Hello Internet - H.I. #129: Sunday Spreadsheets

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

Grey and Brady discuss: Grey's suspension from YouTube, the end of Project Cyclops, straws, Brady goes West, and Ingrid Goes West. Sponsors: 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 Hover: the best way to buy and manage domain names - go to hover.com/hi and get 10% off your first purchase from Hover Audible: the largest selection of audiobooks and original audio performances anywhere - get a free audiobook and two Audible originals, 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: Discuss this episode on the reddit Grey on Twitter finding out he was suspended from YouTube Brady hotdrop Hollywood hotdrop NASA Reaction GIFs KLM Flight Safety video Ingrid Goes West

Banned. Banned from YouTube. Right into it, Brady. Right into making me feel like I've been naughty and got suspended from YouTube. What did you do? Did you upload indecent material? Does it involve bombs? Terrorism? Nudity? Don't sound so intrigued, Brady. For those of you who don't follow me on twitter and we're not exposed to gray complaining over the past weekend i woke up on a nice sunday morning and i was like oh let me go check my stats on youtube i have a nice little spreadsheet oh yeah a bit of sunday spreadsheet stats yeah sunday spreadsheets for, nice. I had a coffee in one hand. I'm like, I'm going to download this CSV file and import it

into numbers. And then I'll be able to manipulate the data in the way that I wish and have it presented in a way that is understandable to me. And I was like, oh, it's gonna be great. What a nice relaxing morning. What was not relaxing is I went to youtube.com and the moment that I logged in, there was this half a second where I immediately knew, uh-oh, something's up. And it's the thing where you can see when a webpage has redirected you. It landed very briefly on YouTube and then redirected me to this other page the naughty step yeah this is the you're in trouble step yeah so staring me in the face this big message unable to access a google product google of course the parent of youtube if you've been

redirected to this page from a particular product it means your access to this product has been suspended. Read on for further information. Like, oh no, right? Because this is my YouTube account. This is the place where I would upload videos to all of the subscribers. Like, this is not good news. Is your initial feeling like complete and utter panic? Like this is the end of the world or is it more like, oh, this is just a small mistake I've made or they've made and this is going to be sorted out or like, what's your default position when this kind of thing happens? I was, I wouldn't say panicked. It's like the Maryland point of panic where you go way past the scale and you end up back at kind of a like a nervous calmness yeah this is really bad but we've maxed out what we can actually perceive on this

scale like entirely losing your youtube account is so catastrophic that it just can't be real it's not a great feeling and then the description is the kind of description that really doubles down on, this doesn't feel good. So they go, your access to YouTube has been suspended because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or the YouTube Terms of Service. By the way, I really enjoy that part there. Not a violation of the Terms of service, but a perceived violation of the terms of service. Like what a great word of leeway that they've given themselves there.

We have terms of services, but if you violate them, or if we just think that maybe you have, or we perceive that you have, we can suspend your account. It's like, uh-oh, that's going to be hard to fight if you're in some kind of weird gray area. Then it continues onward, right? For further information, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the part that I like at the end of these two final things, like, oh, by the the way before you go google reserves the right to terminate your account at any time for any reason with or without notice and then at the bottom was this helpful yes or no that's gonna be a no it's like this is a hell of a page to land on right there's there's no information about what is it that you may or may not have done yeah there's no specifics and the only things that they

do tell you is you might have violated our terms of service but even if you didn't we could have just shut you down without ever letting you know which which, by the way, I didn't get a notification about this account's access being suspended. So just like, goodbye, and we'll never talk to you again. This is the digital equivalent of coming home and your wife has gone and has cleared out all the cupboards and everything, and there's no note. That's not a bad comparison at all. It is a little bit like getting fired as well is a little bit what the feeling feels like, but also then mixed in with these complicated feelings of,

but I'm not even an employee, right? Like I was doing this thing. I was trying to build something and it's like, oh, it's all just maybe gone for who knows why. What was your first step after reading that? Okay, so because I am a YouTuber with millions of subscribers, I have access to a partner manager. So like there's an email of an actual human being somewhere in Google that I can message to try to get stuff like this resolved. Or a really good AI.

I mean, I've never met them, so I have no idea. to try to get stuff like this resolved. Or a really good AI. I mean, I've never met them, so I have no idea. And at least in years past, I have often emailed a partner manager with questions like, hey, can I get access to content ID? And it's always like, oh, no, we're not allowed. You can't have that. It's like, oh, but I have friends who have that.

No, we can't do that. So it's like, it's not... in the past, I have not found it like a wildly helpful resource. It's more helpful than nothing though. So this is the thing, more helpful than nothing. And they can usually email someone else when something goes wrong.

It's an escalation point. Yeah. So I emailed a partner manager who is new for me. I was like, hi, I can't get access. I don't understand what has occurred. Now, it is the weekend though. So I'm not necessarily expecting any response.

And this is the strange thing of YouTube. Is it always happening business? Like, you know, it's 24 hours a day all over the world. And they're showing videos all the time. But surely the platform is so enormous that on any given day, someone is always having a problem at a really inconvenient time. It's like it just occurred to me that this whole concept of, oh, there's a person in a particular time zone. I don't even know what time zone, right. Who may or may not be able to help you. It seems like there are moments when it is totally not adequate. And if this had been a day where I was intending to upload a video, this would have been like

a real problem. Or even if something had happened on the channel where it's like, oh, I need to go in and change something. It's like, nope, you get nothing. And you have no idea when this is going to be resolved. Yeah. So of course, I took to Twitter and complained. I got to talk to someone.

I guess I'll talk to Twitter and complain about this situation. Just as an aside, Gray, and I know this is something we're going to come back to. This obviously will be ringing alarm bells for some people who are familiar with Project Cyclops. This wasn't what caused the end to Project Cyclops, though, was it? This is just a coincidence. Project Cyclops, where you had taken yourself off social media for a year, had actually already ended. Yeah, it had ended a couple of weeks earlier. Right.

But I think this would have been a breaking event. Right. Promises to yourself are all well and good. But when your whole career has been shut down for who knows what reason, you're going to use the next biggest platform that you have to talk about it. I don't have millions of people on Twitter, but I have a couple hundred thousand people on Twitter. And it's like, this is now my next outlet. Well, you're lucky you hadn't been suspended off there. This is where you start to think about this like cascade effect's like, this is now my next outlet. Well, you're lucky you hadn't been suspended off there. This is where you start to think about this like cascade effect of like, what's going on? I have no idea.

And it's genuinely like a really uncomfortable situation to be in. And it was also doubly frustrating to me because I'd been on a really good roll of like working days of just like, man, I'm hitting it out of the park every day, like just getting a lot of writing done. And like, I'm feeling really great. And this is the kind of thing that even though there's nothing I can do, but wait, it really throws off your ability to focus on other stuff during the day. It's like, why am I writing this script? If I don't even have a YouTube channel, I'm sure it will get resolved. But like, it's just, it's just in the back of your mind.

It was not a great situation. So what happened? happened well is it the tweets that saved the day or did a partner manage to save the day or you have got access again what happened and why did it happen i think there was a combination of partner manager and also complaining publicly that brought the situation to a close but in the most unsatisfactory way ever so i I eventually did get communication from YouTube. And the communication wasn't a proper form or anything. It was, oh, hey, we've restored your access to YouTube. And it looks like, looks like is a great phrase here as well, because it still leaves that uncertainty.

It was perceived. Yes. It was perceived that your account was in violation of our impersonation terms of service for CGP Grey. So my account was suspended for impersonation of me. I was suspended for impersonating me. Was it a verified account? Yeah, yeah, it was a verified account. Yeah, okay. My best guess, based on very little information, is I know that YouTube is doing something to change the way their verification system works. And I'm thinking, maybe there's some kind of outlier problem here

that I got swept up in. And I have since found out that several other YouTubers have had the same thing happen to them, where their account has been suspended. And they've gotten at least automated emails saying, oh, you have been suspended for impersonating you. So anyway, that was a super fun time. This is what it's like to be a professional YouTuber and really have the point brought home that you have absolutely no control or rights to access the largest number of your audience on a platform that somebody else controls.

What do I take from this? What am I supposed to like, you know? Brady, there are no lessons to be learned here, except that, you know, this is just the way that things are. Don't impersonate yourself, Brady, I think is maybe what you should learn. How long did you lose access for altogether? It's an interesting question. I don't know when the suspension happened. Oh, okay. Yeah. I checked on Sunday morning and I didn't get access back until Monday afternoon.

So it was more than 24 hours. It was a long enough period of time. Yeah. But how would you have felt if this had happened to you? Like to me, it's this weird, like I said, Maryland point of so absurd. It's sort of funny, but I don't know. Like if this had happened to you, how do you think you would react?

I think I would have thought this can't be real, this will be fixed. But after a day and a bit, I would have tweeted more than you did. Yeah, I felt like I'm going to give it until the end of the working day on Monday. That was sort of my mental line of, try not to really freak out until it's been a full business day. I mean, I don't know that it hasn't happened to me. I mean, I don't know if this sounds like a humblebrag, but I have enough accounts that I don't know whether I have lost access to some of mine at the moment. I just don't know because I haven't logged into them yet.

