Hello Internet - H.I. #118: Dinosaurs Attack!

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

Grey and Brady discuss: Dinosaurs Attack!, MBS hotstop updates, more annotations #neverforget, Brady visits Paris and Moscow, and Diamonds. Sponsors: Hover: the best way to buy and manage domain names - go to hover.com/hi and get 10% off your first purchase from Hover Dashlane: password manager app and secure digital wallet - try Dashlane here: www.dashlane.com/hellointernet (plus, here's a promo code -> Hello50 for first 200 people to get a 50% discount) Curiousity Stream: unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and nonfiction series - go to curiositystream.com/hellointernet and enter promo code hellointernet when prompted during signup process and your membership is free for the first 30 days Listeners like YOU on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/hellointernet Show Notes: Discuss this episode on the reddit: Dinosaurs Attack! Diamonds Uncut YouTube version of the show with images

Graham, the last show, you told me that as a boy, you collect these dinosaurs attack cards. Yeah. It explains a lot about why you've turned out the way you did. What do you mean by that, Brady? They're harrowing. What a thing to expose a young boy to. Well, I mean, here's the thing. I found a link for the episode last time and I put it in the show notes and I meant to have a good jolly romp down memory lane, but I didn't quite get a chance to really look at them.

Shall we go through them? Let's go through a few. And anyone who's listening, if they want to, we're going to go to this page that's put together by a helpful chap named Bob Hefner. And he has scanned all the cards in an epic moment of freebooting, but we'll forgive it because this is a historical document. I'm sure these dinosaurs attack cards are very historic. Look, my memory of them is gruesome, but awesome. And that they would almost certainly never be produced today. So I'm happy to take a look at some of them. If on this one time on Hello

Internet, you want to take a stroll down memory lane with Grey for some reason. So, it seems the premise of the story is some dude is doing some kind of time research, and he wants to go back and look into why the dinosaurs became extinct. But he presses some wrong button or does something wrong and by mistake brings all the dinosaurs into modern times right like sucked through time through some rip in time and suddenly i just among us and just wreak absolute havoc for a while and then right at the end spoilers right at the end of the series of cards he figures out how to suck them back to where they came from. Isn't that the plot twist though? Isn't it that modern man and his meddling in science is the

thing that caused the dinosaurs to go extinct? At least in my memory, the dinosaurs don't do very well when they come into the modern world and they're all torn to pieces when they get sent back. So I feel like that was a great plot twist of childhood. Like, oh, we are the ones that made the dinosaurs go extinct. Maybe that was lost on me. Anyway, the interesting stuff is what they get up to during their brief sabbatical in modern times. Okay.

Like, it starts off okay. There's a title card and card two has this thing up in orbit, this space station where the research is happening. Wow. Card three sets up there's a problem card four things kick off and we get our first dinosaur in modern times ripping this bridge apart and being attacked by fighter jets these are drawings obviously by the way they're not historical photographs even though this is apparently a historical document drawings

of their time so anyway at this point at card four i'm thinking oh this is cool fighter jets shooting missiles at a dinosaur the dinosaur's got a train in its mouth what boy would not love that yeah and look it's all quite bloodless so far like it doesn't look like there's a person falling out of the train or something that the dinosaur's eating but it's all quite bloodless and then you get to oh five. Home Room Horror. I remember this. This is like burned into my brain. Each card has this like really click-baity title as well. So card five is Home Room Horror.

And now we've got some purple dinosaur ripping into a classroom. And just like, it's got like some screaming woman in one hand who is at least still alive, but in its mouth there are two people being completely chopped to pieces. There are three people being chopped to pieces, Brady. You have to really look at the detail. These dinosaurs attack cars. They're filled with detail. Yeah.

Presumably that woman is a teacher. You'll also notice that the classroom lesson that was occurring is about dinosaurs, right? So this is a tremendous irony that the dinosaur attacks during a lesson on dinosaurs. Clever. Very clever. And of course, as a child, you imagine yourself as the boy who's getting away, as opposed to the teacher and your horrible classmates who suffer the fate that they obviously deserve. You're projecting a lot into this card. If you managed to do this with every card, I can see why you were so into this. Well, do you think I am wrong, Brady, with my assessment that these would not be produced today? It feels like a holdover from the, I don't know, I guess early 90s? I don't know

when they were made. Because there's a lot of blood. The whole mouth of the dinosaur is filled with blood. The teacher is poking out the dinosaur's eye. And my memory is a lot of the cards are really like this. Oh, yeah. That's tame. Go to card six. Okay. Police precinct assaulted.

Oh, God. Jesus. Yeah. I remember that one. And we've got, is that a steg? That's a stegosaurus. And like in its mouth, it's biting a policeman in half with blood coming out. And at the same time with a spiky toe, it is literally, with one of its spikes,

swiped at the eye of a policeman. And the eye has come out of the socket, followed by an explosion of blood. Yeah. And also the detail that you can see the police officer's skull underneath. Like, I sort of wonder, this must have been a dream job for the right kind of artist. Because look, there's more detail than is really necessary

if you're some company and you say we want to make a bunch of cards where dinosaurs attack this is the briefing for the artists it's going to be dinosaurs they need to be attacking and run with it it feels like some guy said this is my dream job like this is the moment I've been waiting for my whole life. Because there's just so much more detail than needs to be. And the detail is all gruesome and horrifying. How big were the cards, Gray? Like, were they like a normal size? Because there's so much detail in the pictures.

It must have been hard to see all the detail. Well, I mean, looking at this, I remember these cards. I remember the detail that you can see the dude's skull underneath his face. I mean, I think they were just like baseball card size or Magic the Gathering card size. Like, I don't know exactly, but they weren't dinner plate sized so that you could really see all of the detail. They were regular trading card size. I mean, in card seven, DC Holocaust, while the White House burns under attack from

pterodactyls, a woman is being absolutely savaged by this pterodactyl. In the background, another guy's had his head cut clean off by like the, is that the leading edge of a pterodactyl wing? Yeah. As we all know from paleontology, pterodactyl wings were sharp as razor blades and could slice through anything. I presume that dude's like a secret service dude he's got the sunglasses on he's got a machine gun in his hands and was was attempting to protect the presidential family and epically failed because of course who could go up against pterodactyls were there descriptions on the back because our friend bob hasn't scanned the back of the cards like

presumably the story of what's happening on that card was told on the back but brady i can't believe this how did you not know the thing that you would like the most if you click on view card back on this web page which shows you the reverse sorry stupid of course they were all it's all there listed as newspaper articles oh they're done as newspaper articles. I think there were a couple of outliers, like notes from people trapped in a basement or other things like that. Apologies, Bob. You are a thorough man. So the back of the DC Holocaust card is done as the front page of the Washington Examiner.

And it says, Washington, DC, a nation watched in horror as the president while boarding the helicopter and shouting to reporters on the White House lawn, was savagely slain by a trio of hungry pterodonts. The First Lady and two secret servicemen were also eaten alive as hundreds of concerned citizens watched on live TV. What a dream story to write as a reporter. Would you really enjoy this scoop? Can you imagine sitting there writing

that? The first family literally being eaten on the front lawn of the White House in front of reporters. I guess it's a moment that reporters can only dream of. You're thinking, I've got page one for sure this time. Nothing's knocking me off page one as the president gets eaten by a flying dinosaur. Even if you were, say, new to the adelaide observer you know you're gonna get page one with this story the thing though on this back is that they have a picture they show you like a teaser of what the next card is presumably to help kids who maybe can't count with numbers get the next one they have a preview of the next one you will not be surprised to know that this one as a child I thought was way over

the line and I didn't like it at all. So, Card 8 is crushing a canine. Yeah. And after like the epic grand scale of the first family being eaten on the White House lawn, we have just a moment on a street corner where a giant dinosaur foot is literally stamping down on a cute dog while its little girl owner looks on in horror through gaps in her fingers as she covers her eyes. And the poor dog. I don't like to look at it. I think this is too gruesome. And my memory as a child was I had a box of cards and things that I didn't keep this one in the stack with the other ones. That's really interesting.

