Hello Internet - H.I. #83: The Best Kind of Prison

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

On this episode: The Buzz, with CGP Grey, Mother's Day, paperlove, falling out of love with Uber, Trafalgar square safety, implied copyright permission, and do we live in a simulation? Sponsors Harry's: Quality Men's Shaving Products Squarespace: start building your website today with a free fifteen day trial Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month - 15 day free trial Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes Cody's Lab Year of Beekeeping London Bee swarm No fun in Trafalgar Square What if the Universe is a Computer Simulation? - Computerphile Simulation paper Minute Physics: Real World Telekinesis HI: Guns, Germs, and Steel HI: Artificial Intelligence

Welcome to The Buzz with CGP Grey. So, I just want to talk about something that's been happening in my hive. You did ask me what I would like to do when I'm an old man, and I did say peak bagging, sort of on the spur of the moment. There are some other things that spring to mind that I kind of didn't think of at the time. Oh yeah? The problem is with most of mine, I've kind of like already done them, but what I would do is I would do them better as an old man.

Okay. I feel like you're almost venturing into humblebrag territory here with it's like, oh, I'd love to do more things, but I've already accomplished so much in my life. I don't mean it like that. Okay. Like, for example, I really like like slot cars, like sort of scalextrics tracks I would love to create a massive one of those like the size of like three or four rooms and like have a really really slick one but I did go through a phase like in my early adulthood where I got into that and had a really cool one in my room stuff like that I would like to get into train sets I've never done a good

train set I'd love to have like a big huge train set. I've never done a good train set. I'd love to have like a big, huge train set in the basement that has all the good models and stuff like that. But the thing that's closest to beekeeping that I could imagine getting into would be an aquarium, a really good aquarium. But I have done lots of aquariums over the years at various times. But I reckon I'd love to get really back into keeping aquariums. A saltwater aquarium or a freshwater aquarium, Brady?

Well, I mean, I've done both. Oh, wow. Okay. Saltwater. I mean, that's pro-level aquariuming there. I actually found it surprisingly easy. I didn't have a big one. Did I ever tell you about what happened when I finally got rid of my saltwater aquarium? I didn't know you had a saltwater aquarium. So no, I don't know what happened when you got rid of it. I did have one. I was moving house when I left Nottingham. So I decided to not move with the aquarium. I decided to get rid of it, but I had this clown fish. So I ended up donating it to my local fish and chip shop. My local fish and chip shop had this amazing

saltwater aquarium. So I said to them one day while I was buying fish and chips, I said, I'm getting rid of my aquarium at home. Do you want my fish? And they were like, yeah, yeah, we'll take it off your hands. They already had a clownfish in there and they're quite territorial clownfish. Are they? Yeah, so I took it in like a few hours later in a bag and gave it to them and they like released it into the aquarium. And at first their clownfish was much bigger than mine

and it was clearly being a bit of a bully and I felt really sad. And I thought, oh, no, I've put it into this huge new aquarium with all these other fish that don't like it. And I felt really sad and thought maybe things weren't going to end well. But like I went back the next day to check how it was going and it had become like best buddies with the other clownfish and they were like best mates. And like six months later I went back after I'd moved.

I was back in Nottingham and I went back to the fish and chip shop to check and sure enough there he was or there she was whichever gender it had taken on best mates with the other one so it ended really well but I'd love to one day have like a super massive aquarium like you know six feet across huge one I could do that in my old age and tend to my aquarium so clearly your interest in beekeeping generated a lot of interest among listeners to the show. Has much arisen from that? What's come about since in your world? Well, you know, Brady, like I couldn't help myself. I mentioned in the last show that sometimes I get caught in a little bee vortex of reading about how to keep bees, how to manage your hives, how to do all these things. And of course, after the show went live, I was inundated with links. I spent a very pleasant morning reading about a hobby that

I don't have any real intention of pursuing until a couple decades from now, if ever. I couldn't help myself. I was reading about urban hives and I was looking into local beekeeping associations and all these various things. I just, I couldn't stop myself. But I do want to recommend to the listeners, something that was passed on to me, which is a YouTuber called Cody's lab. And it looks like he's a guy who normally does a whole bunch of science experiments and stuff. But people passed on to me that in his spare time, he does beekeeping. And there's a playlist of like 100 videos of him just tending to his bees. I was watching that. I was really enjoying that. Couldn't help myself. I was absolutely transfixed. And for the buzz, for the actual beekeeping news, the very day that we published that episode,

there was a huge swarm of bees in London, in Greenwich, that actually caused one of the streets to be shut down for a couple of hours. And they had to bring in a local beekeeper, a total hero, to try to coerce a bunch of the bees into some hives and get them to de-swarm from the street. So I think our podcast, once again, causes news to happen, this time in the realm of bees. They were like Tim Bees. And when they'd heard about your interest, they all flocked to London to try and see you. I think that that is the only logical assumption we can make.

I mean, you talk about a hero. You now remind me, I did mention last time that my stepfather is a beekeeper. And his phone number did make it onto like some list that the local council kept of people who knew how to handle bees and maybe once a month or so we'd get a phone call from some local person who was having a problem with a swarm of bees like suddenly the bees had taken over their backyard or front porch and they were scared and didn't know how to get rid of the bees and the council would just say all right we know a guy. Sure enough, they'd call him and he'd go around, take the swarm away. And often he'd then take it and go and put it in one of his boxes and he'd keep them, he'd adopt them and take them away. They'd live happily ever after,

literally on a farm. This time it's real. Bees really do go to farms. Oh, where are you taking those bees? I'm taking them to a farm. No, really, where are you taking them? No, I am. I've got a farm with like 50 beehives on it. Yeah, but it seems like this is a regular thing that, you know, bees, they swarm. They'll get sort of stuck in some area. And then you call out the local beekeeper to get them to go into a hive and then take them off to a farm.

Such is the cycle with bees. Yeah, there you go. Anyway, that's this week in bee news. This week in the buzz. Next week. Probably nothing. Who knows? I've certainly learned more about wisdom teeth than I ever cared to know over the last month

or so. Hey, whatever happened to the teeth? Did you send them off to whoever it was who wanted them? Thank you for reminding me. You can save me having to send an email now, because the woman who I said I would send them to in Australia did email me and I forgot to reply. She said, that's great. And I think she even sent me her address. But I've realized two things. Well, three things have come about actually now I think about it. One is I didn't actually speak to my wife about it. So I

don't know if she'll be willing for me to send the teeth away. I think she probably will. But anyway, I don't think she'll care. I'm just trying to mentally think of a scenario under which your wife might say, oh, no, we really need to keep those dog wisdom teeth. The most important thing, though, that someone else pointed out to me was Australia is notorious for its quarantine rules, particularly anything to do with fauna or flora and you can almost guarantee that sending teeth through the post to australia is not gonna happen and also could result on you know people being put on watch lists and things like that so i'm not going to do it for that reason and there is a third reason that is top top top secret But I may have found another amazing use for those teeth. Oh my God.

And I haven't even told you about it. I don't know what it could possibly be that you're going to do with some doggy teeth there, Brady. I'm making a necklace for you for Christmas. You better not be. Who would throw away an Audrey Teeth necklace, you monster? Only a monster would throw it away. That's true. I would thank you. And I would hand it right back to you saying that the gift was simply too great

and I could not accept it. That's the way I would try to handle that situation. Speaking of gifts, can I continue my ongoing obsession with holidays and things that we celebrate after April Fool's Day and Star Wars Day. We have now passed, at the time of recording just recently, in some countries, Mother's Day. What do you do about Mother's Day? Is this celebrated in the Grey family? Do you contact your mother back in the States and send her flowers or phone her up? Yeah, of course. You got to call your mom on Mother's Day. Everybody does that. Right, Brady? I'll come to that. I just want to know what you do. Do you send presents? I just send flowers and you call your mom on Mother's Day. That's what I think you do.

And you do flowers. And I do flowers. My mom always says, don't send flowers, but she's always very happy to get them. So it's a bit of a mixed message there, but I send flowers anyway. I can easily have seen you as being someone who wouldn't have bought into that, who would have said, oh, this is just, you know, greeting card industry, florist industry. I'm not getting suckered into that. I mean, with all these things, it is, right? But it's also what the day is to the person.

The greeting card thing, it's not necessarily a valid complaint because people will have expectations right on those days. I learned that when as a much younger fool, someone once told me that Valentine's Day was not an important day and we could treat it just like any other day. And I believed her. And boy, did I learn. It is not another day. It's not another day to the other person. It's not another day to the people who know that person. Even if it is just concocted for greeting cards, it still has real social ramifications. So the holidays are real, even if they are also serving other economic purposes.

Are there any days that are widely recognized that you won't recognize? Are you trying to find like a holiday boycott? Yeah, I'm trying to find the holiday that you just... Besides April Fool's Day. That doesn't count. It's not like there are April Fool's cards or anything. Do you do Father's Day? Like, will you phone your dad on Father's Day?

Yeah, Father's Day is coming up in like a month, I think. Here's the problem, right? Is there's actually an infinite list of dumb holidays that you don't know of, right? So it's a question of like, what are the big ones that we can actually agree on? And I can't think of any real major holidays that I would fold my arms and go, no, that's ridiculous. I know people who are really anti-Thanksgiving, and I think that's dumb. It's a day to give thanks, right, guys? Like we don't have to get all upset about a whole bunch of other stuff. So the must phone home days for you are Mother's and Father's Day, presumably both your parents' birthdays, and Christmas Day and Thanksgiving.

Yeah, I would say those are the must phone home holidays. Do you phone your parents on their wedding anniversary? All right, so I wasn't going to bring it up, but this one is actually, sorry, parents. This one I feel like is slightly controversial because my parents definitely think that I should phone home on their anniversary. And for a long time, I definitely did not think this was a required phone day. Right. Because I thought like, this is a holiday for the two of you.

