"H.I. #91: Last Man to Die?" is the 91st episode of Hello Internet, released on October 31, 2017.^[1]

Official Description[edit | edit source]

Grey and Brady discuss: singing, the psychology of self-checkout machines, laygo, animal emoji changes at Apple, yet more ways to be freebooted, 'nudity' on YouTube, school photos, plane crash corner, and death and immortality.

Sponsors[edit | edit source]

"Last Man to Die?"
	Hello Internet episode
	{{#widget:YouTube\|id=DwWBV0AaXik\|height=188\|width=336}} Episode 91 on the podcast YouTube channel
Episode no.	91
Presented by	CGP Grey; Brady Haran;
Original release date	October 31, 2017
Running time	02:00:22
Sponsors	Videoblocks; Backblaze; Squarespace;
Episode chronology
← Previous; "Pumpkin Pressure"	Next →; "Grey Honeypot"
	List of Hello Internet episodes

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Show Notes[edit | edit source]

Discuss this episode on the reddit

Apple animal emoji changes

H.I #80: Operation Twinkle Toes

Brady: Animal Locomotion - Objectivity #137

Brady makes art sexually suggestive

Grey's view while editing plane crash corner. Thanks, Brady.

Grey: Why Die?

Live fast, but die old

Kurzgesagt: Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever?

Other[edit | edit source]

