Hello Internet - H.I. #59: Consumed by Donkey Kong

Episode Date: March 23, 2016

Brady and Grey discuss: copyright and the Parliament, the inevitable and unavoidable Guns, Germs, and Steel follow-up, further travels of Brady, bi-something weigh in, and video games. Brought to You By Harry's: Quality Men's Shaving Products. Promocode HI for $5 off your first purchase Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month Squarespace: Use code HELLO for 10% off your website Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes Discuss this episode on the reddit Objectivity Cassetteboy Guns, Germs, and Steel assorted links: GG&S Discussion Thread Grey's conversation with mmilosh Assorted Bad History Discussions: Inaccuracies of Grey: A Disease-Free Paradise and Immune Europeans Grey Germs and Generalization Wondering Wednesday "What's the point?" This Video Will Make You Angry r/changemyview Grey Twitches Professors React to 2048 - Numberphile LCD Donkey Kong Brady's History with video games The Amazing Graphics of Pole Position for the Atari 2600 Myst Walkthrough Greenwich Foot Tunnel Year Walk

You have this thing listed under follow-up. I don't think it's follow-up at all. It's a new topic, but you just want to talk about it. This is how you steal the show all the time. You put everything you want to talk about, you list it as follow-up, even if it's not remotely follow-up. Well... Yeah, I know your trick. I know what you're up to. It wasn't really a trick. I thought it kind of was follow-up. There's nothing about it that's follow-up. The listeners will know. Listeners will know now. This is my hairdresser story. And the reason I wanted to tell you was I thought it had two components that would appeal to you.

Because if there are two things that sort of have some level of appeal to you, one is being horrified by social situations. Is that appealing? I don't think that's appealing. I don't know. Well, I don't know. It always gets a response from you, at least. And it's so hard to get responses from you.

You, because you are a natural winder upper you and your brain equate getting a response from someone to appealing to them that's that's just the way you know but it's but it's just so hard to get you to engage with my stories unless it's something that you're really into it is not true it's very hard to get you to engage and i I think this has two things that engage you. One is you are engaged by horrifying social situations. And the other thing that engages you is my ineptitude. And this story has both of them in spades. I'm looking forward to the story, but I do just want to get it on record that when we're doing the podcast, I know you don't believe me. And I always cut it because you sometimes yell at me about how I don't respond fast enough to you. The reason I find

these podcasts so draining to do is that whenever you're talking, I am spending the whole time consciously thinking about, is there a question that I can ask Brady? What can I say to Brady at the end of this story? So it's draining. It's exhausting because I am spending 100% of my attention fixated on you thinking about what to say and how to engage with this conversation. That should just come naturally. That should just be natural. It should be natural. It should be natural if you're a Brady, but not if you're a Grey. If you're a Grey, it's not natural. That's why it's always so frustrating. It's always so frustrating when you criticize me for not engaging in your stories. Like, man, I am never more focused on human conversation than I am during the three hours in which we

record one of these episodes. You've got me at my peak social. This is the best I can do. And I do it for you, Brady. Don't focus too much because it puts too much pressure on the story now. It's like, oh, like now I know that you're sort of listening with this double attention and thinking of questions and suddenly there's a lot of pressure on the story and the story is not that good. It's no different than any other time that we ever record the podcast. So now tell me this amazing, amazing story. i'm really looking forward to it i drove down into the center of my town because i wanted to get the car cleaned give it the big shebang now i don't

know whether i should call that valeting or valeting because that seems to be something that people it's a valet so it's valeting that well that's what i thought but more and more often i'm hearing it called people calling it valeting, which I think is wrong, of course. Yeah, of course it's wrong. Isn't it a French word? They don't regard consonants at the end of their words. So I took the car down to this place where there are these guys who wash it. They've got like this, what would you call it?

Not like tent, like a little marquee type thing that people can drive in underneath so that they're sheltered in case it rains. And they'll sit there and they'll spray your car and then they'll open the doors and they'll get inside and vacuum it and polish everything and make your car lovely. I take it there reasonably often. And because I was going to go and get my hair cut and I had some errands to run, I leave it with them, leave the keys in the ignition. And I say, guys, take care of it for me. So I parked it just outside. Did you say it like that? So seriously? Whoa.

It was like you're leaving a baby with them. Guys, take care of this. We discussed which option I want. And I went for the £20 option. I was going to say, yeah, the way you communicate to them how much they should take care of it is with money. That's how you communicate this. Yes. So I want the £20 option.

And I couldn't park it right in the little zone because they were doing another car. So I parked behind that car and I left. Went to the post office, went to the bank, did my jobs. And then I went to the bank, did my jobs. And then I went to the hairdresser. I picked a bad time. Schools were out and I picked the wrong time of day, a time that I don't normally like to go.

And the place was packed. I had to sit there and wait forever for my turn. And I could have said, I'll come back another day, but I really needed to get my haircut. So I had to wait it out. And I must have waited an hour and a half and then finally got my haircut. And he was slow too. He was a slow one.

An hour and a half. Jesus. And here comes the situation. At the end of the haircut, I thought he did a pretty good job, albeit slow. At the end of the haircut, he says, can I take a photo? What? And I thought, you know, maybe he was a trainee or this was one

of the best haircuts he'd ever done. I don't know, but he wanted to take a photo of it. And I was kind of like, yeah, I guess. And then I said, what for? And he said, oh, I want to put it on Instagram. No, no. And I thought, what would Gray do if the hairdresser said, can I take a photo of you and put it on Instagram?

No. That's a really awkward situation. Okay, here's the question. Here's the question. Was he using social dominance on you? Like, were you still sitting down or were you still bibbed up? I was sitting down. I still had my big coat on.

I was very vulnerable. Oh, no. I was in a position of weakness. It's like an interrogation room. Yeah, it was a really awkward situation. But I know this is becoming a big thing in the young people's hairdresser community. Is it really? Because my nephew was showing me the Instagram of his hairdresser,

and everyone who gets their hair cut by him has an Instagram done, and they do these special poses and things like that. So it's becoming a really big thing in the trendy, cool hairdresser community. And this hairdresser I go to is quite a trendy, cool place for young people. They're really big on Instagramming all the haircuts afterwards. No, no. I gave it a no. I did.

I found the strength and I gave him a thanks, but no thanks. How was it received? Quiet and awkwardly. I did think, oh my goodness, Gray would have hated that. Are you ever going to go back to this person? Yeah, I'll go back. No, you can't go back. When it comes to hairdressers, I am such a creature of habit.

That's why I sat there for an hour and a half instead of going to one of the four or five other ones on the street. Because this is where I get my of the four or five other ones on the street because this is where i get my haircut four or five other ones you mean in that tiny town where you live there's no there's not four or five hairdressers on the street there is that there totally is no there's you have like three shops on the street there's like a corner store there's apparently there's a corner store there's a corner store, a car wash, three charity shops and 19 hairdressers. What a strange local economy. Anyway, I got out of there. Awkward situation over.

Go to the car wash, ready to be apologetic for having left my car there for two, two and a half hours. I get there. My car hasn't moved. I'm like, what's going on? I walk up to the guy saying, what's going on? And they look at me going, oh, there you are, there you are. Turns out, out of just habit and reflex, I didn't leave my keys in the ignition and I took them with me and my car had been sitting there blocking the entrance to their little car wash marquee thing for the last two and a half

hours. What an effective afternoon of errands you had. It was terrible. I felt so bad. I felt so bad about it. That Instagram thing, though, man, that's horrifying. This Instagram, it doesn't sound like anything good is coming of it, as far as I can tell. It's a real big thing in the hairdressing community, at least in the west of England. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope nope nope no haven't it no that's not

gonna happen not gonna happen not ever not ever i made i made some i made some reference to sort of like with my job i'd rather not have like hairdresser pictures posted of me and then he thought i was some kind of spy or did something like to do with security and i just didn't correct him okay so you started to make it you started to make up a story to justify why yeah i did i made some i made some i sort of said something like ah with my work it's like it's something i'd rather not be doing it's very hard not to do but i find the trick in those situations if you're going to have to say no is don't justify right you just say no and then there's going to be an awkward silence but the first person to break the awkward silence loses and so you don't want to be the loser well no well i still got my way but i mean i know i

don't think you would find that hard you're double hard when it comes to that stuff but yeah but if the other person plays the it sounds like this guy who's trying to manipulate you again you were in a vulnerable position that That's when he decides to ask. He probably knows the tricks. I'm just imagining in this situation that he would have also tried to beat the awkward silence. And sometimes that can go on for a while. It's like a staring contest between gorillas. I don't think either I looked that good or the haircut was that good that he was going to really lobby for it.

But maybe. Maybe it was a once in a generation haircut and i don't even realize it and i just look amazing right now uh i didn't notice on the video chat before we started i'm sorry i really am finding myself wishing that the story had gone the other way mainly because i would enjoy nothing more than putting a link to your photograph on instagram of your haircut in the show notes. I would really quite enjoy that. This will be fun forever, this little picture here. No.

We're having to miss out on it. Didn't happen. Do you want to give us a selfie for the show notes? The reason I really needed to get it cut was because I was doing some objectivity videos the next day. So you can do me an even bigger favor and just post one of those it's way less funny if i'm just pimping objectivity i mean i guess i'll do it yeah link to objectivity in the show notes people it's not nearly as funny it's like it's not really what i want from you brady you're not giving me what i want

charlie brooker who i think you and i are both big fans of. We quite like some of the things he does. He was just having a bit of a gripe because some recent stuff that came up in the parliament or re-came up in the parliament. And that is the fact that, and I think this is crazy, that satirical television shows are not allowed to use footage from inside the UK parliament. And this has been hamstrung in Charlie Brooker who makes satirical TV shows for quite some time, because when he wants to poke fun at the politicians, they have banned all TV shows like him from using the footage of proceedings in parliament. It can be used on the news, it can be used in various other shows,

but if you're poking fun at them, banned. I don't understand how such a law could get passed. By the people in the parliament. Yeah. I find that just astounding that the people in parliament would pass such a narrowly self-serving law. It's confusing to me. I don't get it. I think it's almost so self-serving that I'm surprised they had the audacity to do it. They had the balls to do it. Yeah. For comparison for Americans, you know, like the stuff Charlie Brooker does,

it's a bit like if Congress passed a law saying that The Daily Show was not allowed to use footage from inside of Congress. Like C-SPAN footage is available to everybody unless you're making fun of C-SPAN footage. When the Daily Show itself pokes fun at the UK and uses footage from the UK Parliament, those episodes are banned from being broadcast in the UK. Copyright and intellectual property, it comes up on this show so much and it's a thing that I've been following for years because it really does have this bizarre impact on everything. Like the way that we decide intellectual property works has huge unexpected ramifications in all kinds of areas. Really? Really, United Kingdom? You are going to ban the import of satirical shows from overseas because they include footage from Parliament? It's so weird. And it also feels a little bit like you guys know that this stuff exists on the internet, right?

Like people can still view the programs. I don't know what you're trying to do here except just preventing local producers from being able to make stuff. Like you're just – I mean, they are making it harder to see because it is harder to find that stuff. The thing that – I have some sympathy, for example, with Britain being a bit more draconian than other countries like the US with televising proceedings in courtrooms and things like that. I have some sympathy with not televising everything and broadcasting everything or protecting people from being humiliated when they're doing normal things. But not the MPs, not the people in the parliament. They're the one group that we should be allowed to mock and satirise. Yeah, I completely agree with you there as well.