Yeah, and that's totally possible. You could just miss it. it so one of the things i checked was that i still had access to my cgp gray 2 account which if anything should be flagged for impersonating me surely it would be that one but no okay that account i still had access to but i had lost access to cgp gray and the ever so valuable cgp play my youtube streaming channel yeah clearly what that one too. Clearly what's happened is that they've somehow identified your CGP Grey 2 channel as your main channel and the other two were pinged for impersonating it. Maybe, I have no idea. But you are not humble bragging. This is the weird kind of problem that you could run into that makes everybody feel uncertain about stuff of

oh, you're uploading a video to a channel that you use less frequently. And you go to log in to upload it that day. And it's like, oh, no, you can't. This is impersonating another educational YouTube channel. You don't have access. But if it's been long enough as well, you could have moved beyond the suspension zone into the deleted zone. Like if you don't, if it's a channel I only log into once every few months. That is something that I was really wondering about. And that is also the thing that helped

me not go completely nuclear is all of the videos are there. But I do agree, and it did pop into the back of my mind of, I had just come back from a very isolated working retreat. And I was thinking like, man man if this had happened at the beginning and i didn't notice for a week which is very easy to do if you're me like what i have come back to there's no youtube videos like it was all just deleted i have no idea and it's horrifying you'll never go a week without noticing because you've always got sunday spreadsheet stats when you do a bit of early morning manipulation of those numbers. I don't do it every Sunday, but maybe now I should make

it a regular thing. So you did mention Project Cyclops has ended. Yes. How long did it last? How long were you off social media for? So the original plan was, I think, a month that then got extended to three, which then ended exactly a year after it had started. So it got to a point where you thought, I want to get to a year just because it's cool to say I was off for a year. Well, not really. There's a bunch of complicated things. It was much more a bit of the reverse, where I could imagine a scenario under which I had decided, oh, I'll just do this indefinitely. But right around the time I was seriously trying to think about,

oh, do I want to come back? Do I want to end the project or not? I was realizing it was about a year, and I thought, you know what? That's just a good time to come back. And if I do extend it longer, it's just going to be possibly infinite and arbitrary. So yeah, it just, it happened to work out well for a year. I was sort of originally planning to come back around the six month mark, but then for a variety of reasons, I decided to stay away a little bit longer. But yeah, so all in all, it was a year without Reddit and posting on Twitter and Instagram and all that stuff from start to finish.

So what did you learn or achieve? And because you've started again so like it's almost films like this sort of thing you do this self-flagellation okay i'm gonna fast for a year and then just continue like it didn't happen so tell me something enlighten me no but see this is this is the problem brady you don't come back with enlightenment wherever Wherever you go, you are there. And I know like, oh, I did this project for a year and I'm supposed to come back with like, oh, let me tell you how mindful and attentive I am. It just doesn't work like that. Why did you stop then? Why did you come back? I need to know either why you did it or why you stopped. Look, Brady, the tides come in and the tides go out.

Who can explain that? No one. These are just the cycles of life. Graze on the internet and then graze off the internet. The thing that's interesting about having done it for a year is it's a long enough period of time that I have that feeling that I always have quite strongly of you don't owe your past self anything,

and you're a different person as time goes on. And so I think this project ended up being so long that a lot of the original reasons why past Gray wanted to do it, I feel sort of disconnected from at this point in time as future Gray. And I'll just say, like, a year is obviously a long time, but I do think it's good for everyone to do their little mini versions of taking a break from the internet. And lots of people do this now.

It's become almost like a cliche. People are like, oh, I'm going to take a break from the internet. I do think it's good. I think the comparison to doing a food fast is actually quite apt here, where I tried doing a food fast for the first time, I don't know, maybe like two or three years ago. And it's not something that you do all the time because you die. But it's useful to do every once in a while because it sort of changes your relationship to food in a way that's a little bit difficult to describe. And I think it's the same thing with many things in life. Like the internet might just be one of those things.

Like it's good to take a little break. Yeah. It sort of changes how you think about things. And it's not always easy to articulate those reasons. You know, like I had some specifics that I wanted to do. Like I definitely wanted to read more. And that is a thing that I have achieved. Like I read more books now than I did before when I started.

But I think I have a hard to articulate different way of thinking about what do I want my interactions with the internet to be like? And, you know, this stuff isn't permanent. You know, the tide comes in and the tide goes out. And maybe in a year, I'll decide I'll take another break for a month and then come back. Like, who knows? Did you miss it? I did in the beginning. I would say that the reason why I could imagine it having lasted indefinitely is there was some point where I sort of didn't think about it very much anymore. There were a couple of things I missed. The primary one is an internet-y sense of humor. Like, you just don't get that in regular life very much. And then the other thing I can say, and this is like the upside of social media is I was aware of being disconnected about what people in my life

are up to. As you might know, Brady, I'm not a very good texter or phone caller to say, hey, what's your up to? How's that trip in America going? Right? Like, I'm terrible about that. It's just not in my nature. I was aware that this is like, this is the good thing that social media can provide in the correct amount of dosage. It's just like, oh, I see what Brady's up to on his trip. Isn't that nice? And maybe I can send you a little comment about it it's very different from having to like pull information from people who you just want to be aware of like what are they up to but you don't want to harass them with text messages i did miss those things and sort of appreciate

the place that they serve in life the other main thing is just also, I think people lie to themselves about how much they need social media for their job. Like anybody who does a creative thing on the internet, you know, people will always say like, oh, it's, you have to have a social media presence. It's absolutely necessary. I don't think it is necessary. I don't think you need it, but it can be helpful sometimes. And so this thing about getting locked out of Google sure was good timing for, oh boy, Twitter can be really useful where you have a problem

and you want to try to kick up a fuss about it. Like this is a useful time for a tool like Twitter. Is there any part of it, I'm especially saying this because you came back after exactly a year. Is there any part of it, I'm especially saying this because you came back after exactly a year. Is there any part of it that was performative and like being a bit playful and adding to the mystery and interest by disappearing for exactly a year and then is he coming back? When's he coming back? Like creating a buzz. I mean, I don't think that's a very good way to create a buzz if

that's what you're trying to do. I'd be shocked if you said, yes, Brady, that's why I did it, but I'm just putting it out there. No, no, no. Like there can be usefulness in difference. And so I think part of it was just like, oh, if I'm going to do this, maybe just do it for a really long time. That most people who take breaks from the internet, like they'll take a break for a week or they'll take a break for a month. Let me do this for a really long time and see if that makes any difference. I've just always thought like you as a creator has always seemed to have seen value in rationing yourself out. And this seems like a version of that.

It's like, you know, there's even more interest in what you are going to tweet now because you stopped tweeting for a year. I mean, I think it seems very clever. I don't know. I'm going to disagree with that. This does sort of tie in a little bit to the movie that we did for homework later. But I might as well mention it now. It's not a value in like rationing out for anybody

who's a person who creates things in the public sphere you have to try to make decisions about how much of yourself are you giving over to the audience like where are you drawing these lines there's this thing that is difficult to talk about, like the relationship that the, like the creator has with the audience. And there's also the thing of where you want to draw the line is not necessarily where the audience wants the line to be drawn. And the, like the audience will always want more than you're willing to give. So I don't feel like I who sort of ended up in this position of being a public person. And I've never been comfortable with it. And one of the things I didn't really want to talk about, but that was an additional reason for doing Project Cyclops.

I felt like this line was being encroached upon of like, yes, I talk about my life on the podcast but it doesn't mean that the whole of my life is like for you to consume as entertainment and so part of project cyclops was also wanting to like pull back a little bit in this way so that's part of what it is yeah like this is always these strange moments. You and I, Brady, we're having a conversation. But as always, the audience is listening. And to talk about the audience gets into this very strange thing.

And especially because it's not a single consistent group of people. It's just this very strange world that we live in with creators and access and the audience. And I felt like there was some balance that was a little bit off. And so I also wanted to just pull back a bunch. And so that was one of the things that I was doing as well. Like the obvious way to like conclude the thing would be to say, well, it's nice to have you back, Gray. But hearing all the things you said, I'm not entirely sure why you are back.

But anyway, I sometimes find your tweets entertaining. So I'm glad there'll be a few of them in the coming weeks. I don't know how much I'm going to be tweeting necessarily. It's always just readjustment. Like it's this important thing in life that you, you should never think of yourself as this static, unchanging thing. You should be constantly like reassessing, oh, is this the situation that you want? Does this thing work in this way? And so, yeah, you just like, everyone should do that. You should always reevaluate. What's your situation?

How do you want to make it better? What do you like? What do you not like? And try stuff out and see what works and see what doesn't work. You've got a lot of Hello Internet subreddits to catch up on. No, I'm not catching up on anything. Do you know what this is? This is like day zero on the internet.

We're starting over and we're starting fresh. Although I did make one exception, which was I went back to see all that sparkling water feedback. You've reintroduced me to my love of sparkling water. I've got one in my hand right now. I'm going to have a sip right now. Oh yeah? Are you enjoying the bubbles, Brady? Yep. I love them. They're all about the bubbles. I was amazed how many people agreed with me and said it was just about the niceness of the bubbles.

Yeah. When we recorded that episode, I knew that I was going to be back on the internet before we recorded the next one. That's why I was like, tell me about the sparkling water. I was like, I'm going to go back and I'm going to read all of this. And I do have to say, it seemed like absolutely everybody was on your side that it is the bubbles that make sparkling water so addictive to drink. I have to say, I find that somehow really deeply unsatisfying as an answer.

I was disappointed that I didn't mention carbonic acid too. I think that does play a role in giving it a little bit of extra tang, the carbon dioxide and water, making it weakly carbonic acid right right so yeah this was also the feedback we had like chemists weighing in here about how it's mildly acidic and everyone says this gives it like a tang or a sour taste or not sour uh bitter bitter was the word people were using right i can't taste it it tastes like water but with. I think it has got a certain, I wouldn't say bitter, a certain zest. A certain zest. Yeah, it's just got a certain something that you wouldn't call a flavor, but it's got a certain spikiness to it that normal water doesn't have.

