094 = The First Podcasts and Votes Precast

Hello and welcome to a problem squared, or as we like to call it, peace sign, waving white flag, opaque drop of mystery liquid, which is the Wingdings for APS.

Oh, very nice.

I'm joined by...

Actually, do you know what your name is?

Do you know what Beck is in Wingdings?

I do not.

I can best describe it as okay hand sign, pointing finger hand sign.

So it's basically that.

Yes!

It's the rude hand gesture for intercourse.

And then a thumbs up.

Fantastic.

It's so perfect.

I had to check with producer Lowe and I hadn't already.

Well, I know you haven't because if you had.

You'd remember that.

yeah and now that's going to be my name on everything forget bechillcomedian.com

circle finger sign pointing finger sign thumbs up sign Becca's a comedian and writer and I'm bomb symbol peace sign snowflake snowflake that tracks yeah I think so I think that's about right yeah aka Matt that mask guy off the internet because you come in like a bomb come in like a bomb come here but then you're chilled and chilled in a snowflake And then snowflake, snowflake, in a chilled way.

He's a big fan of six-fold symmetry.

And I'm going to say

fractals

are snowflakes.

I'm going to give you half points for effort.

Thanks.

Innuendo hand signs, thumbs up sign.

Yeah.

On this episode.

I'm taking us back to the first podcast ever.

Oh.

I've worked out the most extreme way to lose the US election.

And we'll have some peace sign, flag, circle hand.

So, innuendo thumbs up, how you been?

I've been great.

I've been great.

I went to Berlin.

Oh, yes, you did go to Berlin.

It was beautiful weather.

Great.

Low 30s, sunny.

I cycled everywhere.

It's such a cycle-friendly city.

I'm very impressed.

I thought of you a lot because every time I cycle now, I might be proud of me.

Yeah, that's because I'm in my project to cycle every day for people who are wondering.

Yes.

Which I haven't done yet today.

I had to cycle once before.

Ooh, crikey.

Yeah, you will.

And I discovered, upon borrowing a bicycle, my feet didn't reach the ground.

And my friend, who was the same height as me, went, oh, you can

try my bike.

Because we didn't have the thing to put your seat down.

And I got on her bike and my feet still didn't touch the ground.

That's when we realised that my legs

are very short.

Now, I've always known I've got short legs.

I always had to get get like trousers taken off.

I didn't want to bring it up.

But I didn't realize how short they were until I.

It was an issue when I stopped at lights.

What percentage of your height is legs?

Do you know what?

Just on the top of your head.

I say that like I know my own.

I don't know.

I mean,

I don't know, 40, 35%.

This now makes more sense because when I wear like a one-piece swimming costume,

I also find that it can get a little bit tight

around the button, the crotch area and the shoulders.

And it's like, oh, it's just because my torso is longer

than average.

To paraphrase fellow Aussie comedian Sarah Bernetto, who has a similar dilemma, I've got trunk.

You've got trunk in the trunk.

Yeah, I've got a whole lot of trunk.

Like a tree, like just a lot of...

I've got trunk.

Yeah, yeah

so that was a discovery what a lesson to learn yeah but i did i had a great time in berlin really nice had ice creams in the park oh lovely it was very good but i also went to birthday party uh my friend's friend and while i was there i was chatting to someone and ended up talking about how we do a podcast yep that's the job of being a podcaster you have to tell you have to tell people yeah i have a podcast you know yeah this reminds me of when i record my podcast yeah

Well, it came about because the friend that I was staying in Berlin with, I met through listeners who listened to this.

Hi, Gilda, I met you.

Who listened to Enemy in Paris?

Your other podcast.

I met them in Paris.

And my friend Anya was visiting them.

Right.

And Anya lives in Berlin.

Gotcha.

Anyway, but I was like, but I have another podcast.

And I said that I host it with a mathematician called Matt Parker.

And he works in like

data stuff.

I said that and he went, whoa, that's so cool.

That's amazing.

Does he like show up in a puff of smoke or something?

And I was like, what?

And then I went,

mathematician.

Mathematician.

And he went, oh.

Great, great, great, great, good, great.

So not only has he never heard of you, Matt.

Brilliant.

I'm on board.

But he thought I said magician.

And then he was like, I was going to say, I'm not sure how you would turn that into a podcast

just be like and avocadabra the elephant is gone now for the listeners at home yeah yeah just imagine

imagine not an elephant although i do kind of love the idea of doing a podcast as a magician and then being a really bad magician so like it's still the audio of you making it whoops yeah

oh no okay forget the doves loose yeah

it's just the audio

and things smashing.

Yeah.

Oh no.

So anyway, that's how I've been.

How about you?

I've been magical.

I was recently in the States.

I went to the Bridges Math Art Conference,

which is a big conference where mathematicians who do arty thing and artists who do mathsy things come together.

Yep.

Like a Da Vinci.

Like a Da Vinci book.

And I previously attended this two years ago in 2022.

And I don't know if you remember, but I mentioned that one of my favorite talks last time was someone who made generative mittens.

So these are mittens where the pattern is like randomly started, but then once you've seeded it, you get this cool pattern that covers the mitten.

Yes.

Yeah.

It was a while ago.

It was a while back.

So Emily Dennett's the person who made, did the talk, showed the mittens, somehow heard it in the podcast.

Probably with ears.

Probably with her ears.

Yeah.

And got in touch and say, Do you want some mittens?

Like, should make some changes with mittens.

And I was like, sure, love some mittens.

Who doesn't want mittens?

Well, then, no mittens ever arrived.

We never got those mittens.

Emily, however, continued listening to the podcast.

Oh.

And do you remember the episode where I was cycling in London because of my cycling?