Fan Art

Flowchart

Summary

Transcript

Brady's before gentlemen. Okay. It's still quite not had a party set sentence for, okay. I just thought of it there and I've never heard it before. When I'm like checking my sound before like I phone into you so I'm just checking it on my own. I don't know what most people would do with they would just like check one too or say hello, hello. But I always sing. Like I always sing to the microphone when I'm doing my check on my own. And it just made me wonder to see to be great ever. Sing. I can't imagine you singing to yourself. I mean Brady, I am human after all. If you prick me I will bleed. Right. I don't think there is a human on earth who doesn't in some circumstance sing. Yeah. It's a very very human experience that I definitely replicate on occasion. Try to think like what is the best most probable singing time for me would be driving in a car on my own. That's going to be pretty high probability of singing time because I think that's the best time to sing to oneself. Okay. You sing in the shower Brady, you seem like a singer in the shower kind of guy. No, I don't sing in the shower. Really? The shower was like my thinking time. I sing to the dogs a lot. Do you mean literally sing to the dogs or talk in a sing song you way? No, I'll sing to them but like I'll sing them a song but I'll change the words of the song to make it about the dogs. So like instead of like singing like brown-eyed Gill I'll sing brown-eyed dog to the dogs and things like that. Or if it's songs got the name of a woman in it like a love song I'll change it to one of the dogs names or something. It seems like a lot of effort for very little understanding on their part probably. And singing to yourself in the car is like a good use of your time. I don't think it's an argument I had a good use of the time. I was simply saying it seems like a lot of creative effort to change the song to be dog-related. I don't like sit there and like write a few drafts. I'm just singing a song and just change the word on the spot. There's no effort. It's not like a difficult thing to do. I don't think I could change a song on the fly like that. To me it would seem like oh you'd have to really think about that. I guess if you're as good with words as a breed is you can just spontaneously start singing and the words come out. Oh it's just simple. Like if there's a line of a song that says you know I love you baby you just change it to I love you Lulu. There's no cleveness here. I'm not like changing all the different words and the meaning of the song. I'm just like changing one word to make it cute about the dogs. I'm sure they appreciate it Brady. The question I have is if you're not particularly into songs. What songs do you sing? Like I kind of imagine you knowing the words to any songs. It's more just that the music plays a very particular role in my life. I don't have very many venues for new music to come into my life. I just don't follow it. Yeah. I feel like most people you get kind of largely stuck in the music that existed when you were younger. So I feel like there's a bunch of songs that I have on rotation that are from a while ago. So you would sing along. You would never sing without music to sing along with. You would like to just walk down the stairs and sing like the first line of a song that's stuck in your head for some reason. I'm literally not sure I could do like this didn't even occur to me as a scenario. When you're discussing you're singing to the dogs I presume that there's something on the radio and you're changing the lyrics on the fly. As you're singing along to the dogs. This changes the whole conversation, because the singing is along with something. Yeah. And then the song is guiding your brain in this rut that's a very familiar rut. So I couldn't just do it spontaneously. That's madness. I don't know how you can do that. Like I wouldn't do a full song, but like if like one or two lines of a song get stuck in my head and often it's a song I don't like. Like I was at the gym a few days ago and they were playing the song Hold On by Wilson Phillips, which is a song from my youth, but it's not a song I would like anyone to ever hear me sing. And it's just one line from the song. It's been stuck in my head for days and days. And I just keep singing that one line of the song as I walk up the stairs and I want it to go away. But I will just sing it, you know. I'm sorry about that torment Brady. This is not a frequent experience for me. The line goes if you hold on for one more day. But then if the dogs walk in the room I'll sing if you hold on for one more dog. You know, like, I'll just sing it to the dogs. I see the pattern here. I don't want things to their dogs. You wait and say, I don't think to Lucy. Oh, and you could sing actual Lucy songs too. I used to have a dog called Lucy and I had another dog called Carlos and they used to be out in the backyard together and my friend Tim used to come around and he would sing Lucy in the backyard with Carlos to the music of Lucy in the sky with diamonds. I guess Lucy is a name that has more song possibilities than Lulu. Yeah. Songwriter is out there. Get on the Lulu songs. When we used to have music lessons in school, we used to have to sing out of the songbook. There was a song about Lulu. It was called Don't Bring Lulu and it was about someone was throwing a party and they didn't want them to bring this person called Lulu because she always ruined the party. I often sing Don't Bring Lulu to Lulu. What are you talking about singing out of the songbook? We used to have these music lessons in primary school where we had these single-on books and the teacher would then put on a tape that came with the book and the songs would play on the cassette tape. We would have to sing along. It was just one of the activities we would do. Oh, okay. So you're talking about little, little kid school. Okay. Yeah, primary school. But there was a song called Don't Bring Lulu and all the songs used to sing in school. They're all burned into my head. I still know the lyrics to Don't Bring Lulu. So I have got a Lulu song ready to roll. Good. You should sing it to her after the show. I can't. She's not here tonight. Oh, wait. Where is she? Well, I'm away for the next few days. So the dogs are away at their holiday home. Oh, okay. I have a sad time for me when the dogs are away. Right. Holiday home in the country. It's by the beach. By the beach. They love it. They get to walk on the beach every day. We better than living with you. It is. I sometimes think they're a bit sad when they come home. Regular listeners or even irregular listeners to Hello Internet would know that you and I have different attitudes to supermarket checkouts. You prefer the self-checkout because you don't like sort of awkward interactions with the people who are doing the check out. And I prefer to go through with the people because I think the people working in the supermarket are quicker and better at it. And I don't mind the interaction. You're a man of the people. You like to have a little chat here. What's going on in their life? This has been well established. So anyway, an amazing thing happened tonight, like a switch went tonight in a funny kind of way. Because I went to the supermarket tonight and it was just a quick smash and grab. I just need just a grab three things. Dinner. I just need a three things. And I had my three things. And then I got to the checkouts. There's a long, long, rough checkouts where I shop very long. Human checkouts. Human checkouts. And then right at the end I were all the self checkouts. But I was very far from the self checkouts. And I walked up to the human checkouts with their big, long conveyor belts and their spacious alleys for supermarket trolleys and all of that. And it was very quiet and there were two or three that had no people. So I could have just walked up and said, here are my three things. Thank you very much. And I was suddenly overcome with this sense of like guilt or they would think I was a bad person for going up to the normal check out with the big conveyor belt and all the infrastructure in place for trolley. And I was just going there with my three items. I felt like if I went up, I felt like I couldn't do it. I felt like three items were too few. So instead I traced all the way to the end to the self check out where I had to queue and where there were people using the self check out using trolleys with up to like 40 items, laboriously self checking them self out. And I stood there in the queue waiting to use my three items on the self check out because I felt this pressure or guilt or something coming from somewhere that I couldn't use a human check out with so few items. Brady, Brady, two things. First of all, this story just confirms to me like you don't know how to supermarket. There's something about those that invalidates everything you've ever told me about your supermarket use. And secondly, I feel like you're also in a supermarket in an alternate universe like who's going to the self check out with a truck. Like I have never seen such a thing where someone goes to the self check out. Oh, yeah, to be fair, that freaked me out too. I swear she had at least 40 items in her trolley and she was very slow. I was like, why? Okay, but does your supermarket not have a 10 items or fewer lane that would absolve your guilt of having the few items? Yeah. And that's right next to the self check out. But once I'd gotten there, I thought I will. I might as well do the self check out now. It's only three items. But there were all these empty lanes up ahead. And I don't know whether it's just in my head or there is some pressure that's happening in society now where if you've got few items, it's considered bad to use a check out person. But I felt like I couldn't do it. Okay, I think this is all on your head, but I'm curious about this. Do you feel that there is some kind of social norm that is spreading here? That. If you have small items, you have to use the self check out. Yeah, I feel like if you're like a young, able bodied person with a few items, like there I was, you know, oh, look, I'm all super fit in my gym gear and all my style. Yeah, I'm a, you know, with my three items. And then if I went into like the lane for the people with trolleys or people who struggle to do things themselves, they'd look at me and go, what are you doing here? Like, can't you do this yourself? You're like, what are you? So you feel like the human check out lanes are not for the physically fits and with small items. Like is that where you feel like this is going? Like you need a bunch of stuff or you need difficulty. That must be it. I felt like I would be abusing a privilege, which I know is stupid. And like it keeps people in a job if I use that lane. Yeah. But I felt like it would be lazy of me to have used it. And it just happened tonight. I would just, I walked towards and I thought, nah, I can't do it. I've got to go and do the self check out. Even though I've got to walk all the way to the other end of the store and then go in a line and then do the checking out myself, which I hate doing and I'm not good at. I have this mental image of you walking past 10 cash years, every one of them with their eyes on you watching you walk past thinking that guy is part of the problem. That guy is why I'm going to get fired next week because he wanted to check out lanes. And I may be a rot. It was a weird thing. I thought you'd be placed by it, but I couldn't believe I was doing it. I think it just confirms to me that we have wildly different supermarket experiences and that makes no sense. I feel like there's a related question here about social expectations around the use of common areas in this way. So here's a question. There's a bunch of bathrooms. One of the bathrooms has the handicap symbol on it. All of the bathrooms that you could use except for that one are full. What do you do in the scenario Brady? Probably white. You'd wait. Interesting. Is anyone there that can save me? There is a security camera in the hallway. So you're looking at a bunch of doors and there's a hallway and this is security camera. I mean, I'd be less worried about a security camera than actual other people. I pick that in particular. There's no human, but you are not purely on your own. If I was capable of waiting, I would most likely wait. If the situation felt like it was becoming urgent, I may go into the unused one. But if I could wait, I would probably wait. What about you? I have always been of the opinion very firmly that those bathrooms are handicap accessible. They are not handicap exclusive. Right. I am perfectly happy without any social guilt whatsoever to stroll right into the handicap bathroom. Also though, the times I have used those toilets, I actually find all that extra space quite disconcerting to use a toilet and have a really long, long way away to the door and have all that open space around me. I find quite unnerving, don't you? Is it like bathroom agoraphobia? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I kind of. I don't want to be using a bathroom with that much space around me and be that far from the door. Because if someone opens the door or tries to open the door, I'm too far away to do anything about it. That is a good point if you forget to latch it. You don't have the ability to emergency slam shut the door and save everyone the embarrassment of what's happening. Yeah. All that's going to happen is the door opens and there you are, it's going to be to the world. I'm picturing that frog walking in there. That's that pervy frog that you're scared of watching you on the toilet. Yeah, he just opens the door and stands there and smiles at you. That's what the frog does. He's not even there to use the bathroom. He's just there to watch. I noticed that you have changed your Twitter handle and picture to get into the Halloween theme. You have succumbed to the pump compressor. How about succumbed to pump compressor? I don't know about that. You did. Do you think that's a fair description of what occurred? Oh, well, I mean, either that or someone just suggested such a cracking name that you couldn't resist using it. You obviously have extremely creative friends. Here's the thing, Brady. Sometimes you hear an idea and you just know the idea is irresistible. I feel like it's not actually pump compressor. I just thought that idea was too good to pass on. Plus, unbeknownst to you at the time of recording, I was immediately after going to be posting a video that was related to death. So as soon as that show was over, I was like, I can't not do this. I have no free will in this scenario. I'm going to have to change my name to R.I.P. Gray. It's not even a choice. So are you happy, though? Do you feel pleased with yourself? I do feel like a little sense of ownership. Obviously, because you then put out a death video, it did make me wonder, would you have done it if you didn't have a death video in the works? But I think you would have. I think it was a good enough idea that you would have. To be fair, the death video thing made it perfect. It made it absolutely perfect in the world. But it struck me as just such a good idea. And such again, masterful wordsmithing on the part of a Brady Harron. I think had the stars not aligned, you would still have had a pretty good chance of getting me to do that. Can I just say this whole, with this people changing their names to Halloween themed and changing their avatars and that? The thing about it that bothers me the most. I don't know if it was hammered home enough in the last episode. So I just, this is one point I want to make. It's not so much my problem with doing it. It's how long people do it for. They should just do it on the day of Halloween, like just on the 31st, change your name to something spooky. I have a laugh doing it for the whole month. You know, I don't think they celebrate at the end of World War Two for a month. And yet we change things for Halloween for a whole month. I have to completely agree with you on that. And also I agree that we didn't hammer it home well enough in the previous show. It's like, it could be fun for a day, but the length of time, it's just too much. It's just too long. And even the whole RIP Gray thing, I was aware that I felt like it was a little soon to do it anyway. Halloween is fantastic as we both agree. One of the best holidays in the year. Everybody loves Halloween. But doing it for an entire month is just too long. I'm also going to say, I especially think Halloween is a holiday that really doesn't serve being stretched out for a long period of time. Christmas, I can kind of get on board with stretching Christmas from Thanksgiving until Christmas. But we just have a time of year that is merry and filled with lights. It's the season. It's a season. Yeah, it's a Christmas season. I'm fine with that. I don't like it with it. Six months in advance. Right. But I can deal essentially with two months of Christmas. That's fine. But a month of Halloween is like if we had Valentine's Day and