Hello Internet - H.I. #120: Battle Tested

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

Grey and Brady discuss: Dinosaurs Attack! follow-up, Panini Cheapskates, Polymath University, YTWTBTVC: Premieres, and It's Always Christmas at Hello Internet. Sponsors: Away: thoughtfully designed luggage for the way you actually travel - get $20 off a suitcase at awaytravel.com/hi20 and use promo code hi20 HelloFresh: tasty recipes & fresh ingredients delivered to your door - for a total of $80 off (8 free meals in your first month) go to hellofresh.com/hellointernet80 and use promo code hellointernet80 Audible: the largest selection of audiobooks and original audio performances anywhere - start a 30-day free trial by signing up at audible.com/hellointernet or text "hellointernet" to 500-500 Listeners like YOU on Patreon: Show Notes: Recorded two weeks ago. Discuss this episode on the reddit H.I. #118 YouTube edition: Dinosaurs Attack! Bob Heffner's Dinosaurs Attack Page - please form a queue and only visit one listener at a time. LOTS OF MONEY OR NOT LOTS OF MONEY!? 1993 The Black Lotus Edition Panini Cheapskates Calculator Unboxing

This episode of Hello Internet was brought to you by Nice Steak. I have something to show you. I went onto the eBay. Okay. I did a bit of insider trading because I bought this before it was a thing. And I've bought a couple of boxes. Oh, wow. Of these bad boys.

I've never even seen such a gigantic box of dinosaurs attack cards. And have a look if you open it. It's overflowing. Oh, my God. With unopened packs of dinosaur attacks cards. How does that even exist in the world? That you have unopened booster packs for dinosaurs? There's loads of packs of them.

Basically, I bought them before we did the show so because i thought maybe the price was going to go up on ebay so i bought a whole bunch of packs and when i got them my wife said oh that's great you should give them to gray as like a christmas present or a birthday present or something and i said you don't know gray but that's pointless so what i've actually been doing with them last week, and I cannot tell you how much I've been enjoying this. Okay. I have been opening packs and then putting random cards into envelopes

and sending them to Tim's. Oh, my God. That's amazing. That's amazing. So, any Tim's that have given us a postal address via Patreon, I've been pseudo randomly selecting them and sending them to people. And I cannot tell you how much pleasure it has been giving me. It has been so much fun because I've been loving opening the packs

and seeing what cards I get. And then it's this little feeling of being a little bit like Father Christmas, choosing which card to put in different envelopes and sending it off to someone and imagining them opening it up and thinking, oh, I wonder what they'll think of that card. And I'm genuinely thinking, oh, that person's lucky they've got a really good card. Like, oh, that person's unlucky they've got one that's not quite as good. It's been so much fun. It's been so much fun. And I've gotten really into opening them. Shall we open one now? See what we get? Yes. Oh my God. Yes. No, of course. You have to open one now, Brady. Let me get two packs. Because the packs actually come in either red or blue.

Would you like to open the red or the blue pack? Let's go with blue. I think I like the blue one with the brontosaur. That's cool. Let's do that one. I like the blue pack better too. All right. I'm going to open it. Here we go. Right. Gray's watching on the camera. Now, the first thing you'll notice when i open it is these packs still these are from like 90s or 80s like hang on let me look what year 88 1988 this pack 1988 oh my god and you'll see when I open it, it's still got the gum. Still got the bubble gum in there.

Okay. All right. I can smell it. I can smell it from my childhood. It's lost the smell. The smell is gone. Hmm. I'm not going to put 12, 31 year old gum. Luckily the gum is always up against the less important to me sticker card, because

you actually get these stickers. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yep. There were stickers. I remember those stickers. So we've got the Brontosaurus sticker. As you can see, there's still some remnant of the gum on the sticker card there, but

it's only the sticker card that gets affected in this way. Fortunately for the serious dinosaurs attack collectors, those looking to receive mint cards, it's just the sticker that's being damaged. That is lucky for the halls of history that we're going to be preserving the actual proper cards without the gum against them. So let's see what cards we got. Are you excited? I legitimately am excited. I don't often think this way, but this is a surreal moment to imagine trying to explain to a child me, like, you know, buying these in the local stationery store on Main Street.

And I like zap in from the future and be like, hey kid, let me tell you these cards. It's not just now. It's going to be in your future. All right. What are they, Brady? Show me one. What's the first one on the top? So first of all, we have number 21, Fast Food Frenzy. Oh, yes. Burger Barn, the alternate universe McDonald's being attacked. Not one we discussed on the episode.

No, there's an ironic sign on the burger behind saying salads fresh all day. As a brontosaur or brachysaur, I'm not sure which goes to town on it. So there is an irony there, that's a vegetarian dinosaur, isn't it? Helicopters firing missiles at it, all sorts of carnage. Card 39, Trilobite Terror. This is a bit of a controversial card, this one. Trilobite Terror, to describe for the listeners. It's a close-up image of a man screaming on the ground as trilobites crawl all over him. And this is a little bit of a confusing card because I don't quite understand the situation.

How did this guy get in this situation? I also don't think these were a creature that did this kind of attack, but do you want me to read some of the back two to give you some context? Please. It says here, An unidentified corpse was discovered on the corner of Central Park West early this afternoon. The man's face was a grotesque, misshapen nightmare. Eyes were completely gouged away.

The sockets encrusted with dried blood. Authorities believe he was the victim of trilobites. Is that how you say it? Or is it? I don't know. How is it trilobites? Trilobites. I don't know.

It says here, flesh-eating worms from the Devonian period. Worms. Apparently they weren't flesh-eating worms. No, I think that's why it's controversial. There's a quote here from the mayor. I mentioned this in your newspaper. Obviously, there's more than just giant dinosaurs to be concerned about, commented the mayor with a dark chuckle. These little guys are pretty nasty, so keep an eye out and forgive the unfortunate choice of words.

I like that little bit of characterization for the mayor. This mayor is about as un-PC as it gets. That strikes me more as the mayor is giving a mischievous little wink to the reporter, right? It's like, ooh, there's a lot to watch out for these days. Wink! So, next card I know is one of your favorites. And this is the one I've thought about the most since we recorded. Okay.

And it is card five, Homeroom Horror. Homeroom Horror. That's great. It's a strong card early in the deck. The reason I've thought about this one so much is how you said, when you were looking at it, how you identified with the young lad who was like getting away while all his friends were being eaten and i'm just imagining kind of a slightly disenfranchised young gray like just wishing this upon the bullies of the class and like and this card being his like fantasy and it gave me an insight into why you may have liked homeroom

horror like any young person who has their struggles, you might think, oh, I just wish dinosaurs would just kill everyone I don't like. I mean, what child hasn't had that thought? Let's be honest. Next, this is another one that we didn't discuss much in our previous episode. This is card 29, Monster in the Museum. Oh, right. Yes.

So we have a dinosaur breaking into a natural history museum and attacking a dinosaur skeleton that is on display. It looks like it's a T-Rex attacking a brontosaur skeleton. Oh, okay. What does it say on the back here? Oh, it's part of a stupid Prometheus log sub story that's going on that I don't care about. I prefer the newspaper articles. Of course, Brady prefers the newspaper articles. But yes, after we put up that episode last time, I was looking much more in depth at a bunch of the cards because I was putting it together for

the animated version of the YouTube podcast. Which you did a great job on, by the way. Thank you. I spent way more time editing those cards in than any return on investment calculation could possibly warrant. You've got to do that sometimes. But I truly enjoyed the experience of editing all the cards for the YouTube version. If you haven't been onto the YouTube channel and seen the video that Gray put together for our dinosaurs attack episode, you must have a look at it. It's a whole different experience. Well, I was looking at all the cards while doing that.

And it is the funny thing of head canon, or like when you're watching a TV show, there's like, there's some characters sometimes that have a subplot. You feel like, oh, I don't care about this. It's like watching The Wire. It's such a great TV show. But everybody has the plots that they do and don't care about on The Wire. And it's like, for me, Dinosaurs Attack, it's like The Wire, right? Like,

I can't get enough of Stringer Bell. Like, give me all the Stringer Bell you got, right? My doors are always open for Stringer Bell. Dinosaurs Attacking Schools, great. You know, keep it coming. That's all I want. And then some of the things, at least for me in the wire, it's like, oh, these stupid kids. I don't care about these dumb kids. I'm not interested. And dinosaurs attack has the like Prometheus log and what's going on. And the devil dinosaur we mentioned last time, like none of this counts. I'm not interested in any of this.

I just want my meat and potatoes, dinosaurs attacking. That's all I want. Well, the final card probably falls outside your preferred part of the series, but it is the one we described as the most gruesome of the cards. And this is card 31, Our Forces Flattened. Right. Yes, there we go. The The general who, by the way, I noticed we discussed he's flattened by this dinosaur that has stepped on him. There's like a big footprint and he's been crushed under it.

Yeah. Again, through vastly more time than was really necessary in editing and putting together the YouTube video. There's not one, but two rats in that image. And the second rat is already dining upon the general, like we suspected that first rat was doing. So even though these many decades later, there are new details always waiting for you in Dinosaur's Attack. I mean, there is so much there. I mean, even there's a little folder next to his dead body with with top secret written on it and say like oh what's in that binder what top secret information was he carrying i'll read the back because the the back scene has been written as a u.s army official dispatch it says at 1700 hours general frank manchester was killed in the service of his country and species oh great yes there's some great detective work here because

it says death was apparently caused by the heavy footfall of a theropod dinosaur let the record show that despite his untimely demise general manchester delivered top secret battle plans to our correspondents in new jersey still hopeful mitch Stevens, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army. Well, there you go. Even my top secret question is answered. Is there nothing dinosaurs attack cards don't deliver on? It's so intricate. I am so happy that you are sharing in this dinosaurs attack pleasure with me. I love it. I've got this box and a whole other box of them. These five are going straight in the post tomorrow to Patreon supporters.