Yeah, I think that's the bubbles. I'm not sure that that's a taste. Although maybe I would love to do like a blind taste test because also I didn't realize from the comments how many different kinds of sparkling water there are. In my head, it was all just sort of mushed together in one category. And it's like, oh no, no,

there's four different kinds of sparkling water. I was impressed by the number of soft drink experts that are who listen to Halloween today. Including like people that do it for a job like oh hi i make i develop soft drinks for a living if you would like me to send you a 19 page email on it let me know yeah yeah so look i understand that everybody's telling me that the bubbles are what makes it addictive but there's some part of my brain that just cannot let this go i was like it can't possibly just beat the bubbles.

However, the only other thing that I was holding onto was this idea that there was somehow too much salt in the water that was making me drink it all the time. And I feel like I had been thoroughly disabused of this notion. Yeah, that never held water for me. Well, there's two things here. Someone pointed to a Daily Mail article from five years ago that seems to have been the start of this.

Like, oh, here's the first reference of people talking about there's like 11 times as much salt in the water or whatever. Daily Mail. Are they not a paper of record? I still don't know what the papers of records are. You have to tell me one of these days. It's not for me to say what the paper of record is, but I will say that it's not that.

Damn, it drives me crazy, Brady, when you do that. It's very important to read the papers of record, but I can't tell you what they are. They're secret. So there was that. But the thing that really clenched it for me was someone left a big comment about how they were talking about the rehydration solutions used in hospitals and the, like the amount of water and salt that is in your blood and like what the ratio should be. And it was like, okay, this totally sold me on this, that the amount of salt in the water is trivial. It's

just like helping maintain homeostasis in your body. So that leaves me with nothing, right? Because now it's, okay, we have a bottle. It is filled with three things. Water molecules, a tiny bit of salt that's totally fine, and bubbles. What makes this container so addictive to drink? It has to be the bubbles. Hello, Internet. It's time you get some HelloFresh into your life.

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Thanks to HelloFresh for supporting the show. And thanks to HelloFresh for feeding so many people. Can I talk to you about straws again? I know I'm banging on about this too much and I'm even annoying myself and I'm certainly annoying my wife. I mean, Brady, when I was reading the Reddit, I did have to scroll past all of the straw comments to get to the few sparkling water comments that I wanted to get to.

I know this is a subject that incites passion and all the environmental stuff, right? Okay. Yes. But I want to come back again to the fact that paper straws are not an adequate solution. And I've recently been in California, which I'll talk about, but California has gone paper straw crazy too. Right. And I didn't realise just how big a problem this was until I ordered like an expensive cocktail,

like a Long Island iced tea. I decided I wanted to have something a bit fancy and spent a lot of money on it. And they bring it out and just drinking it through a paper straw, taking away the fact that the straw disintegrates eventually and you can't drink it properly, taking that away, just the feeling of drinking a posh expensive drink through a paper straw, I think takes 30% off the value. Are you saying that you want a 30% discount on all of your drinks if they're going to bring out a paper straw?

It's just wrong. I was talking to the barman about it and he was like, what can I do? But do you know what happened? I went to Europe this week and I went to a McDonald's and ordered a Diet Coke. And good old Europe, you can always depend on to be a bit behind with some of these things. And I had a plastic straw and I drank the Diet Coke through this plastic straw. And oh, my God, it was amazing. It was like, it felt amazing. It was so lovely. It was like, this is the way it's supposed to be.

It just felt colder and the liquid was moving faster and it was just the right flow and i think maybe it was nostalgia it was like oh this is what a cold soft drink supposed to taste like it was so much better it was so much better and that made me think about another thing okay moving away from the straw issue i know this battle is over and we're stuck with paper straws even though lots of people don't like them right i think it's really sad the way that humans have turned on plastic like this friend of ours that has done so much for us for so long like i feel sorry for plastic it's like this innocent thing that got created and we all loved it and we all used it.

And now we hate it and we talk terribly about it. And I think, you know, plastic's amazing what plastic's done. Like if we're going to get rid of it, we're going to get rid of it. But let's at least take a few seconds to think about the good side of plastic. It's funny you mentioned that because I was just having a conversation with someone and the topic of technological innovation came up. And there's an argument that I've heard and I've even used myself sometimes about like how different does the world 50 or 100 years ago look from the world now? And you can say like once you get to the 1950s, it's like, well, the world kind of looks the same if you just ignore computers and phones as the two main things. There's not like a whole world of change in the same way that from 1850 to 1950, like everything that's in the house is new and different and amazing. This sort of came up as a topic of conversation.

And the counterpoint was plastic, which I'd never really thought about. But it really made me realize, oh, this material is incredibly useful and is everywhere. Like the reason that you're thinking that a house from 1950 just doesn't look all that different is because you're not perceiving the actual materials that things are made out of. And the reason we use plastic is because it is cheap, it's durable, it's strong when you need it to be, but it's also flexible. And even just thinking of the number of medical instruments that use plastic, like breathing tubes and all sorts of things. So I thought it was a, it was a really good counterpoint to how much has the world changed. And one of those things is, well, there's plastic everywhere because it's an incredibly useful material that has properties you couldn't possibly replicate if you had to make things out of metal or wood or dare we say it paper so yeah i'm on board with like plastic we don't want it as garbage in the environment but just from a from an actual material perspective it's it's very useful

poor plastic it's a bit like an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend that you look back on who you were like completely enamored with and then you know you move on and you weren't the right match and you meet new people. But you shouldn't look back at those exes and say they were terrible. Right. They were right for the time. And, you know, obviously plastic has its drawbacks. And, you know, I love penguins more than I love plastic. But I don't think we should look back at that old girlfriend or boyfriend and say,

they're terrible. They're good. Brady, quote, pro-plastic, right? That's Brady's stance. I just, it's amazing the way we've turned on it. I mean, I know we turn on stuff when we start realizing, you know, there was a time when everyone loved cigarettes, but I wouldn't put plastic in the same category as cigarettes. You know, you can go to museums and they'll have, look, here's the first sample of plastic. This amazing thing that changed the world. Isn't it amazing that scientists invented it?

Now it's talked about like it's the worst thing ever. Like, it's a bit sad. Anyway, I know plastic doesn't care, does it? It hasn't got a brain. No, plastic doesn't care, Brady. Yeah. plastic doesn't care does it it hasn't got a brain no plastic doesn't care brady yeah i'm sure if it did care it would be happy to know that you're a friend of plastic tell you what this plastic straw is still so much better than paper god that coke was good i was very thirsty maybe that it wasn't a completely controlled experiment but i swear shocking i swear that

was the best coke that i've had in a year. It was amazing. Thanks to plastic. Thanks to plastic and the bubbles, of course. A little bit of plane news. Okay. It's not plane crash corner. There are no crashes here.

It's just a plane corner. There's been a few stories and debates and things going on that I wanted to quickly run by you. I won't get too caught up in them. The first one is an article I just read moments ago about Japan Airlines that I think you'll find interesting. If you click on that link that I put in the notes, Gray. Japan Airline seat map helps avoid screaming babies. I would like to know more. So when you go and click on those maps to choose your seats, if you scroll down, you'll see an example. They have a little icon to show you which seats are available and which ones are taken. And if the people who've booked the seats have young children, they have this little baby face icon that goes on the seats. So, you can strategically pick where to sit based on where young children are going to be on your flight.

That's amazing. Because I'm always looking, where's the toilet? Where's the galley? And I will always avoid the bulkheads because I know that's where they put the fold down tables for babies. But this is new information. This is amazing. Okay, it is interesting and it's good. I'll take it over nothing.

But what I really want is people with children have to pick their seats first, or it all has to be locked in so that you know. Because there is a way in which this could almost be more frustrating. Because you know when you step on a plane, we're all playing the baby lottery. Please don't let this baby be near me. As the joke goes, that's why they let parents with children board first, so they don't have to deal with everybody staring at them and thinking simultaneously, please don't sit next to me when they walk down the aisle. Which is 100% what I'm thinking when I look at literally everybody walking down the aisle.

Please none of you sit next to me. But with this, it almost feels like it would instill false confidence. Oh, I've avoided the aisle. Please, none of you sit next to me. But with this, it almost feels like it would instill false confidence. Oh, I've avoided the babies, you know, but there's still free seats. There still could be babies. I like it. I think it's an improvement. Ultimately, what we all want is for the babies to have to sit in the back or in the front, like it's a smoking section. But I think this is probably an improvement overall. Let me give you a hypothetical situation, Grey. Okay.

Because you talked about how you look at everyone and hope they won't sit next to you. Yeah. You're sitting on a plane, you're about to go on like a transatlantic flight, so it's going to be a long flight. You've got one seat next to you, you know the plane is completely booked out, so that seat's going to be taken. Right. People are walking on, you know, walking on the plane. You can't help but notice Tim Cook gets on the plane and starts walking down the aisle. Would you hope that he would be the one who would sit next to you? Yeah, he seems like he'd be really quiet on a flight. Like, I think he's 100%

a minds his own business on a plane kind of guy for sure yeah all right well who would even say no to that i don't understand he looks like a very good flight citizen i was thinking more you could ask him like about apple stuff but yeah all right no of course not here's the other here's the other bonus with tim cook you know he's not going to start up a conversation with anybody he doesn't want to talk to you yeah, he's not going to start up a conversation with anybody. He doesn't want to talk to you. Yeah. Especially when he sees you with Apple products falling out of every pocket in your body. Yeah. He sits next to me. I've got the Apple watch on. There's an iPad in the seat in front

of me. I've got my laptop open. Yeah. He's like, oh no, this guy, I better not speak a single word lest he recognize my voice, which is also my strategy on planes. We would pass the entire flight without uttering a single word. If you were sitting on a plane in that circumstance and someone had to sit next to you, what person in the world who is alive would you most want to sit next to you? Not including family members. In fact, not including people you know personally. Like what person who you've never met but but is alive, would you want to sit there? I disagree with this whole hypothetical. Like I want the quietest person to sit next to me. But it has to be someone whose name you know for this game to work.

