H.I. No. 53: Two Dudes Counting

"H.I. #53: Two Dudes Counting" is the 53rd episode of Hello Internet, released on December 16, 2015.
Grey and Brady count the votes of the Hello Internet flag referendum. The YouTube version shows them counting the postcards at Brady's house.
==Official Description==
Grey and Brady count the votes. Click here for a video version of this podcast. And check out the podcast postcards website.
==Show Notes==
Okay everyone the moment has arrived. I've jumped in the car, I'm going to the train station to pick up CGP Grey because today we are counting the votes. Let's get this show on the road, eh? So we're off to Bristol train station, we'll pick up Grey and then the adventure really begins. So I left the house in bit of a hurry. Surprise, surprise. And I'm a bit disorganized and I just realised I haven't got the money that I would like to have to pay for parking and crossing the Clifton suspension bridge. So I'm going to ring Grey and I'm imagining Grey's not the sort of guy he's going to have coins on him but because he's at the train station. I'm guessing he might be able to get some coins before me so we'll give him a call and see if he can help us out. I'm guessing he won't answer. Don't leave a voicemail, this account is never checked. Don't leave a voicemail, this account is never checked. Okay everyone I'm arriving at Bristol Temple Meads train station. It's quite a beautiful station actually from the exterior if you ever have a look at the pictures of it or visit it. It's not much to look at inside but it's got a really nice facade. Very pretty. I'm driving it up to it now and see if Grey has arrived and we'll see if he got those coins. Hey man. Hello. It's an historical day there. It is. Is it historical or historic? You don't know. You don't care. Leave it for the grammar patterns. All right, whatever it is. You take that so I can drive. Just historical. How is your trip? It's right to rolling. Oh, rolling. Yeah. It was good. It was good. Yeah. Just nice. Always a nice ride up to see you. Did you get the coins? Yes, I got the coins for you. Did you find that unpleasant having to handle coins? Oh, I know you like the sound there. There you go. It's a point in my pocket. So the thing we're going to do now is go to the postbox to get the last remaining votes. So we've pulled up in Clifton near the postbox. Now a whole bunch of the votes and the postcards are already in my house. But the last couple of weeks worth we're about to pick up. Grey, this is going to be your first time even seeing bad. Yeah, I've never seen them in person. This is going to be really exciting. Is that all you got to say? I will have more to say when I see them. You on the other hand, you've been spoiling yourself, you've been looking all the postcards. So you have like an exciting idea of exactly what's there, but for me, this is all the unknown. So who's in a better position? Because I see more excited. So for all your talk about not spoiling things, I feel like I'm more excited. I feel like I didn't spoil it by looking at them early. Brady, you're always filled with childish excitement about everything. I am. Come on, man. Let's go. Let's go. We're off. Hello. I don't have my key. I can't. Is it 28? Is this the Halloween tonight? Yes. Oh my gosh, she got so much. Oh, sorry. Oh, you're... Oh, we're recording... Hello, Internet support cast. So we're just recording me coming to pick them up. So you're actually holding postcards in your hand now, aren't you? I'm sorting through the mail. What have all you guys been thinking about receiving all these postcards? It's pretty interesting. I'm very intrigued to see what it's about. Do you even know what any of this is about? I keep meaning to look at it. Well, you can't read our mail. That would be unprofessional. We're doing a vote. We're deciding what our official flag is going to be. There are five candidates. So everyone is sending in their votes as to what they want our flag to be. For anyone who's listening, the lady here at Mailboxes is sorting through the last postcards that have made it by deadline. Technically, these haven't made it by deadline. Yeah, but that's the way that works. You tell people the day before because you can come in the next day. Otherwise, people will be angry. So these lucky people are just getting in. There's my driver's license because I haven't got my key. So you can see that I'm me. We could prove our identity with the podcast though. We could load up the podcast. We're like, these are obviously for us. But we could be disguised. We have similar voices. To steal the votes for the election. We've been practicing our Brady and Gray voices for the last three weeks. This is our ultimate highest. You ready, Gray? Oh my god. That looks heavy. It nearly ends up being two months since. I think we can manage. Look at that. Holy cow. This is going to be a long day of counting because you said you've got like two more like this. There's two more bet this though. It's one's bigger than this one's a bit smaller. Okay, this is very impressive to see in person. And we have to read every single message. Oh my god. Is that it? You're happy? Just checking. Yeah. Oh, and there's a big parcel for us as well. So I have to sign for some of these parcels. Do you know what? I once covered a trial because I used to be a journalist and I covered a trial by a guy who got blown up by a parcel bomb. And the last thing he said before he opened it was, haha, I hope this isn't a bomb. And then he pulled it open and it was a bomb. You always have the curious story. Yeah. That's everything. You will get some more but it will taper off now. Okay. All right. Yeah. Until we do another one of these. Yeah. Thank you very much. Bye. All right. We're back in the car. Gray tried to get in the wrong side. As I do every time in the UK. So even after all this time, your default side is the American side. Yeah. So before we go home and start, well, we're not even going home yet because we've got to go and buy a bottle. We've got to get some supplies. Yeah. But before we do that, there's a special trait. Oh, yes. We're driving over the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Oh wow. Let's go. It's a mighty handsome bridge. You need to give me a pound because we can't get across it without a pound. Oh, I need to give you a pound. This is why I have coins. Jingle, jingle the coins. I'm trying to get them out of my pocket under the steep belt. Quick, grow, quick, we're reaching the bridge. Oh, damn it. I don't like time pressure. Haha. I know you don't. There you go. You have a pound. Are you happy? Yep. So with the recorder, Lena crossed me so we can get the sound of the coin going into the bucket. Okay. Here it goes. All right, this is exciting. This is the sound of crossing the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Here comes the toll bucket. I'm pulling up. Here it goes. We're on. Well, very exciting. You talk us through a grey giver as a commentary. We're driving over it. Yeah, this is a bridge and we are driving across it. It's very narrow, isn't it? It is quite narrow, actually. That cyclist guy is way too close. Oh, look, white teeth cars. You won't see you going to hit the cars. Yeah, but the cyclists are squishier than cars. That's the problem with cyclists being so close. And it's much higher on the bridge than it looks before you get onto the bridge. It's a deep gorge. The A-thin gorge. That's why it's so popular for suicides. No, there we go. We should have someone should keep score of how long it takes on an episode of it. Hello Internet. Before death comes up as a topic, at least incidentally. It's an important part of that. Well, we're across. We're over. You can press that red button on the front now and it stops recording. I think everything is ready for this monumental occasion. This is the biggest go-no go so far. How many people are all these pieces of equipment? I suddenly know why they feel so nervous when they send people into space and stuff. This has been like sending a man into space. Yeah. So we are filming this, but for most people, hopefully they're listening to it as a podcast. So, Greg, you can tell people where we are and what's going on. We're in this amazingly now that I look at it amazingly amateurish contraption. I was going to say it looks amazingly impressive. We are in your house, in your kitchen because it is the biggest table that is available. And we have five plastic containers in front of us, each labeled with one of the flag names. And we have three very large boxes of postal ballots to go through. And we're going to start sorting and counting very shortly. There's actually a sixth plastic container because there is a red one to my left, which is like the container of doom. Right. That will be where ballots go. That are either mapped up, deliberately being in use since people, people giving us a hard time. That's the naughty box. Right. Spoiled deliberately or not. My shred is still not working. So they're avoiding the shredder for now. But they're going in the red naughty box over to the left. How's this going to work, Greg? I think it's going to work. We start grabbing handfuls and start sorting. The thing that makes this difficult, obviously, we're all about the voting, the one, two, three, the preferences. That's where that's what's important. But the problem is almost every one of these postcards has an interesting face to it. And almost every one of these postcards has little letters or notes or drawings or just little personalizations that are quite cute. But there's probably, I'm guessing there's like maybe over 3,000 of them. And this is a bit like, you know, when you do a spring clean and you have to throw, well, you don't know because your life is one big spring clean. But whenever I do a spring clean and I'm sent to a room and I'm told, Brady, go into that room and decide what you're going to throw away, I spend like an hour looking at each thing before I throw it away. I can imagine that. So the thing is, earlier today, when we first picked up all these postcards and we just went to grab a quick coffee, I did a quick calculation to figure out how long is it going to take us to sort them based on if it's three, you know, 3,000 postcards. That's like, okay, let me do some calculations. And while I was sitting here having you set up everything watching it, it did occur to me like, wait a minute, I'm counting with Brady. And I did all of my calculations based on two seconds per vote, right? Just sort them through. But I'm going to be like, oh no, this one's from Adelaide. Oh, have a look. Right? This one's got a pretty picture. And let's talk about this for 10 minutes. Yeah, so my feeling was like, okay, two seconds per seems reasonable, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, get them all in. But yeah, as I was sitting here, I was realizing, no, of course, that's not the way it's actually going to go. But you are going to advocate a bit of ruthlessness here. I am going to advocate moving along. And we can always talk about many postcards. It's so many in person. That's the thing. It's so many in person. So we're going to, we're not exactly sure what's going to happen today. We're going to start counting. And I feel that you are going to be the force of slow-edness. And I'm going to be the force of quick-edness. Okay. And somewhere in between we will meet. So for people who aren't, who can't see the camera shots, because you're listening, Gray and I are taking handfuls of ballots and postcards out of the cardboard boxes in which they have been transported to my house. And we're just going to be throwing them into either flaggy flag, club and claws, white cross, nail and gear, or H.I. logo. Any predictions? This is the one thing we haven't done. I'm not going to make a prediction because you know I've been looking at too many ballots. I have too much information. You got a prediction? Results? I, I really don't have a prediction. I'm going to leave my, I'm going to leave my mind open. Like I said, I am going to just accept the will of the people. I don't have, I don't have a strong guess about which is going to be the winner. Well, the first ballot, number one that I pulled out, which is a postcard of a rock. We're not going to, we're not going to do this for every ballot, I promise. It's a postcard which seems to be some picture of a rock. And I can't even tell where it's come from because it's one of these automatically generated postcards. Right, right, right, right. Which a lot of people have done. It is a vote for flaggy flag number one. They did put number two white cross number three H.I. logo number four nailing gear. Already, already, it's too much. Yeah, but, but people have to understand, people have to understand that there are preferences here. But their first vote is flaggy flag into the flaggy flag bin. You go. All right, my first one is from Shaboygin, Wisconsin. A lovely picture, have an autumn scene and a road. Shaboygin was constant seems to be written in Comic Sans. Nice. Yes. And what have we got on the back? It is nail and gears as their first choice. And they've written a little message that I've told you something about Shaboygin. Shaboygin. Yeah, that one. Shaboygin is home to the world's tallest symbol of freedom. A flagpole 400 feet high with a flag to match. That's nice. Put a little, put one of these little markers on there. Really? You like that one? No, just so that I can remember, this was your first one you counted. This was the first one. Grey and I've got these little stickers and we're going to put them on postcards that catch our eye and we'll tell you about that later maybe. Nail and gear. Okay, so we're not going to do that for every vote. Let's, let's, I'm going to get a glass of water and let's crack on. All right. I'm already distracted though. I'm actually really good. I haven't even looked at them yet. Look, it's a fancy science thing. Looks like from some science museum somewhere. See, the thing you have to decide when you're sorting, grey, which is hard, is do you hold them so you're just looking at the back or do you look at the pretty pictures on the front? But it's all mixed up. It's all mixed up. What we should have gotten is your nephew to come in and flip them all in the same direction for us. That's what we should have had them do. That would have been smart. Even at this very early stage, a lot of them seem to be going into nail and gear and club and nail and gear and club and clubs are definitely the two early contenders right now. Like flag. And it's really early. Like, this is interesting. I mean, we have no ones yet for white cross and each eye flag. I don't know. We've sorted 30. Here is something interesting. And I imagine we'll see a few of these. Here is someone who has not put any votes on the back of their postcard. And they've just written a rant to us. And basically, what they're saying in a nutshell is that they're upset that we didn't give them a none of the above option. And what I'm going to do with this particular one is I'm putting a sticker on it. Old time's sake. And this goes into the the naughty bin. It's our first naughty one. It's the red bin. In you go. It just realized it did that wrong. Yeah, I imagine