That's amazing. I wonder if we are genuinely causing like a spike in the dinosaurs attack market on eBay. Like we are the beginning of a renaissance of collectors looking for vintage quality dinosaurs attack cards. I did see some suggestion that the price had gone up a bit on eBay of the cards. And I know for a fact we crashed the poor chap who runs the dinosaurs attack card website after the podcast because people kept visiting and the website was down. Yes, we hugged it to death. Very sorry, Bob.

It's back up now. But the hello internet masses were thundering through the halls of this tremendous archive to see all of the images. Well, I don't have to go to the archive anymore. I've got them all here for real. And it's like a great work of art. It's only when you have the actual card in your hand, do you truly appreciate everything about it. You can look at it on a website all day long, but until you've held one in your hand, you haven't felt the magic of a dinosaurs attack trading card. Listen, Brady, I know you're having a fun time opening those cards, but you have to promise that you're going

to save some for the next time that I come by you so we can open them together in person. All right. I would have given you a box as a surprise but i was so convinced you wouldn't want to keep them i thought that you just bin them no but see i'm not saying i would keep them right although a nearly complete collection might be an amazing thing to mount on a wall and like display behind class would be kind of cool yeah but i do really like the idea that you're opening them and then they're like little presents that are being passed on to the Patreon supporters. This is the way I like things, right? They flow through a person and then onward. I was going to sign them when I sent them out, but I decided there was no part of the card I

was willing to sign. It was just too perfect a thing. Like I didn't want to sully it. So I left them unsigned. Like, you know, cause I thought, oh, you know, a bit of Hello Internet merchandise. Because I would want it signed if I was like, you know, a fan of a podcast and that sort of thing. But in the end, I didn't sign the ones I've sent out. It is a tough call because like you said, they are so detailed. Yes. I feel like your signature would cover up almost anything.

Exactly. Even on the back, those newspaper articles, like it's tiny prints. There's no good place to sign. It's precious. Although I think if you and I get together and open a few of them in person, you can have like rare, super special collector's edition cards that are signed by both of us. And I'll get a really fine tipped pen so we can do it like in little spots that it feels safe. So we don't ruin the gore. You do want to fully appreciate it. You know, Neil Armstrong, when he signed pictures of himself, there's a famous portrait of him, like the cliched portrait of Armstrong, before he went to the moon. He's got his helmet off,

but he's wearing his space suit. Yes, I can see it in my head. Yeah. He obviously signed a lot of those before he stopped signing autographs. He would never let his signature, legend has it, touch the American flag, like on his shoulder. So if the signature encroached upon the American flag, that was a sign you had a forgery. Although I think there are a few legit specimens where he has sneaked onto the flag a bit, but interesting factoid there. I wonder if someone has done one of those videos about how to tell forgeries for collector cards.

Because again, I keep comparing these to Magic the Gather the gathering cards which were the other cards in my childhood and there's a few really interesting videos online like people who collect those things about how do you tell what's legitimate and what's not it's so interesting to see like how people try to determine like which one of these things was authentically printed at the time and what kind of crazy detail you have to go through. And there are tricks like that where it's like, oh, if this ink is slightly misaligned, like, you know, this has to be a fake. And it's just like, like that signature. Oh, if the signature goes straight over the American flag, like that's not a real one. That's a, that's a fake one for sure. All right. Good luck to all the dinosaurs attack card collectors out there. Yeah, no, i feel like i've hoovered up

most of the market's spiking it is it is i might have to do another little purchase now before we this show goes out i'm gonna recommend that brady i'm gonna recommend that hello internet is also brought to you by away away is the company that sets out to make objects designed to be resilient resourceful and essential to the way you travel. And the object that's the most essential to traveling, of course, is a suitcase. Away asked thousands of travelers how they packed, why they travel, and what bugged them the most about their luggage. And they took all of that information and designed a bag to solve a few of the old problems and a few of the new ones. And Away sent me one of

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So once again, to get $20 off a suitcase, visit awaytravel.com slash HI20 and use promo code HI20 during checkout. Thanks to Away for supporting the show. So Greg, while we're on the subject of collector cards, I thought I would share with you a news story. A news story, you say? Yeah, caught my eye this week and it's related, so I thought I'd give you a look. Panini Cheapskates. Panini Cheapskates. Panini cheapskates. So just to give you the context, Panini are people who make these soccer stickers,

most often associated with the World Cup. When the World Cup comes around, you buy all these packs of stickers. They're just headshots of the players and you've got to collect all the players and fill up your album with all the players that are at the World Cup or all the players that are in the premiership and things like that. Okay. So the World Cup organization prints a binder that has all the slots for the stickers that you need to collect. That's the idea? Rather than a binder, it's an album and these are stickers and you stick the stickers on the page. You get it for the World Cup, you can get it for your local soccer league. It's a big thing

amongst sort of, you know, soccer people. And a few years back now, there was a World Cup and it's really expensive to buy all the stickers to try and fill your album. I've actually done a video for Numberphile about the mathematics of how much you have to spend to try and get all these stickers. It's like famous, like, how much do you have to spend to fill your Panini album? This year, there are 800 stickers

and the probability is this and you've got to spend this much on a pack. So anyway, what happened was there was this couple in England that like for a bit of a joke, instead of buying all the stickers, they like did these pretty crappy hand-drawn versions of them and stuck them in their album instead. And they were called like the Panini Cheapskates. And it became this worldwide sensation.

The media loved it as a story. Look what this couple's done. Isn't it funny? These like childlike drawings of the players, but still recognisable as the players. It was good fun. Anyway, because of all the publicity they got, they did it again.

And then it became so big, they created a business and they started making like their own hand-drawn Panini cheapskate stickers. These, you know, crappy childlike drawings that you could then buy and they started selling them on Etsy. Right, right. I see where this is going.

Okay. So if you scroll down the story, you'll see Manchester United, the famous club, finally served them with a legal notice saying, hey, you're infringing on our intellectual property. Only official licensees and partners and sponsors of the club are allowed to use these representations of our logo and things like that. And basically these people have had their shop shut down.

There's a side-by-side picture lower down in that story that shows the official Manchester United logo and the unrecognisable cheapskate version of it. Okay. So I think you get the story in a nutshell. We'll put the link in the show notes because it's worth having a look at these images. And I wonder what you thought about it. Okay. I mean, well, first of all, you say these drawings of the players are childlike. Yeah.

You know, this is no Mona Lisa here, but it is better than I could ever draw all of these players. Like when I look at them, I instantly recognize the players. So there is a definite skill there. You have to have a certain level of artistic skill to draw something that looks that bad, but is also still recognizable. It's an interesting set of images here. It's just funny to see these pictures. This is always the thing, like that's a funny idea.

It's a funny meme. But once things become a business, once people start making money off of this kind of stuff, it's like, okay, now people have to get involved. And it looks like this is a trademark dispute. Because what I'm wondering is, they're not arguing over the images of the players. It seems like the dispute is over the actual logo for Manchester United or the other sports teams.

Is that correct? I believe so. Because all those stickers they made of the Manchester United players, I can't help noticing are former players, which I also find quite interesting. I wonder if there was a reason they did that. Like all those players in that page of Manchester United stars, none of them currently play for Manchester United. Is that not just because of the turnover of sports people like this? It says this is from 2014. Don't you have to rotate in and out young bucks to join the sports team to then be used

up in the prime of their life for the entertainment of others? That's true. But looking at these players, they seem to cover a period where some of these players wouldn't have played together either. So I think they've deliberately chosen former players over current players. I don't know why they've done that. It's just something I noticed. I'm wondering, because I do know this has come up in the world of sports video games, like disputes over the rights to use the likeness of the player or not. But anyway, nonetheless, trademark disputes are the one that I always feel

most lenient on because companies are required to enforce trademark disputes. If the company continues to look the other way on trademarks, they can lose the trademark. Right. But now this is like the time you brought me that article about it was a trademark for the color purple or something for that cellular phone company carrier. Yeah. And it was a question of, well, how close to purple is it? These cheapskate cards, it strikes me as the same thing. How close to the actual Manchester United logo do you have to be before it's trademark

infringement? What do you think, Brady? Well, I mean, obviously this is not close in any way, but in the context it's been used, it's nothing but. It's in the corner of the card where the logo goes. It's next to a Manchester United player. It's the shape, it's the colours. I mean, even though it doesn't look like it, it can be interpreted as nothing else but the Manchester United logo. Like for the last few days, I've been preparing to come on the show and say, I feel a lot of sympathy for Manchester United here. And that's always a really unpopular

thing to say because everyone prefers you to side with the little person and not the business that everyone hates and has done terrible things over the years. If you want to win friends on the internet, you always have to support the underdog. Yes. If you want to win mean comments, you support the overdog. That doesn't win you any friends at all. Anyway, I did slightly change my position legitimately just before we started anyway, because it suddenly occurred to me, this whole cheapskate thing, it is like a parody.

It's kind of a taking the mick of the cards. And if you could get away with that defense, if you could look at it that way, that this is like a sort of a counterculture, painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa type avant-garde joke at the expense of this industry of people buying just headshots of football players, which when you think about it is kind of a ridiculous thing we do, that we'll spend millions and millions of dollars on tiny square pictures of footballers standing in front of a white background. If you look at the whole project that way, and it's a bit subversive, it kind of maybe starts straying into kind of a

fair use parody type genre. And then I don't know whether or not that starts giving them some wiggle room i don't know you have a good point there you have a really good point there because yeah i was going to agree with your first set of comments there that it's a funny case for trademark because it doesn't look like the thing but in the context it can't be anything else like you're totally right about that yeah it's a weird corner case of, does trademark law apply in those circumstances? Has there been case law on trademarks that don't look like the trademark, but couldn't possibly be anything else? I can't imagine that there've been cases like that before, but I feel completely moved by your argument that this is a kind of parody.

