Hello Internet - H.I. #51: Appropriately Thinking It

Episode Date: November 16, 2015

Brady and Grey discuss: 'Sir'ing, arbitrariness, team Uber, the inevitable auto revolution, YouTube Red, setting the flag referendum date, Fiji also referendums, a potential spin-off podcast is born, recognizing great acts in service of the podcast, not bi-weekly weigh in, Grey's Dialing Down article, and subvocalization. Brought To You By: Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month Harry's: Quality Men's Shaving Products. Promocode HI for $5 off your first purchase Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code 'QueenOfSpades' for 10% off Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes: Discuss this episode Rice Rat with Cheese Computer Uber Adelaide autos Greek autos YouTube Red Hello Internet YouTube channel Hello Internet flag referendum A legal ballot for @t_animal, a spoiled ballot for you Brady: Mile of Pi Fiji flag referendum Mean Girls Love, Actually The Devil Wears Prada Hello Internet Halloween costume Hello Internet in the White House The Cheese Board 800 Degrees Hello Internet exercise shirts are exercise shirts r/FITOTRON5000 #FOT5k Dialing Down Subvocalization

I'm going to minimise you here because I'm getting distracted by your pretty face. Don't minimise me, Grey. You mustn't minimise me. I want you to take me seriously. You think that joke is funny every time. God, we are like a married couple now. I've heard that joke before. You always say that.

It's not funny. The one that drives my wife crazy is whenever the waiter comes and asks if you want to test the wine and he gives you just a tiny sip and you have like a little swig and then you say, yes, that's fine, thank you. I always like pull a face and pretend it's disgusting. Like I go, oh, God. Yeah. And like, yeah, she's like, yeah, that wasn't funny last time.

It won't be next time. And it wasn't this time either. You do that every time? Most of the time. It's something fun. Oh, is it? Is it fun every time You do that every time? Most of the time. It's something fun. Oh, is it? Is it fun every time for the waiter? It's fun for the waiter.

It's not fun for my wife. It's fun for the waiter every time because the waiter hasn't seen it a million times before. Do you think the waiter hasn't seen it a million times before? I think the waiter has seen it a million times before. Yeah, they probably have actually. The waiter is being paid to be nice to you. It's part of their job. You shouldn't judge your humorous skills against someone who is paid to be nice to you.

Or I should just pay more people to be nice to me. If you're in a restaurant, you're dealing with a waiter, or you're interacting with a service person in general, like a hotel concierge or an Uber driver or any of these people in the world who are providing a service to some extent. Would you use the word sir with them? I actually am more likely to call them sir than anyone else. And I do that all the time. it's almost like an overcompensation because of not an awkwardness, but just a kind of a thing in the back of my head that they're kind of serving me. And now I feel a bit uncomfortable with that power dynamic. I feel like maybe I overcompensate because I will always call

someone who is serving me or doing something for me, which sort of puts me in the more powerful position. I always call them, sir. Thank you very much, sir. Have a good day, sir. I always do that. I will do it particularly with Uber drivers. Almost every single time, I normally don't speak to the Uber drivers, but then at the end, you just want to acknowledge the person. And so I would always say something like, thank you, sir. Right. As I'm getting out. Yeah. To me, it feels like it's a nice thing. It's a bit of a sign of respect.

You're acknowledging that this other person is a person too, and it's slightly more than a thank you. But I'm never quite sure in a place like England if this is as standard. Like, I don't really know if that is the case. But you do it too, so that makes me that is the case, but you do it too. So, that makes me feel a little bit better. I do it too. I think you're overthinking it, Grey. I think it's all right. I wouldn't worry about it. I don't think I overthink things. I don't think I overthink things.

Grey, if there is one thing you do, it is overthink things. That is like your defining quality. No, it is not my defining quality. It so is. Okay. But I haven't overthunk things, but there not my defining quality. It so is. I haven't overthunk things, but there are two problems with the sir, though. One of which is, I find the double sir suddenly gets really awkward. So if

I will say to the Uber driver or the waiter, thank you, sir. And then they say back to me, thank you, sir. Suddenly the sir feels ridiculous to me, thank you, sir. Suddenly the sir feels ridiculous to me. It doesn't work both ways. Like if the Uber driver beats me to it, like if it says like, oh, have a nice day, sir, then I always feel like I have to just say, oh, thank you, you too. Like I can't say the sir if the other person has beaten me to it. There's something about it where it's like, it's too many sirs in too close of a time span is just no good. It doesn't work. I agree with that.

Yeah. Okay. So, I haven't overthought it. This is the correct way to think. No, no, you have definitely overthought it. No, it's not overthought it. You are just proving my point that you're just digging a deeper and deeper hole of over thoughtfulness here. No, it's okay but okay i had never thought about that before let me let me be clear gray just because i'm just because i'm agreeing with you now that you've put it out there doesn't mean i had thought about it before

you've never thought about this before not not the not the double sir first in best dressed suits you sir problem no you have never thought near the end of an interaction in which you might use the word, sir, I need to be the first person to get to the word, sir. This hasn't crossed your mind? No, it's completely just instinct with me. It's just natural. There are things that I think about beforehand at the end of a taxi ride or a interaction with someone.

But one of those things is not, I must make sure I get the first sir in. It seems very natural to me. Okay, but so the only other problem, and this is the one that comes up much more frequently, is that there's no appropriate female version for sir. There is no word for this in the English language. And now, if you are in Alabama, you can say, ma'am. This is acceptable, just broadly, like across the South, as the sir equivalent for women. But, you know, it's like, in the South, I would totally say thank you, ma'am, to a woman in a service position.

But I do not think that the word ma'am in my very limited experimentation goes down well almost anywhere else. I never get the feeling like this is a word that, say, a waitress in her 30s really wants to have applied to her under normal circumstances. Like, do you ever say ma'am? Do you say sir? Do you say ma'am? Thank you, ma'am, in a restaurant? Would you say that? I think I possibly would, but I'm less likely to.

I think you've assessed a situation correctly. I just see what comes out at the time. That's not always the best policy in life, I realise, and sometimes it gets me into a pickle, but I usually don't think too much about what i'm gonna say i just i just follow my heart yeah see the only way i would use ma'am outside of the south is if i could lay a thousand dollars on the table to say that the service woman i was interacting with is over 60. If she's over 60, then I might use ma'am. But if it's less than that, I feel like, no, if I can't be absolutely sure about this,

I'm not going to make this bet. But we have the problem in the opposite way that the only other vaguely equivalent word is the word miss. But I feel like miss does not carry the same weight as sir. And it also has its own weird problems. I don't know, Gray. I don't feel quite the same way carry the same weight as Sir. And it also has its own weird problems. I don't know, Grey.

I don't feel quite the same way you do about Ma'am. And I think when you call someone Sir or Ma'am, there's a kind of jokiness that's already going on. It's kind of already like a pretend formalness. There's a bit of a wink-wink because neither of us here are particularly noble or important. So, we're just using these formalities for fun. And I think that applies when you would use them, ma'am. So I don't think a 30-year-old woman's going to think, oh, my goodness, he's suggesting I'm much older than I am or he's doing it wrong.

I think there's already like a little game going on where we're joking around. Thank you, sir. Thank you, ma'am. Have a good day. I think there's already such an over-the-top friendliness going on that it's understood the whole thing's bit of a gag. Brady, this just goes to the fundamental jovial nature of your whole life. I can imagine you

going from place to place and just everything's happy, everything's a joke. Brady's just so happy and the sun is shining. Aren't we all just having a great time? And these are how your social interactions just naturally go. So you can do the little, thanks, ma'am. And you give a charming wink and you scamper off and everybody's had a great day. Well, I wish that was true. In fact, I'm a bit of a grumpy old man who just sits around whinging, having paper cuts. But I guess when it comes to that sort of thing, I am a bit more jokey. I do like when I actually do interact with people, I do like I do like things to be a bit fun and a bit of a joke. I'm not an overly serious person. I think you can get away with more than I can, which is why I might appropriately think about these things to the level that they deserve. So now do we have any follow up, Brady?

Do we have follow-up? We have no show if we don't have follow-up. I must first start with something I know you don't particularly like. And this is an arbitrary shout-out to a fan. Arbitrariness. I know, I know. And you think this is the thin end of the wedge. It is.

Yeah. But let me explain why we have to do this one. And you cannot edit this out. There's always some reason. There's always some reason, Brady. If I left you entirely to your own accord, the show would be starting with nothing but a long list of happy birthday wishes to everybody whose birthday it ever was. I have to rein you in on these things to some extent. Someone emailed me today asking me, I'm not going to do it. Right. You're not going to do it, but you're going to mention it now. Okay. Yeah. Open that

door a bit wider. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. I'm going to mention it, but I'm not going to use the names. So, it's not going to serve its purpose. But basically, I think this male has a bit of a crush on a female who he's figured out is also a Hello Internet listener. And he wanted me to ask her out on his behalf because he thought asking her out via the show would be a novel way to sort of get in with her. And can I just say to that person, that is not a good idea and you are lucky I'm not doing it for you. No, that is a terrible idea and also brady you have just raised the suspicions of all of these single listeners who are female of the hello internet

show like everyone everyone who falls into that category they're they're a little bit more on edge now thinking about the people in their life that's brilliant though because now i've now everyone feels like involved in this segment. Like, it no longer feels arbitrary and just one person. Everyone can share in the fear and terror of this moment. Right, right. Yeah, we've just made a large portion of the audience slightly uncomfortable. Everyone's included.

Well done, Brady. Anyway, the person I am going to give a shout out to is a young girl named Caden, who I met at a public event recently. And her and her brother, who I think was called Elliot, I'm guessing. I'm so sorry if I got that wrong. And Caden and Elliot's mother brought them along to this event because they wanted to meet me because I am one half of Hello Internet. Caden drew a picture on a canvas. She drew a picture of a Jamaican rice rat, which just between you and me looks a little bit like a cat.

So it looks like a Jamaican rice cat. But don't say that. I'm going to say Jamaican rice cat in the future. But Caden drew a lovely picture of a Jamaican rice rat in a field full of flowers with the sun shining. And it was using a computer. Made of cheese. Made of cheese, a cheese computer. As a rice rat would. Yeah, of course. Although I don't think you would. Like, we don't make computers out of things we want to eat because we would eat our computers. That's why we make them out of metal so that we don't eat them are you not supposed to eat computers i didn't know that well in fact if there's one person who i would not

be surprised to find out eats computers it would be you but anyway um so she gave me this picture it was really nice uh very very sweet and cute it's on a little canvas too but then she said to me can you please say on the show that i gave it to you and say my name on the on the show and like and and she's just said that to me and like her mum's there and she's there and she's looking at me with a cute face and she's just given me this wonderful gift which i really love so i just said of course i will obviously that's no that's boundary pushing brady it's boundary pushing i've taught enough kids to know about this so you're saying if cute little caden just gave you this wonderful picture and looked up at you with a cute face and said, can you please mention that I gave this to you on the show? You would have just said, nope, and walked away. I would have said, talk to Brady.

