Hello Internet - H.I. #86: Banana Republic

Episode Date: August 24, 2017

Brady and Grey discuss: co-first-personing, invincible and disappointing phones, self-checkout and payments revisited, a bench of moral quandaries, a bit of buzz, and, of course, the aftermath of the Radio Times election. Sponsors: Harry's: Quality Men's Shaving Products - go to www.harrys.com/HI for a free trial set Audible: get a free 30-day trial by signing up at audible.com/hellointernet Squarespace: start building your website today with a free fourteen day trial and 10% off first purchase Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes: Hello Internet Pirate Flag The Buzz Bee rustling Present with Audrey for scale Present on the YouTube version of the show

Okay. Oka is not cutesy. You have not understood what Oka is. Oka wouldn't be cute. Oka would be like, oh, the cash bastard. Have you used the cash bastard? Yeah. Yeah. I paid for my tools with the cash bastard. I'm thinking like Oka is like the, I'm forgetting the word, but like the Japanese word for cuteness that a thousand people will put in the comments? No. Ockerness is very masculine and it's very unrefined. Not always obscene, but someone who's ocker is very likely to use a lot of swear words. Ocker in my head, it feels like a koala with big eyes. That's what ocker feels like, Brady. Oh no, you have not understood ocker.

I'm going to improve your education on that with some materials. I think I like this definition of Akka much better. Akka is like Australian cuteness. We have talked a little bit about Disney. We were talking about the FastPasses, which I don't even want to get into it. But boy, did I discover that FastPasses work different everywhere. They work different in different Disney parks. We got explained in the Reddit all of the various algorithms that exist with FastPasses

everywhere in the world. And I left feeling 10 times more confused than it had started. But I am appreciative to everybody who wrote in all that stuff. But it's like, holy hell, FastPasses are complicated. That must be in the top 10 or top 20 of most fed back things we've ever got. And I understand maybe we made some mistakes and if you want to understand it just go to the subreddit from that previous episode and knock yourself out fill your boots but one thing i did notice is obviously a lot of people who work for

disney listen to hello internet because a lot of them got in touch and one thing which i was obviously aware of before and was emphasized by by these messages, and I just wonder what you think about it, is the fact that Disney call their staff cast members. This is like obviously a very Disney thing and I think they're known for it. And the staff seem to like it too because they always like referring to themselves as cast members. What do you think of that?

All right. Why are you giggling already,ady because i know what i'm poking we've never discussed this but i know you're well enough to think you must have views on this and i think they will entertain me i don't have views okay i sort of do of course you do because this kind of crap i hate when businesses do when it's oh, we're a family and you're a guest in our company here coming to visit us. And the like false familiarity and the false chumminess, it really rubs me the wrong way. Except somehow, somehow the magic Disney Tinkerbell pixie dust has gotten into my brain.

And I feel like I'm perfectly okay with the Disney staff being called cast members. I'm perfectly happy with probably in Disney corporate lingo, them referring to the guests like as guests, right? As opposed to customers. Right. So I feel like I'm perfectly fine with this with Disney. I'm not sure there are very many other companies in the whole world I would be okay with this, but I'm going to give it a thumbs up.

I'm perfectly fine with it. Disappointed, Brady? Did you think I'd be angrier? I did, actually. I'm a bit disappointed. I didn't think you'd give Disney such a pass. I didn't think you'd be so suckered by the corporate behemoth that is Disney into thinking it's like Tinkerbell and stuff.

Isn't that what Disney is? Aren't they small and vulnerable and charming like Tinkerbell, and you just have to believe in them, otherwise they'll go away? Not one of the world's largest companies. That's why I think it's funny. It totally shouldn't work on me, but for some reason it just does. Tell me why that term though. Why cast members? Why would that have been chosen as the way to describe staff of the theme park? I just realized, is this supposed to refer to

staff in addition to the people in the costumes? Like, does cast members refer to everybody? No, I think like the person ushering you onto the roller coaster is a cast member. Okay, but what about the guy doing paperwork in an office on the park? Now I don't know. Now you've got me wondering. Is that guy a cast member? But see, the thing is,

I feel like I could actually make an argument for him being a cast member. Because if you're putting on a big show and it feels like a Disney park is kind of like a big show, even though it's really a machine to feed the mouse, it's kind of like a big show. So like on a big show, even though it's really a machine to feed the mouse. It's kind of like a big show. So like on a Broadway show, are members of the crew, are they called cast members too?

I don't know if they are or not. I don't know. I imagined all the public facing people were cast members, not just the person like dressed as Mickey. I will give Disney a pass for every person that a guest would see in the park. I think that's okay to call them cast members. Even if you're the person like saying, okay, you go and sit in that seat on the roller coaster. Yes. I think I'm going to give Disney a pass on that one, but only Disney.

Okay. Don't even think about it, Six Flags. You're not getting a pass on this one for me. All right. I'm only going to give it to Disney. I think that's the way this works. Am I a Hello Internet cast member? Yes, I think you are, Brady. I am.

However, I think our corporate policy should not be to use these terms. Like, I think you are, you are better described as a co-host of the show. Don't you think that's a more accurate way to describe it? Do you think describing me as a co-host, rightly or wrongly, is belittling? Like, because if someone said they were the co-pilot, that doesn't sound as awesome as saying like you're the captain or you're the pilot. You're the co-pilot makes it sound like you're the junior guy in the right seat who occasionally gets to land if there's no wind

and stuff. Now I know you don't describe yourself differently. You also call yourself a co-host. But do you think just the term co-host sounds like you're the vice president? Because I say sometimes I'm the co-host of a you're the vice president? Because I say sometimes, oh, I'm the co-host of a podcast called Hello Internet. Does that make me sound less than if I said I was a host? I think what you've done here is that you've done like an anchoring effect,

that by mentioning pilots, which is one of the cases where the co-pilot does mean something else. I can't wait to hear from all the pilots. Co-pilots, they should be called sub-pilots. It's not the co-pilot because the captain is the pilot, right? That's the way that works. Well, I don't want to be called the sub-host of Hello Internet. I wouldn't mind being called the vice host. No, but that's worse. I know it's worse, but I just think it sounds funny. No, that's way worse. You can't be the vice host of the show. That makes no sense at all. That's ridiculous. That means if you were ever incapacitated, I would be the host. No, Brady. That's not how this works. That's not how these titles work. So I think you have anchored it in bringing up

maybe the one or very few places where co actually means sub. That's fair enough. I hear what you're saying and I agree with what you're saying. But I still think co does have a slight belittling effect because it says you don't do it on your own. Like if you were the co first person to step on top of Mount Everest as opposed to being the first person, it's not as awesome. You've kind of lost a bit of your glory because it's not all yours. I will totally grant that if Hillary and Everest held hands and stepped on top of the mountain at the same time.

Tenzing. I'm sorry, Brady. You're not going to let me go until I do it right. It would be amazing if the first person on top of Mount Everest also happened to be called Everest. Yeah, like George Everest or whatever. That's right. That's who it's named after, but he never climbed it.

Well, I'm spinning a tale of magic here. That if Hillary and Everest held hands and stepped on top at the same time. Yeah. Or if Armstrong and... Come on. This is easy. Armstrong and... Buzz Aldrin.

Aldrin. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I was like, damn. Okay, I should have gotten that one. I should have gotten that one. If they held hands and jumped onto the moon at the same time. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I was like, damn. Okay, I should have gotten that one. I should have gotten that one. You should have. If they held hands and jumped onto the moon at the same time,

like I would be going back through the footage and going frame by frame of like whose foot landed first, right? Like I'm going to disallow this notion that you're co-first men on the moon. You're the co-first climbers of the mountain. That's not how this works. This is a debate that centers around the climbing of Mount Everest. It was always an often discussed topic as to who actually led the way and stepped on the summit of Mount Everest first out of Hillary and Tenzing. It was like a huge debate and they never wanted to answer the question and talk about it because

for all the sort of people of Nepal, they like to think it was Tenzing. And for people through the Commonwealth, I think they liked to think it was Hillary. And it wasn't until one of Hillary's late autobiographies came out that he actually put in writing that he was actually in front and got to the top first. According to him, Tenzing's dead, so he couldn't argue with it. But Hillary's dead too now, by the way. Okay. It's an interesting time to wait, right? Yeah.

We all know it was a Sherpa, right? That's the first person on the top of the mountain. That's clearly going to be the case. That's not what Hillary said in his book. But anyway, I don't even know how we got onto this topic. We were talking about Disney cast members. The way we got onto this topic is, as always, the Brady wandering through the valley of misplaced metaphors and analogies. And I think, yes, you are correct that being the co-person to discover a thing or get to a place is a ridiculous notion. I don't think co in the world of podcasts has any kind of sub meaning. Because I think the most directly comparable thing is like companies where people co-found a company because you're not getting to a place, you're making a thing together.

But even then, and as I said, it's still awesome to found a company, but isn't it more awesome to be the only founder rather than a co-founder? Like saying I'm the co-founder of something means, I wonder who like had more of the ideas and who was cleverer and who's richer. And like, it just sows those seeds, the co-ness. It's like, hmm, you say you're the co-discoverer of that comet, but does that mean the other guy actually saw it first? And this is just a technical reason we have to call you the co-discoverer. You know what's really funny about this, Brady? I think there is something I have recently really gotten an understanding of with you that I haven't had over these, lo these many years, which is your competitiveness. You've mentioned to me about your competitiveness, and we've talked about it on the show sometimes, like that you're a competitive person. But I feel like I have only recently actually understood this on a more deep level. And somehow this conversation about the nature of co versus solo, I feel like I get this. Deep down, this is a question of competitiveness.

