H.I. No. 47: Charismatic Megafauna

"H.I. #47: Charismatic Megafauna" is the 47th episode of Hello Internet, released on Septmeber 22, 2015.
==Official Description==
Grey & Brady discuss: the lack of hotstoppers in Starbucks in the UK, wolfgate, pilots and snipers, Google's new logo and Google creepiness, the bi-weekly weigh in and the Grey Health Bot, Corners Corner, and the next round of drama in the New Zealand flag referendum.
==Show Notes==
can you hear me? Hello, Britney. Do you wanna try to recognize me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? No, I can hear you. Hello, ***, Chill Sweet Hello. Can you hear me? Hello? I can hear your. Hello. Hello. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Are you one of these sound andager folks like movies all over? Hello? Cover my ears. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Goodness. I would like to open the podcast by lodging a formal complaint against Starbucks in the United Kingdom. Wow. Formal complaint. One of the things that I like about America is just this feeling of everything is convenient. From big ways, we have a gigantic Walmart that contains everything that you could ever possibly want. Plus other stores that you may need to use while you're in Walmart like a bank or a haircutters. From the biggest thing America is very convenient to the smallest little details America is very convenient. Yeah. And one of those little details is when you order a coffee in Starbucks in the US, they have for you to use. These little sticks that you can put in your coffee lid to block the place where the coffee pours out of. I don't know the name for these things. Do you know you were laughing there? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? I don't know. Fat person assistant sticks. No, they're not fat person assistant sticks. You know there's a hole where the coffee pours out of. Yeah. It's a little blocker, like a tiny quirk that you can put in your coffee. Yeah, no, I know what I mean. It's just like, it's just the many, many toes. The fat people of America have to help them continue in their becoming fat. How is this related to becoming fat? This is just convenient. And so when you get a coffee, you can put the little stick in it and it prevents coffee from spilling out on your hand. When you walk to the car or when you walk somewhere else while you want to hold a cup of coffee. Totally reasonable. Yeah. So basically it's assisting people that even when you're walking and moving you can still have something incredibly calorific in your hand. Or just coffee. Regular coffee is not super calorific. No, fair enough. You do it with the frappuccinos. What they do there is they give you the extra wide straws so that you can suck it up faster. Right? That is much more fat person assistance technology that exists in America. Yeah. Right. And it's necessary when I don't know in theory one might buy several Java chip frappuccinos and you want to make sure that you can get all of the big chunks at the bottom nice and easily and they don't get stuck in the straw. That's fat person assistance technology. Although if you have too wide a straw diameter when you do get towards the end it does get harder to pull stuff up. Yeah. You almost need a second thin straw to sort of hoover up that last bit. That's when you just pour it in your face. Okay. Right. Getting back on track here. I'm talking about drink quarks. That's what I'm going to call it. It's a drink court. It also doubles as a little stir for your coffee. Why don't we call them hot stoppers? Let's say better name. Hot stopper. Hot stopper. All right. I'll give you that. Hot stopper. I'll let that pass. Okay. So the hot stoppers. You can also use them to stir your drink. Very can be. All right. So it drives me crazy that here in the UK the exact same company Starbucks doesn't have these things. If you get a coffee in the UK they don't have any hot stoppers for you to use. Yeah. They're just unavailable. And the thing that really bugs me about this is that Starbucks unlike McDonald's is not a chain. Starbucks actually owns all of the locations. Like they are a single unified corporate entity that is in charge of all of these Starbucks locations. They don't. They don't chain it out. There's no franchises. There shouldn't be any local variation. Why? Why are there no hot stoppers here? Why do I have to suffer little tiny bits of boiling hot coffee coming out of the lid of the Starbucks coffee here and onto my hand when I want to walk from the Starbucks to my office? This has happened multiple times and it makes me curse Starbucks in the UK. And somehow it also just feels very typical of all of England. I love England very much. But it does feel like English people sometimes enjoy the minor inconveniences of life that they would feel that life was diminished if they didn't have trivial things to constantly complain about. And I feel like is this the reason that Starbucks doesn't have the hot stoppers because English people would actually complain that like, oh the hot stoppers, well what am I going to do if I don't get to complain about drops of coffee on my white shirt or on my hand? I bet there's a reason. I don't think it's your reason. I appreciate the humor of your observation about the grumbling of the British people and I do concur with your observation. But seriously, there probably is a reason. There's probably some EU mandate or something to do with choking hazards or something to do with litter and recycling. I bet there's a reason. I bet there's a stupid law. I wanted to know the reason so badly that I actually spoke to some of the people at one of my local Starbucks just recently. Wow, you must really want to know if you spoke to someone at the Starbucks. Yeah, I went in and I said to the guy, I said hey, you don't happen to have any of these little sticks that you put in the lid to stop coffee from spilling over in the back. Are they there? Are they in a box and you just don't know to put them out front or something? I actually was willing to overcome my great social resistance and speak to a person and try and find out the answer to this. The worst thing was the guy said to me, no, there aren't any. He completely agreed with me and he said he went to some Starbucks manager training in America and saw these things and thought that they were absolutely amazing. And he has been trying to get them in his own local Starbucks, no luck thus far. So I don't know the reason, but there's got to be something. There's got to be something. Have you now forged like a sort of special connection with that guy that means you can now go to that Starbucks again? I will not be going to that Starbucks for quite a while until hopefully he forgets. He forgets about the guy who wanted to know about the hot stoppers. But that's the price one pays for trying to find out the answer to a question. Okay, well, there you go. I'm really impressed by how quickly you've adopted hot stoppers. We need something. I can't keep saying the stick that you mix the coffee with that also prevents coffee from spilling on your hand. Or that's a terrible name for a product. Yeah. Okay, there we go. So, shall we start real follow up? We shall start real follow up. I think the feedback and the number of comments we had about tipping was high. Yes. Is that fair observation? Yes. It was very high. Yes. Do you have anything that you want to mention about the feedback on tipping? Do you know what I would say? No. It became so overwhelming that it ceased being something that I felt like I could feed back on. It was just I kind of just got swamped by the avalanche of comments and advice and experts and anecdotes and rules and to the point where I'm just like whatever. This perfectly lays into what was my main point about the feedback on tipping. The overwhelming sentiment was, hey you guys, you're just way overthinking it. Tipping is really simple and then the person out lays how they tip under what circumstances. Which then with really prescriptive rules and exceptions. Right. With this group of employees, yes. Those group of employees know this group, it's 12 and a third percent. Right. That group, it's 19.25 percent. But only if it's Wednesday. And then the commenter was always acting as though like we are the idiots who just don't understand these rules. But the best part about being on the receiving end of this kind of follow up is that you see everybody's drastically different opinions. But everybody thinks it's very obvious. Right. Everybody's coming at it from this. Oh, well you just do this. Everybody knows that. Why? Why do you find this confusing? Even though you're hearing from a hundred people a day who have different opinions about what the correct procedure for tipping is. And I was trying to think like a comparison to this. The only thing I could think to compare it to is sometimes like the rules of grammar. People will argue over like a way to make a sentence grammatical or what a sentence or like how a sentence should be structured. And everybody just thinks that the grammar rules that they learned from Mrs. Terwilla B in the fourth grade. Everybody knows those are the universal grammar rules that we use in English. But like English is this horribly messy language. And you don't have necessarily super consistent grammar rules everywhere. So it's reasonable to be confused about what is the true state of this because there is no true state of it. There is no better example of that for me. And I don't want to start a whole talk about this now. But there's no better example of what you just said to me than the Oxford comma. Oh yeah. There is a holy war waiting to happen. I know. I know. I'm on the opposite side to you on that one. And I have absolutely no justification for other than it's just what I was taught to do. And the other way seems wrong to me. And I can hear the argument for the other side and it makes absolute perfect sense to me. And I say, yeah, you're right. Everything you say is logical. Yeah, that comma should go there. And yet I just refuse to do it because it's just not... It's just I think it's wrong. And I have no explanation other than it's just that's my rule. I was taught no Oxford comma in school as a kid. That was really nailed into us. As an adult, I have broken free the shackles placed upon me by my education. And I will use the Oxford comma. But you're never completely free of the shackles in your mind. Because even when I write out the Oxford comma, I have to do it somewhat intentionally. And it will still look weird to me. But I think it's the way it's the way of the future. We have to go with this Oxford comma. But I can completely understand your side of this. It just feels wrong even though it doesn't make any sense. It's like someone who has a really religious upbringing and then decides to become an atheist. I still think even that person, if they're an atheist for the rest of their life, every time they declare their atheism, they probably think, sorry about that God. It's just the way I think, alright, I'm sorry. Don't hold it against me. I just don't believe in you. I am sure you will receive no feedback on that remark, Freddie. That's whatsoever. I think the Oxford comma will get people more inflamed than the how atheist and things say. Yeah, without a doubt, Oxford comma will be more of a religious war than actual religion. Two other minor points that I just want to have on our tipping discussion for follow-up. One of which was many, many people were telling me, what I already knew, which is that in the United States, the way the law is supposed to work with waiters and waitresses is that if they don't earn enough from tips during their shift to have earned minimum wage, their employer is supposed to cover the difference. Yeah, he's very aware of this. But I have also spoken to people who actually work in that industry who unsurprisingly report that that just basically doesn't happen. That if you're stiffed on tips or you're working a bad shift and your salary doesn't equal what minimum wage is supposed to be, you're not going to get that money out of the employer. It is never going to happen. What are you going to do? This is one of these situations. You're going to start trying to sue your employer for the money back. You're going to spend many years on a class action lawsuit. It's just not going to happen, which is precisely why restaurant owners feel that they can stiff waiters and waitresses out of what should be minimum wage. That's why again, I reiterate, I know people think in theory it's okay not to tip in America, but I would say it is not okay not to tip in a restaurant in America. You just have to do that. The final point that I want to say that just goes to my feelings about how tipping is uncomfortable for everybody is a number of people were telling me about how some Uber drivers do want to expect tips and that Uber drivers, some of them will rate you as a bad passenger in the system if you don't tip them as a way to try to let other Uber drivers know not to pick you up. One of the things that I think is great about the whole Uber system is that you have a rating that the driver can see before they choose to pick you up so that some Uber drivers are trying to drive down the averages for people who don't tip so that they can pick up tipping customers more on average. They're like, oh great, great, thanks. This goes exactly to what I think about tipping. It's complicated, it's socially awkward, and fundamentally it feels like blackmail, kind of like bribery. It's just, I don't like it. Apparently, I don't know if this is true or not, but I was told it. So I'm believing it and I'm now repeating it so it is true. But when you're shopping and haggling in places like Thailand where it's almost expected that you would do a bit of haggling if you just walk up to a stall and say how much for that t-shirt, that's the beginning of the negotiation. Right. And some people obviously drive hard a bargain to others, but apparently if you're a really hard bargainer and you're a bit of an arse, what they do is when they finally agree to the sale and they put your object that you've bought in a bag, they have different coloured shopping bags that will tell the other store owners. Don't deal with this person, he's an arse and you'll spend half an hour until he gets you down to eight but whereas though if you're not much of a bargainer and you're a bit of a pushover, they give you a different colour bag. So when you go into a negotiation, the store owner knows what to expect because of the bags you're holding from the store you're in before. Right. He's looking at all those green bags thinking, this person is money for me. That's right. I am just going to assume that it's true because it is delightful to think that it is true. Fact. You heard it on Hello Internet. Now we've been talking over a few episodes about puns and dad humour. I don't think we need to go over it too much more, but I did receive an email that I enjoyed and I wanted to share with you. So here's the paper grey. Oh wow. You know I like my emails and bits of paper. I do. This comes from Isaac. I believe you and Mr Grey are wrong about puns because obviously you and I have been a little bit negative about puns, even though I am a big user of puns. Good puns are a great form of humour. I've lived for a couple of years in, here we go. How do you say this? Gothenburg? Goatenburg? How do you say in Sweden? I say Gothenburg, but let's go with Gothenburg for now. Apologies to the people of that fine city. I've lived for a couple of years in