Geoff returns from summiting the Sydney Harbour Bridge with fun facts, barely describing the actual experience and the duo couldn't help but include the seemingly regular occurring "social media gripes" segment.
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Geoff returns from summiting the Sydney Harbour Bridge with fun facts, barely describing the actual experience and the duo couldn't help but include the seemingly regular occurring "social media gripes" segment.
(and a multitude of social media which we don't need to link)
(nah jokes, but don’t expect much more from Instagram)
Social media
Toast & Roast:
Georgie:
Geoff:
Geoff 0:10
Welcome back to another episode of Toast & Roast. I am your co host Geoffrey. Don’t call me Geoff though, frey, though, Geoff. Got it. (laughs) As usual I’m here with Georgie.
Georgie 0:23
Hi.
Geoff 0:25
That was a, that was a rocky start, but that’s what today is. Today is all about. Oh shit, I just hit my hand. Rocky.
Georgie 0:33
So I didn’t tell you this, but I tore a hole in a pair of my jeans.
Geoff 0:41
Oh no. Is it a Nudie jean, because you can get that repaired? Right?
Georgie 0:44
It’s not a Nudie jean, it’s a Neuw jean.
Geoff 0:47
Oh god, new jean. What about old jean?
Georgie 0:52
No, as in, the brand is Neuw, N, E, U, W.
Geoff 0:57
N, E, U, W. Are you, you gotta be kidding me. What kind of brand name is that? In Japan they had this this building and I had N, U, W, O, M, E, N.
Georgie 1:17
New woman?
Geoff 1:18
New women, yeah. Like a “new” woman. I don’t know why it was up there. Maybe it’s a new clothing store, but it made it very good, like, visual, like, point, you know, like just meet me at Nu Woman, because it’s just super big. And you can definitely mi—not milestone, but like, yeah, one of those places you can easily spot.
Georgie 1:48
Yeah.
Geoff 1:50
But it’s kind of like you go to like, Paris, Paris, I found pretty easy to navigate, because they had like three big ass monuments. Right.
Georgie 2:01
Eiffel Tower.
Geoff 2:02
Yeah, the Arc de Triomphe.
Georgie 2:04
Yeah.
Geoff 2:06
And—
Georgie 2:06
Is it the Montparnasse to, tower?
Geoff 2:09
I think so. I can’t remember what the third one was. That doesn’t sound familiar. It was probably the Versailles or something like that.
Georgie 2:17
Oh. Okay.
Geoff 2:18
The steps of Versailles.
Georgie 2:20
Yeah. Palace of, palace of—
Geoff 2:22
Palace.
Georgie 2:22
Yeah.
Geoff 2:22
Yeah, the palace with the steps. You can’t have the palace without the steps unfortunately.
Georgie 2:27
Just climb up the side wall.
Geoff 2:30
Yeah, you just, you just yeet over the, parkour, parkour, parkour over all the royalty did it back then. Yeah so, what was the, oh my god, the [inaudible] umbrella. I’m sorry.
Georgie 2:46
Yeah, the wind has been like—hey, do you pay attention to the wind speed when you look at the weather?
Geoff 2:54
No, not at all. Despite the fact that my ideal weather is 21 degrees with a 30 kilometres in southeasterly wind—
Georgie 3:02
Wait, really? You have an ideal wind?
Geoff 3:05
I mentioned that in the last podcast, last episode didn’t I?
Georgie 3:08
I don’t think you mentioned having an ideal wind speed.
Geoff 3:12
Yeah, it was a joke. It was a joke. Because I’m basically we’re doing this you know, what’s that thing called? Where you do you do the questions about a person? I think you do it mostly at hens—oh my god there goes the umbrella, gonna have to wipe that one later. Anyways. You, I think it’s at hens parties, they’re like, they do like how well do you know this person?
Georgie 3:37
Oh, yeah. That kind of thing.
Geoff 3:38
It’s like, what’s their favourite colour? And everybody kind of guesses the favourite colour. And the person’s like, oh, you’re all wrong. It’s Mojave green or something. Is that a colour?
Georgie 3:48
I know Mojave is a word to describe something, and green is a colour. But at this rate, you could say anything, right? You could just be like, I don’t, like people say, what is it, baby poo brown, baby poo green.
Geoff 4:03
Baby poo brown! Have you been talking to people with newborns?
Georgie 4:05
It’s just it’s a pretty common descriptor, I guess. But you could say like, Sydney orange. Like, what the fuck is that? You can say Parisian, uh, Parisian blue, like what is that, right?
Geoff 4:18
Yeah, the, actually something about way back when I was doing AMP’s website was trying to figure out what the blues were called. Because they had so many blues for AMP—
Georgie 4:32
Please don’t tell me you went with 100, 200, 300, because we did this and it just—
Geoff 4:37
Oh no, no, we weren’t at the token stage that was before tokens were a thing, but essentially we were trying to find the name of the colour, like literally the name, like what kind of like eggshell white and stuff like that.
Georgie 4:50
Yeah.
