Hello Internet - H.I. #136: Dog Bingo

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

Grey and Brady discuss: The Mt Doom Edition, Dinosaurs Attack! randomness, YouTube videos from beyond the grave, betting on your weight, speedrunning, date formatting, the Space Force logo, and emoji. Sponsors: HelloFresh: tasty recipes & fresh ingredients delivered to your door - get ten free meals including shipping - go to hellofresh.com/hellointernet10 and use promo code hellointernet10 Audible: the largest selection of audiobooks and original audio performances anywhere - start a 30-day trial and get 1 audiobook and 2 Audible Originals absolutely free by signing up at audible.com/hellointernet or text "hellointernet" to 500-500 Dashlane: password manager app and secure digital wallet - try Dashlane here for a free 30 day trial: www.dashlane.com/hellointernet (plus, here's a promo code -> HelloInternet to get a 10% discount for Dashlane Premium) Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes: Discuss this episode on the reddit Mt Doom Edition Vinyl supply threatened Podcast Postcards A Tim and David Allen "I've been murdered" Aaron Swartz Weight loss wager firms Speedrunning Pitfall 2 Speed Run Doom level speedrun explained House of the Dead Confessions of a Tetris Addict United States Space Force New Emoji season

Before we even get started, I just want to complain about a little thing, which is I'm old school with my emojis. I still don't even like emojis. I prefer to use emoticons. If I'm going to do a little smiley face, I want to craft it with my bare hands out of colons and parentheses and brackets and semicolons and dashes. And what just happened in our pre-show setup that annoys me every time is when I go to do a standard smiley face, you can never quite know on what machine or how it's going to happen, but Apple decides for you, oh, we'll do the little picture. You wanted to send a regular smiley face, but we're going to send one of the picture smiley faces instead so when i meant to send just regular colon space smile apple instead sent to you the picture of the guy who's who's

like way too smiley and also has embarrassed cheeks and it just greatly annoys me like that was not the emotional state i was trying to convey i don't even know why you'd go with a dial down smiley face where you were just basically saying, call me. This is also like emoji infection. I feel like you have to constantly fight against it in that, like if you talk to people who use smiley faces frequently, it spreads throughout the population. I think that then the lack of smiley faces indicates, oh, this message was sent without friendly intent. Yeah. I have been aware of trying to pull back on the number of smiley faces because, yeah, it has become a little bit much because of some of my interactions.

It's not a stupid move for you, though, because you write such terse texts. Oh, okay. That throwing in a little bit of, it's okay, I'm not angry. Couldn't hurt. Well, yeah. So this is like the game theory then of a smiley face is what do I have to lose? Nothing. What do I have to gain? Friendly intent is clear. Yeah. Okay. I'll keep that in mind, but I still prefer looking back on our text message conversation, a yes, full stop, return, right? And that just goes straight through. But anyway, it really bothers me

when my handcrafted emoticons get turned into little emoji pictures. And it's like, it's not what I want. That's never what I want. I didn't judge you. I noticed I'm looking back at earlier conversations we've had. The last time you did send me anything emotional, it did come through as a colon bracket, but you did put a space between the eyes and the mouth. Maybe that's the key thing to do. That is the main thing that I try to do is put a space or maybe two spaces. But if you look in our own conversation, you sent me a colon, close parentheses, what is it like 10 interactions ago, but it didn't get turned into a smiley face. And I'm very certain that one that

just came through, I did colon space parentheses, and it still got turned into a smiley face. You just haven't got the Apple tech savvy that I have, clearly. Yes, that's what it is. I am the less Apple tech savvy of the two of us. I bow to your superior manual emoticon crafting skills. Thank you. So, should we deal with the very exciting news first please please so for the longest time people have been hoping for a repressing of the hello internet vinyl edition and it has been resisted until now right but there has been a change of circumstance and that is i got an email the other day from the company that was used in the production of the vinyl records and basically

the metal work that is used to press it like the original dial for lack of a better word they've been holding it for too long and they told me we're going to melt it down we're going to recycle it unless you order more records. I took that as a sign from above that the record should be repressed to save it from a fiery doom. So I'm pleased to announce there will be a repressing of the Hello Internet Vinyl episode, the Mount Doom edition. Oh, okay.

There we go. The Mount Doom edition. Yes. It will be limited, but there will be differences. It will be the exact same recording, obviously, because it's the same metal die. So, it will be the exact same episode recording on both sides. There is no new material. If you already have it, you're okay. You don't need to get another one. But to celebrate this new edition, I have commissioned new artwork from the same artist

simon who did it before and he's designed a new cover based on the original one but with a bit of a mount doom twist you haven't seen it at this point have you no i haven't i haven't seen this now i'm gonna send it to you now because i am just a little bit excited about it okay here comes the front what do you think it's cool isn't it can i describe it at all or is this okay right because all right this is going to be up on the actual sales page as well yeah yeah it's very much reminiscent of the original design except that now the background of a mountain has become a steaming volcano with lava coming down the sides and also forming into a Hello Internet nail and gear symbol there for the actual Mount Doom edition. Yeah. Color change as well.

We've got like blues this time. Because it's like the evening now. It's more sinister. The other one had a kind of morning daylight orangey look. And this is sort of blue tones like because it's the evening. Right. And also you and I on the beach. we were laying down that's right we were chilling now we're standing up and pointing at the volcano with some concern right because if you look closely the plane that had crashed in the original one on the back i was gonna ask about that yeah yeah

it's now flying over the volcano and that's symbolic of it's about to drop the metalwork into the volcano. Yeah. And if you have a look at the back. Okay. Looking at the back. So there's no plane crashing in the water anymore. Right. But I immediately see pink flamingo. Washed up on the island. Are we on Instagram Island or is this, this is traveled from Instagram Island to wherever we are? i like to think it's traveled from instagram island there is one other difference because i actually sent you the wrong mock-up then unintentionally oh okay here is that what the actual mock-up is because i'm changing one other thing as well have a look at this oh okay yeah okay so i'm quite surprised here because

the record is it's not black. The vinyl isn't black. It's like a light gray. It will be like Hello Internet gray colored. I didn't even know you could color vinyl. I didn't even know that was a thing. You can do all sorts of things. So this will have a different sleeve and it'll be a different color vinyl. You're really going all out for trying to make the second printing as different as possible.

And this is partly to preserve the specialness of the first edition. So people who have first editions can still say they have something, you know, they've got the authentic original, but the second edition is still cool and interesting. Yeah. I wanted them to be different. Yeah, they're very different. And it never occurred to me that after we had printed it, that, oh, obviously the company's holding on to the original mold for this and that they can't hold on to them forever because otherwise they'd end up with an enormous warehouse of them just holding onto that until the end of time. So it did seem like a really

sad tragedy if the original mold was destroyed. Melted in a volcano. Melted in a volcano. Yeah, I like this design. Simon always does great work. Like I love the colors on this, you know, the little details. It looks good. Looks really good. Nice. So have a look in show notes and Twitter and Patreon pages for information about ordering. I haven't actually, as I speak to Gray now, I haven't actually completely got my head around what's going to happen, but it will be informed. There's something that crossed my radar, which I never thought would be a story that might possibly affect us. But now I realize that it does, that apparently there was a huge fire at one of the largest vinyl production facilities in the world. And it was like the

global supply of vinyl has been threatened by this one manufacturing facility so i just like i don't know if this is going to affect the ability of us to print our actual records yeah this is new information gray you've just sent me the link this is uh yeah even more reason to follow closely with right the global vinyl markets are in flux having just promised this new edition i may be snatching it away before it even gets produced. Yeah, we'll have to see what happens. Watch this space, but the wheels are very much in motion. Dinosaurs attack cards.

