H.I. No. 136: Dog Bingo

"H.I. #136: Dog Bingo" is the 136th and most recent episode of Hello Internet, released on February 28, 2020.
== Website synopsis ==
Grey and Brady discuss: The Mt Doom Edition, Dinosaurs Attack! randomness, YouTube videos from beyond the grave, betting on your weight, speedrunning, date formatting, the Space Force logo, and emoji.
== Release and commercial performance ==
"Dog Bingo" was released to podcast clients on February 28, 2020. The corresponding video was published on the Hello Internet YouTube channel on the same day and received 34 thousand views within its first five days of release. Its accompanying visual consists of a looping animation.
Before we even get started, I just want to complain about a little thing, which is, I'm old school with my emojis. I still don't even like emojis. I prefer to use emoticons. If I'm going to do a little smiley face, I want to craft it with my bare hands out of colon's and parenthesis and brackets and semi-colons and dashes. And what just happened in our pre-show setup that annoys me every time is when I go to do a standard smiley face, you can never quite know on what machine or how it's going to happen, but Apple decides for you, oh, we'll do the little picture. You want it to send a regular smiley face, but we're going to send one of the picture smiley faces instead. So when I meant to send just regular colon space smile, Apple instead sent to you the picture of the guy who's like way too smiley and also has embarrassed cheeks. It just greatly annoys me. That was not the emotional state I was trying to convey. I don't even know why you'd go with a dial down, smiley face, what you were just basically saying, call me. This is also emoji infection. I feel like you have to constantly fight against it. If you talk to people who use smiley faces frequently, it spreads throughout the population, I think that then the lack of smiley faces indicates, oh, this message was sent without friendly intent. Yeah. I have been aware of trying to pull back on the number of smiley faces because yeah, it has become a little bit much because of some of my interactions. It's not a stupid move, though, because you write such terse texts that's throwing in a little bit of, it's okay, I'm not angry, couldn't hurt. Well, yeah, so this is like the game theory then of a smiley face is, what do I have to lose, nothing, what do I have to gain, friendly intent is clear. Yeah. Okay. I'll keep that in mind, but I still prefer looking back in our text message conversation, a yes, full stop return, right? That just goes straight through. But anyway, it really bothers me when my handcrafted emoticons get turned into the little emoji pictures and it's like, it's not what I want. I did judge you for it. I did judge you. I noticed I'm looking back earlier conversations we've had. The last time you did send me anything emotional, it did come through as a colon bracket, but you did a space between the eyes and the mouth. Maybe that's the key thing to do. That is the main thing that I try to do is put a space or maybe two spaces. But if you look in our own conversation, you sent me a colon close parentheses, what is it like, ten interactions ago, but it didn't get turned into a smiley face. And I'm very certain that one that just came through, I did colon space parentheses and it still got turned into a smiley face. You just haven't got the Apple text, Evie, that I have clearly. Yes, that's what it is. That's what it is. I am the last Apple text, Evie, of the two of us. I bow to you, superior manual emoticon crafting skills. Thank you. So should we do with the very exciting news first? Please, please. So for the longest time, people have been hoping for a repressing of the Hello Internet vinyl edition. And it has been resisted until now. But there has been a change of circumstance. And that is, I got an email the other day from the company that was used in the production of the vinyl records. And basically, the metal work that is used to press it, like the original die for lack of a better word. They've been holding it for too long and they told me we're going to melt it down, we're going to recycle it unless you order more records. I took that as a sign from above that the record should be repressed to save it from a fiery doom. So I'm pleased to announce there will be a repressing of the Hello Internet vinyl episode, the Mount Doom edition. Oh, okay, there we go, the Mount Doom edition. Yes, it will be limited. Right. But there will be differences. It will be the exact same recording, obviously, because it's the same metal die. So it will be the exact same episode recording on both sides. There was no new material. If you already have it, you're okay. You don't need to get another one. But to celebrate this new edition, I have commissioned new artwork from the same artist, Simon, who did it before. And he's designed a new cover based on the original one, but with bit of a Mount Doom twist. You haven't seen it at this point, have you? No, I haven't seen this now. I'm going to send it to you now, because I am just a little bit excited about it. Here comes the front. What do you think? It's cool, isn't it? Can I describe it at all? Or is this okay? No, no, no, no. Right, because it's going to be up on the actual sales page as well. Yeah, yeah. It's very much reminiscent of the original design, except that now the background of a mountain has become a steaming volcano with lava coming down the sides and also forming into a hello internet nail and gear symbol there for the actual Mount Doom edition. Color change as well. We've got like blues this time. Because it's like the evening now, it's more sinister like the other one had a kind of morning daylight, orangey look. And this is the sort of blue tones, like because it's the evening. And also you and I on the beach. Yeah, we were laying down. That's right, we were chilling out. Now we're standing up and pointing at the volcano with some concern. Right. Because if you look closely, the plane that had crashed in the original one on the back I was going to ask about that. Yeah, it's now flying over the volcano and that symbol like off it's about to drop the metalwork into the volcano. Oh, yeah. And if you have a look at the back, looking at the back. So there's no plane crashing in the water anymore. Right. But I immediately see pink flamingo washed up on the island. Are we on Instagram Island or is this this is traveled from Instagram Island to wherever we are? I like to think it's traveled from Instagram Island. There is one other difference because I actually sent you the wrong mockup then unintentionally. Oh, okay. Here is what the actual mockup is because I'm changing one other thing as well. Have a look at this. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, so I'm quite surprised here because the record is it's not black. The vinyl is in black. It's like a light gray. It will be like hello internet gray colored. I didn't even know you could color vinyl. I didn't even know that was a thing. You can do all sorts of things. So this will have a different slave and it'll be a different color vinyl. You're really going all out for trying to make the second printing as different as possible. And this is partly to preserve the specialness of the first edition. So people who have first editions can still say they have something, you know, they've got the authentic original. Right. But the second edition is still cool and interesting. Yeah. I wanted them to be different. Yeah, they're very different. And it never occurred to me that after we had printed it that, oh, obviously the company is holding on to the, you know, the original mold for this and that they can't hold onto them forever because otherwise they'd end up with an enormous warehouse of them just holding onto that until the end of time. So it did seem like just like a really sad tragedy if the original mold was destroyed like so melted. Melted. Yeah. Melted in a volcano. Yeah, I like this design. Simon always does great work. Like I love the colors on this. You know, the little details. It looks good. Looks really good. So have a look in show notes and Twitter and Patreon pages for information about ordering. I haven't actually, as I speak to Grey now, I haven't actually completely got my head around what's going to happen, but it will be like, you know, informed and something that crossed my radar, which never thought would be a story that might possibly affect us. But now I realize that it does that apparently there was a huge fire at one of the largest vinyl production facilities in the world and has like the global supply of vinyl has been threatened by this one manufacturing facility. So I just like, I don't know if this is going to affect the ability of us to go into our actual records. Yeah. This is new information. Grey, you've just sent me the link. This is a, yeah, even more reason to follow closely with the global vinyl markets are in flux. Having just promised this new edition, I may be snatching it away before it even gets produced. Yeah. Watch this space, but it's the, the wheels are very much in motion. Dinosaurs attack cards. I've got a few things to share about this. One is I am becoming wearingly addicted to this notion of sending them randomly to Patreon supporters. And I've developed this algorithm and random number generator system and stuff so that I can share them, but do it in a way that's fair that, you know, rewards, patrons in different ways so that you're okay. Essentially, so you've got more lottery tickets if you're a longer term Patreon. Right. You're doing like a weighted randomization. Yeah, exactly. Like a weighted lottery. And I'm just, I'm so addicted to doing it because I enjoy it so much. I honestly, I feel like Santa Claus in his workshop. Right. And I'm just smiling away to myself. And like when the name gets sped out about who gets one this week or something like, I'm just feeling so happy for that person and smiling away as I'm popping the envelope and right the address like is seriously, it is the highlight of my week sending out these cards. I honestly, I feel like Santa Claus. It brings me so much happiness and then going to the post office and just thinking, oh, they don't even know it's coming. This is