Hello Internet - H.I. #119: Hit The Holler Horn

Episode Date: February 28, 2019

Brady starts the show with sportsball corner before he and Grey discuss: Netflix spoiling shows for your own good, Amazon HQ2 twist, Brady's (potential) new office, and a YouTube Survey. Sponsors: Ting: a smarter, less expensive and more human approach to cell phone service - get $25 off your bill (or $25 off a new phone in the Ting Shop) at hi.ting.com Curiosity Stream: unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and nonfiction series - go to curiositystream.com/hellointernet and enter promo code hellointernet during signup process for a free 30-day trial 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 hello75 at checkout Listeners like YOU on Patreon: Show Notes: Discuss this episode on the reddit: Chelsea goalkeeper vs Manager Content Warning: Hospital Amazon HQ2 twist LowSpecGamer PewDiePie

Why were you late to the start of the show today, Brady? I was late to the start of the show today, Gray, because I was watching a game of football. Soccer! It was a game of soccer between Chelsea and Manchester City. A plus American accent there. Yes, thank you. You would blend right in with the natives. I would. So we'll jump straight into Sportsball Corner here. We'll jump straight in. It's a final. It's called the League Cup Final. It's one of a few finals that happen each year where you actually get to win a trophy. It's like a knockout trophy.

So two teams you probably have heard of were playing, as I said, Chelsea from London and Manchester City, two of the big famous teams. And just by way of background, this actually becomes relevant. The Chelsea manager, like the boss of the team, has been under a lot of pressure in the last few weeks because Chelsea hasn't been performing very well and everyone thinks he's going to get sacked. He's like a man in crisis.

His leadership has been questioned, right? Okay. Coming into this game. Everyone thought Manchester City were going to absolutely smash them because about a week or two, they beat them 6-0 in another game. So everyone thought Chelsea was going to get slaughtered in this game. So I was watching it before we start recording and it ends up the game is 0-0. So it goes to extra time, half an hour of extra time. Right. And I'm thinking, oh, fair enough. I've got to record with Gray.

I'm probably not going to see the very end of the game. And if it stays near nil after extra time, they'll have one of these penalty shootouts, which I know you're familiar with. You're familiar with a penalty shootout in soccer. Yes. Yes. All right. So I thought, I'll just put the game on my iPad.

And if it goes to a penalty shootout, I'll watch it while Gray and I are recording. That's no big deal. Just so I can see what's happening. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. How often are you watching sports while we're recording a show? Rarely. Rarely. Rarely is way more than the zero times I would have expected that answer. Actually, watching the game, I probably don't do, but I do keep an eye on scores like on Twitter and websites and stuff, if it's an important game. I can't believe that. Brady, you always have my 100% focus. It's very rare. It's very rare. Anyway, that's what I thought I was going to do.

Okay. And just as we were about to start recording in the last minute or two of the game, before the penalty shootout started, just when I was about to call you, they were still playing. It was still nil-nil. Something kicked off. Something was going on in the game. And I couldn't tell what it was. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. And this coach of Chelsea, the guy under pressure, just completely lost the plot. And he was storming all over the place, furious. And it looked like he was going to walk out of the stadium and the cameras were pointing in unusual directions and the players were doing unusual things. And I couldn't tell what was going on, but it looked weird. So that's when I said to you, Gray, I need to find out what's

going on and watch the end of this game. I couldn't figure out what was happening and it would be too distracting for me to have recorded. Right. That's when I presume that you cancelled the FaceTime call that I was about to accept. Yes. I would have got off the call anyway, because I had to find out what was going on. I went downstairs and I rewound my TV and it was something I have never, ever seen in a soccer game before. And I don't think I've ever seen in a sports game before. Certainly a very, very rare thing happened. So, I thought I'd share it with you. Well, now I need to know too. What was this tremendous event? All right. So, the goalkeeper for Chelsea, right? He started having all these like cramp and needing treatment every

few minutes. But I didn't think much of that because that's like a normal tactic. If you're like the underdog in a game and you want the game to go to penalties, sometimes you'll milk the clock by pretending to be injured. So I was thinking, oh, okay, he's just milking the clock. But then it began to look like, actually, maybe he is starting to get cramp. This game's gone 120 minutes. It's longer than a normal soccer game, and he's probably getting a bit tired. Other players get cramp in these situations. And another thing that often happens at the end of soccer games, if you still have a substitute player you're allowed to use, and you've got a goalkeeper who is a specialist at saving penalty kicks. Sometimes in the last minute or two of the game,

you'll substitute your goalkeeper and you'll put on your penalty specialist so that he will be the player in the penalty shootout and he will save the goals. Makes sense. Yeah. So the manager, the coach of Chelsea, obviously decides that this guy looks like he's injured and Chelsea do have a very good

penalty saving goalkeeper who was on the bench so they got him to take off his track suit and warm up and signal to do a substitution and the referees held up all their boards they do when there's a substitution and the new goalkeeper was waiting on the sideline to come on to replace the ailing smaller goalkeeper who they wanted to take off and this goalkeeper because it was a final and it was his big chance to you know be a hero in a penalty shootout he they wanted to take off. And this goalkeeper, because it was a final and it was his big chance to be a hero in a penalty shootout, he just refused to come off. He saw what the coach was doing and the referee was holding up the board saying substitution time, and he just waved it off and he wouldn't leave the field. The referee obviously didn't know what to do. The coach didn't know what to do. None of the players knew what to do. This guy was just refusing to do it. Okay. I didn't know that was a possibility.

Neither did I. But it suddenly made me realize, what are your options? You can't physically send on police to take him off, presumably. Well, I mean, look, I'm a very calm person, but this sort of situation, if I was the coach, presumably you've been hired to be in charge of this team. You're a man under fire as well. You're a man under intense pressure because of all this media speculation. Excellent additional factor that you're including here. But if you are the coach, these players, these are but pawns in your chess game well yeah and so i think i would go from zero to furious in about half a heartbeat if i was trying to move a piece on the chess board and the piece objected this is not your role here you don't get to decide that's not how this works you know your

description of it is that this is not a thing that has ever occurred before. But if I was the coach, I think I would immediately be getting security to pull this guy out of there. Like, it's not your call. You don't get to hold up this whole game because you don't want to go along with this decision that's not yours to make. Security, get him out of there. That's really interesting that you react that way, because when this coach, his name is Mauricio Sarri, he completely lost the plot. Like he was banging his chair and he almost walked out of the stadium and he was banging the wall and he was really angry. And I even thought he was maybe overreacting. So to hear you say that you would

be really angry, someone who cares not a jot about sport, sort of makes me think, oh yeah, he probably was a lot angrier than even I realised. Do you have more sympathy for him in this situation now? I do a bit now. At the end of the game, before the penalty kicks, the teams get together in a little huddle and have one last tactic talk before the shootout. The Chelsea players were having to restrain Sarri from this goalkeeper. He was still so mad at him. And they're just about to start this important procedure to decide who wins the cup. So the reason I said to you, I have to see this out now is I had to actually see what happened in the penalty shootout, because obviously maybe this goalkeeper was about to become a hero. And if this goalkeeper was the

hero and say, you know, did the important save that won them the trophy, well, it would cast everything in a completely different light. But what do you hope happened? Well, what I hope happened is security removes the goalkeeper. They put in the specialist, which is exactly what you want in any situation. It's what the whole concept of civilization hinges upon, is specialists. You can't do that, Gray. You can't make a substitution after the game has ended, though, and the final whistle had blown. You can't do that, Gray. You can't make a substitution after the game has ended though. And the final whistle had blown. You can't change the players then. That's against the rules. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. The original goalie was not removed. And what, the clock was just still running? The clock was still running.

And eventually the referee said, well, if he can't come off, there's nothing I can do. And the referee kind of nulled the request for a substitution and they played another two minutes and then he blew the final whistle so that was like two or three minutes when this goalie stayed in his goal and they just kept playing and the manager was just losing the plot like he was just like off on the sidelines banging his head against the wall the specialist goalkeeper who thought he was going to come on was just kind of sitting there stunned thinking oh i thought i was about to have a glory moment okay no one knew what was going to come on was just kind of sitting there stunned thinking, oh, I thought I was about to have a glory moment. And no one knew what was going on. And then time ran out. So the referee blew his whistle. You can't make any changes then. And he was the goalie.