Geoff 4:50
So we found that there was such thing as cauliflower blue, and—
Georgie 4:54
Wait, cauliflower or cornflower?
Geoff 4:56
No, no, cauliflower blue.
Georgie 4:59
OK, I know cornflower. Cornflower is a bit close to Periwinkle—
Geoff 5:03
Oh, is it cornflower? Cauli—I’m pretty sure it’s called cauliflower blue.
Georgie 5:06
Are you talking about—
Geoff 5:07
Cauliflower?
Georgie 5:08
The CSS colour?
Geoff 5:10
Blue? No, not the CSS colour.
Georgie 5:11
OK, because there is a CSS colour called cornflower blue. And I was very obsessed with that colour. When I first started kind of tinkering with code, it was a very nice blue. It was actually similar to the periwinkle blue that we ended up using for our bridesmaids dresses for our wedding.
Geoff 5:28
Ah, nice. See, this is cauliflower blue.
Georgie 5:31
Yeah, that’s a lot deeper than—
Geoff 5:33
It’s a lot deeper than cornflower. Yeah.
Georgie 5:35
I would say it’s, it’s close to like a dark, true blue, if that makes sense.
Geoff 5:43
True, true. But anyways, I digress. So we did this for mum, like for her. Like we’re doing a video for 60th birthday. And my sister came up with a bunch of questions. And one of the questions is, what’s mum’s favourite like, weather. And I was just like, it’s got to be 21 degrees with, with, with like, partly cloudy 21 degrees with and I just trolled like by adding way more detail than necessary with a southeasterly wind of 30 kilometres per hour. So it became, it, I realised that that was probably my ideal weather conditions.
Georgie 6:27
So you’re just gonna assume that like, if that’s your ideal, that must be your mum’s as well?
Geoff 6:32
No, no, I just made it up on the spot.
Georgie 6:35
Because you didn’t know the answer.
Geoff 6:37
Yeah, it just was just like giving a stupid answer. And then I was like, wait a second, that probably is her ideal. And maybe mine. Because yeah, when I was a kid, or younger, I always thought like, you know, what would be the greatest thing? If I just flew away from winter, and I just flew to every country that had that exact like, 21 degree weather. Partly cloudy.
Georgie 7:03
Yes.
Geoff 7:04
Just fly away.
Georgie 7:06
You mean, like, kind of like, because my friend does this. She’s really into summer weather, but she’s from the UK. And—
Geoff 7:13
Yeah, that’s fair.
Georgie 7:15
So she doesn’t like it there because it’s just cold and like, kind of doom—
Geoff 7:19
Oh, what, it’s not cheery and bright and awesome all the time?
Georgie 7:23
Haha no. So it sort of feels like she’s kind of I think she in her words. She said she like “chasing the sun” around the world, like so when she travels, she tries to avoid the winter, and the really cold, like snowy weather in the UK. And I said come over here to Australia when it’s like summer. But then I read an article the other day. That said that bloody La Nina is going to cause us to have just another wet, rainy summer. So I said maybe don’t come here. I don’t know.
Geoff 7:59
Yeah, it’s supposed to be somewhat of a cold spring as well. So but then I was like telling some co workers about this. And my friend was saying that there’s probably about like three locations in the world that fit that exact criteria. So you’re gonna have a hard time, like, flying kind of back and forth between those three places. And I don’t know if any of them really overlap. So can you like fly from one place that has 21 degrees to another place that is 21 degrees? It becomes fairly hard to do something like that practically.
Georgie 8:39
Yeah.
Geoff 8:40
You know, but you could dream. But you’d spend all your time on the plane, which is not entirely like fun.
Georgie 8:48
No, no, it’s not. I have to admit like, because it’s raining. It’s gonna be raining. So do we care about what time? Whatever, it’s spring here, whenever you episode, it’s probably still spring, but—
Geoff 9:02
Just replay this during spring, don’t even listen to it during winter.
Georgie 9:06
But essentially, we had our first day of spring in Australia. And that was actually a very nice day, it was quite sunny. And I managed to go for a walk. Wow. I know. Right?
Geoff 9:19
What. Legs. What?
Georgie 9:20
No, I do I do walk but like it’s been difficult because of the weather recently. But then immediately after that it was just like, yeah, first day of spring. Everything is good. The, after that it just started raining. It was like, we’ll give you this, that’s enough. That’s enough for like the rest of the year.
Geoff 9:38
I think we only had one good day and that was the day I went to climb the bridge.
Georgie 9:43
Yes, that was good.
Geoff 9:45
Sunny. Hot.
Georgie 9:46
I went out that day too. How was the Bridge Climb?
Geoff 9:50
Yeah, I think it was quite interesting because like, well, for for one you don’t just, for people who don’t know, you go there with a tour guide. You don’t literally like—
Georgie 10:02
Just climb the fucking bridge.