It's a comment, isn't it? It's a comment on our culture. or at least what would seem to me like a good argument for parody, that it's making fun of the idea of spending a lot of money on photographs of these players. You have changed my mind on air, Brady. This is a parody, and this is not a case where maybe trademark law would apply. If you put your camera back on for a second, I happen to have a whole bunch of Panini football stickers here in my head. Oh, you have them. Okay. You're a collector. i didn't realize well when i made that number file video about them i contacted

panini and said i'm making this film but i need some stickers and they sent me loads they sent you loads they sent me quite a lot of them so you're not a collector yourself no but no but but when i had this huge box of unopened packs, I just got into that addictive opening them thing like I have with the dinosaur attacks. And like sometimes I would just say, I've got 10 minutes spare. I'm just going to sit down and open a few packs of the stickers just to see who I got. Because, you know, I know most of the players.

I just love saying, oh, have I got a really good one? Have I got a special sticker? Eventually I had to get rid of them all, but I kept this handful here of about a hundred because they were just really cool players or i thought they were really cool collectible ones and i thought i can't throw that one away so these this is like cream of the crop stickers here oh okay those are the cream of the crop i like since you made me turn the camera back on i can literally see the excitement in your eyes as as yeah and brady's shaking his head as

his eyes are twinkling right now as he looks at all the cards. He's so excited. I know. I love it. I love this stuff. I love collector cards and stickers and stuff. I don't know what it is, but it's just the perfect alignment of Brady brain tickling. When I was young, I was really into playing backyard cricket with my friends. And I used to keep all our stats. I used to keep exercise books of all our stats and performances, even though it was just two or three friends playing cricket in the backyard. And then one season when I got my first ever camera,

I took like 20 photos of us posing, playing cricket just in the backyard. You know, just kids, just like, you know, 13, 14 years old. I took all these photos of us, went and got them developed and processed at like the local pharmacy because that's what you did and then brought them home and put stickers on the back of all the photos with numbers and descriptions of what was happening in the photos. And they were like collector cards of us playing cricket in the backyard.

And they were just printed photos I'd taken. But, you know, card three, Brady plays a classic cut shot and stuff like that. It was like... Two things here. I can't believe... Well, no, let me retract that. I can believe that you made your own collector's cards. Now knowing this about you, it seems delightful. And I'm almost hesitant to say this out loud, but I feel like you could do that again with Hello Internet collector's cards.

Oh, Hello Internet collector cards are almost inevitable now. I mean, this is a coming storm. Oh, okay. All right. I just haven't decided how to execute it yet. Here I am thinking like, oh, maybe I have an idea. You're weeks behind. I don't know.

Okay. So I was pausing and thinking thinking should i say these words out loud because sometimes these like and little did i know little did i know that brady's already on this and i'm not suggesting anything to him if i didn't have so many other things on the go at the moment i'd be in full production but i'm just a bit busy at the moment so i'm having to make do just sending dinosaur attack cards to Patreon supporters instead. Ah, okay. So I see.

That's partly to hold you over. It's just to give me my fix. It's my gateway drug. Okay. All right. Well, there's that other secret Hello Internet project that I want to do that I told you about when we met in person last time. And that's kind of at the forefront of my brain at the moment.

So I want to get that executed before I move on to collector cards. I think it is fair to try to only have one ridiculous hello internet project going at a time. Yeah. But in the meantime, Dinosaur's attack is like scratching my itch. Also, I have a question because I'm curious to know. Do you watch YouTube unboxing channels? Like, does that scratch the itch for you no i don't

particularly unless it's something i really want i might sometimes watch one but i think you could count on one hand the number of unboxing videos i've watched for just the pleasure of watching an unboxing video okay so like yeah you're watching it if it's the review of a product that you're looking to buy yeah i'm considering the thing and I want to just get an idea what I'm getting. Yeah, okay. So you don't like the pure ones. Because I do know some people just, they like watching the videos of a thing being unboxed. And there are unboxing channels that specialize in the surprise of it.

Where it's like, it's not clear at first what the unboxing thing is. And then it's like, oh, here's a little surprise. And what was this thing? I find that somewhat baffling, but this again is like whatever scratches people's itches. And I was curious, like, what's the boundary of this? Like Brady likes opening the cards himself, but. I make calculator unboxing videos with Matt Parker on Numberphar. That's more of parody, obviously. Yes. No, that's protected under parody law obviously along with my reaction videos yeah i was aware of those and that was partly why i was asking it suddenly occurred to me like are those things parodies of love or they're just they're

just parodies for the fun of it they're not made in love they're made more in bemusement that this could be a thing okay all right yeah well if people haven't seen them i recommend you go watch the calculator unboxer because there's some minutes you'll never get back they're surreal we do enjoy making them like each video probably i don't know how long they last five or six minutes but we must spend about 20 minutes before each one like in this weird preparation phase where matt and i will kind of jointly talk about what is the mindset of our unboxer today? You're trying to get into character.

Yeah. And we've built this personality about the unboxer, even though he calls himself Matt, we've built this personality about like his ego and where he thinks he stands in the pecking order of things. And because he gets sent calculators to unbox now, it's like, how does he feel about this? Is he like protective of his domain? Is he like, is he scornful of other people trying to even suggest what he unboxes? But he's also a little bit condescending and it is flattering his ego.

And we'll spend a good 20 minutes talking about where he's at before we start the camera rolling. It's been so much fun. That's the most fun part of it. Just sitting down and talking about this fictional character. That's why they're fun to watch, Brady. That's the magic behind the scenes of you're putting in the work. Yeah, the craft, the art.

For the viewer experience. Yeah, it's an art. Crafting this creator who unboxes calculators. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by HelloFresh. HelloFresh is the company that makes cooking at home enjoyable and easy. With fresh, pre-measured ingredients and easy-to-follow, six-step pictured recipe cards delivered to your door each week in a special insulated box. I don't know about you, but for me, one of the hardest things about trying to eat healthy is going out to get the healthy food. So HelloFresh makes it way easier to achieve that goal by just having the stuff sent straight to

you. HelloFresh does all the planning, the shopping, and the prepping, so you can just focus on a healthier you. There's three plans to choose from, the classic, the veggie, and the family, with an option to switch between them for when your tastes change. So if you want to get out of that recipe rut, do that by going to hellofresh.com slash hellointernet80. That's hellointernet and then the number 80. That will get you a total of $80 off with eight free meals in your first month. HelloFresh is part of the greater gray office empire, and it really is just easy and delicious to make. I never expected in my life that I would make a meal out of a box, but I did it and it was really easy and it tasted great.

HelloFresh is America's number one meal kit and works out to be $6.99 per serving. So once again, to take advantage of HelloFresh's special offer for 2019, get a total of $80 off with eight free meals in your first month by going to HelloFresh.com slash HelloInternet80 and entering promo code HelloInternet80. That's HelloInternet80 with the number 80 for the $80 off that you're going to get. Thanks to HelloFresh for supporting Hello Internet.

And thanks to HelloFresh for sending fresh food and easy to make meals out to our listeners. There's another news story that I thought you would find interesting. I don't know if you know about this or not. Let me read the first couple of lines of this randomly found article about it. Britain's first new university for 40 years will open in London next year, offering a single degree that pioneers a polymath approach. Backed by a variety of businesses, the London Interdisciplinary School will offer the one Bachelor of Arts and Science degree spanning science, technology, arts and design and humanities. The first 120 students will enrol in September 2020, will live in the same accommodation for the first year and will get 10 weeks of paid work experience a year. Quote here, today's problems are more interconnected, complex and

urgent than ever before, says the university. At LIS, we're building a university that will give students the skills to go and tackle some of the most complex problems that we face in the world. Real world problems don't respect boundaries of subject or industry. Our interdisciplinary approach teaches you the most fundamental theories and models from across the arts and sciences, and then empowers you to make new connections and find new solutions. God, that is a corporate quote. But anyway, the idea is interesting. They're like, uh-oh, we are on a fast train to corporate town. Exactly.

They were selling me on it until they went into that kind of written by committee press release statement. But anyway. I'm confused by a few things with this. Did I hear that right? It's the first new university in 40 years? I mean, I don't think particularly in a place like the UK, I would not expect there to be a big turnover in universities. This is not a soccer team where you're burning through the people on a yearly basis. Universities are institutions that last a long time, and they're also really hard to put together. But that's actually quite striking if it is true that no new universities have opened in the past 40 years. I've just opened up a Wikipedia page called List of UK Universities by Date of Foundation.

I'm going down to the most modern ones. Oh, hang on, 1980s, they're saying the University of Buckingham and the University of Ulster. The early 80s, that's close enough to 40 years ago. Like, I'll give them that. Oh, hang on, then we've got 1992. The passage of the Further and Higher Education Act in 92 allowed polytechnics. And so, these are institutions that like upgraded to university. So, 1992, there was a long, long list of upgrades. For example, the University of Worcester was founded as a training college in 1946 and then absorbed Herefordshire

and Worcester College of Midwifery, and then it gained full university status in 2005. But you wouldn't call that like a totally new university, would you? That's a pre-existing thing taking the next evolution. I don't think that quite counts the same way. I don't know, Gray. I think we're getting lost in the weeds here. What I think is interesting is what do you think of a university saying, oh, we're not going to have like a chemistry degree or a biology degree or an English degree. We're just going to have these like all rounder polymath degrees where you just have to be a Jack or Jill of all trades.