Yeah, and you had to put socks on your hands.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then I realized

all the things that were wrong with cycling with socks on my hands.

Yes.

So I risked life and limb and still had quite cold hands.

Emily listened to that and went, oh my goodness, this wouldn't have happened if I'd sent Matt the mittens.

You're right.

Emily, I hope you feel horrible.

Exactly.

So Emily was at Bridges again.

She found me and said, here are your mittens.

Amazing.

And there's a pair for me and a pair for you.

I have them here.

Let me get them out.

Oh my gosh, this is perfect timing because the weather's starting to turn hands.

It's just starting to get cold.

Wow.

They're in a bag.

Let me get them out.

Oh my gosh.

So I can't remember if she allocated.

I'll give you one of each so you can see both.

So we can have like uneven pairs of uneven pairs.

Oh my gosh, these are so cute.

They got little farms.

Look at this.

I'll be able to hold handlebars.

We'll put some photos on all the socials afterwards if people want to see what they look like.

They've got a cool generative mathematical patterns and then different colours.

One's like white and blue.

The other one's like more of an

aqua color and then grey pattern on it.

They're very, very cool.

yeah and so now now we have uh

procedurally generated mittens that's amazing you can decide which pair you would like to hang on to and i'll have the other one and yeah they're all mine now

i'm not getting them back i never had proper mittens i don't think i've ever owned a pair of mittens no i've had like cut off

finger gloves I've got a pair of finger gloves, cut-off finger gloves that have a little hood.

So they sort of transition into mittens.

Oh, right, yeah, yeah, but but then they're very weak, they're very the wind gets to the wind gets right in there, yeah.

These are proper, nice and warm.

Look at that, yeah, amazing.

So, I just wanted to close the loop on that.

That's amazing.

So, the journey is complete.

Thank you very much, Emily, for our fantastic.

Yeah, thank you so much,

or as I'd like to say, pointy finger, bomb,

full hand,

full hand, yep, sad face, sad face, star David, David.

Classic Emily.

First problem was sent in by someone who goes by the name Tadaz,

or they're just Tad As.

Yeah, or that's their actual name, which is quite rude.

Look, if someone sends their name into this podcast, they know what they're getting.

Yeah.

And that's because you're a magician.

That's why you're named.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Tadaz says what is the first podcast ever made and what kind of pods were they casting i don't feel like a podcast casts pods i feel like it's cast on a pod well well it depends when you want to start clarifying stuff as a podcast yes basically since the internet yeah allowed us to send

sound

There's been like audio blogs and things like that to upload sound and stuff so people could listen to people's like personal radio shows and stuff like that in 2003 there was a software engineer called dave wiener dave wiener yeah who developed an audio rss feed for a new york times reporter and public radio host called christopher lyden right

and they used that rss feed to offer audio content And that's still largely how podcasts work to this very day.

Yeah, it was whenever he was doing interviews with like notable people and stuff.

So if you define a podcast as distributed by an RSS feed.

Yeah, that was 2003, so just over 20 years ago.

There was a blogger con.

I didn't even know blogger connected.

BloggerCon.

Oh, I loved the 2000s.

Yeah, so BloggerCon in 2003, people started to talk more about these like audio.

Yep, audio blogs.

Yeah, audio blogs.

And then Dave Weiner partnered up with Adam Curry, who is an MTV VJ,

which I'm assuming stands for Video Jockey.

And they created iPodder.

iPodter.

Yeah.

And that program helped people download internet, like audio blogs onto their iPod.

Got it.

So that allowed them to download internet radio broadcasts onto their iPods and audio contents.

That could be it.

So people then started calling them podcasts.

Apparently, the iPod MP3 player that played them was called a podcast.

I'm guessing like a podcaster.

At the end of 2004, the first podcast hosting platform.

Want to have a guess?

The first podcasting hosting platform.

Libsyn?

Yeah.

Libsyn.

God, Libsyn.

Which we are no longer with.

But we were hosting.

We overrated syndication, I think.

That's correct, yeah.

I thought it was much earlier than this, but it wasn't until 2005 that they built podcast subscriptions into iTunes so that you could just get it straight from iTunes.

You didn't have to use any other sort of program.

And that's when Apple Podcasts was released and became a thing.

I mean, technically, you could argue that the first podcast, as in something that could go on a pod, on an iPod, were these interviews by Christopher Leiden.

So you could argue that those were the first podcasts.

I bet Leiden does.

I bet they do, too.

So it was called Radio Open Source.

The actual term podcast was officially coined by Ben Hammersley, who was a Guardian columnist.

Ah, that's a bit like how your friend of mine, Dr.

Carl, was the first person to coin the phrase selfie.

Was he really?

Yeah, I'm sure there's probably some contention.

I'm sure more than one person claims that.

But I think he's got a pretty solid claim on the first person to use selfie.

Yeah.

Huh.

But that's biased towards people who have a Guardian column or a radio show to be the first sighted person to use a new word.

Yeah.

It obviously lends itself to people who have a platform to say a word on the record.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Have you ever pioneered a word other than the park square?

That's a whole vibe.

I don't think I've ever pioneered a word.

I've mispronounced words.

I'm very envious.

My friend Brady, Brady Harron, who does NumberFile.

Yes.

Came up with free booting.

Freebooting.

For when people download your video and re-upload it somewhere else.

Ooh, that's nice.

Based on an old pirate term, which is very cool.

Because bootlegging is the recording part of it.

It's such a good word for it.

And free booting apparently was a phrase used for original pirate activities.

That makes sense.

Bluetooth is from

Viking stuff.

Bluetooth.

I'd love to invent a word and have it stick.

I think I've mentioned this on the podcast.

I've invented a word.