Do you know what I hoped would happen? Because this is allowed. I was hoping the manager wouldn't let the goalkeeper be the goalkeeper, be the goalie, because he could have anointed one of his other on-field players to be the goalie and said, you put the gloves on and the colorful shirt and you try and save the penalties, which would be ridiculous because it's not a goalie, but it would have been a right up yours to the guy. There would have been like a fight on the field and it would have been amazing, but that's not what happened. The goalie got to stand in the goals and do the shootout. Also, so the manager is the person who owns the team, right? Just to be clear on the roles here. No, he doesn't own the team. He's an

employee of a higher power, but he is the- Okay. So there's a mysterious consortium that owns the team, but the manager is the representative of that consortium on the- Yeah. I mean, in the case of Chelsea, it's owned by a billionaire called Roman Abramovich from Russia. Okay. All right. This is too specific now, right? Shady group, whatever. There's like yeah a level of abstraction the gods own the team and the manager is the representative of them on but okay for all intents and purposes the manager is the ultimate power for a soccer team unless he gets sacked by the corporate owners of the club well my thought process here is the wrath of the gods must rain down upon the goalie and i mean that because it's like a challenge to the structure of the environment that he is in

and i would think tremendously corrosive to the concept of a team and team sports. Presumably the reason that you have a coach is that the team itself can't make hard decisions sometimes. And so that's the purpose of that role. And then the manager is then overseeing these two groups. So if you can make a substitution with another player on the field, I think if I was the manager, I would totally make that call because you want to send a message from now until the end of time to players like you follow instructions. This is what you're supposed to do here. I didn't know this was an option. That is 100% what I would do you're saying that that's not what happened so then all I can hope is that the universe is just and the goalie was completely

humiliated and didn't save a single penalty shot that would be my hope in this situation he did save one but he also let one in that he should have saved. He stuffed up and he lost. Okay. They lost the shootout. So justice did reign. Okay. I can accept that. I would like it better if it was pure humiliation, but that's acceptable. It wasn't pure, but he did miss an easy one. He did miss an easy one.

I mean, I'm reading some of the comments that are coming now through on the BBC commentary. And one of the BBC's pundits is saying, Kepa, this is the name of the goalkeeper, should never play for Chelsea again. That should be his last performance in a Chelsea shirt. It's a disgrace. I've never seen anything like it. I'm with that guy 100%. But what do you think, Brady? Do you think this is too far? He says, why weren't the players dragging Kepa off anyway? I don't know. Another comment I just saw online saying a friend of mine raises a good point do the rules need to be changed what's to stop every 14 year old across the land refusing to

come off now when their coach tries to bring them off they've just seen it happen in a league cup final right anarchy will reign in the land that's why you need the boot of justice to come down on the neck of the player players are famously petulant when they're substituted and throw their shirt away and discussed as like a passive aggressive show to the coach that they disagree with the decision. But I've never seen one just say, no, I'm staying on the field. So yeah, I mean, look, if you as a player want to do some kind of passive aggressive action like that and show yourself as a child to the world, you go right ahead. As long as you keep moving off the field.

But yeah, to actually just boycott and to stay on the field, that seems outrageous to me. But I feel like you don't think it's that outrageous. Or are you still just in shock from having seen it? It's shock. I think it is outrageous. I think he should be sacked tomorrow. I think the goalkeeper should be sacked. No question. I mean, actually, it's particularly famous at Chelsea Football Club that when a coach, they call it losing the dressing room, when the players no longer respect the coach behind closed doors, that's normally when things start going wrong at a club. And it's always the coach that gets sacked because of it, because you can't sack all the players.

That makes sense. That's why you have the layer above the coach. The idea of the player revolt is not unheard of, but to actually do it in a packed stadium, in a cup final in front of 80,000 people at Wembley, it was amazing. So that's why I was late to start the podcast. Today's episode of Hello Internet is brought to you by Ting. Ting is the nationwide mobile phone service that does things easily and is almost certainly going to save you money. Instead of having a set monthly data plan for your phone, Ting lets you pay for just the actual amount of data and text that you use every month.

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and get $25 off your first bill or $25 off a new phone. Thanks to Ting for supporting the show. And thanks to Ting for having such an easy and fun URL to say. hi.ting.com hi.ting.com Go try it out. I have a complaint to lodge, Brady. Excellent.

Gray lodges a complaint. What's new there? We've discussed spoilers on this podcast numerous times, lo these many years. Yes. And I have a new one that I'm going to add to the list because sometimes we have this philosophical discussion about what is a spoiler. And the one I want to add to the list, which is really annoying me currently, is Netflix content warnings. So Netflix traditionally, when you start to watch a show, it flashes up on the top something like violence or sexual content to give parents a heads up for what they

might see in the show yeah but i have noticed over the years over time it went from these broad categories into becoming more and more specific and i knew one day this was going to happen that they were going to have something specific enough to irritate me right and it is now the case I'm working my way through a Netflix show yeah and every time I go to play an episode it has this I should take a picture of it hilariously long string of content warnings across the top and the very last one is suicide that they put as a content warning right i am now six episodes in to like a 12 episode miniseries no one's committed suicide yet and so every episode all i keep thinking is well who, who's it going to be? I know one of these characters is going to kill themselves because Netflix tells me at the beginning of every single episode.

And it's really bothering me. Now, just to get it out of the way, I don't have a problem with content warnings, but this is my complaint, Netflix. I am a grown human being. Can I somewhere, please, in your interface, tell you, hey, I can watch whatever I want because I have grown up and I can see these things. You don't need to treat me like I'm a child or as though there's a child in this house. Like, no, we don't need to do this. It's not only children who could be disturbed by depictions of suicide, though. Like, there are certain things that even adults may want a heads up. Like, I may be fine with all the violence in the world and all the sexual content in the world,

but suicide, for example, might be a sensitive subject for me, or sexual content might be. Like, you might have specific things you try to avoid while other things it's like bring it on i'll take what you've got so how do you deal with that well we live in a land of technology so i think there could be check boxes and there actually is i'm on the reverse side of this that there is one thing which to me is a kind of content warning that i would want the content warning I would want is people sick in hospitals. Yeah. My wife would want jellyfish.

I still think my play that contains peanuts was the most specific warning I've ever seen. But yeah. But over the past couple of years, I have spent more time than I wish with my wife in a hospital. And it's like, boy, those are not fun environments. And we were watching, Oh God,

I can't remember what it was. It was some movie about the guy who like invents the iron lung. And it slowly dawned on me like, Oh God, a lot of this movie is going to take place in a hospital. And that was the one where I'm like, you know what? I'm done.

Yeah. If your movie has a lot of scenes in a hospital, I don't need to watch your movie anymore. There's been a couple of times where we're watching a movie and I'm starting to be like, wait a minute. I think this might be a hospital movie. So I'm not going to watch this movie. So I understand the concept of people want content warnings, But I don't think it's an unreasonable request to ask for a toggle to say, I don't need content warnings. I can figure out for myself if this is a movie that I don't want to see. I think what you're suggesting is already too complicated, but you could take it a step further

and say, you could have like an interface on Netflix saying, don't warn me about anything except hospital sickness, or don't warn me about anything except jellyfish. So you never see content warnings unless it's going to be a jellyfish show. And then frankly, you could make the content warning a lot bigger and a lot longer because Netflix is a little fast with those content warnings, right? It's like, listen, there's jellyfish. I want it right across the center of the screen. You could put that up, but it's totally fine.

Like, again, I understand that all of these companies are always allergic to options and they don't want to put something in complicated. And I can't conceive of a universe where Netflix is going to let me pick like, oh, these content warnings I do want and those content warnings I don't. Yeah. I think it is not unreasonable to ask Netflix for a master toggle that says, don't show me content warnings. I'm a grownup and I can handle this. I'll take it all. I can take it, whatever you got. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Then they'll get sued by someone who like gets upset by some.

