H.I. No. 14: How Humans Work

"H.I. #14: How Humans Work" is the 14th episode of Hello Internet, released on June 10, 2014. The episode additionally has a section that was cut and uploaded to the podcast YouTube channel, entitled WWDC and Swift.
==Official Description==
Grey & Brady talking about Comic Sans, Shredders, Families, and a whole big mess of whatever. This episode also has a bit that was cut that you can watch on YouTube
==Show Notes==
*Comic Sans
*Comic Neue
*Comic Book Fonts
*Quadclops! Har! Har!
*Hobbit two-movie announcement
*Hobbit three-movie announcement
*Every picture is made of waves
*Skype live computer translations
*John Oliver Net Neutrality
*Humble
*Find out what these Amazon customers are talking about
*Your Family Tree Explained
*Brady Explains the Monty Hall problem
*Friends and Strangers Theorem
*Discussion on the reddit about passing on your name
==Other==
 Oh right, I have to talk. Oh, come on. How unprofessional. Oh, come on. You know what? Because we haven't really started, I'm gonna answer this thing. Oh. Hello. Hello. No, I have to listen to half a conversation. Trevor, I can't talk at the moment, mate. What time are you coming tomorrow? Kim, did he hang up or I lost his connection? Oh, who called back now? This is good. He's gone now anyway. He's gonna call back in two seconds. Now we have to wait. Now we have to wait. Since we last saw each other. Yes. Well, we saw each other in person last week. Yes, we did. We took you. You took me on a date. Did I take you on a date? I'm not sure. I guess I did by dinner. I did by dinner. You bought and we had wine. Yeah. I guess it was a date. But like since we've since the, since the, since the podcast has kind of, you know, really got going, it was the first time we've spent a long time together in person. And I thought it created quite an interesting dynamic because like obviously we talked about lots of stuff we would normally talk about and stuff. Stuff we wouldn't talk about in the podcast and whatnot. But there were a few times and I think we both acknowledged this that we would sort of start to talk about something or a topic would come up and we'd be thinking, oh, this would be, this would be quite a fun podcast chat, wouldn't it? Should we be keeping our power to dry? Or is this, you know, it was a bit strange in that respect? Yeah. Did you feel that? Yes. There was one topic in particular, which I think you're going to bring up shortly. Where we did, we did say, oh, let's not talk about this now. What's not? You totally put a lid on it. You said no way. I want to talk, I want to talk in the podcast about that. So I'll say what it was. I think I need the transcript. I don't think I totally put a lid on it. But it was, it was, it was a strange situation. And yes, I don't think I've ever been in a situation like that before where you realize, maybe we shouldn't talk about this thing now. We'll talk about it later on the internet. It was, I don't know, it was weird. It was very weird. I don't think that's a healthy thing for our friendship. It's a, it's a strange thing. But maybe here's my thought, maybe it's a good thing because we can, we'll end up talking about maybe more superficial stuff on the podcast sometimes. And then like you said, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you just, you wouldn't want to talk about on the podcast. So maybe it'll drive our in-person conversations to a whole new level of this relationship. Has that rashed clear up by the way? No, let me tell you. It's not irritating. Let me, let me tell you what I brought up that you wanted to talk about. Okay. And it's the issue of Comic Sans, the font. Now, I think it's fair to say I am, or I have been fairly airty Comic Sans, like I'm one of those people who thinks it's a bit of a naff font. Mm-hmm. But my position is softening. Mm-hmm. I've used it a few times in videos. And initially I was using it to kind of be bit of a troll or be a bit ironic or stir people up or flame or whatever the cool word is for when you upset people. So I've dropped it into a few videos just to upset people. But like in doing that, my position is changing a bit. And there've been a couple of recent videos where I've actually used it almost to function. I like, I've thought, I think Comic Sans actually might be the font just to do this with. Mm-hmm. And like after all these years and all this sort of anti-comic Sans sentiment, I feel like maybe it gets a harder time than it deserves. I don't really know what your position is on this font. Yeah, so I think Comic Sans for me is an interesting specific case of a broader kind of question that I've had about fonts for a long time. And it's, I don't understand what makes some fonts good and what makes some fonts terrible. And I guess this is also part of a broader question about just design in general. I've read a few books on graphic design or just design work. And I've been trying to find out why is it that something can look good or something can look terrible. And what I want are some rules about this. And I've read books that are supposedly filled with rules about what is good design, what is not good design, white space, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I've never find it satisfying. And I think it's particularly an interesting question with fonts because I've learned more about, or you know, really type faces, I guess. But I've learned more about the features of particular kinds of type faces. And I can pick out some things when a font has just gone terribly wrong or an assign when something has just gone terribly wrong. It's like, I will bring up the end of the example now which is, you know what, kerning is? Yes. Okay, so for listeners you might not be aware. Kerning has to do with the letter spacing. And because of the ways some letters are shaped, you can kind of slide them under each other when you put them on a sign so that it looks more visually pleasing if the letters can kind of, oh, not overlap, but they can be closer to each other. Then they would be if you were using a typewriter, for example. I'm actually, I'm looking at something on my screen right now and I can see, like an O and a W, like the O is rounded and if the font is arranged very nicely, the W can kind of edge over the O a little bit. And that looks like that. Once you tune into this, words that aren't current properly, it's very irritating because you can see it on store signs and things, the guy, you should move the letters closer together. If you make YouTube videos and do bad kerning, that is something also that you will soon find out about in the comment section. Oh yes, that's happened to me. And I think I've been lucky with that. But you've heard about people who play kerning or police or all over me. Yeah, it's something that I've done manually in a couple of places. I think in the header of some of my websites where it says CGP and it's CGP with full stops between the letters, I have manually curned it a couple of times so that the full stops, the periods, like slide under the P, for example, because it can look weird once you're aware of that, it's just too far out. So there's something like, there's things like kerning, there's a few other things with fonts. But I have a very hard time when people who are really into fonts talk about why some of them look, or this font looks great or that font looks great. And an example of this is Helvetica, which people always hold up as this amazing standard of such a perfect font. Yeah. And I've really tried to figure out what makes Helvetica good. And I don't know if I knew nothing about the history of Helvetica, would I be able to pick that out of a lineup of fonts and say, oh boy, this is clearly such a great font. I don't think I would be able to do that. And I think Comic Sans kind of suffers this reverse effect of that where people hate it disproportionately because other people hate it. Yeah, has it become fun to pick on like Justin Bieber or things like that? Has it become like almost the go-to guy for if you want to really kill a font? Yes, and I think there, it's an interesting choice because I think at big sizes, there are some things with Comic Sans that just, I do think look awkward, it's not a font that translates well to a gigantic sign. Yeah, there's a child's nursery around the corner from where I live, and that's got this huge sign in Comic Sans and I have issues with it. Yes, yes. And so I think it's identifiable and then because it looks worse at larger sizes, it's an effect where people can really tune into it. But something is big and then obviously Comic Sans and you think, oh, it looks terrible. But at relatively small sizes, I think it's pretty good. And the thing about the Comic Sans that I want to bring up, when you mentioned it was, so I went to college university now, I don't know, I guess about, oh, it's so long ago. 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I don't want to do the counting. More than a decade ago. Yes, it makes me feel old. And I remember turning in papers that I had set in Comic Sans. Comic Sans about 12 point font. So relatively small on the page. All the text was written in that, like an essay or something. Yeah, so I would do sociology, you'd have to write an essay about something or other. And I would write it up and I would set it in Comic Sans. Wow. And the reason I did that is because this is first of all, it's not pre-internet, but I think it was pre- the existence of this Comic Sans hate. And I remember just looking through the fonts and I was trying to find something that I thought was relatively readable, that was in Times New Roman. And I remember from myself, I used to have this pattern where I would write on the computer and I would print it out, I would make corrections by hand and then transcribe it back in. And I remember just thinking that at, you know, it's smaller size as Comic Sans was kind of nicely legible. It was easy to read. Yeah. And the thing that makes me wonder about the piling on of Comic Sans was I never had a single professor make any comments about this throughout the entirety of my college career. Right? No one ever commented. They just put an F on it and gave it straight back. Yeah. No one ever commented on it. It was just completely unremarked upon that this was a font choice. I don't think there's almost anybody who could do that now and it would be unremarked upon. And I feel like that experience of mine is a tiny anecdotal data point for Comic Sans has become hated because it is hated, not because of anything in Trinsic about the font itself. Anyway, so as soon as you mentioned the Comic Sans things, I thought back to, I remember handing in stuff in Comic Sans that I would be mortified, mortified to do that now. But it just, it didn't even cross my mind, you know, a decade plus a go. I think the usefulness I'm finding with it is sometimes it's quite useful if you want to say something on screen in text that you want to be quite human and have quite quite like a human personality voice without using one of those, you know, rubbish fonts that's supposed to look like it was handwritten, which is just a bit, a bit too naff. But it's kind of got a personality to it. It's a bit like this isn't official voice. This isn't official filmmaker, scientist voice. This is just a little human voice I want to give you for a second. And I wonder, is that because of the shape of the font and the nature of the font? Or is it because it now has such a personality and a place in culture that it's almost taken on personality? And it's almost got like, it's almost like you're getting, you're getting something for free with comic sounds. All this baggage it has actually can be quite helpful. It almost, it almost is a character now this, this typeface. In some way, does that make any sense at all? Is that just a bit weird? No, no, no, no, no, you're talking about. There are definitely times that you want more informal fonts. Yeah. In my own videos, for example, there are three primary fonts that I use. And I have a big thick serif font that I use in most of my videos for the titles or the words on the screen. I have a relatively bold sans serif font that depending on the, it's going to sound crazy. But some of my videos it feels like, this is more of a sans serif kind of topic, which is, I don't know why that is. But some of the videos they clearly feel like, no, no, no, this is not for serifs. I need a sans serif. He's getting too close. I'm switching to sans serif. Yes, yes. But I have a third font that I spent a lot of time trying to pick, which I almost always use for the little stick figures talking or thinking. And that, that's not going to be times new Roman, someone's internal thoughts. It is a handwritten looking font because it conveys something completely different. What is that? Because that kind of does look a bit comic-sansy. Yeah, I was trying to pick something. I don't remember the name off the time I had, but there's a website, oh god, I think it's called Comic Book Fonts, something like that. Is that the name of it? Let me look it up. Yeah, comicbookfonds.com. They have their website. They have just a ton, a ton of, from my perspective, very good looking, quasi handwritten fonts. And they also have just a lot of really great themed fonts. Everyone's in a while I go there if I'm looking for a font for a particular kind of thing. But yes, I know I spent a lot of time trying to find that particular little font, too. Because you definitely want different feelings for different things. The other thing I just wanted to mention is, where, how long was it? Is it called? Yes, okay. So I saw this recently, I think I'm right at, maybe it was on the hack videos, I don't remember. But someone has developed a font that they call Comic New. And it is a sort of a refined version of Comic Sans. And I think it actually looks really good. The website goes through and shows how they've changed a little bit of the way the letter strokes of Comic Sans, look, they've smoothed it a little bit, but still kept it