Gothenburg. The city known for having a strong pun culture. Here people of all ages and social status as tell puns and they can be very inventive and well timed. So I was obviously intrigued by this, him telling me that this city is well known for its pun culture. And I was obviously going to make a little joke about it. You know, say how it's funny how people think their city is famous for something. But when I did a little bit of research, it turns out Gothenburg is famous for its pun culture. Oh yes. Apparently I found, because I found this other article which was based on a survey, a nationwide survey done in Sweden by Comedy Central, that decided the people of Gothenburg were the funniest in Sweden. Apparently their accents are quite funny. But also it says in the article Gothenburg's favourite joke, puns are the funniest type of joke according to the Swedes followed by irony and slapstick. So Swedes do find puns funny and the people of Gothenburg with their funny accent are famous for their puns. It must be a side effect of the language. Like I heard from a few people that puns are really big in China, but that it's a side effect of the way the Chinese language is structured. Right. I'm thinking the Swedes, it's something with their language where they overlap all their languages that makes them really enjoy puns. Yeah, that's quite possible. English isn't a terrible language for punting that, you know. But do you get to imagine a language that was better suited to puns? Yeah, I'm glad I don't speak that language, whatever it would be. Because they're not funny. So what's a language as well suited to puns? One where there's more confusion and overlap or one where the overlap and confusion is rarer and therefore the pun is more of a diamond in the rough. The impression that I got from some feedback was that because Chinese has this tonality part of indicating meaning that it's not just the sound, it's also the rising or falling tones that this lends itself to lots of puns where you can make things that sound very similar. I'm going to guess that a language that has a great deal of overlap is what lends itself to punting, as opposed to a language that is barren in overlap where puns are rarer. I mean, that would make sense, doesn't it? That tellies with the whole Chinese number thing, isn't it? Where the numbers they like and don't like are because, you know, this number sounds like the word for death and this number sounds like the word for money and things like that. So how am I unfamiliar with that? Oh, okay. That sounds interesting. I mean, Chinese people are obsessed with the number eight, I don't know. I do not know this, I think. I think it's eight. And if they so like a license plate or a house that's a house that's number eight on a street is worth more than all the other ones. Oh, humans. No, no, no. That's great. Kerb appeal is trying to change the number of the house. Maybe like we talk about how in big cities everything is one London bridge, maybe in the Chinese cities, they all like to be eight. Eight and six are sought after and four is a bad number. I can't remember why. I think it must be something to do with death. Chinese lucky numbers. I'll send you a link later if you want to find out more. I learned something new today. The things you learn on how to internet. You learn about the Chinese love of numbers and how you're going to get different colored bags in markets around the world. That's right. Now, one thing you have been learning from time to time until recently was the location of two ships, two crew ships that I was constantly looking up on the internet and telling everyone where they are. And I, without your permission, I made these the official flag ships of Hello Internet. Yes, you did. I'm not going to lie. Gray wasn't keen on the idea of me looking up the positions of these ships in every podcast, but because he's a good friend and a very tolerant person, he was letting me do it. So I'm happy to report much to his delight. Although he doesn't agree with my reasoning. I have decommissioned to these two ships. Oh, really? I'm not even speaking their names. That is the extent of the decommissioning. That's really sad, baby. That's really sad. Yeah. And as Gray well knows, and I'm not going to go into it in detail here because he's already laughed at me way too much and I'm not going to give him another opportunity to do so. Oh, what do you mean the 20 minutes we cut from the last podcast? I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. Basically, I contacted like the cruise line in charge, Royal Caribbean or Royal Caribbean, which is another discussion that was cut because we probably spent way too long on it. Uh-huh. Because I just wanted to go. When the ship was next in England, I wanted to go and have a look at it and maybe do a podcast there or something. I didn't know what I wanted, but I was not shown sufficient love by the public relations. Do you want me to summarize the conversation that we had? No, I do not. I most certainly do not want you to summarize it. The upshot was I was shown insufficient respect by the public relations people in my opinion. And Gray has already pointed out to me that an $8 billion company like Royal Caribbean can probably live without the love of Hello Internet. And also I don't imagine many of the blue rinse set who like going on cruises, Hello Internet listeners either. Although I will point out two things in the wake of that. Oh, do you like what I did there? The wake of that? I will point out two things in the wake of that. One is I have actually in the last couple of weeks received an email from a passenger on one of these ships saying, Oh, I was just listening to your podcast and I was on the ship. So we do have listeners on the ship. And also we love talking about like robots and things being taken over by machines and things don't we? And it turns out one of these ships has like robot bartenders and we could have spoken for hours about that. But you know what? We're not going to. Here's now Gray. Don't you start on me? I'm just going to say four of the listeners. I'm just going to say four of the listeners. You've got a whole corner you didn't want. You've got rid of a whole corner you didn't want. You should just be happy and move on. I am very happy. I am very happy. But I just want I just want to tell the listeners that if you ever receive a phone call from Brady, be sure to show him the respect that you think a man in his position in life deserves. Because if you don't if you don't roll out that red carpet for Mr. Number file, he will be like, hell hat no fury like a Brady scorned. That's all I'm going to say. You work for PR and Brady calls. If it's not the way that he thinks it's going to go, you will be dead to him forever. So even though even though Brady in some ways is trying to play this as, oh, CGP Gray didn't like this corner where we discuss an arbitrary location in the ocean every week. It's actually much more Brady is scuttling these ships to the bottom of the ocean. I have been entirely honest about my motivations. Your dislike for my checking on the ship's corner has absolutely nothing to do with the end of it. It is entirely my displeasure. Oh yes. This is public relations person. I just want to make it crystal clear for people. But let me let me clarify that message that Gray just sent out to the public relations people of the world. Right. Don't think that way about Brady calling you. Take that way about people from new media calling you because although you may not be entirely aware of this, old newspapers printed with ink onto dead trees is not the only place that you can garner publicity in the world. And if a gift horse comes along offering you all sorts of lovely things, don't shun it just because it doesn't print its message onto dead trees. Can we move on now? We can move on. I will let you have the final word. Hello Internet. Let me tell you a story. A story of sadness followed by great happiness. So this summer I was visiting my parents. And as parents are, they are sad when it is time for their child to leave. The actual morning of departure is a difficult one for parents. I was getting ready for the flight, packing the final bags, moving them into the car, but I had prepared for this moment. You see, all summer long, my parents kept mentioning how there was this one photograph of Brady that really made them laugh every time they saw it. It's Brady trying to read getting things done. A frown on his face, Audrey on his chest, also looking at the book, also frowning. It's an amazing photograph. So as I was doing the final preparations to get ready to go, the doorbell rings, the delivery man is there and what arrives, but a fracture of the photograph of Brady. And let me tell you, it turned the whole morning around. This is magic in photographs and fracture wants to take that magic out of our digital lives and into our physical lives. And digital man that I am, the physical is different. Now I had never seen a fracture before. This was actually the first time I had ever ordered one. And I was really impressed with seeing it in person. Now many times you have heard how great fractures look. This is all very true. It looks beautiful. But I want to focus on the thing that was most surprising to me, which is that the fractures are very light. I kept hearing on all of the ads how it's printed on glass. And in my mind, I imagine that this was going to be very heavy, that this was going to be a real solid thing that would be difficult to mount on the wall or display somewhere in the house. No, it's surprisingly light. So installing something like this in your house, it's not a big deal. If you've been hearing photographs printed on glass and like me kept thinking must be really heavy, don't want to deal with it. That is not the case. A physical picture as a gift can change a whole day. So if you're listening to this and you've never ordered a fracture before, I want you to take this opportunity and think about someone in your life whose day would be made brighter with a surprise gift. Think of a moment that's important to them and get it printed and get it sent to them. And when you do that order, you can use the offer code HelloInternet all one word to get 15% off your order. So right now open up FractureMe.com and brighten up someone's day. I see that we have some follow up for the emoji pdf wolf. Oh yes, I'm very excited about this one. Remember wolf gate. Right. This was the Audrey emojis is what we were confused about. Yes, because my wife and I who both use iPhones use the wolf face emoji as a representation for Audrey and Lulu because they're both kind of beige cutler dogs and they look a little bit like the wolf face on the iPhone. And it turns out that the wolf only looks like that on the iPhone. And if you use Android or Windows, I'm looking at list here or Samsung and Twitter and Facebook, they all have different emojis. And all of theirs not only look quite different, they're gray colored. It's only Apple that has this kind of form color. That's like my dogs. Right. It looks nothing like a wolf. Apple is clearly wrong with their drawing and I hate all of apples emojis. They're terrible. And if this is supposed to be a wolf, I mean I didn't know it was a wolf, we just called it, we called it Audrey and Lulu or it looks probably more like a fox. So many of their emojis are terrible or they're terrifying if you zoom in on them. Like a lot of the faces and the family ones like don't look at it too close because they're terrifying. I am not a fan of them. They're opposite. They're wolf ones actually much nicer than the other ones. Although if it's supposed to be a wolf, then they're probably missing. That's right because it's much nicer because it's a puppy is what they've drawn. I don't know who's in charge of emojis over there at Apple, but let me show you a picture of a wolf. We've already discussed this at considerable length much more than you could think to guys could discuss one emoji. But anyway, we did discuss at one point how our debate on this issue caused a spike in the number of people viewing the wolf page on emoji pdf, which is a website that I didn't know existed until we drove all this traffic to it. I don't know if this is like some big operation like Wikipedia or at some Mickey Mouse operation that just one person is doing in their basement. Either way, it's like an encyclopedia of emojis and it looks pretty well done to me, to be honest. And one of the things they're doing obviously to sustain their site or to make money or whatever is there allowing people to sponsor pages on their website instead of having ads. Obviously they're trying to make their money with ads and they're thinking maybe a better way to do it would be to get people to give them money. You know how are these things go? Anyway, I was contacted by Jeremy from emoji pdf and he has kindly made Lulu an Audrey, the official sponsors of the wolf page on emoji pdf. So if you go to the wolf page on emoji pdf instead of being served some grotesque ad that you don't even want to see, you will see that Audrey and Lulu are the sponsors and there's even a link off to Audrey's Facebook page. Oh, there we go, sponsor. This wolf face emoji has been adopted by Audrey and Lulu. Look at that. I still love the fact that Audrey has a Facebook face. Yeah. That's what you do, Brady. It's so cute. There should be more people following that. It's so much cuteness. You have a thousand people following your two hour. You want more? Yeah. Audrey deserves more. How many does Audrey deserve? I would say 10 to 20 K. 10 to 20 K. That's what you think Audrey the adorable two hour deserves. Yeah. I think that would be nice. I base that on nothing. Yeah. But no, this is good. So good. Audrey is sponsoring emojis. I like this. We will have, by the way, I've been meaning to talk to you, not today because we've got way too much to talk about, but we will have a discussion at some point about whether or not I'm going to be able to persuade you to get a dog because we've been avoiding this issue for too long on the podcast. Have we been avoiding this issue? I feel like we haven't been avoiding this issue because you constantly badger me about it in just our normal lives. I feel like it's in this way we always talk about. In our normal lives, we talk about it a lot, but we don't talk about it on the podcast much. Okay. I'm just going to, I need a bit more time. I want to put together my arguments. Okay. We'll do it later. You want to get together all your paperwork for that one in a nice, nice case. Well, actually, what I really want to do is just buy one and give it to you for Christmas in the presence of your work. And then watch what you do. Oh, yeah. Oh, I'll show you what I do. You go ahead and try that. All right. Another piece of follow up here. This is a link that, I don't know where this link came from. I'm sure it was sent to us by someone. So thank you, person. Good job, I've credit there, Brady. Yeah. Attribution. Some people seem to think it's this right they have to just be attributed if they send us something or suggest we talk about something. I remember one time on the podcast I just mentioned, oh, someone sent me a link. And someone said, Brady, you're free booting. You're free booting, but not attributing. I'm not sure that it's free booting, but anyway, I'm not, I'm not entering the debate, but I'm just putting it out there. I'll just say the only reason I called you out on it is because if listeners go back and listen to us talk about stuff. I never even