Hello Internet - H.I. #106: Water on Mars

Episode Date: July 31, 2018

Grey & Brady discuss the British 'heat wave', water on Mars, Trypophobia, Kit Kat Trademarks, anti-dog discrimination, and YouTube's new news initiative and fake news. Sponsors: Backblaze: unlimited, cloud backup for Macs and PCs for just $5/month - get a fully-featured 15 day free trial at backblaze.com/hellointernet Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass - get 15% off your first order at fractureme.com/hi and don't forget to pick Hello Internet in their one question survey Audible: start a 30-day trial and get your first audiobook free by signing up at audible.com/hellointernet or text "hellointernet" to 500-500 Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes: Discuss this episode on the reddit Water on Mars Trypophobia Trypophobia subreddit GROSS WARNING, MAYBE DON'T CLICK UNTIL AFTER HEARING BRADY'S REACTION ON THE SHOW TOTALLY OK TO CLICK: Trypophobia face makeup Welcome to North Carolina Trypophobia coconut YouTube truth banners, Example 2 Kit Kat case: No break for Nestlé in trademark row YouTube's new news initiative News Lab at YouTube channel

That's why I am the radio and podcast champion. How could anyone ever forget that you're the radio and podcast champion? I can't. I'm looking at my little microphone trophy you gave me right now. Pro tip for England. If you have a heat wave that happens every year for about two, two and a half, maybe three months. That's not a heat wave. That's summer.

That's what summer is. And your heat wave that they don't understand. Oh, I don't know. This year has just been one of the worst years where I keep, not the worst year in terms of heat, but the worst year in terms of me having to listen to English people explain that they don't have summers and this is just a freak occurrence and it doesn't make sense to outfit any of their buildings with air conditioning.

Like, I know I've complained about this in the past, but this year, this summer, I really feel like I'm losing my freaking mind over this. And just earlier today, I was in an argument with an English person who was like, oh, what an unusual heat wave we're having. I'm like, listen, I've lived here for a decade. Every summer, every summer, it's just like this since the first summer when I arrived. And I remember laying on the floor of my apartment, sweating and simply not moving and waiting for what I then, like a fool, believed was the heat wave to pass. But it's not a heat wave. It's just every summer and the city's not built for it. I've decided it's like some kind of self-propaganda that English people do to themselves,

where they just want to believe that all of England is like Northern Scotland all the time. Like they just want to believe it. And so every year when the weather is the same in the summer, which is hot in mid to upper 80s, like it is today, it's like pushing 90 in London, which is an ungodly temperature. They still want to believe that it's a freakish occurrence but it happens every year every year for 10 years at least this is summer english people you need to build infrastructure to deal with it well technically if you look at the statistics, this has been a heat wave. I only partly agree with you, but I do partly agree with you. Okay. Why do you partly disagree with me?

Because we are in the middle of something quite exceptional. Are we? It feels like it's every summer though. This is the heatiest heat wave that I can remember. And I think the numbers flesh that out. I've never seen the grass so dried out as it is now. It's like Australia at the moment. All the grass is so yellow and brown. It's because of the length of it without rain. Like you do get heat, but normally it gets broken up occasionally.

But because it hasn't been broken up, everything's dying at the moment. But England is exceptionally poorly equipped to deal with the mildest deviation from what it considers to be normal weather whether it's wind or rain or heat or anything like it just the whole country just grinds to a halt and they always find new things to go wrong it's like there's a government department for coming up with clever things that can go wrong because of weather, like melting train tracks and weird problems with leaves. And like every year there's a new thing that I'm like, I didn't even know that could be a problem. And yet because the temperature's deviated by one degree or the wind has gone five miles per hour faster than it should have, like everything goes wrong. It's a country living on the edge when it comes to weather.

It really is. It really is. It feels like we've built all of our infrastructure to handle like a plus or minus five degree variance and a plus or minus a couple knots wind speed and plus or minus a couple millimeters of rain. And if it goes beyond that, it's just a total disaster. This is a famous trait of English people, though. I can't remember all the details, and I should because it's part of Australian folklore. But when the first settlers from England went to Australia, they packed as if they were going to be going to England. They packed like warm and cold clothes and all the different types of seeds and things and that they took. And they arrived in Australia and then they planted all their crops based on what they would do in England, even though they were in a different

hemisphere. And they just like, they went through years and years of hardship because they couldn't accept that weather changes and like different things happen with weather. So it's just an English thing, I think. I guess what you're saying to me is that I'm not going to be able to convince English people that you need to install central air conditioning systems in your retail centers across the country. You don't think I'm going to be able to convince them that this is a necessary thing? No. But also, English people love talking about weather, right? It's probably their favorite thing to talk about, either that or transport and travel on the roads.

They love talking about it. And English people love to whinge and complain. So this is like an absolute perfect storm because they can complain about weather. That's bliss for them. I almost think they don't improve the infrastructure because it would reduce their opportunities to whinge about the weather. If it was just like, oh yeah, it's hot today, but luckily we've all got air conditioners and all the public transport can cope with it, there'd be nothing to complain about. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but it's like, I can't let this opportunity pass where I think you may be right. I do my best to think that people all over the world, like I think they're basically the same, right? That people really aren't all that different.

I'm not even sure, like I super believe in this idea of like cultural differences, but the one that just kills me, that seems so stark is what you're saying there. It's like, there's something about English people that they love to just state a problem and let it sit there on the table. And we're all going to sit around it. We're all going to sit around the table and we're going to talk

about that problem. And when you go to America, there really is just much more of a can-do attitude of like, hey, there's a problem. What could we do about this problem? Let's propose solutions. Hey, maybe someone can take action. At a bare minimum, someone can sweep this problem off of the table. And now it's on the floor, but at least it's not in our face all the time. I try to think that people are the same everywhere. And I think that that mostly holds true. But there is something about English people versus Americans in the can-do-itiveness that is

clearly different and sort of drives me crazy sometimes. Yeah. I mean, I do think people are culturally different and that difference you point out is definitely true. I mean, how do you think Australians rate on the can-do-itiveness scale? They've got to be like on the American side. That's my impression anyway. Yeah. Australians are can-do and. That's my impression anyway. Yeah. Australians can do, and Australians are also hard as nails. Right. For example, right. I come from Adelaide. Adelaide can get really, really hot in the summer. Like in the summer, you could have consecutive days

in the forties Celsius. Like I'm talking well, well into the hundreds here, Fahrenheit. And that's just normal. And I lived there and I worked there. And when I used to work at the newspaper, I used to have to wear like, you know, business trousers and a shirt and I wore a tie every day. And I often walked to work. I remember when I lived in the city, I had like a 15, 20 minute walk to work sometimes. And when I went out on jobs and stories, I had to go outside and work outside in clothing that you wouldn't ideally wear in hot weather. And I have zero memory of the heat ever being a massive problem or something you would talk about.

It was just a thing. But now that I live in England and I've been experiencing this heat wave, even I'm talking about it all the time. And I'm lying in bed thinking, oh, woe is me. I'll never sleep. And I dare not go outside. And what am I going to do? Like it's infected me. And I grew up in a hundred degrees every day, like scorching, scorching desert heat. I think one of the reasons particularly on my mind is, is I happen to have a bunch of American friends coming through London this summer. Yeah. And I had to prepare all of them for like, listen, just so you know, it's going to be what you would regard as a hot day, but nothing unusually hot.

But you need to be prepared for the fact that there will be no relief anywhere you go. So you have to bring clothes where you're really prepared for the summertime. And what you're saying there, like I think your memory of it not really being a problem is almost certainly a side effect of that fact that if it gets really hot, you have infrastructure to deal with it. It's like when I visit my parents in North Carolina, which is so hot and so humid that to be outside for a couple of minutes in a row in the afternoon is flirting with death. You really, really are. It's incredible. But guess what? You never need to be outside for more than 20 seconds at the most, right? It's like, how long does it take you to walk from your car to the building? And it's crazy. It's like, oh, I'm so

much more physically comfortable in North Carolina where it's lethal outside, right? Than in the UK where it's like, it's uncomfortable, but it's uncomfortable always. Like, and there's just nothing that is ever done about it. And it's way worse than that situation. Fair enough. Anyway, we've been English-icized. We're talking about the weather, but I'm in a nice chilly room Fair enough. crazy but it's like i've set it up so that i can be recording this podcast in comfort as opposed to being in 88 degree weather as it is right now i do envy you a bit i am sweltering in the room i'm in why don't you have air conditioning brady i don't know because you don't do that in england i did go on to this uh department store website about a week into the heat wave and looked up

air conditioners and they were all sold out. Yeah. No, that's too late. It's too late, Brady. They're all being bought by Americans abroad or other people who are just dealing with it. This whole time we're having this conversation, like, I just assumed that your house must be air conditioning because you're a practical Australian.

No. Apparently not. Okay. Since when am I practical? I don't know. I just, I thought it would be the culture of your people. That you'd be prepared for warm weather. Wow. Like, and I really crank it down.