I'm trying to think if I know any mutes. Are there any famous mutes that I can think of? Like the question behind your question, Brady, is who do you want to talk to on a plane like that's clearly the question that you're asking talk to or or have just like the anecdote that i sat next to x on a plane but that's not like that's not an interesting anecdote people tell those anecdotes like oh i sat next to famous person in situation x and i i never know how i'm supposed to respond. Like, congratulations or like... What happened? What were they like? What'd you talk about? Tell me something I don't know. I don't like this question. I don't like the premise of this question. But why don't you tell

me your answer to this question? Right? Because you're so friendly and everybody likes you and you can chat up a storm. So who is the person that you're going to have like a wonderful transatlantic flight with if you can arrange this situation well i mean i should go for a moonwalker of course i guess buzz aldrin because he is he's apollo 11 right i'm not sure he's a bit loopy old buzz surely that would make for a more interesting interview though well not an interview but yeah like a good chat you know i'd ask him if he got a cup of drinks and started telling me the good stories and all the goss. So, someone like that. He starts telling you it wasn't real. Like the Pope would be a good one. That would be pretty amazing, wouldn't it? You're not going to believe who I sat next to on my flight. Who? The Pope. Oh my God, he was such a laugh.

Yeah. Somehow I don't think the Pope is flying commercial. I think when you're in charge of the Vatican, I think the entirety of the Catholic Church can afford a private plane for the Pope. But I'll take it in the hypothetical that it is. Would you strike up a conversation with the Pope? The Pope is sitting there wearing his combat hat. Would you be like, hey, I think I know who you are

and give him a charming wink? Yeah, you look familiar. Yeah. I'd like to talk to him. Right. Okay. He studied chemistry. I'd tell him about periodic videos. Oh, okay. Maybe you want to mention it in one of your sermons. Yeah. Could you give us a retweet? That would be a pretty good get as far as a Twitter retweet goes. That'd be a pretty good one. Anyway, speaking of planes, I've got more plane stuff to talk about. Okay. Grey, I know you do travel to the Netherlands a bit. I don't know if you ever travel on KLM. Yes, I do. The KLM pre-flight video. Okay. Before you poo-poo and shoot it down. Okay. The KLM pre-flight video is a novelty video, novelty safety video that I think is good. Okay.

It's well done. It's interesting, but it also meets the other criteria that a pre-flight video should meet. And I'm going to give it thumbs up. Like nothing is popping into my head, but I think it's because whenever I fly KLM, it's these tiny little hops between London and Amsterdam. They don't even have like video seats in the back. So I've never taken them on a long flight. They're only these little teeny tiny flights.

So I've never seen a KLM video. And I also have an irrational fondness of KLM as an airline from my memories, like a child traveling over for family in the Netherlands. So like they're blue. I'm very aware of as one of these little branding things that totally got in my head of like, oh yeah, the KLM blue. I really like it. The pilots let me in the cockpit. You know, it's like that kind of stuff from being a kid.

I have put a link to the video in the show notes. Do you want to watch it or do you want me to talk you through it? Or do you want to watch it and just see what you think? Let me watch it. Can you wait? I can wait. I've got my sparkling water. Okay, great. I'm want to watch it and just see what you think? Let me watch it. Can you wait? I can wait. I'll watch it. I've got my sparkling water. Okay, great.

I'm going to watch it right now. All right. All the way to the end. Okay. I've watched the video. I'm going to give this safety video two thumbs up. What could I even possibly complain about in this safety video? And yet, clever and novel and unique. Yes. So for the listeners, it opens in a Delft's tile production facility in the Netherlands.

You know what it is. It's that very particular blue that is used in, I think, ceramics and pottery in the Netherlands. Those famous blue and white ceramics that you associate with Holland. Yeah. You've got like a flight attendant, don't you, standing there next to some man who's painting one of the tiles and she introduces the safety video that's about to start. Yeah. And then you notice that the painter is actually painting the flight attendant onto the tile.

Yes. Also, the reason why I can give this two thumbs up is flight attendant doesn't really draw attention to the guy who's painting it. She's just giving the safety spiel. And the camera zooms in then onto the tile on the table that has the drawing of the flight attendant on it. And then it proceeds as a very straightforward safety video. Animated on a white tile.

Yes. You've got this blue animation of, yeah, just a basic safety video. This is how you do the seatbelts. This is where everything is. But the tile's always just slightly moving and the picture's a little bit inconsistent, which has you wondering all the way through the video. Have they just done the lazy option and got like a, you know, a picture of a tile and done a blue animation on it and made it look a bit painted? Or have they dared to do what you think maybe they've done that you don't find out until the end that they did it? They actually made each of these tiles as a frame of the animation.

Like painted them and fired them and, you know, made real tiles for each frame of the animation in the kilns. An enormous amount of labor and effort. And I think that is also why they don't have a lot of time for jokes because guess what? We have to make a tile for each one of these things. And every, every second that we're going to spend explaining something is 30 tiles that we need to make. So I think that contributes to the goodness of the video. That it's just, it's straightforward. Here's an explanation.

Here's all the things that you need. And what I also like, very understated at the end. At the end, when they zoom back out to the actual flight attendant, she doesn't go, oh my God, can you believe we animated every one of these tiles and then laid them down? Like, can you believe that? Look at that. Look at us. She goes, no, no, no.

Just add KLM, right? We care about every little detail. And you just see her sort of point to the tiles and the camera zooms up and you see a bunch of tiles. It's like, what a great way to not be like, look how cool we are making all the tiles. So yeah. Total class.

Two thumbs up. Great safety video. This I'm going to hold up as the blue standard for what safety videos should be. This was great. And I was a little worried you were going to show me something that would make me then have a bad association with KLM. But now my thinking that KLM is a great airline is just continuing onward.

Like, very well done to whoever came up with this concept and execution for the safety video. Now, at the end of the flight, they gave us little Delft pottery things as well as little gifts at the end of the flight. Oh, I didn't realize you saw this on an actual KLM flight. Yeah. So what did you get as a gift? It's like a little house, like a little model house that's done in the Delft style. I'm reading like the press kit about it

and I'm just trying to find the number of tiles they made as a result of it. In the description, it says over 1000 hand-painted tiles. Okay. So the tile guy was given all the frames by the animator and had to hand paint them so i wonder if they slightly cheated and went with like 12 frames a second instead of 24 or 30 definitely i think there was definitely some cheating involved yeah looking at the animation i'm gonna guess that's 12 frames a second animation but you know great

still a tremendous amount of work. One last thing I want to talk about on planes. There was a whole Twitter thread I read about this that went viral a couple of weeks ago. And I won't rehash everything in it. You could guess most of it, but I'm just wondering what your position on this is. And this is the etiquette and social norms and pressures put on people on a plane who have the window seat and what they should do with the window shades. Because some people think they should all be down and you need to create this dark tomb so everyone can sleep. And other people are like, hey, you know, I've got a window seat. I'm having this incredible experience of flying over incredible things from a vantage point I'll never get to see. I'd like to look out the window.

Some people feel safer and prefer to look out the window, but sometimes there can be a real pressure. Sometimes even the attendance will make you close your window shade. And I know there are different arguments to be made here. And there are different arguments to be made when it's a long hole fly as opposed to a two or three hour jump. Where do you stand on window shades open or closed for the good of the many? I was going to say, is this a problem? I feel like this is one of the rare things on a plane that I've never come across as being an issue.

Oh, no, it can be a problem because some people think they should all be closed to create this dark atmosphere so everyone can sleep, even though you're flying through daylight. But there might be one person who's like, there's a mountain range down there i want to watch it you know go by and they'll have their shade open and it only takes one or two shades open to take away that dark environment on a plane and sometimes the flight attendants will say sir please can you shut that to keep the plane dark and other people say how dare you there's a real like peer pressure to have it shut and some people think it shouldn't be well i'll say from knowing someone who's an insider in the industry flight attendants will want you to shut those windows

if most people are sleeping because that makes everything much easier if you have a sleepy cabin full of people this was something that came up. Like attendance favorite, because if everyone's asleep, they don't have to work. They're not an entirely disinterested group of overseers here. No. It's a little bit like there's a scene in The Wire about the schools turning up the temperatures

to make the students sleepy, which I can also confirm is 100% a real thing. I'm like, oh, if it's slightly warm, kids, they're much less hassle than if it's a, than if it's a perfect temperature. But I don't know. I feel like I've, I've taken a lot of flights and I don't think I've ever been on a flight where whatever is the obvious group consensus for what needs to be happening now doesn't happen. Or it's like, oh, the plane turns off all the lights. It's a long haul overnight flight. All those windows go down.

And if it's just a regular day flight, some people have the windows open and some people don't. I don't think I've ever run into a situation where you're having like a tragedy of the commons with regards to windows here. I haven't seen like, you know, fights break out. But I have seen people wanting it one way and having to go the other. Well, I mean, my adjudication here would be, one, it's not your window. You're just sitting next to a window. Two, the flight attendants have control over those windows being up or down. Like, they get to make the call about what the situation is with the window shades.

Well, hang on a second. You've just pointed out that they've got skin in the game. Yeah, 100% they have skin in the game. But look, somebody needs to be the authority figure here. You're the customer. Look, Brady, customer is not always right. So yeah, I'm delegating all of the power to the flight attendants here. They can make the call about window shades.