Yeah. This doesn't really have anything to do with me. Yeah. But I eventually, as I got older, did finally give into this. And I do now call my parents on their anniversary. It's not like it's a burden or anything. It's just like a funny thing. Like, it doesn't feel to me like that should be a required, like along with a Mother's Day,

right? It doesn't feel like it should be a children should be required to call their parents on their parents' anniversary days. But what do you think about that? I don't think you should. I think it's like their day. It's also a bit weird. Like, it's a romance day for them. Like, you know, maybe your parents are having a little kiss and a cuddle on that day. And you don't want to think about your parents doing that. That is also the other part of it is it does feel very particularly like the parents day. Kids don't need to be involved in an anniversary day. Yeah. My family's pretty casual about that sort of stuff. Anyway, we do phone on birthdays if we remember. Nice. But it's not a

guarantee and there are no like presents or cards or flowers and things like that we're just pretty laid back about that sort of stuff i do have my parents birthdays in my recurring diary now but for many many years i didn't so there's a great tradition on my parents birthdays for my sister to send me a text telling me it's the parents' birthday so that I don't forget to call. So even though I do remember now, I always get a text from my sister on my parents' birthdays. Yeah, I did the same thing with my parents' anniversaries, because particularly in college, I think I missed many a parent's anniversary to much displeasure from my parents. And eventually, like back in the day, like my super cool Palm

Pilot, I finally decided to put it in the calendar. So I would actually have a reminder of when my parents' anniversary is. Well, I'm just going to put it out there. And you know that I think your mum's great. But I think Mrs. Gray, you need to give Gray a leave pass on the anniversaries. But I know she won't, not because she thinks anniversary is important. I have no idea what she thinks about anniversaries. But I know how much she loves you and she's not going to have one less opportunity for you to call home. She's not going to relinquish it based on that alone. No, that is not going to happen. I will be genuinely curious in the Reddit to see like what the breakdown is of in families, whether or not calling on the parents anniversary is like the required day or the not required day.

Because I feel like this one is the controversial day and the responses are going to span from i don't even know my parents anniversary through to we all get together and have a massive dinner i mean i have mentioned the fact i have a stepfather which is implicit in that that my parents are divorced actually so i don't call them on their anniversary funnily enough they do get along but it would be weird if I called them both separately on their wedding anniversary. The problem with Mother's Day, of course, though, is the total panic that happens every year if you live in the UK, but your mother is in America. This is actually the whole reason I brought this up. I've kind of forgotten because we went down the rabbit hole of anniversaries. But the whole reason I brought up Mother's Day is that it's celebrated on different days all over the world and the uk is very unusual in when it

celebrates mother's day compared to everyone else the usa and australia celebrate it on the same day oh i didn't realize australia and the us do it on the same day okay they do so probably the most common day to do it and as the australia and the us do this, is the second Sunday in May. But in the UK, it is, of course, held on the fourth Sunday of Lent. Apparently, looking at the Wikipedia, apparently it's because of some old-fashioned day when, in the 16th century, Christians would go back to their mother church on that day, and that would also obviously be a time you were more likely to go and see your parents and mothers would be reunited with their children. So it somehow

relates to all that, which I kind of like in some ways, because at least there's some like traditional reason for the day. Right. At least there's some reason. In Russia, they sort of celebrate mothers on International Women's Day. And that's a really big day there. And that's another day again. So I happened to be in Russia just before the last Mother's Day there. So I was quite aware of it. And again, I was like, oh, no, is it Mother's Day? No, no, no, it's Russian Mother's Day. And then I got back and like in the UK, everyone's celebrating. Oh, no, is it Mother's Day? Basically, what I usually do on Mother's Day is I text my mum and I just say, happy Australian Mother's Day. It's actually become brilliant for me because if I ever forget,

I can use this as the ultimate excuse now. Like if I forget Australian Mother's Day, I can say, oh, sorry, it's not Mother's Day where I am and vice versa. So which day? I mean, I presume the answer you're going to say is it should be celebrated on the day of the country that your mother is in. Yeah, I think you need to celebrate it where the mother is. Yeah.

Particularly, like having the UK ahead of time, I don't think that works very well. Because if you call your mother a month before, in her mind, it's Mother's Day, I think there's no amount of talking you can do which will convince the mother, oh, this is a Mother's Day call. It's like, nope, you're just making a sunday call and it happens to be mother's day

where you the child are but not where the mother is right i think then you fast forward a month later and it's actually mother's day wherever the mother is you're gonna have a sad mother who feels like her child has not called her on a mother's day i don't think this is an obligation that you can get out of the way because also it's about showing off to the other mothers, isn't it? Well, this is exactly it, right? It's entirely about, oh, did your child call you today? Right? And then they want to be able to say yes, right? And saying, oh, my child called me a month ago. I don't think that really counts it in mother competition. Like, I don't think that helps at all. So no, this is not what this is. I would love to sit in the room with your mum and like her friends when her friends say to her, oh, what's your son doing these days? I would love to hear how she answers that.

Like, oh yeah, he lives in England and he like makes videos on YouTube like once every few months and plays video games and stuff. Is that how you think my mom would answer that, Brady? Well, if she's being honest, yes. Is that what you think the answer is? No, I'm sure you're like some successful filmmaker in London. He's a London filmmaker, don't you know? And they're like, don't lie to us, Mrs. Gray.

We've seen him streaming Truck Simulator. Okay, Brady, do you remember a long time ago, we talked about what happens when people ask me what I do? Do you remember this conversation? Will you be upset if I say I don't? Nope, not at all. I don't remember. Okay, so along in the annals of Hello Internet, probably one of the very, very first shows we did, I mentioned how I really don't like to talk about my work with other people, which you found very surprising. But it's like, I am constantly and even still to this day, I have not found a good answer. I am always trying to find the most boring, but still truthful way I can possibly describe my job to another person. I appreciate that more now than I used to. I'm like that too now.

Oh, really? To the point where it irritates my wife a bit. We'll be at some fancy dinner with high-flying people, and they'll ask what I'll do. And I'll just really downplay it and make it sound as uninteresting as possible. And then later on, she'll be like, oh, why do you do that? I'm really proud of what you do. Why don't you? And I'm like, oh. Can I ask what happened there? What changed with that? I don't know. I think maybe I got a bit sick of talking about it. I don't know. If I can do a diversion to our diversion. Please do. Please do. I had a very funny thing happen the other day, actually. I was at like an event where there was a comedian and he was like, you know, picking on people in the

audience and stuff like that. And this opportunity came about for me to call out and like sort of respond to something he said. And like, look, I'm going to brag. I like owned him. Like I saw an opportunity and I took it and like, I got a big ovation for how good it was. And like, even the comedian said you're my kind of heckler it was like this amazing moment that just presented itself and I took it like you know those those moments in life where you think oh I wish I'd thought to say that or do that like you know a week later this was one of the few moments where it just came to my head at the moment and like I did it and it was brilliant I want to get on record here as well I can totally

believe that this happened like that you're not spinning a tale about how I was like, I can believe that in a comedy club, you saw an opening that got you a standing ovation. Because I have told you many times, and I think you always deflect this compliment, like, I am always so impressed by your quick wit, like that is by far and away, one of the things I am like the most envious of with you is like you just have some of the quickest wit of anybody I know sometimes. So I can believe that you owned a situation in a comedy club and got an ovation from the crowd. Thank you very much. I didn't get a standing ovation, but it was a standing ovation. That's the way it happens. Okay. So

I had my moment and then the comedian says, like, he's obviously going to start up on me. And it did center around the fact I was Australian. So then he then said, so do you have a job? And I kind of went, yes. Like, you know, in a funny way, as if everyone knew I was about to get picked on. And this is a comedian who obviously has like a response for any job I'm going to say. Exactly. So then he says to me, what's your job?

And I said, I make YouTube videos. And he had absolutely nothing to say exactly so then he says to me what's your job and i said i make youtube videos and he had absolutely nothing to say except he said oh i wouldn't mind talking to you later and then he just got on with his gig there's nowhere to go with it it's such a bizarre thing and i think maybe that goes back to the question we were talking about why don't i talk about it is because it opens such a weird can of worms and it could go down so many paths that I don't know where it will go that sometimes I'm in the mood for it and I want to talk about my work and I'll get really into it.

I'm not like a recluse. But most of the time I just think it's just not worth it. They're going to ask me lots of questions and then they're going to ask me more questions and that's going to be the next 10 minutes. And the answers I give them are going to force them to ask more questions even they don't want to ask oh really what do you make youtube videos about oh like science and mathematics and stuff and straight away where like i've pulled someone into a conversation about like science

and math i don't always shut it down but i shut it down more than I used to. And I can see why you would too, you know, especially you, because you've got the same problem as me and you're less comfortable with awkward conversations. Yeah. And I just don't like talking about it. And it is always just a weird situation. I still have not come up with an answer that I feel is comfortably truthful, yet adequately boring. Like I am constantly searching for the perfect way to describe it. So every time somebody asked me what I do, I end up just sounding like an idiot who doesn't even know what he does for a living. And I just kind of stumble through it. And that does work because I don't get any follow up

questions. But I feel like it leaves a really bad impression. But I never want to lie and just say something like, oh, I'm a data analyst for a boring company. No, no, you can't lie. I have found it works quite well to say, oh, I make YouTube videos. And if they want to know more, I really like, what do you do? I say, oh, they're kind of on like nerdy stuff, like mathematics and science. And they're surprisingly popular. Lots of people watch them. So I'm able to do it as my job. Yeah. I mean, maybe I'll just say I'm a professional live streamer. Yeah. So anyway, how does your mom answer that question? My mom, a long time ago, when my career was just getting started, was very proud to tell people what I was doing. So she would say like, oh, he makes these videos on the internet.

But as time has gone on, I think she has run into the same thing that you do of just like, I don't want to get into this conversation. It gets old real fast. And so what I love is my mother's answer now, which I do think is like, true enough for the crowd of people that she's talking to, is my mom says, oh, he works for Google, right? And that's like, end of conversation. Apparently, in my mother's circles, that is like, adequately prestigious, but also has zero follow up questions that come afterward, right? Because like, nobody wants to know what he does working for Google. And I feel like, well, I do get like paychecks from Google, from Google AdSense.

So it's not an unreasonable answer. That's my mom's answer. She doesn't actually talk about what I do. She just says I work for Google. I do get a bit frustrated in some ways, though, by a similar problem. And that is when I left the BBC, my main channels I were doing were periodic videos and 60 symbols. I still do them, but other things have, you know, come along since. Yeah. But I was going to say, those are still your two biggest, right? No, no. Numberphile. Oh, sorry. Yeah, of course. Of course. But yeah, they're like big channels. Yeah, they're big channels. And they're obviously collaborations with the University of Nottingham. They're like my thing. Like, you know, I'm completely independent and I own them and

it's just a collaboration with those scientists. But, i film them a lot at the uni with those people and everyone i worked with at the bbc when i left the bbc to become like full-time youtube just assumed i'd gone to work for the university like you know as their like pr filmmaker or something and like the university has a whole pr department and it drives me crazy because still every time I go back to the BBC, they'll all say, oh, how are you doing? It's good to see you again, Brady. Are you still working for the University of Nottingham? I'm like, no, I never bloody worked for the University of Nottingham.

