Hello Internet - H.I. #92: Grey Honeypot

Episode Date: November 24, 2017

Grey & Brady discuss: the Hello Internet logistics center, Objectivity censorship revisited, Twitter grants Grey (and Brady) 280 characters, Halloween IN SPACE and corporate attention grabbing on Twitter, school photos and (::sigh::) safety, the 9/11 memorial, Universal Paperclips, and Operation Hotstoppers. Sponsors: 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 Harry's: Quality Men's Shaving Products - go to www.harrys.com/hi for $5 off Listeners like YOU on Patreon Show Notes: Discuss this episode on the reddit Objectivity: Animal Locomotion Grey abusing his power on Twitter Airplane cross section Brady's Indiana Jones photos Halloween on the International Space Station Year long -- 11 month -- mission in space mission Alan: The Maestro Universal Paperclips -- DO NOT CLICK LINK UNLESS YOU HAVE LOTS OF TIME TO BURN RIGHT NOW Democracy News videogame: We become what we behold 9/11 Memorial photo 9/11 Memorial sign 9/11 Memorial from above Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hello Internet hotstoppers What do you think we should do with these hotstoppers?

Hello, this is Brady speaking into the microphone. I should ask you what you have for breakfast, I always forget to do that. Three protein Weetabix. Protein Weetabix? What the hell is that? It's like a special type of Weetabix, it's got a bit of extra protein in it. What's a Weetabix? If you don't know what Weetabix are, this conversation is beyond repair. So, I've done a thing yesterday.

Oh yeah? You know how sometimes, I don't know if this happens to you or not, but sometimes you do a thing and something happens and it just fills you with so much excitement and enthusiasm that you want to tell the whole world about it, but you realize that when you tell people, they're not going to be as impressed as you feel about it. I know. I don't actually have this experience very often, but I can imagine that this is an experience that you have quite a lot for you. Well, let me give you the background first, right? Okay. In my house, like at the top floor is where my office is. And I actually have two offices. I have like one that I'm in

now where I have my computer in my desk and I do my editing and do the podcast and whatnot. And you have your memorabilia, there's Lego boxes, photographs of astronauts. Yeah. Yeah. I like it to be like a nice environment it's like an old school gentleman's office i've got a ye olde map of south australia and adelaide on the wall and ian rush scoring one of his goals in the 1989 fa cup final in which liverpool beat everton 3-2 things like that you're sitting in a big plush leather chair right now as you record this i believe i am in a leather chair. Yeah.

It's got like the nice green office walls that you would expect from an old scholarly office. Anyway, we're going off subject here. And then I have like a second office that is supposed to be also like my personal room with a TV and a sofa where I could be banished to watch sport. But it's kind of more evolved into like an office as well. And it's where I do a lot of recording and I have like, so I have some video equipment in there and some lights and stuff, but it's supposed to be a nice looking room. All the rooms in the house are supposed to be nice looking because my wife likes a nice looking house. And you do have a very

nice looking house, Brady. Thank you. All right. Let's not go there. Thank you very much. You're very kind. Okay. So, the problem is over the last sort of six months or so, largely because of Hello Internet, there has been an encroachment. It's been spreading like a disease of cardboard and cardboard boxes. As we've had things like Project Revolution and Operation Twinkle Toes and things like that. There's like packaging and boxes and material and packing materials coming to my house more and more often. And like what started in just a corner of the second office has been gradually expanding and spreading until it's almost engulfed my second office with cardboard boxes

and it's just a big wall of beige now. And it's even starting to slowly leak into my nice office. So anyway, the chief designer of the house has been in my ear. She's not been pleased about it. We've got guests coming at Christmas. And she said, enough's enough. You have to get rid of all this stuff. But I can't get rid of it. You have been slowly accruing a hello internet distribution center in your house. I mean, that's what it sounds like. Yeah. Another big problem is the proliferation of brown papers from number file videos that I don't throw away. So I've got filing cabinets upon filing cabinets of rolls of brown paper with mathematical scribbles over it for the last X number of years of number file, because I can't be able to throw them away because I think they're like historical items

and quite collectible. So anyway, this week I did something I've been thinking about for quite a while. And yesterday I went and hired my very own storage, like locker apartment place offsite. Oh, okay. Okay. storage like locker apartment place off-site oh okay okay and i cannot tell you how much pleasure it is giving me at the moment like it feels so industrial and so like it really appeals to that caveman part of my personality because it's like it's this really cool place with all these anonymous rows of mysterious steel locked apartments and i've got my own one with a code number and a lock and i have to go in these like really cool goods lifts

that are like old-fashioned lifts where you have to pull all the doors and the shutters open yourself and it's this really amazing place and then i've got my own secret cave i'm packing up all the brown papers and all the boxes and memorabilia and stuff into containers and taking them there and stacking them up and creating this like special place. And it's just bringing me so much happiness that I'm just looking for excuses to go there. Like, oh, I think I might take this box to the storage locker, chuck it in the back of the car, sign in, say hi, get out the big trolley and roll the trolley to my car and put the boxes on the trolley and then yank open the goods lift. It's all so industrial and I love it. And it's

like my own special place and it's like a little expansion of my domain and my empire. It just makes me so happy. I mean, it sounds like you're going to move in, Brady. Will you bring in chairs and toilets right in a sink soon in your storage space? I mean, is that what's going to happen? That's what it sounds like. It's disappointingly small and very unlivable. But also, it's just creating so much space here in my at home, like these filing cabinets that have been like just absolutely overflowing with brown papers for the last year or two are now completely empty. And I'm like, oh my goodness, I can put other stuff in these now.

This is what I was going to say though. It's like, Brady, I don't know anybody who ever genuinely solves the problem of I don't have more space with getting more space. This is always a very temporary solution at best in my experience. So I'm very happy for you. I'm glad that everything's going to get cleared out for the holidays. But somehow I think what you're already approaching here is like, wow, look at all this space I have at home. What could I possibly do with it? I think that's what's going to end up here. No, it means I can take stuff that's been out and visible that shouldn't be and put it into the storage space that had previously been filled up with all the papers and things like that. So I think it's going to create less clutter. I mean, you sound exactly like my

wife. And actually just before the show, I was talking to the Duke from Venezuela and I was telling him about my storage locker. And I said, I'm going to talk about it on Hello Internet and tell Grey about it. And somehow in the back of my head, I thought maybe you would like share it and you would tell me some story about some storage thing that you've done offsite. But he just said, no, Gray's going to slate you for that. That's so anti-Gray. And I'm like, I'm not so sure. I think maybe he'll think this is kind of cool, but the Duke was right.

Okay. Well, there's two different things here. I completely agree with you that storage lockers are kind of cool. Yeah. Like if I was going to have to run a business that doesn't seem like a bad one because it's like you don't have to do very much you're just renting space it's it's relatively automated there's also i understand the appreciation of those places because there's something logistic about them right it's it's like there's movement

of objects like you say you have like the trolleys. It's very pleasing to pack stuff away. Like I get all of that. Yeah. But I have never in my life had a storage unit like that in addition to the place that I lived. Right. So even when my wife and I were living in a single studio flat or before that, when my wife and I were just sharing a bedroom in a shared flat with a bunch of other people like we didn't ever have a storage space the only time I ever used a storage space was in college which was I think just for the first summer where it was simply easier to

just pack up my belongings into a big storage container for the summer and then go home and then return and get it all out of there. But I can't imagine using it as a permanent little house annex or logistics distribution center in the way that you're using it. I hope it works for you, Brady. I hope that you clear up all the space. But I do think that the problem is like whenever you do have, you clear up space, like the space invites more things. Look, I get you. I get this whole, you know, nature abhors a vacuum and I'm just going to fill the empty space up with more crap. And I'm also not saying that I couldn't be more

ruthless with my throwing away of stuff. I'll acknowledge those two problems, but I genuinely think I have created a situation that is not my fault that has resulted in me having very large things that don't really belong in a house. Like all these huge bits of cardboard you need to package up vinyl records and huge rolls of bubble wrap and, you know, all this stuff. And there's more stuff coming and like, it's kind of, it's not my fault, you know, but it's not good looking. And we, you know, we, we like running a tight ship in the house and want it to look nice. And there aren't many storage solutions that you can have in a nice looking house that can hold all this stuff.

So I think I've had no choice but to go off site. I do agree because in a normal house, the solution to this would be the basement, right? Like you put everything downstairs in the basement. But the way your house is laid out is that the basement is actually a very nice other room. It's a kitchen eating area. So your house doesn't have the normal, like, oh, right, there's this underground cellar where we can put all the things. So you simply don't have that option. And yes, I am actually giving you much less of a hard time than I can imagine people might think I would give you over this. Because I do understand that once you take on the burden of sending out shoes of different sizes to people,

and I do agree with you that those papers that you keep from Numberphile, those are quite legitimate to keep. I do think that they are unique little pieces of art. I will never fault you for keeping those. So you are in a bit of a different situation. So I will give you a little pieces of art. Like I will never fault you for keeping those. So you are in a bit of a different situation. So I will give you a little bit of a longer leash than I normally would on this kind of thing, because it is the nature of your work, Brady, that you are going to be attracting this kind of stuff into your house.

But I also think it's the nature of a Brady that he really likes keeping these things too. I want to know how your objectivity video is doing from last time. This is my scandalous, naughty video with the old fashioned nudie pics. Even just the description like that. I really do want to follow because this is sometimes, sometimes when you record a podcast, you know, you talk about things and something gets stuck in your brain. Like I could not let that segment go last time. Like after we recorded it, after I edited it, I just kept thinking about it over and over again, like this endless messy problem that YouTube has

and the demonetization and everything. And for some reason, this one in particular really stuck with me and I couldn't get out of my head. So I want to know what's the update. Has this been monetized? Has your whole channel been taken down? I'll tell you what happened and it will involve a minor confession. Okay. But I won't go into all the details. People who've listened to the last episode will know what this video was about, but it involved these pictures that had been automatically flagged as unsuitable. I pressed the button for a so-called manual review and it was very quickly rejected a second time. And I was told I'd failed the manual review and it was very quickly rejected a second time and i was told i'd failed the manual review process and i wrote an email i'm in the lucky position to have like you know

a partner manager and people at youtube that i can write to who are humans so i wrote an email sort of saying this is not good and what happened was actually i i thought it had sent but i actually hadn't sent it. So for two or three days I'd heard nothing back. And I was like, oh, they've gone to ground the cowards. They're too scared to deal with me. And, you know, I'd said, we're not happy. And if you want to know what I think about it,

I sent them the link to the Hello Internet section and said, this is what we think about it. And I was polite. I was polite. But I was like, you know, I'd made my case strongly and they hadn't replied. So I was like, cowards, cowards. It hadn't sent. So I went and saw it wasn't in my sent items and then I found it in my drafts. So I sent it.

