Hello Internet - H.I. #108: Project Cyclops

Episode Date: August 29, 2018

Grey and Brady discuss: Brady story time, KSI vs Logan Paul, left vs right & heroes vs villains, why-don't-you-just-ism, Formula One, and Grey is concerned about the attention economy and his own attention span. Sponsors: Molekule: the only air purifier that actually destroys pollutants - get $75 off your first order at molekule.com and don't forget to enter offer code hello at checkout 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 Hover: the best way to buy and manage domain names - go to hover.com/hi and get 10% off your first purchase from Hover Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes: Discuss this episode on the reddit KSI vs Logan Paul #wwcgpgd That one notable exception... Hello Internet Patreon Brady in sparkle shorts 'why don't you just carry a plastic cup with you' Metal Ice Cubes Formula One Live News To Be Broadcast In Tube Stations The Attentional Mine Field At Newark Airport Grey asks for book suggestions Hacker News (Probably don't click this if you share Grey's concerns) Overcast The Hello Internet Store

Okay, how do I want to start this? It'll start with a sigh, no doubt. I lean back and I think, how do I do this? And then I just sigh into the microphone. You measure it on the grey size monitor. Oh, oh. I'm on fire with the dad jokes. I've been cracking out dad jokes all day on my texts and stuff to friends.

I'm in a real dad joke zone at the moment. I'm sorry. My wife sent me a text earlier saying, oh no, there's a hole in my boots. And I went, yeah, that's where you put your feet in. She just replied, dad joke. That's brutal. That's brutal. I have a story to tell.

Oh yeah? You have a story? It's Brady story time at the beginning of the podcast? At the beginning. Because this only just happened last night. And also, I'm quite ashamed about it. Ooh. I like this story already.

Yeah. So, I had a long drive last night. I was driving from Nottingham back to Bristol. And when I'm driving is normally when I listen to like normal radio. So, I was listening to BBC Five Live, which is the radio station I listen to when I go on long drives. Is it like talk show radio? Yeah. Is that what you mean?

Okay. It's talk. It's a mixture of news and sport. It's got quite a heavy sport leaning and things like that. That's just my preferred station most of the time. Anyway, it just so happened that last night was also the night of, and I'm imagining you must know about this because you're much more plugged into the YouTube world than me. It was the night of this boxing match between Logan Paul and KSI, the YouTubers, this big grudge match, boxing match that was happening in Manchester in England and was being streamed around the world. You're familiar with this, surely? Yeah, I don't think anyone can quickly check their analytic stats on YouTube without being

inundated with there's going to be a boxing match between these two guys who I don't know any of the details but I just presume as is the way with YouTube have manufactured a grudge between themselves. Beef great it's beef. Oh okay a beef yeah they've manufactured a beef between each other to both of their tremendous profit and benefit like that's what i presume it is yeah anyway it's this thing i actually was very late to realize it was happening i only found out about it like a couple of days before anyway i don't even know ksi obviously i've heard of this logan paul character because of this controversy but everyone has heard of logan paul because of his great work on youtube yeah but i'm in i'm in the same position where I am aware of Logan Paul.

I feel like I have some sense of him. KSI is a totally unknown person to me. Anyway, my interest in it was very low. Anyway, I was driving back in the middle of the night and it coincided with this boxing match. And someone at Five Live had decided that the BBC was going to give this like big coverage. I think someone there probably decided this is what the young people are into. It's zeitgeisty. And now let's give this proper coverage and treat it like a big event.

This seems real recent. We better cover it. Exactly. So they had one of their younger hip reporters there like ringside covering it live. And back in the studio was the old guy that normally presents this late night slot who's a bit more your old school old-fashioned radio presenter who you don't imagine would be too into logan paul or ksi he does happen to be quite into boxing i believe so anyway they started doing all these live reports and live crosses to this thing and this

young guy was there in the stadium going and now they're coming out and now the fight's starting and hey this guy was taking it seriously he was treating it for what it was you know he was realizing this was like a youtube big corporate event sort of thing but he was giving it fair coverage right he was treating it like a big event right Right. And it probably was quite a big event, you know, 17,000 people in the stadium and all these people watching. And the BBC guy back in the studio, like the main presenter, sort of bit his tongue for a while. And then eventually he just lost the plot. And he absolutely went on a rant and he was saying, I cannot believe we're covering this on the BBC. This was his show. He was talking over and bullying the guy back in the stadium going,

this isn't boxing. This is stupid. This shouldn't be on the BBC. And he absolutely just went on this hour long tirade that was coinciding with the coverage of the event. It was this really bizarre scenario where he was the host of the show saying that he was absolutely embarrassed by the stupidity of this. And he was trying to rile people up, obviously. That's what radio presenters do. Was he mad as hell and not going to take it anymore? Exactly. He was like that. So he opened the phones because it's like a phone-in show. And lots of people were phoning and saying, I absolutely agree with you. This is rubbish. This is stupid. I can't believe we're giving these people all this extra exposure. And then some people, usually younger people were phoning in and saying, this is a big deal to me. I'm really interested in it. You know, this deserves some coverage. And he was like,

he was acknowledging, Hey, I'm an older guy and this is a young person's thing, but I still think it's ridiculous. And I got so riled up, Gray, by it in so many different ways. I was like, I've had enough. Like, how are you riled up about this? What are the Brady dimensions of riled upitude? I can't even begin to tell you. I was having so many different thoughts and eventually I was like, I can't take it anymore. And I pulled over on the side of the road. I got my phone out and I phoned into the show. I phoned in, right? I pulled over in this quiet lane and I phoned in. Oh no, Brady, don't phone in. Don't ever phone in. I know. Why? It's the worst thing to do, right? You're the man with the hat in the audience right now.

Don't phone into a radio show. The producer answered, right? These producers are like the first line of the defense to figure out whether or not you should be allowed on the show. And I was a gift because I'm like an older guy, you know, but I'm also like a successful YouTuber with millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions of views. And someone who's worked in the news business. I would imagine from a producer's perspective, you are a diamond in the rough calling into the show i was a gift from god so i phoned in and said i want to split i want to go on i want to talk i'm this successful youtuber i don't agree with what he's been saying i've got things to say and the producer who i think was a bit of a flunky said let me talk to the control desk like the producers of the show for a second they put me me on hold. And then she came back and said, they definitely want you, but they have to go to the news now.

You'll have to wait for like 10 minutes. Can you please wait? But you're definitely going to go on. They're going to slot you an exact time and everything. Okay. And I had the dogs in the car and I was nearly home and I'd been driving for a long time. I had this moment of zen.

Maybe I looked down at my what would CGP Grey T-shirt do? What would Grey do? And I just said, so I'm going to have to wait 10 minutes. And then I just said, no, I'm going to pass. Oh, thank God. Oh, thank God, Brady. So then I got back in the car and I kept driving home. And then I started listening to the show again and I got all riled up again.

Oh no. So when I got home, I pulled up at home and I rang the desk again. Someone different answered.iled up again oh no so when i got home i pulled up at home and i rang the desk again and someone different answered i said oh it's that youtube guy again i'm home now i've got things to say and they were like oh okay yeah okay can we put you on like hang and say i'll talk to the i'll talk to the producers again and uh and then they came back and said yeah they'd like to speak to you they can't do it right now because they were talking about something else can they call you back in about 15 minutes radio like i can't deal with the emotional roller coaster of this like i

okay oh god okay they said can i call you back in 15 minutes i looked down again at my what would cgp gray do t-shirt and i went i said no forget it forget it i don't want to do it and then i stopped listening to the radio show and i just went and sat down on the sofa and calmed down and then the obvious realization came over me that if you're not listening to it it doesn't exist anymore and you don't care i'm like why didn't i just change the station? That was the solution. The solution wasn't to phone in and try and get on air. And also this great relief came over me because I know if I got on, I've done a lot of live radio actually on the BBC,

but I've done it as like a guest twice. Once I phoned in and it went really well. Okay. And another time I went in to like talk as a civilian person about sport and it went really, really badly. And I kind of, I lost control of the situation and it was a lesson to me. And I realized if I'd gone on 95% sure I would have lost the situation. The presenter would have taken it somewhere. I didn't want it to go. I would have looked stupid. I wouldn't have said what I wanted to say. And then he would have hung up on me. So I didn't get on. Thank goodness. But God, I was so riled up. I phoned in twice. Can you believe that? What an idiot. Oh man. Can you imagine any circumstance

under which you would phone into a radio show? No, never. Not in a million years. But I can imagine, were I a slightly different person being in that position? Yeah. I have so many conflicted feelings about this story of yours. One, I'm very glad that I was able to help you remotely with hashtag what would CGP Grey do?

I'm glad you were able to think of that in your moment of need. I'm glad to spread the good word. But I can totally understand that feeling of, it's not just infuriating. It's a thing that's infuriating that is hitting your, not only knowledge, but professional working world. I felt like I knew so much more than him.

Like you got no idea. Like it was hitting my professional world in every possible way because it was about youtube and youtubers it was about the bbc and news coverage and journalism it was also about sport there was a lot of talk about is this a sport is this not a sport like it was hitting every possible interest and passion of mine and i was like i't take it. I couldn't handle the wrongness. I can see the perfect storm there. And why I say I was slightly different, I could imagine doing it because I agree that I would never call into the radio show because of that, that thing that you

say there that you are, you are now playing in someone else's arena. Yeah. And you are not on your home turf. That is bad news. This is why, like, Brady, when we record the podcast together, we're on our home turf here, right? There's a reason the show doesn't go out live. But someone who's the radio presenter,

they don't have your best interest at heart, right? They want something interesting to happen or, like, they want to control it, and so that is super bad news. I can say that I can't, I wish I could think of at heart, right? They want something interesting to happen or like they want to control it. And so that is super bad news. I can say that I can't, I wish I could think of a particular example right now, but the closest I have come is that I have at times started to produce a video out of something

that just happens to be a perfect storm for me of like, things that really anger me yeah and it's that same thing of like oh i'm like i'm so mad right now and then i wake up the next morning i'm like i'm still pretty mad but 99 of the time although there is one notable exception yeah i was gonna say did i upload that stick figures video last night oh my goodness i did yeah that was your phone in of the radio show that video yeah with one notable exception where it was a perfect storm of hashtag regrets most of the time my slow production cycle saves me and i can do the same thing of you where it's like why am i even thinking about doing this because if they'd thrown me on live straight away it would have happened that was if they said yep you're on it would have been a very public dethroning of the radio times

radio and podcast champion yes it would have been oh i know i can think of the most recent one was it was one of the recent changes to uh youtube subscription model where it came out that like the details don't matter it happened to hit me at like just the wrong moment. And so I had written most of this script about how YouTubers should run their online businesses and like don't trust it. Like I'd written this whole thing about like you can't trust YouTube as far as you can throw them. And I was like, I'm going to turn this into a video like doop-a-doop-a-doop, like I'm getting to work.

