Hello Internet - H.I. #82: God of Bees

Episode Date: May 13, 2017

Brady and Grey discuss: CGP Grey (the penguin) update again, the height of the mighty black stump, Bees, Dying on Everest, Brady finds an argument for the Apple Watch, Brady travels, world records, the UK snap election and the French election. Brought to You By: Squarespace: start building your website today with a free fifteen day trial Audible: get a free 30-day trial by signing up at audible.com/hellointernet Away: get $20 off a suitcase at awaytravel.com/hi Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes: CGP Grey the Penguin CGP Grey the Penguin Weigh-In Star Wars Day Nail & Gear Bees Ueli Steck - Cara Norte del Eiger en Velocidad Escape to the Country Brady signing area Banner ads in the sky Miami beach ads UK snap election French election

Are you ready for my prepared statement about the news, Brady? Is that what you've been doing the last three or four days? Just penning it? That's right, yeah. I have an opening statement about the news. I hope you don't mind. It's 20,000 words, and I will truck no direct response afterward. I'll put a big piece of gaff tape over my mouth. I have penguin news. This is going to be...

Penguin news? A shaggy dog story. Oh, okay. I'll get comfortable. And I've thought about how to tell it, but I've decided to tell it chronologically so you can experience it as I experienced it. So, very, very quick backgrounder

for people who are new to the podcast. A couple of years back now, I think it was, Gray and I were involved in a fundraising event at Bristol Zoo raising money for South African penguins, which I found I actually have the nickname Jackass Penguins because of the noise they make, which was new information to me. But anyway, and to thank us for helping with the fundraising, the zoo took the very unusual step of naming one of their newborn penguins CGP Grey.

This was only the second time they've ever named a penguin. The other one that has a name is the generic one that anyone who sponsors penguins gets a certificate about. So having a name was a big deal. We were very grateful. And I promised to sort of follow the penguin's progress and i have to admit besides getting some video of its first weigh-in and revealing the fact that the penguin was a lady that was pretty much the last we spoke about cgp gray the lady penguin yes you gave me a bit of a ribbing about not following it very closely but anyway anyway. Only because you said you were going to take up the mantle of regular reports.

Otherwise, I would not have ribbed you. Okay. Hey, look, I deserved it. I deserved it. I'll take it. You got me. Anyway, some news came to hand a few weeks ago. It was spotted by the Tims, not by us, that as a result of a tragedy in the capital of Georgia,

a city called Tbilisi, where there was serious, serious flooding, in which many humans died, but it also was very, very devastating for their zoo. They lost many, many of their animals. And as a result, the people that oversee zoos in Europe asked all the other European zoos to help them repopulate their animal population.

And Bristol Zoo was kind of requested, but also kind of instructed, because this is how it works, to give a certain number of their penguins to Tbilisi Zoo, which Bristol Zoo did. This came to our attention. And of of course the first thing we wondered was was cgp gray among the penguins shipped to tibolisi and we didn't know there's the background what has happened since here we go okay bit of a story all right so the story has not yet begun the story hasn't begun that was the background this was the background okay yeah now in true investigative nature some some of the more zealous fans of the podcast started trying to make contact with tibulisi zoo and i saw on reddit someone had contacted the zoo through facebook and said

is cgp gray the penguin with you this is easy to to find out because CGP Grey the penguin has a name tag or a number tag on the wing. A20583 is the wing number. Anyway, so you could look up databases and that. And the word from Tbilisi was, apparently this was their answer. I couldn't read it because it wasn't in English. But their answer was,

CGP Grey the penguin is not here. Apparently the zoo has a popular penguin that it wasn't willing to send. Presumably CGP Grey. So CGP Grey is penguin is not here. Apparently the zoo has a popular penguin that it wasn't willing to send, presumably CGP Grey. So CGP Grey is still in Bristol. And there was all chat on Reddit about her, and it was problem solved and well done. And a second person said,

actually my mum's friend works at Tbilisi Zoo, amazingly, and they also made some inquiries and confirmed that CGP Grey wasn't sent. Okay. I had been trying to contact Bristol Zoo. I'd sent some emails to various people in their media department. I wasn't getting replies. I wasn't happy about not getting replies. You were not getting the respect you deserved.

Don't say it. I just want to say it because I know that tone of voice. You're like these people are not responding to my emails quick enough i know i know how you get pretty anyway and then i thought this is not the brady way to be crowdsourcing hearsay on reddit or to be waiting for press people to maybe reply and maybe not especially when the zoo is only 20 minutes from my house so i this was a call to arms and i thought i'm not just going to sit here i'm going to be a man of action i'm going to go to the zoo i'm going to find the penguin so i got my camera with my long

lens wow okay so i could zoom in i've got a special new super long lens and you know i'm not going to deny i made bit of a hoo-ha on twitter and on snapchat about it made a big deal saying that's it i'm coming to the zoo this ends today i said i took pictures on the way as i crossed the suspension bridge and i was going in so i'm you know i was i was not quiet about the fact i was doing this were you making a snapchat story about it were you doing that i was i was making a Snapchat story. I'm not going to lie. So I arrive at the zoo, half expecting them to be waiting for me. Right. With a red carpet. I understand. Yeah. Well, no, not necessarily the red carpet. I thought maybe it would be a bit more defensive than that. The people on Twitter had seen my comments and had said, oh, well, we've seen your email and we're going to get back to you.

And I'm like, nah, you've had your chance. chance and i plowed on went straight to the penguin enclosure long lens and actually it was feeding time when i got there and i said to the woman feeding oh have you said i'm looking for a specific penguin and she was like she wasn't having any of it she was like oh i'm not the usual penguin keeper i can't help help you. She ignored me. I just love, I love the idea from this person's perspective that like a crazy man with a telephoto lens, like I'm here for a specific penguin, right? Yeah, anyway, so I got out the long lens and I started zooming in on,

and then there's loads of penguins there. Yeah, there's a lot of penguins. And it turns out, it turns out even with the long lens, it was quite hard to read the numbers. And also the penguins don't make it turns out it turns out even with the long lens it was quite hard to read the numbers and also the penguins don't make your job any easier like they face the way they want to face and that's it that's the way they're going to face so i was always waiting for penguins to turn around sometimes the wing tag is like the wrong way around and it's in their like wing pit like in their armpit okay and so for those ones i had to wait for them to flap their wings to even

get a look at the number some of them didn't seem to have a number. They just had like a wing band with no number written on it. And I was worried that might be CGP Grey. And just as I was giving up hope, this penguin steps out from behind the wall and I look at the number. That's the number I've been looking for. It ends with the three and it's got all the thing. I start taking loads and loads of pictures of it. It even starts posing for me i go onto snapchat and say look who it is and i like put a fun thing and i

you know make a big deal that i've found the penguin but then i think i haven't got the i haven't got the killer photo yet of the wing number on the thing so i decided to get one more number before leaving the zoo and when i go for that photo and i look closely it turns out that's not the number it's out by one digit it looked just like the number but it was out but I double checked I'd found my mistake so they actually do just number them sequentially they don't have check digits or anything like that I don't know this was a very similar number so anyway I'm back to square one some of them are sleeping in their little hutches and things so I'm having to wait for them to come out I must have been there 45 minutes.

And then suddenly these two people appear behind me. And this is an older man and a younger lady who it turns out is the social media manager for the Twitter person and the head of communications for the zoo. And they're like, oh, you're Brady. And I'm like, yeah, I am. I was really friendly really friendly yes i am i'm here looking for cgp grade the penguin and they're like yeah can we you know

can we have a chat and i'm like yeah yeah sure we can they and they wanted to take me away from the penguin enclosure and i'm like oh we can chat here and they're like no no let's go for a chat uh-oh they took me out of the enclosure we went on this bench right they want you to have a seat sir for a moment before we talk to you yeah okay and i say before we go like is my penguin there i want to take a picture of cgp gray and they say no it was you know in the gone to tibber lissy and i'm like oh that's great i thought they were scared that i was going to be upset they'd sent it to tibber lissy so i said don't worry like gray and i'll be really happy if it's gone to tibber lissy we think it's a really good story, etc., etc.

You know, we like that, you know, we like the story. Then the head of communication says, well, unfortunately, CGP Grey the penguin died on the trip to Tbilisi. There were 19 penguins sent. Three of them actually died on this trip and one of them was cgp gray the penguin and i tell you i have never i cannot think of a weirder time in my life than sitting on this bench at the zoo with these two zoo employees either side of me and it was like in the movies like when the surgeon comes out and says yeah that's that's what it feels like that's what it feels like it was just like that or like when the police come and it was like in the movies like when the surgeon comes out and says yeah that's what it feels like that's what it feels like it was just like that or like when the police come and it was like and it was really difficult because like they would devastate to have to do this i felt really

bad for them and i was kind of having to console them and i was saying putting the arm around saying don't worry about it look you know this these things happen and they're like we're so sorry we should have told you we should have told you we were moving it and we should have told you what happened and we're really you know we're really sad that the penguins died and it was this really weird thing and then they got like the head of birds for the zoo to come and meet me and give me like the full story of everything that happened and his assistant and we're having this big long talk and we ended up talking for like half an hour in great minutia about everything. And then I was like, well, all right.

I guess I'll be going now then. Sorry that this happened. And I left the zoo. And CGP Grey, the lady penguin, has died. I feel very strange about this. I tell you what, the more I think about it the sadder i feel because you know when that was just a baby we were there we saw it like i feel attached to it i made that cute video of it with the cute music as a baby i posted the footage of it being weighed and

i feel this real attachment and i feel i feel sad when any animal dies but i feel especially sad about this i'm wondering about those numbers for zoo animal transport. Like those seem like pretty high fatal numbers. You said 19 penguins went and three of them died in transit. Yeah. That seems like a high percentage. I was told that birds dying in transit is more common than say a gorilla. Right. Okay. Like if you send 20 gorillas and you lose three of them it's that would be really concerning they will receive an autopsy report at the zoo with all the details they haven't got it yet they've actually promised to give me a full briefing when they find out what happened they don't know exactly what happened themselves there's a for real

autopsy going to be done about this well there's some kind of report yeah apparently that has to happen i guess that makes sense that if you're transporting zoo animals back and forth, the sending zoo is going to want to know the details. It just never occurred to me, but... It's serious. It's very serious. So I feel like I have to put this on record in fairness to the zoo. Because this is basically a publicity stunt gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Because of all the penguins that could have died, the one that has this really popular podcast following it and this silly guy who made a big ruckus on Twitter and stuff, I feel really sorry for them that they tried to do a good thing. It's blown up in their face and it's made this penguin dying an even bigger deal than it would have been. And I also want to say, everyone has different views about the rights and wrongs of zoos

and i i can see all sides of the story but i do have to point out that this zoo does a lot for penguins the reason we were raising money for them is they have this special program where they send their experts to south africa every year and they like rescue all these hatchlings and then hand rear them and release them back into the wild. So like this zoo has an above average interest in the welfare of South African penguins. Yeah.

