Freakonomics Radio - 393. Can Britain Get Its “Great” Back?

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

It used to be a global capital of innovation, invention, and exploration. Now it’s best known for its messy European divorce. We visit London to see if the British spirit of discovery is still alive. Guests include the mayor of London, undersea explorers, a time-use researcher, and a theoretical physicist who helped Liverpool win the Champions League. Dan Schreiber from No Such Thing as a Fish rides shotgun.

On last week's episode, we spoke with former British Prime Minister David Cameron about his fateful decision to hold the Brexit referendum and how things did not turn out as he'd planned. This week, an episode we recorded live in London, just a brisk walk away from No. 10 Downing Street, where Cameron lived and worked when he pulled the Brexit trigger. We'd gone to London with a very particular purpose in mind, and, as you will hear, we were not the least bit disappointed. Hope you feel the same. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the host of Freakonomics Radio, Stephen Dubner. Thank you so much. Thank you. This week's show is being recorded live at the historic Cadogan Hall, which is in London, which is in England, which is part of the United Kingdom,

although by the time this airs, none of that may be true. Now, in any case, we've come here with a particular mission. As we all know, Britain has had an extraordinary history of discovery in just about every realm you can imagine. You have discovered oxygen and penicillin and the circulation of blood, the electron, the first practical steam engine, the first jet engine. You've produced extraordinary literature and all those Scottish philosophers. You've produced some of the best dead economists ever, as well as the modern banking industry. And of course, you've explored massive swaths of the planet Earth and promptly colonized most of it. So a tremendous history

of discovery, but emphasis, if we're being honest, on history. It strikes us, and maybe this is just because we're arrogant Americans, that for the past century or so, you've been pretty crap. We've been busy inventing the internet and life-saving drugs, sending people to the moon. You've been busy deciding whether to break up with Malta and Cyprus and Scotland. But let me say this. We've still got faith in you. We believe in you. And we thought that if we came over here and we invited some very clever people to this beautiful auditorium, we might find that rather than just limping into the future like some sclerotic former empire, that London

and England and the UK are in fact brimming with remarkable new ideas and discoveries. So that is our mission tonight, to discover the discoveries that may be lying just out of sight. And I've got a friend to help me who's a Londoner. He is host of the massively popular and massively wonderful podcast No Such Thing as a Fish. Would you please welcome Dan Schreiber. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. So on the topic of discovery, Dan, I'd love you to share with us

maybe one of your favorite personal discoveries. So I'm constantly discovering stories that may have got lost in time. And years and years ago, I was in Sydney and I discovered a book called My Amazon Adventure by Sebastian Snow, a British explorer. Never heard of him.

I went online, couldn't really find anything out about him. He was born 1929, died 2001. so kind of didn't quite make the internet. But he discovered three lost Incan cities. He traveled the length of the Amazon, first person to do that. And he climbed two previously unsummited Andes peaks. But what's most amazing is that according to every explorer who ever met him, he was the most accident-prone person to ever live. He once had to be rescued from the side of a mountain

because he trapped himself in his own sleeping bag. They found him wriggling inside and had to unzip him. Should have died at every single moment. He was just completely useless. Never carried a gun with him. Should have carried a gun. Didn't carry a gun, not because he was a pacifist, but because his friends didn't let him.

They were worried he would shoot himself. And I've not found anything about him, largely, as I say, because he's not on the internet, but also because when I do Google him, there's another Sebastian Snow who's a chef who gets in the way the whole time. Anytime I'm Googling, this chef in Oxfordshire comes up, and as a result, Google is just messed for me. I can't find anything. So that's been a huge problem,

and I finally had a breakthrough two years ago when I was talking to an explorer, and I said to them, did you ever meet Sebastian Snow? And they said, yeah. I went on an expedition with him. I said, can you put me in contact with anyone who knows him? And they said, you could try and contact his sons. One of them's a chef. He lives in Oxfordshire, actually. It was his son. My Google nemesis was his son all this time. And I messaged him, and we're now friends.

And he's hopefully going to write a book on him so the world can know about Sebastian Snow. Dan Schreiber, thanks for that. Thanks for joining us tonight to hunt down what other discoveries may be happening in Britain right now. Our first guest tonight, and we are starting at the very top, would you please welcome the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. Mayor Khan, we so appreciate your joining us tonight. First question, what is one remarkable thing that you've discovered about London that you didn't know until you became mayor? I know you grew up here, but I'd like to know something nice and specific,

please, as opposed to the standard, you know, it's a beautiful tapestry of people from all over the world living in harmony kind of thing. Firstly, that is true. But many people outside of our country think London is home only to wealthy people. But in fact, in London, we have the largest number of households and the largest number of children living in poverty of any region in the UK. 37% of London children live in relative poverty. And one of my missions is to try and reduce the inequalities in our city. I've read that due to the encroaching Brexit, that roughly $1 trillion of assets from London's financial district have already moved elsewhere. So there is big concern if we have Brexit, but even worse, a catastrophic no-deal Brexit

that could lead to an exodus of jobs, growth, prosperity, but also businesses. At the moment, businesses are waiting. Look, even if we do leave the EU, the underlying strengths of our city will still be there, which are our people. We've got the best universities in the world. Our economy is not just finance.