make any attempt to try to attribute things because I feel like who knows where it comes from. It just comes from the internet. I just, I loved, I loved your attempt and then immediately just giving up on trying to attribute it. Whereas I feel like the only, the only winning move here is to just, is to not try. It's just so hard to keep track of this stuff. So that's why I drew attention to it. I think it's nice to do it when you can, but unfortunately it does create a precedent that everyone expects it. It creates a precedent and then you also end up with a podcast where a good 10% of the podcast is discussions on how a person's name might be pronounced and then also apologies for not pronouncing it correctly. You did that to a whole city just moments ago. I'm sorry, I did. Yeah. At least I didn't go each person in the city one by one, but let's say this link came from Tim. Okay. What did Tim send us? A report or some sort, you can click on it. It's there in the show. Oh, right. Tim, the safety, a casser, the civil aviation safety authority in Australia. So that's the, you know, it's the plain people in Australia. And it's this big report that was done. And I haven't, I haven't, oh, this looks boring. Yeah. I actually, I think it looks quite interesting, but I haven't read it. But basically it's about whether or not, if they've done a research into whether or not people are paying attention to flight safety videos. Yeah. And they've actually used, they've actually used some of the more gimmicky ones as their example. And the reason this looks terrible is that it opens with the standard opening line for articles that just is never a good indication, which is the, what do X things have in common? So this report opens with, what do the following have in common? Bill Bobaggens, Lady Gaga and the Manchester United football team. I was like, oh, no, this is always a terrible open, open air. But all three have been featured in pre flight safety demonstration videos. The reason I brought it up was in the last podcast, when I said, I thought it was quite conceivable that research is done into whether or not people pay attention to safety videos. I thought you were a bit dismissive and didn't think that was particularly likely. And I said, well, I think it is. I thought it is likely. So I'm just bringing this up to point out not only is it likely, we now know that it does happen. People do research. People's attention into airline safety videos. And that was the first plank of my argument about whether or not it's their legal reasons for mixing it up with your airline safety videos. And I just wanted to put that in there, you know? Yeah, I'm just skimming through this though. And I am unconvinced by their bullet points here because the big headline here is the problem is people don't pay enough attention. Right. And so they're giving examples of when people don't pay attention. So as an example, they list an airplane that had the oxygen masks deploy. And as we all know, Brady, oxygen may be flowing to the mask, even though the bag does not inflate. Yes, I have heard that. And here say the two crew members had to get up and assist two passengers who were concerned about the bag not inflating on this particular flight. And all I can say is two people out of an airplane, that's amazing. Like my experiences as a teacher is you can't give instructions to a room full of 20 people and be guaranteed all 20 of them are going to follow those instructions. That's actually really impressive. Yeah. If you have everybody paying attention 100%, there was, I don't know if I should bring this up now, but there was a kind of kid who, I don't know how to describe this, but I would just say there were some kids who weren't they weren't like dumb, but you would give instructions to a group and they would sit there and then the group would get started doing whatever you told everyone to do. And they would wait for you to personally explain the thing to them and they seem to just not believe the group instructions could possibly apply to them. And so that's why I just skimming these things over here. There's another one, there's another example here about six people on an airplane didn't follow the appropriate instructions, eight people on an airplane. And it's just like these numbers seem tiny to me. So I'm not convinced that the opening statement, the problem people do not pay enough attention is actually a problem. I think you're starting from the assumption that if you could get everyone to pay full attention to your video, that they would follow instructions perfectly. I think that is a false assumption. And I'm also not convinced that making the video more engaging is also going to be guaranteed related to an improvement in knowledge about what to do. But you can have people watch a thing and learn and retain nothing from it. Like for example, you can watch one of my videos where I talk very quickly and moments later, maybe remember absolutely nothing even though you were paying attention. So I disagree with the premise of at least my two seconds of skimming this report. My skim of this report, I was equally unimpressed by it, but that's by the by. The whole point I wanted to make was this is an area of research. And I thought it was inevitable that it would be researched because airline safety gets researched to death. And I found it impossible to believe this area wasn't another area that gets researched. And so it is whether it's being well researched or researched by idiots or it's just well-funded kind of jobsworths, I don't know. And I haven't read this well enough to say for sure, but I wasn't massively impressed at first glance as well. But anyway, I just wanted to throw it out there, you know. And I love any excuse to talk about airlines and planes. And they'll do it again, even in this podcast. Yes, I know it's coming. I could feel it looming over their eyes. But while we can still talk about airplanes, I was quite delighted to discover the answer to how do pilots relieve themselves when they are flying fighter jets across the Atlantic ocean for 10 hours. This was a great Reddit comment too, by the way, from... Let's try and say this name. X-I-X-O-X-I-X-A. Zizoxia. Zizoxia. Oh, yeah. Well, I spent a good minute trying to think how to say that. And you just... You speak Reddit so much better than me. So what did Zizoxia have to say? Zizoxia. Zizoxia. It's not ear though, because it just ends with an A. It's Zizoxia. Just let it go. It's Zizoxia, that's how you say it. The whole trick is just say it confidently and don't apologize. That's how you do it. So that's not some word you already knew. That's not like the name of some demon from Lord of the Rings that I should know. And you're laughing that I don't even know if I heard of it or something. No, that's the first time I've seen that word. And you just run with it and don't look back. Okay. Like Gothenburg. Yeah, exactly. So Zizoxia linked us to the urine collection devices that are commonly referred to as Piddlepacks that the people in jets will use. And the thing that is most interesting to me is that they can... Basically, they are little... Almost like the airline sickness bags, but they are shaped in a little bit of an arc so that they can be attached to male equipment rather easily that you can urinate into. And they contain a powder that turns into gelatin when it is contacted with liquid. So you are not doing the thing that say a long haul trucker does, which is taking your empty bottle of Mountain Dew, right? And then just hoping to seal it up, right? That these Piddlepacks will turn your urine into something solid and presumably more easy to deal with in the confines of a fighter jet. And the answer about what do they do for number two is they wait. Which I would find rather stressful for 10 hours. Well, sometimes it has to be done. I also found it really interesting that these are also often used by military snipers when they are in their hides, for long periods of time. So what is cooler than pilots and snipers? I don't know. Not many things. Sniperers are so cool. Yeah. The killing thing is the killing people things, I guess not great, but it's still pretty cool. You know how when you talk about plane crash corner, you tell me to put aside like the horrors of it and just discuss the thing. Yeah. That goes with fighter jets and snipers. It's like aside from the murder, let's talk about how cool this is. Snipers. Super cool. I often thought if I was ever going to be in the military, sniper training just seems like that would be amazing. I would love to be a sniper if I had to do that. That'd be great. My first instinct is that you would not be a good sniper. I might be terrible at it, but I would be willing to give that a go. If you have to be on the ground, I mean really if I was in the military, if I was drafted or something, my number one strategy would be to convince them about like, hey, I can program computers. Let me sell how I can be useful to you military in a way that is not being on the front lines. But if I had to be in the front lines, sniper is what I would try for. I would try to do that. What about you, Brady? Oh, fire pilot, of course. No, but yeah, I mean fighter pilot. Yeah, and then I drive a tank or something. But if you had to be, you don't get a, you don't get a, we just cherry pick sniper. And then you're saying, I can't cherry pick a cool job. What I mean is if you had to pick a job where you don't get to surround yourself with a protective machine, would you be the guy holding the telephone in the military? I wouldn't classify fire to pilot as the safest job in the military. But we're not talking about it if it's safer not. I'm just saying you're a dude on the ground. Would you hold the rocket launcher? Would you be the medic? I'm going to follow in my dad's footsteps and be a dog tracker. Oh, dog tracker. Hey, have you finished those videos yet? We talked about those like a year and a half ago. I've done, did I tell you that I've done, did I tell the viewers that I've done a second one in the series? There is another, there is another video with my dad. No, you never mentioned there's a second one. There is another one. I'll put a link in the show. There is a new video with my dad. This one is about him climbing up a hill and showing you the geography of the base where he was when he was in Vietnam. There we go. Yeah, it's okay. It's not quite the gripping story of action and combat of the first one. But it tells you a lot about how it worked and how they'd helicopter in and out and things like that. It's pretty good. It's all right. I'll link to it. You can have a look if you like. In the show notes. Yeah. Look at that. You gave me a nice little plug there, great without even meaning to. Of course I meant to. Check out the book and check out the book available on Amazon. Now you just now you're just trackers. The books, the books, the good part don't watch my video. The books where you should be reading. Forget the videos. I see we have Shredder follow up. This is also very exciting to me. So Maddy 001 just asked for Shredder follow up and just because someone asks for something doesn't mean they're going to get it on the podcast. But in this case, they are because I did have some Shredder follow up. And that is the news that I have not been shredding for quite some time now because I have suffered a major jam that I cannot fix. Oh, you mean the paper jam in your Shredder? Is that what you mean? Yeah. Yeah. I put through too many bits of paper at once and it seems to have caught and I've tried like going forward and reverse and this is the thing with Shredders is they tempt you to push them to the edge. So I always think, this seems good. I can fit eight simultaneous pieces of paper. Oh, maybe ten simultaneous pieces and then sooner or later, there's some trouble. My trick I have found is use a letter opener. That's the best tool for destickifying a Shredder. Have you tried a letter opener? This sounds like this should be on your other podcast if we're talking about things like letter ripeners and documents and things. I have not tried a letter opener. I've got a Swiss Army and I've got to stick my blade in and see what happens. The other great solution is to just buy a bigger Shredder. That's really what a Shredder jam tells you is that it's time to buy a bigger Shredder. I don't think I need a bigger Shredder. You can always use a bigger Shredder. I could do a bigger... How big is yours? I am still using what in my mind was just some temporary Shredder. Right. The problem is it hasn't jammed so I guess I don't have an excuse to get into one. Is it on a realising here? Lend it to me for a few days. Griao, take care of that. After the show I'm going to run all these tax documents through it and try to jam it real good so I do have an excuse to buy a bigger one. I did want to ask you what you thought about Google's new logo. You've seen Google's new logo? You like it? No, I don't like it. You don't like it. Really? Interesting. I do like it. I'm coming down on the side if I do like it. Let me pull it up. I mean I'm sure in another week or two I'll be used to it and I won't even remember what the old one was but I don't like it. Why don't you like it? I think it's too childish. There is no arguing that it is very childish and I'm betting that the design spec was make it look like the magnetic letters that go on people's refrigerators. That has to be what they were going for because that is exactly what the logo looks like. Then why do you like it? You like childishness or why do you like it? I don't know. I think this is one case where it works. I mean Google is just a silly word. Yeah. Google? Google Gaga. It sounds like babies. Yeah. And Google's corporate image has always been somewhat playful. I think maybe this is the way I describe it. Playful? Simple. And then this also fits in with their overarching. Google is now a subsidiary of a company called Alphabet. This kind of works in with that. So I'm a fan of the new logo but what I have to say what I like is not even so much just that the like on the Google search page that this logo. But even they they they redid their fav icon on the website to be the big G. And also if you do any voice search with Google they redid the way their little microphone works to match up with all the little Google colors. I just think they they rebranded and I think they did a good job making it look consistent across a bunch of stuff. I'm going to give it a thumbs up. I know lots of people seem to dislike it. I'm a fan. I think it's it's clean. And I think the childishness is is perfectly okay in in this moment. Although it did take me longer than usual to actually notice because I have actually recently finally really switched to duck duck go which I maligned many podcasts ago for not having great search results. But they had been improving over time. And so now duck duck go is my default search engine everywhere now instead of Google. So I won't actually be looking at Google logo every single day. But I do like it. I'm going to give them the thumbs up on this one. Now that the search results are better on duck duck go. Why have what why move to them why move away from Google. What do you not like about Google is it the is it the creepy data stuff or what do you not like about Google because the search results are pretty good on it. Yeah, the search results are pretty good. And at least for the moment one of the things I like on Google is the option to search for stuff within a time period. So duck duck go doesn't have that for the