Geoff 10:02
Just just climbing fucking bridge by yourself. I under underestimated how much preparation it took to go up because like they said, oh, first 40 minutes, is gonna be just prep and I was like, you gotta be kidding me. 40 minutes, what the hell could you do in that time? Oh boy. Well, you can do a lot. So like the first part, they were saying, you know, all the—not safety rules, but general—like you can’t wear your watch, or you can’t, you can’t bring a phone or a camera up there. So really, you just have to strip naked. Which, you know, they had options. They were like, be underneath your jumpsuit, you can either wear all your clothes, or just like one layer, we recommend one layer, or there’s like a picture on the far left where it’s just like in underwear. Like, okay, yeah, people could just basically strip down.
Georgie 10:59
But it was like, I mean, when I did it, like I just kept my clothes on because it was a pretty cool day. And it and it does kind of get cold as, as the, as the day goes on. And like when you’re outside I guess. Why? Did you just go, I’m gonna wear nothing.
Geoff 11:15
Yeah, yeah, Full Monty it, like, why not? Nah. So, like, I did the one layer thing. I think it was okay. I did get a little bit chilly. But in any case. So after that initial screening, they kind of read your documents about whether or not you need medication or how you have any health problems. I’m like, who’s thinking about going up the, up this bridge with like any heart conditions, or like when you’re pregnant or something like that. It’s probably not ideal you go up the bridge when you’re pregnant.
Georgie 11:51
But they just need to do their, they need to check, right, like they got to do this stuff anyway.
Geoff 11:55
And yeah, it’s legally legally—
Georgie 11:58
Legally, yeah.
Geoff 11:58
Yeah, covering their ass about like, oh, they had a heart attack on top of the bridge. Why didn’t you tell them, stop them from going up the bridge. So yeah, tick the tick the boxes that said I have no problems. And then we got to the jumpsuit place. We put on the jumpsuits and then had to put on the harnesses. The harnesses were cool. They were kind of like an extra version of our climbing harnesses for indoor rock climbing.
Georgie 12:33
Yeah.
Geoff 12:36
You don’t wear the same kind of shoes. But yeah. The, then they’re like telling you all about it. It was kind of strange. It’s kind of like cattle ish. They have these like stalls. And then you kind of like walk up to the stall, you put two legs into one and then you pull up the harness and you step back away, and then you get, you get get strapped in. They had a bunch of accessories. So they’re all like hooking some hankies on—did you take their hanky?
Georgie 13:05
Oh, I didn’t, because at the time I didn’t use one, but Nick had a hanky. So.
Geoff 13:10
Yeah. One of my friends took the hanky because they they knew their nose would start running up there.
Georgie 13:18
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, yeah, if I were to do it today, I probably I probably would, because I, I now I’m very attuned to my leaky nose. (laughs)
Geoff 13:30
So they had a bunch of accessories. And they had the radios, the headsets and then you go, you go up there, the coolest thing is actually that cable, the cable thing? So you have this kind of, what would you call it? Yeah, okay, there’s a cable. And it on the end of it has like a hook and you kind of hook it onto this, this line, metal wire type thing. And it just slides along with it.
Georgie 13:59
Yeah.
Geoff 14:00
Kind of cool. turns into a little bit of a game when you’re trying to like go up some stuff and you’re, you’re keeping a hold, I’m keeping a hold of it. I’m trying to like make it go as smooth as possible through every gate.
Georgie 14:11
Oh, instead of just like dragging it like kind of behind you, as you move.
Geoff 14:16
Yeah. So for those don’t know, the, basically every time like the the wire that you’re trying, that’s keeping you attached to the bridge essentially. So that if you fall, it’ll catch you, every corner, every turn, and sometimes in the middle, there’s like this like a very thick piece of metal, kind of like a curve clamp type thing. And you’re meant to and then the other clamp that’s attached to the wire that’s attached to yourself kind of has to go through that in a very specific orientation, so that it would slide through onto the next—
Georgie 14:53
I vaguely remember this.
Geoff 14:53
Cable.
Georgie 14:53
Yeah.
Geoff 14:54
Yeah. But usually you can just walk and it just slides up and it gets caught, you can just like, readjust it and it goes through the, goes through the gate, I would I call them—but I held on to it the entire time. And I was just like rotating it and like adjusting it to make it go really smooth through every gate. Anyways. It’s not too bad of a climb, like there’s only one really steep part, which is kind of like really steep steps. I wouldn’t call them ladders, but I also wouldn’t call them steps.
Georgie 15:25
Yeah.
Geoff 15:26
Maybe closer to ladder.
Georgie 15:27
But they’re like steel, right? Like, yeah, steep steel stairs. So like you could maybe get your foot—can you get your foot stuck? Not really, like—
Geoff 15:35
Not, not really. But you can, you could do it without hands, it’s obviously not recommended that you do it without hands. But it’s not steep, so steep that it’s a ladder ladder that you couldn’t do with hands.
Georgie 15:47
I guess it’s like a ladder that’s at an angle enough? I mean, not that big of an angle that you can walk up it almost.
Geoff 15:56
30 degrees. How about that? Let’s go with 30 degree angle.