It makes me think of a thing I haven't thought about in a very long time, which was when I was doing my first round of job interviews as a teacher with my brand new shiny PGCE so I could apply to schools in the UK. I was going around to a few places and talking to the headmasters and the headmistresses. And a thing came up in every one of those interviews because I have two bachelor's degrees. I have a bachelor's in physics and I have a bachelor's in sociology. And I listed them both on my resume. And every head of the school brought this up as a thing because what they wanted to be really clear on,

even though I had a PGCE, I was a qualified teacher in the UK, they wanted to be really clear that these are two separate degrees, right? You didn't get a degree in physics and sociology, right? You have a physics degree and a sociology degree. And it was very clear that if I had had a physics and sociology degree- Right, like some hybrid. Yeah. Like if I was doing a course that was like, we're going to learn about physics, but we're also going to learn about society. And we're going to learn about the synergy between these two topics to find solutions in an ever-changing dynamic world. That would have

been a real negative mark. I mean, the way you said it made it sound pretty negative. But I haven't thought about that in a while, but I just, I remember being kind of struck by that because it was a thing that just hadn't crossed my mind of, I guess some school might give out degrees like this. And it's just a thing to check on if you're hiring someone where their skills should be that they know physics, that you want to make sure they don't have some kind of mixed degree. You're right. At the moment, it does sound a bit like a Mickey Mouse degree, but I guess this could be the start of a process where that mindset has changed. And if this university was to become prestigious and the degree was to

become well-known, it could be like what the baccalaureate has become to high school education. It could become this new thing in tertiary education. Oh, really? You've got one of those, have you? Oh, they're quite, they're pretty good. If they build the right reputation for it, the right brand for it, it could be a cool thing. Or it could go the other way, and it could become what you used to come up against. And that whole, is that just like some wishy-washy around the campfire kumbaya degree? Brady, you know that I'm the person who, let's say, has some mixed feelings about the success of the education system to do anything that it claims at all. And I don't doubt the general statement that a lot of the problems in our modern world and a lot of

the problems in the future are problems that require an interdisciplinary attack to solve in almost any domain. I remember even when I was doing my physics university degree, even then was the beginnings of the rumblings of like, hey, kid, you might not want to go into particle physics just on its own because that field doesn't look like it's going to make a lot of progress. We've got a lot of physics really locked down. If you're looking to make a career of this, you want to combine this with chemistry or biology and you can do something there that's like an interesting mix of things. And I don't know. Another one of these things, I don't know if I should say out loud, but I had a very ambitious friend who I sometimes wonder what she's up to nowadays because she got a degree in geoengineering

and law and her specific plan was what she called the team evil plan which was to be able to specialize in like where are resources and how do you get access to the land that those resources are in? And so she thought that this like two-pronged attack was the way to go and to be really valuable to companies. And I often assume that she's somewhere just swimming in a pool full of money if that plan worked out. She could be on the ground

and like identify the valuable parts of land and then also be like, so what's the situation with your lease here, you know, and find some loophole. So like, I do think that it's true that you can combine things, but. Grae, I thought you'd be all in on this. Because you always strike me as one of those people who thought one of the problems with school education was it was teaching the wrong stuff. Yeah. You know, you shouldn't be teaching so much of this. You should be teaching this because it's more practical.

And maybe they've got it wrong, this new university, or maybe they, you know, they haven't quite tweaked it right. But at least they're taking the attitude that the degrees we're doing are wrong. It's time to change the degrees and make them more industry friendly. And they've got all these industry collaborators and things like that and the backing of all these companies. So I thought this is like, oh, this is the solution Gray would like. Okay. So the reason why I'm hesitating here is for the same reason that I think the heads of school were hesitating over my degree,

is I would be worried that in a course like this, where you're going to be mixing, say, hard sciences or hard math and computer science skills with other areas, you're always going to be extremely tempted to cheat on the hard technical side. Right. the hard technical side, simply because if you're doing a four-year degree and you're going to do a bunch more things, you cannot possibly go into depth as much on the various topics. Now, to be fair, I did a four-year physics degree, and I think the first two years of that were the years where the marginal increase in value was very high, and then you rapidly run into diminishing returns. So I can conceive of a four-year degree working really well, like giving someone hard science tools and ways to think about things and then combining it with other skills.

But I would just be concerned as an employer that, like, you're selling me this thing that you're skilled in this area, but I'm not convinced that you are. It sort of goes back to what we were talking about in Sportsball Corner last time with specialization, you know, get the goalkeeper out of there and bring in the guy who's the specialist on stopping these kinds of kicks. I'm so proud that you just reached for that as your analogy. A little tear came to my eye. I've thought about that sports ball corner several times. I have had echoes of anger thinking about that sports ball corner since we first recorded. It pops into my head.

And I just, again, have to just think about the boot of justice that was not able to come down as hard as it should have. That's why it's a thing for me to reach for immediately. I'll tell you how it was resolved in a minute. Oh, please do. Here's what I think about this LIS, this interdisciplinary school. Obviously, you're going to have a reasonably shallow knowledge. And I don't imagine people graduating from this place are going to get jobs at the Large Hadron Collider or necessarily get a job as the new head of school, you know, for an English department at a university.

But what you are going to get is the sort of people I would love to employ. Someone who could be like a video editor on one of my projects and I could throw them anything and I know they'll know enough about physics to muddle through. They'll understand that Shakespeare reference that the scientists made or they'll be able to handle anything. I think there are so few people who are all-rounders like that these days and they're like my dream person. Like the few people who I work with who I consider to be

all-rounders, they're just like absolute gold dust to me. They're really special people. And this sounds like this will be a place that will churn those people out. So I don't know. Do we need more of them? Brady needs more of them, but I'm just some YouTuber who makes videos. Is there a shortage of these people in the world? Or do we need more people who have deep knowledge that can build the next invention that's going to save us from a comet or send us to Mars? Do we need more specialists? Do we need more all-rounders?

I don't know. Okay, this is a totally different conversation. And I'm going to completely agree with you there. It is definitely true that if you're in a situation where you're starting a business or you're trying to find people to work with, like all rounders are super valuable and they're also much rarer than you think they are. We've sort of touched on this in the past, but it's a thing that I'm really aware of that basically almost all of our YouTube colleagues are all rounded people. They're good at a bunch of different skills.

They're technically skilled enough with the computer, and they also have enough domain knowledge in a particular subject. But they can also, you know, they also read a lot and get literary reference. Like, they're well-rounded people. Good general knowledge. They have a lot of general knowledge. They have a lot of general knowledge. And every one of those YouTubers has the exact same problem of like, they're trying to find another well-rounded person who's good at a bunch of stuff to work with them. And that's really hard. In my own experience, it's been very hard to find those sorts of people to work with. So like, I agree with you that those people are generally valuable across many different fields, but there aren't enough of them. But that's a very different question from, is this university going to more often than not, most of those well-rounded people that I come across have a pretty serious education in some hard environment like the sciences.

And they just happen to also be like well-rounded people. And I almost wonder if they had gone through a course like this, if they'd be just less valuable because they had never spent the time doing like the one particularly hard thing. There's like two models of what does school do? One of those models is school teaches you skills. And the other model is that school acts as a great filter. And it's just simply certifying that people were able to pass through a series of filters. And I lean more toward the filter side of things than the production side of things. But I don't know. Like, if there was a university that could produce a bunch of really well-rounded people, I would be totally for it. But I'm just like, I'm not convinced that this is that. It could end up being like a magnet for indecisive wishy-washy people that don't really know what I want to do with my life. That's probably incredibly unfair, but the sort of person I could imagine gravitating to this course could be people that are not focused. Yeah. While we're in the well of the past, this is another one of those things. When I was applying to the PGCE program, I'll never forget this. My interviewer there was looking over my resume and

the things that I had done, because I had a couple of things, like I went to do an economics course that I didn't finish when I came to London originally. And she wanted to know if I was flighty because I had done sociology and then physics, and I had gone to economics and decided not to do it and was now going into teaching. That was her red flag that she didn't want someone who was flighty, who was going to be flitting from topic to topic. I could see a university like this attracting people who are flighty, like who just want to flip from topic to topic. And the all-rounded person is really valuable, but they're valuable because they're skilled at a bunch of stuff. And someone who just like knows a little bit about a lot, but doesn't have any particular skills in any field is not really useful. And then on the other end of the spectrum, what's useful to companies is

specialists, people who do this thing particularly well. And what I was going to bring back about this promise of like, oh, we're going to have people who can solve cross-disciplinary problems. If I was a company that was faced with a bunch of cross-disciplinary problems in whatever domain, the world of politics or the world of science, it doesn't matter. And I, as a company, needed to solve these problems. I wouldn't think that if I hire a bunch of people with combined degrees in these areas, I don't think that team would beat a team made up of a bunch of people who are specialists in each of the areas. I'd rather hire five physicists and five biologists to work on a nanotechnology problem

than to hire 10 people, all of whom have physics slash biology degrees. You'd rather have the Avengers sort of everyone with a different superpower than seven or eight people who are just like nice and fit and in good shape. I mean, yes, in that analogy, I would like, of course, you'd hire the Avengers. But it's not about what I would want to do do it's about which team do i think would be much more likely to solve the problem and a team of specialists seems vastly more likely to solve the problem than a group of people who are generalists if your problem is remotely difficult at all i don't think that the team of generalists is going to win out it might be useful to have

one generalist on that team, but you're mostly going to want to have specialists. So here's the thing. I'm all for places trying different stuff in education. I think one of the problems is that so much of education is sort of the same. It all sort of follows the same pattern. I'm all for more experimentation. I just, you know, I would not immediately get behind something like this and say, what a great idea. And for sure, if I had a child who was looking at universities and they said, oh, hey, there's this new one that's opened up that's going to be like, no, no, no, no, no. You're not considering that one. That one's not going to happen. Trust me, kid. You don't want

to be in the first class of the new university that's doing this new thing. No, no, no. You can pick something else. Do you think I'm wrong? No, I think you're probably right. The thing I kept thinking about in my head was you were talking about how most of the people that do our job, like when we hang out with a bunch of educational YouTubers who are like a lot of our friends now most of them have like some hardcore sciencey degree and they just happen to be good at all that other stuff and then i was feeling sad because like i feel like they're odd person out in that respect because i have i didn't do that

but then i thought i guess i was like a professional journalist for many years so that's kind of my equivalent in all seriousness brady you were battle tested in a in a job that i couldn't for sure battle tested now i job that I couldn't handle, for sure. Battle tested? No, I'm really liking it. Oh, do you like that? You like battle tested? Because that's hard as nails.

Yeah. But like... Battle tested. I think that really is true. And as much as we joke about it, you know, you had to produce a lot of content in a short amount of time. And I think that that is a thing that perhaps it was innate in you, but the news industry certainly sharpened and that carries on into the work that you do now. I mean, you didn't have a generic desk job filing TPS reports. You know, you had like a very clear, like,

we need this many things, we need it this many times a day, and it needs to be done by this particular time. And it just goes. So I do mean that as a kind of battle testing. Like, I couldn't have done that job. Hashtag battle tested. I love it. Let me tell you what happened with the football thing. So in fact- Was he fired? Please tell me he was fired.