And anyway, I don't even need to make this call because they already have that legal thing of like, oh, you're breaking some kind of federal crime if you disobey flight attendants instructions. So yeah, they can already tell you close that window or you're going to prison when this plane lands. I'm going to send you this Twitter thread later because it's actually really interesting. It started with someone saying, I thought I was the only one who hated the new norm, usually enforced through social dynamics, not crew instructions, where you're supposed to close

all the shades so you can't see scenery and flights it kicked off there's all sorts of interesting stuff about how highly reflective clouds make it bad to have windows open and some people say hey if you've got the window seat it's your call that's part of the bonus of having a window seat some people say they get scared flying in a plane when the windows are shut. They have real phobia issues. There's all sorts of interesting arguments and discussion about it. No, it's very, very clear. Flight attendants, they get to make the call. What if they don't make a call?

What if they sit it out? I mean, then I guess it will devolve into fistfights on the plane. That's what's going to happen. You can't pass over that kind of power to the crowd. That's not going to work. But the situation where this really would be bad is it's a nighttime flight and one person has the window open.

You mean it's a daytime flight, but you want to make it, yeah. I just realized, I don't know how the airlines make this decision, but when I'm flying back to London, I think they make the call of, this is a nighttime flight, even if it doesn't strictly make sense from the time that

you're taking off in California or whatever. So the plane is in the air, it's still sunny out, and you're doing a long haul flight, but the cabin crew has turned off the lights on the plane. And they're serving breakfast at the end. And they're serving breakfast at the end. And then if one person opens the window, because you're above the clouds it is like you are flying across the surface of the sun like the light that comes through that single window is so incredibly bright yeah that i think it just totally overrides that one person's desire to see outside so yeah i have been known to nudge it up a few millimeters just so I can get an iPhone camera there

to take a few pictures. Oh, yes. You have been known to do that, Brady. Yeah. I love all those views you get sometimes flying over. You're sitting next to the Pope who's trying to catch 40 winks and you think you're cleverly inching up the window

by just a couple millimeters. Oh, he won't notice, but he notices Brady. He'd probably derive great meaning from the sudden shaft of holy light, like blasting through the cabin. Yes, that's right. You're doing everyone a favor. This episode has been supported by Hover. And today I want to give you a use case that I think every Tim should be thinking about. So hear me out on this one. Now you all know Hoverbar now. It's the best way to buy and manage domain names bar none. Gray and I both use them. We've told you plenty of times why they're the smoothest and easiest way to do all this domain stuff. Now anyone in business or online or in some kind of creative field, I think by now it's probably super obvious why you should

have a few domain names registered. I don't think we need to go into that again. But what about you, humble Tim? What possible need could you have for a domain name? There are a few answers to that question, but today I want to give you one example. I think you should at least be considering registering your name as a domain. Down the track, you never know what you might be up to, why you might want some kind of web page or presence or something that links to you.

And you might end up kicking yourself if you missed out on registering it. So say your name's Tim Purplegrape. Why not register timpurplegrape.com or timpurplegrape.net, one or two of the key ones. Now, you don't necessarily have to link it to anything at the moment. You could just sit on it for a rainy day. But for what it's worth, when you're using Hover, it is super easy to link domains to anything. You could link it to your Twitter page, your Facebook page, your Instagram profile, whatever else. So anyone entering timpurplegrape.com will land exactly where you want them to. I know it's not for everyone, but you should be thinking about it. I have a lot of friends

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I think you might be sold on it. And our thanks to them for supporting this episode. Look, I know we're going to talk shortly about Ingrid Goes West, this film. Can we talk about Brady Goes West first? Oh, I want to know about Brady Going West. I've just had a big Western holiday. And I just wanted to run you through a few key Hello Internet points. Yeah. So, I've just been- I have no idea where you've been. So, where have you gone? The West Coast. So, I was Vancouver, British Columbia, then down into California, Yosemite, and then down to LA. And just a few things I thought worthy of mention for you. Firstly, I went to Yosemite National Park. And I had mentioned

previously on the show that I was planning to go there. And a few teams got in touch and said, you know, I live near there or I know a lot about it. And one of them in particular sent me an email that caught my eye and I ended up getting in touch with him. And he ended up being like our tour guide at Yosemite, like came and met us and stuff. And I tell you what, it was fantastic because he grew up in Yosemite. His father was like a ranger and he was a ranger himself there.

And he like grew up as a little boy in the park, you know, like a cabin. And he owns a cabin in the park still. So, he had like special access permits and he knew the place like the back of his hand and he knew all the little secret places to park. And we avoided like sometimes when there'd be like a huge queue of cars, he'd be like, it's okay, I know something. And he'd do like some secret move and park somewhere and then all the rangers there knew him, knew everything about the park.

He was the ultimate Yosemite tour guide and he did it all for the very, very small payment of one hot stopper. I don't know if I should have given him more actually come to think of it, but that's all I gave him. But he was great. I won't name him because he's a private guy, but he knows who he is. And thank you to him. And I hope he enjoys his hot stopper.

Presented at the base of El Capitan. Right. I feel like you got a pretty good deal there, Brady. I did. It was amazing. So thank you, Tim. That was amazing Tim-age. How would you rate Yosemite on the national park scale?

I had been there before, but only very briefly. It was nothing like I remember it. I haven't been to enough American national parks to rate it in that way. I'm a bit obsessed with El Capitan though, because I'd gotten into like the recent movies about it, Dawn Wall and Free Solo. So I was all about El Cap capitan which was great because our special guide like knew like the little places to go and took us to the base and we stood at the base and he could say there's the line where that happened and like could point everything out and knew it all so are you going to give summiting el capitan a go i mean you've been to the top of everest this is not as high yeah i haven't been to the top of Everest and I won't be climbing

El Capitan up the hard way. That's for sure. You can walk up some paths to the back. No, that's not what I'm talking about, Brady. No, I want a selfie from Brady in one of those little sleeping mats that gets hammered into the side of a sheer rock face.

That's what I want. I think you should give that a go. Have you seen Free Solo? I can't remember if I saw that one one but i've seen a couple of these i know there seems to have been a a few of these documentaries that have come out and i've watched some of them and they're very interesting and terrifying and standing at the very bottom looking up it is crazy that a guy did that without ropes that's absolutely terrifying awesome though great film free solo as is the dawn wall they're both amazing i watch them each night when we're at the park as well overnight just to like get in the mood

i like i want to be psyched for seeing the dawn wall let me re-watch the movie one thing i did think at numerous times on this holiday though and i don't want to sound like uncharitable here it comes yes i feel like in life, sometimes in life, I take photos for strangers when they ask me to. Sometimes strangers take photos for me when I ask them to. I feel like this is not a fair deal. And I do an amazing job taking photos for strangers. If someone says, can you take a picture for me?'ll take 20 i'll take portrait ones and landscape ones i will move around i will give them instructions i will give them a full selection i will think carefully about composition i really make a huge effort because i want them to later on look back

and go do you know what the best picture from our holiday was it was that one that crazy australian guy took i feel like when other people take pictures for me they just don't care and they let me down every time they don't take the picture as they should they are rubbish people are rubbish at taking photos rubbish i feel ripped off because you know i'll take my own pictures but occasionally sometimes you need someone else to do it for you, don't you? Brady, can I just ask for clarification here? So you are disappointed that you, Brady Heron, professional video journalists are better at photography than Joe Average Citizen on the street. You do know that images are your living. It's your profession.

This is what you do, is framing things and making stuff look good. Of course you're going to be better than the random person you bump into at Yosemite taking pictures of you. Look, yes, what you say is factually true and mildly flattering. Yeah, so fair enough. But I just think people just don't care. And everyone's a photographer these days. Everyone's got their phone.

And I bet you if they were taking it for themselves or they were taking their own selfie for Instagram, they'd spend plenty of time getting it just right. I think taking photos for strangers is like an honour and I take it really seriously. Like if I'm with my wife and someone comes up and says, can you take a picture? And they hand the camera to my wife, she will always say, I know you should let my husband do it. He really likes this and passes it to me because she knows like, I take it seriously. This is one of

the great services we do for our fellow humans these days i will agree with you that the moment of taking a photo for someone else feels like a tiny drop of glue that helps keep civilization together of yeah we're all going to participate in this reciprocal game so yeah i'm on board with you here and i'm in the the reverse situation of when my wife and I are traveling and someone asks us to take a picture. I immediately hand the phone to my wife. But with a little caveat to the people of like, are you sure? Because she's going to be very serious about this being the best photo. She's next level your wife when it comes to taking photos.