looking handwritten-y. And I have to say, I think, man, this looks great. It looks very much like Comic Sans, but just a lot nicer. As though the theoretical person who wrote Comic Sans was just concentrating really hard when they wrote each of these different letters. So I could totally see under certain circumstances that they were using Comic New, if it felt right, if it felt like that was the kind of thing to do it for. Actually, I'll send it to you. Let me see what you think of this. You can get my initial reaction, as I see it, for the first time. Yeah, I approve. You approve of Comic New? Yeah, I do. It's nice. So if you scroll down, they show the letters being simplified a little bit, but also the whole website is written in Comic New, in all the paragraph text. And I think it looks like a really good handwritten font. But you approve. My first impression is a positive one. We will see what the others think. Yes, we will hear. I'm sure very soon what the internet thinks about this. I'm mostly wondering how much more time we can possibly spend talking about fonts. I think no more time. This episode of Hello Internet has been sponsored by audible.com, leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment. You can listen to audio books whenever and wherever you want, thanks to them. Now, Greg and I love these audible ads because it's a chance to tell you about some of our favorite books. But today for something different, I'm going to give you a recommendation that has come from a listener. Let me tell you why. It's a chap named Adam, and he tweeted the other day, saying that he just heard the word freebooting used in an audio book. Now, you can imagine this caused me a great deal of excitement. I immediately tweeted back and asked him what the book was. And apparently, it was The Jungle by Uptown Sinclair. I don't actually know what the book's about, but Adam says it's very good. But what I do know is it has the word freebooting in it. So if you want to hear someone saying that magic word that isn't me and isn't Gray, why don't you go for The Jungle by Uptown Sinclair? Now, as you probably know by now, if you sign on for Audible's 30-day trial, you can download a free audio book. I've now told you what book to get. Why don't you give it a go? Go to audible.com slash hello internet. Don't forget the slash hello internet because that's how they know you came from us. Thanks so much to audible.com for again supporting us and our podcast. And thanks to Adam for his recommendation. Back to the show. In the last episode, we talked about originality. Oh, yes, yes. I think you wanted to follow up from that. Yes, there's a little follow up item that I want to bring up on this. So do you remember we mentioned as an example of how people are an original. If you make a comment on Twitter, people often respond back to you with the same joke very quickly. Yeah. So this happened to me. In reverse, Destin, he of smarter every day, the owl tamer, the manly man. But by the way, Destin said that he would have dealt with the owl exactly the same way I did. I knew he weren't going to not let that one. I wasn't going to bring it up, but you brought him up, so there you go. Anyway, he was on Twitter, was he? Destin made a little comment on Twitter saying something like he just realized that he is a by-clops, as opposed to a cyclops. And I saw him make this little comment on Twitter. And I replied, and I said, oh, does that mean the people who wear glasses are quadclopses or four eyes? Very good. Ha, ha, ha, right. And I wrote that fact to him. And I honestly thought, wait a minute, because this was shortly after we just put up the podcast. Yeah. And it entered my mind and I thought, no, I think this is exactly the kind of joke that other people, this is not original to me. This is just the first thought that came. Pretty much any glasses wear is going to make that joke. I went back and I looked and sure enough, I was not the first to say this to Destin. I'm sure he's still getting tweets from people saying the quadclops thing. And I just thought it was funny. Did you quietly delete it and pretend it didn't happen or did you sort of let your shaggy? I figured, you know what? What's done is done. I'll leave that up there. Me and Kopa. Yeah, this is my just embarrassing in quotation marks, joke that was really just a thought came into my head and I replied immediately to Destin. I felt kind of dumb about it. But anyway, I just thought that I thought, just to show that it happens to the best of us, you know what you don't mean to. But this kind of thing just happens all the time. Have you calmed down since your little hobbit tie ride? Well, I mean, I'm not sure if I was, was I angry? I guess maybe I was angry. You weren't angry, but there was a flicker of emotion from behind those robotic quadclops eyes of yours. Yes, I felt resigned and disappointed maybe. But now you sounded more than just disappointed. You weren't like I was disappointed with this film. Yes, thanks. You had things to say. Well, I had many more things to say, but somebody cut me off before I was even really warmed up. Did I tell you off? Well, I was quite enjoying it. If you go back and listen, you will hear that I was talking about something that was occurring. Oh, that's right. I was talking about the opening, the sort of second opening scene of the movie with Bill Boa. And you said something like, it sounds like you could talk about this for a long time. But let's try to move the conversation to a general disappointment in the movie because I could have done a blow by blow throughout that whole thing. But you maybe rightly cut me off. I don't think it was right. I think a lot of people have requested that blow blow blow since maybe that could be it. Hello, Internet, after hours at some point. Yeah. All right. But there were two things I just wanted to follow up with that I thought were interesting. I got into a discussion with a couple people on the Reddit. And it was a question of the movies being two movies or three movies. And it was interesting to see that it was originally announced as two movies. Yeah. And then at some point in the production cycle, Peter Jackson has this Facebook posting where he's happy to announce that it is now going to be three movies. He's accountants are happy to announce. Yes. Well, this is why I would really wonder how happy he was about that and how much he was involved in this decision because one of the things I didn't mention from last time, but that I found really interesting is that it's the same writing team who did the Lord of the Rings. And they, and the one point I wanted to make listening to myself argue about the Hobbit movie from last time. As I kept mentioning all these times about how it's different from the book, it's different from the book, which was interesting to hear me say because it comes across as though I wanted to stick to the book very accurately. And that is never my opinion with movies that are made from books. Movies are such a different thing. It has to be wildly changed because they're just such different media. And it can be death for a movie to stick closely to the book. And one of the things that I thought was really great about the Lord of the Rings was that they did make all kinds of changes. They moved stuff around in the timeline. They added a few scenes. They cut a whole bunch of stuff. And I thought that that was done just really well. So I want to make it clear that my complaint is not, does not stem from the fact that it was different from the books. The Lord of the Rings movies are very different from the books. But they're done really, really well. It's just that the Hobbit movies, when it's different, and it also goes poorly, then it just irritates you more. But I just want to be able to. It hangs you out to drive it more when you've made a change and made it worse by making the change. Yes. And I was thinking about it a lot. And with that two movies to three movies announcement, and I thought this moment here was really the kiss of death. Because with the Lord of the Rings, there was way too much to film, way too much. And so what they had to do was cut down what could have been 16 hours if you just filmed it as it happens in the book and compress it. And then the exact reverse process has to happen with the Hobbit of expanding and stretching. And I'm sure that is why the same director, the same writing team, the same everybody can be involved in two very similar projects. And one of them, at least in my opinion, came out great. And one of them is objectively a boring train rack. They've gone from ruthless cutters to shameless pedders. Yes. Yes. When you're adding stuff, it's not really the same. But I do see that even with my own scripts, I'm really aware that cutting it almost always makes it better. And I mean, you're an editor for your own videos. I'm sure you must see the same thing as well. Like you have as a creator this desire to keep stuff in that you like or to have it longer, but it's almost always. There's conflict. There's always that conflict that you think everything is so interesting. But in your heart of hearts, cutting it more is probably for the best. So which is why I don't cut my stuff enough. But if I do spend a long time on something, it invariably gets shorter and shorter and shorter because when I go back with a fresh set of eyes the next day, I will always cut it. Actually, how long? I don't even know. This, how long does it typical? Let's say I just watched one of your videos today with Phil Moriarty, the one about everything is waves and randomness. So that video was, I think, it was about 10 minutes long. Yeah, it was about nine minutes something. How long is a conversation like that when you record it for the first time? What does it start as to get down to 10 minutes? I would say that that was in the order of, feels pretty concise these days on most subjects. So I would say that was in the order of 20 to 25 maybe. Everyone's different. Someone like Martin Pollukoff in the chemistry videos is almost like 15 minutes becomes 10 minutes. Phil might be 20 becomes 10. But there are other people who will talk for 30 or 40 minutes. But yeah, I would say that was around. That was in the order of 20. So I bet halved it. Interesting. Do you watch Game of Thrones? I do not watch Game of Thrones. Oh, that conversation went well then. I guess I try, I don't know. I try to read the books. I've not read the books, but I'm told by my much, much better half who has just finished them all. All the ones that have been written so far. She loves them, but they're pretty long. Yes, they're pretty long. I don't know. Aside from the Lord of the Rings, I have almost never found myself able to get into any kind of fantasy genre book. So there's something about them that my brain is just, I am very bored. And I think they all suffer from this huge vocabulary problem. It's almost every one of them. It's, okay, here's a map. And here's a whole bunch of kingdoms you've never heard of. I believe characters. Yeah, and races of people and all of this. And that is to me, is almost always such a barrier to get into fantasy. The TV show is cracking, man. It's really good. I hear people that it's good. I don't know why. I just, for some reason it hasn't crossed my threshold for something to watch, but I've got series one here as a box set. So I'll even give it to you as hard copy. Okay, that's just what I want. That's great. Now, if I'm going to watch it, I'll watch it online. Is this not... I was trying to save your money. Because you would never let download it illegally or anything. So I was trying to save your money and lend you my DVDs. Although, what can you play DVD on these days? Well, actually, that's a good... I'm not sure in our house we have anything that can play a DVD. My new Mac Pro. Yeah, there's no, there's no DVD player on the side of my Mac Pro. Maybe I'll just hand right a summary on a piece of parchment and then come and act to out for you. Now we need to go. Please don't do that. No, that would be terrible. Although, actually, wait, it's on HBO, isn't it? I don't know. Can you even buy HBO stuff online? I'm always hearing people complain. This is why I was offering you the DVDs. But then I have to, but I have to buy a DVD player now. This is a good help. I'll lend you a DVD player. I only use mine to watch the DVDs. Okay, but I don't have a TV to hook a DVD player up to. Now, you can have to download it. It's the best app. It's top-tracked. It's top in my house. I don't watch it stuff. You put your stuff. I'm just trying to be nice. I do, I appreciate this sentiment. I'm just trying to get objects into your house. I know that's what you're trying to do. I know that's what you're trying to do. What's this about? Skype live translations. Oh, just as a follow-up to the language stuff. Oh, language. Yes, I favor to. I just today got an enormously long email. I keep getting emails from people still about the language thing. Always arguing with points that I didn't make as well. It's my fun thing. The number of emails that I get from people who tell me language lessons are really important because they grew up in a country that didn't speak English. And they learned English and they wouldn't be able to write an email to me now if they hadn't. So there's never the argument that I'm making people. I'm perfectly on board with English language taught in non-English language speaking countries, but as always, this makes everybody even angrier when I say that. But still, I get emails anyway. They're saying, I could never have written this big long email for you to ignore. Yeah, that's the good. Yes, that's the good. I have to say, someone did write an email to me today. Today was, oh, god, it was just the worst. I was just doing email all day long. But someone sent an email and it was one of these emails that I could see on my screen. Just there's a little scroll bar saying that it's a quarter of the whole thing. It's someone's writing this thing. And I see it at the