So for us now to be doing a podcast about a penguin that they were transporting dying, I feel a bit sorry for them because they're trying to do the right thing by penguins and it's kind of, this has kind of gone a bit wrong. i feel like i should say that i also have taken lessons from it myself good and bad oh okay what have you learned really my first lesson is maybe be a bit more careful before you make a big ruckus on social media what do you what do you mean because i was like oh this ends today and i was going in there all

guns blazing and everyone was saying we can't wait to find out brady what's the news and then suddenly i was like confronted by this horrible outcome and i didn't want to then like tweet or snapchat hey the the penguin has died right which is what had happened uh-huh so i kind of had to go quiet while i thought about it and that was just like getting people more and more fired up the suspense is killing us where's the penguin how is she maybe i played my hand a bit early on the uh on the social media side of things i can see how this particular time this this worked out as an unfortunate outcome for you uh but i don't think this is like a general lesson to learn from the situation like it is a lesson gray you know because this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened to

me admittedly social media but like i remember this another thing that happened to me once twice in the course of a week i'd been trying to contact you know some of my academics around the university about making films and sometimes i just wander around the university and go to their offices just for a chat and i walked past a few of the offices of people that i'd been emailing for a while and one of them i walked in and said hey how you doing like jokey i was like why aren't you replying to my emails i've emailed you like three or four times in the last few months what's going on and then he was like oh my my mum died a few weeks ago and then i was like oh sorry and like that explains why you're not replying to my emails then so i was like maybe i should have been a

bit more sensitive about not replying to my emails and then like a few days later the exact same thing happened with another academic and i made the same same joke. And again, he'd had like, I think it was a parent die as well. So I don't know. Maybe I'm just unlucky. Perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn in the difference between the lack of correspondence from a human being and the lack of correspondence from a penguin. It hadn't occurred to me that because of all that stuff that had been going on on Reddit, the idea that the penguin could have died had gone out of my head. Right, right. One never thinks of penguin mortality,

does one, right? Until you have to face it directly. I'm not like going through like, you know, the stages of grief or anything, because it's just, it's just a penguin. But I am also wondering whether I'm partly to blame, because if I had done more for that penguin in terms of coverage and publicity, would it have become so valuable to the zoo that they would not have dared even transport it? Like if it had become more famous? Did I not make it famous enough? I think that's undeniable. That is true.

If the penguin had been promoted more with updates about her weight and her health over time and you had sent more people to the zoo through your efforts you could have saved her life do not think there's any way that isn't true like it has to be true that that's the case even if i just called about it more often they would have thought because one of the things they were so sorry about was they were saying we're so sorry we didn't tell you it was being moved we probably should have told you but if i was someone who like you know called about it every month and stuff they would have known I was watching and maybe not had sent it. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I think your negligence definitely does have a hand in this, Brady.

I think there's no way around that. By the way, just to be clear, I did say this earlier. The zoo kind of did have to send penguins to Tbilisi. This is how zoos work, by the way. Like there's an overarching body that looks after breeding populations and what animals go where and if this body says you're sending animals here and there that's pretty much binding as long as where you're sending it is like a legit proper zoo and you and it was so yeah yeah that's totally understandable i saw a few things on on

the reddit where people were actually discussing that about how i didn't realize this but yeah that there's like a it's like a meta zoo organization that directs the transport of animals around, like you said, for breeding populations. Again, it's one of those things like it makes total sense once you think about it, that that would exist. It's in the interest of all zoos to mix their animals more than they would be mixing just within the zoo. Yes. But yeah, but yeah, you can see like it becomes a kind of contract where this meta organization directs the movement of animals around so again i'm not i'm not holding the zoo in in any blame at all i'm just saying that you're basically just blaming me yeah yeah that's that's just to make it really clear it's not the zoo's fault if brady had acted differently could things be different the answer is is yes. That's undeniable.

There's one more lesson from this. Okay. This is a lesson to me, kind of about journalism, but also about you could talk about this in other aspects of life. And it reminded me of lessons I learned in my early days. And I'm not making this part of our earlier discussions about the media and journalism. This has nothing to do with any of that. This is just a general thing about being a journalist okay and that is the best journalism

always comes from getting off your butt and going to the place because i thought the problem had been solved by this reddit facebook stuff and also i thought i'll probably get an answer from the press department eventually although it didn't look like I was doing it but really I didn't get to the bottom of things as terrible as it was until I just like turned up and got in faces and started counting penguins and looking at numbers and like being there on the spot and making them actually come and see me and looking people in the eyes and having the discussion and And it doesn't just apply to journalism. It can apply to lots of other things in life. Like if you sit around and wait for stuff to get done by other people or nothing beats, if it's feasible and possible,

going there and being there and being on the spot because you always find out more and you always get closer to the bottom of the things if you're like at the place the hello internet nation is indebted to your journalism on this particular issue really well i wish i wish i was the bearer of better news but that do you know what when i first started as a journalist you know i would interview and do lots of things over the phone because that's the way things work quite often but then often you need photographs to go with it and we would have these

forms you would fill out and give to the photograph editor saying i need a picture of this or this place or this person and you'd organize it all and set it all up and then you'd fill out the form with the addresses and the phone numbers and the times and that and there was a box you would tick to say whether or not the journalist was going on the story or not whether the journalist wanted to go with the photographer to sort of direct or maybe you hadn't interviewed the person yet so you needed to be there so it was a yes or no and i would always tick no because i don't know maybe a little bit of laziness and a little bit of shyness you know i was i was still that younger journalist who was a bit who wasn't that confident i would always tick no and

I remember one time the photo editor sort of took me to one side because I got along really well with him and he said you should go on some of these stories more often because it's good to go there and like see things and you know it'll make your stories better so then I started ticking yes more often and I would just go even though I'd spoken to these people on the phone often and I already knew the story I would go along just to be there for the photo shoot and I found that so valuable and so interesting and it always I always found it so much so much more amazing stuff and interesting stuff and like my stories became so much better by doing it that it just became my rule and I would tick yes for everything like no matter what it was I just wanted to go and see the

stuff and be part of the story. It got to the point where a year or two later, the photo editor pulled me aside and said, do you actually have to go on all these stories? Because it's really inconvenient for me for the photographers to always have to come back and pick you up and take you. So it backfired on him,

but it was a really good lesson. It was a really good lesson. If you're doing anything and you feasibly can go there, there's a lot to be said you're doing anything and you feasibly can go there there's a lot to be said for it i like that your enthusiasm was causing logistics problems for yeah the organization that you're working for it's like yeah okay buddy it's good to be enthusiastic but not this enthusiastic yeah we're just taking you know we're just taking a photograph of the

person sitting at their desk do you have to be there yes i want to be there i could ask a good question we went for you to do a ride along once every couple months right but not not every day not twice a day not three times a day that's not what we were looking for yeah anyway i there we go cgp gray the lady penguin rest in peace rest in peace it's gone to that great rocky outcrop in the sky gone to a farm in upstate yeah i figured some i figured some rocky outcrop in the middle of the sea is the penguin equivalent of the farm no it's all a farm all all the animals go to the farm together that's how that works that's what they could have done they could have put me on that bench and said cgp gray the penguin isn't here and isn't it tibelissi she's gone to a special magical zoo yeah there's a farm

in tbilisi she'll be she'll be running through the forest the happy penguin wait that doesn't make any sense don't question it too much man don't question it we're just telling you a story here we need to think of something to do about this gray i feel like it can't end here what do you mean i don't know i feel like this can't be the end of the story. All stories come to an end and death is an ending. I'm not sure what you're looking for here, Brady. Yeah. Well, those people who like timing how long it takes death to come up in our podcast are going to...

We've got a cracking opening for them this time, don't we? The whole opening story is about death. When I was thinking about how to tell the story like obviously i had to tell you and the listeners about this i was thinking do i tell it chronologically how it happened to me or do i just say it from the start look before i start the story the penguin is dead and now here's how i found out because i was a bit worried as i told the story you'd be Mr. Jokey oh Brady you're so funny and like you'd be laughy and stuff and then like I'd drop the bomb and then you'd feel bad about being jokey because that's what happened to me you know I was joking about it all the time and making a big joke at the whole thing yeah yucking it up on social media

right right writing checks that you're gonna have to cash later yeah so I didn't want to put you in the same position, but I felt like you should experience it as I experienced it. I think that was the appropriate choice there, Brady. And you also had that moment that I had when they said, actually, no, we want to talk to you somewhere else. Like, it was like, oh no. That's never good, right?

It's ah, ah, okay. Whenever people say they want to talk to you, how many times is that good news the answer is never right it's never good news and they literally took me somewhere where i could sit down yeah yeah if they want to talk to you and they also want to change locations that is never good right it's just you just know you know something something bad is about to happen there so mighty black stump is ticking along. There's been a lot of online investigations

into the height of Mighty Black Stump versus Telstra House. People seem to be, in the same way they were relying on sort of Reddit and the internet to figure out what happened to the penguin, they seem to be using sort of, you know, all this Google Earth and visualization stuff

to settle the matter of which building is taller, which I don't think is going to provide an adequate solution. Yeah. All I want to know is if there's somebody out there with, I don't know, what are those things people use, like the little triangle things to measure the stars? Is it like a theodolite or something like that? Yeah. So yeah, one of those things, right? Yeah. You see them in like old manuscripts. That's what I want. I want a dude with one of those measuring heights in Adelaide. That's what we need. I want sketches. I want triangles. I want trigonometry. Yeah. Parchment, sketches on a parchment, something like that. That's what we

need. Blueprints. The thing that is crucial here, Telstra House, which claims to be one meter taller, it does seem to make sense it would be one metre taller because it was built a lot later. And why would you build a new building in Adelaide and not make it the tallest when you were so close? You would chuck an extra metre on there just for bragging rights. Yeah, of course. Even though it only held the title for one year before the other building came along. But the problem is the the mighty black stump has this antenna on top that telstra house does not and the antenna clearly makes the mighty black stump taller if you include that and this leads to this can of worms about how do you define the height of a building and this is

a huge issue there's a great wikipedia article about, as there is about everything. This is not a new debate. This has been going on since they started building skyscrapers, really. From the moment the builders of the Chrysler building put that cheeky spire on top that they hadn't told anyone about so that they could take top spot and they'd hid the spire until the last minute. Do you count antennas? Do you count spires? Is it from the architectural top of the building what's the difference between a spire and an antenna is it the highest level that people can actually habitate you're always a guy that has opinions if you were defining the height of a building what would you use as your cutoff point so i was thinking about this earlier today. I think there's only two choices to go with. One is the ground height to the top of the structure, including antennas or spires or whatever.

Just anything that's one measure to do is just like if a kid is asking how tall a building is i think that's their their idea the tallest point but i was thinking though i actually like the definition that it is it's not actually the top of the building it's the top most part of the building that is like where a person can stand that isn't maintenance, right? That's the usable part of the building. That to me seems like a non-cheaty way to talk about what is the tallest structure. I feel like those are the two things that I would go with.

Like what is the place at which someone can either have an office or an apartment at the top of this building? Or what is the actual tippy top of the building? I think those are two not unreasonable ways to try to figure out what the tallest building is. I hear a Brady sigh over there. What are you thinking? Well, it's fair enough. What you're saying is fair enough.

But it just opens more cans of worms. There's a big difference between that spire at the top of the Chrysler building, which is like a proper meaty structure. And just bolting some token flagpole to the top to give yourself a few meters. Some rickety piece of wood in a pot. I think this way lies madness. You're right about that. I know what you mean. Like the Chrysler building is a great example.

