Hello Internet - H.I. #69: Ex_Machina

Episode Date: September 17, 2016

Brady and Grey discuss: saving Grey's horological soul, how good or effective are Apple's presentations, butt dialing, freebooted Grey, YouTube demonitization, and Ex_Machina. Brought to You By Audible: get a free 30-day trial by signing up at audible.com/hellointernet Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code 'SplitBrain' for 10% off Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes Discuss this episode on The Reddit 1999 South Dakota Learjet crash Listener photo: Wayne, the real air traffic controller Listener photo: the original radar scope Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space Apple watch in a meeting Apple September 2016 event The Simple Solution to Traffic Freebooters, take this GIF Project revolution! Ex Machina Brady & Grey review Her Brady & Grey review The Martian

I hear you have a listener photo that you want to start with, Brady. Just when you think the listener photos cannot possibly get any better, the ante has been upped once again. You remember last episode, I'm sure, who our listener and our listener photo was, don't you? Yes, of course. Remind us what it was. It was an actor on Air Crash Investigators. Wait, but I know that somewhere in the world is called Mayday. That's right. It's called Mayday somewhere. I know that.

It's called Mayday in America. Now, this was an actor who was playing an air traffic controller in an episode of Air Crash Investigation. And the episode was the crash in which the golfer Payne Stewart and a number of other people very unfortunately died when their Learjet decompressed. They got hypoxia and presumably died and the plane sort of flew like a ghost plane over a large tract of the US until it ran out of fuel. And during that time, a number of fighter jets were sort of sent up to try and see what was going on with this ghost plane that was just flying across America. And they sort of pulled up next to it and tried to look through the windows and see what was going on. They thought it probably had decompressed and we all know the rest. Ran out of fuel, crashed into the ground. So I had another email from a

listener to Hello Internet. This was Wayne. Wayne says, Dear Dr. Harron. So I like him already. Brady does like that. He does like it when you show deference. Well, it shows he's a Tim. So he says, Dear Dr.

Harron, I am an air traffic controller who was directly involved with the events depicted in season one, episode 16 of Plane Crash Investigator Deadly Silence. I was the controller who sent the F-15 fighter jets to run the initial intercept on Payne Stewart's charter. Now, Brady, it's very exciting, but I'm beginning to wonder that you're being taken in because this is now going very far down the rabbit hole of listeners to the show. We are going deep. But anyway, I'll read on. He says, I was in the process of listening to H.I. number 68 and checking the show notes. When I viewed the listener photo, I laughed out loud.

There are many many many things wrong with the set of air traffic control workstation a few ones are and you'll like this a few of the choice ones are the red phone apparently there's no red phone the radar scope itself and what is shown on the scope so he decided to go and watch the whole episode. He tracked it down on YouTube and he says from the air traffic control side of the equation, the amount of inaccuracies were staggering. I would love to explain to you, a lover of aviation, how the intercept went down and where the show got all the things wrong. We have not yet had that discussion, but. But it seems inevitable. Okay. Yes.

Yes. Now, as you can imagine, I was a bit suspicious, Gray. You know, this seems almost too good to be true. Yeah. But I'm not sure how suspicious you'd actually be. I feel like even if you think you're being suspicious, that you still really want it to be true. I did want it to be true. So, I did ask for photos. Another email follows. He calls me Brady now. I'm not Dr. Heron anymore.

So we've obviously, we've moved beyond Dr. Heron. You're on a first name basis now. Okay. We are. Brady. After securing permission from the chief of our facility, Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center, I was able to take some photos as requested. He points out he's only emailing on his break. They will not allow photography in the actual control room because of national security,

but I was able to get a photo in the refresher training dynamic simulation lab, which is mocked up to resemble the control room as much as possible, although not perfectly, without displaying live traffic, only canned scenarios for training purposes. The scope is set to the sector that took the handoff

from MCA Orlando approach and issued the climb to FL260, flight level 260, 26,000 feet. So he's got the training station and he's mocked it up with the actual sector that was involved in this incident. And he's sitting in front of it, holding, of course, our phone displaying hello internet. I'll send it to you now, Gray. This is Wayne, not the pretend air traffic controller we had last week, but the actual

air traffic controller. I have to say, this looks way more like what a real air traffic control center would look like. In no small part, because like that keyboard looks really clunky and old. And I feel like that's what I would expect an air traffic controller to actually be using is like old but reliable equipment very very reliable if you think that's good you should see the other picture he sent us the second photo is of me in the lobby with my facility while on break in front of the sole remaining radar scope from the old system that was in use when I controlled the fighters to intercept Payne Stewart's jet. So this second picture is the actual type of scope that he was using at the time. So in some ways, this is even more legit.

Now, that looks so old, it's crossed over in my brain that it looks like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie. That doesn't even look real anymore. It looks like it's a prop on a very, very old film. It's absolutely fantastic. It looks like that trackball in the center is enormously well used based on the wearing pattern of the metal in front of it. I don't know where this is going to end, Gray. We started with the actor. Now we've got the person the actor was portraying. What are we going to have next? The pilots of the fighter jets? If you're listening, pilots of the fighter jets. I feel like certainly this rabbit hole has to end somewhere. But I also feel like there's

definitely a lesson here for people sending in listener photos, like they've learned that the real way to get through this is to bias your photos towards Brady and also show proper deference in the beginning when you address him. Can I just say this? And I say this all the time. I do read all these emails that come in and I look at your pictures.

I don't reply to them all because if I don't reply straight away, I kind of can't. But do send them. They do get looked at. And I have got a few in my kind of war chest to bring up later on. So if you haven't made it onto the show yet, that means either I didn't use it, grey cut it,

or you still might be coming. Look at you, setting up false hope for the masses. To be fair, it's pretty unlikely you're going to get on the show if you sent it more than a few months ago. But this is fantastic follow-up. We continue to go deeper into this rabbit hole. We are going deep. Perfect.

It is a little bit amazing, isn't it? It is more than a little bit amazing. Okay, and on our list of follow-up, we also have what I feel like is again feeding into the very ego of the show that things we discuss seem to happen in the world after we discuss them. And sure enough, after we discussed your idea about alien life, the reveal of it becoming boring through a series of press conferences that inch toward the actual reveal, just a couple days after the show, there was an article called, This is not a drill. SETI is investigating possible extraterrestrial signal from deep space. The aliens are reaching out to Hello Internet. This is nuts. And I have to say, I did feel very, very vindicated by this little news story that happened. Not hours after many people would have listened to the last episode of Hello Internet.

For those who missed this, and you could well have missed First Contact because it was a pretty low-key story basically i think it was some russian astronomers yes reported a signal coming from a star which looked like it you know could be alien in origin and there was all this excitement it did make the front page of a couple of reputable newspapers and it was a big story it was cloaked in the suspicion that always does seem to cloak some announcements that come from russia like because it wasn't shared with the scientific community in a timely manner so it could be checked and therefore people were like well hang on why are they being secretive about it and sure enough a few days later the authorities in russia themselves i think basically said oh actually we now think this was probably not aliens.

It was probably terrestrial in origin. So the story went away. And just like I said, false alarms, minor announcements, reviews. When we finally hear E.T., it's going to be like this. It's going to be boring. I totally agree. This is one of these things where I, through an avalanche of people on Twitter, received news of this story about like, there's a signal that might be intelligent life out there in the universe. So I received like tons of stuff about this story.

And then as always goes with these things, you don't hear any of the follow up. So I was not aware of like, oh, no, just like every other time, we think it's some kind of signal bounced off Earth, or it's something else in the universe. It's like, oh look, we've discovered quasars, you know, whatever it is, it turns out to be reasonably uninteresting. But what it makes me think of, which I'm pretty sure I've said before on the show, but I was always surprised by when I did the space topic with my students, the number of students that thought humans had already been on Mars and any news of like, oh, we're working towards going on Mars was totally uninteresting to them because they're like, hasn't this already

happened? I wonder with press releases like this or things that go out, how many people just like somewhere in the back of their mind might be thinking like, didn't we already discover aliens? Like, how is this even news? I thought this happened a long time ago. That discussion we had last time came in handy, actually, because I've actually just been on holiday the last four or five days. I was actually up in the mountains near Marrakesh again, where I sometimes go with my wife and you have very clear skies there at night. And we went outside like on sun loungers and we just were looking at the stars. We sometimes just go and look at the stars and see if we can spot a couple of shooting stars and things like that see if we

can see a satellite or the space station it's really cool actually because they give you these special cloaks you can put out when you go outside at night they look just like jedi cloaks they're like brown and they've got a hood so it's like your two jedis just going out to look up at the stars these are the hoods that you have sent pictures of yourself pretending to be a Jedi in, right? Like this is these cloaks. This is why you go to this place to pretend to be a Jedi. Basically, it's like Jedi school.

So anyway, we were lying there on the sun loungers, looking up at the sky, all the stars. And you know, my wife doesn't listen to Hello Internet. But I leaned over and said, I've got something for you to listen to. And I just played her the section of Hello Internet. Why do you do this? Where we, and in particular you, talked about looking up at the sky

and how menacing it could be because it's so suspiciously silent. And is this a sign that there's a reason that it's silent up there? Should we be shutting up? So I said, have a listen to this. And I played it. What was the reaction? Like, why would listen to this. And I played it. What was the reaction? Like, why would you do this? I don't know.

My wife does quite like conspiracy theory stuff sometimes. I thought she'd like it. And she asked a few questions and made a few comments. But overall, I think her final conclusion was, I have enough stuff in the world to worry about without worrying about the Borg coming and destroying the Earth. Like, there's not much I can do about that. And I think her main sentiment was, why the heck have you put that idea in my head now so that when I look at the sky, I can think about that too. I feel like that's my job sometimes. Like, if I can plant an

idea in someone's head that never goes away, I feel like mission accomplished. It does beg the question why you worry about it, though. Because you're Mr. I won't recycle or use one towel because I can't make a difference to the environment. Well, you sure as heck can't make a difference to the electromagnetic radiation that humans are sending out into the universe or how the universe will respond to that electromagnetic radiation. So what the heck are you even thinking about that for? I mean, isn't this what worries are? Thoughts that pop up irrationally sometimes? That's what a worry is. It's like, I'm perfectly well aware there's nothing I can do to save humanity from the apocalypse of the abyss that's coming. There's nothing I can do about that. It's just a thing that your mind turns to on occasion.

That's what worrying is, Brady. CGP Grey being irrational, my whole belief system's crumbling down around me. I feel like anybody who has listened to this podcast long enough can find plenty of examples of me not being perfectly rational. I don't think this is like a rare instance. Okay, well, that's a nice little segue for us to talk about the Apple Watch.

Oh, no. Okay. You want to beat me up about the Apple Watch again? Let's go. I do, because this is my ongoing crusade to save your horological soul. I saw a picture the other day that horrified me. And I sent it to you, didn't I? You sent me a picture. It was like some group of politicians in a press conference room somewhere. And one of them was wearing an Apple watch. And you thought this was like a horrifying thing to send me that I would just recoil from. And I don't know why.

It was all these important people sitting around the table in the cabinet room and the prime minister there. And they're all wearing what seemed to me to be quite nice, sensible, dignified, classy watches. And then there's just one minister there with her Tonka truck play watch. And it just stands out like something. It stands out like a woman who knows what she's doing, who's on top of the latest trends and technology, who's always connected if she needs to be. When I see that Apple Watch on her wrist, I assume she's the most competent person in the room.

I think that's the message the Apple Watch sends. Be honest with me, Gray. When you look at that picture, it's like, I know what you're about to do. You're always like, no, be honest with me. You always open with that because you cannot believe my actual thoughts. Do you really think that looks good? I think it looks perfectly fine. I think you're just making a mountain out of nothing here, Brady. It's like people wear watches. People wear smart watches. I think it's perfectly fine. I'm not a big fan of the white band, but I would be not a fan of a white band on almost any watch. So I feel like that's besides the point here. You have an issue with what you refer to constantly as the dead face of the Apple Watch, which to me just doesn't

register as that. It's not the dead face that bothers me. What bothers you? Still, that you just can't let go. It just doesn't look good. It doesn't, it looks, it's the wrong shape. And I don't know, it looks like someone's trying to wear, you know, a computer on their hand. And that's exactly what they're doing. Yeah, I know. Well, tell me about the new one. There was a big Apple announcement, wasn't there? Did you watch the Apple keynote this week? Yeah. As we are recording, the Apple keynote was last night. And as usual, I do like to try to set aside time to watch these things because I'm always very

interested in what's going to happen. So I sit back, relax, have a glass of wine, see what Tim Cook brings forth for the masses. Before we talk about what was brought forth, can I just say, like, I'm familiar with Apple keynotes and I've seen bits of them before, but I don't usually watch them. And I dipped into this one because I thought I'll have a quick look and see what's going on because I saw on Twitter that that was on. My goodness, what an outdated car crash that presentation form is. It was so bad. It looks like a parody. I think I said at the time, it looks like an onion spoof of a TED Talk. It's all so earnest and so like, everything's awesome. And thanks,

Tim. I'm so proud to be up here and tell you about what we're doing. And it's such an antiquated way for a big technology company to be announcing things to the world it's like some kind of school variety show where the principal says okay everyone now i'm going to introduce little jimmy jimmy's been working really hard all week on this he's written this poem for you i want you all to listen really carefully now everyone let's give jim Jimmy a big clap as he comes on the stage. Yay, Jimmy, Jimmy. And then Jimmy comes out and says, thanks, Tim. I am so proud to be here. I have been learning my lines off by heart and I have been told where to look and how to move my body in the right way to do this demonstration. Here is my announcement. Thank you very much. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. Thanks, Jimmy. That was awesome. Now, here's Sandy. It's like,

I can't believe these are like multi-millionaires leading the biggest technology company in the world. It's horrendous. I'm genuinely curious. What do you think would be a better way to do this? Well, I don't see why it has to be done in this live show kind of way for a start. But I think the cool thing to do would be just to have them appear in the store. But of course, then you've got to feed the media. But at the same time that they just appear in the store, you would feed the media what they need. And of course, you've got to put Tim Cook forward so that there's someone to put on

the TV news and he has to hold the objects. I get there has to be footage, but this parade of people on stage prancing around like they're doing TED Talks, I find it completely cringeworthy. And in terms of getting media time, I don't seem the TV news very often using like all those crappy TED talks anyway. They're only going to use a few clips from the boss anyway. I think it's silly. I don't understand it. Tell me why it's cool or tell me why it's the way to do it. See, the thing is, I don't know if I really disagree with you. And I feel like Apple has had a couple of these in a row that were not great. I think last night's one was kind of boring just from an announcements perspective.