I invented a word, gushaping.

Gushaping?

Yeah, it's when you gush about someone in a gossipy way.

So when you're complimenting someone behind their back.

Right.

Got it.

So for instance.

Gushaping.

Oh my gosh, Lauren, have you seen that Matt's just had an asteroid named after him?

That's so cool.

What a great guy.

Oh, quick, here he comes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gushaping.

I'm really trying to get it out there.

Like, I've been trying really hard for several years.

Oh, wow.

But I think it's a good term.

I can't think of anything that quite describes like when you're aggressively nice about someone behind their back, having a good gushuping session.

Do you want to know what year I did my first podcast?

Yes.

1999.

Go on.

But I don't know.

Obviously, it wasn't called a podcast.

It wasn't called a podcast.

It was before the iPod.

It was me and two of my mates.

We would, let me know if this sounds familiar, the new season of the X-Files was coming out.

And so we would discuss and review each episode of, I think, series six of the X-Files

on a show we called Agree to Disagree.

And we would then edit it down, identical to a podcast, and then put it up on my mates' website.

We got shut down almost immediately

because the amount of bandwidth was being used up.

So agree to disagree didn't make it very far.

Are these episodes out there still?

I very much doubt that.

Are they not on a hard drive somewhere?

Potentially, Simon's.

This is my mate, Simon Wright, who actually does the design for my Stand Up Mass channel to this day.

Simon and Cohen I can.

Yeah.

We all went to school together.

Yeah.

And this was like my first year at uni.

So it could still be available.

It could still be available.

Please find me.

Internet sleuths.

Good luck.

We have a new wizard Patreon, $100 a month.

You get to listen to

Teenage Matt talk about X-Files.

Yeah, so we tried to do it, but the technology wasn't there because we just like, basically, it was like the audio blog thing you're talking about.

Yeah.

This was also before blogs, because it was before movable type or any of that.

So

you had to do a lot of the lifting yourself to host the files in a way people could then listen to.

But too many people downloaded that, so we got shut down by our internet service provider.

IINet are to blame for the death of my first podcast.

I mean, it's not a podcast, but I used to, like, you know, how you make mixtapes for people?

Like, I would make mixtapes for my friends when they went on holiday.

But I would interspersper.

Because you do the right radio DJ.

I do that.

Yeah, I would intersperse it with little bits of chat and everything.

I would like to come in between.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So technically, it was like a manual.

Scrooge me, you're surprised.

That's brilliant.

An acoustic podcast.

I do leave very long voice notes for my friends, which we've started on.

As the recipient of.

Oh, oh, oh, Matt.

Oh, no, I know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm on the line of this.

There is a lot.

No, no, no, no.

I'm not making this a challenge.

My friends and I routinely leave each other voice notes that are between

20 and 60 minutes long.

20 minutes.

We call them personal podcasts.

You should.

And I love them.

I love them.

And it's great.

My friends and I were saying, like, because sometimes there's, I'm in a WhatsApp group with two friends back from Adelaide, and there'll be times where we won't talk to each other for ages.

And then

someone will send a voice note, and then another one, and then you'll get quite far behind because you're quite busy.

But then it means that later when things quieten down, you can binge their personal podcast and just like they're talking about how they're worried about something at work or whatever.

And then the next one, they're like, okay, so this happened.

Oh, I love it.

I love it.

It's like the best possible soap opera because the parasocial relationship is a genuine relationship.

Parasocial relationship.

No, that's like a nightmare to me.

To feel the social obligation to catch up on hours of unlistened media.

Oh, it's

no, no, thank you.

I tend to just call it a voice.

It's correct with your voice.

No, it's you tend to voice fine.

I tend to just call you and then keep you on the phone for 20 to 60 minutes.

Your favorite conversation is one where the other person person can't interrupt or say anything.

Anyway, back to answering this question.

Have I just seen in the notes web archives of the alpha peer?

That's terrifying.

That's the website we hosted it on.

I think producer Lawrence found it while we were talking.

Oh my gosh.

Yes!

That's terrifying.

Check out my trousers.

Matt, you look like you're wearing a wig.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

About the team.

Here we go.

Matt Parker.

He's the new guy to the X-Files.

Before we recruited him for agree to disagree, he'd only seen a couple of season one episodes in the movie.

That's true.

But it doesn't stop him from making insightful

comments on season six.

No, sir rebop.

It was season six, I remember.

Matt spent most of 1998 just outside of the world.

A quarter of a century ago, I want to make that very clear.

And before that, lived in Perth, Australia, and Indonesia.

Not all at once, though.

There's a joke.

And the fact that the school in Indonesia was run by Americans when combined with the UK and Australian experiences gives him that truly bizarre accent.

That hasn't changed.

Your accent's not that weird now, though.

Really?

I think it's very Australian.

Oh, okay.

His greatest achievement so far in the reviews would have to be his world record attempt in Drive, where he managed to say bobbins three times in the edited version of the reviews.

And we're supposed to

bobbins.

And we're supposed to keep this quiet, but he's also a science engineering student at UWA in Perth, but you didn't hear it from us.

Here, we've got some answers as well.

Coke, Pepsi, or one of those generic supermarket ones, you've written Coke, Coke, Coke.

I was really into Coke as a teenager.

I mean, I'm assuming you mean Coca-Cola.

Yes.

Because the exclamation would be.

I am the anti-Pepsi.

Wow.

Dogs or cats?

Cats?

This was all handwritten.

You've said?

Cats.

Guys in the room.

Guys literally sleeping right next to us.

They are always their own person, and then in brackets, feline, whatever, and can be amused for hours by the simplest things.

You haven't done a closed bracket, so I feel like we're never going to get any ending.

