Modern Wisdom - #399 - Rob Orchard - Terrible Journalism & Interesting Statistics

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Rob Orchard is a journalist and the co-founder and editor of Delayed Gratification Magazine. Journalism isn't working. Media outlets are more concerned with being first than being right and stories are built to create outrage rather than insight. Customers aren't happy with this setup, so Rob and his team began a Slow Journalism project which focuses on finding signal from the noise, rather than speedy delivery. Then he found a ton of fascinating statistics about the world. Expect to learn what the most popular crossbreed of dog was in 2020, how the Amanda Knox story shows how modern journalism is totally broken, what you should statistically do if you want to win an Oscar, why the 2010's was a terrible year for original cinema, why there's 2 golf balls on the moon and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Check out Rob's Magazine - https://www.slow-journalism.com/ Follow Delayed Gratification on Twitter - https://twitter.com/dgquarterly  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rob Orchard. He's a journalist and a co-founder and editor of Delayed Gratification Magazine. Journalism isn't working. Media outlets are more concerned with being first than being right, and stories are built to create outrage rather than insight. Customers aren't happy with this setup, so Rob and his team began a slow journalism project, which focuses on finding signal from the noise rather than speedy delivery. Then, he found a turn of

fascinating statistics about the world, and today we get to talk about both. Expect to learn what the most popular crossbreed of dog was in 2020, how the Amanda Nock story shows how modern journalism is totally broken, what you should statistically do if you want to win an Oscar, why the 2010s was a terrible year for original cinema, why there's two golf balls on the moon, and much more. Rob's call, Rob is a very cool British guy who is just doing something different with a small team that's a bit sort of contrarian and going a bit against the grain.

And I think it's interesting. You can check out what he's doing if you go to slow-journalism.com and if you want to pick up his book and answer for everything, it is linked in the show notes below. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Rob Orchard, welcome to the show. Nice to be here, Chris. Nice to be here. Thanks very much for inviting me. My pleasure. How do you describe what you do for work?

So I'm an editor. I edit a beautiful quarterly news magazine called The Late Gratification, which I launched with my co-editor, Marcus, back in 2010, with an idea of providing sort of an antidote to knee-jerk, Twitter-driven news reporting, which doesn't give journalists enough time to really get to grips with stories. So we kind of go the opposite way. Once every three months, we produce a beautiful magazine, News Magazine, which looks back over the big events of the quarter with the benefit of hindsight and ask the question of what happened next.

So that's slow journalism that you've kind. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not going to claim ownership of it. It's, you know, a lot of people have been talking about it for a long time, but I think ours is the first magazine, or as was the first magazine to put a flag in the sound and say, yes, this is a slow journalism magazine. And the idea is it's a bit like slow food and slow travel, right? So taking your time to do something of quality and kind of providing a counterbalance to sort of like getting terribly speedy and news getting terribly speedy and everything getting terribly speedy. What's the big difference between slow and fast journalism?

Well, there's also sort of different things, so what tends to happen in terms of the way that we process our news is that it's coming at us from all directions. You know, it's on our phones, it's kind of quite often the first thing that we do in the morning, right? Instead of turning to our loved one, we turn on our phones, we check and make sure nothing horrible has happened overnight. And last thing at night as well, and throughout the day, and on our socials, and it's kind of this white noise of news. And what tends to happen as well is that it moves in kind of cycles. So you get an intense concentration on a massive story for a few days and then suddenly the news agenda moves on. And you're quite often, for the sort of the feeling of

not having really got to grips with what the story was or wanting to know what happened next. But, you know, the new cycle feeds on novelty and so it's kind of constantly moving on. So to take an example, Afghanistan, we were all glued to the story over the summer in August, August 15th, the fall of Kabul and the few days leading up to that and the few few days after that. But since then, the coverage of what's been happening in Afghanistan has completely fallen off a cliff. And we haven't had in the next issue a very well written, a very well-considered piece from female journalists who's been there for the last year and who continued, very bravely continued, didn't leave with everybody else stayed there and has got this incredible

6,000 word read for us, really getting to grips with what has happened in the country since then. So I suppose when it works well, what it is is you open up the magazine or wherever you read it. You open up the magazine and you think, God yeah, that's story. What the hell happened to that? I remember that and we tell you, you know, and in amongst that we also tell you the stories that you missed. We have this kind of slightly cheesy line of the stories are the missed or others missed or mistold. So this idea of in the kind of the heat of, you know, like 24, 7 rolling news, there's stuff that gets missed

and there's stuff that gets put out there wrongly. So this is ideally in his best form, it's an antidote to that. I remember doing an AS level in social media, no sorry, in media studies and sociology. So a quarter of an A level in media studies. And even then, I remember learning about on 9-11, the way that certain companies, executives, said it's a good day for bad news, and they released tons and tons of weird, murky stories that they just needed to kick out into the

press because they knew it was going to be relegated to page 105. And it didn't really matter. So that's super, that's before social media, that's before Twitter, that's before rapid smartphone delivery for information and disinformation and misinformation and misinformation. And even then people were able to play these games and they were able to work with the if it bleeds it leads, seductiveness for the press to look at the things that are in front of them. And there's now even more, it sounds like we're delivered the front end of the story because that's where the novelty lies, but we never close the loop around what actually happened in the story because who cares about closure

or that anyone wants to know about is what's new. Yeah, I mean, it's very easy to get very cynical about it. And obviously, there are tons of brilliant journalists and brilliant news organisations. And one thing that I'm always trying to be careful about is not in any way to say that like we are the answer Because we're a small team. We make a beautiful magazine comes out once every three months if you relied on it for finding out what's happening You know what's going on in the world then you know like three months after the fact you were like oh wow so Biden got in Yeah, there's a pandemic on that's why everyone's been dying. There's a pandemic going on So we're not we're not the answer in that sense. There are tons of you know skilled and talented journalists

are they're doing amazing work and there are people doing kind of follow up stories. However, that's not that's not the way that most of the news that we receive works. And part of that is as you say it's novelty. It's if it bleeds at lead, which is kind of you know from time in memorial that is you know how how journalism is worth. But part of it is also the economics, right? So as you have moved away from, you, you know, you get up in the morning and you go and buy your particular newspaper, you spend money on it and, you know, you can take it and dissect it and so on. And the editors make their best guess as to what will be interesting and useful to you. You move to a time when news is largely free and has been expected to be free.

And the way to monetize it is by using the data of the people who are buying it and feeding them up very invasive, very targeted advertising. And that kind of militates away from considered journalism, right? Because actually, if you're only measuring value in terms of clicks, then the sensible thing to do is not to, you know, is not to commission a 6,000-word considered piece,

which, you know, a team of editors work on with a brave journalist and, you know, you're going to get something really interesting. The sensible thing to do is to bang out a couple of hundred words of nonsense with some sort of sly reference to a celebrity who's invoked at the moment, put on a provocative headline, and just kind of pump it out and pump out 20 or 30 of those, you know, a day. That's, you know, because then you get the clicks and then you get the advertising and then you can fund things and so on. So there's something rotten about the system. There's an interesting thing that I mean in recent years

I have seen Dependulum start to swing back a little bit as it always does right, which is paywalls and people putting up you know paywalls and demanding money for their journalism and thank God right because we got into a really bleak period when we launched this this magazine it was you know like the only way for the people saw was in digital, like print was there, digital, and it had to be free, it had to be free and you had to get mass. And that was really, really kind of scary because we were educating the entire generation of people to expect that they should get, you know, all of their news for free, even though good news cost money. Sam Harris has a point around this that he says the entire internet made a price estimation error in terms of how much it values content. Podcasts shouldn't be free. Everyone that's

listening to this right now should be paying me for my time. Everyone should. And they should be paying every other podcast for as well. When you think about the amount of value and pleasure that you get and how engaging it is and how awesome that platform is, and that's just one platform. And then talk about the best follow that you have on Twitter. And then think about the best blogger that you follow that just writes because they like to do it. And the best newsletter that you subscribe to and yeah, people are picking up the scraps

with affiliate deals and maybe they've got a members area where you can pay for more content and maybe blah, blah, blah, like freemium model thin end of the wedge shit. But the bottom line is that when we began the internet, when we began content creation on the internet, we misjudged the entire universe misjudged what you should be paying for and what you should expect for free. And sadly now because of anchoring bias, there is that genie can't go back in the bottle. You cannot do that. There is anchoring bias is precisely what people are doing

with gated content. They're saying, you still get the show for free, but you pay for more. As opposed to, this is what you could have got, and now you have to pay to get it. It's all about avoiding the anchoring bias, but yeah, I think that the perverse incentives that de-insentivise people from writing good pieces