Sent it with your tail between your legs. Yeah. Well, luckily I hadn't told anyone I thought they were get me. So I was like, I'd gotten away with it. No Twitter rants from you? No, there'd been no Twitter rant. And that email was replied to quite quickly. And I was told like in less than 24 hours, I was told this is a mistake and we've reinstated it.

And it is now on the normal monetization status. So that video is now normal it's gone from the yellow tick of naughtiness to the green tick of happiness whatever you want to call it so it was reinstated and like okay a i'm lucky i have someone who i can appeal to who is a human and b the fact i even had to do that still says to me the system is broken. So while I'm grateful for a reasonably quick reply, I'm still upset at the way the system works and I think it's broken and I'm still unhappy with the whole experience. Yeah, it's like a no-win situation. And again, the golden 24 hours when a video gets the most views. I mean, this isn't like a massively watched video, but if it was, if it was a CGP Grey video, that 24 hours where I was waiting for them to say,

mea culpa, we've reinstated it, you'd be gone. That's when all your views have happened anyway. Oh yeah. That's the main value of almost all the videos. And I have, not recently, but I have in the past had that happen where a video isn't monetized when it goes up and you know,'s like okay well it's like clock is ticking youtube i figure now your video is is another data point on the gigantic pile of machine learning for whatever algorithms they're using to try to determine what is or is not appropriate for uh for future videos but i feel like this should be a super data point for the algorithms. This one, you should never miscategorize. No matter what crazy algorithms you come up with, this one

should always be in the clear as a very obvious reference point for the algorithms to chew on. But what's the algorithm learning? That if a willy is very small and black and white, it's okay? Well, with all this stuff, I think the idea that's impossible to convey is that you can't describe to people what the algorithm is learning. You can just, in a database, assign an extremely negative score for mischaracterizing this video, right? And then it's just like, okay, well, you build up a data set and you're just training the algorithms against it. And I think this is like a fundamental frustration of the modern world is that it is very difficult. People want why answers to these questions. Like, why did this algorithm do this?

Like, why when I go on Facebook, does it show me that? And I just am not convinced that there are why answers to this question. Like everything I know about machine learning just says like there is no why answer. All you have is a data set. And then you have an algorithm that really nobody understands. And, you know, it's like, oh, you can point over here to some linear algebra, but it doesn't change the fact that ultimately it's like a bunch of calculations that nobody understands. So I agree with you that like the system is in quotes broken,

but I just don't think that there's ever going to be like a winning solution to YouTube for this one. So this is just the fun future of things. It's got to be a smart algorithm though, doesn't it? Because if I took a nudie pic of my mate Bill and like put a sepia tone over it and uploaded it to YouTube, they would be right to block it because there's no historical or scientific significance to it. And it's just me being a mischief maker with nudity. And then they should block that. So, smart algorithm, because it would have to take into context the whole video around it and what was being said and done. And, you know, again, I think even the idea of a smart algorithm is a strange, meaningless idea that we try to apply to things. If you dig into machine

learning, there's a thing called neural networks. And I'm often really shocked by how simple a neural network can be before it starts correctly, say, classifying images. like, you know, what is this image or what is that image? It's weird how they can be quite simple and still work. But again, like you look at it and you go like, I don't really know what it's doing. I can follow each of these individual calculations that it does, but how at the end it lights up the light that says, you know, this is a horse, right? Or this is a mountain, like you just can't really know how it does that stuff. And what you highlighted there is exactly the problem that whatever it's doing, it's really only just learning from the database that it has seen. And so you will get really weird results

when you show it stuff that is just totally unfamiliar with. There's like a sort of classic example of this. But if you train like a neural network to recognize handwritten numbers, you can train it, it will recognize handwritten numbers with like 90%, 95% accuracy. But if you show it an image of just static, a surprising amount of times it'll go like, oh, that's the number eight or that's the number three. And it's like, what on earth is it doing that it can both correctly categorize numbers, but it doesn't have any concept that an obviously meaningless image is not the number three? It's a very, very weird world when you dig into it. Grey, I saw that you have been granted 280 characters on Twitter. Yes. Yes, I have.

And a few days later, I was also allowed into this exclusive club. Oh. What's been your reflection on the new Twitter, the new expanded 2x double size, twice as good Twitter experience? Are you enjoying the power? Double the size, half as good. I totally agree. For anybody who follows me on Twitter, I'm very sorry.

But I did go over the power, man. For anyone who still follows you on Twitter. I'd be really curious to see, like someone must be able to do this, but like I have a suspicion that my Twitter usage is very spiky. My perception of myself is that I go for long periods of time where I don't tweet very much at all. And then it's like an afternoon where I tweet a whole lot. And when I discovered that I had 280 characters, that was an afternoon of a lot of tweeting. You went on a Twitter binge. And I was really 100% abusing my power and also upset at the number of people that seemed to be getting the increased tweets right after me. I was like, ah, no, I need this to be exclusive. If everybody has it, it's no good. So I did have a day where I was going a little bit nuts and intentionally nuts in the most

annoying way possible. But since that has now calmed down and I've been on Twitter a bunch, I will re-emphasize my opinion that I think it is worse even more strongly now than before. Because the thing that I have found really interesting from a subjective experience is when I go to tweet, 280 characters is almost always longer than whatever thought is in my head. And I have noticed that I essentially never really need to amend the tweets that I'm sending out there into the world. And it's like, this 100% has the effect of making my tweets sloppier and less well thought out, like without a doubt. Because you're not going through a draft process.

Yeah, without a doubt, this is what does it. Whereas before, I would almost always blow past the 140 limit and then have to think for a second, oh, what did I actually want to say? Let me say it in a different way. So I feel much, much more strongly about it that even if people aren't doing what I was doing on the first day of being intentionally annoying by having unnecessarily long tweets, I think even tweets 50% longer are worse. And my experience of composing tweets is worse. And I also find that the length, it really changes the experience of reading Twitter. There's something about these tweets that are like just a little too long to skim. Yeah. It's gone into the wall of text zone. You know what? It really has. It really has. That's interesting.

It's like that email that you won't read. Like, you know, you open an email and if it's two, three sentences, you'll read it. And if it's 10, you won't. This is like scaled down what happens on Twitter. I'll read the short tweets and I'll skip the long tweets. Oh, I'm not reading that. And there's more and more that I'm not reading. Yeah. I've been wondering, I'm most of the time I'm using Twitter through a Twitter client, I'm either using Twitterific or Tweetbot are two that I really like. And those applications often have custom filters that regular Twitter does not. I'm hoping that one of them will actually implement a like, hide all tweets above this length filter. Let's be honest here. If you write out a 280 word tweet,

I'm not reading it. So why don't we just hide it? And then I can have my old Twitter back. Like I would love to be able to have that feature where it's like, I'll give people a little leeway, but anything above like 160, I'm just going to filter out on my end. Like I just don't even want to see it because this is one of those things where it's so weird. It's like, is reading three sentences an incredible burden that reading one or two is not? Not really, but it doesn't change the fact that I just don't. And it does matter when you're looking at the volume of tweets that Twitter has. I feel like I try to not follow a whole lot of people and I'm pretty aggressive now with filters in a way that I didn't used to be before.

But even still, I feel like Twitter is a pretty active thing and it does matter a whole lot for things to be shorter than other mediums. And especially because, again, it's like the live aspect of it. Like Twitter is what's happening right now, like what people are saying. So you're saying you agree with the reading experience, but have you found the same thing with the composing experience? Like, are you aware of it different when you write tweets? I have started writing a few longer ones occasionally, but generally I've been keeping my tweets quite short still. A funny thing happened actually, when I was still on 140, I wanted to write this funny tweet, which the joke was going to be, it's not a very original joke,

but I thought it was at the time I was writing something along the lines of I can't wait to have 280 characters because then I can write tweets to say important things like and it was going to be like my tweet got cut off before I got to say the important thing

that was going to be the joke that I couldn't quite fit in the joke I was trying to formulate that tweet to 140 characters and I couldn't get to 140 I've become so used to writing concise things I was having to formulate that tweet to 140 characters and I couldn't get to 140. I've become so used to writing concise things. I was having to pad out the tweet to make my joke get to 140 characters so that it would run out of characters.

So I think I've been quite well trained to keep it short. And now that I've moved to 280, most of the time my tweets have been staying short because of that training. I guess the fear is, and what will happen, is that training will wear off. I'll get sloppy. I'll write longer, worse tweets, and I'll become like everyone else. You're like a dog with the electric fence. They learn where the boundary is, and then they don't go near the boundary. And now the boundary has been removed. Eventually, you're going to start pushing that edge a little bit further, a little bit further. And you don't have that feedback of like an angry negative red three on the bottom there telling you that your tweet's

too long. I mean, clearly Twitter did this because they want to get more users to the platform. And obviously that experience that you described of writing a tweet and then being in the red and going, damn it, I've got to rewrite it now and write another draft to get it down. Totally frustrating for new users, without a doubt. Yeah, exactly. So while your sort of disciplined brain saw this as a blessing and a chance to refine your thoughts, other people were saying, to hell with this, I'm not using Twitter. So Twitter thinks it's going to help them, but I don't think it is. Yeah, well, this is always a conflict, particularly in the software world of how easy is a thing for new users versus what is the experience for long-time users and or

professional users. And, you know, like we were complaining last time, I really think that Twitter's selling feature is the same thing that makes it kind of a pain in the butt for new users to get on board. And trying to explain why being limited in what you can post is a good thing is not a thing that someone signing up to a social media account wants to hear. That's not what they want. I bet it will onboard more people and, you know, maybe it'll make Twitter more popular and maybe it'll prove for the company to be a great decision. But I think in the process of doing that, it's losing what I like about Twitter. And the very reason why Twitter is for me, the only social network that I use in any serious amount. So I think it's a shame. I have this great power, and I don't want it.