No, but put in one of those, you know, put in one of those end user license agreements, everybody pretends to read. If you want to unclick this button, you have to sign our waiver that says you're not going to die of a heart attack if there's a jellyfish on the screen. I don't think that's an unreasonable request. And I especially don't think that's an unreasonable request if the trend is going to keep continuing that I have seen of more and more granular content warnings. In dramatic TV shows, suicide is often one of the real plot twist as well isn't it you know that's often a a real device in drama writing so yeah or there was another one that was watching where it would have been more surprising but there was a content

warning for torture yeah and again the way i like to watch shows there was nothing in the show to give you a heads up that the torture was coming. And I'm willing to take that on me that like if I uncheck content warnings, sometimes there's going to be surprise torture. And like that's what's going to happen. Again, I found it annoying. I'm waiting for the torture to happen. And this would have been a different viewing experience. And the torture would have had the emotional impact that the director was going for had

I not known that it was coming. I think that this kind of warning is very different from the movie ratings, like PG-13 or R. Yeah. Where it's like, okay, R. I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but I know this is a serious movie. Yeah. Right?

And then it's like, oh, PG-13. It's barely not a cartoon for children. Yeah. But you don't know what the details are. And that feels fine. I think you're quite reasonable. I agree with you. I agree.

Thank you, Brady. Can I give you a technology complaint? Please do. Again, this is one that I don't really have a request or a solution to it because I see both sides of the problem. But it's just something I noticed before. So I thought I'd bring it up. And this is to do with Twitter.

So obviously, Twitter has the functionality that you can mute people. Right. And this is a feature that I have increasingly been taking advantage of. I have an ever-growing list of muted people. You're getting faster with those mute trigger fingers. I am. And it could just be my mood. It could be a whim. It could be just, I'm not on a plane at the wrong moment. No malice to it. I don't want to block people. I don't know. I've just been getting a bit trigger happy on the mute. And then figuring out how to unmute is really difficult when you look

at that list because you don't know why you muted them in the first place. The mute button is for life. Yeah. I mean, look, people on the internet, you need to know when you interact with someone on Twitter, no matter what it is, you're always risking the silent mute. Yeah. So anyway, this is a thing, but because there are so many of them now, particularly some of them I've muted for excessive replying. So this exacerbates the problem. What I've now noticed on my Twitter is I'll sometimes do a tweet and I'll see one reply, three replies, 10 problem. What I've now noticed on my Twitter is I'll sometimes do a tweet and I'll see one reply, three replies, 10 replies. And I'll go, I wonder what people are saying.

And I'll go to look at the replies and sometimes I won't be able to see any of them. So, what Twitter does is it still tells you the number of people who are replying, but you can't see the replies. And it reminded me a bit of that episode of Black Mirror. You know how in Black Mirror where they had that technology where you could actually mute humans and they just became like TV fuzz? So it wasn't like they were erased from the world. You still knew they were there, but you didn't know what they'd done wrong or who they were or what they were saying.

That's what it's like for me now. It's like I know they're there. I know they're saying things, but I can't hear or see what they're saying. And it's kind of a weird scenario. And I don't really, I wouldn't want it to be another way. I wouldn't want Twitter to make the reply count zero just for me when whole conversations were going on. But I also find it a little bit frustrating and annoying. I feel like this really does show how heavy on the mute button you've been. You've like, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, mute, mute, mute, mute. You've done this so much that you can have these threads where you notice the disparity

between how many people are replying and the number at the bottom. It is a bit self-selecting too, because the sort of people I've muted may be people who are like really excessive replies yeah no i get it i get it there's the people who want to include you on these threads where they're having some conversation with their friends and for some reason they want to ccu on every single one like i understand but i just i still think that's funny that you notice that there's a disparity there i have noticed it i notice it often but you don't want them to change the number to be the number that is what you see? I think that could cause problems too. I have no feature request.

I just have a complaint. If you ever come back to the twits, then you can give me better advice. Amazon. Amazon HQ2. Interesting twist to the story, hey? Yeah. I'm hoping maybe you can tell me a little bit more about this, because I just sort of caught this headline. I'm going by the Wikipedia description, but it seems that Amazon has cancelled their plans for the surprise second New York headquarters. It's a little unclear to me exactly what has occurred. Like, I was trying to just read the Wikipedia description.

It's like, protests against it? But it seemed like Amazon was complaining that the politicians weren't backing them. But I don't understand because presumably that's where they got the deal. I don't know exactly what's going on here, but there is a plot twist. I've only read one or two articles about it. So I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, and I'm sure I'll upset someone. But my overriding feeling about this is it makes me love Amazon a little bit. Because you knew this was going to happen. You knew people were going to complain. All the NIMBY people were going to be not in my backyard and you're going to ruin our thing and they shouldn't be getting the tax breaks and stuff like that.

And you knew this was just going to become a controversy and Amazon were going to have to see it out and there'd be this PR war. Politicians have to balance their desire for the project versus keeping the constituents happy. And it was just going to be a mess. And Amazon were going to have to wade through it to get what they wanted. It was probably an ambit claim.

The people of Long Island City or whatever that place is called were probably thinking, this is good. At the end of this, they're going to bring the tax rebates down and we're going to get this and we're going to get that. And they were probably rolling up their sleeves for a big battle to see how much they could claw back. And Amazon have just said, stuff it and just walked away. But they're like, oh, hang on.

But, oh, it's genius. You know, it's like they have all the power. I mean, part of me thinks they must not have wanted it that much. It's not like they're going to put it somewhere else. They're just going to spread it out over multiple sites. But part of me also thinks, good on you. That is like, why do we want years of controversy? Fine.

We'll just go somewhere else. Genius. It puts them in such a powerful position for any future things like this right because everyone fights for it and wants it and then once they've got it then they start their fight right amazon have basically laid down a marker saying no that's not how it works if you want us you want us if you don't you don't but like we're not gonna beg good on them i didn't really think of it in those terms, but that does make it kind of hilarious. I love that you're on team Amazon for this one. I mean, I know Amazon, like a lot of people

don't like them and I'm sure they're evil and I certainly have my complaints about them. But in this particular case, I think it's great. Imagine if Google and YouTube did this. Imagine if during the adpocalypse, Nestle said, oh, we're not happy with your content and everyone's complaining, so we're going to suspend our ads for a month while we think about what to do. And then Google just said to Nestle, you can never advertise on Google again.

We don't want you. They'd suddenly be like, oh, my God, we can't advertise on Google ever again. This is like the most important place in the world to advertise and we're just locked out for life. I think Google and YouTube could learn a lot from this. That is even better than what was my original plan for the adpocalypse, where I thought YouTube should just hold strong and say like, okay,

if you don't want to advertise, whatever, and just wait. But the life ban, that's amazing. Well, I guess they couldn't ban them for life, but they could just say that's fine, but we're doing things in 12 month chunks. So you're off the platform for 12 months. We can't fiddle around with you being on and off all the time. It's an interesting way to think about it. And it really is the question of who has the power in the negotiation. I think that is a really interesting point that perhaps New York politicians thought that once Amazon had announced

it, that Amazon would feel like it was on the hook. But guess what? They don't. I don't think it's really all the big politicians' fault. I think they're a bit upset about it too. I think it's more at a lower level. I think it was the NIMBYs. Well, this is what like, just for me, the Wikipedia one, I was a bit confused about it because it sounds like the governor of New York was blindsided by this announcement that the VP of Amazon just called him up and said, we're out. But here's the thing, from my perspective, there's not a law, but a general rule of thumb, which is the way things start is the way they continue. I can imagine that if Amazon felt like it's already a thing that's turning into a big hassle before they've even broken ground, that is like, oh, the hell with this. We'll go somewhere else where they actually want us and we'll just do what we want. And if it's a hassle

now, it's going to be a hassle for the next 50 years and forget this, we're out of here. And look, I do see the other side of the argument, right? And it is a bit of a bully move by Amazon and they could negotiate or they could come to a negotiating table and be a better community member. I could make the other argument, but I'm just so fatigued by every time there's a big announcement, all the negative stuff gearing up, you know, all the complainers complaining, like it was just a little bit refreshing to not see Amazon play the game that Google and YouTube always say, you know, we'll do a review, we'll do consultation, we'll make it work. And there's this kind of dance that everyone dances. Yeah.

