H.I. No. 12: Hamburgers in the Pipes

"H.I. #12: Hamburgers in the Pipes" is the 12th episode of Hello Internet, released on May 13, 2014.
==Official Description==
Grey & Brady are both in bad shape but still manage to discuss: pronunciation pedantry, Avatar, viral videos against social media, and net neutrality.
==Show Notes==
*Aluminium
*Brady's High School Periodic Table
*Grey's flashcard program
*Ponitless
*Unobtanium
*Avatar
*Ringworld
*MacGuffin
*AT-ATs and AT-STs
*Star Wars Day
*Red Letter Media Star Wars Reviews
*All Red Letter Media Plinkett Reviews
*Ezra Klein's Vox
*Paul Graham: Female Founders
*Look up: A Spoken Word Film for an Online Generation
*I Forgot My Phone (video)
*Prince of Wales Hotel
*Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park
*Grey's Net Neutrality video
*Brady vs Grey
*Hank Green on Net Neutrality
*ViHart on Net Neutrality
*The Internet
*Kevin Gisi on Net Neutrality
*Tom Wheeler FCC chairman
*FCC petition
*Tim Wu 2003 Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination
==Other==
You are second, I am just exhausted. And amount of coffee that I need is more. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. I just wanna clear something up here because you're like one of my American friends. Element 13 on the periodic table, symbol AL. I was gonna say, you don't need to tell me the symbol. Element 13 is aluminum. Aluminum. You mean aluminum? Come on. Are you really gonna start this argument? Are you really gonna start this argument? Do you know what? Do you know what the funny thing is? I need to pull up some Google stuff right now. I go ahead and down. No, no, no, no, you don't need to pull up. No, no, I do. I certainly do. But you keep talking. I'm gonna do a little live research right now. Yeah, go ahead. I am across this issue. I actually thought you were gonna be in the aluminium camp on this. Why on earth would you think that? I don't know. I just thought... That's just what I thought. I thought, I know a lot of Americans say aluminum. I thought you were gonna... I don't know. I thought what would happen. But no, you called it aluminum. Tell me your live research or your position or whatever. I'm just trying to find out because I thought that there was some chemistry organization that did in charge of the pronunciation things. I UPEC, the English Union of a Blood and Pure Chemistry. This is, you're talking to the guy that makes periodic videos, man. I UPEC sneeze. I'm making video. All right, then you took... I'm trying to pull it up here because I couldn't remember which way they went on this. Yeah, it was 1990 that they basically said it's aluminium, right? That was the deal. And they also, I think, went change the spelling on cesium and sulfur. And there was this kind of... I think there was a bit of a deal where they gave one to the Americans and the Americans gave some to the Europeans. And the Europeans did the right thing and took on the American side of the deal. And the Americans just said, no, we're sticking with aluminium. We don't care. And about two or three years later, I UPEC folded like a deck of cards. And said, oh, okay, you can have both. Aluminium is still the first preference. It's still how they write it on their official periodic table. But they have a little footnote saying, some people also say aluminum, meaning Americans who bring their gone deals. Yeah, that's the passive-aggressive some people. Wikipedia is sometimes very good at the super passive-aggressive way of phrasing something. They're like, oh, we're neutral. We're just passively, aggressively neutral. I'm looking at this. I thought there was something more reason than that, but I'm gonna take your word for it. Well, it's aluminium-weak on periodic videos. And I'm doing millions of videos about them. So don't go throwing a spatter in my works now. Well, if it, I don't know if this makes you feel better or if it makes you feel worse, but when I taught here in the UK, I would always say aluminium. I would never say aluminum, because it was just far too distracting for the students to hear apparently what is the hilarious American pronunciation. So I would say aluminium and never a comment. So I adopted that while I was here teaching, but if I'm just saying it in normal speech, it's gonna be aluminum. You did have a little monovictory, though, in my house today. Oh, yeah. Because my sister has started listening to all the Hello Internets, and she's really into it. Which was surprising, but nice, because I'm sure she doesn't watch my videos or anything, but anyway, she started listening. She says she enjoys it. So we're having a chat. And then I said, oh, I've got something else I want to show you. We were talking on Skype. And I went and got this periodic table that has just been sent to me by my high school chemistry teacher from Australia. And it was the periodic table that was up on the wall of my classroom when I was a student that inspired my interest in chemistry. And it's just huge, huge old outdated dusty old thing. But it's a great piece of memorabilia. And I pulled it out and said, look at this. Look what's been sent to me really proudly. And she just went more rubbish for you, more silly in there. Ha, ha, ha, ha. That's great. I know she was, she was, which is ridiculous, because her house is full of stuff. But anyway, she was on your side there. So I like that she called it your mausoleum. That is great. That is, that is really good. Could we ballpark your age based on how many elements are on that periodic table? I don't know the rate at which elements have been discovered over the past several decades. But where does that periodic table stop? You must have it framed somewhere by now. No, no, it's next to my desk that rolled up hang on. Let me see if I can unroll the void. Yeah. All right, I've got it. Here we go. It's massive. This is actually really hard to do. We need to picture this for the show notes in the future. Yeah. Well, I actually made a video about it because when I went to Australia, it was still up in the classroom. It was still up in the classroom. And I went there with the professor from periodic videos. And we said, look, there's the periodic table that inspired the website and the videos. And it was all very lovely. And now, all this time later, he's actually sent it to me. I was hoping they'd keep it up there and maybe put like one of those little blue plaques underneath it and say, oh, yeah, Brady Haran went to school and stuff. But no, they've basically gone rid of it, dumped on me. That's exactly it. They knew who would accept it gratefully. Well, element 104 is not even named here. So. Oh, wow. OK. So what I'll for is, oh, OK, can I remember, is it a shoot? Phenium? Something like that? What is it? It ends in AM, but you'll probably end it with UM because you're American. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, there you go. More tat for my house. But wait, wait, wait. So it has 104, but 104 is not named, is it? Yeah, it's still got the Latin name in convention, yeah. So. Hmm. It actually stops. It stops at 106. But 106 is that we're not in a hexium. It's got the UUH as well, so. If you want to know the year, I'll just look. There'll be a year written on it, sorry. God, it's rutheran 40M. I cannot believe I couldn't remember that. That is disappointing. Why did you disappoint it? I wouldn't have thought you'd like, but you really into the periodic table. OK, I will tell you yet another story of me just being a terrible person. Then I guess what she goes along with this. I had a friend in college who I was somewhat competitive with. And she was a chemistry major, and I was a physics major. And simply to irritate her, I memorized all of the names of all of the elements and their atomic number and their positions in the periodic table. I was trying to drive home, of course, like a physics major would. The point that, oh, chemistry is just stamp collecting. I can spend a few days and memorize this thing. And it's, oh, I basically know all there is to know about your subject. But I have a whole flashcard system that I keep up to date. I like to put little facts and things in it. And that periodic table, the information, is still in my flashcard system to this day. So I can usually, not as well as I did back in the day, but I can usually know the name of an element given the atomic number of the element. Did you watch the TV show pointless? I do not. It's a, I won't bore you with the details of the show. But the idea of the show is to know answers to questions, to which there are multiple answers, like, you know, elements on the periodic table. But to pick the most obscure possible answer. So the idea is not just to get it right, but to get it right in a way that no one else would get it right. They do a poll of 100 people and that you've got to find the answer that no one else said, which is still correct. I don't know. Is this like reverse family feud? I don't entirely understand this, perhaps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's actually, that's not a bad way to put it. Yeah. But it still has to be factually correct. It's OK. You want the answer that is factually correct that the fewest number of people give. Yeah. And if no one gave it, then that answer is considered pointless. And that's like that's like, you know, that's the huge. OK. So that's the big win. Nobody else said this. It is, but it is still correct. OK. Yeah. So I like the premise. That's interesting. Yeah. So to give you an example, that was just on the other day. I was watching it the other day and I wasn't doing very well. But then sort of the grand finale for the big jackpot, they had five areas they could choose between. And one of them was chemistry. One of the women on the show really fets it herself as a bit of a science expert and had been talking herself up as this real science guru through the show. So she said, we're going to do chemistry. But with supreme confidence. So I thought, oh, well, this is going to be good. And then the question was, name an element on the periodic table for which its symbol is also the first two letters of the element's name. Which is a, you know? Oh, OK. OK. Yeah, right. So it took a second for my brain to pass. But yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah. So like helium has a symbol, H-E. And that's also the first two letters of helium. Right. So. Xenon. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, there are quite a few of them. So the idea was to come up with one that, you know, no one else would think of. And that's why I was trying to pick Xenon there. That's the fastest one I can come up with. They're probably the fewest number of people would guess. I think I can't remember what one's I was fancy. Anyway. So I was really off a whole bunch that I thought were likely. And then she decided, and she was allowed to name three. And one of them had to be completely pointless to win the jackpot. There had to be no one else had said it. So I thought, OK, let's see what she names. And the ones she named were plutonium. So wrong answer. Yeah, the other one she named was boron, which is just B. But then that's great. There's not even two letters. No, no, no, no. It gets better. The Pester is a Stonz. And her one that she thought was most likely to be correct. So she made her like banker was unobtanyum. Oh, God. I know. And this was the one who said, I really want to do a science category. Because I know my science and like, leapt at the chance to do chemistry. She had three options. I unobtanyum. Unobtany, God. I was pretty disappointed. I hate James Cameron so much for putting unobtanyum in Avatar. It just was bad. That was really bad. That was really bad. I agree. I mean, I just have to explain this just briefly. To anyone on the internet who happens to be listening and who made it all the way through Avatar. But unobtanyum was a science fiction term just to refer to some kind of material which is not possible to actually make. So it was a generic classification. So like the material in the ring world books that those worlds are made of, you could say, oh, that is an unobtanyum because it's an incredibly light, super strong metal that can't possibly exist. And then for Cameron to actually have the metal that they're going after in the movie called unobtanyum, it's just so distracting. There were so many things in that movie that