If I look at the thermometer in my office, it is currently 65 degrees in my office. I've got like a 20 degree temperature differential between the outside and the inside, which is just the way I like it. So Gray, there's some really exciting breaking news that actually started breaking only half an hour before we started recording. Oh, yeah? Yep. Apparently, water on Mars. That's pretty. It's awesome. My Twitter timeline has lit up like a slightly orange-hued Christmas tree.

You know what's crazy about this? Yes, I do. We've discussed this topic a number of times. I know we've discussed the water on Mars thing. That's the whole joke. But I'm sitting here right now, unable to remember what the verdict was from any of those previous conversations about like, has water been discovered on Mars? I don't remember. I'm guessing not. It's Groundhog Day. It's ridiculous. And every time, this time it's different. Okay. What's different about it this time? It's Groundhog Day. It's ridiculous. And every time, this time it's different.

Okay. What's different about it this time? What's different about the late breaking news this time, Brady? Well, I don't think it is that different. Supposedly, like, this time there's actual water and it's not just evidence that there was water there in the past. But dig a little deeper. So you might click on this story thinking you're going to see lovely vistas of lake michigan but dig a little deeper and you very quickly start running into all the

mights and maybes and couldbes and quotation marks let me read a little bit of this too researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on mars what they believe to be a lake a lake gray are you hearing this a lake, what they believe to be a lake. A lake, Ray. Are you hearing this? A lake. What they believe to be a lake sits under the planet's south polar ice cap and is about 20 kilometers, 12 miles across. They talk a little bit about what's been found in the past about possible intermittent liquid water flowing on the surface. But this

is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day. This one, Brady, it sounds like it's a body of water that we've discovered. But they haven't discovered it. They just think maybe it's under there. It's probably not a very large lake, says Professor Roberto Orase from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, who is currently having its grant funding reviewed. No, sorry. Who led the study. Oh, Brady, you're such a cynic. The detector they're talking about wasn't able to determine how thick the layer of water might be, but the research team estimate that it is a minimum of one meter.

This really qualifies this as a body of water, a lake, not some kind of meltwater filling system. Wait a minute. Did you say one meter? Yeah. That's not a lake. That's like a puddle. Well.

It's a serious puddle. It's not a lake if it's one meter. Look, people can read the story and decide what they want. Look, I'm not saying there is or isn't water on Mars. And do you know what? Even if they did find an exposed lake of water on Mars, wouldn't it be more amazing if there wasn't water on Mars? I mean, this is a planet in the sort of habitable zone of the solar system. It should have all the main famous blockbuster molecules and atoms on it, shouldn't it? You know, just like there's gold on earth and methane and all these things. Shouldn't there be a cocktail of stuff on Mars?

But anyway, let's just go back to that Wikipedia article of discoveries of water on Mars, which is ever, ever growing and add this one to the list. And if this one ends up being the one and they find fish or something like that, I will hold my hands up and say, hey, don't I look stupid? But I am very willing to bet in like, by the time this podcast goes out, this story will have just quietly slipped under the surface of all that Martian water, never to be heard from again. And sunk to the bottom of that one meter lake. That one meter lake. No one can possibly find it at the bottom of a lake so deep. You know, I made a snarky tweet thinking, okay, here comes the cheer pressure. Brady,

you don't understand. This is a big deal. Why are you so down on space? And I think even the cheer pressure people are a little bit tired by it and most of them were just like yeah this happens a lot doesn't it i think maybe that's a case of just being alive long enough to be exposed to hearing it a bunch of times right it's like oh the first time that you're around and you hear about it it's like oh wow it's so exciting this has never happened before but then when you've heard about it for the third time it's like well okay and all these spacey people who i see on twitter going this is a big deal people this is huge whoa i can't believe it like are they really that enthused or do they just feel they have like a professional responsibility to push this along like surely

they're thinking oh not again i mean as a fairly sciencey person myself i feel like why is it a big deal you need to explain to me how this is a big deal if there's water on mars like great i can't wait to turn it into rocket fuel for rockets to bring us back from mars to earth oh but gray water is a necessary ingredient for life maybe i'm a monster but it's like i care about mars exactly as much as it is useful to humans. And if this is the precursor to finding evidence that there's life on Mars or there was life on Mars and they find some, you know, old dead bacteria cells, again, so what? Like, we live on a planet full of life. Like, it's not inconceivable that life can happen.

We see it every day like if they start finding like collapsed skyscrapers on mars then they will have my attention like they will have my 100 undivided attention i'll be like hang on that's awesome but if they find oh in fact 60 100 million years ago there was like once a cell but but it didn't go anywhere. I'll be like, oh yeah, probably would have expected that to be honest. Yeah. Cool. Well done. Have a gold star. But it's not going to be like, oh my goodness, shut the Vatican. Like everything you think is true is no longer true. It'll just be okay. Yeah. Cool. What next? Brady, I feel like you have become, over time, a more cynical man about this sort of stuff because of the cheer pressure.

I do agree with you. I'm with you on a lot of this stuff. It feels like you're making much stronger statements than the Brady of four years ago would have made. But it's the result of being at the receiving end of this weird cheer pressure on both sides where now you're like, i need a ruined city on mars before i'm even gonna listen to you people in two years even that won't impress me anymore

a ruined city oh well i would have expected that it'd be surprising if there wasn't a ruined city on mars I want an operating train system before I even get out of bed. See, this is what happens, people. You get too much cheer pressure, too much promotion. It has the opposite effect. Yeah. You become inoculated to it. It's like, oh, my amazement has been depleted.

You spent my amazement too early. That's a sad way to think about it, but it is kind of true. Got to keep your powder dry. This is a PR war you guys are in. Yeah, but the problem is everybody's part of the PR thing. This is a different version of people standing up first to try to get off the airplane, right? That when you have fewer places that can coordinate, everybody wants to try to grab the headlines that they're the person who's found water on Mars or vertebrates on Mars or an abandoned city on Mars.

Like everybody wants to stand up and be the person to get that. And then it becomes like, well, because everybody's talking about that is like I care so much less. And the threshold for excitement is much, much higher as a result of like the increased noise and increased war for human time and attention. And the thing that makes it worse in this day and age of social media is not only, you know, do the people making the announcement want the attention and the clicks and the eyeballs and the media organizations reporting it and writing stories about it want the attention and want the eyeballs, but the whole world wants to be the person who breaks the news to their followers with the retweet or with the pithy comment with the retweet. This is a big deal,

guys. Have a look at this. So it's not just that I went to the BBC website and I was like, wow, this is a cracking story. That's really interesting. But then everywhere I turn on the internet, my Facebooks and my Twitters and things like that, everywhere you look, everyone's yelling at you like they're the one breaking the news to you. So it's like, okay, like, shut up. I guess you haven't spent a lot of time disabling retweets for the people you follow yet, hey, Brady?

I'm definitely going to disable the word Mars and water at some point. That will halve the number of tweets in my timeline, I reckon. Anyway, we'll see what happens. I'll be asking Gray to cut this segment from the podcast if in two or three days, like they release pictures of a lake full of flamingos. It doesn't matter if they do, right? Because we've already established that our threshold is incredibly high. There's one tiny area where I do disagree with you. It's

just that even if they discover, oh, there was a bacteria on Mars somewhere, I do think that's a big deal, mainly because it makes, once again, the Drake equation and the question of why are we alone in the universe even more terrifying because, okay, well, now we have another data point. We can see two planets in the habitable zone and both of them had life at some point. It seems like there should be life everywhere. Why isn't there? Which is the thing that concerns me. So I do think that's kind of a big deal, but also at the same time, I'm with you on the like, I don't care. I don't care if they find a lake full of flamingos until we start actually landing people on Mars. And then it's like, boy,

look at all this real estate. We need to do something with it. I'm not saying it's not a big deal if we find out there was life on another planet, but it certainly feels like much less of a big deal than it would have 20 years ago. And I don't know what that says about me or about the world or about stuff, but it just feels like less of a big deal. And I think it's funny that the reason you think it would be a big deal is not because, oh my God, life, you know, it exists. Life finds a way. The reason it's a big deal to you is because now I'm really scared. Now I've got even more to worry about. Brady, I think you can see that the underlying thread is,

yes, but how does this affect me? Right? And so it's like water on mars great okay whatever can i use that as rocket fuel for my rocket in the future can i drink it during this british heat wave right no well then it might as well not exist right it might as well be thrown into a black hole it doesn't exist i don't know i think maybe what you're getting at is like the cheer pressure is part of this there's something about like i'm visualizing the two sliders in my mind and the sliders are important and the other slider is but how much do i care i can recognize that things are important like water on mars is important but i can't move that like i care at all slider in my head. I don't know. I find

that there are a lot more topics that I think a younger version of me would have hit that slider of like, oh boy, I'm really interested and I care a lot about this much harder than I do now. And I do think it is kind of like the cheer pressure thing. I think it's a side effect of how many people want you to care about things like that pushes me away. And this, again, is like an Internet thing where there's people everywhere who want you to care about whatever the thing is that they care about the most. And I feel myself like pulling back from a lot of that stuff. And the like space for space sake is definitely one of those areas where I'm like, ah, important maybe, but like how much do I care? Like not a lot. I don't know if you feel that way, but that's just something I'm aware of is like that pushback. It feels like it's sort of related to cheer pressure. I do have like a slight resistance to like keeners, you know, people who

are too keen and that is just a sign of being a grump, I guess. Mars. What could we use it for? This other planet nearby. Doesn't sound like there's a lot of water there. Doesn't sound like there's life there. Just seems like another rock orbiting the habitable zone of our star. Maybe that's what we could use Mars for. It's in the habitable zone. We could get humans living on Mars. Because right now, humans only live on one planet. And one is none. You need a backup of the human civilization. And maybe Mars, that's its ultimate purpose, to be Earth's backup. Now, just as the human civilization needs a backup, so do your computer files. They're sitting there right now on your computer waiting for disaster, just as the human species is waiting for an extinction-level event. You don't want a stray gamma ray to come flying from the cosmos through your hard drive,