moment. But often if I'm trying to do some like I'm looking up a solution to some tech problem where I'm trying to fix something on the computer. It's really helpful to be able to say on Google show me results that are only from within the last year. Because very often you know if you don't do that you get results from years and years ago that aren't relevant. But so Google definitely still has its purposes. Mainly I just feel like I want to separate the YouTube business stuff from just like oh I'm a person searching for things on Google all day. Like I'm just aware it's impossible on my browsers to not always be logged into at least one of the YouTube or Google accounts that are directly related to business stuff all the time. And so I just feel because Google does have that little bit of a creepy we're always watching you and using all of this data to predict stuff about you. But I do want to put a little bit of a barrier between like oh this is the CGP Gray Google account that is used for YouTube and official business stuff and then separate out like hi I'm CGP Gray a person who's just searching for stuff on the internet. Like I just want to put a little bit of distance between those two. And now that duck duck goes results are good enough I'm happy to have them be the default everywhere. Plus they have a dark mode which I quite like because I'm always a big fan of that. And it always comes down to dark mode. Dark mode goes a long way. Yeah it always comes down to dark mode. But do you think Google's creepy like this is one of these things where like how do you feel about that? Do you think about Google keeping all your search results? Yeah they are a bit creepy. It doesn't worry me as much as it worries you and I'm not as I was going to say paranoid but a fairer word is cautious. I'm not as cautious as you. But yeah I don't know I mean it depends on my mood in any given day. My mood today is what your saying makes a lot of sense and I feel like I should do that too. I should move away from them. I don't need them. And you know I use them for work enough as it is with my 200,000 G plus accounts and G the accounts. I don't need to also be you know searching for recipes on them as well. Paranoid or even cautious is is over blowing it because even I can't quite put my finger on why I feel this way. Yeah. Because if you made me sit down and write on a piece of paper someone says what do you think is the worst case scenario here? It's very hard to say what that would even be. It's like oh Google the algorithms know more about me and like and I care why? Like not really. I have a hard time placing a solid thought on why I feel this way but I'm just happy to have a little bit of separation between me searching for stuff and the thing that I use for the vast majority of my business. Now that it is a more practical possibility but I can't say I can't say why and I don't feel like I have any convincing arguments for why that would be why why anyone should do that. This episode has been brought to you by Harries dot com. You all know about Harries by now they sponsor the show all the time and they're brilliant. I use their products myself. Basically they're well there are razor company you go online. Basically you would start off by buying one of their starter kits which will come with sort of a handle and blades to go with it. These interchangeable blades of course and sort of cream or a shaving gel. You use it you shave. Most of you probably know how to shave by now and then when you need new razors you go online order them. They're super cheap super high quality though really great product really great service. I mean Harries was started by two guys who wanted a better way to get this whole shaving thing happening. I think these guys were going into drug stores and chemists and thinking this is ridiculous. These things are so expensive it doesn't have to be this way. They found a really great blade supplier from a factory in Germany and they liked it so much they even bought that company they bought the factory so they could have their own high quality excellent German crafted razor blades. That means you're getting kind of factory direct pricing so you're not paying those huge amounts from companies like well you know those other companies don't you and you're not having to wait around for some guy to come and unlock the high security Fort Knox case where all those super super valuable blades it kept. It's crazy you think they made of gold or something. 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If you are ordering I always say I like the Winston handle that's kind of a nice silver everyone nice and weighty and as I've said before the packaging and branding is really really nice on these as well that's one of the reasons I think these also make really nice gifts if you've got someone with a birthday or something coming up getting them one of these starter packs from Harry's well worth considering and here's the best bit $5 off your first purchase if you're listening to the podcast here which obviously you are because I'm talking and you're listening so go to harries.com harries.com and use the promo code h i when you're checking out h i and that will get you the $5 off your first purchase it's already so cheap $5 is a really big saving our thanks to harries for supporting the podcast. um bye weekly weigh in. how you feeling over there buddy. heavier. yeah you feeling heavier. do it this is feeling increasingly more pointless to make it's a bit like doing a a buy weekly check on how I'm going making a quilt and I'm not a quilt maker but anyway you're not seem to be stuck with it now. you're not a quilt maker. well I'm just not doing any sort of weight loss things at the moment and in fact I'm doing quite the opposite this week. I since since I last weighed myself I have put on 1.5 kilos put on 1.5 kilos. mm hmm okay I am down but just barely 0.9 pounds which I think comes out to be zero kilograms and I can never remember how this works. so you're pretty much the same a hair down and I'm up. we are like the worst role models of weight loss ever. well this is exactly it because the the point 9 down is one of these things where this is well within the uncertainty of measurement right. oh yeah that comes down to what you're wearing when you're way yourself and when you went last went to the toilet. exactly right this is this totally falls down into how long has it been since you've gone to the bathroom territory which basically doesn't count as all at all so I feel like yes I have made no progress and you have made negative progress. so we are terrible role models for people but here we are here we are nonetheless. now I thought your twitter account must have been hacked today. oh yeah why did you think that? have you really started a twitter account where you're like putting all your personal information about your weight and fat things and stuff on the internet? yeah I guess since we just had a discussion about how what worrying about how much Google knows about us. yeah I was I have been disappointed in myself as a human being since our last way in because I have made basically no progress and in no small part it's because when I'm under a big work pressure like that is just when I am at my my worst in terms of like just eating crap to get through the day and I just always find myself kind of justifying it is like well you're up all night for the third night in a row like you know you're going to need some soda or something just to stay awake and you can't possibly drink any more coffee and I was thinking like but I always do this like I've been doing this for two years this this like habit and essentially like making no progress really and so I thought well how can I step up my own personal accountability and so yes just this morning you arrived I got a scale allows me to auto tweet my embarrassing potentially no progress weight loss so I put that up there on the internet as a way of trying to hold a gun to my head not just once every two weeks which has been unsuccessful for me but hold a gun to my head once a day so yeah that's for real the at Greyhelfbot really was me I didn't get hacked wow I don't know what to say I think it's a mistake yeah you think it's a mistake well it's not a mistake I just think it's well it wouldn't work for me I'm learning this doesn't work for me because because I imagine there would have been a time where I would be so worried about what people think of me and like fear of failure that maybe it would work but I think having made YouTube videos for so long I feel like I've almost become a noculated to what people think about me so so so the shame of you know putting on weight or losing weight or doing something embarrassing or doing something good like it almost it doesn't mean much to me anymore I really appreciate like you know feedback and the audiences and things like that but I just don't think well look obviously it's not working and so and you seem you seem to have an even stronger ability to not worry about what other people are saying I don't see how putting it forward like this is going to help you much so this is really interesting to me that you're coming out from this perspective for me it's it's not about like the the the feedback from other people it's more about like I have put it out there that I am attempting to do a thing and if I do not succeed at the thing my failure is very public and this is a thing that I have declared is important to me to do like it's very it's very different from like putting up a video or something where if I put up a video that was a total failure it's like well it's going to happen sometimes right sometimes videos aren't good and if you end up getting a hundred thousand people saying you suck like I'm very immune to that kind of feedback at this point like anybody who makes a living on the internet you just have to be but this is this feels like I am really putting me on the hook because I have said this is a thing that is important to do to try to lose weight and if I am not able to do it then this is in a very public way saying like I have I have failed at this thing that I have set out to do so that's why I have put it out there it's it's much more about like what this says about me if I am not able to do it as opposed to like people tweeting at me at fatty fatty McFaderson exclamation mark that kind of thing I just feel like it's something that if I asked your advice about you would advise you would advise against like I'm just thinking you know I can imagine me ringing your up and saying grey I've got this problem and here's what I'm thinking and here's my options and the sort of advice you normally give would be along the lines of you know do a bit of a cost benefit analysis and what do you hope to achieve what's the good outcome what's the bad outcome and you sort of you know you rationally go through it in your way we just did this the other day we did do it we did do it a day on another issue and the and the thing that would happen like what happens here you either you either lose the weight and good for you you've accomplished what you wanted to accomplish because you know you did and I'm happy for you or you don't and and and how bad you feel about it is just compounded by the fact that you did this health bot thing and I don't see you know I see what you're doing you're thinking this will help you succeed this will become you know a stick or a carrot I don't know which it is probably more of a stick it's much more of a stick it's a stick yeah but but I think it's just and it's just another you know you said you said I feel a bit bad about myself when I don't do it this is just going to make you feel even worse about it I think it's got more downside than upside but I'm sure you have thought about it and you've made it you made a decision based on that so yeah you know what you're doing but this is one of those cases where the fact that it has more downside is the upside from my perspective they're like I I obviously when I think about like okay I've tried to lose weight over the past like year and a half two years sort of and without much success like I'm pretty much the same way now that I was two years ago and I have kept like turning up the dial of like okay what do I need to do to lose weight and I have made some changes but none that have been sufficient and so this to me is just like well I'm continuing down this path I like I want to lose some weight and I need to keep cranking this dial of what are further things that I can do and this is probably one of the most severe things that I can think of to do is to make this very public this smacks of last chance alone to me because you know this is the guy that's famous for not telling people what he's working on you you're very very secretive about the things you do until you do them and now for the first time ever you're saying this is what I'm doing follow me from day one like this is this this goes against everything about you in terms of other aspects of you that I know normally I don't know you're working on a project till the day of dinner like nor the typical way I would expect great weight loss to work was that every time I ask you about how your weight loss is going you would say nothing not talking about it and change the subject and then like six months later I'd see you and you'd be like a waif and I'd be like oh my goodness and you're like I was surprised I didn't tell you but look at me aren't I amazing but this time it's the exact opposite you're like come and follow me look you know it's this is this is desperation stakes if you ask me but it's it's funny because in it in a way I don't regard the weight as like personal information even though I know for some people it feels very personal whereas what I'm working on it's like oh no of course I would never tell anybody what I'm working on and there are lots of aspects of my life that I'm very private about but how fat I am I feel like that's not private like people can look at me and they can see actually in your in your case that's not the case is it though you're kind of the one exception to that you're the one person the strangers can't look at I wasn't meaning in my professional life I mean just like when I'm walking around yeah like you can't you can't fool anybody about what you look like because that's what you look like so yeah but those people those people in the street don't know you're trying to lose the way it's your sort of fans and followers that if you were walking around with a sign on your shirt saying hello I am trying to lose weight and you walked around the train stations and streets of London wearing that well that would be different yeah that'd be crazy I wouldn't do that yeah that's a terrible idea I would advise me against that very strongly there's no upside but essentially but essentially that's kind of what it feels like you're doing you're doing on Twitter except you do have the advantage of people not knowing what you look like you know I'm in videos every week and stuff like that so people look at me and see me and I post photos of myself because because I'm a normal person but um so he's a little dig you can never let it slide it wouldn't be hello internet if I didn't make a little gray jokes no wouldn't do but anyway I think it's I think it's cool I think it's really interesting what you've done and I may even follow it what's it called at what at Grey Healthbot yeah at Grey Healthbot I think is what it is cool do it man all right we'll see that two weeks well it won't be a surprise for me in