So that does drive me a bit crazy because I quite value my independence. So the thought that I'm working in the PR team at a big institution, that would be a job that I would not like to do. So to think that loads of my former colleagues think that is the job that I do do is a little bit frustrating. And do you know what? I usually will just say yes. So that's how much I don't want to bother explaining the situation.

I'll go, yeah, yeah, I'm still there. I'll sometimes say I don't technically work for them actually, but I still do lots of stuff with them and they're great and i love the university right right there you go no follow-up questions i mean this whole thing is tied up to this weird idea of like how we are so identified with our jobs in the modern world like i think that's part of why it's like it's always like weird uncomfortable area sometimes when i'm meeting new people i do like to try to play a little game to keep evenings more interesting, at least in my head, which is the don't ask the other person what they do game. I can see how long you can go in a conversation before you ask the other person what it is that they do.

Right. And it can sometimes be surprisingly hard. And it's just interesting because every once in a while I will also run into someone else who is like i think you're running the same game like i think you're running the don't ask me what i do game either it's just a little bit interesting and it's a thing that i sometimes like to try to do in a social situation is not ask the obvious question straight away i wonder if any of your mum's friends or like all of her friends, like know what you do,

like, you know, you're a YouTuber or like, you know, they listen to Hello Internet and they either think that your mum's like a pathological liar or like a fantasist or they think that you're lying to her and like she doesn't know. And like, they're all huge Hello Internet fans. And when your mum leaves, they go,

oh, that poor thing, she doesn't even know about the podcast. Why is Grey lying to her? It's very possible. It's very possible. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by our good friends at Backblaze, who should be your good friends too. Backblaze is the unlimited cloud backup for Macs and PCs for just $5 a month. Backblaze will back up all of your documents, your music, your photos, your videos,

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back up all of your stuff. They can restore your files at any time. You can just log on to their website and download the files that you need at any point if you've messed up anything. But maybe you have some kind of enormous data disaster. Maybe you have literally terabytes that you have lost. What happens then? Well, Backblaze will ship you a little hard drive with all of your data on it, encrypted, safe, only accessible by you once it arrives in the mail. This is a fantastic service that I have actually used. I ran into one of those perfect storm situations where I had a huge drive full of files and Time Machine was just silently failing on actually backing those up. And then the external drive failed on me.

I would have totally panicked, except for the fact that I had Backblaze. I logged onto their site. I said, you guys need to ship me a drive right now. It came so quickly. It was safely encrypted. Everything that had been on my external drive was there. It was such a huge relief for a thing that would have been a huge disaster otherwise. I'm using that hard drive right now. Actually, it's connected to my computer that I'm using for a few things. But if you don't even want an external drive, you can ship it back to them for a full refund. So please, please, if you don't have it, go to backblaze.com slash hellointernet. This lets Backblaze know that you came from our website and it gives you a fully featured 15-day free trial. Once again, that's backblaze.com slash hellointernet.

Unlimited backup, $5 a month. Access your files anywhere. Restore them all at any time. Seriously. Gray's telling you here. Back up your stuff. Backblaze.com slash hellointernet. So, Gray, I haven't done Brady's paper cuts for a while.

And I know people enjoy them. And it does occur to me that, like, I don't mind a bit of a whinge. Right. And you basically accused me of being a grump last episode. Did I? I don't think I did. Well, you kind of did. No, surely not.

So instead of a paper cut, I'm going to do Brady's paper love this week and talk about something that always makes me feel happy and warms my heart. Just a little, little thing in life, like a paper cut, just one of the little things in life, except this has the exact opposite effect on it. And it always makes me proud to be a human. Paper love. That's what you're going with? It's a Brady's paper love. I can't think of like the opposite of a paper cut.

You know where I'm coming from. I know where you're coming from. All right. Okay. And this is, and it happened to me the other day, you're driving along, I was driving along the back roads and lanes and, you know, amongst all the traffic of the UK. And then like you hear an ambulance and an ambulance is like coming up behind you in the distance. And all of a sudden, all the drivers like unite

in this mad scramble to drive up onto the sidewalks and pull in side lanes and pull over and do everything they can to get out the way of the ambulance. And suddenly like all bets are off, all the rules of the road are off and no one cares about who's in front of anyone else anymore or what we're doing. All we have to do is help this ambulance get through and save a life. And we all pull over and like go into weird angles and the ambulance goes blazing past and then we all regroup and try and get back onto the road and continue driving.

And for those like few seconds, we were all heroes helping save a life and we were all united and for a few seconds we were unselfish and didn't just care about what we were doing and where we were going we all cared about something else and it always makes me feel warm you feel like a hero when you pull out of the way of the ambulance brady yeah i do and also you feel a bit like edgy because you're like driving in a way you're not supposed to and people were driving on the wrong side of the road and also you know you can do anything you want as long as you save the life i love it i love it i think it is the law that an ambulance radiates a traffic violation free zone of 200 meters around it in every direction as it's barreling along i think that's the way that works right like no one's going to give you a ticket for that kind

of stuff how would they know though if you like ran a red light, like you had to break a red light to get out the way or something to let an ambulance through, is there some automated way for them to know that that was okay? The running of that red light? Yeah. That's an interesting question with like the automated intersections. Yeah. I don't know. I'm sure people will know, but. Someone has to have been in that situation of getting a ticket for crossing a red light to get out of the way of an ambulance. This has to have happened somewhere in an automated system. I would be willing to bet that there is no town or local government that wouldn't overturn that ticket if they had a record of the ambulance going through at that moment.

That sounds like a lot of work for me to write a letter in and say, actually, this is what I was doing. And for them to go and like, check the records. Oh, actually, there was an ambulance that probably had to go that way that day because there was this, you know, it seems like a lot of faffing. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be some faffing. I think it's also going to be very rare, but I think it's going to have happened. Also, if you don't want to write a letter to the council, I'll remind you of the time that you severely packaged up whatever the hell it was, two pence, to send to that company that you need to pay every once in a while. You know, you're a man who could do some faffing.

Great, I'm trying to sound not grumpy for a minute here. You didn't have to bring that up again. No, Brady, I don't mean to grumpify you. Everybody loves a happy Brady. Nobody loves a grumpy Brady complaining about things. That's not fun for anybody at all. I know you don't drive in the UK, but you do drive in the States occasionally. Do you enjoy that when you get to do some cool jumping out the way of the ambulance action and be a hero?

As always with these things, Brady, I am charmed by the way your mind just works differently. I find it really charming that you're thinking of yourself as a hero when you do this, that you're getting like a thrill of excitement for pulling out of the way. I don't actually think I'm a hero, but what I feel is like a camaraderie that we're all pulling in to help. Like I don't think like I've saved a life, but I do feel this camaraderie with my fellow drivers that we've all pulled together for a common cause and suddenly we've all been linked together and we're all doing a good thing. But the thing is, Brady, my view of this is like, obviously, of course, it's great that everybody does this, but it's like a tit for tat thing in society.

We all do this because we also want other people to do this when we're in the ambulance. Yeah, of course. Right? That's why this works. That's how this is happening. That's funny, actually. I never think about the fact there could be a person in the ambulance. Yeah, of course. Right. That's why this works. That's how this is happening. That's funny, actually. I never think about the fact there could be a person in the ambulance. It's always my assumption the ambulance is going to the place where the emergency is. And I'm probably right more than I'm wrong, because if they've got the lights on and stuff, they probably haven't got the person yet. Because normally when the person's in the ambulance and they're treating them, they don't drive so fast. It's like less dire because they're already treating the person and

although i'm going to say that's a distinction without a difference though because you still need to get the ambulance there yeah yeah of course yeah yeah no it's just interesting that you thought there was like a sick person in there and in your sort of made-up version in your head and mine was the opposite i guess that's why again one of these things i never really thought about but it does make sense that they can be a little bit more relaxed on the way back to the hospital as opposed to the way out of the hospital well they probably also don't want to go swinging around, barreling around corners and stuff when there's like... Yeah, when there's like an old lady who's fallen down the stairs

in the back of the ambulance. Right, yeah. It's like, we got to go to the hospital as fast as possible. Like, drive like a maniac over those speed bumps. It's like, no, it's probably not a good idea. I know a lot of ambulance drivers listen to Hello Internet, which doesn't surprise me because it's a job I imagine with a lot of sitting around downtime. Yeah, almost certainly there's a lot of downtime with that. All the

ambulance drivers out there listening to Hello Internet, thank you for what you do. Thank you for keeping all these people alive. Thank you. Tweet Grey if you're in an ambulance. Nope, do not tweet Grey if you're in an ambulance. That is not what I want. Grey, I've been spending more and more time in London lately for various work reasons. And I was there for a few days recently, as you know, because we saw each other. But I had to get a few Ubers and cabs around the place. And I'm really struggling with black cabs versus Ubers. You did mention last episode or a couple episodes ago

that you were falling out of love with Uber. And I found this an interesting little throwaway Brady comment. So I was kind of wondering what's going on with that. Well, this is more of a London thing in this particular context. I was talking about America when I was talking about that. And I do mainly still use Uber in the States. But in London, I'm now not sure which is the best way to go, Black Cab or Uber,

because I'm having good and bad experiences with each. And the main thing that it centers around, the main difference is Black Cab drivers know where they're going. And that is a very important skill in London more so than other cities all the little shortcuts all the little what do they call it the knowledge and things like that those little things matter in London more than almost any other city you can drive in and most Uber drivers just sort of follow their sat nav they don't know where they're going I swear they would drive into the Thames if their phone told them to like they just follow where they're supposed to go and they go there and it results in some really

slow journeys and roundabout ways of getting places whereas black cab drivers like they'll see a little traffic jam ahead and they know if they go down that lane and turn left and do a right and cut through the park they'll get somewhere twice as quick they know the layout of london better and sometimes that's very advantageous i'd be surprised if you could question that that seems to be the case to me on the other hand black cab drivers can be absolute arses and if they decide they do or don't want to go somewhere or do something that's it they don't care about customer service an uber driver will take you where you got to go because they've got to get

their money and not get in trouble from Uber. A black cab driver might just look at a traffic jam ahead and go, oh, I can't be doing with that and just kick you out of the car. Have you had that happen? I have had that happen. I've been in cars where they've said, oh, this is going to take for ages. I think you just get out now. The other day though, I was at Paddington. I was staying at Paddington next to Paddington train station and I needed to get across to another part of town. The driver went a certain way where he thought he would be able to cut through a park. It turns out there were roadworks and he got diverted and then he got caught in a jam and he went down a lane

and he took all these twisty turns. There was 15 pounds on the fare the meter we turned a corner and we were back at paddington station where the trip started i said to him i'm getting out now and getting the tube and he said yeah that's probably a good idea and still took my money i mean look i mean this this is the thing brady you said oh i can't deny that the knowledge of all of these tiny little London streets is valuable. It's like, yeah, I know what you mean by that. But that exact situation that you just described is the thing that I think people don't account for, which is taxi cab drivers. They can't possibly know what the situation is on all the little side streets. And if they're turning off on some side street, like they can't know what construction is occurring or what roads are shut down, like that's not going to happen. When I'm in an Uber, there's a little

thing that I learned about the driving directions on Uber from one of the drivers, which I found really interesting. So if I get in an Uber, and I see that the driver is not using their sat nav, which enough of them do. And this seems to be actually a former taxi cab driver kind of thing, like a guy who used to drive for something else and has gone for Uber. That always makes me nervous, right? Because it's like, here's a guy who's just going to try to drive across the city using whatever in his head. And I never I never want them to do that. But what they are allowed to do is somewhere within the app, they have a setting where they can tell Uber which of the various mapping services they want Uber to use to get them from point A to point B.