I think, as we discussed on our Making a Murderer episode, the US goes crazy far in what it allows to be broadcast. I don't think that there should be broadcasts inside of courtrooms. That seems antithetical to justice. But yeah, I completely agree. Oh, public servants engaged in public debate? You can't use this footage to make fun of people. Like that's, that's bizarre. And what I really want to know, right? Like, so we have just seen

these, these tweets from, from Charlie Brooker. What I want to know is, is how does this affect a YouTube channel? Like, I always forget his name. Is it Mixtape Boy? Is that, is that the one? Oh, Cassette Boy. Cassette Boy. Thank you you i can see his little his little pirate bay kind of logo there but cassette boy is this guy who does these amazing mashups of political footage and it just i cannot imagine how many hours of work he goes through to do to like recut politicians um speeches so that they're saying completely opposite things. Trust me, people, I've seen this stuff done before. The Cassette Boy does it amazingly, amazingly well.

But so does this ban on programs that are poking fun at Parliament? Does it include internet producers within the UK? Because Cassette Boy is located within the UK. This to me seems like it's the kind of thing that might just blow up into a bit of a Streisand effect problem if you're also going to try to ban it on the internet. It's, yeah, this copyright stuff is just ridiculous. I'll have to rewatch a bit of Cassette Boy stuff, but in my head, most of the stuff he uses is from press conferences and out outside the parliament so i wonder if he does use parliamentary footage i'll uh i can't remember now yeah i agree

with you most of the most of the stuff i've seen is outside of it but it's still the idea of it like could he use something from within parliament i don't know i'm not sure they can be shamed i'm reading this uh this article about it and it points out that after one of john stewart's daily shows was censored so it could be shown on channel 4 here in the UK like they actually had to censor scenes of the prime minister talking at the dispatch box Stewart then did another episode like asking about it apparently his quote was why why the people's parliament the most basic expression of British democracy is too fragile to withstand a gentle parody, a good-natured kick to

the clotted creams. But you know, if people like Jon Stewart are putting them under the spotlight and they're still not budging, then they're probably not going to budge. It does just make it feel like, ooh, parliament, our feelings are so sensitive, you can't make fun of them at all, despite the fact that we are public servants, right? It's like, it's just, it's intrinsically, it's intrinsically laughable maybe we need a new video from the from the new reborn flame-throwing cgp gray don't drag me into this don't drag me into this after you finish torching the fine brothers maybe it's time to turn that laser focus to the british parliament see if you can shame them into uh back down. I'll see if I can get divinely inspired for that voice again.

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Go to harrys.com and use the promo code hi to get five dollars off your first purchase thanks to harry's for supporting the show so gray is it time is it finally time i guess i guess we'll do you know what i feel like okay people he's bringing up guns germs and steel right that's that's why that That's why Brady's poking at me here. I have this feeling like I'm in school again, and there's some assignment that I'm supposed to do, and it's really late. I keep going, I'll hand it in next week. I'll hand it in next week. But then at the same time, when you don't hand it in every week, there's some expectation that it's going to be something really good that you're handing in. But now I feel like, okay, fine, fine. I'm just going to hand in this homework assignment and it's just going to be over. And we're just going to do this.

So we're going to talk about guns, germs, and steel, but it's not going to be long, people. It's not going to be long. We're just going to go over a few things and then it's going to be done. Then it's going to be over. All right. So by way of background, if you're new to the podcast, we did an episode recently where we reviewed the book Guns, Germs and Steel. Gray has made two widely viewed videos, which is loosely based on some of the things in the book. We talked in the podcast about some views and opinions about things in the book. And Gray did warn at the time that this was a book full of ideas that divided opinion. And that turned out to be true.

And looking at the subreddit dedicated to our discussion, it certainly attracted many opinions, many long, long detailed comments arguing for and against various positions. I have to say, because I hadn't finished the book and don't feel particularly passionate about it, I kind of dodged this bullet. And it has mainly been Grey's opinions who've been coming in for scrutiny. And so we've been saying, so we've been thinking,

do we address some of these? Does Grey answer back to some of them? And now's your chance, Grey. Of the million things that were said, are there any that you wish to address or speak back to? Okay. Of the million things that were said, are there any that you wish to address or speak back to? Okay, so this to me is, again, just like the first conversation, it's a little bit hard to know even where to start, because there's just so many particular things that people want to argue over. And I always find the particulars just exhausting. And again, I'll put some links in

the show notes later. But again, you will see in some of the conversations that I have had, I am often saying how I agree with these constraints. And it brings me back to this thing that I said at the very beginning, which is that I find the conversation around guns, germs, and steel, the reason that it creates a big argument, almost much more interesting than the particulars of the argument itself. It's like it causes this division. And I have just been increasingly interested in the way conversations on the internet unfold. And I think this is just to me a perfect example of a thing that I have seen many times where people are talking past each other and it's very hard to get at the root of what is the fundamental disagreement. And so like with

the last video that I just put up, which was the America pox part two, right? Some, some people want to argue about like, were these animals really easier to domesticate than these animals? Like, how do we know? We can't know unless we go back in time, right? Like you want to get into the specifics of it. And I'm always interested in the much more higher level argument.

Like I don't really care if Jared Diamond got some detail about ancient llamas and their breeding seasons correct. Like, it just, it doesn't interest me. I am interested in the bigger picture of were there easier animals to domesticate in some places than others? Were they randomly distributed across the earth? If so, that's an interesting phenomenon. Like, I'm not, like, I just don't care about the details of this exact animal and if Jared Diamond got it right or

not. And that infuriates some people, but I always just want to reiterate at this point, like, don't forget this part, internet. I am always willing to just grant the historians that they are correct and that Jared Diamond is wrong on the particulars. Just grant it. It doesn't mean that I'm not, like, I don't care what is right. I'm just saying that I think there is this bigger picture to draw from the book that is separate from, like, Jared Diamond and who he is and what exactly he gets right and what exactly he misses. Like, I just think there's this bigger picture to be drawn from it. I've been thinking a little bit about why insights...

Well, I haven't been thinking about it. I've just been thinking about it while you've been talking for the last minute. That's fine. So, that counts as thinking about it. I've been trying to think about why insights so much passion. And I mean, the obvious thing to think is that it incites passion because people feel there's something racial going on here because of, you know, this book is about why continent X, you know, dominated over continent Y. And people could, I can see how people would

associate that with race, but it doesn't really seem like race is much of an issue in the book and he always emphasises that it's not. I think it must be more like nationalistic. People just feel like a bit of pride in their country and don't like to hear things about where they're from belittled and I can give you a really good example of that because this is something I always feel when we talked about guns, germs and steel, and I realise how ridiculous this is.

Like it's double ridiculous. But I remember when reading about and when you talked about why Australia was a country that was never going to or had very, very little chance of becoming the dominant, the source of dominance, and it was never going to be Australians who took over the world. And I remember every time I heard that feeling like a little bit of resentment and like patriotism and thinking, that's not true. Australia is awesome and we Australians can do anything.

Completely ignoring the fact I am a white European who actually, my team did win. Like, you know, it was the white Europeans who came and took over Australia. And still, when people talk down about Australia and say it hasn't got the resources and it couldn't have taken over, I'm thinking, yeah, we could. Australians are awesome. But who's the we in that sentence? Exactly.

Exactly. And that disconnect and that lack of ability to look at the bigger picture, even in the back of my brain when I know it's ridiculous, I think that's what's going on. I think people take things in the book personally when really this is just stuff that happened a long, long time ago. It had nothing to do with any of us really. And it's just an interesting discussion in how we ended up where we did.

But I don't think a lot of it is massively relevant anymore. Maybe it is and some lot of it is massively relevant anymore uh maybe maybe it is and some people think it is but but i think i think that i think this is kind of it's an interesting it's an interesting history to find out how we got here but to me it's not that many steps removed from how did the solar system form like i'd love to know you know how did the universe start i'd love to know but it doesn't make a difference to when I go and get my hair cut tomorrow. And I think the world has gotten to a point now where how come country X dominated over country Y, or continent X dominated country Y, a thousand years ago, 10,000 years ago, however many thousand years ago. It feels like it doesn't matter much anymore.

Yeah, this is part of the conversation we didn't get to in our first discussion of guns, germs, and steel. But I completely agree that one of the things about guns, germs, and steel that I find frustrating when people are arguing against it is that they bring it into a modern context. And I think that this is a theory that applies up to the moment that you have civilizations from different continents meeting each other. But at that moment, like guns, germs, and steel suddenly becomes very irrelevant, right? It's just a question of what is more likely to get you a civilization that can cross oceans. But once you have people crossing oceans and you have transcontinental trade routes, then the geography of the people matters much less. Like it's a dial that gets turned down

over time that I think geography matters much more in the beginning when every single advantage that you can possibly get really matters because it's going to compound over time. But then once the whole world is connected, this doesn't have such an effect anymore. So yeah, I agree. I don't think it's relevant at all to modern times, which is partly why I said last time in the discussion, like, when you asked, oh, does it matter if this is right or wrong? And my answer is like, in a modern world, no, it doesn't matter, right? Because if it's right, it doesn't have any predictive power for the next hundred years. But I think people still feel like you're dissing their continent, like I felt about Australia.

Even though it's not my continent, even though I'm the European guy. Yeah, but I'm the American here, right? Yeah, and I think that's what people think. They feel like you're dissing their animals or you're dissing their continent and saying that their continent wasn't good enough. Yeah, your marsupials are shit, man. They're shit. You can't even tame a kangaroo. Yeah.

Even if you could tame a kangaroo, is it going to pull a plow? No, because it's worthless. Worthless, worthless kangaroos. I know. And I'm like, Australia's awesome. Oh, well. and I'm like, Australia's awesome. I'm not actually super sure how much it is that people get defensive about their own contents. That never occurred to me before

because I just, I don't have that feeling at all. It never would have occurred to me to feel defensive about North and South America being terrible continents either. But anyway, a couple of the points that I do just want to touch on really quickly is that I will put the links in the show notes. There is a long conversation between me and another Reddit user. Nilosh is his Reddit name. I think this is probably a great example for anybody who really wants to dig into

the details of me having an argument with someone else. And this argument follows what I feel like is a very well-worn pattern for arguments that I have had about this book with many people from many different backgrounds. There is some back and forth here, but what I think is the interesting thing is that I'm trying to get at what I think is this fundamental difference. Do people think that there is any predictability in history pre-transcontinental civilizations or not? And many historians seem to take the position that there isn't any predictability. And it's interesting because they will immediately go to free will and say, oh, you're disregarding the notion of free will. Now, again, on the record here, I don't believe in

free will. I think it is a fairy tale that people tell themselves. But in the context of a discussion of history, I'm always happy, like, look, let's not argue about free will because we'll be here for forever. I will just, I will just happily grant to you that free will exists and let's take the whole conversation forward from there. But so many historians are of the view that because free will exists, you can't make these generalizations that Guns, Germs and Steel wants to make, that Eurasia was more likely than other places to take over the world. And I think that you can make those generalizations, even if free will exists. And I think that that is at bottom level, like the

fundamental disagreement that is taking place here and trying to read through the many, many different threads of people who've been arguing about this and people who've written some articles about this. Like, yes, everyone, I have read all of the articles. I have read just about everything about this. I think like that is the bottom root level of this is like a question of human agency. And my view is, even if we grant the existence of free will and human agency, that humans are allowed to make their own decisions, that it seems crazy to me that some people will argue against the idea that human decisions are constrained by environments that you cannot like so there's an example that i'm always trying to use and i think the conversation i'm going to link to is a good example of of what kind of happens where i want someone to

answer a very specific question that I have. So here is this thing that I wrote in the discussion, right? I said, do you agree with what I view as the counterclaim? So like, do you agree with like my portrayal of your argument that all continents are equally as likely to produce empire building civilizations? Like that seems to be the counter argument. If you are saying that there's no predictability, you are saying that someone living in the aboriginal desert, right, or in Antarctic ice sheets, that those people are just as likely to be able to come up with empires as

someone else. And it is so interesting to me that in all of these conversations, no matter how many back and forths I have, I can never get someone to directly answer that question. All I will ever get back is people saying, you can't do a historical what if. Historical what if questions are meaningless, so we can't have this discussion. That's not a thing that we can say. Or they'll say, oh, you are trying to make a statistical argument, but we only have a sample size of one Earth, so we can't make any statistical arguments. And this is the back and forth that happens where I feel like, okay, here at this disagreement is our fundamental level. And it is crazy making to me because I feel like, for the love of God, right? Like if you have a tribe of people living 10,000 years ago at what will be Dead Horse,

