Hello Internet - H.I. #91: Last Man to Die?

Episode Date: October 31, 2017

Grey and Brady discuss: singing, the psychology of self-checkout machines, laygo, animal emoji changes at Apple, yet more ways to be freebooted, 'nudity' on YouTube, school photos, plane crash corner, and death and immortality. Sponsors: Videoblocks: Get all the stock images, video, and audio you can imagine for $149. Download anything from thousands of images, videos, and tracks—and unlock discounts on millions more. Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month - 15 day free trial Squarespace: start building your website today with a free fourteen day trial and 10% off first purchase Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes: Discuss this episode on the reddit Apple animal emoji changes H.I #80: Operation Twinkle Toes Brady: Animal Locomotion - Objectivity #137 Brady makes art sexually suggestive Grey's view while editing plane crash corner. Thanks, Brady. Grey: Why Die? Live fast, but die old Kurzgesagt: Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever?

Brady's before gentlemen. Okay. I just don't quite know how to parse that sentence, but okay. I just thought of it then. I've never heard it before. When I'm like checking my sound before like I phone into you, so I'm just checking it on my own. I don't know what most people would do,

whether they were just like a check one, two, or say hello, hello. But I always sing. Like I always sing to the microphone when I'm doing my check on my own. And it just made me wonder, does C.G.P. Gray ever sing? I can't imagine you singing to yourself. I mean, Brady, I am human after all. If you prick me, I will bleed. Right. I don't think there is a human on earth who doesn't in some circumstance sing. Yeah.

It's a very, very human experience that I definitely replicate on occasion. Try to think like, what is the best, most probable singing time for me would be driving in a car on my own. That's going to be pretty high probability of singing time. Because I think that like, that's the best time to sing to oneself. Okay. Do you sing in the shower, Brady? You seem like a singing in the shower kind of guy. No, I don't sing in the shower. The shower is like my thinking time. I sing to the dogs a lot. Do you mean literally sing to the dogs or talk in a sing-songy way? No, I'll sing to them, but like I'll sing them a song, but I'll change the words of the song to

make it about the dogs. So like, you know, instead of like singing like brown-eyed girl, I'll sing brown-eyed dog to the dogs and things like that. Or if a song's got the name of a woman in it, like a love song, I'll change it to one of the dog's names or something. That seems like a lot of effort for very little understanding on their part, probably. And singing to yourself in the car is like a good use of your time. I don't think it's an argument about a good use of the time. I was simply saying it seems like a lot of creative effort to change the song to be dog related. I don't like sit there and like write a few drafts. I'll just sing a song and just change the word on the spot. There's no effort. It's not like a difficult thing to do. I don't think I could

change a song on the fly like that. To me, it would seem like, oh, you'd have to really think about that. I guess if you're as good with words as a Brady is, you can just spontaneously start singing and the words come out. No, it's just simple. Like if there's just a line of a song that says, you know, I love you, baby, you just change it to I love you, Lulu. There's no cleverness here. I'm not like changing all the different words and the meaning of the song. I'm just like changing one word to make it cute about the dogs. I'm sure they appreciate it, Brady. The question I have is if you're not particularly into songs, what songs do you sing? Like I can't imagine you knowing the words to any songs. It's more just that the, like the music plays a very particular role in my life. I don't have

very many venues for new music to come into my life. I just don't follow it. I think like most people, you get kind of largely stuck in the music that existed when you were younger. So I feel like there's a bunch of songs that I have on rotation that are from a while ago. So you would sing along. You would never sing without music to sing along with. You wouldn't like just walk down the stairs and sing like the first line of a song that's stuck in your head for some reason. I'm literally not sure I could do, like this didn't even occur to me as a scenario. Right. When you're discussing, you're singing to the dogs, I presume that there's something on the

radio and you're changing the lyrics on the fly as you're singing along to the dogs. This changes the whole conversation, Brady, because the singing is along with something yeah right and then the song is guiding your brain in this rut that's a very familiar rut so I couldn't just do it spontaneously that's madness I don't I don't know how you could do that like I wouldn't do a full song but like if like one or two lines of a song gets stuck in my head and often it's a song I don't like like I was at the gym a few days ago and they were playing the song Hold On by Wilson Phillips, which is a song from my youth, but it's not a song I would like want anyone to ever hear me sing. And it's just the one line from the song has just been stuck in my head for days

and days. And I just keep singing that one line of the song as I walk up the stairs and I want it to go away, but I will just sing it, you know. I'm sorry about that torment, Brady. This is not a frequent experience for me. The line goes, if you hold on for one more day. But then if the dogs walk in the room, I'll sing, if you hold on for one more dog, you know, like. Right. I'll just sing it to the dogs. I see the pattern here.

Everyone sings to their dogs. You wait and see. I don't sing to Lucy. Oh, and you could sing actual Lucy songs too. I used to have a dog called Lucy and I had another dog called Carlos. And they used to be a dog called Lucy and I had another dog called Carlos and they used to be out in the backyard together. And my friend Tim used to come around and he would sing Lucy in the backyard with Carlos to the music of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

I guess Lucy is a name that has more song possibilities than Lulu. Yeah. Songwriters out there, get on the Lulu songs. When we used to have music lessons in school, we used to have to sing out of the songbook, there was a song about Lulu. It was called Don't Bring Lulu. And it was about someone was throwing a party and they didn't want them to bring this person called Lulu

because she always ruined the party. I often sing Don't Bring Lulu to Lulu. What are you talking about singing out of the songbook? We used to have these music lessons in primary school where we had these sing-along books and the teacher would then put on a tape that came with the book and the songs would play on the cassette tape and we would like have to sing along. It was just one of the activities we would do. Oh, okay. So you're talking about little, little kid school. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Primary school. But there was a song called Don't Bring Lulu and all the songs used to sing in school, they're all burned into my head i still know the lyrics to don't bring lulu so i have got a lulu song ready to roll good you should sing it to her after the show i can't she's not here tonight oh wait where is she well i'm away for the next few days so the dogs are away at their holiday home it's a bit of a sad time for me when the dogs are away right holiday. Holiday home in the country? It's by the beach. By the beach. They love it.

They get to walk on the beach every day. Way better than living with you. It is. I sometimes think they're a bit sad when they have to come home. Regular listeners or even irregular listeners to Hello Internet will know that you and I have different attitudes to supermarket checkouts. You prefer the self-checkout because you don't like sort of awkward interactions with the people who are doing the checkout. And I prefer to go through with the people because I think the people working in the supermarket are quicker and better at it. And I don't mind the interaction. You're a man of the people. You like to have a little chat, hear what's going on in their life.

This has been well-established. So anyway anyway an amazing thing happened tonight like a switch went tonight in a funny kind of way because i went to the supermarket tonight and it was just a quick smash and grab i just needed to grab three things for dinner smash and grab i just needed three things and i had my three things and then I got to the checkouts. There's a long, long row of checkouts where I shop. Very long. Human checkouts. Human checkouts.

And then right at the end are all the self checkouts. But I was very far from the self checkouts. And I walked up to the human checkouts with their big, long conveyor belts and their spacious alleys for supermarket trolleys and all of that. And it was very quiet. And there were two or three that had no people. So I could have just walked up and said, here are my three things. Thank you very much. And I was suddenly overcome with this sense of guilt or they would think I was a bad person for going up to the normal checkout with the big conveyor belt and all the infrastructure in place for a trolley. And I was just going there with my three items.

I felt like if I went up, I don't know, I felt like I couldn't do it. I felt like three items were too few. So instead I traipsed all the way to the end to the self-checkout where I had to queue and where there were people using the self-checkout using trolleys with up to like 40 items, laboriously self-checking themselves out and i stood there in the queue waiting to use my three items on the self-checkout because i felt this pressure or guilt or something coming from somewhere that i couldn't use a human checkout with so few items brady brady two things first of all this story just confirms to me like you don't know how to supermarket there's something about this that invalidates everything you've ever told me about Two things. First of all, this story just confirms to me, you don't know how to supermarket. There's something about this that invalidates everything you've ever told me about your supermarket use.

And secondly, I feel like you're also in a supermarket in an alternate universe. Who's going to the self-checkout with a trolley? I've never seen such a thing where someone goes to the self-checkout. To be fair, that freaked me out too. I swear, she had at least 40 items in her trolley and she was very slow. I was like, why? Okay. But does your supermarket not have a 10 items or fewer lane that would absolve your guilt of having the few items? Yeah. And that's right next to the self-checkout. But once I'd gotten there, I thought, oh, well, I might as well do the self-checkout now. It's only three items. But there were all these empty lanes up ahead. And I don't know whether it's just in my

head or there is some pressure that's happening in society now, where if you've got few items, it's considered bad to use a checkout person. But I felt like I couldn't do it. Okay. I think this is all in your head, but I'm curious about this. Do you feel that there is some kind of social norm that is spreading here that if you have small items, you have to use the self-checkout? Yeah. I feel like if you're like a young, able-bodied person with a few items, like there I was, you know, looking all super fit in my gym gear and all my style, yeah, I'm a,

you know, with my three items. And then if I went into like the lane for the people with trolleys or people who struggle to do things themselves, they'd look at me and go, what are you doing here? Like, can't you do this yourself? You're like, what are you?

So you feel like the human checkout lanes are not for the physically fit and with small items? Like, is that where you feel like this is going? Like, you need a bunch of stuff. Yeah. Or you need difficulty. I think that must be it. I felt like I would be abusing a privilege, which I know is stupid. And like, it keeps people in a job if I use that lane.

But I felt like it would be lazy of me to have used it. And it, it keeps people in a job if I use that lane. But I felt like it would be lazy of me to have used it. And it just happened tonight. I walked towards and I thought, nah, I can't do it. I've got to go and do the self-checkout, even though I've got to walk all the way to the other end of the store and then go in a line and then do the checking out myself, which I hate doing and I'm not good at. I have this mental image of you walking past 10 cashiers, every one of them with their eyes on you, watching you walk past thinking, that guy is part of the problem. That guy is why I'm going to get fired next week, because he won't use one of these checkout lanes. I know, maybe you're right. It was a weird thing.

I thought you'd be pleased by it, but I couldn't believe I was doing it. I think it just confirms to me that we have wildly different supermarket experiences, and that makes no sense. I feel like there's a related question here about social expectations around the use of common areas in this way. So here's a question. There's a bunch of bathrooms. One of the bathrooms has the handicap symbol on it.

All of the bathrooms that you could use except for that one are full. What do you do in this scenario, Brady? Probably wait. You'd wait. Interesting. Is anyone there that can see me? There is a security camera in the hallway.

So you're looking at a bunch of doors and there's a hallway and there's a security camera. I mean, I'd be less worried about a security camera than actual other people, but. I picked that in particular. There's no human, but you are not purely on your own. If I was capable of waiting, I would most likely wait. If the situation felt like it was becoming urgent, I may go into the unused one. But if I could wait, I would probably wait. What about you? I have always been of the opinion very firmly that those bathrooms are handicap accessible. They are not handicap exclusive. I am perfectly happy without any social guilt whatsoever to stroll right into the handicap bathroom. Also though, the times I have used those toilets, I actually find all that extra space quite disconcerting. To use a toilet and have like a really long, long way away to the door and have

all that open space around me, I find quite unnerving. Don't you? Is it like bathroom agoraphobia? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, kind of. Like I don't want to be using a bathroom with that much space around me and like be that far from the door. Because if like someone opens the door or tries to open the door, I'm too far away to do anything about it. That is a good point. If you forget to latch it, you don't have the ability to emergency slam, shut the door and save everyone the embarrassment of what's happening. Yeah. All that's going to happen is the door opens and there you are, exposed to the world. I'm picturing that frog walking in there.