I've got a few things to share about this. One is I am becoming worryingly addicted to this notion of sending them randomly to Patreon supporters. And I've developed this algorithm and random number generator system and stuff so that I can share them, but do it in a way that's fair, that, you know, rewards patrons in different ways. Okay. Essentially, so like you've got more lottery tickets if you're, you know, a longer term Patreon. Right. You're doing like a weighted randomization. exactly like a weighted lottery and i'm just i'm so addicted to doing it because i enjoy it so much i honestly i feel like santa claus in his workshop right and i'm just smiling

away to myself and like when the name gets spat out about who gets one this week or something like i'm just feeling so happy for that person and smiling away as I pop it in the envelope and write the address. Like it is seriously, it is the highlight of my week sending out these cards. I honestly, I feel like Santa Claus. It brings me so much happiness. And then going to the post office and just thinking, oh, they don't even know it's coming. This is brilliant. That's very charming. That's very sweet. What are you doing with the randomization that like, how do you, is it like a website or how are you actually doing this i do it using spreadsheets and random number generators and things like how long people have been patrons for and things like that okay so you've rigged up your own spreadsheet to put out the random numbers yeah wow wow i'm very impressed

with that brady anyway by the by that's that's very good and thank you so people now have also got the message. And when they receive them, they are tweeting me and like redditing and stuff like that. Oh, that's right. You know what? You're right. I have seen more of those on Twitter. Now that you mention it, I've seen a few more of those.

Since the last time when we were wondering if they are just being sent out into the void or if they're actually arriving at their intended destination. We need to get together soon though, Gray, and do another dual signing because I'm running very short on ones you have signed. So at the moment, some people are getting just Brady signed ones. We do have to get together. I've also had some like personal requests for dual signed cards that I'd like to try to fill.

So like we totally have to get together because these are quickly becoming like Hello Internet collector items. And yeah, we got both of our signatures on there. And there's nothing wrong, people, if it gets a bit dinged and bent in the post that's part of its dino journey don't feel bad about that yeah these things are what 30 years old at this point they're they're forever ago like it's it's a miracle that there still exist any to even sign so there's been a few other developments one is which i think i think you're aware of is

i've created a little sub site on our podcast postcards website where i'm gradually cataloging the cards for posterity and also commenting on them and giving them some commentary and a few perspectives and observations that's something people can go and look at if they want. But in the process of doing it, I've made some interesting discoveries. I've had a hypothesis that I thought I'd share with you. Because basically, I needed a full set of the cards to do this, right? So, I wanted to have the full set, one to 55, I think it is. Yeah, sounds about right. So, I've got more than enough packs

so i just started opening all the packs trying to put together a full set like basically living like a childhood six months in the space of 60 minutes as an adult i'm going to solve this problem through money which children don't have and just like burn a bunch of money on cards yeah brute force because i've got two full boxes of the cards, of boxes of cards, say. So, anyway, I was opening them. I had it all spread out on the floor in a big grid in rows of 10 or something like that. So, I was gradually putting the whole set together. And there was like a few that I just couldn't get, like four or five that I just couldn't get.

And then I opened a pack and I filled all the holes at once from one pack and I was like, hang on a second, I haven't been paying much attention here, but just how random is the distribution of the cards? And I've got a theory that the cards are not randomly distributed and like the packs are like kind of very samey. And that was confirmed by a comment that I think I read on Reddit from someone. Oh, okay. When we live opened a pack in the last episode and we went through the five cards that were in the pack, they just so happened to have bought their own pack of cards and opened them.

And they got the exact same five cards in their pack. Here's the thing i don't know if i can tell the story on the show but you have interesting statistical luck that i got a demonstration of when we were last together and playing a game called dog bingo now yes listeners imagine it is bingo but instead of bingo numbers you're calling out dash and right this is alaskan sled dog uh multi-poo right you're calling out dog names dog breeds ticking them off if you've got them on your bingo card or not yeah so you me and several people we're playing a round of dog bingo as you do and as we're playing the game, Brady was not getting any dogs. Not even no bingo here. Just like dog after dog was being called and Brady had none of them on his card.

And you guys had like 10. Yeah. So the thing is, it started out just sort of, oh, isn't that sad for Brady? He's not getting any dogs, but it did go on so long that it became the most statistically impressive thing that any of us was accomplishing at that table. It became actually astounding. Whatever it was, like we'd gone through something like 15, 20 dog calls and you had gotten none of them. And it's like, you just won this kind of reverse statistical lottery of the probability of not getting any bingo calls. Like it was such a like a strange moment. So I feel like whenever you're going to tell me any story

that has anything to do with statistics, I feel like, I don't know, maybe it's just Brady, like Brady's weird luck. So I was going to say, oh, cards have rareness. I'm not sure how much faith I put into this. But what you're saying here is a very different thing. So your theory is that the packs themselves don't have random distributions, that there's something like 50 sets of five that are being manufactured and sent out. I've still got some unopened packs, so I'm going to do a little bit of research into this, but I do think each card is not equally probable to be with a different card. They can be put together in little collections. Because there's two questions here. Because at first I thought you were just going to say, oh, some cards are more frequent than others. But yeah, that's how card collecting works.

The manufacturers are always going to have some of the cards be more rare because this then encourages trading and it's good for a collection to not be evenly distributed. But it's an interesting concept that perhaps the way they were put together in the factory means that every time you get, you know, number two experiment in space, it also always comes with Catley's Revenge, or whatever these five come together. This actually feels like some kind of crazy crowdsourcing project, right?

Like we would need a bunch of people to just report what their card sequences are and yeah we could narrow it down pretty quickly because even one listener having the exact same set of five as us opening it live on the show it seems pretty unlikely yeah exactly one out of 55 times five like oh those are not likely odds so it's i feel like like we're unraveling everything about the dinosaur's attack that there could possibly be unraveled including the statistical distribution of the cards yeah we're gonna be world authorities on this topic it was also very nice to receive a picture or i, I saw it posted on Reddit, so I guess I didn't receive it. That counts.

The Reddit counts. I don't know who the person was, but it was a Tim of some description, and she had her photo taken with none other than David Allen. Right. Her ranked author of, what's it called the code getting things done isn't it yeah getting things done a classic episode of hello internets our reaction to that book goes down in the hello internet halls of fame and this is like this thing where like stuff ripples out into the world and here here's david allen just minding his

own business and someone's looking can i take a picture of you but also i need my phone in frame here she's there kind of arm in arm with him arms around each other but she's also like discreetly holding her mobile phone pointing at the camera with the hello internet episode playing on there so yeah yeah you can see you can see it on the screen is it even that episode is that 39 i think that's the one although okay so here's the thing she's very clever very clever tim in this setup because if you zoom in on the photo you can see that what she's actually done is it looks like she took a screenshot of her podcast player playing the episode and set it as the lock screen image on her phone because you can see the time right you can see the time yeah the hello internet artwork so i'm pretty sure that was set as a lock screen which is a clever move for i don't want to

mess this up in the one moment of the actual photo but But so well done. That's a really good idea. It's not entirely clear to me whether or not she told him what she was doing. I did ask. I said, were you doing this on the slide? Did you tell him? And her answer just says, I was waiting if I should tell him, but probably having another person going for Brady, give it another go would have outraged him.

So I think maybe she didn't tell him what she was doing. Poor David Allen. We're unintentionally still getting flack from Brady, give it another go five years later. Ironically, we're chewing into his productivity and sort of useful time. Sorry, David Allen, but also I love this photo. But if you do see him doing a picture with some kind of Hello Internet merchandise. Hello, Internet. It's time to talk about HelloFresh and why you need it in your life. I visited my parents recently. And once again, the number one thing they wanted to talk about and show off and have me participate in the deliciousness of was their home-cooked

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better. And thanks to HelloFresh for supporting the show. I have a thing that came across my radar. I was going to bring it up and I thought, I don't know, maybe it's just like, it's just sort of weird and morbid. And I can't quite remember where I first came across this somewhere in the depths of Reddit. But have you heard about YouTubers who have made videos for after they die, right? So they have like a video ready to go for after they cease to exist? I don't know, but it is something that has crossed my mind on more than one occasion. Not to do it myself, but it has crossed my mind. Right.