I hated. But that one really, really ground my gears. It would be like having something in a movie that the characters are going after that is called the McGuffin. Oh, we are trying to find the McGuffin. It's like only the first movie that did the McGuffin that created the term McGuffin is allowed to do that. You in your subsequent movies can't just call something in McGuffin without being incredibly distracting. That movie made me furious for very many reasons, prepirous subtitles being one of them as well. But the unobtanyum particularly, which is like, I cannot believe that. Just make up a new name. This is the laziest, most awful distracting thing you could possibly do. That movie's dating badly too. When it came out, like I didn't hate it. I didn't hate it. I saw it at the IMX. I thought it was pretty impressive. It's got its flaws, but it was pretty impressive to look at. I watched it again the other day because I stumbled over on the telly. It's looking really poor these days. Time has not been kind to it. Good. Good. How many stars? How many stars you've given it? No stars. I give it no stars. No stars. No stars. So any more follow-up? Can I just tell you one more thing about Avatar, actually? Can I just... No. No, of course you can. OK, good. You know what I hate most about? The ending of that movie drives me crazy. And sometimes I just remember the ending of that movie and it makes me angry because I think, OK, OK. This space-faring civilization is coming into conflict with basically people with no technology whatsoever. And I can understand the notion that maybe under highly specific circumstances the natives can win a ground war on this planet. Sure, whatever. I'll let that slide. But the final scene... No, the A-Walks did it. Yeah, yeah. Right, like that's... I'll give it to the E-Walks. Fine, you know the terrain. Those at-ats can be tripped up quite easily with some string. Fine, fine. I'll let that go. But in Star Wars, like the whole Empire, it crumbles. This whole system is gone. No, in Avatar, the locals are loading the invaders back onto their spaceships, right? Their spaceships, presumably... They definitely are. Yeah, to take off and to go into space and the whole opening premise of that movie is that they're coming from Earth because there's some unspecified, huge problem on Earth. People are dying, so they need this unobtainium. It's incredibly expensive. It's hugely valuable. They're not just going to go home, right? They're not just going to go back to Earth. They'd be like, well, sorry, everybody. We couldn't remove that tree from its particular location and we know billions of people have to die, but they did fight us off with sticks on the ground. It's just, oh, God, I cannot stand that. Spaceships. Spaceship. Oh, sorry. It just, it really, it makes me angry. I hate that movie so much. We're in the mainly AT-STs that the EWOX were taking out. You know what the AT-ATs? You know what the terrible thing is? As soon as I said it, I realized it was the wrong designation because, yeah, the at-ats are the four-legged versions. Yeah, you'd have two like versions. You don't muck around with that. The only shot I think of AT-ATs in the final movie is there's a shot of them kind of patrolling the base. But it's like... When Luke gets brought hand over to that side, do you say one, yeah? Yeah, there's like an ad in the lower left-hand side of the screen, but yeah. Yeah. As soon as I said it, I regretted it and I knew it was wrong, but I thought, I can't do real myself at this very moment. But I am glad you picked it up on. I picked it up on. I've saved us a good 20 minutes in follow-up next week. You have, you have. We would have gotten emails. And you know what, that's the kind of person who could pick up on that. I appreciate that if you realize it's the wrong designation. So... Yeah, I accept, on Facebook with my friends and staff, if people make spelling mistakes or typos or get commas or apostrophes wrong, you let that stuff go. But when friends start spelling, Star Wars things incorrectly, like I was having a discussion the other day on Facebook with a friend about the Sarlac. And he spoke Sarlac incorrectly. And I wasn't letting that go. But you know, because it was all about pedantry, because someone had posted a picture of R2D2 with a lightsaber, like someone dressed as R2D2, but also wielding a lightsaber and someone's like, oh, you know, R2D2 never had a lightsaber. And then someone was like, well, as a matter of fact, yes, he did when he fired the lightsaber to look skyward. I was going to say he was a very least- He's contained it, yes. Yeah, but then I was like, well, okay, if you get a call that, you've got to get Sarlac spoke correctly and then anyway, it's spiraled into the sort of conversation that results in you never having a girlfriend. That's true. I mean, yeah, I imagine we could talk about Star Wars forever, which we're not going to do. But I will just say, as I find a little, you know, what I've been up to, think, it was recently May the Fourth, which has become this kind of weird Star Wars sort of holiday, I guess. And I spent my May the Fourth, not, I didn't do this on purpose, but afterwards I thought, oh, this was quite, this was quite, this worked out quite well. For reasons we'll get into later, I had stuff that I need to do. And I spent the whole May Fourth rewatching one of my favorite things on the internet ever, which is the Red Letter Media reviews of Star Wars episodes one, two, and three. Have you seen this breeding? There is no better way to spend your time than watching those. They are brilliant. I have thought many a time that I forgive the existence of those first three movies because without them, we would not have the Red Letter Media reviews. I will put the link in the show notes. If you haven't seen these things, they are great. It, what, I will just pre-worn people that the style of them takes a lot of getting used to. There's a kind of super creepy narrator who is doing this review of why the first three movies are awful. Trust me, people, run with it. Just go along with it. It is completely worth it. They are amazing. They're really entertaining. And I often think of them as, I mean, they are as long as the movies themselves. I think it's six hours to watch all of them from start to finish. They're great. And he's done some really good stuff on some other films, too. I mean, the last two, the Star Wars is the pinnacle. But the Indiana Jones stuff is quite good. Yeah, and the Star Trek ones. I actually, my wife has seen the Red Letter Media reviews. But my wife is a very big Star Trek fan. I think I've sort of referenced this before on the show. And I will not let her watch the Red Letter Media Star Trek reviews because I've told her, and I know her well enough to know that this is true. These reviews will just ruin some of the things on Star Trek for you forever. You can't unsee some of the things that he talks about or the flaws that he points out. There's a whole team of guys at Red Letter Media. And I mean, those reviews are, I think, just great, great reviews. But I would definitely list the Star Wars reviews in particular as one of my 10 favorite things I have ever seen on the internet. So it'll be in the show notes. Check it out people. It's amazing. Follow up, follow up. We were talking about news last time. Someone in the Reddit left a quote, which you can I thought summarized, my position just beautifully, which is this Mark Twain quote, that goes, if you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. And if you read the newspaper, you're misinformed. And I thought that just struck me as beautiful. Like that is a perfect encapsulation of basically my opinion of most of the news. And I choose to be uninformed rather than misinformed. So I just, I love that. So thanks to whoever posted that on the Reddit, that was just perfect. That was really good. Did Mark Twain say anything in his life that wasn't like an awesome quote? Like he must have been 500 years old to say to set all the awesome quotes that he said. Well, this is it. I have not investigated if there's actually Mark Twain. Now, there's so many misattributed to Mark Twain kind of quotes. It's like, it's like Yogi Barra. There's a certain kind of quote that just gets described to a particular person. So someone can tell us in the comments if that is genuinely, if that is a sourced Mark Twain quote, or if this is just a manufactured Mark Twain quote, or if somebody else said it who wasn't as famous as Mark Twain. But either way, that statement I think is just perfect, absolutely perfect. I link here. You put a link down that you wanted to talk about. Oh, yeah. Just very briefly, because I mentioned Nate Silver's 538 project. The other one that I wanted to mention, which is, I don't know this reporter as well, but it's got called, as Recline has started his own news project as well, which looks promising. I was taking a look at it a little bit earlier today. But one of the things I like that they're doing on this alternate news project as well is they're publishing, if they interview someone, they're publishing both the interviews, like the full length. Here's the actual interview we did in addition to the story itself. And I think that that is a great example of how news on the internet can just be so different. You can have a story that summarizes an interview that you did with somebody. And within that story, you can link to the audio version or whatever. Because the full-hour limitation is nice. Yeah, there's no limit at all. And I think part of it is, a guy I have followed for years called Paul Graham, was recently caught out in a big problem where he said, quotes that he said were sort of taken out of context. And this is the kind of thing where I think it is great if this could become more of a standard. That look, if you're going to do a story, you're going to publish the whole interview as well. So you can't try to spin it in a particular way. And also on the flip side, it allows, it doesn't allow people to just claim that they were misquoted. If they are actually just said some horrible thing or if they really meant it, they can't say, oh, the newspaper took me out of context. Because again, you have the whole interview there. So I thought, I just thought that was a good example of how the internet is different and can be better than traditional news reporting in some ways. So, link in the show notes. Yeah, I'll put a link to Vox in the show notes if people want to check that out. Today's episode of Hello Internet has been sponsored by our friends at audible.com, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment. Listen to audiobooks whenever and wherever you want. Now, you can get a free audiobook when you sign on for the audible membership. If you go to audible.com slash hello internet, you'll find all the details. And I always really enjoy audible ads because we get to recommend a book. And today, Grace let me lose. He's going to let me recommend one. But first of all, I think I quickly talk about why you would listen to audiobooks. I've only really gotten into audiobooks in the last couple of years. And that's because of a few changes in my life. One is I've started driving a lot more and longer distances because of my work. And like reading an actual book at the wheel of the car is pretty dangerous. So I give that a miss and go for the audiobooks instead. But also you've probably heard me talk recently on the podcast about some trips I've taken to the Himalayas and that involves basically, you know, 10 hour walks each day. And audiobooks really help pass the time. Now, when I did those trips, I filled up the iPhone with books all about Mount Everest and the Himalayas and I love Mount Nearing Books full stop. I want to recommend a book today called High Crimes by Mokal Kodas. I guess is how you'd pronounce his name. This is a book I listened to while walking to Everest Basecamp. And basically, I mean, the subheading of the book is the fate of Everest in an age of greed. And it really is about, well, the crazy things people are getting up to on the mountain these days. The, I mean, this isn't like sort of into thin air where you think, well, you know, some people here have got moral dilemmas. This book tells some stories about some acts people do that are, well, just playing criminal. It really is