two weeks because I'll know exactly how you're doing yeah this gives you an unfair advantage in some ways you know exactly how things are going I'm not I do need to get back together I need to try harder this weather's not helping no no yeah heading into heading into the dark season in England doesn't help anybody I need to rejoin a gym maybe yeah I do like swimming oh yeah swimming is really good for me creatively like that's what I have I have all my best ideas and have we ever discussed this I have all my best ideas in water that's why I have really really long showers because that's where I just sit and think or stand and think okay that makes sense because when I last visited your house you were discussing with me this engineering problem that you were having where you wanted to have a minimum of 60 minute 90 minute long showers hot showers and the plumbers the plumbers were telling you about how this was not possible and you you were basically saying make it possible and there were going to be additional boilers that were installed on the upper levels of your house to satisfy the enormous quantities of hot water that you require for your morning shower but this makes more sense now because if you're having your best ideas there this is like a business expense so this makes way more sense way more sense yeah just just so that people don't leave comments and email me because that would have been a real pain in the but I do not have 60 minute showers and there was no talk of installing another boiler for me to have long showers that is a lie you've been there was no discussions no no you've missed you've misinterpreted you or misunderstood a few things there but I do have unusually long showers and my desire for long showers was a factor in deciding some of the equipment we had installed in terms of pumps and things right yeah and the water reserve there was no you that's right you remember the the like the like a water company had to build a new reservoir and I I agree to fund it on a kickstarter so they could I could have my showers yeah anyway I do have very long showers but all your best ideas come in water yeah I do I feel more creative in water for some reason and I don't want to stop now before I sound anymore like a lovely darling no no it's it's it's my most creative moment so when I'm in the water or darling it's just because you're separated from all the other stuff taking a shower it gives you brain a little moment to relax and and make some other connections and and maybe the swimming is going to be the same thing right with with swimming you're you're you are forced to be separate from other stuff yeah it's like when I go to the gym I'm very conscious of not listening to podcasts not having something that occupies my mind is not quite the same as being in the shower where your brain really is just all on your own uh because I listen to music instead but it's it's like 25% that so I'm not surprised that uh swimming swimming is when you have all your creative ideas so more swimming for Brady the show I was going to say the show is one place where you you can't sort of be on the internet and on wifi but that's not true for destined destined has a face time to me from his shower before that's not even that's not even a lie I would believe it I would still believe it it was it was family friendly by the way before people make silly comments but let their imaginations run wild Brady that man's got to get the maximum out of every hour of the day shall we do our corners corner we have so we have so many corners now that we need a corner to store all the corners this is just a hello internet polyhedron what people do when listening to the hello internet podcast corner oh very good I better hear some paper yep I got some paper here here we go I've gone through a few more just normal ones this time I feel like we've been upping the ante and raising the bar so much that short of I don't know what an alien I don't know how we could talk about we've been having lately so so I want to go back to just a bit of normality and also you know I want I want I want the listeners to know you don't you don't have to be a fighter pilot to listen to hello internet it helps but you don't have to be so here we go this is Mike Mike is a professional magician and mind reader he says I make my living by doing impossible things which is a good thing he's addressed this email to me and not you because I don't think that sentence would go down very well with you but but then he bring he comes back to work most of my work is entertaining guests at weddings couples are terrible at planning their big day when I turn up to start entertaining people they're always running late I therefore have to wait around before starting the magic and mind reading I take this opportunity to listen to hello internet it puts me in the right mood to do amazing things following your recent discussions on free will I've used it as a theme in the magic someone makes an apparently free choice and I show them I'd predicted it beforehand this really freaks them out oh nice because there's no free will that's why they get freaked out exactly I like this one this comes from Martin from Canada my wife and I took a road trip to the east coast of Canada in May this year it was nearly 6,000 kilometers over 12 days and before you ask he's put in brackets 3,700 miles for the robot thank you my wife who was a professional musician and was doing a performance to it does not drive a standard transmission so I had to do all the driving myself we were able to listen to episodes 1 to 26 and half of 27 on that one trip that's a marathoning that's amazing has anyone listened to more consecutive hello internet in one in one batch than that I'd love to hear from you if you have uh Martin has since caught up and he appears to be on real time now so he says he's he's listening normally like some kind of peasant it is a sad moment when you catch up on a podcast that you like I know that feeling of going through the back catalog and then it's like oh no now now I have to wait it's terrible it is bad it's like that with a watching like box sets to I've just finished a big series that I've been really getting getting really into and I just finished it and then we went to download the next series and I was like it's not out yet they haven't even made it yet but I want to watch it now we were we were bereft I tell you what it is it's the good wife and it's a really good show we've really enjoyed it but we're not we're caught up with it now let me tell you who listening to the two of you just melted the hours away you were able to put my mind into some magical zen-like trance and I can't thank you enough for turning what would have been an utterly awful amount of time in the car into a wonderful trip here's the best part I was so happy that as soon as I got home I immediately became one of your patreon's that's patreon.com slash hello internet is that right is it hello internet slash hello internet go on you know you're wanting so thank you Martin but I got this email from this this person called Thomas who is a student and he had like a car crash and he rolled his car over and he sent me a picture of the crashed car but he said I can't share it and he said he crashed his car he said when he crashed I was in bit of a panic mode and thoughts race through my head and I have to say the moments on hello internet when you spoke of the hardest nails mentality give me the push to calm down and get myself together and get up out of the car thankfully I managed to come out with only minor cuts and bruises but I don't think I would have had the guts to get it without you and gray in my head now I know he's taking the Mickey I don't think so Brady I think they're going to be using Brady hard as nails as a as a visualization tool in the military soon do you think so you're going to be telling guys you need to be more like Brady get through this chop it up mentally I mean I know you're joking Gray but I'm enjoying it still so the reason I wanted to rate it actually Gray was I wanted to ask you if you've ever been in the car crash I yeah I was in a car crash I guess I don't know maybe almost 10 years ago now eight years ago it's been a long time but yeah I know this is something I did not know about you is it something you ever talk about or is it sort of a private matter or no it's just I mean just like you know it's just it's a it's a car crash we were my wife and I were T-bone going across an intersection and yeah all right anyone hurt you okay it was one of these things it was it was shockingly shockingly lucky because one the guy T-bone does directly outside of the police department so there were just police and people there immediately on the scene which is very reassuring because they were in the building right right across from where it happened we were also very lucky because the car almost flipped over and if it had it would have landed on a bunch of children who were waiting for a school bus on the other side of the intersection oh and then to top it off the thing that was quite relieving to me was that we was a Toyota Prius that we were in and my wife and I will never ever rent or drive a car that does not have side impact airbags now because the medical people on the scene were like yeah your wife would have died if you didn't have side impact airbags here I would have been fine and my wife would have been dead so if you're getting a car check out and make sure they have side impact airbags it is a necessity for us at this point so it's always cheering wait wait it was in America wasn't yeah it was all one of our road trips in America does it change your attitude to driving yeah a little bit I've been a little bit more gun shy about driving ever since then but the problem is also that this was the last big road trip that my wife and I did and it just so happened that very naturally I have driven very very little since then normally because I've been living my whole life in London I very rarely visit America where my parents happen to be I usually don't need to drive very much at all so I haven't driven a whole lot since then and it's a combination of just not needing to and also being like slightly hesitant about driving because of that but the autos are coming soon so I don't really have to worry about it yeah a couple of years it's all set well that'll be smashing into each other all the time when I went in someone hex the network no that I'm not worried about but I have honestly I've honestly been just ticking down the time until autos are available because I can't wait to do another road trip in a self-driving car like when when I can get my hands on a real self-driving car I I will definitely take the time to do another road trip because that will seem like magic but magic that I have been waiting for my entire life like I cannot wait to do that hurry up autos I've just got a quick one here from Elia or Elia from Bern in Switzerland just saying I know I can't possibly one up some of the other submissions to the corner but just for the sake of diversity I wanted to let you know that I'm a corporal in the Swiss military and I listen to the podcast a lot while driving to the shooting range it helps calm me down and focus so I just thought that was a nice one I'm really fascinated by the Swiss army yeah why so Elia if you if you want to email again Elia tell me all sorts of stuff about what it's like being in the Swiss army and all the hidden all those hidden bases you have and do you get given like do you have a Swiss army knife do they give you all Swiss army knife I love Swiss army knives they have to have a Swiss I want to know more about the Swiss army this email was too short it would be it would be madness if they didn't have Swiss army knives in the Swiss army like standard issue and do they do they get to choose color or do they all have the red handle no it's got to be red militaries are uniform everybody gets the red handle on I think a Swiss army knife is it was one of the best presents I ever got from my dad a Swiss army knife is the best present that any father can get his son right as soon as soon as a kid's old enough to be trusted with something sharp Swiss army knife is the way to go do you still carry a like a multi tool I don't carry it with me but I have got I've got a Swiss army knife here on my desk that I use I use all the time but I don't carry it with me around like away from home but I use it a lot like it sits on my desk in my pen pot that's how often I use it the thing about like a father giving his son the Swiss army knife thing is you immediately realize all the circumstances under which it is actually quite handy to have a little tool around you like as soon as you have it there are a million circumstances under which you want to use it Swiss army knives very cool they are cool so let us know if you have one elia there we go say this some listeners I've got lots more cake them coming I really enjoy them and I'll try and dribble a few more out over time as grey lets me can I do a quick plane crash corner grey I couldn't possibly start you well before we do this let me tell you this let me give you the pre limb here my wife was away for the weekend a few weekends ago and it just so happened that coincided with a stamp and postcard fair coming to like a local school where I was so all these like you know you know how these things work I don't know how stamp and postcard fairs work I have no idea what you're talking about basically lots of dealers of you know stamp sellers and postcard sellers and things of this genre oh okay it's like a trade show like a trade show kind of yeah like that so they get a big school gymnasium and they all set up loads and loads of tables and they sell their wares and I love this and because my wife was away because my wife's like I really get to the point kind of woman whereas I like to just browse for hours and hours I can see that I can definitely see that yeah so I said this is brilliant so I just went there for hours and hours and I just sat in the chairs and went through all the postcard I'm not that into stamps but I am into a lot of that's kind of what do you call all this stuff what's the word the fill fill and I don't know stuff to do with postage and stuff like that I really enjoy fill a lot of you fill it it's fill it anyway I was going through all this stuff I was having a I was having a great time and then suddenly I saw a little section in one of one of these tables and it was called a Ted written crash mail this was a new thing for me now if you switched a video I got I got I got well into this I got well into this we got a switch to video now okay we got to switch to video because I've made some purchases let me show you let me show you what I'm pretty I have been recording the video of my screen when you said let me make some purchases because you had just the brightest twinkle in your eye so excited like a little boy with this what I can't wait to see what this is these are in their protective plastic slaves you tell the viewers what you say you can can you get a good look at that or not there's it yeah it looks like I'm looking at an envelope and it says well it's it's handwritten address on it and says damaged damaged in plane crash in 1955 that's right there's like a place there's a stamp it's a Hollywood but not that Hollywood Hollywood Hollywood so so there's that and so and that that damaged in plane crash thing is like stamped stamped on it's there's like a handwritten letter and here's some more there's a there's a there's