And then the next day it's like, wait a minute, let's do a return on investment analysis of this idea, right? Like this idea is a terrible idea thank goodness that there is time to think it over because sometimes there isn't time to think it over when you make a thing really fast and before brady gets downstairs it's already uploaded besides the stick figures one which obviously went live have you ever got any further down the path than writing a script have you ever started animating one and thought hang on yeah stop okay i for various reasons i will not talk about what this was right but some people listening will probably know but there is a video yes that i'm now

remembering i was at one minute to midnight on the nuclear clock because I had written, animated, uploaded, tagged, and monetized a video that was essentially a video made out of anger and frustration on a particular topic. And all I had to do was press the publish button. And I remember like staying my hand over the big red button on this one and then i decided you know what let's not do this and so i didn't and to this day i am very glad that i didn't i still think all of my grievances were legitimate but it wouldn't have helped anything had i uploaded that video so yes i'm thinking it over yeah there There was one time when I had but to press a button and I think it wouldn't have been better. It would have been worse. I tell you what, if we get to a hundred million dollars on the Patreon, we'll publish it on

the Palo Internet YouTube channel. No. A hundred million dollars? Ooh, that is a lot of money. I mean, a100 million between us or $100 million for each of us? Of course I'm going to say each. No, no, no. Just all for you, Gray. I'm not making any promises, but that would be quite compelling.

Have you still got it, like, in a folder somewhere? Yeah, yeah. I still have it. I still have it. Is it still on your YouTube channel as private? Or have you deleted it? No, no, no. I took it down because having it up on the channel is, it's a bit like if you're writing

an angry email to someone, you don't want to put the address in the to field. Or there's a thing that I see other people do, which makes me super nervous when someone is writing, say an important text message and they're writing it in the text fields to the person it's that same feeling of like hey you're playing with a with a loaded gun here like especially with the text message like your fingers are inches away from the button that just sends it i know so easy so easy to send a text by mistake the moment i have a text that goes past a sentence or two and that text is even just like a little bit important that I get the wording right, I always will say write it in notes and then paste it into the text message and then send it. I have been on a campaign with some people I know to be like, hey, maybe you should write these really long, important text messages somewhere else first. But I have been unsuccessful in that campaign but yeah so no i've taken it down from the youtube channel because it feels a bit too

like i don't need to fall on my mouse the wrong way one day and then publish it and also miss out on the hello internet patreon bounty that may come in the future for the reward it's also such a lottery depending on what messaging system you're using on like Facebook or your iOS or Twitter or whatever, as to what pressing return will do. Will it start a new line or will it send the message? I never know which one it will do on what system. And so sometimes I think, if I press return now, will it matter if it sends? Right. Or the reverse of that. It's like, I'm pretty good about doing alt return. Usually works, but I know there's a couple of places where it doesn't.

Anyway, I didn't get on air, so happy ending. I'm very glad you didn't get on air, Brady. But, you know, do you want to rant your thoughts about the boxing match? No, no. And do you know what? My thoughts weren't about the boxing match. My thoughts were all about the radio coverage of it and the discussion of it. I couldn't? My thoughts weren't about the boxing match. My thoughts were all about the radio coverage of it and the discussion of it. I couldn't really give two hoots about the boxing match. My overall thoughts about the BBC covering it was, yeah, they were right to cover it.

They gave it a bit too much. They gave it too much coverage, but they were right to cover it because it was a big novel event and there was a lot of attention on the country, on Britain, for that hour or two. So it was a local story for the country. There wasn't much else happening at the time. Yeah. I thought it was right to cover it.

Couldn't care about the match itself though, myself. You know. Do you know who won Brady? I know it was a draw. Oh. Funnily enough. That's King Kong versus Godzilla there, right? Where, oh yeah, we can't have either person win.

I did feel a bit sorry for the reporter because the reporter at the event was kind of sticking up for it, sticking up for the event. Like he was really good. He was really realistic about it, but he was sticking up for the event. He was like the advocate of the event and he was getting this tirade from the other end. And I thought he was doing a really good job. And then when they announced that result and he had to convey, oh, they've just announced it's a draw, he was so undermined. Because then it was like, oh, the fix is in. Yeah. It's like, look at all the wires showing through this marionette display. You didn't watch the big fight then, Gray? No, I didn't watch the big fight. Only really realized it happened today when in frantically trying to prepare for the show, I briefly

appeared on Twitter. Then all of a sudden I saw people talking about the fight and I was like oh yeah that's right I vaguely knew this was the thing okay was it $7.50 to watch the fight if you and I had a boxing match do you reckon a lot of teams would watch the problem Brady is back in the early days of the show we've already revealed what would happen in a boxing match like that although i'm just wondering now if a brady even really remembers yeah but the discussion with the fight was that you would win but that was if it was like a fight almost like a fight for life like you would just turn into like a mad dog and maybe win yeah but if it was a fight just for competition like for show, and it was like a sporting contest,

you think I would win? You would win because I would concede at the first moment of discomfort. That's what would happen. One punch at the face and be like, I'm done, right? He wins. He's the better boxer than me. I'm good. Thanks. Thanks, everyone. You have the size advantage though, and that's quite a thing in boxing. That's why I'm saying the first sign of discomfort i'm out but if it was a cage match to the death i would tear you apart without a question yeah but that's why we can't have the boxing match because the outcome is is already known there is a video that just came out today that is absolutely perfect for what you just said which

was another boxing match that happened last night this was a real boxing match and one of the fighters was unhappy with the like the financial or contractual arrangements about the fight but for some reason he didn't express this before the fight and they like did their touch of gloves and got ready to fight they went to their corners and the bell went ding ding ding and as soon as the bell rang this boxer just went through the ropes and left and walked out and the other boxer was just standing there going what the hell and guy just walked out, walked through the crowd and walked out the door out the back. No one knew it was going to happen. I like that man's strategy. I like that man's strategy.

That would be you. That would be you in the big match. He's the real winner. Hello, Internet. We have a new sponsor today at the show that I think you should go give a try. It's Molecule. Molecule is a next generation air filter. Now, if you have an air filter in your house, it's almost certainly what's called a HEPA filter. Now, these HEPA filters were invented in World War II, over

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and thanks to them for supporting the show. Feedback from our previous episode. As always, my ability to predict what we discussed in the previous episode that would cause discussion was way off. Right. Way off. I thought, oh, the people are going to want to talk about this and that and all with some salient points there that's going to stimulate discussion. All anyone wanted to talk about was whether Gray or Brady is on the left or the right in their heads when they're listening to Hello Internet. I've never seen so much discussion of a topic. I think it may be one of the most, at least top three domination of the Reddit discussion without a doubt. And what I think is really funny is

sometimes, as I mentioned before, when you're recording the show, you're just talking, you don't know what words come out of your mouth. And sometimes I've recorded the show and there's a moment where it even makes me cringe a little bit. And I made that comment about not wanting to carry around a cloth bag like a peasant. And listening back was thinking oh i might get a lot of feedback on not a single comment right and i was like no nobody can like literally not one you're giving people a second bite out of it by saying it again it is it is endlessly fascinating and interesting and unexpected what gets people's attention what doesn't and it's like oh we're gonna do a big topic here i'm sure lots of people are gonna talk And it's like, oh, we're going to do a big topic here.

I'm sure lots of people are going to talk about it. Nope. Minor thing in passing. We didn't even really discuss before the show. Boom. That's the whole thing. So yes, left versus right. Where do people position you and me in their head? What I always like to imagine the podcast as, what I want the podcast to be the experience for the listener is that, you know, it's, it's a conversation between friends and the listener just happens to be a friend that isn't saying very much in this conversation. That's what I want the experience to be. That's what I hope the experience is for the listeners. I think that the tremendous response of people having a positional awareness of us feels like oh some sort of

evidence for a little bit of a victory of that feeling that people had lots of responses lots of really strange responses as well aside from just the left right thing there were some people who were had like an up down positioning in their head or like there were several drawings in the subreddit about here's how it is there's one guy i really liked who it was basically like ab cameras in a movie right that when one of us speaks it's like that switches to a camera and when the other person speaks that switches to b camera it's like people's internal landscape is quite various and unexpected. Yeah, I said one person said that he or she imagines us inside their brain, but Brady's in the front part of my brain and Gray's in the back part of my brain. Brains are weird.

Brains are super weird. There were several attempts to try to collate a bunch of this data. The one I'll put in the show notes is someone threw up a strawpole.me link for people to vote on okay i haven't seen that and at least on that one i take it as somewhat representative that the choices were you know one of us on the left and one of us on the right or neither yeah and that one broke down to be roughly a third for each it It was basically even. I did see that just before we recorded, you threw up a Twitter poll as well for left versus right. Yeah. And same results.

Interesting. Which makes me think, obviously, it's just no bias. But both polls have a very, very slight preference to gray on the left. But so it's a small difference that it's not really a big deal. Yeah. I think it's not statistically significant. Nah, nah. If we now have two polls that basically show equal division between all three, small difference that it's not really a big deal yeah i think not statistically significant no no if we now have two polls that basically show equal division between all three i think that's that's scientific a twitter poll plus a straw poll dot me like i think we could publish those

results in a paper but there is one thing which i didn't really think about until the show went up. But I think that there is a lack of clarity in the question itself. When we talk about Gray on the right or on the left or Brady on the right or on the left, on the right or the left of what? When you hear that question, how are you thinking about it? The left and the right of what? Well, I'm imagining the listener is imagining themselves as one of the three points in a conversational triangle. So as they face us, as they face the opposite side of the triangle, who is on the left, the vertex to their left, and who's on the vertex to their right. That is really interesting, Brady, because

you've managed to combine the two things that I feel like I was confused about when I thought about it more later. Because I was like, left or right of the ears or of the eyes? And these are not necessarily the same thing. So to give away my answer, which I was concealing from the audience before to not modify the results of our highly scientific polling. When I think of the podcast and I'm listening to us with headphones, I always think of my voice as going in the right ear and your voice as going in the left ear. I think the opposite. Do you? Okay. Interesting. I'm on the right-hand side

of the conversation. Like if I was watching us have the conversation, you're on the left of my body and I'm on the right of my body. That's interesting because when I think about the eyes, because you sort of positioned it in the show and I wasn't really thinking about it when you were talking, but you positioned it in the show as seeing people who do the animations of sections of the show. And there I have the exact reverse experience that it seems to me like if I'm watching us on screen talking, that I expect me to be on the left and you to be on the right. Yeah, that's my way. That's the Brady interpretation. Wait, wait, wait.