And for Brady, there cannot be ties, right? Someone must win. And isn't it better to win than to tie? I think that's what's going on here, Brady. I think that's my interpretation of what's going on in your Brady mind. I don't think that's true. Like in the case of Hello Internet, I mean, Hello Internet was your idea. You came up with it. You did all the work at the start. So like, I would consider if we had to say who is the junior person, of course, it would be me.

Like, I wouldn't doubt that for a second. So it's not like I'm thinking, oh, why am I co? It's not fair. Like, I have no problem with that. It just gets me thinking about the word co. I think we are co-hosts. Because Brady, you know what we're doing here? Yeah. We're building a beautiful thing together. In the last episode, you mentioned that you had a new wedding ring that your wife got for you because your previously chubby fingers have been replaced with new live Fitatron 5000 fingers.

Yeah, I think that's exactly the way I phrased it. Yeah, it was my chubby, chubby hands. So as someone who doesn't like to hoard objects, I didn't get the chance to ask because the topic sort of moved on. What have you done with your old wedding ring, the original uh i don't know where it is all i know is that it is somewhere under the aegis of my wife's protection okay she has it somewhere it still exists it's in the house someplace it hasn't been thrown into mount doom or anything like that no it hasn't been thrown into mount doom i don't think i could throw it into mount doom i would i would stand upon the precipice and resist, were that the case.

Speaking of dropping things into Mount Doom, you know I love my segues, so I'm just going to go with that. You know how I talk about how I'm invincible when it comes to dropping phones, and I literally have dropped my phone off a cliff and it didn't break. I was listening to the last podcast of ours because I

like to check to see what made it into the final episode. I was just listening to that section about me saying how invincible I was dropping my phone when I bumped into a lady I knew at the park walking dogs. So I stopped the podcast and started talking to her. And while I was fiddling with my headphones and trying to put my phone away, I dropped my phone onto the asphalt path we were standing on and it landed face down and went bang. And the woman went, oh my goodness. Oh no. And I said to her before I even picked up my phone, I said, don't worry, there's no chance it's broken. I leaned over, turned around the face, pristine, absolutely pristine. She was like, oh my goodness. How did you know it wasn't broken? I was like, my phone never breaks. No case or anything.

Bang. I think with that story, all of the credit goes to your superpowers. And none of it goes to the hundreds of materials engineers who've been working on the magic, quote, glass that isn't glass at all that's on the front of those screens. Yeah, but my wife sneezes on her iPhone and it shatters into a thousand pieces. That sounds a little bit overblown as a description of what's occurring. Sounded good though, didn't it? It does sound good.

It would make a fantastic Android commercial. Like they hire your wife, she sneezes on the phone and it just explodes into a thousand pieces. I'll tell you what though, since then, and since I last saw you, which wasn't long ago, I've changed my iPhone. Ooh, tell me Brady, you were using the iPhone SE and you have, you've changed now. I'm trying at the moment, the newest one plus. You're trying the plus. I am.

I'm trying. Okay. I can't remember now because I feel like we've switched phones a bunch of times in the course of this podcast. Have you ever used a Plus phone before? No, it's my first Plus. Okay. What do you think of the Plus?

Pros and cons. Okay. Pros and cons. It's a hell of a thing to go to after the SE. It is. And occasionally I go back to my SE for certain things still, and it does feel very small now, of course. But i'm undecided i'm going to stick with it for a while because it's really expensive and i paid a lot of money for it so i'm going to use it for a while yeah the plus is not cheap

no so i'm kind of stuck with it now but it's good for some things the main reason i got it was because i found myself watching so much video on my phone that I wanted a bigger screen for video watching. Like whether it's just watching sports highlights or graphs of videos that people are editing with me professionally and stuff. And for that, I'm liking it. It's nice to quickly, you know, watch the goals that have been scored in the football that day on the bigger screen. But the reaching around and navigating the screen with my mortal human fingers, which I don't think I have

overly small hands, but they're certainly no match for the plus screen. Nobody has hands that are a match for that phone. It's impossible. No man can do it. Only giants. I like using my phone while I'm walking, like, you know, walking down the street. And you don't want to use two hands when you're doing that. So I'm a big one-handed phone user. I find it very hard to switch to two-hand phone use. I just don't think it's a fit for me. And I don't think the Plus is suited to one-handed phone users. So unless I get down with the kids and start becoming a two-handed phone user, I'm going to continue to be frustrated by it.

Is that what the kids do, Brady? The kids are the two-handed phone users? Apparently, that's what someone told me. Apparently, that's the young person's kids are the two-handed phone users? Apparently, that's what someone told me. Apparently, that's the young person's game, is the two-handed phone use. Well, I do have a little bit of good news for you, because I am running the beta version of the Next operating system on my phone currently, on my plus-size phone. And I've sent you a picture that they have finally conceded and acknowledged

that this phone is too big for people's hands. And there is a scrunched over to the left keyboard in the iPhone Plus that makes one-handed texting easier to do. See, the one thing I do want is a big keyboard because I was having problems on my small phone of mistyping all the time. I felt like I was making more typos. So I wanted my keyboard buttons further apart. That's the one thing I don't want scratched. Okay. Then I have no good news for you, Brady. I'm sorry. I thought you were going to be happy. The top of the phone is just like a wasteland that I can't get to. I'm using the plus, you know, I haven't been happy with any of the iPhones really for like,

what, four years now with this rounded design that I've just been very sad and frustrated with. It is also frustrating that app designers and everybody keeps putting stuff at the top of the phone. It's like, hey, that might as well be a hundred miles away. I can't reach that. Why don't you put all the controls at the bottom of the phone? The bottom of the phone is where the action is. I need to do a big icon rearrange.

I know there's all these little trick things, but I need to start putting my go-to apps like my Twitter and stuff like that down low where my thumb can get to. Yeah. If you switch to the big phone, you have to reverse everything. Everything that's a frequent use, it's got to go at the bottom. Yeah. Like my iMessages, Maps, like Calendar, all of that stuff, it's got to be at the bottom of the phone. You're right. I need to do that. And then I'll relearn it in a day or two. So it is very hard to get rid of that muscle memory though. Yeah. I almost hate to bring this up, Brady,

but you do know the time that we're recording, this is like right before new iPhone season. Are you aware of this? I do, but I'm like, whatever. You just couldn't wait anymore? I don't think I'm going to like the new ones as much. I'm liking them less as they go. So I'm figuring they're going to do something else I don't think I'm going to like the new ones as much. I'm liking them less as they go. So I'm figuring they're going to do something else I don't like on the next one.

They'll remove whatever ports are left. They'll say, no, we don't think screens are the way of the future. Everything's just going to be smell now. I don't know. You never know what they're going to do. So get in before they ruin it more. If the rumors are to be believed, they're taking away the home button on the next phone. Yeah.

We'll see. But I wish you were happier with your phone. I wish I was happier with my phone. But it is a hell of a transition going from the little one to the big one. You've got to reverse absolutely everything. I'm sorry that the smushed over keyboard is of no assistance to you. iPhones. They've been frustrating for the last four years.

Yeah. Hopefully less frustrating soon, but I'm not necessarily holding my breath on that one. You remind me of like those football fans whose team loses every season. And at the start of every season, they're like, this is the one, this is the year we're going to get it together and go all the way. And then yet again, disappointed. I'm simply saying I am hopeful about the next phone. I'm not expecting to be happy. We'll see in a couple short months.

But big phones too big, little phones too outdated, middle phone both too big and too small. That's the situation. Oh, and they're all made of soap. I've actually put a case on this one, believe it or not. Why have you put a case on these phones, Brady? You don't have to worry about dropping them at all. You have some kind of superpower.

You can confidently tell ladies in the street, don't worry, my phone is unbroken. Yeah, but the problem is the longer that goes, the more disappointed I'll be when I finally break one. So now I'm taking steps to minimize breakage so I can keep my... So you can keep your streak. Yeah. And like, not only is this one soapy,

but because I can't hold it the way I like with my safe one hand, one finger underneath for backup, I just know that more drops are imminent. So I need a bit of friction. I'm not worried, Brady. I have confidence in you. From now until the end of time, no broken phones. That's the Brady promise.