It's like hollow on the inside, isn't it? It's just like a hat that the building's wearing. It's not a whole lot, I think. There is a difference between that and just sticking an antenna up as tall as it can possibly go. But I think there's no meaningful way to try to come up with a way to say here's how we are going to distinguish essentially antennae from decorative adornments on the top of the building people do try by the way that there is an attempt at it yeah i'm sure you know i'm sure there is but i i just think there's no there's no way that you can possibly get around that you're always going to be rules

lawyering about this whole thing maybe i'm wrong but i feel like the top most usable part of the building is a lot harder to rules lawyer your way around and i think it gets to the idea of why do we want tall buildings because they're fun to go up into yeah right there like there needs to be space for people at the top of these tall buildings otherwise what, what's the point of it? So you would count observation decks? Yeah, I would count an observation deck as a top point. So like the Empire State Building, the observation deck, I think is the highest part where people can go. And that seems to me like, I think that's where you should measure the height from, for what the tallest building is. I mean, also it comes down here to whether we're counting things as buildings or

structures because i think they're two different categories what you're talking about is a fair categorization of a tallest building maybe but not a tallest structure okay you know so like a so so a radio mask could be a taller structure but it's not a building obviously okay all right yeah i think you have a point there, right? Because the structure is going to be a place that doesn't have any human usable space on the inside of it. There's a certain definition too. I can't remember what it is off the top of my head that precludes the CN Tower from being

a building, but it is a structure, even though it's got that lovely observation deck, because so much of it is just tower and lift to get you to what is basically just a floating observation deck that gets crossed off there's some definition of a building i don't know if it's a percentage of the structure that can be habited or you know i don't know i can already see here from the wikipedia page right that they have three categories they have buildings structures and towers yeah so i guess I'm just going to make it up, but I'm presuming then that a tower is a thing that a person can go up into. So it has some limited amount of usable space versus a structure, which probably has none like a radio tower,

which is a structure in these definitions, I'm going to guess. It's a mess. But, and you know, this is what happens when you deal with mighty, mighty buildings like the Mighty Black Stump. these kind of questions need to be answered so there is some definition by which the mighty black stump is taller than telstra house because it's got this wispy little antenna on top but the jury's still out there's still a lot to go this is not the last you've heard of it but despite gray's wishes once again i'm looking at these two buildings in a 3d rendering and it looks like telstra house might have higher usable space but it's hard to tell are those just elevator banks on the top what is that i don't know who knows who knows

someone needs to go out there in person to take care of people are using all this visualization software i don't know what it is. And what they've been doing is they've been like virtually going to the top of the Mighty Black Stump. And when they do that, they can like see onto the top of Telstra House. And then they virtually go onto the top of Telstra House and you can't see onto the top of the Mighty Black Stump.

So they're saying, look, it's proof, it's proof. But I don't even know what this software is. Like, I don't know what's going on here. It's not satisfactory to me. This needs to be done i'm sorry this needs to be done in person this is not something that's going to be solved virtually google earth is not going to cut it for brady that's what's happening here that's right i want real earth in this particular case if the black stump building manager had shown me the respect I deserved and had let me onto the roof, I would be a lot closer to knowing the answer to this. That's true.

That's true. But he didn't let me up there. So we don't know. Someone in Adelaide has to be able to get access to those roofs. I think that's got to happen. Of course, immediately following our discussion, there was a total lockdown of all Wikipedia pages pertaining to Adelaide buildings. I'm getting a little bit upset about something, and I've been dealing with this a lot on Reddit and online, but I want to have it on the podcast so that everyone has heard it.

The Black Stump is a legitimate long-term nickname for the Grenfell Centre. It was called that when I was growing up. You can go through newspaper archives. It's referred to all the time. There is nothing wrong with the Wikipedia page referring to this building as the Black Stump. The word mighty has been added by Gray to be facetious. No one calls it the Mighty Black Stump in Adelaide. That is a joke.

Of course, it should not be on the Wikipedia page. But the Black St stump is completely legitimate and it's driving me crazy that people keep deleting references to the black stump saying oh this is just some hello internet joke and nuisance makers that is not nuisance making the black stump is 100 legitimate and it's driving me crazy that people now think it's some joke i mean do you have a primary source for it being called the black stump because we have a primary source of t-shirt sales that say it's the mighty black stump i've gone and i've i've pointed people to old newspaper articles that predate hello internet

referring to it you know real estate sale articles referring to the black stump but i just i can't win this one it's this's this Wikipedia vandalism backfiring on me. I blame you. Me? With your stupid mighty. Yeah. Because you put mighty in there and have confused everything. If I've caused some kind of Wikipedia trouble, I'm terribly sorry.

I've never wanted to cause, I would like to get it on record here that I have never wanted to cause Wikipedia trouble. I have never encouraged Wikipedia trouble. I'm just saying, like, I think we have a primary source that shows that it's called the mighty black stump i've never seen a primary source for saying that it's called the black stump and the mighty black stump is just a better name but you know like i'm sure people will sort it out in the wikipedia like that's how this works the truth will triumph brady now last episode just very very quickly last episode we spoke about something that both you and I dislike, and that is April Fool's Day.

I'm adding to that list from my end at least, Star Wars Day, as another completely naff day that everyone jumps on and thinks they're the master of dad jokes, and they look like complete idiots. Stop it with all your May the 4th be with you jokes. Stop your corporate people photoshopping Darth Vader into whatever your corporate picture is to make it look like you're down with the Star Wars fans. You look silly. Star Wars Day was cool for a couple of years. It was funny for a couple of years. Now it's been co-opted by the idiots. And anyone else needs to get the hell out of Dodge.

Whoa. Wow. That's just my opinion. Yeah, but it sounds like you're feeling pretty intense about this what about you you think star wars days you know oh it's the best it's the best i don't want to be lumped in with you as as this grump who doesn't like fun that's not me i'm all about the fun and a holiday based on a pun like man I couldn't imagine something that I'd be more down for I think that's a fantastic idea and yeah it's great I love seeing corporate cross promotion I love seeing dad jokes I love everything about it so so don't get me wrong listening audience Brady is the curmudgeon here. I think it's great.

I think it's awesome. Is it purely the pun or is there some link to the date as well? Like it wasn't the date that the film premiered or anything, was it? It's purely the pun. I think it's literally just the pun. That's all it is. Star Wars Day, Wikipedia. Yeah, it's entirely just a pun.

It's just a pun-based holiday. I'm perfectly in favor of. You like a good pun? Yeah, yeah. It's entirely just a pun. It's just a pun based holiday. I'm perfectly in favor of. I think that's great. You like a good pun? Yeah. Yeah. That's my favorite. It's the best.

I think, Brady, the problem is you just don't like things when they get too popular. You like Star Wars when it was just you and your friends who knew about it. Yeah. When virtually no one had heard of Star Wars except me and my friends. Exactly. It's just you and your friends back in the 70s had watched Star Wars, right? But now that everybody knows about it,

now you don't like it. I think that's what's happening here. Yeah. I liked Star Wars before it was popular. So like a day before it came out. This episode is brought to you in part by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that lets you make a beautiful

website oh so easily. With Squarespace, there's nothing to patch, install, or upgrade ever, which is what I really like about it. If you ever tried to run your own website, it is an enormous hassle, and that's a hassle I was very happy to give up and just simply have Squarespace deal with it. I haven't thought about configuring a MySQL in years, and I'm so happy about that. Squarespace has award-winning templates that are a beautiful way to present your idea online. And they're so easy to tweak and adjust that you won't end up feeling like you have a website that looks like it was made from a template. You can just make it be just the way you want it to be. And if you have any trouble at all, Squarespace provides award-winning 24-7 custom support. It's used by a wide range of creative people, businesses, musicians, designers,

artists, restaurants, and many more. Basically anybody who needs a website, you should be using Squarespace. It's what I use for cgpgray.com. It's what we use for Hello Internet. It's just so easy. If you need a website for anything that you are working on, make your next move with Squarespace. Just go to squarespace.com slash hello to sign up for your free 14-day trial and receive 10% off your first purchase. That's squarespace.com slash hello. Thank you so much to Squarespace for supporting this show. I saw something on the Hello Internet Reddit, which I really liked, Brady. It was a picture of a guy installing his new bee house, his new apiary, wearing the nail and gear.

Did you see this photo? I'm looking at it now. He's a handsome man. He's a handsome man. I have to say, I gave him credit for not wearing the bee suit. If you look closely in the photo, he has bees all over him. Is that his real beard or has he got one of those bee beards? Oh, it's a good question.

Let's enhance. I'm enhancing. Click to enhance enhance that is a beebeard wow okay there's actually way more bees on here than i first thought super impressive i wanted to mention this photo because this one made me really smile because you might think this is crazy i have this idea brady that when i retire from the internet when i give up the tremendous volume of outputs that i create when i hang up my reddit username and retire i have this like crazy idea that you know what i'd love to do in my retirement i'd love to raise bees i don't know why i have this idea that like i'll get a bee house and i'll love to do in my retirement i'd love to raise bees i don't know why i have this idea

that like i'll get a bee house and i'll tend to the bees this is just like this little idea that i have as an old man hobby i love it cgb gray why that what of all the old man hobbies you could have like you know i mean you know if you'd said i want to build a train set i'd be like oh yeah i'm totally on board with that who doesn't want to build like an awesome train set i don't want to build an awesome train set no that seems that strikes me as incredibly tedious that sounds uninteresting why are the bees then why are the bees good i have no idea this is one of these things that i'm just aware that okay so sometimes i watch these property shows i think i mentioned before on the podcast, I watch this property show called Escape to the Country,

where people who live in London decide they're going to retire out in the country. You've just melted my brain. Why have I melted your brain? That's like a TV show. You don't watch TV. How do you even watch that? What device do you watch that on? It's, you know, you can find the show i can't

believe you watch escape to the country i'm so sure i've mentioned this before to you this is a bigger shock to me than the penguin dying listen it's fantastic it's a great show it is a great show but i can't believe you watch it or like it it's a great show essentially for pensioners my wife and i will make a cup of tea we'll put a blanket over our legs like we're 80 years old and we'll watch Escape to the Country. And it's fantastic. Do you think you could ever live in a rural location with your bees? Here's where I'm going with this, right?

Is because I watch this show and there's a funny thing that always happens on the show. We're like a couple who has lived in London their entire life. They're like, oh, we're going to go retire. And they'll be describing what they want to have in a house when they retire. And they'll be like, oh, okay, we want this feature. We want that feature.

We want this other feature. And then the husband will always say something dumb like, oh, and I want a really big yard because I'm going to manage goats, right? And then it's like, have you ever taken care of goats before? And he's like, no, no, it's just a thing that I want to do. And I'm watching the show and I always feel like, what an idiot. Like this guy thinks he's going to be managing a herd of goats in his retirement.

Like that's a disaster. Like we all know how this is going to end. Goats roaming the country free once they've escaped from his backyard. Right. Or they're all going to die. Like who knows? It's just not going to end well. Like this idiot has never raised goats.

This is what he thinks he's going to do. But like I have this same crazy idea in my head. Like at some point in my future, I'm going to be raising bees. And I don't know why. I don't know why I have it there, Brady. But it's just like it's this idea, my old man hobby. And it's a contradiction because I'm aware that I am totally disdainful of other people who on a TV show that I watch have essentially the same idea for their retirement. And I'm like, ah, those idiots.

Right. But no, but me, this somehow feels different. I think this is going to happen at some point, Brady. Do you like honey? Yeah, it's good. Honey's good. Are you allergic to bees? You seem like you would be.

Do I? That's a good question. I've been stung by... Wait, what do you mean? Why does it seem like I would be allergic to bees? How can someone seem like they're allergic to bees? I don't know. You just seem like an allergic kind of guy. Oh, yeah?

Like, all kinds of things, I should just be allergic to them? This is the way it seems? That's just the vibe I get. Like, you don't look sickly or anything, but you just... I get an allergic vibe from you. Okay. I've been stung by bees as a kid. Okay.

Can you get allergic later in life? I don't know. I have no idea. Do you want to hear my bee stung story? Of course you have a bee stung story. Tell me, Brady. I grew up with a swimming pool in Australia. My parents had a swimming pool, so my sister and I had a swimming pool by default.

And I remember one day my mum took us to the shops and bought us lots of fun stuff for the pool, like inflatable stuff and these big plastic oars and things like that. So we were going to have the time of our life playing with them in the pool. But for some reason, I was going to go to my friend's house first to play cricket. My sister and I, because we were little kids, we were funny about not getting to play with the toys first. So we made a pact that when I got back, we would play with the toys together. One of us wouldn't get to with the toys together one of us

wouldn't get to enjoy the toys before the other one and my sister who's like just completely sweet just agreed to that and said yes that's fine so we put all the toys around the pool and said we'll play with them when i get home but first i'm going to go over to my mate's house and play cricket and we were playing cricket and then after a while i said to my mates we've got all these awesome new toys in the pool my sister thinks I'm going to play with them with her. But why don't we put our bathers on secretly and run around and go and play with them before she gets the chance?