you started Valentine's Day stuff January 7th. No more Halloween stretching people. Fito. Come on. One day. I enjoy the week before. Build up week before seeing the decorations go up. But they sell pumpkins so long before Halloween that I think there's no way those pumpkins are still going to be good by Halloween. I feel like there's a delicate line which I'm okay with sort of fall themed decorations maybe up to a month before Halloween. And in that case it's like, oh putting out some pumpkins. Pumpkins a little close. But if you want to put out a squash, I'm very okay with that. But it's like where do we draw the line of what becomes a Halloween decoration between what or what is just like seasonal decoration. I don't know exactly where to draw that line but it just needs to specify you know for the record here that I'm okay with some fall themed decorations leading up to Halloween. But Halloween is spiders and ghosts and skulls and witches and werewolves and vampires and all that stuff. That's week before tops. In the previous episode I said and I spoke on behalf of my home nation of Australia that when we pronounce the word Lego we say Lego and you were quite surprised by this. You were like, oh what a funny way to say Lego and I'm not telling you great. It was an Australianism. I had never come across. It was an Australian. In Australia we say Lego. Can you imagine my horror when my fellow Australians started calling me out on it and saying, what are you talking about, Brady? It's Lego. I was like, oh my goodness. Is this like have I just alone been doing it wrong all this time? Yeah was this a joke that your family pulled on you? I think all families have that thing that they do which I think is kind of strange where a kid is mispronouncing something in a funny way and the whole family just lets it slide for what seems like a really long time. Like maybe your family did this with you and Lego. Well anyway I was a bit worried. So I did a bit more research, a bit more polling, a bit more informal surveying of people out there and also reading some articles and it turns out saying Lego instead of Lego is a South Australian thing. It's something that a lot of people from my home state of South Australia, the capital of which is Adelaide. Right. Say. So it's actually a regional pronunciation that I was voicing upon you. Not all Australians, probably not even all South Australians for all I know, but it's a very South Australian thing to say Lego and I've since learned there are other little enclaves of Canada and the United States like certain regions or states and areas where I was also getting a high Lego pronunciation. So there are little pockets of Lego out there but it wasn't like a whole countrywide thing and I just wanted to clarify that. I'm just pulling up a map of Australia here. Because when you say South Australia, do you, do you mean, oh this is embarrassing, is the word province, what's the subdivision? Their states. States, okay. Do you mean the state of South Australia or do you mean southern Australia, like the bottom half of Australia? I mean the state of South Australia because Victoria and New South Wales which to your I would also appear to be southern states, other more popular states and they do not say Lego. They were the ones who would jump in with me. What do you mean to my eyes? Is there some way that they're not more southern? Okay. Yeah, you said like it was like it's a little known fact outside of Australia but South Australia which is not the southern most Australian state by far is actually which one on the map differently than it really is. Okay. You are right. But to defend myself, if you lived in Australia, you would refer to those as the eastern states, Victoria and New South Wales and Queensland, you would say the eastern states. Where are you from? I'm from the east coast, I'm from the eastern states. So even though Victoria and New South Wales are very southern, they are referred to as eastern. This is the linguistic southern versus the actual southern. Yes. Okay. I just wanted to clear that up to reduce the amount of feedback that you weren't getting from someone from Perth complaining that people in the southern part of Australia don't say Lego. I know my Australian geography here, Brady. That's right. It's just exciting to hear you talking about these places to be honest. Do you like that? We could talk about a little northern territory, Darwin. Northern territory, of course, is not a state. Right. It's a territory. There's sometimes talk about giving the Northern Territory statehood but it hasn't happened yet. They drink a lot of beer in the Northern Territory. Oh, yeah. The highest beer consumption per capita of anywhere in the world. I mean, it looks like if you're in Darwin, you're very far from everything else. So what are you going to do? You're going to say Lego and you're going to drink your beer. You're going to drink your beer. Hello Internet. We're happy to let you know about a new sponsor this week, Video Blocks. If say you work in the YouTube world, if you make videos, if you make audio productions of any kind, you'll know that stock video and audio and photos can be a fortune. I know in the past I have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on videos just sourcing stock for them. You know that humans need not apply video for many years ago? Very expensive to make. Video blocks are new sponsor is here to solve that problem. You can get all of the images, video and stock audio you need for one yearly price of get this $149. That price is so low, I triple checked it before reading it in this ad because it is simply unbelievable to me. 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So there's always something fresh. So this is the one stop shop you need for all your stock media requirements. And as they're a new sponsor, if you're thinking about this, if this is a service you might even want to try, go give them a shot, go to video blocks.com slash hello internet and start a seven day free trial to check them out. That's video blocks.com slash hello internet. Thanks to them for making stock photography and video and audio ridiculously cheaper than it was before. So of course, in the great tradition of hello internet, it feels like as soon as we talk about a thing. The whole world around that thing changes. I'm sure because of the show we are influencers. Yes, we are influencers. Shapers of culture. By no means is this the car effect or when you buy a car, you see it everywhere. It's not that at all. It's like a reverse the secret. We think about a thing in the whole world around us changes to bend to our thoughts. That's just a straight line of causation. It's a straight line of causation. So one of the things that has happened is we have been discussing emoji. We have been discussing animal emoji in particular in some data and B emoji in particular. And complained about Apple B emoji. Guess what emoji is being changed in the next release of iOS Brady. Really? The B emoji is getting an update. That run out. Yeah. Now, this brings up a thing that I wanted to discuss with you. So if you look at the link that I have put in the show notes, I am. It is not just the B emoji that is getting changed. There are five animal emoji that are getting changed in the next update to iOS. Okay. The B, the snail, the octopus, the whale, and the dolphin. Okay. On the image you are looking at, the top row is the new version and the bottom row is the old version. Yes. Can you describe for the listeners what you're looking at and tell me your thoughts on these changes? Well, let me talk you through it. We do spend a lot of time talking about emojis for an audio medium. But anyway, I think emojis and podcasts is like peanut butter and jelly. Right. They just go together perfectly. So the old B was like a big fat, bolly B with little tiny, tiny stick legs and stick antenna. And now it's getting more substantial realistic insecty legs and beefed up antenna, more realistic beefed up wings. Yeah. But a slightly droopier sting. Yes, it's true. It does have a droopier sting. There's a big B eye as well. Yes. Of course, the change of the eye is probably the most significant change from just a little lazy white dot when someone really wasn't trying to a more sort of realistic big three-dimensional dome-like dark eye with even with a little bit of white reflection in it from the light. From the camera that is somewhere off screen for this emoji or the window or whatever. Yeah. Okay. The snail, the main changes to the snail. It's just got more detail. They're just putting more sort of photo realism in there. And again, they've obviously decided the previous eyes that are on the end of the stalks on the head of the snail were just too small and insignificant. And they've given it sort of slightly larger darker eyes. I'll add the B. And the snail also used to have two little human eyes on top of its stalks. Like if you zoom in, they're basically human eyes, like no, no eyes, eyes like that. So yes, more realism there. A bit more realism, but not a dramatic change. The octopus on the other hand, they've gone in hard because the old octopus is quite cutesy and was sort of looking at you front on and it looked like something that would be a child's toy or something you wanted to give a little cuddle to. And significantly, it also has four legs. But the upgrade, they've gone for more the killer octopus that you're scared will grab a ship and pull it underwater. And again, it looks more realistic. It looks more aggressive. It's in a more aggressive pose. Oh, yeah, I just realized that octopus is doing like a little bicep curl with you, Durham. They still haven't up their game to eight legs. They stopped at six. Well, you know, what can you do? And you know, there's just a little bit more texture on the head. And again, we've gone for more sort of realism. Moving on to the whale. The whale again was super cute, cutesy, child's toy that would play within the bath. And they've kind of maintained the cuteness. It hasn't changed a tremendous amount. They've put the eye in a more realistic place. It still doesn't look like a very realistic whale. And they've added a lot more fine detail to the water spout that it's blowing out the top. And finally, the dolphin. The dolphin, again, hasn't changed much. They went from a pretty kind of run of the meal, artistic representation of a dolphin. That's quite cutesy. And they've pretty much kept it that way, but they've just added more sort of texture and fluting and design to the side of the dolphin. And they've made the fins look a bit more real. It still doesn't look like a real dolphin, but they've given it more. It looks more like something that would be a living thing rather than a drawing. Do you have a preference for the new versus the old? Like if you have to accept them as a package, new versus old. As a package, I prefer the old. I don't like the path they're going down here. They're moving away from the spirit of emojis. I agree with you 100%. And in fact, when I saw this image, I was thinking about our conversation last time about emojis, a surprising amount. Like you're talking about how songs get stuck in your head and you're thinking about them over and over again. I found myself, since I last recording, constantly thinking about like, what is the platonic ideal of emoji? Like this is an idea that was just recurring in my brain over and over again. And while I was thinking that, of course, like our show goes out and then a couple of days later, Apple as a direct result announces that they're going to change a bunch of the emoji. And this image, like this side by side image here of the five animals and how they're changing it, it really crystallized something in my mind, which is like, I didn't like the Apple emojis all that much to begin with. And now I really don't like them. And it is because it's like Apple has lost the way of what an emoji is. And the thing that crystallized in my mind is like, oh, I know what emoji are. Emoji are modern, high-roglyphics. And as such, they need some level of abstraction. Like emojis are almost like an alphabet. And the more I think you make it like a photograph, which is the way Apple is clearly going, like they're making them more photograph like more impossible to draw. The less I feel like they're emoji, the less I like them. And I think there's also crystallized why in the last show when we were talking about the blobs. Like the Android emojis would draw a family. It would be a family of blobs. Like four little blob creatures. Like, oh, that's a family versus an increasingly realistic depiction of a family. And I could never quite put my finger on like, why does that kind of bug me? And now I know because I feel like some level of abstraction is intrinsic to what an emoji is. And if you're taking away all abstraction, I don't think it's an emoji anymore. Like, it's just a picture. I mean, speculating on what's going on here, because I think I kind of see what's going on here and why it's happening. And it all comes down to how you use your emoji. Okay, tell me. There are two main ways that I use my emoji. The first way is when I'm sending text messages, maybe to someone like you where exchanging a series of SMSes and occasionally will drop an emoji and to be funny or express something. And in that case, the emoji is appearing in a line of text. And ideally, you want it to be about the size of the text, because it's sometimes it's in the line. Right. And when that happens, the small, cute, low detail emoji are ideal. And the super detailed emoji seem, in fact, seem very, very useless. I can't imagine these emoji at that size. There is a second way that I use emoji, though. And that is when I'm on Snapchat, sometimes I'll take a picture and I want to add an emoji to the picture. And when you do that, you make your emojis much bigger. Right. You drag them onto the screen and then you pinch with your fingers, outwards to make them bigger and bigger. So they become almost a feature of the picture. Like, I might take a picture of the sea and then say, oh, wouldn't it be funny if I put a big emoji whale in this swimming in the sea? Right. That the emoji becomes very big. And in that case, the detail starts having some use. And in some ways, I see more utility in the detailed ones. And the very low detail emojis, when they're blown up big, become quite unuseful. And they just sort of look at a place and wrong. They don't work. So I don't use them. So I think what's happening is they're seeing more and more people are using their emojis as these huge decorative ornaments in sort of picture-based communication. And they're being used less and less as a punctuation mark in a sentence. And maybe that's why they're changing the emojis in this way. And for me, that's a shame because I still prefer the use of emoji and sentences and text in a tweet or text to someone. So these detailed ones are doing me a disservice. But I can imagine on Snapchat, these ones will be a bit handier. That's an interesting distinction. I have a slightly more cynical interpretation. Apple is rolling out this animoji feature with their new phone where you can have the emoji be animated. Okay. I have a suspicion that Apple is setting up all of these emojis as being animated things in the future to maybe integrate with the face recognition on their phone or to be able to do things with. Maybe or maybe not, someone spent a lot of time looking through the history of all the Apple emoji and seeing the direction they were going in. Who knows? If you were to do that, there's a clear arrow toward increasing detail and especially suddenly, like way more detail. I suspect that that's where they're going with this. But that aside, on all platforms, you're totally right that there are two different use cases. There's in line with text and there is out of line with text. That's totally true. But what makes an emoji an emoji versus like the concept of a sticker, which many platforms have, is that an emoji can exist in line with text. That's what it is. Like I feel very strongly that that is the level that the design should be at and at that level, you have to have some abstraction built into the design. You can't just have a tiny picture of the thing. You have to have some level of abstraction. But yeah, big giant detailed emojis everywhere. That's where we're going. I do think your emoji theory is more likely right, actually. If I have to weigh up my theory, which involves Apple saying, let's make emojis that are more useful for our customers or your theory, which is let's make emojis which will sell more iPhones. G, how does that board meeting go? Amongst the first world YouTuber problems that we grow up about most, free booting must be up there. I've been another free booting victim recently, but it did highlight one of my little gripes about free booters that I don't think I've raised before. Just quite interesting. I know. Is it possible? Is there something we haven't raised before about free booting? Is there some depth left unplummed on this