mac that is at home, which is acting as a server and I can kind of ping that server from my iPad to do things for me, which then combat, there's an enormous amount of stuff that's going on here that I have set up. And 20% better is not worth the cost of switching over an incredibly complicated system that I have very fuzzily set up over a number of years. It just, at a certain point, it's just not worth it because I have to say well. But there must be a point where Android could become sufficiently better that you would switch. I mean, I have, I spent years creating a great catalog of VHS tapes and audio cassettes, but eventually I had to say, well, they're now useless because I'm moving on. There must be a point where you would switch. That's a bit of a different scenario though, because VHS technology is not ongoing. We're talking about two ongoing paths. Yeah. And so what about taking that 20% do? There must be a point where it could and could anything happen in the world of Android that would suddenly make it compelling or at least make you consider it. It has to be a huge, obvious improvement across everything because it integrates, like iOS integrates very well with my Apple stuff, which I use to edit the videos, like the podcast right now, recording this on a Mac Pro, and I'm going to use Logic for it. And so switching over to Android is not just, oh, let me just change my phone. It's also, I'm going to change the way I professionally make videos for a living. And now this is a very big question about, what am I going to get a Linux machine with video editing software that is comparable to what I currently use? That's what our switching costs can be very, very high. Once you don't necessarily have a huge amount of time to put into things. But the other thing that I think is a kind of unexpected problem is what you don't know about that might cause you trouble. So people, when I complain about something and then someone says, oh, on Android, you can arrange the icons anywhere that you want. It's like, yes, okay, on that one particular issue, Android might be better, but you have to look at the whole set of problems and benefits you get with one thing versus the whole set of problems and benefits you get with another thing. It's a bit like, when people tell me, oh, to switch to Android, if I've complained about something particular on iOS, it's a bit like, if I'm complaining about my taxes, and oh, like taxes are really complicated and it causes me a lot of stress over the past six months. And it's, you know, it's just been this usually frustrating situation. And somebody says, why don't you become a bear? Bears don't have to worry about taxes. They don't have any of these kinds of problems. You know, bears just get to live in the forest and you don't have to, all of these human problems you have, you're worried about your pocket or your iPhone is too big. Bears don't have any of these issues. It's like, yes, but being a bear comes with a whole other set of problems, many of which I don't even know about at this stage. I don't know. I think being a bear would be pretty cool. I bet you would. If one of the two of us was going to live as a bear, I think everybody knows which one of us is going to be the bear. I often think in many ways I already am. You have way there as a caveman. The other thing also is hardware. Hardware does lock you in and makes change also difficult. Like, even with my camera, I bought a Canon DSLR and started buying all these lenses for it. And that made me buy a Canon video camera. Oh, yeah. I see what the Nikon thing is the worst. Yeah. And so suddenly, if someone was to say, you should change cameras, like, okay, maybe, but I've invested so much in all my lenses now that I kind of, you know, that's one of the things that locks you in. Once you make that decision for whatever reason you made, and you talked about why you made the decision when you made it. And then you start this kind of staged staggered buying of IMAX and MacBooks and iPads and iPhones. That's exactly it. Yeah, you kind of, and it's not like you can just change them all in one fell swoops. I think there is a certain kind of nerd who was just driven crazy by that notion that someone might fully well acknowledge that the other thing is better, but it does not compensate for the switching costs. Oh, yeah. And like, well, that's just the way things actually are. Well, I should say that the comment that I see very particular is people expressing disappointment in me because they go, oh, you know, I thought CGP Grey was such a smart guy. I can't believe he uses an Android phone, you know, it's incredibly disappointing that he would make that sort of choice. And it's just like that kind of thing I find so strange. And I think that that is why the language of religion is sometimes appropriate when you talk about people picking sides in these iOS wars because if you're the kind of person who really invests yourself in a particular platform, you almost have to come to the conclusion that everybody else who doesn't make the same decision as you is stupid or they're just deluded, or they've been fooled by marketing because you are all in on whatever your platform is. And so if everybody else doesn't use it, you know, you think that you have made this awesome decision and so you have to assume that everybody else is dumb or blinded. And I think that's just, I don't know, this is a much broader thing about why I hate labels in general. Like, I just don't think people should self-apply very many labels because it starts to limit your thinking and it changes the way you look at other people. And it's like, I happen to use Mac stuff, there's a bunch of reasons for it. I'm not, you know, I'm not incredibly, I don't love Apple in the abstract. I use Apple because it gets things that I need done very easily and part of the reason that works is because I already have Apple stuff. But I do actually think it is better, but I can acknowledge that even if it wasn't, that the other alternatives would have to be much, much better to uproot the foundation of my whole life to change all of this. Like if the house next door to my house, which is almost exactly the same, but was like 2% better because I had a nicer bathroom or something, like I wouldn't