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There's no gotchas. They're just the best. Backblaze.com slash Hello Internet. Thanks to Backblaze for supporting the show. Thanks to Backblaze for supporting the show thanks to backblaze for protecting everyone's data so we last time were discussing the nail and gear that had been etched at a microscopic level onto a 5p coin a nanoscopic level i was going to say nanoscopic but i stopped myself because weren't we talking about micrometers? Isn't it literally microscopic then? No, I think maybe you're right on that one. You're really, really pulling out the nerd voice for this podcast. I am, I'm giving it a run.

I'm quite congested today. It's actually quite easy to go. It's easier to speak in nerd voice than my own voice, so. Ah, okay. I could do the whole podcast in nerd voice if you want. I really don't. I really don't want that, Brady. I don't like that guy no well stay off the internet because he's everywhere commenting on everything especially number five

videos i'm sorry i feel like you have a lot of channels that particularly draw that guy i love him yes yes all views count the same so yes you do love him that's true okay so my bit of feedback is on that coin photo in the comments on the reddit for the last episode a bunch of people were talking about how that close-up photo made them feel really queasy the image that had like the spikes and the holes we you know we were about, does it look like stalactites and stalagmites or does it look like a geological feature? My initial description of it was looking like a canyon and down the bottom were like spiky tentacles, like the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi trying to reach out. Yes, that's right. That was your metaphor, the Sarlacc, which is a very good one. I think that works perfectly. So a couple of people were pointing out in the Reddit that as everything exists on the internet, and that there's maybe a thing called

trypophobia. And of course, there is a subreddit for it. And I clicked on the subreddit. And boy, you know, just when you think the internet has like, oh, surely there's nothing more that the internet can show me, right? Like I've ended up in all of these strange places like, oh, okay. This is another one of these very strange places. So it's described as like a fear or an uncomfortable feeling when you look at particular patterns of like holes or small repeated cracks in a thing, particularly those found in nature. So I went, of course, you're like, oh, well, here's a weird subreddit. Let me go start clicking around and clicking on these

things. And I don't know if you've opened it up on your web browser. I'm looking at it now, Gray. I'm looking at it now. Right. So clicking around, what do you think of these photos or some of these things that you're seeing? I mean, I can see how they're like unpleasant-ish. It's not things of beauty. And I guess there's always a sort of a menace and a spookiness about holes. It doesn't affect me the way that I read other people were being affected by that image but i get why some people don't like it but it doesn't freak me out or anything do you know how to uh on reddit sort by the top of all time so you can see the most trichophobic images okay i'm looking at top of all time and these are more unpleasant. Yes, it's much more unpleasant. Yes. I'll put a link in the show notes for people.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, what are you doing to me, Gray? Oh my God, I've shut that tab. Oh man, I was about to say that this is going to come with a severe, there are some things that cannot be unseen warning, but you beat me to it. Why didn't you warn me? I was about to. And then you were reacting in such an entertaining way,

I just let it go. Oh, God. That was terrible do you want to tell the people no brady no don't do it people that's not just like trypophobia trypophobia though that's just like grossness in any phobia yeah it's not like looking at a bunch of knitting needles or something and going oh that makes me feel weird that's just like grossness oh i can't get some of them out of my head are you still clicking brady it sounds like no i shut it i'm never going there again you know i can look at stuff but you don't look at that stuff volunteer like that's just there's no pleasure in that and i look at some macabre stuff too on the internet like i don't look at that stuff voluntarily. That's just, there's no pleasure in that. And I look at some macabre stuff too on the internet. I don't mind looking at things that are

dark, but that's like, there's no value in that. Like you, I basically had the same reaction when I opened it up. I was like, Jesus, what is that? Right? Click next. Oh God, what is that? Click next. Right? The first couple were all right. And I was thinking, oh, this is fine. And then after that, like the rest in that top 20 or 50 were like horrendous. Who subscribes to that subreddit? Well, 35,000 people subscribed to that subreddit. Just take a deep breath over there.

Okay, yeah. The ones that you saw, were they natural images or were they some of the constructed things no they were all natural things okay yeah the natural things are more horrifying than the constructed things because that's like oh that's a photoshop job or like they're usually things that have gone wrong with people or animals too like it's like you know it's nature gone wrong this is actually what i what i thought was kind of the interesting thing about this is with it's trying to be like what is it that your brain is is wired for and this one i found it very interesting because i kept thinking oh i feel like this is probably

really wired into people on some level precisely because of what you said there that if in nature you come across this sort of pattern where a thing that should be smooth actually has a large number of holes in it that's probably really bad like that is a thing that has become infested or infected. It's not the way it's supposed to be. I was very aware of like, actually when I was in North Carolina a while ago, I didn't grow up in an area where there are snakes, but there are lots of snakes in North Carolina.

And I was super interested in the fact that my brain was ready to spot snakes. So like if you go out into the park, like your brain is just clearly looking for this little S pattern moving along the ground. And it's like, oh that this pattern of circles and holes is like built into the brain as a really bad sign if you see it somewhere. And then I can see that this gets transferred to people when they look at the nail and gear that is made out of these little holes in a surface. That it's like they feel uncomfortable because it's this same pattern. And I'm going to give you an example of one. This is not a gross one.

This one I'll put in the show notes because I think it's like a safe for work version of this. It's a woman who's done this makeup job on her face and it's not a gross makeup job. She's just made it look like her face is sort of a bookshelf like with things placed in the shelf on her head and it's like man looking at that it just feels so uncomfortable to look at and i think it's the same thing because like if you came across someone who had lots of holes in their face, it's probably a really bad sign in the natural world.

And they might be infected or have some kind of other problem. Yeah, but if you came across someone with a bunch of spikes on their face or even one weird thing on their face, I agree with everything you just said, Gray. It all made sense. And clearly this trypophobia or trypophobia or whatever it's called is definitely a thing because it certainly triggered a lot of people. But when I was watching those extreme ones and I had that reaction that I had, I don't think that was trypophobia or trypophobia or anything being brought out in me. It was when something else was added to it that it became gross. Like when I see a bunch of holes in some skin, I'm like, okay, there's a bunch of holes in the skin. But then when a whole bunch of like worms or pus or something suddenly comes squirting

out of it, that's just like gross. Well, it is also just the idea of why is a thing gross or like why is a thing repulsive like in the same way that you said like why is a thing beautiful there's something in your brain that's looking for patterns out in the world the traditional one is like things are beautiful when they're symmetrical and probably we find symmetrical people more attractive because it means that their genes were expressed properly like that there wasn't a transcoding error in reproducing their face and like symmetry is a hard thing to do i think even for some of the gross ones it kind of raises this interesting question of

you find a thing gross but why and the answer is almost certainly because like the gross thing is bad news in the past right even when you say there's like pus why is pus so gross because it's bad news like it's super bad news in the past okay but i was just going to mention like i had the absolute strangest experience because there's one more which is not gross that makeup one by the way i've been staring at the whole time we've been talking i'm absolutely mesmerized by it. I love it. It's an amazing makeup job.

I find it very uncomfortable to look at. Obviously, the notion of this woman having a whole bunch of holes gouged into her face seems disturbing for a few seconds, but then you just appreciate it as almost pretty. All right, now I'm looking at the other one. This is a bunch of holes that have been poked into some coconut flesh but because the coconut has had all the brown hair pulled away from it so like the coconut skin is almost like skin colored it kind of almost looks like you're seeing through some human skin to a bone the caption says it looks like a knee something's gone wrong with a knee to me it looks

like the top of someone's head and they've had a bunch of holes drilled into their brain or something when in fact it's just a coconut it's just a coconut with the skin removed and then someone's poked a bunch of holes in it yeah yeah i came across this image and this was one of the like strangest experiences i've had in a while seeing this image because and i know you'll love this, Brady, this image is straight out of my dreams. All right. You know, like people have various recurring dreams. The famous one that I used to think was like a joke until I realized, oh, people really

do have this dream is the like, oh, you show up to school naked dream, right? Which I never had. And I thought was like like is this a joke but apparently this is a fairly common one that people have or like teeth falling out of your head or something else i have those ones yeah i have the teeth falling out of my head one too which is like even if i think about it i can think about what that feeling is like but man this one is like this is straight out of my dreams or like I have had recurring dreams where there's problems with my knees and they're getting holes in them exactly like this. Wow.