But when I'm thinking about us as a podcast, it's the reverse, right? That I'm thinking I'm going in the right ear and you're going in the left ear. Yeah. So you flip it. I keep it the same. I flip it. Yeah. This is one of those moments where I'm glad we don't do a video version of the show because I'm doing all these hands, I'm pointing to my ears and I'm putting my hands in front of me because I'm trying very hard not to say it the wrong way. But yeah, so anyway, it's an interesting thing that I never thought about it, but in my head, I flip it if it's audio versus video and that it seems like we should switch sides somehow if I'm looking at us talking or if I'm just listening to us talking.

But the listening to us talking one is super strong, though. Like, I can't imagine if I'm listening to us talking that you would be in the right ear. No, that makes no sense. I would be in the right ear. I don't understand how it could possibly be. Just to continue this most self-absorbed conversation in the history of podcasting. Right. I didn't particularly care about the answer until I was just reading on the subreddit

discussion an hour or so ago, someone pointed out that in Hollywood movies, it's usually considered best practice to have the hero on the left and the villain on the right. And then when I looked through the polls and saw that, even though they were very close, you did slightly come out on the left more often than me, I suddenly thought, am I the villain of Hello Internet? Oh, no, Brady, you shouldn't feel bad. Look, I think if we ran a poll of who is the villain of the podcast and who is the hero of the podcast, there is no universe in which you are not the hero of the podcast.

I don't, I don't agree. Well, we can now have another thing for the Tims to vote on. Who is the hero and who is the villain? Oh, thanks. That's going to be fantastic. I look forward to that one. I'm just so confident. And it's obviously correct, that Brady is the hero of Hello Internet and Grey is the villain. I feel like that's not even debatable. No, of course you're the hero because you're like the underdog. You've got like an arc. What is my arc, Brady? You're the guy who learns to become human.

Whereas I was human all along, so I'm just like nothing. You have a hero's journey. Right, i mean you haven't completed it yet but but and i also wildly disagree and my handshake collection data in real life shows that that journey is not going in the direction that you think it is it's obviously getting worse and worse so i I disagree with you here, but I didn't see that thing about which side is the hero and which side is the villain. I can see why that would suddenly make the difference matter to a Brady. When you look at photos of Batman and Robin, who stands on what side? Maybe that's better because that way we can both be heroes that way. And just one of us is Robin and one of us us is batman i mean clearly you're batman

i was gonna say is that better does anybody want to be robin nobody wants to be robin it looks like batman is more often yeah i think batman's more often on the left just doing a google images but i don't know it's interesting well i do believe this may be the most self-absorbed section of follow-up we have yet done to date on the podcast i mean you're batman because you're a bit taller and your face is less known like more consumed and you're robin because you wear glittery shorts yeah i showed gray the glittery shorts in which i was spotted as previously discussed. Listeners, your imagination falls far short of the majesty and beauty of Brady's glittery shorts. Thank you.

I've got some complaints to register with the universe, Brady. Yeah? It is the disease or the compulsion on the internet called, why don't you justism? Well, thank you, Gray. I think you are about to vindicate something that I've long spoken about. And that is when you complain about something, you don't want solutions. You just want to complain. And when I took that stance, i have been widely condemned for that

and mocked and i will condemn you right now for it because i do want solutions but listen internet what i don't want are your dumb solutions right and boy when i god damn it god damn it when i I, goddammit, goddammit, when I posted at your insistence that tweet of the busted Starbucks coffee cups, I swear to God, I must have gotten 40,000 tweets from people saying, why don't you just carry a plastic cup with you everywhere you go? Or even better, why don't you just carry a metal straw with you? I have to say, the metal straw intrigued me. That was the one why don't you just moment where I went, I quite like the sound of a metal straw. I don't want to carry one with me everywhere because it's like the most impractical shaped hard thing to have to carry with you. But metal straws sound cool.

Metal straws sound dangerous to me. Like the soft, squishy part of your mouth and the brittleness of human teeth. Like this whole region doesn't seem like an area you really want to introduce a thin, sharp object. Well, you use a fork very delicately yes very delicately i don't know this the straw it just seems like a bad idea that you have would have to become much more conscious of because i'm thinking like what if i'm drinking an iced coffee how many times do i just vaguely bring the drink to my face and the straw hits me in the face and bends? And then I go, oh, I'm totally missed, right?

The days of that are over when you can punch a little straw-sized circle hole right through your upper lip with a metal straw. I imagine the metal being quite thick, though, and having like rounded edges at each end. So I don't imagine you being able to like hole punch a piece of flesh out of your cheek. But I do see the potential to hurt your gums or bang a tooth or something though if you're like, you know, something interesting goes past as you're taking a drink and you bang your mouth or something. Yeah, you're just not paying attention. It seems like a bad place for it. I want one. I want one.

I want a metal straw. I do like the sound of them. Well, you're the guy who gave me as a gift at some point, I can't remember when, those metal ice cubes. And I think they're great, but they're like metal and in your drinks and things like that. Like they seem like an accident waiting to happen and dropping big, heavy metal ice cubes into glass drinks as well. Like, but I love them. I just like metal. heavy metal ice cubes into glass drinks as well. But I love them. I just like metal. The metal ice cubes are amazing. And they are the standard great gift at this point going forward.

You were so pleased with those metal ice cubes that we gave you. We thought, oh, we got to start giving these out like Johnny Appleseed. Oh, dear. Because they are fantastic. You're just covering your butt now because you've given them to so many other people. Yes, that's true. All across the land, people are thinking, I thought I was special. Well, spoiler alert, nobody's special. I do like the Johnny Appleseed idea though. Okay. I agree with you that of the solutions, right? The metal straw is the one that at least is the, oh, this is intriguing. I never thought about this before right but if you give it two seconds worth

of thought or you read the replies from people who actually own metal straws that you immediately come into the practicalities of how do you clean it oh it comes with a special brush so that you can manually clean the inside of your metal straw and now this again is what am i a peasant hand washing all of my laundry here like i'm supposed to carry around a metal straw and it's special brush for cleaning how am i to keep this brush clean in what the backpack now that i have to carry with me everywhere that i go so it's not that i don't want a solution but what drives me crazy is the like i think it's the word just i think this word yeah is why don't you know help to the english language right and it is such a thing

that if you were to think about it for two minutes you can come up with a whole panoply of reasons why one might not want to just do a thing. And the thing about keeping around a cup to bring with me to Starbucks all the time, it's like, are you for real? Why don't I just like, where am I carrying it? Like I'm walking into work without a backpack. I have nothing. So I'm just, I'm walking down the street now with this cup chained to my arm, always with me. And then now this is also a thing that I have to clean. Am I bringing it back from my office every day to my house? Like, no way.

That's not going to happen. Why don't you just get two? Yeah. So I can bring one every time I'm going, I can grab one with me. It's like, listen, listen, people, If Starbucks totally got rid of their paper cups and then only had the plastic cups, I would buy one anew every time and then immediately throw it out when I got to the office because I'm not going to carry it with me. It's like I don't want to carry unnecessary cumbersome items, especially like a cup that was filled with coffee but now isn't that is also also thrown into this backpack that I'm going to carry just for the cup. I don't know. It's like this word, just, it's infuriating.

And it is used in these situations where I think a person is introducing what seemed to me obvious downsides that for some reason they totally disregard. Is it possible, Gray, just to do with the plastic cup and straw issue, not the justism issue, is it possible that you are ruling out the fact that to make the world a better place, some small degree of personal sacrifice by humans may be necessary? I mean, are you asking that as a question in general? Like, do humans need to make sacrifices to make the world a better place? Yeah, of course, I'd agree with that. Yeah, because I think most of the things that humans could do to make the world a better place, you dismiss because it will cause you inconvenience. And maybe you need to wear a bit of inconvenience. Maybe we all need to wear a bit

of inconvenience, but you're not willing to. But a lot of other people are. The guy who carries the metal straw around in his backpack and his straw cleaning brush and his special straw cleaning machinery that he seems to have with him at all times like he's willing to make the sacrifice and if we were all willing to make a little bit of sacrifices and carry our peasant bags and all do a little bit of stuff maybe we would start solving some of these things that might be problems. But the attitude of, oh no, that would like cause me some modicum of inconvenience is one of the problems we're facing as a species. I mean, now you're rapidly getting into this idea of should, which is another idea that I find nagging. I'm not interested in what humans should do. I'm interested in what actionable steps

can we do to encourage or discourage the behavior that we want out of humans. This is all we can do in the world. But people do sure love to talk about what humans should do. I say, yes, we all should be nicer to each other. We all should do a lot of things. But always with these conversations, my feeling is, what are you trying to achieve? Is the thing that you're doing to try to achieve that goal actually effective in the way that you think it is? And so much of this stuff strikes me as simply not thought out. And one of the pieces of feedback that I thought was very good in the Reddit, which is a thing I was not talking about very well last time, is many of these things, it's not that like, say, the metal straws are worse for the environment. It's that you're trading one environmental impact for another environmental impact. And this is the

case of water use. The example I always really like is washing your dishes by hand or using the dishwashing machine. A modern dishwashing machine is crazy effective in the small amount of water that it uses to wash your dishes. Our dishwasher, it's something comical. It's like, oh, the dishwasher only needs half a cup of water to wash all of your dishes. But people think, oh, I'll just wash a dish and that's better than running the dishwasher. And it's like, no, no, there's no version of this where you do a better job than the machine does, no matter how poorly you load it. And so I wonder, and a lot of the environmental trade-offs that people want to do, I'm just not convinced. Like, have we done a total cost of ownership here for the trade-offs?