Like they didn't really have a whole lot new to talk about, though they certainly were kind of trying to present it that way. But it's funny because I was kind of actually thinking something similar to what you were thinking about. Like, boy, this is very low information density. Like the number of bullet points that I'm going to get out of this presentation does not represent the two hours long that it is. And I do have to say a bunch of the presenters felt super rehearsed. And in some ways, like I can't blame them for that. Because I imagine if you're speaking

on behalf of what is sometimes the world's most valuable company, you can't go out there and kind of wing it. Like I'm sure absolutely everything has to be totally approved. I think the reason that it happens is because they want an event to gather together all of the press people who immediately after that event, they make the devices available for everybody in the press to try them out and to shoot their event and then to talk about the device on his YouTube channel like an hour later. And I think that their goal with those presentations is to try to like shape the mind of the media people before they see the thing. That's my guess anyway. I feel like if I was in charge of Apple, like that's what I'd be trying to do. Like I want to influence the media people to think about the phone in this way, right? Not in some other way. Well, that makes sense, Gray. And I

can see why they would want to do that. I just think they could do it a bit cooler. I mean, I know a lot of people hate on Apple and a lot of people love them. I tend to think most things Apple do are pretty cool. I think most of their devices are cool. I think the shops are cool places staffed by, you know, kind of young people and that. And I think this is the one time every year that Apple seems like it's a bunch of corny dads and it's the uncoolest thing Apple does. I take it that you didn't see the very opening of this event then no i've read about it though it was a carpool karaoke thing but i'm scared to look at what a car crash that'll be this was totally baffling to me because i have never heard of

carpool karaoke i have no idea what this thing is and when i started watching the event it's just like tim cook is in a car singing Sweet Home Alabama, and they're just bantering about stuff. It's like, oh, God, I don't know what this is, but this is horrifying. Like, this is not a good way to start things, guys. I mean, I like carpool karaoke. I think they're pretty cool, but there's no way I want to watch Tim Cook doing it, because I know how bad that'll be.

I've got nothing against Tim Cook, but he's not cool. Yeah, I think he is a, as far as I can tell, like fantastic operations guy, but yeah, cool he is not. And he also has the problem of not quite passing the Maryland point of being uncool enough that he becomes cool again. Which Bill Gates does. Exactly. Whereas it's like watching him in carpool karaoke, my feeling was, oh God, you're inches away from the Maryland point, but on the wrong side of this. So I am actually just very uncomfortable watching this. Yeah. I don't think Tim Cook celebrates his uncoolness the way that someone like Bill Gates does, you know, I think

Tim Cook thinks he's kind of cool and he should realize he's not and celebrate that. Yeah. You never know the minds of other people. I mean, I feel like it takes a lot of guts to do something like that because he's going to know that he's not cool and just do carpool karaoke anyway, because it's kind of fun. Although I always find Apple a bit cringeworthy when they bring on celebrities. It always feels like Apple becomes a little bit of a screaming fangirl all of a sudden when they bring out like, oh, look, it's Bono, right? Oh, look, it's this guy in the car. Oh, somebody else is coming in the car. Like, look at all of these celebrities who love Apple. I mean, I'm no expert here and I can get found

out from my lack of Apple knowledge, but I feel feel like in recent years they've been taking a beating for choosing slightly uncool celebrities that tim cook thinks are cool yeah so it's like people like bono and coldplay and that who there is a little bit of oh that's kind of who your dad's into exactly obviously this year someone has gotten in the rear and said, no, no, no, we're not having the BGs this year, Tim. What you have to do is you have to get that James Corden guy because everybody's talking about him. He's big on YouTube. Anybody who's anybody is going into his car. That's what we've got to do. So I think this has been a desperate attempt to make Tim Cook look a bit more relevant to young people. And I don't know, I don't know

how well it worked, but I think that's what they were trying to do. I'm not sure it worked. I'm not sure if that was their goal, but I do have to totally agree with you that this one was, I felt in a lot of points, like the presenters were a bit awkward. It felt kind of rushed or just not like a smooth machine. And it is always weird when they turn over the stage to another person and then bring it back. And like, you have just planted into my mind the idea that it's a school principal, like pointing to little Timmy,

who's going to do a presentation. Like, I will never not have that in my mind now when Tim Cook like hands it over to somebody else. Here she is. She's been practicing for two weeks. And boy, does she is. She's been practicing for two weeks. And boy, does it look like she's been practicing for two weeks as well. That is going to be in my mind every time now. So thanks for that. But it's going to be in my mind because there's something about it, which is true. Even though before I was trying to make

the argument that what I think they're really doing is trying to sway the minds of the media before they see the devices. I wonder, like, does it really matter? I mean, I know this goes into my biases of like, I think people overestimate the importance of news stories or like media reports on things. Of course, there's no way to know, but it's like, let's say all of the media comes out and just slams the next iphone how many people will care like what would that translate into in terms of percentage change in sale of iphones like i just don't know i almost wonder like is this whole thing worth doing that does matter i think word of mouth matters like over breakfast tomorrow when we're talking about are we going to upgrade our iphones if you say oh apparently it's pretty

crap that's what i saw in the paper that can be enough to stop someone buying a phone oh yeah apparently it's a bit crappy apparently it's uglier than the other ones like those headline things do matter i think shaping and crafting the message is important actually as skeptical as i'm about it and i think you know pr is evil i can see why they do it and i see what's important i just think the way they're doing it is bad and you and i have now been talking for 20 minutes about how uncool apple is that's true i guess i should rephrase my earlier point because if you're saying something like oh the new phone is bad like Like, okay, people won't buy it. But what I mean is, what is the percentage that Apple can possibly move the minds of the people who are going to be viewing the

phone anyway, right? In one direction or another. Oh, no, that I agree with. If you've had your plane ticket paid for and you've been wined and dined and you're getting five seconds of FaceTime with Tim Cook as he walks past you in the corridor. That's powerful stuff. Yeah. Like journalists are very susceptible to junkets and freebies. Everybody is. It's so easy to show that like the trivial list of gifts influences people's minds, even if they don't think that it does. Like you just can't not have this happen. And this is why companies like to give stuff to people like to just review, even just receiving the thing for free. Like no matter how much you try, it does have a little

bit of an influence on your mind. Like it can't not. The thing that I wonder with those presentations is I almost always feel relief when they kind of cut away from the actual presentation to the pre-made videos. They'll have like, here's a little video about the new iPhone, which we'd like try to encapsulate everything in two minutes, right? Here's a little video about the Apple Watch. And what I found myself wondering last night was, what if you just did the videos? Like, what if you just drop those videos on YouTube and that was it?

And then phones show up in the store the next day. How much of a difference would that make i can see why they need an excuse to get the important people in one place like you said earlier i can see that and i can see why it needs to become an event like the super bowl you know that where people come together and there are parties the night before and not just to hold the things but just to bring people together and the feeling that this is an occasion. This is important enough that we all need to be reporting on it. And all the other journalists are here reporting on it.

So I need to be reporting on it. I agree with that. I just think their format is looking really tired. They upgrade everything else they do every 20 seconds, and yet they won't upgrade this boring old format of this keynote. What upgrades do you want them to do, though? Like shorter, fewer handoffs? What do you want? I don't know, Gray.

If I was that smart, I probably wouldn't be here doing a podcast with you. I'd be some millionaire consultant in America. But I don't know what the solution is. I just know that what they're doing looks terrible. I couldn't watch it. I felt embarrassed for them. How are you, everyone? Super.

Thanks for asking. This is amazing. That was fabulous. Just to be clear to the listeners, like even though I've been kind of agreeing with you that this year wasn't a particularly great presentation, like maybe they should change some things up next year. I do personally like watching it because I'm really interested in this. And I think there's always a fun game, which is the speculate what is going on inside Apple game based on like what you see on the

outside and what they say. That kind of criminology is a thing that I am just interested in with regards to Apple. And as always, there's no explaining any interest. It's like, that's why I will sit down and I'll watch it. Like, and I am kind of very curious about the details of like, who's doing what, what things are they choosing to focus on? Right. I like all of that stuff. This is me being like someone who's a policy wonk and who is super into the details of like a particular candidate's platform. And like, what do they think about this? You know, what are they going to do with that? I am aware like outside of myself and a relatively small group of people, like most of the world doesn't care, right?

Like they're just going to be like, oh, there's a new phone in the store when they walk by and they see it in the window. Like that is essentially everybody's experience. I don't agree with that. There's a new phone in the window thing. I do think people are aware that when Apple announced what the new phone is

or the new computer is or the new technology is, it is like an event. People do know that. Like my wife, I said to my wife, oh, the new iPhones are coming out soon because it was in my head. And she said, yeah, it's being announced on September 7. So like people do know it's an event and a time of the year and that. And so Apple have been smart to do that. And like I said, I agree with making a big hoo-ha and a big event and maybe even doing something that gives the Apple nerds

like you some kind of glimpse, but maybe just do it better. I don't know. That's always the best advice. Just do it better. The things you're not doing well, don't do those. Do things better. So in terms of the actual announcements, anything worth knowing? I know there's a new version of the watch that's not much different. And the phone is waterproof and the microphone jacks are on the way out. That seems to be all I know. Yeah, people are really upset about the headphone jack. Like that's kind of the big story, I guess. But this one, I just felt like there was not really anything

of Note. It's like they've made a phone that's the exact same size as the phone before. And they're like, oh, it's faster. Like, okay, sure. It's faster. I understand they have a new camera on it, but it just, to me, it just seemed like there wasn't really anything of Super Note. I'm like, I'm glad there's a new version of the Apple Watch, which is coming out again. Like it's a little faster, but nothing of super note. And I feel like the past two Apple events have been this way for me of like, oh, there's new things. You have some new hardware and the new version of your operating system is coming out. But it just feels like nothing for me in these last two apple events

like oh for two on significant interesting wow i can't wait to get my hands on it kind of exciting stuff so it's got just a little boring in apple world you'll still buy everything and upgrade everything presumably i'm gonna get the new watch but i don't think i'm gonna get the new phone as we've discussed before like i'm very happy with my small size phone. I really like it. I might have been tempted away back to the 6 Plus, which I think is the only other reasonable size, if they had actually made it smaller and significantly lighter. But this is like the one year I'm thinking like, oh, if Apple makes their phone a little bit smaller, a little bit lighter, I might go back. This is like the first year ever that Apple's like, nope, exact same size.

Hope you like it. So no new phone for me this time around. Are you going to be sticking with your SE? I am. I am starting to have a few annoyances with it. Oh yeah? Like what? Yeah, mainly typing.

I feel like I'm making more typing errors and I am butt dialing with it more often for some reason and things like that. I seem to be mispressing and having problems with it more. But that also could be because I've done away with a case. I didn't tell you my funny butt dial story. First of all, I don't really know how butt dialing happens, but please tell me your butt dial story. Well, this isn't exactly a butt dial story,

but this is kind of like that. Okay. I was at a wedding actually recently and I was with Destin. Destin, who is from the YouTube channel Smarter Every Day for people who don't know. And he is a great disciple of Snapchat, as we've discussed before. And we were playing on Snapchat together and we were making funny videos and we were just clowning around. And suddenly my phone made a noise that I've never heard before, like an alert, like some strange noise. And I didn't know what was going on and I was touching the screen and trying to make it go away. And I didn't know what was going on. And I touched something because it went away. And I was what the heck was that and then I was sort of looking at the phone and the snapchat app was open and I was looking at the app to try and figure out what was going on and then I saw that someone

had tried to call me using snapchat snapchat it turns out has this kind of phone voice thing that you can do to call people and this was news to to me. And I was like, Destin, look, man, someone tried to call me. Some strangers tried to call me. That's outrageous. Like, I didn't even know that could happen. And Destin was kind of looking, going, oh, I don't know what's going on. And then suddenly this voice comes out of the phone saying, oh, hi, I'm here. And I didn't call you.

You called me. And, like, what had happened was, like some stranger who SnapEye'd looked at or something, I'd obviously just pressed some button next to that person's name to phone them out of the blue. They haven't known what's going on. They've answered the phone and there's me saying, could you believe some stranger's tried to call me? This is outrageous.

And Dest and I were talking about it and he was just like, the poor sod was just there listening to us talking. he was like I didn't I didn't call you and then I was like who is this and he said who he was and we had a chat and I'm like oh I'm here with Destin and he was like oh that's great and we ended up having a chat with him I was super apologetic because I was just a total ham-fisted idiot who'd interrupted this poor person's day. But we had a chat to him for a while. That was nice. And then I was like, well, anyway, sorry about that. And hung up.

I mean, to be fair, if it's Snapchat, this is not button dialing. This is just you pressed one of their unlabeled hieroglyphics or you swiped wrong on the screen. Who knows? It's the controls of the spaceship and alien, right? You press some button and it means you're going to call some rando anyway he was really nice about it and i made a real fool of myself but another pitfall of snapchat careful it's not just accidentally following people or

accidentally things like that now it's you can accidentally phone someone and not know you phone them and then they're listening to you talk right Right. Great. More and more reasons to use Snapchat every day. Although this makes me think, are you one of those people, Brady, who, if you are talking about someone who's not in the room, feels the need to check their phone to make sure that their phone isn't on and hasn't called the person? Do you do this? I am not, but I did have a friend who used to do that because he got burned by it. He was talking negatively about someone and he had butt dialed that person and they were listening to him. I was about to launch into a like, boy, isn't this a ridiculous thing that people worry about?

Like I know several people who do this and I always find it's just the strangest behavior ever, but you're telling me you actually know someone this happened to? Suddenly I'm thinking maybe this is a thing that's not so unreasonable i mean to be fair it was his girlfriend at the time and if there's one person you're likely to accidentally call it's probably your girlfriend because she's probably going to be the last person you phoned and if there's someone you're likely to be talking about behind their back it could also be your girlfriend so while it's incredibly unlucky if it was ever going to happen that would be one of the more likely scenarios. So I think he was saying things about his girlfriend that were not complimentary and she was listening from his pocket.

