H.I. No. 72: 64 Pairs of Underwear

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"64 Pairs of Underwear"
Hello Internet episode
Episode no.72
Presented by
Original release dateOctober 31, 2016 (2016-10-31)
Running time1:23:15
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"H.I. #72: 64 Pairs of Underwear" is the 72nd episode of Hello Internet, released on October 31, 2016.[1]

Official Description[edit | edit source]

Grey and Brady discuss: shopping for clothes, Siri's irritation at having to do what you tell her, project revolution, freebooting and watermarks, YouTube Red one year later, and the future of content on YouTube.

Show Notes[edit | edit source]

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I'm feeling kind of good about myself at the moment. Oh yeah? Because I would say once every maybe one to two years, I just go on this mega clothes shop. I'm not a big fan of shopping for clothes and trying things on. Who is it? It's awful. Yeah. And like so many times, I'll go to the shops with my wife and she'll be, come on, let's do some clothes shopping for you and we'll walk in and then I'll just be, no, not feeling it and we'll have to leave. But just on my own, I happened to walk into the shop the other day and I wasn't even really there with much intent and suddenly it just hit me. I'm just, that's it. I'm going crazy. I just went for it and I was grabbing things off the rack and I was walking into the changing rooms and I'm going to try these and I'll grab that and I wasn't even looking at prices. Why would you do that? Suddenly that brings thinking into the equation and then everything falls apart. I just was not thinking. I was just grabbing and trying and buying. It was magnificent. My absolute favorite part was at the end when I was like buying it all, the poor guy took forever to put it all through the register and then at the end he says for some ridiculous amount of money and then he says to me, would you like a plastic bag with that? And I'm like, well of course, because how am I going to carry all this stuff home? I said, yes. And he says, that will be five pence on top. I've just spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds and then he's there. Is another five p. Okay. I just laughed and said, yes, that's okay. I'll pay the five p. Oh good, because I'm never quite sure with Brady how this kind of thing is going to go. I thought there is a non-zero chance that you were going to be upset about that final five pence that you have to pay for the bag. It's a take it all back. This is the kind of thing that I could see that would drive a Brady crazy. So I'm glad that you were able to be in a happy mood and to roll with it and just let it go on the day that you felt in the mood for a clove shopping. The five p's never an issue. It was just the ridiculousness of it. But then I went even further and I did what is an even bigger step for me, King of Horde. I came home and I opened up all my wardrobes and drawers and I threw away a lot of clothes for garbage bags for... I honestly feel proud of you at this moment, Brady. Oh, that's amazing. Not as proud as my wife was. I've never seen her so happy. All the clothes that she hates me wearing, all gone. She came home and opened up my wardrobe and it was all neat like a soldier or beautifully folded and hanging up and there was hardly anything there. She had the biggest smile on her face and I felt good. I felt purged. Did you get rid of any of those old Alabama t-shirts from years ago that I always see wearing? No, but that's because they were already going through a wash at the moment. The clothing in the wash guard's beard, that's what you're saying. Yeah, I was brutal. But if it was in the wash, it's probably already in the rotation. So there was a good chance I was going to keep it anyway. But it was amazing. And when I told my wife that I was doing, I was texting her going, you're not going to believe it. I'm clothes shopping. And then I said, and now I'm going home and throwing stuff away. And she was going, come on, be brutal and was sending me all these encouraging messages saying, go on, throw the stuff away, throw it away. And I'm texting back, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm throwing it away. She's like, this is magnificent. Because you leave me speechless, Brady. I'm very happy that you purchased clothes for yourself and also threw out clothes that no longer fit. Congratulations. It wasn't stuff that no longer fits by the way. It was stuff that I just don't wear much. Okay. I was throwing away stuff that does fit. I was just in this sweet spot of organization. But it did make me wonder what your clothes shopping routine, like how does that work? Because I know you're not always wearing the same thing. But kind of in my head, and I imagine you're being a bit like Steve Jobs and just having like the same clothes over and over again on a rack. Like how does clothes shopping work with you? Are you a regular shopper? Do you do it in big binges like me? Do you buy an assortment of things? Do you buy lots of the same thing? What's your sort of modus operand I hear? I'm trying to think how long it has been since I have been in a clothing store that was not clothes for a particular purpose, like just clothes in general. And it's been years, maybe five years since I've walked into a store to buy clothes. I think that's probably about right before the YouTube career started. Where do you buy clothes from online? Yeah, so essentially I have been trying and failing over time to build up for myself the perfect wardrobe that is exactly the same every single day all the time. And it's super funny to hear you say, oh, you think that I'm not necessarily wearing the same thing every time I see you. And I feel like, oh, great success because I know for a fact that in the last two years, every time we have met up, I have been wearing one of two outfits. I feel like it's success that you didn't notice because the clothing is just unremarkable and so it slides under the perception radar. It's like, what is that person wearing? He's just wearing clothes. No, Gray. It wasn't success that I hadn't noticed. It was politeness that I didn't mention it. You're holding back on the podcast that you don't want to point out the fact that you do know that I've been wearing the same thing every time we've met up for years. That's a polite guy. No, to be fair, there was an unremarkable to it. That sort of unremarkableness that you are aiming for, you are succeeding with. I never mean that in a nice way. Like, I know what you're doing and it's working, so I'm not going to pick on you. Like how many of the same t-shirts do you have or how many of the same trousers? If I was to go through your clothing storage areas, what would I say? Okay, so this is the method that I think is the best for acquiring clothes. I'll use an example which is t-shirts. Yeah. So I spent an enormous amount of time trying to find t-shirts that I liked, which is really difficult. You think, oh, I just want to buy a t-shirt, right? But when you're looking for a t-shirt that you can wear under almost all circumstances, suddenly it becomes very hard. I don't want labels. The material has to feel nice. The collar has to feel nice. It needs to be comfortable. I need to be able to wear it out. It needs to be able to work under a buttoned up shirt or it needs to be able to work on its own. There is a surprising number of requirements that make it extraordinarily difficult. I have now, after literally years and trying many, many t-shirts, found two t-shirts that I like. And once I've found those, I just bought dozens and dozens of them to have them in my house. All in the same color? All in the same color. All in the same size. Yeah. The reason I need to is one of the t-shirts is for warm weather. It's made out of a different material. And one of the t-shirts is for the rest of the year. Yeah. That's the only reason that there need to be two. If I could get away with one, I would get away with one. It's the gray uniform. Like this is fantastic. T-shirts have been very successful. I've ended up doing the exact same thing with underwear. I found underwear that I like. There's like a 64 pack of this underwear that I could buy. I like, great. Okay. Just ship it over. I just want this. Hang on, just for the record here, you bought 64 pairs of the same underwear. I'm trying to tell this story in like a coherent way, but I'm realizing we need to get to part of the problems that I end up facing. Right. You're worried about lines being discontinued, aren't you? The thing that occurs is the t-shirts that I like, for example, I'm not going to mention what brand they are because the company that sells them has been out of stock for months and months. I'm like their emergency update email list. Let me know when you get those t-shirts back in stock. I will order 200 of them. Right. I don't want to say I'll out. What brand of t-shirt it is that I wear because I don't want to be competing with anybody else on the internet to get these t-shirts if and when the company ever comes back in stock. I've sent them emails like, hey, when are you going to get those t-shirts back in stock? This is the problem because when I buy them bulk, I'm unaware. I'm not aware of when things have gone out of favor. I don't know if this company is ever going to produce this t-shirt again and if they're just messing with me. Now as my wife has been pointing out to me, I'm in this situation where I have been running out eventually of all of the bulk clothes that I bought a while ago and I'm quickly coming into like hobo land. I have just like a few of these perfect things left that I want to wear all the time. Now I'm finding myself having to do laundry more and more frequently because my supply of perfect clothes is dwindling and dwindling. It's very upsetting because I don't like to do the laundry that much and I am just constantly out of clothes, I'm constantly out of shirts. It's very frustrating. How many ways do you think you can get out of a t-shirt before it has to be retired and you know, it gets to your hobo? I don't know. That's really hard to measure. I don't have a good system for keeping the t-shirts in