of long journalism that would have taken ages versus can you believe what Chloe Kardashian wore last night, his effort with her with no makeup on going to the whatever, that's gonna get shared around, and that'll trend. So, yeah, of course, well, it's even more in cities than that. So it's also,, and that'll trend. So, of course, it's even more insidious than that. So, it's also in certain news organizations, what happens is, is journalists come in in the morning, and they're given a list of the stories that were trending online overnight, you know, kind of the things that are out there in the ether, people were talking about,

which is why, you know, these poor, poor buggers, you know, they come come into work and they're like, right, write something about this. Who is this? I don't know. It's an American celebrity. She was on some kind of series that you've not heard of. Ryan, and what's happened to her? I don't know. She's breaking it with a boyfriend. Who's a boyfriend? I don't know. It doesn't matter. Just write something. So, you know, at the bottom end, the other thing that happens with this, of course. And you're actually right that there's, I mean, it's not a difficult argument fundamentally, is it to say that, you know, when you're talking about journalism where you're sending people to the difficult and scary places to, you know,

to be put into situations that you wouldn't want to be put into on your behalf so you can get information. That's, that should be a fairly easy sell. But the other thing that happens, of course, is that, as, as the number of media multiply, right? So as you kind of bust outside of the established media, which in many ways was very, very, very good because it empowers a lot of smaller producers to do some interesting things into experiment. But as you do that, and as their economic cloud comes down

and down and down, and as they sort of hemorrhage cash, there's fewer opportunities for journalists to take what was traditional real journalism. for journalists to take, you know, what was traditional real journalism. So in this country, for example, what would happen is you would, you know, you'd start at an entry-level job on a local newspaper and you'd frantically work away, hopefully some nice editor would take you under their wing and sort of knock some of the the rough corners off, rough edges off your writing and so on. You'd start writing pieces and try and ascend them to the nationals and eventually you get a couple placed and then eventually some of the rough corners, rough edges off your writing and so on. You'd start writing pieces and trying to send them

to the nationals and eventually you get a couple placed and then eventually you might get something, like at the nationals and then you'd work your way up. There was a kind of a ladder that you could climb. It kind of made sense, right? And so what you end up there, it is proper training and proper experience and you can do that in a context

in which you can make enough money to survive. That sounds like a good way to fund journalism, which as we all know is incredibly important to a stable society, right? And to democracy. But the problem is now there's so few, there's no local news jobs, local news is basically dead, has been killed by the internet. And there's very few opportunities that are kind of the bigger establishment organizations. So you still got all of these people wanting to become journalists, still loads and loads

of people desperate to go into that. They come out the other side and they realize there's nothing for them to go into. And so then what they have to do is they have to find some sort of back door. So there's the possibility they could launch a podcast that it might take off, it won't, it might, you know, or they could launch their own magazine, it might take off, it won't, it might, you know, or they could launch their own magazine, it might take off, it won't, it might, you know, and you sort of, you're, you're hollowing out the whole ecosystem. And what you end up with is the kind of the few opportunities that there are there tend not to be for the, the better sort of kind of interesting genus, and they tend to be the thing where you're just turning the wheel to, to keep the whole

shorted process going. Talk to me about the difference between first and being right. I heard you talk about the Amanda Knox story as a really good example of this. The Amanda Knox story was fascinating. So it was this, you know, it was the retrial of Amanda Knox for the murder of Meredith Kurcher. For the impure.

The impure. That's right, yeah. And so this was a highly attended court event in Peru, and all of the world's major news organizations were there. There's these extraordinary photos of these banks and banks of people kind of watching the story. And the Daily Mailhood prepared two new stories, one for if the verdict

went one way and one for if it went the other way. And there was something that happened, maybe somebody in the court misheard something, you know, it was guilty, but it was guilty to something else, to a lesser charge of slander rather than murder. And the button was pushed and the wrong new story went up online because as we know at the retrial Amanda Nox is the guilty verdict was overturned and she was she was ended up that subsequently being released. And so this story goes up on the world's single biggest English language news site, which is a diametric opposite of the truth. And you know this sort of thing has always happened, right?

Because news organizations, they've always prepared for eventuality, you think about elections. There's famous examples in the past of people just being, certainly election was gonna go one way and they published their front story with X1 and Y wins. And the thing that they got into trouble with the mail was that there was quite a lot of kind of elaborated colour, there was quite a lot of elaborated quotes that went in there

as well. And of course, I think there was a thing about, need to be careful to get this right, but I think there was a thing about the reaction of Knox and of the family, and I think also there was a quote from a court official, which I think was not correct. And so, you have this very weird situation where this wrong story kind of goes up, and you can completely understand why you get to that point, right? Because getting stories out first means that when lots and lots of people searching for them, that's the story that they land on, right?

So people all around the world were interested in this verdict and they wanted to know. So there's this incredible pressure to get the story out first and obviously the people that may want to get it right. But they kind of like they pushed the wrong button and this went up. It's only up for a couple of minutes and then they put the correct story up. And if the verdict had been what they thought it was, then that would have been part of the record of this event for the rest of history, even though stuff in it was not kind of correct. So that's a weird thing. This need for speed in this hyper, hyper, hyper speedy knee jerk news environment means

that we're kind of built for error kind of creeping in. And then more than that, and this is not what I'm sort of suggesting in this case, particularly, but the whole ecosystem is built up for spreading disinformation and misinformation very, very rapidly around the world. You know what it's like? It reminds me of the algorithmic trading companies on Wall Street that moved their exchanges closer, that moved their offices closer to the exchanges to gain half a millisecond. That's right, that's right. And you know, because it matters, right? Because the economics of it are such that, if you get that story out first, then you're higher in the Google

rankings, which means more people link to you. And I mean, I know the algorithm is changing all the time, but you know, but you're notion you're going to get higher up, which means you can get more clicks, which means you can charge more for the advertising, which means at a time when people aren't prepared to pay for news, you can still continue to fund your organizations. But I mean, if you sat down to construct a kind of a news ecosystem from scratch, you know, it wouldn't be that.

What else are the press getting wrong at the moment? I'm very low to criticize the press because I think that by and large, the press is kind of comprised of editors and journalists who are just trying to do their best and trying to get the truth out there. And of course, my magazine, one way we've talked about it is we're slightly the kind of with the Seagulls following the trawler, right? Because we're not breaking the news, the slogan down the spine of all of our issues is last the breaking news. So we're kind of following along behind and we get to look at what has happened and then we get

to ask people to take a broad view on it. And there are interesting things around that. So one of the things that often happens is when people are interviewed about an event, when it's just happened, and sometimes when it's still happening, it's still unfolding behind them. They tend to give a very different reaction, understandably, to a few months down the line when they've had a chance to consider and put things in perspective. When they're standing in front of the burning building, trying to process what's happened, then it's a very different reaction to a three months down the line, I think about it. So people are selecting for witnesses and for statements and for reactions from people and commentators and opinion pieces, they're selecting for a very particular type of opinion.

Well, that's right. and commentators and opinion pieces, they're selecting for a very particular type of opinion. Well, that's right. So it is the opinion that you get immediately, and also because the media moves, you know, on mass around certain stories, you also get things so I remember going to Sultzbury three months after the poisoning. And it's actually my hometown hometown and just kind of walking around talking to people and they're like, God, they're just endless journalists. And people were almost scared to go into the town center because they would just be stopped. Like, I am from CNN, I'm BBC, can I get some words from you? How are you feeling? I'm feeling fine, just fuck off.

It's just like the entire town is now just journalists and potentially some novice shock. So, yeah, so that's another kind of quirk there. But no, as I said, sorry, I'm very lucky to create such journalists. I think in an ideal world, we would find, and I think slowly we're getting there, because I think these paywalls seem to be working. And actually, a wonderful example is the Guardian. So the Guardian was losing money, hand over fist for many, many years. And they took this kind of very grown-up decision to say to their readers, what we do costs

money, and you need to support us if you want it. Well, keep giving it. We'll do it free because we want reach and we think our genitals need to reach the foregone as the world. And if you can't pay no problem at all, however, it costs money and if you can support us then do. And they had a tremendous reaction and they managed to break even, I think, ahead of where they thought they were going to. So I think that people are trying to do. I mean, obviously, there's always, as in any organizations, there's obviously

kind of, there's bias and there's corruption and there's things that I see happening, which, you know, I think are unpleasant in terms of invasion of privacy and things like that, but, you know, that's been with us forever and I probably always will, always will be. But I think, you know, I just have, I just have the privilege, I guess, of being able to offer a slightly different view. The bastards are ubiquitous. It doesn't matter where you are or what industry you're in, the bastards are going to be, bastards are going to be everywhere. I'm pretty fascinated thinking about what it does to the psyche on mass for people to hear stories,

very vociferous, aggressive, eye-catching stories, and never get to hear the conclusion to them. Never get to tie up that loose end. That's something I never ever thought of before, but it's almost, unless it's a court case in which the court case itself becomes another piece of novelty that people want to get to, the only reason that that closure is being featured is that the closure is also another piece of novelty. But for the most part, you hear the Afghanistan exit is a perfect example. We all knew what happened.