extraordinary. It's true story and it's told really cleverly. It's told from the two different sides of the mountain at the same time. Some people who are going up from the depot side and some other people who are going up from the, the China Tibet side. It's really worth listening to. It's well narrated. It's well written. And if you're someone who does like going for walks, it's a really nice book to have playing while sort of, you know, admiring the scenery and watching the world go by. So there you go. High crimes. If you want to listen to it, audible hazard, along with 150,000 other titles, not all mountaineering books, unfortunately, but they've got pretty much every genre covered. You'll find what you're looking for, go to audible.com and put slash hello internet so they know you came from us. And remember, you get a free audiobook when you sign on for their 30-day trial today. Thanks for sponsoring us. That's audible.com. Slash hello internet. I just wanted to share a little moment I had with you. And like, it was a really, it was a nothing moment. But I think it will speak to you in some way, being a robot, of course. Basically, I had, I'd been filming all this stuff on all my various cameras, including like the high-speed slow motion camera that creates these, enormous files that take days to process. And I've actually got a second computer in a corner that just processes those files because for various reasons. So I had plugged in all the high-speed camera and all these files were processing. And then over on my main computer, I had all my rushes from that days filming, all going into the computer. And at the same time, the computer was processing some other videos from one format to another that needed doing. And at the same time, I was downloading a bunch of stuff that was being sent to me by someone else via Dropbox. And while that was going on, I think I was just surfing the internet or something. And I suddenly looked around at what was going on. And how much work these machines were doing. And I thought, computer's are pretty amazing. Good. They're amazing, aren't they? Yes, they are. They are quite amazing and super important. I remember I was going for a walk and I was closing a gate that had to be closed otherwise like sheep would escape. And someone had attached a rock to the chain that pulls the gate closed. And because that rock was tied on there, the gate would always be pulled closed. You couldn't leave it open by mistake. And I looked at that and I thought, isn't that clever? Isn't that amazing? How clever humans are? And I spent a good five, ten minutes talking to people about this clever person who had attached a rock to a chain. And you're old day, I'm surrounded by these machines that are doing these remarkable, remarkable things. And you just don't think about it. I think that the rock on a chain and the computers are kind of the same thing. If you want to set up an environment that assists you in whatever it is you want to do. So I actually really love the rock on the chain as well because it's the same thing. There are going to be times when you're exiting the gate and you're occupied with something else or you're in a big hurry. And so you want to engineer the situation so that it is not possible for you to forget because then you have sheep running all over the countryside or whatever it is. The raptor gets loose because you didn't put the bolt in the way it's supposed to be. Like well, you shouldn't be able to leave the cage unbolted. So I think that stuff is great and the computers are the same thing. Having the machines do work for you when you're not actively using it is brilliant. The sheer volume of work they do is amazing though. Like just anyway, so I sound like I've just come from, I sound like a caveman, I don't have to go for it. And like, but sometimes you just forget, like just how much they do and how quickly. But anyway, I was just a little moment I had, a little nostalgic moment and I thought, grey would like this. I do. I feel in the love for computers. I do. I'm glad that you appreciate the mechanical servants that we have on our lives, the digital servants that we have on our lives. So speaking of technology and digital servants and assistants, I went to phone you the other day and I didn't get through. I got your voicemail. It basically is just you saying, don't leave a message. I don't listen to messages. Yeah, that's about right. I liked that. I liked that. It was hard core. You know. Yeah. I was just around with pleasantries, just like you're wasting your time. It's like sending you an email. Don't bother. No, no, see emails at least have the possibility of catching my attention. You can check your voicemail at all. Yeah. In case I can't play it, my voicemail basically says, hi, you've reached CGP Gray, don't leave a voicemail. I do not check these messages. And the thing that baffles me is that I know people still leave voicemails. I don't understand who the people are, who leave these voicemails because I don't listen to them. I'm not kidding around. And a little while ago, when I think it was in the latest version of iOS, Apple introduced a feature where you can block messages or text from a particular phone number. So I actually blocked whatever number it is that my telephone service provider uses to send me a notification to let me know that I have 45 unread voicemail messages. So I was like, oh, this is great. So I can block this. So now I don't even have to once a week get some dumb text telling me that there's some messages that I should listen to. So no, my voicemail is basically just a black hole. Things go in there and they never come out. I never do this. What if your wife gets abducted or something and she's trying to call you from the trunk of a car or she's being sped out to the countryside? You're saying, help me darling. Help. They've got me in last or so. First of all, she probably sent me a text message. But second of all, I mean, I have my phone on me all the time. She tries to call. I can see that it's her calling again with on the iPhone. Her picture shows up and it's my wife. So I know to take that call, but my phone blocks anything from unknown numbers. I just don't even receive those. But of course, the people in my life who want to be able to contact me know how to contact me, but they're not going to leave a voicemail message. That's, again, I don't know who these people are. And I guess I never will know who the people are who leave voicemail messages. I guess all I know is that they have my phone number, but they don't know the ways that I actually want to be contacted. And that's fine, I guess. It's never cause any problems for me. So I came across a video the other day, which I had shown you today. I will try and explain the video for the few people out there who have not seen it. And it must only be a few because it's been watched 29 million times. I'm just going to pull it up again, even though it didn't furiorate it. Yes, 29, oh, actually, as of now, it's now 30 million views. They must have just updated it. So I will try to summarize it before I let you off the leash. I would, it's a very clean, cut young man in a sensible sweater, reciting a poem that I believe he wrote. And it was kind of one of those poems that you write at school that is nice because it will rhyme all the time while you eat some lime sort of thing. It was quite, you know, quite a rhymy poem. And it's all about our current society's obsession with social media and always being on our computers and our phones. And a sort of a video like this comes along every few months, I guess, that goes viral, which is ironic that they come along and go viral on social media. But anyway, this one went viral. There was one last year that was really good, actually. That one about that girl that was sort of hanging out with her friends and doing all these activities and everyone was always on their phone. Yes, I'll see if I can find that one because I remember that one making the rounds and I really like that one. That one was good. But this one's a bit, I don't know. This one didn't do it for me so much. But anyway, do you know what? I'm going to be completely honest with you. I haven't even watched it all. Five, I will not give five minutes to a video. I don't enjoy. But I believe you did watch it all. Well, well, well, to be clear about this, you sent this to me and said, oh, I really want you to watch this for today's program. Now, because I wanted to stay here. Well, well, I was stirred up partly because about three minutes into it, I said something to you like, I should actually pull up. I should pull up the messages right here. What did I say to you? I said, this video is so insufferable. Do I have to watch to the end? It's already been three minutes and 46 seconds and the video is five minutes long. And then you reply and you're like, oh, I didn't even watch it at all. You know, I just sent it to you. I thought you should watch it. And I so, I like an idiot, just assume that you sent me something to watch and that you would have watched it all, but you just wanted to pass it along to me. And they'd like to mention that you yourself didn't watch it. So I was super irritated at you by that. I think I got the general gist. And the general gist is, you know, technologies and illusion and let's end the confusion and the delusion. And let's all get together and hold hands and get our heads out of the screens and smell the flowers and touch a baby and stuff. Yeah. But like, I don't disagree with the sentiment. Like I sometimes feel really down about how much time I spend on computers and social media. Like, unlike you, I probably, I know you, I mean, I am probably, this video should appeal to me more than you because I do feel that life has become too skewed in that direction. But this video, 29 million years. Tell me what you thought about it. Well, yeah, I just assumed that you were 100% on board with this nonsense. I'm actually kind of surprised that it irritated even you. But, yeah, so the basic, I mean, we'll put it in the show notes. So, you know, good luck people. You can watch it. But the basic premise of the video is exactly that. People spend too much time on social media and blah, blah, blah. And there is the rhyming poem. And the video that's going on in the background shows people on their phones. But there's a kind of story, I guess, that's cut through it, which is this guy using, instead of, it shows a guy who, instead of using his phone, is trying to find directions somewhere. And of course, a pretty girl walks by and he asks her for directions. And then they skipped to them suddenly having dinner, right? Which I guess it's implied that she walked into wherever there was going to go. So there was a story. So if you talk to real humans, you can. Right. Like a pretty girl will suddenly end up having dinner with you if you just ask her for directions. Which first of all, I just think instead of using Google Maps. Yeah, instead of using Google Maps. I mean, so many things wrong with that. But I mean, first of all, how many women are going to presumably walk a stranger to their location and then end up having dinner with them that night? I think the chances of that are pretty low. So I don't like the framing mechanism just even to start with the video. But also, again, the idea that there are only people in the real world, right? There aren't people on the internet world. I think I mentioned before on the show, but I found my wife through the internet. I would never have met her were it not for the internet. We had many a digital communication before we ever met in person. So the idea that like, oh, the only way you can find true love is just by random chance walking around in the street, asking strangers for directions and then being a total creepy person and having them walk you to that place long enough so that you can get to know each other. And then she invites you over for dinner, I guess, in this fantasy land of how human interactions go. No, it's the framing device is just awful. So I hate it. But even you must realize that eventually you have to supplement this cyber relationship with like a physical meeting. Yeah. Even you bit the bullet one day and said, oh, I'm going to make this woman before I actually marry her. Yeah. No, obviously, obviously. Yes. I hate about a video like this is, is just the