That pervy frog that you're scared of watching you on the toilet. Yeah, he just opens the door and stands there and smiles at you. That's what the frog does. He's not even there to use the bathroom. He's just there to watch. I noticed that you have changed your Twitter handle and picture to get into the Halloween theme. You have succumbed to the pumpkin pressure. Have I succumbed to pumpkin pressure? I don't know about that. You did. Do you think that's a fair description of what occurred? Oh, well, I mean, either that or someone just suggested such a cracking name that you couldn't

resist using it. You obviously have extremely creative friends. Here's the thing, Brady. Sometimes you hear an idea and you just know the idea is irresistible. I feel like it's not actually pumpkin pressure. I just thought like that idea was too good to pass on. And plus, unbeknownst to you at the time of recording, I was immediately after going to be posting a video that was related to death. And plus, unbeknownst to you at the time of recording, I was immediately after going to be posting a video that was related to death. And so as soon as that show was over, I was like, I can't not do this. I have no free will in this scenario. I'm going to have to change my name to R.I.P. Grey. It's not even a choice. So are you happy though? Do you feel pleased with yourself? I do feel like a little sense of ownership. Obviously, because you then put out a death

video, it did make me wonder, would you have done it if you didn't have a death video in the works? But I think you would have. I think it was a good enough idea that you would have. To be fair, the death video thing made it perfect. It made it absolutely perfect in the world, but it struck me as just such a good idea and such, again, masterful wordsmithing on the part of a Brady Haran. I think had the stars not aligned, you would still have had a pretty good chance of getting me to do that. Can I just say this whole, with this people changing their names to Halloween themed and changing their avatars and that. The thing about it that bothers me the most, and I don't know if it was hammered home enough in the last episode. So I just, this is the one point I want to make.

It's not so much my problem with doing it. It's how long people do it for. They should just do it on the day of Halloween, like just on the 31st. Change your name to something spooky. We all have a laugh. Doing it for the whole month. I don't think they celebrated the end of World War II for a month, and yet we change our things for Halloween for a whole month.

I have to completely agree with you on that. And also I agree that we didn't hammer it home well enough in the previous show. It's like, it could be fun for a day, but the length of time, it's just too much. It's just too long. And even the whole R.I.P. Gray thing, I was aware that I felt like it was a little soon to do it anyway. Halloween is fantastic, as we both agree, one of the best holidays in the year. Everybody loves Halloween. But doing it for an entire month is just too long. I'm also going to say, I especiallylloween is a holiday that really doesn't serve being

stretched out for a long period of time like christmas i can kind of get on board with stretching christmas from like thanksgiving until christmas it's like okay well we just have a time of year that is merry and filled with lights it's the season it's a season yeah it's a christmas season i'm fine with that i don't like it if it's six months in advance, right? But I can deal essentially with two months of Christmas. That's fine. But a month of Halloween is like if we had Valentine's Day and you started Valentine's Day stuff January 7th. No more Halloween stretching people. Veto. Come on. One day. The build-up week I enjoy the week before. I enjoy like a week before seeing the decorations go up. But like they sell pumpkins so long before Halloween that I think

there's no way those pumpkins are still going to be good by Halloween. I feel like there's a delicate line, which I'm okay with sort of fall themed decorations, maybe up to a month before Halloween. And in that case, it's like, oh, putting out some pumpkins. Pumpkins a little close, but if you want to put out a squash, I'm very okay with that. But it's like, where do we draw the line of what becomes a Halloween decoration between what is just like seasonal decoration? I don't know exactly where to draw that line, but I just need to specify for the record here that I'm okay with some fall themed decorations leading up to Halloween, but Halloween is, is spiders and ghosts and skulls and witches and werewolves and vampires and all that stuff. That's week before tops.

In the previous episode, I said, and I spoke on behalf of my home nation of Australia, that when we pronounce the word Lego, we say Lego. And you were quite surprised by this. You were like, oh, what a funny way to say Lego. And I'm like, nah, I'm telling you, Greg. It was an Australianism I had never come across. It was an Australian. In Australia, we say Lego. Can you imagine my horror when my fellow Australians started calling me out on it and saying, what are you talking about, Brady? It's Lego. And I was like, oh my goodness. Is this like, have I just alone been doing it wrong all this time? Yeah. Was this a joke that your family pulled on you? I think all families have that thing that

they do, which I think is kind of strange where a kid is mispronouncing something in a funny way and the whole family just lets it slide for what seems like a really long time. Like maybe your family did this with you and Lego. Well, anyway, I was a bit worried. So I did a bit more research, a bit more polling, a bit more informal surveying of people out there and also reading some articles. And it turns out saying Lego instead of Lego is a South Australian thing. It's something that a lot of people from my home state of South Australia, the capital of which is Adelaide, say. So it's actually a regional pronunciation that I was foisting upon you. Not all Australians, probably not even all South Australians for all I know, but it's a very South Australian thing to say Lego. And I've since

learned there are other little enclaves of Canada and the United States, like certain regions or states and areas where I was also getting a high Lego pronunciation. So there are little pockets of Lego out there, but it wasn't like a whole countrywide thing. And I just wanted to clarify that. I'm just pulling up a map of Australia here because when you say South Australia, do you mean, oh, this is embarrassing. Is the word province? What's the subdivision? They're states states okay do you mean the state of south australia or do you mean southern australia like the bottom half of australia i mean the state of south australia because victoria and new south wales which to your eye

would also appear to be southern states right are the more popular states and they do not say lego they were the ones who were jumping on me. What do you mean to my eyes? Is there some way that they're not more Southern? It's a little known fact outside of Australia, but South Australia, which is not the Southern most Australian state by far, is actually we draw it on the map differently than it really is. Okay. You are right. But to defend myself, if you lived in Australia, you would refer to those as the eastern states. Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland, you would say the eastern states. Where are you from?

Oh, I'm from the east coast. I'm from the eastern states. So even though Victoria and New South Wales are very southern, they are referred to as eastern. This is the linguistic southern versus the actual Southern. Yes. Okay. I just wanted to clear that up to reduce the amount of feedback that you weren't getting from someone from Perth complaining that people in the Southern part of Australia don't say

Lego. I know my Australian geography here, Brady. That's all right. It's just exciting to hear you talking about these places, to be honest. Yeah. Do you like that? Yeah. We can talk about a little Northern Territory, Darwin. Northern Territory, of course, is not a state.

Right. It's a territory. There's sometimes talk about giving the Northern Territory statehood, but it hasn't happened yet. They drink a lot of beer in the Northern Territory. Oh, yeah? The highest beer consumption per capita of anywhere in the world. Well, I mean, it looks like if you're in Darwin, you're very far from everything else. So what are you going to do? You're going to say Lego and you're going to drink your beer. You're going to drink your beer. Hello, internet. We're happy to let you know about a new sponsor this week,

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ridiculously cheaper than it was before. So of course, in the great tradition of Hello Internet, it feels like as soon as we talk about a thing, the whole world around that thing changes. I'm sure because of the show. We are influencers. Yes, we are influencers. Shapers. Shapers of culture. Yeah. By no means is this the car effect where when you buy a car, you see it everywhere. It's not that at all.

It's like a reverse the secret, right? We think about a thing and the whole world around us changes to bend to our thoughts. It's just a straight line of causation. It's a straight line of causation. Yeah. So one of the things that has happened is we have been discussing emoji. We have. We have been discussing animal emoji in particular.

In some detail. And bee emoji in particular. And complained about Apple bee emoji. Guess what emoji is being changed in the next release of iOS, Brady? Really? The bee emoji is getting an update. Don't run it.

Yeah. Now, this brings up a thing that I want to discuss with you. So if you look at the link that I have put in the show notes. I am. It is not just the bee emoji that is getting changed. There are five animal emoji that are getting changed in the next update to iOS. Okay.

Yep. The bee, the snail, the octopus, the whale, and the dolphin. Okay. The snail, the octopus, the whale, and the dolphin. So on the image you're looking at, the top row is the new version, and the bottom row is the old version. Yes. Can you describe for the listeners what you're looking at? And tell me your thoughts on these changes. All right.

Well, let me talk you through it. We do spend a lot of time talking about emojis for an audio medium. But anyway. I think emojis and podcasts is like peanut butter and jelly, right? They just go together perfectly. So the old bee was like a big, fat, bowl-y bee with little tiny, tiny stick legs and stick antenna. And now it's getting more substantial, realistic, insect-y legs and beefed up antenna more realistic beefed up wings but a slightly droopier sting yes it's true it is it does have a droopier sting is a big b eye as well yes sorry of course the

change of the eye is probably the most significant change from just a little lazy white dot when someone really wasn't trying to a more sort of realistic, big three-dimensional dome-like dark eye, even with a little bit of white reflection in it from the light. From the camera that is somewhere off screen for this emoji. Or the window or whatever. Yeah. Okay. The snail, the main changes to the snail, it's just got more detail. They're just putting more sort of photorealism in there. And again, they've obviously decided the previous eyes that are on the end of the stalks on the head of the snail were just too small and insignificant. And they've given it sort of slightly larger,

darker eyes, a la the bee. And the snail also used to have two little human eyes on top of its stalks. If you zoom in, they're basically human eyes. No snail has eyes like that. So yes, more realism there. A bit more realism, but not a dramatic change. The octopus, on the other hand, they've gone in hard because the old octopus was quite cutesy and was sort of looking at you front on. And it looked like something that would be a child's toy or something you wanted to give a little cuddle to. And significantly, it also has four legs. But the upgrade, they've gone for more of the killer octopus that you're scared will grab a ship and pull it underwater. And again,

it looks more realistic. It looks more aggressive. It's in a more aggressive pose. Oh, yeah. I just realized that octopus, he's doing like a little bicep curl with each arm. They still haven't upped their game to eight legs. They stopped at six. Well, you know, what can you do? And, you know, there's just a little bit more texture on the head. And again, we've gone for more sort of realism. Moving on to the whale.

The whale, again, was super cute. Cutesy, child's toy that would play within the bath. And they've kind of maintained the cutesiness. It hasn't changed a tremendous amount. They've put the eye in a more realistic place. It still doesn't look like a very realistic whale. And they've added a lot more fine detail to the water spout that it's blowing out the top. And finally, the dolphin. The dolphin, again, hasn't changed much. It went from a pretty kind of run of the mill artistic representation of a dolphin. That's quite cutesy. And they've pretty much kept it that

way, but they've just added more sort of texture and fluting and design to the side of the dolphin. And they've made the fins look a bit more real. It still doesn't look like a real dolphin, but they've given it more, it looks more like something that would be a living thing rather than a drawing. Do you have a preference for the new versus the old? Like if you have to accept them as a package, new versus old. As a package, I prefer the old. I don't like the path they're going down here. They're moving away from the spirit of emojis.

I agree with you 100%. And in fact, when I saw this image, I was thinking about our conversation last time about emojis, a surprising amount. You're talking about how songs get stuck in your head and you're thinking about them over and over again. I found myself since our last recording, constantly thinking about like, what is the platonic ideal of emoji? This is an idea that was just recurring in my brain over and over again. And while I was thinking that, of course,

like our show goes out and then a couple of days later, Apple as a direct result announces that they're going to change a bunch of the emoji. And this image, like this side-by-side image here of the five animals and how they're changing it, it really crystallized something in my mind, which is like, I didn't like the Apple emojis all that much to begin with, and now I really don't like them.