topic? It's shocking. I think you'll appreciate this one. And I think it comes from a confusion that people have about using things fairly, fair use and things like that. And it's maybe a confusion that someone like you has helped foster with some of our previous conversations, although I don't think you're the root of the problem here. I just think it's like, because people have probably heard us in the past often talk about percentages like when we were talking about that recent fair use thing. There was what percentage of the video was taken and stuff like that. So this is what I'll just give you the practical example, because this shows the example perfectly. I got some alert or something on my system saying, oh, someone's free booting video. Go and check it. So I went along and did my check because I always have a look and see what's going on. This is in the YouTube content system. In the YouTube backend. Because sometimes they haven't free booted or it is fair use. So it's not even my content and things like that. So I'll go and have a look. So I find this video, and it's this math video of mine. And the free booter in question has taken like a huge chunk of the video, like not the whole video, but say three or four minutes. Consecutive, unedited, uncommented. It's just a really nice explanation of a mathematical concept with nice animations. And it was very useful to this person. So they've taken that piece of my video and they've dropped it into a video they've made that's about an hour long. I imagine it's made to be like a lecture or a lesson or something. It's a big long video. And part way through, they've obviously said, oh, to understand this concept, here we go. And then they'll play my video for three or four minutes. And then they crack on with whatever they were doing in their video, just dropped it in. And in their kind of thing that they wrote where they like defend the why this is fair use, their defense was this is fair use because I used four minutes of your video. But that is only 10% of my whole video. Because my whole video, only 10% of it is your video. That's fair use because that's hardly anything. And all the rest of it came from other places. So I haven't free booted you. And I think that's ridiculous. I mean, that's a new one to me. I haven't come across that before. I've seen it a few times. I mean, by that rationale, I could upload all of Star Wars. And as long as I tag another 30 hours on the end of it of me just juggling, I can say, hey, I didn't free boot Star Wars because it's only 10% of my video. Yeah. I think like, I'm just going to go around and make a compilation of all of the funniest videos on YouTube, right? And for each individual content creator, I mean, oh, but you're only 1% of the total thing that has been created. Yeah. It's like if I walked around Bristol and punched 50 people in the face and one of them came up to me and said, hey, you just assaulted me and I said, hey, no, no, I punched 50 people in the face. Metaphor escalation here. You haven't been assaulted because lots of other stuff has happened. So you haven't been wronged. So I guess you see this a lot like people are using your videos in like a longer selection of it of I think is I think that's just interesting. Yes. Like, I'm like, someone will make like a big, long lesson. And you know, today I want to explain to you all the ins and outs of calculus and to do so, I'm going to like go and cherry pick all the best explanations of every concept ever and put them all together in a big mashup. But it's not like they've taken like a few seconds and critiqued it or used it like, it's just a complete section like a big section being used because it's just, you know, useful to them. But don't you want to spread knowledge of calculus around the world? I'm sure part of the justification also had some line about this video is, you know, it's it did say, although I'm making money from it, it's educational. I don't know what happened. But basically I press the button to say I don't agree with this. And I don't know what's going to happen next. I don't know how the system works. I think after a while, YouTube just drop it, don't I? Well, you can end up getting all the revenue from the ads that are running on their video. Right. That's the thing that can happen. If they then say, no, no, I disagree, 10% fine. What does YouTube do now? Do they then say, well, now what do you say, Brady? Are you going to take them to court? If there's a Mexican standoff and you know, one's willing to go to court, who wins in the end? It's the person with the copyright claim wins. We have this actually with the Hello Internet video that was uploaded several episodes ago when we talked about the, I can't say the name of the song, but the middle of the list of the four and whatever. Yeah, the Italian one. Right. The Italian one. And so I put that song in the podcast for people to hear. Yeah, just like a sample. Here's what it sounds like. People can debate whether or not there was like too much or not enough. Right. This is always the ambiguities of copyright. Well, great. Was that any 0.01% of that podcast? So I think we're safe. They're what? You have an excellent point there. Yes. I may have used 30 seconds of the song, but the podcast was really long. But so anyway, there was a, like as I kind of expected, there was going to be, there was a copyright claim on that. And I went through the little appeals process of like, I think this is fair use. And the copyright holder came back and said, no, they disagree. And the way the YouTube system works, which I think YouTube should definitely improve is that all of the ad revenue on that podcast goes to the copyright holder for that song. Right. To me, it seems like a little much. Even if you were in the wrong and used too much of it, which I don't think you did. But even if you did, the fact that from that whole 2L podcast, they now get all the revenue because we used 40 seconds of their song instead of 15, that's nuts. Yeah, it's a weird system. It seems like from everything I've seen with other creators and the stuff I've had firsthand experience on that like one copyright holder becomes the one who wins, like who's the one that's most wronged. And that person is the one who ends up with the claim on the revenue from the advertising dollars. Oh, well, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? You got to pick your fights, don't you? Yeah. And you pick that fight. I told that guy now. Well, I don't know what's going to happen. Seeing we're talking about YouTube fights, should we do with my other one that's bubbling along at the moment? Yeah. So my other little YouTube problem at the moment, Gray, is I've had another video demonetized, put into the sin bin of advertising deemed inappropriate and unfriendly for advertising. And instead of that nice green tick, you get next to a video saying, oh, you can have ads on this video. I have the dreaded yellow tick of no it's. Brady, I just have to ask, why do you keep uploading inappropriate videos to YouTube? I mean, where there's smoke, there's fire, right? You give me an example, oh, there's one, where you're uploading deranged videos to YouTube and you get this slapped down, but you keep doing it. You seem to not be able to help yourself. Yeah. I keep pushing the boundaries of that. Yeah. You keep uploading all these inappropriate videos to YouTube that they're not advertising friendly. I don't know what you're up to over there on objectivity. So those of you who don't watch objectivity and how dare you not watch it. Wow. How dare you? But if you somehow miss the episode, we did a video about this guy called Edward Moibridge who you may not know the name, but in the 1800s was bit of a big deal. He came up with this way of taking in the early days of photography of taking multiple pictures very quickly in succession, sometimes being tripped by strings and things like that and he used other technology that he pioneered to show things that were happening quickly like a horse running. Yeah, I feel like everybody in the world, even if you don't know his name, everyone's seen that video clip of like, here is the first time we had motion video in a way of horse running. He's the guy who did that. Because there was actually debate whether you know all the horses who was off the ground at a given time and stuff. So he he wanted to break it down. He then started filming everything he could use this camera system at. So anyway, he started taking all these pictures to show animal locomotion and then he also started showing human locomotion. So he would show humans doing things like walking and running and using an axe and fencing and wrestling and all these different things. So it could be studied in detail. And not only was it like, you know, a lot of scientific breakthroughs were being made. This was leading towards obviously movies and moving pictures because you've got this quick. He was like the first slow-mo guy I like to think. It wasn't, it wasn't slow-mo. They were playing a bag in real time. Well, no, but like it was using like a high speed camera to show things that were too fast for the eye to say. Okay. And he's kind of doing that same thing, you know. It was a high frame rate for the time. Okay. Right. Because we had no frame rate. Yeah, exactly. Look at these 12 frames. Yeah, exactly. 12 frames per second. It's amazing. So anyway, when he was taking pictures of humans doing stuff, they were usually not wearing clothing because you wanted to be able to see, you know, muscles and the way the leg was moving and the arm was moving. And if it was all covered in clothes, you wouldn't be saying it. So I uploaded this video all about all these old pictures and what he did and we showed videos of it and, rar, rar, you can imagine. And in the course of the video, we showed lots of these pictures. We animated some of them to make them into little movies. Now the video has naked people in it. You know, we left a lot out that we thought was a little bit, maybe a little bit confrontational. We haven't got like, you know, things dangling in people's faces and it's not too, you know. I thought we were restrained. Yeah. You left out the slow mo pillowfate that he had filmed as well in half hours. Yeah. Like that stuff wasn't in there. There was a lot of stuff that maybe could be construed as a bit risky, but you know, we didn't use any of that. It was just, you know, it was all pretty normal stuff. But there were occasional glimpses of parts of the body here and there, but it was, I thought it was all right. The YouTube's automatic system to its credit, unless someone flagged it to its credit. Flagged, this is inappropriate. I disagree with that. I appealed it asking for a manual review. The manual review has been conducted and the manual review has come back saying, nope, that's inappropriate. So as it stands now, the video is unavailable for monetization. Objectivity videos aren't massively watched. So like this is not costing me an amount of money that concerns me. But I am concerned about like the bigger issue, not like in a campaign or I want to change the world kind of way. But I do think it speaks to a bigger issue about like art and showing things and what's right and what's wrong and what's suitable and not suitable. You have watched the video, have you? Yeah. I'm just going to do a video. All right. Tell me your thoughts. Well, first of all, I recommend everybody watch it because it was just interesting to see. I didn't know the extra detail was about this work. Somehow assume that the horse thing was like one off and seeing the animated early videos of human motion was really interesting. I just genuinely liked it as an objectivity video. Thank you. But I was watching this video and my perspective on it was you selected video. So when people hear you describe it, right? You listener. What's in your head when Brady just described the video? I can guarantee you what's in your head is 10 times more explicit than what is in the actual video. Imagine a man walking in a low resolution image who's walking sideways across the camera with extraordinarily convenient leg placement, 95% of the time. That's what's in the video. The level of nudity for the parts that people care about is so trivial in this video. Now when you say it was flagged immediately, that I'm not surprised because from talking to people who would know about these things, my understanding is that if there is one thing that the army of artificial intelligence bots at YouTube are extraordinarily good at recognizing it's naked people. And this is a thing that the AIs have been trained on and they can spot very reliably, very immediately. I have high class, willy recognition. Yeah, exactly. And this is to YouTube's total credit. I have in my whole life, I think, never, ever seen anything that remotely is pornography on the channel. They are deadly serious and it's a relatively straightforward thing for the system to try to automatically flag as people without clothing. So I'm not surprised it was caught instantly in the trap. But I really think this is a very interesting case that if this was manually reviewed by an actual human, I'm going to say that I think this is kind of outrageous to be classified as a video that cannot be monetized. I really think this is like, if you had a video where you showed the statue of David, there's something about this that really bothers me, right? Where it's like artwork or anything of scientific value is so far on the one end of this extreme that is like, if we can't agree that this is acceptable, I feel like all hope is lost. If this is not acceptable, I feel like we've fallen into some kind of crazy land where you can never know who knows what's acceptable now. I find it genuinely upsetting that this has been, again, if it was a human, that this is the verdict that has come down on this. Okay. Just very quickly on that, if it's not a human, that's even worse because they make it absolutely clear. You have no right to appeal. There's nothing that can be done about it. The judge's decision is final. So if I've been turned down by AI twice and no correspondence will be entered into, then that is a little bit unfair. But we don't know. If it's a human or not, so we don't know. I just say if it's a human because I have some very strong suspicions that at least some portion of those manual reviews are not actually going to a human, that there's a bot that's doing the first pass and maybe it gets kicked up to a human, maybe it doesn't. I don't have anything to prove that, but I just have a suspicion that maybe that's partly the case. Yeah. Anyway, on the broader issue, like I'm the first to admit, if you pardon the pun that I have skin in the game here. So I will say from the start that, okay, I'm a bit biased, but I also think it's a little unfair. I will say I do recognize that statue of David, numerous famous paintings you could mention, Venus, Demilo, all these things are not photographs. They are artworks. But I mean, these things, I was using a very old from the 1800s, black and white grainy pictures that are really historically significant. It was the pioneering images that led to cinema. It was really scientifically significant work. Like this is like important stuff in art and science. It is in no way sexual or sexually suggestive. And that's what the YouTube terms talk about. They don't talk about nudity as much as things that are sexually suggestive. These are in no way sexual. And in kind of my like, bemusement, I went and had a look and Google's own YouTube channel for art and culture has numerous videos that show naked bits of art. Interesting. They even have one where like it's popping up in front of a little kid and the little kids giggling and going, oh, isn't that funny because you know, the person's not wearing clothes. And they have one where they could persons on like an iPad screen and the kids like, you know, manipulating it to zoom in and look at it and things like that. And they're on their own channel. They're quite comfortable with nude art. So I do know the difference between photos and art. But if that's the defense, which I don't know what the defense is because I haven't heard anything, it doesn't wash with me. And what do I have to do now? Should I have uploaded that video with big, you know, black boxes over the top of the root bits or what was I supposed to do? That kind of stuff drives me even more crazy. That would make me look stupid. That would make everyone look stupid. And it also falls again into my very strong feelings about this that like when you go crazy about the prohibition of a thing, whatever that thing is, it's like, guess what? You're the one who's making it powerful or you're making it into a thing that it isn't. And so that's why it's like, if you start putting black bars over, like as we're having this discussion, like I have on screen in front of me. Probably the most, in quote, suggestive part, which is at 135 where you have the three film strips of the man walking to the side, the man walking front