And I just never see anything convincing. And it always seems suspicious to me that we just pick like the immediately visible items always. And we never seem to be super interested in the much harder structural problems. Like I've mentioned before, my particular pet issue on this one is like drought in California, where no one's talking to almond farmers, but everybody's talking to people taking showers as a great example. But yes, is there some level of discomfort that humans, quote, should endure to make things better? Yes, obviously. But I don't think a lot of the things that people want to guilt or nag you into doing are actually effective. I'm just

not convinced by it. I mean, this is what you do. If there's anything that is asked of you that inconveniences you, you kind of wave your arms about in a way that I don't fully understand and say, oh, I've seen no evidence or this won't work. So I'm not doing it. And I don't know if what you're saying is true or not. I mean, you can just sit there and say, oh, it wouldn't make a difference anyway. And then I'm kind of like, oh, Grace says it wouldn't make a difference. So obviously it wouldn't.

So I'm not going to recycle either. I'm going to take eight towels at the gym as well because Grace says it doesn't make a difference. Like, I don't know. Maybe you're right. But I don't know. What's something in your life that you do that is a hardship but you do because you think it's the right thing to do i don't know are there examples of things you do do because you think oh yeah this is the responsible

thing to do as a person it's inconvenient but you know i'll do it that's a hard thing to just pull out off the top of my head do you separate your recycling do you like you do you recycle yeah like we have two bins in the house one for recycling and one for not recycling yeah and i try to remember which one goes and what yeah but this is actually this is a great example of like a structural change so i have to anonymize the story slightly but someone else who lives in the house with me used to think that i didn't do a very good job at recycling someone that lives in my house doesn't think i do a very good job recycling either yeah yeah you know it could be anyone so what she did

which was completely genius was got a recycling bin where the recycling bin is just, it's open at the top. And so our garbage can or our garbage bin has one of those little flippy lids at the top, right? Okay.

And of course, garbage, you're putting in stinky stuff like, you know, old broccoli, like you put it in the garbage. You don't want to put it in the thing with the open top because it smells bad. And then also that means the recycling thing is ever so slightly easier to put stuff into. And we can say that this had a dramatic impact on how much recycling occurred in the gray household.

That's genius. In a way that no amount of should would ever have affected. And indeed, for years, ever did affect it. That's, to me, the thing that you want to do. You want to make it easier to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing. I don't like the idea of like, oh, you've got to perform these Sisyphean tasks uphill just because it's good. I had this exact same discussion with the anonymous

other person in my house, because we actually listened to that section of the last podcast about recycling and straws and plastic. And the anonymous person in my house became quite riled by you. And by default became quite riled by me for not standing up to you i'm sorry brady and i said that this issue it was around the plastic bags you know do you take your own plastic bags to the shop or pay five pence and get one at the shop and i said kind of similar to what you just said but in a different way i said there are two possible solutions to any problem one is you're just going to charge people more and more money for plastic bags until it just becomes so draconian

that they will start you know 50 it's 50 pounds for a plastic bag okay well i'm just going to bring one from home for that or you do what they do when like they design footpaths at universities and stuff and they don't actually pave the footpaths until they look where everyone walks and And then they look where the students walk and say, okay, well, that's where we're going to build the footpath. And they design the infrastructure to suit people's behavior. So they need to find a way to reduce our use of plastic in a way that suits our existing behaviors, not try to modify our behaviors. And that's kind of what's been done here, isn't it? It's kind of what's been in your house. Yeah. And I agree, but I'm also, like one of the things that makes me a bit suspicious of some of these changes is let's just say that the, you know, the government does some

study and we determined that yes, the UK is a tremendous source of plastic in the world and we just, and it's a real problem and we want to try to solve it. I'd be totally in favor of draconian taxes on plastic bags. That's one of the best uses of taxes is to try to capture those sorts of externalities. And I'm 100% in favor of trying to financially punish externalities. And like a ton of environmental regulation is exactly that kind of thing that you're going to to financially punish externalities. And a ton of environmental regulation is exactly that kind of thing. That you're going to charge companies money if they're not complying with whatever the standards are. And that's how you do it.

And the cost of petrol in the UK, which is crazy, crazy high because they're trying to discourage petrol use, aren't they? I always forget that it's so high because it's priced out in liters. And so it doesn't look that different to my eye of what the prices should be versus america and then i remember like oh wait but it's for a fifth as much gas uh this exact same price it's crazy what the prices are yeah i'm just always in favor of structural change

and i'm suspicious of people focusing on the obvious visual things. Or when people propose solutions that just have no chance of ever happening. There seems to be a very big contingent of people who want to just end air travel. It's like, yeah, I'm sure that the air travel industry is a huge negative impact on the environment. But what is the universe in which you're going to convince everyone to stop flying? And there's no possibility to put on a draconian tax to something like that because it's just so vital for the modern world. Like it would have such knock on effects to all kinds of things. And so when I see people complaining about people flying, it's always like, I don't understand what you think could possibly happen in a realistic universe to change this other than just a genie grants your wish and all airports are banned. Things have trade-offs. And there are also things in the world which may be bad for the environment,

but they're a net positive for civilization overall. And you're never going to stop people from doing those things. Plus, I do also always feel in these environmental conversations like I have a real trump card, which is I don't have children. There's nothing better that I could do for the environment than not have a child. No amount of drinking out of plastic straws is ever going to be like, outweigh the scale of thousands of years

of gray descendants. You are a true humanitarian and environmental crusader. I think so too, Brady. You know, a bit earlier today, I was just scrolling through my Instagram, looking at pictures from family and friends. And you know what? Some of them are really good.

Yes, there are a few duds, a few more pictures of plated meals and generic sunsets than I'd ideally like to see. But there are also some absolute crackers. But the sad thing is most of them will be looked at for a second or two on my puny little phone, then scroll down off the screen and vanish forever, never to be seen again. And that seems a shame.

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really good. I've given several of these as gifts already and they always go down a treat. Now for a discount on your first Fracture order, go to the site fractureme.com.hi. And you want to be choosing Hello Internet when you do their really quick one question survey that helps support the show and we appreciate that that address again fracture me.com slash h i it's easy it looks great and it gets some of those best photos out of the virtual world and into the real world where you can enjoy them every day. Just before we started recording, I was watching a Formula One Grand Prix, which is one of my favorite things to do. I'm very into Formula One racing.

And it does occur to me, this is not like an attempt to like convert you or anything, right? It's definitely not. But it did occur to me that if there was any sport that you should be really into or would get really into, it would be Formula one car racing like it's impossible now because i think with sport you have to like imprint early and that should be sailed for you so i'm not saying you should get into it or start watching it in fact you shouldn't oh okay but there is so much about formula one

that makes me think this is like gray's dream sport if he was going to get into sport. I wish I'd written more down, but I just quickly wrote some things on a post-it note about things that you should like about Formula One. By the way, this is only really Formula One racing. It doesn't apply to other forms of motorsport, even NASCAR or IndyCar racing or anything like that. I'm really applying this only to formula one okay is is formula one is that the one in monte carlo where they go yes they do race in monaco once a year they race all over the world yeah they race all over the world and then once a year they race they have a race in monaco

that's a different race in each country pretty much each week like it travels all around the world oh i didn't really okay yeah so today they're racing in belgium and then they'll race in america and they'll race in asia and they have a race in every different country that's one of the reasons i think you'd really like it in my on my list i've created here i mean yeah that is true when you when you add the countries in it's automatically more fun for arbitrary reasons i'll make that my number one reason then. The internationalness of it, I think, would appeal to you. It's very international. And also, all the countries bid to have a race, and they actually pay Formula One to

be allowed to have a race in their country. And there's all sorts of skullduggery and multi-million dollar contracts and all sorts of nastiness and controversy over who gets to host the races and where they get to go and who has to pay and who doesn't have to pay. And like, for example, Monaco is such an iconic race that they can have the race for as long as they want, but other countries would have to like stab other countries in the back to try and get a race. So there's all this like international intrigue about it as this sort of traveling circus travels around the world every year. So that's one of the things I put i put monaco so iconic that i didn't even know it happened

anywhere else i thought that was the race there's a whole bunch all year it's a whole championship and they go from each week different country different place some of the circuits are very old and famous and they've been using for years and years. Other ones are quite new and modern and stuff. It's such a logistical sport at every level from during the race itself to like the way the whole production travels around. I think the logistics of Formula One is something that would intrigue you, the way that these entire like almost factories

move around from country to country, week to week and all these planes and trucks and things. It's just really amazing. And they always do planes and trucks and things. It's just really amazing. And they always do stories and reports on it. It's really interesting. And the logistics of an actual Formula One factory where the teams are based, they're amazing places. I think I mentioned to you once, I went to the McLaren factory, which is one of the teams

in Formula One. And it was one of the buildings and places I've been to that I most thought, oh my God, this is the place on earth that would make Gray really happy. They're amazing places. Obviously, it's a sport where there's this amazing interface between like absolute bleeding edge technology and humans. Like what can humans do versus what can machines do? It's a really interesting interface between humans and machines. It is an absolute war of physics like formula one is all about physics in the development

of the cars in the way the races work like you listen to a formula one commentary and i reckon without even realizing it 90 to 95 percent of the time all they're doing is talking about physics about like tire degradation and heat and warmth and the way air is moving over cars and he can't get past him because of the air coming off his car and his car's been designed that way to do this all they're doing is talking about physics the whole time it's also really like it's really techie and geeky and statty but also when i was young and was really into it it involves lots of maps like the maps of formula one tracks with things i used to memorize i used to be able to name any

you could show me a formula one track like a map and i'd be like oh yeah that's the belgium grand prix that's that so it's very mappy like money's a really big deal and finance and economics because everything's dominated by money in formula one in every way and it's this kind of constant arms war where they're trying to control it but they also realize that the more money's in it the better so there's always talking about money and economics and contracts and things like that there are so many rules and technicalities and things like that i think would would intrigue you it's very very complicated the rules of formula one racing is like it's like an encyclopedia of rules that no one understands and are always coming about. I think that would appeal to you. And there's always lots of epic drama, like that kind of YouTube-y drama,