You know, it's like an innocent doggo, right? I know, it's funny. You can watch the first family being torn to pieces, but... Yeah. And this one is quite bloodless in the scheme of things. Like, there's no blood. It's the least physically gruesome. It's the most emotionally hurtful.

That's why it's like, I can't deal with it. Let's move on. Yeah, we have to move on. To number nine, nuptial nightmare, where a triceratops has managed to impale both the bride and groom on two of its spikes. Right. Now that is just hilarious. Yeah.

He looks kind of confused, doesn't he? The triceratops, like he doesn't really know what's going on. Like, how have I ended up here? What are these people wearing? Here's the thing. In these stories, are not the dinosaurs the true victims? They were just minding their own business when humans came along and ripped them out of their timeline and dropped them off in the middle of a wedding. It's like a surprised buffalo just appearing in the middle of a wedding. Like, what do you think is going to happen? Nothing good.

Brady, do you really want to zoom through every one of these cards? Like, I will do it with you. Though I'm not entirely sure the listeners will have the patience to go through every one of the dinosaurs attack cards. Let's skip through where they attack a baseball game, a rock concert. Oh, trapped in the basement. That one's real drama. What number is that?

That's number 11. Oh, I'm trying to skip forward and you're pulling me back to 11. Yeah, but look at the back of the card, Brady. This one I remember really striking. Oh, so instead of a newspaper, now we have just like some kind of flyer that's been handwritten in red, which is ominous. It says, help us. We're trapped in the basement, air running low.

Monsters burrow out of the ground every night to eat us. We dot, dot, dot. And there's like a smearing as the sentence was not finished. As his red magic marker trailed across the bottom of the page there, I'm sure. And the picture on the card itself is the moment that dinosaurs do get into the basement and just like go to town. Yeah. Notice that a heroic man in the corner is trying to save everybody by using a power saw to slice off the skin of the dinosaur. There's so much detail.

Never miss the details, Brady. Does looking at these give you like huge deja vu to when you were a kid looking at these? This is genuinely like a bizarre deja vu moment. I feel like a lot of these cards are just burned into my brain. And I know you were sort of joking at the beginning, but like, do you actually think this stuff is harmful for kids? Because I'm obviously on the side of, no, it's not harmful. I think kids are much more resilient than adults give them credit for, but I'm also kind of baffled that they ever got produced and parents were totally fine with kids

buying and collecting these cards. I think they're deeply affecting, but I don't know that I would call them harmful. Like, I think this affects the way you are in a lot of ways. What do you mean by that? I don't know. It just forms lots of the mental pictures in your head of what things look like. Like, obviously, all these cards are dealing with forms of death, aren't they? Quite gruesome death. And I think as you grow up and you think about death and you have fears about safety and death, a lot of what that kind of looks like in your head

is coloured by these depictions. Do you think you can draw a straight line from dinosaurs attack to CGP Grey uploads 24 hours of death onto YouTube. Is that what you're saying? There were no dinosaurs in that video, by the way. Not a straight line, no. But a curvy line. But there's no way this hasn't affected you and made you part of who you are. I will grant that in terms of the butterfly effect of life. Did dinosaurs attack not exist? My whole life would probably be different. But that's true for anything. You know, that's true for Magic the Gathering cards. That's true for any Sunday morning

cartoons I watched. That's true for every teacher in my... Like, it's true and also meaningless, I think. I don't agree it's meaningless, but obviously something else would have taken its place. Right. But, I mean, let's jump to number 18, tourist trap. Because here we have a beautiful Hello Internet moment. Because the Terradons, with their appetite not sated by the first family in Washington, have made their way for more presidential dining.

And they are now at Mount Rushmore. Oh, I never made that connection. There's a thematic through line here. They're gouging the eye out of George Washington. That was a detail as a kid that bothered me. Because thought like it looks cool on a card, but it's nonsensical. There's no reason for it to gouge out the eye. That eye is just made of stone of George Washington. It's not delicious to eat. There's clearly a bunch of people at this tourist trap to eat instead. I felt like that broke immersion a little bit in the reality of this story. Like, well,

I can assume that there's dinosaurs around, but that they're eating stone or just vengeful against the presidents of the United States is a little hard to swallow. If we go to the back of the card, we can see what the Rapid City Herald had to say about it under the headline, tourist trap, Mount Rushmore's nest of horror. We have in South Dakota, above the impassive stone faces of America's greatest presidents is a horror beyond belief. Early this morning, a flock of pterodonts created an enormous nest made up of trees, shrubs, and shredded wood from nearby cabins. As the giant eggs of their offspring hatched, the pterodonts swept out of the sky and hunted for suitable food. Innocent tourists from all over the world. I love the idea that the whole world is under attack from dinosaurs, but tourists are still going to Mount Rushmore.

Yeah, I never connected that. I'm also thinking that the life cycle of these eggs is quite short. What's the timeline here? How long have dinosaurs been attacking? I guess maybe they appeared out of time with the eggs already intact i don't know but also confusing the timeline and the urgency of everything is the final sentence of this story in the rapid city herald which says a plan to blow up the site was considered by congress but ultimately rejected as an extreme response to what could be a temporary problem in the timeline of this one day where the story's been written, Congress has sat and considered what to do and made a decision.

I mean, I didn't quite notice these, we can call them plot inconsistencies in the story. I didn't notice them as a child, but it also does raise the question of, okay, dinosaurs are attacking the world. Presumably, there's a long list of problems. And is a bunch of lizard birds on top of one of the most remote tourist attractions in the world something that Congress really has on its agenda as a thing it needs to discuss? Specifically, considering that the presidential family has died. It doesn't seem like it's going to be top billing for what are we worried about? Should we destroy Mount Rushmore for this temporary problem? Like, I'm pretty sure they're considering, do we have to nuke our own cities at this point? Right. But then this is also on the agenda.

Card 23 is an odd one for me. Okay. 23. This is called The Perfect Wave. Oh, yeah. I thought this one was dumb. This is like a visual gag of a dinosaur coming out of the water. And there's a dude on the surfboard on his head. And he seems to be unaware that the dinosaur is there.

Or he's just willing to keep surfing and going with it. And there are women either side who are also surfing, and they're to surf one of them does look concerned the other one less so but yeah i felt like this is like in a drama where there's a misplaced joke or a joke that feels like it's from a different movie that's a little bit what this card feels like it's a bit out of place card 24 london in flames so obviously you weren't affected enough as a boy to be scared of moving to london despite the horror that is befalling it here i'm still not entirely sure London in flames. So obviously you weren't affected enough as a boy to be scared of moving to London, despite the horror that is befalling it here. I'm still not entirely sure I go along with your thesis here that these cards had a big influence on me as a child. And I feel like this

is evidence exactly to the contrary. Surely I would not go to London having seen the horrors of this card. It was worse in America. You start to get this theme starting around card 30 where the humans fight back we've got a kid strikes back and a kid has like got a bazooka and seems to be blasting a hole right through a dinosaur followed up by the amazing card 32 cat lady's revenge where a cat lady uses a shotgun to blow off the eye of a dinosaur and coming near to eat her cats. Good for you, cat lady, defending your home territory. Yeah, that's very graphic.

Although the card before 31, I think is the most graphic of all of them. It's just a close-up shot of a man who has been stepped on by a dinosaur. It is probably the most graphic. There's also a rat suspiciously lingering in the background. What's that rat about to do? I think we all know. Yeah, we know. We know what you're doing, rat. There's a few where New York are under attack. This must have been close to home for you as a boy. Yeah, of course. It was terrifying, Brady.

Card 35, the Statue of Liberty. Why would a dinosaur attack the Statue of Liberty? Because it makes a cool card. I think that's why it attacks the Statue of Liberty. Look, 36. Comic-Con's catastrophe. They have the dinosaurs attack a Comic-Con, like, just in case you're a nerd and not worried enough. Like, I don't know the history of this. Maybe some dinosaurs attack historians can dig at the details.

Even as a child, I always assumed that one of these three guys or all of these three guys in this card are the artists or the people who worked on this good call even as a kid this one feels like a little bit of an in-joke and self-referential yeah and particularly the guy running towards the camera i feel like he's almost so detailed he's out of this the art style that has been established in this universe i think you're right i assume that that's one of the artists again like with magic the gathering card sometimes the artists like sneak themselves in as the subject of the thing that's what this always felt like as a kid like i bet that dude with the glasses drew a bunch of these pictures that That's my guess. What do you want next? Any more?