and the man walking back. I have this blown up on a 27 inch screen that's two feet from my face at HD resolution. But of course, I'm looking at a thing that's from the 1800s that's filmed at an angle. There's not four pixels of detail in this image here to put a black bar over it is like a mockery. It's like, what are you hiding? All that black bar is doing is like, oh, right. This is the black bar of shame, right? Because this is the thing that can never be seen. Putting black bars on it would sexualize it. You're going to picture with Michelangelo's David and you think, that's a nice sculpture. You put a big black bar over his private parts and suddenly it seems more sexual. Yeah. There was a meme a few years ago, which was fantastic where people were pixelizing parts of innocuous photos. And it's amazing how sexually suggestive you can make a totally normal photo by very strategic pixelization of particular moments. So the meme was you'd show like the before and after like with the pixelization that were without. There's another meme, which is about like seeing the nudity and it's, it works surprisingly well where you take a photograph of a fully clothed person and you just put transparent circles on that photograph in strategic spots. And it's so crazy. But it's like your brain sort of fills in what the person looked like. This kind of censorship I legitimately think makes it more of what it isn't. It'd be crazy for you to put black bars on this video. It would 100% achieve the exact opposite purpose and make the very thing that isn't something into something. So yeah, it's so frustrating. It's absolutely frustrating. I'll just send you a tweet I did yesterday, you know, just as another case in point. I got a couple of famous cultural images. Yeah. Perfect. So Brady just sent me his tweet with Leonardo da Vinci's famous man in the circle with the black bar, a strategically placed and the Venus de Milo with a bar across her chest. And yeah, unambiguously, the bar makes the images worse than they are without the bar. It's the thin end of a wedge isn't it in terms of culture and history and that when we start having to push this stuff aside because we want to cater to advertisers who they think might be sensitive. I'd be surprised if any advertisers were sensitive about this video, by the way, because what they're going to do in the long run. I mean, they're not going to change me. Maybe in the long run, people are going to stop making videos about certain subjects because they can't monetize them. And then those subjects just fade out of existence, you know, is there a whole generation in period in art history that is going to be disproportionately less covered on YouTube? Because people can't show the paintings. Yeah. I mean, we've sort of screwed it around this issue a couple of times on the show, but this is why I think it's always dangerous to get into the content filtering game. Yeah. All platforms should stay as far away from this as they possibly can because it is the thin end of the wedge. There's no winning. Even if you think you're doing the right thing is like, this is a perfect case. Like would any advertisers in the world actually care about this? No. But I know for a fact that this kind of demonetization does have a chilling effect on the kinds of content that people produce for the platform. We've said it before, but I think YouTube and platforms like it are big enough that I don't think you can play the, oh, it's just a company card anymore. I think at a certain point, it becomes so vital for speech that this kind of stuff really matters. And this objectivity video is just like a perfect example because you have everything going for you. It's historically significant. It's barely visible. It's the most innocuous video imaginable. And if this can't get through the filter, like what hope is there for anything that is remotely near an interesting edge? There's no hope at all for that kind of content. This episode has been brought to you by Backblaze Unlimited Cloud Backup for Max and PCs for just $5 a month. Your documents, music, photos, videos, drawings, projects, everything. It says drawings here. 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Well, did you presumably when you were at school that once a year would you have a photo taken of the whole class that would go into like a yearbook or your parents could buy one and would they take one of you on your own as well? Each year at school. Oh, look, he's CGP Gray when he was in year two and here he is in year three. Here are his class photos all through the years. Did you know two school photos? I haven't thought about this in forever. This is something that maybe in another five years would have totally passed out of my mind. But yes. Well, I'm glad I saved it. And he's like, oh, right, these are some neural pathways left untouched for a very long period of time. Well, they can be quite damaging memories too. Maybe you have repressed memories. Being the one kid in the class photo who has his or her eyes shut. That sticks with you for years. I mean, I'll take your word for it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know that. None of my memories are surfacing that piece of information. You obviously have good photo face. I'm terrible at having my photo taken. Is that what we're going to have here is Brady therapy corner for your old school photos? Well, maybe it is. I don't know. Let me tell you what's got me thinking about this. Let me send you a photo. Okay. Unfortunately, I can't share this with the collective because it involves a whole bunch of people whose permission we don't have. Right. But this is the class photo of my nephew. So my sister sent it to me and said, have a look at the cute class photo. This is not how I remember class photos looking, but we live in a new age now. What? What? No, this is weird. This is not a class photo. What do you think of that? Okay. Let me just set up the expectation. So in my head, a class photo is you shuffle everybody down to the gym and you're sitting on the bleachers. So there's something height difference between everybody. Yeah. Maybe there's like a little plaque in the front where someone has put the words on that says, what this is a photo of. And that's where you take the picture. You know, in Smith High School, year three, 1987. Yeah. You want to be real fancy. You go outside into the bleachers. So there's trees in the background. That's what this is. Oh, wow. You had some nice ones, right? I went to a very par school. Would yours be like the whole year level? It would be broken into classes in a home room. So it was like groups of 30 or you like a group of like a hundred or something. My rusty memories are that are like in primary school. It was just the class. Yeah. That in high school, they shuffle everybody out onto the bleachers. Yeah. The whole bunch think. But I could be wrong about that. So explain this one that I sent to you. I think most people have that image in their head, hopefully that we've all done and saying, this is my nifty. This is the new generation of class photos. How would you describe this one? Okay. Well, just like with movies, I know you want my opinion at first. I'm going to give this class photo a thumbs down. It's really weird. And what makes it weird is, okay. So instead of the kids sitting in the bleachers, they are all. All standing in a line next to each other. So that it's just all of the kids in a big row facing the camera facing the camera. Face in the camera. Like a panorama shot, isn't it? Yeah. It's like if you were there with your iPhone, you would need to put it into panorama mode to take this picture. The background is an empty void of nothing. It's just a pure white background, which makes me wonder like was that they roll out the green screen for this photograph? It kind of looks like it is a clothing catalog for the uniform that these kids are wearing. Like if I didn't know any better, I would almost assume this was an advertisement in a magazine that's like, hey, look at these uniforms for these kids. The kids are not just standing in a line all looking at the camera. They look very posed and they look very posed like it's a magazine. It was like, oh, here's a kid. And the kids on either side who are taller have their hands on his shoulder. Some of them are like got their arms crossed and some have got like sassy poses with a hand on their hips. Yeah. So I'm looking at a couple of the girls have the very standard photo pose of hands on hips, like one knee a little bit forward. It looks really strange. I have this feeling like again, a kind of meme that you see sometimes on the internet is where if you look in a catalog, someone will sometimes post these images where you can see that the person doing the Photoshop job has messed up and there's an extra hand where a hand shouldn't be because someone was Photoshopped out of this scene. There's like, something's really weird that you don't notice at first. And this photo feels like I wouldn't be surprised to learn this is actually a composite photo of a bunch of shots. Great. It totally is. They were all photographed as like in twos or threes separately and then they were all put together afterwards into this big long line. Yeah. It's like, it's like a scene. It looks strange. It's the one mistake they made. The rest of it was actually done pretty well, but yeah, I'm a little bit mortified by this. I have some feelings about it, but tell me why are you mortified? I know I'm like old fashioned right and we live in this digital age, but there are a few things about doing class photos so digitally. And I've seen this a lot lately. Class photos now are amazing. They're like, they're so different to what they used to be. They're like portraits. One of my other nephews, I saw his class photos the other day and it was like a photo shoot from another world with all that lovely bocker and everything's all amazing and there's these candid poses. We were wondering where one thing which was in my old high school yearbook, like the photographer came to the school and did the photo shoots and so everybody looks the same. But one of the girls, her father worked in the fashion industry and she had a photo that stood out as noticeably different because it was just crazy professional. I do always remember being like, I was that kid. I don't think I would want this. So when you say that they look different, I can easily imagine what you're talking about. I don't know. There was just a rights of passage thing about class photos that I don't know. It felt like it gave me life lessons and it was character building and I feel like that's all been taken away. For example, in the old days of photos when they didn't have digital cameras and we all lined up and had our individual photos taken, it was like your one chance they would go bang and then you wouldn't see anything thing for six weeks. And six weeks later you'd be given these envelopes to take home for your parents where they would say do you want to buy some of these? And if your eyes were sharp or you'd got it wrong or something, you'd blown your chance. You had one chance and you didn't know if you'd done it or not and that teaches you a lot about life. So opticiously. Because laughs like that sometimes. You guys are one chance and don't blow it kid. That's the lesson you should learn in life. It's kind of. But now it's like let's take a thousand until we get it perfect and it's the same with the class photo, you know, having someone who has their eyes shut in the photo. I mean, that doesn't happen now because they do them all separately. That's why they're doing this so that no kid is going to have a stinker because if you put 20 kids in a line, you have to take a thousand photos until you get the one you need. But here you're taking away that problem by just doing them in pairs, making sure everyone's eyes are open and things like that. And like so it's just taking away that kind of randomness and it's also taking away like the camaraderie of a class photo. It was the one time you were all together and you'd be all lined up by height and you'd learn how tall you were in relation to each other and you'd secretly be hoping that you'd end up in the photo somewhere close to like the girl you had a crush on or something and there's so much going on in the class photo and it was just all character building stuff and that. You try to get bunny ears on the kid who's in front of you. Yeah. And then you get to take a funny one at the end if you're like the older kids like it's your final year of school. You'd say can we do a funny one where you all do a crazy pose and they'll take one of those and also like I don't know if it was just me or not. I've told people about this and they say it is just me. But I never knew what day the school photos were going to be and you just turn up one day and like the photograph company is there having taken over the gymnasium or something and it's like oh my goodness at school photo day you know what a surprise and it's a big part of my memories of school and these photos become a big part of your life and you look back at your old school photos occasionally. So I don't know this is a case where I think the digital path is getting rid of some problems but it's also taking away a lot of charm and a lot of character building and a lot of I don't know maybe I'm just overly sentimental. I mean look I'm very happy to be the first one in the pylon of Brady is two sentimental. I got my front row ticket to that party but I got him totally with you on this school photo thing. Great also sorry one other point I didn't make. It also like is instilling a really interesting lesson about fakery because this photo is designed to look like they're all together at once. These kids know they weren't obviously because that incident never happened. That's a moment in history that never happened that they've all now got as a keepsake for all time and it's just instilling at an early age that nothing is real. Yeah I mean maybe to be devil's advocate for a moment that's the most important lesson that you can teach children these days. Yeah. You have to say what kids you live in a world where you can trust nothing that you see. Yeah okay the reverse is also true it also instills early on that nothing has to be real. We'll fix it all in the edit. Everything can be fixed in the edit. We'll fix it all in the edit but I don't like it because I said if you were going to take a picture of this with your iPhone you need to take a panorama but the thing that's weird isn't like in a panorama everybody would be at a different angle right like you would be rotating the camera and so not all of the kids would be the exact same distance from the camera and in this photo it's like oh right of course all of these kids are looking straight ahead into a camera but there's a line of 20 of them side by side so there is no place you could put the camera to actually get this photo the way it looks with all of them standing in a straight line. You get to mile away with the telephoto zoom. At an infinite distance you could capture this photograph right and since it seems like they're standing in a Euclidean fantasy land right where there's just infinite nothing in all direction maybe that's where this photograph was actually taken but this is a case where it's like I'm all fine with digital stuff but if you're doing the digital stuff it has to look right this just looks terrible. My big vote for why we're school photograph days great is not for lessons learned or any of that sentimentality stuff. My perspective on it was just oh thank god it's a day that's different it's a different day at the school we're not going through the same routine you would hope that it would land on some day with the extra boring classes that you don't like and I feel like poor kids the school routine it's you know it's the same thing day in day out and any chance you can get to like go outside and sit in the bleachers that's way better whereas I can already see that from a school perspective they sure would love this because it can also be much less disruptive right you can just catch some kids whenever they're available you don't necessarily have to mess up the whole schedule. Take them out two or three at a time yeah this modern world Brady you know. Can I tell you one of my journalistic war stories that just came into my head. Please please do. So back in the newspaper days when photoshopping was like high tech like normal people couldn't do it this was many many moons ago like analog photoshopping is that the kind of stuff we're talking about. I don't know what exactly the technology was at but certainly this story will give you an idea where the technology was at because my beat was covering like the city council and I've done it for a while and I had really good contacts and I was a really good mischief maker. My favorite stories weren't like you know the important stuff that was being done in the council it was like making mischief it was my specialty and I knew the council was having