Because that would be like, you know, just to torment her because that was what brothers do to sisters. Right, yes. So we changed into our bathers and my sister was like watching TV in like a living room that looked out over the pool. And we came storming into the backyard

and our bathers going, woohoo, woohoo. And we picked up all the inflatables and one of the oars was sitting by the side of the pool. And I threw the inflatable in and picked up the oar and jumped into the pool with the oar ready to go rowing. And my sister came out into the backyard crying because of this terrible thing we were doing to her and tormenting her. And suddenly I had this tremendous pain in my hand and I'd been stung by a bee. And that was on the oar. And it turns out while I was playing cricket, my sister had rescued a bee from the pool using the oar

and had like fished it out and left the oar by the side of the pool because she's so humane. She wanted the bee to, you know, dry out and fly away. So when I'd come running and picked up the oar from the side of the pool, she's so humane she wanted the bee to you know dry out and fly away right so when i'd come running and picked up the oar from the side of the pool i put my hand straight on the bee and got stung so i got my i learned my lesson i got my come up and i can't believe you did that i was getting all angry after what i'd just done to her so you you learned to never torment your sister again is that how that worked that was the last day i ever tormented her ever that was the last day that's good yeah that's good i'm glad you learned to never torment your sister again? Is that how that worked? That was the last day I ever tormented her, ever. That was the last day.

That's good. That's good. I'm glad you learned that lesson. It's important, Brady. Yeah. My stepfather's a beekeeper. Oh, yeah? Really?

Hmm. Interesting. I've never gone and seen his bees or hives. He kept them on another property away from the house when I was growing up. But he would just sometimes go away and tend to his bees. See, even like just the idea of it, like it just sounds romantic. Like, oh, tending to bees. Huh? Yeah, of course.

That sounds like a great thing to do. I've caught myself sometimes reading about how to keep hives. I'm like, what the hell am I doing? Right? But it's like, I can't, I can't help myself. This is definitely one of the strangest things that I find my mind, like vaguely drawn to every once in a while you can leave them alone gray you could get an allotment somewhere and just go once a week

just go check on them leave the allotment people to deal with the hive of bees i guess somewhere more out in the country i can see why that would appeal to you because there's like you know because bees are all about organization and colonies and all those sort of things that you find so interesting you know organizational structures so being like the god of some organizational structure would quite appeal to you that's what i'm doing it for it's the power trip yeah that's it i am the god of this hive right you've nailed it brady yeah you've gotten to the core of my obviously i don't think you want to do it to be the god of bees, but I can see why studying it and looking at it would be interesting to you.

I can see why it would be an interesting hobby to you. Yeah, it just captures my attention. What are you going to do in your retirement, Brady? I would like to spend more time in mountains and walking up. I'd like to be one of those people who goes to Scotland and captures monroes. You know how there are people who try and get to every peak in Scotland and walking up. I'd like to be one of those people who like goes to Scotland and captures Monroe's, you know how there are people who try and get to every peak in Scotland and stuff like that.

I would like to climb hills. In your retirement? Yeah. Old people do it. It's not like, you know, crampons and an ice axe and stuff. It's just like pleasant walks up Scottish hills.

Oh, okay. All right. I thought you basically told me that you're going to be, you're going to be you're going to be summiting peaks in your retirement which seemed a little bit like

I've got bad news for you. Yeah. I think I would like to do that. I like hills and mountains. I like that. I think that's a romantic image of a Brady

when a Brady retires. You'll see him on the Scottish hills in the distance walking around that's what brady will do bagging another peak yeah on my list crossing it off my list i like that i like taking a pointing selfie at the top pointing to the the style or whatever's up there the trig point we'll see i like this we'll have relaxing retirements brady. Maybe this is a good point to move on to Mount Everest then, because you know I love talking about Mount Everest.

It is, as we are recording at the moment, we're just coming into the Everest climbing season. Or it should be more accurately described as the Everest death season, because that's when we start hearing all the stories about people dying at Mount Everest, which seems to be becoming more and more common. More and more people go every year, right? Isn't that how that works? Isn't it like a busy place now, Everest? All the tourists have ruined it. There's a Starbucks at base camp. There's not a Starbucks. There's very good Wi-Fi at base camp though. Give it time.

There'll be a Starbucks there eventually, right? There's better phone reception at base camp than where I live, that's for sure. That is true. You live in the center of a black hole of reception that drives me crazy every time I'm at your house. I'm like, it feels like I'm in the third world as far as my phone is concerned. Like, why can I get no signal in your house? It's crazy making. Good place for bees though out here. The first death that was reported was not of a tourist or some amateur it was actually as far as mountaineers

go it was a guy who is probably the superstar of mountaineering at the moment there's a guy called Uli Steck or his nickname is the Swiss machine and he's like a really famous mountaineer he's really good at climbing peaks quickly and he was getting ready to try and do an unusual everest climb this season and he was just kind of acclimatizing and warming up sort of sort of thing and he was actually just going up a little side peak called nutsy it's funny mount everest to my mind is really three mountains kind of joined together everest lotsy Nutse. And yet they all are treated separately. And Lhotse, in fact, is the fourth highest mountain in the world. But actually, it's really just like a southern peak of Everest.

Anyway, so there's these three sort of mountains joined together. And they form like a little cradle around this western coombe. And he was sort of doing a climatization climb on Nutse and has fallen to his death, which is a terribly sad thing to have happened. But an interesting thing about him is Uli Steck is actually the star of my all-time favorite YouTube video, which I actually have since found out, I think, maybe a little bit of a freeboot. But it's been freebooted so much now, I don't really know what to say. It's a clip from a longer film where he's climbing the eiger in record time and it's got a really cool song that i really love to it as well this is the video that you sent to me before the show started of

this again thing didn't even occur to me but obviously there's going to be records for how fast people can summit. Yes. And it seems like that was this guy's specialty. When I'm watching this video, it starts off by he's saying, oh, you want to go quickly, but you can't make any mistakes. Yeah. And I'm just thinking like, oh, of course, that's any kind of climb. You want to get up quickly because you want to get to the top or you want this experience to be completed. It didn't occur to me that people would be racing for time which just seems so

crazy to me it's that you're doing an already dangerous thing and you're turning it into a vertical race but the video is very impressive to see him moving up the mountain at quite a rapid pace it's an impressive little video and i'll put it in the show notes i'm pretty sure it's the north face of the ayaga which is like the famous face of the ayaga and it's also where you know you always hear about north face i think that must come from the north face of the ayaga it's the famous difficult climb he would go up it with you know very little equipment and super super fast so when i saw that this person had died i was like oh that's the guy in that video isn't it and i went back and sure enough so so that was sad news that video is like quite beautiful though isn't it like what did you think watching that video like it's beautifully filmed yeah it

must be really quite breathtaking to be in these locations and and that that shot of him right as he's like walking along the the crest of the mountain, right towards the peak. It's just I can't imagine what that experience is like to have the mountain plummeting down on either side of you as you're walking along this ridge towards the top. Like, it must be an amazing experience. Well, I'm glad you said that. That leads me to the thing that this has had me thinking over the last week or so. Obviously, he died falling off a mountain. And when that happens, it's like, well, that's just a total tragedy.

But he was a guy who was very aware of the risk. He talked a lot about the risks of what he did. He wasn't like a cowboy. He knew he was doing a risky thing. And he obviously made this decision that it was worth it. And when you see that video and you see the sorts of things he was experiencing it did make me think about how do you make this calculus of risk in your life versus getting to experience that sort of amazing stuff astronauts who walk go to the moon people

who do amazing things and see amazing things but risk their life doing it and like how does one make that decision and it's very easy you know the week after the person dies to say well he made the wrong decision because he's died at the age of 40 but like i don't know i kind of think i get why you were doing it like i think it was and i kind of think it was worth the risk you know he got to see and do lots of amazing things that you and i would never get to experience he got to experience what it's like to go up that snowfield at the top of the Eiger on your own after having just climbed the North Face. And that's pretty amazing stuff. And I guess you could say what counts for nothing when you've died. But I've been thinking a lot about that calculus of the last week or so because of his death. Well, we're all dust in the end, Brady. Like that doesn't change things. But

I don't think a guy like this makes these calculations i think people like this are i mean this in the best possible way i think they're total freaks i think someone like this is they're not doing any kind of like risk reward calculation and feeling like oh i'll see amazing things if i do this very dangerous thing like i think this is just a person who is more or less born to do a very extreme thing. And you probably couldn't possibly stop them. Whenever you see people doing like really extreme sports, or even things like astronauts, right? Like someone becomes an astronaut, like those people are just such extremely driven people as to be such a small percentage of the human population that it's it's just like oh of course you were going to do something i don't think this is a

calculation as happens in the human population like there's going to be somebody who wants to do this sort of thing they almost can't help themselves i think i think that's the way that works out okay is that not what you want to hear brady no i mean yeah it makes sense but i mean i feel like i make the calculations like i just i've gone to everest base camp a couple of times you know despite this dicey airport that some people are a bit scared of and and walking at the altitude because i thought you know i weighed it up and my desire to see this place and go there was greater than my fear that you know i'd come to an untimely end but on the other hand i really want to go and see k2 and there's like a trip that

i've been looking into to go there but it does involve going through a few places that are not considered very safe for sort of political reasons and i've been put off that and i've decided not to do that at the moment because i don't think it's worth it, you know, when I've weighed everything up. So I feel like I do make those decisions and I just wonder. Yeah, but precisely you making those decisions is the reason that you're not doing speed runs up Mount Everest. Right. That's precisely what I'm saying. Right. I don't think that there's another person who's doing the calculus in the other way. It's like, yes, no, I think this is going to be worth it. I think someone like this

is just like, I got to climb. I got to climb mountains fast. And I just, I don't know why, but I just have to do it. I think that's what this is. So you think when he would do talk, I know you haven't followed his career or read interviews with him, but you think when he would do talk about, you know, I'm aware of the risks and I weigh things up. You think that's just lip service. And really, he just had this drive that was all consuming. Yeah, lip service isn't exactly right. But it's like, I just think that the way the person's brain is set up is doing this calculation in a very different way than anybody else would do it.

That's what I mean. It's like the adrenaline reward wired in his brain is like way higher than it would be for somebody else right and it's also a person who's probably had like just the right experiences to be this sort of person so that's what i mean by like people who do this kind of stuff are freaks in a particular way i've often used this example of like, like Richard Branson as a business person, who I think is a similar thing. He's like, oh, he's like a broken human being, but he's broken in such a way that he can't stop starting businesses. I think it's just the thing that's like kind of hardwired into him. It's not a thing that's about,

whenever you're looking at anybody who's in like the top 0.01% of people in any category, you just it's crazy to think that they'd be like a normal person who's just decided to do something else. Like, I think all of those people are sort of freaks who can't help themselves. That's why, like you're sitting there thinking about, oh, the political problems and wherever I need to fly through to get to K2. Like, yeah, that's why you're not that's why you're not climbing up k2 i mean maybe in your retirement brain yeah when you have more time to it you'll you'll do things a little bit differently but that's kind of my take on it like i just don't think these are normal people i think like definitionally they have to not be normal people he was the same age as me oh really and he twice won this award which is like the oscars of mountaineering i like that there's like the mountaineering has this award, which is like the Oscars of mountaineering. I like that there's like, the mountaineering has this award every year.

How does that even, what do you mean the Oscars of mountaineering? That doesn't make any sense. I can't pronounce it. The Pilo d'Or, which French for the golden ice axe, the annual mountaineering award given by the French magazine Montagnes.

I don't understand how that can work. I think it's if you do something that year that's like pioneering, like you pioneer some new route or you climb something in a new way that hasn't been done before. It's like, I don't know. I'm trying to get a nice little pricey

of what it's given for, but I can't really find it. Anyway, there has been another death at base camp. He was attempting to become the oldest man to climb Everest. He had been the oldest man before. His record had been taken from him. So he was trying to get it back. And he was 85 and he died.