Alaska at the very northern part of that state, there's no way that those people are going to be able to build an empire-like civilization. There's just nothing there for them. They're not going to have agriculture. They're not going to be able to develop advanced technology. They're not going to conquer the world. It just seems to me like you can't argue against that. And if you, historian, will grant me this one case that people living on a sheet of ice are slightly, like even ever so slightly, less likely to take over the world, then you have granted what I see is the only thing I need to make the rest of this argument. There is some statistical money-balling of history that you can do on a grand scale over long periods of time. But I'm trying very hard

here not to misrepresent the other side, but this is the argument that I come up against, where people will not grant that, or they will just avoid answering that one part of it. And that is what I think is the fundamental disagreement. Well, yeah, it's because they know how much ammunition they'll be giving you if they answer it. Honestly. Yeah. And that's why I like, sometimes I feel like there's a,

there's like a bizarre, I don't know how to put it, put this, but like, I feel like they don't want to address this for like, like for some other reason. Yeah. So it's funny that you mentioned the,

the, the race stuff before, because as well when these conversations happen inevitably again i've had many of these arguments many times not under my own name on the internet which is why i love anonymity on the internet it's like i could be cgp gray and argue on some random forum about guns germs and steel like nobody knows it's me now now everyone's going to be seeing cg grade ghosts on every single forum about it. You never know.

You never know if it's me. But so this one thing comes up all the time, which is that the person I'm arguing against, when I feel like we're digging down to this moment where I'm saying like, do you think Aborigines are as likely to take over the world? Nothing to do with them being Aborigines, but doing to the fact that they were in the middle of a desert, right? With terrible animals and no resources accessible at 10,000 years ago BC level technologies. Then there comes a moment where someone is saying something like, why are you measuring success as people taking over the world? And so this exact thing happened in this conversation where the person I'm arguing against says, why is conquering the world the measure of a historical success? Like, shouldn't we be impressed with how people are able to live

in incredibly difficult circumstances in various parts of the world? It's like, that to me seems like I don't think you're intentionally diverting the conversation. But I think this is like mimetic evolution. This is a thing that comes up all of the time because it ends up turning the conversation into something else where it's like i mean yeah that's that's not what the book's about that's why i'm not discussing right yeah the book's not about the book's not about 10 000 years ago who was the happiest yeah the book's about or most successful it was about who went and took over the place and killed other people. That is precisely how I feel. But there's like this weird thing where the conversations do get derailed in this way

where someone else is like, why are you saying Europeans are so great? And it's like, that is the reverse of the conversation that we're having. Like we're having the exact opposite conversation. And I will refuse to be drawn into this because, again, I don't think it's a diversion, but I think like this is just an evolution of how these conversations go. Like, I think there's a meme inside your head and my head that's having some other argument and it's taking this little moment to like blossom into the world by jumping into the conversations. Deep stuff, Gray. You think about this pretty deeply, don't you? Well, again, I just really think that this pretty deeply, don't you? subreddit, when people start talking about my argument, and again, I'll link to other threads about this, but it is this idea of the infuriating totems that I mentioned in the this video will

make you angry thing, where it has been very interesting over the past few weeks to see how things that I have said on the podcast have mutated into the most infuriating versions of themselves that they could possibly be. And so for like for two examples, people represent my argument as absolute determinism, that I am saying that if you knew enough about the world, you could predict everything that was going to happen throughout all of history. And it's like, I'm not making that argument. Jared Diamond's not making that argument. Nobody's making that argument. Like, that's a crazy argument to make. That is the argument that people want to argue against. And it is also just infuriating, right? Like, it's incredibly wrong. And then the other one that I think has been

very, very interesting to see has actually come out of this podcast. So when we discussed Guns, Germs and Steel last time, I made the remark at the end about how I overly endorsed Guns, Germs and Steel as the history book to rule all history books at the end as a way to like troll people who were clearly going to be getting irritated by the video as they were watching it all the way through the end. And that would be like the final capper that would set them off. But that has turned into, and I've tried to fight against it, but I know like this is just a losing battle. I have seen people say, CGP Grey doesn't believe anything in guns, germs, and steel. And he made that whole video just to piss off historians right this isn't about me like this isn't just i'm saying this is an interesting pattern that i see in the world that

happens with conversations right where suddenly people are arguing against like this this infuriating totem version of me it's like boy i would hate that guy too right like if someone who had built a career as a person who is making educational videos then intentionally made something that was false just to screw around with a community that he doesn't like so much like wow what a dick that guy would be right like i would totally agree with that so the the thing that i want to mention so much, like, wow, what a dick that guy would be, right? Like, I would totally agree with that. So the thing that I want to mention here, which is like the broader point is, especially after having done this podcast and seeing this happen to myself, like with conversations like language that we discussed a long time ago and a bunch of other things, basically

I have come to the point, and I think everyone should keep this in mind, that if you have only heard about another person's opinions from someone who doesn't like that person, you need to be extremely suspicious of that. Yes, that is true. But I think it's less obvious than you think it is, right? it's less obvious than you think it is. Yeah. Right? It's less obvious than you think it is. And I have definitely found a bunch of very interesting cases where, like, I have intentionally done a thing over the past year much more than I ever used to, which is when I keep hearing about how awful someone is, I'm like, oh, let me go actually try to figure out a little bit about their viewpoint on topic x or whatever it is

sometimes they're still just awful people but many times i had been surprised and go oh okay wow like this person i thought was awful uh i thought it because i wasn't even aware of it but i had only ever heard of their views in these like vastly distorted ways yeah and it's like oh okay yeah i thought that this person this imaginary totemic version of this person was absolutely awful but it's like it is just this cartoonish version of their actual views like and that is really interesting to to see firsthand and again like the guns terms of steel thing like again i'm not trying to dismiss all arguments against it as as this totemic thing

there's plenty plenty to to criticize legitimately i just think this is to me an interesting example of this phenomenon in action and it's very interesting for it to be happening to myself over a topic that again as we said at the beginning like it doesn't really matter that much if guns germs and steel is right or wrong so like this is all like a fun intellectual game in some ways which i'm sure someone will take out of context but it's just i think it's very interesting to see how conversations unfold and if you really really want to see uh a back and forth in more detail with many thousands of words i will link to a couple of things in the show notes for you to go take a look at for conversations. You have this great interest in arguments and

debate and the spread of hate and all this sort of stuff. You know, you've made a video about it and you've been talking about it now. It's like, it interests you a lot intellectually, no matter what the debate is about. And I sometimes wonder whether or not that comes from just who you are and what your mind is like, or it comes from the fact that I feel like you have a very internet-y existence, you know, you have this sort of very reddity and internet existence, and that is kind of the hotbed for this kind of place. This is where this stuff is at its most overt and wild. And I wonder whether that feeds into that and has made you more interested in it, or you're just naturally into that sort of stuff.

Because, you know, you're a guy who likes debating and intellectual discourse, or whether or not you spend so much time on Reddit and watch so much people throwing crap at each other, that you now have become very interested in the process of crap throwing. Yeah, well, the internet definitely takes crap throwing to 11, right? Like there's no disagreement with that. And I think that the internet has an effect of magnifying certain features of arguments so that they are more obvious, right? It's more clear. I'm not exactly sure when this started, but I mean, I can definitely say that one of the most interesting things that comes out of seeing a lot of arguments on the internet is this recognizing of patterns, right? And recognizing how, oh, this conversation is, like, these participants think that they're

having this conversation, but actually they are an instantiation of this pattern that occurs all the time looking at it like a level above like that it becomes i don't know it becomes different than seeing two people having an argument it becomes i'm seeing this pattern spread through the world and I think one of the best ways to do this is, is actually like, like, so like I read it, like change my view, which has a lot of people just arguing and debating about whatever. Pick a topic on there, like look at what people are discussing and pick something that you just don't have any interest in, that you don't, like you haven't decided what side you're on. And when you watch people argue a thing that you are not a part of,

it becomes much more clear like, oh, there's some kind of meta structure here. There's something that is not specific to this argument that is still happening. And that is where it is most clear where you can see this thing where people argue past each other. When you don't have a dog in the fight, it becomes much more obvious when like, oh, person on side A, you're arguing against an imaginary version of person on side B and person on side B, you're doing the same thing. Like you two are not actually arguing against each other. Or you can have the case where, which I feel is a bit like the guns, germs, and steel thing, where it's like, I am a person who is conceding 99% of the ground in this argument,

but the other person constantly thinks that we have much more of a disagreement than we actually do. And it's, I think basically, long story short, I think you're right. I think that being on the internet and being a very internet-y person magnifies a certain interest that I have in this already. And it's definitely something that has been growing over the past year. Argue about it in the comments, people. If you lost all your episodes of Hello Internet from your computer tomorrow,

well, that'd be okay. You could download them again from the Hello Internet website or perhaps somewhere like iTunes. But what if all your personal data disappeared tomorrow? Your photos, private information, that novel you've been working on for the last eight years. Where would you go? What would you do? Maybe, and I stress maybe, you remembered to back them up to external hard drive.

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trial i think once you've seen an action it'll probably sell you on the whole thing that address again backblaze.com slash hello internet the slash hello internet will let them know you came from here on the podcast and as always our thanks to backblaze for supporting the show. So as we record, what I should be doing right now is packing. Didn't this happen before when you were supposed to be packing, but somehow we're recording a show with me instead? I am going on a holiday briefly to India. Oh. And then the main body of the holiday is in Bhutan, which is a place I have never been to before. And I'm very excited about visiting. Bhutan. Yeah. Quick, click, click, click. You must vaguely know where it is. You always get it vaguely right. I feel like Bhutan's near Indonesia. No, I wouldn't say that. Problem is I know they have the dragon flag. Like that's the thing that leaps into my head,

but I have nowhere idea in the world. Oh, I'm confusing them with, I'm confusing it with Brunei. That's what I'm thinking of. Sorry, entire nations of Brunei and Bhutan. Sorry to all the Tim and Timanithas who live there. I can't speak for Brunei, but I would be very surprised if we have many listeners in Bhutan. It's a bit of a forbidden kingdom and technology has only sort of just started coming to it. What are you talking about? What do you mean technology has only just started coming to it? What kind of apocalypse has happened there? No, it's just one of these really sort of, you know, forbidden sheltered places. It has this reputation for that. What do you mean by the word forbidden?