And it is because it's like Apple has lost the way of what an emoji is. And the thing that crystallized in my mind is like, oh, I know what emoji are. Emoji are modern hieroglyphics. And as such, they need some level of abstraction. Like emojis are almost like an alphabet. And the more I think you make it like a photograph, which is the way Apple's clearly going, like they're making them more photograph-like, more impossible to draw, the less I feel like they're emoji, the less I like them.

And I think there's also a crystallized in the last show, when we were talking about the blobs, like the android emojis would draw a family. It would be a family of blobs, like four little blob creatures like, oh, that's a family versus an increasingly realistic depiction of a family. And I could never quite put my finger on like, why does that kind of bug me? And now I know because I feel like some level of abstraction is intrinsic to what an emoji is. And if you're taking away all abstraction, I don't think it's an emoji anymore. Like it's just a picture. I mean, speculating on what's going on here, because I think I kind of see what's going on here and why it's happening. And it all comes down to how you use your emoji. Okay, tell me. There are two main ways that I use my emoji. The first way is

when I'm sending text messages, maybe to someone like you, where we're exchanging a series of SMSs and occasionally we'll drop an emoji in to be funny or express something. And in that case, the emoji is appearing in a line of text. And ideally, you want it to be about the size of the text because sometimes it's in the line. And when that happens, the small, cute, low detail emoji are ideal. And the super detailed emoji seem, in fact, seem very, very useless. I can't imagine these emoji at that size. There is a second way that I use emoji though. And that is when I'm on Snapchat,

sometimes I'll take a picture and I want to add an emoji to the picture. And when you do that, you make your emojis much bigger. You drag them onto the screen and then you pinch with your fingers outwards to make them bigger and bigger. So they become almost a feature of the picture. I might take a picture of the sea and then say, oh, wouldn't it be funny if I put a big emoji whale in there swimming in the sea? And if I do that, the emoji becomes very big. And in that case, the detail starts having some use. And in some ways I see more utility in the detailed ones and the very low detail emojis when they're blown up big become quite unuseful and they just sort of look out of place and wrong. They don't work. So I don't use them. So I think what's happening is they're seeing more and more people are using their

emojis as these huge decorative ornaments in sort of picture-based communication. And they're being used less and less as a punctuation mark in a sentence. And maybe that's why they're changing the emojis in this way. And for me, that's a shame because I still prefer the use of emoji in sentences and text, you know, in a tweet or a text to someone. So these detailed ones are doing me a disservice. But I can imagine on Snapchat, these ones will be a bit handier. That's an interesting distinction. I have a slightly more cynical interpretation.

Apple is rolling out this Animoji feature with their new phone where you can have the emoji be animated. I have a suspicion that Apple is setting up all of these emoji as being animated things in the future to maybe integrate with the face recognition on their phone or to be able to do things with. Maybe or maybe not, someone spent a lot of time looking through the history of all the Apple emoji and seeing the direction they were going in. Who knows? But if you were to do that, there's a clear arrow toward increasing detail and especially suddenly, like way more detail. I suspect that that's where they're going with this. But that aside, on all platforms,

you're totally right that there are two different use cases. There's in line with text and there is out of line with text. That's totally true. But what makes an emoji an emoji versus like the concept of a sticker, which many platforms have, is that an emoji can exist in line with text. That's what it is. Like I feel very strongly that that is the level that the design should be at. And at that level, you have to have some abstraction built into the design. You can't just have a tiny picture of the thing. You have to have some level of abstraction.

But yeah, big, giant, detailed emojis everywhere. That's where we're going. I do think your emoji theory is more likely right, actually. If I have to weigh up my theory, which involves Apple saying, let's make emojis that are more useful for our customers. Or your theory, which is let's make emojis which will sell more iPhones. Gee, how does that board meeting go? Amongst the sort of the first world YouTuber problems that we gripe about most, freebooting must be up there. And I've been another freebooting victim recently, but it did highlight one of my little gripes about

freebooters that I don't think I've raised before, which is quite interesting. I know. Is it possible? Is there some depth left unplumbed on this topic? It's shocking. I think you'll appreciate this one. And I think it comes from a confusion that people have about using things fairly, fair use and things like that. And it's from a confusion that people have about using things fairly fair use and things like that and it's maybe a confusion that someone like you has helped foster with some of our previous conversations although i don't think like you're the root of the problem here i just think it's like because people have probably heard us in the past often talk about you know percentages like when we were talking about that recent fair use thing, there was, you know, what percentage of the video was taken and stuff like that. So this is what,

I'll just give you the practical example, because this shows the example perfectly. I got some alert or something on my system saying, oh, someone's, you know, freebooted your video, go and check it. So I went along and did my check because I always have a look and see what's going on. This is in the YouTube content system? In the YouTube backend, because sometimes they haven't freebooted or it is fair use or it's not even my content and things like that. So I'll go and have a look.

So I find this video and it's this math video of mine. And the freebooter in question has taken like a huge chunk of the video, like not the whole video, but say three or four minutes, consecutive, unedited, uncommented. It's just a really nice explanation of a mathematical concept

with nice animations, and it was very useful to this person. So they've taken that piece of my video, and they've dropped it into a video they've made that's about an hour long. I imagine it's made to be like a lecture or a lesson or something. It's a big, long video. And partway through, they've obviously said, oh, to understand this concept, here we go. And then they'll play my video for three or four

minutes. And then they crack on with whatever they were doing in their video, just dropped it in. And in their kind of thing that they wrote, where they like defend the, why this is fair use, their defense was, this is fair use because I used four minutes of your video, but that is only 10% of my whole video. Because my whole video, only 10% of it is your video. That's fair use because that's hardly anything. And all the rest of it came from other places. So I haven't freebooted you. And I think that's ridiculous. I mean, that's a new one to me. I haven't freebooted you. And I think that's ridiculous. I mean, that's a new one to me. I haven't come across that before.

I've seen it a few times. I mean, by that rationale, I could upload all of Star Wars and as long as I tag another 30 hours on the end of it, of me just juggling, I can say, hey, I didn't freeboot Star Wars because it's only 10% of my video. Yeah, or I'm thinking like,

oh, I'm just going to go around and make a compilation of all of the funniest videos on YouTube. Right. And for each individual content creator, I'm like, oh, but you're only 1% of the total thing that has been created. Yeah. It's like if I walked around Bristol and punched 50 people in the face and one of them came up to me and said, hey, you just assaulted me.

And I said, hey, no, no, I punched 50 people in the face. Metaphor escalation here. You haven't been assaulted because lots of other stuff has happened. So you haven't been wronged. So I guess you see this a lot, like people are using your videos in like a longer selection of a thing, because I think that's just interesting. Yes, that is quite common. Like someone will make like a big long lesson. And, you know, today I want to explain to you all the ins and outs of calculus. And to do so, I'm going to like go and cherry pick all the best explanations of every concept ever and put them all together in a big mashup. But it's not like they've taken like a few seconds and critiqued it or used it.

It's just a complete section, like a big section being used because it's, you know, useful to them. But don't you want to spread knowledge of calculus around the world? I'm sure part of the justification also had some line about, oh, this video is, you know, it did say, although I'm making money from it, it's educational. I don't know what happened. Basically, I pressed the button to say, I don't agree with this. And I don't know what's going to happen next. I don't know how the system works.

I think after a while, YouTube just drop it, don't know. Well, you can end up getting all the revenue from the ads that are running on their video, right? That's the thing that can happen. But if they then say, no, no, I disagree. 10% is fine. What does YouTube do now? Do they then say, well, now what do you say, Brady? Are you going to take them to court? If there's this Mexican standoff and no one's willing to go to court, who wins in the end? It's the person with the copyright claim wins. We have this actually with the Hello Internet video that was uploaded several episodes ago

when we talked about the, I can't say the name of the song, but the Medo, Plista, Florian, whatever. Yeah, the Italian one. Right, the Italian one. And so I put that song in the podcast for people to hear. Yeah, just like a sample. Here's what it sounds like yeah people can debate whether or not there was like too much or not enough right this is always the ambiguities of copyright well great it was only 0.01 percent of our podcast so i think we're safe you know what you have an excellent point there yes i may have

used 30 seconds of the song but the podcast was really long yeah but so anyway there was a like as i kind of expected there was going to be, there was a copyright claim on that. Yeah. And I went through the little appeals process. I think this is fair use. And the copyright holder came back and said, no, they disagree. And the way the YouTube system works, which I think YouTube should definitely improve,

is that all of the ad revenue on that podcast goes to the copyright holder for that song. To me, it seems like a little much. Even if you were in the wrong and used too much of it, which I don't think you did. But even if you did, the fact that from that whole two hour podcast, they now get all the revenue because we used 40 seconds of their song instead of 15. That's nuts. Yeah. It's a weird system system it seems like from everything i've seen with other creators and the stuff i've had firsthand experience on that like one copyright holder becomes the one who wins like who's the one that's most wronged and that person is the one who ends up with the claim on the revenue from the advertising dollars oh well

what are you gonna do what are you gonna do you got to pick your fights, don't you? Yeah, and you pick that fight. I told that guy no. Well, I don't know what's going to happen. Seeing we're talking about YouTube fights, should we do with my other one that's bubbling along at the moment? Yeah. So my other little YouTube problem at the moment, Gray, is I've had another video demonetized,

put into the sin bin of advertising, deemed inappropriate and unfriendly for advertising. And instead of that nice green tick you get next to a video saying, oh, you can have ads on this video, I have the dreaded yellow tick of naughtiness. Brady, I just have to ask, why do you keep uploading inappropriate videos to YouTube? I mean, where there's smoke, there's fire, right? You give me an example. Oh, there's one where you're uploading deranged videos to YouTube and you get this slapped down, but you keep doing it. You seem to not be able to help yourself. Yeah. I keep pushing the boundaries of what's allowed. You keep uploading all these inappropriate videos to YouTube. They're not advertiser

friendly. I don't know what you're up to over there on objectivity. For those of you who don't watch objectivity, and how dare you not watch it? How dare you? But if you somehow missed the episode, we did a video about this guy called Edward Muybridge, who you may not know the name, but in the 1800s was a bit of a big deal. He came up with this way of taking, in the early days of photography, of taking multiple pictures very quickly in succession, sometimes being tripped by strings and things like that. And he used other technology that he pioneered to show things that were happening quickly, like a horse running. Yeah. I feel like everybody in the world,

even if you don't know his name, everyone's seen that video clip of like, here is the first time we had motion video in a way of a horse running. He's the guy who did that. He then started filming everything he could use this camera system at. So anyway, he started taking all these pictures to show animal locomotion. And then he also started showing human locomotion. So he would show humans doing things like walking and running and using an axe and fencing and wrestling and all these different things. So it could be studied in detail. And not only was it like, you know, a lot of scientific breakthroughs were being made. This was leading towards obviously movies and moving pictures because you've got this quick... He was like the first slow-mo guy, I like to think.

It wasn't slow-mo. They were playing it back in real time. Well, no, but like it was using like a high-speed camera to show things that were too fast for the eye to see. Okay. And it's kind of doing that same thing, you know. It was a high frame rate for the time. Okay.