While we were recording, actually, like press conferences happened that I didn't tell you about. And basically, the coach, this guy called Sari, the manager, the boss. I also realized, by the way, from reading comments on Reddit, I didn't explain very well what the manager of a football team is, because I think you thought at first it was like a corporate owner. And then people started thinking, oh, is it just some coach that gets people to do push-ups or something? But the manager of a football team is what Americans would call a coach, but with lots of powers.

So they do have lots of powers over the running of the club day to day, what players are bought, what players are sold. They're also in charge of the training and stuff, but then they're also in charge of the tactics and managing the match. They're like a very powerful person, but they're not the person that like, they're not like the billionaire that owns the club. Right. Yeah. I feel we got there in the end. You did get there. You did get there, but I did a poor job explaining what that was. But anyway, the manager of Chelsea, this guy called Sarri, came out and did this press conference after he'd completely lost his mind during the game when the goalkeeper refused to come off.

He did this kind of, oh, it was all a big misunderstanding. Everything's fine. And nobody believed that. It was like the least believed statement in the history of statements right i think that was kind of the press officers had got to him and said you better say this or we're gonna have big problems tomorrow so he was like oh i didn't understand that i thought he was injured and he wasn't injured and it's just all a big misunderstanding nothing to see here but the next day or so the goalkeeper that refused to come off this guy called kepper

was fined a week's wages but importantly the next game he didn't start he was on the bench game after that playing again all forgotten so he basically got a week's salary docked and he missed out on playing the next game as you're kind of public shaming. And now it's like forgotten. That's what happened. That makes me sad. Yeah.

We live in an unjust universe, Brady. Yeah. He should have been ground into the dust for insubordination. Sari, though, hasn't been sacked, the manager, and I thought he was on the brink of being sacked for other reasons, and I think they can't sack him just at the moment because it will look like the players got him sacked. So I think it gave him a stay of execution,

but I think he'll be gone soon anyway, just for other performance-related reasons. It's disappointing. It's very disappointing, Brady. It's not what i wanted to hear but i wanted to hear a story of justice and this was not a story of justice this is a story of sadness oh hey while we're following up on things yeah how many people knew that you were you had a cold while you were recording yeah not many people knew they were and they all said no i

didn't know victory victory see podcasters don't tell the people when you're sick. Nobody knows. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Audible. With Audible, you get access to an unbeatable selection of audiobooks, including bestsellers, motivation, mysteries, thrillers, memoirs, and more.

I've been using Audible for years and they are the number one place I get my audiobooks. It's just so easy. It syncs everywhere. It syncs with my Kindle. It syncs with my phone. It syncs on my computer. Getting my audiobooks through Audible is just the easiest. You can get a 30-day trial when you go to audible.com slash hellointernet or text helloin Hello Internet, all one word, to 500-500. If you're looking for an audiobook to try in that free trial, might I suggest Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman's an author I really like and I've been reading for years, and I think this might be the first book of his that I ever came across. It was recommended to me when I first moved to

London because it's a kind of urban fantasy book that takes place in London. There's the real London above and a fantasy London below. And it's just a fun, simple story that I really liked. So if you're looking for a good book, or if you've heard of Neil Gaiman before and you're looking for a book to start with his, might I suggest Neverwhere on Audible. And when you become an Audible member, you get to choose three titles every month, one audiobook and two Audible originals that you can't hear anywhere else. Audiobooks are a real positive addition to my life, and I think they could be for you too, especially if you listen to podcasts. Audiobooks are right up your alley then. slash hello internet or text hello internet to 500 500 to get started with your 30-day free trial thanks to audible for supporting the show i tried a little experiment with the show these last two episodes i know i jumped into it yes brady you did you did bravely jump into it. This is another edition of YouTube wants to be TV Corner. And YouTube, a couple months ago, released this feature that strikes me as very TV-like and also very not TV-like at the same time.

It's a strange feature that YouTube calls premieres or as you would say premieres yeah we do say it differently don't we yeah yeah i can't just realize i can't do the brady i can't even say it exactly the way you say it you say the way you say it makes it sound much fancier does it yeah it does it does brady it's very brady has a glass of brandy in his hand as he's as he's talking about the latest premiere of Hello Internet. Posh's cushions, battle tested. I can see that on a Hello Internet collector's card right now. So yeah, they introduced these premieres. Now, we're going to have to be very precise explaining what these are and how they work,

because they have caused not a small amount of confusion amongst the Tim community. Okay, so I'm going to start by explaining the thing that people get confused with. So for a very long time, you have been able to stream live on YouTube. So that means you can just flip on the camera on your computer and talk into it, and it's just broadcast immediately live out to the world. And plenty of people make their entire living just doing stuff live, particularly video gamers. And that is a thing that I have never understood for a long time, but I dabbled in live streaming myself a little while ago. And I feel like I kind of got an understanding of why do people enjoy watching something live what is it like to be the creator of something that is live and I can see why that

is interesting and part of the interestingness I think for the audience is to know that whatever creator you're watching is creating their content at this very moment as you're watching it. And that's just sort of exciting. It feels like a little bit of a connection between you and that person. And then, of course, there's also the Formula One hope that there's going to be a dramatic crash. If something is live, there's always that little bit of you that has the arsonist delight of,

maybe this could go terribly wrong. Maybe I could be here and watch this empire crumble before my eyes. Everybody feels that when watching something live. So that has been around for a while. And I think it's very well understood by the community and it's very integrated into YouTube. People know what it is. Right. So then YouTube introduced this thing called premieres. And premieres work like old fashioned TV. So on the creator side of things, you need to have already made an episode of whatever. So like we had recorded and edited and made the video for an episode of Hello Internet. It was all done. Days before. Well, a day before. The morning of, but you know.

But it's finished. It's finished. It's made. It's finished. It's made. It's a file sitting on my desktop and upload it to YouTube. It's done. And so then what premieres do is you as the YouTuber are given a URL and that URL is where the video will appear. The watch page. Yeah. You can promote this URL on YouTube and you set a time for when the video will go, quote, live. No one can watch it before then. They'll go to the watch page, but they'll just be confronted by, this will be watchable in X hours or X minutes.

Yeah. The next episode of Hello Internet is coming out in 90 minutes. Yeah. And there's a little chat room where you can wait in the matrix loading screen for this thing to appear, like in the void of nothingness. And you can talk there. You can say, Oh, isn't this going to be great? I hope there's a plane crash corner. Yeah. And then when the time comes, the video is quote live in the sense that it is broadcasting. One could almost say premiering and it just plays in real time. Unlike most YouTube videos,

you can't fast forward it. You just hit the URL and wherever it is, like for Hello Internet, an hour and a half long show, if you arrive 20 minutes later, like it's just starts playing from that 20 minutes points. You can rewind. You can go back to the start though. Yeah, you can rewind, but by default, it's kind of catches you up to the current point in time because there's a chat next to the video and that

is happening live so that is people discussing the video that is premiering i mean you can really kind of think of it as it's tv old-fashioned tv non-streaming tv yeah like friends will be on at 7 30 so you watch it at 7 30 right but like30. Right. But like all of the technology we have to erase from this scenario. We have to erase DVRs. You know, it's just like you're just watching it as it broadcasts, which is a strange concept for some people. But as soon as it's finished, it just becomes the YouTube video. And then you can just go to it like it was normal. You can go to it.

You can jump forward. You can go back. It becomes a normal YouTube video as soon as the live stream finishes. So I've seen some people kind of play around with this, but most of the things I've seen people do, I don't think it really makes sense because most of the content on YouTube is still videos that are like under 12 minutes, you know, five minute videos, maybe like a 25 minute video if someone's really gone into something. But like overall, like compared to actual TV,

the vast, vast majority of content on YouTube is still very short form. Yeah. And the whole concept of a premiere to me, just, I don't think it makes any sense if you are looking at content that's less than 30 minutes long at a bare minimum. I just don't think it makes sense because the chat room is all over before it even begins. But it had been on my mind that Hello Internet might actually be the perfect kind of content for this premiere system because it's long and it's also not action-packed every second.

Yeah, it's not a breakneck speed. We linger, some would say, for too long on most subjects. It's you and I in the audience taking a semi-random stroll down a garden path. It's very relaxed. The content is appropriately paced so that a chat room could make sense alongside of it. And so I'd been toying with this idea of premieres and I tried the last two episodes as a premiere. And I can say that it seems like there was a tremendous amount of confusion on the user's part about, is it live? Is this happening now? Or what the situation was? I felt like I had a little bit of a loophole from the scope of Project Cyclops because I hadn't really

considered things that were streaming or premieres. So I was checking in on the chat and seeing how things were going and making sure it wasn't a disaster. But you were there the whole time. I was making my presence known and i was in the chat and people could talk to me and i would try to talk back as best i could i do have to say the most riveting part for me was the first one watching you try to figure out how to at reply to people in the chat i don't know i mean i could get very lost in the weeds complaining about the interface might come to that in a minute. No, but like that was high drama for me.

I was riveted. I was like, is Brady going to figure out how to reply to people in the chat? It was great. Hello? Is this thing working? But would you second my assessment there that people were rather confused about what the nature of this thing is? Yes.

And then as new people were coming in, so everyone would be like, is this live? Are they like, are we listening to a live recording? And everyone would say, no, no, no. And it would all get sort of damped down a bit. And then someone new would come along and say, oh, I've just got here. What's going on? Is this live? And everyone would be, it was like every new person who walked into the room had to have

it explained to them. So it got a bit tedious after a while. But maybe that's just because it's new, you know. I don't know. I think that there's something interesting about this. Despite what seemed like a bunch of negative feedback, especially on the first one, there's something that my mind keeps coming back to about this, which is that it has the potential to be a virtual listening party for an episode of Hello Internet,

which seems to me like a fun thing. I find myself really drawn to this idea that premieres and podcasts might be a thing that work really well together. But what is your take on this whole premiere system? Where do I start? So I've been fascinated by it too. Thinking about it initially for, you know, my own video projects, should I be premiering Numberphile videos when they go live?