You always hear the word forbidden used when people talk about Bhutan because they don't let many people in and things like that. It's like a forbidden kingdom. The word forbidden shows up once on their Wikipedia page saying that proselytism is forbidden by a royal government decision in Bhutan. Well, there you go. I don't think that's backing up your case. One match for forbidden.

They're famous for forbidding that for you forbidding proselytism here we go here's a blog here's a wall street journal blog where they say forbidden kingdom opens up a little bit like oh i don't care what you say i'm calling it forbidden because it sounds awesome i'm sorry brady i didn't mean to try to take away your forbidden kingdom that you're going to visit in the mystery of the east and and one of the one of the things that really got me interested in going there there is a mountain there which is the highest mountain in the world that has not been summited and i can't i can't say it it's like ganga poonsam are you going to summit that mountain brady i'm not going to summit it i

just want to see it oh that's much less interesting obviously i'm not going to summit that mountain, Brady? I'm not going to summit it. I just want to see it. Oh, that's much less interesting. Obviously, I'm not going to summit it. Why obviously? Aren't you? Haven't you been up Mount Everest? Haven't you gone there? Do you know why Ganga Pusnam has not been summited, Gray? Obviously not.

I'll tell you why. Because it's forbidden. It is not. You are not. No, you are not allowed to climb it. The government of Bhutan has banned the climbing of mountains over 6,000 meters. And Ganga Poonsam is 7,570 meters high, which is very high. So that's not allowed to be climbed.

It is a forbidden mountain. I would say it's prohibited. That too. But the prohibited kingdom doesn't sound quite as good as the forbidden kingdom. Not even close, no. So depending on the weather, I hope to catch a glimpse of that mountain from a distance. Otherwise the clouds may forbid my viewing of it as well. They may block your viewing of it. So I'm hoping to get a look at it and I'm really looking forward to Bhutan. I will report back to the

Hello Internet Nation upon my return. But going there does involve me going to India twice. I have to stop in India on the way, and we're going to go and see the Taj Mahal because no other of us have ever seen it. And then we have to stay in India when we come back. And this brings me to one of my favourite topics, Indian visas. Yes, I hear that the Indian government's bureaucracy is amazing. Well, last time I went to India, I had a real moan on the podcast because I had to go all the way to Birmingham, which is a city a few hours from where I am, and fill out all these forms in person. And since then, India has introduced this electronic visa system. And everyone tweeted me and emailed me and said, oh, Brady, do you know this has come in? You know,

what do you think about it? And I couldn't tell people what I thought about it because I hadn't done it. I have now done it. And I have to take my hat off to the Indian government. I didn't think it would be possible to replicate the terrible, terrible, terrible experience of visa application in person in the online format. But they've done it. They have managed to transfer the heartache, disappointment and impossibility of their visa system very effectively onto the internet. That sounds amazing. The only thing that's leaping into my head is on my list of games to play is a game called Papers, Please. And it is a game where you just look through documents as a government employee, like it is a paperwork replicator. And so I like this idea

that someone in the Indian government is like, it's really terrible to apply to our visas in person. How can we capture the feeling of that and put it onto the internet? They have captured the feeling. And you should add to your list of games to play, applying for an Indian visa, just for the fun of it. That would be the only reason to go to India. I'm going to ignore just the bad design and unintuitive layout and just the general unpleasantness of that. Because, you know, that's a matter of taste and maybe culturally Indian webpages are different. I need to deal with that. I don't know.

I don't think so. But okay, sure. Go ahead. But having sort of arbitrary red asterisks next to the things that have to be filled out and not filled out and then changing your mind and saying you've got to go and fill that out even though it didn't have an asterisk like you know whatever whatever yeah i'm sure that's just that's just a cultural difference but the level of detail they want to go to this country continues to amaze me and okay i guess i was able to recollect the the intimate birth details of my parents eventually. Then being asked to list every city I've ever been to in India is, when I've been there a few times now, it's not easy.

Being asked the visa number and the address of the last place I stayed in when I was in India was also quite a challenge, digging up that information. But my favourite was being required to list all the countries I have visited in the last 10 years. I know like I'm an old guy, so I travel a bit now, but like that's a long list and I can't do it. I travel as little as possible, but I would have a hell of a hard time coming up with all of the places I have been in the last 10 years. I was just at the bank the other day, actually having quite a good bureaucratic experience for once, but they needed to know the address of the house I lived in two houses ago. Oh, that's a, I can't do that either. Now this is within the past five years and it was like

i have i got nothing right there's nothing in my head about this like can you give us the first letter of the postcode no i i have i have no idea i just i text my wife whenever that happens i'll be in a bank saying what was the address of that place we lived in in nottingham that third place like she she's amazing for that but i got no So anyway, an excruciating amount of detail was required. Now, I understand they're pretty delicate about people that have connections with Pakistan. And if they just said, have you ever been to Pakistan or have you got any relatives who are from Pakistan,

I would understand. There are issues there. But this was an ordeal and it was worsened by the fact i had to apply for me and i was i volunteered to do my wife's as well so i had to go through it twice but no i didn't have to go through it twice i didn't have to go through it twice because here's the other catch you can only do one entry and we are going into india on the way to bhutan and then we're coming into India again on the way back like a week and a half later that requires a whole separate visa and you have to

go through the whole multi-page website again and do the whole thing again but also you can only do it in this kind of window one month out from when you go so I filled out the form not knowing I was going to have this problem of having to do it twice I filled out the form, not knowing I was going to have this problem of having to do it twice. I filled out the form, filled out the thing, went through the whole separate thing you have to then do to pay the $60 to some other bank, which never works and takes about eight goes to make work over a series of days. But then I found out, okay, you've got your visa, but that's only going to get you in once. You now have to wait for the other window to open for your other visa to go into India when you're coming back. They make it so hard to get into that country. I'm pulling up a map here, right?

Why are you going to India? Like you're just stopping over on your way to Bhutan, right? Why don't you just give India the middle finger and just stop in Pakistan, get a connecting flight in Pakistan, right? For Rizlabad or something. I don't know. Get a connecting flight in Pakistan. For Rizlabahd or something. I don't know. I've never been to Pakistan and I can imagine applying for visas there is probably also not the world's easiest experience. Okay, well, fine. Well, then next over it's Afghanistan, right? I'm sure it's going to be easy, right? To get a connecting flight into Kabul, right? Look, I'm just, I'm trying to help you here. Okay, fine. Let's go. We'll go a little bit more west. We can get a connecting flight out of Iran. Is that, does that work for you? Can you get a connecting flight out of Iran?

This is not an easy part of the world to travel to, is it? But I have to say, my wife loves India and we both want to see the Taj Mahal. So that is why we're going. And I'm sure it will be lovely. And all of these problems with the visa will be long forgotten. Will they though? I feel like this kind of stuff sticks in your craw for a long time. I have had problems with visas every time I've ever gone to India and some of them have involved mercy missions in the middle of the night

to go and get some guy to unlock the embassy for me to sign some document. Well, on my long list of reasons never to go to India, this is just another one. Don't say that because we have lots of listeners in India and they're really good at emailing. I'm sure they are good at emailing. Like, sorry, India, I'm never going to your country. Like, I have no interest in going.

Your visa sounds like a real pain in the butt. I swear, like if I saw saw if i was like if i had some some even mild interest into going to india and i loaded up a visa page and i could see at the bottom of the page it said you know click next for page two that would be enough to totally defeat me be like ah forget it i'm not going to india i mean you know me gray i'm always trying to get you to go places and do things that i've done because that's just what i do i'm always trying to get you to go to nepal but i i'm not selling you in india yet i i'm i'm yet to see that after is that after the nepal experience it's just i uh yeah when we get our connecting flight through uh let's see

yeah we get our connecting flight through baghdad to nepal nepal is easy to get into the forbidden kingdom Bhutan, I can't tell you because the travel agent had to do those visas. It is so forbidden that I couldn't even do the visa application. That's how forbidden it is. I didn't even know what was involved. I don't know whether they were paper bags exchanged in the dead of night or mysterious magic words have to be spoken, but I don't even know what it was required. I've just got it. Or bribes paid. Bribes paid. That's the thing. But yeah, so I'm not going to India and email Brady. Sometimes I defend bureaucracies because I think bureaucracies have a bad rap. My favorite experience with the bureaucracy ever was when I was getting qualified to be a teacher here in the UK. I am a foreigner.

I'm an immigrant in the UK. And so at one point, I was talking with my advisor, and she was telling me, oh, we have to get you certified that you can speak English. Okay, I am talking to you right now. Is this not good enough? And she goes, no. everyone who is from outside the uk you have to bring to me a piece of paper that says that you are fluent in english and so i had to book

an exam to go to this building to take in to take a test to prove that I could speak English. And what did I think was going to happen? I thought, okay, so I'm going to get into like a room with some dude and it's like, oh, ha ha ha, we'll have a fun chuckle over this, won't we? Right? Like, can the Americans speak English? Who knows? Nope. The only way that the test to see if I was conversant in English, enough to teach in a UK school was entirely an on-screen computer test that was multiple choice. I had to sit there for like an hour answering a bunch of questions in English. And then they gave me a piece of paper which said, congratulations, you passed. You can quote speak English. And then I gave my advisor back at the university that piece of paper. And in front of me, she could tick a little box on

her form that said, yes, this person speaks English. Great. That sounds like your dream come true. You didn't have to interact with a person, just a screen. I would have thought you'd be quite grateful for that. I lost a whole afternoon of my life, Brady. A whole afternoon of my life. Never, never gotten back. I couldn't retrieve that afternoon. But that to me was like the apex, the apex of what a bureaucracy was. Because it wasn't even that, oh, my advisor then has to pass off this piece of paper to someone else who doesn't know me. It's like, no, no, just within her system. She's not going to tick this box until she has the piece of paper, even though she knows that

I speak English. Like, can you just pretend that you have the piece of paper? Is anyone ever going to check this? No, no. We've got to crank the gears of the machine, dehumanizing us all. What sort of questions were you asked? Do you remember much about the test? I don't remember anything about it, except a vague feeling of being slightly nervous, like I was going to actually fail this test about can I speak English? Did you have to speak answers or would you just touch a screen? Like it would be which one of these words is cloud or something? Or did you have to say things? I could have been totally mute. There was nobody there. I didn't have to speak anything. I was just clicking buttons on a screen. So to prove that you can speak English, you didn't actually have to speak.

You could have had no tongue and passed that test. That's entirely correct. Yes. It was only mildly less frustrating than the test I also had to take to prove that I could do grade school math. My bachelor's in physics was apparently not accepted by the university either. That was not okay. Even though I was also accepted into their program to become a physics teacher.

No, I also, as a foreigner, had to take a test that proved that I could do multiplication up to and including numbers as large as 12. Do you know what I want to say? I want to say the process you have to go through to become a school teacher in India. Please list your class schedule for all schools you have been to for the past 20 years. Have you not weighed yourself, Brady?

No. Okay, Matt. So like I let you slide last week, but I think I need to have like a friend intervention here because how long has it been since you weighed yourself? months now it's it's been a long time uh yeah i mean yeah you can do an intervention i feel like maybe i need to do an intervention on you and realize you know i feel like saying to you he's just not that into it just let me like if you truly love a bi-weekly weigh-in, you let it go.

