Modern Wisdom - #401 - Rory Sutherland - The Psychology Of Transport, Google Maps & Bear Attacks

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising and an author. Transportation is getting quicker. As we reach close to terminal velocity for getting from A to B, behavioural scientists should be looking at how journeys can be made more enjoyable, not quicker. Yet Google Maps and public transport never takes this into account. Expect to learn why all Indian restaurants deserve a Michelin Star, why the crema on your coffee was a branding stunt, why Rory is in love with his new Ford Mustang Mach-E, how a glass-sided toaster can change your life, Rory's thoughts on Insulate Britain, how stepping on pavement cracks can increase bear attacks and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get a $5 discount on Magic Spoon’s amazing cereal at https://magicspoon.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Transport For Humans - https://amzn.to/3oCzzSl  Follow Rory on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rorysutherland  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

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is the one and only Rory Sutherland. We are talking about the psychology of transport, Google Maps, and bear attacks. Transportation is getting quicker, as we reach close to terminal velocity for getting from A to B. Behavioral scientists should be looking at how journeys can be made more enjoyable, not quicker. Yet, Google Maps and public transport never take this into account. Rory's new book discusses how you can design travel to actually work for humans, as opposed to just for the timetable. Expect to learn why all Indian restaurants deserve a Michelin star, while the crema on

your coffee was a branding stunt, why Rory is in love with his new Ford Mustang Machi, how a glass-sided toaster can change your life, Rory's thoughts on insulate Britain, how stepping on pavement cracks can increase bear attacks and much more. Rory Sutherland is biblical. This guy is a complete force of nature. Every time that I get him on the show, he's a complete joy. And I dragged this one out as long as I could. This is 90 minutes of pure Sutherland, and he's absolutely best. If you've never listened to Rory before, you're going to adore this.

He's one of my favorite humans on the entire planet. So yeah, just sit back, sit back and enjoy this. It's really, really special. Don't forget, if you want to join the Modern Wisdom Locals community, where there are 1500 other people who all listen to the show, we discuss episodes, I get suggestions for life hacks, or for stories to react to, head there. Modernwisdom.locals.com. You can join for free, and if you love the show, you can support it through there as well.

Modernwisdom.locals.com. But now, it's time for the force of nature himself. It's the Rory Sutherland. You've been looking at transport a lot recently. What have you learned there? Yes, sorry, sorry. Okay, so the book's coming out on Thursday. It's being launched on Thursday, and it's called a transport for humans. Are we nearly there yet? And it's co-authored, and I had to say he's probably authored rather more of it than I have. My colleague, Pete Dyson, who was my colleague in the Behavioral Science Practice in Oglevy, and now works for the Department for Transport

as the Head of Behavioral Science there. And it's a very, very interesting area for exploration because transport even more than most areas of kind of business and governmental behaviour tends to get dominated by reductionist metrics. And as a result it gets overoptimized around what you can easily measure things like speed and time and capacity and duration and punctuality and under optimised around things that humans care deeply about, but which you can't actually measure because we don't have quantifiable SI derived units.

What? Injignment, regret, fairness. Okay, there's a very useful actually. Guy called, I was going to say Chris Rock, but he's obviously not called Chris Rock. There's a guy called David Rock, who's a neuroscientist, he's a Kiwi, but based in New York, and he has a model which he calls Scarf. Scarf stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Now, I don't think it's completelyist. I think there are other things like regrett avoidance, although you could put that under certainty as opposed. But his contention is these are five things that humans simply evolved to care deeply about, but which economists, or for that

matter, transport planners, don't really understand or factor into their equations at all. So I'll give you a very simple example, okay. And Daniel K Carneman has actually done work around this. It's much more annoying to miss a train or a flight by five minutes than it is to miss a flight by 25 minutes, or half an hour or an hour. Now, you know, to a, you know, reductionist metric, it shouldn't matter because you missed the plane. You didn't miss the plane. The degree of an iron snap set you might experience should be pretty much exactly the same in either case. There's also much more regret, I think, if the flight was delayed and left five minutes before you arrived at the airport, it pisses you off more than if the flight wasn't delayed. There are all sorts of interesting psychological things

going on here. Now the point about that kind of thing is that for instance, barriers like queues at ticket machines and problems getting through ticket barriers or a delay at a gate prior to boarding a train are likely to create disproportionate annoyance because they cause a large number of people to miss a train by a very narrow amount of amount of time. Another thing would be, which is a particular rant of mine, they spent hundreds of millions on new rolling stock for Temerslink. Now Temerslink, because it's a penetrating service, it'll go from places like Brighton to Bedford, for instance, it is potentially, although it's a penetrating service, you know, it'll go from places like Brighton to Bedford, for instance. It is potentially, although it's mostly used probably for commuter rail, it is potentially quite a long distance rail service. And the trains, by the way, are very, very good. I think

they're extremely well designed with one extraordinary failing. They're on seatback tables. So if you're on a one and a half hour journey from let's say Brighton to, I don't know, you know, just north of London, Kentish town or something, okay, you can't work on the train. Okay, no, that kind of thing, everybody is basically stipulating their assessing transport proposals based on their objective characteristics of time and speed and capacity. And yet that's based on the assumption that time spent on a train is a dis-utility. And that's in fact the justifiable, that's the case used to justify high speed too, that everybody on a train is economically useless.

So the less time they spend on a train, the more productive these people are. As opposed to, can we make their experience on the train and facilitate productivity? Yeah. So I mean, interestingly, they spent six billion on high speed one and on the high speed rail line between folks done and some pancreas, not necessarily a dumb thing to do. I'm not totally disputing the value by any means. But they spent six billion speeding the trains up between Paris and London. And it was only something like 12 years later, they put Wi-Fi on the trains. Now the Wi-Fi on the trains, okay, I imagine, I'd let me get this, I'm gonna guess here, but I'm guessing it cost either single digit millions or maybe low double digit millions

of pounds to install that. It might even have been less. In many ways, to any business person thinking, how do I get from central Paris to central London, that is probably more of a decider relative to air travel than the duration of the journey. Because one significant difference between the Eurostar and flying to Paris or Brussels or even Amsterdam, actually, is yes, it takes longer, but it's quality time. You know, you're sitting in the same place

with some sort of table for an uninterrupted period of two or three hours. They slightly do interrupted by making breakfast, to be honest, a little bit too much to have drawn out procedure for my tastes. But nonetheless, it's three hours of time when you can work, read a book, watch a film, do exactly what you'd be doing

if you're at home, to be absolutely honest, okay? With the additional facility of a pleasant view out of the window. I find trained journeys disproportionately productive. Yeah, I agree. And yet, most people actually, you know, I enjoy the trip to Manchester two hours, 10, is about the right length for a train ride. You know, it's not long enough to get bored, it's long enough to actually get deeply into something and be a bit productive. So these,

these reductionist metrics, which effectively treat humans as though they were freight. In other words, they turn transport into a logistics problem, which is a psychology-free problem. Actually, logistics isn't quite psychology-free because you have the state of mind of the recipient or the sender to consider. And so, for example, online package tracking is actually a transformation for UPS or FedEx, because many, many people might not be that bothered about a pastoral arriving a day late, provided they know what's happening. Whereas if your package doesn't arrive on Friday as promised, and you don't have online

package tracking, your natural assumption is it's got lost, not that it's got delayed. Well, I guess even in the case of freight, there's a degree of psychology, but at least the freight itself doesn't have a hissie fit because it's sent by FedEx, not UPS. It doesn't have a hissie fit because it's got to share the lorry with some unsavory characters. You know, freight is beautifully inert and free of those psychological factors, whereas human passengers, status, the autonomy autonomy, relatedness, fairness really, really matter. Yeah, I guess as transport becomes faster, we have less headroom to improve the speed of it.

So you need to look at these other things. Convenience, enjoyable. I think we're hitting the law of diminishing returns. That's one point. The second thing is I think there are a lot of metrics where we continue to pursue things. Let me give you an example, okay. There is a correlation between punctuality and passenger happiness. Absolutely confident of that, okay. However, I think if you disaggregate the data, you'll find that that correlation mostly emerges because people who are on a transport journey that is significantly delayed, are very, very upset. I don't think there's much difference in passenger satisfaction if your train arrives on time or if your train arrives four minutes late. Okay. I regard it as monstrosity

that railway operators are fined for rolling into a London terminus more than three minutes after the schedule time. Is that right? Yeah, it's crazy. Now, don't get me wrong. There are cases where punctuality matters, where people have to make a connection, for example. And if you dick around too much for the timetable, it's also punctuality is important

for the efficient running of the service, because obviously if you run to timetable, it's likely that there are knock-on effects on other trains. I'm not being totally ignorant of the importance of the logistical challenge here, but from a pure passenger point of view, no one traveling into London and arriving at a London terminus has failed to leave 10 or 15 minutes margin of error for their onward journey. If you're significantly pissed off because a train is four minutes late, either you're Swiss or you're borderline neurotic,

and I would argue that's your problem, not the rail operator's problem, you really should have built in some sort of buffer, because let's be honest, if you've chosen any other mode of transport, most of all, the car, you know, if you're driving to Central London by car, you have to leave 50 minutes as a margin of error,

you know, so the idea that a train is being disappointing if it's three minutes late is really getting a bit silly. Did you have a look at the reliability and the punctuality of different modes of transport? Yeah, I mean, it is interesting in that, first of all, what is punctuality? So a train that's late where the driver gives information and reassurance to the passengers probably creates a lot less disquiet than a train that just stops in the middle of the countryside for no readily discernable

reason for 20 minutes. A train that keeps moving slowly is less frustrating to passengers than a train that grinds to a halt. I don't know if you drive a car, you're young, so you're excellent. You're a Manchesterer aren't you anyway? Newcastle, but I mean Texas right now. Where in Texas? Austin. Oh, what a glory.er aren't you anyway? Newcastle, but I mean Texas right now, yeah. And where in Texas? Austin. Oh, what a glory. You definitely drive a car then. Yes.