like their official portrait taken this was the 20 members of the city council whoever they elected members I can't remember how many there were and they were having their equivalent of a class photo done and they were wearing all the official regalia all the formal robes of the city council and the traditional stuff and it was being done in the council chamber which is a lovely ornate room where they would have their meetings but the doors were locked and I wasn't allowed in which made me suspicious but anyway I wandered by and I looked through the keyhole at one point and I saw them all in their robes and getting ready and standing in lines to have their photo taken they were doing it the old fashion way with you know short people at the front tall people in the second row and one of like the council officials like one of like the PR people who was not a councilor he was just like a lackey a staff member was wearing all the regalia and the robes and I was so confused but I thought nothing of them and then the next day I was talking to one of the other council and I said I was looking through the keyhole and I saw what's these chops wearing the robes what heck was that all about and she said oh look I'm not supposed to tell you but I will because there was such gossips so and so the councilor couldn't be there because he was sick so they got this person to stand in the photo and then they used modern technology to put that person's head on the photo and I was like no way so like a couple of days later when the official photo got released to the press you know here's the council photo which is something we'd normally would have to ignore because who cares I then called the council and asked for an official statement about whether councilor Jones or whatever was in the photo was that really him so they had to like fess out that it wasn't and that was such an unusual thing to happen and it was considered like so scandalous that it became you know it was like page three or page five of the paper or something one of these councilors is not really there it's a you know it's a pretend photo it wasn't like a scandal like the count you know people should be sacked but it was like funny and embarrassing for them and it was a big thing like now you think nothing of it you know school photos a photo shop but back then having like someone's head put onto another body for the official portrait you know what I still think that's wrong to this day look at you Brady rustling up trouble where there's no trouble at all trying to kick up a scandal for some poor guy probably staying at home because he's sick now I to this day I think it's wrong when you go through the holes of city council and you look at all those portraits over the year the photos of all the previous councils knowing that photo is not a real photo and they all weren't there in one place it's wrong it's wrong it's not a document of a moment they were all together that's what bothers me photographs are sometimes documents of amazing times in history when you know you look at those photos where like you see all these famous scientists in one photo like Einstein and Niels Bohr and yeah I know the exact one you're thinking of yeah it leaps right to my head yeah imagine if you found out actually two of those people weren't there and they just put their heads on later the thing that's special about that photo is they were all in one place at one time yeah and it's the same with a school photo the thing about a school photo is they were all there if you were sick on school photo day back in my day you weren't in the school photo absent you know tough like you've been raised from history and again that's a life lesson if you're not there you're not there but these days there's no lesson like that these days if you're not there we'll just put you there later that's not how life works but maybe it is Brady it's how it works now gray it's playing crash corner time it'll be a quick one there's just been so much happening this corner is bursting at the seams I feel like you're already contradicting yourself your Brady like we're gonna do a quick plane crash corner and then you're coming up to me with all of these model airplanes in your hand we're like I've got so many I want to talk about it's gonna I promise it's gonna be really quick hey you're the one slaying it down you're complaining about how long playing crash corner is just making it longer it's all my fault it's all my fault do you have any superstitions when you get on a plane okay so a while back I found myself unintentionally developing a superstition for getting on the plane yep I don't know how it started I don't know what it was but it was a behavior that I became aware of which is I have this tungsten wedding ring on my hand and yep when I was a teacher I used to like tap it on things sometimes for like a point of emphasis in a classroom and I tend to just like tap it on stuff because it makes a pleasing sound and at some point I got into the habit of just as you're stepping on the plane as you're leaving the gangway of tapping the ring on the outside of the plane on the physical surface of it yeah and it became a superstition and I was doing it a bunch but not really realizing it and at some point I became aware of this as a conscious behavior and I have since banished this this is what superstitions are right there's some part of your brain that's not really thinking things through I did have a brief period of time where it's like as I'm walking into the plane and like you're not going to tap you ring on the surface of the plane it's fine nothing's going to happen you know nothing's going to happen don't let yourself fall into the category of building up this habit over time so I sort of did but I have since gotten rid of it well Gray I have a superstition when I get on planes okay and it's the exact same thing I've never gotten on or off a plane without touching the outside of the plane I do it every time just with my hand I just have to touch it I just have to have touched the outside of the plane for the first time ever when I got on a plane about a week ago one of the airstuids noticed that I did it as I was getting on I touched the outside of the plane. Front of the left she said oh you can touch me instead if you like which now I think about it sounds kind of weird but it wasn't all mine that's that's not appetizer friendly at all she didn't mean about that but when I as I said it out there I realized it's kind of weird but she was just paying my friendly but if we bleep out what she said it'll sound way better right is that how that works right we'll take that and we'll put a bleep over it then it'll be just fine oh yeah you can touch beat instead I have a feeling like maybe this is a more common one it's it seems unlikely that you and I have both engaged in the exact same behavior that the fact that that is the thing makes me think that going in and out of a plane a lot of people are touching the edge like I particularly don't want to do plane crash corner right now because I'm getting on a plane tomorrow right it's right but when I am getting on the plane tomorrow I'm going to be paying attention and see if anyone online in front of me touches the plane on the way in well I've learned my lesson and I'm not going to say tweet me if you touch the outside of planes but anyway a lot of cultures have superstitions that involve coins but in particular the Chinese do apparently there's a story I read a few months ago but the exact same thing happened a few days ago so it's happened twice now where Chinese passengers as they've been walking along the tarmac to get on the planes for luck have thrown coins into the engine of the plane oh Jesus Christ and then this has been spotted and obviously they've had to pull the engine apart and get the coins out but twice there's a link in the notes for you to look at I've got it open right in front of me a superstitious passenger delayed a flight from Shanghai for several hours on Tuesday after throwing coins at the plane's engine for good luck they're usually elderly women that do it I imagine if it didn't get spotted there's so many different aspects of this when you say imagine if it didn't get spotted I would hope to guide that a jet engine could chew up a penny and spit it out but now there's the niggling thought that it couldn't that there is a non-zero possibility that if it hits in just the right way especially as the engine is starting up and not at full chewing through stuff capacity that there's some damage that could be done so great great let me put let me put this to you great if you were getting on a plane and you thought in the corner of your eye that you weren't totally sure you saw an old Chinese lady throwing coins in the direction of the engine you don't know is that what she was doing did she actually get it near the engine what happened I don't know look look would you then tell some people as you got on the plane I think maybe that person through coins at the end or would you just keep still before you can even get to the end of this question before you could even pose the question I've already added to my mental pre-flight checklist keep an eye on the old Chinese ladies it's already now going to be part of my plane boarding routine to be looking around it is like hmm right terrorists merrished like who knows anyone could be a terrorist you can't pick them out like an old Chinese lady who has something in her hand and have my eye on you lady right is that racial profiling yeah yeah it is tough luck right but if if apparently this is like a thing where old Chinese ladies throw coins into engines for luck it's racial profiling and life saving it does seem to have become a trend so keep your eyes out people oh man Jesus Christ I didn't know you were flying tomorrow grace I'm sorry to be throwing a few of these things but it was another one I wanted to ask you about if you look on the next link there was a recent case there's an air France plane flying across the Atlantic a380 the big new super jumbo something went wrong with the engine it kind of blew itself a part of it mid flight it then landed and everything was okay the thing is there've been a bunch of pictures there were bunch of pictures on Twitter and in the press that people took out the window the blown up engine like you know the badly damaged engine while the plane was still flying my question is if you are on a plane and something happened to the engine but the plane was still flying and the captain just came and I said oh we've lost one of the engines we're just going to go and land now for safety would you take photos of it would you get your phone out and think oh wow and take a bunch of photos of the damaged engine on the plane that you are currently flying in okay now this is a very particular situation because I generally don't like window seats I especially don't like window seats where I have a view of anything mechanical out the window because I will find myself just looking like looking at the wing all right looking at those little flaps that come up looking at the mechanical pieces that are underneath right if it's a stormy night you're looking at the gremlin who flies on and off the wing repeatedly as the plane goes on so I specifically try to avoid seats that are the windows or that have a view of the wing I do not like it but if for some reason I was in one of those seats yep and something happened because I host a podcast with a co-host who is obsessed with plane crash corner I don't see how I could not take a photo I feel like if if I was in that situation you would berate me for the rest of the time that we knew each other for not taking a photograph of that engine so so the answer is yes I would feel compelled because of the situation that I am in but if I was just like a regular citizen I'm not sure it would occur to me like looking at the pictures that you're showing you like this is an engine that look pretty badly damaged it's not like a minor thing I somehow expect that I would in that moment it just would not occur to me to take a photo of the engine that's my guess as I mentioned many times the plane crash corner you know every time I fly now I get to know that if the plane does go down you know I'm going to be thinking about Brady and plane crash corner in my final moments on the surf so thank you that means I will have some kind of responsibility to document them perhaps tweet them in my final moments on the plane going down so yeah I would be taking pictures would you be taking pictures Brady I probably would take a picture yeah but I can understand someone who wouldn't not because it wouldn't occur to them I'm amazed that it wouldn't occur to you but I can see hey someone might feel like it's inappropriate like now is not the time to be taking pictures when like you know lives could be at stake sort of thing I only just say that it might not occur to me simply because in in those kind of situations like people can have unexpected behavior that's why it's it's like I think it might not cross my mind but I would fully expect Brady to be taking pictures possibly selfies where you're pointing out the window at the engine that's the kind of picture that I want from you if you ever want to plane and the engine gets all busted up interestingly the debris from that engine was found very quickly afterwards in the barren wastelands of Greenland they found it really quickly like some of the parts that fell off the engine and yet they have finally totally yet again abandoned the search for this Malaysian airlines entire plane that went missing MH370 that went missing around the time Halloween to net first starter that I was sure would be found within two or three episodes that gave birth to plane crash corner I suspect yeah it probably did but I feel like this is the Voyager Pro breaches the edge of the solar system story like haven't we given up the search for this flight several times now you're right it has happened several times and just to keep it going and quickly the point I wanted to raise because this is the latest development because since the Australian search party officially abandoned the search which upset some people in Malaysia because there were so many Malaysian people on the plane a few other companies have stepped in and offered to do it privately the most interesting being this company called ocean infinity i believe which have offered to search for the debris somewhere in the Indian ocean far far off the west of Australia for free unless they find it in which case they would get a find us fee kind of like a no win no fee type search for a plane that went missing and I wonder what you thought of that proposal I feel like I need to see the economics of that proposal I don't it sounds like an incredibly expensive thing to do I would certainly want to get the money from the Malaysian government in escrow before moving out like you know I'm not exactly sure I would be trusting Malaysia to like pony up the millions of dollars necessary if this happens there's something kind of macabre about kind of a you know no win no fee type situation around like you know a tragedy and a loss of so many lives and this thing that sort of there's just something that felt a bit weird about it when I first heard it that made me think is this right like is this what we've come to do you think they should be searching out of honor or human responsibility or some other junk like that in my opinion that is what they have been doing for the last few years I mean they've been tirelessly searching the ocean floor spending a fortune as it is that has been happening and now that finally they've said look this is getting ridiculous enough so enough does that mean it's time to bring in like you know the cowboys I don't know maybe it is and maybe that's how it will get found you know the Titanic was found like that wasn't admittedly a long time afterwards but by private enterprise but something about it just felt a little bit just sat a bit uneasy with me but maybe it's just maybe queasy I think it's you wanting people to do things just to do them yeah I feel like as soon as the money gets involved you're crossing your arms and going hmm I don't know about this Malaysian airline hunt stroke SpaceX right well maybe that's it though I feel that maybe there's a bit of emotional blackmail here because the families of the people who run that plane are most strongly the people who want it to be found with very good reason finally the governments and the official them have sort of given up and said look we just can't find it but now these other people have come in seen like an opportunity and they can leverage sort of the emotional pressure of these people who are saying no no we need it found to say to the government hey come on you know it's not going to cost you anything unless we find it you've got all these upset people and all the upset people are saying yes yes get them to do it we want it found I feel like it's a bit it's a little bit black miley maybe yeah maybe I feel like I'm okay with