rotation so that there's even wear. I pay no attention. They just get trashed over time. This is a thing like I really do think that if you can possibly get away with it, having the minimum number of clothes that just fit the maximum number of circumstances all the time is clearly the superior way to live. This is obviously the better thing to do. There's no decisions to make when you get up in the morning. You just wake up, you put on the clothes like what am I going to wear? I'm going to wear these exact same jeans. I'm going to wear this exact same t-shirt. I'm going to wear the same underpants. I'm going to wear the same socks. And I'm going to have the same shirt that I put on top of it. Three day the same. It's like living the dream, Brady. It's fantastic. As long as you're not like me and you start getting really, really picky then about what each item of clothing has to be, and then you're going to be in for a world of sadness because obviously things will get discontinued and you will be left adrift. Halloween tonight is so easy. All I have to do is just pick some topic like I just say t-shirts. And nine times out of ten, I will then discover some crazy thing about your personality that you can talk about for the next ten minutes. But this is not crazy. OK. I'll tell you what, I do now realize why when we went to that Alabama football game a while back and you dressed up all in red and wore all the Alabama stuff and I sent the photo of you wearing it to your wife, why she was so delighted by the picture. Because to her it was like you were dressed in a Santa suit. So we must have just blown her mind. Oh yeah, that would have been many sigmas outside of the average range of clothing that I ever wore. I know for a fact that she found it delightful. You got him to wear a red sweater with an elephant on it. That's amazing. That is not normally what I do. But listen, listen, in the theme of what you did and what I do, you got rid of a whole bunch of clothes and I try to wear all the same things. I do have a recommendation for people out there. Even if you don't want to do what I do, which is to try to construct futile a uniform that you're going to wear all the time, I do think people should do this. When you buy socks, buy socks in bulk and get rid of all of your old socks every time you do a refreshment. This way, all of the socks at least are uniform. Because I think people just get frustrated with having different kinds of socks you're trying to match them. Just listen to me, people out there. Go on the internet, find some socks you like, buy 40 pairs of them and throw out all of your old socks. Trust me, it's life changing. This will get you started down the one true path of finding everything else that works for you and keeping it as similar as possible. But even if you just do the socks, it makes life so much better. So, grow, let me ask you this. I know, you know, wearing the same thing every day can be a thing. And famously, there was the whole Steve Jobs thing. Most people don't do it. Most people have a variety of clothes and colors and styles and change them and wear different things each day. The people who do that, so the majority of the people who you see walking around the streets of London, what do you think they're thinking? Why do you think they do that? Why do they not do what you do? I have no idea. Do you ever wonder? Do you wonder like you think you're surrounded by crazy people? I don't think they're crazy. As we've discussed on the podcast a bunch of times, you cannot explain. I think that's an interest in a thing. And I recognize that fashion is an area of life that people are interested in. Some portion of the population is interested in fashion. This is a thing that occurs. So, some portion of the population just wants to do this. But I think the bulk of people just sort of go along with this feeling, even though they probably don't care very much. They just think you're not supposed to wear the same thing every day. So I won't. Right. Yeah. Protit people, if you wear the same thing every day, as long as you are not smelly, as long as you are being obviously a hygienic person who cleans themselves, you're just wearing a different shirt, even if it is the same color shirt. If you just go along with that, people don't comment. Nobody says anything. Maybe they think a little bit for a little while, like what a weirdo. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't actually really affect anything with your interaction with those people. Like it's okay. You can just wear the same stuff all the time. Nobody will say anything. It's fine. So, Grey, normally we would do follow up around this time. We have gotten ourselves into a little bit of a pickle here. How so breathing? Well, because if we're being entirely honest with the teams, I think this is episode 72. Who knows? And while we recorded episode 71 about a week ago, it has not been edited yet. I don't even know what's going to be in it. You haven't finished it. We don't know what the teams think of the episode or what they have to say to us about it. No. So, we can't really follow up or answer any questions because we don't know what the episodes like yet. I want to go on record and say that this is 100% my fault. I have been caught up with other things. So, yes, I have taken a long time for me to get the Hello Internet episode out. But yes, it is true that we have no follow up because there is no show out at the time. We are recording this. Who knows when this show is going to be released? We can still do follow up because there's always stuff from long ago. You've got a paper cut, I understand. I do have a paper cut. Now, this is such a minor thing, but it is slowly driving me crazy. I want to recognize, before I say anything, how trivial and incidental this is. So we have set up the whole house so that it has hue light bulbs all around it. So all the light bulbs can be set through your iPhone or through a system to turn them on or turn them off at particular times. And ever since the latest version of Apple's operating system for iPhone came out, there's now this ability to talk to Siri to request things happen. So we have a movie mode so we can say, hey Siri, turn on movie mode and the lights all change and everything is fantastic. Hey Siri, turn off all the lights. So this is a thing that you end up actually doing quite a lot. It ends up being kind of easier just to talk to the robot, to change the lights and to do things then to go onto your phone and flip over a bunch of different places and press some buttons. So I find myself quite frequently asking Siri to do things with the light bulbs in my house. Yep. Okay. So relatively frequently, Siri takes a few seconds to kind of turn on when you're using the watch. It's not ready immediately. And the way it lets you know this is you press the button to talk to Siri and then it comes on the screen and it says, hold on. I'll tap you when I'm ready. What do you think about that language, Brady? It's a bit arse. Yeah. It's a bit like I'm doing something else like excuse me. I'm serving another customer and your turn will come when your turn comes. So just wait. Exactly. Like here's the thing. I'm pointing this out to people now because I never noticed this until my wife pointed it out that it was bothering her. Like my wife was clearly not getting along with Siri a little bit. Like it was feeling like her and Siri were having a bit of a like a little bit of snipiness. She brought this up to me and she goes, my Siri is telling me to hold on. Screw that. Like hold on. What do you mean hold on? Tap you when I'm ready. Tap you when I'm good and ready is what it might as well say. As soon as she mentioned it, I'm like, you know what that language is wrong. It's one of those things in life where here's rational gray. Right. Rational gray is taking over for a moment, acknowledging the fact that this is a machine. This is just a little piece of text that somebody put in the machine to indicate that it's not ready immediately. But nonetheless, like I find myself increasingly infuriated by this little bit of language, which is always like, I'll tap you when I'm ready. Like I'm busy doing something else. Like Siri's in the watch filing her nails. And she's like, I'll get to you in a second, buddy. Right. Let me finish what I'm doing now. You're my computer. You do what I tell you to do. That's the nature of this relationship. Like you are an inanimate, soulless object whose purpose is to turn on my f*** nights when I tell you. Your purpose is not to tell me what to do. You don't tell me what to do. And if you're going to tell me what to do, you better be super polite about it. I mean, you better not be giving me like this little assy remark about like, oh, I'll tap you when I'm ready. Like, I'll tap you when I'm ready. That's how this relationship works. It's infuriating. I wish my wife had never pointed it out to me because it's a splinter in my mind that just keeps festering every time it occurs. And so now I am doing the audience the same favor. I am passing this long audience. You too notice Siri's little bit of bossiness when she doesn't want to turn on the lights immediately when you tell her to enjoy that because it's infuriating. I'll tell you what, great. Just like everyone else. You just want to be shown the respect you deserve. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you by Harry's. Harry's is the place to buy your razor blades online. In fact, they're so confident about that. They're offering to let you try them for free. 