whole premise, the whole premise through something like this is that our technology is not any good because it separates us from each other. And I think that premise is obviously wrong. There is a totally reasonable argument to be made about the amount of time that people spend using technology. That's a completely reasonable argument. But this idea, the premise of the video is like, you know, go ahead. It ends with the takeaway message is the next time you go outside, be sure to leave your iPhone behind so you can experience the real world. It's like, what are you crazy? Who's going to do that? I'm not going to do that. Unless I'm intentionally, I don't know, going to some isolation retreat for the weekend, which I would also say like that that can be an interesting experience to do. There are places you can go that are intentionally separated from technology. I think that's a super cool experience. But I'm still going to take my phone right on in my car to get to that place for so many numerous reasons. It's just, these things just make me mad. They make me super mad. I also noticed, I mean, there's no way he could have known this was going to be watched as many times as there has been watched. And I have noted that he has activated advertising on his one video on YouTube. So he's about to start spending a whole lot more time making YouTube videos. Yes, probably. Was this uploaded recently? I think he's about to enter the television. April 25th. Whoa. So this is what I guess now we're recording. It's been two and a half, three weeks. Yeah. This guy said, I bet he's not going to think it's such an allusion and delusion when he starts getting a big check from YouTube. Yeah, no kidding. Thirty million views. That's like a third of my whole YouTube career. Right. But oh, so anyway, it just, it makes me mad. And I think now the one that I liked a while back, and it's been a long time, but I'm going to presume based on the kinds of things that passed me with like, because that video was more reasonable about it. And I think that, I don't know, I don't know if you experience it super often, but I will judge people harshly if we're in a social situation and someone is always distracted by their phone. You know, partly because like, okay, it's taken a whole bunch of effort for everybody to come out and like, and we're in a place. And if you are the person who was always on their phone or, or God, you know, you're the person like posting photographs of the thing that we're at right now, yeah, I do kind of judge that a little bit. I think if you're socializing with other people, it's time to put your phone away. And make a conscious effort to be present with the people that you're there with. That's the point of going out. If you didn't want to be there with the people, then you shouldn't have gone and you should have stayed home. And that's perfectly fine. So I make it a very, very conscious effort that if I'm out with people to not have my phone out to not be checking the phone, and I think that that's good. And that's a reasonable argument. The idea that you're going to leave your phone at home is just ludicrous or that the phone hasn't helped your life in a numerous, in just so many ways. I mean, that's, that's the thing that gets me is people don't have iPhones for no reason. People have all of these smartphones and all of these devices because they're making a judgment that their life is way better with them than without them. So that's why I just, I can't stand these things where it's like, oh, Apple has made all of us sad by the magical, wondrous things that they have created, which we all voluntarily use every day because they're great. That just, it just impregnates me. Yeah. It's pretty annoying. It was pretty, I mean, like you said, I mean, I'm probably more susceptible to that message. But I kind of can't believe that you're on my side in this argument to be honest. Well, well, I think, I think he lost me with his style. Like the, like, whereas that other one, the one that was good from a year ago or so, like that was a kind of cool and well shot. And like, I was sort of jealous of the filmmaking and thought, yeah, this is really cool. He made, whereas this one was kind of a bit like, you know, I thought it was a bit toy and a bit, yeah, he didn't do it for me. So and, you know, I'm not, I'm not completely hardcore, but I do think there is, you know, I think a bit differently to you on this and we will do spend too much time on the internet. And I'm mean more than anyone. But so I'm super open to the argument that there are times to put technology away. Yeah. I think many years ago, let me look up the name. I just want to check it out this right. I think it was called the Prince Albert Hotel. Tell, listen to that fast typing. Wow. Yeah, I wasn't even looking at the keyboard when that was going on. How do you know what buttons you were pressing? Well, I have learned to touch time is how that has happened. So I knew I didn't quite get that right. I was just looking it up and it was the Prince of Wales Hotel. So it's just one of the name that people want to look it up. And it is in an amazingly gorgeous place, which is this national park that spans both Canada and the United States called the Waterton Glacier International Peace Park. It is stunningly beautiful place if you are ever in the area you need to take a trip to see it. And I happened to just stumble upon this place when I was doing a road trip across America. I didn't really intend to go there. I just sort of ended up there. And the hotel makes a big point of the fact that they don't have Wi-Fi. They don't have internet. You're not going to get cell phone reception at that hotel. And that's part of the experience. And I think I ended up staying there for two or three days. And I thought it was just great. I loved that kind of conscious decision that we're going to have this space where we removed technology. And they had a downstairs dining area where they encouraged everybody to come. And they said, look, there'll always be people here. And we want to try to encourage you to talk to other people in this setting. And I did. And it was really nice. It was really great. So there's definitely benefits to conscious exclusion of technology from certain areas. But the idea that all of life is made miserable by technology is just obviously ludicrous. So anyway, that's that's that. Did the actual border run through the grounds right between the two countries? Well, not for this, that hotel was very clearly on the Canada side. But it's basically, it is this stunning forest mountain range glacier area. And both the United States and Canada thought that this mountain range would make a great national park. And then at some point they realized, oh, we both have these national parks that are budding up right against each other on our border. So why don't we make this like an officially managed area as an international park? So it's it's very, very cool. And you should go check it out if you're ever in the area. The elephant in the podcast that we have not yet discussed. Mm-hmm. You've put a new video out. Yes. Yes. We're recording this on Thursday night. And on Monday, I put a video out. And there was a there was a brief glorious moment on the gray versus Brady website where it showed me is having put out a video and you as having nothing at all. And so I had to screenshot that for myself to preserve this rare moment because normally it says that you have released 27 videos since the last time I released a video. So I was I was happy to see that counter at least briefly reset with a with a real video. So before we talk about your video, I do have a few issues with that website. Go go right. Like like I enjoy that it was made and like I get a chuckle from it. But I think it manages to be unfair to both of us, which is quite amazing. It manages to portray both of us very unfairly. Uh-huh. That's a pretty special special thing really. How do you think it treats both of us unfairly? Well, how long have you got? Let's give it a give it a few brief minutes. What do you think? It treats you unfairly. Well, I guess it may be it treats me more unfairly. But it treats you a bit unfairly because it makes it it makes you look unproductive. It makes it look like I'm you know, busily making videos and trying to educate the world while you're stagnating. Right. That's one way you could put it, which is completely unfair because of the completely different nature of our videos and the way they're made and the production cycles. So I think that's unfair on you. And then I think it's unfair on me or maybe because it makes me look like I'm just whacking out videos while you're lovingly crafting videos in a, you know, in your studio. But also, you know, having these view counts and having having the average view count, obviously my average view count is very, very low compared to yours partly because you have a much bigger more successful channel. But also because my number of file is pretty much the same number of subscribers as me. No, no. Anyway, but also, you know, my average is being dragged down by all these other little videos I make for these little niche projects. So I think that average is slightly deceiving figure. But then the total number of views, which obviously then puts me up probably higher than you again. I think it does. There's also, it's also unfair because, you know, I have all these different projects and different things I'm working on and some of them have help and you're just, you know, so I think, I don't know. I think it's a bit unfair on both of us, but I love that it was made and I do look at it and I get laugh from it and I think it's a good joke to have going. Yeah, I think it is mostly funny and I think, or yeah, I think anybody who is enthusiastic enough to go to that website, like they're, they know that it's funny where they understand how different our videos are. I do love, I do love the little Easter egg though that when, when a new video is on there and the view counter has frozen at 301, so that you can't just say 301 in there, they've actually made that a hyperlink to my 301 video that explains why views stick at 301. Have you noticed that? I didn't notice the hyperlink. It didn't notice the hyperlink. Yeah. I am, I'm forever envious of your 301 video because I had something in the works on that and then you beat me to it and so now you, you get to be the definitive video about why videos stop at 301 views. So well done, well done for you on that one. You should, you should still make one, like, because you would do it better and like, it would be really cool to watch. Yeah, I think, I think yours is good. There was no reason to duplicate this. You win this round, but I did not notice that there was a hyperlink on the 301, so that's good. That's a nice touch. Yeah, it is. That was, that was nice. I really want you to make a 301 video. I'd really like to watch that. Anyway, anyway, let's stop talking about that. Let's talk about your new video, which you put out this week on Net Nutrality and which I've watched a couple of times and enjoyed very much. I thought it was excellent. Tell me about, well, you also made it very quickly. Was this a long, you know, tell me the story? Yeah, this, this was a video that I think honestly took some, some weeks off the end of my life because this was made under just the most unusual group of circumstances. So the short version of this is, I was working on something, a main video for this month, which was not the Net Nutrality thing. But I don't know what it was. I think I maybe saw something on Reddit or for some reason Net Nutrality was just on the top of my mind on Thursday night, the Thursday before I uploaded the video. I remember going to bed and it was kind of just cycling in my brain as I'm falling to sleep. And so then on Friday morning, when I went to my usual work routine, I thought, let me just poke around and research the Net Nutrality thing a little bit. I can feel my brain is interested in this. This might be a good time to work on it. And Friday morning, I discovered that this whole news in, you know, while we're recording this right now, that in America, the FCC, which is the government body that kind of regulates all of this stuff, all of internet and telecommunications and everything in America, they announce that they're going to