Georgie 16:00
What do you mean, you don’t have a protractor on you?
Geoff 16:03
Yeah, let me pull up my handy dandy ruler.
Georgie 16:07
Yeah, I have my ruler. I don’t have a protractor.
Geoff 16:12
That’s about it, then you just have to go up a couple flights of those. And then you’re at the top. And yeah, it was all pretty interesting. It kind of makes sense after I got told it. But essentially how they built the Sydney Harbour Bridge was from two different shores on the either side, and they built the archway from both sides to meet in the middle. And if you don’t know, that takes a lot of calculation, like ridiculous because the weight constantly changes the further you go up the archway so then people are constantly adjusting the, they had cables essentially, attached to the top. And down below on the on the ground. They were pulling these cables to like, adjust the, the height and the and the and the wiggle room. Side to side, all the way up to the top. And astoundingly, they only had 12 centimeters of adjustment to make at the top before they could weld it together.
Georgie 17:16
Wait, wait, I have a ruler. (laughs)
Geoff 17:18
Yeah. 12 centimetres.
Georgie 17:19
I mean, like, given the, teah, given the size of the bridge. That’s not. That’s not a lot, like—
Geoff 17:24
It’s impressive for trying to build something on one side and the other and then connecting it to at the top. I can’t remember how heavy it was... Sydney Harbour Bridge... My question, which I didn’t really ask, and I didn’t really get time to ask.
Georgie 17:41
Yeah?
Geoff 17:42
Was how did they know? That? How much weight this would carry? Because total length is 1149 metres or 3770 feet, the, the width—the height is 134 metres or 440 feet?
Georgie 18:05
Is there a weight restriction on it? Just curious.
Geoff 18:07
So apparently, it can it can hold three of itself. So so if you were to build two more bridges on top of it, it would it would be fine. And so there’s there’s literally like no worries.
Georgie 18:23
My guess is like maybe the the way it’s structured is that they would have been able to calculate it with some kind of physics.
Geoff 18:31
Yeah, I guess I greatly underestimate the—
Georgie 18:35
Math?
Geoff 18:35
Greatly under, underestimate the math capabilities of 1932.
Georgie 18:43
People were engineers, man, like they—
Geoff 18:46
Apparently it was on the books to be built like 100 years before it was actually built. Like it took—
Georgie 18:51
Amazing.
Geoff 18:51
100 years for them to even like start building it. So it’s it is 552,800 tonnes with the arch itself weighing 39,000 tonnes. So it could actually, it could actually hold three times its weight or something along those lines. So it’s pretty impressive. I think it’s pretty cool. Oh, so if you ever have a look at the beach or the Sydney Harbour Bridge, there’s pylons right on either side. There’s two pylons on one side, two pylons on the other side. Those are in no way useful to the bridge. You could knock them down—
Georgie 19:33
Oh yeah.
Geoff 19:34
And it would make no difference.
Georgie 19:37
They just look good.
Geoff 19:38
Yeah, yeah, the, the fun fact of that is that they added those pylons because the head engineer said nobody would trust a bridge that didn’t have pylons. Like they would like, how does that bridge stand? If it doesn’t have pylons? I’m like, wow, that’s pretty, that’s pretty dire.
Georgie 20:01
I mean, I think it looks better with them anyway. It’s now it’s weird to imagine them without.
Geoff 20:10
The, it apparently it’s quite similar to a different bridge. So they they modeled it, they modeled it off, like some deep research about bridges around the around the world. So maybe that’s how they knew it would it would weigh, it would be able to take the weight, enough weights. I was like man, how do you how do you calculate that this thing would be able to weigh, could, could carry three times its own weight.
Georgie 20:35
I’m guessing if they did that much research, they must have known those existing bridges were XYZ strong enough. And then they use that to then like construct the Sydney Harbour Bridge or plan construct.
Geoff 20:51
Yeah, so this is the Hells Gate Bridge in New York, which basically looks very similar.
Georgie 21:00
So similar. Yeah.
Geoff 21:00
Yeah. But to me, it’s kind of like I guess Yeah, physics, extrapolation all that stuff happens where you go like, well, if it can hold X pound, and at this scale, then you times that scale by 1000, then you’ll have 1000 times that weight capability and therefore you can surmise and theoretic, theor, theorise that it would carry that much. Not that you’d ever get to the point where you’re like, oh, yeah, I feel like I should put on another 39,000 pounds onto the bridge? Do we need, how many elephants do we need?
Georgie 21:35
I reckon a bunch of them could cross. It’s probably, it’s fine right? We’re good.
Geoff 21:41
We’re good. If we get invaded by a ton of a ton of elephants we’re fine.
Georgie 21:47
I’m guessing if someone drives a tank over the bridge we’ll probably also be fine.
Geoff 21:52
Yeah, a few tanks, a few Tesla’s which are super heavy as well.
Georgie 21:56
Are they?
Geoff 21:56
Yeah.
Georgie 21:58
Are they like heavy, like are they actually heavier than an ordinary car? I didn’t know that.