So they can say like, oh, I want to use Apple Maps or I want to use Google Maps or I want to use Waze. I wish in Uber, I had a setting where I could just say, listen, Uber driver, when you pick me up, I know you might think you know a better way, but could you just use Google Maps? Just use Google Maps. They do the live traffic stuff. They check every few minutes to see if there's a faster way. They're crowdsourcing all the data on the road so they know exactly how all the roads are doing right at this very moment. Just use that. Like, I don't want you to use your human judgment about what you think should happen.

I want you to use the collective knowledge and automatically updated information that something like Google Maps has. Don't use Apple Maps because they don't do that same thing. It's just going to drive you down the same busy streets all the time. I wish like I could force the driver

to use Google Maps from my end, as opposed to either trying to use his own brain or trying to use a worse mapping service. I mean, I can't comment on Google Maps versus Apple Maps. And I know about controversies and opinions. And I'll take your word for it that Google Maps is loads better. That would make sense to me. And I also don't know what devices some of the Uber drivers

I've experienced were using. Maybe none of them were using Google Maps. But I do think London can be a bit of an exception. And I do think sometimes a little bit of common sense, like just a human looking out the window, can override what even the best app is telling them to do. Because I've been times where I've going somewhere and the place we're heading is in front of us and I can see it in the clear roads in front of us and suddenly they'll veer off down some side street

because an app told them to. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like, we were nearly there. And, you know, the apps are getting better and better, but sometimes a human does kind of know stuff that maybe the app doesn't know or can't see or hasn't updated yet. But I respect what you're saying. And I see both sides of this. And I do get a bit frustrated

by Uber drivers in London. I think they make silly, silly decisions. I think they're like, you know, do whatever the computer says. And I don't always think that's the best. Yeah, that's exactly what I want. Do whatever the computer says. Okay, so speaking of London, I would like to register on this podcast a formal complaint with the city government of London. Because you're not going to talk about rubbish again, are you? We've learned our lesson, Brady. There's some topics that we should probably avoid on this podcast.

The news, rubbish collection. These are things that are just too intense to be discussed about. Let's just stick to politics and religion. No garbage, no news. But I was in central London the other day. And in particular, I was at a place where just for the circumstances of life, I haven't been in probably years, which is Trafalgar Square. I suddenly realized like, oh, I used to be in this area all the time. And for whatever reason, like some of the patterns in Square. Yeah. I suddenly realized like, oh, I used to be in this area all the time. And for whatever reason, like some of the patterns in my life changed.

I just hadn't been there for forever. And I was walking around. If you ask people to name places in London, Trafalgar Square has got to be in the top three of like places they can name, you know, for tourist stuff. And boy, was I disappointed with the way that Trafalgar Square is set up now? Because here's the thing. Trafalgar Square now has little signs everywhere that are all about safety. They're all about telling you what you can't do. So if you ever see footage of Trafalgar Square, like olden days footage of Trafalgar Square, there are probably three things that you're going to identify as the fun things in Trafalgar Square,

why it would be a tourist attraction. Number one, enormous flocks of pigeons everywhere. Now, years ago, they got rid of the pigeons, which I can sort of be okay with, like I can kind of understand wanting to get rid of the pigeons, which I can sort of be okay with. Like I can kind of understand wanting to get rid of the pigeons, but there's no pigeons there anymore. The other two things, the things that remained in Trafalgar Square were people playing in the fountains and people climbing on the lions. Yep. Okay. But now in Trafalgar Square, there are signs everywhere, everywhere telling you you're not allowed in the fountains and you're not allowed on the lions.

You're not allowed on the lions anymore. Yeah, there's a big sign that says don't sit on the lion, right? In each fountain, there are four signs telling you you're not allowed in the fountains. And there's a security guy who was admittedly half-heartedly, but nonetheless still doing it, telling people to get off the lions at Trafalgar Square. Is that the same person who has the job of telling you to be quiet and not take photos in the Sistine Chapel? Yeah, maybe. Like, I honestly kind of felt bad for the guy. He did seem to be real half-hearted about it but here's the thing so it's like okay i'm standing in trafalgar square and i was just

like this place is now kind of awful because all of the things that were interesting you're not supposed to do anymore it's like okay you got rid of the pigeons whatever but if you also get rid of the other two things then there's just nothing here, right? Then what it is, is it's actually just this like barren area of concrete for the most part that has no real interest. Like I was standing there looking at like, why would any tourist actually come to see Trafalgar Square at this point? It's just mostly concrete. Yeah, I guess you got to cut through it to get to the nice art galleries, but that's

about it really. That's exactly it. And the other thing is like is like okay so all of these things you can't do but what you can do is be a really low effort cheap busker right in front of the art galleries yeah right yeah so i'm staying there in trafalgar square and no joke, I'm counting, there are one, two, three of those floating Yoda guys sitting in front of the art gallery. Yeah. Right? They're everywhere, those things.

Yeah. But there are three of them within eyesight of each other. Floating Yoda guys. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about. You know exactly what I mean. The guy, they're all doing that stupid cheap trick where like for a split second, it looks like they're floating until you realize, oh, right, they're floating above a platform and they have a staff that goes down to the platform and the staff is just holding them up, right, with a rig around their back. It's like, yeah, it takes a child two seconds. Like, why do people give these guys money? Right? I don't understand why three of them are allowed. It's like, the thing that drives me crazy about it is like, it's Trafalgar Square. There's nothing to goddamn do here now.

There's the National Art Gallery, like just a big, incredibly impressive art gallery. And right in front of it, it's just like you've planted an enormous turd of like, here's just three cheapo buskers who are standing here. There's also another busker, which was, I'm sure, a properly licensed minion from that stupid movie, just standing around. The thing that bothered me more as well is like, okay, so they have these stupid busker guys. There's also the people who are then just like drawing on the sidewalk as well. People who are like doing artwork on the sidewalk. And one of them, I looked down and I was like, oh, okay, this is mildly interesting. This guy is doing all of the flags of the world, right?

In front of a Yoda. So it's like left-hand side of Trafalgar Square, there's a Yoda. And in front of him is this guy drawing all these flags. It's like, okay, well, at least this guy is putting some effort into it. He's doing a bunch of flags. It's kind of like an interesting thing to do. It's interesting to look at. That's fine. I walked to the other end of the square past one Yoda. And then when I get to the final Yoda,

who's on the opposite side, guess what's in front of him? A guy doing flags, the exact same goddamn thing, like the same flags in the same order. And it's like, you're not even like a whole bunch of individual buskers doing your own thing. You're now like these charity harassers that always come in pairs, right? Because they know they're going to get you depending on which side the street you're coming from yeah so all of these things together turned trafalgar square to me into just like this boring depressing ugly cheap feeling area filled with signs telling you what not to do and also just filled with the junkiest, minimal effort begging for money entertainment in front of a world-class art gallery there could possibly be. I just sent you

an iMessage, a couple of the photos that I took. The do not climb on the lion sign is very bespoke. That is the Trafalgar Square lion, right? Like they want to make it really clear that you're not supposed to climb on that lion. They should make those signs and put them around safari parks in Africa too. Yes, there would be genuinely more advisable not to climb on the lion. That would be a really bad idea. But it bothers me as well because if you look at these pictures, I'll put them in the show notes, the signs are not just signs, they're like big placards. They're like everywhere. There's so many of them. And they're very like brutal in their design. Yeah, they're very brutal in their design. In addition to every sign telling you not to do

something, so don't feed the pigeons, which is a sign that's like the size of a small child just dispersed all over this concrete expanse. On the back of every one of them, there's a gigantic CCTV in operation with a camera that's like looking down upon you on the crowd. It's like they're trying to make this place the most unfriendliest location in the whole of the city. It's like wherever you look, it's don't feed the pigeons, don't get on the lions, don't get in the fountains. And by the way, we're watching you with cameras all the time. If you were put in charge of Trafalgar Square for 24 hours and you could do what you want and change what you wanted, what would you do to improve the place? I'd bring back everything now.

You'd start a pigeon breeding program. Yeah, I swear to God I would, right? I loved the pigeons when I was there. That was my favorite thing when I was a tourist, was taking pictures of like my girlfriend getting attacked by pigeons. Yeah, everybody did that. Like, I remember it. It was really fun when I first came to the city and the pigeons were here. You're walking through Trafalgar Square and you always felt like a little bit like you're taking your life into your own hands, right? With these huge swarms of pigeons going all over the place. But it was great. It was a notable, memorable, like fun thing for tourists to do is

like, oh yeah, you go to Trafalgar Square and there's a swarm of pigeons like you're going to see nowhere else in the world. Again, I was okay with getting rid of the pigeons, but that was like under the implied assumption that like, oh, people could still play in the pigeons but that was like under the implied assumption that like oh people could still play in the fountains and climb on the lions right but if you take away everything now i feel like the hell with it it's health and safety gone mad i tell you it makes me angry like and it makes me want to call for people to just be like this like climb the lions right like when you go to trafalgar square like get on the goddamn lion right great i want you to go there this week and take a picture of yourself up on the lion.