All right. Because we had no frame rate. Yeah, exactly. Look at these 12 frames. This is mind blowing. Yeah, exactly. 12 frames per second. It's amazing. So anyway, when he was taking pictures of humans doing stuff, they were usually not wearing clothing because you wanted to be able to see, you know, muscles and the way the leg was moving and the arm was moving. And if it was all covered in clothes, you wouldn't be seeing it. So I uploaded this video all about all these old pictures and what he did. And we showed videos of

it and rah, rah, rah, you can imagine. And in the course of the video, we showed lots of these pictures. We animated some of them to make them into little movies. Now the video has naked people in it. You know, we left a lot out that we thought was a little bit, maybe a little bit confrontational. We haven't got like, you know, things dangling in people's faces and it's not too, you know, I thought we were restrained. Yeah. You left out the slow-mo pillow fight that he had filmed as well in the off hours. Yeah. Like that stuff wasn't in there. There was a lot of stuff that maybe could be construed as a bit risque, but you know, we didn't use any of that. It was all pretty normal stuff,

but there were occasional glimpses of parts of the body here and there, but I thought it was all right. YouTube's automatic system, to its credit, unless someone flagged it, to its credit, flagged this as inappropriate. I disagreed with that. I appealed it, asking for a manual review. The manual review has been conducted and the manual review has come back saying, nope, that's inappropriate. So as it stands now, the video is unavailable for monetization. Objectivity videos aren't massively watched. So this is not costing me an amount of money that concerns me. But I am concerned about the bigger issue. Not like I'm a campaigner, I want to change the world kind of way.

But I do think it speaks to a bigger issue about art and showing things and what's right and what's wrong and what's suitable and not suitable. You have watched the video, have you? Yeah, no, I watched the video. All right. Tell me your thoughts. Well, first of all, I recommend everybody watch it because it was just interesting to see. I didn't know the extra details about this work. Somehow assumed that the horse thing was like one off and seeing the animated early videos of human motion was really interesting.

I just genuinely liked it as an objectivity video. Thank you. But I was watching this video and my perspective on it was you selected video. So when people hear you describe it, right? You listener, like whatever is in your head when Brady just described the video, I can guarantee you what's in your head is 10 times more explicit than what is in the actual video. Imagine a man walking in a low resolution image who's walking sideways across the camera with extraordinarily convenient leg placement 95% of the time. That's what's in the video.

The level of nudity for the parts that people care about is so trivial in this video. Now, when you say it was flagged immediately, that I'm not surprised because from talking to people who would know about these things, my understanding is that if there is one thing that the army of artificial intelligence bots at YouTube are extraordinarily good at recognizing it's naked people. That this is a thing that the AIs have been trained on and they can spot very reliably, very immediately. They have high class willy recognition. Yeah, exactly. Right.

And this is to YouTube's total credit. I have in my whole life, I think, think never ever seen anything that remotely is pornography on the channel right like they are deadly serious and it's a relatively straightforward thing for the system to try to automatically flag is people without clothing so i'm not surprised it was caught instantly in the trap yeah but i really think this is a very interesting case that if this was manually reviewed by an actual human, I'm going to say that I think this is kind of outrageous to be classified as a video that cannot be monetized. I really think this is like if you had a video where you showed the statue of David, there's something about this that really bothers me, right? Where it's like artwork or anything of scientific value is so far on the one end of this extreme that is like, if we can't agree

that this is acceptable, I feel like all hope is lost. If this is not acceptable, I feel like we've fallen into some kind of crazy land where you can never know. Who knows what's acceptable now? I find it genuinely upsetting that this has been, again, if it was a human, that this is the verdict that has come down on this. Okay. Just very quickly on that. If it's not a human, that's even worse because they make it absolutely clear you have no right to appeal. There's nothing that can be done about it. The judge's decision is final. So if I've been turned down by AI twice and no correspondence will be entered into, then that is a little bit unfair. But we don't know. We don't know if it's a human or not. We don't know. I just say if it's a human or not so we don't know i just say if it's a human because i have some very strong suspicions that at least some portion of those manual reviews are not

actually going to a human that there's a bot that's doing the first pass and maybe it gets kicked up to a human maybe it doesn't i don't have anything to prove that but i just have a suspicion that maybe that's partly the case yeah anyway on the broader issue like i'm the first to admit if you pardon the pun that I have skin in the game here. So I will say from the start that, okay, I'm a bit biased. But I also think it's a little unfair. I will say I do recognize that Statue of David, numerous famous paintings you could mention, Venus de Milo, all these things, are not photographs. They are artworks.

But, I mean, these things I was using are very old, from the 1800s, black and white grainy pictures that are really historically significant. It was the pioneering images that led to cinema. It was really scientifically significant work. This is like important stuff in art and science. Right. It is in no way sexual or sexually suggestive.

And that's what the YouTube terms talk about. They don't talk about nudity as much as things that are sexually suggestive. These are in no way sexual. And in kind of my like bemusement, I went and had a look and Google's own YouTube channel for art and culture has numerous videos that show naked bits of art. Interesting. They even have one where like it's popping up in front of a little kid and the little kid's giggling and going, oh, isn't that funny?

Because, you know, the person's not wearing clothes. And they have one where the naked person's on like an iPad screen and the kid's like, you know, manipulating it to zoom in and look at it and things like that. Like on their own channel, they're quite comfortable with nude art. So I do know the difference between photos and art, but if that's the defence, which I don't know what the defence is because I haven't heard anything, it doesn't wash with me.

And what do I have to do now? Should I have uploaded that video with big, you know, black boxes over the top of all the rude bits? What was I supposed to do? That kind of stuff drives me even more crazy. That would make me look stupid. That would make everyone look stupid. And it makes everyone look stupid. And it also falls again into my very strong feelings about this, that like when you go crazy about the prohibition of a thing whatever that thing is is like guess what you're the one who's making it powerful or you're making it into a thing that it

isn't and so that's why it's like if you start putting black bars over like as we're having this discussion like i have on screen in front of me, probably the most in quotes, suggestive part, which is at 135, where you have the three film strips of the man walking to the side, the man walking front and the man walking back. I have this blown up on a 27 inch screen that's two feet from my face at HD resolution, right? But of course, I'm looking at a thing that's from the 1800s that's filmed at an angle. There's not four pixels of detail in this image here. To put a black bar over it is like a mockery. It's like, what are you hiding? All that black bar is doing is like, oh, right. This is the black bar of shame, right? Because this is the thing that can never be seen.

Putting black bars on it would sexualize it. You look at a picture of Michelangelo's David and you think, that's a nice sculpture. You put a big black bar over his private parts and suddenly it seems more sexual. Yeah, it totally does. There was a meme a few years ago, which was fantastic, where people were pixelizing parts of innocuous photos. And it's amazing how sexually suggestive you can make a totally normal photo by very strategic pixelization of particular moments.

So the meme was, you'd show like the before and after, like with the pixelization or without. There's another meme, which is about like seeing the nudity. And it works surprisingly well, where you take a photograph of a fully clothed person and you just put transparent circles on that photograph in strategic spots. And it's so crazy, but it's like your brain sort of fills in what the person looked like. This kind of censorship, I legitimately think makes it more of what it isn't. It'd be crazy for you to put black bars on this video. It would 100% achieve the exact opposite purpose and make the very thing that

isn't something into something. So yeah, it's so frustrating. It's absolutely frustrating. I'll just send you a tweet I did yesterday, you know, just as another case in point. I got a couple of famous cultural images. Yeah, perfect. So Brady's just sent me his tweet with Leonardo da Vinci's famous man in the circle, right, with the black bar strategically placed and the Venus de Milo with a bar across her chest. And yeah, unambiguously, the bar makes the images worse than they are without the bar. It's the thin end of a wedge, isn't it? In terms of culture and history and that when we start having to push this stuff aside because

we want to cater to advertisers who they think might be sensitive. I'd be surprised if any advertisers were sensitive about this video, by the way, because what they're going to do in the long run, I mean, they're not going to change me, but in the long run, people are going to stop making videos about certain subjects because they can't monetize them. And then those subjects just fade out of existence. Is there a whole generation and period in art history that is going to be disproportionately less covered on YouTube because people can't show the paintings? Yeah. I mean, we've sort of skirted around this issue a couple of times on the show, but this is why I think it's always dangerous to get into the content filtering game. I feel like

all platforms should stay as far away from this as they possibly can, because it is the thin end of the wedge. There's no winning. Even if you think you're doing the right thing, is like, this is a perfect case, like would any advertiser in the world actually care about this? No. But I know for a fact that this kind of demonetization does have a chilling effect on the kinds of content that people produce for the platform. We've said it before, but I think YouTube and platforms like it are big enough that I don't think you can play the, oh, it's just a company card anymore. I think at

a certain point it becomes so vital for speech that this kind of stuff really matters. And this objectivity video is just like a perfect example because you have everything going for you. It's historically significant. It's barely visible. It's the most innocuous video imaginable. And if this can't get through the filter, like what hope is there for anything that is remotely near an interesting edge? There's no hope at all for that kind of content. a month. Your documents, music, photos, videos, drawings, projects, everything. It says drawings here. I don't have many drawings on my computer, but I know some of you do. It doesn't matter what

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really needed it, but it didn't matter because Backblaze lets you remotely get into your backup from a phone or another computer. If you've got all your passwords and everything, you can get in. And I was able to retrieve that one file I needed out on the road. And I was able to get on with my work. It was basically like I could just nip upstairs to my computer, except I was on the other side of the world. It was fabulous. So not the big save from catastrophe that Backblaze is famous for, but just a little bit of help on the road. To put Backblaze on your computer, go to backblaze.com slash hello internet. There's a fully featured 15 day trial. So you can just see how it works. Try before you buy. I think once you try it,

you'll buy it. That's what happened to me. It's backblaze.com slash hellointernet. By the way, if you already have them yourself, but you need them for business, there's also a business backup feature too. Just click on the business backup link on their webpage, backblaze.com slash hellointernet. As always, our thanks to them for making such a great thing and also for supporting this podcast. So, Gray, you have been a school student and you also have been a school teacher. Tell me what comes into your head or your memories or how you feel or what you think when I say to you school photos or class photos.

What emotion does this bring out in you? What do you mean? Like in a yearbook? Well, did you presumably when you're at school, like once a year, would you have a photo taken of the whole class that would go into like, yeah, a yearbook? Well, did you presumably when you're at school, like once a year, would you have a photo taken of the whole class? That would go into like, yeah, a yearbook. And your parents could buy one. And would they take one of you on your own as well, wouldn't they?

Each year at school. Oh, look, here's CGP Grey when he was in year two. And here he is in year three. Here are his class photos all through the years. Did you not do school photos? I haven't thought about this in forever. This is something that maybe in another five years would have totally passed out of my mind, but yes. Well, I'm glad I saved it.

It's like, oh, right. These are some neural pathways left untouched for a very long period of time. Well, they can be quite damaging memories too. Maybe you have repressed memories. Being the one kid in the class photo who has his or her eyes shut, that sticks with you for years. I mean, I'll take your word for it. I don't have that. None of my memories are surfacing that piece of information. You obviously have good photo face.

I'm terrible at having my photo taken. Is that what we're going to have here? Is Brady Therapy Corner for your old school photos? Well, maybe it is. I don't know. Let me tell you what's got me thinking about this. Let me send you a photo. Okay. Unfortunately, I can't share this with the collective because it involves a whole bunch of people whose permission we don't have. Right. But this is the class photo of my nephew. So my sister sent it to me and said, have a look at the cute class photo. This is not how I remember class photos looking, but you know, we live in a new age now. Whoa, what, what the, what, no, this is weird. This is not a class photo. What do you think of that? Okay. Let me just set

the expectation. So in my head, a class photo is you shuffle everybody down to the gym and you're sitting on the bleachers. So there's some height difference between everybody. Maybe there's like a little plaque in the front where someone has put the words on that says what this is a photo of. And that's where you take the picture. Jones Smith High School, year three, 1987. Yeah. You want to be real fancy. You go outside into the bleachers so there's trees in the background. That's what this is. Oh, wow.