we're going to do a few wrong because we're talking at the same time. Yeah, this is something we wondered as well. Like, what is what is the percentage error rate? Not going to be zero. It's going to be non-zero. Some people have sent in like this postcard I'm holding about the world's largest pelican, which is at Pelican Rapids, Minnesota. And the thing I like about it is this is an old postcard. It looks like it's from the 70s. Yeah, it looks very old, I mean. A few people have sent in vintage postcards. And I'm very... Look, you can even see the pencil written price from the antique store written on it. I cood us to people who sent in antique postcards. And that goes into nail and gear. I just got the first way across. We still have not had any for H.I. logo. I feel sorry for H.I. logo at the start here. Ah, first one for H.I. logo. The first one for H.I. logo has come from Porto in Portugal. Best regards from two university students in Porto, it says. And they have voted for H.I. logo. Someone here on this postcard I've just pulled out had written their votes. And they've then crossed them all out and voted again. Like, they've changed their mind and changed the order. So they're really testing me out here. But how have they voted though? Is the top one club in class? Yeah, that crossed out. They initially had number one as nail and gear, but they've clearly changed it to club. Can I get an umpire's decision here? That is a one for club in club. I'm going to say that's a one for club in class, yeah. Okay. I think so. All right, and you go. We're not really looking at the pictures very much. That's going to be a job for another day, I imagine. We have our first death-related postcard. All is vanity and a skull. All right. And the person who sent us this morbid skull postcard, what have they voted for? They have voted for nail and gear. I'm not surprised. Here's a nice hand draw. And a hand draw. When someone has hastily done the H.I. logo, on a piece of... You don't know that they did it hastily. That might have taken hours. If that took them hours, they've got some answering to do. Nail and gear. They have voted for. We've hardly made a dent in box one. My god, you're right. In box one of three. You know that. But nail and gear, I'm putting down as my early leader. This is the thing with elections. Is that in theory, a subset, a random subset of the votes, should give you the same results as the whole thing. But we're going to count them all. Oh, look at it. We both, we both at the same time. There we go. At the same time, we've both pulled out postcards that people have made, they've made their postcard, the flag they voted for. Making it nice and clear. Quite a few people have done that. I think that's a nice touch as well. All right. Let's go. All right. So at last, H.I.L.O.G, it's another one. Oh, and another one. It's having a surge. Nice postcard here from Houston. I always like, they're quite a few spacey themed postcards coming in, which I like. I'm always special place in my heart, as people know. They're pandering. This one has a lovely portrait of you and I on the back, which is another theme. A lot of people have taken to drawing pictures of us. The only question with this early preference in voting is if there's any kind of time dependency on the voting. Because we are sorting votes in reverse chronological order, right? Because this is the box we picked up today. So these are the most recent votes. So we'll find out if there's any kind of time bias. Yeah. And whether there's any sort of clustering and... Oh, look at this. I got a letter. Letter for you. Someone has written a letter. I've written it to Mr. Periodic videos. I think that's you. We'll put that, that is me. We'll put that to one side for now. We told people letters wouldn't be counted as votes. So if there's a vote in there, you've missed out. Flaggy flags having a little surge here. Each eye logo is so sad over there. H-I logo, isn't it? I think if we're going to eliminate anything first, it's probably going to be that one. Do you know what? After your little introduction where you said I was going to be a slow down distraction, I'm surprising myself by how undistracted I am and I'm just looking at the votes. I think we have our first single preference vote there. Someone just nailing gears or nothing. That's what they want. Yeah. That's a layout. That's a layout under the rules. Every time H-I logo comes up, I feel like a little thrill for it. So great one thing that came up a few times. We're sort of speaking in this staccato way because we're working at the same time. Here's another sealed letter. It says, this is not a vote, but please open. We'll see about that. In fact, no, what am I doing? These should go in the red box. The naughty box. There we go. We have one from the land of two hours. Oh, someone's drawn a cute little cheat sheet. Audrey is here watching us do the vote by the way, people. Basically, Grace spent the whole time I was setting up the cameras in the sound system playing with Audrey. I did. I did. So, Grace, yeah, the thing I was starting to say was a lot of people were against white cross because they felt it had like bad connotations or it looked sort of socialist and they were talking about swastikers and all sorts of rubbish. Did you ever feel anything about white cross? I mean, I think that's just silliness myself. Oh, that stuff, I think, is nonsense. Each flag is like its own thing. Like, you give it the meaning that it is going to have. Yeah. Trying to sort this stuff is surprisingly harder than you think it is. I'm trying to go fast and sort them correctly and kind of looking at the interesting things. I'm not even looking at the interesting. I'm not even looking at where they're from or what the pictures are. That's for another day for me. I guess you have forever to go through all of these things. They are going to leave at my house, aren't they? Oh, no, I thought I was going to bring them back. I don't think I'd let you leave with them even if you begged. I'm too attached to them there. No, I came here in my pickup truck. I wanted to load up the back with postcards that I will keep with me for the rest of my life. Move from house to house as time goes on. Well, we haven't even made a dent in the first box. We've got to wear as Waldo on, I like. Nice. That's not going to waste our time. Yeah, it's like, whereas Waldo on is very nice, we do not have time for that right now. We have an unusual material one. Oh yes, this is made from very thin wood. Very thin piece of almost like very thin bowl sword. Yeah. Very interesting. Where's this come from? Where's that come from? Is that come from? Do you know what country that is? I don't know. Like it looks like Latvia or something, but where's Vilnius? Vilnius, I have no idea. Oh no, that's a vote for Flaggy Flag. It's an unusual material, but I'll let it allow it. Yeah, now the votes are in. We don't have to deter people anymore. Right. Yeah, being idiots. Well, we didn't want to get with gigantic ones made of aluminum or anything like that. Yeah. Now here is an interesting thing, right? This is a side effect of the process we've gone through because when we went and picked up the postcards today, we saw the people at the post center. They were almost a bit overwhelmed by how much they were having to sort. I wouldn't say they were almost overwhelmed. They seemed, they seemed quite. They were completely overwhelmed. And as a result, we seem to have here in the box occasionally letters and things that aren't even meant for us. Either they meant for other postboxes or other addresses. So I'm going to put these ones in the naughty bin and return these to the mailbox center so they can go to the proper recipients. Are you sure you don't want to separate them somewhere else? I don't think we're going to have that many in the naughty. All right, all right. I like this one. Someone took the time to do calligraphy for their votes. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, let's put a seat. Look at that, nice calligraphy. Very nice. Thank you very much. That's a flaggy flag vote. Maybe people who are more calligraphy oriented because they're old fashioned are drawn to flaggy flag, which is clearly the most old fashioned of the flags. I think we have a very high correlation so far with calligraphy and flaggy flag votes. It's a one-to-one correlation. So the nailing gearbox is definitely filling up the most quickly. The question is, if this continues, if nailing gear keeps its lead, will its lead be sufficient to survive the first runoff when we start distributing preferences? That's why these things are interesting. Is it may well be that just as in real elections, there's one group that is not the majority, but is very clearly focused, and everybody else is spread out between different choices. That's pretty common when you look at real elections. That there's one group that wants one thing or nothing. When that happens, Gray, when one person sort of concentrates and the rest is quite spread, is it common for the person who has that first round lead to get pegged back on preferences? I don't have any data to back it up, but I can just say that the things that I have looked at, it seems that in many countries and many elections, it's one group together, large group, and then a number of groups that are split, but would all prefer each other to the one leading content. So they can pinch victory from that first round lead. But it may be possible that nailing gears gets very few second preference votes. Right. This one, someone here likes my style because they have typed their vote. The postcard is Checkpoint Charlie, the famous Berlin Wall Checkpoint, and on the back they have typed their vote, and then they have typed a note to us. And at the very end, they say, sadly, my typewriter does not have a flower emoji, but I can do an interrobang. Yeah, you can manually do an interrobang on a tapewriter. Yeah, they've obviously had to rewind to do that interrobang. Just to show you how much I love typewriters for people who happen to be watching this, they did vote for nailing gears, I'll put it in nailing gear, just to show you, within reach of where we are doing this count, I have a typewriter. Hahaha. If you're sitting on the camera, there you go. I've got a typewriter right here. I do love a good typewriter. It's hard work sorting these votes. I've just crossed my activity goal for the day according to my upper watch. It's very happy now. Well done. There we go. Of course I'm wearing my classy. Right. Yeah, it's no much classier than me. This is never an argument. I'm wearing the moon watch. We have a piece of spam. Oh, yeah, we have. We, we, that's not even meant for us. It's just a piece of junk mail. That's very much going in the North even. I've covered a few elections over the years, and I was at an election for the Adelaide City Council. I was sort of there in the room while they were doing this. They were sorting all the ballots, and I was just there talking to the election officials and waiting to see the result. And someone dropped one of the ballot papers, and it got sucked into an air conditioning kind of a duct and got lost, and they could see it, but they couldn't reach it, and they spent 20 minutes discussing what to do about this one ballot. They didn't know who it was for, and it was, and all the, all the candidates were there, and everyone was discussing what to do. And in the end, they just left it. They said, oh, well, we can't get it out. One vote's not going to make a difference. I was surprised they did that. Like, it really sticks with me to this day that the election officials decided oh, well, it doesn't really matter. And they just left this uncounted ballot there, and it felt like this travesty, it really like, for a few seconds, it shattered democracy for me, that the election officials were willing to not counter-vote. I just noticed we have something quite cheeky here. Someone has done the gray peak as the postcard. They have, they've made, so the front of their postcard is gray peak, but on the line, in fact, they have voted for Nail and Gear. But it's funny you should say that, Gray, because at that very moment, and I know you don't believe in coincidences, but at the very beginning, I believe that they have a vote, or believe that they're magic. No, at the very moment, you pointed that out. Oh, I do have a gray peak, but this person has voted for gray peak. They have put their vote that they want to be gray peak as our flag. That is not allowed. Not allowed. That goes straight into the naughty building. You said it. That one votes being stuck somewhere story, makes me think of every once in a while on the internet, you will see someone claiming that an election was rigged or that the results are invalid, because they voted for a candidate who then shows up having no votes when they do the final tally. So someone will do a write-in candidate and they're supposed to report, like, oh, yes, one vote for this made-up candidate. But maybe there one vote was the one vote that gets sucked into the air conditioning system, and so it's not actually a tampered ballot. Exactly. There are quite a few of these three-dimensional postcards coming in where you, you know, what do you call those, that kind of thing where you tilt the paper to different angles and you see three-dimensional? Well, this isn't 3D, this is just a difference. Oh, it moves. Right, it moves. It's the earth moving back and forth. Those things are those, I don't know if you would to remember the tilting ones. The term of those magic eye things, you mean, were you on a focus? No, no, not magic eye. Actually, like three-dimensional holograms, basically. There's a few of those coming in. The hologram type postcards. This is amazing. We're not even, we still hardly made a dent in the first box. Just maybe I'm coming back up again to continue doing this. I think my wife could be coming home to a crazy scene. I was hoping this would all be clean up. Exactly. Oh, don't worry, we'll have everything all nice and neat before you come back. My wife would not be happy if she comes home to find her kitchen turned into the Hello Internet polling station. Oh. Great. Is that what happened there? Oh, great through and two. God, stuck together. Oh, this looks suspicious. Oh, I have suspicious activity. Suspicious activity. Look, we have potential voter fraud. We have exciting. We have our first instance of voter fraud. I have four postcards, all identical votes from an identical person. Identical front. Oh, I see what's happened here. Explain, Gray. Explain. Look, they're numbered. Yeah. Someone's made a flipbook of my first pass the post voting video. Yeah. And so what we actually have is a serious problem because there are probably 23 of these because they're numbered 21 of 23. So we've got to keep an eye out for this stuff. This voter fraud. They've even put like their atname. They've been so, so they're being flagrant about it. I can't believe we're having to deal with voter fraud. We're so excited. Oh, no. So keep an eye out for that. Yeah, we got to keep an eye out for this and on the reverse my video. I'm sure you know every single frame of my video. Yeah. I feel like they're probably