44 meltdown is pretty gruesome as well. Oh yeah. There's like a fire and someone's really cupping the heat there in the foreground. Their face is coming off second best. 45 must be terrifying for you, Brady. Anchorman's peril. Yeah, they're specifically attacking TV reporters now. Right. And then in the last couple few, the tide turns, humans send the dinosaurs back in the past. There's also like a devil dinosaur, which seems a bit strange, but whatever, let's just skip past that.

Yeah, 47 Supreme Evil, they've just lost the plot there. Yeah, it's like, wait, what were we doing? Okay, there's a devil dinosaur. It doesn't seem necessary, but let's keep going. But card 49 is the first time we see something really graphic happening to a dinosaur besides the one that lost its eye. Because you're right, as they're ripped back to the past, they don't seem to be ripped to the past quite as cleanly as they were ripped into the present. And it seems to pull the dinosaurs apart. Their skin comes off their body and there's something about that that's not working for them.

Yeah. I think that's why I assumed as a kid that this is like the plot twist, that we caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. So it all comes full circle back in the end. I guess the lesson here is don't meddle with science. I think that's what you're supposed to come away with as the moral of dinosaurs attack. So the synopsis card says, the sudden yank of this time reversal literally shreds the reptilian invaders into bloodied pulp and bone. Despite unprecedented losses and mass destruction, our civilization recovers. So we end on a moment of hope. Right. Humans are always resilient.

Yeah. I think the other lesson of the cards is be sure to be well-armed. I imagine that part of the reason it takes place mostly in America is because Americans are the ones who have shotguns and pistols and home bazookas with which to fight back against the dinosaurs, which makes it look more awesome in the cards. That's why in London, they're just all dying on top of a spiky dinosaur. They have no way to defend themselves. That's right. I don't know. I'm still maintaining that this is a kind of innocent boyhood fun. Like it's not serious. It doesn't matter. I agree. Great. I don't think it matters. I think it like shapes who you are, but not in a negative way. Maybe kind of like

you say in a meaningless way, everything shapes who you are, but you know, this is something that would stick in your head as a little boy though. This is not forgettable. And you've shown that. You remember these very well. Oh, yeah. I probably remember these dinosaurs attack cards in much greater detail than I remember most of my childhood. And also that's not necessarily just because they're graphic. Because I remember all those Return of the Jedi cards extremely well. And maybe it's partly also because of the collecting and coveting nature of them. Oh, yeah, for sure. I do think that that's part of it. That's also why, like, I've already referenced it a few times, but Magic the Gathering cards

are also the same thing. Like, they're really burned into my brain, some of the early ones. And I think that is part of the collecting nature of it. Yeah. And also a certain kind of the collecting nature of it. Yeah. And also a certain kind of repetitiveness of it, that when you're collecting something, you're going through the collection a few times to be like, ah, I finally got number 37, right?

Or, you know, ooh, I finally got that rare card I was looking for. Let me place it in the binder with the rest of the collection. I enjoy those cards. Thanks, Brady. And of course, thanks to Bob Hefner for his very thorough freebooting of all of these cards. Although I don't see this, there's not any ads on here. So perhaps this is just regular old copyright infringement. But somehow I don't imagine whoever produced all these cards is really trying to track down their copyright and intellectual property ownership of them.

It was Topps. I mean, Topps are still around, aren't they? In all seriousness, if any of the listeners out there do have any information of the story about how on earth these things came to be, I would really love to know that because it just seems like such a strange thing to exist in the world. Can I just say, I'm genuinely grateful to Bob for the website he's created, archiving all the dinosaurs attack trading cards. But I do feel like he's missed a trick with his URL. If you're going to create the world's number one destination for

dinosaurs attack trading cards aficionados, it feels like you should have an appropriate web domain. So I went along to Hover.com. Yes, Hover are the sponsor of today's episode. And I had a look at what's available. DinosaursAttack.pictures. DinosaursAttack.gallery. Both good options, fairly priced, easy to buy in just a few clicks. But then I saw it.

DinosaursAttack.cards. Available. Too good to be true. In fact, so good that I snaffled the domain all for myself. I kid you not, within 10 seconds, it was mine. It was so easy. And then in another couple of seconds, I had it forwarding to Bob's great page. You could do that with any domain you register as well. If you haven't got a website ready yet, you can just forward it off to something else so it's not completely dormant. Go along dinosaursattack.cards right now and Hover will deliver you to Bob's fantastic and gruesome collection of cards. Now if you have a website now or maybe you're thinking of launching one in the future, you should be going to Hover and registering the best possible names. Don't get scooped. Hover's a really great,

simple service. It's a clean website that makes registering domains, well, it actually makes it a bit of a pleasure. Hello Internet listeners can get 10% off their first purchase by going to hover.com slash hi. Seriously, folks, I know this is like a sponsorship message, but Hover's a really great service. I use it personally all the time and I recommend it to my family and friends. You can get 10% off that first purchase, hover.com slash hi. Our thanks to them for supporting the episode. I've been contacted by a lot of people who've been travelling to Adelaide. I am becoming a little bit concerned about the number of people who seem to be making Adelaide a destination now so they can go to the Mighty Black Stump for a hot stopper.

Why are you concerned? That's awesome. There seems to be quite a few people who are adding it to their itinerary. I mean, it's a hello internet pilgrimage site, Brady. I don't understand what would be concerning about that. I mean, I'm beginning to feel like a real player on the South Australian tourism scene. I enjoy that's where your mind goes, whereas my mind feels like, oh, this is great. We're at step one and a half of a cult religion here, right? So,

we're going at this from different angles, but- They'll be surveying people at the airport. Why have you come to South Australia? It'll be the wineries, the peanut pound, the beaches, hot stoppers at the Mighty Black Stump. Right. Anyway, supplies have recently run out. Oh, no. So I was being contacted by people who in some cases had travelled thousands of miles and then found

that either Black Stump Espresso was either shut or had run out of hot stoppers. But I have sent them another restock. So hopefully by now or very soon, there will be more available. Make your way to the mighty Black Stump. Pack well for that long pilgrimage. But we make no guarantees as to availability or the trading hours of Black Stump Espresso. They are in no way officially affiliated with Hello Internet. Make no guarantees as to availability or the trading hours of Black Swan Espresso. They are in no way officially affiliated with Hello Internet.

And the randomness of if you can get them or not, it's like a lesson in life that's part of the pilgrimage. Yeah, it's the whimsy. It's the whimsy. Sometimes you travel literally around the world and you get nothing. So speaking of people who travel around the world, my friend who is a airline pilot recently came to visit me. We were driving around. So I said to him, oh, I've got something for you to listen to.

And I played him some sections of the podcast where we talked about your recent flying dramas, you know, Conspiracy, The Near Crash, all that sort of stuff. He had a listen and he basically thinks the whole reason for the plane pulling up was pretty much what we surmised. It was just going a bit too fast and doing that fly around was very routine. Like any pilot, he's just straight away, oh, this is routine. This is nothing. They would never concede that something was extraordinary. I'm sure he watches, but he suddenly land on the Hudson and says, oh, routine. I could have done

that. Is this a property of pilots? I mean, in some ways, that's a very reassuring property to have, that they feel like it's all routine and normal. Yeah, they would never concede anything is extraordinary or surprising to them. But the other thing that I was interested to get his comment on was the talk about why pilots come on and introduce themselves, because he does this. He listened to us talk about this theory that it was about building rapport between the pilots and the passengers, which he dismissed out of hand as we did. Right.