He was Nepali. So he was quite good at altitude. But he died at base camp. They think of a heart attack, which, you know, again, very sad, hard to be completely shocked when someone really old dies trying to climb the highest mountain in the world. Yeah, I'm not surprised when an 85-year-old man dies of a heart attack at Everest base camp. That's not exactly shocking news. No, this is the thing I wanted to ask you about was that the authorities

now in nepal are considering an age limit on people climbing everest you have to be over 16 to be allowed to climb everest to get a permit they're now considering putting a limit on and for some reason i'm not exactly sure why i've got a theory why but i don't know they're thinking of setting the limit as 76 so okay i need to know your theory so why do you think 76 this nepalese guy that held the record before did climb it at the age of 76 so i wonder if maybe they're using that uh the record the record now is 80 a japanese guy who was 80 broke the wreck broke the record but this this nepalese guy that used to have the record was 76 when he did it so i wonder if maybe that number is being used somehow there could be other reasons i don't know but what do you think about setting an age limit on climbing that everest because you're all into like you know

freedom and people can do what they want and stuff that seems crazy i mean i there's a thing that i don't like which is rules for what i imagine are really rare circumstances how many people over 65 are trying to climb everest every year how many people can that possibly be i'm imagining it's not a huge number and it's like if if someone someone who is older wants to try to climb ever and presumably, you know, you have to sign some waiver or whatever. Be like, yeah, I know I'm climbing Everest. I know it's going to be dangerous. Like, I don't like this kind of stuff.

Like why, what is the point of this to stop people from dying on Everest? It's like, well, it seems like lots of people die on Everest. What difference does it make if they die if they're old? Well, I can give you a point if you want one just to make the argument. And that is when people get into strife on Everest? What difference does it make if they die if they're old? Well, I can give you a point if you want one, just to make the argument. And that is when people get into strife on Everest, that actually can cause a lot of other people's strife. Because inevitably, sometimes they'll try

to rescue them. It's very costly to try and rescue people. People can lose their life trying to help other people who are losing their life. So getting more people on the mountain who are incredibly likely to get into strife has that implication. You know, if you send someone up there who's almost definitely going to get themselves into trouble and then everyone else is going to have to try to save them, suddenly you're risking a whole bunch of other lives.

So that's an argument. I have a question for you because I don't know. Is there some kind of qualification that you need to do to climb Mount Everest? Do you need to prove yourself physically in some way? I actually do not know the answer to that. Famously, that people complain that, you know, any old tourist can get dragged to the top practically by their guides.

But I don't know how much that's an exaggeration and you have to prove some kind of ability. I imagine most of the companies that help you get to the top of everest would reply and say yes we have a vetting process we don't take any tom dick or harry up there how stringent that is i don't know and i don't know i don't know the the answer is i don't know i guess like what i'm wondering is like okay let's say i go out and i buy some boots and then i fly to nepal and i'm like all right i'm walking up that mountain what's going to stop me from doing that you would have to get a

permit from the government okay to go above a certain height so if you're not doing it with a company and you're just going on your own right i don't know how easy it is to get permits for that and then i don't know what the government would require from you i don't know how they check you but so there there exists some sort of permit yes to go above a certain height like i went to base camp if i when i was there i said oh i think i'll go up the kubu icefall and see how far i can get i would be breaking the law okay like that was as far as i'm allowed to go without a permit right and then then the everest police would grab you when they put you in everest jail okay and the permits are super expensive all. My feeling on this is whatever you need to get the permit, like that should... I just don't like this artificial, like, for your own good rule.

I would be totally fine if there was like, oh, as part of the permit process, when you arrive in Nepal, there's a exercise room and you have to be able to complete a certain number of physical tasks to demonstrate that you're able to do this. Right. Yeah. And I was like, that's fine. that's totally fine like i wouldn't have any problem with that i don't like the age limits seems a bit arbitrary yeah it seems a bit arbitrary right but it's like if you have to go into a room and you have to be able to do 100 push-ups

yeah and if you can't do 100 push-ups they don't let you climb the mountain yeah that that seems fine right i would be okay with that if a bunch of pensioners want to freeze to death on mount everest thumbs up from gray to that that's fine as someone who's a little bit fascinated by the moon landings i'm often asked what's the best book to read about the apollo program so for today's audible sponsorship and book recommendation i'm going to tell you. But first, a word on Audible, a leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment on the internet. Audible has a truly vast selection of audiobooks and other products.

You can sign up as an Audible listener and you get book credits each month for a low monthly fee. But importantly, you can try before you buy with Audible's free 30-day trial, which includes your first book, and here's my recommendation, A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaykin. This is hands down the best book I've read on Apollo, both for its storytelling and attention to detail. It's absolutely first rate and formed the basis for HBO's later miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon. Chaikin had great access to all the main players and his book reads like he was there every small step of the way. A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin, check it out. And why not check it out on Audible where the unabridged version weighs in at 23 hours. That's plenty of train trips, car journeys, gym workouts, dog walks,

wherever you listen to audiobooks. Go to audible.com slash hellointernet to sign on for a free trial. That URL is handy for us too because they'll know you came from the podcast. That's audible.com slash hellointernet, hellointernet, all one word. And enjoy A Man on the Moon as much as I did.

Or if that's not your cup of tea, you can choose any other title as your freebie i finally met someone who made a strong case for the apple watch brady i almost feel a little bit insulted by the way you're starting this conversation because i feel like how many times have we discussed the we've discussed this many times gray has often over dinner and over a drink you know when we're not podcasting i i sometimes say to gray gray sell me on the apple watch and he tells me why he likes it how it fits him with his life i understand the logic of the things that gray says they make sense and like okay you know if that's if that's how your brain works and that's what you want i can get it but the case you make never seems

compelling enough to me it doesn't it just never lands it never like like even in your case i think the things you're saying it helps you with don't seem strong enough to me for what i think the pleasure i imagine you could get from having like a nicer watch that's just me that's just me it is like i wanted to get you on record for that because i do always think it's funny because it's it's not just that you find my reasons unconvincing for you you find my reasons unconvincing for me yeah i kind of do i kind of do i can't i mean obviously it's your decision and obviously the case is compelling enough because you wear an apple watch and you don't wear the other watch but i feel almost a bit i know it sounds really arrogant but i feel almost like if only you knew like no i know like i know when we have this like

i can see it in your little baby eyes yeah that you're thinking like oh gray i know better than you on this topic and if only like i totally know that that's how i feel that's how i feel with you but i spoke to someone the other day thinking it would the discussion would go the same way and at the end of it i was like no okay you should have an apple watch okay i have to know what is this argument well he was the person driving me to the airport okay so he's a like a car driver who runs a car service for a living and he used to have nice watches and then it was an apple watch so i'm like why do you why do you wear the apple watch tell me and the two reasons that seemed completely compelling to me and they were both

relating to his work one is he's always driving and just being able to flick his wrist while still holding the steering wheel to see what's going on is a strong case as opposed to fishing a phone out which is not only dangerous but it's illegal and i don't want any driver phishing their telephone out and checking their phone all the time but he can just flick his wrist at the wheel and he's driving all day long right so but the second part of that is is the business case he's self-employed he needs to get bookings it's an industry where booking cars i'm like this if i try to book a car with someone and they don't get back to me really quickly i'll just book one with someone

else because i want to get it done so he can't afford to miss opportunities so he needs notifications to him are so important and he's driving all the time so being notified every time an email comes in from someone who might want to book him seems really compelling and like it would start to hurt his business if he was missing those messages those emails and those opportunities so the fact he's always driving combined with his really really compelling need for notifications which i think is much stronger than your need for notifications as you've told me he sold me on it and i was like all right I still think your watch looks a bit naff but I see why you're wearing it it sounds like you're just making a case for distracted driving that's

what it sounds like sounds like so I'm listening to this is like this guy doesn't need an apple watch that all I'm hearing is like I'd be trying to talk this guy out of his apple watch that sounds it's like oh great now I've got a guy who's looking at his watch 100 times while he's driving this is no good he didn't look at his watch once the whole trip but i was sold on it i was i thought okay i can't this is the worst argument in the world and this is what you feel like you're you finally see someone has a compelling reason to use the apple watch i can't believe this no because you're like a bit mumsy about safety you're thinking that is slanderous there's a slanderous accusation you are you are a bit you are a bit of a little you're a bit careful so i think so when i tell this story you're saying you're seeing the horror

of someone looking at their watch and crashing whereas i see more just a glance oh that's something i need to deal with uh and i will you know at the next petrol station i don't see it as a safety concern but i can see how the gray eyes of safety are seeing it somewhat differently he could just he could just check his phone at the petrol station instead this is i can't i i feel infuriated that this is the argument you feel like has landed for you for an apple watch this is crazy this is crazy well i think people using their phones while driving is like really really bad yeah of course and at least this is a bit safer and you're never going to stop people connecting while driving you just can't do it it's an impossible it's impossible

gray like you cannot stop people wanting to check emails and internets and things and social media while driving it just can't be done and if the watch like scales that back a little bit okay i'll take it i'll take it okay so you're doing this thing is like it's not that he's going to be a responsible person and check his notifications at the petrol station you're saying it's less distracting for him using the watch but he's still doing a bad thing that's what you feel like here that's your argument i'm not arguing anything i'm trying to say something i'm trying to say something nice about the stupid tonka toy apple watch for once and you're slapping me down this is yeah because this is terrible a little chunky silly thing and i'm like oh i'm trying to throw you a bone and now you're saying he should check his phone at the petrol station

okay and get yourself a nice watch too while you're saying he should check his phone at the petrol station. Okay. And get yourself a nice watch too while you're at it. That's what I'm thinking. This guy should be checking his phone at the petrol station and he should get a nice watch. So yeah, I disagree. Disagree. We can never come to a meeting of the minds on the Apple Watch, Brady,

until eventually one of these days you'll end up with a smartwatch, just like I know you will. It's only a matter of time. Soady i need an update on something a little bit more firsthand journalism i know you've been to the u.s i know you probably have very many u.s stories but there's one thing that i want to know which is tell me are the at-ats are they still at dulles are they still there they most certainly are oh thank god yeah so i've just been there it was my first time at dulles now gray has spoken rather negatively about washington dulles airport over the course of this podcast it It's true. It's terrible. He made it sound pretty terrible. So this was my first time seeing it with my own eyes.

And I have to say, I'm inclined to agree with Grey. Okay, thank God. I could feel myself building up this tension because I'm like, Brady's going to spout a bunch of nonsense about how it's not so bad and he's hard as nails okay so but but you're on my side with this one i arrived and i was a little

bit excited i was gonna get to see these at-ats maybe if they were still operating we didn't know if that there was there were rumors that they were no longer operating because of some train that's being built but anyway i got off my plane and i didn't quite realise how these at-ats would work, but it was like we were a bunch of dazed prisoners being led off the plane. And before we could even like get our feet and figure out where we're going, you're kind of shepherded around this steep corner into this holding area. And then like cattle, you're shuffled into through this door and you don't know what the door was to.

Oh, OK. It's not obvious where you're going and you're not prepared for it. They don't say you're going to get put on this thing. There's no chance to do anything else. And suddenly you're in this weird room with carpeted walls that doesn't even really seem like a vehicle. And then it does its weird thing where it changes its height and starts driving. The lack of communication about what's going on when you've just gotten off a long-haul flight was really disappointing.

So anyway, I chugged along in the AT-AT, and I saw all the other ones crawling around, and that was kind of cool. I mean, it was kind of otherworldly because I got there sort of late at night. So seeing these things crawling all around the airport was kind of cool i mean it was kind of otherworldly because i got there sort of late at night so um seeing these things crawling all around the airport was kind of cool i was just one gate away from the cursed gate which i think was b50 i saw it from a distance but i didn't get to take a photo of it and then i got and then the adat deposited us at the arrivals you know immigration area which again was kind of not a very pleasant place and not a very pleasant experience these places rarely are to be honest but this was particularly bad and they were pretty rubbish with what queues to put us in and then i got moved from

queue to queue and i was thinking oh this this couldn't get any worse and just when i thought it couldn't get any worse almost as if gray had arranged it that a little kid a little tiny kid standing next to me some toddler suddenly got down on his haunches and started vomiting all over the floor so so i'm waiting in queue next to a pile of vomit at dallas you know i'd like to be sympathetic but no... No, no, there's not like, no. Nobody is sympathetic to children when they're traveling, right? It's like, listen, kid, your only job is to be quiet and that's it. To be quiet and not vomit.