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So for a smooth, comfortable shave that will also save you money, go to Harry's.com slash Hello Internet and use offer code each I when you do this, it not only lets Harry's know that you heard about them from this podcast, but you're also going to get a free post shave bomb with your order when you use that offer code and URL. So once again, go to Harry's.com slash Hello Internet use offer code each I to get your post shave a bomb for free, along with your free trial of razors and Harry's. There's really nothing to lose. Give it a shot. And thanks to Harry's for supporting the show. The only thing that could be more perfect than a plane crash corner is the follow a article. We have not got a plane crash. We have got one of your famous at at mobile lounges at Dallas Airport having a crash. Oh, my. Apparently it drove into a construction ditch and two people were hospitalized, not life threatening. I hastened to add. OK, not live threatening. The people mover carrying 37 avianca airlines passengers arriving from Bogota, Colombia crashed just before 2.30 p.m. as the vehicle navigated uneven pavement outside gate B50. The cursed B50 as it is now known. An hour later, officials said the uninged passengers had arrived safely at the terminal for customs processing following medical evaluations. So these at ads, the excitement and the mythology around them just continues to grow. Indeed it does, Brady. The mythology continued to grow. I don't remember them actually going that fast. The idea of them kind of crashing into anything seemed a little bit comical to me. But yes, I guess the mythology continues to grow. I did see a couple people actually message me about possibly diverting their flights through Dallas Airport because they wanted to see it because of the podcast. I need to tell people like, don't do it guys. It's not worth it. I know you think it will be funny. You're like, this is a lovely pilgrimage to a Hello Internet holy site. But no, you're actually just going to spend hours in a sweaty, uncomfortable airport lounge with low ceilings where the air is thick and you can feel it in your lungs. And you may have to ride on one of these at ads, which apparently is more dangerous than we might have originally thought. So don't do it. We thought the only way to bring them down was a tow cable around their legs, but apparently construction ditches do the same thing. Right. In they go. Did you ever play the Empire Strikes Back on the Atari 2600? I'm sorry Brady, I just barely played Atari out of my friend's house, but not very much. I was just a year or two, too young for that old man. I recently rediscovered it on one of these online simulators where you can play all the old Atari games on the internet. I played Impa Strikes Back for a good 20 minutes. And in that you just shoot the hell out of that at its glorious. I'm sure it looks amazing. It really is terrible, but gosh, it brought back some happy memories. I'm glad that's what it did. That's what matters to you Brady. My Star Wars video game memory as a child is the TIE Fighter games, where of course you have to climb the ranks in the evil empire to become the best TIE fighter that you can possibly be. That is like burned onto my memory, spending hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to shoot down X-Wings and Y-Wings and A-Wings and make it up through the Empire. So we were on different sides in our childhood Star Wars gaming. All right. One thing we are on the same side with is Project Revolution. Yes. And we had a big milestone this week because we caught up in person. And although this is a collaboration, I feel like I've been doing the heavy lifting on this one. And for the first time, you actually got to experience the joy of seeing the albums in person just before we start distributing them. What did you think? Yeah, it was great. I came up to your house for a sleepover, I guess, is what happened essentially. And yes, this was the first time I got to see the records in person and I have to say, even as a person who's not super into things, they are gorgeous. It's one thing to see the artwork just remotely, like when someone sent a few images, but I have to say they look fantastic in person. Like I think it just came out really, really well. And without a doubt, I think probably the audience already knows that this is a Brady pet project for which I have not helped very much at all. This is 100% down to Brady. And you pulled off, I think, a fantastic thing getting this designed and manufactured and soon shipped off to the people. So it's really great. It looks fantastic. So many people have asked if we will do the little trick that it seems to be a trick that's going around at the moment on the interweb and elsewhere where the new British 5-pound note, which is a sort of one of these plastic notes as opposed to the more old fashioned papery type note. If you use one of these new plastic 5-pound notes and stick the corner into the groove of a record, you can actually hear the music or the record. Coming out of the note, it's quite extraordinary. Obviously it sends vibrations through the note and you can listen to it. So sure enough, we did crack out a 5-pound note and stuck it onto the Hallow Internet album. And we heard our voices coming out of a 5-pound note, which was quite the experience. Yes. Our wives who were in the room at this moment when you and I were bent down over the turn table trying to put the 5-pound note on the record. I think they were much less impressed by what occurred, but you and I were screaming with joy. I was like, it works, it works, we can hear ourselves. But I think the ladies were not so impressed. It was a perfect storm for us because it was two things we love, our podcast and some geeky science, internet trick. I'll tell you what Greg, how about for the first ever snipper of the vinyl episode that's heard publicly, why don't we play in just a tiny, tiny little bit of the vinyl episode emanating from a 5-pound note? I will leave the logistics of that to you. Well, there we go. That was it. It's just played. I have to say though, I mean, you might say the wives were being a bit sniffy about our 5-pound experiment, but your wife took a few copies for the friends and family. Sounds like it's going to be a few distributed down the grey half of the Hello Internet family tree. Oh, yes, of course. It's a very different thing from how impressed was she at the 5-pound note trick, not very clever. No, not very clever. How much did she want to get copies of records for people who have requested them much more? These things are going to start making their way out into the world, so if you've ordered one, get excited. Have your 5-pound notes ready? When is the estimated delivery for these breads? Do you have any idea? Well, I had a meeting yesterday and I've seen some of the packaging that's being done, and I would say imminent. Imminant. There you go, people. Imminant-ish. Imminant-ish. Might already be at their doors by the time the podcast goes up. Who knows? Probably not. Toothbrush Corner. Toothbrush Corner. Why is there a toothbrush corner breeding? Well, we seem to discuss my toothbrush situation more often than you think for a podcast called Hello Internet. But people may remember in the last toothbrush corner, we had my wooden toothbrush explode in my mouth and fill my mouth with bristles and splinters. Can I just say before you go any further in this story, breeding? Mm-hmm. You and I have been talking to each other for a long time now. And it seems like decades. We've been discussing stuff on the podcast and I have listened to your little stories. And I think there is no single story of yours that just randomly pops into my head and makes me go, ugh, more. For thinking about you, using a wooden toothbrush and having the bristles explode in your mouth. This is just like an echo of a story in my head that when I'm just minding my own business it keeps coming up and I feel like, would in toothbrush really? This is actually what's going to happen of the many, many Brady stories. I think this one stands above all of them. Well, clearly this has been something that has been playing on your mind and possibly on the mind of Mrs. Gray because when the two of you did come recently for a sleepover, I was given a very unexpected and delightful gift. Supposedly from my birthday, which was many months ago, but I'd yet to make sense of that entirely, related birthday gift, I think it was just kindness or maybe it was frustration. Or a ball. But I was given another electric toothbrush by the Graze and they gave me the one that they advocate and use I believe. So I was very curious and excited to receive this and that night I went and used it and I've been using it since. And I think it's time for me to let you know what I think about the electric toothbrush. Yes, how is it, Brady? Magnificent. Oh, great. Fantastic. My teeth have never felt so clean. See? See? It's like I've been to the dentist every time I brush my teeth. It's fabulous. And my wife had a sneaky use of it and she used it once. And then stormed into the lounge room and demanded that I immediately buy her one. Victory. See? Technology wins, Brady. So she's got one too now. And I have to say, superb. So happy. Superb present. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Gray, for my new toothbrush. I have used an electric toothbrush before and obviously I was using an inferior quality one because this one has been great so far. Yeah. When my wife found out whatever model it was that you got for yourself, she was just revolted and like, oh, of course he didn't like it. We got a terrible one. We have to get him a perfectly good one. Yeah. I do have to admit that I did know that you had tried the toothbrush because during our sleep over, my wife came up to me and she said, do you know what I just heard? I said, what? And she said, I was walking past the bathroom and I could hear the electric toothbrush on. But more than that, I could just hear the giggling as Brady was feeling the toothbrush tickling his gums and he was giggling like a little child playing with the electric toothbrush for the first time, which is why the next morning I felt the need to really try to impress upon you that you need to push past the point at which it tickles your gums into which that just becomes normal and you don't notice that anymore because I knew that you had been giggling away using the toothbrush the previous night. It does tickle a little bit when you first use it. I'm loving it. And it looks cool too. I got sort of that matte black night rider one and I think it's fabulous. My wife actually did buy you a cooler looking toothbrush than she bought me. So I feel like I need to upgrade now. I've got Brady's is black. It comes with his awesome carrying case. I want a cool black toothbrush as