it the Malaysian government doesn't have to take them up on it yeah I guess if I if they get the job done then they've succeeded where others are failed so see what happens I'm sure we'll still be talking this long long into the future which happens first does Malaysian airlines wreckage get found or does the podcast come to an end or is the discovery of the wreckage like the trigger point for the end of the podcast like maybe that's maybe ocean infinity other people who will bring us to an end like we know long have a reason to exist yes because plane crash coroner is the beating heart of hello internet hello internet it's future gray here who took the plane trip and hasn't died well yet anyway but I did take a photograph of the engine while I was in the air that seems like the kind of thing that could become a bit obsessive maybe a bit like a superstition but I'd have to take a photograph of the airplane engine every single time man if I started getting a lot of those I would need some place that I could show them off on the internet where could I go to make an amazing Hortfolio website that I could show on the internet I know where I could go I know where you could go it's square space square space is the best place to go to make your website if you just have a weird obsession with airplane engines or perhaps plane crashes but have no technical skills whatsoever don't worry square space is for you if you don't know a thing about making websites it doesn't matter they have beautiful templates created by world class designers you can just drag and drop your way to perfection everything is customized so you can get it to look just the way you want on mobile and on desktop and if you need any help at all they have 24 seven award-winning customer support people who are there to help you anytime so if you have a website that you want to make if it's a blog if it's a portfolio if it's a resume if you want to sell things online if you have any of those things that you want to make but you haven't known how to do it go to square space dot com slash hello today that square space dot com slash hello to try square space free for 14 days and receive 10% off your first purchase your idea is just a great idea that doesn't yet have a website until you make it so make it a reality today with square space let's move to lighter subjects because this is obviously all these playing crash corners a bit heavy going let's talk about death yes death the lightest of topics so gray your most recent video uploaded is about death I think it's about life Brady about life it's about life and death basically you're saying come on man we should all forever let's get our act together and do this yeah kind of do you know what can I just say for at least six months now like I've got like a list of questions in my head of things I would ask you if we have a random of things to talk about okay and there's about five or six of them and one of them has been for a long time do you ever worry that the key to eternal life like you know immortality will be discovered just after you die and the reason that question's been in my head for a long time to ask you is because I feel there is something about you that has like a interesting preoccupation with death and living forever obviously everyone has feelings about death but like you have in this interesting way that I think has been made more public now by your last video I'm curious can you do you have any particular reason that you feel that way because like I find that sort of surprising I think it's just kind of something I had taken on by like osmosis just from lots of little things it's not like you talk about it all the time but just the times it's come up I don't know but I'm not making it up it is a question that I've wanted to ask you for a long time because I I've always thought it is something that concerns you I think the thing that you're picking like when you say by osmosis you may be on to something there because I've been very hesitant to do a video like this for a long time like this has been on my topic list for forever but I've always been very hesitant to do it because at least in my personal experience talking with people is a topic that gets a lot of pushback in interesting ways and often quite frankly in ways that I don't really understand so yeah it's been up my list for a while but I think what you might be picking up on on osmosis is the thing that I've never really wanted to say out loud and that may bleed through in our conversations of death is the reverse of of what you're probably thinking it's not that I actually have some kind of focus on death it's that in the back of my mind I feel like I have a like there's a non-zero chance that I might not die in what is a normal human time frame but I've kind of never wanted to say it out loud or talk about it on the podcast or do a video about it because it feels like jinxing it it's almost like a superstition it's not touching the outside of the plane yeah exactly that is 100% what it's like and so I think maybe that's what comes across on the podcast sometimes when we talk about death is I have this little spark in the back of my mind which is actually the exact reverse it's not that I have a worry or preoccupation with my own death I'm actually very indifferent to my own death because of my feeling it's just like well when you're dead you know you don't care it doesn't matter it's not a big deal but I do have a feeling that there may be a non-zero chance that I may have a longer than normal human lifespan as in oh people of your generation not just you specific yeah yeah that's it that's it I am I'm a watcher I'm like I think I might be part elvish uh no that's not what it is let me back up for a second here and say that I do think that radical life extension technology is a thing that can exist in our universe I don't think there is any technical reason that this is not possible to build as opposed to something like sort of like the start track transporter which is like essentially a magic piece of technology that you know we we may live in a universe where nothing like a transporter is ever built and it's not really feasible to build something like a transporter but I don't feel that way about life extension because my my view of it is that this is a biological and a physical process and it is a biological and physical process that I think that we will be able to intervene in in some way at some point in the future and then yes I think that that then raises a very interesting idea that there does come a moment where there may end up being a divide where there's like the last generation to die and the first generation that lives unusually long lives I mean in your video great you you sort of showed it graphically quite nicely you sort of drew that divide and showed like a whole bunch of people falling off one side of the ravine and the other people the other side that was almost you making manifest what I thought maybe was something that sat in your head that fear of being the last little stickman who's the wrong side of that divide yeah because as soon as you put that idea out there that does create that fear there is going to be one man or woman who's the last person to die before you know obviously there'll be some blurring but you know I'm okay yeah there is going to be this like this unlucky generation and gosh who wants to be in that unlucky okay so this is interesting let me just let me just let me just clarify something here because do you agree like with this proposition at all like do you think this is a thing that is technically possible to do you know me like I'm a devil's advocate and I'll argue against anything but I find that one hard to argue against okay like if we can like make atom bombs we can just one by one check off the list of all the things that are causing us to age and die I can't see like an imperative in the universe that makes us die like I don't think we could you know there are some things in the universe I think maybe we can't stop like you know we probably can't speed up light right or change like the fundamental constants we can't change pie or the gravitational constant but I do feel like we can tinker with our own machinery and if we can tinker with our own machinery then yeah we probably can dramatically change it that's really interesting for me to hear I was really unsure about where where you would fall on this and again it is partly because I'm very surprised in personal conversations that it's like even talking about this subject with almost everybody puts me quickly into cookie category which is also why I was like a little bit hesitant to do a video on this topic for a while is it's like there's something about this that feels very different than the topic of like free will where people can simply disagree the your crazy comes out way faster on this topic than on other topics I don't have crazy is the word I would use but there is a certain stigma attached to people who want to live forever or live for a long time yeah that it's not always craziness it's like a certain kind of like you bit of a knob yeah another word that comes up very quickly is like arrogance yeah so when I watched your video like I actually made a little tweet and I was I guess I was being a bit unshavable to you and like taking the mickey a bit but I just tweeted it because it reminded me there's a scene in the UK office where the boss of the office this guy called David Brent is talking about like his attitude to life and philosophies to life and then one of the things he says you know he says there's an old saying live hard and die young and then he just suddenly turns serious and goes I don't want to die young I want to die old I want to be really old and one of David Brent's like characteristics is that he wants to live for a really really long time I don't remember that in his personality in the show and I think one of the reasons they gave him that characteristic is because it's been of an arrogant knobby characteristic yeah okay yeah I can see that it's also I think also maybe it's like it could be considered quite a selfish attitude because the people who say that rarely talk about wanting everyone to live a long time they usually just talk about how they want to live a long time they don't want to die you know what if all the people around you die what would you do you'd be like no I'd still want to live a long time so there is a certain stigma attached to people who weighed into this territory and maybe that's also where like some of your reluctance was coming from that could be it don't get me wrong if for some reason I could only accept personal immortality I would accept that at the drop of a like I keep my eye out for any passing vampires it's like it's not a likable quality to want to be immortal it's one of these funny things where I've been when while I've been working on this this is like an incredible rush job script for various reasons that are not interesting for the podcast but while I've been working on this it's like every movie I have watched the villain is obsessed with the idea of outliving forever and it's like like some of me have seen this everywhere and it's like oh all of the villains like this is this is a primary characteristic and all of the heroes are arguing for humanity in diana jones in the last crusade yeah it's all about like people being brought unstitched by their greed for a ton of life exactly and I think that there's also something about the idea feeling like it's generous to pass on the world to the next generate and so like suddenly you're arguing against sharing I think in a way when you start talking about this kind of stuff so it's just an interesting topic and I like to say it's a thing I've been hesitant about and it's it's also a thing like I can see in the in the numbers like on all the spreadsheets of the videos that I record that it's like this is a video that has the most pushback since interestingly the reddit video which still holds the record for like most pushback of any video it's done well though it's done good viewing figures hasn't it yeah no the viewing figures are good but if you like looking at the like dislike ratio is the second worst compared to the reddit video which is the worst reason do you think maybe also it's because it's a different kind of video you made I feel like your videos have been changing in tone a little bit lately anyway like taken on the average it felt like the video was it was more of like an opinion pace there is a thing here that's like an opinion that I want to change in people's minds and I'll be very upfront about it I don't think I was successful in it in the video I think people should look at death in the same way that we look at other diseases I think people should look at aging in the same way that we look at other diseases if you didn't couch at that way did you like I think if you'd centered it on aging rather than death it wouldn't have been as like clickable and as like exciting to have seen the title in my sub box but I would have understood the point you are making better that aging is a disease because death isn't a disease death is like a consequence of numerous things one of which is diseases another one is jumping in front of a bus another one is having wars like death is a consequence and so framing it around death made it like a more enticing peg but I think maybe that detected from your argument a bit yeah well it's an interesting thing like I can see it in the comments where like these these arguments with people talking about like will the universe is going to come to an end eventually so we're all going to die so you can never defeat death it's like well I'll take that like that's true but if I live a billion years like I'm still going to consider it a win like you get hit by a bus like you're still like it's you know there's going to be accidents and things I'm imagining six billion years I would see GP Gray making video saying we've got to stop this universe ending thing now well I mean you know there's the multiverse people maybe we can punch through but you know that's a problem for way future Gray so I don't know how much people care that much but like the details behind the scenes is just that like Kurtzka's at convinced me at the real 11th hour to do a video on this topic because he was doing a video on death and aging as well and there's a follow up that's that's coming out where he's talking about some of the technology of this stuff which may or may not be out by the time the podcast is out and it was really a case that like when we get together this is a topic that we we talk about a bunch and he wanted us to do it as a like we're both planting a flag here on this topic and in a way going to come out on a topic that I know people will regard as kooky like on a topic that I know we'll get a bunch of pushback and I totally wouldn't have done it if it wasn't for him but it also added in some constraints just that it was produced under a shorter period of time and I also didn't really want to talk about the stuff that he was talking about in his video yeah so he talks about aging very directly so I was trying not to talk about aging so directly but for people who care about the details those are some of the details but I could see like I think I'm missing the mark with this and the thing that I want to change in people's minds if you feel like he missed the mark with it like you know slightly why are you still happy with it like what's the thing you looked at and thought yeah it's alright I'm at least I'm glad it's out there so I'm glad it's out there because I have gotten messages and I've seen comments from people who have changed their mind on the topic right what I would really want is something like I think some of the videos on voting that I've done which I feel like are real like lockslam bar cases against this right but this topic isn't like that because there's no arrows and possibility theorem about death or you can just talk through the mathematics of a thing and it's sort of indisputable that's why like this is kind of an opinion piece because there are cultural arguments around the end of life that are not resolvable through facts such as what that what's just an example I think the question of like passing on the world to a next generation you can't get a correct answer on that in terms of math there's no way to show definitively that it is better to or better not to do this so like I have the feeling that I think we should push for technology to extend human life and I think we should push for it very hard because my opinion is that death is a kind of horrific degenerative disease and this is tremendous amount of of suffering that we can avoid right and and like continued generations of this suffering I think is is really bad and I think there's a kind of cultural blindness to the suffering of senescence over time part of the reason why I really wish that it was like a perfect slam dunk case because I want to change more people's minds on this because really it's not just about