Hello Internet - H.I. #56: Guns, Germs, and Steel

Episode Date: January 29, 2016

Brady & Grey discuss: Brady goes to the doctor (or doesn't), Corporate Compensation Corner massage edition, arguments about Guns, Germs and Steel and a theory of history, breaking news about the New Zealand flag referendum, and thoughts on Making a Murderer. Brought to You By Squarespace: Use code HELLO for 10% off your website Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code 'Bullseye' for 10% off Harry's: Quality Men's Shaving Products. Promocode HI for $5 off your first purchase Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes Discuss this episode on the reddit Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond Brady and Grey discuss Getting Things Done What a pulse is Grey: Americapox /r/badhistory on Guns, Germs, and Steel Moneyball, by Michael Lewis Foundation, by Isaac Asimov Triumph of the City, by Edward Glaeser New Zealand flag referendum results New Zealand flag referendum voting breakdown Making a Murder first episode on YouTube

Look at that posh glass you're drinking water from. You are posh as cushions, man. Look at you, you look like a millionaire. Why? Because I'm drinking water out of a wine glass? Yeah. This is what millionaires do, Brady. They drink water out of wine glasses. And meanwhile, look at me with my 20% bigger Pepsis ready to go. You sound impatient and we haven't even started. It's all in your mind, Brady. I have nothing but an infinite well of patience for you, my friend.

Infinite well of patience. You are quite a patient guy, I'll give you that. Yeah, for you, for you. No, I think you are a more patient person than me in general. You have to be gentle with me today because I have been very sick for the last week and a half. Sick with what? Somewhat appropriate because I think we're going to be talking about plagues and poxes later on. I am very full of plague and poxes today.

This will give you some idea as to the gravity of how sick I've been. I went to the doctor. See, this only means something because I know you. And I know that you seem to have some sort of stubbornness about going to the doctor when you're sick, which I don't understand. That's called being a man. Is it called being a man or is it called being dumb? I go to the doctor when I'm sick. If I think I need to go to the doctor, I don't understand this reluctance to go to the doctor. This is the nub there. You said it, when I need to go to the doctor. When does one need to go to the doctor? This is the million dollar question.

Okay, what is your level then for you need to go to the doctor? Close to death. Okay, see, that seems cutting it too close, Brady. I think 99% of the time when you go to the doctor, they just say, I'll go away and come back in a week if you're still sick. And that happens to me all the time. And then I go away for a week back in a week if you're still sick. And that happens to me all the time. And then I go away for a week and in a week or so I get better. And so I never go back.

So I just, I hate going to the doctor because I know that it's going to tell me, oh, okay, yeah, you're a bit sick, but come back in a week. It drives me crazy. Yeah, yeah, I understand that because most of the time you just have some sort of normal cold. Like if I have what feels like a normal cold i won't go to the doctor but if it's much beyond a normal cold or if it lasts longer than it seems like a normal cold should then then you go to the doctor i will agree you don't go to the doctor if you wake up and you go oh i'm a little sniffly today let me see what the doc has

to say about this yeah you don't need to have your marker be near death to be the, when do you need to go to the doctor phase? How's this though? I went to the GP and I went into the room and she said, okay, what's wrong? And I've had a few other little things, you know, ongoing things that I thought, oh, this is a chance to bring them up. Things I hadn't gone to the doctor about, but I thought, oh, I'll, you know, kill a few birds with one stone here. Right. So I sat down and said, oh, I've got a few things for you actually.

And she said, well, you've got less than 10 minutes and I'm already running late. How's that for care? What if I was dying? This is how triage works, Brady. Depending on what you go in there with, they might decide that you need to be escalated up to the next level. But yeah, you need to go to the doctor. You never know what it is. You might think you just have a regular flu, but then you go to the doctor and you find out, oh, you might have died from meningitis. That's the kind of scaremongering that makes people go to the doctor too much. I'm not scaremongering. This isn't scaremongering. And this is also, this is for the triage thing, right? You have a quick meeting with the doctor there. They're just trying to determine, oh, is it something more serious or less serious? And and it should be 80% of the time that it's something less serious, even 90% of the time that it's something less serious. It would be quite remarkable if everyone who went into the doctor had the most serious thing that they possibly could. The doctor is a filter and the vast majority of the time it should come back saying, oh, it's not a big deal.

You're fine. But you're there to catch the freak occurrences that could kill you. Yeah. This is good advice, people. Follow Gray's advice, not Brady's advice. This is from someone who works in a school. It's had students die of meningitis. You think it's a flu and it's not

bam dead so go to the doctor don't be a brady i really wanted antibiotics because basically i was told to get antibiotics go to the doctor and get antibiotics so that was my whole and they hate giving you they hate prescribing you do everything in a way that's infuriating so you don't want to go to the doctor but when you, you're the guy who's going to bully the doctor into giving you antibiotics. You only take antibiotics if the doctor thinks that you should. You don't bully the doctor into this. I basically said, if you don't give me antibiotics today, I'm probably going to get divorced. And she laughed and said, I've never heard that one before.

And then prescribed me the antibiotics. I don't want them. I don't care. I was just trying to me the antibiotics. I don't want them. I don't care. I was just trying to grease the wheels. Are you taking the antibiotics then? I am. So you don't even think you need them and you're taking the antibiotics?

No, I do need them. You're part of the problem, Brady. No, I do need them. I do need them. I've been sick for too long and... Do you think the doctor would have given them to you if you hadn't turned on the Brady charm? I would not say she was charmed by me. I think she gave them because she thought I needed

them. You know, she looked at me and looked in my throat and said I was sick. And I told her, you know, I told her the story. But another habit of mine, though, that will probably infuriate you is whenever I go to the doctor and get prescribed whatever is needed, I almost feel like that's job done and I've accomplished what needed to be accomplished. And I quite often don't like the actual process of then taking all the medicine and doing all the things the doctor said. It's almost like walking out of the doctor being told, yes, you're sick and this is what you've got to do.

Almost feels like the cure, like, okay, that's dealt with. And the actual sitting there and taking all those pills for a week and a half is like a bit of a grind and I usually get a bit bored by it. I can also understand a little bit that feeling. Because it's a bit like if you bring your car into the auto shop, when you pick up your car, it's like, okay, great, everything's done. They don't prescribe you a course of activity to do with your car over the course of two weeks. Exactly.

I can understand that feeling. Like, haven't I been serviced so that i am now fixed isn't this what this is exactly but that's not what it is you have to take the pills and the numbers of people who follow through on taking their antibiotics course through to the end is always appallingly low is it this is a common problem is it non-compliance rates for medication taking are just astoundingly high. It's a miracle they get anything done with these drugs. But you're going to finish your course of antibiotics, Brady?

Do I need to pester you about it? I'll finish them. I'm glad it wasn't anything major and you found out that it doesn't keep you up at night wondering if you're going to die of an exotic disease. Thank you. Thank you for caring. I do care, Brady. You do.

Whenever I'm sick, you do get a little bit mumsy. That is slanderous. That is slanderous, sir. You're very mothering when I'm sick. Well, I don't want to put any strain on you that would cause you to be ill for a further amount of time. My wife is currently at home from work from exactly this thing of overstraining herself at work when she wasn't fully well and going in and I'm like, no,

no, no, you need to stay home until you're better. And so that's how I feel about you, Brady. No, no, no, we don't have to do the podcast until you're better. The people can wait. But you are, of course, as you like to say, hard as nails and you just want to soldier on through no matter what. Have we got any follow up from the last episode? I can't remember what was in the last episode. Was it a good episode? I can't remember. I think what we talked about was whatever we talked about on the previous podcast. Okay. It looks like we have no follow-up of substance then. Yeah. What we have to dive into is you apparently have another breathtaking

installment of Corporate Compensation Corner. Well, I'm going to blame you for this. We have delayed Corporate Compensation Corner for so long now that I've built up so much possible material that I don't really know where to start. I can't imagine why anyone would ever delay Corporate Compensation Corner. I know. We should put out a flash podcast whenever one happens, like an instant, like we go straight to press. I'll tell you the one, like I'm looking at four bullet points here. I'll tell you the one that's drawing my attention straight away.

Corporate compensation corner, massage edition. Okay. It was a while ago now, but we had a little holiday down in Devon Way and we're staying at a nice place and it was one of these and we went to one of these um you know beauty treatment spa type places that we quite like going to as a couple and you have nice food and then they you know you sit in a jacuzzi and stuff like that and then you have you get cucumbers on your eyes brady cucumbers on your eyes that kind of thing and we went we thing. And we went for this sort of new agey type massage thing.

And it was really funny because it was one of those things where they like, you know, you do a questionnaire and they decide what your energies are and what all these sort of things. And it's like, it seems like a load of rubbish. Although I filled out the questionnaire and then I sat down with my massage woman and she said, oh, okay, I see your questionnaire and this is what I know about you. And I was like, she was psychic. She said all these things about me, like about how I work and how I live.

And I'm like, yeah, that's like. Very specific things or just, you know, broadly applicable to lots of people. Do you work in a chair a lot of the time? Do you find yourself sitting down? Ooh, yeah. Sitting down a lot. She wasn't claiming to be a psychic, though. It's not like she was saying, you know, you're going to meet a tall, dark stranger and stuff.

I didn't say she was claiming it, but you seem impressed. And I'm imagining that she was just saying things that were broadly applicable to the group of people who are likely to get a massage. So I went in and I thought it was going to be a little bit of a dud massage because it was all about like pouring oil on your forehead and all this sort of stuff like whereas I just want to be you know I just want to my back rubbed and my legs rubbed and make all those knots go away from sitting at my computer all day but it was it was one where they like poured all this oil all over your face and your hair and stuff like that I I actually quite enjoyed it. It was quite nice. And about two or three minutes before the end of the massage,

the fire alarm went off. Oh. And we had to be, like, evacuated. And it was freezing, freezing cold. And I'm covered in oil. I've got all this oil all over my face, and it's dripping in my eyes and all through my hair like it's like it's like honey coming off me i've just got like a greased up piggy yeah i'm like a greased up piggy i've got a i've got i've got a robe on and we all get taken outside onto this

freezing cold deck everyone's staying in the place like a hundred people and my hair's all over the place because she's been like rubbing my hair so it's all standing up and oily and then they do a roll call and they're calling out our names and there's me the freak in the corner harren brady here so here's where we come to corporate compensation corner the therapist then says basically well there was only like one or two minutes left anyway there's no point putting you back on the table to then say okay we're done but we feel really we feel really bad about it. And we'll, we'll line you up with like the manager to talk to the manager or, you know, whoever was in charge. We get taken off to this side room. I still got oil over myself. The woman says, we're really sorry. But then the genius of it was, it was all put back on me. She says, what can we do to make it up to you? What do you want? Oh no, that's,

that's bull. That's ridiculous now. And like, what do you do? What do you want? Oh, no, that's bull. That's ridiculous. No, that's not allowed. And what do you do? What do you do? What would you have said? What would you have said? The battle for hearts and minds is already lost at this moment, right?