You had some nice ones, right? I went to a very posh school. Would yours be like the whole year level or would it be broken into classes and homerooms? So it was like groups of 30 or were you like a group of like 100 or something? My rusty memories are that like in primary school, it was just the class. Yeah. And that in high school, like they shuffled everybody out onto the bleachers. The whole bunch.

I think. But I could be wrong about that. So explain this one that I sent to you. I think most people have that image in their head, hopefully, that we've all done and seen. This is my nephew. This is the new generation of class photos. How would you describe this one? Okay. Well, just like with movies, I know you want my opinion at first. I'm going to give this class photo a thumbs down. It's really weird. And what makes it weird is, okay, so instead of the kids sitting in the bleachers, they are all standing in a line next to each other.

So that it's just all of the kids in a big row facing the camera. Facing the camera. Facing the camera. It's very wide, like a big panorama shot, isn't it? Yeah. It's like, if you were there with your iPhone, you would need to put it into panorama mode to take this picture. Yeah.

The background is an empty void of nothing. It's just a pure white background, which makes me wonder, like, was that they roll out the green screen for this photograph, it kind of looks like it is a clothing catalog for the uniform that these kids are wearing. Yeah. Like if I didn't know any better, I would almost assume this was an advertisement in a magazine that's like, hey, look at these uniforms for these kids.

The kids are, they're not just standing in a line, all looking at the camera. They look very posed. And they look very posed like it's a magazine where it's like, oh, here's a kid. And the kids on either side who are taller have their hands on his shoulder. And some of them have got their arms crossed. And some have got sassy poses with a hand on their hips. Yeah, so I'm looking at a couple of the girls have the very standard photo pose of hands on hips,

like one knee a little bit forward. It looks really strange. I have this feeling like, again, a kind of meme that you see sometimes on the internet is where if you look in a catalog, someone will sometimes post these images where you can see that the person doing the Photoshop job has messed up and there's an extra hand where a hand shouldn't be because someone was Photoshopped out of the scene, right? Or there's like something's really weird that you don't notice at first. And this photo feels like, I wouldn't be surprised to learn this is actually a composite photo of a bunch of shots.

Great. It totally is. They were all photographed as like in twos or threes. Right. Okay. Separately. And then they were all put together afterwards into this big long line. Yeah.

There's one that has like, it's like a seam. It looks strange. It's the one mistake they made. The rest of it was actually done pretty well. But yeah, I'm a little bit mortified by this. I have some feelings about it, but tell me why are you mortified? I know I'm like old fashioned, right? And we live in this digital age.

But there are a few things about doing class photos so digitally. And I've seen this a lot lately. Class photos now are amazing. They're like, they're so different to what they used to be. They're like portraits. One of my other nephews, I saw his class photos the other day and it was like a photo shoot from another world with all that lovely bocker and you know, everything's all amazing. And there's like these candid poses. You reminded me of one thing, which was in my old high school yearbook, like the photographer came to the school and did the photo shoots. And so everybody looks the same. But one of the girls, her father worked in the

fashion industry and like, she had a photo that stood out, right? As noticeably different because it was just crazy professional. I do always remember being like, if I was that kid, I don't think I would want this. So when you say that they look different, I can easily imagine what you're talking about. I don't know. There was just a rites of passage thing about class photos that, I don't know, it felt like it gave me life lessons and it was character building. And I feel like that's all been taken away. For example, in the old days of photos, when they didn't have, you know, digital cameras and we all lined up and had our individual photos taken, it was like your one chance that would go bang, and then you wouldn't see anything for six weeks. And six weeks later, you'd be given

like these envelopes to take home for your parents where they would say, do you want to buy some of these? And like, if your eyes were shut, or you'd got it wrong or something like you'd blown your chance, like you had one chance and like you didn't know if you'd done it or not. And that teaches you a lot about life, like surreptitiously, because life's like that sometimes, you know. You get your one chance and don't blow it, kid. That's the lesson you should learn in life. It's kind of like, but now it's like, let's take a thousand until we get it perfect. And it's the same with the class photo, you know, having someone who has their eyes shut in the photo. I mean, that doesn't happen now because they do them all separately. That's why they're

doing this so that no kid is going to have a stinker. Because if you put 20 kids in a line, you have to take a thousand photos until you get the one you need. But here you're taking away that problem by just doing them in pairs, making sure everyone's eyes are open and things like that. And like, so it's just taking away that kind of randomness. And it's also taking away like the camaraderie of a class photo. It was the one time you're all together and you'd be all lined up by height and you'd learn how tall you were in relation to each other. And you'd secretly be hoping that you'd end up in the photo somewhere close to like the girl you had a crush on or something. And there was just so much going on

in the class photo and it was just all character building stuff. And now- You try to get bunny ears on the kid who's in front of you. Yeah. And then you get to take a funny one at the end. If you're like the older kids, like it's your final year of school, you'd say, can we do a funny one where you all do a crazy pose? And they'll take one of those. And also like, I don't know if it was just me or not. I've told people about this and they say it is just me, but I never knew what day the school photos were going to be. And you just turn up one day and like the photograph company is there having taken over the gymnasium or something. And it's like, oh my goodness, it's school photo day you know what a surprise and it's a big part

of my memories of school and these photos become a big part of your life and you know you look back at your old school photos occasionally so I don't know this is a case where I think the digital path is getting rid of some problems but it's also taking away a lot of charm and a lot of character building and a lot of, I don't know, maybe I'm just overly sentimental. I mean, look, I'm very happy to be the first one in the pile on of Brady is too sentimental. I got my front row ticket to that party, but I am totally with you on this cool photo thing. Great. Also, sorry, one other point I didn't make. It also is instilling a really interesting lesson about fakery, because this photo is designed to look like they're all together at once. These kids know they weren't, obviously, because that

incident never happened. That's a moment in history that never happened, that they've all now got as a keepsake for all time. And it's just instilling at an early age that nothing is real. Yeah. I mean, maybe to be devil's advocate for a moment, that's the most important lesson that you can teach children these days. Yeah, good point. Guess what, kids? You live in a world where you can trust nothing that you see. Yeah, okay.

The reverse is also true. It also instills early on that nothing has to be real. We'll fix it all in the edit. Everything can be fixed in the edit. We'll fix it all in the edit. But I don't like it because I said, if you were going to take a picture of this with your iPhone, you need to take a panorama. But the thing that's weird is in a panorama, everybody would be at a different angle, right? You would be rotating the camera. And so not all of the kids would be the exact same distance from the camera. And in this photo, it's like, oh, right, of course, all of these kids are looking straight

ahead into a camera, but there's a line of 20 of them side by side. So there is no place you could put the camera to actually get this photo the way it looks with all of them standing in a straight line. Except a mile away with a telephoto zoom. At an infinite distance, you could capture this photograph, right? And since it seems like they're standing in a Euclidean fantasy land, right, where there's just infinite nothing in all direction, maybe that's where this photograph was actually taken. But this is a case where it's like, I'm all fine with digital stuff, but if you're doing the digital stuff, it has to look right. This just looks terrible. My big vote for why were school photograph days

great is not for lessons learned or any of that sentimentality stuff, my perspective on it was just, oh, thank God, it's a day that's different. It's a different day at the school. We're not going through the same routine. You would hope that it would land on some day with the extra boring classes that you don't like. And I feel like poor kids, the school routine, it's, you know, it's the same thing day in, day out.

And any chance you can get to go outside and sit in the bleachers, that's way better. Whereas I can already see that from a school perspective, they sure would love this because it can also be much less disruptive, right? You can just catch some kids whenever they're available. You don't necessarily have to mess up the whole schedule. Take them out two or three at a time. Yeah. This modern world, Brady. Can I tell you one of my journalistic war stories that just came into my head please please do so back in the newspaper days when photoshopping was like high tech like normal people couldn't do it this

was many many moons ago like analog photoshopping is that the kind of stuff you're talking i don't know what where exactly the technology was at but sort of certainly this story will give you an idea where the technology was at because my beat was story will give you an idea where the technology was at because my beat was covering like the city council and I'd done it for a while and I had really good contacts and I was a really good mischief maker. My favourite stories weren't like, you know, the important stuff that was being done in the council.

It was like making mischief was my specialty. And I knew the council was having like their official portrait taken. This was the 20 members of the city council, whoever they, the elected members, I can't remember how many there were, and they were having their equivalent of a class photo done and they were wearing all the official regalia, all the formal robes of the city council and the traditional stuff

and it was being done in the council chamber, which is a lovely ornate room where they would have their meetings. But the doors were locked and I wasn't allowed in, which made me suspicious. But anyway, I wandered by and I looked through the keyhole at one point and I saw them all in their robes and getting ready and standing in lines to have their photo taken. They were doing it the old-fashioned way with, you know,

short people at the front, tall people in the second row. And one of, like, the council officials, like one of, like, the PR people who was not a councillor, he was just like a lackey, a staff member, was wearing all the regalia and the robes. And I was so confused, but I thought nothing of it. And then the next day I was talking to one of the other councillors and I said, I was looking through the keyhole and I saw what's his chops wearing the robes. What the heck was that all about? she said oh look i'm not supposed to tell you but i will because there was such gossips so and so the counselor couldn't be there because he was sick so they got this person to stand in the photo and then they used modern technology to put that

person's head on the photo and i was like no way so like a couple of days later when the official photo got released to the press you know know, here's the council photo, which is something we normally would have just ignored because who cares. I then called the council and asked for an official statement about whether Councillor Jones or whatever was in the photo. Was that really him? So they had to like fess up that it wasn't.

And that was such an unusual thing to happen and it was considered like so scandalous that it became, you know, it was like page three or page five of the paper or something. One of these counsellors is not really there. It's a, you know, it's a pretend photo. It wasn't like a scandal, like the count, you know, people should be sacked, but it was like funny and embarrassing for them. And it was a big thing. Like now you think nothing of it, you know, school photos are Photoshop. But back then having like someone's head put onto another body for the official portrait. You know what? I still think that's wrong to this day. Look at you, Brady. Rustling up trouble where there's no trouble at all,

trying to kick up a scandal for some poor guy, probably staying at home because he's sick. No, to this day, I think it's wrong. When you go through the halls of city council and you look at all those portraits over the year, the photos of all the previous councils, knowing that photo is not a real photo and they all weren't there in one place. It's wrong. It's wrong. It's not a document of a moment they were all together. That's what bothers me. Photographs are sometimes documents of amazing times in history when, you know, you look at those photos where like, you see all these famous scientists in one photo,

like Einstein and Niels Bohr. Yeah. I know the exact one you're thinking of. Yeah. It leaps right to my head. Yeah. Imagine if you found out actually two of those people weren't there and they just put their heads on later. The thing that's special about that photo is they were all in one place at one time. And it's the same with a school photo. The thing about a school photo is they were all there. If you were sick on school photo day back in my day, you weren't in the school photo. Absent, you know. Tough luck, kid.

Bill Jones. You've been erased from history. And again, that's a life lesson. If you're not there, you're not there. But these days, there's no lesson like that. These days, if you're not there, we'll just put you there later. That's not how life works. But maybe it is, Brady.