another there's another letter and that one you see on it says their salvaged male from an air crash in press tweak in 1954 and this was this one here was you know was in a ship wreck here and it's got stamp on it say damaged by immersion in sea water and it looks all damaged like when you say it does it looks it looks exactly like when you would ask a Hollywood person to make up as a prop for a damaged piece of paper another one and here's one last one this one I mean this one's got scorched this one's in terrible condition yeah this one looks like it was in a fire or something so basically so now you are reading the personal correspondence of the dead from playing crashes that's what you're doing it's not the personal it's not the personal correspondence if you are you don't have to look at me anymore if you don't want to you can or you can I don't know great it's so weird I'm gonna I'm gonna minimize you basically this is it turns out these things called crash covers or crash metal is is a whole subgenre of collecting oh I love the world sometimes when a plane crashes I mean quite often it is or is carrying postage obviously a airmail in bags underneath the plane and if if the male is recoverable what happens is the the male agency will get it and they'll stamp on it with a stamp saying this was in a crash often because you need to explain why it was delayed or why it looks a bit worse for where and things like that right the person will the person still receives their letter they'll open it and read it and do what they want with it but sometimes the envelope not the letter itself but the envelope is retained finds its way into these collecting communities and becomes quite a cherished item this is like a you know a letter that survived a plane crash is considered a collectible thing an interesting thing and I found that so fascinating I got so taken by the idea of it of these little mementos that had gone through this adventure and come out the other side that I couldn't help myself when I spent more money than I should of buying them and I'm sort of I've been looking up a little bit about the actual crashes that these letters were in and I'm planning on I might write a blog or something you know and all about them and tell their story because I've gotten really into it and I don't know I'm not gonna rule out maybe even buying some more if I get a little bit addicted but for now these five will do and I'll take some pictures of them and we'll put them in the show notes so people can have a look at them as well but I just thought it was a nice thing and something different for playing crash corner it might not be quite the right fit but this feels almost like it could be like a bit of a a land-yat video on something for objectivity I know the objectivity focuses you know on on Keith and his work but yeah this this feels like it could there's something to talk about here of these objects as representative of these events yeah no you're right that's exactly in fact that's exactly what I'll do I feel stupid that I didn't think to do it I was thinking oh if only I had a YouTube channel that has something to do with old objects I kind of lose track of them sometimes it's understandable that's exactly what to do it for yeah yeah yeah you're right I hadn't I can't believe I hadn't thought of that I would do it I mean obviously most of the objectivity videos do focus on the role society but there's no hard and fast rule and we do sometimes freestyle elsewhere so I'll do it on my personal objects and tell the story of these these on Vallex one day good idea you're good it's good idea great you should make YouTube videos for a living I should I should give that a go I hear that I'm mostly a podcast do these days well it seems like it but you know you are you are you are an online Swiss Army knife very generous of you let's let's quickly try my new experimental corner as the final corner in Brady's corner of corners yeah I suggested that we talk about things we were obsessed with as a kid as a little corner yeah you brought this up last time and you also messaged me this morning asking me to try to think about things I was fascinated with as a child that I was still fascinated with as an adult and I was having a difficult time with this and I felt like you were getting really frustrated with me over instant message which is many of our conversations we are often on different wavelengths with our instant messaging that's why quite often when there's something I want to talk to you about you're like oh yes I'm a message I'm like can I just call you yeah you know what I will I will give you carte blanche to just call me you can just call me any I would never call you with that I would never call you with that warning gray no you can just call me it's fine it's fine I'll see that happy Brady face on my phone and unlike every other time when my phone rings and I assume oh god it must be some kind of emergency I think I can eventually train myself to the think oh no it's just Brady and we need to talk on the phone because we can't really talk very well on instant messenger because I am terrible at understanding what you're trying to tell me have you come up with something that you think might fit and I'll tell you if you've done well or not I understand you don't yet understand this corner so I won't judge but tell me and I don't blame you for not understanding it because basically the the nature of this corner is the nature of this corner is read Brady's mind yeah basically yes well okay so that I had something broad that you didn't like but then I realized oh actually maybe there is a little sub sub thing here but as a kid I was always fascinated by robots I always just loved robots as a kid I have lots of little robot toys and as you do as a kid like you'd think about robots and an amazing future with robots and maybe one day being a robot and like that that was the kind of stuff that I know the kid me used to think about and that adult me still does think about and has the feeling of the future kid me was waiting for is finally arriving but that I am still very interested in developments in robots in the modern world does this fit what you were looking for is this this good yeah did you have like a did you have of all your robot toys did you have like a favorite like one that sticks in your mind the most like your your your yeah so many related robot toys I had tons of transformers and I had just lots and I remember like in in wood shop class you had to build something I tried to build a robotic arm and was very sad that of course it's just made out of wood and it's not a real working arm that can do anything I had I'm just trying to I'm just trying to pull it up here because when I was last in America my parents were trying to go through some of the stuff that they had left over from my childhood and one of the things that we're going through was as I mentioned before on the show that my mom was a flight attendant for United for very many years and when I was a little little kid she used to bring me toys from Japan because Japan was her regular her regular flight and she brought me when I was a little kid these transformer robots but they were also the letters of the alphabet I had those for forever and I absolutely loved them as little kid and it was a bit it was it was quite the blast from the past as I grown up to find a box full of these things uh when I went back and I was going through some of my old stuff in my uh parents house last time I was there would you describe yourself as having more of a collector's attitude to the robots or were you interplaying with them and like bashing them against each other and making them do things or would you like to sort of display them and catalog them and have them on the shelf and collect the set and that's all now I was totally interplaying with them as a kid I was not a I was not a collector kid I've always been rather rough with the objects that I owned so no I was not I was not displaying them prominently did you have a make robots like you know like kind of Lego, Makano type things no I never really made robots but I always was very interested in computer programming and I was always frustrated by some of the limitations at the time of like you can't really do anything with this in the real world and I do look with envy at some of the stuff that's available for kids these days with relatively simple robotic tools that are programmable and I think oh man I would have loved that as a kid but it was not available to me then we are sort of like a young visionary and you were aware that the robots of the future wouldn't be these kind of you know humanoid C3PO's and they were more likely to be take a different form or was little naive great thinking we'd all have like bicentennial man living in our house and fetching coffee and things like that no no I definitely even as a kid was always thinking like oh these Star Wars robots they're fun but they're almost like trolls or elves they're not real that this is not this is not what people working in robotics are really going for right so I was I was very interested in like some of the very primitive robotic stuff that was around but I was aware when movies were just being movies like the Johnny five movies like short circuit with Johnny five alive it's like okay this is like it would be awesome if robots were like this but this is just a total fantasy even though robots are a real thing but this is not a real representation of what they are robots robots goes on great list but so now my understanding is that this corner is really just stuff reading wants to talk about corner so what did you want to bring up my one for the list today that I was obsessed with is going to be extinction the whole idea of animals going extinct like completely fascinated me as a child I just thought it was like I had everything it had like nature and drama and you know and we did it bring up your own mortality as well no I don't I very rarely extrapolated the extinction of animals to the extinction of humans I think that's something that perhaps came later I think I mean obviously dinosaurs are foremost in a young Brady's thinking when he's thinking about animals that go extinct but also as a young Australian I think the the pinup boy for extinction is the Tasmanian Tiger so the the thylacene as it is also known so as a little boy in Australia besides dinosaurs of course the the pinup boy of extinction is the Tasmanian Tiger I am unfamiliar with the Tasmanian Tiger and see I thought you're you're going to say oh of course like that's a bit of a cliche but then it's one of these moments where I realized this is an Australian thing the thylacene the last one died I think in 1936 and it's like oh I do know this thing I do know this I've seen pictures of this it is one of the along with like something like the dodo I think it's one of the cliched animals that went extinct animals so that's obviously a real a real favor of ours and because I could go to like the South Australian museum as well and see like a stuffed one so to see a stuffed one and be told they no longer exist that was quite that's quite a powerful thing and I think extinction still has quite a powerful hold over certainly over my brain what do you think about extinction are you kind of this kind of you know pragmatic well it's part of you know the way the nature works or do you think of it as a kind of potent thing as well that has a has an effect on you I mean it's just it's it's both things the the problem is I think the term in the industry is talking about charismatic megafauna that we have as humans great overemphasis and concern for charismatic big animals and we are much more concerned about the extinction extinction of say pandas even when pandas seem to be doing everything they possibly can to make themselves extinct pandas just want to lay down for a long sleep and humans will not let them because we love them and they're adorable so it's like extinction is a very a very broad brush thing whereas there's many there are many creatures whereas like oh mosquitoes if I could snap my fingers and make them all extinct I would so it depends on who you're talking about with extinction would it be bad if mosquitoes went extinct are there one of these things where all but they're an important part of this whatever cycle and or they just bad news all around bad news all around their bad boys are they right thing that I've looked into it is that people usually argue about oh there's so many things that eat mosquitoes but there's nothing that mosquitoes are the majority of its diet okay so animals would they'd they'd they'd figure things out if the mosquitoes were gone they would just eat some slightly more of something else and I'm frankly much more concerned about the suffering of humans than I am about the suffering of mosquitoes right or a bird somewhere being slightly more hungry so it has to eat an additional caterpillar like in the grand scheme of things I'm going to say that the human suffering matters more because humans are able to conceptualize the suffering but doesn't the balance then get thrown out like you say I will just eat the bird or eat next to caterpillar but then suddenly too many caterpillars get tipped over the balance and then this dies and that dies and whenever we mess with things for what we think is the greater good don't we always muck it up what do you mean always like have you seen civilization if civilization is nothing but us constantly messing with stuff and it's a net game I think it's just easy to focus on the times of what are some animals what are some animals we've driven to extinction okay well no but okay but now now you're talking about a specific thing about with extinctions you're saying whenever we mess with any example of getting rid of all the mosquitoes I'm not saying we should build roads or have cities or have running water but I'm talking about you said you'd be happy to get rid of all the mosquitoes yeah I would I would without a doubt I would without a doubt snap my fingers and roll the dice on getting rid of all the mosquitoes I'm not even saying you're wrong right you're probably right I'm just wondering if you can for my intellectual curiosity tell me another animal that we wiped out it's quite possible we have I don't know maybe there isn't an animal that was just bad news and we got rid of some little bad bug or something it wouldn't be an it wouldn't be an animal my go-to example is polio although you can argue whether or not polio is alive or not but that is something that we certainly drove to extinction you know what no one's no one's crying sad tears over polio and how it knocked over the internal ecosystem of humans we're just think like any kind of parasites you know that you try to get rid of in human populations like we've what is it's like tapeworms in the United States are basically extinct you know what the ecosystem in the US is in isn't worse because of that I'm not gonna rule out extinction is universally bad it depends on what's going extinct I was I don't treat me environmentalists I'm not sure I didn't realize because I was just look I went on to Wikipedia to look at some extinct animals beforehand because I'm no expert the one of the top things that came up was that there was a whole page dedicated to animals from our good old favorite reunion island that have gone extinct yeah which was which I didn't realize it was such a famous island that it has its own extinction page so I thought and I'm not gonna go through the list but I thought I'd