And if it returns to you, it was truly yours. So you've got to let me go. And if I start weighing myself again, then I'm truly yours. See, here's the thing. Here's the thing, Brady. Yeah. I know this about you right it is it is the very fact that i i am putting this bi-weekly way in in here and i'm trying to to bring it up again and i'm trying to put you on the hook again

i think that you being on the hook for your health i think this is a good thing for you i i i want you on the hook but if you truly knew me you would know making me do a good thing for you. I want you on the hook. But if you truly knew me, you would know making me do a rigid thing every two weeks is not how I work. I don't care if it's exactly every two weeks. Like, whatever. I just don't want to let you try to have this just slide away like you have been doing from the very beginning, since we ever started this. It's always like you've got to let me free away you've got to let me go free but see i when when you say that all i hear is that you you just want to drink your diet pepsis unmolested that's that's what you want to do

diet pepsis are good they've got no calories the thing the thing is the thing is i've got to want to do it i can't do it because you want me to do it. It's got to come from within. Well, of course, of course. How do we get you to want to do it from within? How do we inspire you, Brady? I don't know, but I don't think it's going to happen in the next 10 minutes. So what are these points you want to cover?

The reason why I was brought up the bi-weekly way in this week is I thought, and I just let it slide last week because I knew last week I wasn't even going to try. I mean, I don't mind the bi-weekly way. But to me it's not a bi-weekly way and it's like health corner right but but we call it like a meta joke now right it's bi-weekly way although it does it does pose the question the elephant in the room is is bi-weekly twice a week or fortnightly we're not no we don't we're not getting distracted right that's that's memetic warfare right there you're just we're getting distracted yeah you think guns germs and steals controversial you tried talking about whether something's bi-weekly or fortnightly so okay so so here's why here's why i thought this would be a nice gentle point of re-entry for the bi-weekly weigh-in because last time i was very happy to be under

200 pounds but this time i am back over 200 pounds entirely entirely through my own actions and my own fault uh i weighed myself this morning and i am 201 pounds. My low was 198. So I am up three pounds from my bottoming out there. But so I thought this was this is a great time to, again, just reiterate, reiterate my fundamental idea here that it's it's not about succeeding every single time that the skill is about getting back on the wagon and about being able to constantly recommit yourself to the thing that you are trying to achieve. And so when I saw that I was over 200 pounds, I was, A, not entirely surprised for reasons that we will mention shortly. But B, I thought, OK, it's OK. Like, this is not some failure. I was genuinely hoping that after getting

back down under 200 i thought like i will never be over 200 again but like that that to me is exactly the wrong kind of thing to think though right because then it's like oh there's only one way to fail here whereas the correct way to think about this stuff is like no no you just like you didn't follow the system and now you just need to get back on with the system. So that's the point here. I thought it would be an excellent time to bring you back on board, but maybe not so much. I mean, what you say is true, Gray, and it's motivating to hear it. So you are doing me good by saying it. I'm a motivational speaker. I tell you what, a lot of people have taken inspiration from, and I'm not saying people

should do this, but I've found it really touching how many people have really started health kicks because of those t-shirts you thought of. The Fitatron t-shirts. So many people have posted pictures or sent emails saying, I've got one and it's just made me decide to get really healthy and they're doing well. I felt a bit that way when I first got it, to be honest. I started wearing it all the time and going for runs and i've stopped a bit just lately but um but it's funny how something so like little and trivial can be the thing that can give you a little a little kick my guess is it's partly the fact that they are people who are listening to the podcast as well right like the podcast comes out on a somewhat regular basis so yes i do like seeing

people getting their their t-shirts but the the the messages that i have seen so far that i definitely like the best are people who have over a longish period of time lost some weight like i will never grow tired of those and i and i think maybe just the fact that this t-shirt is also connected to a podcast that they listen to on a regular basis. Like maybe that's just the thing that kind of puts someone over the edge. Yeah. You know, whatever it is, it's a good thing. But, you know, you're here every two weeks.

You're here every two weeks, Brady. I'm here every two weeks. I'm here bi-weekly. Yeah, you're here bi-weekly. That's right. That's what you are. Or am I? Or am I here fortnightly?

No, no, no no no no we're not doing that we're not doing that i will have to confess what my problem is and why i am back over 200 pounds i will i will start by saying and having excuses right so i was doing animating for the last video that came out and animating has always been my danger zone because one i just don't get any sleep at all and then two i just eat garbage all the time while i'm animating and three i don't move so it's like three solid days of just the worst i could possibly be i was really proud of myself this time because i didn't stay up all night like I normally do and so ended up dragging out the animation over many more days I think it took me five days to animate it instead

of just the usual two or three so like okay so like baby steps baby steps but I still wasn't exercising and I was also just eating a bunch of garbage but chief among them was popcorn, which is just, that's just a black hole of danger for me. Like, can't get near the popcorn because you will eat all of it in the world, right? Like, there's no amount of popcorn that is satiating. How can that be bad? I mean, popcorn is just corn, which is healthy because it's like, you know, vegetable-y. And it's air. It's air blown into corn. That sounds like the healthiest like, you know, vegetable-y. And it's air. It's air blown

into corn. That sounds like the healthiest food in the world. Okay, listen. Listen, this is going to get a little personal. So many years ago, when I listened to This American Life, before I had to give it up because I just found it too tedious. And yeah, I just couldn't deal with this american life but they did an episode which was about people who had food allergies but that who could but that couldn't give up the food so they'd be people who would like they would have something like shrimp that they just totally loved but they would have horrific allergic reactions to it so they would just epi pen themselves while having shrimp right or they would just accepti-pen themselves while having shrimp, right? Or they would just accept the fact that they were going to be deeply uncomfortable for

a long time. And I remember listening to that show and thinking, how can anyone possibly be like that? Like, what are these idiots doing eating these foods that in some case just totally endanger their lives? Shrimp and prawns is probably the food that would make me do that too. So it's funny you chose that example. But anyway. Yeah. So here's a little lesson that I have learned from the low carb diet, which is that under a certain point of carbs, I have discovered that you can basically give yourself allergies to carbs after a long enough period of time. I first discovered this with milk, which I had a really bad reaction to after not drinking milk for a very long time. But popcorn is the absolute worst. And I haven't discussed it on the podcast before, but I eventually picked up a pattern after, say, going to The Martian and Everest and Star Wars and a couple of movies at home sometimes.

And now this last binge of animating that if I have popcorn in the evening, I better not have to go anywhere the next day. I'm going to stay real close to the house as in I'm never going to leave the house. Popcorn, but it doesn't stop you eating it. Apparently, this is not unusual for people who go on a really low carb diet. And that the like the shells in popcorn that they can give you really basically like a horrific internal reaction in your intestines if you go on a really low carb diet but basically now he's being so delicate it's like there's no i mean maybe there's there's no polite way to say it but it's like man it's a bad decision but nonetheless nonetheless

i find myself in this situation where now i am one of those idiots who was on this american life a long time ago where it's like i'm looking at a bowl of popcorn and thinking well you know you're not just gonna eat one of these you're gonna eat like three of these and then you know you know if you have anything scheduled for tomorrow for the whole day tomorrow you were just gonna have to cancel it right and like yeah okay i understand, right? Like, we're just going right ahead with this. And the following day, while I am in great discomfort, and in some cases, quite serious pain, I'm still thinking, worth it, right?

It was totally worth it. I'm going to do this again. I'm going to pay this price. Oh, man. I'll tell you what, I think you're the one that needs an intervention not me this episode of hello internet is brought to you by squarespace squarespace is the simplest way for anyone to create a beautiful landing page website or online store start building your website today at squarespace.com with With easy to use tools and templates, Squarespace helps you capture every detail of what drives you. Squarespace puts all

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I'd noticed that you were video gaming on Twitch or whatever it's called the other day. And everyone was telling me on Twitter, Brady, why aren't you there watching Grey play video games? Which I don't feel like I need to answer that question. But anyway. What do you mean? Why didn't you want to watch me play video games, Brady? I know. I mean, I know it's a huge, huge thing and it makes me feel so old to say it,

but the fact that people sit and watch other people play games for hours is quite the thing. But it did make me contact you this week and say, we should talk about video games. Well, the first idea I had was I want to sort of get my head around why I feel like I've grown out of games and sort of, and throw that issue around a bit. Cause that's the main thing I want to talk about, which I know is interesting interesting in itself but then as i was thinking about it i felt like to give it some context we should probably talk a little bit about our sort of our history with with games and gaming like you know how it started for us and how we got to the point we're at now and sort of thinking about that over the last few hours today has just got me so excited about the nostalgia of games and my

history with games that that's what I want to talk about. But I know that's not what you want to talk about. Yeah, well, this is, yeah, this, your relationship with video games, I have a hard time, I have a hard time understanding and I have been quite surprised by your childlike giddiness as you've been sending me messages about your busy reminiscing over past games. So I'm not, I have a very hard time understanding your relationship with video games at all. So you need to explain to me. Are we calling them video games? Is that the right term? Is that like what old people call them? Or is that okay? I'm saying video games talking to you. I'm almost certainly just going to slip into

games as the conversation goes on. All right. How do you differentiate between board games? This is a whole other conversation. Don't try to move off track here. I just want to like, just try to tell me what your relationship is, because I don't understand at all. Because it seems to me like adult you, this is going to be too strong of a word, but adult you almost has some kind of disdain for games or like like it just it's a it's a funny thing when video games come up between us

and i just don't know where you stand uh no that that is not a fair characterization i would say it is more indifference but an appreciation for how much i used to love it and a kind of almost a confusion as to why i don't anymore like like like i kind of almost want to get back into them like sometimes i see like a couple of the games you're playing you'll tell me about them or i see promotions for new games that are out and i think that looks really cool like i wish i had that when i was young i think i'd really enjoy playing that and yet i cannot i cannot get get it i can't get into it like i i don't have the desire and i don't know where it went i used to love them and that's why i think i have this cliched view that young people are into games and you grow out of them right and i know people are going to say oh the

statistics show that the average gamer is 35 years old and that sort of stuff. But I actually am not convinced by that. And if it is true, why is it so disconnected with the circles I move in? Does it say something about my friends and the world I move in? Yeah, it definitely does say something about your friends. Let's just get this out of the way, like, immediately. You, and I know you're going to argue against this, but you are moving in above averagely successful circles. The people that you are talking to are compared to the average person, much more successful in their fields, right? Not even just financially successful, but just successful in a

broad sense. And I think that there's definitely going to be an anti-correlation there between someone who is unusually successful and video game playing. Basically, you're saying a lot of the people I spend time with just haven't got time to play games. Yeah, pretty much, right? Like if you are going to be successful in any sense of the word, you need more time than the average person does to do stuff. It's interesting because in preparation for watching this video, I re-watched your video we mentioned recently, the professors react to 2048 video,

just because I just wanted to kind of bring it fresh in the mind. And I wasn't surprised there that most of the professors, as an example, you could see that they just, they weren't so interested. Notable exception, Professor Moriarty, which I'm not surprised by.

But for the large extent, like they just weren't interested in playing the games or one of them even said like, oh, it's just, it feels like a waste of my mental efforts to be playing this kind of game. It's like news at 11, successful chemistry professors not so interested in video games.

