Hello Internet - H.I. #58: Hawk & Mouse
Episode Date: February 29, 2016Brady and Grey discuss: Brady visits Derek, greyhound corner, the UK/EU referendum, and problems with YouTube's content ID system and freeboot depression. Brought to You By Hover: The best way to ...buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code 'React' for 10% off Harry's: Quality Men's Shaving Products. Promocode HI for $5 off your first purchase Squarespace: Use code HELLO for 10% off your website Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes Discuss this episode on the reddit Jim Carrey in Brazil Derek of Veritasium Brady taking advantage of Derek's pointless recklessness Michael of Vsauce Americapox Part 2 Bookmakers urged to boost their contribution to greyhound welfare lulu the greyhound crash Lulu's fundraiser for the Retired Greyhound Trust UK/EU independence referendum EU Flag GradeAunderA: Everything That's Wrong with YouTube Part 1 GradeAunderA: Everything That's Wrong with YouTube Part 2 I Hate Everything: copyright problems Nostalgia Critic: Where's The Fair Use? Your Movie Sucks: YouTube's Content ID System SUCKS Grey's Facebook page Numberphile's Facebook page
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I just feel after every section now it's like,
I wonder if that'll make it.
Probably not.
Why do you think that, Brady?
But that's also why I'm so confused about things I've talked about before
on the podcast.
Because there are things I've talked about and you've cut.
And then like a few weeks later,
I might have like a second bite of the cherry
and see if I can get it through this time.
It's like when your parents say no to something and then you ask them a few weeks later.
I sometimes feel like that with topics on the podcast.
It's like, oh, grey cutter.
I wonder if I get away with it next week.
This feels like the episode that nearly didn't happen.
Yeah, because you are in California, which is awful for many time zone reasons we have
gone over before.
It's impossible to record, but it is nighttime for me and very early morning for Brady, as
far as I understand.
Grey, Grey, you know where I am and you know I want to hear you say it.
Say it.
Just say it for me.
You're in San Francisco, Brady,
at the spiritual home of Numberphile. Yeah. It's Berkeley. Oh, is it Berkeley? I didn't know. I
didn't know that it was Berkeley. My mistake. You are there so often, it feels like. Maybe you
should just tell me when you are not at the spiritual home of Numberphile. Let me know when
you're in England. Let me know when you're not there.
I know, as I was saying to you,
I've recorded so many episodes here
that it should be the spiritual home of Hello Internet.
I actually haven't spoken to you
since you took delivery of the package
of classic and pro flags for signing.
Oh yeah, yeah.
I was just wondering what you thought of the flags
when you finally touched them
and handled them for the first time.
I was quite impressed with the flags that you were able to get made. I have to say,
they were extremely quality feeling in the hands. Yeah, I thought they were nice. Yeah,
nice and nice and thick. You know, they felt like real, like this is a flag that is going to be
flown somewhere. But the one thing I was wondering is, I'm sure, have you kept one for us, Brady?
Because I was thinking, I got this whole big package of flags, and I'm signing them for people
and sending them off. I took them off to the post office. But as I was going through the package and
signing all the flags one by one, I thought, is there going to be a flag for me? I didn't actually
order one, but I was just wondering, like, oh, I'm getting to the bottom of this. I don't think there's a flag for me.
Well, we have a slight conundrum here because I sort of pre-ordered a batch and then the orders
came in from people that wanted these. They're quite expensive. So, I wasn't expecting a lot
of orders. Yeah, the pro flags.
Yeah. But there was only one pro flag left at the end. So unless I
have more made, there's only one and there's obviously two of us. And basically, I kept it
for myself. Cut a long story short. I just didn't think it I didn't think what would you do with it?
You would it's not like you'd put it up in your house or it would just I didn't think you'd want
one. And I thought you'd be happy just knowing I had one. I am happy, Brady, Because if there was one in the box, I would have thought, oh, that's really lovely.
I'll give this to Brady for safekeeping.
But you already kept one.
And I don't know why, it didn't even cross my mind that you would already have one in
your little Brady clutches.
I was just thinking like, oh, we must have just sent them all out.
But no, we didn't, of course.
So yes, I would have just, I would have looked at it admiringly for a few moments and then
sent it right back to you for safekeeping.
Well, I have got one.
So if we ever have another sort of public event,
like a Darth Vader event or something,
we have one that can be sort of flown over the event or something if necessary.
If necessary. If necessary.
I think that is absolutely necessary.
Yeah.
This is going to be in our rider whenever we do events in the future,
that the flag must be flown above whatever venue we are going to be at.
All right.
And if one of us ever shuts down one of our YouTube channels,
it has to be flown at half-mast and things like that.
Yes.
And we would request that all of the Hello Internet flags around the world
be flown at half-mast if one of the channels gets shut down.
Or I guess on the inevitable day when one
of us dies first. Suddenly this is feeling quite morbid, but yes. When you inevitably die before
I do, Brady, I really hope that everybody puts the flag at half mast. That would be the respectful
thing to do. I wonder if your wife would see the funny side if you died and at your funeral,
I gave her like a folded up nail and gear flag i think a more touching thing could not happen breeding um sorry man i'm having this
weird mental image of being at your funeral now i'm gonna get that out of my head hello internet
suddenly serious i've actually taken the pro and the classic off the market temporarily because it was just such a faff packaging them and signing them and then sending them to you for signing.
And like, even though they're quite pricey, I still thought this is like taking loads of time and effort.
And this is why listeners of the Hello Internet podcast might notice that anytime there's a one-off thing that happens, one of us, the Brady of us, is the one who always
handles it. So anytime something goes up on eBay, anytime there's flags for sale. You recently did
like a special run of t-shirts on like Teespring that was separate. You did the two animals
t-shirts on Teespring. Everything that's a one-off is really a brady off
because i will not touch one-off things with a hundred foot pole because i just i hate how much
of a faff they are and like you say it is always so much more of a faff than you think it's going
to be yeah even if it's something simple like oh, oh, someone's going to send me flags, and then I'm just going to pass them on. It's always so much more of a pain than
you think it's going to be. And my own experience was, you know, when I first started doing the
crowd fundraising thing, one of the rewards that I did was I did these handwritten postcards that
I was sending out to people. While they were really fun to do, and while people always had me write really funny things,
or sometimes quite touching things actually in the postcards, like wishing people happy
graduations and all these other kinds of things, I eventually had to stop it because it was
just like this flag problem of like, man, this takes up a surprising amount of time
to do these things individually and to send them off to the post
office. And so that was my lesson in scalability. I will touch no projects that cannot scale
automatically. But I'm very happy to work with you, Brady, because you like to handle the one
off stuff. You'll complain, but you'll still do it. You're still having to handle them though,
because you had to take them all out and unfold them and sign them and fold them back up and put them in their envelopes. So I did it for the nation, Brady. It was our flags. I was happy to
do it. But still, you handled the bulk of it. And I felt like the least I could do was eventually
get around to sending them out. I have to say, I mean, it's not like we get asked for our signatures
a lot, but I'm always reluctant to not sign something if I meet someone. In fact,
I would never not sign something if I met someone because I remember when I have asked people for
signatures and the ones who have refused and the ones who haven't, and it's burned in my memory to
this day, how much it meant to me when I met my favorite cricketer and he agreed to sign something
for me. And I also remember the people who said no. Who said no? Who was the most heartbreaking, Brady?
It's okay. You can share with the group.
I'd rather not go into the no's actually. It's too painful a memory.
Fair enough. Fair enough, man. You'll share when you're ready.
I'm still in autograph refusal counselling.
It's a traumatic event. It's a traumatic It's a traumatic event
Did I ever tell the podcast the story about
When I met my cricket hero
I don't know, I think so
But I don't know, it's been too long, you tell it again anyway
So my cricket hero
Who was a wicket keeper for the West Indies cricket team
Called Jeff Dujon
And he'd retired from cricket by this point And he was now a coach Indies cricket team called Jeff Dujon. And he'd retired from cricket by this point.
And he was now a coach of the cricket team.
And that cricket team happened to be in Adelaide.
And I was working by this point.
And I took my lunch break off work
and I was dressed in my shirt and tie and everything.
And I went down to the cricket practice
where they were training
so that when they came out of the training session,
I could try and ask for his autograph.
And he was rushing from one place to another
and he was refusing everyone
and going past all the autograph collectors.
And I called out to him and I said,
Jeff, can you sign this cricket card for me?
And he sort of just sort of shook his head and kept going.
And then I looked at him and I said,
Jeff, I've come here in my lunch break
and I like held up my tie,
like I grabbed my tie and held up
and showed him my tie as proof grabbed my tie and held up and showed him my tie
as proof and he looked me up and down and he saw I was dressed in like work attire and then I just
put on this pleading face and I said you're my boyhood hero and he just caved and he came over
and signed my card and the minute he did that a hundred other people came running over and lined
up and he had to sign all their things as well.
But you know what?
I love him for it.
And I still remember it.
I still remember that he like, he heard me out and I made my case and he thought, okay,
you've sold me on it.
And he did me a solid.
See, I'm pretty sure that you have told this story on the podcast before now, because I
remember this.
I've definitely told you the story.
I just don't know if I've told it on the podcast.
Well, we'll hear about it in the comments if we have but it just reminds me again
of just how how sympathetic i am though to celebrities who don't want to sign autographs
you you do hear from people all the time you know these stories that are burned into their mind of
oh yes i asked this person for for a signature and they said no. I don't know. I always just feel
conflicted about these things. But people sometimes feel really resentful about that.
But the bigger the celebrity is, the more it is definitely like, but you don't understand how much
of a problem it can be for that person, right? Where it's like, it's not just you, it's everywhere
they go all the time. And then immediately once they start signing something,
it's like other people are going to come up. And it can literally be a scenario like they could be
stuck there for hours signing. People are always gauging this on, boy, I would love to be asked to
sign my name on something once in a public situation. And they're not thinking about it
from the scenario of the celebrity. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but there's a video that I think is the best example of what being a celebrity is like.