It is finance, it is legal, it is accountancy, it is life sciences, it is tourism, it is culture, it is tech. And so the underlying strengths of our city aren't going to change. Now, Londoners in particular, and those throughout England, are pretty familiar with your personal biography,

but many of our listeners do not know. So can you give us a quick version? Sure. I'm quite shy about talking about my family. Not many people may have heard this from me. It may be exclusive to Freakonomics. My dad was a bus driver. Now, wait a minute. I know he was a bus driver, but he trained as an engineer, correct? Correct. He was in the Air Force,

and he was an engineer. So I'm the first in three generations of Khans who's not an emigrant. My grandparents migrated from India to Pakistan at partition. My parents came to London. My grandparents migrated from India to Pakistan at partition. My parents came to London. My dad first went from Pakistan to Australia and said, I don't really like Australia, and then came to London and fell in love with London, not with any of the challenges then.

And then he called for my mum to come over. And my three oldest siblings, two brothers and sister, were born in Pakistan, but the rest of us were born in London. And my three eldest siblings, two brothers and sister were born in Pakistan, but the rest of us were born in London. And my cousins in Pakistan and India make the point that what we've managed to achieve in London, they've never achieved and could never achieve in Pakistan or India. That's the wonders of London. So you became a lawyer, you held many posts in government. People outside of England may be surprised to learn that you are just the third mayor of London. So why did it take so long for London to have a mayor? I'm assuming it could have used one at some earlier point? Yeah, we are, ironically, bearing in mind we claim

to be one of the exporters of democracy, we are the most centralized democracy in the Western world. Whites on Westminster hoard a lot of power. And so it took us some time to move towards the mayor model, which America's had for decades and decades. So some of your top priorities include better public transportation, cleaner air, more housing and more affordable housing. So the sort of standard mayoral issues. But as I understand it, the mayor of London retains just 7% of taxes raised in the city versus, for instance, 50% in New York and 70% in Tokyo. So does this mean that London is essentially subsidizing the rest of the UK? And if so, why does the rest of the UK hate on London so much, accusing you of snobbery,

greed and whatnot? Well, firstly, yes, London does benefit the rest of the country, but that's not a bad thing. I believe in the nation state. I think it's really important for us to, you know, as those with the broader shoulders, to carry the greatest burden and help those parts of the country that need our support. So I'm not in favor of unilaterally declaring independence. But it sounds like you're open to it. Well, listen, I love the sound of El Presidente. But my point to our friends in government is, look, we think we can do even better with more devolution. So I've got no problems sharing some of the tax revenues with the rest of the country. My argument to the government is, give us more control over the monies we raise in London,

and we can do a better job. All right, let's take this conversation back to the Brexit vote. You were elected mayor of London in May of 2016, and one month later, voters in the UK decided to leave the European Union. But there's no link between that and me being elected. They're separate. If you say so. And just to be clear, London voted overwhelmingly to remain. But now there is an official Lundependence party. You have talked publicly, including just a moment ago when

you nominated yourself El Presidente. You've talked about the appeal of running some kind of city state. I am curious the degree of independence you would like to see. And was the Brexit vote then, I'm starting to wonder, just a conspiracy engineered by Londoners to get rid of the rest of the country, perhaps? Yeah. So my argument to the government is we should have more control over our taxes, fiscal devolution. So we pay a huge amount of money,

not just in income tax and corporation tax, but think of stamp duty, the property taxes we pay. We're in charge of the tubes, the buses, the trams, and we run them very well. We're not in charge of the commuter trains coming into London. We think we should be in charge of those. We think we should be in charge of the types of homes built in our city. We have lots and lots of homes, luxury homes, which sit empty, which are bought by foreigners as gold bricks. I have nothing against foreigners. Some of my best friends and family are foreigners. But I think we should be building homes

that Londoners can afford to live in. And there's good news and bad news. The good news is that at the head of the government is somebody who should understand this stuff because he used to be the mayor. The bad news is it's Boris Johnson. And so we're going to, Londoners, we're going to use a charm offensive

to try and lobby him to give us more powers. You can be the charm, I'll be the offensive. So we actually interviewed Boris Johnson several years ago when he was mayor, and we talked about this very topic. Here's what he told us then. We have now in London 72 billionaires, which is more than New York. New York has only 43 billionaires.

And how about that? Paris has only 18 billionaires, and Moscow has, I think, 40. So, you know, London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. So, I don't really have a question for you other than would you agree that London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan? Can I just say to all the Freakonomics listeners from outside this country, I apologize for Boris Johnson.

Please don't judge us. I'd like to ask you a bit about immigration and integration in Britain, especially in light of your family's background. So there's a law professor and philosopher named Hasco von Kriegstein who recently made the argument that it is logically impossible for an immigrant to Britain to not integrate. The immigrant can adopt British values and attitudes. The immigrant would therefore be perfectly British. Or the immigrant can reject British values and attitudes, the immigrant would therefore be perfectly British, or the immigrant can reject British values and attitudes. But since moving to another country and then spurning that country's values, language, and attitudes is a quintessentially British behavior, the immigrant is, again, perfectly British.

