Hello friends.
This is Ashlee Vance, the host of Hello World.
And thanks for joining me for this journey
along the esplanade in Helsinki.
This is a special VR addition of Hello World,
so now is the time to put on your fancy goggles.
All this stuff was shot in 180 degrees,
with a stereoscopic camera.
And we just wanted to give you guys
a peek at how we make the show,
while we were shooting the full version
of Hello World, Finland.
Sunday morning, in Helsinki.
The Hotel Kamp, right in the center
of the city.
Here to interview an author this morning,
who wrote a book about the fall of Nokia,
to find out what went wrong with Nokia,
and maybe how Finland has recovered a bit.
So this is a little
bit of how we set up the interviews
that you'll see, throughout the episode,
for the camera buffs out there.
You can see my director, David
Nicholson, nerding out.
The art of TV hosting, I've discovered
here, is making small talk with your subjects,
holding back what you really wanna ask
'em, until the cameras are on.
I mean you know how the--
Are you writing another book now?
I am working on, I just sold my next one,
yeah, so, I don't know if writing
has officially started, but I need to be writing.
I've got a little more.
Can you talk about it?
Yeah, yeah.
[Narrator] You can never promote
your new books too early.
This was shot at a startup incubator
in Helsinki, this company is called Naava.
And they make the coolest green
walls I've ever seen.
Yeah, so this is a bio filter,
where we washed off the soil from plants.
We placed in this biological filter,
which consists of seven different ingredients.
Some of them stabilize the pH for the plants,
some of them keep the humidity for the plants,
and the water and so on, some of them provide
surface base for their microbes
to thrive and so on.
It's kind of a combination of different things.
It took us like, two and a half, three
years to make this mixture.
This is Maija,
she runs Gold & Green,
which makes a sorta meat replacement,
that's really popular throughout Finland.
The big theme in the middle of the episode
is food and all the weird science
that's going on in Finland around new types
of protein and meat replacements.
Before we hit up the labs, there was this herring
festival going on.
It's just right in downtown Helsinki.
It was pretty cool, lot of action,
and this mix of tourists and locals.
Would you like a taste?
I'd like to have a try.
Thank you.
This is Solar Foods.
I think of it as like the Breaking Bad
version of making food in Finland.
They make food out of thin air.
They grab the air, they throw
it into some bacteria and cook it.
As a TV host you have to give up part
of your control.
And just be placed where they want you.
This is at the headquarters
of Gold & Green, with Maija, who you saw earlier.
One thing I found, with the Fins, is that they
are really secretive
around their technology,
and wouldn't let me see it, half the time.
You don't trust strangers. Well, but also, kinda like
when you're a tech company, you want
to protect what you have.
So that part, I understand.
But seriously, 'cause I'll go to like, SpaceX,
rocket companies, or like a fusion laboratory--
Like a self driving car.
Yeah, there's definitely bits
where they're like, please don't show
this thing, but, it's just happened
now, three days in a row, I think
you Fins are up to something.
Yeah, maybe that's true.
We're here on the edge
of Helsinki in a trash dump.
Inside of there there's some zen robotics,
robots that sort out the trash.
Gonna head in, see 'em do their work.
And not get killed.
Hopefully.
If you're gonna visit
a dump, this is the one you wanna see,
because you got your garbage, you got
your trucks, we got some robots
in this one, super fancy, AI robots.
It's pretty cool, so the dump trucks
come and just bring this whole pile of stuff.
Kinda gets pre sorted by some humans,
and some other machines, and then it ends
up on this conveyor belt,
where the robots really go to town,
using AI to grab metal, and wood, and plastic,
and sort it out into the right place.
Something sorta mesmerizing about the trash
getting sorted into these piles,
and just going through the whole
conveyor belt line.
Okay, this was my favorite.
I'm here, with a future Finnish Olympian,
Lassi Etelatalo, whose name I've learned to say.
We were going to practice the ancient
Finnish art form known as cellphone throwing.
I was doing research for this episode,
it turns out that Fins are into really weird
kinda competitions, like wife carrying,
and cellphone throwing.
They did this for years, and our man, Lassi
here, was the actual cellphone throwing champion.
And this looks pretty ridiculous, but I think
it sorta had a purpose,
which was a lot of our episode focused
on the fall of Nokia, that I thought
it would be a good idea to throw
some Nokia phones, to help get into things,
and see if they held up.
They're sorta famous for being pretty sturdy.
It turns out they held up pretty well.
Except I don't think anything can survive
this guy throwing it.
Wow, that was cool.
This is me, doing
my hosty thing, in a tram.
The trams are a pretty awesome
part of Helsinki.
My director David made me record
this in the tram.
Little embarrassing, because, I was bagging
on Finland a bit, and they all speak English.
These are the Allas pools.
It's right at the edge of downtown Helsinki,
they're really cool, you can go in this,
which is like the regular
temperature pool, or you can go freeze
your everything off in the Baltic Sea pool.
If you watch the full episode, you can see
me humiliate myself doing that.
Here's David torturing me, again.
Telling me how to make bubbles the right way.
You know?
I want you to create some bubbles
around it, you know?
Okay.
Like that?
Yeah, exactly.
Even got Diana
here, who's a bubble coach.
Bubble making partner, I suppose.
That's it.
Please watch the full version of Hello World,
Finland, and leave us any tips for things
you'd like us to do in VR, or anything
we can do to make the show better for you guys.
More bubbles?