It's how it works now. Grey, it's plane crash corner time. It'll be a quick one. There's just been so much happening. This corner's bursting at the seams. I feel like you're already contradicting yourself here, Brady. You're like, oh, we're going to do a quick plane crash corner. And then you're coming up to me with all of these model airplanes in your hand and be like, I've got so many I want to talk about. I promise it's going to be really quick. Hey, you're the one slowing it down. You're complaining about how long plane crash quarter is. It's just making it longer. It's all my fault. It's all my fault. Do you have any superstitions when you get on a plane?

Okay. So a while back, I found myself unintentionally developing a superstition for getting on the plane. I don't know how it started. I don't know what it was, but it was a behavior that I became aware of, which is I have this tungsten wedding ring on my hand. And when I was a teacher, I used to tap it on things sometimes for a point of emphasis in a classroom. And I tend to just tap it on things, sometimes for like a point of emphasis in a classroom. And I tend to just like tap it on stuff because it makes a pleasing sound. And at some point, I got into the habit of just as you're stepping on the plane, as you're leaving the gangway of tapping the ring on the outside of the plane, on the physical surface of it. And it became a superstition and I was doing it a bunch, but not really realizing it. And at some point I became aware of this as a conscious behavior.

And I have since banished this. This is what superstitions are, right? There's some part of your brain that's not really thinking things through. I did have a brief period of time where it's like, as I'm walking into the plane, I'm like, you're not going to tap your ring on the surface of the plane. It's fine. Nothing's going to happen. You know, nothing's going to happen. Don't let yourself fall into the category of building up this habit over time. So I sort of did, but I have since gotten rid of it. Well, Gray, I have a superstition when I get on planes. Okay. And it's the exact same thing i've

never gotten on or off a plane without touching the outside fuselage of the plane really i do it every time just with my hand i just have to touch it i just have to have touched the outside of the plane for the first time ever when i got on a plane about a week ago one of the air stewards noticed that i did it as i was was getting on, I touched the outside of the plane. Funnily enough, she said, oh, you can touch me instead if you like, which now I think about it sounds kind of weird, but it wasn't weird. Oh my, that's not advertiser friendly at all. She didn't mean it like that. But when I, as I said it out loud, I realized it sounded weird, but she was just being like friendly. But if we bleep out what she said, it'll sound way better,

right? Is that how that works? Right. We'll'll take that we'll put a bleep over it then it'll be just fine oh you can touch beep instead i have a feeling like maybe this is a more common one it's it seems unlikely that you and i have both engaged in the exact same behavior the fact that that is the thing makes me think that going in and out of a plane a lot of people are touching the edge like I particularly don't want to do plane crash corner right now because I'm getting on a plane tomorrow, right? It's like, oh, god damn it. But when I am getting on the plane tomorrow, I'm going to be paying attention and see if anyone on the line in front of me touches the plane on the way in. Well, I've learned my lesson, and I'm not going to say tweet me if you touch the outside of planes. But anyway, a lot of cultures have superstitions that involve coins,

but in particular the Chinese do apparently. And there's a story I read a few months ago, but the exact same thing happened a few days ago. So it's happened twice now where Chinese passengers, as they've been walking along the tarmac to get on the planes, for luck, have thrown coins into the engine of the plane. Oh, Jesus Christ. And then this has been spotted.

And then obviously they've had to pull the engine apart and get the coins out. It happened twice now. There's a link in the notes for you to look at. I've got it open right in front of me. A superstitious passenger delayed a flight from Shanghai for several hours on Tuesday after throwing coins at the plane's engine for good luck. They're usually elderly women that do it. Imagine if it didn't get spotted.

There's so many different aspects of this. When you say imagine if it didn't get spotted, I would hope to God that a jet engine could chew up a penny and spit it out. But now there's the niggling thought that it couldn't, that there is a non-zero possibility that if it hits in just the right way, especially as the engine is starting up and not at full chewing through stuff capacity, that there's some damage that could be done. So great, great. Let me put this to you, Gray. If you were getting on a plane and you thought in the corner of your eye that you weren't totally sure you saw an old Chinese lady throwing coins in the direction of the engine. You don't know.

Is that what she was doing? Did she actually get it near the engine? What happened? I don't know. Would you then tell some people as you got on the plane, I think maybe that person threw coins at the engine? Or would you just keep storming? Before you can even get to the end of this question, before you can even pose the question, I've already added to my mental pre-flight checklist, keep an eye on the old Chinese ladies.

It's already now going to be part of my plane boarding routine to be looking around as like, hmm, right? Terrorist, smarerist, like, who knows? Anyone could be a terrorist. You can't pick them out. Like an old Chinese lady who has something in her hand. I'm going to have my eye on you, lady. Great. Isn't that racial profiling? Yeah, it is. Tough luck, right? But if apparently this is like a thing where old Chinese ladies

throw coins into engines for luck, it's racial profiling and life-saving. It does seem to have become a trend. So keep your eyes out, people. Oh, man. Jesus Christ. I didn't know you were flying tomorrow grace i'm sorry to be throwing a few of these things there was another one i wanted to ask you about if you look on the next link there was a recent case there's an air france plane flying across the atlantic a380 the big new super jumbo something went wrong with the engine it kind of blew itself apart a bit mid flight it then landed and everything was okay.

The thing is there have been a bunch of pictures, there were a bunch of pictures on Twitter and in the press that people took out the window of the blown-up engine, like, you know, the badly damaged engine, while the plane was still flying. My question is if you were on a plane and something happened to the engine but the plane was still flying and the captain just came around and said, oh, we've lost one of the engines, we're just going to go and land now for safety.

Would you take photos of it? Would you get your phone out and think, oh, wow. And take a bunch of photos of the damaged engine on the plane that you are currently flying in. Okay. Now this is a very particular situation because I generally don't like window seats. I especially don't like window seats where I have a view of anything mechanical out the window because I will find myself just looking, like looking at the wing, looking at those little flaps that come up, looking at the mechanical pieces that are underneath. And if it's a stormy night, you're looking at the gremlin who flies on and off the wing repeatedly as the plane goes on. So I specifically try to avoid seats that are the windows or that have a view of the wing. I do not like it. But if for some reason I was in one of those seats

and something happened, because I host a podcast with a co-host who is obsessed with plane crash corner. I don't see how I could not take a photo. I feel like if, if I was in that situation, you would berate me for the rest of the time that we knew each other for not taking a photograph of that engine. So, so the answer is yes,

I would feel compelled because of the situation that I am in. But if I was just like a regular citizen, I'm not sure it would occur to me. Like looking at the pictures that you're showing here, like this is an engine that looked pretty badly damaged. It's not like a minor thing. I somehow expect that I would, in that moment, it just would not occur to me to take a photo of the engine. That's my guess. As I mentioned many times at Plane Crash Corner, you know, every time I fly now, I get to know that if the plane does go down, you know, I'm going to be thinking about Brady and Plane Crash Corner in my final moments on this earth. So thank you. That means I will have some kind of responsibility to document them, perhaps tweet

them in my final moments on the plane going down. So yeah, I would be taking pictures. Would you be taking pictures, Brady? I probably would take a picture. Yeah. But I can understand someone who wouldn't, not because it wouldn't occur to them. I'm amazed that it wouldn't occur to you, but I can see how someone might feel like it's inappropriate. Like now is not the time to be taking pictures when like, you know, lives could be at stake sort of thing. I only just said that it might not occur to me simply because in those kind of situations, like people can have unexpected behavior.

That's why it's like, I think it might not cross my mind. But I would fully expect Brady to be taking pictures, possibly selfies, where you're pointing out the window at the engine. That's the kind of picture that I want from you if you're ever on a plane and the engine gets all busted up. Interestingly, the debris from that engine was found very quickly afterwards in the barren wastelands of Greenland. They found it really quickly, like some of the parts that fell off the engine. And yet, they have finally, totally, yet again, abandoned the search for this Malaysian Airlines entire plane that went missing, MH370,

that went missing around the time Hello Internet first started, that I was sure would be found within two or three episodes, that gave birth to plane crash corner, I suspect. Yeah, it probably did. But I feel like this is the Voyager probe reaches the edge of the solar system story. Like, haven't we given up the search for this flight several times now? You're right. It has happened several times. And just to keep it going, and quickly, the point I wanted to raise, because this is the latest development, because since the Australian search party officially abandoned the search, which upset some people in Malaysia, because there were so many Malaysian people on the plane, a few other companies have stepped in and offered to do it privately.

The most interesting being this company called Ocean Infinity, I believe, which have offered to search for the debris somewhere in the Indian Ocean, far, far off the west of Australia for free unless they find it, in which case they would get a finder's fee, kind of like a no-win, no, no fee type search for a plane that went missing. And I wonder what you thought of that proposal. I feel like I need to see the economics of that proposal. It sounds like an incredibly expensive thing to do. I would certainly want to get the money from the Malaysian government in escrow before moving out. I'm not exactly sure I would be trusting Malaysia to pony up

the millions of dollars necessary if this happens. There's something kind of macabre about kind of a, you know, no win, no fee type situation around like, you know, a tragedy and a loss of so many lives and this thing that's sort of, there's just something that felt a bit weird about it when I first heard it that made me think, is this right? Like, is this what we've come to? Do you think they should be searching out of honour or human responsibility or some other junk like that?

In my opinion, that is what they have been doing for the last few years. I mean, they've been tirelessly searching the ocean floor, spending a fortune as it is. That has been happening. And now that finally they've said, look, this is getting ridiculous, enough's enough. Does that mean it's time to bring in like, you know, the cowboys? I don't know. Maybe it is. And maybe that's how it will get found. know the titanic was found like that wasn't it admittedly a long time afterwards but by private enterprise but something about it just felt a little bit just sat a bit uneasy with me but maybe it's just me being queasy i think it's you wanting people to do things just to do them yeah Yeah. I feel like as soon as the money gets involved,

you're crossing your arms and going, I don't know about this. Malaysian airline hunt, stroke, SpaceX, right? Well, maybe that's it though. I feel like maybe there's a bit of emotional blackmail here because the families of the people who are on that plane are most strongly the people who want it to be found with very good reason. Finally, the governments and the officialdom have sort of given up

and said, look, we just can't find it. But now these other people have come in, seen like an opportunity, and they can leverage sort of the emotional pressure of these people who are saying, no, no, we need it found, to say to the government, hey, come on, you know, it's not going to cost you anything unless we find it. You've got all these upset people, and all the upset people are saying, yes, yes, get them to do it. We want it found. I feel like it's a bit, it's a little bit

blackmailing maybe. Yeah, maybe. I feel like I'm okay with it. The Malaysian government doesn't have to take them up on it. Yeah. I guess if they get the job done, then they've succeeded where others have failed. So we'll see what happens. I'm sure we'll still be talking this long, long into the future. Which happens first? Does Malaysian Airlines wreckage get found or does the podcast come to an end? Or is the discovery of the wreckage like the trigger point for the end of the podcast? Like maybe that's it. Maybe Ocean Infinity are the people who will bring us to an end. Like we no longer have a reason to exist. Yes, because plane crash corner

is the beating heart of Hello Internet. Hello Internet, it's Future Grey here, who took the plane trip and hasn't died. Well, yet anyway. But I did take a photograph of the engine while I was in the air. That seems like the kind of thing that could become a bit obsessive, maybe a bit like a superstition, that I'd have to take a photograph of the airplane engine every single time. Man, if I started getting a lot of those, I would need some place that I could show them off on the internet. Where could I go to make an amazing portfolio website that I could show on the internet? I know where I could go. I know where you could go. It's Squarespace. Squarespace is the best place to go to make your website. If you just have a weird obsession with airplane engines or

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because this is obviously all this plane crash corner is a bit heavy going. Let's talk about death. Yes, death. The lightest of topics. So, Gray, your most recent video uploaded is about death. I think it's about life, Brady. About life. It's about life and death. Basically, you're saying, come on, man, we should all live forever. Let's get our act together and do this.