This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Harry's. Are you a human with hair on your body that you want to shave off? Well, guess what? This is the ad for you. Because Harry's is all about a great shave at a fair price, which is why over 3 million people use Harry's. The company was started by Jeff and Andy, two ordinary guys fed up with buying overpriced razors. They started Harry's to fix shaving and bought their own German factory with a hundred years of blade making experience to ensure the

highest quality for all of your hair shaving needs. The thing about Harry's is they're not just quality razor blades. They're razor blades sent right to your door. You don't have to go outside with that hair on your face or wherever. You can have the razor blades shipped to your house and take care of that shaving problem behind closed doors. Never have to step outside. It's fantastic. They're so confident that you'll like their razors that all their products are backed with a 100% quality guarantee. Harry's offers the best

blades at half the price of the leading razor brands directly over the internet to you. And if you want to get them for someone else, they have fantastic looking packaging and branding. They really do make nice gifts. So Harry's is offering Hello Internet listeners a free trial set. Go to harrys.com slash hi right now to get your free trial set, which includes a weighted ergonomic razor handle, five precision engineer blades with a lubricating strip and a trimmer blade,

rich lathering shave gel, and a travel blade cover. All that is yours for free as a trial for starting with Harry's. Just go to harrys.com slash hi right now and sign up for Razorblades over the internet. Thank you to Harry's for taking care of human hair problems. And thank you to Harry's for supporting this show. So Brady, last time you mentioned that you'd seen the Tims come up with a bunch of words to describe their actions. Yep. There was Tim foolery. Yes. There was... Tim work.

There was Tim work. That's right. A bunch of these different words going around that the Tims like. I've seen people really run with this with many different variations, like a thousand, let a thousand Tim prefixes bloom as far as words are concerned, seems to be what the audience has done. Yeah. And they've really rolled with that.

There was like an explosion of Hello Internet creativity on the subreddit recently. And I just wanted to point out that related to all of this, one of my favorite things that a user put together, Munkintaras is a Hello Internet pirate flag that I absolutely adore because i think it strikes an excellent balance of being adorable and intimidating i think just like you what do you think of this pirate flag that the tims have made i do like it it's sort of like a slightly comic jolly roger but with a few little Hello Internet flourishes like the famous grey glasses, my kind of side parted hair, and like a robotic arm and a nail instead of the two crossed bones. It's worth a look. I'm

sure Grey will link to it in the show notes. And I think you're right. You sum it up right. It's like it's the perfect mixture of cute, yet it has got a slight menace to it. Like any Jolly Roger does. I've got to say, I really like it. It seems like a great little logo for Tim mischief that occurs. It's really greatly put together. This is one of the reasons why I do love having the hello internet subreddit where people just post whatever they're working on. And I really wanted to draw attention to this one because I think this is one of my favorite things to come out of the show artwork in quite a while. I really like this flag. It's adorable. And thank you for making it. And I hope you guys have fun with it. It's hilarious. It was made in the context of the recent voting hijinks, which we might come to later in the show.

And for that reason, I like it because I think it was sort of made in the context of when you see this flying, like when you see this coming over the horizon, you know something is going to happen that's not necessarily good if you don't like mischief. So I do like it as a kind of a warning sign. I can just see it striking fear into the heart of Wikipedia editors everywhere. Yeah, there's an armada of Tims approaching. That's what it is. Quick, serious one, because I know that you have been giving me a hard time about basically how I neglected CGP Grey the penguin.

Oh, yes. Forgot about her, basically, until we found out about her demise. So I was trying to make amends for this. And I contacted the zoo and I said said i want to know how she died like i want details obviously we know she died on this trip this foreign trip she was going on to go to another zoo yeah we were awaiting the penguin autopsy were we not yeah so i was kind of like i was tenacious i was you know i was reminding them I wasn't going to let this one slip through the cracks. I said, I insisted on, you know, they said, okay, we'll have someone from like the Penguin office call you when we know all the details. So I finally got the call.

But the call came like while I was on holiday and having a nice time and I was just about to go down to the pool and like my phone rings and I'm like, this is, I think this was when I was in Greece and my phone rings and I'm like, oh, what's this? I was in Greece and my phone rings and I'm like oh what's this it's a Bristol number I was like oh you're interrupting my holiday and then it was the lady saying oh it's so and so from Bristol Zoo I'm calling with the details of the penguin death oh it wasn't the right time for it so I ended up being one of those phone calls where I was like yep yep yep fine appreciate that thank you and now I feel like I can't contact them again, asking for loads more detail because they called me, like the person called me to give me all the details. So I feel like I failed again, basically. I like this because it feels like what you're

basically saying is, I didn't want this penguin death for which I am responsible to be a downer on my vacation. That's the story that you're telling me. Well, it sounds like you're the one putting words in people's mouth this time. I would never do such a thing. That's the story that you're telling me? Well, it sounds like you're the one putting words in people's mouths this time. I would never do such a thing. That's outrageous. But what I did glean, because there was talk that maybe CGP Grey, the lady penguin, had died from maybe like some kind of disease or virus that exacerbated when the plane travel happened.

But I was told that's not the case. The penguin just died from like the stress of the plane travel. There were lots of penguins that did it. Two or three died from memory, which is bad. But it sounds like it was just like C.G.P. Gray, the lady penguin, which wasn't made of as stern stuff as some of the other ones. The zoo lady also did tell me like, you know, they're taking lessons from this and other measures are going

to be implemented to make sure nothing like this can happen again. So CTP Grey, the lady penguin did not die in vain. Sounds a little bit like you're saying that she wasn't hard as nails. Like if she was made of sterner stuff, she would have survived the journey. Is that what you're saying there, Brady? I'm not going to sit here on a podcast and start bad mouthing a dead penguin. Okay. All right. bad-mouthing a dead penguin. I would never try to get you to do that. That would be ridiculous. I'm not going to do that. I loved that penguin. And I still feel a bit sad when I think about it. But I don't know. I always had a feeling that it was like a softer penguin compared to the

other ones. Oh, did you? But maybe that's because I felt protective of it. But like, if you were going to ship 20 penguins to another country, I felt like CGP Grey the Lady Penguin might be the one that would have struggled. And it turns out that was true. Well, I mean, this is the thing with most animals, pets in particular. We love them, but they're all just tragedies waiting to happen. A moment of silence for CGgp gray the lady penguin all right i just want to talk a bit about shops i've been going to the shops lately

so i go to tesco the supermarket quite a lot these days like i go almost every day now it's like a quick shop rather than doing like a one big shop i like just going every day and buying two or three things and we have talked about self-checkout before you like it and i don't right i have now decided self-checkout at the shops i go to is a mugs game i see them queuing to use it looking for the barcodes on their things and not being able to find it they all look miserable it takes them ages and meanwhile where i go there are like 20 checkouts that are staffed usually there's no queue at all you walk right up to it You don't have to have a conversation if you're a bit introverted. You can just say, hello. They scan your stuff. They're so good at it because they know where all the barcodes are because they've seen everything

before. They do it for a job. They're way better at putting things in bags than I am. Everything's so fast. And now with like contactless payment, like the interactions even less, most of the time, I think self-checkout is a bit of a mugs game. I keep having the feeling that this is like a suburban versus urban divide because your description of this, I find baffling and doesn't match my experience. Now, personal preferences about which till to go aside. Like when I think of all the supermarkets I go to, even the big supermarkets around me that I think might be more on the scale of what you would find in a suburban environment, they're always the case that it looks like the lines with the actual checkout people have long

lines and people with shopping carts filled with three, four, 500 items in them. That to me looks like, boy, I feel sorry for you if you have to use the human line, because this is the line for, I have a thousand things that need to be checked out. Whereas the self-checkout lines, they're fast, they're faster, they're smaller. There's a bazillion machines in the same amount of space that you could put a few checkout people. So I feel like I almost want to go with you on one of your holiday excursions to pick up two items at the supermarket and see like, what's the situation that Brady's working with here? See how the other half lives. All right. We'll arrange that. I acknowledge we must be having different experiences. How does this

country mouse go shopping? That's what I'm trying to find out here. It doesn't make any sense to me, your description of what's occurring. But I have to say, while I am traditionally the advocate of the old-fashioned way of doing things, and you are more the modern man, my goodness, contactless payment with cards. What a life changing thing that is. How quickly I've become used to it. How much I resent having to even put my PIN number in when I'm buying things. It is such a wonderful innovation. It's a much bigger step up from going from money to PIN cards, which I don't think much of as a step. But the step up from putting your PIN into contactless is fabulous.

And places that don't take contactless, I think, are barbaric. And they have to lift the limits on these things. Like, you know, if I spend 40 or 50 pounds on something, it's like, oh, no, you can't use contactless. I'm like, what? What are you doing? This is insane. I need to use my contactless.

I don't want to touch things. I don't want to press buttons. I just want to do the thing. I think it's fabulous. Literally just before this show was starting, I was running an errand to pick up a few things from the local supermarket for the house. And the total bill went over 30 pounds,

which at this store is the limit for using contactless. And it was something like 33 pounds or like just barely over. And I caught myself, unfortunately there's no self checkout at this thing. I have to actually use a person, but I caught myself looking at the guy and almost saying just ring it as two separate things so i can tap twice like because it's also about like i don't want to touch your buttons that have been touched by a thousand people and the contact list is so pleasing like you just boop like it just

goes like i use it on my phone or my watch all the time. It's the greatest thing in the whole world. I'm with you 100%. I absolutely love the contact list. But this is a case where I feel like I have become so spoiled by it as well. And I did not realize until I had spent all of this time in America this past summer. Because in my world, in all of the places that I go, I'm essentially 99.9% of the time using contactless payment because everything is under 30 or 40 pounds. And every single store that I go to takes it. And I can just use my watch or my phone everywhere. Like I'm so ridiculously spoiled. And then going to America, it feels like stepping back in time a hundred years. When they ask you for your signature

on the card to do payments, it feels like, why don't you bring out that machine from my childhood where you like put the credit card in the thing and then you go clunk, clunk over it. And then I get like a piece of yellow paper and you take two pieces. Like, I don't even know what the hell that machine is. Like, what is this thing even doing? Like, I don't understand how any payment is getting processed by this analog thing. Yeah. I never understood that. And you need like the Rosetta Stone to read what's on the bit of paper because it's so hard to decipher. I mean, I guess thinking it through, that machine must be a mechanical version of an IOU. Like, is that what it's doing? machine must be a mechanical version of an IOU. Like, is that what it's doing?