It's just, it seems like obviously this would be anti-correlated. I think a lot of people won't like hearing that. Why? Well, because the flip side of it is saying, if you're really into games and like playing games, you're not successful. That's a kind of weird argument. I'm just simply saying that if you're a successful person...

Hang on a second. I know you say I say some weird things, but that's not a weird thing to say. I'm not saying it's true. I don't think it's true, but it's not a weird thing to say when you just said people who are really successful haven't got time for games. Isn't it a fair leap to make to say, well, if you have got time for games, you must not be as successful. That's not like a... It could be wrong, but it's not stupid. No. Yeah. So I wasn't saying it's a it's a stupid argument i just think it's it's like the it's like basketball players are taller than the population on average that's not saying that only tall people are basketball players right like

that that's the that's the converse argument here if you're talking about successful people i think you should find that on average, most of their time is spent on the things that make them successful. I think that's what's going on here. So what was your first experience of games? I really want to know about your first experience. Where do you start with video games? Because I really don't have any sense of this at all. I'm a bit older than you. It probably started a bit earlier for me. I was trying to think where it started for me. And the first one I wrote down were those, do you know those handheld Donkey Kong games that Nintendo used to make? Do you mean the LCD screen games? Yeah, the two LCD

screens. So I had that Donkey Kong and then I also had Donkey Kong 2 of that. And so I wrote that as the first one. So that was, that was one. So that's my earliest sort of gaming memories. But the thing I want to say about that, and I found this really interesting, was I had that Donkey Kong game where you could clock the game by getting to, what, 999 points. And I remember spending hours and hours and days and days and weeks and weeks trying to get through that game and having like at one point having a high score of 970 or something and i choked right before the end and i was consumed by the game and then eventually it retired you know i got put away in a drawer and i never played it again and i moved on and i remember one time about five or six years later getting it out and thinking for old time's sake, let's put the batteries back in

it and have a go. And I turned it on and played it. And the first time I played it, I clocked it to the end straight away. And I've never fully understood it. Was it because when you're older, you just get better at things? And was I just like better and smarter and more? Like as a little kid, was I just not capable of... Donkey Kong was beyond you. Yeah. Is that it? Was it a really easy game? And just when I was young, like there was certain skills I didn't have. And then when I was a bit older, like a late teenager or something, it was just like child's play.

Like that could be the only explanation couldn't it okay well so for our younger listeners who have no idea what you're talking about just just to set the stage here because i think this answers your question yeah the very first handheld video game consoles of any kind were like game boy sized things but they were dedicated to a single game. And there was just a couple of LCD things on the screen that could light up or that would not light up. So if you think of an old fashioned calculator, where when you look at the screen, you can see that it can't draw arbitrary shapes, it can only draw the couple of shapes that will then appear as numbers depending on what's illuminated on the screen. these games were so simple that

they built an entire game out of that concept where there would be a little picture of a donkey kong that could light up or not and so it could only be in like three positions right and every single place that you could possibly be on the board as a little mario like the picture would light up or not and so i think brady these games were so simple that yes adult you is just able to perceive it as the full system that it is and just crush it whereas a kid whereas a kid it was like i was the man moving around like i got lost in that and therefore but when i And maybe because I'd also seen more advanced games by that point, it just seemed like from a primitive intelligence to me. Right.

You were just able to perceive it as the system of like, oh, okay, there's only three spots that the guy in the bottom can be whenever the barrel's in this location. Like it's not a moving barrel. It's a sequence of lights. Even is over representing what it actually is so those things were just so so simple that you can't compare them to even anything remotely like a modern video game i did feel like a god all those years later when i took it out and just got straight to the end but was that after you drove your car so and but then the first

from there we were actually i think my parents were quite although my parents weren't into games they did like new gimmicks i think so we were quite early adopters when it came to the atari 2600 console which we used to plug into our huge wooden Rank Arena TV, which took four people to lift because it was so heavy. I'm pretty sure the Atari had wood on it as well. The old Atari 2600. There was wood on the front. Yeah, we did have that. I had that early one.

I'll tell you what, that TV, though, brings back fond memories. It got to a point where whenever you switched it on, you had to wait a good half an hour to 40 minutes until it became bright enough to be able to see things. Like if there was a TV, like the tube was so old and my parents didn't replace it, if there was a show on in 40 minutes you wanted to watch, you would turn the TV on now so that the picture would be bright enough by the time the show started.

That's pretty bad. That's pretty bad. And we went through this phase where I had this like yellow glow crawling across the screen that we could never figure out. And it turns out we'd put it too close to like one of the speakers from our sound system. Magnetic shielding. You have to have magnetic shielding for your speakers. Otherwise, they're going to mess up your cathode ray tube. I was so into the Atari games. I mean, starting from the really simple ones like Outlaw was my earliest memory and Basketball with those

with just that square pixel bowl and two stick men literally two stick men that make your videos look like masterpieces right uh playing basketball and i'll tell you what i was amazing at that game i was amazing at basketball then space invaders and defender and yars revenge and all that but i remember when pole position came out on the atari 2600 like that was such a leap in graphics. Like I thought, this is amazing. Like games will never get better than this. And if you Google Atari 2600 Pole Position

and watch a YouTube video of it being played and just think that there was a time when I played that game and I thought, games won't get better than this. Graphics won't get better than this. This is, I can't believe they've done this. It extraordinary to me yeah i definitely played some some of this this is that racing game i was just googling it because i couldn't remember precisely what it is but yes i never i thought that was i thought i thought humanity had peaked with the making of that game

and nothing would ever be better i mean just just for comparison here, people, right? Like the whole game is 256 pixels by 256 pixels on the screen. Like I'm pretty sure that icons on my Mac are 256 pixels by 256 pixels at this point. I was wrong because then eventually I got this game called pitfall 2 not the original pitfall i actually got pitfall 2 before pitfall and that that game was like it was like tomb raider to me i thought oh my goodness this is it's so complex it's so it's so incredibly layered and it's full of depth and adventures to be had. I could spend a lifetime playing this game and never get to the end of it. And of course, I watched someone play it on YouTube a bit earlier today and it was like the simplest thing in the world. It was, again, it was ridiculous. But at the time it was this whole world I could get lost in.

How old are you when you're playing this Atari? Like what's the timeframe here? Well, it's the 80s. So I guess I'm from, you know, either side of 10. Okay. I'm just, I'm just trying to establish like, okay, so this is your early, this is your early gaming because this is, this is where you, you are, uh, about five years older than me. And my wife is about the same amount of age younger than me. And it's interesting that there are so many things where that age difference doesn't matter. But when you're talking about what were the experiences of 10 or 15 year old you, it's like, oh, you're from different planets, right? That it's accelerated, especially for people who are interested in technology. When you rewind and you're going across like, okay, were you experiencing computing in 1980 or 85 or 90?

Like these are light years apart. And going through my own history of gaming, like I had some of the handheld stuff that you did. That's why I know what you're talking about with the Donkey Kong game. And I had a neighbor who had an Atari. So I played some games on there. some of the handheld stuff that you did. That's why I know what you're talking about with the Donkey Kong game. And I had a neighbor who had an Atari, so I played some games on there. And I'm sure that definitely helped solidify our friendship. It's like, oh, you have an Atari.

You can play video games. Wow, I'm going to make sure I always go over to your house. But for me, my own personal gaming experience didn't really happen until 1990 when i got a game boy it's like that was the first thing that i owned that was actually a general gaming platform and like the difference between something like that and the atari is just like it puts us at surprisingly far difference in some way for what is the early experience of gaming. It makes me feel ancient when I think of some of our younger listeners who could look these up now and think, oh my goodness. Right. But moving to a computer was a really interesting thing for me.

The computer that my mum bought for me was an Amstrad CPC6128. And the reason she got this was because that was the computer that they used at my school for computer lessons and that I was going to learn on. So she thought it would make sense to have the same computer. I don't know who she bought it from or where she got it, but she bought it from some mysterious computer Jedi because the one we bought, he had done so many hacks to it and had made so many things

and he'd literally added buttons to it, like actual red buttons that did weird things that computers weren't supposed to do. And my mum bought it with these two massive, massive boxes full of discs and games. Like there must have been 200 maybe disks, and most of them had multiple games. I never got through finding out all the games he had on them, but he also had all this software that did weird things,

and he gave us these instructions onto how to use one of these disks to fix your computer when weird things happened. And it was all very strange. My mum had no idea. So it was just me discovering all this stuff as I put in disc after disc and finding new games and new things. But there was this one disc, this one bit of software that was like very powerful and magical.

Because I remember one time I had this friend that was really into computers and he was really into this 6128. And I said to him, oh, you should come around and see mine one day. It's got all these weird things built on it and I've got all this software that I don't understand. And he came around and it was like I'd just shown him a map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. Like he couldn't believe what I'd shown him,

this powerful, amazing piece of treasure. And I was then banished from the room and he spent the next two days just copying everything and taking all this stuff. So, I had countless, countless computer games. And some of them I would play for a few months and other ones I would look at for 10 minutes and never play again. But I was really into games at that point because I had this ridiculous number of them. The PC gaming thing is where, for me, it's hard to figure out precisely when this happened. I was trying to look through pictures earlier today to place my own history with games. But I too know that I had a variety of computers when I was young.

I was lucky enough that I was in a family that had that kind of thing. And I also had, I don't even know where they came from. Did my dad get them? I have no idea. But there was just tons of floppy disks with the same thing where like, there's a bunch of games on here or there's just random programs on here that do stuff. And having that computer was just like, wow, this is amazing. There's an infinite world of stuff to explore in this box.

It's just amazing. And that was my first experiences with computer programming. I'm like, wow, there's this system here that I can talk to in this very basic way with computer programming, or they're just these games that are these machines to interact with it was all just like very very horizon broadening for the right kind of person like i think a lot of nerds in our broad age demographic had this experience of a computer being just something so fundamentally different from everything else in the world and just just really, the adults don't know what it is. They just have it. They feel like, oh, our kids need this for the future. But it's just a machine like, oh, here, kid, here is a corner of the world in which you have

autonomy, where you can just interact with this virtual world, and it will push back against you. It feels like okay you are as good as you can be here or as bad as you can be here like whatever you can figure out it's entirely you figuring out and for the right kind of kid like that is just incredibly rewarding and I know I was definitely that kind of kid I spent every free moment I possibly could on the computer, just playing games or messing around or trying to write a horrible QBasic programs, because it just felt like a, like an infinite universe where I have autonomy. And it's just, just different from everything else in your life when you're a kid at that age. I feel like, I mean, perhaps because I love sports so much and I was in a place with a really nice climate

and I did have a bit of balance and I didn't spend every waking hour on the computer, but I did spend a disproportionate amount of time on the computer. You know me now. I mean, I can't code my way out of a paper bag, but I did go through, there was a brief window when I almost could have become one of those people because I remember when we first started learning coding, like really basic stuff in

school, like just basic, you know, 10 go to 20 type stuff. Right. Within like within a day or two that the computer teacher had taken me off the curriculum and while everyone else just went through the textbook and typed in stuff and did their lessons and tests, I was allowed to just sit in a corner and just make programs. I would just sit there and make code things and make games and make things and the teacher would just come along every few days and go, wow, it's amazing.