Don't expel anything from your body, right? Just be silent and miserable like the rest of us. Yeah. So like, and I finally got through and got my bag and then i had to join some other queue with my bag which was even longer than the immigration queue where they just wanted to take a piece of paper off me and let me continue so and then you know and then i ordered my uber and my uber guy phoned me up and wanted to figure out where i was going and just obviously decided i wasn't a good fare and cancelled on me so I was having uber problems as well I'm falling out of love with uber I can tell you that right now

oh wow and but that's a whole other story but anyway um so my Dulles experience was terrible and when I left Washington I went via Ronald Reagan airport which is lovely I'm realizing though you didn't actually you were barely in the cd terminals i didn't even you know experience all the things you hate about it i had a quite limited exposure and even that put me off it is now on the list of places that hello internet listeners can check off that they've gone to on a worldwide hello internet scavenger hunt i guess so i'm glad i'm glad now that both of us have been there yeah that's exactly what it is yeah'm glad now that both of us have been there. Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

I'm glad the both of us have been there. Super fun for you. I'm sorry that a child vomited in line. I'm sorry that you're falling out of love with Uber. It sounds like difficult travels, but did you make it to your math festival on time? I did. I enjoyed Washington.

It was only my second time I'd spent any time there, and I really enjoyed it. I was only my second time I'd spent any time there, and I really enjoyed it. I was there for this National Math Festival, which was interesting. It was really good. I really loved it. It coincided with the March for Science, which was held in Washington, which I think there was some worry that it might sort of, you know,

the nerds might do the March for Science instead of the Math Festival. But I think the two sort of played off each other quite well. And luckily for the Math Festival, it absolutely poured with rain in washington that day so i think a lot of people who were thinking i'll do the march and then go to the festival or i'll go to the festival and go to the march thought i'll bugger that i'm just going to go to the math festival so i think we were the winners from that fantastic i love that like oh i've come all the way to protest oh but it's raining how much do i really care turns out not rainsworth much it was a great success the march for science anyway and i must speak positively about it if only because our friend duke from the vatican

was one of the like hosts of it and i did catch up with him for a drink in washington the wave function that is dirk did spread to washington So I got to see him while I was there. I didn't know he was there for that. Yeah, he was the guy up on the stage, you know, showboating around in the dry, no doubt, covered by the stage. Yeah, yeah. No, for that pretty face, they can't let him get wet.

No, that's not going to happen. Exactly, yeah. There's sunshine machines at the top of the stage to keep him nice and warm. I'm sure that's how that works. So now you feel like you have to speak positively about it that's funny interesting i'm gonna show a bit of solidarity so the math festival like i obviously got there early and i had to do these like three presentations two of them with matt parker and one with cliff stull who are people in my number five videos

and there was this like really big room that we were doing it in. And like, I'm thinking, there's no way people are going to come to this room. I get really nervous about that. Like, I just imagine like three people turning up because I'm like, who's going to want to come to this? And then after that, I knew I had to do this, like they'd set up this kind of meet and greet thing for me,

like meet Brady from Numberphile which I was a bit uneasy about and I wanted it to be as low key as possible and then I went to the place where it was going to happen which was this huge area at the convention centre in Washington that I swear was

three times bigger than an aircraft hangar and then there's this one tiny desk over on the side with a sign saying, meet Brady from Numberphile, and like a chair and like ropes and stuff. And I'm like, why are there ropes? That makes it like, you do not need crowd control.

This is not going to be a big thing. I felt really like really uneasy about it and really embarrassed about it. So luckily lots of people came to the presentations. There was a really good audience. And there were lots of Tims. I met the guy that does nerd stats on Reddit. Oh, okay.

Did you complain to him about that worth the weight measurement? The terribly named worth the weight measurement? I didn't really get time to discuss that. But if I had, I would have. He was disappointingly normal. I was hoping he'd be a bit nerdier, but anyway, he seemed kind of normal. But anyway.

Anyway, so I met lots of Tims, saw a few nailing gears around the place, and then I went up, like at three o'clock or whatever, I went up to this desk where I was going to have to sit for hours, which I thought was going to be the most embarrassing moment of my life, and I was going to be sitting at a table for like three hours on my own. There were a few people milling there when I got there, so I'm like, hi, and like signed a few

things and did a few selfies, and then amazingly, like it was never like a long queue, like a, you know, VidCon, where like a thousand screaming people line up to meet some vlogger but there was always just like 10 people like for the whole three hours like i think people would come along and think oh the queue there's a queue oh there's no queue i'll join the queue now so like for the whole three hours it never stopped like i was able to just spend three hours meeting people which was nice and also incredible relief for my like personal pride brady i love i love this stuff because it's like it's like you don't know who you are brady you you're worried you're worried at all these events that nobody is going to show up but you aren't

like you're the mighty brady harron you are a number file at a math convention. Like you think nobody's going to show up to say hello. Like, do you have any concept of who you are in this situation? I'm amazed that you weren't mobbed, right? That the fans didn't dare you limb from limb screaming in excitement to see you there, right? It's like, it's just, it's so funny to me because like I saw the same thing at VidCon where you're like, oh, I wonder if anybody's going to show up. It's like, no, no. Dude, like you're Brady Heron. You're at a math convention. Like, I think you're like, ooh, I wonder if anybody's going to show up. It's like, no, no. Dude, like, you're Brady Heron. You're at a math convention.

Like, I think you're going to be fine for a meet and greet. Like, I think you're going to be just fine. Well, all right. That's fair enough. But having said that, and quite a few Hello Internet listeners came just for Hello Internet, who probably weren't Numberphile fans.

But my favorite people who lined up and there were a few of these and i remain bamboozled by them are people who were waiting in line for maybe you know 15 20 minutes because sometimes i would talk to people for a while and someone would get to the front of the queue and i'd say hey how are you and they would say to me yeah i'm good thanks who are you i saw this queue of people or people wanting to meet you. So I thought, I want to find out who you are. And then I would have to like, to a total stranger who had been waiting in queue to meet me,

I would have to say, oh, well, my name's Brady, and I make these YouTube videos about mathematics, and some people like them. They're like, oh, really? Oh, that sounds really interesting. How long have you been doing that for? And I'd talk to them for like five minutes they had no idea who i was and then and then they would be oh can i have a picture with you i'm like yeah of course you can or can i have a signature yeah

yeah you can yeah and then they would just walk away i feel like i can't believe that that's real it's true it happened three times one of them was family. It was a mom with like all her kids. And then I had to like have pictures with the kids and none of them knew who I was. I really almost can't believe that. What kind of person would do that? And they were just seeing a queue and thought maybe I was someone interesting or famous. But like, it's not like this is Soviet Russia and you see a line and you just have to get on the back of it because maybe there'll be bread.

Like I don't. Oh my God. i cannot okay i mean i was grateful for them because they kind of you know padded out the line a bit but but i've kind of felt a bit sorry for him i would find that the strangest moment to be in a way justifying the existence of the line to see you like someone gets to the front like you don't seem that impressive who are you that is so weird i can't believe that that happens at all let alone like if you told me one person did it i'd be like well obviously there's some lunatics in this world but three people that's one an hour on average i don't understand how those people can exist that is very strange to me i'm sorry that

you had to go through that so from washington i went on to miami and like i'm not going to talk for ages about miami but it was a weird place i'm sorry were there expectations that you are going to talk for ages about mi Miami because everybody knows it's a place that you talk a lot about? I have never been to Miami. Tell me all about it, Brady. I'm not going to go too much into Miami because, you know, I don't want to turn Hello Internet into what Brady did on his holiday. But there was one thing that struck me as interesting. And this was, I mean, probably the thing it's most famous for and its greatest asset is its lovely, big, long, beautiful beach.

Big, long, sandy beach. Beautiful water. Always great weather. All the hotels look out at the beach. I had a hotel room looking out over the beach. Everyone sits by the pools at the hotel that are oriented so you can look out over the beach. Or you sit on the beach itself. And everyone gazes at this marvellous vista.

So being America, obviously this is seen as an advertising opportunity and they have lots and lots of planes dragging ads behind them. And I actually quite like that. I find that quite quaint. And I'm in favour of those planes dragging ads through the sky on one condition they have to be those ads that are like made of like letters that have obviously been you know taken from a stockpile of letters and they just rearrange the letters depending on who the advertiser is you

know that you know that cliche kind of look i'm talking about right right i get it but you want letter like you you want letterpress here like like a gutenberg rearrangement of the letters for the advertisements because what happens now is some of the planes are dragging behind them like these huge obviously like silk screened posters with like pictures of women holding machine guns saying come to our firing range and that sounds pretty awesome i think i could be sold on that that one was awesome but generally those ones i don't approve of it's a bit too high tech but when there's those ones just like dragging like letters i feel like i've gone like to the 1960s or something and it's quite i feel like i'm in like scarface or something and i'm back in miami in some cool time okay but but if it's like a bottom

third banner advertisement on a youtube video that's's not cool. That's what you don't like. Yeah, I want the letters. I want the printing press letters. So they're okay. But there's another kind of advert that I was horrified by. And that was every sort of 20 minutes or so, probably about 100 to 200 meters out to sea, this slowly chugging boat goes along,

like, you know, from right to left and then left to right, along the whole stretch of the beach, with this giant TV screen facing back to all the people on the land, playing video ads at them. And it just chugs along, and you've got to watch all these video ads from this advertising boat that just chugs up and down the beach all day. And I do not approve of that. I'm going to say that might be one of the most offensive kind of ads

I've ever heard of. It was terrible. It was terrible. I cannot believe they're allowed to do it. I think right below that, the kind of ad that always bothered me the most is, and I particularly see them in Las Vegas, is they have these, in quotation marks,

I want to say like trucks, like they're little trucks, but on the back of them, they're carrying nothing except a gigantic vertical poster, right? In either direction. And those things always bother me because I feel like your whole job, little truck, is to drive up and down some of the busiest streets in a city, just causing more traffic while advertising. You offend me here.

At least don't have the advertisement be actively in the way of everybody else on the road. And I've seen them in London every once in a while too. And I was like, those really bother me. But to have someone essentially literally drag a TV across an ocean view. Yeah. I feel like that would make me furious if I was on vacation. That is horrific. It's the, you know, it's your thing. thing it's their beautiful thing it's why you're there and like i like i said i can get on board

with the planes because i don't know it's like from another era but the tv screens that's like a crime against humanity that's that feels like to me come on miami sort yourself out yeah rid of those things quick sports ball corner gray doesn't involve a bowl this is from the world of athletics and something i thought you might find interesting and that is obviously you know who wins things is quite important in athletics you get your gold medals and stuff but a sub important thing about athletics is who has the world records who has you know run the fastest hundred meters or who has thrown the javelin the furthest. Right.

Now, because of all the problems that athletics has been having with doping and things like that and drug cheats, a controversial proposal seems to be close to becoming a thing and that is they are thinking of scrubbing the record books of any world record that was set before 2005 and that's because before 2005 they didn't keep samples since then they do keep samples so as they come up with like better drug tests and better ways of finding cheats you mean they can samples? I think blood or urine and things like that. I'm not exactly sure which. I think that's the reason. I'm pretty sure that's the reason.