With those photos of people falling from the plane as it's taking off, that clinging to it is they're running along and they're waving at the camera. And I don't know how that's even been completed. I have no idea at all. Well, this is true. And also, I suppose the other thing is, arguably, you could do a magazine that does this every six months.

You could do one that does it every year. There's loads of stories that we could continue to follow up. And when does it end? When did the ripples stop emerging from that story? And I suppose that we've always kind of positioned the magazine is halfway between a magazine and a history book, right? You know, it's like, it's sort of, you know, some of the, it's a lot of the three, but one of the two is history.

Haha, that's true. I mean, we do do deeper stuff than that. So, I mean, it's, it's often the stories are kind of inspired by something happening out three months here, but we'll reach further back. And well, I guess what we try to do is given that we have these lovely, like long form stories that we can do, we can do is we try to get to do what a lot of journalists aren't given time to do, which is provide lots of context and seek out lots and lots of expert opinion. And, you know,

like try to try to take a broad view. And that's very difficult to do if you're having to turn out stories, you know, that's the the stuff that's such a tremendous case. It's the consistent ambient, unfulfilled open loop that it has to have an impact on the public's psychology. It has to. You're constantly being fed issues that do not get resolved. That's what the news is. That's true. That's true. And also, of course, I mean, you know, this is not a new thing, and this is, this is, this is just the nature of news as we kind of see it. Is that because everything is, you know, not everything, because there's a lot of terribly bleak things out

there. And because you want to cut through with your stories, you kind of have to escalate. I mean, you know, this is, this is, right, this kind of feeds back to this amazing and a Lemki, interview they were talking about, that you kind of, you know, you can't, you just, you can't give people the same thing and expect the same reaction, you kind of have to escalate.

So, and that's part of the reason, I think, why so many people have said that they want to switch off the news, and that's part of the reason I think why so many people have said that they want to switch off the news, and that they feel so much better when they stop reading the news for a few months, because they can't do anything about it. You know, none of the massive issues are anything that we can actually influence. We can't influence government, coronavirus policy. We can't influence China's plans to build coal-fired power stations. We can't do anything about any of these things.

And yet, they weigh on us as though we could, and as though we're not fulfilling it. So you're right. News is very anxiety-inducing, which is part of the reason that people want to consume it, because they think that if they can consume it, then they can master it and somehow get on top of it. But they can't. I mean, I kind of wish that I could stop reading the news, but I can't because it's my job. I got sent a plug-in by my buddy George called Twee-Mex, which is just a plug-in for Chrome, and it brings up a highlight of the person who's profile you're on, their top tweets of all time, by likes and retweets. But the most important thing that it does is it covers over the trending

portion of my Twitter homepage. So I go on to my newsfeed now and this thing comes up. And if you're not on someone's profile, it just randomly chooses one of the people that you follow. And it brings up their best tweets of all time, which is awesome because I only follow 99 people. So they're always someone that I know or someone that I absolutely adore what they're doing. But on top of that, it stops me from seeing trending that that trending on the side. And when you realize when you log on, there is nothing that I can be surprised by now that would go in that point. Right. It could be any story at all. I don't know whether you've seen, I can't remember who the comedian is from America that did this, but they piece together.

I think it might have been Ryan Long, Ryan Long piece together, how you make an eye catching a headline. Right. And it's just a bunch of particular group does something in this. So it's outraged mothers fighting over misappropriated cat culture or something like that and it's just that's how you piece it together and he does all that and you look at the side of trending and you think this is fucking this is the world that we're in this sort of formulaic algorithmic headline. Definitely. If you can get some outrage in there, that's amazing because then you get multiple bites

of the cherry, right? So you can scrape together. If you look on Twitter, you can find three or four people who are outraged about anything, right? Anything, like, you know, vanilla ice cream, you know, people smiling too much, whatever it might be. They can find them, outrage at this. Vanilla, you know, vanilla ice cream, you know, people smiling too much, whatever it might be. They can find them, outrage at this. Vanilla ice cream, outrage, and then you get that, and then you get the reaction against that,

and then you can report that. I mean, you can go on with this forever, and people kind of do. But I mean, that's funny about the kind of gaming the system, because, you know, at the beginning it used to be stuff like writing, you know like writing the word sex in white on white background a thousand times over so people, and then obviously that was way too sophisticated, I way too unsophisticated and they've got conchanger and then putting the names of celebrities into your titles, you'd have these incredibly dry publications that for some reason were referencing Britney Spears and nobody really kind of, why are you doing that? You're a plumbing magazine,

you know, but, you know, it kind of all feeds into it all health. And this is just the latest part of that, right? Are you just kind of concoct what will work, what will cut through? But the problem is, because we've all been doing it for so long, the kind of the, the sort of the sheer outrage you need to cut through if you're going for the outrage angle, it's difficult. But that said, I mentioned before, this pendulum, it does swing back and people get sick of it. When we launched, people were so in love with digital. People were prepared to, without any sort of credible business model, they were prepared. Long-standing publishers would

say, yeah, I mean, we're digital first now. How are you going to make money? I don't know. It'll become apparent. How are you going to make money? I don't know. It'll become apparent. What are you talking about? What are you talking about, as well? And also, you know, how in love people were with their smartphones. I mean, you know, there was nothing wrong with smartphones. And now everybody's uneasy about their smartphones. Everybody's trying to detox, trying to kind of get themselves wean themselves off here.

They're anxious about their kids having it. They know, you know, how much time they're spending just scrolling through, you know, stuff that they don't need to scroll through on social. So I think these things change. And actually, so our magazine is a case in point, we've managed to build a modest subscriber base that funds us to do good journalism. That's great. Antiquated communication medium. That's true, yeah, exactly. Yeah, go proper on school. But I think almost you need to do that, right? So you need to do the opposite of what other people do.

Because you do print instead of digital, you do read a funded instead of invasive personal advertising, and you do slow instead of fast. And then you can, it's always going to be a niche, but you might have a niche that works. I think that you're right about the counterculture thing. And I think that we are at the beginning of that pen job, I'm starting to move that you're right about the counterculture thing and I think that we are at the beginning of that pendulum starting to move that you see

How much support people's substats and patreon's get What do you think Let's say it's 20 years or 30 let's say it's 50 years time What do you think that the world will look back on this period of think that the world will look back on this period of limbic hijack and technology that is incredibly unethical, manipulating the most base elements of our psychology to get us to stay on site for this long. What do you think people are going to look back on this period of history and consider? Wow, that's quite a big question. I'm aware I'm asking you to be the most

sort of divinated clairvoyant that you can. But just, well, no, it's funny. So I did this, I did this TEDx in 2014 and one of the things that I said, I sort of wanted some nice bold statements for the end. And I said in 10 years time, there won would be a single printed, like a single major printed newspaper left in the Western Europe or something like that. And so I'm slightly anxious now because it's got like two years to go. Come on guys. Check it out. Go out business. I mean a lot have folded but still, well it's funny isn't it? When you look back, obviously, what happens is that all the noise kind of goes away. You look back on the entire decade, like the 70s. What was the decade of?

You can name three or four things and one of them is disco. So, all the people who lived through that is absolutely nonsensical. But I would imagine that a huge amount of it will be to do with climate stuff, weren't it? So, these guys were such morons. Why didn't they just do cold fusion like we've got and sort it out of a limitless power? What on earth were we thinking that's so stupid? Or can you imagine them living in a time before they knew that there were aliens? Or something like that? It'll be some massive thing that we've not, you know, I think in terms of my, my strong

feeling is that in terms of the way that, you know, big social media organizations have been operating and big tech companies have been operating, I think that that won't persist because I think people won't stand for it. People are getting way too savvy about it. As a very basic thing, people are going to demand to have the value of their information, I think. And all of the technology exists to put that in place. People could be micro-compensated for all of the data that is sold behind the scenes about them. And they could also be compensated every time that there's a data breach, every time that people don't have to kind of protect it, then whatever it might be.