So I'm curious how you see immigration and integration in Britain these days, especially for someone whose skin is not white. So let me share my family's own experience. When my dad first came here in London, and it's hard to believe now, there were signs in guest houses, restaurants, pubs that said, no blacks, no Irish, no dogs. And by blacks, that meant anybody who wasn't white, right? And then a government, a Labour government, passed a law

to make it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of race. So those signs could no longer be put up. This was what year? 68, the legislation was passed, the Race Relations Act. My dad came here, signs up saying, no blacks, no Irish, no dogs. The city he came to, his city voted his son to be the mayor of that city. That's London. So when you wonder how great is London as a city, well, London is a city that can vote

for the son of an immigrant with working class parents from a council estate who is not just an ethnic minority, but a Muslim at a time of the greatest amount of Islamophobia the Western world has seen. So when I say in response to your question, how worried are you about Brexit? Of course I'm worried. Of course I'm worried about an eligible Brexit. Of course I'm worried about the impression that may give to non-Londoners and non-Brits. But I am so confident in our ability as Londoners to deal with that head-on. So along those lines, let me ask you this. You are the mayor of London. You grew up in South London. But when it comes to soccer, what you call football,

you are a Liverpool supporter. Can you tell us that story? The true story about why I support Liverpool is, and it goes back to what we were talking about, about integration. So my big brothers used to support Chelsea and on one occasion they went to this Chelsea game and they were basically chased away by the national front because they were not the colour skin that those who in the stadium and support should be I didn't go to any matches except for one I went to where I was also didn't have the best experience because because of the colour of my skin.

So my only experience of football was watching it on TV or listening to it on radio. And, you know, the Liverpool team of those days were just a great, great team. And so, you know, there's a great saying, you can, you know, change a job, you can change the house you live in, you can even change your partner, but you don't change your team. So Liverpool's best player these days is Mohamed Salah, who's Egyptian and like you, a devout Muslim. And he is extraordinarily popular among hardcore Liverpool fans who are, shall we say, not always the most inclusive fans in the world. And yet, one chant that they've been singing lately goes like this. If you can make that out, the lyrics were

Mohammed Salah, a gift from Allah. He came from Roma to Liverpool. He's always scoring. It's almost boring. So please don't take Mohammed away. There's a better one. Let's hear it. There's a better one. You can sing it.

Right. If he's good enough for you, he's good enough for me. take Muhammad away. There's a better one. There's a better one. You can sing it. Right. If he's good enough for you, he's good enough for me. If he scores a few more goals, I'll be a Muslim too. Mo Salah, Mo Salah. So several political scientists at Stanford recently did a study looking at whether Salah's popularity has had any effect on Islamophobia in England. They did this by surveying Liverpool fans and measuring changes in hate crimes and anti-Muslim tweets. And they found that indeed Salah's popularity has significantly decreased anti-Muslim sentiment in England. So I'm really curious, Maricon, what you think about this research, whether it rings

true to you, and whether it might have a lasting effect. Because, you know, when Salah or any player starts to decline, or if he messes up, will it make life worse for Britain's Muslims? And along those lines, what about you, as one of the most prominent Muslims in the country? If you decline or mess up, does that change public sentiment toward Muslims? So I remember as a Liverpool fan when John Barnes, John Barnes is a black British person who played football, very talented. And in those days when he played in the 80s, it wasn't uncommon for bananas to be thrown on the pitch to the black players. But because he was so talented, he changed the way people thought about black footballers, including some Liverpool fans who may have been racist,

but their attitudes changed because they were mixing, mingling and idolising this black football. The same goes with Mo Salah, Mane, Shaqiri, three Liverpool players, all Muslims, and they start the game at the beginning praying in front of their teammates. And you heard from the football chant, it's educating ordinary people about a religion that I could do a thousand speeches and you could do a million pieces of research. It won't change people's attitude unless they experience it themselves. So I'm confident that the attitudes that people have towards Muslims are going to regress as long as we aren't complacent. We've always got to be vigilant. There's an assumption that many of us who are

progressives made, which is, you know, progress only goes one way, whether it's gender equality, whether it's to do with sexual orientation, to do with ethnicity. It doesn't. It can go backwards. And we're seeing that around the world with the rise of nativist populist movements from America to Hungary to Italy to Poland in our country as well. So, yeah, of course it's possible if players of a certain ethnicity or religion miss a penalty or play a run of a few games, then some people can revert to the prejudices. But I hope over a period of time, people will understand that actually,

whether it's Salah, Mane, Shaqiri, whether it's a Brazilian goalkeeper, it makes people realize that we're a team owned by Americans, managed by a German, with representatives from all around the world. We're the United Nations, and we're champions of Europe. So it's very interesting to me how fragile that is. You know, the sociologists and political scientists talk about the difference between contact theory and exposure theory. If you're just exposed to someone different, it may not change.

If you have contact with someone that's unlike you, it can establish a different relationship. I'm sure you've met a lot of people who probably thought they were not going to take a liking to you for whatever reason, a hundred reasons. And I'm curious what you've learned to have that much contact with so many people outside your circle. Yeah, that's a cracking question. I realize often through no fault of their own, there are some people who will have prejudged me, may have preconceptions for a variety of reasons because of the party I belong to, because of the color of my skin, because of my religion. And so I make an extra effort to try and get them to know me, get them to meet me. Not just going to churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, but going to big companies, small companies, schools.