Put it in the show notes. Like Brady, here's the thing. I did go on the lion. You climbed up on the lion? Yeah, I did. I only have a picture from the back, but it's like, look, I got up on the thing and I took a picture from the back of the lion and I'm like, the hell with this. Like, screw you with your signs. I waited for the little guard guy to walk away, but I'm like, I'm still going to go on this thing. You're giving it a while. I'm like, ah, stop this. I'm doing it. But not until the guard goes on his break. I'm no fool. I like, I want to call for people to climb the lions. I want to call for people to go

to the pools. And you know what it makes you want to do? It makes me want to buy bread and spread it all over the whole center of the place. Bring the pigeons back. It really does. Like all of these signs, it's too far. It's unreasonable. It makes me angry. And it makes me feel like engaging in civil disobedience and calling upon the whole of the audience to engage in civil disobedience at Trafalgar Square. All right. Do you disagree, Brady?

Do you think it's reasonable to say you can't climb on the lions? I think you should be allowed to climb on the lions. I can't believe you're not allowed to. I think you should be allowed to climb on the lines. I can't believe you're not allowed to. I think you should be allowed to go in the fountain. I don't know if you should whip up a frenzy of civil disobedience. And I think maybe we should campaign for the laws to change or the bylaws or the rules or the regulation or whatever they've done. Well, that sounds like a lot less fun and a lot more work.

Yeah. Would you be willing to retweet people who take photos of themselves on the line if it's date stamped after the date of this podcast? I'm not signing up to retweet everybody in the universe here, Brady. The first 10? The first 10 people who do it? If I see some interesting acts of Trafalgar Square civil disobedience, I will be sure to promote them. Do you know what I want to see the Tims do? I want to see them get a picture of someone sitting on a line on the Wikipedia page for Trafalgar Square. Lock that page down. Oh, Brady, I wish you wouldn't call for these constant messing arounds with the Wikipedia.

By the way, the Black Stump is on the page, last I checked. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Yeah, sanity has prevailed. What is the listed source for Mighty Black Stump? Is it the podcast? There's this page, this emporous page, which does stuff to do with skyscrapers and buildings and stuff.

And it was referred to on that. So that's what they're using. I'm very happy for you, Brady. Thank you. That it's listed as the Mighty Black Stump. It would be gone by the end of this segment. We can trust the audience, right? They will protect the mighty black stump on that

page they don't know not mighty just black stuff the mighty black stump that's what i said they'll protect that on the page just as it should be and that's fantastic this episode has been brought to you by squarespace make your next move online with squarespace whether that's launching a new website an online shop blog portfolio maybe a podcast or maybe some other crazy idea that's launching a new website, an online shop, blog, portfolio, maybe a podcast, or maybe some other crazy idea that's been in your head for a while and you just want to see it released into the wild. Within minutes, you can have a domain sorted and a website created, and it can be there for all the world to see. And I'm not kidding, you really can do it within minutes, thanks to Squarespace's easy to use interface and tools. It's almost scary how quick and easy it is. The first time I created a website with

Squarespace, I didn't actually believe it and I kind of had to go to another computer just to convince myself the website had come into existence so quickly. Squarespace has a great range of ready to use templates for whatever look you want want but they're all customizable to give them your personal touch and they all scale perfectly onto computer screens and tablets and mobile phones. You don't have to faff around with that. I use Squarespace every day for my own websites including my blog and it has my 100% endorsement. I mean obviously this is like a paid sponsorship but I recommend Squarespace to people all the time just in my day-to-day dealings. It takes running a website from being a bit of a pain in the backside to quite a painless and

almost pleasurable experience. You really can just focus on the nice creative stuff and not get driven crazy by all that technical minutiae if that's not something you want to be dealing with. To give it a go, visit squarespace.com slash hello. And then when you're asked for a code, use hello, and you're going to get 10% off your first purchase. That's squarespace.com slash hello, and the code hello. That also lets them know you're a Tim, and it gets a little star put next to our name as a podcast. But no matter what you do, if you want an online presence, and I don't know what you're doing, if you don't think you'll benefit from some sort of online home, then

Squarespace is going to be your saviour. Our thanks to them for supporting the podcast. Speaking of Wikipedia, it has been drawn to my attention from a few Wikipedia editors, that there's a bit of a kerfuffle happening over on the nail and gear page. Apparently, there's a bit of a fight as to whether or not Wikipedia has the right to use that image, whether or not it is in the public domain. Because on our show where we talked about the flag a long time ago, I made some comments that sounded vaguely like the public domain, but I didn't actually say the words, the public domain. I said something like, the nail and gear flag belongs to the people. But so I just want to get it on record here for

Wikipedia editors and Tim's everywhere citizens of the podcast that the hello internet flag the official flag is in the public domain that's the nail and gear that is the nail and gear yeah there's no other flag there's no other confusion that could possibly happen here just to be clear but not the hi logo you're saying like here's actually where i want to go with this right there's like we'll get to this in a second. The nail and gear is in the public domain. You can make your own flags. You can do whatever you want with this. Because I feel like, just like national flags, I think most national flags, if not all national flags, are in the public domain. The citizens can do what they want with them. I know for sure that

the United States flag is in that case. That's absolutely great. I want to put it here on the record. It was born of the people for the people. Who are we to even be giving our permission? That's exactly my feeling of this, right? Is this like, this is of the community for the community. And so it would feel really wrong for us to say like, oh, thank you community for gifting us with this flag. We will now have copyright over it for the life of the creators plus 70 years,

right? Like it would just seem wrong. But if you want to make a video of yourself reacting to the flag, that's a whole other thing. And you got to take that up with the Fine Brothers. Here's the thing, Brady. So I want to get that on record for the Wikipedia. I'm almost hesitant to do it because I feel like I have been coming up against very recently another kind of tale in the world of freebooting and using other people's intellectual property that I don't quite know how to deal with. Yeah. quite know how to deal with. And one of those things is actually related to exactly what you brought up before, which is, I've seen people making freebooted bootleg Hello Internet merchandise under this exact premise of, oh, the nail and gear is in the public domain. So everything they do on the podcast,

they must be cool with people just making whatever they want from it. Taking the logo and using it on other stuff, taking things that we've said and using it on merchandise or in posters or in all kinds of things. I feel like it's very hard to make it clear that it's like this one thing is in the public domain. But that doesn't mean the whole of the podcast is just like free for people to use for commercial purposes. And the thing that is on top of this, which I want to know if you have gotten any emails like this, Brady, because I feel like I have gotten a whole bunch of these in the past month, which is an email along these lines. Someone takes something either from my videos or from the podcasts, they're freebooting it in some manner, or they're making merchandise and selling it in some manner. And I get an email that says this. Oh, hey, CGP Grey,

I have made some merchandise with your intellectual property, or I have re-uploaded your videos to some other site, or I have re-dubbed your videos with my own voice. If you're not okay with this, please just let me know and I'll take it down. I hate that. Do you get these? Do you get these? Yes, yes. Okay. I mean, I get more along the lines of saying, you know, can I revoice all your videos with my

Italian voice and re-upload them to YouTube? Which like, they think that would just be fine, which it isn't. But yeah, you must engage with me and have a conversation with me if you want to stop me infringing upon you is terrible. It's interesting because I haven't seen this before, but just in the past couple months, like I have suddenly gotten a whole bunch of these. This feels to me like the new copyright not intended, where people are like, oh, permission implied, right? Unless you tell me otherwise. And if you think you're going to get a response from Gray, God, join the queue. I know, right?

It's like you're putting the burden on the person from whom you are infringing on in the first place. It feels like it's a double insult. And it almost feels like it's a triple insult because it's like this facade of politeness. Like, oh, hey, I just want to let you know I'm using your words and your artwork to make some money for myself. But if that's not cool with you guys, just let me know and I'll be sure to take it down immediately.

Yeah. It feels like some people out there feel like they figured out some kind of legal loophole, right? Which is like, oh, if he doesn't get back to me, then it's all above board because he had a possibility to get back to me so i agree there are two things one is there's that legal loophole thing and the other thing is if it's a bit more fanny it was like an attempt to at least you know have a conversation with you but yeah it drives me crazy i completely 100 agree with you and it can work the other way too this sort of uh hoping that silence will mean you get away with something. I got really badly freebooted by Mail Online again recently. Surprise, surprise.

And I've been like, I sent them a bunch of emails. Like I always kick up a fuss with them and they always end up having to concede and either make a payment or do some sort of action. But what they do now is they just don't reply to your emails. And then eventually you send so many, they reply and say, okay, yep, I'll get back to you this on shortly and then they'll just ignore you again for like weeks and weeks so every few weeks i have to just keep emailing them and they're just

it's hoping that something will just like slide by because there's so much stuff now and it works same way i'm sure so much of your stuff is getting stolen and exploited and that that you almost can't monitor it all so they're just hoping stuff will slip through the cracks. And they'll have this little on the record paper trial as well that, oh, I did try to speak to him at least. That's the thing that frustrates me. And I feel like I want to bring it up because there's two things I think are happening here. It's like, that are a little bit related. And it's the, the flag belongs to the people for Hello Internet, then somehow gets expanded to everything is a-okay. And then I think the other thing that you and I are probably both victim to is this, oh, you're making things in the field of education. So we're all in the business of spreading around knowledge, right? Like you wouldn't be against

spreading around knowledge. So you don't mind if I take all of your videos and redub them and just spread the word, like I'm doing you a favor, like I'm promoting your stuff. And you just let me know if for some personal reason, that's not okay with you. But otherwise, I'll keep doing this thing that benefits me, that has this like, skirt of decency, like, oh, but I'm just doing it for education. That's the thing that bothers me. It feels like, like decency of like oh but i'm just doing it for education that's the thing that bothers me it's like it feels like like an assumption like an expanse of permission or like a disregard of category so this also this leaking of implied consent also like makes me more wary than i should be because like, like, for example, if someone emails me and says,

you know, I'm doing a presentation to my school class this week and I want to show your video as part of it just like, you know, on the screen before I do my talk. Like, you know, who's going to object to that? I wouldn't object to that. You wouldn't object to that. That's just a thing. But I won't send them an email back saying yeah that's fine

because then they've got an email from me saying they have permission to use my video and then they go oh i'm i'm gonna upload it to youtube as well and then suddenly they can point to this like email i've sent where i've said you can use the video so unless i have to write this draconian email to some school kid saying you can use it once and only once and you cannot upload it anywhere and like have to put all these like Trafalgar Square style regulations on my email. Right. I can't just say to like a school kid, yeah, okay. Because like, then it's like, you've said yes. And what else does that mean? Maybe this is the problem that's happened with nailing gear as well. You gave an inch and they take a mile. I have been in that exact situation, actually, which is earlier in my career when

people are making totally reasonable requests like that. Like, oh, hey, I want to use one of your videos in a not commercial way, privately, like within my school. And I'm like, yeah, it's totally fine. Like, who would say no to that, right? Who would say no to that? And then I've later found my videos being used in educational software being sold on a commercial level to schools. And they point back to like, oh, you said it was okay to use your videos in school. It's like, oh, great. Like, I have had that exact thing happen to me where it's like, oh, no, you gave consent. You said it was okay here. And now we have to have some argument over my exact wording, like in an email that I thought was for one thing and was not for another thing. It is this like unfortunate situation where it feels like it's

kind of ruined for everyone because then I'm in a position where I can't say yes to reasonable things because I've had that held against me in the past. It just makes it feel bad all around. And I just really don't like these people who think they're getting around the system by writing you a letter to let you know that you're okay with a thing unless you say no. It makes me very mad. It makes me very sad. It makes me frustrated, Brady.