So I imagine that that sort of thing might mark a shift. But in terms of kind of broader news media, I guess probably it'll still be guided by the same things that we want as humans, which is we want to emass enough information that will be invulnerable and we'll have a special advantage over all the other humans and we'll be protected and our family's what we protected, which is obviously nonsense. Absolutely impossible. Do you have a side interest in data science

or something, because you've written a book that works out things like how much it would cost to buy everything in an edition of Vogue or what the actual best invention since sliced bread have been or the UK's most popular dog breeds. Are you a closet data scientist too? So I would never glorify myself as a data scientist, but since we launched the magazine, so in the first issue of the magazine, my co-editor, Mark, said,

do you know what we should do? We should do some infographics. Infographics are fun. And our director, who's the best art director in the world, sort of came onto this and said, yes, so the very first issue we started doing it for graphics. Just trying to work out how we do them and over years we've kind of worked out, we've got better and better than I think. Actually what happened with this book was it was April 2020 and the first lockdown. Suddenly we'd gone from selling three or four thousand copies of the magazine at the new stand to selling zero copies because nobody was going to, you know,

airports, nobody was going to book shops, nobody was going to train stations. I mean, obviously, as, you know, in terms of what was going on at the time, that was a very small drama. But for our business, that was a big deal. And so we were just casting around for something that we could, we could do, a project that

we could all throw ourselves into in this time when we were not going out when we were staying at home. And we thought, let's do a book, because we talked about doing a book for ages, and we had 10 years worth of infographics. So we started putting stuff together and coming up with new ideas and how it would all look, and then we found an agent, and we got an offer from Bloom's B, so we sold it to them. And then we started putting together, and I love infographics. And I'm not a data scientist, but I have enough data manipulation skills to pull together infographics and to do research for them.

And they're brilliant from magazine because they give you a way in. I think that they are like a gateway drug for magazine purchases. And I've seen people at the news stand flicking through a copy of the load gratification. And it's not the long form features, the earnest kind of analysis, any of that that they stop at is the funnies, is the little infographics,

the little things like, oh wow, how's that? My goodness, did you know how many chickens there are? Wow. And so that's been great for us for the magazine. But I also think that they're really interesting from a journalistic point of view, because you can kind of use them in a way, slightly to take the heat out of kind of quite controversial

stories, because you can just put the facts down, right? And you can kind of give people a way into the facts, you know, that kind of looks good and that kind of amuses them and intrigues them at the same time as hopefully giving them some information. So the great, and this book is, I mean, this book is 10 years in the making and it's got lots and lots of lovely silly stuff in it,

but it's got quite a lot of serious stuff in it. I think I'm glad that you mentioned what's the best thing since sliced bread because that took me flipping forever to work out how to answer that question. But basically what we ended up doing was getting loads and loads of lists that Eminem bodies had produced in the best human inventions of all time. And then we taught it up, we did a meta list, so we taught it up all of their kind of votes,

we worked out what the most kind of most lauded inventions in human history were, post the industrial revolution. So it wasn't like fire and the wheel and stuff like that. And then we found out when sliced bread was invented, it was introduced in 1928, I think in June, 1928. And then we just looked at the two inventions that were best ranked after that, which were spoiler alert, they were penicillin

and the internet. And penicillin only just scraped on the wire because I think that was something like September, 1928. But that's it, you know, that's- So penicillin only just scraped under wire because I think that was something like September 1928, but that's it, you know, that's penicillin. So it's grown on bread as well. Yeah, so that's two bread based. And if you've been able to make the internet off of bread, we would have had three bread based inventions.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, let's not rule it out at this stage. Let's see if we can get some funding. Into bread. Yeah. So I've got some of my favorite ones that I went through. So the world's oldest person was 122 years old and she was French Apparently. Yeah, J'accalement. Yeah. Yeah. And so we like looking at old people. So we did this whole infographic at the the other end of the book Which was it was called How to Live Forever. But it had a little asterisk that said up to a maximum of 122 years.

And what we did was we looked at super centenarians, so people who had lived older than 110. And the nice thing about that is that they've all been interviewed at some stage. And I mean, quite often they're, you know, so barely kind of capable of of giving answers but the one question everybody has always asked them is how did you live to such an old age and and the answers are just just absolutely delightful so there's mad stuff like so whiskey and boiled onions eating boiled palenta a of humor, quite a few people said that, lifelong virginity. Eugenie Blanchard, lifelong virginity. God, no alcohol, tobacco off, off fooling around.

No fooling around. No fooling around. No fooling around. My favorite one is there's a lady who said, daily raw steak and brandy and leaving her husband. Age 39. So that's quite nice. Like you can start to get, I mean,

I'm not sure I wouldn't necessarily, I'm not necessarily endorsing lifelong virginity in a all brandy diet to people, but there's kind of nice funny things that you can find out from it. I'm a big fan of May Harrington, who lived to 113 died in the 29th of December 2002 and just has nothing divulged written below her advice. She's not giving her secrets away.

You don't know what she, you don't know. Yeah, enjoy dying at 80 bitches. Yeah, exactly. I knew I didn't tell. You didn't know. And then the oldest living creature was a clam that lived to 507 years old until he was accidentally killed by researchers. That's right, I think it was the researchers who found the clam accidentally in the process of identifying the clam working out how old it was, accidentally killed it.

So I mean, it could have been, you know, like could have gone a lot of homes, you know, didn't have a good innings. That's so unbelievable. The oldest cow, 48 years, the oldest goat, 22 years, 29 years for the oldest dog. That's, I mean, there's a 43 year old spider in here as well, which I do not want to meet. No, exactly, exactly. And with all of these things as well, you know, one thing that we found out in making

this book, you know, and going through these billions and billions of data sources, and some of them are actually kind of fantastic. And many, many diligent people kind of compiling them so on, is that you also do get to a few where you think, how did you know that? Like did some, like the spider one. Was he just kept in one place for those 14 whatever years it was?

I mean, potentially, maybe it was, maybe it was in a zoo or whatever. But if not, is there just a chance that a younger spider scuttled in at some point? Just like the other way around? You've got some concerns around the veracity of the conclusions of the spider research. You can't just put its leg off and look at how many rings are inside of it. That's not the way it works. That's the, you can't cut with data spider. Yeah.

And I think there's, I think there's just a lot of, in terms of kind of the data that's out there, necessarily, you know, there's a lot of best guesses and kind of approximations. I mean, actually, if you think about something like, like CO2 emissions or whatever, you know, we've got these things and broadly, they're probably, you know, like ballpark correct.

But then also, like, no government in the world, even the most scrupulous and well-funded government is measuring every single fire in somebody's back garden or every single kind of whatever it might be. And certainly that's even the best funded one. So there are a lot of people, it'll be, I think, probably just a finger in the air, like approximating it. Yeah, looking at the CO2 emissions, I was quite interested in this. The UK has seen the biggest CO2 emissions drop

of all G20 nations, a decrease of 41% since 1990. Meanwhile, China is emitting 11.5 billion tons of CO2 per year which accounts for 30.3% of the global total. That's one country contributing 30.3% of the entire global total of CO2 emissions. It's true. One thing to bear in mind, I suppose, about that is an impressive drop by the UK, and a lot of it has been this real kind of like throwing ourselves into renewables. And so actually since 1990, coal fired, power and energy production has kind of absolutely plummeted.

But another thing that's happened is that manufacturing in this country has effectively been off shore to China. So our emissions data doesn't take into account the embedded emissions of the products that we buy constantly from China. That's interesting. And that made there using less clean energy and that shipped here, flown here, whatever it might be. So actually there's loads of different ways of, I mean, even in this, so actually there's three different major standards for how you measure emissions and some of them take into accounts like aviation and some of the dose.