That's the best way to change people's attitudes, by spending time with them and breaking bread. So for those people who may, for example, think there are parts of London that are no-go areas, or may think that it's not possible to be a Muslim and a Westerner, I hope you will realise that actually your life would be enriched by really understanding that diversity is a strength and nothing to be scared of. Mayor Khan, it's been great having

you. Dan Schreiber, before we let the mayor go, I'm curious whether you have any facts about Mayor Khan or mayors generally that you might want to share with us. So first interesting fact about Mayor Khan here is he's human. In America, you can't always guarantee that when you have a mayor. This year, actually, in Fairhaven, Vermont, a three-year-old Nubian goat was voted in and made mayor. She's called Lincoln. And her first action after being sworn in was to defecate on the floor. Actually, a former mayor in America was born in London in the underground, and that was Jerry Springer. Very cool fact. I've got a fact as good as that, by the way.

Oh yeah, go for it. In the entire history of the underground, only three people have been born on the tube. Jerry Springer is one of them. Wow. He was born because his mum, during the Second World War, underground were air raid shelters. So his mum didn't fancy having a baby in the tube. Well, actually, I'm going to throw another underground fact back at you. It's quite fun having a fact off with the mayor about the underground. Whitechapel, the underground there, it's a station in London,

which we have an overground as well. It's a station where the two meet. And it's the only station in London, which we have an overground as well. It's a station where the two meet. And it's the only station in London where the underground is above ground, and the above ground is underground. Dan, I thank you. And Mayor Sadiq Khan, thank you so much for being on our show tonight. Great job. Coming up after the break, discoveries about how we spend our time,

about what lies beneath the ocean, and how Liverpool Football Club managed to obtain Mohamed Salah, and what it would take for Liverpool to part with him. Your minimum starting bid would be 150 million euros, at which point the answer would be no. Stop wasting our time. Hey there, Stephen Dubner. We recently spent an evening in London with a live audience

and a series of guests who, in the spirit of Britain's rich tradition of exploration and discovery, told us about their discoveries.

Dan Schreiber from the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast was riding shotgun. And what have we learned so far? London Mayor Sadiq Khan revealed that London, the city that did not want the UK to break off from the EU in the Brexit vote, may in fact want to break off itself from the rest of England. Our next guest was a professor of the sociology of gender at University College London

and co-director of UCL's Center for Time Use Research. Her name is Oriol Sullivan. Thank you. Thank you. So first, if you would, talk about the data you've used, where the data come from, how good the data are, and whether these are the typical sort of data that have been used in the past to measure how people spend their time. So what we do is we collect time-use data surveys using diaries. We archive it in a way that makes it comparable both across time and across country. And these go back how far?

These go back to the 1960s. And when you say diaries, is it what we think of as a diary with paragraphs of writing? Well, some people do wax lyrical about what they're doing, but in general, people's answers tend to be relatively shorter. You have a record through the day where you record what you're doing in sequence. And we also have some interesting additional fields like who you were doing it with, whether you were enjoying yourself at the time. And the reason that it's good data is that in the past when people were asked how they spent their time, those questions tended to be just conventional survey questions like, last week, how much time did you spend doing unpaid work?

Now, I understand that one impetus of your research was to look at the notion of whether technology has sped us up or otherwise changed the way that we spend our time. There's a kind of media panic, we call it in sociology, about the way in which our life is constantly speeding up and we never have enough time to do the things we want to do and we always have too much to do and one of the surprising things that we found is that in fact when you look at the the actual evidence of how many activities people are doing and how much they're multitasking because multitasking is also something that appears in the literature as being a major contributor to having too much to do.

We don't really find any change in that over time. And we also don't find that people's perceptions of feeling always rushed have changed over time. If anything, there's been a general decrease in people's reports of feeling always rushed for time. If anything, there's been a general decrease in people's reports of feeling always rushed for time. That is so interesting, because what your data say seem to be the opposite of what the media say and what most people feel, yes? Absolutely, yes, it is. So why is the perception thus and the data, what's the opposite of thus?

I'm sure you have a word for it here. There may be several things involved, but I think one of the things is that the kinds of people who write about feeling terribly rushed are not students living on their own. They're also not retired people. You know, both categories who might have a certain amount of time on their hands. They tend to be people in mid-career, possibly also with small children. Are you saying that journalists are not 100% excellent at representing the reality in the world? Well, not just journalists, but professors as well, because we exist in the same category of mid-career professionals, and we have families, we have children, and our perceptions are largely determined by how things used to be for us. I'm very curious to know whether your data reveal interesting differences in different demographic groups, particularly

gender. You mentioned unpaid work. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Sure. Women report feeling always rushed considerably more than men. And that was true in 2000, and it's also true in 2015. The gender difference is far larger than the difference between social classes, for example. That's a really interesting finding, and I think it reflects women's double burden of continuing to be thought to be responsible for the domestic work, but at the same time being increasingly expected to participate in the labor force. Women spend how much more time doing unpaid work than men? Well, they do about three to four times the unpaid work of men. Three to four times?

Three to four times, yes. Since the 1960s, we've seen women's time spent in unpaid work. This is all unpaid work, and childcare as well has gone down from about five to four hours a day, whereas for men it's increased from about one to just under two hours a day. But most of that increase for men has come in perhaps more desirable activities like shopping and childcare activities rather than in the core housework activities. Can you put some numbers on the value of the unpaid work? In 2015, the value of unpaid work came to £450 billion. That is one quarter of total national GDP.