well. Well, thank you to both of you. It was a very nice present. I was recently in Australia watching a lot of Australian morning television and I'm trying so hard to not be grumbly, miserable, winging guy because you know, I'm in a good mood. I got my new clothes. I got a nice toothbrush. Life is good. But watching Australian television was difficult. And I'm going to let almost all of it slide because I'm a forgiving kind of guy. But the one thing that stuck in my craw, partly it was the free booting, but you'll understand why in a second. See, like most television shows these days, I think they've cotton onto the ease of free booting online videos and sort of dressing it up as if they're sort of doing a service or using some kind of news coverage use. Like they'll say, now let's have a look at what's been viral over the last 24 hours. Like it's news coverage, like sports results. And then they'll just show like the five or six choice online clips of, you know, a parrot riding a skateboard or a cat surfing or whatever's amazing on the internet that day. And to me, this is borderline free booting. You know, I see what they're doing. They're trying to pretend it's newsy, but I don't think it's a fair use news usage, but it's borderline, whatever. This is what morning shows do. They just play clips from the internet. Yeah. That's what happened when my Audrey clip was on Good Morning America. It was like, have a look at this. This is what everyone's watching over night. Audrey, the Chihuahua chasing bubbles to be fairness. Good morning, America did have my permission to use that clip. So I'm not slagging them off. And maybe these Australian shows are going and getting permission from everyone every night as well. But I find that hard to believe. Seems unlikely. Regardless, the thing that stuck in my crawl about it is immediately afterwards, they then cut to whatever new story they were doing that day. And this happened almost every morning, you know, it would be a house on fire or a car crash or whatever they were deciding was news for that day. But Grave, you play the videos that I sent you because I filmed this off the television with my phone because I was so outraged by it and wanted to show Grave. This is what they do when they then show their footage of their news clips. Okay. So you sent me a couple videos here. Yeah. Now this is seven news first channel. Yeah. So they have the stonking huge watermark. Not a watermark in the corner or on the bottom anything, just this huge watermark over the entire screen scrolling from left to right throughout the entirety of the clip. Class and channel seven news. So it would be absolutely impossible to use or crop or do anything with. You couldn't take that without having channel seven news plastered all over it. And fair enough, if that's what they think they have to do to protect their footage. But the irony of them showing all their free booted clips without attribution. Immediately followed by their jealous protective, zealous, crazy attempt to stop people using their footage did strike me. This is an amazing watermark for the listener. I mean, it's, it's this giant seven news first logo that scrolls literally across the very center of the frame. Now we have discussed numerous times about how when you're filming chemistry experiments, you already have the free booters in your mind. You're trying to think about how to frame the shot and you will put watermarks on the image, but you're trying to get it close to what's happening. So it's uncropable. But I think you have never, at least to my knowledge, you have never put a watermark literally over the very thing that you are filming to obstruct the entire purpose of the video. It's an amazing watermark. Let me show you my all time favorite example of this though. It happened a while back. There's a billionaire guy in Australia called James Packer and he got involved in some scuffle in the street where I think he might have punched someone. It was like a physical scuffle. And this James Packer is like a media mogul and the rival media company news caught up in Australia got a picture of the incident. So they had the picture and they wanted to make sure no one else used it. And I'm just messaging you now their picture of this incident and how they protected it. This isn't real. This is absolutely real. Okay. They have taken the Louis Vuitton approach to watermarks. Isn't it Louis Vuitton or one of them that they put their logos on every single inch of the bag which to me makes it look like garbage? No, Louis Vuitton bags and no, I suck quite like them because it's like a stylish Lego but it's not stylish when you put it on every single inch of your bag. Imagine if your phone had 70 Apple logos all over the back of it. You'd be like, oh Jesus Apple. Yeah, but with the Louis Vuitton it's like the print, like a flu or something or like a tartan. That's like the Louis Vuitton fabric. Is that look? I feel like I have unintentionally insulted your Louis Vuitton bag or something. You seem to be taking this by personally. I think Louis Vuitton bags are fine. Whereas I think this news caught things ridiculous. We'll put it in the show notes. They've literally written in this terrible font which is the new news Cop logo. News Cop is written like time and time and time again all over the picture. To the point in this case where you can hardly tell what's even happening in the picture anymore. Yeah. And because the narrow watermark just looks like a handwritten thing, it just looks like someone has scribbled all over the page. This is fantastic. Apparently that news Cop logo which is supposed to look kind of handwritten is somehow based on Rupert Murdoch's handwriting. I once read. I don't know if that's true but anyway. Well, is this going to be the future direction of your YouTube channels braiding? What does have? Number five. It's massive across the screen at old times. Yeah. These news channels it seems like maybe they are at the forefront of the arms race of stealing other people's videos and also trying to make sure that your own videos and media are not stolen. If this is where they have ended up with obstructing the very thing that they try to show, then maybe they're just a year ahead of us in this free booting war. This is where you're going to eventually be. Maybe. Anyway, we will put these in the show notes in fair use because this is breathtaking stuff and to sort of see what we're talking about, go and have a look because it will blow your mind. But there was another use of content without permission, I believe. I don't know if you've seen this yet but this was also somewhat interesting and baffling and involves Hello Internet. I'm going to send you the website of a pub in New Zealand and they have sort of a little section with three pictures. They have click for the menu and they have a picture of a dish of food, click for functions and they have like a table where you can choose where to sit or you can click on the image for contact us. What's the image for contact us? It's the Hello Internet logo. It is. It says hi. Yeah. I know if this is like a Tim who's put this in here as a joke or someone has just been told to source an image on the internet and they thought, oh, that says hi, it's friendly, we should use that. I don't know but it's completely baffling. It's the Hello Internet logo complete with the dotted edge. Well, sort of complete with the dotted edge. They've cropped it in a strange way so it looks like ass but it's definitely our logo. Yeah. This is baffling. What are you doing? Pegasus arms in New Zealand. Great. We've got to go protect our trademark. Fantastic. It's just what I wanted to do today. One more thing to do. Fantastic. They could have used the nylon gear. That's like open source, isn't it? But yeah, that is. We released that into the public domain so people could just use that as whatever. Like go nuts people. If you want to make a Louis Vuitton bag that's nothing but the nylon gear logo all over it, go crazy. Free for you to use but the Hello Internet logo for the podcast is not under the public domain. Well, maybe New Zealand have different copyright law but Pegasus arms. What's going on? But it's so random that I'm almost a little bit enchanted by it. It just looks terrible. I've got the extra looks really awful. It does. Oh, it's a particular choice on their behalf. But. Yeah. So I feel like if we end up bullying the Pegasus arms into taking down this logo, we're doing it for their own good. You can't use this logo and it also looks terrible. Maybe we could ask them to replace it with the nylon gear. I'm not sure that would be an improvement. I don't think that would be bullying to help them. I think that would make things much worse. Maybe the person who designed the site around the pub is a Tim in which case everything will kind of fall into place. But for now, it's a bit strange. I'm googling now. If I type the word contact into Google, does the Hello Internet logo show up? How did this happen? And I must have googled hi for like hello or something. Yeah. I say like, what is the Google search that might have brought this up? I'm coming up blank for the time being. But I think that that's what happened. Or we've been uploaded to a stock usage website somewhere. That's what's happened. Nail and gear people. That's your thing to use. This episode of Hello Internet is brought to you in part by Squarespace, the simplest way for anyone to build a beautiful landing page website or online store. Start building your website today at squarespace.com, enter offer code Hello at checkout and get 10% off your first purchase. With easy to use tools and templates, Squarespace helps you capture every detail of what drives you by putting the power you need in your hands to make a website while taking away all the usual pain points like worrying about hosting and scaling and HTML code and CSS. Where's that closing tag on the div? You don't even need to know what a div is. Forget it. Squarespace just handles that for you. Sign up with Squarespace and you will get a website that looks professionally designed regardless of your skill level. And it will also look like it's yours. Because while they have fantastic templates