All of these different things. So generally, the UK has done well. It's probably also the case that a lot of the low hanging fruit for the UK has now been picked, which is somewhere like China. Actually, they haven't kind of made that switch to renewables, but if they did, that would make a massive difference. I'm terrified of China. Sometimes I just sit and think about what it's going to be like with our new East Asian overlords, which personally,

I welcome with open arms and have always been an ardent supporter of the Xi-Gin Ping entire everything that he's done his hair his outfits Yeah, his 30.3% of the global total CO2 emissions per year. I welcome them Absolutely absolutely well, so We did actually we did industry in for graphic in the book about that and it was just called How has China changed? And we just looked at some of the data about what has happened to the quality of life of

citizens in China in the 20 years, the last 20 years. And it is astonishing across so many different measures across education, public health, you know, earnings, just all of these different things. Chinese citizens have leapt ahead. Their government has brought them incredible, incredible benefits. But I mean, you were absolutely right that they are on the path to becoming our overlords. I mean, certainly economically, one of the kind of the most telling things as well in the book for me was we just looked at how GDP has changed in the kind of the nations of the world with the highest GDP. And it's fascinating because Japan's GDP has

increased by something like 3% in that last 20 years. And China's has increased by more than 1,000%. I mean, it is completely out. I think the UK's around 97 or something like that. But it's just, I mean, it's an incredible thing that's been happening there in the background. This economic expansion, which has been coupled with a lot of kind of very good things for some of the citizens and a lot very bad things for some of the other citizens.

Totalitarian communist regime is good for the GDP. That's effective. That's the like it's effective. It's effective. It gets the job done. I would love to see an accurately done study around happiness levels and around fulfillment and meaning levels for Chinese citizens. You're never going to get the same as finding out if COVID came from Wuhan, or whatever, we're never going to find out.

I think it's very unlikely that we're going to find out, because you bite very nature, the people that would be conducting the study have a perverse incentive around the outcomes of the study. But I don't know what it's like to be a Chinese citizen with a social credit score and all of your movements being tracked. And have you seen that they've got gate analysis now on the artificial intelligence system. So even if you don't show your face, they can predict who you are to a 97% accuracy simply by the way that you walk. I was petrifying. Terrifying. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, you also have, you know, was going on in Xinjiang, and with the Uighurs, you know, this is kind of a petrifying development. I mean, the other thing to kind of add in, I suppose, about the, you know, there's this incredible expansion, economic expansion, is of course you have to measure it from the base. So actually, you know, Japan 20 years ago was one of the kind of the most developed nations in the world, and China has made this drastic jump to be, you know, exactly. And of course, it's the most popular nation on

the planet as well. So actually, the interesting thing as well is that GDP is colossal. The GDP per capita for China is still very middling. There's a lot of people not doing particularly well, and there's lots of people who are doing very well. But yeah, you could do a book of infographics just on China. Just on what's happening. They've mad stuff. They're looked at the tallest towers in the world. I think at least seven of them are in China.

The tallest skyscrapers in the world. So it's completely kind of eclipsed. It's someplace, what's the new one? Because there's a new one, is it in some Saudi place that's going to... Oh, the gender tower. It's going to wipe the floor with the Burj al Arab. Right, that's what the Burj Khalifa.

That's right, so Burj Khalifa is your tallest. You've got one, two, three, four, five, six of the top 10 tallest towers in China at the moment. And then I think it's the Jeddert Tower, which is scheduled to open in 2024, which is going to be emotionally a kilometre high. And that's where the... Was that Saudi Arabia somewhere? That's in Jeddur and Saudi Arabia, yeah.

And then I know from my trip to Dubai last winter that they are building in the center of a brand new marina that's going to be downtown, huge downtown marina. They are building just, it's not a building, it's just a spike in the ground, but this spike in the ground is going to be 1.1 kilometers high. So they're already planning to take the title that they're about to lose to Jetta back and put it in the same place. It's just, I shit you not, I shit you not, it's a spike in the ground. It does all feel a little bit, a little bit sort of old-fashioned, it doesn't it? You know, like, it's sort of showing off competition with towers. I mean, we've got a little bit of it, actually, it's quite interesting with the,

the kind of the recent launches, kind of Bezos and Branson and so on, doing these big launches into space. And a lot of people are saying, why are you doing that? You don't think you've got other things to do. When you've got basically unlimited oil money in the Middle East,

what have you got to do other than stick the biggest spike in the world in the ground? That's it. That's all that's left. Yeah, I mean, I suppose so. I mean, that's kind of the, that's slightly the, the the bezels argument, although bezels is also saying that, you know, we're going to learn those and stuff from him going into space. But I don't know, it just seems, it feels a bit of an old-fashioned way to spend your, spend your billions, doesn't it? Do you see what Elon tweeted recently talking about how people were criticizing him

for not paying tax on his unrealized gains from stock holdings? So he did a Twitter poll to say, should I just dump 10% of Tesla stock? And I'll abide by whatever the results of this poll are. And that ended up with a Twitter poll deciding the fate of $20 billion worth of stocks. And they decided on yes, ended up at 57 and a bit percent said yes.

So it's like, if you're holding Tesla stock, might be an idea to just get out of the market for the time being and then rebuy backing because Elon's about to dump a little bit. Oh, God save us. But I mean, it all it keeps us, it keeps us in interesting stories, right? Yeah, right. It keeps you something to talk about. Dog breeds. I love this one. I love dogs. The most popular dog cross breed was cockapoo's with 39,000 being sold through pets for homes in 2020. This is in the UK. 10 of the 24 most popular dog breeds has poodles as parents and cavapuz are the most expensive dogs. Now, I know a lot of people that have got cockapoo, so I anecdotally can completely back this.

Yeah, well, this was fascinating. So this was something that we looked at in the magazine first, right? Because it was a big phenomenon about COVID and the lockdown. So actually, we did a ton of, ton of, ton of, um, uh, graphics about COVID. I mean, there was so much amazing data that, that, that, to, to play with. And this was a fascinating, proper one. It was, it was going through this unbelievable inflation. Um, so there's two things going on. So people getting more and more interested in, in, in, in, in crossbreeds. Um, and there will also paying more and more and more for them. And so we got this incredible data, quite often, you know, for the book,

we would kind of go and approach somebody that we thought had some interesting data. And Petsville Holmes did have interesting data, they sell kind of tons and tons of dogs. I think the thing, one of the things that I like the most though, I'm not particularly a dog person, but I do love the kind of these Portmanto names. So you've got, you know, you've got Cavapoo

and Multi-Poo and Golden Doodle, but you've got Pomsky, Poochon, you've got Spruodle, you've got Sprocca, a Malshi, a Morky, a Pomshi, a Chalki, a Puggle, a Jug and a Shalki. I'm just going to lovely, lovely things. But the prices for these things were insane. I mean, actually, the thing to really invest in over the last year has been cross-free dogs. Dogs. Yeah. Crazy. I'm trying to work out what it is about poodles that make them, because I know that cockapoo's are, I want to say, hypoallergenic, which sounds like the sort of thing that you

look for in a bed pillow. Oh, yeah. Well, thankfully, because Jonathan, he's got infotago, so we need to have a hypoallergenic fucking pillowcase for him while he comes up in the rash. But yeah I think that there's something to- But no you've answered that's exactly right but it's the poodles that hypoallergenic. Okay so they pass that that's a dominant gene is it like having brown eyes. The hypoallergenic nature is that gets passed down even if you make that with a duelix dog, the duelix dogs jeans just get completely whitewashed by the poodle. Now that, you have me there.

I think that's the case, but you know what? I don't want to definitively say that. But can I tell you about, so the other, so I'm really glad that you picked that one. The other one that I loved from the lockdown was, and the other kind of really novel bit of data that we got, was we looked at what people were searching for across the world during lockdown and it was kind of it was it was so revelatory because it's such a such a weird experience that we've all had right we all

went through this and you know the third of the world at one point was in some form of lockdown how we did quite earn this stuff about the disease and how it spread and you know the financial impact and so on. But the really human story, and I think that's where the infographics work best is where they've got this real human story at the heart of it, is what people were searching for on Google.

And we, so we went to Google and we said, look, the sort of thing that we're looking for is data that tells us about how people's priorities changed. So the data that we got was searches that had increased the most year on year. So the year before the pandemic and then the year after, and then we drilled down, we got it kind of day by day. So we related it to how the whole thing unfolded. So fascinatingly, before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic, the big thing that people were searching for was hoarding.

You know, we can all remember there was this unease and there were things starting to kind of people was starting to hoard things. We were quite sure what's going on. And then in order, this is an all of them, but it went hoarding, toilet paper, coronavirus, people just across the world and every language under the sun just going,

what is coronavirus? Hydroxychloroquine, when Trump was just like, this is, you know, this, I'm interested in this, this is going to sort things out. Amunition, so driven by people in the states being like, right, it's the end of the world, let's load up, exercise bike. My absolute favorite bit is on day 12, there's two searches that spike. The first one is home schooling, so people just be like, how the hell do I do this? And the second one is, when will schools open? Then you had social distancing, which is a term that had never been searched for in a quantity

that it would register on Google's radar before, complete breakout term, same with Zoom dating, cut your own hair, permit to go outside. This is lovely. Cafe sounds on YouTube. People hadn't searched for that before. Cafe sounds. They wanted to sound, make themselves feel like they were in a cafe while they were

sat at it. Like they were in a cafe. So, you know, what they used to do in the old days was go to a cafe and then there was just sitting at home on their bed and it's been like, God, this is a bit sad. So, you fucking silence in here. Let me get the sound of Sheila making a cup of tea. So, which, you know, was the market provided, like the clank and the clank and the sort of, you know, people tamping down his press at or whatever, unmute on Zoom. How to make your own McDonald's. The most boomer search ever. Isn't it? That's a bit.