That's probably what happened. That's why I got it. This is exactly it, right? I don't need cute little kids harassing me with their gifts all the time, making very difficult, very awkward social situations where I have to say, no, ma'am, I'm sorry, I can't accept this gift to a five-year-old girl because I'm concerned about all of the adorable five-year-old girls in the future who will try to cute blackmail me with their various gifts to mention on the show you just you can't open up your life to that kind of stuff brady you can't open up your life to that

kind of arbitrariness well i do i did so thank you kate i tell you what though thank you kate this was not the first time this has happened that i got a real wake-up call as to how young our audience is there are a lot of very young people who listen to hello internet first of all we need to define a lot and we need to define very young. I need some parameters here. A lot is more than one. Okay. More than one. Got it. Great. Okay. And what's the other thing I've got to define? Young. How young are we talking here? How many young Hello Internet listeners have you run across?

Someone that you would not say a swear word in front of. Haven't we been through this before, though? I find it very hard not to swear in front of children. No, you don't. You say that, but you're a pretty decent guy. It's not. It's nothing about decency. It's nothing about decency.

Well, again, the trick is, if I'm ever around your children, don't tell me not to swear around your children. I will naturally be trying not to swear around your children. But if you go out of your way to tell me not to, then the evil part of my brain just wants to take over and just constantly curse. If you swore, Brady, if you swore, which you don't, how old would it take for a child to be before you would feel comfortable swearing around them? Because you said young enough that you wouldn't swear around them. So what's the ceiling on this? Well, it depends on the relationship, obviously.

Like, if they're a complete stranger, I'd want them to be 18, maybe. Is that like the age of majority here? Well, it depends. But if it's a younger person, but it was like, you know, my nephew or something something who would think, oh, it's so cool that Uncle Brady just did something a bit naughty. Cool Uncle Brady. Yeah, I do like being cool Uncle Brady. Let's just say we have a lot of very young listeners. And the one thing I wanted from Caden and Elliot, and my goodness, I hope his name is Elliot.

The one thing I really wanted to find out from them when I was talking is why on earth do you listen to Hello Internet? And I couldn't indoctrinate the next wave of Hello Internet listeners. So, parents out there, if you're fans of the show, make sure to start them young. Speaking of indoctrination, I have joined Team Uber. Oh, really? Yeah. I was out the other night and I was walking home from a dinner and it started raining and I got rained on a lot. And there were no cabs in Berkeley most of the time. And I was just thinking, oh, I wish I could just get out of this problem. So, when I got home, I signed up to Uber and put the app on my phone straight away.

I've been using it ever since. I think I'm in like my fifth day, maybe fifth or sixth day of Uber use. Yeah. And you're liking it so far? Great. I love it. See, I told you last time. This is like one of the top five things that have changed in my life in the last 10 years. It's amazing. Not only is it like, not only is it voodoo witchcraft with the technology,

but it's so fun as well. It's almost gamified a bit because you can follow people's progress on maps and you don't have to ever think about money. The one thing I don't like about cab drive at the cabs is the whole money situation. That's just taken out of the equation. It does encourage a good relationship, so I always have really interesting conversations with my driver. And in fact, I was going to give it a 10 out of 10 super duper amazing rave about how much I loved it. Except my Uber trip up to the spiritual home of Numberphile today to record this podcast, I had my first Uber problem. Just as I was about to tell you how much I loved it, it went pear-shaped for the first time. What was your Uber problem?

Well, I got in and I put in like this. Because another thing I really love about it is you don't even have to tell them your destination. They know where you're going and just start driving there. Yeah, this is why I said you can use it like it's a self-driving car if you want to. Yeah. But what happened was somehow and spontaneously a few seconds into the trip, my destination changed on his screen. Really? And he turned to me.

Yeah, my phone was in my pocket. I don't think I was pressing it with my legs by mistake. Maybe I did. I don't know. But I don't know what happened. But a few seconds into the trip, he said, oh, did you just change your destination? And I looked at his phone,

and it was taking me somewhere completely differently, miles and miles away. And? And I looked at his phone, and it was taking me somewhere completely differently, miles and miles away. And then I looked down at my phone, and it spontaneously changed in front of me from one destination to another. And I'm like, I don't even know where that place is. I certainly don't want to go there. I don't know what happened.

I think there was a ghost in the machine. He could quite possibly have just started driving to this other place before I realised he was going the wrong way. you do trust technology too much things happen and and this literally happened before my eyes so that's weird you can definitely have i mean obviously any technology is always going to have occasional bugs i've never had anything like that happen but what i will say is that i have always 100 of the time had the drivers question me about any route changes. Like they always confirm, like, is this what you want to do?

If a driver wants to take an unusual route from location A to location B because of traffic, they will always check with me first and they'll say something like, oh, I'm going to go around this way instead of going on the main route because of the traffic. I get the impression that they have some customers who think that they are professional drivers and know the best way to go. And my feeling on that is

always like, dude, you do this all day. I'm just going to trust you about wherever is the best way to go at this time. So I've always had them check with me for that kind of stuff. But the one thing that I can see is a little bit dangerous about it as well is because you don't use money and you don't even see money, it become a bit like monopoly money like you almost feel like you're getting all these rides for free and i can imagine you could easily rack up some interesting bills just thinking oh just jump in an uber and i don't even need to get my wallet out i don't even need to get my card out it's all coming off on paypal and i can imagine it could come back to bite you it also makes and that same reason makes me realize why having like free Uber as part of your job package or as part of a perk for employees is quite a cool thing.

I can see why you'd think that was awesome. Saying, oh, I've got this salary and this and I also get free Uber. I can imagine you'd quite like that. Oh, yeah. That's a huge perk. So the question I want to ask you, Brady, is if you are aware of a thing with Uber, which is that, you know how when your ride ends, you rate the driver, you know, up to five stars?

Yeah. Are you aware that the drivers also rate you? I am aware of that. Yeah? How do you feel about that? I don't really mind because I've been asking my drivers lots of questions about Uber. Like every trip for me is like a chance to interrogate them about how things work and how they feel about it and stuff like that.

Yeah. There is a joke about Uber that you haven't Ubered until you talk to the Uber driver about Uber while you're Ubering, right? That this is everybody has to do this. And yeah, while mostly I don't talk to the drivers now, when I started out, every ride was like an interview about how do you like this? How does it work? And they always seem pretty happy to talk about it.

Like, I think everybody likes talking about their jobs. Yeah, they do. They do. And I've been making it clear, hey, I've only been on the platform for a few days. So I don't sound like an idiot. I almost apologize for it beforehand saying, sorry, I'm really new to Uber. So I'm really curious. Sorry about these questions.

And then I ask them all my questions. But it sounds like when they accept me, and certainly when I accept them, the star ratings don't come into it. It's only after they're on their way that I know what their star rating is. And I was saying to them, when you get the request, and this little clock comes up on their phone, and I've got like 10 seconds to decide if they're going to take me or not. He was telling me,

I don't even see a star rating of who you are. So, while these star ratings exist, I don't know how they're being used to discriminate. Can people then cancel afterwards if they don't like your star rating? I don't know. The thing is, to see the star rating, the driver might not have been aware, but you need to tap on the profile picture to see the star rating before the thing occurs. And so when you book a driver, you can tap on their picture and then it shows. It's interesting because I've used Uber now in several different cities and several different places, and it works slightly differently in different locations. like when I was in North Carolina using it North Carolina has this bizarre rule which is that cars don't have to have a license plate on the front of the car which is crazy making to me yeah but

it means that when you're trying to find an uber car you can't be sure that you're going to be able to see the license plate but when you book a car in North Carolina there and only there the app shows you a picture of the car with the color but But when you do it in London, like it just shows you the license plate. So things vary from place to place. But anyway, you can see the star rating before you book. And the way it works with Uber is that you can cancel within whatever it is, like two minutes. I don't do it often, but every once in a while, like I will look at the star rating before a driver comes. And every once in a while, there's someone who is clearly about to get kicked off the system. It seems like there's

a dynamic number, but roughly speaking, it's like if they're under 4.4, they're on like a warning system. So if I see someone who's like 3.9, that's someone who's about to get fired. And so I will actually cancel that ride. Can I find out what my star rating is? This is this thing that I think Uber should do for the benefit of human society. Because one of the things when I was first riding Uber, that I like to ask the drivers is, because some of them seem to work in different areas of the city, or they do different sorts of things. I said, like, Oh, what are your what like, what are your average customers like? Like, who are you driving around? And some of them seem to specialize in areas where there were are you driving around? And some of them seem to specialize in areas

where there were lots of parents taking kids around. Some of them dealt with businessmen. But I would also like to ask, what are the worst customers that you've ever had? Like, tell me your nightmare story. And boy, do the drivers love to tell you about like the worst dude they ever had in their car. I think that Uber should make the driver's ratings of the users visible to the user.

Because as it is right now, there's no place for you to see what you are rated. If you ask the driver, I've had drivers, they'll tell me out of curiosity. It's like, oh, what is my rating? I just want to know. And they'll let you know what it is. But it doesn't show you. I think that Uber would be providing like a service to humanity if they made the customer's rating visible to the customer. Because one of the things that I've heard from many of the drivers is that the worst customers

are business dudes, guys who expect everything to go their way all the time. And it feels like this is my rule of, you know, if you think everyone in life is an asshole, you're the asshole, right? It's not everybody else. But I think there's no feedback mechanism to let those people know that they indeed are the jerks in the world. And so I think if someone like takes a whole bunch of Uber rides and they see that the drivers are rating them two stars all the time. This is like a feedback mechanism to let you know in a somewhat anonymous way, how other people view your actions. Like I think it's a possibility for people to correct themselves. How anonymous, Gray? Because this is the problem with your thing, anonymity. I've been talking about electronic voting the last few days with a few experts in electronic voting. And that is the problem with your thing, anonymity. I've been talking about electronic voting the last few days with a few experts in electronic voting,

and that is the one issue that comes up all the time as well. The importance of anonymity is something that comes up a lot, and I think what you're saying will cause problems in that respect. Obviously, you're not saying that I can see the driver who just drove me what they gave me. You're saying I should be able to see my overall rating. But surely I can reverse engineer from that, can't I? who just drove me what they gave me. You're saying I should be able to see my overall rating, but surely I can reverse engineer from that, can't I?

So with the drivers, they get a report at the end of the week about how their star rating moved and they get like a random selection of the comments that people have left. So they don't get to see everything and it's all bunched together, right? That here's your rating for the week. My feeling is for the customers,

because the customers obviously are doing way fewer Uber rides than the drivers are. I think it's easy enough to build into the system to say something like, you are going to get a report, an email to you that says your star rating, but do it only after every 30 rides and those rides have to have had a certain number of different drivers in

them right so if you took 30 drop rides and it happens to be the same three guys because you're in a little area like it won't auto send you the report until you say have like at least at least a pool of enough different people that you couldn't reverse engineer it so i think there's a really simple solution to that just that that the customers get it much, much less frequently than the drivers do. That's what I would do. Cool. This is the same CGP Grey who a few minutes ago was telling us how he doesn't overthink things. He's already come up with the feedback mechanism for Uber passengers. Everyone is going to want me to ask you, so I have to ask you, what has your rating been when you've asked them to tell you? I actually just had a guy tell me two days ago that my rating is 4.9.