Yeah, kind of. Do you know what? Can I just say, for at least six months now, I've got a list of questions in my head of things I would ask you if we ever ran out of things to talk about. Okay. And there's about five or six of them. And one of them has been for a long time. Do you ever worry that the key to eternal life, like immortality, will be discovered just after you die? And the reason that question's been in my head for a long time to ask you is because

I feel there is something about you that has like a interesting preoccupation with death and living forever. Obviously, everyone has feelings about death, but like you have in this interesting way that I think has been made more public now by your last video. I'm a little curious. Do you have any particular reason that you feel that way? Because I find that sort of surprising. I think it's just kind of something I had taken on by like osmosis, just from lots of little things. It's not like you talk about it all the time, but just the times it's come up. I don't

know, but I'm not making it up. It is a question that I've wanted to ask you for a long time, because I've always thought it up. It is a question that I've wanted to ask you for a long time because I've always thought it is something that concerns you. I think the thing that you're picking, like when you say by osmosis, you might be onto something there because I've been very hesitant to do a video like this for a long time. Like this has been on my topic list for forever, but I've always been very hesitant to do it because at least in my personal experience talking with people is a topic that gets a lot of pushback in interesting ways and often, quite frankly,

in ways that I don't really understand. So yeah, it's been on my list for a while. But I think what you might be picking up on osmosis is the thing that I've never really wanted to say out loud that may bleed through in our conversations of death is the reverse of what you're probably thinking. It's not that I actually have some kind of focus on death. It's that in the back of my mind, I feel like there's a non-zero chance that I might not die in what is a normal human timeframe. But I've kind of never wanted to say it out loud or talk about it on the podcast or do a video about it because it feels like jinxing it.

It's almost like a superstition. It's not touching the outside of the plane. Yeah, exactly. That is 100% what it's like. And so I think maybe that's what comes across on the podcast. Sometimes when we talk about death is I have this little spark in the back of my mind, which is actually the exact reverse. It's not that I have a worry or a preoccupation with my own death. I'm actually very indifferent to my own death because

my feeling is just like, well, when you're dead, you don't care. It doesn't matter. It's not a big deal. But I do have a feeling that there may be a non-zero chance that I may have a longer than normal human lifespan. As in all people of your generation, not just you specifically. I am immortal. I'm like, I think I might be part elvish. No, that's not what it is. Let me back up for a second here and say that I do think that radical life extension technology is a thing that can exist in our universe. I don't think there is any

technical reason that this is not possible to build, as opposed to something like, sort of like the Star Trek transporter, which is like essentially a magic piece of technology that, you know, we may live in a universe where nothing like a transporter is ever built, and it's not really feasible to build something like a transporter. But I don't feel that way about life extension, because my view of it is that this is a biological and a physical process. And it is a biological and physical process that I think that we will be able to intervene in, in some way, at some point in the future. And then yes, I think that then raises a very interesting idea that there does come a moment where there may end up being a divide where there's the last generation to die and

the first generation that lives unusually long lives. I mean, in your video, Gray, you sort of showed it graphically quite nicely. You sort of drew that divide and showed a whole bunch of people falling off one side of the ravine and the other people the other side. That was almost you making manifest what I thought maybe was something that sat in your head that fear of being the last little stick man who's the wrong side of that divide yeah because as soon as you put that idea out there that does create that fear there is going to be one man or woman who's the last person to die before you know obviously there'll be some blurring, but you know what I

mean? There is going to be this like, this unlucky generation and gosh, who wants to be in that unlucky generation? Okay. So, so this is interesting. Let me just, let me just clarify something here because do you agree like with this proposition at all? Like, do you think this is a thing that is technically possible to do? You know me, like I'm a devil's advocate and I'll argue against anything, but I find that one hard to argue against. Like if we can like make atom bombs, we can just one by one check off the list of all the things that are causing us to age and die. I can't see like an imperative in the universe that makes us die. Like I don't think we could, you know, there are some things in the universe I think maybe we can't stop. Like, you know, we probably can't speed up light or change like the fundamental constants. We can't change pi or the gravitational constant. But I do feel like we can tinker with

our own machinery. And if we can tinker with our own machinery, then yeah, we probably can dramatically change it. That's really interesting for me to hear. I was really unsure about where you would fall on this. And again, it is partly because I'm very surprised in personal conversations that it's like, even talking about this this that feels very different than the topic of like free will, where people can simply disagree. The you're crazy comes out way faster on this topic than on other topics. I don't know if crazy is the word I would use, but there is a certain stigma attached to people who want to live forever or live for a long time. Yeah. That it's not always craziness. It's like a certain kind of like your bit of a knob. Yeah.

Another word that comes up very quickly is like arrogance. Yeah. So when I watched your video, like I actually made a little tweet and I was, I guess I was being a bit uncharitable to you and like taking the mickey of it, but I just tweeted it because it reminded me there's a scene in the UK office where the boss of the office, this guy called David Brent is talking about like his attitude to life and philosophies to life. And then one of the things he says, you know, he says, there's an old saying, live hard and die young. And then he just suddenly turns serious and goes, I don't want to die young.

I want to die old. I want to be really old. And one of David Brent's like characteristics is that he wants to live for a really, really long time. I don't remember that in his personality in the show. And I think one of the reasons they gave him that characteristic is because it's a bit of an arrogant, knobby characteristic. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I can see that. I think also maybe it's like, it could be considered quite a selfish attitude

because the people who say that rarely talk about wanting everyone to live a long time. They usually just talk about how they want to live a long time. They don't want to die. What if all the people around you die? What would you do? You'd be like, no, I'd still want to live a long time. So there is a certain stigma attached to people who wade into this territory. And maybe that's also where some of your reluctance was coming from.

That could be it. Don't get me wrong. If for some reason I could only accept personal immortality i would accept that at the drop of a hat like i keep my eye out for any passing vampires it's like it's not a likable quality to want to be immortal it's one of these funny things where i've been while i've been working on this this is like an incredible rush job script for various reasons that are not interesting for the podcast but while i've been working on this it's like every movie i have watched the villain is obsessed with the idea about living forever.

And it's like suddenly I'm seeing this everywhere. And it's like, oh, all of the villains, like this is a primary characteristic. And all of the heroes are arguing for humanity. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is all about like people being brought unstitched by their greed for eternal life. Exactly. And I think that there's also something about the idea of feeling like it's generous to pass on the world to the next generation. And so like suddenly you're arguing against sharing, I think in a way when you start talking about this kind of stuff. So it's just an interesting topic. And like I said, it's a thing I've been hesitant about. And it's also a thing like I can

see in the numbers, like on all the spreadsheets of the videos that I record, that it's like, this is a video that has the most pushback, since interestingly, the Reddit video, which still holds the record for like most pushback of any video. It's done well though. It's done good viewing figures, hasn't it? Yeah, no, the viewing figures are good. But if you like looking at the like dislike ratio is the second worst compared to the Reddit video, which is the worst for some reason. Do you think maybe also it's because it's a different kind of video you made? I feel like your videos have been changing in tone a little bit lately anyway, like taken on the average. It felt like the video was, it was more of like an opinion piece.

There is a thing here that's like an opinion that I want to change in people's minds. And I'll be very upfront about it. I don't think I was successful in it in the video. I think people should look at death in the same way that we look at other diseases. I think people should look at aging in the same way that we look at other diseases. Yeah, but you didn't couch it that way, did you? Like, I think if you'd centered it on aging rather than death, it wouldn't have been as like clickable and as like exciting to have seen the title in my sub box. But I would have understood the point you were making better, that aging is a disease.

Because death isn't a disease. Death is like a consequence of numerous things, one of which is diseases. Another one is jumping in front of a bus. Another one is having wars. Like, death is a consequence of numerous things, one of which is diseases. Another one is jumping in front of a bus. Another one is having wars. Death is a consequence. And so framing it around death made it like a more enticing peg. But I think maybe that detracted from your argument a bit. Yeah, well, it's an interesting thing. I can see it in the comments where these arguments where people talk about like, well, the universe is going to come to an end eventually, so we're

all going to die, so you can never defeat death. And it's like, well, like- I take that. I take that. Yeah, that's true. But if I live a billion years, like I'm still going to consider it a win. Like you get hit by a bus, like you're still like, you know, there's going to be accidents and things. I'm imagining 6 billion years old CGP Grey making a video saying, we've got to stop this universe ending thing now. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, there's the multiverse people, maybe we can punch through. But you know, that's a problem for way future Gray. So I don't know how much people care that much. But like the details behind the scenes is just that like, Kurtzgesagt convinced

me at the real 11th hour to do a video on this topic, because he was doing a video on death and aging as well. And there's a follow up that's coming out where he's talking about some of the technology of this stuff, which may or may not be out by the time the podcast is out. And it was really a case that when we get together, this is a topic that we talk about a bunch. And he wanted us to do it as a like, we're both planting a flag here on this topic, and in a way going to come out on a topic that I know people will regard as kooky, like on a topic that I know will get a bunch of pushback. And I totally wouldn't have done it if it wasn't for him, but it also added in some constraints just that it was produced under a shorter period

of time. And I also didn't really want to talk about the stuff that he was talking about in his video. Yeah. So he talks about aging very directly. So I was trying not to talk about aging so directly. But for people who care about the details, those are some of the details. But I could see, like, I think I'm missing the mark with this and the thing that I want to change in people's minds. If you feel like you missed the mark with it, like, you know, slightly, why are you still happy with it? Like, what's the thing you looked at and thought, yeah, it's all right. At least I'm glad it's out there. So I'm glad it's out there because

I have gotten messages and I've seen comments from people who have changed their mind on the topic. Right. What I would really want is something like, I think some of the videos on voting that I've done, which I feel like are real like lock slam box cases against this, right? But this topic isn't like that because there's no arrows and possibility theorem about death where you can just talk through the mathematics of a thing and it's sort of indisputable. That's why like this is kind of an opinion piece because there are cultural arguments around the end of life that are not resolvable through facts. Such as what? What's just an example?

I think the question of passing on the world to a next generation, you can't get a correct answer on that in terms of math. There's no way to show definitively that it is better to or better not to do this. So like I have the feeling that I think we should push for technology to extend human life and I think we should push for it very hard because my opinion is that death is a kind of horrific degenerative disease. And this is tremendous amount of suffering that we can avoid, right? And like continued generations of this suffering, I think is really bad. And I think there's a kind of cultural blindness to the suffering of senescence over time. Part of the reason why I really wish

that it was like a perfect slam dunk case because I want to change more people's minds on this because really it's not just about changing people's minds, it's about changing the right minds. I really want anybody who is in medical school and thinking of going into medical research, I want those people to be aware if they're thinking of suffering in the research, I want those people to be aware if

they're thinking of suffering in the world, that aging is on the board. Like it's a thing to consider about what is the suffering that's in the world, right? Or if someone's like a very wealthy person who's looking to fund new projects, like this is a project that has the potential to reduce a tremendous amount of suffering. So it's partly how I was convinced to do the video at the last minute under constraints that I might normally not do it because it was presented to me in terms of like opportunity cost way. Like what if the very person who could come up with this technology would have been convinced by your video at the right time,

and you didn't make it. And then you found yourself on the wrong side of this cliff. Like, okay, well, you know what? Now you presented me with this Pascal's wager that I can't get out of my head. I'm going to make this thing and I'm going to upload it and it's going to happen. So rather than feeding lots and lots and lots of viewers some fish, you just want to teach the right person to be a fisherman. Yes. If three of the right minds are turned even slightly on this topic, I will consider that an incredible success. Especially if it affects me directly.