have some announcement related to Net Nutrality on the 15th of this month. And so I discovered that on Friday morning. I'm looking at my calendar. So I just was just waiting to get the right, because what is that? So that would be the second, I guess. Yeah. So yeah, that was Friday morning, was the second. And basically I thought, oh God, this is the best time ever to make this video that I've been kind of thinking about for a while, like I had a bunch of notes already on Net Nutrality. If I'm ever going to do it, I have to do it right now. But it's going to be an advocacy video. So that means I need to get it out as soon as possible. And for various strategic trying to hit the news cycle reasons, that meant like, okay, I have to get this out on either Monday or Tuesday at the absolute latest. Now, knowing my normal production cycle, that is not really possible. But I was thinking, okay, I do already know a lot about this topic. I don't have to do a bunch of research on this, so I can cut all of that out. And this kind of thing, I think most people who watch my videos don't notice it, but it's a big deal for me. I stylistically have two different videos. There are videos where I'm talking to the audience directly. Those are the videos that usually start out where I say hello internet. And then I have my, what I think of as the main videos where stylistically, I don't use the word I. I might make oblique references to my thoughts, but I very intentionally don't ever use the word I. And the ones where I talk to the audience are way easier to write. I was thinking, okay, if I do this as a first person centered video, and I don't need to do the research, is it possible to turn it around? And so I basically spent all of Friday trying to write a rough draft for the script. And I came to the conclusion that if I don't sleep, I might be able to get this out by Monday, which is what happened. But just to add in the thing that made this a little bit more difficult and it was just the worst timing in the world was that both on that Monday, my wife was leaving for a trip where she's going to be gone for about a week. And so the idea of having to say, I'm not going to be around because I need to spend all of my time on this project right before you're going to go somewhere is not ideal. That's not good, man. Yeah, it's not good. And then you add into the fact that I had family visiting from America at this exact same time. And so I had to say the same thing that, oh, I know you flew across an ocean to see me, but I need to take three days to not be available because I need to go do a thing on the internet. So this project was both incredibly rushed and under terribly difficult circumstances, but I did it because it is a topic that I super care about. There are very few topics where I would look at that factor, all of these decisions and say, but I should still make this video anyway. I think almost any other topic I would say, oh, I do not have the time or the resources or just the sanity to be able to ignore my family in this time to be able to do it. So it was a very costly video in a whole bunch of ways. And yes, I ended up on Sunday. I did all of the animations and most of the audio. And I basically woke up Sunday at about 7 a.m. and I went to bed at 3 a.m. and then I got up Monday morning and finished up a couple final things. And so I was not in great shape that day. And I feel like I'm still slightly recovering from this ridiculous burst of work, which is not a sustainable way to work. So it was very exhausting from start to finish. But only took three days, just do that once a week. Yeah. And then like rest for the other four days and you could have a weekly video. That would be brilliant. Oh, man. Oh, God, no. That is a once, maybe twice a year kind of thing. And again, only under incredibly exceptional circumstances. And only for topics I know already that is that even possible. So I love you, internet, which is why I made that video. I think this is super important, but there's no way I could do normal videos like that. And still be alive by the time I was 50. So. So let's talk about net neutrality for a minute. Obviously, I'm imagining almost everyone who listens will have seen your video. And if they haven't, well, maybe they should pause now and watch it. Yeah, I was actually wondering. And do your listener who hears my voice right now, you can answer this question. I was kind of wondering if there's anybody who listens to this, who doesn't watch both of our channels or at the very least one of our channels. I feel very curious in the Reddit if there is anybody who came upon this podcast in some other way, but didn't, didn't either know your channel or my channel before that. I'm just curious to know if that person exists. So if you exist and you're listening to me right now, Thomas, leave a comment in the Reddit and we'll see how that goes. I'm just kind of curious. ViHat also listed a video, which is excellent, which I'm sure you might mention and will definitely link to Hank Green. I had missed Hank Greens, but I saw that today as well. And that's also very good. I discovered his video after I spent my whole day writing the script. And then the first time I checked my computer email, one of the things that I was was Hank Green uploaded a video. So I thought, oh, cool. Let me see what Hank has done. And then yes, ViHat uploaded her video yesterday. I guess I'm not sure. I am really, I'm so still out of it. I think it was yesterday, but yeah, so just super brief for the record on this show. Net neutrality is basically, it's this issue about what amount of control does the company that you buy your internet have over what comes through the wires? And net neutrality is the principle that they should basically have no control. That all of the data should be treated equally. And that whatever website you're attempting to access, that should just come through your internet cable at the maximum, technically possible speed, or the maximum speed for whatever package you have paid for, and that there shouldn't be any ability to change that. So that is the principle of net neutrality in a nutshell. Treat all data coming through the pipe equally. So this is so that sort of your internet provider can't do some deal where they say we'll give you super fast Netflix, but your YouTube videos will be slow, things like that. In the US and in other parts around the world, companies, internet service providers, some of them anyway, are trying to get that rule removed because if you are the person who's actually maintaining those internet connections, you want the ability to influence the traffic that is going through those wires. And as a company, you have a huge number of reasons that you would want to do this. But I would say what I would assume is one of the primary motivating factors is simply just money. If you control the final wire going into somebody's house, and you have the ability to artificially slow down various websites unless people, either the consumer who is already paying for the internet pays more for the speedy YouTube package, or as has happened in the United States where the internet service providers have charged, it sounds so awful, but they have charged other companies like Netflix additional money in order to just let Netflix through the wire as it's supposed to go. It's not holding data for ransom, isn't it? Yeah, it's basically like holding data for ransom. And there are topics that are just basically impossible to talk about in terms of what they really are. Go to Wikipedia and read the article about how the internet works. You have all of these complicated connections between tier one, tier two, tier three providers, backbones, peering exchanges. All of these huge levels of complexity, and I was speaking with a few people, you know, to try to sort out some of this stuff. And it's like, man, if you are not a network engineer, it's almost impossible to talk about this in the terms that it actually is. And so you see, as in my own video, as in ViHARTS video, or as in HANKS video, people talk in terms of analogies, and the usual analogy is like a road. And people are talking about trucks and delivering packages and all the rest of that. And it's because there's no other way to talk about this. You can't have this discussion on the actual level of what it is. And then all of the arguments kind of boil, get messed up when you're arguing over the analogy, because there's so many reasons that cars on a road is nothing like the way the internet works. That it's very confusing. And it's one of the reasons why I absolutely hate it. The internet service providers are often talking about building fast lanes. You know, like, oh, we want to build fast lanes for the internet, which sounds awesome, except that when you try to route through the technical details, what they really mean is like, oh, we'll slow down everything, and then the normal lane becomes the fast lane. And you know, everything else is going through the slow lane, and it's simply fast by comparison. But it's just such a complicated issue. And I have some just incredibly deep disappointments with the video that I produced, but I'm relatively happy with it, given the time constraints, and given the kind of goal from my perspective, which was to talk about net neutrality in the most general possible terms, so not specifically related to the issues going on in America. And in a way that might hopefully give a person unfamiliar with the technology, some notion of why it is bad. So those were basically my goals for that. I was not attempting to explain more of the details of what's going on. And for that, I think, ViHeart, who we actually were talking, ViHeart is spotted me on Twitter asking a particular question. The couple of times I've talked with ViHeart in person, it's just creepy, but sometimes we have the exact same thoughts about something, or like we know what the other person is thinking. And ViHeart saw me ask a relatively innocuous question on Twitter where I was asking people for help with something, and basically sent me a message a minute later where she said, I know exactly what you're working on. You're working on a net neutrality video. And I am too. It's like, yes, ViHeart, you can read my mind. So she showed me her script, and we had a little bit of a discussion about it. But if you want a video that does a much better job of talking still in analogies, but much more about what are the details of this and what is happening in America right now? ViHeart's video is a much better video than mine for that. Mine I think is a much more general one that I hope will be applicable in future situations if net neutrality problems come up elsewhere. I was having a think about like discussing this, because obviously sometimes my role here is to be a bit of a devil's advocate, just to kind of nudge you a bit to find out more about what you think. But this really is a case of we're being the devil's advocate is being an advocate of the devil in a way, because it's hard to reconcile the opposing position. And like I was doing it to myself in my head saying, I could ask Ray this or I could put this to him. But I was just like, my argument was falling apart before it even came out of my mouth, because I kind of, I think we're pretty much in agreement and like no one, you know, net neutrality is really important to me for my job too. But I will try. Well, if I, well, before you even try, I'm just going to simply say that I did get a whole bunch of comments both on YouTube and on Reddit where people were asking, you know, well, what's the other, what's the other side to this? Or you know, why, you know, why would a government even consider doing this? And most of the time I would try to explain that if there was some kind of reasonable argument to be had on the other side. But there are definitely times when there is no reasonable argument to be had on the other side. I can understand why the company wants to do it. But there's no argument to be made for why it is good for either society or the internet as a whole is my position. So now I will let you devil's advocate after I've put that in ahead of time. So, yeah, you could. Well, I guess the first question, like the most fundamental question to this is, is data and like access to the internet a fundamental right, like, you know, like having air to