top. Oh, it's about languages. And all right, I just caught this little line about. I would never have been able to write to you if I hadn't learned English. And yes, just delete, you know, okay, fine, whatever it's gone. But I have to say, the link that I have in here for us to just mention is as follow up is Skype did a demonstration. Now, I was always wait until you see the actual thing, but the demonstration looked really impressive. Of them doing live translation between two people using Skype video chat. One was an English speaker and one was a German speaker. And so they would take turns talking to each other. And I have obviously I can't evaluate the quality of the German translation, but what the German woman was saying came across as reasonable English to the listener on this end. And it looked really impressive. And how sort of, and it was right, like it was up to the second, or was it like kind of like when you see footage from like the United Nations and everyone's got the earpieces and you hear some guy droning on in the background, you know, a few words behind. And you kind of, no, it was okay. So it was not real time in the sense of speaking over the German talker. They still had to alternate. Of course, it was like one person said something, they wait and any other person said it. But it was fast enough that there wasn't three seconds of silence when the person stopped speaking. Basically, as soon as they stopped talking, it said whatever they said in the appropriate language. I remember this reminds me of a link I sent you about a month ago that we never got around to talking about in the podcast, I think. And it was, the BBC, I think, was in all this trouble because people were complaining about the quality of the live captioning, you know, they were, because obviously a lot of shows on BBC are live captioned by, I assume, I don't know if it's, it used to be sort of stenographer type people. I don't know if it's become automated now or not. But anyway, people were complaining, there were mistakes, and you know, the silly mistakes that happen where a word gets mistranslated into something silly or nonsensical. And part of me thought, well, okay, let's get it right, guys. But another part of me thought, what are you complaining about? This is incredible that you've even got this, this that this exists. Like, sure, there's a few mistakes, but can you even, I can't believe it's even possible that we can do this. And people are complaining about a couple of wrong words. Well, Brady, as you know very well, people like to complain. Yes. Yeah. Everyone has their pay for goods. Yes, this is like, I think, you know, you are in a high and mighty place to be looking down upon the people complaining about transcription errors in their live captions, Mr. Oh, I can hear the clicks and it makes me weep in my car. And it's just, you know, it's good to say that my miss quoting thing is catching on it. You're using it back at me now. Yes, yes, that's right. So, so Mr. I think no one should be taught languages even and no one should be able to speak English. There was another article we've got here on the notes as well. I think I spotted this one and sent it to you. This was a BBC News article about some report showing that language learning slows brain aging. So yet another excellent reason that we should all be learning other languages. I still disagree with this because I've seen a bunch of stuff like this talking about things that came across before was about language, language learning delaying beyond set of Alzheimer's, for example. And there's no argument that that is the case. But the interesting thing is that it is nothing special about language. It has everything to do with learning something new. And this is where you'll see interesting articles talking about people doing Sudoku or crossword puzzles and that's highly correlated with delayed onset of Alzheimer's or just forgetfulness in general. But the interesting thing when I've dug around in that a little bit is that it has much more to do with the people who do crossword puzzles are generally learning new stuff in other areas of their life as well. And that's really the key thing for kind of keeping your brain young and healthy is to continue to learn new things. So that's my main complaint with articles like this is, yes, language learning slow is brain aging. You could do that with anything. I'm sure, I'm absolutely sure he could do the same thing with programming languages, right? Teaching people to add a program a computer. I'm sure that would show the exact same kind of result. So it's a question of, that's not an argument in favor of learning languages in particular. That's an argument in favor of learning in general. There are many benefits to it. So I'm still, I'm not convinced by this. Not convinced at all. All right. Did your best, I guess. Cool mate. Speaking of words and rightness and wrongness, I am going to try to not bring up the ongoing turf war between you and I. The thing is, the thing is, you're trying to act all noble here that you're trying not to bring it up. The view jacking versus free booting thing. However, I noticed you pulled view jacking first then. Yes. However, I am not bringing this up on the internet. I am just using the word that I think is better. And then you always chime in with your remarks about how we should know what you're doing. You know, when you do something about you, I don't think I've ever tweeted you to correct you and say, oh, you should call this this view jacking instead. Well, I don't use it. But anyway, I, you know exactly what you do. I do not. You know what you do. And there's a debate to be had and I have many things to say about the problem with the term view jacking. But I respect, I respect that you have, I respect that you are turncoat. And turncoat. And after building me up and helping me with free booting, anyway, it's all good fun. And I love the conversation. But anyway, I think it's time for us to put that behind us and just let nature run its course. What are you typing? Are you tweeting more stuff a bit of you jacking? No, I am not. I'm not. You're up to something. I could hear your fingers up to a DV set. I am tweeting at the moment, actually. Of course, my keyboard, I swear. I knew you would do it. I was completely listening to your conversation about free booting. It was very interesting. Thank you. I just love it when I don't. I just realized I was trying to find a link earlier, and I was unsuccessfully able to find it. And so now I'm going to see if Twitter can find a for me for a discussion later on. But I know I swear. Did you want to keep talking about the free booting thing? It's really interesting. No, I didn't want to talk about it in the first place. I think you did. You were the one who brought it up. Yeah, well, what I did want to talk about, I think you just saw. What I did want to talk about was, net neutrality. Oh, yeah. Because this is the term that there is no replacement for, as yet. And I've been racking my brains. And I, it's amazing, actually, as a little side note, it's, and it only occurred to me last night while I was thinking about this particular issue. How little time I now spend just having ideas? It used to be like my thing. And I'm just so busy now. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can you go back to it? Having ideas was your thing? Can you elaborate on that? Well, that used to be the thing I thought I was quite good at. And people would tell me I was good at it. We're just coming up with all these new ideas and creative things. And I feel like I don't do it as much anymore. Because I just have to produce so much stuff to feed my earlier creations that I don't sit and just have new thoughts enough. I need to do it more. That was just something I thought. It's, it's happens in life, doesn't it? You know, you're really creative and have ideas. And then you start working. Oh, wouldn't it be a good idea to do a video about every element on the periodic table and do it like this and make it look like this. But then you have to go and make the thing. That takes a lot of time. Anyway, I gave myself a bit of free time. And I thought about replacements for the term net neutrality. OK. And having just built myself up for having ideas and been creative. I was going to say, this is your thing. Yeah, I can't wait to hear. Yeah, I failed. This would be so. I failed. Obviously, it's not my thing anymore. Because I didn't do very well. But I did have some thoughts. And I wanted to kind of throw them out there to you and to others and do a bit of a, you know, Google sit on the bean bag, brainstorm, everyone talk when you're holding the beach bowl type thing. And see if you see if you like any of them. And I'll just tell you some of the things I was thinking about. Let's let's let's go. And when I want to hear these great ideas. Could you possibly sound less exerted? No. Is it even possible that you could say more bored by this? This is all in your mind. If it was possible, you'd be editing this out as I said it. No, actually, you can run any finish. No, we're waiting for the live editing for a plane crash corner. That's the point I would ask. I'm not even giving you the pleasure of editing a plane crash corner anymore. But you know, you have got to be kidding me. You have been doing nothing but complaining to me about the lack of plane crash corner. And I'm already for plane crash corner this time. And now you're not going to do it. I can't let that go. Because you just cut it out again. No, I like to do it every time. No, well, I, well, first of all, I only cut it out once. And I think that was because it was incredibly boring. It was, it was boring. You could agree with it. Yeah. It was just inhumanly boring. But it was only boring because you didn't go with it. No, it was, it required. It was participation. And I was like showing you things. It was you to respond and you were just like, you were showing me boring things. You were showing me boring things. Anyway, I cut that out because it was, it was just no one could have sat through that. OK. And then the second episode we didn't have plane crash corner, you yourself said, oh, let's not do plane crash corner. And I said fine. And I did it and I said, I'll talk about it. And I mentioned how it's your mum's favorite section on the show and everything. And you cut that out. I did cut it out because if we weren't going to do it, what are we going to do? We're going to have a five minute conversation about how we're not going to do something. No, this is, we were talking about editing earlier today. I made the editorial decision. We don't need to talk about the thing that we're not going to do. Oh, right. It goes so ruthlessly with Hello Internet, without one hour 40 show. No, terrible. No, terrible. But I'm already, I'm already for plane crash corner. I'm going to be waiting. I'm going to be waiting. And I'm going to leave whether or not you do it, I'm going to leave this in so that the internet can understand what's going on here. All right. In the meantime, before we get to plane crash corner, which will be very exciting, why don't you tell me you're exciting net neutrality names? All right. We are friends, everyone. I know some people get a bit upset when they hear a slight joking around like this. And they think we're having a fart. So we should just tell them that we are friends. Yeah, we are. And if we do have a fight, I will just buy you dinner again. Yeah. Although you bought dinner and you're top-jent for doing that. And then we went back to the hotel I was staying at. And I said, and I said, let's just have another drink at the bar because we're having a good chat. And how extortionate were the prices of that bar? Those two drinks cost nearly the price of dinner. I don't remember because you paid for it. That hotel was a rip off. And they wanted to charge 15 quid for Wi-Fi when it had 3G. He was still not letting that go on. I think you're just delaying because you don't want to tell everybody your net neutrality news. I'm trying to. I know. I cannot possibly survive the build up. And I'm trying to defuse the build up a little bit. I know you are, but it's not going to work. I thought I'd done well defusing it. And now you're building it up again. Can you just sort of let it quietly just see its way back into the conversation? So anyway, I was happy to think about net neutrality in a few different words for it. And I know you want me to use that as an edit point. Did you jump into that way? No. Jump into that way, but I'm not going to do it. That was not the intention. So I was thinking about things like queue jumping and leapfrogging, things like that, because that's part of what I was. And I've written down all these. And I was thinking of there have been lots of data discrimination, which is one that a lot of people have already raised is quite good. And I was thinking of that words that involve segregation or data damning, because a lot of it came to rivers and water and stuff like that. And I've written all these things. I'm not going to go through them all now, because I can't now. I did think about pay lanes and cash lanes. And also cash for comment was always a really popular controversy in the UK when it emerged that politicians. You've heard of cash for comment? I have not heard of cash for comment. I'm getting mixed up. It was in Australia that cash for comment caused a big controversy. This was when radio presenters were taking the slide payments to talk about products, not like in an advert way that we do, but in a kind of a slide, slide way. And it caused all this controversy. This cash for comment. So I was thinking like, you know, you could have some dollars for data type thing. And I had all these rubbish ideas, but there were a few that I did like. The first one that I didn't mind, I liked the sound of, although it has got its problems, was split streaming? No, it's terrible. OK. Terrible. Thumbs down. Tell me why it's terrible. I don't even know what is being split. I don't