I've put it back on you because the social pressure there is for you to be a reasonable understanding person right if they want to win the hearts and minds and have you be like oh man you can't believe like how great this place was and the customer service was amazing it's their job to step up and to schedule and schedule you another whole replacement one that the company just eats the cost or whatever like that's what they should do if they want to be like, oh, we're a great place to come for a vacation. But when they say, oh, you know, how can we make this up to you?

It just, I feel deflated even thinking about this question in theory. It's just, you know what? You know what? You can't. It's just over. I just don't even care. You know, keep your money and

enjoy your low review like that's that's that's how we'll make it up to each other here oh yeah i didn't think of going and reviewing them the thing with the massage right is is like even if they only have two minutes left the whole the whole point of something like that is that you're coming out of it a a relaxed and new brady? At the end of this experience. Yeah. And I can't imagine if, let's say for the rest of their massages, that the person has an hour-long massage and everything goes perfectly fine. And in the last second of the massage, you bang a cymbal above their head, right?

Really loud. And you go, oh, but we only ruined one second of your experience. It's like, that's not how it works, right? It's not the actual amount of time. It's the disruption relative to the expectation. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the easy way to create your own website. Back in the day, I used to make my own website by hand and host them myself.

And boy, was that a pain in the butt. Because of podcast ads, actually, a few years ago, I decided to give Squarespace a try and I moved CGPGrey.com over to it. And I am so glad that I did. With Squarespace, making your own website is just so easy. You don't have to worry about all of the kind of nonsense that you have to worry about if you are hosting it yourself. You don't have to worry about managing a server. You don't have to worry about sudden spikes in traffic. Nothing. Squarespace just handles it all. It's super easy. With Squarespace and using their templates, you get sites that look professionally designed

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with no credit card required at squarespace.com. And when you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use the offer code HELLO to get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace, build it beautiful. I wanted to talk a little bit about a book called Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's a book that I think is an interesting book, but there's also a lot of arguments that take place around the book. And in some ways, I almost think the meta argument about it is more interesting than the actual book itself. What's the spoiler situation here? And is this one of these things where people should pause the podcast and read the whole book now? Or

because sometimes people do that. Are we going to be like-tastic is this is this one of those cases or do you think people should keep listening well my thought is this is a bit like a world war ii situation can there be spoilers i don't think there can really be spoilers for most non-fiction situations yeah like which is this essentially kind of a history book isn't it if we get to the second topic we will discuss the possibility of spoilers in a non-fiction situation but but in general i think a book that is about a topic can't be like a spoiler yeah okay so is if someone wants to stop and go read guns germs and steel now you can pause the podcast if you so like it is a long book and it is a i find at times overly detailed book but you know you go you go for it man if you really want to

but we'll talk about it we'll talk about what's in the book now so i think if you haven't read it you can still enjoy the conversation because we will try to sum it up as we go along a little bit i agree with that i agree this shouldn, you should not be spoiler worried. I'm listening to an unabridged version and looking at the scroll bar here, it looks like I am nearly halfway through it. I'm not qualified to talk about it as a whole, but I've listened to a fair old chunk of it. So how have you been finding it, Brady? This is not the harrowing experience that Getting Things Done was,

where I actually went so far as to get my money back for that one, because that was how much I felt my dislike for that book and the way it was written. This has not been the case. And I would go so far as to say I found it quite interesting. I think the guy reading the book, who's the author does a very good job and i think some of the topics are interesting but i but it is not without criticism if i i have to say i have never heard someone say the terms hunter gatherer and food production so many times in such a short space of time, like to the point where I'm like, say hunter-gatherer one more time. Say hunter-gatherer one more time.

Why dare you? Because it does get very repetitive at times, and it made me wish that maybe the author could have expanded his vocabulary just for the sake of variety, because it does get very repetitive at times. Before I talk about the content, because I think that's what you really want to talk about, but just more about the actual book itself, just to sort of forewarn people. It's very list-tastic, and there always seems to be lists within lists.

Like he'll say, Sir, you're probably wondering, you know, why cows eat grass. Well, there are seven reasons for that. Let me tell you them. Number one, number two, number three, number four, number five, number six, and number seven. And as I'll talk about later in chapter 34, there are another nine reasons that they eat green grass and while i will go into that later

let me tell you those nine reasons and like so this seems to be lists breaking out of lists and there's a lot of there's a lot of that going on which i can see really appealing to you actually because you know we all know you like like lists and at times you do find yourself thinking oh my goodness i cannot believe i'm listening to so much talk about wheat crops flax and how pulses are high in protein i don't think i really know exactly what a pulse is i can kind of guess but um so at times you it seems like, oh, my God, he's talking about the most boring things ever. But I think despite the repetitiveness in the list, it's actually quite well written. It's kept at a real layman's level, which I think is probably quite easy because it's talking about pretty basic stuff like herding cows and sailing to other countries. Right.

I can see why I think it would appeal to you by the way i know that you have criticisms of the writing of the book so i'm not saying you think it's a masterpiece of literature but i can see why it would appeal to you because i mean i i joke around about getting things done and how it's like you know productivity porn and i think you're quite you know you love organization and productivity and think you're quite, you know, you love organisation and productivity and stuff, so getting things done would appeal to you. And in some ways the whole thing about this book, I call it productivity mega porn because this isn't just

about people being productive. This is about like the productivity and organisation of like the whole planet. So I can just see you going oh margaret this is amazing i can't believe it they're not just talking about organizing a work day they're talking about how whole populations are organized and why the world's so for you i can see why this is like right in the sweet spot but next time you tell me you think it's funny that i can sit and watch a game of darts i will pull out this book and say let me talk to you a little bit about flax and pulses i think that is a grossly unfair

comparison everyone's interested everyone's interested in different things so anyway so so as a as a read it is as as a book it is sometimes a book where you think, wow, this is pretty amazing and pretty tedious. But I think it is well written despite the repetitiveness and I think it's very approachable and it's very well argued. It's actually like a conversation with you where even when sometimes you think you're wrong, because your arguments are so well thought out and they've been sort of pre-planned, like they're very well fortressed and your arguments are very – like you have answers to most questions. And like even when I think you're wrong, you're very hard to argue with because you're so well prepared for the battle. And that's what this book is like.

Even though I think some of the things in it are wrong, it is very strategically well done. And it becomes hard to say exactly why you think it's wrong. Yeah, he's a bit overly prepared at points. I think it's an interesting book. By no means, by no means do I think that everything in it is right. But he definitely comes to the table with a bunch of stuff. And I think it's later in the book, but the section that always stuck with me was there's a point at which he goes through every example of how human writing has ever come into existence, like every society that has ever come up with writing. And I remember the first time I read the book, like, I believe you, man, like I am just giving up. Okay. Like I believe your theory about human writing. Please don't

make me read one more. Like I've read enough about knots versus cuneiform versus writing versus, you know, when does it come up on its own? When is it distributed through other people? Like, let me just move on to the next thing. Let me just move on. That's probably an advantage of an audio book, isn't it? Because sometimes when it's there on the page and you can see what's coming and you see what's gone before, those sections can seem quite tedious. But when you're listening and you've sort of forgotten what he's already said and you don't know what he's going to say next, you can be in the middle of one of those kind of patches of quicksand and not know it until it's too late. So in some ways, an audio book kind of spares you the worst of that because you kind of just live it rather than see it coming. So in closing, before we talk about the content,

I don't know if I'll finish it, but I feel quite comfortable recommending it. Like I would say if this is something you're interested in, go ahead. It did win the pullet surprise didn't it as well so it's not like i'm it's not like we've pulled one out of left field here for people this is like this book's bit of a big deal i have been fascinated for years about the kind of meta argument that takes place on the internet about this book and uh we were talking on this to message before a little bit. And I said

that this is the book that launched a thousand arguments, like a thousand argument threads across the internet. Like people just argue about this book all the time in a way that I find very interesting. So here's what I would say is the like the thumbnail overview of the argument in Guns, Germs and Steel. And Guns, Germs and Steel is arguably vastly oversimplifying all of human society. And now I am going to vastly oversimplify the very argument itself. The book is setting out to answer how is it that Europeans ended up conquering the whole world and Europeans ended up with all of the stuff that allowed them to conquer the whole world? Why did the Europeans have ships? Why did the Europeans have guns? Why did they have all of this technology?

And then why were they the ones who were able to spread all over the world and like why is it that when the europeans arrived in north america that they weren't faced with american indians at the same level of technological progress ships didn't meet in the atlantic where where human societies had had developed at the same rates and right they bump into each other in the middle of the Atlantic, go, oh my, oh my, right, how are you, how are you? Like, that's not the way it went down. Like the guy who believes in an alternative universe and builds a rocket to fly there,

and then when he does it, he crashes into a rocket coming the other way. Right, yeah, like, that's not the way human society, that's not the way human society works. Yeah, he could have just written chapter chapter one because someone had to be first. The end. Right. So, like, that is a totally legitimate answer. Yeah.

Right? It's like, you know, of course someone's going to be first. How could someone not be first? It would be quite remarkable if someone wasn't first if everybody was exactly the same yeah you know like that would be that would be astounding which we can also then relate this the same conversation to space faring civilizations right it'd be it's like it's like the star trek universe of where everybody every alien race is about the same level of technology like that is shockingly unlikely so it's someone has to be way ahead of somebody else

yeah so what he lays out in the book is he's he is talking about the starting point of like 10 000 bc when roughly speaking humans had spread to everywhere they were going to be on the face of the earth and they were all at roughly the same level of technology of basic stone tools and then says okay his argument is fundamentally that when you have people everywhere some environments are more beneficial to human thriving than others. Right. Some places are just going to be better for people to live. I mean, I have this guy, Jared Diamond, I have two nicknames for him. Mr. Hindsight and Mr. Obvious. And I think that first argument is wearing his Mr. Obvious hat.