Those things were obviously being sent off to like some head office somewhere. How could anyone read those carbon copy paper things? They were awful. It's ridiculous. But that's what it felt like in America, where I'm using my card and they're like, oh, you have to sign for this thing. And I'm like surprised and angry every single time that I have to sign. And the signing is also like,

it's just such a ridiculous farce. Like, you're not checking my signature. Yeah. I had a credit card that like for years went unsigned before anybody ever commented on it, right? Like some picky rules following person's like, oh, you have to sign the card. But no, this stuff just feels, it feels so arcane and so ridiculous. And I felt so happy coming back to London and like, wee, right? Contactless payments everywhere. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Like it just works. And there's a thing in America that I don't, I had heard people describe, but I sort of didn't believe it because obviously I know Americans,

I listen to podcasts that have Americans on them, and people complain about these credit card machines that are being rolled out in America. And I heard people complain about them and I just thought like, what is the problem with this? But there are these like weird, clunky, gigantic credit card machines that I guess are supposed to be the American version of the little wireless terminals that everybody in Europe uses, except they're like twice as big and huge and confusing. And what is baffling to me is that when you make a successful payment, they make a noise like, they have like an angry beeping noise, which is confirmation that everything went okay.

Right. Right. It's like, everything's great alarm. Like it confused me every single time I used it. And I was in a bunch of different places in America and I came across them in a whole bunch of different states. And I was like, oh, America, why are you so behind the times with payments? Like, why are you so bad at this? Like there's a solution for contactless new payments. These little machines that we use over here.

Like, why don't we use these in America? I don't understand. I don't understand at all. It was infuriating. Okay, people, here we go. I'm going to ask you some questions and just answer yes or no in your head. Not out loud because you might get some funny looks. Do you ever travel in planes, trains or automobiles?

Do you ever walk places? Do you ever just lay planes, trains or automobiles? Do you ever walk places? Do you ever just lay in bed at night? Do you listen to podcasts? Now, if you answered yes to any one of those questions, then I think you might like audiobooks. And if you like audiobooks, today's sponsor, audible.com is where it's at. Now, Audible's a leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment on the internet. That's what it says here, and it's true. They've got an intimidatingly vast library of audiobooks and other products.

And if you sign up as an Audible listener for a low monthly fee, you'll get book credits and access to short programs now playing in channels each month. You can also get, listen carefully, a free audiobook with a 30-day trial at audible.com slash hallowinternet. A free audiobook. Shall I recommend one? I think I shall. Today it's going to be Conclave by Robert Harris. This is a fictional account of the vote for a new Pope. And for anyone fascinated by what happens in the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican when a new Pope's being elected, this is a great book for you. Plenty of politics, intrigue, mystery, but also a really easy listen.

It really rips along. I got through this one pretty quickly, desperate to know what would happen next. So that's my recommendation, Conclave. But there are countless others you may prefer as your free audiobook with that 30-day trial. I know that Tim's on Reddit even keep a list of previous recommendations from the show, both from Gray and myself, so maybe check that out. That address for the free book? Audible.com slash hellointernet. And hellointernet is all one word. There'll also be a link in the show description. They help us make Hello Internet as sponsors,

but we're also just everyday customers and we really like them. You know that bench I sit on sometimes where I have lunch, where I was sitting a few months ago when I saw like someone crash into another car and try to sneak away. And I like, we had this quandary about what do I do? Do I dob them in? Do I leave a note? That sort of stuff. You're wondering how much of a Samaritan do you have to be?

Is there a good Samaritan law that you need to worry about in this area? What is the right thing to do? I was sitting on that same bench yesterday, just minding my own business. Swinging your feet back and forth, eating a sandwich. That's how I imagine it. In fact, that is what I was doing. Perfect. Okay. And something caught my eye on the ground, a little flash of red and silver glint. And it was a dropped Visa card, like a Visa debit card with contactless payment and everything like that. And I had the person's name on it. It was brand new in pristine condition.

Like it looked brand new. And the expiry date was like matched the month we're in. So it made me think maybe it was a brand new card. So I picked it up and I sort of looked around and there was no one around. So I went and bought another sandwich with it. No, I didn't. I looked around, there was no one around.

And I was like, what do I do? Like, what are my responsibilities here? What is the right thing to do with this card? What would you have done? It's one of those things that you're not entirely educated about best practices. I'm just pausing here because I feel like there is, there's some version of an old school teacher in my head who's like, well, if you find a thing, you should take it to a police station. Yeah. I guess here's, here's the complication. What you didn't find is somebody's wallet.

No. Right. Just the card. Yeah. If you find somebody's wallet, it feels like, okay, I guess I'll take this to the authorities. Yeah. And the police have a lost and found box in the station yeah or they get the new guy to try to track down the owner of a wallet

in between solving homicides like i don't know what's gonna happen i mean to be honest if i found someone's wallet i feel like i would have enough information to probably find that person in 10-15 minutes and get it back to them. You know, I could Google them or if the address was nearby, I could just walk to their house. Like that seems easier in many ways. But yes, if not, I probably would take it to a police station. But all I had was a surname, like, you know, Mr. Jones and a card. If you have address information in the wallet, that also makes it much easier,

right? That's, that's a much clearer thing to do. I don't think there's anything in my wallet that actually lists my address on it. Like if my wallet was lost, someone would need to take it to a police station. No, you don't have a driver's license or anything.

Yeah. I don't have a driver's license. So there's nothing in there with, with my address on it as far as I know. Yeah. But an individual card, what we have here is something that's on the spectrum from how much burden do you feel versus personal inconvenience yeah right and a wallet feels like it's very far along that

spectrum of it's horrifically inconvenient for another person to lose a wallet so you feel like oh i'm doing a great thing by bringing the person to the wall i'm saving them an enormous amount of yeah like if it happened to me i'd be begging for someone to find it rather than me having to deal with all of that bureaucracy. Right. But a single card, a single card feels like it's sitting on that knife's edge of, is the personal hassle to me worth this thing? Or like, will the police officer laugh me out of the station if I bring them a single credit? Like, I think they would. I think if I go in there, officer McNulty is going to be like, get the hell out of here with this, with this credit card. Like, why are you wasting my time?

They just take it out of your hand and cut it in half with a pair of scissors and say, thanks for coming. That is exactly what I expect would happen. Talking this through, I think that is what I would think is my level of responsibility. I would cut it in half and leave it at that. No further good Samaritan action to be required than that. Okay. The question is, Brady. What did I do? What did you do? I'm a bit reluctant to say in case I broke some law or someone says I shouldn't have done it. Well, I mean, we can just say that this is, of course, a fanciful story that is just being told on a

podcast. Yeah. So there were one or two people in my vicinity. So I did say to them, did you just drop a card? And if they'd said yes, I would have then said, what's your name? And if they got the name right, I would have handed them the card. What are the last four digits? Yeah. But no one had. I walked into the sandwich shop where I'd gotten my sandwich. And I said, has anyone come in here saying they'd lost a card? I don't know what I would have done if they'd said yes because I guess I would have said, have you got their details? I wouldn't have given it to some people at the shop. But they said no.

And the girl behind the checkout said, you should probably just cut it in half because they probably already cancelled it. There were two restaurants right near where it had dropped, like an Italian restaurant and a Chinese restaurant. And I did think about going in and asking if I should make some kind of public announcement because there's, you know, 50 or 60 people. So it was a good chance that the person who dropped it was in the restaurant and needed it to like pay for their meal or something. But I did feel like that was a high

level of disruption for maybe not even success. So I decided not to do that. What I did was I then went back to the bench near where I found her and I sat there for another 15, 20 minutes just finishing my food and faffing around on my phone to see if I could see anyone walking around looking for a card and no one emerged who fit that description. So then I went home and I cut it into lots of small pieces with scissors and threw it in the bin. You didn't shred it, Brady? You didn't have a shredder that can handle a credit card?

No. That shredder I famously bought right at the start of Hello Internet hasn't worked for about two years. And I haven't replaced it or fixed it. It just sits under my desk dormant. That's very sad on a number of levels. It annoys me. But anyway, let's not go there. Anyway.

I'm much more interested in the shredder underneath your desk, taking up your precious foot space that you haven't fixed after two years. Is it still there? Have I thrown it away? No, it is still there. I do need to throw it away and get another one. Because I did like it when I was running. I just got greedy and tried to put too many pieces of paper in it one day.

It jammed. And no matter what I tried to do, I couldn't fix it. No, of course. That's the call of the paper shredder. You want to push it to its breaking limit, right? You're never satisfied until you get too many pieces of paper. Five? You could do six.

Six? Six is for weaklings. What about seven? Seven? That's for co-hosts. Why not eight? No. Yeah.