I'm going to go find this page now.

What type of music or musicians do you listen to most?

Jars of Clay Rock.

Yeah.

Tree exclamation marks.

Also, Skillet, Cause, Audio, Adrenaline, Delirious, Tree, Blues, Brothers.

Oh, yeah, DC Talk.

Savage Garden.

Classic Savage Garden.

DC Talk.

I haven't heard them in a lot of

That's a guy I grew up with parents in the church.

Correct.

Savage Garden and Newsboys.

Are my favourite colours green?

Stuff under your bed, a drum kit.

You did activate yourself.

And then you've got Taboom Ching.

Favorite saying, oh, my giddy aunt.

The first thing you thought this morning when you woke up, why is Simon phoning this early?

That is literally true from memory.

Drinks with or without ice cubes.

With, indeed, a glacier's worth.

Your childhood dream job.

A bricky.

That's true.

Yeah.

Hey, I just wanted to build stuff.

I have since found out that it is the engineers who get to have all the fun making stuff.

Well, since then, I've also learned how tedious working as an engineer can be.

This was like my first year of my engineering degree.

Yeah.

Ah, young Matthew.

Then the suggestion that people get in touch with you.

I don't think that email address will still work.

I'm pretty sure Simon has not reviewed that.

They said you could tell him that his aunt is a Diddy Giddy.

This is this is

a treasure trove my friend simon started a thing called the x-files alphabet book which was a school project when we were in high school

in like 1997 i want to say and it ended up being one of the most popular x-files websites oh like doing interviews with the cast it's very it's very enemy in paris if i may yeah it sounds like it's better researched to be fair and then off the back of that because he already had this un this is back when a a teenager in high school can make a website of comparable quality to anything else that was on the internet.

It was very level playing field at the time.

And off the back of that, that's when he relaunched it as the ALF instead of the X-Files alphabet book.

And that's when we then released agree to disagree.

I love this.

It was a lot of fun.

Yeah.

There's never been a point in my life where I've not been making ridiculous things.

That tracks.

And there's not been a point in my career when my good mate Cy hasn't been doing design work to make me look more legitimate than I should be.

Yes, yeah.

Those friends are so necessary.

Yeah.

The number of projects I've done where Simon making it look legit has made it happen.

That's when I ended up working with Ross Noble.

Oh, yeah.

Before I was doing anything else, Cy and I knocked together a website and a ridiculous project involving a printout nana and got in touch when he was doing Triple J.

And because Cy made us

incredible.

I remember you telling me about that and me remembering it because I would listen to Ross Noble on Triple J and being very excited about that.

I may have even printed out the Nana at one point.

I think I did.

Yeah, yeah.

None of this sentence surprises me.

So this was 98, did you say?

99.

99.

Do you want to see a picture of me in 99?

That feels only fair.

I don't feel like we have much of an age gap until

you see the year by year.

Oh, that's cheating.

Also, 100% on brand.

Is that like your last year of primary school?

Yeah, it is.

Hang on.

I think, to be fair, a photo of you at age 18.

I'll find a photo of me.

There is one from my 18th birthday.

Great.

The audio file that I got off that website is like 37 bytes.

I'm very fortunate that when I hit my teenage years, technology had just got to the point where you could start doing some of this stuff yourself.

Yes.

So me and my mates could knock together a ridiculous audio review or whatever we called it at the time, which is basically podcasting.

And then during university, we all made short films and did all sorts of ridiculous things like that.

And I think that's still true.

I mean, it's nice now.

People can still start a YouTube channel or a podcast.

Just bear in mind, be creative, make stuff.

But in a quarter century, it'll be dragged up and you'll be reminded of the things you made when you were 18.

Yes.

No regrets.

No regrets, indeed.

Back to the original question.

Adam Curry, who was the MTV VJ who helped create iPodder.

So that was the first podcast that went on to iPod

once iPodder was a thing.

So that was the first thing that was called an actual podcast.

It was the daily source code, which was all about podcasting.

Amazing.

Yeah.

That was the best possible choice for first podcast.

Yes.

It covered events in the the podcasting space, general news, and played music from the PodSafe Music Network.

The PodSafe Music Network.

Yeah, I feel like you answered the question.

I think that answers it.

Would you like some bonus podcasting stat facts?

Yes.

Podcasting was kind of like, yeah, sort of gaining some traction and stuff.

In 2006, Ricky Gervais got the Guinness World Record for most downloaded podcast in one month, which was over 260,000 downloads.

Oh, wow.

Which sounds like a lot.

Yeah.

And it is a lot.

It is a lot.

But other podcasts are getting those numbers like highly routinely now.

Yeah, quite routinely.

In 2011, Adam Carolla won the Guinness World Record for most downloaded podcast with over 59 million downloads.

From I think the show started in 2009.

So that was over two years.

That was over two years.

Now, it was in 2014 that Serial

started, which was a true crime

podcast.

And that was so popular

that people started listening to podcasts in general more.

Oh, wow.

It dragged up the whole industry.

They started listening to cereal and went, oh, this is quite good.

What else?

What else can we do?

Which I think is just incredible.

Can you imagine having a show that genuinely changes the industry?

It was the first podcast to win a Peabody Award.

And here's a couple of other little stats because I know you're hungry for this sort of thing.

At the moment, there are about 546 million podcast listeners worldwide.

I thought you're going to say podcasts.

I don't think it's far off, to be fair.

I don't have the number.

47% of the US population who are over 12 years old listen to a podcast at least once a month.

Wow.

In 2024, worldwide podcast ad spending is estimated to hit $4 billion.

That's a lot of billions of dollars.

Yep.

We get zero of those $4 billion.

So this episode is brought to you by our Patreon.