understand. The stream of data. Split streaming? Yeah. I don't know. It sounds like there's twice as much data coming into my house if it's split streamed. Interesting. OK. Slow flow. No, no, that's also awful. What about, unfortunately, this one's kind of already has another use, but I quite liked it. Narrow banding. That's the best. That's the best. But it's still... Todd, isn't it? It is very hard. I think that what we saw in the Reddit was most people... I think the highest up-footed alternative was the data just did a discrimination. Drain discrimination, and there's all her quality in that. But another thing I quite liked, I was thinking... I don't know much about medical terms, but I was thinking about sporting terms. And I, what about sandbagging? Because that's what's happening here. It's sandbagging. I don't know what sandbagging is. Is that good? Does that give it... does that give it hope? I mean, sound... Sandbagging sounds bad? Sandbagging. Yeah, and all that stuff. Sandbagging... I mean, sand... I don't know what the origins from. Is it from car racing, where they would put bags of sand in the car to hide its true performance? And then on race day, you take out the bags of sand and your car's lighter, and, oh, wow, that car's much faster than I realised. But it happens a lot in other games and sport and things like that, where players pretend to not be as good as they are for the reasons of their ratings, like in chess, for example, you would lose chess games at times that don't matter to get a lower rating. And then you kind of blitz everyone later on, taking advantage of your lower ranking. And that's kind of what they're doing with data here. They're sandbagging, they're weighing down, slowing down, certain data. And it has a kind of negative connotation to it. And it's also quite a fun term, so sandbagging. That's the best of the bunch. Mm. Yeah. I've still got some work to do there, haven't I? Yes, yes. Brady, idea machine man, has more ideas to come up with, I think, for that one. Yeah. I think split streaming and narrow-bending are cool words. The problem with split streaming for me is it... It actually sounds too cool. It sounds like a good thing. Like, oh, wow. Yeah. I could... There's my initial reaction to it as well, if it's... It sounds good. I don't know quite why, but that definitely sounds like it's good. Streams are fast. I don't know. It sounds like it's good. Narrow-bending, I think. Yeah, that's the context. After that huge buildup on your part, I have to say I'm quite... Well, I tried to dial it down a bit, but I wasn't trying to say, like I was this idea machine, what I was trying to talk about was how, when we become busy people, we have less time for ideas, which was kind of my point, that kind of I failed to make, miserably, before I then failed to. Do you think if you had more time, you would have come up with better ideas? I don't think this is a time issue. I mean, if we gave you an eight-hour workday and we paid you what you would have... You're lost earnings for that time, and we gave you eight straight hours to come up with a better name. I'm not convinced that you could. I wouldn't plan on that. I reckon I would. Really? Yeah. Because I'd go for... You're very confident, man. I'd go for a swim. I'm not saying I'd come up with a good enough idea, and I'm certainly going to come up with an idea that you would have been. You're just saying, if I paid you for eight hours of work, you certainly would think about it real hard. No, I'm saying I would come up with better ones than those. I wouldn't come up with one that you're pleased with, because you will only be pleased with one that you come up with. That is not true at all. That is an unjust remark. It is unjust, because you didn't come up with you, Jacking, so... I did not. And you're pushing that barrow. I'm going to get a word. Yep. Fair enough. A final quick thing, I would be remiss if I did not mention this thing that a hundred people at least must have emailed and tweeted me, which is the John Oliver's video on Net New Trailer. Oh, yes, yes. Of course. A lot of people sent that to us. Yes. And it was excellent. Yes, it was very good. And his alternate term was cable company f**kery, unless his suggestion for Net New Trailer because he too covered in his video, the difficulty and the boringness of the term Net New Trailer. So I will put that in the show notes. Although I have a hard time imagining that anybody listening to the show has not already seen that clip, which was done... It was done very well. It was done. It was a really good... It was really good. Yeah. So anyway, that was a... Do you know what? Another one for the Net New Trailerty? Brady Flow. What? Because do you know that Brady in some context means slow. So that Brady Cardier is a slow heartbeat. And I was thinking, well, I can't have all the glory. It can't be called Brady Flow, also because I don't want my name attached to something. Rubbish. What about grey data? Because then we could have black data, which is stuff that isn't allowed to come through anyway. White data, white listed data, which is the stuff that's all premium and paid for and gets the golden ticket. And then you've got grey data, which is stuff that gets slowed down and has this dreary life getting through the pipes and won't come to the house. I know what you're trying to do here, but I think that's also a terrible suggestion. It's tough. Because even what you just said there, white listing, black listing, and grey listing are already words. And they don't have anything to do with speed. And the same thing with white hat, black hat, grey hat hackers. I think this... Trying to connect the color with the slowness, I think, is not so good. Whereas... Yeah. It obviously has lots of connotations with being in the middle, which I think works for me because I think most of my opinions are quite reasonable and quite in the middle. Unlike yourself who's taking nothing but extreme positions on everything all the time. So... Do you think? Oh, yeah. Nothing but incredibly extreme positions. I'm not a very extreme person. No, you're not. You're sometimes frustratingly non-extreme. Sometimes I want you to be more extreme in your thoughts. But you're always... You're always Mr. reasonable, oh, I can see both sides of the issue. That's you. Do you agree? Uh... Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I do. I do see. I think there is more to every story than people realize. I think the world and life is extremely complex. And we make a lot of judgments and decisions and our views are not very well informed. So I'm reluctant to have a really, really solid position on lots of things because I just know I don't know all the information. It's funny who you say that because I would agree with everything you said, but sometimes I will still end up with very extreme positions anyway. Yeah, well, I mean, you do have to take positions and stay. You can't just be flopping in the wind on everything. But yeah, that's why I kind of sometimes I'm quite mild is because I'm like, well, I don't know. I don't know the whole story. No one does. Who am I to make it? Who am I to decide? Well... Let's talk about shredders. Ah, shredders, okay. I see this on the notes. What is it? What is it that you want to talk about with shredders? When did this come up? I was... You were shredding something? Yeah, so I think you... I was in the middle of shredding a tragic pile of documents. Yeah, that's right. You message me instead of I'm in the middle of shredding all these documents. And I was like, oh, I've never even owned a shredder. And you were like, you couldn't believe that. You were quite surprised, I thought. Ah, yes, I was... I was surprised. I was disbelieving that you never owned a shredder. This is a... I mean, your dad is a tax attorney or something, isn't he, so? Yeah, he is... My father is both a lawyer and a tax attorney. So you would have got... So what does that tax attorney's... Let's try that again. My father is both a lawyer and a tax attorney. Right. So you grew up with shredders. Yes, my dad has this in his office in North Carolina. He has this big borderline industrial shredder for documents. But I mean, as, of course, as a lawyer, he's dealing with pieces of paper that have just very private information on them, people's social security numbers and income estimates and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So he needs a real industrial shredder to deal with getting rid of that kind of stuff. And I guess he always instilled in me the value of shredding in documents with any personal information. My dad instilled in me the value of shredding documents. Yes. I think... Well, I've taken my own spin on this, which is that... I think what you were making fun of me over Insta Messenger was that I was telling you that I just shred every piece of paper. Every piece of paper that I'm getting rid of, it just goes in the shredder. And that is not out of paranoia. What that is is reducing cognitive load so that I never make a decision about, oh, is this a shred-worthy piece of paper or not? All paper is shred-worthy. That's just the way it works. That's just the rule. And I... I like doing that. Like I have pre-decided and gotten rid of a thousand decisions over the course of my lifetime with just making this the rule. All paper is shredded. It doesn't even matter if it's just the envelope that something came in. It all goes in the shredder. I swear so much you'd do some psychological study of you. You would be an absolute gold mine. Does that not sound reasonable to you though? I think that sounds really reasonable. Yeah, but it sounds so ridiculously reasonable. It sounds so reasonable that it doesn't sound human. Like it's crazy. I don't understand what you even mean by ridiculously reasonable. It's like too rational. It's just rationalized today. But do you hear your words? It can't be too rational. If something was too rational, you are describing something that must be irrational, which can't be rational then. I just think I am being rational. I think you are a rational A rational. I think that doesn't make any sense. To shred everything so that you don't have to make a decision about whether to shred things or not. I don't see why that's so funny. I mean, it makes sense. Like I said, it makes sense. But it's just kind of a big... Have you gotten a shredder? Are you going to join me on this or what? No, I haven't got a shredder. And I probably... Didn't you say you had some big pile of talking with that you had to shred that you're just... I guess there's some corner of your mausoleum reserved for pieces of paper that you're never going to shred that you're just keeping? I actually don't know where those bits of paper went. I think I'm... Oh, even better. Even better. When did those sensitive pieces of paper go? I know not. They're just somewhere. I don't... I don't think I've ever heard you as upset at me as when you found out that I have a little notebook full of passwords. Oh, God. No, don't even... Don't even bring it up. No, we... Oh, no. No. Oh, God. I'm not even sure we can have a conversation about this now. I feel like I need to prepare for this. I mean... I bet you keep all yours on an electronic device or something, though. Yeah. Where when, which is completely impervious? It's not... At least someone has to break into my house and physically take it to get my passwords. And the sort of people who break into houses and smash windows, other sort of people who are more likely to do a poo on your bed than hack into your computer, whereas the sort of people who are going to get your passwords out of your phone in some clever way, are the exact sort of people who want to steal passwords because they want to cybercrime you. I think having your passwords written on a piece of paper in your house is safer than having them on your phone. Oh, well, here's the thing. I'll actually... If I can calm down for a moment. I will actually agree that having... I mean, you hide this, I hope, somewhere in your house. It's not just... You don't have a book that has written on the front cover passwords to all my important things and you leave it next to the computer, right? Somewhere else? Oh. All that information you just said is the case, no. Oh, God. But so I will agree that writing passwords down is not necessarily the worst thing that you can possibly do. But it's also just an issue of... That's just as really clunky. It seems like it's just a very... Because I know you are a person who has at the very least a large number of Google accounts to deal with. Oh, dude, I have so many passwords. It's ridiculous. Yeah. So, what we need to do, what we need to do is we need to get one password on as a sponsor for the show and then we can do... We can do double duty where I can yell at you for a while about what you should do. And then we can have one password sponsor, sponsor the show. So we'll do that at some point, if we can. But anyway, we need to get back to the thing that we started with. You want it to bring up the shredders. So why aren't you buying one? Why aren't you doing this? Can I buy you a shredder? Would you accept a shredder into your house? You're trying to give me some DVD player that I don't want. Meanwhile, you desperately need a shredder. Can I help you with that? I think I would quite like it. I think I would quite like the noise and the... And how they would look and what they would do. Yeah, I'll have a shredder. It's my birthday in a couple of weeks. Is it? I will get you a shredder for you both. You have to get one that does cross cutting. That's the way to go. Crosscut. Why is that? You don't want just the lengthwise cuts. I like those length cuts, though. That's like in the movies. Yeah, but the point is not to make it like it's in the movies. The point is to shred the document. You can even get better ones that basically powderize the piece of paper that just grind it up into dust. That's really high. The thing about the long stripes, though, is you have got an out. Like