Yeah. Well, see, like, when I read this book,'s gonna sound dumb but like you know i went through history classes in high school and it was remarkable to me that there was no overarching description of things like history class was like this big long list of stuff that happened and one of the things that you can't help but notice is like, man, the UK is just dominating in this history game. They have empires, right? And it's like the UK, and then it's the Dutch and the French and like this, this little cluster of places has taken over absolutely everywhere. And I'm not even really sure that when I was younger, like it

occurred to me to wonder, like, why was this the case? Like, I don't even know. In some ways, when you just grow up going through history class, or you grow up learning about anything, you sometimes don't think to ask questions at all. It's just like, oh, of course, Europe took over the world, because that's what they taught me in school. And like, it never even occurred to me to think that something else could have been possible. But Jared Diamond poses the alternate question of why isn't it that Africa conquered the new world and brought European slaves to the new world? It's like, oh, okay. Yeah. That's an interesting question. Like why, why didn't that occur? Or for example, the thing that my video was focusing on, which was the question that really struck me, which, again, obvious question never asked, which is, why didn't the Europeans get sick from

Native American diseases if the Native Americans got sick from European diseases? Like, it just never occurred to me as a kid to ask that, because you're always told the story in the context of like, and the Europeans came and the Native Americans got sick from their diseases, like, and we keep moving along. And you just don't think to ask these questions. That's why the book kind of struck me when I was a bit younger was like, oh, I didn't think to ask these questions. But so the bottom line of that argument is just some places are more beneficial to human societies. And that once you start down the road of having more food and settling down and building cities, that this process is a self-sustaining, self-feeding process. That your cities get bigger, you have a higher population density, you can then

develop more technology if you have citizens who are free from the burden of producing food. And this just spirals up and spirals up and spirals up. And so that a relatively, even just a relatively minor advantage in the beginning, can end up becoming something that makes the difference of like two centuries worth of technological progress by the time societies meet. Do you think that's fair from what you've read so far? Yeah, I do. I think, yeah, basically he's saying a little bit of luck, a little bit of fairy dust and luck at the start, and you win the whole game. The example I often like to use is it's as though the earth is a very unfairly designed board game and your starting position gives you more or less advantage.

And like Australia is the worst place in the world to start. And Eurasia is probably the best place in the world to start. That's what the book's trying to say. Yeah, well, I mean, you just said it in a far fewer sentences. But anyway, yeah, it wouldn't be a book otherwise, I guess. It wouldn't be a book otherwise. But this is why I think like that statement ends up becoming like this remarkably controversial thing.

Like there are these huge arguments over guns, germs, and steel. For what I agree with you is I think in many ways to me seems in retrospect, like a fairly obvious kind of argument that just never occurred to me when I was younger. Of course, some places are better for humans to thrive than others. Like that's why Europeans ended up taking over because Europe was easy. I guess one of the things that comes across in the book that I hadn't thought about quite so much was if you'd told me that at the start, like, you know, that the dice were loaded or the board was rigged, I'd think, okay, yeah, you know, this obviously, weather is obvious, you know,

obviously the climate, you know, what your climate is like is pretty important. As someone who lives in England and sees all these rolling green hills, 24 days, 365 days a year, whatever and and then when i'm in australia i see barren desert right i look i look and think okay well you've got a head start here the thing i guess i hadn't thought about quite so much was how loaded dice were when it comes to animals the strongest thing i've seen in the book so far, as he's saying, the best natural resource advantage that the Eurasians had was they got lucky with animals and everyone else got unlucky with animals. Right. That to me is probably one of the key features of the book

is exactly this. Yeah. Because you could say, oh, well there's, but there's nice places everywhere in the world. Like it's, it's not like Europe is just uniformly perfect farmland. And everywhere's got gold and everywhere's got oil and some people have diamonds and some people have this and some people have that. But he's basically saying animals and plants is where it was at and Europe got lucky. Yeah, so he runs through the things that make plant species and animal species susceptible to human use. In order to be domesticated, animals have to have a bunch of characteristics, which when, and this is where your lists and lists, you know, begins, because he goes through all of this stuff

with plants and animals. Again, I think it's very interesting to go through all those details. It's far too much to go into for this podcast. But I mean, just basically, you don't really think about it, but for domesticated animals, you need a couple things. Broadly speaking, you need animals that are big enough to be useful. So if you domesticate chinchillas, they're not going to be pulling plows for you in a farm. You need a big animal. You need animals that are big, but also animals that are not unpredictable or violent, which is what is the big problem for Africa. Like Africa has tons of big animals. All of them are horrible to work with. Like hippos, horrifically violent, way more dangerous than you think they are.

Or he runs through all the examples about like zebras versus horses. They look the same, but zebras are bastards, right? And horses are great to work with because they have a bunch of inbuilt characteristics. I haven't got to this yet, Gray, because the point you're making, obviously, is you've got all these nightmare animals in places like Africa or a paucity of animals in other places. And then Europe's got all, you know, your docile cows and your sheep and all your dream animals. So I get the point. Does he later on in the book explain why Africa's full of badass animals and Europe's full of docile dummies? Or is that just luck? At one point in the book, talks about and i think this is

really interesting is that if you go back lots of continents used to actually have many more large docile animals uh and there's some really just funny examples from australia with like these mega marsupials like big large mammals yeah. And North America had the exact same thing of like big, large mammals, but that when basically because humans developed their hunting skills, like as they went along, humans arrived in North America and Australia and the rest of the world, like with really great hunting skills already.

Right. So we're able to out hunt a lot of the local population. And so like, like when, when they arrived there, it's like, okay, great animals that have never,

ever seen humans that have no reason to avoid humans collide with a sudden immigration of into North America hunters with big pointy spears, which is why Africa is so so full of badass animals because right only badasses could survive where human started yeah yeah and so he goes through that there's um basically around 10 000 bc there's a huge number of megafauna extinctions everywhere that humans have just arrived right with the with the exclusion right, Eurasia and Africa, because humans were already there and animals had gotten used to them to some extent. So that's the argument. It's like, it's not even entirely luck. It's that humans caused this situation to be the case. But even if,

so here's one of these things, like people love to argue with all the details in Guns, Germs and Steel. And like, did humans cause the megafauna extinction or did humans not cause the megafauna extinction? To me, that's not even relevant. Like, let's say that that part of the argument turns out to be false. Like people find out, oh, megafauna extinction didn't happen because of humans.

Okay. Well, it doesn't matter because you should still expect that somewhere on earth, there are going to happen to be more plants and animals that are useful to humans than somewhere else. How could it be otherwise if you have a semi-random distribution of useful animals across the world? Yeah. But I mean, that applies to this whole book, Gray. I mean, this whole book is based on digging down into something that you probably don't need to dig down into anymore. But he does for the intellectual exercise of it.

So you can't just say, it's like saying the British Empire was great because they had boats. Why did they have good boats? I don't know. Because they had good wood, for example. Why did they have good wood? Because they had a good climate. Why do they have a good climate? Oh, no, we'll stop there.

Well, no. At what point do you stop? Why have you got a good climate? Oh, no, we'll stop there. Well, no. At what point do you stop? Why have you got a good climate? Oh, because you're further north. Why is it further north? At some point, at what point do you stop asking? It's like a little kid that just says why to every single thing you tell them. That's what this book is like, and that's what his attitude to history is like.

It's like the Europeans, you know, dominated the world. Why? Because they invaded the other countries why because they went because they wanted to they wanted more land and wealth why you know when they got there why did they why like you just keep asking why and if he keeps answering why all the time eventually he's going to come unstuck isn't he right well eventually you're going to come to a point that has to just be an assumption about the world yeah right which is we assume that there are animals some of which are more or less useful to humans like well like this is a ground start assumption and then like we can also assume that the distribution of these things is not going to be equal it would be

shockingly unlikely for it to be equal and so that means some place has to be equal. It would be shockingly unlikely for it to be equal. And so that means some place has to be better for humans than some other place, like just by definition. And Celia, you always have to come to some kind of fundamental little moment of it. I mean, going through the bits of the book I've encountered, I think sometimes it's guilty of simplifying things that I think are very, very complicated. And other times I think it's guilty of complicating things that I think are far more simple. I agree. But as someone who has read the whole book for a start and also has followed some of the arguments around it, what are the big bones of contention?

Not the minutiae like, you know, I disagree that that was how wheat was domesticated. But what are what are the big controversial topics here what are the what are the big things here is where i need to like show my hand a little bit about some some of my thoughts the way you brady you want me to like let me let people know what i think about a movie before we start talking about it yeah so again i agree with you there are many faults with the book and the reason we start talking about it. Yeah. So again, I agree with you. There are many faults with the book. And the reason we're talking about it now is because I made this America Pox video recently because I took a section of that,

of Guns, Germs and Steel, the section about why didn't the Europeans get sick from Native American diseases. And I made a little video about it because I think that's an interesting part. And also this is, I have a very limited repertoire of questions to ask people at dinner parties to try to get interesting conversations going. And this is one of these little questions that I like to bring up. And I find almost universally that the person I'm sitting across from has the same

reaction that I do of, oh, you know, I never thought about that. Why didn't the Europeans get sick? So I took that little section and I made the video about it. And people have been sending me all of these things about like, oh, it's a real shame that you didn't know about the criticisms of Guns, Germs and Steel before you made this video. But the thing is, I had read all of those criticisms. There is on Reddit, like a series of very interesting articles where someone goes through the book chapter by chapter and points out all of what they view as like the contradictions or the things that Diamond says that are clear that the person says are unclear and like goes through it step by step by step by step. And I had read all of those things. And I also agree with most of the criticism of the book. Like, I'm not going to argue with a professional historian when they say like, oh,

ex-historical event occurred and Jared Diamond like skimmed over it. Like, I'll take them at their word for that. Like, you're a professional historian. I have no reason to disagree with you. But the thing that I find interesting and valuable in Guns, Germs, and Steel that I almost never see the critics argue against is the theory that the book presents. Guns, Germs, and Steel to me gives a very simple but very basic theory of history. It's a theory that only operates on very long timescales and over continent-sized human divisions, but it is still nonetheless a theory. Because I think it makes, if not a testable prediction, it makes a question that you can ask about the world where you can say, look, if we were to rewind the clock and play history again, what would you expect would happen?

And the guns, germs, and steel answer is that because Eurasia, the that because Eurasia, the whole of Eurasia, is more susceptible to human technological flourishing, let's say you should expect 80% of the time that the first two colonial technology, that happens in Eurasia, right? And maybe, you know, 10% of the time it happens in Africa, and then like 5% of the time it happens in North America, and like 1% of the time it happens in Australia, right? Not that it could never happen, but it is just extraordinarily unlikely. And so that to me is the interesting thing. It this theory of history and so in many ways like i

again i agree with tons of the criticism about the particulars in the book and tons of the the details that jared diamond gets wrong because jared diamond is not a professional historian he is oh god i should have looked it up before we started. He's an ecologist. He was like a bird expert at one point, wasn't he? He's into birds. Yeah, he's worked in Papua New Guinea and yeah, he's cataloging birds.