Patreon.com slash a problem squared.

Yes.

Well, I hope that answered the question.

Yeah, I mean, the question was, what was the first podcast?

And what kind of pods were they casting?

It was literally the iPod.

The first podcast was the daily source code.

If you're going from the term podcast.

Yep.

Talking about podcasting.

And I was talking about podcasting.

Couldn't be a better answer.

Yep.

Oh, we agree to agree.

Oh, let's start a podcast.

Bec, I'm going to give you a ding.

I'll give you an I ding.

Excellent.

You've answered all the questions.

Thank you.

Not a wing ding.

Not a wing ding.

You've answered it so well, I don't think we even need to include that stuff about my 1999 podcast.

Oh, I'm going to ask Lauren to put that in twice.

Oh, what?

Just loop it.

This next problem

is from Parker Square Enthusiast.

I already have reservations about this, but carry on.

They say, hello, BNM.

That's us.

I hope so.

With the upcoming U.S.

election and the usual talks about swing states, it got me pondering this.

What is the theoretical highest percentage of nationwide individual votes that a party can get while still losing the election due to the state-based system?

Thanks for a great show.

Great.

Thank you, PSE.

I don't understand this question.

So.

That's my problem.

The reason I was attracted to this question, despite it being from Parker Square Enthusiast,

is we have a US election coming up.

And last time we had a US election in 2020, I made a bunch of videos because people were throwing around all sorts of ridiculous and made-up statistics and mathematics after the election because the calculations and the way a US election works is not super straightforward.

And it's almost like large amounts of the population have been primed to expect shenanigans.

And so they'll latch onto any wisp of a shenanigans.

Yeah.

I think it's interesting that

there's an audience for learning about statistics that normally wouldn't care about statistics.

And so I like to make videos at the time because I think it's both useful to set the record straight

and

it feels like if people want to learn about stats, it'll be a dereliction of duty for me to not.

I'm assuming.

This election will go so smoothly, there will be no need for me to step into the fray and talk about statistics.

I would be very happy if that was the case.

On the slim chance that's not what happens in November, I thought me brushing up on some stats would not hurt.

Yes.

So I thought, you know what, I'll dive in.

It's like a warm-up lap for me to just chuck together a spreadsheet and answer some election questions.

So the way a US election works is it's not whoever gets the most votes who wins,

it's whoever gets the most electors electors who vote for them.

Because the US system, it's very clever in a lot of ways.

One of its early features was because the US was such a geographically spread out area.

Yeah.

This is even back when they only had like 13 states or 15 early on.

You wouldn't directly vote for who's going to be president because you don't know who they are.

Yeah.

You've never met them.

Yeah.

You've not been to New York or DC or wherever the

four podcasts.

You couldn't listen before podcasts.

You couldn't listen to Mark Mark Marin interview Barack Obama.

Exactly.

And so they thought, what are we going to do to fill the gap between now and podcasting?

And what they decided to do was, in their own local community, they should vote for someone from their community who will then travel all the way to wherever the election is actually happening.

Wow.

Meet and greet or find out what the deal is.

Yeah.

And then cast their vote.

So you guys.

I want to be that guy.

Yeah, yeah, you're nominating

one human to go and represent you wherever the action is.

So then they can go there, they can be informed, they can get up to speed on what's happening elsewhere.

I can't see that possibly going wrong.

It can't go wrong.

That system still holds.

Yep.

But what's interesting about it is now, and different states have enshrined this in different extents of law because in the US, like in Australia, we have a whole separate electoral organization who run the elections.

Yep.

In the US, each state determines how they run their own elections.

Okay.

So it can be different state to state.

And some states...

Some of them use machines, some of them use beans.

Ah, yeah, let's not get into this beans versus machines debate.

Why can't the two coexist?

Beans and machines will never see either.

Torah button next lean bean machine or whatever it's called.

So some states, the electors have to vote for the way the vote went in the state, whereas others, there's some ambiguity.

But anyway, the knock-on effect we have now is when people are casting a vote in their state, they're actually voting for the elector who will go and then vote for the president.

And the vast majority of states

will have a number of electors

that represent the state.

So the more population, the more electors you're going to send.

But they will all have to vote the same way.

Okay.

So California, for example, is the one with the most.

California has like 50 electors that will be sent.

Yeah.

And then they use a clapometer.

And they use a clap.

You know how it works.

They come out and say, who do you want to vote for?

Like, I can't hear you.

Yeah.

They hold their hand above each candidate's head.

Everyone goes,

you know how it works.

It's a lot like the gong show at the comedy store.

I think that should be how the debates go.

It should be how the debates go.

Not enough gong.

Yeah,

if they're not enjoying it, if they're not like.

If like three audience members hold up a card, they have to leave the gong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The lights go out.

That'll fix them.

So California's got 54 electors.

And it's all or nothing.

All 54 vote Republican or all 54 vote Democrat.

Other parties, in theory, they'll have to all vote for the same party.

So it means

if you get just over half the votes in California, you get all the electors

vote for you.

Yeah, so it means the impact is you basically individually win or lose each state separately,

and then you've got to add together the electors you get from each one.

So, in theory, to win the election, you could lose a bunch of states completely

and and barely win

in just enough states so all their electors add up to over half of the total number of electors and then you're in business okay and there are 538

electors

and so you have to get 270 to win okay which is why there's a website called 538 that's where they got their name from from doing election predictions

But Matt, you say, how do they work out how many electors per state?

But Matt, how do they work out how many electors per state?

That's a great question, Beck.

Because you'd think, oh, it's just you scale it based on the population.

Yeah.

You don't.

Oh.

What you do is you look at how many representatives in Congress they have.