bats together. Oh, yeah. Am I keeping eye for them? If I was being really sneaky as a voter fraudster, I'd spread them out over multiple times. The one who is committing voter fraud, who are they trying to help? They're trying to get club and claw. Is there a preference? Here I have a bill of someone. LAUGHTER Someone says someone here obviously has some bank statement or bill that's made into our election box. I hope it's not vitally important they received that. Yeah. Dear sir, your kidney transplant has arrived. Please contact us by... I like this. We have an unusually shaped one. The Beehive, the Parliament building and Wellington New Zealand. Nice. Quite a few votes have come from New Zealand. They're in the flag voting mood. If you're voting one, send a flag referendum. You might as well vote another one. Have you noticed, I don't know if you've noticed, because you haven't been on email and Twitter much lately, but a lot of people have been sending us the ballot paper for the New Zealand flag referendum? I haven't actually seen it. Yeah, it's out now. People are actually voting. So people have been scanning them and sending us a copy so we can see what it looks like. Do you think it's a well-designed ballot? Yeah, I do actually. I think it looks reasonably idiot proof. Even though I don't agree with this short list, I think the ballot papers find. From memory, they include images of what it looks like flying and things like that. I am worried that when I'm talking to you at the same time, I am throwing loads into the wrong bins. But that's why we have to do the count just separately. I think the same thing happens when we count. When we talk, it vastly increases the probability of error. We can't do a recount though. We can't count them again. No, but it gives you a chance of when you're counting to just look and maybe notice one that's wrong. Yeah. Because then we got the bigger boxes. We're going to have to rearrange the nail and gearbox soon just so we can fit more in. This will be interesting to look at in time lapse. My favourite postcards are the postcards that come from towns that shouldn't really have postcards. Here's one from Wolverhampton. And I know Wolverhampton. And I've been there and I like it. I can't say I'm familiar with Wolverhampton. I went and saw the killers play in Wolverhampton, believe it or not. But I'm surprised it's a town that has a postcard. And when you look at their postcard, you can see why I'm surprised. No, those are iconic buildings. When you do a selection bias, you can make every place look good. Every place has at least one thing that's photogenic for a postcard. There's a vote from Wolverhampton for flaggy flag, which they describe as the one true flag. They say hope you enjoy the glorious 1970s vistas of Wolverhampton. That comes from Martin. Thank you, Martin. It's funny doing this great. This feels like normally for someone like you and your work, this is the sort of job you wouldn't have ended up doing. You would have outsourced touching all these postcards and dealing with all this paper. It's best not to think how many people by proxy you're touching by touching the postcards. You just put that out of your mind. We're going to have a big hand wash later on, eh? Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, we're going to have a big hand wash later on. I'm surprised you haven't had one yet. You don't mind a good hand wash. Who does mind a good hand wash? Someone has sent us a letter. And it feels like there's a postcard in there. And it's come from Nigeria. I think it's legit though. And I just think maybe you can't send a postcard from Nigeria. I'll have to check that one. You want to put that one to the side? We'll take a look at it later. Yeah, we'll put it in the naughty bin for now. But I might give that one a chance. Every vote matter is breathing. No, no. But if you break the rules of voting, you break the rules of voting. We said no one votes. There's another vote for Graypeak. This ballot is spoiled. Someone here has just written this ballot is spoiled. I like that they went to the trouble of sending it in. We have our first Tim from a trip to Norway. No, there we go. Thanks for voting Tim. Well, someone here has painted a reunion swamp pen on their ballot. That is a vote for Flaggy Flag. Again, sort of the artistic person there voting for Flaggy Flag. Make of that what you will. Well, now here is an interesting dilemma for us. Here is what looks like a legitimate vote that has come from Portland, Oregon. And someone I think maybe the postal service has put some sticker on the back of the postcard for some reason. That's perfect. Saying place this article in the foreign holdout, whatever that means. But it means we can't see what they voted for. It sounds like this got sorted into their foreign system. Which Portland makes sure that the message can be read when they put the sticker on. So the postal service has put the sticker over the vote. But actually, under the right light, I can see through the sticker. And they have voted for Nail and Gear. And I think we've got to let them have their vote. I will let you decide on that one. That's going in Nail and Gear. The vote counts. This one is spoiled by a Tim. But they're voting for the Comic Sans version of Maryland, which was one of the ones originally in our Makeup flags for Hello Internet One. But spoiled away. Spoiled away. Well, it's like a deep cut Hello Internet reference though, right? So we're the people who were on that red, who remember that flag. We've got one from the Netherlands, right? Just was. Lovely. We've both been just setting a bit this last week, but this on this episode, we'll probably talk about that in a future episode, aren't we? Yeah, I think so. I think I could not possibly talk about anything else that I have done while doing this. Yeah. There's a postcard with my face on it. So people are being creative and also taking the Mickey out of us, which is to be expected. Expected and appreciated. Nail and gear. Nail and gear made of thick cardboard. Nail and gear. Flaggy flag. Clevver and claws. Oh, here we go. This person has broken the rules of voting by writing their message to us above their votes. I'm going to say that spoiled. That's definitely spoiled. No, I'm not. I'm not. It's spoiled, Brady. But we know their intent. And this is democracy. No, see, this is how you open up the box of having to evaluate everything. I would I would. I would. Oh, look at you. I'm just going to follow. I'm just going to follow my instinct. You can't believe it, Brady. If that had landed in my hands, it would be in the naughty box already. I'm counting your lucky listener, whoever it was who sent that one in. I think, Brady, you're very fact that you do that is you slowly undermining democracy. So that's how democracy dies. Yeah, with the wrongly counted. Hell, we can't. Yeah. With bending the rules. That's how it dies. It's not about the wrongly counted ballot. You're bending the rules, my friend. I'm just making Star Wars references, basically. Yeah. I know what you're doing. Yeah. Any excuse. We're going to do a show on Star Wars. Oh, yeah. I think the people will demand it. Have you booked your tickets yet? Oh, yeah. A long time ago. I haven't. Oh, yeah? I was going to go a long after the hubbub's start, dear. I'm surprised. I'm not, I'm not a sheep. You know what I've done. You know that I booked my VIP theater. No other way. Yeah, yeah, of course. There's no other way I'm ever seeing a movie. And it's surprisingly empty when you book it that way. Even for Star Wars, I have avoided all the trailers so far. But then this becomes like a bizarre kind of investment that you have created over time. That the possibility of ruining, like the gets bigger and bigger as time goes on, like what you lose is more and more. Yeah. So that's one of the reasons why I wanted to book soon. Is it's like protecting the investment of having remained spoiler free for a long period of time. Have you remained spoiler free? No. I've been watching. I haven't been like watching interviews with cars and stuff. Okay. But I've been, I've watched the trailers and things. Okay, I think, I think that's like, that's like a level one of spoilers. But do you haven't been going on like sites that come through everything and try to figure out all the stuff ahead of time? Not much. I have to admit, I've called a little bit on how good I think it's going to be. Yeah. What makes you say that? I don't know, I'm beginning to think maybe it won't be that great. My expectation is not that it will be great. What I am thinking, not that it will be bad. But what I'm thinking is it might be a bit like rebooted Star Trek, which I quite enjoyed. Like was a fun movie. But there's no way, like I would say, oh, it's a perfect movie. No, but I think that's very good. I'd be happy if the Star Wars and you Star Wars reached that level. Oh yeah. And so like I do have expectations. But I also feel like I haven't rewatched that Star Trek movie in a long time. And I never feel like compelled to rewatch that. Whereas the original Star Wars is like everyone's know us. Like well, I guess I have to watch the trilogy again. How often would you watch the original Star Wars movies? Probably every once every two years maybe on average. I guess. Yeah. What about you, Mr. Quotes, at all the time? Probably the same, but rarely by choice. Normally by Arts on TV, I'll have a look sort of thing. I really will. Well speaking of which there's a... There we go, we got Stormtrooper. Got a Stormtrooper on the stamp there for a vote for H.I. logo. Ah, look. Here's one where the votes have been concealed under a post at note. Now is that the one that you saw on Twitter about being concealed under a post at note? I don't know how that is, but vote is four as I peel it back, club and claws. We have another Mr. Directed piece of mail. That looks like a pay slip for someone. If we can make this profitable. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you by Harry's. Harry's offers high quality razor blades for a fraction of the price of the big razor brands. And given that November is now over, you might need some new razor blades to shave off that stash that you've been busy growing. Harry's was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and a leg. They make their own blades from their own factory in Germany. These are high quality performing German blades crafted by shaving experts, giving you a better shave that respects your face and your wallet. Because they own that German factory, Harry's offers factory direct pricing. Plus you don't have to wait around for the guy to come unlock the anti shoplifting case at the drugstore to buy them. They're shipped directly to your door. And boy, do I love not having to go outside to buy stuff? Anything I can get shipped to my door? I will have shipped to my door. Now if you go to Harry's.com and use the promo code HI, you can check out their starter set, which is an amazing deal for 15 bucks. You get a razor moisturizing shave cream or gel and three razor blades. That promo code HI will get you five bucks off your first purchase, knocking it down to 10 bucks for a starter kit. It's a pretty good deal. For comparison, Harry's blades are roughly comparable to Gillette Fusion, but Harry's blades are about half the price of fusions. So with great packaging, nice heavy handles, classy designs, you can't go wrong with Harry's. Once again, go to Harry's.com and use the promo code HI to get five dollars off your first purchase. It's all about voter intent at this point. Now that we did our best to weed out the idiots, now it's about voter intent. I haven't seen any more ballots from our vote rigour yet. Yeah, I haven't either, which makes me suspicious. Maybe, maybe the real trick here is just to mess with us and to label it one out of 23, but only send four. If that was actually what you've done, sir, congratulations. That's like, that's true terrorism. See, even this I've been slightly spoiled. I didn't know that mask face for Star Wars. Oh, you didn't know about that character. I knew I only see the shot of that person from behind in the first trailer, but I never saw that mask. I just received a slightly small, very small spoiler for Star Wars. We have a spoiled ballot from the Netherlands with St. Nick. Oh, I should totally know this guy's name. Black Pete, of course, Black Pete, who is a somewhat controversial outside of the Netherlands Christmas character. But inside of the Netherlands is a totally normal Christmas character, who is a helper to St. Nick, who is usually played by a white person who paints themselves black. And is so controversial outside of the Netherlands. Yes, I grew up in a somewhat Dutch household, and so seems totally normal to me, but I can also understand why not normal. And your household, even that was used, wasn't it? My mom had a bunch of Dutch kind of stuff that we used to do around Christmas time. Black Pete was not a character, but I used to see him on like wrapping paper and some other stuff. So I was aware of his existence. So the Maryland flag is bit of a theme on some of these postcards, and here someone has sent in a postcard, which has got sort of a Jeep car on it, which has been painted with the Maryland flag motif. Looks awesome. That Maryland flag. And they've written a warning on the postcard saying, PS, this postcard jam shredders. We're not going to shred that to work of art, and it's a valid ballot. It's a vote for flaggy flag. You really are going to keep these postcards forever, aren't you, Breeing? When you die, will you bequeath them to the Museum of Hello Internets? Yeah, I mean, I think that museum will be up and running before I die, so they'll probably already be in the museum. No, great. If we have a time lapse video to go with this podcast, to people who choose to watch the video, the question is, will people be able to resist kind of fast forwarding through it? So they can watch which box is filling up the most quickly? There's always people who jump to the end right at the start in ways that I cannot understand. People will do it. It's the internet they can do what they like. It's such a shock when I see a vote for H.I. logo. I have to double check. I'm doing the same thing every single time. It's a bit of a wh-what? Where is that box? I don't even know. I think it's a perfectly acceptable flag. I think it's a bit sad that it's doing so poorly. It's a vote against tradition is what it is, Breeing. Well, you designed it, so it's a vote against you. Burn. I know. You didn't design it to be a flag. You know, like people trying to mess with us is the picture of one flag of vote for a different one. Ah, so this person here has made a giant postcard with the club and floor logo as the face. And then when you turn it over, they voted for flaggy flag. And the second choice is H.I. logo. And it says, hello, have a nice day. I am Tim. That's a person intentionally trying to mess with us putting it in the wrong box. Yeah. We caught you. Yeah, we're very thorough. Yeah, we're definitely going to catch all other things that we notice us catching and not catch all the things that we don't. It must have been so fascinating for the people sorting things at the post place. And, you say that, you say that because you're the kind of person who would be fascinated about this. But as you have on record, they were not fascinated enough to do any investigation to try to figure out what it was. That's true. They were just wondering what the hell are all these postcards for, but not wondering enough to type in club and clause into Google and find out the answer. So I think actually we just represented an enormous amount of unwelcome work is the most likely thing here. Quite a bit of misdirected mile actually in the end. I'm feeling much less confident in the postal service than that. Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely. It makes you wonder how many votes haven't made it to us. And suddenly, for the rest of my life, I will feel much more understandable when someone says, oh, it was lost in the mail. And you always think, yeah, right. Of course it wasn't lost in the mail. We have what, five pieces of mail that was lost in the mail already. I wonder if all the neighboring peel boxes have postcards that they're wondering what the heck they are. Yeah. Well, someone sent me a postcard that says nail and gears. But they think it's some like some kind of spy message or something. Eight people in the last week have sent me a postcard just saying club and clause. Yeah, there's a bit of a bit of a skull and bone sounding actually. I tell you what, doing this is also making me rethink the request I was going to make to my nephew to go and actually type in all the votes for us. No, no. I think it's impossible. Too much. It's too much. Impossible. It's not impossible, but it's just you're burning hours of human efforts. Just to a dojo. Not for nothing, but just to indulge a kind of mild curiosity. It's like, oh, I'm mildly interested in the exact statistics. Why don't you spend many weeks typing in all of this information so that I can go. Interesting. Pretty much what I expected. Oh, wrong one. Yeah, two wrong ones in a row. Oh, I kind of zoned out for a minute there. Great. I think I'm having my first brain fade. Do we need to get you some tea? Would you for our first tea break probably in about 20 minutes? 20 minutes. Well, let's finish this box. Oh, but I've been pulling from a different box. I didn't know you'd done that. You've changed boxes. Yeah, because you were always in my way when I want to grab that box. You're the only one who's emptying that box. That makes me feel good. It makes me feel like we're making more progress than I really last. Yeah, we're actually doing okay. I mean, there's still a lot, but I honestly think we can take a break pretty soon. All right. You take a break before you need to. That's the trick. That's the CGV crack method of working. Yeah, no one knows. No one knows why you never bloody get your videos out. Take breaks when you don't need break, basically. If you think you might need a break, the answer is yes. If you reach the point where you're thinking, I definitely need a break. You waited too long to take a break. This card left intentionally blank. Why send it? It's fun to send it. Yep. I agree. That's the answer. It's fun to send it. I mean, if... This person has voted for the red and yellow version of nailing gear. That is a spoiled ballot. Oh, now you're being all strict, huh? No numbers. No numbers. Oh! I'm counting it. No! I... I... I say you can't count it. I'm counting that. Of course that's what they mean. It's a spoiled... It's not... It's not about you divining voter intent. It's about is it a valid ballot? And it is not a valid ballot. This is like a philosophical question about democracy. So for people listening, this person on the back of their post... Oh, it's the idiot again. I'm going to throw it all out. Oh, oh, oh! Look at you. You know the most... You are the most subjective person ever, right? You're like, oh, my bleeding heart wants to go out to this person. But then you know who it is. You should never be doing anything with elections. Now I know their intent. Their intent was not to vote. Their intent was to test our system. Yeah. And you failed. No, I failed. I got it at last. Not only because you have one to look on the other side. Oh, my God, really. Oh, this person is being a pain in the... This person now is being such a pain in the butt. I'm not even going to show them on the podcast. All of this question though, over. It does a valid count or not. I will have later for you an interesting question about one particular postcard and if it should count or not. Okay. So we will leave that to later. But don't let me forget, because I almost forgot. I think I can predict what your thing is. I think I can predict what you're going to ask me. Oh, yeah? Do you want to do that now? Do you want to try to predict? I'll try and predict it. Uh-huh. I'll give people listening a few seconds to think what they think it's going to be. I think someone asked if they could give you a postcard in person and put it into the box. That is correct. Yeah, that happened that. See? I'm not sad. I'm not as dumb as I look. Today I say that you were done. I wanted to see if you can guess it. This is not an implication that you're dumb. Yeah, there you go. So I'll let you think on that if that should count or not. My feeling. Is and I know I'm just a ball of contradiction in your eyes. No, it shouldn't count. Oh, that one you think. No way. Well, if you're going to be really simplistic about it, they're either trying to cheat the dead line or save money that other people had to pay. Because people had to buy stamps and buy postcards to take part in their sort of thinking. I know this isn't their actual reason. But the whole idea was we put, so I'm trying to kick the sort at the same time. We deliberately put some resistance in there, didn't we, so that people didn't cheat the system. And all these people that have taken the trouble to send us postcards over came that resistance and went to the postbox and all that sort of thing. And one person taking advantage of the fact that they know you or they saw you hasn't done that. So don't you think a certain kind of resistance is also following the rules appropriately, which you seem to just be willing to cast aside if you are able to through magic, divine the intention of the post-loading? No, no, because what I'm doing is doing it properly is a kind of resistance. Yeah, but people make mistakes. You know, people make mistakes and do we punish them for their mistakes? That's the question being, we're trying to answer here. If someone, with all the will in the world, wanted to take part and went to the post office and bought their postcard and forgot to write the numbers, do we punish them for that? Do they not get to be part of democracy because they accidentally made a mistake as opposed to your person who knew they were supposed to send it, but said can you put it in there for me anyway, because I won't make the deadline otherwise. So they knew they were trying to cheat. We have a nice, very solid, wood postcard. Oh, yeah. Actually made a wood from the North Carolina, clearly breaking the rules. With the mermaid on it. Clearly breaking the rules. What have they voted for? I try like a logon. I try like a logon needs all the help we can get. I try like a logon needs all the help we can get. And I will also grant that the unusual materials is vague enough to allow vote counting discretion, whereas put your numbers on there is not vague enough to allow vote counted discretion. Although discretion is still being shown sometimes. What can I say? I've just taken a big softy. Big, softy hard as nails. I think not. I'm showing my cushion side. Here's another unusual one for you. This one's made of metal from Dubai, nailing gear. Nice postcard. It's very nice. I like the, I was the currently for it. It's not the Burj Dubai anymore. It's the Burj Al Arab. Oh, Burj Khalifa. Burj Khalifa, yeah. Oh, yeah, it's got Burj Khalifa building on it. It's got lovely stamps. That's just a perfect storm of cool, hello, internetness. It's from someone called Peter, another vote for nailing gear. Now here's someone has sent in their ballot. And over where the votes should be, they have sticky taped. How is it that you get all of the ambiguous ones? It's like the postcards know to get to you to try to make their way through. This person has sticky taped a playing card over their votes. Which is actually very hard to remove. It's not like a postcard note. Invalid. I am going to count that as invalid. Oh, finally. But do you know what? What? If you look closely, they have actually sticky taped two playing cards there. And I am... Oh, I think I know what it is. I am wondering whether or not it is indeed the queen of spades and the jack of diamonds. But I will not find out now. That is going to be a mystery for another day. But I think you are right. I think your power is a prediction will prove valid yet again. That's pretty cool if they've done that. But that vote is not been counted because that is too much resistance for us to have to... For Brady. For Brady anyway. If it was the first one, maybe I would have done it. Yeah, exactly. I'm getting tired now. And now we are actually faced with a true scale of this thing and what time it is. And when is your wife coming home? Yeah, this is a... This is taking longer than I thought it would. Oh, this is really through me. I was trying to figure out what this person wrote to us. But it's actually a postcard to someone else. It is yet another piece of lost mail. Oh dear. Someone visiting Bonn has... It's addressed to Steve. You love from Mum. And it has ended up in the Halle internet ballot box. Oh, I feel really badly about that. That's terrible. Someone is missing a postcard from their Mum because of us. I tell you, well, I've got the correct address. I will get it to the proper address. Oh yeah? You know where that is? Yeah, but it's right near where the votes went. Great. You can explain when you hand deliver it. How you ended up with the postcard. I'll say make sure you listen and... Well, like, listen, Steve. We were running an election. I'm sorry, but... Your mother does still love you. Halle internet is also brought to you this week by Backblaze. You know Backblaze, they are the online backup experts. If you have a computer, a Mac or PC, Backblaze is just a required part of an operating computer. Because it will automatically, silently, stealthily, backup everything that's on your computer. So you don't have to worry about managing external disks or when was the last time you saved a copy of that all important project. Backblaze just has you covered automatically. But it's not just backup. With Backblaze, you can access your data anywhere. You can, while traveling, get access to some file that you left on your desktop that you didn't copy over to your phone or you didn't put in your cloud system, it's just automatically there with Backblaze, so you can always get it. Backblaze handles over 150 petabytes of people's data. It's quite a lot. They know what they're doing. At any time, you can restore just one of your files that got accidentally lost or if you've had a major disaster, they'll ship a USB hard drive to your door with everything on it. There's no add-ons, there's no gimmicks, there's no additional charges. It's just $5 per month per computer for unlimited, unthrottled backup. The holidays are coming up and let me tell you, if you are going to visit, say, your older family members, perhaps you're at less technical family members, when you're visiting them, just put Backblaze on their computers. It's the holiday gift that keeps giving all year round. I've definitely done this with my family. You go somewhere and you just make sure, yes, they have a computer. Backblaze is running. So even if something terrible happens to their machine, they haven't lost all of those photos that they've scanned in or whatever it is that they do. So don't put it off any longer. Go to backblaze.com slash hello internet to get a risk-free, no credit card required trial. Once again, that's backblaze.com slash hello internet. And thanks to Backblaze for supporting the show. Okay, great. We've had our little tea break. Yep. Before we start more sorting, maybe we should niggin these boxes up a little bit. Well, there's really one that we need to try to compact. Yeah, the nail and gearbox is close to overflowing. Make sure we don't lose any down-any-air conditioning vents. Right. This is hard to do, isn't it? This is actually much harder than ever thinking it was going to be. I thought it was like, oh, it's like playing cards, but of course it's not like playing cards because they're not all the same size. Yeah. Again, I'm having sympathy for the men and women in the little postal centre again now. Dealing with dozens upon dozens of these coming in every day. You should work out what the average is after this. On average, how many came in on a day? Man, can you imagine if we opened all these envelopes? Oh, if you mean if each ballot came in on a day. Yeah. That would have been... Oh, I don't know, it would be impossible. I mean, I think that it easily quintuple the time. Oh, yeah. At least. I'm not really supposed to be working off camera, Gray. It kind of ruins the effect. There's nowhere to go. This way I look like a magic person is doing something. It's like in Apollo, the Apollo moon missions, whenever one of the astronauts sort of went off camera and did something a bit off-piece, it was a bit... Oh, what are they doing? This isn't part of the mission plan. What's Gray doing off camera with all those ballots? Is he doing something exactly right? Oh, did he change ballots? It's a conspiracy theory. You've just given people their conspiracy theory moment. Whenever someone steps off camera, what are they doing? Who knows? Were there many off camera moments? I imagine that was playing down to the tens of seconds most of the time. Yeah, they were particularly in their early missions, where there was just one static camera. I mean, all of Apollo 12 was pretty much off camera because they fried the camera 10 seconds into the mission. So the TV footage of Apollo 12 is nonexistent because they ruined their camera. I didn't know this. Alan Bain accidentally pointed the camera at the sun and burned out the camera. They didn't have a back of camera, they didn't bring two. No, I guess they didn't. No. You guys cameras were expensive back then. Yeah. I mean, there was a camera on the lunar module. I don't know what that would have picked up. Still, that may have still picked up some stuff. The camera they used when they walked down the ladder, but the camera they went and put on the tripod, which was more important, was gone. I kind of can't believe that they don't have two. Well, wait was so important on those missions. Yeah, wait is so important, but if you lose the camera, I guess the problem is everything is vital, isn't it? Right. All right, so we've rearranged nailing gear there. We've compacted it. We've compacted it so we can fit more in. Let's get back to work here. This is very way too for nailing gears. So, Grae has this takes shape. What are you thinking? Is this going to go to like nailing gear clearly has a lead? Is this even going to go to preferences? Well, that's what I was wondering, just