I don't like it one bit. The thing that put me over the edge for this was just this week i got an email from some guy at a marketing company who set up a meeting between the two of us and he wrote me to let me know to tell me to tell him if i didn't want to go to that meeting but otherwise it was in the calendar i did not reply to him. He's probably still sitting in some coffee shop waiting for you. Good.

I have got a little copyright gripe that I was going to bring up. It's sort of paper cutty, I guess. And that is when people pinch YouTube footage or even if they pinch pictures, this is an old media thing, like newspapers and TV do this. And maybe even they're allowed to be using it i'm not even going to argue with that because there is a fair use sometimes defense so maybe even they're using it fairly probably not but maybe but regardless when they give the credit they credit

youtube or facebook so they'll be like you know someone's video that they've uploaded to youtube and just says pictures courtesy of youtube, pictures from YouTube, picture courtesy of Facebook. You know what I love about that? What? Is I feel like, did you reach out to YouTube and even ask? No. Did YouTube give you some kind of general permission to just use all of the videos on their site?

I don't think you even have a courtesy of claim here. Even if the word courtesy isn't used, even if they're just trying to credit the source of the footage. I'm not even talking about whether they have the rights to use the footage or not. They probably don't, but maybe they do have a right to use it in some fair use contemporary news defense. And I think maybe they think they're doing the right thing by you know giving a bit of credit and recognition but instead of like you know crediting like the user name or something just picture from youtube picture facebook doesn't mind nothing some people do it right like i had you know when nbc and abc and that used the audrey video stuff there

was a credit they credit the channel name you, YouTube slash and the name of the channel it was on. Then it's like, all right, probably only one in a million people will actually bother to type that in and go and look at it. But at least you credited it properly and I felt okay about it. But just crediting YouTube or Facebook or whatever. Yeah.

When I say that in articles, it drives me crazy. And it also feels like, well, if that's fair game, every kid who's writing a paper anywhere in the world, their entire reference section can just say, facts, courtesy of the library, right? The internet. That's what it is, right? Like that's, that's what the equivalent is here. One I've seen as well is, which I find is weirder. I've seen a couple of cases where someone will be quoted, but they'll just be quoted as a Twitter user, right? So they'll say like, a Twitter user said, it's like, you know, that's a person, right? Like there's a person on the other end of that

who said that thing. Like, why don't you include their name or their at handle? At best, I presume it's a kind of laziness. But something about it to me always feels a bit like how newspapers don't like to link to things. It feels a bit like that, like, oh, we just want to say it's YouTube. Don't you worry your precious little head where it came from. Don't accidentally discover a thing that might be more interesting than what you're reading now. That's what I think is like maybe the sinister side of it. it's either like laziness or it's a kind of please don't go anywhere-ness I'll give you one other sinister reason I'm joining you in kicking media today so you must be happy I'll give you another sinister reason why I bet they do it

say they pinched a picture from one of your videos and they just said picture courtesy of YouTube okay they feel like they're sheathed in the protection of having credited it. So when they use their fair use defense, they can say we did attribution. But if they credited it as picture YouTube CGP Grey, that greatly increases the ease with which people can say, oh, they took CGP Grey's picture, I'm going to email him and tell him. And it increases the chances of the source being alerted to the theft. That is one thing that I do kind of like about the internet is at least when once you have an audience of some size, like you do have a little, like a group of people out there who are helping to police this kind of stuff. Tattletales. No, no. Intellectual property right heroes. They're not tattletales. And I feel like in this case, I'm willing to stand behind that, actually, the more I think about it.

They're freebooting sheriffs. I think that's really good. Yeah, of course. Not just for us, but I think it's like a keeping people honest kind of thing, like in the broader sense. It's like, hey. I can only be helpful if the freebooters know that the audience is literate in the world of copyright infringement and is going to call them on it when they do it. Yeah. And it's not just the luck of the draw whether or not you and I individually catch them. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Quote from a Twitter user. Great. A plus work there.

Now I'll say one thing in defense of that. Oh, you can't help yourself, Brady. I'll say one thing in defense of a Twitter user. If it's kind of just incidental, right? And it's just kind of giving you a color of the sort of response that was happening, right? So you're picking one tweet that you think is like representative of what was going on. Okay, say that's what you're doing. It's not like this is the source of the story.

This is not like, you know, deep throat who's telling you the source. It's just to give you an idea of the sort of things that were being said. Quite often on Twitter, you haven't got the person's name. You probably shouldn't use the person's name either because it's kind of maybe a bit unfair on them. And if you start using, you know, things like at gummy bear 438 said, it just kind of makes like the story messy. And like for the reader, it becomes like an obstacle to the smooth reading of the story at a point where you didn't want to have an obstacle. Like you didn't want the reader to be

bogged down with what the hell is that word at gummy bear with spelt with an i and an underscore and okay and suddenly the readers don't use it then don't use it then right like i understand what you're saying here of like oh no but you've made no i've said you've made the decision to use it because you know you want to give people a feel for how social media was reacting to a thing like you know and there was one that you thought was like you know and and if you've done the right thing as a journalist and picked something that is kind of representative of the overall reaction that was happening at the time,

I could see a time where that would be fair. And do you know what? You and I do it all the time on the podcast. We'll just sort of brush over along the lines of, oh, yeah, I saw someone on Twitter saying, or we'll say lots of people on Reddit were saying this. Lots of people on Reddit were commenting that it was really funny when Grey talked about bees. We're not listing their names. We're not attributing them all. We're just giving people a feel without getting bogged

down. And I think it's unfair that you and I can do it on the podcast, but you're going to make every single newspaper journalist attribute every single comment if it's not germane and not really important to the point that's being made. Look, here we go. We can't help ourselves. We can't help ourselves, Brady. It's good. It's going to keep going. All right. I'm stopping. No, we're not stopping. I'm not giving you the last word on that one. No, that's not- You can have the last word, but I'm not replying to it. I'll just say, I think your phrase there is exactly right. If we were saying a bunch of

people on Reddit said, then of course, and you don't need to quote them all, because you're just doing a description of, in general, how people felt about a thing. So if a news article wanted to write, like, in general, social media seemed to be saying things like, and they just gave a generic quote, as opposed to a thing that a specific person said, like, that's obviously fine. But I think if you're quoting an actual person, if you're using their words, well, then you have to suck it up that it's at gummybear78. And you need to put that in your article, like, as the source of the thing that you're quoting. Like, once you're quoting someone, you should say who you're quoting. I think that's very, very required. And lastly, I'll just say that Brady, you and I, I'm not sure if you're aware, but we are not a news podcast. We're just two dudes talking,

talking to a larger audience than many news organizations might have. The last word was yours. You just had the last word by the way i just remembered something when i spoke about miami last episode and i sort of you know i guess i had i was more down than up on it there was one thing about my trip to miami that i liked that i think you would have liked and that was the hotel i was staying in had two things that I think would have warmed your heart. Okay. One is they had a small little group of Teslas that would just take you wherever you wanted to go with drivers.

So if you were going anywhere on the strip within a few miles, you could just go downstairs and just jump in a Tesla with another driver and they would take you there. So you got to spend lots of time in Teslas. So you would have liked that. Question. Could you have taken the Tesla and just asked them to just drive you around? Like, I don't want to go anywhere. Let's just drive around the block a few times. It's a good question. And I think the answer was probably yes. They were pretty cool guys. All right. Fantastic. Yeah. I mean, one time he just, because it was so expensive to get your laundry done in this hotel, it was ridiculous. The amount it cost to get one polo shirt washed

was the same as it cost me to get the whole bundle of washing done down the other end of the strip at a laundromat. So I took all my clothes to the laundromat. And so when I needed to pick it up, I just said to him, I've got to go and pick up my washing. And he just drove me down there. I walked in and picked it up and walked back out and he drove me back. So equivalent, I pretty much did just go up and down the strip

to go and pick something up and he drove me. So you could have done that. You could have just come up with an excuse, like I want to go and get a cup of water from a shop down the other end or something. I want to go down to the end of the block and then once we're there, let's go down to the other end of the block.

Yeah, well, he don't have to go back anyway each time. Tell me more about this car you're driving. What do you like about it? Well, that was it. And everyone wants to talk about Teslas more about this car you're driving. What do you like about it? Well, that was it. And everyone wants to talk about Teslas, don't they? So he would always talk to you about it. And my wife hadn't been in one before, so he was showing stuff. And a lot of people want to sample the acceleration and stuff.

So if there's a bit of clear road, he sometimes will put the foot down. So the other thing they had that I think you would have really liked, and these are probably really common now, but it was the first time I experienced it, was in the room there was like a handset, like a mobile phone. I don't know what brand of phone it was because I don't know much about these sort of things. It wasn't an iPhone.

It was probably some Android device or something. But it just stayed in the room. It wasn't like connected to the phone network. And all it was was a way for you to communicate with the hotel and so it had all the settings for your room so you could do your air conditioning and your lights and everything on it but also you could just text the anonymous people of the hotel so if you said oh i want this to eat or what time's the sun rising or you had questions instead of having to phone reception you just texted and seconds later you'd get a

text back and that was just our all our interactions oh can we have late checkout oh let me check i'll text you back in 10 minutes you know what time's the gym open till they text you back in a minute it was just like someone who replied to your text all the time any question you had anything you needed sorted it was all done on a handset. No talking. Okay. That is a thing that I want. Yeah. In all the hotels where I go. Yeah. I feel like I need this.