And I kind of like that. Oh, thank goodness we don't have to do that dance. You think we're really bad fine keep your little town i almost wonder that amazon has been under a tremendous amount of flack it feels like in the past couple years like it's really ramped up there's like anti-amazon idea uh like warehouses and for a whole bunch of things yeah and i guess because i know I would feel this way. If I was the CEO of some billion dollar company and you feel like, you know, almost certainly these guys feel like they're doing good things in the world, you know, like they're creating like jobs and all the traditional stuff. Yeah. And you've been on the receiving end of people telling you that you're a horrible monster

for a couple of years. I don't know. I would feel really tempted to be like, okay, well, I guess I'm just going to roll with this then. then and yeah like push your weight around in new york fine everybody already hates me i'm just pulling out of new york and i'm making no concession screw you yeah if you're getting pummeled everywhere you go why walk into another one when you don't have to there's a danger in a kind of over-austerization that like that you leave a player only moves you don't want them to make. I'm not saying that's the case with Amazon, but I could just imagine that if I was the CEO and everybody's always yelling, I'd feel like, well, I can't make these people happy no matter what I do. So let me take the upsides of being the tough guy instead of always trying to negotiate and play this game. So we've talked about Amazon HQ2, and it was sort of a disappointing story, but I'm enjoying this

plot twist in it. And I'm really kind of hoping there's an HQ3 announcement. And then that one, I really want to see. And everyone knows that it's on the table that Amazon can just walk away. We're once again really pleased to be sponsored by CuriosityStream. Definitely go visit their website. And I challenge you not to be excited by the kind of teaser trailer I just watched. There were all sorts of amazing visuals of astronauts, hot air balloons, volcanoes, and also what looked like a caveman leaping through a forest. It was amazing. CuriosityStream is a subscription streaming service. It offers over 2,000 documentaries

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And that sounds like a pretty noble goal to me. Our thanks to them for supporting this episode. Speaking of offices, I am considering, but I'm probably not going to do it, but I'm considering it. But anyway, next week, I'm going to go and look at an office with the potential of starting to work in an office rather than from home. And I wanted to get your advice or thoughts on it. I think it's definitely a thing you should do. I was really keen on it last week.

I've gone off it a bit now, but I'm going to go and have a look in the middle of this week and see what I think. I'm going to go and look at a potential space. Okay, tell me, why were you keen on it? The reason I'm keen on it is like, there were changes to my life and, you know, my light bulbs and my work-life balance or whatever you want to call it that I want to make that I seem unable to make. And I was wondering whether or not having an office would force some of those things on me. I think maybe I'm someone who needs to have something forced

on them rather than just having the mental willpower to do it. Can I ask what kind of things? Yeah. Like the most obvious example being just my work hours, my start and finish times, my discipline of working. I think mainly things like that. Working from home, as I have been for many, many years now, probably approaching 10 years maybe, means you develop habits and you work weird hours that maybe aren't the best for me. And I wondered if having an office and being forced to work from an office,

because the way a lot of my work is set up with all my big hard drives and my computer and stuff like that, I can't do a lot of my stuff portably. It's very hard for me to do all my video editing on the road. So, having to leave the house to go and do my video editing might force some better habits on me. Do you mean in terms of working more or do you mean in terms of turning off work when you come home? Probably more the turning off work, but also when I am working, working smarter. So at the moment I can start when I want and I can finish when I want and then I can go downstairs and watch a football match or something on Netflix and then I can go down to the kitchen and make a sandwich

and then I can play with the dogs. Or when I shouldn't be working and I should be resting at night, I can think, oh, I might go upstairs and my office for a minute and sit down at my computer and, oh yeah, I've just had an idea for a little edit or effect I could do. And I could sit here and edit for three hours and should I be doing that? I don't know. So, I wondered if having an office would make me stop, give me a hard stop and a hard start. And also when I am working, make me less likely to drift off and find distractions and decide to re-alphabetize my books and things like that. So why have you gone off it then recently?

Because of all the advantages of working from home. And some of those things that I just portrayed as bad things can also be good things. And it of those things that I just portrayed as bad things can also be good things. And it's nice that I'm with the dogs and I can let the dogs out all the time. And, you know, it's good for them to have company. It's good for me that I can just go downstairs and sit in a lovely lounge room rather than just be stuck in some office with a kitchenette and a bunch of people I don't know very well.

So you think like a shared office situation? A shared office, but my own proper sealed office within it. Because one of the other things that appeals to me is socialization. Maybe I should have more humans around me. Because sometimes I can go a long time and not see another human. Okay. See, that's concerning because it feels like you're mixing the purposes of this environment. That is a secondary purpose.

Okay. It is part of the thinking. You know, it's like, you know, you're coming up with lists and pros and cons. The main reason is to affect a discipline on me and to unblur my work and home life. What's going to happen with the doggos? Well, the place I'm looking at is like less than five minutes from my house. So I can come home and let the doggos out for walks and wheeze and things like that. Okay. I would like one where I could take the doggos. I haven't asked if I could take them

to this place, but I could take them with me sometimes as well. Okay. And have like, you know, a big bed for them there and stuff. But yeah. At the very least you could sneak Audrey in under your coat. Oh, well, yeah. Who doesn't love Audrey? She can go where she likes, but. She can just walk in the front door of any building. I like as well, for example, when I'm home alone for the weekend, as I am at the moment, I like that I can just say, all right, I'm pulling an all-nighter tonight, and I can just come up to my office and I can edit until 2am and then just stagger down into bed when I'm done. Because no matter what people say about retrading the way

you work, I definitely work better at night and can work longer and more concentrated at night. So I like pulling up a long night sometimes. I'll get a lot done. Once a week, I'll do a long night and they're productive times for me. And part of me doesn't want to lose that. I like as well that I can get up and think, oh, I can't be bothered having a shower and getting dressed yet. I'm going to go and work for an hour first. That's probably naughty and something that I could unlearn from having an office. That's part of both the pro and the con of having an office.

But I see the negatives as well. And, you know, my office is very nice. You have a beautiful office. Like you have a great working space in that house. Yeah. And I wouldn't get a place anywhere near this nice anywhere. I've got my lovely bookshelves and framed pictures and lovely shutters and lovely furniture and period features and fireplace and things like that.

And I'm not going to have that in some industrial unit. This is very interesting to hear, Brady, because I'm trying to think about this as you and while in general to anyone who's listening to the show if you're thinking about like you work from home and you're thinking about getting an office i recommend that ten thousand percent as a thing to do yeah i don't think it's a thing for you brady it might be something that you want to try but i i wouldn't be signing up to like a 12 month lease if i were you it is a couple of things one of the things is either the more hours you want to work or the more randomly dispersed you want to work whatever hours you work the more that leans on the scale towards

a home office is for you. Of course, but I feel like I do that more than I should. And having a away office might pressure me to stop doing that. I think maybe that's like a bad habit of mine. Here's the thing. It may be, but life is full of trade-offs. And so like, here's what I was going to suggest to you. And then I realized as I'm thinking it through in my own head, oh, this is not going to work for a Brady. Because if the thing that you want to do is you want to have a clear separation between, you know, work life and home life, say, is that you should get an office, but you also don't want to pick an office that's like a really comfy environment like you almost you want a place that is is almost a little bit unwelcoming like that is what is going to

encourage you to go there do your work and then leave and then be done with stuff. That's interesting to hear, yeah. So what you don't want to do is make a cozy office. Right. But like everything I know about you, Brady, I just see you sitting in this antique chair at a fancy desk, maybe at like a brandy tumbler in front of you, computer mouse in the other hand, you know, crafting your videos, moon memorabilia in the background. That is a Brady cave. And I think some of the work environments that I have spent time in as offices outside of my house specifically like environments that i feel like i want to get the hell out of here right i want to go into my office at six in the morning and

then leave by nine and it's like great i got some work done and i am out of here and you know i like having the pressure of oh god people are coming in and i hate all of them so i've got to get this work done before like all of the office people show up. How is your time split between your home setup and your away office? So like, here's the thing, reason this is an interesting thing right now is for various reasons, I have spent most of this year starting in January working from the home office. This just happens to be a coincidence for a bunch of stuff. And I hate it. I really don't like working at the home office. How come? Because of the distractions of home? I wouldn't say it's the distractions, but I want the same thing that it feels like you want in

your life, which is the clarity of the borders. Separation of powers. Yeah, like what is this place for? And in an ideal world, I would want my home office to be barely more than a podcast recording studio and like occasional administrative work space. And then my office outside the home would be for everything that's like a more creative project.