And one of the other things that I, personal criticism that irritates me about Jared Diamond is he seems to just totally love Papua New Guinea, like out of all proportion to what you would expect for any

any impartial outside observer is a very important place in this book yeah there's and it irritates me i did highlight it in the beginning of the book he even goes for like a little tangent about how like let me explain to you how papa new guineans are more intelligent than average human beings i was like oh come on man like one of the fundamental theses of your book is that human intelligence is not different everywhere, but you're still going to take a little side moment about how Papua New Guinea is like an exception to the rule. Okay, whatever. Yeah. But so, that to me is the value of this book. And like, I think that is very interesting. But this then trips in historians into an idea that like you cannot say

geography is destiny. Like historians are very, very, very strongly against this idea for reasons that I find difficult to understand. And every time I get into an argument or I see arguments that take place over the book, what usually happens is just as so many of these things, like different sides are arguing different things. Like I want to have a conversation about what is the current state of the theory of history?

Like has much progress been made about the theory of history? But then a historian wants to argue with me about why was it Spain who was the first to Mesoamerica? And why did Spain lose their lead to the United Kingdom? And my view is always, okay, but that's too small. Like, you're talking, we want to talk about like continent levels here, not particular, like this is not meant to tell you why a particular country came about. It's only here to give you an estimation of what is the likelihood that people on a particular continent will be the ones to colonize the world.

That's my view of this book. Do you know what? I just can't help thinking, and I've thought this several times while I've been listening to the book, and I think even more now listening to you talk like that. How is this different from two guys in the bar talking about sports? Like, it sounds like two guys arguing over why one football team is better than the other. If we played the Super Bowl again, would my team win this time? Did it all come down to that one player mistake or was that team always destined to win because they had these players?

And it sounds like sport like and if you want to rake over it and and rake over the ashes of history and talk about why did these people win and why do those people invade that i know you can use this argument about how we learn lessons for the future but i don't think there's a lot to be learned for the future about this kind of stuff anymore i think we've moved on from it it just seems like it seems like arguing about sport. And I have no problem with that, by the way, because I really love arguing about sport. So I find it really fun that history people will sit there

and argue over why it was the Spanish that went to Mesoamerica and that sort of thing. Here's me going to try to reach and make a sports metaphor, or just you just correct me gently if I'm wrong here. But I will talk about sports and a book that I haven't read, but I only know about, which is Moneyball. So my understanding is that Moneyball is the description of how statistics was first used with baseball, if I'm not mistaken, for selecting the teams and thinking about the players, not as individual people,

but as machines with particular batting averages in particular situations. Yes. And so Moneyball was about being able to put together an effective team in a way that was surprising to existing coaches. Yeah. in some way, like, I always feel the argument with historians is a bit like this, where it's almost like, again, this is so overblown because he hasn't done the same thing, but Jared Diamond is a bit like the money ball for continents, right? Where he's looking at the stats and he's like, Eurasia is an amazing continent. It doesn't mean Eurasia is going to win every time. So, it gets like eight weather points and it gets five animal points and it gets- Right. But you can still score it.

And I can very easily imagine an alternate universe where we are instead living in a world where the aborigines got lucky, right? And they were the first to colonial technology and they took over the whole world. Yeah, because they had some Einstein character that just came out of nowhere. Right. They had tremendous luck. Or actually, what I think is a great counterexample is, I mean, man, if you look at the numbers for the Black Death, like what we think of as the plague, this plague that struck Europe in the 1300s, the Black Death is astounding. Like it's the worst plague. The estimates are at a minimum 30%, at a maximum 60% of the population died in Europe in the 1300s. Let's just say it was 50% just for the choice of this conversation. It's amazing to me that Europe came back from that. That's a hell of a setback to have half your population die. And I can imagine a version of the world where it's like, okay, let's take the Black Death, but let's increase the virality 10% and the lethality 10%. Like a plague like that is something that's a random event. And it is

not hard to imagine just by chance, there's an event that just knocks the destined continent way back, way back. In the same way that random events happen in sports, right? Like some guy twists his ankle on the stairs, walking into the sports arena, like you can just have bad luck. But so there could very easily be an alternate universe version of America or alternate universe version of the world where the Aborigines took over the world. And they're trying to write a history book going like,

man, it's really quite interesting that like the Aborigines took over the world when Australia is terrible. But the thing I suspect though, is in that alternate world, Jared Diamond would write a book in which it seemed inevitable that Australia, Aborigines will have taken over the world. Like, I think when you're using hindsight, you can engineer almost anything. So I think in that world, it would also have seemed inevitable.

The hindsight thing is a real problem, right? This is always the issue of talking about stuff that happened in the past yeah but i would almost feel like you'd you'd be much more willing to try to come to a conclusion that like oh aborigines must just be smarter because they came over it overcame like tremendous tremendous terrible continent disadvantage right whereas one of the fundamental points that jared dime is trying to make in Guns, Germs, and Steel is, look, everybody is about the same intelligence or close enough to like, it doesn't matter, right? And if you rewind the clock, and you take all of the Africans, and you put them in North America, and you take all the North Americans, and you put them in Europe, and you take all the Orientals, and you put them in Africa, like you should end up with

the same probabilities anyway, because it's the continent that is affecting the outcome. It's not the people, like the people aren't any different. And I totally back him on that end. But it does mean that you can have situations where just the unexpected occurs, because I don't think he is arguing, but I see people like arguing against this version in their mind of Guns, Germs and Steel, that he is saying it is inevitable that some civilization in Eurasia was the one that took over the world. I don't think he makes that argument. I think he just talks about it was the most likely one. And we're living in the most likely universe, but it could have happened in a different way. It's just extremely unlikely.

Like Europe would have had to have the Black Death be more lethal or happen at a much more unfortunate point in their history. Like if the Black Death happened in the 1500s. The people that argue against it, who don't like this geography theory, because obviously at the start of the book, he makes a really, really big point about all humans are the same like you know one race isn't smarter than the others etc etc yeah people who argue against his geography theory to put it really simply do they say no in fact it is the people who were different or what do they say the real reason is like what's their alternative theory to the geography theory? Surely they don't come out and say, Europeans are naturally smarter, or do they say that? I don't know. They don't, right? The Zorians are not arguing against that.

But this is where I find it the most interesting. And I am trying to make this as clear as I can in this podcast, because sometimes talking about a thing is easier than trying to write it out when you're just arguing with someone on the internet. I would really like in the Reddit for someone to, who thinks, like a historian who thinks they can answer this question that Brady is asking, that is my question as well, which is don't argue against the particulars about events that Jared Diamond mentions in Guns, Germs, and Steel. I want a coherent alternate theory of history. That's what I am looking for. That's the argument that I want to have. It's like, what is the alternate theory of history? And what I have seen so far, and maybe I have not read widely enough or I've been looking in the wrong places, but on the rare occasions when I see people having the argument on this level, on the like, let's not get down in the weeds,

let's not argue over the details, because often they don't even matter. They're not relevant. I'm not really interested in the Mesoamerican civil war and whether or not that was a factor in the conquistadors ability to conquer the continent. Like, I don't think that's really relevant either way. On the big picture version, because what I normally see is people either saying there is no theory of history, that this whole project is fundamentally ridiculous, that you have to take history as it unfolds event by event by event. And I'm very sorry, I'm forgetting there is a technical name for this, but saying how you have to look at the chain of all things. So like the example I often see is saying like, oh, if a city is founded in a different location, like that can then have a big effect on whether or not a country develops in a particular way. And then like that affects whether or not the country is powerful, which can affect the rest of the world events. And my view of that is like, listen,

man, that's not a theory. That's just listing everything that has ever happened. And that's what I see most of the time from professional historians. Like, I don't doubt that they are right about the list of things, but they just want to present a list of everything that has ever happened in all of human history. And I think that that's very different from the notion of a theory. Like, one of the important or one of the things about a theory is that you don't expect it to be able to perfectly work for absolutely everything like i made a bad analogy when when the video first came out but i originally said like i was thinking that guns germs and steel was a bit like the general relativity of the history world i didn't mean that it's like as as big and all of encompassing as a theory as general relativity is what i was trying to get at there is the idea that general relativity is a theory that works on the big scale, like on galaxy size things. But if you try to use general relativity to describe very small things, it just doesn't work.

But that doesn't mean that the theory is wrong. It's just applicable under certain circumstances. You're sounding like Harry Seldon now from the Foundation series. A bit, a bit. Like, yeah, I will totally grant that. Although I think that the guns, germs, and steel, like, that theory ends in 1492, right? As soon as civilizations interact, like, it is all null and void now. It is, you know, it's kind of over. But that's what I feel like. I'm constantly trying to have this conversation with historians about what is your theory of history? And they keep wanting to talk to me

about the atoms. And it's like, but I agree with you about the atoms. Like we don't actually disagree, but I'm just, I'm asking a different question. Here could be the problem with your question. I don't know if it is or not, but here's what could be a problem. Theory of relativity is not going to change because of something an atom does. Is it like, you know, atoms are atoms and the theory of relativity is unbreakable, you know. It's a big deal and it's the rules and everything has to follow those rules. Yeah, that's why it was a terrible analogy.

Yeah, okay. All right, well, let me veer away from it then. I won't bring it up again. Just let me ask you this about the theory of history. That's why it was a terrible one for me to pick. Let me offer an alternate one, which might be better, which is a guns, germs, and steel is like a geocentric version of the universe. It may be really wrong in very many ways, but it also to

me looks like, isn't this a starting point? Like, shouldn't we be continuing to work on the theory of history and not necessarily just be like, ah, it's just garbage. Just throw it away. Here's why maybe it is garbage. How susceptible is a theory of history to humans? How can one person break the theory? Because no one atom or person can break the theory of relativity. If you're strong-willed or have an amazing personality or do something brilliant, you're still not going to change the theory of relativity.