What do they do? Do they schedule it and give it a schedule date in the future and then just keep changing that schedule date? Or do they give someone the power to release it if they die? I just realized this is where people could really use that premiere function youtube ass right of like oh you know for sure that the video has been made and just set it for what like 80 years in the future or something like it'll premiere then because this is the thing i think the reason i think about it sometimes grace to funnily enough coming back to podcast postcards because i'm still occasionally putting up postcards from our referendum so what i'll do is i'll sit down one day and i'll like scan 10 of them and then i schedule them through squarespace which is what i use to run the site and give them a date to

pop up right and a while ago there was one card that i scanned and i made the page for it and then i figured oh i don't like that card very much. So I gave it a date in the future while I decided whether or not to publish it or not. And then I was thinking about it again. So then I gave it a date like 10 years in the future so that I just didn't have to think about it anymore. And it did occur to me, you know, if I die tomorrow, that website will fall fallow. And then one day, 10 years in the future, there'll just be a new podcast postcard will just pop up suddenly on the screen.

Like, and people will be like really freaked out. Can you imagine also the conspiracy theories that that would start, right? Is the like, explain how this happened, right? Brady died eight years ago, but they're like one podcast. Is this a message from him? No, is Brady really alive? Where do you stand on the idea?

It sounds like something that you would either completely hate or you would think, yeah, makes sense. I've actually got one ready myself. I mean, for me, I can't conceive of why I would do it. Again, I can't really remember where this idea came from, but somewhere on Reddit, and I was sort of thinking about it a little bit and pondered just briefly like, oh, what would I say?

And I realized like, it's just so banal, right? Because almost anything that like a normal person would have to say, it's just, you don't have wisdom to impart from beyond the grave because you're recording it when you're alive. So there's nothing here to say in some ways like, oh, hi, I'm in my room. I'm alive right now, but I won't be at some point. That's weird. It could be just like a last few hundred bucks for your wife, like an ad revenue.

Yeah, please like and subscribe so that the algorithm promotes this and share it. So yeah, that my wife gets this ad revenue. She can have one last really nice dinner so long and thanks for all the fish you know bye yeah but i do feel like the reason i wrote it down on my little hello internet list is that's fascinating it's an interesting idea and i'm 100 willing to bet that like there are current youtubers right now who do have them like ready and waiting to go presumably with you know someone else who has have them like ready and waiting to go, presumably with, you know, someone else who has the login keys of being able to publish the thing.

There was a politician in Australia, well, she's still a politician in Australia called Pauline Hanson. And she was a very divisive figure, sort of a, she was kind of a controversial sort of far right type politician. And at the sort of the height of her interest in her, she made this video that was to be shown if she was like assassinated or something. And it started off with her saying like, if you're watching this, I've been murdered. And then someone leaked it

and it just became this huge news story. It was on 60 Minutes and all that. Here's the take Pauline Hanson made that if she gets killed, but you know, she's still alive today, but the video got out. This is also part of the risk is you don't want to accidentally publish your, oh, if you're watching this, I'm dead video. Like YouTube is in the middle of switching the way their upload system works.

And I find myself very uncertain about like, wait, I don't trust this new system and these new boxes. So I always switch over to the classic mode because like, I want to upload something, but I don't want it visible yet. I'm just sending it out, you know, for people to preview. And that'd be a really embarrassing time to use like, oh, I'll use the beta uploader for YouTube for my death video. Like it's live immediately and you didn't realize this. If it was totally within your power, would you prefer all your normal videos to be removed if you passed away?

Or like, do you have any feelings about that? Because how do you feel about like, you know, if you fell under a bus tomorrow, everyone going and watching your videos going, oh, this is the guy that fell under the bus and, you know, watching them. And that's a bit morbid too. Yeah, no, but I don't, that's fine. I feel like, you know, my personality obviously is in the videos, but they're not videos about me. Like I'm not a vlogger here talking about my daily life, you know, my personality obviously is in the videos, but they're not videos about me. Like, I'm not a vlogger here talking about my daily life, you know, and then like, oh, it's been cut short.

Well, there's lots of podcasts that have that obviously now. And there are, you know, and your Q&A videos have a bit of you in them, you know? Yeah. But with the podcast, though, we've explicitly talked about the weirdness of people listening to us after we're dead many times. Like, that has been a recurring thing on the podcast i feel like it's baked into that in a way that with podcasts it's just i don't know it's sort of different but the videos i don't know i feel fine with yeah oh i'm dead now here's the stuff i made uh you know enjoy it as long as it's continues to remain culturally

relevant and pass on the royalties to my wife, please, YouTube, if you're listening and I'm dead, don't lock her out of the account. Don't suspend the account for impersonation after I'm dead, whatever. I'm going to guess you would feel like you want people to still look at the tremendous legacy of periodic videos and all the channels and like the topics that you've covered especially because like that kind of science content is as close to eternal as you're going to be able to get you know especially in math like things yeah that just literally are not going to change no things that will still be true even after the heat death of

the universe that's right the proof of Ptolemy's theorem is not connected to me being alive in any way whatsoever. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I presume that's the way you would feel, right? Yeah, I don't know. Why do you say you don't know? Well, I don't know. When someone dies, do you ever go and have a look at their Twitter and look what their last 20 tweets were and their recent videos and look at that and kind of through these sort of weird goggles? I do. I'm sure I've mentioned this before. I feel like in the people that I follow on the internet who are content creators that I'm interested in, I have been extremely lucky in that there have not been any deaths in that group.

I still feel like I'm waiting for someone whose content I followed for years to kick the bucket. And I've just walked a statistical path of the people I happen to follow. I haven't really fallen into that category. But even if it's not someone you follow, I mean, the most recent example I can think of was the basketball, the Kobe Bryant died just recently as we're recording this. And in this really tragic helicopter crash. And then one of the first things I'll do is go, you know, in this really tragic helicopter crash. And then, you know, one of the first things I'll do is go, oh, gosh,

he was just alive yesterday. And I'll go to his Twitter and go, oh, look, there he is. Last night congratulating LeBron James on beating his record and writing all these nice tweets and stuff. And then I'll go through his last few tweets. Oh, I wonder what the last picture he posted on Instagram was. Oh, look, there's him and his daughter. Isn't that sad? Like, it's just like this natural human instinct.

I never followed him on Twitter before then, but I did go and have a look. I don't think I've ever had that experience. It's never really occurred to me to do that for people who I don't follow. Yeah. It is this weird situation of people leaving these like online memorials to themselves unintentionally through their social media. Actually, it occurs to me that perhaps Twitter would be a much better place if,

you know, below the text box where you have to write it every tweet, they had a little message, which was, remember, life is short. You can die at any moment this may be the final tweet on your page right yeah and that's always the one everyone uses as your memorial where they'll write their tributes to you and stuff like that so yeah is that the

one that's decided as the go-to people don't use the last gram they use the last tweet well or the last gram but it's always the last one no matter how banal it is you know you could post a magnificent picture of a sunset and then the next one could be oh bugger i just stubbed my toe and if that's the last one you do before you die that's the one that everyone writes oh he was such a great guy like oh yeah so the closest i have ever come to this which is a little strange is is Aaron Schwartz, who was like a co-inventor of RSS and was a guy who was involved in a lot of the sort of early internet stuff. After his death, I remember looking on his Twitter, because I think someone alerted it to me, but three tweets before his death, he watchedlland video and it's one of his

tweets it's a strange feeling also because like the things that he contributed to the internet were really good like rss as an open standard that like podcasting is built upon along with other things and it's you know his death was a like complicated and terrible situation. And it's just, like, it's just odd to know that, oh, a month before he was watching one of the videos that I made. I do it all the time, Gray. You probably think I'm a weirdo, but I do it quite often. I don't think it's strange. It just never occurred to me to do, but I don't think it's strange.