But I happen to have had everything kind of collapsed down into my home office for the past two months, really. And I just don't like it. I don't know if that work setup is for you. And I can totally understand also this thing where you say, you have late nights that work because that happens to me too, is like I sometimes have nights where I just like you can just feel oh I'm going to be really productive tonight and then I'll do the

reverse like I go into the office way after everybody's left and I'll be there for a really long time and then I'll come home but it's a similar thing of, I like that the office environment is not super comfortable because it feels like it helps focus. You're doing work here and then you're leaving. But I also think that like the nature of the work that you do, actually it fits much better to have an office environment in which you're very comfortable because you're doing this like processing of the filming and you're doing the editing

and like you're shaping the things that have been recorded. Like that feels to me much more like I would want to be in a comfortable work environment if that was the kind of thing that I was doing. Like if we imagine an alternate universe where I only made vlogs, like the two I made on my YouTube channel, I would totally then not feel the need to have an office outside the home if I did that. Because it just, it feels like a very different kind of work. And that's probably the closest I ever come to doing what you do. So what's the sort of work that you like doing in an office? It's an intense kind of work. So it's things like writing,

it's things like researching, and it's a couple other projects that fall into that kind of category. Like very intense, self-contained, generative kind of work. And then stuff that's like administrative or editing, I don't do in that environment. So I have that split. So I would have thought kind of the opposite. I would have thought writing and researching would be the place you'd want to do in the smoking room with the brandy tumbler and the iris setter at your feet. And the grind of animating and the grind of administration would be the thing you'd do in the office where you just have to focus and not get distracted by a nice painting and stuff. I have found that it just doesn't, it doesn't work that

way for me. That yeah, if like, oh, I'm trying to do the research and reading in a comfortable environment, it just doesn't work as well. It feels then like, oh, what am I doing? Am I reading for pleasure? Am I reading for work? I do want to have those divisions. It's hard, isn't it? Another thing that just occurred to me is when my office is tidy and looking nice, which isn't always, to put food on the table and be a proper human. Right. And coming up into an office that's nice and it's got a few little trophies and it's got a few nice little trinkets of my successes and it's got some nice little happy memories and pictures and hello internet things around the place and pictures from my adventures it's almost like a little reminder as i start my day that i'm doing all right and things are good like you know this is a nice place to come and work and i'm surrounded by all the little tokens of accomplishment and i felt like if I went into some really boring office with white walls and industrial carpet,

it would feel a bit like, oh, it'd feel a bit like, you know, the office, you know, I'm working at Wernham Hog Stationery and I'm not working in my snug little room as a result of my minor triumphs. I totally get it. And one of the reasons I've been home much more these past couple months is I've been doing a lot of dog sitting. And in all seriousness, this is one of these things that it feels like a way to reap some of the rewards of a lot of the work that went into becoming a self-employed person is, oh, I can be home. There's a chompers around I'm still doing stuff I'm not working as effectively as I would otherwise but this is like taking advantage of a kind of upside that the nature

of the work allows and was a thing that I was driving toward so I completely get that and I think again especially your office I feel like really reinfor reinforces the kind of person you are and the work that you do. So I totally get it. And for me, part of having the office that I go to is the horror of it. That to me is a little bit of the fear again. So it's motivating in that way. It's almost like a self-flagellation though, isn't it?

Like, I'm going to go sit on this spike while I work so that I'll do my work quicker and get the hell off the spike. I wouldn't put it that way, but it's adjacent to that idea. There is something to this, that the comfort level of my office has an inverse proportion to the amount of what I would call quality work that I get done there. But I just don't think you're the same personality type. Maybe I am. Maybe I just don't know it. You might want to try this, but the more I think about it, the less I think an office out of the house that's anything like an office would actually get you what you want.

And here's the sad punchline to this. I just think that you will always have a hard time with the boundaries of what is personal and what is work and when are you working and when are you not. But I think that is the downside that is intrinsic to the same characteristics that got you into the position that you currently are. I think you're a bit like, oh, this lucky coin that I have. I love the head side, but I hate that the tail side is here. And it's like, well, but you have this coin and that's the way it is. That's my personal guess, but don't get me wrong. I would totally love it if you got an office outside of your house and tried it for a while, because I would be very interested to hear how that goes. That lucky coin analogy, that was worse than one of mine.

I don't even know what's going on with that one. That's why I'm moving right along. All right. I'll keep you updated. I'll let you know after I've looked at it how I felt. Basically, I want to have an office that's away from the house, but really, really close. And it's some like cute little loft in a barn conversion or something. I've got this like fantasy office in my head that is just like, you know, so lovely that you could almost want to be there as much as home. And that right there, I feel like is the fundamental problem that you want an office

that you would love as much as your home office is like, oh no, then you're going to be there so much and you're going to defeat the whole purpose of the thing. Yeah. But when I came home, I would be home and like, I wouldn't be able to edit because all my hard drives were in a different building. Yeah. That is one advantage that you have is that your video process requires a physical location. I genuinely think that's a huge advantage. One of the frustrations that I have in my own working life is that I can do anything anywhere. Like it hardly matters where I am or it doesn't even really matter what machine I have with me. Like, did I bring an iPad? Didn't I bring a computer? It's like, ultimately I can do all of it anywhere. And so I always feel

like I'm trying to create artificial boundaries that don't exist. So I am genuinely kind of envious that you could move a bunch of hard drives down the street and create for yourself a real barrier. But I don't know. I think you might end up just with the problem that you're there a lot. And then you're not going to create the thing that you want, which is to feel relaxed at home that you're done with work. Especially if you end up with an office that is so close, you might find yourself popping over quite a bunch. Let me know what you do, Brady. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Molecule.

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That's M-O-L-E-K-U-L-E. So you're going to go to Molecule.com and at checkout, enter HELLO75. That's H-E-L-L-O and then the number 75, no spaces, to get $75 off your first order. That's go to Molecule, with a K, dot com, and at checkout, enter HELL hello 75 to get $75 off your first order. Thanks to Molecule for supporting the show and for silently filtering the air in my home office. I should really probably get another one for my other office. So Brady, I logged into YouTube the other day and there was one of their little blue banners across the top of the system. You know, the blue banners that let you know annotations aren't getting much love,

so we're going to remove them. The little blue banners tell you something that you don't want almost certainly is going to happen. They're supposed to be like friendly little nudges, but they're more like catastrophic changes to your whole career i have been pavlovian response to these banners of like right you kind of suck in and go oh god before my eyes land upon the words and they are read into my head like what is this going to be it's especially scary if there's a date on them oh yeah yeah yeah this one had the underlying lines for a link and this one was a little different. And so here's what it said. Help us make YouTube better for creators!

We want to know how you really feel. Don't hold back! Take this survey. They should just listen to Hello Internet. Well, I thought typing out a bunch of words on a survey for YouTube, I'm not going to do that. That sounds like a lot of work. That's the last thing I imagine you doing. Yeah.

Instead, I'm going to screenshot this survey and I thought you and I could go through some of the questions. Okay. Is this like a suggestion box or a satisfaction survey? Or what is it like? So this ended up being a pretty in-depth survey from YouTube where they were asking how much you agree or disagree with a bunch of statements. And then I'm very sure Bandersnatch-like, they were sending you down different routes

depending on how you answered and having a little follow-up question. So I tried to go through the survey as neutrally as I could for the most part, just to get the questions for us to take a look at. It's not a big secret one, then. We're allowed to talk about it, are we? The questions that I'm going to ask are perfectly fine in the public domain. Okay. And I'm genuinely curious, because we're very different kind of creators.