Right. Is the theory of history so... I mean, we're going straight into foundation territory here, and I won't give spoilers away, but this is what happens with psychohistory in foundation, isn't it? Like, can a person... Could one person break the theory? Because so many humans live and die every day,

that if the theory of history is so fragile that a brilliant person, a brilliant Aborigine inventing a boat 200 years early in Australia or a brilliant person in North America cultivating a plant 1,000 years earlier than expected could break the whole system, then the theory of history probably isn't worth discussing very much because it's probably pretty likely to get broken. Or is the theory of history more robust than that? Yeah, it's an interesting question. My thought is that it would be possible, maybe not for one person, for like i was saying before a series of lucky events to bring you the unexpected outcome well that's different of course a series

of lucky event you know a comet landing on london a few hundred years ago would have changed history quite a lot so i mean is it fragile or does it need a comet or a series of amazing coincidences because of course yeah that is unlikely then i would say it's much closer to the the comet side of things like that that's my feeling of it is that look it doesn't matter how many einsteins in a row you get in australia you're like you're limited by the resources of the world and the very fact that you're being born into australia you're like you're limited by the resources of the world and the very fact that you're being born into australia like it's just limiting the ability to express your intelligence anyway because it's like what are you going to do you're living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in in this situation like it's going to be very hard for you to single-handedly develop agriculture and, like, move the rest of everybody else along the start of this path.

Like, it's just shockingly, shockingly difficult. Like, you have to have incentives to stay put that are in the world. Like, otherwise, you're going to stay as a hunter-gatherer society. You're going to keep moving around because you're at a, in mathematics, you say like you're at a local maximum. Jared Diamond does, does mention, I forget exactly where, but he mentions like one, one place in, in Australia where that is like more susceptible to development than others. But like, but it took, it took humans a while to get there.

And by the time they got there, Europeans had already arrived. So it's like, oh, it's game over. It's probably Adelaide. Yeah, I think it was Adelaide. I think that was right. So there was a mighty black stump that called people new to it. Let me ask you this thing. Assuming that a theory of history is kind of valid and robust and worth coming up with,

that's a fun thing to do. it's intellectually stimulating and humans should do intellectually stimulating things but if it is created how is it useful is it useful to us is it practically useful to us until we reach a point where we start colonizing other planets or we start getting colonized by aliens and things like that like if we can if we can crack the code and crack the theory and we feel absolutely confident it's right surely this is just useless now anyway or is it practically useful to have this information it's almost impossible for me to imagine a situation that it's useful like i think this is purely an intellectual exercise right which might be part of the reason why the fighting over it is just so enormous, right?

That the, you know, that old, that old quote, like the, I forget the details of it, but it's like the fighting is furious when the rewards are small. I think this is, this is that kind of thing. Like, I don't think there's an application of this. Yeah. I just, I get frustrated when, in my view, someone, I don't even want to say nitpicking because that is demoting the work that people have done to, I think, quite correctly criticize guns, germs, and steel across many axes, right? It is undoubtable that you can go through a chapter by chapter and say like, oh, this wasn't quite right, or this wasn't quite right. But it still seems to me just to be

missing the argument. I will just, let me just mention the biggest example where this comes across is like a criticism about whether or not diseases came from domesticated animals. So this is the thing that i was mentioning in my video yeah and without a doubt there is a huge amount of uncertainty about the origin of many diseases and people can quite rightly point out like it's it's difficult to say where a lot of the european plagues originated from did they come from domesticated animals maybe maybe not like it seems like we know that the cow was a pretty bad animal to have around. Like some diseases came from it,

but did all of the plagues come from domesticated animals? I don't know. I'm not sure. So you can go through and poke holes in that. But my view on it with all this stuff is like, okay, but even if that's wrong, even if it didn't come from domesticated animals, nobody disagrees that you still can't have plagues if you don't have a big enough population. So like, it doesn't even matter if that part of the book is wrong. And so I always feel like focus, focus on the value to be extracted from this. Like, I think there is something very interesting in this book. But I also think that it is just infuriating to many historians in a way that I find interesting and I have to confess I have to confess that I did I shouldn't have done it Brady but I did kind of like intentionally poke the historians a bit in in my video because I knew I knew there

were going to be some people watching the America Pox video who were like slowly having their blood boil as they, as they realize like what this video is about. And I could just like imagine this person, like the simmering is getting like hotter and hotter and hotter as they're watching the video. He's going through guns, germs and steel. I can't believe it. Which is why I could not help myself in the end of that video in the Audible ad going, this is the history book to rule all history books. I just love the idea of someone just losing it at their computer screen. Like, I can't believe that.

Like, not only has he done this whole thing, but he's recommending this above all history books. There is a perverse pleasure to be gained from that. This is the joy of trolling. This is the joy of trolling as the word is supposed to be used. Like I knew that someone was going to be wound up by that. And it's like, I can definitely see that some people just popped at that, which is why I had to put that line in there. Even though I'm not even sure I believe it. The only thing that would, the only thing that could have potentially been a little bit funnier was if you recommended like a book that was the exact opposite like made the exact opposite argument to what your video was just about

yeah and they're like he hasn't even read that book that book says the exact opposite you could have made some heads explode doing that too but maybe that's good that's too advanced maybe that's advanced trolling no no no that's good i might do that for a future book i have to keep that in mind i have to keep that in. The thing that has come through from the book and from your video more than anything to me is that certainly Diamond's argument is that the key to success is intensity, is bunching things together for various reasons. One is it makes you hard as nails when you're around lots of people because you get sick and you get better and you get immune. And it consolidates a lot of ideas and technology and intellectual progression. And, I mean, this is something we still do today.

This is why we have universities. This is why we have technology parks. This is why we do lots of things intensely. Yeah. And basically what Diamond then does is he tries to then go down another level and say so why did the intensity happen in europe and and then he comes to the conclusion that it's because it was easy to eat basically and the weather was good yeah easy food made people bunch together and when people bunch together that tends to be best for people yeah and it's not even just easy food it's also just important to note that like part of the argument is also ease of food production because

one of the things is that like there were large cities in mesoamerica but they were still largely agrarian cities like even though they had huge populations those populations were largely involved in food production whereas the difference is in the european cities because like you have draft animals which allows you to start booting up other technology you have large populations that are not involved in food production like you start getting this whole extra layer of people who can do other things. And so you just, you need time on your hands as well to think, Oh, what are we going to do today? Let's invent some stuff and then go and conquer the world. Yeah, exactly. You know, you think about, um, the kind of the golden age of science and it's like, it's no accident that

a number of people like Lord Kelvin, who made lots of contributions to science, they were all men of leisure, right? They were all like really rich people who had time on their hands. And they existed at the right time when you could do tabletop science. And it's like, yeah, if you need tons of just spare, you can't be working at the coal mine every day and then also be figuring out great things about science. You need time to be able to do this. And that's a certain kind of leisure that is provided by efficiency in food production. As a slight side recommendation,

I put it on my website, but a book that I really recommend to go along with Guns, Germs and Steel is a book called Triumph of the City, which I think much more than Diamond focuses on this idea that just let you're saying that like cities are a very interesting meta invention of humans, that they have this exact intensifying effect, that there are these really interesting economic effects that happen in cities, that cities specialize in these ways where you end up with cities that have finance specialties

or fashion specialties or automotive specialties, and that this is a very interesting way that cities help progress technology along faster than you might otherwise expect if you just had people all over the place so yeah intensity definitely matters all right how you feeling you dealt with most of the things you wanted to deal with oh yeah yeah i mean i'm just you know i have like a bazillion notes on this kind of thing that i always do but i i'm genuinely like I really want to see the feedback on this episode. I am curious to see what people say.

I'm curious to hear about alternate versions of the theory of history. Are you really? Like when people go and write war and peace in a Reddit comment, and they write 400,000 lines about why they think the world evolved the way it did. You're going to sit there and read that. You don't even reply to my emails. No, I don't reply to your emails. Here's the thing.

With the super long Reddit comments, it depends, right? You can get a sense sometimes of like, oh, is this is just a lunatic person? Or is it a person who's just not able to explain themselves very well? This is how stuff on the internet goes. But I am curious to see what people have to say about this. Like, I think it is, it's a very interesting book. It's a very interesting book that causes an argument about it. So those are my final thoughts, really. Is there anything else you want to add? Did you consider contacting Jared Diamond and seeing what he thought of your video?

No, no, it didn't occur to me. Do you think I should have? I'd be curious to see what you thought. Why not? Would you like to know what you thought? Do you not care? I would be surprised if he didn't like it because it's reiteration of his theory. Yeah, that's true, I guess. I'd be shocked if he's like, oh, you're video shit, man.

Well, maybe he said, I like your theory, but the animation was a bit shoddy. Yeah. I wish MinutePhysics had done it. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you by Hover. Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names. Get 10% off your first purchase by going to Hover.com and using the code Bullseye. When you have a great idea, you want to secure a great domain for it. So when you think of that name, the first thing you should do, the first thing I would do, is make sure that you can grab a domain that has that name. You want to do it fast, you want to do it easy, and that's what Hover is for. Hover takes all the hassle and confusion out of registering a domain. They give you easy-to-use

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There's volume discounts. You can get emails with your domain name. I use them all the time and you should too. So once again, you can get 10% off your first purchase by going to hover.com and using the code bullseye at checkout. Thanks to Hover for supporting the show. Something I cannot believe we haven't spoken about yet. And I don't know if you know the results. The New Zealand flag referendum. Oh, yeah. So this sort of happened around the time I disappeared from Twitter for a while.

And I think I was off Twitter long enough that whatever the thing was died down. And so I actually don't know the results. Ah, well, would you like to be informed? Why don't you inform me? Do you have a link? I have a link. I'll send you the link in just a second. Before I send it to you, just to remind people listening, there were five, there were supposed to be four, but there were five candidates that all went head to head in New Zealand. Right. And whichever one of these wins now goes off to later this year the super bowl where it goes against the existing new zealand flag so this is not yet a new new zealand flag what this is is the

decider of who is going to be the contender right to go up against the old faithful great so we had five it was supposed to be four but as we know, Red Peak got included at the last minute. Right, because New Zealand announced to the world that they will negotiate with terrorists, basically. That's what they said. So we had Red Peak. We had the psychedelic spirally Koru design that Grey favours. We had a pretty lame attempt at a silver fern,

which was the closest to what i think it should have been so it was kind of my favorite one even though i admitted it wasn't that great but which was all the worse because it fell into the uncanny valley of what the black and silver fern should look like close but not there and so way worse in my mind. And then we had bizarrely these two other flags that were sort of a hybrid of a fern and the existing New Zealand flag. And the only difference between them was a very slight change to the, well, not a slight change, a change to the color palette in the top left corner. Right. So those I thought of as the committee design flags. Yeah. Let's have a fern, let's have the star pattern, and let's give people an option over the colors. Those are the committee options. Exactly. So, Gray, first of all, before I

tell you the numbers and how the voting went, I think you need to see the winner. Okay, so let's find out. Well, actually, everyone in the world knows except me. I'm the only person to not know because of my weird semi-cloistered life. Huh. I am not surprised. So the winner is the committee design flag with the black corner, not the red corner. So of those two that looked identical with the palette switch one of those ones was the winner the black variant i'll tell you what is interesting and this is the part that will get your juices flowing and that is how the voting went okay so i'm going to send you

another link to the wikipedia page which should drop you down to where the vote, the tabulated votes are. Here it comes. You've sent me the link of the votes broken down by preferences. And what's interesting, Gray, because obviously they kept distributing preferences until one flag got over 50% of the vote. As all good flag referendums should. And what's interesting is that the eventual winner, which I will call black corner, was actually trailing red corner for the first two rounds. And on the third round, it was practically neck and neck.