As a way to, you know, create a bit of buzz and make it a bit more of an event just to, you know, boost your videos. And I was glad when I saw you were doing it with Hello Internet. And I found out completely by accident that you were doing it via a leak on Twitter. I'm sorry, Brady. My communication skills are not very good. They were poor. But then I texted Gray and I said, do you want me in on this?

My thought was, it's way better if one of the creators, for lack of a better word, is part of the chat. And you said, yes, please, you know, do it, do it. So I was glad you were kind of testing it with Hello Internet. And my feeling, having sat through two of them now and participated in two of them, is one, you are absolutely right. I could only imagine it working for a podcast. Like a normal video is over so quickly

and the chat is such a maelstrom and a hurricane of talk just flashing by you it's a total waterfall of content moving so fast if you cared about concentrating on the video as well it would be impossible i think people who are in the chat, the video that's playing alongside of it is very much secondary to the experience. And I think that's even true for a podcast, even though it's slow and long and lends itself a bit better to it. I think you've got virtually no chance of paying attention to what's happening in the podcast. I'd already heard the episode. And that's the only reason I think I could handle it. If I hadn't already heard the episode, I don't know how anyone knew what was going on. Here's why podcasts in particular is great,

because there's no visual content unless you're editing in dinosaurs attack cards. But for the most part, there's no visual content to a podcast. So I think a listener who is part of this listening party can also just not always be looking at the chat. They can be using it just as a regular podcast and then flip over into the chat to make comments or like, oh, this is a particularly interesting part. What are people saying? But then if you're just going into the chat to not follow what's happening in the chat and not read it, and you just want to go in and make a comment, well, what's the point? You might as well just go onto a Reddit or a YouTube comment see i think the whole point is the interactivity of the chat and then once you start

looking at the chat suddenly there is a visual component and you're having to listen to a podcast and read something moving very fast at the same time and then your brain just like fries maybe this just says something about my brain but i found it very difficult to listen and experience the chat at the same time. And it got to a point where I just pretty much wasn't listening. I think I may have even turned the volume off at one point, but because I knew the podcast, because I was in it and I knew what was coming, I was able to, as I was seeing comments coming up and people saying things, I knew what they were talking about. So I was still able to engage in the chat in a meaningful way. Yeah. I just meant that a participant can dip in and dip out for a podcast in a way that would be

fundamentally impossible if it was a regular YouTube video. I agree. If it's going to work for anything, it's for the podcasts. It seems almost tailor-made for podcasts. They need to do something about just the technical architecture of the chat. I mean, I'm not an expert on chats and comment threads the way you are. And I know you find the art of them very interesting and you know all the terminology. I don't. But what I do know is that this has problems.

And there are three or four fundamental problems. It goes so fast, right? There are so many comments like piling up that are rolling past that if I see something someone says that I want to respond to, Brady, what's your favourite colour? So from CGP Grey asked me that question. So I will at CGp gray and say blue but by the time i've done that the original question is way way gone like it was 40 comments ago before i can type blue because you know i'm

a hunt and pecker so people will see brady say at cgp Grey blue and there's no idea what the answer is and there's no way to find out what I'm answering unless you climb back up the ladder find the original CGP Grey comment what the question was so like when people start having banter and discussion there's no connection between the comments and there's just a whole bunch of rubbish in between. Also, when you at someone, it only becomes like highlighted and obviously it's an at for the person receiving it. Like, so if someone ats me, I'll see a big red at Brady Haran and someone will say, how are you doing today? But for everyone else, they're just seeing that as normal text and it makes for a really messy reading experience. You don't know who's talking to who and what they're talking about. It's like walking into a crowded room where everyone's shouting at each

other and you don't know who's talking to who and what they're talking about. They've made an absolute dog's dinner of it. And I hope they're going to fix it because at the moment it's really hard to use. Am I wrong? I don't think you're wrong. But I think you have identified a fundamentally unfixable problem about live chat systems. And for live chat systems, I think YouTube should frankly not even really support the whole concept of a threaded discussion in a live chat system. This is just not going to happen. I don't think this is the way live chat systems can possibly work because there's always just going to be too much motion. I think we had like just under a

thousand people at the height of the premiere and it gets a lot of people listening live and some portion of them are chatting and it becomes a fast storm of words very quickly. You were watching a lot of the time, weren't you? What was it like to watch and not even be trying to engage with any of the people, just as like a spectator with his popcorn? What was it like? We have mentioned on the show many times that when I read, I sub vocalize. So it's the same thing of trying to read while listening to a thing is extremely difficult for me. They're competing activities. And so I had much the same experience of you of, oh, thank God I've won know this podcast from the time you recorded it. And then also from the first time I edited it.

And then also the next time I edited it and then checking it before, like I'm, thank God I've heard this conversation four times before I'm here. And I turned down the volume so I could just barely hear us to know where it was when I was checking in and seeing what's going on. So I don't think that I could listen to a podcast live and really pay attention to the chat if I didn't already know what the content was. But I do know plenty of people always report that this is a thing that they can do, that they can read and listen at the

same time. And so I take those people at their word. And so this system is much more designed for them. But nonetheless, the text goes by very fast. And the terminology for the solution to this problem is called rate limiting. There are various systems which try to limit how many comments can go across the screen at once. There's a whole cavalcade of tools about how do you want to manage this. And I have often found that none of these tools do a very good job. So the next time we do this, you know, if the number starts getting up to be like more than a thousand people watching live, we're going to have to implement

some kind of rate limiting system. And on the backend, what that usually allows you to do is say there can't be a comment more than every 20 seconds or every 30 seconds. You can set some arbitrary number to be like, this is the maximum number of comments per unit of seconds. But what most of those systems end up doing is for the people in the chat, it blanks out the box where you can type until 20 seconds has passed. And then the box appears and you can type and you can leave a comment. So is each individual rate limited or is the whole community rate limited? So I don't know about what YouTube does because I haven't tried it personally, but they have a rate limiting system and I have seen both systems in practice.

I think it'd be really negative if everyone was included in that cap, because then you'd feel like it'd be like when you're trying to buy tickets for Glastonbury and like, you know, you can't get online to get the tickets. And for like 20 minutes, like a million people are all refreshing browsers and trying to do like, it'd be like, when's the window going to open? And will I get my comment in when the window opens? And I'd be really dejected by that and just leave. Yeah. So in systems where it's global for the community, I don't think it's good. my comment in when the window opens and i'd be really dejected by that and just leave yeah so in systems where it's global for the community i don't think it's good because not only that but what you then encourage is people write out their comment in advance copy it onto the clipboard

yeah they're just waiting to paste and hit return yeah to like catch it and knowing they'll get all the attention for that 20 seconds, you know? Yeah. I think that's a really terrible system. It turns it into a not enjoyable experience for everyone. Yeah. Now, I've seen systems as well

where you can rate limit it just by the users. So each individual person can't leave a comment more than every X seconds. Yeah. Which is better, but it doesn't solve the problem that as you turn up the dial of how

many people are here, that rate limit isn't actually effective. That kind of per user system is only works for a very narrow case and it actually works better the fewer people are there. So like that's not a very effective system either. Here would be my perfect rate limiting system that I feel like would solve a bunch of problems. Let's say every 30 seconds there can be a comment and the system would just pick randomly from everybody's last comment in the last 30 seconds that they typed into the box. That to me seems like a way where you're not cheating the

system, but it can still scale. And you as the operator of the chat have a possibility of following everyone. What happens to comments that don't win the lottery? Do they just disappear into the ether or do they get pumped out later? Just if I was a YouTube engineer, I'd say design this first so that they just disappear. Like they just go into the ether, that the whole thing is refreshed every 30 seconds. I don't know about that. I think I'd find that really frustrating and unfair too, because if you've got a point you want to make and you've taken the trouble to write something, seems pretty unfair for that just to be thrown in the bin because you weren't lucky. Like this is fundamentally the problem of, it's like a real estate issue there's only so much usable real estate in the chat box and we run into a tragedy of the commons problem

where when there's too many people the real estate becomes unusable for everybody because it just flows by too fast yeah right so like you need some kind of system now youtube also has the system, which I really think they should do a lot to improve, but it's the super chat system. This is where users can pay to make their comments more prominent. Yeah. So if you see a yellow or a green comment go by, that's because the user has paid $2 or $5 to make that comment more visible. I used to think this system was ridiculous, but again, having experienced a little bit more firsthand watching streams and

participating in streams, I feel like, oh, I kind of get it. I kind of get both ends of the super chat thing, but I don't think that YouTube does a good job of giving people who are willing to pay for super chats, more prominent chats, bang for their buck. Because if the chat room is really busy, their comments still just scroll by very fast and just become a little colored bubble at the top of the chat or because this is just a way to make a contribution to the creator? Or do you think they're doing it because they genuinely like, you know, this needs to be heard. I'll pay if I have to, but this needs to be heard. I don't know why people do it. I can say that I've done it on a few chats with creators I've been watching live. And what was your motive?