if you shred something, you won't supposed to shred. You could do like they do in the movies and like sticky tape that back together and... Which I have always thought looks like it would be really cool. Yeah, that's the scenario you want to optimize for. How can I undo this if I shredded the wrong document? It's always good to have an undo. Yes, I guess. Your whole life is just so different from mine. Do they look nice, though? I don't want it to be a nice object. I imagine you found a nice looking one. Well, this is... I have to get a new one from my new office. I have a little tiny one at the moment. Have you got it there, Neyu? Yeah, you want a picture of my shredder? No, no. I want to hear it. This is like a podcast. Oh, you want to... Yeah, shred something. Well, I don't have very much paper. Hold on, let me see if I can find something. Why am I not surprised? I was using a bunch of tax documents that I'm dealing with today. That's fun. I wish I could shred these. When all my tax woes are over, we should talk about how much I hate taxes. Okay, and then I'll talk to you about mortgage companies. Yes, and then that will be the best episode ever. Yeah. Yeah. How are we going to advertise that one? Here, too, too. Talking about tax and mortgage. Yeah, that's now like a first world middle-aged dude's problem. Yeah, but not even interesting ones. Yeah, not even interesting ones. Okay, I'm not sure how close I can bring the shredder to the microphone, but I'll... I found a piece of paper to shred. I'll be really cool. I don't know how this goes. I'm just going to take my headphones off for a second. Yeah. I did that work for you. Could you hear that? That is nice, man. I haven't even seen it, and you've sold me on the idea. Good, good. I'm glad we're going to get this sorted. You'll be living a more secure life with the shredder. And it's just fun. It is fun to just shred a whole pile of papers. I was going to talk to you about my technology woes. Have we got time? Well, first of all, we have to fit in the plane crash corner. I'm not doing plane crash corner, I tell you. Okay. All right. I'm boycoding at this week. You're boycoding. Okay, don't put this on me, internet. I'm sorry, Mrs. Gray. I'm sorry, Mrs. Gray. I know you like it. That's Gray's mum, not Gray's wife. Mrs. Gray is a fan of plane crash corner, which makes me so happy. Yes, she is. Yeah. Okay, but no, but you're going to make my mother sad because you're not doing plane crash corner. That's fine. Thank you to everyone who keeps sending me links to every single plane incident that happens. I actually am grateful for them too. Every little two-seater that crashes into some mountain and Argentina, I find that within minutes now. Oh, boy. I'm so ambience. I'm really, I'm really on top. I'm sorry. I was still looking for a plane crash corner. I got to start. Oh, you want to start by your secure, your computer problems? I don't know. I'll tell you what, I will give you a Brady's paper cut. Okay. Because thank you. Thank goodness. Okay. I do like paper cuts. Brady's paper cut for this episode that you may or may not hear depending on how brutal graze with that size he uses to edit this podcast. Hardly, hardly. Is going to be use of the word humble or humbling when people are not being humble or humbled in any way. What do you mean? Like weirdo, Yankevic. I'm 100 million times more humble than thou art for kind of thing. It's kind of like that. I don't think there's anything wrong with blowing your own trumpet from time to time. But goodness knows we'll do enough stupid things and make enough mistakes and have enough failures that when something goes right, it's okay to tell people and to feel okay about yourself. But I think this term of being humbled, and I've noticed it a lot in sport lately, a lot of sportsmen using it, which is what put it in my head. Oh, you mean the act of someone being humbled? Yeah. Okay. Either the language has been mangled or I have just misunderstood it for all these years and you're about to set me straight. But I don't see how someone's saying, I walked into the stadium and 100,000 people were screaming, Brady Harron, you are amazing, you are brilliant. And then I went on to the field and I scored nine goals. And all the cheerleaders loved me and thought I was brilliant and every man wanted to be me. Leave me trophies and medals and I was named the best player on the ground and I have to tell you, Gray, I was humbled by the whole experience. Do people use the word that way? That's crazy. Yes. Yes. How is it humbling? Like when some, when really good things are happening and people are telling you you're awesome, you know, you know, well, I don't know, maybe they're wrong or maybe they're right. But to say you're humbled by it. That's the opposite of humbled. That's what I think. Yeah, I hear it all the time. People saying, you know, oh, this, this amazing thing happened to me and everyone told me I was brilliant. I can't tell you how humbling it was or people get up and win the Nobel Prize and get a standing ovation at the first thing I say is I am truly humbled today by this, you know, to be given this award. How is it humbling? That's, you're not, you're not being humbled or humbled. Like, you can, I'm not saying you're not a humble person and maybe all those people screaming your name and that adulation isn't something you want. But I just don't understand this context of saying I was humbled. Yeah, the makes us, I just looked it up here with humbled in the verb form to lower indignity or importance. Yes. Or with regard to sports to decisively defeat. Yeah. Which is not, not what those things are. That's a different context. If you know, your team wins 10 nail, you say, like, we humbled them. But that does get used to, that's the proper use of it. Yes, but either of those is nothing like everybody telling me how awesome I am is really humbling. I could, I see examples of it all the time where people want to make a small or a large, you know, they want to, they want to talk about something positive and they dress it with this word. I think it gets misused and I, well, I'm glad you agree because I thought you were going to tell me, I know, Brady, you're misunderstanding the word humbled in this context. So I don't, I mean, I haven't come across the most famous use of it recently where it was used properly was actually Rupert Murdoch when he went before that parliamentary inquiry into all the phone hacking scandals that happened in the UK and the MPs called him up before parliament and he had to answer all these questions. And he started off with his famous statement saying, I've never been, you know, this is the most humbling day of my life or I've, I've never been more humbled or something like that. Fair enough, you know, he was there with his court with his parents down and he was about to get a shellacking on TV. He was being humbled. But that's the word means. Yeah. But other people like the most, another recent example, the one that made me think of it was Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United Footballer who just retired after this glittering career and deserves lots of accolades. And then he got all this herbations and then he said he was humbled by it. How is it? How do you possibly have a stadium full of people applauding you and telling you your great and feel humbled? I just don't get it. I'm trying to, I'm trying to imagine, this is what the pause was, I'm trying to imagine standing in a stadium, having hundreds of people or thousands of people tell you how awesome you are, the cheering you. I can see that that's an emotional experience. I'm trying to imagine what is the word to correctly describe that because I can, I can imagine that you might feel weirdly small in a moment like that in the center of a stadium with all these people around you. But that's still, it's still different from humbled. I don't know, I'm trying to think of a better way to maybe describe it. I'm open to being told I'm wrong about this because I don't think you are. It is so often misused, I'm beginning to think I'm wrong. Well, this is the problem, this is the problem with language as we've discussed. Just words slide away from whatever their meanings are, but it is weird when words sometimes end up taking on the opposite of their older meaning. Hello, Internet. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website portfolio or online store. Squarespace has been around for 10 years and they're continually improving their platform with new features, new designs, and even better support. They have beautiful designs for you to start with and they have a ton of style options so you can create a unique website for you or your business. And every design automatically includes a mobile experience that matches the overall style of your website so your content looks great on every device every time. And Squarespace is easy to use with simple drag and drop tools, but if you need help, Squarespace has an amazing support team that I've personally used many times that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 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That's awful. A link to this Amazon video. Did you see this pre-announcing some products? No. Okay, let me see if I can find this for you. Really quick Amazon. I'm watching it now. Okay, get the idea. So it's sort of a TZ video of people going, wow, this is amazing, but they're not sharing us what the actual product is. Okay, for you, for the listener, that's exactly it. It's all these shots of people saying, boy, this thing is great. It is framed that they're all looking straight down to the thing that is off camera. They're holding something in their hands. It looks like like a... Well, you have let us have something go. You know they're holding something in their hands, but I saw this on Twitter and somebody described it where once you hear this, you think, oh yeah, this video looks like it's a video of people consecutively discovering that they have genitals. And it's just exactly these people looking down at me all go, oh wow, or this is fun. Someone's going to make a mashup of that that's going to be wholly inappropriate. I know, I know. But anyway, so this video just keeps going on like that. It's a minute, half long of nothing but people describing this thing off camera and how amazing it is. Yeah, and the headline on the video is find out what these Amazon customers are talking about. Do they? Do they print late? Mysterious. And I look at something like that and I always think that is just the worst possible business strategy you could ever have. I think Apple is 100% right to just keep their mouth shut about stuff until it's available. Because what happens when people see a video like that is they in their minds imagine whatever this thing is to be exactly what they wanted to be. And so whenever it is, I mean, Amazon could announce that they've cured cancer and people would be really disappointed. Because they want to be like, cool tablet. That's exactly it. I thought I was going to be a personal robot. I know, all I got was a cure for cancer, thumbs down. I don't understand. I mean, marketing people must know this, right? That people are going to start assuming that it's exactly the thing that they want. And so you're just guaranteeing disappointments. But it's also important in marketing to build up hype and expectation. Like they don't make Hollywood movies in secret and then say, by the way, come to the cinema tomorrow because Batman's really. I don't know. I think something like that's a little bit different because you're trying to get everybody in a place on a particular day. I don't like products products that are for sale are not quite that same kind of thing. And also, it's they don't market it as we have a really great movie. We're not going to tell you what it is, but just show up on the day. Yeah. Right. Because how furious would people be? No matter what, no matter what the movie is. If it's a Hobbit movie. Yeah, it's exactly like, oh, great. Another Hobbit movie. I'm not sure what I want it. No wonder they didn't tell me what it was. Yeah. But they could do that. They could have a secret announcement. Oh, there's a movie we're not going to tell anybody it is show up on this day. And it could be another Firefly movie. And some people would be hugely excited, but most people would be really angry. So it's a little bit different. But so I approve of Apple's decision with this. And it's funny because I see even on a really small scale, I don't often talk about the videos that I haven't done because I see the same phenomenon. Or I will mention, oh, I didn't do this thing. For example, I mentioned in one of my videos that I didn't do a video on Sethers of Catan. And I still get comments from people all the time saying, oh, you really need to make that video on Sethers of Catan. But it's the same phenomenon that those people are imagining in their mind a theoretical great video. And that's not what I would necessarily have made. People say, oh, I would love to hear you talk about the Hobbit for hours. Would you really, or you're just imagining a really great version of that? So I think this is this Amazon video, I think to me, is a perfect example of don't pre-announce stuff companies just keep it to yourself. And then, and then have some announcements saying, here's the thing that we have and you can buy it today. I think that Apple method is just much, much better. So I approve of their secrecy. I think it's a good thing to do. Don't build up stuff. Just have it available and also make good stuff and people will be quite happy with it. So before you leave us to become an iOS developer, you are still making videos. Yes, I am still making videos. And it is again one of those rare moments. You have put a video out. Yes, yes. The counter has reset. Well, only reset briefly because you released something 10 minutes after I put up a video. Did you actually get a screenshot of it on zero or did that never? No, I didn't. I have a thing you