sell my house and buy that house because the pain in the neck of moving house and all the costs and all the taxes and all the things and all the time wouldn't be worth it just to get it, just to get that slightly nicer bathroom sink. I think people, I think people, you know, for whatever reason you went all in at some point and I'm sure, I don't know, maybe you're not open to it, but I'm sure you probably are open to change if something compelling came along, but it's gotta be a lot more than. Yeah, you can arrange your icons better. Of course, yeah, you have to be open to change because otherwise that's just insanity, right? The other position is I will continue to use Apple software no matter how terrible it gets, which is the kind of implicit statement that people telling me to change over are sometimes making. They are arguing against this position. It's like, no, I'm not taking that position. If for some reason the old company went terrible and they started producing awful stuff, well, that also affects the switching cost calculation, right? If the thing that I'm currently using is just absolutely terrible, but I mean, I'm just, you know, just pulling a number out of a hat, I would say that, at this point in my life, in order to change over everything, I would have to be looking at something like a 10X improvement in just the productivity or the features or however you want to measure it because otherwise it's not worth taking the amount of time to switch over. So anyway, that's probably enough on this. Do you want to, do you want to Brady's paper cut? I would love a Brady's paper cut. Brady's paper cut is the security options of online banking. Two things in particular, three things, but I'll go with just two things, maybe, that annoy me. One is how long it takes before the page times out. Like I do not have a good attention span and sometimes I'll start doing something and then I'll quickly check an email or a tweet or a Twitter or something and then I come back and the page is timed out. I feel like they should give me a little bit more time. I don't know what the time they give me is, but it's not enough. It's not enough. It's not enough. And the main reason it's not enough is I have to re-log in and I have enormous problems with this system they use where you have to give the third, seventh, and letter of your password. I find that impossible. Is there something I don't know? I'm always just counting them out on my fingers and then getting one wrong and then am I using my knuckle or what finger was I up to and it's just my thumb count and like, what's going on? Does it have to be that way? I know why they do that, but it's still just, it's infuriating. You agree with me? I completely agree with you. Logging into my bank is awful. I hate the little dongle that I have to use. It's like, I mean, I understand. Obviously I don't want other people accessing my bank. So if there's any case where inconvenience is worth the payoff of increased security, your bank is that place. It is still very frustrating. I happen to use one password to manage a lot of the passwords on my computer and for my banking stuff, what I have done with the passwords that they ask where they say, oh, we want this seven and a half digit of your password. I have put a space after every three so I can very visually easily grab the ones they want. So they say, oh, we want the fourth, the ninth, and the 13th. That's really easy to see if you've grouped the password into three space, three space, three space. So that's the way I get around it. But yes, I agree it is very frustrating. I have a password. Yeah. Okay. As you know, I have my little notebook of passwords. Oh, yes, of course. So I have it written down, but then it like in red pen above, I have the numbers of the password. So I can read it off that. But if I haven't got my notebook, which I was going to say I'm not traveling with that notebook because I'm away from home for like five weeks. So I was going to say, I'm not doing it. Well, no, I didn't, which I think will please you. But the reason I didn't was because I actually forgot it in a last minute. I was really organized with my packing this time, which would have made you proud. But then at the very last minute, I decided to make a change of bags. Oh, no. Yeah, and there was one little pocket on the old bag that I forgot to transfer, which contained all my SD cards and all my notebooks and passwords and things like that. So they're all still at home. Oh, and enormous pain in the backside. I'm sorry to hear that. No. So you're stranded without any of your passwords, except the ones you can remember off the top of your head. Yeah, so there's a bit of password changing going on. But no, I'm actually doing all right. I'm actually doing all right. So yeah. Yeah. There you go. That was paper cutting you were on board with that, that was good to hear. I agree with you when you're being reasonable. We had an adventure, like a real life adventure. We did. We did. I made a video recently and you came along for the ride. It was very exciting. You left the London bubble. I did, which is very rare. That's the very rare thing. That's one of the first times I've lured you out. Actually, I was quite, it must have, I must have, I don't know how I did. I haven't been able to lure you to come up for like, you know, dinner or anything, but I lured you out for a film shoot. So did you enjoy the trip? Did you, you came up on the train? I know this because I'm not going to pretend to ask you how you came up because I picked you up from the train station. How was the train trip? Do you like trains? I get really excited going on a train trip. Like I still, even though it's a bit of a pain in the back side of these days, I still at the very start have that nice little feeling of excitement when I buy my copy of a magazine and a drink and sit down. Like you must, you must like that. I do. I adore train stations. I absolutely love trains and everything about them. And yes, when I, when I, when I came from St. Pancras station, tell you didn't you, which is a brilliant station. Yeah, so you can say, I came up from St. Pancras, which is beautiful, absolutely beautiful train station. It is the one which I, and if you've seen the Harry Potter films, that's, they're