I would like to know how you think about some of these things as well. All right. There were maybe 100 questions. I'm just going to pick a few of them. 100 question survey? So Brady, question one. Are you 18 years of age or older?

I'm older. Okay, great. You can now complete the rest of this survey. All right. Okay. Thinking about YouTube in general, all caps underline and bolded. Yeah. How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statements?

Yeah. Question number one, right out of the gate, the big question. YouTube is the best place for creators. Like, in life, you mean? Like, just like... Brady, YouTube is the best place for creators. I don't agree with that. Oh, okay.

Don't agree. Why? Well, because there are lots of things about it that cause me lots of frustration. And I'm sure there are, like, lovely creative spaces somewhere in the world, like my fantasy loft in the barn conversion where creators can just sit and be happy all day long. Like you're thinking of this just in terms of physical spaces as well. You're taking a very literal approach to this question. It's a very open-ended question. I would say Instagram is a better place for creators than YouTube, probably. But not if you want to do what I do. If you want to do what I do,

you have to be on YouTube. But like Instagram is a much easier, more pleasant interface to use. I mean, the YouTube interface is a bit of a moving feast and has its strengths and weaknesses. It's not the worst website in the world to use, and it was worse in the past, but there are better places. It's not the best place in the world for creators. It's certainly the place you have to be if you do what I do though. What's your answer to that question? So YouTube is the best place for creators. I didn't really interpret it in the way that you did. And so I put down agree.

And then YouTube immediately was like, hey, why don't you fill in this text box? Tell us why it is that you agree. I wonder if that text would have popped up if you'd put it was the worst place for creators. Well, yeah, I didn't get text boxes all the time. Tell me why you think it's the best place for creators. The answer was, there is no other viable alternative.

Okay. the best place for creators the answer was there is no other viable alternative okay so i think it's the best place in terms of like by default but not because it's good yeah i mean that's kind of what i said wasn't it for me it's the best place because i have to be there but yeah so but i like like we gave the same kind of answer but i was like guess I agree, but I agree not in the way I think that YouTube wants me to agree. No, I think like some chalet in the Swiss mountains would be a better place for creators to be. I really love that you're imagining like a writer's retreat somewhere as like, where could we go? What would be the best place for creators? They referred to YouTube as a place. If they said YouTube is the best website for video creators, I probably would have said yes. Right.

But they made it like it was this like campfire we're all sitting around. Right. If they want to make it like a place for creators, bloody creators, that word creators. If that even said, is YouTube the best place for video makers? I probably would have started leaning towards yes. But it had to be creators. And suddenly I was imagining myself as like a painter sitting by a river or something. In your new office. Yeah. All right. Doggo at your feet.

Next. If we've got 100 questions, we better crack on. No, no. I think that was one of the better ones. But they're following up with a few that I think are, you'll enjoy is more specific. Brady, YouTube provides me with the biggest potential audience. Do you agree? It provides me with a bigger audience than anyone else could. I mean, it could provide me with a bigger one if it was better at its job, I guess. But I would say I agree. It provides me

with the biggest audience. Other than the fact it has an algorithm that then takes that audience away from me over the years. But these are questions that can't be answered simply. No, Brady. It's like you're trapped in Black Mirror and you have a smiley face that you can press or you have a frowny face that you can press. And YouTube's asking you this question and you get to press the smiley face or you get to press the frowny face. I mean, YouTube has provided me with millions and millions of people

that have been willing to subscribe to my channels. Right. It now denies me access to a lot of those people. But fair enough. Everyone wants access to them. I have no divine right. That brings us right to the next question. Agree or disagree? YouTube is trustworthy. That's an interesting question because the people are trustworthy.

No, no. The individuals. YouTube is trustworthy. I don't want to say no to that because I feel like I'm then slighting a lot of people who are trustworthy. I understand that feeling. And I know what you mean. And we have had opportunity to talk to individuals at YouTube. And I feel like at least the people that I have been able to speak to, I've never felt like any of them are bad, untrustworthy people. All of them seem like good,

well-intentioned people, if perhaps not entirely understanding the needs of creators, but like none of them are bad. I don't feel like I met someone who had real shifty eyes and thought like, I don't trust that guy. All right. I'll answer the question. My answer to the question, despite the fact we've carried on about this annotation thing, like it was like the betrayal by Judas or something. Which it was. When all is said and done, I would fall down on the side of trustworthy. Interesting.

Why? I generally trust them. I trust them to do the right thing in most cases. Sometimes I think they get it wrong. Sometimes I think they get it right. But, you know, we trust them a lot, don't we? Are we actually getting the right percentage of the money they're making from us? I don't know. I trust that they're doing that. Are they going to shut down tomorrow and delete

all my videos? I don't know. I trust that they're not, but I generally put a lot of trust in them and I don't stay awake at night worrying about it. I would say they are trustworthy. They do things that cheese me off. They make decisions that sometimes i think are poor but you know there are lots of people in life i trust who make bad decisions it doesn't mean i don't trust them i think you're selling me on pulling back a little bit from disagree to a merely neutral because you move the bar to some fundamentals of the platform that i feel like yes i trust that they will do the things that are the basics, that the channel won't disappear, that the videos get uploaded and processed and all the rest of it. I just, I feel very strongly that you can't really trust platforms at all. But this is the fundamental thing that keeps coming up again and again in a million different ways all over the internet is new platform comes along and makes promises and everyone says, oh, this one's great.

And then surprise, it still has a corporate structure. And ultimately, that corporate structure bends it in ways that make the initial people unhappy. Like if the question was, I can depend on youtube to support me through my career for the rest of all time i probably would disagree with that right okay right i like that okay so they have they have a bunch of questions about money right but that basically boils down to one of these questions is youtube provides me the best opportunity to make revenue as a creator. And I think everyone in the world can see by the fact that almost every creator of any size is running merch games and other advertising on their own YouTube videos, that this question could not possibly be more

disagree strongly. I mean, I could play with words here again. I can feel it coming. I already know what you're going to do. Well, yeah, the obvious one is you talk about merchandise and all the other ways that creators make money, but they wouldn't be able to make any of that money if it wasn't for the exposure of YouTube. Right, we can start leaning on that word opportunity.

Yeah, but you're just talking about AdSense here, presumably. Yeah, I'm thinking of AdSense and the YouTube red subscription money, which I have a particular bee in my bonnet about over. But yeah, that's what I think they mean by this question. Okay, well, the way AdSense works and the way the advertising auctions work aren't optimized for CGP Grey or Numberphile. So, of course, you know, when we take control and do specific deals or have specific ideas and merchandise, of course, we can optimize better than the huge online auction that just treats us

like fodder. If I had to be charitable to it, the part of this question that I think is good and that is genuinely motivating is YouTube is the place where if you have some success at all, you can start making some money almost immediately. And I think that's really motivating for new creators. So like, if I'm trying to help them out, that's what I would do that, you know, you're just someone who started a YouTube channel and as soon as you cross whatever their current arbitrary minimum threshold is, you can start putting AdSense on your videos. And it's like the CPM,

the dollars per thousand views that you're going to get on that is very low, but it's immediate and automatic. And I do think that's really motivating for new creators. I know that was hugely motivating for me when I started out was being able to see like, I have made a video and I have just directly made some money from it. That really helped in focusing my mind on, oh, maybe YouTube is the path out of this wage slavery that I'm currently trapped under. I'm so baffled by this questionnaire. It's almost like, basically, it seems like there

are a bunch of people working at YouTube whose pay rises or bonuses depend on achieving certain satisfaction levels. It doesn't seem like they want to know what we want to say. It's just like, why ask questions like that? Why isn't the question just, how could we help you make more money? I agree with you. I think it feels like there's someone in management who this is like an internal metric. Yeah. They're just wanting to kind of pat themselves on the back with these sort of nebulous questions. I mean, you'll really like the next one then, which is,

YouTube is the best place to build a fan base. I mean, it's the biggest fan base I have. I look at that question and I think, if someone was just interested in playing the influencer game, they just want to be an influencer and they want to have a bunch of fans. I don't know how you could do anything but recommend them to double down on Instagram and put all of their effort there. Do you think?