for you to start with, they are exceedingly customizable. So you can get that site to look like it is yours, not like one website that came off of a factory. Squarespace uses state-of-the-art technology to power your site and to ensure security and stability. They're trusted by millions of people and some of the most respected brands in the world. But this is just getting started. Squarespace has a ton of awesome features like 24-7 support with live chat and email, a commerce platform to allow you to sell your wares. And if you don't even want to make a whole website, if you have a portfolio that you simply want to put online as a kind of resume of your work, they have a cover page feature designed exactly for that kind of thing. Make a beautiful, simple, single page website. Get all this and more at just $12 a month. If you want to see if Squarespace is for you, you can go to their site today and begin a no credit card required trial. And once you decide to sign up for Squarespace, which you obviously will because they're great, make sure to use the offer code Hello to get 10% off your first purchase and let Squarespace know that you came from this podcast. Thanks to Squarespace for supporting the show. So I have a few things to discuss, which all fall under the umbrella of advertising on YouTube and YouTube red and sort of what is YouTube up to these days. And this all kind of started with, I think I'm beginning to feel a bit bullied by the number of ads that show up on YouTube. I feel a bit like where the frog in this boiling water situation, where slowly but surely the number of ads that you can possibly see on the screen at a time has been increasing. Until now where it's just too much. And this started with I came across a kind of ad on YouTube I had never seen before. I was watching a video and below the video in this horrifically ugly format was a big ad to buy something a physical object that was like related to the thing that they were talking about in the video. I was watching a video essentially about like how to build secret compartments in your house. I wasn't asking. And below was this big link to buy on Amazon like, ah, if you don't want to build a secret compartment for your house, you can just buy one of these pre-made secret compartments for your house. It'd be much, much easier. Did you see this actual image of this thing that I'm talking about? I believe I did. I think I saw your screen grab because I know you were so taken aback when it appeared that you shared it with the world on Twitter. And I think I saw your tweet. And I had not seen one before when I saw your tweet. I was like, I've not encountered that. Admittedly, I don't watch as many YouTube videos as you, but it was new to me. I watch enough to have been surprised. This thing is ugly. It's the whole width of the YouTube video on the bottom. It's an ad for the thing. Like this thing just finally put me over the edge. And now that I've seen one, suddenly I'm seeing a few more of them here and there. And I wonder like, did I just never notice this before? It just, it took something for me to tune into it. But this is another kind of ad. And I realized looking at this, that you can be in a situation where you're watching a single YouTube video. And you can end up seeing something like five to six ads, depending on exactly what's happening in the video. It's like, okay, you load up a YouTube video. And there is a pre-roll ad that you have to see. Okay. Next to the pre-roll ad, there's a display ad in the corner, which are those square ads they have in the upper right hand corner. Below that, there can be a sponsored or recommended videos that the algorithm hasn't picked. They're recommended videos that are just ads. They're just labeled as an ad. And then in addition to that, now you can see the advertisement for this thing that you're supposed to buy that's related to the video. And while you're watching the video in the middle of it, it'll pop up a little button that reminds you to buy the thing that the video is about. And then if the video is long enough, right when it ends, you will also see an ad. How do you think there are two you forgot? There are two you forgot. There's the pop-up ads down the bottom, which isn't necessarily related to the recommended thing, just a normal pop-up ad. And also there are now ad annotations, like sponsored annotations as well. Yeah, I wasn't saying the bottom third one because my understanding is at least if you've seen a pre-roll, they shouldn't show you a pop-up ad, right? You should always get one or the other. I didn't know that. Either you get a pre-roll or you get a pop-up ad. If YouTube is working properly, that should be the case. All right. I think theoretically you can see something like six ads for a single YouTube video. I think this is too much now. I don't know what to say about it, but it's like I feel doubly frustrated by this because for some reason, like I'm sure there's a reason, there's always a reason, but I can't even buy my way out of this with YouTube bread. It's like YouTube. Please, I would like to do the most moral thing here, which is let me just give you money and make these ads go away. Although I'm realizing as I'm speaking out loud, I'm not even 100% sure if YouTube bread makes all of the ads go away. I hope it does. I don't actually know. But it's like I want to give you money for YouTube bread, but it's not available in the UK, so I can't. And now I'm just feeling like it's just so many ads. This real feeling like YouTube is in a position where they kind of have an incentive to make the ads really crappy with the YouTube bread system or just to again continue to crank up the number of ads that you see. And it's just I find it frustrating. I'm sure it's not lost on people that it's funny that two guys who earn revenue from YouTube ads are here complaining about YouTube ads, but I think that just shows how impartial we are. So that's wonderful. The second thing though is you were talking about the frog warming up the frog, which is probably actually not the right analogy because if they're warming up the frog, they wouldn't be trying to get us to YouTube bread. It's more like they're dropping it straight in boiling water and hope we jump out onto YouTube bread. But either way, I'm not sure that's what they're doing. What do you think? I don't think it's quite as simple as let's just make it terrible so they go to YouTube bread. I'm just thinking well, if people don't go to YouTube bread, let's at least extract more money out of those people. And they're just coming up with more and more ways to extract money, which is sort of the same. Yeah, it is sort of the same. I mean, look, this is one of the interesting things about making your money off of advertising. I don't have a business that's like this. So I think maybe I'm thinking about it in the wrong way. But it always seems to me like businesses that sell a product and then the interaction is over are cleaner businesses. It's like a cleaner, simpler, straightforward relationship. They want to sell you a thing and you want to buy the thing. And with advertising, there's always this balance to be struck about the needs of the content creator versus what the advertiser wants. Like as soon as you have advertisers, there's always three parties now involved in this transaction, not just two creator, advertiser, viewer. It's not as direct as just purchaser, producer. It makes me just wonder about is there someone somewhere in YouTube whose job it is to increase YouTube red signups? And he thinks like, well, if I can encourage the ad team to increase the number of ads by one percent, like will that increase the number of YouTube red signups by half a percent, which then looks good on my spreadsheet? I don't know if that's the case, but you just have to start thinking about like, what are the incentives and what is this business trying to do? That's all I mean, like it just makes me think and being aware of six ads per YouTube video suddenly feels like intentional or not. There's a real incentive to go use YouTube red. What about the danger they're running of damaging their platform altogether and helping out some of the alternatives? Or do you think the alternatives are just so far behind that YouTube can almost do what they want with impunity and it's not like Vimeo or anyone else is going to catch them? Yeah, well, I mean, I don't think anybody else is going to catch them. I do try to look out on the horizon for alternatives. And I mean, yes, there are some places that might be more interesting than others, but everybody is just so far behind. I don't think YouTube is super concerned about a competitor, though I deeply wish that they were. It falls under just a concern about the perception of the platform as someone who primarily produces content for that platform. I'm really aware of just this makes YouTube look junky. If you try to imagine your mind like imagine you had never seen this website called YouTube and this is the first time you have ever seen it as you land on a video and there's five ads on screen simultaneously while you're waiting for the pre-roll to end. Yeah, I think it looks like garbage. It just looks like some scammy site. It's dated, doesn't it? It looks like there's a crappy website that I just full of ads from the early 2000s. Yeah, it does. So I think that's part of my feeling of this is like the vast majority of the people who watch my stuff, watching on YouTube by an enormous margin. And I want YouTube to look and feel nice because it's the place that I put my videos. And it just kind of looks crappier and crappier over time. We're sitting here now with this many ads, but I can't help but think that in a year from now, just like a year ago when YouTube Red first came out, are there going to be even more different types of advertising on YouTube? I mean, we'll see, but I'll be surprised if between now and then they don't introduce some additional form of advertising on the site in one way or another. I think this is a kind of one-way ship is the way that this goes. Are you surprised how long it's taking for them to bring this YouTube Red advertising opt out and paid content thing outside the US? I thought