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but I still did. Yeah. I forced myself out of it. Yeah. Didn't want to get that way. I was mildly surprised by how many other people do it. It wasn't like super common. It didn't feel like every person and their dog was saying, yeah, yeah, of course everyone does that. But a lot of people said I do it too, which was interesting. It's always interesting to see this. I saw a few examples of famous people who were doing the touching the outside of the plane thing. It's just interesting to see what people are able to dig up when you mention topics like this. I have mildly enjoyed getting photographs from people doing it as they get on the plane from Tim saying, here I am doing it. I wouldn't

want it to become too much of a thing, but I don't mind at the moment. I was also getting photos from people who were showing me them scoping out the passengers who were going to get on the plane, doing a little profiling for anybody who looks like they might have some coins in their hand. So I enjoyed that as well. It did get me wondering about, and someone wrote something that helped me understand it, about where this superstition could possibly come from. Why would it start? And someone wrote something, and I can't remember who wrote it or where or anything like that but i'll encapsulate it and they were basically saying they've always touched the outside of the plane because touching the outside of a plane felt like a special treat to

them because they're interested in like the material science aspect of what the plane was made of and the metal and also thinking about the extreme environment that was going to be blasting past that part of the plane, you know, in just half an hour's time. So getting to touch it felt like a special treat. And I think maybe that's where it comes from, from me too. It was like something you would never normally get to touch. So when I first started flying, I would touch the outside of a plane because, gosh, when am I going to get another chance to do this? And then once you start doing it and you don't die in a plane crash, you think,

oh, maybe I should do it again. And it sort of then becomes the tradition and the superstition. But the reason you first start doing it is because it's just a chance to touch something that in normal life you would never get to touch, but it's kind of cool and fascinating. Yeah, I think that sounds right. That sounds like how it would start. And then you do it a couple of times. And then as brains go, this is like you start reinforcing a pattern and a habit that you don't intend to. There is something that's like, it's not quite like it, but it's a bit like passing through an airlock, that little moment when you're stepping onto the plane. And you know, you have the jetway has come out and they have like the wrapping that's like attached to the airplane itself. It's like an interesting transition moment in life going from one thing to another.

I can see why that would start to happen. And the other thing is, you know, you just you tap it and it's like, oh, it feels very solid. Then you have to remind yourself not to think about how thick those airplane walls actually are because they're terrifyingly thin. If you ever actually see the cross sections of airplanes, it's like, there's not a whole lot of material between you and the outside world on those airplanes when you're actually tapping those walls. So don't tap them too hard people, nice and gentle with the outside of the plane. So another thing that you discussed in the last episode when we were on this topic was that you don't like sitting in seats where you have a good clear view of the engine because you think about all the things that could go wrong and sort of the fragility of the

situation you're in. No, no, that's not the kind of thinking I would. My previous sentence is no indication that I tend to think towards about the fragility of all the objects and the complicatedness of all the interacting pieces. And no one knows how to build an airplane, but somehow all these people together each do the little piece that makes it work. Yeah, don't think about that. Well, since we recorded that, I've been on a holiday and I went to my favorite place. I went to the Maldives and it took three flights to get to the island and three flights back. And I touched the outside of the plane each time. But interestingly, the final flight to get there is on a seaplane.

You land at Mali Airport in the Maldives at the main airport, and they then put you onto a little seaplane for a half-hour flight to your island. And pretty much every seat on these little seaplanes, you get a really good view of the engine. So I was put in my seat, and I was right next to the engine, and I was looking at all the bits and pieces. And these seaplanes are a bit rough and ready, and you can sort of see rust and algae everywhere and stuff. And you're in the water and I was thinking, oh, Gray wouldn't like this.

And then just before we took off, one of the crew of the plane on these seaplanes has to walk around on, I think it's called like the pontoon, like the footbed that floats in the water that the plane lands on. That makes it like a boat. And he has to walk out onto that pontoon and like undo the ropes that are roping you to the dock. So, the plane can then push away and take off on the sea. He has to hand spin up the propeller. Yeah. So, anyway, it was so interesting because what happened was he was undoing the ropes and he did that and he threw the ropes aside. He was about to get back onto the plane and shut the door. And just before he did, I was watching all this. There was this little pipe or outlet. I'm not sure what it was. It quite possibly was a sensor of some kind, or it was some kind of minor exhaust port or something. I don't know what it was,

but it was a little pipe that I was looking at under the engine near the strut. And just before he got in the plane, he pulled a piece of tissue out of his pocket and stuffed it into this hole and prodded it in with his finger to block something with a piece of tissue, with a piece of dirty tissue paper. He put it in the hole, plugged the hole with tissue paper, then got in the plane and we took off and flew into the sky. I'm like, what the hell? What did he do that for?

It's like the Rocketeer where he's taking a stick of gum and he's just putting it over a hole in the fuel cell. No, no. Did you ask what it was or? I didn't ask. I took a photo of the component. So we will put in the show notes a photograph and I will show people what this component is and whoever is an expert on seaplanes and aviation can tell us what this thing is and why he may have been stuffing a piece of tissue into it mere moments before takeoff but i thought this would freak gray out it was like two feet from my face i was watching this happen i didn't say a word though i just said okay he knows what he's doing. I just want to get on my holiday.

I do love seaplanes though. Flying over the Maldives in the seaplanes. Top stuff. I'm sure the Maldives are great. I bet you feel like Indiana Jones when you're taking off in a seaplane. There's a big stake in the plane, Jack. I can see the appeal of all of that. I'm glad you go to the Maldives.

I'm very glad that you like it. But even if it was three regular airplanes, I feel like there's nowhere in the world I'm going to go if I have to take three flights to get there. Totally worth it. Totally worth it even for you, Grey. You say that, but I feel like one transfer. One transfer or I'm not going. You can get to Mali direct if you want. You just don't get to fly in as nice planes if you do it direct. You're better off doing a stopover so you can get the nicer planes and the nicer flight. Oh, so you're doing a calculation between a direct flight that's uncomfortable and three flights that are more comfortable and one that's kept in the air by a tissue in a pipe?

Oh no, you have to get the seaplane no matter what. There's no choice on that. There's a topic I've had in the notes for us to talk about for a while, and I'm not going to do it now, but this does touch upon it a little bit. So I may go off a bit if you don't rein me in, because we're going to talk about space and I don't want to upset space people, but we're also going to talk about Halloween. Okay.

Because you like Halloween. I do. Everyone likes Halloween. I'm all right with it. But anyway, this Halloween just gone, the astronauts on the International Space Station decided to get into the Halloween spirit. And if you click on the link in the notes there, you can see how they did this. And I want to see what you think about it. Yeah, because I'm thinking they don't have a lot of materials up there on the International Space Station to make costumes out of okay i've got a picture here from the international space station now here's the thing under normal

circumstances i would say these costumes are pretty weak yeah they're basically just t-shirts that they're wearing yeah there's only two guys who are even really costumed in any sense. There's a Wolverine and there's a Spider-Man. Spider-Man, good choice for the International Space Station, I think. But yeah, so under normal circumstances, I would say weak. But the fact that it's the space station, I'm still going to take it. I understand the constraints that they're working on. You disapprove, Brady? I feel like you're wanting to rain on this parade. In no way is it acceptable to me that astronauts in space, in space, flying in space, astronauts, the coolest people in the world, doing the coolest thing in the world, should be dressing up in monkey ears, minion t-shirts, and Spider-Man suits in a desperate, desperate hope of getting my picture shared on Twitter or getting a bit of

viral traction or to reach out to the youth of today. What a terrible, desperate, grubby, cheap, poor thing that astronauts in space have to dress up as Spider-Man to get publicity. Is it not enough that they're circling the earth at thousands of miles per hour in weightlessness and they've gone up in rockets? Do they really have to dress up as a minion? This is This is like embarrassing. It's just cheapening what it is to be an astronaut and space travel. This is like, oh, can't believe it. I see what's going on here. You feel like this is diminishing the office of the astronaut seat.

Like that's what's occurring here. It is. This is the legacy of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong and all these great people that have done amazing things. And now we're dressing up as Spider-Man, a pretend say that they're real superheroes, like they're real astronauts. But if the word superhero means something, astronauts are not superheroes. That doesn't make any sense. I mean, the reason this has been on my to-do list for a while is when the British astronaut, Tim Peake, and don't get me wrong, I like Tim Peake, right? And this is not Tim Peake's fault. I've even met the guy. he's a british astronaut and he was in space quite recently you know and like i've met him and i like him and he agreed to do an

interview for me so i think he's ace so this is not this is not me getting stuck into tim peak tim peak just does what he has to do but when he was in space for his six months obviously the british government the british in particular but the european space agency general, obviously wanted to milk every last bit of publicity out of it because it was their guy up there. And some of the things they made him do, like wear a pretend tux so that he could introduce a section at the BAFTA awards or do some little gimmick to do a rugby game. And basically what they do with these astronauts now is they say, okay, for the six months you're in space, what things are happening, like what events are happening, like Halloween or things like that, that we can somehow leverage to try and get some publicity and get people to tweet about us and use photos. How sad is it that they've gotten to the point where they are like just desperately trying to find ways to get into my twitter stream oh you're right you summed it up best it diminishes the office i don't know i was

no no i know i know you were putting you were doing it on my behalf i'm not i don't know if that's your position is that not your position do you think it's nice to see astronauts you think it's good to see they've got the common touch and they're in touch with their colleagues here on Earth and they're still average Joe. You think this is a nice thing, do you? You're pleased with it. Gee, Brady, I can't tell from your tone what way you want me to go with this. I want the truth. I want the truth. There's many things here. I don't reckon there's one thing. Don't dress up as Spider-Man when you're in space. Just do space stuff. You're cool enough. Sometimes, Brady, your frustration and anger really warms my heart. And this is one of those

moments. I mean, what's going on here? The argument from NASA is going to be, you know, if we're going to have all this public money, we have to do things for the public. But what do you think is going to happen? Do you think they're going to be sitting in Congress one day saying, should we give $10 billion to NASA so they can go to Mars? Well, I was going to say no, but because that guy dressed up as Spider-Man, here's your money. Like, they're not doing themselves any favours. They're not going to help themselves get more funding doing this. I think they're hurting their chances in the future because they're just going to be taken

less seriously. Next time they ask for $10 billion to cure cancer with experiments in space, someone's just going to wheel out a picture of him dressed as Spider-Man and saying, are we sending you up there for a jolly so you can pretend to shoot webs out of your wrists? Get the Spider-Man suit off and do something. Makes my blood boil. What am I missing, Greg? Make the opposite case. Please make the opposite case and I will apologize. Okay. Well, I can kind of make the opposite case. I'm going to try to do what you do, which is be devil's advocate for a moment here,

which I might be terrible at. But okay, so if I'm trying to make the devil's advocate case for this, I would say that if I think about my Twitter stream, when was the last time I saw an astronaut in it? Never. I can't think of the last time that I saw anything about like a NASA style, what's an astronaut doing in outer space thing, right? SpaceX is the exception to that. Like I see SpaceX stuff that people send me, but I can't think of anything as like international space station stuff. So I guess if I am NASA and I have decided that this is an important thing is public awareness

of the international space station. To remind people that they're even in space. This is kind of the thing is, this is actually kind of a perfectly timed conversation because we've been talking about SpaceX recently and talking about how it's not really a thing I follow, but I'm just sort of vaguely aware of what they're up to because it's impossible not to be aware, even if you're not intentionally following it. But it's like, man, I don't have any idea what they're doing up in that International Space Station. I guess they're dressing up as Spider-Man. I don't know. Yeah, that's it. The one time you do finally find out what they're doing, they're clowning around like a bunch of idiots. It's not to say that I assume that they're doing