Interesting. I don't like to talk about dreams, obviously. I don't think there's any point to it. But I thought it was interesting and it's what got me started down this whole road of like, why would that be a thing that your brain even thinks about? And that's why I was thinking about like patterns of holes as really bad news biologically, which may be like where the source of the phobias come from. But it's like, man, this was just such a strange image to look at

because it's like this could have been pulled right out of my brain and then like made into an image on the internet. It's very strange. Do you have dodgy knees? Like when you run and stuff, do you have knee problems? Like would you be getting sore knees in your sleep and your dream brain is going, hmm, let's work with this or? I don't think there's anything like that. I think it's just, you know, the random noise in a brain is sort of what dreams are, but it's still like something that your brain is thinking about in the same way that I suspect dreams like losing your teeth. Like it's a thing that again, super bad news in the past. If you lose your teeth and then it's just like something that brains think about.

So, but I'm pretty sure that most people who have those teeth dreams are clenching their teeth in their sleep. I don't know. I hope you enjoyed your little, your little trip down trypophobia land. I most certainly didn't. I'll put a link in the show notes with a big warning for people before they click it so that you don't befall the same fate as Brady. Don't click it, people. And I'll tell you why. There's no merit to it.

You're listening to someone who will watch things about plane crashes and disasters and things until the cows come home. I will look at dark stuff because it's interesting. There is no merit to this. Only bad will come from this. Yeah, I can back Brady up on that one. I would repeat that. I found it interesting, but only because I had just a one in a million weird personal connection for an image that I happened to find very quickly. But yeah, this is not artistic. This is the corner of the internet that is the gross out body horror corner of the internet. There be dragons. Not even interesting. Not even, you know, like a Phineas Gage type

interesting. Oh, isn't that an amazing thing that happened to a body this is just like cannot unsee anyway link in the show notes you know maybe once in a lifetime you take a photo that rises above the rest and it becomes that photo the one you make your screensaver set as your facebook banner you know the one i'm talking about. It's in your favourites folder on your phone so that when you find yet another excuse to shoehorn it into a conversation at the pub, you can call it up in just a few swipes. Have a look, have a look at this one. I have such a photo. It was taken many years ago in Paris. Now, not many people know about this, but if you walk a little way south of the Champs-Élysées and cross the river, there's a pretty little tower perched over the city.

Le Tour Eiffel, I believe the local street vendors call it. Now, look, I know a lot of people have photographed the Eiffel Tower, but mine was special, okay? And this was before the days of snazzy mobile phones, so I had the photo printed out and framed. It hung on the wall, and it was admired every day, mainly by me, but it was admired every day. And you know what? That just feels all too rare these days. Rare that we print out those classic pictures and let them adorn our homes and offices, give them the pride of place they deserve. And that's even more ridiculous than it sounds, because these days, you can get your photo fractured. Fractured, I hear you ask, recent listener?

What is this thing you speak of? Well, if you're new to the show, you might not know fracturing is a process whereby your photo is printed onto a piece of glass, all ready to hang on the wall, complete with foam backing and a wall hanger. No frames necessary, gorgeous, ready to go, straight out of the box. It's all done at a factory in Gainesville, Florida. Now, I speak from personal experience. These make great gifts for other people or for yourself. You can choose all sorts of shapes and sizes, upload your picture to the website, press a few buttons, and then it arrives at your house. And if you want a discount on your first order, go to fractureme.com slash hi. That's a discount on your first order. And when you get there, there'll be a quick one

question survey so you can tell the fracture folk you came from Hello Internet. Don't forget to give us a little nod. That helps us too. Check the website, Tims. It does a far better job of explaining fractures than I do. FractureMe, all one word, .com slash hi. And if you do get your classic photo framed, be sure to show us. It might even be as good as my Eiffel Tower picture. And if it is, I want to see it. Another story that just broke today, actually, Grey, that I thought might interest you. There's been an ongoing saga. I'm no expert on this, but when does that stop us? Never. There's been an ongoing saga to do with the trademark of the Kit Kat chocolate bar. This isn't like the logo or anything. It's the physical shape of it.

The case is a trademark case? Because I'm immediately thinking, this sounds like a patent case, right? If you need something to be a ridiculous patent, it'd be like, oh, I've patented a way that you can have four chocolate bars next to each other, and they easily break by having a little bit of chocolate between them. And some idiotic patent office would totally grant that. Four trapezoidal bars aligned on a rectangular base is how a top EU legal advisor put it. So KitKat thought they owned this through Nestle, the parent company. Cadbury, which owns various companies and has other chocolate bars

that are similarly shaped, have been fighting them for years and years over this. And the judgment that came down today from an EU court is that KitKat can't have that design all to themselves. Obviously, these cases go back and forth, don't they, forever? Oh, yeah, of course. The latest big verdict that's getting all the headlines today is, sorry, KitKat, you don't own the four trapezoidal bars on a rectangular base. Yeah, these cases never end. Just a few weeks ago, there was a reversal in that monkey copyright case that we talked about years ago. And it was like, oh God, these things never, ever end.

I mean, I don't know all the arguments here, but I kind of feel like KitKat kind of want to have their cake and eat it too here because KitKat are bringing out all these new things like KitKat Chunky and all these different KitKat products, and they're branching out. And I think when they start doing that, they lose their claim of saying, this is quintessential KitKat. Only KitKats look like this. If it looks like this, you know it's a KitKat. Surely their case has been weakened by all the KitKat variations they've been bringing out. That's an excellent point. Because yeah, the purpose of trademark is to prevent customer confusion. That's what it is, a trademark, like a mark that this trade is legit. It's the thing that you think that you're getting. If I was the judge, you know, with my no legal experience

at all, I would have laughed Kit Kat out of the court. I'd be like, get out of here with your trademark case on the fact that your chocolate comes in four bars. A trademark to me seems like it really should be a thing that is on or integral to the packaging of the product. I think Coca-Cola has a trademark on the shape of the bottle or something. And I feel like I can just about let that kind of thing slide. I don't know if they've got it, but I could imagine Toblerone would get away with it with their triangular box as well. Yeah, they might get away with it,

but I would rule against them just purely out of spite since they changed the way the chocolates are on the inside. There's been movement on that, Grey, by the way. There was a story about that a couple of days ago, but we'll save that for another time. Well, they're dead to me forever, Toblerone. They have been forced into a slight backflip on that. Too late. Too late. You've lost Grey's custom. For the rest of time.

They haven't lost my custom because it is too damn yummy. But I am mad at them. It's like Chick-fil-A in the South. It's like, oh, you're a terrible company, but your milkshakes are so delicious. But they're KitKat four bars. There are other bars that do it, you see, and that have been around for a very long time as well and I mean I do associate it with KitKat but when you buy a KitKat off the shelf

it doesn't look like that does it it just looks like a red rectangle what I'm trying to think in my head is where to draw the line here and if I can't see it on the shelf it shouldn't be able to count as a trademark so you can only see the wrapping of the Kit Kat bar. And then however it looks on the inside, I feel like, no, that doesn't

count towards the trademark. Well, here's an interesting one. The other day, out of desperation, I had some of my wife's vegetarian chicken nuggets, corn chicken nuggets. They're actually quite good. Yeah. I've had a lot of that vegetarian stuff. It's surprisingly good sometimes. They're chicken nuggets. The corn chicken nuggets are excellent. They're not a sponsor of the show. They just make excellent chicken nuggets. But interestingly, they have given their chicken nuggets the same, what I presume are arbitrary shapes that McDonald's use for their chicken nuggets. You know, those two or three distinctive shapes that chicken nuggets come in. I only just recently learned this. I never really

thought about it before, but yeah, I didn't realize that there's whatever it is, there's four particular shapes that the chicken nuggets come in. And they seem to have copied or replicated it in some way because they looked just like McDonald's chicken nuggets. Obviously, McDonald's hasn't got the trademark on those four shapes. It's not part of the packaging. The chicken nuggets just come in like a box, right? And then you just... I'm sure if I had a bit of time to think about it, I could think of examples where it isn't just the packaging. Like the actual shape of the product itself is trademarkable. Well, okay. i think maybe not

trademarkable but copyrightable case in point animal crackers right those little animal crackers individually they're like a little piece of art so maybe you could copyright the animal cracker design but a trademark is a it's just like a totally different thing like no one else can sell animal looking crackers. And so you can come up with your own animal designs and you can copyright them. But yeah, no, the chicken nuggets, I think they come in a box. Nope, I wouldn't give that to McDonald's. I'm glad that Kit Kat has been ruled against here. I'm reading about these chicken nuggets. I've seen them described different ways. It's the bell, the bow tie, the bowl and the boot.