And it's a video that Jim Carrey took in Brazil where he's beneath that giant Jesus statue. Have
you seen this video? No, no.
Okay, it's astounding because it's Jim Carrey and he's filming himself, he's filming his face,
and he says something like,
oh, I'm here in Brazil beneath the gigantic Jesus statue. And he has the camera panned out so you're
looking at the view, but then he just slowly turns around so that he's now facing the monument.
And what you just see behind him is just a sea of people crushed right up against him.
All of them have their phones out filming him. That to me is like the most clear example of
showing that like celebrity at a certain level is just scary. As you can see, like he's crushed up
against the edge of this monument and there's just like this crowd of people who just want to get close to him.
And it's like, man, everywhere Jim Carrey goes, it must be like this all the time.
It must be just awful.
So that's why if you see a celebrity, leave them alone.
That's my advice, people.
It is always kind of packed up there anyway, but I do want to see that video.
I'll have to send it to you.
It's super weird.
It's super creepy.
All right.
So while I have been here for two weeks, I did go to LA on the weekend.
Oh, I'm sorry.
It was good.
I went and hung out with Dirk from Veritablium and we had a great time.
Oh, Derek from Veritasium?
That would be worth going to LA for.
It was Duke date weekend.
Really? A date weekend, huh? Well, I'm away and Mrs. Dirk was away. It was just the fellas. Yeah. I got there
and Dirk was like, let's go riding on bicycles, like down to, you know, Venice beach. And cause
everyone's all outdoorsy and that. And I'm a little bit ashamed of what I'm about to say, but
we had, Dirk had a bike and, uh, we had to borrow another one from his neighbour.
But we only had one helmet between us.
And the LA roads are kind of crazy and we were going to be riding on all these main roads.
Yeah, that's not a good idea.
Yeah.
And I'd just gotten off the plane.
Of course, I can ride a bike quite capably, but I don't ride bikes often.
And especially I don't ride them on LA roads.
And I was a bit like, oh, I don't know if I want to ride a bike without a helmet.
So even though it was, I'll switch to Derek, even though it was Derek's helmet, when he
did offer to let me wear it, I did not take the hardest nails option and I took the helmet.
And the funny thing was, we then like posted a couple of selfies on Twitter and people were like condemning Derek for not wearing a helmet.
And he'd given me his helmet.
He'd sacrificed his helmet for me.
And he still copped it for being not safe.
So anyone who saw those pictures and thinks that Derek was being unsafe
and doesn't wear a helmet,
he was sacrificing his pretty face and amazing brain for my inferior face and brain yeah but he should
catch flack for that because he was being unsafe i don't care if he normally wears a helmet that's
still dumb derrick you listening to this wear a f***ing helmet when you're riding your bike what
the hell's wrong with you man if i'm ever gonna visit you LA, I can't do it if you're dead. I love it when you get all mumsy and protective.
I'm not being mumsy. It's just stupid. It's just ridiculously stupid.
Disappointed in you, Derek. I'm really disappointed.
And then like within five minutes, he was pulling out his phone and sending text messages while we
were riding along as well. It was crazy. I don't even want to hear this. I don't even want to know.
This is just... I told him off for that.
Oh, yeah. That's where you draw the line, right? You're happy to take his helmet away,
his skull protector, but the instant he gets on his phone with text messages,
oh, that's over the line now for Brady. Suddenly Brady gets protective now.
There was a very funny moment, though, when we were riding along. You know, there's those, like,
paths on the beach so you can ride along the beach?
It was all very lovely.
And we were planning on seeing Michael that night of Vsauce fame.
So we had to call him up.
So as we were riding along, we called him up on speakerphone
and we were riding side by side while Michael's voice was blasting out of the phone and we were
like both talking to him like looking at the phone and it did occur to me that if there was like a
bystander who was like really into educational YouTube videos they would they would have thought
was that Brandy and Derek just riding past and were they watching a Vsauce video
because it was just Michael's voice blaring out of his phone.
And Michael sounds so much like Michael in his videos, too.
He's like, he's so the same person.
That was definitely my takeaway the first time meeting Michael was.
When you meet someone who does a YouTube channel, there's always a moment of calibrating in your brain the difference between them on camera and them just in real life but i
have never met anyone as close to themselves on and off camera as michael like when you like if
you're ever in a room with him and he's talking to someone behind you it your brain can't help
but always think like is someone just playing a vsauce video i swear someone's playing a vsauce
video on their phone it's like oh no i'm just in a room with Michael. He's just a few paces behind me talking to someone else.
That's what's going on. It was fun. But we also, I mean, we really lived the Fitatron lifestyle.
We went bike riding the first day and then we walked up a mountain. We went up to the Hollywood
sign, sweating up the hill. There was kind of a very ironic moment when we got to the top of this ridge.
There was a left turn or a right turn. And the left turn would take you to this thing called
the Wisdom Tree. And the right turn would take you to the Hollywood sign. And we so went Hollywood.
I said, there's something so ironic being with you here, Derek, choosing between Wisdom and
Hollywood. He's moved to Hollywood, though. Derek has chosen Hollywood. I know.
He's definitely the most Hollywood.
We also did go to the wisdom tree,
but that's because it was only 100 meters away.
But did it impart wisdom?
I imagine it didn't.
I imagine it was just a tree.
It did not.
I did not feel any wiser.
I don't know why.
It's not like the tree of the knowledge of good and evil up on the mount.
No.
The tree of good and evil is not on a mount.
Good and evil is the tree in the garden of
eden and there's the burning bush up on mount sinai we got to get you back to sunday school
man my sunday school teacher will be so disappointed i really liked going up to the
hollywood sign did you uh like in the movies they always end up sitting on top of one of the letters
did you and derek sit on top one of the letters and hold hands and you know yeah funnily enough
that's not really how it works when you actually get there.
Really?
You can only look at it from behind through a huge mesh fence.
And it's like disappointing, but it was disappointing in a way I liked.
I liked sort of the grittiness and seeing like the ladders on the back of it.
It's actually made of like corrugated iron, like wavy corrugated iron.
And then when we got to the summit, there was a viewer. I loved it because he said, oh, you do Numberphile. And then he tried to say
Veritasium and couldn't say it. And he was wearing a Speedmaster. So we ended up just
talking about Speedmasters. I was at the Hollywood sign talking with a Numberphile viewer, talking
about Speedmasters. That was that. I couldn't have been happier. And he got Derek's name wrong.
And he got Derek's name wrong. Derek wanted to look at a couple of open houses because I think he's looking at sort of dabbling with some real estate. So, then he and I just went around to
open houses together. Like, people were coming up to us saying, well, so what are you guys looking
for? Yes, this really was a date weekend. Two young guys in love looking to buy a house together.
He was a super host.
I'll tell you what, he went above and beyond the call of duty.
He basically chauffeured me around, took me for nice meals,
wined and dined me.
Derek knows how to show someone a good time, huh?
He was.
He was fantastic.
But I'm not going to stop calling him Dirk.
Can only go so far.
So, Gray, I really strongly, strongly think it's time that we do some follow-up on guns, germs, and steel.
No, no, no.
Okay, listen, listen.
I know I've dug myself into this corner here.
Listen, people, we will do follow- on Guns, Germs and Steel.
I swear.
Each time we've been preparing for the show, I look at all of these notes and all of these links that I have.
And I just feel like I again, I just can't even like I have to load all of this stuff into my brain before I can even remotely talk about it.
But at least this time I have an excuse.
I have an excuse to put it off because actually by the time this podcast will be up, I will have probably put up the second part of the
video. So at least then, okay, we'll just get it all over at once next time. But we're not going
to do it this time. You're not going to drag me into it, Brady. People will have just seen the
other video maybe, God, I hope so, by the time this podcast goes up. But I'm not getting into it now. I'm not getting into it.
I love when people put things off and it just piles up.
Yeah, it gets worse every time because you keep putting it off.
It's twice as hard next time.
I lived with this mate of mine and we used to like not do the dishes until like there was not a single dish left in the house.
And then we would have dishes day
where we would put on music and just do the dishes together.
And I thought that was really funny.
And I was telling this mate of mine about it.
And he said, that's nothing.
He had these mates whose house he used to go to all the time.
And they were like real slobby university mates.
They never did their dishes.
But my mate used to always sleep on their couch and use their house.
So he felt a bit guilty, like he owed them something.
So one day he looked at their kitchen and thought,
and there was dishes piled like almost to the ceiling.
Like they were just going out and buying more dishes rather than cleaning dishes.
And things were getting caked on.
And it was like, he said it was unbelievable.
So he said, I'm going to do these guys a favor and really surprise them for letting me stay in their house. And he spent all
day, pulled his sleeves up and spent all day scrubbing these dishes, like chiselling food
off them practically. He says he spent four or five hours washing these dishes and then piled
them up all gleaming in the kitchen. And these guys came home and he
sort of said, I've cleaned all your dishes. And they're like, no way. And he's like, yep,
it took me four or five hours, but I've done it. And they were like, you did all the dishes. And
he said, yeah. And they didn't believe it. And they went into the kitchen and they said, did
you do all the dishes? And he said, yeah, I did all of them. And they said, even the ones in the
laundry. And he went into the laundry.
And there were four or five times more dishes piled up in the laundry.
They'd filled up the kitchen with dirty dishes and started moving them to the laundry.
And there were four or five times more dishes again, just caked in food, piled in the laundry.
And my friend just said, I'm not doing those ones and walked away.
Okay, what the hell is wrong with people? Okay. Listen, it's like,
okay. There's only two things to do in that scenario. You buy disposable plates that you
can throw out, paper plates, plastic utensils, just buy them. It's so cheap to buy them.
Or you have a dishwasher. There shouldn't be anything in the middle of these two options.
If you don't have a dishwasher, and you're
going to be moving plates
into another room for long-term
storage, just buy disposable
ones.