And that proportion has been pretty constant since 1961. So imagine that all these people who do these kinds of unpaid work activities stop doing that. And then our entire social care system would collapse under the weight. Our elder care system would collapse. Our child care system would collapse. So that gives an indication of the extent of the contribution that is made by this kind of work. I am very curious to know what's your preferred way to spend a day

and whether during this research you noticed or realised anything about yourself. yourself? Not really, no, because... This is what we call in the business a dead-end question. Yes, absolutely. And I hope you'll cut it from the finished version. I think we're making great radio right here and now. So, Dan, I'm sure you have some interesting additional facts about time use. Yes, I read that according to the Vatican, you can reduce the time you spend in purgatory by following the Pope on Twitter. And this is probably my favorite little time-related fact that I found. So Dolly Parton has a theme park in America, which is called Dollywood. Do you guys know that?

Yeah, it's a big theme park, right? Okay. So does anyone here know what the opening hours of Dollywood are? Nine to five. Nine to five. It's ten to six. What is she doing? What a missed opportunity.

Next up, we welcome to the stage two guests, Lucy Woodall and Oliver Steeds, from an outfit called Necton Mission, which conducts undersea expeditions. Woodall, a marine biologist at Oxford, is Necton's principal scientist. Steeds is the firm's chief executive. We began by asking them about the primary goals of their project. To explore and conserve the ocean, to try and gather more understanding of how the ocean is changing, trying to gather that data to help inform the protection.

Scientific consensus is we need about 30% of the ocean protected by 2030. Currently, we've got about 7.5%. We've got a long way to go. They've begun an ambitious project to explore the Indian Ocean, the least explored ocean, even though it covers 14% of the Earth's surface. We are often the first humans ever to see that bit of our planet. Some people consider it the Florn Ocean, but actually it's an amazing, very, very important ocean. There is large percentages of the population that rely on the Indian Ocean, and it's one

of the least protected as well. So how does it work? Do you own ships? Do you rent ships? What kind of ships, et cetera, et cetera? No, we don't own the ships. We don't own the subs. That's part of the challenge. If you're going to go to do deep ocean work that we do, you're either an oil and gas company and you've got billions, or you're a big government, or you're backed by a billionaire. We're a small charity. We're neither. So no, we go and charter everything. And so our last expedition was Seychelles. We chartered a vessel in, which was 87 metres.

We adapted it so it could launch and recover submersibles, remotely operated vehicles and robots, put a team on board. But it was hugely challenging. So as much as you can, just paint a picture. What's it like to go down? What's it look like? What's it sound like? And what's it feel like? What's it sound like? And what's it feel like? Firstly, amazing. But I guess you want slightly more than that. You're very hot. And then slowly, as you descend, you come out of the light. And as you go down, you lose those large vistas.

It gets cooler and cooler. And then you're starting to notice the sharks, the manta rays, often a turtle as well. And as we go down from the light-loving animals and plants down through the water column, there's less light. We've got more pressure. We have temperatures that decrease as well. So this means the whole host of animals and plants that live there change. So we go from some of these typical coral reefs that we might have seen on the TV, and we get to different types of corals. These are black corals. Their stem is black. But actually, they're amazing, vibrant colours.

Yellows and oranges. And they look just a little bit more like trees wafting around. And this is a really important zone that actually until 2016, we did not know existed. Is this the rarefotic zone that you're describing? Absolutely. So the rarefotic zone isn't one of our discoveries. It's something that we found that another research, Carol Borwin in the Caribbean, had already discovered. So is it safe to say that most ocean explorers in the past have looked at the surface and the floor, and you're kind of doing the middle? Yes, the neglected middle. Yeah, so traditionally there has been a lot of work done on the surface, because it's kind

of easy to get there. We all like scuba diving, but that's generally to 30 meters. And then we really like the deep diving as well because that sounds kind of cool. Let me ask you a quick question about the difference between, I guess, biomass and biodiversity and whether volume of living organisms happens in one place, but in another place where there may be less volume,

there may actually be more variants. Yeah, so on the surface of the ocean, we have a lot of life. So that's the amount of life. But actually, as we go down into those middle zones at around about 1,000 metres, that's where we have our highest diversity. And that's really interesting. And as scientists, we're really still trying to understand the reasons why.

Are you discovering new species hand over fist or what? Yeah sure. Do you want one named after you? What sort of thing? Because actually every time we go into the ocean we find something new. It's because nobody has been to these places before and if they've been there maybe they haven't collected everything. They haven't observed what we're able to do in the submersibles. All of these new things that we're discovering have already had benefits to human life. We call this bioprospecting. There is medicines and other industrial processes that are only possible because people have gone into the ocean, just collected one small thing, and then for years and years they have looked at those molecules.

So I'm curious, given what we've read about pollution in the oceans, about overfishing, about climate change and how that may affect the oceans, as you've gotten in there yourselves with these expeditions to parts of the ocean that perhaps have never been seen before, are you more or less optimistic about the general welfare of our oceans? I'm more optimistic because I have met the most amazing people who are doing fantastic work in their own nations and trying to help people understand why our oceans are important. I want to be optimistic, I really do. And we need to be optimistic. You know, Martin Luther King, he didn't say I have a nightmare,

he said I have a dream. And we need to give people dreams. That would have been a whole different movie. You look at how the ocean's reported at the moment, and we're hearing about the nightmare of the oceans constantly. And that only gets us so far. We know what we need to do. We know that we need to protect 30% of our ocean by 2030.