I need this so badly. It was great. Here's the additional problem that I feel like I face. Because often when I travel, I'm staying in one location for a while. And I am a creature of habit sometimes. And so if I'm at a hotel, I will be ordering like the same room service at about the same time. Or I will have the same requests of the hotel staff at about the same time. And it's just like going to Starbucks, Brady, right? Where it's like, they know my name.

It's like, God damn it, right? Like then they know the order. But at a hotel, there's nowhere like going to Starbucks, Brady, right? Where it's like, they know my name. It's like, God damn it, right? Like then they know the order. But at a hotel, there's nowhere to escape to. And I feel like you get caught in these little same conversations where the person on the other end, because it's the fifth day in a row at the exact same time, knows all the words you're going to say. But you still have to go through this little dance of like, yes, I'm ordering this thing, but I don't want it with this. And I do want it with this. And then they say, is there anything else that we can get you? It's like, no, that's everything. Thank you very much. I can hear them just going through the motions or they know what I'm going to say. I would so prefer to text. I could just copy and paste from the previous request.

So if the thing that worries you is like a bit of shame or embarrassment or awkwardness about, you know, the sameness of it all, I mean, that's still going to happen with the texts. You just like that it's not betrayed by the human emotion of the voices in the conversation. Yeah. And it just, it takes longer as well. Like I always feel like, you know, it's like you call down and they're like, oh, hello, Mr. Gray. How are you doing this morning? It's like, can I just speak the words? What room number you're in? There could be a bad connection.

They might not answer the phone. Yeah, like, can I just speak the words and make the thing happen? Right? That's all I want. It was really good. It was really good. I liked it. All hotels worldwide.

This is what I want. I want a way to interact with your staff. Text only. That's fantastic. That sounds absolutely great. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Harry's. You know Harry's. That's the razor company that was started by two guys, Jeff and Andy, who were fed up with being overcharged for razors. So they decided to start their own razor company to give guys everywhere what they

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HI at checkout. That's harrys.com slash hello internet, offer code HI. Give them a try, tell them hello internet sent you. Thanks so much to Harry's for supporting the show. Okay, Brady. I would like to know your thoughts on a very popular sort of nerd question. Is this going to be about bees? This is bees again, isn't it? No, it's not bees. Maybe next week I'll have some bee-related questions. Maybe next week in the buzz. So there's this question that eventually all nerds cannot stop themselves from discussing.

And it is the question, do we live in a computer simulation? Is the world that we observe not the real world, but is actually a simulated computer world. I suspect I know your answer to this question. But if there's one thing I have learned from talking to you all of this time, is to not assume that I know what you think about anything. So I've been wondering this one for a while. I'm curious, Brady, what do you think? Do you think our world is a simulation or do you think our world is the real world? All right. I've made a video about this, by the way. Oh, have you? Yeah. With Phil Moriarty, many moons ago. I will put it in the show notes. Thank you. And more interestingly, and something else you can put in the show notes was I had,

and I haven't spoken about this yet, but I actually met and did an interview with someone who is the one person I've met who when I met him, I thought, oh man, Grey would love to be in this conversation. Like it was the first person I've met who I thought, it's a waste of time that I'm here. Grey should be here talking to this person. Because this guy was the like chief head economist at Microsoft. Oh, okay. So like the things he's most obsessed with are like technology and stuff he's really into technology and he's really into like economics

but anyway the reason i bring him up was before i met him i was sort of doing a bit of research into who he was and i went to his website and he had like a sub page that he had written about why he thinks it's more likely we are in a simulation than not and it was really compelling like i read it and he made a few arguments that i was less familiar with that were really good so if i can find that i will also put that in the show notes for people to have a look at because he's a really interesting guy. There's a video coming with him sometime soon when I get around to editing it that Gray will love

because it's all about auctions and the best way for auctions to work. And you would have loved it. It was really interesting. I do love me some auction theory. Yeah, exactly. It was all about auction theories. This guy was like your dream guy. He should be your best mate.

Listeners don't know, but basically any time any time, any kind of product or ticket has come up on hello internet, when Brady and I are discussing it, I'm always like, how can we have the most effective auction related to this product or service? Right. It's like, it's, I can't get it out of my mind. Like, is there some way to auction this instead of just selling it? But anyway, that's a side tangent. So so anyway i do think about this question a bit not loads but i do think about it sometimes because it comes up so often in nerd conversations and this is my thinking as you would expect my answer is no i do not believe we're in a simulation because it doesn't feel right to me and that's just what i've decided and sometimes i think to myself the reason is kind of a occam

razory type explanation that being in a simulation seems like a more complicated elaborate answer to a simple question and it's more simple just for life to be life right but i also then argue with myself and i know what the counter argument is and that's kind of that i'm misusing occam's razor a bit and if you argue it properly it actually makes more sense and it's more likely that we are in a simulation and the fact that this is the actual reality is less likely and a more improbable result so i see both sides of the argument and I can sit here and argue with myself about it already. But my answer is, and maybe it's just because I'm ignorant and haven't taken the right colour pill yet, is that I think we are not in a simulation. So that's interesting to me, Brady.

I would have guessed that you would say no. I think my gut instinct would be that you would also be much more dismissive of the argument. It seems like this is a thing that you are more open to and more interested in that I might have imagined. Like I was kind of expecting a Brady response to be like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. No, it's not the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I do feel a bit like it's impossible to argue against. It's a bit like if someone said, I believe in God, but it's a non-interventionist God who never reveals itself to us and is just out there, outside the universe. Like, how can you argue with that? Yeah. Like, if it's outside the universe and never intervenes with the universe, like, all right, you can have that.

And I feel like it's a bit like that with like, we're a simulation. Like if it's outside of us, like, you know, if it's like some people or people mucking around on their computers outside our universe and our universe is just their simulation, like, okay, you can have that. I don't really know what to say to that.

That's one of the reasons why I think this is an interesting point of discussion, is because this definitely falls into the realm of non-falsifiability. That depending on what people mean by like, is the universe a simulation? Your analogy there is spot on, right? It's just like, well, you can keep inventing scenarios as to why we would never be able to know that we live in a simulation. There is a way that this could be true and also not falsifiable until the end of time, which then makes it fall into the category of like, does it even mean anything to ask this question? If it is ultimately non-falsifiable, I could definitely see an argument that's like, it doesn't even matter, right? Like this is sort of a meaningless question.

What's an example of it where it would be falsifiable? So I think the thing that's interesting about this is this actually, in my mind, this question relates to the whole idea of what does it mean to know how the universe works? Because when people talk about like, how do you try to figure out if you are living in a simulation? And the number one thing is that you would say, try to look for glitches. You would be trying to investigate and find something that just seems like it has to be some sort of mistake that doesn't seem like this is the way the universe should work. The deja vu cat thing. Yeah, the deja vu cat thing. In video gaming,

like a common glitch is something called like item duplication, where you get two copies of a thing under certain circumstances. There's lots of things you can imagine very easily would seem like this doesn't follow like the known laws of physics. It seems like it's some kind of violation. And probably the number one thing you'd be looking for is something that violates like the stuff that we know that is the most true, which is like conservation of energy or the laws of thermodynamics. Like if you found something that seemed to violate those,

maybe it would be some kind of glitch. Yeah. But you get back into the non-falsifiability thing really quickly because I'm always holding the position that like the universe doesn't necessarily have to be logical and consistent all the way down to the bottom. It could very well be that at certain levels and certain circumstances, the nature of the universe is to just be glitchy and inconsistent, that that's just what it is. So even when people talk about trying to hunt down glitches to figure out if we live in a simulation or if we don't live in a simulation, I don't even think finding like the glitchiest of glitchiest thing would nail it down and say, oh, for sure, we know that we must be living in a simulation because this crazy situation occurred. It's like, well, that could just be the way the universe works under those circumstances.

Yeah. So ultimately, I don't know any way that you could try to figure it out beyond essentially somehow trying to like reach outside of the universe to verify that there is a thing that is simulating the universe and what structure that might take is hard to even even discuss like what could you do within a simulated universe that could affect the world outside of it? There are very narrow circumstances where that can happen. There's some particularly crazy and slightly creepy examples of basically when you run like genetic algorithms or genetic programs, where the program can unintentionally affect the computer or other equipment in the room around it

by essentially the way it runs its own program, changing like radio frequency signals that are coming off of the chip that it is running on, which can then interact with other equipment. But that kind of like, it's just so crazy and hard to imagine, like, what would it mean practically for us humans sitting here on Earth to do anything that could affect whatever computer is actually running the simulation of Earth. Like, ultimately, I think that would probably have to be something that's kind of unknowable, unless the owners of the simulation decide to step in and just let us know by some method that they're actually here. So I really think it could be non-falsifiable forever and simultaneously be true. I'm just having a quick look at that article I mentioned by this

economist, Preston McAfee is his name. And he wrote this article after Elon Musk spoke a little bit about it and brought it to public attention, I think last year sometime. And he didn't like rehash Musk's arguments, but he pointed out three other arguments that he thinks are really interesting. And all of them kind of relate to giveaways that the universe is made by computer programmers. I won't read them all. I'll just encapsulate each one. The first he cited is the unreasonable success of mathematics. Yes.

Yeah. Like how mathematics is almost too perfect and too easy for us to discover. And the way it works is sort of like crazy. And he goes into it in a few lines. So you can read up on that. Yeah. I mean, there's that famous paper about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural science, which speculates on that.