brilliant. It's very charming. It's very sweet. What are you doing with the randomization that like how do you, is it like a website or how are you actually doing this? I do it using spreadsheets and random number generators and things like how long people have been patrons for and things like that. Okay. So you've picked up your own spreadsheet to put out the random numbers. Yeah. Wow. Wow. I'm very impressed with that, really. Anyway, by the by. That's very good. And thank you so people now have also got the message and when they receive them, they are tweeting me and like, rediting and stuff like that. So, oh, that's right. You know, which way I have seen more of those on Twitter. Yeah. That you mentioned it. I've seen a few more of those. Since the last time when we were wondering if they are just being sent out into the void or if they're actually arriving at their intended destinations. We need to get together so that they're going to do another dual-sense. And we're going to be signing because I'm running very short on ones you have signed. So at the moment, some people are getting just Brady signed once. We do have to get together. I've also had some like personal requests for dual signed cards that I'd like to try to fill. So like, we totally have to get together because these are quickly becoming like, hello internet collector items. And yeah, we got both of our signatures on there. And there's nothing wrong with people if it gets a bit dinged and bent in the post. That's part of its dyno journey. Don't feel bad about that. Yeah. 30 years old at this point, they're forever ago. It's a miracle that there still exists any to even sign. So there have been a few other developments. One is, which I think you're aware of, is I've created a little subsite on our podcast, postcards, website, where I'm gradually cataloging the cards for posterity and also commenting on them and giving them some commentary and a few perspectives and observations. That's something people can go and look at if they want. But in the process of doing it, I've made some interesting discoveries. I've had a hypothesis that I thought I'd share with you because basically I needed a full set of the cards to do this. So I wanted to have the full set one to 55. I think it is. It sounds about right. So I've got more than enough packs. So I just started opening all the packs, trying them together, a full set, basically living like a child who had six months in the space of 60 minutes. As an adult, I'm going to solve this problem through money, which children don't have. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And just burn a bunch of money on cards. Yeah. Through force. Because I've had two full boxes of the cards. Right. So anyway, I was opening them and all spread out on the floor in a big grid in rows of a tin or something like that. So I was gradually putting the whole set together. And there was like a few that I just couldn't get, like four or five that I just couldn't get. And then I opened a pack and I filled all the holes at once from one pack and I was like, hang on a second. I haven't been paying much attention here, but just how random is the distribution of the cards. And I've got a theory that the cards are not randomly distributed. Like the packs are like kind of very samey. And that was confirmed by a comment that I think I read on Reddit from someone. Oh, okay. We live open to pack in the last episode and we went through the five cards that were in the pack. They just so happened to have bought their own pack of cards and open them. And they got the exact same five cards in their pack. Here's the thing. I don't know if I can tell the story on the show. You have interesting statistical luck that I got a demonstration of when we were last together and playing a game called Dog Bingo. Now, yes. Yes. Listeners, imagine it is Bingo, but instead of Bingo numbers, you're calling out DASHIONED, right? This is a last-consled dog. Multi-poo. Right. You're calling out dog names, dog breeds. Ticking them off if you've got them on your Bingo card or not. Yeah. So you and several people were playing around of Dog Bingo as you do. And as we're playing the game, Brady was not getting any dogs. Not even no Bingo here. Just like, dog after dog was being called and Brady had none of them on his card. And you guys had like 10. Yeah. So the thing is it started out just sort of, oh, isn't that sad for Brady. He's not getting any dogs. But it did go on so long that it became the most statistically impressive thing that any of us was accomplishing at that table. It became actually astounding. Whatever it was, like we'd gone through something like 15, 20 dog calls and you would have gotten none of them. And it's like, you just won this kind of a reverse statistical lottery of the probability of not getting any Bingo calls. Like it was such a strange moment. So I feel like whenever you're going to tell me any story that has anything to do with statistics, I feel like, I don't know. Maybe it's just Brady, like Brady's weird luck. So I was going to say, oh, cards have raindrops. I'm not sure how much faith I put into this. But what you're saying here is a very different thing. So your theory is that the packs themselves don't have random distributions that there's something like 50 sets of five that are being manufactured and sent out. I've still got some unopened packs. I'm going to do a little bit of research into this. But I do think each card is not equally probable to be with a different card. They can be put together in little collections. Because there's two questions here. Because at first I thought you're just going to say, oh, some cards are more frequent than others. And so yeah, but that's how card collecting works. The manufacturers are always going to have some of the cards be more rare because this then encourages trading and it's good for a collection to not be evenly distributed. But it's an interesting concept that perhaps the way they were put together in the factory means that every time you get number two experiment in space, it also always comes with cat-leaf and revenge or whatever these five come together, this actually feels like some kind of crazy crowdsourcing project. We would need a bunch of people to just report what their card sequences are. And we can narrow it down pretty quickly. Even one listener having the exact same set of five as us opening it live on the show, it seems pretty unlikely. Yeah, exactly. One out of 55 times five. Like, woo, those are not likely odds. So I feel like we're unraveling everything about the dinosaur's attack that there could possibly be unraveled, including the statistical distribution of the cards. Yeah, we're going to be well-dortheraities on this topic. It was also very nice to receive a picture or I sort of posted on Reddit, so I guess I didn't receive it. But the accounts, the Reddit accounts. I don't know who the person was, but it was a Tim of some description and she had her photo taken with none other than David Allen. Right. Her rang to author of... What's the code? Getting things done, isn't it? Yeah. It's done a classic episode of Hello Internets. Our reaction to that book goes down in the Hello Internets Halls of Fame. And it's just like... This thing where stuff ripples out into the world and here is David Allen just minding his own business and someone's looking to take a picture of you, but also I need my phone and frame here. She's there. I'm with him. I'm sitting on each other, but she's also like... She's just screetly holding her mobile phone pointing at the camera with the Hello Internets episode playing on there, so... Yeah, yeah, you can see it on the screen. Oh, is it even that episode? It's not. 39. I think that's the one. Although, okay, so here's the thing. She's very clever. Very clever Tim in the setup. Because if you zoom in on the photo, you can see that what she's actually done is it looks like she took a screenshot of her podcast player playing the episode and set it as the lock screen image on her phone because you can see the time, right? You can see the time of the Hello Internets artwork. So I'm pretty sure that was the lock screen, which is a clever move for... I don't want to mess this up in the one moment of the actual photo. So well done. That's a really good idea. It's not entirely clear to me whether or not she told him what she was doing. I did ask. I said, were you doing this on the slide? Did you tell him? Her answer just says, I was waiting if I should tell him, but probably having another person going for Brady give it another go would have outraged him. So I think maybe she didn't tell him what she was doing. Poor David Allen. Like we're unintentionally still getting flak from Brady give it another go five years later. Ironically, we're chewing into his productivity in sort of useful time with the recipe coming up. Sorry, David Allen, but also I love this photo. If you do see him doing a picture with some kind of Halloween to-net merchandise. Hello Internet. It's time to talk about HelloFresh and why you needed in your life. I visited my parents recently and once again, the number one thing they wanted to talk about and show off and have me participate in the deliciousness of was their home cooked HelloFresh meals. HelloFresh, quote, literally life changing is what everyone who tries it says. Why? Because they solve all the pain points around food. 