give a special shout out to the reunion swamp pen yeah just because you know you I like arbitrary arbitrary things you do you do love your arbitrary I know I know I know we've got a soft spot for the African penguin because there's one named after you right but I was wondering whether or not you'd let me name the reunion swamp and the official bird the Halloween internet podcast no no no now you're just if I give you an inch if I give you an inch on this Brady you'll be naming everything there's something your other official thing of Hello International how does it affect you how does it affect you I don't know that we have an official bird I don't even know how it affects me one but shouldn't shouldn't clearly the penguin be the official bird of all the animals you have to pull out of the hat why is it going to be a penguin well no I think it should be the reunion swamp pen right yeah and I I'm sticking with it and if you don't if you can't give me a better reason why why I can't be and if we can't have an official bird of the podcast this is the google thing all over I don't have any reasons I just feel resistant to it for some for some like if we were going to have like an official flag obviously that's has to be a joint decision and like things like the name and logos and things but shortly an official bird of the podcast which you couldn't give two hoots about you can just let me have an official bird of the podcast can you like you have official I guess the official flower of our podcast like our floor I should probably be the emoji you always send me but but yeah I don't think I want to go I want to go with the reunion swamp pen as our official bird because I also think it will be a really good trick question in pub quizzes of the future when people say yeah yeah what is the official bird of hello internet everyone will say the African penguin right and it's like no no that's a trick question I see what you get actually the reunion swamp pen right the extinct reunion swamp pen this is like the what animal is are the canary ises named after it's like oh no it's not birds it's not canaries dogs it's canary so that's what you want all right fine for pub trivia purposes you can have your reunion swamp pen excellent now the next thing I want to talk to you about reunion swamp pen t-shirts no I was looking up other now that we've now that we've cleared that up I wanted to I also didn't realize this because I'm obviously don't know enough stuff especially about America but I didn't realize the California grizzly on their flag is extinct I didn't realize that either hmm since since the 1920s California grizzly look at it yeah I'm looking it up right now California grizzly bear but we still have grizzly bears yes yes but not not that one not that iconic one an extinct subspecies of grizzly uh it looks like a grizzly bear I couldn't oh sorry I'm I'm I'm looking at this picture thinking I can't tell the difference between this and a grizzly bear but I'm looking at a picture of a grizzly bear so that might not be a fair comparison so I was looking at this picture and I was like that looks just like a grizzly but it the the caption was this is a grizzly which is the closest living relative to the thing that we don't have uh let's see were they bigger it was the biggest bear ever and I'll see that's disappointing if it was smaller then it's like okay well whatever but if they're bigger than modern grizzlies then yeah that's a loss for hikers in the woods because Americans love things that are big yeah yeah our bears are bigger our bears are 10% bigger do you know one thing I always notice when I'm in America compared to other countries how much more often the food the merits of food is advertised by the size of it how else are you supposed to measure food Brady well but exactly but that it's never like this is the healthiest or this is the most delicious or this it's always this is 20% bigger than the other one or it's now 50% bigger than it was last week you now get two and it's even cheaper it's always like it's volume yeah I don't know I don't know how else you would measure food no no that's the rather than thing with food I was looking up other American animals that became extinct because you only really care about America most of the time yeah that's that's fair the Jamaican rice rat uh-huh could we have an official rice rat no we can't have enough see this is exactly I promise I promise this wasn't planned beforehand this is just coming to my head now but I did notice there were a lot of different kinds of rice rats yes but there's a lot of different rice rats you see pretty the thing is you don't have to plan it ahead of time this is just what happens with you I don't like don't get me wrong I wasn't thinking that you were scheming about how can you get an official rice rat I just know this is the path down which we have started now that I have given you an inch and we're going to have an official everything for the podcast and several podcasts from now we're gonna have to have a little section where you decommission the rice rat because you realize how ridiculous it is or because the rice rat community didn't respond to you with the gratefulness that you thought you should have received like that's that's where this is going that's where this is going I think it would be brilliant to have an official rice rat how many podcasts can claim to have official rice rats and imagine that if all other podcasts all decided they would like another one decided that they would have the marsh rice rat as they're official rice rat yeah I don't even know what a rice rat is I'm not even looking at the page because it doesn't even matter it doesn't even matter what it is what it is it's a brainy fascination at the moment well I'm calling it the Jamaican rice rice the official rice rat of the podcast that won't hear otherwise anyway we must get an official flag of the podcast grey yeah we do that suck on that we do we must do that we do have to we do for it it could have a little it could have a little Jamaican rice rat in the center of it no we already have two designs that we're talking about we have to narrow down from the two that we were discussing that's that's news to me that's very good news you have to tell me what those two are you send me the two no I sent you one the other day and you said no I want to think about it and you never got back to me oh well that sounds possible it's anyway I was talking about extinctions at some point but I think I think we've probably would have said that to my list of things I was obsessed with as a kid yeah along with volcanoes I think we have extinguited that topic it is we're done we're done all right now I and now before we move on I would just like to give a moment silence to the extinct Jamaican rice rats official rice rat of the halloween internet podcast today's episode of hello internet is brought to you in part by hover hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names I speak from personal experience because when I go into hover at the bottom of the page it shows that there are four little tabs that I can click to see all of the domain names that I have purchased with hover over the years I have tried many different ones and hover is without a doubt the best when you get an idea for some project a website a product whatever it may be you want to secure a domain name you want to make sure that you can grab that name before somebody else does and when that pops into your head go to hover to do it they really do take out all of the hassle and confusion of registering a domain name it's a service that I really appreciate because they just try to take all of the annoyance out of it for you if you have domain names somewhere else don't worry hover can automatically transfer them for you and again I have tried to transfer domain names between registrars and they make it intentionally difficult but with hover you don't even have to think about it just tell them what you want moved and they can move it for you in addition they have a new service where if you want to connect the domain name that you have purchased with something like a square space site or something like Shopify.com again they'll set it up just for you so someone can go to your domain name.com and it automatically shows up as the website that you have made this is exactly what I have done with square space and you can do it with just a ton of services online they also keep things simple because there's no upselling there's no boxes that you have to untick when you're going through the checkout process it really is just this breath of fresh air just just float just hover through your domain name purchase experience I recommend them very very highly now of course hover wants to support hello internet and if you want to let hover know that their support has worked when you go to register your domain name the idea that you have use coupon code flags that'll get you 10% off your first purchase so go to hover.com pick out the domain name that you want use offer code flags for 10% off thanks to hover for supporting the show now last podcast as many podcasts before we found out so speaking about flags the super bowl of flags that is currently going on in New Zealand and boy has it been a drummerful couple of weeks since we put out that podcast could we have timed the podcast any better basically it came out the day before they put their long list down to a short list of four it's almost like they reacted to our podcast and we kind of set the wheels turning in New Zealand they said okay Brady and Grave spoken it's time for us to sort this crap out honestly it felt that way to me even though I had to keep reminding myself like you know New Zealand didn't do this because you just released the podcast but somehow in my mind the next day when everyone was saying they'd come out with the short list I was like oh yeah I'm glad they finally did that now that we have given them the kick in the butt necessary to get the next stage of this moving but it was not it was just a lucky coincidence but I did find my brain somehow taking credit for this so they have narrowed it down to four amongst which they must choose one to go head to head with the current flag at some stage yeah so now here's the thing as I was a little bit confused when we were talking last time because last time we were talking about the I said the short list because I thought we were at the short list stage but in the last episode I should have been talking about the long list that was the 40 semi finalists in this competition 39 because one got struck out on copyright grounds and so what I thought was going to happen was of those 40 I thought that 40 was going to be put to a vote in the alternative vote method that they are using in New Zealand where people could say all right one two three four those are my favorites and then I'm done with it that's what I thought was going to happen but that is not what happened the committee then selected of those 39 four and the and those four are the ones that New Zealanders are going to vote on so that that is what is going to happen next so they have a public vote on those four and then another public vote on the winner of those four versus the current one yes that's what's going to happen and both these votes done with people turning out to the polls or is there some kind of online component to the first stage seems silly to have people actually go to the polls twice that's a question I don't know if they I don't know if they're going to physical polls for the vote or if it can be done online if New Zealand is one of those modern countries like Estonia that has their act together and let's people vote on things online or if like America you still need to trege out to the physical voting polls somewhere I do not know the answer to that okay anyway even this narrowing it down to four has plenty to talk about though yes this has been I would say quite contentious so if if we look at the if we look at the four there is the coru design I know I mentioned last time which is the black and white spiral design is the best we can describe it yeah there is one flag that is just a fern going across the diagonal and one half of the flag is white with the fern having black leaves and the other half is the flag is black with the fern having white leaves and then they chose two designs that are exactly the same except for a pallet swap which have the New Zealand fern on the left side of the flag basically and the southern cross on the right side of the flag and one version of this is red, white, and blue and one version of this is black, white, and blue but they are essentially the same flag but this means that of the four designs two are functionally identical and three are very very similar because the other black and white fern flag the fern is in the same kind of diagonal direction it's just missing the southern cross but it's really three very similar flags one different flag and I have to say we were discussing last time that New Zealand had just an over abundance of excellent flags to choose from yeah and this narrowing down to four is terrible it's they've snatched to fate from the jaws of victory yeah yeah I have to agree with this because I'm going to lay my cards on the table right now I'm a big fan of the coru design the black and white spiral I like that I think if I was living in New Zealand there's no choice but to vote for that one right I just I think it's the best of these four but even to me it feels like if that wins it is an illegitimate victory because it is up against the mediocreest of competitions and also just hard to differentiate competitions so even if even if the coru wins I will feel like it should have been up against stronger flags and one yeah so I'm looking at this I'm thinking if I have to put money on the table I might actually predict that New Zealand doesn't end up changing their flag do you know what it has occurred to me that this whole thing has been sabotaged this is what happened with the Australian in my opinion which is just you know I'm just one person I'm going to cut out the in my opinion part yeah you just let us tell you a story and I've made mention it before but there was this famously a lot of Australians thought that Australia should become a republic and then there was a group that thought we should stay you know under the under the monarchy and I and I was a strong feeling that the reason we stayed as part of the monarchy was that the the vote between the Republicans was very cleverly split it almost like they they they they pitted the Republicans against each other about which model of republicanism should be used right they split the republican vote and therefore the monarchy won the day fair enough and then and you were using a first pass the post vote so yes the strategy is to split the alternative or to split the opposition and then yeah so that's and I feel like that's kind of what's happened here if you wanted to keep the current New Zealand flag the best thing you could do is serve up a bunch of lame options and it almost I I mean I don't know New Zealand politics from Adam but it almost feels like maybe that's what happened but there's there's a few things to talk about here there's a lot going on I don't necessarily think it's a bunch of lame options but but the problem that I think with these three similar fern flags is that it makes it hard for anybody to feel like they're really backing one of them because it almost makes you doubt yourself when you look at them and you think oh do I like it