How have you done that? So I did get really into it for this brief period. And then it didn't happen. Like then it didn't stick. But I did stay with games and obviously PlayStation came along and then the first Tomb Raider game was a real game changer for me too because the funny thing with that was I'd heard it was this really cool game and I went and rented it from like the video store

when you used to go and rent games. But they didn't have the instructions and we had no idea how to play it. And I remember really early in the game we were just in this room like moving Lara Croft around, just walking into walls and having no idea what to do. And we must have spent like a good two hours, me and my mate, thinking, well, this game's ridiculous. It's the most boring game ever.

And then just while I was up against a wall, I like pressed a button and suddenly Lara Croft bent down and pulled out one of those blocks to reveal a new passageway. And the minute she pulled that block out of the way, I was like, oh, my goodness, this is something really special. And I got obsessed with the Tomb Raider games. And I went through the first three or four Tomb Raider games and it was around that time that I started working as a journalist

and I was still gaming in my spare time for a while for maybe the first three years as a journalist three or four years and then it then it happened then the drift started so how so how old are you at the point where you're trailing off from games uh early 20s okay i made a brief comeback for uncharted at drake's fortune like i i really liked the look of that and i played that one all the way to the end and i liked that so that was that was after i'd moved to the uk so i must have bought a console when i was in the uk yeah i did buy a console in the uk but i never got really really obsessed with it and i just haven't been able to get back into it since and i really want to like i look at i feel the desire but just haven't been able to get back into it since. And I really want to. Like I look at, I feel the desire,

but I haven't got whatever it takes to get there. Whatever the activation energy is to get back into games has gone. Like, it's like, I can't describe it. It's like falling out of love maybe, or. I mean, is apathy what you're trying to describe? Yeah, I think maybe it's that. You know, and I love, and I i look at that i look at your truck simulator game and think that would really appeal to me because i always liked games that involve

roads and maps and i loved sim city and all those sort of things and and all the designing games that i know you get into like designing your prisons and stuff i think oh that would be really cool because i used when i was a kid i used to love designing pretend houses or i used to love designing pretend racetracks and things like that. So I love the idea of designing and creating. When it comes to that next step of going out and buying one or doing it, I just think, no. And part of me does think, you know, that's probably for the best because I haven't got time. But if I have spare time, you know, I don't want to spend it playing games. I know some people are going to say, do you play games on your phone?

And I do have a few games on my phone and I occasionally will play one. But even then I don't play for very long. And people will say, well, that means you're still a gamer, but it doesn't really mean you're a gamer. Yeah, I don't think so either. That's the casual game world. I was talking with my parents about video games last time I was in North Carolina for the summer. They were discussing their circle of friends and it was like, oh, do you know anybody

who plays video games? And they were all like, oh, no, nobody, nobody plays video games. But as the conversation went on, we're like, you sure no one plays video games? Like, oh, yeah, no, nobody does. The end result of this was, though, that in their circle, nobody thought of themselves as playing video games, but many people had casual games on their phone that they would play, right? But everybody seems to put this in a different category in their mind. It's like, oh, I don't play video games. I've just sunk thousands of hours into Candy Crush on my phone, but I don't play video games. No, I have a few games on my phone, but I definitely don't sync that. I'll play it for

one or two hours over the course of a week and then never open it again yeah yeah so i think what we're talking about here is something slightly above the level of like just a casual thing on your phone to play for a few moments when you're standing in line like that's a different kind of game um and yeah i think those surveys that try to reach about like oh look everybody in the world plays video games it's like yeah but i don't think that's what people think about when they're talking about video games but yeah so you've just you've just lost love that's what's happened to you i've just lost it yeah and i and i wonder why either i wonder why i have or you haven't that's what i'd like to figure out because you're well past the point where i'd lost interest yeah uh even though you're even though you are

just a babe yeah five whole years younger than you yeah but yeah i'm like a grown-ass man who still plays a ton of video games right and and were you i mean obviously you've created a job for yourself now where you can where you have a lot of spare time but even when you were teaching and you had like what i would call like a normal hours job. Were you into your games then? Yeah, teaching was the nadir of my video game playing by far. There was definitely a break the year that I was doing teacher training and my first year as a teacher where I don't think I played a single video game for that entire span because there just was no time available at all. Like those are brutal years for any new teacher. And it just wasn't a possibility.

And then as my teaching career went on, and as I got better at it and better at managing my own time and having materials from the past years, I did have more time to play games. And it was something that I slowly started to get back into after a big break. And in some ways, I do wish that I could be like you, right? In some ways, I wish that I could be apathetic about games in a on the one hand, on the other hand kind of way. Like I wish I could be apathetic about sport

like you are right right yeah there's definitely sometimes a feeling of like is this actually how i want to be spending time like that that thought does cross my mind and of course as i get older and as mortality looms larger on the horizon like You become more aware of that quite naturally. But I also know that games are a huge and enjoyable part of my life. And that's why there was this break for two years when I didn't really play them. But I remember having a couple of conversations with my wife around the time that I was getting back into games about how this is something that I deeply enjoy in a way that I enjoy no other kinds of things like this is a unique form of entertainment that is

different for me and that is also highly meaningful and I was just amazed going back through some of the pictures that I happen to have of my younger life of trying to find like birthdays and Christmases and looking around and saying like oh look my parents got me video games at like every birthday and Christmas. And just thinking about how like, man, I have such strong, intense memories that are related to some of these games. Yeah. I think just a very easy example is a game like Myst, which was kind of a classic in the 90s, but where you explore this island and there's some puzzles. I normally hate puzzle games, but this one just happened to catch my attention.

But I spent so many hours playing that game that when I think back on it every once in a while, like in the real world, there are places that I go to and I think this is so mist-like. For example, in London, there is this footpath that goes under the Thames at Greenwich. And I cannot go there without thinking of that game Mist because it looks like this is something right out of Mist. And that island, I swear, the part of my brain that remembers physical places that I used to spend a lot of time, like my school when I was a kid or the house that I was growing up, that island of mist is as physical in my mind as any of the other places that I have ever been. Some games can give you a sense of place. And I just think that that is valuable and interesting in a way that other life experiences are not.

So when I didn't have video games in my life, I missed them. And I'm very glad that I now have them back in my life. Even if I do have occasional fleeting moments of like, is this how I want to spend my time? But I think anytime you're consuming any form of entertainment, it's a very natural thought to have. Like, I think that sometimes when I'm watching movies or anything like that, like the thought flips through your mind of like, is this the best way to spend your limited hours on earth? And it's like, well, yeah, yeah, I do really like doing this kind of stuff. But I am sympathetic towards your apathy and in some ways find it admirable, like you said,

in the way that you find my apathy towards sports admirable. The funny thing is I'm slowly starting to feel it happened to me with sport as well. Not as dramatic and I still really like, especially really like cricket, but I'm a bit less engaged by a few sports than I used to be and I watch a lot less of it than I used to. And I think you're right. I think it's time. I think I just don't have time for all these things anymore. And, like, I could give them time. I don't want to give them the time.

I would rather do either work or other things. And I don't know. So I think I would almost be copping out or almost humble bragging to say, oh, it's because I'm more successful now and I'm doing all these things and I haven't got time to play games and watch sport. I think there is an element of choice in it. I could put a few of these things on the back burner and play games or watch more sport if I wanted to.

But I don't want to. I want to do the other things. I'm more drawn to them. Yeah. I mean, this goes back to, you know, what I always feel about, like, human interest. There's no explaining why people find things interesting or boring. When you look across a bunch of different humans, things that one human finds incredibly interesting, another human finds incredibly boring, and there's no way to explain that. The video game thing, the reason this topic

caught my attention when you brought it up, talking about how you've lost interest in it, is that I have observed a phenomenon in myself many times when I am playing games that I find interesting, which is that there's a certain kind of game that I'm playing. And for gamers, it's usually something like a dungeon crawler or any kind of game with an RPG element to it, where I will have been playing a game for maybe 10 hours and intensely, intensely interested in continuing onward with the game and advancing a character and collecting more items in the game world. And then suddenly, and I mean within the space of five seconds, I go from I could not be more interested in this game to complete and total apathy in the game. It's like a switch just flips in my brain and I know, oh, okay, I'm done with this game. I will never play this game ever again.

I have just 100% totally lost interest in it. And it's not because you finished it or like, you know, conquered it. It's just something happened. Nope. It's, yeah, I have accomplished nothing or finished anything. There's just some moment where it's like, boom, something in my brain has changed. And I have no interest in it. Not disinterest, just none. And of course, this again is one of these things like it ties into my whole notions of free will and things like this to me, it's one of these moments where it seems so apparent, like will like of course i don't have it what on earth can explain that in the space of seconds i go from finding a thing incredibly interesting to finding it totally uninteresting i i would love to be able to be in an mri machine when this happens because it's so sudden and so obvious i feel like there must be something that

people can see and it's not like oh I've grown tired of it for the day. It's just like, no, this game is dead to me now. I just have no interest in playing it ever again. Have you seen the film? Is it closer? It's got Clive Owen, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts. And it's like about relationships. And the Natalie Portman character is like in love with this guy

who like just does the wrong thing by her all the time. And she just she just keeps going back to him and still loves him and then she just in the in two seconds one day she just clicks and falls out of love with him like just completely this it just all changes in a like a heartbeat it's a really powerful scene in the film and uh that's what reminds me of what you just said like it's completely like, it's like something just tipped, whether there was like a, you know, was it a tipping point of something? Yeah, I don't know what it is.

Other than to say there's obviously something physical that's happened in my brain. Something about the dopamine reward cycle for this particular activity is just broken. Just broken immediately and irrevocably. Like it's just, it's not coming back. And that to me why, like it's interesting, the idea that you have lost interest in games over time as you have gotten older. Maybe that's what happened to me, Gray.

Maybe that happened to me, but on a macro level rather than a micro level. Yeah, well, that's what I'm wondering, right? Has this same process occurred in you just over a longer period of time? Oh, I like that. I like the idea that something physical has broken, like you're saying, like some reward process or some chemical thing that I used to get just stopped. That would be a really powerful explanation. I quite like that.

Yeah, but I mean, obviously, that's the only explanation that there can be, that there's something different in your brain. I mean, what other explanation can there be for you not having interest in it yeah it's just like loving your wife brady right it's all because of something physical in your brain it can't be anything else you're like oh what an amazing explanation the structure of my brain is the cause of my feelings i can't believe that oh come on i mean it's not you're but you're making it sound like you know one conveyor belt suddenly breaks and you lose interesting games i'm sure i'm sure the thing that makes one like games or love a person is an incredibly complex web of many many things and you couldn't put it down to just one thing breaking or changing so when i say one thing breaking i don't

i don't mean that there's a single neuron that just broke, but there's some system in the brain which has changed. And again, just with the games, that is to me just the most transparent thing ever. I cannot believe how my subjective experience of a thing can be so radically altered with nothing apparently being different. The game hasn't changed. I haven't changed. I'm just sitting here doing the thing that I've been doing for the last two hours. But the thing about the thing that makes yours, you're falling out of love with a game in like five seconds.

So compelling and harder to understand is that I imagine what you get from games or sport or whatever you're into is really, really complicated. Like there's lots of this, like is there – what I'm saying, is there one thing that can break that would make you stop liking games immediately or do lots of things have to break? Like a plane can keep flying if component A breaks or component B breaks or the left engine goes out or something. But if a certain number of things break, the plane will fall out of the sky.