This means somewhere someone didn't give me a five-star rating. And I would love to know why. I would love to know what was it. Like, I'm very curious. But I think that knowing that the drivers rate you, it encourages both parties to be on best behavior. So I always feel like I never want to make the drivers wait. You know, I want to be a nice, simple passenger. I think it's, I think this is exactly the kind of situation where it is helpful to have each person rate the other person. I bet you got a two star from a woman that you called ma'am.

Hello, internet. This episode is brought to you by Backblaze.com. I kind of wish that Backblaze would actually stop sponsoring us, because that would mean that everyone who should have Backblaze does have Backblaze. But the very fact that they keep sponsoring our show indicates to me that you, dear listeners, keep signing up, which means that there were some of you who weren't using Backblaze. And if there's going to be a Backblaze ad after this one, it means that some of you listening to me right now need to sign up because you don't have Backblaze on your computer. This is one of the few products that everybody should just get. If you have a computer, you need online

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There's no story there. I had to go find your story for you. Thank you. And can you tell me what it was about? This is what I'm realizing is that not only did I have to find your story for you, but now I have to summarize it for you. I mean, you can obviously see why I put it there.

Right, of course. I mean, I don't care that much about the story. I just care about where the story happened. Brady and I both happened to put stories about the ever-advancing frontier of autos into the show notes. But of course, Brady only cared because there was a tiny bit of, frankly, irrelevant and uninteresting auto news. But it took place in Adelaide.

So it went into the show notes with an exclamation mark. Woohoo! Yeah. But the entirely unremarkable story that Brady put in the show notes was that on a test track in Adelaide, a self-driving car was tested. And this apparently was the first time that a self-driving car had been tested within the city limits of Adelaide. It was on the Southern Expressway, which is a public road, although they had closed the section off. Your dead link makes me suspicious about the

accuracy of that first story, because the story that I found about it said it was on a test track somewhere. But whatever. It happened in Adelaide. Are you proud that your home city has autos now? Or at least there has been an auto in the city? This is for people who have no idea what an auto is. Everyone knows what an auto is. Everyone knows what an auto is.

This is a fast, quickly accepted word. I'm not sure the word's going to take off, Greg. No, of course. I've told you before that I'm convinced that we're just going to call them cars. That what's going to happen is the self-driving prefix is going to be dropped. Yeah, but there's going to need to be a period of at least five to ten years where both of them are on the road. So how are we going to differentiate during that period? Let me get back to that for a second.

So the thing that I put in the show notes, which I thought was the much more interesting story, was that in Greece, in one of their cities, they're doing, it's what seems to me like the first public test of self-driving transportation technology in that they are having a, it's like six self-driving buses that are going around the city. What was that big sigh for? Because Greece is the one country that needs to start putting people out of work.

I didn't think about that. Well, they've got to cut their costs, these municipal governments, right? Isn't that how that works? This is what we call a downward spiral. But yeah, so they have six buses that they fitted with self-driving technology and that they're going around. It looks more like a, it looks like a golf cart more than a bus, but anyway.

Yeah, it's a bus, but it looks like it fits about six people in total. So it's, the interesting thing is not the volume of this, but the interesting thing is that it is just on the roads. And I was reading through it and what it reminded me of is, I don't know if you've ever seen these crazy, uh, like you can find these articles talking about the original rules for cars on the road. Like when cars first came about in very many American cities, there were rules like you can't drive at more than seven miles an hour. You have to file with the city in advance where you're going to go. And the entire time that you're there, there's a man on the horse who has to wave a flag in front of you. I don't know if you've seen this stuff, but there's just some

like this astounding transition period between when cars were very rare and quite accurately thought as deadly technology being introduced onto the streets. And obviously all of that went away very quickly. But this self-driving test in Greece to me reads the same way because the self-driving cars are limited to 12 miles an hour. They're not allowed to go any faster. They've been programmed to stay in this single lane that goes on a loop around the city. So they're programmed never to change lanes. And they're programmed never to try to get around any obstacles, but just to stop dead in their tracks if there's any uncertainty about anything.

So it's like, it's the most cautious thing ever. But my feeling is that just like with cars and the super cautious rules around cars at the start, I think that once the changeover starts, it's going to be much, much faster than people think. I think the transition from regular cars to fully automated fleets of cars is going to be very fast as soon as normal people can start getting their hands on self-driving cars. But a lot of people still buy a new car maybe only once every five years or 10 years. But my prediction is that if you start having a significant amount of the fleet of cars capable of self-driving, I think you end up in a case where it very quickly makes sense to simply outlaw

human- driven cars. Like, I think that's what's going to be the case here is that we're not going to end up in a scenario where you're waiting naturally for the whole fleet of cars to turn over. I think we're going to end up eventually in a situation where human driven cars are outlawed just to say, like, just starting on the highways to say, like, OK, you can't drive a human driven car on the highways and expand it outwards. I don't know if you ever had something like mad mothers against drunk driving. I don't know if you had that in Australia, if they have it in England, but. I know it is, but yeah.

Yeah. This is like a big pressure group in the United States that was sort of omnipresent when I was a kid. Like they ran all these programs, you know, for when you're learning to drive about like, don't drive drunk and kill people. and i think that once you have self-driving cars around to some extent my prediction is that there is going to be some kind of pressure group like mad but for human driven cars right like where there's going to be some pressure group that says the safety gains of self-driven cars are so great that we want to try to outlaw or severely severely restrict human driven cars oh great you're you're in dreamland man i don't think i am i don't think i am because because it's because it's worked so well with gun control doesn't it like you think

you think the people who want to keep their cars aren't gonna and the car companies aren't gonna apply a little bit of pressure you think that you think the the bleeding hearts who think that you know who want to make the roads a safer place are going to be more powerful than the people who make cars and the and the well no no no no already have their cars here's the thing here's the thing i'm aware that car companies are going to make self-driving cars you don't need to explain that to me. No, no, no. That's not my point. My point is- And the oil companies and things like that.

I don't think that pressure groups in and of themselves are often very effective at causing change. So my thesis here is not that like, oh, some mad version for human-driven cars is going to cause this to happen. But I think pressure groups are used by larger entities that are deriving economic benefit from other reasons. And so the reason that I think self-driving cars will take off so much is because I think there is more economic benefit for governments and for companies having them around than there is economic benefit for the losing team on the other side right and i just think something like a like a pressure group is used as a political tool to make a thing happen but i don't think

it's the pressure group that causes this thing to happen okay that's that's my bet and that this is this is only why i'm so bullish on on the self-driving car stuff is because i just think that the economics is on the side of the self-driving cars there's just too many companies and too many institutions that massively benefit from dramatically driving down transportation costs. Like, I just think that's the way it's going to go. I mean, clearly self-driving cars are coming. I mean, we see it every day. But my bet, I don't care if I'm right or wrong about this, by the way. I haven't got a really strong view on it.

But I do not think that humans being allowed to drive their own cars will be banned while you and I are still alive. Oh, man, if you're putting the time horizon that while we are alive, I mean, I would take that bet. I would take that bet. Well, of course you will, because... But what I mean is, like, I would take a bet. I would take a bet on a much sooner time horizon. I'm not exactly sure what that time horizon would be, but I would put the within our life

thing at, like, a near 100% probability. Like I'd be shocked about that. But the main reason that humans will be banned from driving their own cars. Yeah. Yeah. If the time horizon is our lifetime. Yeah. I would put money on that without a doubt.

Well, you're smart guys. So maybe you're right. But well, I, I always want to be, I always want to make it clear that I'm, I am open to the possibility that there is something I'm missing and

something I'm not considering and that I may be wrong here. But one of the reasons why that I, I am bullish on this as well is because there are, there are big advantages to be gained once you don't have any human drivers on the road. And those advantages have to do with traffic flow. Like when you can assume that all of the cars are self-driving, that has huge ramifications for how you manage traffic. And I mean, this stuff sounds crazy, but I've seen some very interesting

computer simulations about it. When you have all of the cars self-driving, you don't need traffic lights, right? And like that's the kind of advantage you can get once you say, look, we're just not going to have people here anymore. And now as a city, we don't need to maintain these traffic lights. And also because the intersections are super efficient now, we've massively reduced the

amount of traffic in the city. I think everybody is all in on that as a goal. So that's why I think it would be effective. The one thing you never talk about when you talk about this is the fact that driving a car is a pleasurable experience. Oh, yeah. Like, people actually enjoy driving cars. So, you talk about efficiencies and this and that and technology and economics. You never talk about the fact that humans like driving cars, like they like controlling the vehicle, like motoring is a pleasant experience.

I know it's not pleasant when you're stationary on a LA freeway. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But a lot of the time, and like, so you think people are just going to let that go? Without a doubt, there is a pleasure to be derived from riding horses. A car does not replicate the pleasures of a horse, like riding a horse outdoors, the connection with you and the animal. Like I've ridden horses. It's a different, it's a different experience. I always want to make clear, like I haven't driven very much at all in the last few years, but some of my fondest memories of my life are related to driving.

Like I understand the pleasure of driving a car. I really do. But I do not view that as a convincing counter argument to people like this thing, therefore this thing won't change. Like I'm absolutely sure there were lots of people who loved their horses and thought, well, I don't, you know, I never want to give up my horse, right? This car is stinky and noisy and it's not even remotely as nice as this horse. This car can't take me home when I'm drunk like my horse can because the horse knows where it's going. So I think the question is not in the abstract, are there benefits from the current situation? Of course there are, right? Without a doubt there are. The question is, do people

appreciate the benefits of a car more than, say, the abilities that a self-driving car will give them? For example, the benefits of being able to relax much more on their morning commute. I think people will take that benefit of I can just kick back in my car and relax as it drives me to work instead of having to be really frustrated about this traffic. I think people will pick that over, boy, the occasional road trip I did through the corn in Kansas was just an amazing experience. Like, I don't think that works out in people, oh, I want to keep my car because of that. You have to compare what the benefits are on either side. So continuing with follow-up, we're cracking through the follow-up as usual. We're setting a fantastic pace.

I don't know. I've got to say, Brady, I don't know why I constantly have this worry that we're just like, oh, there's nothing for us to talk about. What are we going to talk about? It never fails that we have made it three lines into our show and it's like an hour in.