Geoff 22:03
Yeah, how much does the Tesla weigh? So the Roadster not we need the 3, it is f—3,582 pounds. And let’s go with a Toyota Camry. Wait—
Georgie 22:23
That’s 1,624 kilos by the way.
Geoff 22:27
Yeah.
Georgie 22:29
Camry, of course you went with the fcking Camry.
Geoff 22:32
Yeah, cuz it’s like the most popular car or whatever. Weight, weight. Why do I have to download specifications? What a pain.
Georgie 22:41
Why don’t you look it up on Wikipedia?
Geoff 22:44
Yeah, Toyota Camry. Toyota Camry. Toyota. Oh, man. See, Duck Duck Go, can’t even.
Georgie 22:56
(laughs)
Geoff 22:56
Toyota Camry, Wikipedia. Here we go to Camry. All right. How much do you weigh? Weigh? Weight. The weight is? Oh, oh. 2,000 to 2,300 pounds.
Georgie 23:11
So that’s like almost 1,000 pounds.
Geoff 23:14
1,000 kilos.
Georgie 23:15
Yeah, like 1,000 pounds or 500 kilos less.
Geoff 23:20
Yeah.
Georgie 23:21
Than the Tesla.
Geoff 23:23
Yeah, we get a weight tax by the way. And a weight rebate. It’s very strict.
Georgie 23:26
Oh really, sucks to be you!
Geoff 23:30
It’s too heavy, here, pay us more money because our roads are gonna suffer or something.
Georgie 23:34
Yeah, considering you only weigh 30 kilos, Geoff.
Geoff 23:37
Yeah. See...
Georgie 23:39
Yeah, I think more importantly, though, is the I think the luggage you bring with you. I reckon.
Geoff 23:46
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess like, the luggage itself is probably, I mean, you can pack light all you want. But, you know, you see those people in the airport to like pulling out all their stuff and like, piling it on themselves? Because apparently you can’t have your luggage weigh that much. But you can have yourself weigh—
Georgie 24:06
Yeah, yeah, so I’ve kind of been in that boat before when I used to travel with my family. Because we often find ourselves in that situation where oop, the carrying baggage is too heavy, or it won’t even fit. I’ll just wear like all the layers of clothing. So yeah, what about it?
Geoff 24:25
It’s kind of weird, right? Why wouldn’t, why would your suitcase be not okay to be a certain way, but yourself be okay to wear all that stuff?
Georgie 24:36
I reckon it’s an average thing, right? Because you’ve got kids on a plane who weigh very little, and then you got bigger people, taller people, shorter people. And I think it’s overall just trying to maintain some kind of average, right. So there have been times when we took cabin baggage, and Nick, because he is a bigger person than me, and well he brought his hiking shoes on our last trip. And they kind of added more weight than he expected. So I think his suitcase was like, I think the limit was seven kilos. So I think his was like seven and a half. But mine was like, I don’t know, just under, but then they accepted it. They were fine. Probably because they were considering some average. And some people who probably didn’t bring a cabin bag, like cabin bag at all. So.
Geoff 25:28
Yeah. I think it’s a safety thing. Actually. Now that I’m thinking about it.
Georgie 25:31
Oh, it is right.
Geoff 25:33
I remember this.
Georgie 25:33
Like you don’t want the overhead locker to just drop open. (laughs) Has happened to you on a flight where it just snaps open?
Geoff 25:41
No, I’ve never had such a full flight that it just snapped open.
Georgie 25:46
That happened once but it wasn’t a catastrophe. But we were coming in to land. And before we had actually come to a stop, one of the overhead lockers just, like just popped open. I think something threatened to fall down, like a suitcase threatened to fall down just before we stopped. And so someone did like stop it from injuring anyone. But I thought well, that’s the first time I’ve seen that happen.
Geoff 26:13
Nice. Oh, man, I scroll down on this page. And it says what’s the heaviest Tesla? 5,390 pounds is the heaviest Tesla, which is the—
Georgie 26:27
2,444 kilograms.
Geoff 26:30
Yeah, it’s it’s their it’s their biggest one. It’s an SUV. It’s got like seven, like what, 2, 4, 6, you can probably put eight seats in that thing. It’s huge.
Georgie 26:40
Yeah.
Geoff 26:42
But it’s also the most expensive one, Jesus. But yeah, on a completely different topic. Because we always have to have a social media segment.
Georgie 26:54
Oh, my God, no, what are you doing? Just bringing in like some social media rant. Oh. You know, what’s funny is I almost wanted to start this episode by ranting about trying to make a fucking Instagram post last night, but I didn’t—
Geoff 27:10
Yeah, do it.
Georgie 27:11
Is that what is that what you’re going to ask? You were going to ask me for—
Geoff 27:16
You can go for it.
Georgie 27:16
All right, I’ll just briefly—
Geoff 27:19
(laughs) Is it ever brief with us?