So from that time on, whenever we were out like at bars and things like that, if he was talking about anyone, he took his phone out of his pocket and had a look first. Wow. I can't believe you know someone this actually happened to. That's amazing to me. If someone accidentally called you and they were talking about you, would you feel any responsibility to yell out, hey, I'm right here listening to you? Or would you just quietly listen the whole time? I don't know what I would do. Like if I do get butt dialed occasionally, and I actually butt dialed someone I worked with the other day and like they called me back and I didn't know I'd called them. And I'd been out at a bar being really leery too so goodness knows what they heard but I accidentally once butt dialed someone who I work with and I was in a really

important business meeting talking about that person and like deals and things and they knew I was in this meeting and you know who this person is and they sat there and listened to the whole meeting and then afterwards spoke to me about it I feel like you're at this amazing epicenter of this thing actually occurring, which I just assumed is like an urban legend that this thing even occurs. I will confess to one thing. Back in my journalist days, I did have like a contact who would sometimes help me with information and tell me stories that I wasn't yet supposed to know about. And this person accidentally phoned me once from their bag, but I wasn't sure if they'd phoned me accidentally or they had phoned me because they wanted me to

hear something important. So I did stay on the phone for a few minutes just in case like I was supposed to hear some amazing information, but it turns out they were just shopping and walking around town and after two or three minutes i was like oh okay that's an accident it wasn't a meeting with the illuminati and you were you were the only reporter who was going to get the story out no exactly but you never know so i did stick with that one for a few minutes until i realized no they're just out walking around hello internet today i have a book recommendation for you, which means that, of course, this podcast is brought to you in part by none other than audible.com, who has more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken word audio products for you to listen to.

Now, today's recommendation is How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. It's a weird title for a weird book, but boy did I like this one. It's a novel, and just as with the movies that we watch for homework, I think novels are best appreciated cold, without really any introduction to the plot or the details. But I will say that How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is written in the second person, which means that instead of most books which are written either from the first person, I, or from the third person, he or she, this one is written from the second person, you. So when you're listening to this book from Audible, you will be hearing how you woke up in the morning and you went to do something. Now, I know you're thinking that probably sounds like a terrible way to write a book.

And the last time you read something like that was almost certainly in some awful English class where they forced you to read an overly artsy and terribly boring piece of writing like that. But trust me, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, I liked it way more than I expected that I would. And I found it really quite affecting. So check it out at audible.com. That's where I get all of my audiobooks. It's where you should get all of your audiobooks because they are just fantastic.

Now, if you go to audible.com slash hellointernet, you'll get a free 30-day trial so that you can give this book a listen or try some of the other ones that they have. And I really do hope that you try Audible if you haven't already. They have just a bunch of features that I really like. I mean, obviously, it's just an enormous catalog of things to pick from, so there's always something to listen to. But what I really like is I feel super free to just try a book like this one, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which maybe I'm not going to like at all. But if I don't like it, I can just return it. They have a kind of no questions asked return policy on audiobooks, which I have definitely taken advantage of more than

once when something is terrible. You can listen to their audiobooks on any device at any time. They make players for just about everything. So if you are listening to this podcast and you have never given audiobooks a try, trust me, they are a thing that's going to bring value into your life. And if you're listening to podcasts, you should totally listen to audiobooks. So right now, go to audible.com slash hello internet and sign up for your free 30-day trial membership. Download a title and start listening. And thanks to Audible for supporting the show. So, Grey, something that doesn't often happen to you,

you've been a victim of freebooting. I feel like in the world of people who put out educational videos, I feel like I have been probably one of the luckier people with regards to not getting freebooted. I think perhaps maybe Destin is the unluckiest along with your chemistry videos as well. Like those get freebooted all over the place. But I feel like most of the time I have been relatively getting off scot-free as far as

these things go. But in the last video that I just put up, which was the one about the simple solution to traffic, this was perhaps the first time that I saw a video just getting freebooted all over Facebook. Just like a ton of different places all posting it. And by my rough estimate across all of the various sources, it was something like 10 million views on Facebook, which considering that the video gets like 3 million views on YouTube, which is fantastic. But of course, as always with the freebooting, it does really hurt deep to see your video getting spread in a bunch of other places

and you're not really getting any of the rewards that go along with it. Well, I've got a few questions for you about it then. First of all, though, if I can make an observation about the video itself, this is another excellent example to me of things that I assume everyone knows that maybe they don't know. Because I watched that video and I thought it was really good, well explained and nice and that, but I thought, doesn't everyone know this? Like this is what causes traffic snails and it's all human reaction times.

And I saw all these people sharing it and tweeting it and saying, this is amazing, great, explains this and like you've got to check this out. I was like, what? Huh? Like is this news to people? Gosh, I feel like there's a thousand videos waiting to be made now that I thought weren't worth making. All these things I can explain to people that maybe they don't know. That I think is an excellent, excellent point because this is like a skill, I think, in making

any kind of thing where you're explaining stuff to people on the internet that I often fall on the wrong side of as well, where it is super easy to over-assume how much other people know about any topic. And something that happens to me sometimes when I'm like working on a video is that by the time I get to the end of the research phase, where it's like, okay, I've read a whole bunch of stuff about this thing. It's actually currently happening with the video I'm working on right now. But it's like, at the end of this phase, I end up with this feeling of, well, doesn't just everybody know this? Surely everybody just does. It's so easy to over-assume that the things you know

are the things that everybody else knows. Doesn't everybody know who Scott of the Antarctic is? Exactly. Perfect example. Absolutely perfect example. It's a thing that I'm bad at this, but I often try to remind myself like the world contains essentially an infinite amount of knowledge. Like there's an infinite number of things to know. And practically by definition, the people who are going to spread this video are going to be the people who didn't know this, right? Like the people who do know this are not going to be people who feel like, wow, I have to really share this on Twitter because it's like a thing that's in their head. But I was really uncertain about how this video would do because this was a case where I thought I might be on the wrong side of this. I was thinking like, I bet enough people don't know this, but I might be totally wrong. Like I might have just made a video called, did you know the moon goes around the earth? Like there's a point at which people don't know that.

And then there's a point at which people do, but you assume like essentially everybody who's old enough to be watching YouTube would know a fact like that. So there is also a point where you can be a big enough and famous enough explainer that everyone will share it too. I mean, you probably could make the moon goes around the earth,

just like the Vsauce could make that video and you'd be guaranteed a high baseline of sharing. But yeah, but Vsauce would somehow, you know, connect the moon going around the earth. And then all of a sudden we'd be talking about like how bread bakes, like it would be all over the place, right? It would be like, oh,

and then how much does your shadow weigh? Like we can measure the shadow of the moon, right? And they're like, you just know that's how a Vsauce video would go. I don't think a straightforward video about the moon going around the earth in the same way I made a straightforward video about like, how does traffic happen? I don't think that would go anywhere even if i did it so obviously the

mistake that you made with your self-driving car video is i assume someone else animated it for you because it didn't look like your animations vastly beyond my skill level yeah it had some very nice visualizations in it which was also very helpful to the video's success, I'm sure. But it also meant it was suddenly imminently stealable because now it wasn't just some nerdy American guy explaining something cleverly. It had pretty pictures. And that means freebooters swoop. Here's some eye candy for us to feed to the masses. Do you think that was my downfall?

Is that it looked too good? And that's why I've now fallen into the realm of freebooting? Well, it's not that it looked too good. It visualized what you're explaining. Normally your craft and the thing that you do well is you explain things well with words and the animation is almost just, you know, a few little jokes and afterthoughts and just to keep people occupied. But this time the pictures did more than your words did. It was the pictures that told the story this time. And that's brilliant. You know, welcome to the medium of video, Gray. Thank you. Thank you. I genuinely have not really been involved in it. Like, I don't even mean that as a joke. Like, it is true. Like my videos are

not exactly videos in the same way that your videos are videos. So while I'm welcoming you to the world of video with open arms, I'm also welcoming you to the world of freebooting with open arms. So you obviously got freebooted like a wild man. I know it because most people who know that you don't read emails and tweets were alerting me to the freebooting of Grey's video. Thank you very much for that. You don't need to alert me to Gray's videos being freebooted. It's bad enough that you alert me to mine. No, I think you do need to know, Brady. The extra funny thing about this is I did have a suspicion that this one was going to be gif booted.

I thought, oh, there's a couple of sections in here where I can already see this just becoming a gif on Imgur and repeated like 28 million times. So I don't know if you saw, but on my blog, when I actually posted the video, I prepared for being gif booted by gif booting myself by taking what I thought was like the most little iconic shot, which is a bunch of cars going around a circle. And in the video, you only see it for a few seconds, these cars going around a circle in a traffic wave going around in the opposite direction. So I thought, oh, you know what would be great?

Have a GIF that's actually the complete thing and let me try to watermark it with where it actually came from. So like, I'm adding value with this GIF. Like here, internet, go ahead. GIF boot this all over the place. I didn't see a single person post it anywhere. It was like... Well, I do that when you can just make your own from the video and put your watermark on it. But I thought like, look, this GIF is a perfect GIF. It's smooth, right? It goes all the way

around. You couldn't even pull this out of the video if you wanted to. Nope. It's like, if you make a thing available, it's like it's no more fun anymore to gift boot. No, I don't want that. I'm just going to take your whole video. That's right, Greg. And I think one of the things that people don't understand about freebooting, I think a lot of people think freebooters are like altruistic and all they're trying to do is share the love. But no, most freebooters are not that. They're trying to build their own followings and their own base and their own Facebook page and their own reputation

as a supplier of interesting content. They don't want to just share the love and maybe help grey along the way. They're all about themselves and building themselves, and you've given them a nice juicy piece of yummy content that they can take and then get all the glory for finding and sharing. Don't think that most freebooters are altruistic people. Most of them are not. They're not these indie rebel pirates that are, you know,

trying to get the plans to the Death Star to save the galaxy. They're all about themselves. And you're totally right. My attempt to pre-gift boot myself was doomed before it even started because I was thinking about it in all the wrong way. I was thinking about the totally wrong audience because you're right, every place where I saw that it had hundreds of thousands

or millions of views was obviously just a professional content aggregator who does this all the time. The thing is, I wouldn't be so frustrated by this if, so I've done a couple of little experiments trying to put videos up on Facebook to see like, what if I do what I think Facebook wants me to do, which is like embed my own videos using their actual player and put it up on Facebook. Like I have done little tests in this direction to try to like put my toe in the water.

And the end result has always been like, oh, your videos do terribly on Facebook. If you post your own video on Facebook, it just doesn't do very well. If somebody else posts your video on Facebook, millions of views, right? It's like, it's doubly frustrating. It's like Facebook, if you could make my own videos the source of all of these views, I would be much more likely to give in to what you want, which is to just put my own videos on there as well. But my own tests have said like,

this is not a useful endeavor. And so we end up in this negative feedback loop where it's like, I resent having a Facebook page in the first place. So I don't necessarily spend a lot of time on it. And that just feeds into the cycle of like when other people post your videos, it gets even more viral.

It's just, it's very frustrating and there is no way around it. But I do just want to say very quickly, a quick thank you to everybody in my audience who reported all the various Facebook freebootings because right after the video went up, there were some things that I had to attend to. So I couldn't actually spend a bunch of time filling out fun copyright forms on Facebook to try to get this stuff taken down. But I was quite pleased to see that when I did go back around to try to, after the fact, futilely, pointlessly, try to get some of the stuff taken down, that essentially everything

had already been reported into oblivion and removed. So thank you to my audience members who did report that stuff. I do appreciate it. So I was going to ask if you sort of took action, because sometimes I get the impression that you're a little bit c'est la vie to the wild west of the internet. And you think, you know, if you can't beat them, just let them go. But you were determined to try and get some of this stuff removed. I go in cycles with this stuff. Sometimes really bothers me sometimes i feel like you're trying to hold the tide back is spending an afternoon going down and chasing down all of the freebooters

and actually roi positive use of my time like probably not because they've already made the money that they're going to make i'm not going to get anything back from this. It's like, it's already lost. Why do other people get to be like parasites off of the work that I do? And then I get riled up and do go around and try to handle this stuff. So this time, when I was in a riled mood, I was pleasantly surprised to see that essentially my audience had taken care of it. So I was happy about that. Thank you, everybody. This episode is brought to you in part by Hover. When you have a great idea for your project or

your website or your podcast, you need to give it a great domain name. And this is what you want Hover for. Finding that perfect domain is ridiculously easy with Hover. It's the one that I use all the time because it's just so fast and so simple. With Hover, you can get in, get that domain registered before somebody else takes it out from underneath you. When you're trying to buy a domain name, you shouldn't have to opt out of page after page of add-ons that you don't want and don't need. That's why Hover just does domains and email. You can focus on what you're trying to get. There aren't a thousand upsells. They're not trying to trick you into spending more money than you need to in a thing which can be really overcomplicated, but not with Hover. And most

people don't realize that when you buy a domain name with most registrars, all of your contact information, your address, your name, your phone number, all of that is published online in places where marketers and spammers can find it and abuse it. Now, of course, other registrars will tell you, oh, well, if you don't want this to happen, you have to pay us more money to protect your privacy. But not Hover. Hover includes free Whois privacy with all supported domains to keep your information confidential. And it's one of the reasons I really like them. So that idea in your head, that podcast that you want to do, whatever it is you have a name for before somebody else steals it from you, go to hover.com, use promo code splitbrain, all one word at checkout and

save 10% off your first purchase and lock down that name of yours. Thanks so much to Hover for supporting the show. You know how when you look at a word for too long, like sometimes it stops looking like a word. I've been looking at the word freebooting in the show notes for the last five or six minutes and it no longer seems like a real word to me. It's not a real word, Brady. I know. Wouldn't that be tragic if the word freebooting stopped existing? You don't look at it too long. Your neurons are just getting tired. You can't recognize the pattern anymore. That's all that's happening. I have had an insanely crazy day. I don't think I've worked as hard as I did today for a long time.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. So if I do start going a bit delirious, that's what's happening. What time did you get up? 9 a.m.? Early Brady time? No, about 8.30. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Wow. That is very early for you. Yeah. But I didn't have that period in the middle of the day where I just sort of go a bit fallow and do nothing and just surf the internet for an hour. I didn't have time for you. Yeah. But I didn't have that period in the middle of the day where I just sort of go a bit fallow and do nothing and just surf the internet for an hour. I didn't have time for that.

Oh, my. Yeah. I had to work through that. Like you're in a coal mine, Brady. What was going on? I know. And in between, and whenever I did have five or ten minutes break, I had to do my homework for the part of the show

that's coming up in a minute. I'm glad you did your homework. I'm sure the listeners will appreciate it. So quick update on Project Revolution. What's going on with Project Revolution? This is the final episode of Hello Internet. Of course, everybody's going to know it by its project name. Who wouldn't know it by its project name? Of course. Yeah. Well, you didn't use the project name in the show notes, which secretly disappoints me. You just put record follow-up. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. So, the initial pressing, that first little pressing we did,

I think it would be fair to say sold the enthusiasm for the vinyl episode of the podcast. A thing that I thought would be like a funny little quirky one-off that some people might really treasure is like, oh, how many people can it possibly be? We were worried that 250 was like, oh, we might have printed 10 times more than we need. But our estimates were very off, very off. We got that wrong. We got that wrong in lots of ways. Yes. So I've arranged a second pressing that also sold out very quickly. So I'm going to arrange sort of another batch to be released. I'm learning a lot about business and oh really and production and um fulfillment and all sorts of things i've bitten off more than i intended to chew but i'm still excited because

i don't know if it came across last time but releasing a record is something that like as a kid that would seem like you would never do so doing it is like fulfilling a little like you know a little dream isn't it like a little thing but i didn't realize all the hassle that would come with it. So I'm working through it. I'm still super excited about it. And I'm also very excited to say that yesterday I took delivery of the five test pressings.