I think you're right. It's quite a natural human response. I will semi-regularly, if I'm reading the paper in the morning, and there's a story about just like, you know, a civilian, like some British tourist who died in Australia after, you know, getting kicked by a kangaroo or something. If they've got an unusual name, and my phone's out, I'll sometimes just go onto Instagram and look at their Instagram account. Oh, look at that. Just two days ago, they were posting a picture of Ayers Rock, not knowing that was going to happen to them.

Well, I think this is also what makes you a journalist, right? Yeah. Is you have more of that tendency than maybe on average, but I still think that you're, I don't think you're remotely alone or an outlier in that behavior. I would bet more people to not do that. Yeah. I mean, obviously journalists do it because they always do it to investigate them. But for me, it's more just this kind of tragic reminder that one day you can be having everything can be fine. And the next day it can all be over.

And it's always just this kind of morbid reminder of that. It's like a really vivid way of seeing it. Twitter, if you're listening, you should have that reminder to people all the time. Hey, be nice because this could be your final tweet at any moment. At any moment, buddy. That's your legacy. This is why maybe as a YouTuber, you need to have your death video set up and ready to go. What about our death podcast, our death hello internet?

We could interview each other about what we want people to know after we've died. You are normally the one with crazy schemes. I can't remember if I ever told you about this scheme of mine for an episode. I wanted us to do an episode which would be sort of that, which would be a future Hello Internet episode. And my thought was, I'm reasonably confident I could set a cryptographic key tough enough so that it would take like 200 years to crack. Like not infinitely difficult, but pretty hard. That was my idea of, oh, maybe we can have this like cryptographic, difficult to unlock, but not impossible, brute forcible episode that people will be able to hear in 200 years. And I had an idea for what we would talk about in that episode, which I won't say right now. But

for whatever reason, I was like, I've got more important things to do right now than plan for an episode that won't be released until after we're dead. I want to know who's going to sponsor that episode. What company is going to be around for the longest period of time? It's like that rule of thumb of trying to figure out what's going to be around in the future by estimating how long it has already been around in the past. I forget, there's a name for this rule. But it's like just a good rule of thumb of like of like oh spoons have been around for a thousand years so they'll probably still be spoons a thousand years from now that kind of thing so like dinosaurs are text

cards still around so right yes that's exactly it we're still talking about them 30 years so if you have to make an estimate they're going to be around for another 30 years that kind of thing okay but so i don't know which of the sponsors has been around the longest but i still want to know if what do you think about a death video for you i feel like i haven't gotten an answer out of out of what your thoughts are i wouldn't i very much don't like the idea of it so you don't you don't find it intriguing like oh what would brady say from beyond the grave? No. Interesting. Huh. I just want to go away quietly. Okay. You want to go out not with a bang, but with a whimper. That's your plan? You know, having just said I have this morbid fascination, I don't really like the idea of

that morbid fascination being turned onto me. Oh, okay. I see. You feel like that's intentionally courting kind of morbid fascination? Oh, well, yeah. I mean, that's the ultimate courting of it, isn't it? To make something with the specific intent of being seen after you've died. I thought you might be intrigued by the idea and that the mere mentioning of it would set up a post-Brady death video, but obviously not. Interesting. No. But it's only going to be, I think it's only going to be a matter of time before it happens with some either YouTube channel that I know or some relatively big YouTube channel does a YouTube post death video.

Yeah. I'm totally up for doing that hello internet thing though. I think we should record onto like a physical media like vinyl and then like hide it somewhere and then have the location be released after in 200 years. So people then have to go and dig up the time capsule with the episode in it. Oh, wait. So you're talking like a literal lost episode of Hello Internet. So it's in some kind of Indiana Jones style temple. That's what you would want. But I was going to say what medium would last for the amount of time necessary? But I guess the answer would be vinyl.

Vinyl would probably be the best way to record it. For those who know who Harry Seldon is from the Foundation series, we could also have like a special room where like holograms of us appear every few hundred years. That's what this guy does. His hologram appears of the past him telling people his predictions for the future i don't quite think we're there technologically to have the hello internet holograph room where no once every 50 years brady and i show up to talk about some nonsense for 30 minutes so then just appear for another 50 years just open another pack of dinosaurs attack cards yeah it's this one oh it's the same one from 50 years ago.

It's the same five cards. Cheeky buggers. I'm wondering what this weight loss wager firms thing is. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, we spoke, didn't we? We spoke in the last episode about, hang on, let me shut that. I've got a very distracting email. I shouldn't have read my email while I'm doing a podcast.

Brady, I'm going to recommend a podcasting pro tip. Don't read your email while recording a show. Thanks, man. I didn't mean to blow your mind here or anything, but trying to do email while recording a show. I wasn't going to reply. It's not going to work out the way you think it's going to work out. I know you've been inspired by David Allen to be maximally productive during the show,

but I think that's, you know, I don't recommend that path. I just finished editing a video a second ago. Oh, that I believe you could do for sure. Yeah. So we were talking about gambling, weren't we? And betting and long bets and things. And then coincidentally, I stumbled over this story on the BBC website the other day about this growing fad for weight loss wager firms, which are companies

with which you kind of essentially lay a bet. Like you give them 300 bucks, and if you reach a target weight in a certain time, they'll like give you 330 or something. And if you don't, they keep your money. Oh, okay. That's interesting. That's different from what I was thinking of. Okay. Huh. So, you can actually make money off your own weight loss. Yeah. But you're backing yourself to reach a certain weight. Huh. Someone who wanted to lose a small amount of weight could bet 300 pounds, that's dollars pounds, that's money pounds, 300 pounds in total over 10 months, but would make

just 33 quid if they succeeded. If they didn't hit their goal, they would lose all of their money. People who want to lose more win greater returns. That's a poorly worded sentence. Basically, what they're saying is people who want to lose more weight will win greater returns. That's a poorly worded sentence. Basically, what they're saying is people who want to lose more weight will win greater financial returns, assuming they achieve their stated goal. This company, which is American, is saying they've got 250,000 pounds. So what's that about? $350,000 worth of contracts in the UK in the first month of the year. About a third of our participants accomplish their goal and get a prize at the end they said right i mean this this does put the company in a little bit of an interesting position of like do they really want you to win those wagers right

like no obviously they don't right no they don't so uh like oh we're helping people lose weight but actually if everyone achieves that we will go out of business is the actual state of things. But I think it's interesting that you can actually win money because I forget what it's called. Who's the Greek guy who tied himself to the mast of, or had his crew tied him to the mast of the ship so he could listen to the harpies? You know who I mean, right?

Come on, crack the Google out. No, I'm not going to crack the Google out. People are screaming it into their podcast players at the moment i'm sure they are right but it's like but we all know the dude who had his his people tie him to the mast so he could listen to the harpy sing this whole concept is like it evolved into this idea of an of an industry where you can give them money with the same idea like like, oh, I want to lose 100 pounds. But if I don't lose 100 pounds, you're going to take my money and give it to a cause that I hate, right? Or these other things. And I don't know, people have said like, oh, they like this

as a way to bind themselves, like to set up a promise that future them has to meet. But I've always, it's just never struck me as like a good idea. It just seems like a bad idea to put yourself in a situation where you're just going to lose money and you can't win anything. Like it always seems like it's against the spirit of betting and it's against the spirit of incentives. You actually do win money if you reach your way. But I'm saying that's why with this one, I do like it. Every version of this I've seen before is entirely about losing it.

The British Dietetic Association told the BBC, the fact that they would gamify weight loss and add competitive element to losing weight would be hugely detrimental to those who have a poor relationship with food. Those with eating disorders could use a website such as this to justify dieting and restriction for monetary gain. They could have significant impacts on both mental and physical health. Well, that person sounds really fun at parties. Sure, yeah, everything can be used for bad if you have bad intentions. Yeah, great, cool. No, gamifying weight loss is good.