changing people's minds it's about changing the right minds I really want anybody who is in medical school and thinking of going into medical research I want those people to be aware if they're thinking of suffering in the world that aging is on the board like it's a thing to consider about what is the suffering that's in the world right or if someone's like a very wealthy person who's looking to fund new projects like this is a project that has the potential to reduce a tremendous amount of suffering so it's partly how I was convinced to do the video at the last minute under constraints that I might normally not do it because it was presented to me in terms of like opportunity cost way like what if the very person who could come up with this technology would have been convinced by your video at the right time and you didn't make it and then you found yourself on the wrong side of this cliff like okay well you know what now you presented me with this Pascal's wager that I can't get out of my head I'm going to make this thing and I'm going to upload it and it's going to happen so rather than feeding lots and lots of viewers some fish you just want to teach the right person to be a fisherman yes if three of the right minds are turned even slightly on this topic I will consider that an incredible success especially if it affects me directly yes if you get to live forever because of that video I think we'll all thank you Gray I won't even take any of the credit for no good because we'd be hearing better for a long time if you did you would be hearing about it for a long time but like I think going back to your very opening discussion about this is I feel like I was born at a really fortunate time maybe everybody feels this way I don't know but I feel like I'm I've always been really glad to be born when I was like I was just old enough to know a world that didn't really have computers and technology in the way that it exists now and I got to see all of that come online and I feel like I have a better understanding of this stuff because of that in a way that I was always shocked that like my students who grew up with technology seem to just know nothing or have no appreciation for it I always found that really interesting and counter to the predictions that the younger generation would be amazing with technology because they had grown up with it it's like that turned out to totally not be the case they're amazing at Facebook but that's a very different sort of thing there's a few things that are like that where I feel like I was born at like just like I graduated from college at just the right time like I sort of missed economic downswings and then I got into the workforce and I was fortunate to be just at the right age and at the right time when YouTube came around and be able to make a transition you know it's like three years too early or too late and you know maybe my life is very different in these different ways yeah you have avoided some bad wars so far yeah exactly it's it's so I feel very appreciative of this like you're just in a general way and there is one final thing that I'm aware of that there is is this idea about following a bunch of technology developments that are around life extension and just wondering like I have been thinking about this ever since the human genome project I think it concluded in 2003 I think and like the human genome project the first time the human genome was ever sequenced like all the letters of someone's genome were read it took something like 10 years and a billion dollars to do and people who know me in real life over decades know that this is a thing I have always talked about that it's fascinating to watch that price and time go down until now we're at the point where it's like a couple hundred bucks and a couple of weeks 20 years later to get your genome sequenced right so I think you can just do in the mail and I look at that kind of curve and I feel like it's similar to the computer curves and I think well genome technology is one of these things that you need to have on board in order to do life extension and just recently there's been developments in gene editing like things like crisper coming online so now being able to change genetic material on the fly is becoming a much cheaper much more possible thing I've for a while been really interested in like when the first gene therapies became commercially viable like that stuff is amazing you're you're you're injecting and changing DNA and living people it's crazy that it's even possible and so I just I feel like over the course of my life there have been roads that are slowly converging towards this direction but it does have that question of how fast did they converge do they converge fast enough or not. Greg you were talking before almost like sort of the people you were hoping would hear you would be like future medical researchers who would dedicate themselves to combating aging rather than using their intellect and resources to tackle other things that may be a more fashionable and things like that. But do you think technology and medical research is the problem here or are the hearts and minds that you think are going to have to be one over politicians and religious leaders and other cultural things because it feels like those are going to be the stumbling blocks I mean things like crisper and all these other technologies and stem cells and that the thing that seems to be slowing them down as much as anything are laws and regulations and politicians and things like that. When I think about change in the world I feel like technology is what you bet on technology is a kind of unstoppable force once you get it going and maybe you can accelerate that through political means or maybe not but like the technology route is the 100% sure route but without a doubt I would love essentially a NASA Kennedy style we're going to approach this as a real topic from the government project like against senescence like obviously that is a thing that I would absolutely love is for a president to get up and say like oh just like Nixon had in the 70s you have a war on cancer it's like say we're going to have a war on senescence like this is a well understood topic and we're going to make some hard decisions about where we're diverting medical research and we're going to play the long game here I would absolutely love that I just think from my interactions with people that is almost a total impossibility in any practical way I think people push back so hard on this topic you could never get that to happen right without some kind of incredible external force so I don't see the political path as a fruitful path which is why I feel like that the technological path or like the venture capital path like that's that is the way to go that's really the only practical path forward is it just has to be a thing that becomes technologically feasible and then society is always will catch up that's not really what I meant by the question though it wasn't as much the government enabling it as stopping political leaders from blocking it I feel like technology is like bursting to get out of the gate with some of this but they keep getting knocked down by people saying no no no that's banned no no that's like you know this is Frankenstein science and things like that I don't think you even need the government to like do a Manhattan project of death you just need governments to say all right we're open to it show us what you've got this is one case where I am definitely glad that just say not all the countries in the world are on the same page when it comes to this kind of stuff and some of the most interesting most cutting edge biological science is coming out of China and it seems like like China is going all in on a bunch of of this genetic technology related to humans and I really think that if they get anything that's remotely viable other countries just immediately have to fold on it right it's actually it's a bit like a lot of the like self-driving or automation technology that like automation is so incredibly economically valuable that any country that does a good job of automating anything has a tremendous advantage overall others and so the automation just spreads very quickly like if Canada for some reason said self-driving cars are 100% legal across all of Canada and the United States said no we're not going to allow it well all of transportation would divert right it's like the northern half of the transportation economy would divert through Canada as much as possible right like it they'd have such a tremendous advantage in terms of price and manufacturing that the like the United States couldn't possibly hold out very long and I suspect that any significant medical developments along these lines are going to be the same thing that's like okay well as long as there's some place that this research can occur it's going to spread outward from that point so I'm glad that not everybody is as restrictive as as the United States is when it comes to some of this technology well if I can put my two cents worth in on two things as always to do with naming yeah senescence is not a word that many people understand yeah no senescence is a terrible word and secondly if you're going to use the sort of the brand or the name of life extension that might work but for people of my generation all they can think of is vanilla sky and the fact that the creepy company that tries to make people live longer in that it's called life extension and they're like the villains aren't they of the film so life extension is a bit of a tainted term at least for fans of that movie which I like very much this really does come back to you a lot of the pushback stuff like senescence is a totally unknown word but it's also not a great word you know there's no free booting right people just love it and they're going to spread it immediately like it's just not good and yeah like life extension there's something about this which is just like polluted in the popular culture which again is kind of why my my feeling about this video is like doing my best job to try to convince everybody but I feel like what I'm really trying to do is convince a few people who might be on the edge or like you know what that is a thing that that maybe I should think about instead of other options your point from being earlier is totally true that there's some interesting cultural pushbacks on this I presume though that if it is going to be available in your lifetime Brady that you will be signing up for the treatment whatever it may be to extend your life I will consider signing up if you answer me one more question or do with one more issue in my head and talk it through for me and then I'll be happy you make a convincing case for you know being anti death and it shouldn't be the hardest case to make sure that because I don't think anyone really wants to die but can you see any merit to the opposite case do you see any usefulness and utility in death whether it's population control or I don't know what the pro death arguments are but can you talk me through some of the pro death arguments and tell me why they're flawed oh I want to be upfront here that this is a case we're very often I feel like the arguments on the other side are a bit baffling a lot of them fall into a thing which I think is a little bit like when people get into arguments about the education system which is the thing that we have done on this podcast where their backwards justifications for the way a thing is I have found at least personally that it's it's most useful when talking to people to frame it in a way where it's like if this didn't exist would you make it this way right we'd like would you bring it back into existence the way it is right now it's like that's the way you should frame it in your mind like I just think a lot of the death stuff is like a rationalization for the way things are but great lots of things we build and do we do get rid of you know we put up buildings but then we knock them down for new buildings rather than just constantly patching them up and we do build a lot of obsolescence into things we do and not just to make money by selling another iPhone in a couple of years like there is a naturalness to the way we design and do things for it not to necessarily last forever one of the arguments that comes up a bunch which I can I can see where people are coming from is the idea that if you have people living a really long time society will never change and this to me is built on an assumption that I can see why people think it but I I just don't agree with it this idea that society changes because people with old ideas die and younger people with new ideas replace them right now if that was 100% true then yes like maybe this is a concern like society never changes or adapts to different situations because it's like it stagnates and you end up with some kind of like some kind of civilization that you'd visit on Star Trek right where it's like oh nothing nothing has changed for 20,000 years on this planet right and we're just doing the same stuff all the time yeah but I disagree like I just think that that is a false assumption and I also think it's an assumption that it's just not born out by the data like if you look at people's voting patterns people's geography is correlated way better with how they vote for example then their age is correlated with how they vote and I think we have seen enough things in society where people do change their minds because things are better ideas like the most recent example it's it's always used as the as the standard go to cases is simply gay marriage rights in the United States on the scale of societal change that happened relatively quickly and it seems to happen because people changed their mind on this topic through exposure it didn't happen because there was a massive die-off of old people between the 90s and the 2000s that's not the reason that changed it changed because people changed their minds so I think people are able to change their minds at any age and it also ignores that implicit in this idea of radical life extension is the idea that the whole thing that we're trying to achieve here is maintaining your health at an older age so that's not like the old people are still going to be the chief executive of SpaceX but have no new ideas they're going to have a young dynamic brain that's still going to be having new ideas all the time and like in a perfect world you're sort of at the level you are in your 20s or 30s or whatever so that's not like there's a whole generation of oldies that are just getting older and older and just not dying the argument seems to be that we're aiming for the genie's curse where we just get older and older and older forever and it's like who wants that nobody wants that is why I get a little bit like excised on this topic is I think that through might be a bit harsh but through a kind of carelessness of intent we actually accidentally create that world because if we're constantly spending our efforts on solving medical problems that are further towards end of life like what we end up doing is what has happened that we do extend life but we extend old age and so like we're pushing up life expansion but we're we're not increasing what is sometimes called the the health span of life very dramatically like you're increasing the total amount of time that you're alive but that is increasing faster than the healthy portion of your life is increasing sometimes you know when we joke about like oh CGP Gray is dictator and I'm like you don't want me as dictator because I would do things that would be deeply unpopular and this is one of those cases where I feel like I would pull research money and effort off of diseases that kill people in their old age and put it towards senescence research and like that would be a deeply unpopular decision but I do think that's overall that's a better decision to make so for people who don't know that's research to stop aging yeah sorry research to stop aging so yeah I just think that there is there is a way that we unintentionally create the the thing that is the argument that people are having they're like oh you end up with the society that's just full of oldsters and hardly has any young people and becomes really stagnant and it's like well we can do that by accident yeah you can do that if you're Japan but like the whole point is like that's not what we're trying to do all right then well at this stage I think we're getting well into old age so we are getting well into old age we can follow us up at some point but the podcast has been going on for quite a while yes it is late in the evening here I have to go on a plane relatively shortly I know I feel a bit bad about that I'm sorry but I hope your flight goes well I have no idea where you're going I'll what you're doing but I'm sure I'll find out in due course I'm an international man of mystery breeding yeah that's what I am

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H.I. No. 91: Last Man to Die?

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