They did throw those ones away,
the ones in the laundry, and in the end they just went out the back
and smashed them and put them in the bin.
So they were disposable ones. They just bought the expensive
disposable ones that are made of real
dish material.
Today's episode is brought to you by Hover.
Use offer code REACT to get 10% off your first purchase by going to hover.com.
Hover.com is the premier seller of domain names on the internet.
It's the first place I go to whenever I have an idea for a new
project and I want to make sure that I grab the domain name as fast as possible. I know you have
some idea for something in your head right now. Grab the domain name at Hover before somebody else
does. Hover takes all the hassle and confusion out of registering a domain. They give you easy
to use tools to manage that domain so anyone can do it. It's simple enough to use that you'll be
comfortable figuring it out yourself. But if you don't want to bother, there's a support team
that's always ready to give you a hand. And they have services like their valet service, which will automatically transfer your
domains from any other vastly inferior providers you might have used in the past. In less than five
minutes, you can find the domain name you want and get it up and running. All you have to do is
search for a few keywords and Hover will show you the best options available. Hover doesn't believe
in heavy handed upselling. There's no boxes to
untick so that they don't charge you extra stuff. They throw in Whois privacy for free because they
believe that your private information should stay private. They're just a great service all around.
I've said before, just look at Hover's website. Just go to hover.com and look at the nice way
that it is designed. It tells you
everything you need to know about them. So once again, go to hover.com and use the code
REACT at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for Hello Internet.
Greyhound Corner? Greyhound Corner, anyone? Is this your other corner? Greyhound Corner?
Greyhound Corner, yeah this is this your other corner greyhound corner greyhound
corner yeah is that can that be a corner can i stop it from being a corner i think not you know
i love greyhounds do you do you like greyhounds uh i like lulu greyhound seems like like if you
and i were going to get behind a dog if there was going to be an official dog of hello internet
it would feel like it would be the greyhound because I have one and they have Grey in their name. It seems like a no-brainer.
Or is that too obvious? I mean, I would never get a Greyhound, but Lulu's very lovely.
I wonder if anyone has named a Greyhound CGP Greyhound.
It seems inevitable now, now that you've mentioned it. It's only a matter of time.
Well, greyhounds have been a little bit in the news lately and on my mind.
Why is that? I read a story yesterday that has outraged me, Grey.
Outrage, huh? It's about the gambling industry,
which makes a boatload of money from greyhound racing. And the greyhound racing industry is not
something I particularly approve of. But obviously, these dogs, when their racing days finish,
traditionally have been treated very poorly.
Sometimes they have just been put down.
It's pretty terrible, isn't it?
That's terrible, is it?
Yeah, I'm going to agree with you that putting down dogs after their racing days are over
is not a good thing.
Greyhound racing is just something that's really weird about it.
I agree. I agree.
I grew up in a place where there was horse racing, which I'm sure is not exactly like
a pleasant industry. But for some reason, when you grow up near-ish or hearing of a thing,
it just seems more normal. And I never saw a greyhound race until I came to the UK.
And that was the first time I said, I can't remember where it was. There's some big
greyhound racetrack that closed down a few years ago. And I went there with some friends because
they were fans of it. And it was one of the last races. But anyway, so I saw greyhound racing.
It was just a strange thing to see these dogs that have been bred to be like cheetahs racing.
It's like it's made up too, isn't it?
It's like, you're right.
For some reason, maybe it's just conditioning.
Horse racing kind of seems normal.
And then it's like, you would make up for a joke.
Oh, we could race dogs or we could race.
And then, but no, we wouldn't really do that.
But they do do that.
Right.
I'm sure.
It's probably got a history longer than horse racing for all I know, but it does seem strange.
Yeah.
But not only that, it's like, oh, we're going to super breed these dogs to be amazing runners like we're going
to stretch we're going to stretch their biology as far as we can to turn them into running machines
so there is there is though this sort of uh retiredhound industry, well not an industry, it's a charity, where they
take these dogs after they've finished their racing days and they re-home them. That is where Lulu
comes from. Lulu was a racing dog. Lulu raced, had a semi-successful racing career. She was retired.
She went off to a retired greyhound trust that had the job of finding a home
for Lulu and Lulu found a home with us. The retired greyhound industry is funded by the racing
industry itself. And at the moment, there's a lot going on in the parliament and in the media about
the betting industry not giving enough, or in some cases, not giving any money to retired racing greyhounds they've basically
they have a voluntary levy and the amount they're giving to this it to the uh retired greyhounds has
fallen by nearly 50 in the past decade despite the profits being in the hundreds of millions of
pounds i mean i guess the companies that are running the racetracks or whatever, they have signed up for a policy of self-regulation.
They say, oh, don't worry, we'll choose to donate a certain amount of money towards the continued care of greyhounds.
Like, is that the current state of things?
Like, they're just opting to do it?
That's my reading of it.
It does seem like it's basically a public relations thing.
I mean, obviously, the greyhound racing industry can get a slap a lot for the treatment
of dogs, quite rightly. And I think for PR reasons, they have these things in place.
And if you go to a greyhound, I have been to a greyhound racing event as well. They always have
like a section halfway through where they'll parade a couple of retired greyhounds and they'll
talk about the retired greyhound trust. So it's obviously sort of a diffusing PR tactic to say we support these dogs afterwards. But that support is clearly waning.
There's one gambling, according to this article, there's one very famous gambling company in the
UK called Betfair. And they announced a few years ago that they were stopping their voluntary
contribution of 800,,000 a year.
I think this is outrageous. I read this article last night and I was so angry and I thought,
oh, people need to know this. I wish more people knew it. And if only I had some way that I could
tell lots of people about this. And then it sort of occurred to me, oh, I do a podcast with CGP Grey.
Maybe I'll mention it there. And I don know i don't know you know i don't i
don't know what i want to happen or people to do but i just want to say this is outrageous
greyhounds are wonderful wonderful animals and this makes me angry so do you think that the
the betting company should be required to pay for the greyhounds end of life or rehousing or what like what do you think is the
ideal outcome here i think they should be forced and this is what's being debated in parliament i
think making this sort of levy and payment compulsory and not just a voluntary pr thing
i think the people who are making all this money out of the greyhounds should be doing more to re rehome them and i think if this company like i think if the
industry is making 237 million pounds out of greyhounds i think a reasonable chunk of that
should be going towards making sure that these greyhounds have a nice life afterwards and don't
just get killed and have their ear cut off so that people can't see the tattoo in the greyhound's ear and know who killed it.
That's not unreasonable, is it?
Okay, so I got a couple of questions here.
Go ahead.
I probably won't have the answers.
I'm just like stirred up by an article.
Stirred up.
No answers to anything.
Yeah.
That's how internet anger works, isn't it?
It's outrageous.
The bare minimum of facts maximum emotion right exactly
i love dogs i have one of these dogs yeah no that this is like this is like i do i have been
following this for a while i've gone to greyhound charity events and um we've been very involved in
patronage for retired greyhounds so i this is very close to my heart, obviously. It seems to have
just bubbled to the surface a bit lately. There's been a few stories going around about
mistreatment of the dogs and, you know, abandoned dogs found with this ear missing and things like
that. And it's got me stirred up. The thing to me that this immediately strikes me as is
an externality. In economics, there's a cost that a company doesn't want to bear,
but they are a
producer of that cost so it's like okay so you have this industry which churns through the greyhounds
but then they don't want to pay for the retirement of the greyhounds right but they want to take all
of the profits from the prime life of the greyhounds and it's like okay i am anti-externality
in general because then you're not incorporating like the full cost
of the thing and like externalities are bad but what i'm just but it's occurred to me as you're
talking though is who owns the greyhounds during their racing life like presumably the betting
companies don't own the greyhounds no no they're owned by they're owned by breeders and there are
people who race them and for whom and these people these are also under the cosh. It's not like I'm talking about the betting industry,
because I guess the betting industry, I think, make the most money. I think they make more than
the breeders. And also the betting industry seem to be the ones who are in the firing line at the
moment. Whether that's because they're the ones who are reneging on their commitment and the
breeders are not reneging, I don't know if that's the case or not. I don't know the current status
of whether the breeders are doing their bit. And so it's the bedding industry that are getting
slapped around. But you are quite right. These are bred by people who race greyhounds for a living.
And I believe they have obligations in this area as well. I'm not saying that it's just the bedding
industry that is responsible. But the bedding industry is what drives this industry. Like, if the betting on
greyhounds ended tomorrow, I think greyhound racing would end within a year. Yeah, yeah,
that's why. But I was just wondering, like, who are the players here? And it just occurred to me,
like, it seems unlikely that the company, you know, again, I don't know anything about this,
but just thinking through, like, okay, someone else must own these dogs.
The players are the breeders, the tracks and the entertainment around them, the people who, you know, sell beers and meals to people who can watch it.
The betting industry, presumably TV and media, although I don't know how much that is supplementing the gambling and how much people just watch for the fun of it.
But there are multiple stakeholders here who are extracting value to use a grayism from the dogs.
And I think they should put some value into their retirement.
If you were emperor for a moment here, would you allow the greyhound racing industry to exist and you get to determine what percentage should go to happy
greyhound retirement? Or if you were emperor, would you ban greyhound racing?
Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, obviously, because I have a greyhound that I love,
like, I'm glad that the industry existed before because it brought Lulu into existence. So,
but if I was emperor and became emperor tomorrow,
that would put me in a very interesting conundrum.
That's why I'm asking.
I don't know.
My first instinct was to say, stop it.
But if I was emperor and all-powerful,
I mean, I see how much pleasure Lulu gets from running.
She's never happier than when she's running really fast.