Georgie 27:19
Briefly—10 minutes later—(laughs) yeah, I so last night, I message was it last night, I think maybe, could have been the night before, I messaged Geoff and I said, ugh, this Instagram UI and the Reels, just shit. So every week I try and create a social media post on Instagram that has an audio clip of part of our, of part of our latest episode. And I used to be able to do it as as just one post. So like with the with the audio clip in, like as basically as a video with a image of—what do you call those wave things? Doesn’t matter. Anyway.
Geoff 28:00
Sound wave.
Georgie 28:01
Sound wave, animation thing. I used to be able to do that, write the caption, and then Bob’s your uncle. But now it forces me to make it into a Reel. Now a Reel is I suppose an actual, like, it’s not posting the video as a post. It turns it into some full screen thing. And it—how do you even explain this. I sound, I sound very silly talking about this.
Geoff 28:29
It’s TikTok.
Georgie 28:30
TikTok style, kind of like takes off your whole screen. You can’t see the, oh, this is the part I want to rant about. You cannot see the controls for the video.
Geoff 28:43
Yeah, yeah, it’s really interesting actually. I never really noticed the fact.
Georgie 28:46
You have no idea how long the audio clip is. You just see what’s in the video. And you hear the sound.
Geoff 28:55
It’s—it’s as long as your attention span.
Georgie 28:58
Yeah. So anyway, now Instagram, at least on the Toast & Roast pod Instagram account, forces me to do that. And I was just having such a shitty time so I tried to hack it. And—
Geoff 29:09
Maybe we would get way more attraction if we did Reels.
Georgie 29:13
Look, I gotta tell you, I actually, OK so first I tried to hack it by putting posting the video with a picture, like as a multi post thing, to make it do the same thing that we’ve been doing for the past, what, two years or something but then I thought okay, let me—they can humour me, I will try and make a Reel. I will try. But it was just, I just couldn’t get it. I couldn’t get the thing the original video to centre properly. Every time I resized it. It wouldn’t like snap to any of the, like in the centre or anything like that. It just gave me entire free reign. So then me being an ex designer was trying to like centre the fucking thing, and make it position nicely and it just was was having a really hard time. And I thought, you know what, let me just forget about that. And it can be posted as a weird aspect ratio. But let me at least put some captions on it. Yeah, on the, on the screen. So if someone doesn’t open and look at the words, they can at least see the words on the screen. So it does automatic captioning, which is great. But I needed to make a couple of edits. And so I go in and edit a couple of the words that are picked up incorrectly, I press “Done”, and then the whole thing fucking disappears. Like everything I edited—
Geoff 30:30
Ohhh.
Georgie 30:30
I edited, and you know—I just thought, this is—nope. So I was very close to just being like, Geoff, can we just not do Instagram anymore? Can we just not?
Geoff 30:41
Let’s kill Instagram. Why not? Like, that’s a, I mean, if Instagram wants to make it difficult, then we can just take our business elsewhere.
Georgie 30:48
Well, I briefly thought—
Geoff 30:50
...nothing.
Georgie 30:50
I briefly thought, based on what other people do, briefly thought we should maybe record a video, just a video of us fucking talking. But then I was like, I can’t even be bothered doing that.
Geoff 31:01
Nah. Nah. Because then you have to open up the Reel itself and like and just like do like a tall video of us. Right? Otherwise, like doing—
Georgie 31:08
Oh shit.
Geoff 31:09
Doing a video whilst inside the Zoom, it’s kind of strange.
Georgie 31:12
Yeah. Oh, yeah, on the, can I, can I rant about the TikTok thing? I love how I say like, yeah, let me rant about this.
Geoff 31:18
Why not. Why don’t we go to TikTok, where we just take our business to TikTok instead.
Georgie 31:23
So Nick sister, sometimes sends him videos. And this morning, she sent him something on TikTok, and it opens up the app and opens up in TikTok, cool, whatever. But then he’s watching it and like a minute passes. And I’m like, and he’s watching it at brunch. So like, we’re supposed to be eating here or enjoying coffee or whatever.
Geoff 31:44
(laughs)
Georgie 31:44
And then I’m like, it’s still going, I’m like, do you know how long it—and he’s like, I don’t, because he doesn’t use TikTok like, he’s like, I don’t wanna touch the screen, because maybe something will happen.
Geoff 31:53
(laughs)
Georgie 31:53
So the UI is not very intuitive. And I’m like, can you, can you, at least—because what Instagram does with Reels is I think you tap the screen, you tap and hold to pause, which some people didn’t know—sidebar, I was looking at, I was looking at an Instagram Reel where someone was like, “You made this too fast. I’m not following”. And someone in the comments said “just tap and hold on your screen”. And then someone else said the same thing, but in a more condescending manner. Like, ohh, you know, didn’t you know? And the person said, oh, for real, I didn’t know that. Like, thanks for telling me. And they were like, wow. So Nick didn’t know how to pause it. But I think it was pretty much the same action. Like if you tap it, it pauses the video. But he was sitting there for a good couple of minutes. And I’m like, how do you know where the end of the video is? Like this would—
Geoff 32:44
Like aren’t TikToks supposed to be short.