as we were coming back down, and I was trying to eyeball the different heights of the boxes before we compacted. I just found some more votes from our vote, Riga. And also like this one, which I think I've seen a few postcards from a discarded sum from, which is am I disqualified yet? I think there's someone else who's done a bunch that I've caught and put on the side. So you vote, Riga, I think we're catching some of yours at least. We catch everyone that we catch. So yeah, what are you saying? We look at our preferences. Yeah, we were just eyeballing the size of the various boxes. And I would say that I don't know if it's going to go to preferences. Eyeballing it, it just, it seemed within the visual margin of error that maybe we will, maybe we won't for a nail of gears. Wouldn't that be disappointing if it didn't go to, and you've got to stop calling it nailing gears. Yeah, it's nailing gear. It is nailing gear. Even you're getting the name wrong. You even wrote the name wrong. On our official pieces of paper here. Look at this one, Grace. Someone has sent in a postcard of the skyline of Denver, and they like that. They've drawn in the wrong, mighty black stuff. I also like that it's MBS brackets. We have a little abbreviation for it. Mighty black stuff. They voted for club and claw. It's club and claws. Yeah, I mean, even if nailing gear is going to win, win, win this, which is looking very possible. I just type a guy's to preferences. That is where the suspense is. Yes, that is without a doubt where the suspense is. I mean, like our evening will be much shorter if it doesn't go to preferences, but it will be more disappointing. So we will see. We have another postcard for Steve from someone else. Oh, that's two now for Steve. We've accidentally interpret it. We're getting all your mail, Steve. Sorry, Steve. We've got one from Dallas International Airport, where the airport itself is happy that it saw so much of me this summer. So it would say it's a postcard from Dallas Airport. No vote, though. Spoiled ballot. It seems like definitely the way to get our attention is to do the spoiled ballots, because you'd by definition paid more attention to it. Oh, I like this person style. They've made a customized postcard with icons of Hello Internet and all of our other YouTube channels and the Cortex podcast. They've made a little all of our various endeavors. Yeah. I noticed I am taking up a lot more videos. Yeah, I was going to say there's a lot of all of our various endeavors. It's my three entire projects and your 16 other projects. They voted for Nail and Gear and at the end they've written their Dear Brady more Keith please. I was enjoying Keith. Everybody loves Keith. Keith in our objectivity. Who doesn't love Keith? I don't know what my frauds do. Oh, now this person who's been a nuisance, this is one of the other nuisance people who sends this postcard. I finally figured out what their postcard means. Their postcard says only one of these is filled in according to the vote. So they've obviously sent in like 10 postcards. All of them are spoiled ballots except this one. This one follows the rules. So that's their legitimate vote. I'm almost tempted to throw away the shit so you're so capretches. I can see it in your eyes. No, you can have your vote. Ladies and gentlemen, do not have Brady run your election. With all due respect to Nail and Gear, I find myself voting against it now because it's become like the big monster. But this is always where it is. Humans love underdogs. That's the thing. Nail and Gear has become like Manchester United or something like that. Yeah. I think it's a piece to put it in your language. It's so popular. Nobody votes for it. That kind of thing. Another nice postcard of the Burj Khalifa with no votes on the back. I think this is going to go to preferences. Like I said, I think it's close. It's like within the visual margin of error. No, I think it's comfortably going to go to preferences. And I'll make another bold prediction. Bold. All right. This is a bold prediction. You get a confetti with your prediction. There are so few votes for H.I. logo that I think even after we distribute the H.I. logo preferences, we might need to go to another round. You may be right. You may be right about that. If we have two rounds, I mean, I don't know if I can imagine a more exciting evening than having two preferences rounds to distribute, I might not be able to handle that much excitement. We have another postcard from Marcy this time. We're getting many postcards for other people. No. I'm just up the mail. I'm seeing so unreliable. The mile is unreliable. That's the beauty of it, great. The randomness. Is it the beauty of it? No, maybe not. I think not. An empty box. I've emptied one of the boxes. There we go. This is a special work of art this one. This person here who has sent us a postcard has made a compilation postcard of various Liberian county flags combined with the Maryland flag. I believe that's the River Guy. River Guy County. Do you know how I told you this yet? No. I have made my own stamps. You can do this with Royal Mail. You can make your own stamps. I've made my own stamps for my Christmas cards this year. And for some postcards I'm sending from Number 5 that incorporates the River Guy County. Oh, that's where you got them from. I knew you had those stamps. Yeah. I didn't know. I wasn't sure if you actually were importing stamps from Liberia. Oh no, I also have bought some original ones, but I can't. I can't mail things with that. Right, of course. So I had to make my own that I could actually send through the post. Occasionally you come across a postcard that people have left in like a plastic wrapping. Yeah. Like for protection. For protection. Do you think they've done that just because they wanted to make sure it was safe or is that? Yeah, it's like they wanted to be mint conditions, you know, like comic books. Okay. And I'm saying that that's totally valid because you can read it right through the envelope. We didn't really cover that in the rules, did we? Well, that's just it, right? You know, for the next time we run a flag referendum. You know, when we're called into consult somewhere, we'll have, well, no even more things. It's specified with rules. I tell you what, Grave, you're serious about you and I getting workers. Flag referendum consultants. We better hope no one ever listens to this podcast or watches this video. Because I think that will end it right there. Yeah, this is establishing our bonafides. You reckon you don't think this makes us look a bit amateur? I think most people will look at it and think, oh boy, that looks like a lot of work. Those guys do a lot of work and then not watch the whole thing. If that's what they can do, just two of them. Imagine if we gave them the whole government power behind them. We're conveying here is the impression of impressiveness. Do you know what we should do when we finish? We should figure out how many people listen to Hello Internet? How many votes we got to find out what the voter turnout was like? And then compare it with voter turnout at the New Zealand flag referendum? See how we compare. The problem we would have with that, like I think that is very interesting. The problem that we would have with that is it is very hard to know how many people actually listen to the podcast. Like any numbers that we come up with, our population numbers will have a huge uncertainty on them. Right. And so I guess we can do like a bounded uncertainty. So now here is an interesting one, a genuinely interesting one. The person has written their top two choices, nailing gear and flaggy flag. But you can see something is written above it. But it is almost entirely obscured by the airmail notice of the stamp. I don't know. I don't know. What do you think about that? And what they've written above it is clearly it looks like the bottom of white cross. Yeah. But number one, I mean we'll put a picture of this in the show notes for people to have a look at. Yeah. If we don't cut this bit out, we'll cut this. And if we don't lose track of it, it's close. Yes. And I'll put a little sticky on it so I can... Oh yeah, no. In all of this, we'll totally be able to find that sticky later on. I'm guessing they put that sticker on there. They deliberately... Do you think they deliberately put that sticker on there? Should I peel the sticker back a bit and see what's under it? Can you peel the back? Should we steam it open? Ah, see, it's not going to come back. It's not going to come back. They're written four, three. Oh. This is an invalid ballot. I'm going to say that this is invalid. Oh, I've got two number ones. This is... Ah, okay. So this is again. This is someone just messing with us. So yes, underneath... Oh, we've been messed with. Underneath the airmail sticker. They have a second number one and other things out of order. But the airmail sticker covers it up. Nice try. Well, no, they won that one. No, we caught it. They win it if it gets through and we don't notice. Ah, that's true. See, this is invalid. Someone has personal information. It's written above the votes. It's invalid. I think that's valid. It's not valid. That's a valid vote. It is not a valid. I even know who that person is. I recognize their name from Twitter too. They're like a fan of the show. But it's an invalid vote. This is invalid. To me, that's a completely valid vote. It is invalid. Ah, you hate to put it in the naughty box. Because it's an invalid vote because we have rules. This is how society is held together. We have rules as invalid. You write something above the preference there, invalid. You're hard, man. I'm not hard. The rules are hard. They're more like guidelines. They were rules. The only one that is vaguely a guideline is the material one. We will be looking at these postcards, again, people, to have a closer look at some of the things you've done. Because some people have made really creative postcards. They've homemade them and they've put personal messages on them. We've looked at some of them already, but we'll look at more later. Yeah, honestly, I wonder, like, I should come back up again. We should, like, do some things again with this. Like, I do want to look at these in more detail. Today is not that day. Maybe now's a good time to tell people about my other little project I'm working on. Oh, yeah. What are you going to plug here, Brady? No, I'm plugging us. Oh, you're plugging us, OK. Yeah, yeah. Basically, I'm doing it, but I'm doing it with Grey in a way, except he's not doing any of the work. This is my favorite way of working with other people. We're going to create a separate little blog, sort of website. And hopefully, my plan at the moment, but don't hold me to it in case I change my mind. Every day, we're going to share in detail a postcard that has been sent in to the election. Look at the picture on the front. Look at the back. There might be a funny message. There might be a funny story. It might be from an interesting place. It might have a cool stamp. So I don't know exactly what the URL is going to be yet. There'll be a link in the show notes, and we'll talk about it again sometime. But have a look and keep an eye out for it, because if at the moment these postcards are just whizzing by and we're not talking about them in enough depth, but some of our favorite ones are going to end up there on this kind of little daily, daily website. Of course, I'm not suggesting people go to it every day, because that would be a real chore. But you could maybe dip in every few weeks and just have a look at what the latest ones are that have been added. Oh, you can go every day. I was going to say, they definitely should go every day. Yeah, with that to style. But I'm aiming to have new ones going on every day. But we'll see how it turns out. But basically, we don't want all this stuff just to go to waste. We want to showcase some of the great stuff you guys have sent in. Yeah, I definitely like the idea. We're talking about ways that more people can see some of these interesting things. And especially, you mentioned this website to me earlier today. And now, going through all of these votes, it feels even more important that we do something. We're pulling out some postcards. Yeah. Another vote for Gray Peak. You can't tell me what to do. We can't tell you what to do, but we can throw it in the naughty bin. You're in the naughty bin. In fact, we're saying that like it's a punishment, I bet people take loads of problems. I'm sure people are super excited to be in the naughty bin. Yeah. There's a few H.I. logos going in just now. Like it seems like we've moved into a different sort of time area where H.I. logo was a bit more popular. I was just thinking a similar thing, which is that I'm aware of how it feels like votes come in little clusters. Yeah. But of course, this is simply a side effect of just going through so many. Like it would be shocking if they didn't come in clusters. Okay. It's like coincidences. But it somehow feels when I get three in a row, like, oh, wow, that was an interesting little moment. And then I have to remind myself, no, of course it wasn't like you're always going to get three in a row, four in a row. Even five in a row here. It's just probability. It's just probability like all coincidences, Brady. I know. I know you know. Unless the coincidence fairies. Right. Exactly. Or you dreamt it. Right. Or you dreamt it. If you dream of coincidence, that's even better. That's like a dream for her. That's amazing. Yeah. Imagine if you dreamt. Who would have thought? Imagine if you dreamt you had a dream where a coincidence happens. And then you wake up and that same coincidence happens that day. That's amazing. That would be an amazing coincidence. It would, yeah. It would be the kind of thing that a person unknowledgeable of statistics might want to draw meaning from. I feel like Nail and Gears lead is being pegged back. But that's partly because the Nail and Gears bin has been more packed in. So it looks smaller. So it can be deceiving. There's still a lot to go. Yeah. Every time I think we're making progress, I kind of look at what's still to go. I think, wow, this is going to be a boring episode. Do you think this episode is even going to need editing, Greg? Do you think we could just leave this uncut? I think the best thing to do would do. You know, I'll say this. We're not doing that. No, no, listen, listen. Hear me out. Hear me out. We're going to do something with the edited version of this. But there's no reason on YouTube. We couldn't actually just upload the raw thing of us sorting and counting all of this. So people can see exactly how long it took. And then just think when people watch it all the way through, we will get dozens and dozens of pennies from the new YouTube Red system. Oh, yeah. This postcard's got an arse little piece of art. It's a common theme for people to draw a little caveman and robots. But someone here has done a really lovely little artistic depiction of us on the moon. With Audrey on the moon with us and the Nail and Gears flag. But do you recognize the planet? It's the little prince. No, I don't know what that is. You don't know the little prince. I think you would know it if I showed you