Come on. Why is my face not here? Where are my grandchildren? Yeah, how to make McDonald's. And then, you know, all of this kind of stuff, all of this, this kind of stuff, you know, that mad kind of social stuff. And then another breakout this kind of stuff, all of this kind of stuff, a mad social stuff, and then another breakout thing. And this was quite a long way down the line, but how many people can attend a funeral?

This was a breakout search that people hadn't had to think about before, because well, as many people as can fit in the church or crematorium, but that was the thing that people were searching for on Mass Around the World. So I love that sort of data, where it's both epic, because it's on a global scale, but it's also personal and

immediately, you know, relatable. You understand it. Are you familiar with Seth Stevens' Davidowitz? Yes. Yes. Everybody lies. Yeah. So Seth's been on the show and he's, that guy's a beast of, with his data. And I saw a feature that he did. He was able able to predict him or his office were able to predict the rates of covid infections three to five days ahead of the CDC based on aggregated google data based on people searching for loss of taste high temperature loss of smell based on people searching for loss of taste, high temperature, loss of smell. Wow, wow.

And if you map loss of taste, high temperature, loss of smell and a couple of other searches that were common, if you man those on the graph, you see that they're just a lead measure for the lagging measure that ends up being COVID cases. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, is there not this idea also that, you know, you could absolutely use people's kind of search history. You could have kind of algorithms kind of constantly scanning and if people opted into it, into their search histories

and just kind of patching together, firstly outbreaks of kind of various different infectious diseases. But also, you know, you could correlate it with other information that you have about them and say, do you know what, actually if something could pop up and say, you should go to your doctor and get this checked out. You know, you have searched for this particular bowel issue several times and it's probably

okay, but, you know, like, you could just get so much more joined up about all of this, particularly if you also had, of course, you know, if you were linked into their kind of blood pressure and, you know, all the things that are going through on their wrists and so on. Thinking in a techno utopian way, it's a bit of a shame that the period of the world that we're living in at the moment, everybody is incredibly protective about their data because we do not believe that the people who are mining our data have our best interest or heart. You can imagine another world in which the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Jeff Bezos of the world would just seen as these benevolent saints, right? These sort of technocracy saints that

were just all that they did was make our lives better. And we knew that they had our best interests at heart. And they weren't selling it. And they weren't trying to limbically hijack us. And we just wanted more. We wanted to just continue to give ourselves away. But because of the framing that this situation is being given, because of concerns around privacy and human, I had Sebastian Junger on the show, not long ago talking about the brutal history of freedom. And freedom is something that we have been fighting for for a very, very long time. So when you start to encroach on that, humans have a very visceral response.

They're really, really not happy about it and understandably so. But there could have been, this could have been done a different way. And we may end up in a place where it is done in a different way. But the amount of time it's going to need to regain the public's trust of being tech. Think about big tech, the word big tech. It makes you think of this dark, malevolent being hiding at the top of some fucking gilded tower behind an astroturfed lawn. That's, you know, Silicon Valley run a mark. And that's what we think about. We

think that they're selling our data to try and target us with ads. I don't want them to even know my fucking name, let alone my blood pressure. That's what, that's how we feel about this situation. But it could have been different. And I, it would have been nice. It would have been nice to have wanted to supply as much data that you have to these companies as possible. Maybe, I have no idea about this, but maybe Web3 will be able to enable this a little bit more because you can have genuine levels of security. And I don't understand how it works, but someone said that it sounds like it might be a better version than the internet we have at the moment. Well, I mean, it wouldn't be difficult with it. But I mean, you're absolutely right. There was very much missed opportunity there,

because actually, when all of these things started, we could only see the benefits, right? I mean, you know, some people were moaning because actually it turned out that all of the people that they looked up on Facebook from their childhood, you know, there was a reason that they weren't in touch with them anymore and they're all pricks. But you know, actually, I told that I wasn't friends with, yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. So there were things like that, but generally, there was a lot of, wow, and I get this for free. Wow, and you know, there were incredible social benefits and people

kind of reconnecting and there were one of one wonderful things. And you're absolutely right, there must have been a moment at which you've built enough, but the problem is, you're only built enough mass by making it free because there can't be that barrier to entry. But once you set up that relationship where the people, we are not the clients with the products, it's very difficult to turn that round. And at some point you just say, tell you what do you want this, but you pay for it and we won't mess around with your data. Or well, I mean, you can't, there's no way you can package that up. And at some point you just say, tell you what do you want this, but you pay for it and we won't mess around with your data. Or, well, I mean, you can't,

there's no way you can package that up. You have to continue. Once you've set this course, it has to be all about freedom. But I don't know, I think, you know, the, the wiser that people get about what is happening. And what it's, I mean, less so about the data, but what is doing to your mental health, I think, to be kind of, to leave yourself this open to constant, constant distraction and constant kind of titillation and constant anxiety and so on. The more people move away from that, and the more people, you know, capitalism moves in, and it provides alternatives, not necessarily quarterly printed magazines, but like other stuff, other tech stuff, you know, where there's a kind of a QDoS associated,

and you know, you pay for it, but you get a better service. That's the visceral response, the fact that everybody understands that their relationship, I don't know a single person whose relationship with technology doesn't need work. And ten years ago, that would have almost not been the case. I don't know a single person that doesn't need to work on the relationship with technology and the fact that that's there and it's so obvious and it's felt, it's a felt sense by everyone,

that's the gateway drug to people saying we need to have a system wide change with how technology and us relate. You might see something when we move more towards AR and VR and wearables being a little bit more integrated. When you get a step change in the type of media mechanism or the type of consumption mechanism, you may be able to reset some of the market's expectations to do with cost, to do with relationship between you and the supplier or the tech company. So that may be something, but again, it's just anchoring bias.

It's the fact that until you change a bunch of different things at once, we fix ourselves to, well, this was free. And so many people want to have all of the things that they think that they want, with none of the things that they know that they don't want. So I want to still have, be able to access my friends and talk to them, but I don't want them to limbically hijack me. But I also don't want to pay for it. It's like you don't get to have those three things.

Exactly. The reason it's free is because they're selling your data and they're targeting you with ads. So another one, another one of the things that you looked at, which was the decade with the most blockbusters based on an original idea. And that was, that was the 1980s. And the 80s. Unsurprisingly, the 2010s came last. Last out of the last 100 years,

the last century, the worst decade for blockbusters based on an original idea was the 2010s. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah, I mean, it's all kind of based on, well, it's either, it's kind of remakes and it's based on story books and things like that. And yeah, I mean, there was, so actually, if you look at it, the 80s, you had, so the biggest, you know, biggest film of each year in terms of ticket sales, you had Star Wars, episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back. So you've got first Star Wars, sorry, first Star Wars, you've got

19th, you've got Star Wars. And then you've got 81, you've got Braves of the Lost Ark, 82, you've got ET, 83, you've got another Star Wars, 84, you've got Indiana Jones, back to the future. Top Gun, Big Red Traffin, Bang, Dream Man. I mean, Indiana know, Indiana Jones and Luster who said, oh, just kind of just original idea, it's not based on anything.

So yeah, that's, yeah, the, that's the, that's the absolute love it. I think one of the nicest things that we've done in film is, and I always kind of come back to it, is how to win a Noska. So we just looked at every single Oscar winner, going back to 1928, every single male and female winner of the best actor category. And it's fascinating because we looked at kind of like modally how you're most likely to win. Because everybody's got that question when it comes around to Oscar season like, you know, who's going to win and then you all got your pet theories. And actually it's fascinating to see the facts, which is that modally speaking, you'll play a fictional character who's North American from the present day

of your man from the recent past, if you're a woman, who works as a soldier, a lawman, a monarch, a politician, a creative slash media type or a performer, if you're a man, and how depressing is this, who works as a performer, a housewife, a mother, a socialite, a service industry type, or a prostitute slash escort, if you're a woman, in thatite, a service industry type, or a prostitute slash escort if you're a woman in that order, who participates in no sexual scenes and who in the end doesn't die on screen. And these are very clear trends as well, like, you know, it's fictional character and it is North American. Now, none of that is necessarily particularly surprising. But I think one of the nice things about diving into data sets like this is it kind of allows you to confirm, you know, or confound the prejudices and the ideas that you

that you already have about, you know, what you would expect to see going into this story. But I love that one in the films. A lot of cultural stuff is really nice. We did a lovely one about and we got this data from Spotify about songs that have stood the test of time. So the songs from each year going back to the 50s, that are the most played now. So, you know, like, I think it's like, yeah. And it's quite funny because actually it's almost like a, it's like a list of guilty pleasures. It's a bit like, you know, a cess book, everybody lies.