The evidence is pretty clear that fitness wages, fitness apps, and anything where the individuals are able to track their weight loss and use it in a competitive or gamification way is extremely dangerous for people with eating disorders. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, there again, these sentences I love. It's extremely dangerous for people for whom it's dangerous. It's like, yeah, yeah. Alcohol is extremely dangerous for alcoholics. I don't get it. for whom it's dangerous. It's like, yeah, alcohol is extremely dangerous for alcoholics. I don't get it. I think it's a good idea. I don't. Oh, okay. Why? I thought it was such a good idea. It wouldn't even occur to me that you

don't think it's a good idea. So, tell me why. Because I see it a bit like a bit gambly. I think it's mixing two things that people have big problems with, money and and food i think even people without eating disorders could start doing stupid things to try and make the money and or not lose the money what is the thing that you're worried about that someone's gonna someone's gonna come up to the line and go on a real crash like yeah someone will do something really unhealthy to keep their money or make their money or someone will lose a substantial amount of money because they couldn't control their eating.

So do you think it should not be allowed? I am surprised it's allowed. So does that mean that you would disallow it if it was up to you? It doesn't mean that. The UK minister in charge of weight or whatever. Charge of food wages. Yeah, the UK minister in charge of food betting. There's another person quoted in the story that says,

I think with any process where you're being weighed, there's a danger that people might take it to extremes or not follow a healthy eating plan. But that applies whether a bet or a slimming club or whether you shop in person. There were bets on offer where you could put in a significantly larger amount of money for longer periods of time. I was a bit more wary of that.

I think that's where my concern is. I think if we're hovering up to a couple of hundred dollars, then maybe it's just manageable and it's a friendly bet and a bit of incentivization. But I think if people start betting $1, dollars and things like that yeah i mean yeah obviously i sort of mentally assume that this is like people aren't dropping 10 grand on betting that they're going to lose 200 pounds you're totally comfortable with it by the sounds of it you think it's like you know within reason i'm comfortable with it because i feel like uh as long-time listeners now one I don't have any problem with gambling, really. Like, I think it's fine. And then two, if I don't have a problem with gambling, I don't see the problem with gambling on yourself. I'm trying to wonder like, how far could I push it?

Like, is it okay if not only just you can bet on your weight, but other people can bet on your weight? Like if people could bet against you and they're like, I don't think he's going to lose those hundred pounds. Like I'm going to take the opposite side of that bet. Then that starts to feel a little bit mean. And I'm like, hey, great. Do you want to go to Five Guys today? Right, right.

Yeah, exactly. Like, no, no, Brady, I'm trying to get under 195. And they're like, well, you know. I've got 20 bucks that says you won't. Like, no, no, Brady, I'm trying to get under 195. And they're like, well, you know, you know. I've got 20 bucks that says you won't. I think that would be more effective is if I knew that you had 20 bucks riding against me to hit a weight loss. I am not a competitive person, but I think that would actually be quite motivating. Like, I don't want Brady to win that 20 bucks. Right.

Like, I would be really annoyed if you won that 20 bucks. Yeah. But so, like, now I'm talking myself into, no, there should be a market where you can bet on anyone and their weight loss. Even people who don't know about the bet and aren't trying to lose weight. Like I'm just betting that Gray's going to be a certain weight by a certain date. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. And I'm just minding my own business. And then one day the doorbell rings and someone comes in and they're like, hi we need you to step on the scale yeah if you weigh us over this your mate brady wins a thousand bucks that makes me think of um it's the thing that always sort of sounds worse than it actually is but it's where companies can take out life insurance policies on their own employees like that's the same kind of thing of you're gambling on someone else who's a third party in this

situation who's just minding their own business and doesn't know that you're betting on them. That's what this starts to sound like. But then again, if I keep talking, it's like, well, how is that different from people betting on sports or anything else, right? Betting on elections. There you're betting on a third party who's not involved in this thing. So I don't know i feel like i can really talk myself in in circles around this one do you ever place bets on things

i'm just i'm just trying to think in terms of actual money no and i think the closest you could stretch it is the like the lottery tickets that i used to buy forever ago. That's about as close as it gets. Like I said last time, I do think that betting is a useful mental framework. It's a useful way to focus the mind. And so in conversations, I'm aware of sometimes saying like, ooh, do I think this,

what do I think are the odds on this? But in terms of placing an actual bet, no. The closest I came was I was trying to investigate the legality of a US citizen placing a bet on an American election, shall we say an election cycle ago. But I was like, it's a little too sketchy and I'm not going to do it. But that's as close as I came to being like, I'm pretty sure I can win some money here would you have won that bet i would have won that bet yeah when i was like i'm willing to take some pretty far like it was a perfect storm of like there's far odds uh like let me let me look into this but it's like oh it's still kind of illegal though

even if i'm not in america like okay well i'm just i don't want to cross that line for the amount of money so forget it yeah i remember. I remember that. I remember you predicting that. Actually, I just realized, do you sports bet? No, I don't gamble on anything. No. If we're in a casino with a group of friends, I'll like, you know, in Vegas or something, I'll have a flutter, but I won't ever like go out of my way to gamble. What's a flutter? It's having a bet, like, but it's like in a casual way. You could be a hardcore gambler or you could be someone who just occasionally has a flutter on the horses. Oh, okay. So you're like, oh, I like the name of this horse. I'm going to put down 10 bucks.

Yeah. 10 Australian kangaroos on that horse or whatever. Okay. This episode is brought to you by Audible and I almost feel silly telling you what you already know. It's the go-to destination for all your audiobook needs. They've got this huge collection of titles covering pretty much anything you can think of, from air crashes, they've got lots of those, to cricket autobiographies, they've got lots of those too. Plus, they've got their special collection of Audible Originals, that stuff you won't get anywhere else. And it's not just audiobooks, they've also got podcasts, they've got comedy, theatrical stuff, they've got a great app which is free to put on your phone or your tablet or whatever.

That means you can listen across all your devices and you won't lose your spot. Anyway, here's the part where we get to recommend an audiobook and today I'm going to steer you to a book that was named by the Royal Institution of Great Britain as the greatest science book ever written. It's called The Periodic Table, and it's by the very famous Primo Levi. And while each chapter is named after an element, and the book does cover some of Levi's life as a chemist, this is much more than a science book. Starting with Argon as the first chapter, and the last chapter I think is Carbon, it's a moving and clever autobiography, and it's one you won't regret listening to. Don't think you're going to go into this getting like an explanation of what all the elements are. The periodic table is more of a device to tell a

really gripping tale of this man's life. You can get the audiobook or any other one you choose by signing on to Audible's free 30-day trial membership. Go to audible.com slash hellointernet. You can also text hellointernet, all as one word, to 500500. That's a free audiobook, plus you get two of those Audible originals I mentioned earlier. And after the trial, if you keep going, you get another audiobook and two more Audible Originals each month.

Check it out, people. Audible.com slash Hello Internet, or send that text, Hello Internet, to 500-500. That's going to work in the US. You clearly already like podcasts. Why not up your listening game and give Audible a try? So I do have one thing that I've kept meaning to mention to you since we're talking about betting and sports and stuff.

I've found the thing that I think for me is the closest to understanding the interest in watching sports. So are you familiar with speed running? Oh, is this in video games? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. How quickly you can complete a video game.

