Modern Wisdom - #587 - Rory Sutherland - 19 Of Human Behaviour's Weirdest Quirks

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Rory Sutherland is one of the world's leading consumer behaviour experts, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising and an author. Humans are an odd animal. Our behaviour sometimes makes very little sense, but when we exchange our money for products it can make even less sense. Thankfully Rory has spent decades studying the most fascinating parts of consumer psychology and today gives us some insights. Expect to learn why having a Japanese toilet might change your life, why I've become addicted to first class airline cabin reviews, how ChatGPT will impact the marketing world, how to increase your luck in life, whether vaping should be banned, why VR hasn't taken off, if I'm buying McDonald's grease-proof gaming chair and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Alchemy - https://amzn.to/3DyaBfo  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

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Rory Sutherland, he's one of the world's leading consumer behaviour experts, the vice chairman of Olga the advertising, and an author. Humans are an odd animal, our behaviours sometimes makes very little sense, but when we exchange our money for products, it can make even less sense. Thankfully, Rory has spent decades studying some of the most fascinating parts of consumer psychology, and today, he gives us some insights. Expect to learn why having a Japanese toilet might change your life, why I've become addicted to first-class airline cabin reviews on YouTube, how chat GPT will impact the marketing world,

how to increase your look in life, whether vaping should be banned, why VR hasn't taken off, if I'm buying a McDonald's grease-proof gaming chair, and much more. This man is a force of nature. If you are yet to listen to Rory, this will be his fourth time on the show, I think, and he literally gets better every single time. He's everything that is fantastic about Britain and he makes me incredibly proud to be from that country. You're going to adore this one. There is so many hilarious, funny and novel insights around the way that humans behave and are interaction with the market. Enjoy. Also, don't forget that if you are listening, you might not be subscribed and that means you're

going to miss episodes when they go up. So please press the subscribe button. It does support the show. It helps me get bigger and better guests and it makes me very happy. I thank you. But now, ladies's water, brand. Is it sparkling water or still? I've never had it. This is sparkling. So the black can sparkling and the white can is still. Ah. I watched a very interesting advertisement come analysis

that the founder put it across, where he explained the branding strategy behind liquid death, calling something literally the opposite of what it is, having a very sort of unique brand position. It's got this skull on it there. Yes. What's your thoughts on Liquid Death? What's interesting about it is that, in front of NFA, something rather weird, is I pretty

much dislike drinking water from a tap or in the other shape or form. Weirdly, I quite like drinking water from a can, and I have no idea why that is. So I've started buying drinking far more water than I did before. Now you can get it in canned form rather than bottle form. Actually, it's not quite a drinker. I'm pretty happy drinking it from glass, but I don't like drinking water from plastic bottles. Do you know what my favorite brand of sparkling water is if you had to pochico before? No, you'll have to okay. I have to enlighten me on that. So it's Mexican sparkling water and there is a carbonation

grade and I think a a sample of greenos maybe at a 90ish on this particular spectrum and to pochico's 140 so this thing just feels it's like a fizzy battery. It just takes a facelift. It's the same decarbonated. Yeah, finally enough, the Germans have various sort of often fairly cheap brutal vassas, which again insanely carbonated, which I've always really liked. And it's generally coincidentally, there's a very good water, which from enough, you only seem to get now at some Crown Plaza hotels, which is a Welsh water, which I like very much

as well, which I think is called, it's called something like Cambrian, but it isn't called that. But I think the idea, I mean, effectively, the branding will have totally affect the experience because, you know, a packaging affects taste. Is it, is it a conspicuous consumption, do you think, for, for an age where alcohol's less cool than it might have used to be? Yeah, I like the sheer diversity of saying cool, something the opposite of what it really is. There was obviously a brand called Death Sigarettes back in the day in the early 90s, which was from the ethical tobacco company, and they said we're going to sell cigarettes, we're just not going to lie about them.

And that was similar. That had a kind of black packaging and a skull on it. And no, I mean, what is undoubtedly true is you can, I mean, all alcoholic drinks brands know this, you know, that you're drinking imagery as much as you're drinking a drink. And the associations are as powerful as the reality, essentially. And I haven't tried liquid death, I'll be intrigued to know what effect it has on me. Good quality, what's this?

This is a 500 mill as well, which is a nice sized can. I tell you what else has been obsessed with recently. Have you watched first class airplane cabin reviews on YouTube? Yeah, I've watched quite a few of those. Why are they so compelling? What is it about them? I don't know.

It's kind of interesting because in a way, when you think about it, an experience in an airline's first glass is other than the food, it's not all that fantastic, isn't, because you're still confined to a very small space, you have to share a toilet, okay? You've got one seat to sit in. You can't actually, you know, I mean, some of the more elaborate cabins now, you have your own desk in a swivel chair and you can just know what else. Admittedly. But it is surprisingly and weirdly interesting. I quite like the idea they have an emirance, which is if you have a cabin in the middle,

you have these windows which appear to be the windows of a plane, but in fact, a video reproduction of what you would see if you're looking out of a window. No way. I haven't seen that yet. That is interesting implications for airline design ultimately because it's an interesting question. It must be presumably cheaper and safer to build aircraft without windows, but you have to have windows to stop passengers going nuts. I did see once the most extraordinary thing which was a, it was obviously a design project rather than a serious proposal, but it was effectively an airline where, you know, more or less half the inside of the fuselage was video screens

with, you know, effectively showing a picture of the exterior. So you almost felt you were traveling in a transparent plane, which would almost magically weird, I suspect. That's cool. That would make for me. So I mean, it does, it does one of the interesting things actually is that 4K, for quite a lot of functions, 4K TV isn't that much better than the HD. HD, I think most people can tell the difference between HD and standard definition. Certainly, if you're in the United States, we have the standard definition picture, which had fewer lines than the European picture, was particularly crap, actually. I mean, American standard definition television was rubbish even compared to European standard

definition TV. standard definition television was rubbish even compared to European standard definition TV. And HD is, you know, markedly better and clearer, particularly when it was playing something like text or data or like that kind. And 4K is quite interesting because it doesn't really make much difference if you're watching, let's say soccer or football. Because when you've got a lot of movement going on, A, I think there's a lot of blurring anyway, but actually your brain's doing most of the work. Your brain's effectively assembling the image from one information it has, when things are moving very fast. So if you know this, whenever you go into a TV store and they have 4K or in extreme cases, 8K screens

on display, it'll always show like a static closer picture of an ant next to a blob of water or a flower. It's a jellyfish show the moving in slow. Very, very slowly moving or a night sky over, you know, in Madrid. Do you remember when Joe Rogan first moved to Austin and he went into a studio that was this big red thing. It kind of looked like the inside of a flashlight and The first few episodes that he released in this new studio Everybody was unhappy about it. I couldn't tell what was wrong, but they said this is awful We it looks terrible and I can't work out why it's because he was filming it in 60 frames per second They'd moved there and they'd put it in 60 FPS instead of I think 25. And I learned this because this YouTube channel did a great breakdown of what was wrong with it.

And then they fixed it and switched it back to 25 or 30 perhaps. And the issue is that your eyes naturally see blur. So if you hold your hand up in front of your face and you wiggle it left and right, you actually do see this blur. You don't see every single frame of where your hand is. And what that means is that 60 FPS is displaying a type of video that your eyes are not used to seeing in the real world, which is what makes it feel so artificial. Interesting.

Interesting. So, um, I wonder what, yeah, so nearly all TV is broadcast to 25. Is it? 25, yeah, 24. Interesting. Yeah, 24. Interesting. Yeah, that's fascinating. Obviously, you have things like the Mac,

the Apple Retina screen, where there's no point in making a screen that's any finer since we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. What is interesting about 4K is that it does get close enough if you've got a reasonably slow moving image. And there is that interesting hypothetical debate, which is ultimately either through virtual reality or just through really good streams, is there a perfectly acceptable form of virtual tourism? Now I must admit, I'm glad you're a YouTube fanatic. The thing I always recommend people do is subscribe to YouTube Premium.

Oh, Rory, you're a man. Almost subscribe to. You are among friends here. I'm also. We must be on a tiny minority of people, because I've got a friend at YouTube and I keep asking how many people actually subscribe to Premium and it's a pretty vanishingly small number. I did, I think, more or less by accident. And it was practically the best thing that ever happened to me in life. And we're reaching a point, I think, where the volume of content on YouTube has become so vast that it's only, well, maybe it's already happened, but it's only a smidgen away from becoming

effectively Wikipedia with video. In other words, it becomes so comprehensive, this extraordinary kind of assemblage of virtually every conceivable, you know, subject, treated to on video, that you'll reach a point where effectively there'll be a film on everything. Yep. And the two things I really recommend with YouTube, and I said first of all, watching on your tele, you know, because, you know, we all have this very early memory of YouTube, where it was all, you know, handheld slightly pixelated all a bit crap. And there was no point in watching on TV because it would have, you know, effectively pixelated. And actually, you know, the vast majority of the content actually is, if not

professionally produced, it's, you know, sort of broadcast quality. And I do spend occasionally, one of the things I really love is really, really slow TV. So you get these 4K walking tours of Cebu in the Philippines, for example. You know, that was one of them. And it's just someone with a 4K camera wandering around Cebu for an hour and a half. And it's surprisingly worthwhile, in fact. Obviously, one of my favorite ones is virtual rail fan, which is basically an American YouTube channel, often live webcams for train spotters. And when I'm working at home, I leave this on in the background, and effectively you just get a tiny amount of back, it's, if it's in a station, you'll get a tiny amount of background noise or cars