The solutions are out there, but we're moving too slowly. Can we fix it? Yes, we can. Are we able to? I hope we can. We have to be optimistic. So, yeah.

No offense, I like Lucy's answer better. Me too. Dan Schreiber, some fascinating stuff here from Lucy Woodall and Oliver Steeds about the ocean. Do you have any oceanic discoveries to add to that? Yeah, one is that scientists have discovered that if you drop your shoes into the sea, the right foot will go one way and the left foot will go another. A consignment of Nike shoes fell off the back of a cargo and slowly they've been washing up on various shores,

but largely the left shoe is on one shore and the right shoe is going on the other. And it's all to do with asymmetry in the shoe and the way that the currents and winds send it. So that's just a nice little nugget. And probably my favorite bit of ocean news from the year is that two students from Christ Church Academy in Florida were swept out to sea, and with no help in sight, they prayed to God to save them.

Soon after, they were saved by a passing boat called Amen. Oh, nice. Very nice. Dan, thank you. Lucy Woodall, Oliver Steeds, thank you so much for telling us about your mission. And would you please welcome our final guest this evening? He is, as chance would have it, one of the men responsible for bringing the mayor of London's favorite soccer player, Mohamed Salah, to Liverpool. Would you please welcome the Director of Research at Liverpool Football Club, Mr. Ian Graham.

Ian, great to have you here. Congratulations on Champions League trophy. I'm sure that was mostly your doing. Yeah, only 80%. Let's start with the discovery idea. Which football player would you claim as your favorite discovery? So it's important to say that signing a player is a multidisciplinary exercise. So you've got the traditional methods of scouting, some newer methods of video scouting scouting coaches and the manager have to be on board and enthusiastic about the player my role is the data analysis side of analyzing football which is the newer side and the sorts of players that i really like are players who shine through

in the data but don't naturally shine through for your typical football fan or even your typical scout. These are sort of awkward, ungainly looking players or players that have been overlooked for various other purposes. One of my favorite players is Andy Robertson, our left back, one of the best left backs in Europe and now European champion, of course. And is he horribly ugly or something? What was the problem? No, so Andy Robertson's problem was his background as much as anything. So he only started playing English Premier League football maybe at the age of 22. And he played for Hull City, which was not a very good football team. They got relegated from the Premier League and he was the best young full-back in Britain at the time he was a really strange case of really attacking full-back playing in a really poor defensive team

and which metrics particularly could you look at that would identify that ability? so we get data on every ball touch that every player makes in a game where it was in the pitch and what happened next. We can see where all of the players are at 25 frames per second. It's done with optical tracking, same technology that is used for missile tracking originally. It's much easier to track a person than a missile.

They travel a little slower. Can you name just one or two on-field metrics that are measurable that really matter a lot but which are not obvious to fans and maybe even managers and scouts, but you can identify in the data? Yeah, that's a really good question. We try to put everything into one currency. So football is measured in goals because that's what gets you a win. And so we try to take whatever action a player does on a pitch,

whether it's a pass or a shot or a tackle if you're a defender, and ask the question, what was this team's chance of scoring a goal before this action happened? And then what was the team's chance of scoring a goal after that action happened? And we call that goal probability added, which is a really catchy name. And so the thing that I'm really obsessed about is the risk-reward payoff of passes. So some of the best passes in the game have some of the lowest pass completion percentages in the game. And that's because the risk-reward payoff is very, very skewed in soccer or football. We are in London, not in New York.

So it's very easy to massage your statistics and get a high pass completion percentage by playing very conservative passes that do nothing for your team's chance of scoring a goal. And the passes I really love are the passes that go in behind the opposition defence, that take four or five defenders out of the game. Those passes are really hard to make, but someone who four or five defenders out of the game. Those passes are really

hard to make, but someone who gets those passes correct half the time would be a world-class attacking midfielder. That is really fascinating and a great illustration. Is it difficult to identify those high-risk passes in the data? When we look through the lens of the data, it's not a perfect lens. You see a kind of smeared-out view because you don't see all of the lens of the data, it's not a perfect lens. You see a kind of smeared out view because you don't see all of the details of exactly how much pressure this player was under or exactly where the defenders were. But the players who play a full season of football attempt that sort of pass, or the good ones at least, attempt that sort of pass often enough that the law of large numbers starts coming into play and you can get a good statistical reading of the player. So let me ask you this. You got a PhD in theoretical physics at Cambridge.

I didn't mean to laugh at that part. It's a good university. Yeah, yeah, no. But how do you go from that pursuit to analyzing football? A lot of luck and questionable career decisions is the answer. So I was doing a postdoc after my PhD and responded to an advert that asked, would you like to do football statistics for a living? So it was pretty straightforward. All right. So let me just ask you a very basic question. In your job, director of research for

Liverpool Football Club, in which way is analytics more important? On-field play, the actual game and the athletes, or the allocation of resources when it comes to buying and selling players? So it can help a lot with both things, but the place where it really can help is the acquisition of players in terms of helping our scouting process. In Premier League football and European football in general, there's a worldwide free market of football players. So if we spot a player that we would like to play for Liverpool and we can pay the price that the selling club demands, then we can buy him. And the real power of data analysis is when the data set's large. So we have detailed data on hundreds of thousands of players.