But the point I'm making is that, you know, quite often as a car driver, you might choose a route home where you keep moving, even if the journey's 10 minutes longer. Oh, man, this is me. This is me to a tee. Exactly. This is me.

I know the route home where I'm going to get snarled up, and I would prefer to continue to move, even if it's longer and if it's further, but I would prefer to take that route because the psychological discomfort of sitting in traffic, of having to do nose to tail, I can't sit on cruise control,

I can't just sort of zone out a little bit and continue to go, yeah, all over it. I mean, if you've got slow moving traffic, adaptive cruise controls and absolute joy, isn't it? Because you just outsource your driving to the bugger in front. You're basically going, okay, I'll set my speed at five miles an hour faster than that guy, and I'll just let him make all the decisions.

Flora, yeah. It's like a congal line, like a congal line of people trying to get home from work. I'm very interested in the psychology of a lengthc, I've just bought an electric car actually, and I find it very interesting how it changes the psychology of driving. One of which is that range anxiety probably might have beneficial effects on people's style of driving because it makes it more salient the extent to which their style of driving impacts on the number of miles that they get per kilowatt. So you're going to accelerate less harshly, you're going to break less harshly?

Yeah, but secondly I think there's an interesting thing in that it makes you a nicer person, in that if the guy in front of you breaks unnecessarily, regenerative breaking makes you less resentful of your loss of kinetic energy. Because instead of thinking that guy's just robbed me of my hard one kinetic energy, you tend to think, oh well, I've just squirted a bit of electricity back into the tank, is it work? What are you driving? So it's Fort Mustang Machi. Right?

I'm a bit of a lover of American metal, I have to admit. And the Tesla to me is a fantastic car, but it's a bit too Silicon Valley, it's a bit, I want a bit of Detroit, you know, in there. That admittedly the Mustang is actually made in Mexico, but nonetheless it has, it's a little bit of Americana, which I'd rather like, actually. And it's a lovely gorgeous car to drive, really fantastic. Hasn't it been fascinating watching what happened

to the entire world's interpretation of electric vehicles almost exclusively on the shoulders of Elon Musk? Like that, that company, to me, seems to have, think about Prius's five years ago. Think about what it meant to drive a Prius and now think about the entire category of electric vehicles. I think there are those strange entrepreneurs, aren't there,

who can wear there are certain products, which are, in a sense, they are their own advertising. I mean, the iPhone was a similar thing. And the reason I prefer to products as their own advertising is that not necessarily because people automatically want them. But there is this effect, which is that there necessarily because people automatically want them, but there is this effect which is that there are certain technologies which once experienced you never go back.

And that always fascinates me actually, that it's an interesting marketing challenge when you have a product which people don't necessarily want it to begin with, but once they've had it, they never revert. Of the mobile phone is a classic case. Now, you're too young to remember a period where people were cynical about mobile phone ownership. But I experienced 10 years of that where, I'm in 1989, I used a brick-sized mobile phone on Oxford Street, not my fault, I wouldn't have done it to make a call, but someone rang me, and people showed you an abuse at me from passing cars. Someone actually went on the window of a black cab and shouted, Wanker out of the window.

One second, I just got a... Oh, shit. Hello? I'm on the podcast, but where are you? See you shortly, no problem, fantastic. Okay, bye-bye, bye-bye. And so, I mean, there is this electric car thing that you drive in a slightly zen way. I had in my previous car, which was an internal domestic engine car, I had adaptive cruise control. Now, apparently, and I don't understand this, by the way,

but apparently, one sufficient number of cars on a highway have adaptive cruise control. It has highly beneficial effects on the transit speed of all traffic. on the transit speed of all traffic. And I think I know what the reason is, okay, which is that when you have adaptive cruise control, if you're following a car, let's say, a hundred yards behind, the adaptive cruise control is a much better judge of distance and of the car's deceleration than your human binocular vision is.

And therefore, your car slows down gradually when the car in front slows down, which means that you don't get this weird braking wave, because you use your brake lights less effectively. What's fascinating apparently is a braking wave travels backwards along a motorway. Something like it's great, it's on like 500 miles now, okay? So if you can actually get three cars just to break really dramatically on a highway, and you could cause unwittingly a kind of serious traffic jam and bottleneck, basically four miles behind you, something like 10 seconds later. There are these extraordinary effects going on in the fluidics of motorway driving.

And for some reason, if you inject enough cars onto the highway with adaptive cruise control and you get the drivers to use them, use it, then actually it improves traffic efficiency, traffic flow efficiency quite markedly even though a large number of people either don't have it or don't use it. One other thing I noticed, I'd be interested in your opinion because you're in Austin which would give a good sample size. I've never been pissed off as far as I can remember by anybody driving an electric car. Now I've never been cut up. They've never tailgated me.

Okay. You know there are certain brands of cars and we won't name them because Oglevy does the advertising for some of them. Okay. But there are certain brands of cars where the owners are disproportionately tailgators, left lane undertakers. You know, I mean, it used to be BMW and it isn't really any more to the same extent, but BMW drivers used to have that characteristic. I think it's moved

on to other brands now. And what interests me is there are no quite a few Tesla's. I mean, it's a very, you know, it's telling in very large numbers, but I've never had an unpleasant act of behavior from a Tesla driver. How much of that is the selection effect of the people that buy Teslas and how much of that is the type of vehicle that are driving? We've got to remember demography. This is not a representative sample because people who buy cars from new, which is most people buying Teslas at the moment, are disproportionately older in riddisher. But equally, there was objectionable behavior from new, you know, certain German car brands,

which were also new. So you may be right, the Tesla particularly appeals to a particular mindset of person who isn't an asshole to begin with. But I've never had an electric car piss me off. I think, no, maybe to be honest, this might be bullshit, but on the other hand, in my own behavior, I have noticed a kind of more zen style of driving emerging. Have you found yourself more aligned and awakened as soon as you get into your Mustang Machi? Oh, well, it's I'm practically too messing, mate. I love it. Absolutely. I have to say, it's been an absolute joy. Can you see yourself ever going back to internal combustion engine? No, in fact more than that.

Now admittedly there are tax advantages, I want to mention this. So it's not a complete apples for apples comparison, but we need to replace my wife's car and we've basically gone with the electric mini because the active owning, now logically you should say one electric car, one petrol car, but actually the act of owning an electric car, first of all has largely banished range anxiety. Okay, so that, actually I don't yet have a charger at home, I'm still fiddling around getting a 7kW charger at home installed, and I just, or to say to your listeners, if you do live somewhere, London

might be a bit of an exception. But if you live Newcastle Manchester somewhere, which is a sane sized city, not a stupidly sized megalopolis, okay, you can get by perfectly well without particularly if you're a little bit nocturnal like me, you can get by perfectly well without a home charge, in fact, assuming your mileage isn't insane. Presumably, you could use the same charger for your Mustang as you could use for the new Mini as well. Do they have the same connector? Yes, exactly that.

Yes, it'll be a type two charger, seven kilowatt. And we might even, from the house we're in, we've got three-phase power. So we could even get two 11 kilowatt charges if we wanted to go a bit flash. So he was an interesting thing. We're both buddies with Rob Henderson. And I remember probably about three years ago, Rob. He's the job. I mean, all of that, guys, fantastic. Dude, he is anybody that's not following Rob Henderson on Twitter now, search Rob K. Henderson.

He is fantastic to follow. Um, he tweeted ages ago, saying that one way you could encourage the adoption of electric vehicles would be to give a status signal that was visible by everybody. So for instance, the minis are good example of this, the fact that you look at an electric mini and you can't actually tell unless you're a real car buff and you know that the yellow detailing, you've got the green number plate. Yes, the green number plate. So the green, the green number plate thing is now in the UK, it's a status symbol. I am driving an eco-friendly car,

this is electric, so on and so forth. I wonder soon, if that green number plate, if people are going to want to revert back to no longer having that, to have it as they don't want it to be this outward show of how much they care about the environment that I'm so cool. So they'll counter, the new signal.