That's what existence is for shredders. It's like some kind of hellish torment where no matter how much they can eat, like you're constantly upping the spectrum of like, oh, but you're going to eat more until it breaks. I'm sorry that you broke your shredder, Brady. I'm sorry that you had to manually cut up this credit card by hand. It's quite pleasant cutting credit cards with scissors because it's like a naughty thing. Like it's quite fun. I liked it. I'm glad you got a naughty thrill. Like it's quite fun. I liked it. I'm glad you got a naughty thrill out of cutting up that credit card into multiple pieces. It must have been very exciting for you.

It's quite a pleasurable amount of resistance on the scissors when you cut a credit card too. Like you don't normally get that level of resistance on a cut. It's nice. Cutting a credit card with scissors is a pleasant feeling. All right, people, drop your credit cards around Brady so he can get the naughty satisfaction of cutting up other people's credit cards. I will have cut it in half before it even hits the ground. You'll be like,

wait, wait, that's mine. No, bang. You pass the event horizon. You're going to be carrying scissors to that park just hoping, just waiting. Who knows what moral conundrum will strike next on Brady's bench. And you know how you get those park benches where it says, you know, Gladys and Ron used to sit here and watch the sunset for 50 years. Maybe one day they'll put like a little metal plaque on the back of the bench saying, this is where Brady saw two cars hit and where he found a credit card. And like it could become famous.

I don't know if this is a national thing or if it's just in London, but do you have those blue badges that are the historical markers? It's more of a London thing, but other cities and parts of the UK do keep trying to co-opt it. So you do see blue plaques around the place. Yeah. Those historic markers. Yeah. That is a thing that exists then where in your town, you're walking around, there's a blue plaque and it says Bobby Thorpenton III, writer of something you've never heard of, was born here. Yeah, but they're not usually as official outside. This is a whole, we could do a whole podcast about blue plaques, but yeah, there are a couple near where I live, but they're not like officially sanctioned ones. Well, I guess where I was going with this is these blue historical

plaques that I see all over the place in London. You can hardly move in London for blue plaques. It's like wading through treacle. I do feel like, hey guys, maybe we should tone it down a little bit. Especially there's a couple that I love that aren't even like, oh, this famous person was born here. There's a few that kind of make me laugh every time because it's like, oh, this person you never heard of lived in a house on this site from 1832 to 1835.

Yeah. It's like, what is this plaque? It's like, yeah, Jane Austen stayed in a room in this house for three hours while she was spell checking the second draft of Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, that's what it feels like. Like the bar is just too low for some of these things. Like there's too many of them all over the place. And I feel like the number of times I have any idea who the person they're referring to is,

is very small compared to the number of total plaques. But I was just wondering, because we touched on the idea of fame last time. Now that you're talking about this bench that you clearly want to be made a historical object. Do you think, Brady, that after you're dead, this is seriously, you are famous enough to get a blue plaque on that bench that says this is Brady's bench? Brady sat here eating lunch and thinking about moral conundrums sometimes. Grey, I could say without a shadow of a doubt

that I'm not famous enough to get a blue plaque anywhere, anything, anytime to do with anything I've ever done. I totally disagree with that. I think you should have a blue plaque. You're way more famous than most of the blue plaques I see where it's like, oh, some nobody 200 years ago, no one's ever heard of, gets a blue plaque. Great. I can promise you in 200 years, I'll be an even bigger nobody. I don't know, man. People might be listening to the show in 200 years.

Well, let's see. Let's see. It's not over yet. I could still make that late move into test cricket and become the oldest player ever to score 100 for Australia. Yeah, that's the thing that's going to make you the famous person. Yeah, that's what's going to be it. That's what I want to make me a famous person. No, I understand that, Brady. I understand that very clearly. Apparently, you don't want to be known as the mere co-host of a popular podcast. You want to be a man who strikes out and does his own thing. That's what you want to be remembered for.

Not a co-host. Grey, I want us to introduce the term vice host for my position. No, I am vetoing this. It's a ridiculous title. It makes no sense. We're podcast co-hosts. This is Grey, the host of Hello Internet, and I'm his vice host. No, that makes no sense.

It's ridiculous. And I think it's self-demeaning, Brady. I don't agree with this at all. I'd be quite happy to be a vice host. I think that's a really cool name. Like it would be a really good talking point. Like how many podcasts do you know that have a vice host? We might be the first.

And that would make us special. It's like, have you heard that podcast? They've got a host and a vice host. All right, I'm going to listen to that just to check that out. And then they'll listen and be, oh, I thought this would be boring, but actually it turns out they talk about blue plaques, penguin deaths. It's really cool. Contactless payment cards that have existed for two years. It's brilliant.

Yeah. I thought they were just a couple of clowns, but it's cutting edge. Oh, okay. So that'll be your blue plaque then. World's oldest cricketer and vice host of Hello Internet podcast sat on this bench. I'll take that. Not world's oldest cricketer. World's oldest cricketer to score 100.

I have to score a test century. Oh, okay. Just being old is not good enough. I have to score a ton. It probably is too late for me, sports-wise. But you can always be the world's first vice host of a podcast. I don't like it. I still don't like it, Brady. It's out of the bottle now, my friend.

I feel like I know you well enough that sometimes you get an idea in your Brady head and there's just no dislodging it. This moment, I'm ordering the embroidered t-shirt. Across my back in big red letters, vice host. Until the buzz started, I didn't realize how many bee stories were in the media every week. It's massive. It is. I feel the same way.

I was on Twitter earlier and I saw someone had made a little logo for the buzz with CGB Gray, like a cute little turning a microphone into B-Wings, a little bit of a logo. And I was making a joke about how like everybody seems really interested in all the B-News, but like there really isn't like, haha, the joke is over. There really isn't enough B-News all of the time to have any kind of regular segment that's the buzz. And then immediately people are like, oh, did you know this week there was a million dollars worth of bees stolen in a bee heist? I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? All sorts.

And then it's like, oh, not only was this a bee heist, but it's bee heists are a thing? Like stolen bees? This is like a whole underground industry. They're a bee rustlers. Yeah, I know. It's like, I can't believe like this is really a thing that people go around stealing bees. So someone sent me this article about like Fresno police officers find $1 million worth of stolen bees in the great bee heist. It's crazy. Like the guy who stole all these bees is facing 10 years in prison if he's convicted. Oh, you're onto an even better one.

You've got the American bee heist. There was a British bee heist as well just recently. There are multiple bee heists going on. I mean, of course, America's bee heists are bigger and better than a bee heist in England. Yeah. They're more small scale here. Yeah. Go big or go home with American bee heists, I guess, is the way that works. Today in the Times, there was a story about a new nature paper that's just been published about some pesticide that we all use that's devastating bumblebees. They found that bumblebee queens that are exposed to this neotinoid thing are 26 percent less

likely to lay eggs and start a colony like how detailed is that research they're like exposing queen bees to this chemical and then like that's detailed research they're going hardcore they are going hardcore and it was in the times you know bee news is big there's obviously like demand for the sub-editors of the newspaper obviously obviously thinking, what are we going to put in? Are we going to put in this yet another story about YouTube terrorism? Or should we just have a break from that and like put in this story about bees? And they put the bee story in. This kind of stuff is increasing, like reading through the bee heist news. My favorite quote so far is from Steve Godwin from the

California State Beekeepers Association. He says, quote, there used to be a code of honor that you didn't mess with another man's bees. But the perpetrators of this giant hive heist broke that code. Some things are just wrong. It's like the wild west out there with bees. What's the security measures one can put in place to prevent one's bees being taken? I mean, foolishly, I would have assumed that the bees themselves would be the security measure. You know, I guess it's like cattle rustling. The bees are happy to go along with somebody who's, you know, giving them some smoke.

And then they get all sleepy and you can just take them. I don't have any idea. But they caught this guy. Apparently the police got him in an elaborate sting. Oh God, Brady. That was absolutely awful. I'm here all week. Hello, hello, internet listeners.

Are you too fascinated with B-news? Do you want to create some kind of hub to be the center of all B-news in the future? Well, then you know what you want to create some kind of hub to be the center of all B news in the future? Well, then you know what you want to do. You want to make a website with Squarespace. Squarespace is the only place you should go for all of your B website related creation needs or any website creation related needs, really, because they are the simplest, fastest, best way to make a website. They're what I use to make my websites and what you should too. Squarespace takes away all of the technical headaches that you would normally have to worry about if you were building a website the old-fashioned way and replaces it with a rock-, stable, and beautiful system that you can use. When you're

creating your Bee website, you'll be able to choose from a huge variety of templates that they have set up for you to start. And they've just added 16 brand new beautiful designer templates to their collection. Now all of these you can tweak and customize to make them look whatever way you want. Perhaps some sort of black and yellow theme might be what you want to go for. You can adjust the colors and everything about it that you possibly want to. And one of the great things is it will scale to any size. So people can check for your B articles on their phone or on their gigantic computer and it will resize the website so that it reads properly and looks good everywhere. With Squarespace, there's nothing to install, patch, or upgrade ever.