Maybe only 5% of those would be anywhere near a Premier League-level player. But that's still 5,000 players, which is too big a set of players to scout everyone in depth and in detail. So we can really help that filtering and identification process. Now, I understand that you played a role in hiring Jurgen Klopp, the manager of Liverpool

now, correct? Yes, a small role. Tell us about that quickly. So our owners and me and all my colleagues were huge fans of Jurgen and his Dortmund team. In the early 2010s, they played the most exciting brand of football in Europe and coming from a place really not of financial dominance. So they won the German Bundesliga twice, had a huge financial deficit compared to Bayern Munich. And so he was always one of our dream hires for manager. But his last season at Dortmund was disastrous. So they were in the relegation zone and the German media said it's all over for Dortmund, Klopp's lost it, there's no way back for them. Our analysis showed something quite different, which was that they were still clearly

the second best team in Germany, but the performances did not match the results. So I analysed 10 seasons of Bundesliga performances and Dortmund were the second unluckiest team in that 10-year history. It was just some terrible luck, Kostjürgen, that one season. In addition to being a wildly successful manager with Liverpool and Dortmund before,

Jurgen Klopp also appears to be an extraordinarily kind and thoughtful human being. Can you please tell us about something horrible that he's done? I'm going to have to disappoint you, I'm afraid. My concern about Jurgen was his act that you see on the cameras every week was just that, an act, and that the real person would be someone different. But it really isn't. That is disappointing.

It's very disappointing. I mean, data analysis is something that is, because it's new and because football is a very conservative sport, it's something that is difficult to get across and it's very understandable for a manager who has a hundred other things to worry about to just say you know what I'm not interested in this but Eugen took the time and was kind enough to let me explain our approach he understood it and appreciated it which already puts him in

the top five percent of managers in my opinion okay but I've got something on him. I've also read that when Klopp came to Liverpool and you needed a striker, that you brought to Klopp a list of what you thought were the 10 best available strikers. And at the top of the list, I believe, was Mohamed Salah, who at that point was playing for Roma. And Klopp came to you and said, this list, my friend, Ian Graham is not good enough. We don't want those players. Give me more. You gave him more than he said. These are even worse. And then went back and ultimately you did hire Moselaw. So what did he not see that the rest of you did see? And how much nicer was he to you after it all worked out well? So luckily enough, in the aggressive way that Jürgen would have asked this question, I wasn't the person that he was demanding these answers from.

Can we do some role play? I'll be you and you be him. Sorry, I'll be the person who's not you that he's yelling at and you be him. So what would you say? I'm afraid my German accent would be culturally insensitive. Do you want to do it in a neutral, you're Welsh, yes?

Do you want to just do it in neutral Welsh then and we'll imagine? Well, I think so the process that we go through is to... I can tell by your dissembling you're not going to tell me, are you? Okay. Okay, I can be direct if you like. No.

So Liverpool, you paid Roma $41 million for Salah, yes? I'm not sure of the exchange rate, but it sounds about right. What's he worth now? I realise he's only a year and a bit into a five-year contract. Yes, that's true. And he's not for sale.

If he were, what's he worth on the transfer market right now, do you think? I think if we could benchmark him against a recent player that we sold that was Philippe Coutinho to Barcelona, your minimum starting bid would be 150 million euros. At which point the answer would be, no, stop wasting our time.

Last year he had a phenomenal year, won the Champions League, came in second in the Prem with enough points to have won in just about any other year. So there is this statistical concept we all know called regression to the mean, which suggests that a particularly good result or a particularly bad result is usually followed by a more average result. So considering your season last year, how many trophies do you think Liverpool wins this year? Well, I shall give you a straight answer. Just over half. And let me give you the details. And you can check, the bookmakers kind of agree with our internal opinion, which is nice. So, Premier League, 25%. Champions League, maybe 12 to 15%.

League Cup, 12%. FA Cup, 12%. to 15 percent league kept 12 percent fa kept 12 percent so the chance of at least one trophy is greater than 50 percent which trophy do you want more this year premier league well as a rational person i should say the champions league because the income the difference between a winning the champions league and semi-final for example absolutely dwarfs the difference between winning the Champions League and a semi-final, for example, absolutely dwarfs the difference between first and fourth in the Premier League. So, rationally, I'd take the Champions League. Does the director of research get a pretty nice cut from the Champions League victory? A small cut.

Do you want to tell us how small? I do not. Dan Schreiber, do you have some other football discoveries to share with us? Yeah, I discovered that for the last 12 years, there's an annual football cup that's been played called the Tolstoy Cup. Have you heard of that, Ian? I have not. It's amazing.