Georgie 32:46
No.
Geoff 32:47
Aren’t they like three seconds?
Georgie 32:47
My brother said to me that he got like tricked, quote unquote, into watching a video on TikTok that was basically a movie because it doesn’t tell you how long it is. And I find this really frustrating because Instagram—Instagrams Reels basically copied TikTok after TikTok existed. And I just can’t live with this shit. Okay, especially when you and I were like, original YouTube, like followers back in 2006, where like, five minutes was long, people—not having this fucking one hour documentary. On phones, you can get like a short film from somebody that’s like seven minutes, but you have no idea where you’re at in the film, because it doesn’t show you the controls for the video.
Geoff 33:37
Yeah, I feel like I think I’ve seen a few comments about this about, you know, people who kind of want to go into TikTok, perhaps for business purposes, but they just can’t figure it out. Like the whole editing experience. Like you said, it seems like you either follow their rules if you, and if you want to not do something that’s like standard, that it becomes super difficult, which then you give up. And—
Georgie 34:07
That’s pretty much what fucking happened!
Geoff 34:10
Right. But that’s kind of I guess what people want in the short form video is so hands off, you just record whatever you want to record and then like, and then cut it together somehow. You see those crazy TikTok videos where people are like, they look up and then all of a sudden they look down, things drop, they’re, they like throw things to the right, and then they catch it on the left, and all that kind of crazy stuff and seems really, like that’s a specialty. You know, you can probably market an ability to do that because, god, like, it sounds like TikTok’s editing interface is not the most intuitive but you can still do some crazy things in it.
Georgie 34:54
Yeah, I’ve made one TikTok.
Geoff 34:58
Ooh.
Georgie 34:58
It was like two years ago in the middle of the pandemic, and like myself had a bunch of other women who work in tech wanted to kind of put together a video of us passing a laptop to each other. But also like in the process, we would change outfits to like, like, the first outfit would be us really dressed really casually. And then it would change to an outfit where were like, all dressed up and like makeup and stuff, just to sort of like, illustrate the point that like women, there’s like the stereotypes of women in engineering. And like, it took me such a long time. Like, I had to record like two separate videos, and then to like, somehow put them together, and then not to mention get changed and put on makeup in the process.
Geoff 35:45
Yeah, it’s pretty complex. My my thing with social media this week is a lot more simpler. It seems like—and I can’t really find one, I’ve been trying to scroll through. But it seems like on LinkedIn, that’s, there’s a new trend, where they like the links are in the comments. And I was like, wait, they’re no longer putting the links in the main text and putting it in the comments. So you have to scroll through all the bloody comments to try and find the original poster’s comment that has the link that they were talking about in the original post?
Georgie 36:23
Is this because like, if you just dump the link in the post, it’ll do the oEmbed and grab the imagery and all of that from the post that they are linking to? And then they don’t want that?
Geoff 36:35
But why wouldn’t you want that? That seems counterintuitive?
Georgie 36:38
Maybe I need to see an example of what you’re—
Geoff 36:41
Yeah.
Georgie 36:42
So I can understand why, like the benefits of doing that versus not doing that.
Geoff 36:46
I don’t know. The, basically, if you think about it this way, someone wrote a text post on on on LinkedIn. Right?
Georgie 36:54
And are they like, are they like, really long form? Is that what?
Geoff 36:58
Don’t think that too long? Maybe Maybe they are but essentially at the end of it or during the message, they’ll be like, links, links to my like my post or link to my video in the comments. Right? The subject matter they’re talking about has a link associated with it. And the link is going in the comments. And then you have to go freakin sift through all the comments. I can’t—
Georgie 37:22
Do you think it’s an engagement thing?
Geoff 37:25
Yeah, that’s what I feel like is the is the main idea. So that you have to actually go through the comments, and maybe you end up contributing? The... I don’t know, either way, it’s stupid, it’s a stupid engagement. Who needs engagement on LinkedIn? What does it do?
Georgie 37:44
I would argue that like Instagram and Twitter, maybe do the same thing, but in a different way.
Geoff 37:50
Yeah.
Georgie 37:51
Like, actually, you know, it’s funny. I think on Instagram, it was done out of necessity, because you can’t put links in your captions. They don’t link anywhere. And then there was that whole thing of, oh, “link in my bio”, don’t laugh, I do it too. Actually, laugh, because I still do that. (laughs) But you had to tell people, “go to my profile, and then find the link” because I can’t put it in the post.
Geoff 38:15
You can, you still can’t put links in posts, right?
Georgie 38:17
No, you can’t.
Geoff 38:18
Yeah, they do that on purpose. They just didn’t want people leaving Instagram. Like they just made it uber hard.
Georgie 38:25
No. But also Instagram used to be just for photo sharing, not like, hey, just find me on these other fucking platforms. And I’m promoting myself. It used to be just about sharing your fucking pictures.
Geoff 38:36
Yeah. Have you seen Glass? I think—
Georgie 38:41
Glass? What’s Glass?