She was bred to love that. But I mean, if I was emperor and I could have every, every dog
pampered and on a big velvet pillow eating its favourite pig's ears and then do one race a week
and then get a nice pat afterwards and lots of people watch it and enjoy it and then they have these amazing retirements and i mean if the level if the level of care was like luxury spa in vegas level
and i'm emperor so i can dictate that well you can dictate a percentage of the company's money
that has to be spent on the greyhounds right greyhound welfare right you can't i mean unless
you're going to start taxing people to just take care of greyhounds, like you're taxing the whole nation.
I think you might then have some problems on your hands there.
But you could say like, oh, 50% of your profits have to go into greyhound luxury services.
Like that's what you can do.
Part of me says, stop it.
You know, we shouldn't be using animals in this way.
But I ate meat and I don't know, grey.
I don't know.
That's a really good question.
I think if I became emperor tomorrow, I would phase out greyhound racing.
I've been to greyhound racing before.
I've even bet on greyhound races.
So there is a hypocrisy there.
But I think I would be comfortable phasing it out over time.
Yeah, even if it meant that greyhounds ceased to exist eventually?
I'm willing to be a bit grey rational about that
and say that if people like the dogs and breed them,
they'll continue, and if they don't,
they won't, sort of survival of the fittest maybe, I don't know.
I love the idea of survival of the fittest
as though there's any kind of natural selection with dog breeds.
That's true.
It's like, this is the world's most privileged example.
It's like, it's more like survival of the cutest or survival of the most,
survival of the most appealing to humans.
Yeah. Or at least appealing to a subsection of humans, right? Like this is, this is the
most anti-natural selection that there can possibly be. As long as there remains a small
group of humans that are extremely dedicated
to greyhound breeding, like there will still exist greyhounds. I have got another greyhound dilemma.
Oh yeah? On a recent holiday, Lulu was running on the beach. Lulu loves running on the beach.
That is her nirvana. And I was filming her with my iPhone and I was filming her in slow motion
so that I could watch some great, glorious, majestic footage of her running along the beach.
And she was running towards me at absolute top speed.
And there was a puddle in like on the beach that she couldn't see.
And I was oblivious to it as well because the water was very clear and still.
And when she stepped into this puddle she had the most spectacular crash you you could
imagine she i mean you've seen the footage of it see she smashed down head first onto her neck
she rolled onto her back she slid for about two or three meters on her back across the wet sand
audrey audrey my little chihuahua who was, had to leap out of the way because she was about to get cleaned up like a skittle by a bowling ball.
And for a split second, I thought Lulu had broken her neck and was going to die.
But straight away, Lulu jumped up, shook the sand and water out of her coat,
wagged her tail and was ready for more running.
She was absolutely fine.
And as soon as I realised she was fine and ready for action,
the thought also occurred to me,
I just filmed this in slow motion.
And I looked up to my wife with a smile on my face.
She was just completely distraught and worried that Lulu was hurt.
And I just looked at my wife and said,
I've got that on film.
What a good dog owner.
And she was a bit disappointed.
She was like, oh, all you care about is filming.
And I said, look, she's absolutely fine.
She's wagging her tail.
She wants to run.
We put her on the lead for 10 minutes
because we were worried that maybe she shouldn't run.
But she just wanted off the lead.
She wanted to run.
She was absolutely fine.
This happened a number of months ago.
And I am yet to do anything with this footage other than show it to a few of my friends.
Because part of me now feels like it would be wrong of me to take advantage of, like, her mishap.
I've been, like, I've been torn about whether I should, like, put this up on YouTube for people to look at and have a laugh at.
Or I should just, like, save Lulu's embarrassment.
Lulu's not going to be embarrassed.
No, no, I know.
Of course she's not.
I know she's a dog, but I felt a bit torn about it.
But I think maybe the time has come to put it on YouTube.
And I just want you to hold my hand here for a minute and tell me it's okay.
It's okay because Lulu is fine. And I have never seen a more magnificent filming of anything, human or animal, tripping up and just totally crashing in the way that she does in that video. the very fact of poor little Audrey realizing what's occurring and running to get out of the
way and just making it, the video is just perfect in every way that it could be. You have to put
this up on YouTube. It is going to be a free boot central when I do it, isn't it? Yeah, without a
doubt, it's going to be everywhere immediately. But it's amazing the fact that it's like, it would
be a great video if it was just a regular video. The fact that you happen to be filming in slow motion when this occurred, it's like winning the lottery.
It's filming something like that.
You have to put it up.
Maybe I should put it up and somehow do it for the Greyhounds.
Do it for the Greyhounds.
Whatever you got to tell yourself, man.
Just get this up on YouTube.
You're going to do it for the Greyhounds.
You're going to donate the money that's raised from that to the Greyhound trust or whatever man just like put it up put it up it's
great yeah for the greyhounds sure whatever you can sign off on your conscious with that one i do
secretly want people to see it because it's so amazing but yeah of course you do and i've been
hearing about this for months now right it occasionally comes up you're like should i put
that video up just just do it go look. Look, here's the thing.
You know now we're doing this podcast.
I promise you, Brady, I won't cut out this part.
So this is going to go up.
And then people are going to harangue you for it if it's not in the show notes.
So you have to put it up now.
Okay? But is this its moment?
Or is this a chance just to build up more anticipation?
Because now it will be disappointing. I mean, even Grey bigged it up now okay but is is this its moment or is this a chance just to build up more anticipation because now it will be disappointing i mean even gray bigged it up i'm giving you what you want
which is that i am checkmating you into having to put this video up so that you can feel that you
don't have the responsibility of this you're doing it for the greyhounds right you're in the you're
in the moral clear on this one brady because because I'm putting it in the show. Thank you. Thank you.
You're a good friend.
I'm a good friend who bullies you when you need it.
You didn't bully me.
You just, you gave me what I needed.
This episode is brought to you by Harry's.
Harry's offers high quality razors and blades for a fraction of the price of the big razor brands. Harry's was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and
a leg. They make their own blades in their own factory in Germany. These are high quality,
high performing blades crafted by shaving experts. That's the kind of line that I just wouldn't believe if it was
anywhere other than Germany. But those Germans, they're just great engineers. Harry's will give
you a better shave that respects your face and your wallet. The best thing, of course, is that
you don't have to go to the pharmacy or the supermarket to buy those razor blades. They just
come to your door. You don't have to leave the house. And they're half the price.
It's the best.
They have a starter set, which is a great deal.
For $15, you get a razor, moisturizing shave cream or gel, and three razor blades.
When you need more blades, they're just $2 each or less.
They have great packaging, nice heavy handles, and classy designs.
So give them a try today.
Take a look at that starter set,
check it out, go to harrys.com and use the promo code HI to save $5 off your first purchase.
Thanks to Harry's for supporting the show.
The EU-UK referendum date has been set. I believe it's during the Glastonbury Music Festival,
which I intend to be at. So that is a spanner in the works if I intended to go to the polling
stations. I think it is June 23rd. And so yes, it is a in-out vote on whether or not the United
Kingdom should stay in the European Union or if it should leave.
Is it that cut and dry in or out? Or is it sort of a bit watered down and we're voting to consider leaving and there'll be more steps? Or is it really, you know,
black and white binary?
I attempted a little bit to look into this. And it just, with so many of these things,
it gets so complicated so fast. But my impression is that a vote on leaving the European Union would start
the mechanics of actually the UK leaving right it's not like boom on that day suddenly it's out
it's a bit like if the Scottish independence referendum had gone differently that would have
been the start of presumably a possibly multi-year long project
of Scotland to eventually become independent. And I'm guessing that the same kind of thing
is going to be the result of this vote one way or the other. But we seem to like to track
referendums and votes on this podcast. And so now this is another thing that is going to be coming
up, something that we can have on our radar for the future.
It's a great tragedy that Hello Internet is not in one of these podcast networks,
because if we were, we could have had a postcard referendum, let the people decide if we should
like withdraw from our network. Like we could have mirrored it like we did the flag referendum,
but that's not to be. There's not really anything Hello Internet can be in or out of.
So we haven't really got like something where we can sort of secede from.
No, that's because we are our own independent nation here, Brady, right?
We're not in any of these coalitions.
Yeah, we're a mighty nation.
So I think like there's a million questions about this.
I'm secretly hoping Gray's going to make a video, but I don't know if he will or not.
He doesn't tell me these things.
But the million dollar question is this.
Do you think the UK should be in or out?
Can you vote, by the way?
You know, that's actually a good question of if I can vote.
My current voting status is entirely based on this funny arrangement that the United
Kingdom and Ireland happens to have with their
citizens. Like it has nothing to do with the EU. If I was an Italian citizen living in the United
Kingdom, I would not be allowed to vote in national elections. But it actually never occurred
to me until you just asked now if I can vote. And I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not allowed to vote.
I don't know what the rules are. I may not be able to vote on this as
an Irish citizen in the UK. I can vote, by the way. I'm a fully fledged UK person. I have a UK
passport. Do you know how you're going to vote? I do not yet know how I'm going to vote. I'm very
unfamiliar with all the arguments, which I think are about to start in earnest now, I completely and utterly
reserve the right to change my mind. But if someone put a gun to my head right now and said,
Brady, vote, or I pulled the trigger, I would vote to stay in the EU.
Do you have any particular reasons why? Or is that just your gut feeling?
It's partly gut. And it's partly that I feel like some of the people who want to leave the eu perhaps
have a more insular i don't mean insular in like a in a judgmental way but they're more in the uk
they're a more insular person and they they see the eu as an external thing and that they don't
like because of my work i travel into the eu a lot I do business in the EU
I like the freedom of all of that
and I suspect if the UK was no longer in the EU
there would be just more barriers put up to that
not necessarily insurmountable barriers
you know there was a time when there was no EU
and business still happened
but it has become very easy
having the EU as one big thing
for someone in my position.
So, from a purely selfish perspective, I like being able to travel and do business in the EU
without much encumbrance. So, I think that's a good thing for me. What would be your feeling?