driving past, and then you get on with your work, and then about every half hour of train going past, you can take a break to stare at it for the seven minutes it takes to pass the screen. There's a guy that does city tours walking at night, a lot of the time in rain, and there's something about that which is oddly very, very therapeutic. I saw an article that I wanted to bring up actually, 50% of Americans watch content with subtitles most of the time. 55% say it is harder to hear dialogue in shows and movies

than it used to be. Nearly three and four respondents claimed muddled audio from their content. 61% use them on accent to difficult to understand. 29% prefer to watch their content at home quietly, leaving subtitles on so as not to disturb their roommates or family. And 27% of Americans rely on subtitles

to keep them focused on what they are watching while juggling the distractions of multiple screens, children, pets, work the news, and more. So interesting, if you go back to the 1970s, not that they broadcast many of them, but Americans would impose subtitles on Australian content, in particular, which seems like, you know, I think it's... If I've got this right, Prisoner's Cell block age

was the first Australian sort of soap, if you can call it that, to be broadcast in the US without subtitles. Well, there's a, you'll always see this even in the UK, especially for us, because we have such a panoply of different accents that you could get stuck into. What I always find hilarious is when they hard code subs onto certain people, perhaps in a documentary or whatever, the policeman, there's no subtitles, but the criminal with a very strong scous accent, he's been forced to have this,

because they've just made a decision like, no one is going to be able to, the cohort of people that can understand this man is like five, so we're just going to put them on the screen for everybody. So, funnily enough, it's another of my friends who also has YouTube premium, who is one of the first to point out that actually subtitles are generally preferable in all kinds of ways. And is it, and of course, Brits got used to it, probably with Scandi Drama, unless you were into French Art

House or something. It was probably Scandi Drama that really got Brits into subtitle watching. It does force you to pay attention. It stops you dozing off, because you have to look at the screen to know what's going on. I find the diction and enunciation of a lot of modern actors pretty poor. You know, I mean, one thing you say what you like about Kerry Grant, but he didn't exactly mumble, you know what I mean, one thing you say what you're like about Kerry Grant, but he didn't exactly mumble, you know what I mean, I mean, you know, it was a bizarre hybrid of a Bristolian English and American accents, you know, we can probably all accept that. By the way, the one thing that Brits are very talented at as linguists and it's through necessity is being able to understand English spoken in a very wide range of accents.

So we're always said to be very bad at languages, well yes and no. I mean one thing we're pretty good at is being able to understand more or less anybody speaking English. And it's partly our own regional accents give us practice. The one of your love, if you're from the northeast, is that the elder Steven Stevenson inventor of the steam locomotive had such a strong Jordi accent that when he presented the locomotive in London he was accompanied by an interpreter. No way. Actually, I'm just saying, yeah. What was it? I'm just talking about what there was James and there was the elder one, the father. I think the father sent, you know, the son to a letter fancy schools was presumably

he'd made enough money by then, but the eldest evenson will apparently get an abandoned for devastated and go, right, yeah, boy, that other bastard, and fucking I need a, and then they go, what Mr. Stevens wants to say is that the addition of a boiler to the loan commotive will facilitate the debt. It's a little tape. Right. It's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just , it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just,

it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's the only form of motive power not invented in the UK. Oh, yes. So both, both, the petrol engine are basically continental inventions,

pretty much everything else, electric motor, probably Faraday, sterling engine, steam engine, what, et cetera. And what's quite interesting is actually that, and so many of these things were kind of invented, I mean, what being one obvious case, Faraday himself to an degree, although he became an assistant to entry-daily. But they're actually uneducated people,

which is kind of interesting. They were tinkerers and fiddlers, and they had access to the right tinkering equipment. Have you read Winston Churchill's Ministry of Unjentmanly Warfare? I've heard of it, but tell me more. This is... If I could give you a single book that I think is the most rory book that I've read over the last 12 months, this would be it. So, in the buildup to the beginning of World War II, a bunch of big wigs in the UK government realize that war seems to be a foot and they realize that we are woefully unprepared

to be able to fight a war with this level of brutality and the reason that he calls it ungentlemanly warfare is that there was a point where guerrilla warfare, sabotage of key bridges and stuff was seen as being such an uncouth military strategy that a British military general was actually quoted as saying, if this is what it takes to win the war, I'm prepared to lose. He basically saw that he had this sort of stiff-up-alip type of discipline with regards to the way

that breaks. It's absolutely a great fight, combatants, but to craft people's general quality or it wrote sort of crop burning and all that other stuff. Too much. Too much. The reason that the tinker thing got me onto this was that they try and create this web of miscreants basically. So this garage inventor who'd created a three stories high caravan that was only able

to go across certain roads because of the bridge clearance he needed. He made the world's first limpet mine. So the limpet mine that was deposited into a sea and would then attach with a magnet and would then blow up you bots and stuff. And the way that they did it was so cottage industry. This is why you love it. So for instance, they needed to find a primer that would dissolve at the exact right rate and the solution that they came up to having gone through everything was anacid seaballs.

So the anacid sweet that you would have and the reason they needed that, they needed something to separate out the two electrical contacts so it wouldn't fire too quickly, it wouldn't fire too slowly and they tried everything. They also tried. And the anacid was perfect, was it because Eden Saltwater would be what, sort of, a number of minutes. Yep, 30 minutes exactly, let's say, for this particular type. And then they wrapped it, they wrapped the entire thing to make sure that this Anisee

Bull didn't start to dissolve too quickly in condoms. And I can't remember where it was that they were doing this. It was maybe, let's say it was in like Sussex or something like that. Some little village in Sussex. And the guy that wrote the book says, it's unclear whether or not there was an increase in the number of children born nine months later after this, the town of Sussex. Notice that every single condom was in the border. Yeah, because they were trying to do it subversively.

They needed to go into little village stores and buy. But yeah, that's, that's fantastic. And the tinkering thing makes a lot of sense as well. But the jet to be warfare thing is interesting because one of my favorite characters, I think and fairly sure it was Admiral Coburn who almost started the war of 1812, the United States. And he was part of the group which, along with I, you know, Bachelors Canadians as well who burned the White House down, which is why it's the White House to cover the smoke damage and so on.

It wasn't the White House before. I've got a very good idea that it was painted white thereafter because of smoke damage, but I have to double check on this. But he was certainly the guy who burnt the Senate in the capital down in this war of 1812. And he was a kind of libertarian military man who was absolutely in the system that you could you could damage national property because it was, you know, the property of the seditious Yankee state, but you must not damage private property. And he only made one exception.

There was a newspaper that was very rude about him, and I think he just broke into the newspaper and destroyed all their letter Ks, so they couldn't write about him. That was the only thing that was true from the strict instructions. You know, town halls, that's fine. You can burn those down. But if, that's fine, you can burn those down, but if it's private property, you don't touch it. It's kind of quite interesting. Why do you think you mentioned earlier on about VR?

Why do you think that VR's not necessarily taken off mainstream adoption the way that some people might have predicted? Well, there's also a strange one, which is why we don't use computers wearing goggles as well. Just regardless of any 3D-ness, even in 2D, you could presumably have a fantastic and enormous screen as an interface. An interface would possibly have, but we need to see the keyboard. I guess we'd touch typists be better off, but it was right to me strange that just watching a film with using goggles, which of course,

you can do on Oculus device or Metma devices now, isn't more popular because it's a very cheap way of getting a huge screen in a way. Okay, some of it seems to be sort of slight feelings of vertigo or sickness, and I'm not sure they've actually tracked that. There are certainly a large number of cases where I wouldn't use it, so I'd probably feel pretty comfortable using VR goggles on a plane, but not on a train. There's on a train I'd be convinced that either someone's going to nick my briefcase, or that I might be stabbed from behind. If you think about it, the whole thing is very interesting on the headphones question. Because I'd bought before Christmas as a pure experiment these bone-conducting headphones, which you don't wear over your ear to. I can't wear in ear headphones.

I genuinely, whether it's the shape of my ears, just age, habits, it just strikes me as completely bizarre, you know. And I've struggled with in ear headphones and I've bought them and I've tried different sizes of the sort of butt-plugged device and so on. But I can't make them work. And also on a plane, for example, I'm terrified they'll just fall out, get trapped in the seat mechanism and the whole thing will be a disaster. And so I'm always a big fan of over-the-air headphones and noise-canceling headphones, which work for me very well, as you can see. But these bunkin' rankings are interesting because they don't actually cover your ears at all. And so your ability to hear things in the outer world is, well, it's not completely unimpeded, because obviously you have a lot of noise coming

from something else. But they were intended for joggers, but actually they're also brilliant for old people with hearing loss, because the sound goes straight to your, effectively straight into your cheekbones. And so if your ears have become generally damaged through gent, you know, what you might call the subtle, what is it, the anvil and the stirrup and so forth. If they've become a bit clogged up and less flexible, it bypasses that part of your ear, which has been damaged and kind of goes straight into sensation. Now my experience with Bern can knock me a headphones, and I think which magazine's review kind of bears this out, is that for music it's a bit shed still.