the book. Okay. You would definitely know it if you saw it. Okay. I've gotten the marriage proposal. Grey, I love you. Will you marry me? Well, sorry. I'm already married. You're off the market. I love the market as it were. Sorry, miss. Sorry. Miss it says here, Scarlett Johansson of Hollywood, California. Too late. Too late. So I picked up this postcard and it felt a little funny. And the person's written hugs and kisses from Belgium. But they have made a little origami heart, which goes on the inside of this. It's like a little envelope that they put together. Oh, no. I like it. That's really pretty. A lot of postcards have come in with pictures of moose. Is that the plural of moose? Moose and moose and moose. Is it? Yeah. A lot of people have sent in moose and on their postcards. Obviously, I'm imagining. I know this one's from a... No way. Yeah, no way is the moose in kind of country. A lot of Canadians also and stuff has sent moose. This person here has sent in a picture of a moose looking at a nude lady in the water. Oh, my. A little bit racy. A naughty postcard, but not one for the naughty man. That's an H.I. logo too, so there you go. Who would have guessed? I've also noticed a few postcards that have got the... Is it the corer? Is that the leaf that you...? Yes, yes. People have sent in pictures of that. So, Washington DC, I think? No, that's Chicago. Oh, of course. Of course, of course, Chicago. You obviously haven't watched the Ted talk about flags. No, I have not watched the Ted talk about flags. We know. Someday. That is the star of that video. Someday. It's still too open a wound. That's your... That's your what could have been moment like scarlet your hands and thinking how she could have had you if she'd proposed earlier. Why do you always say your hands in? I don't think that's the way she said it. I don't know what's between the two because I don't know which is right. I've never heard anybody say Johansson except you. Isn't that kind of a Scandinavian way? There was a formula one driver who I really liked. I'm not saying that there aren't people who don't use the J as the water. Yes, I understand that. But wasn't scarlet Johansson born in America? I presume she was. We need to find a video of her saying her own name. Oh, yeah. No, I don't know because maybe she's changed it to be a Hollywood. I want to hear her parents say how they say their name. No, she gets to decide how her own name is pronounced. Yes, but if she changes it, she loses her right to tell me off for mispronouncing it. Ah, that's a difficult question. Because then you'll get people who will just demand that you pronounce their name in a completely unrelated way to the actual letters. It quite often happens in sport that for two or three years, all the British football commentators will call the foreign player by a certain name. And then eventually, after two or three years, the player will speak to someone in the media and say, by the way, guys, you've been getting my name wrong all these years. And overnight, they will change how they pronounce it. It's really interesting when that happens. But it's like the Steven Colbert thing. Does father pronounces it Colbert? Does he? Well, then I think if someone called him, I'd say, okay, fair mistake. A hard stopper attached to your postcard. So someone's actually sticky taped a hot stopper to their card. So, Mr. Ruthless Gray, are you going to make that invalid? That's fine. What rule does this break? Material or... It's not made out of a different material. There was no envelope that needed to open. They've written everything in the right. There's no rule that this breaks. So if someone had super glued a poo to their postcard, would you still count it? Of course not. Because we all have lines, Brady. We all have lines. And your line is somewhere between a hot stopper and a poo. I think that's correct. I think most people's lines are somewhere between those two. Yeah. I will not be using that hot stopper though. Okay, I appreciate that it was sent in. I will not be using it. That's not going into your personal collection. It's not going into my coffee is what's happening. All right. We've got another one. What do you think, Brady? All right. What's the problem here? The problem is they got one of the names technically wrong. Someone here has voted and their number one is Hello Internet logo instead of H.I. logo. And if you don't count that, you are a ruthless, ruthless, heartless bastard. Clearly we are going to count that. Clearly we are going to count that. We're going to count it because it's what H.I. stands for. And I think you could fairly call that the Hello Internet flag. And also quite frankly, I'm going to count it because once again, the H.I. logo box is so sad. I'll let that one slide. Okay. So we're swapping sides, but I'm going to count from the other side. Are we swapping sides? Okay. So you've got to reorient your brain, don't you, about where you're throwing things. Yes, it's going to mess you up. Do you want to swap back? No, no, I'm good. I'm adaptable. Oh, yeah. That's you, Mr. Adaptable. How does Niles? Posh is question. Adaptable as what's something adaptable? Do I think of like a hardware tool, like a multi-tool? Oh, a Swiss Army knife. Swiss Army knife. Of course. I am the Swiss Army knife. A vote count is. Adaptable as Swiss Army knives. Quite so catchy, but I'm awesome. It's not quite so catchy, but it works. So here's some controversial for Christmas. My wife didn't, by asking what I would like. And I have asked for a leather man. Oh, the great brand difference here. I've just been looking at them lately, and I think maybe it's time for me to move from Swiss Army knife to leather man. Any thoughts on this? Well, when we had our Swiss Army knife discussion a while back, the truth is in my brain I just grouped these things together, which of course is exactly what the Swiss Army presumably doesn't want you to do. But to me, Swiss Army is like the Kleenex. It's been brand-ized. And the only Swiss Army knives I have ever owned are actually leathermen. And I have always really liked my leather. They're completely different. That's like you can't compare leathermen to a Swiss Army knife. I believe I just have. Last, but certainly not least. This episode of Hello Internet is also brought to you by The Mighty Igloo. The Internet you will actually like. They use that slogan because if you know what an Internet is, if you have to use an Internet, you almost certainly hate your Internet. It's just some horrible thing from two decades ago at your company that's held together with duct tape. There's just a mess of files and folders everywhere that you're forced to use because your company makes you. Well, let me tell you, share the good word of Igloo with the IT department at your company. Or if you're at the IT department at your company listening to this right now, check out iglooatigloosoftware.com slash hello. Igloo allows you to share news, organize your files, coordinate calendars, and manage projects all in one place. And Igloo's latest upgrade, Viking revolves around documents and how you interact with them, gather feedback, and make changes. They've even added the ability to track who is red critical information to keep everyone on the same page. This is an Internet that is built to be an Internet. It's not just something that was cobbled together out of whatever was lying around 20 years ago. So if your company has a legacy Internet that looks like it was built in the 90s, you need to give Igloo a try or you need to bring Igloo to the attention of the IT department at your company. Go to igloosoftware.com slash hello and you will see the simplicity and good design that awaits you. Thanks to Igloo for supporting the show. I'm not sure if this is the actual way it works or not, but from this company that has many people have used to send us a postcard. We have a postcard that says, dear person, click here to write your message from the company that is sending these postcards. So I'd like to have them filled out the profile. That's what I'm wondering is, did they write this as a joke? Or did they just forget to actually flip fill in the other side? I think they forgot to fill in the other side. And it's come from Ottawa, Canada. Sorry, a person from Ottawa, Canada, but you've mucked up big time there. All right, here we go. This is something that you wanted to mention. We have a postcard that is marked received in damaged condition. But I think this is a person who actually did this on purpose. I think this is an intentionally comically spoiled ballot because it cuts off exactly. Part of it has been ripped off and it ripped off exactly the number one choice of their votes. I think this is intentionally spoiled. And you can see what they're 2345. Right. But they have also ripped through the stamp and they risked it not being posted by ripping through the stamp. You think it's a damaged one? So maybe it is legit. And we're actually, we have a really interesting question with this. Yeah. Because you, Mr. Intent, because they've written all five, you know what their first one was. Yeah. Right. Their first one was nailing gears, right? Because it doesn't need any help. Yep. Nailing gear. I mean, nailing gears, as it mentioned, they even have a flower for Brady. Oh, I think maybe this, I think maybe it's legitimate. Also, where do they get that damaged condition stamp? Well, it says received in damaged condition. Right. So this is that, uh, where is it? New York when it was passing through New York. They stamped it as received in damaged condition. I think this is still valid though. Do you know what this is unbelievable? Because I think we should make this invalid. Why do you think that should be invalid? You can derive what the first one is, right? There's no ambiguity about intent. I'll tell you what. I'll tell you why there is ambiguity about the intent. It's possible they didn't write a number one, or it's possible they were taking the Mickey Ados and they put number one greypeak. We don't know what they put as number one. You have convinced me. There's this spoiled ballot. You're going to, you're going to kick my butt in a minute because I know there's one coming later, which is it. Similar problem that I think we should count, but I'll mark it. People can look at a picture of this on the website. We're going to, we're not going to count this one. If they were evading voting for nailing gear, I don't think nailing gear needs the help anyway. But here's another one of these, these postcards from Taiwan that is like all three dimensional and you have to pull levers and things to open. Oh, and it's got, it's got stickers in it. Oh, stickers for you. It's a vote for nailing gear. So yeah, this postcard's weird people. It's sort of, it looks like a little cardboard thin, thin cardboard box with a little paper flap coming out the side. And I'll show people in the video camera now. But when you pull this little paper lever, all these extra bits of paper pop out with writing on them. I think that counts. Yeah. I guess that is just toying with the idea of what a postcard is and just barely slides under. Do you think people are going to see this kind of inconsistent attitude we were taking to what counts and get really upset at us? Or that would just be like, meh. They're only going to be upset at you because you're the one who's being inconsistent. You were inconsistent with that damaged one a minute ago. Oh, no, I just put one in the wrong one. I was inconsistent because I realized I was assuming a tent automatically, but you raised a totally valid point. So I am not being inconsistent. You are the one who does elections by feelings. Oh, we've got another misdirected postcard that was intended for ABU. How on earth is ended up with us? I don't know because the address is not even mildly similar to obviously the sorting people just saw a postcard and threw it in with us. I imagine that some sorting facility somewhere just got exhausted by postcards and just whatever. Just send them all on. Although when I do say that I'm the one who's being perfectly consistent and you are the one who is not, I'm still going to make you do the final vote on Does Hand Delivery Counts. I was thinking about it all the way up here and I cannot come to a conclusion about whether or not Hand Delivery Counts. If it had been Hand Delivered to the correct address, if it had been Hand Delivered to the address that we required everyone to send it to, if I would counter. Because it was given to you personally, I'm inclined to not counter. Even though I suspect it was handed to you by a friend of ours who we like. I still think we can't make exceptions just because it's our friend. I think you're right. I think you're right. Because it's actually inviolating two things in the end, right? It's violating the deadline and the delivery as well. Yeah. All right. decision made. Okay, great. This is great. This is one of my favorites. This is a postcard that has been completely mashed by the postal service. It's been ripped apart. It's come from California and the US Postal Service has put it in a special plastic bag. They put damaged evokes in. But damaged, damaged nail. You know where my brain is. But here we can clearly see all the votes. Like this is clearly a vote for Nail and Gear. We can see. Yeah, I'm in big US. There's no doubts here. I vote for Nail and Gear, but again, I'm in big US. Again, people who are only listening and not watching the video, we will also put some links for you to look at some of the stuff. But here we go. Here we have a damaged vote. Again, the plastic bag. This is from the British Royal Mail with our sincere apologies written on it. We are sorry that this item has reached you in this condition. And when you turn it around half the postcard is ripped in half. And it is impossible to tell what they voted for. You can tell they voted for flaggy flag over Nail and Gear and H.I. logo. But you don't know if there's anything above. Yeah, you can't tell there's anything above. This feels like a tragedy. It does. It does this vote. Someone sent it in. In good faith. They sent it from somewhere called Lieben. Is that a place or is it a comment? It says Lieben in Kiers. You can sort of see the front of the postcard there through the bag. Sad. That's a real tragedy that one. Yeah. That's just bad luck. That's our equivalent of the one that went in the air conditioning duct. Yeah. It just wasn't meant to be for that person. Tell you what they've got a really strong chance of ending up on my special website. Oh, here's a very special one because this comes from Gleineog in Adelaide, South Australia. And Gleineog is the suburb of Adelaiding which I was born. How was it? Yeah. Gleineog. Sounds very beautiful. The person here's written, Brady, I honestly looked for a postcard of the black stump, but alas, this one is just about 15 minutes from where I live. So they're kind of apologizing and as if I don't know where Gleineog is. Right, but they actually hit the bulls out of my eye. Yeah, exactly. I grew up in Gleineog, but I'm more fond of Gleineog than I am of the black stump. Who's one for you? 3D Apollo. Oh, it's a 3D of Buzz Aldrin on the moon. That's someone who's trying to catch your