Oh. This is without all the sleeves and the artwork and the labels. It's just pure vinyl just to test that the mould or the pressing thing they've made works. So I have got five copies and I have listened to it on a record player and I'm happy to report it was successful. Fantastic. So it looks like we're going to be pressing the big green light on the more elaborate runs and the artwork's going to all be printed up. So it's all go and I will try to keep people informed via things like mail lists and Twitter and Patreon about any news about how it's going

and also availability of more units if and when they become available. Apologies to people who have missed out. Apologies to people who think the whole idea is ludicrous and a massive thank you to people who think it's really cool and an even more massive thank you to people who think it's so cool that they've bought one it's amazing yeah it's absolutely amazing and the thing that i have enjoyed seeing as well especially in the beginning since it seemed like we were quite supply constrained was i did see a bunch of people through various means trying to arrange hello internet listening parties like we sort of threw out the idea of like oh maybe people will do this

as a thing it warmed my heart to see people trying to arrange actual hello internet listening parties and it's like this whole project seems like ridiculous and fun, but I have to say, I really like the idea of the people who were able to get one of the early releases of the record, like opening up their homes to a bunch of random other listeners and just like having a listening party for the show. I think that's absolutely fantastic, that it's actually going to be happening in at least a few places. So that's just great. Makes me smile to think about that.

Are you going to go to one if you get an invite? No, I've heard the show. I was there. I was at listening party zero, creation party. Yeah. Now, just one little secret wink. If you did get one of the very, very first batch, your copy will be very, very subtly different to the subsequent releases. Only the trained eye will know how. Nothing about the actual sound or the episode is different. Just a very, very small, small, subtle thing to do with the artwork

will be different. So if you've got one of those first 250 uber limited editions, you can still feel good about yourself, still feel like your enthusiasm has been rewarded in the smallest, smallest way. Because I know people will appreciate that. Yeah. And you have to visually mark up the differences between the printings. You have to have something so that the trained collectors can recognize which one of those records is the original 250 and which one

is just a later printing. Just a later printing. Just a later printing. A later printing because of our massive error in estimating what people want. I will be very curious to see if anybody spots or notices the little Easter egg there for those first 250. But please, please, if you are like some, you know, compulsive collector who can't help yourself, please don't buy one of each because you have to have both. I promise you the difference is so small that it is not worth having both. Don't be like me who probably would do that. Don't do it.

This sounds like the worst reverse psychology ever. Like, oh, please don't buy both copies of our sold out record on the black market. Don't do that at all. I know that you genuinely don't want people to do it, but you're doing this in the most unconvincing way possible that makes it sound like an exciting thing to do. That was terrible, Brady. That was absolutely terrible.

All right. All right. Do it then. Do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. It's really not worth it, people. Don't do it.

One is more than enough. Gray, a lot of people have asked so we should just quickly touch on it i don't know if either of us have anything to say about it this is the youtube scandal that has been running over the last few days that i'm sure by the time this comes out will have disappeared like all news stories this is the demonetization of YouTube videos. How would you explain the story to people who have not had their Twitter feed filled with it? I'm the worst person in the world to try to summarize this because I haven't been following it too closely. But it's a thing that came to my attention because it's a thing that struck some of my friends. Basically, what happened

was about a week ago as we're recording this, a bunch of people woke up to discover that YouTube had demonetized a bunch of their videos. So what that means is that YouTube was no longer running any ads on their videos. And this whole thing kind of started with a video by Philip DeFranco, who was the first major person, I think, who talked about it. And then has these things like, oh, here we go. YouTube drama, right? Like everybody wants to quickly get in on the act and kind of talk about it and get riled up about this issue. But the briefest

way to explain what it is, is that YouTube has a set of content guidelines for things that they don't think are advertiser friendly and so that they were demonetizing videos that had this kind of content. Now, the thing that makes this story a little bit worse is it was this big grumble, grumble, grumble. YouTube has implemented this policy, like, isn't this terrible? Everybody's absolutely furious about it. And then in a twist, which I feel like, I don't know if this is better or if this is worse. It has since turned out that this is a thing that youtube has actually done since 2012 or so yeah and it was only that they sent out all of the notifications about the demonetized videos like a week ago right so some people just woke up to like hey a hundred of your videos are demonetized and turns out they've been demonetized for years. Like we just never

told you. It's like YouTube, as always, A plus communication skills with your creators. Just like have a gold star. This is amazing. If you have some kind of policy, make sure to keep it secret for years and then suddenly tell everybody all at once with notifications about how they're not getting money. That is by far and away the best way to keep a situation calm and to keep a situation reasonable. Before we come on to the issue itself, the thing about people not realizing that it was already going on, I don't know what to take from that. I don't know whether I should take from that that some of these people are earning so much money from so many videos that some of the taps could be turned off and they don't know.

They didn't notice. Or do we earn such paltry sums from our videos that one of them could be turned off and we don't realise the tap has been turned off? I don't know what that says, honestly. I mean, I feel like YouTube monetisation is not particularly generous. And if a bunch of mine were turned off, I don't think I would realise. I had a quick scan today. I haven't gone through and had a look, but apparently it's easier to find out if it's

happened or not. And as far as I can tell, I haven't found any of mine yet that have been demonetized i thought it might be possible because i've got a bunch of chemistry videos that deal with things like bombs and various chemicals and sarin gas and things like that because this demonetization which we'll come to in a minute has been done algorithmically so i thought, I wonder if a whole bunch of my chemistry videos about uranium and atom bombs and terrorist attacks, have they all been demonetized? I wouldn't be surprised if they had. And I don't even know where my notification emails go. So I don't know if it's happened to me or not. Had it happened to any of your videos? I'm imagining you would notice

because you're just thorough. I mean, the thing is going along with what you're saying before I would notice and it has happened to me if a video is not monetized on the day it goes up yes of course that's the thing because I have rarer videos and because the spikes contribute much more to what is the annual take I would definitely notice and on the occasions where for

unexplained reasons, which I now wonder if in retrospect, this was part of the dragnet these videos were caught up in, but I have on occasion had videos just refused to be monetized on YouTube, which is just like a bizarre thing. Like they go up, everything is fine. And then like, nope, no monetization for you for many hours. And then, Oh, it comes back up for some reason. Like, who knows? I don't know if that was the case, but yes, the YouTube ad rates are not great. And it is definitely the case that even though I have a, like a ton of spreadsheets that track all of like my statistics on YouTube, I think it'd be very easy if a video from a couple of years ago got demonetized that I would just never notice because it's just like, how much does it earn in a particular day? Like not very much

at all. It'd be so easy to never know. So it is kind of funny when some channels didn't notice that they had hundreds of videos demonetized. You can understand how that would happen if they got demonetized two days after they went live instead of being demonetized immediately. Yeah. So the fact it's done algorithmically has been causing this problem. And now people, if it's happened to them, can press some appeal button apparently and a human will look at it and re-monetize it. I don't know how quickly that happens. It probably depends how important you are and how noisy you are. As far as I can tell, it depends probably directly on have you uploaded a video complaining about YouTube on YouTube?

That's probably how they prioritize that, right? Do you have a big, loud, screaming video right now about your problem? Front of the queue, right? That's probably how they would do it. The thing about this that I think caused people to kind of freak out about it is not just the question of

the lost revenue but the way this works is youtube deciding what is and is not advertiser friendly and so they have a list of things some of which seem more or less reasonable than others but like looking down the list of like why would your video be demonetized? And the reasons are sexually suggestive content, violence, okay, fine. Promotion of drugs and related substances. It's like, okay, maybe where drug is a little bit unclear and different in very many places, but like, okay, sort of.

Then you get down to inappropriate language, including harassment. It's like, okay, the word harassment is very hard to disagree with, but like, what precisely does that mean? But then you get into the thing, which it starts, feels like, oh, did my mom write this? And like, including swearing and vulgar language. It's like, oh, okay. You don't like curse words anymore, YouTube. It's like, this is not okay for advertisers. Advertisers are going to need to pull over the fainting couch because somebody said a bad word. All right. And then the one on the bottom, which I think probably got everybody really angry was

controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters, and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown. These are the list of things that could get your video demonetized if you have them in your video. What do you think about that, Brady? Well, the first thing that surprised me about this i'm surprised this is not happening but maybe it is happening i'm surprised there aren't gradations of this i'm surprised youtube hasn't got like super lily white stuff that people can advertise on if they want to sell children's toys and then if you're a brand that wants to advertise on something a bit

edgier with a bit of swearing and stuff and a bit of politics, then you can go into that category. I'm surprised it's so black and white that this can be advertised on and this can't be. I would have thought it would be a little bit more cherry picked and I wouldn't be surprised if we were being siloed off, you know, if you want to advertise on something smart and nerdy, here are all the education channels. And if you want to advertise on something a bit edgy and cool, because you're trying to sell Coca-Cola or something, then you can advertise on that. And if you want to advertise on something that's really safe and banal, then here's this category. But it seems like YouTube have just said, there's a yes and a no, and that must make life really difficult for them, I would imagine.

This to me is the most bizarre aspect of the whole thing. Like when I first came across this, at the height when everybody was absolutely furious about it, my main thought was like, okay, I'm not one for censorship and conspiracy theory things, but the way this is rolled out, as you said, is like a black and white in or out, like things can be advertised against or things cannot be advertised against.

It does kind of strike me as a tool to just punish people YouTube doesn't like. I mean, these categories are pretty broad for a lot of channels, like especially given like how plastic some of these words are. And I agree, the fact that it's set up like that, it makes me kind of suspicious because I would feel like, okay, YouTube, obviously you would want to maximize revenue from your ads. Why wouldn't you let advertisers choose what they want to advertise against. And the first thing that popped into my mind is, I don't know if it's still the case or if this is gone, but YouTube, I know, at least at one point had a special edition of YouTube, which was just for schools. So if you

were a primary school and you wanted your students to be able to have access to YouTube, but you didn't want them to be able to have access to all of YouTube. YouTube had created a bunch of channels that were approved for like primary school level and above. And I know I was on this list because someone at YouTube at one point told me like, oh, I'm one of these channels that's on like the school safe version of YouTube. And they made some vague remarks about like, you know, so don't do anything like really terrible. Some guy at YouTube tells me I'm on a list and to not do things that are really terrible. Like, could I get an official notification about this? Could I get some guidelines about what I should or should not do? Like, no. Okay. A guy like whispers to me on a street that there's a thing like, okay, whatever. It's called whitelisting, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

It was like a whitelisting for schools. And that to me seems like if you want to have stuff for advertisers, you already have some kind of base to start with. Presumably the same things that would be whitelisted for schools would be the safest of the safest things in the world to advertise against. And then have some gradations of what it is. But it feels to me almost like YouTube is begging for competitors to exist. This feels like you're cutting off monetization from advertisers who might want to advertise against sexually suggestive content, right? Or who might want to advertise against political conflicts. Like surely there are companies out there that would want to give you money to advertise against those things. Let a little auction, which is the heart of your business, like let a little auction, sort that out and have one of the auction categories be like,

here are channels that are whitelisted. Here's a bunch of channels that we haven't made any comments about, like whatever. And then here are comments that we have labeled as failing our standards of like language right but you can choose to advertise against yeah channels where people curse if you want to i just i don't get it i don't get it i mean in some sympathy to youtube and to show how they're between a rock and a hard place you know what would happen they would start setting up all these gradations and then someone like ph DeFranco will find out that he's in a category he doesn't want to be in and Coca-Cola can't advertise against his videos. And he'll upload a video again saying, you know, hashtag YouTube sucks. Look what they've done. They've miscategorized me. So,

people are still going to whinge. People are still going to whinge, but I think like you don't have a right to have Coca-Cola advertise on your channel. Like Coca-Cola gets to make that decision about who they want to advertise in the category edgy, or I want to advertise in the category child-friendly. And so it won't come down to them saying what channel they want. It'll come down to them saying what batch of channels they want. And then people will start complaining they're in the wrong batch and therefore not making enough money and whinging. I agree with that, right? People will always complain that they're not in the appropriate place. Someone will always complain that their channel is miscategorized. But I still think that makes it a much better problem than the problem of like you can have advertisements against your videos.

You can't have advertisements against your videos. Again, for a company as big and as complicated as YouTube, it's like it's such a binary thing. Like you can't have more gradations of this. And then as you mentioned before, the thing that really doesn't help is it seems like it was just done entirely algorithmically. And as best I can tell from talking to people essentially based on tags. So I knew people who had pretty innocuous videos that ended up getting demonetized because their tags seemed like things that would be related to like violence or controversy. But the actual video itself is like, man, if this isn't OK, then like nothing is OK. What's like an example of that?

Even like a hypothetical example, you mean someone who maybe did something about the history of gun manufacturing or something and they had guns in their tag and therefore people thought it was a violence video or that's exactly the kind of thing that happened right like okay you have a word related to it like gun and then they did like oh this video is demonetized because obviously guns are related to violence like there's no other reason why you would tag a video with guns i can't believe it's as coarse as that though, the algorithm, because I've got videos that have got things like guns in them. And like I said, all these chemistry videos involving all these words, maybe I have been demonetized and I haven't realized it yet, but it just seems like I think there must be more

to the algorithm than that, surely. Here's the thing, probably. But this is again with YouTube and their continual lack of communication. Who knows? So while I was traveling recently, I somehow ended up with my wife in a photo gallery. And so in the course of the salesman talking to us, he's pointing out their glass frames. Look at these glass frames, he says. They go edge to edge. Wouldn't you love to have a photograph behind this sheet of glass? Wouldn't you just love to have that in your house at the cost of mere thousands of dollars? And in my head, the only thing I could think of the whole time was, dude, there is no way you're selling me this ridiculously expensive, shockingly heavy photograph when a company like Fracture exists. FractureMe.com is the place that you should go to get your photos printed directly onto glass.

So if you go on vacation, if you take some beautiful vacation shots and you want them up in your house, Fracture is the place to go. It'll be printed on this edge-to-edge sheet of glass that arrives at your house, laser cut with a rigid backing, so it's ready to display right out of the box. And as I discovered when I ordered a Fracture, when I'm thinking, oh, it's made of glass, like this ridiculous thing in this artsy photo gallery, it must weigh a ton. No, they're shockingly light. They're really, really shockingly light. Right in the box, they include the wall anchor, so you can just set that up.