using the St. Pancras one, although it is Kings Cross in the books because of some confusion for J. K. Rowling when she was writing the book. But if you've seen the exterior of that train station, that is the train station that I left from. And yes, I have to say that is one of the most gorgeous train stations I have ever seen. It's absolutely great. And so yes, I also enjoy, I think it is very exciting to go get some coffee and be ready to go on a little train ride, even if it's a relatively short journey. So yes, I love everything about trains. And it's funny, I made a note on this last journey because I thought, oh, Brady might like to know this. I thought of something that is old and obviously less convenient than the modern alternative, but that I like better. And I thought I would tell you about an old thing that I like. Oh man, I can't tell you how excited right now. I bet you are. I don't know what to call them, but I miss the clacky train signs that used to roll over when they would tell you when the platforms would change and it would go clack clack clack clack clack clack. I have no idea what the name of those things are. But that's a good call. Yeah, so I realized when I first moved to London, which is, I don't know, 11 years ago now, I can't even keep track of it. When I used to take trains all over the place, the stations that I went to, particularly Victoria station, had those old clack things on there. So when you stand there and we're... Yeah, Victoria. Oh no, where's the one I used to go from? No, yeah, Victoria is the one I used to go to a lot to that. Yeah. And there was a same thing that it was almost like this bizarre moment of excitement that once they start turning over, it's like, oh boy, it almost feels like... Like a... Lottery balls. Yeah, that is exactly what I was thinking of. It's like the lottery balls rolling around and like, oh, what's going to come out? What platform is it going to be? Show me strange clacking machine and it makes particular noise. And I... Like there's some random element involved because things are hitting each other. Yeah, it's like, obviously, it's pre-determined. There's no randomness here. But it still, it just feels exciting. And the noise is just such a train station, you kind of thing. And I was thinking about that when I was standing in St.Pan Chris. You've got a heart. You've got a heart. I do. I do. So I was thinking about that when I was standing at the platform and I was waiting to find out what train I was going to get on to see you. And I realized, I go, I'm just looking at this LED screen and I give this LED screen a thumbs down. Even though I know it is a million times more practical for a train station to use all the LED screens, which is why they use them. But I thought, I could do with something that's a little bit more romantic here. Bring back the old train clacker signs. Would you put one in your house? My house is not a train station. So no, I couldn't do that. Why would I put it in my house? Just to have it go off randomly? That's a terrible idea. That's a terrible idea. All right. Anyway, besides the disappointment of not having a clacky side, besides that disappointment, you were, the train trip was all right, wasn't it? It's not the most picturesque journey. You came up, it was less to sheer we met in in sort of the middle of England. It's not the most picturesque journey that one from London up to a less to sheer. It's a pretty boring scenery. Yeah, I guess the reason I'm hesitating there is because, you know, I'm a pretty optimistic guy about the future of the world and the state of society. I'm pretty optimistic. Yeah. The one time I feel clouds of foreboding on the future of civilization and the state of the world is, if I'm on a train and I am in the quiet cabin and other people are not quiet, I don't understand, I don't understand the world and it makes me really grumpy and I feel like, we're in the quiet train, people, shouldn't, don't you understand? This is not the place for your cell phone conversation. You too elected to be on the quiet train. There's a whole bunch of other cabins they could move to. I know. It's not like they're not catered to. I know. This is why it's like, this is, we have tried to have this little area where self-selecting people can go, we can sit and we can be quiet together and ignore each other. But when people are on the quiet train and they themselves cannot possibly be quiet, that is one time where I feel like, all of society is doomed. If we can't pull this little tiny bit off. The only time I think it's okay to make noise and have a phone call in the quiet cabin is if it's me who needs to make the noise or make a phone call. So you are the problem. That is great. That is exactly, all right. So, yeah. So you, that is what I assume every one of these people on the quiet train is thinking. Oh, my phone call conversation, slash unattended daughter who's running up and down the aisle. Oh, that's perfectly fine. Oh, and I didn't say anything about unattended daughters. That's different. I'm not having that. I'm not saying, obviously, you don't have an unattended daughter. But I'm sure that that mother on my last train who I was particularly irritated with, she's thinking the same thing too. Oh, my kid is totally fine. My phone conversation is totally fine. Sure, I'm in the quiet train. Everybody else is being quiet. They're giving me the stink eye, but it's fine because it's me. I was jerking. I am like a very square. I'm a square. I follow the rows. I don't like breaking rows. Why can't we pull this together, people? It's not. I'm not asking for a lot. It's a bit like when I used to be a teacher. I was always kind of, I don't know how to put this, but I found it hard to understand the kids who just couldn't be quiet. All I'm asking for is inaction. It is literally the easiest thing in the world. And you want to be loud and noisy, which is more effort. You seem to not be able to do nothing. You seem to have to do something. It's you. They're like puppies. It's like, it's like you think, why won't you just go to sleep puppy? They just, they just won't. They just want to do stuff. They've just got too much energy. It's like trying to contain the sun inside a lunchbox. It's just too much energy. I don't