And if you need any help, they have award-winning 24-7 customer service that you can always easily get in touch with. If you ever need to sell B merch, they also have an integrated commerce platform. It really is an absolute no-brainer. So whatever website you want to make, you want to make your next move with Squarespace. So just go to squarespace.com slash hello to get 10% off your first order and show your support for this show. That's squarespace.com slash hello. I caught up with Gray and Mrs. Gray a week ago or so, was it? Yeah, I saw you in person. We had a lovely day together.

And the day got off to a brilliant start because the moment your wife walked in the room she was carrying this incredibly huge wrapped present for me wrapped in gold paper with a big red bow i felt a bit bad because like i hadn't turned up with anything and you guys were bestowing on me this enormous gift which i have to say is one of the best wrapped and ribboned gifts I've ever seen. I will put a picture of it wrapped in the show notes. And I couldn't wait to open it. And then you guys told me I couldn't open it until this episode. So it remains wrapped and it's sitting next to me right this moment.

Fantastic, Brady. Yes, we got a little gift for you. And I wanted to wait. It's not little. It's massive. You have a picture I'll put in the show notes of the gift with Audrey for scale. So people can immediately understand how big the package is. Yeah.

But yes, there's a present that we got for you that we wanted to have you open on the show. We thought it would be the best way to do it. So we've made you wait a week. The suspense has been killing me. Has it, Brady? Has it actually been killing you? It actually kind of has. I've grown kind of attached to it now, though.

It's been sitting in my office. And because it's such a beautiful object, you know, it's big and gold with a big red sash. I've come to quite like it to the point where unwrapping it is going to be disappointing because the beauty of it will be destroyed. I'm not a very like neat unwrapper either. I wouldn't expect you're a very neat unwrapper either. I figured this could go one of two ways, which is that one, you would obsess over what's in the box or two, you might just totally forget about it. You put it in a room and it would out of sight, out of mind. It didn't occur to me that you would place it in a spot where you could see it and gaze upon it all

the time and then just like it as an actual object in your office. The only slight problem with having a beautiful gold gift wrapped in your office at a time that is not Christmas and stuff like that, is over the past few days, I've had a few people visit my house. Like some of them have been here for like extended stays as well because they're like Numberphile guests who sometimes come here and we make videos together for a day or two and then they go off. So all of these people, like when they come into my office, they see this wrapped gift.

And I'm a bit worried in the back of their head, they've all been thinking, oh, I wonder if that's for me as a thank you for doing Numberphile. And of course, like they never get it. And then I feel really guilty that all these people have been coming and thinking that the present's for them and it's not, it's for me. If people don't say anything, I think you can kind of assume that in the back of their mind, they were hoping that the gift is for them. Because they don't go, oh, what's the gift? Because you wouldn't say that.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Like they're standing by it, like, you know, rubbing their toe into the ground, looking at you and going like, so is it time to go now that the day is over? I guess I'll be heading off if there's nothing else, nothing else that you need to discuss. I think that's the implicit social thing that's occurring there. Yeah. They've been feeling like gifts are for them. So I'm sorry about that, Brady. Maybe they just didn't notice it. Although it is hard to miss because it's gold and red. It's crazy. So should i open it okay yes you can open the gift now i will just preface yes that there is some assembly required just so that you know that

you know that going into it but yes you can open the gift you can open the gift. You can open the gift now, Brady. Okay, here we go. I'm putting it on my lap. And I'm undoing this. It's very secure. It doesn't contain bees, does it? Yeah, surprise. It's a box full of live bees. That would make quite the podcast segment.

All right, I've done the sides wow this is a new microphone it's called shore legendary performance 75th anniversary model, limited edition. It's amazing looking. Funnily enough, it's the sort of thing that I would quite like the look of. It's almost like the people who bought it knew my taste. It's almost like we've been in your house and know how things look. Again, top of the line, early 1900s look for everything that's in your house, Brady.

This is gorgeous. I'm actually opening the box to look at the device itself now. This is what I was going to say is, what you have to understand is that it is, it's not just a microphone that we got you, Brady. Yeah. This is a symbol of something. So what I want you to take a look at is the bass.

Because what we got you is not just a microphone, but it is a trophy, is what it is, Brady. Wow. So, oh, wow. So it's got like a numbered certificate of authenticity. So like that already really excites me. All right. And it's like, oh, wow, this is amazing.

It's in like its own little steel suitcase. Mm-hmm. Like you would see someone carrying if it was like, like if they had like, like it should be handcuffed to my wrist. Yeah, that's exactly what, like that case totally looks like the case that's handcuffed to a security guard kind of case. It's awesome. I'm going to undo the case now.

Wow. There's the microphone, like in all spongy, sponginess. That's a good looking microphone. Now, it doesn't appear the base is there. It looks like the base is separate. So I'm going to open the other box with the base in it. Because, you know, it's all about the base on Hello Internet. Oh, my God. Oh, here's the base is separate so i'm going to open the other box with the base in it because you know it's all about the base on hello internet oh my god oh here's the base oh hang on no the base is engraved there we go oh wow what does the base say brady the base says dr brady harron

radio and podcast champion 2017 you're being naughty brady we're not being naughty because as the audience already knows at this point the people who follow Hello Internet intensely know, you won the internet radio competition podcast voting extravaganza that the Radio Times put on that we were discussing in the last episode. You won that. You won that by an enormous amount. And what was there from the radio times? Nought but silence. And my wife and I thought, that's not the kind of respect and acknowledgement that Dr. Brady Herron deserves. We need to give him a trophy to embody this accomplishment and this award that Brady has won. So my wife went out on the internet and we decided to find a trophy for Brady. And there was nothing that was up to what we thought

would be the magnificent standard that you deserve. So we found this limited edition microphone and we got it engraved in London and the base. So this is the trophy to represent your triumph in podcasting, Brady. Well, I feel like I should make a short speech at this point. I would just like to say, this is not just a victory for me. This is a victory for my co-host. Although he fell in the battle and was not able to make it all the way to the final stages. I felt like he was with me in spirit and he was certainly with me on Twitter. I was with you on Twitter every step of the way, buddy. But also, this is not about me. No. And this is not a victory for me.

This is a victory for the Tims. And I mean that quite literally. Because as we will discuss shortly, they pretty much did it. And I was a slightly confused and bemused passenger for their mischief making. But before we talk about this vote and how it came to be that I am the Radio Times Radio and Podcast Champion, and we will talk about it because it was fascinating

and also I need some of it explained to me. There is a group of people I want to thank and these are not the people who are responsible for the victory, really. But they actually are a really sizable group and that is the group of people that sat at their computer and just clicked on a button and refreshed the page and waited and clicked the button again

and then went and had a coffee and clicked the button again. And I had like some friends that did it and like some friends' wives and people like that who were oblivious to the technological firestorm that was taking place behind the scenes on both sides. Even people who were aware were still participating. There were many a manual vote cast in the grey household for Brady. I'll tell you that right now. And like there were lots of people who used the conventional way of ballot stuffing,

of just voting over and over again on their computer i seriously want to thank them because some people like spent a lot of time doing it and it was really sweet like alan who famously composed the hello internet jingle the little sound at the start of our show called me up and said oh my wife and i so happy that you won my wife like stayed up really late and was just sitting in bed voting for you lots and lots of times and then i sort of said to him like you realize like there was quite a lot of other stuff going on and he was like oh i didn't i had no idea like so there are lots of people who were just like really sweet voting the old-fashioned way and like that means a lot like you know the whole

thing doesn't mean anything because it's a silly vote but i want to thank those people because because they're like, you know, they're old school. I guess we better talk about what happened in this vote and discuss a few things about it because it had quite the conclusion. Let's talk about that vote. Just to finish my speech, thank you to Gray and Mrs. Gray, because this is actually a really lovely thing you've given me as well. Like actually does mean a lot to me. So thank you very much. And I will thank her in person. That's well, again, we know physical objects mean a lot to you, Brady. We wanted you to have an embodiment of this tremendous thing that we have all gone through together as a big Hello Internet

group. I mean, should I use this microphone now as my podcasting microphone? Or should I put it on my little shelf where I have like my favorite? Because I do have three or four trophies that mean so much to me. I do have them on display. So I could put that up there on my little, my mantle of fame. This is 100% up to you. It serves either as a trophy or it can be a Hello Internet microphone.

It is a working microphone. It is a limited edition working microphone. So it looks like the bee's knees, to be honest. However, it's your trophy now. is in your hands however it best serves you brady i just don't want to sully it it's so lovely like i don't want to scratch it and knock it but maybe that will add you know charm to it if it's like used in battle like it will it will increase its value if hello internet episodes were actually recorded on it it's up to you. It's up to you, man. It's up to you. All right. All right. So let me very quickly recap what happened

for people who are smart enough to have taken absolutely no interest in this debacle that happened a few weeks ago now. Just before you even begin with this, like I just have to say, I love kind of sometimes getting involved in these sort of silly internet things. It really is fun to let yourself get like

swept away in an event like this. Something like that just really heightens the feeling of, even like you were saying with Alan and his wife who were voting for you in the election, that people are just unaware of like, to us, what seemed like this incredible all-consuming maelstrom for a weekend, right? There's Twitter and there's coordination on Reddit and there's messages going back and forth where I am and it's like this flurry of activity that seems so all-consuming, which you realize is like just one of like an infinite number of internet maelstroms that are occurring on every corner of the globe, right? It's like outside of this world, totally meaningless, inside of this world to a

sub-community, all consuming for like 48 to 72 hours. I have followed no election in my life more closely than this one. So I'll give like a brief summary of what I think happened. Please do. And then you can explain some of it to me and tell me the parts of it that tickled your fancy. So last time people listened, if they listened to the last episode, they'll know the radio times around this poll for their radio and podcast champion. They ran all different polls for different categories, like TV stars and comedians. And there was a radio and podcast section. It was a huge, big thing, very elaborate with all different groups and a knockout section.