it would be here by now. It's been around America for ages now, hasn't it? It was on my list to actually discuss YouTube Red for entirely other reasons because we are now at just about the one year anniversary of YouTube Red actually being available for people to buy and use. It seems like I hear from people all around the world in various places where it isn't available. I know they have some international rollout. I'm not exactly sure what the full extent of it is. I do think it is in Australia, but it is not in the United Kingdom, which is just very, very frustrating. My numbers, of course, might be skewed for obvious reasons, but when I look at the demographic data for where do people watch my YouTube videos, United Kingdom is number two. It's the number two most popular place after the United States. It feels like whatever the problem is, YouTube, fix it and roll this out so that I can give you my money to make these ads go away. Could I say something controversial for a second or deeply honest? Please, please. I'm suspicious of your desire for an advocacy of YouTube Red. It is so unlike you to be so into something and want something this much that it makes me feel uneasy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you seem so drinking the cool aid for it that it amazes me. Is it purely just because you want the uncleted experience? Is it because you think it's better for your business? You will earn more as a businessman or you just think it's a really good product. I'm slightly baffled by it. Like, I'm up for it. I'll get it when it comes because I want to see what it's like and I hope it makes YouTube better. But your zil for it is surprising to me. Okay. So part of it is I had an idea pop into my head that I can't get rid of and it has irritated me every time it's crossed my mind. It has popped into my head a little while ago and it was, I keep a bunch of spreadsheets to track my business. And so I know what my hourly rate is. And at some point it occurred to me to break down my hourly rate into a second rate. Like how much is my time worth per second? Because I was thinking about the stupid ads on YouTube and the five second skipable thing. And now every single time I watch an ad and I wait for those seconds to pass by, I can't help but think. I would happily pay $10 a month to get back the time that is being stolen from me in tiny intervals by watching these ads. Great. Just unrelated for a second. I think if you start measuring your time in seconds, there in lies madness. Because like every time you like scratch your knee, you're going to be like, oh my god, I just spent two seconds scratching my knee. I think you are well on the road to madness. Here is the thing. I totally agree with you. I should never have done this calculation. I should never have even allowed this thought to enter my head. But enter my head it did. And then here it is. Right? Now it cannot be banished. My mental calculation of value of my time versus time spent watching YouTube ads ends up being greater than $10 a month. This is the intersection here. Like I'm frustrated because it's like I have the correct economic answer that says I should buy YouTube bread. But YouTube won't let me buy YouTube bread. I think that maybe that's like where the real frustration is coming from is like I want to do this thing, but you won't let me do it. And I also know that the math says this is the correct thing to do. Like this is the correct answer. How often is there like a mathematical answer to a consumer purchase almost never, but like in this one case, there is. So I find it frustrating. But Gray, couldn't you spend those five seconds having an idea or like multitasking or thinking about your next video or putting away a pen that you knew you needed to put back into the pen pot or something? If you use those five seconds for work time, then you haven't lost any time. Does your brain work like that at all? No, but it sounds like yours does. I mean, I'm not here with like a watch beeping every five seconds and dividing my time into five second intervals and switching between different things every fight like that's crazy land. Nobody can do that. How did this conversation turn around to me being made to sound like the crazy person? You literally just said that you now figure out how much you earn per second and worry about lost seconds. You are the crazy person, Gray. You are the crazy person. Don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. No, listen, okay. First of all, economic distinction here. I said, value of my time, not how much I earn per second because when I'm sitting in front of YouTube video, I'm earning nothing. Right? I'm just sitting there. Time is wasted. But you're a lunatic for suggesting that this could somehow be otherwise useful time. I was like, oh, I wanted to watch a video. Click. Five second artificial barrier between me and this video. What am I going to do in that five seconds of time? Nothing, right? It's just lost to the void of my life and I can I get it back. I was taking the mickey a little bit when I was saying put a pen away or think of an idea for the next video because the point I was making is for God's sake, it's just five seconds. Like, you know, you can't do anything in five seconds anyway. And yes, they all add up over the course of a month, but still it's five seconds. It annoys me too. If I can get out of it, I will, but I think you are overstating the problem and turning it into a whole big economic rationalization is silly. Just say, I'm willing to pay ten bucks to get rid of the inconvenience. You don't need to let have a spreadsheet to tell you. Everybody who buys YouTube Red is willing to pay the $10 to get rid of the inconvenience. That's their selling feature. Sorry, YouTube Red original content of which I am totally unaware. Just a few moments before I started recording this message, one of my two main hard drives started making a strange, clicky, clunky sound and a worrying error message appeared on my screen. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not happy about this turn of events. But unlike previous times, I have not broken out in like a cold sweat or started rethinking all my life decisions. And that's because now I have backblaze. Who coincidentally are one of this week's sponsors? Backblaze is a superb unlimited, native backup solution for your Mac and or your PC. Why not have a 15 day free trial of the inner piece it provides? You won't need your credit card to get started. Just go ahead, go to backblaze.com slash hello internet. Now this is a really great service, not just in times of crisis like I may be in now, needing to restore possibly all my data from backblazers, huge servers. You can also just use backblazes a handy way to access your stuff when you're out and about remotely. They've got great apps on both iOS and Android. Very handy if you need to just access one file and it's hard to get to. Backblazers stored 200 petabytes of customer data and restored over 10 billion files for people. Hopefully I'm not about to add to that list, but maybe I will. If you are impressed by the 15 day trial, the full service will set you back just $5 a month for unlimited, unthrottled offsite backup. If you give them a look, make sure you visit backblaze.com slash hello internet so they know you came from here on the podcast. And again, our thanks to backblaze for supporting the show and maybe for the support they're about to give me. Okay, so while I was busy making spreadsheets, I did just think, you know, since I guess we both do YouTube professionally and we talk about YouTube sometimes on this podcast, you guess we do. I don't know whether I'm being insulted there or not. Is this podcast about YouTube or is it about toothbrushes? Which if we actually spent more time discussing, it might really be toothbrushes. Which do I wish we were discussing right now? To toothbrushes. Fair enough. So however, I thought since it has been a year since YouTube Red has rolled out, I was kind of wondering like we were speculating before it came out, we were wondering how might this affect the shape of YouTube? How is this going to affect earnings for creators going forward in the future? We were wondering year ago us like how all of this was going to shake out. And so now here we are a year later us. And so I decided to go through some spreadsheets and some numbers and to try to find out some answers about how much YouTube affects the business. And I thought we're in an interesting position because you and I have sort of normal YouTube channels in a sense that are uploading like traditional videos that are, you know, say maybe like two to fifteen minutes long at most most of the time. And then we also are running this YouTube channel that uploads these freakishly long two hour videos in the form of our podcast. And those videos get enough views on them that there's actual data to be drawn out here. And so I thought, oh, actually this is quite great. We can see like how much does YouTube read like longer videos? How much does this actually affect things? And so pulling back the curtain a little bit, I crunch the numbers for my YouTube channel to see what percentage increase in revenue does YouTube read create for normal YouTube channel like mine? And the answer is 5%. This is the difference that YouTube red makes versus the channel a year ago when I'm looking at any particular video, what percentage of the revenue comes from YouTube red? It's about 5%. Now the actual increase is probably ever so slightly smaller than that because obviously there's some lost advertising revenue from people who are using YouTube red. But I think it's probably insignificant enough that we can just totally round it off. So it's like 5%. It's nice. But for this length of video for this kind of YouTube channel, I feel like YouTube red is just no consideration for me whatsoever. Right. I mean, I'm imagining like you haven't felt like it's raining mana from the sky since YouTube red was introduced. You know, me, I haven't looked at the data and done all that sort of stuff, but you haven't looked at the data. You haven't imported it into a spreadsheet. No, I don't. You haven't drawn trend lines and shown art