Well, not only are you right, but I can prove you're right because there was research done on Tesla's, sorry, no, there was research done on Priusis versus, if I'm right, there was alongside the Toyota Prius, there was a Honda hybrid. And the Toyota Prius was Sui generous. It was obviously a hybrid. Whereas the Honda something or other was effectively a stealth hybrid. Okay, it was a little like, you know, a kind of, I mean, there are quite a few more. I think there's a Range Rover or Land Rover, isn't there, which is a plug-in hybrid. And what they did find was that in, I think, in Democrat areas, people, I mean, vastly more people bought the Prius than bought the Stealth hybrid, but then in certain, more right-wing

areas, there was an urge for people to enjoy the cost savings of driving a hybrid vehicle without, in fact, telegraphing that fact to their neighbors or to fellow motorists. That's funny. I'll try and dig out the paper, but there was some research done on signaling and counter signaling, if you like. And it is very interesting because one of the best things people could do, really, to improve their environmental impact or to reduce their environmental impact, will be either replacing their home central heating or boiler in the case of the UK, or indeed replace the boiler with a heat pump. But it's worth noting that unlike a car, a heat pump doesn't

really carry the same bragging rights or status connotations. You can't drive the heat pump around the centre of London. No. No, you can't drive. I don't think anybody's pulled by having a heat pump. Yeah, don't worry about the fact that I'm still driving a diesel vehicle. Wait until we get home and you see my heat pump. Just wait, wait, did you get home, love, and see my heat pump? No, actually, I didn't, even, I'm, okay, now I like, you know, I like to consider myself reasonably, you know, scanny in terms of physics and general science, but even I can't quite

get my head around a heat pump because apparently a heat pump is 500 percent of fish. Okay, so the best boiler you can have converts energy, heat energy from gas into heat energy in your home, and around about the 90 percent of efficiency level, maybe it's a little bit higher. So in other words, they now recapture far more of the heat that used to escape into the environment. And I think some of them might even, I think there was one boiler I heard of, which had a kind of sterling engine operating.

So it generated a bit of electricity on the exhaust gases. But you can get 95% efficiency. What I never realized is a heat pump. We all understand how a fridge works, right? Okay. But you can get 95% efficiency. What I never realized is a heat pump. We all understand how a fridge works, right? It basically uses some energy to extract energy from one place and put it somewhere else. Now, of course, the problem there is that we tend to think

when it's cold outside. Generally, heat pumps work well in countries like the UK and where you don't get extremes of temperature, by the way. So, you know, Austin, Texas, the case, maybe slightly weaker. And then it's disgusting over here. You need, you need a vest and shorts during the day and you need a hooded top and long trousers on a nighttime. The amount of heat swing in the middle of November is absolutely insane. Ah, but there's a great thing for that, which is true of Phoenix as well, which is you

have a great nightlife, because it's intolerable going out during the day. So everybody goes out in the cool of the evening. Correct. And you get totally hot, you know, I always noticed that about Phoenix, you know, you actually get a bit of late nightlife, you know, which is rather fun because people then go and do the kind of one Spanish style wandering around the street stuff, that kind of eight or nine at night. The thing as well is, especially at this time of year, where it is, it's perfectly fine during the day. It's not disgusting during the day.

You're talking 23 degrees maybe, ish, at Celsius during the day outside. So all of those places that have got beer gardens with food trucks that are pulled up outside, they've managed to pivot themselves. I'm across the street from a place called Cosmic Coffee and Beer Garden. Now if that's not just a perfect display of the fact that you've got daytime and nighttime,

they have this unit, they've got fairy lights that aren't used during the day, they've got a beautiful garden and a waterfall in there, and then on a nighttime all the lights come on, everything dims, the music comes out, live stage goes on, and you think this is a single unit that's got every use under the sun from 9 a.m. for breakfast when I went this morning until one in the morning. It's amazing. There is a guy in Australia who worked out that, that you could have a dual-purpose coffee shop and cocktail bar. And I mean, I imagine using digital signage, you could actually effectively...

The branding even more, yeah, yeah, yeah. You could morph a retail outlet from one thing to the other. Yeah, because you know, the kind of lighting and signage that's appropriate for a T-shop isn't really appropriate for, you know, you know, you know, a cocktail bar or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So you could, I'm sure, using clever LEDs and lighting and screens, do something really clever there. But I've always slightly fantasized about Austin because I'm a little bit hipster and a little bit red neck.

And so I've always rather liked the idea that I could go to a farmer's market in the morning and buy organic sourdough bread that hadn't drafted by people with really interesting body art. But then if I wanted to, I could drive a pickup truck out into the desert and fire machine guns and oil drums. And the fact that kind of yin and yang thing

really kind of appeals to me. You really feel it here. Here's another thing that I was thinking about to do with transport. So I was talking, where was I driving? I can't remember where I was driving, maybe up to Edinburgh. And Google Maps, you don't have the same number of preferences

as I think humans want. And there's two preferences that I would want to have, including in Google Maps. The first one would be ease. So that would be, can I sit at a more consistent speed throughout the entire journey? I.E. Can I sit on cruise control? My car doesn't have radar guided cruise control

or adaptive cruise control. So can I sit at just a single speed or close to a single speed for the most amount of time? And also the fewest number of turns, the fewest number of junctions, the straightest road. I don't want to go on some b-road for ages. And then another option that I would love to have in there would be beauty. So can I drive? Let's say that I don't actually care about the speed of my journey. I'll go a bit further than that, which is that Google Maps, and actually, I'm fairly sure that the great guy Jonathan Height, his sister, is involved in a campaign to make Google Maps more public transit friendly.

All right. And one of the American aspects of Google Maps, it doesn't really understand multi-modality. So if I say to Google Maps, I want to get to work. It will either think that I'm only going to use public transport, which as an American means, I don't earn a car, and it will suggest I catch a bus to the station, which takes bloody ages, and then take a train into London, because that's public transport, or it's just I drive all the way into central London, which you would only do if you're illuniting. Now in electric car I don't even pay the congestion charge but to be

honest you don't need the congestion charge anymore they should pay me for the stress of driving into bloody London because it's intolerable you know the speed limit changes from 20 to 30 more or less at random bus lanes spring up all over the place, their cycle lanes which take up half the available space. If you don't basically kill someone or get a 50 pound fine, you can't yourself lucky. Then we're going to add electric scooters into the mix and it's going to be good night Vienna, frankly. But Google will either suggest I drive in,

which is mad, or that I get a bus to the station. Now, what we will do as brits is we drive to the station, we park the car, we take a train, but Google Maps can't get its American head around that multi-modality. And you're right. I mean, interestingly, when I do drive to the station, I drive to quite often to a station called Ottford, where it's slightly easier to park and it's a little bit cheaper to park. But the main reason I do this quite often, oddly, and it seems completely bonkers, okay, is that I can't deliberately catch a slower train to London Black Fries. The fast way to get to work is Seven Oaks, London Bridge, change to Thameslink, Thameslink, Black Fries, okay audience. Waterloo East, go through South of Tube station,

walk to Black Fries. Those are the two fast ways to do it. Now, what I do is I take a slow stopping train that takes an hour rather than 33 minutes from Oxford all the way to Black Fries because it's one hour, first of all, it's not very crowded the train, so I can work on the train.

I get a table because I sit at the back, okay? And it's an hour of total quality time in which I can clear my email inbox for the train. I get a table because I sit at the back. And it's an hour of total quality time in which I can clear my email inbox for the day. Now, if I take the faster route, I have to change trains, dick around, go down and escalate it. And so you're absolutely right that transport apps are all optimized around speed, not scenicignness, sometimes they're optimized around price, but they're principally optimized around one or two metrics, which fail to capture things that really, really matter to the human passenger. I'll get you, okay, how many of your listeners to the podcast live in the UK? About 50%.

50, okay. So this is, if you ever want to go to Cornwall, particularly if you want to go to Devon or you want to go to Bristol from London, okay? There are trains nonstop from Waterloo to Bristol Temple Meads and from Waterloo to Exiters and Davids. Okay? If you search, even if you search Waterloo to Exiters and Davids on the National Rail website, these trains do not show up because they're so speed obsessed, they say go to Paddington on the tube, take a fast train to Exeter from Paddington. Now a consequence of this is that virtually nobody knows these Exeter trains exist, because if you search for them, the only way you can find them is to go to Waterloo, two exesers of David's and then travelling via Salisbury.

Now, unless you're a KGB officer, looking to kill somebody, nobody's actually searched for that journey in the last 10 years. No one's but in via Salisbury. When you do put in via Salisbury, it reveals these trains, which are slow, but it's extremely beautiful as a journey. And because nobody can find the trains, they are insanely cheap.

Because yield management basically assumes there's no demand for that service. And the reason there's no demand isn't because nobody wants it, is because nobody knows that the choice exists, because the algorithm has basically hidden it from view. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think my daughter, my daughter and three friends had to go to some weird festival in Cornwall, because that's what young people do.