Well, here I see the bell, the bowl, the bone and the boot. Well, here I see the bell, the bowl, the bone and the boot. So the bow tie could also be called the bone by the looks of it. Bell, bow tie, bowl and boot. Who doesn't like the boot most of all? It's the least symmetrical one, isn't it? That one always feels like the treat when you're having chicken McNuggets and you're taking them out. When you get the boot, that feels like, oh, that's my favorite. Surely you're the same. I mean, it's been a long time since I've had chicken nuggets. It's been a very long time. But I'm also now realizing that the boot is the one that tricked me into feeling like the

chicken McNuggets were much more like chicken pieces than what they actually are. Precisely because it's unsymmetrical, it's a bit like, oh, this must be a chicken wing. Well, you also, you feel like you're getting a little bit of extra. Oh, there's a bit of extra chicken on this one. And when you eat the boot, do you eat the booty toe part first or the top of the boot first? Where would you bite into the the boot first and what part do you dip into the sauce i dip toe first and then bite the toe first no sauces i did no sauces and i held it by the little handle bit and ate the big bit and then the little bit oh so you would hold it by the toe and bite the top of the boot no no no i like that our chicken nugget eating is the exact opposite yeah well Would you expect anything else?

I hope McDonald's has a copyright on that boot shape. I don't know. I think the corn chicken nuggets are adopting the boot, if my memory serves. Well, how can you tell if it's a chicken McNugget or a corn vegetable impersonator? This is what trademark is for. It's very interesting. The intellectual property stuff matters you know it's it's but more and more of the economy is that's why these fights happen over this stuff

we can't have nugget booting going on can we no we can't we can't it's boot booting oh brady so gray as you well know quite often i end up staying in London over Christmas for various work reasons. And what we would normally do is hire like a nice house through like a nice website where people put up their houses when they're away over Christmas. And we've used one or two companies over the last few years. And you have been to these houses because you often come and join us on Boxing Day. So, you know these a lot. You know, they're nice houses. It's a very nice thing that we do sometimes, Brady. I'm always happy when it works out and we get to on Boxing Day. So you know these a lot. You know, they're nice houses. It's a very nice thing that we do sometimes, Brady.

I'm always happy when it works out and we get to spend Boxing Day together. So it looks like I may be in a similar situation this Christmas. So we've started looking for a house. And we went through one of the usual companies we go to. Now, the issue is we have our two dogs, Lulu and Audrey, who are both very clean and nice dogs, but they are dogs. And because people are putting their houses up, I understand maybe some people don't want dogs in their house.

You know, it is their decision. Some people allow it, some people don't. So we're trying to find a house we like where the owners are okay with dogs, and we always get there in the end. The company that we go through, though, for the first time this year has kind of like outraged me a little bit because they say if the owner says you can have dogs that's good but you will have to pay a non-negotiable cleaning fee afterwards after the dogs have been and that's not uncommon as well so

i thought okay you know what the cleaning fee is? 700 pounds, nearly $1,000. And we're like, that's ridiculous. And they came back with this like, you know, people might be allergic to dogs, so we've got to do this like super thorough clean. But, I mean, you could clean a space telescope for less money than that, I reckon, like $1,000. Like if it was like a couple of hundred bucks, maybe I'd think,

oh, it's steep, but fair enough. You know, you want to do a good job. But I just thought that was absolutely ridiculous. I had a little bit of a rant on Twitter about it because I was disappointed. I was disappointed by this and I thought it was anti-dog. I mean, basically they're saying don't bring your dogs. I think they're being hostile to dogs. And then some people will say, oh, you don't understand people

with allergies to dogs. This is a big deal. Fair enough. And by the way, if the people who own the house are allergic to dogs, I hope they're not letting dogs in the house. And I hope they're saying you can't bring your dogs. But using this allergy card, you know, people have dog allergies. This is serious business. Don't get me people have dog allergies. This is serious business.

Don't get me wrong. Allergies are a serious business, but we don't spend $1,000 cleaning every single place a dog walks into in society. Like we have to manage these things and be reasonable about it. And you have places dogs can go and places they can't. But saying you can only bring your dogs if you pay $1,000 afterwards to clean this place, I don't know. I spend a lot of my life a little bit disappointed by people's attitudes to dogs. And I get that some people don't like dogs, and I'm absolutely fine with that.

But I think sometimes the anti-dog lobby does my head in. Can you imagine if they said you can only bring your human baby if you pay us a thousand dollars afterwards oh brady i know people aren't allergic to babies well babies have other problems well i can assure you little kids are going to make a bigger mess than my thimble sized chihuahua and my greyhound that will lie in the corner the whole time too scared to move. Do they have rules against peanuts? Yeah, there's a $2,000 fee if you want to eat peanuts in the house.

If allergies is the argument, that's what they should be having, right? But they don't have that. They don't have a peanut check in the house. They only have a dog check in the house. I should reply to the company and say that. Am I allowed to bring peanuts? Yeah. And if they say yes, I'm going to say, gotcha. Right. Yeah. You can totally say that because that's what it is. That's anti-dog bias. I mean, Brady, since Mr. Chompers has come into my life, let's just say my mind has been awoken to the anti-dog prejudice and discrimination everywhere in our society.

Oh, yeah. If you're at work, if your dog is sick and you call up work and say, I've got a problem because my dog is sick, they'll laugh you out of the room. But dogs get sick. Dogs need care and to go to the vet. But if someone calls up and says, my child is sick, well, don't come back to work for a year. It's fine. I know that humans are more important than dogs. Humans are more important to me than dogs. But the anti-dogness... It's crazy. Someone has a child, they get months off from work to take care of that child. You get a new puppy, you ask for a time off from work to help raise it. They're not going to give you that time. Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying we should give people dog leave, but what I'm saying is we have, as a species,

domesticated the species and made it a big part of our lives. And even if you don't like dogs, I think you're partly accountable for looking after them. Just like I'm partly accountable for looking after human babies that I haven't brought into the world. I have an accountability and I accept that, you know? Man, I love this. This is spiraled like immediately to this civilization wide problem. That wasn't my plan. That wasn't my plan. Everything in my brain is saying abort, abort. No, but I love it. It's like, we won't possibly talk about it on the show because it's too fraught

of an issue, but for 100% sure, they're like, there should be a thread that keeps civilization together where you could take care of or reprimand children that aren't yours in a public environment. But like, boy, you certainly can't if you don't want to go to prison. I'm not suggesting that. Right. We'll just move right along from that and keep on going. But no, it's big scale like i agree with you i have said many times in the show i think that dogs are in a unique place

they're basically like a symbiotic creature with humans and they're everywhere and having mr chompers around one of the things it's such a like it's such a minor thing but i do sometimes get annoyed by like there's a bunch of like local corner shops like where i'd run errands like not a big supermarket but like a little store that just had stuff and sometimes like if i'm coming home and i have mr chompers and i just need to get some milk or whatever it's like i can understand that maybe you don't want dogs in the store but it always always strikes me strange. It's like, but I can hold this dog in one arm and be in and out in two seconds.

I can grab the milk, I can hand you the money, and I can go. And it's incredible to me how on my walking route, there's nowhere that I can go to get milk where the shop owner won't be like, get that dog out of my store. But I'm holding him in my arms. go to get milk where the shop owner won't be like get that dog out of my store it's like yeah but i'm holding him in my arms like i'm not bringing a pack of malamutes in here like to shed all i know like and i know it's illegal to have dogs in food preparation areas like there are laws about this

and fair enough but i had a shop near me that was like that and when audrey was a tiny tiny puppy like tiny she just didn't know anything about the world i was carrying her under my arm to buy milk and this guy said you can't bring your dog in here and i never ever shopped at that shop again and about a year later they went out of business and i did not shed a tear right you brought audrey along to pee on the front door right as they closed it that's that's what was happening. I was just nipping in to buy a quick milk. And it was a tiny shop. And it wasn't like a big fruit and veg area where there was exposed food and stuff.

And fair enough. That's the rules. And I said, OK. I didn't kick up a fuss. And I left. But I never went back. And also, what is more disgusting to have around an exposed food area in a supermarket? A dog in your arms or children?

Like, disgusting, disgusting, germy, sneezy children touching things. Like, surely if we're actually concerned about germs and dirt, like, the children would clearly be worse. I think maybe both of these things can be okay in this environment. Like, if children are allowed, I think a dog should be worse. I think maybe both of these things can be okay in this environment. Like if children are allowed, I think a dog should be allowed. I've been to McDonald's where people put their kids up on the counter, like their bums sitting on the counter where the food gets served. I see that and think, yeah, you should be ejected from civilization immediately whenever I see that kind of thing. But yeah, so I'm so aware of it And I'm aware of it with like parks that have no dogs allowed signs.