I mean, I have to say it's not brilliant. If the delicacy's just not there? I suppose the sort of warmth, the timbre, it's just not there, it's missing something. I mean, you can hear all the lyrics, you can enjoy it to an extent, but it doesn't really do. But for spoken content, particularly podcasts, I'd say it's actually brilliant. You know, I found it because one of the things is A, you can walk around wearing these things rages because they just hook over your ears, okay? And then there's a little thing which makes very mild pressure against your cheek. So, um, for answering phone calls, having a phone call,

you can forget you're wearing these things. Now, that's not true of over the ear headphones, where your ears will overheat. And you also have that mild sense of disorientation. I do see young people walking around with nose-canceling headphones, or as I call them, the furry wife-canceling headphones. It's a furry edge. But I see people walking around. I couldn't do it myself, I think, because I'd feel some sort of loss of almost loss of balance. In other words, they're too immersive, in that sense. So these bone

conducting things are definitely part of the solution. If you wanted to just wander around London listening to a podcast without getting hit by a van, I'd say they're a pretty good idea. And actually, what's a bit tragic is of course, because of that whole thing of traffic and awareness, they're being marketed to young joggers, when I would say that 50% of the market is actually people over 50. Yeah, you know, who's hearing just isn't quite so good.

Am I making this up? Or about 20 years ago, was there a brand of lollipop that was released for kids that came attached to something that looked a lot like the base of an electric toothbrush and it would play a song while you sucked on the lollipop by going through the lollipop in terms of vibration. I swear that I'm not making this up in my mind. If it's not the case though, imagine this. Let's say that you need to get kids to brush their teeth and they need to use an electric toothbrush, there must be a way that you could

induct a song as opposed to just the vibrations of the actual toothbrush through the mouth of the child so that they would actually enjoy the one minute and 20 seconds or however long a infant needs to brush its teeth. I think in two minutes, I think might be the optimal time for an electric toothbrush. Yes, at least two minute long song, and maybe they could dance around while they're listening to it. I don't know. That seems like a potentially cool solution if you could somehow blend both of these technologies together. Because then there must be very closely linked because when you think about it, when you are cleaning your teeth, particularly with an electric toothbrush, it is impossible to hear anything on the radio,

anything that's being sent to you. So in other words, the vibration must be effectively drowning out all the use of your ears. I love the Japanese road organ, which you probably know of, which is a series of kind of corrugated strips on the road. And the idea is, if you... B the legal speed, it plays a nice tune. If you drive too quickly, presumably, it's absolutely awful.

So, if you imagine lots of, those of you who know the Southwestern quadrant of the M25, which is the most appalling stretch of ribbed concrete still, which was never tarmed at. And where you have to drive them, that actually has a rather negative effect, because the vibration is less unpleasant than the fast you go. So this is really well-earned, just to make that stretch of the M25 tolerable. It's a bit around Cobbum. But the Japanese one is quite sensible because it's various little different vibrations, which plays a

cutie little tune in terms of your tie and eyes, and the tune only sounds any good if you're traveling at the legal speed. Have you heard about this new jet that's going to come and basically replace what Concorde would have been? So a transatlantic this new jet that's going to come and basically replace what Concord would have been? A transatlantic, supersonic jet that's going to get people across from New York to London in no time at all? It's interesting one, isn't it? By the way, there are still weird problems that are always struck me with supersonic travel. One of which is that unless you can actually make it work

across land and on a wide variety of routes, it isn't that big a time saving to anyone given individual, unless you cross the Atlantic practically weekly. So unless you cross the Atlantic, you know, practically weekly. So unless you can actually create a network of supersonic jets rather than just one route. But the other thing that always strikes me is fundamentally flawed with the idea is the Eastbound leg. Because everybody goes concord, absolutely marvelous, used to wake up in New York

before you'd taken off in London, which was true. You can leave London at 10 o'clock and you'd basically arrive in New York at something like 845 in time for breakfast. Yeah, Phil Collins once played live aid in the UK and then flew to the US and played the same time slot, I think. You're right. I think that's right. Yeah, that would have been, yeah.

And the interesting thing there, though, is that Eastbound, it really doesn't work. Because the best way to, there are only, I think there are only about three or four day flights between New York and London. The airlines don't like them because you have a plane sitting on the tarmac overnight, not making any money.

Okay, so the airlines really don't like day flights, I think they just do it out in necessity with what you might call the last flight of the day to land. And the interesting problem is that if you think about it, I think Concord's return flights, let me get this right. I got a vague idea. There was one which where you left at about nine in the morning and it landed at about five. And I might have the idea there was another that landed that went to 11 in the morning with the one that went to seven in the morning. There were two flights that used to come in. I always remember there was one around about sort of five o'clock, five thirty-six, it would land in Heathrow and you'd hear it coming over London. But that's a singularly useless return journey because they've got to have a totally pointless night in their hotel where you get up really early and have to get to JFK by, I don't know,

seven, something or other, right? And then effectively you lose a complete day while you're awake flying back. And most people I would have thought for the return lane would have preferred to have left the evening before or a 10 o'clock flight and woken up the following morning in London. Yeah, especially if you're not staying in London once you arrive there. If you're going on somewhere from London, you're going to have to probably get a public service. Exactly. Yeah, so you're actually right. So what were you saying? The onward flight.

You might have missed the last flight to Milan or whatever it might have been by dinner to that. So it always strikes me that everybody always being up to the glories of Concord going east to west, which seemed to me fairly I agree. There's something rather wonderful about leaving London in the morning and having a full day in New York. But at the same time, I suppose you can still do, I suppose you can still, you can still kind of leave London fairly early and get into New York, what would it be? Didn't they need to reinforce runways? Wasn't there an issue with runways that the tyres were sinking into them because of the pace that, or the wait,

perhaps? It was a very high landing speed, if I'm right. I'm fairly sure that it landed at a much faster speed speed if I'm right. I'm fairly sure that it landed at a much faster speed than most other planes did. Yeah, I was talking to a friend who was a, he was doing civil engineering at uni and he was telling me about the project was remapping Newcastle's international airport. And one of the things that they needed to do is you need to, your planes that are allowed to land are limited by width, length, density of the tarmac and concrete underneath. There's a whole bunch of things that actually restrict the type

of planes that are able to land. So I imagine that somewhere at Heathrow, there must still be a Concord compatible but slightly aged runway, perhaps. I think the main runway Heathrow would probably be reinforced to that level, given the volume of traffic it takes. Yes. I know that the space shuttle had obviously a number of emergency runways around the world where it could land. And you also get this slightly weird thing where you get freakishly long runways where

you don't expect them in places like I think St Morgan which is Newke airport has an incredibly long runway because it was originally a military airport. I got a big idea that near here, Manston in Kent, the runway is incredibly long. And so I know the space shuttle had to have this various kind of, there was this worldwide network of places it could land in an emergency. It never actually, I don't think it ever took advantage of any of them. Because with the space shuttle, when things went wrong, they went really wrong. Yes, the emergency landing is not the biggest thing you ever did.

The emergency landing was never an issue. Yes. But no, I mean, the other thing, the other thing in a sense is that the time saving is not quite as pronounced with supersonic flight as you might hope. And it doesn't work either if there's no reliable way of getting to the airport on time. And if JFK doesn't build a train to the airport, you basically have to leave two, you know, two and a half hours before your flight to be confident of getting there. Okay. That's one problem. And then the amount of time,

now obviously with the Concord, they reduced the amount of time you had to spend digging around at the airport to some degree. And the amount of time you had to spend digging around at arrivals. I know I don't think you went through the standard US immigration procedure, because imagine I'm maddening that would be to go on the concord for, you know, and pay a fortune to go on the concord and then three detained in an immigration queue for two hours.

So they did these cut down other parts of the journey as well as the parts in flight. But I mean, you know, the pain of getting to an airport really adds three hours to the beginning of any long haul flight unless you live spectacularly close to Heathrow and you're happy really dosing it. So, have you ever done the journey to America through Dublin where you immigrate into America in Ireland? Well, I've done the equivalent,

which still is actually the British Airways right from London City, where you land in Shannon to refuel, you clear immigration in Shannon, and then you do an onboard flight. It's West Coast of Ireland. It's actually very beautiful. I mean, it's unbelievably, and you come in right next to the river Shannon,

and it's unbelievably green and lovely. The reason is that the 757 couldn't take off from London City with a completely full fuel load. And so what they did is they combined, if you like, they made a virtue out of necessity, which is they said, okay, well take off with a partial fuel load. It was business class only seating. It still exists. There's one flight a day, I think, or they may have killed it under COVID.

London City, and then you land in Shannon while they're refueling the plane, or rather topping the plane up with fuel to the full load in Shannon. You then clear US immigration, which you can do in Dublin, Shannon, and knock him, where else. And then when you arrive in New York, you basically walk straight out to a world. It's an internal flight, yeah, so wide.

What do you think about chat GPT and how it's going to impact advertising in the behavioral science world? Oh, God. At some level, it is, it is, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, level it is unbelievably impressive, okay? In that it kind of passes a sort of churring test, doesn't it? In that you wouldn't know it wasn't written by a human. And, you know, in some of its things like, you know, mimicking other writers and so on, it, you know, it's not fabulous, but it doesn't do an atrocious job, by any means, you know, Bob Dylan's song lyrics or PG Woodhouse or whatever else, you try and get it to emulate. But, No, how would I describe it? One alarming facet it had, which is that a colleague of mine in New York called Chris Graves

and he's made a big scene about this and linked in. He asked it to explain a couple of cognitive biases in the social science literature around human behavior. And CHAPT GPT came up with an extremely good and intelligent description of what these biases are. And he said, well, that's handy. You seem to know a lot about this. Please can you cite academic sources?