And I think I got something bonkers, like all four of them, now admittedly they have their you know, young persons bloody rail card. In fact, there's so many rail cards that they should just say, okay, we're going to get rid of all rail cards and we're going to give middle aged men a white bastard middle aged man's rail card, which means you've got to pay 33% extra. Because I mean, everybody except the middle aged gets a bloody rail card nowadays. Anyway, sorry, old Boomer Grumble over, I'll leave that, I'll leave that for a second. Okay, but I think I got them. With their rail cards,

it was like a first-class single from Waterloo to Exeter for something like 20 quid-each or 19 quid-each in first class. And I said, look, I can't send you in second class for £12.50, but I mean, for the sake of a quid, what the hell, you know? I had, I was in Rome recently, I'm not sure if you've ever seen this before. Italian trains are racco-cheap sometimes, aren't they? Yeah, they're crazy, but this is the maddest thing. So while you're driving along in the train, while you're riding along inside of the train, especially on an underground, all of the opportunity for you to see billboards or have advertisements sent to you, they're limited to those tiny little sort of

landscape things that are above, you're trying to find a map and instead you're looking at an advert for insurance or whatever. What they have in Rome, they've mounted projectors onto the outside of the train that project adverts onto the inside of the moving wall as you go along. So you look outside and you see this advert and obviously the projector can move and it's not just a static thing. And then as you arrive at the next station, the projector turns off,

people get on, you get back into darkness, you hit another wall, the projector turns back on into different advert. So good. That is actually given that the alternative is looking at a wall. You know, if you started projecting a building walls and projecting over views of the Temers Valley, I'd get a bit pissed off about it. But actually given that the alternative is looking at a dark wall, I think that's actually advertising performing a mild public service. I would agree. What do you think about insulate Britain's campaign?

Oh, crankie. Yeah, I have to say that there is often a problem with perfectly well-intentioned movements. Okay. I've very interesting taken environmentalism, by the way, which is I think there's a 20% chance that Nigel Lawson's right and that actually, you know, the anthropogenic climate change through carbon emissions may be a scientific mistake and a form of collective insanity. Okay, 20% chance, I think he's right, because we, you know, we do see that, you know, collective insanity manifested in institutional decision making. All the time. Okay.

All the time, Emperor's New Clothes. On the other hand, my question is slightly different. Even if we're wrong, is it necessarily a bad thing to treat carbon reduction as a heuristic to improve the quality of life on the planet? So, in other words, electric cars may actually benefit humanity as much through being quiet, okay?

Think about people who live on a busy road, okay? I mean, actually, the stress created through noise. So it might be, I'll give you an example of this, okay? I think most people who think they're gluten intolerant are actually full of shit, okay? Now, don't get me wrong, okay? There are people with celiac disease, it's a serious condition, but I think for every person who actually is gluten intolerant, there are four people who think they are. And similarly with lactose intolerance, okay? Among Westerners, not, I mean, it's more common

in different genetic populations. On the other hand, people who give up lactose and gluten do feel better or claim to. Now, A, even if that's purely placebo effect, you know, what the hell? Who cares? If it makes you feel better, who cares? Secondly, it may be that following the heuristic of don't eat gluten causes them to feel better for some completely unrelated reason, which is actually nothing to do with gluten, but the fact that they don't digest wheat very well, or they don't digest something else very well, it may be just a useful dietary heuristic, which improves your gut health, for reasons entirely tangential to the reason you stayed. What this is like.

So one argument about carbon reduction is even if Nigel Lawson's right, that doesn't necessarily mean that carbon reduction isn't a useful heuristic by which to act. Yeah, the reasoning can perhaps be wrong, but you can still arrive at a conclusion which is correct. I had a argument with Stephen Pinker about this. My asthma theory wasn't actually true, okay? Germ theory is a much better theory of disease, but my asthma theory led to beneficial

consequences like the funding of sewerage, waste management, airy, well ventilated hospitals with big windows, which it turns out were good things to do, even if we were doing them for the wrong reasons. Well, this is the same as the porcupines don't throw their quills, right? The fact that if you treat it, so porcupines for a long time, it was told that porcupines could throw their quills at you, that they were actually, at some sort of archery, archery animal that was actually able to do that. Now, that would be fucking cool. It would be awesome.

I imagine that. But they can't. So porcupines cannot do that. That would have been amazing. Yeah, you had to hold it and then squeeze it and then you can try and aim it. Yeah, exactly. I'm fine, right?

Okay. But the type of behavior that the belief, the erroneous belief, the incorrect belief that porcupines throw their quills, the type of behavior that that engenders is optimal because you need probably more of a degree of freedom than you think from the porcupine. And it's exactly the same as why Jewish people don't eat pork. Now, there's

it sacred animal and blah, blah, blah. But in olden days, pigs were very difficult to keep clean. They have a higher number of parasites. They have a higher number of germs within the meat. They're quite often instrumental in the transmission cross species transmission from birds to humans as well Okay, so I mean all of these are Reducs and proximity with pigs for example. There's a greater risk of kind of avian Flues nightmare. Yeah, so both of those things are What ones ones? I guess like a cultural artifact, and the other one is an outright myth.

But it's encouraged a particular group of people to behave in a way which is optimal for them, despite the fact that the reasoning behind that was a little bit more kind of... So I would have piece of the spectator about this saying that telling your children that if you tread on the cracks in the pavement, you might be eaten by bears, which A.A. Milner. Okay. There's a poem, I think it's a little thing, which you have to watch out for the bears, because they catch children who trevon the cracks in the pavement. Now, children are much more frightened of bears than they are of traffic, because they've had a

million years of evolution to warm them off wild animals. What this does, now there is no scientific evidence of any correlation between walking on pavement cracks and the risk of bear attack, okay? But what it does do is it encourages the children to keep an eye on where they're putting their feet, which stops them tripping over. I don't if you've had very young children, but they are prone to getting distracted and falling flat and they do a face palm, you know, they kind of fall flat on their faces. But secondly, it means they stay on the pavement and they don't wander off onto the road. Because by adhering strictly to stepping within the cracks, you will, as a byproduct of that belief, you will adopt a more transport safe behaviour. It's this sort of thing that's

basically impossible to mandate. Yeah. So this is what you might call heuristic. It's actually heuristic behavior. And there are lots of cases where heuristics are arguably, you know, social norms. I mean, because we're noting that the Greek for law is nomos. I don't think that's the origin of norm, but nomos means both custom and law. The word can mean those two things, and so the creation of socially beneficial customs, which eventually then get formalized as laws, doesn't necessarily require reasoning. It

simply requires an empirical measurement of the benefit of following that belief. So, you know, a belief in an omniscient God is probably a pretty good way of keeping people well behaved, okay? You know, clear, I mean, you know, if you think about it, they're all kinds of behaviors, which would be, you know, bad, you know, which from a purely utilitarian stance would be completely harmless, but it would be better if people didn't indulge in them. You know, it's strange. I wonder a lot about this,

the fact that there's a level of virtue or honesty or integrity that kind of almost holds advertising back in this situation. Let's say that you need to tell children that there's a bear if they step on the cracks in the street, but also there's a degree to which you think, well, we're fucking lying to children here. We're making them fear bears because of whether put their feet on the pavement. And it's only culture that can deliver this.

A top-down dictatorial campaign couldn't do this because it would just be an outright lie. Charlie says, have a look at the COI campaign, Charlie says, which you won't, you'll be too young to remember, but it was a boy who had a friend who was a cat, who delivered sensible advice about not talking to strangers, not and telling your mummy, because bare-mouthed this is the 1970s, so your dad was at work and your mum was at home. But always tell your mummy if you are going out with strangers or going out with your friends, you know, tell your mummy if you are going out with strangers or going out with your friends. You know, tell your mummy where you are going. And Charlie will go, okay, there's cartoon character just to be clear. And then the child would translate for the benefit of the

ear. Charlie says that you should always tell your mummy, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now that was the use of an animal to impart good advice. Now, if we get absolutely a little about this, why on earth would you have the advice delivered by a cat, rather than by a... Well, the green cross code was a hedgehog for years, wasn't it? You had a hormone, you had... Now, there was a very bad weasel, wasn't that old?

I never thought it was right. There was a weasel that was bad, and there was a squirrel that was good. So that was a different one. That wasn't Charlie says. That was a thing with a squirrel. Sophie, what was that squirrel that used to give you advice about crossing the road? Tufty, tufty. Now that wasn't that tufty, wasn't actually a SOI campaign.

It was found funded by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, I think. But it was a very, very useful campaign where, again, you had a squirrel, and then the weasel, which was a badly behaved criminal thing, would always ignore the advice and end up being run over by a truck or sent to hospital or whatever. And it was quite weaselish. I mean, you know, it was probably a bit unfair to weasels. But that kind of thing is interesting because the assumption is as adults, I mean, you know, it was probably a bit unfair to weasels, but that kind of thing is interesting because the assumption is as adults, of course, we don't need any of that stuff,

we just respond to facts. But as, to be honest, okay, the most boring finding in advertising, okay, which is so banal that I can't stand there as kind of Oxbridge graduate in front of a bunch of clients and even utter this fact, despite the fact that it is completely true, is that basically advertising that features animals, particularly I suspect in the UK, advertising that features animals is more effective than advertising that doesn't feature animals. Now, you know, the, you know, BMP under the glorious days of John Webster and the Hoffmeister bear and the Cresta bear and the and the dog at Tomto. I think it was in John Smiths, okay. I mean John Webster actually said,

my question is not does the ad have legs? Does the campaign have legs? It's does it have four legs in a tail? But it's almost such a banal finding. But if I had to stand up in front of a bunch of people from PNG and go, why don't we put an animal in this? I'd feel like you can bleed idiot. But it works. There's a family guy episode where Stewie, the baby, is going shopping with lowest the mother and he's being pushed along in the trolley

and he sat there and she needs to get a aluminum foil, they call it. Also, why is Americans removed one of the eyes from aluminium? There's something even weirder about that, which is the British used to pronounce or spell it differently in some way as well. So I'll try and find out, I'll go and do the research after this is over. Aluminum foil, pushing along, and he starts mocking the fact that on the side of one of these aluminum foils, there's a tiger. He says, look at this tiger. What's the tiger doing on the aluminum foil?