know, maybe. But when people are talking in the quiet cabin, I look at them and I just think, I bet I know exactly what you were like in school. I bet you couldn't be quiet in school either. Quiet cabins make me feel like I can't believe this whole civilization project has worked out as well as it has. And makes me slightly gloomy. But aside from that, I had a lowly trip. So you came up to, let's just say, maybe you should tell people what was going on like, because I think I'm a bit close to this project. Yeah, I think maybe you should explain why you came up. So you invited me up because you had printed out a million digits of pi onto a one mile long strip of paper. And you'd flown out to Denmark to get this done. And you had this wheel of paper. Now here in England, and you are going to unroll it on an airstrip, which took you a while to find. And this was all in service of celebration for your one million subscriber numbers, which ties in very nicely. What were we talking about before? This was my Nobel Prize moment. Yes, just like the Nobel Prize. If the Nobel Prize was YouTube subscribers and paper on an airplane runway. Yeah. So that's what this was. If you printed out the million digits, it was for your one million subscriber video. And yes, you found it was a retired, or retired, but it was a former air force. But it was a bit unclear to me what they were currently doing. It's a place called Bruntingthorp. And it was like one of these World War II air bases. So it has the long, huge, long runway. And it's gone through various incarnation since the current use is a car proving ground. So they've used it as a car test track. And the main runway is the main straight and the old taxiways are for driving. And it's also used for storing cars. There's loads. There's thousands upon thousands of cars there. But it is also an aircraft kind of museum slash storage place. So they've got all these cold war jets. And they've got, they must have had 15, 747 planes. And they've just taken delivery of a 747, which also, why you and I were talking about 747s, they just taken a delivery of a retired Cathay Pacific 747, which was just sitting at the end of the runway, still looking with all the delivery on it and looking like it could just turn around and take off at any moment. It didn't look like it was retired. It just looked like it had been parked there. Which it pretty much was. The security guy told me it was totally airworthy. Like it could fly. Yeah. So if we could just follow a checklist, we would have been able to fly off with that 747. I wonder how much fuel was in it. I don't know. But conceivably, that would have been a hell of a million subscribers video. CGP Graham Brady jumping a 747 and just say, we're doing it, man. We're doing it. I wonder if we actually did steal a 747. How long would it take before the RAF would just shoot us out of the sky? I don't think that necessarily need to. But I've seen a few episodes of air-crushing investigation. I can handle this bad boy. But I'm just thinking of it. There's a Rogue 747 in British Aerospace. I don't think that would last very long. I don't think that would stay up for very long. A lot of video that would make though. The day to YouTube results, stole a 747 and then got shot out of the sky. Yeah, the video they'd have to recover from the black box, though. I mean, from the Robert. So we'd have GoPro's everywhere, man. I'll have a cover anyway. So that's pretty much that's what we did. And you kept, how many people? There's about 10 people there? 10 people in the end, I think. So I think you were there ostensibly just to be an observer to witness the spectacle. Well, this was how it was pitched. It was pitched as come along and watch this fun thing that we're going to do. And so that is what I signed up for. But at the end of the day, I had a slightly busted ankle and my hands were very dirty. And I've been jumping in and out of a van and it was raining and dropping traffic cones all over the place. That is honest to God, the most physical labor I have probably done in like 10 years. You totally mucked in. I was pretty impressed. You were good. You were good. I think it was one of those things. It became very clear to all of us very fast that this was a big job and it was going to be slow going. We maybe had bitten off more than we could chew. Yeah, this was very quickly a, we need all hands on deck situation. And it still felt to me like we just barely pulled that thing off in the end with 10 guys dealing with traffic cones and unrolling the paper and all kinds of craziness. But it was, I have to say, it was very fun. I was very glad that you invited me along and I really enjoyed the day in spite of the physical labor that I was not told about in advance. It was very different. It was very different to what, like everything in life is different to what you expect, isn't it, you know? And maybe there was a high degree of brain cracking going on here. But then what were you expecting the day to be like? What did you think? Were we just going to roll it down the runway on its own? The paper, the mile long piece of paper, was more difficult to manage than I expected. And we, obviously there was bits and pieces of rain on the day, which probably wasn't the biggest problem. It was inconvenient and, although in some ways maybe we were lucky because it sort of, it did maybe make things stick down a bit more and weighed the paper down a bit. But the problem was wind, like I didn't quite comprehend how susceptible to wind that piece of paper would be. And we, the wind was very merciful to us. It was not a windy day. If that had been a really windy day, can you imagine what that, well, it just wouldn't have happened, wouldn't it? Yeah, it wouldn't have happened. There was the slatest of breezes and it turned out that that was a huge problem. When you're dealing with a mile long strip of paper and trying to keep it on a runway in a very, very flat area, that tiny bit of a breeze was a huge problem. So we were quite lucky with the weather, because yes, you kept messaging me, fretting about the rain and... This is like, yeah, the night before, yeah. For a week before you were fretting about the rain and sending me messages. I can go back in my eye message history and pull up all the