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I think if you want to play that game of I am building a fan base, it feels like Instagram is the no-brainer option. That's the way to go right now at this exact moment in time. And obviously that's always very fluid. So I would feel like,

no, I can't agree with this as just a general statement. Follow me on Instagram, people. Brady underscore Heron. Yes, Follow me on Instagram, people. Brady underscore Heron. Yes. Follow me on Instagram as well. I'll be posting any day now. I post some good Instagram stories sometimes.

That's really interesting that you say that. Are you talking like bang for your buck, obviously? Yeah. I'm 100% talking about probability of success, bang for your buck. You're nobody and you're trying to make yourself into somebody. Where should you put a lot of your effort? And I know nothing about your particular skill set. Yeah.

Whereas if I know that you are great at making videos, then obviously you'd be an idiot not to focus on YouTube. Oh, so you're saying Instagram requires less talent and less hard work. I'm not saying it's less talent. I'm saying it has two advantages. I think it has a general audience that is different from YouTube, but people who are actively looking for new things to follow. That seems to be a behavior I'm very aware of in my wife when she's on Instagram.

She's always looking for more people to follow. on youtube when there's a cool new channel you're like damn it i haven't got time for this yeah there really is that effect and also i just think on instagram you have the possibility to show off like a wide variety of other things it's a less specific skill than can you film and edit a video in an entertaining or interesting manner? Your audience is less niche and more forgiving of a departure from your usual content. Yes. Yeah. That's a good way to put it as well. Yeah. Here's a question that I enjoyed. I understand what YouTube offers creators of various channel

sizes. This is definitely an internal tick box process. These questions are getting more and more obviously people trying to justify their jobs and success at what they're doing. No, but here's the thing. I looked at that question and I was like, wait a minute. YouTube offers different channel size creators different things. Like, I've never heard anything about this. What was I supposed to get when I was small?

What am I supposed to get now that I'm big? Where's my special switches on the dashboard? Do I have special switches on the dashboard? This one made me feel like I'm missing something. Disagree, Greg. Disagree. This was disagree strongly. If there was a disagree angrily option, I would have totally ticked that. And it's planted this idea in my head

that big creators have extra stuff that somehow I'm not getting. You don't think this is like more of a nod to all like the resources they create? Like, hey, if you're a small creator, here's like 10 points, you know, use a good thumbnail, use a catchy title. If that's what they mean, that's not what this question seems to say at all. I interpreted this question as YouTube hands out special goodies to different size channels, and I've gotten none of them. And now I'm angry. That's how I interpreted this question. I mean, that's an impossible question to answer because maybe I know 20 things that fit that

category, but in fact, there are 100 and I didn't know that there were another 80. Yeah, they needed to make it clearer what those things were. So you knew if you knew. The very next question with which I could not disagree more strongly or more hard, YouTube offers clear communication, which they then put brackets, easy to understand. YouTube offers clear communication, easy to understand. I love that they have brackets to clarify this statement, but it's not even written in a good way. Like, it's so strange.

YouTube offers clear communication, open brackets, easy to understand, close brackets. I don't think communication is their strong suit. I'm willing to go with disagree on that one. What about YouTube offers transparent communication? This too might be one that's impossible to answer because you don't know what they're not telling you. Followed immediately by youtube clearly communicates how copyright and the content id work on the service which can strongly disagree yeah i'm willing to

go with disagree on that it's a bit of a mess i don't understand how all the copyright system works and the claims and things like that i've just been going through something related to this because there's a thing i'm working on where I've like, I've licensed a bit of music and I was, I was just trying to get information ahead of time and be like, Hey, how can I make sure that licensing this music doesn't totally screw me when this thing goes online? You mean you've paid for someone else's music, like permission to use it? Yeah, I paid for someone else's music. Like there was someone who made a song and I was like, Hey, can I use this in a thing that i'm making sure we exchange money and i have an email agreement and it's like yeah how can i make sure that this doesn't screw me like some yeah automatic copyright strike or

something yeah yeah either from that artist unintentionally or one of the many troll places that just you know sucks up a whole bunch of music that isn't registered to anyone and says, oh, it's all ours. Give us the ad revenue. So that was not fun and also not clear. I still don't have a good answer to that. I'm very happy to disagree with that. The copyright system on YouTube, partly for reasons that aren't their fault, but partly for reasons that are their fault, is very perplexing. I will give them that point that they're in a tough situation. And it's obviously, it's very hard, but it just, it really makes everybody furious.

Yeah. So there were a bunch of questions all about how YouTube communicates. The one that I gave them an agree on, which I was like, I'll give this one to you, YouTube. Whatever person whose internal ratings I'm slaughtering with my six strongly disagrees in a row. I will give you an agree on YouTube gives timely updates on changes that could impact me solely because of the heads up they gave me about removing those annotations. It's like, you know what? They told me a month ahead of time. I had plenty of time to prepare. I can give you an agree on that one.

I do tend to ignore them because it becomes noise and you don't know what to ignore and what is important, but don't let you know beforehand. Okay. Here's a couple quick ones here. YouTube inspires me to keep improving. No, that's like saying the road inspires me to keep driving. The road is just what I have to drive on. Right. YouTube makes it fun to be a creator. You know what? I mean, just before the recent VidCon in London, they hosted an event, EduCon, and they got all the educational YouTubers together and they put on what I thought was quite a nice couple of days for us. And they've done other things in the past. I think YouTube does more than it has to in that respect.

They make you feel good for a day. You know, they give you some free drinks and they put you in a nice room and they organise a nice event. And they send you these buttons and sometimes they send you a gift. I actually just got a Christmas gift from them that was quite nice, like a personalised sort of suitcase thing. You know, they do okay in that. They do make you sometimes feel a little bit more important than you are.

They make you feel like a bit of a star for a day sometimes. I'm going to give them that. So now I've skipped over one where I would recategorize this, which is YouTube makes me feel part of the creator community. And having just been off the back of Educon in London and they did one of these out in LA yeah like I completely agree that is a thing that YouTube doesn't need to do at all and especially for our little corner of the internet it's really great to be invited to those things yeah it's really great to be able to talk to and hang out with a

bunch of people who you don't get to see very often. And people from YouTube as well, you know, pick their brains. Yeah. Like there's people from YouTube there who are talking to us and like telling us what they're up to. And like genuinely, because there have been a couple of years where YouTube hasn't done those EDU meetups in the past.

And I feel like those years were very different years where it's like oh there was never a time to meet up with everybody and it's just helpful when an organization like youtube says we're hosting this thing everyone come that crystallizes people into coming so i will give them that and like you said because they really don't need to do it for edu creators we're a very small corner of youtube yeah it's very nice that they do it and i'm really appreciative that they do yeah so i will give it to them for there but i'm not going to give it to youtube makes it fun to be a creator that to me is too close to all the corporations are like isn't it fun to work at amazon like no i come here because it's work

you know i come here because you pay me and this is work this is what we do here there's also's also one, there's a question here, which I actually like, and I want to get it on the record as well, that I strongly disagree with this one. And it is breaking through on YouTube has become more difficult over the last few years. I really strongly disagree with that one. I think people can still break through on YouTube. This is kind of like an argument that always happens between creators. I feel like if you come to YouTube and you're doing something interesting, I think it might even be easier now to build up an audience than it used to be. I would need to see data because certainly there's more and more people coming through.

There seems to be more of them in volume, but I don't know how many people are trying. If it's been 20% more superstar channels, but 400% more people are trying, then it is harder. There certainly seems to be plenty of people coming through and always new people having success. And I'll always go along to something like VidCon or EduCon and meet a whole bunch of people I'd never even heard of who have become massively successful. So I think, gosh, there must be millions of them out there. But I don't know how many people are trying. I don't know how many failures there are on the scrap heap for all these self-selecting successful people who I'm exposed to because they're successful. Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned that because surely YouTube has data on this.