square values to see what does revenue correlate most highly with. This is not what you've done. No, you haven't done anything. No, I just went the end of my finger and held it up in the air to see what way the wind's blowing. So I haven't noticed anything really. I have noticed when I like, you know, I'm going through all those analytics pages, I've seen that the number attached to YouTube red has gone from like, you know, nearly zero in the early stages to actually being a number now. Right. But how it's affected anything, I haven't really noticed. I'd never thought of it as just a cream on top like the way you're treating the calculation is almost like additional income because obviously the advertising short foil creator bar you're treating has almost been significant. I never thought of it like that. That number is just new money. I just thought it would be a more complicated calculation than that. Yeah, I was trying to do some ballpark calculations from this about like how much revenue is YouTube bread coming in versus what is the possible lost advertising revenue. You know, and obviously I don't have any of the inside numbers. I don't know the details, but I think you can close enough round it off to zero. Like the lost revenue from people on YouTube bread is probably pretty close to zero compared to the revenue that comes in, you know, maybe 1%, but it's close enough that it's not making a huge deal. And one of the reasons that I wanted to actually run the numbers on this is because I have seen this like meme spreading around the internet about YouTube videos that creators are making longer and longer videos because of YouTube ad revenue. This is an idea I've seen repeated over and over again that people are like caching in on YouTube bread money with longer videos. And so it's also a thing that I could look at on my own channel and I took my longest video before two days ago, which was humans did not apply. And just two days ago, I've released the longest video yet and just today the data came in. And so for people who want to know the behind the scenes stuff, a 15 minute video or like a almost 20 minute long video, these push the YouTube revenue numbers up into the relatively high rates of 8% additional revenue versus five. All right. So I think this idea that creators have increased the length of their videos to caching on YouTube bread is crazy if you're talking about videos in the length of like five to 15 minutes. I think the data just does not support this idea. I don't think that this is what's happening. So when you said it's gone from five to eight, you're being sarcastic and saying that's not a big increase or that is a big increase, but it only kicks in if you go up to like 20 minutes. I think the difference for someone who's a professional creator between 5% and 8% for stretching out a video longer than it might otherwise be or picking otherwise longer topics, I can't imagine anybody's really making decisions based on that. I don't think there's anybody whose channel is like, you know what? YouTube bread, longer videos, this is the way to go. Instead of making five minute videos, we're going to make nine minute videos. I just don't think that it shows up in the data that there's a strong enough incentive to actually do that. Now there may be some cargo culting where everybody thinks this is the thing that happens. And so they're making longer videos because they think it matters. But like my spreadsheet say no, that if you're doing this for revenue reasons, it's probably not a good enough reason to justify the additional length of the video. And the reason it could maybe work is that presumably the YouTube bread money pie is distributed based on watch time. So you're trying to get more of that watch time out of the pie. Right. YouTube bread is distributing the money based on watch time. That's precisely why, like if I release a 15 minute long video, it has a higher percentage of revenue from YouTube bread because it's eating up more watch time hours from the viewer. But you have to keep in mind that it's like the watch time from my video is being divided among all of the watch time in all of YouTube. Right. So I'm a enormous number. And so that's why if a video is five minutes versus 15 minutes, that changed while the video is three times longer. It is a tiny additional drop of water in this enormous ocean of watch time that is occurring. And so that's why the percentage doesn't seem to matter very much. So the other thing that could maybe be considered though is does the YouTube algorithm recommend videos more often if they're longer, either in the sort of the recommendations bar along the side or even recommending to subscribe. It's because not all subscribers find out about all videos. I guess that's the other argument, isn't it? Have you got any ideas on that? That is the interesting thing. And I understand why YouTube doesn't do it. But sometimes I really wish they would let us know a little bit about how the recommendation algorithm works. What affects a larger or smaller percentage of your subscribers seeing your videos? Because we really are just totally in the dark. I find it a very interesting statistic, at least on my channel, that if I look at almost any video, if you dig down in the analytics, there's a space where you can see what percentage of the views came from your subscribers versus not your subscribers. And at least from my own videos, that number is something like 50% is usually what it hovers around that half the views are from non-subscribers and half the views are from subscribers. And I just always wonder, I'd love to see some data here on why that other 50% is missing. Is it missing because the people aren't interested in my videos? That's totally fine. Is it missing because the YouTube algorithm decided not to show a million people a recommendation from one of my videos? That I like a lot less, but you just don't know. And so I think it ends up in this kind of YouTube culture of everybody's always trying to guess what is the algorithm up to? And people do guess that maybe it's watch time because YouTube has spent a lot of visual design work re-emphasizing watch time as the central metric that they want to show you for all of their videos. If you're just watching YouTube, you will see those view counters. But if you are a creator, everywhere you log in, watch time is the number one number they want to show you, right? What is the watch time of your channel versus 30 days ago? If you click on the details for any particular video, they show you watch time first and they show you views second. So clearly YouTube is super obsessed with this number. And one of the things that makes me just wonder, like I just don't know, is when I did run the numbers on YouTube red for the Hello Internet channel, I was pretty surprised because over the last couple of months, YouTube red was 40% of the revenue on the YouTube channel. So when you start talking about really long videos, stuff that's like two hours plus, it makes a difference. And more shockingly, on the last video that we released, it's the first video where the lines crossed. YouTube red was more than 50% of the revenue being generated from that video. Gosh. And I think that is really interesting. And what I wonder is like, boy, maybe YouTube doesn't really care a whole lot about the difference between, you know, 5% to 8%, you know, which is the difference between five minutes and 15 minutes. But maybe YouTube cares a lot once you start talking about long form content. Once you start talking about stuff that's up in our plus two hour length, maybe this is where YouTube is going. This is where the algorithm perhaps matters more. It just makes me wonder about like, is this the direction that YouTube is leaning, that they're thinking more and more about long form content? I don't know. We've always known that I kind of wished they were TV and want to be TV and want to have like long proper, proper, I say an inverted commas TV shows on YouTube. Which is baffling to me. Yeah. I just thought maybe it was just because, you know, that was just some stupid dream they had and they should let go of that. But maybe it's all about time. They want the long form shows because they want people on the platform for longer because that's how they make more money. Maybe that's what's been driving it all along. They want you to sit there and watch an hour long episode of Narcos, not a CGP gray, a number file, a minute physics, and then leave. Yeah. It may be the case. It's definitely interesting because in the times where I've spoken to people on the inside of YouTube, I have always found this drum. Some beat of YouTube wanting to be TV just so strange. It's like you understand the traditional TV industry is dying and where is it all going? It's going to the internet and why is it going to the internet because the internet is a different thing. But you seem to be obsessed with this idea of like, oh, if only we were as good as our big brother TV instead of being just what we are. Although great. If I look at myself, I've moved away from TV to online. But the thing I've moved to is not watching 19 five minute videos in a row. It's still watching a box set on Netflix or Amazon Prime. So I think maybe YouTube will write before we realized it that all the attention and time is still going to be long form high production value stuff. And we were thinking no YouTube, it's going to be the stuff that we're making. It's going to be the short stuff made by the amateurs. That's what people want. They're sick of well produced long form stuff. It's not that they're sick of well produced long form stuff. They're just sick of watching it on television to a schedule. Yeah, I mean, I'll definitely grant that. Nobody likes TV, nobody likes schedules. That is for sure. But like, do you spend more time watching quality box set stuff on Netflix and other providers like that? Or do you sit watching videos that are less than 10 minutes long on YouTube? What do you spend more of your time watching? It's an interesting question. It's probably long form content. It's simply because again, it just eats up so many hours. Well, somebody's got to sit here and watch this season of Stranger