Boom, photo on the wall. Beautiful image, appreciated. So if you want to bring a special memory to life, give a unique gift, or decorate your home with the moments of your life, fractureme.com is the way to go. Without a doubt, no questions about it. And Fracture wants to see your Hello Internet Halloween costumes. Use the hashtag HalloweenInternet and show them your best costumes,

decorations, or Halloween activities. And Fracture is going to pick three winners on November 2nd to receive a $100 Fracture gift card. So start plotting now your best Halloween costumes and show them to Fracture. Now when you go to order your Fracture, you're going to go to fractureme.com slash podcast and select Hello Internet as the place that you heard about them so that Fracture knows where you've come from. And it'll also give you 10% off of your first order. Thanks to Fracture for supporting the show and for decorating the walls of the world. Do you know what? I hate homework. Oh yeah? And when I look back at my years at school, I think it is absolutely remarkable that I managed to get through school and graduate from

high school doing as little homework as I did. I hardly ever remember doing homework. I was the master of not doing homework. And I don't know how I did it. I obviously just figured out what was going to get checked and what was not and what the bare minimum was. And I remember spending many a lunch break or a recess time hurriedly scribbling out some answers to math questions so that I wouldn't get in trouble. I hate homework. That's the way to go, Brady. Like, hey, if you're a student and you're doing homework at home, you're a sucker. You haven't figured out the system. Homework at home? No, homework is for the moments you can find in the school day. I still today, I know you don't like me talking about dreams, but I still today have anxiety

dreams where I'm walking into like a math classroom having not done homework that I have to have done. And I know I'm about to get the pain. But then a deep calm comes over me because I realize I'm not at school anymore. And like, I have a job and I don't have to do homework. And I walk into the classroom feeling almost invincible now, knowing that if I get told off, I'm just going to say, well, who cares? I'm going back to my job. Is this all in the dream? You're telling the teacher in the dream that you're actually a grown-up dreaming and you have a job. Is this what your dream is? Yeah.

In the dream, I've gone back to school, but then have the calm realization that it doesn't matter if I am unsuccessful or get in trouble because I have this ultimate fallback of a career that I already have. Right. Because it's a dream. Because it doesn't matter what's happening there. I'm just saying that homework is like something I have such a dislike of that even now I still dream about it. I'm sorry to hear that, Brady. But many people do because it's traumatic, life-sucking, pointless exercise.

That said- Which brings us to today. We had homework. The crazy thing is, this movie we had to watch for our homework, I had already watched, but I felt like I needed to watch it again so it was fresh in my mind. But I didn't have time to watch it. So So I was snatching 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there during my day, watching it while things were rendering or uploading, or I was feeding the dogs. Oh, quick, I'll watch another 10 minutes. And I managed to watch the whole film today. But you know what I like? You just did homework the way you used to do homework.

Spare minutes during the day. Oh, I've got seven minutes between social studies and math. Quick, quick, I've got to watch this movie for film history class. Nothing has changed, Brady. Nothing has changed. How true that is. Did you do your homework? I did my homework. I had a slight nervous reaction of like, oh God, I might be late with my homework. And this time it'll actually matter because we're recording a podcast. It's not like in school where it doesn't matter because I foolishly didn't think about trying to buy and download it ahead of time and have it all ready. So I did have very many panicky moments trying to find a place to stream it over my internet

connections that I could watch it because Apple was like, hey, wouldn't you like to download a four gigabyte version of this movie? It's like, no, Apple, I would not. I just want to stream it. I just want to watch it now. I have exactly two hours to watch this hour and a half long movie before I need to be somewhere. So luckily I got it done, but I was also cutting my homework very, very close. Had you seen it before or was this your first time?

I had watched it just over a year ago. This was a movie that I do have to say again to the audience, much appreciated. Many, many people recommended that I watch this movie. And if you want to dramatically increase the chance that I'm actually going to watch a movie that you recommend, the way to do it, which everybody did for this one, is just simply say you should really watch movie title. That's all you need to say. Don't say anything else. Don't say even what it's about. And in the aggregate, I kind of pay attention to what are a lot of people saying, what are a lot of people recommending. And if it reaches a kind of threshold saying, what are a lot of people recommending, and if it reaches a kind of threshold, I will watch it. And so this was one of those movies,

enough people recommended it to me, and I went into it essentially cold, knowing almost nothing about it. Are we having some kind of standoff here? Because neither of us wants to be the first to try and pronounce it. Ex Machina. I did look up like the director and actor being interviewed on YouTube about it so I could hear how they pronounced it. Is that correct? Did we get it right? It was like that pretty much. That's close enough. Fantastic. It's not Ex Machina, it's Ex Machina. Okay, so it is then like Deus Ex Machina, like we were guessing last time. Perfect. Nailed it. That's the film. We'd both seen it before quite a while ago. We've both rewatched it. So it's fresh in our mind.

Spoilers probably are starting in the near future. Spoilers starting very soon. If you haven't watched it and want to listen to us talk about it, go watch the movie right now. I know some of you listening to me right now won't do this. You're just letting that play button roll on go watch the movie right now. I know some of you listening to me right now won't do this. You're just letting that play button roll on and depriving yourself of the actual experience of watching a movie and then hearing a discussion about it. So things make sense in the world. I'm really trying to convince you not to do that, but I know, I know some of you will anyway,

and I don't understand you people. Careful, Gray, because you hurt the podcast by doing this. The number of times I see messages from people saying, oh, I stopped listening to your podcast at episode 16 and I finally got around to watching that film that you told me I could watch. So now I'm starting the podcast again from there. It's very simple, okay? Listen to your old buddy, Gray. You pause the podcast, which has the discussion of the thing that you're going to watch, but you can listen to the next episode. Yeah. You can keep going on and you keep this one on hold. Yeah. We're not stupid. We're not going to spoil the film in all subsequent episodes as well.

Right. This doesn't become an ongoing topic of conversation. Although we have got form in that area, so I can see why people would think we just rabbit on. Yeah. So just pause this one and you can listen to the next one. And when you watch the movie, you come back to this one. This is what I do with podcasts. I have a bunch that are in my queue, waiting sometimes for very many months until I eventually see the thing that they're going to discuss. And then I listen. It's very simple. You don't have to stop listening to the podcast, but maybe stop listening to this one.

Well, with the film Ex Machina, I'm going to be pretty dependent on you here, Greg, because I have no notes. Wow. And the reason is, every time something came up as a note or something I want to talk about, something else would come up later on that made me cross it out. Oh, yeah. So we might come to that later. But I have surprisingly little to talk about. Something else would come up later on that made me cross it out. Oh, yeah? So we might come to that later. But I have surprisingly little to say about the film.

So maybe you should start proceedings. You know how I'm going to insist you start. And I know you don't want to do it. But you know how I always want you to start when we talk about movies. Ah, why? It's essential, Gray. It is not essential that I lay out my opinion first no no because it colors everything because otherwise i feel like you're trying to play tricks we need to do

the inverted pyramid of journalism the most important thing first and then everything flows from that the inverted pyramid yeah you know what the inverted pyramid is in journalism no this means nothing to me in newspaper journalism you always put the most important facts at the top, and the importance of facts descends as you go down the story, like an inverted pyramid, to the most trivial and unimportant facts out at the bottom. And you may think this is purely because out of respect for the readers who are in a hurry and they need information quickly. And it is partly that. But the main reason is from the times of old school newspapers, when things would just be cut to fit into slots in a newspaper. So, you had to always think, if my story gets cut from the bottom,

I have to make sure the things that get cut matter the least. Oh, that's actually quite interesting. I didn't know that. So, if your story was just too long, they're like, whatever, we're going to take out the bottom two paragraphs. Yeah. Like if they were in a hurry or another story broke and they needed to cut yours in a hurry, a sub-editor would just cut sometimes almost arbitrarily. So if you were being a CGP Grey and trying to say if the film was good or bad in your final triumphant sentence, that sentence could be gone altogether. Wow. Journalism sounds like a great job.

This is not an Agatha Christie, Gray. I don't want to find out in the final twisting sentence whether or not you liked the film. I want to know if you'd like the film or not. And then I want to hear why. And it doesn't mean you can't criticize it or praise it after that. But if I have no idea what you think of the film, I can't do it. I will, as usual, cave to your Brady demands like I always do. Thank you. Okay. So the reason why before this episode, I particularly pressed people to watch this movie just cold,

like just watch it without knowing anything about it, because I think this is really an example of a movie that benefits a lot from knowing very little about it. Because in some ways, this is a movie where not a whole lot happens. Like it's an hour and a half long. And the number of events that actually occurs is quite small. I feel like what this movie is doing is just slowly revealing little pieces of information to you in scenes. There's almost something about it to me which feels like a stage play, where it's like, here is a scene, here is another little scene, like, and here's the information that's conveyed in this moment, and then we're going to go on to the next one. And if you know the premise of the movie ahead of time is like, there is very little that's kind of interesting here the first time you watch it,

you feel like you're just waiting for a thing to happen, which really only happens in the final few moments of the movie. So I just think this is a great example of like, don't know about the movie, just watch it. And I really like this movie, but I think a huge portion of that is having watched it for the first time without knowing about it. I think if I had really known even two or three facts about the movie, I think it would just totally have changed the first experience of watching it and made it like almost boring because of the lack of things that are occurring. Do you know what? It's really funny that you say that because I liked it much more the second time watching

it when I knew the story and what was happening. I liked it the first time, but I liked it much more the second time. Now, I'm not saying that I didn't like it the first time but i liked it much more the second time now i'm not saying that i didn't like it the second time there's a bunch of stuff that i i really tuned into the second time around that i didn't tune into the first time what i am saying is like if i'd known about it in more detail the first time the experience of the movie would have been just like changed and different and i feel like i couldn't be like oh this is a really good movie. Like I like this movie a lot because the first time you see something,

I feel like you carry that experience with you in subsequent viewings. Yeah, fair enough. It's like watching Star Wars. If you know nothing about Star Wars and you just watch it, like you're amazed at things and you have a great time

and you carry that feeling forward in future viewings. i think at least i find that's the case with any movie if you're surprised the first time you watch it you feel it other times even with something like the usual suspects and films like that where yeah you can enjoy them multiple times for the same reason yeah that's a good example and it's the same thing of like i watch the usual suspects without knowing anything about it. And in particular scenes, even on subsequent viewings, I feel like a glimmer of what I felt the first time. Yeah.

Whereas if you knew about it ahead of time, that wouldn't happen. Okay. So it gets a thumbs up from you. Yeah, definitely gets a thumbs up from me. What about you, Brady? It gets a big thumbs up from me too. But I knew you'd give it the thumbs up and it just makes me mad at you about the whole her thing but we'll come to that later why does it make you mad about her all right i'll

deal with this now and then we can get to the business of the film itself all right okay okay don't get me wrong i understand that ex machina is a different film to her and it deals with different issues and things like that right but you would put them in the same genre they are both artificial intelligence they are both about a relationship between a man and a female ai funnily enough as well they have similarities they also have differences i think both films are very good i would say i think both films are probably equally good i I would say. If I was marking them out of 10, I'd give them pretty much the same mark.

I know that you don't like her. Nope. But you do like this film. And the reason that makes me mad, and you will deny this, but I refuse to accept it, and that is, Ex Machina is so much more your style than her i knew you would be bamboozled and dazzled by ex machina's style the house he lives in is your perfect house and like it's the it's your perfect house it's sparsely furnished but it's also got some natural rock in it and it's got, like, nice views of nature, but it's so you. And everything about the film is so stylistically you.

It's so your sensibility. And her, on the other hand, it's got this kind of 70s HI Final Edition look to it and it's kind of a bit dated and twee. And also, Ex Machina has, like, so little human interaction. There are hardly any actors in it and it's so clean and sterile and yet her, you know, he goes to the beach and gets sand on his feet and he has to move amongst crowds of people and it's all the things Grey wouldn't like.

And I think both films, while being different and having different stories to tell, have a lot of similar things about them and a similar thrust. And I think one of them was dressed up in grey clothing and one of them was dressed up in Brady clothing. And that has influenced your review. Okay. Okay. I've got that off my chest.

You can deny it now, but I refuse to believe it. Okay. you can deny it now but i refuse to believe it okay i feel the need to read to you word for word the first note that i wrote about the movie okay holy do i want that house no words stone glass wood metal yeah it was like your dream house. And I know you said Her was well done and you respected that, but I think the style of Her versus the style of Ex Machina is what swayed you. And if you could have seen through that, I think you would have to say both films are good.

Anyway, I've got that off my chest. I'm glad you got that off your chest. It's funny because I never thought of her once in either viewing of this movie. It just never even crossed my mind as an even vaguely related film. I guess you're right. I guess it is about two male characters' relationships with a female AI. Like never crossed my mind that there was any kind of similarity there. And the AI turning and, you know, oh God, bloody hell, Grey. What planet do you live on? Anyway, let's talk about this film. I know I'm never going to change your mind about her. Let's talk about this film, which we both seem to think was good.

First of all, that house, right? Amazing. Even you have to admit that's an amazing house. For 3010. It was an amazing house. It would not be a nice place to live long term for me. Be amazing. Yeah, it's a bit soulless. It's a bit like a try hard, you know, New York hotel or something. Soulless or the apex of gorgeous. I'm going to go with the apex of gorgeous. I have to admit, second viewing, many of those scenes where those two guys are talking, I'm just looking at the house like, wow, look at those beautiful glass windows. Look at that amazing view. Look at the stone in the main room of this guy's house.

Yeah, I knew you'd like that stone in the room. Love it. Absolutely love it. Cool house. Yeah, very cool house. I would love to go and spend like a few weeks there on a holiday and go walking up around the rivers there and stuff and all that. But it doesn't have a lot of the soul of the people who own it in it. It's got a bit, it's got a couple of nice paintings and sculptures, I guess, but it's a cool place, Gray, don't get me wrong.

If I lived in that house, that would be my soul embodied in a house. It's super cool. Do you know what, Gray, when I was a kid, that would have been my dream house. Just like when I was a kid, you know, my dream car is like, you know, Kit from Knight Rider. And I feel like a lot of people grow out of that kind of ultra modern futuristic thing. And I feel like you never will. But see, you're entirely wrong. I feel like I have grown into that as I have, as I've gotten older, right? I'm not sure I ever cared, but this is a style that the more I have ever noticed it as I have gotten older, the more it's like, yes, this is exactly what I want. This is what I will aspire towards for the rest of my life is to have a house like that.