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So go to HelloFresh.com slash HelloInternet10 and use code HelloInternet10 for 10 free meals, including shipping. Thanks to HelloFresh for making meals better and thanks to HelloFresh for supporting the show. I have a thing that came across my radar. I was going to bring it up and I thought, I don't know, maybe it's just like it's just sort of weird and morbid. And I can't quite remember where I first came across this somewhere in the depths of Reddit. But have you heard about YouTubers who have made videos for after they die? So they have like a video ready to go for after they cease to exist? I don't know, but it is something that has crossed my mind like on more than one occasion, not to do it myself. Okay. But it has crossed my mind. Right. What do they do? Do they schedule it and give it a schedule date in the future and then just keep changing that schedule date or do they give someone the power to release it if they die? I just realized this is where people could really use that premiere function. Yeah, you too fast. Right. Oh, you know for sure that the video has been made and just said it for what like 80 years in the future or something, like it'll premiere then. Because this is the thing. I think the reason I think about it sometimes, Grace, it's funnily enough coming back to podcast postcards because I'm still occasionally putting up postcards from our referendum. So what I'll do is I'll sit down one day and I'll like scan 10 of them and then I schedule them through square space, which is what I use to run the site and give them a date to pop up. Right. And a while ago there was one card that I scanned and I made the page for it and then I figured, oh, I don't like that card very much. So I gave it a date in the future while I decided whether or not to publish it or not. And then I was thinking about it again. So then I gave it a date like 10 years in the future so that I just didn't have to think about it anymore. And it did occur to me, you know, if I'd if I'd die tomorrow. Right. And the website will fall fall low and then one day 10 years in the future, there'll just be a new podcast postcard. It will just pop up suddenly on the stream like and people will be already freaked out. Can you imagine also the conspiracy theories that that would start, right? Is the like explain how this happened, right? Brady died eight years ago, but they're like one podcast. Is this the message from him? No, is Brady really alive? Where do you stand on the idea? It sounds like something that you would either completely hate or you would think, yeah, makes sense. You want to run ready myself? I mean, for me, I can't conceive of why I would do it. Again, I can't really remember where this idea came from, but it somewhere on Reddit and I was sort of thinking about it a little bit and pondered just briefly like, oh, what would I say? And I realized like it's just so banal, right? Because almost anything that like a normal person would have to say is just you don't have wisdom to impart from beyond the grave because you're recording it when you're alive. So there's nothing here to say in some ways like, oh, hi, I'm in my room. I'm alive right now, but I won't be at some point. That's weird. It could be just like a last few hundred bucks for your wife in ad revenue. Yeah, please like and subscribe so that the algorithm promotes this and share it. So yeah, that my wife gets this ad revenue. She can have one last really nice dinner. So long and thanks for all the fish. I know, bye. Yeah, but I do feel like the reason I wrote it down on my little hello internet list is fascinating. It's an interesting idea and I'm 100% willing to bet that like there are current YouTubers right now who do have them like ready and waiting to go presumably with you know, someone else who has the login keys of being able to publish the thing. There was a politician in Australia where she's still a politician in Australia called Pauline Hanson and she was a very divisive figure sort of a she was kind of a controversial sort of far right type politician. And at the sort of the height of her interest in her, she made this video that was to be shown if she was like assassinated or something and it started off with her saying like, if you're watching this, I've been murdered. And then someone, someone leaked it and it just became this huge news story and it was on 60 minutes and all that. He's the type Pauline Hanson might that if she gets killed, but you know, she's still left it out. But the video got out and so this is also part of the risk is you don't want to accidentally publish. Yeah. Oh, if you're watching this, I'm dead video like the YouTube is in the middle of switching the way their upload system works. And I find myself very uncertain about like wait, I don't trust this new system with new boxes. So he switched over to the classic mode because like I want to upload something but I don't want it visible yet. I'm just sending it out, you know, for people to preview. Yeah. So it would be a really embarrassing time to you like, oh, I'll use the beta uploader for YouTube for my death video. And then like it's live immediately and you didn't realize this. If it was totally within your power, would you prefer all your normal videos to be removed if you passed away or like do you have any feelings about that? Because how do you feel about like, you know, if you fell under a bus tomorrow, everyone going and watching your videos going, oh, this is the guy that fell under the bus and you know, watching them and well, that's a bit more but two. Yeah, but I don't that's that's fine. I feel like, you know, my personality obviously is in the videos, but they're not videos about me. Like I'm not a vlogger here talking about my daily life, you know, and then like, oh, it's been cut short. Well, there's lots of podcasts that have that obviously now. And there are, you know, and your Q&A videos have a bit of you in them, you know? Yeah, but with the podcast though, we've explicitly talked about the weirdness of people listening to us after we're dead many times. Like that has been a recurring thing on the podcast. I feel like it's baked into that in a way that with podcasts, it's just, I don't know, it's sort of different, but the videos, I don't know, I feel fine with you. Oh, I'm dead now. Here's the stuff I made, you know, enjoy it as long as it's continues to remain culturally relevant and pass on the royalties to my wife. Please YouTube, if you're listening and I'm dead, you know, don't lock her out of the account. Yeah. You know, don't suspend the account for impersonation after I'm dead, you know, whatever, like, I'm going to guess you would feel like you want people to still look at the tremendous legacy of periodic videos and all the channels and like the topics that you've covered, especially because like that kind of science content is as close to eternal as you're going to be able to get, you know, especially in math, like things that just literally are not going to change, things that will still be true even after the heat death of the universe. That's right, the proof of Tollamy's theorem is not connected to me being alive in any way whatsoever. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I presume that's the way you would feel, right? Yeah, I don't know. Why do you say you don't know? Well, I don't know. When someone dies, do you ever go and have a look at their Twitter and look at their last 20 tweets where and their recent videos and look at that and kind of through these sort of weird goggles? I do. I'm sure I've mentioned this before. I feel like in the people that I follow on the internet who are content creators that I'm interested in, I have been extremely lucky in that there have not been any deaths in that group. I still feel like I'm waiting for someone whose content I followed for years to kick the bucket. And I just like, I've just walked a statistical path of the people I happen to follow. I haven't really fallen into that category. But even if it's not someone you follow, like, you know, I mean, the most recent example I can think of was the basketball, the Kobe Bryant died just recently as we're recording this. And, you know, in this re-tragic helicopter crash. And then, you know, one of the first things I'll do is go, oh gosh, he was just alive yesterday and I'll go to his Twitter and go, oh, look, there he is. Last night congratulating LeBron James on beating his record and writing all these nice tweets and stuff. And then I'll go through his last few tweets. Oh, I wonder what the last picture he posted on Instagram was. Oh, look, there's him and his daughter. Isn't that sad? Like, it's just like this natural human instinct. Mm-hmm. I never followed him on Twitter before then, but I did go and have a look. I don't think I've ever had that experience. That's never really occurred to me to do that for people who I don't follow. Yeah. It is this weird situation of people leaving these like online memorials to themselves unintentionally through their social media. Actually, it occurs to me that perhaps Twitter would be a much better place if, you know, below the text box where you have to write it every tweet, they had a little message which was, remember, life is short, you can die at any moment. This may be the final tweet on your page, right? Yeah. And that's always the one everyone uses as your memorial, or the right attributes to you and stuff like that. So, is that the one that's decided as the go to? People don't use the last gram. They use the last tweet. Well, all the last gram, but it's always the last one no matter how banal it is. You could post a magnificent picture of a sunset and then the next one could be, oh, bugger, I just stubbed my toe. And if that's the last one you do before you die, that's the one that everyone writes. Oh, he was such a great guy. Like, oh, yeah. The closest I have ever come to this, which is a little strange, is Aaron Schwartz, who was like a co-inventor of RSS and was a guy who was involved in a lot of the sort of early internet stuff. After his death, I remember looking on his Twitter because I think someone alerted it to me, but three tweets before his death, he watched my Holland video and it's one of his tweets. It's a strange feeling also because the things that he contributed to the internet were really good like RSS as an open standard that like podcasting is built upon along with other things. And it's, you know, his death was a like complicated and terrible situation. And it's just odd to know that, oh, a month before he was watching one of the videos that I made. I do it all the time, Gray. You probably think I'm aware, but I do it quite often. I don't think it's strange. It just never occurred to me to do, but I don't think it's strange. I think you're right. It's quite a natural human response. I will send me regularly if I'm reading the paper in the morning. And there's a story about just like, you know, a civilian, like some British tourists who died in Australia after, you know, getting kicked by kangaroo or something. If they've got an unusual name, I'll end