breathe and to a lesser extent access to a power of water. I know there are a lot of people who don't have that. But how fundamental the right is this? Because a lot of the chest beating that goes on is like, how dare you, how dare you slow this one down and give me this one fast? I want to all the same. And I guess a question is, well, hang on. We have this real sense of entitlement about the internet and data and access to it. Is it, is it like a right, you know, should we just expect to be able to have it in the first place? I think it, I think you can reasonably call it a right in the same way electricity is a right once your society is at a certain level of wealth that it doesn't, it doesn't make sense to deprive your citizens of plumbing or electricity or internet if your GDP per capita is above amount x. So it's not a fundamental right in the same way that you might say or that one might make an argument for food being kind of fundamental to being human. Obviously, the internet is not. But if your society is wealthy enough, it's just crazy not to ensure that everybody has access to the internet. So that's a little bit the way I would look at it. But the entitlement thing is interesting because, you know, the internet works very differently in countries around the world and until very recently, the UK did not have any kind of net neutrality laws. And everything was basically sort of fine with UK internet. But the reason things were okay with UK internet has to do with competition regulations. So basically in the UK, for almost everybody, you have a genuine choice of internet service providers. I think in our latest flat, when I went to look, there was something like seven companies that we could buy our internet from if we wanted to. And so this is internet neutrality matters a lot more in a place like the United States, where almost everybody has no choice with their internet service provider. And now this, I mean, this has to do a lot with regulations in particular countries. And I sort of don't want to get into that. But I would just say that net neutrality, it's, I think it is very important, but there are circumstances under which it is not necessarily the most important thing. If you have genuine competition between internet providers, you can do okay without net neutrality because they all act as a check on each other. But I swear, America sometimes tries to make sure it does the worst of everything and then combine it together to make it even worse than anything could be in a kind of a amazingly awesome badness synergy. And so both having no competition and then not having any kind of regulations to ensure that the person, your monopoly provider does a halfway decent job. It's just the worst of both worlds. It just makes it absolutely terrible. So, I think that's where, yeah, that's, I think that's a room, the room number of the matter there because the one thing I think, you know, from, from our discussions over, over time is, I know you're a big believer in market forces and, you know, things working out, that commercial forces often allowing things to work out. So part of me was thinking, you know, what's great about it? Like, surely the right thing, you know, if someone's trying to make money, they're allowed to make money. And if they can be undercut, they'll be undercut and, well, you know, the rest. But this is not, obviously, this is not the case. My experience of the internet is the same as yours in the UK in that, you know, I shop around and get the best deal I can. But, I mean, you point out there, this is not the case in the US. So they've got you over a barrel. Yeah, that's exactly it. And I would just say that I think markets are a particular kind of tool and they're not universally applicable in every situation. You just have to think about what situations do, do markets work best under. And for a situation where you have to dig up streets and lay cables in the ground, it is a huge start of cost to becoming an internet service provider. The barrier to entry is so large as to effectively exclude any kind of genuine competition. And that can be the problem with the internet. So unless you live in a place that has laws that say, you know, we're going to eventually make sure that all of these cables, any company can use and figure out a way to make sure that that works for everybody. If you don't have that, you just, you can't start up a competitive internet service provider because you have like, call me when you've dug the roads to every, dug ditches to every house in America and laid fiber up to cable inside of them. Right? Once you've done that, let me know. And then you can start up your internet service provider. I think the great example of this is Google in America who is starting up an internet service provider, but it is taking years and it is going very slowly and from everything I read, it is just insanely costly to actually do. And they can only do it in relatively small cities because of the, like, having to dig up the roads and all these and things like, can you imagine a city like New York saying, okay, we're going to shut down the roads for a few months as we allow a whole bunch of companies to lay down competitive cables underneath these streets. I mean, it just can't happen. There's almost no way it would ever be worth shutting down New York for something like that. So there are situations under which market forces just cannot possibly work and this is definitely one of them. So it's a tricky situation. And yeah, I just think again, it's so hard to explain it, but I mentioned it really briefly in the video, but I had a way longer section that I thought I just, I had to cut down because I couldn't possibly do it in the allocated time. But I really think that the best comparison for net neutrality is not the roads, but it is the electrical grid. And that we have an electrical grid that in every country in the world, when you plug something in your house, the electricity company doesn't have any say over how you're using that electricity on your end. You buy a certain amount of electricity, just like you buy a certain amount of data from your internet service provider. And the electricity company, like it's none of their business, what you do with that. If you're running it like bulbs or computers or anything else, that's not their job, right? Their job is to just deliver electricity. And it's a similar situation where we have these regulations that don't allow the electricity company to charge you differently for different things in your house, because the barrier to entry for starting up an electrical company building a gigantic power station, running electrical lines all over the country, it's just too big, right? That can never be a competitive market. And even if in theory, it could be, we wouldn't want dozens of electrical wires running into everybody's house, only one set of which is ever active at a time because that's the company that people have happened to buy their electricity from. So I really think that that is the best comparison to what the situation is with the internet. And it becomes more understandable about why we have to ensure there are certain protections in this area, because it's just, competition is just never going to happen on its own in this environment. And you're treating data like electricity, this kind of anonymous, same block of stuff. Yes, loads in there. And the commodity is what it is. One watt is just as good as one bit on the internet as my perspective on it. And the electricity company... I guess the difference there though is the electricity company can do deals with the electricity generators. And there's a bit of wheeling and dealing going on there. We'll buy this many megawatts this year at this price, et cetera. And that's kind of, isn't that kind of what the ISPs are starting to do? They're starting to say, hang on, let's start doing deals with the people generating the data, Netflix and things like that. But the only way they can monetize data is the amount of it or the speed of its flow, because it's not like you can do a deal with a power station. You can't do the same deal with just the internet. Well, that's a whole. The thing that's weird about this, I think it's a strange framing issue, but people are talking about Netflix's data, for example, in the United States, taking up a huge amount of the bandwidth. Yeah. Anything. But that's not Netflix's data. That is the data that I am trying to download from Netflix with the internet connection that I paid for. You are purchasing access to the internet from your ISP. The very notion that Netflix is sort of getting in the way is just... Or taking it... Yeah, or flooding it. Right, it's like, Netflix isn't flooding the pipes. People are sucking data out of Netflix with the connections that they have paid for. And also the thing that I find particularly galling about this is that the way the data flows on the internet is that a lot of times it travels like 90% of the way to your house through networks that are just unrelated to the actual person providing you with the internet at the very end. So they are charging you to just basically get from the street to your front door sometimes where they're like, oh, suddenly it's a huge problem that we have to deliver this Netflix data. And it's like, hey, guy, this came across a continent sometimes maybe to get to me. And you're telling me that suddenly once it gets to my front door, it's shockingly expensive to let it get the last 30 feet. I mean, that's a little rich. So that's the problem that I have with this framing of the issue that Netflix is slowing down the internet when it's actually the problem is that people are demanding Netflix. And this again, that's like saying it's not McDonald's fault. It's the fat Americans buying all the burgers. Like that's true. But McDonald's have created a demand for something that causes a problem. And is it not true that sort of Netflix has this very successful company that is selling video data has suddenly created a demand for something. And then the ISPs have, if it's causing them all these problems, which is a debate to be had. But let's say it's a problem. Let's assume it is. Yes, let's assume it is. They have two choices. They either ramp up the price on the consumers or they go straight to the source of the hamburgers and say, look, if you're going to start putting all these hamburgers in the pipes, you're going to have to pay something for it. And that's kind of what they've done, isn't it? Yeah. And here's where again, I think that the problem is that the internet just works nothing like out, like anything else. The hamburger analogy is sort of okay for the real world, but again, take it back to the electricity company to talk about that same problem. Right? So imagine it's, I don't know, it's 19, it's the 1920. And we have electricity, we have electric light bulbs. And there's some infrastructure in place that is supplying all the light bulbs across the country with electricity from these electric companies and the power stations. The current situation is a bit like, okay, as time goes on, we're inventing more and more electrical do-hikis, right? That we want to plug into the wall and we have vacuum cleaners and washing machines and all these other kinds of things. And the electricity companies who are in this analogy are the internet service providers are basically saying that they don't want to build any more infrastructure than the infrastructure that was already there. Yeah, all the wires and the power stations. All the wires, the poles, and importantly, the power stations, right? That's what they don't want to build because power stations are big and expensive. And so what they do instead is start charging you based on what it is that you want to plug into the wall, forcing everything in all the light bulbs in your house to be dimmer because there's more and more Americans with more and more light bulbs, so we have to make the light bulbs dimmer. Yeah. The problem here is like, okay, electricity company, I can understand that under some circumstances if the demand for light bulbs, you know, it went way up faster than you were expecting, people have more electrical devices than you were expecting. Okay, maybe there's some scenario under which you would theoretically have to do this. But the issue is like, as a society, what we