It was fun. I honestly can't put any better words into it, but it was just like, it's just sort of fun. Spectacle. Yeah. It's like, we're all here together and it's very hard to put into words. And I feel like I kind of get the live experience and I don't know the motives of the user. I mean, obviously visibility is one of them. When someone is actually live streaming, most creators who are live streaming will try to at least mention by name the person who just did the super chat. So for a live event, there is a little bit of notice me, but that's not going to be the case for a premiere. So super chats are sort of a way to

try to handle the real estate problem, but I don't think YouTube does a good job of it. I think super chats should stick around at the top of the screen for a little while and not just disappear immediately like everything else does. I actually thought they did, but... But just as little bubbles, not as the actual comment. It's still very hard to read them if a bunch of people are all super chatting at once. So I don't know. The rate limit problem is a real problem where chat rooms can be destroyed by their own success. And I still like

my idea of random comment selection as rate limit options, but I agree that would be frustrating for a user to feel like, hey, my comment didn't get selected. I haven't got a better one, but that strikes me as really unfair. So, interesting. Yeah. The only reason I'm still sort of okay with it is because I figure for anything that is, quote, live, if you haven't made your comments within 30 seconds or a minute of whatever people are talking about, it probably rapidly becomes not relevant anyway. Like the conversation moves on or the broadcast moves on. I think that's the other problem with rate limiting in general, though. Like, you know, people have got things they want to say and it has to be said at that time. Otherwise it becomes pointless. So I don't know. It's really hard. This isn't that it's really hard. It is genuinely quite a difficult problem of how do you want to solve this? I also have like the tiniest little thing about why rate limiting is no fun. So I have live streamed my

truck simulator game a few times and I've never turned on rate limiting. I'm using discord for that, which is a live chat tool. It has an option to rate limit, but it's been fine. There's not been too many people. And which method does that use of rate limiting? That one has the global method where the chat box just goes away until the time limit is over. But I haven't had to turn that on because the chat room hasn't been too busy. And so when you don't have rate limiting on, there is a fun thing that can happen, which is so as I'm driving my little truck simulator game and I cross the border and you can see the little signs is like, welcome to Nevada. The chat room will just spam all of the little slot machine emojis to be like, Hey, we're in Nevada, right? The gambling state.

And to talk about the fun of the live experience, it's fun to see a whole bunch of people all like putting a row of three emojis and it just goes flying by. If you do not have a rate limit, the chat room can express excitement in a very internet-y way. That's true. We've gone to Arizona. Now the chat room is filled with cacti, cacti as far as the eye can see.

It's fun. It was the same on Hello Internet. You felt like when you said something a little bit funny or engaging and suddenly the speed at which the comments are going by suddenly would go yeah i could accelerate you go oh look that was obviously engaging that and that was a nice little bit of feedback yeah even if you couldn't follow what they're all saying or they were just all going low low low, low, low, low, low, you know. And this is where premieres are simultaneously feeling like the oldest, most traditional TV thing possible. But they're also interesting to me because it is one place where YouTube is being a

little bit internet-y and an unrate limited chat room expresses excitement. And that's enjoyable. It's enjoyable as a creator. It's enjoyable as a creator. It's enjoyable as a participant in a chat to see like, whoa, the chat room's going wild, right? And you don't get that if you have to use rate limiting tools. But that's a chat room not being used for chat, is it? Like that's not a chat room. Then it's just like an emotion room.

That's a really good way to think about it. It's like an emotional barometer. And the restrictions of rate limiting do not allow the same kind of expression of emotion to occur. emotion room that's a really good way to think about it's like an emotional barometer and the restrictions of rate limiting do not allow the same kind of expression of emotion to occur it's just like boom boom boom it happens at a really regular rate yeah very metronomic but like despite all of these problems of how do you handle a chat room that is busy i felt like the premieres were just on the edge of too busy but they weren weren't actually too busy. So we didn't have to introduce any of the rate limiting stuff. And it was still pretty followable if you were

paying attention. And of course we can't introduce rate limiting, can we on print me as by the way, it's not like that's not an option we have. Yes. No, YouTube does have an option to do rate limiting. There is a rate limiting method. Yeah. I don't know which method it uses, but there is a method that lets you set like a 20 second or 30 second timer. I didn't know that. I just don't know if it's by user or by community because I feel like I really don't want to ever have to do that.

But if we keep doing premieres and if people like the premieres, there may be a time where you have to look at, well, it's just, there's just too much. Like nobody's able to read this. What are we going to do? When you do rate limiting, I wonder if the creator themselves is rate limited. I hope not. That would be silly, wouldn't it? The owner should be able to spam emojis if he wants to. You do get this confusing situation too when people are landing on the watch page during a premiere and some people are going into the chat box and joining the chat and other people are going and putting comments under the video, normally to say that they don't like premieres.

You also get this, oh, now where am I supposed to look now? Yeah. There's a few things that I think YouTube needs to iron out. One of those is don't have two places to chat in a video. Like just have the chat room. Don't have the comments below. Open up the comments below when the premiere is done. Guys, don't introduce additional confusion. That's comments below. Yeah. Open up the comments below when the premiere is done. Guys, don't introduce additional confusion.

That's no good. Yeah. I also have a real suggestion for YouTube. I hope they're listening to, to try to help minimize the confusion. So on YouTube, if you are streaming live, YouTube will show your video, you know, in the recommended section. And they put below it a little red box with all capital letters, red letters, a little red rectangle that outlines it, it says live. And I think the YouTube users have been trained to

understand that that little red box, like exciting, a thing is happening right now. And I couldn't help but notice that when you're premiering a video, YouTube uses the exact same red box and letter style and font, except it says premiere. Yeah. Now, if we know anything from the internet, it's people don't read. And I think people are, they're seeing the red box and they're clicking it. They're expecting the thing to be live yeah so youtube please for premieres could you just make it green or blue do something other than the universal color for live like i mean no i'm talking to you right now i'm looking at my

recording equipment what does it have to indicate to me that things are recording? Red lights everywhere. Red light means it's live. And so like, just, just use a different color. I honestly think that would go a really long way to reducing user confusion that the thing that they're listening to is broadcasting, but the creators are not making it live as they're listening. So while the whole idea of a premiere feels like a very TV thing, we're all going to sit down and we're going to listen to the Hello Internet episode that's premiering live on the radio right now. Here's why it feels like it's YouTube wanting to be TV. And it's my frustration with premieres in a way that I think they could be URL where your video is going to appear and then you can tweet it out to all of your followers and tell them like, you know, tonight at 9.30, 7 central, this episode is going to go live and you can all watch it. And the idea, I guess, is you can like build up a crowd of people who are waiting for the thing to go up. And that's weird on a couple of levels. It really assumes that the production cycle is like TV because your video has to be finished and uploaded to the YouTube system in order to make the

premiere work. Yeah. Like if you're a video creator and let's say you're doing a thing where you've made a video in two parts and you want to have part two next week. And so premieres in theory can let you do a cool thing where at the end of the video, you can say like, click here for part two. And when they click there, it takes them to the premiere page and they can get a notification when part two goes like quote live for that premiere. Because when you go to a premiere page and the thing hasn't started yet, there's an option that says set an alert. And you can go about your business and it'll bring you back when the time comes.

Yeah. Like it's an interesting way to do something to say like, oh, go here. You know, I could imagine doing that in one of my videos saying like, oh, there's a story for another time and click here and, you know, it'll Premiere at this url but it means as a creator you have to have finished both parts one and parts two before you upload either of them if you want to do that thing on the back yeah and have the url there already yeah which is not mandatory yeah no it's not mandatory but i'm just saying like i'm trying to think about how could a person use this tool yeah and the idea is like oh in the future a thing will be here and it would be much more useful is like, oh, in the future, a thing will be here. And it would be much more useful if you could say, oh, in the future, the thing will be here. But you as the

YouTube creator don't have to have produced it in advance. I mean, again, most of the people I know who make YouTube videos, the day that they upload, they finished the video the night before or the morning of. And it's like, it's done. And you feel like, great, I'm going to put it up on YouTube and go. And so it's like it's a strange production cycle to think about, oh, if I want to use this feature, the thing already has to be done. But if it's already done, why don't I just put it up now? What is the point of making people wait? And that's what feels to me like a real harking back to the ancient TV production cycle of like, we film a season of TV and then

we dole it out like one episode a week, every week for the next six weeks. And it's like, it's mostly done before we even start uploading. That brings two things into my mind, Gray. Like I have two reactions to your comment there. The first one is you certainly couldn't have a system to solve your problem where you would just trust the creator is going to make the video next week and give them a URL because so many creators are unreliable and might not meet the deadline.

I don't see a way to solve your problem and like trust the creator's going to have that video ready for next Tuesday, visit this time and place because there'll be just too much disappointment. But the second thing is, and I think this is one of the big problems with premieres at the moment and a reason people don't like them. And that is there seems to be a real resentment amongst viewers. And I'm not commenting on that resentment, whether it's good or bad, that they hate the idea that you could dare to have a piece of content finished and not give it to them immediately. Like, even when we put the Hello Internet thing up and it was like, this is going live

in 30 minutes and you give it some lead time just so that people have time to assemble from whatever they're doing, get a tweet and say, there's going to be a premiere here in half an hour. They hate the fact that they could have it now and they haven't got it. It's a bit like Netflix dumping a whole series at once because people would hate the fact that it was being held back. And I think on YouTube that resentment is even stronger.

And I think if premieres is going to have any hope of becoming a thing, they're going to have to get over that resistance people have to that idea that you're daring to have it finished and not giving it to them. Because it is a cynical thing to do, isn't it? If you're holding back your video because you want to release it at an optimum time or things like that, that is being done for strategic tactical reasons.

And people on the internet hate that because then they think they're being played. Yeah. I'm going to agree to your first point about YouTubers are going to miss the deadlines. The Premiere system actually does let you change the date afterward. I played with it just a little bit and like it let me bump back the release date for 15 minutes when i was trying it the first time just to see like does this work like if there's a disaster so it would let you bump it back which opens the possibility that you could have a url as a holding place that doesn't mean that like you're on the hook for you

have to hit this exact time. What's that video game that has never been released that everyone always jokes about? Half-Life 3, yeah. Yeah, you could have a video like that, like your Settlers of Catan video. You could have the URL and just keep pushing back that date for like the next 20 years. That's a great idea. I might just have to take part in it. So it is possible to move back the date.