because there's such big egos, because it's such a pinnacle sport. And there are so few of these drivers and so few bosses of these teams. There's so much self-perpetuating drama in a way that i think you would enjoy in like a popcorn-y type way and this is just like the start of my list of things this is a long post-it note that you have there i know i know this is just on one post-it note and this is without me even thinking about it you will not get into it obviously but i think formula one would be your sport like the only thing i don't think you'd like about it is what most people don't like about it and it's a couple of hours of cars going around on a track right but the strategy and all the stuff behind that underpins it it's like a perfect storm of stuff

that you would like well i did recently drive a go-kart around a track which i imagine is quite comparable and that was super fun well you like driving too you like your truck driving game and stuff like that like but you do seem to like driving i do like driving yes that is true listening to you talk i guess i am realizing that maybe formula one is the logical conclusion of my feeling that arbitrary restrictions in the Olympics are dumb. And so if you were to remove all of the restrictions from the 500 meter dash for humans, you would just end up with Formula One racing, I guess. Like, we got to get from here to there as fast as possible, and it's got to be a human. No restrictions. Okay, I guess it's going to be a formula one car that's what's going to happen all right you said a thing at the beginning which never really occurred to me do you really

think it is true that sports are a thing that need to be imprinted upon someone when they're young do you think that sports are not able to be an acquired taste as an adult if you were not imprinted when you're young i think that's like a massive generalization and there are going to be thousands and thousands of exceptions to the rule but in general i think it's true i mean yeah people can change i guess if you you know marry someone who's into a sport you might just get into it through osmosis or something but generally i think sport in general it helps if you're interested because i i could pick up a new sport and get interested in a new sport now but that's because i've been printed just with sport in general but then individual sports themselves as well i think i don't know without

thinking much about it i do think it's reasonably important i think yes but i could be wrong obviously there's going to be exceptions to a rule like that yeah no it's one of those things where as soon as you said it i think it just never really occurred to me but it seems super obvious in in retrospect and i wonder if you could do uh most of the people i know who are really into sport were into sport when they were younger most of the people i know who do not like sport didn't like sport when they were younger. Most of the people I know who do not like sport, didn't like sport when they were younger. Whether or not that's just because that's the way they are and they've always been that way, or when you're young is the time to imprint, I don't know. The reason I laugh there is because this is, again, one of these moments I come up against

in the podcast where I'm about to say a thing where I'm like, oh, maybe I shouldn't say the thing. But while it's just you and me, Brady, and we'll see if it makes it through later, the comparison I was thinking of is you could do a sociological study about sports, like the heritability of sports in children. And this is a term I think people sometimes get a little bit confused about in sociology, but when you talk about heritability, it just means if you know this thing about the parents,

is it true about the children as well? It doesn't necessarily mean genetically inheritable. I would be super curious to see something on the heritability numbers to something like religion, where obviously a religion is highly heritable, as in, you know, you know the religion of the parents and you don't very often get a child who is, surprise, a different religion. They're almost always the same. So I just wonder if you could do something like that with sports about the different branches of sports, some heretical, maybe some not. And like, what is the heritability factor with children? And then obviously, like the heritability of lack of interest in sports, because, yeah, my parents were never into sports in any way, shape or form. And then obviously that got passed on to me. It's a really interesting thought. I'd love to know if there's any actual data out there on sports heritability. You got me thinking about my parents. I would say my parents, definitely not my mum and

not even my dad that much was that into sport. Yet I got really, really into sport. I think a lot of that was to do with my neighbours and my best friends who were a real sport family but the funny thing is that got me thinking now like in the last sort of five to ten years my parents are a bit older now and retired and that they have started getting a bit more into sport and whenever they ring me they're like oh i've been watching the cricket i've been watching the football it's been so interesting but in a way that makes me kind of cringe and think no you're like johnny come lately you haven't given a whole life to this and i almost resent them being into it a bit like

oh the cricket was so exciting yesterday wasn't it and they'll say something that makes me realize i don't realize that same thing happened 19 years ago in a similar match and i'm like right no you're not allowed to be into sport now you haven't done the time that feeling is such a funny human feeling that is replicated across so many different areas definitely i knew the band before they were popular i watched the original star wars movies yeah it's replicated across everything and why is it that there's something in humans which almost pushes back against more people like the thing that you like. Are you guilty of that?

Or are you above that? Or do you even feel that emotion sometimes? I'm having a hard time thinking of a specific example off the top of my head, but I know I've felt that. I just, I can't think of a good example right now. Do you ever feel that about Apple products? When someone says, look at my new iPhone. Isn't it fantastic?

It does all these things. And you're like, you don't know the half of what that machine can do. Well, I mean, that's a different thing. I'm never not surprised at the lack of technical knowledge of younger generations for whom I was propagandized my whole life were going to be amazing at technology. Turns out, not true. It's just striking me as such a funny thing, especially when applied to your own parents. I'm so guilty of it, Gray. Whenever a new film comes out about Apollo and the moon, I'm like,

no, there's gonna be a whole bunch of people now. There's a new Neil Armstrong movie coming out. Oh my goodness. I'm loathing that. I'm gonna have a whole world full of Neil Armstrong experts. I never thought of you as a space hipster or i should say an apollo hipster is really what it would be like totally i've been into apollo before anybody thought it was exactly oh humans are just the worst i know we are this thing i love i don't want other people to love it i'm trying to think of something i love that i'm happy when other people find out about it surely brady you love it when more people love hello internet that must be a thing like when people spread the word far and wide that's a

thing that makes you happy yes that doesn't count though even though you were into hello internet before it was even published yeah i'm trying to think if there's something like some TV show or band I like, and if more people start liking it, surely that's good for me because more money comes into it. They can make more of that thing. Like surely that's the only time it would benefit me. The human resentment against newcomers runs deep. Get off my lawn. I mean, I'm quite happy sometimes for people to get attention i think they deserve like for example when we you know we talked about public service broadcasting the band and since we spoke about it not because we spoke about them but since we spoke about them they've become you know a lot more popular and that has made me happy because i sort of think

oh that's good you know those people deserve success and attention and i don't like resent that in any way i think the more the better so i don't know it doesn't apply to everything but it applies to most things anyway formula one formula one i think you'd like it it's got lots of grayness in it i'll be sure to check it out i'll see if i can get you into that mclaren factory because remember we went to that what was that place in waterloo we went to and you like you were absolutely like smitten with the building and the space because you just thought it was just a great space yeah that was awesome and if you could get me into the mclaren factory i would do that for sure the mclaren factory was even better than that physics building in waterloo for just like a cool space i think you'd like it. Use your contacts, Brady. Get me in.

Maybe that will be also your like gateway drug to getting into Formula One. If I do get into Formula One, then obviously you will like Formula One less well then. I would totally resent it then. And then you'll start like a Formula One YouTube channel and podcast and I'll be absolutely livid. And then you'll start traveling the world and going to all the races and meeting all the drivers. I'll be like,vid. And then you start traveling the world and going to all the races and meeting all the drivers. I'll be like, damn it. He didn't even like Formula One before.

Oh, that would make it all worthwhile. I have to say, since this show aired, I've been looking forward to my future as a Formula One race car fan. Race car fan? Racing fan? I don't know. I'll figure it out later. Brady made it sound so romantic. Traveling the world, going to all of those races, a lot of Zoom. It seems like it could be exciting. Maybe it is something that I could get into.

But there's definitely something that I know about myself, that when I get into things, it's hard not to turn them into a business. I'm not a man who's good at hobbies. So I'm already beginning to think about what I'm going to need to add to my collection. My collection of domain names at Hover. Eventually there'll be a blog or some videos or something and I'm going to want to have a website as a place to build my future career in the Formula One commentary world. And the number one place I go to for domains is our good friends at Hover. Why have I used Hover for so many years? Because their website is just simple and beautiful. A long time ago, when you wanted to buy a domain name on the internet,

you had to go through some pretty ugly and sketchy websites that tried to sell you a bazillion services you didn't need. Not Hover. You should go to hover.com right now, slash HI, to get 10% off your first purchase. And take a look at their beautiful website. I always feel like, ah, I'm relaxed to simply see the beautiful and simple design of Hover. Whenever I have to renew domain names or change any information about them or add or subtract emails, any of that kind of stuff,

it's just a nice, clean interface. So I'm going to be brainstorming some of those ideas for domain names I want to snap up before other people do. And you certainly do have some project that's being mulled over in the back of your brain. When you think of a good domain name, you need to go to Hover to get it, to make sure that nobody else beats you to it. If someone else is using a competitor, a slower competitor, Hover's simplicity and speed will make sure that you get that domain name first. They have world-class customer support and they make integrating with any other services you want to use Hover with just a snap. So once again, go to hover.com slash hi and get 10% off your first purchase. That's hover.com slash hi. This is kind of a big

thing. I'll apologize in advance if it's a bit poorly thought out, but the topic is Gray is concerned about the attention economy slash his own attention span. I think if I had to try to put it in under a header, I think I realized that's what a bunch of stuff I've been thinking about for a while and kind of vaguely wanting to talk about on the show, but it never, it's never been like the right moment. For example, one of the more recent little links that I threw in is this news article that in the London Underground, they're installing big screens in the tube stations, you know, where you stand to wait for the tube so that they can display the news live to you while you're underground, while you're waiting for your train. So where they used to have like ads and posts and stuff, now there's like

rolling news channel or something. Yeah, there's like a rolling news channel. And the thing here is, it's not what you think it is. I don't care that it's news. I think it's an example of this thing that I am concerned about. And it seems like everywhere in every aspect of life things are getting better at demanding your attention advertising on the underground isn't new it's been around i'm sure since the whatever it's 1890 when they had the first steam trains going underground like i'm sure it didn't take long before somebody put an ad on the walls in those stations. Yeah. So it's not like, oh, the sanctity of this underground space is violated.

It's more, this is another example of what was static now becomes motion. And a thing that really bothered me was I recently flew through newark airport have you been through newark airport recently brady not recently not the last year or two okay i don't know how new they are but i i honestly i saw this thing in newark which to me felt like the horrifying face of the future, which is Newark Airport on every surface, in every restaurant, in every waiting area, has these little iPad screens that are bolted to the desk that are just little rolling advertisements slash things that the airport wants you to know.