And they get the same number of electors as they have reps in Congress.

Well, that seems unfair.

And in Congress, every state definitely gets two members in the Senate.

No negotiation.

Every state gets two.

Does it matter on your population?

Yep.

In the House House of Reps, you get a minimum of one.

You can't have zero.

You get at least one representative.

And then that scales based on population.

Okay.

So the bigger your population, the more members in the House of Reps.

Yep.

But you're always guaranteed at least one, and everyone gets two in the Senate, which means the minimum number of electors a state can get is three because they're guaranteed to have three in Congress.

But very small states like Wyoming

has a tiny population,

has a population currently

under 600,000 people in Wyoming.

Okay.

And they get a full three electors, which means their electors representing

very few people in the state per elector.

Yeah.

Which is why sometimes you hear the arguments in different states your vote's worth more or less.

Okay.

Because there's more or fewer people per elector.

Got it.

Whereas somewhere like California with millions of people and 54 electors, there's way more people per elector.

And it's this weird thing in Congress, the way the Senate works, is why you get this weird skewing.

Now, on one hand, that is kind of deliberate because the point was originally you don't want small states to be bullied around by the big states.

And you don't want the needs and requirements of...

people in the rural areas just getting rolled over by people in the cities because they've got the votes in terms of sheer numbers of people.

We still need farmers and rural areas and all that jazz.

So this is a deliberate attempt.

The reason the Senate, it doesn't matter how big or small your state is, you get the same number, is to mean every state's on an equal footing in the Senate.

And so there's representation for even small, far-flung, spread-out states.

But it does mean now people get very upset about this.

But the electoral college is the issue.

If they didn't have the electoral college, which is the fact that you go to send all these electors who then vote, vote, and you didn't have states that just have an all-or-nothing approach, you wouldn't have these issues.

Two states, Maine and Nebraska, will

split their electors based on the ratio of the vote.

So if the vote's pretty close, half and half, they, in theory, I mean, they haven't got that many electors, to be honest, but in theory, they would say

half of you vote for this party and the other half vote for that party.

So they scale the electors to the vote, which people are like, well, that makes a lot more sense.

And in theory, that would solve a lot of the problems.

Yeah.

Now, here comes the question.

So, I temporarily thought I would flip the question because they said, What's the most votes you can get

and not win?

Yes.

I thought I would answer, what's the fewest votes you can get in order to win?

And then, assuming the other party got every other conceivable vote, that will answer that question.

Yeah.

I had to work out

how many

people are going to vote.

So, what I did was I took the population increase since 2020 for all the states.

Because, like the UK, voting is not compulsory.

Whereas we're from Australia, where it you have to have to vote.

Compulsory voting.

Yeah.

Which has its own pros and cons.

I think it's better, compulsory voting,

but I can see there are arguments against it.

Yes.

Because the good side is politicians have to appeal to the entire population, not just the demographics within the population who tend to vote.

Yes.

So they know everyone's going to be voting for them.

They've got to appeal to everyone.

And you can still choose to not vote.

You've just got to show up and write, they're all jerks, spoil the ballot, and shove it in.

You have to show up and not vote or show up and vote.

I mean, the downsides are a lot of people will vote without knowing much about the parties, and so potentially will vote based entirely on one or two things in the media, which means certain stories or bad faith reporting can skew

voting way more than it can in other countries.

Pros and cons.

So I had to take the turnout for all 51 states, because DC does get to vote,

scale it up by the population change, because since the last election, some states have increased in population and some have decreased in population.

So for example, Wyoming is up by like over one and a half percent, whereas DC is down.

DC's down

like 2%-ish.

So I went through and

took the number of people who voted last time, did all the percentage changes based on the population change since then, and then I tried to work out what's the fewest votes you need to win the electoral college.

And so, I just sorted every single state by the number of votes per elector in the electoral college.

And your absolute winner is Wyoming.

You want to go hard in Wyoming because

to win Wyoming, you're getting electors at just under 47,000 votes per elector.

Whereas somewhere like Florida, it's almost 200,000 votes per elector.

So those are very expensive.

If you're trying to minimize how many voters are voting for you, you don't want Florida, you want Wyoming.

And then District of Columbia, DC is next, followed by Alaska, North Dakota, ranked them all.

And what I've seen done before, because people have done this online, is then you just start from the bottom and you work your way way up, adding on the states one at a time for the ones with the fewest votes needed per elector until you hit the threshold at 270 and you're like, job done.

Yeah.

However, that's not the most efficient way to do it.

I then realized if you do that, just looking at the numbers, you actually overshoot because you go up in such a big block every time.

The state that gets you over the line is Illinois.

But that's 19 electors and you only need nine of those to hit the threshold.

So I was like, oh, maybe there's a more efficient way of of doing it.

And so I spent ages working out: like, if instead of Illinois, you didn't win Illinois, but you did win Arizona, it's more votes per elector, but you don't overshoot by as much.

So it's actually fewer votes in total.

And so I went through and shuffled exactly which states you can win or lose.

And I worked out that if you

don't win Tennessee and Missouri, but you do win Arizona, the ranking otherwise works.

That's the absolute minimum number of votes you can to win.

And that ends up being it's 34.7 million votes,

which is 21.6%

of all votes cast.

Wow.

Which means in theory

the other party could have gotten 78.4% of all votes and still lost.

Wow.

So

you need under a quarter of votes cast for you to win in theory.

Yeah.

In the most efficient way possible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that kind of makes sense because

if you want to win the Electoral College, you have to win half the states.

And in each of those states, you have to get half the vote.

Well, half the vote plus one.

And so if you have to get half the vote in half the states to win, that's a quarter of the votes.

Yeah.