So basically, the rules are as such. For world records to be recognized, it has to have been achieved at a competition that's on a list of approved events where I guess they have the right clocks and tape measures and stuff. The athlete has to have been subject to an agreed number of doping control tests in the months leading up to the event okay and the doping control sample that was taken from them after they set their record has to have been stored and available for retesting for 10 years

and basically up until 2005 that didn't happen since then they've had these more stringent requirements so i think for like the integrity of the sport because some of some of these world records for example the world records set by florence griffith joiner who was a american sprinter and her records are considered pretty suspect but they still stand they've decided we can say that because she's died so we can defame her but anyway is that is that how that works oh okay yeah all right that's okay i'm not the journalist i don't know how that works when you're engaged in defamation so what they've said is for sort of the integrity of these records they've decided to take this

heavy-handed broad brush approach and say let's just wipe out all the records from before 2005. And of course, a whole bunch of people who probably are clean and certainly say they're clean are saying, hang on, this is really unfair. We're losing all our world records. But this is the decision that they seem to be coming to. Let's wipe the slate clean and start world records from then. I was wondering what you would think of this. This is an interesting decision. My first impression is you're telling me that somewhere in the world there's a vault with 10 years worth of athletes' blood and urine samples?

Like, that's what I'm getting out of this story. Like, somewhere they have these samples stored? That is weird. That is really weird to think about. I think they would only keep the ones of people who have won the medals and set the world records. I don't think anyone who ever does anything has everything kept. Although I imagine they must have to try

and keep fourth and fifth and sixth. Maybe they do it for all the finalists. You've got to keep a few, right? Because we're going to go back in time and we're going to reset who's the record. You're going to have to test who's number two as well right yeah otherwise you're just filming the lead golfer all the time right and that's no good you have to film everybody okay so after you get over the shock of the wee and the blood no but isn't that interesting to you like do you think

they're all in one place where do you think they i want to know where they're kept i don't know like i've seen like reports and stuff before from these facilities that do this it's like a whole industry you know checking athlete samples for doping. They always just look like big giant labs with fridges and freezers. And if they decide to pass this new rule, and then let's say one of the facilities that's storing all of the blood and urine burns to the ground, do all of those people then lose their record? That is an interesting question.

I think maybe there's a degree of higher powers there and people would say, well, that's not your fault. You're not going to lose your record for that. I think this 2005 thing is they've said, we didn't really get our act together in terms of having good mechanisms in place to stop cheating until 2005. Let's make that our new start point.

Let's reset the clock. You know, and there's a whole bunch of people who are saying they're sort of innocent victims. But, I mean, world records are funny things anyway because it's not like they're like, you don't get medals for having a world record. They're just like, they're just pieces of information anyway.

Yeah. And even if someone new has the world record for the 100 metres, women's 100 meters everyone's going to know oh it was run quicker you know in 2002 but that one doesn't count yeah everyone's everyone's going to know that yeah that's that's how that works i thought it was an interesting decision that you might have thoughts on because i i never really know where you stand on drugs in sport anyway i kind of part of me thinks you think maybe they're okay so i'm pro doping right like it seems like a stupid arbitrary thing to say like oh we can do all of these things

that are sports training which are all about manipulating the chemicals inside your body through physical means yeah and you can eat healthy food oh that's not fair you ate too many carrots that's making you really strong. It's dumb. Like I'm all in favor of doping. I don't even mean that as a joke. I 100% am in favor of doping. I think it's dumb that it's not allowed. Won't people then like put their own lives at risk

as they sort of push themselves to the limit? Won't sports be more exciting when people's lives are on the line for the game? What's the downside here, right? It seems like it's all upside. The sport gets more exciting when people's lives are on the line for the game? What's the downside here, right? It seems like it's all upside. The sport gets more exciting. You're going to have more impressive physical feats, which is the whole purpose of it. I have no problem with this.

I have no problem with this whatsoever. Wow. It amuses me that you think that. I think it would be a little bit irresponsible if we allowed doping in sport. Yeah, because sport is filled with nothing but responsibleness, right? It's a very responsible field. It's all above board. Everything's fine.

There's nothing irresponsible about the whole notion of professional sports in the first place. But doping, no, that is too far, sir. No, definitely, that's not allowed. I mean, like, all that crazy stuff about people doing, like, high altitude training and, like, taking out their blood and then blood and then pumping their own blood back into them. It's like, oh, that's not doping because it's your own genetic material. This stuff is crazy. I'm totally fine with it.

You want to take some steroids to be a better athlete? I'm okay with that. I have no problem with this. So you're saying let's make sport a technological arms race and just take it to its conclusion, wherever that is. It's that already. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you. I hear you.

God, i can't remember where i came across it but i came across something which was just talking about um even like sports records as they relate to like baseball bats and tennis rackets and and all kinds of things where you just you don't even really think about it but it's like oh of course of course there's actually quite a lot of technology that goes into a tennis racket and and how it responds yeah to the tennis ball. It's like, oh yeah, this is all like a thing anyway. That's, that's about progress. Yeah. I mean, your people will say, oh, countries with the best, you know,

chemists will start winning all the medals. But as it stands now, the countries with the best training facilities win all the medals. So I understand that argument. I do think there's like a human safety element to some of the drug stuff that probably is worthy of consideration. Don't get me wrong. It's worthy of consideration, but I think what will just end up happening is we'll start genetically breeding people to be more receptive to those drugs to compete in our sports. And we'll just end up with an entire class of people who are bred to be athletes i think that's the natural logical conclusion of this and it'll be an amazing sporting future would you rather watch that

sporting contest between like the super bred drugged up uber humans or robots competing or bees Or bees. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Away. First class luggage at a coach price. Away is a team of thinkers and designers focused on creating objects designed to be resilient, resourceful and essential to the way you travel today. Away uses high quality materials while offering much lower prices compared to other brands by cutting out the middleman and selling directly to you. They make a really fantastic suitcase. It's a hard shelled four wheel suitcase that includes a battery which will charge your phone up to five times. And they offer this with a lifetime warranty. If anything breaks, they'll replace it for you for life. They sent me a

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sad old suitcase, I really do recommend that you give them a shot. You have nothing to lose with the 100 day trial. And I'm sure that you will absolutely love their suitcase. Thank you so much to Away Travel for supporting this episode of Hello Internet. So Brady, piece of news broke through my bubble. Yeah. Which is we're going to have an election here in the UK. A snap election. a snap election. A snap election.

How exciting. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, has just decided, let's have an election. I thought this new law where you had an election every five years, which was new to the UK, was designed to stop this being a thing you were allowed to do. But obviously it's not. I don't actually know what that new five-year law is for now,

if you can call snap elections anyway. I don't understand how she's allowed to do it but it's happening so yeah we mentioned this once when that law first came out and my understanding is that law was primarily to just shorten the maximum length between elections in the uk it was six years before wasn't it oh okay okay so this new this law whatever it's called about having a set election every five years on a set date is just a fancy way of saying the limit now is five years between elections that was my understanding of it and that seems to be the case background for americans right there's there's this thing in the uk just very briefly where you can have an election at any point and then you have it's what six weeks

is the whole the whole uh cycle um before the election actually takes place yeah like this is a thing that can happen in uk politics and it can it can happen either because you have a coalition government that falls apart or it can happen uh as has happened in this case where the party in power thinks that they can more firmly lock in their power and you can just you can have an election and the thing that happens now which i think is interesting is that it looks like it resets the clock so it's again the next election can be no more than five years from this election is the way it works so we don't have like a fixed election cycle in the UK in the same way that the United States does.

Yeah. And that is what has happened most recently with Theresa May calling the snap election in the UK. And for those who don't follow British politics, pretty obviously what's happened is the opposition party in the UK is in such a dire state and it's so far behind in the polls that I think the Prime Minister here thought it was a fait accompli

that she would win an election and win it handsomely and probably increase her mandate. And not only would it reset her clock, she's probably arguing it'll give her a bit stronger mandate for all the Brexit hoo-ha and stuff that's to follow. So it's sort of opportunism, isn't it? Or shrewdness or whatever you want to call it. I saw your tweet.

I saw your tweet. Which, what tweet? I don't even remember what tweet I sent out. Your clever girl tweet. I think it was. I think it was, right? Because it was one of these things where, obviously, I don't follow the day-to-day of politics.

I have no interest in this, but this did burst through my bubble from a bunch of people sending me stuff about the election happening as soon as i saw it i thought it wouldn't have occurred to me but it does seem like there was a very clever move on her part it's one of those things in retrospect it seems almost obvious like it's a good decision for her to gain more power and to sort of lock in more more victories for her party i mean it'd been discussed for months and months but she just kept promising she wouldn't do it it wasn't a shock because no one thought she would do it like everyone thought it was a really obvious move but she just promised that she wouldn't do it so the

reason it was a shock was because it was such a such a brazen uh break of her promise I have a hard time holding someone to the notion of like, if you've had an opinion once, you have to have that opinion for forever. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I wouldn't even pass it off cynically as like, oh, politicians, you can't trust them. It's just like, no, you know, you don't necessarily know what reasons like why things change, even if it was just straight up strategic to say like, oh, we're not going to hold an

election and then later we're going to do it anyway. It's like, yeah, people have their reasons. I can never like fault someone for changing their mind i think it's okay to change your mind i don't think it's okay to lie for strategic reasons when you are a leader of people because then people could make decisions like if before an election you promised you would do something and you knew for a fact you wouldn't do it and everyone voted on you on that basis and then you did a fact you wouldn't do it and everyone voted on you on that basis and then you did the other thing what hope have we got for democracy if like

like i'm not saying it will stop happening but if it's like acceptable and everyone's saying oh no it's fine yeah you're allowed it's okay to lie i think when you do strategic lying that will never stop but i think you need to be cold on it and slapped over the wrists i think if we create a world where strategic lying is like fine then what hope have we got as like voters like what like we're just like we're just flopping in the wind now because they can just do whatever they want there has to be some penalty for your strategic lying and too much strategic lying has to result in you like you know getting kicked out where a little bit of strategic lying you kind of get away with it's yeah it's it's funny because it's like when i when i was first saying that i was having in my in my mind like i was going to go to some like world war ii analogy about what will a leader say on the radio that's

a strategic lie to like win a victory it's like yes but at the other end of that spectrum is just straight up lies that we can all agree are like terrible like i'm never gonna fulfill this promise at all lies so yeah obviously there's got to be somewhere there's got to be something that's somewhere in between there yeah i'm okay with being strategic about when you want to announce a snap election it feels like it's someone who is already in office trying to time a thing i feel like i'm okay with that but maybe maybe much further is not okay is it a little bit like that because i know you're someone who is really opposed to gerrymandering aren't you like you think you think that's pretty poison thing that happens in the u.s yeah right and that is a prime example of the people who are in power being able to manipulate the electoral system is snap elections another example

of that though like she had the power and she's manipulated the system by calling the election at the moment that gives her the maximum opportunity to win not like an arbitrary fair time that's been decided this date in the future is this not like a kind of gerrymandering how is it different so yeah i think you're right that in a way this is a kind of gerrymandering but i'm more okay with it because i think this is again we have to talk like in the abstract about how do you have a governmental system work like we're not talking about this particular election. I'm kind of okay with it because I think this is just the natural consequence of the way this system is set up

that you could also have a moment where you have like an impasse in the government and then you can have an election that occurs when there is an impasse. And the election is like the thing that solves this political impasse if a coalition government isn't able to stick together. And I think it's very hard to imagine like a set of rules where you can have the government dissolve, but not have it dissolve strategically. This is like the consequence of the way the system is set up but i totally agree that there's this

what has occurred now is probably the situation where someone is strategically dissolving the government in order to win by a bigger margin i mean she's pretty upfront about that just to quickly come back to this practical example although we're mainly talking in abstractions i mean there was no real impasse in the uk and no one's has even pretended there was she she basically has said i want a stronger mandate you know going into the next few years with all the things that are ahead for the uk and to be fair the opposition all the other parties lay down and approved it like you know it went through the parliament so it's not like they all said cried foul and said stop it so but i don't think it's not even like they she manipulated the system and created some bill over which no one could agree that would result in the parliament collapsing she just

basically said i want more votes what do you all say and you know what opposition isn't gonna approve an election? Because you look cowardly if you say no. Putting aside the particulars of the policy, this was just a totally brilliant game theory move, right? Because I think this whole situation with Brexit and then the UK having another election, she's able to do the, like,

do you want to vote to make us stronger in a negotiation? Or do you want to make us weaker in a negotiation? It is such a killer electoral move. And to time it at a place where yeah, the opposition party seems like they are particularly weak. I don't follow the details of a day to day, but I expect that the conservatives are going to walk away with like a huge, a huge victory over this one. It's hard to imagine how that that wouldn't happen. I do think that that she's right in a way that the more resounding of a victory she can win, like the better it makes it for the UK negotiating with the European Union. And it's like, oh, God, like you're trapped in this position where she's made it almost feel like if you don't vote her way, you are voting against the best interests of the UK.