I'm going to send you a couple pictures just so you can see what these things look like, because it was beyond my ability to express the horror in words of what this looks like. So let me just send you a couple of these. It's like everybody left their iPad behind when they left, like the rapture happened while everyone was on their ipad you know what that is a great way to describe it uh because there's no one in that picture there's just all these sitting ipads like they'd be in use i was trying to take pictures where you know i wasn't taking pictures of people and and the horror of

it is greater when you see it without context but yeah for the listener i do mean this in a literal way like when you think of you go into an airport and there's places to wait at the gate and there's restaurants that you can sit in every table and every chair had this little ipad that was bolted in front of where the chair is. And the chairs, most of them are bolted into the ground. So the only position you can possibly sit in is right in front of this little iPad. Like you could not sit at that table and have like your hamburger and chips without staring at that screen.

You have no choice. Yeah. The only place to put your hamburger would be in the few inches in front of the iPad that they give you as space on the desk, right? That isn't being used by that iPad. And what photos don't convey is they're all constantly moving. They're all displaying ads or trying to convince you to do something. And I look at stuff like this and while I just earlier in the show took a big poo on a lot of environmental stuff, I've come to think of this as a kind of environmental pollution almost. I don't know if that is me being overly sensitive or overly dramatic on this topic. But in so many areas of life, I see this incursion where stuff is getting better at trying to hold your attention or even just being distracting in the background. And while I was in Newark, it was just intolerable. Like there's nowhere to sit where these things aren't in your peripheral vision, just constantly

moving. And you can't either not look at them or be aware that you're focusing really hard on what's in front of you. Like, I will not look at these things that are moving in my peripheral vision. That picture that you sent is exacerbated by the fact there are 10 widescreen TVs above them, bolted to the walls above the bar. And I'm looking at it, I think every single one of them seems to be on a different channel. Yeah. So that picture from the bar, to me, is what the world feels like it's moving towards

everywhere with all things. There's only an ipad in front of every seat but as you're sitting at the bar there's tvs across the entire back of the bar and every tv is tuned to a different channel now this is in this is in the physical space obviously but i think you can combine this with a lot of what we talk about on the show with regards to like what does social media do to your mind you know and like like we were recently talking about i was on instagram and i was aware like oh wow instagram is the first social media that feels like it does to me what it does to other people it pulls on on your attention in perhaps not a good way. And I'm concerned that the increasing level of all of this stuff,

the reason why I think maybe it makes sense to compare it to a kind of pollution, is I'm concerned that it's giving the world a kind of attention deficit disorder. I may be wrong, but I suspect that constantly being in environments that are trying to distract you and getting better at it all the time, and always having with you technology that is trying to get your attention. I feel like I've upgraded my concern about this from, oh, you should do the best that you can to isolate yourself from all these things into I think it really may be having an effect on people that over time fractures and shatters their attention and their ability to concentrate into smaller and smaller shards. I think this in no small part because I feel like this has really happened to me over maybe the past 18 months. Like in this very slow way that I haven't felt very sharply until suddenly in the last month, I've been really, really aware of it. How does it manifest itself? What's an example of you seeing it in yourself? So I think one of the red flags that has been building up over the last while is

repeated efforts to read more books and finding that a surprisingly difficult task. As I have gotten older, the amount of books that I have read has just done nothing but drop. You know, in terms of an actual book with words, not an audio book, I have read nothing for big stretches. What are you doing instead? Like in that time when you used to sit there and read a book, what's stopping you reading a book? Are you checking Twitter? Are you, you just can't look at the screen for long enough or what's, what are you doing instead? Yeah. Okay. So there's two things there there the one that i find more concerning is the phenomenon that the reading is actually harder i find my brain just wandering much more and now of course in some sense i'm comparing myself to a much younger version of myself and so maybe like with many things this is just a

simple fact of getting older but i don't think that's it. The thing that goes along with that as well as in addition to finding books just harder to read, I'm finding books much harder to get into. It's one of the reasons why a couple of weeks ago, I actually, I even did a shout out on Twitter where I was just asking people to recommend like interesting nonfiction books to read because I had ended up spending basically a whole day just trying to find something to read and totally failing at it that each book I was picking up I'm like I'm just not interested even though this thing is interesting or I should say the way this topic is described like I just can't get into it and so that I find extremely concerning. And it feels like this thing has happened in this very slow way that, like many disasters, comes on slowly and then quickly.

Do you think that your problem with, like, using the example of, you you know settling into a book are you suggesting it's because like your standard unit you know an si unit of attention time has become much smaller or is it because you've become standardized to you know a top 10 list with a capital letters headline and or you know a three or four sentence pithy reddit comment and like that's just what you want now which are those two things is it like is it a style change or an actual like quantity change is it a qualitative change or a quantitative change it feels like both it feels like the si unit of attention is is smaller i've been trying to do things like setting timers and saying like oh i'm going to read and don't stop reading until the timer goes off.

And don't look at the timer either, right? Just keep reading. And of course, right? Failure number one, I look at the timer, right? So it's like, okay, great, great job there. Ability to concentrate. And then problem two is I look at the timer and I'm shocked by how much time is left, right? It's like, oh, I thought I had been reading for a thousand years

and I had actually been reading for five minutes right that's super alarming to see the quality thing is interesting because what you were asking before is what has replaced this whenever you're trying to look at any kind of behavior change i think people too easily focus on the additive part like when we were talking about, you know, Fitatron 5000 lifestyle, like what are you going to do? It's like, well, one of the things you have to do is stop doing something else to have time for your health. Because if you imagine that you're just going to be additive

into your life, it's totally going to fail. And so obviously for me, one of the biggest things that has taken up just huge portions of my time is just being on the internet. For me, the two swamps of attention are, without a doubt, it's Reddit and Hacker News, which is like a more focused version of Reddit. But they're the same thing. They're places where people post stories. I don't read the stories. I just read the comment threads about what people are talking about in the stories. Right. And like, even that

is, is a way that I feel like I've kind of unintentionally trained my brain to have no patience. So it was like, oh, theoretically this hacker news page is full of nothing but links to interesting articles. How many of those articles have I read? Zero. Right. Because what I just want to get to is what's the top comment that tells me why the article is all wrong, right? And then I want to read that. Because you like the conflict and the drama or because you want the intellectual nourishment or have you just become a bit of a, you just like enjoy the conflict in the theater of people yelling at things. So even there, Brady, you're talking about it so nobly. What I feel like has happened is that these things used to be much more additive in my life that like, oh, I used to get much more

benefit out of this stuff. And over time, it's just become much more of a habit, right? Like it's a well-worn groove in my brain that I go to these places, but by going to them and then just skipping to the comments, it's training my brain to not read anything that's more than a couple of paragraphs. And I mean, even there, we've mentioned on the show several times that like, if you want us to read your comments in the Reddit, don't have it real long, the shorter, the better, right? And I think even that's an interesting kind of side effect of now I find myself not even reading the article that the discussion is about, but I'm not even really reading all of the comments about the article that I'm not reading. I'm just kind of skimming over them.

You're reading the ones that are short enough to not take too much time. It's easier to go downhill than to go uphill. It's easier to read the comments about the article than it is to read the article. And it's easier to read the shorter comments than the longer comments. And like with many things in life, what is easy is not necessarily better. I feel like this is a real area where it just feels like I've trained my brain out of having a longer attention span.

And for me, the ground zero is really this internet behavior and particularly with Reddit and Hacker News. I am very aware of like this wider phenomenon in the broader world that, that oh this happens to be the thing for me but i really wonder and am concerned about brains always bathing in an environment that

is full of distraction and is also super full of the easy thing to do at any particular moment. So these are a bunch of concerns that I have. I can't see how you have allowed this to become a problem because you're so disciplined about your time. Like for example, you know, you switch on, like I know there's no point trying to text you after 10 o'clock because Gray switches on his do not disturb. I cannot reach him after 10 o'clock because grey switches on his do not disturb i cannot reach him after 10 o'clock i cannot reach him until the next morning and while i find that incredibly infuriating and frustrating like i accept that's what you've done because you like controlling your life and partitioning things and not having distractions and so why can't you just put one of these plethora of apps on your phone that won't let you use Reddit except for like one hour a day.

Or like of all the people in the world, I know who could just say, all right, I'm only going to use Reddit for half an hour a day. And the rest of the time I'm going to write a script or I'm going to walk the dog or I'm going to go to the gym or I'm going to do some animation or something. Why have you not been able to just write a new schedule that doesn't allow you to use Reddit? Why haven't you just banned yourself from Reddit if you see the problem so clearly? So this is a super interesting thing. And it's one of the reasons why I'm concerned about broader society in a way that's beyond just me,

because I've been over the last year kind of talking to a bunch of people about this topic in different ways. And without a doubt, compared to just about everyone I know, my digital and attentional life is already like this monastic existence. For years and years, I've never had Twitter on my phone. I don't have email on my phone. Much to the annoyance of many people who try to get in touch with me, like dramatically limit all of these ways that I can be reached. So I find it interesting that even for me who feels like, oh, I try to be super careful about this stuff that I've still been gotten in a slow way over time that I didn't notice. And so it's like, well, yes, I don't have any of this stuff on my phone, but when I come home at night, I'm spending lots of time just on the computer on Reddit, for example. I'm just sitting on the couch and kind of browsing around. And then that's where

it feels like it's accreted over time to have this attentional effect. And I don't mean to set up this Kafka trap for other people, but a thing that I notice in some people that I talk to is I sometimes get the impression that people have become almost so used to interruptions and so attentionally short that they seem to lack the ability to notice this. Again, I am aware that that is like a ridiculously unfair kind of comment to make because there's no way to talk your way out of it. But I'm just saying it as an observation. That it seems like some people are so distracted that they don't recognize what the problem is.

Or they don't even recognize that they're distracted what's what's an example can you give me like a practical example of that i'm not quite understanding the point as a practical example of it i've had many many a conversation where i'm talking to a person about how distracted they feel in which during the conversation they answer many a text message and don't seem to be aware that they just halt and stop and then are on the phone texting and then come back to the conversation and seem to be like even if i bring it up seem to be not aware that everything just stopped for two minutes whereas like their subjective experience is oh it only took me one second to just reply to this thing. It's like, yeah, but it didn't. Like I'm not ballsy enough to

actually start a timer when that happens. But that's an example of what I mean, where the other person's subjective experience seems to not match up with what they think. The classic example of this, like before we all became slaves to our phones phones would be when you had a friend who had a child and you would go out with them like for a coffee or something and they would come with the child they like a parent because you know children are so demanding of your time and you know you have to care for them and that having conversations with your friends who was a parent they didn't realize like you weren't having a conversation because they would like just in the middle of a sentence say,

Charles, stop that and run off and go and do this. And it used to be the joke that that's what it was like if your friends had kids, they became these other creatures that you couldn't have a conversation with anymore. But now we're all like that. Like whether we have a child or not, we all go out and just like the number of times i'll go out with a group of like four or five friends and it could be like to a restaurant or something

like that or it could be something lovely like going to a cottage by the sea and we're just sitting around in the lounge room like in this lovely place and i'll look around and all of us including me are on our phones all of us i went for lunch with my friend yesterday who i hadn't seen for a while and we were like we were chatting and that and i don't think we ever went five consecutive minutes without one of us picking up our phone and checking a football score and going oh everton are one nil up now right oh oh look that's an interesting instagram post that our friend james just posted like we wouldn't go five minutes without it. In between, like a conversation.