And it's like, ah, all of this kind of stuff. And your particular situation with trying to rent a house, this, as with many things we discuss on the show, is the multi-party problem, right? That there's like three different interactions here. There's the person who's renting the house. There's you. And then there's another company that's involved in the middle. And so like whenever you have three party interactions, it's just less clear and it always gets more complicated. Well, they would claim there's a fourth party as well. There's future people who will

stay in the house as well, who may be like violently allergic to dogs. Look, I don't want to make too big a deal about it because, you know, life goes on. And I am willing to pay extra for dogs because society has deemed dogs dirty and require extra cleaning. And I'm okay with that. And by the way, if my dogs did make a mess, I would pay 700 pounds in a second because I would think, wow, that's really bad. But I think setting at the level at that much money, at nearly $1,000, is either incredible profiteering or is deliberately hostile to dogs. It's just being deliberately mean and trying to prevent people with dogs having a fair go. And I think it's excessive. It's too much. I'll agree with you. I'll agree with you. It almost feels like,

why don't you just say dogs are not allowed that's clearly what you're going for oh it costs 10 000 pounds to clean up after your dog like well unless you're in there unless you're a hollywood millionaire with your lap dog to which money's no object so that that's obviously who they're just allowing for and just someone who just has pet dogs it's like no i'm also very willing to believe that whatever cleaning company they bring in there doesn't know when it's a house the dogs have been in there or it's not a house the dogs have been in there but like i guarantee you the cleaning company is just on the standard contract of like clean the house and then they just go in and do their regular job and they get much less than 700 pounds yeah yeah i think the in-between company just gets to hold on to that they just get to

hold on to that amount but yeah i am with you brady i think the anti-dog sentiment in the world is too much and like yes dogs can be dirty and dogs can be poorly trained when owners don't properly train them but all of the arguments i ever seen against dogs like they apply to children and i generally find children vastly more disruptive than dogs in almost any environment where you're going to find both I've ever seen against dogs, like they apply to children. And I generally find children vastly more disruptive than dogs in almost any environment where you're going to find both. And so if you have an anti-dog argument, like all I hear is an anti-children argument as well. It's like, well, why can't we all just get along? During my travels this summer, I did a bunch of recreational driving, the kind of driving you can only do in America, down a beautiful highway,

through a stunning national park. America is a place where you just can't beat the driving. And one of the things that makes these trips just fantastic is doing the drive while listening to an audiobook. I have very many pleasant memories of listening to particular books in particular locations on trips while driving. It's just fantastic. Audiobooks are great companions when you're traveling at all times, but particularly when you're driving. There's something just super nice about it. Then I have a great recommendation that I found this summer for you. But of course, where to get audiobooks from? Where is the most convenient best location? Well, there's only one answer, and that is Audible.

Audible has just an unmatched selection of audiobooks for you to listen to, covering everything you could possibly want to read. And one of the things that I really love about Audible, and that has become increasingly important to me over time, is their integration with Kindle eBooks. You can be listening to your audiobook, and at any point in time, just open up the eBook version, and the whole thing just syncs the locations together. So you'll be on the same page on your ebook as you are where you're listening to the audiobook. This makes things like highlighting relevant sections super duper easy. And a thing that I just never thought that I would do, but I actually do a surprising amount, is it lets you switch between do you want to be reading this book now

or do you want to listen to this book in audio format. I think it's just a great feature. I really love it. Now, Audible is offering Hello Internet listeners a free audiobook with a 30-day membership trial. To sign up for this, you just go to audible.com slash hello internet, or you can text hello internet to 500 500 to get started. Now the book that I found this summer that I really liked that makes a hell of a companion to a road trip is American Wolf by Nate Blakesley. It's the story of Yellowstone National Park and how wolves were reintroduced into the area starting in the 1990s. This is a thing that I wasn't really aware of at all, but it made for just an incredibly gripping story in terms of how the local towns around

Yellowstone were affected, all the various groups that were either working for bringing wolves into the park or keeping them out of the park. And then, of course, the lives of the wolves themselves. It's just a really stunning listen. And it was also narrated by Mark Bramhall, who's an audiobook narrator I'm really growing to like. He's done a few things I've listened to now, and they're just great. So my recommendation for an audiobook to start your trial with is, again, American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee. And once again, to get that audiobook for free with a 30-day trial membership, just go to audible.com slash hellointern text hello internet to 500 500 thanks to audible for supporting hello internet and thanks to audible for many many hours of keeping me company while driving so brady as the professional youtubers that we are or at least that one of us is.

Hang on, which one are you talking about? I literally don't know who you're complimenting and who you're besmirching there. How could that even be a question about which one of us is the professional YouTuber and which one of us is not the professional YouTuber? I don't think there can possibly be any question about it. I think you go into it with a more professional attitude. I have perhaps a more professional output. I feel like that is almost very kind of you to say. You're like the person who spends weeks and weeks preparing that outfit for the dance. I'm the person who actually goes to the dance. Yeah. Well, for the most part, I've been going to the summer

now where it's like not much happens during the summer. Yeah. Well, it's a heat wave. I'm not surprised. It is. Yeah, it's a heat wave. No one can do anything during a heat wave. You so badly want to make that video, but all the metal work around you is melting. Yeah, if only.

Yeah. But so as professional YouTubers, there's news about the YouTube, which sometimes I feel like we need to discuss. And this time, there is news about YouTube news, which is that you may remember we discussed a few episodes ago that YouTube was concerned about the problem of fake news on their platform. And that they were going to try to instigate a few things to... I don't even know how to say it, but I guess from their perspective, they want to have people hear true news as opposed to fake news. Why are you saying that with like a question mark in your voice? I'm mentally kind of getting ahead of myself here because the reason that there is a question mark there is the fundamental problem I have with YouTube in particular getting involved in this stuff is it to me just feels like YouTube gets to decide what is the true news that they want people to hear.

Right. And it's like, okay, well, I don't know exactly how I feel about that. I feel that it's a sort of a complicated thing. YouTube is launching this $25 million program, which they are categorizing as part of their goal to fight fake news. And it's just a very strange thing that they seem to be doing. They're spending this money and they're talking about using it to bring together news organizations and media experts to advise YouTube on their new features. And they're giving money to organizations to help them with their video production capabilities. Like, I don't know what this is. I don't quite understand what their goal is or like what are the actionable items that they're trying to achieve here.

Like they have this strange YouTube channel, which is like the News Lab at Google, that has a very sad number of views on their videos. And they're just talking about like trying to increase the quality of journalism like globally with their $25 million and trying to improve it on YouTube. How come they haven't called me? Former News Corporation BBC journalist turned YouTuber. I've never picked up the phone to me. I'm here, guys, sitting in a really hot room in England. I wanted to raise this to your attention, partly because I actually think that is a legitimate question. Because if you are YouTube, you have homegrown people who work in the news business. And reading through some of the press reports and watching some of the YouTube videos on this, they're all focused on this idea of journalism is really struggling in the world.

And so we're going to give them money to do stuff. So it's like we're doubling down on the thing that isn't doing very well. And it's like, but there are people on YouTube who have experience in this world and who also have success on YouTube, why isn't YouTube reaching out to them and instead is going to like the traditional media that's having the very problem? I don't know. Like, I just don't understand what they're trying to achieve here. And I was just genuinely wondering, as someone who has worked as a journalist and someone who also has experience on YouTube and someone who's more familiar with the problem of real news versus fake news. Let's say that YouTube put you in charge of this. They're like, here, we have this multimillion dollar fund and we're trying to

increase the quality of journalism online. Go. What do you think could be done to try to achieve that goal? Well, here's where I'm going to massively disappoint you. And this is why they probably shouldn't call me. And that is, I feel very ill-equipped to deal with this problem. And actually, funnily enough, I was just thinking this a few hours ago, because I was listening to some talk radio in the car, and they were talking about the huge problem of fake news on Facebook. And I do think fake news is a really big problem. And I would love to see it somehow being dealt with. But the reason I struggle to get my head around it, and I kind of am bewildered by it is I can't believe that so many people get their news information from these sources in the first place. Like there's this huge

problem of fake news on Facebook and everyone's reading all these news stories on Facebook and think they're true. And I'm thinking, who on earth is using Facebook as their source of news? The same place they're going to look at the pictures of Auntie Maureen's new cupcakes and Cousin Jimmy's trip to the beach is also the place they're going to find out big, important things about the world. I know news organizations have a presence on Facebook, but it just seems like the wrong place to be getting your news information to start with. So I don't have a very good understanding of this environment because the fact that people are even doing it is bizarre to me. And the first thing I would be saying is, don't use Facebook as your source of news, you numpties. And probably I would say the same thing

about YouTube. I know there are good quality news sources on youtube and facebook for that matter i guess but it just seems like a polluted place to be getting your information like if everyone who was drinking at a watering hole started dropping dead i would say hey maybe we should all stop drinking from that watering hole and go get our water from that lovely clean river over there where we've been getting water for hundreds of years and we seem to have been getting bio-right. And yet everyone's going and drinking from this stinking watering hole all the time and then saying, we need to fix this watering hole.