my phone there. I'll sometimes just go on to Instagram and look at their Instagram account. Oh, they'll look at that just two days ago. They were posting a picture of Ayers Rock, not knowing that was going to happen to them. Well, I think this is also what makes you a journalist, right? You have more of that tendency than maybe on average, but I still think that, you know, I don't think you're remotely alone or an outlier in that behavior. I would bed more people than not do that. Yeah. I mean, I obviously journalists do it because they always do it to investigate them. But for me, it's more just this kind of tragic reminder that one day you can be having everything can be fine. And the next day it can all be over. And it's always just this kind of morbid reminder of that. It's like a really vivid way of seeing it. Twitter, if you're listening, you should have that reminder to people all the time. Hey, be nice because this could be your final tweet at any moment, at any moment, buddy. That's your legacy. This is why maybe as a YouTuber, you need to have your death video set up and ready to go. What about a death podcast, a death Hello Internet? We could interview each other about what we want people to know after we've done, you know? You are normally the one with crazy schemes. I can't remember if I ever told you about this scheme of mine for an episode. I wanted us to do an episode which would be sort of that, which would be a future Hello Internet episode. And my thought was, I'm reasonably confident I could set a cryptographic key tough enough so that it would take like 200 years to crack. Like not infinitely difficult, but pretty hard. That was my idea of, oh, maybe we can have this like cryptographic difficulty unlock, but not impossible brute forceable episode that people will be able to hear in 200 years. And I had an idea for what we would talk about in that episode, which I won't say right now, but for whatever reason, I was like, I've got more important things to do right now than plan for an episode. It won't be released until after we're dead. I want to know who's going to sponsor that episode. One company is going to be around for the longest period of time. It's like that rule of thumb of trying to figure out what's going to be around in the future by estimating how long it has already been around in the past. I forget there's a name for this rule, but it's like a, just a good rule of thumb. If I go, spoons have been around for a thousand years. So they'll probably still be spoons a thousand years from now, that kind of thing. So like, Don DeSos, the text cards still around. So, right. Yes, that's exactly it. We're still talking about them 30 years. So if you have to make an estimate, they're going to be around for another 30 years, that kind of thing. Okay. But so I don't know which of the sponsors has been around the longest, but I still want to know if what do you think about a death video for you? I feel like I haven't gotten an answer out of what your thoughts are. I wouldn't, I very much don't like the idea of it. So you don't, you don't find it intriguing of like, ooh, what would Brady say from beyond the grave? No. Interesting. Huh? I just want to go away quietly. Okay. You want to go out and out with a bang, but with a, with a whimper. That's, that's your plan. You know, having just said I have this morbid fascination, I don't really like the country of that morbid fascination being turned onto me. Oh, okay. I see. You feel like that's intentionally courting kind of morbid fascination. Oh, well, yeah, I mean, that's, that's the ultimate courting of it, isn't it, to make something with the specific intent of being sane after you've died? I thought you might be intrigued by the idea and that the, that the mere mentioning of it would set up a post Brady death video, but obviously not interesting. No. But it's only going to be, I think it's only going to be a matter of time before it, it happens with some, either YouTube channel that I know or some relatively big YouTube channel does a YouTube post death video. Yeah. So, doing that Hello Internet thing though, I think we should record onto like a physical media, like a vinyl, and then like hide it somewhere and then have the, the location be released after in 200 years. So people then have to go and like, you know, dig up the time capsule with the episode in it. Oh, wait, so you're talking like a literal lost episode of Hello Internet. Yeah. So it's in some kind of Indiana Jones style temple, like that's what you would, that's what you would want. So what, I was going to say what medium would last for the amount of time necessary, but I guess the answer would be vinyl, vinyl would probably be good. I was going to record it. For those who know who Harry Seldon is from the foundation series, we could also have like a special room where like holograms of us appear every few hundred years. That's what this guy does. He's hologram appears of the past him telling people his predictions for the future. I don't quite think we're there technologically to have the Hello Internet holograph room where once every 50 years Brady and I show up to talk about some nonsense in 30 minutes and just appear for another 50 years. Just open another pack of dinosaurs attack guns. Woo, what's this one? Oh, it's the same one from 50 years ago. It's the same kind of guys. Cheeky burgers. I'm wondering what this weight loss wager firms think. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, we spoke, didn't we? We spoke in the last episode about hang on, let me shut that. I got a very distracting email. I should have read my email while I'm doing a podcast. Brady, I'm going to recommend a podcasting pro tip. Don't read your email while recording a show. Thanks, man. It means like blow your mind here or anything. But like trying to do email while recording a show. I wasn't talking about what plot is not going to work out the way you think it's going to work out. I know you've been inspired by David Allen to be like maximally productive during the show, but I think that's, you know, I don't recommend that path. I just got to take a video a second ago. Oh, that I believe you could do for sure. Yeah. So we were talking about gambling. Wouldn't we embedding and long bets and things? Right. And coincidentally, I stumbled over this story on the BBC website the other day about this growing fad for weight loss wage affirms, which are companies with which you kind of essentially lay a bet, like you'll give them 300 bucks. And if you reach a target weight in a certain time, they'll like give you 330 or something. And if you don't, they keep your money. Oh, okay. That's interesting. That's different from what I was thinking of. Okay. Huh. So you can actually make money off your own weight loss. Yeah. But you're bad backing yourself to reach a certain weight. Huh. Someone who wanted to lose a small amount of weight could bet 300 pounds. That's dollars pounds. That's money pounds. 300 pounds. Oh, right. Yes. Yes. In total over 10 months, but would make just 33 quid if they succeeded. If they didn't hit their goal, they would lose all of their money. People who want to lose more win greater returns. That's a poorly word of sentence. Yeah. What they're saying is people who want to lose more weight will win greater financial returns, assuming they achieve their stated goal. This company, which is American, is saying they've got 250,000 pounds. So what's that about? 350,000 dollars worth of contracts in the UK in the first month of the year? About a third of our participants accomplished their goal and get a prize at the end, they said. Right. I mean, this does put the company in a little bit of an interesting position. And I was like, do they really want you to win those waiters? Right. No, obviously they don't. Right. No, they don't. So we're helping people lose weight. But actually, if everyone achieves that, we will go out of business because the actual state of things. But I think it's interesting that you can actually win money because I forget what it's called. Who's the Greek guy who tied himself to the master or had his crew tied him to the master of the ship so he could listen to the harpies? You know who I mean, right? Come on. You know, I'm not going to crack the Google out. People are screaming it into the podcast by the moment. I'm sure they are. Right. But it's like, but we all know the dude who had his people tied him to the master. He could listen to the harpies sing. This whole concept is like, it evolved into this idea of an industry where you can give them money with the same idea. Like, oh, I want to lose 100 pounds. But if I don't lose 100 pounds, you are going to take my money and give it to a cause that I hate, right? Or these other things. And I don't know. People have said like, oh, they like this as a way to bind themselves like to set up a promise that future them has to meet. But I've always, it's just never struck me as like a good idea. It just seems like a bad idea to put yourself in a situation where you're just going to lose money and you can't win anything. It can always seems like it's against the spirit of betting and it's against the spirit of incentives. You actually do win money if you reach your way. But I'm saying that's why with this one, I do like it. Every version of this I've seen before is entirely well-muted. Spotsmen in the British Diet Ethic Association told the BBC the fact that they would gamify weight loss and add competitive element to losing weight would be hugely detrimental to those who have a poor relationship with food. Games with eating disorders could use a website such as this to justify dieting and restriction for monetary gain. They could have significant impacts on both mental and physical health. That person sounds really fun at parties. Sure. Yeah, everything can be used for bad if you have bad intentions. Yeah, great, cool. No, gamifying weight loss is good. The evidence is pretty clear that fitness wages, fitness apps and anything where the individuals are able to track their weight loss and use it in a competitive or gamification way, is extremely dangerous for people with eating disorders. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, there again. These sentences I love, it's extremely dangerous for people for whom it's dangerous. It's like, yeah. Yeah, alcohol is extremely dangerous for alcoholics. I don't get it. I think it's a good idea. I don't. Oh, okay. Why? I thought it was such a good idea. It wouldn't even occur to me that you don't think it's a good idea. So tell me why. Because I see it a bit like a bit gambling. I think it's mixing two things that people have big problems with, money and food. I think even people without eating disorder could start doing stupid things to try and make the money or not lose the money. What is the thing that you're worried about that someone's going to come up to the line and go on a real crash like? Yeah, someone would do something really unhealthy to keep their money or make their money more. Someone will lose a substantial amount of money because they couldn't control the rating. So do you think it should not be allowed? I am surprised it's allowed. So does that mean that you would disallow it if it was up to you? It doesn't mean that. The UK minister in charge of weight or whatever. Of food. Of wages. Yeah. Yeah. The UK minister in charge of food betting. There's another person quoted in the story that says, I think with any process where you're being weighed, there's a danger that people might take it to extremes or not follow a healthy eating plan. But that applies whether a bit of a slimming club or whether you're a shopping person. There were bets on offer where you could put in a significantly larger amount of money for longer periods of time. I was a bit more wary of that. I think that's where my concern is. I think if we're hovering up to a couple of hundred dollars, then it may be it's just manageable when it's a friendly bit of incentivization. I think if people start betting a thousand dollars and things like that. Yeah. Obviously, I sort of mentally assume that people aren't dropping ten grand on betting that they're going to lose 200 pounds. You're totally comfortable with it by the sound of it. You think it's like within reason. I'm comfortable with it because I feel like as long time listeners know, one, I don't have any problem with gambling, really. I think it's fine. Then, do, if I don't have a problem with gambling, I don't see the problem with gambling on yourself. I'm trying to wonder how far could I push it? Is it okay if not only just you can bet on your weight, but other people can bet on your weight, if people could bet against you? I don't think he's going to lose those hundred pounds. I'm going to take the opposite side of that bet. Then that starts to feel a little bit mean. And I'm like, hey, great. Do you want to go to five cars today? Right, right, exactly. Yeah. I'm like, no, no, Brady, I'm trying to get under 195. You're going to be like, well, you know, I've got 20 bucks that says you are. I think that would be more effective is if I knew that you had 20 bucks riding against me to hit a weight loss. Yeah. I am not a competitive person, but I think that would actually be quite motivating. I don't want Brady to win that 20 bucks, right? I would be really annoyed if you won that 20 bucks. But now I'm talking myself into, no, there should be a market where you can bet on anyone and their weight loss. Even people who don't know about the bet and I'm trying to lose weight, like I'm just betting that gray is going to be a certain weight by certain. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I'm just minding my own business and then one day the doorbell rings and someone comes in and they're like, oh, hi, we need you to step on this scale. If you waste over this, you might break the wins of thousand bucks. That makes me think of, it's the thing that always sort of sounds worse than it actually is, but it's where companies can take out life insurance policies on their own employees. It's the same kind of thing of like you're gambling on someone else who's like a third party in this situation who's just minding their own business and like doesn't know that you're betting on them. That's what this starts to sound like. But then again, if I keep talking, it's like, well, how is that different from people betting on sports or anything else, right? Betting on elections. There you're betting on a third party who's not involved in this thing. So I don't know. I feel like I can really talk myself in circles around this one. Do you have a place bet on things? I'm just trying to think in terms of actual money. No. And I think the closest you could stretch it is the lottery tickets that I used to buy forever ago. Yeah. That's about as close as it gets. Like I said, last time, I do think that betting is a useful mental framework. It's a useful way to focus the mind. And so in conversations, I'm aware of sometimes saying like, ooh, do I think this, what do I think are the odds on this? But in terms of placing an actual bet, no. The closest I came was I was trying to investigate the legality of a US citizen placing a bet on an American election. Now we say an election cycle ago, but it was like, it's a little too sketchy and I'm not, I'm not going to do it. But that's as close as I came to being like, I'm pretty sure I can win some money here. Would you have won that bet? I would have won that bet. Yeah, when I'm trying to place it. I was like, I'm willing to take some pretty, like it was a perfect storm of like, there's far odds. Like, let me look into this was like, it's still kind of illegal though, even if I'm not in America. Like, okay, well, I'm just, I don't want to cross that line for the amount of money. So forget it. Yeah, I remember that. I remember you predicting that. Actually, I just realized, do you sports bet? No, I don't gamble on anything. No. If we're in a casino with a group of friends, I'll like, you know, in Vegas or something, I'll have a flutter, but I won't ever like go out of my way to gamble. What's a flutter? It's having a bet, like, but it's like in a casual way. You could be a hardcore gamble or you could be someone who just occasionally has a flutter on the horses. Oh, okay. So you're like, oh, I like the name of this horse. I'm going to put down 10 bucks. Yeah. 10 Australian kangaroos on that horse or whatever. Okay. This episode is brought to you by Audible and I almost feel silly telling you what you already know. It's the go-to destination for all your audiobook needs. They've got this huge collection of titles covering pretty much anything you can think of from air crashes. They've got lots of those to cricket autobiographies. They've got lots of those too. Plus, they've got their special collection of audible originals. That stuff you won't get anywhere else. And it's not just audiobooks. They've also got podcasts. They've got comedy, theatrical stuff. They've got a great app, which is free to put on your phone or your tablet or whatever. That means you can listen across all your devices and you won't lose your spot. Anyway, here's the part where we get to recommend an audiobook. And today I'm going to steer you to a book that was named by the Royal Institution of Great Britain as the greatest science book ever written. It's called The Periodic Table and it's by the very famous Primo Levy. And while each chapter is named after an element and the book does cover some of Levy's life as a chemist, this is much more than a science book. Starting with Argonne as the first chapter and the last chapter I think is Carbon, it's a moving and clever autobiography and it's one you won't regret listening to. Don't think you're going to go into this getting like an explanation of what all the elements are. Great table is more of a device to tell a really gripping tale of this man's life. You can get the audiobook or any other one you choose by signing on to Audible's free 30-day trial membership. Go to audible.com slash hello internet. You can also text Hello Internet all as one word to 500 500. That's a free audiobook plus you get two of those audible originals I mentioned earlier. And after the trial, if you keep going, you get another audiobook and two more audible originals each month. Check it out people audible.com slash hello internet or send that text Hello Internet to 500 500. That's going to work in the US. You clearly already like podcasts. Why not up your listening game and give audible a try? So I do have one thing that I've kept meaning to mention to you since we're talking about betting and sports and stuff. I've found the thing that I think for me is the closest to understanding the interest in watching sports. So are you familiar with speedrunning? Oh, I was just doing video games. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, how quickly you can complete a video game. Yeah, speedrunning video games is the thing that a friend of mine has been trying for like a year to get me into because he's like, dude, you're going to love this. I'm like, I don't get it. I don't really follow it. But slowly but surely I've taken a look at like little bits of speedrunning here and there. And I don't want to say I'm really into it. Like I'm not an obsessive fan of speedrunning. But boy, are my YouTube recommendations filling up with speedruns and watching people do speedruns and explanations of speedruns? What game in particular do you like watching speedruns off? So this is the thing. I'm still on the the new phase. But if you as the listener are unfamiliar with this, like, but you know what a video game is and you've played a video game or you've seen video games played, there is a whole community of incredibly obsessive people who are trying to figure out how can you get from the start of the game to the end of the game as fast as humanly possible. And there's a website speedrun.com which is like the unofficial, or I think it's the official place where all the records are basically tracking them. I'm going to say, what you should do Brady and anybody who's listening, go and like pull up a game that you're familiar with. That's what I'm doing. I used to try and spaderuns. Are you going to, what is it? Is it Tomb Raider or pitfall two? Oh pitfall two. Okay. Yeah. Go look for pitfall two. When you see someone speedrun a game, it's hard to describe, but once you understand what's happening, I think it's one of the most impressive things I have ever seen a human do where you where you watch someone blast through like all of Mario World in 13 minutes. It's like, it's just insane. Like it's totally insane. But the thing that makes me think about sports and why I was thinking about you is like we've talked about with sports many times. It's really hard to talk about them to outsiders because the thing that makes the sport interesting is all of these details that are internal to the sport itself. And so it's often very difficult to describe why is this event that has just happened in sporting game X interesting? Because three years ago, this happened between these two people. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, it comes with so much context that it's like, well, you need to have watched the last 10 years of this sports to get it. And the speedrun thing is for me, one of the things was like, ah, I can truly, truly see this. And so for some games that I used to play and back in the day, like Doom is one of my examples where I was watching a couple of YouTube videos about the history of speed running in Doom, for example. And like, and they walk you through, oh, in 1999, people were just trying to play it fast. And then when you get to modern day, the tricks and the things that people are doing are so incredibly dependent on the entire history of how we got here that it's like, I can't even explain to you why this is interesting or how they're doing it so quickly. And I do literally mean that it's some of the most impressive stuff I've seen because when I've seen the explanation of how is this person pulling off this trick, very often the reaction times come down to one frame. And there's 60 frames a second. And I was like, oh, this guy had to hit a button on the exact 60th of a frame three times in a row in this fight in order to pull off this maneuver. And it's like, how is that even humanly possible? Like it's crazy how good people are at these speed runs. How do you say about it when sometimes they're like, cheap, so they take advantage of like a floor and the design of the game? Do you mean glitchy or glitchless runs Brady? That kind of thing. And all the records are broken down into, like for any game that you go look on, they'll have the records like with or without glitches. And then just like sports, this brings up the whole meta argument about, but what is a glitch? What counts as a glitch and what doesn't count as a glitch? And so I also kind of love it because it's a world in which precisely because of these distinction of like, oh, we're using the glitchy version or the not glitchy version, is that the new engine or the old engine? Are you running it on NTS or are you running it on PAL? There's sort of so much room for everyone to be king of one mountain. And is there also presumably ones where versions where you just finished the game and where you finished it and got all the coins and things like that? Yes, yeah, or it's like just this level or the whole thing from start to finish. And it's like anybody who wants to be obsessive can pick some little corner that isn't getting a lot of attention and become the king of that corner and then build up their speed running skills from there. So it's the first thing that feels really sporty to me and is like, ah, okay, I have a much more intrinsic understanding of this. And I've been watching like every commentary I can find on YouTube that explains the history of a speed running for games that I'm familiar with. It's like, it's unexplainable how impressive some of these things are. So I keep meaning to mention this to you. Besides being the best speed runner at a game, how else can you be king of a game? Just the highest score, I guess as well. I haven't seen anything about the highest score. My suspicion about why this doesn't seem like it's tracked very well is that would have a ceiling like there's a sort of known ceiling potentially of how high that could be. And unlike speed running, it feels like there's less room for interesting new strategies to be found with regards to the score. Yeah. Whereas some of the videos I've watched, I felt like boy, Michael, I have a background in physics here because it's like even the technical explanation of like, what is the game engine doing and how is the person manipulating their momentum? It's like, man, you better be paying attention to understand how they are even pulling off this trick. So did you find anything for pitfall two for speed running? No, I didn't, unfortunately. But funnily enough, when I was young, I was really into pitfall two and it took me forever to finish it. But a year or two ago, I found it again, like, you know, on some JavaScript player or something online where you could just go and play it. And I found it really easy to finish straight away. And then I played it once or twice to see how quickly I could do it. I did my own little speed runs on it. So I found it on YouTube, pitfall two speed run Atari 2600, five minutes and two seconds. Wow. Tom's slow bro bachelor. Wow. I'm going to have a watcher that later. I would be curious about with pitfall two, which I'm just now silently watching because I want to see is I'm willing to bet that game was simple enough that they probably don't have a lot of real tricks. See that first screen. Let's see the very start of that video. Right. See there's the man standing on the red cross. Yep. And below him, you see that nervous cat that's like shaking. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's the end of the game. That's where you have to get. Oh, okay. Right. So you're running across the top of the screen and the end of the game is the bottom half bottom. You go down as these caverns. You go down screen upon screen upon screen. Right. Yeah. That must have been mind blowing as a kid when you first play the game like, oh my god, I ended up back where I started. I knew that's where you had to get the moment I actually got there where I could touch that cat. I was shaking like it was incredible. The feeling like it was like I was trembling with excitement. That's also one of one of the other sports like things with speed running is there's a whole like interesting subcategory of how do you know that someone hasn't cheated that they haven't done tool assisted software or like all this other stuff. And one of the mechanisms is many of the speed runs are done live like on Twitch in front of hundreds of thousands of people watching. And I greatly enjoy. There's only two levels of reaction that somebody has when they get the new world record for a game or for a level. The most common reaction is the headphone warning like explosion of excitement. And you can see like you're saying with approaching that cat, you can see that when someone knows they're coming to the end and they're getting close, it's like they go quiet. And like the intense is like this is all is all coming down to the last couple seconds here. Right. And you can feel it like the chat room goes quiet. Everybody's holding their breath. You can you're right. Are we going to see it? And then boom, right, you touch the cat, you got the record time like huge explosion of excitement. There's that or I think because of the obsessive nature of some of the people who are doing it, I always really enjoy the total non reaction reaction. So someone would be like like a Mike great. Yeah, like great. 459 pitfall to new world record. Right. And that's it. Right. And then they like restart the game and they go right back to trying to do the next one. Like let's go for 458. Oh reminds me of that fistful of quarters movie, which is one of my favorite movies to watch. And the whole you know, the dock did video type of the record and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I just want to say like this now for me is the most sports like thing in my life. And I really feel like it has the even on the show now talking about it, it's like impossible to describe any of the details because there's just too much backstory. And while it's still an individual thing that people are doing, it feels very sports like and I'm like, okay, I can see how I could get into this and then be the person who's like, let me explain to you why that trick at Super Mario was so impressive. Maybe you should try to speed run pitfall too as an adult. Maybe this is something you could be competitive about. I think I'm up. Yeah. I might do that the same the day after I make my Lego millennium Falcon. No, but okay, but no, I think you should do it. You boot up your old Java copy of pitfall too and let me know what your time is and we'll put it up on the board. I have to learn how to do it again though. I have to learn where the different little places are where you need to jump and there's a couple little things I had to learn. Do you know how I finally mastered the game? I don't want to get too metahebid it was I thought I was quite clever at the time. But in pitfall too, you have these like, they're like save points right? But they're these little red crosses that you touch. And then if you die, you go back to that red cross. Right. Fair enough, fair enough. That's pretty standard thing to have in games. But the way it works in pitfall too is when you die, you kind of fly back to the cross. You see the character like he starts flashing and he just flies through the game back to the cross. And this game was really complicated, right? It has lots and lots of levels and it goes like it's got a huge map. But this was before there was the internet and I couldn't look up the map. So I didn't have the map of the game and I didn't know where everything was. So what I did was I went through the game to the far corner of the map and deliberately didn't touch any of the red crosses, any of the save points and then sacrificed myself and let myself die. And that flew me back through the whole game like at a different angle back to the start of the game. Ah, okay. And I got to see the whole map and parts of the game. I didn't know existed. And that's how I got this mental picture of where everything was in the game and how to crack it. Right. See, you were hacking the backwards track mechanism to get a peek at the whole map so you could know what to expect. Very clever, very clever, Brady. Google pitfall to map and just open any one of them. Right. Big maps. So you start in that top