This is when it got really weird. It made up academic papers that don't exist. It just took a few academics to some of whom had published in the field and some of whom had happened. And it's somehow, instead of saying, okay, here are the reliable sources from which I derived my knowledge of human psychological biases. It's just said, okay, what do citations look like? What do academications look like? What do academic references look like?

I will create a plausible version of these. And in the process, it effectively invented completely knowledge of this, the academic papers. Which is, when you think about it, it's really weird. What do you think it's doing? So, but cheating, I think, I think it's think. I think it's essentially suggests that it doesn't know what the truth is in a funny kind of way. It merely goes, how can I say this in a way that looks plausible? I mean, because, you know,

two or three of the academic cited in these papers which they'd never written were actually social science academics. In one case it was a bit weird because the person who drew an expert on magnetic resonance, nothing to do with social science at all, but it's not safe. It's interesting. And to use it as a curiosity, it seems absolutely fair, but equally, it's not totally safe. I read an article that was very interesting and said that the prediction, this particular author's prediction was that chat GPT will become the biggest search engine in the world because what you're doing when you go to Google is you're looking for an existing article

to be discovered by Google that will give you an answer to the question that you're posing, whereas what you do when you go to chat GPT is to just get the answer directly. So you say, I want to make a Manhattan cocktail. And Google would bring you up 400 million different results from blog blogs explaining what a Manhattan cocktail is. Whereas you type in the actual query to chat GPT. Now, one of the problems here is that if there are biases, if there are some sort of predisposition, if it's been trained on a particular type of language, you're going to potentially impact because there's no crowdsourcing, right? It just gives you a single answer. So yeah, that's a concern as well? No, I mean, you know, well, you know, it's very heavily aligned on Wikipedia, and I personally

find Wikipedia pretty okay, but a lot of people accuse it of political bias. I mean, it was interesting, in a sense, in that I didn't write my own Wikipedia page, someone else did. But for various reasons, I mean, it was very, very difficult getting a Wikipedia page because once you work in advertising, there are a lot of people who basically assume that anybody working in advertising is doing this for reasons of self-publizancy.

And so people who have no idea who I was, they were, I think, Chinese or Japanese or something of that kind, you know, somebody wrote a page for me and then it kept getting deleted. And the person would go, this just looks like advertising to me. Well, and that was partly because I would have advertised it, except very obviously. And it, you know, you can argue that, you know, I don't know how impartial Wikipedia is politically. It doesn't seem atrocious to me. I mean, it doesn't seem nakedly biased, but it would surprise me equally as the people

who are the most active Wikipedia contributors or editors, horror, realistic cross-sectional of society. Correct. It takes a pretty damn weird person to want to do that, to be honest. Very correct. I saw a visualization of the difference between GPT-3 and GPT-4 and the other. The one that's not yet released. Correct.

Yeah, it's not out yet. However, apparently GPT-4 is going to be able to write a 60,000 word book from a single prompt in less than a minute because of the amount of data that it's been trained on. It's some obscene amount of data. And they're too frightened to release it, is that right? Not ready yet. Not ready yet. Not ready.

I think it'll still be being trained. I've had a contrary review which it isn't actually set to replace the search engine. The proper place where this belongs is going to be inside Microsoft Office. How so? I suppose the idea is you have people who have work to do and you could say okay Um if you could actually talk to Because what what has to say actually for all its faults its comprehension is very good, isn't it? It's level of comprehension of a question or of a request is you good compared to Alexa, for example. I haven't yet

tried it on banal things like train times, which will strikes me as one of the weirdest Alexa failings that you can't say, can you tell me the the times of the next trains from this station to somewhere else? Oh, that's, or how long is it going to take me to get to just a few? Yeah. I don't know. Because I mean, the interesting question is, because there are two, there are two components to it.

There's the outpourge, which is very interesting in terms of being grammatically written with what has to be said is a remarkably low low level of total garbage. Okay well except in that even when these academic papers were fake the whole reply looked plausible okay but it's comprehension of the question does seem pretty impressive to me. a tool that I was out for dinner with last night Used it for is if he writes quite advanced nutritional advice and he puts his entire Blog post or whatever into it and says please rewrite this at the third grade lead reading level So he uses it to dumb down

very Complex technical talk. And apparently that is very, very successful. I haven't tried that, but. So, if you asked it to, we'll know that thing PowerPoint Shakespeare. But if you asked it to take something you've written as an argument and the condense it into PowerPoint, somebody else sent me the thing where they'd asked me to ask GTBT to summarize, you know, my books or work or something, and it did a pretty

damn good job, I have to say. And then there's the second question which is, you know, are we nearing a point where the speech interface or at least we actually, we're typing full sentences to some extent replaces what you might call the push button point and click interface. Everything would just be speech commands. Yeah, so I mean, it is interesting in that, okay, well, other things that's a sort of interesting finding and I'm not quite sure what the explanation is. I think there are multiple reasons,

but in customer service, for example, even though live chat, not necessarily slower than speech. Okay. Okay, sorry, are you back on? Can you hear me? I can. Yep. Oh, for some weird reason. It's a bit okay. Let me try this. I need to get back onto the headphones. Why has it dropped the headphones? I think you might have poked it with your hand. Shit. Okay, well don't worry. People, people weirdly, really, really like, people really, really like, what the hell is going on here?

I want the snapshot, stir string, damn, I will never mind. Okay. People really like live chat as a form of customer service. Yes. the way you make it work economically as the people who are doing the live chat, both use sort of boilerplate answers, which they can just cut and paste. In many cases, they don't have to type the whole thing from scratch. And they're also handling three customers simultaneously, which is how you make it work economically,

but it's much, much slower than a spoken phone call. And yet the levels of customer satisfaction, even though it's slower, are much, much higher. Is that because you can do something else whilst you're chatting to them? Yeah, I think there are probably multiple reasons. AI suppose, if they have to pass you under somebody else, the transcript can get passed on to the next person. So you don't have that infuriating thing of having to repeat yourselves.

That must be part of it. And, sorry about that. That's all right. If you're still fighting with it, we can hang fire until you get it right. There we are. Is that right?

But I'll pop up. Yeah, I'll pop up. There we are. We'll try this. But so there is an interesting question, which is, are people actually happier with, we do. We obviously defaulted to this point and click interface for a time when it was much, much faster and pleasant to

and gave us an illusion of control, whereas one of the things that makes voice interfaces absolutely hopeless is when, you know, Alexa is by no means, you know, I mean, for example, local train times, um, uh, in voice, uh, My local station from which I nearly was traveling to London is called Oxford, which is spelled OT, F-O-R-D. Well, I mean, forget about asking about trains from Oxford because nine times out of 10, you're going to miss the trains going to Dijkert from Oxford. But there is an element where if the voice or text perception was good enough and didn't

generate absolutely nonsensical responses, you know, or responses that were totally blind to context. Like the time when I used, I might have been Googling this case, I was driving home from work and I wanted pharmacies that were currently open and it gave me a list of pharmacies in Atlanta, Georgia, which were indeed currently open, but were a bit of use to me. Okay. And so there may be, I suppose, there may be a component where we're at strangely, we go back to command prompts with our interaction with computers. We're actually just using spoken language or type language is so much easier than going through some weird routine of button pressing and menu pointing.

I wonder whether there's a concern about the amount of control that people have. So we've spoken about this on the show before where someone would much rather be killed by a person driving than injured by an automatic driving vehicle. Because there's just something, if you were to put a vocal prompt into some sort of word processor or some sort of computer and it got it wrong. You would feel so aggrieved. You would feel completely hard done by. If you'd meant it to order from this particular restaurant and it ordered from somewhere else,

whereas if you pressed the button, at least you feel culpable for it. And I wonder whether they might just be a case of acclimatizing to your level of... Oh, oh, oh, oh thing would have to repeat you repeat the booking word for word. Do you mean the last days of the Raj Indian restaurant? Exactly. Yeah.

What have you been obsessed with? It's worth noting that when you go back to my childhood, you know, the most of, you know, or act, you may remember from Blake 7, though, you don't, you don't remember Blake 7, or, okay, but the one of the common interval, well how for that matter, okay, the interface with the computer was assumed to be speech, you know how did not have a graphical user interface, right? And so there is something really, really interesting there, which is that you can, and I mean, the great problem you have with Amazon Alexa is they've spent billions on the thing and 90% of the requests are basically for the

time, the weather or something, you know, there is one huge benefit by the way of Alexa, which I discovered, which is that when you're half awake early in the morning, that uncomfortable as I am about having a nexer in the bedroom, obvious reasons, okay. When you're half awake, you can find out what the time is without opening your eyes. Now once you open your eyes to look at an original clock, there's a danger that you then wake up. But if a nexer replies when your eyes are still shut,

then it's actually, you know, 457. Then you can basically dose off straight back to sleep again without that slight problem of searing off your retinas by looking at a digital clock in the middle of the top. It is a game of chicken when you wake up on a morning to know how much light do I want to light it. What have you been obsessed by recently? If you had any new purchases, we've spoken, I think in the past, I want to say you tried to get me

to buy a glass-sided toaster. I didn't. Yeah. I didn't become part of your movement there, although I did get my parents to buy a air fryer and then they upgraded to an air fryer with pressure cooker in one. Wow, I mean, does that hold ninja thing, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're happy with it, are they?