time to start to worry about it. But neither of us even thought about the wind as a potential issue and that turned out to be the real big problem. I got, there were lots of comments under the final video saying, why did you do it on such a wet grey day? Like, people, I think, do people think I just could turn up to a runway and use it on any day I liked? Like, I don't know what people think, but for those who don't realise this, like, I booked this airfield in advance and you can't have these places any time you like. Like, whatever the weather was gonna be was what the weather was gonna be and there was no. And it was not, it was also not like, it wasn't given to me. This was like an outlay like I invested in this because I don't know why I did it because I just loved the idea too much. So this was very fun. And yes, I was all in. I was all in and whatever the weather was was what we had to deal with. So yeah. I've been hearing about you planning this for quite a while. Like, it took a while to get the, to find a place to print a mile long, a piece of pie and took a while to find the airstrip. But I do like, you know, you always get these kinds of comments whenever you do anything in public or people say, oh, I didn't do this. Why didn't you do that? And so there's a million reasons why we didn't do it just the way that you might have suggested. And I do love the notion that you could just rock up at the airstrip at any time and say, yeah, let's suffer all that paper today. And also just even if the airfield said, oh, come down whenever we're not using it, don't worry. You still need to coordinate 10 other people and their schedules to get everybody there at the same time. And so you can't just roll a roll out of bed one Sunday morning, stretch your arms, take a look out the window and say, well, today looks like the day we're going to unravel the pie. So yeah, there's a lot of planning and these kinds of things. But it came off very well. You should feel very pleased about it. It was. I need more people to watch it. It hasn't been watched by many people. But if you haven't already paused it and go watch the video, you should definitely definitely. Mile a Google mile of pie. I'll put it in the show now. I'll put it in the show now. Cool. I had some help with a couple of people who are much better at operating cameras than me. And we had a drone to do sort of all these cool aerial shots. Tell me that's not the coolest toy. The drone is amazing. The drone footage looks great. And it was very fun to see the drone in action on the day. Drones are just great. I kind of want to get one, but I can't. But I can't. Yeah, I was going to go right next to your telescope and- Which is still in the box. No, this is exactly. And I'm sure there are a number of other toys around you. Jet wash, my water jet washer. Still in the box. Water jet washer. I don't remember this one. What is it, washer? I get it. It's a lot. You can wash cars with it or blast pavements and things like that. But they're just cool things. And I think they look cool. And I got one last Christmas and I still haven't used it. Last Christmas, OK. Yeah, so this is the problem of yes. Maybe you could get a drone. I imagine it would sit in a box in your house for quite a while before you ever actually unpacked it and tried to play with it. There's also a lot of laws and things depending on what you want to do and how you want to use it. It's not trivial. Where I live is like a quite a quaint seaside town. Like it looks really old-fashioned. It looks like from a Victorian era. And it's got this old pier. And the seasides got old buildings. Like it hasn't been modernized. It's very quaint and lovely. And a couple of times a year, there's this steamer that comes out. It's old-fashioned steamer. And it goes to a few of the piers along the coast and picks tourists up and takes them on a big day trip. And I was there. I was having breakfast by the seaside with my wife the other day. Like it's very lovely, all very lovely. And then the woman servings breakfast says, oh, the steamer's coming today. And we're like, oh, we had no idea. Oh, that's lovely. She said, oh, it'll be here in half an hour. Make sure you stay for it. So we went and sat on a bench by the sea and looking at the pier. And then the steamer, we heard the steamer coming from around the other side of the point. And it could have been, you could have gone, been gone back 100 years. That's what it was like. It really was like it'd gone back in time. And just as the steamer started coming towards the pier and everyone was like, breath was taken away by the beauty of the majesty of it all. This guy with a drone. Oh, no. Obviously wanted to capture the moment. Sent his drone up. Yeah, they are. Oh, loud. They are so loud. And when we're flying out over the sea, a little hovered above the steamer and above the pier. For the whole time, the steamer pulled up and the whole time the people boarded. And then the whole time it pulled out and did it's like, big, unwieldy 3.10. It would have been the most beautiful thing ever, except the whole time. Oh, man. And this little mosquito, however, robot was ruining the whole thing. And all the pictures, we were taking with our phones to capture the moment, all had this bloody little white helicopter. So I do love them. And it made, it certainly made the pie video fantastic. But there's a time and a place maybe, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what to think. It's certainly ruined it for me. But I'm sure he got some lovely footage of the guy off the steamer. Yeah, I mean, this is where in the, I don't know, in the, in the eternal conflict between, say, the progress of technology and laws regulating that technology, in which the laws are behind the times normally. And I usually, I side with the, let's go with the technology here. But the drones are definitely one issue where it's like, well, we need to decide as a society very quickly what the rules are going to be about these things, because the price of the drones are just dropping very quickly. And sure, right now it's only one guy with a drone, but they are so loud that it's like, this is one of the very rare cases where I would, I would say, I think we really need to sort out the legislation before we