Like actually, this suddenly occurs to me, it's a strange question to have on the survey unless they're just trying to get the impression of people. Yeah, the sentiment, yeah. Yeah, but it's like, they must know. They must know the answer to this question, however it is they want to measure it. I feel like maybe you're right. Yeah, again, this is totally anecdotal, but even just with my own viewing habits of like, I feel like I've stumbled across smaller channels that seem to have gotten bigger pretty fast. Not even channels

that are like of mainstream interest, but just like, it seems like people are able to pick up subscribers and do well in a way that I think might even be easier than it used to be. By catering to niches, isn't it? I. I went to VidCon in London for one day, and one of the only talks I went to was by the chap who makes the LowSpecGamer channel. And he did a talk all about niches and how you can be successful by really focusing on a niche rather than trying to have broad appeal. It was a really good talk. It was really good.

Very clever. One of the few talks I've been to where every time I thought of a question or a problem with the argument, that was the next point that was made. And that made me realize, yeah, because the audience is so big now on YouTube, if you smile and concentrate on a niche and don't try to be PewDiePie, you can have a quite happy and successful existence. That's partly what I think of it as well is how many people are able to make a full-time living on youtube i mean this is where going back to the revenue thing i think people make that

transition when they start bringing on sponsors to the channel or like or they start up a patreon or they start up something else like that's that's usually when people make the transition but you need to have a big enough audience for that to work. And I feel like the whole ecosystem on and around YouTube allows a person with a smaller audience than five years ago to make the transition into being a full-time person. Because the audience has passed like a critical mass of massiveness and also the thing with the niches is just youtube has expanded so tremendously much that there's room for a whole bunch of other things like something that actually came up a number of times at the edu conference was talking to people about how say five years ago in edu land in theory if you wanted to you could be pretty much caught up to date on almost everybody's channel in the EDU world. Yeah.

And even now, just within the already small category of education on YouTube, even just within the number of people they had at the conference, it'd be like a full-time job keeping track of what is everybody up to i thought it was interesting to see that there are more like niche education channels that are able to do things full-time so yeah i'm gonna strongly disagree with it's harder than it used to be yeah youtube does a good job distributing my new videos to my subscribers. I disagree with that. Why do you disagree with that, Brady? Well, unless my subscriber number's wrong, obviously not all of my subscribers are getting my videos. And in fact, I see that in data. When I look at my viewing numbers and you see the percentage of people watching who are your subscribers and who are not your subscribers, that's like skewing more and more to the non-subscribers. So not only are the view numbers like holding solid or sometimes falling, the number of those people who are subscribers is falling as well.

And it's quote mark strangers who are watching my videos more than subscribers. I'm happy for both. But if the question is, are they distributing my videos more than subscribers. I'm happy for both. But if the question is, are they distributing my videos to my subscribers? The answer to that is no, they're not. And fair enough. You know, if that's the way they think it should work, I have to accept that. That's like the rules of the game. And I don't think they're picking on me specifically, but they're sure as heck not showing all my subscribers, my videos. My number one and forever case for this will always be

pewdiepie who's got 80 million subscribers at this point yeah and his his videos for years have been getting around the same view numbers yeah like yeah in the past several years he's tremendously increased in subscriber numbers but suspiciously the view numbers are always like 2 million 3 million 4 million 10 million yeah they're always in that range the subscriber count has become you know we have this discussion all the time but in the last sort of six months to a year it's become like just a crazy meaningless number it's totally meaningless but here's the thing i was thinking about this today it's a bit like youtube removing the annotations hashtag never forget but with what's happened to the subscribers i feel like i just today kind of made a mental piece

with it which is youtube has sort of screwed over creators who have been on the platform for a long time with the way subscribers used to be and then slowly changing that out from under us but if we start the universe at time zero right now and say how does this system work and say there's two levels there's a button which indicates that you are interested in this channel and there's another button which says notify me every time this channel does everything yeah that's not a bad division contingent upon there will not be bell inflation that two years from now there's not a super bell which really notifies you every time and the regular bell mostly notifies you, right? It's

like, as long as we don't have an inflationary curve, I don't think that's the worst system. Nah, you'd have the same problem. You'd have the same problem within five years where people have switched on the notification for too many channels and it just builds up like a gunk, a backlog on their account. And they have like a little hack in their brain where even though I've switched on notifications for 800 channels, these are the 10 channels I still like. And then suddenly that notification number would be the inflated number that we get upset about. You'd be starting this new problem again, just under a different name. This is the question about the trustworthiness of YouTube. I don't trust YouTube to not do bell inflation, that there's going to be another super notification method in the future.

Is that YouTube's terrible and don't know what they want. And so people are always going to overbell themselves. And it will always be true that YouTube can come in and say, hey, if you let us algorithmically bell you, bro you will use YouTube more and so I don't think YouTube will be able to resist that temptation two or three years down the road when some manager needs to get his numbers up for the quarter

and then they'll be like, well we're going to algorithmically bell you. Yeah, you're right because I can hear certain people saying to me our job here at YouTube is to give people what they want even when they don't know it. Like, you know, we've got to kind of second guess them. We've got to help them, like hold their hand. And that could be taken as like a lovely thing they're doing, a service to the viewing community.

Or it could be taken as pushing people around, taking control and not letting people just figure things out for themselves. And the reason it irritates creators is I've seen more and more channels not even mention anything about subscribing to me. I've seen more and more channels just jump straight to the bell. They say, hit the bell. All right. And they don't talk about subscriptions. And this is the same thing with annotations where if there's a super bell in the future, you know, there's a holler horn and you got to hit the holler horn. People are going to look dumb for saying bell me, bro.

Yeah. And if YouTube can hold the line and just let there be a place where people can make decisions that YouTube knows full well aren't even in their own interest about overbelling themselves, then I would agree with the sentiment YouTube does a good job of distributing my videos to people because they would show up in the notifications if they hit the bell and the subscribe button is more like a thumbs up, I'm interested in this channel button. That would be fine. But again, I think the reason so many longer-term creators

feel really burned by this is because the rules were changed. But if we start now as like day zero, I think I can agree with this system. But then I can also see two years from now being furious again because they've introduced the Superbell. Yeah. Okay. Final question. My favorite question. Yes or no. Have you heard anything from or about YouTube in the past 90 days?

Yes. No. Not sure. Yes. I love this question because it's so perplexing. Like, have I heard anything from or about youtube in the past 90 days i almost feel like you would have to go to like an uncontacted tribe in brazil you're the only person in the world who has half a chance of answering no to that question yeah but it's like anyone hasn't

heard something about youtube in the past 90 days it It's like, have you heard anything about Hollywood in the past 90 days? It's like, yeah, yeah. Everyone in the industrialized world is going to say yes to that question. Have you used electricity in the last 90 days? Yeah, it's crazy. And so I was like, I click yes. And then this is, this is the best. What have you heard?

Question mark. Just give you a box. Type in, what have you heard? What have you heard? Well, YouTube, I hear there's another adpocalypse on the horizon. That's what I've heard. Where do I start? I just send them a link to a few Hello Internet episodes.

Yeah. Anyway, I just, I love that. It's like the weirdest open-ended question in the world. What have you heard? Oh, I've heard a lot, YouTube. I've heard a lot about you. And also bear in mind, this is a survey for like professional YouTube creators. I know!

It's not like I've gone to like an old folks home to ask them if I've ever heard of YouTube. They're asking people who like make YouTube videos for a living. Yeah. It's like, especially in a community where like a huge portion of the industry is gossip about the industry. Is there anyone who's doing this survey who could possibly click no, or even better yet, click not sure. I'm not sure if I've heard anything about YouTube in the past 90 days. What's the point of this question? Is this question like the equivalent of someone saying, you know, ah, so did they say anything about me?

Did I come up at all? That's why I love this. I think it totally feels like that, especially with the way it's phrased. What have you heard? Question mark. It completely feels like like what were people saying about me at the party after I left?

That's what YouTube is asking. So needy, YouTube. So needy. you you you you I seriously hope the people at YouTube don't listen to this podcast. Oh, I hope they do. I hope they do, Brady. Really? Hi, Susan. I know you're listening.