We were friends catching up. How's your work? What are you up to? What have you been doing? What's happening with your wife? Where have you been on holiday? We were still doing all of that, but never for more than five minutes without a quick digi break.

I think that that may also be having an effect on attentional fracturing because it also keeps the conversation eternally at a more surface level it's a thing that i have felt with people where sometimes a conversation is starting to dip down into a more significant level but then the outside world breaks it in and you feel like why are we even bothering with trying to like you're just gonna have this thing interrupt and it doesn't really matter but then it turns oh our ability to focus in a conversation is limited by the mean time of interruption on the other person's device and so it's like well whatever you're saying should mostly be conveyed in five to seven minute long stretches, maybe not longer. Or just the other thing that I suspect is not good, which I mentioned before, like why I first took Twitter off my phone is the recognition of having this background demon running in your mind all the time. That's meta thinking about the presentation of your own life and the one that i i still find

very strange and i can never get used to it and i like i apologize to the people who know me who do this in person but but when you sit down to dinner with people and there is the moment of the food must be presented for the grams first and a photo must be taken of this thing that we are about to enjoy together like i never don't feel like i'm in an episode of black mirror when that happens where the food has arrived but we perform this little this little seance of arranging everything to look great to take the photos and then the photos go up and then well five minutes into the meal people want to see how it has been received to the internet like what their dinner i find that one like the most strange example of this and then your partner will lean over and say

oh what have people been saying about it right right, right. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, Jeff liked it. Oh, really? I'm totally guilty of this, by the way. Like the Instagramming the food one is the one where I feel like I'm an alien on it. I'm like, I'm a stranger in a strange land with that one. But then, you know, I'm saying like, I go home and it's like, oh, I'll read what's on Reddit and then switch over to Hacker News.

And then as soon as I'm done with Hacker News, I'll be like, I wonder what's on Reddit. And then go back and it's, it's the things you just read, you idiot. And go, oh, okay'll be like i wonder what's on reddit and it go back and it's it's the things you just read you idiot and go oh okay well i wonder what's on hacker news then also the things that you just read and like flip back and forth like a total idiot in this thing that i'm not really extracting any value out of and i think has has made my brain worse and to take it away from the traditional ones i also want to mention one other area that i'm just i'm aware of as having become not a danger area but a bit like the screens on the

underground and that's to me just listening to podcasts like i've become very aware that it's so easy to just start listening to podcasts in any moment where, for whatever reason, like I can't do something with my eyes. Like you're walking the dog, you're doing hand washing the dishes for the environment or whatever it is. Like you can start listening to podcasts. And then that's a train that for me can just sometimes not ever end. Where it's like, oh oh i've started listening to podcasts and they just keep playing and i just keep listening because i i like listening to these podcasts but i can find my own life too full of those things what do podcasts take away from from you what's something that you maybe feel you should be doing instead because i listen to a lot

of podcasts but i always feel like that's what I do like as filler and like it doesn't eat away at other time. Oh yeah. Like 100%. It doesn't feel like it eats away at other time. Except, and this is the real key to me, it eats away at your brain's time to just be your brain on its own. If you're always filling your mind with the thoughts of others, how do you know what you think about anything?

This is another place where I feel concerned about this attention-ness of the modern world. And like, I've had more than one friend admit to me that if they ever, for some reason, find themselves out of the house and they realize, oh, like I forgot my headphones, like they will just have to buy headphones so that they can listen to podcasts while they're walking around, or they'll just hold their phone up to their ear, listening to the podcast as though they're walking around or they'll just hold their phone up to their ear listening to the podcast as though they're on the phone yeah and i have done both of those things as well and yeah i push back against that like i i routinely keep uninstalling overcast from my phone and then somehow i find it back on the phone within a few months of like, oh, I just wanted to listen to this one thing.

And I can construct some reason why I really need to listen to it right now. And then I install it back on my phone. And then all of a sudden the podcasts are just eating up all of the mental space of my life. I'm just listening to other people talk about things. And yeah, it is filler time. It's time that is not being lost to something as opposed to wasting time on the internet is time that could be spent reading a book in a way that lots of podcast time. That's not remotely the case. Yeah. But it is eating away at chunks of time where the brain has nothing to do. And this, again, I feel like goes right back

into the idea of like attention deficit disorder society. Like if you freak out because your brain has a long stretch of nothing to do always, like that seems like a really bad situation. So do you think walking the dog with no headphones, no podcast, no phone, just like looking at the trees and walking along is like makes you a better man? Makes you smarter, helps your ideas form, is making you cleverer? I want to state it in the reverse way.

That always walking the dog and always listening to podcasts makes you worse. It's not that you are getting smarter by doing nothing in those moments. It's that the constant pull on your attention drags you down. That's what I think it is. Whereas reading books as an attentional exercise, I do think that that is a good thing for your brain. And it's why I feel really frustrated with it. And in the same way that much to my surprise, ever since starting the Fititron lifestyle, while I have not been perfectly consistent with it, shall we say, over time, having done that, i now have the thing as an adult that feeling of if i don't exercise for a while or i eat really badly i feel gross about myself yeah in a way that i i never did before i'm finally in that place at the moment i quite like it it's a good thing right like at this very moment i feel gross about myself because I've been eating poorly and not exercising. And I don't like feeling gross about myself, but it's better to feel that way. And I feel like I have done the

same thing to my brain. Like I kind of feel gross about how attentionally distracted I have become. And that I am a person who was already concerned about this stuff but it somehow still got me makes me very concerned about the world at large oh my god if if gray can't do it what hope are the rest of us got that's how I feel as well Brady what have you allowed to change or slip it sounds to me like you're spending more time on your computer than you should i don't think anything has dramatically changed i really mean it in what i said before that it's it's a disaster that happened slowly and then quickly like this past month i've been particularly just incapable of paying attention to stuff like i can just really feel it that

reading is super hard and doing just about anything other than just like vegging out not even fully reading stuff on the internet has just become very very hard to do and has reached for me a level of like okay something super duper needs to happen. It needs to be a change on this. I wonder if you're going, you know, it sounds like you're going down the path of about to do something extreme to deal with it, which I don't always think is the best. It's like when someone wants to get fit. If someone wants to get fit and they say, okay, I'm going to fast for three weeks or something. I'm not always sure that's the best way to get fit but okay it sounds like you're about to do something dramatic right well my plan is i'm going to fast for four months so i don't know if that sounds dramatic to you or not but i wanted to talk to you about

this brady because i feel like if anybody if anybody is going to push back on me in an interesting and unexpected way it's you but okay what i am endeavoring to do i haven't nailed down the details fully yet i really think that i need to dramatically close myself off to the external world in a bunch of ways that i allow too much to come in through the internet or through podcasts or through social media. And I feel like my brain needs some time to heal and to be almost without a doubt, super bored. But that's the medicine. That's the good medicine here. Like that's the medicine that's the good medicine here like that is the thing that is necessary is less coming in and more more mental space so i'm kind of thinking of doing this until the end of the year what does that look like like what does well? How extreme is this? Sounds very hermit-like.

It's not the cabin in the woods yet. I mean, we all know that's like someday that's the eventual end game for Grey. We're not there yet, right? That's a while's off. But here's my broad outline. I'm going to stop listening to podcasts in the same way that years ago I just stopped watching educational videos like that was a good decision that i have i've stuck with there's a couple of little asterisks for professional reasons there but like i just don't really watch youtube videos in in the same way that i used to and it's like oh that was a good decision this is a kind of incoming thing that i don't really want in my life yeah and so i'm going to do that with podcasts i'm just going to stop listening to

podcasts and the thing that may have a bit of an impact on you brady is i'm going to go without going back on places like hacker news and reddit yeah but i think that even means not reviewing comments on Reddit threads. I think if there's something that I know in my personality is I'm much better at abstaining from things than being moderate about things. I don't work with the like, oh, we'll do things in moderation. Have some popcorn at the movie in moderation. No, that will never work. And I know that about myself. And so I've been

thinking it over and I was, I was originally trying to think like, well, I could not go on Reddit except for professional reasons, but it's like that door feels dangerously open and ready for abuse. I think it would also be just interesting to produce a bunch of podcasts without necessarily directly seeing the feedback from people on those podcasts. And that worm did work its way into my brain a little bit when we had those few episodes that were released in a funny out of order way. So we never had the comments from the previous show on the next show. It's like, oh, that did kind of work. Although I am slightly terrified of things to talk about on the show. Like I'm always very aware of trolling the internet and like writing down notes

and looking for things for the show. But I think that's a door I'm going to close. And I think I'm also going to close the social media door. So again, I'm just talking about this now. I'm throwing this out as the idea, but that's my thought is I'm going to close those three doors, the social media, Reddit, and podcasts. So is i'm going to close those three doors the social media reddit and

podcasts so you're still gonna create content yeah right and you're still going to use the internet as in like other websites yeah so reddit hacker news social media no social media posts like will you still do like professional social media posts? Like, you know, Hey everyone, new video or new t-shirts available, or are you just going to like delegate that as well? And just like not even touch it, not touch the poison chalice. Again, I think I have to abstain from things. And my initial thought is, is not touch, not touch the chalice. I think that just works better for me. I think that the, the comment threads on Reddit are, as I've said many times, a great part of the show.

I think they're a great part of the show for the audience as well. But that's super easy for me because when I post things on my blog, the posts to Reddit are always automatic. Like I don't touch them. It's just an if this then that thing that eventually picks it up and just post it to Reddit. So I never even have to see it. So those, like the discussion threads can still exist and I can do a thing that triggers them without ever having to touch it directly myself. Well, what do you think about this, Brady? I would describe it as like an overreaction. Right. Okay. But if it's a big problem for you, maybe that's what it takes, you know? Like, I don't think it sounds like the world's biggest problem.