This is the advantage I have doing a podcast with one of life's great overthinkers. This is not overthinking. This is really irritating me. I do not overthink. I know. I know. Of course. Of course. You shouldn't have let me know that it's irritating you. That's why I keep bringing it up. Let's talk about YouTube Red. What's the latest there? Because we spoke about this at length last time. Yeah. We spoke about it perhaps at too much length well we've got to i think once every 10 episodes we have to talk about the youtube industry saying that is ostensibly what we both do yeah it's in the show note or it's it's in the official show description that we talk about youtube right but

so i guess we've got to do it every once in a while yeah uh But yeah, so we recorded that episode before any of the earning stuff came in from YouTube Red. And as we are currently recording, the free trial, free in quotation marks trial is going on with YouTube Red. There's a lot of complications around that that I don't want to get into. But we can summarize them by saying that, yes, creators are to some extent, possibly to a lesser extent, being compensated for the lost ad revenue during this free period. But it occurred to me earlier today that we have a week's worth of some YouTube-read data. And as we discussed last time, it's very hard to know from YouTube what they are really doing with their algorithms for how they determine revenue split. But then I realized, oh, wait, I actually run two different YouTube channels that are wildly different in their watch times. So I have my channel, the CGP Grey channel, where, I mean, videos are almost always less than four minutes, but I also upload all of the stuff to the Hello Internet YouTube channel

where the videos are vastly, vastly longer. And so what I decided to do is play around with some of the numbers and see, oh, okay, if YouTube Red is distributing its revenue based on watch time, then the Hello Internet YouTube channel should have a higher percentage of its income coming from YouTube Red than my CGP Grey channel does. And I went through and I ran through some of the numbers and I checked it. And that is exactly the case that YouTube Red is currently 3% of the total revenue of the CGP Grey channel and it is 12% the total revenue of the Hello Internet channel. So I feel like this is data that confirms, yes, it is really being distributed on watch time because otherwise there's no reason that that disparity would exist.

It's interesting to have some confirmation in numbers of what we were guessing and what we were sort of told by YouTube. Well, you know what that means, Gray? What? More Hello Internet, less CGP Gray rubbish. Oh, yeah? Is that what you think it means? No, I have no idea what it means. I haven't. Because that's not what my spreadsheet say. My spreadsheet say more CGgp gray and less hello

internet right that's what that's what the ceo of gray industries wants oh well you gotta you gotta follow your heart not not the money mate so um i shall i must i should probably investigate what's happening across my fleet of channels at some point but the thing is again we're in this we're in this funny starting phase and yeah looking at looking at the numbers my what i'm guessing is happening is that it doesn't seem like the revenue is to be clear to listeners up 12 i'm saying 12 of the total revenue is coming from youtube red but the advertising revenue is down and so it looks like these things are just balancing each other out for the time being.

But we're also in this funny trial period. So we really, really won't know what's going on for several months until all this stuff shakes out. So we'll keep you up to date with the latest of YouTube news as always. Now, the Hello Internet flag referendum, which is the thing that has the whole internet buzzing, obviously.

Yes, the whole internet. Everybody wants to know about the Hello Internet flag referendum. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm getting stopped in the street and also, you know, it's crazy. It's like a national celebration, an international celebration. It is. It's amazing. It's amazing.

So, it just occurred to me the people on the international space station can't vote because they can't get postcards down so we we haven't really allowed for that so we must we must look into that anyway we mustn't look into that there's always corner cases sorry astronauts um we have set a deadline for votes yes so this is this is going to hopefully calm down some of the people who are just sweating because there is no deadline. Instead of going out and voting, they seem to be dedicating all their time to emailing me about why there should be a deadline. So my suggestion to those people is instead of worrying about it, just go and vote for goodness sake. Brady, Brady, Brady. suggested to those people is instead of worrying about it just go and vote for goodness sake brady brady brady this to me the fact that this bothers you it's it seems like such a brady characteristic like this really you seem to get just constantly irritated at this fact that people

are harassing you about the deadline and to me it's more just like oh man you've never been a teacher if i said if i set an assignment and i oh, the deadline's at some point in the future, I guarantee you 90% of the energy from everybody would be about harassing about the deadline. And no amount of like, why don't you work on your homework instead, right, would mollify the crowd. It's just like, this seems so natural to me, but this is your workaholic, hard as nails, Brady get stuff done tendencies. Just don't run this way. This is like you coming up against the masses. Okay.

Well, so to all those people who have been emailing me about it, Gray has just described you as acting like a bunch of school kids. And I think that's probably fair enough. Yeah, of course. I'd be doing the exact same thing. When's the deadline? That's why, like my sympathies are with these people. The deadline, the deadline, my friend, is December 3. The votes must be in the postal box. Not the post box, not your post box. The votes must have arrived at my P.O. box.

Right, in Brady's P.O PO box in Bristol. And I know what you're going to say. You're going to say, oh, I live in the mountains in western Bhutan, and our postcards take three months to arrive anywhere. Well, then, just like the people on the space station, I'm afraid your votes will not be counted in this election. Because I don't care when your thing was postmarked. I don't care when it was sent. That's when it has to arrive in the box. And if that discriminates

against you, I really regret that. And I wish that it hadn't happened, but we have to count these votes and we are doing that. We have decided a date that we're going to count the votes. And to do that, I need the postcards. Do you really regret it though? I don't feel any, any tiny sense of regret. You have to pick a date. No, I do. If someone sent their postcard the day we announced it, and because they live in some obscure place, or Italy, which has the worst postal system in the world,

because they live in some obscure place, their postcard doesn't arrive. I genuinely feel bad about that. I don't think there's anywhere on earth that if someone had sent the postcard the day the podcast went up about the flag referendum, that it wouldn't arrive in your postbox by then. Because it's like a month later. It's like a month later. It's well over a month later. So I hope that's the case. By the way, if you're ever in Rome and you want to send a postcard, don't send it in Rome. Go to the Vatican and send it there because their postal system is amazing. And that's a little tip for new players. If you ever want to send mail from Rome, go and do it at the Vatican.

I have to imagine that any place in the world that's going to take more than a month to get a postcard somewhere is not a place where there's a high number of podcast listeners. That is probably true. But I'm sure, but I bet I'll be hearing from them, that's for sure. You know, Brady, just like how we still get tweets from people who tell us that they are not on a plane currently you know you're going to be getting postcards at that post box until the end of time now do you know what i'm totally i'm totally cool with that and i think that we should leave that hello at hello internet.fm slash what's it called flag vote flag vote flag

vote yep i think we should leave the address there for the for future people that listen to at hellointernet.fm slash, what's it called? Flag vote? Flag vote. Slash flag vote. Yep. I think we should leave the address there for future people that listen to the podcast. And they can still send in a postcard and tell me what they would have voted for and do what they like because, you know, we may use that postbox for other things. So you can still send something in. Don't feel excluded.

And, you know, if you want me to see your funny postcard and what flags you liked, go ahead and do it. But if you want it to count in the vote, it must arrive by 5pm UK time on December 3rd. Now you can get to work. And then Gray and I will scoop them all up and we'll be going through your votes and your postcards, which is going to be the highlight of the year for me, surely. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this. I'm really looking forward to this. Everyone is still tweeting pictures of themselves sending in their votes, which are really cool.

I saw one person sent me a picture of their postcard from in front of the White House and things like that. But my favourite goes to at T underscore animal, who showed me the postcard that they've sent in. And basically what they've done is over the section where their votes are written, they've put like all these post-it notes in some configuration so that the postal workers can't see what they voted for. And over the top of the post-it notes, it says,

secret voting information underneath. Seal may only be removed by Hello Internet staff. I love that. I love love that so that's uh is that a spoiled ballot though well that's what they said in their tweet they've written i've put post it still over my vote to keep it secret is that legal question mark so and that's a fair question don't anyone else do it because we may have to just start spoiling the votes if we get hundreds of people doing it because that's going to be a real pain in the butt taking off all those post-it notes this is why we actually had the rule

about no envelopes because we were trying like that kind of thing it sounds ridiculous to say we have a no envelope rule because we don't want to open the envelopes but again we know from experience that this kind of stuff when you have to do it in the hundreds opening the envelopes makes a severe difference so if there were hundreds and hundreds of ones with secret ballots on it i think we would have to declare it as a spoiled ballot this guy t underscore animal they're getting in with this one but nobody else nobody else we're gonna match it to the picture that was sent on twitter to make sure it's the correct one that one gets a special ticket for a non-spoiled ballot but nobody else do this because we've got to try to make it easier. I'm dying to

find out how many are going to be there. I think we could get past a thousand here quite easily. It's not out of the realm of possibility. We're going to have so much data as well, Greg. We haven't discussed this yet, and I'm sure you and I will discuss it and make a formal announcement soon. But I do like the idea of us somehow making all the data public, as much of the data public as possible, and people can manipulate it in all their own different ways. And I think we should kind of, you know, open source it in some way that works, that we think is appropriate. So, we'll see what we can do about that. But we haven't discussed it yet. I've already been thinking about this because- No.

God damn it, Brady. You haven't been you haven't been overthinking it have you gray no i have been appropriately thinking it but okay i have been i have been wondering about how to get the preference data into some sort of shareable format because yeah when you're doing an alternative vote it's actually quite easy to count the ballots physically, like to physically move them around in piles is a very easy thing to do, which is one of the reasons why I selected this as opposed to some other methods. But the thing that to me is interesting is to see an aggregate amount of data about where do first preferences go?

How do the second preferences break down? And so it's easy to count, but there's a much more complicated story to be told in the preference data itself yeah well one of the things i've been thinking about and again i have i have not discussed this with you yet so doing it publicly on a podcast for the first time might not be the smartest idea but you know i'm a go with the flow kind of guy you are you're a spontaneous guy yeah. But we did say on like the official page with the instructions that what you write on the postcard may be seen on the internet. We made that clear because, you know, we're going to video the counting. So everyone is aware that what's on this postcard, it could be public. And we even said if you put your name on there, be aware this could be on the internet.

So we have said that. So we could feasibly just scan the backs of all the postcards and just let's say to people, sort it out yourselves. But I'm not entirely sure about that. I think maybe that's not fair. I don't know what you think. Because here's the thing, I'm trying to think about how do you actually get this stuff in a shareable format? And I think that there are actually enough postcards where there's maybe a thing like we need to bring some extra people to help us but there's the front of the postcards which would be interesting if we can share them in some way and then yeah there's the there's two sections

of the back which is potentially has something like a return address on it depending on how people write a postcard out and so it's like you said yeah we can't share that so but this is what i'm saying like obviously that can't that can't be there but there's at least going to be half of the postcard which is theoretically shareable because it's just a list of preferences and then maybe a funny thing at the bottom but that that i think is going to have to be something that we see when we when when we get closer to the day but i'm honestly thinking like do we need to hire someone to help us input all of the preference stuff into a spreadsheet to share on the internet? I think we might have to.

Yeah. Well, I think Brady's nephew could be cashing in here with a day's work maybe. Oh, yeah. Look at that. I've put him to work before scanning all my brown papers for number file. So, maybe this could be a job for him. Yeah. And rolling out the papers on the million pie day thing, right?

Oh, yeah. No, yeah. He was one of the slaves there as well, yeah. December 3, you've been told, and we will also tweet it and Facebook it or whatever, however we share things, and then people will still complain that we didn't tell them, but... Yeah. Well, you'll tweet it. I'm not on Twitter. Well, we might come to that. This episode of Hello Internet is being released in November, and that is a big month in the world of facial hair. So how appropriate that I get to talk about today's sponsor, Harry's. November, as almost everyone knows, can also be called Movember.