were holding. You have some video that you were holding back now all the time I assume to release immediately afterward. That doesn't work because it works on the upload time. It was pure coincidence that. And I'm sure you're just going to have some video that you're going to wait to upload until after I upload something. I mean, not that amount. You release videos practically hourly anyway. So I have to be quick if I want to get a screenshot of the Brady versus Gray counter at zero for a Brady one for me. I guess it doesn't really matter. Your latest video is about for those who haven't seen it. And if you listen to how that internet and you're a fan of CGP Gray, I'm a bit disappointed you haven't watched the video yet. But just for those who don't know is about family trees and how they work and how our cousins work and grandparents and all those sort of things. Yes. Cousins is really the heart of that video. But it's about the titles and family structures is what it's about. Why did you make this video? This one has been on my list for either two or three years now because I myself went to a family reunion for my wife's family. And I didn't know any of these terms. Cousins is really the complicated one. But even the things like, you know, grand niece, exactly who is this person who's a grand niece? So I was at a family reunion and of course I'm an in law to all of these people in my wife's family. And I ended up at this family reunion partly because just all of these people were new to me. Of course, my wife knows who they are. They're her family. But this was the first family reunion I had been to since we got married. And I ended up going around like a total nerd with my iPad and talking to people and figuring out where they go on the family tree and making a little family tree to try to connect everybody. Well, I got a pretty accurate impression of how you were pretty quickly. Do you think that's fair? I don't think that's fair. Wondering around with your iPad feeling in a family tree. I that is that might be accurate. Anyway, but so I did that just mainly because it is very rare for me to be in a social situation where I'm actually going to meet such a large number of new people. And since my family is very small, I had no mental framework in which to place all of these people. And that's partly why I thought, okay, if I'm going to meet 30 new people, I need a diagram for all of you so that I can understand where you are in relationship to my wife. And so therefore where you are in relationship to me. And so that was very handy, although yeah, that's that anyway, since that experience, I had been thinking of doing the family tree video for quite a while. And now you have? Now I have, yes. Was it hard to make? Was it, I mean, it's taken your years. What was the roadblock between you thinking I should make a video about this and actually making that video? It's not like you had to, you know, this stuff wouldn't have been hard to find out, I imagine. No, no, I mean, this is one of the things where I haven't been actively working on this for three years. That'd be quite sad. It's just been on my list of projects to work on. Okay. So various reasons it eventually filtered its way up to the top of the list. This one was relatively quick. That's partly because the net neutrality video ended up bumping back something else that was supposed to happen. And then I was trying to pick something that would be faster to do. And this seemed like a natural topic to pick. Yeah. But yeah, I think I'm relatively pleased with it. It's a weird one though because it's, it's not typical of, it's not typical of your videos or certainly of your recent videos. So lots of people have said that. I'm curious, can you tell me what about it do you think is a typical or why do you think is different? If you can, you know, I don't mean to put you on the spot. No, I know, I don't mind me putting the spot, but yeah, I'll have to think, I'll kind of have to think on my feet a bit. I can give you Brady thinking time. You can come back. No, no, I'll just, I'll just make it up as I go. I mean, it kind of visually it was different because it didn't, it had a lot less variety than the usual videos because you can't have just navigated your way around this family tree up and down it and left and right. So it didn't have the, it didn't have the feeling of like a journey that some of the other ones have of, of moving to different places and different people and different. So in that respect, it was, it was visually different. I found it, I found it more confusing than I have found some of your videos. Like I, I think I said to you after I watched it just in our own personal communication, I said to you, I like, I had to watch it a second time, like it kind of, and I, and I think this has a lot to do with me being just the way I absorb information. I'm, I'm not a good attention payer and I'm a bit, maybe I'm just a bit slow, but the first videos I struggle with anyway, I kind of, I, I, I learn and absorb a slower speed maybe and this one was kind of like, whoa, what was that? Like, that's, that's, I did take a lot from it and I liked it and I really like, and I think it was a really good video to, to have made and to exist. I think you're really filling a need, which is both good for altruistic reasons and hopefully it's good for you because lots of people will watch it over a long, you know, it's a very timeless video. Yes. Yes. It's a bit, it's funny though, two, two things with that. There was one part of this video that I struggled with, which is I had two different audio tracks. I recorded the audio in two different, very different ways. One of which was much slower and one of which was, was the one that ended up going live, which is the faster version of it. And it's a problem with podcast. I'm going to forget stuff that I've said before. So this is, this is, this is my blanket. I may have said this before and I'll try never to say that again in the podcast, but in the videos, I'm trying to be very intentional about having this speed be inversely proportional to how much I'm expecting people to remember something. Okay. So I go slower when I want people to remember things or I think something is complicated. And I go faster when it's, it's, you just need to get the gist of this, but the details don't matter. Like lists of countries I always do fast. Of course. Yeah. Because I don't expect someone to remember 27 countries. The idea is just to know that a big list exists. That's exactly right. That's the time where it's perfectly fine to go really fast. Yeah. And so I felt like this, this whole video should have been slower. I was one reason why I had the slower audio track. But like you said, with the visuals being very different, I was really aware when I was animating it. Yeah. That because there was less going on, it could have been quite pedestrian, just slowly roaming around that family tree. The video felt like death with the slow audio track. It was amazing how much of a difference it made. I thought, boy, I can't, I can't put this up. It's just, it just, I mean, it wasn't even much longer. I think the slower audio track ended up being, I was like 30 or 40 seconds longer in total. So maybe the, I guess the whole thing is 10 or 20% longer. But it really made such a difference that I thought, even though I would like this video to be slower, it has to be faster because of the nature of the visuals. And you will have to this. But I actually, when I was animating it, I thought, you know what, this would make a really good Brady video. I thought having someone explain this in your video format might work much better because in preparation to do this one, I spoke to a few people in person trying to walk through the cousin's thing to try to see how people, where do people get confused by it? Yeah. And I found in person, this worked much better. And I could see like, oh, there's a little conversation back and forth between people. This is good. And so I was immediately thinking like the number file videos. This is this, this is almost a perfect topic for someone with a, with a pen and a piece of paper to go through and let's talk about the relationships of all these people. So like we were discussing last week with originality, I think this is a topic that you could totally do again. And I would be very interested to see the family file video on cousin structure. Like as an interview though, or as a, as a like, I just didn't explain it. Someone like me asking questions or, or just a good explainer doing it as a, I think the way you do most of your videos, you are filming somebody else talking about it. You're obviously asking questions in person, but you often edit those questions out. And then you are filming the person going through the things. I think it could be done again in that way and, and be another interesting video to watch. Because I, I agree. It ended up being a little too fast and, but like I said, I think that would, that would just, was the natural result of the way the animations worked. The interesting comparison for me and I'm very, I will, I don't want to compare your videos to mine because I think your videos are better in a lot of ways in most ways. But the, but the way, because I recently did a video where I explained something myself, which was this Monty Hall sequel. I was a Monty Hall one, yes. Where I sort of said, okay, I sort of took the ball by the horns of it and said, okay, I've had all these other videos about it. I want to explain how I would explain it to someone. So that, that for me was watching myself explain something in a way, you know, watching is me trying to do what you, what you do. And, you know, Henry does and all you guys, you know, just, just being an explainer myself. And I found interesting to see how I did do it differently and I did do it quite slowly. I mean, I didn't, because it's not, hasn't got much information at my video. And it's just let me say that again. Are you understanding? I would, you know, but the, the Monty Hall problem deserves that. It deserves a very slow walk through. I'll put the link in the show notes for people listening. You know, it's just a problem with, with two goats in a car behind the doors and the hose changes and all that. We talked about that a little bit beforehand and that, that is one that really deserves a slow walk. I could never make a video about the, about the Monty Hall problem quickly. It was just to feed the whole purpose of doing a video like that. No one would be able to follow it. But I, I guess I like, like when I'm being, when I'm teaching someone something and I'm told I'm quite annoying when I teach people things. So it's, I'm probably not a good example, but I do like to like emphasize things and say things twice and say, did you see that? Look, I'm going to show you that again. And, but these fast videos don't lend themselves to that. And that's where I kind of, well, that's why I watch them twice. Two views for you. Yes. It's not really that I have hundreds of thousands of people watching my videos. I have tens of thousands of people watching them many times as problems with the case. I'm sure that's not the case. But anyway, let's go back to your video though, because there's a few, there's a couple of other things to talk about that have fallen out from up. We have to do with and as soon as it went up, everyone was waiting for us to talk about this on the podcast. You made a mistake. Yes. Yes. Let's, I'll let you, I'll let you explain it. Yeah. So in the video, there is a section where I talk about in-laws and I, I mistakenly use the phrase in-law prefix. Right. So you add the in-law prefix to the title to get the full name. Yeah. And of course, you talk about a brother in-law. It comes at the end. It's a suffix. It's not a prefix. So, so for those who didn't even realize that mistakes in there, it's not like a structural mistake to the explanation here. It's just your refer. You made almost, you were almost making a sort of an offhand, glib remark about this prefix when in fact, you should have said it's a suffix, but it doesn't, it doesn't change the meaning of the video in any way. It's just a pedantic little, little point. But people notice. Yeah. It's not a notice. I didn't, I watched it twice and didn't notice and then I had said, I wonder how great his comments are going. And there were always comments about it. Absolutely. Have a quick one. Yeah. Every comment is on. Well, that's one, that's one of the things that's interesting. You just brought up an interesting point that I'd like to get on the record here. But very often, people will spot a comment like this and then they'll say something to me like, why don't you just put up an annotation instead of avoiding all of these comments. And for, for a video, or for an error like that, I will never put up an annotation because it doesn't, like that, that error doesn't matter. There's nobody out there who's speaking English who is going to be writing or saying, in law, brother, as a result of my video. No one's going to do that. No one's going to make that mistake. So I don't put up the annotation because my suspicion is that most people don't notice and it doesn't matter. And putting up the annotation then is just, it's a distraction from the video. It's the same reason why I ran that subble campaign to get rid of the pop-up ads because those pop-up ads come 12 seconds into the video and it's just, it's such a distraction for a moment from, I'm just watching this video. And I think any kind of annotation, you run that same risk that the annotation is just for a moment it diverts someone's attention. And since I think most people don't notice, I don't want to put something like that up to call attention to it. It has nothing to do with, oh, I hope people think that I'm right about everything. And it just has more to do with that little element of distraction. It's like cluttering the viewing experience. Yes, it's a no-reaser. It's a visual clutter. And I actually, when my wife watched