Yes. If you get to live forever because of that video, I think we'll all thank you, Gray. I won't even take any of the credit for it. No? Oh, good, because we'd be hearing about it for a long time if you did. You would be hearing about it for a long time. But I think going back to your very opening discussion about this is, I feel like I was born at a really fortunate time.

Maybe everybody feels this way. I don't know. But I feel like I've always been really glad to be born when I was. I was just old enough to know a world that didn't really have computers and technology in the way that it exists now. And I got to see all of that come online. And I feel like I have a better understanding of this stuff because of that in a way that I was always shocked that like my students who grew up with technology seem to just know nothing or have no appreciation for it. I always found that really interesting

and counter to the predictions that the younger generation would be amazing with technology because they had grown up with it. It's like that turned out to totally not be the case. They're amazing at Facebook, but that's a very different sort of thing. There's a few things that are like that where I feel like I was born at like just like I graduated from college at just the right time. I sort of missed economic downswings and I got into the workforce and I was fortunate to be just at the right age and at the right time when YouTube came around

and be able to make a transition. It's like three years too early or too late and maybe my life is very different in these different ways. Yeah. You've avoided some bad wars so far. Yeah, exactly. So I feel very appreciative of this, just in a general way. And there is one final thing that I'm aware of, that there is this idea about following a bunch of technology developments that are around life extension and just wondering. I have been thinking about this ever since the Human Genome Project. I think it concluded in 2003, I think. And like the Human Genome Project, the first time the human genome was ever sequenced, like all the letters of someone's genome were read, it took something like 10 years and a billion dollars to do. And people who know me in real life over decades know that this is a thing I have always talked about, that it's fascinating to watch that price and time go down until now we're at the point where it's like a couple hundred bucks and a couple of weeks, 20 years

later to get your genome sequenced. It's a thing you can just do in the mail. And I look at that kind of curve and I feel like it's similar to the computer curves. And I think, well, genome technology is one of these things that you need to have on board in order to do life extension. And just recently, there's been developments in gene editing, like things like CRISPR coming online. So now being able to change genetic material on the fly is becoming a much cheaper, much more possible thing. I've for a while been really interested in like when the first gene therapies became commercially viable, like that stuff is amazing. You're injecting and changing

DNA in living people. It's crazy that it's even possible. And so I just I feel like over the course of my life, there have been roads that are slowly converging towards this direction, but it does have that question of how fast do they converge? Do they converge fast enough or not? Gray, you were talking before almost like the people you were hoping would hear you would be future medical researchers who would dedicate themselves to combating aging rather than using their intellect and resources to tackle other things that may be a more fashionable and things like that. But do you

think technology and medical research is the problem here? Or are the hearts and minds that you think are going to have to be won over politicians and religious leaders and other cultural things? Because it feels like those are going to be the stumbling blocks. I mean, things like CRISPR and all these other technologies and stem cells and that, the thing that seems to be slowing them down as much as anything are laws and regulations and politicians and things like that. When I think about change in the world, I feel like technology is what you bet on. Technology is a kind of unstoppable force once you get it going. And maybe you can accelerate that through political means,

or maybe not. But the technology route is the 100% sure route. But without a doubt, I would love essentially a NASA Kennedy style, we're going to approach this as a Nixon had in the 70s, you have a war on cancer. It's like say, we're going to have a war on senescence. This is a well-understood topic. And we're going to make some hard decisions about where we're diverting medical research. And we're going to play the long game here. I would absolutely love that. I just think from my interactions with people, that is almost a total impossibility in any practical way. I think people push back so hard on this topic, you could never get that to happen, right, without some kind of incredible external force. So I don't see the political path as a fruitful path, which is why I feel like the technological path or the venture capital path, that is the way to go. That's really the only practical path forward, is it just has to be a thing that

becomes technologically feasible, and then society as always will catch up. That's not really what I meant by the question, though. It wasn't as much the government enabling it as stopping political leaders from blocking it. I feel like technology is like bursting to get out of the gate with some of this, but they keep getting knocked down by people saying, no, no, no, that's banned. No, no, no, that's like, you know, this is Frankenstein science and things like that. I don't think you even need the government to like do a Manhattan project of death. You just need governments to say, all right, we're open to it, show us what you've got. This is one case where I am definitely glad that, let's just say,

not all the countries in the world are on the same page when it comes to this kind of stuff. And some of the most interesting, most cutting edge biological science is coming out of China. And it seems like China is going all in on a bunch of this genetic technology related to humans. And I really think that if they get anything that's remotely viable, other countries just immediately have to fold on it. It's actually, it's a bit like a lot of the self-driving or automation technology that automation is so incredibly economically valuable that any country that does a good job of automating anything has a tremendous advantage over all others.

And so the automation just spreads very quickly. Like if Canada, for some reason, said self-driving cars are 100% legal across all of Canada and the United States said, no, we're not going to allow it. Well, all of transportation would divert, right? It's like the northern half of the transportation economy would divert through Canada as much as possible, right? Like they'd have such a tremendous advantage in terms of price and manufacturing that the United States couldn't possibly hold out very long. And I suspect that any significant medical developments along these lines are going to be the same thing. And it's like, okay, well, as long as there's some place that this research can occur,

it's going to spread outward from that point. So I'm glad that not everybody is as restrictive as the United States is when it comes to some of this technology. Well, if I can put my two cents worth in on two things, as always to do with naming. Yeah. Senescence is not a word that many people understand. Yeah, no, senescence is a terrible word. brand or the name of Life Extension, that might work. But for people of my generation, all they can think of is Vanilla Sky and the fact that the creepy company that tries to make people live longer in that is called Life Extension. And they're like the villains, aren't they, of the

film. So Life Extension is a bit of a tainted term, at least for fans of that movie, which I like very much. This really does come back to a lot of the pushback stuff like senescence is a totally unknown word but it's also not a great word there's no freebooting right people just love it and they're going to spread it immediately like it's just not good and yeah like life extension there's something about this which is just like polluted in the popular culture which again is kind of why my feeling about this video is like I'm doing my best job to try to convince everybody, but I feel like what I'm really trying to do

is convince a few people who might be on the edge. We're like, you know what? That is a thing that maybe I should think about instead of other options. Your point from being earlier is totally true that there's some interesting cultural pushbacks on this. I presume though, that if it is going to be available in your lifetime, Brady, that you will be signing up for the treatment, whatever it may be, to extend your life. I will consider signing up if

you answer me one more question or deal with one more issue in my head and talk it through for me, and then I'll be happy. You make a convincing case for being anti-death, and it shouldn't be the hardest case to make, should it? Because I don't think anyone really wants to die. But can you see any merit to the opposite case? Do you see any usefulness and utility in death, whether it's population control or... I don't know what the pro-death arguments are, but can you talk me through some of the pro-death arguments and tell me why they're flawed? I want to be upfront here that this is a case where very often I feel like the arguments on the other side are a bit baffling. A lot of them fall into a thing which I think is a little bit like when people get into arguments about the education system, which is the thing that we

have done on this podcast, where they're backwards justifications for the way a thing is. I have found, at least personally, that it's most useful when talking to people to frame it in a way where it's like, if this didn't exist, would you make it this way? All right, like, would you bring it back into existence the way it is right now? It's like, that's the way you should frame it in your mind. I just think a lot of the death stuff is a rationalization for the way things are. But Gray, lots of things we build and do, we do get rid of. We put up buildings, but then we knock them down for new buildings rather than just constantly

patching them up. And we do build a lot of obsolescence into things we do and not just to make money by selling another iPhone in a couple of years. There is a naturalness to the way we design and do things for it not to necessarily last forever. One of the arguments that comes up a bunch, which I can see where people are coming from, is the idea that if you have people living a really long time, society will never change. And this to me is built on an assumption that I can see why people think it, but I just don't agree with it. This idea that society changes because people with old ideas die and younger people with new ideas

replace them. Now, if that was 100 true then yes like maybe this is a concern like society never changes or adapts to different situations because yeah it's like it stagnates and you end up with some kind of like some kind of civilization that you'd visit on star trek right where it's like oh nothing nothing has changed for 20 000 years on this planet right and we're just doing the same stuff all the time. But I disagree. I just think that that is a false assumption. And I also think it's an assumption that is just not borne out by the data. If you look at people's voting patterns, people's geography is correlated way better with how they vote, for example, than their age is correlated with how they vote. And I think we

have seen enough things in society where people do change their minds because things are better ideas. Like the most recent example that's always used as the standard go-to case is simply gay marriage rights in the United States. On the scale of societal change, that happened relatively quickly. And it seems to happen because people change their mind on this topic through exposure. It didn't happen because there was a massive die-off of old people between the 90s and the 2000s. That's not the reason that changed. It changed because people changed their minds. So I think people are able to change their minds at any age. And it also ignores that implicit in this idea of radical life extension is the idea that the whole thing that we're trying to achieve here is maintaining your health at an older age.

So it's not like the old people are still going to be the chief executive of SpaceX, but have no new ideas. They're going to have a young dynamic brain that's still going to be having new ideas all the time. Like in a perfect world, you're sort of at the level you are in your 20s or 30s or whatever. So it's not like there's a whole generation of oldies that are just getting older and older and older, but just not dying. The argument seems to be that we're aiming for the genie's curse where we just get older and older and older forever.

And it's like, who wants that? Nobody wants that. Yeah. This is why I get a little bit like excised on this topic is I think that through, it might be a bit harsh, but through a kind of carelessness of intent, we actually accidentally create that world. Because if we're constantly spending our efforts on solving medical problems that are further towards end of life, like what we end up doing is what has happened, that we do extend life, but we extend old age. And so like we're pushing up life expansion, but we're not increasing what is sometimes called the health span of life very dramatically. Like you're increasing the total amount of time that you're alive, but that is increasing faster than the healthy portion of your life is increasing.

Sometimes, you know, when we joke about like, oh, CGP Grey is dictator. And I'm like, you don't want me as dictator because I would do things that would be deeply unpopular. And this is one of those cases where I feel like I would pull research money and effort off of diseases that kill people in their old age and put it towards senescence research. And like, that would be a deeply unpopular decision. But I do think that's overall, that's a better decision to make. So for people who don't know, that's research to stop aging. Yeah, sorry, research to stop aging. So yeah, I just think that there is a way that we

unintentionally create the thing that is the argument that people are having. They're like, oh, you end up with a society that's just full of oldsters and hardly has any young people and becomes really stagnant. And it's like, well, we can do that by accident. You can do that if you're Japan. But the whole point is that's not what we're trying to do. All right, then. right then well at this stage i think we're getting well into old age so we are getting well into old age we can follow this up at some point but the podcast has been going on for quite a while yes it is late in the evening here i have to go on a plane relatively shortly i know i feel a bit bad about that i'm sorry but i hope your flight goes well i have no idea where you're going or what you're doing but i'm sure i'll find

out in due course i'm an international man of mystery brady yeah that's what i am