I'm a bit perplexed by it. What would I do on YouTube about news? I don't know. Yeah, you could have good news sources, but people are still going to get delivered the cruddy stuff because the algorithm rewards crud. I think the problem's probably more algorithmic than content related. The thing with fake news that you're finding strange

is that the people are getting their news from Facebook. That's what you're saying there. But like, may I suggest that perhaps what it is is that like that is their only source of news in the sense that they are not going to a newspaper or going to a tv news it's more a side effect of facebook has taken up a huge portion of their time and attention. And that's just where their information about the world is coming through. Okay. Yeah, I hear you.

And you're right, Gray. Here's my answer then. I have got my answer. This is just me thinking on the fly. So this may not be a good idea. I think the solution is human curation of news because all of the sources of news that love them or hate them i think are better in some ways are human curated you mentioned tv news right curated every night by an editor newspapers curated by editors you know i'm not saying that

these institutions are flawless of Of course they're not. We've discussed this many times. Yeah. But, like, I think they're better than what these algorithms are doing on Facebook. I think you need to have a corner of these platforms that are human curated for all the problems that come with human curation. So I think the algorithm should still decide whether or not you're getting a CGP Grey video or the latest cat falling down the stairs and things like that. To a certain extent, you know, as we've talked about before, no human can curate that waterfall. But stuff

that's counting as news, there should be editors, there should be, like, there should be somewhere where you can go for human curation. And they would probably argue, well, that's the job of a channel, you know. A channel is its own curator and things like that. But that's not how people are devouring content on these platforms. And they know it. And we certainly know it. Everyone else knows it. You don't go to a channel each day like you do on TV, on YouTube.

You just go to a front page or right recommendation bars and things like that so all the new sources that i think have any hope in the world do seem to have sensible humans in charge and i know you're a big advocate of robots and algorithms and humans need not apply but at the moment they're just not good enough at it i'm not going to disagree with you there. I think it's a very interesting question about, could you possibly try to have an algorithm that could figure out which news is correct? And let's say the answer to that question is, yes, we're certainly not there now. And I don't think we're going to be there for quite a while. Because that's like, oh, that's post-singularity level AI. And then we've got other things to be concerned about at

that point. I don't think that you're wrong that if there is to be a solution to this problem, it is almost certainly going to involve human creation of some kind. But I get back to what you said before though, which is that if people are just kind of browsing around what their friends are posting on facebook and they're just like clicking around randomly on youtube like how are people going to see what youtube decides is the correct human created news yeah you're right and if they have like the news tab or the news corner where they have their nice, neat, curated, trustworthy news, no one's going to go there because they're too busy looking at cats falling downstairs and then stumbling over the new Flat Earth video.

That's what I'm wondering is like, how do you get people to do the thing? I don't know. Whenever I hear these sorts of projects, I can never help but immediately start thinking, how would you know when you have succeeded news organizations so that they don't write as many bad stories about YouTube. Because I can't see, like these traditional media organizations so that they can improve their video production teams to put more videos on the YouTube. So you think this is basically pork? I'm not saying it's pork. I'm saying it smells like pork, right? It's got a porky kind of smell. Yeah. As I was digging around into it, the youtube news thing is a subset of a bigger google

news project which is it's the same thing but at like one order of magnitude larger right like google's giving money to news organizations because they're seriously concerned about the quality of journalism and they want journalism to be better and it's like nobody not even me is like on the other side of oh i want journalism want journalism to be worse. Now, everybody wants journalism to be better. But what could you do? Like, what are your action steps? And there's just this fundamental problem that a thing that is true and unsensationalized or unmanipulated is always going to lose out to a thing that is more sensationalized. That's practically like a tautology. That's what sensationalism means, is it's the thing that gets more views than the boring version.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, YouTube has given me money years ago to seed and start things like Numberphile. And I and start things like Numberphile. And I think a channel like Numberphile exists because Google put a little bit of money into it at the start to help it get it on its feet. And then it becomes self-sufficient. So I do think them putting money into projects can have positive outcomes. So I don't think it's bad that they are giving money to news organizations to train their staff to make better videos and things like that but it's a tiny tiny spec i'll pause you there and the reason why it smells porky to me is i don't know the details of your situation exactly but like i suspect that you

already had educational channels that were like clearly getting views when youtube gave you money yeah and that to me is almost like what venture capital investing is. It's like, here's a thing that has some success. Can we accelerate its success through money? Right? Yeah. And what makes this smell kind of porky to me is even in all of their own press materials, it's like, oh, the journalism business is in real bad shape.

Like fewer numbers are down and they're losing money. It's like, now we're putting money into a thing that's going down. I just find that interesting and counter to it. Like, I don't think your millions of dollars are going to make video production at any of these companies significantly better. I don't think that money is necessarily the bottleneck in that problem. I think talent is the bottleneck in that problem. And one of the things that the internet has done is given talented people many more options about what they want to do with their. They want all the money for themselves. They think they can sell the advertising for more, which sometimes they can. They want to keep all of it, not share it with Google. Like deep down, these organizations don't want to be putting videos on YouTube. They're desperate to put them on their own players that they're monetizing and or behind their paywalls.

Yeah. I mean, there was one little comment in one of the articles about this that I just, I couldn't track it down to an official YouTube statement about it. But it did mention that YouTube is building a custom player that these media organizations can use

that they can put on their own site that lets them keep, quote, all the ad revenue. I was wondering about that. I was like, wait a minute. Do you mean all the ad revenue, like all of the ad revenue or like the 60-40 split that we get with YouTube?

Like, oh, can I get access to your special player? Oh, no, of course not. I can't. That's not the way that's going to work. But I can see it though. Because every time I talk with friends of mine who work in mainstream media and I say to them, you guys should be using YouTube more. It's where people are going.

It's where all the viewers are. It's like they just glaze over. Like, no. get 40 we want it all we don't want to be on them we want them gone but that's also why like something about this does smell a little porky to me youtube and google are directly giving money to you know the organizations that have caused them a lot of problems yeah over the past years laundered through this quote marks video training program that's basically what it feels like and i find it really interesting that you know and going through the history of this podcast like that's one of the things that i have been the most wrong about is i was like oh this problem

with youtube's ad this is gonna blow right over right it's like boy did that not and it's like, oh, this problem with YouTube's ad, this is going to blow right over. It's like, boy, did that not. And it's like the traditional media has caused YouTube just so much trouble. And then I look at this program where Google and YouTube are like, hey, we're going to reach out because we really think this industry needs a lot of money and a lot of help. I don't understand what is really actionable here. I don't understand how even if they give them money and they make amazing videos, how are people going to end up even seeing them in any way that doesn't end up just being YouTube has some news tab or that they tremendously promote them, which then, I don't know, as a creator on the platform, I think lots of creators on the platform would feel real disgruntled if YouTube is heavily putting its thumb on the scale for here are the videos that are news that we think are the quality true news that you should watch. I just don't see how this works out well. The problem is, and this is like going back to first principles here and beyond what we're even talking about, is that reporting and finding and getting news is really, really labor, time and money intensive.

Like you need big organizations to do this. And those organizations therefore need to make big money and to make big money in news. Normally, unless you're the bbc you need lots of advertising revenue and now that everything's fragmented small because of online video there's no big behemoths all the big behemoths are dying because they haven't got enough money and there's no one left to make the news and all your other small players that are coming on the scene you hip upstarts that want to break into news on YouTube, have got this massive problem that they either have to just regurgitate what they're reading on the internet anyway, so it's not original journalism, or they have to do original journalism and get in a plane and go away for three weeks to some war zone and make one video. And one video every three weeks doesn't make you enough money to sustain a life on YouTube.

Yeah. every three weeks doesn't make you enough money to sustain a life on YouTube. So unfortunately, the old media system of giant, huge news organizations that cost a fortune but make a fortune in advertising was actually quite a good model for reporting and getting news. And the brave new world we live in of everyone with a video camera and sitting at a desk is now a star on the internet and everyone can make videos is very empowering and seems very democratic but it's really really bad for true journalism it's really bad for it has created this vacuum into which people can just make crap up yeah it's like one of the downsides of this new world we live in a new world which by the way has been great for me.