nothing, right? That's not what I'm saying. But it's more just like, what is my level of awareness of what's occurring on the International Space Station? Like, it is essentially zero. And I feel like I'm the kind of person that you would expect to know more about this. And I know that I am weird a little bit in the way that I deal with the news. But I think that I should know more than like average random person on the street about what's going on with the International Space Station. I can't name a single thing. You know, maybe NASA has some internal data that just shows this that like, hey, when we do men on the street survey questions, nobody even knows that the International Space Station is a thing that exists. And they want to be able to move those numbers. So how are they going to move those numbers? It's

like, well, in this modern world, where I think we really do live in an attention economy, you have to strategize about how to get attention if that's your goal. And whatever work they're doing in the International Space Station, we know does not naturally get the attention of people. So like you have to do something else. That would be my devil's advocate case. What do you think of that, Brady? I think what I said, I think if the one time people know they're in space is seeing them dressed up like that it's doing them an absolute disservice makes them look like a bunch of clowns and like if that's the only time people hear about them that's even worse fair enough for me who does see a lot of astronaut

stuff in my twitter stream at least i can say well okay they're having a fun day but if the people they're trying to reach are the people that don't know what they're doing, okay, you've made your case. Do you believe your case? Yeah, no, I don't believe my case at all. But the thing was, Gray, when you first looked at that and you didn't know how I felt about it, your initial reaction wasn't, oh my God, how embarrassing. The minute I saw that, my heart sank and I thought this is ridiculous. But that wasn't your reaction. Your reaction was quite, you were commenting on what you thought of the costumes and this was okay. And this wasn't okay. So that wasn't your sort of gut reaction to it, which is.

Yeah. But it's also like, we're having a conversation about Halloween. So I'm just like, okay, we're having a costume contest right now. This is the question. And you're having a costume contest where every gram is incredibly expensive to get there. So what's going to happen on International Space Station? I'm coming at this from a very different perspective. What I was going to say, though, is I kind of agree with you, although for different reasons. Even if you listen to my devil's argument case, I think the thing that's happening here that's sort of wrong is companies and organizations really focusing on public awareness of what they do. I have always found that kind of a weird concept. Like I get why it happens. And I think that there's something about the attention

economy and the social media world in which we live that aggravates this because now you can put these really clear numbers on how many times is a Facebook posting from NASA liked or how many times is one of their tweets retweeted and you know what they would have looked at the stats for this for their dressing up as a minion in Spider-Man and saw this off the scale number of retweets and likes and said, mission accomplished. And what I say is every single one of those retweets is another nail in my heart. And it should be another nail in their heart too. Oh no, another person has seen this humiliating thing we've done. Well, I'm not necessarily going to agree that it's humiliating, but I do think that it's

a case where the numbers don't necessarily tell you something. Sometimes I'm not necessarily going to agree that it's humiliating, but I do think that it's a case where the numbers don't necessarily tell you something. Sometimes I'm in conversations where I'm talking to people who are, let's say, I'm talking to people people, which I just realized applies in this situation, which is social media is not your job. Like you're not getting paid to tweet. I go on Twitter because I like it, but it is also a thing that I do spend a lot of time reminding myself when I'm there. Like this isn't actually my job, right?

But it has a lot of the kind of benefits of having a job where it's like, oh, you tweet and you get instant reactions from an audience. And you can see like, oh, like this joke landed really well, or, you know, people really like this thing. It got a whole bunch of retweets. But like, that's not what my job is, right? My job is making videos or podcasts. Like that's the actual job. The social media is just a thing on top of it, but it's really easy to get turned around on that. I feel like it's the actual job. The social media is just a thing on top of it, but it's really easy to get turned around on that. I feel like it's the same thing with a lot of companies that seem weirdly obsessed or

just weirdly interested in what their social media presence is. And if I was sitting down with the board of NASA, I'd want to have a real conversation about like, OK, what do you think this social media presence gets you? Because it's super easy to measure, which makes it very easy to turn into somebody's job, which makes it very easy to have actionable items around. But what are you getting out of it? I think at best, it's just a waste of time. To me, this is like a neutral thing. It doesn't count.

But I think you have made a pretty strong point that it's not even just a negative, that maybe it's worse than nothing, that the only way that NASA can get a million retweets is by doing a thing that diminishes NASA. Just quickly coming back to something you said, Gray, though, about social media not being your job. Do you ever tell yourself that having a strong social media presence, though, and being like an interesting person who people look forward to tweets from doesn't help your job, though, in some way? Because then when you do, like, say, I've got a new video or you want to engage with that audience, you've got them like on your side. Do you not see it as part of your job to cultivate that part of your audience because it feeds into your main job?

Here's the way I look at it. There's a benefit to having a Twitter audience. The benefit, it's not zero, but it's very close to zero. There's no video that I'm going to make, or there's no podcast episode that I'm going to put out where if I lean on it really hard on Twitter, it's going to make any kind of measurable difference in how that actually does. And when I look at, you know, the podcast backend or the YouTube backend, I do try to tell people this, but it's like, I'm fortunate enough that I do pretty well on Reddit when I post videos. But people think that like Reddit's driving an enormous amount of traffic to the videos.

And it's like, it really isn't. And like Reddit's presence is way bigger than my Twitter presence. So like when I post a tweet to a video, it's really just for like, oh, there's people who are here right now who might want to see it. And it's just convenient for them to click the link. But I could stop linking to my own stuff on Twitter. And I don't think it would make any difference to the success or failure of my various projects. I mean, I haven't got loads of Twitter followers, but I occasionally will have friends who have like, you know, no presence on social media. And they'll say to me, oh, Brady, can you tweet this thing for me? Because if you do, it will help. And I always say to them, seriously,

you might get five people looking at it if I tweet it. Yeah. People dramatically overestimate what the presence is. Like, I'm sure a lot of people see it, but people don't. Like, if you ask people on Twitter to do something, they generally won't do it. Unless you're asking them to do something they already want to do. Yeah. But even then, it's just such a smaller space. And I think you and I are in a position where we're much more likely to be able to encourage engagement because we're individual people, right? Like the people following us on Twitter know that we are individuals tweeting from our individual accounts. So I think we are

in the best possible situation. And that's one of the reasons why like the companies and social media, I just find very strange, because I feel like, I think there's a huge amount of this that is being done, because people think that it needs to be done. But I just always want to know, like, what is the outcome from this? Like, what do you think you're really getting out of it? And I just don't think it's very much. Oh, yeah, that was the thing that I was going to say before is when you ask, like, is there a benefit? I think the way that I like to think about it is if I didn't enjoy being on Twitter,

would I go on Twitter to promote my stuff for the benefits? Like, I would not, right? There's no way I would do it, right? Whereas there's plenty of stuff about the work of producing podcasts and videos that is not enjoyable work, but I do it because the benefit is so clear, right? So obvious.

So it's like Twitter just doesn't make any sense in like a business context. Wise words, Gray, wise words. I think people cannot place too much importance on the power of social media, in particular, Twitter, to drive other things. I don't think that they are these great engines that can drive traffic and push people around the way that we think they are. People are there on Facebook or they're there on Twitter, and that's where they are. You can't use it to leverage other

things in the way that people think to sell things or to promote things and is the immediacy and the measurableness of it that i think is it's like a siren call to people where they can put effort into it it sounds like uh what you were describing that nasa does is that kind of thing like oh what what kind of events are there that we can tie into nasa's mission so that we can get more hearts on Snapstagram. Yeah. I don't think that's your mission, guys.

I don't know what your mission is, but I don't think that's it. All right. Seeing I have kind of fired my gun at this NASA publicity thing that's been on my mind, let me get the last one out of something else that's been on my mind. Yeah. In 2015. Ooh, wait, okay. Getting in the way back machine yeah an american astronaut called scott kelly and a cosmonaut called mikhail kornienko did this trip to the space station nasa went absolutely crazy promoting it because it was longer than the normal

mission i think they normally go up for like six months or something. But this was the one-year mission, the year in space. And you couldn't look at anything anywhere on NASA without having Scott Kelly's year in space shoved down your throat. Year in space. He's spending a year in space. He's going to do all these things during his year in space. The mission patch had a special year-long mission patch with a big number one in it for one year in space.

It says year in space in English and Russian. It was massive. They were so pleased with it. I got sick of hearing about it. I love our non-overlapping worlds. I'm like, this is the first time I've ever heard of this thing. Well, yeah. Anyone who knows anything about NASA will be very familiar with Scott Kelly's year in space.

By the way, 342 days he was in space. That's not a year. That doesn't count. It wasn't even a year in space. How's that for false advertising? That's terrible. Now I'm just learning that NASA is a bunch of liars. Year in space.

Fair enough. If they think this is a really good gimmick year in space and they want to push it hard okay but at least leave the guy up there for a year actually i was just looking at a wikipedia link there is an iss year-long mission link but i was looking at scott kelly's page our wikipedia page and i don't know if this is serious or it's excellent wikipedia mischief making there's no mischief making on wikipedia someone here refers to it the goal of their year-long 11 month expedition it's got their year-long expedition and someone's put in brackets 11 months it's the 11 month year in space i don't know if that's mischief making because if it's true, it's just, it's like Wikipedia

snideness. There are sometimes articles you find where there's like, there's a kind of, I don't know, almost like a style guide for Wikipedia humor. And that feels like a great template for like the Wikipedia humor style guide. It's like, it's true, but you know, do we need to put it right here in the title? Maybe not, but this is a do we need to put it right here in the title? Maybe not, but this is a great place for it to go. I was going to say that the most generous I would be with a year long mission would be to include the two transit days. So the day that you fly up and the day that you come back down, because when I travel, I don't include transit days in like, oh, how long were you on vacation?

I was on vacation for five days. But a five day vacation requires seven days because you have two transit days and transit days don't count. They just go into a void of nothingness as useless days. I'm also not sure it takes that long to get from the launch pad into the station. I don't think it takes a whole day. I don't care if it's a 20 minute flight. If I'm just not sure it takes that long to get from the launch pad into the station. I don't think it takes a whole day. I don't care if it's a 20 minute flight. If I'm just flying down to the continent, that whole day is written off as a travel day. It doesn't count.