That's why I did think like as soon as I like I heard that the election was occurring and then I saw her little speech about like, oh, you need to you need to vote with us or you're against us you're against the uk thing i was like man it just feels like it's a really clever little game theory win on the behalf of the conservatives so i just i think it's an interesting situation and i'm going to be very curious to see how it turns out but i'm expecting that they're really going to clean house yeah the only thing i disagree with and what you just said was capturing it as like some brilliant move like she's just solved for mars last theorem or something i think it was like just a bit of a no-brainer and she was just a bit ruthless i don't think you know she's pulled off

some political act of genius like it was just like everyone was saying for months yeah she'll probably call a snap election because she'll crush them and increase her majority and then sure enough that's what she did it's not just calling the snap election it's the it's the tie-in with brexit that's what makes it a stronger position i'm not saying that this is like oh this is some strategic 3d chess move it's an interesting thing that has occurred in the way this system works. And I think combining it with Brexit,

it just feels like a kind of trap for the voters where you have very little maneuverability. Yeah, I guess the sneaky move was calling the snap election after triggering radical people. Yeah, that's what it is. It's no longer a revote on Brexit. Like Brexit's happening.

You can't stop it now. But are you going to sabotage the country or not? That's probably the interesting thing about the timing. If she'd said, I'm not going to call Article 50 until you decide on me as your new prime minister, then it would have become referendum too. Right. It's like, oh, I'm flying this plane. We've taken off. We like oh we're you know i'm flying this plane we've taken

off we know where we're going and now are you going to let me pick the crew that i fly the plane with or not we're all on this plane together like we need to get where it's going and we can't get you out of the cockpit so it's almost crazy to try to like pick people who are going to work against you it's just that's why i think it's just it's an interesting thing it's also sort of like sad to see the opposition parties are trying to negotiate with each other to run candidates or not run candidates in various districts based on who was going to win or who isn't like it's just you can see all of the side effects of the strategic voting that has to occur everywhere else and it's just you know again that's just like a it's just a very frustrating situation tell you an interesting thing about politics gray yeah

like just to touch on you know my consumption of news again i'm really into my political podcasts at the moment there are quite a few i like listening to particularly american politics you know it's become so interesting now that I've really increased my intake of American politics stuff. And there's also like a few, like there's a satirical magazine that comes out every two weeks in the UK called Private Eye, which deals a lot with politics. And it's one of my favorite things to read. And I've always got great pleasure from these things.

But the problem is because, you know, I'm a busy person and there's so much of this stuff, you can't consume it straight away. You know, you've got to pick your times when you go for a drive or you go to the gym and stuff and in the last year or so politics has just started changing so quickly that all of these things become completely pointless to listen to within hours of coming out it's been a really crazy thing i guess i'm helping make one of your arguments here in a way but like this stuff is changing so soon that if i have any podcast about american politics and i don't listen to it that day and leave it three or four days i may as well be listening to them talk about andrew jackson or something it's so out of date like the stuff they're talking about like it's crazy i don't know why politics is moving so quickly now i don't know

whether it's changed or i've changed or something but it's just everything's just happened so fast now it makes my head spin has something changed that's made politics go into some kind of fast forward or is it just like is it just a weird little time we're living in at the moment or is it just the way i'm perceiving it like i, I know you, I know you don't follow it, but you must be aware that all this stuff that's happening so quickly now. I feel resistant to arguments about how things are happening faster now than they have ever been. I wonder, because I think that that is almost certainly going to be affected by how much people are discussing things. The amount of talking is going to make stuff feel faster than otherwise.

Like I am not saying that things aren't faster. I'm just saying that like your perception of how fast things are. Essentially what I'm saying here, Brady, is I think you might be subscribed to a lot of political podcasts, right? Which are talking about a whole bunch of stuff. And you only have so much time to actually listen to your political podcasts which then makes you aware of yeah all the ones you didn't get to have become totally meaningless and irrelevant than the time that has passed and so then it feels like wow

things are things are going by so quickly because i didn't get a chance to listen to these three other political podcasts about this thing yeah i understand the point you're making there. And perhaps I framed that incorrectly and made it sound like I listened to loads and loads of them. There are only like two or three of them. And I do listen to them within a few days. And they just seem out of date really, really quickly. So why do you listen to them then?

I think a big part of it is the handful I do listen to, I like the people as much as anything, which is always an important part of a podcast. I the handful i do listen to i i like the people as much as anything which is always an important part of a podcast i'm just enjoying smart hearing smart people talk about interesting things in an interesting way so it's not that i'm like some you know total political junkie i mean i think what's happening in america is quite interesting at the moment it's quite it's quite a show but i don't think that's the whole reason i think i also just enjoy listening to these people but like so many things the landscape's just changing really quickly.

It's kind of a bit dizzying sometimes. And the UK doesn't feel that much different. And this snap election certainly hasn't helped. Like it's just when the UK felt like, okay, let's bed in for two years of Brexit slog. It's like, no, no, we're having another election. She called the election, you know, a few days before the council elections. And so there were election results coming in

during the election campaign. And it's like, whoa, man, it's a bit fatiguing to be honest. It's a bit fatiguing. Maybe you should listen to fewer political podcasts. I know, I need a good beekeeping one. Do you know any? I'll find some.

I'll get a good beekeeping recommendation. You should start one. It could be called The Buzz with CGP Grey. And it's just all about like latest happenings in the world of beekeeping. I was about to say there's no possible way that there can be news in the beekeeping world. But if there's anything I've learned from the internet,

right, it's that everything is a world unto itself, right? Every topic has an infinite amount of depth to it. So I'm absolutely sure that there's like beekeeping monthly and a podcast and politics within the beekeeping world every topic is an infinite topic of course there's been another big election though this has been the french election did you follow this uh do you know what happened? No, I'm sorry, Brady. There has been a French presidential election. I wanted to ask you about their voting system, but if you don't even know what happened, you're probably not going to... Oh, I know about the

two-round French voting system. Yeah, I know that. Okay, okay. I think you probably should know that there was a French presidential election on the weekend. But I totally respect that you don't. And let's see. That's good because that will make your discussion completely non-political, which is great. How many elections happen worldwide every month? There must be a bunch. Yeah, but France is a pretty big, important country. And this is like, you know, particularly the context of...

Are you saying other people's elections are not important, Brady? That's what I'm hearing. Particularly in the context of are you saying other people's elections are not important brady that's what that's what i'm hearing particularly in the context of what's happening in the eu and although we're not going to go into the details the nuances of this election you know involving you know who was running and what was going on and some of the implications in a broader context this was an interesting one this was one did i miss something important like as someone who missed the whole thing, what's different now than before? The final two-person runoff was between a centrist candidate and a far-right candidate who was very anti-Europe.

So it was considered a bit of a referendum on that. Was this going to be like a Brexit rerun? After recent election results where more right views have prevailed, a lot of people were thinking, is this a trend that's going to continue and this woman who was running for french president was quite extreme from quite an extreme side of politics so there were lots of eyeballs on it to see what what would happen and in the end the sort of more centrist candidate won the two-person runoff in bit of a landslide

but the thing that was interesting from purely a voting perspective was the round before where there was just this right-wing candidate and then lots of other candidates who were left and centrist and that they all split the vote amongst themselves and the right-wing candidate did really really well so but then what happened was when it became a two-person runoff all the people then consolidated behind the the centrist one so it was just really interesting from a sort of an electoral theory perspective so i thought maybe you'd followed it for that reason no it sounds like the system works then that is the french system like it's round one one vote per person and then you pick the two most popular

and they face off in the final election it's's a better system than the first-past-the-post system, but that's not hard to do because first-past-the-post is the worst ever. Is it a better system than the transferable vote though? What are the advantages or disadvantages to this runoff system versus a transferable vote and just having one round in the first place and everyone just has their priorities and knows that everything's going to get shuffled around in the end to where it should be if i'm going to rank these two things i would say that the two round system is better than first past the post but it's not as good as a as a

ranked method like single transferable vote or instant runoff right it's because you're losing you're losing information about preference what you're essentially doing is you're having two first-past-the-post votes, one after the other, in the two-round system. And so it sounds like in this latest French election that what can happen is exactly this, where you get a candidate who has a smaller fanatical base that sticks together wins they get a bunch of votes and then there happens to be somebody else who is also has a bunch of votes who might be like a centrist candidate like the round two essentially is an option to undo the winner of round one in a way like that's what the two round system is doing whereas if it was just a straight runoff of straight first pass the post vote like that wouldn't happen but the thing with like with a single transferable vote system or an instant

runoff system is you're able to say like oh i like this person and that part there's like there's more information to work with yeah about how much the people like each of the candidates and and what their ranking is. Better than first past the post, not as good as some other systems. Even with this, you get very quickly into this kind of like fun, debatable area where with all voting systems, like I like them because you have to be making some kind of negotiation between what the mathematics tells you about how systems work, and then what is it that you are valuing in an electoral system,

which the math can't possibly tell you. And it's why arguments about this stuff will never end, because there's no mathematical answer to say, oh, this system is obviously the best. You can only just say, this system meets a bunch of different criteria in better or worse ways. And then ultimately there has to be some human judgment about which of the criteria matter more than others. There's no way to just say like, oh, this is the best or this is not the best.

But we can all agree that first past the post is the worst. I guess the advantage of the runoff, I mean, I think I agree with you. I really like the transferable vote, but I guess the advantage of the runoff, I mean, I think I agree with you. I really like the transferable vote. But I guess the advantage of the runoff is once you know people's preferences the first time around and the landscape changes, you can debate again in the new context. You have the second election campaign for a few weeks. Suddenly, now that the stakes are different and who's against who is different, you might want to change your vote. Like you might think, oh, okay, if I knew it was good, if I knew those two were the two most popular, I'd want to hear what they thought about this

and that, and it might change the way I vote. So. And what I also think is really valid in a voting system is this whole idea of, you know, again, in theory, you should be voting for the person that you totally like that you agree with more and that you like more but like let's be honest there's there's a huge amount of the voting system which is well i don't want that person in charge right like i'll take anybody but that person and so i think the two round system it gives you that moment of saying like okay well i didn't like joe blogs but when joe blogs is running against bob logs like oh he's that guy's the worst like i'll take anybody over him yeah and it allows you to do that kind of switch like there's

there's that information change that happens between the rounds it's why something like a rank system just happens to collect all that information up front by asking you to order the candidates because that's implicitly what you're doing like would you like this person over this person over that person? And then you're able to run like a bunch of theoretical elections. Like that's again, that's the main problem with just a single first past the post election is that you can very often end up with a candidate that the majority of the citizens all agree they'd rather have anybody else than that candidate.

And at least the two round system prevents that from happening because it allows people in the second round to consolidate around a candidate that everybody prefers to the other person. It's fine. But I do find it mildly amusing that this massive country, which is the nearest country to the country you live in just had this really like tumultuous interesting presidential election and you were just like like plodding away driving your truck simulator and having the time of your life

and i had no idea it was happening