But he said the reason they do it is just the airlines do market research all the time. And one of the things people like is when the pilot comes on and talks to them. People just like it. And I can see that. It's part of the ritual of a flight, isn't it? There's, you know, like whoever drinks a Bloody Mary in real life, no one. And yet it's like one of the only drinks you can get on a plane because it's part of what you do on a plane. Like there are certain things that are part of the airline

experience. And I think the pilot coming on and talking to you just must be one of them. That makes me sad. that's just people ruining everything oh oh i love it when this happens oh great thank you for filling that out on the feedback survey so that now i have to listen to this all the time yeah as always with brady stories there are several things that i love about them first question your pilot friend does he have the pilot voice does he have the you know the calm hi this is flight whatever yep calm deep for a male pilot right yeah he's like very cliche pilot and like my friends and i for years he doesn't like this but he's learned to accept it we always jokingly will call him wharf he's just like a wharf in star trek

really serious all the time but You know how Worf's like always so serious. But he thinks he's a bit of a joker. And he is a bit of a joker. But he thinks he's Mr. Fun Time. He doesn't realize he is like the really sensible dude. Which is good. That's what you want in a pilot. He's the organized, sensible dude. But he doesn't think he is. But that can make a person much more funny sometimes when they think they're the funny one and they're not. So, the second thing here is I love the image of you, Brady. You're out with a friend, you're driving and you say, hey, let's listen to the podcast that I'm on. And you're playing a section of your own podcast to someone else to listen to. I'm wondering how often that happens. It feels

like a thing Brady might do a lot. Very rare. Okay. Very, very rare. I'll take your word for that. Except maybe sometimes for my wife, might do a lot very rare okay very very rare i'll take your word for that except maybe sometimes for my wife but even that's very rare now as well yeah so my understanding is that often hasn't gone very well but he's like genuinely interested in my work and i'm really interested in his work like we'll spend hours talking about each other's work so he quite appreciated actually hearing an example of what the podcast sounded like because he knows it's part of my job and like he's got you know he, he's a very analytical guy. So, he was interested to hear what the podcast actually sounds like. Do you think you could be a pilot, Brady?

Yes. But I think I would find it very boring. Okay. So, it's not a job that would call to you. You can't imagine an alternate universe, Brady, who would be an airplane pilot? No, it's too much time of hours and hours of boredom. You would be a good pilot because the sort of people who want to be a pilot are the sort of people who want to earn a good, nice income, but not work very much. Oh, yeah. That's why it was one of my top contenders for jobs as an adult i know i've mentioned that before on the podcast but for sure seeing my mom as a flight attendant and like the flexibility that she had with her schedule yeah and then being exposed to that world a lot has like sweet the pilot looks like the optimal solution to this like pretty decent money also don't have to work a bunch what more could a

human want out of life than that whereas i'm not like that i need to work a bit more okay i should rephrase that what more could almost all humans want out of life nothing more than that that would be great then i found out it was a lot of work to become a pilot and i was like oh i'm not climbing that hill there's one more factor that i want which is not too difficult to acquire that's what I'm looking for in a job. It's not very hard. I also get paid a lot and I don't have to do it much. Who knew that YouTube was coming for you? Oh man, thank you, YouTube.

You're the best. Speaking of YouTube, we discussed last time YouTube's removal of annotations, which I will hashtag never forget. It really is. It's one of the great tragedies in YouTube history. But there's a little final annoyance for me that was waiting with this because I mentioned I had to go back through all of my videos and try to fix everything that was going to be broken because of annotations. And during that process, I forgot that for a brief period of time earlier in my career, I had the brilliant idea of uploading footnote videos to the main video as unlisted.

So every once in a while, there'd be some little thing that I felt was important to mention but i didn't want to put it in the main video so i'd make these little adjacent things i don't know why i thought this was a good idea for a little while but i did it for two videos and here we are four years later it came back to haunt me because when i was going through these annotations i realized oh no i have five footnote videos that are invisible on the channel. And now that annotations are gone, what do I do with them? No one will ever find them. You can't click on the buttons to see what they are. And I didn't want the work of past me to have been for nothing, right? Like I want to build things that last, Brady. And so I didn't want those videos to go away. I don't yet see the problem. This seems like an easy fix to me.

Well, here's the thing. I wanted to make them public, but I wanted to do it in a quiet way. So I thought I had the correct solution to this, which is I went into YouTube, I went into all their little advanced settings, and there's the box that you can uncheck, which says, Hey, I'm going to make this video public, but please don't bother my subscribers with it. Don't put it in the subscription feed. Don't send them an email. Don't do anything. So I went through, I unchecked all of these boxes and in the back of my mind, I had a suspicion, which was, I don't think this is going to work the way i think it's going to work i think something's going to go wrong why don't i wait until i have an actual real video to put up so that i can hopefully distract from this problem in case there is one and sure enough the day came i made those old videos public and i was trying to stage them out over time. And YouTube was notifying and recommending this to all of my subscribers for like the first hour it was up. It was incredibly frustrating. It's like, I felt like I'd been kicked twice. Like, God damn it, YouTube, you took away the annotations. So now I'm going to make these old hidden videos public. is public, but please don't bother people with four-year-old little footnotes that aren't main

things. And now all of those videos have hundreds of thousands of views on them because YouTube was pushing them on my subscribers. So it's like one final pain point from YouTube. Like, God damn it, this button didn't work the way I wanted it to work. I thought it would be nice and silent. And the other thing that kills me is those videos now show up in my timeline as though I uploaded them last week. I even went, there's a setting in the back end of YouTube which allows you to like manually specify what they call a recording date. And I thought, oh, maybe this is the thing. I can go in here and say, these videos are from four years ago. They're not from now.

And now, of course, that doesn't fix it. So it's like, I feel like I have this scar on my channel left over from the deletion of annotations, which is now five 30-second videos. I don't see why you made them public. What did you want me to do, Brady? Well, I would have gone to the main video, the video the mothership the mothership and just where you used to have the annotation to take people off to the footnote video put a card there so the card pops up in the top right saying see annotation now right because you can card to an unlisted video

and i would have gone high up in the description and said here are the annotations for the video and listed the links and i would have gone into the and said, here are the annotations for the video and listed the links. And I would have gone into the comments and said, here are the annotations for this video, one, two, and three. Here are the links. Pinned that as the top comment. That would have given three different ways for people to get to those annotations from the source video, which are all prominent enough for what is already an old video and for annotation videos that aren't that important. And you would have solved the problem without the obvious other problems that were inevitably going to happen. Okay. You say inevitably, I was trusting in YouTube system. That was my problem. Well, what's wrong with my solution anyway?

You would have kept them hidden that way and they wouldn't have appeared on the channel. You know what part of the problem is? Part of the problem is I'd totally forgotten that these videos existed. And the fact that they were different from all of the other footnote videos, this inconsistency, Brady, it was a thorn in my brain as soon as I discovered them. It would have bothered me until the end of time to not have made them part of the channel. And I figured I only had one shot to do it where if something went wrong, at least was understandable, which was after the annotation delete. But why didn't this bother you before? It didn't bother you when you made them.

It didn't bother me before because I totally forgotten that past me had ever done this. I didn't even remember these videos existed. But why didn't it bother you when you made them? Like when you made them, they weren't visible on the channel. This was the case when they were brand new to you. And the week they came out, this was the case that they couldn't be seen on the main channel. That is 100% true. But this was past me, foolishly, trying some idea that actually wasn't a really good idea because nobody ever clicked on those videos. The click through rates for them was very small. And it felt like there's no point in doing the footnote videos at all if this few people see them, which I think is why I stopped. And for whatever reason,

Past Me didn't think to make them unlisted at a time when they would have fit much more in the timeline. So I understand you have these alternate solutions, which would have been totally reasonable. But you know me, Brady. I cannot abide by pointless inconsistency. So I wanted to have these videos be public on the channel like all the others were. Now I have to live with these five on my timeline out of order forever. It's like YouTube is personally punishing me for hashtag never forgetting about annotation deletion. I don't see why you are unwilling to have such unimportant videos be invisible.

It's consistency, Brady. It's consistency. That's what I wanted. And again, my real problem here, my real problem, is that I trusted that by unchecking the button, don't notify people about these videos. YouTube wouldn't actually notify people about these videos and would not clog up their recommendation screen with them. But so now I don't even know what the point of that button is. Like, why is this button here? Presumably they didn't go to subscribers in

a subscriber feed. They just started turning up in recommendations because you can't turn that off. That's where people started seeing it, presumably. They just went high into people's recommendation list because you're highly recommended. I think that's true. But I did see on some of the YouTube comments that people were saying they got notifications about it. This is where you always wonder, like, what's going on with YouTube? And there's the question of, did people get notifications? Did they not get notifications?