It's like, you're going to love it, but I hope you have a little bit. You just get out the deck chair and have a rest. I open up a book on my phone and it's like, well, let me find a place to sit down. The other thing I have to do though, and you have to find subtle ways to do it, is to give instructions to the other people. Because you know what they're going to get wrong. What are they going to get wrong? Maybe you should turn the camera vertical so that you'll get the top of the mountain. Make sure you haven't chopped the tail of the plane off that picture, yeah? Like, how do you say these things without sounding like too much of a douche? Look, there's no way around it, but this is another example to me of

Brady has very high expectations for people and gray has very low expectations for people. And my threshold for surprise is just when someone will take a photo as though this is the literal word, like, can you take a photo and they'll go, yeah, click and hand it right back to you. And it's a little bit like, are you for it's like you know we're not paying for these buy the photo you know exactly taking one is unforgivable i always say when i hand it over take as many as you want the more the better like and still i am guilty of the thing everyone's guilty of when someone hands it back and says do you want to check to check it's all right you always say i'm sure it's fine yes you'll never look at the picture in front of

them and say, that's rubbish. Can you do it again? Yes. That is the agreed upon convention that you should just thank you very much. Everything's great. And you are releasing the other person of the obligation that you have put upon them. That's part of the compact. That's the way it should work. And then what you do is you just linger a little bit if you really need a good picture in this location until that person leaves and then you just get someone else and you pretend like the previous event has never occurred that's that's how this works right yeah oh can you take some pictures of me and my wife at this location oh yeah thank you great great we're gonna pretend like you know you're the fifth person to come by because it's all been terrible and unacceptable

but no i don't expect people to be really great at taking pictures and that's just that's just the way it is to be clear i don't expect that either i've learned my lesson i'm just endlessly disappointed by it okay so just quickly also it has been a golden period for hot drops. Has there been a trail of hot drops in America? I'm keeping them rare, like a gray tweet. I don't want them to be too common. No, don't start this. Okay. But Vancouver was done, a few random other places. But my favorite place to go in LA, which is like in the hollywood hills

the ridge along to the hollywood sign and then behind the hollywood sign we went there we went there with the duke himself oh my stablium and he did a first of hallow internet history of not just a dirk drop but a double dirk drop in, he in fact dropped three hot stoppers for us. Oh, wow. Yeah. All have been retrieved. One of them days later, which is a first for me. Interesting. I find they normally go pretty quickly or not at all, but there were two put behind the Hollywood sign and one of them went like that night. And then the other one went days later. Some guy went

back, went there who was on holiday and the other one was still there took it i remember a while ago there was a listener who was trying to keep track of all of the hot drops and like how many how many hot stoppers are out there in the wild yes and that person remains as uh vigilant as ever okay i was i wasn't sure if it's still in existence or if that time when I lost a bag of hundreds just broke their spirits. I was like trying to diligently keep track of all of them. And then it's like, oh, and Gray lost a bag full of hundreds somewhere in America. I did one in Rome this week, which is where I was briefly, just by the Coliseum. And someone came and grabbed it.

And then another Tim came, like she got there 20 minutes later. briefly just by the Colosseum and someone came and grabbed it. And then another Tim came, like she got there 20 minutes later. Apparently she'd run across Rome to get there and missed out on it by like 15 or 20 minutes. And I felt so bad for her. I was having dinner by the train station. I said, if you come to the train station in the next hour, I'll give you one in person. And she came and I gave it to her. I think I was just in such a good mood because I was giddy from that Coke with a plastic straw. Right. That's what it was. Yes. If Fred had a paper straw, he would have been a different Brady, much less generous. I would have been grumpier.

But the hot drops continue, people. So keep your eye out yeah you never know where it's going to be next yeah keep them peeled oh and i guess i can actually now post them on instagram that makes it a lot easier instead of having to make a youtube video before the show is going to start sometimes i get a message from brady about a thing to check out and this time brady sent me a message saying that I had to go to NASA's Instagram stories and check out their new NASA GIFs and I see this tweet and I'm like oh no what is this this is going to be ridiculous and embarrassing I can't believe we're going to talk about another ridiculous and embarrassing thing. And so I'm going into this with low expectations. Boy, did NASA manage to limbo under my, my low expectations for what their gifts were going to look like. We are going gifts. We're not going gifs. Cause you know, we're going to get it in the

neck about this gifts, gifs. No, don't even acknowledge those people. Like those are pointless pedants. Just push right past them. So, will you explain to the people, Brady, what these NASA gifs are? So, NASA has released this pack of gifs for people to use, and it's using it themselves very, very liberally. And it's a bunch of, well, it's the same astronaut, I guess, in like that, you know, a typical EVA NASA suit. It looks like a moonwalk suit or an EVA suit, the big white suit with a backpack and the

gold visor, you know, the look. Right. American flags all over it and NASA logos. But the astronauts doing a bunch of crazy and zany things, like it'll be doing like a love heart or a dab or holding a sign saying subscribe. And so I think the idea is that we're all going to use these gifts in our everyday life. And of course, there's no shortage of zany astronaut gifts in the world, but for NASA to be making these and putting them out, I think is a different case.

Well, as you say, you as a big NASA fan, I'm sure you're going to use this in your text communications with me from now on. I can expect NASA reaction GIFs in my text messages from Brady. Hang on. Before we drop me in it, right? You said that NASA had gone under a low bar in your opinion. Yeah. You tell me what you think of the GIFs and you explain them to me and what you're concerned about them is. Here's part of the problem, Brady.

I think you have poisoned my mind a little bit with your lofty notions of what NASA should be. Don't worry. These GIFs have gone quite some way to changing my position on that. Yeah, but look, if we could rewind back five years ago to the start of hello internet and this was the first brady complains about nasa being embarrassing corner that we had done i might have said i don't entirely understand what the big deal is but you like you put this thing in my mind and i can't know how much of this is my own opinion versus how much of this is your opinion in my head. So this looks like the sort of stickers that you can buy in the iMessage store where you can have a regular text message and then you can drop GIFs and stickers on top of the text message in a mostly really annoying way. Like we've complained about Bitmoji in the past.

It's that kind of thing. Here's the thing though. Do you know what an astronaut in a full NASA suit doesn't have? A face. They don't have an expressive face with which to communicate human emotion. And so an astronaut is a poor choice

for what do you want your reaction gifts to be? Because there's no face to go along with it. And so now we just have an astronaut making a whole variety of comical gestures that are too cartoony. We have excited double thumbs up, clapping back and forth, lots of pointing at signs that the astronaut is holding. There's an astronaut making like a pew face,

like there's something stinky, which doesn't make sense in context every meme dance or gesture you can think of you know fortnight dancers or mind blown and all that sort of yeah anything that is like trying to be down with the kids yes there's flossing there's an astronaut doing that flossing dance which is very on point from two years ago, I think. I don't know, man. I keep coming back to the core of every time we have these conversations of not understanding quite what NASA is trying to achieve with this. Or what is the brand of NASA that this furthers? And if it's just that they want people to know that NASA exists, I mean, I guess maybe.

I mean, these memes only work because people know NASA exists. Like this isn't going to raise awareness of astronauts and NASA. Everyone already knows what NASA astronauts look like. That's why these have been made. Look, I know how people feel about this, right? And also I know people can dress up in an astronaut and suit and do silly things and it can also be cool public service broadcasting they have a music video for their song gagarin which has got people dressed in astronaut suits doing these like incredible dance moves and it's a really cool

music video and it really works but that's because it's been made by artists and stuff this is kind of like official nasa stuff and this is almost like a i don't want to use words like sacred and stuff because then people think i place too much importance on it but like you know when i see these suits i think of iconic images on the moon or bruce mccandless doing floating through space or these incredible brave and pioneering spacewalks. And getting to wear this suit is like a dream for millions and millions of boys and girls. Like this is like the ultimate to get to wear this suit.

This isn't something you can just, you know, put on and go into space. This is like a huge badge of honor and accomplishment. Now it's just being used for flossing dances and silliness. It's like disrespecting the suit and everything it stands for. This suit is an icon of NASA. And I know anyone can make one that looks like it and do something stupid, but this is NASA themselves doing it. Yeah, it is different when it's NASA themselves doing it.

I didn't realize that each of these GIFs, if you hover over them, comes with some recommended hashtags. And I can't understand how you can possibly think this demeans NASA when they have recommended hashtags like hashtag stinky, hashtag PU for their stinky reaction GIF, hashtag dab on ya, Y-A.

There's some real winners in here for their recommended hashtags. I don't know whether or not they've said who's in the suit, if it is a real astronaut or not, but I'm mildly curious about that, to be honest. Would it make you feel better or would it make you feel worse if it's a real astronaut in the astronaut suit i think it will have been a smarter play by nasa if it is an astronaut right because if it's just some social media flunky putting on the suit doing it i think that's like oh okay yeah that's not what i asked though i asked about how do you feel that a real astronaut might have done hashtag boohoo and then made a crying face in front of their faceplate in the suit to be filmed and put on the internet?

Once you've put an astronaut in a Spider-Man suit on the space station, that's it. We're done. So you want it to be a real astronaut inside the suit? I don't think non-astronauts should even be allowed to wear the suit but I know it happens now I am making it more important than it is it's like the Australian cricket team wear these baggy green caps this special style of cap and in a world where everyone can buy everything that is worn in sport like it's illegal to sell or buy baggy green Australian caps with the Australian logo on it no one's allowed to ever wear one except like an Australian cricketer.

And when it's handed over to you when you play your first match for Australia, there's a ceremony and they hand over the cap to you and you put it on and at last you've got to the point where you can wear the baggy green cap for Australia. I feel like, you know, suiting up in a NASA EVA suit is a bit like that. You know, you're going where very few people have gone before and done great things and you're wearing something very special. And I'm just looking at love hearts and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, there you go. Well, I'm going to download these and I'm going to try to use them in our conversations

going forward. Can you get GIFs into a video? Can we use them in our conversations going forward can you get gifts into a video can we use them in the youtube version of this this podcast video oh that is a great question yeah we should totally be able to do that because it's all nasa public domain stuff they want us to use it yes they do brady will be spreading awareness of nasa to our hello internet audience who i think has probably never heard about nasa until this very moment and by the way i was wound up on this i didn't know this had happened until all the teams on twitter started saying what's brady gonna say about this have you seen this

wind up merchants yeah but that's a great idea that's a great idea so this will be the video i'm going to collect a bunch of these together, and everyone can enjoy the NASA reaction gifs. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Audible. Audible has the world's largest selection of audiobooks and audio entertainment. Now you know that Audible has hundreds of thousands of audiobooks in their catalog, but they also now have Audible Originals. These are stories created exclusively for Audible, including documentaries and scripted shows that you can't hear anywhere else. When you sign up to Audible, you get to choose one audiobook that you want to listen to, as well as two Audible Originals from a fresh selection every month.