Okay. So, you were whispering before like, oh, you know, you're wondering if I'm going to make
a video about this. I don't like to talk about video projects, but I can say it's pretty likely that I will end up making a video on this topic. I mean, so here's the thing. Every
time I have looked into doing any kind of video on the EU, of which I have only done one that just
barely touched on anything, like the EU and its relationship with all of the member countries is just so incredibly complicated. And I used to be very much more pro-EU
than I am now after having looked into a whole bunch of stuff about it. Because looking into
the details of how the European Union operates, it's like, oh, a bunch of people I used to dismiss
as kind of crazy people about how the European Union is super undemocratic. Like when you actually dig into all of the details
about how the whole system works, you go like, you know, it kind of is an undemocratic governmental
body. Like they just have so many weird ways that so many unelected people make decisions. So I do not dismiss the criticism of the EU out of hand.
It's just the whole thing is very, very complicated.
It's definitely also, aside from its kind of overriding structure,
it is a very flawed body.
I certainly could criticize things the EU do and the wastefulness
and things like
that until the cows come home. But like you say, maybe that's not the core argument. I don't know.
The thing is, we're not getting a vote on changing that.
Right.
We're just getting a vote on leaving it.
Right. That's exactly it. Like, there's an in-out vote and there's like a superstructure that maybe
you like or maybe you don't like. And, you know, everybody has different feelings on this.
The slang term for this argument often is the shorthand where people talk about the United States of Europe,
where it seems like there's a general political movement towards more of a United States of Europe situation,
meaning that the various member countries are more unified in what they do,
as opposed to the current situation where they are less unified. It's tied up in all of this
complicated argument about like, what do you want the European Union to be? And do you want to
continue to be a member of that? I am definitely going to, over the next few weeks, and and dig into as much as I can of the argument for leaving because my natural
first response is like you if I had to vote today if someone just put a gun to my head
I would say the UK should stay in like that is my natural position on this. I think that leaving would be a mistake.
If I'm going to put together a video on this, I can't just take my natural response and then just
be like, here's all the reasons that we should stay in. So I am interested in seeking out and
trying to find all of the arguments for the opposite side of this. Should I take from this that you're leaning towards a video that will have more of a position
rather than just laying out the facts?
Like, should we expect a video where you come to a conclusion then?
That doesn't sound like a normal video you would make.
Yeah, well, here's the thing.
I can't say if the video comes to a conclusion without having actually done all of the research
ahead of time.
Like, I don't know, right? But let's imagine, right? Like, let's imagine a scenario in which my initial
thoughts of what I, you know, what I have gleaned about how the EU and the UK interact over the
years of living here, if my initial thoughts pan out to the way that I think they am, I would be
very comfortable making a video that explicitly said something like, the UK should stay in the EU.
If after I feel like I have done due diligence on this topic that I can back that, I'd be fine
making a video like that. But I don't know if that's the way that video is going to come out
until I actually research more into both my own side, which I don't know all that well,
and the opposing side, like it just,
I want to be able to look at this more
than just my initial reaction.
So I'm curious to try to find legitimate sources
on both sides for this.
But again, my initial impressions,
which internet may be very, very wrong.
But my feeling on this from everything I know about the UK and the EU
is it always seems like the UK has the best of everything when it comes to the European Union.
Like the UK has all of these exemptions from European laws that it doesn't like. The UK is
not involved in the monetary currency, so it doesn't have to deal with any of those problems.
The UK is not part of the Schengen Agreement.
So it has its own border control that is totally separate from the rest of the European Union.
It seems like all of the things that the kinds of people who want to leave the EU talk about,
it's like, but the UK already has a lot of that stuff.
Like it already has control of its own currency and borders and many of its own rules.
I don't see the potential gains of leaving outweighing the costs, like the benefit of
being integrated with the European Union, with the ability of being able to do business much
more easily. That's my initial thought on it. But I could be wrong, like there could be things that I'm not considering here. But those are my initial
thoughts as of right now. But like you say, as the weeks and the months go on, and people start
having more arguments about this, and I start looking into it more deeply, like I may change
my opinion on that. But I think my vote would be to stay in.
I'm assuming you don't like the EU flag.
It's just boring.
It's like a boring corporate flag.
That's why it is.
Like it could be a bank flag.
I don't know.
Just wanted to get you on the record there.
But, you know, I don't feel super passionately about it
because in some ways, like, isn't that its job, right?
Like it's a gigantic super national structure yeah like like if you if you said oh look if you said it looks oh it looks kind of
italian it wouldn't be doing its job would it yeah job number one is to be bland and inoffensive
it's like yeah we'll put a bunch of stars in a circle done right you know like what are you
gonna do and even you know they pick the most corporate of all colors, blue. In that respect, it deserves a design award.
Like, if someone said design a bland flag and someone came up with that,
like, they are meeting the brief.
Today's episode has been brought to you by Squarespace.
This must be the simplest way to create a beautiful landing page,
website, or online store.
They've got easy-to-use tools and templates.
Anyone, and templates. Anyone,
and I mean anyone, can create a stylish webpage that's easy to maintain. I use Squarespace myself both for my own blog and the daily website featuring our postcards from the Hello Internet
flag referendum so you can check them out as examples of what I mean when I say anyone,
even with my limited skills, can do it using Squarespace.
I think most people have an idea for a site or portfolio, some sort of project they'd like to
showcase online, and Squarespace is your ultimate solution. Now, for 10% off your first Squarespace
purchase, go to squarespace.com and use the offer code HELLO when you check out. Now, that offer
code not only helps us here at Hello Internet and you get
that 10% off, but there could be an additional benefit that I never thought of. Here's an email
that comes to me from Corey. Whatever, here it is. I've got it here in front of me. This is what
Corey said. Today on my way to work, my car broke down. The tow truck came and picked me up and drove
my car to the shop. He told me, I assume this is the driver of the tow truck,. The tow truck came and picked me up and drove my car to the shop. He told me,
I assume this is the driver of the tow truck, not the tow truck itself. He told me that it would
cost $175 to hook it up and $5 a mile to get it to the shop about 20 miles away. And all it should
have cost me $275. However, on the ride, he asked him what i did and i told him computer stuff his wife is opening her
own dog grooming business and needs a website and asked if i knew how i promptly filled him in about
squarespace.com and even gave him the promo codes for your podcast and 10 off he was so appreciative
of the help that he knocked off 25 and didn't charge me for the miles turning my $275 bill into a $150 bill so thanks to you and CGP for saving
me a hundred and twenty five dollars on my towing bill anyway there you go folks
spreading the word about Squarespace and our offer code could save you even more
money than you thought that's not guaranteed it only happened for Corey
but it's a nice story.
What is guaranteed is 10% off your first Squarespace bill
when you go to squarespace.com and use the offer code HALLOW.
Get that website started today.
And thanks to Squarespace for their support of HALLOW Internet.
Have you seen all of the kerfuffle over the YouTube system lately?
It seems like a lot of people are making videos about how they don't like how things are working at YouTube.
Have you been following this at all?
I followed it a little bit.
I mean, I've been living at grey.
We haven't talked about this.
Yeah.
But I've been at the center of a freebooting storm in the last week.
Oh, yes.
I had a video that I posted to YouTube, get Facebook freebooted, big style,
to such a point that it became a trending topic on YouTube.
I think it was the third biggest trending – no.
It was the third biggest trending topic on Facebook while I was just a victim.
Partly coincidentally, but well-timed, I was contacted by the Wall Street Journal that was doing an article about freebooting.
Oh, yeah?
And I was sort of recommended to them by the interviewees.
I don't think they sought me out.
No, I'm sure they sought you out as the world expert on freebooting.
Well, I'm not an expert on freebooting, but as the coiner of the word, as some people may
realize, I think I have a special place in the pantheon of freebooting. I was thinking the other
day though, like, you know how I like joke around, brag about how I came up with this word that's
taken off. Is that something one should brag about like if i invented the word murder would i be proud of
that maybe not maybe this isn't such a claim to fame i'm realizing maybe it's a claim to infamy
you know okay you know i it's like sometimes you say these things and I don't even know how to respond to what you're saying.
You really do.
It's just like you've thrown this Brady wrench into my brain and all of the gears are clogged up. My brain is trying to think like, okay, how do we explain to him that coining the word
is not the same thing as participating in the thing that the word is going?
But then another part of my brain is going, no, but he must understand that.
That does not need to be explained to me.
But what I'm saying is if you invented the word murder, would that be like a nice?
It's like if a disease gets named
after you. Like, is that like, that's not a good thing, is it? But see, like the very way you
phrase that just makes my brain go back to, he knows that it's not doing the thing, right? Like
Lou Gehrig didn't bring Lou Gehrig's disease to the world. It's named after Lou Gehrig.
No, exactly. But he's like forever associated with it.
Right.
Like, I think, I don't think people are there blaming Lou Gehrig. No, exactly. But he's like forever associated with it. Right. Like, I don't think people are there
blaming Lou Gehrig for this disease,
but he's associated with it.
And if we could bring him back
and ask him the question and say,
do you want this disease to be known
as Lou Gehrig's disease?
This is a bit different now
because it's actually named after the person,
but still there isn't a...
Yeah, this is the classic Brady maneuver
of taking something and
turning it into a vastly more extreme version of itself where it's like yeah i'm much more
i'm much more likely to agree here but if we go back to your original example of like
inventing the word murder how could anyone possibly possibly object to that like i invented
the word murder okay well done i mean no one really cares because you you would forever become associated with murder like when you looked up what is great about this
brady you know what is great about this when you talk about like forever associated with this
we've clearly come to the point long ago maybe even a year ago now where the vast majority of
people who are using the word freebooting have no clue who you are man right
it's like you have this idea of like oh i am forever associated with this like are you though
you are already long relegated to the dustbin of linguistical history here my friend right it is
only this corner of the internet that has any idea that this was you.
Grand visions of yourself.
Oh, the Wall Street Journal is contacting me because of my freebooting associations, right?
Don't be mean.
Don't be mean.
You're being a meanie.