Geoff 38:41
It’s called Glass app. It’s paid. It’s a paid. It’s a paid thing. You kind of have to... Glass photo... Shit. It basically, it’s a photo community.
Georgie 39:00
Yeah.
Geoff 39:01
It’s a photo community. And you pay to basically get the app, the app is a paid app. Looks great, though. Like honestly, it did, I was trying to figure out how to build my own photo sharing app at that, at that time, they they opened up their beta or closed beta. And it looks really good. And they essentially they’re a paid community that looks pretty similar to, to the, Instagram, but at the same time, it’s kind of like you have to really want to be posting photos. Almost like it’s maybe a like a serious portfolio because that’s the only reason why I think you’d pay—
Georgie 39:51
So you’re paying, which means they already setting some kind of high standard. So...
Geoff 39:56
Yeah.
Georgie 39:57
It, I don’t know it makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t really have a strong opinion on those business models. But yeah, it’s nice that someone is doing something different, I guess, like making a social kind of thing that’s not out there to fucking get you.
Geoff 40:16
Yeah, it’s very much geared towards, like whenever I see a subscription I think, okay, firstly, you would have to be semi professional in here. Like you’d basically be someone who is—
Georgie 40:29
Serious about this shit.
Geoff 40:31
Yes, selling, selling your photos as kind of art. And you—and I don’t think this community this community is like about maybe helping each other, like giving some kind of serious feedback on a more professional level. “Safe space for top members are required to follow a code of conduct”, anyway, so. So yeah, I think when it comes with a subscription, you it’s like, okay, I gotta be making money on, in some capacity related to this, that makes it worth it for me to then pay a subscription for, like, you don’t pay a subscription to Lightroom if you’re not like‚
Georgie 41:12
Yeah, if you’re not gonna use it. That’s why I don’t have that anymore.
Geoff 41:15
Yeah, I mean, you can be an extreme hobbyist like we used to be.
Georgie 41:20
(laughs) Oh, sad, sad.
Geoff 41:21
But...
Georgie 41:23
Those days are gone.
Geoff 41:24
Is that what we’re called now, extreme hobbyists, I guess?
Georgie 41:26
I would not—wait, did you say extreme?
Geoff 41:29
An extreme hobbyist is someone who is I think, in my opinion, extreme hobbyist is someone who pays an exorbitant amount of money or things that are professional grade, but their themselves aren’t doing it professionally. Like they’re being paid to do it. Like, I don’t know, getting professional grade photography gear, even though you don’t get paid to do photography, you just do it as a hobby.
Georgie 41:53
I don’t know, I guess I just never would—I never would have—described myself as an extreme hobbyist. And maybe I just don’t like the word hobbyist. Because like, people should generally have hobbies anyway—or not “should”, sorry, don’t, I don’t want to... I don’t know. I think I’ve not always labelled the things I like to do as hobbies. Because it seems—
Geoff 42:18
Right, just “things I do”.
Georgie 42:19
Because it, because it seems like too fun. Do you know—wait? Sorry, not “too fun”.
Geoff 42:25
Too... too...?
Georgie 42:28
You’re taking—
Geoff 42:29
Flippant? Or...
Georgie 42:29
You’re taking the—
Geoff 42:30
Too simplified?
Georgie 42:31
You’re taking the fun, too seriously, such that you give it the name of hobby. Right? Like I—
Geoff 42:38
Yeah, yeah I get what you mean.
Georgie 42:38
Like, I like hiking, for example. I don’t go very often, but I like to hike. I wouldn’t even call hiking a hobby. Because it just gives it this like level that’s a little bit too high. Like it’s, it takes it too seriously.
Geoff 42:54
Oh, right. Right. So it’s the other way. I thought you’re thinking—I thought you meant it, like diminishes it. But actually you’re, you’re saying that it’s too it’s too much? Because if you think about a hobby, yeah, I think yeah, “hobby is considered a regular activity that is done for enjoyment typically during one’s leisure time, hobbies include collecting themed items, objects”, okay. This is kind of the same thing when someone says, like, you’re passionate about something. I’m like woah, woah, woah. Don’t call me passionate. I really don’t care that much about it.
Georgie 43:27
Yes, I think that I think that’s the mentality. I have.
Geoff 43:32
Yeah.
Georgie 43:33
I can tell you though, I’m definitely not passionate about making holes in my jeans.
Geoff 43:40
So it’s one hobby that you are probably not going to put on a list of hobbies. Speaking of things you wouldn’t put a list of hobbies. The end of this episode. Don’t even care if that made sense. So you can catch us on—you can follow us on @toastroastpod on, well, Twitter.
Georgie 44:07
Maybe we’ll have a little break from Instagram. We’ll see.
Geoff 44:11
Maybe next episode, we’ll announce TikTok.
Georgie 44:14
Nope. You can find our episodes on Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcasts and the big hole in my old jeans, maybe.
Geoff 44:25
Yeah, and new episodes every Monday. So.
Georgie 44:28
See you next week next week.
Geoff 44:30
Bye.