Are people confusing stuff showing up on the home screen with notification yeah like this is one thing where i do have sympathy for youtube because we all complain about subscription boxes and the way videos are recommended but they also have urban myths around what happens that are impossible to get rid of and one of those is when you have a channel where there's a lot of people, you're always going to have people reporting some problem. And then you have to wonder about what the veracity of that is. I don't know, but I did see enough comments from people saying they got a notification about that new video. And so I just, I have some doubts about how well that system

worked. I think there are two things going on here. What? I think because just the nature of your channel, you're being highly recommended prominently. So you're getting a lot of clicks on recommended videos. And I also think just because of the nature of the people who are super fans of you, I bet a lot of them have got ways to be notified of new videos of yours existing that are like hacks and workarounds and aren't conventional ways of being notified and i think they're confusing that with just bog standard dumb user subscription notifications possibly like i bet there are like rss ways to find out when the channel you like has a new video or something that is a bit of a hack and that would still let people know when anything new appeared in your list of videos. That is possible. I have one other really irksome complaint that I'm going to put in under here while I'm complaining about

small things. But under YouTube wants to be TV corner, there was a thing I discovered in uploading the most recent video, which I'm really annoyed at. But it's another feature that YouTube has taken away. And you no longer have the ability to link to a video at a specific time anywhere in the YouTube system. So, for example, let's say at an end card, like this has come up with the podcast a couple of times. Like when I made that video about thinking about attention, like that walking vlog on my second channel, I wanted to put a card at the end of that, which linked to the hello internet episode at the particular time that that conversation took place. It's like,

nope, you can't link to a specific time in an end card. And I thought, okay, well, they made end cards. They just haven't put that in. But I discovered by playing around with the most recent upload, there is nowhere on YouTube that will allow you to link to the video at a particular time that works for someone to click on it. So you used to be able to, in a playlist, specify the time a video should start in the playlist. Nope, that's been totally removed. You can't do that anymore. And I even found out that they've gone in and if you copy paste a URL, which has the time code in it, and you put that link in the description of your video, when a user clicks on that link, it strips out the time code and just starts you at

the beginning it's inferior it's again it's like anything that's interesting that would allow creators to play with the internetty format of the videos has been removed and this this one is like i can't even put it in the description of a video that that's infuriating. So as far as I can tell, the only timestamp thing that works now on YouTube is when people leave a comment on the video that says, ha ha ha, I really liked the joke at 3.04. And someone can click on that and then it will jump to that section in the video. But that seems to be it. Like if you want to link to someone's lecture on YouTube and say, oh, the interesting part is 20 minutes in and have a link that works, that has been completely removed as far as I can tell, which is extra dumb because you can

send someone a link, you know, that they can click on an iMessage that will open the video at that time, but you can't do it on YouTube anywhere as far as I can tell. Incredibly frustrating. Why do you think they've done that? Well, here's the thing. With any of these little decisions, you can come up with a whole bunch of speculation about why, but I just view it as this continual narrowing of possibility that everywhere creators used to have flexibility they're bringing in the gates and it feels very much to me like youtube is optimizing for watching youtube on an apple tv that's like the idea like they don't want to have a tv experience be a thing where a video starts at a particular time they just want to have a TV experience be a thing where a video starts at a particular time. They just want

to have the videos start at the beginning and play to the end and they're taking all of it in. And the thing that really kills me is by putting a link in a description with a timecode in it, it means they had to go in and tell the YouTube system to manually strip out the starting time code when you click that link. Like that's a positive thing they've done as opposed to everything else where they're simply removing features. So you think it's optimizing for kind of a cross-platform compatibility on YouTube? I think that's what it is. That they basically want it to be like Netflix everywhere. That you're just watching videos and the videos roll into next videos and anything that could potentially be clever or that could be nonlinear is slowly being removed. Which, of course, is extra funny because Netflix just did Bandersnatch.

Yeah. Cool. Interesting. Yet another place where our creativity is narrowed by YouTube. Thanks, YouTube. Hey, while we're whinging about media platforms. Oh, yeah. It suddenly occurs to me that I think it's outrageous that Twitter allows people to see the list of people who follow you.

Okay, wait, can you clarify what the complaint is here? I'm a little confused. So if you go to my Twitter profile, it's like, who are all the people who follow Numberphile? You click on it and there's the list of them all. Oh. Because I was reading about people who are like launching new YouTube channels and trying to promote things. And they were saying, oh, yeah, the best thing to do is go to someone on Twitter who's got lots of followers who are in your area.

Get all of those names and tweet them all and message them all because you know they've got like a, you know, predilection for that area. And suddenly it occurred to me, what an incredible invasion of privacy. That's really interesting. I never thought of that before. If I was launching a channel about, you know, dinosaurs, I would go to the leading dinosaur expert on Twitter, look at all the people who follow them and just try and contact all those people and say, you should check out my dinosaur channel. Okay. So I have to ask you, can you, when you're looking at the followers of someone else, can you then filter that down to just see

who the verified followers are of someone else? I'm kind of wondering, can you not only see the list, but also pick out like the high quality people who are following them? I'm just kind of wondering, can you not only see the list, but also pick out like the high quality people who are following them? I'm just kind of curious, but I never really thought about that because I've never, like, you don't have any reason to click on who was following this person. It's such an insidious thing to do that. It's such a naughty thing to do that it makes me a bit mad that people do it. But I think you have a point point i think you are correct that it's it's almost like a kind of free email subscriber list access for other people that information should be private by default yeah i mean i've never particularly liked that twitter does a lot of that facebooky feeling

stuff where if you look at someone's profile, at least I'm presuming they still do it, it'll show you like, oh, the people you follow who follow this person. Yeah. Or being able to see the list of people that someone follows. I think it's bad. It isn't private because Twitter is this public platform. Like I think it's the most interesting thing and the most useful thing about Twitter is its public nature between people and the

semi-connectedness of a mutual follow between people is interesting and one of the most valuable parts of Twitter. But I think it's a little uncomfortable that you can see the social graph so clearly exposed. But I never thought about it on the other end as well, that just in terms of the pure follower numbers, that's all visible. I would love it if Twitter had some kind of semi-private mode where I don't have the account be private. So it's totally locked down and basically a useless Twitter account. But it would be good to be able to say, like, don't let people see who all my followers are and don't let people see who I'm following. But if I'm following someone, that person should still be able to see that I follow them. If you see what I mean,

like still allowing that connection. The world is a scummy place when people are scraping and promoting to the followers of other people on Twitter. That feels really gross. Yeah. It's poor form. The people who do it know it's poor form too, but you know. It is poor form. That's an excellent way to put it, Brady. Poor form. It's the desperate, scummy world we live in, hey? At least there aren't dinosaurs attacking though. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Dashlane. I don't know about you, but I have a lot of passwords that I need to remember.

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So Brady, you're again back from your world travels. A little while ago now, I came back with an awful cold that I've still got, in case you hadn't noticed. See, Brady, I don't think you need to tell people when you have a cold on a podcast. Even though all podcasters seem to feel the need to do this. Because I bet, until this moment, because of very careful editing, you have snuck past many of the listeners even recognizing that you have a little bit of Brady cold voice. Why draw attention to it? I think you can sneak under the radar sometimes. I mean, you can edit out coughs and sniffles, but you can't edit out the baseline fact that you're just very nasal.

I'm willing to bet a significant number of viewers did not pick up on it until now. That's my bet. Leave a comment in the Reddit and Brady will let me know how that went. I blew it. I blew it, Gray. I was doing so well. So I've been to Paris, France, and Moscow, Russia recently. What did you think of Paris? I love Paris. And I know you don't. and this is a bone of contention between us. Okay, right. I couldn't remember if you're one of these people who are insane and love Paris, and I just wanted to make that clear, because yeah, I think it's a total disgusting cesspool.

But anyway, tell me about Paris. I love it. I love it. So, this year has been declared the International year of the periodic table by UNESCO. Is it an anniversary? Yes, it's the 150th anniversary of Mendeleev's first publication of it. Huh, okay. I can't decide if that feels like it's a long time or it's a short time. I'm even going to claim a 1.7% ownership of this year being the international year of the periodic table. Okay.