The one that I'm currently listening to is the amazingly titled A Grown-Up's Guide to Dinosaurs. If you liked dinosaurs as a kid and haven't thought about them in a long time, I highly recommend it. Now, to start your 30-day trial and choose one audiobook plus two Audible originals absolutely free, visit audible.com slash hellointernet or text hellointernet, all one word, to 500-500. That's audible.com, A-U-D-I-B-L-E, dot com slash hellointernet, or text hellointernet to 500-500. I've been listening to audiobooks for years with Audible,

and you should give them a try too. Thanks to Audible for supporting the show and for giving me many things to listen to. Last time on the show, I suggested a homework for what I just thought was an interesting movie to maybe talk about a little bit. And that movie was not Brady Goes West, but it was Ingrid Goes West. Had you seen the movie? Because I thought you had, but I saw on Twitter today, you were desperately watching it before we started recording. I had watched it already, but I had watched it long enough ago that I wanted to just get it

fresh in my head. I was not confident in my ability to just remember it from whenever I watched it. I don't know, like four months ago, maybe. I watched it about three weeks ago and I meant to watch it again, but haven't. So you've got three week old one watch versus two watches from Grey, including a very recent watch just for context. This is not a tremendously in-depth homework. I just sort of thought it was an interesting thing and it kind of vaguely relates to both of our lives and a bunch of other things so that's why i just kind of wanted to mention it as a possible little homework to discuss at the end of the show yeah but can i ask what was your opinion on the movie from three weeks ago this used to be

something you didn't like discussing like you know look i've just given up yeah i know we're not going to get through it without you just having us put the cards on the table straight away so that's why i figure let's just dive into it my cards on the table was it was okay a bit meh i think in a world where black mirror has has become like the standard bearer for this kind of satire of society and seems to have hoovered up all the best ideas and done them pretty well. Any film like this is always struggling to say something original because I feel like Black Mirror have taken all the good stuff

and I felt like I was watching a Black Mirror episode done well, but with flaws. It wasn't like a disaster, like say like the circle or something like that. Oh, wow. I forgot about that. It felt like a reasonably good, but not amazing Black Mirror episode. And I thought, I've only got a few things to say. I think the first 15 minutes I found like a really good, awkward watch. I was watching it with my wife and we were doing lots of knowing looks at each other because it was all about that Instagram life. And like sometimes it would cut close to the bone and sometimes it was funny. But so the first 15 minutes I thought it was pretty good. And then I felt the film

slowly and then more rapidly started becoming very implausible in a way that I wasn't entirely comfortable with like in ways like I was thinking that would never happen like that's just not realistic I don't think that would happen that way so then it became a bit hard to believe and yet the film was supposed to be quite believable and then it also kind of had that sort of cliche typical ending that we see a lot. And we've seen in Black Mirror several times before as well, where it has that little twist at the end where you think they've learned their lesson, but in the end, you know,

it's going to get worse and the problem continues. And what was that merits one of Black Mirror? How many merits was it in the title? It was like 15 million merits. 15 million merits. Like the end of Ingrid Goes West felt like the end of that, where you thought like, you know, she'd come out the other side, but she hasn't.

And same as the protagonist in 50 Million Merits or whatever, you thought he'd stood up to the machine. And then there's that twist at the end where he becomes part of it. I didn't think of Black Mirror when watching this. Although if I had to pick a Black Mirror when watching this. Although if I had to pick a Black Mirror episode, this is most like, it's most like nosedive. Yeah, very much so. This is just a total sign tangent, but did you watch the last season of Black Mirror? Yes, I have actually, yeah. What did you think about it?

I can't remember what they all were. I remember a couple of them I liked. The first one about the video gaming guys I thought was really interesting. What were the other ones? I thought they were okay, but not amazing. I watched the last season. I sort of binged it all at once and came out the other side with the same sort of thing. I'm like, I can't really remember anything that I've seen. Oh, that's it.

The phone call, the one with the guy from Fle fleabag the priest from fleabag in it like it wasn't a good black mirror but it was a good tv show you know where there's the uh where he's trying to call the ceo yeah no that was terrible brady that was awful what i liked about it with the characters and the acting in it i liked him i just like him as an actor yeah he's a good i thought he was good in it so that's why i said i liked as a show but not as a black mirror Yeah, he's a good actor. I thought he was good in it. So that's why I said I liked as a show, but not as a Black Mirror. Like it wasn't a good Black Mirror episode, but I just liked seeing him. And what was the other one? Rachel Jack and Ashley Too. Ashley Too was the one with-

Oh yeah, Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus. The first 10 minutes, I thought it was going to be good. And then suddenly I realized it wasn't good. I started watching that one and I thought, this is cool. My wife's going to love this one. So I paused it and said, we should watch it together. I think you're going to like it. And we watched the first 10 minutes and she was saying, yeah, this is good. And then it just went completely rubbish. And at the end I said, I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was going to end up so bad.

I had the strangest experience watching that one, which was, I actually kind of liked that episode, but I had one main problem, which is I thought that the main actress was totally unbelievable as a teen pop idol. And I found it just incredibly distracting throughout the whole thing. And then when the credits came up, I was like, Miley Cyrus, where do I know that name? I was like, oh, okay. Oops. Sorry. My bad. So you thought that one was all right. Smithereens, the one in the car you didn't like. What did you think of Striking Vipers, the video game one? I only remember thinking I didn't like it very much, But I think we never even discussed it as a season because it sort of never really crossed our radar. And that concept of Black Mirror had a couple great ideas. And I feel like they should stop now because they've used up those ideas. And it's an interesting thing to hear you compare this movie to that

in that same sort of context of Black Mirror nailed a few ideas and it's hard not to compare things that are doing those ideas to the earlier Black Mirror episodes in particular. And again, in my head, this movie didn't really fall into that category, but I did have that exact same thought about the later black mirror episodes of okay i feel like i'm just seeing the same thing but a little worse each time i'm astounded you didn't think it was black mirrorish i don't know when it was made uh did it it doesn't predate it does it it's quite a new

film no no i think it's i think it's relatively new i think the reason it didn't fall into the black mirror category for me is plot of the movie aside the reason i thought of it last time and why it popped into my head as homework is you brought up the thing of like text messages in cinema. How do you display text messages or this whole internet world that we're trying to figure out, how do you show on the screen? And I thought this movie did a pretty good job of maybe the best version of showing what Instagram is on film. They start with this montage of people on Instagram and there's a couple little moments

here and there of like, what is Instagram like? And I feel like you could show this to someone and those parts are the best way I have seen of how do you portray through film what it is like to use Instagram or what the life on Instagram is like. Now, I'm not saying the characters themselves. I'm saying just those little segments of here's people posting photos on Instagram, hashtag no filter, hashtag blessed, that kind of stuff. I've seen it done a bunch, but I felt like this movie really nailed that. I remember thinking, if you showed this to someone who had no idea what Instagram was, like your grandma or something, I don't think it will convey Instagram to them.

I felt like Instagram was almost bordering on assumed knowledge. Interesting. Interesting. I had a funny experience. There's one little shot in the movie of the main actress Aubrey Plaza, I think. She's sort of scrolling through Instagram and she's doing this little gesture where it's like, scroll up so that the image comes into view and then she double taps it to give it a heart and then immediately scrolls up to the next one and like double taps to give a heart. And she's just going through her whole feed,

like scroll up, tap, tap, scroll up, tap, tap, scroll up, tap, tap. Clearly not looking at any of the photos. She just wants everyone to know that she's liked their pictures. It definitely captures, especially the first half of the film. Like I said, the reason it cut close to the bone and those awkward looks was it definitely captured what it's like to live that Instagram life. Like it did a really good job of that. Really good job of that. Yeah. So when that scene came on, I remember turning to my wife and I was like,

do people use Instagram like that? And she looked at me like I was crazy. Because I'm not sure I have ever liked a photo on Instagram. And I was like, who would scroll through their feed and just heart all the photos? Isn't that like hearting none of the photos? I don't understand. I think it's certainly from my experience, certainly women who I know who use Instagram, it's like that. And they notice if you don't like one, like, oh, Jane liked my last 19 photos, but not that one. Is that sending some kind of message? Do you notice when I don't like your photos on Instagram, Brady? Oh, I don't notice when you don't know, because you don't like anything. Obviously, I'm not a huge Instagram user, but I'm trying to think like,

where do I even go to see when someone likes my photos? I don't like anything. Obviously, I'm not a huge Instagram user, but I'm trying to think like, where do I even go to see when someone likes my photos? I don't understand what I should be keeping track of on here. But just a couple of weeks ago, I happened to be standing in line somewhere. There was this teenage girl who was like a few places ahead of me and she had her phone out and I could see what she was doing on her phone.