And then black corner won on the final iteration, the final distribution. So red corner was leading the vote right until the end. And as the preferences got distributed, as the lower ones, KORU came last, by the way, as they got distributed those preferences, it was only right at the end that the Black Corner came and won. They basically had the vote that we wished we had. We didn't. We had a landslide. But New Zealand, despite choosing a dud flag, had a cracking election. These results are great.

These are a great example of preferential voting in action. All right. So a couple of thoughts here. The first is, I am not surprised that my favorite design, the Kourou spiral, came in last. I'm not surprised that my favorite design, the Coru Spiral, came in last. I'm not surprised by that. I wouldn't have thought, oh, that's going to be a massive winner for people. I am surprised that the red corner flag got the first preference uh votes like that that that was if this was a first past the post

election that one would have won because to me that one is unambiguously the worst i i think that one is awful and every time i think i said in the last podcast, it just reminds me of like the National Baseball League in America. It just, it's terrible. I think it's absolutely terrible. And so I am almost appalled to see that it got 41, almost 42% of the vote on the first round. Like that's, that is quite surprising to me.

I would not have guessed. Like, I'm not surprised Kourou is last, even though it was my most favoured one. I can't believe that that god-awful one came very close to being the flag for the Super Bowl of Flags. I mean, we'll link people to this table of votes. But, I mean, it was really a two-horse race. Even Red Peak, with its sort of groundswell of support, came a distant, distant third. Yeah, it was really between the two committee designs, and by far. I mean, the percentages are, the first preference round, it was 40% for the black corner committee design, 42% for the red corner committee design.

And then Red Peak, the terrorist negotiation option, was only at 8%. And then it was 5% and less than 4% after that. So yeah, it was a two horse race by a huge margin. By a huge margin. Lovely statistics and numbers there. Terrible flags. That's interesting.

That's interesting. That's interesting. What we needed was the classy brilliance of our flags and the fantastic numbers of the New Zealand vote. Then you'd have a dream flag election. If we had to count 1.4 million votes and it went all the way through to the fourth iteration though, it would have taken us about 10 years to do it. Yeah, that's why we would have your nephew do it. So the final thing, brady if you were voting in the flag referendum would you vote for the new flag over the new zealand flag if i was voting i would my my gut says no i would stick with what they have but not strongly i'm probably probably 60-40 on that.

I'm assuming you would change because you think change is crucial. No, I don't think change is crucial. I just think that the current New Zealand flag is terrible. I meant change is crucial in this case, not change is crucial at all times. Yeah, you're making a blanket statement. Are you for or against change, sir? think cgp gray is mr change is as good as a holiday but i think in this case in this case you seem to be of the mind that take what you can get basically to get rid of that flag yeah i'm always of the opinion just

like with voting referendums i'm looking at you uk you can change and then you can change again later if you want right like you're never locked into something forever. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I would definitely vote for the Silver Fern flag as its official name, Black Corner, over the current New Zealand flag. However, I'll make a prediction now that the new flag loses in the super bowl that the current new zealand flag wins the head-to-head race i don't really know the the temperature in new zealand well enough to know to make a prediction like that but my i'm over there with the dipstick every day brady i'm reading the polls i'm tracking all the numbers you didn't even know what flag it was i'm doing

vox pops on the street you know i want to want to know what the average man, what the average sheep thinks of this referendum. But what do you think? Like, if this is, you know, this is Vegas, and we're putting money on the table, like, what are you going to bet on? I feel like New Zealand can be quite progressive sometimes. I feel like they're the sort of country, you know, they've led the way a few times in sort of social change. So I can imagine them of, of, of the countries I know a bit about. I can imagine them being a country that will take that attitude that you have of, come on, let's just change it and crack on.

Let's get, let's get things changed. So I think, I think it's a, it's a better chance than if, if this was happening in Australia, for example, or the UK, for heaven's sake. Yeah, but the UK doesn't need to change its flag because it's great. I think they might do it. I think they might do it. But when I said I don't really know the temperature over there, what I mean is I don't know how Black Corner being the winner went down.

Like, I don't know if it was like everyone thinking, well, that was the best option, now let's move on. Or there's like still a lot of outrage. I don't know. it was like everyone thinking, well, that was the best option. Now let's move on. Or there's like still a lot of outrage. I don't know. So that could be affecting things. Yeah. Yeah, it could be. But that's my prediction.

We will see in, what is it? It says March here. The final one is in March. Harry's have been supporting Hello Internet almost since we started and again are a sponsor of this episode. Go to harrys.com and use the promo code HI for $5 off your first purchase. Harry's offer top-notch razors and shaving products for a fraction of the cost of those big razor brands. But the fairer price doesn't mean any drop in quality

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and harry's know that you're supporting the podcast. Our thanks to Harry's. Now back to the show. I had you read a book and you had me watch a Netflix series. This is the Netflix series called Making a Murderer. I sent you a message saying, have you watched it? And telling you, you should. saying have you watched it and telling you you should and amazingly you did amazingly you uh did what i told you to do i take your recommendations very seriously okay okay so uh so we are now going to talk about we are now going to talk about that if you haven't watched it yet and and intend to you probably want to stop stop listening because

it is very like you know it's very spoiler prone this is the example of something that is non-fiction but that i think definitely you can classify as having spoilers so uh i think it's actually interesting netflix did a promotion where they put the first episode up on youtube which i think is interesting an interesting move i'll try to find that link and i'll put it in the show notes so if you want to just watch the first episode, you can see it for free on YouTube without having a Netflix account and you can just check it out and see if you're interested. So you don't have to commit yourself to watching all 10 episodes, I think. Eight or 10 or something. Yeah. Something like that. That's a, that's a good idea actually. Cause at the end of that first episode, I imagine

would make one quite interested in engaging with what may come next. It's a perfect example of why I don't like to know anything. I just like to go into it cold because the ending of that first episode is quite the gut punch when you don't know what's coming. Yeah, it was the same for me. I knew nothing going into this. Spoilers coming up. So do you want to give us the thumbnail overview for people who are continuing to listen without having watched it?

What is Making a Murderer about? Making a Murderer is the story of a guy called Stephen Avery, who lives in Wisconsin. He is jailed for a rape. He spends many, many years in jail. How many was it? It was like some ridiculous number. It's 18 years. 18 years in jail.

And then it turns out he was innocent of the crime. He's released. He sues the local police who do not hold this man in very high regard. And a very short time later, he is accused and charged with the murder of a young woman called Teresa Holbach. And he claims he's been set up by the police because they're out to get him again. The police say that's ridiculous. And he committed the murder. His nephew, who's a young man named Brendan Dassey, is then also co-charged with the murderer.

It's claimed they together murdered this woman. And the series over eight episodes basically first of all deals with the investigation and then the trial of these two men to find out you know did they or didn't they do it i think it would be fair to say that this film has been made in a very sympathetic way with stephen avery the accused the the filmmakers certainly leave you thinking most of the time that boy this this seems like maybe there's something dodgy going on here and there's a bit of a travesty of justice i would go so far as to say you my instinct was that it was biased because it was sometimes so jaw-dropping how biased it seems and how much he seems to have been set up

that that that i'm thinking this can't be real this they must be leaving loads of stuff out they have since been accused of leaving loads of stuff out um but whether that's the case or not i don't know yeah well this is also this is also just like with gun germs and steel you're always gonna have to leave stuff out. You can't talk about everything in the world. Yeah. And so even doing a 10 episode documentary about a single murder trial. Guess what? Unless you are just showing everybody everything that happened every minute of every day in the actual trial you have to leave stuff out and uh after after i finished

watching this i did try to dig around a little bit and to see like what did the police department say about the things that had been left out in the trial and you know i will agree with you that the the documentary is very sympathetic to step A. Avery. Perhaps to a degree that almost does a disservice to itself. Like, it's very much on his side. Yeah. But I did try to look into it just a little bit, and at least from what I could see from the police departments,

where they were saying, oh, the documentary makers left out these key things. And I looked at them, I thought, I'm not impressed by that list. Yeah, none of them are like a big smoking gun, are they? None of the things the police have said since have made you think, oh, well, if I knew that, of course he was guilty. Like, there's a few bitty things that do implicate him more, but nothing that, nothing like sensational. Yeah, and everything that, as a professional video maker, I feel like yeah

obviously you'd cut that like don't mention it it doesn't have any relevant it doesn't matter like it totally makes sense not to include every single piece of evidence so like the police department has come up with nothing from my perspective that i find like oh wow that's amazing i wouldn't go so far as to say nothing but i would say nothing sensational but there are a few things there are a few things there are a few things i think could probably could have been slotted into eight hours of television without slowing things down too much but yeah but everybody always thinks that right like everybody wants their their additional thing included but well i'm not i think i'm quite impartial but you are you are impartial, Brady. Brady the impartial.

I did like the series. I felt like it was a really good use of my time. Yeah, I have to say, I really recommend it. I liked it quite a lot. The thing is, just like with Serial, I have a hard time with these real crime things in no small part because I have a hell of a time keeping everybody straight. Like all of the humans involved and their relation to each other and like who knew what when.

This doesn't fit very naturally into my brain. And I think that for someone like me who has a hard time following some of those details, it did a very good job of trying to constantly remind you who everybody is what is their relationship to each other like showing the org chart of the police constantly up on the screen and highlighting this person spoke to that person you know when when was this and that so i have to say i think it was very very well made for a topic where even if it was just 10% worse, I would have been 50% more lost. Like they did a good job holding it together for me anyway. So I really liked it. I have to say, I liked it much more than I thought I would.