Okay, there's only two teams that play, actually. It's the War Studies Department at King's College London and the Peace Studies Department at the University of Bradford. So they've met 12 times. Peace has beaten war eight games to four. And then this is... I got told this by a fellow researcher. I really hope it's true. As part of a holistic training regime,

footballers at Sweden's Östersunds Football Club are contractually obliged to read Dostoyevsky. I don't know if that's put into your training with Liverpool. It's not mandatory. It's advisory. Dan, good stuff. So, Ian, I'm guessing you're not aware of this, but Freakonomics Radio actually sponsors a soccer team or football club. They're called Duncow FC. They're in Shrewsbury. And this began with an

email out of the blue from the club's media manager and third string goalkeeper. His name is Alex Simpson. And we decided to sponsor the club when we realized that Alex Simpson was actually 15 years old at the time. And it worked up the gumption to write and ask for sponsorship. His dad is the team's manager, and the star player on the team is his older brother. So Duncow, they are a Sunday League amateur club who are playing right now about 17 tiers below the Premier League, but they've received three promotions in the past few years.

So it's possible that in 17 more years, they'll be playing with you in the Premier League. And Alex Simpson is now studying history and politics at Keele University. He's actually here tonight. And he's got something for you, Ian Graham. Alex, would you come on up? So what we've got here is an official Duncow FC jersey, Freakonomics Radio logo on the breast, and you could see on the back, Graham. So before you actually take permanent ownership of it, though, Ian, let me ask Alex to ask you. Alex, I know that your ultimate goal is to get Duncow all the way to the prem.

And you've got here a guy who probably has some good analytics software. He could maybe loan you. And I'm just curious if you have a shot here with Ian Graham. And he's on the spot. And you've just given him a beautiful free jersey with his name on it. I think you should try to get some info from him. So we've just been building our squad for the new season, which starts next Sunday.

And there's one position we think we slightly could do with an extra body there, which is a quick centre-back who can also play right-back, like Joe Gomez for Liverpool. So from your analytics side, what we should see in those players? And you're playing the 17th tier of English football. So the fuel of data analysis is data. And in the English game, our data probably only goes down to the 8th level.

We might know some names of players that low. So in terms of specific recommendations, I'm stuck. You seem so nice up until this moment without data i'm nothing you know i mean my general observations about lower league football is that the level of quality flattens out quick so as you go down the levels the impact of athleticism becomes higher and higher and higher. So just get big, strong players who can run for 90 minutes, because that's going to be your limiting factor.

I am curious, though, Alex, when you're trying to recruit players to an amateur team, you're dealing with different issues than just athleticism, like reliability, right? 100%, 100%, yeah. And I know that, Ian, even at the top level of all sports, there are athletes who are 100% on the physical ability scale and very low on the reliability scale. Yeah, absolutely. Do you have anything to help Alex scout for reliability?

That's a really good question. Many years ago, we did a study with an unnamed club's academy where we asked the players to rate themselves on talent and we asked the coaches to rate the players. And we also asked the players of the coaches of personality questionnaire to say, you know, are you strong-minded? Are you punctual? And so on. And the correlation between the players' self-rating of ability

and the coaches' rating of the player's ability was zero. The coach's rating of ability was only correlated with ability to obey instructions and punctuality. So that's the way to get far, even at a sort of good academy level, is to do what your coach says and turn up on time. Those are not necessarily the best players. So if you have a mercurial talent, as long as you can somehow get him on the pitch, they might be difficult to manage, but that's the sort of player that will be overlooked by your rivals. Alex, your dad, the manager, is former military.

Does he do a pretty good job of getting people to show up and fall in line? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, definitely. We have one club rule for signing players, which is no d***heads. The problem is if everyone has that rule, there's going to be a surplus of really talented d***heads that could win you the league. Ah, yes. I love my job, I really do. I'm afraid, however, it's time for us to go. It has been a remarkably interesting evening, at least for me. I very much hope for all of you as well.

I have to say, I feel that our faith in the spirit of British discovery has been at least partially restored tonight. So thank you so much to all our guests, Ian Graham of Liverpool FC and Alex Simpson of Duncow FC, Lucy Woodall and Oliver Steeds of Necton Mission, Oriol Sullivan of University College London, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, the truly wonderful Dan Schreiber.

But most of all, thanks to all of you for listening this week and every week to Freakonomics Radio. Good night. Thank you. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio. Have you ever wanted to be a princess? There's a multi-billion dollar industry out there with some potentially massive side effects. Sitting in the audience going, oh my gosh, am I destroying my daughter?

We'll hear from a teenager who happens to live in my house. So I would wear that yellow dress. I would wear it everywhere. Do you remember? We'll hear from some researchers. You know, Hollywood is leaving money on the table. We'll hear from the head of a Hollywood studio. And then we started to realize, wait a second, we may have a tremendous opportunity here. And we'll hear from the Hollywood actor who's been fighting this fight for a long time. I'll tell you what, I'll blink, yeah.

Yes, that is Thelma from Thelma and Louise, known in real life as Geena Davis. Yes, in fact, I put that in my email to you in the subject. It was from Geena Davis, the actor, not some random Geena Davis. What princessism has done to Hollywood and beyond. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode is produced by Matt Hickey, Alison Kreglow, Greg Rippin, and Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Zach Lipinski, Daphne Chen, and Corinne Wallace. Our intern is Ben Shaman. We had help this week

from Stephanie Tam. Thanks to everyone at Cadogan Hall in London and a hat tip to Robert Cottrell of The Browser for alerting us to that essay

about Britain and integration by Hasco von Kriegstein. If you don't read The Browser regularly, you are really missing out. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra.

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