This is a time when people raise money and raise awareness around men's health issues. They do this by growing moustaches throughout the month. It's normally men that do that from my experience. Now for some people that means they end up looking really cool or in my case a little bit silly. I took part in Movember a couple of years back and as luck would have it I recorded a video during that period which ended up being really successful and having a really long shelf life. Unfortunately, every time I show it to someone, that also means I have to explain, oh, this was recorded in Movember, supported by Harry's. Harry's is the event's official razor partner. And you know how I, among all people, love things that are official. They even have a special Movember shave set. You can check that out on the website.

I'm sure you all know the Harry's story by now. This is a company started based on selling high-quality razors and shave sets, but not at the stupid prices you find in most stores. I've got a Harry set myself it's called the Winston a lovely weighted silver classy looking handle and high quality replacement blades available at the click of an internet button. So why not get a starter set delivered to your door? It's free delivery, and that comes with a razor handle, three blade cartridges, and your choice of shaving cream or foaming shave gel. And it comes in really cool packaging too.

The Harry's packaging is spot on. Harry's will give you $5 off your first order if you use the code HI. So go to harrys.com, H-A-R-R-Y-S.com. Pick out what you like. I like the Winston. You might like something different. And then enter that code H-I on checkout. That's H-I for Hello Internet. Then they'll know you came from the show. Our thanks to Harry's for their continuing support of Hello Internet. And why not also check out what they're up to this Movember. Really good cause. I don't know if you're aware of this. Obviously, there are two flag referendums going on in the world at the moment that have

captured the imagination. The Hello Internet flag referendum being the most important. Obviously. And there's also the New Zealand situation, which I think New Zealand situation is probably an appropriate name for it after the debacle of their flag gate. Yeah, it's a real shame. It's a real shame what they're doing over there. If only there was a shining example of how to run this sort of thing for them to follow.

Yeah, it's too late. It's too late for them. I don't know if it's too late for Fiji, because I have only just been made aware of the fact that it seems Fiji is another country which has got fed up with having a Union Jack in the corner of their flag and are going for a new flag. And they're going through a process as well. Why are you saying it in this weird way? Isn't it Fiji? Oh, no.

This is one of those words that you and i are going to say differently why do you say fiji that's weird i think i think it's an australian thing maybe it's just a brady thing but i think maybe it's an australian thing but i say fiji fiji now you're saying it more like me you're saying i think i just polluted your brain with it because i say fiji but you said like fiji or something in the beginning i say fiji yeah yeah i split it up more than you whereas you sort of say it more continuously and we could spend a long time talking about the pronunciation of this country if you want or we could cut to the flags i just find your pronunciation wildly distracting i'm sorry but it's just bizarre it's just absolutely bizarre which is why I had to comment on it. Well, I think it's crazy that you say emu,

but I've had to deal with it. So you can deal with Fiji for a while. Yeah, you have to deal with Fiji. So weird. I know. Well, come to my rescue Australians and say that we all pronounce it incorrectly together, but maybe it's just me. I don't know. Whatever you want to call it, country F. Let's call it country F. No. They're getting a new flag. I was not aware of the Fiji flag referendum that was going on.

So there seems to be an official website that the government is running, or it seems like it's the official website. I am not going to recommend that because it is a bit like wading through treacle, even trying to find the pictures. So I've put this other link in the show notes for you, Gray, which seems to be some third party that has put them all into one place so you can run an eye over them at once. I think that's all of them. Am I allowed to click this?

Because you have a note here that says I'm not allowed to click this. Well, that's because I wanted people to hear your first reaction to seeing them. And now people can hear you because we're recording a podcast. You may now click on it so people can... The thing is, I have to admit that I do not have any idea what the Fiji flag currently looks like. Should I look that up first? Yeah, go and Google the current Fiji flag first. Yeah, you should explain to people what the current flag looks like sorry fiji i can't think of your flag off the top of my head uh see i see i i i grew up with it i know it yeah you grew up with the flag of fiji yeah because you know it's it's it's on my doorstep when i'm australian uh yeah it's just

it's one of these standard British territorial places flags. So there is the Union Jack in the upper left-hand corner, much like New Zealand. The rest of the flag is light blue, almost cyan. Yeah, it's like too light. It's not the same blue as that's in the Union Jack. I've given it, it's like a light blue. Yeah, the Union Jack isn't light blue. The Union Jack is navy blue exactly but like on the australian flag in the new zealand flag the

the blue of the flag is the same as the blue of the union jack so it fits in more nicely in my opinion but on fiji it sort of stands out a bit doesn't it like it it doesn't quite look right yeah fiji picked a uh fiji picked a different blue a light light blue. And they have a shield in the corner where they're, or on the right-hand side where there is space with a lion on the top and some, looks like some local flora and fauna in the bottom quadrants of the shield. Quite complicated, quite busy shield. I'm being less harsh on this flag than I would normally be

because this to me just fits in with this whole universe of flags that look exactly like this of all of the various former british territories or dependencies in in one way or another so it's like it's not a good looking flag but there's a ton of flags that look just like this in their own in their own ways okay so now can i take a look at the at the link that you have here for me? Can I click this? Have a look at the candidates for a new flag for Fiji. Now, I don't know what the situation is.

I don't know if there is like a referendum. I've read a bit about it and it seems like it's an official thing that the government's doing. So I think we're heading towards a new flag and there are some candidates there. Just glancing at it, I mean, I would say most of these are probably better than the current flag. Again, because the current flag is not great.

But these look like, I would be curious to know the design process by which these came into existence. Because these are a lot of very similar looking flags. So all of them have that same cyan light blue color background to them. And almost all of them have a triangle on the left-hand side pointing across the flag, or they have a ship design somewhere else so it's it's a bit like in the new zealand flag referendum where they had the two choices of flags that were the same except for color palette swaps and with these fiji flags there are a lot of them that are very similar with a small design change it makes it harder to pick out

which one you immediately like because many of them are so similar. I'm looking at a couple of them like at the bottom, design 56 and design 57 are the cyan background and then a, I don't know, a kind of brown sail in the center

with a flower design in the middle of the sail, maybe. And as far as I can tell, the only difference between these two designs is the number of petals on the flower design in the center. Like that's quite specific. No, 57 has a little palm tree in the middle of the flower and 56 doesn't. Oh, is that what it is? I'm looking at this page has done a smart thing which has reduced them down to the size at which they're going to look when you're seeing them in real life when you're looking at a flag in your visual field it's really only you know two inches across

so i'm looking at this overall gallery that has shrunken them down and when you shrink them down 56 and 57 are almost impossible to tell apart as are many of the others yeah and like 54 and 55 is funny because it's like a boat sailing on the water and just the boat has been moved a bit to the left in one of them so yeah so they're like giving you every possible little variation and variant and permutation to vote right do you like your boat in the center of the flag or do you like it more towards the left yeah yeah it's a bit like hanging a picture or something. Yeah. So anyway, anyway, I think maybe we should take a bit more time to digest and figure out what's going on here because this is new information to both of us. And we don't want to go rushing in talking about a flag referendum. We don't fully understand because

we of all people, we of all people understand how important a flag referendum is. Yes. And it is so much about the details. Like the details like i want to know how are these flags created how is the vote going to happen there are many many things to know here there are many things to know here i'm just looking at them i'm just seeing which ones catch my eye there are a couple that do catch my eye though which i think are better flags that that light blue is a real anchor for them because it's a really unfortunate colour. And combining it with brown, as they have in a few variations here, is just out of the question as far as I'm concerned. Brown is a difficult colour to work with at the best of times.

Combining it with cyan is not a good choice. Not a good choice. Some of the boats are a bit complicated, but some of the more stylised sail ones look too much like a corporate flag of a local council and things like that. So I haven't got a position yet. I need – I, like you, want more time. I also want to understand some of the meaning behind this stuff as well because meaning is important. So let's come back to it.

But it's just exciting to know there's another flag referendum going on. This is an exciting time to be alive for flag enthusiasts. So we will put a link in the show notes for these designs for the Fiji flag, and I'll look forward to discussion in the Reddit for which ones people like. I think so. I'm hoping that the Fiji government will fly over some consultants from Liberia to help out with some more designs. Because I think they need some more Liberian influence in their flag design. I thought you were going to say what should really happen, which is that Fiji should hire us as consultants.

We can start a whole side business, Brady, as flag referendum consultants. Can you imagine anything that would be more awesome than that? I would do that just to do that, right? Normally, it'd be like, oh, well, let me plug this into my spreadsheets. Let me make a business decision about whether the return on investment for my time in this project is really worth it. But if there was some nation that said, listen, we need someone just to talk to, We need some consultant for our flag referendum. I'd be like, sold, right? I'll just do it. Years ago, I went to Ethiopia and made some videos about chemistry in Ethiopia. And like,

as a little thank you, the Ethiopian like chemical society made me an honorary fellow. So, I am actually an honorary fellow of the Ethiopian chemical society. And like, I got a certificate and things like that. And for me, that was one of the greatest things that had ever happened to be able to say, yes, I'm an honorary fellow of the Ethiopian Chemical Society. That's awesome. I think that could only be topped by being an official flare consultant to the Fiji government. Or anybody. There's plenty of flags out there that could use updating and governments that could use some consultants. So one other little quick bit of follow up. In the last podcast, you mentioned a film that I know you like, Mean Girls. And I said we should watch it together, like have like a pajama party or something and watch it together. But I couldn't wait. And I'm having some pretty lonely nights here in California.

So I went ahead and watched it on my own. I am so disappointed, Brady. I thought we were going to have a slumber party, going to be braiding each other's hair, doing our nails, watching Mean Girls. I was looking forward to this evening with you. We could have painted the county flags of Liberia on each other's nails while we're watching it there's there were so many things in our in our slumber party which i thought mean girls would might might be a nice kickoff too but you just couldn't wait i'm so i'm disappointed i truly am i truly am so i'm not going to discuss the contents of the film

there are going to be no spoilers i won't even discuss whether I liked it or not, but it will give it away a little bit to say that I then recommended to my wife that she watch it because she was having a slumber party. A friend of hers was staying over last night and she said, oh, we're going to watch some TV or a movie. We don't know what to watch. And I said to her, oh, watch Mean Girls. I just watched that. So they watched it. And I was talking to her this morning about the film. And then she said, you know, why did you watch it? Like, where did that recommendation come from? And I said, you're not going to believe this.

But the reason I recommended it was because of CGP Grey. Why is that so unbelievable? She almost fell off her chair when I said that that recommendation had come from you, of all people. And the one question I have for you is, why did you first watch it? Like, how did you first come? How did you cross paths with this film? You may not know this about me, but I am almost an expert in chick flicks. I have seen so many chick flicks in my life.