You know, you tell the truth to Spotify because you actually want to listen to those songs. And you might, you know, if you were asked to compose your list of the best songs of the last 50 years, whenever. None of those are good features. None of that shit. One of my buddies is absolutely adamant that the window into a person's soul is their suggested videos on YouTube home

that what someone watches between 10 pm and 11 pm at night on a weekday evening on YouTube, that's who they really are. Not the person that they tell you, not who they are with their lover in their most vulnerable moments. It's the shit that they watch between 10pm and 11pm at night on YouTube.

Yeah, I could see that. And that book everybody likes. There was a lot of stuff in that, wasn't it? Because it has this lovely example, which is what people write about their partner on Facebook, as opposed to what they type into Google about their partner. It's mad. Like, my boyfriend is so sweet, charming, kind, generous, adorable, whatever it is.

And then people are typing into Google. My boyfriend is horrible. It's my boyfriend autistic. What's wrong with my boyfriend? Why is my boyfriend so mean? And that's how we use Google. It's like it's like it's an electronic psychiatrist on the couch, isn't it? Why is this happening? I mean, one of the things I liked in the pandemic searches, one of the things people were just doing in large enough numbers for it to register a massive spike, was just going into Google and typing in, I'm bored. And that's amazing.

What, you, what, you fucking want them to do? And it's a search engine, but I mean, it's actually, you know, it probably would throw up some useful stuff. But I love that, just people, you know, all around the world in all different languages. I'm bored. 569 people have been to space. 24 went to the moon, 12 of which walked on the moon

and three went to the moon twice. Plus, we left two golf balls to the moon, 12 of which walked on the moon and three went to the moon twice. Plus, we left two golf balls on the moon because one of the astronauts played golf up there. That's right, yeah. So actually pulling together that data was, was quite a colossal job because it's not centralized. So I'm not sure that anybody's ever calculated that before. There are kind of various different calculations

floating about the place, but we got the kind of the data from NASA and from the Russian Space Agency and from the Chinese Space Agency and from the private companies. And so, yeah, so we kind of went through methodically and we've listed them all. I think this is one of the nice things about this and answer for everything. It's just, there's this thing where you quite want to own knowledge, right? I mean, you're never going to sit there and read through the list of every single person who was ascended space in 1984. But I like having it in a book that I own. It's just nice. I like it. It's completism. That's what it is. It's anytime that you can be completist about something, every single person, they're immortalized and is...

It is apparently satisfying. It is satisfying. And you know, why not like why not spend eight pages going through and like calling out the most exciting things that they've done and then yeah I mean there's loads of lovely we had the NASA I mean there's so many data sources that you know obviously we can do without the NASA. I've got this amazing data sources about stuff that we left on the moon. So there's hammocks and for you know because the astronauts kind of went up and like they didn't really cater for where they were going to sleep when they first sent them,

so they were kind of effectively sort of sleeping all hunched up in the space craft. And eventually they graduated to hammocks and they chopped them out afterwards. There's quite a lot of excrement up there. There's unused tick bags. There's this amazing thing where there's a stack of money. And it's a special, I think it's $2 bills or something like that. And somebody thought that they would take it up there

and then they could go back down and then hand them out at souvenirs, you know, because this is a special bill and it's been on the moon. Wow, you know, that's amazing. But at some point, they jettisoned it, like they'd thought it was a bad idea or they'd take off and they're like, how, have I forgotten something? Oh, fuck!

I have a $42 down on the moon. Exactly! That was my ticket to the big time. So, I mean, that's the other thing is you find out how weird the world is. There's a lot of long-tailed stuff as well. I don't know if you saw we did one about government e-petitions. So, the UK government has set up, set up a few years ago, an e-petition portal, the UK government has set up a few years ago an e-petition portal and you can go on there and you can suggest an e-petition and if you get enough votes on your e-petition, I think 100,000 or something like that. 10,000 is that it will be noticed by someone. 100,000 is that it gets brought up in the House of Lords, I want to say. It's something like it gets considered for debate in parts. Yes, that's it.

And certain number of them have broken through a tiny percentage. The vast majority of them, and I went through every single year how many were submitted, how many were rejected, the vast majority of them rejected. And there's this lovely government line that they put underneath. And so it says like e-petition rejected, reason for rejection. And usually the line is just really polite. And it just says, this e-petition does not relate to something that the government is responsible for. And it's like no shit. So like some of my favourites on there, there's this brilliant one which has changed the plural of sheep to sheep's. Make gingery is a part of the discrimination laws. I'm asking favourites, there's somebody where it's not like the petition which was increase

the standard size of a wine bottle to one litre. And they had this lovely little right up under it and it just said basically, you know, you finish a wine bottle and you always want just one more glass. So why not make wine bottles a litre and then you don't have to open a second bottle? I mean, it's brilliant. And then the government rejected it. They're like, it's not really. That's not really our remit mate.

This is a you problem. Yeah. We're more NHS and stuff. Yeah. Man, yeah. The number of times that I've seen a spurious e-petition go up, but it does seem like, I don't know, that system for Americans, I don't know if there's an equivalent for Americans, but that system

is a, it's an a rage outlet for a lot of people's social justice concerns. But the problem is that people believe, the people that are voting on it believe that they're genuinely making a change by doing that thing. That's the way that I'm going to contribute to this particular movement. So for instance, there's been a recent social concern around spiking in nightclubs. I'm not sure if you've seen it. Huge, huge concern around it. And I run nightclubs in the UK. So it means that I've been we've been dealing with this on the front lines as it were, and the main thing that people were pushing toward there was we're going to do an e-petition, we're going to get this to be considered for debate in whatever, wherever Parliament. And one way that you could look at that e-petition

page is that it has, it's a simulacrum of doing work, while not requiring any of the things that might actually enact change, that it gives people who are indignant and want to contribute to a social movement, it gives them an outlet that dissipates their rage, but doesn't by the numbers seem to actually make change all that often. That's right. I mean, I think you do get certain breakthrough ones, and when you're going through them, there are certain bees in bonnets that are just, you know, it's like everybody's putting

up a thing over and over and over and over again. But you're right, there's a certain amount of virtue signaling going on. You know, you share any petition on your socials, and that's kind of like you've done something about it, but you haven't actually done anything about it. There was this amazing statistic, and I can't remember exactly what it was, but there's this frighteningly high percentage of news stories where they are shared online before people have read the story at all. So you're basically getting on Twitter if you do that now. Do you? Because they did something.

They did something. If you retweet an article without opening the link, and Twitter knows if you've opened the link, Twitter pops up and says, you haven't read this. Do you want to read the article before retweeting? That's amazing. Because somebody did an amazing spoof on it, where they put in some

quite, somebody something amazing where they put in this quite powerful headline, which was kind of virtue signaling headline. And then there was, I think there was a paragraph of real text and then underneath it, the text basically said, you're all bunch of idiots. And if you've read this far, then kind of congratulations, but this is all nonsense and kind kind of made up and people were just sharing it kind of willy nilly Oh, yeah, this is this is important work. You've got to read this, you know, I mean a whole our whole digital system is kind of Get up for that. I don't know though. I don't know whether You're right at some level. It's just kind of a pressure valve and it's a way of making people feel that they've done good But also I suppose I kind of applaud any government that's prepared to wayade through. I mean, there's something quite nice about that. Some

official going through him being like, the fucking guy in that department. Can you imagine me? Can you imagine that poor bastard's job? No, we're not going to make gingeries and part of the discrimination laws. No, we're not going to give you extra large bottles of wine just by, I don't know, by a third size bottle of wine, it's not to do with us. I want to serve. What have I missed off? What was one of your favourites from the book that we haven't covered? Good question. So there's all sorts of lovely things. I think there's a very simple one that I really like, which is just called Where The Babies Come From. And I'm really interested in this, which is that it's just about fertility rates around the world.