want to encourage is we want to encourage you electrical company to build more power stations, right? So that everybody has more electricity so that they can do more things with that electricity, right? Like my washing machine, like your computer is doing work for you all day long. Society as a whole wants more power. And so what you have to do if you're in a situation where markets don't work because normally if there's huge demand, right, a market that that's what markets do great is they are able to fill that demand. And if you don't have a situation where markets work, you have to make sure that the regulations encourage creation of new infrastructure. And so if you tell electrical companies, look, we're not going to let you charge different prices just so you don't have to build a power station. You can't do that. You have to make sure that they build more power stations. And so I think that is very analogous to the current situation with the Internet service providers. Is there whining and moaning about how full their pipes are with all this data from the Internet? And all I could think of is, hey, Internet providers, don't you think this is a good sign that people want more Internet? And net neutrality is a great kind of regulation that forces them to increase investments in infrastructure. Right? If they can't start biasing what data they let into your house, what particular speeds, the only solution for them is that they have to start building more infrastructure, which is what you want as a society as a whole. Because in 10, 20 years time, I think it's a pretty good prediction that actual data going across the Internet is going to quintuple in that period of time at the least. So we need to ensure the creation of more infrastructure. We don't want to set up a situation where companies can get away using their same infrastructure forever because they can do this kind of horrible, variable pricing and not have to make the investments that we as a society actually want to be made. So that's where I think the analogy to other companies just falls down a little bit is because we want to encourage more pipes and our only tool is through regulations. So that's why we have to keep this net neutrality in place because it acts as an incentive to encourage the creation of more infrastructure in addition to just all the fairness issues that come along with net neutrality about biasing one kind of data over another. So that's my thoughts on that. If you're going to do like that, if you're going to be using the law as an instrument to make a commercial company do something, why faff around the edges? Why not just say, all right, you have to do it. You have to build the government. You're saying the government and society is going to make a commercial entity do something. They don't want to do basically fair enough. Why not just pass a law then if you want to keep the cables, you've got to build more infrastructure. You've got to build more cables. Yeah, well, this is, I mean, the internet's such an interesting topic because so many countries handle this in different ways. And in some places, the internet is basically nationalized in the same way that some countries just, they build all the sewer pipes and they build all the internet pipes. And that's just the way it is. And other countries have more hybrid models. I would say in the US, the political sentiment is generally very resistance to having the government directly do things. I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm not saying that's right. It depends a lot on the particular situation. But in America, Americans generally don't like to expand the scope of government if they don't have to. So I think I can't imagine a situation where someone said, hey, you know, we have a great idea. Let's nationalize all the broadband providers. That would not go down well in America. And again, I think that might be legitimate reasons why you shouldn't do that in a place like America. I can definitely understand that kind of argument. So I'm just looking at that as a certain kind of tool that you have to try and basically as a stick, move companies in the right direction if you can't control them directly, as just force them to do this thing that they don't necessarily want to do. But in America, instead, the FCC is very likely to turn around and just say, oh, net neutrality doesn't exist. And now your existing business is way more profitable because you can charge both your customers more and the other companies more. And you don't have to make huge infrastructure investments just immediately. And so it's all very depressing in America. I have to say, I'm quite glad at the moment anyway to be in the UK where there's actual broadband competition and as the EU, I think it was just last month, EU passed laws guaranteeing that there is net neutrality in the European Union as well. So it's, you know, thumbs up for Europe on internet policy, thumbs down to America. I mean, unless, of course, I'm wrong. And the FCC chairman comes out on the 15th and says, I heart net neutrality. But since he is apparently a former lobbyist who used to work for Comcast, one of the biggest broadband providers, I'm not super hopeful that he's going to come out with a pro net neutrality stance. So it'll be spun as, it'll be spun as neutral. There'll be a spin to it to make it sound like it's a good thing. But I wouldn't be surprised if they just come straight out and use the same fast lane technology talking point that they're that I see on the news everywhere. You know, we want to encourage the creation of fast lanes on the internet. So blah, blah, blah. That's, that is kind of, if I had to put money on the table, I would, I would be fairly willing to bet that you might hear the exact phrase fast lane in the FCC announcement on the 15th. That would, that would be slightly my prediction. If it goes badly or we, you know, if it goes against how you would like to see it go, what will be the sort of medium term? How will the problems start to manifest themselves for both people in America, but for also you as a YouTuber, are you do you fear for yourself? Well, I don't, I can say that I am not concerned for me personally in terms of my career because you know, we put our videos up on YouTube and I'm assuming that Google would be able to pay basically like the ransom money that ISPs are asking for to make sure that YouTube comes through the pipes quickly. So I think it's a bit of, it's a bit of an overstatement to say that you're worried about YouTube because YouTube is, is an entity that is connected to an incredibly powerful and relatively wealthy company. So I'm not concerned that YouTube is going to go away. I think that the bigger issue is it's just, it's a, it is stagnation for the internet in the longer term. So I think that this, based on the way the ruling goes, you can expect that internet speeds will continue to just not really grow in America by any significant amount. But I think from a customer's perspective, the worst thing is it's, for someone who's kind of unaware of these issues, they're not going to notice anything. If the internet service provider is slowing down artificially some websites, they're not going to think, boy, my internet service provider is a total jerk. They're just going to think that some particular websites happen to be really slow and kind of blame those websites precisely because the, the, the, the blessed websites come through really fast. So obviously their internet connection is fast. It just so happens that some websites are slow. I think that would end up being the general perception from the population. So I have to say, I mean, but then, but then we come down to just like commercial realities of life, like successful, just like everything else in life, if you're successful, you go to the top. Will it not be that way with websites, the, the rich websites that can pay the ransom are successful in much the same way that successful airlines that have good marketing campaigns become successful or the food companies that do the best become successful is it not fair that the internet goes the way of everything else in life that the successful rise to the top because in the end, they have the means to do it via their success and those that are unsuccessful, you know, have to work harder to become successful. Yeah, I mean, when you pose it like that, it sounds like this, the status quo in terms of human society. But from my perspective, the most amazing thing about the internet is it is this incredible meritocracy that we have never seen before. That just is obviously great that people can start little companies or they can just post stuff on the internet and so many people can see or use that just immediately. And you don't need to pay some kind of gatekeeper to ensure that your new business is able to get the same kind of access as the big boys. Now, I understand that there are a lot of, there are always going to be advantages to players with more money. So YouTube, I know, it does invest in a lot of genuine infrastructure to try to make sure that YouTube in particular is very fast with local data centers and all of these kinds of things. I understand that that happens, but it doesn't change the fact that for lots of teeny, tiny companies, they can make their website and that has whatever service it is and it can become incredibly popular in a very short period of time. And right now they don't have to worry about someone knocking on the door and saying, oh, you're using too much of these pipes. I think that that is just great. It's such a meritocracy. Really, we've never seen before in human history. And that is my concern is that losing net neutrality makes it less meritocratic. It reinforces the power of existing players more. And I don't think that that is good. I don't like that kind of influence. And in the amount of... It is not inevitable. Is it not inevitable that, you know, surely internet had this little fairy tale period for a while, but if it's going to survive in a capitalist society, the capitalist world, which a lot of the world is, eventually people are going to get wise and think, well, hang on. You've been immune from the rules of capitalism for too long. It's time for a reality check. Well, again, it's capitalism for who? Capitalism for companies on the internet is nothing but just like the most pure market competition ever. People can use different services. On the internet companies can start up. They compete. They're born. They died. It all happens just in an incredible way on the internet. The question is, do the people who control the plumbing underneath also get to suddenly compete in also not capitalism, but basically predatory monopoly practices, which is just the shocking dark side of what can happen. When you put it like that, it sounds a bit meaner. It does, but that's what it is, right? You have someone who has monopoly power over infrastructure and is then able to engage in rent-seeking behavior from traffic flowing through those pipes that they have absolutely nothing to do with. There's no argument that there's capitalism happening at the plumbing level, at the level of the apps' actual fibers in the ground. No more than it's practical to have capitalism on the level of the roads to your house. It's the same kind of thing. You wouldn't give some company the ability to put toll booths on every single road in an entire country and then also charge different rates to different trucks that want to pass through those tolls, even if they're the same weight. One truck is carrying some goods that the company who controls the toll road doesn't like. That's just crazy. That's not capitalism in any sense of the word. There's two very different levels here. I think you have just super efficient, super interesting market forces on the level that we interact with, which is nothing but good. The level beneath it is not possible to have that same kind of level of interaction. I just have to say here, my concern with the America ruling in particular is not so much about the details of this ruling that from our time, when we're recording this, is going to happen in basically about a week. It's my concern about what I see often, and particularly in American politics, is this establishing of a precedent that you can then build upon to make things even worse. Again, I recommend you go