Now, I cannot give the details under which I have seen these. I cannot name names that might implicate anybody who would be the reason why I have seen so many of these movies. But I am like, I am like a serious expert on what makes a good chick flick and what doesn't make a good chick flick because I have seen so many i actually have seriously debated writing a script for a romantic comedy at one point i was like oh this is not a bad idea for romantic comedy i know the rules i know how this works i know what makes a good romantic comedy and what doesn't i think i could do this what was i'd love to know your romantic comedy script does it involve i am genuinely not going to tell you because I might use this one day.

I know what's, I know, I already know. It's about a computer programmer who keeps getting the same Uber driver over the course of a few years and their relationship develops from there. So that doesn't, see, that doesn't work. That's, that's not, that's not good. That's not good. You know, I was making jokes. I really love chick flicks too.

So we should have a, we should have a night and compare notes and watch a few. Yeah. Because, you know, when you've watched a lot, you pick up on the rules. Like they have very clear rules about how things work, how things don't work. There's so many bad ones that it's kind of delightful to find a good one. I mean, I wouldn't call Mean Girls a romantic comedy. There are different genres of chick flick. There are sub genres of chick flick. are sub-genres of chick flick.

This is why I use the word chick flick, right? Because a romantic comedy in my mind is largely, not exclusively, but it's largely a sub-category of chick flick. Although I will say romantic comedies can sometimes straddle the line for more broader audiences. I would say Love Actually is a good example of that. That it's a romantic comedy which is a bit outside the Venn diagram of a traditional chick flick. But I think let's take something like The Devil Wears Prada is another good example of like a chick flick that is also not a romantic comedy. Like the romance is of almost no interest in that

movie. Like it's almost tangential to that. But that but devil wears prada also quite good if you haven't seen it her fella in that is also uh vinnie chase from entourage isn't he he's in that in a very very minor i have no idea who that is but i am i am impressed with your knowledge of this person so you've seen this movie too i i love devil was proud i've seen that a few times yeah it's good it's quality very good quality it is it is it is very good it is very good it is very good we have to find another good chick flick to watch on our slumber party yeah maybe we should have maybe we could have a chick flick episode of hello internet where we just review review a few of our favorites compare a few yeah i have i have i have many thoughts i have many thoughts on on

chick flick so do i so do i well look at this look at this unexpected similarity we have discovered maybe we could collaborate on a script. Or you could write a script and I could come in and do a polish at the end. Maybe. I mean, honestly, it sounds like this is fertile territory. We might have a whole spinoff podcast, which is just us reviewing chick flicks. Dude, I'd be so up for that. Yeah?

I would be totally up for that. Oh. Yeah? You know what? You know what you know what we could actually become like major voices and influence on the chick flick industry if the podcast became big enough yeah yeah yeah like our reviews make or break the release weekends i love this idea i'm all on board i don't i don't know if we could fit that in between our flare consultancy business.

Oh, man. Yeah. It's just, this is the problem. You know, there's so many things to do, so little time to do them. I know you're not on Twitter at the moment because of your weird, weird kind of science thing you're doing. There's nothing weird about it. Yeah.

But anyway, I sent you these pictures because you had to see them. Yeah. And one was of two people. One of them is a gentleman. I don't know who the second person is. I don't know if it's a gentleman or a man because their identity is concealed. But they have dressed up as CGP Grey, the robot, and Brady the caveman for a Halloween party. And the caveman, I guess the caveman guy looks a bit like me because he's got like sort

of my color hair a bit and you know he's a pretty handsome guy but the cgp gray outfit is incredible it is like it is it is one of the best halloween outfits i've ever seen he's and and the cgp gray is even giving a flower to the caveman presumably an emoji flower but you have got to see this cgp gray halloween outfit is outstanding yeah we'll find the we'll find the link for the show notes but yes i have to say seeing that seeing that halloween costume just was amazing and brightened my whole day i cannot believe there are one people who were dressing up as us for halloween right this is like a this is like a weird moment to cross in your life when someone you don't know is dressing up as you you know definitely in halloween sometimes friends dress up as each other that's a fun thing to do but to

have a stranger dress up as you is a weird barrier to cross but they did such a great job on this i think i think both costumes were just great and the cgp gray one must have taken a lot of effort to do and it's based on the on the animated the hello internet animated dofsky version of the cgp gray the robot and it just it looks astounding it really does and i have to say to say the flower emoji gift was definitely the cherry on top of that amazing cake. Like it was just such a comes from Chris. Now, people will remember Chris. He worked, he drives the stairs for Air Force One. He took a picture of his phone playing Hello Internet with Air Force One in the background and he listens to the podcast while waiting around for the president to come and go. Now, the first sad news is that he's moving to a different station. They call this a permanent change of station in the military,

and he's leaving sort of the Washington area. So I think his days on Air Force One have come to an end, like any job does. But what happened was, as part of his, like, going away, he got invited to the White House for sort of a, you know, a meet and greet or I don't know why he got invited to the White House for sort of a meet and greet or I don't know why he got invited to the White House, but he did. And the President wasn't there, but the First Lady was, and he got to meet the First Lady and shake hands

and spend some time in the White House. I'll read a little bit of what he wrote. Unfortunately for me, President Obama had a day trip. I didn't get to meet him formally. Of course, he's seen him lots of times getting on and off the plane, but I did get to meet the First Lady and had a picture taken with her, which he has shared with me. While waiting for her, we had a bit of time to look around, and I could not pass up the opportunity to snap a picture of the HI logo inside the White House, which I'm going to send to you now, Gray.

Hello Internet is just getting everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Was taken in, what's this room called? The Diplomatic Reception Room, which is one of the oval-shaped rooms in the main residence. It's on the ground floor. Oh, yeah, there we go. Hello Internet in the main residence. It's on the ground floor. Oh yeah, there we go. Hello Internet in the White House. Yeah, with a portrait of George Washington in the diplomatic reception

room. I like it. I like this idea of Hello Internet. I don't want to say sneaking, but it almost feels like sneaking into places around the world. Gray, I know you get a bit sick of all my corners and my official things that I come up with all the world. Grey, I know you get a bit sick of all my corners and my official things that I come up with all the time. Do I? Do I, Brady? Yeah, well, obviously you do. No, I totally do. I completely do.

I know. But, Grey, I want to put another one out there. And I think now that we've been going for over 50 episodes, it's time for us to do this. Okay, why are we doing this now? No, come episodes, it's time for us to do this. Okay. I think. No, come on. Be positive. Be positive. Come on.

I can't be. I can't. No, here's the thing. I can't be positive. I can't be positive just in the abstract. I'm always cautious. I'm always cautious about something that we're going to be doing potentially for forever. That's how I have to approach this.

Well, you don't have to worry about this. I will maintain it. I will look approach this. Well, you don't have to worry about this. I will maintain it. I will look after it. You have to have nothing to do with this except you have to be in on it, like as one of the judges. Oh, yeah. Because I think the time has come for us to start. And we're going to take this seriously.

This isn't like there's no Mickey Mouse here. I think we should start the Hello Internet Hall of Fame for people who have gone above and beyond the call of duty for the betterment of Hello Internet. And this is not an easy thing. I'm talking Medal of Honor, Nobel Prize type level here. People that have done

selfless things to make Hello Internet a bigger and better thing. And I'm going to propose to you now that Chris, who not only had got Hello Internet picture with Air Force One, he has also now got Hello Internet into the White House, will be the first inductee into the Hello Internet Hall of Fame. Will you second that?

All right, I can get behind that. I can get behind that? All right. I can get behind that. I can get behind that. All right. This definitely feels a bit like nation building is what we're doing right now. Yeah. Starting to pass out medals and awards for those who have done great service to the nation of Hello Internet. Exactly.

Exactly. So there we go. We have our first inductee into the Hello Internet Hall of Fame. Now, this is not an easy thing to get into, people. I don't want you all to start emailing now with some picture of, you know, Hello Internet or, you know. And you cannot ask to be inducted as well. If you ask to be inducted, that defeats the whole purpose.

This is a decision that we will take at appropriate times. But we will start the Hello Internet internet hall of fame and our first inductee is chris congratulations you have served the podcast with honor do you do you have a future vision for for the kinds of things that could be done to earn this medal or you want to take this on a case-by-case basis to get into the high hoff as it's called, the Hello Internet Hall of Fame. Jesus. I would say, I mean, I'm talking, you know, the first person who flies the Hello Internet flag on top of Mount Everest, they will have a strong chance of being inducted. The first person to listen to the podcast on Mars, for example,

I think will have a strong case. But I don't want to put it in a box. And also, this doesn't just go to great achievers. The common man can get into this. I don't want to put any constrictions on it. I don't want to put rules here, Gray. I think this is just something that will happen organically. Right, right.

You have got me thinking you have got me thinking we should have metal struck yeah so we see if we can get metal struck yeah i think that would be nice yeah that's not a bad idea that's not a bad idea at all i see i when you say striking metals now i get much more behind this i like like this. Because that also puts constraints on us about how many we're actually going to give out. Yes. It makes it much less frivolous if we have to send a box with a medal somewhere. Yeah. I think it needs to be an exclusive thing.

You know what? This is done. Yeah. Okay. I'm now sold on this with medals. We have to figure out how to get medals made. Is it okay to have it called the Hello Internet Hall of Fame? Or does it need a different name?

Like, does it need something that sounds a bit more, you know, because Hall of Fame is a bit rock and roll and a bit gimmicky. Should it be the Hello Internet Medal of Honor? I don't want to piggyback on the Medal of Honor because it's such an important thing. Yeah, but there's something here. I think Hall of Fame is now suddenly not the appropriate thing for this. Yeah, it cheapens it a bit, doesn't it? What should it be? The Hello Internet.

Okay, here's what we're going to have to do, I think. Because this is a momentous decision. This can't be like a Fitatron 5000, well we just we just decide live on the show right this can't this can't be that i think we need to we need to seriously think about what this is but yes i like the idea that we will actually send metal somewhere yeah and that it needs a an important sounding name so i I think this is also something that the Hello Internet community needs to help us with here.

So I will be looking for discussion in the Reddit for proposed ideas on a name. This isn't a vote, right? This isn't a referendum. This is Brady and I as the Jack and Queen of Hello Internet. We will be making a decision about this. The Jack of Diamonds and Queen of Spades of Hello Internet. Right, of course.

But we are soliciting input from the community and we will be making some decisions about this. And whatever it is the first one will be going to Chris who got Hello Internet onto the runway with Air Force One and into the White House. Yes. Selfless acts for the betterment of Hello Internet onto the runway with Air Force One and into the White House. Yes.

Selfless acts for the betterment of Hello Internet. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. All right. It's happening. Now, you did mention Fitatron 5000. This week, we are doing the not bi-weekly weigh-in because you don't have access to the regular scale. And I do have access to copious amounts of pizza, which I've been eating every night.