And then everything I've done around there is just fine-tuning exactly which state you do and don't win to get it down to 21.6%.

But I'm not at all surprised it's about a quarter in general because you've got to win half the states by half the vote.

Yeah.

Huh.

I don't know how that makes me feel.

So it's a lot of numbers.

I mean,

it was a great system.

It still is a good system.

But the Electoral College is a bit of a nightmare.

The knock-on effect now is

some states, because it's all or nothing,

there's no point campaigning in a state like California if you're the Republicans, because the Democrats have such an advantage.

There's no way the Republicans are going to get over 50% of the vote.

Unless you can get over 50% of the vote, you get zero of the electors.

If it was proportional, If they like, oh, well, if we do a bit of campaigning in California, we might increase our vote by 10% points.

And that would get us an extra elector or five.

Then it would be worth campaigning, even though you're never going to win the whole state.

You might lose by a bit less and still get more electors.

But the fact that it's all or nothing means unless you've got any chance of winning the entire state, there's no point campaigning or appealing to those voters.

Other than obviously, you want to maintain your base because you don't want a state to flip.

And it means you get these things called swing states, and it means all the campaigning money and effort and resources and policy is dumped on a tiny number of states, which could go either way.

Yeah.

And so in that regard, it's not incentivizing people who are campaigning for president to appeal to all voters.

They're incentivized to only appeal to voters in swing states,

which is, I think, a misfiring of the intention of the setup.

I think this could all be solved if we.

You say beans.

Okay, well, I've got nothing.

No, I still think that it should be based on.

I've said this previously on the show before.

I think it should just be based on voting for policies and not, as in, like, you don't, it's a blind vote.

You don't.

You don't know who you're voting for.

You just do the policies on the paper.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think there's something in that.

It involves more effort from each person, but at least then

you know you were getting what you asked for.

Yeah, but I think we should have, you know, ranked choice voting.

I think that would solve a bunch of problems as well.

But, you know, we can dream.

Anyway, neither of us are Americans, so we can just watch on in

horror,

curiosity, hunger, in hunger.

I will say, for people in the US for the election, come election time.

If you've got suggestions for videos or things that you think are worth looking into or something that's interesting, I can't guarantee I'll do it.

But if there's something sufficiently good, I will definitely make a video about it.

So do email me with your suggestions, research, comments, etc.

Yeah.

Well, thank you very much, Matt.

I feel like I just said so many numbers.

You've got no choice but to say, ah, that sounds like a solution.

I will put a complete list of all the states you'd need to win to do the minimum vote victory.

And we'll put them in the show notes if people would like to see the actual list.

I think you should run for presidency.

I know there's

you weren't born there to start with.

Yeah, yeah.

But now you know how to hack the system.

It's Wyoming or nothing.

Oh, it's nothing but hacking hacking the system over there.

It's Pennsylvania or nothing this time, I think.

Oh, thanks for teaching us.

I think I'm going to give that a ding state.

Hey, huh?

Huh?

Yeah.

See what I did there?

Instead of a swing state.

Instead of a swing state, it's a ding state.

Give you a ding state.

Now I get it.

That's very funny.

Yeah.

Thanks.

That's the sort of humor I'm going for.

You nailed it.

No laughter.

Just people go.

Well, that joke is so funny.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm happy with that.

But Pug Square Enthusiast, are you?

Let us know.

Yes, let us know.

Now it's time for a little segment we like to call peace symbol, waving white, square-edged flag, hole-in-the-finger symbol.

AOB.

Any other.

Any other wing-bing-ness?

Wing-bings.

That's what they call it.

Yep.

We heard from Mark.

who is referring to episode 092, Broken Hands and Alexander's Bands.

They said, regarding how many colors of the rainbow you can see in episode 092, I checked 140 named HTML colors supported by all browsers.

Now, I just want to flag up here.

A lot of people talked about RGB values.

Yes.

Which is just how you define a color on a computer.

Yep.

But in HTML, you can just name a color.

You can be like, background, ah, blue or orange.

So you can write it in text.

Got it.

Which is good because obviously if you slightly tweak an RGB value, it might be indistinguishable to the human eye.

Because RGB values generally are done like, so red, you'd have 0, 0.

Yes.

Green would be 0, 0.

No, well, as in like a 3D.

It's done all of them, yeah.

Yeah, so it's like six numbers, each two represents red, green, blue, and then it's kind of like if you were looking at it on a square graph and you were plotting it out, kind of.

Yeah, it's a point in a 3DQ.

Not a graph.

Yeah, a Q.

You were right.

Yeah, yeah.

You're spot on.

But it means there's like 256 values for each of RG and B.

So if you slightly change one of them, you probably couldn't visually tell the difference.

Yep.

Whereas if you have named the colors, HTML colors

are distinct.

They've got names each.

Yeah.

Like text human readable names.

It's almost like sizes of Neil.

It's like sizes of Neil.

Yeah.

They said they checked 140 named HTML colors supported by all browsers and selected the ones with 100% saturation and 100% value in the HSV color space.

A different colour.

Not RGB.

You can switch it to a different colour space.

Hue saturation value.

Value.

Yeah.

Based on that, I conclude you can see 12 colours.

Ooh.

Or 13 if you count magenta, but you shouldn't.

There isn't a magenta wavelength.

Long story, we're not doing that now.

They are red, orange-red, dark-orange, which still has value at 100%, so isn't really dark.

Orange, orange, gold,

yellow, chartreuse.

Chartreuse!

Yep.

That's not not a word.

You've never heard of chartreuse?

I've never heard of chartreuse.

It's like a yellowy.

It's a deal when I Google it.

Like a very, very bright yellow.

Well, that's how I'm going in memory.