Like, the problems you're explaining certainly resonate with me, and they probably resonate with most people. I think you're describing a real symptom of the modern world, whether or not sort of four months of, I guess it's not that much cold turkey, is it? It's not like you're not going to touch your computer or it's not like going to, you know, disappear into the woods and not work. And I think it's all right. I think you could do like, you know, a more of a rationing system.

Like I said, like if you had a problem with your weight, I wouldn't say don't eat any food for four months. I would say just like have a bit of everything, moderate your diet. Like when you're on a diet, I think it's good to still occasionally have a chocolate. And I think it's the same for you. I think there's nothing wrong with saying I can go on Reddit when I eat my Weetabix in the morning for 20 minutes and then I'm not allowed to use Reddit. And set it up. Set up. Get one of these apps that doesn't let you use Reddit except in that window

and do one tweet a day or something, but do it at 5 p.m. each night if you've got something you want to tweet. Also, I sort of project this onto myself and I think, what if I did what Gray's suggesting? And my problem would be that I'm so all or nothing and once I failed, like once I lapsed once and went on to Reddit, you know, sometime in October, I'd be like, oh, well, I failed now. My streak's over.

That's pointless. I might as well just go on Reddit all the time. I feel like I'd be setting myself up to fail. And once I fail, I would fail dramatically. Yeah, that is definitely a personality type and a difference as well. Whereas I don't feel that way. And I always feel like life is always about getting back on the horse. And yeah, if in October, I'm not paying attention and suddenly it's like, oh, I've been on Hacker News for an hour. I wouldn't feel like, oh, well, the hell simply to be aware that hey notice the fact that you're doing this like what happened why did this occur are there adjustments that you can make and try to get back on on the plan but also part of the reason why I'm talking about it on the show here at all is is to act as as a kind of lock-in like i have had it in my

project list for months now about doing a kind of like a public lock-in in this way for doing something like this like i think that that is helpful for this sort of project even though i don't normally like to talk about the things that I'm doing until they're done. This is a case where making it public seems helpful to me. Puts yourself on the hook. Yeah, it does. It does put yourself on the hook and would be for me helpful in that moment of like, oh, if it's October and I'm reading Hacker News, like, you know, dude, you said you were going to do this thing. Get off here now. and it's not ruined because you made a mistake although you don't get you

won't get caught reading comments on reddit and hacker news you will get caught if you suddenly start tweeting or something but yeah but to me like this is a thing that i feel like i want to do some version of this for myself and it's important to me to have the big stretch to step away that this feels like it's a thing that i want that i think i really need to do in some form and so yeah like no one would know if i was reading the comments but that would defeat the whole purpose which again is a reason to talk about it out loud and to put myself on, on the hook for that. And one of the reasons why I even think about like not,

not reading the comments on my own work is the same thing about like creating some mental space for my own brain and doing that would just it would defeat the purpose of it well part of my reaction is like i said before it sounds a little bit extreme right and also like i don't know if you need to go quite that far but also that's quite selfish because this is also going to make my life slightly more inconvenient like i feel super guilty talking about like i'm very it could be quite interesting in other ways for me you just but the thing that i'm interested in is to see whether or not it has this grander effect that you're hoping it will have of almost like rewiring

your brain like that's quite interesting to me like will you suddenly be able to read books again and the other thing i'm interested in is because you're not doing this like crazy digital detox where you're not even like touching an electronic device. I'm very curious to find out whether other things will take the place of Reddit and Hacker News, whether you'll find like a replacement drug. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I was working on a thing this morning where I was trying to write down what are my thoughts about this, you know, to put up on like a little blog post and be like,

what are the guidelines here? And immediately identified one area of concern, right? Which is, like I thought, audio books are okay, right? But it's very easy to see that audio books slide right into podcasts, right? That it's like, well, you know, oh, this heroin is no good, but this methadone is delicious, right? Right now, it doesn't feel like they can slot in, partly because I've just never been able to listen to audiobooks in the same duration for podcasts. It feels more tiring.

But even that feels like it's part of it though it's it's more tiring because an audiobook requires more attention than a podcast whereas you can drift in and out of a podcast much more easily whereas with an audiobook if you if you lose the plot you're like wait a minute i have no idea what's going on but yeah it's totally possible that there will be replacement activities i mean that's what happens very commonly. But I think if replacement stuff comes up, I'm just going to try to be aware of it ahead of time. And if the replacement stuff is better

than what has been replaced, like, well, we've still made an improvement. So that's good as well. It's funny though, because I know from your perspective, you're saying that this seems quite extreme. Whereas from my perspective, the place where I am having the moderation is, well, of course, I'm still going to use electronics. Like I'm still going to use my phone and I'm still going to use my computer. That to me feels like only like a madman would draw the line there of saying, oh, I'm just going to abstain from all this digital technology and I'm going to go back to the analog world.

That to me feels like where I'm drawing the line of moderation of like, oh, my phone is an incredibly useful tool to me. And my phone isn't the source of the problem anyway, because it's like, I've got that really locked down. Like it's other things that I'm trying to make a change about. Do you know what? It's not actually as extreme as I kind of make it make a change about do you know what it's not

actually as extreme as i kind of thought it was going to be when you started talking oh yeah and i say like oh this is going to affect me but it's not really going to affect me very much the only way it's going to affect me is when like something like goes wrong like say there's some you know drama or technical problem or something because you know sometimes sometimes technical problems happen when you release podcasts i don't think i don't think no that never happens that can happen sometimes and like so when that occasionally hits the fan i need some like bat phone to be able to somehow let you know that like something needs dealing with or maybe i'm just gonna need more powers and passwords to deal with things as well and stuff like that but you know you're sort of saying oh i'm sorry this

is an imposition on you brady but it's not really yeah okay and in some ways it's quite an interesting experiment and it could make hello internet quite interesting as well for a few months because i don't know what what structure our conversations will start taking i mean i imagine you'll be bringing quite different material to the table. And I don't know how that might be different. It might be things you've seen out in the real world. It might be things from new online sources. And I might be bringing new things to your attention. So, it could be quite an interesting experiment in that respect. Yeah. I'm curious to see what the result is. And maybe it's not much. Maybe it's like, oh,

right. The world's just boring. And I'm not getting any better at reading books. And this is just the way things are. Who knows? I am curious though, Brady, do you agree with my concern that there is something that's AD up the world absolutely okay yeah i do sometimes i i feel like i've so changed my mind on so many technological things over time that i wonder like wait a minute like am i wrong or is it the children who are wrong like i like i just don't i don't know and it makes me feel better to hear that you two think that like this is this is a thing in the world that's occurring oh yeah i mean when we record hello internet and you go off on one of your long talks

i sometimes pick up my phone and check twitter while you're talking how terrible is that like my interesting friend who i do like hearing what he has to say, who will only talk for two minutes at a time before he pauses to let me talk. And I can't sit through two minutes of just listening to someone talk. I have to say, oh, I'll just quickly check my email and see if any more merchandise

is sold from the Hello Internet store. Or I'll check what's happening. Has anyone, what's the score in the chelsea game or i'll watch a tv show you know that's really good on netflix or something and i'll still if there's just a slightest lull in the show just the slightest you know i'll quickly glance down at my phone or the thing i think is interesting about your problem as opposed to the problem i see in some other people though is your problems less ego-y than some people like for lots of people it's about themselves like you're saying

before oh how many people have been liking my gram how many people have been watching my video what have people been saying about me on on this you don't seem quite so self-absorbed you know you're you're less of an ego-y person. So that seems to be less of a problem for you. So in that way, it's interesting to me that the thing you're so hooked on is just like other people yelling at each other or making pithy comments. And it's an interesting thing to me that it's less ego-driven with you. Yeah. It's a concern over the state of my own mind. Yeah.

You've just basically, you've been eating too much junk food. Yeah. I think that there really is a comparison. The other comparison to food here that's interesting is both the thing about the world is filled with food that is terrible for you if you look into the industry of food like it really is quite horrifying how much resources are poured into how can we get people to buy and eat more food like this is an actual industry that that you as a person just living your life are silently fighting against and you don't even necessarily realize it and i think that it's the same thing with much of this attentional world that you're fighting against these big institutions

that are all trying to control your attention in in some way and to like to focus where you're looking. And it's not good for you in the same way that food that is manufactured to be maximally palatable is not good for you. And the last comparison there as well is, I don't know if I've ever said it on the show, because I'm always slightly concerned about even suggesting this but i have done actual fasts like uh you know again my abstaining personality shining through here i've done 24 uh 48 and 72 hour fasts what was that like well the first time you do it you think you're going to die and it's right it's terrible i am not recommending it i want to be really clear. I am recommending to nobody that they fast, but I will say that it changes something about your relationship to food that is hard to quantify. And I know a number of years ago, I did a social media fast. I think

it was just for December. And I was, you know, I just just was like i'm not going to post on twitter and i think that was about the extent of it and i feel like that had the same kind of effect where oh i've never thought about twitter and social media the same way since having done that and having done actual food fasts even if i'm not being great about food, it has fundamentally changed the way that I think about food, knowing that like, oh, I can go for 72 hours without food and it's fine. Like you're not going to die as long as you're drinking fluids, a little bit of broth, maybe you're fine. Like it's totally okay. And I'm kind of wondering if this much bigger break from things that I think of as external inputs and the normal focuses of attention, if doing a kind of fast from them will also change the way I think about things. But part of the reason why it's on my mind now

and why I'm thinking of generally aiming through until the end of the year is I have a suspicion that this is a much bigger scale of a thing than stuff in the past. So I feel like the phase where we're talking about this right now, I'm still being super speculative about it. The planning phase. It's the planning phase still. It is the planning phase. My rough idea right now is to maybe start in September, like with the beginning of September. But when this episode goes up, I'm still going to be in the comments and I'm going to be curious to see people's feedback

and thoughts about this. So I want to be clear that this is, I'm going to do something but this is this is like a tentative first talking out loud with someone about an actual plan of action i mean the most important thing is have you given it a project name yet project cyclops cyclops yep really yeah did you just make that up or no no that's been the name of my project system for at least six months uh wow having some notes on it so yeah that's that's not a joke brilliant that's for real and now we have a show title