Things. It's not going to watch itself. And then 10 hours later, and I'm still there watching it and finishing it off. That's how this happened. It's like, oh, Narko season two. Well, there goes my Wednesday, right? All day it's gone. You say that like it's a chore though. I'm the same, but I think that's because it gives me more pleasure. Oh, okay, no, don't get me wrong. I don't mean it like it's a chore. I'm just saying it is much preferable to watch shows. All in one bunch. Yeah. All I'm saying is that the result is how many YouTube videos do I need to watch to equal one season of Narkos? The answer is a lot, right? A huge number of YouTube videos. So even though I think like looking at my own YouTube usage, I feel like I have been watching more YouTube over the past few months than I have earlier in the year, there's no way in terms of just raw hours. It can possibly match my far less frequent Netflix watching that comes in intense bursts when something's on that I want to watch. There's no way those things balance out. I just think maybe the YouTube saw the future and they saw the future was going down this Netflix Amazon Prime now TV, which I watch a lot of on demand stuff. They looked at that and thought that's where all the eyeballs and the time is going to be. Therefore that's where we need to be. And we thought they were wrong. We thought no, it's going to be bitter little producers like us and it's all going to fragment and be disparate and big productions work on the way out. And I think maybe they were right and then we realized, yeah, I think you might be right about this. And I'll tell you another thing, YouTube haven't done it successfully. What they wanted to be, which maybe they were right to want. I think they failed it. Unless all this on demand stuff that's about to come through the pipes through YouTube bread is amazing. I think that I've been unsuccessful. Yeah, they're clearly trying to get into the look at us where Netflix were producing our own content game. That's clearly where they're going. And I think that's partly why, you know, I think it was a bit less clear when the YouTube bread announcement first came out because people were complaining about, and I felt the same way like, boy, nine bucks a month is a big amount to pay for no ads on YouTube. But it makes way more sense if you reframe it in the idea that a couple years from now, YouTube wants to be like Netflix. They want to have their own original content that they are producing that is super long form that is very high quality that people are paying for a subscription to access it. And then the 999 price fee makes a lot more sense if they're trying to sell it that way. But I think in the original announcement, it was a bit more like there's ad for YouTube and also will give you some music. Oh, and we have a couple of shows with PewDiePie where he runs around that we've made as well and you can watch them on YouTube. But I think maybe like that was really the big thing in that announcement, not ad for YouTube, but we want to make our own long form content and we need to raise a whole bunch of money to be able to do it. I don't know this is true enough and I know I'm not very well read on the subject, but it almost feels like they've attacked it from the wrong direction or a different direction that may not be right because Netflix obviously have attacked it from a more traditional Hollywood direction. Haven't they? They're getting all the big directors and the big actors and the big Hollywood productions and they're making their Netflix originals, which are like these TV shows that don't just name them all again, but we've liked a lot of them. And it feels like YouTube have gone more down an angle, at least it seems to me, but maybe it's just the circles I move in. They're taking all the YouTube celebrities and getting them to make the long form stuff. So people that made their name on YouTube are now getting the budget to make longer things and YouTube originals. It just doesn't have the same feeling about it. It doesn't have that feeling of like, oh, I must appointment to view. I can't wait till PewDiePie's new series comes out. It's going to be amazing. It still feels like YouTube and cheap, whereas when a new Netflix originals comes out, like a narcos comes out, you're like, oh, wow. This is awesome. This is so well made and so well done. And I wonder if YouTube have played that right. I wonder if they have gone the right way or they had no other card to play. They played to their strength, which was their carder of YouTube. So they're pretty. It's an interesting point because yes, that would be YouTube strength is we have a ton of people who know how to make videos. Can we give them a bunch of money to produce long form content? And in like PewDiePie's case, can we work with them to try to produce an actual thing? Up until this point, I have seen exactly one YouTube red show, which was a single episode of PewDiePie's scarathon. Your word is exactly right. It felt kind of cheap and it was a very strange viewing experience because I was recognizing like, this is clearly a kind of Hollywood production. There must be 200 people involved in this thing. I mean, the basic setup of the show was the premises they put PewDiePie in an environment that scares him. It's not a bad idea. And so it was an episode of where they have him in some hospital, right? And everybody's in the hospital acting crazy. And I just kept trying to put my finger on like, I don't know what it is about the way this is being filmed or the way it's handled. But yeah, it feels way more like a YouTube video. But suddenly now that you have stretched it to an hour long show, the feelings all wrong, like I don't feel like I'm watching a TV show. This premise isn't bad. Like there's something interesting that you could do with this, but it was a strange production. I haven't seen anything else that's been produced on YouTube red, but it's a weird endeavor. I mean, I'm sure everyone's now going to get in touch and tell me that Stephen Spielberg's been recruited to make a five-part series exclusively for YouTube or something. And if that's the case, fair enough, I look forward to seeing it. But the thing that would then be interesting will be creating a culture of watching quality stuff on YouTube in its messy format that you were talking about before, YouTube's. It's gone down this path where the platform's starting to feel a bit more uncomfortable, not look quite as nice. And I think they need to smarten up the look of the platform. And I'm sure once you go into red mode and the ads are gone, that helps. It does mean going back to where we started with this, which is this page looks like garbage with all these ads on it. It does mean that there's a bifurcated experience. The goal of producing something that's like a Netflix where there is a selection of things for you to watch that are arranged. They're all long-form. They're all in this way. The goals of that feel very different to me from the goals of we have a million YouTube channels or people uploading whatever. And it's just crazy videos and some of it's very good and some of it's very terrible. Some of it is hilarious and some of it is awful. Those two worlds don't seem to mix. And my only experience with this of what YouTube has done is YouTube did try to make a YouTube gaming, which is like a version of YouTube where they're only trying to show you video game related stuff. And it just feels so strange and weird and tacked on to YouTube. And every once in a while, YouTube will flip into the gaming mode and like, oh god, go back YouTube. This is terrible. So I don't know. It's like YouTube is kind of fracturing in a bunch of directions maybe that like the things that they would need to do to make a pleasant long form high quality viewing experience. And contrary to the current YouTube experience. And maybe that's the whole goal. That sounds just like the way Google would do something to it. It'd be typical Google to fragment and go in eight different directions and see what sticks to the wall and what doesn't. That seems to be their strategy sometimes and it's sort of hard to follow. It's not always pretty watching them do it. Yeah, that is very Google. But I guess I guess the bottom line is go watch the podcast on YouTube. Yeah. You know what everyone's asking? Well, there's quite a few things people are asking us about these days, but probably top of the list is going to have to be black mirror on Netflix. We've been getting a lot of tweets about that. I think we're going to have to set black mirror as homework. Yeah. Because if the feedback is anything to go by, the people demand us. No. The people are demanding it quite vocally. Have you watched it? Yeah, I haven't watched any of it yet. I have watched none of it yet, Brady. I'm entirely going to wait for us talking about the next time. I don't even know how many shows there are. I know literally nothing. I know nothing. Next time we speak, hopefully we will both have watched it and may have something to say. And we may have something to say. I think I'm going to be in America next time we speak, depending on when we schedule the next recording. I'm actually going to be in America for the election. Oh. That's what I wanted to ask you. What do you do on election day in America? Do people have parties or like, where do I hang out? What do I do? I have to sit on my own and watch news channels or I can't wait. But I don't know what to do at a loan or with people or... I don't know what to tell you because I have never been an adult in America when an election is occurring. I'm like, okay. I have lived my whole adult life here. I have no idea what happens in America on election day. So you're going to have to report back about whatever it is. Like, I don't know. Does everybody wear hats? I don't have the slightest idea what happens on election day in America. So I expect a full report next time, Brady. All right. So next time we speak, I'll tell you about what I did on election day in America and we will discuss Black Mirror.

==Episode List==

References[edit | edit source]

  1. "H.I. #72: 64 Pairs of Underwear". Hello Internet. Hello Internet. Retrieved 12 October 2017.