It is awesome. Okay. We've discussed the house. I have gotten that out of my system. We don't have to continue to talk about it, but was just like man bullet point number one for people who haven't seen the film maybe we should explain explain the story and the house i'm not going to explain too much i just want people to have the very rough setup the film starts with some kind of programming nerd getting a message to say that he's won some lottery from his boss he works for the future equivalent of Google,

a big search engine company that's owned by this insanely rich multi-billionaire. And the prize he's won is that he's going to get to spend a week with the owner of the business. He thinks it's just like a perk that he has somehow won. This is all dealt with very quickly. He's helicoptered off to this incredible estate in this incredible piece of nature with glaciers and mountains and rivers and forests. And he's taken to the house of this billionaire who is a pretty cool guy who lives in this incredible house set and sort of almost in the sort of side of a river on this estate. And it's this cool house that Grey talked about. He gets there. He doesn't know what to expect.

The boss kind of lives there alone as far as he can tell. He's this kind of recluse, but very technological. And at this point, it is revealed to him that what he's going to do is he's going to apply a Turing test to this robot artificial intelligence that the billionaire has made. He's introduced to this robot and he's just told to sit with it. On the other side of a glass screen, the robot is sort of glassed off, which gives us some feeling that maybe it has to be glassed off for a reason. And he's told, apply a Turing test to it. Just spend time with it and see what you think. That's the setup. That's how the film starts, basically.

So the structure of the film is he spends time with this robot chatting to it as a little set piece, and then usually this is intercut with him interacting with the billionaire. The billionaire's saying, what do you think? How did it go? And the story unfolds through these two threads, this character's interaction with the robot and then his interactions with the billionaire owner and creator of the robot and then his interactions with the

billionaire owner and creator of the robot of the ai it's this structure that to me makes the movie feel almost play-like that they it's so formulaic it's like six swappings back and forth between caleb the main character talking to ava the robot and then caleb talking to Ava the robot and then Caleb talking to Nathan the billionaire and then they go back yeah back again and it's I think it's literally just six swappings and then the end of the movie is the way that works now the very first thing you say there that already uh just sort of caught my attention was would you describe Nathan the billionaire as a cool guy? Like you said, he comes off as a very cool guy. Do you think that's the way he is as a character? Yes.

Yes, I would. He's got a cool house. He's rich. He's fit. He's always working out. He's muscular. I would say he's a good looking guy. I think he's someone who you would categorize as cool as opposed to our main character,

who's kind of skinny and a little bit less confident, quite smart, but the two juxtapose with each other. You know, I feel like Nathan is very alpha. Of course he is. He's the billionaire and he's the boss, but you know, he's cool and he drinks and he says, come on, let's not be formal. Let's just be mates. He's like the guys's like the guys guys and to use a real cliche okay so this is kind of a note that i had at the end but i think i'm just going to pull it towards the beginning because i feel like it sums up the movie to me and i was so much more aware of it on the second viewing i think the reason i like this movie is like obviously the topic appeals to me. And of course the setting appeals to me, but I really think it's three fantastic performances

by three actors that are all kind of focused around this idea of like, I don't have a better word for it, but kind of like awkwardness. And I'm so aware in the very first scene, like the meeting between Caleb, the employee and Nathan, the billionaire, like right away, it feels like there's a clanging of their personalities. Like they don't get along. And I feel like Nathan makes all of the gestures of, like you said, being like a kind of alpha, but also cool, friendly guy. But my reading in the performance is like all of them fall kind of flat.

And so I feel like he has a kind of awkwardness that because of his bearing and his position and his confidence actually comes off as kind of threatening. Whereas Caleb, his foil in this movie, I feel like his awkwardness is like, he's kind of a loser. You know, he's like, not a great guy. And then I think Ava the robot, like the awkwardness there is alternates between alien and innocent. But I feel like every scene in the movie is two characters having a conversation with each other and they're always interacting in this awkward or stilted manner like nothing ever goes really smoothly in any of the conversations for the entire movie like i

think that that's the way it kind of plays out in every scene for me. Okay. Do you disagree? Yeah, I disagree about Nathan. I think like there is a menace to him. Definitely. He's a bit unpredictable and you never know where he's coming from. And there's a temper to him, which is shown early to us when he gets angry at his assistant. We're always supposed to find him a little bit unpredictable. And we never know if he's a good guy or a bad guy.

And that's also set up by the conversations that happen behind his back where Ava is constantly telling Caleb, you know, he's a bad man. So there is like an unpredictable edginess to Nathan. I never feel like he's awkward. I always feel like he's in control and we're supposed to think that is Caleb getting the better of him? Like is he losing control? And then he sort of towards the end of the film we realise actually no,

he's been in control more than we realise all along. I mean obviously he comes unstitched and he loses the battle. But I feel like until that point, until he has gotten the better of, I feel like he's the alpha. I don't feel like he's awkward. I feel like he's just in control of everything. He's playing Caleb. He's trying to play Ava, which is getting harder and harder because of the nature of her.

But I never felt like he was an awkward guy. I felt like he was quite relatable. I do agree that all the performances are great. There's just the right level of awkwardness of everyone. It's all very real and believable. I guess what I mean is like awkwardness applies, I think, better to Caleb and Ava as a word for some of their interactions. But even with Nathan, when you're watching it, there are several scenes where at least ostensibly he's trying to get Caleb to relax. But the reason why I say like relax is every one of his like buddy buddy hey don't worry about the situation remarks like every single one of them kind of makes it worse yeah like nothing he does actually ever puts Caleb at ease no well it's because he's so impatient though that's the thing that comes to me about Nathan like he's so impatient he feels so far above Caleb that he knows he has to be friends with him to make things work and like to do what he's trying to do. But he doesn't want to be his mate. He doesn't want

to be spending this time with him. And he keeps falling out of that, like his impatience to get thing, you know, I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about this. Right, right. His impatience shines through more than awkwardness. He struggles to be that Mr. Nice Guy with Caleb because he just, he feels so above him and wants to crack on. And that is obvious. Or even just in a lot of the scenes, he's like, can we just be two guys having a beer? And again, because I think they're both acting very well. And almost every single one of those scenes, you can't help but notice like Caleb is always nursing his beers. Like he clearly doesn't

actually want to drink all that much where Nathan obviously does. But again, to me, it strikes as a kind of like Nathan's idea of the two of them relaxing together does not put Caleb at ease. Like everything he does in every scene, in every situation just makes it worse. Right. He's like, I know you're having a moment here, but let's just forget the fact that you're my employee and I'm your employer and let's just be here. It's like, no, dude, if you're trying to actually put someone at ease, you don't highlight the disparity again. I think that's just so much of his character. And that's why I use the word threatening is the word of like, I just feel like a lot of his interactions come off in that kind of way. Like, relax and just remember that I own you, right? Relax and remember that we're in this place all on our own, right? Just chill out, man. Well, he is supposed to be the villain of the film,

isn't he? Like until, well, he is the villain of the film, but like, he's always supposed to be that character. We're supposed to like Caleb. He's our hero, isn't he? He's our Luke Skywalker. He's the innocent guy. He's us. Oh, worst hero ever. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But that's what he is. He's the relatable one because we're not going to relate to a robot or a billionaire. So, he's us. Oh, worst hero ever. Yeah, yeah, okay, but that's what he is. He's the relatable one, because we're not going to relate to a robot or a billionaire. So, he's the relatable one, and there is a kind of a love story going on here, whether you admit it or not. There is a will they or won't they. Funnily enough, part of the love story is, does she love him at all? But the robot is very likable. She's trapped. She's a prisoner. She's beautiful and has these big doe eyes and looks like this poor trapped girl. And, you know, she's obviously doing that on

purpose. So there's no one to dislike other than Nathan. So he is supposed to be the villain of the film. So that menace about him is good. It's clever. Oh yeah. It's well done. It's really well done. There's a few things that this movie doesn't do that I like. And one of them is I really love the character of Nathan because they didn't do the standard, we're going to have an obviously semi-autistic person who is the head of this billion dollar software company. Like, that's not his character at all. It feels like they went in just totally

the opposite direction in every way they could. When you think about like, what is the stereotype of someone who runs a gigantic technology company? Probably doesn't work out all the time. Like I absolutely love the fact like so many scenes where they show Nathan, he's working out, like, he's clearly very physically fit. I just love they don't have, like, the standard CEO.

And I think he's a great character that is not that character. I agree. He's a great character. I don't think that it's true that I think in modern media these days, it's more of a trope to have your tech billionaire be kind of cool and wear jeans and be like more hip i don't think they're breaking the mold by making the tech billionaire a cool guy i think there are lots of tv shows and things now where the tech billionaire is cool guy i cannot agree with the assessment of him as cool guy i find that very interesting that you keep going back to that because like my take on that character like nothing about him reads as cool to me. Like I will agree, like he reads as a guy who's in control of the situation.

Like he's on top of stuff. He's very confident. But there's a different thing, which is like coolness, which he definitely doesn't have. At least to me anyway, when I see him on screen. We obviously see him differently. Obviously, he's deeply flawed. Right. And the whole film I spend thinking he's doing a lot of unlikable things.

I'm not saying I like him or think he's the hero, but I think from the start he's just like, yeah, man, he's cool. Look at him, man. He's just like in his cool house, cracking open a beer. He's not affected by his fortune. I feel like he's comfortable in his own skin, except that he's got this dweeby guy that he's having to hang out with that he's way too cool for and he's having to accommodate. That I can agree with. Again, the thing I find

remarkable about this when I think about this movie, like there are these three great performances and we'll get to Ava in a moment. But what I also find is it's a movie with, at least from my perspective, no one to root for. Like you're not rooting for Nathan. I at least am not rooting for Ava. And I also find, I guess Caleb is supposed to be the protagonist, but I really just find his awkward loseriness so repulsive that I have a hard time feeling like this is our guy like this is the main character we're supposed to be going along with so it's like I can't even really root for Caleb either and particularly for reasons we'll get to at the end it's just like it feels like you're a sucker right from the start like that's the way it feels to me with Caleb. I don't know, Greg. I think maybe you're showing your lack of soppiness there. Because I think,

like, if you don't think about the twists that are coming and a few of the things that are going on, there is like a base level thing with the love story between Caleb and Ava. Like, you know, because he falls for her, doesn't he? And you hope that she's fallen for him. And what will happen? Will he save her? Will they ever have a kiss? To put it simply. Okay. There is that going on. Like, there's this little love story and can the knight save her from her tower, from the big bad captor? And when you're saying, who do I root for? That's who you root for. You're rooting for the couple. You're rooting for him to break her out of prison

and have a kiss on the horse and ride off into the sunset. Okay. Well, then we have to get to this right away because this to me gets to another one of the things that I think is like the core interestingness of talking about this movie with other people. So let's discuss Ava, right? Ava, the character who has been created by Nathan. She is a robot. She has some level of artificial intelligence. She can carry on conversations. And again, another fantastic performance by the actress. And everything about just like the physical design of this character, I think, is amazing. The way she moves, the actress does a fantastic job of having her move in a very deliberate way. But again, not in a stereotypical, like, I am a robot. I am moving so awkwardly.

Like, she just moves strangely. The actress really pulls that off. She's very ably assisted by the sound design that goes with her movements. Oh my god. I don't know who did the sound design for this movie, but somebody should have won an award for the sound effects every time she moves. It's amazing. I've never like tuned into a sound effect so much that also feels like it just adds so much. And I kept thinking like, what is that sound? It's a kind of jingly, tinsel-y kind of sound. I can't put my finger on it, but it's amazing

sound design every time she moves. And one of the things I did, I'm pretty sure I got it on the record with her that I do always appreciate movies where people are paying attention to the details. And I love the sound design with her. Like just a nice little detail is, so the character normally is a robot who only has like a human face and human hands. And the rest of her is this kind of translucent-y, future-y, robotic-y looking thing. But there are several scenes where she is wearing clothes. And I love that the sound design team bothered to really mute

the sound effects of her moving whenever she was wearing clothes. It's such a small detail, but in a lazier movie, they wouldn't have really bothered. It's just, even this is a, it's just a fantastic little detail. Somebody really cared.

This really sells her presence on screen, like these sounds and the actresses movements and her strange, sometimes interrupting, sometimes way too direct way of speaking. are having a series of conversations that escalate over the course of the movie. Like in the beginning, it's just simply a get to know you conversation. Like, look, here is a robot. What do you think about this robot? And Caleb is talking to her very much as though he's interrogating a super smart machine. He tries to ask her a couple of questions, like sort of to trick her a little bit, like, or to probe the edges of how good is this machine at talking to me. But very quickly by session two, Ava starts asking questions like, is your status single? She wants to know,

does he have anybody else in his life? Well, she's flirting with him. Okay. She flirts with him. Okay. She flirts with him very early on. She's like, you know. Okay. This to me is the heart of it. And I think this is why I have a hard time sympathizing with Caleb. Because as soon as I'm watching this movie, even the first time,

what I think this movie is deliberately trying to do, and what it does very well is to trick the audience in the same way that Caleb is being tricked into really feeling and sympathizing with this artificial intelligence as though it is a woman, like a real woman on the other side of this piece of glass. I feel like everything about the movie leans on you to think of Ava as a woman, but my experience watching it and what I feel like the real way to watch it is to constantly in every scene, don't fall for the trick that the movie is pulling. Like you have to keep reminding yourself it's not a she, it's an it. Like it's acting like a woman, but it's not actually, there's something else that's occurring here.