start having tons of drones in the sky that once, when they hit a point where they are very, very cheap, and in particular, when we hit a point at which, like the, like, Amazon is working on, which I'm at automated drones and drone delivery. And it's like, we need to, we need to sort out some stuff in advance before, before this happens because, yeah, rather than, rather than chopping the price, I wish they'd do something to chop the noise. Well, this is what I mean is that, like, legislates some kind of decreasing decibel level over time. Say, you know, you cannot legally sell a drone that is louder than X decibels this year, and next year it's going to be X minus five decibels, and like, let's bring this down over time to make sure they're quiet, because yes, a lot of the issue with them, I think, would be resolved if they were quieter, but it's also just in the States, there have been some cases that have come out about what is the reasonable expectation of privacy with people's homes and drones in airspace, and you have cameras on those, and it's like parts of people's houses that were never accessible from street level view are very accessible from a higher level view with the drone, and there's lots of questions about this kind of stuff, and so yes, the drones are super cool, but we do need to decide what the rules are going to be about these things. Yeah. Anyway, but then I would be very annoyed as well if I was enjoying the sight of an old steamer, and some guy's drone was ruining the whole thing for everybody. But with the pie thing, what a cool shot that was. Yeah, it goes over the 747, and then it comes down to us. For all we know, there was some guy's house just on the other side of the tree line, who was sitting out in his backyard and constantly annoyed by the loud droning. He was nude sunbathing, yeah. But those shots are beautiful, that is for sure. Yeah, what did the whole thing put you off, or give you a taste for making real life videos with humans and nature and stuff? I have on occasion thought about doing videos that are real life videos, but I'm aware that this is probably not my skill set, and it's also a question of trying to, you know, learning how to do that versus learning, or doing that versus doing the current projects that I have. This is also the problem of just being a self-employed person, is you have way more projects that you want to do than you possibly have time and ability to do. And there are a number of things around London that I constantly think about, oh, I'd love to do this as a real life video. But I know from watching you work on other occasions, and particularly on this pie day, that it is so much more work behind the scenes than you ever think it is. I mean, you had Matt Parker was there on the day with us, who was the kind of on-screen pie expert. And you were just driving up and down this runway with him for a huge portion of the day, just constantly filming him talk about interesting sections of pie and little facts about this sequence of numbers, or that sequence of numbers. And I mean, I'm going to guess probably half of that, you didn't use in the final video. I mean, I didn't put it in the big long, extra one. Yeah, well, your extra one is half an hour long. But the actual millions of Scarborough's video, I'm going to guess you used maybe half of the material you actually filmed. Not even that, no, we need that. So I am very much aware of these things are a lot more work than people probably think they are. All of the videos that you film, there's so much more that you have to capture than you actually do. So I think I'll probably leave the in real life videos to you. I think that's probably a probably wise decision. Well, I did get much amusement from saying you lugging traffic cones around, and you're a real workhorse. I was using you for your brawn, not your brawn. That is definitely the case. Yeah, we're just... How fun was it driving on a runway, though? You seemed to really enjoy that. You liked it quite a lot. I did offer to let you drive. Like, I was saying how fast I could go, and I did say at one point, do you want to do the next drive and say, how fast you can go? And I had no interest in doing this now. Why not? I thought maybe you'd say yes, but you said no. I did say no. Were you worried about rolling my car over? Well, yeah, first of all, I was shocked that you would let somebody else drive your car. On the day, you would just like handing your keys to every passing stranger and like, they're letting them drive your car up and down the runway. So I couldn't believe that you were that generous with your personal items. But no, there wasn't much to hit to be fair. I wouldn't be giving my keys to people if it was like, you know, a busy car park or something. But still, if the positions were reversed and somehow that was my car, you can bet no one would be driving my car. But I had no choice. Necessity is the mother of generosity. I got so. But I have never driven a car in the UK. I've never been on the opposite side of a car. Well, that's why I thought this was the perfect chance for you on like this two mile long runway that was like, must have been 100 meters wide as well. Like this was your perfect chance to, you know, take a baby step. It's I just, I also, I'm not a huge fan of driving and I don't ever plan to really drive in the UK. So this is a baby step towards nowhere. And I would not enjoy driving fast just for the sake of it because that feels like, oh, let's live dangerously for no benefits. And I say, no, thank you to that. Well, there's the benefit of getting where you need to go a bit quick. I'm not a fast driver. I am an old granny driver, as many people would say. And even when I was like letting loose and going for super speed, like we weren't really going that fast. So, so it's not like, it's not like I would have been there saying fast to grow, you know, break the sound barrier. Anyway, anyway, anyway, anyway, it was, it was fun. It was fun. It was just fun driving on a runway, like not for the speed, just for the like, it had like for the novelty. Yeah, it was just something you don't normally do. And my favorite, one of my favorite moments was that we had this problem weighing down the piece of paper because we didn't have, we were in