It's pointless. And then his mother goes to pick up the one that doesn't have the tiger and he goes, no, no, I want the one that's got the tiger on. Yeah. Precisely. So I want to talk about. You are kind of a walking id, isn't it? Correct. Correct. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. He's just expositioned throughout the entire thing. Absolutely brilliant, yeah. I want to talk about some of the things. Why is he got a British accent? Is that just because...

I'm not sure. I think it's because there's a low key hint at the fact that he's gay. And he, that effeminate nature, maybe Americans think that Brits are a bit effeminate, but there's also the Lyme Brit as well, isn't it? There's the sort of Slimey Lyme version, but then there's maybe the, I don't know. It's fascinating, isn't it? I mean, it may just be because the guy who does the voice

loves doing it that way. The nails it. And then you loved it. That's the mad thing about when you start a TV show or anything. Cartoon's a good example. You begin a cartoon, you do a pilot, you put it out there and you think, right, well, this is the way that it's going to be and we'll just have a go and hopefully we'll get signed. 13 seasons and 200 episodes later and all of those creative decisions that you and you mates made when you had no idea what you were doing. You're locked into those shy of killing

some poor unfortunate bastard off. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. I was talking to John Cleese about how they came up with Monty Python and they literally went in to see some guy at the BBC and he'd say, so this sort of commonly series, you know, is it going to feature sketches and they kind of look at each other and go, is it going to feature sketches? Yeah, I think we might have some sketches. And genuinely, of course, they haven't, they haven't got to clear what they do. And of course, this being the BBC in 1970 or 60, whatever it was, they said, well, just go away and make 10 episodes, here's the money, and let's go and see what happens. And in a weird way, because they didn't know what they were doing, they created something completely unique and distinctive.

If they'd gone in with a clean format in mind, it wouldn't have had any of the delicious, because I remember this as a kid, it was unlike any other television you ever watched. The bizarre segues, everything about it, the fast-paced-in you know, extraordinary kind of animated sequences that would suddenly interpolate themselves in between sketches. And it was utterly transfixing. In the same way, I think, the curbure enthusiasm, the fact that it's plotted

but not scripted. There's something about curbure enthusiasm, which means that even when it's not being funny, which is comparatively rare, it's still very watchable. Because there are elements to the whole thing, which somehow seem completely fresh. There's a kind of veritate of the dialogue and so forth, which I don't think you could write. Are you familiar with the thick of it, Armando Yannucci's thing? Yeah, you've extraordinary found that.

Glorious. One of the best British. In fact, I would say, I would go as far as to say, it's worthy of the black adder title of the modern era. You know, it was the 2010s black adder. I don't know whether you knew this, but I read that they filmed every scene, a minimum of twice. So they filmed one perfectly on script, and they filmed another where the actors were permitted

to add live as much as they wanted. And they ended up using a really high proportion of the number of ones where they actually went off script and there's a really good, do you remember when one of the guys is being asked to make a coffee and as he's walking away he throws a ball at him and he turns around and says you're getting a coffee, it's coffee with wee in it and that scene was shot 30 times and he did a new version each time, 30 different takes of him turning around and they just decided to go for coffee with coffee with we in it. Stuart Lee talks about this very interestingly. So one of the reasons why Standa

people kind of rehearse is they will dick around with the person who first spoke about this in comedy that it's so execution dependent. Okay and the first person I remember hearing this from was let me get this right. Oh yeah, it was Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams used to read sentences in paragraphs of PG Woodhouse and try and disentangle what it was about the precise word order that made them funny. Okay and then subsequently reading about stand-up comics, what they will do, I think there was you know Gary Linnaker blah blah blah blah blah like a velvet owl. It was a little analogy that Lee used and And he was tweaking different versions of Velvet Owl in every single performance, both to find out what amused the audience the most,

but also actually to find out what amused him the most. Because there's a kind of recursive stochastic, it's an iterative thing where you don't quite know what's funny until you've found it. And you notice that that you can end it if you write a piece which is supposed to be funny of 500 words, you'll particularly dick around with the last sentence about 47 different times. And you can't explain what it is that makes the last sentence right,

but you know when you've got there. You couldn't get there in advance, you can't say, oh, the way to write a last sentence is this, and there's something about the cadence that we understand instinctively that makes it funny and a proper, the last line of body copy and advertising will be the same, the last sentence, you know, where you traditionally leap back to the first paragraph to create a kind of closed system. A people pretend ruling that as well, is the peak and rule contributing to that a lot of. To instinctively we kind of feel that how something ends has a disproportionate effect on its potency, as we would do if we were making a speech, so you wouldn't just come up with a banal thing. You've got to end your talk on a sentence that is kind of

semi-quotable or Pithy and by the way that advertising me of looping back to the beginning of the body copy was a bit of an overused trope to be honest. I mean quite a few very good copy writers said no, no, no, no, when it's the right place to end just ended there You don't always have to refer back to the beginning What's but look what have you become an evangelist for recently because we spoke a couple of years ago, we talked about an air fryer, but since then, I've heard you talk about

a glass-sided toaster, a Japanese toilet, and having two dishwashers. Yeah, I think there is a certain category of technology, which is, it's not self-explanatory, but it's self-revalaturing, which is, you's not self-explanatory, but it's self-revalatory, which is, you know, once driven forever smitten to borrow that line from Foxall. And I think the electric car is one such thing, which is that it's difficult to persuade mobile phones. We are now that multi-channel television, the internet. Now, you know, I spent a large part of the late 1990s

working in advertising agency, basically writing to BT customers and saying it might be a good idea to pay to have internet access at home. Okay? Now, ridiculous now, okay? Right? Okay. I mean, you know, if you moved into a house and there was no Wi-Fi, you'd just go, okay, this is a fucking non-starter, right? Okay. I mean, you know, nearly everybody under the age of actually 80 would, okay? But back then, you have to persuade people. Now, I don't think there are many other people who change broadband provider. I don't think there are many people who actually revert, okay? I had friends who were very, very late, rich friends, by the way, who were

very late to get a mobile phone, because they just didn't like the idea. Now, eventually, they get a mobile phone and once they've had a mobile phone, you never go back. Actually, the car itself, fascinatingly, there's a very good article in Edge by a guy who's an expert in adaptive preference formation, who made the point that nobody wanted a car. But once, and actually, if the car had never been invented, we'd all whiz around on trains and buses thinking this was perfectly acceptable. Once you've experienced car ownership, your bar and expectation for personal autonomy

ratchets up by about 70%. To a point where nobody who has ever, there are a lot of young people in London. Okay, you go, no, you don't need to earn a car, no, no, no. Now, one of the reasons they're so anti-car is that they've never owned one. In the same way that, you know, what, you know, surprisingly, you know,

what often happens is anybody who's been vaccinated is not an anti-vaxxer, okay? So it's one of those strange things and actually as the proportion of the population against vaccinated goes up, the number of anti-vaxxers goes down. So there is a kind of collective herd mentality that seems to go on with these opinions. Talk to me about this glass-sided toaster and... So the glass-sided toaster, particularly good if you toast a lot of different things, either different breads or crumpets, morning goods, muffins, whatever it is you toast.

Because of course, it's difficult to know what the right setting is in advance for every single toaster product you put into the toaster. And so the great thing with the glass side of toaster is you can if in doubt you put it on eight. Okay? You bang the toaster on and then you look at it and when it reaches a point where it looks kind of just at the right level of toastiness, just as what Thomas Hardy would have taught in brownement, once it's reached the optimal level of in brownement, then you hit a jet. That's such a good idea.

Why the two dishwasher's thing, I'm going to need explaining to me as well. Ah, okay, so I'll explain that which is that if you do have two dishwashers, and this is a bit of a bonus contention with my wife because we're having the kitchen read down, and she doesn't want two dishwashers because she's a bloody luddite. And she, you know, okay, but you never have to unload your dishwashers. So you don't lose any storage space because what it is is you have a dirty dishwasher Okay, and you have a clean dishwasher you retrieve plates from the clean dishwasher Use them put them in the dirty dishwasher

eventually the Clean dishwasher is empty the dirty dishwasher is full you turn on the dirty dishwasher and then you reverse the process That becomes the dirty dishwasher and then you reverse the process. That becomes the clean dishwasher and so you don't have to unload your dishwasher and put things because the problem with the dishwasher is you've got to empty the dishwasher before you can put dirty things in. Okay and that's a pain in the ass because you have to put things in cupboards. Okay? Before you can start putting dirty plates back in the dishwasher. Now with two dishwashers, that process doesn't happen. And it takes quite a bit of, it takes a certain understanding of logistics and understanding of complexity theory

to grasp that principle, because it's not intuitively obvious. Do you think that they'll end up making purpose-built two segments, kind of like bunk beds, dishwashers? You could get one that would come in, and then you could even have, perhaps, a wall between them that you could slide things back with and forward. Well, there is interestingly a Fisher and Prychle dishwasher made in New Zealand, which has two drawers, and you can put them on separately.