There's a place in Berkeley called the Cheese Board. And my goodness, that place is going to be responsible for my early death. That sounds delightful. It's this pizza place, Gray, and it's really, really popular. And every night they have like the pizza they've made and that's the pizza you have to have. There's no like choice. You can't go and say, you know, hold this or add this or I want this. It's just tonight, this is the pizza we're serving. And people queue around the block to buy this pizza. You just turn up and you just have what

they're serving. And it is really good. This is an excellent way to start off our section on the bi-weekly way and i may have mentioned before but there was a pizza place that my wife and i discovered in las vegas which was called 800 degrees pizza which was by far and away the best pizza i've ever had in my life and as someone who's grown up in new york like i've tried lots of pizzas in different places i'm a fan of of many different kinds of. But this was just the best by a lot. And like I may have gone there for several meals in a day at some point. I may have had the staff very well in a short period of time recognize exactly who I am and what my order was.

These are things that may have occurred but i said to my wife at the time as i was stuffing my face with this delicious pizza i'm gonna be honest here if one of these opens up in london i may just have to accept living a shorter life that the trade-off for how good this pizza is like i might take 10 years off the end of my life right they're the worst years they come off the end anyway yeah so while we are discussing our renewed efforts on a healthy lifestyle we're also going to of course discuss delicious pizza yeah it's like i say your renewed efforts my my renewed efforts have taken a massive blow but i'll get back on the horse when i get back to england i promise this is one of the things that I really think about this kind of stuff.

What? Do you overthink it or just think about it? God damn it, Brady. No. I think with anything like health or any kind of long-term change that you want to make, I find it very helpful to think about it, not in terms of, oh, I'm doing this thing and I'm going to make a change. And then if I fail, then that's bad. I think it's best to focus on it in terms of getting back on the wagon is

actually the skill that you need to develop. But you should expect that many times, especially when you start something new, you are going to fall off the wagon. And the thing that matters is the getting back on, right? It's not the falling off. Yeah, true, true. And because that's always my problem. My problem is, as we've discussed before, I always have this attitude that, oh, I failed, I may as well fail completely. And what you're saying is don't have that attitude, you know, accept your lapses and don't just throw it all in. Like, you know, keep playing. Never give up. More importantly, I think it's not even accept your lapses. It's understand that this is part of the process. And the question is, over the space of a long period of time are you getting better at this or

not better at this but the individual lap is like this is just a thing that happens like this this just occurs and i first started thinking about this when i was reading about um i was reading about people who quit smoking and some research on like what is effective and what is not effective and that one of the the things that was coming out of this research was that almost nobody is successful quitting smoking the first time. That people who actually quit smoking for long periods of time require four, five, six serious attempts at quitting smoking before they're actually successful at it.

And that what the research was showing is that the process here is that it's the attempts at quitting that they are learning what their own failure conditions are, right? They're learning what are the kind of things that cause them to fall off the wagon and that they're getting better at this. So that's why I just want, I think we're not doing the weekly way in this time, but I just felt like I wanted to mention just a couple of things about like for anybody who wants to join us on the Fititron 5000. I think this is a useful thing to keep in mind. Yeah, that's good.

It's really good advice. Yeah, really good advice. And I also wanted to mention because I totally forgot to say it last time. I've gotten some feedback a bit about this the exercise shirts that we have so that you can join team fitatron 5000 they're actually exercise shirts yes right they are made of uh polyester where i should find the actual description of them but they got wicking hasn't it to take away sweat right they have the moisture wicking these are not the regular cotton t-shirts that you happen to be able to exercise i i especially asked eftba if they could make real exercise shirts for us and

this is the thing that they were able to do so this is their serious serious exercise shirts for people to to get started with but there was some confusion over that last time this is hello internet man we don't mess around yeah we don't mess around we're going to be minting metals soon right yeah no it's uh it's it's it's real stuff um and two two other just minor points then which is that i don't know if there's going to be anything necessarily done with it. But I did make the Fidotron 5000 subreddit in case people want to discuss the Fidotron lifestyle with others. Oh my god, what have I done to you? And I also feel like we need to settle on an official Fidotron 5000 hashtag. Because on

Twitter, since you're so constrained for space, actually writing out Fitatron 5000 takes up a lot of what you want to do. So I think the official hashtag should be hashtag FOT5K. That's what we should do. All right. I'll let you do that. I'm not as enamored with that, but I can see the logic of it and it is quite funny that you've done it. So's do it yeah yeah hashtag fot 5k short for fitatron 5000 yeah because you can't actually write fitatron 5000 you've lost 20 of your words there with on twitter i know i know but that's half the joke to me but yeah you're right you sometimes you've just got to be practical yeah you got to be practical sometimes so anyway i'm just throwing that out there if people want to talk about getting started or you know discuss whatever strategies not that not that i want to encourage

more people onto reddit because i think you're already the poster boy for reddit too much but what are you expecting people to put on the fitatron 5000 subreddit subreddit subreddit subreddit like like their like their their stories their inspirational stories the pictures of them with their shirt off showing how fat they are i don't know i don't know i'm viewing this as the opposite of the cgp grace i've read it i keep really locked down like i'm the only one who can post to that and i make i make the discussions official and there are advantages and disadvantages doing it that way whereas fitatron 5000 i'm just throwing it open to the winds like this this one is this one is for the community so i'll be curious to see uh what if anything people want to post there but like i was just thinking like for for me getting started with this stuff like it's

it's useful to see different strategies that people use or different things that people try like there's there's a lot out there and it's hard to say like, what's going to work for everybody. Like the thing that I have been really aware of that has been successful for me is totally startling, which is doing weight training. That even though that is not actually directly related at all to weight loss, I have found that lifting weights in the gym, which is a thing

I just never thought that I would do. I'm just not that kind of guy. But having that has been this surprisingly helpful through line that has made for me like getting back on the wagon consistently easier when it's like, oh, there's this other area of my life which is health related it's not weight loss related but it's also an area where it's like oh okay i can see that i make consistent progress as long as i do this relatively simple thing yeah and like that's something that has been totally surprising to me but has definitely been one of the things that has has helped me a lot with getting started. So, like, that's one of my little pieces of advice for some people.

Like, if, like me, you think of yourself as, like, a nerd and not the kind of person who would go to the back of the gym where the free weights are. Like, I was this guy, and I have found that surprisingly effective for me anyway. Yeah. And trainers and, like, personal trainers and that always tell you lifting weights is a good way to lose weight. But I'll tell you what I think is going to happen on the Fitatron 5000 subreddit. It's going to be just lots of people talking and not a lot of people listening. Everyone's going to go on there swearing by their method and saying, this is the only way to do it. And everyone else is doing it wrong. And you shouldn't pay attention to this and you should do this. And then the next person will say,

this is how you should do it. I don't, But anyway, that's cool. People could just go and read them. The internet is for arguing, Brady. That's the purpose of the machine, right? It allows people to argue with each other. If you think, oh, I want an internet community, but I don't want people to argue. It's like, well, you need to take your ball and go home, right? There's no way you're going to have that. Today's episode is also brought to you by Hover. Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names. Let's say you're kicking around an idea with a friend and suddenly you come up with something that you want to make or a website that you want to build or a product that you want to ship into the world. Well, you need a website to promote that thing. And so you're going to want to score a good domain name. And Hover is the

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QUEENOFSPAIDES, all one word, to get 10% off your first purchase at Hover. Thanks to Hover for supporting the show. Well, having just told people to go to a subreddit and given them a hashtag for Twitter, let's talk about the CGP Grey weird cone of silence where you just cut yourself off from all these things for the next however long. You want to talk about this, Brady? Well, just quickly, because I think this is vintage Grey overthinking

and overreacting. Like, I read you a little article about it, which was really cool and like all your articles, very well thought out and well written. And I understand the logic of it. But I just think you're overdoing it. This whole, you know, because the other day there was a nice tweet and so I texted it to you and said, oh, grey, have a look at this tweet. It's really nice. And you couldn't it to you and said, oh, great, have a look at this tweet. It's really nice.

And you couldn't even open it because, like, you said, I can't look at it because it's on Twitter. And so presumably you have some technical ban in place that stops you even being able to look at Twitter if you want to. And I think that's a bit extreme. Yeah, just as quick background for the listener. I did write this article. It's up on my website called Dialing Down, where I talked about a bunch of things in my life that I want to reduce to some extent over the next month. I'm intentionally a little bit vague on precisely what I'm doing

when I wrote that article, because I feel like this is a process that I am going through. But yeah, I wanted to reduce some of the things. And so one of the things that I have done is on all of my devices now, Reddit is blocked and Twitter is blocked. So yes, when Brady sends me a link and he's like, look at this tweet, if I tap on it, it just opens nothing. It just opens a blank

page in in the browser on the machine that i'm on uh i haven't posted anything directly on twitter for well what is this this is the 8th of november so since the 1st of november i think i haven't posted anything directly and uh yeah i'm dramatically dialing back on reddit and a bunch of other things this month. So, yeah, I don't think it's overthinking anything. I don't think you're dialing down, though. I think you're panging up or switching off. You know, I've said this before about you and you disagreed with me strongly, as is your right.

But I think this is another example of CGP-grade binge behavior. It's like opposite of binging it's like anti-binging you've gone from gone from using something to just not using at all there's no there's no sort of uh tempering or just modifying it's just like no i'm gone i'm gone that's it i'm turning it off and i don't know i just think it's uh you know i i see the benefit to it and i i see how much time i bleed away to Twitter and Reddit and things like that. And I admire you for taking such strong action and grasping the nettle, to use a term that you know I like. But I just think it seems like overkill.

I just think it seems like you go too far. I don't know. My feeling on it is, I don't know. I'm having a hard time expressing why I wrote that article and precisely what I'm trying to achieve. But I think one of the things I'm trying to figure out is how much of the external world do I want to let into my life? And I mean that in the broadest of all possible ways. So

like, I'm also not listening to podcasts on my phone this month, which is another thing that I used to do just a lot. And I think in trying to find like, what is the appropriate level of external stuff coming into my life, it's useful to try for a while what i think is a level that is too low to try like i'm trying to find i'm trying to like calibrate what is the what is the level at which i want to have external stuff come into my life and so i'm trying to have it be too low to get a better sense of well where is the median point okay so it's like it's like you've got music and you want to decide what the best volume is so you've turned the dial all the way down to zero and you're just gradually going to turn it up

until you find the level you like yeah in some ways that might be what I try to do over the next little while and so this this month I'm intentionally lower than is reasonable. I do not live a life where it is possible to not be on the internet. Like that, my being on the internet is a huge part of my personal life and also my business life. So I am very aware that this is not a level

that can be maintained for a long period of time. But yeah, maybe the volume analogy is a good analogy that you're turning it lower and then trying to turn it up to see what happens or to find where is the comfortable place for this. But I don't know, it's been weird. Like I've been doing it for about seven days now and in some ways my life doesn't feel all that different, actually.

Like I miss Twitter much less than I expected I would. This is also why I felt like I want to commit to this for a while, commit to it, say like trying this for a month. Because I kind of thought this behavior would manifest itself in myself. That it's like, oh, doing almost anything for a week is easy. The question is doing it for more than a week. Doing it for a slightly uncomfortable amount of time is where you really figure something out. Anyway, yeah, so that's the thing that I'm doing. But yeah, it does mean that I'm not seeing what people send me on Twitter.