Oh, whoa, yeah.

Oh, okay.

It's not lime, but it's slightly green, bright yellow.

Okay.

Yeah.

Although, funnily enough.

I think it is.

I would say green.

When I Google that, I'm then getting chartreuse, the liquor.

Which is a green liquor.

It's sort of an olive-y colour.

Appropriately named for its resemblance to the French liquor.

It's a yellow-green colour that sits between yellow and green.

Oh, well done, everybody.

Wait, the liquor came before the.

I like how we just started naming colours after food.

Yeah.

This is great.

It could have been anything.

We could name it after animals that have that color.

Yeah,

plants, no.

Food.

Yeah.

I want nugget.

Not gold nugget, just nugget.

Just nug.

Yeah.

Nug.

Oh, I love what you've done with

your living room.

Oh, thanks.

It's all nug.

Nug.

It's more of a nuggy brown.

Can I just say my favorite thing about having producer Lauren in the room with us is when she has to look out the window, but I see her shoulders moving.

Yeah, yeah.

So after chartreuse, we've got lime.

Spring green.

You don't get just green, you get spring green.

Yeah.

Spring green.

Aqua.

Or cyan.

Cyan.

Yeah, aqua.

Deep sky blue as one word.

Deep sky blue.

Deep Deep sky blue.

Blue.

And blue.

They managed to stick the landing there.

So thanks, Mark.

Twelve colours.

Twelve colours if you were to create a rainbow in HTML.

Which would be rod.

Og.

Rod, Oggy.

Rod, Oggie, Claus.

A few people wrote in with more details about if you get health care

if you're traveling within the EU and you're a UK citizen.

Yes.

Which is not something we originally talked about in depth.

It was in passing.

Yeah, because after I recorded that episode, one of my friends had been to Paris and had fainted while on a walk, a food walk, but she'd been holding off from eating.

For the guided food tour.

Maximum value.

And then there was too much walking versus eating and she fainted.

So she had to go to hospital.

She's from America and they couldn't believe how lucky lucky they were.

She got to go to hospital in an ambulance for free and wasn't charged.

And I was like, oh, that's interesting because we just recorded an episode where someone said that you would be charged.

So please tell me more.

Well, apparently, UK citizens can still get a GHIC instead of an EHIC.

I don't know what either of those are.

Which provides the same reciprocal health benefits.

And that was Richard who pointed that out, as well as a few other people.

I'm going to guess an EHIC would normally be a European health insurance certificate.

Maybe now it's a

great health insurance certificate.

But the point is, Richard and several other people wrote in to say it still applies.

And Tom said that even if you haven't got the correct E or G HIC,

you can still apply for a provisional replacement certificate at the time of need.

So if you do need healthcare in the EU and you didn't previously have the certificate, you can still get a provisional one at the time.

Yeah,

so healthcare for everyone, it seems.

Yeah, and apparently, if you faint

from lack of blood sugar, even if you're American, I wouldn't be surprised if the French specifically offer free health care to Americans just to rub it in.

Yeah, or say,

I was going to say thanks for the Statue of Liberty, but they do

what's wrong with you.

What's wrong with you, Paris?

They gave them Lafayette, the Statue of Liberty.

Yeah.

What did America do?

Freedom fries.

Emily.

Emily.

Oh, before we wrap up any other business,

my friend Tom Solinsky,

actually our friend, friend of the podcast, because he came on and talked about aspect ratios with us.

He's written a book which is essentially the definitive guide to Red Dwarf.

The British comedy sci-fi series Red Dwarf.

Yes.

I have a feeling that there'll be somewhat of a crossover between our listeners and fans of that show.

So if you are a fan of Red Dwarf Dwarf and you would like to read, it's a very good book.

I've been reading, it's very, very funny and fascinating.

He's basically collated all the information about the show from conception to how it's come out.

Yeah, it's everything, it's literally everything you've ever wanted to know about Red Dwarf presented in a very funny and interesting way.

So, that is being launched on the 3rd of October.

He's doing a public book launch for it.

That's in the future.

It is, which I am hosting

in London.

I believe there are tickets still available.

We'll chuck a link up on the show notes.

If you can't make it, you can still buy the book, pre-order it, do whatever you want.

I'll sadly not be there because I'll be on a plane to Australia.

You will.

Otherwise, I would have been there.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, that's the many other business.

Thank you so much to everyone who listens to our problem squared, or as we call it, peace sign symbol, pointy white flag, mysterious opaque drop of liquid.

So, we thank you for listening, telling your friends and family, reviewing us on all the various online podcasting platforms, both old and new.

But we particularly like to thank our fantastic Patreon supporters who keep this whole enterprise up and running.

We pick three of their names at random to thank and mispronounce every episode, which this time includes Willie

Amwal Lace

moving Moving the spaces.

That's all I do.

Cha

delick hollita.

Hollita, yeah.

Cool.

I'm trying to like.

Yeah, yeah.

See our T knee.

That's when you've got a T on your knee.

You have been listening to A Problem Squared with myself, Matt Parker, and Beck Hill.

We'd like to thank our producer Lauren Armstrong and Carter, the LAS, or

sad face,

peace,

hand symbol, drop of mystery opaque liquid.

That sounds about right for her.

That sounds about right.

Yeah.

You should do readings.

Let me read your wingdings.

Yeah.

I think some of mine have fallen out.

Oh, my ships have stayed, but everything else is a nightmare.

We should just glue these in.

I was

just buy our own and glue them in.

And then we can send them.

We could hang them as art once we're done.

Oh, that's cute.

C3.

C3.

Miss.

Bum.

Now, I'm not copying you.

I'm continuing my strategy.

C three.

Miss.

But it was close.