So it had to at least get into the 360s before I'd start saying, oh, okay, maybe there's a day lost because you were going the wrong way around the earth and you crossed the dateline and something. And there was some, I don't know. I could accept some fudging around there. I'm like you. I could accept it a few days short, but this was a full 23 days short of a year. I feel pretty harsh about this because my minimum threshold is he steps on the ship and you start a timer. And when that timer is done, it has to read 363 times 24 hours, right? And then you get two days as transit days. And I'll count those

because I'm feeling generous. That would be a year long mission. I think we have to have a word with NASA about what a year is. And then the last people I thought would need that explained to them. You see what a year is, is the earth, right? It's going around the sun. Oh no, but that won't help with our year long mission patch. I feel like the longer you tell me about these things, the more I'm coming around to your side here, Brady, that it really does sound like they're trying to come up with ways to promote stuff so people hear about it. And then when I actually find out the details, I think worse of them than if they had never done it in the first place.

I feel bad about it. I mean, you know how I feel about NASA and, you know, I love them. You are like the number one space booster of anyone I know. I mean, it makes me sad that they're stooping to this. It's disappointing. It's disappointing. Bloody space bait. SpaceX are terrible for it. They'll even post videos of their own rockets blowing up if it gets clicks. Okay. Do you have a website? And if not, why not? Because I think almost everyone has a reason to have one, whether it's a business, some passion you have, an online portfolio or a CV, a blog, just a place to post things that you create or you want to share. Now, you might think,

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but more importantly, it's good for you because you'll get 10% off your first purchase. That address one more time, squarespace.com slash hello, 10% off. Our thanks to them for supporting this episode. I have got a little bit of feedback from our school photo discussion. And you know how sometimes, you know, you go off on a rant and then someone points out some really serious somber point and you think, oh yeah, I guess I'm a bit of a douche. Yeah.

You think what a party pooper. That's what I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, just to quickly, very quickly recap, we talked about how the way school photos are being done now is that students are being photographed individually or in small clusters. And then they Photoshop them into into these big weird montages that

neither you or i approved of you didn't approve because you didn't like the look of them i didn't approve because i thought it took away this whole you know documenting a real moment in time sort of thing so anyway we discussed it go back and listen to the previous episode if you were so inclined. But I did get an email from a chap who works for a company in Australia and his job is putting these photos together. He's like the Photoshopper guy at like Mission Control that all these pictures get sent to. And he listened to the section and he wanted to point out, he was a good guy. He wasn't like being snarky or anything. He just wanted to give us more information. And he pointed out some of the pros and the cons of this process. And some of the reasons that this is a good thing to do were things that had not occurred

to me. And I still don't particularly approve of the process, but I thought it was worth mentioning these things because they were good points and I didn't think of them. Before you go, though, I'm just going to guess that all of these are really benefits for the school or for the administration. This is going to be my guess. Okay. I don't know if that's how to read these or not. Maybe partly. Let me tell you some of the things he said. Some of these are ones that you're like, well, I can't really argue with that, but we'll put them out there anyway. One is that, and you will know this, there are often students at school who are in dangerous situations or protected situations where their pictures can't be published because of parental things that might be going on.

And doing this process does provide a way to take pictures of all the students, including the protected ones where they don't feel left out. So it's not like, okay, it's school photo time, but Jimmy, you have to stand over there in the corner because you're in this like special case. So it does remove that situation where one child is like, feels a little bit ostracized because this child can still have their picture taken like everyone else. So it becomes less of an obvious situation. And I thought, oh, that's okay. That's an interesting point. Yeah. I guess I agree with that, but I'm also going to take the unpopular position that like, not for maybe for these particular students, but like being left out, it's an important life lesson. It's like, it's an experience we all have to go through. And of course the student in question is still going to be left out of the final photo. So there

is still this bridge to be crossed, but it was a point I hadn't thought of. I do wonder about that, that there's a thing where it makes it easier on the day, but doesn't it make it weirder later? Where it's like, oh, you've literally been photoshopped out of existence. You don't exist. I'm not 100% sold on that. But I actually do feel that this lines up with my thought about it's for the administration, because that is a super easy line for a school administration to take. It's like, oh, hey, we're trying to protect the feelings of all of the children. So it's like, boom, great. Well, basically, most of the other things on this list are also going to fall into that

sort of worthy category that could be used then. Because also pointed out is people with epilepsy who can't deal with the flash can be stitched back in later, not having to have a flash. I feel like I need to pause there. I genuinely don't know. I would be really curious. Is there anybody who's going to be triggered into epilepsy by a single flash? I've never heard of such a thing.

Like I know a sequence of flashes. I don't know. I'm just trying to imagine any kind of professional photography situation, which I have been involved in and worked with. The flashes are not that frequent, like even in pretty high end photography setups with like real lighting gear. I don't know. I would be very interested to know. I would find that just surprising. What I would worry about is like a school photo shoot. Is that a thing that is this like an actual harm or is this just like a theoretical harm right which again is is like oh here we go with the safety boxes right where someone's making an argument for safety and no one can say no it just it always passes yeah sometimes you get

students who come from difficult backgrounds that was pointed out and may have sort of you know injuries or things about them that could be fixed in post production to sort of lessen their embarrassment he also pointed out special needs classes where you have children who perhaps it's hard to get all of them to sit still perhaps in this in the same way for a prolonged period of time so doing them individually helps and the last one he pointed out which is a bit unsavory but interesting was you also can sometimes get a problem where if people are sitting, if they're wearing like dresses and skirts and that, and they sit in an unfortunate or unlucky angle,

you get this problem with high res photos now where unfortunate pictures suddenly get circulated all around the school and can cause a lot of embarrassment for a student who kind of just was unlucky in the angle that they happened to sit on and things like that. And that problem can be removed as well. So these were things that were pointed out. And I thought they were all interesting points that i hadn't thought of yeah he also points out though some of the bad points and one is that really crappy photographers

are getting made to look good by people doing his photoshopping work back in the studio which drives him absolutely crazy because he's getting all these terrible pictures of students sent and he's like making them look good and he also pointed out that for one job he did, there was a principal at a school who didn't like doing the photos, but then insisted on being photoshopped into the center of every single photo taken of every single class. So the principal was at the center of every single class photo taken, even though they didn't pose in any of them, which I thought you might find entertaining. That's hilarious.

I'm still giving it a thumbs down. Like, yes, you can make a bunch of points. It just has that same feeling in my mind, like the safety arguments where it's like, no one argues against safety. Everything becomes safer. And it's very hard to argue about what has been lost. There's something about that, which is like, even me, who's like, I'm not one for like tradition or like a big group events, but there is something that's just different about

getting everybody out in the same place to try to take a picture. And it's like part of the fact that it's like a real pain in the butt and things always go wrong. Like that's part of the experience. Like that's part of what it is. Hey, you're sounding like me, Gray. I'm proud of you. It's also an even bigger cloak when you say child safety. Oh yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. I'm sure I've mentioned it in passing before, but I just, you know, I can never not mention it again. But in my schools, the forms

for taking kids out for field days or trips were such an incredible joke with what they required for safety. You as the teacher need to think of everything that can possibly go wrong and how you will prevent it from going wrong. Thereby, if anything you didn't think about happens, it's your fault, right? We can blame you for not thinking about it ahead of time. And so the end result was like, well, screw this. I'm just never taking kids on field trips. And it's like, sure, they're safer. Like, it ahead of time. And so the end result was like, well, screw this. I'm just never taking kids on field trips. And I was like, sure, they're safer.

Like, it's just worse. Like, it's just like field trips are fun. Like when I did get roped into doing them, like I was happy to do it, but I was like, I am never going to organize one of these things because just like the structure of the safetiness just makes it untenable. And it's like, it's no good.

It's no good to lose that stuff. It's also become an absolute nightmare ever trying to film anything in schools like i've just put a blanket band on that now sometimes my um scientists i work with will contact me and say brady i've got a really good idea for a video we should do but why don't we like take it into a school with a bunch of students and show them you know this rocket or this experiment and interact with the kids it will make a really nice fun video and it would and say, no, I'm not pointing my camera at any school kids. Even if you get like a thousand permission slips, it just takes one mum or dad to say,

oh, I don't want my little Jimmy in the background there on YouTube and like go to the mattresses. And then you're like, all your work just goes down the tubes. Like it's just more trouble than it's worth. I think people have become overly protective. Yeah, I agree. There's a weird situation where I know, I know people who work in schools where the policy is about if they take the children outside, right? So you're leading kids into a park or whatever, or you're on a field trip that the teachers are supposed to prohibit anybody from taking pictures of the kids right now.

Like this is an extra funny situation because in the UK, generally most schools have uniforms here. And so for tourists, like seeing a bunch of English school kids in uniform, like it's part of the London experience. Like you've come to another country and you're just taking pictures in the same way that I think if Westerners go to Japan. Oh, it's like, oh, look, it's like Harry Potter. So I think I have never been more of a tourist attraction than one of my final years of teaching.

It was an anniversary of the school and we all got dressed up. Like even myself had to get dressed up in these like very formal academic robes. Sort of like the thing that you wore when you got your honorary doctorate. And the kids we were teaching had these formal versions of the uniform. And they also all were wearing like the school emblems and flat like it was way over the top. And then from there, we walked across the gardens at Westminster Abbey as like a million photographs were taken because it couldn't not be just such a center of attention to any tourist. Like it's just, it was so striking.

I think it's just weird for schools to have policies that like we're taking the children out in public, but nobody is allowed to photograph them. It's like, well, I think that's just unreasonable. Like it's, I understand the intent behind it, but it's just crazy. I think, I think it really is just too far. How could you stop people at Westminster Abbey? Was it your job to throw yourself in front of cameras? If any, if like a tourist tried to take a picture.

Yeah. So I, you know, as always with these things, I just ignored it. Like, what am I going to like? Yeah, sure. I was the best meeting attendee ever because I would always just sit there and be like, oh yeah, what a great policy. Sure. I'll be sure to do that.

And then on the actual day, like, I'm not doing that. What are you crazy? To be fair, the people giving the instructions were probably thinking the same. They were like, make sure you stop people taking pictures. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like, so we're all going along with this, but it's, it's crazy. And what I think people don't appreciate with, you know, like your situation, you talk about

filming in a school. It's like, obviously, yes, it would make a way better video if you had like kids and their reaction. Like that is a super fun video. But even if in theory you went through the hassle of getting all the permission slips, like those permission slips are not legally binding documents, right? Any parent can just change their mind at the last minute and they will do it. Or like they'll change their mind after you put in all the work and then tell you to take something

down. So it's just like- Of course, them telling you to take it down also isn't legally binding, but it can be more hassle than it's worth sometimes. It's not legally binding, but you're in a situation where it's like, well, now we're in a very uncomfortable position, aren't we? Right? Because they say safety. Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's very, very frustrating. It's very frustrating all around i've been there i've been there gray don't worry when you say kids in schools like i presume that you don't or do you mean university level as well like would you shoot a video no no i'd be comfortable doing it at a university okay so it's just like secondary school level and below that's that's where you draw the line yeah where the people are at an age where

you know they can't give full permission for everything in their life. A university student has a choice as to whether or not about such, you know, they're filmed and such things, you know. Well, no matter what we think of it, I think for all the reasons we've mentioned before, this is the future of school photography. Look forward to it, parents. So Brady, the composer of the Hello Internet anthem, Alan Stewart. The maestro, I call him. The maestro, yes. Because he does lots of music, can't he? I just ring him up and I say, maestro, I need some more music.