Probably not enough size, though, A, because you want to be able to have a full dishwasher load. Well, I kind of agree with you. They're also, of course, popular. Someone thought I was absolutely bonkers when I said this. They had a Fisher and Pagel dishwasher, and I said, very popular with Orthodox Jews. And they thought I was making some sort of weird racist point. I got really upset. No, no, no, it's because if you're actually a devotee, you have to keep your crockery separate. So it's stuff that's stuff that touches dairy and stuff that touches meat has to be entirely separate. No way. So the fish are in pichael dishwasher, which allows you to wash them separately. And somebody not realizing this thing about Jewish dietary law looked at me as if I was kind of like some sort of... Z-d-f-o-f-e-y-e-y. We're here to Z-d-f-o-f-o, but I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, So he can't touch anything electric during that time. It's slightly complicated.

You can have things on timers. Yes, but so that's what he's got. He's got smart lights around his house that are pre-programmed. And that to me, don't get me wrong, I think that Ben should be allowed to light his house as he wishes. But I'm not sure that that's in the spirit of the doctrine. I mean, the other thing you can have is a Sabbath guy. And a Sabbath guy.

And a Sabbath guy is someone who lives, who's not Jewish. Oh God, they're a light-turner-on-er. So yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember when I was at university, it was late. And they closed the door to the college and about, I can't remember what it was midnight or something, okay? And there was a little door and then they locked the little door, it's called a Judas door actually, they locked the Judas door sometime like midnight. And we

were there Saturday night and there was this huge banging on the door and the Italian guy who was the porter said, Jews! They couldn't ring the bell, but they could knock on the door. Oh, that's so funny. And the reason is, of course, electricity didn't exist, but it's deemed to be making fire. And so if you flick a switch, there's also a weird thing about keys about locking your house, because I spoke to a Manchester police officer who did quite a lot of police work with the Orthodox community in Manchester. And you can wear keys, but you can't carry them on the Sabbath. Okay.

And so there's some sort of thing, which is if you have a kind of key chain, that's considered okay, whereas putting it on your pocket loose. So a lot of... You know, I don't know if I've said or something, but yes, except people. There's some sort of, but they would quite often get people, she'd often be patrolling the area and people would come in and say, could you turn my cooker on for me?

Wow, that's crazy. I didn't know that. I think that question of the spirit of the thing is an interesting question, because I've always thought that's a little, having an elevator that goes up and down, if you go to an Israeli hotel, okay, quite often on the Sabbath, the elevator is programmed just to stop at every floor, so no one needs to push a button.

Now, there's a bit of me that goes, that's kind of cheating mate. But I think the point is that there's a certain dot there's a certain kind of Jewish restriction which you obey it and there's no reason that the argument is and I can't remember what the Hebrew phrase is but it's a law for which there is no reason you simply have to follow this. And the argument they made about this particular kind of law is that if you provide a reason, okay, people will always look for reasons to get rid of the law. They'll say, ah, but it doesn't apply because, you know, it doesn't, you know, the, you know, the prescription on pork doesn't apply because now we have high standards of hygiene and a factory. So if you've given a reason saying that this is unclean.

So in order to have the successful heuristic rules, they need to be capable of being chestnuts and fences. In other words, something you obey without knowing why you obey it. I mean, that's every parent of a teenager, that's their rule decree. Why can't I go out tonight because I said so? That's the, because there is no coming back to that,

because I said so, is this bullet proof of an argument as you're going to find? And so actually having those, I mean, there's a huge amount of chested and fence stuff in, for example, tuition, Muslim law, which is very chest-atonian in the sense that just because you don't know what it's for doesn't mean you should disregard it because the person who instigated it may have had a good reason.

There's a hell of a lot of good stuff in the Quran about what to do if there's a plague. For example, Jewish and very, very rapid burying of bodies, okay? It has very positive hygiene effects. So during the Crimean War, interestingly, you had effectively Christians fighting Turks, and the Muslims were absolutely ascidious about burying the dead. And the Christians weren't. And as a result, from decomposition and decomposing bodies, the disease was a much, much greater cause of loss of life on the part of the... I've got this right, I'm probably talking the historical bollocks here. But similarly, the belief in Revenance is why Cemetery is tended to be built outside towns.

The belief that the souls of the dead would rise up and haunt you, totally irrational belief. On the other hand, building Cemetery's outside towns is pretty good from a public health fund of you, particularly if you have to deal with a water supply or anything of that kind. Do you know where the word quarantine comes from? 40 days. Yes, Quaranta. Yes, I learned that while I was in Florence a couple of weeks ago. And that's probably a heuristic rule which is that by and large, anything that's going to manifest itself will manifest itself in that period.

Yeah, it's either you're either dead or you're okay in the space of four days. We could argue, okay, it was kind you're either dead or you're okay in the space. We could have we could argue okay. It was kind of I guess in in in in they eventually in COVID they brought it down to about what was it 10 days I think was an intervention. Yep. That and by the way that was probabilistic. I think that there were certain number of people who manifested symptoms 10 days more than 10 days after they're affected infected. But what you were doing was effectively making a trade off then between total inconvenience. And so it couldn't have been 40 days because the compliance would have been so low that it might as well have been no days.

Yeah, well that's a very interesting question actually, which I often raise about this, which is that when you design a rule, it's very rare that you can design a rule on purely scientific grounds without factoring in behavioral factors. So 40 days in a hotel room would be so much to ask your people that, what if that happened in Melbourne, wasn't it? Is the hotel security started having sex with the guests? No way. There was a huge outbreak in Victoria. And the reason was that the people at the quarantine hotels were so God am bored they started having sex with the people who are there to provide security Amazing, so the whole there was so funny. Oh my God and the joke was why why is Australia like the spice girls because Victoria has to spoil it for everyone else

Nice but But but the interesting thing is let's say you let's say you know, and I think we knew this, okay, six or eight months ago, okay, outdoor non-dense social encounters are highly unlikely to lead to transmission, okay. So I said outdoor and non-dense. I don't mean a football crowd, but I mean people, a government, a Buckingham Palace Gov and party with reasonable social distancing is very unlikely to lead to transmission. So a completely rational person would say, okay, we'll allow outdoor

social events. Now, the problem there is you've got a factor in the behavioral component as well as the scientific component, which is this outdoor event, outdoor socializing tends to lead to indoor socializing, because you meet in the afternoon, it gets cold in the early evening, a few people move into the conservatory, they leave the door open, you know, the patio heaters run out of gas, the next thing you know is there are 10 people in the conservatory, then they close the door because it's getting a bit nippy, then four people use the lue, then they go into the kitchen and they have a rather Brexit. And before you know, you've had a super spreading event. Now, if that sounds fanciful, that's exactly what happened at the White House, right? They had a bloody session in the Rose Garden.

I think nobody who only attended the Rose Garden event got infected, they all went back into that orangey thing, whatever it's called, you know, that kind of, you know, off the pallet, you can't even prefer the white hairs to having a patio, but you know what I mean. And they went into that thing with the curvy windows, and that's when the transmission happened. And so you can't just say, you have to be an empiricist, you can't just be a kind of reductionist when you design legislation.

What are your thoughts around the communications that we've seen to do with vaccines? The, um, oh, Krakki, um, bloody hell. Um, uh, one really interesting thing. Okay, there's been, to be honest, I mean, in the UK, I'm pretty impressed with my fellow Brits, they're pretty sane, but in fairness, there mean, in the UK, I'm not pretty impressed with my fellow Brits, they're pretty sane, but in fairness, as more and more people get vaccinated, the hesitancy decreases even in the unvaccinated. I'm not totally hostile to anti-vaxxers,

by which I mean people who oppose to vaccinating the very young, because there is a case to be made that actually, you know, the cost-benefit analysis might not pay off, old people who refuse to be vaccinated are just being irresponsible. Middle-aged people look mate, you know, you kind of have a duty to, you know, to your fellow man here. And he maskers struck me as completely bonkers, because it was, to me, even if the thing didn't work, it was a mild courtesy to my fellow man. I saw the mask wearing as rather like the reason I tend to wear underpants and trousers

when I go out, which is that even if I'm more convenient for me to walk around naked, I'm conscious of the fact that it might cause distress to other people. So, you know, and also I love the comment of the comedian, I can never remember his name, he's always on Bill Bailey. I said, people said, you know, wearing a mask, you know, they're making us wear a mask, it's like the Nazis. He said, because that's right, isn't it? Because he said, that's what the Nazis are chiefly famous for, imposing mild inconveniences

like people are acting. Okay. My view was the cost of wearing a mask was so trivial. I'll make my... Why don't you caveat to that? I'm not totally comfortable with mandating masks all the time out of doors. For a very strange reason, which is I did find that wearing a mask slightly disoriented me when I was crossing a busy road.