attention. We should have had this company that does postcards over the internet sponsor us. They're on a fair bit of business. There's a couple of them, but yeah, some of them have been used quite a lot. They've done well from us. Some of these are a bit rude. Just eyeballing it, it looks like flaggy flag is catching up to club and claws, which is our early second place contender. What would have been nice if we were organised and rich would have been to have each of these five buckets on a scale so we could watch the weight of them changing like a live count kind of mechanism. That would have been cool, wouldn't it? For the next referendum. Yeah, it would have been overkill, but I have to say there are in some ways far fewer intentionally spoiled ballots than I would have suspected. It's because people want their side gray. They want to be part of it. They're good people. Of course, as I say that I go through a run of like three intentionally spoiled ballots. Someone has done the background of my phone. Oh, that kind of black, grey triangle. Yeah, the black, grey triangles. It just makes me wonder how many we have missed as intentional things for the other person. I don't think you would have recognised that image as my phone background. Yeah, maybe not. I may have recognised that, but I'm sure I'm missing a lot of other in jokes. Speaking of words, here is you and the professor? Oh, yeah. Oh, no, hang on. You have stumbled over a very special postcard, grey. Oh, have I? So this postcard, which is a photo of me and the professor in the gold vault, which is just a postcard I've made to send from priority videos, is the postcard I sent to our postbox to test that the address worked. So this was like this is a test moment. And it just made it into the box. So this is the postcard that wasn't intended to be a vote. It was just to make sure the address worked. Right. Put it in the name of the... It's a spoiled ballot. It's a spoiled ballot, but... But, yeah. I'm going to let it slide. I'm going to let it slide. Would someone wrote gear and nail? All right. All right. Someone here is sent in a really, really huge postcard, all about the geology of Utah, which is a really interesting postcard. And there's got all this blank space on the back. And that's just really, really, one, flaggy flag. And then there's all this white space underneath. Oh, Utah? You are a beautiful state. You think flaggy flag seems to feel like it's strengthening. That's what I'm saying. It's much closer now between club and clubs and flaggy flag. Well, someone has sent in one of those cards that radio-hams use. You know, when they contact each other and send like a receipt to say, do you know about this? I know nothing about this. Like radio enthusiasts. When they go on and they go, hey, this is, you know, BN43Z here in Sarajevo, and they accidentally get to talk to someone in America, and they have like an interaction. They then swap details, and they send each other these special cards about when they had their interaction. And you collect these postcards from around the world, showing who you've spoken to and when. Oh, so it's like a calling card for you. Yeah, kind of like, yeah, I spoke. And do you know what? There is, I can't remember who it is, but he's like a king. He was like the king of Saudi Arabia or the king of some really rich state. And he had a hobby which was being a radio enthusiast. And sometimes to some normal Joe would talk to someone, you know, by code. And sometimes it would be by Morse code or just a really small interaction. And then when they swap to cards, they'd get their card. It would be from the king of this country. And they didn't realize they'd been speaking to this really important person. We have another postcard that came to us, which was not supposed to. And all of these make me feel bad because then I read this message about how. I'm so sorry we missed each other and we need to catch up soon. I want to hear back from you. And it's like, oh, it's been sitting in our postbox for a while. Maybe some of those marriage proposals to you have gone to other people's postboxes. And they think, and they don't realize it's a joke. And they're thinking, this poor guy called CGP great. He got a marriage proposal from someone he doesn't even know. Somehow I'm getting the feeling that most of the errors were in this direction. Here's another one of these interesting ones. This person I think has filled out that ballot correctly. It's become water stained so their numbering of their ballots has been washed away. Invalid. Completely valid. Invalid. Because we had the vote where someone put the numbers on the wrong spots. Remember? Yeah, but they did that on purpose. You don't, maybe this person did the same thing. You cannot assume, you cannot assume the order. Invalid. No question about it. Invalid. Should it even be a hesitation in valid content? It's really. I just put it into the box. You can go and find it if it means that much to you. I feel that the, what is it like, the common law of this election process is that the person holding the ballot makes the final decision about the ballots. It's a perfectly acceptable way to go. Oh, here's one for you. Again, I think this is a, I think this is a genuine mistake. Someone has made their number one flashy flag instead of flaggy flag. I mean, that could be an auto correct because it's been typed. Invalid. No. Invalid. You already counted one where they got the name wrong. Not like that though. They wrote hello internet logo. You know what they meant. I think you just get some sort of power trip from saying they're invalid. I do not. You're a big meanie. I think you get the big softies, you're problem. You're counting all of them. It feels like we're actually really coming down to the end here. Okay, this one, this person has been clever. They've sent in a postcard saying an invalid ballot with no votes saying, don't shred this. Think of the whales because their postcard is a picture of whales. The only thing stopping me shredding it is the lack of a shredder at the moment. And I kind of want to keep them off of posterity. Yeah, I was going to say, the lack of a shredder and your natural hoarding tendency. The only things that preventing these ballots involved are not being shredded. I am a hoarder and my wife is not and when she comes home and says, this is not what she's going to want to see. This is like when a parent's walk into the bedroom and the kids have got access to the chocolate and they've always had a mess everywhere. Yeah, it's all over their faces. I feel like I will be losing many points with your wife when she wants. I'm like, oh, you're a party to this? Yeah, I guess so. Well, at least two naughty kids with all this rubbish around us. It's really exciting now that the box is filled up so much and you've got a real sense of the proportions of the votes for each one. It's like, it's really coming, it's really come to life, hasn't it? Like the magnitude of it all and the proportions of it all. Another postcard to someone from someone who loves them. I think of the havoc we made of unintentionally wrecked us in people's lives. I know, I know the family feuds we've caused. I wanted it to be really close and I don't know, is it a landslide? What would be a landslide? Is it only a landslide if you win on foot? What would constitute a landslide? I feel like informally a landslide is a win by a pretty large margin. So if you don't win the first round, it can't be a landslide. So can only be a landslide if you win without the distribution of the votes. Without the distribution of votes. Okay. And even then, I would feel like you would have to be like 60% win. Oh no, look at birthday card. Dear Sarah, happy 21st birthday. Oh god. Love from Rachel. He's breaking my heart. I will be returning these postcards to eventually. Yeah, you're going to hand deliver them around town. No. I think you owe to these people. Or is it part of their story that they ended up here? Well, they will know unless you hand deliver it to them. I feel like the weight of the nail and gear once here is pressing down on the ones underneath enough to create more space. Yeah, we're going to get a black hole situation soon. On reflection, I wonder if someone would watch this in real time. Is that too boring a thing to upload? It is not the expectation that someone is watching it. It is the funny part of uploading it to me. Okay. Right, like that's the... It's like a performance piece. Yeah, right. It's like the joke of it. It's not that I'm expecting someone's actually watching us do the whole thing. It is the only way people will get to see their own vote go in though. Yeah, because otherwise if it's... If we're doing it sped up, so I think we definitely upload the whole thing with just us doing it. I think this wins the biggest postcard we've got so far. And of course it goes into your hands and you're... Yeah, there you go. You're just totally accepted. What you think that's not acceptable? I'm not saying that it's not acceptable. It just seems to me like, of course you get this one. Great. I'm putting it into your hand. Let's see where you put it now. You sort it. That's fine. You will add it. There's a couple more handfuls of these things. Yeah. It has a good thing to do because we're just about topping up the box. It very mildly. Don't think I'm getting carried away here, but I'm very mildly feeling the emotion I felt. Like I once ran a half marathon, which was a big deal for me. And like coming down like the final straight, you feel this emotion. And also when you... When at first time I went to Everest and you finally get back to the... Finally end of the track and you know you're back at the last hotel and you're going to get to go home soon. You get quite overcome by emotion. And I'm feeling a mild version of that at the moment, which has just been completely scuppered by this... This postcard from California of a naked man. This is what the internet is great at, right? The internet is for horsing around. Got to concentrate on these final steps growing, not making mistakes. This is when you get careless. It's like coming down the mountain. It's the dangerous time. Yeah. The place and see sets in. The finish lines inside. One false step. Looks like we're just going to fit all the nail and gear into one box, which is... Only thanks to your indigent compacting. I can not believe the number of misdirected pieces of nail. It's a bit worrying, isn't it? It really is. It's my last one. My last one comes from the University of Montana. And it is a vote for White Cross. The last one is mailed from the United Kingdom. What is it? Picture of the red room in the White House. And it is for nail and gear. All right. Here we go. The sort is complete. We have five boxes of votes in front of us. Plus the red naughty box with all the mishaps. Clearly, nail and gear is like the most fall, even with the clever compacting and packing. It is still by far the biggest. The nail and gear is the biggest winner. Each eye logo is the biggest loser. Flaggy flag and club and clubs need counting. Yeah. They're very close. And White Cross is the fourth place. So each eye logo looks like it's going to be the first eliminated. If that even comes to that. If it comes to that. Yeah. Yeah. We'll have to find out. It's time to count. Counting time. I've bought these cool little counters. All right. So we're going to sort of, I don't know, put them into the little groups of 10 and count them or something. Yeah. This might be one of these things that we realize very quickly that we don't know what we're doing. But our initial thought anyway is yet to try to batch them into 10 and on the clicker do 10 at a time. Okay. And we sort of do around half each and each sort of around the world of 10s and then combine our two numbers. All right. All right. All right. Well, you do your thing and I'll do my thing and then more. It's my first three. Lots of 10. So when you count them, do you hear a number in your head? Oh, don't make me think about that stuff now, man. It's hard enough. I just don't know how to count without hearing. I'm thinking about the podcast and I'm thinking about I'm counting numbers in my head. But do you hear it? I kind of do. It's a lot harder to talk to the year. But listen to this one, we're doing this. I mean, you realize I am I can't because I have to hear the number. Yeah. It's the most boring piece of podcasting ever created. Yes, it is. Like the sound of clicks intermittently space people. You're going to love it. Tell me these clickers weren't a good purchase. The best. I was foolishly thinking, oh, I'll use a tally app on my phone. But this is obviously a bazillion times better. Here's my first miscount one. Going for club and clubs in the wrong box. Oh, we found one in the wrong box. I'm amazed you noticed that. Are you not looking at the votes while you do this? Not very closely. Oh, the minute you told me to do it, I found one. A miscount. I found a flaggy flag in the nail and gearbox. And another one. One of us had a brain fade for a minute there. Do you think lots of people looking to watch the videos back and check our work? I bet they do. Someone will. I guarantee you, someone at some point will notice something we did wrong. I'll tell you one floor with the postcards. Because they're all different sizes and textures, it does make this part quite hard. I can imagine holding your ballot papers with a sign. It's a lot easier to count and sort. Yeah, it is surprisingly hard to manage the different sizes of them. It definitely makes it much trickier. Hot and sweaty work this. Oh, no. Just like all podcasting work, you always end up sweating. Do you sweat when you podcast? Do you not? No. I'm always just a sweaty, disgusting mess after the podcast. I always have to take a shower. So I counted 880. How many of you got gray? 930. 1,810 votes. It's a carry the one, the nine goes to a 10 goes to an 80. What the hell is... What is this? Why do you have a... Why is there a thing there? I just wrote that when I was carrying it. Okay. Yeah, that's fine. We're good. That's right, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. All right. So nail and gear. 1,810 votes. We might find some nail and gears in the other boxes. So that might slightly adjust, but we'll keep that ready. But that's the benchmark. So, gray and I've counted the nail and gears. Oh, gray. Oh. It fell apart of my hand. What do you want me to do? I've got a whole other new box here. Look at this. I want you to be more careful. You're not showing these postcards quite as much respect as I'd like. Look at you becoming Mr. Fussy Pants. I am. I'm upset about that. There you have it, brother. That's better. Going through them again, you start to see some really nice postcards to be missed the first. Yeah, there were a whole bunch that I wanted to stop and make a comment on, but no time. And I've had a couple of yours obviously spoiled balance, but that you still accepted. What have we got next? Probably club and clause. Club and clause and flaggy flag. I have some suspicions about how well we sorted them. Oh, OK. So I feel like it's good to pay extra close attention. Yeah, the very fact that they switched positions is suspicious to me. OK, so keep an eye out for wrong votes here. Yeah, either way. OK, don't forget to reset your counter. Yeah. Yeah, that's the sound of professionalism. That's what that is. Yep. You guys, you top one. All right. So what do you want me to do? You want me to fold them up? Just like put them in. Just keep them straight. Nice and neat. Yeah. OK, but then look. Put them in like, like, Oh, quickly. Just put them in here. Don't drop them in. Yeah. Let me get you the other story. Where's the other story? Something else we haven't discussed, Gray. Is how close does it have to be for a real recap? I was thinking the same thing. Because we might miss a three every now and again. We could be 30 votes out here or 60 votes out there. It is very possible that our margin of error is 100 plus or minus, right? Like with the counters and with all the regular counting. Yeah. So in theory, if we were doing an election and the vote was within like 200, I would think that would like on a proportionally sized election. That would be a recount kind of situation. Yep. But I have to go home at some point. 