I think I'm reflecting you back to you. In a thousand years, like, obviously, every time someone says freebooting they don't like think of hello
internet but in a thousand years someone might say why did they start calling it freebooting
and like some academic might start researching and and stumble over it and like no one will care
about like i don't think people are ever going to find out that like what i did like in my job or
that i made videos or anything like that so So like this one thing, like I think
now you're making, yeah, you're tricking me into making it sound more grandiose than I think it is.
No, this is what you're thinking. Again, you're envisioning people a thousand years from now,
remembering who you are. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. I'm just making the point that do you want
to be associated with coming up with something that is a negative thing?
I feel like you understand, but you're pretending not to understand.
You really don't understand.
This is our fundamental problem.
It's like the more you talk, the less I have any idea what you're trying to say.
You invented freebooting, man.
You know, be happy about it. In the future, people will look up the root meaning of the word, and for a brief second, they will read your name in a book long after you're dead and forgotten.
And I imagine you're the kind of person that would bring some sort of pleasure to.
I don't think that's the case.
But I do like to think that the things I do aren't for nothing.
Like I don't think my whole purpose for existing is so that I can earn
enough money to buy tomorrow's dinner.
I do like to think there's more to me than just sustaining myself
until my heart stops beating.
But I don't want people to be reading about me in encyclopedias or anything.
I have no visions like that.
But I'd like to think that there is a bit more to me than the next meal.
Right.
Than just your negative association with freebooting.
I was just thinking about it.
Anyway, I did this short interview with this Wall Street Journal person. And the position was, and this is my position at the moment,
is I'm just exhausted by it.
And I just don't care anymore.
And all these people were tweeting me and emailing me all these,
you know, have you seen now this website's taken it
or this player's playing it or it's on all of these Facebook pages now.
And this was over the weekend, weekend actually while I was with Dirk
and I was saying to him, I wish that they weren't telling me.
And I don't want people to stop telling me because, you know,
knowledge is good.
But I almost wish that they didn't because it just became
like cognitive load and I didn't want to get all upset
and go to the mattresses over it.
I just was like, I just don't want to know. Like I'm just, this is just what
happens now. So this wall street journal guy called up and I think he was hoping that I'd be
all fired up and go on a rampage. And I was basically saying to him, look, man, I just,
I'm just exhausted by it. It's just like, he's just depressed.'re just depressed yeah he's calling the saddest man in
the world and he asked me a few questions and got me fired up so i i made a few wisecracks towards
the end and i'm sure that's the only thing that will get used in the article if anything gets
used in the article and i will come across as like an angry wisecracker yeah that's why you
never talk to reporters like you should know that if i don't come across this way i think the overarching
theme of me on the issue of freebooting now and copyright is one of jaded exhaustion and i'm just
being beaten down beaten i've just been beaten he said he said to me you know it seems like the way
forward for the youtubers or some youtubers think the way forward is just to start putting all their videos on Facebook so that other people don't put it on Facebook first.
And I said, I just said that would just be what a tragic way for the war to end if they win the war that way.
Yeah.
But I mean, the thing is, it's like a it's a serious consideration.
Of course.
And it's a thing that I have totally tested out.
I mean, a couple of people who follow me
on my Facebook page will notice
that I have occasionally tested
putting native videos just up on Facebook
for the exact same thing of like,
can I at least be the first person
to post my own goddamn video on Facebook
and try to get some number of views from that?
You know, but it is totally depressing to end up doing that. Anyway, that's not the main thing that's going on. That's not what we're
here to talk about. That's a side issue in the never-ending, exciting adventures of copyright,
which is what we want to talk about now a little bit. It's become a big thing the last few weeks, hasn't it? I always think it must be quite
boring for the podcast listeners. It's very inside YouTube, but...
That's why it's at the end here, Brady, right?
Yeah.
There's nothing else coming, people. If you don't want to hear about copyright,
turn back right now, because there's been a bunch of stuff about it.
What do you want to bring up of these numerous things that have been going on? There have been four videos in relatively rapid succession, which are all dancing
around the same topic. There have been two videos from Grade A Under A, which is a YouTube channel
I quite like, that have been talking about problems broadly in the YouTube system. Channels getting taken down, copyright infringement,
and a similar thing with I Hate Everything, another good YouTube channel, talking about the
same kind of problems of like copyright strikes against his channel. And then Nostalgia Critic
also put together a video talking about fair use on YouTube. And what all of these videos are talking about to
some extent is the Content ID system that exists on YouTube. And this is the
system that is supposed to allow content owners to keep an eye out for uploads of their content on YouTube's system. Now,
I feel a bit like the like the Fine Brothers thing from last time, I want to mention something like
that relates to me before we get into this conversation. So you were talking before about
how like you didn't even want to hear about how your video kept getting freebooted
just everywhere all over facebook and it's going crazy and it just like gets you just depressed
after a while and so i in the past few months had gone through something similar where i had for a
very long time a bunch of google automated google alerts and searches for my own videos being uploaded elsewhere,
particularly on YouTube. So I would be searching for titles or very similar things to the titles
of my videos. And Google would send me emails anytime something similar popped up. And then
I could do the normal thing, which is to file a takedown of it, where it's like, OK, someone just
re-uploaded my video on their channel. Let me fill out this long form and get it taken down.
But at a certain point, it became just so many notifications just all the time
that it became just like depressingly overwhelming. Like, what do I want to do?
Do I just want to constantly spend afternoons of my time
filling out the same dmca form over and over and over again to take down videos on youtube of of
my stuff that people have re-uploaded and so i basically like turned off a bunch of the alerts
because my feeling was like i you win like you win freebooters like i'm just giving up i just
don't care right i don't even want to know anymore that
like oh this has been uploaded here that's been uploaded there yeah but then i realized like oh
but wait a minute isn't this the whole point of the content id system that youtube supposedly has
is that people who are rights holders can do this in an automated fashion like isn't this the idea
of this thing and so i tried to reach out through a couple of the contacts that I have at YouTube to be like,
hey, I know that I'm not one of these big multi-channel networks that you guys love to work with,
but I am a content owner.
Can I please also use the content ID system to try to do automated recognition of when people upload my stuff?
And long story short, I have a meeting with YouTube in a couple weeks. they're going to see if they can set this up for me, right?
I'm already in that, Gray.
I know. This is one of the many, many frustrating things with YouTube, right? Is like,
their seeming capriciousness. And so some people are in, some people aren't in. I seem to be in
some bizarro in-between land where i need to
convince them that i should be able to use this system like i can't like you were talking in the
last episode about people who can just like press a button and have other people's videos taken down
i haven't got that right but if someone re-uploads my videos it will be identified like automatically
and that person i don't know what happens that person gets
a some kind of notification i actually don't really look at it i'm a bit it's very automated
and i never really see it much and sometimes i'll i'll log into something and it will say
oh so and so you know pinched your video but i mean that's only for youtube and i don't think
i don't think the problem is as big on youtube anymore i think i think the problem is as big on YouTube anymore. I think the problem is much bigger outside of YouTube.
And that's just free for all. We have no control over that.
It's partly why when YouTube creators are talking about the problem of Facebook freebooting,
kind of implicitly what creators want is something similar to content ID on Facebook.
And so I bring all of this up because I want to have this as the
starting point for this conversation, because it's very easy when people are complaining about the
system to complain about big companies giving copyright strikes, right? This is almost like
whenever I talk about politics, or if I do a video on politics, I never want to talk about the specifics. Because as soon as you talk about the specifics,
the conversation is like, it's over before it's begun. Right? Because then people are thinking
about their team and what the how they want their team to win. So what we have on YouTube is like,
in without thinking of specific teams, you have these two broad groups, right? You have
people who are making videos, and people who want to use fair use content in their videos. So people
who do like movie reviews, or there's a whole genre of people that fall into the sort of extremely
broad category of reply videos, which may or may not be fair use,
but let's say like a certain number of them definitely are. Like there are people who want
to make videos and who should legally be allowed to use clips from other people's videos to do so.
And then on the other side, you have content owners who want to be able to protect themselves from people just endlessly re-uploading their material.
These are the two sides.
And YouTube wants to make these sides happy, right?
Like in many cases, like they're the same side, right?
People like upload videos and they also want to protect their own videos.
Like it's a very, very complicated case.
But the thing that I didn't quite realize before this latest kerfuffle is just how far
the content ID system is really bent in favor of content owners. Like the structure of the way content ID works vastly,
vastly favors the owners of the content and disfavors creators.
But creators are owners of content.
I know, I know, right?
So like, I don't quite understand. I have a power when I create content that if someone steals it,
I can try and take action.
And the person at the other end fears me like I'm a hawk
that's going to sweep on them and protect what I made.
But I am also a mouse.
Every time I upload a video, I live in fear that someone is going to,
wrongly I hope, accuse me of stealing content.
So I don't like, I am both people every day of my life.
It's like, how do you balance this thing? But here's my view on like the system level problem
of what's going on. Let's say right now, like you, dear listener, like you are creating a YouTube
channel. And let's say you upload a video in which you have some unarguably
like fair use material in it, right? So you upload some video, you have a little clip from a TV show
that you're reviewing or whatever, right? The way the current system works is that the owner
of the material that you have used can automatically lay a claim on your video,
which to keep things very simple will basically means they're going to get any
money that you would have earned from advertisements on that video.
So they can claim the video.
Now,
the reason that this is an unbalanced system is because you as the video
creator can then start a process which says, oh, but this is fair use.
Like I want to appeal this.
I want to work through this whole process and say like, oh, no, this is totally fair use.
That process can take quite a while to happen.
It can it can take up to three months, like depending on how super long companies want to wait, like if they want to wait until the absolute last moment, because there's like a 30 day window and there's like, there can be three
replies back and forth. It can take forever. But the point is that all that while, while the video
has a claim on it, the person who made the claim is earning money off of the video that you have
put up. And if you win your claim, you don't get any money back.