to Vi Hart's video if you want all of the details. Basically, it's companies have warmed their, the ISPs have warmed their way into the situation where they have all of the kind of legal protections that what are called common carriers have. They're not responsible for the traffic that flows through their pipes. They have all of these legal protections, but throughout all of our history, those legal protections have come at particular costs, and now they're trying to work their way out of the costs that we as a society want to impose on them. I don't like the precedent it's setting. It reminds me of in America the initial rulings about money as free speech in America. I remember being really frowning my face at that. It was not because of that particular ruling, but because I thought, man, that ruling is a horrible precedent that allows things to happen later. We have seen over the years as slowly, but surely once you establish that money is free speech, there's also some other constraints that you eventually have to take away. In America, limits to giving to campaigns. They say, well, we don't limit how much someone can talk about a candidate. If money is just like talking, you can't limit how much talking you can do about a candidate, so we can't limit how much money you can give a candidate either. That's my concern about the net neutrality ruling is I do not want to give the local Internet Service providers more power to discriminate either in favor or less in favor of the data that is flowing through their pipes. I'm worried about where that goes in future steps. Once you establish this as a precedent that the companies are allowed to have some kind of control about what's flowing through those wires. That's where my concern comes from. One thing I would say, that common carrier point I think is really key to this, and that's one thing that I mean, I loved your video, but that's one thing I really took from Vise video that hit home with me. When I sit and formulate any argument for the dark side here and think, well, maybe we don't need net neutrality, as soon as that common carrier issue comes up, the argument falls to pieces. I think anyone who Vise video is quite long, 11 minutes, not long by my standards, but it's quite long for a YouTube video. If you stick with Vise video and get to that common carrier part, that's a real killer issue. We won't spoil anything here, but one of the examples she uses, which I think is very illustrative, is airlines are classified as common carriers. What that means is that airlines have to sell tickets to just whoever is buying airline tickets. They're not allowed to discriminate against employees of one particular company or another particular company. One of the benefits of being a common carrier is that you're not responsible for whatever the people are doing with your airplane transportation. If people are using your airplane to commit a crime, they're getting from one location to another location that they need to, you as the airplane company are not responsible for that. This actually originally came up from, I wanted to mention this point, but this came up when I was doing some of my research, was originally this came from telegraph companies in the United States. The whole idea of the common carrier came from there, which was that telegraph companies were accepting money to duplicate messages that one company was sending and send their messages to their competitor who was paying to hear all of the correspondence that their competitor was up to. Basically, paying to wire tap their telegraphs. The telegraph companies made the argument saying, well, these are our wires. We built this telegraph network. We can do whatever we want. If that means if someone is willing to pay us to send them a copy of all the communications from a particular individual, if we think that's good business idea, we can totally do that. The court stepped in and said, no, you cannot do that. You have to treat all of these messages the same. That's the very notion of a common carrier. That's the same kind of rule to apply to the internet is to say, you are a common carrier of data. One of the benefits of that means, again, if people were using the telegraph to plan their bank robbery, you, the telegraph company, are not complicit in that. You were not helping them conspire because you just have to treat all the messages the same. That's the benefit that you, the telegraph company, get. The common carrier thing is in the petitions that we have to the FCC. You're supposed to use this phrase to say that we would like you to classify internet service providers as a class two common carrier in the United States, which comes with all of these kinds of responsibilities, but also these freedoms from being complicit in what's actually traveling through your network. I would think if you're an internet service provider, you don't want to be responsible for anything going through those pipes because it's just terrifying. People might actually be doing on the internet. They enjoy that cloak of protection, but they don't want to tow the line in some other aspects of it. Yeah, that's exactly it. Well, hopefully next time we talk about this, we'll be talking about, it wasn't as bad as we thought, but you don't sound hopeful. I am not optimistic. It's what I would say. It's because I look at the structure of the way that this was set up. The FCC is not a democratic body. You don't elect people to the FCC. They're just appointed. They don't necessarily have any meaningful accountability to the general public. I have a tiny glimmer of hope in that they pre-announce their announcement. They said, we are going to announce something about the net neutrality rulings on the 15th. In the meantime, we're opening it up to public inquiry. No, taking the temperature. That is my only glimmer of hope is that they wanted to see, okay, how wild are people going to be about this? My hope is that they felt there was enough rile meant to warrant maybe not doing what they were going to do. Actually, I was tracking, I used a URL tracker to see how many people clicked on the link in my video to go to the FCC. I can't know how many people filled in the form, which the FCC goes way out of its way to scare you into not doing. It makes it super user unfriendly. At the time of the recording, about 50,000 people at least clicked the link in my video to go to the FCC page. I reckon one in a hundred. That's slightly my guess as well as maybe one in a hundred would fill out the actual form. I can't know what the results are, but I am not optimistic. I expect the FCC to have some opening line in their statement about how we really listen to what you said. Everybody said they wanted a better internet. Our regulation changes today are to encourage a better internet with new fast lanes for you to get the content that you want as fast as it can be delivered. That's basically what I expect to talk about next time. I really hope I'm wrong, but I'm not optimistic. I feel a bit like I didn't give you a hard time and make you duck and wave, but that's because I think this is a no-brainer. There is no other side to this issue. Yeah, and yet it might not work out. There are a couple of things off topic though. I think we should point out as we wrap things up. I have an admission to make at the end here, Gray. You knew beforehand that I wasn't very well, and I wasn't feeling a hundred percent, but well enough to do the podcast. I've never really let us have recorded the whole thing on my built-in microphone on the computer and not my big push microphone. Oh, I was asking you about the microphones in the beginning. All right, well, we have to retroactively apologize to the people for your terrible audio quality then. I'm sorry, man. I'm apologizing to you as well. I feel really bad. I realized about 15 minutes ago and it feels really bad. Don't worry. This stuff is bound to happen eventually. Sooner or later, I will be doing the whole thing talking into my laptop microphone and I'll sound terrible one day. Don't worry. Do you know what the funny thing was? This was the first time I didn't do the backup recording onto my camera with a radio mic as well. It was the first time I said, I'm not doing it. Yeah, of course that's when this was going to happen. Don't worry. It's really no issue. Are you mad at me? Are you mad? I don't even understand how I would be mad. Gosh. I can understand. Can I put one last thing out there about net neutrality as well? Yeah. In much the same way that I think copyright infringement is the wrong term, I think net neutrality is bad PR. Oh, God. Yeah. It's a really, it's a, I mean, it couldn't be a more neutral, less provocative term if it tried. It's even got the word neutral in it. Yeah. That was a mistake by, or genius, depending on who came up with it. Tim Wu from Stanford came up with that in 2002, I believe. And is he, is he pro with the neutrality? Is he against it? He's pro, isn't he? He is pro net neutrality. Well, he should have called it something different then because that's a terrible thing to have called it. Yes, but if I can just point out, I skimmed through the original paper that came across this term. It was a technical paper talking, talking about a particular property of certain networks. This was well before this ever became a political issue. So this, this was not like someone was trying to coin a term for political debate. Someone was just trying to have a useful technical term to describe certain kinds of networks. And in that circumstance, net neutrality is a great term, but I completely agree with you. I mean, I've in discussions online and in real life with people. I have found that everybody has a hard time with this term, even people who are technically oriented very easily run into this issue of, am I for net neutrality or am I against net neutrality? And in my own video, if you, I only say net neutrality, I think three times and in both, and all those times, I very intentionally tried to structure the sentence so that it was super clear that you should be for this. Right, so like the end of the video ends with defend net neutrality. And I think it starts with an important part of the way the internet works is net neutrality. But for most of the video, I went with, I was thinking about, you know, what could I say instead? And I was using the term data equality. I was trying to cope with something that's better. Yeah, that is a bit bit. It's still not, it still doesn't grab me by the way that freeboating does. But well, but I think that is a better term. That was the best I could come up with. And also it's like fair, maybe fairness. Can I point it out? Can I point it out? Just slightly here. The more I think about freebooting, the less I like it. I hate to tell you this, but the more I think about freebooting, the less I like it. And I can't remember who it was because we're just doing this now. But somebody proposed the alternative view jacking, which I, the more I think about it, I'm way more in favor of the term view jacking than freebooting. So I don't, I don't mean to, Do you think fans too much like some rubbish sort of A.T.s movie? I know what you're saying. I know what you're saying. And I don't mean to split the vote on this just so briefly after you made it into the urban dictionary and we're going to try to get you into the Oxford English dictionary. But the more I think about it, I think freebooting has the same kind of thing, which is, oh, am I for freebooting? I like free stuff. And the date that net neutrality has, which is again, like, oh, am I for the neutral thing? Or am I against the neutral thing? It is, it is not a good term politically. And yeah, data equality is not the greatest, but it's better data fairness. I don't know. Maybe we can ask the listeners if they're still listening since we're just rambling on now. What turns do they think would be better than net neutrality? So any if they can hear a word I'm saying on this microphone, I apologize, this is an I apologize, Gray. I wasn't well and I set my computer up incorrectly and I will be punishing myself. You know what we should talk about next time? More checklists. I have a lot of checklists. You need a checklist.
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==References==
Category:HelloInternetEpisode
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