And it got to a point where I was in this quarterfinal up against this guy called Steve Allen who Gray and I thought was a bit dismissive of us in a tweet. So we sort of caused a call to arms to try and win the vote, let me win the vote against this guy. And that's how the last podcast ended. And we deliberately released that podcast after all the voting was over because we didn't want to like be seen to be like, you know, getting involved. Well, at least via the podcast.

Let's back up that phrasing. We thought it would be better to drop the episode after the results were closed. Yeah. I mean, releasing the podcast to like, you know, 900,000 downloads or whatever felt a bit like we'd be bringing a gun to a knife fight. So it was like, let's just do it. They do this the old fashioned way. So I won this vote against Steve Allen. And I had said on the podcast, that was it. This is a meaningless, silly vote to just drive clicks to their website

and increase their advertising. And I said, I'm not going to have anything more to do with it. I want to just jump in here as well, that I too, at this point felt satiated in this internet kerfuffle. I think my exact words were that I wanted your opponent crushed into the ground. I feel like that was in internet terms accomplished. It was victory. And I felt like, oh, okay, catharsis. It's all over. Oh, good. Oh, good. So in the semi-final, I was paired up with someone called Lila Parsons, who is a DJ and a TV presenter and a model, and obviously very talented and successful. But it turns out I won that vote as well i didn't even follow that vote really but

it turns out i won that vote and that put me into the final and the final was against funnily enough a colleague a radio colleague of steve allen like a co-presenter on the same station like mates and i was in the final against him and he had taken an interest in this whole vote and had been tweeting about it and encouraging people to vote. Now, out of kind of respect, I kind of looked him up and who he was and found out a bit about him. And I listened to his show. And I just want to say from the outset, I quite like this guy. Like I listened to his show a couple of times. I've read some of the stuff he writes. He seems reasonably like-minded to me on some issues. A lot of people who follow Hello Internet like him. I found out there was a lot of crossover.

Seems a sound guy. And also before the vote started, he even tweeted me and, like, said, you know, good luck, mate, ha-ha, and I sort of tweeted back. So no issues with this guy at all, sound guy. Everything's good. Yeah. So the vote started and there was a bit of to and fro early. And I think he had a lead.

But what happened then was the Tims took over at this point. And they got really, really into it. And I want to say Radio Times was really whipping this up into a frenzy. Their article on their website said in the blue corner and in the red corner. And all the way through the whole thing, they were tweeting about it all the time they were inciting people to vote they were using language that like made it sound like a real war they were using language like rally the troops oh yeah they specifically said on their website and in multiple places vote as many times as you want vote often because i think they wanted people to continually refresh the pages and

up their ad impressions exactly yeah that's 100 That's 100% what it was. I realized they were retweeting everything that they possibly could that was related to these internet fights. They were whipping it up. They were really whipping it up. So the Tims took the gauntlet. Now I decided to stay out of it. That was my decision. I wasn't going to tweet about it i wasn't going to get involved in the end my only policy was to retweet whenever this james o'brien tweeted so if he ever said come on everyone let's vote lots of times i would just retweet his thing and let people decide what to do but the teams the teams got really into it they created this like battle command station on reddit on a reddit thread where they coordinated in ways that I still don't understand. They were clearly using automated voting and bots and things like

that. They were creating pages where the voting could be done automatically by your computer. And clearly a kind of arms war started because James O'Brien fans, who I want to point out, were doing the same thing. And I have lots of evidence they were doing the same thing. And the vote wouldn't have been as close as it was if they weren't doing the same thing. But some of the more old-fashioned James O'Brien fans started crying foul. And because the Tims were doing this so openly, they were doing it on Reddit, they were explaining their tactics so that other people could do it. It was a real public communal effort.

It wasn't clandestine. That's why the James O'Brien fans were stealing all the technology and codes that they were finding and using it to vote for their guy. So it was very open. But like the more old-fashioned fans of James O'Brien, probably your more typical Radio Times readers,

I think when they found this thread, thought they'd found something from like the dark web or something, some great secret. And they were then tweeting it and sending it to Radio Times going, look what's going on, there's cheating. And they started crying foul. And they started saying some like inflammatory things like, I'm going to cancel my subscription and this whole thing's corrupt. And they got really upset because their beloved radio presenter looked like he might lose the vote.

And at that point, Radio Times were like, oh my God, what have we done? We've created a monster. Yeah. There was definitely a tonal shift from Radio Times. They went deadly silent on the whole thing. They never said or tweeted another word. They still haven't to this day, even though they're happily tweeting about other winners, they went completely silent. But they obviously started trying to implement technological solutions. Like at one point they introduced captures to stop people from using the automated process. But when they did that, the lead I had actually started increasing, which makes me think maybe I had more manual voters than the other guy. I want to just point out a couple of things as we're going along this

road here, right? Because yes, automated started happening and and escalating at a rate that almost felt like there's like there's a self-learning artificial intelligence here that is pulling apart everything everything that has anything to do with how the entire system works and cranking out every advantage that there could possibly be it's like yeah it was very interesting to see in the reddit threads slightly terrifying to see what the audience can do if it coordinates. It's like, Jesus Christ, like these guys might be rigging real elections, right?

It was amazing. It was very impressive. What I really liked is someone put together a data visualization of the percentage win over time, which made it much easier to follow the election. This is like, you know, if I was the kind of person who'd follow a real election, you'd be checking updates in the polls

of the predicted wins of candidates, you know, once a day when the news publishes it. But like, there's a graph that's updating every five seconds with what the current exact 10th of a percentage edge is. The technology, the technology was amazing. And there's a few things about it I want to come to. Yeah. It was really interesting to follow.

Like I kept refreshing the graphs and seeing how things were going. And once the graph existed, you could see more clearly that at some point, as the bots were introduced, it became entirely a bot war. Because the graph just ended up being just too smooth, right? Like when humans are voting, it was much more spiky. But then at a point when you have bots that are voting, whatever it was, like hundreds and hundreds of times a second, and you have bots on both sides voting, it ends up becoming like a smooth curve because you're just looking at the difference between the bots on either side. And this is where I would have paid so much money to know what was going on inside Radio

Times headquarters because they obviously built a click machine. They wanted this to be a bring your audience, bring advertising revenue to us click machine for Radio Times' own benefit. And much like a shredder in which you keep shoving in more paper until it breaks, this felt like the same thing. Like, Radio Times, you want votes? You're going to get votes. You're going to get millions and millions of votes. You're going to get more votes than there ever will be people in the universe. Like, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if in the end, the results on that final vote were in the billions, like on either side.

They made the percentages public, but they didn't make the number of votes public. They didn't make the number of votes public. You could only see the percentages. So for me, again, it's like, just like in the first round where it's like, oh, la-di-da, isn't this fun? And then I got angry when Steve Allen tweeted the kind of dismissive of you tweet, like, please vote for me over this, like, I've never heard of thing. Then I got riled up. I was having the same feeling with the later rounds of the election. Like, oh, isn't this a kind of fun thing to follow over the weekend? Like, let's see if Brady wins. Oh, it's now become a bot war like it obviously would. Like, LOL, it's hilarious. But then the thing that you just mentioned is where once again, I felt myself turn from like happy, fun Gray into like furious Gray. And it was when very obviously someone at the radio times

was looking at the numbers, looking at the monster that they themselves have summoned from the internet and they wanted to turn it off, right? They wanted to stop it. And so they introduced the captcha. So the captchas are those words you have to type in to prove that you are not a robot, right? Or that the pictures that you have to click. But they were using like a bargain basement word captcha as the thing that they were using to try to determine that they were actually humans voting. This to me was when it's like, oh, okay, I see what's going on here. You now, you've set up your dopey election, which has dumb rules in the first place where you can vote as many times as you want, because it's not really an election. It's an impressions generating machine for you.