That is nuts that the person who laid the claim keeps the money throughout that.
And even if the original little battler wins and it was fair use,
they don't get the money for that month or three months.
That is totally crazy.
But the thing that compounds it is that you as the
person making videos, you can only challenge three of these claims at a time. I mean, let's say you
have a back catalog of like 100 videos. And one day you wake up and discover that all 100 videos
have been claimed by some media company saying like, oh, you know, whatever you have our material in here, right?
Yep.
You have a hundred videos that are now earning money for the person who's made
the claim or the company that has made the claim.
You are earning no money on any of those videos.
You're only allowed to challenge three at a time.
And this means like, okay,
you can be looking at like years before you could clear all of those claims if they all take the absolute maximum of time.
And so this is where the system is horrifically unbalanced because it's like, okay, content owners can lay an infinite number of claims.
But for some reason, YouTube has decided to put this arbitrary limit on how many claims a channel can fight at once.
And so like, okay, we have this ridiculously unbalanced situation where if you are a company
that has access to this whole content ID system, like you might as well just lay claim to everything.
Like you can set up the system to have rules about what do you want to do?
How many seconds do you want to allow of content before the system automatically flags it.
You might as well just say like, oh, allow no seconds worth of time.
Like any use is not fair use.
Claim everything and just have the bot go automatically laying claims across the whole of the YouTube landscape.
And then you just start collecting the money from that. Like,
there's no incentive for the claimant to have any kind of respect for fair use. Even if you are,
as a content owner, like you are, every single one of your claims comes back as invalid, right?
YouTube can see in the system like, oh, this company in the past year, it's made 10,000 copyright claims against other people's YouTube channel. And every single one of them
has come back as invalid. YouTube is like, oh, thumbs up. That's fine, right? Like that's
legitimate business practice. And in the meantime, they earned all the money while those claims were
active. Like that's crazy. Like it's a crazy amount of power to give to the content owners.
When on the flip side, like, you know, the people uploading to their channels,
like, you can only dispute three. And if they, you know, you have three go the wrong way,
like your channel will get deleted. It's just such an unfair system, or it's so lopsided is
really what it is. The other thing I didn't realize was happening,
and I know you've put this in the notes here,
but it seems like now's the time to bring it up.
The thing I didn't realize was happening somewhat naively is
this isn't just a case of there being a gray area about
was that fair use or wasn't it fair use?
There seem to be companies whose modus operandi
is to make claims
against other videos that aren't in this gray area of fair use but just to make completely fake claims
that where they clearly have no nothing in the video at all it would be like if i went and claimed
your last cgp gray video even though i don't make the videos, I don't make the music, I don't make the
animation, I'm just some guy who exists. And I'm just saying, oh, I made that. I'm not saying I
made that still that he took, or I made that music. I'm just saying I made that. I'm claiming it.
Completely, not debatably, just completely, fakely. It's almost become like a Nigerian email
scam thing where companies
can just create this shell company
claim every single video on
YouTube as something they made even though
they could never have made a
piece of content in their life
and that just becomes this little
revenue maker because presumably some people won't
fight it, some people might not know they've been
claimed against and that and it just you just it's just become
this like loophole i i can't believe it won't be closed within days now because after seeing the
i hate everything video about it it's like i watched that and thought that that can't be real
yeah yeah the i hate everything video is just the is just the absolute pinnacle of this.
It was astounding.
It's amazing, but it is also just the natural consequence of this system, where a company comes in and says, oh, okay, we can make claims.
There's no penalty for making false claims. What we're going to do is just manually identify videos that are getting popular and manually put on a claim on them.
And so I Hate Everything has this example where it's like, oh, this company called Merlin ICC or something.
They claim that a section of his video is playing a song by someone they represent, but they don't represent that person.
And the song isn't in the video, right?
Like there's no debate about this.
But nonetheless, the way the YouTube system works is like, oh, OK.
But that was I Hate Everything's most recent video.
It was it was rapidly running toward a million views.
But this company Merlin Ic something like because of this dumb
system like they get to make all of the money i hate everything won't get any of that money back
when the claim is proven to be false and youtube just has no consequences to making false claims
like that to me is the real core of this like you can't have like content ID should be this system that is trying to balance these two parties,
right? And to keep everybody happy. But if, if one side can act in a way that has no repercussions,
like, well, of course, they're going to end up totally exploiting it. And and this,
the I hate everything situation is just the pinnacle of it. It's like, well, might as well just start laying claims on all kinds of videos
and just collecting the ad revenue.
It's crazy.
It's really crazy.
Can I ask a naive question?
If I make a claim against you, like I think you've used a bit of Numberphile
in your grey video that you shouldn't have used, and you say it's fair use,
and we go through this month, few months processes of me saying you stole it,
you saying no, I didn't, me saying yes, you did.
And neither of us give any ground.
How does it end?
Who's the final umpire on whether or not something was used fairly?
Like by default?
So my understanding is that it's the person who is claiming it is fair use is the default winner.
So I would have to take you to court in the end.
That's right.
After three months, if no one gives, after three months, the fair use claimer wins or it goes to court part of what is being decided in these documents that are going
back and forth is that the person who has made the video is basically setting themselves up to be
sued if like and to lose really big if a court finds that it's not fair use yeah right so like
that like that's what happens is like you are ticking a bunch of boxes as the
video creator that will totally screw you over if you're lying.
So that's why I think it defaults towards the,
the creator being the default Victor,
because it's like,
okay,
well they've just,
they've put themselves in a situation where they're screwed.
You can take them to court if this really is a big problem and, and they're just, it's over for them, right? They're not going to win.
For the first time, that gives me some small insight into why this crappy system maybe was
set up that way though. Because that means if the big bad wolf keeps the money until the noble, fair, used person wins the day.
You can almost see why you would skew it that way,
because if the big bad wolf, it turns out, isn't the big bad wolf,
you're pretty unlikely to take someone to court.
It's like you've sort of tipped the scale a little bit.
So, well, if someone is taking advantage of you,
in the end, that person is going to win, because you're not going to to take them to court because that's just going to be a bowl like for everyone.
You're not going to take them to court.
So the little bit of compensation you do get for being exploited is you keep the money for that first month or two and then they'll have and then they get to exploit you for the next hundred years because they won the day.
Yeah.
And most of the time that's
not the case, but you can almost see why you would set it up that way now. I don't think they should,
but I can almost see why they would. Yeah. And this is one of these cases where I have never
had to follow this through all the way to the end. I've had to do a little bit of this, but not very
much because I've always had claims released after just the first challenge. It hasn't really gone super far.
So this is a case where I may be wrong about these details.
But let's just assume for the moment that this is the case.
I can see the argument, yes, that like, okay, we will give you some compensation in the meantime to make up for the fact that you won't go to court but the the problem is anytime you drop the price to zero
people are going to use an infinite amount of it right if it has any utility at all and so what
youtube has done with this system is it has dropped the cost of making claims to zero
which then incentivizes companies to just lay out an infinite number of claims.
That's where the core of the problem exists. And if there was some kind of penalty to just
constantly making false claims, then this wouldn't be the case. But since there's no penalty,
you just might as well make all the claims in the world.
It's almost amazing that Content ID has existed this long
before some genius at Merlin ICC Co. or whatever
thought like, I know how to make a whole bunch of money
while doing nothing, right?
It's astounding.
It's absolutely astounding.
So this is one of the rare cases
where I feel like there's a relatively straightforward
answer to this, which is YouTube imposing a cost on making claims so that you just don't
make an infinite number of claims.
Do you mean like 10 cents or something?
Or you've got to pay a dollar or you've got to pay $10?
I don't even mean necessarily.
I mean a cost just in the sense of any kind of cost.
Some small amount of money or some like strikes or getting your multi-channel network removed if you have too many false claims.
I don't think that will work.
I don't think that's good enough either though, because people just create these sort of shells,
these shells, won't they?
And then have like a week or two of fleecing everyone
and then they get thrown off the network but oh yeah yeah sorry is it to be to be clear i also
agree with you with this idea of the escrow that the the other very simple change is if if a video
has a claim on it all of the money is held in a separate account that goes to the winner in the
end right that's yeah like that plus a small amount of goes to the winner in the end right that's like that plus a
small amount of cost for making claims is the way to fix this and it's like it's unlike our
conversation last time we were talking about how do you fix angry internet mobs right where i think
there there isn't anything that you can do that isn't worse than the problem that you're trying
to fix this to me seems like oh there's a relatively straightforward solution to this
that I hope YouTube implements because it's just like, man,
makes everybody angry, this content ID system.
I'll tell you what, though, if you have a viral video and like, you know,
so there's like potentially thousands and thousands of dollars sitting in this escrow pot,
suddenly that fight over fair use is going to start getting nasty and like i said like suddenly the trophy is more like it could become a real mess the amount
of money isn't any different than the amount of money that we're talking about now it feels
different though it feels different if you want to get really cynical about it then you can just
say oh youtube has an incentive to prolong the process to make it a year long so they can earn interest off of all of the money that's been held in escrow there's that too
right that did occur they're going to double the number of forms that you send back and forth
yeah yeah it's just it just turns into a bloody pain in the ass yeah that's as with as with many
of the things that we have discussed about on the podcast before, I,
I just,
I find so much of this YouTube business stuff,
just exhausting,
like exhausting in this really boring way that I just find like,
man,
it is,
I'm not trying to be like,
oh,
you know,
back when it was small,
it was amazing.
And it was a little community of people making videos together.
Like that's not my feeling of it, But I don't know, there's just
there's just something about like, all of the layers now that are involved in like, I just want
to upload a video on YouTube. But it's like, oh, but there's multi channel networks, I can and if
you want to be a creator, you need to sign up for one of these mafiosa style multi channel networks.