Oh, they are. I don't think that they use anything else. I don't think that they did. It sits on top of the cooker and now is is the cooker in itself. So what else? Has there been anything else? You were Ford Mustang Machi glass-sided toaster and. Okay, that's very interesting. So the, I have to say, the air fryer continues its magic. The Japanese toilet never loses its magic. I'm down here in Diel where I don't have a Japanese toilet. And the gap between using a Japanese toilet and using a conventional toilet is roughly equivalent to the gap between using a conventional toilet and

shitting in a bucket in prison. That's roughly speaking, the yawning sense of reversion, you feel, when you go from using a Japanese toilet-chirque conventional one, it's barbaric, it's ridiculous, and it will just stop. The air fryer maintains its magic. I mentioned these bone-conducting headphones, which I think for age-oggers be the elderly and see people who don't want to become disoriented by, you know, walking around with no knowledge of what's going on around them. Which tends to happen with noise cancelling headphones. I like the fact that they cancel noise, but it's also kind of disquieting. In a way, you can turn it on and off, I'm glad that. So those are interesting in that they have an application and for certain people

I think can be very, very useful. My father's stair lift, I strongly suspect to anybody elderly listening to this or anybody with a long memory, listening to this, that almost everybody leaves getting a stair lift too long, too late. Because they want to resist, they have all this whole thing about the exercise of going up and down stairs is good for you. They want to retain independence as long as they can. Well, there's no compulsion to use a stair lift simply because you have one. But to my father, that's been absolutely transformative.

Well, I also didn't realize is you don't need to put any, you don't need to drill into the wall at all. The whole track for the stair lift is a fairly discreet strip of metal that just goes up the flight of stairs. And it's basically screwed into the wood of the stairs, not into the masonry of the wall. So as an important note, I think what you might call Geronto Tag, of how you manage aging and caring through technology will be an enormous source of progress in the next 10 years and a very worthwhile area for investment, I think. What are the things?

The things that where the magic never really goes. I've gone back to using a tablet again after about a four year hiatus. What's absolutely. I've got some Galaxy S8, the eight inch thing, which I have to say is absolutely excellent. And that's mainly for reading and reading newspapers and reading books, etc. and watching films occasionally. I'm happy to have gone back to a tablet after, as I said, after a long period making do without one. The other point I would make about the electric car is that the...

Well, I've had one of them now for, I guess it must be a year and four months or something. One, I don't have charging at home. And I'm shortly to get charging installed at home, but I delayed and fudged around and needed to liaise with the neighbours about having a new three-phase supply put in. And oddly, given that that's a period of about 15, 16 months, I have found it surprisingly non-problematic to actually have an electric car without home charging. So if any Londoners

listening, you know, well, we can't get an electric car because there's nowhere for us to charge, you know, charge at home, particularly given the utterly feeble businesses London has managed to drive. I don't think that is actually a problem. I genuinely don't think there is an issue in the slightest. And also the weird pleasure of driving an electric car with regenerative braking and single pedal driving is a pleasure that never goes away or hasn't yet. I drove my first Tesla model. Why is that the big one? Why is the big one?

The taller one, yeah. Correct. But it was the ludicrous or the plaid edition of this thing or whatever. And for the first time ever, I was just pulling it after going from not to 16 some terrifying amount of time. I then was trying to pull around a corner and took my foot off the accelerator like you would to allow it to close around a corner. And the fucking things stopped.

I thought, hang on a second. So I take my foot off of the accelerator and the brakes get deployed. Yes. Okay, right. This is an entire new type of driving. What most of the accelerator and the brakes get deployed. Yes. Okay. Right. This is an entire new type of driving. What most of the braking will actually be regenerative. So that's it. So in a conventional car, particularly in automatic,

when you take your foot off the accelerator, the car continues to coast. Creeps because it would be, it would be wait, but it would be wasteful for it not to coast in a sense. Because you'd be throwing away momentum, okay? Whereas in an electric car, because the momentum actually gets recaptured by the battery, there's no particular reason why

you shouldn't just decelerate with the accelerator with no particular need. I mean, I go for miles at a time without using the brakes in any shape or form. You just anticipate by throttling off the car slows down. The brake lights come on, even if the brakes aren't deployed sometimes, to notify cars behind you that you're going to be separating at a fastest pace than they might typically expect.

But it's actually a lovely way to drive, partly because you don't have a feeling of resentment when you lose speed. What makes cyclist wankers, okay? I try an electric bike, that strikes me as quite an interesting technology for two reasons, which is that the dirty secret of bikes, as I said, is that when you cycle up hill, it's no faster than walking. Secondly, there is only a limited range of demographies and levels of physical fitness who can rarely cycle. Thirdly, acceleration is painful and slow. Fourthly, very large

areas of the earth's surface are totally elsuited to cycling. I mean, Lisbon, for example, or Bath, or one of those hills, or Durham, and you know, having a bike in Durham, Newcastle wouldn't be terrible, but there would be chunks of Newcastle, which would be awful, I imagine, right? And so, you know, when you factor that in, the electric bike, which basically means that uphill and accelerating, and for people who are less than,

you know, Lancaster Strong fit, okay. It actually becomes a viable mode of transport, assuming the weather's good enough, or assuming that you design a completely different kind of bike, which actually has some sort of protection from the elements, which I suppose is another consideration. Because the great advantage is there is, A, you'll be able to make bikes slightly inefficient, fatatiles, the comfort, wider seats, also possibly some sort of rain shielding.

Because the electricity will basically counterbalance the aerodynamic inefficiencies of those things so that you can actually cycle in something which isn't absolutely optimized around titanium and narrow tires, which are hopeless in urban environments, for example. You know, you hit a pothole at the wrong angle and there's a total carnage and disaster. So the electric bike is interesting, I have to say. I gave one, there's a brief test drive and was quite impressed in fact. It took a little bit of mastery, but that's probably because it's bloody years

since I've cycled at all. And other things, but that does strike me as quite significant because one of the reasons, and this is where I come back to the electric car and regenerative braking, okay. One of the reasons cyclists are art holes is that because accelerating is really painful, they have this mentality of maintain momentum at any cost, which causes them to sort of leap onto the pavement, ignore red lights, go at precipitous speed through roundabouts without paying much attention. Now, I don't totally blame them for that because if you imagine driving a car where every time you press the accelerator,

you know, electrodes in your testicles gave you a sharp burst of pain, you know, we'd all drive like ourselves. And in the bike, you know, because it's painful getting up speed and it's slow, they have this sunk cost problem, which is they're desperately unwilling to slow down in that it's absolutely necessary. But the great thing with the electric car and regenerative braking is because you feel you're getting your energy back when you slow, you don't have that same, if same resenting full feeling, if you're forced to slow down a bit. Instead of going this bastard by turning so slowly as Rob me of my hard one kinetic energy, you just go, oh, okay, energy back into the tank for later.

And then off you go again. What's happening here? Okay, energy back into the tank for later and then off you go again. What's the electric vehicles are very, very good for things like delivery vehicles, which do a lot of stop-go motoring? Well, I mean, that was the original milk float, right? In the UK, that was a Tesla before it was a Tesla. What's happening? You're moving through different vapes here. What's happening with the vaping debate at the moment? I've seen certain companies have been cracked down on for making flavours that are basically too tasty, that kind of

entice younger kids to get into vaping and stuff like that. My own view is this is a total nonsense, okay, and that this, watch if I don't know the world's most common, you commonly use streaming service, but Plex, which you can get on Smart TVs and so on and Google Chrome TV. Someone once gave me an illegal login to that where I could watch every movie ever created.

Someone gave me like an access code. It's like a hard drive, it's like you can stream hard drives and stuff, right? Yeah, absolutely right. But Plex has on it a film called One Billion Lives, which is obviously made by vaping enthusiasts, but it actually co-opts some pretty hard-ass, serious medical scientists talking about the fact that, you know, because in middle class, Western milieu, the number of people smoking is small,

then people tend to think of the smoking problem as having been solved. But if you take the world's population as a whole, they would argue with this, that look, the wider legalization, the deregulation of vaping and other forms of nicotine delivery device has the potential to save a billion lives and their accusations sometimes level that Big Farmer.

From there, not Big Tobacco. Big Tobacco is oddly, in a sense, because they've invested in vaping technologies. They're not actually the evil presence you might have expected, but Big Farmer, which is invested in a lot of fairly ineffectual patches and sprays and gums, only to find that at the last minute some hipsters came up with a better idea, has played dirty. And the extent to which governments have been persuaded to ban flavours, to ban disposable, for example, there's an environmental case for banning disposable. And also the endless recurrence of this argument,

oh, but children have been doing it, okay? Well, my argument there is I've got two children in age 21 at university, surrounded by a pretty active drug culture and a lot of booze. Okay, worry number 407 on my list is they might take up vaping. Okay. And all the things they could do, you know, something which has actually pretty trivial short medium and I would argue long term effects that has very few negative externalities on the people around them. The demonization of nicotine has distinct from burning tobacco.

Has been one of the most extraordinary kind of wasted human efforts or misdirected human efforts of the last 20 years because it's coffee basically. There's a drug, it's that kind of thing. Now, the children argument, one of the great things is that flavors, by getting your hooked on a flavor that's very unlike the flavor of burning tobacco, is a great way of getting people off smoking, right? Because switching back to smoking cigarettes would be pretty untasteful. It's weird and kind of horrible.

Yeah. Does it, you know, do I care that 23-year-olds who can get hold of ecstasy, you know, LSD, cocaine, etc., do I care that they're buying elf bars, not really? And I always think it's a bull, you know, that owe the children, owe the young people. It's got a bullshit argument, actually, because, I mean, off, you know, I shouldn't say this, I won't say it, actually, because I prefer not to share the information. But actually, I'm even smoking cigarettes below a certain age, provided you quits, and that's a very big provided, by the way, doesn't have massively deleterious effects on health.