That's my arbitrary number of credit that I'm going to take for it. All right. And why is that? Because as far as I can tell, the main reason it happened was because Sir Martin Polyakov, who I make my chemistry videos with, all about the periodic table, thought of it and suggested it to some influential people, who then went on to recommend it further to UNESCO and got it to happen. So, like, the kernel of the idea came from him, it seems, and I have some email proof of that. And I don't think he would have suggested it if he didn't make chemistry videos with me and became Mr. Periodic Table. I think that's fair.

I think that's fair. Obviously, it's just an arbitrary number that you picked there. But I think it is fair to say that you deserve a non-zero amount of credit for this happening. Yeah, non-zero. So, I don't know, maybe 1.7 is high. Maybe it's low. You decide. But anyway, now that I've built myself up, allow me to tear myself down.

Oh, great. Because going to these events was incredibly humbling for me. And I mean it in the true sense of the word humbled. Okay. I was properly humbled on these trips. Because, I mean, the last big trip I did that was publicly facing was thinker con right right in alabama and because it was a very self-selecting audience and everyone who'd come there had come there to see educational youtubers right like you feel like a bit of a celebrity

don't you gray like loads of people recognize you and want to say hello and take a picture. You get this overinflated sense of like importance, like, oh, people know who I am. People like what I make. They associate it with me. They know that Numberphile is made by Brady. They know that Periodic Videos is made by Brady. They thank me for making it. And you come away with this like glow, right? And this inflated ego. Is that what happens when one visits an event like that? How interesting. There is some of that, of course. Yeah. That's why things like VidCon were invented, weren't they? So that non-celebrities could feel like celebrities.

I know, of course. I agree. 100%. That's my experience too. Anyway, whether you like the attention or not, you certainly come away with a sense that people are familiar with who I am and what I make. Yeah. It's ground zero for the density of people who know and appreciate your work is going to be nowhere higher on earth than at an event like ThinkerCon. Exactly. And don't get me wrong, you know, I walk the streets of London on a regular basis and not a single person knows who I am. So, I don't think I'm famous. Right.

But I feel like, oh, if I go to somewhere like that, people know who I am and what I do. In the right circles, you're an important, notable person. So, I thought going to the launch of the International Year of the Periodic Table, being the guy who like for the last 10 years has made the videos with Sir Martin Polyakov about the periodic table in chemistry. And it was going to be full of chemistry teachers and students and people from the world of chemistry. I thought, oh, I'm sure someone will come up to me and, you know, say good work. Maybe not, maybe not, maybe so. So I went to this event with Martin, you know, there was lectures and talks,

but there was also a big hole full of periodic displays and members of the public were coming. And Martin, for people who don't know, he's this chemistry professor I work with who's got this big frizzy head of hair and he's very distinctive looking. And he's obviously been in hundreds of videos with me that have been watched, you know,

a couple of hundred million times. Martin was a superstar. Like he could not move. Like there were crowds were forming, queues were forming. He must've been in a thousand photos and selfies, which is funny because he's absolutely terrible at them and still doesn't know where to look. So you get these weird pictures with him. He was like rockstar, absolute rockstar. Right. I was seriously like that guy that carries the nuclear football for the president. I was nothing except the guy that had to take all the photos. Like, oh, can you take a picture of us? Because I was always standing with him. Can you take a picture of us? I was taking all the photos and that. And like, Martin, what an amazing thing you've created. What a fantastic idea you had. Oh,

it must be so much work that you've done over the years making all those videos. I'm literally standing there. Like I'm literally standing there having given my life to make these videos. Spent God knows how many hours up until midnight. Not to take any credit away from Martin. He works hard on it too. He also has been responsible for a lot of the funding and his knowledge and just like charisma are the reason the videos are successful. I don't forget that. But gosh, it was funny. Like the contrast to be so absolutely anonymous. Sometimes Martin would remember to say, oh, see that guy standing there? Like, you know, he made them all. When people would say,

how did you have the idea? If I'm standing next to him, he's learned not to say it was his idea because I call him on it. So, he'll say, it was that guy there. And then they'll just look at me and go, hmm. I feel like I'm his like assistant, like his camera assistant that just carries his equipment and points the camera at what he tells me to point the camera. It was such a contrast. It brought me so back down to earth. That's brutal. In my head, the mental picture you're painting is that you're a camera donkey.

You're there to be holding the things. I think they think I'm one of his chemistry students who can operate a camera. The best thing was I had a whole day of it. It's fine. You know, it's life. It's a good life lesson for me. And then at the end of the day, I checked my email and I had this email, which just like was like the cherry on top of the cake.

It said, dear Brady, I have greatly enjoyed watching a number of your videos over the last couple of years. They are highly entertaining. This year, I'll be running, and it's this science festival this person's running. I'll be running the science festival. Bearing in mind, he's just called me highly entertaining. Right. We are looking for entertaining and informative speakers to come and do some kind of show, talk, presentation in our local town hall.

And I'm thinking, oh, here we go. This is where, you know. You even have experience with this kind of thing. Yeah. So, this year's dates are blank, blank, blank. Saturday would probably be the main day for events. All right. I'm bracing myself.

I've already approached Professor Polyakov, but alas, it looks like he will not be available in September. Fair enough. He's a busy man. Now I'm feeling a bit like second he will not be available in September. Fair enough. He's a busy man. Now I'm feeling a bit like second place Charlie. Right, of course. All right. Let's hear what you've got to say. Next sentence.

I wondered if you might be able to suggest some other scientists who might fit the bill. Any help or advice you could provide would be greatly appreciated. Best regards. That's brutal it's extra brutal because of the psychological setup that you feel like you're going to be number two like oh and then no you're not even number two not even that not even that i don't want to be immodest on your behalf brady but this story is also extra funny to me knowing that whatever event this is if you were to but tweet that you were going to this thing they would have a packed house right so i have to say that like i am genuinely surprised that you were the camera mule at this event do you think it was just that the attendees were, say, out of the

demographic of periodic table viewers? I'm just curious if you have a theory as to why. Yeah, maybe they were probably only light viewers for a start. They weren't like super fans. And I guess on periodic videos, I'm a lot more anonymous, I guess. My face doesn't appear on screen. But surely people know someone's filming this and they can hear you ask questions. Do they think about that? Maybe they just think it's just, you know, like it's just this court of people around Sir Martin who does as the great knight instructs. And I just, it was my day on the camera that day. Oh, maybe.

Like I said, it was humbling and it's good to be humbled. Right, especially after the high of Huntsville. I did do a hot drop with Sir Martin while I was in Paris, which is now we've dubbed a la chaldoplank. A what? I had a bit of help from some French-speaking friend. That's the ideal name for a hot drop. Chald, I think, means hot, and plank means stash.

The word drop was inappropriate, I was told, so I was told to go with Le Chauderplank. So we did a Le Chauderplank at the Eiffel Tower and a hotel called the Tim Hotel. Le Chauderplank. That's kind of fun to say. Chauderplank. I mean, I presume that pronunciation is perfect.

I'll tell you what i like about paris though i want to put this on a list a new list i want to create and that is a list of things that are so much like the movies that they don't seem real and that is the sound of french ambulance sirens like they have this sort of comical sound about them, French ambulances, and like even their emergency services that aren't like any other, you know, the countries I'm used to being in, like England and the US and Australia. And it always reminds me of being in a movie when a French ambulance goes past. I feel like I think I can hear it in my head, but I'm not 100% sure. Like American police cars, those big black and white ones,

so like American money, although I've gotten used to American money now, but the first time that big black and white ones. American money, although I've gotten used to American money now, but the first time that you ever have to deal with American money, you feel like you're in a movie. Yellow taxis. Right. Yeah. I mean, again, I put the entirety of the city of New York in this category. That's where I always have the feeling the strongest. Yeah. Lots of things in London too. All the London stuff, the magic has completely worn off for me. I don't have that movie feeling but new york always has that really strongly especially if say you're walking by the ghostbusters fire station it's like oh that always really throws me every like i happen to have reason to be around that area a bunch and every time i walk past the ghostbusters fire

station it's like wait did i fall through a wormhole into movie lands like do i have a ticket to the last action hero here it's it's always very disorienting so after paris came moscow and i did go to russia you know a year or two ago but this time i got to spend more time in moscow which was good but i did have some like russia problems this time though okay and this was being like a media person a camera person in a country where there's, you know, different attitudes to that. Do you mean like scary Russia problems? Well, not scary, just more unfriendly towards the idea of media.