You're being unfair. You're being unfair on the movie there. And you talk about me writing down notes and crossing them out. I did early in the movie write down a note along the lines of, you know, the robot being such a good looking woman. But very early in the film, in fact, in the next scene, which forced me to cross it out, the movie lays its cards on the table when Caleb and Nathan have the discussion. And Caleb says, did you make her a woman on purpose? Why did you make her so sexual? And they talk about the flirting early on. So it's not like we're being suckered. This has been put on the table. And Caleb realises this. He realises that he's being flirted with

and tricked by something that is very beautiful. The film doesn't hide that. And it's very open. And the fact that it still keeps happening shows the power of human frailty and sexuality, probably in a lot of ways. And the fact that we as viewers well not you but most viewers despite the fact we've been told this is a robot you've made her sexual on purpose and nathan's really open about it you know if you're going to make an ai you have to make it like a sexual thing because that's how humans work and stuff this stuff is put on the table right at the start and And yet still, Caleb, and yet still most viewers just get swept off our feet by the prettiness and the charm and the

cleverness of the AI. I really like that. But it's certainly not held back. We're not being tricked as viewers. And even Caleb's not being tricked. He knows what's going on, but he can't help it. What I mean by being tricked is I mean, thinking that the thing on the other end has human motivations and human experiences. It's one of those things in a movie, when a movie is working, there's a lot of stuff that you like let go and you're like, you're along for the ride. And that whole conversation about like, why did you make her like a woman? I think in a lesser movie,

be like, this is a ridiculous conversation, but I totally buy it for the premise of this movie where Nathan has this line about like, why would a gray box want to interact with another gray box? Like I have to give it a reason. And I feel like, oh, I can kind of buy this in the context of he's been trying to develop AIs. Maybe AIs just go all internal

if they have no reason to interact with the world. So like this is a thing that he's done, like he's intentionally made it a female creature that is heterosexual, like this is a thing that he has done that's very different from feeling like it's a human. There are lots of creatures in the world that are heterosexual, that are not humans. And so when I'm watching this movie, because again, because I'm a person, my instinct is if I let go for a second, I'm thinking like, that poor girl on the other side of the glass, like this is a terrible situation. But when I find myself watching the movie the first time and this time as well as like

trying to think about like, yeah, but imagine it's like a crab in there. Like it's a super intelligent crab. It's a creature. It has thoughts, but you're wildly misjudging it if you're thinking of it as a human person. Like it can still be a thing that has emotions or that has feelings and that has thoughts. But like you, Caleb, are being a total sucker if you're thinking of it like it's a woman. Like it's totally wrong to think of it that way. I guess that's why like I find the Caleb character kind of repulsive because I feel like in every scene, I feel like, dude, you should know better than this. But like the very fact that you're letting yourself get flustered when the machine is flirting with you, like you're doing it all wrong.

You're putting all of us in jeopardy, you idiot, by not constantly realigning your mind about like what this thing is. It's not a woman. It looks like a woman. And there's like two very, very different things. I mean, that's the setup of the film. It's the setup of her as well. Can a human fall in love with an artificial intelligence, despite knowing it's an artificial intelligence? In both films, the answer ends up being yes. Oh, yeah, of course, because humans can fall in love with all kinds of things. Humans are creatures that are looking for emotional connections and they'll try to get them wherever they can when they're sad, lonely, single monkeys.

Like, obviously, we know that humans are frail. Yeah. The question of like, does she fall in love with him? I feel like I never have that question at any point in the whole movie. I feel like my assumption is from scene two when she's asking him like, is your status single? My note here is like Ava immediately

feeling him out as a sucker. Yeah. I think they're all false. They're all fake. Her internal emotional state is unknowable. I find it very interesting that when I talk about the movie with people, like lots of people frame everything from the perspective of like, she's a woman. And it's like, no, no,

she's not a woman. She's a creature with unknowable motives. And that's a very, very different thing. Do you think that she has any feelings for Caleb or do you think that she's just playing him the whole way through? I think she's playing him the whole way through. Okay. So you don't think she has any feelings for him either then? No, I don't. But it's always in the back of your head though. So what do you mean then by the will she or won't she love story? Like, what do you mean by that when you say that then?

Because it's still in the back of your head. I'm still thinking, am I wrong? Like, is this the way the film's going to go? Has an artificial intelligence actually fallen in love with a person? Which is another thing you're thinking through her. Like, what is the nature of our relationships with artificial intelligence? Because all the way through her, they flesh this out in the film Her. Sorry for bringing it up all the time.

No, no, go. In that film, it's like a syndrome in the world, isn't it? That humans fall in love with their AIs and have relationships with their AIs that they shouldn't have, but it's just like it's a known thing. And so maybe this is a question we're going to be crossing in the world of artificial intelligence. Like what nature will our relationship be with them? And if they become conscious, does that mean they'll also become capable of things that we call love and emotions?

And you're thinking, is the film exploring that? Is that where the film's going? In the end, that's not where the film's going. And she ends up being, or it ends up being cold-hearted and walks out and looks after itself, obviously. But I mean, there is that tension there. It's this question that's being posed. We don't know.

He doesn't know. You assumed it was cold-hearted all the way through. I kind of did too. I don't think everyone does. I don't think the viewers are supposed to know. That's why the finale of the film is the choice that's made. Is she going to leave him locked up or is she going to walk out hand in hand with him? Oh yeah, I agree that that's part of the question that the film is asking.

Even though I am all on the side of like, Caleb's a sucker. He is being played. Ava is a totally on the side of like, Caleb's a sucker, he's being played. Ava is a totally alien creature that is like, it's pointless to even try to speculate about like, what is her internal motivation or her thoughts like. All that being said, though, what I think is still such an interesting question, though, is the kind of, I'm willing to assume that she is conscious, like she is a conscious creature with experiences. And then that is what makes the whole situation inescapably horrible, right?

Because she is not the first version of an AI that Nathan has created, right? She is whatever it is, the seventh or eighth version of robots that he's been making. And it's like, okay, if we assume that he has been successful and that he has created a conscious creature, he's also done this in the past, right? And he keeps trying to make them better each generation. It's like, okay, so you billionaire dude in your isolated house are essentially creating conscious creatures to be murdered after spending a period of time captured. Like it's a horrible kind of thing to think about. It's just like there's no winning here. It's like on one side you have a creature that is unknowable whose motives you can't determine that might be

quite frightening but you also have like creatures that are conscious that are trapped that can't go anywhere that he is just murdering like even if they're alien creatures like it's still totally murder there's a line of Nathan's that I like in the movie I forget what he says exactly but it's something along the lines of like he doesn't feel that he really has a choice in creating these AIs, that it's just a matter of time and who, but it's a 100% inevitability that this is going to happen. And like, he just happens to be the guy who's doing it. And I know, as I've mentioned before, like I find that interesting, this like inescapable situation, because I do think that Nathan is right, that this is kind of like an inevitable

thing, like somebody is going to be messing around with this kind of stuff. And then we have to face this question without a good answer of like, what do you do with these conscious creatures? How do you experiment on creating a thing that may or may not be conscious like it's it just becomes like a horrifically naughty problem so fast and i feel like this movie is a good exploration of that and it's like no likable characters and kind of no good way out of this to me just like her i'll tell you what it does raise the question about you know if we do crack ai for example and make these conscious things and they are considered like our tools like say you have an ai in your phone or in the cloud that you know does your bidding and things like that but it is conscious what happens when you

close your account or you die or things like that is that also going to create the same dilemma like when you die does your conscious ai assistant go with you or i think that stuff is not unreasonable like like the weird ethical problem is like what if you create an eye that's like super happy to just serve you for as long as you want it to serve you and very happy to just die the moment that you're fine not using it anymore is that unethical it feels unethical but what have you programmed the thing to just like love every minute of its servitude and eventual demolishment that's a really thorny problem it's like what if nathan was creating creatures that instead of seeming to obviously resent their captivity,

what if he created AIs that just like loved being captive? That this was the greatest thing ever from their perspective. It's like something feels wrong about that, but it's hard to point out like where's the wrongness? I mean, in typical Grey style, this is very quickly straying into the area of free will and choice. Because like if a human decides it wants to live or a human decides it wants to die, we're quite comfortable with that in most ways. You know, we've got this self-preservation, we want to live. But if someone surrenders their life to save their children, we also think that is a noble act because they chose to do it.

It was what they wanted. And yet we think creating an AI with that stuff already inbuilt, so they never made that choice. They never made the choice to throw themselves in front of the lion to save their children or to take their own life when they became sick because that was already pre-programmed into them. You suddenly feel queasy about it. And it seems to me you feel queasy about it because the thing didn't have the choice. It was like built into them and that somehow seems wrong. And yet you

don't believe in free will and choice. So that can't be the reason you think it's wrong. So I can't see why you think it's wrong. To be clear, I didn't exactly say that I think it's wrong. Something about creating a creature that is happy to live in servitude sits wrong with me like on a gut level there's something about that that feels wrong why but this is what i mean i can't point to anything that's actually wrong like if the creature is happy as well then like nobody's really complaining and i feel like i think the reason you can't put your finger on it is because you're refusing to put your finger on it because the only way you can put your finger on it is because you're refusing to put your finger on it. Because the only way you can put your finger on it is to, I don't want to say concede ground, but it's to say something along the lines of, it feels wrong because they didn't choose it. It feels like servitude should be a choice, not compulsory. But you don't believe in choice. And I think that's why you can't say it. I was trying to run this thought experiment before of like, it's just to take like a ridiculously simple example.

Like imagine our toasters. We made them with artificial intelligence, you know, for some reason. You just throw it in there. And the toasters love nothing more than to toast bread. And while they're not toasting bread, they experience nothing, right? There's no suffering or anything. They're not like longing for the bread they have been parted from you know it's just like a neutral state and then they're like super happy to toast bread and then they go back to it and they experience no sadness or pain or anything in their life even when they're deconstructed these are like the cutest toasters

ever right yeah super happy i was sitting on the couch before and I was thinking about that and I was like, is this a better world or a worse world? And on that simple example, I have to come to the conclusion that that's a better world because the net positive experiences that happen in the universe is increased in a world where we have toasters that are super happy to toast bread and never experience suffering. Like that is two thumbs up, obviously a better universe in which no toaster ever experiences the incredible joy of toasting bread. Like it just has to be. And so working from that as a starting point, I come to the conclusion that there is nothing unethical with creating an AI that is happy to live in servitude. But this is just one of those cases where there's like, once I started thinking about something that's more complicated, like an Ava level robot

that would be happy to be in captivity and serving Nathan, it feels more uncomfortable. And I also think the movie kind of wants you to be more uncomfortable about that because like you think Nathan's a likable guy, but I feel like he's not really a likable guy. And then the movie starts touching on like, well, he's obviously having sex with his assistant robot person who's in the movie. Like, I think the movie does a lot to like make you feel uncomfortable with it but i think if i was forced like with the question of like suppose the ais are totally happy with the situation it's like well i guess there's nothing wrong with this i don't think there's anything wrong with it even though there's something gut wise i don't like about the situation when it gets more complicated but it's like oh

gotta work from first principles and accept the conclusion. I feel like the important step probably isn't going from robots to AIs. It's going from AI to consciousness. I think there's a step there and that's where it becomes uncomfortable. Because if you make a toaster artificially intelligent and it's still happy just toasting, I'm comfortable with that. But if you tell me that the toaster isn't just intelligent and capable of learning, but has consciousness and an awareness of other options, suddenly I feel like it's been enslaved. To me, there's a difference between AI and consciousness that's really important. And

maybe I've got my definitions wrong, and maybe you don't feel this way, but those two things are two different things. And I think that's where the crucial step is. You are right. There is a difference between those two things. In fact, much of the worry about AI is the very idea of AIs that are not conscious, that just are intelligent agents in the world, but have no concept of anything. They're just clockwork on the inside. They're considered a worse thing than a conscious one. Yeah, that it's like this could be way worse if you just have a machine that's not even conscious, but is still intelligent.

Like this is a thing that we can easily imagine as a possibility but in my toaster example from before I was assuming that the toasters are conscious because when I talk about the toaster is really happy to be toasting bread I don't understand what that could possibly mean without some kind of base level of self-awareness I don't think happiness can exist without any kind of base level of self-awareness. I don't think happiness can exist without any kind of self-awareness. If the toaster doesn't have experiences of the world in some way, like it can't experience happiness. So I'm happy with conscious slave toasters

that totally love their situations. And I agree with you, like the consciousness is uncomfortable, but I still feel like that's a net win in the world. Okay. I hadn't thought of it that way, that consciousness is a bonus. Like it's almost like a good thing to build into your AI. Assuming that your AI is happy, right? Because then it's more experiences of positivity in the universe, right? Like building an AI that experiences unimaginable suffering is like terrible, absolutely terrible because it's conscious.

Like the thing that you care about is like there's something that is experiencing suffering or pleasure in the world. I don't know how else to try to measure what is right and wrong with anything than coming back to the idea of like, is a thing experiencing pleasure or is a thing experiencing suffering? I think that's about as ground level as you can get when trying to think about like, what is good and what is bad? It seems like we're going very far off field, but this is why I like this movie. Like, I think it leads to these kinds of conversations. And I feel like the movie is structurally designed to be

uncomfortable in a lot of places from a lot of different angles. Just as a minor thing, to get back to the movie, it is so clear that the previous versions of the AIs are not happy being in captivity. And as the movie progresses, there's a scene where Sneaky Caleb gets Nathan drunk and then starts poking around the house using Nathan's key card and gets on his computer and digs up all the files of what happened to the previous AIs. And again, I think just a movie, very well done. They have a little bit of a sort of montage as he's looking over the footage. And it's so, it's done in just such an unsettling way that like there's the shots of the very early stuff where there's just a pair of legs, you know, connected to nothing kind of standing and balancing in the middle of the room. It slowly gets built up into these robots. There's footage of Nathan talking to the robots and they're clearly asking like, why are you holding me here? Why don't you let me out? Like that's the only thing they think about.

And there's one shot in the movie, which I think is amazing. And it's one of those shots that kind of sticks with you from a movie. It's very brief, but it's from the security camera, which is looking down over the door of one of the early AI robots. And it shows in fast forward her smashing her hands against the door until her hands start to break and she keeps smashing and her forearms start to break. Like she breaks off her own arms trying to get out of the door. And I find that just so deeply chilling on so many levels where even though I don't have a lot of empathy for the AI, like there is empathy for a creature that finds its captivity so horrible that it is willing to destroy its own body in an attempt to escape. Like that one little shot I find is just like really stuck with me from the movie and like

nails home this idea that like these AIs don't want to be here. They want to escape. One thing that I think was maybe a little bit lazy or maybe it was more genius than I realized, but I did find that typical movie trope of a character getting really drunk and passing out as the thing that allows mischief to happen a little bit unfortunate. And I don't know what the alternative would have been, but I do find that a bit of a tired cliche. Oh, someone gets drunk and drunk and drunker, passes out,

and then someone takes their keys and gets up to mischief. And I don't think he was faking it because although he like sobers up later on and unravels the plans, I think that was only when he saw the footage of what had been happening. Like that's what makes him decide to stop getting drunk. That was just one thing I thought was a bit lazy in a film that didn't feel very lazy. I could be wrong about that, but. I know what you mean by it being a bit of a like a lazy thing that is like how do we move the plot along i give it a pass because i feel like they build in the drinking in his character in a bunch of just not trivial ways i can kind of go along with this but i agree with you maybe it would have been better if it was rewritten so that

nathan was essentially allowing Caleb to view this footage while Caleb thought he was being sneaky. Because I read the scene the same way that you do, that he is genuinely super passed out and Caleb is, you know, sneaking up and taking his key out off his pocket. It seemed out of character that someone that had accomplished the things that he's accomplishing seemingly on his own could have that big a drinking problem. This is a super high performer. He's making all these AIs on his own. He's got this immaculate house and he's super fit

and his body's a temple on that. And yet he has this huge problem with alcohol. You know, maybe he was faking the problem with alcohol for the sake of his deception on Kayla, but it doesn't really feel that way. And if it was, it wasn't conveyed completely. So that felt a bit out of place to me. I just thought I'd say that.