Yeah, the concern is the gateway, right? I mean, I've noticed this deleterious effects on health. Yeah, the concern is the gateway, right? I mean, I've noticed this, especially since being in Texas. It's a gateway out. It really is a gateway. Is it a gateway to cigarette through? If she absolutely zero evidence of that, I would have said. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a really good point, actually. And it is a gateway out. So what's happening? So you're in Texas at the moment. Yeah, yeah. So I live here now. I've been here for just a year and because of the existing culture of dip, dipping tobacco

over here, snows, those little pillowcases that you slot in between your lip and your gum, those are insanely popular over here. This is absolutely everyone hammers these, and they come in all manner of different flavors and different sizes, they do a two milligram all the way up to a 20 milligram nicotine dosage. Yeah, yeah, I mean, 20 milligram would make me immediately want to throw up.

But yeah, that's something that people use, but it's so interesting because the culture's already been primed here through the existing heritage of dip and using dipping tobacco, which this is the cooler, less disgusting. I don't need to have a bottle and into it every 30 seconds or whatever because I've got some awful buildup in my mouth. That's incredibly popular over here. because I've got some awful buildup in my mouth. That's incredibly popular over here. So how is Texas more liberal than most states

in regulating vaping as well? I'm not sure about that. I mean, the vapes are everywhere. They're sold on the street, they're sold in corner shops. People are using them indoors in comedy clubs and gigs and bars everywhere that I go. Yeah, this is where I like Texas actually. I don't know what people said.

Before I moved here, everyone was like, oh, you're going to kind of the diluted down, like PG version of Texas by going to Austin. It's a blue dot. That is true. Yeah, it's a blue dot in a red ocean. And I don't know. It might just be a selection effect for the people that I hang around. But I see no hints of blue here at all. I don't see a massive amount

of progressivism or liberal overreach or the woke tards in the street. There's none of that I see in Austin. It just seems like Texas with young people. It's a university town, a great music town, it's fantastic food town, it's a brilliant town. And actually, also people tend to take on to an extent the moreays of the pre-existing culture. I've only been to Austin once, I absolutely loved it, but I also love Houston Dallas everywhere I've been in taxes. I've found people absolutely charming. I like that thing of screw this. I'm going to vapour the comedy club. That slight kind of independence and independent mindedness is really, really healthy.

Talk to me, you've been big into this erudicity thing for quite a while. I was thinking about how that and Bayesian updating and all the rest of it kind of applies to people's life design. Have you got a good way that people can increase their chances of getting lucky in life? One thing I think that you might say is an intelligent evolutionary adaptation is that the younger, more experimental than the old for a reason, which is that they have less experience to draw on, so they need to experiment more, but they also have more future life to profit from experimentation. So if older people become more conservative, it's partly a perfectly rational response, effectively summed up in the phrase, I know what I like.

Okay? And they have more experience to draw on. And therefore, you know, the likelihood that they'll suddenly discover a new holiday destination, which is 200% better than their best current estimate of what a holiday destination would be, is low when you're 70,

whereas when you're 25, it's by no means impossible, right? You can discover something which is sensationally better. That's interesting. The fact that when you're old, even if you do discover something sensationally better, you only got five years to enjoy it, also probably makes older people conservative

because the lifetime remaining gains to experimentation are also shorter. So the fact that we see that decline in openness as people go on through life is, to some extent, probably a sensible evolutionary mechanism in all kinds of ways. So is the applied solution there for younger people to say yes to money experiences, to go on adventures, to try and do things? But not to get massively angry with older people, for not doing so. There's another book which I really recommend actually to everybody listening called Algorithms to Live By, which is by I think Brian Christian and somebody Griffiths, actually. And one of the most interesting things,

which, if you're old, was one of the best things I've read in terms of generally uplifting information. The reason when you get older that you find it often slower to retrieve information is not because of deteriorating mental faculties, it's because you know more, okay? Or you've accumulated more information and therefore more of what you know needs to be stored in kind of the slower access parts of the brain.

So one of the reasons why, you know, you notice this extraordinary, if you see there's a university challenge program in the UK and then there's the kind of, that there's the celebrity university challenge around Christmas where people tend to be in their 40s and 50s. And the people in their 40s and 50s kind of know more, but they're much, much slower at extracting the information. And the reason is that the amount that can be stored on kind of RAM is finite and therefore more of what you know as an old person actually takes time to retrieve. So much wisdom that you've got to dig through. And actually if you told, you know, because a lot of

people when they hit their 40s and 50s are convinced that this phenomenon is a sign of mental deterioration. You know, you know, you go, you know, French chat, eight or cake, dipkin and you know, you go French chat, A to cake, dip it in, you know, Marcel Bukh, Proust, right? Whereas the 22-year-old and university challenges just goes, eh, Marcel Proust, okay? Is deeply disquieting, I think, to a lot of older people. And if you told them this, it would massively cheer them up. Just as I actually think it's quite important to tell people that, is it particularly men that your level of happiness weirdly tends to be a little bit U-shaped, that people in middle-aged have the lowest level of life satisfaction, and then it actually rises again

more or less continuously after you pass through sort of middle to late middle-aged, I can't remember, but there's some period. The biggest suicide risk for men at the moment is 40 to 45. Is that 40? Really? It's no longer young men. No, it seems to be this was Max Dickens and Matt Rudd, both two separate books last year. One was Billy Nomates and the other from Matt Rudd, who is the guy from the Sunday Times. I can't quite remember the name of it, but he was good and he was on the show.

Was algorithms to live by the book where Brian suggested that if you were trying to find a partner, you should go to the... Yeah, I'll go to the... 33 people in and then once you find a person who is better than those first 33 you just go with them. Yeah. Because you probably don't have to have an extensive relationship with all 33, you know, because that will, you know, living with people for a year and then ditching them 33 times would

not make you popular perhaps. But the, it's known for in a very sexist way as the secretary problem because it was first posed as a, you could only interview secretaries one at a time. Once you've rejected someone, you have no chance of following up. It's slightly artificial depiction of the problem. And the question is how many should you interview before you reach this point where you go, OK, the next one who comes along. And it's partly the Explore exploits trade off. And it's partly the trade off between having

too little information to benchmark what a good secretary might be like versus having too few secretaries left that you're in danger of running out. And so I think it is, if you have a hundred secretaries lined up, I think the optimal strategy is something, is it 60 something? I think it was 30. I thought it was in the 30s. It's probably 30, yeah.

I think it would be in the 30s. So you could see the 30s, you could see the first 30s, and then you've set your peak, the best of the 30s you've seen, and then the next as soon as one comes along who's better than or as good as that you choose that away you go. One of the things that I've been noticing online especially in the post Trump world this allure of black and white thinking which has been quite reductionist people seem to to be ever more seduced by low nuance. Yes, and actually, so for example, at the evening, express it itself with being unwilling to accept that something might be acceptable in a comedy club,

which is unacceptable in a business meeting or a church meeting or whatever it may be. So unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that the rules change according to context. And therefore demanding that you can, and the thing about it is, I think, it is characteristic of people in their late teens and perhaps early 20s. I think there's something kind of slightly softer more about it in that most older people once they've been particularly if there's been any time working in an office know that the answer to a hell of a lot of questions

is it depends, okay? And there's something fundamentally wrong with our education system, if it isn't effectively showing people, that a very large number of questions should be answered with, I don't know, I need more information. And this need to be able to make an absolute pronouncement on almost anything, regardless of context, is fundamentally a bit weird. So if you take the transgender question, well, here's an example, okay. In every single social situation, I can imagine, okay? You would treat a transgender person as a member of their preferred gender in accordance with their identity. But as a doctor, it will be completely wrong to treat transgender person as though they were female, okay? Because obviously you have

to make an acknowledgement for special circumstances.es. And therefore, it doesn't seem to be impossible that you can say, well, maybe in prisons or women's refuges, we need to actually rethink this general principle. In other words, you have a principle which is true to the extent that it is possible to make it true, but where you may have to actually make concessions according to certain particular situations. In the same way, I had a, it's a very simple thing, which is, I'll give you the class of the example of this, which is something which divides a completely different

group of people, I'm not, you know, turf, sawabilit and the accurate feminists, which is in the UK, now apologies to Americans because the general patterns of behavior are totally different in the US. Okay, is it okay to drive in the middle lane of the motorway? Okay, and the answer to that is actually, and people will take an incredibly strong view.

And the answer to that is, it has to be, it depends, right? Because given that cars can only travel at a slower speed when you have a high level of traffic density okay if you had everybody traveling at 60 miles an hour and insisting on all traveling on the left hand lane of the motorway leaving the other two lanes empty okay that would massively slow down traffic and be an incredible way to road okay low down traffic and be an incredible way to road. So it is not actually wrong to use the middle end of the motorway under all circumstances. You should obviously be fairly attentive to what's happening behind you and so on and so forth. But what people want to do is they don't accept this fact that in a complex system, you occasionally need to take a count of

more than one or two or three factors in making a decision. What is this allure toward black and white thinking or the displeasure that people have with more subtle or complex or nuanced opinions? Where does that come from, do you think? You get a lot of people, you could argue that a lot of people found that clarity and religion a hundred years ago, that people who wanted that I need to be told, you know, a series of good heuristics by which to live life without having to work everything out for the first principles, which isn't a totally ridiculous requirement. They would have found a religion to accommodate that or something of that kind.