I make a living in it. So I, you know, it's weird for me to complain about it, but, you know, we, sometimes we talk about the downsides. I think this is a really big downside and it was almost inevitable. Yeah. And again, looking at this funding program, I don't see any mention of we're going to give this to big media organizations so that they can fund long term intensive investigative research projects for their teams. No, no. We're doing this for video training on the YouTube platform, which again seems like, do you care about someone spending a lot of time trying to figure out what is the truth

and what is not? It doesn't seem like you do. But also when I talk like this, I think maybe people have visions that I've got this idealistic version of media organizations where everyone's breaking Watergate or they're going undercover in Syria for three weeks and making this once in a lifetime Pulitzer Prize winning piece of journalism. It's much more basic than that. Like a big newspaper, like where I used to work in Adelaide, like one of my jobs, I was the city council reporter. And every day I would go and pick up the council agenda and read through it to see what the council was up to and what the stories were. And I would go and sit in the council meeting every Monday night and sit through the

committee meetings and hear what was said. And, you know, I would then come back and be a bit of a sausage factory and just churn out stories to fill pages and that. But I was there and I was independent and I wasn't taking everything from council press releases and things like that. I wasn't breaking world exclusive stories, but I was independent and I was there. And that's just disappearing all over the world. There's not even local newspaper journalists sitting in council meetings anymore. So when local councils are making decisions, they're putting out press releases with their spin on it. Those press releases are being picked up by some wire agency that's just churning out a

wire story and then some newspapers picking it up and putting it in and we're just regurgitating pr so like this problem with all the big newspapers dying that's a bigger problem than the problem of no more woodward and bernstein the problem is there's no boring brady sitting in the council meeting anymore there's no one driving out when there's a fire or something or like a crime. There's no journalist jumping in the car and driving 20 minutes out into the suburbs just to sniff around and see what happened. And when the police say, oh, there was nothing to say, it's no big deal, no story. There's no accountability because there are no journalists employed to check. So while it is true that now everyone's got a mobile phone and maybe we will

record the police brutality or the house fire can be caught by someone on their mobile phone, and that's good and a whole new dynamic to reporting. There's no professional journalists anymore, even crap local ones. Even the crap local journalists are better than no journalists. And that's what's just vanishing now. There's this huge void. Well, how many crap local journalists do you think you could fund with $25 million? Not many. This is not a problem that can be fixed.

This is me just whinging. This is gone. And now we have to adapt to a new thing. I know it's you just whinging. But again, I'm interested to hear it because what you're saying there is kind of confirming what i i felt like was my cynical take on this news initiative but i think hearing your take on it convinces me that i wasn't just being cynical the problem is that you as someone who has worked in this field are concerned about are basically unaddressable. And this spending program by

YouTube is, it won't fix that structural problem. It has no hope of fixing that structural problem. And so like, what is it for? You know, maybe it's for YouTube to look good so they can seem like they're fighting fake news. I don't know if you happen to see, but I've seen some advertisements from Facebook, these posters that say fake news is no friend of ours. And it's a Facebook advertisement. Yeah. They've been running all these TV ads as well. It's been a big thing for the last few weeks. It's like, I don't know who did that marketing campaign, but like, Hey, pro tip, don't say the thing you don't want to be associated with in your ad. Did they call it fake news?

I thought they called it something else like false news or something. I thought they were avoiding fake, but I haven't seen all the ads. I only saw the posters. In my head, I just read it as fake news, but maybe they're calling it false news. But it's like running a campaign where like where murderers are no friends of ours. I was like, boy, the more of these anti-murder posters you put up, Facebook, the more I wonder what's going on in your boardroom. I don't know. I just wonder if this YouTube news initiative is basically YouTube's version of this. Like, oh, we don't like fake news so much that we're spending millions of

dollars on real good news. That's what we're doing. And that's what this actually is. And meanwhile, the real problem is just totally unaddressed. And then YouTube has a carrot to say, oh, look at this money that we're giving you traditional news organizations. Maybe you don't want to write bad things about us. And a bit of a stick to be like, well, we can always withdraw this funding. We've heard a lot of complaining from me, and I obviously have loyalties and some skin in this game from the years gone by. $25 million stupid projects aside, do you think fake news, false news is like a big problem for society? Or do you think it's just like something we love complaining about? Or do you think this is like a big deal problem for the world? I'm a bad person to ask about this because

I'm not in the places where people seem to be talking about this. Facebook for me is a theoretical conversation. I'm not there. I don't really know what it's like. I'm going to put this in a very gentle way. I do think that fake news is a particular instance of a general problem that I find very concerning. So let me say that first. there's something about the fake news that always strikes me as the person who is very hysterical about fake news seems largely upset that the world isn't going the way they want the world to go and that is not to say that fake news doesn't exist. Well, of course, the beneficiary is not going to complain about it. But what I mean is, it's like people sometimes focus on things for different reasons. And it's like, I think the fake news thing has become such an issue for reasons that are outside of the fake news itself.

But what I do find genuinely concerning, and that fake news is an instance of is this, what I think of as a kind of self-propagandization that people do. And that's what we talked about when we discussed the whole flat earth thing, that people can self-propagandize themselves on the internet in a way that would have been very difficult 10 or 15 years ago to do. That you can just keep walking yourself down this path of crazy, and each subsequent step doesn't seem crazy, but you end up at the end of this path that you have walked down, and now you're talking about how the earth is flat and it's just a huge conspiracy. Like I said, I've had some personal experience with things like that,

where I've seen people from my perspective, step by step, turn themselves into kind of crazy people on some topics in a way that I just don't think would have happened if the internet didn't exist. And so that self-propagandization is a thing that I find very concerning, but I don't have the slightest idea of like what would be an action plan to try to help with that. Like I wouldn't even know where to begin and anything that could be remotely practical. But it's a thing that's been on my mind and has been increasing ever since the first video that I made. Like this video will make you angry thing was the start of thinking about that. And I just see it more and more.

And like I said, I've had things happen in my life which seem like, whoa, this is kind of crazy. And yeah, the fake news seems like a specific instance of that to me. But I think it may be a problem that is just unaddressable in any practical manner. What do you think the level of responsibility is on the platforms, your Facebooks, your Googles, your YouTubes, your Twitters, do you think that they should be treated as like common carriers or neutral in this? Or do you think they have a responsibility to act? Well, I get very uncomfortable in this because there's a thing that's happened,

which I don't quite understand legally, but I thought part of the whole reason that we give companies like YouTube these legal protections where they're not responsible for the material that's posted on them, like this common carrier status, is precisely because they don't get involved editorially in promotion or preferential treatment for various things. And that to me always seems like a pretty good trade-off. And somehow it feels like we've wandered into a world where YouTube and these platforms get both advantages. Like we still give them all of these common carrier protections, but now we're also asking them to decide how to promote various things. And I get very uncomfortable when a company like YouTube or Facebook or Twitter, I will

say even if, but maybe especially if they have good intentions, starts getting into the public opinion and reality shaping business. Again, there's no good solution here, but I find myself getting real uncomfortable. And this is the problem with my human curation suggestion, of course, as well. wasn't saying anything during that section, but I do agree with you. If you want to try to find out the truth and you want to try to be running some kind of real news organization, you're going to need to have human curation. But it's so contingent on getting the right people to do that and then also having the right people in the right positions of governance on the platform in order to promote it. And there's just too many contingencies there for me that I feel like, well, even if it starts out good, it's a system that is just begging to be corrupted.

And that's why I get really uncomfortable. Of course, I agree with what could be the best version of this thing, but I get uncomfortable when a structure is then put in place, which seems to me just immediately corruptible by people who don't necessarily have the best of intentions. That's why I always get uncomfortable with this kind of thing. We're like, oh, YouTube is now going to, like they've started doing, putting these, I don't know if it's the official name, but people are calling them the truth banners. There's a couple of screenshots of them

starting to pop up on YouTube under videos. And what I think is really egregious is the YouTube truth banner where they're pulling from Wikipedia or an encyclopedia Britannic or some other place. It's directly below the video, but above the title of the video. I've not seen these. I don't even know what you're talking about. There's a below the video, but above the title of the video. I've not seen these.

I don't even know what you're talking about. There's a link in the show notes, which shows an example of one of them. They've started to appear on YouTube in a few places. And again, even if it has the best of intentions, I just get uncomfortable when the platform owner starts putting its thumb on the scale in any way. When they're like, your video needs a truth banner where we're going to tell people what the truth is. Even if it is in the most neutral and minor way, I don't really understand how is this allowed to exist

while YouTube also maintains common carrier protections. This is also really pointless, Greg, because it's obviously some talk show host is talking about Barack Obama. And then the truth banner just takes you through to Barack Obama's Encyclopedia Britannica page, which tells you when he was born and where he's from. I don't even know how helpful that is. I don't think it's really helpful. Again, what is it trying to achieve? How will you know when you have had victory on this? If someone says Barack Obama was the worst president in US history and he made a bunch

of terrible decisions and he ruined US trade and foreign policy or whatever, and they're going off on this rant, how is me knowing what year he was born and what his middle name is and that he was the 44th president of the united states going to help anything that particular example i think is like a comical example right you know but like who knows where this stuff is going to go presumably like they said they're going to start with wikipedia and and now apparently encyclopedia britannica as. But it's the mere presence of the banner that makes me uncomfortable as opposed to any of the content that is within it. Because again, it will quickly become like, where do you put these truth banners? That's all I'm saying is I get uncomfortable with that kind of stuff. But I don't know if YouTube gave me $300 million and they said, you know, you want

to fix this problem of self-propagandization go we'll give you all the talent in the world to work on it I'd be like I don't know if there is a solution to this

this is a byproduct of a society where there is more information and people have increased communication so like

I think the only way to fix this problem would be wind back the technological clock which I have no interest in doing so

shrug emoji yeah