It first exposed itself as we were being driven to a place where we were just going to go and have some meetings and we were thinking maybe we'll do some videoing there. Right. And on the way, one of the minders said oh they don't want brady to film anything they've been googling and they found his name associated with a bunch of bbc stuff because obviously i worked for the bbc for seven years right they'd been googling me they thought i was like i don't know did they think i was like an undercover bbc thing but suddenly i wasn't martin's camera donkey anymore i I was like a BBC journalist. Right. But not only a BBC journalist, maybe a spy.

No, who knows? So it was like, oh, is this going to be a problem? It turns out where we were going, I didn't want to film there anyway, because it was dull as dishwater. But it was like, hmm, is this going to be a problem? That felt very high school there, Brady. I didn't want to film your thing anyway. It was funny because a lot of these things that we were going to kind of were things Martin wanted me to film. And it's quite often Martin wants me to film things that he thinks are interesting. And I have to tell him, this isn't interesting. We shouldn't be doing a video about this. And this was like my get out of jail card. We went to this place and Martin was

like trying to explain to them I didn't work for the BBCbc that's fine martin i'll check my camera and let's not create a scene like i don't know that's great so you can play it like you're not disagreeing with him about the interestingness of this boring thing and it's just oh the russians won't let me film here otherwise this would be great this episode of hello internet is brought to you by CuriosityStream, a subscription streaming service that offers over 2,000 documentaries and nonfiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers. You can get access to all of their documentaries and use the promo code hellointernet. CuriosityStream is the world's first streaming service addressing everyone's lifelong quest to learn, explore, and understand. Their content spans nature, history, technology, society, lifestyle, and it's available across almost every platform you can imagine. And of course, because this is the internet, it's available worldwide. If you want to learn about it, they probably have a video about it.

Say, for example, you've recently rekindled your interest in dinosaurs. Well, the rise and the fall of the T-Rex is waiting on CuriosityStream for you. So once again, for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and nonfiction series, and for our listeners, go to curiositystream.com slash hellointernet and enter promo code hellointernet to get your first 30 days of membership free. Use that URL, let CuriosityStream know that you came from Hello Internet, and go watch some interesting documentaries. The next event we went to was the big launch event in Moscow for the periodic table year,

because they had the event in Paris, and they had like a mirror event in Moscow, because the Russians are very involved in the celebration and the event for obvious reasons because of men to life and stuff so it was being held in this big lovely building that had this great big auditorium and in a venue and we got there early so we were going through this side entrance that we were told to go through because the public entrance wasn't open yet there was a side entrance for people involved in organizing the event and the stands and things like that. And Martin was like the guest of honor. He was one of the big, big speakers.

So he was a big deal. And the problem was the prime minister of Russia was also doing a talk at this event, which suddenly made it like a big deal. Security was jacked up to the max and things like that. Everything was high alert because the prime minister was coming. All the car parks were closed and there was metal detectors and stuff like that and we went to this side entrance and our name wasn't on the list that they had at the side entrance because we weren't one of the exhibitors i don't know where our name was but martin's name

wasn't there let alone mine so like they put us to one side which was really funny because we also had all these minders and important people with us who were like incredibly embarrassed because sir martin couldn't come in and he had to like sit in this chair and wait while the people with earpieces and that were trying to figure out who was what and where this list is and who this person was i was fine with it i was just like i thought it was funny with it. I was just like, I thought it was funny. But it got even funnier because the next person that tried to come in the door was Yuri Oganessian, who is the guy who just had an element on the periodic table named after him. He was the other super VIP guest. You know, element 118 has been named after this man.

He's the only man alive with an element named after him. Oh, wow. And so he turns up at the door and says his name. And again, they're like, your name's not on the list. At which point I leaned over and said to Martin, his name's on the periodic table. Is that not enough to get you in? He could just point at a periodic table and say, see that there? That's me. This is all about me. Because he's an old Russian guy. he just said, bugger this, and just walked in.

That's also really good. But I like the idea of carrying around a periodic table as ID. Yeah, it's my business card. Recognize this? Yeah. That's me. So anyway, we got in, but then the writing was on the wall now. I was like, okay, this is an interesting environment. A couple of times while I was in there, people came up to me and said, do you work the media i was like no no i'm here with the professor i make these youtube videos okay and then about 10 20 minutes before the big event started i went into like the main auditorium where martin was going to do his speech and i was going to film the event and stuff

and i i hovered close to this back door because I figured I'll shoot it from the back. You know, I want to be out of the way. My camera's got a good zoom. And this burly security guy says, who are you? Do you work for the media? And he didn't speak very good English. And I said, no, no, I don't work for the media. I'm with a professor, YouTube. I'm an invited guest.

You know, I was like a proper guest. I was sent invitations, formal invitations to get my visa and everything. I was like properly VIP. He says, come with me and makes me leave like the auditorium. And then all of a sudden I find myself off to the side in this room that I didn't even know existed. That is just full of journalists. Like there must have been 50 Russian journalists there. And they were penned in this room outside the main auditorium where they weren't allowed to go. And they were watching

everything that was going inside via screens. And they were being like, I don't know, they were being monitored and, you know, herded into this one place where they could watch when the prime minister came in and watch it on TV, but not be in the room. And there were all these minders and they all suddenly all came up to me trying to figure out who I was, this guy with a camera. And I was like, no, no, no, I'm not a journalist. I'm not from the media. I'm here making this video for the event. I'm a guest of the event, you know, and I couldn't get this across to them. Russia is a place where if you're not being shown the respect you think you deserve, you kind of have to play it right. Yeah. I mean, place where if you're not being shown the respect you think you deserve,

you kind of have to play it right. Yeah. I mean, this may be the first time I've ever heard you downplay the journalism part of your life. Usually it's like top card to come out, bam, journalist. Fiercely independent. I'm fiercely independent. Now I was just a lackey of Sir Martin filming chemistry. I've never heard you downplay journalism ever before but this feels like the correct situation in which to do that journalist i've never even heard the word i don't know what are you just don't don't google me and bbc so anyway i said look i need to go and get someone who speaks russian to talk to you guys here's my camera i'll leave my camera here with you i went quickly back in and got like our mind. And I also got, and Sir Martin came out.

And they came out and this big discussion ensued and it was a big flurry. And these people, I don't know, they weren't having it. But I wasn't having it either. And they said, he has to wait in here until after the prime minister goes. And I said, look, if I'm not allowed to film the prime minister, that's fine, you know, you guys make the rules. But I'm not flying all the way to Moscow to come to this event about the launch of the periodic table at your invitation and then being locked out of the room.

So, I said, here, keep my camera. I won't film it. It's fine. The rules are the rules. But I'm going back in to watch because that's why I'm here. And you tell me when I can have my camera back. And when I can, I'll start filming again. I trust you with my camera.

There you go. In the end, I think they realized I wasn't going to stay in this pen with all the journalists. Right. So, I went back in and left my camera behind. And then like five minutes later, the woman who'd taken my camera comes back into the room where I'm just sitting in the auditorium now with my camera and says, here, here's your camera back. We've decided you can have it.

After all that. But then five minutes after that, a message comes back, but don't use your camera until after the Prime Minister's gone. I was like, in the end, but he went, the Prime Minister was there. He was there for five minutes and then left straight away. While he was there, there wasn't a single person in the auditorium who wasn't filming it on their phone. There were like thousands of people there.