The one thing that does worry me is does it come from our education system which is leading people to believe that there must be a right answer? In other words, one of the interesting things when you get curious about decision science is not everything is an optimization problem. There are an awful lot of human behaviours which make no sense to people who are inverted commas rationalists because they assume that what the person is trying to do is to optimize when actually what they are trying to do is to de-catastrophize. The same talent, and I, the observation that people in Milan railway station are eating

up McDonald's, okay? They're not trying to get the best meal they can find in Milan, okay? What they're doing is basically, you know, there will be search costs and everything else attributed to that, Gromton. But what they're trying to do is to get something to eat which has a very, very low chance of making the meal or being disappointing or a rip off. And McDonald's is absolutely brilliant at not being crap. And so, depending, you know, it's very, very dangerous to declare people irrational,

unless you know deep down, both consciously and unconsciously, what they're really trying to do. A brand preference, I was given the argument that a large part of brand preference is not I want Samsung TVs because they're better, but I'll happily pay 100 bucks more for a Samsung TV, booze, I'm fairly confident it's not going to be shit. And when you think about it, the reputational mechanism works because if you've invested billions in your brand as a massive sunk cost, you have much more to lose in terms of future revenue and profit

through selling a shit television than someone who nobody's ever heard of. When you go on Amazon and search for TV and you get all those scrabble racked brands called Rujagu or whatever, right? Well, why should they care? Why should they invest in quality control because they don't really have a reputation at stake in the first place? I heard that Sky Glass, which was Sky's attempt, was, I saw a bunch of reviews as it was coming out and then once it came out from tech people and it just got smashed. It got completely annihilated as the protein pancake problem, which is what I've referred to.

When you try and blend two products that previously were very well optimized on their own into one product, which is shitter than either of them were and worse than they both would be separately. So protein powders have been pretty well optimized. They're quite tasty. They're pretty much a nest quick that's got 30 grams of protein in pancakes for almost all of time have been fantastic. If you try and make good protein pancakes, they usually end

up being a clumpy horrible mess. And what Skye's tried to do is integrate your Skye membership into a television so that it is a one-stop shop, but the TV underperforms the Sky system that interacts with it is bad and it's trying to beat a Kindle fire stick which is absolutely blazing fast and already people's existing fantastic Samsung TV which they they know and the interface is optimized as well. It's very interesting isn't it because I, one of the things I talk about with television, the other way, which is fascinating, is that there is an amount of money, and nobody knows what it is. I imagine you could get it through a free-to-room information request,

that the BBC has to pay Samsung to put eye-player in a prominent position and the Samsung smart hub. And Samsung has indeed its power, indeed, has already done so, to make the hub the default starting point for all viewing periods. When I first got a Samsung TV years ago, you could activate the hub, but it was by pressing a very weird button on, which was one of about 47 buttons on the remote control. And we all know you never press the weird buttons in your remote control because they can make your TV go weird, I'll irrecover it for you know the next half hour. The aspect ratio is off for all of the black

and white. For the purpose of screen number two, which I mean, literally number two, appears on the top left of the screen, you know, and you can't make it go away. That kind of thing. The modern Samsung TV comes with two remote controls, one of which is blissfully simple, and that's the one you use all the time. Every time you're not sure what to do, you press a button with a house on it, which is something we feel incredibly comfortable doing. You either press back or house, and surprise, surprise that takes you to the Stramson smart hub. It previously returned on a TV and probably it was broadcast TV by default, then it was sky by default. And now it's whatever Samson

wants it to be. I love the power they enjoy on that is absolutely spectacular. Yes. So there will be at some point later this year, I haven't signed a contract yet, but this podcast is going to be featured on a number of airlines, and it's going to be able to be used in in-flight entertainment. And as the discussion has gone on, I asked this particular guy that is handling the acquisition of the content on the library,

what he intends on doing with it, and he said, some insane percentage of what gets viewed on InFlight Entertainment is based on the first screen's tiles of what shows up. So if you want everybody to watch bullet train with Brad Pitt, and that's tile number three of six, it's going to get...

It's the same as being above the fold on Google, right? It's like, you're on the first page of Google or basically you're not on Google because everybody's going to click on something on the first page, usually the first result. So it's a power law distribution that the thing that appears first gets 50% the thing that appears, yeah.

100%. Going back to the thing that you said about young people, I learned a concept that I gave a term to from a friend, Gwinderbogel, and he said, you can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues like war, poverty or pollution on just one cause, like capitalism, are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply.

And I referred to that as monotheking. Yeah, I've found a friend of mine calls it whose indium interestingly calls it monotheirism. And he is indium. And as a Hindu, he always jokes that people in the west have a particular propensity to monotheirism because they need one God to be behind everything. As he says, they hid new, they're completely happy with ambiguity. Very good. And they're polythearistic. I mean, one of the interesting ones is that, you know, all social ills are down to social media, when we're strikes me as a bit too fucking easy. and we strikes me as a bit too fucking easy. And I've always said one of my mischievous ones is that some part of what might be more

obnoxious behaviour in people may be down to the decline in smoking. Now if you think about it, if you have a society where, which 20, 30 years ago, 50 to 60% of people regularly took what was a kind of relaxing drug. Okay? And now that's down to 10%. You would expect, and of course, the effect could be magnified through social network effects. You would expect some change, just as if you put everybody on, you know,

well, open, it's okay. You notice a change in general behavior. Surely mass withdrawal from drugs is going to have some visible effect. And yet it has been assumed that that effect can't be there. Well, why not? One of the weirder theories is that, you know, there's an equal body of belief

which suggests a very eccentric opinion that tobacco, tea, coffee, were major contributors to the Enlightenment. And so it is kind of me, I have to say, but you're right, the need to go, yes, because capitalism. There's a wonderful sketch about this that dates back to you know where you recite something bad that happened to go thatcher okay right now you know it's it is slightly amusing to me which is that and to people born long after actually thatcher left office okay it's seen as this absolutely pivotal changing point in British history, where before I had everything was supposed to be absolutely lovely, it was like the Beatles

and Flare Paren's re-loving completely forgetting the 1970s altogether, okay? And then you had that shirt and it all got nasty and greedy and selfish and I'm thinking, you know, I mean, and self-uncertain. And I'm thinking, you know, I mean, pre-thatscher, there was a lot of extraordinary human unpleasantness of all kinds. Maybe it was less greedy, that possibly is true, but there were all forms of manifestation of genuine, really malicious nastiness and unpleasantness, which if anything, diminished in the 1980s. But it's so easy to have, you know, that stupidity, I mean, actually creativity is also trying to imagine things that could be much more important factors than that they're generally given credit for. You know, is this because, you know, and actually, I mean, it's a classic case of wanting the rules of a simple system also to apply to a complex system. And I've been talking to doctors recently

about obesity, and it looks as though there may be a group of people who are fat, very largely simply because they're biome, the microbiota in their gut are just very good at extracting energy from food. And so you eat the same, some people have whatever reason, a mix of microflora, which just aren't that great at extracting caloricic value from food. I mean, things like, you know, I mean, that's another classic case in one of the whole mind-body dualism thing. It's a classic case of saying, you know, okay, in order to make the world comprehensible, I'm going to pretend these things are entirely unrelated and that you have willpower and that your body and your bodily state and your digestive state and say, well, has no influence on your behavior. And that's again an attempt to say, okay, what we'll do is we'll divide the world

into water type compartments for purposes of tractability and comprehension and proceed from there. And, you know, it's great in high school physics to do that shit. It doesn't really work anywhere else. I mean, the extreme case is to say that science is a bit of a calm because it hives off that very small proportion of big decisions that can actually be solved definitively with a single right answer, and where you have all the data you need to make the decision at the very start of the process. And it hives those off, Poytskra's extraordinary success in areas like engineering.

And effectively, that effectively claims the credit for writing the exam first and then solving it. It's marking its own homework to some extent because anybody can be clever if they give them 5,000 exam questions, okay, and they're asked to solve the 10 they like the best. What can people expect from you next? What are you doing for the rest of this year? What can people expect from you next? What are you doing for the rest of this year? I'm going to be writing a book called Slow Good, I think, which is how it takes 30, 40, 50 of the world's best advertising lines and then dissect some of the kind of behavioral

science angles to say what they tell us about ourselves are unconscious and our society. That's cool. So looking at persuasion, I think that can be quite interesting. I'm a big fan of this business of taking something and just looking at it through a peculiar lens. There's a wonderful thing on YouTube which is, I don't know if you've ever seen the YouTube channel, ask your mortician, have you? No, what's that? Okay, so ask your mortician as a woman who works as an undertaker or more Tish and in the United States. And there's a film she made about 30 minutes long, which is why didn't JFK have an

open casket or why did JFK's casket stay closed? Now, you know, the whole Kennedy assassination thing is the most you know, overraked period of three days in 20th century history pretty much. Every single thing, every single person in the crowd in the Zapruder film has been subject to kind of microscopic analysis. But this is just taking the whole thing and telling the story from the point of view of the morticians, obviously where they got the casket from, the fact that the fact that the Secret Service commandeered the Earth from the local mortician

to drive to love field, I think it was, where Air Force was waiting, had no idea how to operate the detaching mechanism that allowed you to remove a coffin for a hers. And so in order to get the coffin and the plane, there were basically loads of secret service guys with crow bars basically tracking this thing to bits. No way. To get it out of the hers.

No way. Because they refuse to take anybody, they refuse to take anybody from the undertakers with them. They just come and tear the vehicle. And so one of the reasons it takes a very, very familiar well-worn story and just adds a completely new perspective on it. Shenzhen completely you like. That's where monopthinking becomes interesting, right? If you have a single optimizing function that's...