the end, we were using traffic cones. We used a few bags of sand that I brought along, but we ran out of sand pretty quick. And then we were using traffic cones and we ran out of traffic cones. So we needed more weight. So I went looking for stuff. And in the end, by luck at the other end of the two mile runway, I found a whole bunch of traffic cone bases, such as the base of cones, and they were really, really heavy. So you and I started fearing back and forward and picking up all these bases and bringing them back to the team who were unrolling. But the other thing that was down the other end of that runway was like, yeah, there was this, there was like, the runway had like a big giant hedge running along one side. And then at the end of the runway, it turned in a right angle to cover the end of the runway. So it was this big, right angled hedge and buried in this right angle was like, it wasn't like the wreckage, but it was like, it was the fuselage of an old plane that had its wings removed and it was in bad condition. And it looked, it looked a mess and I assume it's used for training or something or spare parts, I don't know, but it looked pretty bad and it was just in the corner. So that was playing crash corner. It looked just like a plane crash. And it was right and it was tucked right in this like, this right angle so it couldn't have looked more corner like. And I was like, you know what, that is, and you're like, what? I was like, that's playing crash corner and suddenly you went, yes! And we went, we even went and took selfies. Yes, we did. I like your impression of me, by the way, is that how I say, what? Well, you were unusually slow on the uptake, but maybe you would just need different headspace to me. So I was like, and then like, you're facelied up when you realized, maybe you were just exhausted from liking all those cones. Yes, because you were driving the car and I was pulling the cone pieces out of the back of the car. So, yeah, and then, and like, when we were dropping them off, we had to drop them off stack it. So I was driving along it just a couple of miles an hour and you were like having to run to catch up and pull them out of the moving car. That was a bit Indiana Jones over you in a way. It was quite good, wasn't it? Yes, it was, it was very daring of me. It was mostly just dirty because those cones were in some kind of typhoid swamp water at the end of the runway. It was just awful. It was really just awful. It wasn't, I'm not genius, I'll do that. I kept thinking of was, oh God, dude, just don't cut your hands on anything here. Like, don't want this water touching your circulatory system. Who knows what's in here? It was really just awful, but it was bad. Despite all of it, again, it was, it was a very interesting and very, very fun day. And interesting for me to see you pulling off a project, managing a whole bunch of people and just all of this activity going on in different places throughout the day, it was quite an experience and I'm glad that you invited me up. It was, I have to say, like, it looks and sounds almost heroic, but it was very, I mean, it was very unusual for me. I never do things of this scale. And the thing that was really different for me, and I imagine maybe this is what it's like for people who work on big Hollywood movies, not that I'm comparing, obviously I'm not comparing this to a movie, but it was when you start doing something that involves this level of teamwork, you suddenly are unaware of like so much stuff, like because there was a team that was using this big contraption to roll out the paper and they were kind of going ahead and just rolling out the paper and they were dealing with their own sets of problems and things that worked and didn't work and challenges. And then I was a lot of the time I was with Matt doing sort of filming further down the paper, talking about numbers and stuff like that. And then there were other little sub teams that were sent off on a mission to go and find more cones or do this and that. Like, everyone had a really different experience of the day. And like, obviously I was watching back the footage from the other people who were helping film, like a day or two later. And there was just whole things that I'd completely missed about the day. And it was quite a new thing for me, who's very independent and does everything on my own. It was quite a new thing and quite a different and nice experience to sort of see. And I can imagine if you're making a film and you have second units going and doing other things and set designers and costume people like, there's a whole world going on you're unaware of. That was a slightly new experience for me to, I mean, it used to work in television so in putting together the TV news. So I am aware of making a program where there are a whole elements I had nothing to do with. But this was in different way because I was kind of the boss and had to put the final thing together. It was a really weird sensation. And like, to not see the drone footage for two or three days and then have it sent to me and it's like a new surprise like days after the event. It was really a really weird sensation. But you're glad you did it? Yeah. So what's the next big project going to be? There is one other one, which is sort of in the pipeline, but I don't think it will ever happen. And once it's confirmed it won't happen, I might not talk about it, but in case it does happen, I can't talk about it. Okay. You can tell me that. You tell me all that. You know about it. It's not just for secrecy. It's also for security reasons. I've forgotten. I'm a bad friend. I'm a bad friend. I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah. So I can't talk about that one. But that would be, it wouldn't be as like difficult and as grand, but it would be maybe quite eye catching. But other than that, all pretty normal. I tell you what, I've been meeting some interesting people the last few days. I must, I didn't tell you about this. I met a vice president of Google. Oh, yeah. I met a person, one of those people who works at Apple, but can't tell you anything about what they do which is my first experience of that. Imagine that's most people at Apple. Yeah, yeah. And, but he seems an important. Right. And I'm sure all their business cards just say from Apple and there's no titles. That's how I match it. Pure white business card. And last night, I met one of the world's richest men. He's been described as the world's smartest billionaire. I was going to ask on Twitter who that was, but then I thought, he's a guy called Jim Simon's. Jim Simon's. Jim Simon's. Who knows, who hardly anyone's heard of. He used to run a, I'm reaching for Google right now. Do it. He used to run a hedge fund that, that can realize completely on mathematics. And like it's one of those, you know, the computer makes the decision. And you know, millions of transactions are happening every day on trades. And he's a mathematician at heart. And then he became super, super rich by applying algorithms to the markets. Hmm. It's worth, what does it say there? 