But there are also a few deal breakers. Like if the wings fall off, the plane's going to crash no matter what. So do you fall out of love with a game because the wings fell off? Like the one important thing you were getting from that game broke? Or did a few things all break at once? Were you no longer interested by the storyline? Were you no longer getting your dopamine? Were you no longer, you know? I guess that's what I'm getting at because I feel like me falling out of love with games

is more a widespread failure. Lots of things failed. Whereas you can't just enjoy a game and not like a game two seconds later because a whole bunch of things changed at once. That would be too big a coincidence. Well, again, I, you know know your analogy is terribly confusing to me but i i just i just know that this is the thing that happens all the time to me when playing games like it's it is it is recurrent

and frequent and that's why observing it is always interesting and sometimes i try to catch myself like what has happened and the answer is i i have no idea that says to me you're getting one simple thing from gaming though like or from your enjoyment of those games there was just one very simple thing you were getting you know that the the biscuit for the dog and suddenly the biscuits ran out it wasn't like there was like all these things going on that were making you love the game like you weren't enjoying it on numerous levels because I can't imagine all those levels would fail at once. That's why I think that the kind of games that this happens to me in usually have mechanics that relate around exploring and collecting and crafting items.

They are almost always games where you don't get better at the game the character in the game improves and can do things better right so it's like oh you're fighting monsters you can fight monsters better because you have better swords not because you have learned a skill like that is the common factor in those and and the closest i have come to figuring this out is like at some point my brain just kind of sees through the mechanics a little bit too far into what the game is doing and then just totally loses interest um that that's my that's my basic guess but you know when you talk about losing interest in games one of the things that's interesting to me is i am always just

impressed by the incredible wide variety of what games encompass in the modern world. It's very easy to think of games as just a narrow subset of genres. Like basically a lot of people when they think of video games, they think of like, oh, the AAA kind of games, right? You know, big shoot them up-up, central character-focused kind of games. But like the universe of games is just so enormous that they are this expanse of various forms of entertainment, some of which are remarkably un-game-like. And I put Truck Simulator in there as a thing which is like, is this a game? I don't think this is even a game at all. Like this is driving a truck across a virtual horizon.

Like this to me fulfills a totally different need and form of entertainment than anything remotely game-like would be. And I think that's one of the very interesting things about modern games. And so I wonder about you getting back into games. Like, are there other kinds of entertainment that you would enjoy that can happen to be experienced in video games, but is not necessarily like the games that you may have played when you were younger. Like I think of a game I really enjoyed a few years ago called Year One, which is also a thing that I would classify as barely a game. It is much more of like an interactive story. And most of the time, games that market themselves as

interactive stories are just disasters. They're just terribly boring. But this was one that I spent quite an enjoyable, maybe hour and a half, like it's very short time working through this little interactive story and exploring this world. And it was much more like a movie-like experience and maybe broadly in the genre of horror. But I really liked that that even though i'd be very hard pressed to say like was this a game i like i don't think it was even though it's kind

of marketed as a game so like maybe maybe there's stuff along the edges that you might you might like to play that's less game like than traditional games still at the end of the day i mean that was a short one but still at the end of the day, probably the biggest problem is time. Which makes me wonder, does your wife play games or do you play games with her? Or is this a completely separate activity for you from that time with her? There's two different things that I'm doing here, right? So I'm generally unproductive in the afternoons so if if I am not editing a podcast or animating uh in the afternoons that's one of the times when I will sometimes play games sometimes I just read in the afternoons but sometimes I'll play games and then my wife isn't around anyway so it's like okay well whatever I'm just on my own here and that's

usually when I'm playing more along the lines of what are like hardcore games like PC games that require my my full attention to that. If I was, if I was forced to watch with 100% of my attention, I might think we're quite torturous to watch, but if I can dial it down to like 33% of my attention, then suddenly it's an entertaining experience for the both of us. Right. So I like to do a lot of more casual gaming, like on the couch when I'm watching TV with with my wife and that's a much more enjoyable experience because i can make snarky comments about whatever's on tv and make her laugh and

like we're we're there kind of spending time together even though i am partly engaged in another activity but i would find it just intolerable to just sit there and and devote 100 of my attention to the tv like i would never want to do that so it's like i think that works well for both of us yeah i mean it sounds like you've got a good a good uh compromise there and i think maybe that's another big factor for me is now that i'm married um i'm working and then when i'm not working i want to uh i want to spend time with my wife which i which i didn't have when I was in my 20s and right of course yeah that's the other big thing yeah so and like yeah and my wife's not into games and we do like watching the exact same things

so I think I think when like in the evening or when we're together I kind of think we should do things together and we want to do the same thing and be engaged in the same thing and if i was sitting on a game while she was watching another show that would be that wouldn't go down well in the harron household well not just that i think yeah i think i think saying you've got 33 of my attention might not go down well but but but it's but it's more a case of you know we do watch the exact same things and we want to and we want to do that together so that little window where i could have game time and and when i did have game time as a as a guy in my 20s is not there anymore as well so that's probably that's probably another big factor which exactly ties into time again as well but it's another reason that i have less time so

when i was going through the the photos to remind myself of the games that i used to play when i was a kid all i could think of is man i sank hundreds and hundreds of hours into some of these games that I was looking at on photos. And like, you know, it would come up and it was like, man, look at that first Warcraft that you got, kid. Like, you don't know, but you're going to spend 500 hours on that. Like, just playing it over and over again. Like, oh, look, there's total annihilation. Yep. Like there was your entire sophomore year of high school, right? Like every free hour you had, like you played that game. And it's of course, because like, yes, as a kid, what did I have to do? As we discussed in an earlier podcast, I blew off all my homework as

much as I possibly could. And so I spent all of my free time like messing around on a computer, reading a book or playing a game. The end like that. I didn't have any other responsibilities in the world. Right. So so you could definitely spend so much time in it. Whereas now I use it. I use a program called Steam on my Mac to play all of my games. And they do have a feature where they'll tell you like, oh, how much you've played various games. Like they'll let you know how many hours you put into a thing. And I look at them sometimes and it's like, oh, these are sad numbers. It's like, how much time do you spend gaming a week?

I know it changes because of your production cycle, but what would you if you had to put a number on it? If we're talking about something like a thing that I'm actually focused on, so like afternoon gaming, it's probably not more than a couple of hours a week at most. And then the evening gaming is very hard. The casual gaming gaming maybe like four hours a week i'm just trying to ballpark it here but so i'm gonna say maybe something like

six hours a week on average are those evening games the same games you play in the afternoon no they're different games they're different games are they like phone games what are the games you're doing in the evening while you're watching a show with your wife? Yeah, there's stuff on my iPad and they need to have a few requirements. One of which is that the game can't take all of my attention because I need to save 33% of it right for the rest of the home environment.

And they also have to be pausable straight away. Like I can't have a game that I can't immediately just put down and stop. And so in some ways I have to intentionally pick games that are much less engaging than games I would otherwise play, but it's like, it's, it's a nice compromise. So what's an example? Cause people are probably going to be wondering, what's he talking about? Like what's, what's one of your evening games at the moment? Uh, I have been playing through a game called Crashlands at the moment, which I can kind of recommend although that is

definitely one of those rpg style games where i i know like clock's ticking on that one i'm going to be playing it you know in the middle of watching devil wears prada or something and just going to at some point immediately just put it down and be like oh i'm done with you game i'm just done oh i play a lot of what are called tower defense games so something like kingdom rush where you're just placing placing down little towers to defend yourself from invaders that are coming in like these are casual ish games uh they're not anything that requires a huge amount of focus if you thought there was a game at the moment that had a hope of getting me back into gaming what would it be if you like if you had to if you had one go at it and you really

cared about me getting back into it which i know you don't you couldn't care less but yeah if it was your mission what would what would you use that's impossible you're setting for me just an absolute impossible task you know what you know what this is like it's almost like you're coming to me and you're saying i've fallen out of love with movies i haven't watched movies in 10 years if there was one movie you were going to give to me to sell me on movies, what would you sell me on? That's also a great question. Yeah.

But then I also, I just don't have a really good sense of what kind of games you like. Like even just, you know, you're going through your history and you're talking about some Atari games and things like like i don't know man like it's it would be impossible to pick something to try to get you sold on it just again just because like i was saying before there's just so many different genres like there are games i am convinced there are games for everyone out there right even people who don't think that they like games there's something for you you just don't know what it is. Games that to me seem horrifically boring. My favorite example of this is there are games where the whole game is someone shows you

a picture of a messy room and you have to find an object in that room. And that's all the game is. Just like, here's a picture of a room. Click on the object in the room. I can't imagine anything that is more repulsive, but people love those games. I forget what they're like, object finding games or something like that. You couldn't pay me to play that, but people love it. I'll tell you a kind of game that I sink a lot of time into, which I think you wouldn't like, but you would appreciate. And that is football management games or soccer management games to an American. Yeah, no. I quite like those.

I thought you would like them because you don't actually play the game. You don't play the soccer, but you manage the team. Oh, my God. I cannot stand those. No, those are... I thought you'd like it because it's like work and you like work-oriented games. Yeah, see, this is why we're just so far apart on so many things. This is different to a sports video you did hear me you were listening to me though weren't you you don't play the sport yeah i know

what you're talking about i know what you're talking about they're like the management things no they're just the worst they're just the worst they're boring they're they're absolutely boring i do have i do have to say that like as a slight as a slight tangent here even though i give you a hard time about your darts you know your dumb sports that you like to watch, video games have totally given me appreciation for like why people like sports on an intrinsic level. Like I can, I can understand it so much better years later now when I, when I, I'm not in a school anymore that like forces me to play sports. So I feel this intense resentment toward it. Like now as an adult, just playing video games, like I can completely understand the whole sports thing.

Both because, you know, with certain kinds of video games, pulling off maneuvers is incredibly satisfying when you have a game that you can get better at and you become more skilled at. And it's like, oh, okay, this is similar to when people are learning to play sports. Like it is satisfying to be able to pull off a maneuver well in a sport. And the other thing, which is, you know, you mentioned at the beginning that I was doing this Twitch live stream a couple days ago, like just for fun. And while I was on Twitch, i got sucked into watching this thing that i always think is just so funny but like esports and when people are commenting on other people playing video games but like in real sports announcer voices and i was i was just on twitch and i it happened to

catch my eye but i saw that like oh some there was someone commenting on a starcraft game and like oh i used to i spent thousands of hours on Starcraft. Like, let me watch. And I'm watching this thing and people are commenting on it. And it's like, oh, okay. Again, I understand why people watch sports and why people will say something like,

if you've ever played soccer, you'll like watching soccer so much better. Because I was watching these guys play Starcraft. And it was like, yeah, I got sucked into watching a Starcraft game for 30 minutes because I could appreciate when they were pulling off hard moves or I could appreciate like what is going on, even if those players were phenomenally much more better at the game than I could ever be if I dedicated my whole life to it. So I do have so much more sympathy for sports because of games, without a doubt. But

I'm still going to make fun of you for darts. I'm never going to let that go. And I'm going to make fun of you for pretending to drive a vehicle on the road in the real world when you could actually just do it. It's so satisfying, though. It's so satisfying. I could get into that one. Like, I see the appeal of that one but i won't i'll tell you though man that game is in no small part some some amount of self-medication because what i really want to be doing is driving across america but this again like is is the responsibilities of adult life and adult time constraints i can't actually just ditch my whole life and go drive across America for six weeks. So the best thing that I'm going to be able to do

is to do it virtually.