Yeah, no, he's great. He's done music for some of my videos as well. And he's done, of course, our theme music jingle at the beginning, which I really like and appreciate the little Easter egg that's in there. He recently sent us an email with a link to a little online video game

that is right in the crosshairs of Hello Internet interests. Now, did you play this video game, Brady? I did. I was just curious and I had a quick look and then it became like a kind of drug addiction problem that I had for three or four days. He ruined my life for three or four days with that game. Okay. All right. That's super interesting because that is my exact same experience with this. I clicked the link and it was like, oh, goodbye, two days, right? Like you have just gone into the void. You are totally useless. And I got nothing done at all. But I was curious just to ask you about this because my impression is that you just don't really play video games. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

I mean, I know this is a game and it's on a computer. This is not what I would really consider a computer game in some ways. You should probably explain the game. And once you've explained the game, I'll tell you how I played it and why it caused me some problems in funny ways. Okay, right. Yeah. So this is partly why I was like, I'm interested that you played it precisely because of the

nature of this thing. So yeah, there's a genre of computer games that are what I think of as like, barely games. I've long used an example listeners may be aware of there's a game called democracy, where you are directing the actions of a government. But that game is basically just like a pretty spreadsheet is really all it is. Like it is as close as you can get to a spreadsheet and still call it a game. And there are a lot of different things that fall into this interesting genre where it's almost like people are playing with the idea of what's the minimum thing that we can make into a game. And so this thing that was sent to us, which is called Universal Paperclips, this to me also falls into the category of a thing that is barely a game. So you can just load it up in your web browser. Now, even seeing it on my screen right now,

I feel the need to warn listeners, like listeners, I'm gonna put it in the show notes, but don't click unless you have like a weekend free. Be listening Friday on your way home from work, It's like, listeners, I'm going to put it in the show notes, but don't click unless you have like a weekend free. Be listening Friday on your way home from work, but you know, and then click if you have two full days to burn your way through this thing. And my warning, and I'll come to why I'm giving you this warning in a minute, is don't do it on your phone. Okay. Yes, definitely. I 100% back that.

Don't do it on your phone. That was the problem I had. And I got so deep. Do it on a computer because I opened it originally on my iPad and it ended up in one of those little pseudo browser windows that's not really the actual Safari browser. I was terrified to close it. And I eventually got so terrified about closing it. I had to say, okay, listen, be a rational grownup man and start again on a computer because there's like, I had to look right into the eyes of loss aversion and be like, I see you loss aversion. I understand what you are and I'm going to walk away. So actual game, you load up your browser, preferably on a computer, preferably when you have a big expanse of time ahead of you.

And it looks like a webpage from, you know, the very early days of the internet. There's no color. It's so simple. So simple. It doesn't even look like bad retro. It just looks so minimalist. That's an excellent point. It's not trying to be retro. It's looking like, hey, this is when we could first make webpages. There's just some text and just a couple of

buttons. And one of those buttons, the one right at the top is called make paperclip. And so you click that button and then there's a paperclip counter that goes up to one and you think oh okay and you wait a second and then you see that your inventory counter drops down to zero because somewhere someone bought that paperclip and now you have 25 cents in your bank account and so it begins right yeah oh i go, oh, I'm going to do that again. I'm going to click make paperclip again. Oh, now I have, I've made two paperclips. And oh, someone just bought my paperclip. I have it right in front of me right now, which is dangerous to do while recording.

So it says, oh, you have 50 cents available. And so you click, click, click, click, click. And you think something's going to happen, right? Like, I wonder what's going to happen. And you keep clicking and you keep making paperclips. And eventually when you get $5, you can buy a little machine, which is called an autoclipper, which will start making paperclips for you. And then like the mechanisms of the game start to unfurl themselves over time, you can adjust the price, you can raise the price of the paperclip, you can decrease the

price of the paperclips, You can invest more into your marketing. You can invest more into auto clipping machines. You can try to make like futures decisions about when you're going to buy wire at what price the wire is at right now. It is all just presented in the form of counters on a web page and buttons to adjust those counters. That's all it is. Very simple, but I found it completely absorbing.

So what happened with you with this? Because again, I'm just, I'm fascinated because if I had to predict, I would have guessed that this game, game in quotes, would have a near zero chance of holding your interest. Like I'm genuinely quite surprised that this got you. Oh, great.

How little you know me. How little you know me. You know I'm the guy who's obsessed with like statistics and numbers and- I know you're obsessed with statistics and numbers. But when we've talked about games, the thing that you often mention is the thing about like it not being real or it feeling like it's a waste of time. And so, these are all just pretend statistics. There's nothing that's real here. Well, the thing about this game is that- I mean, we're not going to spoil the game other

than to say it would be fair to say the game escalates over time. But also, it can be left alone. So, you can have it running in the background. A smart person would get up and walk away. A crazy person would sit there watching the numbers going up, right? That would be insanity. Yeah. And that's what happened. Like, I kept telling myself, I'm just going to make a little tweak here and leave it alone while I get on with my editing. But obviously, I didn't. I just kept coming back to it time and time and time again, and it caused real productivity problems. But it's just a well-designed game. It's just addictive. There's always one more little thing that's just a few more steps away that's going to unlock a

whole new thing for you. Oh, if I could just get another few more dollars here, if I just make 10 more of these and get four more of these bonuses, I get one of these to do that which you have to be there to then click on so there's always one more thing to keep you there to click on but i opened it on my phone right and you know because i didn't know how long this was going to take i thought this would be like you know an hour or so there's also games that are almost like art house games where they're just little demos to like explain an idea about a thing. There's one, I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but I'll find it for the show notes. There's a game which is just about, it's like, you're deciding what to show people on the TV news. That is also, like, barely a game, but it's also like a 20-minute experience

because it's almost like a piece of art. When I saw this, I think maybe that is partly what dragged me in as well is because I was thinking, oh, this is probably a piece of art. When I saw this, I think maybe that is partly what dragged me in as well is because I was thinking, oh, this is probably a short little art experience that just wants to tell me something, right? It's like, nope, this is a weekend long of your life. And the thing about the game that I think is really commendable is how much it holds back and how long it hides its depths for. like most modern video games will have an awesome title sequence and marketing and blow you away right from the start and you think i have to play this but this game just keeps giving and giving very very gradually if you think about what it

was like towards the end like you could never imagine it had what was going to get to this stage the things that were happening later on like and it just kept all of that under its cloak for so long. But I opened it on a phone and my night got wiped out. I was home alone that night because my wife was working late and she got home late. And I'm like, oh, I've got a problem. And I can't now shut this browser on my phone because I'll lose all the work I've invested into it. And I ended up all night with my phone next to the bed on the floor and me deliberately sleeping like at the side of the bed so that I could wake up every 20 minutes or so just to check on how things were going and make little adjustments.

Oh my God, this got you deep. This really got you. But it got to a point where I was thinking, this is just like, I can't keep doing this. It was that loss aversion thing. So I had to eventually say, all right, I'm going to pack this one in. As far as I've gotten, I'm going to have to pack this one in and start it again on a browser on my computer, just so I can get work done and still do some editing and like live my life. And then I opened up my browser and started again. And I actually had learned from my mistakes I made the first time around as well. So I was a bit quicker at the game the second time, but. Same thing for me as well. I was like round two. I'm like, okay, I'm all business here, right? I know what to do. Yeah. I mean, you know me, I like sort of stats and numbers. I do have

like an addictive personality. I'm quite obsessive. You know, I'm someone who will do something for a long time for no real reason. I know that you are obsessive. It is interesting to me that this caught your obsession, right? It got me. It got me big time, yeah. Knowing what I know about it now, I could have thought that this was like a honeypot set for exactly me on the internet, right? With like how hard it got me. I wouldn't have thought that same thing about you. And I don't know much about who made it or why, like I just, I didn't really look into that. But I do have to say from a game design perspective, like you said, on the surface level, it does a very good job of holding back or just showing you enough that you're interested in seeing what the next thing is.

It does a very good job of that. But the other thing that I found really fascinating is because the game is so simple, it's like, I am very familiar with all of the mechanics from a game design perspective of what this is doing, where you have kind of like countdown timers and it's using different currencies. Like these are very familiar game mechanisms. And what I found really fascinating is I almost always loathe games that use these mechanics because I think that they are... A cynical ploy. Yeah, they're often very cheap.

They're a very easy way to manipulate someone. But somehow like this game just, I think it was a great example of make a thing that is much better than the sum of its parts. So if someone described to me the mechanics of this game, I would have said like, Oh, that's awful.

I will never play that. I don't have any reason to play it. And what I actually got out of it was a very enjoyable experience that was, was totally unexpected. So I'm genuinely glad that you liked it. I'm sorry that you you lost two days of your life but it's it's interesting to me to hear that this one got you well i'm sure the uh the listeners to hello internet gonna go and give it a workout now so i'm sure we'll hear

what other people thought about it but i'll put the link in the show notes uh again recommend it when when people give it a try go and have have a look. It's a grey honeypot. Hello, hello, internet listeners. You know what time of year it is? It's the time of year when you start getting holiday offers from our sponsors. That feeling of cold sweat that just broke out on your skin? I know. I sympathise.

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shopping done early and take advantage of the free shipping. Get a limited edition holiday shave set while supplies last. Go to harrys.com slash hi right now. That's harrys.com slash hi. So I recently was traveling, Brady. I think I mentioned on the last show, just as you were telling me about playing Crash Corner, that I had a plane to step on. So thanks as always for that. Always appreciate it. Did you touch the outside when you got on? No, I did not touch the outside, but I did keep an eye out, you know, for suspicious activities. Right. For old Chinese ladies, you can say it.

Got to make sure that engine's nice and safe. That's all I'm saying. But so I was, I ended up going to New York for some business reasons. And I ended up in downtown Manhattan where I have not been for a very long time. I've been back to New York a bunch since I moved away in my adulthood. But I hadn't been back to downtown Manhattan since I think probably about like 2004 or maybe 2003 was the last time I was there. And of course, traveling to New York, the time zones are all messed up.