And if you don't sign up for one of these multifiosa style multi-channel networks and if you don't sign up for one of these multi-channel networks and then you have like this whole other big set of problems
to work with and then there's youtube on top of it and this content id system and gigantic media
companies moving in it's just i don't know it's all very busy like there's so much stuff to keep
track of and there's there's so much stuff to worry about it's just it's and you're better
at that than me at least you can kind of do that.
I'm just rubbish.
Yeah, it's just absolutely exhausting.
It's just so much to think about.
Coming back to fair use, just to be controversial and get people upset for a second.
Oh, yeah.
I think most people misunderstand fair use.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, obviously.
And we've talked before about how saying fair use doesn't automatically mean it's fair use. But this would be much less of an issue if there wasn't. Oh, yeah, everything is a remix. And that's like a trendy thing to say. But like, if everyone
just makes their own stuff, if people just create instead of doing what they call create, which is
reacting or reviewing or twisting or changing what other people have made, this would not be such a
big issue. But I think it's lazy. And I know that's the controversial thing to say, because
it's an act of creation to transform someone else's creation. But I think it's lazy, and I know that's the controversial thing to say because it's an act of creation to transform someone else's creation.
But I think it's lazy, and I think because it's easy,
more and more and more and more people are doing it,
and it's what's creating this storm around what's fair use
and what's not fair use and what's copyright and that.
It's because everyone's just being a lazy bones,
taking the work of what is probably becoming proportionally a smaller number of
people who actually make new stuff, who actually go out with a camera and film things, or who sit
down and write a script or sit down and animate something. Those people seem to be becoming,
I know that they're probably growing, but they're becoming a smaller proportion.
And there's this growing, growing, growing group of people
who then just wait to greedily devour all these creations
and just watch them or comment on them.
And that's what they do to make their money.
As someone who's in that smaller group, it feels a bit frustrating.
Yeah, it always is frustrating.
The Facebook thing is now a total and utter industry.
And there are people who are doing it legitimately who I have a bit more respect for and people who aren't.
But every time you make a video that's any good, there was a whole bunch of people who just immediately gobbled it up and put it onto Facebook.
And there was another group of people who emailed me. I've got a whole bunch of emails in my inbox from Facebook people and companies saying,
we saw this video, can we please put it onto our player?
So there are people who are doing the same lazy thing, but at least they're asking permission,
which I give them credit for.
But it's just this growing industry now, just sitting there waiting with their mouth open
to be spoon-fed other people's creations.
Yeah, it can definitely be a bit dispiriting when you are one of the people who puts a lot of work into making a new thing
and then just seeing a bunch of people make money off of your work.
And there's an amazing clip. It's in, I think it's in the first grade A under A
video where he talks about the problems with YouTube. But there's an amazing clip where that
he gets of one of these guys who does these react channels, where the guy literally says at the
start of the video, he's like, it's time to make money off of your hard work, right? Before he goes to
just film his dumb face watching other people's videos.
I know, that's so flagrant. I'll tell you what, just to reactivate my rant for a second. This
is what it reminds me of. Because I was filming yesterday with a guy who designs clever things
like mathematical models and dice and things like that. And then he mass produces
them and he can sell them. He's a really clever guy coming up with these ideas. And I said to him,
you know, how are you getting these made? Presumably, you know, you send the design to
China and they make it. And he says, that's normally what I do. But that's always a big
step when I do that, because the minute I send it to China to be mass produced,
they will steal the design and a thousand other people will make knockoffs of it
and it will be produced by other companies
and the person who's doing it for me will sell it to other companies.
And the minute I do that, it's going to appear everywhere.
So people who mass produce things feel that now.
They feel this dread that the minute it goes into the wild west of China,
the wild east, I guess I should say, of China,
it's going to get stolen because there's less protection
for them and they no longer control their intellectual property.
That's what it feels like for me now.
Whenever I make something that I think is a little bit special and will interest people,
I feel like the minute I press upload on YouTube, part of me feels excited that I'm finally
going to be sharing this with the world.
And another part of me thinks this is the moment I'm also giving it to all those people, all those freebooters who
are just waiting with their mouths open to gobble up what I've created. It puts a different feeling
on it when you know with almost 100% certainty that like more people will see the thing where
someone else has just taken your thing
than on your own channel like if you distribute all of the freebooted views that happen elsewhere
like it it's very often like a larger number than the people who see it on your original thing and
it's like oh god why like why am i even the sucker who's doing this anymore right like why am i yeah why am i just feeding this whole economy of
parasites on my back and yeah it's just is dispiriting and like you say it's i mean really
i even feel like in the past few months has turned into just this remarkable industry of
looking for things that are popular and then just leeching off of them and hey great no they're
curators and if someone says oh you should just be happy that it's being seen by so many people
tell me that when it happens to you yeah that's exactly right and no one ever feels that way when
it's it's their own it's their own thing but so yeah i don't know. It's like, like I was saying before, I feel a bit weirdly defeated in this whole process of having deleted all of the alerts that I used to keep on top of, of other people uploading my stuff where it's just like, man, it's just too much up the youtube content id system like this is not another thing
that i want to deal with but it's like okay i guess i'm going to go into a meeting with youtube
and and have this done and figure out how to make this work and like plead my case for please allow
me to try to make claims on my own videos that are uploaded elsewhere but it's like i just feel
like i don't i don't want to do this but I've been forced into a situation where I just have to because it happened just way too much.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you have to.
I mean, your channel's easily massive enough for that.
But I'll tell you how ingrained it has become.
When I'm filming, I'm already thinking ahead to how I'm going to edit the video.
Sometimes I'm already thinking what the title of the video will be.
Sometimes I'm even thinking what the thumbnail could look like.
It's just like the way my brain works.
And now if I'm filming something out in a lab or in an office with someone
and I can tell this video is going to be really good
and I'm already thinking, oh, I could call it this
and this is how I'm going to edit it and it's going to be really popular,
it has now reached the point where while I am still recording,
while the red dot is still on the screen,
I'm already thinking about the fact that this video is going to be freebooted.
Like the days are over where I'm thinking,
this is going to be a great video.
Loads of people are going to watch this.
It's going to be one of my really big ones for the year.
I'm also at the time thinking,
oh man, this is just going to get stolen so bad.
Like it's permeated that far into my process
that's how much a part of my consciousness it is now thanks rebooters that's yeah yeah it really
is so uh yeah this has been your uh your semi-weekly dose of happiness from the hello internet podcast
we're still really lucky to have such a good job
yeah of course of course like that's always that's always the thing but it is it is the defeat
in our voices is the like the acknowledgement and the recognition of of this like economy that
we are feeding into with our own creations yeah like that Like that is the thing that just suddenly feels different about it
as opposed to a lot of the earlier conversations that we had
where it's like, oh, individuals are uploading our own stuff.
And it's like, oh no, now there's just a whole economy about this
and tying into the YouTube content ID system.
It's like, now there's even this absurd length
of people making money just straight off the work of channels like I Hate Everything with false claims.
It's like they're not even uploading anything, right?
They're just able to literally steal the money from a channel by putting in a content claim.
And you know me, Brady.
I don't like to use the word stealing frivolously,
but I think a lot of this stuff
with this content IT system is like,
no, that is stealing.
Like that is money that was as close
to that person's pocket as it could possibly be
before you diverted it into your own pocket
with this false claim for which YouTube
will never punish you.
You're a stealer.
Do you know who we sometimes sound like? And I am aware of this.
Oh, no.
We sound like the music record companies did five, ten years ago when things like Napster and all this stuff started. And I didn't feel piles and piles of sympathy for them. Like,
I saw what was happening was wrong, but I didn't think you poor record companies. I thought, well, you know, you make money anyway.
And okay, this is unfortunate, but it's sort of just a thing.
And that's exactly what we sound like now.
Don't you think?
See, yeah, I agree with you, right?
That there is a certain sense in which we sound like the record companies, right?
Part of what I think was the record companies
problems was their refusal to acknowledge how things were in the world and that was why i had
like no sympathy for them and this is a thing that i try to be aware of that's why like for example
i'm like i want to set up content id because i thought like okay the way i was doing things is
just totally unsustainable and the other thing is, as we discussed before, like this is partly why I feel
like I'm just kind of giving into Facebook at this point a little bit tepidly because like, okay,
well, if my videos are going to be all over Facebook anyway, they might as well be my videos,
right? I might as well post them on Facebook. Isn't that sad that you did
that before they found a way to reward you for enriching their site? Isn't that sad that they
won the battle that way? Yeah, I mean, it really is. But it's also partly why like I have tried to
change my business over time to adapt to that. Pulling aside the curtain for a little while,
part of this whole like recognizing things are getting freebooted
everywhere thing is one of the big decisions about why i finally i was so late to this party but i
finally said like okay i am going to put embedded ads at the end of my videos like i must have been
one of the last big channels on this train but i decided to do it in no small part because I was already thinking like,
okay, well, Facebook, I won't be able to earn any money from advertising on Facebook because they
don't have any kind of revenue sharing plan. So the only way that I can make money if I'm still
posting my videos on Facebook is if there is an embedded ad in there. And then I can count those
views as part of how I sell the advertising to who is ever
sponsoring those videos but like this is this is why I've been trying to change my business very
slowly to adapt to this new situation it's like I don't want to put my videos on Facebook but I also
just can't can't stand like a like a rigid statue and refuse to bend or recognize
the changing environment around me
because that way lies doom.
And so if in the future,
that means like, oh, okay,
well, I upload videos on Facebook
and I have embedded ads in them.
This is just the next step
of how this business is going to work.
Are you going to post your videos on Facebook?
Dunno.
Yeah, I guess guess you need to
set up a whole bunch of facebook pages i already have facebook pages for all those uh projects i
guess this is a good time to tell the people follow us on facebook oh god i feel so gross
saying that but seriously do follow us on facebook you you you you What is that now this is the the uh like the armrests on my chair are a bit noisy
something always something there is always how is it how is it that no matter where you are
there's something in your environment that you can fiddle with that i'm going to have
to cut out later everywhere we go i was born to fidget