But like, I agree with you with YouTube users' frustration about premieres, precisely because the way the system works is when you see a premiere URL, you know that that video is done. And if someone says this is broadcasting in three days, you know it's just sitting there on the server and a totally arbitrary time has been set for when it's going to go up. A time that's probably in the best financial interest of the person who made it. Yeah, exactly. You know that they're doing it for some reason. And when I uploaded the first Premiere, I didn't quite realize a particular feature of this system. So I scheduled the video for a couple of hours in advance so that

there would be enough time for the file to upload from my computer and like fingers crossed process by YouTube in time for it to go live. And people were really frustrated in the chat because it initially said something like, oh, the hello internet episode is going to appear here in three and a half hours. So if you lost your internet connection for some reason and the upload failed and then you couldn't get your internet connection for some reason and the upload failed and then you couldn't get your internet connection back, a whole bunch of people would have had that alert and then the video wouldn't have made for that time. Yeah. If the internet connection had gone out, I presume, yeah, the whole system would have just totally failed. That's bonkers that

that can even happen. Surely the video has to be in place and uploaded before they send out alerts. Nope, it doesn't. That's crazy. And the interface is confusing. But like, just before we get to the second part, I was 100% with the listeners that I would be frustrated and annoyed to get an alert that says, oh, this thing is going to be live in three and a half hours. Because that's like, it's just enough time to be irritated that you can't listen now if you're around

and you're available to listen. And almost certainly, no matter what you're doing now, in three hours, you're going to have to be doing something else. You know, it's no good for anybody. Premiering something that's going to take place in a week because you want to spread out episodes, I feel like, okay, you know, I can kind of get that. Although it's still frustrating to know that it's just done and you're arbitrarily waiting. You're making people wait for no real reason but what i what i realized through some strange interface confusion for the second time i premiered the video is you do have the option to have the whole thing like private and hidden and all set and uploaded

and processed and then you can set a premiere to say it's going to be up in 15 minutes, I think is the minimum amount of time you can reasonably make this work. And I think that's pretty good for someone to get an alert to say that the video is going to be playing in 15 or like 30 minutes at the most. That feels pretty good to me. I think that's okay. Does that give enough time for people who are at work to carve out 20 minutes so they can be part of the chat and things like that? Is that enough time for people? You only have the choice of 15 minute increments. You can say like it's going to be 15 minutes from now or it's going to be like 30 minutes

from now. And I don't know. I feel like both of those intervals are sort of about right so that someone can wrap something up that they're finishing and then listen. Like, I don't think that's the way YouTube wants anybody to actually use the Premiere system to say, hey, it's broadcasting in five minutes. Go watch it right now. Like, I think they really do want people to promote these URLs for a thing that's in the future. Days in advance.

Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, they don't want you to be able to change the thing. It already has been done. So I don't want you to be able to change the thing. It already has been done. So I don't know. I find that the premieres are one of the more interesting things that YouTube has done in a while, but it feels like a slightly confused project unless you're thinking of it purely in terms of a television production company is going to make six episodes of a show and they're going to dole it out and

it's going to all be finished before the first one even goes up. I really feel like it has some potential for podcasting in particular to be an interesting live listening party. Do you think that it's interesting for Hello Internet or do you think I'm like experimenting in a wrong way? I'm willing to give it some more goes and see how it works because I just think it's also, it was just a good moment to get a thousand Tims in one place. And I could have a chat to them, which I liked, but I also liked watching them chat to each other and being part of it. And like, I saw that as a positive thing, whether or not it enhanced your first listen of the episode. I think most people were of the mind that I'll actually listen to the episode properly later on.

I know a lot of people who were at work weren't even listening to the episode and were just sitting in the chat for the sake of having a chat and they didn't even know what we were talking about because they couldn't hear it. So I like that. I think it creates a campfire to sit around even if you can't really pay proper attention to the campfire because there's just too much craziness and too much people. But I'm willing to give it more goes.

Do you think you'll use it for CGP Grey videos? No, I don't think it makes any sense for a regular video. This is why I don't think it makes sense for the vast majority of YouTubers in any way. I mean, premiering a four minute fast talking video, it seems like just a disaster on every level, right? Like no one's going to be able to follow the video. It's too short to even get into it unless I had some very long, very slow content that was on the channel.

Like, oh, I know, I know what would have been good for premiere. I could have done the 24 hours of death live stream as a premiere instead and probably slept a lot more soundly instead of worrying about technical problems with the live stream that would have happened while i was asleep for what was basically like a weird art project so if i do something like 24 hours of death again i would premiere that but like for a regular video, I don't think it makes any sense, but across your great collection of channels, because you were thinking about it too. Like, is there something that you think it would work for?

Well, I just don't know whether it creates just a bit of buzz and interest in a new video. Will it get more people to come? And is that a good thing? The other thing that I'm worried about, though, I'm not worried about it. I just wonder if it's going to happen, was if more and more people jump on board with this and think, oh, I want my release to be a big event. I want everyone to come and watch my video. And one of the ways to get attention in a place where everyone's screaming for attention becomes to make your launch a premiere, not just publishing it, but making it a premiere, then what's going to happen when everyone does it and that becomes like the default way to release every video?

Does that mean you're going to go to your subscription box or your homepage or something that's just going to be 90 things premiering in the next three minutes and you've just got to choose which premiere do I want to go and sit in on? What I think will happen is it will just become the norm and then people will stop caring about it and it will just become how videos are released. Just every video that gets released on YouTube has a countdown and an ability to watch it for the first time as a stream as opposed to being able to fast forward straight away. I think it could become the default and then I think it will become meaningless.

The only way I could see it becoming the default is if YouTube gives algorithmic or promotional preference to premieres. Then yes, everybody is now in the game of only the people who don't premiere lose. We're in a situation where nobody wins anymore because everybody's trying to do the thing and the people who lose are the ones who do it the normal way. I don't know if YouTube gives algorithmic or promotional preference to premieres. I don't really know what this looks like from the user end, but like assuming that doesn't happen, that the algorithm does an extra super love premieres. I just really can't see most people using it because it just doesn't make any sense as a tool. But there's no cost to it though. Like it doesn't make sense and it's might not be a great experience, but there's no penalty for using it. Because if you make a five minute video, there's only five minutes of that video's life where there's this confusing time where people

are having this possibly suboptimal experience and then it becomes a normal video anyway. So why not just check the Premiere box and Premiere in 15 minutes, which is no great loss. You're not holding it back or anything like what's the penalty to doing a premiere i don't think there is one so i want to know is are all the periodic videos going to premiere like is this what you're toying with i have no plan to do that i didn't know anything about it i knew it existed but i'd never even considered it it was just something to ignore on my alerts and YouTube page. But I always thought, oh, what's that like?

And I did think Hello Internet would be a good place to test it, so I was glad when you did that. But I don't know. I don't know. I have no plan to do it, but I want to know more about it. I was talking to some people about it at Educon, and a few people said, oh, yeah, it's a good thing. Yeah, it's cool.

Other people were a bit like me and were like, got nothing to say about it. So it's a big unknown for me. I wasn't enamored by it as a user on Hello Internet. I didn't fall in love with it, but there were the positives. I did enjoy the community aspect to it. And, you know, hopefully if we keep doing it on Hello Internet, I'll keep attending as best I can. Yeah. And if we keep doing it on hello internet i'll keep attending as best i can yeah but and if we keep doing it on youtube people will know it's not live it's a listening party it's a live stream of something that was pre-recorded yes it's very simple and straightforward youtube just just turn the badge green just turn it green i think blue so great should we do a really quick christmas card corner because i've still got this huge pile pile of Christmas cards with questions from Tim's.

And it's kind of like our emergency backup. But I want people to know they're still here and we'll still occasionally get to some of these old questions. Yeah. You want to hear a couple? It's always Christmas at Hello Internet. This one came from Israel and someone asked, I want to ask you, what is your umbrella of choice? Classic, folding, a coat. Are you an umbrella carrier? I can't imagine you being willing to have such a

large object on you. Did you say coat? I think they've added coat as like an option instead of umbrella. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm an umbrella only if absolutely necessary kind of guy. I really don't want to carry one on me regularly, despite having lived in a sporadically rainy city for a decade. I don't keep an umbrella with me. But you own one at home. You've always got one at home? Like my umbrella of choice is, oh, I'm out somewhere and it's raining. I'm going to buy a cheap umbrella from a store that I'm going to be frustrated at the low quality of and lose track of immediately as soon as I get home. That's how my umbrellas work. How about you? I avoid them. I'm more of an umbrella loser than a user. I lose them all the time if I have one. But if I am buying one, I'll get like a small one that can like, you know, telescope down into something I can fit in a pocket.

I do like getting one that feels like it's got a bit of quality about it as best you can with those telescoping ones. But that's the problem though. A few years ago, my wife got as a gift, like a very high quality umbrella. It wasn't a telescoping one, you know, it's like a full length one from a really fancy umbrella store in London. And I use it a couple of times and it was like, I didn't know this experience could be like this. It keeps me dry. It doesn't get blown around by the wind. Yeah. I feel like a fancy gentleman walking down this London street. Well, then why haven't you got one of them all the time?

Because like you, I'm an umbrella loser. And I used my wife's very fancy umbrella a few times, and who knows where, but somehow I lost it. It's like umbrellas are just an object that I'm incapable of keeping track of, and I don't particularly like anyway. So it's a sad umbrella experience, but I'd rather get a little wet most of the time than have to carry around an umbrella just in case. All right. One more. This one comes from, it just says a group of space Tims. Space Tims? Spacey themed card. I don't know what space Tims are. If we were astronauts and had to spend christmas

aboard the iss what personal item would you bring into space i think i'd just have to ask you for advice on what to bring into space i wouldn't even know where to begin i would definitely want to wear my speedmaster watch to space because then it would have been into space of course right i'd love to take a few packs of dinosaurs attack cards in space because they would be like highly collectible then like you know sign them while on the space station bring them back down these dinosaur attack cards were signed on the space station that'd be like the ultimate collectible yeah that would be pretty great maybe i'd take my lightsaber replica not your actual lightsaber just the replica not

my actual one no because that'd be dangerous on a space station yeah no that seems like a really bad idea on the international space station to take the real one i don't know maybe a spider-man costume so i could like you know have to do some wacky fancy dress photos to help with space outreach yeah yeah that's what we'd both do. We'd both bring our costumes. We'd both wear a Spider-Man costume. It'd be the best photo ever. All right, yeah, there you go.

That's what we'd bring, two Spider-Man costumes.