I have no idea why that is. But there were certain aspects to it, but indoor mask wearing and mask wearing in any kind of densely populated area struck me as simply something which even if I didn't believe in it, I'd be happy to go along with that of just, you know, courtesy to my fellow man. Now, one very important point with anti-vaccine, which I was, I had, I had theorized about this, but had never written about it because I thought it was maybe too stupid a point to make. But somebody else also theorized it and went to the intelligent lengths of actually investigating it, and that's the fear of needles played a bigger part in anti-vaccine than we let on. Because about a significant double-digit percentage of people are really frightened of needles, okay? I'm not, not bothered. I've got a friend who

might faint if you injected him with a needle. He was actually head of policy for the Liberal Democrats, he's not to his history, right? He's not some wacko, but phobias are very strange, they're very strange things. If I said to you because of some peculiar medical reason that the injection, the covid vaccine injection had to be given into your eyeball, I think you'd rapidly go around looking for reasons not to get vaccinated. I think it's fair, now for people who have a real phobia of needles, the idea of being injected in the arm is equivalently distressing as it would be to you or me. I thought I know you may be frightened of needles,

but to you or me being injected in the eye, I think it's fair to say, would give me the fucking eBGBs. It's just differences in degree, not differences in kind, right? Just risk tolerance here. So one interesting thing is quite some of those people may have been engaging in what you might call motivated reasoning. So they were frightened of getting injected, but they didn't want to say this. So they can try, they, they, they reverse engineered a whole lot of reasons not to get vaccinated, which were enough. Now, I don't think that explains the whole anti-vaxxer movement, but it's a relevant sector. One of the things they said is if you told people you can get vaccinated in private and you can get vaccinated

lying down, so if you do fake, you don't crash onto the floor. Another thing you might want to do is you might want to offer those people a very, very rapid Vax. So if you went to someone who's frightened of needles, right? And you said, do you want to come in now and get vaccinated? They might go, fuck it, I'll get it over with. Yes. Yes. Because the anticipation for so long is where they're just, yeah, they're discomforts going to come from. You know, I've got friends who basically, you know, well, I'll give you the classic example of where I understand this is public speaking, because I do a lot of it, right? You've got to do a lot of it because if you only do a bit of it, it's too frightening. And I know people, totally

intelligent people who, if they have to give a speech like a best man speech or a business speech in front of a hundred people, four weeks away, they have to spend four weeks shitting themselves, okay? Literally four weeks. I noticed when I started flying on business, because a lot of people who fly business don't really want to fly, but their bosses told them they've got to go to Frankfurt. I noticed in the business class compartment of planes, a significant minority of people

are clutching the armrest on takeoff. You know, it's white knuckle of shit. So one of the interesting things you could do with people who are frightened of getting injected is just say, come in right now and get injected. Or there's a walk on by thing. Because if you actually had an appointment for them three weeks hence,

they'd have to put up with three weeks of total anxiety. And that might have been a factor in emotional decision making, which we didn't actually think about. Did you know, I don't know if this story's true and I'm gonna stress test it on you. The original way on the fear of things like that. I had a friend who did medicine at Cambridge and on about day 10 you go into the dissecting room. To first year medical student,

there are a lot of corpses right laid out on tables and you've got to get a scalpel and you've got to start putting them to bits, right? Now bear in mind, these people have spent six years of their life getting into Cambridge, three medicine, okay, right? And apparently, on that first day, you'll get, I don't know, 300 medical students or whatever, in the first year medical students, I don't know how many there are,

but it'll be something like 200, 300. I don't know, two or three of them will just go, fuck or three of them, just go fuck this for me. Not for me. Not for me. Yeah, I'll go and read law or, you know, something like that. So that's like a hazing ritual to select out the people that are never going to be able to do this. I know. It's a really, really interesting question about that, because if you're too squeamish to do that, maybe you just can't be a doctor. Cut your fucking losses after 10 days mate, it's fine. Yeah, yeah, cut your losses, yeah.

Yeah. Did you know about this? Is the original reason that a head on top of a beer, a pint of beer, that that was there and it was seen as scum originally? That's coffee, not beer. Is it coffee? Oh, yes, it's... It's crema. Crema, that's it, yes. So in other words, it was considered scum and it was the Gad, yes, it's it's Kramer Kramer. That's it. Yes. Now I so in other words, it was it was considered scum

And it was the Gadger machine post war Gadger machine produced this stuff and instead of getting rid of it Because an espresso previously pre war Italian espresso was just pure and black They they effectively rebranded it as Kramer and something else else has occurred to me, which has done that. Okay. Are you familiar with them? How long since you've been in the UK? Week. Oh, so you'll have to tell me why you're an Austin, anyway, but fantastic. Okay. Are you familiar with the MNS Cheddar brand Cornish Crunchy? It's a mature cheddar brand, and it's called Cornish Crunchy. Now what's very clever about that, right? Is that when you make mature cheddar, particularly super mature cheddar, the process of

maturation causes salt crystals to form within the cheese. And so, you know, someone who just called it Cornish mature would run the risk that people go, what are these weird lumps doing in my cheese? But by Cornish Cornish crumcher, you turn a bug into a feature. That's so good. So it's really, really clever. Really, really clever thing to do. I love that. I don't know how you would... It's like advertising Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So you've taken something which was a byproduct that shouldn't have been there and turned it into something which is now an actual attribute of the product.

The most glorious thing of all, I might actually go there this evening, I'm almost tempted, is the German cabab. I couldn't get my head around this tall. It's a huge thing in Britain, the German cabab house. Okay? I was thinking, what the f**king hell of the German Kabab House. Okay? I was thinking, what the fuck, the hell of the German has got contributed to the Kabab? You know, why would I go to, now it's interesting because of course, Germany has a Turkish population of about six million.

The Kabab world, it's like the Indian restaurant world in Britain, okay? The Kabab world in Germany, because their ethnic food is Turkish, whereas ours is largely, you know, Indian, as God intended, okay? And I was saying to some of the other day, which is that my own particular pantheon of food, all Indian restaurants have an automatic Michelin star. You know, it's like all buildings built before 1700 or automatically grade two, and all Indian restaurants have a Michelin style in my particular book.

Because even if it's bad, it's still better than anything else, right? But anyway, in Germany, it's the kebab wars. It's hugely competitive. And you literally have people putting fresh heads of lettuce in the window of their shop to sow out fresh the salad is. And so this hyper competition in the German and since their auto industry might be stuffed by the electric cards good they've got another export industry waiting in the wings. So the German can I'm actually go this evening to into Bromley and try one of

these things. I've never had one. I think I did. I think I got treated to one the last time I came to London, but it was just someone said you just want to get a cabab. And I thought, it's three in the afternoon. This is a, it were 12 hours too early. I haven't had six. Yeah, precisely. I haven't, I haven't fought anyone this evening. I haven't, I haven't lost my keys and had had an argument with the misses. So yeah, it's um, that's so strange to think about the fact that you associate a particular type of food with the time of the day and not just because of the effect it has on you. So for

instance, if you have a big pizza for lunch, you're going to be sleepy for the rest of the day. No one's no one's serving a big pizza at lunch ahead of a long conference where everyone's in a warm room. You can game that system, by the way. Next time you're in Central London, go and find a Michelin Star Indian restaurant. As I said, all Indian restaurants have a Michelin star, but go and find one with a real Michelin star, okay. And first of all, you'll be able to get in, okay, lunchtime. This is the big thing. Secondly, they will have a lunchtime set menu, which is like 24.95. Okay. You spend that at Pizza Express. It's the biggest bargain in the world. It's all because most people associate Indian food with the evening. And I also suspect

it's because out of any group of four people, there'll always be one worse you get. It's an Indian food for lunch. I had a boss, I lost all respect for them. Boss, you said you don't eat Indian food at lunch time. I said, well, 1.4 billion Indians seemed to manage okay, mate. No. And so I love eating Indian food at lunch time. I sure think it's fantastic.

But you will get the best bar. I mean, you're getting world-class food there for kind of pizza money. Penny's on the dollar, yeah. I'm really fantastic. I think this was one of your tweets from the other day. One reason political polarization tends to be confined to the young and stupid is this.

Anyone over 35 possessed of any observational mouse has noticed that there is no correlation between political allegiance and basic decency as a human being. By the way, a lot of people misinterpreted that and thought I meant young and also stupid, whereas I meant and or stupid. So I'm just gonna qualify that.