Yeah. Speed running video games is a thing that a friend of mine has been trying for like a year to get me into because he's like, dude, you're going to love this. I'm like, I don't get it. I don't really follow it but slowly but surely i've taken a look at like little bits of speed running here and there and i don't want to say i'm really into it like i'm not an obsessive fan of speed running but boy are my youtube recommendations filling up with speed runs and watching people do speed runs

and explanations of speed runs what game in particular do you like watching speed runs of so this is the thing i'm still in the the noob phase but if if you as the listener are unfamiliar with this like but you know what a video game is and you've played a video game or you've seen video games played there is a whole community of incredibly obsessive people who are trying to figure out how can you get from the start of the game to the end of the game as fast as humanly possible and there's a website speedrun.com which is like the unofficial or i think it's the official place where all the records are basically tracked. I'm going there now. So I was going to say what you should do, Brady, and anybody who's listening,

go and like pull up a game that you're familiar with. That's what I'm doing. There's one that I used to try and speed run. So are you going to, what is it? Is it Tomb Raider? Pitfall 2. Oh, Pitfall 2. Okay.

Yeah. Go look for Pitfall 2. Oh, Pitfall 2. Okay, yeah, go look for Pitfall 2. So when you see someone speed run a game, it's hard to describe, but once you understand what's happening, I think it's one of the most impressive things I have ever seen a human do, where you watch someone blast through all of Mario World in 13 minutes.

Yeah. It's like, it's just insane. Like it's totally insane. But the thing that makes me think about sports and why I was thinking about you is like we've talked about with sports many times, it's really hard to talk about them to outsiders because the thing that makes the sport interesting is all of these details that are internal to the sport itself. And so it's often very difficult to describe why is this event that has just happened in Sporting Game X interesting? Yeah, because three years ago this happened between these two people and yeah yeah yeah and it's like it comes with so much context that's like well you need to have watched

the last 10 years of this sports to get it and the speed run thing is for me one of the things was like ah i can truly truly see this and so for some games that i've i used to play and back in the day like doom is one of my examples where i was watching a couple of youtube videos about the history of speed running in doom for example yeah and like and they walk you through oh in 1999 people were just trying to play it fast and then when you get to modern day, the tricks and the things that people are doing are so incredibly dependent on the entire history of how we got here that it's like, I can't even explain to you why this is interesting or how they're doing it so quickly. And I do literally mean that it's some of the most impressive stuff I've seen,

because when I've seen the explanation of how is this person pulling off this trick, very often the reaction times come down to one frame and there's 60 frames a second. So it's like, oh, this guy had to hit a button on the exact 60th of a frame three times in a row in this fight in order to pull off this maneuver. And it's like, how is that even humanly possible? Like, it's crazy how good people are at these speedruns sometimes. How do you feel about it when sometimes they're like cheats or they take advantage of like a flaw in the design of the game? Do you mean glitchy or glitchless runs brady that kind of thing like all the records are broken down into like for any game that you go look on they'll have the records like with or without glitches and then just like sports this brings up the whole meta argument about but what is a glitch what counts as a glitch and what

doesn't count as a glitch and so i also kind of love it because it's a world in which precisely because of these distinction of like, oh, are you using the glitchy version or the not glitchy version? Is it the new engine or the old engine? Are you running it on NTS? Are you running it on PAL? There's sort of so much room for everyone to be king of one mountain. And is there also presumably ones where versions where you just finished the game and where you finished it and got all the coins and

things like yes yeah yeah or it's like just this level or the whole thing from start to finish it's like anybody who wants to be obsessive can pick some little corner that isn't getting a lot of attention and become the king of that corner and then build up their speed running skills from there. So it's the first thing that feels really sporty to me and is like, ah, okay. I have a much more intrinsic understanding of this. And I've been watching every commentary I can find on YouTube that explains the history of a speed running for games that I'm familiar with. It's unexplainable how impressive some of these things are. So I keep meaning to mention this to you.

Besides being the best speed runner at a game, how else can you be king of a game? Just the highest score, I guess, as well. I haven't seen anything about the highest score. My suspicion about why this doesn't seem like it's tracked very well is that would have a ceiling, like there's a sort of known ceiling potentially of how high that could be. And unlike speed running, it feels like there's less room for interesting new strategies to be found with regards to the score. Whereas some of the videos I've watched, I felt like, boy, am I glad I have a background in physics here. Because it's like, even the technical explanation of like, what is

the game engine doing? And how is the person manipulating their momentum? It's like, man, you better be paying attention to understand how they are even pulling off this trick. So, did you find anything for Pitfall 2 for speed running? No, I didn't, unfortunately. But funnily enough, when I was young, I was really into Pitfall 2 and it took me forever to finish it. But a year or two ago, I found it again, like, you know, on some JavaScript player or something online where you could just go and play it. And I found it really easy to finish straight away. And then I played it once or twice to see how quickly I could do it. I did my own little speed runs on it. So I found it on YouTube, Pitfall 2 speed run atari 2600 five minutes and two

seconds wow tom's slow bro bachelor wow i'm gonna have a watch of that later i would i'd be curious about with pitfall 2 which i'm just now silently watching because i want to see is i'm willing to bet that game was simple enough that they probably don't have a lot of real tricks. See that first screen, like see the very start of that video. Right. See, there's the man standing on the Red Cross. Yep. And below him, you see that nervous cat that's like shaking.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's the end of the game. That's where you have to get. Oh, okay. Right. So you're running across the top of the screen and the end of the game is the bottom half, right?

You go down into these caverns, you go down screen upon screen upon screen. Right. Yeah. That must have been mind blowing as a kid when you first play the game. Like, oh my God, I ended up back where I started. You knew that's where you had to get. The moment I actually got there to where I could touch that cat, I was shaking. it was incredible the feeling like it was like i was trembling with excitement that's also one of one of the other sports like things with speed running is there's a whole like interesting subcategory of how do you know that someone hasn't cheated that they haven't done tool assisted software or like all this other stuff and one of the mechanisms is many of the speed

runs are done live like on twitch in front of hundreds of thousands of people watching and i greatly enjoy there's only two levels of reaction that somebody has when they get the new world record for a game or for a level yeah the most common reaction is the headphone warning, like explosion of excitement. And you can see, like you're saying with approaching that cat, you can see that when someone knows they're coming to the end and they're getting close, it's like they go quiet. And like the intense is like, this is all, it's all coming down to the last couple seconds here. Right. And you can feel it like the chat room goes quiet. Everybody's holding their breath.

Are we going to see it? And then boom, right? You touch the cat, you got the record time, like huge explosion of excitement. There's that. Or I think because of the obsessive nature of some of the people who are doing it, I always really enjoy the total non-reaction reaction.

So someone would be like- Like a mic drop. Yeah, like, great. 459, Pitfall 2, new world record, right? And that's it, right? And then they like restart the game and they go right back to trying to do the next one. Like, let's go for 458.

It all reminds me of that Fistful of Quarters movie, which is one of my favorite movies to watch. And the whole, you know, the doctored videotape of the details because there's just too much backstory. And while it's still an individual thing that people are doing, it feels very sports-like. And I'm like, oh, okay, I can see how I could get into this and then be the person who's like, let me explain to you why that trick at Super Mario was so impressive. Maybe you should try to speed run Pitfall 2 as an adult. Maybe this is something you could be competitive about. I think I might. Yeah.

I might do that the same the day after I make my Lego Millennium Falcon. No, but okay. But no, I think you should do it. You boot up your old Java copy of Pitfall 2 and let me know what your time is and we'll put it up on the board. I have to learn how to do it again, though. I have to learn where the different little places are where you need to jump. And there's a couple of little things I had to to learn do you know how i finally mastered the game i don't

want to get too meta here but it was i thought i was quite clever at the time but in pitfall 2 you have these like they're like save points right but they're these little red crosses that you touch and then if you die you go back to that red cross. Right. Fair enough. Fair enough. You know, that's a pretty standard thing to have in games. But the way it works in Pitfall 2 is when you die, you kind of fly back to the cross. You see the character, like he starts flashing and he just flies through the game back to the cross. And this game was really complicated, right? It has lots and lots of levels and it goes, like it's got a huge map. But this was

before there was the internet and i couldn't look up the map so i didn't have the map of the game and i didn't know where everything was so what i did was i went through the game to the far corner of the map and deliberately didn't touch any of the red crosses any of the save points and then sacrificed myself and let myself die and that flew me back through the whole game, like at a different angle back to the start of the game. And I got to see the whole map and parts of the game I didn't know existed. And that's how I got this mental picture of where everything was in the game and how to crack it. Right.