No, absolutely. So what you might call that nerd thinking where you actually take a very, very different point of view. What you're doing then with monopony think is I think complementary to the main dialogue. It's all thought of all you're doing. If all you're doing is taking everybody else's monopony thinking, okay, you're just contributing to the two-dimensionality of the whole field. But if you actually go over 90 degrees orthogonally and say, okay, what shadows of cast if we point the light over here, that's when it gets interesting. Amazing. Do you know? Because no one's telling us that asking more

Titian is the complete definitive answer. But what it does is it's a completely fresh lighter what was going on. Yes. Very interesting. Very interesting thing, there was a Texas, I guess he must have been, what do you call it? What do you call it when you have the guy who is the Texas coroner in Dallas? Okay? And one of the reasons there was such a massive conspiracy theory as they refused to let this coroner perform the autopsy. And he's often portrayed as being a bit of an arse because he refused to let the president's body go and be flown back to DC. But he was entirely correct in that if a death occurs in Texas in his jurisdiction, in absolutely his responsibility to do it, whether it's the president of the United States or someone

found dead in a shopped doorway. And so it's very, very interesting from that point of view, because I'd always heard of this guy as like being like Mr. Diffinal trying to must learn. But no, absolutely not that case at all. He was entirely correct in what he was trying to do and they were entirely wrong. And this is ask a mortician. Yeah, ask a mortician, I think it's called, yeah. Phenomenal. Do you know Richard Shotten? He wrote the choice factory a few years ago. Really? I know Richard very well. He's absolutely fantastic behavioral scientist.

He's got new book out this year. He's got a new book out. I've got it on the show. And it's cool. If I've got it right, it won't remind me of what the book's called. It's called, um... Give me one second. It'll get it up in it up in my calendar you might get it before me though Where in Zion is it next week? No, is it the week after? No, is it the week after that? There it is I know that's Richard Rangham the guy that wrote ah who is also great Richard shot and is coming on why the fuck is he? Anyway, he's in he's in here somewhere. Anyway, I'm very excited for that. I know that you and him have a lot of crossover. Do you know the story of how his, what's it called, Astro 10, his company name?

No, I guess a friend of my wife was just asking about that, saying, what's this Astro 10 thing? So go on, tell me the story. You'll have to ask him for the full description. However, he found online some company that had used a behavioral insight in a very smart way and he loved it. He then registered astrotenn.com and all of his email addresses and went to company's house and maybe got the trademark as well in all the rest of it.

And then only later realized that it was actually called Astro-Teng or something. There was a G on the end. And he'd type out the entire thing. He'd actually misspelled this, but preferred the version of it that he came up with and now he's lumbered with it for the rest of time. Oprah Winfrey is a similar case where actually the Old Testament character is called orpah, not Oprah.

And the cleverest one of all, which was a deliberate kind of perversity, Cliff Richards, who will be probably not well known to American listeners, but was a massive kind of pop star, and it still is indeed in the UK. He's kind of the, I think he might sort of vaguely call him the British Johnny Halliday, okay? But he was originally, I can't remember what his real name is,

but it's not Cliff Richard, okay? He was originally gonna be called Cliff Richards. And I think he was his manager who said, no, no, well, call you Cliff Richard. Why? Because then every time you get interviewed on TV, the interviewer is gonna call you Cliff Richard. Why? Because then every time you get interviewed on TV, the interviewer is going to call you Cliff Richards or call you Mr. Richards and you get a chance to correct him, which means everybody gets to hear your name twice. Wow. So that was the, I mean,

the surprising actually, a surprising number of names arise through a complete, now there's another name which also arose through a completeness understanding. Do you know the story? Do you know the story of Salvador Dali? Of why? So Salvador Dali's parents had a child born about nine months before Dali was, and they named him Salvador Dali, and he died only a couple of days after he was born. They then basically almost immediately conceived again and had another child that was born nine months later and they were adamant that he was a reincarnation of

dead son. So they called him Salvador Dali, they called him the name of the son that had already gone. Elvis is interesting because it's widely believed that the middle name of Elvis Aaron Presley, spell ARON, okay, is an ignorant typo or misspelling either by the parents or by the whoever registered the birth. In fact, it's the Welsh spelling of Aaron. And whether Elvis is Welsh or not, is open to debates. I mean, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Stop trying to, you have, you have a lot of affinity with the Welsh people and countries. Stop trying to adopt everybody for your, you know, take over of the Welsh. His dad was convinced, I think, that they were Welsh. I was convinced that Presley came from the Praseli hills, where there is, wait for it, a church of St Elvis.

There's only one church of St Elvis anywhere in the world. It's in Pembrokeshire, not far from the Praseli hills. He's it here. I think what might have been happening is Vernon was it? Elvis's dad, I think it was Vernon. Vernon was convinced of the family as well. In the same way, but the other way, that Johnny Cash seemed to be able to convince

that he was part Native American, even though his ancestry was entirely Scottish. Here's a question for you. Here's a question. As a proud, loosely associated Welshman, how has it become that Irish has a cultural impact on the world? You've got Irish areas in New York, people understand St Patrick's Day. They've generally got themselves a cultural foothold,

the Scots as well, the bagpipes, they've got the hats, they've got the tart and they've got everything as well. Yeah, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well,, they were fed and Thomas Jefferson, basically Welsh. But they seem to assimilate faster. You get Welsh communities in Pennsylvania, mining communities, you get to all those places called Bethesda and so forth. You also get those places in Brinmar, which I think is in Connecticut, isn't it? Must be named after the Welsh Brynmar. But so you do get Welsh communities, and obviously, patigode in South America. What do you mean? Can you count it?

What? Okay. But they haven't done a good job of marketing themselves. Because the Welsh, I think the Welsh, what you might call diaspora in Hillary Clinton, for example, is pot Welsh. But we'll agree to differ on Elvis. I have no idea, to be honest. About Elvis Presley's bloodline, I'm sure that he'd been researched in

absolutely enormous depth. But, you know, where his Trump would mention his Scottishness, I don't think Hillary Clinton ever mentioned her Welshness. I want to know what the branding problem is with Welsh. Of course it would have been absolutely no electoral value to play on your Welshness. absolutely no electoral value to play on your Welshness. Correct. Hillary, are having problems. And I mean, I've also, you know, and Frank Lloyd Wright was conscious of his Welshness interestingly.

So, you know, Taliesin is a Welsh phrase meaning shining brow and Frank was pretty conscious of his Welsh ancestry. Were there other, there was also an absolutely fantastic Maffioso character in Chicago, who was kind of a number two to Al Capone called Murray the Camel Humphries, whose parents I think came from Carno in Howis, was I'm where. But so, so, so, so, you have this kind of, you know, I mean, undoubtedly, they're pretty

well represented proportionately, although Davis is always spelled IS in the US, rather than IES. The Jefferson Davis, I guess, is actually, I think he's actually a Welsh origin. But the interest in promulgating or promoting it versus the Irish or the Scots seems to be much, much lower, I have to say. Maybe you can try and appeal to the Welsh government and speak to them and say if you could do a rebrand perhaps for Wales. Yeah. No, so let me, I'll think of a few more. Actually, the early presidents were disproportionate. Washington, I don't think it was, but I've got a vague idea that Adams and quite a few of the early presidents were fairly heavily Welsh. And then there's also an interesting intonation, which may or may not be true, that Welsh surnames are quite common

in my African Americans because of a Welsh quaker thing, where things like underground railroads and so forth tend to be run by quakers who tended to be Welsh. But I've read that out plausible, that is I don't know, it could be entirely fanciable. But it is kind of interesting, because you could, as you could say, you do Anglo-Saxon Americans have a particular sense of identity too, which is an interesting question.

So the scops and the Irish, and there's a little, you know, you think you're actually right that the small country is in Rome where people tend to be slightly more proud of ancestry from a less populist country. But again, I suppose, you know, German Americans have never, you know, I mean, the population of the US is probably more German by ancestry than it is British, not quite. The interesting question, possibly more than English, but if you include the whole of the British Isles, no. But you get the, you get the, you get the answer in Milwaukee, places like that, just as

you get the Swedish thing Milwaukee, places like that, just as you get the Swedish thing in in Minnesota. I would love to hear a Welsh American blended accent that would be that would be one hell of a cacophony coming out. Yeah, I mean, one theory I did here is that the Welsh being fairly sort of heazy going, um, uh, you know, wood within one generation, basically completely blending. I did just allow themselves to dilute down into the local culture. Just dilute down. There's very funny comedian who I think you'll enjoy called Andrew. Is it Schultz?

Can you come across him? He's been on the show. Oh, he's been on the show. I thought what was absolutely hysterical is I was watching him on YouTube doing a show in Hawaii, taking the piss out of people who moved to Hawaii. He said, his mother Scottish, he was born in Scotland, and she's lived in New York for almost all her adult life, but she is still completely Scottish in her speech and her behavior and mannerism. She said, you don't get my mother going fuck you, etc. But people moved to Hawaii, and three weeks later,

they're all there going alone, and using Hawaiian phrases. He was kind of calling out bullshit. Calling everyone a howly, that's what they call the people that are from out of town. Look, Rory, let's bring this one home. I always love speaking to you, mate. I'm going to be back in London at some point this year, so I'll definitely give you a minute. You must catch up. We have to split it. Thank you, mate. Catch you later on. All the best.

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