the video, I didn't say anything to her about it and she didn't notice either. When did you realize the mistake was there? Oh, I knew it in the audio tracks. I had it when you were editing. Yeah, this is part of the problem is I actually, I phrased it slightly differently in the slower audio track and I phrased it in the slightly wrong way in the faster audio track. And I spent a good while trying to edit around this, but it, I knew it was there when it was uploaded, but I couldn't edit around it in a way that didn't suddenly have me talking really slowly or where the edit point wasn't just so obvious and awkward. So I left it in. I knew it was there. I'm amazed by that. I'm amazed you didn't fix it. Well, I'm just from what I know of you. For me, this is a workflow issue is going back and fixing something like that. At that stage is not so easy. I, I, I, I may, I have often wanted to do some research into professional voiceover people to know more about how they do their jobs because I am really aware that I cannot record things at different times without them sounding incredibly different. So I had set up on my audio equipment. I had done the recording. I caught the error later and I knew if I'm going to fix this, I have to fix the whole, I have to redo the whole thing. You couldn't do redo the whole thing. I was at so cut to the sound that it would have just been a massive mess, I guess. It was, it was mainly an issue. I wanted to get it out by Wednesday at the latest and I was doing the mental calculation of, okay, how long is it going to take for me to redo the audio and then recut it? And I figured, no, I'm not going to get it out on time. This is going to push it back just a little bit too much. I am willing to take the hit on this error and, and let it go up, which I just want to point out internet. I am not a perfectionist and I think this is evidence for that fact. Like I am very happy to make cost benefit decisions along these lines of, of is this error worth fixing? And in this case, I came down very clearly on, on the no side of it. It wasn't even a debate in my mind. I'm not redoing the whole audio just for this, this one little thing. But I knew that I was going to have to deal with everybody, everybody commenting on it, which they did, they did in speeds. I got many emails and tweets and comments and thank you everyone for pointing that out. I think the top comment on the road discussion is that. Hasn't Swagey though, it doesn't make you think, I should have just breathed on the audio. You know, hasn't changed your mind. You stand by the decision. No, I, no, I completely stand by the decision. I know that if I, if I had done that, the video wouldn't be up now. I would rather have it up sooner than later. Because it's also for me, it's an issue of impacting the future things that I'm working on because I know full well that if I didn't get it up by this week, even though in theory, maybe I'm only adding a couple of hours to the actual workflow, the result would be I would end up spending more time on that video because now I'm mentally thinking, well, that doesn't have to be up until the following Monday. I would end up putting more detail into the animation. This was a, this was a just cut down on future workload decision, which I think was the correct decision. I can't imagine there's anybody out there who thought, oh, this video was great, but that one error just killed it and now I'm not going to share it on Facebook. You must do the same thing. There must be times when there are things in your videos that you know are inconsequential errors and you leave them in. I mean, you're acting all right. But that must be... It happened today. Ha! Okay. It happened today and I knew it was a number of file video went up today about the Friends and Strangers theorem and it just has a, there was a moment where the guy called Simon, who's in the video, wrote a greater than sign and it should have been a greater than or equal sign. And again, incorrect, it should have been greater than equals. It didn't change the meaning of what he did. He's 10,500 miles away so we can't re-record it. And we, I noticed it and then I discussed it with him and he noticed it as well and we just said, well, it doesn't change anything. Anyone who notices it, anyone who knows it's a mistake understands what's going on well enough anyway. So it's the sort of person who points it out is a sort of person who's not going to be misled anyway because they're savvy enough. So I left it but I did put a note in the video description saying it five minutes 15, where it should have been a greater than equals. And when I uploaded it, I uploaded it with that comment. So it was the top comment. It was the uploader top comment. So anyone who looks at the comments will say it as the top comment. Still... No, no. You're assuming people read. I've said many times. No, no, no. I knew the description wouldn't matter but I thought top comment would matter because I thought if you're going to write a comment, don't you just, just like if you're going to make your glasses joke on Twitter nine times out of 10, you're going to check that no one else has made the joke first. No, no, you're just, you're so filled with the desire to correct somebody else. You just scroll past all that other stuff to the comment box. No, actually, is the comment box, the comment box is above the top comment, isn't it? I'd be, I'd be into it now. I'd be too embarrassed to write a comment on a YouTube video without first checking that there weren't a million other comments the same. But other people don't share this reservation. Yeah, but then you have to spend time looking through the YouTube comments, which is a total trade record. Yes, yes, yes. I wouldn't look through it all thousand, but I'd look at the top one. And in this case, the top one deals exactly with the thing that they're commenting on. That's why I made sure it was the top comment. So it's anyway. It doesn't bother me. I knew it was going to happen. Yeah, that's a to your question. Sometimes these things happen. My reason was more because of we couldn't redo it because the guy I filmed is in Australia now, but even I just had to look at the place to leave a comment on YouTube is above the top comments. So someone could not even see the top comments when they're when they're writing to come to. Yes, of course. Well, I certainly hope they're not saying it. I hope that's the case. I'd be even more disappointed if you're looking at the top comment, saying a perfectly logical explanation of not lodging the mistake and why it happened and why it hasn't been fixed. And then just blindly wrote, you made this mistake. I hope they're not looking at it. They want to really rub it off. I've lost even more faith in humanity. If they are saying the comment and still writing that, but it is astonishing to me that people write these comments and it just shows how much of internet commenting is just people talking into the void, doesn't it? Because all of these people who are writing comments, expecting people to read them and even reading comments themselves. Well, I think this is... I think that is a lesson. There's only people reading the comments, you and me. Yeah, this has been our topic list for a while, is to do an episode about comment forums. This is a particular hobby horse of mine. Now, I shouldn't even mention it now because people are going to imagine the most perfect hello internet episode ever about that. But yes, I think that at least on YouTube, YouTube is structurally set up so that you are yelling into the void. Obviously, comments are not like that everywhere, but the structure of YouTube just makes it so that you are. I really felt this mental image of opening a room, opening a door to a room and there's thousands of voices already in that room screaming. And then you just yell your comment in and close the door. That would be the real world equivalent of contributing to a YouTube discussion. It's just why even bother. Sorry, YouTube engineers who work on the comment system. I know that I have met some of you. I know it might not necessarily be your fault, but that comment system is just a total disaster and I'm never going to not harp on it. Speaking of comments, I know the place that you do love comments is Reddit and there has been some discussion in the wake of your family tree video, which was quite a lot of interesting, which is about the issue of your video, prompting someone to think about the end of their family tree in terms of their name. Obviously, there are certain configurations that will result in a male name not being passed on anymore. And the grey name won't continue because I haven't had children and my brother has got. And this person was feeling quite sad about the idea that maybe their name was about to hit a dead end. They're so named. And I think you were winding them up a bit. You will say you weren't, but your responses were very deliberately cold and robotic saying, well, why do you care about your name? I don't get it. Well, you were winding them up a bit. But do you really not understand why someone would be sad that their name would come to an end? OK, well, two things about this. I should see if I can find the exact comment. Yeah. First of all, I will genuinely say that I was not trying to wind them up. I know that you won't believe that. People on the internet might not believe that. But I really wasn't. OK. And it is partly just a side effect of the day that video was released. I had only slept two hours. I was up all night animating it. I went to sleep very briefly and then got up and finished working out of the morning and uploaded it. And even at my best on video release days, I tend to be pretty brief in the coming comments partly because there are just so many comments coming along that I do. I can come across as quite curt, but I'm much less likely to write long comments on video release days. So I think that's partly why I come off as very brusque in that thread. But I am not trying to wind the person up. But what we're about to discuss here is a particular example of something that I would say happens in my life quite a lot, which is someone will discuss with me. Something that they... I had to put this. That they don't like some sort of problem, like this person saying, oh, it makes him sad to think about his family name dying out. So people will discuss with me something in their life that is making them sad. And I'm trying to convince them that the thing that's making them sad shouldn't make them sad in the first place. And then that generally just transitions them to sadness now mixed with anger is usually the response that I get. And I can kind of understand why this happens, but I also genuinely find it sometimes kind of baffling and confusing. And that's not how humans work, right? Well, not how humans work. This is... So I would... This is the problem I have with the discussion. I would like you to try to explain to me now. Why is it that... And not everybody, but some people are concerned with the notion that 100 years from now there are people who have their name descendant from them walking around the world. I don't understand that. So we talk about that. Before we talk about that, let's talk to you about how humans work. Oh, okay. Okay. All right. Many times when people tell you their problems, they do not want you to solve their problems. Why are they telling me their problems? Because they want empathy. Because they want to share their problem. They want to unload it. They want someone, another human to tell them things are okay. They don't want them to invalidate their feelings and tell them you're wrong to think that. But generally, like... If your wife comes home from work and she's had a bad day, this is general advice. I'm not talking about your wife because your wife's different obviously because she chose to marry you. But... Right, yes. Nice, nicely done there, really. But generally, if your wife comes home from work and says, I'm having these problems at work, I had a terrible day. My boss wasn't nice or clients weren't nice or something went wrong. They don't want you to sit there and say, well, tomorrow, this is your strategy. You've got to go into the room and tell the people this and then you've got to report that and you've got to fix this and you've got to withdraw. They don't want that. They just want you to put the arm around and make them a cup of tea and say, well, you had a really rubbish day. I feel really sorry for you. Well, life is tough, but I'm here and I care for you. They don't want you to sit and likewise when someone says, I'm feeling a bit sad about my name coming to an end. I don't think they necessarily want a robot to reply to them and say, well, what your feeling is completely irrational. There's no logic to it. You're wrong to feel sad. Your sadness is invalid and this is why. That's not what humans want when they share their problems. But if I could convince that guy that there was no reason to be sad about this, he would be better. He would be happier if he realized, oh, that is irrational to think. That's okay. This is not a problem anymore. Yeah. That's not how it works. I feel like this is not convincing to you. No, of course. You know, what are you saying? What are you saying? If we were all computers and I know, I know. I don't think this is. I don't think this is. I don't mind the robot joke, but I feel like this is a general. There have been cases in my life where I have been discussing problems with people. I'm almost always looking for feedback and I'm very happy when people have some kind of solution. That's great. That's what I, if I have a problem and someone has a solution, please, please, share it to me. Don't put your arm around me and go, oh, I'm so sorry for you. I empathize with you. You know, I like it. Do you have a solution to my problem? I would love to. I have experienced this this week. I've had this catastrophe with my, well, hang on. I'm not going to say catastrophe because two weeks