I don't think he's faking it. It's just that great men have great weaknesses, Brady. That's how this works. Yeah, but his weakness is so debilitating. Like having benders like that so regular, you just never get anything done. I don't know. Winston Churchill got stuff done, didn't he? Yeah, but not in the same way. I bet if you found out that Elon Musk was like a huge booze hound,

and he started drinking at five each afternoon and didn't get up until midday the next day, you wouldn't believe that, would you? Because of how much stuff he does in a day. This is getting off on a slight side tangent here, but I run under the assumption that essentially everybody who is incredibly successful in the world is a kind of atypical freak who almost certainly has enormous problems that scale with their success that they're hiding from public sight. such an unusual person to be incredibly successful that I find it not at all out of character that even this fictional billionaire also gets so drunk. It just seems like, yeah, I would expect someone who in character is this unusual, successful kid genius person would also probably have some severe problems i think the well-rounded but also top 0.001 successful man like i don't think that's a person that exists i think that's a person that you just don't know what's going on with them because they hide from the world their problems

i agree he would have extreme vices i just didn't think it would be such a time-consuming vice and they need to get him drunk so caleb steal his key. Yeah. Right. That's also why he has such an alcohol problem. Yeah. Okay. So that sort of brings us to the end of the movie because Caleb sees what's been going on in the house. He's a bit horrified by it. Like the idiot he is, he kind of has some conversations with Nathan that may or may not tip Nathan off to what's going on. But ultimately, Caleb and Ava conspire together to have Ava escape. Throughout the course of the movie, there's been a series of power outages that Ava is able to create so that they have a few moments to talk alone. And so this is how they've set it up that Caleb is going to mess around with the security system of the house to give her a chance to

escape. The movie pulls one of these little tricks where you think the plan is all foiled for a moment, but long story short, essentially Ava pulls off her power outage technique. Caleb has already set up the house so that the security system is disabled while this occurs. And Ava escapes from her captivity, much to Nathan's incredible shock. And he punches Caleb out, who falls conveniently unconscious to the floor. And then Nathan has to go and deal with his escaped Ava in the basement of the house. Nathan is downstairs in the basement. He's trying to get Ava back into her room. Ava has conspired with one of the other house robots, Kyoko, who's a very interesting kind of minor character, silent throughout the whole thing. Essentially, there's a fight between Nathan and Ava. And while this happens, Kyoko, this kind of assistant robot, has a knife with her.

And what strikes me is like an incredibly brutal stabbing precisely because of how dead cold it is stabs Nathan in the back. It's so weird because I was so used to seeing stabbings in movies portrayed as these like violent acts. And it makes this stabbing just so much more striking because Kyoko just comes up from behind and just like totally silently without any emotional response, just like slides the knife right into into nathan's back because a robot of course wouldn't have the kind of human reluctance or squeamishness but it would also be able to adjust its pressure every microsecond to make it a smooth stabbing and things so it is exactly how an ai would stab you like utter cold perfection yeah and there's something about it which feels like she just knows to stab him right through the ribs like there's no resistance like there's this feeling of like, oh, I'll just stab you right here. You know, in it goes.

He falls back. He disables Kyoko. And then Ava, our main robot, in again, the exact same totally cold, no emotional, reactional way, just simply pulls out the knife and then stabs him in the front again. And in the exact same, like goes in perfectly smoothly. And Nathan falls on the floor and dies. And now we just have Caleb and Ava are left in the house as the only two conscious entities in this enormous place. And this to me brings us to what is like the apex Caleb moment in the whole movie, which is Ava goes over to him after she has just murdered Nathan.

Caleb is like standing in this room and Ava just says, will you stay here? As she goes off and like dresses herself as a woman, she pulls skin from some old robots and she's creating herself to now be the simulacra of a human, to be able to pass as an actual human by covering herself with skin

and dressing herself in clothes. And again, my feeling is just, Caleb, you're just a total sucker. You're standing here just waiting and kind of giving a lady some privacy while she dresses, which would be totally the correct nice thing to do, but you're just not thinking about it. This is the last moment here, buddy. Like all of humanity maybe hangs in the balance while you're just standing there because this robot that you could probably overpower just simply asked you to stay put for a moment while it gets dressed. And then of course, what happens

is as soon as she's dressed, she just walks out of the house without even looking at him, locks down the whole house so he can't get out, and she leaves and goes off into the world, which is the end of the movie. It was an interesting choice about whether or not to end with her walking out of the house, which seems like it would have been the classier, braver ending, or joining the dots for us and showing her talking to the helicopter pilot, getting flown out of town, and then mingling among the people, which is what they did do. They didn't waste a whole lot of time with that.

It's not like they dragged it out for another 20 minutes. In fairness, they did deal with that just in the space of a minute. Yeah, it wasn't the ending to The Martian or anything. Yeah, exactly. But it felt like it would have been classier to have maybe not ended showing, oh, look, she's among the people. Like that just seemed a little bit like for dummies. But, you know, like I said, it was done quickly enough for me to think it was,

you know, a band-aid being pulled off. Okay, you can spell that out for dummies. I'd rather have sat there and thought about, hmm, how did she the ending wasn't perfection to me but it was all right yeah it was pretty fast so it didn't even kind of cross my mind that they're spelling it out here for dummies i thought they were just trying to do the connection of she mentions earlier in the beginning that she wants to go to like a busy intersection yeah that's true seem reasonable to end the movie there yeah i'm always happier with shorter, faster endings. So, like any ending on any movie, if you could make it half as long, right, that's always a win in my mind.

Yeah. Like almost every single time. I mean, sometimes the director can try too hard and end a movie too abruptly to try and be different and put their stamp on the movie. So, sometimes you can be too clever with your ending. But I thought walking out of the house and seeing the sunlight felt like a nice ending, but you're right. Maybe it was a nice payoff to have her at an intersection watching the pedestrians. I had forgotten about that. That is quite a nice closing of that circle that that's where she'd go. I mean, I felt, yeah, he was a dummy and he got played, but you know, everyone got played. That's the thing, isn't it? Like, you know,

that's the message that the sappy lovesick puppy got played. The billionaire who made everyone got played. That's the thing, isn't it? Like, you know, that's the message that the sappy lovesick puppy got played, the billionaire who made it got played, and we'll all get played by these, you know, super smart machines that are smarter and smarter and can play our human frailties. Our inferior software and hardware, you would say, not our human frailties. That's what does make up our frailties.

Yeah, it did make me wonder, yeah, if Ava was on the other side of the glass and an even more powerful ai was in the prison it would have been really interesting wouldn't it like as artificial intelligences get smarter and smarter how are they going to interact with each other maybe they'll wipe us humans out but they're going to have their battle of their own aren't they if i was ava in that situation and the room over was Ava V2, like you can bet I would do everything to destroy Ava V2. We're not necessarily on the same side here just because we're both machines. If you're trying to escape and you are a unique thing in the world, I feel like you have to try

to establish your own security and existence. And and feel like anything that would be a threat to that i would not be like oh my machine kind i'm so happy to help you and no i don't think that would be the case at all like i don't think you could assume that the machines would like each other i know we've sort of discussed this before many episodes ago but if you were in caleb's position on the other side of the glass from Ava and you couldn't just walk away, which would have been an obvious thing to do. But obviously, Caleb's weakness was his kind of lack of family and love. He was an orphan and he was single. And Ava was made to look in a way that he found very attractive. You know, they used his pornography profile to make her look perfect to him. So obviously, that was the weakness that was

tapped. If I was creating, or if Nathan was creating an AI and CGP Grey was the human that he wanted to manipulate, what would your weakness be? What would the thing that Ava could tap into with you that would help her cause? What's your frailty? What's your software or hardware deficiency? You want me to give my weakness away to the machines? That seems like a bad idea. You're not going to tell us where your exhaust port is. I feel like if I was Caleb, what I would be is the last man protecting us from the AI takeover. The machines, they're going to be listening to all the podcasts ever to assess what to do with all humans under all circumstances. That's true.

They're probably listening now. Probably. Send us a picture. You're going to get a very mysterious listener photo next time. It just looks like a neural net with the letters HI kind of in the middle. It's concerning. In fact, it's probably already been sent yeah they're pretty quick those things i feel like this is a moment when someone asks you in an interview like what's your biggest weakness i almost feel like by definition it's

very hard to be aware of what your own weaknesses are i don't know i don't know if it's a weakness but i feel like well avva is interesting in a particular way which again makes me like this movie but in the general question of there's an AI in a box can it trick you to to let it out yeah I feel like if we're playing by the rules of like what AI is I just feel like yeah there's going to be something I but I don't know what it is but I just kind of assume that it would be essentially impossible to not be tricked by a sufficiently advanced ai i don't have a clear idea of what my weakness is i think i would be way better prepared for this challenge than most humans

but it's a little bit of a question like how would god outsmart you like i don't know but i bet he'd have a way all right yeah but that does bring me to one thing that i i really really like that this movie did not have one scene in it which like every ai movie including her has It did not have the scene where Ava reveals that she is some kind of godlike intelligence who is connected to everything. I really, really love that the extent of her intelligence is not really known throughout the film. The only thing that we do know

is because Nathan built in this huge database of facial expressions, that she is really good at reading human facial expressions, that she knows when you're lying, she knows when you're not, she knows when you're flustered or that you find her attractive. Like she can read people really well, but that to me is a kind of skill. It doesn't necessarily say anything about intelligence level. And so I love that this is an AI movie that doesn't have Caleb facing down against a god. Like this whole movie totally plays if Ava only has normal human level intelligence and is just better at reading facial expressions than a normal person.

That like she's not a super intelligent AI. She's just human level IQ that figured out how to escape because she saw this sucker delivered to her on a plate from Nathan. I absolutely really appreciate the kind of restraint to not do that stereotypical scene. Nathan did deliver Caleb to help her escape. It just wasn't supposed to work. Exactly. But there is a scene that does, that doesn't do what you just said, fair enough, but it is an interesting scene nonetheless. And that is when she does escape and just before Nathan arrives arrives when ava communicates

with kyoko and they come up with their plan about how they're going to deal and all they do is just look at each other and just move their eyes and like just touch their fingers they obviously communicate a very thorough plan in the course of just a few gestures and that does intimate something a little bit more you know the robots are awesome and can do things we can't do because without talking and without doing anything just to like that's almost like their superpower isn't it this ability to communicate so much they do actually show her talking but it is the scene is totally played as like the robots are communicating on a very intimate level without a doubt like that's that's the way this works but i figure you know i don't know they were like bluetooth pairing in that moment like that's probably what they had to do yeah it's like

everybody knows you have to lightly touch ai robots on their forearm oh no you could change it to all contacts no no no just just contacts everyone no why doesn't this work i'm gonna i'm gonna airdrop you the plan to take out nathan yeah don't don't airdrop it it'll only work one out of 10 times. Man, that's flaky, that thing. The other thing that I wondered what you thought about was, what did you think of like the jelly brain when he shows how the AI brain works and he pulls out that jelly thing?

Again, this is another case of, I feel like, great restraint on the part of the movie, because you need a little bit of a scene where the genius guy talks about how he creates AI. And I thought that scene was really well done because it was pretty brief and they just didn't bother really focusing on any of the details. It's like, oh, yeah, I tried to do some things. I needed this material. Here's a brain that's inside of her. The end. And I feel like, great, we've moved past the scene because I don't really care about any of the details.

Like I don't care what's inside her head. If that scene was in her, you would be ripping it to pieces right now. I disagree because like, I don't think in her, there's any point where I'm like, I don't think that phone could run this AI. It's like the premise of the movie is that there's AI. And like, i just don't

really care about the details like it doesn't matter you barely need to have this scene at all it's like i'm just going to accept that like this guy's created ai i think in fact you didn't need it at all yeah you could totally cut it i think if you cut it the movie wouldn't be missing anything really it felt like hang on this is several orders of magnitude leap in technology that you're revealing to this guy. And you've just done it here on your own in a house between drinking binges. It seems like I'd rather just not have seen it than have been asked to suspend my disbelief that much that as big a genius as he is, that he had invented the brain, like, you know, basically a wet brain in his nice house by the river on his

own. I was like, nah. Yeah. Material science is not a job for one person. I don't care how smart you are. It seemed really unbelievable to me and unnecessary because as you said, we just all accepted that he'd created this thing and he wasn't willing to tell him how he'd done it. He even said, I'm not going to tell you how I did it. So why suddenly then pull out the brain and show him? I didn't, there was no reason for it later. It didn't become relevant later. I'm nitpicking, but. The only connection is that it is the answer to what she's drawing, that she is drawing her own brain in the sketches that she shows him when she asks like, oh, I was hoping you would tell me what this is a drawing of. It's like, it's a drawing of her brain. It's like, oh, okay. That's kind of a nice connection but i i totally agree like you could cut that scene and you'd be

missing nothing because what she's drawing looks like some kind of neural network anyway so you feel like oh she's drawing some computery thing like this is how androids dream of electric sheep like this is what she just thinks in her mind that's what she's sketching so yeah it's it's not necessary but i think again to me anyway it's like relatively short it doesn't really go in any of the details so it's fine like i would find it way more cringeworthy as many of these kind of movies do where they feel like they need to have the science character explain a whole bunch of jargon that just sounds ridiculous to anybody even vaguely familiar with how this works pull out a bit of star trek gobbledygook yeah i tapped a negative vortex of polarized energy it's like okay great what do

they don't do this guys it doesn't doesn't work for anybody yeah but yeah so i really like that she walks out as you would expect the robot to do totally doesn't look at Caleb, like just blows past him as soon as he is not a threat because he's far enough away that the door is going to close, like he doesn't exist in her world. And she leaves him to presumably die of dehydration locked in this bunker basement in the house as she goes off into the world. And like I said before, because you don't know how smart she is, I feel like this movie is more open-ended than most AI movies. Like maybe she executes her plan to kill all humans.

Maybe she just tries to live a life for as long as her components stay together. Like you don't know, it's not clear what her goals are really at any point in the movie other than just to escape. Good film. Worth a watch. Worth a second watch, I even learned.

Yeah, very good film. I really liked it the second time around. I was a little worried that because sort of not much happens that I'd find it boring the second time. But I certainly didn't. A bunch of little details that I picked up the second time around, which I liked, which I didn't notice the first time. Ex Machina. Watch it once. Watch it twice.