As always with these things, you sort of binge watch it all in a row yesterday. Yes. So also like all of the episodes like blur together a little bit, but I also think if I had watched this over any length of time, I wouldn't have had a prayer of, of holding it all together in my head. So aside from, um, finding it sort of, you know, entertaining and engaging, did it, did you come away with any kind of new thoughts about criminal justice system and things like that? No, I mostly just found this man's false imprisonment quite entertaining for me.

Look, I don't know what you want me to say, but in some ways, this is the kind of thing that just reaffirms many of my thoughts about the criminal justice system. Yeah. many of my thoughts about the criminal justice system yeah like you know it's just it reaffirms many of my thoughts about what people imagine themselves to be like let's just let's just take what i think is is the perhaps the most galling and clear of all of the things is not Stephen Avery, but talking about his cousin, Brendan.

Yes. Right. Who, who is this kid who was interrogated by the police over this three and a half hour period without any legal defense present without his mother present. And from my perspective, and I think if you see the video most people would agree is basically like not exactly bullied but just tricked into a false confession he's also you cannot overemphasize how much he is a guy who's not blessed with normal intelligence

yeah so it is like it is, it's certainly probably the most jaw-dropping part of the whole series, isn't it? The way, and how he's thrown to the line by his defense lawyer as well. Like at times his first defense lawyer actually conspires against him to have this done to him as well, which is even more amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but again, even ignoring what seems just like criminal negligence on the part of his own lawyer, people will say things like, oh, but if they were innocent, why would this person give a false confession? People just imagine themselves in ideal circumstances always. And so people think, oh, you know, we're having a dinner conversation here while I'm

comfortable and having a glass of wine. I say, oh, I would never give a false confession. It's like, okay, right. But let's actually put you in a high pressure situation. And the tapes of the police interviews are just brutal. When you hear the police just constantly saying the same things over and over again like tell us why you killed her tell us why you killed her you know or like building it up piece by piece are you sure you didn't go to his house are you sure you didn't go to his house and people overestimate their own ability to withstand that kind of thing i don't know gray i'm i don't 100 agree with you there i i think what was done to him was was wrong and like a travesty and when you watch it you just can't believe what you're seeing but he wasn't like he wasn't being like waterboarded or tied

up upside down with bamboo shoots under his fingernails like he's sitting in a comfortable chair he's being asked tough questions but it is a murder investigation. Yeah. And he does like, he does admit to things. And the part of me that, I mean, he should have had a lawyer and his parents should have been there. And the police were really wrong for that reason. But the part of me that was most amazed is that people will admit

to a murder under those circumstances just so they can go home or go back to school. Like that, that there are people who, who are that. But this is, this is exactly the unexpected human behavior. Everybody likes to think, oh, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't give a false confession if I was just sitting on a couch. I wouldn't, Gray. Right. Yeah, of course, of course you wouldn't I wouldn't, Gray. Right. Yeah, of course. Of course you wouldn't, Brady. Of course.

Right. But the thing is, we know that that is not the case. Like, we know through science how remarkably easy it is to inject false memories into people. Right. Remarkably easy. Like, this is precisely the point and i just i get frustrated when people just imagine that they're like oh an innocent person would never confess like but we know that that's not the case we absolutely know that that's not the case i guess the thing that

amazed me was how easy it was to do but as you said the kid is not a bright kid right i mean they said his iq was like 65 or 70 like he's a borderline retarded kid yeah and so and then he admits to the murder and thinks that's great now i can go back to school and hand in my homework yeah like it's so clear he has no concept really of what's going on yeah i mean there's a few points where his vocabulary is so limited that it's like he doesn't even know what he's agreeing to. He doesn't know if people are confirming or denying the thing that he is saying because he doesn't know words like confirm or deny. It's just awful to watch. And like, yes, a grown adult like Stephen Avery, right, his cousin. A grown adult is also interviewed under brutal circumstances

and he does not elicit a false confession. So again, as with many things, there is a statistical outcome, right? But you can't say that like no one will ever give a false confession. Oh, no. And when I was joking saying I wouldn't do it, I probably would do it

if I was being waterboarded and had bamboo shoots under my fingernails. But i bet we could get you to give a false confession under less circumstances probably for a kit kat the diet pepsi yeah exactly right the the thing the thing that uh did i write it down what did he say hold on okay so there was a thing that just ah it just broke my heart so So again, it's this, they're talking about Brendan, this kid giving this false confession. And his mom is asking him, like, why did he give this confession? And, you know, he says, oh, you know, I don't know. I don't know. And at one point, he says something like, they kept asking me these questions.

And I guessed the answers. I guessed because that's what I do with my homework. And the thing that broke my heart about that is I have totally done the same kind of false confession tactics with my own students under different circumstances, which is the like, are you sure you're done with this paper? Right. Which is basically saying like something's wrong on this piece of paper. And like this, this is just what happens in schools of like, do you want to go with option A or option B? This, this kid who's not a bright kid has almost certainly grown up in an environment where this is what adults are doing just all the time around him, right? I'm like, we want you to say this thing. We don't want you to say this thing and like pick up from from what i'm putting down like which way you should go with this kid and you know i

like i know i know i have done that with dumb kids in class where they're saying some stuff and you're just like you're just trying to move along you're like why don't you what do you think about this option like oh that option sounds great. Like, great. But what the police did was so like, it wasn't even that subtle though. I mean, I can't think of a specific example, but it was almost along the lines of like, you know, to make something up, but to make it similar. Did you cut, what part of her body did you cut? And he would say foot.

And they'd go, no, shin, no, knee, no, thigh. And he was like guessing every single part of the body until he finally, he would say the one they wanted. And then they'd go, ah, so you did, you know, cut her ear. Right. After he'd named 19 other body parts. Yeah. This is, but this is exactly how false confessions get made. Right.

As soon as you get the person to just agree a little bit, like you've planted that seed in their mind and then like you start going over the whole thing like let's okay let's take it from the beginning so you said you did go to his house right you did step inside you did go here and now you're saying you did cut her in the knee and like you just and like what happened next like tell us what happened next and you and you just keep badgering for some detail and you get that other detail and then you start over again and be like okay let's go through it and make sure we have the story again like and just for hours and hours and hours of this people fold in ways that are are unexpected and so the brendan thing is is the absolute the worst the most appalling one that just makes me sad in so many ways that the police have an incentive to get a confession out of someone. Humans bend in this way that is remarkably unexpected. And because it is unexpected, juries are very hard

to convince that false confessions exist. It's just like a perfect storm of awfulness in the judicial system. It was remarkable the way the two trials attacked in completely different ways as well. It was almost like, are you allowed to do that? Like to say that the murder happened one way at one trial and then go to the other guy's trial and the exact same guy is saying the murder happened in a completely different way. It's like, wow, I'm amazed.

I'm amazed you can do that. Well, this to me, again, for people who are just listening to us talk about this now, like they ran two separate murder trials for these two different guys, Brendan and Stephen. And yes, they were, the state was presenting different theories about the murders at each, which just seems unbelievable. But it's a reminder of, oh, of course, the judicial system is this thing that is about procedure and it is about trying to convince people.

And the thing that I really dislike about it is that the state has incentives to win. And because the state has an incentive to win, they participate in things that seem obviously counter to what you think is truth-seeking behavior. And it shouldn't be unexpected when you give people incentives to win that they want to win, that prosecutors have careers, that the chief of police has a reputation to uphold. Like, I don't know if there's a great way around it, but it just it is not unexpected it's just sad to see it so laid out taking away like you know profession professional pride and career progression and all those reasons that the state is incentivized to win take all that away and pretend they were just all altruistic people who were serving us right who didn't have their own careers to think

about shouldn't they still be incentivized to win because the bad guys break the rules as well? Like, it's not like the bad guys go into court and are saying, okay, let's just find out the facts. Like, the bad guys are obstructing, are so, like, are obstructing in doing the wrong thing so much that don't the good guys need, like, some kind of, like, don't they need to fight back in

the interest of justice if they just sat there passively and accepted everything i mean well i'm not sure what you mean by the bad guys break the rules like i don't think that the defense is allowed to break rules in court like what do you mean by break the rules no it's like it's like um if i rob a bank and then the police think I robbed the bank and take me to court, it's not like we all hold up our hands and say, okay, there's no more good guys and bad guys. Let's just walk in a room and everyone tell the truth and then justice will be done.

Like once the trial starts, like the bad guys are still lying and they're twisting and they're tricking and they're being tactical and if the prosecution wasn't allowed to be tactical i'm not saying the prosecution should lie but if the prosecution wasn't allowed to be tactical in return wouldn't wouldn't the prosecution be turning up to a gunfight with a knife like wouldn't it be a case of like they need the full armory that is being used by the defense including the use of tactics and strategy and like you know so this is this is this is the thing right this is an interesting point that i think comes up when i argue with people about the judicial system sometimes is

one i always find it interesting how often everybody is tempted to frame it in these terms. There is the prosecutor and there is a criminal. Like, okay, well, we're already starting from a bad place, right? There is someone who is on the defense who is suspected of this crime. Yeah. But we're supposed to presume that they are innocent. Yeah. Right?

But if you actually speak to people, nobody works from that starting position. Like everybody in their mind is imagining like, yeah, okay, we say that, but surely most of the time they're bad people. No, I wasn't really doing that. I can see why it sounds that way, but I wasn't really doing that. What I was doing was- I'm not saying that you're doing that no i was posing i was posing to you the hypothetical case where the person is guilty and they're going to get away with it if we don't arm

the prosecution with the same tools we arm the defense with yeah because you're so you're sort of saying we shouldn't you know the the prosecutions shouldn't be so focused on winning they should be focused on truth but if they don't focus on winning, I think they don't use the tools of winning, and that will allow the very occasional guilty person who gets charged with a crime to get away with it. In your scenario here, we're imagining that humans are just perfectly altruistic, right? And so, presuming that the prosecution is convinced that the defendant is guilty that provides them an incentive to want to win okay that is separate that is separate from their careers because nobody wants to see a murderer go free right like that's not what

anybody really wants but the thing is like like, here's my fundamental problem with this. Everything in life is a dial, right? That you are turning up or you're turning down. And people always want to argue about where is the correct place to turn that dial. And I don't think this is a reasonable argument to have. I think you have to have an argument about, look, we will never know the exact place to turn the dial. And so the question is, do we want to have it turn too high or too low? And my feeling with something like a judicial system is that you should have the dial turned too high in favor of the defendant.