Now this has gotten out of control because you radio times probably have like actual people on the radio being quite annoyed with you and your position is you're trying to be like this thing that radio people might care about so like they suddenly found themselves in an awkward position yeah because the radio people didn't seem to take it as quite the joke we did no and i think obviously you know core business for radio times is probably radio these people probably buy ads in their magazine they pay to have their listings on there so the people they were pissing off and the people who were losing suddenly were like the people who actually put bread on the table and the podcasters who they don't really care about. And they just put in there to try and up their clicks by getting people with lots of Twitter followers was suddenly

winning. And they're like, oh no. This is the structural problem they have is like, this is why like it started to get into my brain. Like it makes me mad about the whole system because like you obviously included podcasters in some of these polls because you wanted to bring in like those juicy, juicy internet clicks. But it's like, none of these people are your business. You don't actually want any of the podcasters to win. And we know that's the case because like you said, when they introduced the CAPTCHA, it actually made things worse because like you said, when they introduced the CAPTCHA, it actually made things

worse because like you said, so many people were manually voting for you from Hello Internet versus the number of people voting for the radio people that when they introduced the CAPTCHA for a couple of hours, you could see on the graph that it's like your lead just kept increasing even faster than without. And so after a couple of hours, they pulled the CAPTCHA. And that was when it was like, my blood is now boiling. It's like, oh, okay, you're just being really open about this banana republic that you're running over here, right? Like, okay, if you're going to put the CAPTCHA on and then you're going to take it away because you're obviously trying to monkey with the results to get the thing that is financially in your own best interest. Like, why don't you just make up the results at this point? Like, this whole thing was a ridiculous charade, like,

before it even began. Now you have made it into, like, an even more ridiculous thing that the person who clearly has more people manually voting for him, like you kind of wanted to have happen in the first place, but you don't want him to win. So you're switching it back, hoping that the radio personalities bots will somehow win or that it won't be such an incredibly crushing defeat if you have the bots fighting it out versus having the actual people fighting it out. So it made me furious to see this election where they wanted to change the rules to get the result they want. And when it wasn't working and it was actually worse for them, they're like, whoop, I guess we'll go back to the other way and like change it back. So, the whole thing was just ridiculous. But my blood was boiling after the

capture incident in this election. It's like, it still riles me up. That's when you started marshalling a few troops and started encouraging people on Twitter. Because I was trying to be like presidential about it. Yeah, no, yeah. And like stay out of it. And I never linked to anything that encouraged multiple voting, either manually or automatically. I was trying to rise above it. But then you energized an already very energetic group. My feeling of it was like, Radio Times, you made me do this. Like, I didn't want to do this, but you made me do it. Because after the quarter't want to do this, but you made me do it. Because after the quarter

finals with Steve Allen, when you won, I felt like, oh, we're done. And this is just a fun thing to follow and see what happens over the weekend. But after the capture thing, it was like, no, Brady has to win this. Like, I'm going to come in on Twitter and try to make sure that like, push as much as I can. Like, I want this thing to go a particular way because Radio Times has like, shown their hand with this vote manipulation that they wanted to have happen, but didn't happen. You wanted to blow past the capture thing. Like, but if it's like, to me, this was like one of the major events in the great election of 2017.

Well, there's a few other things I want to ask you about and talk about, but just to kind of finish the emotional story first, I didn't want to care, but as you have pointed out, I have like this naturally competitive, but as you have pointed out, I have like this naturally competitive streak, like most Australians. I didn't want to win because it would be a little bit embarrassing, but I also really didn't want to lose. So it got to a point where I was really like consumed by it, but trying not to be. And I kept, I would look at the numbers and like, I would see myself myself going up and holding a lead. But as the O'Brien fans got more savvy with the automated voting, sometimes he would claw back some ground.

And I'd be thinking, that's it. I'm going to lose now. This is the start of the precipice and it's all going to end. And it got to a point where I was so worked up about it over days because they made the final last more days just to prolong the cruelty and their revenue. Of course. It got to a point where I was like just going for walks. Like I would just go for a walk out like to the sea so that I didn't have to think about it or look at it.

And like then I would get my phone out and just quickly check the score. And I'd be like, oh no, I've gone down another 0.1 of a percent. And whenever a trend started, it would continue. You would drop a 0.1 of a percent every minute and then someone else would do something technological and it would change. So anyway, I decided I thought the best thing for me would be to win, but to win narrowly so that everyone saved face. But that's not what happened. And I ended up winning about 80%. But never a word

was spoken about it by Radio Times. They completely disowned the whole thing. Which is, again, exactly shows you that this is not what they wanted. On all of the other things, they're very happy to promote the winners. And then suddenly, this is like silence. I'm kind of a little bit glad because if they'd made a big deal about it and stirred it up again, then all the O'Brien fans would have come back online and said that it was a farce. And that would have riled me up again and it would have riled you up and I just would have, I'm quite happy for it to sort of fade a little bit out of existence, but still happy to

have won and like to have my trophy from you and Mrs. Gray. But there are a few things that I observed and liked about it and a few questions I've come out with. First is I've said thank you to the people who, like, voted manually, but also thank you to the people who did all this technological stuff because, like, it was awesome. Like, they were awesome. And it was really interesting to watch as, like, an outsider all the discussions they were having

and all the tactics they were coming up with and all the things they were doing and, like, the camaraderie they were having and, like, the two camps of with and all the things they were doing and like the camaraderie they were having and like the two camps of like nailing gear and flaggy flag got together to work together for it and stuff so there was a it had a real fun spirit to it and i've got a few friends who are like just casual hello internet observers and they went and had a look at like that subreddit and what was going on. And they said to me afterwards, I didn't realize like Hello Internet had so much like lore about it, like so many in jokes and so many things and like all of that stuff really bubbled to the surface in a really fun way on that subreddit. I did enjoy that. But an important question is, I'm not going to say is this cheating? Because I think

that's not even a valid question. It's not cheating because it's not prohibited in the rules. But the thing is, is it morally right? And if you think it's morally shady to be winning the election this way, is it any more morally shady than Auntie Doris, who likes listening to the radio, sitting there with a cup of coffee and the lamp, clicking over and over again, because they were told to, you know, with a sore finger clicking a thousand times. Like, is that more legitimate than the people who say, well, I'm not going to get a sore finger when I can just automate this. Like, are there moral shades here? Is it the wrong thing? Is it the right thing? What do you think about that? I have zero moral qualms about this whatsoever. Radio Times asked for as many votes as humans could give them and just panicked when more

votes were being shoved down their throats than they expected. Right. But I don't think there's a moral problem with this. Right. That's why, again, like there's something about this in my mind that it's just like a perfect little storm of antagonism is a vote that is so obviously intentionally set up to be an illegitimate vote by an organization that is sort of pretending like it's a real thing. You're taking a bit of shine off this trophy right now, by the way, Greg.

No, but see, this is why I wanted to get you this trophy, is I think like the trophy is a manifestation of like the thing that the Hello Internet audience did. That's my question is, what did this vote measure? Because it hasn't voted who's a better radio presenter or podcaster or champion of anything in terms of us as individuals like me or James O'Brien or Steve Allen or anyone. What has this vote established? Has it established that hello

internet listeners are the most technologically savvy and determined or has it established that there's a size of them? What do you think this vote has established? What has been won? I think what has been won is a kind of audience intensity. I think that's what has been established here. This is why I have such a fun feeling about this meaningless vote, because of precisely what you were saying before, that it was enjoyable and engaging to see everybody on the subreddit working toward a thing. And working toward a thing in a complicated, intricate manner. One of the things that was happening just before the Radio Times turned off the CAPTCHA,

so like it was a couple of hours in, but there was like 30 minutes before they actually ended up shutting the thing off, was people who didn't have technical skills were asking like, oh, what can I do to help? In addition to just manually voting, someone was essentially running the CAPTCHA through like a mechanical Turk system so that people could decode what the words were and then have a bot do the other parts of doing the voting automatically. And it's like, they just got that system set up

like right before the CAPTCHA got shut down. That was the equivalent of internet users saying like, and you have my acts, right? Like I don't have programming skills, but like what else can I bring to this table to help? And people building a system so that there was something that was there to help. So I think it's a real indicator of audience intensity and interest. That's why like when the radio times doubled down on their silence, it felt even more intense to me like, there needs to be some acknowledgement of this. That's why this trophy exists, right?

It's like, Radio Times, you thought you were doing something. You were not remotely doing what you thought you were doing. Something far more interesting happened around this. That's what this trophy is about there, Brady. It was just a very, very fun and interesting weekend and terrifyingly impressive to see what an internet community can do. So I guess the next big question is when they do it again next year, and I think they will, because it seems to be something they're quite proud of. Will you and I be put in again? I mean, I'm the defending champion. You know, Brady, you are the defending champion. It would be outrageous if you were not included next year. It would be interesting to see how they conduct

the vote next year. I imagine it will be different. It would also be really interesting if next year we were both put in because this kind of slipped under the radar before the teams were really onto it and you got knocked out by the very zealous steve allen fans before you know without us rallying the troops so if you if this time we were ready and troops were rallied before the vote you know we could get our long-awaited showdown no no i don't want there to be a showdown okay i'm like i will promote no polls until after I have been eliminated. That is my policy. So that's the way that's going to work. I don't want to win these things.

But when I won, it was so sweet. I saw some of the teams that were saying, this is so great. We're really pleased. I wonder if they're going to do a magazine spread with Brady and an interview and a photo shoot. I think they genuinely thought like I was, you know, so I have seen someone mock up a cover of Radio Times with me on the cover, but I think they genuinely thought like, you know, there would be some celebration of the win as opposed to the stony, stony cold silence that

it's been met by. Yeah. Well, again, if it was, how could we phrase this? A more legitimately intended poll? Like, yeah, of course, they would have some kind of photo shoot with Brady, you know, you and Audrey, they'd have pictures. The trophy, my new trophy, like just lounging with the trophy. Yeah, a trophy, they do all this kind of stuff. But of course, no, absolute silence on their end. But again, that's why. That's why you needed a physical, tangible symbol of this thing, Brady. This thing we will never forget.

You, my friend, are a radio and podcast champion. You deserve that trophy.