And I've read this really, really good book a few years ago, Empty Planet. I interviewed one of the authors, there's two authors, I think I interviewed John Ibitsson. And it's basically saying that if you look at the fertility rates as in the number of babies that women around the world are having. In many, many countries, they are way below replacement rate. So in a modern economy where you've got a good chance of your kids, very good chance of your kids surviving through childhood, you need to be having something like 2.1 kids per woman in the population in order to maintain your population static without any immigration.

And in dozens and dozens of countries around the world, that is not the case. And in many, it's nowhere near the case. And the trend is all downwards. And a lot of that is a good thing because a lot of that is people moving from primarily agricultural societies to more urbanized societies. It's women becoming educated and realizing they've got more options, it's people leaving it later to have kids

and it's birth control, there's also to wonderful things. But their argument in this book, which we did kind of a big feature on, was that what's gonna happen is, we're gonna reach a tipping point with the global population, much earlier than the UN is predicting. And that after that, it's only gonna go one direction. The global population, much earlier than the UN is predicting. And after that, it's only going to go

one direction. The global population of humans will shrink year on year on year on year and year. And nothing's going to change it because the economics of it kind of won't change. You've tried, you know, all of these governments have tried basically bribing people to have kids. You've got Scandinavian countries that are setting up the most amazing benefits for people who have kids. Still, they don't want to have lots of kids. China's kind of like pulled the break on its one child policy, and now it's pulled the break on its two child policy, and it's saying, you know, if you won't

three, that's fine. You can have three. And they're talking about what the world will be like, you know, with this diminished population. What it means is you'll have a much older population. So you'll have far fewer young people paying for a lot more old people. And they're talking about some interesting things

that might happen that you might possibly have a less aggressive society, because you'll have far fewer young people paying for a lot more old people. And they're talking about some interesting things that might happen that you might possibly have a less aggressive society because you'd have fewer kind of young men. You'd have more oldies just about the place. But then conversely, you might have a lot more very frustrated young men because they're just basically spending their entire lives paying for the pensions of the people who went before them. And then this, you know, that was an eight-page feature. And then just kind of condensing it to the basics, you just got a map of the world. And you color code it by the places that are making babies at a sustainable rate and those that aren't.

And it's fascinating because the world is just colored in, you know, like North America, most of South America, all of Europe, large suites of Asia, people aren't having babies at a sustainable rate. And it's gonna shift, everything, it's going to change everything. You know, you've got people like, I think Taiwan is down just above one. You know, there's nowhere near enough for its population to sustain.

So that's going to have interesting impacts in terms of everything, in terms of environment. You know, it could be that the thing that saves us is not technology. It's not people changing their lifestyles. But it's just that, you know, humans, you humans, the human population just starts to wither away, hopefully in time to mitigate the worst excesses of climate change, maybe not. You might completely have a sea change in your attitude towards refugees. You might start to think that you really, really, really needed them.

You wanted to welcome in. Everything could change. I just love that you have a double page spread, a very simple map, and hopefully you can spark a lot of conversations around that very easily. People in Chad pumping out nearly seven children per woman. That's right, but it's all still it's all still trending down. Is that right? And then the bottom five Singapore at 1.16, the United Arab Emirates at 1.14. So that's interesting to me because both of those are very wealthy countries. Yeah, super wealthy countries.

Andora 1.13 Puerto Rico 1.1 and Taiwan at 1.06. Yeah, that's, I wouldn't have guessed. I don't know much about andora Puerto Rico,, I wouldn't have guessed, I don't know much about Andorra Puerto Rico, but I wouldn't have guessed Singapore, the United Arab Emirates or Taiwan to be in that bottom five. Hmm. I mean, religion factors into it as well, of course, as you have a kind of a less religious society and, you know, the religious strictures around, you know, populating the earth and not

using contraception so on as they fade away. The real key thing on one of the real key dynamics though is moving out of villages. Because in villages, everybody knows you and you're under immense social pressure to have kids, particularly if you know if there's a level of kind of religiousness there as well. But when you move to the city, nobody knows you. There's nobody sort of saying, oh, are you still no kids? Oh, okay, you know, nobody's wagging their finger. Plus also you can get, you know, an education and you can move on with your lives. And it turns out that when people do that, they don't want so many kids. Scary, man. When you think about what the development of birth control and the decline of religion,

those two things, no one could have predicted that that was going to mean. I don't know, does it look like the global population is going to break 10 billion, or will it, do you think it'll slow before that? So there's all sorts of different things. I think the UN one has this breaking 10 billion. This one, but actually, I think to be fair, the UN has got three different scenarios. Okay, yeah. And one of them has some fucking loads of fucking less. That's right. Yeah, yeah, it's like a fucking scale. Yeah. And, and, and yes, so and so, and it, you know, it, it'll depend on on where we get on that, on that scale. But yeah, under some scenarios, you know, in 20 years time or so, you start the lands off the bottom of

10 billion or something like that. And then it never stops, you know, the decline, I mean, presumably it stops when you get to two people, but that decline will continue because obviously each generation shrinks. There's fewer people having fewer kids, having fewer kids. What's the solution to that? Does he propose one? Well, I think that they, I think in the book, they think that we don't kind of need a solution, we just need to be ready for it.

So actually there'll be tons and tons of benefits. If indeed the population levels off and then starts to decline quite rapidly before we've totally messed up the environment, then that will have incredible benefits. Like each year there'll be fewer people consuming. You know, the quality of life for the people who remain, well, I mean, that's quite broad-sacred, because obviously there's a lot of implications about kind of a dwindling society

and having fewer people to kind of do the jobs and so on. But from an environmental, from a purely, from a global point of view, actually, the environment, you know, could be a massive, massive beneficiary, and that was one of the big things that they talked about. And they just said, you know, this will be another thing that humans have to adapt to, but it's something that the best thing you're about.

Yeah, well, I mean, if everything's going to become automated, and there's going to be no jobs for us in any case, if robots are going to take over everything, that just might as well as only going to be two people left. Yeah, I wouldn't because there must be a, there has to be a level that things flat now to that they're, or else we're talking about, this is the next big extinction event. Imagine if we make it through global pandemics, world wars, nuclear weapons,

we avoid destroying ourselves, we avoid all of the asteroids, and the fact that we're not fucking enough annihilates the human race. How did that civilization go extinct? Ah, they just got bored with sex. They just got bored with it and they didn't do it enough and they, that was it.

But here's another thing, man. Imagine we could be living through the period where there are the most humans on the planet that there will ever be. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, that will probably be another kind of, like, thing to chalk up in our lifetimes. But then, of course, you know, like making predictions

about these things is kind of nonsense. You can see where the numbers are trending and so on. But also, say the robots do take over and we've got loads and loads and loads and lovely spare time. Do humans start to reorient their lives again? Yeah. I mean, they don't need to work to provide, you know, maybe they're living to 120. So they dedicate 30 years of their

lives just to study. And maybe they can have babies when they're in their 70s. So maybe that's the thing. Maybe you start pumping out babies in your 70s. Nobody foresaw the fucking revolution of the 2040s. That's right. led by 70-year-olds, led by Randy 70-year-olds, on a mission to repopulate the earth. I mean, who knows? Who knows any of these things? I agree. Rob Outschild, ladies and gentlemen, an answer for everything, 200 infographics to explain the world will be linked in the show notes below. Where else should people go if they want to hassle your company on what it is that you do. Oh, so go to slow-dashjournalism.com and find out all about the magazine and subscribe for a very reasonable rate of 40 pounds a year.

And come to some of our events. We do fantastic free events where we do in-depth chats with journalists about their stories. We really kind of get behind the scenes of that. Come to one of our classes. We'll teach you how to make infographics. We'll teach you how to be a features writer. Teach you how to launch a magazine. you know, any number of different things

how to be a graphic journalist. Yeah, I'm coming along to one of those and get the book, it's June at this book. This is your classic Christmas book, it's semtinkquid, but it feels like it's worth 25, which is nice. It's got heft to it, it's got volume. And I kind of picture myself, as I almost, you know, wondering around water storms, like a lost sheep on the 23rd of December thinking, I got to buy for all the, who I got to buy, what am I going to get, what do they even like? This is good because this

has got politics, culture, sport, film, you know, environment, everything. There's something there for everybody. So it can look like you've chosen it for just that. You'll be like, yeah, I saw they've got a chapter on designer dogs and stuff like that. And I know you like dogs. So here's your Christmas present. So this is where we're aiming it. It's like four square in the center of that, you know, like that panic buying Christmas market. That's very well thought out. Yeah, exactly. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,