better with black in the corner or do I like it better with red in the corner they should have just pick one flag with this fern design and the stars and then had two other different flags and make the choice clearer for people like I just think it even people who would have liked one of these flags under other circumstances will find their like of the flag diminished by now second guessing themselves with color palettes or slightly different design elements or gray is this not a sign maybe of mature decision making I mean if you were designing the hello internet logo which you did by the way when you were designing the hello internet logo I'm sure you thought of a few different things and then you zeroed in on what you wanted as you got further and further down the process and I'm sure towards the end you probably had the big h i in the middle and you would just you were just fapping about with little minor changes to the border and slight changes of the shade of gray that you were thinking about and should this move a bit to the left and a bit to the right as you get closer to a decision would it not be the case that all your options start looking more and more similar and you'll just fine tuning palettes and colors and if they are getting close to their final flag does it not make sense that you've got to the same but with slight color differences I disagree because I think there's you're talking about the work of one designer working on one thing so this is what you should expect the designers of each of these individual flags to be doing like I'm sure the guy who was designing the coru was homing in on that design and then figuring how far over do I want the spiral to be how thick should the spiral that's very natural for that kind of work right so you think that process is over and done with that the time for that is finished is what you're saying what I'm saying is that process is how you come up with the individual designs but the whole thing with the committee is selection between designs and so I feel like a fundamental part of that is to pick different designs right and to let people vote on them and so that's why I just I don't agree that this is like a narrowing down situation and you don't think the committee is saying look we actually think bay and d is the best the one with this palette switch from red and black but we don't know which one of the which color should be there so we want you guys to decide on that oh and by the way he's a coru in another fan I wouldn't be surprised if this is a result of the the commission themselves having some split between yeah these two color palette swaps and this is almost almost the absolute perfect example of bike shedding right where everybody likes to argue about the color of a thing and it's like oh god guys you couldn't have you couldn't have just made the decision and and pick pick one of these like this is your job as a committee as it's I feel like there's something weird going on with the decision making here and then part of the scandal of what has happened in the past several weeks is that one of the women on the committee had to admit that she had a conflict of interest because she's on some government board which is which has the job of spreading the firm imagery across the great nation of New Zealand yeah it's like oh okay well that's interesting and then we get three of these designs it's just it's it's been it's been an interesting and interesting process to watch and uh do you want to mention the the copyright thing well well there there is that too I actually suspected this last time because last time when we were talking you mentioned how you thought the versions of the firm that was being used didn't quite ring true for you you thought they're a bit rounded and they lacked the nice edges of the one associated with the all blacks rugby team right the best looking one and it has turned out that that nice slightly better looking one used by the rugby association was sort of struck out because of copyright the rugby guys was now well you're not using our phone so they had to kind of slightly adapt it and make it look a bit different so they could get around this copyright issue which goes some way to explaining why the phones do look a bit different I think the rugby people should have you know been the bigger man here and let it go I think New Zealand you had one job your job was to have a black flag that's all you had to do and the rugby people had to step aside and say look we're so awesome and our logo so awesome that now transcends just rugby and it's also going to be our flag they actually probably has some benefit no it may have had some benefit to them I can I understand what their concerns would have been but I think they had to step aside or the government had to step in but they had one job they still had an option that was the firm on the black flag they didn't make the final and and they haven't done it and I think it's I think there are a bunch of silly billies I mean one of the arguments that was going is this whole it looks like ISIS especially I guess when it's not flying properly and draped it might look like this Islamic state flag that a lot of people associated with the well with the you know who's and so people think it might look a bit nasty that's dumb that's a dumb argument I think that's a dumb argument you don't make a decision about a flag for the indefinite future based on the particulars of politics today and and the black is such a striking color on a flag and unlike many other nations like New Zealand has a legitimate claim to the color black like if you if you have that you run with that the other thing is just dumb yeah you know this is absolutely dumb yeah so and it was was it the prime minister who widened and said that shouldn't be black on the flag I can't remember it was I'm having a look now it was uh yeah the prime minister John Key said he wasn't keen on on a black background another interesting thing that's come up I'm sure there are other things you want to talk about gray is there's been this kind of late contender for a for a new flag to be thrown into the mix yes this fifth this fifth option I like this it reminds me a bit of that that Dan Brown book what's the Dan Brown book that's set at the Vatican and when they're and they're voting on the Pope and uh and the last minute they just have a wild card comes in the room and they elect him like by acclamation and he wasn't even part of the original vote I quite like that oh it's even that happened in the West Wing as well when that democrats were deciding who was going to replace Bartlett they had like a last minute person come in who hadn't even gone through the primaries I quite like the idea of that some some last minute flag coming in and not being properly vetted and swooping in and becoming a contender what do you think of that flag yeah I'm I'm looking at this so so the thing that has happened is there's been a bit of an internet campaign for this flag called the red peak and this is reminds me of you showed me that flag for earth a while back on one of the podcasts where someone had done a mock-up of how does the flag for earth look under various uh situations how does it look in space how does it look uh you know on the side of a building or on the side of a ship and someone has done that for this red peak flag and while I was not really sold on that flag of earth I have looked at this red peak design and I have thought sold I am 100% sold on this I think it it looks good I think it's a strong option and like this to me is exactly the kind of different sort of design that should have been in the final four it's it's very different uh for the listeners the red peak is if you imagine there is a triangle upright in the center like a pyramid from the base of the flag up to the top middle of the flag that is white there is a smaller red triangle within it that is the red peak and then the left hand side the space above the triangle is black and the right hand side the space of the triangle is blue so I would say like at first glance you'd almost say it's like a red mountain with snow all over it and the sky on one half is black and the sky on the other half is blue it's beautiful Brady that's that's pure poetry what you're saying there that's exactly like New Zealand doesn't it mountains it says snow it's got the black it's got the sea yeah it does it does and the design page runs through why they talk about it and this to me just seems like it's something like this or this flag should have been in the final four something different something that is unrelated to traditional images in the way that we think of it like you can you have four options pick one that is something modern that is just something different even though I generally think that the colors red, white and blue are way overused on flags something about the ratios and the way this is done it doesn't bother me at all it doesn't phase me in the slightest that it's red, white and blue so I think this is a really really strong design contender for a New Zealand flag my problem with the red peak is that it doesn't look like a national flag to me it looks like a semi-force signaling flag or it looks like something that you should be using to communicate to another ship to keep to the left or something it doesn't say nation to me it says like I've got utility I'm just a useful flag that's used in a car race to warn you that there's oil on the track ahead and things like that I can see where you would see that comparison but I like it I think it's I think it's a good design if red peak had made it into the short list against Kauru which would you have gone for? That's a that's a tough question I I might still go for Kauru over red peak but this going back to my earlier complaint would feel like if Kauru won it would be a legitimate win and if Kauru lost I could have no complaint with red peak as the victor that that's my initial thought so I'm looking at it right now there is a there's a petition on change.org that needs 50,000 supporters to I don't know whatever they're trying to reach on on change.org but they're trying to hit 50,000 petitioners to get the red peak flag as an option for the fifth flag in the referendum. I think they have exactly a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting this on the referendum vote no matter how many people sign the petition but I am still going to tweet it right after the podcast because they have 24 hours to go and they are about 3000 signatures short so I would like to help them get to their goal if I possibly can even though I don't think they even if they make it they're going to get onto the referendum but they totally should be there. If Kauru wins would you vote for that over the existing New Zealand flag? I would vote for Kauru over the existing New Zealand flag without a doubt same with red peak. Would you vote for either of the other three finalists if they make it through versus the existing New Zealand flag which of course is a moot point because you didn't get to vote at all but yeah of course no I don't get to vote at all. I mean here's the thing I just don't think New Zealand's flag is great at being a flag because it is not distinct it's too confusing with Australia it's too much in the past so I would vote for pretty much anything over it and if I'm ordering it I would go yeah say Kauru number one red peak number two I would do just the black and white silver fern as number three the black and blue silver fern with the southern cross next and at the bottom of my list would be the major league baseball looking flag which is the red white and blue silver fern with the stars. The problem with the ones combining the stars the fern and sort of the bluey look of the old flag is it's the one thing they shouldn't do and that is it's it's the one thing you fear a committee would do and it's compromise and have a bit of everything. Yeah that's exactly right and like we were saying isn't isn't this great we're looking at this isn't it great they've they've been bold they've got great designs they've been really visionary they've got all sorts of cool stuff and then they sat down as a committee and they made the committee decision and made a big bland stupid compromise. What's your order here Brady because on my list implicitly the current New Zealand flag is at the bottom so how would you arrange things including the current New Zealand flag. You know this whole splitting the vote to keep the existing flag conspiracy theory has just about worked on me I would I would almost hold off and say let's give it another 10 years and come back when this stupid committee is all retired and let's get a decent committee to do it. No but you can't do that Brady because that is like the alternative vote thing that happened in the UK where the whole campaign to split the vote was well if we if we changed the alternative vote now then we'll never change in the future and that that is not a valid argument if you can make progress now even if it's not all the progress you want you should take it. So you take a smiley face just to get rid of the existing flag. I'm saying progress I don't think a smiley face flag I would have heard. Well having current New Zealand flag. To finish my thought I said it's almost worked on me. Oh okay but I wouldn't take the caroo I'm sorry I think I think it's okay I think it's I don't think it looks like a flag. You don't have to like the flag. Yeah so I wouldn't I won't take the caroo I would take the black and white fan because it's the closest to what they should be doing. Right okay so the black and white Fern is your number one. Yeah what would be number two. The current New Zealand flag. Are we including red peak? Let's include red peak I'm including red peak. The current New Zealand flag is my number two. Number two. Red peak is my number three. Number three. Black and blue Fern. Mm-hmm. Coru. Red and blue Fern. Yeah that red and blue Fern is just awful. Yeah it just it so looks like major league baseball to me. Yeah yeah but I just but I'm now I've said it before and I'll say again I cannot believe they didn't get the plain black flag with a silver Fern on it. It's it's amazing to me. Amazing. The people didn't even the people didn't even get a say on it. Yeah I can understand why the people in charge of the all blacks might might want to fight the government about using the same flag. I can understand that but it is just a real shame that that's the way things have things have gone down because you you are totally right. I think you said the first time we'd ever discussed this you said it was the most obvious choice in the world and look where we are now. Good luck New Zealand. Good luck. Yeah I don't know when the vote happens. I assume it happens immediately after this podcast goes out. I was just yeah I was just reading it looks like it must be online or it because it or by mail because it goes for a long time choosing between the four the first referendum goes from 20 November to 11 December. It's a long time. Yeah and then the Super Bowl next year between the two is the third to the 24th of March. Well follow up then with live commentary. But for now from me from Grey from the reunion swamp hen and from the Jamaican rice rat have a pleasant evening. you We are having technical difficulties. We are having technical difficulties. We are having technical difficulties. We are having difficulties of a technical nature. We are having technical difficulties. I am trying to reconnect. 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