So you were hacking the backwards track mechanism to get a peek at the whole map so you could know what to expect. Very clever. Very clever, Brady. Google Pitfall 2 map and just open any one of them. Right. Big maps. So you start in that top left corner.

Right. But you never see all that stuff on the left-hand side. Those left two columns, I'd never seen. Right. So I got to the bottom right hand corner of that map and then killed myself with an electric eel right and then i diagonally flew from that bottom right corner up to the top left corner and i saw all that other stuff for the first time i was like oh my god i also find this really charming to look at because you know it's the kind of levels that

you could sketch most of it out on a napkin. Oh, it's so simple. Compared to modern day, like, oh, our map is a third the size of the United States. It's completely open run. Yeah, yeah. This truck simulator is building all of America at one fifth scale. And you're like, Jesus Christ. When Pitfall 2 came out, I thought they would never make a greater game than that i thought humans had peaked we're never getting any better than this yeah

have you been tempted to get into any speed running yourself don't know don't put this ring in front of me because yes yes i totally have i looked it up because i was like okay what's the most ridiculous thing that could possibly exist? I was like, there's no way that there exists speed runs of American Truck Simulator 2. And it was like, nope, there sure are, right? There are like people who get the fastest route between two cities in American Truck Simulator. I was like, oh, God, this is ridiculous. Are you allowed to speed in American Truck Simulator or do police pull you over and stuff? You get fined, but you can speed things up okay but so the thing the thing that i have been tempted by

is i'm pretty sure the best i have ever been at a video game was house of the dead which was this old what we call like an on rails shooter so you're not even walking through the map like it's like you're at a disneyland you know and you're sitting in a cart so the motion is controlled for you yeah and you're just shooting at targets around you and i got super obsessed with being able to like perfectly make it through this game when i was in college and i remember feeling like i am a god at this game like no one on earth can be better than this at me right which is very easy to think when your comparison is the 50 people who are in the like the labs with you right and but that is the only thing that it crossed my mind to be like oh i wonder

maybe i you know i should start live twitch streaming my house of the dead speedrun attempts and i have to immediately shut that part of my brain down like dude this is not a good use of your time of like of all of the things that you could possibly do getting really good at a 1996 video game for speedrun cred is like not the way that you should go but i can say that i have found myself tempted of like maybe i should look into it were you known to be really good at it like in those labs if you walk down the corridor where people go see that guy there he's awesome look i don't want to big myself up but people did literally used to stand around and watch it because my skills were so unbelievable that people would sit down and watch me go

through. So it was quite impressive. Have you ever seen the video I made with James Clewett, who used to be the world champion at Tetris? Oh yeah. I love that one. Yeah. That's really good. Yeah. He's like that. People will gather around him and there's even a line he says in the video. It's right at the start of the video, think he says like everyone thinks they're good at tetris right and then when they see someone who's really good at tetris yeah everything changes the thing though that struck me in that documentary because i remember when i watched that video like that interview of him he says something that struck me as the same experience I had with house of

the dead of the satisfaction of being really, really good at a thing is it becomes kind of weirdly relaxing of like, Oh, you can just do this. Like your brain knows the pattern. You just like, you just go through it. And there's like,

there's some really well worn neural network that's like, this is my job. I have got one job and I'm super specialized at it. And I got to that point with House of the Dead of feeling like, this is actually kind of relaxing. He says something like that in the Tetris video. And it's like, yes, there's an appeal to this of being really good at a thing that's also straightforward. But yeah, so I have literally not even allowed myself to look at seeing if there even are any speed runs of House of the Dead. I've said like, nope, this one is off my list. Don't look at it. Don't get into it. Don't get started down this path. Just watch Doom speed runs or something. Well, tweet Gray if you want to see him do those

speed runs. Yeah, you go right ahead. Tweet me about it if you want to get instantly muted. This episode is brought to you in part by Dashlane. Log in instantly, save every password, fly through forms, and breeze through checkouts on every device you own. Dashlane fills out those forms with fast one-click logins and auto-fills for personal info and payment details, works everywhere across every device on Mac, Windows, iPhone, or Android, and responds easily to breaches and hacks with personalized security alerts. Dashlane is different than other options

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and keeping them secure. And thanks to Dashlane for supporting the show. So, Gray, as we're recording now, it is the 9th of February, 2020. Right. How would you write that date? Okay. So I'm in a bit of an odd situation here because any situation where I'm writing the date,

where it may be important to be referenced in the future. I tend to write that now like Feb 9th, 20. And the reason that I've gotten into this habit is because I have too many documents that I need to sign that are in the UK and also in the US. And I've just standardized my brain on write out the letters of the month so that you never mess this up on a document where it matters. And you write the Feb first? You don't write 9 Feb 20? I'll usually write the Feb first. It depends a little bit on like the space for the, you know, how much space do I have to write? But yeah, I will write out the letters of the month. But you would just write 20? You won't write 20 20? Yeah. Again, I'm assuming like there's not a lot of space. So I would do apostrophe 20.

Okay. What's going on here? Well, there's lots of things going on here. Okay. And I got myself into a bit of a Twitter. Well, I brought it on myself. I got myself into a bit of a Twitter avalanche when I asked about it. Okay. The other day, it was this palindromic date when it was 02-02-2020. People thought that was interesting because it was a palindrome, no matter whether you put the month first or the day first,

it worked as a palindrome both ways, 02-02-2020. And we can get into a whole debate about whether the month should be first or the day should be first. And I understand the arguments and the year or the year should be first and all that. And computer people get very caught up about this. Yeah. Computers. That's why I was asking like, what's the situation? Because if you're talking computers, it's totally different. Computers are different. I'm not talking about computers. But the thing that I thought was interesting was to make this even work, you had to write zero to zero to. zero to. Oh, yeah. You need the leading zero. Yeah.

Yeah. And I made the argument that no one, when writing a date, computers aside, would write the zero first. I would use a leading zero in the day or the month if it was a lone digit. Yeah. I'm going to agree with that. Nobody does that. Exactly. Don't say that on Twitter. And don't get me wrong, I realize how self-selecting it was, but I reckon of the many, many replies I had, all of them were from people who write the zero first. But that's because, I realize this, this is because it's so normal to not do it, that people who don't do it wouldn't even bother replying.

Right. do it, that people who don't do it wouldn't even bother replying. But everyone who does do it replied, which created this illusion in my head that suddenly there are a whole bunch of people out there writing leading zeros when they handwrite the date. Look, I'm not asking for Twitter trouble here. I'd want to see some predated documentation of this effect. Don't just tell me on Twitter, oh, I write the leading zero. I want to see a document you signed from five years ago where the leading zero... Listen, internet, I don't really want to see it. Don't send it to me on Twitter. No, he doesn't actually want to see it, people. This is just the theoretical discussion of like...