left corner. Right. But you never see all that stuff on the left hand side. Those left two columns. I'd never seen. Right. I got to the bottom right hand corner of that map and then killed myself with an electric eel. Right. And then I diagonally flew from that bottom right corner up to the top left corner. And I saw all that other stuff for the first time. I was like, oh my god. I also find this really charming to look at because you know, it's the kind of levels that you could sketch most of it out on a napkin. Ah, it's so simple. Compared to modern day. Like, oh, our map is a third the size of the United States. You know, it's completely open run. Yeah. Yeah. This truck simulator is building all of America at one fifth scale and you're like, Jesus Christ. When pitfall two came out, I thought they would never make a greater game than that. I thought humans had peaked. We're never getting any better than this. Have you been tempted to get into any speed running yourself? Don't know. Don't put this ring in front of me because yes, yes, I totally have. I looked it up because I was like, okay, what's the most ridiculous thing that could possibly exist? It's like, there's no way that there exists speed runs of American truck simulator too. And it was like, nope, there sure are. Right? There were like people who get the fastest route between two cities in American trucks simulator. And I was like, oh, god, this is ridiculous. Are you allowed to spade an American truck simulator or did that police pull you over and stuff? You get fined, but you can speed things up. Okay. So the thing that I have been tempted by is I'm pretty sure the best I have ever been out of video game was House of the Dead, which was this old, what we call like an on rails shooter. So you're not even walking through the map. It's like you are at Disneyland, you know, and you're sitting in a cart. So the motion is controlled for you. And you're just shooting at targets around you. And I got super obsessed with being able to like perfectly make it through this game when I was in college. And I remember feeling like I am a god at this game. Like no one on earth can be better than this at me, right? Which is very easy to think when your comparison is the 50 people who are in the like the labs with you, right? But that is the only thing that it crossed my mind to be like, oh, I wonder, maybe I, you know, I should start live twitch streaming my House of the Dead speed run attempts. And I have to immediately shut that part of my brain down. Like, dude, this is not a good use of your time of like all of the things that you could possibly do. Getting really good at a 1996 video game for speed run cred is like not the way that you should go. But I can say that I have found myself tempted of like, maybe I should look into it. Were you known to be really good at liking those labs? If you walked down the corridor where people go, she's the guy there. He's awesome. Look, I don't want to big myself up, but people did literally use to stand around and watch it because it was my skills were so unbelievable that people would sit down and watch me go through. So it was quite impressive. Have you ever seen the video I made with James Clua who used to be the world champion at Tetris? Oh, yeah, I love that one. Yeah, that's really good. He's like that. People will gather around him. And there's even a line he says in the video. It's right at the start of the video, I think he says like everyone thinks they got at Tetris. And then when they see someone who's really good at Tetris, everything changes. The thing though that struck me in that documentary because I remember when I watched that video, like that interview of him, he says something that struck me as the same experience I had with House of the Dead of the satisfaction of being really, really good at a thing is it becomes kind of weirdly relaxing of like, oh, you can just do this. Like your brain knows the pattern. You just like you just go through it. And there's like there's some really well-worn neural network that's like, this is my job. I have got one job and I'm super specialized at it. And I got to that point with House of the Dead feeling like this is actually kind of relaxing. He says something like that in the Tetris video. And I guess there's an appeal to this of being really good at a thing that's also straightforward. But yeah, so I have literally not even allowed myself to look at seeing if there even are any speed runs of House of the Dead. I've said like, nope, this one is off my list. Don't look at it. Don't get into it. Don't get started down this path. Just watch Doom Speedruns or something. Well, Twight Gray, if you want to say him, do those speed runs. Yeah, go right ahead. Twight may about it if you want to get instantly muted. This episode is brought to you in part by Dashlane. Login instantly save every password, fly through forms and breeze through checkouts on every device you own. Dashlane fills out those forms with fast one-click logins and auto fills for personal info and payment details. DASHLINE takes everywhere across every device on Mac, Windows, iPhone or Android and responds easily to breaches and hacks with personalized security alerts. Dashlane is different than other options for automatic logins because Dashlane never has access to your personal data and won't trick you into subscribing. No credit card required at signup and it's always an ad-free product. Go to Dashlane.com slash hello internet to get a free 30-day trial of Dashlane Premium where you can see these features in action and try out Dashlane for yourself. You can also get 10% off once your trial is over by using code hello internet. That's hello internet all one word. Thanks to Dashlane for remembering everyone's passwords and keeping them secure and thanks to Dashlane for supporting the show. So Gray, as we're recording now, it is the 9th of February 2020. How would you write that date? Okay, so I'm in a bit of an odd situation here because any situation where I'm writing the date where it may be important to be referenced in the future, I tend to write that now like Feb 9th 20. And the reason that I've gotten into this habit is because I have too many documents that I need to sign that are in the UK and also in the US and I've just standardized my brain on right out the letters of the month so that you never mess this up on a document where it matters. And you write the Feb first? You don't write 9 Feb 20? I'll usually write the Feb first. It depends a little bit on the space for how much space do I have to write. But yeah, I will write out the letters of the month. But you would write 20, you wouldn't write 20? Yeah, again, I'm assuming there's not a lot of space so I would do a post-refer 20. Okay. What's going on here? Well, there's lots of things going on here. Okay. Well, I got myself into a bit of a Twitter, well, I brought it on myself. I got myself into a bit of a Twitter ever launch when I asked about it. The other day, it was this palindromic date when it was 02, 02, 2020. People thought that was interesting because it was a palindrome no matter which whether you put the month first or the day first. It worked as a palindrome both ways. Oh, right, right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And we can get into a whole debate about whether the month should be first or the day should be first. And I understand the arguments and the year or the year should be first and all that. And computer people get very caught up about this. Yeah, completely. That's why I was asking like, what's the situation because I'm talking computers. Totally different. Computers are different. I'm not talking about computers. But the thing that I thought was interesting was to make this even work, you had to write 02, 02. Oh, yeah, you need the leading 0, yeah. Yeah. And I made the argument that no one when writing a date, computers aside would write the 0 first. I would use a leading 0 in the day or the month if it was a loan digit. Yeah, I'm going to agree with that. Nobody does that. Exactly. Don't say that on Twitter. And don't get me wrong. I realized how self-selecting it was. But I reckon of the many, many replies I had, all of them were from people who write the 0 first. But that's because I realize this. This is because it's so normal to not do it that people who don't do it wouldn't even bother replying. Right. But everyone who does do it replied, which created this illusion in my head that suddenly there were a whole bunch of people out there writing leading zeros when they handwrite the date. Look, I'm not asking for Twitter trouble here. I'd want to see some predated documentation of this effect. Don't just tell me on Twitter, oh, I write the leading 0. Like I want to see a document you signed from five years ago where the leading 0. I don't listen to internet. I don't really want to see it. Don't say it. He doesn't actually want to say it. This is just the theoretical discussion of like, it's a rhetorical question. It's a rhetorical demanding of the evidence. I'm not actually interested in the evidence. I believe there are people who write leading zeros when they handwrite the date, right? But those people are the exact people who would reply to my tweet about it. And they're the only people who would reply to my tweet about it. I'm also going to bet that people who write a leading 0 on a piece of paper in front of the number for a date are wildly overrepresented among the Twitter followers of the guy who runs number file, right? Like, overrepresented compared to the general population, like a million to one, right? Like you may have literally heard from every human on earth who writes a leading 0 before the date. So selection effects explain a lot of crazy things in social science. And this, I think this is really maybe one of those cases. I feel better now because if there was anyone who I knew who I thought might do some leading zeros, it would be you. So even you don't do it. Yeah, I think that's nuts, right? That's bizarre. And again, computer stuff is different, but on paper leading zeros, forget it. So Space Force has a logo. This is the new branch of the US military. So I saw you put this in the show notes here. Space Force has a logo. This is where I just don't follow things well enough, but I had to remind myself like, wait, a space force real? Like is this just like a real thing that's really happening? Yeah, it's real. Have a look at that second one. The second links better than the first link. It's not terrible. Yeah. It's fine. I mean, everyone just wanted to know what we thought of. I mean, it's just, it's a good logo. A lot of people pointed out it looks just like the Starfleet command logo from Star Trek. Yeah, it does. It does. I mean, the Starfleet command one is better. It's a bit old fashioned, the Space Force one isn't it? The way they've done the Earth, like with the old latitude and longitude lines on it, it's quite old fashioned, isn't it? Bit pan-am. It's totally pan-am. You're right. I don't love the three dimensionality of the arrow. There's something about it that's very like location arrow on your GPS map, whereas the reason why I like the Starfleet command one is it's great because the little swoosh, I feel like it's invocative of NASA without being NASA. And I love that the like the star on the Spacefleet command logo is very much like a rocket ship, right? It's sort of halfway between a star and a rocket ship. I don't love the little, I don't know a nice way to say it, the thing I like the least is the little sperm orbiting the Earth. I think that's perhaps the least good part of the logo. But it's not terrible. I think also I would need to see this in context with like what does the army logos look like? I don't imagine any of them are really amazing. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. It's okay. Do we have a space force? Like are there space troops with this patch on their space arms now? I don't know if I don't know if I can. Yeah, there are, but the uniforms they've got are repurposed army uniforms. So they wear this green and brown camouflage with that space thing on the shoulder, which calls no end of amusement on the internet a little while ago. Yeah, green and brown. The best color is for hiding in space. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there are 16,000 people in the space force. Huh. Because they've secondered people from what there was already, which I think was like the army's space command, therefore space commands, are they? So some people from that have been moved over into space force and then they're recruiting more people than so. What was the number of people who were involved in the Australian space agency? So wasn't it like 24 people were involved in Australian space? It was three people. Part time, wasn't it? I want to know when they finally get their own uniform because the word is they're going to get their own uniforms. They're not going to stick with the like the green and brown, obviously. Is it going to be all black? How awesome would that be? Just having an all black uniform? Not very practical, but I'm trying to think about the practicalities of a space force uniform. And the most terrifying thing about space is drifting off endlessly into it and dying. Right? Like, oh, you let go of the spaceship and you're just drifting off. And I think if I was in the space force and you're doing an outside mission, your tether came loose and you lost grip of the ship and you're just starting to drift away. I feel like I want some reflective tape on my suit. I don't want this to be a perfectly black, invisible against the background of space kind of suit. Until the Chinese space force ship comes past and then you'll be wishing you were wearing all black. Okay. So what we need is a suit that can switch between all black and all white at a moment's notice. You just have lots, although they're just like stars right in the background. Yeah. And the problem with lights is I'd be worried about the batteries. Yeah. I got so many things to charge in my life, Brady. If I'm part of space force, I don't want to also have to remember to charge up my life saving lights before I go out on recon or whatever. Maybe it's like navy, really dark navy and white are going to be the space force colors. Yeah. That's what it's going to be. It's definitely going to be dark navy. But do you think it's okay? I think it's fine. I mean, I know even I forget that this is like a real thing, but I don't. You know, look, we're going to need a space force. Like you could bet your bottom dollar China is not going to just say, oh, space, it's for the benefit of all mankind, right? Like I don't think that's the way they're going to look at it. New emojis. I've seen them. Is it that time of year? Is it new emoji time of year? We've gotten you emojis before I even look at this. Here's my problem with new emoji season. Yeah. I know I'm not a normal person here, but the thing that I want out of emoji is I want more objects like I want more things. Things are useful as representations of very many ideas, but the emoji board seems really obsessed with people and it's like so many people, like people doing everything that people can possibly do. And I find those emojis really boring. The thing that really irritates me about it is like on my phone, you know how they have those little categories at the bottom where it's like, oh, smiley and people and food or whatever. The people are so soon that you have to scroll past this increasingly long list of like people engaged in every conceivable human activity that there is. Learn in Tuxedo, man with moustache and wedding veil, gender neutral Santa Claus character. Well, Gray, I had to say I agree with you. The one thing I always want more of are animals and types of food. Yes, animals, animals, more animals. And yeah, and objects like everyday objects. They're always, they always seem to be missing the ones I want. And I think some of these new ones are going to satisfy you. If you go to the link I just messaged you and then scroll down to the list. Right. I'm happy with some of the new animals. There aren't enough but there are some good new ones. There's some good new useful food. Blueberries at last. I tell you the ones I'm most pleased with to get the ball rolling. I'm not commenting on the design. I don't think the design itself is finalized. But ones that I'm glad exist. I'm very interested and glad to see the headstone. Okay. Yeah. The boomerang I'm happy about just because it gives me the opportunity to express my Australianness. Right, of course. And I'm also interested to see they have the dodo. I think that I'm glad to see the dodo there partly because I think having an interesting animal and a mammoth because I think having extinct animals is opening the way for the Jamaican rice rat and reunion swamp in. Oh, right. Okay. Right. Ladders a good inclusion. Screw driver. Nice. It's not too bad with an overabundance of people. I'm not sure how often I would need Russian nesting dolls. Here's the reason why I want objects. I'm not ever texting with you and I'm like, oh, this is the perfect time for a Russian nesting doll. Yeah. That never really comes up. But I do find with my to do lists and with some computer stuff, like occasionally emoji are useful to represent a category or a concept of a thing. So I do find myself using the objects in practical situations on the computer sometimes. I don't like to write out words if I don't have to. I find words distracting because they talk dumbly to you when you're just looking at stuff. Give me a practical example of that. Like a checklist and the heading would be like a Russian nesting doll. So I'll open up OmniFocus here. So in OmniFocus, it's just where I keep most of my running to do lists. The to do items themselves are actually written out, right? Because you have to say like, oh, what I need to do this or I need to do that. Yeah. But I do, I do much prefer to have emoji for the folder names because like the way OmniFocus happens to display information, it always wants to show you the folder name. And like I don't want to read that every time. I'd rather just have a little symbol for what it is. So what are some of them? What are some of the symbols you've used for different things? So like just some very obvious ones, but it's like, okay, for all of my various checklists, there's a little clipboard, right? That's what I use for podcast stuff. There's a folder that has a little podcast microphone. Okay. There's a folder that's just a star, which is like the top level stuff to jump above everything else. Yeah. And then there's a little cardboard box for miscellaneous stuff. There's a picture of a book for the books that I'm reading. I've got a little frat factory for a bunch of work stuff. I find that visually much easier to parse to just like look through this. I don't use it a ton, but that's a situation where I use it and sometimes with my scripts, it's a similar thing of like, it's useful to stand in for concept. So the Russian nesting doll, that implies like a concept of recursion or self similarity. Like it can represent a bunch of different things. Okay. So thank God they've got coming up then. You're right. But this is also why I was like, people, I never want to think about or see people. So I don't need these people emojis. But I'm really glad to see the bison has made the list one of my favorite animals. I would still for it to be called a buffalo. Like we do in America, but bison's on the list. So that's good. Paul LeBère. I'm happy, although I'm not into people ones, I'm happy for them to include the ninja. Job stuff for the people isn't bad. Like every once in a while those are useful. I just think it's like a person doing yoga, person making a salad, person making a sandwich. Like there's just too many of like people doing everything you can possibly conceive of. I do use the yoga one a lot to be fair. Oh yeah. Well, because my wife does yoga a lot. So I always say, I'll say how was yoga and stuff like that? And I'll just send a little yoga lady. Ah, okay. So you're actually sending it. You don't mean that you're on the receiving end of the yoga. Nah. Nah. Yeah. So there's more objects than I expected. So this isn't too bad. I do find like you I'm often really surprised at missing ones. But I also do wonder like emoji committee. How long can this go on for? Like in a thousand years are we still going to be adding more little emojis? Like when does this stop?
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