ago, as you know, there was a loss in my family and someone else has had this surgery. So there's been serious stuff going on. So I'm not going to describe computer problems as a catastrophe because they're not. But I've had substantial problems with my computer and hard drive and it looks like I've lost a lot of data. Hopefully what needs to be backed up is backed up, but there was so much stuff that it wasn't even feasible to back some of this stuff up. I'm talking terabytes upon terabytes of archive and it looks like it's gone. I've had a bit of a win-john Twitter about it a couple of times saying, oh, dear, what I want is either a solution. I would like someone to say there is a solution. You can recover it, right? I would like that. But also I don't mind people saying, oh, poor Brady, that's really bad. Feeling for you, man. Hope you get your data back or hope it works out. I don't want people telling me, you should have, this is what you should have done or this is how you should back stuff out. But no, no. Listen, listen. I want to just want a bit of us. I'm around you in a well life is tough. I have to interrupt you here for two things. First of all, one, you've told me about your computer problems and I believe I have said many times like, wow, that really sucks. You were great. That's what you should always do. Yes, but can I tell you why I did it in the circumstances? Because me telling you, oh, you should have backed up your data, that's just me being a jerk, right? That's like, oh, if you had a time machine, you could go back in time and back up, yeah, great. But you know what? That's not where we are right now. Where we are is you've lost all this data and you know what? The loss of data is tremendously sad. There's no recovering from that. It's gone forever. And me telling you what you should have done in the past is pointless. Totally pointless. Nothing, nothing to be done there. So I expressed a loss, you know, like sadness over the loss of your data. So I did, this is the right thing. This is not the situation that we're describing right now. Okay. Where somebody currently has a problem and there's a solution to that problem and they don't want me to tell them the solution. They instead want me to go on, so sorry for you. Now, is that's, those are two totally different unrelated scenarios. I think they are different. I don't know about totally different. I think completely different. I think there are threads here. I think there are threads here and lessons that connect the two, but you're right. They are very different for the ways you explained. Yes. So let's come back to the one you explained. Uh-huh. I'm clearly, I've had my say about how you should, how I think sometimes people should be dealt with when they express things that make them sad. Let's come to the actual facts of the matter. Yes. And again, this is, this is like problems. Yeah. The person has a, the, the, the time out, they're, they're family name dying out. It's about to come to an end. It's about to come to an end. It's about to come to an end. It's about to come to an end. Nobody else to carry on. Yeah. But I think it's a shame and I completely empathize with what that guy's saying. And I think telling him that his name is just a construct of sounds and language attached to a lineage of fleshy, watery bodies that are reproducing over time on a rotten, a rotten, none of the universe. No, no, but this is, you know, I think, okay, you tell me, you tell me the rationale. You tell me why he shouldn't be sad. Well, here, here, again, we're touching upon like a sensitive issue here, which are two different things. If somebody wants to have children and is unable to have children for whatever reason, that's a huge tragedy. That is, that's just a, like, very sad situation. Yes. Yes, of course. And it's why, like, if you want to talk about, you know, like pet peeves, one of the pet peeves that I find totally unbelievable is that it is socially acceptable to ask a couple when they're going to have children. That infuriates me to no end because it's, it's like such a personal issue and people have fertility problems and there are couples who want to have children. And if they're trying to have children and not able to, like, that's such a huge source spot. So the very notion that it is socially acceptable to ask people when they're going to have children. I just, I cannot believe the people do this. I find that just infuriating. Yeah. I think it's so rude to do that. It's making me angry even just thinking, no, no, I'm on board with you there. Yeah. So, like, that is a totally different issue. Like, I, um, that was not the conversation we're having on. No, no, no, no, that's, like, no, that's far from the conversation we're having. Yeah. So, like, that's, that's a very different issue. The, the idea is people, we're literally having a conversation of people talking about, like hundreds of years in the future, there's not going to be anyone who's descendant from this person or the name is going to die out. There was, there was another sort of sub thread about, like, he's, like, this guy has daughters who will have children presumably, but he's not going to have a son, you know, he's not going to have a son to carry on name. Okay. And I find that just, that's just like, I, I just, I don't even understand what the person wants. Because there's a line here in the conversation where, where I'm trying to, I'm trying to ask and get it clarified. I said, like, I don't understand why people care about the name in particular. And the response was, you know, it has to do with, uh, tradition and legacy and family values. A name is, is not just a word. It was, it was the response. And I, it's a symbol. It's a symbol, but surely traditions and legacies and family values, those have to do with the people, right? Like, maybe you're living daughters and their families. Right. Like, what is this? What does the name have to do with this, this thing at all? Like, if that's, of course, of course, that's true. But it's still really sad if someone goes and, if someone went and, I was going to say the Vatican, but I went because that's a bad example. But if someone goes and smashes down an old church, you know, the church is the people and the people can build a new building and still come together and have that community. But it's still sad that this 500 year old building has gone because it was a symbol of what came before. Also, terrible analogy with that active destruction of something. Okay. If it wasn't destructive, if it, if it, if it just fell down from old age or, uh, it had to, there was, you know, it went for natural reasons, you know, a, a sink cult opened up in the ground and it sank into the ground, whatever, whatever the reasons. There's nothing wrong with symbols like, and people and it's sad to see the end of, if you're watching a film of some ant walk across the desert and it gets to the other side of the desert and then right at the very end of its journey, a rock falls on it and it gets squashed. You can say, oh, well, it was just an ant or, oh, well, there are other ants. But it's still sad when you've seen something go for a long time and do carry on, come to an end. There's like an attachment. Who are giving me nothing would examples that I agree with that I think are all irrelevant to this discussion about the family names. I like the death of a living creature. Yeah. I'm agreeing. That's sad. But now, what I'm saying is attach those emotions to the symbol that is a name because that's what this person's doing. I know that's what they're doing. I, I can't understand. I can't understand why. I mean, here's a, here's a, here's a different. You understand symbolism. If this person who wrote that reddit comment was taking the position that I don't care what happens to the rest of my family and if they all have horrible diseases and end up in jail, I don't care as long as they have my name. I'm happy. If that was their position, then, then your analogy works and I agree and I'm saying, well, hey man, you're putting a bit too much emphasis on a name here. But I don't think that's what they're doing. I think, I think they have got things in a bit of context. I think they're just a bit sad that a symbol that has been going for a very, very long time because of a series of events and coincidences or happenings that you and I don't know about. That symbol's about to come to an end and and there's nothing wrong with mourning at that loss and feeling a bit sad about it. And I'm not saying they should go and jump off the golden gate bridge. That would be unreasonable. But I think there's, it's perfectly valid to to mourn the passing of an old tradition. But you know, I'm like that. I like old traditions. I like old stuff. It is just a name, but it is a symbol and it's a powerful symbol. It's not just a trinket. This isn't just a little, little, I, I full tail souvenir. Yeah, a name is a very powerful symbol and therefore it's lost. But a rose by any other name would smell a sweet Brady. Yeah, and and and I'm sure that person hopes that their descendants, their daughters go on to do great things and their daughters, daughters and daughters, sons and all those people. I hope that that person is not, you know, just completely, you know, dissociating themself from their family because their name's not continuing. But I still completely understand that little bit, that little twinge of sadness. There's been this long line of that name for however long and it's, and it's coming to an end, you know, that's a, that's a, the world keeps spinning, but there's nothing wrong with being sad about it. I completely understand what that person's saying. I understand what you're saying too, you know, this is your, your, your, your pretty cold, you're pretty coldly rational about these things. You don't, you are not a sentimental dude. But I guess if they're our sentimental people though, I, I, I, I don't know, I still, I feel like I have a hard time understanding, I feel like I have a hard time understanding the, the position. I don't know, I don't know. You don't. It's just a sentimental attachment to something that's been in the family for a very long time. That's about to not be in the family anymore. It's, it's, it's losing, it's losing, it's losing an old, nice thing. And I know you don't like things. It's like, if some watch that had been in the family for just, I was just about, yeah, I was just about to use that as a counter example because that, that is a case where I, I have, I have no space in my heart for hand me down to my own personal life, but I can, there I can intuitively understand why other people place value on objects that have been in the family. I like, I can get that, you know, you pass down your, you know, great grandmother's engagement ring. And yeah, but names are far, names are very, very powerful to us. CGP Gray, owner of CGP Gray YouTube channel. It, yeah, but, yeah. Names are very, names are powerful things that we are very attached to and are very much part of us. And I can, I understand the sadness at losing one. Hmm. What you're saying makes sense too, but you're not taking sentiment, you're not taking sentimentality into account enough. There's no right or wrong here. Well, I mean, I still think I'm right. Okay. I'm not, I'm not going to lie. I'm glad. Well, that's because you are right. But you're also the other guys right. That's the beauty of it. No, this is, you can't both be right. It's just, yeah, it's just, I don't know, I don't know. Like I said, I can, I can understand, I can understand the physical objects thing. Even though I personally don't forget that, I can see why other people feel that. It's just, the, the name thing, I don't know, it just, it strikes me weird. It strikes me especially weird when, or not weird, but not understandable when somebody has a family. Like they think they already have children. It's just that by the conventions of the world that we live in, males pass along their names and they get married and females don't. Like that, I guess that I, I can totally understand if this is wrapped up in the question of, do you have children and well, those children have children? That's completely understandable. But the, like, oh, I have children, but they're not going to pass on the names that makes me sad. Is, I don't know, I feel, it feels weird. Well, this becomes a real, this becomes about, you know, first world problems, relative type thing, too, doesn't it? Like this person's complaining on Reddit, you know, to you, who has a good life. He's already a terrible decision. Yeah, but you know, everyone here, we're assuming has a good life and everything's okay. If this guy was wandering around the plains of West Africa to people who were dying of starvation and asking for their sympathy because his name was coming to an end, I would, I would say, we're hang on buddy. It's not a big deal. But, you know, so of course. Of course. Yeah, but I'm sure he would recognize that as well. Yeah. Yeah. So, all the things that I worry about on my daily life, I would not be worrying about them if my life was radical. And so likewise, comparing his mourning of a name to people who haven't got, you know, progeny who would like to have progeny. Oh, that's a different, yeah, that's a different discussion. You know, and I don't think he would, and I don't think he or she is doing that either. But it's a good fun discussion. It's interesting. Yeah. No, it's a strange thing. I mean, I don't think we'll ever have a podcast about this. But when I hear you talk about, you know, the insignificance of names and things, it does make me wonder about what you think about, like, you know, the deeper, deeper meaning of life and legacy and what we leave behind and do we worry about that and what happens next? Oh, come on, man. We've got 10 minutes before you have to go. The thing with this new language, sorry, do you know what that noise was? I just dropped my little book of passwords.
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