It's a rhetorical question. Right. It's a rhetorical demanding of the evidence. I'm not actually interested in the evidence. I believe there are people who write leading zeros when they handwrite the date, right? But those people are the exact people who would reply to my tweet about it. And they're the only people who would reply to my tweet about it. I'm also going to bet that people who write a leading zero on a piece of paper in front of the number for a date are wildly overrepresented among the Twitter followers of the guy who runs Numberphile, right? Like overrepresented compared to the general population, like a million to one, right? Like you may have literally heard from every human on earth who writes a leading zero before the date so selection effects explain a lot of

crazy things in social science and this i think this is really maybe one of those cases i feel better now because if there was anyone who i knew who i thought might do some leading zeros it would be you so if even you don't do it no i think that's nuts right that that's bizarre and again computer stuff is different but on paper leading zeros forget it so space force has a logo uh this is the new branch of the u.s military so i saw you put this in the show notes here space force has a logo this is where i just don't follow things well enough but i had to remind myself like wait is space force real like is this is this like a real thing that's really happening yeah it's real have a look at that second one the second link's better than the first link uh

it's not terrible yeah it's fine i mean everyone just wanted to know what we thought of i mean it's just it's a good logo a lot of people pointed out it looks just like the starfleet command logo from star trek yeah it does it does i mean the starfleet command one is better it's a bit old-fashioned the space force one isn't it that the way they've done the earth like with their old latitude and longitude lines on it is quite old-fashioned isn't it bit pan-am it's totally pan-am you're right um i don't love the three-dimensionality of the arrow there's something about it that's very like location arrow on your GPS map. Yeah.

Whereas the reason why I like the Starfleet Command one is it's great because the little swoosh, I feel like it's invocative of NASA without being NASA. And I love that the star on the Space Fleet Command logo is very much like a rocket ship, right? It's sort of halfway between a star and a rocket ship. I don't love the little, I don't know a nice way to say it. The thing I like the least is the little sperm orbiting the Earth. I think that's perhaps the least good part of the logo. But it's not terrible.

I think also I would need to see this in context with like what does the army logos look like i don't imagine any of them are really amazing yeah but yeah i don't know it's okay do we have a space force like are there space troops with this patch on their space arms now like i don't have any i don't have any idea there are but the uniforms they've got are repurposed army uniforms so they wear this green and brown camouflage with that space thing on the shoulder, which caused no end of amusement on the internet a little while ago. Yeah, green and brown. The best colour is for hiding in space.

Yeah. So I think there are 16,000 people in the Space Force because they've seconded people from what there was already, which I think was like the army's space command air force space command sorry so some people from that have been moved over into space force and then they're recruiting more people and so what was the number of people who were involved in the australian space agency wasn't it like 24 people or were involved in australian it was three people part-time, wasn't it?

I want to know when they finally get their own uniform, because the word is they're going to get their own uniforms. They're not going to stick with the green and brown, obviously. Is it going to be all black? How awesome would that be? Just having an all black uniform. Not very practical, but... I'm trying to think about the practicalities of a space force uniform and the most terrifying thing about space is drifting off endlessly into it and dying

right that's the like oh you let go of the spaceship and you're just drifting off and i think if i was in the space force and you know you're doing a an outside mission your tether came loose and you lost grip of the ship and you're just starting to drift away. I feel like I want some reflective tape on my suit. I don't want this to be a perfectly black, invisible against the background of space kind of suit. Until the Chinese Space Force ship comes past.

And then you're like, then you'll be wishing you were wearing all black. Okay. So what we need is a suit that can switch between all black and all white at a moment's notice you just have lights although they'll just look like stars won't they in the background yeah and the problem with lights is i'd be worried about the batteries yeah i got so many things to charge in my life brady if i'm part of space force i don't want to also have to remember to charge up my life saving lights before i go out on recon or whatever yeah maybe it's like navy really dark navy and white are going to be the Space Force colors. Yeah, that's what it's going to be.

It's definitely going to be dark navy. But do you think it's okay? I think it's fine. I mean, I know even I forget that this is like a real thing, but I don't, you know, look, we're going to need a Space Force. Like you could bet your bottom dollar China is not going to just either say oh space it's it's for the benefit of all mankind right like i don't i don't think that's the way they're going to look at it new emojis have you seen them is it that time of year is it new emoji time we've got new

emojis before i even look at this here's my problem with new emoji season yeah i know i'm not a normal person here but the thing that i want out of emoji is i want more objects like i want more things things are useful as representations of very many ideas but the emoji board seems really obsessed with people and it's like so many people, like people doing everything that people can possibly do. And I find those emojis really boring. The thing that really irritates me about it is like on my phone,

you know how they have those little categories at the bottom where it's like, oh, smileys and people and food or whatever. The people are so soon that you have to scroll past this increasingly long list of like people engaged in every conceivable human activity that there is. Woman in tuxedo, man with mustache in wedding veil, gender neutral Santa Claus character. Well, Grey, I have to say I agree with you.

The one thing I always want more of are animals and types of food. Yes, animals, animals, more animals. And yeah, and objects, like everyday objects. They always seem to be missing the ones I want. And I think some of these new ones are going to satisfy you. If you go to the link I just messaged you and then scroll down to the list. Right. I'm happy with some of the new animals. There aren't enough, but there are some good new ones. There's some good new useful food, blueberries at last. I'll tell you the ones I'm most pleased with to get the ball rolling. I'm not commenting on the design. I don't think

the design itself is finalized, but ones that I'm glad exist. I'm very interested and glad to see the headstone. The boomerang I'm happy about just because it gives me another chance to express my Australian-ness. And I'm also interested to see they have the dodo. I think that I'm glad to see the dodo there, partly because I think having extinct animals and a mammoth, because I think having extinct animals is opening the way for the Jamaican rice rat and reunion swamp hen. Oh, okay, right. Ladder's a good inclusion. Screwdriver, nice. It's not too bad with an overabundance of people.

I'm not sure how often I would need Russian nesting dolls. Here's the reason why I want objects. I'm not ever texting with you and I'm like, oh, this is the perfect time for a Russian nesting doll emoji, right? That never really comes up. But I do find with my to-do lists and with some computer stuff, occasionally emoji are useful to like represent a category or a concept of a thing. So I do find myself using the objects in practical situations

on the computer sometimes. I don't like to write out words if I don't have to. I find words distracting because they talk dumbly to you when you're just looking at stuff. Can you give me a practical example of that? Like a checklist and the heading would be like a Russian nesting doll. So I'll open up OmniFocus here. So in OmniFocus, which is where I keep most of my running to-do lists, the to-do items themselves are actually written out, right? Because you have to say like, oh, I need to do this or i need to do that yeah but i do i do much prefer to have emoji for the folder names

because like the way omni focus happens to display information it always wants to show you the folder name and like i don't want to read that every time i'd rather just have a little symbol for what it is so what are some of them what are some of the symbols you've used for different things? So like just some very obvious ones, but it's like, okay, for all of my various checklists, there's a little clipboard, right? That's what I use for podcast stuff. There's a folder that has a little podcast microphone. There's a folder that's just a star, which is like the top level stuff to jump above everything else. I have a little cardboard box for miscellaneous stuff. There's a picture of a book for the books that I'm reading. I've got a little factory for a bunch of work stuff.

I find that visually much easier to parse, to just like look through this. I don't use it a ton, but that's a situation where I use it. And sometimes with my scripts, it's a similar thing of like, it's useful to stand in for concept. So the Russian nesting doll, that implies like a concept of recursion or self-similarity. Like it can represent a bunch of different things. Okay. Oh, wow. Thank God they've got it coming up then.

You're in business. But this is also why I was like, people, I never want to think about or see people so i don't need these people emojis but um i'm really glad to see uh the bison has made the list one of my favorite animals although i would still for it to be called buffalo like we do in america but bison's on the list so that's good paula bear i'm happy although i'm not into people ones i am happy for them to include the ninja job stuff for the people isn't bad like every once in a while those are useful i just think it's like oh person doing yoga person making a salad person making a sandwich uh like there's just too many of like people doing everything you can possibly conceive i do use the yoga one a lot to be fair oh yeah because my wife does yoga a lot so i always always like, I'll say,

oh, how was yoga and stuff like that. And I'll just send a little yoga lady. Ah, okay. So you're actually sending it. You don't, you don't mean that you're on the receiving end of the yoga. No, no. Yeah. So there's, there's more objects than I, than I expected. So this isn't too bad. I do find like you, I'm often really surprised at missing ones, but I also do wonder like emoji committee, how long can this go on for? Like in a thousand years, are we still going to be adding more little emojis? Like when does this stop?