Every single person was holding up their phone, the entirety of his speech. My camera was sitting down by my feet. I'll share a few other random thoughts I had about Moscow though, because this time I went and saw Moscow properly. Last time I didn't actually go to Moscow properly. This time I was based there. So I went and walked around the city and saw a lot more of it. Right. And my thoughts are, it certainly didn't feel controlled. Like, you know, you were talking

about this was a place where you could just, you know, just go anywhere. It was just like a big city full of tourists. And, you know, I went and had a McDonald's where I was sitting at a table looking at the Kremlin, like literally right next to the Kremlin. So it was like, you know. That feels like an American victory. To be fair, there is an obsession there with burgers and like American diners, like everywhere you go, there is like American style diners and burgers and hot dogs. Like there's like a crazy overcompensation towards American food since it came in, obviously, because there was almost nowhere you could eat that wasn't very Americanized. I mean, to be fair, American diners are awesome.

It came in handy. It actually came in handy when I did my one hot drop in Moscow as well, because I was nervous about doing a hot drop, you know, furtively dropping some mysterious device. Right. So, the only place I did do a hot drop in Moscow was in a Shake Shack. I left a couple in a pot plant at the Moscow Shake Shack. That doesn't quite feel as on brand with the place that you're visiting as your French hot drop, but you know, you got to do what you can.

I was playing it safe. I can understand that you wouldn't want to be hiding something outside the Kremlin. Ooh, here's a fun hot drop for people. I tell you what, the discussion I had in Paris with the Tim Hotel explaining why I wanted to leave hot stoppers in their reception was quite funny. But coming back to Moscow, the city exceeded my expectations for how much I liked it and how grand and interesting it was, except for Red Square, which was a bit of a disappointment but maybe that's because it's the one place i thought would be awesome but everywhere else i was really impressed by all the buildings and the scale of everything the subway is amazing

i'm aware i think it was built a lot by prisoners so maybe that's you know there are sensitivities involved but the subways are very grand. They're like banquet halls. They have these amazing ceilings and chandeliers. And it's like the subways are worth going into. We went to the subway with a local and he just took us to four or five of his favorite stops just to see how awesome they were. Yeah. We'd get out and look at them and think, wow, this is amazing. And then we jumped back on the train to another one he wanted to show us.

Moscow subway. Ridiculous. Those things do look amazing and the one thing that also is really striking about them is there's no advertising yes they're beautiful things i've seen this from a few countries around the world where they do like the one thing that's kind of interesting is you don't have this commercial influence in all of these places. And it creates it as just totally a different space. And I can't remember if it was Helsinki or another country where I went to where they did the same thing.

Like the underground stations were just like beautiful cathedrals. I don't know if I'm overplaying it because as someone who's used to and grumbles about all the advertising on the London Underground, which is everywhere and awful, I don't know if it's the change that makes it seem so much more striking, but I can't help but feel that is a better environment for people to be when they're commuting is to just be in a place that was architected to be beautiful rather than just a hole in the ground that is filled with advertisements trying to sell you stuff on your way to and from work.

I feel like that must have a positive mental impact to have these kinds of spaces as part of your day. And it's great for a government to be able to say like, no, no, no, this is not a commercial space. This is a space for the people passing through it. Another thing that was new information to me, and I feel stupid, like maybe I should have known this already. But one of the big things we did in association with the periodic table launch was we went and filmed with a company in Russia that's a huge diamond mining company. And they gave us access to basically all their awesome diamonds, which was brilliant.

You know, it was so interesting for these videos we made. And one of the things we did was they showed us all their uncut diamonds, how they come out of the ground. And in my head, diamonds out of the ground were always like quite boring lumps. And then, you know, the cutters and the polishers would go to town and turn them into these objects of beauty. I didn't realise that not all, but most, lots of diamonds come out of the ground as these quite beautiful octahedrons. Really? Like diamonds come out of the ground. Beautiful.

Oh, wow. I'm googling raw, uncut diamonds. Yeah. In my head, it was, yeah, like they're in coal that people have to carve away and turn into the beautiful thing. I mean, they are in kimberlite. Yeah, but they have a shape. Like they're much more diamond shaped than I ever would have guessed. Yeah, when you get them out of the rock, when you get them out of the kimberlite yeah but they have they have a shape like they're much more diamond shaped than i ever would have guessed yeah when you get them out of the rock when you get them out of the

kimberlite not all but loads of them have this beautiful geometric shape that is really surprising the reason they were called diamonds like it comes from uh you know i think it comes from ancient greek for like sort of unbreakable and the reason a diamond shape is called a diamond is because of the natural shape of these bits of carbon that came out of the ground that were called unbreakable. So, the shape diamond is called that shape because of unbreakable diamond comes out of the ground with a shape roughly that way. Just sent you another picture I took of some, just another handful of diamonds.

That is really striking. Before you sent me your took of some, just, you know, another handful of diamonds. That is really striking. Yeah. You know, before you sent me your photos, I was just Googling the raw images and it's beautiful enough that I'm seeing some places that just use raw uncut diamonds as part of the jewelry. Like they just mount it as is. And it's really quite a striking look the video will be up shortly i'll send it to you gray like some of the diamonds they showed us you occasionally like clouds you can sometimes get a cloud that oh that looks like a dog and

stuff you do get diamonds that look like weird things like skulls or soccer balls and things like that so they showed us a few and you do get lumpy diamonds that are just shapeless lumps that they then you know cut into shape like you do get the whole gamut but like the default is usually the octahedron or sometimes you get ones that are like quite perfect cubes as well i mean you know when you think about it it makes sense because they're crystals and they're forming as crystals but i didn't realize that crystal structure manifest itself so much on the the macro scale. Yeah, no, I never thought about it, but this is interesting.

This is a very interesting today I learned fact. I'm looking forward to seeing your video on it. I know, I was deciding what to call the video. I've never had a video that I've had so much trouble thinking of a title. It's one of my favorite scenes. We're doing a couple, but one of my favorite scenes in the video about the uncut diamonds is they bring out like a million dollars worth of uncut diamonds and Martin just like sticks his hands in,

like washes his hands in all these thousands of diamonds. So there's this image of like washing hands in diamonds. I'm thinking, do I somehow title it around that? And I was talking to my wife last night saying, what am I going to call this video? I haven't got a title. You can't call it, you know, washing your hands in diamonds because that's stupid and too long and stuff. says well what's the video about what's the main

thing and i said well the main thing about this video is uncut diamonds because the next video we're doing is going to be about how they cut and polish them and you know make them look amazing she said diamonds uncut and i felt stupid for not thinking of that. I'd been thinking for weeks about what do I call a video about uncut diamonds? And I never thought to call it diamonds uncut. Diamonds uncut is good, but it feels like it could be clickbaitier. Washing your hands with diamonds. I think that's clickbaitier, Brady. A, I don't like being too clickbaity. And B, isn't that too many words and too clumsy a phrase for a YouTube title?

I think it's on the outer edge, but I think that could work. I mean, look, Diamonds Uncut, that's the classy title. It's cool. Yeah. It's got a coolness about it. Classy title. But does YouTube reward classiness or does YouTube reward clickbait and then an outrageous thumbnail with someone making a shocked face at all the diamonds and then an arrow pointing to their hands being washed in diamonds. That's what YouTube wants. I don't know, Gray. I feel like in the last year, I don't know whether it's like a YouTube suicide pact or something, but I feel like I've really moved onto a point where I'm happy to not chase what YouTube rewards.

Like I've been guilty of chasing the clicks from time to time. I also think overall, I've probably been fit, had a fair bit of integrity on YouTube, but I feel more and more pulled towards the integrity side of it as it turns into more and more of a cesspit. I feel like, okay, you know, maybe it means the start of the end, but I'd rather go down with the ship and a bit of dignity than this eternal battle with arrows and shocked faces and bright colors.

I'm glad you feel that way, Brady, because there is an arms race coming soon to YouTube over this stuff. So I'm glad that you are content with your classy titles. We are going to have to make decisions along these lines, aren't we? Yeah, no, we totally are. How low do I go? Because if people don't watch, I will go out of business and then everything stops. I mean, this is an age-old debate, isn't it?

It just feels like it's becoming more and more of a something in our face. If I end up calling this video, washing your hands in diamonds, people will know that I totally sold out now. I will use that imagery and the idea in like social media, but I just don't know if I'm willing to have it as the title of the video. Well, the listeners will now know whether Brady cracked or not. Link in the show notes.