13 billion or something like that? A very easy rich. Yeah, $12.5 billion. Also incredibly generous, incredibly smart. I was impressed by him. I was impressed by his talk. I only spoke to him for a minute or two afterwards, but I was very impressed by him. He does not wear socks, which I found very interesting. This is a. Uh-huh. OK. I have it in the back of my head that someone had told me that was the case. And I think maybe I've also read it somewhere else. But did you ask him, it was as part of your interview? I did not. I didn't interview him. Oh, yeah. No, I just was just chatting to him. But he wears, because whenever I meet someone who's really, really rich, like I've met a few really rich people, I've met like Rupert Murdoch and his sons, a few times and stuff. I'm always really fascinated by what they wear and their clothes. And so I always like to see, do they look different to a normal person? Could you tell that person was a billionaire if you didn't know that a billionaire? So I was just looking at how he dressed. He was dressed very normal, just normal slacks and a jacket and that. And he was wearing like nice loafers. I'm sure there are really expensive Italian loafers, but they just look like nice, really nice brown loafers. And no socks. Do you not know why he doesn't wear socks? I must ask someone. But that was my abiding memory. Well, I have a few abiding memories of what he said. He was very wise and interesting. But my abiding memory of what he looked like was he does not wear socks. I'm sure that's how he wants to remember it. I think he's a right. I think as a few things he'll be remembered for. He's made a lot of really great mathematical discoveries. He's got a few things named after him. He's not a trivial mathematician, but then here. But then at some point in the 70s or 80s or something, he said, all right, let's try this market thing. Any cracked it big time. Would you like to be really, really rich? Obviously, yes. Who's going to say no to that? People who are in honor with themselves, maybe. Is that people who say no? You're quite practical, though. And it's no secret that being incredibly rich, like incredibly rich comes with its own set of problems. And quite a big set of problems. So of course, you would like a few million dollars and never have to work again. But I'm talking billions. Would you like to be that kind of guy, like one of the richest men in the world type rich? Here is the thing. It's I think this James Simon's guy, this is exactly the kind of way that you want to be rich is almost completely anonymous, right? Nobody really knows who this person is. And I think Bill Gates kind of rich is a whole different story, right? Bill Gates, I don't think there's a place on the face of the earth Bill Gates can go without being recognized as Bill Gates. And that is a different question. Do you want to be rich and famous? No, no, thank you. Fame is not a desirable thing at all. So to be very, very wealthy is good as long as you are also not shockingly famous. So that's the way I look at it. Many of the downsides of being very wealthy are from other people knowing that you are very wealthy. And in particular, strangers knowing that you are very wealthy. So yeah, I mean, strangers knowing you're wealthy raises lots of extra issues. And that's a good point you make. But even if you're quite an anonymous billionaire, or everyone who knows you is going to know that. And that creates an interesting dynamic, doesn't it, with your friends and your family? But this is why billionaires have billionaire friends. This is the whole thing, right? As much as we as a society might like to pretend otherwise, I think it is practically very difficult for someone who actually has billions of dollars to be friends with just normal people, at the rest of us, because the gap in life is just so enormous that what are you even going to talk about sometime? So this is also the same reason why celebrities tend to marry other celebrities. It's not because that they're, oh, they think they're better than everybody else and they're super exclusive. It's, no, this is the orbit of people who understand the kinds of problems that you have if you are a wealthy and famous celebrity. And they can intermingle in a way that is harder to mix with people outside of that group. So that's why billionaires are friends with billionaires, rich celebrities are friends with rich celebrities and that I think that makes perfect sense. So I guess, I guess really what I'm saying here is ideally I would like to somehow, completely anonymously have billions of dollars and also have nobody know it. That would be ideal. That'd be the best situation. I'm trying to think how I can be absolutely sure you don't have billions of dollars, because if anyone was going to keep it a secret, they'd be like, yeah. Yeah. But also, I think you wouldn't be doing the podcast if you... Well, this is, I think, yes, from whatever, the other things that you know about. See, I would. I would still be doing the podcast if I had billions of dollars. But I don't think you would. Well, this is it. Everything you know about me says that the very fact that I work as much as I do is an indication that I don't have billions of dollars. But maybe I'm being really clever and this is actually my cover for having billions of dollars. But it isn't, sadly.
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==References==
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