8, 9, 10. Again, round number. Brilliant. So that is club and clause counted. And I counted 360. How many did you count? 350. 710. That's a massive difference. Oh no. Is this going to go to preferences? Well, if you figure, this is almost half that, right? But club and clause and flaggy flag probably have about the same. And then plus the final two. It's going to be close. It's going to be close. All right. So just a reminder, nailing gear, 1,810. Club and clause, 710. Now we're going to have a look at flaggy flag. Flaggy flag. That's really, man. What do you mean what's with me? Put him in the letter. Just put him in the letter. I put him in the way I put him in. We got counting to do. The counting is the thing. Yeah, but we've got to arrange them afterwards. It doesn't end. It could be a recount. Yeah, it could be a recount. And if there was a recount, you'll be wishing you did it later. If there's a recount, I'll be coming up tomorrow. No, we'll bring it to post-loyer with you. That's a good moment. Are we getting divorced? Oh, no. Of course. You're getting divorced. This is interesting and it feels important, but it's a bit less fun. Can you expect everything to be fun? Well, that's kind of how I try to arrange life. So we've just finished flaggy flag. I'm adding 400. If you've got 400. 400. Exactly. Suspiciously, but truly, exactly 800 for flaggy flag. But while doing that, we found two incorrectly sorted votes for nailing gear. So nailing gear has gone up by a mere two, which we'll add to their tally, which makes a 1,812. And flaggy flag 800, which gives it second place, over club and clause, a further 90 back on 710. If we add together flaggy flag and club and clause, we come to 1,510, still 300 votes behind. If the other two candidates white cross and HILOGO surpass 300, we are going to go to preferences. If they don't surpass 300, nailing gear will win it. I think the interesting thing here as well is that flaggy flag and club and clause had some kind of time variance in the voters, because club and clause and flaggy flag switched places. Club and clause in the beginning really started out strong, and flaggy flag overtook it. And I don't know which way it was, which box is we count? Were we going backwards in time, forward in time? But there was some time variance in voter preference between those two. Something may have happened on Redo or something may have happened on Twitter that motivated voters or who knows? Who knows? Oh, we're missing one. We just found an extra vote for flaggy flag taking it up to 801, not 800. It's a neat for you. Reasonably neat. Not that neat. That's not neat. Oh my god, you thought that was neat. That's terrible, Gray. What are you? I hate love that you are Mr. Fussy British about this. I am. This is hilarious. You're like some kind of animal. We need white cross next. Where's white cross? This is H. I like that. White cross must be over here. This might not go to the back. I think it might not. This must go over 300 surely. I don't know. Man, it's going to come down to the wire though if it does. Time to count white cross. I'm getting distracted. I saw a reunion swamp head and stand, but it threw off my counts. There is a Jamaican swamp head. I don't remember. I'm not talking about that. This is not the time for joking. Don't make me think. I'll have someone say this is not the time for joking. That's exactly the time for joking. So we've finished the white cross. A bit quicker, obviously, with less votes. I have 160. I have 146. So that is a total of 306 for white cross. So we are going to prefer. We are going to prefer. If you combine flaggy flag, club and clause white cross, it actually surpasses Nail and Gear. We still haven't even counted the giant Lego. Or is it just full short? It's like too short, isn't it? No, I think it's a couple short. It's like, yeah, it's like literally too short, I think. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. But I think despite the unpopularity of H.I. logo, I think we have more than five votes for it. So just thank you, H.I. logo, for ensuring that we go to one round of preferences. So just to recap, Nail and Gear is out in front. But the next three, which are flaggy flag, club and clause and white cross, combined, actually still full, five short of Nail and Gear. But we have got the H.I. logo votes to count, which will put those bottom four combined above Nail and Gear. H.I. logo, let's count these ones up, Gray. Reset your counters. Yeah, yeah, got it. Oh, yeah, down. Pretty pretty. I think Gray is going a bit delirious on us here, people. It's been a long day. It has been a long day. So H.I. logo is countered. I had 80. I have 94. So 174 for H.I. logo. All right. So have you got your calculator on your phone? Yeah. Let's see how many total votes they were. Okay, you're going to add these together for me, Gray. Nail and Gear, 1,812. Flaggy flag, 801. Club and clause, 710. White cross, 306. H.I. logo, 174. 3,803 votes in total. Okay, now what percentage did Nail and Gear get? You do that divided by that. 1,812 divided by 3,803. 47.6%. Oh, the vote. Now in a first pass, the post election, it'll be game over. We would be finished. But the game is not over. The game is not over. We have one round of preferences to distribute and then to see where we are. But in the moment, I think we have been roped into moving a Christmas tree. Is that correct? I don't know if we have to move the Christmas tree yet, but we do need to stop recording for a second. So after a brief break in moving a Christmas tree, we have found we missed 1,812. It had fallen down a crack, so to speak. So that is added into the H.I. logo, Tally, which still keeps it firmly in last place. But it's 175 is the actual number and takes the overall number of votes to 3,800. And 4. By our reckoning, Nail and Gear has fallen 91 or 90 to 91 votes shy of having over 50% and being the winner. So now we take last place, H.I. logo and distribute preferences. Do you think everyone listening pop understands how this works or should we explain this or is this common knowledge? I think very briefly we can just say that what we are going to do is now look at the second choice of all of the ballots. Some of the votes I have noticed already people haven't listed a second choice. So if that's the case, that ballot is just discarded. It doesn't count any more in the election. And yeah, the question is if Nail and Gear can get 90 of the second preference votes of this batch, it wins. And if not, then we go to another round of preferences. Do you think people listening might be thinking, well, whoever voted for H.I. logo has gone from a loser to now being the most powerful voters of all. They seem to have all the power. Their second choice is going to decide the whole election. This is precisely how this is always misrepresented when you do elections. But yes, that's why it is called an instant runoff vote. Is that in theory, what this is simulating is doing an election multiple times over multiple stages where you say we are eliminating the last candidate. And now we're going to run the whole election again of the top four. But we're not going to do that. That's what instant runoff is just simulating. Is eliminating the worst person or the one with the fewest number of votes and acting as though the whole election is taking place again without that person there. Is it an accurate assumption that if we were to run it again with just the four candidates, Nail Gear, Flaggie Flare, Club and Cloth, White Cross, that all the people would vote the same way except the H.I. logo voters? I mean, in some sense, you can say you know for sure it wouldn't always happen precisely the same way because time is a lapping, right? And people can change their minds. So there is like a small amount of accuracy that you are losing for a vast gain of time. All right, so here are the H.I. votes. So for example, I'm taking one out and its second choice was Club and Cloth. So I'm putting going to put that in a little sub pile for Club and Cloth. And we'll do this for all the H.I. votes looking at their second preference. Nail and Gear is starting to get some of those all-important 90 that it desires. I hardly lot more reading this time right? Yeah, you have to think about it a bit more here, don't you? As you distribute them, you've got to... Nail and Gear is doing OK. It is getting a lot of the second preferences. This person hasn't put a second preference on their vote so that is sort of discarded in a way. What are you thinking, Grey? How's it looking? The truth is I'm having to focus a tremendous amount on looking at the second place votes. So I'm having a hard time thinking anything else. It seems broadly to be following the trend of the overall election, which is what I would expect. But we will have to wait until the final count to see for sure. I have to say this is my virgin preferential vote distribution either way. Hey, Fondue. It's very exciting. It's all everything I hoped it would be. But you never run an election like this in a school. Kids couldn't handle it. So I do the approval voting there. But yes, this is good. I'm kind of wishing it would go to another round. I don't know if it will, but you don't want it to ever end really. I don't, I don't. OK, Grey. So the preferences have been distributed. Everyone who voted for HILOGO, we've looked at their second choice and attributed them to the other flags. Correct. Now, first of all, in my hand at the moment are the votes of the people who voted for HILOGO, who didn't specify a second preference. Who wanted HILOGO or nothing. Alright, so bad luck to them. How many of theirs there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven? There's eight of them. Now, the next thing worth looking at is how many white cross people, white crosses in fourth place? How many of the HILOGO does have they picked up in preferences? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So plus ten, taking the white cross total up to 316. Now, club and clause was on 710 in third place, a good 91 votes behind flaggy flag. How many of the preference votes did they, did club and clause pick up to make up some ground? Did it do well? I felt like it was doing well, but let's put it. I've quickly there counted 31. What did you get? 13. We didn't split them for a look. No, not at all. It's a really thick car. Yeah, so there's an extra 44 votes for club and clause, taking club and clause up to 754. A flaggy flag, 801, over a thousand behind Nail and Gear. I think it's going to need a miracle here, but let's see. I had 21, grey, what did you have? 16. So there's another 37 for flaggy flag, taking it up to 838. How many preferences did Nail and Gear get? If it got more than 90, it's the winner. If it doesn't get more than 90, we will need to distribute the preferences of our fourth place holder, which is white cross. So we need to see, did Nail and Gear get that 90-ish it needs? Here we go. I got 31. 45. That's 76. So that takes the total for Nail and Gear up to 1,888. So the question is, is that more than half with the eliminated voters? Okay. So let's just quickly do some math to double check. So we need to now add up the total for Nail and Gear, flaggy flag, club and clause and white cross. And basically those eight people who's vote count for nothing now are going to be coming off the tally. So I will read you the totals for the four leading flag. Okay, go. Now many people will not be listening to the podcast anymore. Some people will have pins and notepads out and be following this like crazy. Nail and Gear, 1,888. Flaggy flag, 838. Club and clause 754. 754? White cross, 316. 316. The total valid ballots we've counted is 3,796. What you would need to win would be? You would need to win 1,898 ballots to win. So Nail and Gear is 10 short. Nail and Gear has not yet, after the first distribution of preferences, received for necessary majority. Nail and Gear is being the Zeno's paradox of this. The already drowned is going to get closer and closer maybe. So we need to distribute white cross. What do you sound disappointed? This is exciting. But flaggy flag, club and clause and white cross can't realistically come back from here, can they? They can if nobody votes for Nail and Gear's. We now have all of the white cross votes. This is all the people that put white cross as their first preference. Plus the H.I. logo people who have by default ended up voting for white cross. And we're going to start redistributing these. But as soon as Nail and Gear gets 10, we know that it wins. We know that it wins. It can't not win. It can not win. And you can get a train home. Exactly. I guess we start. We start with these, I guess, and grab a few. Let's keep the Nail and Gear one nice and nice. So we'll do them. Hello. So there we go. The first one I've pulled out goes to Nail and Gear. Nine more needed for Nail and Gear. And another one. Eight more needed. The first one for me. Seven more needed for me. And the next one for me. Six more. The other one's in the next one. Five. Five more needed for Nail and Gear. Club and clause. Oh, Club and clause. Club and clause making a late go. Flaggy flag. Flaggy flag. We're symmetrical here. Oh, Nail and Gear. Nail and Gear is. So how many of Nail and Gear got now? So what is eight? Three, four, five, six, seven. Nail and Gear needs three more. Out of gut. One more for Nail and Gear. I've got one more for Nail and Gear. I don't know if it's going to make it, man. Now hang on. Before this is interesting, this person here voted for white cross. Their second preference was H.I. logo. Which it can't go to. It cannot go to. Their third preference was Nail and Gear. And it goes to Nail and Gear. And Nail and Gear is one the election. Is that the tenth one? That's ten. That's ten. We only had to distribute 14 of white cross's votes for Nail and Gear to win. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Citizens of Hello Internet, you have your flag. The Nail and Gear.
==Episode List==
=External Links=
*Pictures of postcards
*Reddit Discussion
*Episode on YouTube
*Episode on HelloInternet.fm
==References==
Category:HelloInternetEpisode
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