And I am going on Reddit, but only when I'm posting something. So like when this podcast goes up, I'll be on Reddit for a little bit to see the feedback from people because that is important. But I'm not just like hanging out on Reddit like I used to. I'll be curious to see how it unfolds.

And Gray's article is definitely worth a read, people. So Gray, I'll link to it in the show notes for sure and go and have a look at it. But I do think, I don't know, sort of make you're making yourself this kind of virtual hermit and doing things sort of in your extreme way and but that's good i mean you know it's good that you do it so the rest of us can benefit from the results point and laugh point and laugh is what you mean brady no no not point enough i find it i. I find it endlessly frustrating because it just makes you harder to communicate with. But it hasn't been a problem.

You have been replying to my emails and texts in sort of the usual time frames. So I guess I can't complain. It's a shame that it's – I think you need to tweet what the new deadline is for our vote because you've got a lot of people who follow your Twitter that don't follow the other ones. Okay, I'll do that. I'll do that through, because the system that I'm using is something called Buffer.

Even though I can't access Twitter, there's this website where indirectly I can post something to this website, which then posts it on Twitter. So I have access to that. So, okay, maybe you've convinced me you're right. I will post the deadline for the Hello Internet flag referendum through Buffer. Yeah, this is crucial information. It is crucial information.

It's vitally important. It's vitally important. All right. Well, watch this space. I would like to talk to you about it again because although I joke about it and I talk about your binginess and I think you're overthinking it and overcooking it as usual. I think this is one of the real professional problems for people like us. And it's a huge problem for me. And so I do admire your ability and discipline to do this, even though I think maybe you're taking it a bit far. So I'll be really curious to find out the results. This to me felt very much like the day that I set up the great Twitter health bot, where some part of my brain said, this is a good idea.

I don't exactly know why, but it feels like it's a good idea. Let's do this really quickly before we think ourselves out of it. And so that article was a similar thing of like, something about this feels like a good idea. Let's put this article up as fast as possible before we can think of all the reasons why we shouldn't do this. Okay, so I have a question for you, because this just came up in a conversation earlier with someone else today. And the question is, do you sub vocalize? Hmm, that is an interesting question. Do I sub vocalize? I guess an interesting question do i sub vocalize i guess my first question would be what on earth does that mean right so i only recently learned what the word sub vocalize means

as well but i came i came across this thing i just realized what i'm just about to say and that you're going to make fun of fun of me But I was reading a book on how to read books. Overthinking. Maybe someone might think it's overthinking. But yeah, so a few weeks ago, I thought, I read a lot of books. I should think about how to read books better. And so I found a book about how to read books. So you'd already finished that other book you're reading about how to breathe?

Yeah, that's right. I finished that a long time ago. Okay. All right. I'm walking right into that one. All right. You're reading a book about how to read books. Yeah. So anyway, I came across this little section, which talked about this thing that they called sub-vocalizing. Hmm. And what this means is when you are reading something, if you're reading an article,

a Reddit discussion thread, whatever it is. So now I'm directly asking you, Brady, when you do this, is there a narrator in your head that you hear reading the words to you when you read? I don't think so. I don't know. It's like one of those things that when you think about how you do it, you suddenly forget how you do it. Okay. So here's the conclusion I've come to with this,

because I've asked a few people about this since I came across this. And my conclusion is the fact that you are doubting is an indication that you generally don't because when i ask people you get either get the answer people immediately say yes or you get exactly what you do which is like do i hear a? I don't think I hear a voice. But the people who hear a voice when they read, they know, right? They're not uncertain in the slightest. It's very obvious. Well, then I don't because I'm definitely not certain.

This blew my freaking mind because I didn't know that anyone could read without hearing a narrator in their head the whole time that they're reading. This is astounding to me that such a thing is even possible, that a person can look at the words and not hear someone in their head reading the words to them. So you do sub-vocalize. I do sub sub vocalize. I do sub vocalize. And I did not know that it was possible to read without doing this. This is just astounding to me. Who's doing it? What do they sound like? It sounds like me reading in my head. So you sort of hear your voice. Oh,

that's nice. You've got a nice voice. At least you've got a nice voice reading to you. So, I don't know. Now I'm wondering if I do it or not. So, when you're reading a book, right, and it's been written in, like, say, the third person, and then there's a quote mark, you know, John walked up to the bank teller and said, could I have $20 please? The could I have $20 part in quotes? What voice is that in? That's in my voice. It's still in my voice. That's your voice too. That's okay. All right. So, it's not like you're a narrator,

but when there's quotes, that's in like golden compass. Right. My own voice doesn't put on a voice for itself reading a book. It doesn't try to do the girl parts in a girly voice right this is not what's happening in my head but it is as though i was just reading something out loud in my normal voice now of course when i what i mean is i don't hear it like like an auditory hallucination hear a voice but this this is this is the kind of words like there's a voice okay so here's where i'm going with this which is the other thing that that then this has led

on to me with some other people which is like so when you think thoughts do you think thoughts in words or do you think thoughts in not words and so that's that's always really hard to answer i always ask people who speak two languages too i say do you think in english or do you think in german right and i always say they'll always have an. I say, do you think in English or do you think in German? And they always say, they'll always have an answer. They'll always say, oh, I think in English. Or I think, I had a teacher who said, oh, I think about physics in German because I learned physics in German. But I think about just telling you a story, I think in English.

So the more accurate way to say it is it's not really like i'm hearing my voice like with my ears in my head but the voice that is reading the book in my head is the same as the voice that thinks the thoughts in my head but it's also this realization that like it seems like the same people who don't sub vocalize they're the same people who seem to not think thoughts in words. Like when I focus on it, I am pretty sure that I am not capable of having a thought that is not verbally expressed inside my own brain. Yeah, but it's like, you know, Heisenberg's uncertainty and all that. It's the act of observing your thoughts, I think immediately puts puts them into words. So, I think it's the minute you think about it, like the whole- the wave function collapses and suddenly all your thoughts are in words. I think that's quite possible.

And when you're not thinking about it, are they or aren't they? See, that's exactly what I would expect a non-sub-vocaliser to say. It's like when I look at it, it forms in words. Because I'm very much aware, like if I'm walking around, it's like parts of my brain are talking to other parts of my brain. Like there's a little narration that's going on in there about this is how thoughts are expressed. They are expressed in a very vocal way. And at least in my thoughts with reading, it seems like this matches up pretty clearly. That the same people who when they read a book, they hear a voice in their head reading the book to them, seem to be the same people mostly who when they think thoughts, the thoughts are very verbal thoughts. And they don't seem to think thoughts that are not so verbal thoughts. I would have predicted that you were a non-savocalizer just because we're so different in absolutely everything that it seemed like it would be astounding to me if we were the same on this one.

But this is one of these things where it just – you come across a thing and you think, how did I not know about this difference between people? It almost reminded me of when I was a kid and I got glasses for the first time and I was blown away by the way normal people can see. It's like, how did I not know that the world existed like this? You can recognize a person from across the street by their face, not by how they walk. That's amazing. And I feel like the sub-vocalizer thing is the same thing. I just cannot understand how anyone can read without hearing the words in their head.

That is unbelievable to me. My instinct here is that in fact, we do do the same thing and we just describe it differently. Like my, I just find it so hard to believe that we would do think we would think or read so differently. So my instinct is what I do when I read is the same as you, but you describe it as hearing the words and I just haven't given it that description. But my other question is, if we do do it differently and you do have this voice, this narration going on in your head and your brain is talking to different parts of your brain

all day, do you think it slows your thinking down? Like, it sounds to me like that would be a slower process because it's having to go through this extra level of abstraction. I feel like I am a slower reader than other people because of it. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if on an objective reading test, if I am reading slower than other people because of it and it sometimes almost feels like it takes longer to read than maybe it otherwise should i don't know if that's if that's really true or not but yeah i would be willing to bet that you read faster than me at uh at a comparable level of comprehension on comprehension tests where we scored the same

that you would have read something faster than i would have read it, is my guess, like if this is the case. But the only thing, you know, you just mentioned this, and the only thing where you're saying, oh, you're surprised that if we're actually doing something different, it does remind me, the only thing I can think of that's similar to this is in one of the Richard Feynman books, which are always excellent. Everybody should read them. They're great. He mentions, I forget the exact details of the story, but it is him talking to some other physicist. And somehow in the course of the conversation, they run into the question about

whether or not someone can count in their head while someone else says random numbers out loud yeah i remember this yeah yeah and feinman says like oh he's like he can't possibly do it and the other guy's like what do you mean you can't do it it's so easy to do it and that over over the course of the conversation what they discover is that when feinman counts he is doing it auditorily in his head in the same way that i would do it right when i count in my head there's a voice in his head in the same way that I would do it, right? When I count in my head, there's a voice in my head going one, two, three, four, five, and that the other guy is visualizing numbers when he counts in his head, that there's no auditory part there.

And so someone saying out loud random numbers doesn't mess him up in the way that it messes Feynman up. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if people are doing things different, but. When you get like an email from me and you're reading it you're reading my words in your voice it's like cgp gray's reading brady's email to cgp gray you don't hear that in my voice the answer is for the most part no but i am aware that every once in a while if i read something that someone has written that is particularly in their style, it will switch to that person's voice. And this is the reason why I would expect that the people who hear a voice in their head, they're so universal, is there's a standard Reddit joke where people will write something like, you are now reading this in Morgan Freeman's voice, right? Like,

they'll be writing a comment and they'll throw that in. And it works every time with me. It's like, oh, yes, now Morgan Freeman is in my head reading this sentence for a little while. Like it totally activates this. But I'm like, oh, there's some subset of people who just think that's a joke, but it's not really working on them as I guess what's happening. But yeah, so I always just assume that everybody did the same thing I did, but that's not the way, it's not the way it is. The world is a strange and unexpected place. I still don't believe it. I still don't believe it. I still don't believe it.

Because when I ask you a question and you react to me, you react so quickly and will say the next thing so quickly that I can't believe you're having to go through all these, like, levels of. No, no, that's different. That's different. When you're talking, when you're talking, it's not, that's not the same thing. So, it's only read. No, but you said it's true for thinking as well. So if I ask you a question, like I ask you a question like, Gray, what do you think about this controversial subject? You don't have to think, what do I think about this controversial subject? Let me think,

what do you think about it, Gray? Now I need to come up with an answer to Brady's question. No, no, no, because nobody does that. Nobody's meta thinking about it. When you ask me a question, the voice that you hear is the voice in my head using the mouth parts to express sound to you so that you can hear it. Right? That's what's happening. That's what talking is. Yeah.

But it's not like my thoughts are talking to someone who then is like, oh, great. Now we got to work the mouth and make this happen. Okay. There's not an extra level of filtering going on. No, there's not an extra layer of filtering going on there. That's definitely not happening. Wow. Well, this is interesting stuff.

I don't know if I'm looking forward to reading the Reddit comments about it, but I'm sure there will be a lot. I'm expecting there will be minds blown in the subreddit.