Because the consequence of being wrong is severe. It is deriving a person of their freedom, of the only life they will ever get. And so if you are wrong, that is a tragedy. And now this is where it comes down to a personal assessment. But I think it is far, far worse to wrongfully imprison an innocent person than it is to let a guilty person go free. Now, you can make an argument for the other side, like we were discussing before. Everything comes down to some fundamental assumption. But that is my feeling, that an innocent conviction is vastly worse and so i am willing to turn that

dial quite high in defense of the advantage should be to a free man who was just pulled off the streets by the police and then the police have to say here is the evidence for why we think this person should be removed from society, possibly until they die. The defense is arguing against police procedure and people go like, oh, but they're trying to put a murderer away. Like, no, but you can't think about the particular situation. If you, like, let's say you're convinced Stephen Avery is an absolute murderer.

You're convinced of it. Is your stance that the state should be allowed to decide when they don't want to follow procedures to put someone in prison? Like, ah, we don't need to worry about how we handle the blood. Ah, we don't need to worry about people signing in and out of crime scenes. Ah, we don't need to worry that people who were banned from being on the crime scene were actually on the crime scene. You can't give the prosecution that kind of power. That's crazy power. And this to me is like with the Stephen A. Avery thing, it's astounding to see how they don't follow the rules. And my feeling is like, man, if I'm sitting on a jury, as we've discussed before, number one, my thought is, well, human testimony is almost worthless, including confessions. So almost anything that anybody says is like, I'm immediately just throwing it out. You say you're guilty, Brendan, I don't even care that you say it, right? Because I'm just not interested. What physical evidence do you have? And so the state had all of this physical evidence. They had a key that was found in the house. They had Stephen A. Avery's blood in the car. They found her bones in a pit behind his house. It's like, oh, okay, now all of this evidence is garbage, and now you have nothing. That's my view on it. If the state doesn't have to follow the procedures,

that's crazy town. That is insanity. It's absolutely insanity. So, regardless of what the filmmakers say, I'm not entirely clear what the filmmakers say about this, but I think the purpose of the film was to convey that a miscarriage of justice has been done to Stephen Avery and Brendan Dassey, but let's concentrate on Stephen Avery for a minute. And certainly a lot of other people who've watched it feel this way. We see all these petitions to the White House and people saying this needs to be pardoned and whatever. Did it work on you? Do you feel a miscarriage of justice has happened a second time to this man? I mean, look, we're just at the serial thing again. Yeah, I know.

You and I are just a couple of guys. Yeah, we're a couple of guys. No, no, but my feeling is it's astounding that this jury convicted him. It's astounding. And one of the other things, I know you won't like Brady, but, you know, it's just my thought on this is it was just a case of they show how the police department just was constantly, before the trial, talking about all of the gruesome details about Stephen A. Avery and the confession and the murder and how awful it was. And the police chief gives this dramatic press conference about like, oh, hide your children behind your skirt while I discuss this horrible murder that has taken place. It was crazy they got away with that press conference before the trial the american justice system never ceases to amaze me for things like the use of the media and trial by media yeah it's astounding and it's just an example of the police and the media together poisoning the minds of everyone who could potentially participate

in this jury it's it's amazing it's amazing and speaking of human biases the way someone first hears something like stephen a avery is a murderer you almost can't undo a first impression that somebody has like It's almost impossible. This is a thing called the backfire effect, which like it's astounding. But sometimes like if someone hears something that is wrong, your very attempt to explain why it's wrong ends up convincing the person even more

that their first impression was correct. I agree with you. I cannot believe whenever it happens that the media is allowed to just discuss accusations of anyone on any crime. I find that amazing. just desserts for the police commissioner in this case where you know he was using all of these uh press conferences to totally just poison the well for steven avery on the jury and then at the end like he is um he's talking to some reporter who's gotten sex text messages that he's sent to uh people he's worked with that was the special prosecutor wasn't it yeah and the reporter is like oh but if if you if you have uh there's nothing

if you haven't done anything you have nothing to worry about right and and he says to the reporter he's like oh come on you know full full well as i do that just the accusation will destroy someone yeah it's like yeah you bastard you're exactly right yeah so i don't know it's just in addition to what seemed to me to answer your question a horrific miscarriage of justice this also just fit right into a lot of my preconceptions about like man the way the media is allowed to report on criminal affairs are awful and that's quite that's that doesn't that doesn't happen in the uk and Australia. And, you know, there are quite, there are very strict rules about reporting court cases in certainly the

countries I've worked in as a journalist. That's why when I watch this, I'm like, it almost seems like a, like a joke to me, like made up because the things they're doing, you just can't, you just couldn't do, you just couldn't do. The journalist would be in jail. I honestly think all of those journalists should be in jail. And the court TV, the court TV astounds me how they're like, they're like sports commentators and pundits, and they're predicting what might happen next and who won that day's play. And do you think he's, do you think like, I just can't believe,

I just can't believe it. It's just like sport, isn't it? It's like they're gladiators or something. That to me just feeds the whole problem of like everybody starts picking sides. And then all of a sudden you have once again what humans love to do is they divide themselves into tribes. And then it becomes more about sticking to your side as opposed to any kind of trying to sort out what is really right. The media thing is just awful. And it's like, the thing I keep thinking of is there's some kind of horrible

cross between like whores and vultures, because the way they flock around every person who's involved in this trial is just despicable. the way they're picking apart the emotional trauma of other people for their own benefit and careers. You still haven't answered my question. What? Do you think he did it? Well, you asked if it was a miscarriage of justice,

which I would say, yes, like there's no way he should have been convicted under those circumstances. Yeah. Um, if I have to put money on the table, I would say no, he didn't do it. Right. Much more so than with Serial.

I feel like I'm very aware of having watched a thing that is super favorable to this person. But my feeling is no, that this guy didn't do it he got framed it's a if that's true isn't it amazing how audacious the police were to do this and almost like it's like how did you think you could get away with that well they did get away with it but how do you think you get away with that with all that attention but part of me thinks it's probably some slight backwater this manitowoc county in wisconsin and they never realized it was going to become this big famous netflix series and a big national story and yeah well this is i mean i hate to say it but i think like small towns have particular horrors in them and and this this kind of small town, you know, big hats kind of thing.

And like, it's just horrifying. Like, I think it's not surprising that this kind of corruption in the police department can happen. Something to point out, though, which I think, I'm not sure how great the show tries to wrap it up with this, but the defense lawyer does make the point, which I think is true, which is that I don't think that anybody in the police department is like oh man we can't wait to frame this guy and we're gonna get him i i think they are all just horrifically biased against this person and they all felt like they were moving this along to make sure that they can put him in prison rather you know we

haven't spoken about it but there are very many reasons why the like the family wasn't liked by the local community like there's this guy wasn't plucked out of absolutely nowhere you know he got into trouble as a kid so like there there's more going on here. But my feeling is that this Teresa girl got murdered by somebody else who took advantage of the situation. See, I think that seems really unlikely, Gray. That seems like, it seems pretty amazing to think, I want to murder this. I think I can get away with a murder today because if I dispose of the body in this way at this person's house, this person who the police are already predisposed against is almost certainly going to go down. That seems really implausible to me that a third party did the murder and the third party framed Stephen Avery. I think the most likely scenarios are Avery did it or someone else did it and the police found evidence and moved the evidence into a place where it made it more obvious that Stephen

Avery did it. Whether or not they thought he did it or not, they moved the evidence like that. I find it very hard to believe that a third party saw i think i could get away with a murder this week because i could frame avery or they did a murder and then thought now i'll put it on avery see to me that that second scenario is seems more unlikely that the police find her dead and they move her in they find her dead they think steven they find her dead they think steven avery did it because that was the last house he was at and they're thinking we've got no evidence we can't make this stick like avery's clearly done it and he's going to get away with it again we can't make this stick because

so then they start moving a couple of things yeah but they have to move a lot of things because they have to move her car and they have to move the remnants of her body. Like moving the car is a big deal. Yeah. Like, do the police find the car up the road? I don't know. That to me seems way harder than... There's a huge celebrity.

Like this is the other thing to be like, to be really clear about. He's not just like some guy in the, that the police have had run into. He's a huge known person in this area. Like the family are well known. I don't think it's crazy to think someone would think this is a great place to try to dump the body. Right. And if it's found, they're not going to look too hard. My feeling is somebody else killed her.

He was so well known like the that it's an obvious place to dump a body and and think maybe they'll just they'll just not look very far past this guy if they if they find a body on on his property and just think oh right this this guy everybody already thinks is kind of awful he did it when i watch something like this like i love i really like america i work there all the time lots of my friends are americans and like americans you know america's a cool place but when i watch this documentary i sometimes think whoa man america's weird you know only in america as they say and you sort of think that's a crazy place do you look at american things like that now you live in london and have lived here for

a long time do you watch this like do you feel like an outsider when you watch this or do you watch this and think my country is a bit weird sometimes i don't know i've lived outside of the u.s long enough that i have a lot of distance from it and it feels like an other place but much less than the america thing this This to me just feels much more like a small town kind of place. Right. That's what actually feels like the real difference. And it's like small towns, you know, everybody knows everybody else. And like the police department has a blood feud with some family because you know because of a cousin who married

into the police department and oh yeah like this is how this whole thing kicks off it's like one of the distant aviaries who who doesn't get along with them marries into the police department it's like this is the problem with small places like they're just they're incestuous in this way it's like everybody's connected to everybody else and that can be great when things go well but it can be terrible when things go wrong this to me is the the flip side like the dark side of a small community and that's what i view is the real difference i don't feel like oh it's america it's more just like oh god it's a small town and these are all the things that are creepy and weird about small towns and so that that's that's how i feel about this i remember really early on getting really excited though

because quite early in the show they mentioned sheboygan oh yeah i'd never heard of sheboygan until during our postcard count when you one of the first postcards you pulled out was from sheboygan wisconsin i remember you made a little joke about it right and i was like i never heard of that place that's quite funny and then really early on sheboygan came up and i'm like oh i know where sheboygan is oh you look at you big man on campus i'm sure there's some name for the effect where you've never heard of a word or a place before and then it starts popping up a few times that you'll know there is there is there's some name for the effect where you've never heard of a word or a place before, and then it starts popping up a few times that you'll know. There is.

There is. There's totally a word for that. Yeah. Well, I got that. There you go. All right. Making a murderer. Quite a clever name for the show, isn't it?

Because what does making a murderer mean? That's a good name, wasn't it? Right. Did they, is it just like making like the police make someone for the crime or did they make a murderer out of him by how he was treated earlier? Or did they make him into a murderer with fake evidence? It's got lots of meanings, that title,

hasn't it? Yeah. They're manufacturing a murderer. That's the title.