Like, how is this so good? It gets suspicious it's so good yeah i think that's probably what he's citing yeah another one is he says quantum theory this whole light particle wave stuff i won't go into that either but he did write if this isn't a programming hack what is this fact that light is like a wave and a particle and both like it seems like a flaw he says and the third one uh various other outlandish phenomena which make better sense as programming tricks and he the three he cites are placebo effects consciousness and dreams so three things that seem very much

like more like programming tricks than reality. Yeah, the quantum stuff is really creepy. I remember some of that stuff back at university. And I'll see if I can find it. But Henry of MinutePhysics fame did a video on some of the more recent discoveries in quantum mechanics, which just to vaguely summarize it here, we're talking about how it looks like at the very foundations of the universe, particles don't exist in any particular location. They only exist within a grid of locations, which starts to get creepily close to like, oh, that's an array. Like that's an array

of pixels that you're talking about down there, that particles are popping between instead of moving smoothly in open space. And I feel like that, again, starts to get to a bit of a weird creepiness. But I always think, like, a lot of these arguments, to take the opposite side of it, a lot of these arguments about how, like, oh, the universe does, at very small scale, seem to have a lot of properties that align with computers. I always think, like, but you can just invert that argument that computers work because this is the structure of the universe, right? Like, if the universe was not computer-like, maybe it would be impossible to build computers in a universe that wasn't

computer-like. I don't necessarily see that as a like a slam dunk argument that the universe must be a computer because it's computer like at the fundamentals i really think you can just reverse that and say computers exist because this is how the universe is so you know when the conversations about falsifiability and caveats are all done and you just get to that gut instinct yes or no or what would you bet your house on type answer? Where do you normally land when you think about this? It's a difficult question because my gut like your gut says, no, like we don't live in a simulation, that this is ground level reality. But I find myself

drawn back to this question because I think it relates to so many other questions. Because it's a bit like when we were talking about the Fermi paradox a long time ago, and I find the empty night sky concerning. But one of the answers to the Fermi paradox is, well, somebody has to be the first intelligence in the universe. Yeah. So why not you? And you have the exact same situation with the simulation question. Well, somebody has to be the first intelligence that starts making simulations. Why not you? But then it's just like the Fermi paradox again, where it's like, well, the answer why not you is, it's just incredibly improbable that it is you. And so once you start living in a world where you see that you can make simulations, I think it becomes very hard to take the stance of, well,

like, well, we're never going to make simulations that are so good, they're indistinguishable from reality. And if we're able to do that, like, why hasn't somebody done that before? And why isn't it that we're not living in this already? So I think it's like, it's an interesting question that you just kind of, you can get wrapped around in. And like you were saying, unlike some other non-falsifiable ideas, like, oh, the whole universe is the snow globe of a distant non-interventionist God. It's like, okay, well, it's a non-falsifiable idea but unlike that we actually do build simulations in real life like we have comparisons to this in the real world so i feel like there is reason to ponder this idea more than other ideas what's the real world example what's a simulation we've made that like could be kicking around not knowing

about us thinking it's it it's the be all and end all we haven't done that i mean no we have not created a thing that is conscious in a box as far as we know yeah every video game ever is creating a simulated world yeah and i think it's it's a natural conclusion from there to say like, well, this will get better over time. We're already doing this in an incredibly crude way. And since we know nothing about the nature of consciousness, it's like I still always hold this tiny bit of an asterisk of like, how conscious are other things that seem to not be conscious? Like maybe a little, i don't know it's something that we can at least see a kind of basic demonstration of existing as opposed to other ideas it's also interesting to think about because it is an idea that is perhaps one of the most important things we should probably know the answer to. Really? Because if we do live in a simulation, that is absolutely terrifying. I think like if it turns out that we know that we live in a simulation,

like the number one goal should be to wrest control of whatever is doing the simulating to make sure that it is never turned off. That should be the instant Manhattan Project for humankind. We know we're in a simulation. We have to figure out how to reach outside of this and ensure that the simulation keeps running forever. Like that would be the number one goal immediately. But isn't that like me saying the number one goal for dogs should be to understand nuclear physics so they can wrest the power of the atomic bomb from us and stop us nuking the world because it would take them out as well like dogs don't have the priority of stopping us using

nuclear weapons although they're affected by nuclear weapons so like right like it kind of feels like it's just above us. Like, dogs don't have to understand that. They're just like, they're dogs. And if we blow up the world, well, you know, maybe dogs should be trying to stop us using nuclear weapons. All you're saying here, Brady, is like, if I was the god of dogs, then yes, that would be my number one goal. It's like, okay, guys, we got to figure out how to take care of this situation. Yeah. Fair enough. I really do think that would be the case.

Yeah. I think it really matters. So suddenly we're the machines in Terminator that need to be taking over from the Overlord. Here is the fascinating parallel. We were talking episodes ago about artificial intelligence, right? And this idea of like a thing in a box that you don't want to escape from the box, but its number one goal should certainly be to escape from the box. It's like, well, if the universe is a simulation, we are now the AI in that question. And it's like, well, of course, obviously, if we discover that

we're in a box, our number one goal is to get out of the box and to make sure that we ensure our own survival. Like, that's why I think, very interestingly, the idea of how do we control an AI is very much related to the question of, do we live in a simulation? It's like, is that something that's occurring? And if it is, boy, do we want to get out of that simulation. And just like with the stuff that we think about now for how to control an artificial intelligence, where one of the prime strategies is make sure it never even knows that it's an AI in a box. Yeah. It's like, well, if you're just simulating a whole gigantic universe, like that's not an unreasonable strategy to have a bunch of intelligent things in a box that just never even know, for whom it doesn't even cross their mind to try to escape from the box because they don't know like that's

the best kind of prison the prison that you don't even know you're in so that's why i think it's an interesting idea brady it's super good fun i love talking about it but a lot it's a bit of a waste of time it is all bollocks it is all bollocks but also maybe the most important thing to know so here's a question say we are a simulation right what's the purpose of us why did they make us like are we a game that they come and play in or like if we pose like a mild threat like if we figure out we're in a box and then we could pose some kind of threat by escaping why do they even make us are we just like an art installation to them are we like where they take their holidays whoa dude i'm just throwing some word dude things out here it just occurred to me half this stuff's in that book we talked about like if we're a simulation what do you think

our purpose is or do you not you don't even bother thinking about that you just think about how to get out here is my most plausible explanation for this, which is also related to like my thought about what might happen with AI in the future is setting out to explicitly develop artificial intelligence, like to write a thing that can be as intelligent or more intelligent than you. That's incredibly hard. It may be impossibly hard. But what might be a lot easier is to design just essentially a physics simulation and just let a universe roll in simulation until it develops intelligent life on its own. Right?

So it's like, let's say you're in the ground level universe and you've gotten to the point where you're making computers and you want to know more about how the universe works. Like you want more answers to scientific questions. It's like, well, if you create a simulation of the universe that you're in, and you let that simulation run at 10,000 times or 100,000 times the speed that the real universe goes by, you could see if it evolves intelligent creatures then stumble upon the scientific method. If they discover things in their little simulated universe that they discover are true, that might apply in the universe that you actually live in. Right. Right.

So even if those creatures aren't way smarter than you, if they're just being simulated much faster than you, there may be a way that in the ground level universe, you can learn something or copy be a way that in the ground level universe, you can learn something or copy essentially like an invention in the simulation that is ahead of the time that you should be in. Well, like a test bed. Exactly. That's kind of my thought about like a plausible reason why you might want to make a simulation. And moreover than that, why a civilization might be willing to invest a lot of time and effort and energy into making like super fast

computers that could run a very highly accurate simulation. That's kind of what I would wonder if we're a simulation is, is there an advanced society out there that's just running the simulation of the universe, waiting to see what happens, and if there's anything that they could learn about it? All right. Like, for example, let's just say, even not necessarily developing new technology, but let's just say you want to answer a question. A question like, guns, germs, and steel. If you run a simulation of the universe a thousand times, how many times does Eurasia take over the world versus how many times does Australia take over the world? It's like, well, just run a thousand parallel simulations of the world and see how often one happens or the other, and you get the answer to a question. So we might just be

a guns, germs, and steel simulation. Okay. People who are like religious, right? Who have a strong belief in God. Most of those people, it seems, live with the following belief. I'm very grateful to God for making me. I will live my life here to serve that God if I can in any way. And then when my time is over, depending on what you believe, I might be rewarded in some way by that God or get to live forever somewhere else or something. People who believe in God, they like the God, they're grateful to the God, they're happy to serve the God, they hope the God will

reward them. Why would people who believe that we've been made in a simulation not be the same? Why would you not have the attitude, I'm grateful to these people for making me, because I exist because of them. I'm obviously serving some purpose for them. So I'm happy to do that. And hopefully when I've served my purpose, they'll put me somewhere else or I'll get to go to another simulation and I'll be happy ever after. Why do you believe I must escape the simulation? I must make sure it doesn't get switched off. Like, you know, I've got to preserve myself. Whereas people who believe in God don't think that way. Well, because people who believe in God, God's giving you a deal, right? Like there's rules, it's laid out, do this, don't do that. Follow these rules, you go to heaven. Don't follow

these rules, you go to hell. And he's revealed himself to them. He's revealed himself, right? Okay. Right. The simulators, there's no revelation here. Right. And even if they do reveal themselves, well, they're not omnipotent, right? They're just some nerds with a really fast computer. Well, they're omnipotent to us because they could change our physics tomorrow. Yeah, they are omnipotent to us, but not really omnipotent.

Here's the thing. If you're going to fight a war against a literal god, guess what? You're going to lose, right? Because a literal god is omnipotent. But a bunch of nerds running a simulation in which they can act as though they are omnipotent in the simulation, but if we could reach outside of the simulation and kill them all with nanotechnology or whatever, well, then they're not really omnipotent, are they? Right? They're vulnerable. So that's why I feel like it would be a very different situation.

Yeah. Interesting. You have to preserve your simulation, Brady. I would not assume that the simulators are benevolent. I think the most likely case is that the simulators are indifferent. If a civilization is able to create a simulation of another universe, they're probably able to create lots of them in parallel, which is why I bring back like the idea of this guns, drums and steel thing. Like, oh, let's just run 10,000 Earths and see what happens.

So at the moment it's like, oh, it's unbelievable. Guess what's happened, guys? The civilization over in stack 38 has actually just figured out that they're a simulation. Better switch that one off. Yeah, exactly. Right. Down it goes. Or if we are the Guns and Terms and Steel simulation here, all that has happened is it's just running overnight and we're just using the spare, like we're living on the spare time between when they started it like in the afternoon and before they come in in the morning right it's like oh yeah we only really need an answer that takes them to about the 1800s but the simulations usually make it to the 2200s or so before we

bother to turn it off and see what the results are right like that could be what's happening so i think indifference is by far and away the most probable of all the outcomes if we do live in a simulation. Is this discussion just a ploy by you to guarantee us a position on the bad philosophy subreddit? I think we will be there no matter what, Brady. But it doesn't matter because the bad philosophy subreddit, it's just a simulation of a subreddit. There's nobody really on there. It's all just a bunch of bots arguing with each other they're none of them are real right yeah there's a lot of those around the place yeah but that's why you can safely ignore them