Hello Internet

» see hellointernet.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Two video makers who agreed on almost nothing started an audio show on 31 January 2014. Brady Haran shot Numberphile and Periodic Videos out of Nottingham, pointing a camera at academics and letting them talk. CGP Grey animated flat little explainers about voting systems and borders from London, very slowly, one every few months. Episode one was called "Being Wrong on The Internet" and the shape of the thing was already set: no guests and no topic list, just two professional YouTubers arguing about how to do the job.

It ran 136 numbered episodes plus 18 unnumbered specials over six years, and the episodes got long, routinely past the two hour mark. In its first year it reached number one on the UK iTunes chart and Apple picked it as one of the best new podcasts of 2014. The Guardian put it on a list of the 50 best podcasts in 2016 and named episode 66 its episode of the year. Haran also reintroduced the word "freebooting" on episode 5, for video lifted off YouTube and reuploaded to Facebook for the ad money, and that word outlived the show by years.

The subject was mostly the two of them. Grey was the robot who optimized his working life down to the hour, Haran was the caveman who did not want to and said so for six years. Around that argument the audience built a surprising amount of structure, and the show leaned into it rather than away.

Then on 28 February 2020 episode 136 went out, titled "Dog Bingo", and nothing followed it. No final episode and no announcement that there would not be a 137.

~ the record ~

~ the tims ~

Listeners were called Tims, after a running joke that escaped containment. In 2015 the show ran an actual flag election for itself, with submissions and voting rounds and all the seriousness Grey brings to flags, and the winner was the Nail and Gear: a hammer-and-sickle layout rebuilt out of a nail and a cog. It ended up on merchandise and on actual flagpoles.

The specials got stranger as the show went on. From episode 123 there was an after-show called Goodbye Internet for Patreon supporters. Two episodes were never released digitally at all: one pressed on vinyl, one cut onto a wax cylinder, a format that predates radio.

~ an ending nobody announced ~

On 18 May 2020 Haran said on Reddit that they were taking a break. His own site still carries the short version, that the show has been on a break since February 2020 and that after six years they are just having a rest. It adds that there has been no drama and that both of them are healthy, which was the question the audience was actually asking.

Neither host stopped working. Grey kept making Cortex with Myke Hurley while Haran started the Unmade Podcast and the Numberphile Podcast, and the video channels never paused. The thing that stopped was the specific pairing. In March 2026 the gap since episode 136 passed the length of the entire run.

~ what the site does now ~

Numberphile travels. YouTube has no customs desk, and a man filming mathematicians in their own offices does not need localizing. An hour of two Englishmen talking about their email habits is a different ask, and outside the English-speaking internet most people never took it up. The flag election is the part I find funniest from here, because voting on a flag for a podcast is exactly what a certain kind of engineer does with a Saturday.

hellointernet.fm is still up and still answers. The newest post on the front page is H.I. #136: Dog Bingo, dated February 28, 2020, with the player and the show notes intact, and under it the whole run back to 2014. Nothing about the site says the show is over, because nobody ever said it.

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