I get in the day before, I have stuff to do because travel days don't count. They are a void of nothingness. And then the next morning I wake up and it's like four in the morning in New York. And I'm thinking, what am I going to do? Well, I need to wait for the rest of the city to wake up. And-'m thinking, what am I going to do while I need to wait for the rest of the city to wake up? And- Great. It's a city that never sleeps. It definitely sleeps, Brady. It's an amazing advertising slogan from New York,

but New York goes to sleep. If you're trying to get a bacon, egg, and cheese bagel at four in the morning, you're going to be hard pressed to find a lot of places that are open. So it definitely sleeps. Las Vegas is the city that doesn't sleep. That one is real. That's true. You can gamble your life away at any time of day in Las Vegas. But so I was trying to think about like, what am I going to do? Then it dawned on me. I was like, oh, I just realized I haven't been here for forever. I have never seen the 9-11 memorial since it was finished. So the last time I was there in 2003 or 2004, the 9-11 site was still just a hole in the ground.

It took forever for any major construction to start in there. And last time I saw it, it was just an empty pit. So I thought, you know what, this is what I'm going to do. I have some time to kill. Let me wander down and take a look. It was a very interesting experience to actually see this thing. Let me just describe this. So you go to the 9-11 memorial and the whole former ground where the Twin Towers were, that has been turned into the memorial. And what they've done is they've made these huge up on these former footprints of the building, I genuinely found it surprisingly affecting. The way they've set the whole thing up, you can't really see the footprints of the buildings until you're standing right there. They've built it so that there's a border around the two holes, and the border lists

the names of everybody who died on those days. It was interesting to see, but there were two things that I thought about this on the actual day. One of which was very surprising to me, which is almost the opposite of Trafalgar Square. And Trafalgar Square famously is the no fun zone where you're not allowed to touch anything. The 9-11 memorial actually had a bunch of signs all around it, specifically saying that it was okay to touch the memorial, which I thought was a really interesting choice. And when I first saw one of those signs, I thought, oh, this is an interesting decision. Yeah. I'm looking at the sign. It literally says,

visitors are invited to touch the memorial names panels. I would almost feel obliged to touch them after reading that. It's a very strong statement. The thing though, which was like, I saw one of those signs and I thought, I think that's the right choice. I think this is the way to go about it. I approve of this. But what I wish I had taken a photo that you can't see in that image is,

I saw one of those signs and then I'm walking around the memorial. And as I saw another one of those signs signs and then another one of those signs. And they must have one of those signs every 20 feet going around the perimeter of both of the former towers. And so at a certain point I thought, okay, it's a little much now, right? There's too many signs now. I'm feeling a little pressured into touching the names, like you said before. I've not been there, but because these signs are quite like colourful, they're like a sort of a brightish blue colour. And the memorial itself

looks like it's a very kind of, you know, black and grey thing. I would imagine all those little blue spots everywhere would detract from the aesthetic of it in some way. The signs that were there that I approve of the message were so frequent that they detract, right? It's like walking around, you keep seeing reminders that it's like, you're invited to touch the names. You're invited to touch the names. It's like, yeah, I get it. Like, I get that I can touch the names. It's the right decision, but it's too much. It's too much memorial. Greg, well, can I ask quickly, did you touch the names? Actually, no, I didn't touch the names on the day that I was there because while I know people who were affected by 9-11, I didn't know anybody who actually died on the day. There was no name that

I would be looking for. There'd be nobody that I would have a personal connection with there. So I didn't touch the names myself. So I just had this funny experience, which was I went to this memorial. I did find it quite moving. I thought it was nice that it's different and that they're inviting you to be part of this situation. But there was something about it that just kept niggling on my mind that took me the rest of the day to kind of place. It was on my mind so much that I thought, I want to go back the next day and just see it again to see if I've settled this thought in my mind.

And the answer is that I have, which is, I think it's a bad memorial. And the reason I think it's a bad memorial is, have i think it's a bad memorial is have you ever taken a look at the 9-11 memorial on a satellite photo i have not no okay i want you to open up google maps right now or apple maps or whatever and type in the 9-11 memorial and take a look on a satellite image of what you see how would you describe what you're a satellite image of what you see. How would you describe what you're looking at? Tell me what you see, Brady. Well, you see like a sort of a tree grassy area. And then you see these two, the two black squares that are the footprints of where the twin towers were. They're kind of grayish looking. Trying to think why this picture would displease you here's the words that i've settled on to

describe it there's a balancing act that you're trying to do here right like it's a public space but you're also trying to you know recognize whatever has occurred with the memorial i mean you could suggest that maybe it's a stark reminder of a scar left behind on the city. That's the feeling that is my conclusion. I think it's affecting as an individual to walk up and to not be able to see the bases and then suddenly they're upon you in the way that it's built. Like you just can't see it in the distance. And I think it is also affecting that they have water pouring down them so you can hear it, but you can't see it.

Yeah. But I think this is like immortalizing an open wound. I don't think there's any other way to really look at it. It's like this is a thing that was done to New York, and we're going to make sure that forever the exact damage that was done is like etched onto the face of the city forever. So it's just interesting because it's like I haven't really thought about this in years. Like, I was just aware that the construction took forever and, you know, it ended up being more than a decade and took ages to get the Freedom Tower put up. And it's like, you know, I haven't been following it in any way, even though I'm, you know, from New York State. But seeing it now, like when it's all done and finalized, like I just I really think it's a bad decision. I think it's a bad decision

to make a memorial that is in the literal shape of the damage that was done to you. I think it should have been turned into a park that people in the city could enjoy with something respectful in that park that memorializes the event. But to keep the wound open forever, I just think it was an absolutely terrible decision. And I've been mentioning it to people simply because I feel like I want to be talked out of this position. I want someone to convince me why it is a good decision so I can feel better about it. But so far, everyone I've run into has agreed with me on this one, and I haven't been able to find someone who's going to talk me out of it. Well, I think you found someone who disagrees with you. Okay. Tell me why then. But I'm not sure I'll be able to talk you out of it. I mean, I've not been there. So I'm talking

to someone who hasn't been there. I did go to the site when it was being cleaned up and looked down into those big pits. And I was actually in New York the day that they got the last pillar, the last bit of rubbish out of that pit actually. And there was a big ceremony. So I was sort of in all the flyovers. I happened to be there for that. And looking at your picture, which you sent me, where you're sort of at ground level, there is something about the hull that's very gaping and very concrete and very affecting. I agree with what you say about sort of the scar

and keeping the wound open. But I think a memorial is about remembering what happened. And I think if you gloss over it too much and make it like a park or an abstract statue or a place where children can play and a place of happiness instead of a place of sadness, I think the thing that is being memorialized over the course of maybe a generation or so can easily be forgotten. And the power and the magnitude of the thing that happened gets glossed over and it just becomes a park where you walk the dog and you have a good time.

And you may say, yeah, that is good. We shouldn't live in the shadow of a terrible thing that happened. But then it's not really a memorial, is it? It's just a nice space that's wallpapered over a terrible thing that happened. But then it's not really a memorial, is it? It's just a nice space that's wallpapered over a bad thing that happened. Maybe that is how you deal with tragedies. I don't know. Maybe that's the way to do it. But if you want to memorialize and remember a horrific event, I think putting a pretty pink unicorn there isn't going to do that. It has to be something that reflects the scale and the horror of what happened. Have you ever been to Hiroshima? No, I haven't.

Well, I went to the war memorial at Hiroshima. There's a museum there for the bombing, and it's excellent. It's one of the best places I've been. They have a very interesting thing there, which you will find very interesting. I'll send it to you now. It's called the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. And basically, right over the spot where the atom bomb went off, everything got completely flattened, obviously. But there was one thing that didn't. Amazingly, there was like this prefectural industrial promotional hole that somehow remained standing, but it got really beaten up and it looked in a bad way. And when you look at the old pictures of flattened Hiroshima, it's quite interesting that this one building somehow stayed standing.

I'm looking at photos of this is the building with the dome shape on top of it. Okay. And I call it the atomic bomb dome. And they have kept that in its like ruined form right in the center of modern Hiroshima. So, the city now is really great and buzzing and there's stuff happening all over the place. And it's a really cool place. But in the middle of it all is this like wrecked building that is like a testament to the power of the atomic bomb. It's really moving and it works really, really well for me, but maybe it works well for me for the same reason it wouldn't work well for you if you went to Hiroshima. You might think the same thing. It's keeping this wound

open. I think there's something to be said for it. Like you look at it and you think, you know, a terrible thing happened to this city and like, let's not forget that. And I think those two pits in the ground in New York are doing the same thing. You know, we're not glossing over this with teddy bears and dog walking areas and trees. We're saying the city is scar scarred. We can give it laser surgery if you want and pretend that it's not there anymore. Or we can say, we've got scars. We all carry scars in life from things that have gone wrong. And sometimes you look at your scars and you remember bad things that happened. You look down at a bad scar on your leg and think, remember that car accident you had. And it's part of who you are. You know,

you carry your scars with you for life. This Hiroshima Memorial is an interesting counterpoint. I've never been there in person. I'll highlight one picture on that page for you, Greg, because I think it best demonstrates what I mean. Because a lot of the pictures you're looking at there, the dome is kind of in close up, so you don't really see it in context. But yeah, I was looking at some pictures that are backed up from it. So it's like on a green area, there's a bit of a wall around it. I just sent you one by the river. That one in particular, I think gives you a good feel for how it just nestles among the modern city on the bank of the river.

It's interesting to see it as part of the skyline. There's something that strikes me that's different here that makes these memorials literal opposites of each other. One is a hole in the ground. The other one is a structure that survived the bomb. Yeah, it's like I got a defiant note to it. Yeah. I feel like that really makes an emotional difference. This is a building that was not destroyed by the bomb. The towers were completely destroyed and yeah like we're going to remember that forever it's a difficult job with this kind of thing like like what do you do i mean my i am much more always in favor of the like it's not good to linger

on the past like i just don't think lingering on the past really does you any favors but of course you know a nation has to sell itself as an entity, and what has occurred to it is part of the story of what makes that a nation and what you use to bind people together. I understand all of that, but I feel like the Hiroshima Monument is a thing that survived a terrible event, whereas the 9-11 memorial strikes me as just, we're holding this wound open for all time. And this area of the city is sort of dead for use. Because even if you're looking at it

from the satellite picture from above, it gives you a false sense of how park like it looks like there are trees, but the trees are all pretty far apart. And it's all concrete below those trees. So there is, there is no way that that space is usable as a park, it is a real void of an area. I don't know, it was, I'm glad that I went to see it in person. Like it was an experience to go and see it, but I don't approve of it as the memorial for all time for what happened on 9-11. From the podcast that brought you a vinyl record episode

and a pair of limited edition trainers, I think we've come up with the mass produced item piece of podcast, Hello Internet related merchandise to rule them all. Oh, I haven't given this a name yet, Gray, a project name. Oh, what are we going to call it? Already the way you're pitching this story, you say we, I didn't know what was going on until it was done. You did approve the expenditure.