And of course, she had Instagram open and was doing that exact gesture. The like yeah scroll up tap tap scroll up tap tap scroll up tap tap just to heart all the photos you would automate that process you would have some kind of macro key wouldn't you and yeah there's got to be a way to automate that 100 like you learn a little javascript i think you could automate that really easily and then you could you could always be like the first one in to like the photos that anybody posts yeah but i don't know i found it kind of shocking to see that in in real life maybe i'm a little bit sheltered but i found it really quite surprising to see someone

do this like i don't know like really mechanical and like hypnotized or not even hypnotized isn't right because they're not looking at it but like mindless yeah a sort of mindless obligation yeah to this service that has to go on so yeah i thought that it was an interesting representation of instagram but you may be right though that you need to know a little bit about Instagram to feel like it's being portrayed, that it doesn't give you a good idea if you know nothing about Instagram. Yeah. For example, that scene you mentioned that you like so much, like I think would lose a lot of its cleverness if you had no idea what was going on. You'd still get it. You'd still get what's going on, but it helped to know what Instagram was and how it

worked, which could date the movie of course yeah it's a very in its time movie but yeah so i guess for people who if you haven't seen the movie and if you're not going to see the movie the basic actual plot that kicks off after the sort of introduction of here is instagram is Ingrid Goes West is about Aubrey Plaza, who is sort of not entirely right in the head. And she's a lonely person who ends up focusing on and sort of obsessing over, I don't know the actress's name or the, I think I just think of her as Scarlet Witch in my head from the Marvel movies. She's one of the Olsen twins, but like she ends up focusing on this, not even an Instagram celebrity, but someone who just uses Instagram a lot and is somewhat popular on the service. An influencer of sorts. Yeah. But I think it's an interesting choice

that she's a little bit of like a low level influencer yeah right she's yeah she's not an actual celebrity celebrity she's more like someone who is just somewhat popular on the site yeah and aubrey plaza's life has sort of fallen apart on the east coast and she says oh the hell with it i'm going to sort of travel across the country with some money that i've inherited. And I'm going to try to become friends with this person. And it's just a very uncomfortable viewing experience, the whole movie. It's weird. You sort of feel bad for Aubrey Plaza, but she's also just a terrible person and also just being someone who works in a creative field it's like you're sort of thinking about it from both of these characters perspective and uh as i mentioned last time when i sort of assigned it for homework it's a movie that i've been hearing a lot of creator friends sort of mention because this is also the like nightmare of anybody who lives in the public world is that this sort of thing is like something that can

happen is that someone can like fixate on you in a way that is not entirely appropriate and cross boundaries and attempt to ingratiate themselves in your life. That's why it's been sort of making the rounds, it seems, with creators as like a movie that people have asked, oh, have you seen this movie? And what did you think about it? So it's like a warning, like, you know, if you lose your dog, it could be a fan that stole it, which is something that happens in the film. That's how she meets her. She steals her dog. And then the girl puts posters up saying, have you seen my dog?

And our crazy girl then says, yeah, I found your dog. And they become friends. Yeah. 100%. If you live in the public world, don't trust the person who returns your dog. That's a lesson that we learned. Don't invite them in for dinner. Don't bring them into

your life. And this is a bit like, don't negotiate with terrorists. We all have to hold to this policy. And it makes it better for everybody if we can just hold to this policy of don't trust the person who returns your dog. I just thought it all got a bit implausible. I mean, the dog thing was stretching believability for me, but then she just does such extreme things that I was like, this would never happen, surely. What did you think of then the end? Because obviously, you know, we're not worrying about spoilers here because this is what we do.

Obviously, she attempts suicide and she live streams it or something like that, doesn't she? And she ends up failing in her attempt, but her attempt becomes very famous and makes her an Instagram celebrity. So the film ends with her now being having loads and loads of followers and being famous on Instagram because of her suicide attempt. Did you find that a satisfying ending or a clever or a twist or a cop-out or what did you think of how that ended the film? I don't know. I don't think it's a twist.

This person has tried to make friends with someone and has crossed all of these inappropriate boundaries. And it's obviously gone wrong because they're not able to make friends in this appropriate way. And it of like, I'm not 100% sure how genuine I'm supposed to take this suicide attempt. Because she is filming herself talking about, oh, this is the real me, everybody on Instagram. Like, I've been lying to you about how perfect my life is. And everything is actually terrible. And now I'm going to kill myself. And that's the end of it. And sort of watching it the second time, I was just thinking like,

I'm not a hundred percent sure if you're supposed to, as the viewer, believe her in this moment, or if it's just more manipulation she's actually making a kind of desperate play to do this sort of thing but either way like the you know the internet rewards her with this kind of this weird way in which things can go viral of like oh we all love you for being just who you are. And now you are like Instagram famous for being this person. And I don't know, I think if like you have to try to figure out how are you going to end this movie? I don't think it's a terrible way to end the movie. And it sort of keeps this character consistent that she's, she's really lonely. Like this is the core thing about this person. And I think it's one of the reasons why Aubrey Plaza is playing like this person who's not really right. But I still find her sympathetic. And it's like her loneliness just really comes across like she is a terrible person, but she also just has no friends.

And I think the central idea in this movie is it's not really about Instagram. I feel like it says something about parasocial relationships. This idea that you feel a little bit like you know someone because you follow them on Instagram. And so she knows like, oh, what restaurant this girl goes to and what kind of avocado toast she likes. And she learns like, oh, how does she decorate her house and all the rest of this. And I think there genuinely is like a real problem with loneliness in modern society. That this seems to be something that is on the rise, that has increased over time.

But Grace, she does become friends with her. See, I can pinpoint the point up to which I enjoyed the film. I enjoyed the film up to the scene, which I also enjoyed, you know, when she becomes like starts becoming friends with this girl who she's idolized. And then they take a picture together, like they take a selfie together and she realizes this is my moment. And she checks Instagram later and like the girl posts the picture and tags her in it. And she's like, I've made it.

I've been tagged in one of her pictures. and like that was also one of those really uncomfortable interesting moments that kind of reminds me about the the awkwardness and all the the unspoken stuff about instagram and all that i really enjoyed that scene in that moment but then that's pretty much where the film takes a turn in two ways one she, she's become friends with this girl now. So that whole interesting dynamic of wishing you could be that person's friend is gone because she kind of is her friend. And also that's where it all starts falling apart and this brother comes on the scene with this completely unrealistic plot line involving stealing phones and blackmail and

all that sort of stuff, which just did not sit right with me because I just didn't believe it could happen. It lost its Instagram interestingness. It lost its obsessive fanness in a way because she was no longer just an obsessive fan. She was now a spurned friend. Then it just became this kind of quite cliche typical movie from that point onwards where it was kind of single white female type, stalkery type film. And then it was just like, you know, any other film really. It was all right. But that first half up until that selfie point, I did quite enjoy because it was, it felt like it was a real commentary on the life we all lead. Yeah. That shot of the two of them taking the picture together was very husbands of Instagram,

which is the, you know, the video that you've shared with me of all these poor husbands having to take pictures. And it's always like, higher, higher. You need to take the picture higher. It needs to be back here. It needs to be this way. It needs to be that way. That's me, man. I'm on board with that. It's all about taking good photos for each other. It's our job as humans. You have real specialty in this area of taking pictures for people. But that was very much like, oh, yes, we're going to have this other person and we're going to use him as a kind of human tripod to take the picture for us. But yeah, no, I can see how that is the moment where the movie sort of turns and does have this weird plot

line that on the second viewing, I had sort of forgotten about all of that. Like I remembered much better the first 30 minutes of the movie and like the last 10 minutes of the movie. And I had kind of forgotten about a bunch of that stuff in the middle, but I was just going to say though, that I just think the thing with her being lonely and kind of wanting friendships and Instagram and the social media being something that really aggravates a kind of loneliness. It's a good point that the movie is hitting on. Maybe going on Instagram and seeing all of the pictures of people whose lives you want to live or people that you wish you were closer to, it makes things much worse and it makes things much harder for you to try to have a normal social life.

That's a pretty well-established fact by now, isn't it? Isn't spending too much time looking at airbrushed perfect people on Instagram being bad for your health, akin to smoking being bad for your health now. It's like, it's just such a well-established fact. This has been a fact forever. And certainly since Instagram has been around, it wasn't like I watched this film and went, oh my goodness, I hadn't thought about this before. Maybe looking at all these perfect people on Instagram is unhealthy for us in some way. It's a bit like, yeah, tell me something I don't know. It doesn't mean you can't make a movie about it, but it didn't break any paradigms for me or anything. No, obviously it's not new information.

I just think, like, I felt it was just portrayed well in the first part of the movie. Like, this is sort of of this is shown well like there's there's just one shot of of her where they she's like looking at instagram or whatever and then they just cut to her like crying on the bed also looking at the images and then it's like oh it's just back to her living her normal life looking at stuff and i felt like they did a couple little things like that that sort of convey the feeling very well. It had a nice style to it. It had a nice touch. You're totally right. That is not new information.

Although I do feel like maybe it's as of 18 months ago or maybe two years ago, whenever the Facebook Analytica thing, that felt like the real turning point in the public consciousness about how do people feel about social media and companies like Facebook that that was the real turning point of hey these things aren't so great and now everybody kind of understands that these things aren't so great yeah they became like a proper pantomime villain around that time. Yeah. And I do think that the comparison to smoking is maybe not the worst one. Like I

thought about that a few times, like, I don't know if that's overblown or if it's not overblown. I do think maybe that is an appropriate analogy that further down the line, five or 10 years from now that people will think of a lot of this stuff as much more like smoking mental health wise. But then like, even as I say that sentence out loud, I think, oh, that sounds way overblown. But then I read a book recently called iGen, which was talking about some of this stuff and going through surveys of like mental health with people who've grown up with social media and then like that kind of book terrifies you with with these graphs about you know what happens with depression and anxiety and suicide rates and like all of this like horrible stew of mental problems that tracks incredibly strongly with people growing up with or being very heavy

users of social media. Then I read something like that and I think maybe this smoking metaphor is not remotely overblown. Maybe it's underblown. I don't know, but I would say I like the movie more than you. It sounds like it, but I'm glad I watched it. In the way I'm glad I watched Black Mirror. Yeah. Like, so I would say if someone said, oh, should I watch it? I would say, yeah, yeah, watch it. It's not a waste of your time to watch it.

Maybe I just had higher expectations because you said, oh, lots of people I know have been talking about it. And so I thought maybe it was like, you know, going to be some awesome film. But it was just good. It was just good. All right. Well, should we have a quick summary of Brexit then as well while we're here? Oh, no, Brady.

We've got to go record. Goodbye, internet. That's what we need to do. Oh, I forgot we have to do that. You totally forgot. I knew you totally forgot. I had. I totally forgot.

I was thinking I was off the hook.