This is the problem with Twitter. You don't have quite the space to necessarily make clear. And also, you know, the great mistake, you understand what you're writing and other, and on Twitter, of course, people willfully misunderstand what you're saying, which is the worst problem of all. So you have this inadequate mode of expression combined with willful misunderstanding, which leads to these kind of ridiculous spats, okay? And so, the point I'm making is that, yeah, I would argue that this

moralization of political opinion, if you are reasonably astute, or you know, you're reasonably astute, particularly if you're over 40 years old, you do realize that there are nice left-wing people and nice right-wing people and there are horrible left-wing people and horrible right-wing people and that political allegiance is not really a suitable enough shiver-leth on which to actually judge people's moral character. I still think that's a fair point. I mean, there are certain behaviors, for example, certain behaviors which you would think would be right wing, which just as often crop up in the left,

like extreme stinginess, for example. Real stinginess doesn't really, you'd think that might be a bit of a right wing vice, but actually you find it just as often in people on the left. Okay, people were then going, but actually they spent a lot about the extreme right and extreme left. Well, fair point, but they tend to be pretty nasty in either direction, for nasty for different reasons, but still nasty. I think the average age at the moment,

it might be in the UK, I think it is in the UK, is 20. The average age for the population in the UK is... No, no, it's much higher than that. Is it? No, there are lots of countries where the average age, lots of countries in Africa where the average age is very, very young. Okay, but Japan's historically the highest. Right.

Germany's quite high, all,. Historically, because Germans have fewer and fewer children and have them. Also, people have children later, which also skews things. The UK tends to be quite a large elderly population. I think the proper thing is not perhaps the average age, but the median age. So let me go and find out what the median age is in the UK, UK median age 40.4. Wow. Is it? I've been my research. 2001, don't worry, in 2001 it was 37.9. Yeah. So the average age of the UK population has been increasing throughout this time period, although between 2014 and 2016, the median age remained at 40. Wow. So what you're saying is that if he has the highest median age, actually, is very interesting. Monaco tax tax haven. Yes. 55.4 followed by Japan at 48.6. Samplier and Mikalon,

which is so small as to be a bit silly. And then Germany at 47.8. Well, I mean, Japan is Japan is completely annihilated by all of these outliers that lived to 120 years old. That's their problem. Yeah, and they also, also I suppose, whether they have, you also get these weird people who live at home, don't you? But, you know, so they tend not to have children. So family formation happens later and later, combined with smaller and smaller families. And so quite often there are three things going on at the same time. We're going to see some really interesting population demographics, aren't we, over the next sort of 20 to 50 years.

It really does feel like we're not going to, I asked someone the other day that seems to understand this pretty well. Whether or not the world is going to break 10 billion people. And they said it was teaching go about whether or not we just glance off the bottom of that and then start to tune back down again. My, my hunch would be actually that there's a very good book on this which is PEC full of statistics. Two good books I'll recommend to your listeners factfulness by Hans Rosling. Oh, you'll thank you. I was just going to Google it. And there's another book called The Great slowdown by Danny Doerling, I will tell you what the subtitle is because it's quite a good book. It's called Slowdown, sorry, the

end of the great acceleration and why it's good for the planet, the economy, and our lives. And Doerling has an interesting take on statistics using these particularly peculiar graphs, which are mostly used, I think, only in, you know, abstruse parts of mathematics, which shows that most things are either slowing down or they're increasing at a decreasing rate. And so, you know, the very large families are disappearing very, very rapidly in parts of the world like Latin America, where we wouldn't necessarily have predicted it in my childhood. The only thing Dalling could find that was increasing at an increasing rate

was I think jet air travel, which would have been effectively because China and India have now been entered into the domestic airline. So we've got a step, we've got a step change there that's opened up an extra two and a half billion people to this. That's effectively opened up. I guess it's one of the probably 50 million more, 60 million people in India, 60 million, 100 million people in China, maybe more, who can fly domestically on planes, whereas that would have been a tiny percentage of the population, you know, not that many decades ago. You know, India, you travel by train if you're going long distance, unless you are super rich.

And my brother remembers going on a long distance coach in Chile in the 1990s. And he boarded this coach and was surprised to discover it was a super luxury coach with like reclining seats and everything else. And he couldn't work out why this thing, because your vision of a Latin American coach in the 1990s was kind of, you know, you'd be sharing it with some chickens or something. Okay.

And what he realized, of course, is back in 1994, to fly internally within Chile was like super expensive. So this was effectively a business catch. If you're traveling on business between Santiago and Farmer Gusto, that isn't Chile, isn't I'm not talking bullshit here. If you're traveling long distance and Chile, of course, is the kind of shape where quite a lot of journeys are quite long. Unless you were like the chief executive of the business, you wouldn't fly, you'd basically go by coach. And so as a result, they had these super luxury coaches, which were the equivalent of domestic air travel in the United States.

luxury coaches which were the equivalent of domestic air travel in the United States. We should have that in you. Okay, more. I think, I mean, Well, you know, fun enough George Monbio has made that case that coach travel if you could destigmatize coach travel. I'll tell you, I'll tell you a business, if anybody's listening and they want to get in touch, okay. You could even take the business even further and put your car in a car transporter.

But okay, but a bus that left London at, let's say, 9 p.m. picked me up at Ashford or Ebb's Fleet at like 1030, where I had a tiny little cabin and woke up in Frankfurt, right? You got the European motorway network, which is more of that empty overnight. Okay, certainly it'll be very smooth. You've got modern coaches which have much, much better suspension and soundproofing and they've got toilets and onboard entertainment and a coffee machine. Okay, it's not the coach travel of my childhood, which was frankly pretty grim. Okay, so you could,

undoubtedly, if you could just destigmatize coach travel, you could use the failure to create a European sleeper train network. And actually, the other one I've always wanted is one where you put your car in a car thromb sporter. You board a little cabin thing. Now, the way you could do it is if they're two of you, you'd share a cabin. If I'm traveling on business, I'd pay double and have a cabin to myself for a bit of a desk, a bit the way the sleeper trains work, you know, it first classes the same as second, you just don't have to share. Okay? And, you know, I would definitely travel to Frankfurt one way overnight that way, because I'd rather get on a bloody coach in EBS fleet at 10

o'clock at night than have to get up at five o'clock in the morning and then travel to London City or something. Well, that's the alternative, right? This is something that nobody ever thinks about. They look at the journey time and Skyscanner does this brilliantly because they tell you the total amount of travel time, but then you need to add on the transfers. Then you need to add on the amount of time to check in at the front end to collect your bags at the back end, the transport and potential cost to get

yourself from where you are to the airport. And when you actually end up loading all of this up at the end, you think, fuck, I might as well just... So of course, what happened is that coach travel tended to be, has been associated with people who can't afford to travel any other way, because they don't own a car, they can't afford to go by train. They're very price sensitive You know quite often you get a fairly high pisshead propensity on a coach as well. You get that on's trains as well though Trains trains are you can trains are it's okay to drink at any time on a train if it's 10 a.m People drink. Yeah, they forget we wouldn't go for a pint at 10 in usually. You're off to a work meeting, but because you're on a train.

There used to be a train that went effectively non-stop from Glasgow to Brighton, and it went through Kensington and Olympia. So it went through that Western thing, then went down to East Croydon, then Gattwick, then Brighton. I think I've got that right, am I? Yes, you're definitely. Anyway, I've boarded it once between, I think, Kensington Olympia and Gattwick, because it was convenient where I was getting to get me.

Bear in mind, it was full of glass regions who'd been on the train for five and a half hours. Basically, I was a smoker back then. I was in the smoking compartment. You couldn't see the opposite window. And every time the train went over a set of points, 470 empty cans of tenant super would crash off the table, or roll around the floor, disgourging their contents. It was kind of like a heronimous Bosch, you know, it was extraordinary. But I don't blame them entirely. And if you're going to sit on a train for eight hours, I mean, it's not a totally crazy way of passing the time. The only way that you can put up with it is by getting yourself pissed. Look, Robby Sutherland, ladies and gentlemen, where can people go to pick up the new book, Rory?

Right. So you can go wherever you normally buy books, which probably means Amazon, but let me go and give you, it's called Transport for Humans, it's Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland of the authors, the subtitle is, are we nearly there yet? Okay, it's got a very nice cover which shows the brain in the shape of a tube map, which I have to say whoever the graphic designer was deserves some kudos. And it's available, I should quote the price, didn't I? Did you do an audible version of it as well? I've got to record that, okay?

So you can pre-order that, okay? You haven't recorded the audible version. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, okay, I was already insected it one weekend and they got a massively sore throat. Now, it's pre-orderable on Amazon. It'll be available. So it comes out on the 18th, right? 18th, 1499, the Kindle Edition is 849, the paperback is 1499. And let me just brag, it's currently, even though it hasn't come out yet, just on pre-order's loan on Amazon, it's number one in road and transport engineering, number one in urban and rural planning, and number four in the transportation industry category. So the only books that are beating

into the transportation industry category are published by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, which are books you need to read to pass your driving test. We're even beating all aboard the timeless book all about remembering British railways. So unless it's mandated by law before you can actually get in a car, your book's doing pretty well. So at no point did I ever think that I would be number four in the transportation industry

books category of Amazon. So it's one of those strange things. It's going to be my best humble brag for the rest of my life, I think. I was once number four in the transportation category on Amazon. But why I don't understand is why is the ghosts of big inhale by Bob Ogley, who's a local seven-hooks historian, by the way, and frequent columnists for the seven-hooks chronicle, not that you'd be expected to know that? Why is he in at number 29? Why has that suddenly surged? Well, why isn't he in at higher than that? That's the question that we need to be asking.

Yeah, no, I'm beating the ghosts a big inhale anyway, so take that Bob, you're bastard. Rory, thank you so much for today. It's a joy, I'm a fan