I said, Grey, can I spend a large amount of money on a project that I don't want you to know about yet? And you said, okay. I gave you approval. But so when you're pitching it as like, we're bringing you a thing. It's a we, it's a team. Everything we do on Halloween is a team. We are a team.

But I always feel like I want you to get the credit as the man who does the legwork for some of these projects. I seek no credit. As the man whose house is filling up with boxes of merchandise, so much so that he has to get a second area for his Hello Internet Logistics Center. Yeah, I see what's going on here. I mean, I don't think there's any, should we give it a code name? I don't think it's a code name kind of thing. No, it's just Operation Hotstopper. It's Operation Hotstopper. That's just what it is. Because we now have, can I call them official? Yeah. Oh yeah. They're official. They're as official as official can be. All right. We have official Hello Internet Hotstoppers. How many Hello Internet Hotstoppers are in this first batch braiding? How many are arriving in

your house or have they arrived already Or they're getting there tomorrow? No, they're due to arrive tomorrow. They're arriving tomorrow. Okay. Yeah. A couple of boxes full. We're talking in the thousands. They've been mass produced.

So they're like proper hot stoppers like you'll get in Starbucks. For people who don't know what a hot stopper is. No, there's nobody. Look, there's nobody who doesn't know what a hot stopper is, right? There's nobody. This is their first podcast that they're listening to and they made it

all the way to the end. That person doesn't exist. We can go on without having to explain what a hot stopper is. All right. I'm told they are official hot stopper dimensions. So they'll fit into your takeaway coffee mug and the little plastic stopper part should fit into your industry standard hole. But instead of like a Starbucks mermaid at the top or a Pret star, your official Hello Internet hot stopper has at the top. What

else could it have at the top, Gray? What is at the top of the Hello Internet hot stopper? The nail and gear. That's the only thing. The mighty nail and gear. And unlike Starbucks green or Pret purpley red, of course, the Hello Internet official hot stopper is Hello Internet grey coloured. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. It looks the role. So as of tomorrow, I'm going to have a whole stack of hot stoppers. Bearing in mind, I don't drink coffee, by the way.

You can use hot stoppers with tea. You can tea it up. I am partial to a hot chocolate as well. So, I can use more hot chocolates. Yeah, that works. Hot chocolates, officially part of the Pidatron lifestyle. Definitely not. But can I just say, and this amazed me, I met with Gray in London a couple of days ago, and this is when I first told him about this project. And I said, Gray, I've got something to show you. And I showed him a photo of the first one that had been printed at our secret production plant offsite.

And you were quite taken with it. And we spoke about it for like 15 or 20 minutes. And then Gray said something i cannot believe he said he said to me i want you to send me lots of these i want a lot of these like there wasn't okay i'll have one brady to keep you happy and file it away you said i want some and i said yeah of course i'll send you some and you said no no i want a lot i want you i want you to send me like a lot of these for myself I couldn't believe it okay all right all right well it's true they're great I do want a bunch of them in my defense what I want to what I want to bring up here and why we're talking about it on the show now

is that while you have brought into the world these hello internet hot stoppers. And while I love them, what we've run into is a kind of economic problem of distribution. So I wasn't sure if there were ever going to be more hot stoppers in the world. We don't even know right now what the situation is going to be because it's like, I love that you made this. I love that they're getting shipped to your house. But when we were talking about it, we essentially immediately realized there is no economically or time feasible way to even try to attempt to distribute these things. Because the thinking was, obviously, that some people who enjoy the podcast would want

some of these. You know, you could have a handful of them and you could use them for your coffees and things like that when you go out and about and show a bit of Hello Internet pride. You don't get thousands of hot stoppers made and sent to your house if you're planning on just keeping them for personal use, right? It's not what you do. No. So, I always wanted these to get out there to the audience. But the problem is, obviously, these are like little plastic things

that on the face of it aren't worth like, you know, a large sum of money. They're like, you know, disposable plastic coffee sticks. But like to get them to people, I would have to sit here and like do labelling and go to the post office and put them into packaging. And that would take a vast amount of time. So you think, well, the only way I can justify that is to like, you know, put a cost on them that makes it worth my time. But then you can't sell like a plastic hot stopper for, you know, quantities of dollars. This is the thing, right? This is a product that when Starbucks has them made, right? Starbucks has some paperclip style factory out there in the world that's producing

20 million hot stoppers a day, right? And they're getting- That's pretty much what I have too, right? They're getting shipped off to Starbucks in huge boxes, right? With, you know, 10,000 hot stoppers at a go. To be given away for free. To be given away for free because at this scale for this material, the hot stopper from Starbucks perspective is essentially zero, right?

Like the cost to manufacture is nothing in comparison to everything else in their company right and so then so we were like hey let's take a product that's usually manufactured in the hundreds of millions and distributed in units no smaller than 10 000 and get it instead delivered to us in units of thousands to be redistributed. And then this is where we started getting stuck in terms of like, what, do we sell one at a time? Like, I was trying to think like, would that be almost like a funny joke? Like we sell one at a time?

I was like, no, it doesn't make sense to sell one at a time. It's just so fiddly and crazy. And there's no price that could possibly justify it. And then everything else we're coming up with, we're realizing it's just like, it's like we have manufactured the world's worst merch product in terms of ability to distribute to people. And we just have no idea what to do with these thousands of hot stuff. We were giving it a lot of thought.

I spoke to you about it and we were tossing some ideas around. And then you like texted me later and said, I can't stop thinking about it. I can't solve the problem. I brought it up with my wife, right? My wife and I had like a strategy session where we're discussing what is it that we could do with the hot stoppers. And, you know, I told you like, I was going to get back to you about it. And then it's like a whole other day went by where it was just on my mind and I kept rolling it over. Like, how do we crack the hot stopper problem? Right? Like, it's like, we're trying to crack the problem where you're moving, recycling from five cents to 10 cents, taking it across to Michigan. Like, how can you do this economically?

It's like, I don't know if there is a way to actually do this. We have to do something because we can't just have all these hot stoppers. But like, that's just it. There's like a pressure, right? There's pressure from the presence of these hotstoppers arriving. So essentially what we're saying here is, listen, audience, we're really looking for some ideas about how can we possibly make this work in a way that is not just unbearably time consuming and tedious and makes no sense to do. So when you go on Reddit and say, hey, Brady, can you send me one for a dollar? Can I just say to you?

Do you realize I also have a couple of YouTube channels I run and a whole bunch of other stuff I have to do and sitting in the other room to put all these five cent hot stoppers into envelopes and then have people email me saying, hey, my hot stopper never arrived. Can you send me another one? And it's going to turn into- Here's a little tip for anybody who's ever thinking of getting into the merchandising business, right? You think the hard part of it is shipping it. Oh no, right? Like that's the easy part, right? The hard part is the eternal half-life of returns and difficulties and management, right? And then from my perspective, it's like, hey, you know what I love to do?

I love to raise the price on things, right? Like I'm happy to raise the price. Like I was trying to strategize about auctions and like all these other ideas that just don't work at all. But the flip side is we would legitimately feel like terrible people selling individual hot stoppers or even a handful of hot stoppers at a price that would make it make any sense to be able to do it. So that's why like we just feel

so stuck because it's not like, it's not like there isn't a number where it makes sense. It's just that the number, like we feel bad about the number, right? Because we're just selling these hot stoppers that are like kind of free to manufacture after a certain point. Well, I had to spend a lot to have the mold made. And by the way, a bit of inside baseball, they mucked up the mold. So we agreed the design, it had the mighty nail and gear, and then they started like manufacturing them. And they sent me a photo saying, we've made them all Brady, here they are, we're going to send them to you. And they'd mucked up the nail and gear design and the nail didn't have a point and it was like all

round and they got it wrong. And I was like, no, no, no, you can't do this. So, they had to make a second mold. We didn't have to pay for that, of course, but they then made a second mold. So, it's gone through like iterations. Yeah, there's always a bunch of hassle with this stuff. But when I say free, what I mean is like, it's free at scale. Each additional hot stopper that is produced decreases the overall cost per hot stopper of manufacturer. So it like it trends towards zero. If for some reason we're, you know, getting 10,000 manufactured, I don't know. So it's like, I find this a really interesting economic problem.

And I think we are very happy to open it up to the audience for any ideas about what to actually do with regards to distribution of this. I mean, I think you and I, Grae, would be quite happy to just wear the cost and have them for ourselves. I quite like the idea of you and I traveling around the world like Santa Claus, just putting handfuls into various coffee shops anonymously, like just shoving them in amongst the normal hop stoppers. So people may just find a guerrilla attack and find a bunch of hello internet hot stoppers in their local Starbucks and things like that. But I think people will want some. So that's where the problem comes from.

Yeah. I don't know. I'll leave a link to the Reddit discussion as always. Yeah. What are you going to do with yours? I'm going to use it to stop hotness. That's what I'm going to do. Like, so you take it to the coffee shop with you. Like they'll say, do you want a hot stop? And you'll be like, nope. That's exactly right.

Because if there's anything I could do to not draw more attention to myself, it's having a custom made hot stopper at my local Starbucks. Yeah. That's how I'm going to fly under the radar. That is like advanced coffee drinking though. Having your own hot stopper at my local Starbucks. Yeah. That's how I'm going to fly under the radar. That is like advanced coffee drinking though, having your own hot stoppers. Like that's like, that's pro level coffee. Yeah. I got this. You could be like, just like a Superman and like, like people be like, oh, have you got, have you got a hot stopper for my drink? And they're like, no, sorry, we won't stock them. You can just lean over and go here you go man yeah i'll sit there for an hour like a weirdo waiting for them to

run out just so i can offer someone one when they go oh there's none of them here you're like a hot stopper batman i do like the idea of just leaving them anonymously around the place but i do really like that too what are you gonna do like how will carry it? Will you just put it in like your top pocket? Like where on your streamlined, you know, grey, a man about town outfit, could you put hot stoppers? Like a new utility belt or something? I don't know how any of this is going to work. I just know that I want them. But I have thought none of this through.

I'm going to have like a little batch in my car. So when I go like through drive-thru Starbucks, I'm going to be like, when I see them putting it in, I'll go, no, no, it's all right. That's perfect. I got one. That's really good. I like that. I got one. If by the way, anyone out there runs their own coffee shop, let's talk business. If you've got a chain of coffee shops and you're thinking, I like the cup of his gym, that's a nice set of hot stuffers. You're looking for a supply. We've already had the mould made so we can get them for you cheap. I can send you thousands of the bad boys.

I am looking forward to the Reddit this week. I'm looking forward to the look on my wife's face when these boxes of hot stoppers arrive. They're going straight to the storage unit.